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      Arizona secretary of state calls threats to election officials ‘domestic terrorism’

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      The rising threats against US elections officials are a form of domestic terrorism, the secretary of state in the presidential campaign battleground state of Arizona has said.“Terrorism is defined as a threat of violence for a political outcome,” Adrian Fontes said in remarks recorded for an NBC Meet the Press episode airing on Sunday morning. “That’s what this is, and … we do have to address it for what it is.”Fontes’s comments came as he formed part of a Meet the Press panel of top elections officials from states whose voters could decide in November whether Joe Biden serves a second term in the White House or Donald Trump returns to the presidency.The Guardian has reported how Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, has taken extraordinary measures to protect its staff and the counting of ballots. Election workers there endure a daily torrent of hateful and menacing messages over email and social media as Trump and his Republican supporters continue to lie that Biden and his Democratic allies fraudulently stole the 2020 presidential race from him.Fontes, a Democrat and retired US marine, told Meet the Press that such abuse was not enough to get him “off of his post” personally. But, he added: “I will say … it has [affected] not just us but our families as well.“You know, when you have to tell your neighbors, ‘Hey, pay attention, if something happens, the kids might have to come over,’ or to have go-bags ready, or to any number of these things so many people across the country have had to suffer through – that’s a problem,” Fontes said. “One of the ways that I have been looking at this and addressing this is telling the really hard truth. And that is this: threats against elections officials in the United States of America is domestic terrorism.”The label of domestic terrorism is one that both the political left and right in the US constantly argue over.For instance, federal prosecutors have avoided seeking domestic terrorism sentences for Trump supporters convicted of carrying out the deadly attack on the US Capitol after his defeat to Biden. But agencies laid the groundwork to level domestic terrorism charges against mainly liberal activists protesting against a proposed police training center in Atlanta known as Cop City.Fontes said he was optimistic that the justice department was “really ramping up and starting to prosecute” threats aimed at election officials. Notably, in March, a Massachusetts man who had threatened to blow up Fontes’s office in 2021 was handed three and a half years in prison, marking one of the most severe federal punishments yet handed down for the wave of violent threats against ballot workers driven by Trump’s stolen election lies.Trump’s attempts to subvert the legitimacy of Biden’s victory in 2020 has been at the center of several of the more than 80 state and federal criminal charges pending against him across a total of four indictments in various jurisdictions.“We’re working with law enforcement across the country to really start to address these things,” Fontes said of election-worker security. “It’s not too little, too late – but we do have to address it for what it is.” More

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      Biden campaign releases De Niro-voiced video ad warning Trump has ‘snapped’

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      Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has released a high-profile new video ad they are calling Snapped, which attacks Donald Trump as a candidate who will stop at nothing to grab power again.The aggressive, 30-second spot is voiced by an old Hollywood foe of the former president, the actor Robert De Niro, and will be distributed nationally.Against a backdrop of dramatic orchestral music and news images from Trump’s presidency, the De Niro voiceover begins: “From midnight tweets, to drinking bleach, to teargassing citizens and staging a photo-op, we knew Trump was out of control when he was president, and then he lost the 2020 election and snapped.”In relevant photographs, Trump is shown on his phone on Air Force One and at the podium in the White House briefing room in a notorious press conference in 2020 when he suggested that being treated internally with bleach might combat Covid-19. Then he is shown posing with a Bible outside what’s known as the Church of the Presidents, near the White House, after nearby demonstrations against racial injustice and police brutality, following the murder of George Floyd in May, 2020, had been violently cleared by the authorities.Then it goes on to show the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, when extremist supporters of Trump, encouraged by the then president, broke into US congressional chambers to try, ultimately in vain, to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory over him.De Niro continues that Trump was “desperately trying to hold on to power”. Then adds: “Now he’s running again, this time threatening to be a dictator, to terminate the constitution.”Footage of Trump shows him warning there will be a “bloodbath” if he does not win in 2024, and additional images showing a mob carrying pro-Trump and election-denying flags clashing with police.“Trump wants revenge and he’ll stop at nothing to get it,” the voice of De Niro continues.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe US president then says in his voiceover: “I’m Joe Biden and I approve this message”. The closing image is Biden walking towards a doorway and saluting the troops that guard him. More

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      Ohio governor calls special legislative session to include Biden on election ballot

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      Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has called an emergency legislative session to put Joe Biden’s name on the presidential ballot after what he called an “absurd” threat from the state’s top election officer to remove the president for missing its deadline.For weeks, Ohio’s secretary of state, Frank LaRose, has been at loggerheads with the Democrats over how to put Biden and his vice-president, Kamala Harris, on the ballot given that their official nomination comes after the expiry of the state’s deadline of 90 days before the November election.The Biden-Harris ticket is scheduled to be certified after its official coronation on the final day of the Democratic national convention on 22 August in Chicago, 15 days after Ohio’s 7 August cutoff date.LaRose, also a Republican, warned this week that current rules would force him to exclude Biden’s name from ballot papers, denying voters in the state a full choice of presidential candidates.He wrote to the chair of the Ohio Democratic party, Elizabeth Walters, saying the onus was on the party to change its nominating arrangements because the state legislature had ruled out amending Ohio law to accommodate Biden.In a news conference, DeWine overrode that decision, calling the situation “simply unacceptable”.“Ohio is running out of time to get Joe Biden, the sitting president of the United States, on the ballot this fall,” he said. “Failing to do so is simply not acceptable. This is a ridiculous – this is an absurd situation.”Posting on X, LaRose – who first raised the issue last month – had earlier said he was “duty bound to follow the law as Ohio’s chief elections officer”.“As it stands today, the Democratic Party’s nomination will not be on the Ohio election ballot,” he wrote. “That is not my choice. It’s due to a conflict in the law created by the party, and the party has so far offered no legally acceptable remedy.”The Democrats had earlier suggested resolving the problem by offering a “provisional nomination” of Biden and Harris, a solution LaRose said fell short of the state’s legal standard. Democrats countered that this view was contradicted by the experience of the 2020 election when, they argued, several other states accepted a similar resolution to incompatible deadlines for both parties.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDeWine’s decision potentially saves the Democratic party from filing a lawsuit to force Biden’s name on to the ballot.A similar possible deadlock situation arose in Alabama, but state legislators resolved it by pushing back the certification date, with the governor quickly signing it into law.The imbroglio has come against a backdrop of mistrust between Democrats and Republicans over elections, fuelled by Donald Trump’s relentless peddling of a lie that Biden’s 2020 presidential victory was “stolen”.Ohio was once viewed as a swing state but has recently trended solidly Republican, with Trump triumphing over Biden by eight percentage points four years ago, and beating Hillary Clinton by a similar margin in 2016. More

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      ‘Thrilled to be back’: Trump swaps courtroom for Bronx in play for Hispanic and Black voters

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      Even for a man known for his bombast, Donald Trump’s foray into one of the poorest, most diverse and staunchly Democratic parts of America, New York city’s South Bronx, on Thursday night was an offensive move of breathtaking audacity.His rally in the crucible of hiphop, where 95% of the population is Black or Hispanic and where 35% live below the poverty line, was like voluntarily stepping into the lion’s den. Being Trump, he declared it a historic victory.“When I woke up this morning I wondered whether it will be hostile or will it be friendly. It was a lovefest!” he said towards the end of his 90-minute speech.Just a few blocks away from Crotona Park – the location of Trump’s first campaign rally in New York state since 2016 – is the congressional district of his nemesis, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Trump notoriously told AOC to “go back” to the country where she came from – a bold line to take with a woman born in the Bronx.Yet despite arriving in a New York borough that is home to some of his fiercest critics in the Democratic party, Trump strode onto the platform on a balmy evening as though he were returning to his own personal playground. “Right here in the Bronx, I’m thrilled to be back in the city I grew up in, the city I spent my life in,” he said.What he pointedly didn’t say was that he wasn’t just turning up in New York after a long absence. He has of course spent the best part of the past six weeks holed up in a frigid courtroom just 10 miles south of Thursday’s rally site, his eyes often closed, while a jury considers whether to convict him of falsifying business records to cover up an alleged affair with Stormy Daniels.In five days’ time he will be back in the Manhattan criminal courthouse for closing arguments, after which the jury will be sent out to decide his fate.View image in fullscreenAOC goaded Trump remorselessly over his ongoing legal afflictions. In comments made before the rally, she said that the only reason the event was happening at all was because he was trapped in the city for the duration of the trial.“The man practically has the legal version of an ankle bracelet round him,” she said.By all accounts, the experience of enduring 20 court days of People v Donald J Trump has been excruciating for Trump. He has been forced into a world where he has no control, where people do not fawn over him, where he looks “haggard and rumpled”, as the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman memorably portrayed him.On Thursday night that shriveled Trump was gone, to be replaced by a more familiar figure: Trump as the architect of the best economy on Earth; the most successful businessman and deal-maker ever … and the “hottest”, to boot (his description).In epic meanderings that have become increasingly common at Trump rallies, he took several trips down memory lane, as though nostalgia has become his balm for legal agony. He listed at length his triumphs as a real estate developer in New York, so much so that at times it seemed the city’s legendary skyline was built by his own fair hands.He swung between lavishly praising New York city, and denigrating it as a metropolis in decline. It was both the greatest city in the world that had spawned heroes like Teddy Roosevelt, Frank Sinatra and Babe Ruth; and a Third World catastrophe littered with discarded needles, drugged-out homeless people, buckling sidewalks and lunatics pushing innocent bystanders onto the subway tracks.The Trump campaign had billed the Bronx rally as an opportunity to display to the world how well the former president is doing with Hispanic and Black voters. A ripple of recent polls have indicated that his fortunes with these two heavily Democratic-leaning voting groups may be starting to improve.“Who said we are not going to win New York? We are going to win New York City!” he prophesied, before going on to make a naked play for the majority-minority vote of the South Bronx. He claimed to have lifted 6.6 million people out of poverty when he was in the White House, comparing that with the “disaster” of Biden’s economy in which African American earnings had slumped almost 6%.“African Americans are getting slaughtered. Hispanic Americans are being slaughtered. The biggest negative impact of the millions and millions of illegals coming into this country is against our Black population and our Hispanic population who are losing their jobs, housing, losing everything.”View image in fullscreenTrump’s prediction that he will win New York is fanciful, political observers have no doubt. The last time a Republican president won in the Bronx was Calvin Coolidge in 1924. Trump lost to Joe Biden here in 2020 by a thumping 84% to 16%.Which is not to say that something is not happening. The crowd at Crotona Park was unquestionably more diverse than your typical, almost exclusively white, Trump rally.Up to a quarter of the thousands of people who came to hear him (the New York City Parks Department said Trump’s campaign had a permit for up to 3,500 people) were Hispanic or Black. Some of the supporters wore their Make America Great Again politics proudly on their sleeves.“I’m a Black dyed-in-the-wool Republican,” read one T-shirt. A group of three Hispanic women waiting for the secret service to screen them at the start of the evening chanted “Trumpito!” “Trumpito!” as they danced to the official theme song of Trump Latinos.Theo Diakite, 29, an African American who lives close to the park, said he was drawn to the rally out of curiosity. He has never voted in his life, but this year is feeling tempted to back Trump.He has noticed that other people in his neighborhood share that curiosity. “There are a lot of people who were firm against him in 2020, but are now not so sure.”When Diakite told his dad, a lifelong Democrat, that he was going to the Trump rally he expected a tongue-lashing. To his surprise, his father replied: “Yeah man, I’ve been very disappointed about what’s been going on these past two years.”Anson Paul, 30, a Black personal fitness trainer from the South Bronx who voted twice for Barack Obama, was wearing a red Maga hat backwards. That was a sign of the times, he said.“In 2020 I wouldn’t have worn a Maga hat – it was too crazy, people could have assaulted me.” Now, he said, things were changing.“We’re still in the minority, but people in the Bronx are waking up to Donald Trump.”Tiana Diaz, 43, was born and raised in the South Bronx in a family of Puerto Rican descent. She said she was proud to sport a pink Make America Great Again hat, having voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020.For Diaz, Trump’s legal troubles in the courtroom merely strengthened her adulation for him. It reminds her, she said, of why she turned to him in the first place – the sense that everybody in the “system” was out to get him.“I have a BS radar, and I knew it was all bullshit,” she said. “That trial is just plain BS.”Democratic organisers and union leaders staged their own counter-rally at a separate corner of Crotona Park. It was a small gathering of only about 200 people, according to reports, but it carried a punchy title: “Trump isn’t welcome in the Bronx”. More

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      Who does RFK Jr pose the bigger threat to: Joe Biden or Donald Trump? – podcast

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      Last week it was announced that Donald Trump and Joe Biden would finally hit the debate stage for a rematch. While voters contemplate which of the pair stands to lose more by going head to head, another candidate is working hard to try to join them – Robert F Kennedy Jr. The controversial independent candidate doesn’t even have the backing of his famous political family, but he’s polling nationally stronger than any third-party candidate has in decades.
      This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to political analyst David Corn about which of the two frontrunners should be more worried by RFK Jr’s presidential campaign

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Nikki Haley says she will vote for Donald Trump in 2024 election

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      Nikki Haley, who emerged as Donald Trump’s most enduring rival and trenchant critic during the Republican primary elections, has said she intends to vote for the former US president in November.Haley was speaking at the Hudson Institute thinktank in Washington on Wednesday, her first public appearance since dropping out of the race in March. She was asked whether Joe Biden or Trump would do a better job on national security issues.The former ambassador to the UN and South Carolina governor ran through a list of priorities when choosing a president, ranging from the need to back allies and hold enemies to account, to supporting capitalism and freedom while reducing the national debt.“Trump has not been perfect on these policies,” Haley said. “I have made that clear many, many times. But Biden has been a catastrophe. So I will be voting for Trump.”The 52-year-old added by way of caveat: “Having said that, I stand by what I said in my suspension speech. Trump would be smart to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me and not assume that they’re just going to be with him. And I genuinely hope he does that.”Haley joins the US Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, the former attorney general William Barr and Chris Sununu, the New Hampshire governor, in the ranks of one-time Trump foes who will nevertheless support him as the party nominee.During a bruising primary campaign, she said Trump had “lost any sort of political viability”, showed “moral weakness” and is “thin-skinned and easily distracted”. She argued that America needs to move on from his “chaos”. Trump fired back and recently dismissed reports that he might consider Haley as his running mate.Haley’s U-turn provoked a swift backlash. Sarah Longwell, a political strategist and publisher of the conservative Bulwark website, tweeted: “So when Nikki Haley said, ‘It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him.’ She really meant, he can treat me and my voters like garbage and I’ll still fall in line and support him.”Joe Walsh, an ex-Republican congressman, added: “This isn’t complicated: Nikki Haley believes Trump is unfit. And she believes he should never be back in the White House. But if she said that publicly, her career as a Republican would be over. So, as expected, she decided to not be truthful. To keep her career as a Republican.”Although she dropped out of the primaries in early March, Haley has continued to draw up to 20% in the contests, a clear warning sign for Trump’s campaign. The former president has dismissed the idea of trying to appeal to Haley’s voters, where Biden said in Atlanta this weekend: “Let me say, there’s always going to be a place for Haley voters in my campaign.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump has also been endorsed by former Republican primary opponents including Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur, and the South Carolina senator Tim Scott.Earlier in the event at the Hudson Institute, attended by several foreign ambassadors, Haley was fiercely critical of far right Republicans who favour “America first” isolationism, though she did not mention Trump by name. She praised the House speaker Mike Johnson for pushing aid for Israel and Ukraine through Congress.“A growing number of Democrats and Republicans have forgotten what makes America safe,” she said. “A loud part of each party wants us to abandon our allies, appease our enemies and focus only on the problems we have at home.“They believe if we leave the world alone, the world will leave us alone. They even say ignoring global chaos will somehow make our country more secure. It will not. This worldview has already put America in great danger and the threat is mounting by the day.” More

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      Trump falsely claims US justice department was ready to kill him

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      On social media and in a Tuesday fundraising email, Donald Trump raised an alarming concern. The Department of Justice, he said, was ready to kill him.The wild distortion came against the backdrop of Trump’s hush-money trial in New York and amid fears of rising political violence around the coming presidential election, predominantly from the far right. The comments cement an inverted picture Trump and his allies have painted, in which a patriotic Trump is pitted against anti-democratic deep-state foes.The outlandish claims could ratchet up anger among his supporters and stoke conspiracy theories. “You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable,” read the Trump campaign fundraising email, signed with the former president’s name. “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”On his social media website, Truth Social, Trump echoed the claim. “Crooked Joe Biden’s DoJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE,” he alleged.Trump was apparently referencing the order for a search warrant executed in August 2022, when plainclothes agents of the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in search of classified documents Trump had allegedly refused to turn over to the government.A May court filing by Trump’s legal team, under a section titled “The Illegal Raid”, quotes from a line in the search warrant.“The Order contained a ‘Policy Statement’ regarding ‘Use Of Deadly Force,’ which stated, for example, ‘Law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force when necessary,’” attorneys representing Trump wrote.The language cited in the filing was apparently taken from DoJ policy outlining the use of force in executing search warrants. The unabridged text of the policy reads: “Law enforcement officers and correctional officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force only when necessary, that is, when the officer has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.”The agency executed the warrant to search Trump’s Florida home while Trump was in New York and reportedly communicated with the Secret Service agents present to ensure a smooth operation.In a statement, the FBI described the language as “a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force. No one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter.”The Washington Post has previously reported that FBI agents picked a day for the raid when Trump would not be at Mar-a-Lago and told the Secret Service ahead of time.But Trump’s statements about the filing have unleashed a frenzy. Christina Bobb, an attorney for the former president who signed documents before the search claiming Trump had complied with the subpoena for documents, reacted with similar hyperbole.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“WTF?!! They were prepared to kill me?! A few dozen FBI agents v. me and they were ready to kill me?!!! What in the world happened to the United States of America?!” wrote Bobb, on X.“These people are sick,” wrote Paul Gosar, an Arizona congressman and staunch Trump ally, also on X. “Biden ordered the hit on Trump at Mar-A-Lago,” he added in a subsequent post.The rhetorical redirection – from the content of Trump’s legal battles, which range from alleged financial improprieties to the mishandling of classified documents to his brazen attempt to overturn the 2020 election – form part of a strategy Trump and his allies are embracing before the 2024 presidential election.The public relations strategy turns Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies back at his critics – “enemies”, in the former president’s parlance – as allegations. In communications shared widely with his followers, it is the Department of Justice, the media, the Democrats and Rinos – Republican in name only – who dare to criticize him who threaten democracy.Trump, who has warned of “death and destruction” if charged with crimes and who defended supporters calling for the assassination of former vice-president Mike Pence for refusing to join the plot to overturn the election, urges his supporters to see him as the victim.“NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE,” Trump added in his post accusing the D0J of preparing to use lethal force, “THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY.” More

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      Ivanka Trump looks like the comeback kid – and we should all be afraid | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Forget polls or statistical modelling – if you want to know what is going to happen in the US elections, may I suggest consulting the Ivank-a-Meter™? Much complex analysis has gone into the development of my proprietary prediction tool, but the premise is this: the closer Ivanka Trump is to her father, the closer Donald Trump is to the White House.Both Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, always seem to know which way the wind is blowing: the pair made out like bandits when they were unelected members of the Trump administration. Then, when it felt like the grift may be up, the Saudis gave Kushner billions to invest. Over the last couple of years, Jared has been managing those billions while Ivanka has been walking her extremely white dog, Winter, on the beach and going surfing. Both of them seem to have made sure that there are frequent quotes in the press from “people familiar with their thinking”, insisting that the pair don’t want anything to do with politics ever again.While “Javanka” kept their distance from the former president during Trump’s lows, there are signs Ivanka might be thinking of coming out of political retirement. Last summer, just as Trump started doing well in the polls, Ivanka started being spotted with Dad again. Now that a second Trump term is a serious possibility, an Ivanka comeback is being more prominently teased. A few weeks ago, the media outlet Puck reported that Ivanka is “warming to the idea of trying to be helpful again … She’s not like ‘Hell no’ any more.” Last week, an anonymous “friend of Ivanka” told Business Insider that the former first daughter has softened her stance on avoiding politics for ever. While a spokesperson for the couple told Puck these rumours were nonsense, it does feel as though Ivanka is testing the political waters.And while it’s certainly not a done deal that the US will see a President Trump again, if we do then you can expect the reign to be long. Trump recently floated the idea of a third term if he wins in November, and it is rumoured that Ivanka has harboured dreams of being the first female president. All of which to say: the Ivank-a-Meter is flashing red. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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