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      Freed Americans on flight bound for US as families hold ‘emotional call’ with president Biden – as it happened

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      From 1h agoFive detained Americans and two of their family members have been allowed to leave Iran and are on their way back to the United States after the Biden administration reached a deal in which Washington freed five jailed Iranians and allowed Tehran to access $6b in oil revenue, but only for humanitarian purposes. The agreement comes as the United Nations general assembly kicks off in New York, but it’s too soon to say if the deal between the two archenemy nations will lead to further negotiations down the road.Here’s what else happened today:
      Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi described the release of the Americans as “purely a humanitarian action”.
      Joe Biden held what the White House described as “an emotional call” with the freed Americans as they traveled back to the United States.
      Michael McCaul, the Republican leader of the House foreign affairs committee, worried the deal would incentivize “future hostage-taking” and “free up funds for Iran’s malign activities.”
      Siamak Namazi, an Iranian-American businessman, credited “all of you who didn’t allow the world to forget me” for his release.
      Hunter Biden sued the IRS, arguing that the tax authority broke the law by failing to protect his privacy when two agents went public with claims of political meddling in their investigation.
      You can read our latest full report here:Our diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour has written about how this deal may signal new direction in western diplomacy:In a statement, Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, welcomed the release of the five Americans from Iranian custody, but criticized the Biden administration for allowing Tehran to access $6b in oil revenue:
      I am immensely relieved that five Americans held hostage by Iran are finally reunited with their families and on their way home. I wish them peace, strength, and health as they rebuild their lives in freedom.
      I am very concerned that this $6 billion hostage deal incentivizes future hostage-taking. Even though the Administration claims these funds are limited to humanitarian transactions, we all know that transactions are difficult to monitor and that money is fungible. There is no question this deal will free up funds for Iran’s malign activities.
      Republicans have generally called for harsh measures against Tehran, and during his presidency, Donald Trump went as far as to authorize a drone strike that killed top Iranian general Qassem Suleimani in 2020. Democrats, meanwhile, have tried to find common ground where they can with Iran, such as the 2015 deal Barack Obama reached to curb its nuclear weapons program – which Trump announced the US would withdraw from in 2018.In domestic political news, NBC News reports that the far-right Republican troublemaker Matt Gaetz is highly likely – in the estimation of one source, “100% in” – to run for governor in Florida in 2026.By then, the current hard-right Republican governor, the presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, will either be in the White House or at the end of his two-term time in state office.On Monday, NBC quoted one “longtime Florida Republican lobbyist” as saying that at a reception in Tallahassee on Sunday, “there was a lot of talk about it … and Gaetz was telling people to basically expect him to be in”.Another “Florida Republican operative” was quoted as saying: “He’s 100% in. I think Gaetz is an instant frontrunner and from what I hear he’s already won the Trump primary”, meaning Donald Trump’s endorsement.Gaetz, 41, told NBC: “Many did encourage me to consider running for governor one day.”He also aimed a dig at DeSantis, saying: “But we have an outstanding governor who will be in that position through 2026.”Gaetz’s “only political focus right now”, he added – other than opposing almost everything Kevin McCarthy does as US House speaker, including proposing ways to fund the federal government – “is Trump 2024”.Some further reading:The Iranian nationals who were released in a prisoner swap with the United States have landed in Tehran, state-run PressTV reports:Reuters reports that the two individuals arriving in Iran after transiting Qatar are Mehrdad Moin-Ansari and Reza Sarhangpour-Kafrani. Another two Iranians released by the United States will stay in the country, while a fifth will go to an undisclosed country to join his family.The White House announced that Joe Biden this morning “held an emotional call with the families of the seven American citizens who are returning home to the United States from Iran.”“Each family member who joined the call spoke with the president,” it added in a statement, which also confirmed the group had departed Doha, Qatar for the United States.The five Americans released by Iran today in a prisoner swap have departed Doha, Qatar for the United States, Reuters reports, citing a source familiar with the matter.Qatar helped broker the deal between the two archenemy nations, and the group of former detainees along with two American family members that had been prevented from leaving Iran were flown earlier today from Tehran to the Gulf nation.World leaders meeting at the United Nations in New York on Monday warned of the peril the world faces unless it acts with urgency to rescue a set of 2030 development goals to wipe out hunger and extreme poverty and to battle climate change, Reuters reports.The news agency further writes:
      Their declaration, adopted by consensus at a summit before the annual U.N. General Assembly, embraces a 2015 “to-do” list of 17 Sustainable Development Goals that also include water, energy, reducing inequality and achieving gender equality.“The achievement of the SDGs is in peril,” the declaration reads. “We are alarmed that the progress on most of the SDGs is either moving much too slowly or has regressed below the 2015 baseline.”U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the summit of leaders that only 15% of the targets are on track and that many are going in reverse.Earlier this month, Guterres called on G20 leaders to ensure a stimulus of at least $500 billion per year towards meeting the goals. He called on countries to act now.The leaders are meeting in the shadow of geopolitical tensions – largely fueled by the war in Ukraine – as Russia and China vie with the United States and Europe to win over developing countries, where achieving the Sustainable Development Goals are key.“Instead of leaving no one behind, we risk leaving the SDGs behind … the SDGs need a global rescue plan,” Guterres told the summit.The U.N. said this month that there are 745 million more moderately to severely hungry people in the world today than in 2015, and the world is far off track in its efforts to meet the ambitious United Nations goal to end hunger by 2030.
      The United Nations General Assembly is getting underway in New York with world leaders flying in and the biggest leaders getting ready to deliver their headline speeches tomorrow.Joe Biden has already traveled north and has a couple of Democratic fundraising events this evening in the Big Apple.Tomorrow, the US president will speak at the UN headquarters, following the major opening address by the UN secretary general António Guterres. Guterres will be followed by Brazil’s Lula and then Biden. We expect Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who appeared by video link last year but is attending in person this year, to make his speech around noon local time at a crucial time in the counteroffensive against Russia’s invasion 1.5 years ago.The Ukraine war will be the dominant topic, especially in the absence of Russia and China’s leaders.But Reuters adds:
      With the world on track to break the record for the hottest year in history, world leaders, business leaders, celebrities and activists have converged on midtown Manhattan for Climate Week and the U.N.’s Climate Action Summit, again focusing the world’s attention on the climate crisis. The annual climate gathering coincides with the start of the United Nations General Assembly, bringing heads of state and top government officials together with private-sector leaders to focus on climate change in a year marked by a record number of billion-dollar disasters, including eight severe floods.The main event will take place Wednesday when Guterres will host his own Climate Action Summit, a high-profile event meant to reverse backsliding on Paris climate agreement goals and to encourage governments to adopt serious new actions to combat climate change.“There is lingering doubt that … we can meet our climate goals. There is too much backtracking; so we’re really hoping that this summit can be used as a moment to inspire people,” Selwin Hart, special adviser on climate to the secretary-general, said in an interview.
      The five Americans freed from imprisonment in Iran are now on a flight bound for the US, Reuters reports.Citing an unnamed source, the news agency just reported that an aircraft has departed Doha, the capital of Qatar, where the Americans had been taken as an interim stage, en route for the States.Five detained Americans and two of their family members have been allowed to leave Iran, in a deal with the Biden administration that saw Washington release five jailed Iranians and $6b in oil proceeds, which Tehran can only spend on humanitarian supplies. The agreement comes as the United Nations general assembly kicks off in New York, but it’s too soon to say if the agreement between the two archenemy nations will lead to further negotiations down the road.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi described the release of the Americans as “purely a humanitarian action”.
      Siamak Namazi, an Iranian-American businessman, credited “all of you who didn’t allow the world to forget me” for his release.
      Hunter Biden sued the IRS, arguing that the tax authority broke the law by failing to protect his privacy when two agents went public with claims of political meddling in their investigation.
      Businessman Siamak Namazi said in a statement released on his behalf, “I would not be free today, if it wasn’t for all of you who didn’t allow the world to forget me,” the Associated Press reports.Namazi was among the five Americans released by Iran today in exchange for the freeing of five Iranians detained in the United States and access to $6b in money from oil sales Tehran can spend only on humanitarian supplies.Namazi continued:
      Thank you for being my voice when I could not speak for myself and for making sure I was heard when I mustered the strength to scream from behind the impenetrable walls of Evin Prison.”
      A dual US-Iranian national, Namazi was detained in 2015 while visiting family in Tehran. Months later, his father, Baquer, was detained when he came to visit him in jail, before being released in 2022.Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the United Nations general assembly in New York, Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi cast Tehran’s release of five Americans as “a humanitarian action”, and hinted that similar deals could be possible, Reuters reports.“This was purely a humanitarian action … And it can certainly be a step based upon which in the future other humanitarian actions can be taken,” the Iranian leader, who was elected in 2021, told reporters.In his remarks to reporters, secretary of state Antony Blinken said seven, not five, Americans had been released by Iran.Blinken included in that number two Americans who had been prevented from leaving the country.“Just a few minutes ago, I had the great pleasure of speaking to seven Americans who are now free, free from their imprisonment or detention in Iran, out of Iran, out of prison, and now in Doha enroute back to the United States, to be reunited with their loved ones,” Blinken said.“Five of the seven, of course, had been unjustly detained, imprisoned in Iran, some for years. Two others had been prevented from leaving Iran.”In a briefing to reporters, secretary of state Antony Blinken said the $6bn in money from oil sales released to Iran can only be used to buy humanitarian supplies: More

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      ‘Cognitively impaired’? Trump’s confused attacks on Biden start to backfire

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      Donald Trump has long attacked Joe Biden, his likely opponent at the polls next year, as “Sleepy Joe”, portraying the 80-year-old president as too old and too mentally fogged to occupy the Oval Office. As recently as Friday, the former president attacked his successor for being unfit to deal with Russia and the threat of nuclear war.But Trump’s tactics rebounded when he said Biden threatened to lead the US into “world war two” – and suggested that he, Trump, thought he had beaten Barack Obama for the presidency back in 2016.There have been two world wars. The first ended in 1918, the second in 1945. The cold war, the nuclear stand-off between the US and the Soviet Union that often threatened a third world war, ended with the fall of the communist regime in Moscow in 1991.Obama was president, and Biden vice-president, from 2009 to 2017. In the 2016 election, Trump beat Hillary Clinton.Mockery of Trump’s stumbles was immediate and sustained. But it also pointed to an increasingly stark issue on both sides of the aisle: the advanced age of many American leaders, and polling that shows most voters want generational change.At 80, Biden is the oldest president ever. Should he win re-election and serve a full term, he will be 86 on leaving office. Polling has shown more than 75% of Americans think he is too old for a second term.Trump is 77 but polls show significantly fewer voters think he is too old to return to power. Whether gaffes like those he made in Washington move the needle remains, of course, to be seen.Addressing the Pray, Vote, Stand summit, a rightwing event, Trump said Biden was “cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead and … now in charge of dealing with Russia and possible nuclear war”.Under Biden, he added: “We would be in world war two.”On Monday, the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, laughed as he said: “It’s almost like it’s the summer of 1939 all over again. You know, [Trump’s] father’s going to a Nazi rally or something, or a Klan rally. I don’t know which rally he did or didn’t go to.”Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was arrested after a Klan riot in Queens, New York, in 1927. Donald Trump has reportedly expressed sympathy for Nazism and Adolf Hitler.“But yeah,” Scarborough said. “You think they may want to take out the ‘cognitively impaired’ part of his speeches from now on.”Jonathan Lemire, his fellow host, said: “That’s an attack line the Republicans and Trump love to use [against Biden] but, man, that does seem like he was looking in the mirror just there.“I mean … we see these polls that suggest that voters are more concerned about President Biden’s age than Donald Trump’s age. Trump is only three years younger and anyone watching Trump day in, day out says he’s changed too.”Biden says he is fit to serve. So does Trump, telling NBC in an interview broadcast on Sunday “there should be a competency” test for presidents, of the sort he “aced” while in the White House. That prompted memories of previous national mirth, when in summer 2020 Trump, then 74, bragged about successfully recognising “person, woman, man, camera, TV” in a cognitive exam.But, again, the issue remains a serious one.Democrats protest that disproportionate attention is paid to Biden’s age than that of Trump. Last week, Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist, told CBS News: “Joe Biden is getting older, we all know that. But the other guy he’s probably going to be running against is getting older, too. And in the focus groups that I’m doing, old and steady still beats old and crazy.”Nonetheless, on Sunday, a new poll from CBS and YouGov said only 34% of voters thought Biden would complete a second term if elected. Asked the same question about Trump, 55% said they thought he would complete a full four years.Asked if the two men had the necessary mental and cognitive health to be president, 26% said only Biden did, 44% said only Trump did and 23% said neither did.Ninety-one criminal charges and assorted civil lawsuits notwithstanding, Trump leads Republican polling by wide margins. His challengers have made age and cognitive ability an issue but such is Trump’s dominance, they have mostly directed their fire at Biden.Ron DeSantis, the hard-right Florida governor who is a distant second to Trump, said last week age was “absolutely a legitimate concern” when electing a president.“The presidency’s not a job for someone that’s 80 years old,” DeSantis told CBS.He did not say if he thought the same about someone who was 77, and who the former Republican party chair Michael Steele called a “dumbass”, over his Washington remarks.But DeSantis added: “Obviously, I’m the governor of Florida, I know a lot of people who are elderly, they’re great people, but you’re talking about a job where you need to give it 100%, we need an energetic president.”Concern about the age of many US party leaders has spread beyond the presidency, particularly given public health scares suffered by Mitch McConnell, the 81-year-old Republican leader in the Senate, and Dianne Feinstein, the 90-year-old Democratic senator from California.DeSantis said: “I think that if the founders could kind of look at this again, I do think they probably would’ve put an age limit on some of these offices.” More

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      Here’s the scary way Trump could win without the electoral or popular vote | Stephen Marche

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      In an ordinary time, under ordinary political conditions, the specter of another Trump presidency would be strictly the stuff of nightmares. The former president is facing 40 criminal charges for his mishandling of classified documents, and will have to interrupt his campaign next summer to defend himself in court. Those charges are apart from the 34 felony counts of falsifying business records he faces in New York. And then there’s the rape defamation lawsuit, which will begin in January, and which he will almost certainly lose.The American people, however, can be awfully forgiving. In current polling, Joe Biden and Donald Trump are tied nationally; no Republican nominee has emerged to challenge Trump. But, as we have been learning pretty much continuously since 2000, the will of the majority of the American people no longer matters all that much in who is running their country.The abstruse and elaborate mechanisms of the US constitution relating to elections, which used to be matters for historical curiosity, have become more and more relevant every year. In 2024, there is very much a way for Donald Trump to lose the popular vote, lose the electoral college, lose all his legal cases and still end up president of the United States in an entirely legal manner. It’s called a contingent election.A contingent election is the process put in place to deal with the eventuality in which no presidential candidate reaches the threshold of 270 votes in the electoral college. In the early days of the American republic, when the duopoly of the two-party system was neither desired nor expected, this process was essential.There have been two contingent elections in US history. The first was in 1825. The year before, Andrew Jackson, the man from the $20 bill, had won the plurality of votes and the plurality of electoral college votes as well, but after extensive, elaborate negotiations, John Quincy Adams took the presidency mostly by offering Henry Clay, who had come third in the election, secretary of state. Jackson, though shocked, conceded gracefully. He knew his time would come. His supporters used the taint of Adams’s “corrupt bargain” with Clay to ensure Jackson’s victory in 1828.Jackson was a patriot. He put the country’s interests ahead of his own, to preserve the young republic. The United States is older now, and the notion of leaders who would put the interests of the country ahead of themselves and their party is archaic. The 2022 midterms were unprecedented in terms of how many election deniers were appointed to serious office.“Many 2020 election deniers and skeptics ran for office in the 2022 midterm elections, with 229 candidates winning their elections,” a University of California report found. “A total of 40 states elected a 2020 election denier or skeptic to various positions, from governor to secretary of state to attorney general to congress.”The American people are already disinclined to believe in the legitimacy of any election that doesn’t conform to their own desired outcome any more, left or right. In 2016, at the inauguration of Donald Trump, the crowds chanted “not my president”. As of August, the percentage of Republicans who think that 2020 was stolen is near 70%.So the possibility of the electoral college releasing a confusing result, or being unable to certify a satisfying result by two months after the election, is quite real. The electoral college, even at its best, is an arcane system, unworthy of a 21st-century country. There have been, up to 2020, 165 faithless electors in American history – electors who didn’t vote for the candidate they had pledged to vote for.In 1836, Virginia faithless electors forced a contingent election for vice-president. If the 270 marker has not been reached by 6 January, the contingent election takes place automatically. And the contingent election isn’t decided by the popular votes or the number of electoral college votes. Each state delegation in the House of Representatives is given a single vote for president. Each state delegation in the Senate is given a single vote for vice-president.The basic unfairness of this process is obvious: California with its 52 representatives, and Texas with its 38 representatives, would have the same say in determining the presidency as Wyoming and Vermont, which have one apiece. State delegations in the House would favor Republicans as a matter of course. In the struggle for congressional delegates, Republicans would have 19 safe House delegations and the Democrats would have 14, as it stands, with more states leaning Republican than Democrat.All that would be required, from a technical, legal standpoint, is for enough electoral college votes to be uncounted or uncertified for the contingent election to take place, virtually guaranteeing a Republican victory and hence a Trump presidency. It would be entirely legal and constitutional. It just wouldn’t be recognizably democratic to anyone. Remember that autocracies have elections. It doesn’t matter who votes. It matters who counts.In 2021, I published a book about American political decline, The Next Civil War, which examined the structural crises underlying the collapse of the American political order, but I didn’t include a chapter on the electoral system because it seemed too far-fetched, the stuff of historical figments. Those deep structural crises are now, rapidly, overtaking the electoral system itself. A contingent election would be, in effect, the last election, which is the title of the new book I co-wrote with Andrew Yang about exactly that possibility. The rot is advancing faster than anybody could have imagined. Figments from history are now hints to the future.Polls aren’t worth much at the best of times but this year they are particularly meaningless. Democrats have taken comfort from a recent New York Times/Siena College poll that showed how the Republican advantage in the electoral college, which was 2.9% in 2016, rising to 3.8% in 2020, has diminished to less than a single percentage point, according to the most recent data. None of it matters.The real danger of 2024 isn’t even the possibility of a Trump presidency. It’s that the electoral system, in its arcane decrepitude, will produce an outcome that won’t be credible to anybody. The danger of 2024 is that it will be the last election.
      Stephen Marche is a Canadian essayist and novelist. He is the author of The Next Civil War and How Shakespeare Changed Everything More

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      Congressional Biden ally dismisses Republicans’ impeachment strategy

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      One of Joe Biden’s key congressional allies has rejected the notion that Republicans can bait the president’s fellow Democrats into embracing an impeachment inquiry as an opportunity for him to be cleared over questions about his son’s business affairs.“What the American people want is for us to fund government and solve their issues,” the California congressman Ro Khanna said on Fox News Sunday, referring to how some hard-right Republicans have made a Biden impeachment inquiry a condition for them to support new funding that would avoid at least a partial federal government shutdown after 30 September.Khanna, a leading progressive who sits on the US House’s oversight committee and is a member of Biden’s re-election advisory board, added: “There is no grounds for an impeachment inquiry, and this is why” Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy lacks the votes necessary to have already called one.The comments from Khanna to the Republican-friendly news program came after host Maria Bartiromo suggested that going along with a Biden impeachment could afford the president a chance to demonstrate – once and for all – that allegations of corruption stemming from his son Hunter’s foreign business deals are unfounded.Bartiromo said Republican congressman Scott Perry – Khanna’s fellow House oversight committee member – had previously advanced a similar line of argument to support impeaching Biden. And Bartiromo also alluded to Fox News polling which showed a percentage of voters believed Biden had done something unethical, if not illegal, as far as Hunter’s business dealings were concerned.But Khanna countered by pointing Bartiromo and her viewers to a Washington Post opinion piece by Colorado’s Republican House member Ken Buck, which asserted that there was no evidence to justify a Biden impeachment.Buck said that was his position even as he strongly condemned the Democrat-led impeachment of Biden’s Republican presidential predecessor, Donald Trump, in 2019. That impeachment concerned attempts by Trump to find dirt on his political rivals, including Biden, pertaining to politics and business in Ukraine.It was separate from Trump’s second impeachment stemming from his supporters’ violent attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 after his electoral defeat to Biden. Both impeachments resulted in Trump’s acquittal.Khanna said it was also telling that other Republicans have publicly shared Buck’s opinion that Biden’s impeachment would at best be a fruitless distraction. That reality contrasts sharply with the generally united front which Democrats presented when voting to impeach Trump, Khanna argued.“I mean, when we impeached President Trump, every Democrat voted for it,” said Khanna, though two House members belonging to his party opposed the 2019 impeachment. The GOP House speaker, Khanna said, “simply doesn’t have the votes on his side”, and a substantial number of Republicans in the chamber have expressed their preference to focus on avoiding a government shutdown.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Fund the government; solve people’s problems,” those Republicans say, according to Khanna.Bartiromo conceded that there were “definitely Republicans saying they don’t want to go down this road” of impeaching Biden.As ultra-conservative rhetoric about impeaching Biden swirled, the president’s son was indicted on Thursday on federal firearms charges which can carry up to 25 years in prison. The charges were brought against Hunter Biden after the collapse in August of a plea deal that also involved two separate misdemeanor tax charges.Since last year’s midterm elections, Republicans have held only a thin majority in the US House, which has the power to draw up articles of impeachment. Democrats hold a thin majority in the Senate, where two-thirds of the members need to vote to convict – and, as a consequence, remove from office – an impeached official. More

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      Trump says Republicans ‘speak very inarticulately’ about abortion

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      Donald Trump grappled with a wide range of contentious issues in an interview with NBC that generated criticism against the network, including his thoughts on democratic principles, abortion rights and ageing politicians.He also confirmed his interest in choosing Kristi Noem to be his vice-presidential running mate if he wins the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 as he seeks a second term in the White House.In an interview on Sunday with Kristen Welker during her debut as host of NBC’s Meet the Press, the former president advised members of his party to abandon their hardline stance of abortion bans with no exceptions.He said Republicans “speak very inarticulately” about abortion and criticized those who push for abortion bans without exceptions in the cases of rape, incest and the health of the mother.“Other than certain parts of the country, you can’t – you’re not going to win on this issue,” said Trump, who faces more than 90 pending criminal charges across four separate indictments, including for subversion of the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.“But you will win on this issue when you come up with the right number of weeks.”Trump predicted that both sides would eventually come together on the issue after the US supreme court last year eliminated the federal abortion rights that had been put in place decades earlier by the Roe v Wade ruling. Three justices whom he appointed to the supreme court made the elimination of those rights a reality.“For the first time in … years, you’ll have an issue that we can put behind us,” he said.Trump said he is “all for” a presidency competency test, but the 77-year-old expressed his opposition to age limits.He alluded to taking a mental competency test two or three years ago and boasted that he “aced it”.“I get everything right,” Trump said during the interview conducted at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf retreat. “I’m all for testing. I frankly think testing would be a good thing.”In 2020, it was revealed that some of the early questions in that test involved Trump identifying an elephant and counting backward from 100.Asked if it is time for a new generation of US leadership, Trump said: “It’s always time for a new generation.” But he qualified his answer: “Some of the greatest world leaders have been in their 80s.”Those remarks from Trump came after retiring Republican US senator Mitt Romney of Utah called for a “new generation of leaders”.Trump notably defended Biden, his Democratic rival, on his age. A poll last month from the Associated Press and the Norc Center for Public Affairs showed 77% of Americans – including 69% of Democrats – think the 80-year-old Biden is too old to serve a second term.“I don’t think Biden’s too old,” Trump said to Welker. “But I think he’s incompetent, and that’s a bigger problem. It’s really a level of competency, not the age.”Two days before Trump attacked Biden’s acuity, Trump told a summit in Washington that a “cognitively impaired” Biden would lead the US into “world war two”, which already occurred between 1939 and 1945.Meanwhile, Trump said he “liked the concept” of having a woman as his running mate if he wins the Republican nomination, adding that he had his eye on Noem, the South Dakota governor. “I think she’s fantastic,” he said. “She’s been a great governor. She gave me a very full-throated endorsement, a beautiful endorsement actually. Certainly she’d be one of the people I’d consider.”Noem recently confirmed that she was a candidate for the position. “Of course, I would consider it,” she told Fox News. But that was before the governor was splashed across the tabloid press for allegedly having an affair with former Trump aide Corey Lewandowski since at least 2019.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Daily Mail’s reporting has not been denied, though Noem’s spokesperson said it was “so predictable” that the South Dakota governor would be attacked soon after she endorsed Trump for the Republican nomination.Trump was asked if he still believes democracy is the most effective form of government. “I do – but it has to be a democracy that’s fair,” he said. “This democracy – I don’t consider us to have much of a democracy right now.”He went on to complain about the indictments against him, which also contain charges for allegedly mishandling classified documents and attempting to conceal hush money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels.Those charges are separate from civil cases that include a $250m lawsuit by the New York attorney general about his business affairs as well as a defamation claim stemming from a rape accusation that a judge has deemed to be “substantially true”.During the interview, Trump said he was not “consumed” with the prospect of prison time.“I don’t even think about it,” Trump said. “I’m built a little differently I guess, because I have had people come up to me and say, ‘How do you do it, sir? How do you do it?’ I don’t even think about it.“I truly feel that, in the end, we’re going to win.”Trump has maintained he would not pardon himself if he is re-elected, but he revealed to Welker that he had discussed pardoning himself in the dying days of his presidency – a sign that he and his legal team understood the legal peril he brought on to himself by challenging the election’s results.He said his failed election challenges eventually prompted him to ignore advice from his attorneys “because I didn’t respect them”.Sunday’s interview earned NBC criticism from many commentators who questioned the wisdom of giving such a soapbox to Trump after his alleged criminal misdeeds from before, during and after his presidency.One question by Welker that some dismissed as a soft ball sought to discuss the contents of a message that Trump left for Biden when he left the White House.Earlier this year, CNN was pilloried for giving Trump a town hall-style platform in New Hampshire that indirectly led to the dismissal of its programming architect, former morning TV producer and CNN chief Chris Licht.NBC has said the network has also invited Biden to sit down for an interview with Welker. 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      Armed man posing as US marshal arrested at Robert Kennedy Jr event

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      An armed man accused of impersonating a federal officer was arrested outside a Robert F Kennedy Jr campaign event in Los Angeles.A Los Angeles police department statement said police received a call on Friday afternoon that a man with a loaded gun and holster and wearing a US marshals service badge was outside a theater where the Democratic presidential candidate was scheduled to give a speech.A campaign statement said Kennedy’s security team surrounded the man, who later was arrested by the LAPD. The FBI also was on the scene.No one was injured.“The man claimed to be part of Kennedy’s security team,” the campaign statement said. He told the candidate’s security team “that he needed to be taken to the candidate immediately”.The man was booked on a charge of carrying a concealed weapon.In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Kennedy said he was grateful for the Los Angeles police’s swift response. His campaign said Kennedy’s requests for Secret Service protection have been rejected, and he plans to apply again this month. More

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      The old story: Biden team veers from humour to hardball to tackle age issue

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      Joe Biden began his press conference at the JW Marriott Hotel Hanoi in Vietnam at 9.09pm local time. “Good evening, everyone – it is evening, isn’t it?” he said, prompting laughter. About 25 minutes later, the 80-year-old US president had another quip: “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go to bed.”Headline writers pounced. The Daily Beast website declared: “Biden Wraps Up G20 Conference by Announcing ‘I’m Going to Bed’”. But unusually, the White House fired back. Ben LaBolt, its communications director, retorted sarcastically on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter: “Presidents shall never sleep. Not even at night after days of marathon meetings overseas. Sage guidance from the Daily Beast. Next up in the series: presidents shall never eat.”The riposte, combined with sharp pushback from LaBolt’s colleagues, suggested a newly pugnacious approach from Biden’s communications team over that most delicate of subjects: his age.A recent opinion poll by SSRS for the CNN network found declining shares of Democratic-aligned voters see Biden as inspiring confidence or having the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president. Asked to name their biggest concern about his candidacy in 2024, nearly half directly mentioned his age.As a white man with a blue-collar background, Biden has effectively neutralised many familiar Republican attack lines on race, gender or class elitism. But the prospect of him being 86 at the end of a second term has provided fodder for critics. Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor running for the Republican presidential nomination, has called for mental competency tests for candidates over 75 and warned that Biden will almost certainly be replaced by Vice-President Kamala Harris before the end of a second term.This week, David Ignatius, a venerable foreign affairs columnist for the Washington Post newspaper, lavished praise on Biden’s legislative achievements before contending that he and Harris should not run again. He wrote: “It’s painful to say that, given my admiration for much of what they have accomplished. But if he and Harris campaign together in 2024, I think Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement – which was stopping Trump.”Biden’s age is a problem that poses a unique challenge for the White House and the president’s re-election campaign. Some have advised them to embrace it as evidence of his experience, knowledge and wisdom. Jeffrey Katzenberg, a film producer and media proprietor, remarked earlier this year: “President Biden’s age is, in fact, his superpower.”But Frank Luntz, a consultant and pollster who has advised numerous Republican campaigns, described that as the “single dumbest political advice I have ever seen”. He explained: “Americans just say 80 is too old for being an effective president. The key is that Democrats are saying enough already, thank you for your service but don’t run for president, we need somebody else.”Biden’s likely rival in next year’s election, former president Donald Trump, is just three years younger, but Luntz counsels Democrats against emphasising that point. “They can’t do that because Trump may be 77 but he acts seven.”Biden’s Asia excursion illustrated the messaging opportunities and pitfalls around the issue. The White House points out that he “literally” travelled around the world – more than 18,000 miles – in under five days and met 20-plus foreign leaders. It gleefully quoted Peter Doocy, a reporter at the conservative Fox News network, who said from Hanoi: “He has basically been working all through the night. The equivalent of an all-nighter.”But the climactic press conference was interpreted by some as feeding into an existing narrative seen in Franklin Foer’s recent book, The Last Politician, which reported that Biden holds strikingly few morning meetings or public events before 10am and occasionally admits feeling tired.A report on CNN’s website said the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, had “abruptly” ended the session and foregrounded Biden’s comment about “going to bed”. It did not go unanswered. Olivia Dalton, principal deputy press secretary, set out Biden’s very long day on X and demanded: “What will be enough?” LaBolt targeted the author of the article, adding: “The desk jockey who wrote this utter BS was not present at the press conference or the trip.”It was an unusually personal, bare-knuckle approach from an administration that has condemned Trump’s frequent attacks on “fake news” and pledged to defend the freedom of the press.Robyn Patterson, an assistant White House press secretary, defended the responses to negative coverage, saying via email: “At the conclusion of the trip, President Biden held a press conference in the standard format. The President was scheduled to take five questions – he ended up taking seven.“He gave detailed answers on questions ranging from the US-China relationship, to his Indo Pacific strategy and climate change. When we see unfair spin that omits or downplays key facts and narratives ripped straight from right-wing Twitter, it’s our job to call that out.”Political analysts contend that calling out individual members of the media is unlikely to win friends in the long term.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “I don’t think it’s wise. When you make things personal like that it doesn’t serve any positive purpose. No journalist who gets called out is going to all of a sudden go, ‘Oh, you’re right, I see it your way now, let me bend to your will.’ If anything, it makes the White House look overly defensive and overly concerned and a little touchy.”Reporters are not the problem but YouTube videos and TV coverage are, argues Charlie Sykes, editor of the Bulwark website and a former conservative radio host.“It is out there. The question of Joe Biden’s age comes up in every single conversation with every voter in America and that’s not going to go away and you can’t just simply spin that by beating up on reporters. People are watching Joe Biden very carefully.”The White House does need to rebut rightwing media claims that Biden is senile, Sykes added, because there is no evidence that he is unable to do the job. “But it seems naive to me to not recognise how the visuals undermine their message. The visuals of someone with a very stiff and wandering gait who sometimes loses the thread of conversation in these unstructured environments clearly is going to hurt them.“What really haunts me is what if we’re having this conversation in September or October of 2024. What if there is a Mitch McConnell-like episode [the Senate minority leader has frozen twice at press conferences] with the president in the fall of 2024, especially when Joe Biden may be the only thing that stands between this country and the constitutional disaster of a second Trump term?”Before Biden and Trump, the oldest American president was Ronald Reagan. When, at a debate in 1984, the moderator reminded him of this fact Reagan, then 73, replied: “I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Even his Democratic opponent, Walter Mondale, laughed at the line. Reagan won re-election in a landslide.Biden himself appears to have borrowed from the Reagan playbook, deploying self-deprecating humour and taking a less combative approach than his aides. He has joked about serving in the Senate 180 years ago and knowing “Jimmy” Madison, who was president in the early 19th century. At this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner he made fun of his age several times.Chris Whipple, a journalist and author of The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House, believes this is a more fruitful way of handling the issue than going on the offensive. He said: “The answer is humour, not anger. It makes them look desperate when they get angry. The communications people in the White House should take a page from the boss and just try to keep a sense of humour.”The challenges facing Biden, who turns 81 in November, were underlined this week when Republicans in the House of Representatives announced an impeachment inquiry into unproven allegations of corruption and his son, Hunter, was indicted on three criminal counts related to his alleged illegal possession of a gun.His re-election effort will also include more travel and voter interaction than during the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns of 2020. Last week his campaign team released a video about his surprise visit to Ukraine, referencing that it was a near 40-hour journey that started at 4am and involved a nine-and-a-half-hour train journey to Kyiv. They can also point to Biden’s triumphant verbal sparring with Republicans at this year’s State of the Union address.But there will have to be enough to drown out the many clips circulating on rightwing media of Biden falling off a bike near his Delaware beach house last year or tripping over a sandbag at the Air Force Academy commencement a few months ago. The president’s gaffes, a hallmark of his long political career, now tend to be seen through the prism of a fading octogenarian.Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington and former White House official, noted that Biden had been making his case in speeches across the country and called for a sense of perspective. “His age will only be a liability if he’s running against somebody young,” she said. “It’s not going to be a liability running against Trump. You’ve just got to look at the guy.“All that’s happened is so far the Republicans have been more aggressive on the age issue. But this is people throwing stones at glass houses. Trump is a walking heart attack, he looks a mess, he’s overweight and he talks in frequently incoherent babble. I don’t know if it’s dementia or just plain old stupidity. At least Joe Biden says things that make sense.” More

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      Does Wile E Coyote explain US voters’ gloom amid buoyant economy?

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      Strolling past the colorfully restored Victorian homes of the Fourth Ward, watching the barman hand-carve blocks of ice for old fashioneds at the jam-packed bar of The Crunkleton, it’s easy to fall for Charlotte’s ample southern charms. And yet, people are not happy – at least according to the polls.Consumer sentiment in North Carolina is now lower than it was at the height of the pandemic, according to High Point University’s confidence tracker. “People are just not feeling particularly good,” said Martin Kifer, director of the university’s survey research center.North Carolina is not alone. Official figures suggest the US pulled off an astonishing recovery from the Covid pandemic and recession.More than 20 million people in the US lost their jobs in April 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the world’s largest economy. The unemployment rate rose to 14.7%. But the rebound was just as dramatic. Unemployment has hovered near 50-year lows since January 2022 and is now 3.8%. In North Carolina, it’s just 3.3%. More than 100 people are moving to the city every day.But as an exclusive Guardian/Harris Poll survey found this week, two-thirds (68%) of Americans report it’s difficult to be happy about positive economic news when they feel financially squeezed each month.Across the country, poll after poll shows people are not feeling it. That’s not good news for the Biden administration, particularly in a potential swing state where the perceived success – or failure – of “Bidenomics”, as Biden has dubbed his economic strategy, will be one of the key issues in next year’s election.The election is still a way out, and Biden has proven pollsters wrong in the past. Nevertheless, the economy – or voters’ perception of it – will be a defining issue in one of the most consequential elections in US history.Americans are deeply divided on the economy. The Harris poll shows over half (53%) of Americans believe the economy is getting worse. Some 72% of Republicans share that view compared with 32% of Democrats. But the unhappiness runs deep on both sides. Only a third of Democrats believe that the economy is getting better.Even when Americans say they are doing OK financially, they believe the economy is in trouble. According to the Federal Reserve’s annual survey of economic wellbeing, 73% of households said that they were “at least doing OK financially” at the end of 2022. In 2019, that figure was 75% of households. But back then, 50% said the national economy was good or excellent. By 2022, that number had fallen to just 18%.Some heavyweight voices share the gloom. Both the former Treasury secretary Larry Summers and Bill Dudley, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, have speculated that having shot out of the pandemic like a coyote chasing a roadrunner, the US may be in a “Wile E Coyote” economy and, like Warner Brother’s cartoon canine, the US economy may be heading off a cliff. “Falling back to earth will not be a pleasant experience,” Dudley has warned.Partisanship explains much of the seeming disconnect between economic data and sentiment. But not all of it. Large forces are reshaping the US economy and may explain the nation’s vertigo.Many low-wage workers, have been living with that fear of falling for a long time.Ieisha Franceis’s wages have shot up from $12.50 to $17 since the Durham, North Carolina, resident made the shift from working in fast food to a job at a senior living facility. Wages are – finally – running ahead of inflation overall but for Franceis, “everything looks the same. Inflation’s not gone down, it’s just not going up,” she said. “These days $17 an hour is looking a lot like $12.50,” said the low-wage activist.Franceis used to buy her family’s side dishes, boxes of macaroni and cheese, mashed potato, at Dollar General. The Kraft Macaroni and Cheese (“the good stuff”) has gone. “Now they only carry a cheaper brand with the powdered cheese.” At the average grocery store, that Kraft Mac and Cheese is over $2.“The Dollar Tree went from everything being $1 to everything being $1.25. Now they even have a $5 section and a $10 section. Huh? This was a dollar store,” she said. “Bidenomics” means little to Franceis. “What we need is higher wages and more unions,” she said.Even entrepreneurs are finding the new, post-Covid economy taxing.Cocktail queen Tamu Curtis saw her business boom during lockdown. A Los Angeles transplant, she started giving cocktail classes online and saved enough to open her bricks-and-mortar shop. The Cocktailery – nestled between an Anthropologie and Warby Parker inside an old streetcar station – opened in September 2021 when the vaccines started rolling out. “I thought, OK everybody is going to run and get the vaccines. We are saved! Of course, it didn’t work out that way,” she said ruefully. “That was a plot twist.”Up and running now for over a year, business has been strange. “This has been the craziest summer. It’s so slow,” she said.Retail sales have collapsed but classes have boomed. “People will spend money on experiences. On travel. We spent two years filling our houses with stuff. Maybe we just don’t need that any more.”On top of that, she said, “inflation is killing me.” An order of cocktail bitters that used to cost her $700 shot up to $1,500. “There’s only so much you can pass on. I can’t sell a bitter for $42. There’s a max people will pay.”At the same time, rent is high and financing is getting tougher as interest rates rise. “It’s difficult,” she said. And more so for a minority, woman-owned business. She hasn’t been able to get a traditional bank loan yet or a line of credit from her bank, Charlotte-based Bank of America. “Now the banks aren’t lending the way they were.”Post-Covid has been an easier ride for other local business people but still, existential questions remain, ones that may point to a wider national malaise.Desmond Wiggan and his partner Aubrey Yeboah launched their business, BatteryXchange, in 2019, just before the pandemic. The company sets up battery charging stations for mobile devices and the idea had originally been to target people at conferences or out on the town. “Suddenly there were no people,” said Wiggan.BatteryXChange retooled and now rents its equipment to healthcare providers and others who use the service to help keep their customers online. It worked and business is booming, as is Wiggan’s profile. He has just returned from a business symposium on swanky Martha’s Vineyard. A copy of Propel, a local Black business magazine, sits on his office table. Wiggan’s headshot is above a message from Michelle Obama: “Success isn’t about how much money you make, it’s about the difference you make.”But Wiggan has some wider concerns. He spent two years living in China and has seen firsthand that other countries think on a longer timescale. Back in the US, he said, it’s all about the next election cycle. On top of that another likely hot election issue worries him. “The age gap of our leaders. They are old. The torch has got to be passed.“These other countries are starting to sniff us out,” he said. Foreign students were getting their education in the US then going home because they see their country looking to the future, he said. “They are thinking 2060 not every four, eight years when we go back and forth.”****Why people feel so bad about an economy that – technically – appears strong is a question that is vexing not just the White House but Nobel economic laureates. Historians will have a better answer. For now, the reasons look manifold.As HPU’s Kifer points out “the perception of the economy is not the economy.” The disconnect between the official figures and how people feel may be temporary. Nor is it unusual for the hangover of a recession to outlast what looks like the beginning of a recovery. High Point’s own consumer confidence index started in 2010, two years after the peak of the 2008/2009 recession. It wasn’t until September 2011 that confidence started rising.The US’s pandemic recession began in February 2020 and ended two months later, making it the shortest recession on record. The body blow it dealt to confidence is, however, proving hard to shift. And things are different this time. For one, there is relatively high inflation – something never directly experienced by Americans under 40. Slowing increases have done little to calm people’s nerves and most people in North Carolina expect inflation to get worse next year, according to another HPU poll.The mood of economic despondency is fueled by other fires, too, illustrated by life in North Carolina and felt across the country.Politics plays a huge role. The University of Michigan’s national consumer confidence index shows Republican confidence soared under Trump and dropped under Biden while Democrats’ did the opposite.But it’s not the only factor. While people may not have lost their jobs, America’s middle class has lost $2tn in wealth since 2020 thanks to inflation and the fastest increase in interest rates since the 1980s, according to data compiled by economists at the University of California, Berkeley.That fall comes after outsized gains from stimulus cheques, rising house prices and other assets for those who rode out the pandemic with little financial cost. Still, the psychological pain of losing is about twice the pleasure of winning, according to Nobel-winning psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman. Losses loom larger than gains.Then there are the epochal issues of our day – ones that will spread far beyond North Carolina and the Biden presidency.North Carolina has been voted the best state for business for two consecutive years and business is still good. But there are signs of a slowdown. According to the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance, the Charlotte area expects businesses to invest $2.3bn in the region this year and create 7,200 jobs. That’s down from $8bn in investment and 20,000 jobs last year.Uncertainty is a large part of that drop, said Danny Chavez, chief business recruitment officer of the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance. Concerns about the direction of interest rates and political change are part of it – businesses waiting to see what happens next year, a natural part of the cycle. There is also something more.The number of jobs created per investment is also decreasing as tech takes jobs. Financial services and manufacturing are extremely important to the region. They remain so, said Chavez. “But in terms of jobs, both those industries are highly vulnerable to automation and AI,” he said.While Charlotte is better positioned than most to ride out that change, Chavez said the region – and the rest of the US – is also increasingly competing with global players. India and China are challenging the US’s rank as the world’s largest economy.Biden’s economic plans are playing to the long term and America has proved resilient to big shocks before. The president also has a track record of beating expectations. If hiring stays steady and inflation keeps receding, maybe Americans will hear the good news soon. That may or may not happen before the 2024 election.But the polls may also reflect a wider anxiety about the existential challenges the US (and other economies) face. Perhaps those challenges explain some of the national mood. It’s hard to measure existential dread.Longer term, neither Bidenomics – nor Trumponomics – are likely to fix America’s broken healthcare and childcare systems or the climate crisis. Nor do they offer clear solutions to the global trade winds that threaten American exceptionalism or the challenges presented by AI and automation.Little wonder then that so many in the US feel like Wile E Coyote, running off the cliff, treading air, waiting for the fall. More