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      ‘Madman in a circular room screaming’: ex-aide’s verdict on Trump in book

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      Donald Trump’s defense secretary called him “a madman in a circular room screaming” and stayed away from the White House, a new book quotes a senior Trump aide as saying regarding the man now facing 88 criminal charges but set to be the Republican presidential nominee for a third successive election.“Anybody with sense – somebody like Mattis or Tillerson – they immediately shunned and stayed away from Trump,” Tom Bossert, formerly homeland security adviser to Trump, tells George Stephanopoulos in the ABC News anchor’s new book, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis.“I mean, you couldn’t get Mattis into the White House,” Bossert says. “His view was, ‘That’s a madman in a circular room screaming. And the less time I spend in there, the more time I can just go about my business.’”Stephanopoulos’s book is a survey of how presidents have used the White House Situation Room, “the epicentre of crisis management for presidents for more than six decades”. Co-written with Lisa Dickey, a prolific ghostwriter who has also worked with the first lady, Jill Biden, and the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, the book will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.James Mattis, a retired US Marine Corps general, was Trump’s first defense secretary. Rex Tillerson, an oil industry executive, was Trump’s first secretary of state. Both were among so-called “adults in the room” who famously sought to contain Trump.Mattis’s frustrations and ultimate opposition to Trump’s re-election are widely known. Tillerson was reported to have called Trump a “fucking moron”. Trump fired him by tweet.Bossert worked in the Trump White House for 15 months, from the inauguration in 2017 to his resignation in April 2018. He is now an analyst for ABC News. He and other former aides tell Stephanopoulos Trump avoided Situation Room briefings – which his predecessor, Barack Obama, consumed – because, in Bossert’s words, “He didn’t like the idea that he had to go into it. He wanted everybody to come to him.”Bossert also says Trump had Situation Room aides produce “books of chyron prints” – a way to boil down cable news to the messages displayed at the bottom of screens. Stephanopoulos and Hickey call this “surely one of the most prosaic tasks ever required of the highly trained intelligence officers serving in the White House”.Though Bossert’s White House tasks including advising the president on cyber security, in August 2017 it was revealed that he gave his personal email address to a British prankster pretending to be Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and chief adviser.Still, Bossert was a strong advocate of cracking down on leaks and leakers. In March 2017, he made headlines by calling people who leaked government secrets “enemies to our state”, adding: “They need to be caught, punished, and treated as such.”Throughout his presidency, Trump fumed about leaks, both of sensitive information and regarding his chaotic White House.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn summer 2020, as protesters for racial justice came close to White House grounds and Trump was reported to have been hurried to a protective bunker, Trump reportedly called those who leaked the story treasonous and said they should be executed.Trump was said to have become “obsessed” with finding leakers. But Trump has long been known to be a prolific leaker himself.Bossert tells Stephanopoulos: “I caught him doing it. I was walking out of the room, and he picks up the phone before I’m out of earshot and starts talking to a reporter about what just happened. And I turned around and pointed right at him. ‘Who in the hell are you talking to?’”Trump, the authors say, “essentially shrugged, seemingly unbothered”.“He does it, so he assumed everybody was that way,” Bossert says. “His paranoia was in part because he assumes everyone else acts like he acts.” More

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      Stormy Daniels’s testimony paints a dark picture of Trump’s view of sex and power | Moira Donegan

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      He seems to have understood it as a business deal. That’s what Stormy Daniels – the former porn star whose account of a sexual encounter with Donald Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in 2006 is at the center of his criminal hush-money trial – told Anderson Cooper in 2018. When Trump summoned Daniels to his hotel room in Lake Tahoe, he suggested that she might come on his television show, Celebrity Apprentice. Then he demanded sex.In the law this is called quid pro quo – this for that – an arrangement in which work is offered in exchange for sex. It’s illegal: sex cannot be a condition of employment, or a prerequisite for being considered for a job, under laws that are designed to punish sexual harassment and make workplaces accessible and tolerable for women. But Trump has long had a casual relationship to the law.Daniels has described the sex that followed as a grim affair, performed out of a begrudging sense of obligation. “I realized exactly what I’d gotten myself into,” she told Cooper of coming out of the bathroom to find Trump lying on his bed, in his underwear. “And I was like, ‘Ugh, here we go.’ And I just felt like maybe – it was sort of – I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone’s room alone. And I just heard the voice in my head, ‘Well, you put yourself in a bad situation and bad things happen, so you deserve this.’”On the stand at Trump’s criminal hush-money trial in New York on Tuesday, she described the same moment, saying, “The room spun in slow motion. I thought, ‘Oh, my God, what did I misread to get here?’” Trump told her that she reminded him of his daughter. He did not use a condom.For a while after that, Trump kept calling Daniels, asking to see her again. When he called, he would again mention the prospect of her appearing on The Apprentice. They met one more time, a year later, in a hotel room where Trump was watching Shark Week. He tried to initiate sex again, and Daniels refused. Later, she got a call informing her that she would not be cast on his show.The hush-money trial that has been proceeding chaotically in New York over the past four weeks is broadly considered to be the weakest of the four criminal cases proceeding against Trump – and, perhaps not incidentally, it is also the only one that will be tried before he again stands for election this November. Before Tuesday, the testimonies were dense with proceduralism, talking about attorney accounting practices and editorial meetings at tabloids. This was all meant to explain to the jury – and to the voters following along at home – the nature of Trump’s “catch-and-kill” scheme with the National Enquirer, an arrangement in which the tabloid purchased the rights to unflattering stories about Trump – like Daniels’s – and then hid them from public view, silencing the relevant parties with NDAs.But the focus on technicalities can obscure the gendered nature of the arrangement: at the center of the allegations is an elaborate, multi-party scheme to prevent women from speaking in public about their experiences with Trump – to stop what they know from becoming what the voters know, and to keep their stories of Trump’s conduct toward them hidden.An anxiety about women’s speech – about what they might say about men, and how their words might affront or embarrass – animates much of our popular discourses around sexual misconduct, due process and the boundaries of acceptable sexual behavior. But it is rare that the mechanisms used to silence women are made so visible, or rendered so explicit in their relation to electoral politics. Trump’s fixers, after all, had reason to be especially worried about the stories of women like Stormy Daniels. At the time that the deal at issue in the case was finalized, in October of 2016, the Access Hollywood tape had been released, in which Trump bragged about grabbing women by their genitals. More than two dozen women have since accused him of sexual misconduct; there are likely others that we don’t know about.Daniels has said repeatedly that she did not refuse the sex with Trump, and that she does not consider herself a victim. She has also said that the encounter was marked by what on Tuesday she called a “power imbalance”, and that she did not feel she had full freedom to decline it. She has always described the encounter as distasteful and unwanted; she has spoken of being afraid of Trump in the aftermath.Conversations over sexual misconduct frequently become conversations over semantics, in which debates about what counts as rape or assault or harassment stand in for the unasked question about what is a decent, respectful and humane way to treat women. But we need not litigate a definition of Daniels’s encounter, or place it into a different category than she does, to say that what Trump did to her in that encounter was marked by a profound sense of sexual entitlement, and by false promises and gestures toward bribery that make it clear he knew that Daniels did not desire him. That such encounters are usually not called rape does not mean that they do not index a gendered form of exploitation, the leveraging of a man’s money and position for access to an unwilling woman’s body.What followed, too, was a gendered form of exploitation: a conspiracy to secure her silence. Trump’s attorneys will argue that paying a woman in order to get her to sign an NDA is not illegal; even the prosecution is arguing that the criminality is not in seeking Daniels’s silence, but in trying to cover up the arrangement afterward.But legality is not the only standard of morality, and it should disturb us all, as believers in free expression, open inquiry and an informed public, that a group of powerful people went to such extensive and allegedly felonious lengths to prevent women from telling the truth about what men did to them. Daniels is the first woman to take the stand in the hush-money trial. That’s partly because the people who arranged the catch and kill scheme were all men.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Trump’s strategy to delay cases before the election is working

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      Despite some dismal days spent in the courtroom, Donald Trump earned two significant legal victories this week with separate decisions that make it all but certain two of the pending criminal trials against him will take place after the 2024 election.As had been expected for months, Judge Aileen Cannon on Tuesday scrapped a 20 May trial date that had been set in south Florida over the former president’s handling of classified documents. The delay was almost entirely the doing of Cannon, a Trump appointee, who allowed far-fetched legal arguments into the case and let preliminary legal matters pile up on her docket to the point where a May trial was not a possibility.On Thursday, the Georgia court of appeals announced it would hear a request from Trump to consider whether Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, should be removed from the election interference case against him because of a relationship with another prosecutor. The decision means both that Trump will continue to undermine Willis’s credibility and draw out the case. “There will be no trial until 2025,” tweeted Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University who has been closely following the case.The third pending case against Trump, a federal election interference case in Washington, also appears unlikely to go to trial before the election. The US supreme court heard oral arguments on whether Trump has immunity from prosecution last month and seemed unlikely to resolve it quickly enough to allow the case to move forward ahead of the election.The decisions mean that voters will not get a chance to see Trump held accountable for possible criminal conduct during his last term in office before they decide whether to give him another term in office. (Trump is currently in the middle of a criminal trial in Manhattan that centers around allegations he falsified business records to cover up hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, but it happened before his presidency, during the 2016 campaign.)The developments vindicate a pillar of Trump’s legal strategy. Facing four separate criminal cases, his lawyers have sought to use every opportunity they can to delay the cases, hoping that he wins the election in November. Were he to return to the White House, he would make the two federal cases against him go away (he has said he would appoint an attorney general who would fire Jack Smith, the justice department’s special prosecutor). It’s unclear if Fani Willis, the Fulton county DA, could proceed with a criminal case against a sitting president.“In all likelihood, Trump’s election would pause the proceedings against him in Georgia. There is a large consensus among legal academics that a sitting president cannot be tried for crimes. That, however, is an untested constitutional theory, which Fani Willis will probably challenge,” Kreis said. “If I had to hedge a bet, should Trump win in November, his Fulton county co-defendants will be tried mid-2025 and Trump would stand trial alone after his second term ends.”While Trump may have successfully secured delays in three of the cases against him, prosecutors in Manhattan continued to move ahead this week in laying out evidence for why he should be found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records. Testimony from key accounting employees at the Trump Organization helped connect Trump to the monies that were paid out to Michael Cohen. Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who alleges she had an affair with Trump in 2006, also testified in detail about the incident, irritating Trump, and bringing one of the most embarrassing episodes back to the center of the public discourse.Trump’s lawyers objected to the testimony and requested a mistrial, saying the lurid details Daniels disclosed had prejudiced jurors against defendants. Judge Juan Merchan rejected that request, but still conceded jurors had heard information they should not have.While Trump is likely to use the episode in any potential appeal, experts doubted whether he would succeed.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Skirmishes like this happen all the time, and defense attorneys call for mistrials in many, if not most, criminal trials. I don’t think this was even close to cause for a mistrial and don’t think it would end up being a major issue on appeal,” said Rebecca Roiphe, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office who now teaches at New York Law School.“The details of the sexual encounter are relevant because they go to why Trump would want to suppress her story. The judge tried to limit any prejudicial effect by asking the witness to be less colorful in her description. She didn’t abide by this until warned a few times, but this hardly seems like a cause for concern on appeal.” More

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      Mockery, low tactics, sexist tropes: gloriously, Stormy Daniels is repaying Donald Trump in kind

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      The spectacle of Stormy Daniels on the witness stand in a Manhattan courtroom this week sent one back to the image of Trump’s last female antagonist, E Jean Carroll, the advice columnist who famously sued Trump for sexually assaulting her, standing victorious outside another courtroom in January. Daniels, unlike Carroll, is not the plaintiff in this case. Nonetheless, Trump’s fortunes rest, to a large degree, on her credibility, a 45-year-old former porn star who the New York Times described this week as “a complicated and imperfect witness”. If Carroll – elegant, measured, articulate – was the perfect victim, Daniels is practically the archetype of the woman court systems tend to revile. And yet, on the strength of her opening testimony, she strikes me as Trump’s very worst nightmare.This impression is extrajudicial. Daniels, who has already been rebuked by the judge for straying off topic, may prove too wayward a witness to achieve what Carroll did: the civil case equivalent of a guilty verdict against a man almost supernaturally able to avoid them. If we are looking beyond verdicts to the public image, however, Daniels is in some ways by far the more menacing foe for Trump. You couldn’t make up the details of her testimony this week, which sent court reporters scrambling to find sober ways to present her account of spanking Trump with a rolled up magazine and insisting on having sex with her without a condom. This is a woman willing to meet Trump at his preferred site of conflict – public humiliation – and on the evidence so far, he isn’t weathering it well.Last year, during the Carroll hearing, the former president defaulted to the standard tittering, smirking, mocking performance he reserves for critical women – be they accusing him of rape or running against him for president. Accounts from the courtroom this week suggest this persona was no match for Daniels. The Associated Press reported that Trump “squirmed and scowled” during Daniels’ testimony. The Washington Post recorded him in the act of “angry, profane muttering”, which won Trump his own rebuke from the judge. “I understand your client is upset but he is cursing audibly,” said Judge Merchan to Trump’s lawyers. Upset! Go Stormy.As with so many episodes involving Trump, this is a spectacular reversal of cultural norms. Women like Daniels tend not to prosper in court, where unruliness that might be considered rakish in a man is more likely to be read in women as a byword for trash. None of that quite applies here. One has always understood about Daniels that, at some deep level, she has Trump’s number and knows how to hit him where it hurts. If the narrative he constructed around the Carroll accusation was the classic too-ugly-to-rape defence, this won’t work with Daniels – 30 years his junior and a confident sexual operator who appears hellbent on depicting Trump as a pathetic little man. While they were having sex, she said on Tuesday, she recalled, “trying to think of anything other than what was happening”.The lingering question, apart from what the magazine she allegedly spanked him with was (was it the Economist? Or, as all British people over a certain age immediately thought, a Woman’s Weekly? Was it, in a pleasing dramatic irony, a copy of the Enquirer?), is how will this land with his supporters? Trump has long capitalised on the idea that he is the kind of “pussy-grabbing” sexual aggressor who might enjoy sex with a porn star. Until now, we have never heard from the other side – and Daniels’ description of him as a man allegedly more interested in quizzing her on STD testing and whether sex workers are unionised, rather than actually having sex, replaces his swaggering self-image with a fussy, emasculated alternative. If Trump destroys women by reducing them to sexist tropes, Daniels has come back at him with exactly the same.This manoeuvre, as Trump’s lawyers pointed out while asking for a mistrial (it was denied), has nothing to do with the facts of the case, which hinges on whether or not Trump paid Daniels $130,000 (£104,000) in hush money in the run up to the 2016 election, and then covered it up by falsifying business records. Trump and his team know what Daniels is doing – which is flatly, salaciously and in incredible detail – making an absolute mockery of him in front of the world. It is, they have argued, unfair. It is below the belt. It is unmistakably, compellingly, and as it may turn out, successfully, an approach borrowed from Trump’s own playbook.
      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More

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      House quashes Marjorie Taylor Greene motion to oust speaker Mike Johnson

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      The House easily quashed Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resolution to oust the Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, on Wednesday, as members of both parties came together in a rare moment of bipartisanship to keep the chamber open for business.The vote on the motion to table Greene’s resolution was 359 to 43, as 196 Republicans and 163 Democrats supported killing the proposal.Greene took to the House floor on Wednesday evening to announce her plans, prompting boos from fellow Republicans present in the chamber. Her request triggered a countdown clock, as House rules stipulated that members had to vote on the matter within two legislative days. House Republicans chose to take up the matter immediately, as the resolution was widely expected to fail.House Democratic leaders previously indicated that they would vote to kill Greene’s resolution, and the vast majority of their caucus took the same position on Wednesday. However, 32 Democrats and 11 Republicans opposed the motion to table the resolution, and seven members voted “present”.Speaking to reporters after the vote, Johnson thanked his colleagues for helping him to hold on to a post he has held for six and a half months.“I want to say that I appreciate the show of confidence from my colleagues to defeat this misguided effort. That is certainly what it was,” Johnson said. “As I’ve said from the beginning and I’ve made clear here every day, I intend to do my job. I intend to do what I believe to be the right thing, which is what I was elected to do, and I’ll let the chips fall where they may. In my view, that is leadership.”Greene’s maneuver appeared to catch many Republicans off guard, after the hard-right congresswoman spent much of the past few days meeting with Johnson to address her concerns about his leadership. She has repeatedly criticized Johnson for passing significant bills, including a government funding proposal and a foreign aid package, by relying on Democratic support.Greene had said she would force a vote on the motion to vacate this week, but she appeared to back away from that commitment on Tuesday.“We’ll see. It’s up to Mike Johnson,” Greene told reporters when asked if she still planned to demand the vote. “Obviously, you can’t make things happen instantly, and we all are aware and understanding of that. So now the ball is in his court, and he’s supposed to be reaching out to us – hopefully soon.”Donald Trump, who has voiced support for Johnson in recent weeks, reportedly called Greene over the weekend, but she would not disclose details about the call to reporters.“I have to tell you, I love President Trump. My conversations with him are fantastic,” Greene said. “And again, I’m not going to go into details. You want to know why? I’m not insecure about that.”Even though her motion to vacate overwhelmingly failed, Greene and her allies already appear poised to turn the issue into a litmus test for fellow Republican members. Congressman Thomas Massie, a co-sponsor of Greene’s resolution, shared a picture on X of the 11 Republicans who voted against the motion to table.“It’s a new paradigm in Congress,” Massie said. “[Former Democratic speaker] Nancy Pelosi, and most [Republicans] voted to keep Uniparty Speaker Mike Johnson. These are the eleven, including myself, who voted NOT to save him.”View image in fullscreenThe Republicans who rallied around Johnson returned the fire by accusing Greene and her allies of promoting chaos in the House. The episode came less than a year after the ouster of former Republican speaker Kevin McCarthy, which brought the chamber to a standstill for weeks until Johnson’s election.Congressman Mike Lawler, who faces a tough reelection campaign in New York this November, told reporters on Wednesday: “This type of tantrum is absolutely unacceptable, and it does nothing to further the cause of the conservative movement. The only people who have stymied our ability to govern are the very people that have pulled these types of stunts throughout the course of this Congress to undermine the House Republican majority.”Congressman Sean Casten, an Illinois Democrat, offered a more concise and cutting assessment. Writing on X, he said of Greene: “She is so, so dumb. And yet she keeps talking.” More

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      Pete McCloskey, Republican who tried to unseat Richard Nixon, dies aged 96

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      Pete McCloskey, a pro-environment, anti-war California Republican who co-wrote the Endangered Species Act and co-founded Earth Day, has died. He was 96.A fourth-generation Republican “in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt”, he often said, McCloskey represented the 12th congressional district for 15 years, running for president against an incumbent Richard Nixon in 1972.He battled party leaders while serving seven terms in Congress and went on to publicly disavow the GOP in his later years.Years after leaving Washington, McCloskey made one last bid for elective office in 2006 when he challenged Richard Pombo of northern California’s 11th district in a primary race that McCloskey described as “a battle for the soul of the Republican party”.After losing to Pombo, who had spent most of his tenure in Washington attempting to undo the Endangered Species Act, he threw his support behind Democrat Jerry McNerney, the eventual winner.“It was foolish to run against him [Pombo], but we didn’t have anybody else to do it, and I could not stand what a––– they’d become,” the frank-talking former Marine colonel said of the modern GOP in a 2008 interview with the Associated Press.McCloskey cited disillusionment from influence peddling and ethics scandals under the George W Bush administration as reasons why he switched parties in 2007 at the age of 79.“A pox on them and their values,” he wrote in an open letter explaining the switch to his supporters.Born in Loma Linda, California, on 29 September 1927as Paul Norton McCloskey Jr, he graduated from South Pasadena high school, where the second baseman made the school’s baseball hall of fame, although he self-deprecatingly called himself “perhaps the worst player on the baseball team”.He earned a law degree from Stanford University and founded an environmental law firm in Palo Alto before making the move to public office. In 1967, he defeated fellow Republican Shirley Temple Black and Democrat Roy Archibald in a special election for the San Mateo county congressional seat.The left-leaning McCloskey had a thundering presence in Washington, attempting to get onto the floor of the 1972 Republican national convention during his bid to unseat then president Nixon on an anti-Vietnam War platform. He ultimately was blocked by a rule written by his friend and law school debate partner, John Ehrlichman, that said a candidate could not get to the floor with fewer than 25 delegates. McCloskey had one.Still, McCloskey loved to say he finished second.He would later visit Ehrlichman in prison, where Nixon’s former counsel served 1.5 years for conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice in the Watergate break-in that led to the president’s resignation.While in office, McCloskey also was known for befriending Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and criticized Israeli influence on US politics. The congressman was the first to demand Nixon’s impeachment, and the first to demand a repeal of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that allowed the Vietnam war.But his enduring legacy is the Endangered Species Act, which protects species designated as endangered or threatened and conserves the ecosystems on which they depend. McCloskey co-wrote the legislation in 1973, after a campaign by young people empowered by Earth Day activities successfully unseated seven of 12 Congress members known as “the Dirty Dozen” for their anti-environment votes.“On that day, the world changed,” McCloskey recalled in 2008. “Suddenly, everybody was an environmentalist. My Republican colleagues started asking me for copies of old speeches I had given on water and air quality.”After 15 years in the House, he lost his run for a Senate seat to Republican Pete Wilson, who went on to be California’s governor. He moved back to rural Yolo county, relishing the life of a farmer and part-time attorney.“You know, if people call you ‘congressman’ all the time, you’ll end up thinking you’re smarter than you are,” he said.McCloskey is survived by his wife, Helen – his longtime press secretary whom he married in 1978 – and four children by his first wife: Nancy, Peter, John and Kathleen. More

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      Peta unveils Kristi Noem ‘ghoulish monster’ Halloween costume

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      Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor and Republican vice-presidential hopeful, is “scarier than any horror movie villain”, the animal rights pressure group Peta said as it unveiled a Halloween costume inspired by Noem’s stunning campaign-book admission that she once shot an “untrainable” 14-month-old dog called Cricket.“Anyone cruel enough to blow a rambunctious puppy’s brains out instead of attempting to train her or find her a more responsible guardian is scarier than any horror-movie villain,” said Ingrid Newkirk, president of Peta.“With Peta Kristi Noem costume, dog lovers everywhere can strike terror in their friends as the most ghoulish monster at their Halloween party.”Halloween is more than five months away but Peta said it was taking orders for the costume, which costs $79.99 and includes “a mask of Noem’s face with devil horns and a camo hat imprinted with ‘Noem: Puppy Killer’, a fake gun, and the pièce de résistance: a stuffed dog to ‘bite’ the neck of the wearer, adorned with a bandanna that reads, ‘Take a Bite out of Cruelty.’”Noem describes killing Cricket – and an unnamed goat she deemed too aggressive – in her book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward.The Guardian first reported the remarkable tale of gravel-pit slaughter, thereby lighting the match on a political explosion widely held to have wrecked any chance Noem had of being named running mate to Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president.Noem has repeatedly defended her decision to kill Cricket the dog and the unnamed goat, as representative of her willingness to do unpleasant things in farm life and thus in politics.She has also rebuffed questions about what appears, later in the book, to be a threat to kill Commander, Joe Biden’s dog which was sent away from the White House after more than 20 biting incidents.This week, Politico reported that editors and advisers stopped Noem including the story in a previous book, because they insisted it would damage her image.Peta said it “urges everyone to consider whether they have the time, patience, and other resources necessary to socialise and train a dog before adding one to the family.“Humane dog training uses only positive reinforcement – never fear, intimidation, or painful methods such as shock collars, which Noem admits to having used on Cricket prior to killing her.” More

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      Trump has yet to decide his VP pick – and it’s turning into a pageant of its own

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      Hello there, and welcome to the Guardian’s brand new US election newsletter. I hope you’re having a nice week.It’s less than six months until election day, and Donald Trump, when he’s not in court or looking at racing cars, is spending time weighing his vice-presidential pick. It’s becoming quite the spectacle.But first, some of the happenings in US politics.Here’s what you need to know …1. I don’t feel so goodDonald Trump’s trial over hush-money payments to an adult film star saw Stormy Daniels recall her sexual encounter with the president in front of a presumably nauseous Manhattan courtroom. Will this trial – and the three others he faces – torpedo Trump’s election chances? One poll this week found that it will depend on whether he is convicted. About 80% of Trump’s supporters would definitely stick with him if he becomes a felon, while 16% would “reconsider” their support. Just 4% say they would definitely ditch him.2. Biden gives antisemitism speechIn a speech on Tuesday at a Holocaust remembrance event, Joe Biden condemned what he called the “ferocious surge of antisemitism in America and around the world”, amid widespread student protests over American support for Israel’s war on Gaza. Thousands of students have been arrested around the US, during a frequently militaristic police response. Republicans have tried to use the unrest to paint Biden as weak and sow division among Democratic voters.3. TikTok hits back after US government crackdownTikTok and its parent company are suing the US government after Biden signed bipartisan legislation which could potentially ban the app from the US if it is not sold to another owner. It comes as Russian state-affiliated accounts have used TikTok to draw attention to Biden’s age and immigration policies. Critics have said ByteDance, TikTok’s China-based parent company, could also collect sensitive information about Americans. But others – including TikTok – say the US is unfairly singling out the social media platform, potentially hurting free speech and independent content makers. The debacle is fraught in an election year when many young people get news from TikTok, and Biden himself has a campaign account.Eeny, meeny, miny, moeView image in fullscreenThe election is in November, and Donald Trump has yet to decide on his vice-presidential candidate. That’s not unusual – assuming he’s not in prison by then, he’s got plenty of time – but what is kind of new is the very public auditioning for the role.Trump summoned several of the candidates to Mar-a-Lago over the weekend, where he forced them to parade around on stage, in what sounds like a version of the Miss Universe competition he used to haunt.But the contenders, who range from long-time sycophants to more recent converts, have been doing some parading of their own.Marco Rubio, the Florida senator who ran for president against Trump in 2016 (Trump dubbed him “Little Marco”, Rubio suggested Trump had a small penis, but the two have since made up) has been near-ever present on TV in recent weeks, as has Elise Stefanik, a New York congresswoman who was once seen as a sober legislator, but has since evolved into a Trump disciple.Doug Burgum – recently dubbed “less interesting than a wooden post” – and Tim Scott, who both ran against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination this year, have also been showing up on TV shows to defend Trump’s legal entanglements and threats to undermine the election.There’s also JD Vance, a big-faced beardy man who once believed Trump to be an “idiot” but has since changed his mind, and Byron Donalds, who with Scott is one of the five Black Republicans in Congress.One thing appears to be certain: it will not be Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor who has dominated headlines after admitting that she shot and killed her dog in a gravel pit.Will the identity of Trump’s running mate really make a difference?In 2016, Trump was viewed with suspicion by some evangelical voters – voters he needed to come out in droves for him to defeat Hillary Clinton. That’s why he chose Mike Pence, a devout Christian who just released a book that is literally called So Help Me God.But religious Republicans have pretty much made their peace with Trump since then – largely because the supreme court he appointed overturned the federal right to abortion.Reports indicate that what Trump is really looking for is an uber-loyal attack dog, someone who can tear into Trump’s critics on air, before coming back to the White House to quietly snuggle at his feet.It would be easy to see a vice-president as inconsequential. But since the US became a thing, nine vice-presidents have stepped into the top job: eight times because the sitting president died, and once because the president – Richard Nixon – resigned. Without wanting to be too macabre, Donald Trump is quite old, and is not known as a healthy eater. (In the name of Journalism I once lived like Trump for a week. I genuinely think it took years off my life.)Anyway: some of these people might fancy their chances of ascending to the throne.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn the roadView image in fullscreenA dispatch from our Washington bureau chief, David Smith:Is it a bird? Is it a plane? OK, it’s a plane, with “TRUMP” written in giant gold letters on the side. I watched the Boeing 757 dubbed “Trump Force One” fly into Freeland, Michigan, last week, accompanied by the booming soundtrack of Tom Cruise’s Top Gun.It reminded me that the Trump Show has always been about reality versus fantasy. Reality for Trump right now is hour after hour sitting in a cold, dingy New York courtroom. Fantasy is stepping out of his private jet into afternoon sunshine and the warm glow of a campaign rally where the crowd chants his name.The demographics were telling: overwhelmingly white and dominated by retirees. Every Trump supporter I interviewed is convinced that the trial in New York is a witch-hunt designed to hobble his election chances. When I asked about his dictatorial ambitions, they brushed the question aside and preferred the word “leader”.Who had the worst week?View image in fullscreenOn Monday Judge Juan Merchan, handling Trump’s hush-money payments trial, said he “will have to consider a jail sanction” if Trump doesn’t stop publicly criticizing witnesses and the jury. But if Monday was bad for Trump, Tuesday was worse.“I had my clothes and my shoes off, I believe my bra, however, was still on. We were in the missionary position …” so went the testimony of Stormy Daniels, who was allegedly paid $130,000 to remain quiet about the claimed encounter, which she says took place in 2006, a year after Trump married his wife Melania. (Trump denies having sex with Daniels.)Daniels said that Trump told her she reminded him of Ivanka Trump, his daughter, before the two became intimate. Asked by the prosecution whether the encounter with Trump was “brief”, Daniels said: “Yes.”‘It’s my favorite book’View image in fullscreenI spent no short amount of time last week reading the God Bless the USA Bible, a special version of the holy text Trump is hawking online. If you enjoy the Bible, but feel like it is missing images of American flags and bald eagles, then this is the book for you.If, however, you want a Bible without sticky pages, which hasn’t been dubbed “blasphemous”, and which doesn’t cost $60, then maybe give it a pass.Read the full story here.Elsewhere in US politicsView image in fullscreen Milwaukee is replacing its top election official, Sam Levine and Alice Herman write, which means “there will be a new head of elections in one of the most critical cities in a key battleground state”. Biden won Wisconsin by just 20,000 votes in 2020. Bernie Sanders won more than 13m votes in the 2016 presidential primary, as his brand of democratic socialism inspired young people across the country. He didn’t win, of course, but Martin Pengelly reports that Sanders plans to run for re-election to the Senate. More