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Key takeaways from day three of the Republican national convention
Republicans had a new chant on Wednesday night: not just “Trump! Trump!” but also “JD! JD! JD!” in honor of Trump’s new vice-presidential pick, Ohio senator JD Vance, who introduced himself to the country Wednesday night in a confident and personal primetime address.Also new: the professionally printed signs reading “Mass Deportations Now,” a reference to Trump’s campaign pledge to engage in the biggest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in US history.Here are five key takeaways from the night:1. Republicans are simply not talking about abortionDuring his race for the US senate in Ohio, Vance said that he did not support rape and incest exceptions in abortion bans. In 2022, he said he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally”, expressing sympathy for the view that a national abortion ban was necessary to stop women from traveling to different states in order to get abortions.A section on Vance’s Senate website, accessible as late as Monday, read, simply, “End abortion,” calling him “100% pro-life, a Huffington Post reporter noted. By Wednesday, that message had vanished, as Vance’s old website simply redirected to Trump’s presidential campaign site.Vance similarly erased his anti-abortion views from his primetime speech to the RNC on Wednesday, and as my colleagues have noted, he’s far from alone. There’s been a conspicuous silence on abortion throughout the Republican convention, as well as on other issues that Republicans appear to see as weaknesses, like Project 2025 and the future of American democracy.2. Warm reaction to Vance’s bestselling life story, as ‘hillbilly’ aims for White House The Republican national convention crowd was already eating out of Vance’s hand, as the charismatic 39-year-old Ohio senator talked them through the life story that made him into the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy, a 2016 memoir that became a 2020 feature film starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close.Vance had described growing up “a working-class boy born far from the halls of power” in Middletown, Ohio, with a single mother who struggled with addiction, and a tough, loving grandmother who kept him from falling prey to a local drug dealer. He described his journey from the Marine Corps, to Yale, to working in venture capital, to being chosen as Trump’s vice-presidential pick.He neatly contrasted his youth to Biden’s age, noting policies Biden supported when he was in high school, and saying: “Joe Biden has been a politician in Washington for longer than I’ve been alive.” Then, talking about other single mothers like his, who had struggled with addiction but never given up, he revealed that his mother, Beverly Aikins, was in the RNC audience with him, and that she is “10 years clean and sober”.“I love you, mom,” he said, suggesting that she might he able to celebrate her full 10 years of sobriety next year in the White House.As the cameras panned to Vance’s smiling mother, she mouthed, “That’s my boy! That’s my boy!” And the crowd started chanting, “JD’s mom! JD’s mom!”3. It’s clear that JD’s job is to woo the rust belt Vance shouted out to his home state of Ohio in his speech, but he quickly cut off the chants of “O-H-I-O,” quipping, “We gotta win Michigan too.”His speech was threaded with references to rust belt states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Kentucky, which he connected to the struggles of his Ohio hometown, and to the importance of restoring American factories and American manufacturing.Vance described a series of economic and foreign policy choices Biden made over his long career that, he argued, hurt American workers, particularly those in towns like he grew up in. Some observers saw the speech as a rewriting of Vance’s own life narrative, shifting from Hillbilly Elegy’s preoccupation with Appalachian poverty’s connection to cultural problems and personal responsibility, to instead blaming politician Joe Biden for creating the conditions that left the people he grew up with, impoverished.Strikingly, Vance came onstage to the country twang of Merle Haggard’s 2005 protest ballad, America First, which expressed the singer’s opposition to the Iraq war.4. Republicans highlighted grief and anger over the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021Some of the family members of the 13 soldiers killed in an Islamic State terrorist attack at Kabul airport during the “disastrous” US withdrawal from Afghanistan spoke at the RNC to criticize Biden.Alicia Lopez, whose son, Corporal Hunter Lopez, was killed on 26 August 2021, said: “Despite our pleas for answers and accountability, they have pushed us away and tried to silence us. The Biden administration has not owned up to the bad decisions, they have not been transparent about their failures and their so-called leaders work to protect themselves, rather than our sons and daughters who took the oath to defend our country.”A mother-in-law of a marine killed at Abbey Gate said that Trump, in contrast, had spent dedicated time with family members, offering them what she felt was genuine support in their grief. The family members were also featured in a video in which they said that when they met with Biden as their loved ones’ bodies arrived at a military base in Delaware, the president appeared to check his watch during the ceremony.Other pro-Trump veterans also spoke to the lasting sense of anger and betrayal they felt in witnessing the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and in the struggles and fears of the Afghans they had worked with who were left behind as the Taliban seized control of the country.“Throughout our careers, we never had regrets about our service, but this moral injury caused many of us to ask: ‘Why did we serve, if this was the outcome?’” Scott Neil, a retired green beret, said.A scathing state department review of the military withdrawal from Afghanistan concluded that both the Trump and Biden administrations were to blame as “during both administrations there was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow”.But the RNC’s focus on the withdrawal also took aim at one of Biden’s political strengths. As someone who has lost family members to a car accident and cancer, he has often been praised for his ability to grieve with people, and offer them support in moments of profound loss, even being referred to as “the designated mourner”. But on Wednesday, the RNC offered multiple speakers who portrayed Trump as the man who would comfort Americans in their grief and Biden as a self-involved politician.5. Chants of “Bring them home” as parents of 7 October hostage speak Orna and Ronen Neutra, whose son, Omer Neutra, was kidnapped during the 7 October attack in Israel, said Trump had supported them, asked the RNC for continued support in securing their son’s safe return. Omer is one of eight American hostages, Ronen Neutra said.“President Trump called us personally right after the attack, when Omer was taken captive,” Ronen Neutra said. “We know he stands with the American hostages. We need our beautiful son back and we need your support. We need your support to end this crisis and bring all the hostages back home.”Shabbos Kestenbaum, a recent Harvard Divinity School student who was part of a group of students who filed a lawsuit alleging that Harvard failed to address antisemitism on campus, also spoke, as did members of a University of North Carolina fraternity who held up an American flag during a pro-Palestine campus protest.Chris Stein and Carter Sherman contributed reporting More
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Peter Navarro airs grievances in convention speech hours after prison release
Walking out to a standing ovation, Peter Navarro, the former Trump official, delivered a speech of personal grievances at the Republican national convention on Wednesday, hours after he was released from federal prison following his conviction on contempt of Congress charges for obstructing the January 6 committee investigation.The former Trump White House adviser tried – as he has done previously – to portray his criminal case as an egregious overreach of prosecutorial power, taking a page from Trump’s own playbook to claim he was a martyr taking hits on behalf of voters.“If they can come for me, if they can come for Donald Trump, they can come for you,” Navarro said. “If we don’t control our government, their government will control us.”“I went to prison so you don’t have to,” Navarro later added.Navarro, 75, was found guilty last September on two counts of contempt of Congress after he refused to produce documents and testimony in the congressional investigation into the 2021 Capitol attack, claiming executive privilege protections meant he did not have to cooperate.The committee took a special interest in Navarro because of his proximity to Trump and his involvement in a series of efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including to have members of Congress throw out the results in a plot he named “the Green Bay Sweep”.But Navarro’s subpoena defiance prompted a criminal referral to the US attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which brought the charges and ultimately asked for six months in jail because he brazenly ignored the subpoena even after being told executive privilege would not apply.“He cloaked his bad-faith strategy of defiance and contempt behind baseless, unfounded invocations of executive privilege and immunity that could not and would never apply to his situation,” prosecutors wrote of Navarro in their sentencing memorandum.At trial, Navarro’s lawyers offered evidence that Trump had asserted executive privilege over a subpoena issued by a different congressional committee examining the Trump administration’s handling of the Covid pandemic. But there was no such explicit letter for the January 6 subpoena.The reality of the charges did not dissuade Navarro from offering a sanitized version of the story, for which he received thunderous applause from the crowd at the convention.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Your favorite Democrat, Nancy Pelosi, created your favorite committee, the sham Jan 6 committee, which demanded that I violate executive privilege,” Navarro said as the crowd booed. “What did I do? I refused.”“The January 6 committee demanded that I betray Donald John Trump to save my own skin. I refused,” Navarro continued. “And the Democratic majority in the House then voted to hold me in contempt.”At the end of his remarks, Navarro brought out his fiance, who appeared in a red Maga hat, and abruptly jumped into a kiss – before continuing his remarks assailing the justice department for causing his separation from his family: “On election day, the American people will hold these lawfare jackals accountable.” More
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Biden hasn’t done enough to ease age concerns, former top Obama adviser says – live
David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, warns that Joe Biden has not done enough to relieve voters’ concern about his age since last month’s hapless debate performance.“I’ve felt for a long time, and I’ve said for a long time, it’s not in any way a commentary on his record, which I think will be honoured more by history than it is by voters right now,” Axelrod told the Guardian in Milwaukee on Wednesday.“But it’s a very hard case to make that anyone should be elected president in the United States at the age of 82, not for political reasons but for actuarial reasons. This is the hardest job on the planet. It takes a lot out of you. It’s a legitimate concern that people have and that concern has been intensified by what happened at the debate. I don’t think anything that’s happened has relieved that concern.”Axelrod, chief strategist for the 2008 and 2012 Obama presidential campaigns, was speaking after an event organised by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and the Cook Political Report on the sidelines of the Republican national convention.Asked whether he thinks Biden can survive, Axelrod replied: “That’s entirely in his hands and that’s been the case. This whole race has been in his hands, his decision to run and now his decision to stay.“There’s a lot to think about because I know he’s laid out the stakes in this election. The question he has to answer is, what are the odds of his winning? Would the odds be better with another candidate? I’m sure there’s a lot of discussion about that.”The president’s re-election campaign has ended the pause on advertising it imposed following the Saturday assassination attempt against Donald Trump, a Biden-Harris campaign official told the Guardian’s US politics live blog.The first new ad features abortion-rights activist Hadley Duvall, and in addition to attacking Trump singles out JD Vance, Trump’s newly announced running mate. See it here:Jack Smith, the justice department special counsel, has filed an appeal of judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling earlier this week dismissing Donald Trump’s indictment on charges of illegally possessing classified documents.Here’s the latest on this long-running legal saga:The Trump campaign has announced that it will not yet schedule a debate between JD Vance and Kamala Harris, citing uncertainty over who will be the Democratic nominee for vice-president.The decision is a reference to continued tension among Democrats over whether Joe Biden should seek re-election, after his poor showing at his first debate with Donald Trump. The president insists he has no plans to step aside, but if he did, the new nominee would have to find their own running mate.“We don’t know who the Democrat nominee for vice-president is going to be, so we can’t lock in a date before their convention. To do so would be unfair to Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, or whoever Kamala Harris picks as her running mate,” Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes said in a statement.The Biden-Harris campaign had previously proposed three possible dates for the vice-presidential debate, all before the beginning of the Democratic convention on 19 August, where the party will formalize the presidential ticket.Donald Trump’s campaign has encouraged speakers at the Republican national convention to stay away from extreme rhetoric, and in some cases directly edited their speeches, NBC News reports.At the convention thus far, there have been few to no mentions of topics liked the January 6 insurrection, or Trump’s baseless claims that he lost the 2020 election unfairly. That’s a deliberate strategy his campaign shifted to following the assassination attempt on Saturday, as it now looks to project an image of unity.Here’s more on that, from NBC:
Trump said that he had rewritten his own speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination ahead of Thursday night after surviving an assassination attempt. The Trump campaign has said that now he intends to home in on the theme of unifying America.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga, said Wednesday before delivering his convention address, ‘Frankly, they sent the same message to those of us giving speeches.’
‘We always planned to be a reflection of our party’s unity and remind the American people of the difference between President Trump’s success and Crooked Joe Biden’s failure,’ Brian Hughes, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said in a statement. ‘The convention messages from everyday Americans and policymakers have met that goal. This convention is one of the greatest ever held and will launch us forward to victory in November.’
While convention speakers this week have served up plenty of red meat to the thousands of delegates in attendance, particularly on the issues of immigration and crime, they have steered away from some of the party’s more divisive topics and talk of seeking retribution.
Through the convention’s first two nights, speakers have not mentioned the following issues: unfounded claims of stolen elections; the Jan 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol; investigating Trump’s political opponents, including Biden; and investigating the prosecutors who have sought indictments against him, like Special Counsel Jack Smith, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg or Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
A video where Trump mentions the unsubstantiated threat of Democrats ‘cheating’ in the upcoming election was played during the first two nights of the convention.
Asked if the toned-down theme would continue through the week, Rep. Dan Meuser, R-Pa., said, ‘I do.’
‘I mean, it starts with Trump,’ he continued. ‘Hopefully, JD [Vance] picks that up. And others. Trump said he didn’t want people to change their speeches, but I think that they will.’
Anyone attending the Republican national convention could be forgiven for thinking they have stepped into a mirror world where Donald Trump is a saint, not a twice-impeached former president convicted of 34 felonies.On Wednesday, Brenna Bird, the attorney general of Iowa, was asked why she travelled to New York to support the former US president during his hush-money trial.“I was glad to go out to New York to support him during that trial because I’m a prosecutor and I have prosecuted many criminal defendants, but I’ve never seen anything like that,” Bird told international reporters at a Foreign Press Centers briefing.“It’s a travesty. It’s not how the legal process is supposed to work. As a prosecutor, I’ve never taken someone’s politics into account when deciding whether to charge a crime. That is just wrong and, if it’s allowed to happen, it breaks down the rule of law and the constitutional order.”Bird added: “I went there specifically as a prosecutor to support President Trump because what was happening was an injustice and I wanted to be there and stand up for what was right and support President Trump. I think we saw his character during that trial. He doesn’t give up and he keeps on moving forward and that’s exactly what our country needs right now.”In May, Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records alleging he was involved in a scheme that sought to cover up extramarital affairs in advance of the 2016 presidential election. The New York state prosecution had no connection to Biden and there was no evidence of jury bias against Trump.Here’s where the day stands:Joe Biden said he would consider dropping out of the presidential race if a “medical condition” emerged, the New York Times reports, citing an excerpt released from Biden’s interview with Ed Gordon of BET News. According to the Times, Biden was asked if there was any reason that would make him reconsider staying in the presidential race. In response, Biden said: “If I had some medical condition that emerged, if somebody, if doctors came to me and said, you got this problem and that problem.”
John Hinckley, the man who shot and wounded president Ronald Reagan in 1981, has released his own statement following Donald Trump’s assassination attempt on Saturday. In a tweet on Wednesday, Hinckley, who was released in 2022 after spending 41 years under federal oversight, wrote: “Violence is not the way to go. Give peace a chance.”
Kamala Harris has accepted a third possible date to hold a CBS-hosted vice-presidential debate against Trump’s newly announced running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance. The Biden-Harris campaign said it was open to a showdown with Vance on Monday, 12 August, as well. Harris had previously agreed to participate in the debate on either Tuesday, 23 July, or Tuesday, 13 August.
The high-profile California Democrat Adam Schiff has called on Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race. Schiff, in a statement to the Los Angeles Times, said that Biden “has been one of the most consequential presidents in our nation’s history, and his lifetime of service as a Senator, a vice president, and now as president has made our country better” adding: “But our nation is at a crossroads.”
Joe Biden lashed out at a “tense” meeting with dozens of House Democrats who bluntly questioned his viability as their party’s presidential nominee, according to reports. During the Saturday Zoom call, Colorado representative Jason Crow told Biden that voters are concerned about his vigor and strength, and noted the importance of national security in the November election, the reports say.
Lloyd Doggett, the Texas representative who became the first House Democrat to publicly call on Joe Biden to step aside, has doubled down and urged the president to withdraw from the ticket in the face of “the reality of steadily, worsening poll numbers”. “My call for President Biden to step aside remains even more urgent,” Doggett said in a statement on Wednesday.
During the Democratic press conference in Milwaukee, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, was pressed on the party’s plans to nominate Joe Biden via a roll call vote in the coming days. Walz, who co-chairs the Democratic national convention’s rules committee, confirmed that delegates would not begin voting before 1 August, and the governor’s spokesperson confirmed that the process should wrap up by 7 August.
Donald Trump does not have stitches but has a “nice flesh wound”, his son Eric Trump said following his father’s assassination attempt. In an interview with CBS, Eric said: “You know, he was millimeters away from having his life expunged … I’m sure the ear doesn’t feel well.”
Nearly two-thirds of Democrats want Joe Biden to withdraw his re-election bid, a new AP-NORC poll has found. According to the poll, which was mostly conducted before Donald Trump’s assassination attempt on Saturday, 65% of Democrats say that Biden should withdraw. Overall, seven in 10 American adults say that Biden should drop out of the race.
The Democratic National Committee said that its virtual roll call to officially nominate Joe Biden as its party’s presidential nominee will happen in August, CBS reports. In a letter obtained and reported by CBS on Wednesday, the chairs of the Democratic national convention’s rules committee, Leah Daughtry and Tim Walz, wrote: “We have confirmed with the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic National Convention that no virtual voting will begin before August 1 … .”
David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, warns that Joe Biden has not done enough to relieve voters’ concern about his age since last month’s hapless debate performance.“I’ve felt for a long time, and I’ve said for a long time, it’s not in any way a commentary on his record, which I think will be honoured more by history than it is by voters right now,” Axelrod told the Guardian in Milwaukee on Wednesday.“But it’s a very hard case to make that anyone should be elected president in the United States at the age of 82, not for political reasons but for actuarial reasons. This is the hardest job on the planet. It takes a lot out of you. It’s a legitimate concern that people have and that concern has been intensified by what happened at the debate. I don’t think anything that’s happened has relieved that concern.”Axelrod, chief strategist for the 2008 and 2012 Obama presidential campaigns, was speaking after an event organised by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and the Cook Political Report on the sidelines of the Republican national convention.Asked whether he thinks Biden can survive, Axelrod replied: “That’s entirely in his hands and that’s been the case. This whole race has been in his hands, his decision to run and now his decision to stay.“There’s a lot to think about because I know he’s laid out the stakes in this election. The question he has to answer is, what are the odds of his winning? Would the odds be better with another candidate? I’m sure there’s a lot of discussion about that.”Following Rudy Giuliani’s fall at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee on Tuesday, the 80-year-old disbarred lawyer’s spokesperson Ted Goodman released the following statement on Wednesday:
Mayor Rudy Giuliani appreciates everyone’s concern after tripping over a dip in the walkway on the convention floor of the convention.
The mayor and I were both filming footage for his social media and livestream programs on the floor of the convention, when he turned to set some equipment on a chair and tripped over a dip between the walkway and chairs.
Those falsely suggesting anything else are misleading the public for their own agendas.
The rift among Democrats is deepening over Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy despite party leaders saying Biden is the nominee.Joan E Greve and Martin Pengelly report for the Guardian:Demands for Joe Biden to step aside as the Democrats’ presidential pick to face Donald Trump have slowed since the Republican survived an assassination attempt last weekend, to the extent that on Wednesday one “prominent strategist” was moved to say of the rebellion: “It’s over.”The strategist spoke anonymously to the Hill – and before the influential California congressman Adam Schiff said publicly that Biden should quit.Nonetheless, in Milwaukee, at a press conference during the Republican national convention, Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and a party grandee, said Biden would be confirmed as the Democratic nominee by virtual vote between 1 and 7 August, before the Chicago convention.For the full story, click here:Joe Biden’s campaign team released a new ad on Wednesday featuring Hadley Duvall, a 22-year-old abortion-rights activist from Owensboro, Kentucky.In the ad, Duvall, who was in an emotional ad last year during governor Andy Beshear’s re-election campaign, describes her experience of being impregnated by her stepfather, who raped her when she was 12 years old.She said:
I’m from Kentucky where, because of Donald Trump, an extreme abortion ban is now in place, with no exceptions for rape or incest. During the overturn [of Roe v Wade], I went back to the time I was 12 years old and I was holding my first pregnancy test in my hand …
Trump brags about overturning Roe v Wade. He is ‘proudly responsible’ for each and every abortion ban across the country. And he calls them a ‘beautiful thing to watch.’ What is so beautiful about telling a 12-year-old girl that she must have the baby of her stepfather who raped her? The stakes of this election could not be higher for our choices. More - in US Politics
Ivanka Trump said she was done with politics – but is the Maga Princess plotting a return?
If you’re a woman freaking out about the imminent possibility of another Trump term, don’t despair quite yet. Yes, Project 2025 is hoping to turn the US into a Christian nationalist country. Yes, JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running partner, has been primed for the job by Peter Thiel, a man who has mused that women having the vote is problematic. Yes, experts are raising the alarm that “a Trump-Vance administration will be the most dangerous administration for abortion and reproductive freedom in this country’s history.” But it’s not all doom and gloom: there may well be a beacon of light and female liberation coming into the White House as well. Signs suggest Ivanka Trump is considering a return to politics. Ladies and gentlewomen, the patron saint of female empowerment may selflessly serve us once again!To be clear: the younger Trump hasn’t explicitly said that she’s interested in another go at being Daddy’s special adviser. In fact, she’s spent the last few years getting as far away from politics as possible. A renaissance woman, Trump has sold everything from handbags to shoes to real estate – but her most valuable product has always been herself. The former first daughter has always been very careful about protecting her personal brand. And, for a while, that meant staying well clear of her father.With Donald Trump now formally the nominee, it can be hard to remember just how bad things looked for the former president a couple of years ago. After an underwhelming performance by GOP candidates in the 2022 midterm elections, a lot of Trump’s former acolytes started turning on him. High-profile Republicans complained that Trump was a drag on the party. Even the New York Post, once Trump’s personal Pravda, thought he was a joke: “TRUMPTY DUMPTY”, a post-midterm front page crowed. And then, of course, there were Trump’s mountains of legal problems. A lot of people wrote Trump off.Ivanka was noticeably not by her father’s side during his hours of need. The moment that Donald got kicked out of the White House, Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, followed him to Florida but kept a safe distance from the political goings on at Mar-a-Lago. Can’t have an insurrection ruining one’s image, after all.View image in fullscreenA company called College Hunks Hauling Junk helped them clear out their DC mansion and the pair decamped to Miami’s “Billionaire Bunker”. They didn’t go empty-handed, of course. The couple reported between $172m and $640m in outside income while working in the White House and Saudi Arabia gave Kushner’s private equity firm $2bn to invest. Enough to keep them busy for a while.For a long time, Javanka stayed fairly under the radar. Ivanka Trump would pop up in headlines now and again in Fun-loving Mother and Caring Philanthropist mode. Behold, a flattering headline about Ivanka helping deploy medical supplies and meals to Ukraine! Look: here’s an Instagram slideshow of the whole family skiing! Now here’s a fun picture of the Javanka family at the flashy Ambani wedding!A cynic might say these carefully curated images were designed to humanize Trump and erase her messy political past. Aiding this was a consistent drip-drip of mysterious sources telling the press that Javanka had no desire whatsoever to return to politics. Even this year, when Donald Trump became the presumptive nominee, media “sources” kept insisting that the former first daughter wanted nothing to do with the White House. “She is very happy, living her best life,” a source told People in March. “She left politics totally in the rearview mirror and so this time around, even if her dad is the leading Republican candidate, she basically doesn’t care. She told him when he said he was going to run again that she didn’t want to be involved.”Mary Trump, the woman who has made a career out of being Donald Trump’s disgruntled niece after a legal battle over her inheritance, has been blunt about why Ivanka seems to have retreated from politics. “I think Ivanka made very clear that she doesn’t get enough out of [her relationship with her father] any more,” Mary Trump told CNN at the end of May. “She’s barely been heard from for months; she could not be bothered to show up at [her father’s] trial [over falsifying business records].”As the election inches closer, however, Ivanka seems to have reassessed the value of her relationship with her father. In early May, the media outlet Puck reported that she was “warming to the idea of trying to be helpful again … She’s not like ‘Hell no’ any more.” A similar report from Business Insider soon followed: according to a “friend of Ivanka”, the entrepreneur wasn’t ruling politics out. A spokesperson for the couple told Puck that this was all nonsense but rumours of a political comeback kept mounting.Then, a couple of weeks ago, Ivanka jumped back into the spotlight with an appearance on Lex Fridman’s highly influential podcast. (Fridman has more than 4 million subscribers on YouTube.) In this she opened up about how working at the White House was “the most extraordinary growth experience of my life” and how privileged she was to have been asked by her father to help so many people. During the conversation, she also carefully recapped some of (what’s she’s claimed as) her key achievements in the White House, such as boosting the child tax credit. It wasn’t so much an interview as it was a hype project by a friend. It felt a lot like it was teasing Trump’s return to political life should her dad be re-elected.So, after years in the Floridian wilderness, has the Maga Princess officially returned to the family fold? It’s a tad too early to tell but it increasingly looks that way. As one would expect, Ivanka Trump has spent the last few days close to her father after the attempt on his life: she’s very much thrown herself into the role of doting daughter again.And while Ivanka has been absent from the Republican national convention so far, she and Jared are expected to be at Donald’s side on Thursday when he formally accepts the party’s nomination. And if that happens and images of Ivanka standing next to her father hit the headlines, it won’t just be a celebratory photoshoot – it’ll be a preview of Trump’s second term. More
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Ohio voters hope son of soil JD Vance will ‘do something good for us’
For many in Middletown, Ohio, JD Vance is better-known as a bestselling author and hit Hollywood movie subject than a politician who on Monday was propelled into the political big time as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick.Amanda Bailey moved into Vance’s grandmother’s house, the home in which Vance was mostly raised, 18 months ago. Since then, she’s been dealing with a steady stream of curious passersby inspired by Vance’s 2016 autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, and the 2020 film of the same name, driving by and taking photos of the house.Bailey, who works at a local hardware store, admits she’s not entirely up to speed with Vance’s policy positions.“I hope he’ll do something good for us, and I think he will,” she says.Her thoughts are echoed by Jerry Dobbins, who has lived three doors down the street for the past 31 years. Dobbins says his memories of Vance’s family are mainly of the vice-presidential candidate’s grandmother, Bonnie, who mostly raised JD and his sister, Lindsay.“Bonnie was a tough bird. She was just a strong woman from Kentucky,” he says.But there’s a reason Bailey, Dobbins and a number of other Middletown residents say they are not especially concerned by Vance being rocketed into the political mainstream without much in the way of experience – it’s because they have complete faith in the person who picked him: Donald Trump.“I like Trump,” says Bailey. “And I think they’ll do a lot of good work together.”“Trump’s not a politician. He’s a businessman,” says Dobbins, who worked as a fabricator at a nearby aerospace company before retiring. “When Trump got in [in 2016], things started looking better economy-wise, business-wise. I don’t think he can be beat [in November].”The Middletown Vance was raised in is not unlike the dozens of other left-behind communities in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and beyond, where Trump’s particular brand of politics and rhetoric has found favor. In Butler county, which encompasses most of Middletown and several satellite towns of Cincinnati, Trump beat Biden by 24 points in the 2020 election.Like thousands of others, Vance’s family were lured from Appalachia to Ohio by the promise of work at Middletown’s many paper and steel mills that for much of the 20th century dominated the region’s economy.And as with dozens of other rust belt towns, Middletown’s economy shrank due to industrial offshoring that began in the 1970s, giving rise to job losses and the ravages of the opioid epidemic that endure today.It’s these ills, which the 39-year-old Vance has blamed on Joe Biden, immigrants and China, that he has used to craft a so-far successful political career. Despite these claims, the Biden administration has invested billions of dollars in the midwest, while immigrants have helped stem population decline in many towns and cities.For longtime Middletown residents Bev and Tom Pressler, Vance’s lack of political experience may even be an advantage.“I think the young blood is good. We need some younger politicians running the country,” says Tom. “Obama got in and he wasn’t all that old, and he didn’t have all that experience. Trump didn’t have all that experience and I think he did excellent.”For Bev Pressler, a 62-year-old resident, Vance has worked hard to get where he is today.“If you saw the movie and read the book, he was trying to get into these schools, he was trying to pull his mom out of drug addiction, his family depended on him,” she says.But not everyone in Middletown thinks Vance’s meteoric rise to the forefront of US politics is a good thing.“He has a legislative legacy of zero achievements, especially lacking any meaningful support for Ohioans,” says Kathy Wyenandt, the chair of the Butler county Democratic party.“Vance is willing to change his beliefs at any time for the sake of amassing power … he is an out-of-touch millionaire and political shapeshifter who is wrong for Ohio, and wrong for our country.”Although Vance launched his political career in the US Senate with a campaign rally at a steel manufacturer in Middletown in July 2021, locals say they haven’t seen much of him since then.“What concerns me more than anything is that, at Senator Vance’s age, he is able to take the Maga agenda and to see it out far beyond even Trump’s time, if he were to get re-elected,” says Scotty Robertson, a pastor who has lived in Middletown for seven years.“Those policies are so destructive to our country and to Middletown. We’re talking about potentially ending social security and Medicare as we know it, continuing to roll back voting rights and ensuring that large segments of our population find it extremely hard to even vote. We’re talking about supporting policy that allows the president to essentially do whatever he or she chooses without any kind of accountability.”Still, for Debbie Dranschak, who with her husband runs the White Dog Distilling Company on Middletown’s Central Avenue, that’s not enough of a reason not to vote for his running mate in November.“I don’t know him, I don’t know his politics, but I’m glad Trump picked him,” she says. “Biden is just too old. He needs to get out. I grew up Democrat, but it’s about who is going to do the best for the country.”For Chad Sebald, an audio engineer, Vance has been unfairly labeled by some locally as a “class traitor” – someone who leaves behind the people they grew up with in search of better opportunities elsewhere.“Knowing his history, he came from nothing. He did what just about anybody in Middletown would do – he got out. I can’t blame the guy for getting out of here,” says Sebald, who also plans to vote for Trump in November.However, for a few minutes on the same street Vance was raised, the kind of dangerous, racist rhetoric that many say Trump has fueled over the years was in full view on Monday afternoon.As a local TV news car pulled up to interview residents, a man wearing a T-shirt with the word “freedom” written on it emerged from a nearby home angrily asking the car and its occupants to leave.“JD Vance is a race traitor,” he yells. Vance’s wife, Usha, is the daughter of immigrants from India. “Fuck that motherfucker.” More
- in US Politics
The American republic is crumbling before us – and Democrats must share the blame | Owen Jones
Has the US entered its late Soviet phase? The country is a gerontocracy led by ailing leaders and with a crisis of confidence in its dominant ideology; it is a flailing superpower suffering foreign humiliation (not least in Afghanistan); and its economic system struggles to meet the needs of many of its people. The similarities are a little uncanny.There are, of course, clear differences too. The US is a democracy, albeit one severely compromised by wealthy vested interests and concerted rightwing efforts to weaken voting rights, and it is a racially diverse union of states, rather than an unstable federation of nations. But, crucially, if Joe Biden is a Leonid Brezhnev or one of his two short-lived elderly successors, then Donald Trump is no Mikhail Gorbachev: he is more of an American Vladimir Putin.The attempted assassination of Trump marks a further descent into the darkness. Earlier this year, a poll found that more than a third of Americans believe civil war in their lifetime is likely, with another 13% opting for “very likely”. In 2021, a leading Canadian political scientist and scholar of violent conflict warned that the weakening of US democratic institutions over decades could lead to the whole system’s collapse by 2025, leading to extreme violent instability and a rightwing tyranny prevailing by 2030. A decade ago, such prophecies would have seemed outlandish, deranged even. Now only the foolishly complacent would dismiss them as lying outside the realms of plausibility.The liberal order is imploding. But just a quarter of a century ago, under Bill Clinton’s presidency, many considered it bulletproof. The US was drunk on its recent cold war triumph, and the political and economic order it extolled was described as the final stage of human development by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History? The image of an at-ease, amiable US was projected to the world in cultural exports ranging from Friends to The West Wing, or as humanity’s benign protector in Independence Day. Globally, liberal democracies appeared to be becoming the norm, not besieged exceptions. Sure, the arrival of George W Bush, the horror of 9/11 and the killing fields of Iraq were traumatic for progressive Americans, bookended by the most severe crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression. But Barack Obama seemed to wash those sins away. He was the first black president, telegenic and with a confident charm: central casting could not have produced a more ideal candidate for the sensibilities of the liberal American.Yet nine decades after the publication of It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’s dystopian novel about a fictional fascist dictator seizing power in the US, the scenario it imagines seems less far-fetched than at any other point in the 250-year existence of the American republic. Then, Lewis looked to Nazi Germany as a warning: his wife was the journalist Dorothy Thompson, who had interviewed Adolf Hitler and subsequently been expelled by his regime. Today, the authoritarian model can be observed in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Fidesz was a centre-right party that became radicalised in power, and since then has deployed anti-migrant hysteria to build support, demonised opponents as unpatriotic foreign puppets, rigged the media in its favour and trashed judicial independence, building what Orbán describes as an “illiberal democracy”. It is a trajectory perhaps most strikingly pioneered by Putin: you keep the trappings of democracy, with the substance gradually rotted away. Shortly before the assassination attempt, Trump hosted Orbán – who has endorsed the Republican presidential nominee – at Mar-a-Lago.Democratic culture in the US is stronger and more embedded than in Hungary. But Trump is even more demagogic than Orbán, with a more extreme and motivated grassroots base. Furthermore, he is more vengeful and radicalised than ever – the relative moderates in his entourage have left in horror at his plans for the presidency. The supreme court has a conservative majority, and a Trump presidential victory could easily be accompanied by Republican victory in both houses of Congress, meaning precious few checks and balances. Trump has floated cancelling the US constitution and jailing his political opponents, and his promise only to be a dictator on “day one” (and not after) is hardly reassuring.Trump’s return to the White House is likely to be met with a response on the streets. Any such protests could be used as a pretext to impose authoritarian measures, perhaps even martial law. Trump reportedly told the top US military leader to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020. You can see how it could spiral. We don’t yet know the motive of Trump’s suspected shooter, but the episode will be used by Republicans to shut down scrutiny of Trump and the danger he poses to the republic on the grounds that it is inciting further violence against him. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of extremist violence in the US is perpetrated by rightwing elements.How did it all go wrong? The truth is the US system has long been dysfunctional, with Democratic elites partly to blame. When Trump came to power, the real average wage had about the same purchasing power as it did four decades earlier. Most gains had been accrued by top earners. Such stagnation breeds pessimism, ripe for demagogic exploitation. Democrats failed to transform this broken order.Trump’s surge is also a racist backlash, but it is linked to the failure of Democratic economic policy. Republicans have assiduously exploited and promoted a white backlash ever since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, deploying racist dog whistles which only escalated under Obama. But the Democrats’ approach to social reform did not help. Corporate taxes were slashed from the 1960s onwards, while the tax burden on middle-income Americans nearly doubled between the mid-1950s and 1980. Social programmes targeted at poorer Americans were therefore easily demonised as being paid for by blue-collar workers, breaking down the solidarity of the traditional Democratic coalition. That resentment was easily and crudely racialised as undeserving poor black America being subsidised by hardworking white people.The foreign military ventures of Democratic elites such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden – principally in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also Libya – were also characterised by bloody turmoil and international humiliation. Today, Biden has infuriated natural Democratic voters and morally disgraced the US globally with complicity in Israel’s genocidal rampage. Republicans are enthusiastic about their nominee: Democrats are not.A superpower in crisis both at home and abroad risks some form of reckoning, as the Soviet leadership discovered. Across the west, the cordon sanitaire between the centre-right and what lies beyond has collapsed: a Trump victory will embolden Europe’s surging far-right movements. The liberal order crumbles before us: we have barely begun to contemplate what lies beyond it.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist More
- in US Politics
‘A dystopian plot’: how will Trump’s Project 2025 affect California?
Donald Trump has not been shy about attacking California on the presidential campaign trail, telling fellow conservatives that “the place is failing” under Democratic party leadership. And all signs suggest that a second Trump administration would not hesitate to take a sledgehammer to principles and policy priorities that the Golden state and other progressive bastions hold dear.The Project 2025 policy document, a blueprint for a second Trump presidency drawn up by former Trump administration officials and sympathetic thinktank analysts, takes specific aim at California on abortion rights, fuel emissions standards and the transition to electric vehicles.The document also raises the possibility of a large-scale crackdown on immigration and an intense focus on border security – a cornerstone of the Trump campaign that could upend the lives of millions of immigrants living in California as well as parts of the state economy, especially agriculture, that depend heavily on immigrant labor.That is not to mention the other ways Project 2025 envisions overhauling the US government, with implications for California as much as the rest of the country: enhancing the power of the presidency and eroding the independence of the justice department, dismantling what it calls “the administrative state”, abandoning efforts to combat the climate crisis and curbing the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans.“Project 2025 is more than an idea,” the California congressman Jared Huffman has warned, “it’s a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will.”What remains to be seen, though, is how much of the wishlist laid out in Project 2025’s 900-page “Mandate for Leadership” is actually achievable. Trump himself has sought to distance himself from the document, as Democrats like Huffman have started using it as a cudgel with which to attack his campaign. And a number of policy experts at one remove from the heat and hyperbole of the election campaign believe that any dystopian plot might quickly give way to a lot of lawsuits likely to slow or halt parts of the Trump agenda for months or years.“I don’t think they are capable of pulling off a lot of the things they want to pull off,” said Christopher Thornberg of the Los Angeles-based research and consulting firm Beacon Economics. While an immigration crackdown similar to the one in Trump’s first term seems inevitable, mass expulsions of millions of people as promised by the former president would be dizzyingly expensive and near-impossible to pull off, he argued.As for California’s more ambitious environmental targets that Project 2025 wants to disrupt, some – getting rid of gas-powered cars by 2035, for example – are probably unfeasible.On many other issues, California can draw on its experience of the first Trump presidency to throw up roadblocks or pass its own state legislation. The Project 2025 document may be a sign that Trump and his allies are more ready to govern this time, but – as the political consultant and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project Mike Madrid argues – California and other blue states are better prepared, too.“Whatever the federal government decides to do, California can compensate,” Madrid said. In the event of a second Trump presidency, he expected the state to start filing lawsuits almost immediately, as it did more than a hundred times during the 2017-21 presidency, and find administrative or legislative solutions to many of the problems a new Trump administration might try to create.“This state is good at finding ways around the policies,” he said. “The size of the economy makes it easier to do that.”In one instance – a proposal in the Project 2025 document to end a legal waiver that has enabled California to set its own fuel efficiency standards for the past half-century – the courts have already heard a suit brought by several Republican-run states and ruled in California’s favor.None of that diminishes the threats that Trump and his supporters have been directing at California’s political leadership, or the nastiness of some of their language. In speeches over the past year, Trump has mischaracterized California as a place with so little water that even rich people in Beverly Hills can’t take proper showers, a place where shoplifting and other crimes are so rampant the only solution is to shoot criminals on sight, a place where undocumented immigrants are, implausibly, offered pension funds and mansions on arrival and can vote illegally multiple times over. “The world is being dumped into California,” he told state Republicans last September. “Prisoners. Terrorists. Mental patients.”Project 2025’s approach has been less fanciful and much more focused on policy detail. It rails, for example, against what it calls “abortion tourism” in California and other states and proposes a number of administrative remedies to track women who travel there because of abortion bans in their states, and to withhold Medicaid and other federal funding if California continues to insist that insurance companies make abortion part of their health coverage.None of this, though, is as frightening to abortion rights activists in California as the part that is left unsaid: the desire of many on the political right to institute an outright national abortion ban. Asked whether she believed Trump when he said he would not support such a ban, Jodi Hicks of the Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California responded with a flat “No.”To her, the fight in California is not about the fine print of the Hyde amendment or the Weldon amendement – tools invoked by Project 2025 that Republicans have used in the past to try to restrict abortion around the country – but rather about control of Congress to avert even the possibility of a national ban.Hicks has identified eight swing districts in California that she believes can determine control of the House of Representatives and her organization is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the Democratic candidates there. “The road to reproductive freedom runs through California,” she said. “We know what the intention is – they want to take away abortion rights all across the country, including California. What we need is a Congress that can push back and protect us.”The best way to thwart the Republicans’ plans, in other words, is to vote against them. California, as a solid-blue state, will do its part to keep Trump out of the White House. What the rest of the country does remains to be seen. More
