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      Donald Trump’s popularity has fallen among Republican voters, poll suggests

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      Donald Trump’s appeal has sunk among Republicans, a new poll has found.The former president, who faces criminal indictments in two cases and possibly a third, announced earlier this year that he is once again running for president in the 2024 election.Pew research found that 63% of Americans of all political affiliations have an unfavorable opinion of Trump – an increase from 60% last year.At 66%, the majority of those who identify as Republicans or Republican-leaning still view the former president in a favorable light, but that is 9 percentage points lower than last July’s 75%.Last July, about a quarter of those on the right viewed him as very or mostly unfavorably, but that figure has risen to 32%.Unsurprisingly, Democrats’ opinion of Trump is also low, though consistent with recent years. Ninety-one percent of Democrats polled viewed Trump unfavorably. Of that, 78% viewed him as very unfavorable.A mere 8% of Democrats view him favorably.By contrast, Biden’s popularity among the general popularity slipped about 4% since last year. Positive opinions of Vice-President Kamala Harris were worse, dropping from 43% to 36% since last year.Trump still remains the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, ahead of the far-right Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, according to FiveThirtyEight.It is unclear how Trump’s legal troubles will affect his campaign, if at all. This year, he was indicted on 37 counts for mishandling classified documents at Mar-A-Lago in Florida and on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records in New York. Trial dates in both cases have been set for during the 2024 primary season.He could also face the music for his role in inciting the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol in Washington DC in 2021.The poll does not address why Trump fell in the eyes of his own party, but many within the GOP have not shied away from sharing their distaste for him as their 2024 candidate.Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told the Hill in May that she was “certainly” looking for an alternative to Trump and DeSantis.“If that is the face of the Republican party, if that’s the contest, Republicans are doomed,” she said.
      This article was amended on 25 July 2023 to correct a typo concerning 91% of Democrats polled. More

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      Ron DeSantis unharmed after car crash on way to campaign event

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      Ron DeSantis, the rightwing governor of Florida and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, was involved in a car crash on the campaign trail on Tuesday.In a statement to media, DeSantis’s press secretary, Bryan Griffin, said: “This morning, the governor was in a car accident while traveling to an event in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He and his team are uninjured.“We appreciate the prayers and well wishes of the nation for his continued protection while on the campaign trail.”DeSantis, 44, remains in second place in primary polling, albeit about 30 points behind Donald Trump, the multiply indicted former president, in most polling averages and in polls in early voting states.A month out from the first Republican debate, the governor has been reported to be seeking to reboot his campaign.On Tuesday, according to News Channel 9, a Chattanooga ABC affiliate station, the crash happened when “traffic slowed and four motorcade cars hit each other”.The outlet also said one DeSantis staff member “had minor injuries” but “went on to the campaign stop [to] be treated there”.DeSantis was in Tennessee for fundraising and other events. A spokesman told Florida media the governor would continue with his schedule. More

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      Texas governor Greg Abbott rejects demand to remove floating barriers targeting migrants – as it happened

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      From 5h agoA battle is brewing in Texas between its Republican governor Greg Abbott and the Biden administration, which has demanded the state remove floating barriers placed in the Rio Grande to prevent people from crossing from Mexico.Today, Abbott vowed to defy the request from the justice department, potentially setting up a legal fight with the Democratic administration:As the Guardian’s Maya Yang reported last week, the deployment of the floating barriers comes amid reports that Texas authorities are mistreating migrants who cross into the state from Mexico:
      Two pregnant migrant women who were trying to turn themselves in to US immigration authorities have alleged that Texas national guard soldiers refused to provide them with water.
      Speaking to CNN at a shelter in Eagle Pass, Texas, the two women, identified as Carmen from Honduras and María from El Salvador, recounted their experiences at the border amid recent reports of “inhumane” behavior by American border authorities.
      “They told us it was a crime to cross into the US and that we should return to Mexico,” Carmen, who said she is six months pregnant, told CNN. She added that she and her husband had initially tried to cross the Rio Grande on 12 July but were stopped by Texas national guard soldiers.
      Election day 2024 is still a long way off, but we’re getting closer to 23 August, when Republican presidential candidates will have their first debate. Most of the big names have qualified, but Donald Trump says he might not attend, while his former vice-president, Mike Pence, is struggling to qualify, as are Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson. We’ll see if these candidates can turn it around in the weeks to come. Meanwhile, the White House expressed alarm at the latest news from Israel, where the far-right government has won passage of a key part its judicial overhaul. Opponents of the move say it could threaten the country’s democracy.Here’s what else happened today:
      Texas’s Republican governor has rejected a justice department demand that the state remove floating barriers intended to stop migrants entering from Mexico.
      Mitt Romney says donors should cut off support to Republican presidential contenders who have no hope of winning the nomination, in an effort to winnow the race to two candidates and defeat Trump.
      House Republicans may decide to hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt.
      Special counsel Jack Smith has obtained documents from Bernie Kerik, who advised the Trump campaign’s attempt to prove fraud in the 2020 election.
      Alabama Republicans are resisting a supreme court order to draw a second majority Black congressional district.
      Mitt Romney, the Utah senator who was the Republican nominee for president in 2012 but lost to Barack Obama, has proposed a strategy to unite the current crop of GOP contenders for the White House against Donald Trump.Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Romney, one of Trump’s most outspoken opponents in Congress, calls on donors backing Republican presidential candidates to withdraw their support once it becomes clear that their choice can’t win. The goal is to winnow the field to a two-person race, in hopes the other candidate can keep Trump from returning to office.Here’s more of what he has to say:
      Despite Donald Trump’s apparent inevitability, a baker’s dozen Republicans are hoping to become the party’s 2024 nominee for president. That is possible for any of them if the field narrows to a two-person race before Mr. Trump has the nomination sewn up. For that to happen, Republican megadonors and influencers – large and small – are going to have to do something they didn’t do in 2016: get candidates they support to agree to withdraw if and when their paths to the nomination are effectively closed. That decision day should be no later than, say, Feb 26, the Monday following the contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.
      There are incentives for no-hope candidates to overstay their prospects. Coming in behind first place may grease another run in four years or have market value of its own: Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum got paying gigs. And as former New Hampshire Gov John H Sununu has observed, ‘It is fun running for president if you know you cannot win.’
      Left to their own inclinations, expect several of the contenders to stay in the race for a long time. They will split the non-Trump vote, giving him the prize. A plurality is all that is needed for winner-take-all primaries.
      …
      Our party and our country need a nominee with character, driven by something greater than revenge and ego, preferably from the next generation. Family, friends and campaign donors are the only people who can get a lost-cause candidate to exit the race. After Feb 26, they should start doing just that.
      CNN has reported new details of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2022 election loss, including that Bernie Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner who worked with the Trump campaign to uncover fraud, has turned over a trove of documents to the prosecutor.The materials include research and witness statements produced by the team, which was led by Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani. CNN reports that Kerik will meet with Smith’s prosecutors next month for an interview.Here’s more from CNN’s story:
      Former New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik was part of the team led by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani trying to uncover fraud that would swing the election in favor of Trump.
      For months, Kerik had tried to shield some of the documents from investigators, citing privilege.
      But in recent weeks, Kerik gave the documents to the Trump’s 2024 campaign to review. After that review, the campaign declined to assert privilege, according to Kerik’s lawyer, Tim Parlatore, who turned over the documents to Smith’s office on Sunday.
      “I have shared all of these documents, approximately 600MB, mostly pdfs, with the Special Counsel and look forward to sitting down with them in about 2 weeks to discuss.” Parlatore said.
      Kerik is scheduled to sit down for an interview with the special counsel’s office next month, CNN has learned.
      Among the materials now in Smith’s possession are witness statements, research and other documents produced by Giuliani’s team.
      When the January 6 congressional committee subpoenaed Kerik for documents, he provided a log of his communications that he said he was withholding due to privilege. Those communications have never been disclosed publicly, as the committee did not challenge Kerik’s privilege claims in court.
      The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax authority today announced it would end the practice of sending its employees on unannounced visits of the homes of people who owed taxes.The IRS received a major infusion of funds to modernize its systems under last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, but wound up in the crosshairs of Republicans, who claimed, without evidence, that the money would pay for armed agents.In a statement, IRS commissioner Danny Werfel said the decision to end the decades-old practice of dispatching unnamed agents to homes and businesses was part of its modernization plan.“We are taking a fresh look at how the IRS operates to better serve taxpayers and the nation, and making this change is a common-sense step. Changing this long-standing procedure will increase confidence in our tax administration work and improve overall safety for taxpayers and IRS employees,” Werfel said. The IRS added that the change in policy was supported by its employee union.In an interview with CNN, a top official with the NAACP civil rights group explains the problems with Alabama’s new congressional maps: Nonetheless, the GOP-led state has gone ahead with maps that appear to violate a supreme court ruling ordering lawmakers to draw a second majority African-American congressional district.Israel’s far-right government today won a battle in their case to reform the judiciary, but as the Guardian’s Chris McGreal reports, American Jews opposed to the government’s policies against Palestinians say they are feeling optimistic about changing minds in the United States:Mike Levinson has been pushing back for 40 years and finally thinks he might be getting somewhere.“There’s a change and the politicians see it. I think it scares them,” said Levinson, holding a sign demanding “Stop Israeli settler violence” as he marched through New York on Thursday.“There’s a tremendous change going on in the American Jewish community. There are a lot of Jews, especially young people, who are not so quick to automatically and unconditionally support everything that Israel does. People are accepting the fact that it’s OK to be Jewish and criticise Israel.”Levinson, a Jewish New Yorker, began protesting against Israeli government policies during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. It’s been a long and often lonely road since then as he has sought to get his fellow Americans to pay attention to decades of Israeli occupation, military assaults on the West Bank and Gaza, and the unrelenting expansion of Jewish settlements.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York was seen joining striking writers and actors on a picket line outside Netflix’s Manhattan offices today.An overwhelming majority of voters in Ohio support a proposed constitutional amendment that would guarantee access to abortion in the state, according to a new poll. A new USA Today/Suffolk University poll showed 58% of Ohio voters backed the amendment enshrining abortion rights. Among those who backed the amendment included a third of Republicans and 85% of independent women.The proposed amendment states that:
      Every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion.
      Under this proposal, abortion could still be banned after “fetal viability”, or whether it can live outside the womb.Republican congressman of Florida Matt Gaetz has been defending his decision to introduce legislation to defund investigations into Donald Trump led by special counsel Jack Smith.Gaetz made the announcement last week, just hours after the former president said he had received a letter identifying him as a target of the justice department’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection, led by Smith.In an interview with Newsmax, Gaetz said he didn’t “need Jack Smith to tell me what happened on January 6”. He said:
      I was there. I saw President Trump encourage people to peacefully and patriotically go into places where permits had been reserved with city government for lawful protest activity.
      A key group of Senate Democrats have urged the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to pressure Senator Tommy Tuberville to end his “reckless, dangerous” hold on military nominations.The letter, led by armed services committee member Senator Mazie Hirono and obtained by NBC, calls on McConnell to “exercise your leadership to protect the readiness of our military”.Tuberville, who for months has been blocking military nominations in protest of the Pentagon’s policy to reimburse travel expenses for those seeking reproductive care, including abortions, across state lines, has been “threatening our national security”, the letter says. It continues:
      We know you share our concerns about the consequences of this hold on our Armed Services, and as the leader of your conference, we urge you to take stronger action to resolve this situation.
      The Democratic signatories to the letter all serve on the Senate armed services committee with Tuberville.Election day 2024 is still a long way off, but we’re getting closer to 23 August, when Republican presidential candidates will have their first debate. Most of the big names have qualified, but Donald Trump says he might not attend, while his former vice-president Mike Pence is struggling to qualify, as are Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson. We’ll see if these candidates can turn it around in the weeks to come. Meanwhile, the White House has expressed alarm at the latest news from Israel, where the far-right government has won passage of a key part its judicial overhaul. Opponents of the move say it could threaten the country’s democracy.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      Texas’s Republican governor has rejected a justice department demand that it remove floating barriers intended to stop migrants entering from Mexico.
      House Republicans may decide to hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt.
      Alabama Republicans are resisting a supreme court order to draw a second majority Black congressional district.
      Republicans have hammered Joe Biden over migration at the southern border ever since he took office, but over the weekend, one GOP lawmaker said he believed both state and federal authorities had mishandled the crisis, the Guardian’s Maya Yang reports:A Texas Republican representative, Tony Gonzales, has called the current tactics used to deter migrants at the US-Mexico border “not acceptable” and urged the Biden administration and Congress to focus more heavily on legal immigration.In an interview with CBS’s Face The Nation on Sunday, Gonzales, whose 23rd district in Texas includes 800 miles of the US-Mexico border, said that the border crisis “has been anything but humane” and called recent reports of Texas troopers allegedly pushing small children and nursing babies back into the Rio Grande “not acceptable”.“It’s not acceptable and it hasn’t been acceptable for two years … Everything that is happening along the border is just adding fuel to the fire,” Gonzales said. He went on to say that Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, who has come under fire from human rights groups over his controversial Operation Lone Star border security program, “is doing everything he can to secure the border”.A battle is brewing in Texas between its Republican governor Greg Abbott and the Biden administration, which has demanded the state remove floating barriers placed in the Rio Grande to prevent people from crossing from Mexico.Today, Abbott vowed to defy the request from the justice department, potentially setting up a legal fight with the Democratic administration:As the Guardian’s Maya Yang reported last week, the deployment of the floating barriers comes amid reports that Texas authorities are mistreating migrants who cross into the state from Mexico:
      Two pregnant migrant women who were trying to turn themselves in to US immigration authorities have alleged that Texas national guard soldiers refused to provide them with water.
      Speaking to CNN at a shelter in Eagle Pass, Texas, the two women, identified as Carmen from Honduras and María from El Salvador, recounted their experiences at the border amid recent reports of “inhumane” behavior by American border authorities.
      “They told us it was a crime to cross into the US and that we should return to Mexico,” Carmen, who said she is six months pregnant, told CNN. She added that she and her husband had initially tried to cross the Rio Grande on 12 July but were stopped by Texas national guard soldiers. More

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      Never Trumpers get ‘brutal wake-up call’ as Republican candidates flounder

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      For Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas, there were boos and chants of “Trump! Trump!”. For Francis Suarez, mayor of Miami, there were jeers and cries of “Traitor!” And perhaps most tellingly, there was no Florida governor Ron DeSantis at all.The recent Turning Point USA conference brought thousands of young conservatives to Florida and there was no doubting the main attraction: former president Donald Trump, who made a glitzy entrance accompanied by giant stage sparklers. In a less than rigorous poll, 86% of attendees gave Trump as their first choice for president; DeSantis, who polled 19% last year, was down to 4%.Events and numbers like this are cause for sleepless nights among those Republican leaders and donors desperate to believe it would be different this time. The Never Trump forces bet heavily on DeSantis as the coming man and the premise that Trump’s campaign would collapse under the weight of myriad legal problems.But six months away from the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, none of it seems to be working. DeSantis’s campaign is flailing and leaving some with buyers’ remorse. Hutchinson and Chris Christie, outspoken Trump critics, are polling in single digits, sowing doubts about voters’ appetite for change. Never Trumpers have reason to fear that his march to the Republican nomination may already be unstoppable.“They’re experiencing a brutal wake-up call that the party is not interested in hearing critiques of Trump,” said Tim Miller, who was communications director for Jeb Bush’s 2016 campaign. “The Trump challengers’ candidacies have been astonishingly poor and learned nothing from 2016. When the leading candidate gets indicted and all of his opponents besides Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson just echo his fake persecution complex talking points, it’s going to be hard to beat him.”The Never Trump movement is almost as old as the celebrity businessman’s hostile takeover of the Republican party. In 2016, 50 senior Republican national security officials from past administrations signed a letter saying they would not vote for him, even though Trump was the nominee. Republicans including Colin Powell, a former secretary of state, openly backed his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, albeit in vain.Hopes that Trump would “grow” into the presidency were soon dashed. In 2018, White House whistleblower Miles Taylor wrote an anonymous column in the New York Times under the headline “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”, describing the president as unfit for office. Taylor went on to build a network of former government officials and advisers aiming to deny Trump a second term.Former Republican operatives in groups such as the Lincoln Project and Republican Accountability Project welcomed Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election and hoped his part in a subsequent insurrection at the US Capitol would finally break the fever. But Senate Republicans squandered a chance to end his political career by failing to convict him in an impeachment trial.Since then certain members of Congress have proved willing to criticise Trump on certain issues and a few, such as Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, are implacably opposed to him. But many others, such as Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, have either retired or been purged.As the 2024 election looms, there is no coordinated plan on how to derail the Trump train or alter the trajectory of a race that is still his to lose. Even critics admit that the external events many were counting on to thwart his candidacy have not hurt his standing.Indeed, criminal indictments in New York and Florida have led some voters who were entertaining an alternative to return to Trump’s fold while handing him another fundraising bonanza. His campaign announced that he raised more than $35m during the second fundraising quarter, nearly double what he raised during the first three months of the year and well ahead of his competitors.Trump’s opponents within the party are running out of time and ideas. Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman, said: “They were all hoping that Trump’s legal troubles would kick him to the side of the road but every indictment or potential indictment just strengthens him among the base, eats up all the oxygen in the room and makes him the likely nominee. They’re probably as frustrated as can be.”Many Never Trump hopes were pinned on DeSantis but the governor is already cutting staff and experiencing fundraising setbacks. Donors ignored the warnings of longtime political operatives who said DeSantis was “undercooked”, had a glass jaw and lacked the personal warmth and charisma required for retail politics. These appear to be have been borne out by a stagnant campaign in which the more exposure he receives, the less popular he becomes.Walsh, who challenged Trump in the 2020 Republican primary, said: “They all bet on DeSantis without knowing who the fuck he was, without understanding that he’s really bad and weird with people and also mean and cruel, even more so than Trump. They put all their chips on DeSantis before they knew who he was. That was a mistake because they don’t have an alternative.“There’s only one lane in this Republican party. That’s the Trumpy lane and DeSantis is in that lane with Trump. His problem is he can’t get past Trump but the base wants somebody like that and so there’s no other alternative. They’re really kind of screwed.”Ominously for DeSantis, Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, who had previously given the governor copious airtime and favourable coverage, has reportedly gone cold on him and resigned himself to the prospect of another Trump nomination. Fox News this week unveiled a line up of prime time hosts who have lauded the former president.Republicans are doing little to dispel an air of inevitability around the former president securing the nomination again. When it emerged this week that he faces a third indictment, this time over his attempt to subvert democracy, rivals including DeSantis again parroted his claim that the cases are politically motivated.Kevin McCarthy, speaker of the House of Representatives, where Trump had notched far more endorsements than his rivals, told reporters: “If you noticed recently, President Trump went up in the polls and was actually surpassing President Biden for reelection. So what do they do now? Weaponize government to go after their number one opponent.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJust as in 2016, Trump is also benefiting from a divided opposition. Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, suggests that Never Trumpers coalesced around DeSantis too soon. “The strategy shouldn’t have been necessarily backing that horse but sitting out a little bit to see how the field settled, to see if someone would emerge. Then you come in.”Individual ambition has prevented Republicans from uniting around a strategy to stop Trump. Steele observed: “The party was unwilling in the first instance to have a come to Jesus meeting with all the candidates other than Trump and say, ‘OK, I get it, y’all want to be president but none of you is going to get there if you all stand so I need one of you to do that duty. So that means the rest of you get behind that one.“‘Is it Nikki? [Haley] We’re all behind Nikki. Is it Christie? We’re all behind Christie. But one of you.’ And so that’s the word we send out to the party faithful … At the end of the day, this game is about winning general elections, not winning primaries and the Republican party is stuck on winning primaries to prove a point. And what’s that point? Oh, we lose general elections.”The election is still more than 470 days away and the race is far from done. During the 2008 election campaign, for example, Hillary Clinton appeared to have a decisive lead for the Democratic nomination over Barack Obama while the eventual Republican nominee, John McCain, did not emerge as the frontrunner until January 2008.In theory, Trump should be vulnerable. He comes with excess personal baggage including legal troubles that appeared to converge this week with fresh momentum. On Tuesday Trump revealed that he had been named as a target in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of interference in the 2020 election.On the same day Dana Nessel, the attorney general of Michigan, announced criminal charges against 16 people who signed paperwork falsely claiming Trump won the election in that battleground state. Meanwhile Fani Willis, district attorney for Fulton county, Georgia, is preparing to present a case to a grand jury over Trump’s election subversion efforts there.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington and former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, said: “There’s still a chance that the steady drip, drip, drip of indictments and other problems will open up a larger portion of the party to an alternative because they see him as increasingly risky, as someone who might well not only be indicted but convicted of a major crime, or more than one, during the presidential campaign.“Will a lot of Republicans quietly come to the conclusion that’s not a risk worth taking? I don’t know. I find it very difficult to understand my own party and impossible to understand the other side.”Christie and other critics have also made the case that Trump is an electoral liability, pointing out that, after his narrow win in 2016, Republicans lost the White House, House and Senate. They did regain the House in last year’s midterms but underperformed expectations. Trump’s campaigns are always risky and haphazard: he recently criticised Iowa’s popular governor, Kim Reynolds, for her seemingly cosy relationship with DeSantis while she purports to be neutral.Several groups that oppose Trump’s candidacy have begun spending big money on efforts to undermine his support. Win It Back Pac, an independent Super Pac with ties to the conservative Club For Growth Action, recently spent $3.6m on an advert that features a purported Trump supporter who has grown tired of the former president’s antics. Americans for Prosperity Action, part of a network founded by the billionaire Koch brothers, has also sought to weaken Trump through door knocking and phone calls.But for now, Trump is still the 800lb gorilla of the Republican party. He is dominating polls, drawing huge crowds and shaping the narratives by which other candidates define themselves. Just as in past recent elections, that leaves Never Trump Republicans with few palatable options except to put country before party.Walsh, the former congressman, said: “If you really believe Trump is unfit then you have to do what me and Liz Cheney and so many others have done and that’s just say we’re going to throw our support behind the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, even though it goes against our policy interests, because Trump has to be stopped. Clearly he can’t be stopped in the primary so he has to be stopped in the general.” More

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      Struggling DeSantis and Pence attack criminal justice law they championed

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      As a Republican congressman, Ron DeSantis was a supporter of legislation that made moderate reforms to the federal prison system intended to reduce recidivism and mass incarceration – a cause that was also championed by then president Donald Trump and his deputy, Mike Pence.Five years later, DeSantis, now Florida’s governor, and Pence are struggling to overtake Trump’s lead among Republicans as they vie for the party’s presidential nomination, and have turned against the criminal justice measure they both supported in an effort to win over conservative voters.“Under the Trump administration, he enacted a bill, basically a jailbreak bill. It’s called the First Step Act. It has allowed dangerous people out of prison, who have now reoffended and really, really hurt a number of people,” DeSantis told the rightwing pundit Ben Shapiro in a May interview, vowing that “one of the things I want to do as president is go to Congress and seek the repeal of the First Step Act.”Pence echoed a similar message, telling the Washington Examiner that as president he would “take a step back from” the law.Their comments were the latest instances of Republicans wooing voters with promises to crack down on crime, a time-tested tactic for the GOP that last year helped the party win back control of the House.But conservatives who supported the First Step Act in 2018 say there’s no reason to repeal it, nor do they believe attacking it will help Pence and DeSantis overtake Trump’s substantial popularity advantage among Republican voters.“You’re in a political, what I call, silly season of you say a lot of things, and crime is a concern, public safety is a concern across the country,” said Doug Collins, a former Republican congressman from Georgia who introduced an early version of the act.He said the law was “not an issue until it was brought up, and it’s not an issue that seems to be gaining a lot of traction out there, especially when the facts of the bill were put out there for Republican voters.”One of the biggest pieces of criminal justice reform legislation Congress has passed in years, the First Step Act reduced mandatory minimum sentences for some drug-related crimes, created new rehabilitation programs for released inmates, banned the shackling of pregnant women and expanded time-served credit for most federal prisoners.Only a minority of America’s prison population, the largest in the world, is incarcerated in the federal system, but one of the act’s chief goals was to create programs that helped people released under the act keep out of prison for good.According to justice department data, the recidivism rate for those released under the law is just over 12%, as compared to the 45% rate the Government Accountability Office says is the baseline for federal prisoners overall.“When we see policymakers talking about the First Step Act, and trying to make some sort of misguided connection with crime, we have to be really realistic that the research and the evidence doesn’t point that way,” said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive non-profit.The act’s passage represented one of the few instances in which Trump and his Republican allies in Congress joined together with Democrats, and their legislative push was endorsed by outside groups as diverse as the American Civil Liberties Union and the conservative benefactors Koch Industries.The version of the act Collins introduced mostly dealt with ways to reduce recidivism, and DeSantis voted for the bill before resigning later in 2018 to mount his successful campaign for Florida governor. The Senate then added provisions dealing with sentencing reform, and as he signed it, Trump said the legislation “brings much-needed hope to many families during the holiday season”.Two years later, Covid-19 broke out and crime spiked nationwide, a phenomenon that appears to be relaxing but which has had an enduring impact on American politics. The former president currently leads the polls among Republican presidential candidates, but doesn’t say much about the First Step Act, having now shifted his demands to calling for Congress to slash the FBI and justice department’s funding over their investigations against him.DeSantis, meanwhile, has made an about-face on criminal justice policy since announcing his presidential run in May. While he signed a major criminal justice reform bill in 2019, he last month vetoed two measures dealing with expungements and probation violations, despite them passing with overwhelming support in Florida’s GOP-dominated legislature.Writing in RealClearPolitics, Steve Cortes, a spokesman for the DeSantis-aligned Never Back Down Pac, said that as a congressman, the governor only supported the initial “law-and-order version” of the First Step Act, and not the one that Trump enacted.“This obfuscation on Trump’s jailbreak points to an even more serious problem for the 45th president as he seeks re-election: he remains unable or unwilling to admit policy mistakes and to propose appropriate reversals or reforms,” Cortes wrote.Arthur Rizer, a conservative advocate for the act who co-founded ARrow Center for Justice Reform, remembers DeSantis as a supporter of the law during his time in Congress. Pence, meanwhile, at one point went to the Capitol to personally negotiate with GOP senators on getting the bill passed.The former vice-president is currently polling in the single digits among Republican candidates, while DeSantis is in a distant second place to Trump.“I think that they sense that there is a potential to create another wedge issue. And they are taking this opportunity to distinguish themselves from Trump. They can’t go out for Trump for the indictment stuff, so they’re looking for ways to pick at him,” Rizer said of the attacks on the First Step Act.“It actually breaks my heart to see people turning on something that’s done a lot of good for people who were in prison for relatively minor stuff. And now that they’re out with their families, and we’re using it as a political football, to score points and to dunk on the other side.” More

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      Summer of discontent: will US strikes spell trouble for ‘union guy’ Biden?

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      It became known as the winter of discontent. After the Labour government tried to freeze wages to stem inflation, Britain was convulsed by labour strikes and disruptions in public services. Rubbish piled in the streets, bodies went unburied – and a fierce political backlash swept Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives into power.Forty-five years later a summer of strikes is roiling industries from coast to coast in America.Unions have launched or are threatening stoppages that could affect everything from airline travel and parcel deliveries to car manufacturing and film and TV production. They could also disrupt the economic growth that Joe Biden wants to campaign on in 2024.“It takes him off message because strikes are visual, strikes are hot video, and they’re a focal point for media,” said John Zogby, an author and pollster. “It becomes lame trying to explain, ‘But the numbers are good, but the numbers are good, but the numbers are getting better,’ when the video just doesn’t appear to show it.”The coronavirus pandemic had many aftershocks and labour turmoil may be among them. Hollywood production is shut down as the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild are striking, partially over concerns about streaming revenues as well as artificial intelligence taking away jobs from creative workers. The action has put films and TV shows in limbo and could cost the economy an estimated $3bn.There is also the prospect of a United Auto Workers strike as contract talks get under way and the industry wrestles with a transition toward electric vehicles. The Teamsters union said its drivers might walk off the job as they struggle to reach a new contract with UPS (United Parcel Service). And more than 26,000 flight attendants at American Airlines are set to hold a strike vote over the coming weeks.Among other examples mushrooming across the country, thousands of hotel workers in Los Angeles have also been striking this month while healthcare workers at a major Chicago hospital are planning to do likewise in a dispute over wages and lack of staffing.And last month there were localised walkouts at Amazon, McDonald’s and Starbucks, while hundreds of journalists across eight states went on strike to demand an end to painful cost-cutting measures and a change of leadership at Gannett, the country’s biggest newspaper chain.Drexel Heard, a public affairs strategist based in Los Angeles, said: “This is what I believe is the start of a trend that was inevitable post-pandemic: workers knowing and understanding that things cannot go back to normal. We all work hybrid now, for the most part.“People are understanding that their need for healthcare is something that’s critical. Their need for better pay and better work hours is essential, especially when we have things that happen like a pandemic, and people want to feel safe. The only people who are fighting for workers’ rights are unions.”Scenes of industrial strife heading into winter would provide fodder for rightwing media who already accuse Biden of embracing the leftwing ideas of Senator Bernie Sanders. It might also create a headache for a president who is focusing much of his re-election campaign on the strength of the economy.On Thursday he was at the Philadelphia Shipyard in Pennsylvania to promote “Bidenomics”, a recently adopted slogan. The president said: “We have a plan that’s turning things around pretty quickly. ‘Bidenomics’ is just another way of saying ‘Restore the American Dream’.”But that message is still struggling to break through with voters. In a CNBC All-America Economic Survey released this week, 37% approve of Biden’s handling of the economy and 58% disapprove. In a Monmouth University poll, only three in 10 Americans feel the country is doing a better job recovering economically than the rest of the world since the pandemic.There is a baffling disconnect between these opinions and data that shows America defying predictions of recession and curbing price rises faster than other major economies. Inflation has fallen from 9% to 3% and is now at its lowest point in more than two years.Indeed, Biden may have helped create the very conditions that make strikes more likely. White House officials say that unions are empowered to press for more benefits and better pay because of the strong job market. Unemployment is just 3.6% and job openings are relatively high.This is one reason why Robert Reich, a former labour secretary under President Bill Clinton, does not believe that the current wave of strikes and potential strikes will overwhelm Biden’s effort to highlight economic growth.He explained in an email: “(1) the strikes and potential strikes still represent a tiny segment of the American workforce, (2) overall job gains and wage gains continue to roar, (3) a big reason workers feel able to strike is that the labor market continues to be tight, which is another good sign for Biden.”Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and a Guardian US columnist, added: “The potential problem for Biden isn’t the wave of strikes and potential strikes but the seeming determination of the Fed to continue to raise interest rates, thereby risking a recession before Election Day.”Widespread industrial action would pose a fresh test for Biden, a self-proclaimed “union guy” born in blue-collar Scranton, Pennsylvania. Past attempts to intervene in such disputes have not always gone smoothly.Last year his administration helped forge a tentative agreement between rail companies and their unionised workers to avoid a strike that could have rocked the economy before the midterm elections. The tentative deal prevented a strike but failed to appease workers, and Congress ultimately had to intervene by imposing an agreement.Biden, who is pushing the Senate to confirm Julie Su as his new labour secretary, has already expressed support for the striking Hollywood actors and writers, insisting that all workers deserve fair pay and benefits. Such an approach could work to his advantage against Republicans seeking to rebrand themselves as the party of the working class.Faiz Shakir, chief political adviser to Sanders, who met with Biden and young labour organisers at the White House this week, said: “When you think about some of the working-class people who are in the swing voter category, they tend to carry an anger and frustration about an economy that hasn’t been working for them.“It would be wrong to go back to them and tell them, ‘Hey, everything is much better since I was president.’ I think you want to say, ‘I’m fighting for you and I’m improving the situation for you. However, there’s way more work to do and the people who are standing in the way are these corporate bosses, and I’m taking them on from you.’In the UPS dispute, Shakir argues, Biden should make clear he stands with the workers. “Stand boldly with those workers. Say, ‘I stand with you. You want to go on strike? That’s fine. Yes, there will be costs to consumers, yes, there will be some challenges in the economy, but your work is essential and important and you deserve your fair share.’“What I think will end up happening is you usually get some criticism from the business elite who are going to say, why is the president of the United States siding with these workers and making it even harder for these people to reach a negotiated outcome? To that, I say that is good for politics, because when working people see that you’re sticking your neck out for them, they will reward you. They see you taking arrows for them.”Shakir also believes that the dispute will be resolved in a few weeks with a positive outcome for labour, and that Biden will be able to justifiably claim that he helped improve the lot of hundreds of thousands of workers.In his remarks in Philadelphia on Thursday, Biden was again careful to align himself with workers and unions against Wall Street and companies that made record-high profits during the pandemic. If a disruptive wave of strikes comes to pass, this is likely to be the least risky strategy.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank, said: “It’s my distinct impression that support for labour unions has gone up significantly so we’re not talking about [British miners’ leader] Arthur Scargill in the 1970s. We’re talking about an extended period during which a lot of Americans believe that workers have got the short end of the stick.“They’re much less worried about ‘big labour’ than they used to be, in part because labour isn’t as big as used to be, especially in the private sector where labour unions have weakened enormously. There’s a basic sense of fair play operating to increase support for not just working people but organised labour, so I don’t think this is a bad time to strike and I don’t think that will necessarily redound to Joe Biden’s discredit.” More

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      Blowback review: Miles Taylor on the dangers of a second Trump term

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      Miles Taylor is a former chief of staff of the US Department of Homeland Security who catapulted himself to nameless fame in the fall of 2018, when he published an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times under this headline: “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”Taylor described himself then as one of many senior officials “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of [Trump’s] agenda and his worst inclinations … To be clear, ours is not the popular ‘resistance’ of the left. We want the administration to succeed … But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”The article set off a firestorm, Trump and his allies demanding to know the identity of this “traitor” while some on the left questioned the morality of continuing to work for an administration after you’ve realized it is a clear and present danger to the health of the country.In his new book, Taylor reveals that debate was as vivid inside him as it was within the rest of the body politic. He has now concluded that anonymity, which he carried into a first book, A Warning, was a mistake, “a gift to authoritarians. They thrive on fear and the suppression of dissent.”The subtitle of his new book is “A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump”, and there is certainly plenty of that in its 300-plus pages. But there is also lots about Taylor’s “mentally, emotionally and physically” painful “journey to the truth”, which included the break-up of his marriage, bouts of alcoholism and prescription drug abuse.Even after the scores of Trump books which have assaulted our bookshelves, Taylor still manages to reveal a few fresh moments of astonishing evil or narrow escapes from Armageddon. These include Trump’s musings to his then chief of staff, John Kelly, “that he badly wanted to strike North Korea with a nuclear weapon”; the president talking about his daughter Ivanka’s “breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her”; Steven Miller’s eagerness to eliminate the judiciary (“Yes sir, a country without judges would help”); and Miller’s equal affection for genocide, revealed when he interrogated the commandant of the US coast guard about why he couldn’t use a drone with a missile to “obliterate” a “boat full of immigrants” in “international waters”. International law would be a problem, the commandant explained.The substantive part of Taylor’s book is devoted to waking up Americans to the very real dangers of a second Trump presidency, including plans to “manipulate the justice system to cover up corruption, punish political enemies and reshape US courts”.Taylor reminds us once again of how completely the Republican party has been corrupted by Maga ideology, with powerful allies of the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, calling for “defunding the FBI” while the Texas senator Ted Cruz wants “a complete house cleaning” at the same agency.“They will be unconstrained and untethered,” former homeland security general counsel John Mitnick says. “What little restraint was exercised in terms of respecting the rule of law will be gone.”Like many other George W Bush Republicans, Taylor is weakest when he argues that Trump is an outlier to “ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people”. This ignores the party’s historic affection for racism and homophobia, which dates at least to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy in 1968, or Bush’s advocacy for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, a cornerstone of his re-election campaign in 2004. When Taylor casually accuses Barack Obama of backing away “from America’s allies” and “bowing down to its adversaries”, we are reminded the author is indeed an old-fashioned Republican.But his book is still important because it rings alarm bells about the huge danger of fascism and authoritarianism that would come with Trump’s return to the White House, in a moment when many Washington reporters are silent. This journalistic impotence was evident in two recent stories co-authored by the New York Times reporters Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman.The first, published last month, described Trump’s promise to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Joe Biden as part of “a larger movement on the right to gut the FBI, overhaul a justice department conservatives claim has been ‘weaponized’ against them and abandon the norm – which many Republicans view as a facade – that the department should operate independently from the president”.The second piece by the same trio described Maga plans to eliminate the independence of all federal agencies, including the Federal Reserve board, and laid out Trump’s “plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the state department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as ‘the sick political class that hates our country’”.These two articles totaled 4,800 words but included less than a hundred words from anyone questioning the morality or legality of these plans to politicize the justice department and destroy the federal civil service. This single quote, from Kelly, was the only significant balance provided in either piece: “It would be chaotic. It just simply would be chaotic, because [Trump would] continually be trying to exceed his authority but the sycophants would go along with it. It would be a non-stop gunfight with the Congress and the courts.”The Times reporters did not respond to an email asking why they thought a hundred words of opposition to the Maga agenda were sufficient to make their stories balanced.With that kind of laissez-faire attitude prevailing among too many journalists, books like Taylor’s, which focus on the imminent dangers from a Maga revival, are crucial to a broader effort to rescue American democracy.
      Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump is published in the US by Atria Books More

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      US third-party group mulls 2024 ticket – but would it merely help Trump?

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      On a small stage in New Hampshire this week, West Virginia senator Joe Manchin and former Republican Governor Jon Huntsman sat together extolling the virtues of bipartisanship and talking very much like running mates. They were there on behalf of the centrist political advocacy organization No Labels, which is considering fielding a third-party ticket in the 2024 presidential election, and had enlisted the two men to debut its 67-page policy manifesto.Early on in the evening, the moderator asked the question looming over the event: were Manchin and Huntsman running for president? After a smattering of applause died down, Manchin deflected, saying they were simply there to “explain to you that we need options”. But Manchin’s refusal to announce whether he will seek re-election for the US Senate next year, and his presence at the town hall, has drawn speculation that he and No Labels may combine to upend the 2024 election.No Labels has been around since 2010, largely promoting centrist policies and occasionally working to elect moderate Democrats to Congress. Its recent ambitions are far grander, as it plans to raise $70m, get on the ballot in every state across the country, and build a third-party ticket for the presidency. The group has become a specter looming over the 2024 election for Democrats, with polls showing that a centrist third-party candidate would draw votes away from Joe Biden and tilt the race toward Donald Trump.The growing prominence of No Labels and its potential to run a third-party candidate has resulted in backlash from Democrats and more centrist Republicans as a result. Democratic representatives and political organizations such as MoveOn have mobilized to oppose the group, including holding briefings for congressional staffers on the risk of a third-party ticket. Democratic and Republican strategists additionally commissioned a poll that showed how an independent centrist candidate would act as a spoiler against Biden.But efforts to show that No Labels could take a significant portion of the vote and effectively hand Trump the presidency have only emboldened the group. No Labels’ chief pollster told Axios that the recent survey – which showed a moderate independent candidate would receive around 20% of the vote and shift the election to Trump – was proof that their strategy was sound and that they had a viable chance at the presidency.“The people who are spearheading this are not doing it cynically. They have convinced themselves that this is a unique historical moment and they intend to seize it,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who co-founded No Labels in 2010 before leaving it earlier this year.Galston disagreed with the group’s decision in 2022 to focus on fielding a third-party candidate, he said, and after a year of offering arguments against the shift decided to quit the organization in April of this year. Although he still supports the group, he sees its current mission as misguided and has spoken out about how it’s likely to benefit Trump’s presidential hopes.“I could not go along with the formation of an independent ticket,” Galston said. “I saw no equivalence between Donald Trump and Joe Biden and feared that this ticket would, on net, draw support away from Biden’s candidacy.”No Labels, and its potential candidate Manchin, reject the notion that they will act as spoilers. The group has claimed it will not go ahead with its plans if it appears to shift the election to one party, though has been vague on its criteria for such a decision, and Manchin on Monday told the audience in New Hampshire that “if I get in a race I’m gonna win”.Undisclosed donorsAs No Labels moves forward with its fundraising and attempts to get on nationwide ballots, it has faced increased scrutiny over who exactly is backing their efforts. The group refuses to disclose its donors, which it is not obligated to do, but a Mother Jones investigation identified dozens of wealthy contributors affiliated with No Labels.Although it includes several major Democratic donors, many of the contributors favor conservative causes and Republican candidates. A separate investigation from The New Republic found that conservative billionaire Harlan Crow, most recently known for his close ties with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, donated $130,000 to the group between 2019 and 2021.No Labels officials have cited privacy concerns as the reason that the group will not release its donors, while chief executive Nancy Jacobson told NBC News this week that there is “nothing nefarious” about its fundraising. Galston brought up to Jacobson in the early days of the group’s operations that a lack of transparency might become an issue, he said, but she told him “in no uncertain terms” that was how things would be run.Jacobson and No Labels did not respond to a request for comment on this article.It is unclear just how much of its $70m goal No Labels has raised, although previous years and Jacobson’s status as veteran fundraiser show that it is able to draw large sums. No Labels’ 2021 tax forms, the most recent year publicly available, state that it took in just over $11.3m in revenue that year. The organization’s highest paid staffer was former political commentator Mark Halperin, according to the 2021 tax form, who made around $257,000 as No Labels chief strategist. The organization hired Halperin despite allegations from multiple women of sexual harassment and assault against the once-prominent journalist. Halperin, who has previously apologized for some of the harassment allegations against him while denying other allegations including physical assault, left No Labels in March of this year. He could not be reached for comment.The tax forms also show that No Labels paid top Democrat-run consulting firms for their advocacy and communications work. It gave around $946,000 in compensation to communications firm Rational 360 in 2021. Rational 360 did not respond to a request for comment on this article.The group has faced criticism from Democrats before, including when it endorsed an anti-LGBT, anti-abortion Illinois Congressman during the 2018 midterms. A Super PAC tied to No Labels spent aabout $1m backing the campaign, according to the Intercept. But previous backlash against the group is nothing compared to what it currently faces, with growing concern among Democrats that No Labels has the potential to lose them the White House.“It’s pretty clear that a No Labels candidate would help re-elect Donald Trump,” Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen told the Hill.No Labels has given itself until Super Tuesday – when a large number of states hold primaries in early March of next year – as a deadline for announcing whether or not it will run a third party. The group’s national co-chair Pat McRory stated on Monday that if Biden and Trump are the likely match-up by then and the group sees a path to victory, it will run a candidate. More