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      Ohio residents flock to Springfield’s Haitian restaurants: ‘They are family’

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      The line down the center of the Rose Goute Creole restaurant on Springfield, Ohio’s South Limestone Street is halfway out the door. It’s been like this ever since former president Donald Trump falsely accused immigrants in Springfield of eating cats and dogs during a televised debate on 10 September.At the back of the restaurant, kitchen staff scramble to take orders and load plates of herring patties, rice and beans, and barbecued chicken legs on to serving trays. Outside, cars with plates from Georgia, Wisconsin and Indiana – diners who’ve stopped off a nearby highway to show support for the Haitian community – fill the parking lot.It’s a partly chaotic scene, as Dady Fanfan, a 41-year-old from Plaisance in northern Haiti, stands inside the door, greeting diners as they enter, before slipping away to clear nearby tables.“One day I came to the restaurant to buy something, and I saw there was a lot of people,” says Fanfan, who despite not knowing the restaurant owners personally is this week spending his free time helping his countrymen and women. “I just stayed a little bit to help them, and then the next day I came because they are family.”As Trump and JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate and Ohio senator, continue to spread false information about Haitians in Springfield, regular people from the city and beyond are taking it upon themselves to seize back the narrative around immigrants in the Ohio city.And the outpouring of support aimed at countering Trump’s damaging comments hasn’t been limited to volunteering.Many community healthcare centers and support organizations that have been assisting Haitians in Springfield for several years are reporting increased donations and contributions coinciding with the furor of the past 10 days.“In the last three days, we’ve taken cash donations about seven times the normal rate, and it’s specifically because of this polarization,” says Casey Rollins, executive director of Springfield’s Society of St Vincent de Paul. She says the money is then transferred to gift cards to be used by those in need at a local international grocery store.Unlike his party colleagues, Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has come out in strong support for the Haitian community, urged Trump and Vance to end their “very hurtful” comments and pledged $2.5m over two years to assist healthcare organizations in Springfield.“I’m just trying to make it easier for them to go through the firestorm that they’re in,” says Sammy, who drove her Yamaha motorbike 176 miles (283km) from Cleveland last Saturday and pulled into the parking lot of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center without knowing a single person in town. Seeing the threats and hate for Springfield’s Haitians online and having served in the army, she wanted to help protect people she saw as innocent victims.“I believe that America does best when it is one community standing up for, protecting and in solidarity with another,” she says.Sammy, who asked not to be fully identified as she is a trans woman in the process of changing names, says she’s seen supporters bring fresh garden vegetables, perform yard work around the center, and drop off furniture and office supplies.“It’s been one of the most American experiences of my life,” she says.“It’s humbling.”As Sammy speaks, JoAnn Welland, 79, from the neighboring town of Enon, walks by the front of the center, asking where she can donate.“The people who are coming here [from Haiti] have sacrificed so much to come, and Springfield, in my opinion, is a lovely town,” she says. Welland says she was motivated to get into her car and drive to the Haitian community center to donate after hearing the lies on television about Haitians eating pets.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Then, I heard that the town hall got a bomb threat, the elementary school got a bomb threat. The hatemongering, that’s wrong. That’s ugly and negative and hateful. This is my way of standing up for truth,” Welland says.But even as Welland speaks, across town three supermarkets are abruptly evacuated and closed due to bomb threats, dozens of which have set the town on edge since Trump singled out Springfield during last week’s debate. One Springfield elementary school saw around 200 children absent from classes on Tuesday due to security concerns and bomb threats, which largely have been found to be hoaxes.Earlier this week, CultureFest, a fall festival beloved by locals, was canceled to “prevent any potential risks” to attendees. A debate involving local politicians up for election has also been canceled.Springfield’s Republican mayor, Rob Rue, has pleaded for both presidential candidates not to come to the town, saying it would place an extreme strain on the city’s already stretched resources. Despite that, at a rally in New York on Wednesday, Trump said he’d travel to Springfield in the coming weeks.Back at the Rose Goute Creole restaurant, the stream of customers keeps coming. Orders stack up as hungry Haitian workers wearing T-shirts depicting their employers dart over to the counter to collect their orders before scampering back out the door.And Fanfan isn’t alone. Amanda Payen hands out free bottles of water and asks diners if they’re being served. Her husband, Jacob, who’s from Port-au-Prince but lived in Florida for decades before coming to Springfield, thanks diners for coming in as they leave.None are employees of the restaurants, but as Haitians, they want to help.“I’ll come back again tomorrow,” says Fanfan, “and if I see they need help, I’ll stay.” More

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      Activist with far right ties fronts Marco Rubio-linked anti-immigration effort

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      The rightwing activist Nate Hochman, who was fired last year by the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, for employing neo-Nazi imagery in a campaign video, is now the face of a Marco Rubio-linked thinktank’s efforts to spread anti-immigrant panic from Ohio to Pennsylvania.Videos featuring Hochman recorded in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, have been boosted on X by a range of rightwing figures including the platform’s owner, the tech billionaire Elon Musk.In recent days Hochman, 26, has recorded several videos on location in Charleroi for America 2100, a rightwing thinktank where he is an adviser, according to his biographies on X and at websites where he has published articles. Hochman is also a staff writer and podcaster at the rightwing website the American Spectator, where his recent output has mostly consisted of anti-immigrant messaging.Like Springfield in Ohio, Charleroi has attracted a community of Haitian migrants.The borough manager, Jim Manning, told CBS News on Wednesday that immigrants including Haitians “have been a benefit to the town”.He added: “They come here. They buy property. They open businesses. They work here. They pay taxes. So for us, at the end of the day, it has been a benefit.”At the time of reporting, Hochman had only published interviews with older white residents of the town, who have variously complained that the newcomers do not speak English and that migrants have taken “American jobs”.One interviewee appears to concede that the Haitians are in Charleroi legally but dismisses the importance of that fact.“The perception is that it’s not legal,” the interviewee says at one point. “Now, you get a lot of people saying they’re illegals and everyone wants to fight about that term, but it doesn’t really matter.”In an email sent after publication, Mike Needham, America 2100’s founder and president, pointed to an interview with a Black resident that had been published on the organization’s X account on Friday afternoon.Needham added in the same email: “Nate also recorded interviews with multiple Haitian workers in the course of his week-long investigation.” As of noon on Saturday, no interviews with Haitian immigrants had been published on the X account.Most have not been shared extensively, although one of the videos was reposted by far-right account End Wokeness, and reposted in turn by Musk to his nearly 200 million followers along with a nugget of political analysis. “Pennsylvania is a swing state,” Musk wrote. His repost was shared in turn by the America 2100 account.America 2100 is ostensibly a thinktank, launched by Needham, Rubio’s one-time chief of staff, in June 2023. Rubio is a Republican senator from Florida. Coverage of the launch presented it as a project with Rubio’s blessing, whose mission was to “begin the work of codifying and institutionalizing the ideas Rubio helped pioneer”.In July, however, Needham was also appointed as chairman of another thinktank, American Compass, which is led by a former Mitt Romney aide, Oren Cass.Cass and American Compass have drawn attention by promoting interventionist economic policies. Those policy ideas overlap with those of JD Vance: in reporting on the Needham hire, Politico called American Compass a “Vance-aligned think tank”, and Vance “an ally whose own staff has deep ties to the organization”.American Compass’s policy director, Chris Griswold, meanwhile, is another former Rubio staffer.After being dubbed “Little Marco” by Trump in a 2016 primary in which he, in turn, mocked the size of Trump’s hands, Rubio moved closer to Trump politically over the succeeding eight years, and in May even refused to commit to accepting the results of the upcoming election.At that time, Rubio was under consideration as Trump’s running mate but was eventually passed over for JD Vance.Although there was reporting on America 2100 at launch, there is little information on the site about its current personnel or the nature of the entity underlying its activities.America 2100 was registered as a non-stock corporation in Virginia in June 2023.Officers listed in filings include Needham and another former Rubio staffer, Albert Martinez, along with Lisa Lisker, a lawyer who was reportedly previously involved in an organization that spread misinformation about solar power in 12 states, and was also secretary for JD Vance’s campaign committee during his run for Senate in the 2022 election.The Guardian emailed America 2100 for comment via an email address designated for “press”, and emailed Needham and Lisker. The Guardian also contacted Rubio’s office.Only Needham responded, writing that: “I know this article will be bad-faith political hit job.”Needham added: “Nate did a great job reporting on the tragic story playing out in Charleroi.”In mid-2022, Hochman appeared poised for a high-profile career in conservative media, having been rewarded with blue ribbon fellowships and a staff job at the home of mainstream conservative opinion, National Review.His status as a representative of the emerging, harder-edged “national conservative” movement made him “the leftwing media’s go-to voice for insight into this crowd”, according to a story on rising rightwing influencers published at that time by the Dispatch, a “never Trump” conservative website.Hochman’s appearance in that story, however, was the start of his undoing.The Dispatch reported on a recording of Hochman in a Twitter spaces conversation with the white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer Nick Fuentes.In that conversation, Hochman reportedly disagreed with Fuentes on some topics, but also appeared to compliment the “America First” far-right activist, telling Fuentes: “You’ve gotten a lot of kids based, and we respect that for sure,” and “I think Nick’s probably a better influence than [the conservative commentator] Ben Shapiro on young men who might otherwise be conservatives.”Amid the furore that followed, Hochman was stripped of his fellowships. In March 2023 he left the National Review to work for DeSantis’s abortive presidential campaign. He was fired by the campaign that July, however, after he retweeted a meme-drenched pro-DeSantis video on his personal account that embraced the aesthetics of the online far right.As the Guardian reported at the time, the video portrayed “a ‘Wojak” meme, a sad-looking man popular on the right, against headlines about Trump policy failures before showing the meme cheering up to headlines about DeSantis and images of the governor at work”, all to the tune of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill.Then finally it superimposed DeSantis on to ranks of marching soldiers and a Sonnenrad – a Norse symbol frequently appropriated by neo-Nazis.As Hochman departed the campaign, Axios reported that Hochman had made the video, but endeavored to make it “appear as if it was produced externally”.Since then, Hochman has more fully embraced the more extreme actors of the so-called “new right”.A week ago, he published an essay at the far-right magazine IM–1776, which appeared to embed conspiratorial claims about the media in a jeremiad against democracy.Hochman claims at one point in the piece: “The US constitution was conceived to thwart tyranny; but it did so, in part, by limiting mass democracy. Once those limits were removed, power was no longer dispersed across a system of checks and balances, but centralized in the hands of whoever controlled the machinery of opinion formation.”Another recent essay published at IM–1776 characterized critics of Darryl Cooper – the “Holocaust revisionist” who recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s webcast – as adherents of “Hitlerian Satanism”.IM–1776 also gave space for the alt-right influencer Douglass Mackey to characterize his prosecution under Klan-era election laws as the government “prosecuting people [for] posting election jokes”.The Guardian previously reported on IM–1776’s close links to the rightwing activist Christopher Rufo, who has spent much of the last week trying in vain to substantiate Donald Trump’s false claims that Haitian immigrants are eating “dogs” “cats” and “pets”.In his essay, Hochman praises Rufo, saying that he “has won an impressive string of culture war victories by actively crafting news cycles rather than responding to them”.In May, in the American Mind, Hochman began a glowing review of The Unprotected Class, a book by the Claremont Institute’s Jeremy Carl that claims America is racked by anti-white racism, with the line: “Ethnic discrimination is as old as human civilization itself,” and goes on to argue: “Racial revenge is the germ of the sustained campaign to defame, attack, and disenfranchise white Americans on behalf of their country’s most powerful institutions.” More

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      Harris campaign raised triple the funds in August that Trump team took in

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      Kamala Harris’s presidential election campaign raised more than triple the funds that Donald Trump’s did in August, according to the latest figures released by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).The US vice-president and the Democratic National Committee saw $257m (£193m) flow into their coffers, compared with $85m (£64m) raised by the former president and the Republican National Committee, continuing a towering financial fundraising advantage that has been leveraged since Joe Biden stepped away from his re-election bid in July and Harris became the party’s nominee for the White House.The FEC’s release on Friday showed that the Democratic campaign of Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, and the Democratic National Committee have $286m (£215m) to play with in the final two months before the election on 5 November, compared with Trump’s $214m (£161m).Harris’s cash advantage translated into significantly more spending: FEC disclosures show spending on the Harris-Walz campaign reached $174m (£131m) last month, almost three times as much as the Trump campaign outlays of $61m (£47m).Campaign and national committee combined spending shows a less extreme split. Harris and the Democrats splurged with $258m (£194m) last month into her sprint for the presidency, with Trump and the Republicans dropping $121m (£91m) on campaign advertising and costs, $36m (£27m) more than they raised that month.Meanwhile, tech mogul Elon Musk also made his largest federal political contribution to date, giving a total of $289,100 (£217,090) to the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), a committee dedicated to supporting Republican candidates in the US House of Representatives. The party narrowly controls the lower chamber of Congress, while Democrats have a wafer-thin majority in the US Senate and both parties are battling fiercely for control.Despite the Harris campaign cash advantage, allowing her to blanket the airwaves with ads, opinion polls both nationally and in swing states show an extremely tight race. Both campaigns have said most of their spending was on ads, with smaller sums paying for rallies, travel and campaign staff salaries.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Harris campaign spent more than $135m (£101m) on media buys and ad production in August, FEC records showed; more than $6m (£4.5m) on air travel; about $4.9m (£3.7m) on payroll and related taxes; and $4.5m (£3.4m) on text messaging. Harris’s campaign has assembled at least 2,000 aides and 312 campaign field offices across the battleground states.The Trump campaign has not disclosed comparative details about the size of its operation. In August, it spent more than $47m (£35m) on ads, alongside $10.2m (£7.7m) on direct mail to potential voters and about $670,000 (£503,000) on air travel.The financial disclosures come as an intriguing interpretation of how each candidate might get to the winning threshold of 270 electoral college votes has emerged: if Harris wins the northern swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and North Carolina, but loses the Sun belt swing states of Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, then the 2024 election could come down to Nebraska, where five electoral college votes are assigned proportionally but there is a push by Republicans to change that to a winner-take-all system. More

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      Did Reagan pave the way for Trump? ‘You can trace the linkages,’ says biographer

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      “Understand this about immigration,” Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives and a staunch Democrat, said in an interview on HBO earlier this month. “The best speech on immigration was by President Ronald Reagan.”Pelosi is not alone among Democrats heaping praise on the 40th president for his pro-immigration views, defiance of tyranny and politics of optimism – “It’s morning in America.” For many he has come to symbolise nostalgia for a more innocent, less partisan time. Visitors to America’s capital often land at Ronald Reagan Washington national airport. A newly released biopic starring Dennis Quaid is the latest burnishing of the myth.But a critically praised biography of Reagan challenges these assumptions, balancing recognition of Reagan’s strengths with a close examination of his glaring weaknesses on inequality, race and the Aids pandemic. Its introduction poses a provocative question: “Did Reaganism contain the seeds of Trumpism?”And the book comes not from a progressive Democrat but a former foreign policy adviser to the Republican presidential campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio. Max Boot is himself an immigrant: he was born in Moscow, grew up in Los Angeles, gained US citizenship and is now a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank.“I guess my relationship with the Republican party is like the love affair that ended badly,” Boot, 55, says in a Zoom interview from his white-walled home in New York. “I was an ardent admirer of Reagan as a young man in the 1980s.“He made conservatism cool for a lot of people including me growing up in that decade and all the more so in my case because I was born in the Soviet Union and my family came here and so tended to gravitate towards the right side of the political spectrum. I loved it when he called the Soviet Union ‘the evil empire’ and stood up for human rights behind the iron curtain. He made me a Republican.”View image in fullscreenBut a day after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Boot reregistered as an independent. He believes this has given him an objectivity and distance from his biographical subject. “That’s allowed me to write a much better book than I would have written in the past if I were writing from a pro-Reagan or pro-Republican standpoint. What I tried to do was to do a very balanced job that was neither hagiography nor hit job but trying to show Reagan both good and bad.”In Reagan: His Life and Legend, Boot acknowledges the personal and political differences between Reagan, born in 1911, and Trump, born in 1946. Reagan, he argues, was both more ideological and more pragmatic than most people realise. He was pro-free trade, pro-immigration, pro-Nato and anti-Russian expansionism. Boot has no doubt that he would have supported Ukraine in its battle against Vladimir Putin. Reagan also had a sunny, optimistic vision of America, a sharp contrast from Trump’s “American carnage”.But there are through lines, all the same. “Clearly the Republican party has evolved in ways that Reagan could have never anticipated and yet I don’t think you can just say, wow, Trump arrived from Mars and there was no relationship between what he’s saying and doing and previous decades in the Republican party,” Boot argues.“Just as a historian, that seems to me very ahistorical because we know things don’t come out of nowhere. You can trace the linkages and see that despite the huge differences between Trump and Reagan, there are also various resemblances and similarities.”The first and most obvious is that both men were television hosts – Reagan on General Electric Theater, one of the most popular shows of the late 1950s and early 1960, and Trump on The Apprentice, one of the most popular shows of the 2000s and 2010s.Boot comments: “Both Reagan and Trump beamed into people’s homes so that people assumed that they knew them, that they were like a friend but, in many ways, they were falling for the image rather than the reality. In Trump’s case, the image was that he was this super-successful wheeler-dealer whereas we now know that so many of his companies went bankrupt and he had a very chequered business record.View image in fullscreen“In Reagan’s case, it was this image as the man nextdoor, somebody who was like this friendly neighbour and warm friend, which was certainly the image that he projected. And yet it was striking to me, talking to people who knew him well, that actually Ronald Reagan had this glacial reserve. He would have made a pretty good hermit. That’s an indication of how TV can distort reality.”Reagan also became a Hollywood film actor, which caused later critics to question his political and intellectual heft. In the 1985 time travel caper Back to the Future, Doc Brown says, “Tell me, Future Boy, who’s President of the United States in 1985?” When Marty McFly says Ronald Reagan, an incredulous Doc retorts: “Ronald Reagan! The actor? Then who’s vice-president, Jerry Lewis?”But Reagan was in a different league from Trump, who once used a black Sharpie marker to alter an official hurricane map and suggested injecting bleach as a cure for Covid-19. Boot says: “It’s all relative because Reagan was certainly criticised for knowing so little about the government and paying so little attention to details, which was true compared to other presidents. But he was practically like a political science PhD compared to Trump because he was actually interested in ideas.“It wasn’t all just about himself. It wasn’t all about boosting his own ego. You could argue about his ideas and you could say maybe that they were bad ideas, but he had ideas and he was devoted to them and he read and he wrote. I read all of his letters that are extant and he was a beautiful writer. There was a lot more intellectual substance with Reagan than with Trump, even though Reagan was also accused of being a lightweight.”Reagan was hailed as “the great communicator”. When asked how relevant his acting career had been for the presidency, he replied: “There have been times, in this office when I’ve wondered how you could do this job if you hadn’t been an actor.”Both Reagan and Trump were populists who reviled Washington, though the former did not refer to it as “the deep state”, and both used the campaign slogan “Make America great again”. Boot also points to more troubling resemblances, including Reagan’s poor record on civil rights and racial justice.Reagan himself insisted that he was incapable of prejudice, pointing to the example of his father, Jack, who was of Irish Catholic ancestry and therefore the victim of discrimination, as giving Reagan some sensitivity about the experience of minorities. “But he was pretty oblivious to the African American experience,” Boot contends.“He talked about his home town of Dixon, Illinois, as being a wonderful place where people loved each other and neighbours supported each other and – he wouldn’t have said it this way – it was like a kumbaya spirit prevailed. When I actually researched Dixon in the 1920s, what I discovered was it was a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan.“The Klan was having massive rallies right outside of town. They were marching through the downtown and in their white sheets. This is what Reagan’s neighbours were actually up to and the town actually even had segregation, even though it wasn’t in the south. The movie theatre was segregated; Black people had to sit in a separate area. It wasn’t all peace and love but he was kind of oblivious to it.”View image in fullscreenTime and again in his early political career, Reagan was on the wrong side of history. He opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. In his race for governor of California in 1966, he opposed the Rumford Fair Housing Act, which prohibited discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.In a 1971 phone call with President Richard Nixon, Reagan made racist remarks about African delegates to the United Nations, calling them “monkeys” and saying they were still “uncomfortable wearing shoes”. He did not attend Martin Luther King’s funeral, even though many Republicans did, and opposed the Martin Luther King Jr public holiday right up until the day he signed it into law.Boot comments: “He certainly did not engage in the openly racist appeals of a George Wallace or Trump for that matter but he certainly used race-neutral, coded language that people understood, talking about law and order, talking about we can’t allow our streets to turn into a jungle, talking about welfare queens, that infamous episode in the 1980 election where he spoke at the Neshoba County Fair [in Mississippi] and talked about states’ rights a few miles from where three civil rights workers have been slain by the Klan.“He had a double standard on human rights abroad, where he was very tough, and rightly so, on human rights violations in the Soviet Union but he was very weak on human rights violations in South Africa and in fact vetoed a tough sanctions bill on South Africa. I can’t judge what was in Reagan’s heart but I know his political record and it was one of catering to white backlash voters but doing it in seemingly neutral language which didn’t alarm moderates, didn’t turn off centrists.”A generation later, Trump dispensed with Reagan’s dog whistle and replaced it with a bullhorn, deploying blatantly racist stereotypes in pursuit of the same goal. Boot adds: “He’s not nearly as deft. He does it with these crazy stories about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs or whatever. Reagan loved an apocryphal story himself but nothing quite that crude or crazy.”The parallels do not stop there. Each was a Democrat before they were a Republican. Each was the oldest US president in history when he took office (a record since surpassed by Joe Biden). Each survived an attempted assassination by a loner with no apparent political motive. Just as Trump mishandled the coronavirus pandemic, Reagan had a devastating blind spot when it came to Aids, despite the efforts of scientists such as Anthony Fauci.View image in fullscreenBoot comments: “When you look back at his presidency, the fact that he completely ignored Aids and it was killing tens of thousands of people, that’s a major blot on his record. He even speculated that Aids could be God’s punishment for gay people and so forth – things that were commonly said, I guess, in straight society in the 1980s.“At the time reporters would joke with Reagan aides about Aids; the reporters thought it was a big joke, too. It wasn’t like they were holding him to account. But standards have greatly changed and now, from our vantage point, it seems shocking that Reagan and a lot of his senior aides were so callous about Aids.”Ultimately, Boot argues, Reagan paved the way for Trump. “He was addicted to faux facts. He would often cite apocryphal quotes and anecdotes and statistics that weren’t really true but would keep citing them anyway, even when it was pointed out that he didn’t have any basis for doing so. You can argue that acclimated the Republican party to the fire hose of falsehoods that you see from Trump.“Even more fundamentally, Reagan’s policies truly favoured the wealthy and increased income disparity in the United States. You can argue that those policies, whether it was the tax cuts, lack of anti-trust, anti-union activity, all the rest, by widening those income disparities opened the way for populism in America, both from the left and the rightwing populism that Trump exploits today.”Reagan remains a convenient political prop for Republicans in 2024. Several candidates in this year’s party primary sought to position themselves as Reagan’s true heir, with former vice-president Mike Pence often recalling that he “joined the Reagan revolution and never looked back”. Even Trump regularly calls the former president as a defence witness on abortion, stating that “like President Ronald Reagan before me, I support the three exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother”.View image in fullscreenReagan died in 2004, aged 93, after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. If he were still alive today, it is impossible to imagine him delivering a Maga speech on Trump’s behalf at a campaign rally or convention. Boot reflects: “Every generation of Republicans has been more rightwing than the previous generation. Reagan was well to the right of Nixon and Ford. Trump is now well to the right of Reagan.“I’m sure that if Reagan were still alive, he would be being denounced as a Rino [Republican in name only], just as George Bush and Dick Cheney and so many others are today. After all, in 1986 Reagan signed this immigration bill that legalised millions of undocumented immigrants – what Republicans today would denounce as an amnesty bill and so very different from what Maga Republicans would do.“The ultimate irony here is that, in 1980, when Reagan was elected, Reaganism was pushing the Republican party in the country to the right. Today, if Reaganism were to prevail on the Republican party, it would be pushing the Republican party to the left, to the centre.”Both Reagan and Trump demonstrated the power of personality to shape the Republican party in their own image. Where celebrity led, ideology followed. Boot wonders if the same thing could happen when the party finally enters the post-Trump era.“It’s possible to imagine maybe there will be some charismatic, transcendent individual in the future who might have much more moderate views than Trump does and, if so, that person could easily gain ascendancy over the Republican party. It’s also possible that a rightwing demagogue who’s as crazy as Trump but even more effective could be the future of the Republican party.“It’s up for grabs – too soon to know. But based on the Reagan and Trump precedent, maybe we should be looking for the next leader of the Republican party among people who host national TV shows.” More

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      Republicans step up effort to change Nebraska voting rules to help Trump

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      Congressional Republicans are demanding an 11th-hour change to Nebraska’s presidential voting system in a move that could transform the electoral calculus and tip the race to Donald Trump in the event of a photo finish.With polls showing Trump neck-and-neck with Kamala Harris both nationally and in battleground states, senior GOP congressional figures are pressing the Nebraska legislature to replace a system that splits the allocation of its electoral college votes with the straightforward winner-takes-all distribution that operates in most US states.The change would increase the number of electors allotted to Trump for winning the solidly Republican state from four to five – and raises the possibility that the former president could end up tied with Harris at 269 electoral votes each.Such a scenario would pitch the ultimate decision on the election into the House of Representatives, which has the constitutional authority to certify the results – meaning the outcome of November’s House election, in which Republicans are defending a wafer-thin majority, could be even more pivotal than usual.In a sign of the raised stakes, the South Carolina senator Lindsay Graham – a close Trump ally – visited Nebraska this week and urged legislators to find the extra votes needed to revert its electoral college distribution procedure back to the winner-takes-all system it used before 1992.Pressure was also ratcheted up by the state’s five US congressional members, who wrote to Nebraska’s governor, Jim Pillen, and the speaker of its single-chamber legislature, John Arch, who are both Republicans.“As members of Nebraska’s federal delegation in Congress, we are united in our support for apportioning all five of the Nebraska’s electoral votes in presidential elections according to the winner of the whole state,” read the Nebraska delegation’s letter, posted on X by GOP House member Mike Flood, one of its signatories. “It is past time that Nebraska join 48 other states in embracing winner-take-all in presidential elections.”A two-thirds majority of the Republican-led chamber is needed to change the system. Only 31 or 32 of the 50-seat body are thought to be in favour, meaning the spotlight is being focused on the state senator Mike McDonnell, a former Democrat who turned Republican this year but swore he would never support winner-takes-all.Local media reports have depicted McDonnell as wavering amid speculation that Trump may soon contact him personally.The issue is potentially vital because some pollsters have predicted that Harris is on course to win exactly the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the White House by winning the three northern swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where recent polling has shown her with small but consistent leads.However, she would fall short by just one if a winner-takes-all distribution was adopted in Nebraska, whose second congressional district – encompassing the state’s largest city, Omaha, and its suburbs – together with its single electoral vote is expected to fall to Harris, as it did to Joe Biden in 2020.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTo avoid a tie, Harris would need to win the three northern battlegrounds along with at least one of four southern Sun belt states – North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona – where she and Trump are deadlocked, but where polls often show the former president with a tiny edge.Unlike most other states, Nebraska does not allocate its electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote, but instead gives that candidate two electoral votes while awarding the rest on the basis of which party wins its three congressional districts.Maine is the only other state to operate a comparable system. This year, its Democratic house majority leader vowed that it would cancel out any move in Nebraska to revert to a winner-takes-all approach by introducing a similar change in Maine.However, by leaving the push until less than seven weeks before the 5 November election, Republicans may have blocked off that option.Maine’s legislative rules deem that a bill can only become law 90 days after its passage, unless it is passed with two-thirds majorities in both chambers, meaning there will be insufficient time to implement a new system by polling day. Although Democrats have majorities in the state’s house and senate, they do not have supermajorities. More

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      Harris condemns Trump in Georgia after news of abortion-related deaths

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      In her first speech dedicated exclusively to abortion rights since becoming the presidential nominee, Kamala Harris spoke on Friday afternoon in Atlanta, Georgia, blaming Donald Trump for the abortion bans that now blanket much of the United States.Harris spoke days after news broke that two Georgia mothers died after being unable to access legal abortions and adequate medical care in the state.“Two women – and those are only the stories we know – here in the state of Georgia, died, died, because of a Trump abortion ban,” Harris said. She repeatedly referred to “Trump abortion bans” in the speech.“Suffering is happening every day in our country,” Harris continued. “To those women, to those families – I say on behalf on what I believe we all say, we see you and you are not alone and we are all here standing with you.”In the weeks since becoming the Democratic nominee for president, Harris has made reproductive rights a central part of her campaign. She has toured the country to highlight the healthcare consequences of the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade, which paved the way for more than a dozen states to ban almost all abortions.On Friday, Harris blamed the former president for Roe’s demise because Trump appointed three of the supreme court justices who overturned the landmark decision. She also also condemned Republicans for repeatedly blocking Senate bills that would have guaranteed a federal right to in vitro fertilization, a popular fertility treatment that had its future cast into doubt after Roe’s overturning.“On the one hand, these extremists want to tell women they don’t have the freedom to end an unwanted pregnancy,” Harris said. “On the other hand, these extremists are telling women and their parents they don’t have the freedom to start a family.”The raucous crowd grumbled loudly at Harris’s words. “Make it make sense!” someone shouted.Although Joe Biden won Georgia in the 2020 presidential election, becoming the first Democrat in decades to take the state, Democrats seemed unlikely to recapture it until Harris replaced Biden as nominee. Now, Georgia is once again a swing state. Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina and a major Trump surrogate, has said that Trump must win Georgia if he wants to win the White House. Meanwhile, Harris in August embarked on a two-day bus tour of the state and giving her first major network interview there.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe deaths of the Georgia mothers, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, were first reported earlier this week by ProPublica and occurred after Georgia enacted a six-week abortion ban. Georgia’s maternal mortality review committee looked at both women’s cases and deemed their deaths “preventable”, according to ProPublica.Although Georgia permits abortions in medical emergencies, doctors across the country have said that abortion exceptions are worded so vaguely as to be unworkable. Instead, doctors have said, they are forced to watch until patients get sick enough to legally intervene.After Thurman took abortion pills to end a pregnancy in 2022, her body failed to expel all of the fetal tissue – a rare but potentially devastating complication. Doctors delayed giving the 28-year-old a routine procedure for 20 hours, and she developed sepsis. Her heart stopped during an emergency surgery.“Under the Trump abortion ban, her doctors could have faced up to a decade in prison for providing Amber the care she needed,” Harris said on Friday. “Understand what a law like this means. Doctors have to wait until the patient is at death’s door before they take action.”Harris met with Thurman’s mother and sisters on Thursday night. “Their pain is heartbreaking,” she said.While on the campaign trail, Trump has alternated between bragging about helping to demolish Roe, complaining about how Republicans’ hardline anti-abortion stances have cost the Republican elections, and flip-flopping on his own position on the procedure.Access to abortion has become one of voters’ top issues over the last two years, and Democrats are hoping that outrage over Roe will propel them to victory at the ballot box this November. Ten states, including the key battleground states of Nevada and Arizona, are set to hold abortion-related ballot measures, which could boost turnout among Democrats’ base. More

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      Ohio’s Republican governor condemns Trump and Vance for Springfield claims

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      Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, on Friday criticized former US president Donald Trump and his election running mate, JD Vance, for repeating racist rightwing claims about Haitian immigrants eating other residents’ pets in the city of Springfield, Ohio.The conspiracy theories have caused uproar and led to an onslaught of threats and harassment.In a guest essay published in the New York Times on Friday, DeWine said it is “disappointing” that Springfield “has become the epicenter of vitriol over America’s immigration policy”, specifically calling out Trump and Vance for amplifying disinformation.“As a supporter of former President Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance, I am saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield,” DeWine wrote. “This rhetoric hurts the city and its people, and it hurts those who have spent their lives there.”DeWine said Trump and Vance were raising important issues about the “Biden administration’s failure to control the southern border”.But the governor, who said he was born in Springfield, added: “But their verbal attacks against these Haitians – who are legally present in the United States – dilute and cloud what should be a winning argument about the border.”DeWine’s comments have received mixed reactions from top Ohio Democrats.Some have supported DeWine’s essay amid vitriol aimed at Haitian immigrants in Springfield. Allison Russo, Ohio state representative and minority whip, celebrated DeWine’s essay in a post to X.“I applaud [DeWine] for this fair and very thoughtful op-ed about [Springfield, Ohio] and the Haitian immigrants who are working hard to build a future there,” she wrote.Meanwhile, Ohio state senate leader Nickie Antonio told the Guardian that she agreed with DeWine’s essay, but was “disappointed” that DeWine is still supporting Trump and Vance in the 2024 presidential election.“What the governor left out with his entire [essay], which I think was beautiful, is that Trump and JD Vance started this whole thing to begin with and they continue it,” Antonio said.“They are continuing to beat the drum, encouraging violence, hatred, discrimination of people who are legally in our country, in our state and in that community”.Antonio added that DeWine is a “fine and decent person” who has done positive things for Ohio, but added: “I don’t know how any reasonable person at this moment could put their partisan affiliation in front of decency and some kind of sense of the common good, because there’s none of that with these kinds of statements.”Trump said on Wednesday that he plans to visit Springfield “in the next two weeks”.Both DeWine and the mayor of Springfield, Rob Rue, also a Republican, spoke out against such a visit over security concerns.“A visit from the former president will undoubtedly place additional demands on our safety infrastructure,” said Rue during a Thursday press conference. “Should he choose to change his plans, it would convey a significant message of peace to the city of Springfield.”DeWine had previously questioned dehumanizing rumors targeting Haitian immigrants in Springfield.In an interview with CBS News last week, DeWine said that the rumor began on the internet, which “can be quite crazy sometimes”.DeWine added: “Mayor [Rob] Rue of Springfield says, ‘No, there’s no truth in that.’ They have no evidence of that at all. So, I think we go with what the mayor says. He knows his city.”Meanwhile, schools in Springfield received more than 30 bomb threats after the inflammatory rumors became national news, despite there being no evidence to support them, and Trump brought up the topic in the presidential debate against his Democratic rival for the White House, Kamala Harris.DeWine has since deployed Ohio state highway patrol to provide security.“Bomb threats – all hoaxes – continue and temporarily closed at least two schools, put the hospital on lockdown and shuttered City Hall,” he wrote. More

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      Mark Robinson to stay in North Carolina race despite revelation of offensive comments

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      North Carolina’s Republican candidate for governor, Mark Robinson, was still in the race for governor on Friday morning after the deadline passed overnight for him to withdraw or be removed from the ballot.Robinson has faced increasing pressure to drop out from the gubernatorial race after a damning CNN story published on Thursday afternoon reported that he made lewd and sexually explicit comments on the pornography site Nude Africa between 2008 and 2012.Pressure for Robinson to withdraw has privately come from North Carolina Republicans as well as Donald Trump’s election campaign following the Republican presidential nominee’s enthusiastic support of Robinson, the Carolina Journal reported. Trump has previously praised Robinson, calling the gubernatorial nominee, who is Black, “Martin Luther King on steroids” during a campaign rally this year.The election campaign of Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, wasted no time in posting previous high praise for Robinson from Trump, in which he called him a friend and “one of the hottest politicians in the United States”, and a compilation of images of the two together with the caption “best friends”.Trump is expected to hold a rally in North Carolina on Saturday, but it was not known on Friday morning if Robinson would attend.Robinson has pledged to continue his campaign, preemptively denying the CNN report.According to the CNN story, Robinson previously referred to himself as a “black Nazi” in one comment. In a separate remark made in 2012, Robinson said that he would have preferred Adolf Hitler as US president over then president Barack Obama.Robinson also wrote that slavery should be reinstated. “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring [slavery] back. I would certainly buy a few,” he wrote in October 2010.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRobinson also allegedly made several sexual comments on the pornography website, CNN reported. He claimed that he enjoyed “peeping” into the locker room of a women’s gym when he was younger.The Associated Press contributed reporting More