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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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