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      Trump is now a member of the mass shooting survivor’s club – will it change anything?

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      The assassination attempt on Donald Trump has put the former president in a category that hundreds of other Americans have been forced into in recent decades: the victim of a high-profile mass shooting.For those who have been at the scene of public shootings or lived through the media whirlwind that followed a loved one’s death to mass violence, the past week has felt like a “rinse and repeat” of more than a decade of this type of violence, said Christian Heyne, the chief officer of policy and programs at Brady, a gun violence prevention organization named after the former White House press secretary Jim Brady, who was shot in the head during an assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981.“Every time this type of gun violence happens, it dredges up a lot of trauma,” said Heyne, whose mother was killed and father was injured in a shooting rampage in Thousand Oaks, California, in 2005. In addition to Heyne’s mother, a police officer was killed in the attack, and five other people were injured.After Saturday’s shooting, Heyne was brought back to the day his mother was killed and his community was terrorized. He is troubled that more people now face the trauma he has lived with for nearly 20 years.“The thing that baffles me is that we can be in this cycle of rinse and repeat but we’re not tapping into a conversation about how we prevent the next shooting,” he added.For many like Heyne, Saturday’s shooting was a reminder of their own losses and a stark reminder that gun violence can touch anyone, including a presidential nominee surrounded by armed law enforcement. The policy solutions, they say, are the same they have asked for following every mass shooting tragedy.“The fact that a 20-year-old with an AR-15 was able to get that close to killing a previous head of state is the reason that we have to focus on the gun at the end of the day,” said David Hogg, co-founder of March for Our Lives, a violence prevention group founded after 17 of his classmates were killed at their high school in Parkland, Florida.As the news of the Trump rally flooded television, one of Hogg’s first thoughts was of his mother, who he says is deeply affected by news of shootings. Then, he began calling out what he sees as the fallacy that more guns will ensure protection from mass shootings. “We’re not going to bulletproof our entire society,” he said.Now, he is looking forward with hope that the near-killing of the leader of the Republican party will push lawmakers to build the trust among themselves needed to pass gun policies at the state and federal levels.“The former president of the United States has heightened security and additional Secret Service, and this still happened. We need to change the conversation.“We have to have some semblance of trust between these major party political leaders,” Hogg continued. “Do I think Republicans are actually going to step up to the plate and do something? I don’t think so. But I hope so after the crown jewel of their movement was threatened.”The only similarity Hogg saw between the Parkland shooting and Trump’s assassination attempt was the deluge of conspiracies, speculation and misinformation that have become commonplace following high-profile shootings at Parkland and Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. “This is America, people love conspiracy theories in general,” he said.“There’s this range of public outcry that we continue to live through,” echoed Mark Barden, whose seven-year-old son Daniel was one of 26 people killed in the 2012 tragedy in Connecticut. “There’s sympathy, empathy, outrage and anger. There’s sadness, there’s horror and fear and then conjecture.”After 12 years of advocacy through Sandy Hook Promise, the organization he co-founded with Nicole Hockley another parent whose child was killed in the attack, Barden says he has grown used to the intense news cycle that follows high-profile shootings. He has found a way to move past the ugliest parts of the post-mass shooting news cycle, he said, to focus on spreading awareness about identifying the warning signs and behaviors that often precede mass public violence.“I spend all of my intelligence and mental capital on getting people to know the signs and giving them the tools to make an intervention on themselves or somebody else,” he said.“I think this could be – depending on how this unfolds – a catalyst moment,” Barden said of the rally shooting in Pennsylvania on Saturday. “There’s an opportunity for folks to understand that this doesn’t have to be our way of life.” More

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      Ivanka Trump said she was done with politics – but is the Maga Princess plotting a return?

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      If you’re a woman freaking out about the imminent possibility of another Trump term, don’t despair quite yet. Yes, Project 2025 is hoping to turn the US into a Christian nationalist country. Yes, JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running partner, has been primed for the job by Peter Thiel, a man who has mused that women having the vote is problematic. Yes, experts are raising the alarm that “a Trump-Vance administration will be the most dangerous administration for abortion and reproductive freedom in this country’s history.” But it’s not all doom and gloom: there may well be a beacon of light and female liberation coming into the White House as well. Signs suggest Ivanka Trump is considering a return to politics. Ladies and gentlewomen, the patron saint of female empowerment may selflessly serve us once again!To be clear: the younger Trump hasn’t explicitly said that she’s interested in another go at being Daddy’s special adviser. In fact, she’s spent the last few years getting as far away from politics as possible. A renaissance woman, Trump has sold everything from handbags to shoes to real estate – but her most valuable product has always been herself. The former first daughter has always been very careful about protecting her personal brand. And, for a while, that meant staying well clear of her father.With Donald Trump now formally the nominee, it can be hard to remember just how bad things looked for the former president a couple of years ago. After an underwhelming performance by GOP candidates in the 2022 midterm elections, a lot of Trump’s former acolytes started turning on him. High-profile Republicans complained that Trump was a drag on the party. Even the New York Post, once Trump’s personal Pravda, thought he was a joke: “TRUMPTY DUMPTY”, a post-midterm front page crowed. And then, of course, there were Trump’s mountains of legal problems. A lot of people wrote Trump off.Ivanka was noticeably not by her father’s side during his hours of need. The moment that Donald got kicked out of the White House, Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, followed him to Florida but kept a safe distance from the political goings on at Mar-a-Lago. Can’t have an insurrection ruining one’s image, after all.View image in fullscreenA company called College Hunks Hauling Junk helped them clear out their DC mansion and the pair decamped to Miami’s “Billionaire Bunker”. They didn’t go empty-handed, of course. The couple reported between $172m and $640m in outside income while working in the White House and Saudi Arabia gave Kushner’s private equity firm $2bn to invest. Enough to keep them busy for a while.For a long time, Javanka stayed fairly under the radar. Ivanka Trump would pop up in headlines now and again in Fun-loving Mother and Caring Philanthropist mode. Behold, a flattering headline about Ivanka helping deploy medical supplies and meals to Ukraine! Look: here’s an Instagram slideshow of the whole family skiing! Now here’s a fun picture of the Javanka family at the flashy Ambani wedding!A cynic might say these carefully curated images were designed to humanize Trump and erase her messy political past. Aiding this was a consistent drip-drip of mysterious sources telling the press that Javanka had no desire whatsoever to return to politics. Even this year, when Donald Trump became the presumptive nominee, media “sources” kept insisting that the former first daughter wanted nothing to do with the White House. “She is very happy, living her best life,” a source told People in March. “She left politics totally in the rearview mirror and so this time around, even if her dad is the leading Republican candidate, she basically doesn’t care. She told him when he said he was going to run again that she didn’t want to be involved.”Mary Trump, the woman who has made a career out of being Donald Trump’s disgruntled niece after a legal battle over her inheritance, has been blunt about why Ivanka seems to have retreated from politics. “I think Ivanka made very clear that she doesn’t get enough out of [her relationship with her father] any more,” Mary Trump told CNN at the end of May. “She’s barely been heard from for months; she could not be bothered to show up at [her father’s] trial [over falsifying business records].”As the election inches closer, however, Ivanka seems to have reassessed the value of her relationship with her father. In early May, the media outlet Puck reported that she was “warming to the idea of trying to be helpful again … She’s not like ‘Hell no’ any more.” A similar report from Business Insider soon followed: according to a “friend of Ivanka”, the entrepreneur wasn’t ruling politics out. A spokesperson for the couple told Puck that this was all nonsense but rumours of a political comeback kept mounting.Then, a couple of weeks ago, Ivanka jumped back into the spotlight with an appearance on Lex Fridman’s highly influential podcast. (Fridman has more than 4 million subscribers on YouTube.) In this she opened up about how working at the White House was “the most extraordinary growth experience of my life” and how privileged she was to have been asked by her father to help so many people. During the conversation, she also carefully recapped some of (what’s she’s claimed as) her key achievements in the White House, such as boosting the child tax credit. It wasn’t so much an interview as it was a hype project by a friend. It felt a lot like it was teasing Trump’s return to political life should her dad be re-elected.So, after years in the Floridian wilderness, has the Maga Princess officially returned to the family fold? It’s a tad too early to tell but it increasingly looks that way. As one would expect, Ivanka Trump has spent the last few days close to her father after the attempt on his life: she’s very much thrown herself into the role of doting daughter again.And while Ivanka has been absent from the Republican national convention so far, she and Jared are expected to be at Donald’s side on Thursday when he formally accepts the party’s nomination. And if that happens and images of Ivanka standing next to her father hit the headlines, it won’t just be a celebratory photoshoot – it’ll be a preview of Trump’s second term. More

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      Yes, Joe Biden’s mind is a problem. So is his cold heart towards Palestinians | Ahmed Moor

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      Attention has rightly been focused on Biden’s cognitive lapses – the incomplete sentences, the trailing thoughts, the obvious gaps in coherence. The spectacle, which has been obvious to anyone who isn’t a Democratic party surrogate or a diehard party member, has been astonishing to witness. The images of Giorgia Meloni seemingly redirecting Biden at the meeting of the G7, or his frozen visage as Jill Biden sought to drum up enthusiasm for his candidacy, or Barack Obama guiding him off a stage, or his rigid dancing during a Juneteenth celebration have caused many to ask about Joe Biden’s physical fitness and ability to hold the highest office in the land.Yet, in calling for Biden to step back from running a second time, some Democrats have described the president as “decent” and “a good man”. The opposite is true.Biden has enabled a ghastly genocide, the starvation of children in Palestine, and his legacy is defined by it. Unfortunately, his record before Palestine also puts the lie to the “decency” myth. His enthusiasm for the Iraq war and the savage destruction of Lebanon in 1982 illustrate his poor judgment and ethical lapses on foreign policy. His opposition to federally mandated desegregation busing, his lazy plagiarism, and his sexist treatment of Anita Hill, a Black woman who was allegedly sexually harassed by the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, do not comprise a record of decency either.Donald Trump is a dangerous man. In his first term he employed cartoonishly bad people. Steve Bannon, a criminal and an Islamophobe; Jared Kushner, whose primary achievement appears to have been transmuting an inscrutable role in the White House into a $2bn investment from the Saudis in 2021 and John Bolton, who lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to propel this country into war, all “served” him as president. This time around, we should reasonably expect more of the same. Or maybe worse.Democrats are right to fret – and, to use the illustrative if childish metaphor favored by the Biden campaign – to wet their beds at the prospect of another meeting between Trump and Biden. The president’s decline is alarming many Democrats. Trump, by contrast, presents as someone who is a little more alert, but is self-indulgent and undisciplined. He comes across as a peevish, unimaginably rich man, who has been so wealthy for so long, whose money has insulated him from the consequences of his actions for so long, whose primary company is sycophantic, that he chooses to rant incoherently. If there is something wrong with his brain, it may be attributable to the long-term effects of money on cognition.Another Trump-Biden debate is scheduled for 10 September, and, if he remains the Democratic candidate, there is no reason to believe that Biden will fare any better. While cognitive decline is highly mediated by personal characteristics, it does not get better with time; age is age. Today, Biden is unable to meet the challenge posed by Trump – not cognitively, and not ethically.The argument for replacing Biden was strong as soon as his first “bear hug” embrace” of the “insufferably arrogant” war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu caused him to lose voters in Michigan, an indispensable swing state. And it has grown stronger in the wake of the disastrous July debate. It seems reasonable to believe the polls: Americans will not vote for someone who cannot plausibly hold a regular job to the office of the presidency.Before the debate, it seemed likely that enough Americans would not vote for someone who actively abetted a genocide, who openly regarded Palestinian lives with contempt, and who cast an entire generation of college students and young people as antisemites and miscreants, to produce a Trump presidency. But politics is dynamic – and presaged does not mean prescribed.Biden’s poor performance during the debate with Trump may act as an unexpected opportunity for Democrats. Because far from being “a good man” – as Nicholas Kristof, who has spent time documenting aspects of the Israeli genocide, has nonetheless called Biden – Biden’s ethical failures have always been an albatross. He was poised to lose the election even before the debate – an argument that his supporters were able to successfully withstand, primarily by browbeating the realists in the party. But now, with his mental decline so evident, those who seek a different candidate can argue forcefully that he is unfit.The Democrats do not have to lose this election to Donald Trump. The country, and the world, does not have to contend with another four years of incoherence and ineptitude. As the French election – which saw the Palestine-supporting New Popular Front win a shock victory – shows: the best way to beat the far-right is a strong and principled left.This race is salvageable. To win, the Democrats must jettison one bad, ailing man. And find someone decent to take his place.

      Ahmed Moor is a writer, activist and co-editor of After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine More

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      Ohio voters hope son of soil JD Vance will ‘do something good for us’

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      For many in Middletown, Ohio, JD Vance is better-known as a bestselling author and hit Hollywood movie subject than a politician who on Monday was propelled into the political big time as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick.Amanda Bailey moved into Vance’s grandmother’s house, the home in which Vance was mostly raised, 18 months ago. Since then, she’s been dealing with a steady stream of curious passersby inspired by Vance’s 2016 autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, and the 2020 film of the same name, driving by and taking photos of the house.Bailey, who works at a local hardware store, admits she’s not entirely up to speed with Vance’s policy positions.“I hope he’ll do something good for us, and I think he will,” she says.Her thoughts are echoed by Jerry Dobbins, who has lived three doors down the street for the past 31 years. Dobbins says his memories of Vance’s family are mainly of the vice-presidential candidate’s grandmother, Bonnie, who mostly raised JD and his sister, Lindsay.“Bonnie was a tough bird. She was just a strong woman from Kentucky,” he says.But there’s a reason Bailey, Dobbins and a number of other Middletown residents say they are not especially concerned by Vance being rocketed into the political mainstream without much in the way of experience – it’s because they have complete faith in the person who picked him: Donald Trump.“I like Trump,” says Bailey. “And I think they’ll do a lot of good work together.”“Trump’s not a politician. He’s a businessman,” says Dobbins, who worked as a fabricator at a nearby aerospace company before retiring. “When Trump got in [in 2016], things started looking better economy-wise, business-wise. I don’t think he can be beat [in November].”The Middletown Vance was raised in is not unlike the dozens of other left-behind communities in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and beyond, where Trump’s particular brand of politics and rhetoric has found favor. In Butler county, which encompasses most of Middletown and several satellite towns of Cincinnati, Trump beat Biden by 24 points in the 2020 election.Like thousands of others, Vance’s family were lured from Appalachia to Ohio by the promise of work at Middletown’s many paper and steel mills that for much of the 20th century dominated the region’s economy.And as with dozens of other rust belt towns, Middletown’s economy shrank due to industrial offshoring that began in the 1970s, giving rise to job losses and the ravages of the opioid epidemic that endure today.It’s these ills, which the 39-year-old Vance has blamed on Joe Biden, immigrants and China, that he has used to craft a so-far successful political career. Despite these claims, the Biden administration has invested billions of dollars in the midwest, while immigrants have helped stem population decline in many towns and cities.For longtime Middletown residents Bev and Tom Pressler, Vance’s lack of political experience may even be an advantage.“I think the young blood is good. We need some younger politicians running the country,” says Tom. “Obama got in and he wasn’t all that old, and he didn’t have all that experience. Trump didn’t have all that experience and I think he did excellent.”For Bev Pressler, a 62-year-old resident, Vance has worked hard to get where he is today.“If you saw the movie and read the book, he was trying to get into these schools, he was trying to pull his mom out of drug addiction, his family depended on him,” she says.But not everyone in Middletown thinks Vance’s meteoric rise to the forefront of US politics is a good thing.“He has a legislative legacy of zero achievements, especially lacking any meaningful support for Ohioans,” says Kathy Wyenandt, the chair of the Butler county Democratic party.“Vance is willing to change his beliefs at any time for the sake of amassing power … he is an out-of-touch millionaire and political shapeshifter who is wrong for Ohio, and wrong for our country.”Although Vance launched his political career in the US Senate with a campaign rally at a steel manufacturer in Middletown in July 2021, locals say they haven’t seen much of him since then.“What concerns me more than anything is that, at Senator Vance’s age, he is able to take the Maga agenda and to see it out far beyond even Trump’s time, if he were to get re-elected,” says Scotty Robertson, a pastor who has lived in Middletown for seven years.“Those policies are so destructive to our country and to Middletown. We’re talking about potentially ending social security and Medicare as we know it, continuing to roll back voting rights and ensuring that large segments of our population find it extremely hard to even vote. We’re talking about supporting policy that allows the president to essentially do whatever he or she chooses without any kind of accountability.”Still, for Debbie Dranschak, who with her husband runs the White Dog Distilling Company on Middletown’s Central Avenue, that’s not enough of a reason not to vote for his running mate in November.“I don’t know him, I don’t know his politics, but I’m glad Trump picked him,” she says. “Biden is just too old. He needs to get out. I grew up Democrat, but it’s about who is going to do the best for the country.”For Chad Sebald, an audio engineer, Vance has been unfairly labeled by some locally as a “class traitor” – someone who leaves behind the people they grew up with in search of better opportunities elsewhere.“Knowing his history, he came from nothing. He did what just about anybody in Middletown would do – he got out. I can’t blame the guy for getting out of here,” says Sebald, who also plans to vote for Trump in November.However, for a few minutes on the same street Vance was raised, the kind of dangerous, racist rhetoric that many say Trump has fueled over the years was in full view on Monday afternoon.As a local TV news car pulled up to interview residents, a man wearing a T-shirt with the word “freedom” written on it emerged from a nearby home angrily asking the car and its occupants to leave.“JD Vance is a race traitor,” he yells. Vance’s wife, Usha, is the daughter of immigrants from India. “Fuck that motherfucker.” More

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      The American republic is crumbling before us – and Democrats must share the blame | Owen Jones

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      Has the US entered its late Soviet phase? The country is a gerontocracy led by ailing leaders and with a crisis of confidence in its dominant ideology; it is a flailing superpower suffering foreign humiliation (not least in Afghanistan); and its economic system struggles to meet the needs of many of its people. The similarities are a little uncanny.There are, of course, clear differences too. The US is a democracy, albeit one severely compromised by wealthy vested interests and concerted rightwing efforts to weaken voting rights, and it is a racially diverse union of states, rather than an unstable federation of nations. But, crucially, if Joe Biden is a Leonid Brezhnev or one of his two short-lived elderly successors, then Donald Trump is no Mikhail Gorbachev: he is more of an American Vladimir Putin.The attempted assassination of Trump marks a further descent into the darkness. Earlier this year, a poll found that more than a third of Americans believe civil war in their lifetime is likely, with another 13% opting for “very likely”. In 2021, a leading Canadian political scientist and scholar of violent conflict warned that the weakening of US democratic institutions over decades could lead to the whole system’s collapse by 2025, leading to extreme violent instability and a rightwing tyranny prevailing by 2030. A decade ago, such prophecies would have seemed outlandish, deranged even. Now only the foolishly complacent would dismiss them as lying outside the realms of plausibility.The liberal order is imploding. But just a quarter of a century ago, under Bill Clinton’s presidency, many considered it bulletproof. The US was drunk on its recent cold war triumph, and the political and economic order it extolled was described as the final stage of human development by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History? The image of an at-ease, amiable US was projected to the world in cultural exports ranging from Friends to The West Wing, or as humanity’s benign protector in Independence Day. Globally, liberal democracies appeared to be becoming the norm, not besieged exceptions. Sure, the arrival of George W Bush, the horror of 9/11 and the killing fields of Iraq were traumatic for progressive Americans, bookended by the most severe crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression. But Barack Obama seemed to wash those sins away. He was the first black president, telegenic and with a confident charm: central casting could not have produced a more ideal candidate for the sensibilities of the liberal American.Yet nine decades after the publication of It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’s dystopian novel about a fictional fascist dictator seizing power in the US, the scenario it imagines seems less far-fetched than at any other point in the 250-year existence of the American republic. Then, Lewis looked to Nazi Germany as a warning: his wife was the journalist Dorothy Thompson, who had interviewed Adolf Hitler and subsequently been expelled by his regime. Today, the authoritarian model can be observed in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Fidesz was a centre-right party that became radicalised in power, and since then has deployed anti-migrant hysteria to build support, demonised opponents as unpatriotic foreign puppets, rigged the media in its favour and trashed judicial independence, building what Orbán describes as an “illiberal democracy”. It is a trajectory perhaps most strikingly pioneered by Putin: you keep the trappings of democracy, with the substance gradually rotted away. Shortly before the assassination attempt, Trump hosted Orbán – who has endorsed the Republican presidential nominee – at Mar-a-Lago.Democratic culture in the US is stronger and more embedded than in Hungary. But Trump is even more demagogic than Orbán, with a more extreme and motivated grassroots base. Furthermore, he is more vengeful and radicalised than ever – the relative moderates in his entourage have left in horror at his plans for the presidency. The supreme court has a conservative majority, and a Trump presidential victory could easily be accompanied by Republican victory in both houses of Congress, meaning precious few checks and balances. Trump has floated cancelling the US constitution and jailing his political opponents, and his promise only to be a dictator on “day one” (and not after) is hardly reassuring.Trump’s return to the White House is likely to be met with a response on the streets. Any such protests could be used as a pretext to impose authoritarian measures, perhaps even martial law. Trump reportedly told the top US military leader to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020. You can see how it could spiral. We don’t yet know the motive of Trump’s suspected shooter, but the episode will be used by Republicans to shut down scrutiny of Trump and the danger he poses to the republic on the grounds that it is inciting further violence against him. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of extremist violence in the US is perpetrated by rightwing elements.How did it all go wrong? The truth is the US system has long been dysfunctional, with Democratic elites partly to blame. When Trump came to power, the real average wage had about the same purchasing power as it did four decades earlier. Most gains had been accrued by top earners. Such stagnation breeds pessimism, ripe for demagogic exploitation. Democrats failed to transform this broken order.Trump’s surge is also a racist backlash, but it is linked to the failure of Democratic economic policy. Republicans have assiduously exploited and promoted a white backlash ever since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, deploying racist dog whistles which only escalated under Obama. But the Democrats’ approach to social reform did not help. Corporate taxes were slashed from the 1960s onwards, while the tax burden on middle-income Americans nearly doubled between the mid-1950s and 1980. Social programmes targeted at poorer Americans were therefore easily demonised as being paid for by blue-collar workers, breaking down the solidarity of the traditional Democratic coalition. That resentment was easily and crudely racialised as undeserving poor black America being subsidised by hardworking white people.The foreign military ventures of Democratic elites such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden – principally in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also Libya – were also characterised by bloody turmoil and international humiliation. Today, Biden has infuriated natural Democratic voters and morally disgraced the US globally with complicity in Israel’s genocidal rampage. Republicans are enthusiastic about their nominee: Democrats are not.A superpower in crisis both at home and abroad risks some form of reckoning, as the Soviet leadership discovered. Across the west, the cordon sanitaire between the centre-right and what lies beyond has collapsed: a Trump victory will embolden Europe’s surging far-right movements. The liberal order crumbles before us: we have barely begun to contemplate what lies beyond it.

      Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist More

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      ‘A dystopian plot’: how will Trump’s Project 2025 affect California?

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      Donald Trump has not been shy about attacking California on the presidential campaign trail, telling fellow conservatives that “the place is failing” under Democratic party leadership. And all signs suggest that a second Trump administration would not hesitate to take a sledgehammer to principles and policy priorities that the Golden state and other progressive bastions hold dear.The Project 2025 policy document, a blueprint for a second Trump presidency drawn up by former Trump administration officials and sympathetic thinktank analysts, takes specific aim at California on abortion rights, fuel emissions standards and the transition to electric vehicles.The document also raises the possibility of a large-scale crackdown on immigration and an intense focus on border security – a cornerstone of the Trump campaign that could upend the lives of millions of immigrants living in California as well as parts of the state economy, especially agriculture, that depend heavily on immigrant labor.That is not to mention the other ways Project 2025 envisions overhauling the US government, with implications for California as much as the rest of the country: enhancing the power of the presidency and eroding the independence of the justice department, dismantling what it calls “the administrative state”, abandoning efforts to combat the climate crisis and curbing the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans.“Project 2025 is more than an idea,” the California congressman Jared Huffman has warned, “it’s a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will.”What remains to be seen, though, is how much of the wishlist laid out in Project 2025’s 900-page “Mandate for Leadership” is actually achievable. Trump himself has sought to distance himself from the document, as Democrats like Huffman have started using it as a cudgel with which to attack his campaign. And a number of policy experts at one remove from the heat and hyperbole of the election campaign believe that any dystopian plot might quickly give way to a lot of lawsuits likely to slow or halt parts of the Trump agenda for months or years.“I don’t think they are capable of pulling off a lot of the things they want to pull off,” said Christopher Thornberg of the Los Angeles-based research and consulting firm Beacon Economics. While an immigration crackdown similar to the one in Trump’s first term seems inevitable, mass expulsions of millions of people as promised by the former president would be dizzyingly expensive and near-impossible to pull off, he argued.As for California’s more ambitious environmental targets that Project 2025 wants to disrupt, some – getting rid of gas-powered cars by 2035, for example – are probably unfeasible.On many other issues, California can draw on its experience of the first Trump presidency to throw up roadblocks or pass its own state legislation. The Project 2025 document may be a sign that Trump and his allies are more ready to govern this time, but – as the political consultant and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project Mike Madrid argues – California and other blue states are better prepared, too.“Whatever the federal government decides to do, California can compensate,” Madrid said. In the event of a second Trump presidency, he expected the state to start filing lawsuits almost immediately, as it did more than a hundred times during the 2017-21 presidency, and find administrative or legislative solutions to many of the problems a new Trump administration might try to create.“This state is good at finding ways around the policies,” he said. “The size of the economy makes it easier to do that.”In one instance – a proposal in the Project 2025 document to end a legal waiver that has enabled California to set its own fuel efficiency standards for the past half-century – the courts have already heard a suit brought by several Republican-run states and ruled in California’s favor.None of that diminishes the threats that Trump and his supporters have been directing at California’s political leadership, or the nastiness of some of their language. In speeches over the past year, Trump has mischaracterized California as a place with so little water that even rich people in Beverly Hills can’t take proper showers, a place where shoplifting and other crimes are so rampant the only solution is to shoot criminals on sight, a place where undocumented immigrants are, implausibly, offered pension funds and mansions on arrival and can vote illegally multiple times over. “The world is being dumped into California,” he told state Republicans last September. “Prisoners. Terrorists. Mental patients.”Project 2025’s approach has been less fanciful and much more focused on policy detail. It rails, for example, against what it calls “abortion tourism” in California and other states and proposes a number of administrative remedies to track women who travel there because of abortion bans in their states, and to withhold Medicaid and other federal funding if California continues to insist that insurance companies make abortion part of their health coverage.None of this, though, is as frightening to abortion rights activists in California as the part that is left unsaid: the desire of many on the political right to institute an outright national abortion ban. Asked whether she believed Trump when he said he would not support such a ban, Jodi Hicks of the Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California responded with a flat “No.”To her, the fight in California is not about the fine print of the Hyde amendment or the Weldon amendement – tools invoked by Project 2025 that Republicans have used in the past to try to restrict abortion around the country – but rather about control of Congress to avert even the possibility of a national ban.Hicks has identified eight swing districts in California that she believes can determine control of the House of Representatives and her organization is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the Democratic candidates there. “The road to reproductive freedom runs through California,” she said. “We know what the intention is – they want to take away abortion rights all across the country, including California. What we need is a Congress that can push back and protect us.”The best way to thwart the Republicans’ plans, in other words, is to vote against them. California, as a solid-blue state, will do its part to keep Trump out of the White House. What the rest of the country does remains to be seen. More

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      Republican convention day three: JD Vance to speak as focus turns to foreign policy

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      JD Vance will give his first major address as Donald Trump’s running mate on Wednesday and Republicans will turn their focus to foreign policy during the third day of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.Vance will be introduced by Donald Trump Jr. The theme for Wednesday – “Make America Strong Once Again” – comes amid internal divisions on how to handle the war in Ukraine. Earlier this year, House speaker Mike Johnson only narrowly passed a bill to provide additional funding for Ukraine over the loud objection of some Republicans.The day will also offer an opportunity for Republicans to attack Joe Biden over his handling of the US military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and the war between Israel and Gaza.Some Republicans have already started attacking Biden’s foreign policy.“When Donald Trump was president, Putin did nothing. No invasions. No wars. That was no accident. Putin didn’t attack Ukraine because he knew Donald Trump was tough. A strong president doesn’t start wars. A strong president prevents wars,” Nikki Haley, said on Tuesday.The focus on foreign policy comes after Republicans focused on crime and safety Tuesday and on the economy on Monday.The four-day event has marked a full-on coronation for Trump, who has made his dramatic return to the campaign trail after surviving an assassination attempt over the weekend.It has also underscored the firm hold he has on the party.Haley and Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who challenged Trump for the GOP nomination, both unequivocally backed Trump in speeches from the convention floor on Tuesday. “You don’t have to agree with Trump 100% of the time to vote for him. Take it from me. I haven’t always agreed with President Trump. But we agree more often than we disagree,” Haley said in her remarks.Other speakers on Tuesday highlighted crimes they blamed on the Biden administration. Texas senator Ted Cruz, for example, highlighted Americans who had been killed by undocumented people. Madeline Brame, one of several ordinary Americans picked to speak during the convention, blamed Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg for not prosecuting her son’s killer.Other speakers on Tuesday included Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, Ben Carson, and Rick Scott and Tom Cotton. More

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      Day two of the Republican National Convention: key takeaways

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      1. Confident in Trump’s victory, Republicans focused on winning control of the US SenateThe official theme of the Republican national convention’s second night was “Make America Safe Again”, with a focus on crime and border security. But as a series of Republican senate candidates got their turn in the spotlight on Tuesday, it was clear that a major theme of the night was helping the GOP win a majority in the US Senate. Among the featured speakers locked in competitive senate races were Kari Lake of Arizona, Eric Hovde of Wisconsin, Bernie Moreno of Ohio, Sam Brown of Nevada and Hung Cao of Virginia.Earlier on Tuesday, Chris LaCivita, the co-manager of Trump’s campaign, said the campaign was now very confident in Trump’s chances of victory. “We have nearly 20 paths to get to where we need to get,” LaCivita said. “[Democrats] have one, maybe two.” It’s a dramatic reversal just four years after Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to forcibly prevent the certification of Biden’s victory.If Republicans win a majority of seats in the US Senate and keep control of the US House, they will have achieved the trifecta of power in Washington. Republicans will effectively have majority control over all three branches of government, with even the increasingly partisan supreme court dominated by a majority of rightwing appointees.Leading Democratic members of Congress are also raising concerns about Republicans taking the Senate majority, with representative Adam Schiff reportedly telling Democratic donors that he believes Democrats will not only lose the presidency if Biden continues as the party’s nominee, but that they may “very well lose the Senate” as well.2. Republicans falsely claimed Democrats rely on ‘votes from illegals’Trump supporters were still chanting “build the wall”. Trump and his vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, have both said they support “mass deportations”, and multiple RNC speakers falsely suggested that Democrats were trying to win elections by encouraging undocumented immigrants to vote.Florida senator Rick Scott falsely claimed it was “easy for Democrats” to rig elections, saying they did so by allowing “all the non-citizens to vote”.“Democrats decided they wanted votes from illegals more than they wanted to protect our children,” Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, said in a speech in which he referenced several examples of women and girls who had been raped by undocumented immigrants. It’s an echo of the remarks that Trump made at his campaign launch in 2015, when he falsely said that many Mexican immigrants to the US were rapists.Kari Lake, the Arizona senate candidate, falsely claimed that Ruben Gallego, the Democrat she is running against, had voted to allow undocumented immigrants to cast ballots in the upcoming election, a claim that Gallego’s campaign labeled “a blatant lie”.It’s already illegal for non-citizens to vote, and there’s no evidence that it happens often: a Brennan Center study found just 30 instances of suspected non-citizen voting out of 23.5m votes cast in the 2016 general election.3. Trump’s criminal cases and convictions went unmentioned amid rhetoric on ‘crime’As Republicans portrayed themselves as the party of law and order, there was little mention of the fact that their candidate has been juggling multiple criminal cases throughout the campaign and recently made history as the only former president to be convicted of felonies, in being found guilty on 34 felony counts as part of a hush-money scheme to cover up an affair.“Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, they stand with the criminals,” Randy Sutton, a former police officer, said in his remarks Tuesday night. In reality, though both Democrats have supported some criminal justice reforms, Biden has been an enthusiastically pro-cop Democrat for decades, and Harris was a career prosecutor who literally served as California’s top cop in her role as state attorney general. Neither of them has a mug shot or is able to continue campaigning only because they can afford bail, as is the case with Trump.As one Republican after another linked undocumented immigrants to rape, crime and violence, they did not talk about how Trump had been found liable in 2023 of sexual abuse and defamation in a civil trial brought by magazine writer E Jean Carroll, after being accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women in alleged incidents that spanned decades.Trump is characteristic of a much broader trend: US citizens are much more likely to be arrested for crimes than undocumented people. A recent study using data from Texas found that US-born citizens were more than twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes and more than four times as likely to be arrested for property crimes than undocumented immigrants.But in less explicit ways, Trump’s own legal troubles have lurked in the background of the RNC speeches, as Republicans have railed against progressive prosecutors and the media. Critical mention of Alvin Bragg, the New York district attorney who secured Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts in the hush-money case, prompted one of the loudest boos of the night. Bragg was accused of being a “soft-on-crime prosecutor” by a New York mother, Madeline Brame, whose son was murdered, and who accused Bragg of dismissing and reducing the charges faced by her son’s killers.4. In the name of ‘unity’, Trump’s Republican critics kissed the ring and urged others to fall in lineNikki Haley, one of Trump’s most determined rivals in the 2024 Republican primary, took the stage at the RNC, announcing, to cheers: “President Trump asked me to speak to this convention in the name of unity.”“Donald Trump has my strong endorsement, period,” Haley went on, prompting chants of: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”Earlier this year, Haley publicly called Trump “unhinged” and “diminished” and said he was “not the same person he was in 2016”.But on Tuesday night, both she and Florida governor Ron DeSantis, another Trump primary campaign rival, proclaimed their loyalty to Trump. Haley, in particular, urged Republicans who did not agree with Trump to nonetheless fall in line behind him in the election.“You don’t have to agree with Trump 100% of the time to vote for him. Take it from me,” she said. “I haven’t always agreed with President Trump, but we agree more often that we disagree.”Another never-Trump critic, JD Vance, who once wondered whether Trump was “America’s Hitler”, was named Trump’s vice-presidential pick yesterday.5. Despite talk of ‘national unity’ at the convention, Republicans went on attack Republican speakers at the convention continued to frame Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt this weekend as a miraculous act of God, rather than blaming the attack on Biden or on broader Democratic rhetoric.“God spared President Trump from that assassin, because God is not finished with him yet,” Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders said.But by the end of the day Tuesday, any idea that Trump’s party might embrace a tone of broader national unity had evaporated, amid fierce attacks on Harris, comparisons of Biden to the corpse in the film Weekend at Bernie’s, and Lake’s renewed attacks on the media. Lake, a former television anchor, said: “I don’t welcome everybody … in this room. You guys up there in the fake news have worn out your welcome.”Joan E Greve and Alice Herman contributed reporting More