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      Jackson isn’t just Mississippi’s capital. It’s America’s murder capital

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      Jackson, Mississippi, knows the blues.There’s the old men at sunset carting old amps through a full parking lot to the back of an otherwise nondescript bar, to deliver a fearless late-night symposium in the oldest school of blues.And then there’s the Jackson that wakes up in the morning wondering how many young men got killed somewhere else that night. Jackson isn’t just Mississippi’s capital. It’s America’s murder capital, two years running.Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba is perfectly, painfully aware that his city has a murder problem. And he wants to do something about it.“Our residents aren’t against police,” he said. “Our residents are supportive of having more law enforcement to cover gaps and show presence. But they want a police force that is accountable to them.”But who do those police officers answer to? In a city where 83% of residents are Black and 90% of its voters are Democrats, the only person who lives there with the power to hire or fire the capitol police chief is the white Republican living south of Smith Park in the governor’s mansion. This is a democracy problem. .The response of Mississippi’s predominantly white conservative state legislators and Republican governor, Tate Reeves, to violent crime in the state capital last year was to expand the jurisdiction of the Mississippi capitol police department, a state-controlled agency. House Bill 1020 expanded the footprint of the Capitol Complex Improvement District to much of north-east Jackson, while creating a parallel court system to handle cases brought by the capitol police, bypassing the district attorney and locally elected judges.Jackson’s murder problem is real. The national homicide rate per 100,000 people in the United States was about 5.5 in 2023. Jackson’s high-water mark in 2021 was a staggering 99.5. Last year Jackson’s rate was 78.8..Though violent crime has been falling across the country, Mississippi overall had a homicide rate of 19.4 per 100,000, the highest of any state. Jackson is a fraction of that: only about one out of 20 of Mississippi’s roughly 3 million residents live in Jackson. Take Jackson’s 138 murders out of the state’s 2022 calculation, and Mississippi still has a murder rate of 14.6, about three times the national average.Poverty incubates violence. Mississippi has the highest poverty rate in the country and most of Jackson’s murders are in its poorest neighborhoods.But the section of Jackson covered by the capitol police is not where you find most of Jackson’s murder problem. It is where most of Jackson’s white people live.“If it’s a notion about how we make it safer, then please justify why they are in the areas with the lowest crime?” Lumumba asks rhetorically. He surmises that it is one more extension of white conservative contempt of the state’s largest city, a Black-majority city viewed as unable to act in its own interest on how to operate a police department.“Someone from north Mississippi certainly doesn’t have a greater interest or desire for safety within our communities than we have for ourselves,” Lumumba said. “And so, it’s paternalistic. I think it is underpinned in partisanship. Also quite frankly, and honestly, it reeks of racism.”Over a chicken biscuit and coffee in middle-class north Jackson, Dr Anita DeRouen, a high school English teacher and former college professor, recounted a drive-by shooting at an empty house last year, up the street from her own in midtown.“I was outside packing up my car and I hear what sounds like three pow pow pow,” she said. The city cops responded, eventually, she said. Little came of it; no one had been hurt.Her house is just inside the footprint of the Capitol Complex Improvement District now. She has a doctorate in English and still does a thing that’s characteristic of Black people talking about race in Mississippi. Rather than refer to it directly, she points to the brown skin on the back of her hand when she means Black people.If she has to call the police now, the capitol police respond first. “What I’ve noticed is, I do see more police in my neighborhood when there’s a reason to call the police. Right? Do people feel more confident calling the police? I don’t know. I just see them around.”DeRouen’s concern about the capitol police district is about who they will police, and to whom they will be accountable.“As a person living in Jackson, I was more concerned about the court situation that came along with that. Because we elect our judges, and they weren’t going to be elected judges,” she said. “The thing that struck me about the district as a whole was that it was so carved out to protect as many white people as they can.”The police chiefs of each agency talk to each other regularly, and talk in public about trying to coordinate their efforts. A police officer responding to a call in the CCID in Jackson’s north is one fewer to answer a call in the south, after all.But Joseph Wade, chief of the Jackson police department, has found himself telling the public that his cops haven’t been replaced. “I tell the citizens all the time; we’re still going to maintain a footprint within the CCID,” he said to the Jackson city council in May. “We’re not vacating … but it gives us an opportunity to deploy our resources to higher-crime areas in Jackson.”Wade came to the job less than a year ago with a community-oriented policing strategy to address the city’s violence. He holds regular community meetings where he shares crime data and solicits feedback from the public. The city established an office of violence prevention and trauma recovery last year, which works to intercept people who are likely to commit an act of violence – or to be a victim of violence – before they add to Jackson’s statistics.The Jackson city police department fields about 275 officers. The capitol police have about 200 and are staffing up to get to 225, chief Bo Luckey said in public comments in May.Neither agency is unblemished. Even as the legislature was considering a plan to expand the authority of the capitol police, the department was under scrutiny for a series of questionable shootings. In one case, an officer fired into an apartment building while chasing a suspected car thief, shooting a woman asleep in her bed. In another, police appear to have shot through the windshield of a car, killing 25-year-old Jaylen Lewis.People around Jackson are touchy about policing right now after the revelations of the Goon Squad torture case in neighboring Rankin county. The federal investigation resulted in convictions for six white Rankin county deputies who sexually humiliated and abused two Black men, shooting one in the mouth. The trial surfaced a pattern of misconduct that still has the community reeling.Local law enforcement in Jackson bristles at any comparison between their policing and that of the Rankin sheriff’s office.Jackson police are still digging out from criticism for failing to notify Bettersten Wade that her son Dexter Wade, had been killed by an off-duty police officer and – despite having ID and her phone calls to the coroner’s office – was buried in an anonymous pauper’s grave behind the county jail. The city and county remain at odds over who should take blame; meanwhile Jackson reformed its notification processes in the wake of public scrutiny.View image in fullscreenIn comparison, two years after the Lewis shooting, Mississippi public safety officials have remained unwilling to reveal basic details about the event to Lewis’s family, citing a continuing “investigation”.State officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.The mayor noted that the city’s clearance rate for homicide investigation’s is above 70%, an indication that the public is willing to work with city police to solve crime. The national average is around 50%.Lumumba insists that the violence in Jackson is not a product of poor policing, drawing a contrast in approach with the capitol police. “But the fact that new problems surface, new interpersonal conflicts take place means that there’s a gap that we’re not filling,” he said. “And I only say that to say that this is absent in the consideration of the state, as they try to approach a safer environment for Jackson from a paternalistic standpoint. They don’t engage community.”Downtown Jackson has been losing population for a generation. You can drive long vacant stretches between buildings before finding signs of life inside. Depopulation isn’t just a Jackson problem – when you look at the list of shrinking communities in America, Mississippi towns like Greenville, Clarksdale and Vicksburg top the list, all expectations of Sun belt growth be damned. People are fleeing poverty.The emptiness creates problems for those who remain: squatters and unobserved spaces nurturing crime. Loss begets a vicious cycle.But people live in this town. Many are thriving.An hour before blues time at Hal and Mal’s, Jackson’s resident drag queen Penny Nickels was finishing up trivia night at the other end of the bar. It’s a monthly event held by Mississippi Capital City Pride. They’re worried about how the police will handle anti-queer harassment.“I’ve had protesters outside protesting, just me. I’m just one queen,” Nickels said. “I’ll be getting out of the car in the parking lot, and they will be coming out. Like they will be yelling directly after me.”The city’s Pride festival is a major event in Jackson, and has long had administrative support from the city government, said Chris Ellis, chair-elect of Mississippi Capital City Pride.“The governor vacates the premises while we’re around,” Ellis said. “I’m sure if he was there, he would ignore us, pretend we don’t exist, or outright claim that we’re, you know, degenerates, and all that good stuff.”Jackson’s LGBTQ+ activists fought for protections from bullhorn-wielding protesters during Pride, and the city responded with an ordinance limiting how amplified sound can be used in public.Alas, the capitol police do not enforce Jackson city ordinances.That complicates the coordination Jackson’s police department hopes to achieve with the capitol police. For the moment, a single 911 system handles all calls for the city, regardless of type. “When a citizen dials 911, they don’t know if it’s a city ordinance or a state law,” Wade said.The legislature anticipated this problem. Reeves vetoed a bill extending local ordinance enforcement authority to the department, because he doesn’t like the city’s politics.In a Facebook message explaining his veto, Reeves said capitol police should not be obligated to uphold local laws restricting police from pursuing immigration violations, describing Jackson as a so-called sanctuary city.“I believe, if this bill were to become law, the capitol police could not assist ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] in deporting illegal aliens that live in this community,” Reeves said. “Any time or attention – from an already under-resourced police force – on dealing with city ordinances [of which there are hundreds and none of which have been contemplated, much less approved, by the state] and code enforcement is an unnecessary diversion of personnel from their mission of finding and arresting the criminals.”Reeves did sign legislation requiring any protest next to state property in Jackson to obtain the written permission of the Mississippi public safety director or the capitol police chief. That legislation has been blocked in federal court.Jackson’s annual Pride march – which is held in an area that is now covered by the CCID – is nonetheless caught between the governor and his politics, Ellis said.“We’ve always done a march around Jackson as part of our festivities every year,” Ellis said. “And we’re talking about not doing that because it’s in the purview of the capitol police.”“The reason he even stopped me was because I had my white girlfriend in the car.” Just after leaving an arraignment hearing at the Hinds county courthouse in Jackson, a Black man in his 30s nervously, described the reasons he ran from a traffic stop from a capitol police officer in an unmarked car earlier this year. As the Jacksonian talks jackrabbit fast, he’s reliving the event. He requested anonymity to help prevent reprisals.“So he profiled me. I was driving her car,” the young man said, explaining how the officer pulled him over because his girlfriend was with him.“He gets out. I just see him waving the gun.“I instantly take off, police or no police. This is supposed to be a traffic stop. I’m not wanted for anything. And I haven’t did anything. But I’ve been assaulted by the police. I’ve been beat for nothing. They were supposed to be taking me to jail, instead they put gloves on, beat me and they just dropped me off in a neighboring neighborhood.”In his recollection, Jackson city police tuned him up in an alley some years ago. But it was capitol police that went after him recently.Jackson is depressing, he said.“Corrupt politicians, corrupt government system, corrupted … everything is fucked up. The streets have potholes. There are great people, but living under these circumstances, it creates chaos. The poverty contributes to crime, There’s no resources for our kids for anything to do. You can even have a degree, but you still have to know someone. Yeah, and this is being real.“If you can make it here, you can make anywhere. But if you didn’t make it out of here, then really, it was all against you anyway.”An afternoon in a courtroom at the Hinds county courthouse will break your heart. On a random Monday in July, two dozen men and women – mostly men, almost exclusively Black men shackled together – passed before the bench.The state’s initial legislative plan called for the establishment of a parallel court system for cases brought by the capitol police, bypassing Hinds county superior court. Chief justice Michael K Randolph, a white conservative Republican, would have appointed the judge for this court. Its prosecutors would be appointed by the attorney general, Lynn Fitch, also a white conservative Republican.A fifth circuit federal court approved the basic concept in affirming the law last year. But Mississippi’s state supreme court also ruled last year that the court’s judges could not be appointed and hear felonies under the Mississippi constitution.So now the plan is for the court to be restricted to misdemeanor cases, said Hinds county superior court judge Johnnie McDaniels.“The idea was that court was created to alleviate the backlog of cases in Hinds county. But I’m not sure we have a backlog of cases in terms of misdemeanor cases,” he said. “My position has always been that the state legislature should simply fund two other circuit court judges for Hinds county, so that we can address the real backlog of the number of cases we have. We have a a number of murder cases, a number of all types of cases. And our judges work extremely hard.”Almost all of the defendants had court-appointed attorneys because they were too poor to afford private counsel. Most stood accused of relatively minor crimes. Probation violations, because they didn’t want to show up in front of a probation officer without money to pay their fines. Drug possession. Running from the cops.But four faced murder charges.Senior judge Winston Kidd said what came through court that day was fairly normal. The murder problem is real.“And I acknowledged that when [SB] 1020 came out,” he said, referring to the bill that expanded the capitol police department’s power. “I acknowledged this problem. But no one could tell us why do we need this bill? The only thing I could go back to was the fact that all four circuit judges are African American, and in no other jurisdiction in this state had they tried something of that nature.”In 2017, the Mississippi legislature created the Capitol Complex Improvement District as a vehicle to fund infrastructure issues in Jackson. The state and the city have been feuding over control of its ageing water system. Bit by bit, the state’s eye has wandered over other Jackson assets – a baseball field here, the airport over there.Jackson needs the means to alleviate long-term problems of poverty. Instead, the state looks at taking what the city has left.“I’m more than just looking over my shoulder,” Mayor Lumumba says. “I’m anticipating and expecting it … In Mississippi, we’re also dealing with not what they don’t give us right. But an effort to take what we do have away from us.” More

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      Sofa so bad for JD Vance as Trump’s VP pick faces swirling speculation

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      It all started with a tweet about a couch. Within hours of Donald Trump announcing the Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate in the presidential race, a rather lurid accusation cropped up on social media.The user of a since-deleted X account wrote last month, “can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).”The fake page citation from Vance’s bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy lent credibility to what turned out to be a baseless claim, as detailed in a now-removed fact check from the Associated Press. Soon, the internet was awash in memes mocking Vance’s relationship with various pieces of furniture. “I did not have sectional relations,” one X user joked, paraphrasing Bill Clinton’s infamous quote about his extramarital affair. Another user added: “Who hasn’t been excited by the thrill of the chaise?”Even Kamala Harris’s newly launched presidential campaign appeared to get in on the fun, tweeting: “JD Vance does not couch his hatred for women.”The couch debacle only underscored Vance’s overall dismal introduction to the country after his somewhat forgettable speech at the Republican national convention last month, prompting some to wonder if Trump should make the historic decision to ditch his running mate just three months before election day. Vance enters the final 100-day stretch of the election season as one of the most unpopular running mates in recent history. According to a CNN analysis, Vance is the least liked non-incumbent vice-presidential nominee since 1980.And the backlash goes deeper than couch memes. Critics have dug up his past comments supporting a nationwide abortion ban and attacking women without children. In a clip from 2021 that has circulated widely over the past two weeks, Vance told the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the US was managed by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too”.That comment struck many Americans as so out of touch that it sparked censure from some surprising figures, including the generally apolitical celebrity Jennifer Aniston. “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day,” Aniston wrote in an Instagram post. “I hope she will not need to turn to [in vitro fertilization] as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”The Harris campaign cast an even brighter spotlight on the controversy with a statement titled, Happy World IVF Day To Everyone Except JD Vance.The turmoil has intensified questions over whether Trump might replace Vance as his running mate, a strategy that has not been pursued since 1972. One unnamed House Republican told the Hill last week: “I think if you were to ask many people around this building, 9 out of 10 on our side would say he’s the wrong pick … He’s the only person who can do serious damage.”View image in fullscreenBut many of Vance’s vulnerabilities were apparent well before he joined Trump’s ticket. Vance won his Senate seat in 2022 after emerging victorious from a heated and closely contested Republican primary in Ohio. Vance only won the primary by eight points, even after securing Trump’s crucial endorsement. The endorsement surprised many, as Vance had sharply criticized Trump in the past. Vance’s primary opponents repeatedly attacked him as a fake Trump supporter, reminding voters that he once described the former president as “America’s Hitler”.After advancing from that ugly primary fight, Vance went on to defeat the Democrat Tim Ryan by six points, even though Trump had carried Ohio by eight points just two years earlier. (In comparison, Mike DeWine won re-election as Ohio’s governor by 25 points that same year.) Ryan was able to keep the race competitive enough to force outside Republican groups to spend tens of millions of dollars in Vance’s defense. The Senate Leadership Pac, which has close ties to the top Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell, spent more than $32m in the race, according to OpenSecrets.Since joining the Senate last year, Vance has become one of Trump’s most loyal supporters in Congress and embraced the former president’s agenda on everything from foreign policy to election denialism. In one illuminating interview with CNN in May, Vance suggested pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses should face criminal charges.“So you agree that people who break in and vandalize a building should be prosecuted?” asked the CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins.“Exactly,” Vance said.Collins replied, “I’m just checking because you did help raise money for people who did so on January 6.”All of this baggage has come to the forefront right as Vance is trying to introduce himself to a much larger audience of voters, and the search for a Democratic vice-presidential nominee has only exacerbated his troubles. The Democrats vying to become Harris’s running mate have taken to publicly lambasting Vance at every turn, offering a preview of a potential vice-presidential debate.The Kentucky governor, Andy Beshear, who is reportedly on Harris’s shortlist of options, has accused Vance of caricaturing Appalachian residents in Hillbilly Elegy. In the book, Vance leaned into his family roots in eastern Kentucky, even though he was raised in an Ohio city near Cincinnati.“I want the American people to know what a Kentuckian is and what they look like, because let me just tell you that JD Vance ain’t from here,” Beshear told MSNBC last week.The governor added at a fundraiser in Des Moines, Iowa, last weekend: “This is somebody who exploited us – who used to come for weddings or funerals or a couple weeks in the summer to see his kin, and I respect that. But to claim that you know our culture and then to insult our people is just wrong.”Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, who is also on Harris’s shortlist, has mocked Trump and Vance as “weird”, an attack line now echoed by other prominent Democrats.“The fascists depend on us going back, but we’re not afraid of weird people,” Walz said last weekend at a Harris campaign event. “We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.”View image in fullscreenAs of now, Trump has given no public indication that he intends to drop his running mate, and Vance is trying his hardest to shake off the damage of the past two weeks.“I knew that when I came out of the gate there was going to be a couple of days of positive media coverage and then immediately they would go and attack me over everything that I had ever said in my life,” Vance told NBC News on Tuesday. “The price of entry of being on the national ticket and giving me an opportunity to govern is you have to … take the shots, and so I sort of expected it.”But in a less than stellar review of Vance’s performance so far, Trump reminded voters that elections are not generally decided by the vice-presidential nominee.“This is well-documented, historically, the vice-president in terms of the election does not have any impact, virtually no impact,” Trump said on Wednesday during his contentious interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention. “You can have a vice-president that is outstanding in every way, and I think JD is, I think all of them would have been, but you’re not voting that way. You’re voting for the president. You’re voting for me.”Trump’s best hope for the moment is that voters will start forgetting about Vance. And after the month he’s had, Vance might not mind some obscurity either. More

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      Republicans beware: weaponising pets is a political minefield | Stewart Lee

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      The Ohio senator JD Vance has attacked “childless cat ladies”, going so far as to suggest infertile cat owners, or cat owners choosing life without children, should enjoy reduced voting rights. Donald Trump has already alienated Elvis Presley fans (“Elvis didn’t have 50,000 people and he had a guitar… I don’t have a guitar”) and the wind (“I never understood wind … I’ve studied it better than anybody”). Now Vance is politicising pets. The MP for Clacton, Nigel Farage, has called Vance a “top man”. Farage fuels violence, as we saw in the moving cocaine-and-cider vigil in Southport last week. Should Clacton cats, and Clacton cat ladies, fear the fist of Farage?Rightwingers aiming to weaponise pets should remember the old showbiz adage: “Never work with animals and children.” Especially if, as the American alt-right theorist Jack Psobiec suggests they should, the Republicans sign up the Trumpanzee rock star Ted Nugent. The blood sports enthusiast, and author of the song Jailbait, already has demonstrably poor history with both wildlife and the young.In 2019, the then prime minister Boris Johnson acquired a jack russell cross called Dilyn to try to seem normal. But the dog savaged the stuffed lemur of an award-winning boy, spaffed up random visiting dignitaries’ trousers, and sexually assaulted a stool made from the foot of an elephant killed by Roosevelt, disrespecting the special relationship and endangered species simultaneously. The journalists outside Chequers looked from dog to man, and from man to dog, and from dog to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.The former prime minister David Cameron’s disputed student friendship with an accommodating pig has become legendary, largely because no one can prove it ever happened. The story was allegedly sourced by the Brexit idiot Isabel Oakeshott from the then Westminster Conservative MP Mark Field, but he denies everything. Piggate aside, Field is most famous for grappling a Greenpeace protester at a Mansion House banquet in 2019 while shouting: “This is what happens when people like you disturb our dinner.” If Field had been at the Oxford feast where Cameron befriended the pig, the Mansion House banquet wouldn’t have been the most disturbed dinner he ever attended, so he would definitely have remembered it.We all know that Alastair Campbell, when Tony Blair was on the verge of first admitting the sheer depth of his religious convictions, told him: “We don’t do God.” What’s less well known is that the spinmeister general also advised “We don’t do pets,” when Blair suggested winning back old Labour’s northern heartlands by releasing video of himself and his wife, Cherie, dressed as prize whippet and a racing pigeon respectively.But in choosing to denigrate cats and their owners, are the Republicans on to something? In 2021, researchers revealed that US voters with conservative beliefs tended to dislike cats. The former Washington Post reporter Christopher Ingraham summarised the findings: “Conservatives hold strong anti-cat biases, likely stemming from cats’ disregard for social hierarchies, their general lack of loyalty, and their refusal to submit to authority.” Are cats instinctively left of centre? Can it be mere coincidence that Rishi Sunak’s memorably soggy election date announcement was further sabotaged by the Downing Street cat, Larry, shuffling about on the No 10 steps, like Eric Morecambe in the background of an excruciating Ernie Wise song?I do not wish to make light of postal workers’ suffering, but can it also be mere coincidence that, during the decade in which the Conservatives’ dismantling of Royal Mail escalated, attacks on mail delivery people by presumably right-leaning dogs have also increased, with more than 1,000 post-persons losing a finger or part of one in the past five years? The Royal Mail’s Lizz Lloyd was rightly angry to see “postman-flavour” dog treats for sale at a stately home. It is as wrong as if the JoJo Maman Bébé line were to make costly leotards emblazoned with the face of Trump’s rock-star supporter Ted Nugent.I allow two cats to live with me: one rescued from a litter in a back garden where foxes slaughtered its siblings; the other found in a cardboard box outside the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Kingdom Hall on Stamford Hill. As an adoptee, I relate to them, and am fascinated as I watch their abandonment issues develop. Archie, at only a year old, drinks far too much cat milk, while Winged Ear Fingerling, a year older, I estimate, has retreated into a solipsistic world of narcissistic fantasy. And yes I, a cat man, didn’t vote for Reform.As if to prove the point, Adolf Hitler, arguably the most rightwing person who has ever lived, of course had a dog, which was given to him by his personal secretary, the Nazi Martin Bormann, another known rightwinger. Hitler named the German shepherd Blondi, which was rather on the nose given his passionate belief in Aryan supremacy. It’s as if Nigel Farage had instead named his two dogs, Pebble and Baxter, after what he believed in: Money and Nothing.But today Blondi seems a better pet name, politically, than that favoured by the Dambuster airman Wing Commander Guy Gibson, whose dog’s name cannot be mentioned now because of the wokeness gone mad, those wokies and that wokery. Indeed, the dog’s Scampton gravestone was replaced by the RAF in 2020, at a cost of £675. This was fortunate, as the former RAF base’s fences are now used to contain asylum seekers, and an actual grave bearing a racial slur would make them paranoid. The Conservative party leadership contender and Disney-mural desecrator Robert Jenrick would doubtless have had the original grave reinstated, a deterrent even more powerful than Rwanda. I think all politicians should play by 70s swimming pool rules. No petting! Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee is on Now TV. He will preview new material at Stewart Lee Introduces the Legends of Indie at the Lexington, London, in August with guests Connie Planque (12 August), Swansea Sound (13) and David Lance Callahan (14)Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk. More

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      All in the Family by Fred Trump review – when dollars are thicker than blood

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      Forget about the sanctity of the human family or its sticky glue of love. If you’re a Trump, the institution is a convenient mechanism for ensuring inheritance, whether of gilded financial assets or brazen moral defects. Trumps are branded merchandise, and their dynastic DNA is a double helix of greed, graft and feuding malice.Since numbers on ledgers are what matter to this mercenary dynasty, they advance arithmetically. In All in the Family, the last in a series of Fred Trumps identifies his great-grandfather – who absconded from Germany to avoid military service and founded a property empire by establishing a chain of brothels in Canada – as Fred Zero. His son Fred I, a rack-renting landlord in the New York suburbs, then begat Fred II, who defied the family by preferring a career as an airline pilot; then, after being reduced to a “second-tier Trump”, he drank himself to an early death, which made his younger brother Donald the heir apparent. Fred III, the author of this memoir, aspires to be “a different kind of Trump” but coyly trades on his tainted surname, describing himself on LinkedIn as “a third-generation member of a prominent New York real estate family”.Trumpism consists, as Fred III puts it, of “name promotion”. Fred I advertised the homes he built by anchoring a yacht emblazoned with Trump signs off Coney Island on summer weekends. The logo has since been affixed to hotels, golf clubs, a failed airline, a dodgy university and several bankrupt casinos; it currently sells Bibles, high-top sneakers that yell “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” and a Victory cologne that purports to waft out the intimate essence of Donald.What Fred III calls the “T-word” – almost as odious as the forbidden N-word, which he remembers Donald using when enraged by vandals who damaged his car – undergoes some slick mutations in the course of this chronicle. Fred Zero was born Friedrich Drumpf, which sounds like a belch or sneeze. Anglicised, the surname evokes trump cards and trumped-up accusations, a better match for the family’s ruthlessly competitive creed. Fred I’s middle name was Christ, rhyming with mist, which he derived from his German mother. But he worried that this might repel the Jewish tenants in his New York apartment blocks, so he dropped the “h” and called himself Crist instead. Fred III adopted the new spelling when he bizarrely christened his first son Cristopher; there would be no Fred IV, he decided, because “it was time to stop counting”.The other Trumps remained at their adding machines, policing the succession. Donald’s sister, Maryanne – a judge who retired from the bench after a charge of misconduct, foiling his whimsical scheme to appoint her to the supreme court – complained because Fred III jumped the queue by producing Cristopher: according to her dotty theory of primogeniture, her own son, Fred I’s oldest grandchild, had the right to marry and procreate first. Then when Donald’s creditors threatened to foreclose on his debts during the 1990s, Maryanne and the other siblings produced a will altered by the already senile Fred I that disinherited Fred II’s offspring and cruelly cut off the medical insurance for Fred III’s severely disabled son William.View image in fullscreenFred III and his sister, Mary, sued to claw back a portion of the spoils to which they felt entitled. Mary, a trained psychologist, additionally declared war on the family in her book Too Much and Never Enough, published as a spoiler during Donald’s re-election campaign in 2020; in it, incensed by his mismanagement of the pandemic, she accuses him of “mass murder”. Her brother’s charges against their uncle are milder. Anxious to maintain a semblance of peace, Fred III reminiscences fondly about his access to the Oval Office and takes pride in his complimentary membership of a Trump golf club. The family’s handed-down anecdotes about Donald’s bratty behaviour amount, as Fred III sees it, to little more than “stupid kid stuff”: hyper-aggressive and liable to tantrums, he delighted in “the pain he hoped he had caused” by stealing toys from other children or hurling an eraser at a teacher he disliked. That might sound trivial, but these infantile urges still activate the old man who itches to regain power and they will be converted into vengeful authoritarian policies if he is re-elected.Despite a settlement, the financial dispute with the aunts and uncles continues to rankle. For the Trumps, Fred III realises: “Blood only went so far – as far as the dollar signs.” Arguing about his grandfather’s will, he defends the protocols of “multigenerational wealth”, but that very terminology splices together genetic and economic heritage. As he ought to know, families pass on congenital failings as well as stocks and shares. His father once told him that he had “inherited a bad gene” and warned him to be careful about drinking; Fred III admits to having had his own foreordained struggle with alcoholism.Donald, like Hitler, trusts in eugenics. At a recent rally in Minnesota, he promoted himself as a pure-bred product of “the racehorse theory”, and he fancies that his genes make him “a very stable genius”. His apostles agree. He recovered from Covid, according to the self-styled Maga life coach Brenden Dilley, because “he’s got God-tier genetics, top fucking one percentile genetics, right?” This insane conceit explains Donald’s spasm of disgust when Fred III tells him that William’s affliction is “some kind of genetic thing”. “Not in our family,” Donald replies with a snort, “there’s nothing wrong with our genes!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe most lethal moment in the book occurs when Donald helpfully suggests that Fred III, rather than spending money on William’s care, should “just let him die and move down to Florida”. The advice comes from a remote-control executioner: after the death of the Iraqi terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Fred III listens to Donald exultantly telling the king of Jordan on the phone: “I killed him, I killed him like a dog.” What shocks me most, reading the exchange about William, is the casual logic of the follow-up. Why Florida? It’s Donald’s home, now that he is such a pariah in New York, and he commends it to his nephew as a moral Bermuda Triangle, a swamp for human alligators.Fred III makes a final attempt to redeem his tarnished lineage by citing “something that William inherited from our family”. No, this is not a trust fund; it is the young man’s “heart-melting blue eyes”, his only means of communicating with the world. It’s a nice try, but a harsher truth is proclaimed by the book’s epigraph from The Godfather, which quotes Michael, soon to be installed as mob boss, when he shrugs that the gangsterism of the Corleones is “not personal, it’s strictly business”. Donald, who customarily deflects condemnation by projecting it on to others, used to rant about “the Biden crime family”; indirectly exposing the self-disgust that skulks behind his self-love, he was of course describing the vicious, venal conduct of his own clan. More

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      Donald Trump: judge rejects efforts to dismiss election subversion case against ex-president

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      A federal judge presiding over the election subversion case against Donald Trump has rejected efforts from his legal team to dismiss the indictment on grounds that the former president was prosecuted for vindictive and political purposes.The ruling from US district judge Tanya Chutkan is the first substantive order since the case was returned to her on Friday, following a landmark supreme court opinion last month that conferred broad immunity for former presidents and narrowed special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump.In their motion to dismiss the indictment, defence lawyers argued that Trump was mistreated because he was prosecuted even though others who have challenged election results have avoided criminal charges.Trump, the Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential race, also suggested that president Joe Biden and the Justice Department launched the prosecution to prevent him from winning reelection.But Chutkan rejected both arguments, saying Trump was not charged simply for challenging election results but instead for “knowingly making false statements in furtherance of criminal conspiracies and for obstruction of election certification proceedings.”She also said that his lawyers had misread news media articles that they had cited in arguing that the prosecution was political in nature.“After reviewing Defendant’s evidence and arguments, the court cannot conclude that he has carried his burden to establish either actual vindictiveness or the presumption of it, and so finds no basis for dismissing this case on those grounds,” Chutkan wrote in her order.Chutkan has scheduled a status conference for 16 August, to discuss the next steps in the case.The four-count indictment, brought in August 2023, accuses Trump of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election he lost to Biden through a variety of schemes, including by badgering his vice-president, Mike Pence, to block the formal certification of electoral votes.Trump’s lawyers argued that he was immune from prosecution as a former president, and the case has been on hold since December as his appeal worked its way through the courts.The supreme court, in a 6-3 opinion, held that presidents enjoy absolute immunity for core constitutional duties and are presumptively immune from prosecution for all other official acts. The justices sent the case back to Chutkan to determine which acts alleged in the indictment can remain part of the prosecution and which must be discarded. More

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      Name-calling and hyperbole: Trump continues fear-mongering fest at Georgia rally

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      Donald Trump addressed a fully-packed venue in downtown Atlanta on Saturday, with thousands of people waiting in the Georgia heat outside to enter, or to protest his appearance in a city he has condemned repeatedly.His remarks were consistent with the tenor and comportment of restraint and probity Atlantans are used to hearing at this point.“She happens to be a really low IQ individual. We don’t need a low IQ individual,” Trump said of the vice-president Kamala Harris. “They love dealing with low IQ individuals … She’s Bernie Sanders but not as smart.”Trump highlighted a handful of recent murders in the city, saying “Atlanta is like a killing field, and your governor should get off his ass and do something about it.”Trump rattled off a set of crime statistics in Atlanta that bear no resemblance to the actual change in crime over the last two years. Crime spiked in Atlanta in the last year of Trump’s term and peaked in 2022. It has subsequently fallen back to 2019 levels.But crime – and particularly crime involving immigrants – has been central to his appeal to Republican voters. Trump invoked the murder of Laken Riley, a college student murdered on the campus of the University of Georgia. Police have charged an undocumented immigrant with her murder.“Laken’s blood is on Kamala Harris’s hands,” Trump said, “as though she was standing there watching it herself.” Trump is trying to tie this to Harris’s role as “border czar” early in the Biden administration. “Harris should not be asking for your votes. She should be begging Laken Riley’s family for forgiveness.”Trump made a point of highlighting the work of three Republican appointees to Georgia’s board of elections, who have been entertaining changes to election rules that critics say are setting the stage for a legal contest in case of a Trump loss in November.Of President Joe Biden and the debate that led to his withdrawal from the race, Trump said “He was choking like a dog! He was choking. And that was the end of him … they did a coup, but he doesn’t know it.”Trump said, without any evidence, that “40 or 50 million illegal aliens” will enter the United States if Harris wins, he said, claiming that suburbs will be overrun with “savage foreign gangs”. He also claimed, falsely, that Harris wants to replace all gas cars with electric cars, to ban meat, to increase taxes by 70 to 80% and more claims that can only be taken as hyperbole because they are so far divorced from fact. He also reiterated claims that the 2020 election was stolen.Trump repeatedly called Harris a “lunatic”.Trump’s appearance in Atlanta is at the same venue Harris filled on Tuesday in her first Georgia rally since Biden’s dramatic withdrawal from the race and her ascension as the presumptive Democratic nominee.The contrast between Trump and Harris in the space was stark. Harris’s multiracial crowd Tuesday was peppered with the pink and green of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters. Red Maga hats and Trump mug shots – or the now-iconic shot of his fist in the air after the assassination attempt – dominated the mostly white sea of support for Trump.Trump opened up his appearance in Atlanta lying about the Harris event in the same place, falsely claiming that people left the event early and that there were empty seats. Both events packed the room.Notably, the upper stands began to empty out about an hour into Trump’s comments.The refrain, repeated by speaker after speaker at the rally, was that Trump took a bullet for Republican voters, and they should return the favor with powerful turnout in Georgia.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He took a bullet for you, and in that moment, we found out who Donald Trump is,” said Marjorie Taylor Greene, a representative, in a speech before 10,000 Trump supporters at the Georgia State Convocation Center. “He stood up, put his fist in the air and said ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ And that’s what we will do.”JD Vance, Republican vice-presidential nominee, took note of the emerging Democratic labeling of Republicans as “weird” as he warmed up the crowd.Weird is how “Kamala Harris comes to Atlanta and speaks with a fake southern accent even though she grew up in Canada”, Vance said. “Go watch the clips; she sounds like a southern belle.”Vance also linked the people who tried to “bankrupt” and “impeach” Trump to the attempted assassination.“America is never going to elect a San Francisco liberal who is so far out of the mainstream,” Vance said.Despite this assertion, polls increasingly suggest that Harris may be ahead of Trump today, with the Democratic national convention coming in two weeks. Before Biden’s withdrawal, Trump had been consistently ahead of Biden, so much so that political discussion here had been about whether the Biden campaign would capitulate in Georgia in order to focus its resources on Rust Belt races.Too few polls measuring Harris and Trump in Georgia have been conducted to read the race here, but both campaigns have begun treating Georgia as a battleground state once again.“The road to the White House runs through Georgia,” Greene said, almost word for word what Rev Raphael Warnock, a Georgia senator, told Harris supporters five days earlier.In long, rambling comments, Trump lambasted Brian Kemp, the governor, and Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, for disloyalty: “In my opinion, they want us to lose. If we lose Georgia, we lose the whole thing and our country goes to hell.” More

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      Democratic politicians’ husbands rake in record haul during New York event

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      While Kamala Harris cleared her campaign diary this weekend to finalize her choice of running mate ahead of a swing-state presidential campaign blitz next week, political spouses were hard at work.The vice-president’s husband, Doug Emhoff, and Chasten Buttigieg, husband of the US transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg – a potential running mate for Harris at the top of November’s Democratic ticket whose candidacy has been strengthening in recent days – were on New York’s Fire Island on Friday for a sold-out event that raised $321,000.According to reports, the total was a record for the Pines, part of the narrow barrier island that runs south of Long Island, famous as an LGBTQ+ summering spot second only to Provincetown, Massachusetts.Former treasurer of the Democratic National Committee Andrew Tobias told Vanity Fair that the double-teaming husbands had beat the $200,000 haul for a 2016 political event hosted by the singer Cher.The outlet reported that US Secret Service agents “appeared to waylay hunks in bikini cut swimsuits to smuggle Emhoff on and off the island”. The fundraiser had initially been organized for Harris and Joe Biden before the president quit his re-election campaign – and it had sold out before the vice-president had become the candidate.“The right to love who you want to love, the right to marry who you want to marry, to do what you want in your home, with who you love, without the government over your shoulder … this affects all of you,” Emhoff told the crowd, echoing fears that a US supreme court with three Trump appointees could eliminate same-sex couples’ right to marriage. “We need to have an army for freedom, an army for justice, led by my wife, Kamala Harris.”The Emhoff-Buttigieg husband double act raised speculation that it could be a test run for the transportation secretary to be Harris’s vice-presidential pick. Harris has until Tuesday to decide whom to pick as her running mate.Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, whom many consider as the leading candidate to be Harris’s running mate, may help with his crucial swing state. But he could also bleed votes away from Harris elsewhere over his strong support of Israel’s war on Gaza, which became a constant source of criticism for the Biden White House.“Of course I want it to be Pete,” fundraiser Jack Kabin said. But Kabin said he was worried “America isn’t ready for a gay vice-president”.Rumors of Buttigieg’s strengthening contention in the veepstakes come amid a media blitz. He is estimated to have made at least 30 media appearances, trips to two swing states and held a Washington news conference in the past two weeks. In recent days, he acknowledged that he is “probably” being vetted.In Buttigieg’s favor is his ability as a calm, skilled communicator. He is a Rhodes scholar and a veteran, previously served as a mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and he has emerged as formidable critic of Trump and the Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance.Buttigieg frequently appears on Fox News. Recently, he went on the Republican-friendly network and criticized Trump supporters for fostering a “warped reality” in which the former president is “perfectly fine … even though he’s rambling about electrocuting sharks”.Asked why he was so frequently on the outlet, Buttigieg told Bill Maher in July that it was not his job to speak only to people that agreed with him.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAsked why wealthy men, including gay tech investor Peter Thiel, supported Trump, he said the issues had been made “way too complicated”.“It’s super simple,” he said. “These are very rich men who have decided to back the Republican party that tends to do good things for very rich men.”On CNN, he called Vance “a regrettable choice” because he is “somebody who was at his most convincing and effective when he talked about how unfit for office Donald Trump is, and he has not explained any reason, other than of course his obvious interest in power, why he would have changed his mind on that”.In Esquire magazine, columnist, actor and former White House engagement adviser Kal Penn wrote that Buttigieg is the Democratic party’s “best chance for expanding the electorate and evolving the platform”.“He’s multilingual,” Penn wrote. “He’s comfortable on the world stage. He is deeply connected to blue-collar voters. He polls exceptionally well.“Most important, as a young husband and father of two with a modest home in northern Michigan, he speaks openly about his own family’s struggles and triumphs, which mirror what many Americans deal with day to day.” More

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      Trump says he would debate on Fox News – but Harris insists on ABC

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      Donald Trump says he would be willing to debate Kamala Harris on the friendly environs of Fox News in September – but the vice-president has not signed on to what would be a switch-up.Trump had previously agreed to appear on ABC News and debate Joe Biden a second time this year before the president ended his re-election campaign.In a statement on his Truth Social platform, Trump said the debate would be held on 4 September in Pennsylvania. The former president said that there was a conflict of interest at play after filing a defamation lawsuit against ABC and network host George Stephanopoulos over the anchor’s assertion that Trump had been “found liable for rape” in the E Jean Carroll case.Trump earlier this year was ordered to pay $83m for defamatory statements he had made about the magazine columnist after an earlier case found him liable for defamation and sexual abuse.“The Debate was previously scheduled against … Biden on ABC, but has been terminated in that Biden will no longer be a participant, and I am in litigation against ABC Network and George Slopadopoulos, thereby creating a conflict of interest,” Trump wrote.The former Republican president added that the site of the debate on Fox News – which is generally welcoming to the GOP – had not been determined. But he said the moderators would be Fox News’ Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, and the rules would be similar to his 27 June debate with Biden – except that this time there would be a studio audience.But on Saturday, in a statement that invoked Trump’s previous challenge to debate Biden at any time or place, Harris’s campaign made clear she did not agree to the terms of the proposed Fox News debate. And she particularly rejected using that debate to replace the ABC one.“Donald Trump is running scared and trying to back out of the debate he already agreed to and running straight to Fox News to bail him out,” Harris campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler said in a statement shared on X by NBC News political correspondent Yamiche Alcindor.“He needs to stop playing games and show up to the debate he already committed to on [10 September]. The vice-president will be there one way or the other to take the opportunity to speak to a prime-time national audience. We’re happy to discuss further debates after the one both campaigns have already agreed to.“Mr Anytime, anywhere, any place should have no problem with that unless he’s too scared to show up on the 10th.”In a post on X, Harris herself added: “It’s interesting how any time, any place’ becomes ‘one specific time, one specific safe space.’”The vice-president said in July that she was “ready” to debate Trump and accused him of stepping back from the previous agreement involving ABC.In a post on Saturday, Trump alleged that Harris was “afraid” to “do a REAL debate” against him. He added: “I’ll see [Harris] on September 4th or I won’t see her at all.”Democratic party alarm at Biden’s June debate performance on CNN set in motion his dramatic withdrawal from the race, with polls indicating he was likely headed for a blowout electoral defeat.Trump and Harris are now polling neck-and-neck.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe political dance over presidential debates is now set to escalate. Earlier this year, Biden and Trump agreed to sidestep the typical arrangement of three debates, typically held in the fall and organized by the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates.Democrats said reducing the number to two and moving them up to June and September reflected changes in the “structure of our elections and the interests of voters”.Biden said he had won two debates with Trump in 2020 and challenged him to two this year. “I hear you’re free on Wednesdays,” Biden said, referring to a weekly off-day during the New York criminal trial that saw Trump convicted of falsifying business records in connections with hush-money payments to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels.But that decision ultimately backfired for Biden.The latest twist in the 2024 debate drama comes after Trump said he would not face Harris because she was not the party’s official candidate. On Friday, Harris secured enough Biden delegates to officially become her party’s nominee.At a rally in Atlanta on Tuesday, Harris said she welcomed a debate against Trump, who days earlier had called her a “bum”.“As the saying goes, you got something to say, say it to my face,” Harris said. More