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      Trump mocked for claiming he was ‘tortured’ in Georgia mugshot arrest

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      Donald Trump has been met with a chorus of online mockery after claiming that he was “tortured” while being processed at the Fulton county jail in Georgia last August, an occasion that generated the mugshot that he has since turned into a money-making device as he campaigns for a second presidency.The outlandish and unsubstantiated claim came in a fundraising email and drew at least one unflattering comparison with one of the former president’s political nemeses: John McCain, the former Republican senator for Arizona whose real experience of torture and incarceration during the Vietnam war was a target for Trump’s mockery.“I want you to remember what they did to me. They tortured me in the Fulton County Jail, and TOOK MY MUGSHOT,” Trump wrote in an email promoting coffee cups with his mugshot emblazoned on them.“So guess what? I put it on a mug for the WHOLE WORLD TO SEE!”Trump’s jail experience resulted from his criminal indictment, on which he now faces 13 charges, over allegations that he tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election result in Georgia, one of the key states he lost in his defeat to Joe Biden.That case is separate from the criminal prosecution in New York, which recently led to Trump’s conviction on 34 felonies stemming from hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, the adult film actor who alleged an adulterous affair with him.After arriving in a presidential-style motorcade in Georgia, he was booked, fingerprinted and photographed for a mugshot in a process that took about 20 minutes. No allegations of torture or mistreatment surfaced at the time – but Trump’s supporters have perceived the resulting photo to be a mark of pride that has been stamped on campaign merchandise.Alleging torture prompted a social media comparison with McCain, who Trump repeatedly ridiculed for being unable to raise his arms after having them broken under torture.“Trump is claiming he was ‘tortured’ while getting his mug shot taken at the Fulton County jail,” one post on X read. “John McCain knew all about REAL TORTURE, unlike Trump who has NO IDEA what ‘TORTURE’ is or he would have REQUIRED Hospitalization.”Trump, who earned a medical draft deferment from the Vietnam war because of heel spurs, openly disdained McCain’s war record and prisoner of war status when he successfully campaigned for the White House in the 2016 election, saying: “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”Others ridiculed his torture claim in more general terms. “What does Trump mean by this,” another X user posted. “Like they inconvenienced/annoyed him or that they did something painful/harmful like pulling his fingernails out? I highly doubt the Secret Service allowed Atlanta PD to truly torture Trump.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnother X user posted: “Trump thinks torture includes photographs and fingerprinting. Was he strip-searched? How many criminals are laughing at him?”Another user wrote: “Cry baby Trump now claims that he was tortured when they took his mug shot. Truth is he tortured us with that mug.”It is not the first time Trump has invoked political prisoner imagery while facing multiple felony charges. He has compared himself to Alexei Navalny, the late jailed Russian opposition leader and critic of Vladimir Putin, who died mysteriously in a Siberian penal colony in February.Trump has also used the term “hostages” to describe his supporters who were jailed for their part in the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol in an effort to overturn Biden’s victory in the presidential election weeks earlier. More

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      Republicans have a ghoulish tactic for distracting from Trump’s criminality | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Donald Trump is already showcasing the big surprise he will spring on Joe Biden at their debate. It’s not a surprise; it’s his most morbid, ghastly and predictable trick.On Friday, his campaign arranged and publicized a telephone call to the mother of a young woman who had been murdered by an undocumented immigrant to express his heartfelt sympathy. That day, the former president posted three similar stories of gruesome murders on his Truth Social account. “We have a new Biden Migrant Killing – It’s only going to get worse, and it’s all Crooked Joe Biden’s fault. He’s a disgrace to the Office of President, he’s a disgrace to America. I look forward to seeing him at the Fake Debate on Thursday. Let him explain why he has allowed MILLIONS of people to come into our Country illegally!”In the debate, Trump will cast the president as responsible for those who stalk, rape and kill innocent young women. He will accuse Biden and his policies on the border of being the source of vicious crimes. Biden will be the villain. He will be shown to have no empathy. He will be exposed as secretly conspiring to unleash a reign of terror. He will be unveiled as the criminal. The chivalrous Trump will ride as the white knight to rescue vulnerable women from swarthy rapists and killers. The original scenario of this plot was The Birth of a Nation.Trump’s planned attack in the debate is pulled from his repertoire of ploys like a hack comedian on the Strip drawing from a roomful of old joke files. For years he has exploited these tragedies as set-ups and the anguished parents as props. According to Fox News, “he has lent hope and compassion to those who have lost family members or other loved ones in recent years due to heinous acts committed by individuals who had come to the US illegally”. Alongside its portrayal of Trump as the sincere consoler of the grieving, truly a minister of souls, Fox News helpfully highlighted a story headlined: Illegals Charged with Murder, Rape and Kidnapping in a Week of Shocking Crimes Across the US. (Hyped after that, the next story: Transgender Utah Woman Shot Parents Dead.)Trump has been deploying this gambit since his first campaign in 2016, which featured a cavalcade of members of stricken “angel families”. Most recently, in February, before Biden’s State of the Union Address, he called the parents of a young woman allegedly murdered by an undocumented immigrant and afterward described how the “beautiful young woman” was “barbarically attacked”.When one of the people he had accused was later acquitted, Trump stated that the verdict was the reason there was “no wonder” why Americans are “so angry with illegal immigration”. Trump ghoulishly trolls for this specific and unusual type of murder, and when the details don’t match his grisly story, it doesn’t matter because there’s still a dead woman he can pretend to mourn.Trump’s call last week to another devastated family was a revival of his failed effort to disrupt Biden’s State of the Union. His Maga zealot, House member Marjorie Taylor Greene, elbowed her way to the aisle of the House chamber as Biden entered. Wearing a red “Make America Great Again” cap and a T-shirt reading “Say Her Name”, a slogan appropriated from the Black Lives Matter movement to protest against the police killings of Black women, she thrust a button with a victim’s name into Biden’s hand.In his speech, Biden lamented that the Republicans in the Senate had killed a border security bill, chiefly crafted by the very conservative senator James Lankford, Republican from Oklahoma, and initially backed by the Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell. Biden had exerted considerable political capital to get the Democrats to agree to the bill, which many, if not most, found distastefully draconian. But it was not the Democrats who killed the conservative bill. Trump opposed it. Instead, he wanted the festering problem for his campaign. Under Trump’s pressure, the Republicans caved and even Lankford voted against his own bill.When Biden mentioned the demise of the bipartisan border bill at the hands of cowed Republicans, some Maga members began to jeer him. “Oh, you don’t like that bill, huh?” Biden replied. “That conservatives got together and said it was a good bill? I’ll be darned. That’s amazing.” Lankford was caught on camera muttering: “That’s true.”“Say her name!” shouted Greene. Biden held up the button she had given him, naming Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student allegedly murdered by an undocumented immigrant. “Laken Riley,” said Biden, “an innocent woman who was killed by an illegal,” and added: “To her parents I say my heart goes out to you, having lost children myself.”Biden’s forthrightness deflated the intent of Greene’s stunt. In the face of the calculated effort to rattle him and make him lose his composure, he sidetracked his hecklers.After Biden spoke, the Alabama senator Katie Britt delivered the Republican response. As part of the overarching plan to pin murders by undocumented immigrants on Biden, she raised the murder of Laken Riley but created a weird dissonance speaking in her strange sing-song “fundie baby” voice. “This could have been my daughter. This could have been yours … From fentanyl poisonings to horrific murders, there are empty chairs tonight at kitchen tables just like this one because of Biden’s senseless border policies.”The orchestrated razzing at the State of the Union was the warm-up for the same tactic that Trump will undoubtedly use in the debate. Trump will make another attempt. Now that he is a convicted felon, he is more desperate than ever to shift the taint of criminality on to Biden.The Republicans following his playbook are seeking every opportunity to label Biden the true “criminal” and suppress mention of Trump’s conviction. “What he’s doing to the country is criminal,” the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham parroted on Fox News on 19 June. “His border policies are allowing people to be raped and murdered on the street.”That Trump was adjudicated a rapist in his E Jean Carroll defamation case and has been credibly accused of sexually assaulting more than a dozen women only makes the stories about the murders of innocent women by undocumented immigrants that much more politically necessary.To protect Trump’s reputation, House Republicans have banned any reference to Trump as a convicted felon from congressional speeches as a supposed violation of the rules, a suppression of members’ speech not seen since the Gag Rule of the 1840s forbidding antislavery statements. Then the Republicans pivot to the stories of murders by undocumented immigrants. The Republican National Committee – under its co-chair, Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump – has created a website called “Biden Bloodbath”. In bold red letters, it screams: “Migrant Crime: There Is Blood on Biden’s Hands”.If the facts matter, a definitive study in 2020 conducted by a team of academic researchers from the University of Wisconsin for the libertarian Cato Institute showed: “Contrary to public perception, we observe considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens and find no evidence that undocumented criminality has increased in recent years.”The researchers concluded from data collected in Texas: “The illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 45% below that of native‐​born Americans in Texas. The general pattern [is] of native‐​born Americans having the highest criminal conviction rates followed by illegal immigrants and then with legal immigrants having the lowest holds for all of other specific types of crimes such as violent crimes, property crimes, homicide, and sex crimes.”A new study published in 2024 by Stanford University experts for the National Bureau of Economic Research stated: “We find that, as a group, immigrant men have had a lower incarceration rate than US-born men for the last 150 years of American history. The differences in incarceration have become more pronounced starting in 1960, with recent waves of immigrants being 50–60% less likely to be incarcerated than US-born men (30% when compared to US-born white men). This relative decline in incarceration has occurred among immigrants from all major countries of origin, and it cannot be explained by changes in immigrants’ observable characteristics or in immigration policies.”The reality, moreover, is that crime, which shot up during and immediately after Trump’s incompetent and malignant handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, is now plummeting under Biden, mainly as a result of steadily improving economic conditions. Based on FBI statistics gathered from more than 11,000 police agencies across the country, Biden has noted: “In the first quarter of this year, murders decreased by 26%, robberies by almost 18%, and violent crime overall by 15%.”Since the Republicans under the influence of Trump voted down their own border bill, Biden has issued a series of executive actions. They include suspending entry into the US of those unlawfully crossing into the US, granting citizenship to those legally married to an American and resident in the country for 10 years, and giving quick access to work visas to qualified Daca recipients (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or Dreamers) who have graduated college and have jobs.Biden’s actions have been taken on his own because he has no Republican partners. His Republican critics, who made his unilateral actions necessary, pretend he has not done anything at all.Despite what Biden has tried and effected, Trump’s enduring contempt for facts extends not least to the question of murders by undocumented immigrants. His ability to continue manipulating the calamities of “angel families” for his own ambition has depended upon his wrecking a Republican-written border security bill, his defiance of the facts that undocumented immigrants are the least likely group to commit crimes, and his enlistment and intimidation of Republicans to do his bidding and echo his demagogy.Trump, however, can’t help himself from undermining the frenetic Republican attempts to protect him and the party from his criminality. He just keeps raising it. At every rally, he promises that he will pardon the violent criminals imprisoned as a result of their participation in the January 6 insurrection. He calls them “hostages” and “warriors”.The news is awash in stories of Trump’s filings and motions to delay his trials for his alleged coup attempt and alleged stealing of national security documents. Present and former associates constantly surface to the top of the crime news.Fifty-two people involved in Trump’s fake electors scheme have been indicted in four states. He is under indictment himself in Georgia and an unindicted co-conspirator in Michigan. His personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has been indicted in three states. Another of his attorneys, Boris Epshteyn – who pleaded guilty in 2021 to disorderly conduct after being accused of groping women in a nightclub (the sexual assault charges were dropped) – has been indicted in Arizona. A third Trump attorney, Jenna Ellis, has been indicted and says she regrets ever representing Trump. Another attorney, Kenneth Chesebro, also indicted, has flipped and turned state’s evidence. Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has been indicted in three states.His former campaign manager and senior White House adviser, Steve Bannon, has been sentenced to prison for contempt of Congress for failing to honor a subpoena from the January 6 committee. Bannon also faces an October trial in New York state for an alleged scheme to fleece Trump supporters in a “Build the Wall” fraud, another money-making opportunity after Mexico declined to pay for Trump’s empty promise to Americans that our friendly neighbor to the south would pony up after Trump called immigrants “Mexican rapists”. Trump had pardoned Bannon from federal prosecution for that same charge.For Trump, the emotional manipulation of the compelling anecdotal fallacy is all that matters. New “angel families” are ordered up and brought to his attention to be used and discarded one after another. He will always find the next terrible tragedy involving some immigrant somewhere to illustrate his false narrative to sustain the problem whose solution he has thwarted in order to be able to inflame it in his interest. Then, wet with crocodile tears, he can stage lachrymose scenes of people’s genuine affliction by which to demonize Biden.Demonstrating his piety and virtue, while showing no remorse for his felonies as he awaits sentencing, Trump endorsed the state of Louisiana’s edict to post a copy of the Ten Commandments in every schoolroom. “I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER.” Trump did not specify those “many other places”. He made no announcement about posting the Ten Commandments at Mar-a-Lago or any other Trump golf club.“READ IT – HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG??? THIS MAY BE, IN FACT, THE FIRST MAJOR STEP IN THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION, WHICH IS DESPERATELY NEEDED, IN OUR COUNTRY. BRING BACK TTC!!! MAGA2024” Give me that old time Maga TTC.Trump endlessly cavorts before a credulous audience that either swallows his routine as they did the fakery of Trump as master of the universe in The Apprentice or else don’t care any more than Trump does so long as his pantomime advances him. As Trump said in his Access Hollywood tape, laying out the only commandment he has ever upheld: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      ‘A healthcare crisis’: Harris takes aim at Trump on anniversary of Roe’s fall

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      Joe Biden and Kamala Harris marked the second anniversary of the US supreme court ruling that overturned Roe v Wade with forceful campaign statements that laid the blame squarely on Donald Trump for ending the national right to abortion.In a video released on Monday, Biden pledged to restore the right to an abortion and “protect American freedom” if he is re-elected.The video, along with a campaign event headlined by the vice-president, came two years to the day since the court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization reversed nearly half a century of guaranteed federal abortion rights, and reflect the centrality of abortion in Biden’s presidential campaign.In College Park, Maryland, Harris took the stage to chants of “four more years”. In her remarks, Harris laid out what she said were the stakes for abortion access if Trump is re-elected.“Understand as much harm as he has already caused, a second Trump term would be even worse,” she said. “His friends in the United States Congress are trying to pass a national ban that would outlaw abortion in every single state – in states like New York and California, and even right here in Maryland.”Nodding to her background as a prosecutor, Harris called Trump’s attack on women’s reproductive rights “premeditated” and said he has “not denied, much less shown remorse, for his actions”.“In the case of the stealing of reproductive freedom from the women of America, Donald Trump is guilty,” she said.Harris called Republicans who have passed state-level bans Trump’s “accomplices” and warned that he would go even further by curtailing access to contraception and IVF.Pointing to the statistic that one in three American women live in a state with abortion restrictions, she said: “Today our daughters know fewer rights than their grandmothers. This is a healthcare crisis, and we all know who to blame: Donald Trump.”Kate Cox, the Texas woman who was denied an abortion under the state’s near-total ban last year despite a fatal fetal anomaly, introduced Harris in Maryland.“My state chose to drive me out of my home, my community, away from my children and my doctors, rather than to let me access care,” she said. “I will never again miss an opportunity to vote. I will cast my ballot in every election like my life depends on it.”Cox ultimately left Texas to receive care. Growing emotional from the stage on Monday, she shared that she is pregnant again, expecting a child in January. The crowd erupted in applause. “I hope that by then, when we welcome our baby into the world, we will have a world led by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” she said.“You are a hero of this movement,” Harris told Cox.In Biden’s video, the president, too, placed the responsibility for reversing abortion rights on Trump, quoting him boasting about the decision and taking credit for putting three conservative justices on the court.“Here’s what Donald Trump says about your freedom: ‘After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v Wade,’” Biden says, quoting a Trump statement last year.“Two years ago, the supreme court justices that Trump handpicked helped overturn Roe v Wade,” Biden continues. “Decades of progress shattered just because the last guy got four years in the White House.”“We’re up against extremism. Send me back to the White House and I’ll fight like hell to restore Roe v Wade and protect American freedom.”The offensive comes amid polling evidence that with consistently weak approval ratings for Biden, concerns over reproductive rights represent Democrats’ best hope of retaining the White House in November.Since Roe v Wade was overthrown in 2022, ballot measures in several states – including ones that tend to vote Republican – have upheld or enshrined abortion rights locally, signalling that the issue has popular resonance particularly among female voters.On Friday, a group of Montana abortion rights supporters became the latest to announce that they had secured enough signatures to hold a November ballot measure asking voters to enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution. Although that measure has not yet been confirmed by state officials, voters in roughly a dozen states are expected to weigh in directly on abortion rights this year, including in battleground states such as Nevada and Arizona.Democrats are hoping that these measures will boost turnout in their favor.Several groups – including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Freedom for All – announced on Monday a $100m Abortion Access Now campaign across several states.Since Roe fell, Biden has frequently promised to “codify” Roe’s protections into law. Although his administration has issued executive orders aimed at boosting access to reproductive healthcare, including contraception, as well as defended abortion access in two supreme court cases this year, Biden cannot re-establish a federal right to abortion without congressional support. Congress has repeatedly failed to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill that blocks states from totally banning abortion before fetal viability, or the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb.In a call with reporters on Monday, White House officials declined to reveal any plans for future abortion-related executive actions. Jennifer Klein, assistant to the president and director of the Gender Policy Council, also acknowledged that, if the supreme court rules against the Biden administration in a highly anticipated case over emergency abortions, “our options on emergency medical care are likely to be limited”.Trump has sought to backpedal on his stance in recent months, telling congressional Republicans in a meeting on Capitol Hill this month that the matter should be left to the states and warning them against pursuing a national ban. More

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      CNN abruptly ends live interview after Trump spokesperson criticizes network

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      CNN abruptly terminated a live interview with Donald Trump’s spokesperson on Monday after she criticised the two journalists whom the network chose to moderate the much anticipated upcoming debate between the former president and Joe Biden.Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign national press secretary, became embroiled in a heated exchange with Kasie Hunt, the presenter of CNN This Morning, after saying Trump would be entering a “hostile environment on this very network” when he debates the incumbent president in Atlanta on Thursday.Asked what strategy Trump would pursue on the debate stage, she said he would be contending “with debate moderators who have made their opinions about him very well known … and their biased coverage of him”.Leavitt’s comments were aimed, without initially naming them, at the moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper. They triggered an immediate reaction from Hunt, who defended her colleagues.“So I’ll just say, my colleagues, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, have acquitted themselves as professionals as they have covered campaigns and interviewed candidates from all sides of the aisle,” Hunt said. Citing analysts of previous debates, she added: “If you’re attacking the moderators, you’re usually losing.”Hunt then tried to steer Leavitt back on to the topic of the debate, asking what the Trump team expected from Biden.Leavitt, however, refused to be deflected. “Well, first of all, it would take someone five minutes to Google ‘Jake Tapper Donald Trump’ to see Jake Tapper has consistently …” she began, before Hunt cut her off.“Ma’am, we’re going to stop this interview if you’re going to keep attacking my colleagues,” Hunt said.The two then talked over each other, with Leavitt appearing to relish the exchange by grinning broadly. As Hunt repeated her threats to end the interview, Leavitt said: “I am stating facts that your colleagues have stated in the past …”At that point, Hunt ended the exchange, waving her hand in an apparent signal that Leavitt should be taken off air. “OK, I’m sorry, guys – we’re going to come back out to the panel,” Hunt said.Addressing Leavitt, she added: “Karoline, thank you very much for your time. You are welcome to come back at any point. She is welcome to come back and speak about Donald Trump.”Leavitt’s complaints may have been part of a deliberate strategy to gently lower expectations ahead of Thursday’s debate, which is taking place under conditions seen by many as more likely to favour Biden than Trump.Microphones will be muted when it is the opposing candidate’s turn to speak – a measure adopted to prevent the chorus of interruptions that Trump aimed at Biden during the first presidential debate between the pair in September 2020.The exchange will also take place in a TV studio minus a live audience providing the kind of partisan atmosphere that many analysts believe energises Trump, who lost the 2020 race to Biden four years after he won the presidency.But the questioning of the impartiality of Tapper and Bash may also date back to their comments about the infamous 2020 debate, moderated by the then Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, who was widely believed to have lost control.Bash described the event, live on air, as “a shitshow” while Tapper called it “a hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck”.He added: “We’ll talk about who won the debate, who lost the debate … One thing for sure, the American people lost.”Trump, having for months mocked Biden’s supposed cognitive decline, has suddenly started talking up his debating skills. The former president calling Biden “a worthy debater” in a podcast with a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, adding: “I don’t want to underestimate him.”In a speech in Philadelphia over the weekend, Trump described Biden’s likely debate performance in more colourful – though less complimentary – terms, suggesting that Biden was going to take performance-enhancing drugs after undergoing extensive preparation.“Right now, Crooked Joe has gone to a log cabin to ‘study,’” he said. “He’s sleeping now, because they want to get him good and strong. So a little before debate time, he gets a shot in the ass.” More

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      Trump made Nazi ‘ovens’ joke in Jewish executives’ presence, ex-employee says

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      A former employee of Donald Trump’s pre-presidency organization has publicly claimed that he once made jokes about Nazi “ovens” while Jewish executives were in the same room.Barbara Res – a lead engineer on the construction of Trump Tower and author of a memoir, Tower of Lies, about her almost two decades working for the former president – told MSNBC on Sunday that her erstwhile boss would make “ridiculous remarks”.“We had just hired a residential manager, a German guy,” Res said. “And Donald [Trump] was bragging among – to us executives, there were four of us – about how great the guy was and he was a real gentleman, and he was so neat and clean. And he looked at a couple of our executives who happen to be Jewish, and he said, ‘Watch out for this guy – he sort of remembers the ovens,’ you know, and then smiled.“Everybody was shocked,” she continued. “I couldn’t believe he said that. But he was making a joke about the Nazi ovens and killing people, and that’s the way he was.”The Nazis in Germany systematically murdered more than 6 million Jews during the Holocaust and the second world war, and burned the bodies of many in ovens at concentration camps.Res’s story on Sunday came as both parties are attempting to court the Jewish vote in November’s election, which is expected to be a rematch between Trump and Joe Biden. That vote may be in play over the Biden White House’s handling of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.Trump has argued that Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats hate both Israel and Judaism, saying that he and his Republican party are better placed to help end the Gaza war.Res, who has been critical of Trump’s treatment of women in the past, said the former president’s “embrace of religion” is “absolute nonsense”. She didn’t elaborate, but at the center of the criminal prosecution which recently led to Trump’s conviction on 34 felonies was hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actor who alleged an adulterous affair with Trump early into his marriage with Melania Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRes offered advice to Biden ahead of his televised debate with Trump, scheduled for Thursday.“I wish [Biden] would goad him and make him go nuts, because when he goes nuts, he’s really crazy,” Res said.Res’s MSNBC appearance came after Trump held a weekend campaign rally in Philadelphia. She recalled the Nazi joke Trump once told in part because of his choosing to repeat at the rally a hypothetical situation involving an electric boat that sinks under the weight of its batteries and electrocutes the passengers, who are then circled by a shark. More

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      in Elections

      Kristi Noem pushes pardoning US Capitol attackers so ‘we don’t see another January 6’

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      Kristi Noem, once a contender to be the Republicans’ vice-presidential nominee, has argued that people facing charges over the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol should be individually evaluated for pardons – so as to minimize the chances of a repeat.“Each of those situations needs to be looked at separately,” Noem said on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “What I have been very clear about is that we don’t want to see another January 6 again.“Nobody in this country wants to see another day like that again.”The South Dakota governor also offered Donald Trump her support on his promise to grant presidential pardons to those charged or convicted in the Capitol attack that was mounted by his supporters after his defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.The former Republican president has said he is considering pardons for approximately 1,186 defendants if he wins a second term in November’s expected rematch with his Democratic rival Biden. He has said one of his first actions in office would be to free jailed or imprisoned January 6 participants, whom he has described as “hostages”.Noem said pardons should be “based on his prerogative and his decision when he looks at those cases”.“Each of those individuals needs to be looked at separately, as far as what their role was and what was happening in that situation,” Noem said.Some political pundits were unimpressed with the argument laid out by the winner of the 1990 South Dakota Snow Queen Festival pageant, including Public Notice’s Aaron Rupar, who wrote on X: “completely incoherent stuff from Kristi Noem on Meet the Press”.Noem has seen her favorability polling fall since she included a passage in her book No Going Back describing her decision to fatally shoot a hunting dog that she insisted did not hunt and was a danger to her family.The unpopularity of that admission virtually ruled her out as Trump’s vice-presidential pick, who he has claimed will be in attendance for his televised debate with Biden in Atlanta on Thursday.Trump’s promises to reveal his running mate for November’s election came despite the fact that the network CNN has agreed with both campaigns that there will be no studio audience.Noem said she had not received any paperwork from the Trump campaign that could indicate she is in contention for the job. But she said she had “conversations with the president, and I know that he is the only one who will be making the decisions on who will be his vice-president”, a role Mike Pence held when Trump was in the Oval Office from 2017 to early 2021.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAsked if it would be a mistake to not pick a woman, Noem added: “He needs to pick the best person for the job. He needs to pick someone that will help him win.”Noem also maintained that Trump would make an effective president despite his conviction in the criminal prosecution involving hush money paid to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels – and despite the fact that he has pending criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election won by Biden.“I believe that Donald Trump, when he comes back to the White House and is in charge of this country, we’re going to have incredible opportunities to show that people in this country will be safer, that we’ll have law and order back in our streets,” Noem said.A slew of statistics have pointed to a significant decline in violent crime over the past year of Biden’s administration. More

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      Trump freewheels towards debate as Biden rehearses at Camp David

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      Presidential political surrogates fanned out across the Sunday talkshows to prepare the ground for next week’s televised debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, which could help the Democratic incumbent and his Republican predecessor focus the minds of undecided or unengaged voters on November’s election.But the candidates themselves are taking strikingly different approaches. Biden is hunkered down at Camp David in debate preparation, reportedly with his personal attorney Bob Bauer standing in for Trump in mock exchanges.Bauer told Politico last week that his job was “to approximate as closely as you possibly can how it is that that individual, the opponent, is going to debate”.Trump, however, is not known to have a debate surrogate – or been in any debate practice. Instead, he has been out on the campaign trail. In Philadelphia on Saturday, he continued his rhetoric on immigration, at one point saying he would suggest to Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, that the organization pit a league of fighters who are immigrants against the “regular” league fighters with the champion of each then squaring off.That left the talkshows to mull the impending clash with campaign surrogates talking up – or talking down – mounting expectations for a decisive exchange. However, there are also concerns that without a live TV audience to provide voter interaction, it could also fall flat.“I expect President Biden to do an excellent job just like he did the last few debates,” Biden’s campaign co-chairperson Mitch Landrieu told NBC’s Meet the Press.Referring in part to Trump’s conviction in the criminal prosecution involving hush-money paid to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels, Landrieu said: “It really doesn’t matter how Donald Trump shows up, if he comes in unhinged, like he has most of the time, or he sits there and is quiet, people are going to know that he’s a twice-impeached convicted felon who has been found to have defamed somebody, sexually abused somebody and going bankrupt six times.”Landrieu said that Biden was “really anxious to tell his story to the American people”, adding: “This race is going to be tight. Everybody knows that.”Trump, Landrieu said, “wakes up every day pretty much thinking about himself, thinking about his rich friends … really thinking about ways to hurt people with the power that he would have if he were the president of the United States again”.Biden, Landrieu added, “wants to be really clear about the difference between those two that everybody will see again on Thursday”.Also for the Democrats was the US senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a member of the national advisory board for Biden’s re-election campaign. With the second anniversary of the elimination of federal abortion rights previously granted by Roe v Wade falling on Monday, Warren sought to bring reproductive rights to the forefront of the looming presidential race, a posture that let Democrats retain control of the Senate and blunted the Republican House majority in 2022.Warren said that if Biden is re-elected and Democrats are given a majority in Congress, her party would be able to defend and restore access to abortion, contraception and in vitro fertilization.“We’re going to make Roe v Wade [the] law of the land again,” Warren said. “Understand this. I want to say this as clearly as I can. If Donald Trump is elected to the presidency, he and the extremist Republicans are coming after abortion, contraception, and IVF in every single state in this country. Not just the [conservative] states.”Trump has said his VP pick will be in the audience in Atlanta on Thursday – a contest that is reported to have narrowed to the North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, Florida senator Marco Rubio, and Ohio senator JD Vance.Trump told reporters on Saturday he had made a determination but has not let them know. “In my mind, yeah”, Trump told reporters at a cheesesteak restaurant in Philadelphia.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor who was once considered a strong contender to be Trump’s running mate, on Sunday continued trying to bounce back from a disastrous passage in her recently published book in which she recounted shooting a dog to death that she claimed had become dangerous to her family.Noem’s admission came after Biden’s German shepherd, Commander, was merely banished from the White House after biting three dozen Secret Service agents during an 18-month reign of terror.Noem said she thought Thursday’s clash would be “an important debate” and “a great opportunity for President Trump to talk about his policies and how his policies when he served as president of this country were good”.Nonetheless, Noem confirmed that she had not received paperwork from Trump relating to his vice-president pick that others reportedly had. “I’ve had conversations with the president, and I know that he is the only one who will be making the decisions on who will be his vice-president,” she said diplomatically.A strong contender for the role, Burgum told CNN’s State of the Union that Biden’s team had made a real effort to lower expectations. He challenged the network, which is the debate host, to ask tough questions, including over Biden’s assertion when he last debated Trump in 2020 that the furore around Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation”.Though many claims about its contents have not been confirmed, the laptop was admitted as evidence in the recent trial which led to Hunter Biden’s conviction on three federal gun charges.“If he’s that good at lying about that four years ago, the question is what might he do this time,” Burgum added. More

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      Atlanta center of US political universe once again with Biden-Trump debate

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      Joe Biden will debate Donald Trump on Thursday night in an unnerving repeat of the 2020 election cycle, and once again Atlanta is the center of the political universe.The question is whether the two candidates can influence Atlanta, or if Atlanta, which influences everything in American politics, is beyond their influence.Elections in Georgia have been in a state of trench warfare since 2018, the rise of Stacey Abrams and election outcomes predicated more on supercharged turnout than convincing anyone of anything they didn’t already believe. Georgia’s 2020 election was decided by a figurative hair – the infamous 11,780 votes Trump asked the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to find in a “perfect phone call” that led to his indictment here.Within the state, Atlanta has extra significance this year. The Biden administration has sent Kamala Harris to the city repeatedly this year, a sign of Democratic anxiety about losing Black voters in a historically Black city. Biden himself came last month to give the commencement speech at Morehouse College, a historically Black college, to a generally positive reception.Trump also has a relationship with Atlanta, of course. It is markedly less positive.Whether Trump is returning to the scene of the crime is a matter to be decided, eventually, by a Fulton county jury. Trump had his notorious – and lucrative – mug shot taken at the Fulton county jail about two miles north-west of the empty studio he and Biden will debate in, across the street from Centennial Olympic Park downtown.“All I can see coming out of this is memes,” said Bem Joiner, an Atlanta cultural critic and creative consultant. Joiner doesn’t want to diminish the importance of a presidential debate, and knows there are issues for which the public craves substantive argument, but people have already picked a side, he said.“I think it is what it is with this race,” Joiner said. “I cannot see questions being answered in a way that changes the mind of anyone at this point, with these two people. You can only, maybe, do something to fuck it up more for you.”View image in fullscreenFor all the symbolism of a debate in the heart of Atlanta, the format is made largely for the national stage. The two men will be standing in an otherwise-empty room, interrogated by two CNN anchors – Jake Tapper and Dana Bash – who neither live nor work in the city.Perhaps the spare environment will limit casualties from collateral fire. In the 2016 debates, Trump lied repeatedly and floridly about his performance on the pandemic, race relations and the economy, while interrupting the moderators and Biden. We remember Trump telling Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” and Biden, exasperated by yet another interruption, asking Trump to just shut up for once.The vitriolic chaos effectively ended the Presidential Commission on Debates as a mechanism for administering the events. This time, Biden is the one defending a presidential record. Trump wants to focus on that record, looking for a wedge to separate Biden from what pliable voters remain in America. Biden is likely to be comfortable explaining the accomplishments of his administration, but will try to use the debate to remind America of the reasons they got rid of Trump in the first place.CNN’s studios in downtown Atlanta are mostly empty today. The network has been forsaking the CNN Center bit by bit for a decade, accelerating their shift to DC and New York after AT&T sold the building to developers in 2021. The halls are filled with echoes of Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer, abandoned set signs in the walkways and ghosts in the studios. The markers of life, such as the Cartoon Network store in the moribund food court, are gone.Workers carted away the CNN sign in March. They just call it “the Center” now.Atlanta itself is thriving, generally, despite the protestations of conservatives like Trump, who has repeatedly attacked its elected leaders and its people over the years. Atlanta also has a flair for expressing its displeasure at such things.Trump even unloaded on the Atlanta civil rights leader and congressman John Lewis in 2017 after the congressman skipped Trump’s lightly-attended inauguration. “Congressman John Lewis should finally focus on the burning and crime infested inner-cities of the US. I can use all the help I can get,” he tweeted.Atlanta responded with a barrage of snark under the hashtag #defendthefifth, posting idyllic pictures of children playing in parks or strolling along the BeltLine. Those hashtags were still being used by people standing in line to vote in Atlanta in 2020.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump also showed up to the college football championship at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in 2018. But the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America projected the words “Fuck Trump” on to the side of the stadium while he was there, and not one soul did a thing to stop them.Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that Trump had to cart in Black supporters for a publicity stunt presented as authentic community support for his campaign two months ago at a Chick-fil-A up the street from the stadium. Even so, Trump claims he’s winning Black voters in record numbers, which – if it were true – might represent the margin of victory in Georgia.“What is absolutely true is the Republicans cannot win the White House without Georgia,” said Stephanie Jackson Ali, policy director for the New Georgia Project, a voter outreach organization. “Either way, Georgia is going to be critical this year for any side to perform well in.”“Georgia is also unique in being such a southern state with a large Black population, but also a growing Latino population and API [Asian/Pacific Islands] population. This perfect storm of reasons makes Georgia such a great place to come to, because you can talk to so many people from so many backgrounds, all in one place.”The New Georgia Project’s political action fund is hosting a watch party, “Vibe and Vote”, at a cigar bar on Peachtree Street on debate night, focusing on Black men and voter turnout. Trump’s reported gains with Black men have prompted a wave of outreach from progressive groups.Harris, meanwhile, may as well put down a deposit on a Buckhead condo considering all the time she spends in town. She has made a point of discussing the administration’s investments in the Black community generally and Atlanta specifically, like a $158m plan to use infrastructure dollars on a project to build a cap over Atlanta’s most traveled highway, the Downtown Connector.She again visited Atlanta on Tuesday – her fifth visit to Georgia this year – for a talk with Migos rapper Quavo to discuss gun violence.Biden and Trump are competing for a vanishingly small portion of the electorate – people who haven’t made up their mind about two people who have been in the public eye for much of the last two decades of American life. Neither is popular. But many people have simply tuned out politics, even here in the center of the political storm.The first debate is a warning bell for them, that election season is upon us more than ever and it is time to pay attention. More