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      in US Politics

      ‘A vivid distillation of a deeply fractured country’: a history of the United States in nine photographs

      by

      The American photographer Peter van Agtmael experienced a life-changing moment, aged 19, when he happened on a copy of Magnum Degrees, a photobook published in 2000 of dramatic images from the previous decade.“I got an instantaneous education in the beauty, violence, mystery, complexity and simplicity of photography,” he writes in his afterword to Magnum America, a much bigger, more mysterious and complex compendium of photographs spanning nine decades, from postwar 1940s to the present day.Magnum was formed as a cooperative by a group of renowned war photographers, including Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, in 1947. It’s cooperative nature was initially a reflection of its founders’ stoical postwar optimism in the face of the horrors and traumas they had witnessed, but also their shared spirit of creative independence.Magnum America traces the nation’s often turbulent journey from those tentatively optimistic postwar years to the existential anxiety of the present political moment in which democracy itself hangs in the balance. Though punctuated by celebrated portraits and observational series on ordinary American lives, it is the hard-hitting photojournalism that arrests, from Capa’s blurred but powerful images from the D-day landing at Omaha beach to Van Agtmael’s eye-of-the-storm reportage of the siege of the Capitol by Trump supporters in 2021.Van Agtmael and his fellow editor, the curator and feminist academic Laura Wexler, have not attempted to create a definitive visual history of the United States as reflexed through the lenses of Magnum photographers, but instead deftly explore ideas of history, culture, myth and national identity. The book comprises 600 images – some famous, some relatively unknown – culled from a total of 227,450. The selection here reflects that mix, but concentrates on images of conflict and political drama that are pertinent to today’s fraught pre-election moment.The book is also a revealing social history of Magnum itself: the ideal and the often problematic reality. For too long, it reflected the predominantly white, male world of photojournalism, the exceptions being pioneers such as Eve Arnold, Martine Franck, Inge Morath and, later, Susan Meiselas. And, though Magnum photographers made some of the most memorable images of the black civil rights struggle in the 1960s, it wasn’t until 1988 that Eli Reed became the first black photographer to enter the Magnum fold. That irony went unnoticed for a long time. Today, Magnum is a diverse organisation, but it is its relevance – and, by extension, photojournalism’s role – that is also at stake in a world of relentless image-making and instant image-dissemination, an environment unimaginable to its founders. The ongoing carnage in Gaza enters our consciousness daily on social media, where local photojournalists as well as ordinary people with mobile phones bear witness at great risk in the midst of an ongoing humanitarian disaster. Not one photojournalist from Magnum or any other western photo agency has reported from Gaza because of Israel’s refusal to admit even embedded members of the international media. The integral act of bearing witness, which is at the core of Magnum’s collective being, continues just as powerfully all the same. The next big volume of retrospective Magnum images may have to find a way of grappling with that dilemma.1940s: Robert CapaAmerican troops landing on Omaha beach, D-day, Normandy, France, 6 June 1944View image in fullscreenOn 6 June 1944, Robert Capa was one of a handful of photographers granted permission to cross the English Channel with allied forces during the D-day operation to liberate occupied France. He travelled with American soldiers from E Company of the 16th Infantry Regiment. This blurred but evocative image was taken in the immediate wake of their arrival at Omaha beach, where they were met with cannon and small arms fire from embedded German troops as they leapt off their landing crafts into cold, choppy waters. It remains one of the most visceral images of that pivotal, but at times chaotic, operation, during which about 4,440 allied soldiers lost their lives and close to 6,000 were wounded.Intriguingly, the circumstances in which the 11 images that comprise Capa’s reportage from Omaha beach were created – which he described in characteristically self-mythologising fashion in his memoir, Slightly Out of Focus – have recently been contested. Likewise his contention that they were all that remained of 106 pictures he sent to Life magazine on his return to England, the rest having been mysteriously destroyed after being left too long at a high temperature by an unfortunate lab assistant who was processing them.Whatever the truth, the photographs that were taken under extreme duress during his relatively short time on the beach – he made it on to a departing boat after a severe panic attack in which his hands were shaking so badly he could not reload his camera – are a powerful and up-close record of that day’s tumultuous events. There have been several attempts to identify the “soldier in the surf”, with Private Huston “Hu” Sears Riley the most likely contender. That he has not been definitively identified lends another level of poignancy to the image.Capa, one of Magnum’s founders, was arguably the most revered photojournalist of the 20th century. His most famous quote epitomised his cavalier approach: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” In 1954, 10 years after this photograph was taken, he was killed, aged 40, by a landmine in Vietnam, while covering the first Indochina war.1950s: Elliott ErwittWilmington, North Carolina, 1950View image in fullscreenElliott Erwitt was invited to join Magnum by Robert Capa in 1953. Having studied photography and film-making at college in California, Erwitt, aged 25, had already made a name for himself as an editorial photographer for various commercial magazines. He would go on to become one of the world’s most famous image-makers, best known for his striking, slightly surreal pictures of the everyday. His similarly offbeat portraits of dogs have been the subject of five photobooks to date. It is fair to say that Erwitt’s dedication to being, as he put it, “serious about not being serious” has tended to shift attention away from his more unsettlingly powerful images. One of the most rawly observant is his photograph of a grief stricken and bewildered Jackie Kennedy at her husband’s funeral.His photograph Wilmington, North Carolina, 1950 possesses a resonance that is at odds with its neutral geographical title. Like many images in Magnum America, it captures a significant moment, simultaneously evoking the darkness of the US’s past and signalling a turbulent future of hard-won progress. The tentative beginning of the civil rights movement was still four years away when this picture was taken, and it was 14 years before that struggle achieved one of its seminal victories when the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 outlawed segregation. The separate drinking fountains, marked “White” and “Colored”, the one modern and sleekly designed, the other makeshift and worn, speak of a time not that distant when discrimination was a given in certain states. The face of the man crouching over the sink beneath the Colored sign is blurred, and his stance suggests he is looking towards the other fountain that is so close yet out of bounds. As a signifier of the postwar era of US segregation in the south, Erwitt’s grainy image remains starkly affecting and deeply symbolic.1960s: Paul FuscoRobert Kennedy funeral train, USA, 1968View image in fullscreenIt was a year of sustained social and political turbulence in the US, the war in Vietnam dividing the country across generational lines and provoking widespread protests that often culminated in violence. The conflict on the streets reached a climax of sorts at the Democratic convention in Chicago in August 1968, when police brutally attacked activists and bystanders, the violence captured on TV cameras and broadcast nationally on news reports.By then, the already divided nation had been traumatised by the recent assassinations of two progressive leaders: the black civil rights figurehead Martin Luther King Jr and the Democratic presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy. Paul Fusco boarded the train taking Kennedy’s body from New York to Washington focused on how he would cover the senator’s state funeral at Arlington cemetery for Look magazine. When the train emerged from a long dark Manhattan tunnel into daylight, he was taken aback by what he saw. Ordinary citizens, young and old, had gathered in clusters by the railway track, standing in silent homage to the young politician whose death, like his life, had echoed that of his older, more famous brother, President John F Kennedy.The train moved slowly, perhaps out of respect for the dead senator, taking eight hours rather than the usual four to complete its journey. Along the entirety of the route, people congregated trackside in their summer clothes. Fusco shot about 2,000 photos en route to Washington. In them, he freeze-framed for posterity a nation in mourning: families and friends holding hands, men standing to attention to salute, a woman kneeling in prayer. Mostly, though, a seemingly endless succession of ordinary Americans of every race, creed and colour gaze upwards as the train trundles past from city to suburb and on through sun-dappled rural neighbourhoods, their collective silence palpable in every frame.At the time, the editors of Look bafflingly decided not to publish any of Fusco’s extraordinary funeral train series. After the magazine ceased publication in 1971, they remained unseen for another 30 years, consigned to the vast archive of the Library of Congress until they were uncovered by a Magnum researcher. Almost six decades on, they evoke another now distant US, one united in grief but also, as Fusco later put it, “grateful for the commitment and hope Bobby nurtured in the legions of the poor, the black and countless other forgotten Americans”.1970s: Alex WebbNixon resignation, Washington DC, 1974View image in fullscreenOn 8 August 1974, at 9pm, Richard Nixon, who was facing impeachment and removal from office for his role in the Watergate scandal, announced that he was resigning as president of America. He was the first and as yet only US head of state to do so. “As president,” he told the country in a live television broadcast from the White House, “I must put the interests of America first.”The evidence of his misdemeanours, as uncovered by the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with the help of an anonymous source known as “Deep Throat”, suggested that sentiment had not been foremost in his mind two years earlier, when a break-in had occurred at the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee in Washington DC. It had been carried out by a group devoted to Nixon’s re-election, which included his former close associate G Gordon Liddy. Along with six others, Liddy was subsequently jailed for his part in the burglary.Woodward and Bernstein’s exhaustive investigation also uncovered evidence of wiretaps of the phones of those Nixon considered his most dangerous enemies. The break-in and cover-up was exposed in detail in the televised Watergate hearings that by turns enthralled and appalled the US public over 51 days in 1973.That Nixon hung on in office as long as he did was testament to his tenacity as well as his sense of entitlement. Tricky Dicky, as he came to be known, escaped the humiliation of impeachment and a possible prison sentence and was subsequently pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.When the news of his resignation broke, Alex Webb evoked the country’s collective response in his image of a single, anonymous individual intensely perusing the Washington Post on the streets of the capital. The front page headline, “Nixon Resigns”, resonates across the years, through the subsequent impeachments of Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, as well as the turbulence of the latter’s first term of office, the incendiary nature of his departure from it, and the possibility of his imminent return. “It changed history,” Woodward recently said of the crimes he helped to uncover. “It was a red light for presidents.” We may find out soon enough if that is still the case.1980s: Susan MeiselasUS/Mexican border, 8am: undocumented workers discovered in a “drop off” site, Interstate 5, Oceanside, California, 1989View image in fullscreenThroughout his 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly promised his faithful that he would construct “a big beautiful wall” between the US and Mexico, one that stretched across its 2,000-mile length, thus ending once and for all the flow of illegal migrants that, he claimed, threatened the security and identity of the US. The construction of a border wall was already well under way long before Trump began his campaign, with more than 600 miles of the southern border barricaded and protected by immigration authorities. It signified the strategy of deterrence through military-style policing that had been officially sanctioned by President Clinton in 1995.This photograph by Susan Meiselas was taken in 1989, when the border was more porous and economic migrants regularly made the crossing, mainly to do the myriad low-paid menial jobs that helped keep the American, and in particular the Californian, economy afloat. By then, Meiselas had made her name with her documentary reportage from the long civil war in El Salvador and the Nicaraguan revolution.For her series Crossings, she worked with the migrants and the border security patrols tasked with apprehending them. Many of those sent back to their homeland would try to enter again by different routes, such was their dedication to the dream of reinventing themselves in the US. This image dramatically evokes the precariousness of the immigrant journey by capturing the moment some undocumented workers are discovered by a border patrol officer at the drop-off site they’ve been left at by smugglers after crossing the border. “When people are coming across the border, they are giving up on their homeland,” she said later of this photo and others like it. “That’s a very hard thing to do. There’s an uncertainty; maybe it’s that uncertainty that you are seeing.”1990s: Eli ReedMembers of the Nation of Islam among the ruins of the Rodney King riots, Los Angeles, California, 1992View image in fullscreenThe Magnum archive is rich in memorable images of the struggle – and solidarity – of African American activists during the civil rights era by the likes of Leonard Freed, Burt Glinn, Bruce Davidson and Danny Lyon. It wasn’t until 1988, 41 years after the agency’s formation, that Eli Reed became the first black member of the organisation. “By signing him on, the agency granted loftiness to its existence,” Gordon Parks would later attest. Four decades earlier, in 1948, he had made a similar breakthrough when he became Life magazine’s first black staff photographer.From the moment he took up a camera as a young man, Reed’s ambition has been to capture the full range of black people’s experience, from the everyday to the politically seismic, the intimately tender to the collectively traumatic. To this end, his book Black in America, published in 1997, is punctuated throughout with moments of tentative optimism but also tempered by a deep anger and frustration that Reed, an activist with a camera, shared with many of his subjects.This striking image was made in the immediate aftermath of the riots in Los Angeles that followed the acquittal of four LAPD officers who had been captured on camera a year earlier brutally beating a young black man, Rodney King. It features three besuited members of the Nation of Islam, a black nationalist organisation that believes in the formation of a separate state for African Americans within the US. Despite their extremist views, they are regarded by some in the black community as role models who uphold the traditional values of discipline and self-respect, while espousing self-determination as the only alternative to endemic racism.Here, the three young men stand, alert and yet seemingly unconcerned by the proximity of Reed’s camera, in front of the ruins of a building destroyed in the riots. The stark contrast between their aura of calm authority and the wreckage that signifies chaos and disorder lends the image an edgy complexity. One of the underlying questions posed by Reed’s immersive reportage is how the black community should respond to often murderous police brutality. It has been answered in frequently dramatic fashion in the decades since, most resoundingly in the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which became a global phenomenon after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.2000s: Thomas HoepkerYoung people during lunch break in Brooklyn with the twin towers burning across the river, 11 September 2001View image in fullscreenThe terrorist attack on the twin towers in lower Manhattan on the morning of 11 September 2001 was captured by several Magnum photographers, and their images of the cataclysm and its aftermath were published in a large-format book, New York September 11, less than two months after the event. The exception was Thomas Hoepker’s complex and, for some, provocative portrait of a group of young people gathered by the river’s edge in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, while a dense plume of grey smoke billows from the familiar skyline in the middle distance. The image so disoriented its creator that he chose not to include it in the book, waiting until 2006, the fifth anniversary of the attack, before publishing it.Hoepker’s initial anxiety, it turned out, was justified. After its belated publication, Hoepker wrote a short article in response to a column in the New York Times that decried his “shocking” photograph and suggested that the five young people in it were relaxing, having already started to “move on” from the shock and horror of the attack. Hoepker admitted that he had initially found the image “ambiguous and confusing”, and had swiftly come to the conclusion that publishing it so close to the actual event “might distort the reality as we had felt it on that historic day”.This, in turn, prompted one of the people in the photograph, Walter Sipser, to respond, accusing both Hoepker and the NYT columnist of distorting his reality. He pointed out that the three people chatting to him and his girlfriend were passing strangers, the group having found themselves “suddenly bound together… in the aftermath of a catastrophe”. Rather than feeling relaxed, they were, he explained, united “in a profound state of shock and disbelief, like everyone else we encountered that day”. A scene that had initially appeared “ambiguous and confusing” to the photographer felt cynically manipulative to the subjects, for whom it is a stolen and distorted moment in which nothing but the unimaginable horror unfolding in the background is what it seems. Here, the idea of bearing witness that has traditionally underpinned photojournalism in general, and Magnum in particular, seems to collapse in on itself.2010s: Alec SothLockdown drill, Belle Plaine high school, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2014View image in fullscreenSchool shootings are a particularly American phenomenon, the deadliest of which have imprinted the names of their locations – Columbine, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech – on our collective consciousness. According to a recent CNN report, there were at least 58 shootings on US school grounds and collage campuses between January and mid-October of this year, resulting in 28 deaths and more than 72 injuries.Alec Soth’s dramatic photograph was taken during a school lockdown drill that had interrupted an eight-grade gym class at Belle Plaine high school in his home town, Minneapolis. These kinds of drills are compulsory in more than 20 states. That they are now such a common feature in US schools, that they have become almost normalised, speaks volumes about US gun culture and the failure of legislation to control it. Kenneth Trump, the president of National School Safety and Security Services, told the New York Times: “The majority of today’s generation of students and school staff view lockdowns as a routine part of the school culture, just as we have viewed fire drills for many years.”Soth’s deftly composed photograph is startling in its stillness and atmosphere of vulnerability. The young girls huddled together, faces hidden in hands, heads bowed in silent thought. Their pale limbs are in dramatic contrast to the deep red of their school T-shirts and the shiny gym lockers. The drama here lies in the dread possibility of what might one day come to pass, and one cannot help but ponder where the schoolgirls’ thoughts have wandered in this silent, confined space. It is an image neither violent nor transgressive but that disturbs all the same in its evocation of a singular kind of collective cognitive dissonance.2020s: Peter van AgtmaelStorming of the Capitol, Washington DC, 6 January 2021View image in fullscreenThe tumultuous events of 6 January 2021, when a riotous mob stormed the Capitol building after an inflammatory speech by Donald Trump, hang like a storm cloud over the imminent US election. As the election results pivoted towards a Democrat victory, Trump had urged his followers to converge on the Capitol to “stop the steal”. Many thousands responded, fighting their way into the Capitol building where they ransacked offices, smashed furniture and wandered the corridors in search of the politicians that Trump had demonised. Chief among them were Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Mike Pence, his presidential running mate, who had refused to challenge the result. Both were perilously close to the rioters inside the building before they were safely evacuated.Peter van Agtmael, whose photojournalism over the past few decades has interrogated the US’s foreign wars and its concurrent domestic discontents was in the midst of the mob at Capitol Hill on the day. From the eye of the hurricane, he captured protesters clashing violently with outnumbered police armed with batons and pepper spray. This image distills the greater scattered disorder that erupted around the Capitol building and the dogged determination of the protesters, one of whom has scaled a high wall, his hand clinging to a marble ledge as he bends to help others beneath him. Only his baseball cap is visible and beyond it a panoramic of the unruly horde spread out across the grounds, many of them carrying US flags.In the background, the tall Washington Monument, built in honour of the first US president, points towards the sky, a symbol of the birth of US democracy. Beneath it, all is chaos and disorder. Van Agtmael’s dramatic image is a vivid distillation of a deeply fractured US. It may also be an augury of more turbulent times to come.

      Magnum America by Peter van Agtmael and Laura Wexler is published by Thames & Hudson (£125). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply More

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      in US Politics

      How the Christian right is twisting the legacy of an anti-Nazi hero

      by

      This article is co-published with DocumentedLeading figures on the Christian right have seized on an unlikely hero in their campaign against secular government: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an antifascist theologian and pastor who resisted the Nazi regime before he was executed in 1945.Driving the trend is Eric Metaxas, a prolific author, speaker and celebrity on the Christian right, whose writings on Bonhoeffer and American politics provide the intellectual fodder for a movement that seeks to turn evangelicals against liberal policies on women’s rights, LGBTQ+ inclusion and racial justice.In the short term, this push has taken the form of a well-funded voter mobilization campaign ahead of the 5 November presidential election, with conservative organizations coordinating to screen Metaxas’s 2024 film – which lays out an argument equating liberal policies with Nazism, and urges believers to emulate Bonhoeffer – in churches across the country.In the long run, experts worry that the push to liken American liberal democracy to Nazi Germany could spur political violence, citing past examples of Christian extremists who invoked Bonhoeffer to justify bombing and shooting up abortion clinics.“We’re worried about post-election political violence, and this is a way of inspiring that,” said Victoria Barnett, a theologian and eminent scholar of Bonhoeffer and the Holocaust who has advocated for a nuanced understanding of Bonhoeffer and has cautioned against depicting Bonhoeffer as a kind of evangelical “Lone Ranger”.According to documents obtained by the Guardian and Documented, the production and distribution of the movie, called Letter to the American Church, was coordinated by the rightwing group Turning Point USA and American Letter Productions – the film division of Metaxas Media, an entertainment business founded by Eric Metaxas.Through the Letter to the American Church tour, an initiative launched in mid-2024, these groups and others have screened the film at churches, community organizations, and small groups for donations of any amount; churches willing to screen the film received an “extensive marketing kit” to promote it.Funding for this film and tour was pledged, in part, by the secretive Christian donor network Ziklag, a non-profit that embraces the aims of a growing movement of Christian nationalists who strive to rule over US government and society. As a piece of Ziklag’s larger, coordinated effort to get out the vote, the group committed to funding movie screenings in churches across the country “with a focus on oversaturation in the battleground states” to galvanize congregations and increase evangelical voter turnout.Since its launch, the film has been screened at least 170 times across the country, including more than 40 times in key swing states. Local GOP chapters and numerous outside organizations on the right have also held screenings, some in conjunction with poll worker sign-up initiatives and alongside Turning Point Action, a group the Trump campaign has relied on for its voter registration and turnout efforts.Internal videos produced by Ziklag, obtained by the Guardian and Documented, detail Ziklag’s 2024 election strategy, pledging $800,000 to “focus on rallying the church behind biblically based voting using Eric Metaxas’ new documentary, Letter to the American Church”. Organizations that partnered with Metaxas, including Turning Point Action and TPUSA Faith, were promised donations from Ziklag in this effort to engage evangelical voters.Ziklag and Turning Point USA did not return requests for comment.View image in fullscreenIn an email, Metaxas denied having “anything to do with the making of the LETTER film” – although he stars in the movie and founded one of the companies that produced it. Metaxas rejected the term “Christian nationalism”, saying it is used to “demonize people who believe that we Christians are obliged to live our faith in every sphere, including the political.”And he suggested that Bonhoeffer scholars and his critics were in fact the ones inciting political violence, not him.‘Co-opted by extremists’Born in 1906 and raised in a family of intellectuals and academics, Bonhoeffer dedicated himself as a young man to theology and ministry. At 21 years old, he wrote a dissertation exploring the idea of Christians’ ethical and moral obligations to one another and society.But Bonhoeffer’s prodigious academic career was cut short by the rise of Hitler’s Nazi party.An early dissident, Bonhoeffer wrote in 1933 that the Hitler government’s increasingly discriminatory and violent oppression of Jews was a “problem for the church”, which he viewed as responsible for opposing such policies, even if they were not directed at Christians.His work in the following decade, with other dissenting clergy and networks of resisters, would eventually lead the regime to accuse him of aiding in a plot to assassinate Hitler. He was arrested in 1943 and hanged in 1945 in the Flossenbürg concentration camp, leaving behind his letters from prison and numerous writings on ethics, morality and the role of Christians in a secular, modern society.Before he was executed, Bonhoeffer warned of the dangers of zealotry and groupthink – perils he believed societies face during times of political upheaval.“[The] upsurge of power is so terrific that it deprives men of an independent judgement,” wrote Bonhoeffer, “and they give up trying – more or less unconsciously – to assess the new state of affairs for themselves.”Scholars of Bonhoeffer, and Bonhoeffer’s living relatives, have argued that Bonhoeffer teaches Christians to reject nationalisms of all kinds.To their dismay, Christian nationalists have embraced Bonhoeffer, frequently invoking his participation in the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler as an example of moral courage. In this interpretation, Bonhoeffer is cast not as the contemplative theologian who agonized over his role in the antifascist resistance, but as a Christian warrior with the political leanings of a 21st-century American evangelical.Tobias Korenke, Bonhoeffer’s great-nephew, has expressed frustration about the use of Bonhoeffer by the religious right, saying in a recent interview with Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper that Bonhoeffer’s name had been “co-opted by extremists”.At its worst, this interpretation of Bonhoeffer has led to violence. Michael Bray, a pastor who was convicted for his role in bombing numerous abortion clinics in 1984 and 1985, cited Bonhoeffer as an inspiration. Paul Jennings Hill, an anti-abortion zealot who shot and killed a physician at an abortion clinic in 1994, too, invoked Bonhoeffer.Metaxas’s political evolutionOne evangelical celebrity who has consistently and effectively worked to popularize Bonhoeffer on the right is Eric Metaxas, a Yale-educated talkshow host whose popular biography of Bonhoeffer helped introduce the historical figure to a broader audience in the US.Metaxas’ 2009 book, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, was marketed to Christians but achieved popular acclaim – serving as a biography and an inspirational history for readers familiar and unfamiliar with Bonhoeffer.To explain Bonhoeffer’s participation in the resistance, Metaxas writes that God had called him to “get his hands dirty”.In turn the New York-based Metaxas, already an unusual east coast ambassador for conservative evangelicalism, achieved a new level of fame.“He was the rare figure in the evangelical world who was mixing it up with the culture shapers and the intellectuals in New York City,” said John Fea, a historian who has documented the rise of contemporary Christian nationalism. “And then the Bonhoeffer book came out, and that skyrocketed him.”At the 2012 National Prayer Breakfast, an annual gala in Washington convening lawmakers and Christian faith leaders, Metaxas spoke about the genesis of his Bonhoeffer biography in a speech delivered with the cadence and occasional vulnerability of a stand-up routine.View image in fullscreenFifteen minutes into the 30-minute talk, Metaxas reflected on the book’s widespread popularity, joking that “it was read even by president George W Bush, who is intellectually incurious, as we’ve all read. He read the book.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMetaxas paused, turning to Barack and Michelle Obama, who were seated to his right. “No pressure,” he added, and thrust a copy of the book into the hands of the president, who played along, smiling for a photo with the book.During the remainder of his speech, Metaxas became sharply political, railing in particular against abortion.“This is a Bonhoeffer moment,” Metaxas declared, implicitly comparing abortion to the Holocaust and calling on Christians to intervene in the manner that many Germans did not.In the decade that followed, Metaxas’s political evolution has turned even more dramatically to the right. In a 2016 column in the Wall Street Journal, he endorsed Donald Trump, acknowledging his reservations about the real estate mogul but writing that if Christians voted for Hillary Clinton, “God will not hold us guiltless,” citing abortion as a top issue.Metaxas eventually embraced Maga politics fully, vowing to support Trump as the former president falsely claimed the 2020 presidential election had been stolen and attempted to overturn the results.“This is the most horrible thing that has happened in the history of our nation,” Metaxas told Trump on 30 November, in a since deleted recording of a phone call between Metaxas and the former president that ran on Metaxas’s show. “I’d be happy to die in this fight,” he told Trump later in the call.Experts question the underpinnings of Metaxas’ work on Bonhoeffer. A recent petition circulated by eight Bonhoeffer scholars, and signed by dozens of clergy and scholars of religion, argues that Metaxas “has manipulated the Bonhoeffer story to support Christian Nationalism”.It warns that in his social media posts and public appearances, Metaxas “glorifies violence and draws inappropriate analogies between our political system and that of Nazi Germany”.Barnett argues that Metaxas’s book overstated Bonhoeffer’s role in the plot to assassinate Hitler and that Metaxas “tapped right into” a “mythology that Bonhoeffer was like the Lone Ranger, the Christian hero who fought the Nazis”.In fact, the full extent of Bonhoeffer’s role in the conspiracy has been disputed – and however closely involved he might have been in the plot, Bonhoeffer did not legitimize political violence in religious terms.“He did not justify his knowledge of the conspiracy on his being Christian – he just refused to do that, because he understood the dangers of that,” said Barnett.Blurred lines between religion and politicsIn Letter to the American Church, Metaxas, who narrates much of the documentary-style film, and a roster of rightwing pastors and activists take the Bonhoeffer narrative a step further, casting liberals and Democrats as being as destructive as Nazis and calling on evangelicals to take action and oppose evil.They insist liberal teachings are destroying the family and religion in an effort to strip away freedoms from the American people. The speakers warn that if evangelicals do not rise up against ideas that they portray as evil, such as LGBTQ+ rights and women’s rights, the country is headed for destruction.At the heart of their argument is Bonhoeffer.“Bonhoeffer effectively told the church that if we’re going to see any effective change for the better, they needed to start taking action and getting political,” Metaxas tells his audience in the film. “He said those who call themselves Christians have an obligation to God to get political if necessary, and to take a bold and likely dangerous stance against their own government.”Letter to the American Church has partnered with influential rightwing organizations, including the pro-Trump Moms for America, the anti-LGBTQ+ Her Voice Movement, and Patriot Academy – a Christian nationalist group that seeks to rewrite the constitution – to promote the film and spread its message. The organization also partnered with Million Voices, an evangelical get-out-the-vote initiative, to launch a “Pledge to Vote” campaign, aiming to see “250,000 pledge to vote” after seeing the movie.View image in fullscreenThe effort highlights how some tax-exempt religious organizations push the boundaries of legal restrictions on electioneering.Churches are banned from issuing endorsements or campaigning on behalf of a candidate, but they may be able to participate in the screenings without fear of incurring legal penalties, said Andrew Seidel, a constitutional attorney who specializes in first amendment and religious freedoms cases.“One of the ways that this Christian nationalist movement has started operating in the political space, is to create these kinds of movies and then push them out through churches,” he said.Despite the timing of the screenings – which end on election day – and the film’s ultra-political content, “the churches would all have, probably, some pretty credible deniability, if they said: ‘Hey, we were just [given] a chance to run a movie we thought our folks would be interested in.’”The Letter to the American Church tour officially ends on 5 November – but don’t expect Bonhoeffer to go away anytime soon.A splashy feature film, Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin, is to debut in theaters across the US on 22 November. Bonhoeffer, the movie, features a star-studded cast of German actors and promises to be a captivating second world war drama. (Americans might recognize August Diehl, who plays the resistance theologian Martin Niemöller, from his role in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, or the 2010 thriller Salt).Posters for the movie show Bonhoeffer carrying a gun. “With world-shattering stakes,” the Christian streaming company Angel Studios writes in its promotional materials for the film, Bonhoeffer “begs the question, how far will you go to stand up for what’s right?”Bonhoeffer scholars reject this gun-toting version of the theologian – and the film’s “how-far-would-you-go” framing. “[In] the current, highly-polarized climate in the United States, these are dangerous words,” wrote the leaders of the English and German-language International Bonhoeffer Society last month in Die Zeit.In their petition, the scholars warn more broadly of a possible uptick in violence after the election linked to the Christian far right.“Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words and witness will be used to pit one side against the other, to fight ‘evil’, to put ‘America First’, and to justify violence,” they write. “The misalignment between these views and actions and Bonhoeffer’s own cannot be overstated. When you hear these grievous misuses, and you will, do not be fooled.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump’s alternate-reality ‘mirror world’, where only he can save America

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      For many observers of the coming presidential election, especially those overseas, Donald Trump and his Maga-infused Republican party represent a foreboding stress test for American democracy.Historians have weighed in with analysis that Trump now heads a movement close to fascism, Trump himself has spoken of “enemies within”, he and his followers held a mass rally of racist rhetoric in a New York city venue known for an infamous Nazi gathering before the second world war and his language has been tinged with violent imagery.Yet, in Trump’s world, and those of his followers and campaign surrogates, it is the Democrats who are to blame for the degraded discourse in American politics, their rhetoric a sign that they demonize the other side. It is Kamala Harris who is far outside the American mainstream. It is Joe Biden who is a Marxist. It is the Democratic party who plots a complete remaking of the American way of life. They are even, they argue, trying to take away Americans’ hamburgers.When millions of American Republicans vote on Tuesday they will believe that it is they – by casting their vote for Trump – who are the ones saving American democracy.The alternate reality “mirror world” that Trump has built for himself and his followers features them as the victims of their political opponents, despite Trump’s rampant use of insults and heated comments. And he casts himself as the savior from this persecution, again framing his election in the final days as he only able to fix the country that Democrats have broken, a retread of his 2016 slogan of “I alone can fix it”.The mirror world effect is a feature of the 2024 campaign – a place where Trump’s liabilities are twisted to become his opponents’, a place where he can call people names but it’s an outrage when others do, a place where Trump is saving democracy despite his attempts to overthrow an election.Perhaps no incident more clearly shows the way the same word can be twisted differently in this flipside America than the way a “garbage” gaffe played out this week.At a rally in Arizona last Thursday, Trump called the US a “garbage can” because of migrants, noting how he’d never used the term before to describe the country but that it was accurate, though he had previously said the people around Harris were “scum” and “absolute garbage.” Days later, at a Madison Square Garden rally filled with opening acts that lobbed insults and diatribes at perceived enemies, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”.Trump sought to distance himself from the comedian by saying he didn’t know him and by claiming that Puerto Ricans love him. “Every time I go outside I see somebody from Puerto Rico. They give me a hug and a kiss,” he told Fox host Sean Hannity. He hasn’t walked back his own comments on the whole country being garbage.President Joe Biden then said Trump supporters were “garbage”, though then clarified he specifically meant Hinchliffe, the comedian, and that a critical apostrophe should be added: that Trump supporter is garbage, not the lot of them. Kamala Harris also said she disagrees with calling Trump supporters names, focusing instead on the former president himself in her comments.Sensing an opportunity for a campaign stunt akin to manning the fryer at McDonald’s, Trump donned an orange vest and jumped into a Trump-branded garbage truck for a brief ride, then wore the vest throughout a speech, joking that the outfit made him look thinner.View image in fullscreen“Joe Biden’s comments were the direct result of Kamala’s decision to portray everyone who isn’t voting for her as evil and sub-human,” Trump said. “And we know it’s what they believe because look how they’ve treated you, like garbage.”Since then, he has called Kamala Harris a “low-IQ individual” and a “sleaze bag” and claimed she is “dumb as a rock”. He called Biden a “stupid bastard”. At a later rally, with some supporters on stage behind him in bright construction vests, Trump again brought up the “garbage” comment and said his supporters were “far higher quality” than Harris’ or Biden’s.Yet, in Trump’s words, he is simultaneously “running a campaign of positive solutions” while Harris is “running a campaign of hate.”Trump, talking to rightwing media personality Tucker Carlson on Thursday, explicitly laid out how one of his political opponents, former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, was a radical war hawk and should face rifles herself to see the consequences of US involvement in conflict abroad.“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face,” he said.Cheney said the comments were indicative of how dictators destroy free countries. “They threaten those who speak against them with death,” Cheney said. “We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”It’s exactly the line of attack on Trump that Trump has twisted to say his opponents are using harsh language and calling him extreme names.“For the past nine years, Kamala and her party have called us racists, bigots, fascists, deplorable, irredeemables, and they call me Hitler … They’ve taken your money, they’ve thrown open our borders to criminals … They’ve sent our blood and treasure to fight in stupid foreign wars – This Tuesday is your chance to stand up and declare you are not going to take it anymore – VOTE!” he posted on Truth Social this week.Trump has also continued to claim the Democrats are a threat to democracy, a strategy he picked up this year as he faced a barrage of criminal charges related to his actions to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He has said these charges are the work of the Biden administration to hobble their political opponent during an election year, calling it “election interference”.This line of thinking is now a feature of his speeches, and his allies and supporters now often parrot it – that a vote for Trump is a vote to secure democracy. Despite these proclamations in his speeches, he is expected to declare victory whether he wins or not, and he and his allies are laying groundwork to challenge election results. He has called his political opponents the “enemy within” and threatened to prosecute them or use military force against them for nonspecific crimes, which has led even some of his former staffers to say he is a fascist. He and his allies have instead said comments about the existential threat Trump poses have led to assassination attempts against him. More

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      Donald Trump is a superspreader of a craziness that has split America in two | Simon Tisdall

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      Is Donald Trump going mad? It depends how you define the word. But since he’s hoping to be elected US president on Tuesday, it would be handy to know. Democrats describe him as “weird” and “unhinged”. His rival, Kamala Harris, raised the “M” question again last week. “This is someone who is “unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power,” she warned.Harris, to her credit, was being relatively polite, though goodness knows why, given the way he disses and demeans her. So let’s pose the question in more colloquial, idiomatic terms. Has stark raving Trump finally lost his marbles? Are there bats in the belfry? If he’s off his rocker, not playing with a full deck and away with the fairies, the world and the voters have a right to know.Harris’s assessment is obviously not an objective medical diagnosis of mental disorder. It’s a normal person’s reaction to the abnormal things Trump says and does. Crazy-strange campaign speeches by him and his supporters, notably at Madison Square Garden last weekend – a gathering akin to a Nazi Nuremberg rally – are reviving the debate about his sanity that began during his first term.In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, published in 2017, a group of 27 psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals raised numerous red flags. One contributor suggested he was clearly off his chump: “Trump is now the most powerful head of state in the world, and one of the most impulsive, arrogant, ignorant, disorganised, chaotic, nihilistic, self-contradictory, self-important, and self-serving.”That professional opinion, made seven years ago, still rings true. Yet is the madness of “King” Trump, like the madness of King George (whose tyrannical rule Trump seeks to emulate), getting worse?By one measure – his wild, deranged language – the deterioration is marked. “His speeches have grown coarser and coarser,” wrote veteran White House watcher Peter Baker, who dubs him “the profanity president”.“Counting tamer four-letter words like ‘damn’ and ‘hell,’ he has cursed in public at least 1,787 times in 2024,” Baker wrote. His analysis shows Trump is using such language 69% more often than when he ran in 2016. It’s shocking, even by today’s tawdry standards. Trump calls Harris a “shit vice-president” who is “mentally impaired”. Doubtless he knows of what he speaks.Vulgarity, however gross, is not proof of madness. But it may be symptomatic. The Merriam-Webster dictionary, America’s oldest, defines a mad person as one “completely unrestrained by reason and judgment; unable to think in a clear or sensible way”. Trump aces this definition every time he opens his mouth. It fits him to a tee. Exhibit A: his oddball musings about golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis.Bizarre Trump traits, such as compulsive, blatant lying, meet another dictionary definition of madness – behaviour that is “incapable of being explained or accounted for”.A third definition, rooted in US rather than British usage, suggests that Trump is indisputably bananas, in the sense that he is constantly “intensely angry or displeased”. Always feeling furious, feeling “mad as hell”, must be exhausting. It’s enough to drive anyone round the bend. Older people often get irritable, of course; and screw-loose Trump is 78. So is incipient senility, or cognitive decline, another cause of his exceptional looney-ness?Trump stumbles, mispronounces words, forgets where he is and loses his train of thought. Just like Joe Biden, in fact. But Biden is merely old. Trump is nuts.Trump has refused to take credible mental acuity tests or release his medical records. Last month, more than 230 healthcare specialists urged him to be more transparent. “As we all age, we lose sharpness and revert to base instincts,” they noted. “We are seeing that from Trump as he uses his rallies… to crudely lash out.”It may go back to childhood. One theory is that Trump, bullied and bullier, was driven up the wall by maternal love denied. Another theory is that he suffers from “disinhibition”. This is when people become less restrained, the older they get.But the Atlantic journalist McKay Coppins, who interviewed Trump 10 years ago, says he’s always been this way. His “depthless vanity, his brittle ego, his tragic craving for elite approval” haven’t changed one bit, Coppins wrote.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNarcissism, hedonism, obsession, a need to provoke, scare, shock and scandalise, and chronic, paranoid feelings of victimhood are all indicators of worsening mental imbalance, if not early-onset imbecility. Recent Trump lunacies include claims that flies are buzzing round his head for “suspicious” reasons, North Korea is trying to kill him, the 6 January riot was a “lovefest”, pet-eating migrants are akin to Hannibal Lecter, and that God saved him in the assassination attempt on his life.If Trump were to go mad on his own time, no problem. Unfortunately, by publicly projecting and displaying mental dysfunction daily on a national stage, he is driving America nuts, too – fans and foes alike. He brings out the worst in everyone, right and left. It could be termed national derangement syndrome (NDS).The poisonous effect of NDS was on show at Madison Square Garden, where “comedians” amplified Trump’s sexist, racist, hate-filled messages. This superspreader craziness destroys reasoned debate, splits the country into opposing camps (hence the dead-heat opinion polls) and sends blood pressure soaring. Many Americans fear civil violence. That’s bonkers.This collective madness, akin to mass hysteria, is all-consuming and universally destructive. Like much that happens in America, it reverberates around the globe. Trump’s fascistic Mad Hatter world is also the world of sicko revanchist dictators like Russia’s Putin, Europe’s far-right ultra-nationalist fruitcases, Iran’s manic mullahs and off-their-heads Israeli génocidaires.It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world – to hijack the title of Stanley Kramer’s 1963 comedy classic – but it’s no laughing matter. It may be about to get madder still. Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s Foreign Affairs Commentator More

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      Republicans and Democrats search for unicorns in crucial Wisconsin: undecided voters

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      On a warm October morning in Madison, Wisconsin, Ty Schanhofer found a unicorn: an undecided voter.Schanhofer, an organizer with the University of Wisconsin student Democratic party, had unfolded a plastic table on campus and was trying to encourage people to register in the key swing state.View image in fullscreenWhen Arin Mahapatra, a 21-year-old student from Illinois, stopped by, Schanhofer – who takes an English class with Mahapatra – jumped into action, peppering him with questions and offering reasons to support Harris.“I’m not necessarily [leaning] in a certain direction, I’m just trying to find out who exactly falls in the same line with what I value most,” said Mahapatra, who cited economic issues like the price of gas and cost of student housing as his top concerns.Truly undecided voters are rare in Wisconsin, where presidential elections hinge on the narrowest of margins.“I feel like it’s probably 2% of the voters who are undecided,” said Schanhofer. “It’s not many at all.”Winning the support of young voters like Mahapatra will be crucial for Harris or Trump to pull off a victory in Wisconsin, where students and voters under 30 have turned out in record numbers in recent elections. In 2023, students on college campuses across the state rallied to elect a liberal judge to the Wisconsin supreme court, helping shift the ideological leaning of the bench in hopes that the court would help establish abortion rights in the state.View image in fullscreenPeople like Schanhofer hope that by generating this kind of turnout among young voters, they’ll be able to turn the Wisconsin electorate in Harris’s favor.The Badger state is considered to be part of the “blue wall” – the states Democrats consistently won in the 1990s and early 2000s.But vanishingly narrow margins in the state decided the 2016 and 2020 elections, and today Wisconsin is a virtual toss-up in the polls, as are many of the other six swing states.Trade unions historically helped drive voter turnout for Democrats, but a series of anti-labor laws passed under the Republican-controlled state government in 2011 dealt them a blow. Rural areas have increasingly turned to Republican candidates, leaving cities like Milwaukee – Wisconsin’s most racially diverse – and the liberal stronghold of Madison as Democratic bastions.View image in fullscreenThis election will probably come down to turnout, with the Trump and Harris campaigns attempting to shear away voters from each other’s respective bases. For Trump, that means drawing in young men, who have increasingly drifted to the right.On 26 October, some of those voters could be found queueing up around the corner for an event at the Kollege Klub, a bar just blocks from where the campus Democrats have been tabling for Harris.For hours, the bar was only admitting ticketed attendees, who had spent $150 to see the rightwing Nelk Boys, YouTube pranksters whose podcast has featured the self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate and Trump himself. The Nelk Boys promised to feature Charlie Kirk, the founder of the Maga organizing hub Turning Point USA (TPUSA), as a special guest.Eric Davis, a 29-year-old who lives and works in Madison, waited in line with his friends for more than two hours in front of the bar. Davis voted for Joe Biden in 2020, but said he’s reversing course this year.“I switched over to Trump because I just think, honestly, our economy right now is not going the way that it should,” said Davis. “I don’t believe in everything he says, but a majority of the stuff he goes with – I’m with it.”View image in fullscreenDavis, who is Black, doesn’t always like how Trump talks about immigrants, thinks the ex-president can be crass and understands why he rubs people the wrong way. But the way Davis sees it, that’s just Trump being Trump.“I don’t think he’s racist at all,” said Davis.“My whole family, they’re all liberals,” added Davis, who has not yet told his family how he planned to vote.Despite the night’s political theme, the actual gathering featured little by way of political mobilization. The Nelk Boys stood on a raised platform in the venue, throwing Trump merchandise into the crowd, but Kirk was nowhere to be seen. A stack of cards with voter registration information sat forgotten on a table crowded with beer bottles.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenBut for Brandon Maly, the chair of the Republican party of Dane county, the night was a success.“I’ve never seen a bar in Madison packed with Maga hats, it was just incredible. I love to see it – it’s part of that psychology in Dane county, that people need to be given a permission structure,” said Maly. “You may not think it translates to votes, but it does in the sense that they’re given permission to support Trump.”Maly has no illusions about turning Dane county red.But given its status as the second most populous county in the state, he sees the area as a rich source of Republican voters – no matter how marginal their political views may be locally.View image in fullscreenHis goal, of chipping away at Democratic party margins in liberal hubs, is mirrored in Democrats’ push to fight back Republican party majorities in rural and suburban parts of the state that have historically leaned red.One of those Democratic party organizers is Deb Dassow, the chair of the Ozaukee county Democratic party, who says she feels she has the shifting political winds at her back. In Ozaukee county, which stretches north of Milwaukee along Lake Michigan, Democrats have begun to make gains in the last several election cycles. In 2012, Barack Obama claimed 34% of the vote. In 2016, Hillary Clinton took 37%, and in 2020 Biden pulled 43% of the vote there.Since 2019, when the Ozaukee county Democrats opened a permanent office in the county, the local party chapter has poured resources into organizing local Democrats.“Since April, we’ve knocked 25,000 doors – we knocked 5,000 just last weekend,” said Dassow on 25 October. The local Democrats have facilitated food drives, held parties and hosted beading parties, crafting red, white and blue bracelets emblazoned with the letters K-A-M-A-L-A.Since jumping into the race in July, the vice-president and her allies have raised more than $1bn to fuel her campaign; much of those funds have poured into a broad campaign to knock on thousands of doors across the country.And not least, they are trying to turn out young people: according to a source familiar with the Harris-Walz campaign in Wisconsin, the Democratic coordinating campaign hired seven full-time campus organizers across the state and a youth-organizing coordinator before the election.View image in fullscreenThe Republican party, meanwhile, has farmed off most of its ground game to outside groups – including TPUSA and the tech billionaire Elon Musk’s America Pac. Those groups allied with the Trump campaign have sought to turn out “low-propensity” voters for Trump, in particular, targeting rural would-be Trump voters who might otherwise neglect to cast a ballot at all.The Trump campaign touts the strategy as innovative, but neither TPUSA nor America PAC boast the kinds of detailed voter lists that parties traditionally maintain to target supporters.“There’s suspicion as to whether or not this is an actual ground game,” said Brandon Scholz, a former Republican party operative who left the GOP on 7 January 2021 – the day after Trump supporters contesting the 2020 election results stormed the US Capitol. Even as an independent, Scholz maintains close relationships in the party and has followed the 2024 campaigns with keen interest.“Are these folks really here?” said Scholz. “Are they really beating the hell out of the doors? Are they really identifying and getting ready to turn out voters, or getting them out to vote early, or getting them absentee ballots?”The answers to these questions – is Trump’s ground strategy as haphazard as it seems in Wisconsin, and is the Harris turnout machine as effective as Democrats claim? – could very well determine the outcome of the election. More

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      Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib declines to endorse Kamala Harris

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      Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib declined to endorse Kamala Harris at a union rally in Detroit, where the war in Gaza is the top issue for the largest block of Arab American voters in the country.Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress, is the only one of the so-called leftist “Squad” that has not endorsed the Democrat candidate. The other three members – Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York – endorsed Harris in July.“Don’t underestimate the power you all have,” Tlaib told a get-out-the-vote United Auto Workers rallygoers. “More than those ads, those lawn signs, those billboards, you all have more power to turn out people that understand we’ve got to fight back against corporate greed in our country.”Tlaib’s non-endorsement of Harris comes as a voter survey published on Friday suggested that 43% of Muslim American voters support the Green party candidate, Jill Stein.After Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016, Democrats blamed Stein voters for the loss of Michigan and Wisconsin to the Republican candidate. Some Democrats fear that the same scenario could play out again next week.Earlier this year, during the presidential primary campaigns, about 100,000 Michigan voters marked their ballots “uncommitted” as a mark of protest against the Biden administration’s support of Israel’s invasion of Gaza after the cross -border Hamas attack in October last year that killed 1,200 people and took more than 200 hostages, mostly civilians.Israel’s attack on Gaza has since killed more than 40,000 people, with many of them women and children. In Lebanon, where Israel has now invaded to fight with Iran-backed Hezbollah, more than 2,897 people have been killed and 13,150 wounded, the country’s health ministry reports. A quarter of those killed were women and children.The US has been a staunch ally of Israel during the fighting, continuing to send arms to the country and limiting its public criticism of Israeli actions.Tlaib has been critical of the Democratic party’s position on the growing and bloody conflict, saying it was “hard not to feel invisible” after the party did not include a Palestinian American speaker at its convention in Chicago in August.In an interview with Zeteo, the news organization founded by former MSNBC host (and Guardian contributor) Mehdi Hasan, Tlaib said the omission “made it clear with their speakers that they value Israeli children more than Palestinian children”.“Our trauma and pain feel unseen and ignored by both parties,” she added. “One party uses our identity as a slur, and the other refuses to hear from us. Where is the shared humanity? Ignoring us won’t stop the genocide.”Harris has faced continued protests on the trail, as demonstrators call for her to break with President Joe Biden and support an arms embargo on Israel. Harris has said Israel “has right to defend itself”, and that Palestinians need “dignity, security”.Confronted by a protester in Wisconsin two weeks ago who accused the Jewish state of genocide, Harris said: “I know what you’re speaking of. I want a ceasefire. I want the hostage deal done. I want the war to end.”At a rally in Dearborn earlier on Friday, Tlaib the criticized Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, who has been endorsed by the Muslim mayors of Dearborn Heights and Hamtramck.“Trump is a proud Islamophobe + serial liar who doesn’t stand for peace,” Tlaib posted on X. “The reality is that the Biden admin’s unconditional support for genocide is what got us here. This should be a wake-up call for those who continue to support genocide. This election didn’t have to be close.” More

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      US election live: Trump repeats attack on Liz Cheney as campaign enters final days

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      The office of Arizona Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes is “looking into” whether Donald Trump broke state law when he said on Thursday that Liz Cheney should face rifles “shooting at her” to see how she feels about sending troops to fight.“The Arizona attorney general’s office is looking into whether Donald Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney violated Arizona law,” Richie Taylor, communications director for the AG’s office, said in a statement on Friday. “The office has no additional comments to make at this time.”Trump made the comments about Cheney, one of the former president’s biggest Republican critics and the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, to former Fox News Host Tucker Carlson at a campaign event in Glendale on Thursday, AP reported.“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” Trump said. “Let’s see how she feels about it.”He repeated his aggressive attack at his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon.“She’s tough one. But if you gave Liz Cheney a gun, put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her. She wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said.“That’s why I broke up with her,” Trump commented, prompting some laughs.In an interview on Friday with 12News, a local television station in Arizona, Mayes said Trump’s comments were “deeply troubling.”“I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws,” Mayes told 12News.“I’m not prepared now to say whether it was or it wasn’t, but it is not helpful as we prepare for our election and as we try to make sure that we keep the peace at our polling places and in our state,” she continued.Top Republicans have called on the White House to produce all documents and internal communications regarding president Joe Biden’s statement earlier this week in which he appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump.White House press officials altered the official transcript of Biden’s statement, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two US government officials and an internal email obtained on Thursday by the Associated Press.The Republican lawmakers said they question whether the decision to create “a false transcript and manipulate or alter the accurate transcript” produced for the National Archives and Records Administration was a violation of federal law.Representative James Comer, Republican chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and House Republican conference chair Elise Stefanik demanded the White House produce the records.They also called on the White House to make available for a briefing the top supervisor of its stenography office.Comer and Stefanik said:
      The White House cannot simply rewrite president Biden’s rhetoric.
      We are concerned with the latest reporting of the White House’s apparent political decision to protect the Biden-Harris administration, instead of following longstanding and proper protocols.
      At a Wisconsin rally on Friday, Donald Trump called Kamala Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5 hour-long meandering speech that touched on top campaign issues including the economy and foreign policy – but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style.“I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump during his opening remarks, promising to usher in a new “golden age”.“Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929 style depression,” said Trump.On immigration, Trump’s message was characteristically dark. The campaign played a painful video of a mother describing her daughter’s murder and blaming Harris for allowing the accused to enter the US without authorization. Studies overwhelmingly refute Trump’s claim that immigrants are disproportionately responsible for crime in the US, but such claims are a feature of his campaign.“The day I take office, the migrant invasion ends,” said Trump. He vowed to launch the “largest deportation program in American history” and said cities and towns had been “conquered” by immigrants, whom he referred to as “animals”.Since his Madison Square Garden rally – which showcased racist and misogynistic comments from a lineup of speakers, including comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” – Trump and his allies have sought to recast the former president and his Maga base as unfairly maligned.“Kamala has spent the final week of her campaign comparing her political opponents to the most evil mass murderers in history,” said Trump at the Wisconsin rally.“Vice-president Harris thinks you are Nazis, fascists,” said the Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who spoke at the rally.Johnson praised Trump for bringing into his campaign Robert F Kennedy Jr, who ended his presidential bid as a third party candidate in August; and Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who announced she had left the party in 2022. Johnson accused Democrats of “destroying America” and credited Trump with making “the Republican Party the party of the working men and women of America.”The office of Arizona Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes is “looking into” whether Donald Trump broke state law when he said on Thursday that Liz Cheney should face rifles “shooting at her” to see how she feels about sending troops to fight.“The Arizona attorney general’s office is looking into whether Donald Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney violated Arizona law,” Richie Taylor, communications director for the AG’s office, said in a statement on Friday. “The office has no additional comments to make at this time.”Trump made the comments about Cheney, one of the former president’s biggest Republican critics and the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, to former Fox News Host Tucker Carlson at a campaign event in Glendale on Thursday, AP reported.“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” Trump said. “Let’s see how she feels about it.”He repeated his aggressive attack at his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon.“She’s tough one. But if you gave Liz Cheney a gun, put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her. She wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said.“That’s why I broke up with her,” Trump commented, prompting some laughs.In an interview on Friday with 12News, a local television station in Arizona, Mayes said Trump’s comments were “deeply troubling.”“I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws,” Mayes told 12News.“I’m not prepared now to say whether it was or it wasn’t, but it is not helpful as we prepare for our election and as we try to make sure that we keep the peace at our polling places and in our state,” she continued.Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest from the campaign trail throughout this morning.We start with news that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris battled to woo voters in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin on Friday, as the presidential campaign enters its final stretch.Harris made several appearances in Wisconsin on Friday, including one that featured the musician Cardi B, while Trump visited both Michigan and Wisconsin.At his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon, Trump tried to energize his voters, delivering an address replete with his characteristic fear-mongering about immigrants and tangents including musings about his hair.He repeated his aggressive attack on Liz Cheney, one day after he first said the former Republican US representative should be under fire with rifles “shooting at her”.Harris meanwhile sought to draw a contrast, emphasizing at a rally in Wisconsin in the afternoon that she is looking to be a political consensus builder.“Here is my pledge to you. Here is my pledge to you as president. I pledge to seek common ground and commonsense solutions to the challenges you face,” Harris said. “I pledge to listen to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make. I will listen to experts. I will listen to the people who disagree with me. Because, you see, unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe that people who disagree with me are the enemy.”“He wants to put them in jail,” Harris said, repeating a line she’s has frequently invoked of late. “I’ll give them a seat at the table.”During his appearance in Warren in the afternoon and in Milwaukee in the evening, Trump repeatedly stoked fears about immigrants. In Warren, he said: “every state is a border state” and falsely claim immigrants were being flown into the south-west.He repeated some of his most racist tropes, saying: “All of our jobs are being taken by the migrants that come into our country illegally and many of those migrants happen to be criminals, and some of them happen to be murderers.”For more on last night’s events, see our full report here:In other news:

      Harris told her crowd at the Wisconsin State Fair Park Exposition Center that with four days to go, there was still work to do, but “we like hard work”. Minutes beforehand, during a raucous warmup, the rapper Cardi B referred to Trump as “Donnie Dunk” and told the crowd: “Trump says he’s going to protect women whether they like it or not. Well, if his definition of protection is not the freedom of choice, if his definition of protection is making sure our daughters have fewer rights than our mothers, then I don’t want it! I don’t want it! I don’t want it!”

      Earlier, Harris said Trump’s violent rhetoric about Cheney “must be disqualifying” as far as his suitability for the presidency is concerned. “Representative Cheney is a true patriot who has shown extraordinary courage in putting country above party.” Cheney for her part warned the public against dictatorship and a presidential candidate who “wants to be a tyrant”.

      Republicans’ latest offensive and misogynistic comments have boosted Democratic hopes of turning out women on election day in a contest where the rights of women have been a central issue for the Harris campaign.

      At his Milwaukee rally on Friday, Trump called Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5-hour-long meandering speech that touched on the economy and foreign policy but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style. “I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump, promising to usher in a new “golden age”. “Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929-style depression.”

      Trump’s supporters are laying the ground for rejecting the result of the election if he loses, according to warnings from Democrats as well as anti-Maga Republicans. As well as baseless and/or failed lawsuits, suspicions have been voiced over partisan polls run by groups with Republican links in battleground states that mainly show Trump leading – the idea being that if Trump loses, the polls can be proferred as “evidence” that he was cheated out of the win.

      The New York author and journalist Michael Wolff has released audio tapes that appear to detail how Trump had a close social relationship with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that he has long denied. Wolff says the recordings were made during a 2017 discussion with Epstein about writing his biography. Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges two years later. Trump’s campaign said the claims, made on Wolff’s podcast Fire and Fury, amounted to “outlandish false smears”.

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      A valuable Republican voting bloc in Arizona is seeing a shift of its members towards Harris in numbers that Democrats believe could make the difference for them in an election where the latest polls have Trump slightly ahead. That bloc is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – the Mormons. More

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      Can democracy survive now the world’s richest man has it in his sights? | George Monbiot

      by

      This is what happens when successive US governments fail to tackle inequality. While millions of people live in poverty, a handful grow unimaginably rich. Wealth begets wealth, and they acquire political power to match. It was inevitable that one of them – now the richest man on Earth – would launch what looks like a bid for world domination.A vote for Donald Trump next week is a vote for Elon Musk. Just as Trump is using Musk, Musk could be using Trump as a springboard to perhaps even greater power than the US president can wield. Musk’s secret conversations with Vladimir Putin, reported by the Wall Street Journal last week, and his contacts with other extremist world leaders, suggest a pattern of power-seeking that could be even more alarming than the prospect of a second Trump presidency.Trump, if he wins, will do to the nation what Musk did to Twitter: the US will be e-Muskulated. What this means is that those with the power to swarm, harass and crush people who do not share their noxious ideology will be unleashed.Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist”. But his absolutism seems to extend only to his allies. Since he bought Twitter and renamed it X, the platform has complied with 83% of requests by governments for the censorship or surveillance of accounts. When the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, demanded the censorship of his opponents before the last general election, the platform obliged. When Indian government officials asked it to remove a hostile BBC documentary, X did as they asked, and later deleted the accounts of many critics of the prime minister, Narendra Modi.Last month, X blocked links to a dossier about Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, and suspended the account of the journalist who revealed it. Musk has sued organisations that criticise him. Because the most vicious and antisocial people – racists, antisemites, misogynists, homophobes, even outright Nazis – have been reinstated and often boosted, millions of other users have been driven from the platform, their own free speech diminished. Musk’s own posts are reportedly amplified a thousandfold by a boutique algorithm. Free speech absolutism? My left foot.Now he has bent his immense wealth, power and blatant double standards to a frantic effort to get Trump elected. Some of his tactics – cash rewards and cash prizes – look to me like attempts to buy votes and interfere in an election. His lawyers were able to prevent him having to attend court this week for a hearing challenging these tactics: another privilege of wealth. He has used his X account to spread rampant misinformation on Trump’s behalf, giving him many millions of dollars’ worth of advertising. He has poured $118m into his pro-Trump super Pac (political action committee).What would the world’s richest man gain from the e-Muskulation of US – and perhaps global – politics? He would gain what capital has sought since workers acquired the vote: the truncation of democracy. Democracy is the problem capital keeps trying to solve. Why? Because it ensures that workers have rights and fair wages; that the living world has some (though never enough) protections; that we cannot be ripped off, poisoned and robbed without restraint.Capitalism has used two powerful tools to try to solve its problem: fascism and neoliberalism. But now, though drawing on both those ideologies, it reverts to an older and cruder mode: oligarchy. Why, the billionaires might wonder, should they rely on intermediaries to wield political power? After all, in every other sphere, the world bows to them, not to their concierges. This, I think, is where Musk and some of his fellow tech authoritarians have been heading.A Trump victory would allow Musk to escape the regulators with which he is often in conflict. In fact, if he takes up Trump’s offer of running a government efficiency commission, Musk becomes his own regulator, able to erase the rules that make the difference between a good society and barbarism.But Trump’s election might also permit even greater opportunities. Musk controls key strategic and military assets, such as SpaceX satellite launchers and the Starlink internet system. As Ukraine discovered to its cost last year, he can switch them off at whim. The kind of decision-making powerful states deploy has been privatised. The Kremlin is reported to have asked him to withhold Starlink access from Taiwan, as a favour to the Chinese government. Terrestrial broadband operators claim that Starlink could interfere with and degrade their own systems. Starlink has refuted this. It is not hard to see how his power could grow to the point at which governments feel obliged to do as he demands.He might not look the part. Villains bent on world domination are meant to be suave, laconic, self-possessed. Musk dresses like an attention-hungry teenager and behaves accordingly. Yet he has been equipped with the means to multiply his power beyond any that a plutocrat has wielded in the democratic era.For decades now, the centrist pact with capital has worked as follows: we might seek half-heartedly to improve the lives of people at the bottom, but we will do almost nothing to hold down those at the top. As a short-term tactic it worked: Rupert Murdoch and other members of the plutocrats’ trade union struck an uneasy truce with Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and their ilk. But the long-term result is that the ultra-rich became so wealthy that they could present a direct threat to sovereign nations, even to the most powerful nation of all. Some of us have spent decades warning that this was the likely outcome: appeasement makes your opponents more powerful. But our governments claimed they were simply being “pragmatic”: it didn’t matter how rich some people became, as long as the lot of the poor improved.Decades of studies, some of which were summarised 15 years ago in The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, show what nonsense this is. A highly unequal society, whatever its absolute levels of wealth and poverty, is devastating for social outcomes, for wellbeing, cohesion and democracy. But “pragmatism” prevailed, and turned out not to be pragmatic at all. The slippage from democracy to oligarchy should surprise no one.So now we face a generalised e-Muskulation: of public life, of trust, of kindness, of mutual aid, of a world in which the poor could aspire to something better, and in which all of us could aspire to a healthy living planet. Governments that have not yet fully succumbed must do what should have been done long ago: make the poor richer, and the very rich poorer.

      George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist More