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      Adam Schiff reportedly tells donors ‘I think we lose’ if Biden is nominee

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      The high-profile California Democrat Adam Schiff told donors Joe Biden remaining on top of the ticket for November would cost the party the presidency and probably the House and Senate too, the New York Times reported.“I think if he is our nominee, I think we lose,” Schiff told donors in East Hampton, New York, last Saturday, the paper said, citing “a person with access to a transcription of a recording of the event”.“And we may very, very well lose the Senate and lose our chance to take back the House.”According to the Times, Schiff spoke before Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, was shot in the ear in an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally.As the paper noted, Democratic calls for Biden to stand aside, stoked by concerns about his age and cognitive fitness for office, surged after a disastrous debate with Trump in Atlanta last month but have dropped off since the Trump shooting, in which one rallygoer was killed and two injured.Nineteen House Democrats and one senator have publicly called for Biden to quit.Schiff is not among them but he is an influential voice in the party, a former House intelligence chair who led Trump’s first impeachment, sat on the January 6 committee and is now a candidate for US Senate.The Times said the fundraiser was in support of Schiff’s Senate campaign and those of Elissa Slotkin (Michigan) and Angela Alsobrooks (Maryland), who both face competitive races.“At least one donor … left dejected,” the Times reported, “believing that Mr Biden’s chances of winning were now slim and that they should concentrate giving their time and money to down-ballot candidates in the hopes of salvaging something.”Schiff did not comment. Biden’s campaign told the Times he “maintained strong support from members of Congress”.Biden remains defiant, telling NBC on Monday: “Look, 14 million people voted for me to be the nominee in the Democratic party, OK? I listen to them.”He also attacked NBC and other outlets for their coverage of Trump’s debate display, asking, “Why don’t you guys ever talk about the … 28 lies he told?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRegardless, Biden’s party remains in turmoil.On Tuesday, Axios reported a move by the Democratic National Committee to conduct a virtual roll call, the process by which the presidential nominee is confirmed, before the party convention in Chicago next month.Politico then reported a draft letter in which dozens of House Democrats opposed the plan.The virtual roll call was “a really bad move by the DNC”, Jared Huffman, a California Democrat who has not called publicly for Biden to quit, told the site.“Somebody thinks it’s a clever way to lock down debate and I guess by dint of sheer force, achieve unity, but it doesn’t work that way.” More

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      I’m from Appalachia. JD Vance doesn’t represent us – he only represents himself

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      Back in 2016, I was an Appalachian expat living in Boston, feeling homesick and displaced like I do most of the time up here. I saw a book in the Harvard Coop with the word Hillbilly on the cover and jumped at it. No one up here knew that word, or if they did, they understood it as derogatory, while I understood it as home. Here home was, I thought, staring me in the face from the front table at a major bookstore.View image in fullscreenI barely read 30 pages before I saw the book Hillbilly Elegy for what it was: a political platform masquerading as memoir. Before I saw JD Vance for what he was: an opportunist. One willing to double down on stereotypes, to paint the people of Appalachia with a culture of poverty brush, rather than be honest about the ways in which both electoral politics and industry have failed our region.Here’s the thing: JD Vance doesn’t represent Appalachia. JD Vance only represents himself.To the outside world, Vance is sure to appear far more Appalachian than I do. He is white, Christian, and has longstanding generational ties to the region. I, on the other hand, am south Asian, the child of Indian immigrants who settled in Appalachia in the 1970s, because work in the chemical industry brought them there, and left in the early 2000s, because work disappeared.We do have this in common, though: both of us left Appalachia in pursuit of higher education, and have lived away for as long as we lived within the region. But while Vance uses the story of his upbringing to perpetuate a flat, stereotyped representation of Appalachia, my identity, that of my family and community, complicates the narrative in ways that are politically inconvenient.My friends with generational ties to Appalachia experienced the book much as I did. They felt misrepresented. Misunderstood. Scapegoated for the result of the 2016 election. Many wrote pieces in direct response. Elizabeth Catte’s What You’re Getting Wrong About Appalachia is an absolute must-read in this regard.But up here in Boston? People were lapping up Hillbilly Elegy. Theoretically liberal, educated people brought the book up in conversation, claiming his story helped them understand more about where I was from.It absolutely didn’t.People like me and my family – immigrants who neighbor and labor alongside white working-class Appalachians – don’t exist in Vance’s narrative. Black folks don’t exist in his narrative. Queer folks don’t exist in his narrative. And in his campaign rhetoric, we only exist as the root of Appalachia’s problems; never as one of its sources of strength.View image in fullscreenFolks outside Appalachia devoured Hillbilly Elegy because it reinforced what they already believed about us: that we were lazy, homogenous, and to blame for the unemployment, addiction and environmental disasters that plagued us. Vance’s description of a Jackson, Kentucky, where “people are hardworking, except of course for the many food stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work”, allowed liberals and conservatives alike to write Appalachia off as beyond saving, and its problems as self-created, and thus, deserved.Harper gladly published, and continues to profit off, his memoir. Major publishing outlets issued rave reviews. The book sat atop the New York Times bestseller list for 54 weeks and Ron Howard subsequently made it into a Netflix movie. (More profits, in case you missed them.) Vance quickly became a go-to for legacy media, appearing on CNN as the Rust belt explainer, and talking on NPR as the Appalachian expert, when in fact he was in no position to do either.Vance’s narrative, and the people and institutions who championed it, who profited off it, are why he is Trump’s pick for vice-president. His candidacy rests on the platform that they created for him.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance has only been in office since 2023. He’s not being chosen because of his legislative acumen. He’s got none to speak of.He’s also not being chosen because of his ardent support of Trump. He didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 and went so far as to write an op-ed for the New York Times in which he said “Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office”.So what then, is the basis for Trump’s choice of Vance? Is it to court Appalachian votes? Or to court voters who believe the stereotypes about Appalachians? Or to appease those who profit off Appalachia’s resources while exploiting its people (looking at you, extractive industries and big pharma)?View image in fullscreenA person who truly represented Appalachian people wouldn’t take money from the same big pharma lobby that left West Virginia with the highest opioid overdose rate in the country. They wouldn’t deny climate change in the face of catastrophic flooding that eastern Kentucky still hasn’t recovered from two years out. They wouldn’t stoke fear of immigrants, who provide essential labor in Appalachia in healthcare, agriculture and service industries. They wouldn’t sow division through culture wars in a region where solidarity is desperately needed.My Appalachian friends and I are tired of being reduced to stereotypes. We are tired of the single-source, corporate-funded narrative that is propagated about us. Appalachia deserves a more complicated narrative, and better representation, than a Trump-Vance presidency offers us.Neema Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants and was born and raised in southern West Virginia. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, was published by West Virginia University Press.

      This article was amended on 16 July 2024 to correct that Vance has been in office since 2023, not 2022. He was elected in 2022 and sworn into office in 2023. More

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      JD Vance once worried Trump was ‘America’s Hitler’. Now his own authoritarian leanings come into view

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      JD Vance once feared Donald Trump might be “America’s Hitler”. Last Saturday, the Ohio senator claimed Democrats calling Trump “an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs” caused the assassination attempt the former president survived.But on Monday, after Trump made Vance his vice-presidential pick, worries about Vance’s own authoritarian leanings came straight to the fore.“Trump picked JD Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme Maga agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, Joe Biden’s re-election campaign chair, told reporters.Vance has indeed said that if he had been vice-president on 6 January 2021, he would have done as Trump and his supporters demanded and blocked certification of results in key states won by Biden during the election weeks earlier.Elsewhere on Monday, a profile of Vance was widely shared. Zack Beauchamp of Vox, author of new book The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World, outlined political views “fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy”.Beauchamp described how Vance has repeated Trump’s stolen election lie; has called for a criminal investigation of a journalist he did not like; advocates politicising the federal bureaucracy; and believes presidents can simply ignore the law.“JD Vance,” Beauchamp wrote, “is a man who believes that the current government is so corrupt that radical, even authoritarian steps are justified in response.“He sees himself as the avatar of America’s virtuous people, whose political enemies are interlopers scarcely worthy of respect. He is a man of the law who believes the president is above it.”Trump’s lawyers recently presented that argument to the supreme court he stacked with rightwingers – and won. But Trump will be gone one day and as Vance told Politico recently, “There is a big question about what comes after him.”It looks like it’s Vance, now the leading elected exponent of “New Right” political thought, as championed by figures prominently including Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder, tech billionaire and influential donor.The biographer Max Chafkin has described Thiel’s politics as “closer to authoritarianism” than typical Silicon Valley libertarianism, “super-nationalistic [and] longing for a sort of more powerful chief executive or … a dictator”.While Vance is a fan of writers who want “monarchist” government or “regime change”, Thiel himself once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He also played a key role in the making of Vance.Born in Middletown, Ohio, in 1984, Vance enlisted in the US marines, becoming a military journalist and going to Iraq. He graduated from Ohio State and Yale Law School, becoming a venture capitalist, eventually for a Thiel firm in Silicon Valley.Vance’s first book, Hillbilly Elegy, was published in 2016. Subtitled A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, it was a huge bestseller, widely acclaimed for its portrait of a region where support for Trump is strong.Vance returned to Ohio and ran a non-profit as well as a venture capital fund. At first opposed to Trump, he switched sides and won his Senate seat in 2022, with Trump’s endorsement and Thiel’s financial support.During that campaign, the libertarian Reason magazine said Vance was “more willing than most on the New Right to openly declare his intent to use the state in obviously extralegal ways”.The magazine noted Vance’s contention “that conservatives should employ the taxation power to ‘seize’ the assets of ‘woke, leftist’ nonprofits such as the Ford Foundation and universities such as Harvard”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance has continued to target universities he says should be brought under state control. In May, speaking to Margaret Brennan of CBS, he said: “If they’re not educating our children well and they’re layering the next generation down in mountains of student debt, then they’re not meeting their end of the bargain.“I think it’s totally reasonable to say there needs to be a political solution to that problem.”Challenged about his admiration for how Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian prime minister of Hungary, took control of universities there, Vance said Orbán had “made some smart decisions … that we could learn from in the United States”.On Monday, responses to Trump’s selection of Vance noted his affinity for Orbán. Many also focused on Vance’s warm words for Project 2025, a plan for a second Trump term coordinated by the Heritage Foundation and advocating radical rightwing reform to every facet of government.Trump has disavowed links to Project 2025, given the potency of Democratic attacks on the subject. But Vance has long advocated an assault on the federal government.As noted by Reason, Vance in 2021 told Jack Murphy, a controversial “manosphere” figure: “A lot of conservatives have said we should … basically eliminate the administrative state. And I’m sympathetic to that project.“But another option is that we should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes. We should fire all of the people. I think Trump … [will] probably win again in 2024, and he’ll win by a margin such that he’ll be the president of the United States in January of 2025.“I think what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: fire every single mid-level bureaucrat. Every civil servant in the administrative state.“Replace them with our people, and when the courts – because you will get taken to court … stop you, stand before the country like [president] Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”As Beauchamp noted, the Jackson quote “is likely apocryphal, but the history is real”.An 1832 supreme court ruling said the government should respect Native American land rights. Jackson simply ignored it. The result was the forcible displacement of 60,000 people, an outrage known as the Trail of Tears. More

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      ‘Turning down the temperature’ shouldn’t mean silencing all criticism of Trump | Margaret Sullivan

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      Since Donald Trump was injured on Saturday in the chilling assassination attempt at his Pennsylvania rally, the nation has been advised – including by Joe Biden – to reduce the political rhetoric that can lead to violence.“Turn down the temperature,” is the going phrase.That’s a fine idea.But it shouldn’t mean silencing criticism of Trump in this extremely consequential election season. It shouldn’t mean transforming him into some mythic combination of martyr and hero. And it certainly shouldn’t mean that he gets a pass – a literal get-out-of-jail-free card – for his innumerable past misdeeds.The assailant’s bullets didn’t destroy history, and they shouldn’t destroy the rule of law.But we’re already seeing evidence of that.Most notably, the Trump-appointed judge in Florida, Aileen Cannon, on Monday issued a stunning ruling that is a huge, although legally questionable, win for the Republican presidential frontrunner. She dismissed the entire case about Trump’s mishandling of classified documents, citing violations of the constitution in the appointment of the special prosecutor Jack Smith.Cannon’s decision, fully in keeping with the way she has leaned hard right at almost every turn, may well be reversed on appeal – “it’s wrong six ways from Sunday,” opined the Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck. Nevertheless, the immediate effect is to delay any consequences for Trump’s apparent malfeasance until after November’s election.It’s likely, of course, that Cannon was headed this way long before the assassination effort this past weekend. But the good will that Trump is garnering makes her ruling much more acceptable, at least to the millions who buy the idea that he has been woefully mistreated by a rigged justice system. And perhaps by others, too.And her action fits perfectly with a broader movement to shut down criticism and accountability for Trump in the wake of the shooting. A lot of former critics are running scared, unwilling to be branded unpatriotic or insensitive in this fraught moment.Trump’s allies, both in politics and media (good luck trying to tell the difference), immediately blamed Democrats for the Pennsylvania attack. The gunman was motivated, they charge, by the left’s constant depictions of Trump as a would-be authoritarian, and therefore any such talk must stop.Not so fast.One, we still don’t know what motivated the 20-year-old assailant, though we do know he was a registered Republican who had ready access to an assault-style weapon; two, Trump himself has bragged that he wants to be a dictator on day one of a second term and his confederates have cooked up a detailed plan to help; and three, if anyone has inflamed the nation’s anger, sense of grievance and propensity for violence, it’s Trump himself with his threats of retribution and promises to persecute his political rivals.Somehow, however, we’re now supposed to believe he’s had a profound spiritual awakening and to forget all that divisiveness, including the Trump campaign email that called Joe Biden a “threat to democracy” just last week.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Can we wait to see some evidence before declaring that he is Mandela now?” suggested Tim Miller of the Bulwark, commenting on an Axios report that imagined a kinder, gentler Trump as well as the view from the former Fox News rabble-rouser Tucker Carlson that “getting shot in the face changes a man”.Perhaps, as many are predicting in lofty terms, this assassination attempt will change America forever. Maybe it should.But then again, the slaughter of innocent schoolchildren from Newtown, Connecticut, to Uvalde, Texas, should have done that, but apparently did not.As we wait for that wondrous change, it is more important than ever to hold fast to things that matter. That goes for the news media, for public officials and for American citizens.Let’s be steered not by political opportunism, delusion and blame-casting, but by a more constant north star: the rule of law and the truth.Sympathy for Trump is called for. A free pass is not.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      A Trump-Vance administration would be ‘the most dangerous’ for abortion rights, say advocates

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      Within minutes of Donald Trump’s announcement that he had tapped Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate in the 2024 elections, abortion rights groups vociferously condemned the pick.“A Trump-Vance administration will be the most dangerous administration for abortion and reproductive freedom in this country’s history,” Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said in a statement.“By naming Vance to his ticket, Trump made clear that his administration will sign a national abortion ban and put birth control and IVF at risk,” said Jessica Mackler, president of Emily’s List, an organization that supports Democratic women who support abortion rights running for office.Vance, the venture capitalist turned Hillbilly Elegy author turned GOP standard-bearer, has long opposed abortion.In 2021, while running for Ohio senate, Vance told an Ohio news outlet that he did not support rape and incest exceptions in abortion bans. “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term,” he said. “It’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society.”But voters’ outrage over the overturning of Roe v Wade has grown, leading abortion rights supporters to a string of victories at the ballot box, and harnessing that outrage is widely considered Democrats’ best hope for winning the November elections. As Trump and other Republicans have tried to project a moderated stance on the issue – despite the fact that Trump handpicked three of the supreme court justices who overturned Roe – Vance has also tempered his public position.“We have to accept that people do not want blanket abortion bans. They just don’t,” Vance told CNN’s Jake Tapper last year. “I say this as a person who wants to protect as many unborn babies as possible. We have to provide exceptions for the life of the mother and rape and so forth.”In 2022, Vance said he would support a national 15-week abortion ban with exceptions. He also told NBC News that he wants mifepristone, a common abortion pill that was at the heart of a major supreme court case this year, to remain accessible.Even while supporting a national ban, Vance has said he would like abortion to be “primarily a state issue”.“Ohio is going to want to have a different abortion policy from California, from New York, and I think that’s reasonable,” he said. “I want Ohio to be able to make its own decisions, and I want Ohio’s elected legislators to make those decisions.”But, he added: “I think it’s fine to sort of set some minimum national standard.”Much of Vance’s public persona, however, remains defined by his support of what he sees as the traditional nuclear family. He has backed policies that he says will increase birth rates, such as making childbirth free, and said that people who are childfree by choice “do not have any physical commitment to the future of this country”.“I think the rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and the most evil thing that the left has done in this country,” said Vance, a father of three. He then went on to suggest that several Democratic politicians, like Kamala Harris and New Jersey senator Cory Booker, should not have political power because they do not have children.“Why have we let the Democrat party become controlled by people who don’t have any children? And why is this just a normal fact of American life?” Vance asked. “That the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children?” (The vice-president has two stepchildren.)“Many of the most unhappy and most miserable and most angry people in our media are childless adults,” he continued.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance has also called people who fear having kids “cat ladies” who “must be stopped” and said that universal daycare is “class war against normal people”.Two days after the US supreme court overturned Roe, Vance tweeted: “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”Shortly after Trump announced he had chosen Vance as his running mate, Joe Biden’s campaign started to circulate a clip of comments Vance made in 2021 about violence in marriages.“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that, like: ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term,’” Vance said in response to a question on fatherlessness.Vance has said that he was not defending men who commit domestic abuse and that he himself is a victim of domestic abuse.Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the powerful anti-abortion group SBA Pro-Life America, praised Vance on Monday.“His ability to compellingly share these stories on a national stage will surely be an asset,” Dannenfelser said in a statement. “With approximately 750,000 babies in states like California and New York still lacking basic protections, we need champions whose boldness will not waver.” More

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      RNC day two to focus on crime and immigration after energetic first day

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      Republicans could not have asked for a more eventful day to kick off their nominating convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and they will be looking to keep party members’ energy high on Tuesday.Donald Trump opened the convention on Monday with the announcement that Ohio senator JD Vance would serve as his running mate, ending months of heated speculation over who would join the former president at the top of the ticket. After formally winning the nomination in the afternoon, Trump brought convention-goers to their feet when he made a surprise appearance at Fiserv Forum on Monday evening.In his first public appearance since the assassination attempt against him on Saturday, Trump appeared at the convention with a bandage over his ear, which was injured in the attack. Multiple speakers who addressed the convention on Monday expressed deep gratitude that Trump survived the shooting, which left one rally attendee and the suspected gunman dead.“Two days ago, evil came for the man we admire and love so much,” hard-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene told convention attendees. “I thank God that his hand was on President Trump.”On Tuesday, Republicans are expected to focus their attention on crime and immigration, as the theme of the day will be “Make America Safe Once Again”. Immigration has become a rallying cry for Republicans, as Trump and his allies have repeatedly and falsely accused Joe Biden of supporting “open borders”.Trump has previously called for the deportation of 15 to 20 million undocumented immigrants if he wins re-election, and Vance voiced his own support for mass deportation in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday.“We have to deport people,” Vance told Hannity. “We have to deport people who broke our laws who came in here. And I think we need to start with the violent criminals.”The speaker schedule for Tuesday remains unclear, as Republicans have not yet specified who will next be addressing the convention. But a number of Republican lawmakers and members of Trump’s family, including his sons Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, have been named as speakers and have not yet addressed the convention crowd.While Republicans rally in Milwaukee, Biden and his Democratic allies are resuming some campaign communications after suspending their planned anti-Trump ads in response to the assassination attempt. In an NBC News interview with Lester Holt that aired Monday evening, the president made a case for his re-election while acknowledging it was a “mistake” to say during a recent donor call that Trump should be Democrats’ “bullseye” right now.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I meant focus on him. Focus on what he’s doing. Focus on – on his – on his policies. Focus on the number of lies he told in the debate,” Biden said. “I’m not the guy that said I want to be a dictator on day one. I’m not the guy that refused to accept the outcome of the election. I’m not the guy who said that I wouldn’t accept the outcome of this election automatically. You can’t only love your country when you win.”As of now, it seems like Biden still needs to sell more voters on that message. National polls show a neck-and-neck race between Biden and Trump, and Biden appears to be in trouble in several states he won in 2020. A pair of New York Times/Siena College polls conducted last week found the two candidates virtually tied in both Pennsylvania, a must-win state for Biden, and Virginia, which he won by 10 points in 2020.If Virginia is indeed competitive, Biden’s chances of re-election appear bleak. And Republicans will be looking to further damage those chances on Tuesday. More

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      Trump’s arrival and ‘our God saves’: key takeaways from day one of the RNC

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      Just two days after a gunman targeted a Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania, leaving the candidate grazed by a bullet and one of his supporters dead, the Republican national convention kicked off in Milwaukee in a strikingly normal fashion.Donald Trump, who made his first public appearance but did not yet address the convention, has now been officially nominated as the Republican presidential candidate. Here are key takeaways from the day:1. As VP, Trump picks JD Vance, Hillbilly Elegy author who once called him ‘America’s Hitler’ For his vice-president, Trump chose 39-year-old JD Vance, a bestselling author who swiftly transformed himself from a self-described “never Trumper” to a Trump loyalist.Now an Ohio senator, Vance first took public office 18 months ago, when he won a race for Senate after being backed by more than $10m in support from tech mogul Peter Thiel. Vance had previously worked as a venture capitalist, and lived for several years in the Bay Area before moving back to Ohio.Vance, who gained a national profile for a much-praised 2016 memoir about white family dysfunction in Appalachia and how he made it to Yale Law School, once publicly called Trump “reprehensible” and an “idiot”, and said he was a dangerous figure who was “leading the white working class to a very dark place”. But Vance worked hard to walk back these criticisms and gain Trump’s endorsement in his 2022 Senate race.Vance has endorsed a ban on abortion, continued to falsely claim that Trump won the 2020 election, said that the US should conduct “large-scale deportations”, and claimed the Democratic party is trying to “transform the electorate” amid an immigrant “invasion”, which Democrats have said is an endorsement of the white nationalist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. Vance was praised today by Donald Trump Jr for being a powerful surrogate for Trump on television.2. Trump makes his first public appearance since surviving a shooting attack in Pennsylvania Donald Trump looked unusually somber as he emerged from backstage and joined his sons, and his new vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, in a VIP section of the convention hall audience.There was a stiff white bandage covering his ear, which had been grazed by a bullet on Saturday when the former president narrowly avoided an assasination attempt at a Pennsylvania campaign rally that left one of his supporters dead.Trump waved to his supporters and occasionally held his fist in the air as he walked through the crowd. But he looked more moved than defiant in his first public appearance, mouthing “thank you”, to his supporters, and once gesturing to his ear and to the camera filming him backstage as if to suggest that he could still hear them despite the bandage.After Trump shook hands with other supporters, he joined Tucker Carlson, his sons, and Vance, to listen to the speakers, he appeared to relax somewhat, and began to smile more in response to the crowd.3. Post-shooting speeches focus on Trump’s relationship with God, not blaming Biden Amid multiple media reports that Trump wanted to strike a note of unity after what he saw as his own miraculous escape from death, Axios reported that “Trump ordered aides not to allow the convention’s prime-time speakers to update their remarks to dial up outrage over the shooting.”Many of the speeches on Monday appeared to reflect a more restrained approach to talking about the shooting, with Republicans focusing on Trump’s personal strength and framing the event in Christian terms.“Our God still saves, he still delivers, and he still sets free, because on Saturday, the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle, but an American lion got back up on his feet, and he roared!” South Carolina senator Tim Scott said.4. Teamsters president Sean O’Brien praises Trump’s toughness in defiant pro-labor speech One of the most prominent labor union leaders in the US brought a fiercely anti-corporate message into the heart of the GOP convention, where he wove together a denunciation of corporate power with praise of Trump’s willingness to hear from alternate voices.Teamsters president Sean O’Brien faced sharp criticism for within his own union for what some called his “unconscionable” decision to speak at the RNC.In his speech, O’Brien pushed back at that response, saying: “The left called me a traitor,” but that “today, the teamsters are here to say, we are not beholden to anyone or to any party.”“The teamsters are doing something correct if the extremes of both parties think I shouldn’t be on this stage,” he added.O’Brien used the platform to argue for changes in labor laws to protect US workers and for “corporate welfare reform”.He received some cheers from the Republican audience when he said: “Elites have no party. Elites have no nation. Their loyalty is to the balance sheet and the stock prices at the expense of the American worker.”But his praise of Trump prompted an even more enthusiastic responses from the crowd, particularly his comment that, whatever else people might think of Trump, after the shooting on Saturday: “He has proven to be one tough SOB.”5. Elon Musk is reportedly discussing major donations to a pro-Trump Super PacTrump’s choice of former venture capitalist and Peter Thiel protege JD Vance as his vice-presidential nominee already strengthened the link between the 2024 Trump campaign and Silicon Valley.But a report from the Wall Street Journal today suggested that one of the biggest and most volatile tech titans is now considering pouring a record-breaking amount of cash into a Super Pac designed to boost Republican turnout.The Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk is discussing donating $45m a month, starting in July, to a pro-Trump Pac reportedly created by members of his tech executive inner circle. How much Musk has actually given so far is unclear, and may not be made public until the next round of campaign filings are made public on 15 July, but Bloomberg reported he had already given “a sizable amount”. More

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      Teamsters union president calls Trump ‘tough SOB’ in unprecedented speech at RNC

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      In an unprecedented address, Sean O’Brien, the president of the powerful Teamsters union, delivered remarks at the Republican national convention (RNC) Monday night.In addressing the RNC, O’Brien broke with most major unions in the US, which have overwhelmingly thrown their support behind Joe Biden.During his speech, O’Brien thanked Donald Trump “for opening the RNC’s doors” to the union – whose leaders have never spoken at the Republican national convention – and shot back at criticism over his willingness to appear at the former president’s invitation.“I travel all across this country and meet with my members every week,” said O’Brien. “I see American workers being taken for granted, workers being sold out to big banks, big tech cooperation, the elite.”Backlash from “the left”, O’Brien said, “is why it’s so important for me to be here today”. That comment, followed by his resounding exclamation that Trump proved himself to be “one tough SOB” after the assassination attempt Saturday drew a standing ovation from the crowd.For the rest of his speech, O’Brien railed on corporate greed, demanded “long-term investment in the American worker” and implored lawmakers to seek bipartisanship in congress.“Most legislation is never meant to go anywhere,” said O’Brien. “It’s all talk – and in America, talk isn’t cheap. It’s very expensive. It comes at the cost of our own country.”During his remarks, the crowd often seemed puzzled and sat in a silence punctuated occasionally by applause when O’Brien spoke in more general terms about America’s “elites”.O’Brien’s decision to appear before the RNC came just hours after Trump announced that he had chosen JD Vance to run alongside him on the Republican ticket. Vance, who has invoked his family’s midwestern and Appalachian roots in a nod to working class voters, has embraced populist rhetoric while touting a less-than-friendly labor record. Vance opposed the Pro Act, which organized labor rallied around, and introduced legislation that would legalize company unions, corporate labor formations outlawed by the National Labor Relations Act in 1935.O’Brien’s remarks bookended an evening of speeches focused largely on the economy – a core issue for the Trump campaign and one that O’Brien could address with special authority given his role as a union leader. His was the second speech from a union official that evening – in brief remarks, Bobby Bartels, the business manager of a Steamfitters local in New York, endorsed Trump to cheers from the crowd of Republican delegates and conservative activists.Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers union (UAW), slammed Trump in a speech shortly after he announced his third run for the presidency, calling him a “scab” and saying: “If Donald Trump ever worked in auto plant, he wouldn’t be a UAW member – he’d be a company man trying to squeeze the American worker.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfter Trump announced the rightwing populist Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate, Sara Nelson, the president of the union representing flight attendants, wrote on Twitter/X that “behind all his slick rhetoric, JD Vance is just another shill for the corporate class who will sell out workers to corporate America. This ticket isn’t pro-worker or pro-union. It’s the billionaire ticket through and through.”Liz Shuler, the president of the AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation in the US, called the Trump-Vance ticket “a corporate CEO’s dream and a worker’s nightmare” and vowed that the federation would “continue educating union voters every single day” on topics like Project 2025, the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s playbook for a Republican presidency.When O’Brien met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, and when the union later donated $45,000 to the RNC, it sparked outrage from progressive members.Richard Hooker Jr, the secretary treasurer of Teamsters local 623 and vice-president of the Philadelphia AFL-CIO board, has on multiple occasions spoken out against the union’s increasingly friendly relations with the Republican party.“Republicans have been, for the most part anti-union, anti-labor and anti-working class,” said Hooker. “Labor has to be together. We have to take a position like the AFL-CIO – Shawn Fain said ‘Donald Trump is a scab’ and that’s the same language that all of us should use.” More