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      RNC plan for 2020 denialist to head ‘election integrity’ unit raises alarms

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      As Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has cemented its hold on the Republican National Committee (RNC), alarms are being raised about the organisation’s tapping of the fervent election denialist Christina Bobb to run an “election integrity” unit.Bobb is a former Trump lawyer and ex-reporter for the far-right One America News Network, who gained prominence after Trump’s 2020 loss for promoting bogus fraud charges in Arizona, Wisconsin and elsewhere, and was part of Trump-backed efforts to substitute fake electors for ones that Joe Biden won in some states.Bobb helped spread phoney voting fraud claims with Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and the former campaign operative Mike Roman, both of whom along with Trump and others face charges in Fulton county, Georgia, of conspiring to overturn Biden’s win there; Bobb was not charged.Last year Bobb wrote Stealing Your Vote: The Inside Story of the 2020 Election and What It Means for 2024, a book that was chock full of baseless charges about 2020 election fraud.Former judges, ex-Republican congressmen and election watchdogs voice strong concerns about Bobb’s mission and the potential dangers posed by her flood of erroneous charges of voting fraud.“By designating Bobb to the RNC post, they’re beginning to promulgate the same false narrative of widespread election fraud that we saw in 2020 and 2021 but way earlier,” said John Jones, a former federal judge in Pennsylvania and now president of Dickinson College.“There’s a concept known as illusory truth,” he added. “If you keep saying these same falsehoods over and over, people begin to believe they’re true, and it has the potential to morph into violence. That puts judges, prosecutors and others at risk.”The RNC’s hiring of Bobb comes as Trump keeps falsely claiming that the 2020 election was rigged and talks up new efforts this year to “guard the vote” to ferret out potential fraud. Experts have conclusively said fraud was not a factor in Trump’s loss by over 7 million votes, and stressed that historically voting fraud has been minimal.Bobb’s “election integrity” post at the RNC is expected to involve teams of poll workers, poll watchers and other efforts in swing states and she has begun talking with key Maga allies with similar missions. Bobb last month told the far-right reporter Breanna Morello that her top goal is “empowering the grassroots”.Bobb was on at least one conference call in March with a half-dozen Trump-allied groups including ones that echo her false claims about 2020 election fraud, according to a person on the call, who said: “We’re all going to coordinate.”Among the groups on the call, he added, was Arizona-based Turning Point Action, which has a track record of promoting falsehoods about 2020 election fraud.Many experts raise red flags about Bobb’s new RNC post.The former Republican congressman Charlie Dent said the RNC’s hiring of Bobb “is a further indication of how the RNC has not only become an arm of the Trump campaign, but an outlet for the most extreme elements of the election denial movement”.Likewise, the ex-Republican congressman Dave Trott predicted: “Bobb will be leading the charge and saying the election was rigged if Trump loses.”Some key Democrats are also alarmed by what Bobb’s RNC role may presage.“Putting Christina Bobb in charge of election integrity is like putting Donald Trump in charge of integrity,” the Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin said. “They’re designing a platform for lies to wage the next insurrection.”Although Bobb’s “election integrity” slot is new and a work in progress, the RNC’s new leadership seems to be banking on her.Lara Trump, the new RNC vice-chair and Trump’s daughter-in-law, told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on 12 March: “We have the first-ever election integrity division at the [RNC]. That means massive resources going to this one thing.”Lara Trump added: “We will have trained poll watchers, poll observers, poll workers, people in tabulation centers all across this country,” and signaled that volunteers for these slots and lawyers are needed.Bobb, whose official RNC title is senior counsel for election integrity, wrote on X: “I’m honored to be a part of the new team at the RNC.”Besides Bobb, the RNC in March tapped Charlie Spies, who had previously served as its election law counsel, to be its chief counsel.Further, the RNC also named William McGinley, a veteran election lawyer who worked in the Trump administration, as outside counsel for election integrity, a move that could presage more litigation.But Bobb’s litany of baseless fraud claims as she worked with key Trump allies to overturn the 2020 election results, shadow her new RNC role.For instance, Bobb used her perch at One America News Network (OAN) to spread bogus claims of fraud that led to a defamation lawsuit against her and OAN by the voting technology firm Dominion; Bobb and OAN have both denied any wrongdoing.Separately Bobb signed a letter falsely certifying to the justice department on Trump’s behalf in 2022 that after a “diligent search” he had returned all the classified documents the special counsel Jack Smith later charged the former president with illegally taking to Mar-a-Lago after he left the White House.A subsequent FBI raid found about 100 classified documents; Bobb, who reportedly was interviewed by the FBI, indicated that another lawyer drafted the letter she signed.Given that Bobb was only tapped for her RNC post this month, it is unclear whether she has begun recruiting staff or taken other steps to develop the RNC’s election integrity program.But a source close to the Trump campaign stressed that “the key to election observing is redundancy”, meaning that it would involve multiple coordinated efforts, which suggests that the RNC program will be done in tandem with similar poll-watching and poll worker drives by Trump allied groups.The need for “redundancy” and Bobb’s early conference call with several outside groups are emerging as key strategies for Bobb, as she revealed in an interview on 15 March with Morello, a conservative journalist who used to be with Fox News.Bobb told Morello that her top goal at the RNC is “empowering the grassroots. This has to be a grassroots approach … We have to empower people in their communities.”The RNC press office did not reply to a request for comment.The RNC’s election integrity drive this year comes after a few decades when a moratorium was imposed on RNC poll-watching operations due to aggressive tactics it employed in 1981 that went beyond permissible programs.At some polling places in New Jersey in 1981, the GOP used off-duty police officers and provided rewards to some people who claimed they had evidence of voting fraud. After those incidents, the party agreed to halt poll-watching efforts until 2018, when the moratorium terminated.Still, some lawyers and election veterans are troubled by the RNC’s hiring of Bobb given her history of election denialism and Trump’s obsession with debunked claims of fraud in 2020.“I don’t think it’s a good thing when a major party hires fringe characters who don’t understand how elections work,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.Other lawyers express similar worries about Bobb’s background.“It’s unclear whether the RNC wants those who are not already loyalists to take its commitment to ‘election integrity’ seriously,” said the former federal prosecutor and Columbia law professor Daniel Richman.“But if it does, picking someone who, according to the Florida indictment against Trump, was the vehicle for certifying his false statements about returning all the classified documents in his possession, is an odd choice.”Looking ahead, Chioma Chukwu, the deputy executive director of the watchdog group American Oversight, called Bobb’s hiring by the RNC “a dangerous sign of how entrenched the election denial movement has become on the right”.“Elevating Bobb – who continues to push baseless lies about voter fraud – to a top post focused on ‘election integrity’ serves no purpose other than to sow chaos and confusion in November, allowing partisan actors to cry ‘foul’ if their preferred candidate loses.” More

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      Senator Raphael Warnock: ‘The Bible doesn’t need Trump’s endorsement’

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      Donald Trump’s decision to sell Bibles branded under his name is “risky business”, the Democratic US senator Raphael Warnock said on Sunday, as the former president stands accused of having few moral scruples in four separate criminal indictments pending against him.“The Bible does not need Donald Trump’s endorsement,” Warnock, the pastor of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist church, said to CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. Speaking on Easter, one of Christianity’s holiest celebrations, Warnock added: “It’s a risky bet because the folks who buy those Bibles might actually open them up, where it says things like thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not bear false witness, where it warns about wolves dressed up in sheep’s clothing.“I think you ought to be careful. This is risky business for somebody like Donald Trump.”Warnock’s comments to CNN came days after the Republican who is running against Joe Biden for a second presidency in November presented an offer for the public to buy Trump-endorsed Bibles for $59.99. “Let’s Make America Pray Again”, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, a clear reference to the “Make America Great Again” slogan that he rode to the White House in 2016.But indeed more than 80 criminal charges filed against Trump over the previous 12 months – including in Warnock’s home state of Georgia – charge the former president with behaving in ways that many true Bible devotees would frown upon.Trump has pleaded not guilty to allegations that he tried to unduly overturn the outcome of the 2020 election that he lost to his Democratic rival Biden, improperly retained classified government materials after his presidency, and illicitly covered up hush-money payments to an adult film actor who has claimed to have engaged in extramarital sex with him.He is also facing multimillion-dollar civil penalties for business practices deemed fraudulent and an allegation that he raped a woman – a claim that a judge has determined to be substantially true.Warnock on Sunday said he wasn’t surprised Trump had turned to selling Bibles to help raise funds for his soaring legal bills as well as his presidential campaign. The senator alluded to Trump’s history of hawking – among other things – Trump-branded steaks, non-accredited business school degrees and, more recently, $399 gold sneakers.“Now he’s trying to sell the scriptures,” said Warnock, who was first elected to the US Senate in 2020. “At the end of the day, I think he’s trying to sell the American people a bill of goods.”Warnock went out of his way to mention that Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016, but recognized that his tact allowed him to triumph in the electoral college. But Warnock remarked: “It did not work in 2020,” when Trump lost both the popular and electoral college votes.“And,” the senator said,” I don’t think it’s going to work in 2024.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDuring his interview on CNN, Warnock also addressed criticism from Trump and his Republican allies that Biden recognized Transgender Day of Visibility – which falls annually on 31 March – as scheduled on Sunday, even though this year it coincided with Easter.The Republican US House speaker, Mike Johnson, notably asserted that Biden had “betrayed the central tenet of Easter”, something that he called “outrageous and abhorrent”.Warnock, who is part of a succession of Ebenezer Baptist church pastors that includes the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, said the fabricated controversy was another instance of people “who do not know how to lead us trying to divide us”.“Apparently, the speaker finds trans people abhorrent, and I think he ought to think about that,” Warnock said. “The fact of the matter is … March 31 has been a day to lift up transgender people who endure violence and bigotry.“But this is just one more instance of folks … who do not know how to lead us trying to divide us. And this is the opposite of the Christian faith. Jesus centered the marginalized. He centered the poor. And in a moment like this, we need voices, particularly voices of faith, who would use our faith not as a weapon to beat other people down, but as a bridge to bring all of us together.” More

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      US election workers face thousands of threats – so why so few prosecutions?

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      Shortly before midnight on 14 February 2021, James Clark tapped out a message on his home computer in Yarmouth, Massachusetts, that would change his own life and shatter the peace of mind of several others.Clark, then 38, was surfing the internet having been drinking and taking drugs. Social media platforms were overflowing with heated debate around Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him.Five days earlier, Trump’s second impeachment trial had opened over his alleged incitement of the insurrection at the US Capitol. Over in the battleground state of Arizona the online debate was especially raucous, with conspiracy theories raging that the vote count had been rigged.Though Clark lived 2,700 miles away from Phoenix, the Arizona capital, he felt driven to intervene. He found the contact page of the state’s top election official and typed: “Your attorney general needs to resign by Tuesday February 16th by 9am or the explosive device impacted in her personal space will be detonated.”Then he signed the message “Donny Dee”, and hit send.Clark’s bomb threat was discovered two days later, with instant seismic effect. Terrified staff fled from the state executive office building, sniffer dogs scoured several floors, and top state officials had to shelter in place.Four months after the panic at the Arizona executive building, the US Department of Justice circulated a memo to all federal prosecutors and FBI agents. There had been a “significant increase in the threat of violence against Americans who administer free and fair elections”, the memo said.The increase in threats amounted to “a threat to democracy. We will promptly and vigorously prosecute offenders.”The memo announced the formation of a new unit within the justice department, the election threats taskforce. Its job was to respond to a phenomenon that had barely existed before Trump unleashed his 2020 stolen election lie – violent and abusive messages, including death threats, specifically targeting election officials and their families.The taskforce was devised as a crack multi-disciplinary team bringing together experts from across the justice department and linking them with local FBI and US attorney offices. Its mission: to protect election officials from the intimidation let loose by Trump, by coming down hard on perpetrators.As the November presidential election fast approaches, the taskforce faces its greatest challenge. With Trump back on the ballot, and with swing states such as Arizona continuing to be roiled by election denial, the federal unit is at the frontlines of what promises to be a combustible election year.Much is riding on it. The Brennan Center, a non-partisan law and policy institute, has estimated that since 2020, three election officials have quit their jobs on average every two days – that’s equivalent to about one in five of those who run US elections nationwide bowing out in the face of toxic hostility.View image in fullscreen“What the election threats taskforce does this year is going to be critical,” said Lawrence Norden, senior director of the Brennan Center’s elections and government program. “They have the biggest megaphone, and they need to use it to make clear that threats of violence against election workers are illegal and will not be tolerated.”Day-to-day efforts of the taskforce are headed by John Keller, principal deputy chief of the public integrity section of the justice department’s criminal division. As the election year gets under way, his team is preparing itself for whatever lies ahead amid a collapse of confidence among some sections of American society in election results – and by extension, election workers – which Keller described as “incredibly concerning”.“Any criminal threat to an election official that seeks to intimidate them, or change their behavior or how they perform their critical functions, is a significant problem,” he told the Guardian. “The election community in the current climate feels attacked, they are scared, and the department recognizes that.”As part of those preparations, the election threats taskforce is stepping up its contact with election administrators from coast to coast. Since its inception, the team has held more than 100 trainings and engagements with election officials and regional prosecutors to share knowledge on how to deal with hostile attacks.Over the next eight months the taskforce will continue to hold a series of tabletop exercises in which federal experts and their regional partners role-play responses to possible worst-case scenarios, from serious death threats aimed at election administrators to bomb threats against polling places or other election infrastructure. Similar war games will act out what would happen in the event of a cybersecurity attack or attempt to bring down the power grid on election day.At the core of the taskforce’s operations are criminal prosecutions of the most serious threats against election staff and volunteers. In almost three years, the unit has prosecuted 16 cases involving 18 defendants, two of whom are women.Ten perpetrators have so far been sentenced, with punishments ranging from 30 days to 3.5 years in prison. A further three people have pleaded guilty, and five have been charged and are awaiting plea deals or trials.Clark was sentenced to 3.5 years’ imprisonment earlier this month for his Arizona bomb threat. At his sentencing hearing in federal district court in Phoenix, a prosecutor from the election threats taskforce requested a strong deterrent punishment, pointing out that within minutes of sending his threat Clark had searched online for information on “how to kill” the then secretary of state.Arizona is the ground zero of election threats, accounting for seven of the taskforce’s 16 prosecutions. On Monday Joshua Russell was sentenced to 30 months in prison in federal court in Phoenix for leaving a series of voicemails in 2022 for Katie Hobbs, the current Democratic governor of Arizona who was then acting as secretary of state.He said: “Your days are extremely numbered. America’s coming for you, and you will pay with your life, you communist traitor.”One of the striking features of the taskforce is the relatively few cases it has prosecuted compared with the mountain of hostile communications that has been dumped on the election community in the Trump era. In its early stages, the unit invited election offices around the country to forward all the offensive material to its Washington headquarters and was inundated with thousands of obscene, abusive and hostile messages.View image in fullscreenBut when it pored over the reports it found that up to 95% of them failed to meet the threshold for conducting even a criminal investigation, let alone prosecution. That standard was set by the US supreme court in the 2003 ruling Virginia v Black, which weighed the need to shield public servants from criminal threats of violence against the robust protections for political speech under the first amendment of the US constitution.The court’s conclusion was that for a communication to be a crime it has to be a “true threat”. The justices defined that as a “serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence”.Most of the messages reviewed by the taskforce were distressing and inappropriate, certainly, but in its analysis fell short of that criminal bar. They were indirect rather than direct, implicit rather than explicit, ambiguous and aspirational rather than an active statement of intent to carry out illegal violence.“The difference between what is criminally actionable, and what feels like a threat to an election administrator on the ground, is an inherent problem in this space. What is potentially actionable is closer to dozens of cases, compared with the thousands of hostile communications we have received,” Keller said.Despite the legal complexities of a “true threat”, some at the receiving end of the vitriol are calling for more urgent action. Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s current secretary of state whose office has been the target of several of the most serious threats, told the Guardian that in his view it was taking “monstrously long” for federal prosecutors to secure sentences.He called for an increase in penalties, and a broadening of the scope of what constitutes a criminal threat against election officials. “I don’t know that the federal bureaucracy has been nimble enough. They’re not treating it like the domestic terrorism that it is,” he said.Bill Gates, a Republican supervisor with Arizona’s largest constituency, Maricopa county which covers Phoenix, is quitting his job as a top election administrator after the November election in part because of the terrifying threats he and his family have suffered. He also called on the taskforce to step up the intensity of its operations at this critical moment.“I’m grateful for what they’ve done, but we feel like they could do more,” he said. “We all feel that the January 6 prosecutions [over the attack on the US Capitol] have been very aggressive and well-publicized, and we’d like to see the same level when it comes to threats against election workers.”The taskforce said that the 12- to 24-month gestation period for its election threats prosecutions was similar to any other federal case, from violent crime to fraud. Keller agreed though that deterrence was vital.View image in fullscreen“The deterrent value of the cases is critical. Like most things in most spaces, I’m sure that we could do more and do better, and we are trying to come up with new ways to attract more attention to this work to maximize that deterrent impact,” he said.It’s not just legal constraints that affect the number and speed of prosecutions, there are other technical hurdles that the taskforce has to negotiate. Identifying perpetrators who disguise themselves by using foreign internet service providers or burner phones can be a challenge, and subpoenas seeking the information from companies such as Facebook and Twitter or Verizon and AT&T usually take six to eight weeks.Against such impediments, the taskforce is hoping to build up resilience against the anti-democratic onslaught by improving communications between the central justice department and the FBI’s 56 field offices and 94 US attorney’s offices around the country. Each FBI office has an election crime coordinator, working in tandem with the taskforce’s election community liaison officer.The network has been used to share information about how to deal with growing problems such as swatting – hoax calls to 911 reporting crimes or fires at public officials’ homes. Lists are being compiled of potential swatting targets in sensitive areas like Maricopa county so that officers are aware that the emergency calls may be false as soon as they come in.Norden of the Brennan Center said that as the election year hots up, relationships between beleaguered local election workers and the powerful federal hub will become ever more important. “The taskforce’s presence lets election officials know the federal government has their backs. That’s essential, because a lot of them, particularly in the immediate aftermath, felt kind of abandoned.” More

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      Trump campaign attacks Biden over recognition of Transgender Day of Visibility

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      A Joe Biden White House spokesperson said Republicans who have spent the Easter weekend criticizing the president for declaring Sunday’s annual Transgender Day of Visibility “are seeking to divide and weaken our country with cruel, hateful and dishonest rhetoric”.“As a Christian who celebrates Easter with family, President Biden stands for bringing people together and upholding the dignity and freedoms of every American,” the White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said. “President Biden will never abuse his faith for political purposes or for profit.”Bates’s statement came as the president faced criticism from the campaign of his Republican presidential challenger Donald Trump – along with religious conservatives who support him – for going through with issuing the annual proclamation recognizing 31 March as Transgender Day of Visibility even though that coincided with Easter Sunday.The Democrat issued the proclamation Friday, calling on “all Americans to join us in lifting up the lives and voices of transgender people throughout our nation and to work toward eliminating violence and discrimination based on gender identity”.But Republicans objected to the fact that the Transgender Day of Visibility’s designated 31 March date in 2024 overlapped with Easter, among the holiest celebrations for Christians. Trump’s campaign accused Biden, a Roman Catholic, of being insensitive to religion. And the former president’s Republican allies piled on.“We call on Joe Biden’s … White House to issue an apology to the millions of Catholics and Christians across America who believe tomorrow is for one celebration only – the resurrection of Jesus Christ,” said the Trump campaign’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt.US House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said on social media that the “Biden White House has betrayed the central tenet of Easter” and called the president’s declaration “outrageous and abhorrent”.Biden devoutly attends Catholic mass and considers his religious upbringing to be a core part of his morality and identity. In 2021, he met with Pope Francis at the Vatican and afterward told reporters that the pontiff said he was a “good Catholic” who should keep receiving Communion.But Biden’s political stances in support of gay marriage and for women having the right to abortion have put him at odds with many conservative Christians.Trump’s allies took aim at Biden’s Transgender Day of Visibility proclamation as the former president prepares for a criminal trial tentatively set for 15 April. In that case, he is charged with improperly covering up hush-money paid to an adult film actor who claims to have previously had an extramarital sexual encounter with him.Despite being put under a gag order in the case preventing him from making inflammatory comments about the judge in the case or the judge’s family members, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Saturday that the judge “should be immediately sanctioned and recused”. The post contained a link to a New York Post article about the judge’s daughter, who runs a political consulting firm that works with Democrats.Trump is also battling charges for attempting to forcibly overturn his defeat to Biden in the 2020 election as well as retaining classified materials after his presidency. And furthermore, he is facing multimillion-dollar civil penalties for business practices deemed fraudulent and a rape allegation that a judge has found to be substantially true. More

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      Ex-Trump adviser says former president ‘hasn’t got the brains’ for dictatorship

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      A former national security adviser in the Donald Trump White House has said that the ex-president “hasn’t got the brains” to helm a dictatorship, despite his admiration for such rulers.In an interview with the conservative French outlet Le Figaro, John Bolton, 75, was asked whether Trump had tendencies that mirror dictators like the ones he has previously praised. Bolton not only disparaged Trump’s intellectual capacity, he also disparaged the former president’s professional background, exclaiming: “He’s a property developer, for God’s sake!”Now a vocal critic of Trump, Bolton served as the former president’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019. Bolton had previously served as US ambassador to the UN during George W Bush’s presidency, developing a reputation as a foreign policy hawk.Bolton’s remarks to Le Figaro suggesting Trump is not smart enough to be a dictator will almost certainly do little to allay fears on the political left at home or abroad about a second Trump presidency.After all, Trump has suggested he plans to be a dictator, if only for the first day of his presidency if he were re-elected.Meanwhile, as seeks a second term in the White House, the incumbent Joe Biden has warned that Trump – the lone remaining contender for the Republican nomination – and his allies are “determined to destroy American democracy”. Trump recently provided fuel for that argument by hosting Hungary’s autocratic prime minister Viktor Orbán at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.Trump, furthermore, is known to have lavished praise on leaders considered opposed to US democratic ideals and foreign policy interests, including North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and China’s Xi Jinping.Bolton nonetheless claimed Trump – who is grappling with more than 80 pending criminal charges as well as multimillion-dollar civil penalties – lacks the kind of coherent political philosophy effective dictators require. He also said Trump does not like to “get involved in policy analysis or decision-making in the way we normally use those terms”.For Trump, Bolton added: “Everything is episodic, anecdotal, transactional. And everything is contingent on the question of how this will benefit Donald Trump.”Such disparagements from Bolton – who advocated for the Trump White House to withdraw from a deal with Iran aimed at dissuading it from developing nuclear weapons – are not new. In a new foreword to his account of his work for Trump’s presidency, The Room Where It Happened, Bolton warns that Trump was limited to worrying about punishing his personal enemies and appeasing US adversaries Russia and China.“Trump is unfit to be president,” Bolton writes. And though he may not think Trump can foster a dictatorship, Bolton has warned: “If his first four years were bad, a second four will be worse.”Trump has seemingly leaned into such predictions. He stoked alarm at a campaign rally earlier in March when – while musing about how foreign car production affects the US auto industry – he said: “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole – that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”His use of the word “bloodbath” recalled provocative language Trump has used previously, including describing immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country”.He told a rally in New Hampshire last year that he wanted to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections”.After that remark, Biden attacked Trump for his use of the world “vermin”, saying Trump’s language “echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany” as Adolf Hitler rose to power and orchestrated the murders of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.In his interview with Le Figaro, Bolton said it was “very likely” that Trump would act on his threat to pull the US out of the Nato military alliance if he were re-elected. In recent months, Trump has repeated his threat not to protect countries whom he believes do not pay enough to maintain the security alliance, and he claimed that European members of the alliance “laugh at the stupidity” of the US.“Trump, when he has an idea, comes back to it again and again, then gets distracted, forgets, but eventually comes back to it and acts on it,” Bolton warned. “That’s why leaving Nato is a real possibility. A lot of people think it’s just a negotiating tool, but I don’t think so.” More

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      Trump rebuked for sharing video showing Biden hog-tied on pickup truck

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      Donald Trump drew an angry response from the Joe Biden White House as well as other opponents after he posted a video containing the image of the president hog-tied on the tailgate of a passing pickup truck.The Biden campaign communications director, Michael Tyler, said the provocative image of the truck festooned with Trump 2024 insignia on Friday night could be construed as suggesting physical harm toward the former president’s political rival.“Trump is regularly inciting political violence and it’s time people take him seriously – just ask the Capitol police officers who were attacked protecting our democracy on January 6,” Tyler said, referring to the day in early 2021 when the ex-president’s supporters attacked Congress.The Trump campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, replied that the picture in question depicted the back of a pickup truck that was traveling down the highway.“Democrats and crazed lunatics have not only called for despicable violence against president Trump and his family, they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him,” Cheung said.Cheung’s remark was a clear reference to more than 80 criminal charges pending against Trump for attempts to forcibly overturn his defeat to Biden in the 2020 election, retention of classified materials after his presidency and hush-money payments. Trump is also facing multimillion-dollar civil penalties for business practices that have been deemed fraudulent and a rape claim which a judge has determined to be substantially true.The image of Biden in the truck as well as the reaction to it cap another week of scripted – and unscripted – drama on a presidential campaign trail that is becoming increasingly tense.Biden’s polling number have risen in crucial swing states since a punchy State of the Union address. And his campaign is beating presumptive Republican nominee Trump in fundraising to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.On Thursday night, Biden held a fundraiser at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall with former Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The glitzy event raised a reported $25m, though it was repeatedly interrupted by demonstrators protesting against the military aid that Biden’s administration has provided to Israel in its strikes in Gaza.Trump, meanwhile, was at the wake of New York police officer Jonathan Diller, 31, who was shot to death during a traffic stop. The former president called Diller’s murder “a horrible thing” and said “police are the greatest people we have”.Yet Trump’s remarks also earned him criticism, with commenters noting that the January 6 US Capitol attack carried out by his supporters injured dozens of officers. The attack – a failed, desperate effort to keep Trump in office despite his defeat to Biden – was also linked to some officers’ suicides.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, a caption on the video with the image of a hog-tied Biden said it had been taken in Long Island, New York, just as the former president attended Diller’s memorial and condemned the violence that killed the officer.Trump’s posting of the hog-tie video comes less than three weeks before the former president is due to stand trial in a criminal case alleging that he covered up payments to two women ahead of the 2016 election to suppress information about extramarital sexual encounters they said he had with them years earlier.The prosecutor in that case, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, has also been the subject of violent pictorial representation posted by Trump. The former president last year shared a picture showing him holding a baseball bat next to Bragg. More

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      ‘Feeble, desperate, mentally unfit’: Biden changes tack to mock Trump

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      With November set to be one of the most consequential elections in US history, it would be understandable if Donald Trump and Joe Biden reached for soaring, lofty rhetoric: if they attempted to match the high-minded ideals of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the nation’s founding fathers.American voters, and the country’s political class, are long used to Trump’s insult-laden and often crude rhetoric. “Everything Joe Biden touches turns to shit,” Trump said in Georgia earlier this month, during a rally at which he also also mocked Biden’s stutter.But recently Biden and his campaign team appear to have decided to fight fire with fire, after previously seeking to stay above the fray. It’s a shift that seems to accept that Trump has moved the standards of US politics and that it’s more effective to embrace that notion than remain out of the fight.But it also probably reflects the unique threat that Trump’s bid to return to the White House for a second term represents to American democracy and that the time to sugarcoat the fight against that is long past. For many, Biden and his team’s insults aren’t just political hardball, they also smack of the truth.In recent months, Biden has dubbed Trump “mentally unfit”, while this week his campaign declared that the US “deserves better than a feeble, confused, and tired Donald Trump”.The president’s campaign has dubbed Trump “weak and desperate – both as a man and a candidate for president”. They’ve also taken to calling Trump, who says he is a multibillionaire but was recently unable to pay a court-ordered $454m bond, “Broke Don”.It’s a remarkable shift for Biden, who less than a month ago raised eyebrows for only referring to Trump as “my predecessor” during his State of the Union speech.Marjorie Hershey, professor emeritus of political science at Indiana University Bloomington, suggested to the Guardian Biden’s reason for this shift was “very straightforward.“What he was doing before obviously wasn’t working. Typically, we all learn from bad experience and Biden has been behind in the polls to a candidate who is quite frankly hated by almost half of the American electorate,” she said.“I think that Biden was under considerable pressure from his advisers, from activists, to do something different.”Notably, polling this week showed Biden gaining on Trump in six key states – after his supporters previously had a wake-up call when the incumbent reported dismal numbers.View image in fullscreenSo far, Biden seems to be fully embracing his new persona. On Wednesday, the president, not known for his comic timing, even cracked a joke at his rival’s expense.“Just the other day, this defeated-looking man came up to me and said: ‘Mr President, I need your help. I’m in crushing debt. I’m completely wiped out,’” Biden chortled.“I said, ‘Sorry, Donald, I can’t help you.’”While negative campaigning is not new, Trump took the practice to a new level almost from the moment he announced his run for president in June 2015. At the time, he claimed his rivals for the presidential nomination had “sweated like dogs” during their own campaign events, and said Mexico was sending “rapists” into the US.With Trump having spent the last four years peppering Biden with insults, it seems Biden and his team have decided they need to respond in kind.“We’ve learned that ignoring negative campaigning doesn’t work well,” Hershey said.“People are more likely to remember negative charges than positive statements. People are more likely to give negative statements greater weight than they do positive statements.“And so trying to take the high road and create a contrast between yourself and a negative opponent by not responding simply doesn’t work.”With Biden in the political ring throwing verbal punches back at Trump, he has hewn closer to the “Dark Brandon” meme that is popular among some of his supporters. That concept, which frequently sees Biden depicted with red laser eyes, imagines Biden as a sort of edgy hero or even antihero – the kind of person who wouldn’t think twice about sarcastically congratulating an opponent on a golf tournament win.If we rewind back to the 1980s, there were plenty of negative, and nasty, political campaigns afoot. The New York Times reported from the 1982 Tennessee Senate race that the Republican candidate Robin Beard hired an actor to dress up as Fidel Castro in an attempt to paint his opponent as soft on Cuban communism – but there is hard evidence that Trump dragged things to a new low.According to a study published in 2023, “the frequency of negative emotion words” used by American politicians “suddenly and lastingly increased” when Trump entered the 2016 presidential race.Researchers analyzed quotations from politicians from millions of news articles, and found that the use of negative language by politicians had begun to decrease during Barack Obama’s presidency.“Then in June 2015, precisely the month when Trump started his campaign, there was a massive jump in negativity,” said Robert West, a professor in the school of computer and communication sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and one of the co-authors of the study.View image in fullscreenIt wasn’t just Trump’s own language that accounted for the increase. When West and his colleagues removed all Trump quotations from the data, they found that the amount of negative language had still gone up: people had begun to copy Trump’s tone, just as Biden appears to have done.“It’s very sad that the other side is now starting to play the same game. This looks like we’ve lost as a society, because everyone plays that game now,” West said.For now, it is hard to tell whether Biden cracking jokes about Trump will be a winning strategy. There is evidence, however, that Republican and Democratic voters increasingly view members of the opposing party with contempt.In 2022, Pew Research found that 72% of Republicans consider Democrats to be “more immoral” than the average American, compared with just 47% who felt that way in 2016 (63% of Democrats thought Republicans were more immoral, up from 35% in 2016). In this climate, perhaps there is a real appetite among Biden supporters for him to swing for Trump’s kneecaps.While some say a negative campaigning strategy is effective, others point out – like Stephen Craig, a political science professor at the University of Florida who has studied political campaigns – that is not always the case.View image in fullscreen“There is a humongous amount of literature testing the effectiveness of negative ads, and negativity in other media as well – whether its speeches, radio or mail – and the bottom line is sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t,” Craig said.“And no one can tell in advance when something is going to work and when it won’t.”In the modern era, it is only Trump who has fully embraced mockery and insults as presidential campaigning, although during the 1988 presidential election George HW Bush’s team got plenty of mileage from making fun of Michael Dukakis, his opponent, for trying to look tough in a military tank.But going back in time, it turns out the founding fathers weren’t really all that polite. The 1796 presidential election, in which John Adams defeated Thomas Jefferson, saw Adams’s camp claim Jefferson would promote prostitution and incest, and suggest that Jefferson had an affair with an enslaved woman.Jefferson’s backers, meanwhile, claimed Adams was a hermaphrodite, and dubbed Adams, who they said was overweight, “His Rotundity”.Neither Biden nor Trump have gone quite that low yet – although there are still seven months to go until election day. More

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      Republican choice for vacated US House seat is surprise boon for Lauren Boebert

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      A Colorado Republican panel made the surprising decision on Thursday night to choose a former mayor, Greg Lopez, to be congressman Ken Buck’s likely replacement until the November general election, a saving grace for Lauren Boebert’s bid for another term in Congress.Lopez will now run as the Republican candidate in the 25 June special election after Buck’s resignation at the same time GOP primary candidates are vying to be the congressman’s successor.The stakes, however, were far higher than keeping Buck’s seat in the US House warmed by a Republican.Of the nine competitors who jostled for the special election nomination, seven also are running in the primary race against Boebert. The far-right representative jumped into the race after a near loss in the seat she now holds.While Lopez is likely to win in the dark red district, he will be a placeholder and plans to step down after the general election winner is sworn into office in January. For two of Boebert’s primary opponents who came in second and third, the special election candidacy would have been a boon.They would have run in two different elections for the same seat, garnering more attention, media coverage and fundraising opportunities. That would have boosted their odds in the primary race where they are otherwise eclipsed by Boebert’s near household name and hefty campaign chest.That tension was palpable throughout the six-hour meeting with six votes on Thursday, which winnowed the field in the special election for Buck’s seat to two options, Lopez and former state senator Jerry Sonnenberg, one of Boebert’s stiffest primary competitors.View image in fullscreenThroughout the evening, there were accusations Buck had intended to kneecap Boebert’s campaign by stepping down early and giving one of her opponents a potential leg up. Boebert pushed the claim, saying in a previous statement: “The establishment concocted a swampy backroom deal to try to rig an election.”Buck denied that was his intention.Boebert sent a letter to delegates before the meeting encouraging them to choose a placeholder, so as not to “influence the regular primary election in a way that would taint the entire process and give this candidate an unfair leg up”.That riled her primary opponents, including the former state senator Ted Harvey.On stage, Harvey lashed back at those who had voted for Lopez after landing the third-most votes.“They didn’t do it to support the candidate Greg Lopez, they did it to support their own candidates who weren’t here tonight. That’s not just putting us at risk, but it’s putting our nation at risk,” Harvey said.Harvey then asked his supporters to throw their weight behind Sonnenberg, one of Harvey’s primary opponents. Sonnenberg barely lost to Lopez in the final vote and seemed to shrug off the loss.“This is not a game for the weak. I understand completely, they made a decision,” he said, gesturing toward the mingling crowd.Lopez is a former mayor of Parker, Colorado, who ran two unsuccessful bids for governor and said he would “do the best job that I can and represent this state to the best of my ability”.This helps keep the field clear for Boebert, who has built a far-right name with a ferocious political style and remains a known, if divisive, quantity among conservatives nationwide.While Boebert has made headlines with scandals, including a tape of her groping and vaping with a date in a Denver theater, she also has garnered endorsements from Donald Trump and a key supporter of the former president, the House speaker, Mike Johnson.Those votes of confidence will probably go far for Boebert in the new district, an expansive sweep of Colorado’s plains where voters overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2020 and her opponents are lesser-known, local Republicans.Boebert moved east to join the race in this district at the end of last year, after she nearly lost her previous, Republican-leaning seat to a Democratic candidate in 2022.The option to district-hop was opened to Boebert after Buck announced last year he would not run for re-election, citing his party’s handling of Trump.Buck abruptly left Congress on 22 March, pointing to the “bickering and nonsense” he said now pervades the US Capitol. More