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Who is Mark Kelly, the potential vice-presidential pick from Arizona?
Mark Kelly’s resume stands out in the sea of lawyers that dominate Washington.The Arizona senator was a US navy pilot who served multiple deployments. He was on Celebrity Jeopardy. He is a steadfast partner to his wife, former US representative Gabrielle Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt at a public event in Tucson in 2011 and has worked alongside Kelly to limit guns since.Oh, and he’s been to space multiple times because he was an astronaut, along with his twin brother, Scott. He even wrote a children’s book about it, called Mousetronaut.“An astronaut! Who doesn’t like astronauts, except for Flat Earthers, right? But they’re very small in quantity,” Arizona pollster Mike Noble said. “So, outside of Flat Earthers, I’m trying to think of what’s more American than astronauts. Astronaut takes everybody. I’ve been to space, what have you done?”Kelly is on Kamala Harris’s shortlist for vice-president, and his background certainly helps make his case.He first ran for office in 2020, winning a special election against Republican Martha McSally to take a Senate seat. He won again in 2024 in the regular Senate election against Blake Masters, a well-funded Peter Thiel acolyte.To win the Senate seat in a purple state, Kelly has struck a centrist tone and proven himself a prolific fundraiser. He hasn’t inspired the intra-party ire that Arizona’s other senator , now-independent Kyrsten Sinema, has. He polls at the top of Arizona politicians for favorability.His presence on the presidential ticket could help Harris’s prospects in Arizona, where Trump is polling ahead, though the benefit of a VP pick may be greater in other swing states where she’s closer to Trump in the polls. Kelly could also help her improve how she’s viewed on immigration issues.Harris is expected to choose a running mate in the coming days, then blitz through battleground states with them.Kelly has a couple vulnerabilities, but the biggest drawback is what Democrats stand to lose – his Senate seat, in a swing state, at a time when the balance of the Senate is in contention.Arizonans have endured a series of special elections, expensive and exhausting endeavors, for Senate seats since the late Senator John McCain’s death. Kelly’s vacancy would require another one, “giving the state a Senate election every even year from 2016 through 2030”, the Washington Examiner pointed out. The cycle has made Senate elections, with their longer six-year terms, more akin to congressional races, with their two-year terms. If Kelly becomes the vice-president, Arizona’s Democratic governor would appoint a Democratic successor, then a special election for the seat would be called in 2026.If the state’s Republican party decides to end its lean into hard-right Maga politics, Republicans could win it back. Democrats face a widening gap in voter registration compared to Republicans and independents. But the current Senate race, in which Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, faces Trump favorite Kari Lake, shows Gallego with the lead – a sign that the Republican candidates often remain out of step with the broader electorate there.Still, Democrats in Arizona are excited by the prospect of one of their own on a presidential ticket. The Arizona Democratic party’s executive board issued a letter formally endorsing Kelly as a VP, praising his work in the Senate and saying Kelly and Harris would “build a winning coalition” to beat Trump.“The road to the White House runs through Arizona in this election,” the board’s letter said. “We are united behind Vice-President Kamala Harris and Senator Kelly because our democracy is on the line.”Kelly hasn’t been as ubiquitous on TV or the campaign trail as the other Democratic contenders lately, and he’s not a bombastic debater ready to lob insults at the other side. He isn’t an attack dog like vice-presidents often can be. He isn’t as tested in the trenches – he hasn’t had to address much controversy or endure combative interviews, Noble said, but he has a great relationship with Harris.Kelly has praised Harris on social media in recent days. In one video posted this week, he shows footage driving a Jeep through the Arizona desert juxtaposed with rockets flying into space.“I’ve been on a lot of missions, but never once did I do it alone. I always had a really good team behind me, and that’s what @KamalaHarris, @RubenGallego, and Democrats are going to need to win in November,” he wrote.After Biden stepped aside, Kelly said he “couldn’t be more confident that Vice President @KamalaHarris is the right person to defeat Donald Trump and lead our country into the future”, giving her his full support.Kelly could use his proximity to the US-Mexico border to counter some of the right’s push to brand Harris as a “border czar”. In a TV appearance this week, he attacked Trump and Republicans over the demise of a bipartisan Senate border bill. That bill aligned more with Republicans than with Democrats, he said.“On their side of the field, we realized, we’ve got to get operational control over the border. I realized this, Kamala Harris realizes this, and this legislation was going to do that,” he said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “And our goal here was to get this legislation passed and then start working on comprehensive immigration reform. But this was stopped dead in its tracks by Donald Trump because he wanted to have this as an election issue. Like a lot of other Republicans, they don’t actually want to solve this problem.”If he’s chosen as running mate, some of his past liabilities could come back to haunt him. Perhaps the biggest line of attack he faced in his Senate races revolved around a space balloon company he co-founded and its ties to China. An odd turn slinging vitamins in China could come up, too.The right is also likely to hit him on his record advocating for gun control alongside his wife and her group, Giffords. After the shooting of elementary school kids in Uvalde, Texas, he said, “it’s fucking nuts not to do anything about this”.His personal story showcasing the toll of gun violence should eclipse this attack, Noble said. “That crosses party lines.”Another liability was foreclosed this week after he said he was in favor of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, a pro-union bill that he previously had not signed on to support.It’s a “huge honor” to have an Arizona Democrat on the list for the presidential ticket, said Stacy Pearson, a Democratic consultant in Arizona. “We’ve tried many, many times at this point, with Barry Goldwater and John McCain. Maybe it’ll take a Democrat to get there.”The last time an Arizona Democratic elected official ended up in a presidential administration – when Janet Napolitano left the governor’s office after she was tapped by Barack Obama to be Homeland security secretary – was more than 20 years ago.After Napolitano’s exit, Republicans held the governor’s office until Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, won it back in 2022 – a sign of the potential difficulty in maintaining power if Kelly heads to DC.“As much as they love to see Mark Kelly promoted to a position that important for our country, there is fear that the seat could be lost,” Pearson said. More
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Doctors told Pelosi of concern for Trump’s mental health, ex-speaker says in book
In early 2019, at a memorial service for a prominent psychiatrist, a succession of “doctors and other mental health professionals” told Nancy Pelosi they were “deeply concerned that there was something seriously wrong” with Donald Trump, “and that his mental and psychological health was in decline”.“I’m not a doctor,” the former speaker writes in an eagerly awaited memoir, “but I did find his behaviors difficult to understand.”Pelosi’s book, The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Pelosi was speaker between 2007 and 2011, and between 2019 and 2023, the latter spell coinciding with Trump’s chaotic presidency. Her memoir comes out amid a tumultuous 2024 presidential campaign, in which Trump is the Republican nominee for a third successive election.Questions about Trump’s fitness for office form a thread through the book. At 78, Trump is the oldest candidate ever, his campaign-trail utterances studied for frequent mistakes, his speeches are often rambling and marked by bizarre references.Trump’s volcanic behavior and disregard for societal norms also stoke such questions, not least because he left office having been impeached twice, the second time for inciting the deadly January 6 Capitol attack; has been convicted on 34 criminal charges and faces 54 more; has been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in civil cases including one concerning a rape claim a judge called “substantially true”; and has promised if re-elected to govern as “a dictator” on “day one”.On the page, Pelosi says she did not solicit statements about Trump’s mental health from attendees at the memorial for Dr David Hamburg, “a distinguished psychiatrist who … served as the president of the Carnegie Corporation, where he had been a great voice for international peace”, and who died in April 2019.Elsewhere in The Art of Power, however, the former speaker is not shy of stating her views about Trump’s mental health, calling him “imbalanced” and “unhinged”.By 6 January 2021, Pelosi writes, “I knew Donald Trump’s mental imbalance. I had seen it up close. His denial and then delays when the Covid pandemic struck, his penchant for repeatedly stomping out of meetings, his foul mouth, his pounding on tables, his temper tantrums, his disrespect for our nation’s patriots, and his total separation from reality and actual events. His repeated, ridiculous insistence that he was the greatest of all time.”She describes how subordinates including Mark Meadows, Trump’s final chief of staff, indulged improper behavior, allowing Trump to “surreptitiously listen” to private meetings with congressional leaders, eventually prompting Pelosi to ban all cellphones from her meeting rooms on Capitol Hill.Pelosi also describes getting calls from Trump, often late at night, including one in which she says Trump insisted missile strikes on Syria he had just ordered were Barack Obama’s fault, eventually prompting Pelosi to tell him: “It’s midnight. I think you should go to sleep.”Pelosi devotes attention to the events of 6 January 2021, when she and other congressional leaders were hurried from a mob who meant them harm, then spent hours trying to get Trump to call them off.Much of Pelosi’s account is familiar, thanks to the work of the House January 6 committee, which she created, and of her own daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, a documentarian who was filming her mother that day.“People still ask me how I remained so calm,” Pelosi writes, of the hours when Congress was under attack, she and other leaders were evacuated to Fort McNair, and Vice-President Mike Pence was in hiding as the mob chanted about hanging him.“My answer is that I was already deeply aware of how dangerous Donald Trump was.“He continues to be dangerous. If his family and staff truly understood his disregard for both the fundamentals of the law and for basic rules, and if they had reckoned with his personal instability over not winning the [2020] election, they should have staged an intervention. Whether because of willful blindness, money, prestige, or greed, they didn’t – and America has paid a steep price.”Saying she had quickly realised she had “more respect for the office of president of the United States than Trump”, Pelosi says “it was clear to me from the start that he was an imposter – and that on some level, he knew it”.Still she is not done. After describing how electoral college votes were eventually counted and Joe Biden’s victory confirmed, she says she “and many others wanted a consequence for the deranged, unhinged man who was still president of the United States”.That led to an impeachment and a second failed Senate trial, after the Republican leader there, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, made a historic miscalculation: that Trump did not require conviction and barring from office, as he was politically finished.Pelosi describes another failed effort to remove Trump from office, on grounds of being unfit.“Following January 6,” she writes, “the Democratic leadership discussed asking the vice-president to invoke the 25th amendment to the constitution, which allows for the vice-president and a majority of cabinet members to certify that a president is unable to discharge the duties of the office.”She and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, “placed a call to Vice-President Pence about this possibility”.Elsewhere, Pelosi writes that she admires Pence for his actions on January 6, when he refused to be spirited from the Capitol despite having to hide from a murderous mob sent by his own president, then ultimately presided over certification of election results.But when it came to the 25th amendment, Pence let Pelosi down.“The vice-president’s office kept us on hold for 20 minutes,” Pelosi writes, adding that “thankfully” she was at home at the time, “so I could also empty the dishwasher and put in a load of laundry.“Ultimately, Vice-President Pence never got on the phone with us or returned our call.” More
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Trump favorite Kari Lake wins Arizona’s Republican Senate primary
Kari Lake, the far-right firebrand and favorite of Donald Trump, has won Arizona’s Republican Senate primary.The Associated Press projected the race at 8.44pm Arizona time on Tuesday night. Lake rose to prominence as a gubernatorial candidate in 2022, when she refused to concede the race to her Democratic challenger Katie Hobbs.Having secured a primary victory, she will face off against the Democratic US representative Ruben Gallego for an open Senate seat vacated by the centrist independent senator Kyrsten Sinema.Lake, endorsed by Trump, was widely favored to win the primary against Mark Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal county. Lamb, who has far less name recognition and campaign funding than Lake, pulled in about 40% of the vote as of Tuesday night – a potential sign of general election trouble for Lake, who has alienated the more moderate voters required to win statewide in Arizona.Her contest, along with several key down-ballot races, is considered a gauge for the relative strength of the Maga movement in a key swing state that has been racked with election chaos brought on by a far-right flank pushing false claims about election fraud.Lake, a former news anchor who rocked into the national stage by becoming one of the most ardent and telegenic faces of election denialism, once carried a sledgehammer on stage and told supporters she would use it on electronic voting machines.The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee quickly launched an ad against Lake, where she talks about how abortion pills should be illegal and brands her as a “power-hungry liar who only cares about herself”. Gallego tweeted: “It’s official – my opponent is Kari Lake. Arizona, the choice is clear: Kari wants to ban abortion. I will always protect abortion rights.”Election prognosticators Sabato’s Crystal Ball and the Cook Political Report rank the race as leaning Democratic, citing Lake’s election denialism and belief in abortion restrictions as factors moving the race toward Democrats. Polling on the matchup between Gallego and Lake has generally shown Gallego up a few points over Lake.The race is key nationally for the balance of power in the US Senate – Democrats need to keep it in their control to maintain their 51-49 majority in the chamber. It’s one of few close races around the country expected to see massive funding and attention as November nears.Far-right election deniers starred in several other key Republican primary races. Abe Hamadeh, who repeatedly tried to have his loss in the 2022 attorney general election overturned and has spread conspiracy theories about election security, is leading in a crowded Republican primary in the state’s deep-red eighth congressional district, where Trump made the rare move to endorse two candidates, including Hamadeh.His Republican rivals included venture capitalist Blake Masters, who Trump endorsed last-minute, as well as state senator and fake elector Anthony Kern, Ben Toma, the speaker of the Arizona house; Trent Franks, who resigned from Congress after staffers claimed he asked them to serve as surrogates for him; and political newcomer Pat Briody.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, Mark Finchem, who has still not accepted that he lost his bid for secretary of state in 2022 has the lead in a race against relative moderate Republican Ken Bennett for a state senate seat.In Arizona’s Maricopa county – which includes Phoenix – election deniers vied for positions that could give them oversight in future elections. Early results show a mixed bag for election-defending county officials.Stephen Richer, the Maricopa county recorder who became a nationally known voice for defending elections and sued Lake for defamation over election falsehoods, was behind in his race for reelection as of Tuesday night. He is falling behind Justin Heap, a state representative who will not say whether he believes the 2020 or 2022 elections were stolen, but has called Maricopa county elections a “laughing stock” and supported bills that stemmed from election conspiracies. Another challenger, Don Hiatt, has said the 2020 election was stolen and wants to curtail voting access and is in third.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDebbie Lesko, an outgoing Republican congresswoman who is endorsed by Trump and voted to overturn election results on 6 January 2021, has a strong lead in the primary to join the county board of supervisors over another election denier, Bob Branch, a professor at the Christian college Grand Canyon University.The Maricopa county board of supervisors and recorder played a crucial role in 2020 standing up to pressure from Trump and his allies in their scheme to overturn the results of that year’s presidential election.The recorder and many board members have faced ongoing threats, some of which have been prosecuted and led to prison sentences. The pressure has remained intense in the lead-up to this year’s elections, with errors such as printing problems in the 2022 election adding fuel to rightwing conspiracies.Amid the threats and harassment, two supervisors, Bill Gates and Clint Hickman, decided not to run for re-election.For Gates’s seat, moderate former state lawmaker Kate Brophy McGee is far ahead in the primary against Tabatha LaVoie, who said on her campaign website that she wanted to restore voter confidence because: “Our County cannot continue to raise doubts about the integrity of our elections.”Jack Sellers, currently the board chair, is trailing far behind Mark Stewart, currently a council member in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler. Stewart won’t say whether he would have certified results in 2020 or 2022 and claims he will restore confidence in county elections.Thomas Galvin, who was not on the board in 2020 but has defended county elections since taking office after beating election-denying candidates in 2022, is fending off a challenge from Michelle Ugenti-Rita, a former state lawmaker and Lake-endorsed candidate who promised to “fight for election integrity” and “take back Maricopa County from the establishment”.On the Democratic side, former state senator Raquel Terán is trailing in her primary for Arizona’s third district, for the seat that will be vacated by Gallego. A longtime organiser against anti-immigrant laws in the state, Téran focused her campaign on protecting abortion rights. Her main rival former city council member in Phoenix, Yassamin Ansari, had raised more funds and secured several key labour endorsements, and has the lead as of Tuesday night.And in what is likely his last unsuccessful bid for office, the former Maricopa county sheriff Joe Arpaio, notorious for his harsh immigration regime, was trounced in a local mayoral race to lead the Phoenix suburb of Fountain Hills. Arpaio, 92, was recently kissed on the cheek by Trump at a rally in Arizona. In his run for mayor, one of his main ideas was to make the town’s eponymous fountain go higher. More
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‘Cat ladies’ come together to show support for Kamala Harris
A group of pet lovers and self-described “cat ladies” came together for the latest in a series of Zoom calls in support of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. The Tuesday evening call was hosted by Christine Pelosi, a political consultant and the daughter of Nancy Pelosi, and Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party.The call was not organized around racial and ethnic identity, but as a rebuff to comments made in 2021 by JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, who told the then Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the US was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too”.Tuesday’s meeting began with a slideshow of pet pictures that played over Dancing Queen by Abba. Nancy Pelosi, a surprise guest, bopped along to the tune before telling the audience that the purpose of the gathering was to show support for women’s freedom to “love how they wanna love, and live how they wanna live”.“When JD Vance couched his opinion on our freedom, we decided that the cat ladies are striking back,” Pelosi said. “He didn’t realize what an opportunity he was giving us, and what he would unleash.”The digital conference was organized by a group called Pet Lovers for Kamala. Originally, the group was focused on cat owners in particular, but Christine Pelosi said they found solidarity among dog owners, so they formed an inclusive group that includes owners of all animals.That included Donna Brazile, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, and Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois congresswoman. Both appeared with their dogs.Christine Pelosi and the call’s other organizers gave tips for how to engage people via social media posts, phone and text banks, and by volunteering on behalf of Harris. Fried, who also served as Florida’s commissioner of agriculture from 2019 to 2023, said Harris winning was the only thing stopping the rest of the US going the way of her home state.“I had to sit next to Ron DeSantis for four straight years and see up close and personal the strangeness of Ron DeSantis,” Fried said. “We have been living under Project 2025. We have been the lab rats for the Heritage Foundation.”The Tuesday call also follows several other Zoom rallies put on by affinity groups to raise money for the presumptive Democratic nominee.Within 24 hours of Joe Biden announcing he was ending his campaign, nearly 100,000 Black people logged on to Zoom calls with the groups Win with Black Women and Win with Black Men in support of Harris’s campaign.Last week, Shannon Watts, best known for founding the gun violence prevention group Moms Demand Action, corralled more than 160,000 white women, and on Monday, a White Dudes for Harris call attracted more than 190,000 people and raised $4m for the vice-president’s campaign.A virtual meeting of Latino voters is slated for Wednesday and will be hosted by comedian George Lopez. More
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Do you ever get the feeling that we’re living in a postmodern fiction? You’re not alone | Dan Brooks
Writing about the assassination of President John F Kennedy for Rolling Stone in 1983, 20 years after the shooting, the novelist Don DeLillo remarked: “Europeans and Middle Easterners are notoriously prone to believe in conspiracies … Americans, for their own good reasons, tend to believe in lone gunmen.” How times change. Since Donald Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt on 13 July, social media have boiled over with talk of conspiracies, false flags and complex manipulations of state and psyche for unclear ends. After Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy for president, various online conservatives argued that he was actually dead. Meanwhile, otherwise sensible observers blamed the media for creating the narrative that Biden had lost mental acuity and keeping Trump in the public eye – a kind of Rothschild conspiracy for people who took undergraduate sociology.It’s fun to scoff at such people, who believe that powerful forces secretly organise the world even as we confront evidence that human intelligence is no longer sufficient to run a branch of Chipotle. In fairness to the paranoid mindset, though, a lot of events from earlier decades’ fiction have been coming true lately. Consider Lisa’s prophetic line from the Bart to the Future episode of The Simpsons, original airdate 19 March 2000: “As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.” It was funny at the time. I believe it was either Karl Marx or Nelson Muntz who said that history repeats itself: first as farce, then as whatever all this is now.The other week, Twitter user @ZeroSuitCamus posted a passage from an essay JG Ballard wrote for Vogue in the 1970s (incorrectly attributed to his 1975 novel High-Rise) about a future in which our daily activities are all recorded on video, and every evening “we sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters …” Here is the Instagram experience and its strange effects, complete with filter, algorithm and night-time scrolling, delivered to us decades before it became reality. David Foster Wallace predicted the filter, too, around page 111 of Infinite Jest, in which internet-enabled video calling makes everyone so insecure about their faces that they briefly adopt electronic face-improving technology, before it develops such a stigma that they all go back to voice-only telephony. Wallace’s 1996 novel about a form of entertainment so fascinating that it amuses its viewers to death raises some uncomfortable questions for any reader who gets screen time updates on their phones.All these texts – DeLillo, Ballard and Wallace for sure, and The Simpsons, too, in my opinion – fall under the category of “postmodernism”. The contours of the genre are still debated many decades after it emerged, but two key themes on which critics agree are (1) characters who find themselves at the mercy of impossibly complex systems; and (2) a sincere effort to acknowledge the importance of texts in modern life, which has since curdled into mere referentiality. I submit that these themes are no longer limited to literature and have become defining aspects of the way we live now.I also submit that it’s kind of weird that we have identified our own time as “postmodern” for three generations running. In the same way that the term “modernism” tells you something about how people thought of themselves in the years after the first world war, the fact that we regard ourselves as “post-” suggests a certain mindset. In many ways, our culture thinks of itself as existing after the important part of history – increasingly, after the good part. Latter-days thinking prevails, particularly on social media and in the arts, which seems resigned to rearranging the material already provided to us.I don’t think many of us are delighted to see previous generations’ satires coming true. Stories about technology-driven anomie and lives that had become unmoored from meaningful values were thrilling to readers in the 1980s and 1990s, but to be a character in such stories is a different thing. At the same time, we aren’t kicking against it – at least not much. There is that postmodern sense that the systems governing our world are too big and complex to do anything about them. We are all in a self-driving car that is taking us somewhere we don’t want to go.The bad news is that the conspiracy theories are false, and the car keeps veering toward pedestrians not because California billionaires are secretly priming the public for mandatory bicycles, but rather because someone saved money by skimping on quality control. Incompetence is more common than malice, even though it makes for a less compelling plot. The good news is that the sense that our world has become a work of postmodern fiction is also false. If it sometimes feels unpleasant to believe that what is happening in the news is real, it is also vital to remember that we are not characters in a story. What happens next is not written, even in outline form.The impossibly big systems are real and in many cases evil, as anyone who has travelled by air in recent years will attest. But they are nonetheless our systems, made and not given, and they can be remade. The end of the postmodern era will come not when the last Simpsons joke comes true, but when we realise the world imagined by the previous century is not enough for us – entertaining and fun to talk about, sure, but fundamentally less interesting than what we can come up with. Sooner or later, we must become authors again.
Dan Brooks writes essays, fiction and commentary from Missoula, Montana More
