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      Fema chief warns ‘dangerous’ Trump falsehoods hampering Helene response

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      A slew of falsehoods about Hurricane Helene, including claims of funds diverted from storm survivors to migrants and even that Democrats somehow directed the hurricane itself, have hampered the response to one of the deadliest hurricanes to ever hit the US, the nation’s top emergency official has warned.Misinformation spread by Donald Trump, his supporters and others about the hurricane has shrouded the recovery effort for communities shattered by Helene, which tore through five states causing at least 230 deaths and tens of billions of dollars of damage. Many places, such as in western North Carolina, are still without a water supply, electricity, navigable roads or vital supplies.“It’s frankly disappointing we are having to deal with this narrative, the fact there are a few leaders having a hard time telling the difference between fact and fiction is creating an impedance to our ability to actually get people the help they need,” Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), told MSNBC on Monday.Trump has accused Joe Biden’s administration of “abandoning” people to the crisis and, baselessly, of being short of disaster relief funds due to money spent on undocumented migrants. Such claims are “frankly ridiculous” and creating a “truly dangerous narrative that is creating this fear” among affected people, Criswell said.In multiple rallies in the past week, Trump has accused Biden and Kamala Harris of favoring migrants over disaster-hit areas. “They stole the Fema money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season,” Trump has said.“Kamala spent all her Fema money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal immigrants.” Trump added the places worst hit are “largely a Republican area so some people say they did it for that reason”.JD Vance, Trump’s Republican running mate, echoed this theme on Monday, telling Fox News that Fema’s focus on migrants is “going to distract focus from their core job of helping American citizens in their time of need”. Last week, Stephen Miller, a far-right Trump adviser, said that “Kamala Harris turned Fema into an illegal alien resettlement agency”.Fema does, in fact, have a housing program that offers shelter to migrants leaving detention but this is separate from its disaster relief program. “No money is being diverted from disaster response needs. None,” the White House has stated.In remarks on Monday after speaking to Criswell by phone, Harris urged politicians to stop “playing games” with lives at stake. According to the White House pool, the vice-president said: “There’s a lot of misinformation being pushed out there by the former president about what is available, particularly for the survivors of Helene. First of all, it’s extraordinarily irresponsible. It’s about him, it’s not about you. The reality is Fema has so many resources that are available to those who desperately need them.”Congress recently provided an extra $20bn for disaster relief but Biden has warned that more funding will be needed to help the long-term recovery of places increasingly assailed by powerful storms fueled by global heating.Other conspiracy theories and erroneous claims have swirled online and in areas affected by Helene, such as the assertion that Fema will give only $750 to individuals as a loan (it is, in fact, a grant, and can be followed by further claims for more than $40,000) or that the agency is seizing people’s land.Fema has, unusually, put up a web page to counter these claims, with a spokesman saying the misinformation is “extremely damaging” to response efforts as it deters people from seeking assistance. “We are going to continue to message aggressively so everyone understands what the facts are,” he said regarding the looming Hurricane Milton, which is set to hit Florida.Some social media posts spreading misinformation about the hurricanes called for militias to be formed to confront Fema workers, while other posts contained antisemitic hatred aimed at figures such as Esther Manheimer, mayor of Asheville, North Carolina, a city badly affected by the storm.“It’s surprising to me how this is developing but unfortunately it seems antisemitic hate speech is becoming more common in the United States today,” Manheimer said.“I’ve tried to steer clear of X and other platforms but there is a lot of misinformation that people tend to believe. We’ve had people in the community reaching out to ask if false things are true because folks are intentionally misleading them.”Manheimer said that Asheville, including her own home, still lacks running water but is being “overwhelmed” with support by Fema to clear roads and get power back on.More than 130,000 customers in western North Carolina were still without electricity Monday, according to poweroutage.us.“People have lost everything here and the last thing we need is for people to spread false information,” she said. “There are talking points being distributed throughout the Republican party that just aren’t correct. They seem to think spreading misinformation will help win this election.”One of the more outlandish claims about the hurricane came from Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist Republican congresswoman who previously claimed that Jewish lasers from space caused forest fires. “Yes they can control the weather,” Greene posted on X about the hurricane last week. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said: “There is no mechanism to control a hurricane and no evidence that anyone was trying to modify it. This is just a crazy conspiracy theory.”“While humans don’t ‘control’ the weather we are affecting the weather. Human activities, mainly the emission of greenhouse gases, did indeed make Helene more destructive.”He added: “If she wants humans to stop affecting the weather she should support phasing out fossil fuels.”So far, Biden has declared the federal government will pay for the entire cost of activities such as debris removal, search and rescue and food supplies for Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. The president has also already approved disaster help for Florida ahead of Milton’s arrival.This approach has garnered some rare praise for Biden from Republican governors of affected states, with some Republican lawmakers calling for the conspiracy theories to abate.“Will you all help STOP this conspiracy theory junk that is floating all over Facebook and the internet about the floods,” Kevin Corbin, a Republican state senator for western North Carolina, posted on Facebook last week. “Please don’t let these crazy stories consume you or have you continually contact your elected officials to see if they are true.” More

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      Kamala Harris pays tribute to victims of 7 October attacks on first anniversary

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      US politicians on both sides of the aisle issued statements marking the anniversary of the 7 October attacks, with Kamala Harris paying tribute to the victims and calling, in their honor, to “never lose sight of the dream of peace, dignity, and security for all”.Outside the vice-presidential residence, Harris, accompanied by her husband, spoke of the nearly 1,200 people, including 46 Americans, killed in Israel one year ago.She mentioned a singer from Missouri who died shielding her son from bullets, an academic and peace activist who studied in Seattle, and a dancer from California who was killed at the Nova music festival.Harris expressed a commitment to “always ensure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself” and named each of the seven American hostages still held in Gaza, including four still believed to be alive.“We must uphold the commitment to repair the world, an idea that has been passed on throughout generations of the Jewish people and across many faiths,” she added. “To that end we must work to relieve the immense suffering of innocent Palestinians in Gaza who have experienced so much pain and loss over the year.”Earlier, Joe Biden commemorated the anniversary with a candle-lighting ceremony at the White House on Monday.The US president was joined by Jill Biden and Rabbi Aaron Alexander, who said a short prayer. Biden did not speak at the ceremony, but he paid tribute earlier in a statement to “the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust” and condemned the “vicious surge in antisemitism in America” since the attacks.“The October 7 attack brought to the surface painful memories left by millennia of hatred and violence against the Jewish people,” he said, before also referencing the suffering of Palestinians.“I believe that history will also remember October 7 as a dark day for the Palestinian people because of the conflict that Hamas unleashed that day. Far too many civilians have suffered far too much during this year of conflict.”Harris also nodded to the more than 40,000 Palestinians killed in Israel’s year-long war in Gaza.“I am heartbroken over the scale of death and destruction in Gaza over the past year – tens of thousands of lives lost, children fleeing for safety over and over again, mothers and fathers struggling to obtain food, water, and medicine,” she said in a statement. “It is far past time for a hostage and ceasefire deal to end the suffering of innocent people.”The Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, also spoke out on Monday, using the occasion as an opportunity to attack Biden and Harris. Speaking at a pro-Israel rally in Washington DC organized by the Christian group Philos Project, he called the attacks of 7 October “the worst terrorist attack since 9/11” and an attack not only on Israel and Jewish people but “on Americans”.“It is disgraceful that we have an American president and vice-president who haven’t done a thing,” he said. “Vice-President Harris, our message is: ‘Bring them home.’ Use your authority to help bring them home.”Vance then criticized what he described as the “pro-Hamas” protests happening across the country on Monday and the students that he said are “supporting Islamic radicals, destroying property, and threatening Jewish students and professors”.Meanwhile, Donald Trump paid a visit to the Ohel, the gravesite of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, in New York City on Monday. The site is considered a pilgrimage destination by many Orthodox Jews – a group that widely supports the former president, in contrast with other Jewish Americans who tend to vote Democratic.Trump is scheduled to speak later on Monday at a remembrance event at his golf course in Doral, Florida.He is widely expected to turn the event into an attack on his rival. In recent weeks, he has said that he has been “the best president by far” for Israel, and that Jewish voters supporting Harris “should have their head examined”. More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene condemned over Helene weather conspiracy theory

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      Far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is facing condemnation following several conspiratorial comments amid the devastation of Hurricane Helene that seemed to suggest she believed the US government can control the weather.In a post last week shared with her 1.2 million X followers, the US House representative from Georgia wrote: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”Greene does not specify to whom “they” is referring, but she has a history of promoting conspiracy theories around the federal government and other groups.She appeared to double down on these comments with a post on Saturday, sharing a clip from a 2013 CBS News broadcast about experimental efforts to induce rain and lightning using lasers. “CBS, nine years ago, talked about lasers controlling the weather,” Greene wrote, apparently mistaking the year of the broadcast.Greene, who is no stranger to misinformation including once raising the idea of Jewish space lasers being behind wildfire outbreaks, was met with a wave of criticism for her blatantly false statements.The US government’s top disaster relief official condemned on Sunday false claims made about Helene and its relief efforts, stating that such conspiracy theories, including those made by Donald Trump as he seeks a second presidency, are causing fear in people who need assistance and “demoralizing” the workers who are providing assistance.“It’s frankly ridiculous, and just plain false. This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people,” said Deanne Criswell, who leads the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “It’s really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people, and that’s what we’re here to do.”Shawn Harris, who is running for Greene’s congressional seat, condemned the incumbent’s comments.“Marjorie Taylor Greene’s conspiracy theories are sickening, but she does it to distract from her failed effort to block crucial funding for Fema as Hurricane Helene was making landfall,” Harris wrote in a post on X.Ryan Maue, a meteorologist and popular internet personality, seemed to poke fun at Greene’s comments while also factchecking her false claims.He suggested on X that some conspiracy theories turn out to be true – but added: “I can assure you that the Hurricane Helene weather modification theory is not one of them.“I would know, too.”In an email to his supporters, the Republican US senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina also seemed to condemn conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene, though he did not specify the rightwing source of the theories.“The destruction caused by Helene is incomprehensible and has left many communities in western North Carolina absolutely devastated. The last thing that the victims of Helene need right now is political posturing, finger-pointing, or conspiracy theories that only hurt the response effort,” the email stated.In an opinion piece on Saturday by its editorial board, North Carolina’s Charlotte Observer criticized Trump because of his falsehoods over the government response to Helene, saying the state’s affected parts were “not a political football” and “not a campaign opportunity”.Criticism of Greene’s conspiracy theories even made it to the sports world, with the tennis legend Martina Navratilova using her platform to call out not only Greene as well as Trump’s running mate in November’s election, JD Vance. Vance had praised Greene at a rally just hours after she posted her conspiracies.“Marj is even more stupid than we thought possible,” Navratilova wrote on X. “And Vance is not stupid – he is just a cowardly sycophant. Which is actually worse.”Greene is also facing criticism for her hypocrisy of peddling conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene while she was photographed in attendance at the University of Alabama’s home football game against the University of Georgia with Trump on 28 September. She reportedly left her state of Georgia to attend the game in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, while Helene devastated communities across the state she was elected to represent. More

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      Warren and Dean demand Coke, Pepsi and General Mills stop ‘shrinkflation’

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      It’s becoming a common experience for Americans going to the grocery store: your bag of chips seems lighter, your favorite drink comes in a slimmer bottle, and you’re running out of laundry detergent more quickly than usual. And yet things are staying the same price.On Monday two Democratic lawmakers launched an attempt to get to the bottom of the phenomena, accusing three major companies, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and General Mills, of shrinking the size of products while charging consumers the same price – a price-gouging practice known as “shrinkflation”.Senator Elizabeth Warren and US representative Madeleine Dean allege in letters to the CEOs of the three companies that they have participated in shrinkflation, subtly decreasing the size of cereals and sodas sold in stores.General Mills decreased its box of “family size” Cocoa Puffs from 19.3 ounces to 18.1 ounces over the last few years, the letter alleges. Meanwhile, PepsiCo downgraded the size of Gatorade bottles from 32 ounces to 28 ounces.Companies often say that decreases in size can be attributed to changes in packaging that are unrelated to pricing or the economic environment. PepsiCo told NBC News in July that their 28-ounce bottle has been around for years and that the company had planned to widen its distribution as part of a long-term strategy.But many remain skeptical at the widespread variety of products that seem to be shrinking.“Shrinking the size of a product in order to gouge consumers on the price per ounce is not innovation, it’s exploitation,” Warren and Dean said in a statement. “Unfortunately, this price gouging is a widespread problem, with corporate profits driving over half of inflation.”People on social media have been talking about the slimming down of products for months, with users posting about their shrinkflation experiences with side-by-side pictures of products before and after shrinking.“Major corporations are trying to gaslighting us, trying to make us believe that what we’re seeing is not real,” said TikTok user Melissa Simonson in a video from March, where she points out the sizes of drinks, cereals, chips, orange juice, gum and laundry detergent, among other grocery store items, have gotten smaller.Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and General Mills did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the letters.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Bureau of Labor Statistics, which calculates the US inflation rate each month, says its economists try to incorporate any instances of shrinkflation into its inflation calculations. For example, if a tub of 64-ounce vanilla ice cream was priced at $5.99 in January, then the price-per-ounce is $0.093. If in February, the tub remains the same price, but shrinks to 60 ounces, the price-per-ounce has gone up, representing a kind of price increase.Warren and Dean also used the letters as an opportunity to blast the companies for paying less taxes on higher profits after Donald Trump’s corporate tax cuts in 2017. The lawmakers cited a recent report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy that said Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and General Mills all paid taxes at a rate of 15% or under from 2018 to 2022, despite making billions in profit.“We strongly oppose these corporate tax giveaways, and have fought to pass tax increases on big corporations, including the 15 percent minimum tax on billion-dollar corporations,” the lawmakers said in their statement. “No corporation should pay a lower tax rate than working Americans – especially when that same corporation turns around and gouges consumers on the other end through shrinkflation.” More

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      Georgia residents on Trump and Harris’s post-Helene trips: ‘He’s here to get votes, she’s here to help’

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      Mayor Garnett Johnson didn’t want to put his troubles in front of people wrestling with despair in his community of Augusta, Georgia. On Friday, he was upbeat as he spoke about shelter availability and repair trucks a week after Hurricane Helene mowed down trees and ripped roofs off of houses, leaving half the city without power. But as he talked about unburying Augusta while helping hand out boxes of grapes and bananas and carrots in a church parking lot to a line of cars stretching a mile and a half, he let something slip.“We got seven confirmed deaths as a result of Hurricane Helene. I personally was … unfortunately, I had to witness one, but we’re getting through it.”The night of the hurricane, his cousin Melissa Carter needed help.“She called me,” Johnson said. “One of the lowest points in all of this was on Friday morning, I was wondering why she called me so frantically. She said: ‘I need you to come to my house. Daverio. I can’t … there’s a tree on him, and I can’t get the tree off.”Daverio Carter, her husband of 11 years, had been crushed by a tree that fell on their house. Johnson drove there in the storm. “Of course, you know, there’s nothing I could do.”Carter died in front of them while they waited for help. He was 51, and had five children.“They were able to recover his body at about 9 o’clock that night,” Johnson said. “They actually had to call in a crane to remove the tree to recover him … You’re looking at her as a mayor. I could do a lot of things. But I couldn’t get a crane to get it off of her husband, and for them to see him actually take his last breath while he’s laying in bed.”Daverio Carter’s funeral was Saturday. Johnson made that much time to grieve.“I literally don’t have power in my home. No water,” Johnson said. Debris still blocks his personal vehicles, he said. “On Friday, I had to literally climb old trees and power lines just to get out of the neighborhood to get down to the emergency operations center. So, we have so many dedicated city employees that have been working tirelessly, sometimes 16, 20 hours a day just to try to get this city back running around. I think we’re close.”Johnson has been burying himself in work while his family buries its dead. He did talk to Kamala Harris about it when she came for an emergency management briefing Tuesday, he said. Harris also spoke to Melissa Carter.“Mayor, I want to thank you for your leadership, in particular,” the US vice-president said in Augusta on Wednesday during a visit to access damage and console families. “I was just talking with one of the members of the community and her daughter who lost her husband. And there is real pain and trauma that has resulted because of this hurricane and what has happened in terms of the aftermath of it.”Thanking first responders and local leadership, she said: “The local folks are folks who have personally – and their families have personally – experienced loss and devastation. And yet they leave their home, leave their family to go to centers like where I was earlier to do the work of helping perfect strangers. And it really does highlight the nobility of the kind of work that these public servants have dedicated themselves to, which can be, in moments of crisis like this, so selfless in the way that they do that work.”Harris pointedly toned down her presence in Augusta, giving little advance notice of her arrival last week. She toured some of the poorest parts of the city, where the downed trees on roofs and in yards from the storm compete with rotten siding and missing windows after decades of decay.People living in these neighborhoods who turned out for the fresh produce said they understood why Harris would play things quietly, even five weeks before election day. At the time, people were still struggling to find a gas station with the lights on, dodging price gougers selling gas in five-gallon jugs for $40 on the side of the street.“It shows concern, and shows that she cares,” said Annie Gardner. At 95, she’s the oldest member of Augusta’s Good Samaritan Missionary Baptist church, where people were redistributing food from nearby DeKalb county to local residents. “I’m very impressed already, I was liking her already, and I even like her even more now.”View image in fullscreenShe’s a skeptic of political theater right now, though. “Trump’s not coming here in this neighborhood. He’s out with the rich white folks. If he does, I’d be really surprised. I don’t think nobody cares if he doesn’t come, either.”Both Harris and Donald Trump have a delicate dance to perform. Visibility matters.Michael Thurmond, DeKalb county’s CEO, arranged for the delivery of hundreds of thousands of dollars in produce to Augusta after seeing the reports of devastation in Augusta. “People are looking to see that their leaders are doing something,” he said.But photo-op politics in a crisis leads to images like Trump tossing paper towels at hurricane victims. The former president and Republican presidential nominee seemed somewhat more aware of that in his appearances in Georgia over the last week.“If [Trump] brought a thousand trucks like this, he would still not get my vote,” said April Terry, an Augustan waiting for a box of produce Friday morning. “All that is showing that he’s got money, showing that all he wants is your vote.”Trump spoke to reporters in Evans, Georgia, just north-east of Augusta, on Thursday. There was no attempt to stage a massive rally, though about 100 supporters staked out the road near the venue to wave flags. But he did appear side by side with Governor Brian Kemp, whom the former president has pointedly attacked as unsupportive of his election claims.On Thursday, Trump said Kemp “is doing a fantastic job”.Kemp in turn praised the former president for “keeping the national focus on our state as we recover”, then recited the litany of destruction, noting that major Georgia crops had been all but wiped out. The Georgia governor noted that that the federal government is quickly approving his requests for federal disaster declarations, which will help move relief funding and federal reimbursement.View image in fullscreenAhead of those comments, the state insurance commissioner John King took issue with the political implications of Harris’s promise of 100% federal reimbursement. Doing so would require an appropriation that hasn’t yet been made, essentially daring the House speaker Mike Johnson to refuse. “It’s political blackmail,” he said.Evans, in Columbia county, Georgia, is comparatively affluent. But it also sustained catastrophic damage, and its mostly conservative voters are digging out of much the same hole as everyone else in the region.“You’ll see, if you go in there, at least our street, all the yards along the road are lined with cut-up logs,” said Gage Gabriel, a 19-year-old Trump supporter watching for the motorcade. Public reaction to the storm could change the way people vote, he said. “Depending on the concern showed from the federal government. If the federal government doesn’t seem to show concern to a large section of the country … it should at least sway some results, depending on how caring politicians seem to the plight of especially North Carolina.”Gabriel wants to see leaders with a chain saw in their hands cutting down trees. “Not just shaking the hands of people putting up some power lines.”Jordan Johnson, a Richmond county commissioner, said: “It’s hard to really focus on politics in this very moment, because folks are trying to find power and folks are trying to find food.” But the contrast between the two candidates is stark, he added.“If you look at where Kamala Harris went, she went to a very hard struck part of town in south Augusta. She went to a shelter. She spoke to people, she gave food. Donald Trump is going to one of the most affluent parts of the [Augusta area]. I don’t know what impact their business will have. I’m not really interested in the campaign aspect. He has no purpose here in Augusta other than as a campaign stop. Kamala Harris came as vice-president of the United States announcing that help and aid is on the way. I mean, it tells you a lot about the two candidates are and what their missions are. He’s here to get votes, and she’s here to help.” More

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      Pennsylvania swing county to keep ballot drop boxes after controversy

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      A battleground county in north-eastern Pennsylvania will have ballot drop boxes this fall after its county manager faced pressure and reversed her decision to eliminate them.The announcement on Friday came less than a month after Romilda Crocamo, the county manager in Luzerne county, said she was getting rid of the county’s four drop boxes over concerns the county could not secure them. “I cannot secure the drop boxes. And, you know, sometimes I have to make difficult decisions,” she said in an interview last month.But voting rights groups sued Crocamo last week, saying she could not unilaterally get rid of the drop boxes.Elections in the county are jointly overseen by a five-member board of elections who are responsible for setting election policies, and the county manager, who is responsible for personnel. A hearing in the case had been scheduled for Monday. Voters in the state – a critical one for both Kamala Harris and Joe Biden – have already begun receiving and returning mail-in ballots.Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Michelle Henry, sent a letter to Crocamo advising her that county board of elections had the power to set policies over drop boxes.An agreement filed on Sunday in the Luzerne county court of common pleas says Crocamo does not concede she is under a legal obligation to deploy drop boxes, but that she won’t block their deployment this election cycle.“This is a huge victory for Luzerne county voters,” said Alisha Hoffman-Mirilovich, the executive director of In This Together NEPA, which sued the county over drop boxes.View image in fullscreen“All Pennsylvanians have the freedom to choose how they cast their ballots – in person on Election Day, by mail-in ballot, or by using a drop box. We applaud the Luzerne County Board of Elections for making drop boxes accessible in Luzerne County since 2020, and we applaud the County Manager for reversing course in the best interest of voters throughout the county,” Hoffman-Mirilovich said in a statement.Crocamo said in a statement that drop boxes at two county facilities were deployed “and under video surveillance”. She said the county was still waiting on approval from two private locations.“While Ms Crocamo remains quite concerned about security, manpower, and fiscal issues associated with deployment of ballot drop boxes in Luzerne County, she agrees that given the importance of the November 5th election, the residents of Luzerne County should have every opportunity to attend to their important civic duty and vote in the upcoming election,” Mark Cedrone, her lawyer, said in a statement. More

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      Trump appointees must prove ‘fidelity and loyalty’, says campaign official

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      A senior official on Donald Trump’s campaign has said any appointees in a second Trump administration would need to prove “fidelity and loyalty”.The official also sought to distance the former president from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation plan calling for a far-right federal government in the event of a Trump victory at the voting polls in November.Howard Lutnick, the chief executive officer of Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald and co-chairperson of the former president’s transition team, told the Financial Times that appointees to any second Trump administration are “all going to be on the same side, and they’re all going to understand the policies, and we’re going to give people the role based on their capacity – and their fidelity and loyalty to the policy, as well as to” Trump.The comments come as the Trump team are trying to dispel concerns that a second Trump government would be as chaotic as the first, marked in part by infighting and a staff turnover calculated at 92% as of the day Joe Biden took office as president in 2021.“Those people were not pure to his vision,” Lutnick told the outlet.It is unlikely Lutnick’s comments will calm concerns among those who believe government officials should place American democracy above Trump or any other president.Lutnick joined Trump’s transition team in August along with Linda McMahon, the head of the Small Business Association under the former president and wife of the ex-World Wrestling Entertainment boss Vince McMahon in August.He maintained that Project 2025 was “radioactive”, though its authors openly support Trump and his running mate, JD Vance.“Project 2025 is an absolute zero for the Trump-Vance transition,” the billionaire said. “You can use another term – radioactive.”Democrats have made the controversial document part of their campaign, describing it as a blueprint for a fast-tracked program to increase presidential power and “strip away our freedoms – by forcing states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions, cutting Social Security and Medicare, and eliminating the Department of Education”.While Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, Democrats’ campaigns for congressional seats have launched billboards in more than two dozen districts harnessing the document to the Republican agenda.“All of the data we have shows that Project 2025 just has huge interest and traction, more so than virtually every other issue,” Represenative Jared Huffman of California, the leader of a task force on countering the project’s agenda, told Axios.The Trump campaign has tried to distance itself from the document and its authors. But lines to the heart of the campaign are clear enough, among them Vance’s foreword to Dawn’s Early Light, a book by the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLutnick told the FT that his job selecting candidates to become Trump appointees was that of “a painter of a mosaic” – and they would need to prepare for a “fast and furious” term if the former president was re-elected.Lutnick said he had given more than $10m to Trump’s 2024 effort and another $500,000 for the transition. He also said he had raised about $75m for the campaign in total.Furthermore, Lutnick appeared on Trump’s The Celebrity Apprentice in 2008 and had previously donated to Democrats.His firm, Cantor FitzGerald, lost 658 employees in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, including his brother. Lutnick said his experience hiring new employees was akin to his work for the Trump transition team.“You go to world-class people that you rate highly, and you ask them to help you,” he said. More

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      John Oliver on VP debate’s ‘civility’: ‘Etiquette is kind of beside the point’

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      On the latest Last Week Tonight, John Oliver ripped into those praising the “civility” of last week’s vice-presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz. “Etiquette is kind of beside the point” when the stakes include immigrant rights and women’s bodily autonomy, he contended.“It’s like reading a ransom note and going, ‘This cursive is just so lovely. Look at the capital Y in ‘You have 24 hours before he dies.’ There are still some people who were raised right,’” he quipped.Oliver tore into Vance’s refusal to say, when asked directly, that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. In what Walz called “a damning non-answer”, Vance deflected with: “I’m focused on the future.”“‘I’m focused on the future’ is one of the most generic store-brand fuckboy deflections there is,” Oliver fumed. “It’s no wonder Tim Walz broke the fourth wall there like he was in Abbott Elementary. Because ‘I’m focused on the future’ is what you say when you want to change the subject. If not, you just answer the question.”Oliver also touched on special counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page report detailing the ways Trump and his cohort attempted to overturn the 2020 election, “reminding us yet again of the ridiculous steps he took to avoid leaving office”. According to the document, Trump allegedly told people in the White House he knew he had lost but that he would “fight like hell” anyway.“But it super matters if you lost,” Oliver countered. “It’s kind of the main thing that matters. That is the most unsettling thing you could possibly overhear if you work at the White House.”The report also notes that Trump muted his lawyer Sidney Powell during a phone call “when she was outlining her bogus fraud claims” and called her ideas crazy.“If I ever found out that I lied so badly that Donald Trump muted the call to say this is some crazy shit, you would never see me again,” Oliver laughed. “I would walk directly into the ocean.”Jokes aside, Oliver reminded: “None of this is theoretical. If he loses next month, there is every reason to believe Trump will dispute the results again and Vance has made it clear he’s got no problem with that. And that alone should be disqualifying.“For all the talk this week about his civility at the debate, let’s not forget: deep down [Vance] is the same colossal dipshit who spews rightwing hate with distressing ease and continues to defend the ‘big lie’ that the last election was stolen,” he continued. “It is all tremendously bleak, which is why – to borrow a phrase I heard recently – I’m focused on the future, specifically one in which in four weeks’ time, Trump hopefully loses this fucking election.”In his main segment, Oliver looked into how a routine traffic stop for “non-safety violations” can become a terror, with law enforcement disproportionately targeting people of color. Traffic stops are “the most common law enforcement interaction in America”, with police pulling over an average of 50,000 people in a day in the US.Those interactions can turn deadly: since 2017, armed police have killed at least 813 people in routine traffic stops, the vast majority of them Black. “We’ve all seen the videos of high-profile killings,” said Oliver, referring to the police shootings of Philando Castile, Daunte Wright and others, recorded by bystanders or police body-cams. “The horror of those videos should be seared into our collective consciouses by now.”Because of this pattern, for Black motorists, “driving comes with a constant undercurrent of fear”, said Oliver.He noted that there are legitimate safety reasons to pull over some drivers – someone driving too fast or recklessly, for instance, but no driver should worry about a traffic stop and “also have to worry about being harassed or potentially killed”.Such risks are not the product of a few bad apples in law enforcement, said Oliver; it’s “the inevitable result of deliberate decisions that have turned traffic stops into a systemic issue”.Oliver ticked through documentation of how police departments incentivize traffic stops as a means of funding, and encourage officers to apply deeply subjective criteria to pulling people over. Such “pretextual stops” basically equate to “shaking people down to see what crimes fall out”, he said.As an aside, he played an old PSA featuring characters from the musical Cats encouraging people to drive safely, lest their children become nothing but “memories”. “Let me just say this,” said Oliver. “That musical is an abomination. If there is ever a day that Andrew Lloyd Webber has no haters, that means that I am dead and so, by the way, is Patti LuPone.”On a more serious note, Oliver encouraged a full-stop end to pretextual stops and eliminating non-safety-related traffic stops. Such measures have already been adopted at the local level in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Philadelphia – where, after eight months, traffic stops were cut in half, meaning 12,000 fewer Black drivers were pulled over. He also advocated for decriminalizing minor traffic offenses (such as broken tail lights) and making data on traffic stops public, including the race of those pulled over – “frankly fucking incredible that it’s not already happening”, he noted.While some of these measures may be politically difficult, when it comes to non-safety-related traffic stops, “doing fewer of them for bullshit reasons should be a pretty easy sell”. More