US elections 2020

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      What lies ahead as the US election enters the home stretch

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      Rounding the bend after the national party conventions, the US presidential race typically enters a three-month sprint to election day, with the candidates facing off a few times to debate each other and staging boisterous rallies before crossing the finish line.This year, with the Republican national convention wrapping up on Thursday night with Donald Trump’s fearmongering speech, and the Democratic national convention being held the week before, the home stretch is shorter than ever.The coronavirus crisis pushed the conventions unusually late, and a record number of states are using absentee ballots to push voting unusually early.But both Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, and Trump, the incumbent president, intend to hit some of the classic campaign notes from now until 3 November, while working behind the scenes to press their perceived advantages in a most unusual election year.For the Biden campaign, that means organizing volunteers to coach voters on how to navigate new sets of rules in many states for voting early or voting by mail. For Trump, that means attacking the credibility of mail-in voting and discouraging turnout that his campaign fears will favor Democrats. More

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      Will Jerry Falwell Jr’s fall from grace end his influence over Trump voters?

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      “Every human being is a sinner. We’re all imperfect, we’re all flawed, and we’re redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ.”When Jerry Falwell Jr, the US evangelical leader, president of the country’s premier conservative Christian university and close associate of Donald Trump, told me this in his spacious office in Lynchburg, Virginia, almost two years ago, it was in response to a question about the morality of the US president.But after a turbulent week in which his status as a figurehead for the Christian right crashed and burned, Falwell may be reflecting on his own flaws and imperfections, and hoping redemption will not be too long coming.The tawdry end to his career as president of Liberty University, with its $1m-plus annual salary and use of a private jet, could also mean his influence on the political choices of white evangelicals in the US is over just weeks before a knife-edge presidential election.The essential elements of his downfall are disputed but they centre on his wife’s adultery, his alleged voyeurism, her lover’s alleged attempts at extortion, and an Instagram photograph of Falwell’s unzipped trousers. At its heart, he says, was “a fatal attraction-type situation” – a reference to the 1987 Oscar-nominated psychosexual thriller starring Michael Douglas and Glenn Close.On Sunday evening, Falwell issued a 1,200-word statement to the Washington Examiner, revealing that he had experienced depression and extreme weight loss as a result of alleged threats by his wife’s lover to expose their affair unless money was handed over.It was a pre-emptive strike. Falwell knew that Giancarlo Granda, a former pool attendant with whom the Falwells set up a business, was poised to go public over his relationship with Falwell’s wife, Becki.In an explosive interview with Reuters news agency, published on Monday, Granda said: “Becki and I developed an intimate relationship and Jerry enjoyed watching from the corner of the room.” The encounters, over a six-year period, allegedly took place “multiple times a year” in hotels in New York and Miami, and the Falwells’ home in Virginia.Granda was a 20-year-old pool attendant at a Miami hotel when he met the Falwells in 2012. Without naming him, Falwell said in his statement: “During a vacation over eight years ago, Becki and I met an ambitious young man who was working at our hotel and was saving up his money to go to school … We were impressed by his initiative in suggesting a local real estate opportunity.“My family members eventually made an investment in a local property, included him in the deal because he could play an active role in managing it, and became close with him and his family.”That closeness extended to an “inappropriate personal relationship” between Becki and “this person”, said Falwell; “something in which I was not involved”. He was distressed at learning of the affair but “Becki and I forgave each other”. More

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      Trump unleashes diatribe of falsehoods and baseless attacks in RNC finale

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      You write him off at your peril. Donald Trump stood at one of America’s most hallowed spaces on Thursday – the White House – and bent it to his will, just as he has bent the Republican party and swaths of America.The US president gripped a lectern with the presidential seal on a red carpeted platform. Behind him was a row of American national flags and the magnificent south portico of the White House, traditionally a neutral space for governing, not political rallies. At each side were beaming members of the Trump dynasty and two giant Orwellian TV screens.Before him, enveloped in gloom as the clock struck 11pm on a balmy summer night in Washington, were 1,500 people obediently standing, clapping, whooping, booing his foes and chanting “Four more years!” Like past charismatic leaders who paid lipservice to democracy, Trump understands political theatre, plays crowds like a fiddle and feeds off their energy.It was a formidable spectacle on several levels. With people crammed together and wearing “Make America great again” hats rather than face masks, this was performance art that sent the message that the coronavirus pandemic is over, even though more people have died from it during this week’s Republican national convention than in the terror attacks of 11 September 2001.The mood of exuberance and self-confidence also implied that, whatever the death toll, whatever the huge unemployment figures, whatever the polls say, the 2020 presidential election is far from over. Trump’s grand setting in the nation’s capital, culminating in fireworks at the Washington monument and opera singers, contrasted with opponent Joe Biden’s speech last week to a silent, largely empty auditorium in Wilmington, Delaware.And whereas the raucous crowds at a convention hall in Cleveland four years ago, with their chants of “Lock her up!”, hinted at humanity’s darkest authoritarian impulses returning to the surface, this more polite and genteel version unfolding at the seat of American power was no less ominous. More