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      To his supporters, Trump is a martyred messiah, resurrected after crucifixion | Sidney Blumenthal

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      The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has transformed the theology of Trump. He has long portrayed himself as an innocent lamb falsely accused, the target of slings and arrows to bear the suffering of believers. Now the bullet and the blood of Butler, Pennsylvania, have sanctified him for the faithful and brought forth a new gospel.Earlier this month, the Republican National Committee endorsed the party platform, a document that contained a plank pledging to create a new federal agency to defend Christian nationalism: “To protect Religious Liberty, Republicans support a new Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias that will investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.” The document casts Christians as though they are a sect still persecuted by the Romans, about to be dragged into the Colosseum to face ferocious beasts.But after the shooting, there was no mention of a platform. There was no reference to the political party. Trump had not simply survived crucifixion. He was not only resurrected. He became his own second coming. He was washed in his own blood. Divine intervention proved he was destined to return. All that is required from followers are declarations of faith. The return is a restoration of the grand course of events that was unjustly detoured by a stolen election. Trump is now a martyr, resurrected and the second coming all at once. All power is invested in the messiah on day one.“The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this, he called it a miracle,” Trump explained. “I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead. By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here.” He was reborn.His sanctification has produced a new narrative by those who wish to be seen as his most fervent apostles. They compete to proclaim the new gospel. “GOD protected President Trump yesterday,” tweeted House speaker Mike Johnson. “God’s hand of protection” held Trump safe, the Rev Franklin Graham told Fox News. “The devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle,” said Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina. “Listen, if you didn’t believe in miracles before Saturday, you better be believing right now.” They are the chosen messengers of the chosen one. The fervor with which they tell the story reveals more than their faith, but also establishes their seat at the table of the apostles.The most important revelation was written within hours of the shooting by Senator JD Vance, now Trump’s running mate. His was not a gospel of peace, but of wrath. “Today is not just some isolated incident,” Vance wrote. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”Pointing his spear at the enemy, Vance settled the apostolic succession. He is a changeling, who once compared Trump to “heroin” and “Hitler”, but his conversion into Trump’s warrior has vaulted him to become the anointed disciple and chief of the praetorian guard of the living godhead.Before the assassination attempt, the Christian nationalists’ narrative awkwardly tried to fit the licentious, sinful and predatory Trump into a framework in which his apparent absence of virtue and religious faith served virtue and faith. They commonly referred to him as King Cyrus, after the Persian ruler, who did not “recognize” God but was described in Isaiah 45 as “anointed” by the Lord to free the exiled Jews in Babylon.Trump’s origin story as the son of the brutish real estate operator Fred Trump and the pupil of the nefarious fixer and Mafia lawyer Roy Cohn was always problematic. None of his followers ever acknowledge it, except perhaps for Cohn’s protege Roger Stone, who was handed Trump to run as a client when Cohn was dying of Aids. That true crime story remains dangerous to the Trump mythology.A movie about Trump’s relationship with Cohn, The Apprentice, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, has not yet found an American distributor. Media companies have been intimidated at the possibility of Trump’s vengeance. “If you do not immediately cease all publication and marketing of the movie, President Trump will pursue every appropriate legal means to hold you accountable for this gross violation of President Trump and the American people’s rights,” Trump’s lawyer wrote the producers of the film.So, as in Isaiah 45, the 45th president was the king whose “right hand” was invisibly guided from above. “He, like King Cyrus before him, fulfilled the biblical prophecy of the gods worshiped by Jews,” proclaimed Jeanine Pirro, a Fox News host. The Trump Prophecy, a film hailing his presidency as divinely ordained, produced with faculty and students from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, also cast him as King Cyrus. An evangelical preacher, Paula White, whom Trump invited to speak at his 2017 inauguration ceremony and welcomed to the White House to bless him for nominating Neil Gorsuch to the supreme court, declared: “Because God says that he raises up and places all people in places of authority, it is God who raises up a king.”After Trump’s multiple indictments and felony conviction, he intensified his image-making as a martyr, the victim of conspiratorial forces, of the “Deep State”, “radical left Democrats” and “globalist elites”. He presented himself as selflessly absorbing the blows that were really meant for his supporters, whom he was shielding from “poisoning of the blood” from immigrants. But he instantly translated his supposed self-sacrifice into cries of revenge.On 4 August 2023, the day after he was formally charged in the January 6 case, Trump posted on Truth Social: “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!” By April of this year, Trump had made numerous threats against the judges, court staff and witnesses in all of his cases, who have received death threats and are under the protection of security details, including the US marshals. Trump’s courtroom outbursts forced judges to issue 14 gag orders. In the New York hush-money case, he violated 10 gag orders, which may be pertinent in his sentencing on 18 September. In that case, after Trump attacked Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter, Merchan said, in issuing one of the gag orders: “The threat is very real.”On 4 June, after his conviction on 34 felonies in the New York hush-money case, Trump told Sean Hannity on Fox News: “Look, when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them. And it’s easy because it’s Joe Biden and you see all the criminality.” Biden, of course, had nothing to do with the New York case.Two weeks earlier, Trump had appeared before the National Rifle Association convention to warn: “If the Biden regime gets four more years, they are coming for your guns, 100% certain.” He conflated gun control with his trials: “No, they want to take away your rights. Well, I know that better than anybody. They want to take away my rights better than anybody, worse than Alphonse Capone.” He returned to guns. “We have to have a gun,” he said. “If we don’t have a gun, we’re dead people.”On 6 January 2024, a week before the Republican Iowa caucuses, 17-year-old Dylan Butler entered his school in a small town in Perry, north of Des Moines, killed one student and wounded seven more people before he shot himself. He also had an explosive device. “Two friends and their mother who spoke with the AP said Butler was a quiet person who had been bullied relentlessly since elementary school,” the Associated Press reported. After 36 hours of silence, Trump called the incident “very terrible”, adding: “But we have to get over it, we have to move forward.”Back in 2015, after Trump announced his first candidacy, he gave an interview to a gun blog called Ammoland. He had previously supported the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, passed in 1994 under the Clinton administration, which a research team at New York University’s Langone Medical Center for the National Institute of Health calculated reduced mass shootings by 70%. That ban was allowed to lapse in 2004 under the George W Bush administration.Trump wanted to reassure the gun lobby that he was emphatically against gun control. “To the left, every gun is an assault weapon,” he said. “I certainly stand by my opposition to gun control when it comes to taking guns from law-abiding citizens. You mention that the media describes the AR-15 as an ‘assault rifle,’ which is one example of the many distortions they use to sell their agenda. However, the AR-15 does not fall under this category. Gun-banners are unfortunately preoccupied with the AR-15, magazine capacity, grips and other aesthetics, precisely because of its popularity.”On 9 August 2016, Trump delivered a stemwinding speech against gun control and threatened the assassination of Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent. He ridiculed the idea of “gun-free zones” and hypothesized being shot by a gunman from the side, saying: “Do you know what a gun-free zone is? That’s like – they study where the gun-free zones – if they would have known you had guns, if they would have known that they were going to be shot at from the other side, it would have been a whole different story. Maybe it wouldn’t have even happened in the first place.”Then, he incited the crowd against Hillary Clinton. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Trump said. “Although the second amendment, people – maybe there is, I don’t know.”Four years later, Hillary Clinton still appeared as a target for Donald Trump Jr, who posted a picture of himself on Instagram on 4 January 2020, holding an AR-15 etched with a Crusader’s Cross, a far-right symbol, and Hillary Clinton’s image behind bars on the magazine. “Nice day at the range. @rarebreedfirearms and @spikes_tactical adding a little extra awesome to my AR and that mag,” he wrote.On January 6, according to testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to the White House chief of staff, when Trump was informed that thousands in the crowd on the Ellipse whom he urged on to the Capitol refused to be screened for weapons at the magnetometers set by the Secret Service, he shouted: “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons! They’re not here to hurt me. They can march to the Capitol from here.”Among the banners carried by the mob assaulting the Capitol was a large Confederate flag adorned with an AR-15 and the inscription “Come and Take It”. Other flags depicted Trump carrying an assault rifle. One of the rightwing militias staging the attack, the Oath Keepers, stashed a small armory of AR-15s and other weapons at the ready in a suburban Virginia motel.On 13 July, earlier this month, Trump stepped onto the stage in Butler county, Pennsylvania, where he began by denouncing “the fake news” for not reporting the size of this “big, big, beautiful crowd”. He falsely claimed that Joe Biden had lied about his own crowd sizes, and said: “And we got to bring our country back to health, because our country is going to hell, if you haven’t noticed. Millions and millions of people are pouring in from prisons and from mental institutions.” Trump ripped into “Crooked Joe Biden and laughing Kamala Harris”. He said: “Our country’s been stolen from us … one of the greatest crimes is what they’ve done over four years and hiding what the obvious facts are … .”He was referring to the election of 2020: “I tell you what, we did fantastically in 2016. We did much better in 2020. You know we did much better, and it was rigged. It was a rigged deal.”He turned to talking about people crossing the southern border: “Criminals, we have criminals. We have drug dealers. We have people who should not be here.” On a large screen to the right of his stage, a chart showed how immigration had increased under Biden, though not its recently rapid decrease; he said: “The worst president in the history of our country took over, and look what happened to our country.” Trump turned his head slightly to look at the chart, and said: “And if you, uh, want to really see something that’s sad, take a look at what happened … .” Then the bullet clipped his ear. The shooter with a semi-automatic rifle killed a bystander and critically injured two others.The reborn Trump announced that he would rewrite his acceptance speech to the Republican convention. “It is a chance to bring the country together. I was given that chance,” he said. On the first day of the convention, a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, issued a ruling in the national security documents and obstruction case stating that the special prosecutor was illegal, and dismissed the entire case against Trump – a ruling nearly all legal experts regarded as bizarre, partial and likely to be overturned.Trump’s continuing streak of remarkable luck inspired him to descend from his heavenly state into his usual pit of grievance. His idea of bringing the country together is a lengthy self-interested checklist of settling scores. Uneasy rests the crown of thorns. On 15 July, he posted:
      As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts – The January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia “Perfect” Phone Call charges. The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME. Let us come together to END all Weaponization of our Justice System, and Make America Great Again!
      The motive of the 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, remains obscure. From the accounts of those who knew him, he was a quiet boy, awarded a $500 high school prize for his talent at math, who spent two years at a local community college studying engineering, worked as a dietary aide at a nursing home and lived at home. He once gave $15 to a liberal organization, but was a registered Republican. Fellow students remember him as always being a conservative.“He definitely was conservative,” one former classmate told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “It makes me wonder why he would carry out an assassination attempt on the conservative candidate.” In a school mock debate, the classmate said: “Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side. That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”Another student recalled that others “tormented Crooks ‘almost every day’ and that he often wore ‘hunting’ outfits to class”. Crooks seems to have recently spent time down the rabbit hole of a pro-gun YouTube channel called Demolition Ranch; when he shot Trump, he was wearing one of its T-shirts, with the slogan “What The Hell”. He had parked his car nearby filled with explosives. Perhaps he intended to ram it into the crowd in a spectacular suicide.Crooks left no letter, no manifesto and no clues on social media. His premeditation did not involve making known his personal motive. He wrote no political statement. Trump’s appearance near his home suddenly gave him an opportunity to strike back. He was a bullied boy.

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Why the Trump attack has spawned myriad conspiracies theories – from left and right alike | Colin Dickey

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      Accusations that the assassination attempt on Saturday was staged have proliferated all over social media. Many on the left are arguing that the attack was meant to garner pity for Trump and ensure a kind of “Reichstag fire” scenario so Trump could seize power unilaterally. Many of these focused on the photos of Trump in the immediate aftermath, his fist raised in defiance, as evidence that the entire event was set up to garner sympathy and show the ex-president as unbowed. Meanwhile, on the right, rumours swirled that it was an assassination attempt by President Biden – on Sunday, Alex Jones blasted out an email with a subject line that read in part: “Desperate Deep State Will Try to Assassinate Trump Again”.None of this is surprising – the United States has a long history of presidential assassination and assassination attempts, and a long love affair with conspiracy theories of all kinds. But the ease with which conspiracists of all political alignments have been able to assimilate Saturday’s shocking, unexpected news with their preformed opinions tells us what political conspiracy theories do for people and how they operate.In the wake of breaking, confusing news, conspiracy theories offer the illusory promise of an explanation. Not only that, but a conspiracy theory also offers a narrative of history that is resilient, one that continues to hold up no matter what transpires. If you believe, for example, that the “deep state” is engaged in a long-running, omnipresent campaign to defeat Donald Trump, then anything that happens can be seen as further proof of that.Presidential assassinations – and assassination attempts – are among the most destabilising, confusing and terrifying political events. Alongside major attacks like Pearl Harbor and 9/11, they can change the course of history for ever. So it’s not surprising that such events attract paranoid musings – they proliferate immediately, almost as a sort of self-defence mechanism against the shock of the new.The United States, in particular, has had a long history of yoking conspiracy theories to political assassinations. In 1886, ex-priest Charles Paschal Telesphore Chiniquy wrote a bestseller, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, in which he claimed (among other things) to be a confidant of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had, in fact, represented Chiniquy in 1850 as a young lawyer on a minor matter, but in Chiniquy’s telling, he went on multiple private visits to the White House, where Lincoln purportedly told him that not only were the Catholics behind the civil war, but that if anything were to happen to him, it would be the Jesuits who had pulled the trigger.More recently, they’ve been used to shape reactions in the dramatic aftermath of breaking news. Immediately in the wake of John F Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, everyone from organised crime to the KKK to Cuban exiles to the CIA was accused of being behind the attack – anyone, it seemed, was more plausible than Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone and using an antiquated rifle. Five years later, when Kennedy’s brother Robert was also killed during his presidential candidacy, once again conspiracists alleged that the killer, Sirhan Sirhan, had been brainwashed or was otherwise part of a larger conspiracy.Similar theories surrounded Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination, even though he wasn’t a presidential candidate, and this is to say nothing of the various political assassination attempts carried out by the US government in other countries – in Congo, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Indonesia, as well as the successful coup of Salvador Allende in Chile – and the resulting conspiracy theories they engendered. As the US has long been involved in actual conspiracies (including against its own citizens, such as the FBI’s surveillance program Cointelpro, or the CIA’s experimentation on Americans, MKUultra), the problem is not necessarily in entertaining beliefs – rather, the danger is in using them as a filter against breaking news.It’s natural to want to make sense of something that seems to come from nowhere, changing everything and throwing us off kilter – in such moments of disorientation, any kind of explanation can help reestablish some kind of sense to the world. But when news breaks, facts and motives aren’t at all clear, which is when conspiracy theories emerge as a means of filling that gap, providing a narrative that explains everything that’s happened and what it means. It’s why we turn to them again and again, and why they’re not likely to go away anytime soon.For all the certainty these theories have offered regarding the potential impact of Saturday’s act – that it’s clinched Trump’s election, or that it’s proof that the deep state will stop at nothing to bring him down – it’s far too soon to say for sure. Presidential assassinations have certainly had large impacts on American history: had Lincoln lived past 1865, for example, his successor Andrew Johnson wouldn’t have been in a position to kill Reconstruction. But the effects of assassination attempts are harder to measure. The failed assassination of George Wallace didn’t get him any nearer to the presidency in 1972, and the two assassination attempts of President Gerald Ford didn’t save his re-election campaign in 1976.Actual, verified information takes time; law enforcement has said they still know relatively little about the shooter or his motives. In the coming days, some aspects of this story are going to come into crystal-clear focus. Some may, as with the Kennedy assassinations, remain forever murky. Given all we know about the history of the United States’s covert operations, it’s impossible right now to rule out any possibility of some kind of conspiracy. But what remains true is that any such revelations, should they ever come, won’t come from random social media accounts, and they won’t come from Alex Jones.

      Colin Dickey is the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, and Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy

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      American rule of law is vanishing at the tips of Trump-appointed judges’ pens | Moira Donegan

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      Donald Trump stole thousands of classified documents when he left the White House in 2021, according to prosecutors, and shoved them in unsecured areas around the tacky Florida golf club where he lives. He kept them in basements, bathrooms and ballrooms; they were often unlocked, accessible to anyone who happened to wander by, as dozens or hundreds of people do, every day, at Mar-a-Lago. Trump refused to return the documents when asked; he also lied about what he had.On at least one occasion in 2021, he was recorded showing off one of the classified documents to a visitor, apparently for the sake of his own aggrandizement. “It is like highly confidential. Secret,” Trump said to the man, who was not authorized to see the information. “See, as president, I could have declassified it. Now, I can’t, but this is still a secret.”Aileen Cannon, a US district court judge in Florida whom Donald Trump appointed during his last year in office, has done everything in her power to make sure Trump is never held accountable for the theft of the documents. Since the special counsel Jack Smith’s case – widely considered to be the most legally airtight of the several criminal prosecutions against the former president – was formally assigned to Cannon in June 2023, she has often acted as if she was a member of the defense team; denying routine motions from the prosecutors, antagonizing Smith and his team personally, and dragging on the proceedings in endless rounds of briefings and delays, all surely meant to postpone the case until after Trump retakes the White House.On Monday, she dismissed the case entirely, throwing out all the document-related charges against Trump. Her purported reasoning? That special counsels such as Jack Smith are unconstitutional. Smith signaled that he plans to appeal the decision.Cannon’s ruling flies in the face of decades of precedent, going back to the Watergate era, wherein courts, including the US supreme court, have repeatedly reaffirmed the constitutionality of special counsels and their appointments. But although Cannon wears a robe, she is not interested in the law, which is a mere pretext for her bald effort to advance and protect Trump’s interests. She is not a judge any more than the man who works at the mall every December is Santa Claus. She has the trappings and the power, but none of the expertise, none of the obligations and none of the shame.Cannon’s dismissal of the Trump documents case was predictable: the prosecution, widely considered to be doomed, came at the end of months of strategic moves on her part meant to provide Trump maximum leeway to message publicly about the case, and minimum threat to his electoral process. When Trump lied about the FBI raid on his home, saying that it was a plot on his life orchestrated by the Biden administration, Smith, fearing violence and public misperception, asked for a gag order. Both the sensitivity of the case and the egregious danger posed by Trump’s conduct should have made it an easy call; but Cannon denied it, allowing Trump to continue lying about the raid.At one point during preliminary proceedings, Cannon outright refused to let prosecutors see the documents that had been seized from Mar-a-Lago, a move that prompted a reversal and rare rebuke from the appeals court above her, Atlanta’s 11th circuit. That 11th circuit warning seems to have prompted the first instance in which another federal judge urged Cannon to recuse herself from the case. It would not be the last.Cannon’s single-handed nullification of the classified documents case demonstrates the core problem with what has been, until now, the dominant theory of how to hold Trump accountable for his crimes: with the law. Increasingly, it seems prosecutions in the federal courts are a futile exercise when it comes to the former president. And that’s because the courts are packed with Republican partisans, Trump appointees and personal Trump loyalists, and large numbers of other right-leaning judges who aim to use their seats to roll back the social progress of the past century, further Trump’s authoritarian agenda, and shield him permanently from consequence. To the extent that they are controlled by these actors, the federal courts will never provide a check to Trump’s power. They will only augment it.This reality was underscored on 1 July. The supreme court’s last decision of the term, Trump v United States, created, out of thin air, a vast and near-absolute immunity from criminal prosecution that the court’s conservative justices say applies to presidents – or, at least, applies to their favorite former president.That decision stemmed from another of Smith’s prosecutions, in the January 6 case; in his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas, writing alone, signaled that he thought that perhaps special counsels such as Smith might not be legal after all. It was less like a real, considered legal position than like a set of instructions for Cannon: throw the documents case out on these grounds. Her argument mirrors Thomas’s; she took her marching orders straight from the top.The 11th circuit is likely to reverse Cannon’s dismissal, and it’s possible that Smith will get a chance to re-file his charges – possibly in Washington, closer to the site of the original illegal conduct, which will have the benefit of permanently removing his case from Cannon’s court. But the case will not be heard before the election, and so it may never be heard at all.Even prosecuting Trump might turn out to offer little more than a delay of the inevitable: the complicity of the courts in Trump’s criminality reveals an institutional rot that even locking him up would not solve. If the courts cannot hold the president accountable – or rather, if they choose to exempt one man from their authority, and instead bend themselves to his will – what, exactly, is the check on the presidency? How can a powerful criminal be held to account? Where does the rule of law apply, and where does it vanish?We have at least one answer: the rule of law vanishes at the tip of a Trump judge’s pen.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Trump expected to plead for national unity in first speech after assassination attempt

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      With political winds at his back, Donald Trump on Thursday is expected to use his first speech since surviving an assassination attempt to plead for national unity.Strategists view the Republican national convention address, likely to be watched by tens of millions of Americans on prime time television, as a unique opportunity to redefine the former US president as more palatable to moderate voters.But critics remain sceptical that a Trump reset can last, citing past supposed “pivots” that were hyped by the media only for the septuagenarian to soon revert to dark, divisive and incendiary outbursts.“That was a profound existential moment and I’m sure it’s impacted him in the short run, but you are who you are,” David Axelrod, a former chief strategist for President Barack Obama, said. “He isn’t by habit or orientation a unifier.“Maybe so long as the race is going well others can persuade him that it’s better to be quiet than noisy. But you never know what happens in two in the morning when he’s got his phone in his hand and an impulse in his head.”In opinion polls, Trump is running 11 percentage points ahead of where he was nationally in the 2020 race of the White House. He is surfing a wave of sympathy and adulation after his right ear was injured by a would-be assassin’s bullet at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday.Two days later, his ear bandaged, Trump received a hero’s welcome from cheering, sign-waving supporters at the convention in Milwaukee. Some echoed Trump’s initial response to “Fight! Fight! Fight!”Speaker after speaker suggested that Trump’s life was spared by God’s providence so that he can continue a sacred mission for the nation. But they backed away from early accusations that Democrats were to blame for the shooting.Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, who on Saturday tweeted that the Joe Biden campaign’s rhetoric “led directly” to the attempted assassination, struck a different tone in his convention address on Wednesday night.“Now consider what they said. They said he was a tyrant. They said he must be stopped at all costs. But how did he respond? He called for national unity, for national calm literally right after an assassin nearly took his life.”He added: “He is tough – he is – and he cares about people. He can stand defiant against an assassin one moment and call for national healing the next. He is a beloved father and grandfather and, of course, a once in a generation business leader.”In another move aimed at softening Trump’s image, his granddaughter Kai Madison Trump made her debut on the political stage. “He calls me during the middle of the school day to ask how my golf game is going and tells me all about his,” she said. “Grandpa, you are such an inspiration and I love you. The media makes my grandpa look like such a different person but I know who he is.”Some have shifted their emphasis from “Make America great again” (Maga) to “Make America one again”. Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee, told the convention on Tuesday that Americans should remember “there is more that unites us than divides us”.In a nod towards moderation, Trump invited his erstwhile Republican rival Nikki Haley to speak. She was greeted with cheers and some boos but quickly quelled the latter by giving Trump a full-throated endorsement. “You don’t have to agree with Trump 100% of the time to vote for him,” she said. “Take it from me.”Republicans’ show of harmony offers a stunning contrast with Democrats, who have spent weeks mired in intra-party tensions over whether 81-year-old Biden should abandon his reelection bid after a hapless debate performance. A national NBC News poll found that just 33% of Democrats are satisfied with Biden as their party’s presidential nominee, versus 71% of Republicans satisfied with Trump.Speaking at an event in Milwaukee organised by the Cook Political Report and University of Chicago Institute of Politics, Republican pollster and strategist Tony Fabrizio said: “Right now the Democrats are the perfect circular firing squad and, while they’re the perfect circular firing squad, we have the run of the field, and the run of the field for us is to do exactly what we are doing. Running the messaging we are running. The president doing what the president is doing.”Trump’s near-death experience, and the ensuing national attention, present an opportunity when he formally accepts the party’s nomination to face Biden in a rematch of 2020. His wife Melania and daughter Ivanka, both of whom have been mostly missing from the campaign trail, are expected to attend.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSome Republicans hope that Trump can recreate Ronald Reagan’s defiant optimism after he survived an assassination attempt in 1981, casting himself as unifier-in-chief. On Sunday Trump told the New York Post newspaper that he had intended to deliver biting remarks against Biden until the shooting prompted him to throw them out.Trump is understood to have been reworking his remarks with his speechwriter Ross Worthington since the shooting, according to a person close to Trump, and has discussed making himself sound like he is still the president, as opposed to just a candidate.But at an event hosted by the Axios website, Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, suggested that even if Trump shifted to a gentler tone, his core political attacks were likely to continue. “You can be nicer on the margins but you still have to call out insanity when you see insanity,” Trump Jr said when asked about more caustic language turning off potential voters, for instance on transgender issues. “That’s different, that’s not about tone.”Trump Jr also said that, even though he believed that Trump’s unity tone would last until the vice-presidential debate, he expected Trump to counter-punch if attacked by Biden, who recently urged the country to tone down the political rhetoric in a televised address from the Oval Office.“I think he’s going to be tough when he has to be. That’s never going to change. He’s not going to just take an attack. My father will always be a fighter, that’s never going to change, but he’s going to do his best to moderate that. He’s never going to stop being Trump when attacked, that’s what makes him an effective leader because he doesn’t cower under fire – quite literally.”At an event hosted by Georgetown University on the sidelines of the convention, Trump’s co-campaign chief Chris LaCivita acknowledged that the unity messaging would not come at the expense of winning the election in November.LaCivita said: “This is obviously an opportunity to bring our country together. But let’s not forget we’re in the middle of a campaign. Our focus is very much on putting everything back squarely on the issues that are hurting everyday Americans and providing them an answer to those.”Indeed, for all the talk of a softer, more inclusive Trump, he has sat in a box in the convention hall alongside extremists such as Tucker Carlson, a broadcaster who has promoted white nationalism and praised Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the representative who once floated a conspiracy theory involving “Jewish space lasers”.Many of the speeches in Milwaukee have been centered on the theme of law and order and infused with Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, with speakers angrily denouncing Biden’s southern border policies and referring to an “invasion”. Delegates waved signs that said, “Mass deportation now” and chanted, “Drill, baby, drill!”There are also some striking absences: the former president George W Bush, the former vice-president Mike Pence and senators Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Susan Collins (Maine), Todd Young (Indiana), Mitt Romney (Utah) and Rand Paul (Kentucky) are all skipping the convention.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “‘New’ Trump is teleprompter Trump. He comes out once every six months or so, sticks around for a few minutes and then disappears. He’ll talk about unity and use all the buzzwords for one night but let’s not kids ourselves: it’s an act.” More

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      Key takeaways from day three of the Republican national convention

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      Republicans had a new chant on Wednesday night: not just “Trump! Trump!” but also “JD! JD! JD!” in honor of Trump’s new vice-presidential pick, Ohio senator JD Vance, who introduced himself to the country Wednesday night in a confident and personal primetime address.Also new: the professionally printed signs reading “Mass Deportations Now,” a reference to Trump’s campaign pledge to engage in the biggest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in US history.Here are five key takeaways from the night:1. Republicans are simply not talking about abortionDuring his race for the US senate in Ohio, Vance said that he did not support rape and incest exceptions in abortion bans. In 2022, he said he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally”, expressing sympathy for the view that a national abortion ban was necessary to stop women from traveling to different states in order to get abortions.A section on Vance’s Senate website, accessible as late as Monday, read, simply, “End abortion,” calling him “100% pro-life, a Huffington Post reporter noted. By Wednesday, that message had vanished, as Vance’s old website simply redirected to Trump’s presidential campaign site.Vance similarly erased his anti-abortion views from his primetime speech to the RNC on Wednesday, and as my colleagues have noted, he’s far from alone. There’s been a conspicuous silence on abortion throughout the Republican convention, as well as on other issues that Republicans appear to see as weaknesses, like Project 2025 and the future of American democracy.2. Warm reaction to Vance’s bestselling life story, as ‘hillbilly’ aims for White House The Republican national convention crowd was already eating out of Vance’s hand, as the charismatic 39-year-old Ohio senator talked them through the life story that made him into the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy, a 2016 memoir that became a 2020 feature film starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close.Vance had described growing up “a working-class boy born far from the halls of power” in Middletown, Ohio, with a single mother who struggled with addiction, and a tough, loving grandmother who kept him from falling prey to a local drug dealer. He described his journey from the Marine Corps, to Yale, to working in venture capital, to being chosen as Trump’s vice-presidential pick.He neatly contrasted his youth to Biden’s age, noting policies Biden supported when he was in high school, and saying: “Joe Biden has been a politician in Washington for longer than I’ve been alive.” Then, talking about other single mothers like his, who had struggled with addiction but never given up, he revealed that his mother, Beverly Aikins, was in the RNC audience with him, and that she is “10 years clean and sober”.“I love you, mom,” he said, suggesting that she might he able to celebrate her full 10 years of sobriety next year in the White House.As the cameras panned to Vance’s smiling mother, she mouthed, “That’s my boy! That’s my boy!” And the crowd started chanting, “JD’s mom! JD’s mom!”3. It’s clear that JD’s job is to woo the rust belt Vance shouted out to his home state of Ohio in his speech, but he quickly cut off the chants of “O-H-I-O,” quipping, “We gotta win Michigan too.”His speech was threaded with references to rust belt states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Kentucky, which he connected to the struggles of his Ohio hometown, and to the importance of restoring American factories and American manufacturing.Vance described a series of economic and foreign policy choices Biden made over his long career that, he argued, hurt American workers, particularly those in towns like he grew up in. Some observers saw the speech as a rewriting of Vance’s own life narrative, shifting from Hillbilly Elegy’s preoccupation with Appalachian poverty’s connection to cultural problems and personal responsibility, to instead blaming politician Joe Biden for creating the conditions that left the people he grew up with, impoverished.Strikingly, Vance came onstage to the country twang of Merle Haggard’s 2005 protest ballad, America First, which expressed the singer’s opposition to the Iraq war.4. Republicans highlighted grief and anger over the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021Some of the family members of the 13 soldiers killed in an Islamic State terrorist attack at Kabul airport during the “disastrous” US withdrawal from Afghanistan spoke at the RNC to criticize Biden.Alicia Lopez, whose son, Corporal Hunter Lopez, was killed on 26 August 2021, said: “Despite our pleas for answers and accountability, they have pushed us away and tried to silence us. The Biden administration has not owned up to the bad decisions, they have not been transparent about their failures and their so-called leaders work to protect themselves, rather than our sons and daughters who took the oath to defend our country.”A mother-in-law of a marine killed at Abbey Gate said that Trump, in contrast, had spent dedicated time with family members, offering them what she felt was genuine support in their grief. The family members were also featured in a video in which they said that when they met with Biden as their loved ones’ bodies arrived at a military base in Delaware, the president appeared to check his watch during the ceremony.Other pro-Trump veterans also spoke to the lasting sense of anger and betrayal they felt in witnessing the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and in the struggles and fears of the Afghans they had worked with who were left behind as the Taliban seized control of the country.“Throughout our careers, we never had regrets about our service, but this moral injury caused many of us to ask: ‘Why did we serve, if this was the outcome?’” Scott Neil, a retired green beret, said.A scathing state department review of the military withdrawal from Afghanistan concluded that both the Trump and Biden administrations were to blame as “during both administrations there was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow”.But the RNC’s focus on the withdrawal also took aim at one of Biden’s political strengths. As someone who has lost family members to a car accident and cancer, he has often been praised for his ability to grieve with people, and offer them support in moments of profound loss, even being referred to as “the designated mourner”. But on Wednesday, the RNC offered multiple speakers who portrayed Trump as the man who would comfort Americans in their grief and Biden as a self-involved politician.5. Chants of “Bring them home” as parents of 7 October hostage speak Orna and Ronen Neutra, whose son, Omer Neutra, was kidnapped during the 7 October attack in Israel, said Trump had supported them, asked the RNC for continued support in securing their son’s safe return. Omer is one of eight American hostages, Ronen Neutra said.“President Trump called us personally right after the attack, when Omer was taken captive,” Ronen Neutra said. “We know he stands with the American hostages. We need our beautiful son back and we need your support. We need your support to end this crisis and bring all the hostages back home.”Shabbos Kestenbaum, a recent Harvard Divinity School student who was part of a group of students who filed a lawsuit alleging that Harvard failed to address antisemitism on campus, also spoke, as did members of a University of North Carolina fraternity who held up an American flag during a pro-Palestine campus protest.Chris Stein and Carter Sherman contributed reporting More

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      Bob Menendez set to resign from Senate after bribery conviction – report

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      The Democratic US senator Bob Menendez is refuting early reports that he told allies he was considering resigning from Congress after being convicted on corruption charges.“I can tell you that I have not resigned nor have I spoken to any so-called allies … Seems to me that there is an effort to try to force me into a statement,” Menendez told CBS News late Wednesday evening.Menendez has represented New Jersey in Congress for more than 30 years, as a representative in the House from 1993 to 2006 and since then in the Senate.NBC News reported early on Wednesday Menendez was preparing to resign.A jury in New York on Monday found the 70-year-old former chair of the Senate foreign relations committee guilty of 16 federal charges, including accepting bribes of cash, gold and a luxury car from three New Jersey businessmen, and acting as an overseas agent for Egypt.Shortly after the verdicts were read, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader; Cory Booker, Menendez’s fellow New Jersey senator; and Phil Murphy, the state’s Democratic governor, had urged him to stand down.Despite months of defiance from Menendez, NBC reported he is ready to relinquish his seat, citing two unnamed sources familiar with the senator’s intentions.“In light of this guilty verdict, Senator Menendez must now do what is right for his constituents, the Senate, and our country, and resign,” Schumer said in a statement.Murphy, who was among the first Democrats to call for Menendez to resign, will appoint a senator to temporarily complete Menendez’s term, which ends in January 2025.After the guilty verdict, Menendez told reporters: “I have never violated my public oath. I have never been anything but a patriot of my country and for my country.”It was a familiar refrain from Menendez, who has taken a defiant stand ever since he was first indicted in September last year.The senator was on trial with New Jersey businessmen Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, who were also convicted of all the charges they faced. All three pleaded not guilty.Another businessman pleaded guilty before trial and testified against Menendez and the other defendants.Menendez’s wife, Nadine, was also charged, although Stein announced Tuesday that her trial had been postponed indefinitely. Menendez said in May she was being treated for advanced-stage breast cancer.This article was amended on 17 July 2024. An earlier version stated that Menendez was going to resignReuters contributed reporting More