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      Biden assails Trump for trying to turn election ‘loss into a lie’

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      From the pulpit of a Black church that was the site of a racist massacre in 2015, Joe Biden cast this year’s presidential election as a battle for truth over lies told by those who seek to “whitewash” the worst chapters of American history – from the deadly assault on the US Capitol to the civil war.“This is a time of choosing,” Biden implored Americans during a visit to Mother Emanuel AME church, where nine Black worshippers were murdered by a white supremacist gunman who they had welcomed into their Bible study. Without mentioning Donald Trump by name, Biden assailed his predecessor and likely 2024 Republican opponent as a “loser” who sought to overthrow the will of the 81 million Americans who voted for the Democratic president.“In their world, these Americans, including you, don’t count,” Biden told supporters. “But that’s not the real world. That’s not democracy. That’s not America.”Biden’s remarks were briefly interrupted by protesters angry with the president’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. “Ceasefire now,” they shouted from the pews. Their calls were drowned out by chanting from the president’s supporters: “Four more years.”“I understand their passion,” the president said. He then told them: “I’ve been quietly working with the Israeli government to get them to reduce and significantly get out of Gaza.”The protest was a stark reminder of the challenges the 81-year-old president faces as he runs for re-election. Growing dissatisfaction with his handling of the war in Gaza has hurt Biden’s standing among key Democratic constituencies, as widespread unease with the economy and concerns about his age drive negative perceptions of his job performance and his re-election prospects.The Charleston speech came days after Biden delivered a scathing condemnation of Trump in a 31-minute address near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in which he excoriated the former president for fomenting the January 6 insurrection. Taken together, the speeches lay out what the president believes are the stakes of the 2024 election: American democracy itself.Biden is sharpening his campaign rhetoric as the electoral coalition he carried to defeat Trump in 2020 shows signs of fraying. Polling indicates an erosion of support among Black voters, a critical voting bloc for the party.The president was introduced by the South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn, a Democrat and prominent Black leader whose 2020 endorsement helped resurrect Biden’s flailing campaign and secured Biden’s primary victory in the state. Biden said it was the support of Black voters in South Carolina and Clyburn especially that allowed him to stand before them as president.“I owe you,” he said.Biden noted the record-low levels of Black unemployment since he took office, and touted the appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to the supreme court, as well as legislation that lowered the cost of prescription drugs and made 19 June, Juneteenth, a federal holiday. He praised Vice-President Kamala Harris’s efforts to secure votings rights, though legislation has stalled in the narrowly divided Senate.“Slavery was the cause of the civil war,” he declared to loud applause from the audience. Weeks earlier, the Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, who initially failed to cite slavery as a cause of the civil war when asked by a voter in New Hampshire.Biden made no mention of the incident, but he connected efforts to rewrite the history of the civil war as a patriotic fight for “states’ rights” to the efforts to overturn the 2020 election and undermine democratic institutions.“We’re living in an era of a second Lost Cause,” he said. “There’s some in this country trying to turn a loss into a lie – a lie which if allowed to live will once again bring terrible damage to this country.”In a statement before Biden’s speech, Haley’s campaign accused Biden of “politicized racial speech” and noted that it was Haley who removed the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds after the Charleston massacre as the governor of South Carolina.The visit to South Carolina comes ahead of the 3 February Democratic presidential primary in the state, which launches the party’s nominating contest. At Biden’s urging, the Democratic National Committee put South Carolina first on the Democratic primary calendar as a reflection of how important Black voters are to the party.Biden faces only a nominal challenge for his party’s nomination.Biden spoke emotionally about the Charleston shooting, calling white supremacy a “poison” that “throughout our history has ripped this nation apart”. At Mother Emanuel, Biden said: “The word of God was pierced by bullets of hate, propelled not just by gunpowder, but by poison.”Biden recalled attending a memorial service in Charleston in the days after the attack. He said he came to grieve with the community, but he too found healing in those very pews. Weeks before, Biden had buried his eldest son, Beau Biden.“We prayed together,” Biden said, his voice stricken with emotion. “We grieved together. We found hope together.” More

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      Sarah Huckabee Sanders makes a splash in Arkansas – can she climb higher?

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      Shortly after taking office in January, Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders launched a powerful salvo in the so-called war on woke being waged by Republicans.Sanders, 41, signed an executive order targeting critical race theory, an academic field that probes how racism affects US society and laws. The move aligned with countrywide Republican opposition to the discipline.“Our job is to protect the students, and we’re going to take steps every single day to make sure we do exactly that,” Sanders said in a statement. “And that’s the reason I signed the executive order. I’m proud of the fact that we’re taking those steps and we’re going to continue to do it every single day that I’m in office.”Sanders also barred the use in state of documents of “Latinx”, which an expert described as a “gender-neutral term to describe US residents of Latin American descent”.Days after this slew of executive orders, Sanders also delivered the Republican address responding to Joe Biden’s State of the Union, during which she evoked immigrants, liberals and others held up as boogeymen by her former boss Donald Trump during his presidency.“From out-of-control inflation and violent crime to the dangerous border crisis and threat from China, Biden and the Democrats have failed you,” Sanders proclaimed, later warning: “The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy.”Sanders’s fight, however, didn’t end during her first weeks in office. Far from it, in an October executive order meant “to eliminate woke, anti-women words from state government and respect women”, Sanders prohibited phrases such as “pregnant people” and “chestfeeding” from being used in “official state government business”.That Sanders was even in a position to mount such a comprehensive assault on certain progressive initiative might have come as a shock to some political observers. Sanders had worked as Trump’s press secretary, and other acolytes of the former president fared poorly after he left the White House.But to those familiar with Arkansas politics, and to Sanders herself, her ascent did not come as a surprise. Nor did she simply luck out on account of her father, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. Rather, they say that Sanders is an immensely skilled communicator and politician with a deep understanding of speaking to voters’ wants and needs.“Mike Huckabee had been governor for much of the 1990s and early 2000s, and had been very successful,” said Andrew Dowdle, a professor of political science at the University of Arkansas. “She had spent some time working with his campaign and so, to some degree, that kind of ends up giving her roots here that other candidates might not have had.”While other states didn’t immediately jump to elect Trump associates, Sanders’s bona fides with the former president seemed to play well with the Arkansas electorate. “Statewide, Donald Trump was very popular as well, so that ended up giving her a little bit of a political boost,” Dowdle said.And though Arkansas didn’t have much in the way of far-right leanings, Sanders has been able to appeal to a wide range of Republicans. Sanders “bridges those two camps – but at the same time, she does end up really being viewed by the more populist wing as one of theirs”.Hal Bass, a professor emeritus of political science who taught Sanders’ at her alma mater, Ouachita Baptist University, said: “She was a natural – I think kind of born and bred in the sense.”Bass added that Sanders “very much grew up in the political area”. He also said she showed great promise as a student and campus leader. A double-major in political science and communications, Sanders took several classes with Bass and worked in his office.He also sponsored the student government organization in which she was active.“Ouachita is a small college, small campus, so you would see her out and about over the course of her time here,” Bass said. “She was intelligent, she was articulate, she was fun – she was very much a popular student.”When Sanders worked in his office, peers would just drop by to visit and speak with her. Her organizational skills were clear in how she ran student meetings.When it came time for class, she was a key player in class discussions and wrote excellent exams. “I wasn’t at all surprised to see her pursue a career in politics out of college,” Bass said.As for Sanders’s success despite other Trump-linked candidates’ struggles, Bass said: “I certainly think she has an identity in Arkansas that is more than simply an extension of Donald Trump.” He pointed to her father’s popularity as governor as fomenting that identity.“It gave her name identification, [and] it also gave her goodwill,” Bass said. “I think it is certainly more difficult now to … distinguish her from the Trump era than it was at the beginning of her political rise.“But in terms of developing a political identity, a political persona, I think those foundations were laid before” the 2016 presidential election won by Trump.Margaret Scranton, a political science professor at University of Arkansas at Little Rock, also pointed to how Sanders’s father taught her lots about governance.“She grew up in a governor’s mansion, and so she saw firsthand how a lot of things work – whether it’s having state troopers and security, or managing the press,” Scranton said. “Having a family who understands state and national politics gives you a set of sounding boards that the average person who did not grow up in a governor’s mansion wouldn’t have.”Scranton, whose academic interest in executive leadership focuses on communications, said: “She really is a phenomenal communicator.” Scranton pointed to Sanders’s response to Biden’s State of the Union.“If I just read the transcript, I would see a very Trumpian set of themes that look like ‘American carnage’ – whether it’s the border or immigration or fentanyl, unemployment, a landscape of disaster after disaster,” Scranton said.“Watching her deliver, her tone is more gentle. Her rhetoric is not as stark. She’s saying similar things but in a much more approachable kind of language.”The professor said: “She draws you in, her body language, her face. Occasionally she’ll kind of smile, and there will be a twinkle in her eyes.”Asked if Sanders might have higher political ambitions, Scranton said “absolutely”.Yet whether Sanders can one day be a credible candidate for the Oval Office once occupied by her ex-boss will depend on her performance in office.She endured several first-year foibles, among them outcry over her efforts to restrict public records access and a lectern that cost $19,000. It remains to be seen whether those can hurt her governorship overall.Still, Sanders’s youth and success make her a viable option for those conservatives who say they are ready for new Republican party standard bearers.“One of her themes is, ‘It’s time for a new generation of leaders in the Republican party,’” Scranton said. “There’s a huge opportunity there.” More

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      Biden attacks Trump as grave threat to democracy in rousing 2024 speech

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      A day before the third anniversary of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, Joe Biden delivered a pointed speech to warn voters against re-electing Donald Trump, criticizing the likely Republican presidential nominee as a fundamental threat to democracy in an attempt to shape the dynamics of the 2024 election.“Today we’re here to answer the most important of questions: is democracy still America’s sacred cause?” Biden said. “Today, I make this sacred pledge to you: the defense, protection and preservation of American democracy will remain, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency.“America, as we began this election year, we must be clear: democracy is on the ballot.”Sharply contrasting himself with his opponent, Biden accused Trump of attempting to undermine America’s system of government, painting the Republican leader as a would-be autocrat hellbent on revenge. Biden noted that Trump had vowed “retribution” against his political enemies if he is elected, and had indicated he would act as a dictator on the first day of his second term.“Donald Trump’s campaign is about him – not America, not you. Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future,” Biden said. “Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past. It’s what he’s promising for the future.”The speech came a day before the anniversary of the January 6 attack in 2021, when a group of Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in a violent effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. A bipartisan Senate report found that seven people died as a result of the insurrection, and Trump now faces four felony counts over his role in the attack and his broader campaign to overturn the election results.But Trump has continued to defend those who carried out the attack as “patriots”, promising to issue pardons to them if he is elected.“In trying to rewrite the facts of January 6, Trump was trying to steal history the same way he tried to steal the election. But we knew the truth because we saw with our own eyes,” Biden said.“Trump’s mob wasn’t a peaceful protest. It was a violent assault. They were insurrectionists, not patriots. They weren’t there to uphold the constitution. They were there to destroy the constitution.”Trump, who spoke to hundreds of supporters in Iowa Friday night in his first campaign visit of 2024, shot back at Biden’s speech, painting a dark portrait of the US. He called it a “failing” nation, beset by “terrorists” and immigrants from “mental asylums” pouring over the US-Mexico border.Biden highlighted the setting of his speech, which took place roughly 10 miles from Valley Forge national historical park in Pennsylvania, to underscore the high stakes of the presidential race. During America’s fight for independence in the revolutionary war, George Washington and his Continental army troops camped at Valley Forge during a difficult winter.“After all we’ve been through in our history – from independence to civil war to two world wars to a pandemic to insurrection – I refuse to believe that in 2024 we Americans would choose to walk away from what’s made us the greatest nation in the history of the world: freedom, liberty,” Biden said.The speech came at a particularly vulnerable moment for Biden. Polls show Biden’s approval rating mired in the high 30s with Americans expressing concerns about the state of the economy, despite strong job creation and the easing of inflation. A Gallup poll conducted last month found that only 22% of Americans view economic conditions as “good” or “excellent”, while 78% consider current conditions to be “fair” or “poor”. National polls show Biden and Trump running neck and neck in a hypothetical general election.Biden is holding a series of events to reframe the 2024 election as a fight for democracy and fundamental freedoms. In addition to the Valley Forge speech, Biden will speak on Monday at Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine African Americans were fatally shot by a white supremacist in 2015.Biden’s campaign has said the president will also hold events later this month to commemorate the anniversary of Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a federal right to abortion access. That ruling was overturned by the conservative-leaning supreme court in 2022, resulting in abortion bans in more than a dozen states.“When Joe Biden ran for president four years ago, he said, ‘We are in the battle for the soul of America,’” Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Biden’s campaign manager, told reporters on Tuesday. “As we look towards November 2024, we still are. The threat Donald Trump posed in 2020 to American democracy has only grown more dire in the years since.”Despite that grim outlook, Biden expressed his trademark optimism as he spoke to supporters in Pennsylvania, reiterating his message of American exceptionalism and urging voters to embrace hope.“None of you believe America is failing. We know America is winning. That’s American patriotism,” Biden said. “We all know who Donald Trump is. The question we have to answer is: who are we?”Reuters contributed to this report More

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      Trans candidate disqualified in Ohio for omitting previous name

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      Despite receiving enough signatures to appear on the ballot, a transgender woman has been disqualified from an Ohio state house race because she omitted her previous name, raising concern that other transgender candidates nationwide may face similar barriers.Vanessa Joy of was one of four transgender candidates running for state office in Ohio, largely in response to proposed restrictions of the rights of LGBTQ+ people. She was running as a Democrat in house district 50 – a heavily Republican district in Stark county, Ohio – against Republican candidate Matthew Kishman. Joy legally changed her name and birth certificate in 2022, which she says she provided to the Stark county board of elections for the 19 March primary race.But as Joy found out on Tuesday, a little-known 1990s state law says that a candidate must provide any name changes within the last five years to qualify for the ballot. Since the law is not currently listed on the candidate requirement guidelines on the Ohio secretary of state’s website, Joy did not know it existed.To provide her former name, Joy said, would be to use her deadname – a term used by the transgender community to refer to the name given at birth, not one they chose that aligns with their gender identity.And while Joy said the spirit of the law is to weed out bad actors, it creates a barrier for transgender people who want to run for office and may not want to share their deadname for important reasons, including concern about their personal safety.“If I had known that I had to put my deadname on my petitions, I personally would have because being elected was important to me,” Joy said. “But for many it would be a barrier to entry because they would not want their names on the petitions.”She continued: “It’s a danger, and that name is dead.”The office of the Ohio secretary of state, Frank LaRose, and the Stark county board of elections did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment on Thursday. It is not clear if this law has applied to any current or previous state lawmakers.Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA law school and an election expert, said that requiring candidates to disclose any name changes posed problems in Ohio, but generally serves a purpose. “If a candidate has something to hide in their past like criminal activity, disclosing former names used by the candidate would make sense,” Hasen said in an email.Sean Meloy, the vice-president of political programs for the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, which supports LGBTQ+ candidates, said he did not know of tracking efforts to find how many states require name changes in petition paperwork.“The biggest issue is the selective enforcement of it,” Meloy said in an interview on Thursday.Over the past few years, many states have ramped up restrictions on transgender people – including barring minors from accessing gender-affirming care such as puberty blockers and hormones. In some states, that has extended to limitations on which school bathrooms trans children and students can use and which sports teams they can join.Last year, Meloy said, a record number of candidates who are transgender sought and won office, and he expects that trend to continue in 2024.Ohio lawmakers passed restrictions late last year that were vetoed by the state’s Republican governor, though many Republican state representatives say they are planning to override that veto as soon as next week.Meloy said that some conservatives are trying to silence transgender voices.He pointed to Zooey Zephyr, a transgender lawmaker who was blocked last year from speaking on Montana’s House floor after she refused to apologize for telling colleagues who supported a ban on gender-affirming care that they would have blood on their hands.“Now that anti-trans legislation is being moved once again,” Meloy said, “this seems like a selectively enforced action to try to keep another trans person from doing that.”Joy appealed against her disqualification on Thursday, and is now seeking legal representation. She plans to try to change Ohio’s law. More

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      US ‘won’t survive’ four more years of Trump ‘chaos’, Nikki Haley says

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      The re-election of Donald Trump would bring “four more years of chaos” the US “won’t survive”, the former president’s closest challenger for the Republican nomination, Nikki Haley, told an Iowa audience, turning her fire on the frontrunner as the first vote of the 2024 primary looms.The former South Carolina governor has caught up with Ron DeSantis, the hard-right governor of Florida, in the battle for second place in Republican presidential polling. The gap between Haley and Trump is also closing, particularly in New Hampshire, the second state to vote when it holds its primary on 23 January.Trump faces a slate of criminal and civil trials as well as attempts to keep him off the ballot, for inciting the 6 January 2021 insurrection.Nonetheless, he remains formidably popular with the Republican base and Haley, who as UN ambassador under Trump was often touted as a potential vice-president, must perform a balancing act on the campaign trail.In Iowa, she said Trump had been “the right president at the right time”. But she added: “The reality is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him, and we all know that’s true … and we can’t have a country in disarray and a world on fire and go through four more years of chaos. We won’t survive it.”Saying she used to tell Trump he was “his own worst enemy”, Haley added: “We have a country to save, and that means no more drama. No more taking things personally.”Haley was speaking in Des Moines, as CNN hosted town hall events for her and DeSantis, rivals who will also meet on the debate stage next week, as Trump continues to avoid such traditional forums. DeSantis also used his airtime to attack Trump, but Haley is widely seen to have acquired greater momentum and therefore attracted greater attention.A confident performer and stump speaker, she is not immune to gaffes. On stage at Grand View University, she addressed her controversial failure last week in New Hampshire to say slavery caused the civil war.Saying she “had Black friends growing up”, and that slavery was “a very talked-about thing” in her state (the first to secede in 1860, its declaration of secession citing slavery as the cause), Haley said: “I shouldn’t have done that. I should have said slavery. But in my mind that’s a given, that everybody associates the civil war with slavery.”She was also forced to deal with a remark in New Hampshire only the day before, when she appeared to dismiss the importance of Iowa, telling voters: “You know how to do this. You know Iowa starts it. You know that you correct it.”DeSantis is Trump’s closest challenger in Iowa, Haley closest in New Hampshire. In Iowa, Haley claimed she had been joking.“You are going to see me fight until the very end, on the last day in Iowa,” she said. “And I’m not playing in one state. I’m fighting in every state. Because I think everybody’s worth fighting for.”Trump’s campaign has switched to a fighting stance, airing its first attack ad against Haley in New Hampshire this week, portraying her as soft on immigration.That offensive coincided with Haley securing the endorsement of Don Bolduc, a far-right former special forces general who ran for US Senate with Trump’s backing but now says: “With Trump, there’s too many distractions. There’s too much risk of losing.”Still, any Trump opponent faces an uphill fight: Haley’s state, South Carolina, will vote in February and she trails Trump there by about 30 points. There are also other candidates still in the race.On Thursday, the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, the only explicitly anti-Trump candidate, pinning his hopes on New Hampshire, angrily rejected calls to drop out and throw his weight behind Haley.“The fact is that I’m running for president of the United States and no one’s voted yet,” Christie told Hugh Hewitt, a rightwing radio host, in an interview that started awkwardly and went downhill from there. “And I don’t have an obligation to do anything other than to answer questions, tell the truth, run a good campaign, and try to win. And so, you know, where this has become Nikki Haley’s campaign when no one’s voted yet is kind of a mystery to me.”The biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and the former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson are also still in the race. But their odds are even longer than Christie’s.On Friday, writing on Substack, the Republican operative turned anti-Trump crusader Steve Schmidt said: “Nikki Haley is an imitation of Trump, a hollow woman … firmly on Trump’s side of the field. She is an acolyte who has strayed, probably much to Trump’s amusement because he knows she will be back in the menagerie more loyal than ever.“It is Chris Christie who stands alone against Trump. He is … the only moral choice.”Christie, however, told Hewitt that if he did not win the nomination, and even if Trump did, he would not vote for Joe Biden. More

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      Trump businesses received millions in foreign payments while he was in office

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      Donald Trump “repeatedly and willfully” violated the US constitution by “allowing his businesses to accept millions of dollars from some of the most corrupt nations on Earth”, prominently including China, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee charged on Thursday, unveiling a 156-page report on the matter.Four businesses owned by Trump’s family conglomerate received at least $7.8m in payments in total from 20 countries during his four years in the White House, the report said. It added that the payments probably represented just a fraction of foreign payments to the Republican president and his family during his administration, which ran from 2017 to 2021.The foreign emoluments clause of the US constitution bars the acceptance of gifts from foreign states without congressional consent.Trump broke with precedent – and his own campaign-trail promises – and did not divest from his businesses or put them into a blind trust when he took office, instead leaving his adult sons to manage them.The issue of foreign spending at Trump-owned businesses proceeded to dog Trump throughout his time in power.On Thursday, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the oversight committee, said: “After promising ‘the greatest infomercial in political history’ [regarding his business interests] … Trump repeatedly and willfully violated the constitution by failing to divest from his business empire and allowing his businesses to accept millions of dollars in payments from some of the most corrupt nations on earth.”Such countries spent – “often lavishly”, the report said – on apartments and hotel stays at properties owned by Trump’s business empire, thereby “personally enriching President Trump while he made foreign policy decisions connected to their policy agendas with far-reaching ramifications for the United States”.Raskin said: “The limited records the committee obtained show that while Donald Trump was in office, he received more than $5.5m from the Chinese government and Chinese state-owned enterprises, as well as millions more from 19 other foreign governments including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia, through just four of the more than 500 entities he owned.”Those four properties – Trump International Hotel in Washington, Trump Tower and Trump World Tower in New York, and Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas – represented less than 1% of the 558 corporate entities Trump owned either directly or indirectly while president, the report said.Raskin said: “The governments making these payments sought specific foreign policy outcomes from President Trump and his administration. Each dollar … accepted violated the constitution’s strict prohibition on payments from foreign governments, which the founders enacted to prevent presidents from selling out US foreign policy to foreign leaders.”Shortly after Trump was elected, Congress began investigating potential conflicts of interest and violations of the emoluments clause. The investigation led to a lengthy court dispute which ended in a settlement in 2022, at which point Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars, began producing documents requested.After Republicans took over the House last year, the oversight committee stopped requiring those documents. A US district court ended litigation on the matter. Mazars did not provide documents regarding at least 80% of Trump’s business entities, Democrats said on Thursday.Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination this year, despite facing 91 criminal indictments, assorted civil threats and moves to bar him from the ballot in Colorado and Maine, under the 14th amendment meant to stop insurrectionists running for office.His campaign did not immediately comment on the Democratic report.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRaskin pointed a finger at a leading Trump ally, James Comer of Kentucky, the Republican oversight chair.“While the figures and constitutional violations in this report are shocking, we still don’t know the extent of the foreign payments that Donald Trump received – or even the total number of countries that paid him and his businesses while he was president – because committee chairman James Comer and House Republicans buried any further evidence of the Trump family’s staggering corruption.”Comer – who is leading Republican attempts to impeach Joe Biden over alleged corruption involving foreign money – issued a statement of his own.“It’s beyond parody that Democrats continue their obsession with former President Trump,” Comer said. “Former President Trump has legitimate businesses but the Bidens do not. The Bidens and their associates made over $24m by cashing in on the Biden name in China, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Romania. No goods or services were provided other than access to Joe Biden and the Biden network.”Most observers say Republicans have not produced compelling evidence of corruption involving Biden, members of his family and foreign interests. The New York Times, for example, judged recently that “many messages cited by Republicans as evidence of corruption by President Biden and his family are being presented out of context”.On social media on Thursday, the California Democrat Eric Swalwell said: “No president ever personally enriched himself more while in office than Donald Trump. And mostly, in his case, from foreign cash. I don’t want to hear another peep about bogus Biden allegations. Game, set, match. Move on.”Raskin said: “By concealing the evidence of Trump’s grift, House Republicans shamefully condone former President Trump’s past conduct and keep the door open for future presidents to exploit higher office.”The family business empire, the Trump Organization, including Donald Trump and his two oldest sons, Don Jr and Eric, is in the closing stages of a civil trial brought by the New York attorney general, Letitia James.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      ‘Floored’ union leader called AOC new Springsteen after shock primary win, book says

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      Donald Trump memorably compared the New York Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Eva Perón, the Argentinian first lady known as Evita. But a new book reveals that when the young Latino leftwinger burst on to the US political scene in 2018, one US labour leader made perhaps a more telling comparison – to Bruce Springsteen.“I was floored,” Michael Podhorzer, then political director of the AFL-CIO, told the author Joshua Green. “The best comparison I can make is to the famous Jon Landau line: ‘I’ve seen rock’n’roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.’”Landau is a journalist who became Springsteen’s manager and producer. He passed his famous judgment in May 1974, after seeing Springsteen play at the Harvard Square Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Then 25, Springsteen went on to sell records by the million and win Grammys by the sackful, becoming widely known as the Boss but maintaining his image as a blue-collar hero, true to his New Jersey roots.In Democratic politics, Ocasio-Cortez – widely known as AOC – has built her own star power while maintaining working-class credentials.In 2018, she was a 28-year-old bartender when she scored a historic upset primary win over Joe Crowley, then 56 and a member of Democratic US House leadership, in a New York City district covering parts of Queens and the Bronx.In a campaign ad, Ocasio-Cortez depicted herself as an ordinary New Yorker, hustling to work on the subway.She described Crowley, in contrast, as “a Democrat who takes corporate money, profits off foreclosure, doesn’t live here, doesn’t send his kids to our schools, doesn’t drink our water or breathe our air”.Green, previously the author of Devil’s Bargain, on Trump’s rise to power, reports Podhorzer’s response in his new book, The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics.A look at three stars of the modern Democratic left, the book will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Podhorzer, Green says, is a union official “who spends his waking hours trying to get voters to care about working people”. Among working people who might appreciate his comparison of Ocasio-Cortez to Springsteen is none other than Crowley, now senior policy director for Dentons, the world’s largest law firm.At a party event on election night in 2018, as he digested the sudden end of his 20-year congressional career, Crowley picked up a guitar and took the stage with a band.“This is for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” he said, launching a cover of Springsteen’s Born to Run.In his epilogue, Green considers a common question: was Ocasio-Cortez born to run for president?Noting how AOC, Warren and Sanders have pushed Democrats left, as evidenced by Joe Biden’s record in office, he writes that Ocasio-Cortez “still gets covered mainly through the lens of ‘the Squad’” – a group of mostly female representatives of color who have achieved prominence on Capitol Hill.“But among the rising generation of Democratic staffers and strategists who will soon run the party, she’s come to be seen as a significant figure in her own right.”Speaking anonymously, a Warren adviser adds: “You can see [AOC] pointing a path toward the future in a way that none of the other Squad members are doing. She’s the one really marking the future of the left in the post-Biden era.” More

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      Beware the ‘botshit’: why generative AI is such a real and imminent threat to the way we live | André Spicer

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      During 2023, the shape of politics to come appeared in a video. In it, Hillary Clinton – the former Democratic party presidential candidate and secretary of state – says: “You know, people might be surprised to hear me saying this, but I actually like Ron DeSantis a lot. Yeah, I know. I’d say he’s just the kind of guy this country needs.”It seems odd that Clinton would warmly endorse a Republican presidential hopeful. And it is. Further investigations found the video was produced using generative artificial intelligence (AI).The Clinton video is only one small example of how generative AI could profoundly reshape politics in the near future. Experts have pointed out the consequences for elections. These include the possibility of false information being created at little or no cost and highly personalised advertising being produced to manipulate voters. The results could be so-called “October surprises” – ie a piece of news that breaks just before the US elections in November, where misinformation is circulated and there is insufficient time to refute it – and the generation of misleading information about electoral administration, such as where polling stations are.Concerns about the impact of generative AI on elections have become urgent as we enter a year in which billions of people across the planet will vote. During 2024, it is projected that there will be elections in Taiwan, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, the European Union, the US and the UK. Many of these elections will not determine just the future of nation states; they will also shape how we tackle global challenges such as geopolitical tensions and the climate crisis. It is likely that each of these elections will be influenced by new generative AI technologies in the same way the elections of the 2010s were shaped by social media.While politicians spent millions harnessing the power of social media to shape elections during the 2010s, generative AI effectively reduces the cost of producing empty and misleading information to zero. This is particularly concerning because during the past decade, we have witnessed the role that so-called “bullshit” can play in politics. In a short book on the topic, the late Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined bullshit specifically as speech intended to persuade without regard to the truth. Throughout the 2010s this appeared to become an increasingly common practice among political leaders. With the rise of generative AI and technologies such as ChatGPT, we could see the rise of a phenomenon my colleagues and I label “botshit”.In a recent paper, Tim Hannigan, Ian McCarthy and I sought to understand what exactly botshit is and how it works. It is well known that generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT can produce what are called “hallucinations”. This is because generative AI answers questions by making statistically informed guesses. Often these guesses are correct, but sometimes they are wildly off. The result can be artificially generated “hallucinations” that bear little relationship to reality, such as explanations or images that seem superficially plausible, but aren’t actually the correct answer to whatever the question was.Humans might use untrue material created by generative AI in an uncritical and thoughtless way. And that could make it harder for people to know what is true and false in the world. In some cases, these risks might be relatively low, for example if generative AI were used for a task that was not very important (such as to come up with some ideas for a birthday party speech), or if the truth of the output were easily verifiable using another source (such as when did the battle of Waterloo happen). The real problems arise when the outputs of generative AI have important consequences and the outputs can’t easily be verified.If AI-produced hallucinations are used to answer important but difficult to verify questions, such as the state of the economy or the war in Ukraine, there is a real danger it could create an environment where some people start to make important voting decisions based on an entirely illusory universe of information. There is a danger that voters could end up living in generated online realities that are based on a toxic mixture of AI hallucinations and political expediency.Although AI technologies pose dangers, there are measures that could be taken to limit them. Technology companies could continue to use watermarking, which allows users to easily identify AI-generated content. They could also ensure AIs are trained on authoritative information sources. Journalists could take extra precautions to avoid covering AI-generated stories during an election cycle. Political parties could develop policies to prevent the use of deceptive AI-generated information. Most importantly, voters could exercise their critical judgment by reality-checking important pieces of information they are unsure about.The rise of generative AI has already started to fundamentally change many professions and industries. Politics is likely to be at the forefront of this change. The Brookings Institution points out that there are many positive ways generative AI could be used in politics. But at the moment its negative uses are most obvious, and more likely to affect us imminently. It is vital we strive to ensure that generative AI is used for beneficial purposes and does not simply lead to more botshit.
      André Spicer is professor of organisational behaviour at the Bayes Business School at City, University of London. He is the author of the book Business Bullshit More