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      How Biden ‘erased’ progress he made and alienated the left as election looms

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      In front of a giant banner that said “Restore Roe”, Joe Biden was holding his first rally of the year in Manassas, Virginia, to campaign for abortion rights, a top issue for Democrats in this year’s election.But Biden did not receive the universal affirmation he might once have expected. His 22-minute speech was interrupted at least a dozen times by protesters scattered throughout the audience who rose to shout out demands for a ceasefire in Gaza. It was a jarring collision that revealed a president who stands accused of befriending then betraying the left – and now risks losing a critical part of his coalition.The disillusionment is all the keener because Biden defied expectations early in his White House term, signing landmark legislation to alleviate poverty and tackle the climate crisis that thrilled his progressive wing. But with an election looming, critics say, he is gravitating back towards his comfort zone in the centre ground, and his refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza has caused particular fury.“Progressives in the movement were pleasantly surprised to see President Biden push on a lot of domestic progressive priorities that we have been calling for,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director of the progressive group Justice Democrats. “But without question he has erased much of that progress with his continued support for a genocide that’s happening at the hands of a far-right Israeli government.”Biden, 81, was long perceived as a middle-of-the-road moderate, representing Delaware for 36 years in the Senate before serving as Barack Obama’s vice-president. He came under scrutiny for a cosy relationship with the banking sector, his role in drawing up a 1994 crime bill that ushered in an era of mass incarceration and his failure to protect witness Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’s supreme court confirmation hearing.Yet once Biden reached the White House in 2021, he proved more ambitious than many expected. He appointed progressives to his administration, the most diverse in history, and the first Black woman – Ketanji Brown Jackson – to the supreme court, along with numerous judges of colour. He gained further credit on the anti-war left by pulling US troops out of Afghanistan after two decades.View image in fullscreenThe coronavirus pandemic invited him to turn a crisis into an opportunity. Biden delivered trillions of dollars to boost domestic manufacturing, invest in infrastructure and combat the climate crisis. His lifelong support of trade unions came to the fore. A Wall Street Journal column, arguing that he would effectively run for a re-election in 2024 as a democratic socialist, offered the headline: “Joe Biden Is Bernie Sanders.”But there were seeds of discontent. Some observers felt Biden could have used different tools to fulfill his promise of widespread student loan forgiveness, a plan ultimately struck down by the supreme court. There was disappointment that he did not use his bully pulpit more effectively to push Congress to pass police reform and voting rights legislation. Biden also received criticism for fist-bumping the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who approved the 2018 assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.Even on climate, critics say, his record remains decidedly mixed. The Inflation Reduction Act directs $394bn to clean energy, the biggest such investment in history, and just last month the president ordered a pause on exports of liquefied natural gas, hailed as “a watershed moment” by activist and author Bill McKibben.Yet Biden also approved the Willow oil-drilling project in a remote part of northern Alaska. Indeed, he has rubber stamped more oil and gas drilling permits on federal land than Donald Trump at the same stage of his presidency. US oil production reached an all-time high last year.Stevie O’Hanlon, spokesperson for climate-focused youth group Sunrise Movement, said: “The way that Joe Biden is acting right now, if it continues for the next nine months, is a recipe for him losing millions of votes from young people and losing the election.“So many young people have been frustrated with Biden for approving new fossil fuel projects. His administration has made some important shifts around Fema [Federal Emergency Management Agency] rules, for instance, around air pollution. But while he’s making these steps forward, he’s also taking these really loud steps back that honestly made many young people more disillusioned with him than less.”Last month progressives condemned Biden’s decision to launch retaliatory strikes against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. They argued that he violated the constitution by not seeking congressional approval first and was breaking his promise to keep America out of intractable wars in the Middle East.Meanwhile the president threw his weight behind a bipartisan Senate bill to tighten border security – and send military aid to Israel and Ukraine – which would severely curtail migration and limit asylum in a way that broke a campaign promise. Biden even adopted Republican language, saying he would “shut down the border” when he was given the authority to do so.Andrabi of Justice Democrats said of the bill, which failed in the Senate: “We saw Biden work with mostly Republicans and Kyrsten Sinema, who has left the Democratic party, zero Hispanic caucus members, zero border state Democrats to craft a Trump-like Republican anti-immigration bill that Republicans were never going to vote for.View image in fullscreen“To prove what? Maybe that he’s willing to treat migrant families like Trump did, as long as it comes with funding for war. That’s not sufficient. That is not progressive. That is not even core Democratic.”But nothing has done more to drive a wedge between Biden and the left than the war in Gaza triggered by Hamas’s attacks in Israel on 7 October that left 1,200 people dead and more than 240 taken hostage. He championed Israel’s right to defend itself and only gradually voiced concerns about its rightwing government’s destructive military campaign that has killed more than 27,000 people, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory.A recent NBC News poll found 15% of voters under 35 approve of Biden’s handling of the war while 70% disapprove. Protesters disrupted his speech at Mother Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina as the president spoke out against racism, at a United Auto Workers gathering in Washington and at a political event in Columbia, South Carolina. It is a vivid schism as the president, already facing concerns over his age, gears up for a hard fought race for the White House.Norman Solomon, national director of RootsAction.org, said: “A lot of independents and Democrats are sickened in a gut punch sort of a way. Biden is so out of touch with the base that he absolutely will need this fall to be re-elected. Young people are more politicised and more energised than ever before and some of these Gaza demonstrations are propelled by young people turning out. They’re just disgusted with Biden and it didn’t have to be this way.”Activists in Dearborn, Michigan, for example, are urging people to cast an “Uncommitted” vote in the Democratic primary election on 27 February to demand that Biden support a ceasefire and end to funding the war in Gaza. Thirty-three Michigan government officials have signed an open letter pledging to check the “Uncommitted” option on their ballots.Layla Elabed, a Palestinian American activist who is managing the campaign, said: “Biden and his administration and the Democratic party have abandoned us, the pro-ceasefire and anti-war voters and constituency, and they have abandoned humanitarian politics. Democrats and Joe Biden no longer represent where we are at.“The institution of the Democratic party hasn’t delivered; it’s moved away from what people are advocating for. They have money in their pockets and blood on their hands. Biden’s funding of Netanyahu’s war makes a mockery of the president’s claim that he would fight authoritarianism and be for democracy.”The backlash threatens Biden’s chances of re-election, not because progressives will switch from him to likely opponent Trump in decisive numbers, but because a sliver might choose to sit out the election or turn to a third party candidate such as Cornel West – potentially enough to make all the difference in Michigan and other swing states in the electoral college.Jeremy Varon, a history professor at the the New School for Social Research in New York, said: “Part of me thinks that Biden has basically given up on reassembling on the Obama coalition and decided that the number that they lose among progressives and the young they will make up with [Nikki] Haley Republicans, moderates and independents.“Since there’s no meaningful primary, he doesn’t have to appeal to the base. All of that makes for a campaign where he’s going to run to the centre and progressives are going to feel very much in the wilderness.”For the third election in a row, progressives are confronted with the argument that a vote for anyone but the Democratic nominee is effectively a vote for Trump, a man who has demonised immigrants, vowed to shut down the border immediately and resume construction of a border wall. There is no reason to believe that he would urge Israel to exercise restraint in Gaza.Varon added: “People on the left like me who are terrified of a Trumpian re-election are trying to build a persuasive argument to bracket your values and pull the lever for Biden, even though you might think his Gaza policy is immoral.“This is the most acute case of progressives wrangling with how you square your conscience with the pragmatic necessity of preventing the worst alternative from assuming the White House. This has been with the American left for decades. Do we vote for the Democrat?”For Elaine Kamarck, a former official in the Bill Clinton White House, the answer has to be yes. She said: “Donald Trump has a miraculous way of uniting the Democratic party. People understand what a fundamental threat he is to democracy, to everything that the centre to the far left believes in and it’s sheer folly to vote against Biden.”A dulling of the early optimism about Biden’s progressivism may have been inevitable as the presidential election loomed. When Republicans won the House in the 2022 midterm elections, the window of opportunity for sweeping legislation slammed shut. The war in Ukraine has consumed huge time and resources. The cracks between Biden and a younger generation over Israel were always there but it took the Hamas attack to bring them to the surface.Matt Bennett, an executive vice-president of the centrist thinktank Third Way, describes Biden as a moderate by disposition who believes in compromise. “He’s governed the way he promised he would when he ran for president, the way he has always portrayed himself, which is somebody who’s at the centre of the Democratic electorate,” he said.“He’s not on the liberal fringe; he is not a conservative Democrat. He’s always navigated to about the middle point of where the party is. That’s why he got there before Obama did on marriage equality, famously, because he saw where the party was headed and that’s where he has steered quite successfully as president. No one’s going to be happy with him all the time but most Democrats should appreciate that he’s done an extraordinarily good job.”But Andrabi of Justice Democrats is less sanguine. He warns that Biden is failing to follow the will of the voters who elected him – and could pay a price.He said: “It’s imperative that the Biden administration and Democratic leadership listen to those voters who are screaming at the top of their lungs in rallies, in meetings, everywhere they go that the current state of the Biden administration’s policies in Gaza, on immigration, on climate change is insufficient for core bases of their voters that got President Biden elected, that got Democrats a majority in the Senate and that is going to be crucial to getting Democrats to flip the House.“But they’re not listening and lip service is not going to convince anyone when what we are seeing on the other side is nearly 30,000 dead Palestinians, let alone the ongoing existential crisis of climate change or an immigration system that is broken and their solution is to criminalise more folks. None of these are what the core base of the Democratic voters support.” More

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      How to steal a US election: Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig on Trump’s new threat

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      Lawrence Lessig has a message for America: Donald Trump’s assault on democracy in 2020, with his stolen-election lie and refusal to concede the White House, may have been shocking, but wait till you see what’s coming next.“We are in a profoundly dangerous moment,” the Harvard law professor says. “This is a catastrophic year, and the odds are not in our favor.”Such a blunt warning carries the gravitas of its source. Lessig is a leading thinker on how public institutions can be corrupted, and has probed deeply into vulnerabilities that leave US democracy undefended against authoritarian attack.Lessig has teamed up with Matthew Seligman of the constitutional law center at Stanford. Their new book, How to Steal a Presidential Election, asks whether a second Trump attempt to subvert democracy could succeed. Their answer makes for uncomfortable reading.“We are convinced,” they write, “that an informed and intelligent effort to undermine the results of a close, free and fair election could work in America – if the rules governing our presidential elections are not changed.”It is a sign of troubled times that prominent scholars are wargaming the next election. A country that has long prided itself as an exemplar of constitutional democracy finds itself under surgical lights.Nor is this Lessig’s first such thought experiment. Four years ago, months before Trump launched his stolen-election conspiracy, Lessig and Seligman devised a class at Harvard law school: Wargaming 2020. They looked at whether it would be possible to hack the presidential election and send the losing candidate to the White House. Their conclusion was that American democracy had dodged a bullet.“We discovered that Trump didn’t really understand what he could have done,” Lessig says. “There were obvious moves he and his team could have made, but they didn’t take them.”The insurrection on 6 January 2021 was tragic in its loss of life, but as a method of overturning the election it was the “dumbest thing they could have possibly done. No court would ever allow the election to be decided by force of bayonets.”Having repeated the wargaming exercise for the new book, Lessig is far less confident that another assault on democracy would end so positively. With the former president almost certain to secure the Republican nomination, having won in Iowa and New Hampshire, Lessig has no doubt about how far Trump is prepared to go.“We’ve seen that he’s willing to do much, more more than we expected back in 2020,” he says.Another reason for people to be “very anxious” is that Trump and his inner circle have had four years to conduct their own wargames and are likely to be far more sophisticated: “Trump didn’t understand how to undo the structures of government. Now he’s well-trained, he knows exactly what he needs to do.”For their 2024 wargame, Lessig and Seligman assume the November election will be nail-bitingly close, both nationally and in at least one battleground state. That is not an outlandish precondition – you only have to think about the 537 votes that gifted Florida and the presidency to George W Bush in 2000.Given a close election, there are factors that could help stave off disaster. With the vice-presidency in the hands of Kamala Harris, there is no chance of Trump or his supporters unleashing the kind of pressure to which they subjected Mike Pence in 2020, trying to get him to block certification of Joe Biden’s victory.In the wake of January 6, Congress also moved to close several loopholes by clarifying some of the most ambiguous wording of the 1887 Electoral Count Act. The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act makes it harder for Congress to object to the counting of votes under the electoral college, and gives the courts a greater role in adjudicating the proper slate of electors to be returned from individual states should disputes arise.But in the Lessig-Seligman analysis, inevitable congressional compromises have left some loopholes in place, opening up opportunities for an unscrupulous, now battle-hardened candidate.Three scenarios stand out. The first relates to so-called “faithless electors”: delegates chosen by parties to represent the winning candidate in each state under the arcane terms of the electoral college who decide to go against their pledge and back the loser.During Trump’s first presidential run in 2016, 10 electors switched their votes. The ruse was a creative, albeit vain attempt to stave off a Trump presidency.Lessig argued on behalf of the 2016 faithless electors before the US supreme court, in a case known as Chiafolo v Washington. The court ruled against the faithless electors, ordering that states have the right to compel them to back the winners of the popular vote.The authors’ concern is that the supreme court left it up to each state to decide whether or not to take up that power. Several states have yet to spell out in law that electors must abide by their pledge to vote for the victor. That leaves the door open to electors coming under massive, even violent pressure from Trump’s army of Make America Great Again warriors.“Imagine an elector had Maga Republicans surrounding their house carrying torches and demanding they vote for Donald Trump. Who knows what the electors would do in those circumstances,” Lessig says.The second scenario involves what Lessig and Seligman call a “rogue governor”: the governor of a state who decides to flip the results of the presidential election. This route poses the greatest long-term threat of US democracy imploding, Lessig believes.Paradoxically, post-January 6 reforms in the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act heightened the danger by increasing the powers of governors to certify slates of electors sent to Congress. Both houses of Congress can vote to overrule a rogue governor, and count the correct slate representing the winner of the popular vote, but only if the House and Senate agree.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGiven a divided Congress, a rogue governor and rogue House working together could steal the state’s electoral votes, and with it potentially the presidency.The risk of this scenario in this election cycle is minimal, Lessig concedes. Many of the highly sensitive battleground states – Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin – have Democratic governors.That leaves Georgia, which Biden won by just 11,779 votes. It has a Republican governor, Brian Kemp, but he resisted Trump’s efforts to overturn the result in 2020 and so is arguably less likely to go rogue this year.View image in fullscreenThe third wargaming scenario is the one that really keeps Lessig up at night: what if an entire state legislature decided to go rogue?Again, the idea is not fanciful. Several legislatures in the most hotly contested states have Republican majorities firmly under Trump’s sway – Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, to name just three – and conspiracy theories about rampant electoral fraud continue to circulate within them.Lessig worries that the supreme court ruling in Chiafolo, by giving state legislatures the power to tell electors how to cast their electoral votes, heightens the risk of a Maga-dominated legislature going rogue. He envisages state lawmakers claiming massive fraud in a close race and using that to justify switching its result to Trump.“That’s a kind of opened hole that is going to be very hard to close in time,” he says.The Harvard professor has emerged from this journey into the dark arts of election subversion in a bleak mood. The book finishes with a raft of proposed changes to federal and state laws that the authors argue would close the loopholes they uncovered in their travels. Will those changes happen in time to prevent a second Trump blitzkrieg?“I’m not optimistic,” Lessig says. “I’m not optimistic that Congress will be able to do anything in time, so the most we can hope for is that the infrastructure resists as it did last time.”When he was researching the book, Lessig says he had the voice of his 13-year-old daughter ringing in his head: “Just chill,” as she would say. But in the event of an extremely close result, he feels he can’t just chill.He stresses that none of this is partisan. He began life as a Republican and had the distinction in 1980, aged 19, of being the youngest delegate from Pennsylvania to Ronald Reagan’s nominating convention.“Neither of us have anything against the conservative movement in the United States, as expressed in the traditional Republican party,” he says.But he looks at how the party has become “disengaged from the basic premise of democratic politics – if you win, you win, if you lose, you go home”. And he sees that the number of Americans who still believe the 2020 election was stolen, against all evidence, remains steady. That scares him.“Many Trump supporters have the sense that anything is justified, and that’s terrifying,” he says. “Trump is denying every single core democratic norm, and yet his support continues to grow. That too is astonishing and terrifying.”
      How to Steal a Presidential Election is published in the US by Yale University Press More

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      Donald Trump says he would encourage Russia to attack Nato allies who pay too little

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      Seeking a second presidency as the Republicans’ presumptive 2024 White House nominee, Donald Trump has said he would “encourage” Russia to attack any of the US’s Nato allies whom he considers to have not met their financial obligations.The White House described the remarks as “appalling and unhinged”. Trump made the statement on Saturday during a campaign rally in Conway, South Carolina, ahead of the state’s Republican presidential preference primary on 24 February.The former president has voiced misgivings about aid to Ukraine as it defends itself from the invasion launched by Russia in February 2022 – as well as to the existence of Nato, the 31-nation alliance which the US has committed to defending when necessary.On Saturday, Trump claimed that during an unspecified Nato meeting he told a fellow head of state that the US under his leadership would not defend any countries who were “delinquent”.“One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay, and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’” Trump said, adding “I said, ‘You didn’t pay, you’re delinquent?’”“No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”White House spokesperson Andrew Bates, asked about Trump’s comments, said, “encouraging invasions of our closest allies by murderous regimes is appalling and unhinged – and it endangers American national security, global stability and our economy at home.”Nato countries agreed in 2014, after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, to halt the spending cuts they had made after the cold war and move toward spending 2% of their GDPs on defense by 2024.During his 2016 campaign, Trump alarmed western allies by warning that the United States, under his leadership, might abandon its Nato treaty commitments and only come to the defence of countries that meet the alliance’s 2% target.As of 2022, Nato reported that seven of what are now 31 Nato member countries were meeting that obligation – up from three in 2014. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has spurred additional military spending by some Nato members.Trump’s comments come as Ukraine remains mired in its efforts to stave off Russia’s 2022 invasion and as Republicans in Congress have become increasingly skeptical of providing additional aid to the country as it struggles with stalled counteroffensives and weapons shortfalls.Trump’s remarks on Saturday quickly raised alarm among many political pundits in the US.“Sounds as if Trump is kind of encouraging Russia to attack our Nato allies,” David Corn – an MSNBC analyst and the Washington DC bureau chief of Mother Jones – said on X.Meanwhile, conservative political commentator Alyssa Farah Griffin said Trump’s comments were “music” to the ears of Russian leader Vladimir PutinOn Saturday, the former president also celebrated the recent collapse of congressional legislation aiming to address the migration crisis on the US-Mexico border. The legislation was supported by Democratic incumbent Joe Biden, and Trump vowed that – if elected again – he would carry out “a massive deporation operation” on his first day back in the Oval Office.Trump has been performing strongly in public opinion polls against Biden, who defeated the ex-president in the 2020 election. Nonetheless, he is grappling with more than 90 criminal charges.The charges contained in four separate indictments across various jurisdictions allege that he tried to subvert the result of the election he lost, illegally retained government secrets after his presidency, and made illicit hush-money payments to a porn actor who claims to have had a sexual encounter with Trump.Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges.The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report More

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      Haley hopes to boost election bid with attacks on Trump’s and Biden’s ages

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      Nikki Haley’s Republican presidential nomination campaign in South Carolina is set to parade a mobile billboard drawing attention to rival Donald Trump’s age on Saturday, as ageing and mental acuity issues continue to dominate the United States’ political discourse.The stunt, which was scheduled to pass through Myrtle Beach, comes as Trump begins campaigning in Haley’s home state before the primary there on 24 February. It is scheduled to make stops outside a rally for the former president, according to the Hill, and show both Trump as well as Democratic incumbent Joe Biden appearing to fall into moments of confusion during public remarks.At 52, Haley is about three decades younger than the two leading candidates for November’s election. The video is part of a series her campaign calls Grumpy Old Men.While the 81-year-old Biden has received more attention for public mental blanks that have put Democrats on edge and prompted the president on Thursday to declare “my memory is fine”, Haley’s video highlights Trump’s mental miscues. Those include Trump’s confusing Haley with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi – a Democrat – and mixing up Sioux City, Iowa, with Sioux Falls, South Dakota.Kicking off her presidential campaign a year ago, Haley called for mandatory “mental competency tests” for politicians older than 75 and has since called for a “new generational leader” of her party.Last month, Trump, 77, boasted that he could beat Haley – whom he appointed to serve as his United Nations ambassador – in a cognitive test.“Well, I think I’m a lot sharper than her. I would do this: I would sit down right now and take an aptitude test and it would be my result against her result, and she’s not going to win, not gonna even come close to winning,” he said.On Friday, the former South Carolina governor, who trails Trump by double digits in her state, said both her ex-boss and Biden would use a second turn in the Oval Office as a “taxpayer-subsidized nursing home”.That came as an interview with the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton – recorded before Biden’s fiery remarks about his memory – drew further attention to the age issue.Clinton told MSNBC that while Biden’s age is a “legitimate issue”, she advised him to “lean in” to his years of experience.“I talk to people in the White House all the time, and you know, they know it’s an issue, but as I like to say, look, it’s a legitimate issue,” said Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016. “It’s a legitimate issue for Trump who’s only three years younger. So, it’s an issue.”The focus on Biden and Trump’s mental acuity has prompted a debate on what makes a natural verbal stumble and what marks a sign of cognitive decline.“When I see somebody make a flub on TV, I’m really not all that concerned,” S Jay Olshansky, a researcher on ageing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told the Associated Press on Saturday. “What science will tell you about flubs is that they’re perfectly normal, and they are exacerbated by stress.”Some studies suggest that “misnaming” may occur when the brain has names stored by category – including family – or may be phonetic, as when Biden confused France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, with the late French leader François Mitterrand.“To easily recall names, right in the moment, is the hardest thing for us to do accurately,” Eric Lenze of Washington University in St Louis, who focuses on geriatric psychiatry, told the AP.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA poll by NBC News last month found that 76% of voters had major or moderate concerns when asked whether Biden has “the necessary mental and physical health to be president for a second term”. Posed the same question about Trump, 48% said they had major or moderate concerns.Biden’s personal lawyer, Richard Sauber, addressed the concerns in the classified documents report that triggered the current round of debate about mental competence, arguing: “We do not believe that the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate.”Sauber accused the special counsel, Robert Hur, of using “highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events”.Former attorney general Eric Holder, who served during the Obama administration, posted on X that the commentary in the special counsel’s report on Biden’s document retentions contained “way too many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with long standing [justice department] traditions”.“Had this report been been [sic] subject to a normal [justice department] review these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised,” Holder added.While Trump may have an edge on Biden in terms of voter confidence in mental acuity, Biden retains a lead in other areas. According to NBC, close to half of voters – 51% – said they had major concerns, and 10% moderate concerns, about Trump’s legal issues.Topping Trump’s list of legal issues are more than 90 pending criminal charges, including for trying to subvert his 2020 electoral defeat.Recent Bloomberg polling found that a majority of voters in seven key swing states would be unwilling to vote for Trump if he is convicted of a crime (53%) or sentenced to prison (55%) in one of the four criminal cases against him. More

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      AI firm considers banning creation of political images for 2024 elections

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      The groundbreaking artificial intelligence image-generating company Midjourney is considering banning people from using its software to make political images of Joe Biden and Donald Trump as part of an effort to avoid being used to distract from or misinform about the 2024 US presidential election.“I don’t know how much I care about political speech for the next year for our platform,” Midjourney’s CEO, David Holz, said last week, adding that the company is close to “hammering” – or banning – political images, including those of the leading presidential candidates, “for the next 12 months”.In a conversation with Midjourney users in a chatroom on Discord, as reported by Bloomberg, Holz went on to say: “I know it’s fun to make Trump pictures – I make Trump pictures. Trump is aesthetically really interesting. However, probably better to just not, better to pull out a little bit during this election. We’ll see.”AI-generated imagery has recently become a concern. Two weeks ago, pornographic imagery featuring the likeness of Taylor Swift triggered lawmakers and the so-called Swifties who support the singer to demand stronger protections against AI-generated images.The Swift images were traced back to 4chan, a community message board often linked to the sharing of sexual, racist, conspiratorial, violent or otherwise antisocial material with or without the use of AI.Holz’s comments come as safeguards created by image-generator operators are playing a game of cat-and-mouse with users to prevent the creation of questionable content.AI in the political realm is causing increasing concern, though the MIT Technology Review recently noted that discussion about how AI may threaten democracy “lacks imagination”.“People talk about the danger of campaigns that attack opponents with fake images (or fake audio or video) because we already have decades of experience dealing with doctored images,” the review noted. It added: “We’re unlikely to be able to attribute a surprising electoral outcome to any particular AI intervention.”Still, the image-generation company Inflection AI said in October that the company’s chatbot, Pi, would not be allowed to advocate for any political candidate. Co-founder Mustafa Suleyman told a Wall Street Journal conference that chatbots “probably [have] to remain a human part of the process” even if they function perfectly.Meta’s Facebook said last week that it plans to label posts created using AI tools as part of a broader effort to combat election-year misinformation. Microsoft-affiliated OpenAI has said it will add watermarks to images made with its platforms to combat political deepfakes produced by AI.“Protecting the integrity of elections requires collaboration from every corner of the democratic process, and we want to make sure our technology is not used in a way that could undermine this process,” the company said in a blog post last month.OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said at an event recently: “The thing that I’m most concerned about is that with new capabilities with AI … there will be better deepfakes than in 2020.”In January, a faked audio call purporting to be Joe Biden telling New Hampshire voters to stay home illustrated the potential of AI political manipulation. The FCC later announced a ban on AI-generated voices in robocalls.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“What we’re really realizing is that the gulf between innovation, which is rapidly increasing, and our consideration – our ability as a society to come together to understand best practices, norms of behavior, what we should do, what should be new legislation – that’s still moving painfully slow,” David Ryan Polgar, the president of the non-profit All Tech Is Human, previously told the Guardian.Midjourney software was responsible for a fake image of Trump being handcuffed by agents. Others that have appeared online include Biden and Trump as elderly men knitting sweaters co-operatively, Biden grinning while firing a machine gun and Trump meeting Pope Francis in the White House.The software already has a number of safeguards in place. Midjourney’s community standards guidelines prohibit images that are “disrespectful, harmful, misleading public figures/events portrayals or potential to mislead”.Bloomberg noted that what is permitted or not permitted varies according to the software version used. An older version of Midjourney produced an image of Trump covered in spaghetti, but a newer version did not.But if Midjourney bans the generation of AI-generated political images, consumers – among them voters – will probably be unaware.“We’ll probably just hammer it and not say anything,” Holz said. More

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      Trump campaign sees boost after boost amid bad week for Biden

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      For those campaigning to bring Donald Trump back to the White House, the past week has seen much to celebrate. For those concerned for the health of American democracy, it felt like a disaster.Joe Biden was hit by a brutal special counsel report that painted him as elderly with a failing memory, fans of Trump eager to see him on the 2024 ballot appeared set for victory at the US supreme court, and Trump’s only remaining serious challenger in the Republican primary race suffered humiliation at the polls.Trump could even draw satisfaction from Biden’s decision to turn down an hour on national television before Sunday’s Super Bowl, continuing a theme of Biden largely shunning one-on-one major press interviews.Biden said he wanted to save millions of people, about to enjoy one of the biggest spectacles in American sport, from a lengthy dose of politics even if plenty of other presidents before him have shown no such consideration.But few believed that was the real motive during a week in which, to Trump’s evident glee, Biden was officially and devastatingly painted as too old and forgetful to know if he was committing a crime.Biden’s decision to refuse the pre-Super Bowl interview had already been made before Robert Hur, the special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents while out of office, released a report clearing but damning the president.Hur put his finger on Biden’s open electoral wound when he described the president as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” after a series of gaffs that have increasingly alarmed Americans who worry over the 81-year-old Biden’s health and age but also dread the prospect of 77-year-old Trump’s return to the White House with his raft of criminal prosecutions and two impeachments.But, increasingly, a Biden vs Trump rematch seems the inevitable choice for American voters come November. And with polls showing a close race – and often Trump ahead – Hur’s report was a huge win for Trump magnified on social media and trumpeted on Fox News and other rightwing media.View image in fullscreenThe former US president could not help himself from painting the decision not to prosecute Biden as further evidence of his own victimisation as he faces legal troubles from his own retention of classified documents. “I did nothing wrong, and I cooperated far more,” Trump claimed in a message to supporters.In fact, Biden was cleared in part because – unlike Trump – he immediately returned the classified documents found in his garage and cooperated with the special counsel.The special counsel in Trump’s case, Jack Smith, is prosecuting him not only for storing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence but for making false statements, conspiracy to obstruct justice and hiding documents from investigators.But, despite those facts, the past week has undoubtedly been a good one for the Trump campaign and its quest to put Trump back in power, despite widespread fears that a second Trump term would see him undermine US democracy and is motivated mostly by a desire to stay out of jail.Trump heralded a series of other wins which also provided more fodder for his perpetual claim to be a victim of one conspiracy or another.At the US supreme court, justices – three of them appointed by Trump – appeared deeply sceptical of attempts by some states to keep Trump off the ballot in November under a constitutional amendment that bars candidates who, as former officials, participated in insurrection or rebellion. Colorado disqualified Trump for instigating the January 6 storming of Congress and riot by supporters who did not accept his defeat to Biden. The justices signaled that Colorado overstepped its authority and that it was for Congress to bar Trump if it wanted to.This gave Trump another opportunity to paint himself as the target of a conspiracy, calling attempts to remove him from the ballot “election interference by the Democrats”.Even as the court was hearing the case, Trump’s campaign blasted supporters with a fundraising email in his name: “THEY WANT TO ERASE YOUR RIGHT TO VOTE FOR ME!”.Trump could also take satisfaction in the humiliation of his last remaining rival in the Republican presidential race, Nikki Haley, who lost the Nevada primary when she was the only name on the ballot. Nearly twice as many people voted for “none of these candidates” as for Trump’s former ambassador to the UN. Trump wasn’t on the ballot because of a peculiarity of the Nevada process which saw him participating in a parallel caucus, which he won handily.For all that, the political earthquake of the week was Hur’s report given that 76% of voters already say Biden’s mental and physical health is a significant concern whereas only 48% have a similar worry about Trump even though he is just four years younger.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBiden’s lawyers wrote to the special counsel calling references to the president’s memory lapses “gratuitous” and “prejudicial and inflammatory”. Biden himself, at a press conference intended to prove his mental alertness, was incredulous at Hur’s claim that the president was unaware of the death of his own son: “How in the hell dare he raise that?”.The press conference might have gone a long way to offset the damage of the special counsel’s report had Biden not realised his campaign team’s fears at the end by referring to the Egyptian leader, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, as the “president of Mexico”. It didn’t help that just days earlier Biden twice confused European leaders with long dead predecessors, muddling up President Emmanuel Macron of France with Francois Mitterrand and the former German chancellor Angela Merkel with Helmut Kohl.Trump made a similar gaff last month in confusing Haley with the former Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi. But such mistakes are not as damaging to him because the former president’s most ardent supporters evidently forgive him anything and his opponents have far worse criticisms.View image in fullscreenBiden could claim his own win from the political fiasco which saw Senate Republicans block a bill to address the growing migration crisis championed by their own leadership when Trump objected to the law because it might help resolve an issue that is electorally damaging to the president. That served as a reminder of the chaos Trump brings to politics that helped cost him the last election.But, for now at least, opinion polls show Trump continues to make ground against a president whose ratings have slumped ever lower in the wake of his handling of Israel’s latest war on Gaza and the surging migrant crisis. A Morning Consult poll on Thursday gave Trump a five-point lead over Biden nationally. Other polls put the race closer but for a candidate facing more than 90 criminal charges to still be in the running is, at least in part, a reflection of Biden’s weaknesses.An NBC News poll shows Trump significantly ahead of Biden on all the major issues, including the economy, the migrant crisis on the border and general competence.There is even better news for Trump in local polls which show him ahead in key swing states. They include Michigan where Biden’s campaign team has scrambled to quell the anger within the US’s largest Arab American population at the president’s largely unswerving support for Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. The Arab American vote in Michigan is larger than Biden’s majority in the state at the last election of about 154,000 votes.Even among the broader Democratic vote there is no great enthusiasm for the current president. The NBC poll showed that 62% of those planning to vote for him would do so principally as a means to keep Trump out of the White House.Democratic strategists see that as a strength not a weakness. The Biden campaign is focused on telling voters that they must reelect the president in order to save American democracy from a Trump second term.The president’s strategists are hoping that at least one of Trump’s looming criminal trials for his part in the January 6 insurrection and trying to overturn the 2020 election comes to court before November to remind voters of the threat from another Trump presidency.But all the while, they will be living in fear of Biden opening his mouth. More

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      Democratic party accuses RFK Jr campaign of colluding with Super Pac

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      The Democrats’ national controlling committee complained on Friday that Robert F Kennedy Jr’s third-party presidential campaign and a fund supporting him are colluding against campaign rules to get the dynastic political candidate on election ballots.Kennedy and his Team Kennedy campaign are accused by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) of accepting $10m to $15m in in-kind contributions from American Values 2024, a political action committee – or Pac – that supports Kennedy.The DNC complaint alleges that the Super Pac is coordinating “its activity with Mr Kennedy and his campaign in a way that violates federal campaign finance laws”.Kennedy, who in November was polling higher, at 52%, in terms of voter favorability than Biden or Trump, is attempting to get on the ballot in at least 10 states.The pro-Kennedy American Values 2024 Pac is supported by Tim Mellon, a Donald Trump campaign donor who has pumped $15m into its coffers. Co-founder Tony Lyons told CBS News that the Democrats’ complaint “is just another desperate DNC tactic to defame Kennedy, vilify him and drain his campaign funds”.But in a press briefing on Friday, DNC legal counsel Robert Lenhard said that “rather than doing the hard work itself using money raised in compliance with the candidate contribution limits, the campaign is taking shortcuts”.Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, Kennedy’s campaign manager and daughter-in-law, told the outlet that the Democrats’ complaint “is a non-issue being raised by a partisan political entity that seems to be increasingly concerned with its own candidate and viability”.Fox Kennedy said the campaign had not received any signatures from the American Values Pac or any other Pac. The campaign had also avoided providing any information “that is not available to every volunteer and media outlet on our public website”, she added.The complaint was filed on the same day that Democrats began furious counterattacks on the justice department special counsel Robert Hur over parts of a report into highly sensitive government documents found in Joe Biden’s garage. The report described the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.DNC officials were asked whether they were concerned Kennedy, 70, might win the support of swing-state voters as Biden’s age (81) and mental acuity become significant re-election issues.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump, 77, has had a similar amount of public gaffes confusing the names of prominent political figures – and he has more than 90 criminal charges pending against him, including for trying to subvert the results of the 2020 election that he lost to Biden. But a notable NBC News poll published on Sunday found Trump holds the edge with voters on the issue of having the necessary mental and physical health to be president.DNC adviser Ramsey Reid said the party is “concerned that Donald Trump and his mega-donors are propping up RFK Jr”.Kennedy is the son of Robert F Kennedy, the former attorney general and US senator who was assassinated in 1968 as he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. More

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      How to Steal a Presidential Election review: Trump and the peril to come

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      The Trump veepstakes is under way. Senator JD Vance and Representative Elise Stefanik prostrate themselves. Both signal they would do what Mike Pence refused: upend democracy for the sake of their Caesar. The senator is a Yale Law School alum and former US marine. Stefanik is the fourth-ranking House Republican. He was once critical of the former president. She was skeptical. Not anymore.“Do I think there were problems in 2020? Yes, I do,” Vance recently told ABC. “If I had been vice-president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors … I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there.”Last month, Stefanik said: “We will see if this is a legal and valid election. What we saw in 2020 was unconstitutional circumventing of the constitution, not going through state legislators when it comes to changing election law.”From the supreme court down, the judiciary has repeatedly rejected that contention.As the November election looms, Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman offer How to Steal a Presidential Election, a granular and disturbing examination of the vulnerabilities and pressure points in the way the US selects its president. Short version: plenty can go wrong.Lessig is a chaired professor at Harvard Law School. He views a second Trump term as calamitous. “He is a pathological liar, with clear authoritarian instincts,” Lessig writes. “His re-election would be worse than any political event in the history of America  –  save the decision of South Carolina to launch the civil war.”Seligman is a fellow at the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford, focused on disputed presidential elections. He too views Trump uncharitably.“Former president Trump and his allies attempted a legal coup in 2020 – a brazen attempt to manipulate the legal system to reverse the results of a free and fair election,” Seligman has said. “Despite all the attention on 6 January 2021 [the attack on Congress], our legal and political systems remain dangerously unprotected against a smarter and more sophisticated attempt in 2024.”The open question is whether forewarned is forearmed. On the page, Lessig and Seligman spell out seven roads to ruin, the “inverting” of an election to force a result that thwarts voters’ expressed intentions. The authors discount the capacity of a vice-president to unilaterally overturn an election result. But they warn of the potential for havoc at state level.As they see it, the danger of pledged but not legally bound electors being coerced to vote for Trump when the electoral college convenes is “significant”. They also hypothesize a state governor “interven[ing] to certify a slate of electors contrary to the apparent popular vote”. Another path to perdition includes making state legislatures the final judges of election results. There is also the “nuclear option”, according to the authors, which is stripping the right to vote from the voters.“A state legislature cancels its election before election day and chooses the state’s electors directly,” as Lessig and Seligman put it, a potential outcome they call a “very significant” possibility under the US constitution.“State legislators are free to deny their people a meaningful role in selecting our president, directly or indirectly,” they write. “Is there any legal argument that might prevent a legislature from formally taking the vote away from its people? We are skeptical.”To say US democracy is at risk is not to indulge in hyperbole. Trump’s infamous January 2021 call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, is a vivid reminder. “What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than … we have, because we won the state.” Such words continue to haunt.In an episode that casts a similar pall, Trump and Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee (RNC) chair, urged election officials in Michigan’s Wayne county to block the release of final results.“Do not sign it … we will get you attorneys,” McDaniel told the officials, regarding certification.“We’ll take care of that,” Trump said.Now, as he has for so many former enablers, Trump has taken care of McDaniel. She will shortly be gone from the RNC.Among Trump’s supporters, discontent with democracy is no secret. During the 2016 campaign, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, thought Trump needed to show some “authoritarian power”. In 2019, Mike Johnson, then a Louisiana congressman, declared: “By the way, the United States is not a democracy. Do you know what a democracy is? Two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner. You don’t want to be in a democracy. Majority rule: not always a good thing.”Johnson is now House speaker. For good measure, he claims God told him “very clearly” to prepare to become “Moses”.“The Lord said step forward,” Johnson says.On the right, many openly muse about a second civil war.“We’ve already had one, so we know it’s within the realm of possibility,” James Pinkerton, a veteran of the White Houses of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, recently wrote in the American Conservative.“In fact, by one reckoning, the English speakers have had two other civil wars in the last four centuries, spaced out every hundred or so years. Is there some sort of deep cycle at work here? With, er, implications for our own troubled times?”The election won’t be pleasant. In late December, 31% of Republicans believed Joe Biden’s win in 2020 was legitimate. That was eight points lower than two years before. Trump’s criminal trials loom. Through that prism, Lessig and Seligman’s work serves as dire warning and public service.
      How to Steal a Presidential Election is published in the US by Yale University Press More