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      Republican brandishes private arsenal in House hearing on gun reform

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      Republican brandishes private arsenal in House hearing on gun reformGreg Steube displays succession of firearms he says would be banned under bill being debated in response to mass shootings A Republican congressman used a House hearing on gun control in the aftermath of multiple mass shootings to show off his own collection of guns and brandishing them via remote video link.A Democrat, Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, interjected and said: “I hope the gun is not loaded.”Massie’s gun collection: ‘They shouldn’t be in the hands of civilians’Read moreBut Greg Steube replied: “I’m in my house, I can do whatever I want with my guns.”The hearing on the Protecting Our Kids Act, an omnibus bill backed by House Democrats, was held amid calls for meaningful reform after mass shootings in Buffalo, New York (10 dead); Uvalde, Texas (21 dead, including 19 children); and Tulsa, Oklahoma (four dead).Joining the hearing from his Florida home, Steube complained about proposals to ban high-capacity magazines.“The Glock 19 was the highest-sold handgun in the United States,” he said. “It comes with a 15-round magazine. That gun would be banned.”Then he held up a weapon.“Right in front of you I have a Sig Sauer P226. Comes with a 21-round magazine. This gun would be banned. Here’s a 12-round magazine. This magazine would be banned under this current bill, it doesn’t fit as this gun was made for [a] 21-round magazine. This gun would be banned under this bill.”He showed another gun.“Here’s a Sig Sauer P320. It takes a 20-round magazine. Here’s a 12-round magazine that would be banned. It doesn’t fit. Because it would be banned. This gun would be banned under this bill.”And another.“Here’s a gun I carry every single day to protect myself, my family, my wife, my home. This is an XL Sig Sauer P365, comes with a 15-round magazine. Here’s a seven-round magazine which would be less than what would be lawful under this bill … it doesn’t fit. So this gun would be banned.”Steube is a former US army lawyer who supported Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. He voted against awarding the congressional gold medal to police officers who defended the Capitol from rioters on 6 January 2021.On Thursday, he refused requests to yield from the Democratic committee chair, Jerry Nadler of New York.The shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde and Tulsa happened within two weeks. More mass shootings, widely defined as events in which four or more people not including the shooter are injured or killed, occurred around the US during the Memorial Day weekend.The Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit, says there have been 232 mass shootings in the US this year – substantially more than one a day.Republicans remain opposed to gun reform, although senators from both parties have said talks initiated after the Uvalde shooting have shown promise.On Thursday, two Democrats on the House judiciary committee, Sylvia Garcia of Texas and Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania, read the names of the 19 children killed in Uvalde.Garcia argued Republicans were “complicit” in such mass shootings because they have refused to countenance gun reform.Her voice shaking, Dean asked: “Where is their outrage over the slaughter of 19 fourth-graders and their two teachers? Why don’t they feel an urgency to do something?“This is on our watch.”TopicsUS gun controlHouse of RepresentativesUS CongressRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Republican party building an ‘army’ to overturn election results – report

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      Republican party building an ‘army’ to overturn election results – reportAlleged scheme include installing volunteers as poll workers and getting attorneys who could intervene to block votes, Politico says The Republican party is building a grassroots “army” to target and potentially overturn election results in Democratic precincts, the Politico website reported on Wednesday, citing video evidence.The alleged scheme includes installing party-trained volunteers prepared to challenge voters at Democratic-majority polling places, creating a website to put these workers in touch with local lawyers and establishing a network of district attorneys who could intervene to block vote counts.Many Republicans still believe Donald Trump’s lie that he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden because of widespread voter fraud. At state level the party has passed laws that make it harder to vote while pro-Trump candidates are running for positions that would give them control over future elections.Politico obtained a series of recordings of Republican meetings between the summer of 2021 and May this year.It said one from November shows Matthew Seifried, the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) election integrity director for Michigan, urging party activists in Wayne county to obtain official designations as poll workers.Seifried says: “Being a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than [as] a poll challenger.”Some of the would-be poll workers complain that fraud was committed in 2020 and that the election was “corrupt”.At another training session last October, Seifried promises support for such workers: “It’s going to be an army. We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?”Politico also obtained Zoom tapings of Tim Griffin, legal counsel to the Amistad Project, a self-described election integrity group that Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani once portrayed as a “partner” in the Trump campaign’s legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election.Griffin is seen meeting with activists from multiple states and discussing plans for identifying friendly district attorneys who could stage interventions in local election disputes.He says during one meeting in September: “Remember, guys, we’re trying to build out a nationwide district attorney network. Your local district attorney, as we always say, is more powerful than your congressman.“They’re the ones that can seat a grand jury. They’re the ones that can start an investigation, issue subpoenas, make sure that records are retained, etc.”Politico added that installing party loyalists on the board of canvassers, which is responsible for certifying election results, also appears to be part of the Republican strategy.The revelations are sure to intensify concerns about fresh assaults on American democracy in 2022 and 2024.Nick Penniman, founder and chief executive of Issue One, an election watchdog group, told Politico: “This is completely unprecedented in the history of American elections – that a political party would be working at this granular level to put a network together. It looks like now the Trump forces are going directly after the legal system itself, and that should concern everyone.”The RNC insisted that it is simply trying to restore balance to election oversight in heavily Democratic cities such as Detroit. Gates McGavick, an RNC spokesperson, was quoted as saying: “Democrats have had a monopoly on poll watching for 40 years, and it speaks volumes that they’re terrified of an even playing field.“The RNC is focused on training volunteers to take part in the election process because polling shows that American voters want bipartisan poll-watching to ensure transparency and security at the ballot box.”TopicsRepublicansUS elections 2024US politicsUS voting rightsnewsReuse this content More

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      Abortion and guns may awaken a slumbering giant for Democrats | Robert Reich

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      Abortion and guns may awaken a slumbering giant for DemocratsRobert ReichA mobilisation such as America has rarely seen could propel Democrats to larger majorities this November Two of the most basic human aspirations are making one’s own decisions about whether or when to have a child, free from government interference, and keeping any child one does have out of harm’s way, secure against random violence.Yet both aspirations have been fiercely resisted in the United States – the first by many evangelical Christians, the second by the gun lobby.Republican lawmakers are in the pockets of both. Democratic lawmakers are on the side of reproductive freedom and gun control.It has become the sharpest divide in contemporary American politics.The American people are not evenly divided on these issues. A large majority wants to maintain access to abortions during the first trimester of pregnancy, which has been the rule since the supreme court decided Roe v Wade in 1973.An even larger majority (including many Republican voters) support requiring universal background checks for would-be gun buyers, and most favor banning high-capacity magazines and the sale of assault weapons.Do the opinions of the majority matter on these two issues, where politically potent minorities have demanded the opposite? At first glance, it seems not.After the 2 May leak of a draft opinion in the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, written by Samuel Alito and evidently joined by four other Republican-appointed justices – which argues that no right to abortion can be found in the constitution and that, therefore, no such right exists – Senate Democrats tried to codify a national right to abortion.But on 11 May, the Women’s Health Protection Act failed in the Senate, by a vote of 49 to 51. That was short not only of a simple majority but, more importantly, of the super-majority of 60 votes required to overcome the inevitable filibuster. (Only the West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin crossed party lines.)Now, in the wake of last week’s massacre of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, Congress is about to vote on regulating guns. Almost no one believes there are 10 Republican senators who will support any form of gun control, even after last week’s horror.While steadfastly refusing to maintain access to abortion services and refusing all recent attempts to control guns, Republican lawmakers at the federal and state levels also remain opposed to government funding for childcare, parental leave, sex education and contraception, and for reproductive, maternal, neo-natal and pediatric health services.It takes a great deal to awaken the slumbering giant of American voters. Most do not belong to either major political party. Many are turned off by politics. In the typical midterm election, only about half of those who are eligible to vote do so.Yet every so often the slumbering giant awakens – and with a swoop of its huge arm at the ballot box remedies the growing disconnect between what voters want and what politicians do (or fail to do).In the 2014 midterms, only 20% of young people between the ages of 18 and 29 went to the polls.But in the 2018 midterms, after two years of Donald Trump and congressional Republicans trampling on issues young people cared about – such as the environment, education and protection for undocumented immigrants who came to America as children – young voters were stirred to action: 36% of them voted. That was enough to switch control of the House to the Democrats.Most pundits are convinced that the Democrats are doomed to lose the House and Senate in the upcoming midterms. They point to the fact that after 15 months in office, Biden is polling badly, at about 40%.But the punditocracy is ignoring the disconnect between what most Americans want on abortion and guns and what Republican lawmakers are doing.The two issues of abortion and guns may have a larger impact on Americans together than they have had separately because of the moral relationship between them – being free to decide whether and when to have children and keeping children safe from gun violence.(The pundits also forget that at the same point in his presidency, Ronald Reagan was polling at about 40%. But as inflation declined, Reagan ran for re-election against Walter Mondale and won 49 states.)If the slumbering giant does awaken, a mobilization such as America has rarely seen could propel Democrats to larger majorities in the House and Senate this November – giving them enough votes in the Senate to eliminate the filibuster and consigning Republicans to a near permanent minority.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
      TopicsRepublicansOpinionUS politicsAbortionUS gun controlcommentReuse this content More

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      Herschel Walker ‘mad’ at Trump for taking credit for ex-NFL star’s Senate bid

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      Herschel Walker ‘mad’ at Trump for taking credit for ex-NFL star’s Senate bid‘President Trump never asked me … So, I’m mad at him,’ Georgia primary winner tells rapper and Revolt TV host Killer Mike The Georgia US Senate candidate Herschel Walker has said he is “mad” at Donald Trump because the former president has claimed credit for asking the former NFL star to enter national politics.Walker told the rapper and Revolt TV host Killer Mike: “President Trump never asked me … So, I’m mad at him.”Herschel Walker: the ex-football star running for Senate in Trump’s shadowRead moreTrump championed a Walker run for the Republican nomination for US Senate before Walker announced it and then endorsed him. Walker went on to win in a round of primaries which saw other Trump-backed candidates struggle, including in Georgia where Brian Kemp dismissed a challenge from David Perdue for governor.Walker, 60, was a running back who won the Heisman Trophy for best player in college football while at the University of Georgia, then played for the Trump-owned New Jersey Generals in the USFL before making his name in NFL with the Dallas Cowboys.But his move into politics has stoked considerable controversy. Amid questions about his business record, his widely documented mental health struggles and his all-round suitability for a Senate seat, Walker skipped debates in the Georgia primary but won easily all the same.In the aftermath of his win, CNN published a fact check of one of the many controversies surrounding the candidacy. Its headline: Herschel Walker falsely claims he never falsely claimed he graduated from University of Georgia.Trump has helped steer a big football name into the US Senate before, championing the college coach Tommy Tuberville as he beat Doug Jones, a federal prosecutor and sitting senator, for a seat from Alabama in 2020. Tuberville then supported Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden.Speaking to Killer Mike, Walker said: “One thing that people don’t know is President Trump never asked me. I need to tell him that he never asked. I heard it all on television that, ‘He’s going to ask Herschel,’ saying Herschel is going to run. President Trump never came out and said ‘Herschel, will you run for that Senate seat?’“So, I’m mad at him, because he never asked, but he’s taking credit that he asked.”Trump did not immediately respond. The question of to what extent the former president still controls the Republican party is a live one among observers and GOP power brokers, as Trump considers another run for the White House in 2024.Walker continued: “Before all this coming about, my wife and I … we went into prayer and I prayed about it. And to be honest with you, I was praying to God to bring somebody else. ‘Oh my God, I am happy, my life is doing well …’ But I love the Lord Jesus.”Walker’s opponent in the election in November will be Raphael Warnock, formerly a pastor at a church once home to the civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King.Warnock won the seat in a run-off in 2021, beating the Republican sports executive Kelly Loeffler to become the first Black Democratic senator from a southern state and the first Black senator of any party from Georgia.Warnock’s win and that of Jon Ossoff over Perdue were crucial to Democrats regaining control of the Senate. Control of the chamber, and with it the Biden administration’s chances of any further legislative success, is in play again in the November elections.TopicsRepublicansDonald TrumpUS midterm elections 2022US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Clinton lawyer acquitted of lying to FBI when he briefed them on Trump-Russia links – as it happened

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      A lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign was acquitted Tuesday of lying to the FBI when he pushed information meant to cast suspicions on Donald Trump and Russia in the run-up to the 2016 election.The jury in the case of Michael Sussmann deliberated on Friday afternoon and Tuesday morning before reaching its verdict, the Associated Press said.The case was the first courtroom test of special counsel John Durham since his appointment three years ago to search for government misconduct during the investigation into potential ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign.Michael Sussman not guilty — eminently predictable, given Durham’s desperate stretching of the law and facts.I wrote this back in September:https://t.co/EUWxptnMYd— Elie Honig (@eliehonig) May 31, 2022
      The verdict represents a significant setback for Durham’s work, the AP says, especially since Trump supporters had looked to the probe to expose what they contend was sweeping wrongdoing by the FBI.In the indictment filed in September 2021, Sussmann was accused of falsely telling FBI general counsel James Baker in September 2016 that he did not represent any client when he met him to give the bureau white papers and other data files containing evidence of questionable cyber links between the Trump Organization and a Russia-based bank.The indictment alleged that in fact Sussmann had turned over this information not as a “good citizen” but rather, as an attorney representing a US technology executive, an internet company and Clinton’s presidential campaign.Trump is suing Clinton, the Democratic National Committee and other people and entities tied to the investigation of Russian election interference in 2016, claiming they attempted to rig the election he won.Read more: Trump sues Hillary Clinton, alleging ‘plot’ to rig 2016 election against himRead moreThank you for reading the US politics blog today. We’ll be back on Wednesday.For all the detailed news on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, please consult our global war blog here.Here are the main events that occurred today:
      The White House is making efforts to communicate that Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell may disagree on what the problems are at the root of America’s repeated mass shootings, but the US president can still call the Senate majority leader a “rational Republican” and try to find common ground on gun violence.
      US supreme court clerks may be required to release their phone records as the investigation into who leaked the Roe v Wade opinion draft widens.
      A lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Michael Sussmann, was acquitted Tuesday of lying to the FBI when he pushed information meant to cast suspicions on Donald Trump and Russia in the run-up to that election.
      Joe Biden has been speaking at the White House with Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand prime minister, ahead of their mini-summit.
      The US president is meeting with Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, today to discuss the economy in the US and globally, and what steps can be taken to ease inflation and lower prices. Biden is calling the issue his “top domestic priority”.
      An emergency gun reform package, the Protecting Our Kids Act, will be presented to the House judiciary committee on Thursday as politicians grapple with the aftermath of mass shootings in New York and Texas this month that killed 31 people, including 19 elementary school children.
      The White House is making efforts to communicate that Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell may disagree on what the problems are at the root of America’s repeated mass shootings, but the US president can still call the Senate majority leader a “rational Republican” and try to find common ground on gun violence.Kentucky Republican McConnell, and many Republican leaders, including in Texas where the small city of Uvalde is devastated by last week’s school shooting, continually hone in on mental health issues and a need for more school security.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre noted that: “We are the only country that is dealing with gun violence at the rate we are, so what’s the problem here? The problem is with guns and not having legislation to deal with something that’s a pandemic here.”Biden spoke at length yesterday outside the White House, as he returned from Delaware the day after he’d visited Uvalde, about how the idea of 18-year-olds legally being able to buy military-style assault rifles in the US – the weapons used in the Uvalde massacre and the racist attack on a supermarket in a majority-Black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, days before – made no sense.Jean-Pierre noted that Republicans’ insistence on mental health and “hardening schools” and away from great gun control are “two things he [Biden] does not agree on [with McConnell].”But she added: “But I think there is a way potentially for the Senate to come together and legislation to come together, they need to.”A group of Senate Democrats and Republicans are currently discussing on Capitol Hill the potential for a bipartisan “significant package” of measures, according to Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy.But indications are that any such bill will include a collection of more minor measures, not sweeping change such as an assault weapons ban, freshly urged upon by US vice president Kamala Harris on Saturday when she attended the last funeral for the 10 people killed in Buffalo.‘America is killing itself’: world reacts with horror and incomprehension to Texas shootingRead moreKarine Jean-Pierre says Biden is “considering” more executive actions on gun reforms following the mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, but did not give details of what they might be.She confirmed that the president, and a White House team, is also discussing legislation with lawmakers:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}He’s calling on Congress to act. He’s hopeful, he wants to make sure there’s action.
      The President has done everything he can from from the federal government. We are looking at other executive actions that we could possibly do. But it’s not up to him alone. He cannot do this alone. Congress needs to act.White House economic adviser Brian Deese followed the band to report on Joe Biden’s lunchtime meeting with the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, and treasury secretary, Janet Yellen.“I get to go home and tell my kids that BTS opened for me,” he jokes.Deese says Biden underscored that he respects the independence of the federal reserve and will give the fed the space and independence it needs to tackle inflation.“It’s a global challenge,” Deese says of inflation.“It’s hitting American families and creating anxiety and economic hardship. He [Biden] gets this”.But he says because of Biden’s economic achievements, and US economic strengths including a robust jobs market, few countries are better placed for the challenge ahead.He predicts the recovery moving forward will look different than it has so far. “It’s a marathon and we have to move and shift to stable and resilient growth,” Deese adds, noting that the recovery since the Covid-19 pandemic has been at a furious pace.Soaring gas and food prices remain Biden’s top economic priority, Deese says.“He’s focused on the right policy decisions and choices. We have to address this issue, we need some help working with Congress”. An interpreter has now kindly informed us what the BTS band members were saying.Jungkook, although it might have been J-Hope, said: “Today is the last day of AA and NHPI heritage month (Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander), we join the White House to stand with the AA and HPI community and to celebrate”.The interpreter has raced through the names, and this blogger can’t determine if he said Jimmy or Ji-min, so either Kim Seok-jin (known as Jinny) or Park Ji-min said: “We were devastated by the recent surge of hate crimes, including Asian American hate crimes, [it’s time] to put a stop on this and support the cause. We’d like to take this opportunity to voice ourselves once again”.Another band member who probably was Jungkook said: “We still feel surprised that music created by South Korean artists reaches so many people around the world, transcending languages and cultural barriers. We believe music is always an amazing and wonderful unifier of all things”.The band were hustled out as reporters shouted questions to them in vain.The seven members of K-pop band BTS are flanking White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, wearing black suits and looking more like a security detail than pop stars.“It is a great honor to be invited to the White House to discuss important issues of anti-Asian hate crimes, Asian inclusion and diversity,” the first band member says in perfect English.A second band member steps up and speaks in Korean, as do the others, one by one. There seems to be no interpreter, but they look very earnest in what they’re saying.The English-speaking band member returns:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}We thank President Biden and the White House for giving us this important opportunity to speak about these important causes and remind ourselves of what we can do as artists.One of the most extraordinary White House press briefings in recent memory is about to get under way, with South Korean K-pop band BTS set to take the podium with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.The popular music combination is in town to meet with Joe Biden and discuss “the need to come together in solidarity, Asian inclusion and representation, and addressing anti-Asian hate crimes and discrimination”. You can watch it live here.There’s been reaction to the acquittal earlier today of Michael Sussmann, a lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, who was accused of lying to the FBI.Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse in Washington DC, Sussmann said he “told the truth to the FBI, and the jury clearly recognized that with their unanimous verdict today”.Sussmann was accused of concealing from the FBI that he was working for the Clinton campaign when he met with the bureau’s general counsel James Baker in September 2016 and handed over documents purporting to show links between the rival campaign of Donald Trump and Russia.Sussmann added: “Despite being falsely accused, I am relieved that justice ultimately prevailed in this case”.In a statement, special counsel John Durham, who was appointed three years ago to search for government misconduct during the investigation into potential ties between Russia and Trump’s campaign, effectively investigating the investigators, said he and his team were “disappointed” by the verdict.“While we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury’s decision and thank them for their service,” Durham said.“I also want to recognize and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their dedicated efforts in seeking truth and justice in this case”. Read more:Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer acquitted of lying to the FBIRead moreAs the first of the funerals takes place on Tuesday for the victims of last week’s elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, local media outlets are casting a spotlight on a company that worked with families to create 19 custom-made children’s caskets to honor their lives.Trey Ganem, his son Billy and their team at SoulShine Industries of Edna, Texas, donated, constructed and painted 19 caskets in three days.“We’re creating the last thing that the parents can ever do for their child,” Ganem told NewsNation. And we’re making it with passion and purpose. We put all of our heart and soul into this thing”. Meet the TX man who’s making customized caskets for each of the 19 young victims and two teachers from the school shooting in #Uvalde. Trey Ganem visited with the families last week so each casket is personalized to include each child’s interests.📷: SoulShine Industries pic.twitter.com/eeoOZHcrfF— John-Carlos Estrada (@Mr_JCE) May 31, 2022
      Read more:First funerals of Uvalde school shooting victims to beginRead moreIt’s been a lively morning in US politics news, do stay tuned as we take you through the next hours with fresh updates as they happen.For all the detailed news on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, please consult our global war blog here.Here’s where things stand in the US:
      US supreme court clerks may be required to release their phone records as the investigation into who leaked the Roe v Wade opinion draft widens.
      A lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Michael Sussmann, was acquitted Tuesday of lying to the FBI when he pushed information meant to cast suspicions on Donald Trump and Russia in the run-up to that election.
      Joe Biden has been speaking at the White House with Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand prime minister, ahead of their mini-summit.
      The US president is meeting with Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, today to discuss the economy in the US and globally, and what steps can be taken to ease inflation and lower prices. Biden is calling the issue his “top domestic priority”.
      An emergency gun reform package, the Protecting Our Kids Act, will be presented to the House judiciary committee on Thursday as politicians grapple with the aftermath of mass shootings in New York and Texas this month that killed 31 people, including 19 elementary school children. More

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      US mass shootings will continue until the majority can overrule the minority | Rebecca Solnit

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      US mass shootings will continue until the majority can overrule the minorityRebecca SolnitGuns symbolize the power of a minority over the majority, and they’ve become the icons of a party that has become a cult seeking minority power The dots are easy to connect, because they’re so close together, and because they’re the entry and exit wounds inflicted on US society by the subculture whose sacrament is the gun. Texas, while tightening restrictions on abortion, has steadily loosened them on guns. These weapons are symbols of a peculiar version of masculinity made up of unlimited freedom, power, domination, of a soldier identity in which every gunslinger is the commander and anyone is a potential target, in which fear drives belligerence, and the gun owners rights extend so far no one has the right to be safe from him. Right now it’s part of a white-supremacist war cult.Anyplace its weapons are wielded is a war zone, and so this can be racked up as another way the United States is in the grip of a war that hardly deserves to be called civil. The rest of us are supposed to accommodate more and more high-powered weapons of war never intended for civilian use but used over and over against civilians in mass shootings across the country, including earlier this week when 19 fourth-graders and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, were murdered by someone whose 18th birthday made him eligible to buy the semiautomatic and hundreds of rounds of ammunition he used.At the time the second amendment was added to the constitution, reload time for the guns was about a minute and all of them were single-shot weapons. By contrast, the Las Vegas killer in 2017 sprayed more than a thousand bullets out his hotel window to kill 60 people in a 10-minute period. The teenager in Buffalo who killed 10 Black shoppers and an armed security guard was not a well-regulated militia, and neither was the antisemite who killed 11 in the synagogue in Pittsburgh, or the homophobe who killed 49 and wounded 53 in an Orlando nightclub, or the anti-immigration butcher in El Paso who killed 23 and wounded 23 or the childkiller who took 26 lives in Newtown, Connecticut, 20 of them six and seven-year-old children.To accommodate the cult of guns and the series of massacres, teachers and children practice school drills that remind them over and over that they could be murdered. To accommodate them, schools spend hundreds of millions of dollars on security, building reinforcements, trainings and drills, and the federal government spends more millions for campus officers. To accommodate them, municipalities across the country spend a fortune on police and equipment, in a sort of arms race that has also justified militarizing the police. To little avail, and in Uvalde the heavily armed and armored police seem to have essentially protected the shooter, by doing crowd control of parents as their children died, rather than rushing in as they had trained and rehearsed and been paid and equipped to do. All this is a sort of tax on the rest of us, in money and well-being, so that the gunslingers can sling their guns.One of the staggeringly disturbing things about the American right wing is that it is a cult manipulated by corporations and vested interests profiting mightily off its obsessions. In no respect is this more true than of guns. Less than two decades ago, the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers decided to shift from promoting the culture and equipment of hunting and rural life to hawking high-powered weapons of war and the armor and outfits that go with it, turning conservative white men into amateur commandos cosplaying war wherever they liked and the US into a war zone. Fear and hatred increase the profits, and so both crops are cultivated avidly, by the gun industry, the rightwing news organizations, the various pundits and demagogues and militia leaders and neo-Nazis.As former gun executive turned critic Ryan Busse wrote in the Guardian, “As the increasing vitriol of the National Rifle Association (NRA) proved politically effective, some in the gun business realized this messaging could be adopted by the firearms industry to sell more guns. All that was required for success was a dedication to frighteningly dangerous rhetoric and increasingly powerful weaponry.” Republican politicians gobbled up the industry donations and passed laws making gun sales boom, profits skyrocket, and guns start to show up in new ways. The rage that led to the guns was whetted with racism, anti-immigration hatred, misogyny, war imagery, neo-Confederate fantasies, and cartoonishly vile versions of masculinity, and the guns made it all dangerous. Minority rule perpetrates it, because just as the majority of Americans want abortion rights to stand, so do they want limits on access to guns.Gun culture reminds me of rape culture, specifically the conventions that hold the victims rather than the perpetrators responsible for limiting the violence. For women this means being told to radically rearrange our lives to avoid sexual assault rather than to expect that society will protect our rights and freedoms. We are told to limit where we go and when, to be careful about solitude, crowds, bars, drinks, drugs, naps, parties, public spaces, public transit, strangers, cities, wilderness, to see our clothing and even our appearance as potential provocation, a sort of asking for it. To wither away our freedom and confidence to accommodate a culture of violence. In the same way, we are now supposed to adapt to a culture of guns.The idea of unlimited rights is meant to apply to a limited number of us. Open-carry laws, it’s often noted, wouldn’t allow Black people to wander through the supermarket with huge guns slung over them and the confidence they could impose on others this way; Philando Castile was shot point-blank just for telling a policeman he had a gun in the car in 2016; 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot for holding a toy rifle in Cleveland in 2014. And the spate of new abortion laws being passed and the likely overrule of Roe v Wade means that those who can get pregnant are being denied even jurisdiction over their own bodies while gun owners assert their rights over the bodies of others.In Oklahoma, anyone who gets pregnant has fewer rights than a cluster of a few cells visible only under a microscope. Any pregnant woman may face prosecution as a murderer if she doesn’t bring a baby to term. They also face grotesque intrusiveness – criminal investigation for a miscarriage, having to try to prove to an unsympathetic legal system that a pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, the sense that their pregnancy is supervised and they are potential suspects. There’s a gruesome symmetry to this expansion of patriarchal violence and withering away of reproductive rights.Guns symbolize the power of a minority over the majority, and they’ve become the icons of a party that has become a cult seeking minority power through the stripping away of voting rights and persecution of women, immigrants, black people, queer people, trans people – all of whom have been targeted by mass shootings in recent years. This is the same party that sought to overturn an election through violence whipped up from on high, by the cult leaders, including the former president and various pundits and demagogues. “Trial by combat,” wheezed Rudy Giuliani as he incited the crowd to go rampage through Congress. If guns are icons it’s because violence is a sacrament defended as a right and an identity.Semiautomatic weapons are instruments of death perpetrated by a death cult. And the carnage will continue until the majority can overrule the minority in power that profits from and perpetrates it. This article was amended on 30 May 2022 to correct the spelling of Philando Castile’s surname.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
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      Here’s the Deal review: Kellyanne Conway on Trump – with plenty of alternative facts

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      Here’s the Deal review: Kellyanne Conway on Trump – with plenty of alternative facts The former White House counselor’s memoir is tart, readable and thoroughly selective when it comes to inconvenient truthsKellyanne Conway joined Donald Trump’s orbit after Ted Cruz’s presidential bid collapsed and Paul Manafort wore out his welcome. The Trump White House was a snake pit. Like most Trump memoirs, Conway’s book revels in selective recall as well as settling scores. After all, this is the woman who coined the term “alternative facts”.A Sacred Oath review: Mark Esper on Trump, missiles for Mexico and more Read moreConway strafes Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner and Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff. Her disdain is unvarnished, her language tart. Her book? Readable.Conway labels Bannon a “leaking dirigible” and an “unpaternal, paternalistic bore of a boor”. She dings his aesthetics and questions his stability. Confronted with the possibility Bannon might receive a presidential pardon, Conway says, she told him Trump didn’t owe him anything.“You were a leaker,” she remembers saying. “You were terrible to [Trump] in the press … You were the only source for at least two books riddled with lies.”He got the pardon anyway.Some who feel Conway’s sting are very close to home. She sticks a knife in her own husband, George, for trashing Trump and embarrassing her. Between the two men, Conway posits that Trump was the one who remained loyal. She may wish to reconsider. Her book has kindled Trump’s wrath.“I may have been the first person Donald Trump trusted in his inner circle who told him that he had come up short this time,” Conway writes, about the 2020 defeat Trump has refused to admit. But Trump denies she said any such thing.“If she had I wouldn’t have dealt with her any longer – she would have been wrong – could go back to her crazy husband,” he “truthed” on Thursday on his own ersatz Twitter, Truth Social.But Trump can’t say he wasn’t warned. The Devil’s Bargain, Joshua Green’s 2016 campaign exposé, captures Conway both badmouthing Trump’s chances and playing the sycophant.In 2019, Cliff Sims, once a junior White House staffer, framed things this way in his memoir, Team of Vipers: “Kellyanne stood in a class of own in terms of her machinations – I had to admire her sheer gall.”In Here’s the Deal, Kellyanne soft-pedals Green but is far less charitable to Sims. She rehashes his departure from the White House, dismisses him as a lightweight and gloats over Trump targeting him with a “brutal” takedown on Twitter.Left unsaid is that Sims played a significant role at the 2020 Republican convention, drafting speeches for two Trump children. And whatever his sins, he came to be re-embraced by senior Trump staff even after he challenged a Trump-induced non-disclosure agreement in court.On a matter of greater importance, Conway lauds Bob Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, the conservative mega-donors who invested in Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct psychographic profiling company which was linked to Bannon.Rebekah Mercer allegedly provided connective tissue for the January 6 insurrection, via Parler. Conway omits such details. Not surprisingly, she also ignores Bob Mercer’s tax woes. In 2021, with his business partners, Mercer reportedly entered into a $7bn settlement with the IRS.Like many in Trumpworld, Conway hits Facebook for its role in the 2020 election. But she omits the nexus between Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant and Cambridge Analytica, in 2016 and beyond. The two businesses shared more than a passing acquaintance.Cambridge Analytica illegally harvested personal data from Facebook. Conway takes Bannon to task for profiting from his investment in Cambridge Analytica but stays mum about the Mercers’ ownership.In 2016, the Cruz campaign spent more than $5.8m on Cambridge Analytica services. That same year, the unseen hand of the company put it sticky fingers on the scales of Brexit. This past week, the attorney general for the District of Columbia launched a lawsuit against Facebook in connection with the Cambridge Analytica data breach.Here’s the Deal also contains its fair share of semi-veiled ethnic reductionism. Conway writes of how she “made her bones” – a term with mafia origins – in Trump’s 2016 campaign. Elsewhere, she deploys “clever”, “shrewd” and “calculating” to describe Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who is Jewish. At the same time, she shares a desire to keep things “classy”.Some realities cut too close to the bone. Despite acknowledging Trump’s loss in 2020, Conway is silent on his infamous post-election call with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he sought to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump said. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated.”The only thing missing was the president telling Raffensperger he was receiving an offer he couldn’t refuse. Unsurprisingly, Conway has few kind words for Biden. She recounts the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and rightly tags his administration for inflation. But she also blames the president for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and for Iran threatening nuclear breakout.This Will Not Pass review: Trump-Biden blockbuster is dire reading for DemocratsRead moreHello, alternative facts. In February, Trump praised Vladimir Putin as smart and denigrated Nato. These days, Putin is under siege and Nato is the club to join. This somehow escapes Conway’s attention.As for Tehran, Axios reports that senior Israeli military officials now view Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal as having “brought Iran closer to a nuclear weapon and created a worse situation”. An attempt to placate Trump’s base had a cost.Conway remains in the arena. Here’s the Deal doubles as an audition for a campaign slot in 2024. In Trumpworld, few are ever permanently banished. Conway should ask Steve Bannon. He could tell her some things.
      Here’s the Deal is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
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      Republican primaries offer look into future of Trumpism without Trump

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      Republican primaries offer look into future of Trumpism without TrumpThe ex-president suffered some humiliation when his candidates lost in the Georgia primaries – but the hard-right strain of Republican politics will survive In his campaign heyday, Donald Trump would declare it the greatest movement in the history of politics and promise: “We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning.”What never occurred to him was that the “Make America Great Again” movement – or Maga – might get sick and tired of him first.Tuesday’s Republican primaries did not go as Trump had hoped | Lloyd GreenRead moreThe former US president suffered some humiliation on Tuesday when four candidates he handpicked in Georgia lost Republican primary elections in a landslide. It was a stinging rebuke in what has become ground zero for his “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen.But it was no rebuke of Maga and all it stands for.The hard-right, nativist-populist strain of Republican politics predates Trump and will surely survive him. This year’s primary season winners in Georgia and elsewhere have been careful not to disavow the movement, or its patriarch, even when they lack his blessing.“Donald Trump has transformed the Republican party over the past five years and it is now a solid majority Trumpist party with everything that entails in policy and in tone,” said Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington. “On the other hand, Republicans, including very conservative ones, are clearly willing to entertain the possibility of Trumpism without Trump.”Trump is now 75 and could be living a quiet, golf-playing retirement like other past presidents. But against the counsel of some of his inner circle, he chose to make this year’s midterm elections about him and the primaries – votes in states and districts to decide which Republicans will take on Democrats in November – a referendum on his continued influence.Trump endorsed candidates in nearly 200 races, from governor to county commissioner, often in contests that are not particularly competitive and help bolster his list of wins. But others have been reckless, vengeful bets aimed at dislodging incumbents who defied his claims of election fraud. So far, the results have been a mixed bag.The month began well enough in Ohio, where venture capitalist and author JD Vance leaped from third to first place following Trump’s late-stage endorsement in the Senate primary.In North Carolina, Trump helped the 26-year-old former college football player Bo Hines win the nomination for a seat in the House of Representatives. In Pennsylvania, voters chose his preferred candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, who said he would not have certified Joe Biden’s 2020 win of the state.But other governor races, which often turn on specific local issues, have proved more elusive. Trump’s pick in Nebraska’s primary, Charles Herbster, lost after allegations surfaced that he had groped women. In Idaho a week later, Governor Brad Little comfortably beat a Trump-backed challenger.In North Carolina, meanwhile, voters rejected Trump’s plea to give a scandal-plagued congressman Madison Cawthorn a second chance. And in Pennsylvania, a Senate primary featuring Trump-endorsed TV doctor Mehmet Oz remains too close to call.This week Trump again notched some wins including Sarah Sanders, his former White House press secretary, in the primary for governor of Arkansas. But it was all overshadowed by Georgia, where he has pushed his personal vendetta hardest and so squandered political capital.It was not just that former senator David Perdue, whom Trump had lobbied to run, lost to Governor Brian Kemp, who had refused to overturn the results of the 2020 election in his state. It was also the crushing margin: Kemp beat Perdue by a staggering 52 percentage points.Rubbing salt into the wound, Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who defied Trump’s call to “find” the votes to change the outcome two years ago, also won his party’s nomination. Attorney general Chris Carr and insurance commissioner John King, both opposed by Trump, prevailed in their primaries too.Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, commented: “The results in Georgia were really stunning. Few, if any Republicans, have aroused Donald Trump’s ire so much as Governor Kemp and Brad Raffensperger and they both did substantially better than expected. Donald Trump went all out in Georgia and he ended up an egg on this face, which is significant.“It may be that the people who have been in the bull’s eye of Trump’s ‘big lie’ campaign have started resenting it and took their resentment out. More generally, I think an increasing number of people are asking themselves a question that they weren’t asking previously: would we be better off with a Trumpist candidate who’s not named Donald Trump?”Among those asking the question is Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, who campaigned for Kemp in Georgia and told the Politico website: “Trump picked this fight.” Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul have also felt at liberty to campaign for midterm candidates denied Trump’s imprimatur.Then there is Mike Pence, the former vice-president, who defied his old boss by rallying with Kemp on Monday and telling the crowd: “Elections are about the future.” Pence, himself a former governor of Indiana, has made a habit of speaking with pride about the accomplishments of the Trump-Pence administration while distancing himself from the “big lie”.Should he run for president in 2024, he may pay close attention to how Little, Kemp and others have studiously avoided criticising Trump while capturing swaths of his base by shifting right on abortion, gun rights and “culture wars” issues and signing legislation to prove it. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is another likely student of the formula.That means there is still little room for more old school Republicans such as Senator Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, who lost the presidential election in 2012. Few are making an impact in the primaries. “A Republican who wants to pretend that 2016 through 2020 never happened and go back to the Romney-Ryan era is not going to do well in today’s Republican party,” said Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington.But Trump does face a further challenge to his authority from the far right.Some on this wing effectively accuse him of not being Trumpy enough, as demonstrated last year when he was booed for urging supporters to get vaccinated against the coronavirus (he now barely mentions vaccines in his speeches).Kathy Barnette, a Senate candidate who mounted a late surge in Pennsylvania with ideas even more extreme than Oz, told the Reuters news agency: “Maga doesn’t belong to him. Trump coined the word. He does not own it.” Kandiss Taylor, a similarly far-right candidate for governor of Georgia, backs Trump’s false claims of voter fraud but is unsure whether she would vote for him again in 2024. She said in an interview with the Guardian: “It’s not about him. The people of America chose him and he’s the one that we elected. Will I vote for him in 2024? It all depends on what happens between now and then and who runs against him.”A further sign of fracturing came this week when Cawthorn, smarting from his defeat in North Carolina, swore revenge on “cowardly and weak” members of his own party and declared: “It’s time for the rise of the new right, it’s time for Dark Maga to truly take command.”The anti-democratic implication was that the end justifies the means in an existential struggle for America. Cawthorn named allies including the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Trump himself, suggesting that the former president has already turned to the dark side.Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who belonged to the rightwing Tea Party movement, said: “Maga’s dark enough on its own … Trumpism has metastasised beyond Trump and it’ll go in a bunch of different dark, eerie places but it’s all the same thing. Trumpism now is the dominant strain in the party.”Maga’s identity crisis comes as Biden and other Democratic leaders seek to brand their opponents as “Ultra-Maga Republicans” in the hope that labelling the entire party as extremist will be more effective in the midterms than a singular focus on Trump (though he and his supporters have embraced “Ultra-Maga” in merchandise and fundraising emails).Yet while Trump’s status as a kingmaker has been diminished, and his “Stop the steal” obsession is wearing thin, it would be unwise to extrapolate too much from primaries where it was always going to be hard to oust popular, well-funded incumbents.Trump continues to raise vast sums of money and command loyalty from most Republicans in Congress as well as from the Republican National Committee. Polls suggest that he is more popular with the Republican base now than when he won the nomination for president in 2016. His “America first” mantra is now in the party’s DNA; even the candidates he does not endorse typically do endorse him.Walsh, who challenged Trump in the 2020 presidential primary and now hosts a podcast, added: “Nothing has changed. This is Trump’s party and everything that’s happened this primary season just continues to reflect that … Wake me up when an anti-Trump Republican wins a primary. That would be news.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS midterm elections 2022RepublicansUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More