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      ‘We are staying in this race’: behind the unraveling of Mark Robinson’s campaign in North Carolina

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      Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s tub-thumping Republican candidate for governor, had been trying to extricate himself from problems caused by his own words long before CNN dumped a truckload of dirt on him Thursday afternoon.Robinson has treated outrage over his ever-increasing litany of racist, sexist, homophobic and antisemitic offense as a badge of honor during the course of the campaign and his term as the state’s lieutenant governor. But CNN’s report tilled his pornographic internet history, unearthing comments that still managed the power to shock.CNN’s report connects Robinson’s name, email address and biographical details to the “minisoldr” persona, where Robinson described himself as a “Black NAZI!”, praised Hitler, described Martin Luther King Jr in racially offensive terms, expressed sexual interest in transgender pornography and described peeping on girls in a public shower when he was 14.“Slavery is not bad,” Robinson reportedly wrote. “Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it [slavery] back. I would certainly buy a few.”CNN refrained from exposing the entirety of its findings because some of it was too disturbing to address in public, the news organization said.Shortly before the report came out, Robinson claimed he would remain in the race. If Robinson did not drop out before midnight, he couldn’t drop out; the deadline in North Carolina would have passed.Knowing how the left has sought the removal of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas for receiving questionable largesse from billionaires, it was characteristic of Robinson to liken his situation to Thomas’s “hi-tech lynching” 33 years ago over allegations of sexual misconduct with Anita Hill. “We’re not going to let them do that. We are staying in this race. We’re in it to win it,” Robinson said.But the bombastic candidate had already been facing a crushing defeat after a mix of resurfaced remarks and poor polling led the national Republican party, and Donald Trump, to back off from their support.Robinson’s apparent interest in transgender pornography stands in sharp contrast to his public opposition for trans rights. Calls for his resignation began in 2021 after comments surfaced in which he described education that discussed trans issues as “child abuse”, LGBTQ+ content as “filth” and suggested that trans people should be arrested for using the wrong bathroom.Robinson’s opponent, the North Carolina attorney general, Josh Stein, has needed to do little more than saturate the airwaves and social media with campaign ads drawing on Robinson’s own rhetoric, while speaking in broad positive terms about the state and his platform and reaffirming his support for reproductive rights.“As your next governor, I will veto any further restrictions on reproductive freedom,” Stein said at a rally in Greensboro for Kamala Harris.Abortion policy is at the center of Robinson’s appeal to the right and perhaps at the center of the electoral disaster unfolding for Republicans in North Carolina as well. Robinson’s pro-life politics have not just been strident but defiant and accusatory.In one recently unearthed video from a church sermon in 2022, he attacks women’s empowerment and birth control. “Why don’t you use some of that building up of your mind and building up of empowerment to move down here, to this region down here,” he said, waving his hand around his crotch. “Get this under control.”Notably, Robinson has admitted to paying for an abortion for his then girlfriend, now wife, in the 80s, something he said he regrets. It is the stridency of his anti-abortion rhetoric that has kept North Carolina’s religious right in his corner.Lorra Parker lives in McDowell county, where Republicans have a three-to-one advantage. She went to hear Robinson speak last week. Though she has a broad set of conservative political interests, abortion policy was critical to her identity as a voter, she said. Even as Trump appeared to vacillate on this issue in the debate, he doesn’t need to be the perfect candidate, just the better candidate.She applies the same logic to Robinson. Now, she’s reserving judgment while the reporting sorts itself out, she said.“Honestly, I’d need to hear it from a source other than CNN,” she said. “I think if he’s not guilty of this, then he should fight to prove that he’s not guilty of this. He’s got time to do that. But he’s been lieutenant governor for four years and they just found this out now? That’s a little suspicious to me.”Robinson’s public appearances and social media posts are a treasure trove of opposition research for Democrats painting their opponents as extremists.“The choice couldn’t be clearer,” reads one ad. “Donald Trump and Mark Robinson, their vision is one of division, violence and hate. Mark Robinson just fights job-killing culture wars … Just a few weeks ago, from of all places a church pulpit, he said ‘some folks need killing.’”On defense from all angles, Robinson went to ground shortly after winning the Republican primary earlier this year, refusing interviews with all but the most stridently conservative publications and broadcasters and largely avoiding public appearances.But a strategy of riding Trump’s coattails and counting on the state’s generally conservative lean had been collapsing as waves of negative press – about his campaign finances, the maladministration of his wife’s government-funded non-profit, and always his incendiary rhetoric – flooded the field.Robinson has not led in a poll since June; even before CNN’s revelations, the withdrawal of Joe Biden from the race in July threatened to turn a close race into a rout. The latest poll from Emerson College shows him losing to Stein by eight points.So, Robinson resurfaced a few weeks ago. He had made tentative steps in small venues far from the scrutiny of big-market news reporters to test messaging that retained as much heat as possible without burning people: cayenne rhetoric, not Carolina Reaper.On 11 September, the day after the Harris-Trump debate, Robinson stepped into the back room of Countryside Barbecue in cherry red Marion, North Carolina, looking for friendly territory and as much of a rhetorical rebrand as he might muster under fire.His stump speech touched on gas prices and teacher salaries and state taxes – policy issues instead of the culture war molotov cocktails about abortion and guns and gay people which launched his career and won him the nomination.But time and again, his attention turned to how the press and his Democratic opponent, had been lighting him up.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We’ve got a guy named Josh Stein who wants to talk about any and everything except the truth,” Robinson said. “He’s got something about me from Facebook eight or nine years ago, where he cut it off just to play about three seconds of it. He didn’t play the whole thing, something about ‘keep your skirt down.’”Robinson was referring to the wall-to-wall ads playing across the state replaying a Facebook video from 2009 in which he says abortion “is about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down”.“He cut off the part where he said ‘or keep your pants up’,” Robinson said to the conservative crowd last week, for whom that was convincing. Then he suggested that ad and others were deceptive. He called his opponent a liar. He dared the press to report it. He also demanded a debate, which Stein has been refusing.Shades of the Robinson bluster lay under the fresh paint of respectability.He spent almost as much time haranguing the president and vice-president in the mountain towns of western North Carolina as he did his actual opponent.“The same one that was right there riding shotgun with [Biden] while he was doing it was on TV last night talking about how she was going to fix it all,” Robinson said of Harris. “She tore it up, but she can’t fix it. What policy has she ever championed since she’s been in any office that will fix the problems that we’re facing right now?”Robinson has been walking back his previous, strident calls for a total abortion ban in North Carolina. Earlier this year, he argued for a six-week “heartbeat” law limiting abortion. Earlier this week, he argued for the public to “move on” from the abortion issue.In a room packed with church-going Republicans in Marion, he said: “Everybody may have a different opinion on that.“My opinion is this: no matter where that law sits, as the governor of this state, I’m going to fight to save every single solitary life in the womb. It doesn’t matter whether it’s 12 weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, 20 weeks – we’re going to fight for life in this state.In a reference to Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, Ohio senator and author of Hillbilly Elegy, some of Robinson’s road team wore shirts printed with the words “Felon / Hillbilly”.The shirts reflect the tone of Robinson’s race. He has tied himself for good or ill to Trump’s tenor and politics. But even Trump’s team has had enough.According to the conservative Carolina Journal, the Trump campaign has been pressuring Robinson to withdraw, out of fear that North Carolina’s election-deciding swing voters will not just abandon the lieutenant governor but the entire Republican ballot.Citing anonymous campaign sources, the Carolina Journal reported that the Stein campaign leaked the material to CNN, and that the Trump campaign told Robinson that he was no longer welcome at rallies for Trump or Vance. Trump has not mentioned Robinson in the last week. Vance held his first solo rally in North Carolina on Wednesday. Robinson did not appear. His office announced that Robinson had contracted Covid-19.Trump campaign officials denied that they had been pressuring Robinson to quit the race in comments to NBC.The Stein campaign released a terse statement shortly after the CNN piece aired.“North Carolinians already know Mark Robinson is completely unfit to be Governor,” the campaign said. “Josh remains focused on winning this campaign so that together we can build a safer, stronger North Carolina for everyone.”The Harris campaign, however, has gleefully circulated videos with Trump praising Robinson. Trump referred to Robinson as “Martin Luther King Jr on steroids.”Robinson, in comments under his “minisoldr” persona, said: “I’m not in the KKK. They don’t let blacks join. If I was in the KKK I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!” More

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      If US Senators are openly Islamophobic, what hope is there? | Representative Ilhan Omar

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      On Tuesday, Senator John Kennedy told the only Muslim American witness during a committee hearing to “hide [her] head in a bag”.The intended purpose of Tuesday’s historic Senate judiciary committee hearing was to bring attention to the rise in hate against Muslim, Jewish, and Palestinian Americans. The rise of antisemitism has sparked many hearings in Congress. In contrast, this was the first hearing since 7 October that addressed hate targeting Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian Americans. Fighting bigotry requires us to condemn it wherever we see it. For far too long, hate speech made against Arab, Muslim and Palestinian Americans goes ignored.The increase in threats, hate speech and violence across the country demands serious attention. Instead, Kennedy used his time to verbally attack the witness, Arab American Institute executive director Maya Berry, for her identity. It was telling that Kennedy along with his Republican colleagues could not avoid actively engaging in anti-Muslim hate speech during a hearing about the rise in hate crimes.In the face of vile accusations, Maya Berry answered Kennedy’s remarks with grace, sensitivity and poise. She used her time to educate the sitting senators on the committee about the uptick in hate that too many communities face daily. As unfair remarks were hurled at her, the American people witnessed the very purpose of the hearing in plain view for all: the normalization of hate speech is alive and well.During Kennedy’s questioning, he repeatedly tried to make his line of questioning about foreign policy in the Middle East, instead of making it about the rise of hate crimes impacting Americans. Kennedy did not get the answers he wanted so he resulted in telling the witness to hide her head in a bag. To be clear, Kennedy’s bigoted comments were unacceptable for anyone, let alone a sitting member of the US Senate. Not only should his comments be unequivocally condemned by every single sitting member of Congress, but his remarks raise serious concerns about the normalization of Islamophobic hate speech in our country.Regrettably, we know that espousing anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bigotry resonates well within the base of the current Republican party. During the committee hearing, senators Cruz, Hawley, Graham and Kennedy were competing for the top bigot award. Islamophobia sells to their base and that is why they remain hellbent on ginning up hate speech at the expense of communities across this country they deem as “other”, including their own constituents. The reality is, Kennedy will face no consequences for his actions because of his power, position, privilege and incompetence. But for millions of Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian Americans across this country, it is imperative that we call out this speech in order to bring needed change and for the safety of those communities.As Maya Berry clearly stated in her testimony, the hateful stereotypes of Arab, Muslim, Palestinian Americans normalized in our media and by our elected officials contribute to the widespread hate felt by millions of Americans. We cannot afford to let Kennedy’s comments slide because this is not a one-off or an isolated comment, it is reflective of a harmful trend.We have seen the tangible consequences of this play out in communities across the country. In November, three college students of Palestinian descent were gunned down in Vermont, leaving one of them paralyzed. Last December, Wadee Alfayoumi, a six-year-old Palestinian American child was brutally murdered in Chicago and his mother hospitalized. Another horrific hate crime happened when a Pakistani American woman was stabbed multiple times in Texas.In Minnesota, we have seen an uptick in anti-Muslim attacks throughout my own district, including residents being shot and physically assaulted, many of the incidents going unreported. During the protests across college campuses, many of the Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students were unjustly censored, suspended and arrested. Even Donald Trump and JD Vance’s false claims about Haitians in Ohio have resulted in bomb threats across Springfield.Hate-filled rhetoric has dangerous implications. As someone who has been the subject of frequent death threats and offensive Islamophobic speech, I know the harm of hate speech first hand. From former president Donald Trump telling me to go back where I came from, to the outrageous words by sitting congresswoman Lauren Boebert when she suggested I was a suicide bomber, to mainstream media including CNN and Fox News peddling Islamophobic tropes in their coverage – this harmful language not only endangers my life, but the lives of all Muslims and people who share these identities with me. This speech is corroding our democracy, the fabric of our communities, and the future of our country. In the US, we should be better than this.As Berry rightfully pointed out: “Hate against any one group is inseparable from hate against all and hate prevention should be done collectively – in coalition and partnership with all communities affected by hate.” Hate in all its forms should have no place here in the US.Kennedy’s comments were just the tip of the iceberg. It is incumbent upon all of us to call out hate speech whenever we see it because fighting bigotry of any kind means fighting bigotry of every kind.

      Ilhan Omar is an American politician serving as the US representative for Minnesota’s 5th congressional district More

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      Kamala Harris holds star-studded event with Oprah in battleground state of Michigan – as it happened

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      Among those at the event are Cat ladies for Kamala, train lovers for Harris-Walz, Republicans for Harris, Swifties for Kamala.Actors Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep are joining via video chat, as are Chris Rock, Ben Stiller, Jennifer Lopez, Tracee Ellis-Ross and Brian Cranston.This blog is closing now, thanks for following along. See all our coverage of the 2024 US electionsOprah concluded by quoting Maya Angelou, saying, “if you know better you have to do better”.That event has now ended.Harris is asked by Meryl Streep what preparations are being made for the possibility that she wins, but Trump does not accept the result.Harris says many Americans who voted for Trump have decided 6 January was a bridge too far.She says “the lawyers are working” and that is important to speak to friends and neighbours about misinformation, and to respect poll workers, and to not be afraid to vote.She doesn’t really answer the question.People who have experienced gun violence are speaking now, again speaking through tears. A woman whose daughter was involved in a school shooting recounts the feeling of not knowing if her daughter, who survived, was alright.Harris says what is needed is common sense, and assault weapons bans, and notes that she owns a gun.If somebody breaks into her house, she says, they’re getting shot. She probably should not have said that, she adds, saying her staff will deal with it later.Tracee Ellis-Ross points out that women who don’t have children still contribute a lot to society. She is saying this because of JD Vance’s childless cat lady comments.Julia Roberts is speaking now via video link.She says she wants to be able to travel and have people think it is a good thing she is American, not a bad one.Harris responds to comments from Thurman’s mother and sister, saying, “First of all, I’m so sorry.”Thurman’s family only recently learned how she died, Harris says.Amber’s mom shared with me over and over that the word preventable keeps coming to her, says Harris.Harris points out that Trump chose three members of the supreme court, which then overturned Roe v Wade. She says he did it intentionally.In 2016 Trump said he wanted abortion legality to be decided by individual states, while Clinton vowed to defend abortion rights.He has boasted that he “was able to kill Roe v Wade”.More from Donegan on that story:
      Thurman could have been cured with a D&C, or dilation and curettage, a procedure in which the cervix is dilated to create an opening through which instruments can be inserted to empty out the contents of a uterus. The procedure is a popular form of abortion, but it is also a routine part of miscarriage and other gynecological care. If the tissue was promptly removed, she probably would have been fine: a D&C requires no special equipment and takes only about 15 minutes.
      But Georgia’s abortion ban outlawed the D&C procedure, making it a felony to perform except in cases of managing a “spontaneous” or “naturally occurring” miscarriage. Because Thurman had taken abortion pills, her miscarriage was illegal to treat. She suffered in a hospital bed for 20 hours, developing sepsis and beginning to experience organ failure. By the time the Georgia doctors were finally willing to treat her, it was too late.
      A woman named Shanette is speaking now through tears about her daughter, Amber Thurman.“You are looking at a mother who is broken,” she says.Thurman, a Black 28-year-old mother to a young son died in Georgia after doctors at a hospital there refused to perform a simple procedure that could have saved her life – because the law did not allow them.Here is the Guardian’s Moira Donegan on the subject:Hadley Duvall, 22, is speaking now. She has told the story of being raped and impregnated, at 12, by her stepfather, as she helps Harris campaign for reproductive rights.When Roe v Wade was overturned, she says, she found that while her abuse was over, her story was not.She thanks Harris for “standing up” for women, and “really showing us that life is not about the hard things you go through”.“You don’t bow down,’ she says.Here is Duvall speaking in August:Harris is asked by a young person about the economy, and the difficulty of going from being a student to an independent adult.She compares her and Trump’s plans.She has been stronger than at other times on the economy here, waffling less and talking about her policies more.Harris references Trump’s response at the debate between the candidates, where he said he had a “concept of a plan” for healthcare. She will give small businesses a $50,000 grant, she says. She says the current small business grant of $5,000 is for a “concept of a business”.Harris is asked about her plan to tackle the cost of living. The economy is one of the areas where Harris has often been weak in her responses.She talks about policies she has announced. She says she will take on price-gouging to bring down the price of groceries.She says she will bring down the cost of buying a home with a tax credit. She will support small business owners.She takes a swipe at Trump’s family wealth and bankruptcy plans. She says she will extend the child tax credit.She repeats her idea of an “opportunity economy”.She says she will sign the bill into law if elected.Harris is asked by a voter what her specific steps would be on strengthening the border.“This is not a theoretical issue for me, this is something I have actually worked on,” she says. “I take very seriously the importance of having a secure border.”She says she has prosecuted cross-border criminal gangs.She talks about the border security bill that Trump blocked.“It would have allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl,” she says. It would have allowed more agents.Trump prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem, Harris says.Oprah brings up Springfield, and the repeated false claims made by Trump and his running mate JD Vance, about immigrants in the town.“It seems to us that something happened to you the moment President Joe Biden stepped aside and withdrew his candidacy, that a veil or something dropped, and you just stepped into your power,” Oprah says to Harris.Oprah stands up and does an impression of Harris walking confidently.“We each have those moments in our lives where it’s time to step up,” Harris says.She felt a sense of responsibility, and with that comes a sense of purpose, she says.“There really is so much at stake”.Harris walks into the event, hugging Whitmer and Oprah, and taking a seat in an armchair opposite Oprah.She says when we’ve dealt with so much that is exhausting with this movement trying to divide Americans, it is important to remember what unites Americans. More

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      Senate leader Schumer moves to avert shutdown after House speaker’s ‘flop’

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      The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, on Thursday took a procedural step toward setting up a vote next week on a government funding extension as the House scrambles to avert a shutdown starting on 1 October.Schumer’s move comes a day after the Republican-led House rejected a proposal by the speaker, Mike Johnson, that would have linked a six-month stopgap funding measure, known as a continuing resolution, with a controversial measure backed by conservatives mandating that states require proof of citizenship to register to vote.The final vote was 202 to 220, with 14 House Republicans and all but three House Democrats opposing the bill. Two Republican members voted “present”.At a press conference on Thursday, Schumer lamented Johnson’s approach, saying that the speaker “flopped right on his face” by pushing a GOP plan. As Congress awaits Johnson’s next move, Schumer said he was setting up a vote for early next week on a legislative vehicle for a bipartisan funding bill.“If the House can’t get its act together, we’re prepared to move forward,” he said.It remains unclear which chamber will act first on government funding, which expires at midnight on 30 September. If the Democratic-led Senate moves ahead with its proposal, it could force the Republican-led House to either agree to the continuing resolution, which conservatives oppose, or risk a shutdown just weeks from election day.Donald Trump, the former president and Republican nominee who has championed baseless claims of widespread non-citizen voting, has called on Johnson to reject any funding measure unless it includes the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act.“If Republicans don’t get the Save Act, and every ounce of it, they should not agree to a continuing resolution in any way, shape, or form,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Wednesday.Speaking on the Senate floor on Thursday, Schumer accused Trump of agitating for a shutdown and urged Republicans not to “blindly follow” the former president.“How does anyone expect Donald Trump to be a president when he has such little understanding of the legislative process? He’s daring the Congress to shut down,” Schumer said. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”Earlier this week, the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, warned House Republicans that a shutdown so close to the 5 November election was politically risky and could have electoral consequences.“The one thing you cannot have is a government shutdown,” McConnell said on Tuesday. “It would be, politically, beyond stupid for us to do that.” More

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      Confusing language on gerrymandering proposal will stay on Ohio’s ballot

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      Ohio voters will see misleading language when they go to vote on an anti-gerrymandering proposal this fall after the state supreme court greenlit the deceptive wording written by Republicans.The Republican-controlled Ohio ballot board approved the language on Wednesday in a 3-2 party-line vote, two days after the Republican-led state supreme court voted 4-3 to correct various defects the justices found in what the board had already passed. The court’s ruling, however, did not require the ballot board to rewrite some of the most significant portions of the amendment.If enacted, the proposal – Issue 1 – would strip lawmakers of their power to draw the boundaries for state legislative and congressional districts and hand it to a 15-person bipartisan independent commission composed of regular citizens. The panel would be constitutionally prohibited from distorting district lines to give one party an unfair advantage, a practice known as gerrymandering.But the language the Ohio ballot board approved for the ballot says that the panel would be “required to gerrymander”. Citizens Not Politicians, the group behind the 5 November amendment, sued last month, asserting the language “may be the most biased, inaccurate, deceptive, and unconstitutional” the state has ever seen.In an unsigned opinion, the state supreme court said the language was acceptable. Because the panel would be required to draw districts that roughly represented the partisan results in recent statewide Ohio elections, it was not misleading to say that the panel would be required to gerrymander, the court majority said. “They mandate the new commission draw district boundaries that give a political advantage to an identifiable group – Republicans in some districts and Democrats in others,” the court said.The high court ordered two of eight disputed sections of the ballot description to be rewritten while upholding the other six the issue’s backers had contested. The court’s three Democratic justices dissented. “What the ballot board has done here is tantamount to performing a virtual chewing of food before the voters can taste it for themselves to decide whether they like it or not,” Justice Jennifer Brunner wrote for the dissent.Republicans, who currently control the mapmaking process, drew districts that gave them a distorted advantage and repeatedly ignored prior rulings from the state supreme court to redraw the lines.State senator Paula Hicks-Hudson, one of the two Democrats who sit on the ballot board, told reporters after it met: “This was done and it was created for the main purpose of hoodwinking voters.” The Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, who chairs the board, did not take questions from the press after the vote.In Monday’s opinion, the high court’s majority noted that it can only invalidate language approved by the ballot board if it finds the wording would “mislead, deceive, or defraud the voters”. The majority found most of the language included in the approved summary and title did not do that but merely described the extensive amendment in detail.The two sections that justices said were mischaracterized involve when a lawsuit would be able to be filed challenging the new commission’s redistricting plan and the ability of the public to provide input on the mapmaking process.The exact language of the constitutional amendment will be posted at polling locations. More

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      Pelosi criticises McConnell for failing to hold Trump accountable over January 6

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      Nancy Pelosi has criticised Mitch McConnell, the outgoing Senate minority leader, for failing to hold Donald Trump accountable for inspiring the violent January 6 mob to attack the US Capitol in a bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election.Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives whose office was vandalised in the attack, also told Semafor she felt sorry for McConnell, who has endorsed Trump’s current campaign for the White House despite being repeatedly insulted by the former president.McConnell “knew what had happened on January 6”, Pelosi said.“He said the president was responsible and then did not hold him accountable.”She added that she and other congressional leaders unsuccessfully begged Trump to send in the national guard while the mob besieged the building.In the days after the riot – which resulted in five deaths at the time, with four police officers killing themselves in the following seven months – McConnell gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he said Trump was “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events”.However, he voted to acquit Trump in a Senate trial after the House had impeached Trump for a second time. A Senate conviction, which needs a two-thirds majority to pass, could have barred Trump from holding elective office again. In the event, 57 senators – including just seven Republicans – voted to convict, 10 short of the numbers needed.McConnell’s vote contradicted his belief that Trump was guilty, according to the book This Will Not Pass, by the New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns. “If this isn’t impeachable, I don’t know what is,” the book quotes McConnell as saying, adding that he also said holding Trump to account should be left to the Democrats. “The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us,” the book says he told two associates.Explaining the contradiction, McConnell apparently told a friend: “I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference.”In 2022, McConnell criticised the Republican National Committee for censuring Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, GOP House members at the time, over their role in a Democrat-led congressional investigation into January 6. Kinzinger and Cheney have since left Congress and are among several prominent Republicans who have endorsed Kamala Harris’s presidential candidacy.“It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next,” McConnell said in response to the censure.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAsked if she had any advice for McConnell – who will step down as the GOP leader in November but will remain in the Senate – Pelosi said: “I feel sorry for Mitch McConnell.”Pelosi has not always been so scathing. She issued a generous tribute when McConnell announced his decision to step down from the Senate leadership, saying: “Mitch McConnell is to be recognized for his patriotism and decades of service to Kentucky, to the Congress and to our country. He and I have worked together since we were appropriators … While we often disagreed, we shared our responsibility to the American people to find common ground whenever possible.”Trump has frequently targeted McConnell for abuse and has aimed racial slurs at his wife, Elaine Chao, who served as transportation secretary in his administration.The former president has variously described McConnell as a “broken-down crow”, a “stone-cold loser” and a “dumb son of a bitch”. More

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      JD Vance is factually challenged – and morally deficient | Margaret Sullivan

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      There was a moment when JD Vance could have turned back from the story.After the vice-presidential candidate posted on social media about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets – based on the flimsiest of supposed evidence – a Vance staffer checked it out.“His staff member asked Springfield’s city manager if the claim was true,” according to new Wall Street Journal reporting. The city manager responded clearly: “I told him no … I told him these claims were baseless.”Then and there, Vance could have deleted the post, which had already done damage. He could have disavowed it and tried to limit the harm.Nothing doing. He left the post up and Donald Trump immediately took it from there. As nearly 70 million people watched, the former president blasted the lie out to the world at the presidential debate.We know what followed: not just viral memes and hip-hop songs that feature the words: “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”It was far worse. Bomb threats plagued Springfield’s hospitals, and officials closed schools. Racist rhetoric circulated, harming the lives of Vance’s own constituents – he is, after all, an Ohio senator.Innocent people were portrayed as villains. Despite all the Trump campaign’s trashing of “illegals”, the Haitian immigrants in Springfield are largely there legally, through a temporary protected status, as the Guardian recently reported. Local business owners say they have been a welcome addition to the city’s workforce.But Vance is fine – more than fine – with having turned rumors into real damage.He told CNN that he is willing “to create stories” to focus the media’s attention on his and Trump’s relentless, though often false, message about the harm that immigrants are doing to American society – and of course to blame Trump’s Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, at every turn.Vance’s rejection of the chance to take down his original post speaks volumes about how he and Trump operate. And his doubling down by asserting that making up lies is acceptable should be a red-alarm warning – yet another – about a second Trump term. There are so many.The ugly episode reminds me of Trump aide Kellyanne Conway’s remark to NBC News’s Chuck Todd soon after the 2016 election. As Trump spread ego-driven nonsense about the unprecedented size of his inaugural crowd – and insisted that his press secretary Sean Spicer do the same – Conway offered a blithe defense.Spicer, she said, was merely providing “alternative facts”.“Look, alternative facts are not facts,” Todd pointed out. “They’re falsehoods.” Or, as the mainstream media has finally brought itself to say: they are lies.Nearly eight years later, the Trump team is even bolder about lying, expressing that practice not just as defensible but a necessity. It spreads hatred so efficiently.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis chapter is sad – even tragic – for many reasons. The continual rejection of truth by some of the most prominent people in public life does real damage, not only to innocent people’s lives and to a community’s safety, but more broadly to our society and democracy.One bit of heartening news emerged amid all this ugliness. As the Wall Street Journal reporters explored the original rumor about pets in Springfield, a Vance spokesperson came up with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by her Haitian neighbors.But when a reporter checked it out by going to Anna Kilgore’s house, she told him that her cat, Miss Sassy, had returned a few days after having gone missing.Imagine that: not stolen, not eaten, Miss Sassy was found safe – in Kilgore’s own basement.Afterwards, with the help of a translation app, Kilgore did the right thing: she apologized to her Haitian neighbor. That apology was a touch of human decency amid the ugliness.Don’t look for any such thing from Vance or Trump. They have no regrets, and – on the contrary – take all of this as proof that their methods are working very well indeed.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      With their lies about Haitian immigrants, Trump and Vance have reached a new low | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      During his debate with Kamala Harris on 10 September, Donald Trump proffered the outrageous lie that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating residents’ pets. He wasn’t alone in promoting this little bigoted nugget, either. Earlier that day on X, formerly known as Twitter, JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice-president, had already pushed the idea that Springfield’s residents “have had their pets abducted and eaten” by “Haitian illegal immigrants”.Vance subsequently tripled down on the falsehood, even later admitting to CNN: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”Behold, the political lie. We’re not talking about spin, which bends the truth to something usable. We’re dealing with an outright fabrication. None of what Trump and Vance are saying about the Haitian community is true. Not a single bit of it. The Haitian community of Springfield is there because its members have been granted temporary protected status, a US government program that allows them to live and work legally in the United States for a defined period of time. And none of them have been known to eat your pets.But there is something almost refreshing in Vance’s moment of honesty about his own dishonesty. In an era where cynicism prevails, it feels almost naive to believe in something, and Vance and Trump are showing us they do believe! But what they believe in is the power of spreading the most shocking, contemptible and brazen lies possible to secure their political victory.What’s a little lie, after all, if it helps their cause? Or, as Vance put it on X: “don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing.”The luxury of the political lie, however, is that the tellers of the lie never have to live directly with the consequences of their actions. But others do.On 12 September, Springfield’s city hall was forced to close because of a bomb threat, and all Clark county buildings, including the offices of the department of job and family services, the common pleas court, and the board of elections, were similarly closed “out of an abundance of caution”.By Friday, four other schools had been evacuated due to bomb threats, which similarly emptied the bureau of motor vehicles and the Ohio Southside license bureau. Then, on Saturday, two hospitals, the Springfield regional medical center and the Kettering Health Springfield medical center, were also forced into lockdown. By Sunday, Springfield’s Clark State College received emailed threats of violence and subsequently moved all its classes online for a week due. The local Wittenberg University was also threatened with a mass shooting, forcing it to cancel all its events on Sunday and move classes online for Monday.When Monday rolled around, two more of Springfield’s elementary schools, the Simon Kenton elementary school and Kenwood elementary school, also had to be evacuated “based on information received from the Springfield Police Division”, the Springfield city school district announced. The city of Springfield also axed its CultureFest, the city’s annual celebration of diversity. At a press conference, Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, announced that he is deploying the Ohio state highway patrol to schools in Springfield after they received nearly three dozen bomb threats since late last week.Fox News and Trump’s partisans on the media responded to this harrowing turn of events by emphasizing something that DeWine said during his press conference. The bomb threats had thus far (thankfully) been hoaxes, and many of them seemed to originate abroad. “We have people, unfortunately, overseas who are taking these actions,” the governor said.What Trump’s supporters fail to mention is that Trump and Vance created the conditions for these hoaxes to happen in the first place. But, true to form, it seems they would rather blame shadowy foreigners instead.You can’t blame foreigners for the arrival of armed neo-Nazi members of the Blood Tribe, an extremist North American white supremacist group that marched through Springfield in August while carrying swastika-emblazoned flags. You can’t blame foreigners for a member of the Blood Tribe addressing a Springfield city commission meeting days later, telling Rob Rue, Springfield’s mayor: “I’ve come to bring a word of warning. Stop what you’re doing before it’s too late. Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.” You can’t blame folks overseas for the fact that Springfield’s Haitian church has been vandalized twice in one month. You can’t blame foreigners for the increased racism that many Haitians are reporting.Springfield’s already vulnerable Haitian community (particularly after a tragic traffic accident in August that left an 11-year-old boy dead) is now living on a razor’s edge. Fleeing Haiti for their lives, members of his community currently live as if their “temporary protected status” has been summarily taken away from them while they live in the United States, where they are supposed to be safe.Meanwhile, the work they perform sustains the Springfield’s businesses and can be felt far beyond. Springfield’s Haitians are legally employed in local microchip manufacturing and Amazon fulfillment centers. Your Toyota may have an axle fabricated at the hands of a member of this community, and that salad you’re eating may have been packaged by them at a Dole Fresh Vegetables in Springfield.Springfield has seen a substantial increase in Haitian immigration in recent years. A city of 58,000 is hosting 12,000 to 15,000 newcomers. That puts pressure on city services while also adding to the city’s tax revenue. Time and proper planning can pave a path of prosperity forward for everyone.On the other hand, a new Black population moving into a largely white town is a huge temptation to those who want to stoke division. It looks like a windfall. Spin a lie about immigrants and their barbarism and you get to hate on Democrats, the media and immigrants, simultaneously.But at the heart of it is a lie, a cowardly invention that you knowingly want others to promote. That basic fact ought to reveal the salient truth of today’s political lie. If Trump and Vance can’t take responsibility for their actions now, why would anyone think they could take responsibility for the country later?

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More