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      Both sides of gun issue seek to stir up US voters as NRA influence wanes

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      Anti-gun-control groups and gun-safety advocates are launching hefty voter-mobilization drives this year with the stakes high in the fall elections given the stark differences on gun violence policy between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.But the long-powerful National Rifle Association (NRA), which has been beset with financial and legal headaches for several years, is not expected to be nearly as active as in 2016, when it spent more than $31m to back Trump’s victorious campaign by boosting his political fortunes in key states, say gun experts and ex-NRA insiders.Now, though, other anti-gun-control groups are trying to take up the slack.For instance, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), an influential firearms industry lobbying group, has begun an eight-figure voter-mobilization drive to help pro-gun interests defeat President Biden, whose strong support for gun-control measures it finds anathema.The NSSF’s general counsel, Larry Keane, said that the organization’s “GunVote” campaign will focus on seven to nine battleground states, where it will mount voter-registration, education and get-out-the-vote efforts to help Trump win the presidency again.On the other side of this year’s election brawl over gun control, Everytown for Gun Safety is planning a large effort to get its millions of supporters to help re-elect Biden and defeat Trump, who has a record of siding firmly with pro-gun priorities.“We’re going to knock on doors, make calls, rally and campaign for President Biden,” said Nick Suplina, the senior vice-president for law and policy at Everytown, which claims nearly 10 million supporters including mayors, students, gun owners, teachers and others.The stakes seem higher than usual given Biden’s successes as president backing new gun-control measures such as the first new law in three decades boosting gun safety, and Biden’s talk of doing more if he’s re-elected, including fighting for an assault weapons ban, which would probably need Democratic control of Congress to enact.By contrast, Trump has often reiterated his fealty to the pro-gun lobby, which characterized his presidency. At last month’s NRA annual meeting, Trump earned a ringing endorsement and pledged that if he wins, “no one will lay a finger on your firearms”.But the once deep-pocketed and five-million-member NRA remains mired in internal and financial headaches: its annual revenues have dropped for several years while its legal expenses have risen.The NRA’s problems were underscored when its longtime top executive, Wayne LaPierre, resigned in January as he was about to go on trial in New York, where he was convicted of looting the organization to enjoy lavish personal perks including fancy vacations and expensive clothes.“The NRA is going to again be a peripheral player for lack of funding this election cycle, and that could hurt Trump in several battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota,” a former NRA board member said.“It’s a vacuum compared to 2016 when the NRA was robustly engaged,” the ex-board member added.Longtime observers of gun-control fights agree.Robert Spitzer, the author of several books on gun issues and an emeritus political science professor at Suny Cortland in New York, said the NRA was “as strongly behind [Trump] as they have been before”.“However, the organization simply does not possess the money or personnel to be as influential as they were in 2016, when they spent over $31m on his campaign, and over $70m on Republican efforts around the country. Still, the gun issue will continue to be salient to an important segment of the Trump base.”Spitzer added: “Other gun groups, such as the NSSF and state gun groups, will be working to supplant the NRA’s traditional dominance in national politics. They do not possess the degree of organization, experience and reach as the NRA of old, but they will ratchet up their efforts.”That’s what the NSSF, whose members include such gun giants as Sturm, Ruger & Co and Smith & Wesson, plus other anti-gun-control groups say they intend to do. “There’s a stark difference between Trump and Biden,” Keane said in explaining the NSSF’s hefty effort this year. “It’s clear there are ongoing challenges at the NRA.”Some ex-NRA leaders credit NSSF with trying to fill the NRA’s vacuum. “NSSF has attempted, and continues, to fill the gap left by a weakened NRA,” Jim Baker, the NRA’s former top lobbyist, said.The NRA did not respond to a call seeking comments.Further, the Trump campaign in tandem with the Republican National Committee has launched Gun Owners for Trump including firearms makers and gun-rights advocates such as Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation; Women for Gun Rights; and some NRA officials.To spur more pro-gun votes at the polls, Trump has spoken twice this year at NRA events. At their May meeting, Trump employed some incendiary conspiracy-mongering, telling the crowd that Biden “has a 40-year record of trying to rip firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGun-control advocates and the Biden campaign are using Trump’s own pro-gun pledges and cavalier attitude towards gun violence to rev up their backers, including younger voters and women.After an Iowa school shooting in January, for instance, Trump callously opined that “we have to get over it”, a clip of which is being circulated by Democrats and pro-gun-control advocates.Likewise, another clip in circulation shows Trump boasting to NRA members in May that he “did nothing” as president on guns. Actually, Trump signed a “bump stock” ban after the country’s largest gun massacre ever in Las Vegas, but the supreme court overturned it this month.Biden cemented his gun-control credentials in 2022 when, after the Uvalde, Texas, school massacre, he pushed hard for a gun-safety bill that passed on a bipartisan basis, becoming the first new gun-control law in almost three decades.To energize his supporters, Biden spoke to an Everytown training event for about 1,000 gun-safety volunteers including students on 12 June, where he cited several major achievements, including setting up a White House office focused on curbing gun violence and beefing up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Explosives and Firearms.Biden urged a ban on assault-style weapons and universal background checks for purchases of firearms, both goals he has stressed before.“We need you to overcome the unrelenting opposition of the gun lobby,” Biden said.Suplina said Everytown’s plans for targeting states to help Biden and how much they intend to spend overall this election cycle were not ready to be announced, but he did reveal that Everytown intends to support 465 of its volunteers who are running for office this year. The majority of these races are state and local.Further, Everytown will be backing Senate and House candidates who support gun-safety measures, Suplina said.Overall, Everytown spent about $55m on 2020 election efforts.Other gun-control advocates have broad election plans“This cycle, GIiffords will use its unique identity as a gun owner and survivor-led organization to reach a broad gun safety coalition in battlegrounds – including Democrats, Republicans, young voters, gun owners, and people of color,” Emma Brown, executive director of Giffords, said in a statementThe group plans on “supporting gun safety champions in key House and Senate races, [and] communicating the Biden-Harris administration’s historic gun safety accomplishments in states across the map,” she added.Looking ahead, Spitzer stressed that Biden “has continued to speak out on gun safety, and gun-safety groups will surely redouble their efforts on his behalf, not only to help him get re-elected, but to advance the cause of down-ballot Democrats running for Congress and state offices, where the fate of many gun laws lie”. 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      Minority Rule review: rich history of America’s undemocratic democracy

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      Ari Berman’s new book is a rich history of America’s ambivalent attitude toward majority rule. The founding document declared “all men are created equal”, but by the time a constitution was drafted 11 years later, there was already a severe backlash to that revolutionary assertion.To prevent the union from disintegrating, free states and big states repeatedly gave in to slave states and small states, producing a constitution that would be adopted by the majority.The first and worst decision was to give each state two senators regardless of population. Virginia had 12 times the population of Delaware. Today, the situation is vastly worse: California is 63 times bigger than Wyoming. By 2040, Berman writes, “roughly 70% of Americans will live in 15 states with 30 senators, while the other 30%, who are whiter, older and more rural … will elect 70 senators”.The filibuster, a delaying tactic that led to most legislation requiring 60 votes to pass the Senate – but which has no basis in the constitution – makes the country even more undemocratic. Forty Republican senators representing just 21% of the population have blocked bills on abortion rights, voting rights and gun control supported by big majorities.The House of Representatives was supposed to be closer to the people than the Senate, which wasn’t even elected by voters when first created. But when the free states placated the slave states by allowing them to count every enslaved Black person as three-fifths of a human being, for the purposes of representation, that increased how many representatives slave states sent to the House.To Berman, it was “a fundamental contradiction that the nation’s most important democratic document was intended to make the country less democratic”. As the New Yorker Melancton Smith noted at the time, the constitution represented a “transfer of power from the many to the few”.The national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, Berman also offers a horrific description of the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by modern-day oligarchs to make America even more undemocratic. In just six years, the Federalist Society raised an astonishing $580m “through a shadowy network of a dozen dark money nonprofit groups” to put its “preferred judges on the bench”. The society has gotten a huge bang for its buck – more than 500 judges appointed by both Bushes and 226 appointed by Donald Trump were endorsed by the Federalists.The worst results of this hammerlock on judicial appointments are at the very top of the pyramid: “For the first time in US history, five of six conservative justices on the supreme court have been appointed by Republican presidents who initially lost the popular vote and confirmed by senators representing a minority of Americans.”And what is the “signature project” of these justices? The dismantling of the civil rights laws that are the greatest legacy of the 1960s.Federalist Society judges worked in lockstep with the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, whose priority has been to put an end to all effective limits on who can spend how much in every election.“I never would have been able to win my race if there had been a limit on the amount of money I could raise and spend,” McConnell wrote of his first race, in 1984. Eighteen years later, the Republican John McCain and Democrat Russ Feingold managed to ban unlimited donations. Their law survived McConnell’s first lawsuit to undo it, on a 5-4 supreme court vote. But four years later, after the extremist Samuel Alito replaced the moderate Sandra Day O’Connor, the court gutted the law, allowing unlimited corporate expenditure as long as ads “didn’t explicitly” endorse a candidate.“Thus began a trend,” Berman explains. “GOP-appointed judges reliably supported Republican efforts to tilt the rules and institutions of democracy in their favor … which in turn helped Republicans win more elections and appoint more judges, with one undemocratic feature of the system augmenting the other.”As the country’s founders adopted a constitution that disenfranchised all Black people and all women, modern conservatives do all they can to keep the voting rolls as unrepresentative as possible, particularly as people of color become the majority in the US. Racism remains the strongest fuel for efforts to make it as hard as possible for Black and younger voters to exercise their franchise.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe worst recent example of this was the failure of a narrowly Democratic Senate to adopt a voting rights act in 2021. It failed when Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, both Democrats then, refused to alter the filibuster rule. Manchin supported the bill, then reversed with a specious explanation: while the right to vote was “fundamental to American democracy … protecting that right … should never be done in a partisan manner”Berman’s book ends on a more hopeful note, with descriptions of Democratic victories in Michigan and Wisconsin.In Michigan, a 29-year-old activist, Katie Fahey, figured out she could end the gerrymandering which had let the Republicans dominate her state by putting a ballot initiative before the voters. She needed 315,000 signatures. In one of the few good news stories about social media, she was able to use Facebook to gather 410,000 signatures in 110 days without any paid staff. In 2018, the reform won with an amazing 61% of the vote. Another initiative that dramatically expanded voter access through automatic and election-day access passed by 66%.The end of gerrymandering enabled Democrats to flip both houses in Michigan in 2022, “giving them control of state politics for the first time in 40 years”. And in Wisconsin, the election of an additional liberal justice to the state supreme court finally ended Republicans’ domination of the state government.The hopeful message is clear: despite massive Republican efforts to suppress liberal votes, it is still possible for a well-organized grassroots campaign to overcome the millions of dollars spent every year to prevent the triumph of true democracy.
      Minority Rule is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux More

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      The Wolves of K Street review: how lobbying swallowed Washington

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      Donald Trump decries the proverbial Washington swamp. Congress does next to nothing. The band plays on: lobbying remains big business. In 2023, the industry hit a $4.3bn payday. This year shows no end in sight to the trend. As the US gallops toward another election, The Wolves of K Street befits the season.Brody Mullins, a Wall Street Journal investigative reporter and Pulitzer prize winner, and his brother, Luke Mullins, a contributor at Politico, deliver a graduate seminar on how lobbying emerged and became a behemoth, an adjunct of government itself, taking its collective name from the street north of the White House where many of its biggest earners sit.Smoothly written, meticulously researched, The Wolves of K Street informs and mesmerizes.“This is a book about men – for they were almost exclusively men – who built K Street,” Brody and Luke Mullins write.They have produced a tightly stitched, 600-plus-page tome that begins as a true-crime story. The suicide of Evan Morris, a lobbyist for big pharma, takes center stage. In the opening scene of the book, at a posh Virginia golf club on a balmy evening in July 2015, Morris, 38, turns a gun on himself.The seemingly almost idyllic backdrop to his death is actually a tableau of excess, complete with $150,000 initiation fees, an abandoned Porsche, an emptied bottle of $1,500 bordeaux and a scenic sunset.Millions of corporate dollars were missing and untaxed. An anonymous letter and an FBI investigation helped ignite Morris’s untimely and violent end.“The allegations would touch off a years-long case,” the brothers Mullins write.Morris’s wife and estate settled with Genentech, his employer, the Internal Revenue Service and the commonwealth of Virginia. The government never charged anyone with a crime. Death had taken its toll.The Wolves of K Street is about way more than just one man. It is an engrossing lesson in how lunch-bucket sensibilities and the accommodation between big business and the New Deal gave way to neoliberalism, corporate activism and the decline of industrial unions.The Democratic party, to name just one major part of American life, would never be the same again. The Mullins brothers are keenly aware of the social forces that buffet and drive US politics. They recall how Jimmy Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980 left the party of FDR, Truman and JFK to wonder how it was no longer the political home of working-class America. Democrats wonder to this day.The Wolves of K Street traces how the US reached this point, and lobbying attained its present stature, by following “three lobbying dynasties – one Republican, two Democratic – over the critical period from the 1970s to today, when the modern lobbying industry was created, corporate interests came to power in Washington, and the nature of our economy was fundamentally changed”.The late Tommy Boggs, son of Hale Boggs, once a Democratic House majority leader, stands out as the patriarch and pioneer of Democratic lobbying. His name came to grace Patton, Boggs and Blow, a storied DC law firm now subsumed in Squire Patton Boggs, a sprawling global entity nominally based in Ohio. Evan Morris stood out as Boggs’s “prized pupil” – or apostle.Next came the Republicans: Charlie Black, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and the late Lee Atwater, who would manage the 1988 presidential campaign of George HW Bush.“[They] used their links to the Reagan revolution to erect Washington’s signature GOP house of lobbying,” the Mullins write. “Each member of the partnership had his own distinct role.”Together, they bridged the gap between corner offices and the universe of conservative activists. Furthermore, Donald Trump was a client of Black, Manafort and Stone. Stone helped boost Maryanne Trump Barry, the property magnate’s late sister, on to the federal bench.That history is why Manafort and Stone emerged as part of Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016; why the pair were caught in the special counsel’s net when it came time to investigate Russia’s attempts to help Trump; why they received presidential pardons before Trump left office; and why they stand to be back for one more rodeo as Trump runs for the White House again.Tony Podesta, brother of the Democratic White House veteran John Podesta, is the keystone of the third lobbying dynasty examined by Brody and Luke Mullins, an “avant-garde political fixer [who] used his experience as a brass-knuckled liberal activist to advance the interests of Wall Street and Silicon Valley”.The paths taken by Manafort and Podesta would eventually entwine. Out of the limelight, Manafort came to represent the interests of Ukraine’s anti-Nato Party of Regions and its head, Viktor Yanukovych. In 2012, seeking to stave off sanctions, Manafort enlisted Podesta to his cause.“I used to call them the dynamic duo,” Rick Gates, Manafort’s convicted acolyte, tells the Mullins brothers.The Wolves of K Street is also newsy, disclosing for the first time Manafort’s attempt to have Yanukovych congratulate Joe Biden in summer 2012.“I am thinking of recommending a call from VY to Biden to congratulate Biden on his [re-]nomination” as vice-president to Barack Obama, Manafort emailed Gates, who forwarded the note to Podesta. The brother of Bill Clinton’s chief of staff cum Obama counselor approved.“‘Only downside is [if] biden [sic] presses him personally on politics of criminal prosecutions of his political’ opponents, Podesta responded. ‘I would say worth the risk.’”The Wolves of K Street ends on a weary note: “No matter what new obstacles have emerged, K Street has always managed to invent new ways to exercise its power over Washington,” the Mullins brothers conclude. “New fortunes to be made, new rules to be broken. New stories to be told.”One might well reach for Ecclesiastes, son of David: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
      The Wolves of K Street is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

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      The pro-Israel groups planning to spend millions in US elections

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      A handful of pro-Israel groups fund political campaigns in support of individual candidates in US elections, led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), a powerful force in American politics. Before the 2024 election, Aipac plans to spend tens of millions of dollars against congressional candidates, primarily Democrats, whom it deems insufficiently supportive of Israel.Aipac and other pro-Israel lobby groups have recruited and supported challengers to a number of lawmakers and candidates – most notably members of the Squad, the group of progressive representatives who are particularly vocal in their criticism of Israel’s offensive in Gaza.The 2024 election will be bellwether of the enduring impact of these groups on US politics amid shifting US public opinion on Israel.What is Aipac?Aipac has its roots in the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs, which was founded by a lobbyist for the Israeli government in an attempt to manage the political fallout the Israeli army’s 1953 massacre of dozens of Palestinians, most of them children and women, in the West Bank village of Qibya.The organisation was renamed Aipac in 1959. It was not until financial support surged after the 1973 Yom Kippur war that it began to grow into the powerful Washington lobbyist group it is today.For many years, Aipac’s influence went largely unchallenged on Capitol Hill. The pressure group claimed to voice bipartisan support for Israel in Congress and worked to marginalise the relatively small number of critics there.Aipac’s annual conference typically involved a long rollcall of members of Congress who support the group. It has regularly galvanised almost every member of the US Senate to sign letters in support of Israeli policies, including several wars in Gaza.But the group’s once unchallenged influence in Washington has been diminished by its unwavering backing for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over the past 15 years. It sided with him against President Barack Obama’s opposition to settlement construction in the occupied Palestinian territories and his nuclear deal with Iran.The liberal Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz has described Aipac as “the pro-Netanyahu, anti-Israel lobby”.“Effectively, the organization has become an operational wing of Netanyahu’s far-right government, one that peddles a false image of a liberal Israel in the United States and sells illusions to members of Congress,” it said.What has changed?Aipac traditionally endorsed candidates sympathetic to Israel as a signal for others to fund their campaigns. But in December 2021, the group for the first time in its 70-year history moved into direct financial support for individual political campaigns by launching a super political action committee, the United Democracy Project (UDP). A Super Pac is permitted to spend without restriction for or against candidates but cannot make direct donations to their campaigns.The move was prompted by alarm at the erosion of longstanding bipartisan support for Israel in the US. Opinion polls show younger Democrats have grown more critical of the deepening oppression of the Palestinians, including Jewish Americans, a trend that has only strengthened with the present war in Gaza.Aipac has grown increasingly concerned that the election of candidates critical of Israel could open the door to the conditioning of the US’s considerable military aid, erosion of Washington’s diplomatic protection on the international stage, and political pressure to establish a Palestinian state.So the UDP is working to block Democratic candidates critical of Israel at the first hurdle – the primaries – in an effort to shore up the claim that there is unswerving support for the Jewish state across Congress. It is also targeting progressive Democratic members of Congress who have pressed for a ceasefire in Gaza.What about other lobby groups?A number of smaller groups are working to the same end, principally the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI). It was founded five years ago by Mark Mellman, a Democratic political consultant. The DMFI’s board of directors includes Archie Gottesman, who also co-founded JewBelong, a group that has posted pink billboards in US cities in support of Israel including one that declared: ‘Trust Me. If Israel Wanted to Commit Genocide in Gaza, It Could’.Notably, the UDP has so far not waded into the campaign against Summer Lee in this year’s primary, despite spending more than $3m to defeat her in 2022. Instead the Republican mega-donor Jeffrey Yass has stepped up as the largest funder of a Pac called Moderate Pac to support Lee’s primary opponent, Bhavini Patel. It is running ads saying that Lee’s criticisms of Biden amount to support for Donald Trump even though Yass himself is a Trump supporter.A more moderate pro-Israel group, J Street, was founded in 2007 to counter Aipac’s unflinching support for rightwing governments. J Street established a Pac to support candidates who back a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. But it has raised only about $4m so far this election cycle.Who are they targeting and how?Aipac plans to spend $100m this year against congressional candidates, primarily Democrats, and members of Congress critical of Israel. So far the UDP has raised more than $49m, according to its most recent Federal Election Commission filings.The bulk of that money has yet to be spent but the UDP has already thrown millions of dollars into political advertising targeted against candidates critical of Israel, but which focuses on other issues and fails to make clear that it is funded by a pro-Israel group. Critics have accused Aipac of attempting to intimidate candidates into avoiding criticism of Israel by implicitly threatening to fund campaigns against them.Among those expected to be targeted by pro-Israel groups are members of the the Squad, including Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, who are thought to be vulnerable to political attacks over issues unrelated to their criticisms of the war in Gaza.Who is funding these campaigns?The leading donors to the UDP are Republicans seeking to influence Democratic primaries.The single largest donor is the conservative Ukrainian American billionaire co-founder of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, who gave $5m. Koum also donated to the Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s Super Pac.Other donors include the financier, Jonathan Jacobson, who gave $2.5m to the UDP toward the end of last year although for many years his political donations were directed to the Republican National Committee and the party’s US Senate campaigns. The Israeli-born entrepreneur David Zalik gave the UDP $2m. He has also donated to Republican campaigns in Georgia.The Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus, who was one of the largest donors to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and who continues to back him financially, gave $1m to the UDP, as did the hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who has given millions of dollars to Republican political causes over the years.Donations to the UDP are separate from tens of millions of dollars in pledges made directly to Aipac in the wake of the 7 October attacks by Hamas as the public relations battle intensified over Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza and a surging number of Palestinian civilian deaths.Top donors to the DMFI include Deborah Simon, the daughter of the billionaire businessman and movie producer Mel Simon, who gave $1m. She regularly donates to Democratic causes and Jewish organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League.Sam Bankman-Fried, the former cryptocurrency billionaire who is serving 25 years for fraud, gave $250,000 to DMFI during the 2022 midterm elections. The group has been forced to return the money.Other major DMFI donors are closely tied to Aipac such as Stacy Schusterman, who has given more than $1m, and the venture capitalist Gary Lauder.How has the present war in Gaza changed the equation?The conflict has strengthened the hand of Israel’s critics within the Democratic party as polls show rising sympathy for the Palestinians. That in turn has made Aipac’s financial backing a potential liability for some Israel-supporting Democratic candidates.Aipac was already on the defensive after endorsing the 2022 campaigns of dozens of Republican members of Congress who tried to block President Biden’s presidential victory.Aipac defended the move by claiming that backing for the Jewish state overrides other issues and that it was “no moment for the pro-Israel movement to become selective about its friends”.“When we launched our political action committee last year, we decided that we would base decisions about political contributions on only one thing: whether a political candidate supports the US-Israel relationship,” it said. More

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      Biden campaign raises $25m ‘money bomb’ at event with Obama and Clinton

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      Joe Biden and his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, headlined a star-studded fundraiser with Bill Clinton on Thursday that organizers said raised more than $25m for the US president’s re-election campaign.Such a haul, which Politico called an “NYC money bomb”, will widen Biden’s lead over Donald Trump in fundraising for the November election.Amid improving polling for Biden, the two presidential campaigns recently posted February fundraising figures. Federal filings showed Biden nearly $40m up in cash raised, leading the president’s campaign to taunt their rival as “Broke Don”.On Thursday, a Trump campaign adviser said the candidate won’t be able to match Biden’s totals, blaming the disparity on the Democrat’s “billionaire” supporters and painting a picture of a Trump campaign as being fueled by grassroots, working-class supporters.Obama hitched a ride from Washington to New York aboard Air Force One with Biden. They waved as they descended the plane’s steps at John F Kennedy International airport and got into the motorcade for the ride into midtown Manhattan.The marquee at Radio City Music Hall in midtown Manhattan was lit up and read: “An Evening with Joe Biden Barack Obama Bill Clinton”. NYPD officers lined surrounding streets as part of a heavy security presence for the event.Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer was up first to warm up the sold-out crowd of about 5,000 supporters. Entertainers, too, had their time on stage. Lizzo belted out her hit About Damn Time and emcee Mindy Kaling joked that it was nice to be in a room with “so many rich people”, adding that she loved that they were supporting a president who “openly” promises to “raise your taxes”.The hours-long fundraiser had different tiers of access depending on a donor’s generosity. The centerpiece was an onstage conversation with the three presidents, moderated by late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert. Other celebrities included Queen Latifah, Ben Platt, Cynthia Erivo and Lea Michele. Tickets sold for as low as $225.The fundraiser was punctuated by protests inside the auditorium, as attendees rose at several different moments to shout over the discussion, referencing Biden’s backing of Israel’s war in Gaza.“Shame on you, Joe Biden” one yelled, according to Reuters.Obama said Biden has “moral clarity” on the Israel issue and is willing to listen to all sides in this debate and find common ground.When a protester inside the theater interrupted Obama, the former president snapped back: “You can’t just talk and not listen …That’s what the other side does”On the money raised during the event, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul turned Biden campaign co-chair, said: “This historic raise is a show of strong enthusiasm for President Biden and vice-president [Kamala] Harris and a testament to the unprecedented fundraising machine we’ve built.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Unlike our opponent, every dollar we’re raising is going to reach the voters who will decide this election – communicating the president’s historic record, his vision for the future and laying plain the stakes of this election. The numbers don’t lie: today’s event is a massive show of force and a true reflection of the momentum to re-elect the Biden-Harris ticket.”Katzenberg’s reference to fundraising meant to “reach the voters” was a barb aimed at Trump. The Republican’s unprecedented legal jeopardy – he faces 88 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil penalties – has contributed to controversy over whether campaign donations should be used to pay his legal bills.Trump has appealed to supporters for help. His political operation has been shown to be paying lawyers’ bills. Amid Trump’s takeover of the Republican National Committee, achieved by installing his daughter-in-law Lara Trump as co-chair, attempts have been made to stop it contributing to his legal costs.Trump has been widely criticised for failing to mount many campaign events. On Thursday, seeking to boost his hardline law-and-order message, he will attend a wake for a New York police officer killed in the line of duty.Announcing its event with Obama and Clinton, the Biden campaign sought to emphasise the contrast between the president’s strong fundraising and Trump’s struggles.“In contrast to Trump’s cash-strapped campaign,” a statement said, “tonight alone Team Biden-Harris will raise $5m more than the Trump campaign raised in all of February; nearly double what the Trump campaign raised in all of January; more than what the Trump campaign raised in December and January combined; more than double what the RNC has cash on hand – and more than the RNC has raised all year; nearly 60% of what the Trump campaign has cash on hand.” More

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr names tech lawyer Nicole Shanahan as 2024 running mate

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr selected Nicole Shanahan, a tech attorney and wealthy philanthropist, as his running mate in an independent campaign that could upset the 2024 race for the White House.Kennedy, an environmental attorney who gained notoriety as a vaccine sceptic and conspiracy theorist, announced his pick at a campaign event on Tuesday in Oakland, California, where Shanahan was born.In a nearly hour-long, winding speech, Kennedy cited Shanahan’s career in technology as an asset for the campaign, Kennedy said she had “deep inside knowledge of how big tech uses AI to manipulate” voters.Shanahan was the founder and CEO of the Palo Alto legal tech firm ClearAccessIP before selling the company in 2020. She was also a fellow at Stanford Law School’s center for legal informatics.“I managed to put a technologist at the forefront,” Kennedy said. “I found a vice-president who shares my indignation about the participation of big tech as a partner in the censorship, surveillance, and the information warfare that our government is currently waging against the American people.”Kennedy, 70, a scion of the US political dynasty that includes former president John F Kennedy, also presented Shanahan, 38, as a fresh and youthful voice in a presidential contest between 81-year-old Joe Biden and 77-year-old Donald Trump.“There’s a growing number of millennials and gen Z Americans who have lost faith in their future and lost their pride in our country,” he said.The announcement event took place in the Henry J Kaiser Center for the Arts, a historic building in Oakland that has been in disrepair for decades but is on the path to being reopened. Speaking at the event, rightwing author Angela Stanton-King said the venue had been opened to the campaign despite being partially under construction, and was chosen due to the historical events it had hosted – including a speech by Martin Luther King Jr in 1962.The event featured an introduction from the local Muwekma Ohlone tribe, whose battle for federal recognition has been supported by Kennedy, and musical renditions of This Land Is Your Land and America the Beautiful. Speakers included the Stanford professor and Covid-lockdown skeptic Jay Battacharya as well as Kelly Ryerson, a public health advocate who focuses on chronic illnesses she says are caused by toxins in our food supplies.More than two hours into the lengthy announcement event, after most cable news channels had cut away from the stream, the ex-NBA player Metta Sandiford-Artest, formerly known as Metta World Peace, welcomed Shanahan to the stage. The vice-presidential hopeful explained her political mission, citing her strong anti-war beliefs as aligning with Kennedy’s. She soon launched into an anti-pharmaceuticals screed, attributing her passion for “children’s health” to her child’s experience with autism.Democrats are especially concerned that Kennedy could pull votes away from Biden, spoiling the election. Recent polling from Quinnipiac projected Kennedy could receive as much as 15% of the vote in a race involving Biden and Trump, amid limited enthusiasm for the candidates from the two major parties.One such defector was Marilyn Chin, a volunteer for Kennedy’s campaign recruiting voters outside the event. Chin, who is 71, said she voted Democratic for most of her life but was now supporting Kennedy.“Get out of the duopoly,” she said. “Don’t vote Republican, don’t vote Democrat, start looking for something else.”Kennedy will face an expensive, and uphill battle to get on the ballot in all 50 states, which will involve gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures. He has made it on to the ballot in only one state so far, Utah. Still, the Democratic National Committee has called Kennedy a “stalking horse” and said third-party candidates may have tipped the 2016 election to Trump.In a statement following Kennedy’s announcement, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign called him a “radical leftist” and an “environmental whack job” before stating his campaign would not get very far. The Democratic National Committee called Kennedy’s run a “spoiler campaign” and said it was dangerous for Republican donors to be propping up Kennedy during such a high-stakes election.Earlier this year, the DNC filed a federal election complaint accusing Kennedy and a political action committee backing his third-party bid of illegally colluding to qualify for the ballot in swing states crucial to Biden’s re-election. Kennedy’s campaign has denied breaching financial barriers between candidates and outside groups, which is prohibited by federal campaign law.The Democrats have also said that a major donor to American Values 2024, the Super Pac backing Kennedy, is Tim Mellon, a businessman who has also backed Trump.Shanahan told the New York Times she has contributed $4m to American Values 2024.The Bay Area entrepreneur is known in tech circles as the founder of ClearAccessIP, a startup that uses software to help companies manage and distribute patents and patent rights. But she gained notoriety after her 2018 marriage to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, one of the wealthiest people in the world. The couple’s divorce in 2022 drew extra scrutiny following a Wall Street Journal report that Shanahan had conducted an affair with the Tesla and X chief, Elon Musk. She has denied the allegations.In February, she helped finance a $5m campaign advertisement for Kennedy during the Super Bowl, which alluded to his uncle John F Kennedy’s successful 1960 White House run. The ad was denounced by Kennedy’s family, who have disavowed his campaign and his baseless theories on vaccines and the Covid pandemic, among other issues.Shanahan told the New York Times that she was not an anti-vaxxer, but has shared Kennedy’s discredited claims about the safety of vaccinations. At Tuesday’s event, she formally renounced any affiliation with the Democratic party, saying it had “lost its way”.“The Democratic party is supposed to be the party of compassion and peace, it is supposed to be the party of diplomacy and science,” she said. “While I know those ideals still abide within many Democrats, I want to point out that the party has lost its way. In its leadership, in its institutions, it has become interested in elitism, celebrity and winning at all costs, even if that means turning a blind eye on issues they all know to be true.”Kennedy’s anti-vaccination views drew protesters at Tuesday’s announcement, including Wendy Bloom, a registered nurse who has worked in pediatric cancer units for 37 years, who stood outside the Oakland convention center with pro-Biden and pro-vaccine signs.“Besides being anti-vaccines, he’s not pro-science, and anti-research,” she said. She also dismissed the choice of Shanahan as a running mate.“His choice of VP tells us everything we need to know,” Bloom said. “She has no experience. She’s just a wealthy individual who can help raise money. Voters deserve someone with experience.” More

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      Linda L Bean, LL Bean heiress who backed Trump, dies aged 82

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      Linda L Bean – a granddaughter of the famed outdoor retailer LL Bean who became an entrepreneur, philanthropist and Republican activist – has died. She was 82.Bean died on Saturday, her business manager, Veronika Carlson, confirmed in a written statement on Sunday. No cause was given.Her support for Donald Trump when he won the presidency in 2016 prompted some on the political left to call for a boycott of her family’s clothing company. But a statement from Carlson said Bean also “was known for her amazing work ethic, entrepreneurial spirit as well as her pride and dedication to her home state of Maine and LL Bean, the company her grandfather founded”.“Our hearts go out to her family and friends,” Carlson’s statement said.Bean’s grandfather, Leon Leonwood Bean, founded the company in 1912. It grew through its popular catalogue, offering durable products such as rubber-bottomed boots that came with a lifetime guarantee.Linda Bean served on the company’s board for nearly half a century. She also bought lobster dealerships, founded the Perfect Maine Lobster brand in 2007, and owned general stores, inns and vacation rentals on Maine’s central coast, where she lived in Port Clyde.She helped lead the effort to have Maine’s lobster industry certified as sustainable in 2013 by a London-based non-profit, the Marine Stewardship Council – a certification that was pulled in 2022 over concern about harm to whales.Her philanthropic efforts included supporting LifeFlight of Maine medical helicopters and the Maine Botanical Gardens at Boothbay, as well as promoting the life of the early 20th-century illustrator and artist NC Wyeth – the father of the famous painter Andrew Wyeth – and preserving the family’s properties.“Linda Bean loved the state of Maine. Its coastal communities, islands, and art, particularly by the Wyeths, had a special place in her heart,” the Republican US senator Susan Collins said in a written statement on Sunday. “Linda also was an astute businesswoman who promoted Maine lobster through her restaurants. Many a time while waiting for my plane in Portland, I had a cup of her famous lobster stew at her airport restaurant.”Bean was also a big donor to Republican causes and twice campaigned unsuccessfully for Congress, in 1988 and 1992. She ran as an opponent of abortion rights, gay rights legislation and gun control, and she believed in cutting taxes to spur the economy.She also supported efforts to repeal a Maine law outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation, and she urged the Department of Defense to overturn Obama-era policies allowing transgender individuals to serve in the military.In 2017, the Federal Election Commission said Bean made excessive contributions to a political action committee she bankrolled to support Trump’s presidential campaign. That prompted some liberal groups to call for a boycott of LL Bean – which she described as harassment by “a small kernel of hardcore bullies out on the left coast, west coast, in California, trying to control what we do, what we buy, what we sell in Maine”.Trump came to her defense – the Republican urged his supporters to buy the company’s products.“While her politics did not align with mine, Linda and I found common ground in our mutual love of our home state, of the coast of Maine and our working waterfronts, of Maine inspired art and of the perfect Maine lobster roll,” the state’s governor, Janet Mills, a Democrat, said in a written statement. “I enjoyed her company and admired her business acumen.”No information about survivors was immediately available. More

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      Say it with cash: Trump’s Valentine love letter to Melania is fundraising email

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      In a Valentine’s Day fundraising message, Donald Trump sought to demonstrate the depth of his love for Melania Trump, his third wife, by referring to his lengthy list of criminal charges.“Even after every single indictment, arrest and witch hunt, you never left my side,” the message said.The probable Republican presidential nominee faces four criminal indictments: for election subversion (13 state charges, four federal), retention of classified information (40, federal) and hush-money payments to an adult film star and director who claims a sexual affair (34, state).Stormy Daniels claims to have had sex with Trump in 2006, shortly after Melania gave birth to her son, Barron Trump, a claim Trump denies despite having arranged to pay Daniels $130,000 to be quiet during the 2016 election.Nor is that Trump’s only legal problem – or product of what he claims are witch-hunts mounted by his enemies – to do with matters of sex.Last month, Trump was on the wrong end of an $83.3m judgment in a defamation case arising from an allegation of rape, from the writer E Jean Carroll, that a judge said was “substantially true”.Carroll said Trump assaulted her in a New York department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. In a deposition, Trump memorably confused a picture of Carroll for a picture of Marla Maples, his second wife.And yet, despite it all, when it comes to his current wife – and the matter of raising campaign cash – Trump remains a determined softie.Under the headline “This is a Valentine’s Day letter from Donald J Trump”, the message sent out on Wednesday began: “Dear Melania. I love you!”It then took its unexpected turn.“Even after every single indictment, arrest and witch hunt, you never left my side. You’ve always supported me through everything. I wouldn’t be the man I am today without your guidance, kindness and warmth. You will always mean the world to me, Melania! From your husband with love, Donald J Trump.”Recipients who clicked on one of three big red invitations to “send your love” were directed to a page offering the chance to send a “personalised message” to Melania – and to donate to Trump’s campaign amounts ranging from $20.24 to $3,300 or “other”.Melania Trump has recently reappeared in public with her husband, after an absence believed related to the death of her mother, Amalija Knavs, last month. Donald Trump recently told Fox News his wife “wants to make America great again, too” and would “play a big role” in his campaign to return to power.“I think she’s going to be very active in the sense of being active,” Trump added. More