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      Republicans to descend on Milwaukee – where they’ve been trying to dilute Black voting power

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      Shortly after the 2022 midterm elections, Robert Spindell sent out an email to his fellow Republicans explaining why he was pleased with the results even though Tony Evers, a Democrat, had just won a second term.Spindell, one of three Republicans on the body that oversees elections in Wisconsin, said “we can be especially proud of the City of Milwaukee (80.2% Dem vote) casting 37,000 less votes than cast in the 2018 election with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas.”The comment sparked outrage and calls for Spindell to resign. Spindell, who also served as a fake elector in 2020, has refused, saying, “The last thing I want to do is suppress votes.”While it was astonishing to see a top Republican official boasting of lower voter turnout with such bluntness, it wasn’t surprising to anyone to see Republicans celebrating fewer votes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s most populous city.Nearly 223,000 Black people live in Milwaukee – roughly 60% of Wisconsin’s entire Black population. That means that Black voters in the city can have an outsize effect on election outcomes in the state – they have long been a bastion of Democratic votes and are crucial for any Democrat who wants to win the state (More than one out of every 10 votes Joe Biden received in Wisconsin in 2020 came from the city of Milwaukee). Activists have long understood attacks on the city to be code for attacks on Black voters.Now Republicans are set to descend on the city they have long attacked to formally nominate Donald Trump to a second term at the Republican national convention in July.“They’re not coming here because they love the city of Milwaukee at all,” said Angela Lang, the executive director of Black Leaders Organizing Communities, a non-profit in the city. The decision to hold the GOP convention in Milwaukee, a city Lang said Republicans often “say racist dog whistles about” was a “slap in the face”.Republicans have not shied away from using coded language to attack the city. In 2013, as Republicans debated a measure to curtail early voting, state senator Scott Fitzgerald said “the question of where this is coming from and why are we doing this and why are we trying to disenfranchise people, I mean, I say it’s because the people I represent in the 13th district continue to ask me, ‘What is going on in Milwaukee?’”Donald Trump, for his part, has directly insulted Milwaukee, reportedly telling fellow Republicans in June it was a “horrible city”.Both Democrats and Republicans have touted the economic benefits the event will bring to the city. And Reince Priebus, the former RNC chair who led the effort to bring the convention to Milwaukee, said having the event in the city would bring around $200m in economic benefits and would focus Republican attention on Wisconsin, a critical battleground state. The convention, Priebus said in 2023, “can turn a purple state where only 20,000 people will decide who those electoral votes will go to”.“They have no shame,” said Greg Lewis, a minister in Milwaukee who leads the Souls to the Polls, a non-profit that works to educate churchgoers and get them to vote. Historically, the program has been remarkably successful in mobilizing Black voters.“Even though they have totally tried to abolish folks in our community from expressing themselves with their vote, they still want you to support a system or an organization or a party that is totally against them expressing their power,” Lewis said.In 2018, Robin Vos, the Republican who serves as the powerful speaker of the Wisconsin assembly, said his party would have done better in statewide elections “if you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula”.Republicans have also used their impenetrable, gerrymandered majorities in the state legislature to attack Milwaukee and its Black residents, including passing a sweeping voter ID measure and moving to limit early voting in the city. Non-white voters are more than four times more likely to lack a current ID than their white counterparts. One study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison found that voter ID in Wisconsin discouraged up to 23,000 people in Milwaukee and Dane counties from voting in the 2016 election.In 2016, US district judge James Peterson struck down a Republican-enacted law trying to limit the amount of early voting in the state. He noted that the practice was especially popular among Latino and Black voters. Milwaukee at the time allowed for more early voting than other places in the state.“The legislature’s ultimate objective was political: Republicans sought to maintain control of the state government. But the methods that the legislature chose to achieve that result involved suppressing the votes of Milwaukee’s residents, who are disproportionately African American and Latino,” he wrote. An appeals court has since overturned Peterson’s ruling.Turnout in the city in 2016 dropped by 41,000 votes compared with 2012, nearly double Donald Trump’s margin of victory in the state. When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin in 2016, turnout in Black wards in the city was around 58%, according to a Journal Sentinel analysis. In 2020, it fell to 51%. Black turnout has lagged after white turnout in the city in the last presidential and gubernatorial elections, according to data analyzed by John Johnson, a researcher at Marquette University.“They’re going to places with large concentrations of Black people – that is the most hope we have at building Black political power in the state,” Lang said, referring to Republican efforts to restrict voting rights.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2020, Donald Trump and his campaign waged an aggressive, ultimately unsuccessful, legal effort to get votes in Milwaukee and Madison thrown out as part of his effort to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin. He did not request a recount in any other county in the state.LaTonya Johnson, a Democrat who represents Milwaukee in the state senate, said it was no secret why Republicans were targeting the city. She said she had pleaded with her colleagues in the legislature to support legislation to curb gun violence in the city but had been rebuffed.“Republicans always make it seem like the bulk of – if they feel that there’s fraud – in the system that is coming from the city of Milwaukee, right? And the question is why? Because Milwaukee is majority minority,” she said in an interview.For the last few months, Lewis and Souls to the Polls have been calling for the executive director of the Wisconsin Republican party, Andrew Iverson, to resign. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published text messages earlier this year that showed Iverson trying to sabotage Souls to the Polls operations on election day in 2020. The text messages showed Iverson, then the head of Trump victory, a joint effort of the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, asking a Trump campaign staffer if he could get Trump supporters to use Souls to the Polls on election day.“I’m excited about this. Wreak havoc,” he said in one text message published by the Journal Sentinel. Iverson, who did not respond to an interview request, has denied wrongdoing, saying he was joking. Another Republican staffer told the Journal Sentinel that he took the messages to overwhelm Souls to the Polls.Beyond voting, Republicans have also attacked Milwaukee in other ways. As the city faced serious fiscal issues last year, lawmakers approved a measure allowing Milwaukee officials to raise taxes, but also imposed new restrictions on the city.The bill contained provisions that gave the city less control over the city’s fire and police commission and said it could not spend revenue on diversity initiatives, and limited how much could be spent on non-profits and the arts. The city was also blocked from using state funding on a local streetcar project.Lang said she and her staff planned to leave the city during the convention, but would have some virtual programming. “I have serious safety concerns,” she said.Attendees of the convention will be allowed to carry guns within the “soft” security perimeter around the Fiserv forum, the arena where the convention will be held, but not within a tighter “hard” security perimeter closer to the arena. The city could not ban the carrying of firearms because of a state law that prohibits localities from restricting them.“The same type of people who write manifestos, and shoot up grocery stores with people that look like me, they find home in the Republican party, and now we’re rolling out the red carpet to them in a predominantly Black and brown city that is largely Democratic, and I think that is a recipe for disaster,” Lang said.Still, Lang said she planned to use the convention as an opportunity to educate voters about the meaning of their vote.“If people are like, ‘I don’t really believe in politics or it’s so dysfunctional, I have no faith in it right now,’ well, there’s one party in particular that is happy when you don’t vote,” she said. More

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      Biden under renewed pressure to step aside as top Democrats make agonized appeals

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      Joe Biden came under renewed moral pressure on Wednesday to abandon his presidential candidacy amid agonised appeals by a succession of senior Democrats for him to consider the broader picture.Those calls came as the US president dug in his heels to make it hard to supplant him as the nominee.With the backlash over his 27 June TV debate fiasco refusing to abate, Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, became the most senior party member yet to subtly float the possibility of Biden stepping down while stopping short of explicitly telling him to do so.Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, gleefully sought to further tighten the screw by summoning three White House aides to testify about Biden’s mental fitness.The summons came in the form of a subpoena from James Comer, the GOP chair of the House oversight committee, who demanded testimony from Anthony Bernal, the top aide to the first lady Jill Biden; the deputy White House chief of staff Annie Tomasini, and the president’s senior adviser Ashley Williams, Axios reported.Pelosi, 84, who was speaker until Republicans regained control of the House in the 2022 midterm elections, told MSNBC’s Morning Joe that “it’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run”, adding: “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision. Because time is running short.”That remark came as the president seemed intent on running down the clock until next month’s Democratic national convention in Chicago, to make it practically impossible to replace him. Pelosi later qualified her comments, claiming they had been subject to “misrepresentations”, while adding: “The president is great.”But they prefaced further critical interventions from Senate Democrats, who followed the lead of Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado in voicing doubts over whether Biden could beat Donald Trump in November.Bennet told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday evening that Trump was likely to win November’s poll in a landslide because of the widespread concerns over Biden’s age and mental acuity.“This race is on a trajectory that is very worrisome if you care about the future of this country,” he said in an impassioned interview. “Donald Trump is on track, I think, to win this election and maybe win it by a landslide, and take with him the Senate and the House. It’s not a question about politics, it’s a moral question about the future of our country.”He added: “I have not seen anything remotely approaching the kind of plan we need to see out of the White House that can demonstrate that he can actually beat Donald Trump, which is not going to be about the accomplishments that we all had, you know, three and four years ago. This is something for the president to consider.”Bennet’s comments stopped short of a full-blown appeal for Biden’s withdrawal, in contrast to Democrats in the House – where seven members have explicitly made such calls in the wake of the debate, where the president repeatedly appeared confused, mangled his words and allowed Trump to lie without effective contradiction.Soon after, Pete Welch of Vermont became the first senator to call on Biden to withdraw from the election. Welch said he was worried about the race because “the stakes could not be higher”.“I understand why President Biden wants to run,” Welch wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “He saved us from Donald Trump once and wants to do it again. But he needs to reassess whether he is the best candidate to do so. In my view, he is not.“For the good of the country, I’m calling on President Biden to withdraw from the race.”Richard Blumenthal, a senator from Connecticut, also voiced concerns.“I am deeply concerned about Joe Biden winning this November,” Blumenthal told reporters, adding that the party “had to reach a conclusion as soon as possible” and that Biden still retained his support.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA similarly circumspect call to reconsider came from Katie Hobbs, the Democratic governor of Arizona, a battleground state that was one of six moved by the Cook Political Report – a non-partisan election forecaster – in Trump’s direction following the president’s post-debate poll slide.“I want the president to look at the evidence and make a hard decision,” Hobbs told reporters, adding that Biden had “a lot to do to assure Americans and Arizonans”.And on Wednesday evening, Representative Earl Blumenauer, the longest-serving Democrat in Oregon’s House delegation, put it bluntly: “President Biden should not be the Democratic presidential nominee.”
      “The question before the country is whether the president should continue his candidacy for re-election. This is not just about extending his presidency but protecting democracy,” he said in an emailed statement.“It is a painful and difficult conclusion but there is no question in my mind that we will all be better served if the president steps aside as the Democratic nominee and manages a transition under his terms.”There were even signs of slippage within the staunchly loyal Congressional Black Caucus, which had pledged its support on Monday night. On Wednesday one of its members, Marc Veasey of Texas, became the first to break ranks by telling CNN that Democrats running in tight races should “distance themselves” from Biden in an effort to “do whatever it is they need to do” to win.The public agonising illustrated how Biden’s debate failure has plunged the Democrats into paralysis as the campaign approaches a key phase.Yet there seemed little imminent sign of Biden – who has already written to the party’s congressional group en masse telling doubters to challenge him at the convention – yielding to pressure to bow out.Far from Biden retreating, plans were announced for a second primetime television interview – this time with NBC’s Lester Holt next Monday in the symbolic setting of the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas – to follow last Friday’s with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.The latest interview, coming on the heels of Biden’s hosting of Nato’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington this week – where he has been meeting a succession of world leaders – appeared designed to reinforce the message that he intends to stay the course.On Wednesday, the president visited the Washington headquarters of the main US trade union body, the AFL-CIO, an important Democrat constituency.The trade union visit followed a virtual meeting from the White House on Tuesday evening with about 200 Democratic mayors, in which he restated his determination to remain and reportedly won their support. More

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      Democrat calls for congressional leaders to denounce Trump loyalist’s ‘target list’

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      A senior Democrat called for congressional leaders to denounce a Trump loyalist’s claim to have compiled a “deep state target list”, of public figures to be detained if the former president returns to power next year.“This is a deadly serious report,” Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, told Raw Story, regarding its extensive discoveries about Ivan Raiklin, a former US army reserve lieutenant colonel and US Defense Intelligence Agency employee the site said was seeking to enlist rightwing sheriffs while calling himself Donald Trump’s “future secretary of retribution”.Raskin has spoken extensively of his own harrowing experiences on 6 January 2021, when Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to block certification of Joe Biden’s election win.Nine deaths, about 1,300 arrests and hundreds of convictions are now linked to the attack.Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection but escaped conviction when Senate Republicans stayed loyal. Now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Trump leads Biden in polling and has made pardons for January 6 prisoners a key campaign promise.In its report about Raiklin, Raw Story noted Trump’s words at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland last year, when he told supporters: “I am your warrior. I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”By his own description, in a video posted to X in May, Raiklin wants to implement that retribution with “‘live-streamed swatting raids’ against individuals on his ‘deep state target list’.”The deep state conspiracy theory holds that a permanent government of bureaucrats and operatives exists to thwart Trump. The theory was popularised by Steve Bannon, the former Trump campaign chair and White House strategist now in prison for contempt of Congress over the January 6 investigation.Bannon has said the deep state theory is “for nutcases”.Nonetheless, Raw Story’s report about Raiklin’s plans contained chilling details.According to the site, the target list Raiklin has circulated since January includes “Democratic and Republican elected officials; FBI and intelligence officials; members of the House January 6 committee; US Capitol police officers and civilian employees; witnesses in Trump’s two impeachment trials and the January 6 hearings; and journalists from publications ranging from CNN and the Washington Post to Reuters and Raw Story”.Raiklin has described his plans in “in podcast interviews, multiple posts on X, a press conference and conversations with prominent far-right extremists”, Raw Story said, adding that he acknowledged but did not answer its questions.Claiming to be being hounded, he told the site: “Look at my entire Deep State target list. That is the beginning. This is the scratching of the surface of who is going to be criminalised for their treason, OK?”Citing public records requests, the site said Raiklin had pitched his plans to far-right sheriffs who met in Las Vegas in April, without take-up.He has also “attempted to build relationships with conservative members of Congress”, the site said, efforts leading to Raiklin being seen sitting behind witnesses at “at least five House committee hearings over the past year”.In a May podcast, Raw Story said, Raiklin said he had sent his “Deep State target list” to James Comer of Kentucky, chair of the oversight committee; Jim Jordan of Ohio, chair of the judiciary committee; and to the administration oversight committee, led by Barry Loudermilk of Georgia.None of the congressmen responded to requests for comment, Raw Story said, adding that aides to Loudermilk and Comer said they were familiar with Raiklin.Meanwhile, Raskin sought to sound alarm bells.“A retired US military officer has drawn up a ‘deep state target list’ of public officials he considers traitors, along with our family members and staff,” Raskin said.“His hit list is a vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom.”The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, and the Democratic Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, should “denounce this dangerous plot and repudiate threats of, and planning for, political violence from any quarter”, Raskin said.“Bipartisan opposition to vigilante violence and assassination plots is essential for American government to continue.”In its reporting, Raw Story also said Raiklin was linked to Michael Flynn, the retired general who was briefly national security adviser to Trump before emerging as a prominent figure on the Christian nationalist far right.The site also described Raiklin’s involvement in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, through a memo claiming Mike Pence, then vice-president, could block electoral results, and via links to Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia extremist then a congresswoman-elect.Raiklin was at the US Capitol on January 6. He has not been charged in relation to the attack. The Army reserve cleared him of wrongdoing.The Trump campaign did not comment.A spokesperson for the New York Times, employer of five journalists reportedly on Raiklin’s list, said: “The conspiracy theories underpinning this list are baseless, and the calls for targeted harassment are dangerous … In the event of any instances directed at our employees, the Times will work with law enforcement to prosecute those responsible.”Max Stier, president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, told Raw Story: “The idea that you would target anyone … on the basis of allegiance to the rule of law and the constitution is really scary.” More

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      Bearded JD Vance remains a contender for Trump VP – by a whisker

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      JD Vance is still in contention to be named Donald Trump’s running mate, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee indicated on Wednesday, despite the Ohio senator committing what Trump is reported to consider a heinous faux pas.According to multiple reports, Vance’s offence does not lie in past decisions to call Trump “America’s Hitler” and Trumpism the “Opioid of the Masses”.Vance’s mistake, according to a bristling mass of pundits, is to have a beard.“JD has a beard,” an unnamed “Trump confidant” and Vance supporter told the Bulwark this week. “But Trump is a clean-shaven guy. He just doesn’t like facial hair.”That judgment seemed to check out, given proliferating reports about Trump’s dislike for beards, as sported by his sons Donald Jr and Eric and senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, and indeed for the moustache sported by John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser.But on Wednesday, in an interview with the Fox News Radio host Brian Kilmeade, Trump brushed off the subject.“Real quick,” Kilmeade said, “on your vice-president candidate, word is that you won’t pick JD Vance because of his facial hair. Is that true?”Trump said: “No.”“He looks good,” Trump added. “Looks like a young Abraham Lincoln.”Trump did not discuss Vance further. But he also said he would announce his running mate – with the Florida senator Marco Rubio and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum both empirically clean-shaven and reportedly in contention – “close to” the Republican convention in Milwaukee next week.“It used to be picked during the convention,” Trump said, “and it made the convention frankly, more interesting. The pick used to be during the convention – that’s what I’d like to do.”Unsurprisingly, Trump’s comparison of Vance to “a young Abraham Lincoln” was not strictly accurate.At 39, Vance is a former “public affairs marine” turned venture capitalist and bestselling author who first resisted Trumpism but then adopted it as he won a Senate seat in 2022, emerging as a fiery rightwing populist voice.When Lincoln was 39, in 1848, he was a clean-shaven lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, a former Whig congressman ejected from Washington after one term.Lincoln grew his beard – but not a moustache – when he was well into middle age, at 51, after winning the presidency as a Republican and apparently at the suggestion of a correspondent 40 years his junior.“I have got four brothers,” Grace Bedell, 11 and of Westfield, New York, told Lincoln in a letter in October 1860, “and a part of them will vote for you anyway, and if you will let your whiskers grow, I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you.“You would look a great deal better, for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers, and they would tease their husbands to vote for you, and then you would be president.”Vance may have a similar motive for keeping his beard, as he seeks to project the necessary experience and toughness to appeal to Trump and voters.“Without the beard, Vance looks like he’s 12,” an unnamed Trump adviser told the Bulwark this week. More

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      ‘What we’ve been saying all along’: where do critical voters stand on Biden dropping out?

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      Concerns about Joe Biden’s fitness for re-election on the left may have been muted over the last year. But they were not absent.“There’s a lot of people, especially on the left, that have been talking about this,” said Alex Johnson, an IT worker in Atlanta.Democrats in the center of the party would chastise critics on the left as ageist or radical when bringing up the president’s age before the disastrous debate, he said. “They’re telling everybody that they were crazy. And then one thing happened, and all of a sudden, all of the people who have been calling progressives crazy, they’re like: ‘You know, maybe they were right.’”Biden has repeatedly reiterated that he will not withdraw from the race. Democratic party leaders are locking arms behind the president, instructing their ranks to be circumspect in conversation with news reporters and are strategizing ahead of the Democratic national convention.The conversation about Biden’s fitness ratcheted up after his debate performance last month. But they did not begin then, even among Democrats. Editorials from David Ignatius at the Washington Post and Mark Leibovich at the Atlantic last year called for Biden to refrain from running. Cenk Uygur, progressive co-creator of The Young Turks program, wanted Biden to give up re-election for more than a year and has been more than vocal about it, describing Biden’s supporters on the left as dead-enders.“At this point, eight out of 10 Americans think that Joe Biden’s mental health is not sufficient to be president,” Uygur said. “That’s what we’ve been saying all along. That number was already sky high before the debate.”Uygur has been arguing that it’s more than Biden’s age; no president with poll numbers in the 30s at this point in the election cycle has won re-election. Uygur tried to run as a candidate himself, despite being born in Istanbul – a constitutional disqualification for the office – simply to make the point.Karl Olson in St Louis Park, Minnesota, generally votes for Republican candidates. In 2020, “to save democracy”, Olson made the maximum possible legal contribution to the Biden campaign, he said. He voted for Biden in 2020, but has been calling for Biden not to run for re-election for years.He voted for Nikki Haley in the 2024 primary. Now he is considering a vote for Trump.“I have long held that [Biden] should quit while he’s ahead,” Olson said. “I have concluded that if the Democrats insist on renominating Biden and Harris, they deserve to lose.”“Here’s the thing,” he added. “If Donald Trump is a political antichrist who will destroy democracy, then why are Democrats insisting on renominating Biden-Harris when he’s too old and she’s not enough of a leader to win?”Much of the anger today is being directed at the media, both for ignoring the substance of concerns about Biden’s age before the debate, and now the seeming pile-on after it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe headlines may be overdue, said Blue Tannery, a radio engineer in Atlanta. But they are not helpful.“The age thing in particular; yes, it’s an important problem. I’m really, really, really sick of seeing headlines about it,” Tannery said. The one thing that Biden said that makes any sense: you should all shut up about how old that I am and start talking about what I’ve done over the last four years.”Tannery said he had wanted Biden not to run, but also said the standard the media applies to Biden is unfair. “This is eight years of being in this country, watching Trump just open his mouth onstage and exhale a horde of locusts and the headline is about Biden,” Tannery said. “Because that’s what Trump does every time. That’s not news anymore. It is exhausting.”Samantha Ruddy, a comedy writer in Philadelphia, may be typical of reluctant Biden voters. She’s still voting for Biden. But now she also thinks he’s going to lose.“I have wanted Democratic candidates more politically aligned to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders during the past two election cycles,” Ruddy said. “In 2020, I felt Biden was better than Trump. I still feel he’s better than Trump. However, I don’t think he can win in 2024. I believe the best move is to replace him on the ticket. That being said – much like Donald Trump – I’m an entertainer who looked at the eclipse, so what do I know?” More

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      The Republicans’ new party platform is scary – because it can win | Dustin Guastella and Bhaskar Sunkara

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      The new Republican platform was released yesterday. Some liberal journalists – the opinion-makers of what has been called the Democrats’ “shadow party” – dismissed the new platform as a “joke”. They’re wrong. The Republican party platform is scary. Not because it rolls out the usual litany of conservative policy preferences, but precisely because of where it breaks from that orthodoxy.The new party platform is scary, because it can win.Remember, the Republican party did not release a platform in 2020. Presumably, many in the party had not yet accepted that Trumpism was not an aberrant virus but instead the new normal for conservative politics. But in 2024 party leaders, billionaire donors, and rightwing media have embraced Donald Trump without reservation. The new platform reflects his political formula: moderate, at least rhetorically, on abortion; double down on immigration; and reject the small-government Republican tradition.In addition to the ex-president’s signature anti-immigrant positions, consider the following changes: the drafters have dropped the party’s longstanding commitment to cut “entitlements” and now say that Republicans “will not cut one penny” from social security or Medicare. The platform also does not mention reducing the national debt, opting instead for vague language about slashing “wasteful spending”. The platform endorses an industrial policy to make the US the “Manufacturing Superpower”. The platform rails against the “unfair trade deals” and politicians who “sold our jobs and livelihoods to the highest bidders overseas”. And there is a new commitment to “rebuild our cities and restore law and order”.Most strikingly, the platform does not mention any national abortion ban, only opposition to “late-term abortion”. The platform describes itself as “a return to common sense” and Trump has distanced himself from the radical framing of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.In US politics, platforms typically don’t mean much, and both Democrats and Republicans tend to throw together broad programs designed to triangulate between appeasing ideologues and appealing to swing voters. But platforms can be consequential if they signal a genuine break from past orthodoxy, and if legislators take them seriously. Given the sudden advocacy of platform positions from several leading Republican figures such as JD Vance and Marco Rubio, the new Republican platform does not seem like window dressing.This is the new core of the Republican party’s appeals: moderate on certain cultural issues and economic issues. That can win against a feeble Democratic party that is too busy wrestling over who their nominee should be to promote a second-term agenda. (“Let’s Finish the Job” says Joe Biden, in a recent ad, with no indication what that job is.)Democrats seem to have tricked themselves into thinking that the voting public’s general rejection of the US supreme court’s Dobbs decision means that polarization around abortion will catapult them to victory. They seem to think that because Ron DeSantis lost by making his campaign all about “wokeness”, voters really don’t mind corporate DEI language. They seem to think that because the Republican party is unwilling to follow through on the populist economics presented in their 2016 and 2024 platforms, voters will laugh off those promises. And, of course, they underestimate the degree to which inflation has soured voters on the president and the Democrats.Much was made in the lead-up to 2016 about the civil war within the Republican party between “Never Trump” conservatives and the Steve Bannon populist wing of the party. Moderate figures like Joe Scarborough and Colin Powell left the party in opposition to their presumptive candidate, while Marco Rubio said that Trump’s nomination would “fracture the party and be damaging to the conservative movement”. Far from crippling the Republican party, however, Trump brought it back to power. And in office, he reassured establishment figures by coupling largely symbolic protectionist measures with the deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy that one would have expected from a Mitt Romney administration.And now, instead of moving the Republican party to the radical right, Trump, on key issues like abortion, is at least theoretically moving his party closer to the center. Indeed, the Republican platform appears to be a winning one. Yet while the Republican party is offering a relatively coherent program, Democrats are all over the place, with a nominee unable to effectively communicate with the American people and no unifying theme other than opposition to Trump. Rather than running on the Biden administration’s oversight of job growth in distressed areas and its new industrial policy, liberals seem content to do battle on the cultural front.This discursive failing has allowed common sense policies that are more reflective of the governing practice of today’s Democratic party – from defending the social safety net to growing manufacturing jobs – to become rebranded as the bread-and-butter of the Republican party.In power, it’s likely that Trump will once again betray his working-class supporters and govern like a typical business conservative, because he is utterly committed to more tax cuts and weakening trade unions. He’s promised his richest political donors whatever they want if they help him get back in power. As a result, we’ve seen billionaires lining up to shower him with cash.Yet Trump has displayed surprising political discipline lately. While the Democrats bicker among themselves about Biden’s fitness, Trump is only now beginning to spend big money in swing states like Wisconsin – where he is already leading in the polls.This is a side of Trump we haven’t previously seen; he is campaigning to win in a dangerously coherent way. If progressives don’t wake up and offer an appealing alternative, Trump might do more than rule through the courts and through executive orders – he might forge a long-lasting, majoritarian movement.
      Dustin “Dino” Guastella is a research associate at the Center for Working Class Politics and director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia
      Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, founding editor of Jacobin, and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities More

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      Trump airs list of false grievances at Florida rally: ‘We don’t eat bacon any more’

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      Donald Trump returned to the campaign trail in Florida on Tuesday night, hurling insults at Joe Biden and airing a litany of familiar grievances, but declining to name a running mate for November’s general election.The former president and presumptive Republican nominee was speaking to a crowd of several hundred supporters at his golf club in Doral, a western suburb of Miami, keeping them waiting in 90F heat for a freewheeling monologue that began more than an hour later than scheduled.There was speculation that he might use his first public appearance since last month’s debate with the president to announce Florida senator Marco Rubio, who was present, as his vice-presidential pick, six days ahead of the Republican national convention (RNC) in Milwaukee.Instead, Trump delivered a rambling 75-minute speech that included a succession of attacks on Biden and his faltering debate performance, which has raised questions among Democrats on whether the 81-year-old president was robust enough for a second term of office.He seized on the post-debate turbulence that has prompted calls from some senior Democrats for Biden to step down and nominate Kamala Harris.“The radical left Democratic party is divided in chaos, and having a full scale breakdown all because they can’t decide which of their candidates is more unfit to be president, sleepy, crooked Joe Biden or laughing Kamala,” he said, repeating previous derogatory terms for the pair.“Despite all the Democrat panic this week, the truth is it doesn’t matter who they nominate because we are going to beat any one of them in a thundering landslide.”Trump has kept a lower than usual profile in the days since the debate, a strategy an aide described as designed to allow Democrats to tear into each other following Biden’s dismal debate performance.His remarks on Tuesday were notable for adding the vice-president’s name to numerous attacks on Biden policies, and sprinkling in mentions of both Rubio and Byron Donalds, a Republican Florida congressman also believed to be on Trump’s shortlist for vice-president.Otherwise, it was a standard Trump stump speech, full of evidence-free claims that his 2020 election defeat was fraudulent; baseless accusations that overseas nations were sending to the US “most of their prisoners”; and a laughable assertion that a gathering of supporters numbering in the hundreds was really a crowd of 45,000.It also touched on the surreal. Biden, he insisted, had raised the price of bacon four-fold.“We don’t eat bacon any more,” Trump said.Electric cars, he said, “cheated” the US public because drivers had to stop for three hours to recharge their vehicles after every 45 minutes of driving. And, in an echo of one of the more bizarre debate exchanges with Biden over who was the better golfer, he challenged his White House successor to 18 holes over the Doral course while granting a 10-stroke concession.“It will be among the most watched sporting events in history, maybe bigger than the Ryder Cup or even the Masters,” Trump said, pledging $1m to a charity of Biden’s choosing if he lost.Returning to politics, Trump assailed Democrats for tax rises he said they wanted to impose; criticized Biden for the US military’s chaotic 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan; and promised to build an “iron dome” missile defense system for the US, if he was elected in November.Perhaps worn down by the energy-sapping humidity, the crowd appeared mostly subdued, including yawns in the bleachers behind him as Trump drew to a close with slow music playing, and others tapping disinterestedly on their phones.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHis campaign had touted the possibility of Trump announcing a vice-presidential pick on Tuesday, but in the end his only reference to the post was suggesting that Rubio might or might not still be in the Senate to vote to allow Nevada waitresses to keep their tips untaxed.There was no mention of Ohio senator JD Vance, or North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, other Republicans said to be on the shortlist. Trump will rally again on Saturday in Pennsylvania, close to the Ohio border, with Vance expected to be a speaker.Earlier on Tuesday, Democrats, on a Biden campaign call featuring first lady Jill Biden, and previewing Trump’s Doral rally, mocked him for his low-key approach since the debate.“I hope he hasn’t exhausted himself with all the golf that he’s been playing,” Texas congresswoman Veronica Escobar said.“Speaking of staying off the campaign trail, Trump has been hiding a lot recently, not just from voters and from the press, but from Project 2025.“Donald Trump tried to pretend that he had nothing to do with Project 2025 despite the fact that it was written for him by the people who know him best. And yesterday, his campaign preview of the RNC platform, was just as unhinged and extreme as Trump himself. They left out some of the most unpopular specifics that we know they support.“As usual, they’re trying to hide the ball from the American public.”Trump, in his speech Tuesday, avoided mention of Project 2025 or his policy on abortion. More

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      Nikki Haley releases delegates and urges them to support Trump at convention

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      Nikki Haley is releasing the delegates she won during this year’s Republican primary so that they’re free to support Donald Trump at next week’s convention, a move that goes toward solidifying GOP support around the party’s presumptive nominee.Haley on Tuesday opted to release 97 delegates she won across a dozen primaries and caucuses earlier this year, according to her former campaign.In a statement, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador called for party unity at the upcoming Republican national convention in Milwaukee, also calling the Democratic president, Joe Biden, “not competent to serve a second term” and saying that the vice-president, Kamala Harris – whom Haley repeatedly intimated would end up as president in Biden’s stead – “would be a disaster for America”.“We need a president who will hold our enemies to account, secure our border, cut our debt and get our economy back on track,” Haley said. “I encourage my delegates to support Donald Trump next week in Milwaukee.”Haley won’t be in attendance in Milwaukee next week, according to spokesperson Chaney Denton.“She was not invited, and she’s fine with that,” Denton said. “Trump deserves the convention he wants. She’s made it clear she’s voting for him and wishes him the best.”Haley was the last major Republican rival standing against Trump when she shuttered her own campaign following Trump’s Super Tuesday romp, having accused him of causing chaos and disregarding the importance of US alliances abroad.Trump, in turn, repeatedly mocked her with the nickname “Birdbrain”, though he curtailed those attacks after securing enough delegates in March to become the presumptive Republican nominee.Trump’s campaign did not immediately return a message seeking comment on Haley’s move, which was first reported by Politico.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBiden’s campaign has been working to win over her supporters, whom they view as true swing voters. But Haley said in May that she would be casting her vote for Trump and left it up to the former president to work toward winning over support from her backers. More