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      Anti-vaccine activist Robert Kennedy Jr announces run for president

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr, an anti-vaccine activist and scion of one of the most famous American political families, is running for president.Kennedy, 69, filed a statement of candidacy on Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission.The campaign to challenge President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination is a long shot, in the vein of that launched by the self-help author Marianne Williamson.Kennedy, a nephew of President John F Kennedy and son of the US attorney general and New York senator Robert F Kennedy, was once a bestselling author and environmental lawyer who worked on issues such as clean water.But more than 15 years ago he became fixated on a belief that vaccines are not safe. He emerged as one of the leading voices in the anti-vaccine movement, his work described by public health experts and members of his own family as misleading and dangerous.Kennedy’s efforts intensified amid the Covid-19 pandemic and the development of a vaccine.His anti-vaccine charity, Children’s Health Defense, prospered, with revenues more than doubling in 2020 to $6.8m, according to filings with charity regulators.The organization has targeted false claims at groups that may be more prone to distrust the vaccine, including mothers and Black Americans, experts have said, which could have resulted in deaths during the pandemic.In 2021, Kennedy released a book, The Real Anthony Fauci, in which he accused the top infectious disease doctor of assisting in “a historic coup d’etat against western democracy” and promoted unproven Covid treatments such as ivermectin, which is meant to treat parasites, and the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine.His push against the Covid vaccine has linked him with anti-democratic figures and groups. Kennedy has appeared at events pushing the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and with people who cheered or downplayed the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.A photo posted on Instagram showed Kennedy backstage at a July 2021 Reawaken America event with the Trump ally Roger Stone, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and anti-vaccine profiteer Charlene Bollinger. All three have promoted the lie about the 2020 election being stolen.Bollinger has appeared with Kennedy at multiple events. She and her husband sponsored an anti-vaccine, pro-Trump rally near the Capitol on January 6. Bollinger celebrated the attack and her husband tried to enter the Capitol. Kennedy later appeared in a video for their Super Pac.Kennedy has repeatedly invoked Nazis and the Holocaust when talking about measures aimed at mitigating the spread of Covid, such as mask requirements and vaccine mandates.He has sometimes apologized for those comments, including when he suggested that people in 2022 had it worse than Anne Frank, the teenager who died in a Nazi concentration camp after hiding with her family in Amsterdam for two years.Kennedy has invoked his family’s legacy in his anti-vaccine work, including sometimes using images of JFK.His sister Kerry Kennedy, who runs Robert F Kennedy Human Rights, an international rights group founded by their mother, Ethel, said her brother has at times removed content at her request.She told the Associated Press in 2021 her brother is “completely wrong on this issue and very dangerous”. More

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      Trump remains the most popular Republican despite his indictment

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      When the history-making indictment was read out against him in a New York City courtroom on Tuesday, former president and current contender for the Republican nomination in 2024 Donald Trump gained a new title: criminal defendant.Americans saw a quiet and tense Trump walk into the courtroom under the guard of both the Secret Service and the local police force – whose officers stood behind him during his appearance before a judge, as they do with any other defendant. There, he learned he was facing 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to hush money payments and “catch and kill” attempts to suppress negative news coverage about his extramarital affair with the adult film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election.As unprecedented as that was, it has become clear in the hours after his appearance that the fundamental political calculus has not changed for Trump. He remains the most popular man in the GOP, and the break his enemies have long sought between him and the rest of the Republican party seems as distant as ever.“For those who think this will harm President Trump’s chances at running for the White House in 2024, I have news for you: it won’t,” Kevin Hern, who leads the Republican Study Committee, the influential conservative body that’s the largest ideological caucus in Congress, said following Trump’s court appearance on Tuesday.“The same people who were outraged over the possibility of Hillary Clinton’s prosecution for obvious crimes are now celebrating yet another witch-hunt against the former president and political opponent of the current president. This type of hypocrisy is disgusting, and it underscores what millions of Americans see as a blatant double standard in our justice system, causing many to lose faith in those institutions.”The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, may have scored a symbolic victory by being the first to indict Trump, but the trajectory of his prosecution – or other efforts to hold Trump to account – is far from clear. The next hearing in Bragg’s case will be well into the 2024 election season on 4 December, and the months to come will be consumed by pre-trial motions from Trump’s attorneys, who will probably try to get the case dismissed and argue that Bragg waited too long to file his charges, said former assistant US attorney Kevin O’Brien.Bragg may soon be joined in his pursuit of Trump by prosecutors elsewhere. Special counsel Jack Smith is considering whether to bring federal charges over Trump’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection, the wider Republican effort to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election win and the classified materials discovered by the FBI at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton county, Georgia, is separately investigating attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn Biden’s win in that state, another potential source of legal peril.If any of those inquiries result in charges, courtroom defendant’s tables could become as familiar to Trump as podiums and packed arenas, even as he presses on with his attempt to return to the White House.“There may never be an indictment in Atlanta, there may never be an indictment coming out of the justice department, we just don’t know,” O’Brien said. “You don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. But it’s possible that Trump could be facing two or three new sets of charges in the very near term. Which is, again, an incredible situation.”By all indications, many Republican voters still see Trump as their man, according to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll released following the indictment last week, that showed him far and away the most popular among current or potential GOP candidates.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfter returning from New York to his Florida home, Trump on Tuesday evening gave an irate address at his Mar-a-Lago resort, where he vented his spleen and declared, among other things, that “our country is going to hell”.On Wednesday, he made a demand that was sure to sit poorly with his Republican allies. In a post from his Truth Social account, he called for defunding the police, the sort of thing most often heard from progressives demanding criminal justice reform in the United States.“REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS SHOULD DEFUND THE DOJ AND FBI UNTIL THEY COME TO THEIR SENSES,” Trump wrote. “THE DEMOCRATS HAVE TOTALLY WEAPONIZED LAW ENFORCEMENT IN OUR COUNTRY AND ARE VICIOUSLY USING THIS ABUSE OF POWER TO INTERFERE WITH OUR ALREADY UNDER SIEGE ELECTIONS!” More

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      Democrats bid to use censorship law against DeSantis and ban his book

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      Democrats in Florida are attempting to use a state law that censors books in public schools against the governor who signed it, Ron DeSantis, by asking schools to review or ban the Republican governor’s own book, The Courage to be Free.“The very trap he set for others is the one that he set for himself,” Fentrice Driskell, the Democratic minority leader in the Florida state house, told the Daily Beast.DeSantis published The Courage to be Free in February, in what was widely seen as an opening shot in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. He has said he wrote the book himself.Seeking to compete with Donald Trump – who enjoys convincing leads in polling – DeSantis has established himself as a ruthless culture warrior, willing to use government power against opposing interests and viewpoints.He signed the law regarding books in schools last year. It includes guidelines for content deemed inappropriate on grounds of race, sexuality, gender and depictions of violence.But the law has run into problems over interpretations of its language, not least when a children’s book about Roberto Clemente, a baseball legend who faced racial discrimination, landed at the centre of national controversy.Seeking to take advantage of such uncertainties, Florida Democrats are highlighting instances of language in DeSantis’s book which they contend could violate his own guidelines.As reported by the Beast, in The Courage to be Free, DeSantis “use[s] the terms ‘woke’ and ‘gender ideology’ 46 times and 10 times respectively, both of which could constitute ‘divisive concepts’ the governor has argued should stay out of curricula up to the college level”.DeSantis also claims students have been forced to “chant to the Aztec god of human sacrifice” and, as well as describing violence at Black Lives Matter protests, cites a video showing “dead black children, dramatically warning … about ‘racist police and state-sanctioned violence’”.DeSantis also describes the 2017 mass shooting at congressional baseball practice in which Steve Scalise, a senior Republican, was seriously wounded.Such passages, Democrats contend (in what the Florida publisher Peter Schorsch called a “clever bit of trolling”), could fall foul of the governor’s own rules.According to the Beast, only one school district initially responded to Democrats’ complaints. Marion county, near Orlando, said no public school there possessed the governor’s book.Driskell told the Beast: “We’re leaning into one of [DeSantis’s] weaknesses.“… If America doesn’t want Florida’s present reality to become America’s future reality, people need to know what it’s like here. This is our way of fighting back, but also highlighting how ridiculous some of this becomes, right?” More

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      The most consequential politics story in the US isn’t the Trump arraignment | Robert Reich

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      One of the biggest challenges to the future of American democracy is unfolding this Tuesday, but not in Manhattan. It’s occurring in Wisconsin.Beyond the fact that no former president has ever faced a criminal indictment, Donald Trump’s arraignment in Manhattan on criminal charges offers little by way of news. An arraignment leading to a criminal trial that takes place months (if not years) from now is a dull technical legal proceeding.To satisfy the public’s seemingly insatiable craving for Trump entertainment notwithstanding, the media are filling the void with Trump swag: wall-to-wall “special coverage”, on-the-spot correspondents, panels of pundits, interviews with current and past Trump lawyers and former prosecutors, opinion polls, interviews with “average” Trump supporters, and mindless chatter about Trump’s moods (“troubled”, “angry”, “defiant”, “exhilarated”).Tonight, Trump is expected to deliver a prime-time address from Mar-a-Lago. No news there, either. Predictably, it will be little more than lies and smears – more free media coverage for Trump’s venomous bluster.A larger challenge to American democracy is occurring in Wisconsin, where voters will choose a new judge for the state’s supreme court and a senator for its legislature, but that’s getting far less attention than what’s occurring in New York.Wisconsin is a key swing state in the upcoming 2024 presidential election. Its supreme court and legislature could be critical to the outcome.And it is the most gerrymandered state in the nation. Although voters in the state divide almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans, Republicans hold 63 out of 99 seats in the state assembly and 21 of 33 seats in the state senate.Four years ago, the US supreme court decided to leave partisan gerrymandering cases to state courts. This means that if the justice who’s elected today alters the Wisconsin supreme court’s seven-person majority, it could strike down the state’s wildly gerrymandered voting maps – a major advance for democracy.But even this might not be enough to restore democracy in Wisconsin. Tuesday’s special election to fill an open state senate seat will decide whether Republicans gain a supermajority that could allow them to impeach the new justice.The Republican candidate for that seat, Dan Knodl, has suggested he might try to do so if he doesn’t like who’s elected to the court.Not incidentally, Knodl was one of 15 Wisconsin Republican lawmakers who in January 2022 sent a letter to then vice-president Mike Pence asking him to delay certifying presidential results that showed Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump.The underlying issue in Wisconsin is the same as it’s been since Trump lied and smeared his way into the national consciousness seven years ago: whether an authoritarian demagogue can take over a national political party so that the party can then control enough state legislatures to elect that authoritarian – even though a large majority of voters reject him.Trump lost his 2020 presidential bid by 7m votes. But he could have won the electoral college, and therefore been elected president, had he won just 42,919 more votes spread across just three swing states – Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.So the rules about who gets to vote are crucial, especially in these swing states. And who sets those rules? State legislatures, along with state courts that decide whether the legislatures are acting constitutionally. Hence, the importance of Tuesday’s two races in Wisconsin.Wisconsin Republicans have already changed state law to make voting more onerous by enacting a strict voter ID law. And last year, the state’s conservative supreme court banned drop boxes for absentee ballots. Wisconsin now ranks 47th out of 50 states on how easy it is to vote.Not incidentally, Wisconsin’s supreme court was the only state supreme court in the nation that agreed to hear Trump’s challenge to the 2020 election, eventually rejecting – by a single vote – his attempt to throw out 200,000 ballots in the state’s two large Democratic counties.Another way Trump could have won in 2020 is if the outcome of the election had been determined by Republican-controlled state legislatures in Wisconsin and other swing states – as Trump and many Republican members of Congress sought. Yet another reason why the Wisconsin races are so important.Friends, this is how authoritarian minorities steal democracies: they do it step by step. They design voting districts to freeze out a majority of voters. They then gain legislative supermajorities that allow them to control the state executive and state courts. Then they capture electoral college majorities despite the popular vote.Or they sow so much doubt about the popular vote that they decide the outcome.This was Trump’s playbook in 2020. He didn’t succeed then, but he might in 2024.What’s happening in Manhattan’s criminal court is obviously important. Holding a former president accountable to the rule of law is essential.But what’s happening today in Wisconsin may prove as, if not more, important to the future of American democracy. It will either strengthen or weaken the levers of self-government in a state where those levers could make all the difference.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Every indictment will make Trump stronger – and Republicans wilder | Sidney Blumenthal

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      The indictment of Donald J Trump has not driven a wooden stake through his heart. He has risen, omnipresent and ominous again, overwhelming his rivals, their voices joined into his choir, like the singing January 6 prisoners, proclaiming the wickedness of his prosecution. As he enters the criminal courthouse to pose for his mugshot and to give his fingerprints, evangelicals venerate him as the adulterous King David or the martyred Christ.Trump does not have to raise his hand to signal to the House Republicans to echo his cry of “WITCH-HUNT”. He owns the House like he owns a hotel.“I keep him up on everything that we’re doing,” says Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who serves as one of his agents over the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy. Nine of the 25 Republicans on the House judiciary committee and 11 of the 26 on oversight have endorsed him. Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference, has pledged her allegiance. Jim Jordan, who refused to honor a subpoena from the January 6 committee, now issues flurries of subpoenas as chair of the Orwellian-named subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, to obstruct investigations of Trump, and not incidentally into Jordan’s and other House Republicans’ roles in the insurrection. But not even a subpoena to the New York district attorney, Alvin Bragg, or any other prosecutor, could command the tide of indictments.Between the motion of Trump’s first indictment and the act of the last Republican primary, more than a year from now, on 4 June 2024, the shadow will fall on the only party with an actual nomination contest. Trump’s pandemonium will only have an electoral valence for the foreseeable future in its precincts. His damage to the constitution, the national security of the United States and the rule of law will be extensive, but his most intense and focused political destruction will be circumscribed within the Republican party.From the report of every new indictment to its reality, Republican radicalization will accelerate. Every concrete count will confirm every conspiracy theory. Every prosecution and trial, staggered over months and into the election year, from New York to Georgia to Washington, will be a shock driving Republicans further to Trump. Every Republican candidate running for every office will be compelled to declare as a matter of faith that Trump is being unjustly persecuted or be themselves branded traitors.Profession of the holy creed of election denial has already been broadened to demand profession of the doctrine of Trump’s impunity. Every Republican attempting to run on law and order will be required to disavow law and order in every case in which Trump is the defendant. Trump’s incitement to violence will not have an exception of immunity for the Republican party. Beginning in the Iowa caucuses, the confrontations may not resemble New England town meetings. If Trump were to lose in the first tumultuous caucuses, can anyone doubt he will claim it was rigged? Was January 6 a preliminary for the Republican primaries of 2024?The death watch of Trump is a cyclical phenomenon. After each of his storms, the pundits, talking heads and party strategists on all sides emerge from their cellars, survey the latest wreckage and check the scientific measurements of the polls to give the “all clear” sign that the cyclone had passed. When Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, thoughtful analysts assured that Trump’s time was gone, he would fade away and his comeback in 2024 was an impossibility, just “not going to happen”. Everyone should “relax”. Then came January 6. When Trump’s endorsed candidates in the 2022 midterm elections, a gaggle of election deniers and conspiracy mongers, were ignominiously rejected, last rites were pronounced. Trump was dead again.“We want to make Trump a non-person,” Rupert Murdoch said after the January 6 insurrection. Trump’s image was virtually banished from his bandbox of Fox News. He would be airbrushed out of the next episode of history.“The best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter,” wrote Emily Seidel, chief executive of the Koch network’s Americans for Prosperity, in a memo.On 5 February, the Koch dark money syndicate held a conference of its billionaire donors and key activists at Palm Springs, California, to lay the groundwork for the dawning of the post-Trump age. There it was decided to swing its enormous resources behind the candidacy of Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who they had originally cultivated as one of their Tea Party hothouse congressmen.The wishful thinking that Trump would magically disappear, however, ignored the omens of Liz Cheney’s purging, the victories of his candidates in the midterm Republican primaries over blanched “normies”, and the corrupt bargain that McCarthy was forced to make to secure his speakership. The implacability of Trump’s political base’s attachment was discounted.Murdoch, Koch et al should have grasped the dangerous fluidity of the extremism they stoked, financed and organized for decades, which metastasized into Trump. Their approach to Trump was not dissimilar to that of Vladimir Putin, treating him as their useful idiot. Putin’s purpose was and is to use Trump to destroy Nato and the western alliance, and as an agent of chaos within the US of a magnitude that no KGB agent could have recruited during the cold war.The Koch network contentedly used Trump to pack the courts with Federalist Society stamped judges, deregulate business and thwart policy on climate change. But despite delivering those goods, Trump was ultimately uncontrollable. The problem with Trump was not his wildness and lawlessness. They were willing to tolerate him so long as his administration produced for them. Trump’s foibles were the cost of business. His liability was that he was not their kind of Republican, at heart a laissez-faire free market libertarian. Trump hated international trade and opposed slashing entitlements, particularly social security and Medicare, which they have long tried to hobble and privatize. In 2018, he tweeted his contempt for the “Globalist Koch Brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles … I never sought their support because I don’t need their money or bad ideas. They love my Tax & Regulation Cuts, Judicial picks & more. I made them rich.” But his worst debit for them was that he lost. With DeSantis, they thought they could finally move on. Without Trump, they could wipe the slate clean, restore the past and return to the glory days when the Tea Party militants besieged town hall meetings to shriek against Obamacare. The undercurrent of the oligarchs’ romance with DeSantis is a strange nostalgia.Trump’s announcement on 18 March that he would be arrested and charged in New York three days later, born of a combination of panic and seizing an opportunity for grift, was not a deliberate strategic masterstroke, though it had that effect. In February, DeSantis led Trump by 45% to 41% in the Yahoo/YouGov poll. In the poll taken just after Trump said he would be arrested, Trump shot into the lead 47% to 39%. After he was indicted, he left DeSantis in the dust, 57% to 31%.Trump had already sent Murdoch’s and Koch’s presumptive candidate reeling. DeSantis has positioned himself as a cultural warrior but Trump smashed into his vulnerable flank. Before he adopted his gay bashing and race- and Jew-baiting persona, DeSantis was a cookie-cutter Tea Party congressman who voted several times to cut social security and Medicare. When Trump slammed him for his votes in early March as “a wheelchair over the cliff kind of guy”, DeSantis renounced his position, saying he would not “mess” with social security. Even before the indictment, Trump had Il Duce of the Sunshine State dancing like Ginger Rogers backwards in the Cuban heels of his cowboy boots. Trump has not relented. The day after he was indicted, his Make America Great Again political action committee broadcast an ad ripping DeSantis: “President Trump is on the side of the American people when it comes to social security and Medicare. Ron DeSantis sides with DC establishment insiders … The more you see about DeSantis, the more you see he doesn’t share our values. He’s not ready to be president.” On the right that Trump has made, national socialism beats laissez-faire.DeSantis reacted to Trump’s indictment by stating that he would not extradite him from Florida to New York, which nobody had asked him to do. His empty gesture as a two-bit secessionist would be in defiance of the constitution’s article IV extradition clause. Between the emotion and the response falls the hollow man. His rhetorical lawlessness in tribute to Trump only enhanced Trump’s pre-eminence over him.If anyone should have known better, it was Murdoch. His media properties now veer from slavishly outraged defense of the accused Trump on Fox News (“Witch-hunt!”) to trashing him in the New York Post (“Bat Hit Crazy!”) to puffing DeSantis in the Times of London, not widely read in Iowa or New Hampshire. The ruthless operator has been outplayed. Murdoch, who takes no prisoners, is Trump’s prisoner.Murdoch profitably buckled in for the Trump ride all the way to January 6. His decision not to jump off for the crash has now landed him in his biggest scandal, thrusting him in the middle of the Trump debacle with a January 6 trial of his own. After the 2020 election, following the lead of Trump and his attorneys, Fox News broadcast that Dominion Voting Systems had changed or deleted votes to help steal the election. The Fox chief executive, Suzanne Scott, wrote in an email shutting down the fact-checking of Trump falsehoods: “This has to stop now … this is bad business … the audience is furious and we are just feeding them material.” On 5 January, the eve of the attack on the Capitol, Murdoch discussed with Scott whether the network should report the truth: “The election is over and Joe Biden won.” He said those words “would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election stolen”. Scott told him that “privately they are all there” but “we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers”. On 12 January, Murdoch emailed the Fox board member Paul Ryan that he had heard that the Fox host Sean Hannity “has been privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers”.Fox was terrified of its own audience, the Trump base it had whipped up day after day, fearful it would defect to a more pro-Trump site, Newsmax or One America News Network. Instead of broadcasting the facts, its executives ordered conspiracy theories and lies be aired to satisfy voracious demand. Murdoch admitted in an email that Trump’s claims of voter fraud were “really crazy stuff”. But the show must go on. Dominion is now suing Fox News for $1.6bn for defamation.Much of the material in the discovery documents reads like dialogue from a bad French farce.“I hate him passionately,” wrote a histrionic Tucker Carlson about Trump. Murdoch told Scott about Giuliani’s and the others’ lies: “Terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear.” On 21 January 2021, Murdoch called Trump “increasingly mad”. Murdoch wondered, after serving as Trump’s chief enabler, “The real danger is what he might do as president.” Quel surprise!Of course, the specific falsehoods Fox recklessly and maliciously broadcast about Dominion were of a piece with those the network has been pumping out for years. That Murdoch is shocked, shocked is worthy of Capt Renault discovering there is gambling in the backroom of Rick’s Café in Casablanca. “Your winnings, sir.”The day after Trump was indicted, Judge Eric Davis ruled that the Dominion case would go to trial.“The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that [it is] CRYSTAL clear that none of the [Fox News] statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” he wrote. That trial will begin in mid-April and will probably last for weeks with major Fox personalities and Murdoch called to the stand. The very bad news is that in Delaware, where the trial will take place, unlike in New York, where the Trump trial will be held, television cameras are allowed in the courtroom. Undoubtedly, Fox will not be airing the humiliation of its stars and executives, but it is certain that CNN, desperate for ratings, and MSNBC will happily fill schedules with a Fox cavalcade.Fox’s propaganda was intimately linked to the January 6 coup, but could not be investigated by the January 6 committee. Murdoch’s desperate desire to separate himself from Trump will be impossible when Fox’s lies for Trump in the subversion of constitutional democracy are on full display. The Dominion trial will provide a necessary complement to the trials of Trump, more than an atmospheric touch of political theater, but bearing on politics moving forward. Murdoch, chained to his service to Trump, will not escape a judgment any more than Trump.The response of Fox’s audience to Fox in the dock will inevitably be to rally around Trump. Murdoch may be finished with Trump but Trump is not finished with him. Murdoch’s trial will contribute to the tightening of support for his object of contempt.“I am your retribution,” Trump promises. He rages against DeSantis and Fox as “Rinos” – Republicans In Name Only, which is to say Republicans. In the courtroom drama ahead, Trump will flail against his host of prosecutors, but his retribution during his battle for the nomination will be levied against the Republican party.
      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

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      Asa Hutchinson announces candidacy for Republican presidential nomination

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      The former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson announced on Sunday that he plans to run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, saying the US needs “leaders that appeal to the best of America, and not simply appeal to our worst instincts” while also calling for Donald Trump to drop out the race.Meanwhile, on the other side of the political aisle, the centrist Democrat and West Virginia senator Joe Manchin evaded a question during an interview on CNN about a potential run challenging his party’s Oval Office incumbent, Joe Biden, fueling speculation about his own ambitions.“This is one of the most unpredictable political environments that I have seen in my lifetime,” Hutchinson said on ABC, adding that he traveled the US for six months and listened to repeated demands for new leadership before declaring himself as a candidate.Hutchinson’s announcement follows an eclectic career including stints as a prosecutor, administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration and a member of Congress. He joins the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley as the only members of the Republican mainstream to challenge Trump, Biden’s presidential predecessor, for the party’s 2024 White House nomination. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has been Trump’s only serious rival in polling.Hutchinson spoke of his recent visit to Iowa, which has historically been the first state to vote in presidential primaries and holds a crucial spot in White House election cycles.The former governor of Arkansas had hinted at this candidacy for almost a year and said in May that a possible Trump campaign wouldn’t deter him from running.He said he doesn’t “align” with a lot of Trump’s politics and that the country needed to go in a “different direction”.In Sunday’s interview, he said that Trump is better off focusing on his criminal indictment in the Stormy Daniels hush money case, as well as other legal concerns, instead of taking another shot at the presidency.“If we’re looking at the presidency and the future of our country, then we don’t need that distraction,” said Hutchinson, who added that he would formally kick off his presidential campaign later this month.Meanwhile, on Sunday morning, CNN’s Dana Bash spoke with Manchin and informed him of Hutchinson’s announcement. The host then asked Manchin about his own plans for 2024 after the senator skirted a question about whether he would support re-electing Biden in 2024.“I’m worn out,” Manchin said. “The people are tired, sick and tired of the fighting and division that we have.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen Bash asked Manchin again about his plans for 2024, Manchin replied evasively, saying: “We have a movement. There’s a movement. There’s a movement going on that people want to bring the extremes back to the sensible and reasonable, responsible middle.”He then went on to say he would like to be at least “a part of trying to get a dialogue” that would bring people “to the middle”.“It’s about our country,” Manchin said. “Everyone’s worried about their own political future. I’m worried about the country.”A millionaire coal-trading company founder, Manchin at times has undermined the agendas of Biden and other Democrats, occasionally voting against the party’s interest in the Senate, where the party and the independents who caucus with it currently hold just a two-seat advantage. Notably, last year, Manchin torpedoed sweeping climate legislation staunchly opposed by Republicans before later helping ratify a less ambitious bill.The self-help author Marianne Williamson has so far been the only Democrat to announce an intent to challenge Biden for the party’s presidential nomination in 2024. Biden is widely expected to announce another White House run but as of Sunday had not officially done so. More