US politics

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Harris accuses Trump of playing ‘political games’ during US border visit

      by

      Kamala Harris accused Donald Trump of “playing political games” on immigration – his signature issue – as the vice-president sought to turn one of her biggest vulnerabilities into a political strength during a visit to the US-Mexico border on Friday.Speaking in the Arizona border town of Douglas, Harris declared the US both a “sovereign nation” and a “country of immigrants” and said as president, she would strengthen controls at the southern border, while working “to fix our broken system of immigration”.“I reject the false choice that suggests we must choose either between securing our border and creating a system that is orderly, safe and humane,” Harris said. “We can and we must do both.”She hammered Trump for derailing a sweeping bipartisan package that would have overhauled the federal immigration system, while providing additional resources to help hire more border patrol agents.“It should be in effect today, producing results, in real time right now,” Harris said, speaking on a stage framed by American flags and large blue posters that read “border security and stability”. “He prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”After that bill collapsed, the Biden administration announced new rules to temporarily halt asylum processing at the US southern border. Since then, arrests for border crossings between ports of entry have plummeted. In July, arrests dipped below levels not seen since Trump’s final months in office in 2020, though they ticked up slightly in August.As president, Harris said, she would take “further action to keep the border closed”, including stiffening the punishments for those who cross between ports of entry. She emphasized her support for “humane” and “orderly” policies, reminding Arizonans of the measures Trump took during his first term to curb illegal immigration.“He separated families, he ripped toddlers out of their mothers’ arms, put children in cages and tried to end protection of Dreamers,” she said in Douglas, a blue dot in the overwhelmingly red Cochise county.Before her remarks, Harris walked a stretch of barrier constructed during the Obama administration. In the sweltering triple-degree heat, she received a briefing from customs and border protection officials on efforts to stop the flow of fentanyl across the border.She also stopped by the Raul H Castro port of entry in Douglas, across from Agua Prieta, Mexico, which is slated to be expanded and modernized with grants from the bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law by Joe Biden.“They’ve got a tough job and they need, rightly, support to do their job,” Harris said afterward.Speaking to supporters at a manufacturing plant in Walker, Michigan, Trump boasted that Harris was “getting killed on the border” and blamed the Biden administration’s border policies for fueling high levels of migration during the first three years of his presidency.“It’s a crime what she did,” he said. “There’s no greater act of disloyalty than to extinguish the sovereignty of your own nation.”In her remarks, Harris said she understood the unique challenges and needs facing border communities like the one in Douglas, having served as the attorney general of neighboring California. She recalled touring trafficking tunnels used by smugglers and touted her work prosecuting international gangs and criminal organizations that smuggle guns, drugs and people across the border.Republicans would rather discuss her more recent assignment, as vice-president during a period of record migration when she was officially tasked with addressing the root causes of people coming north from Central America. On Friday, Republicans misleadingly accused her of being an absentee “border tsar” whose policies led to the situation at the border.Voters in Arizona consistently rank immigration – Trump’s signature issue – as a top concern this election cycle, often second only to the economy. A sizeable share of voters trust Trump more on immigration and border security, but Harris’s campaign believes it has made progress softening Democrats’ deficit on an issue seen as one of their biggest electoral vulnerabilities.The campaign has blanketed the airwaves with ads designed to blunt Trump’s attacks over her immigration record. On Friday, it launched a new ad in Arizona and other battleground states highlighting her pledge to hire thousands more border agents and stop fentanyl trafficking and human smuggling. “We need a leader with a real plan to fix the border,” a voiceover says.Less than six weeks before election day, polls show a tight race in Arizona, one of seven battleground states that will likely decide the election and the only one that touches the southern border.A Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll of swing states found Harris with a small lead in Arizona, while a New York Times/Siena College poll released on Monday found Trump opening a five-percentage point lead over Harris, marking a significant improvement from August when he trailed the vice-president by the same margin.Biden won Arizona by just over 10,400 votes in 2020, becoming the first Democrat to win the south-west state since Bill Clinton in 1996.Kris Mayes, the attorney general, who accompanied Harris throughout her visit on Friday, urged Arizonans not to sit the election out.“Races in Arizona can be close, take it from me,” Mayes said. In 2022, the Democrat won her race by 280 votes. More

    • 275 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Harris to call for tougher border action on Arizona visit; Trump threatens to prosecute Google for ‘bad stories’ – as it happened

      by

      Kamala Harris has arrived at the US-Mexico border in Arizona, where the vice-president was briefed by two customs and border protection officials.Harris stepped out of her motorcade on a dusty desert road outside Douglas, Arizona, and shook hands with two men, the Associated Press reported. Harris chatted with the uniformed agents as they walked along the rust-colored border wall in temperatures that neared 100F (38C).The section of the wall Harris is viewing was constructed during Barack Obama’s administration, in 2011-2012, according to the White House pool reporter.Harris’s conversation with the CBP officers was not audible to the pool reporter on scene. A White House official told him that Harris had “heard directly from CBP officials on their efforts to combat traffickers and transnational criminal organizations”.Kamala Harris delivered a speech on immigration policy, laying out the balance she wants to strike: what’s important to her about the US immigration system is that “it works in an orderly way, that it is humane and that it makes our country stronger”.Donald Trump threatened to prosecute Google for “displaying bad stories” about him. In the middle of a busy day of presidential campaign events in Michigan, a key swing state, Donald Trump posted on his social media platform that, if elected president, he plans to prosecute Google for, he alleged, “only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J Trump” while “only revealing Good stories about Kamala Harris”.And, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the state of Alabama for last-minute voter purges. The justice department is suing Alabama for what it alleges is an illegal attempt to remove voters from the rolls too close to November’s election.Here’s what else happened today:

      Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke after his meeting in New York with Donald Trump and said the two men had a “very productive” talk. Ukraine’s president said the two “thoroughly reviewed” the situation in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion more than two-and-a-half years ago, Reuters reports.

      In a video address on Friday, the FBI director, Christopher Wray, spoke of the indictment of three Iranian nationals for their role in a “wide-ranging hacking campaign sponsored by the government of Iran”. Wray said: “These individuals, employees of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, targeted a US political campaign, current and former US officials, and members of the American media, all in an attempt to sow discord and undermine our democracy.”

      Kamala Harris arrived in Tucson, Arizona, from Washington DC for election campaign events, including a visit to the US-Mexico border.

      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are tied among voters in North Carolina, a new poll shows. The CNN poll, released today and conducted from 20 to 25 September, shows Harris and Trump both receiving 48% of support among likely voters in North Carolina.

      Eric Adams, the New York City mayor, pleaded not guilty to corruption charges when he appeared in court in Manhattan. He denies federal bribery and fraud charges. The mayor’s arraignment began just after noon local time at a federal courthouse in New York. It is the first time that a sitting mayor of the city has been charged with crimes.
      After Kamala Harris spoke about her policies related to the southern border during a speech in Douglas, Arizona, the National Border Patrol Council, the labor union representing the US border patrol, said that Harris “has ignored the border problem she created for over three years”.“She goes down there for 20 minutes for a photo op and decides to repeat some of the things the NPBC has said before. But again, where has she been the last 3 1/2 years?” the union wrote on X, repeating a Trump talking point.Google followed up on Donald Trump’s claim that the search engine is illegally using a system to only reveal bad stories about him and good stories about Kamala Harris by issuing a statement:
      Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries,.
      Following up on a report by Fox News, Google continued: “This report looked at a single rare search term on a single day a few weeks ago, and even for that search, both candidates’ websites ranked in the top results on Google.”Hugo Lowell in Washington dug into these claims:The progressive advocacy group Center for American Progress Action Fund reacted to Harris’s speech tonight.“Donald Trump’s failed leadership fanned the flames of hate and did nothing to actually fix the problems at the border,” the group posted on X.During her speech, Harris said Trump made the challenges at the border worse.“He separated families, he ripped toddlers out of their mothers’ arms, put children in cages, and tried to end protection of Dreamers,” Harris said.Here’s some more in-depth reporting from the Associated Press, capturing how the reality of what is happening at the border has changed dramatically in the past few months, even as the political rhetoric (Trump’s in particular) really hasn’t:
      As midnight nears, the lights of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, fill the sky on the silent banks of the Rio Grande. A few months ago, hundreds of asylum-seeking families, including crying toddlers, waited for an opening to crawl through razor wire from Juarez into El Paso.
      No one is waiting there now.
      Nearly 500 miles away, in the border city of Eagle Pass, large groups of migrants that were once commonplace are rarely seen on the riverbanks these days.
      In McAllen, at the other end of the Texas border, two Border Patrol agents scan fields for five hours without encountering a single migrant.
      It’s a return to relative calm after an unprecedented surge of immigrants through the southern border in recent years. But no one would know that listening to Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump talking about border enforcement at dueling presidential campaign events. And no one would know from the rate at which Texas is spending on a border crackdown called Operation Lone Star – $11 billion since 2021.
      Read the full Associated Press article here.If you’re looking to put both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s claims about what’s happening at the US-Mexico border in context, this article from August is a good place to start:Here’s how Hamed Aleaziz, a longtime immigration reporter, summed up the substance of Harris’s immigration policy today for the New York Times:
      In a sign of how the politics of immigration have changed, Harris is promoting a policy that resembles a Trump-era effort to ban asylum for those who cross the border illegally. Harris says that she understands that people are desperate to come into the United States, but that the system must be ‘orderly.’
      In the same speech, Harris slammed Trump for separating immigrant children from their families and putting “children in cages”, and called for a gentler rhetoric about immigrants, and a focus on solutions, rather than blame and attacks.Harris is getting big cheers from a Democratic audience as she shifts from talking about tough enforcement and Congress’s failures to pass immigration reform to talking about legal paths to citizenship for immigrants who have been in the US for years, the importance of helping “Dreamers” – undocumented young people who came to the US as children – and the many contributions of immigrant farm workers.Harris is repeating a central part of her immigration rhetoric: that Donald Trump deliberately torpedoed a bipartisan immigration reform bill because “he prefers to run on a problem than fixing a problem.”Harris’s campaign, like the Biden administration previously, is highlighting Mitch McConnell’s own remarks about Trump’s influence on the legislation.The White House has been using this approach to the immigration issue since early this year: “Congressional Republicans do not care about securing the border or fixing America’s broken immigration system,” Biden said in a statement in early 2024. “If they did, they would have voted for the toughest border enforcement in history.”As Kamala Harris begins her speech on immigration policy, she lays out the balance she wants to strike: what’s important to her about the US immigration system is that “it works in an orderly way, that it is humane and that it makes our country stronger”.Among the people who introduced Kamala Harris, who is beginning her remarks on immigration and border policy, was Theresa Guerrero, a woman from Tucson, Arizona, who has become an activist after her son, Jacob, died of a fentanyl overdose.Trump’s campaign also previously featured remarks, during the Republican national convention, from a parent of a child lost to fentanyl.The Harris campaign is already attacking Donald Trump using a video of his comments from Warren, Michigan, tonight, talking about tariffs and how prosperous the US was in the 1890s.Trump has been making the case for high taxes on imported goods, which Congressional Republicans who oppose tariffs hope they can “water down” if he’s elected, the Washington Post reported yesterday.Mark Kelly, the US senator from Arizona, has been shepherding Harris during her visit to the border town of Douglas on Friday.Kelly began his remarks by sending greetings from his wife, the former Arizona representative Gabby Giffords, setting off a round of cheers for the beloved former representative.He retold the story of negotiating the bipartisan border deal in Congress only to see Trump torpedo the package by pressuring Republican senators to reject it.“This is the most hypocritical thing I’ve seen in three-and-a-half years in Washington,” Kelly said, calling the plan “the deal that Arizona needs”. Harris has vowed to revive the bill, if elected, and said she would have signed it into law.Kelly ended his remarks by saying that the playbook for winning in November was simple: hard work.“This is not rocket science. If it was, I could help,” the former astronaut quipped, as he campaigned for the vice-president.Biden embraced a more Trump-like border policy. Trump still claims Harris is weak.Some context, as we wait for Harris to give a campaign speech in the border town of Douglas, Arizona, where she is expected to call for tougher action at the US border with Mexico:

      Joe Biden and Kamala Harris made criticism of Trump’s harsh immigration policies part of their bid for the White House in 2020. But the Democratic administration has increasingly moved right on immigration, leading to criticisms that, though Biden certainly does not verbally attack and revile immigrants as Trump does, Biden’s actual policy regarding the US-Mexico border made him a kind of Trump 2.0.

      This past June, Biden signed an executive order limiting the number of asylum seekers admitted at the US-Mexico border, a policy that that split Democrats, and that some advocates said “will only cause suffering.” The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups sued the Biden administration over the policy.

      Since June, migrant crossings have plunged, though Democrats are asking: at what price?

      Harris, who supported decriminalizing undocumented border crossings in 2019 during her brief presidential run, has moved away from that stance in her new campaign, also striking a more law-and-order tone, which she is expected to continue in her border policy speech today.

      In contrast with Biden or Harris, Trump’s current immigration policy is a pledge to carry out “mass deportations”, which he has promised will be the largest in US history. That is expected to include a legally dubious roundup of up to 11 million people, “deployments of military and police units, and the creation of vast detention camps along the southern border”.

      Trump has made political attacks against Harris, blaming her for the border crisis, a central part of his campaign against her. Polls have suggested US voters trust Trump more than Harris on immigration.

      The global picture: in the US, as in the UK and Europe, wealthy democracies have spent decades trying to deter immigrants from coming across their borders to seek a better life by making border crossings increasingly surveilled, militarized and deadly. This has not, broadly speaking, stopped people from continuing to migrate in hopes of finding safer lives for themselves and their families, particularly as wars, climate change and other crises provide reasons to seek asylum elsewhere. But deterrence policies do mean that children and adult attempting to migrate are more likely to die because of the conditions that wealthy countries create at their borders, in hopes of persuading people that it’s too dangerous to migrate.
      A Reuters/Ipsos poll last month found that 43% of voters favored Trump on the issue of immigration and 33% favored Harris, while 24% either didn’t know, chose someone else or declined to answer, Reuters reports.Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s town hall in Warren, Michigan, is running about an hour behind schedule, the New York Times reports. (The Detroit Free Press has a livestream here, should you wish to follow along.)PBS also has a livestream of Kamala Harris’s expected campaign remarks on border policy in Douglas, Arizona, that will go live in about a half-hour.Asked what she had learned from her conversation with customs and border protection officials, Kamala Harris told today’s White House pool reporter:
      They’ve got a tough job and they need, rightly, support to do their job. They are very dedicated. And so I’m here to talk with them about what we can continue to do to support them. And also thank them for the hard work they do. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      New York mayor Eric Adams pleads not guilty to federal corruption charges

      by

      Eric Adams, the embattled Democratic mayor of New York City, who was indicted on federal criminal charges in an unprecedented scene for a sitting mayor of the city, pleaded not guilty in court in Manhattan early on Friday afternoon.The mayor arrived at court on Friday morning hours ahead of a scheduled arraignment, accused of accepting illegal campaign contributions and free overseas trips from foreign actors seeking influence.“I am not guilty, your honor,” Adams said, looking solemnly at Judge Katharine Parker.Adams was released on the condition that he not contact any witnesses or people described in the indictment. Prosecutors said they would provide his lawyer with a list of names.Adams is allowed to speak with members of his family and staff but not about anything pertaining to the allegations, Parker said, warning he could face additional charges and punishment if he were to engage in witness tampering or intimidation.Adams left the courtroom without commenting. He smiled at a court officer but ignored the rows of reporters he passed on his way out. Afterwards, Adams stood silently outside the courthouse while his lawyer, Alex Spiro, railed against the charges to a crowd of cameras and onlookers who exchanged shouts of “Free Eric!” and “Lock him up!”“This isn’t even a real case. This is the airline upgrade corruption case,” Spiro said.Adams, 64, is due back in court on Wednesday for a conference before US district judge Dale E Ho, who will preside over the case going forward.In court for about 18 minutes, Adams sat stoically with his hands folded in his lap as Parker read the charges aloud, her sturdy delivery underscoring the gravity of the case.An indictment unsealed on Thursday included five criminal counts. US prosecutors allege that before and during his term as mayor, Adams “sought and accepted improper valuable benefits, such as luxury international travel, including from wealthy foreign businesspeople and at least one Turkish government official seeking to gain influence over him”.The charges include conspiracy to commit wire fraud and to receive campaign contributions by foreign nationals, wire fraud, and solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national.The complaint focuses on trips Adams and his partner took to Turkey, India and Ghana on Turkish Airlines, sometimes staying in luxury hotels, that as an elected official he should have disclosed to the government, and campaign contributions made by Turkish officials through a system of “straw” donors.Adams “did not disclose the travel benefits he had obtained in annual financial disclosures he was required to file as a New York City employee”, the government alleges. “Sometimes, Adams agreed to pay a nominal fee to create the appearance of having paid for travel that was in fact heavily discounted.”In return, prosecutors said, Adams did favors for his patrons. That included helping Turkey get fire department approvals to open a new diplomatic tower in Manhattan, despite concerns about its fire safety system, prosecutors said.Adams says he is innocent. His lawyer has said it was neither unusual nor improper for a government official to accept some travel perks. The mayor has denied ever knowingly accepting an illegal campaign contribution and said any help he gave people navigating the city’s bureaucracy was just part of doing his job.Meanwhile, the local news outlet PIX11 reported that investigators had raided the home of Adams’s chief adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, on Friday and confiscated electronic devices. PIX11 said Lewis-Martin had her phones seized by the Manhattan district attorney’s office when she arrived back from Japan at JFK airport also on Friday morning.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Vance to talk at tour hosted by ‘prophet’ who thinks Harris practices witchcraft

      by

      JD Vance will speak at an event on Saturday hosted by the self-styled prophet and political extremist Lance Wallnau, who has claimed Kamala Harris practices witchcraft and has written that the US is headed toward bloody internal conflict.The campaign announced earlier this week that the Republican vice-presidential candidate will participate in a “town hall” as part of the Courage tour, a traveling pro-Trump tent revival, during a stop in Monroeville, Pennsylvania.Wallnau, who hosts the tour and broadcasts its speakers on his online show – drawing hundreds in-person and sometimes tens of thousands virtually – is a proponent of the “seven mountains” mandate, which commands Christians to seek leadership in seven key areas of society – the church, the education system, the family, the media, the arts, business and government.He is also a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a movement that features modern-day apostles and has taken hold in particular in non-denominational charismatic churches that embrace faith healing and believe that the Holy Spirit can speak directly through believers in the form of speaking in tongues and prophesy. These religious spaces often also practice “deliverance ministry” and “spiritual warfare” to cleanse people of demonic entities.Karrie Gaspard-Hogewood, a scholar whose research focuses on such groups, noted that NAR-aligned practitioners engage in a unique form of “spiritual warfare” – fighting malign forces in not only individuals who are believed to be inhabited by a malign entity, but also entire geographic areas.“Spiritual warfare is the belief that a demon has taken up residence and is controlling anything from a large geographic space to a culture, to the White House or the supreme court,” said Gaspard-Hogewood.Extremism researchers worry that spiritual warfare, which is by definition waged in the supernatural realm, could become dangerous if interpreted excessively literally. On January 6, spiritual warriors affiliated with the Jericho March rallied at the Capitol to protest against the election results, engaging in a form of spiritual warfare on the National Mall. Wallnau, who himself prophesied that Trump would win the 2016 election and rejected the outcome when he didn’t win again in 2020, doubled down on his position at a stop of the Courage tour in Wisconsin.“January 6 was not an insurrection – it was an election fraud intervention!” Wallnau exclaimed to the roaring crowd.Wallnau has also written in his book, God’s Chaos Candidate: Donald J Trump and the American Unraveling, that he believes the United States is headed toward a potentially bloody clash – a “fiery trial” that will come “both to believers and nations”. In his book, in which he also claims to have met with Trump on multiple occasions, Wallnau writes that the US is entering a “crucible”, which will involve “a ‘conflict’ of ideologies, often arms, to determine a victor in the power clash”.The Courage tour has made stops in Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia.The inclusion of Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, in the tour highlights the Trump campaign’s increasing alignment with a movement on the religious right that seeks to subordinate US government and society to Christian doctrine.A typical day at the Courage tour involves faith healing and music in the morning, followed by a series of speakers preaching about the scourge of secular society and espousing their opposition to LGBTQ+ inclusion. Trump-aligned organizations including TPUSA Faith and America First Policy Institute have had a presence on the tour handing out pamphlets and posting up at stands outside the tent.Vance’s speech marks the first time the Trump campaign has officially linked with the tour. In response to a request for comment about Vance’s participation in the Courage tour, a Trump campaign spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, did not directly comment on Wallnau or Vance’s participation in the event, but wrote that neither “President Trump, nor any of his supporters, ever engaged in an alleged ‘insurrection’.”Wallnau did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Republicans have long enjoyed the support of conservative, and in particular, evangelical Christians. In 2016, Trump, whose profile as a twice-divorced billionaire who has faced multiple accusations of sexual assault, managed to maintain that alliance by assuring his presidency would represent the Christian right through conservative judicial appointments. Trump made good on his promise, ushering in an ultraconservative supreme court, which in 2022 overturned Roe v Wade – delivering opponents of abortion a stunning win.Since 2020, a burgeoning movement of evangelical leaders who seek to separate the church from Maga politics could threaten that alliance. If Trump is able to hold on to those voters and turn out enough conservative Christians at the polls, he could win back the White House.With its 19 electoral votes, Pennsylvania could be a make-or-break state for Harris and Trump. Some polling shows Kamala Harris holding a narrow lead over Trump in the state; other polls suggest the candidates are virtually tied there.Vance’s participation in the Courage tour could alienate some. The campaign is probably betting the support he could shore up from rightwing Christians there will outweigh the risk of appearing at an event with extremist overtones. More

    • 238 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      It’s not just Trump v Harris: America’s men and women are also locked in battle now | Jonathan Freedland

      by

      I hesitate to give JD Vance any ideas, but if American women were denied the vote, Donald Trump would be restored to the White House in a landslide. Similarly, if men were removed from the franchise, Kamala Harris would be swept into the Oval Office in an even bigger earthquake. As it is, the two are clashing in an election marked by a gulf so wide, the phrase “gender gap” doesn’t do it justice. In ways that go deeper than mere politics, and with implications for the world beyond the US, the presidential election is increasingly looking like a war between men and women.The numbers are stunning. An NBC poll this week found men favour Trump over Harris by 12 points, 52% to 40%. Among women, Harris leads Trump by 21 points: 58% to 37%. Put the two together and you have a gender chasm of 33 points. Men may not be from Mars and women may not be from Venus, but when it comes to choosing a US president, they are on different planets.What explains it? The most obvious answer is that Trump’s record, including a court ruling that he had committed rape and his own admission of serial sexual assault, boasting that he grabbed women “by the pussy”, makes him repellent to tens of millions of women, none of that reduced by appointing a sidekick who speaks of “childless cat ladies”. Similar explanatory power attaches to the 2022 decision by the supreme court, in the Dobbs case, to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion. Since then, it’s been up to the 50 states whether to grant or withhold that right from women, and 22 of them have chosen to deny it. That shift is on Trump, who nominated three of the six supreme court judges who made the Dobbs decision, an achievement of which he has said he is “proud”.But while the move delighted Trump’s evangelical Christian supporters, it has cost him dear. Dobbs did not just anger American women, it mobilised them. In the midterm elections of 2022, as high inflation fuelled disaffection with Joe Biden, Republicans assumed they would ride a “red wave” to victory. That wave never came, in part because women, furious at the court’s ruling and Republicans’ part in it, turned out in big numbers to vote against them. And while Biden has never been fully comfortable speaking about abortion, Dobbs is widely regarded as the moment Harris found her voice as a national figure.Still, the long-running battle over abortion rights only explains one side of the gender divide. Less obvious is that, as much as women are pulling away from Trump, large numbers of men, especially young men, are drawn towards him.Here, the numbers are even more striking. Attitude surveys show that women between the ages of 18 and 29 are the most progressive group in US history. Meanwhile, a majority of men the same age back Donald Trump. A poll of six battleground states last month found among gen Z voters a gender gulf of 51 points.Part of it is explained by Trump’s trade in swaggering machismo, offering a kind of cartoonish manliness. In recent months that part of his act has only got louder. His supporters always wore T-shirts showing Trump’s face superimposed on a ripped, Rambo-style body, but now they have the image of his bloodied face, fist pumped in the air, seconds after the assassination attempt on him in July, as he urged his followers to “Fight, fight, fight!”There is nothing subtle about this. At his party convention in Milwaukee he was introduced by wrestler Hulk Hogan and the man behind the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Bear in mind that one study of young people around the world found that while young women were most concerned about issues such as “sexual harassment, domestic violence, child abuse and mental health”, young men were more focused on “competition, bravery, and honour”.In his own crude way, Trump speaks to that. I saw it for myself earlier this year in New Hampshire, where I encountered young male voters proudly declaring they were voting for “Donald J Trump”, all but saluting as they pronounced that middle initial.The performative masculinity includes a strong element of defiance. Trump’s disregard for the norms and etiquette that govern most politicians shows a contempt for strictures that are seen as constraining men in particular. When he breaks the rules, it’s often men who cheer because they feel those rules shackle them too – and they’re sick of being told off. As one 20-year-old Trump voter complained to the New York Times, US society no longer “lets boys be boys”. As he put it: “Men my age, from a very young age we were told, ‘You’re not supposed to do this, you’re not supposed to do that, you’re just supposed to sit here and be quiet.’” Trump is anything but quiet.Running alongside all this is the strong conviction that increased diversity and advances for women pose a threat to men. A third of men who back Trump believe that gains for women have come at men’s expense, a figure that rises to 40% among men under-50 who support the former president. This resentment surfaces in the casual misogyny that is a Trump tic, and which informs the “manosphere” that he is doing so much to cultivate: the realm of podcasters and social media influencers that delights in a blend of old school sexism and mocking humour that fits Trump perfectly.Toxic as those voices might be, they succeed because the resentment they feed on is real. If plenty of young American men feel they’re getting left behind, that’s because on multiple key measures they are. As the scholar Richard Reeves has set out, American boys are trailing behind girls whether in readiness to start elementary school or graduation from university. Men have lost their place as the default family breadwinner, and watched as many of the jobs they once regarded as their own, including manual work requiring no degree, have vanished. When it comes to finding a partner, or even just having friends, men lag behind.These are trends affecting all men, which might help explain why Trump has made unexpected inroads not only with non-graduate white men, but also with men of colour, especially the young in both groups. They feel beleaguered – and see in Trump someone who sees them.Now, there’s a good chance that the gender chasm will ultimately help Harris. Women tend to vote in greater numbers than men, and they’re with her. But polls have a habit of underestimating Trump and there could be an army of young men, out of pollsters’ reach, who feel that a woman in the Oval Office would be one feminist advance too many. The Taylor Swift endorsement is welcome, but the Harris campaign could do with a thumbs-up from someone with serious influence over young men. It doesn’t help that the “who we serve” page of the Democrats’ own website features a long list of groups, including women, but makes no equivalent offer to men.I don’t expect any of this came up when Keir Starmer met Trump this week, but there is a warning here that should sound far beyond America’s shores. As one US thinktank puts it: “History is littered with examples of nations suffering from the consequences of young men finding themselves idle without purpose.” The gender gap is becoming dangerously wide. It must not become an abyss.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      MyPillow founder Mike Lindell denies nod to neo-Nazis in new ad campaign

      by

      The MyPillow company and its founder, Mike Lindell, a far-right influencer and acolyte of Donald Trump, are continuing to run a promotion despite criticism that it utilizes numerical symbols associated with neo-Nazism.The company has been touting a promotion for a pillow with a sale price of $14.88 and it was still on offer on Friday morning.Apart from being an odd price on its face, the Anti-Defamation League has noted that “1488” is a numeric hate symbol – “14” being a nod to the “14 Words” white supremacist slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” and “88” being a code for “Heil Hitler”, as H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.The company first introduced the promotion on 20 September and has continued to post about it on X, despite users on social media pointing its association with neo-Nazis.Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow for the American Immigration Council, pointed out on X a day after the first MyPillow post about the promotion that it mirrored the numeric hate symbol.A post from Seth Cotlar, a professor of history at Willamette University, on Bluesky said the promotion was a “disturbing wink at Nazis, wrapped in the seemingly innocuous, plausibly deniable form of an advertisement”.“I doubt Lindell is behind this or would ever get the reference, but that doesn’t really matter,” Cotlar wrote.Neo-Nazi groups have worn the “88” in public demonstrations, like one in September of last year in Orlando, Florida, where a group of neo-Nazi demonstrators wearing masks and red shirts and waving swastika flags were seen marching through an Orlando suburb.When asked by the New York Post about the promotion, Lindell denied the allegations that the price is associated with the hate symbol and dismissed it as another attack on his company.“I have no idea what this is all about,” Lindell told the New York Post. “We’ve done this many times before. It had nothing to do with whatever you guys are trying to make it out to be.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn the conservative talkshow FlashPoint, Lindell said the company used “a bunch of price points” ending with $0.88, like $19.88, $18.88.“Kind of like Walmart does when they have a sale,” he said.The pillow company, founded by Lindell in 2009, has been mired in controversy over the last few years as Lindell became a far-right influencer after the 2020 election. Lindel has promoted conspiracy theories, including a fake cure for Covid and that the 2020 election was stolen, and is a staunch supporter of Donald Trump.Lindell is facing a $1.3bn lawsuit from voting machine manufacturer Dominion for making defamatory false statements about the company to promote his pillows.Lindell is facing another lawsuit from delivery company DHL for $800,000 of unpaid bills. Companies like Wayfair and Kohl’s stopped selling MyPillow in 2021, citing poor sales. More

    • 188 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘She’s our vision of the future’: Black Nevadans rallying for Harris hope to make history

      by

      Las Vegas’s historic Westside has long been celebrated for its Black community’s entrepreneurship, activism and resilience. The neighborhood became “historic” when America’s first racially integrated casino, the Moulin Rouge, opened in 1955, employing Black card dealers and chorus line dancers, and welcoming singers such as Sammy Davis Jr and Ella Fitzgerald to not only perform, but to dine and gamble. Today, campaign organizers for Kamala Harris hope the community will play a history-making role again in November.The 2024 presidential election could hinge on how Nevada swings. To win the key battleground state, Democrats will have to run up the score in Las Vegas to overcome deficits in rural counties and the evenly divided electorate in Reno.About 10% of the state’s population identifies as Black or African American, a majority of whom live in the Las Vegas Valley. According to the Harris campaign, this subset is fired up, and turnout and enthusiasm in the critical Democratic constituency may make a difference.“It’s been pandemonium,” says Ishmael Carroll, the campaign’s regional political director focused on outreach to southern Nevada’s Black community. “I’ve been inundated with calls, texts, emails. It’s complete excitement. In previous elections I had to go find people. People are calling me now first thing in the morning, late at night – ‘How can I be involved? How can I participate? What can I do to help?’“I think they identify the importance of this moment in our history,” Carroll adds.Lya Harvey, a 52-year-old nurse practitioner, is one of those first-time volunteers. Though she always votes, she had never attended rallies, volunteered or donated to a campaign before, she said.“I’m really not that into politics, but given the situation right now between the two parties, I think it’s necessary to be out here getting involved,” she says. She’s tired of the “mean and nasty” attacks that have divided communities and contributed to dysfunction in Washington.View image in fullscreen“We’ve always had Democrats and Republicans and different views,” Harvey adds. “But right, I don’t think we can deal with any problems until we deal with [the division].”Nevada’s winner has gone on to the White House in 10 of the past 12 presidential elections. Democrats enjoy a winning streak in the battleground state that goes back four election cycles, to Barack Obama’s double-digit victory in 2008. But each of those wins was tighter than the last, and though Joe Biden narrowly defeated Donald Trump here in 2020, Trump held a significant lead in the polls of their expected rematch, contributing to Biden’s decision to end his re-election bid for lack of a viable path to victory.Harris’s Sun belt strategy to challenge Trump in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada has its strongest chance of a win here, according to current polling estimates.Daniele Monroe-Moreno, a Nevada assemblywoman and chair of the Nevada state Democratic party, says the reasons for Harris’s appeal in the Westside community are multifold. It’s a diverse city with multicultural families that see themselves, their friends and neighbors in Harris’s narrative, she said, which matches their “vision of the future”.“We’re Black, Native American, Hispanic and AAPI all in my family,” Monroe-Moreno shares. “But we’re also straight, gay, bi, Christian, Jewish and Muslim, so when I talk about ‘the community’, I talk about all of us, because it takes all of us working together for a better future. And I believe the excitement we’re seeing with Kamala Harris is that there are so many families like mine that see her and Tim Walz, who is like that guy next door who mows the lawn for the senior who can’t do it any more … They see Kamala and Tim as people they know and can personally attach themselves to.”Volunteers say they’ve been encouraged by voters’ responses to Harris and Walz’s proposals. The anxieties that Las Vegas organizers and volunteers “hear at the doors”, as they say, are consistent all across Nevada. The state’s education system isn’t preparing children for success. Rent and home prices are through the roof. Essential items like food and gas are frustratingly expensive.Harris’s effort to distance herself from criticisms of the Biden administration’s handling of the economy has included plans that seem tailored for door-to-door canvassers to assuage skeptical voters. There is the promise to build 3m new homes over four years. Tax credits for parents and small business owners. A plan to investigate corporations that engage in price-gouging on groceries.There’s also clear excitement for a younger, vibes-ier candidate who provides a striking contrast to Trump. There’s fresh hope that she can actually win a race that once looked like a Democratic death march. And then there’s the opportunity to shatter what Hillary Clinton often referred to as the “ultimate glass ceiling”.Harris rarely acknowledges the chance to overcome centuries of biases and oppression that have prevented a woman of color from representing one of the two major political parties as the presidential nominee. She may fear hearing the same attack lines Clinton faced about being driven more by personal legacy than by the kitchen table issues voters ultimately prioritize. Still, to borrow a famous Bidenism: this is a big fucking deal.Being one ballot away from electing the first Black Indian American female president has those communities fired up, along with Democrats who value diverse representation in positions of power.“You can see she actually cares about people,” Harvey, the first-time volunteer, says, “and being a Black woman – and I’m a Black woman – she understands that it’s about a lot more than just being a politician.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHer T-shirt suggests a new slogan: “kaMALA: Make America Laugh Again”. If Harris succeeds, historians will note that joy and humor proved surprisingly effective in galvanizing support against the perceived threat of Maga authoritarianism.There are nonpartisan voters in Las Vegas’s historic Westside who would welcome courtship from Republicans. Brian Harris, 64, founder of the Independent Black Voters group on Facebook, says: “It’s not about the party, it’s about the agenda.”There’s one problem, however. “Until Republicans get rid of the white nationalism, I can’t support them,” he says. “If they stop being the party of Trump and become conservative, I’ll talk to them. And if there are good people, they may get endorsed by us, but it comes down to us picking what’s best for us.”What about the complaints that Democrats only show up every four years when they need the Black community’s vote?Carroll, the Democrats’ regional director, says he grew up in the historic Westside and has been organizing here for years. All the campaign’s outreach teams, he adds, are led by individuals with deep community ties and in partnership with neighborhood non-profits and small business owners who host events.Those include Souls to the Polls gatherings in the Baptist community, neighborhood block parties and a weekly roundtable discussion at the Westside Oasis bar and restaurant.A registered independent, Terry Adams, Westside Oasis’s owner, participates in these discussions in which voters air concerns, analyze the issues and share research on news-making items like Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s proposed agenda for a second Trump term.View image in fullscreenThough the event is called Black Voices of Las Vegas, Adams proudly shares that often a majority of the attendees are white women. “This is for everybody,” he says, adding that it’s his civic duty to provide space for the event. “It’s the principles of the United States of America that matter. That’s what everybody strives for.”Longtime Democratic activists are also turning out with excitement to rally support for a Harris presidency. La Toya Laymon, 49, volunteers in every election. She was raised to understand that if you don’t like the way things are, you need to step up and get involved, she said. Her mother was a freedom fighter in Mississippi who was arrested at age 14 for demonstrating for equal rights and detained for three days afterward in a boxcar.“How could I not fight?” Laymon says. “I am her walking dream.”As a human resources professional, she feels frustrated by efforts to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programs. As a woman, she feels disturbed that the right to an abortion was won and lost during her lifetime.“A lot of people don’t understand the gravity [of elections] because they are reaping the benefits of people like my mother and my grandparents,” Laymon says. “This election is just because we didn’t do the job in 2016, and now everyone is like, ‘OK, who is going to get us back on track to democracy? Kamala Harris is that person.’” More

    • 213 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      This is the beginning of Eric Adams’ fall from power as New York mayor | Ross Barkan

      by

      For the first time in the modern history of New York City, a sitting mayor has been indicted.Eric Adams will now know the fate of Donald Trump – to be indicted and possibly convicted in a Manhattan courtroom. Damian Williams, the US attorney for the southern district, has unsealed a 57-page indictment that accused Adams of performing favors for Turkish foreign nationals after accepting more than $100,000 in international plane tickets and accommodations, as well as soliciting illegal donations from them. These donations generated public matching funds for his mayoral campaign in 2021.This indictment, it should be noted, was related to one of at least four possible federal probes into the Adams administration. His police commissioner and top counsel have already resigned, and his schools chancellor – FBI agents seized his phone recently – announced that he is stepping down at the end of the year.City hall is in chaos. All of this, given Adams’ history, was arguably foreseeable.Before Adams was a mayor, he was a Brooklyn borough president and state senator who courted controversy. Corruption clouds followed him. Until now, he was never indicted. Until now, he always found a way to survive.If he and Trump have much that separates them – Adams, a Democrat, is a child of the Black working class – there are also striking commonalities. Both grew up in Queens, an outer borough of New York City. Both talk tough, revel in political combat and enjoy, even more, playing the martyr. In their political and personal conduct, they are remarkably brazen.They do not give in. They do not apologize.Neither care terribly about governing, either. To this day, Trump cannot explain any federal policy adequately. He was not able to sketch the outlines of a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act during his debate with Kamala Harris. He only wants to gut federal bureaucracies, not manage or bolster them.As mayor, Adams has preferred the prestige and the glitz of the office to the actual work of formulating policy initiatives. The municipal government has bled top talent and agencies are stuffed with patronage hires. His achievements, at best, are small bore.His recent predecessors – Bill de Blasio and Michael Bloomberg – could boast of great changes they brought to New York City, like a new universal prekindergarten program or popular waterfront parks. They left behind tangible legacies. They had, above all, governing visions.Unlike Trump, Adams cannot survive an indictment. Either he will resign or he will lose in the Democratic primary next year. His poll numbers, long before the indictment came, were cratering, and they are only bound to fall more. His base has shrunk and Democrats want him gone.Kathy Hochul, the New York governor, has the power to remove him from office but probably won’t. She remains something of an Adams ally and will probably fret the optics of a white governor dragging a Black mayor from office – especially when he hasn’t yet been convicted of a crime.What will happen, instead, is that Adams will drag this out as long as possible. He might eventually cave to pressure from the US attorney’s office and cut a deal with Williams to dodge prison time. Or he’ll battle on to a trial, and force New Yorkers to endure the spectacle of their mayor in a courtroom. Trump had the presidency to protect him from many criminal charges. Adams enjoys no constitutional privileges or loopholes.If Adam does resign soon enough before the Democratic primary next year, there will be a non-partisan special election to replace him. There has never been a mayoral special election before. It will not be restricted to registered Democrats; ranked-choice voting, where voters can pick up to five candidates, will be employed.The disgraced former governor, Andrew Cuomo, is a rumored candidate, hoping to seek redemption from the sexual harassment scandal that forced him from power. Other prominent Democrats in New York City include Brad Lander, the city comptroller, and Jumaane Williams, who as public advocate would become acting mayor if Adams resigns. A Republican or two may try for city hall as well.They will all hope to forget the Eric Adams years ever happened.

      Ross Barkan is a writer based in New York More