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      Here is what will happen on day one of Trump’s presidency, according to Project 2025 | Daniel Martinez HoSang

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      It’s a cold day in Washington DC in late January 2025. Though Donald Trump has lost the popular vote for a third consecutive election, his narrow capture of the electoral college has delivered the presidency.During the campaign, Trump offered some symbolic gestures to distance himself from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led policy blueprint for the next Republican administration, matched with a database of conservative personnel to execute those plans. “Personnel is politics,” they explain.But with Republicans now holding bare majorities in both chambers of Congress, the gloves come off. As Trump utters the last phrase of the oath of office – “so help me God” – the first phase of what Project 2025’s authors call “the playbook” begins.First come the firings. Thousands of federal, non-partisan civil servants –environmental and food safety regulators; authorities in disaster relief coordination; attorneys overseeing anti-discrimination policies in housing, education and employment; medical and scientific researchers – receive immediate layoff notices. Many will not be replaced, as entire federal programs and agencies are shuttered. The new personnel that do arrive come from conservative thinktanks, or are rightwing activists who applied through the Project 2025 application database. Political cronyism is now the official hiring policy of the US federal government.Next come the roundups. As drafted by the Maga nativist-in-chief Stephen Miller, a broad range of law enforcement, from the national guard to state and local police are deputized for a new deportation army. Sweeps of neighborhoods and businesses take aim at blue states and cities, but general terror is their intended goal. Detention centers are established on military bases and federal facilities with quick access to airfields to execute mass removals. Nearly a million lawfully present immigrants are stripped of their legal protections, subjecting them to immediate deportation. An end to Daca and a return of the Muslim ban follow.In the following months other parts of the agenda unfold. Cuts in corporate taxes so generous they would make the robber barons blush. An end to federal funding for public television and radio that forces many local stations to shutter. The termination of Head Start programs leaves hundreds of thousands of parents and guardians without preschool or childcare. The elimination of the Department of Education and programs like Title I halt funding and many protections for students with disabilities, English learners and students from low-income households.Pornography is criminalized. Ditto for abortion rights, emergency contraception and many reproductive health programs. Adiós also to most public sector unions, labor organizing rights and anti-poverty programs.It can be difficult at times to distinguish the hyperbole of Trump and the Maga movement from actual governing plans. “Build the wall” was always more of a campaign performance and fundraising stunt then a policy blueprint. But after attending several rightwing conferences and rallies for research in the last year, I have little reason to doubt their intentions this time around.I’ve heard Miller at CPAC describe the deportation plans in chilling detail. I heard speaker after speaker at a Turning Point USA conference promise violence and retribution against political opponents, the dismantling of nearly all public goods, and plans to bring a shrill Christian nationalism to the center of governance and civic life. I’ve listened to unapologetic defenses of eugenics and scientific racism on rightwing media channels with millions of followers.And perhaps most frighteningly, I’ve observed growing numbers of young people, people of color and others outside of the traditional conservative base join the Maga faithful and embrace the cynicism and demonization that is the heartbeat of the contemporary right.Conservatives often celebrate the unity of their governing philosophy, rooted in small government, entrepreneurship, faith and family. But there is nothing coherent or rational about these policies. Plunder is the prevailing principle.And these ideas are not limited to the Heritage Foundation or Trump alone. They have been embraced across a network of rightwing formations, some with agendas even more extreme than Project 2025.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNor can this agenda be described as populist. Polls show large majorities of the US public deeply opposed to the Project 2025 agenda. Corporate giveaways, drastic cuts to public services and legalized discrimination against queer people won’t alleviate any of the very real crises faced by masses of people in the US and around the world.In the face of this threatened calamity, what can be done? To be sure, the material consequences of this agenda must be exposed. Maga supporters often suggest Trump should be taken “seriously but not literally”. Project 2025’s 920-page policy document is not political theater, and its threat to the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people must be laid out in stark terms. These fissures must be exposed.At the same time, we must not succumb to a fatalism. Rightwing tacticians like Christopher Rufo have explained that they publicize their strategies to intentionally demoralize their opposition. If we only warn against the threat of fascism, we risk leaving people even more fearful and isolated, cynical towards the prospect of any collective change or resistance.And if the only alternative offered is a call to defend a decaying liberalism, one that is itself saturated in violence, precarity and premature death, the reactionary threat will surely quicken.Instead, warnings about the authoritarian menace of Project 2025 and its ilk must be wedded to clear ambitions to rebuild our emaciated public institutions, to protect people from the predations of a rigged economy. The fascist threat collapses when ordinary people have meaningful opportunities for social connection and purpose, the groundwork of human dignity.

      Daniel Martinez HoSang is an associate professor of ethnicity, race and migration at Yale University. He is author of Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California and co-author of Producers, Parasites, Parasites: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity More

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      Harris and Trump tied in latest US election polls, as Tuesday’s debate nears

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      Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are in effect tied heading into the final weeks of the election campaign, according to a national poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College, raising the stakes of Tuesday’s presidential debate.Trump is up one percentage point, 48%-47%, over Harris, according to the survey released on Sunday, a difference that is within the survey’s three-percentage point margin of error, meaning a win for either candidate in the election on 5 November is well within reach.Separately, a CBS/YouGov poll on Sunday showed a similarly tight race in key swing states, with Harris leading narrowly in Michigan (50%-49%) and Wisconsin (51%-49) and tied in Pennsylvania.While the Trump campaign endured a relatively rocky stretch in the weeks after Democratic President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July, the most recent polling indicates his core support base is not going anywhere.The NYT poll notably showed that voters feel they need to learn more about Harris, while their opinions on Trump are largely set. In the survey, 28% of likely voters said they needed more information about the Democratic nominee, while only 9% said the same about Trump.The poll indicates that Tuesday’s presidential debate could be a crucial moment.Harris will have the opportunity to give more detail of her planned policies as she spars with Trump over the course of 90 minutes. The race is so close that even a marginal boost for either candidate would be significant.In the wake of the latest polling, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’s re-election campaign chair, said in an email to supporters on Sunday: “As vice-president Harris has said since day one, we are the underdogs in this race. We have a lot of work to do to make sure we win this November, and that will require us to continue aggressively raising money.“The electoral college benefits the Republican ticket. Even in 2020, when the Biden-Harris ticket won more votes than any ticket in history, the election came down to about 45,000 votes across the battleground states. This November, we anticipate margins to be similarly razor-thin. Every single vote will count.”In the CBS poll, Harris enjoyed a double-digit lead over Trump when voters were asked who had the mental and cognitive health to serve as president, and 71% did not like Trump’s comments about the vice-president, finding them insulting.However, the economy and inflation were shown to be major factor in voters’ intention to back Trump over Harris. Among white, non-college educated voters, Trump was widely favoured to provide economic opportunities for working-class people (53%-27%).The key figures from the latest NYT poll are similar to its last comparable survey, released in late July, just after Biden decided not to seek re-election. In that poll, Trump was also up one percentage point, a difference well within the margin of error.Polls in the seven key swing states likely to determine the winner of the election have also consistently shown a razor-thin race. In the latest poll, Harris narrowly leads Trump in Wisconsin (50%-47%), Michigan (49%-47%) and Pennsylvania (49%-48%).A separate NYT/Siena poll focusing only on those key swing states last month showed Harris leading Trump by four percentage points, 50% to 46%.Since Harris replaced Biden atop the Democratic ticket over the summer, she has hit the campaign trail hard, but has limited her unscripted appearances and kept interviews with the news media to a minimum.With Reuters More

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      Liz Cheney calls Trump a ‘catastrophe’ and urges Republicans to vote for Harris

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      The former congresswoman Liz Cheney called Donald Trump an “unrecoverable catastrophe” on Sunday and urged fellow Republicans to vote for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in November’s election.“We see it on a daily basis – somebody who was willing to use violence in order to attempt to seize power, to stay in power, someone who represents unrecoverable catastrophe, frankly, in my view, and we have to do everything possible to ensure that he’s not re-elected,” Cheney said in an interview on ABC News This Week, a show on the network that is hosting Tuesday’s debate between Trump and Harris.Cheney also reaffirmed her endorsement of Harris and urged other prominent Republicans who have stated they plan on writing in a third option rather than vote for Trump to cast their ballots for the Democrat instead.“At the end of the day, you just have to wrestle with your own conscience when you’re there in the voting booth. And I would expect that you will see far more Republicans and independents, you know, when the time comes, and they’ve got to make that decision, make the right decision,” said Cheney. “Given the closeness of this election, particularly if you’re going to find yourself voting in a swing state, you’ve got to take the extra step if you really do recognize the threat that Donald Trump poses. Then it’s not enough to simply say, ‘I’m not going to vote for him.’”Asked whether she is still a Republican, Cheney claimed she is still a conservative. She said she hopes to “rebuild” the Republican party after the 5 November presidential election.A number of other Republicans have stopped short of endorsing Trump, who has been convicted of criminally falsifying business records while also facing other charges in connection with his attempts to reverse his defeat to Joe Biden while running for re-election in the 2020 presidential race.They include George W Bush, Trump’s former vice-president Mike Pence, US senator Mitt Romney and Maryland governor Larry Hogan.On Sunday, Nikki Haley – who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations and later challenged him unsuccessfully in the Republican presidential primary – refused to answer when asked on a CBS Face the Nation interview if Trump was a good candidate.But unlike Cheney, they have not lent their support to Harris.Cheney fell out of favor with many in the Republican party after criticizing Trump and serving on the congressional committee which investigated the attack that his supporters aimed at the US Capitol in early January 2021. She lost re-election in Wyoming in 2022 to a Republican primary challenger backed by Trump.On Friday, her father and Bush vice-president Dick Cheney announced he plans on voting for Kamala Harris in November, rebuking his own party. A statement from Dick Cheney cited Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.Harris told reporters covering a campaign stop in Wisconsin on Saturday that she was “honored” to have the Cheneys’ endorsement and credited them for putting “country above party”. More

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      Trump threatens to jail adversaries for ‘unscrupulous behavior’ if he wins

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      With just days to go before his first – and likely only – debate against Kamala Harris, Donald Trump posted a warning on his social media site threatening to jail those “involved in unscrupulous behavior” this election, which he said would be under intense scrutiny.“WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” the former president wrote, again trying to sow doubt about the integrity of November’s election, even though cheating is incredibly rare.“Please beware,” the Republican nominee went on, “that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”Trump’s message represents his latest threat to use the office of the presidency to exact retribution if he wins a second term in the oval office. There is no evidence of the kind of fraud he continues to insist marred the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden. In fact, dozens of courts, Republican state officials and his own administration have said he lost fairly.Just days ago, Trump himself acknowledged in a podcast interview that he had indeed “lost”, though he claimed it was “by a whisker” when in fact he was defeated 306-232 in the electoral college and lost the popular vote by more than 7m.While Trump’s campaign aides and allies have urged him to keep his focus on Harris and make the election a referendum on issues like inflation and border security, Trump in recent days has veered far off course.On Friday, he delivered a stunning statement to news cameras in which he brought up a string of past allegations of sexual misconduct, describing several in graphic detail, even as he denied his accusers’ allegations. Earlier, he had voluntarily appeared in court for a hearing on the appeal of a decision that found him liable for sexual abuse, turning focus to his legal woes in the campaign’s final stretch.On Saturday, Trump had leaned into familiar grievances about everything from his indictments to Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election as he campaigned in one of the most deeply Republican swaths of battleground Wisconsin.He did so at an outdoor rally at Central Wisconsin airport, where he spoke behind a wall of bullet-proof glass due to new security protocols following the failed 13 July attempt on his life.There’s no evidence that Biden or Harris, the vice-president, have had any influence over decisions by the US justice department or state prosecutors to indict the former president.Trump has been convicted in New York state court of criminally falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments to an adult film actor who has alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with him. Still pending are three separate criminal cases charging him with trying to forcibly overturn his defeat to Biden in the 2020 election, after which his supporters also attacked the US Capitol.The former president has eschewed traditional debate preparation, choosing to holding rallies and events while Harris has been cloistered in a historic hotel in downtown Pittsburgh, working with aides since Thursday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Democratic nominee has agreed so far to a single debate, which will be hosted Tuesday by ABC.The 5 November race between her and Trump is expected to be close and competitive, a New York Times/Siena College poll published Sunday found.Shortly after Sunday’s poll landed, the Harris campaign sent out an email saying “we cannot let up now” despite raising $361m in donations in August.“We are the underdogs in this race,” the Harris campaign’s email said. “We have a lot of work to do to make sure we win this November, and that will require us to continue aggressively raising money.”

      Guardian staff contributed reporting More

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      Democrats unite to center reproductive rights as Republicans flail on abortion

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      As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump prepare to meet on the debate stage in Philadelphia, the battle over abortion rights has vaulted to the center of the 2024 presidential election campaign, the first since the supreme court’s decision overturning Roe v Wade.At the party’s convention last month, Democrats spotlighted the harrowing stories of women placed in medical peril as a result of post-Roe abortion bans in their states. Last week, the Harris campaign launched a 50-stop “reproductive freedom” bus tour across several battleground states, kicking off in Trump’s “back yard”, miles from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence in south Florida.And this weekend, days before the first – and perhaps only – primetime presidential debate, where the issue is likely to be raised, the Harris campaign debuted three new TV ads reminding voters that Trump has repeatedly taking credit for his role in ending the 50-year-old constitutional right to an abortion. The message is blunt: because of Trump, one in three women of reproductive age now live in states where abortion is banned or significantly restricted. And it could get worse, they warn, if Trump is given a second term.“Donald Trump is a fundamental threat to reproductive freedom – and you don’t have to take our word for it – Trump said it himself,” Lauren Hitt, a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign, said in a statement. “Vice-President Harris and Governor Walz are fighting to restore reproductive freedom in all 50 states because they trust women to make the right decisions for their families.”In the bitterly contested race for the White House, abortion remains a glaring vulnerability for the Republican nominee.“You know it’s an important issue because Trump is trying to change his position,” said Celinda Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster.As a candidate, Trump has held conflicting positions on abortion, alternately boasting that he appointed three of the nine supreme court justices whose votes were decisive in overturning Roe, while complaining that Republican extremism on the issue has cost his party at the ballot box.​He recently appeared to endorse a ballot measure to expand abortion rights in his adopted home state of Florida, only to announce one day later – after sparking backlash among prominent conservative groups – that he would vote against it. He has also previously hinted at support for a 15-week federal ban only to insist that the issue should be left to the states. His campaign has said Trump would not sign a national abortion ban as president.While the economy remains the top election issue for voters this November, a New York Times/Siena College poll released in August showed that a growing share of battleground state voters, particularly women, say abortion will be central to their decision. Among women younger than 45, abortion has eclipsed the economy as their single most important issue.In the final months of the campaign, Democrats are aiming to harness the unabated anger over the loss of federal abortion protections, especially among women and young people, and unifying around a platform that seeks to protect what remains of abortion access and the availability of reproductive healthcare, including contraception and fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization (IVF).In polling and focus groups, Lake said abortion rights remains an especially salient issue for women and the issue was helping to fuel a widening gender gap between Harris and Trump. Harris’s vocal support for abortion rights has not only energized young voters, a core Democratic constituency, but is also helping to persuade independent women and, as Lake put it, “older women who remember when abortion was illegal, and don’t think the idea of jailing doctors, investigating miscarriages, [and] eliminating birth control and IVF is a good idea”.View image in fullscreenIn recent weeks, Trump, who has long worried that Republican-led efforts to outlaw abortion and restrict access to reproductive care could imperil his White House bid, has sought recast his approach to the issue. During a town hall even in battleground Wisconsin, he endorsed a plan to make the government or insurance companies cover the cost of IVF – a type of fertility assistance that can cost tens of thousands of dollars and that some in the anti-abortion movement want to see limited.“We wanna produce babies in this country, right?” Trump said.Democrats assailed the proposal as insincere, pointing to the Republican’s record and the positions of his running mate, JD Vance.Trump has had “more positions on reproductive rights than he has had wives”, Ana Navarro, a TV personality and anti-Trump Republican, said last week, at the Florida launch of the Harris campaign’s bus tour.Democrats have leveraged the abortion issue to secure key victories in the 2022 midterms, when mobilization efforts around abortion rights drove strong turnout and enthusiasm, helping the party keep control of the Senate and limiting Republican gains in the House. In Michigan, Democrats secured a governing trifecta as voters in the state overwhelmingly turned out to back a ballot initiative enshrining abortion rights in the state’s constitution.“Bringing the message to the people, talking with women and healthcare providers and our families, that’s how we had such a historic outcome in our ’22 election here in Michigan,” the state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a co-chair of Harris’s campaign, said in an MSNBC interview this week. “But it’s important, even for Michiganders and New Yorkers and Floridians, to know what’s at stake if we have a second Trump presidency.”Some Republicans have argued that the potency of abortion rights would wane in a noisy presidential election. But Lake believes the opposite could be true.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAbortion rights are a priority for young voters who are more likely to turn out in a presidential election year. Constitutional amendments seeking to guarantee abortion rights are on the ballot in 10 states this fall, including battleground states like Arizona and Nevada as well as Florida, once a presidential bellwether that has trended Republican in recent cycles.“We are the belly of the beast here in the state of Florida,” said Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party. “We are the state that has drastically moved on abortion from two years ago having full access to now being one of the most extreme abortion bans in the country.”Florida Democrats are hopeful the ballot initiative will help boost the former representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell’s underdog campaign against the Republican incumbent senator Rick Scott. Elsewhere in the battle for control of the Senate, vulnerable Democratic incumbents Jon Tester of Montana and Jacky Rosen of Nevada will appear on the ballot alongside measures to protect abortion rights.Fried, who joined the Harris campaign kick-off in Palm Beach county last week, said the referendum had helped draw attention to the state – and was mobilizing voters of all political stripes.“If they can take away access to reproductive healthcare, what else is next?” she said. “What other types of rights have we moved the needle on that would be going backwards if Trump is re-elected?”The state’s referendum would overturn the state’s unpopular six-week ban, guaranteeing the right to abortion “before viability”, usually around 24 weeks of pregnancy. A poll released in mid-August found that 56% of Sunshine state voters support the proposed amendment, just shy of the 60% threshold needed to become law. Yet it drew more support than Trump, who led Harris 51% to 47% in the state, according to the survey.Abortion remains Harris’s strongest issue. She holds a 15-percentage-point advantage over Trump in a national poll of likely voters by The New York Times and Siena College. Yet there were also signs that Trump’s mixed signals have muddied the waters on the issue. According to the survey, released Sunday, nearly half of independent voters say they did not think the former president would sign into law a national abortion ban.Still, the Republican nominee must contend with his base, particularly evangelicals and other conservative Christians, who expect Trump to further restrict access to abortion as president.Kristan Hawkins, president of the prominent anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, recently told the Guardian that young conservatives were “shocked and saddened to see someone who they thought was pro-life, or who had always reaffirmed pro-life values, walking back on that”.Tuesday’s presidential debate in Philadelphia offers one of the highest-profile opportunities for Harris to draw a sharp contrast with Trump on abortion. Reproductive rights supporters anticipate Harris will challenge the former president over his attempts to shift positions on the issue.“I hope that Vice-President Harris makes it crystal clear for the tens of millions of people who are watching that leaving it to the states is not a moderate position – that it is extreme,” said Rob Davidson, a Michigan-based emergency physician and executive director of the Committee to Protect Health Care, a left-leaning coalition of physicians and medical professionals that recently endorsed Harris.Davidson said voters will also want to hear Harris articulate her vision for expanding access to reproductive healthcare.“We know what Trump did,” he said. “What are we going to do going forward?” More

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      ‘We’re in a constitutional crisis’: Adam Kinzinger warns of chaos at documentary premiere

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      Adam Kinzinger reiterated his support for Kamala Harris in the US presidential election at the Toronto film festival on Saturday, but warned that there may be more eruptions of violence should she win.The former Republican congressman, whose party turned against him when he voted to impeach former president Donald Trump after the January 6 insurrection, was speaking to an audience following the world premiere of The Last Republican.The crowd-pleasing documentary, with healthy doses of comic relief in its coverage of outrageous and tragic political events, follows Kinzinger for over a year as he endures the fallout from his efforts to hold Trump accountable for inciting the riot as part of the United States House select committee on the attack. The film is a portrait focusing on the costly personal sacrifice to do what both Kinzinger and the director Steve Pink repeatedly remind is simply the right thing.After the screening, Kinzinger said history could repeat itself at a time when his party has “lost its mind” but doesn’t believe the violence will play out in exactly the same way. The battlegrounds won’t be Capitol Hill, according to the politician who recently spoke during a prime slot at the Democratic national convention, but individual states.“Look at Arizona for instance,” Kinzinger said. “Assume Arizona goes for Kamala. But it’s a Republican legislature. The legislature has to be the one to certify Kamala as the winner. I can see a pressure campaign where these people simply will not vote to certify her the winner. And what happens then? We’re in a constitutional crisis. According to the constitution, if the state legislature decides it’s just going to certify Trump, even if its [voters] went the other way, we have to accept that in the federal government … That’s a real concern I have. You can see violence at these statehouses that don’t have the security we have. Our security got overrun that day for God’s sakes and we have 500 times the security that statehouses do.”The Last Republican is directed by Steve Pink, a self-described leftie who Kinzinger suspects has contempt for his politics. The film opens with Pink sharing his admiration for Kinzinger’s resolute stand – he was one of 10 Republicans to vote for Trump’s impeachment, and the only one next to Liz Cheney to sit on the January 6 committee. Kinzinger reciprocates, explaining that he’s agreeing to ignore the ideological gap and take part in the film because Pink directed Hot Tub Time Machine, which he loves.View image in fullscreenPink’s first foray into documentary is a handshake between liberal Hollywood and a Republican that occasionally leans into odd couple comedy. The director and his subject rib each other throughout for opposing political beliefs that the film shies away from interrogating. At one point Kinzinger admits his pro-life stance, but his voice wavers a bit, hinting at the slightest opening that he could be swayed. During the same interview, Pink declares: “If this documentary helps you win the presidency and you enact horrible conservative policies, I swear to fucking God!”His profile on the extremely charming Kinzinger certainly makes the case that the kid who once dressed up as the Illinois governor Jim Edgar for Halloween and grew up practically indoctrinated into Republican politics would have made a decent presidential candidate. The film revisits a heroic act, when Kinzinger, in his 20s, rescued a bleeding woman from an attacker with a knife. The act of self-sacrifice, the film gently suggests, foreshadowed his recent actions.The Last Republican doesn’t reveal anything particularly new about January 6 and Kinzinger’s work as part of the committee, but forensically revisits the damning moments before and after the attack. Kinzinger reflects on the Republican conference call, when the former House speaker Kevin McCarthy says he would be voting against certifying Joe Biden’s election win. Kinzinger says he warned McCarthy on the call that such an action could lead to violence. McCarthy’s response, which can be heard in the doc, was a dismissive “OK Adam” before he called for the “next question”.As The Last Republican cycles through testimony, Kinzinger offers personal reflections and feelings about how things happened, describing January 6 as a bad bender that the Republican party should have woken up from and sipped water to cleanse its system and recover. Instead, they backed Donald Trump. “You could always fix a hangover by starting to drink again,” says McCarthy, tying up the analogy.Kinzinger expresses that he was angrier at his old friend Kevin McCarthy than Trump. “He’s just nuts,” Kinzinger says of the latter.He admits he wanted nothing to do with the January 6 committee. “Please dear Jesus not me,” he would say before Nancy Pelosi announced that she would be seeking his participation without calling him first.Following the screening, Kinzinger tells the audience that almost every Republican congressman knows the 2020 election “wasn’t stolen” and “most of them would tell you that they think Donald Trump is crazy”. He adds that before impeachment, he believed there was going to be 25 votes in favor, instead of just the 10 who did, because many were too scared to take that stand. “I would have people come up to me all the time and say, ‘Thanks for doing it because I’ll lose in my district if I do it, but thank you.’” He’s exasperated by the gall of it.Kinzinger not only lost his district but was bombarded with hate while ostracized not just from his party but his own extended family. In one scene, his mother Betty Jo Kinzinger recalls a phone call from an old community friend who tells her she doesn’t like Adam any more. “You don’t have to like Adam,” she says, “but you don’t have to tell his mother that.”View image in fullscreenIn the film, Kinzinger’s staff can be heard sorting through the relentless phone calls to his office, ranging from angry voters to terrifying threats, deciding which calls should be referred to Capitol police. The vitriol is so much that they keep a cabinet near their desk filled top to bottom with what you would think is an apocalyptic supply of Kleenex boxes. The reveal elicited a hearty laugh from the audience. But the trauma behind it is all too real.“Over time it takes a toll that you don’t recognize on you,” Kinzinger told the audience. He said that the threats we hear in the film aren’t just a tiny sample, reciting one caller who wishes Kinzinger’s son, who was six months old at the time, would wander into traffic and die.“The people that call the death threats are probably not the ones that are going to come,” Kinzinger continued, who says he was swatted just a week before, a common occurrence when he speaks out. “The ones that are going to come are not going to let you know ahead of time that they’re going to be there.“I would always conceal and carry,” Kinzinger continued, “not because I’m just some crazy gun guy. But that was my way to defend myself in security … You’re living with security [with] your work. You always make sure to lock the doors and arm the system at night. But after a while I realized that I’m keeping distance from people. And I don’t want to be that way.”When pressed about why it’s so hard for his fellow Republicans to question the party line and Trump, Kinzinger said that many were just clinging to what they feel is their identity.“When you see yourself as a member of Congress,” he said, “and you walk into any room, except the White House, and you’re the most powerful person there, and you have everybody’s attention, it’s really hard to walk away from that … I’ve learned that courage is rare … you have to walk away from your identity. And unfortunately, so many in the Republican party were unwilling and are unwilling to do that.“Since we filmed this, there have been more people elected into the Republican party that actually are batshit crazy and truly believe some of this. So that’s a scary thing.”

      The Last Republican is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released at a later date More

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      Ro Khanna says he’s not a fan of fellow Democrats calling Republicans ‘weird’

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      Congressman and Kamala Harris campaign surrogate Ro Khanna said he doesn’t support the trend among his fellow Democrats of calling Republicans “weird” on the election trail.“I’m not, in candor, a fan of calling each other ‘weird’ or names, I don’t think that advanced American democracy,” the California US House representative said during a live event with the Guardian at the Texas Tribune festival Saturday in Austin. “I think we have to – in this country, and as a party – not just win, but deserve victory. And to deserve victory means to offer a vision that is going to bring this country together with a common purpose.”That common purpose, he said, was economic growth, expanding voting rights, women’s dignity, and a “civic religion”.The term “weird” has been part of a campaign strategy by Harris’s vice-presidential pick Tim Walz and several others as a way of painting opponent Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance as destructive and out of line with US voters.“These are weird people on the other side,” Walz said in an interview in July. “They wanna take books away, they wanna be in your exam room. That’s what it comes down to and don’t, you know, get sugar-coating this: these are weird ideas.”But in a sweeping conversation about democracy, the economy, and the role of tech platforms in the election, Khanna emphasized a focus on unity and reaching out to skeptical voters, including in his view of Harris’s strategy for her debate on Tuesday with Trump.Khanna said he realized “it’s not fashionable anymore” to do as his fellow Democrat and former first lady Michelle Obama once said: “When they go low, we go high.” But he said former Democratic presidents like Barack Obama and John F Kennedy Jr “were inspirational figures and inspiration”, and he added: “I still think that wins for a nation that’s hungry for some kind of new common purpose.”Khanna also weighed in on the role of tech platforms and social media in polarizing voters and spreading misinformation. Already this year voters have been faced with deepfake robocalls in a false Joe Biden voice, a fake Taylor Swift image posted by Trump himself, and various fake ads painting Harris as a communist leader.While Khanna said there was no way to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) systems in time for the 5 November election, the congressman – whose district includes a significant part of Silicon Valley – said he is hopeful that there is bipartisan support for policy in this sector.“We’re in much better shape than when we had the printing press. And you look at some of the pamphlets on the printing press … they actually went to war over those pamphlets in Europe,” he said. “ The internet in the early days was filled with, pornography, with things that were not salutary for society. But it took a governing structure so that today I don’t think anyone would say a life in the world or in America would be better without the internet.”He also sought to promote the careful balance of regulating social media and content moderation without compromising free speech.Khanna furthermore reiterated his support for unfettered free speech when asked about Biden and the president’s record of avoiding press and media during most of his term when compared to his predecessors, a criticism that’s also been lodged at Harris early in the vice-president’s campaign for the White House.“I think politicians benefit from being out there in the media,” Khanna said. “And, as much as possible, you’re taking hard questions and making gaffes and letting people see who you are. But if you do a lot of that, by the way, your gaffes are likely to be diminished because you’ve done so many.“I’m a classical liberal. I believe in free speech. I believe in persuasion. I believe that in this country you can still persuade people.”Asked outright if Biden should have given more interviews, Khanna said: “Of course.” More

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      Joy derision: Democrats turn Trump’s deadliest weapon against him

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      In Trump in Exile, her recent book on the former president’s life after losing power, the reporter Meridith McGraw describes how aides to Donald Trump set about destroying Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who threatened to lure Republican voters away.“One Trump adviser referred to Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals,” McGraw writes. “Rule number five: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”Alinsky was a Chicago community organizer who died in 1972 but is still influential on the left and demonized on the right. Trumpworld put his fifth rule – which also says: “It infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage” – into concerted action.DeSantis was ridiculed for his lack of height and his heightened sanctimoniousness but most effectively for his simple weirdness: a discomfiting public manner the Trump camp indelibly linked to an alleged incident on a donor’s jet in which, lacking a spoon, the governor chose to eat a cup of chocolate pudding using his fingers.DeSantis disintegrated. Trump swept to the nomination.With Joe Biden as his opponent, it seemed Trump would once again dominate with nicknames and ridicule, based on “Sleepy Joe’s” (even more) advanced age. But then Biden dropped out, and something unexpected happened. Kamala Harris and her running mate, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, turned fierce ridicule back on Trump and his VP pick, the Ohio senator JD Vance, deriding both for their simple weirdness: personal, social and of course political.If polling is any guide, the tactic has worked like a dream.To Molly Jong-Fast, a podcaster and MSNBC commentator now touring Politics as Unusual, a live show with the Republican operative turned anti-Trump organizer and ridicule merchant Rick Wilson, Trump, Vance and the rest of the GOP are simply easy targets.“They’ve just gone so far afield, this Republican party, that you can mock it all because it’s just so weird,” Jong-Fast said. “All this stuff about women’s reproductive cycles” – support for abortion bans, Vance attacking women who do not have children, endless tangles over IVF – “that stuff is quite weird from an adult man, and so it does lend itself to mockery.“I also think they got so high on their own supply that they didn’t pause and think, ‘Well, perhaps people won’t like this,’ you know?”Ridicule certainly worked for Trump in the past. In 2016, the Texas senator Ted Cruz was “Lyin’ Ted”, the Florida senator Marco Rubio was “Liddle Marco”, and, most infamously, Hillary Clinton was “Crooked Hillary”. Fair or not, the labels stuck.Eight years later, though, Trump “just can’t do it”, Jong-Fast said. “Maybe because he’s almost 80. Maybe because he just doesn’t have it any more.”Trump has road-tested nicknames for Harris but nothing has stuck. He tried “Kamabla”, arguably racist, and “Comrade Kamala”, alleging communist leanings. He tried more.Jong-Fast said: “‘Laffin’ Kamala?’ It just doesn’t do it because their whole plan of attack was that she laughs and somehow that makes her unserious, and being unserious is somehow bad for being president. But the problem with Trump is that his whole thing was that he was unserious, right? Like, you were supposed to vote for him because he was a reality television host, not because he was some genius.“I think Trump is just tired. He’s been running for president for a decade, and he’s just scared [of defeat and potentially jail in four criminal cases] and sick of it. One of the things that Trump was able to do really well was ridicule. He would pick these nicknames and you would always be a little bit horrified by them but a lot of times they actually were right … he was very good at summing people up.”Now, not so much.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCompounding Republican problems, under Harris and Walz – whose decision to call Trump and Vance weird on TV did much to put him on the ticket – Democrats have abandoned the political squeamishness, or just good manners, that long deterred them from firing back in kind.“I think Biden was in a different generation of politics and he just couldn’t meet the moment in the same way,” Jong-Fast said. “He wouldn’t let his people do that aggressive stuff. I think of Democrats now as trying to push back aggressively, which they have to, right? I mean, it’s completely asymmetrical otherwise.”As Walz led in ridiculing Trump and Vance, so party grandees followed. At the Democratic convention in Chicago last month, Barack and Michelle Obama mocked Trump from the podium. The former president even appeared to question the size of Trump’s penis. It was all a long way from “When they go low, we go high”, Michelle Obama’s 2016 appeal to purity of political action and thought.“They know it gets him mad,” Jong-Fast said. “Part of what’s happening here is this ‘audience of one’ idea, which is they know it gets Trump kind of upset when you make fun of him, so they’re doubling down. They know the way to beat him is to get him so agitated that he acts out and alienates voters.”Trump has certainly been acting out – and Jong-Fast’s colleague Wilson, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, is well-practiced in making him do so, attracting threats to sue. Asked about Wilson’s insult-comic style, ridiculing Trump onstage and on the Fast Politics podcast and his own platforms, Jong-Fast laughed and said: “It makes for good podcasting. I think it would make for scary live television.”Probably true. Nonetheless, live television will host the next huge campaign set piece, the debate between Trump and Harris on ABC on Tuesday. Ridicule seems sure to be on the menu. Saul Alinsky’s ghost will watch with interest.Recently, David Corn, Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, a progressive magazine, pondered Harris’s likely tactics.“I would offer the same advice to Harris as I did to Biden,” Corn wrote. “Deride, deride, deride. But it looks as if she got the memo.” More