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      Donald Trump makes racial dog-whistle appeal to white suburban voters

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      Donald Trump on Wednesday said Americans “living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream” will no longer be “bothered” by low-income housing in their communities, an explicit effort to stoke racial fears among affluent, white voters who are abandoning the Republican party under his leadership.The remark is part of a pattern from the US president as he tries to rebuild his standing in the suburbs, which has cratered amid his administration’s failure to contain the coronavirus pandemic and economic recession as well as the president’s aggressive response to the nationwide protests against systemic racism, which polls suggest most Americans support.“I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood….,” Trump tweeted, as he traveled to Texas on Wednesday. “Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!”The tweet references Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, an Obama-era program designed to combat racial segregation in American suburbs. The rule, implemented in 2015, requires cities and towns that receive federal funding to identify patterns of racial bias and take corrective action to address discrimination.Last week, the administration announced it would rescind the program, agreeing with conservative critics that the fair-housing policy amounted to federal overreach into local communities.In the announcement, the housing and urban development secretary, Ben Carson, called the program “complicated, costly and ineffective” and said it would be replaced by a new rule, called “Preserving Community and Neighborhood Choice”.Trump had previewed his administration’s plan to gut the policy earlier this month, a day after he posted a video of an angry, white couple who brandished firearms in the direction of protesters who marched past their mansion inside a gated community in St Louis. The couple were later charged with unlawful use of a weapon.Once a cornerstone of the Republican base, suburban voters and particularly suburban women will probably play a crucial role in determining control of the Senate and White House.Democrats gained control of the House in 2018’s midterm elections by storming through once-Republican districts from California and Texas to Virginia and Georgia. Current polling shows Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, buoyed in part by his support from college-educated women and suburban voters.An ABC News/Washington Post poll found Biden ahead of Trump by nine percentage points among suburbanites. Among suburban women, Biden led Trump by a margin of 60% to 36%. By contrast, Biden narrowly edges past Trump among suburban men, 49% to 45%.In recent weeks, Trump has shed any semblance of subtlety in his appeals to this constituency. More

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      Covid-19: Florida reports record one-day deaths as concerns grow for other states

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      Florida reported another record one-day rise in coronavirus deaths on Tuesday, and cases in Texas passed the 400,000 mark, fueling fear that the United States is still not taking control of the outbreak and adding pressure on Congress to pass another massive economic aid package.Public health experts are becoming concerned about the levels of infection in states such as Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee and Kentucky, while the surge in Florida along with Texas, Arizona and California this month has strained many hospitals.The increase in cases has forced a U-turn on steps to reopen economies after the end of lockdowns put in place in March and April to slow the spread of the virus.Florida has had 191 coronavirus deaths in the last 24 hours, the highest single-day rise since the start of the epidemic, the state health department said.Texas, the second-most populous state, added more than 6,000 new cases on Monday, pushing its total to 401,477, according to a tally being kept by the Reuters news agency. Only three other states – California, Florida and New York – have more than 400,000 total cases.The widening outbreak has pushed the US death toll from Covid-19 closer to the bleak 150,000 milestone, which the country is expected to cross this week and comes just over three months before the 3 November election, where Donald Trump seeks a second term. The US has more than 4.3m confirmed cases, according to totals tracked by Reuters and Johns Hopkins University.The surge in cases in Florida prompted Trump last week to cancel the Republican convention events in Jacksonville in late August, which had already been rearranged from North Carolina.There is, however, a glimmer of hope in the data from Texas, where the state health department reported that current hospitalizations due to Covid-19 fell on Monday.Anthony Fauci, a top infectious diseases expert and the leading public health figure on the White House coronavirus task force, said there were signs the recent surge could be peaking in hard-hit states like Florida and Texas. But he warned that other parts of the country may be on the cusp of growing outbreaks.“They may be cresting and coming back down,” Fauci told ABC’s Good Morning America regarding the state of the outbreak in several southern states.But Fauci said there was a “very early indication” that the percentage of coronavirus tests that were positive was starting to rise in other states, such as Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee and Kentucky.Fauci added on the same TV show that he was not in “any circumstances” misleading the American public, after another attack on him by the US president.In New York, the state governor, Andrew Cuomo, added Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to a list of places whose travelers must quarantine for 14 days when visiting New York. Thirty-one other states are on the list, which was unveiled last month. More

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      Trump administration to give one-year Daca extension to some recipients

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      The Trump administration will allow so-called Dreamers to renew deportation protections for a year while it reviews a supreme court ruling before a fresh attempt to kill the program in question, a senior administration official said on Tuesday.Hundreds of thousands of Dreamers live in the US without documentation, after entering as children. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) was put in place by Barack Obama and some 644,000 people are enrolled.The Trump review follows the ruling last month that found the administration had erred in the way it decided to end the program.The administration plans to continue its existing policy of not accepting new applicants, in place since 2017, the official told Reuters. But the administration will extend eligibility by a year for those whose protection from deportation was due to expire, as long as they do not have a criminal record.“For anyone who refiles, if they are eligible and were set to expire, we will renew them on a case-by-case basis into the next year for an extension,” the official said.The decision means the program will remain in place through the presidential election, in which Trump is fighting for a second term against Democrat Joe Biden. Trump has made his hardline stance on legal and illegal immigration a central platform of his presidency and his re-election campaign.Daca is increasingly supported by the public. A February Reuters/Ipsos poll found 64% of US adults supported its core tenets. A similar December 2014 poll found 47% support.The supreme court left the door open for Trump to attempt again to rescind the program, ruling only that the administration had not met procedural requirements and its actions were “arbitrary and capricious”.The administration is due to file paperwork with the district court in Maryland on Tuesday. The decision to not accept new applications will probably face more legal challenges.The official said the administration would conduct “an exhaustive review” of the memos it initially used to justify winding down the program.“We’re going to review all of that and all the underlying communications that informed those documents, so that when the administration next acts on Daca, it will be anchored on this comprehensive review,” the official said.The official said it was unclear how long the review would take.In an interview with Noticias Telemundo earlier this month, Trump said he would soon unveil an immigration measure that would include some protections for Daca.“We’re working out the legal complexities right now,” he said, “but I’m going to be signing a very major immigration bill as an executive order, which the supreme court now, because of the Daca decision, has given me the power to do that.”Trump’s interpretation of the meaning of the supreme court ruling – that it can allow him to govern without Congress – has proved highly controversial. More

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      Does Melania Trump's revamp of the White House Rose Garden have a hidden agenda? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Say what you like about Melania Trump, she has done an incredible amount during her time in the White House. She renovated the bowling alley; she revamped the Red Room; she broke ground on a private tennis pavilion. Now, the indefatigable first lady is trying her hand at horticulture: on Monday, Trump announced that she is overseeing a renovation of the White House Rose Garden. “Planting a garden involves hard work and hope in the possibility of a bright future,” she explained.More than 150,000 Americans have died with Covid-19 and the pandemic is nowhere near under control in the US. Nearly half of adult Americans are jobless and 28 million are facing eviction. Heavily armed citizen militias are patrolling US cities and protesters are facing off against federal troops in Portland, Oregon. The US is a huge bin fire and Trump is weeding while it burns. Is the woman completely tone-deaf or is there a strategy behind her sudden passion for gardening?One school of thought is that she has looked at the 2020 election polls, realises her days at the White House are numbered and is rapidly legacy-building – or, perhaps more accurately, legacy-plagiarising. The image-obsessed Trumps have not exactly been subtle about their attempts to portray the first lady as a latter-day Jackie Kennedy, with Donald Trump once announcing: “We have our own Jackie O – it’s called Melania, Melania T.”Trump – or, as her husband likes to call her, “it” – has already mimicked Jackie O’s fashion choices, but now she is appropriating her floral ones: a White House statement about the plans noted that the rose garden will be restored to the design first implemented during the Kennedy administration.The first lady’s attempts to restore the past seem to be working, albeit not in the way she may have intended – shortly after the rose garden renovations were announced, “Marie Antoinette” started trending on Twitter. While Melania T may be attempting to channel Jackie O, it looks as though she can’t help giving off strong Marie A vibes. More

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      'We just keep fighting': behind an urgent, inspiring film about the ACLU

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      If there was ever any doubt that Donald Trump would cement a campaign heralded by calling Mexicans rapists into policy, it was dispelled on 27 January 2017, when, to cap his first week in office, the president issued an executive order barring entrance from a slew of Muslim-majority countries. The so-called “Muslim travel ban” immediately roiled the country’s airports, as travelers were detained and families indefinitely separated in the midnight hours after the ban’s announcement. At the same time, protesters gathered outside the federal courthouse in Brooklyn; as depicted in early scenes from The Fight, a new documentary on the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a crowd cheered as lawyers got to messy, long-haul business of going to judicial war.Actor Kerry Washington, most recently of Hulu’s Little Fires Everywhere and a producer on The Fight, watched on TV as the deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants Rights Project, Lee Gelernt, exited the courthouse to chants of “ACLU! ACLU!” and declared a temporary victory: those detained by the new administration in airports would not be deported. Gelernt’s breathless recounting of the injunction’s relief had the feel of a post-championship court-side interview, and it caught Washington’s eye. “They are going to be on the frontlines of all the most important battles that we’re going to be facing to defend our civil rights and civil liberties,” she recalled thinking to the Guardian. “Who’s going to be in the trenches with these guys capturing this war movie that’s unfolding in front of us?”In the crowd at the Brooklyn courthouse that night was Elyse Steinberg, a documentary film-maker captivated by the same determined exhilaration on Gelernt’s face. “When Lee got his victory and he emerged from the steps and I saw him with his fists raised high,” she told the Guardian, “I just felt like this is the film that we needed to make. We needed to be with the ACLU and the lawyers in this epic battle for civil liberties that was going to be raging for the next four years.”In the three and half years since Steinberg stood outside the courthouse, the ACLU has held the legal line against the civil rights assaults of the Trump administration, work that The Fight depicts as variously harried and routine for the Manhattan-based team of lawyers and deeply consequential for the clients they represent. The Fight, co-directed by Steinberg, Josh Kriegman and Eli Despres follows four pivotal court cases central to combatting the Trump administration’s racist, Maga-exclusive agenda: the separation of migrant families at the southern US border and the horrific, indefinite detention of children without their parents; a policy which allowed the Office of Refugee Resettlement to deny abortion access to an undocumented woman detained by Ice; the addition of a citizenship question to the decennial US census; and the blanket ban of transgender people from serving in the US military.In each case, The Fight reveals the work of an ACLU attorney, particularly under an administration whose policies are often enacted without regard for bureaucratic chaos, to be mostly a scramble: hustling through briefs, cramming in a hotel room the night before argument, hungrily reading just-downloaded PDFs. The moments of mundane work dilemmas – Gelernt finding a single workable outlet at Starbucks to charge his dying phone, the LGBT & HIV project attorney Joshua Block fussing with uncooperative Microsoft Word dictation, the voting rights lawyer Dale Ho accidentally misreading a consequential decision or saying goodnight to his kids during another long day on the road – paint a fuller picture of the work. They take the ACLU staff “from being these larger than life Avengers legal superheroes, which is what they are, to also being husbands and wives and moms and dads, regular folks who have figured out how to use their talent for good in the world”, said Washington.The unglamorousness of the hustle, or of the reproductive rights lawyer Brigitte Amiri’s celebratory “train wine” on the Amtrak back to New York after a favorable hearing, contrast sharply with the stakes of the court cases at hand. “If I’m not going to be a civil rights lawyer right now, in this moment, then…when?” says Ho as he worked on a census decision which, had it been in favor of the administration, would have inaccurately skewed fair representation in Congress and federal funding for a decade to come. Amiri’s case – in which the federal government unlawfully barred an unidentified, undocumented asylum claimant for obtaining an abortion was “a harbinger of things to come”, she told the Guardian, as it preceded several states passing abortion restrictions or outright bans in 2019. More

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      Attorney general will defend aggressive US response to Portland protests

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      US attorney general William Barr will defend the aggressive federal law enforcement response to civil unrest in America in a highly anticipated hearing on Tuesday, arguing that “violent rioters and anarchists have hijacked legitimate protests” sparked by George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police.Barr will tell members of the House Judiciary Committee that the violence taking place in Portland, Oregon, and other cities is disconnected from the death of Floyd, which he described as a “horrible“ event that prompted a necessary national reckoning on the relationship between Black men and law enforcement.“Largely absent from these scenes of destruction are even superficial attempts by the rioters to connect their actions to George Floyd’s death or any legitimate call for reform,” Barr will say of the Portland protests, according to a copy of his prepared remarks released by the Justice Department on Monday.Barr will also touch on other controversies that have shadowed his tenure, including his handling of the investigation into Trump campaign ties to Russia, which he derisively refers to as “the bogus ‘Russiagate’ scandal”.According to his prepared remarks, Barr will try to differentiate recent protests in cities like Portland and Seattle and the demonstrations that erupted following the death of George Floyd in May.The attorney general will acknowledge to lawmakers that Floyd’s death struck a chord in the Black community because it reinforced concerns that Blacks are treated differently by police. But he will also condemn Americans who he says have responded inappropriately to Floyd’s death through what he said was rioting and anarchy.Civil unrest escalated in Portland after federal agents were accused of whisking people away in unmarked cars without probable cause. The US agents, drawn mainly from border patrol, were dispatched to the city by Donald Trump ostensibly to protect the courthouse. But they have succeeded in inflaming the situation.Washington DC was stunned in June when peaceful protesters were violently cleared from the streets by federal officers using tear gas ahead of a photo op by Trump in front of a church, where Barr had accompanied him.The attorney general has defended as necessary the broad use of law enforcement power to deal with the situation, but the department’s internal watchdog has opened investigations into use of force and other tactics by agents in both cities.The hearing on Tuesday marks Barr’s first appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, bringing him face-to-face with a panel that voted last year to hold him in contempt and is holding hearings on what Democrats allege is politicization of the Justice Department under his watch. It comes during a tumultuous stretch in which Barr has taken a series of actions cheered by Trump but condemned by Democrats and other critics.Barr makes reference in his prepared statement to that antagonistic relationship, saying that “many of the Democrats on this committee have attempted to discredit me by conjuring up a narrative that I am simply the president’s factotum who disposes of criminal cases according to his instructions. Judging from the letter inviting me to this hearing, that appears to be your agenda today.”Beyond the federal response to the demonstrations, Barr is also expected to be pressed in detail about his intervention in criminal cases arising from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.The hearing will provide Barr with a forum to offer his most detailed account to date for his actions in the criminal cases, which he has said were taken in the interests of justice and without political pressure.Those include the Justice Department’s decision to drop the prosecution of former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn (a request now tied up in court) and his firing last month of the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, whose office oversaw investigations into allies of the president.Barr also pushed for a more lenient sentence for Trump ally Roger Stone, prompting the entire trial team’s departure. That decision was at the center of a separate hearing before the same committee last month, when one of the prosecutors alleged that politics from Justice Department leadership had influenced the handling of the sentence.In the past, Barr has said that Flynn, who pleaded guilty as part of Mueller’s probe to lying to the FBI, should never have been charged and that the original sentencing recommendation for Stone – also charged in the Mueller investigation – was excessive. Barr’s opening statement does not delve into the details of the case, though he will insist Tuesday that Trump has not attempted to interfere in those decisions and has “played a role properly and traditionally played by presidents”. More