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      Nikki Haley was swatted twice within days amid ‘spike’ in threats to officials

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      Nikki Haley was targeted by a second “swatting” attempt on New Year’s Day – just two days after authorities responded to a similar call regarding Haley, according to Reuters.This time, the call was made by someone who said Haley’s daughter had been shot and was lying in a pool of blood. The caller, who told police her name was Rose, also said she was on the phone with Haley, who was threatening to shoot herself.A Charleston county sheriff’s deputy responded to the scene and it was soon discovered the call was a hoax.After the 2024 Republican presidential candidate and former governor of South Carolina confirmed, on NBC’s Meet the Press on Monday, that she had been the victim of a swatting hoax, new information from an incident report obtained by Reuters has revealed she was actually swatted on two separate occasions.Police first responded to a swatting call – or a prank call intentionally made to lure resources such as a Swat team to a location to respond to a false threat of danger – at Haley’s home in Kiawah Island, South Carolina, on 30 December. Haley was not present at the time of the swatting, but her parents were home with a caregiver.Haley’s son was also away from the home, as was her husband, Michael, who is serving overseas.Haley called the ordeal an “awful situation”.“It put the law enforcement officers in danger, it put my family in danger,” Haley said. “It was not a safe situation.”“That’s what happens when you run for president,” Haley said. “What I don’t want is for my kids to live like this.”According to an email including comments from Kiawah Island public safety, obtained by Reuters, authorities were called to Haley’s house after a man called 911 and “claimed to have shot his girlfriend and threatened to harm himself while at the residence of Nikki Haley”.The 1 January incident marks the second swatting attempt against Haley.Haley is now one of several high profile politicians targeted by swatting calls.In December, the home of the Florida senator Rick Scott was also swatted. The homes of two other members of congress, the New York congressman Brandon Williams and Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, were also swatted. Greene said on X that she had been a victim of a swatting call several times, including once on Christmas Day.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFalse cries of danger were also conducted on a larger scale earlier this month, when at least nine state capitol buildings across the US were under evacuation orders due to bomb threats that turned out to be fake.A judge in Donald Trump’s federal election subversion case was also targeted. Police responded to a report of a shooting at a Washington DC home revealed to belong to the US district judge Tanya Chutkan. Authorities quickly determined there was no threat of a shooting.The White House is not immune to these dangerous prank calls. On 15 January, multiple Washington DC emergency crews rushed to the president’s home following a call received at 7.03am.Joe Biden was not in the building at the time.The US attorney general, Merrick Garland,described a “deeply disturbing spike” in threats against public officials.“These threats of violence are unacceptable,” Garland said. “They threaten the fabric of our democracy.” More

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      Can Biden win back Iowa rural voters who shifted away from Democrats?

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      During the eight years he served in the Iowa state Senate, Tod Bowman was a self-described “door knocker”, trekking to the front porches and patios of constituents in the rural counties he represented to appeal for votes.They would, in turn, tell Bowman, a moderate Democrat, of their concerns – that government assistance programs amounted to a “handout”, that too many undocumented migrants were entering the country, that Barack Obama, the president for much of Bowman’s time in office, was planning to take their guns away. Occasionally, whoever opened the door would start interrogating Bowman before he even finished introducing himself.“Are you a Democrat or a Republican?” was the typical demand, Bowman remembered. The former high school teacher and wrestling coach came up with his own disarming reply: “I’m an Iowan.”By 2018, such encounters were happening more and more frequently, and that November, voters in the farms and small towns that made up Bowman’s eastern Iowa district replaced him with a Republican. While Bowman believes a combination of alienation from the national Democratic party and dislike of some bills he supported led to his defeat, he saw only one man to blame for the rising hostility he faced on the campaign trail.View image in fullscreen“Trump certainly made it almost acceptable in our psyches to name call, to lie, to manipulate, to be very aggressive instead of civil,” Bowman said in an interview at his house in the town of Maquoketa. “I really feel he’s changed politics, probably, if not forever, for a certain, significant period of time.”Beyond altering the tone of American politics, Donald Trump’s ascension to the helm of the Republican party undid progress Democrats had made in winning the trust of voters in rural areas nationwide, and many of their election victories ever since have relied on support from cities and suburbs. Whether this trend continues could prove crucial in deciding the victor of this year’s presidential election, where turnout in rural areas could tip swing states towards either Trump or Joe Biden. It will also play a role in determining control of the House of Representatives and the Senate, the latter of which Republicans are trying to gain by winning seats in Montana, West Virginia and Ohio.Few states exhibit the consequences of rural voters shifting away from Democrats better than Iowa. Once viewed by the party as a swing state, Trump won Iowa decisively in 2016 and carried 31 counties that had twice voted for Obama – the most of any single state. In the 2020 election, Biden won none of them back, and the president this year is not expected to campaign for victory in the Hawkeye state.The rise of Trump also undid a fragile tie that voters had unknowingly reached in Wyoming, a town of 523 people in Bowman’s district that was, at the end of 2015, the only community in Iowa with a population of more than 500 evenly split between registered Democrats and Republicans, according to a Des Moines Register analysis.The next year, Wyoming voters overwhelming voted for Trump. So, too, did the surrounding Jones county, which supported a Republican candidate for the first time in 28 years. Wyoming voted again for the New York real estate mogul in 2020, and today, there are more than twice as many registered Republicans than Democrats in town, according to the county auditor.“People are thinking that, you know, there’s a way to make a living, and there’s a way to do things, and I think it’s caused them to change parties. They’re tired of the way that the nation has been run,” the town’s mayor, Steve Agnitsch, a Republican, said by way of explanation for why Trump did so well with his neighbors.Tony Amsler, the chair of the county Democratic party, views the once-and-perhaps-future-president as a politician whose message seemed almost tailored to Iowa. “Democrats have traditionally been progressive when it comes to social issues. Iowans are very conservative when it comes to money. Those things are something, and then comes Donald Trump,” he said.“He certainly represented those who have been disenfranchised, those who think politics wasn’t listening to them. If you add this all together, you’ve got a juggernaut, and it’s hard to change direction.”The former president was the pick of Wyoming’s Republicans last week, when the Iowa caucuses were held. In the months preceding the first-in-the-nation contest, neither Trump nor any other candidate stopped in what is nicknamed “The Christmas City” for the lights Wyoming residents string all over its Main street each year. A few blocks of houses and businesses bisected by a state highway, Angitsch described his town as a community that is avoiding the stagnation that can grip the midwestern countryside. There are new buildings in its high school, the library is open five days a week and though Wyoming’s sole grocery store closed not long ago, a Dollar General was built just down the street.As for Trump, Biden, and their ilk, few in Wyoming believe either man, or anyone else in Washington DC for that matter, thinks much about the town.“We’re in podunkville. Nobody cares about the simple people in life,” said 67-year-old farmer Steve Wherry from a barstool at Rack’s Swinging Door, Wyoming’s main watering hole, where the television was showing a local news broadcast about Trump’s angry outbursts during his defamation trial in New York City that day.Wherry had voted for Trump in the past two presidential elections, and planned to do so for a third time in November, but with all the drama he heard from the news about the former president, he was less upbeat about his candidacy this time.View image in fullscreen“I think there’s people that are not gonna vote for him because of all the trials and all that stuff that’s going on, and there’s people that don’t think that he can guide this country in the right way,” Wherry said. “He’s got himself in trouble a little bit.”Sitting on the opposite end of the bar, 71-year-old retiree Craig Taylor said Trump’s troubles were enough to make him want to vote for someone else.“He’s all about the United States and the country, but they’re just not going to leave him alone,” said Taylor, who twice voted for Trump after supporting Obama in 2008.“We need to make America great again, but we need someone better than him to do it,” Taylor said, as he cracked open a Miller Light. But who? Conspiracy theorist and vaccine opponent Robert F Kennedy Jr was appealing, but Taylor didn’t think he would get much farther. “They’re not going to let him get in,” he said.Heather Campbell, a 39-year-old human resources manager, believed she had found a candidate who cared about communities like Wyoming in Tim Scott. Campbell saw the South Carolina senator speak when he visited her workplace in a nearby town, and was impressed by how he refrained from attacking any of his rivals.But Scott ended his campaign two months before the caucuses, deepening Campbell’s disillusionment with politics. “That’s what sucks,” she said, as she picked up dinner for her family. “He didn’t have the funding, he didn’t have the media funding, and that’s not right.”How communities like Wyoming ultimately vote can have ripple effects across the county. Republicans were able to create the current conservative supermajority on the supreme court only after Democratic senators were defeated in rural states like North and South Dakota, Missouri, Arkansas and Iowa, paving the way for the appointment of justices who have limited environmental regulation and allowed states to ban abortion.“The rural skew in especially the Senate and the electoral college is really shaping our institutions in a way that I don’t think people fully comprehend,” said Matt Hildreth, executive director of progressive group RuralOrganizing.org.Three years ago in Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin used strong support from the countryside to become governor of a blue state, while last year, a Democratic-aligned judge was elected to a crucial seat on Wisconsin’s supreme court, in part because of votes from the state’s smaller towns.In November, Democrats’ continued control of the Senate will hinge on the re-election of imperiled lawmakers from Montana and Ohio, both red states where rural voters are plenty. And in the expected rematch between Trump and Biden, turnout by right-leaning voters outside of population centers could determine if it is the former president or the current president at the inauguration next year.For Democrats, “You’re not looking to win some of these rural counties, you’re looking to cut the losses, maybe by two or three points, which could make a difference in a close race,” said Robin Johnson, an adjunct political science professor at Monmouth College in Illinois, who has consulted with the party on how to improve their rural support.View image in fullscreenIn his view, Democratic candidates have suffered in rural areas because they neglected campaign tactics that work. Chief among them: yard signs, which he says can greatly boost their visibility.“When I was working campaigns, you were taught that yard signs don’t vote. But in rural areas, it’s important because your neighbors notice. If you’ve got a sign up for a Democrat and you normally vote Republican, it kind of gives an okay to consider that person,” Johnson said.Two years ago, Amsler ran for a state house seat representing an area that included Wyoming. He met many voters who spoke approvingly of Biden and were supportive of his candidacy, but didn’t want to display a yard sign for his campaign.“I’m afraid of what those fanatics will do to my lawn, to my home,” they’d tell him.Amsler’s Republican opponent beat him handily, the same year the GOP gained a supermajority in the state senate, and defeated the last Democrat in its congressional delegation.“When I ran for office, I knew I would not win. I wanted to move the needle,” Amsler said. A year-and-a-half later, he’s not sure if he did. “What really concerns me is, we’ve had that real shift from purple to red.” More

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      US historians sign brief to support Colorado’s removal of Trump from ballot

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      Twenty-five historians of the civil war and Reconstruction filed a US supreme court brief in support of the attempt by Colorado to remove Donald Trump from the ballot under the 14th amendment, which bars insurrectionists from running for office.“For historians,” the group wrote, “contemporary evidence from the decision-makers who sponsored, backed, and voted for the 14th amendment [ratified in 1868] is most probative. Analysis of this evidence demonstrates that decision-makers crafted section three to cover the president and to create an enduring check on insurrection, requiring no additional action from Congress.”Lawyers for Trump argue that the presidency is not an “office” as described in the 14th amendment, that only congressional action can stop someone from running, and that Trump did not incite an insurrection.Trump was impeached in Congress (for the second time) for inciting an insurrection: the Capitol attack of 6 January 2021, an attempt to overturn defeat by Joe Biden now linked to nine deaths, more than 1,200 arrests and hundreds of convictions.Impeached with the support of 10 House Republicans but acquitted when only seven Senate Republicans voted to convict, Trump now dominates his party and its presidential primary, 91 criminal charges (17 for election subversion), civil trials and ballot challenges notwithstanding.Maine has also sought to remove Trump from its ballot, a ruling delayed, like that in Colorado, while the supreme court considers the issue. Oral arguments are set for 8 February.Amicus briefs allow interested parties to make relevant arguments. Earlier this month, nearly 180 Republicans joined a brief in support of Trump.The 25 historians – among them James McPherson of Princeton, the pre-eminent civil war scholar – pointed to 1860s congressional debate.“Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, a Democratic opponent of the 14th amendment, challenged sponsors as to why section three omitted the president. Republican Lot Morrill of Maine … replied, ‘Let me call the senator’s attention to the words “or hold any office civil or military under the United States”.’ Johnson admitted his error; no other senator questioned whether section three covered the president.”The historians also cited Andrew Johnson, in 1868 the first president impeached, referring to himself as “chief executive officer”.Pointing out that section 3 of the 14th amendment is self-executing, and that “no former Confederate instantly disqualified from holding office under section three was disqualified by an act of Congress”, the historians also noted that Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, cited his own disqualification as reason an indictment for treason should be quashed.“Contemporary information provides direct evidence of the enduring reach of the 14th amendment,” the historians wrote. “Congress … chose to make disqualification permanent through a constitutional amendment.“Republican senator Peter Van Winkle of West Virginia said, ‘This is to go into our constitution and to stand to govern future insurrection as well as the present.’ To this end, the Amnesty Acts of 1872 and 1898 did not pardon future insurrectionists.”The historians also said “adverse consequences followed” amnesty, many ex-Confederates winning office and “participat[ing] in the imposition of racial discrimination in the south that vitiated the intent of the 14th and 15th amendments to protect the civil and political rights of the formerly enslaved people.”The historians concluded: “The court should take cognisance that section three of the 14th amendment covers the present, is forward-looking, and requires no additional acts of Congress for implementation.”Some political and legal observers have suggested Trump should be allowed to run regardless of the constitution, because to bar him would be anti-democratic.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a forthcoming article for the New York Review of Books, seen by the Guardian, Sean Wilentz of Princeton – an eminent historian not part of the supreme court brief – calls such arguments “risible”.“By their reasoning,” Wilentz writes, “Trump’s misdeeds aside, enforcement of the 14th amendment poses a greater threat to our wounded democracy than Trump’s candidacy. In the name of defending democracy, they would speciously enable the man who did the wounding and now promises to do much more.”Trump and allies including Elise Stefanik of New York, a House Republican leader, have refused to commit to certifying the result should Trump lose in November.Wilentz continues: “Whether motivated by … fear of Trump’s base, a perverted sense of democratic evenhandedness, a reflexive hostility toward liberals, or something else, [commentators who say Trump should stay on the ballot] betray a basic ignorance of the relevant history and thus a misconception of what the 14th amendment actually meant and means. That history, meanwhile, has placed the conservative members of the supreme court in a very tight spot.”Wilentz says justices who subscribe to originalism, a doctrine that “purports to divine the original intentions of the framers [of the constitution] by presenting tendentious renderings of the past as a kind of scripture”, will in the Colorado case have to contend with evidence – as presented by the historians’ brief – of what the framers of the 14th amendment meant.Recently used to remove the right to abortion and to gut voting rights, originalism now threatens, Wilentz says, to become a “petard … exploding in the majority’s face.”He also writes: “The conservative majority of the supreme court and the historical legacy of the [Chief Justice John] Roberts court have reached a point of no return. The law, no matter the diversions and claptrap of Trump’s lawyers and the pundits, is crystal clear, on incontestable historical as well as originalist grounds … the conservatives face a choice between disqualifying Trump or shredding the foundation of their judicial methodology.”If the court does not “honour the original meaning of the 14th amendment and disqualify Donald Trump”, Wilentz writes, “it will trash the constitutional defense of democracy designed following slavery’s abolition; it will guarantee, at a minimum, political chaos no matter what the voters decide in November; and it will quite possibly pave the way for a man who has vowed that he will, if necessary, rescind the constitution in order to impose a dictatorship of revenge.” More

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      The search for Trump’s running mate: ‘like auditions for The Apprentice’

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      The last person who occupied the job of US vice-president ended up the target of a violent mob calling for him to be hanged. Even so, as Donald Trump closes in on the Republican nomination for 2024, there is no shortage of contenders eager to be his deputy.It is safe to assume that Mike Pence, who was Trump’s running mate in 2016 and 2020, will not get the job this time. His refusal to comply with his boss’s demand to overturn the last election caused a permanent rift and made Pence a perceived traitor and target of the January 6 insurrectionists.Undeterred, Trump’s campaign surrogates in the recent Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, both of which he won handily, have been trying to outdo each other with extravagant displays of fealty. “It’s very clear he’s holding these open auditions like it’s The Apprentice,” said Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist. “He will flirt with everyone. He will make them dance. They will all debase themselves and humiliate themselves and jockey for that spot.”When he first ran for president in 2016, Trump understood that he needed a vice-presidential pick who could help shore up support among Republican evangelicals and social conservatives, who were suspicious of the thrice-married reality TV star. Pence, the then Indiana governor and fierce social conservative, was from what Trump likes to call central casting.This year Trump’s allies and Republican strategists believe that he needs help attracting suburban swing voters in a handful of battleground states, where November’s election will likely be decided. Many commentators therefore predict that he will choose a woman or a person of colour, especially since the demise of the constitutional right to abortion.Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, said one of the factors important to Trump is “just how much of a sycophant they would be, not just in terms of ‘Oh, I love you, Donald Trump’, but do you love me enough when I tell you to violate your oath of office in the constitution that you’ll do it?’ And that person for me is Elise Stefanik.”Stefanik, 39, the highest-ranking woman in the Republican conference in the House of Representatives and one of the first members of Congress to endorse Trump, appears to have timed her run perfectly.She gained national prominence last month after embarrassing the heads of three top universities about antisemitism on their campuses during a congressional hearing, which prompted two of them to later resign. Stefanik claimed victory and declared: “I will always deliver results.” Trump reportedly described her as a “killer”.Since then she has outdone even the notoriously obsequious Pence. Soon after Trump described those convicted of crimes in the insurrection as “hostages”, she parroted the same term on NBC television’s flagship Meet the Press programme. When Trump confused rival Nikki Haley with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi while discussing January 6, Stefanik brazenly denied what everyone had heard.Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “She’s running flat out for it. That’s the only explanation for the things she says and does. I’m embarrassed for her but she’s not embarrassed because she only has one career goal. She says whatever she thinks he’ll like. He does like it.”In what is currently Washington’s favourite parlour game, the smart money is currently on Stefanik. Bill Whalen, a former media consultant for politicians including the former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, said: “Just based on what she did at that congressional hearing, what could make Trump more pleased than watching her take apart the Ivy League presidents? That would be very appealing for him to put her on the ticket.”Another contender is Kristi Noem, serving her second term as South Dakota’s governor after a landslide re-election victory in 2022. She gained national attention after refusing to impose a statewide mask mandate during the coronavirus pandemic. Noem campaigned for Trump at several events in Iowa earlier this month.Then there is the South Carolina senator Tim Scott, who is African American and could help Trump make inroads among Black voters. Scott was a one-time Republican rival to Trump but dropped out of the race in November. He has since endorsed Trump and told him during his victory speech in New Hampshire: “I just love you!” He also just announced his engagement to be married.Other potential running mates are Trump’s former White House press secretary and current Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders; Ben Carson, who was Trump’s housing secretary; Kari Lake, who narrowly lost a gubernatorial bid in Arizona in 2022 and is now running for the Senate there; Florida congressman Byron Donalds; Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene; and Ohio senator JD Vance.There appears to be broad resistance to picking Haley, Trump’s former UN ambassador and his last rival for the Republican nomination. On 19 January she said being a running mate was “off the table” while Trump said he would “probably” not pick her. Since then relations between the two have soured with Trump using insults such as “birdbrain” and Haley critiquing his age and mental acuity.In addition, Haley’s hawkish views on foreign policy, including military aid for Ukraine, are anathema to Trump’s “America first” base. Rightwing broadcaster Tucker Carlson vowed recently: “I would not only not vote for that ticket, I would advocate against it as strongly as I could.”Trump has publicly said he has already made up his mind, but he is reportedly still calling friends, supporters and donors for advice on whom he should pick. The stakes are unusually high this time and the oft-quoted old saw from Franklin Roosevelt’s deputy John Nance Garner – “The vice-presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss” – may not apply in 2024: Biden is 81 and Trump is 77, meaning that a vice-president’s ability to assume command has never been more pertinent.Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank at Stanford University, said: “A wary, sceptical voter is going to be thinking: ‘OK, what happens if … ?’ It makes the choice of the running mate all the more important.“We talk about this every election and we then dismiss it as voters don’t really think that way. But it’s on the table in this election in ways it hasn’t been in the past because you are focusing on the candidate’s health and their mental faculty, and the chance that one or both could not finish out a term.“That does lead to a different calculation with Trump in this regard. It’s not so much about picking up some electoral votes or reaching out to a group. It is the question of picking somebody who credibly can say they’re ready to lead from day one. You would think their chops would be more important than just their demographic.”Trump may not be in a hurry to make a final decision. The longer he dangles the prospect of the vice-presidency, the more that aspirants will genuflect and make elaborate attempts to get in his good graces.Wendy Schiller, a political scientist at Brown University, agreed. She said: “He doesn’t think he needs anybody to win this election so my guess is he’ll require lots of prominent people to come and pay homage to him. Then he’ll wait for the convention [in July] to announce it because he wants to make clear that VP – that they’re irrelevant. Generally, we worry more who his VP will be than he does.” More

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      in US Politics

      The Truce review: deep dive on Democrats’ dynamics and divisions

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      Joe Biden is more unpopular than Donald Trump. The Democrats’ upstairs-downstairs coalition frays, riven by the Israel-Gaza war, crisis at the US-Mexico border and inter-generational tensions. The party convention in Chicago in August carries the potential for a repeat of 1968. Then, pandemonium in the Windy City helped cost Hubert Humphrey the White House.But for sustained Republican efforts to gut reproductive rights, a strong issue for Democrats to run on, Biden and Kamala Harris would be in even deeper trouble. Even on the economy: strong GDP numbers and an invigorated bull market have yet to yield political profit.After three years on the job, the 46th president is widely viewed as a back-slapping north-eastern pol and Hunter Biden’s dad – not the transformational figure he sees when he looks into the mirror. Worse for him, at 81, majorities say he’s just too old.With The Truce: Progressives, Centrists, and the Future of the Democratic Party, Hunter Walker and Luppe B Luppen cast a sympathetic eye toward the party of Biden, Barack Obama and the Squad, prominent progressives of color in the US House. Walker is an investigative reporter at Talking Points Memo who covered the White House for Yahoo News. Luppen is a lawyer with a social media presence. In the past, he has donated to Democrats including Obama and Hillary Clinton.Mindful of Democrats’ internal divisions, the authors warmly describe Biden’s shift left and the political cover conferred. Convincingly, Walker and Luppen argue that the tilt from the center united the party and helped Biden enact legislation – until the House was lost.“This rapprochement culminated in Joe Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address,” Walker and Luppen write, of a speech that “leaned hard on progressive policy priorities from promoting organized labor to getting a handle on police violence”.Unfortunately, it failed to make Biden any more palatable to much of the public. On the one hand, 71% are sympathetic to unions, the highest level since 1965. On the other, Democrats remain seen as soft on crime. In 2020, protesters’ demands to “defund the police” were a boost only to Trump.“Bernie [Sanders] may have lost the election,” the Massachusetts senator Ed Markey reportedly told Ilhan Omar, a Squad member from Minnesota, after the State of the Union, referring to the Democratic primary in 2020. “But he won the speech.”Sanders, from Vermont, is the only socialist in the Senate. Biden also needed the centrists, Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema but they were never his. To a point they gave him cover but they never embraced his agenda. Manchin, from West Virginia, now mulls a third-party White House run. Sinema became an independent.Walker and Luppen also describe the enthusiasm shown for Biden’s State of the Union by Jamaal Bowman, a New York congressman and Squad member.“Mr President, that was awesome – that was awesome!” Bowman is quoted as saying.“Did you write the speech?” he is shown asking Sanders.Bowman has attracted controversy of his own. In September, he pulled a fire alarm in a congressional office building, then denied doing so in an attempt to delay a crucial vote. He did plead guilty to a misdemeanor.More recently, Bowman praised Norman Finkelstein, an American academic who has accused Israel of using the Holocaust to justify its actions against Palestinians, who has said Holocaust deniers should be allowed to teach, and who on 7 October, the day Hamas fighters raped and murdered Israelis, wrote: “It warms every fiber of my soul [to see] the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled.”Introducing Finkelstein at a panel session, Bowman said he was “starstruck” and had “watched him all the time on YouTube”. Under fire, Bowman said he had been “unaware of Norman Finkelstein’s completely reprehensible comments”.Encapsulating Democrats’ deepening divide over Israel, Bowman now faces a primary challenge from George Latimer, the Westchester county executive. Two months after that vote, the party will most likely face a convention fight fueled by the same issue.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDoubt also swirls around Biden’s vice-president. Walker and Lappen distill it. “Kamala is not ready for prime time”, a “senior White House aide” is quoted as saying, adding: “She ain’t made for this.” Fifty seven percent of registered voters concur. Walker and Luppen are not done. “This person should not be president of the United States,” a “top aide” to the former California senator’s 2020 campaign says.“The problems Harris and her team experienced on her campaign persisted during her time as vice-president,” Walker and Luppen write, adding that a source offered a damning assessment: “It was, they said, Game of Thrones.”HBO also aired Veep.The Truce also shines a light on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York and perhaps the most prominent Squad member. In the process, the book dishes on Corbin Trent, a former senior aide, and Riley Roberts, the congresswoman’s fiance.“I was hooked on fucking pain pills,” Trent acknowledges. Walker and Luppen stress that Ocasio-Cortez did not know. These days, Trent is back in the news for allegedly siphoning $140,000 in Pac money and for attempting to oust Biden as the nominee.As for Roberts, Walker and Luppen remind us of how his feelings for the police and his entrepreneurial spirit came to coincide. The authors recall a now-deleted site on which Roberts pushed the “Cop-Out Collective”, boasting, “High-end hemp t-shirts with our logo will be available for sale.”According to one poll, 47% of voters see the Democrats as too liberal, a seven-point swing since 2020. In another survey, only 57% of Democrats and Democratic-leaners expressed satisfaction with Biden as their nominee. More than seven-in-10 Republicans and allies are content with Trump.The Democrats have ceded economic policy to Sanders, their social agenda to Ivy League professors. When pivoting left on economics, it is imperative to remain in the cultural center. Democrats, including Biden, ignore this at their peril.
      The Truce is published in the US by WW Norton More

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      Nikki Haley was swatted in December, records review shows

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      Newly reviewed records show that presidential hopeful Nikki Haley was the target of a swatting incident in late December when an anonymous person called 911 claiming to have killed his girlfriend at Haley’s South Carolina home.Authorities responded to a call on 30 December from a person who said he had shot his girlfriend and was threatening to harm himself, giving Haley’s address to the operator. It was shortly deemed a fake emergency, Reuters reported. Haley and her son were not at home during the time of the call; her husband was overseas.“The incident is being investigated by all involved,” Craig Harris, the director of public safety at Kiawah Island, where Haley’s home is located. South Carolina state police, the FBI and Haley’s security team were informed of the event.Representatives for Haley have not responded to the incident publicly or responded to the Guardian’s request for comment.The report comes after a surge in swatting – when anonymous people use the addresses of public figures when calling 911 to report fake violent incidents, like shootings – against public officials in recent months. Some experts have noted that swatting has become a prolific tool of political intimidation in recent years as people respond to inflammatory rhetoric.Earlier this month, special counsel Jack Smith and DC district court judge Tanya Chutkan, both key figures in the federal case against Donald Trump for attempts to overturn the election, were targets of swatting. Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state who barred Trump from the state’s Republican primary ballot, was also singled out in an incident last year.Gabriel Sterling, a top official in the Georgia secretary of state’s office, said that 14 police cars, a firetruck and an ambulance appeared at his home when someone called 911 about a hoax shooting.“Now I bolt my doors every night,” he told Reuters. “That’s the reality I’m living in.”Jen Easterly, the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the federal agency that is tasked with bolstering election security, was also a target of a hoax December 30, NBC News reported earlier this week.“One of the most troubling trends we have seen in recent years has been the harassment of public officials across the political spectrum, including extreme incidents involving swatting and direct personal threats,” Easterly told NBC News. “These incidents pose a serious risk to the individuals, their families and, in the case of swatting, to the law enforcement officers responding to the situation. While my own experience was certainly harrowing, it was unfortunately not unique.”Some officials have also been targets of more direct threats. On the morning of closing arguments in Trump’s New York fraud trial, a bomb squad responded to a threat directed toward the Long Island home of judge Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing the case. More

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      Trump’s ‘achilles heel’? Haley’s refusal to drop out infuriates ex-president

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      It was a moment for Donald Trump to be gracious, magnanimous, perhaps even presidential. Instead he lashed out at his opponent’s clothes. “When I watched her in the fancy dress that probably wasn’t so fancy, I said, ‘What’s she doing? We won,’” he said of rival Nikki Haley in New Hampshire on Tuesday night.Trump had just won the first primary election of 2024 and all but clinched the Republican nomination for US president. Party leaders and campaign surrogates are now eager to banish Haley to irrelevance, move on from the primary and unify against Democrats. They want Trump to pivot to an almost inevitable rematch with Democrat Joe Biden in November.Yet the 77-year-old remains consumed with rage over Haley’s unwillingness to quit the race. His petulance offers a reminder of the unhinged behaviour that turned off independent voters in New Hampshire and could prove to be a liability in a head-to-head contest with Biden. It is also at odds with what is an unusually professional and disciplined campaign operation.Wendy Schiller, a political scientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “Donald Trump wants the race to be over and we see evidence of why that’s important for the Trump campaign from his speech, which was essentially a train wreck and exhibited all the worst tendencies of Donald Trump. It was an undisciplined Trump and this is what turns off independent voters.”She added: “This is the achilles heel for the Trump campaign and they know it. The sooner this gets wrapped up then he doesn’t have any more of those impromptu late night speeches. Their worry is not that they’re not going to win the nomination; their worry is the damage that Trump having to respond to Haley will do in the general election with independent voters.”Trump’s investment of emotion and energy in attacking Haley is wildly out of proportion for the minimal threat that Haley poses. He won the Iowa caucuses in a landslide – she was third – and beat her by double digits in New Hampshire. No other Republican candidate in history who won the first two contests has failed to clinch his party’s nomination. His dominance looks set to render the next five months of primaries irrelevant.Newt Gingrich, a former House of Representatives speaker and ex-presidential candidate, said: “Trump’s best strategy is to assume he is the nominee and go straight at Biden and ignore Haley, let her flounder around until she either runs out of money or realises that there is no future. She’ll presently disappear.”Republicans have coalesced around the former president, putting pressure on Haley to step aside. She is not competing in next month’s Nevada caucuses. Trump has racked up endorsements from most of South Carolina’s leading Republicans and opinion polls show him with a big lead in the state, which has a strong base of Christian evangelicals, ahead of the primary on 24 February.View image in fullscreenYet Haley, 52, a former South Carolina governor and US ambassador to the UN, is soldiering on. She tweeted on Thursday: “Underestimate me, that’s always fun.” Next week she is scheduled for a fundraising tour that includes stops in New York, Florida, California, Texas and South Carolina. She is expected to continue to draw donor support as Never Trumpers within the party make a last stand and hope he could yet be derailed by the 91 criminal charges against him.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “I do know some of her donors and my guess is they want her staying in to put Trump through his paces. They don’t put it on the record but they think there’s a reasonable chance that something will happen to Trump, either health-wise or conviction to the extent that he can no longer be the nominee.”Haley describes herself as “scrappy”, continues to hold rallies and is becoming more aggressive in her denunciations of Trump. On Wednesday she launched a $4m advertising campaign in South Carolina describing the prospect of a Biden v Trump election as “a rematch no one wants”. Its narrator says: “Biden – too old. Trump – too much chaos. There’s a better choice for a better America.”How long can she last? Michael Steele, a Trump critic and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “My bet is two weeks. You really want to go into that race in your home state and lose by 30 or 40 points? Where is the political viability after that? We’ve seen candidates who run actual general election presidential campaigns and they lose their home state and we never heard from them again.”Haley’s tenacity has enraged Trump. He has branded her “birdbrain”. He has threatened to blacklist anyone who donates to her campaign. He has railed against her frequently on social media, writing: “Could somebody please explain to Nikki that she lost – and lost really badly. She also lost Iowa, BIG, last week. They were, as certain non-fake media say, ‘CRUSHING DEFEATS.’”The insults and outbursts are a reminder of why Trump alienated moderate voters in the past. While his win in New Hampshire was historic, it also exposed general election vulnerabilities, showing him to be highly popular with Republicans but highly unpopular with independents, who were allowed to take part in the Republican primary under the state’s rules.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere has never been such a wide gap between the Republican vote and the independent vote in a New Hampshire Republican primary. According to CNN’s exit polls, Trump won Republican voters by 74% to 25%, but Haley won independents 58% to 39%.Forty-two per cent of voters said they would not consider Trump to be fit for office if he were convicted of a crime. An analysis by Fox News found that 35% of voters in New Hampshire would be so dissatisfied with a Trump nomination that they would not vote for him in November.Steele, a host on the MSNBC cable news network, added: “There’s 91 indictments hanging over this guy. Of course he’s vulnerable but everyone wants to keep puffing him up like he’s some tiger or some lion. It’s just ridiculous.“I just wish people would get honest about what’s in front of them. This guy is vulnerable as hell. He’s weak as hell. But in reality TV land, he’s the guy that fires people: he’s rough, he’s tough, he’s single-minded. No, he’s a petulant little boy who shows that petulance when he’s challenged.”Biden’s campaign is working on the premise that Trump will be the nominee. He has delivered two major speeches about the threat that Trump poses to democracy and the dangerous rise of white supremacy. This week he held a joint event with his vice-president, Kamala Harris, in Virginia to promote reproductive freedom, highlighting Trump’s role in the supreme court’s Dobbs decision that overturned the constitutional right to abortion.Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, said: “The Dobbs decision basically became this before-and-after moment in American politics where there just became this sense that the Republican party had become too ugly, too extreme, too dangerous, and it has struggled mightily in election after election since the spring of 2022.”He added: “You’re starting to see, even in the early going here, there is a lot more weakness than strength coming out of the Republican party in the last couple of weeks. It’s because Maga [Make America great again] has become unattractive even to Republican voters. Fear and opposition to Maga is the most powerful force in American politics. It’s why Republicans keep losing, and Republicans have chosen a candidate who is ultra-Maga to be their nominee in 2024.” More

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      Biden hopes abortion will keep him in the White House. But has he done enough to protect rights?

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      Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has made a big bet that outrage over abortion will keep the president in the White House come November.Over the last several days, the Biden administration has unleashed a blitz of ads and events to spotlight the devastation wrought by the overturning of Roe v Wade. Biden met with a reproductive health task force, while his vice-president, Kamala Harris – who he has entrusted to lead this effort – embarked on a national tour to talk about abortion. They even devoted their first joint campaign stop of 2024 to the issue. From the podium, Biden promised to sign any bill that would codify Roe’s protections into law and to fight back efforts by Congress to diminish abortion access.“Donald Trump and Maga Republicans, including the speaker of the House, are hellbent on going even further,” Biden said, a reference to the hard-right Republican speaker, Mike Johnson. “As long as I have power of the presidency, if Congress were to pass a national abortion ban, I would veto it.”Congress is unlikely to ban or protect abortion anytime soon. Not only is Congress largely frozen – it passed just 27 bills last year – but both political parties seem wary of tackling national legislation around a third-rail topic like abortion.Now that Roe is gone, the question of if and how to regulate abortion access is largely up to state governments to answer. But the executive branch of the US government still maintains several powers to protect abortion access – and undermine it.What has Biden done to protect abortion access?The Biden administration’s ability to enforce remaining federal laws that touch on abortion is perhaps its greatest weapon in the fight over the procedure. Shortly after Roe’s demise, the Biden administration announced that it believed a 1986 federal law that protects people’s access to emergency care at hospitals also applies to emergency abortions. The administration later sued Idaho, arguing that the state’s near-total abortion ban flew in the face of that law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala).That case has now made its way to the US supreme court. The supreme court justices are also set to hear arguments in a case involving the availability of a major abortion pill – a case in which the Biden administration is, once again, arguing in favor of abortion access.“Being a check on the supreme court is pretty significant,” said Mary Ziegler, a University of California Davis school of law professor who studies the legal history of reproduction. The US supreme court is dominated 6-3 by conservatives. “If the supreme court says that you can or should enforce rules against abortion providers, I don’t think a Biden administration is going to do that.”Since Roe fell, anti-abortion activists have also begun to argue that the federal government could enforce a de facto national abortion ban through the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that bans the mailing of abortion-related materials.However, the Biden administration has issued guidance declaring that they do not believe the Comstock Act can or should be used to enforce a national abortion ban. According to the Biden administration, as long as someone does not intend to break the law when they mail abortion-related materials, they are not violating the Comstock Act.What more could Biden be doing?The answer depends on who you ask. Abortion rights advocates have long been dissatisfied with Biden’s approach to the procedure; Biden has supported Roe’s protections but also said that, as a Catholic, he is personally not “big on abortion”. During his campaign and the first several months of his presidency, he seemed wary of even saying the word “abortion”, leading reproductive justice advocates to launch a website devoted to answering the question “Did Biden Say Abortion Yet?” (He has now said it multiple times.)The Biden administration has pursued several cases under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or Face Act, a federal law that penalizes people for threatening, obstructing, or injuring someone who is trying to access a reproductive health clinic, or for vandalizing a clinic. But abortion providers have long complained that the law is not being enforced enough.Abortion rights supporters have also proposed a litany of other, experimental ways to protect abortion access, such as by leasing federal land to abortion providers or advocating for the repeal of the Comstock Act. Biden could also loosen regulations around abortion pills, although Ziegler cautioned that such actions run the risk of politicizing the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to a dangerous degree. Abortion rights advocates have also said that the Biden administration could take steps to lessen the impact of the Helms Amendment, a decades-old law that has been used to block the use of federal funding to pay for abortions. Advocates have accused Biden of inappropriately over-enforcing the Helms Amendment, to the point that the US Agency for International Development in 2021 cancelled a conference session on the provision of safe telemedicine abortion.However, in Ziegler’s view, the threat of the supreme court tamps down on Biden’s ability to innovate. Rather than pursuing novel, national ways to protect abortion access and run the risk of litigation, the administration may want to stay out of federal court entirely.“I think Biden has been really cautious,” Ziegler said. “But I do also think that had he not been as cautious, it could have ended up the same or worse anyway, just because the supreme court is so conservative.”What could Donald Trump do to further restrict abortion?If Trump wins the presidency in November 2024, he may reverse course on many of the Biden administration’s decisions around how and if to enforce federal abortion law. He could try to implement the Comstock Act to ban abortion in some form, including in states that haven’t passed bans. He could also decrease Face Act prosecutions, or tighten regulations on mifepristone.Unlike Biden, he likely wouldn’t worry about politicizing the FDA, Ziegler said. “There’s a lot of asymmetry that hurts Democrats, but also Democrats do value some of these institutional separations that Republicans don’t.”Trump’s first four years in the White House also offer a blueprint for how he may further dismantle access to both abortion and contraception if he returns to power.Since the 1980s, whenever a Republican becomes president, he has implemented what is known as “the Mexico City policy” or the “global gag rule”, as abortion rights supporters call it. This policy typically blocks foreign NGOs that receive US family planning funding from providing abortion-related services or even advocating for increased access to the procedure. (Historically, whenever a Democrat replaces a Republican as president, he has rescinded the Mexico City policy.)Trump, however, turbocharged the Mexico City policy during his presidency. Rather than stripping funding only from family planning assistance, in 2017 his administration expanded it to apply to all US global health assistance. Rather than impacting $600m worth of funding, by 2018 it impacted $12bn, according to estimates by the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights.As president, Trump also implemented a “domestic gag rule”, which blocked members of Title X, the nation’s largest family planning program, from even referring people for abortions. Rather than comply with this rule, a quarter of Title X-funded health centers simply left the program. Six states were left with zero Title X providers, who offer low-cost access to family planning services like birth control.If Trump wins in 2024, he will likely reinstate this rule, said Robin Summers, vice-president and senior counsel for the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association. And that’s just the beginning of Summers thinks he might do.“I think it only gets worse,” Summers said.Trump could, Summers suggested, legally label certain forms of hormonal birth control – such as IUDS – as abortifacients, suggesting that they cause abortions. (Medical experts widely believe that they do not.) The US supreme court has previously supported a similar move. In a 2014 decision, issued when the court’s makeup was far less conservative, the justices ruled that a corporation did not have to cover certain forms of birth control for employees because the corporation’s religious owners believed them to be abortifacients.“The bottom line here is that advocates sounded the alarm for years that Roe was at significant risk of being overturned. And we were dismissed by many as catastrophizing the whole thing,” Summers said. “And look where we are.” More