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      Trump tells Jewish donors they would be ‘abandoned’ if Harris is elected

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      Donald Trump told Jewish donors on Thursday that they would be “abandoned” if Kamala Harris becomes president.In his speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, the Republican presidential candidate also said he would ban refugee resettlement from “terror-infested” areas such as Gaza and arrest “pro-Hamas thugs” who engage in vandalism, an apparent reference to the college student protesters.While Trump sketched out few concrete Middle Eastern policy proposals for a second term, he painted a potential Harris presidency in cataclysmic terms for Israel.“You’re going to be abandoned if she becomes president. And I think you need to explain that to your people … You’re not going to have an Israel if she becomes president,” Trump said without providing evidence for such a claim.Under both Trump and Joe Biden, similar numbers of Palestinians were admitted to the US as refugees. From fiscal year 2017 to 2020, the US accepted 114 Palestinian refugees, according to US state department data, compared with 124 Palestinian refugees from fiscal year 2021 to 31 July of this year.Trump also said US universities would lose accreditation and federal support over what he described as “antisemitic propaganda” if he is elected to the White House.“Colleges will and must end the antisemitic propaganda or they will lose their accreditation and federal support,” Trump said, speaking remotely to a crowd of more than 1,000 donors.Protests roiled college campuses in spring, with students opposing Israel’s military offensive in Gaza and demanding institutions stop doing business with companies backing Israel.Republicans have said the protests show some Democrats are antisemites who support chaos. Protest groups say authorities have unfairly labeled their criticism of Israel’s policies as antisemitic.The Association of American Universities, which says it represents about 70 leading US universities, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.In the United States, the federal government does not directly accredit universities but has a role in overseeing the mostly private organizations that give colleges accreditation.The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Trump’s speech.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Democratic presidential candidate has hewed closely to the president’s strong support of Israel and rejected calls from some in the Democratic party that Washington should rethink sending weapons to Israel because of the heavy Palestinian death toll in Gaza.She has, however, called for a ceasefire in Gaza, calling the situation there “devastating”.Health authorities in Gaza say more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli assault on the enclave since the 7 October 2023 attacks led by Hamas.Approximately 1,200 Israelis were killed in the surprise attack and about 250 were taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies.The subsequent assault on Gaza has displaced nearly its entire 2.3 million population, caused a hunger crisis and led to genocide allegations at the world court that Israel denies. More

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      Hunter Biden pleads guilty in tax case after day of back and forth

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      Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to tax charges in federal court in Los Angeles on Thursday, after a day of legal wrangling and in a dramatic move that will avoid a potentially embarrassing trial for Joe Biden’s son.Biden, 54, pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges on a day of courtroom twists and turns, after prosecutors earlier objected to his surprise intention to enter an “Alford” plea, an unusual legal maneuver where a defendant pleads guilty but does not acknowledge wrongdoing. Following prosecutors’ objections, lawyers said Biden was ready to change course and enter an “open” plea, where a defendant pleads guilty to the charges and leaves his sentencing fate in the hands of the judge.In court on Thursday afternoon, Abbe Lowell, Biden’s attorney, told Judge Mark Scarsi: “Mr Biden will agree that the elements of each offense have been satisfied.”Biden quickly responded “guilty” as the judge read out each of the nine counts. The charges carry up to 17 years in prison, but federal sentencing guidelines are likely to call for a much shorter sentence.A sentencing hearing has been set for 16 December.The president’s only surviving son had previously pleaded not guilty. The surprise back-and-forth unfolded on Thursday morning as Biden entered a Los Angeles courthouse for the start of his tax-avoidance trial.After learning of Biden’s earlier plan to enter an Alford plea, US justice department prosecutors said that would not be acceptable. Alford pleas are usually negotiated in advance, because prosecutors must get high-level approval before agreeing to them.“It’s not clear to us what they are trying to do,” one prosecutor told Scarsi, the judge overseeing the case.“[Hunter Biden] is not entitled to plead guilty on special terms that apply only to him,” said prosecutor Leo Wise. “Hunter Biden is not innocent. Hunter Biden is guilty.”A trial, in the run-up to the November presidential election, could air embarrassing details of the younger Biden’s life. A defense attorney for Biden, Abbe Lowell, told the judge that the evidence against his client is “overwhelming” and that he wanted to resolve the case.The son of the president stands accused of failing to pay his taxes on time from 2016 to 2019, as well as two felony counts of filing a false return and an additional felony count of tax evasion.Hunter Biden walked into the courtroom for jury selection on Thursday morning holding hands with his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, and flanked by Secret Service agents. Initially, he pleaded not guilty to the charges related to his taxes from 2016 to 2019 and his attorneys had indicated they would argue he did not act “willfully”, or with the intention to break the law, in part because of his well-documented struggles with alcohol and drug addiction.A guilty plea will head off a weeks-long trial that would mark the second time in three months that the younger Biden sits in a federal courtroom as a jury of his peers is assembled to assess whether he is guilty of a slew of criminal charges.Hunter Biden was found guilty in Delaware on three felony counts relating to his purchase of a handgun in 2018 because he wrote on his gun-purchase form, falsely, that he was not a user of illicit drugs. The new trial takes place in the city where Biden has lived for years and where, according to the prosecution, he spent extensively on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes”.The most serious charges relate to his 2018 return on which, according to the prosecution, he sought to claim his children’s college tuition fees and more than $27,000 in online pornography as business expenses.The tax charges and the gun charges carry maximum sentences of more than 20 years in prison, although legal experts say that, as a first-time offender, Biden is likely to be punished far less harshly even if he were to be found guilty a second time.It has been a whirlwind of a summer for Joe Biden’s son, one in which he was convicted of felonies, rushed to Washington as pressure mounted on his father not to run for re-election, raised eyebrows by dropping into White House meetings – and, according to one report, acting as his father’s “gatekeeper” – then appeared on stage at the Democratic national convention to bask in his father’s reflected glory.Now that Joe Biden has abandoned his re-election ambitions and thrown his support behind his vice-president, Kamala Harris, the political stakes of Hunter Biden’s latest trial will be lower. Still, his legal troubles will take some of the sting out of Donald Trump’s constant complaints that he is the target of a political witch-hunt and that the president has “weaponized” the justice system against him.After Hunter Biden’s June conviction, Joe and Jill Biden issued a statement saying they would respect the judicial process and not consider a pardon for their son. The first lady attended court in Delaware most days, but it is not clear whether she would do the same in California. More

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      Kamala Harris will win election, predicts leading historian Allan Lichtman

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      Allan Lichtman, the historian dubbed the “Nostradamus” of US presidential elections, has predicted that Kamala Harris will win the White House in November’s poll.Having previously warned the Democrats of the dangers of removing Joe Biden from the ticket, Lichtman nevertheless forecast that the vice-president, who became the party’s nominee after the president withdrew in July, would be elected in a video for the New York Times.He said Harris was on course to beat Donald Trump even though the Democrats had effectively surrendered the valuable key of presidential incumbency, one of 13 he used to determine the likely outcome.“Kamala Harris will be the next president of the United States – at least that’s my prediction for the outcome of this race,” Lichtman, 77, says at the conclusion of the quirky seven-minute video, which features him running in a track athlete’s garb, against other elderly competitors in a qualifying race for the 2025 national senior Olympics.“But the outcome is up to you. So get out and vote.”Lichtman’s predictions are based on a set of true/false propositions, and take no account of polling trends.He previously vociferously argued against replacing Biden as Democratic nominee after his disastrous debate performance against the former president in June and dismissed the validity of opinion polls indicating it had damaged Biden’s ability to win the race.View image in fullscreenNevertheless, of 13 keys, he found eight favoured Harris – who he said gained from the absence of a strong third party candidate following the demise of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s independent campaign, positive short- and long-term economic indicators, major legislative achievements enacted by the Biden administration, and absence of social unrest or scandal attached to the White House. She was also favoured in not having had to undergo a party nomination battle to succeed Biden, as other mooted candidates quickly lined up to endorse her before last month’s Democratic national convention.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEven if two still unanswered keys on foreign policy successes or failures fell in Trump’s favour, they would not be enough for him to win the election, according to the formula.Lichtman accurately forecast Trump’s unheralded 2016 election triumph over Hillary Clinton at a time when most opinion polls indicated a contrary outcome. He also correctly forecast that Trump would be impeached during his presidency – which he was, twice.A history professor at American University, he has been forecasting the results of US presidential elections since 1984 and claims to have accurately predicted all but one – George W Bush’s contested triumph over Al Gore in 2000, which was decided after the US supreme court ruled in Bush’s favour following weeks of legal wrangling over disputed ballots.Lichtman claims even that blemish is unjustified, arguing that thousands of disallowed ballots had been cast by voters who had tried in good faith to back Gore, the then vice-president and Democratic candidate, but had inadvertently spoilt their ballot papers. More

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      Trump announces plan for Elon Musk-led ‘government efficiency commission’

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      Donald Trump announced in a speech on Thursday that, if elected, he would form a government efficiency commission, a policy idea that Elon Musk has been pushing him to take on. The former president claimed the tech billionaire had agreed to lead the commission.Trump made the attention-grabbing announcement during a campaign event at the Economic Club of New York, but gave no specific details about how the commission would operate.He reiterated Musk’s argument that such a commission would cut unnecessary spending, while also saying that he would massively walk back government regulations.“I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government, and making recommendations for drastic reforms,” Trump told the crowd.Musk and Trump have forged an increasingly close alliance over the past year, as the SpaceX and Tesla CEO has thrown his full support behind Trump’s presidential campaign. Musk’s backing of Trump has consequently given the world’s richest man a direct line to influence Republican policy – and, if Trump were to actually create an efficiency commission, sweeping powers over federal agencies.Musk’s potential involvement in Trump’s proposed commission would create obvious conflicts of interest, as his businesses, such as SpaceX and Neuralink, are both regulated by, and have business with, numerous government agencies.Musk reposted news of Trump’s plans on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, which he bought for $44bn, and suggested he would accept such a position. “I look forward to serving America if the opportunity arises,” Musk posted. “No pay, no title, no recognition is needed.”Musk raised the idea of an efficiency commission with Trump during their interview on X last month, with Musk offering to “help out on such a commission”. Musk has frequently pushed for deregulation and opposed government oversight into his businesses, while at the same time facing investigations and lawsuits over a range of allegations including breaking labor laws, violating animal-welfare protections and engaging in sexual harassment.Although Musk and Trump formerly had an acrimonious relationship – Trump once referred to Musk as a “bullshit artist”, while Musk said Trump was too old to run for president – the two have formed a symbiotic relationship in recent months.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMusk, who frequently engages with far-right activists on X and promotes anti-immigration content, has attacked Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, as a communist, while his allies in the tech community have poured money into a Super Pac backing Trump. More

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      Why fascists hate universities | Jason Stanley

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      In Bangladesh, something remarkable has happened. Initially in response to a quota system that reserved the majority of government jobs for specific groups, university students initiated large-scale non-violent protests. Bangladesh’s increasingly autocratic prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, responded essentially with “let them eat cake.” Instead of calming the protests down, Hasina’s response made the protests grow nationwide.In mid-July, the government responded with extreme violence, with police gunning down hundreds of students and shutting down the internet across the country. Scenes of extreme police brutality flooded social media. By the end of July, the protests had grown into a nationwide pro-democracy movement. Eventually, the military joined the students, and Hasina fled the country. A nationwide student-led democracy movement successfully challenged a violent autocratic leader, and, at least for now, appears to have won.Bangladesh’s non-violent student movement has not gone unnoticed in neighboring countries. In Pakistan, the popular former prime minister and leader of the opposition party, Imran Khan, was jailed a year ago, an act dictated by Pakistan’s military. Media companies were instructed not to mention his name, quote his words, or show his picture. Members of his opposition party were imprisoned. But something astonishing has begun there. Motivated by the success of the student-led pro-democracy movement in Bangladesh, the Pakistan Students Federation declared an ultimatum for the government: free Khan by 30 August or face nationwide student protests.What has happened in Bangladesh and now could happen in Pakistan is the nightmare of every autocratic regime. Authoritarians and would-be authoritarians are only too aware that universities are primary sites of critique and dissent. Attacks on universities are the canary in the coalmine of fascism.Narendra Modi, India’s autocratic Hindu nationalist prime minister, has ruled the country since 2014. Attacking India’s elite universities as “anti-India” is a hallmark of his government. Similarly, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, started a political campaign with an attack on Central European University in Budapest, with demagogic rhetoric directed against its supposed spreading of “gender ideology”. With the use of legislation, Orbán’s government went so far as to drive the university out of the country.The situation is structurally the same in the United States – would-be authoritarians and one-party states centrally target universities with the aim of restricting dissent. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, is an aspiring autocrat who has used the myth of widespread voter fraud to severely restrict minority voting. (Voter fraud practically never happens in the United States; rigorous investigation estimated it as between 0.0003 and 0.0025%.) DeSantis also created an office of election crimes and security, to pursue supposed cases of voter fraud.Besides minority voting populations, DeSantis has focused on public and higher education as central targets. According to an AAUP report by the special committee on political interference and academic freedom in Florida’s public education system in May 2023, “academic freedom, tenure and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and universities currently face a politically and ideologically driven assault unparalleled in US history.” The committee’s final report reveals an atmosphere of intimidation and indeed terror, as the administrative threat to public university professors has been shown to be very real.Even more so than Florida, Tennessee is a one-party state, with a Republican governor and a Republican supermajority in the legislature. The Tennessee house and senate passed a resolution to honor the Danube Institute; on the floor of the Tennessee house, the state representative Justin Jones questioned why the state was honoring the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán’s thinktank. Tennessee has a state ban on the teaching of “divisive concepts”, one that includes public universities. To report a professor for teaching such a concept (such as intersectionality), Tennessee provides an online form.Attacks on voting, and democratic systems generally, almost invariably center on universities, and vice versa. The Yale Law School graduate and current Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has claimed that the 2020 election should not have been certified because of suspicion of voter fraud. In a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, Vance also proclaimed, echoing Richard Nixon: “The professors are the enemy.”In the fall of 2023, in response to Israel’s brutal retaliation in Gaza for Hamas’s terrorist attack, anti-genocide protests erupted in American universities, with the active participation of a significant number of Jewish students. These anti-genocide protests were labeled as pro-Hamas and used as a basis to attack elite universities, their students, their professors and their administrations, verbally, politically and physically. It is not implausible to take the goal to have been, at least largely, a preliminary show of police power to university students.In the United States, the Republican party has long been aware of the democratic potential of student movements. As it lurches closer and closer to authoritarianism, it will, like all rightwing authoritarian movements worldwide, seek to crush dissent, starting with university students and faculty. With great courage and determination, the students in Bangladesh have shown that this strategy can be made to backfire.

      Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, and author of Erasing History: How Fascists rewrite the Past to Control the Future More

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      Trump campaign pulls away from three target states after Harris surge

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      Donald Trump has quietly wound down his presidential campaign in states he was targeting just six weeks ago amid polling evidence showing that Kamala Harris’s entry into the presidential race has put them out of reach and narrowed his path to the White House.The Republican presidential nominee’s campaign has diverted resources away from Minnesota, Virginia and New Hampshire – states Trump was boasting he could win while Joe Biden was the Democratic candidate – to focus instead on a small number of battleground states.Money is being poured into the three “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which were all carried by Biden in 2020 and are seen as vital to the outcome of November’s election.Special attention is being paid to Pennsylvania, which has 19 electoral college votes, and where a new CNN poll shows Trump and Harris tied at 47% each.Resources have also been transferred to southern and south-western Sun belt states – namely North Carolina, Georgia Nevada and Arizona – where Trump previously had healthy leads over Biden that have been whittled away since Harris replaced the US president at the top of the Democratic ticket.Maga Inc, a Trump-supporting Super Pac, has recently spent $16m in adverts in North Carolina as polls have shown Harris close to drawing even in a state the Democrats carried just once in presidential elections since 1980.The tactical shift is a graphic sign of how the dynamics of the electoral contest have shifted since the Republican national convention in July, when euphoric Trump campaigners talked confidently of winning Minnesota, Virginia and New Hampshire.Democrats have carried all three in recent presidential polls but Biden’s support showed signs of serious erosion following June’s calamitous debate performance in Atlanta – prompting bullish Republican forecasts that they would be “in play” in November.An internal Trump campaign memo even before the debate posited ways that the former president could carry Minnesota and Virginia – partly helped by the presence of the independent candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, whose campaign was initially thought to pose a greater threat to Biden before contrary polling evidence changed Trump’s calculus.As optimism surged, Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, held a rally in Minnesota shortly after the Republican convention, while the campaign said it planned to open eight offices in the state and build up staff.Since then, Harris replaced Biden and chose the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate – helping her to shore up local support – while Kennedy has suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump.Harris’s ascent has also infused the Democrats’ supporters with fresh enthusiasm, leading to a surge in popularity that has propelled her into a small but consistent national poll lead and a fundraising bonanza that saw her campaign raise $540m in August alone.The predicted rash of new Trump offices and hires in Minnesota appears not to have happened, Axios reported.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn Virginia – the site of Vance’s first solo rally after being appointed to the ticket – Trump has not staged a rally for six weeks and the campaign has stopped citing memos claiming it can flip the state. Its apparent slide down the priority list is a far cry from 28 June, when the former president staged a rally in Chesapeake a day after his ultimately race-changing debate with Biden.The clearest evidence of the switch in campaign’s thinking has come in New Hampshire, which a former Trump field worker said this week that it was no longer trying to win.Trump has not appeared there since winning the Republican primary in January and has not sent a major surrogate since the spring, despite New Hampshire being identified by Michael Whatley, chair of the Republican National Committee, after the June debate as one of the states the Trump campaign was targeting to expand its electoral wining map.Recent polls have shown Harris leading outside the margin of error.“This election is going to be won in those seven swing states,” Lou Gargiulo, the co-chair of Trump’s campaign in New Hampshire, told Politico. “That’s where the effort’s got to be put.” More

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      Black US voting ‘bloc’ composed of five distinct political groups, survey finds

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      Black voters in the US are often lumped into one bloc, but a new national survey has found that they can be defined by specific clusters: legacy civil rights, secular progressives, next-gen traditionalist, rightfully cynical and race-neutral conservative.“These clusters indicate that there are incredible differences within the Black community, in terms of how people think about democracy and their role in our democracy,” said Katrina Gamble, CEO of Sojourn Strategies during a press conference on Wednesday,Out of the 2,034 registered voters and 918 Black unregistered voters surveyed, 41% of respondents were found to be legacy civil rights voters who skewed older than 50 years of age and had the highest voter turnout rates. Legacy civil rights voters were also the most likely group to believe that their vote has the power to drive change. On the other end, the rightfully cynical, 22% of respondents, were the youngest cohort and the least likely to vote. Based on their personal experiences of racism at work and with the police, this cluster was the least likely to believe that their vote matters.Next-gen traditionalists, 18% of respondents, were the most religious and least educated cluster, mostly consisting of millennial and generation Z voters. They had a low voter turnout rate and a moderate belief in the power of their vote. The most progressive respondents fell within the secular progressives cluster, at 12%, of which the majority were educated women who were highly likely to vote.Finally, the race-neutral conservatives, 7% of respondents, consisted mostly of men and were the second oldest cohort as well as the most conservative. Race-neutral conservatives had a moderate voter turnout rate and were likely to blame systemic barriers on individual choices.Community-based organizations from Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan discussed the need to tailor mobilization efforts to different types of Black voters during a Wednesday press conference. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the grassroots group Power Interfaith is using the results of the survey to engage 50,000 eligible Black voters throughout the state. Ahead of the election, the organization will tap Black Muslim and Christian congregations to help recruit 2,000 hosts who will serve soul food dinners to young people.Hosts from the legacy civil rights cluster will use the survey results to inform discussions with younger generations at the dinner. “For Black folk, food actually is our love language,” said Rev Dr Gregory Edwards, interim executive director of Power Interfaith. “Something magical happens when folks sit around the dining room table with some good food; it creates space for conversation about politics, about relationships, about dreams, hopes and aspirations that aren’t happening elsewhere.”This fall, the Georgia-based voter engagement group New Georgia Project plans to use the research findings to tailor its door canvassing, phone and text scripts. “We’re able to train our canvassers and others to talk to people and to listen to them and to make sure that they are addressing what they care about, versus some traditional operations that may just talk at people,” said Ranada Robinson, the group’s research director.In Michigan, a series of events called Just Effing Care Fest hosted by the grassroots group Detroit Action will engage rightful cynics by showcasing local influencers and artists while convening young Black people to discuss the issues that they’re most concerned about. “Young Black community artists have a strong influence with the rightful cynics,” said Branden Snyder, the group’s senior advisor. “They’re able to talk about how they’ve transformed their own cynicism into artistic expression, building a world that should be.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile Black registered voters overwhelmingly favor Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, the Black values research is not targeted toward a particular campaign or party, said Gamble from Sojourn Strategies.Instead, the survey is designed to help the Black electorate see that their vote matters. “It really centers understanding, how do we not only increase Black folks across the segments’ perceptions of their own power, but also get this research into the hands of organizations that can organize them into having actualized power in our democracy and our elections?” said Gamble. More

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      in Elections

      Trump pleads not guilty to revised 2020 election interference charges

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      Donald Trump pleaded not guilty on Thursday, via his legal team, to the revised charges in his federal criminal election interference investigation, in the first hearing in the Washington DC case since the US supreme court gave its immunity ruling.The former US president and current Republican nominee for the White House in this November’s election was not present in federal court in the capital.The US district judge, Tanya Chutkan, said she would not set a schedule in the case at this status conference for the prosecution and defense teams, but hopes to do so later on Thursday.The case relates to Trump’s conduct surrounding events after he lost his re-election bid in November 2020 to his Democratic rival Joe Biden, culminating in the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, by thousands of extreme Trump supporters intent on overturning the election result.Chutkan is hearing arguments about the potential next steps in the election subversion prosecution of Trump for the first time since the supreme court narrowed the case by ruling that former presidents are entitled to broad immunity from criminal charges.As the hearing opened, the judge noted that it has been almost a year since she had seen the lawyers in her courtroom. The case has been frozen since last December as Trump pursued his appeal.The defense lawyer John Lauro joked to the judge: “Life was almost meaningless without seeing you.”Chutkan replied: “Enjoy it while it lasts.”A not guilty plea was entered on Trump’s behalf for a revised indictment that the special counsel Jack Smith’s team filed last week to strip out certain allegations and comply with the supreme court’s ruling in July. Prosecutors have said they can be ready at any time to file a legal brief laying out its position on how to apply the justices’ immunity opinion to the case.Defense lawyers are challenging the legitimacy of the case and said they intend to file multiple motions to dismiss the case, including one that piggybacks off a Florida judge’s ruling that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional.Neither side envisions a trial happening before the November election. The case is one of two federal prosecutions against Trump, in a host of legal cases. The other, charging him with illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, was dismissed in July by the US district judge Aileen Cannon, who said Smith’s appointment as special counsel was unlawful.Smith’s team has appealed that ruling. Trump’s lawyers say they intend to ask Chutkan to dismiss the election case on the same grounds.Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting. More