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      US Senate moves forward $95bn Ukraine and Israel aid package

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      After many setbacks and much suspense, the Senate appeared on track this week to approve a long-awaited package of wartime funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, as Republican opponents staged a filibuster to register their disapproval over a measure they could not block.The Senate voted 66-33, exceeding a 60-vote margin, to sweep aside the last procedural hurdle and limit debate on the measure to a final 30 hours before a vote on passage that could come on Wednesday.Senators had worked through the weekend on the roughly $95bn emergency spending package, which cleared a series of procedural hurdles as it moved toward final passage. The chamber voted on the legislation on Monday night following hours of debate and a talking filibuster led by Republican senator Rand Paul and joined by a coterie of Donald Trump’s allies in the chamber.On Monday, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said the weekend votes demonstrated “beyond doubt that there’s strong support” for advancing the foreign aid package.Schumer said: “These are the enormously high stakes of the supplemental package: our security, our values, our democracy. It is a down payment for the survival of western democracy and the survival of American values.”He continued: “The entire world is going to remember what the Senate does in the next few days. Nothing – nothing – would make Putin happier right now than to see Congress waver in its support for Ukraine; nothing would help him more on the battlefield.”If the bill passes the Senate as expected, the bill would next go to the Republican-led House, where next steps are uncertain. Though a bipartisan majority still supports sending assistance to Ukraine, there is a growing contingent of Republican skeptics who echo Trump’s disdain for the US-backed war effort.“House Republicans were crystal clear from the very beginning of discussions that any so-called national security supplemental legislation must recognize that national security begins at our own border,” read a statement from House speaker Mike Johnson.The Republican speaker said the package lacked border security provisions, calling it “silent on the most pressing issue facing our country”. It was the latest – and potentially most consequential – sign of opposition to the Ukraine aid from conservatives who have for months demanded that border security policy be included in the package, only to last week reject a bipartisan proposal intended to curb the number of illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border.“Now, in the absence of having received any single border policy change from the Senate, the House will have to continue to work its own will on these important matters,” Johnson said. “America deserves better than the Senate’s status quo.”The measure includes $60bn in funding for Ukraine, where soldiers are running out of ammunition as the country seeks to repel Russian troops nearly two years after the invasion. Much of that money would go toward supporting Ukraine’s military operations and to replenishing the US supply of weapons and equipment that have been sent to the frontlines. Another $14bn would go to support Israel and US military operations in the region. More than $8bn would go to support US partners in the Indo-Pacific region, including Taiwan, as part of its effort to deter aggression by China.It also allots nearly $10bn for humanitarian efforts in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, where nearly a quarter of residents are starving and large swaths of the territory have been ravaged.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNot included in the package is a bipartisan border clampdown demanded by Republicans in exchange for their support for the foreign aid package. But after months of fraught negotiations, Republicans abandoned the deal following Trump’s vocal opposition to the border-security measure.Though its Republican defenders argued that it was the most conservative immigration reform proposal put forward in decades, Trump loyalists on Capitol Hill deemed it inadequate amid record levels of migration at the US southern border. Others were more explicit, warning that bipartisan action to address the situation could help Joe Biden’s electoral prospects in the November elections.Border security is top of mind for many Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom disapprove of the president’s handling of the issue.After the Senate failed to advance the border security measure, Schumer stripped it out and moved ahead with a narrowly-tailored foreign aid package. In floor speeches on Monday, several Republican senators lamented the absence of border enforcement policies, though all had voted to reject the bipartisan immigration deal last week.“Open the champagne, pop the cork! The Senate Democrat leader and the Republican leader are on their way to Kyiv,” Paul said, launching the filibuster. He continued: “They’re taking your money to Kyiv. They didn’t have much time – really no time and no money – to do anything about our border.” More

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      Judge moves ahead with Fani Willis hearing but documents not turned over

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      A blockbuster hearing with details of Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis’s relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade will go forward Thursday, after the presiding judge chose not to immediately quash subpoenas for their testimony.But the hearing revealed a possible new hurdle for Willis: county administrators have not turned over key documents subpoenaed by Ashleigh Merchant, attorney for former Trump White House aide Michael Roman, one of the 19 defendants charged in the county’s sweeping election interference and racketeering case with the former president.Willis said in filings and in front of an Atlanta church audience that Wade was paid as much as other special prosecutors. Merchant is seeking employment records to potentially refute that assertion. Records released by the district attorney’s office to date show that Wade has billed more than half a million dollars to the county for work on the case.Employment contracts for special prosecutor Anna Green Cross and others that Merchant demanded are not in the possession of county government records administrators, said Shalanda MJ Miller, Fulton county’s custodian of records, in a hearing Monday. Neither are two invoices for work done on the Trump prosecution that Merchant said had been paid.Superior court judge Scott McAfee dismissed questions at the preliminary hearing Monday about whether Wade was qualified to be appointed as a prosecutor on the high-profile racketeering case. Regardless of his experience – or lack thereof – as a prosecutor, “as long as a lawyer has a heartbeat and a bar card”, Wade’s appointment is a matter of the district attorney’s discretion, McAfee said.But the legal question about whether a personal relationship between the two leads to a conflict from personal enrichment requires an evidentiary hearing, he said. “The state has admitted that a relationship existed.”Roman and Merchant have raised allegations of an improper relationship as they seek to disqualify Wade and Willis as prosecutors on the Trump case and for the charges to be dropped. In filings and in court, Willis’ office described the accusations as speculative and baseless.“The defense is not bringing you facts. The defense is not bringing you law. The defense is bringing you gossip,” said Fulton county special prosecutor Anna Green Cross. Willis does not stand to financially benefit from prosecuting the case, she said, and even if the allegations made by Merchant are true, they are an insufficient legal basis to remove the district attorney and her appointees from the case.Thursday’s hearing in McAfee’s courtroom will hinge on testimony by Atlanta attorney Terrence Bradley, a business associate of Wade’s who previously represented him as his divorce lawyer. Willis, Wade and a host of other potential witnesses subpoenaed by Merchant filed motions for those subpoenas to be quashed – for McAfee to rule that their testimony would be unnecessary.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMcAfee said he would consider those motions more closely after hearing Bradley’s testimony. More

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      Republicans say Trump call for Russia to attack Nato allies was just fine, actually

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      A leading Republican senator said Donald Trump was “simply ringing the warning bell” when he caused global alarm by declaring he would encourage Russia to attack Nato allies who did not pay enough to maintain the alliance, as Trump’s party closed ranks behind its presumptive presidential nominee.“Nato countries that don’t spend enough on defense, like Germany, are already encouraging Russian aggression and President Trump is simply ringing the warning bell,” Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a former soldier, told the New York Times.“Strength, not weakness, deters aggression. Russia invaded Ukraine twice under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but not under Donald Trump.”Cotton was referring to the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.As president between 2017 and 2021, Trump was widely held to have shown alarming favour, and arguably subservience, to Vladimir Putin.Trump made the controversial remarks at a rally in South Carolina on Saturday.View image in fullscreenIn remarks the Times said were not part of Trump’s planned speech but which did repeat a story he has often told, the former president said: “One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’“I said, ‘You didn’t pay, you’re delinquent?’ He said, ‘Yes, let’s say that happened.’ No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want. You’ve got to pay. You’ve got to pay your bills. And the money came flowing in.”Amid fierce controversy over remarks the Biden White House called “appalling and unhinged”, another Republican hawk in the Senate, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, told the Times: “Give me a break – I mean, it’s Trump.”Graham, who has vacillated from warning that Trump will “destroy” the Republican party to full-throated support, added: “All I can say is while Trump was president nobody invaded anybody. I think the point here is to, in his way, to get people to pay.”Last year, Marco Rubio co-sponsored a law preventing presidents unilaterally withdrawing from Nato. On Sunday the Florida senator, whom Trump ridiculed and defeated in the 2016 primary, also dismissed Trump’s remarks about Russia.“Donald Trump is not a member of the Council on Foreign Relations,” Rubio told CNN, referring to a Washington thinktank. “He doesn’t talk like a traditional politician, and we’ve already been through this. You would think people would’ve figured it out by now.”Among other Senate Republicans there was some rather muted pushback. Thom Tillis of North Carolina reportedly blamed Trump’s aides for failing to explain to him how Nato works, while Rand Paul of Kentucky was quoted by Politico as saying Trump’s remarks represented “a stupid thing to say”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s last rival for the presidential nomination, which he is all but certain to secure, is Nikki Haley, who served as United Nations ambassador under Trump. Asked about his remarks, Haley told CBS: “Nato has been a success story for the last 75 years. But what bothers me about this is, don’t take the side of a thug [Vladimir Putin], who kills his opponents. Don’t take the side of someone who has gone in and invaded a country [Ukraine] and half a million people have died or been wounded because of Putin.“Now, we do want Nato allies to pull their weight. But there are ways you can do that without sitting there and telling Russia, have your way with these countries. That’s not what we want.”A former candidate for the nomination, the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, told NBC the Nato remark was “absolutely inappropriate” and “consistent with his love for dictators”.Among former Trump aides, John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser, told MSNBC: “When he says he wants to get out of Nato, I think it’s a very real threat, and it will have dramatically negative implications for the United States, not just in the North Atlantic but worldwide.”HR McMaster, Bolton’s predecessor, who was a serving army general when Trump picked him, said Trump’s Nato comment was “irresponsible”.Another former general and former Trump adviser, Keith Kellogg, told the Times he thought Trump was “on to something” with his remarks, which Kellogg said were meant to prompt member nations to bolster their own defences.“I don’t think it’s encouragement at all,” Kellogg said of Trump’s apparent message to Russia. “We know what he means when he says it.”But Liz Cheney, the former Republican Wyoming congresswoman who became a Trump opponent after the January 6 attack on Congress, called Nato “the most successful military alliance in history … essential to deterring war and defending American security”. She added: “No sane American president would encourage Putin to attack our Nato allies. No honorable American leaders would excuse or endorse this.” More

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      Lloyd Austin to resume Pentagon duties one day after admission to hospital

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      The US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, is expected to “resume his normal duties” on Tuesday, a day after he was admitted to a hospital for what the Pentagon described as an “emergent bladder issue”.A statement issued by the Pentagon said Austin, 70, had undergone non-surgical procedures under general anesthesia to address the bladder issue. “We anticipate a successful recovery and will closely monitor him overnight,” the statement read.The Pentagon’s statement added that “a prolonged hospital stay is not anticipated” for Austin and that “his cancer prognosis remains excellent”.Earlier on Monday, a US official told Reuters that Austin had cancelled a trip to Brussels for a meeting with Nato defense ministers due to be held on Thursday – as well as a separate meeting with allies for Wednesday on how to continue supporting Ukraine in countering Russia’s invasion.Austin had transferred his duties to the deputy secretary of defense, Kathleen Hicks, after he was admitted to Walter Reed national military medical center on Sunday. He was then transferred to the critical care unit, according to a Pentagon statement.Austin’s health became a focus of attention in January when the 70-year-old former general underwent prostate cancer surgery and was readmitted to hospital for several days because of complications – without the apparent knowledge of the White House.Earlier, the Pentagon said that Hicks, joint chiefs of staff, White House and Congress had been notified about Lloyd’s hospitalization on Sunday. And Hicks was said to be “prepared to assume the functions and duties of the secretary of defense, if required”.Sunday’s notification about Austin stands in stark contrast to his hospitalization in January.Back then, the White House appeared to be unaware for three days that the defense secretary had been hospitalized.In that instance, Austin had surgery at Reed hospital on 22 December. He was discharged the following day but had to go back to the hospital on 1 January.It was not until 4 January that Hicks, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and then the president were notified of Austin’s diagnosis, treatments or hospitalization, all of which occurred amid escalating violence in the Middle East that had put the world on edge.That prompted a political backlash, including an investigation by the defense department inspector general. The Pentagon later said the Austin’s chief of staff was sick with the flu, exacerbating the delay in information about the secretary’s medical condition. More

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      How to steal a US election: Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig on Trump’s new threat

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      Lawrence Lessig has a message for America: Donald Trump’s assault on democracy in 2020, with his stolen-election lie and refusal to concede the White House, may have been shocking, but wait till you see what’s coming next.“We are in a profoundly dangerous moment,” the Harvard law professor says. “This is a catastrophic year, and the odds are not in our favor.”Such a blunt warning carries the gravitas of its source. Lessig is a leading thinker on how public institutions can be corrupted, and has probed deeply into vulnerabilities that leave US democracy undefended against authoritarian attack.Lessig has teamed up with Matthew Seligman of the constitutional law center at Stanford. Their new book, How to Steal a Presidential Election, asks whether a second Trump attempt to subvert democracy could succeed. Their answer makes for uncomfortable reading.“We are convinced,” they write, “that an informed and intelligent effort to undermine the results of a close, free and fair election could work in America – if the rules governing our presidential elections are not changed.”It is a sign of troubled times that prominent scholars are wargaming the next election. A country that has long prided itself as an exemplar of constitutional democracy finds itself under surgical lights.Nor is this Lessig’s first such thought experiment. Four years ago, months before Trump launched his stolen-election conspiracy, Lessig and Seligman devised a class at Harvard law school: Wargaming 2020. They looked at whether it would be possible to hack the presidential election and send the losing candidate to the White House. Their conclusion was that American democracy had dodged a bullet.“We discovered that Trump didn’t really understand what he could have done,” Lessig says. “There were obvious moves he and his team could have made, but they didn’t take them.”The insurrection on 6 January 2021 was tragic in its loss of life, but as a method of overturning the election it was the “dumbest thing they could have possibly done. No court would ever allow the election to be decided by force of bayonets.”Having repeated the wargaming exercise for the new book, Lessig is far less confident that another assault on democracy would end so positively. With the former president almost certain to secure the Republican nomination, having won in Iowa and New Hampshire, Lessig has no doubt about how far Trump is prepared to go.“We’ve seen that he’s willing to do much, more more than we expected back in 2020,” he says.Another reason for people to be “very anxious” is that Trump and his inner circle have had four years to conduct their own wargames and are likely to be far more sophisticated: “Trump didn’t understand how to undo the structures of government. Now he’s well-trained, he knows exactly what he needs to do.”For their 2024 wargame, Lessig and Seligman assume the November election will be nail-bitingly close, both nationally and in at least one battleground state. That is not an outlandish precondition – you only have to think about the 537 votes that gifted Florida and the presidency to George W Bush in 2000.Given a close election, there are factors that could help stave off disaster. With the vice-presidency in the hands of Kamala Harris, there is no chance of Trump or his supporters unleashing the kind of pressure to which they subjected Mike Pence in 2020, trying to get him to block certification of Joe Biden’s victory.In the wake of January 6, Congress also moved to close several loopholes by clarifying some of the most ambiguous wording of the 1887 Electoral Count Act. The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act makes it harder for Congress to object to the counting of votes under the electoral college, and gives the courts a greater role in adjudicating the proper slate of electors to be returned from individual states should disputes arise.But in the Lessig-Seligman analysis, inevitable congressional compromises have left some loopholes in place, opening up opportunities for an unscrupulous, now battle-hardened candidate.Three scenarios stand out. The first relates to so-called “faithless electors”: delegates chosen by parties to represent the winning candidate in each state under the arcane terms of the electoral college who decide to go against their pledge and back the loser.During Trump’s first presidential run in 2016, 10 electors switched their votes. The ruse was a creative, albeit vain attempt to stave off a Trump presidency.Lessig argued on behalf of the 2016 faithless electors before the US supreme court, in a case known as Chiafolo v Washington. The court ruled against the faithless electors, ordering that states have the right to compel them to back the winners of the popular vote.The authors’ concern is that the supreme court left it up to each state to decide whether or not to take up that power. Several states have yet to spell out in law that electors must abide by their pledge to vote for the victor. That leaves the door open to electors coming under massive, even violent pressure from Trump’s army of Make America Great Again warriors.“Imagine an elector had Maga Republicans surrounding their house carrying torches and demanding they vote for Donald Trump. Who knows what the electors would do in those circumstances,” Lessig says.The second scenario involves what Lessig and Seligman call a “rogue governor”: the governor of a state who decides to flip the results of the presidential election. This route poses the greatest long-term threat of US democracy imploding, Lessig believes.Paradoxically, post-January 6 reforms in the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act heightened the danger by increasing the powers of governors to certify slates of electors sent to Congress. Both houses of Congress can vote to overrule a rogue governor, and count the correct slate representing the winner of the popular vote, but only if the House and Senate agree.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGiven a divided Congress, a rogue governor and rogue House working together could steal the state’s electoral votes, and with it potentially the presidency.The risk of this scenario in this election cycle is minimal, Lessig concedes. Many of the highly sensitive battleground states – Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin – have Democratic governors.That leaves Georgia, which Biden won by just 11,779 votes. It has a Republican governor, Brian Kemp, but he resisted Trump’s efforts to overturn the result in 2020 and so is arguably less likely to go rogue this year.View image in fullscreenThe third wargaming scenario is the one that really keeps Lessig up at night: what if an entire state legislature decided to go rogue?Again, the idea is not fanciful. Several legislatures in the most hotly contested states have Republican majorities firmly under Trump’s sway – Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, to name just three – and conspiracy theories about rampant electoral fraud continue to circulate within them.Lessig worries that the supreme court ruling in Chiafolo, by giving state legislatures the power to tell electors how to cast their electoral votes, heightens the risk of a Maga-dominated legislature going rogue. He envisages state lawmakers claiming massive fraud in a close race and using that to justify switching its result to Trump.“That’s a kind of opened hole that is going to be very hard to close in time,” he says.The Harvard professor has emerged from this journey into the dark arts of election subversion in a bleak mood. The book finishes with a raft of proposed changes to federal and state laws that the authors argue would close the loopholes they uncovered in their travels. Will those changes happen in time to prevent a second Trump blitzkrieg?“I’m not optimistic,” Lessig says. “I’m not optimistic that Congress will be able to do anything in time, so the most we can hope for is that the infrastructure resists as it did last time.”When he was researching the book, Lessig says he had the voice of his 13-year-old daughter ringing in his head: “Just chill,” as she would say. But in the event of an extremely close result, he feels he can’t just chill.He stresses that none of this is partisan. He began life as a Republican and had the distinction in 1980, aged 19, of being the youngest delegate from Pennsylvania to Ronald Reagan’s nominating convention.“Neither of us have anything against the conservative movement in the United States, as expressed in the traditional Republican party,” he says.But he looks at how the party has become “disengaged from the basic premise of democratic politics – if you win, you win, if you lose, you go home”. And he sees that the number of Americans who still believe the 2020 election was stolen, against all evidence, remains steady. That scares him.“Many Trump supporters have the sense that anything is justified, and that’s terrifying,” he says. “Trump is denying every single core democratic norm, and yet his support continues to grow. That too is astonishing and terrifying.”
      How to Steal a Presidential Election is published in the US by Yale University Press More

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      How to Steal a Presidential Election review: Trump and the peril to come

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      The Trump veepstakes is under way. Senator JD Vance and Representative Elise Stefanik prostrate themselves. Both signal they would do what Mike Pence refused: upend democracy for the sake of their Caesar. The senator is a Yale Law School alum and former US marine. Stefanik is the fourth-ranking House Republican. He was once critical of the former president. She was skeptical. Not anymore.“Do I think there were problems in 2020? Yes, I do,” Vance recently told ABC. “If I had been vice-president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors … I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there.”Last month, Stefanik said: “We will see if this is a legal and valid election. What we saw in 2020 was unconstitutional circumventing of the constitution, not going through state legislators when it comes to changing election law.”From the supreme court down, the judiciary has repeatedly rejected that contention.As the November election looms, Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman offer How to Steal a Presidential Election, a granular and disturbing examination of the vulnerabilities and pressure points in the way the US selects its president. Short version: plenty can go wrong.Lessig is a chaired professor at Harvard Law School. He views a second Trump term as calamitous. “He is a pathological liar, with clear authoritarian instincts,” Lessig writes. “His re-election would be worse than any political event in the history of America  –  save the decision of South Carolina to launch the civil war.”Seligman is a fellow at the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford, focused on disputed presidential elections. He too views Trump uncharitably.“Former president Trump and his allies attempted a legal coup in 2020 – a brazen attempt to manipulate the legal system to reverse the results of a free and fair election,” Seligman has said. “Despite all the attention on 6 January 2021 [the attack on Congress], our legal and political systems remain dangerously unprotected against a smarter and more sophisticated attempt in 2024.”The open question is whether forewarned is forearmed. On the page, Lessig and Seligman spell out seven roads to ruin, the “inverting” of an election to force a result that thwarts voters’ expressed intentions. The authors discount the capacity of a vice-president to unilaterally overturn an election result. But they warn of the potential for havoc at state level.As they see it, the danger of pledged but not legally bound electors being coerced to vote for Trump when the electoral college convenes is “significant”. They also hypothesize a state governor “interven[ing] to certify a slate of electors contrary to the apparent popular vote”. Another path to perdition includes making state legislatures the final judges of election results. There is also the “nuclear option”, according to the authors, which is stripping the right to vote from the voters.“A state legislature cancels its election before election day and chooses the state’s electors directly,” as Lessig and Seligman put it, a potential outcome they call a “very significant” possibility under the US constitution.“State legislators are free to deny their people a meaningful role in selecting our president, directly or indirectly,” they write. “Is there any legal argument that might prevent a legislature from formally taking the vote away from its people? We are skeptical.”To say US democracy is at risk is not to indulge in hyperbole. Trump’s infamous January 2021 call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, is a vivid reminder. “What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than … we have, because we won the state.” Such words continue to haunt.In an episode that casts a similar pall, Trump and Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee (RNC) chair, urged election officials in Michigan’s Wayne county to block the release of final results.“Do not sign it … we will get you attorneys,” McDaniel told the officials, regarding certification.“We’ll take care of that,” Trump said.Now, as he has for so many former enablers, Trump has taken care of McDaniel. She will shortly be gone from the RNC.Among Trump’s supporters, discontent with democracy is no secret. During the 2016 campaign, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, thought Trump needed to show some “authoritarian power”. In 2019, Mike Johnson, then a Louisiana congressman, declared: “By the way, the United States is not a democracy. Do you know what a democracy is? Two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner. You don’t want to be in a democracy. Majority rule: not always a good thing.”Johnson is now House speaker. For good measure, he claims God told him “very clearly” to prepare to become “Moses”.“The Lord said step forward,” Johnson says.On the right, many openly muse about a second civil war.“We’ve already had one, so we know it’s within the realm of possibility,” James Pinkerton, a veteran of the White Houses of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, recently wrote in the American Conservative.“In fact, by one reckoning, the English speakers have had two other civil wars in the last four centuries, spaced out every hundred or so years. Is there some sort of deep cycle at work here? With, er, implications for our own troubled times?”The election won’t be pleasant. In late December, 31% of Republicans believed Joe Biden’s win in 2020 was legitimate. That was eight points lower than two years before. Trump’s criminal trials loom. Through that prism, Lessig and Seligman’s work serves as dire warning and public service.
      How to Steal a Presidential Election is published in the US by Yale University Press More

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      Trump is too old and incited a coup. Biden is too old and mixes up names. America, how to choose? | Marina Hyde

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      To the US, where one likely candidate for the presidency delivers hour-long rambling speeches in which he explains that he’s going to be a dictator, but all the chat is about whether the other candidate has lost his marbles. And yes, let me pre-emptively apologise, because I can already tell that we will only be on about the third paragraph of this column before I have exhausted the Guardian’s approved list of euphemisms for being a couple of world leaders’ names short of a full set.Anyway, our business today is with the president, Joe Biden, who called an impromptu press conference on Thursday night in which he hotly insisted that his memory was just fine. The occasion was the publication of a justice department report that cleared Biden of criminal charges over his handling of highly classified materials. This year-long investigation was carried out by special counsel Robert Hur, who happens to be a registered Republican, and whose report specifically mentions the president’s “significantly limited” memory. Mr Hur says that part of the reason he didn’t bring charges was that “at trial, Mr Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Oh dear. A real muffin-basket of an attack-line gifted to Donald Trump there, and confirmation of my long-held conviction that fake sympathy is far deadlier a tone than open attack.Biden had almost left the stage last night when he returned to the podium to take a question on the Israel-Gaza conflict, in which he unfortunately referred to the Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as “the Mexican president”. On the one hand, this was always going to happen just at the moment he was insisting his memory was great, just as it is a truth universally acknowledged that people correcting someone else’s grammar or spelling will normally involuntarily commit some howler of their own in the process. Call it the pedants’ curse – or indeed, the pedant’s curse.On the other hand … oh dear. According to polling, Biden’s age and cognitive glitches are his biggest vulnerability with voters. As for his likely opponent, for my armchair diagnosis, the most terrifying thing about Donald Trump is that he is completely sane (unless you count advanced narcissism, which I suppose we have to these days). But Trump is a mere three years younger than Biden, often walks with a wobble, and himself recently confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi in a rant. So is it fair that the one should face infinitely more scrutiny on the lost-plot front than the other?Alas, fairness isn’t one of the base notes of political life. I’m afraid we could be dealing with Ye Olde Vibes Theory of Politics (est 2022), which holds that the feels-based way in which a politician presents is more important than such trivialities as the facts or their record. Listen – I don’t make the rules. But during the first 2022 Conservative leadership contest in the UK, remainer Liz Truss presented as more Brexity to the party grassroots than leaver Rishi Sunak. Why? Vibes. Just … vibes.The vibes on Biden’s seniority are not great. Yes, he has led his country’s exceptional and internationally envied economic recovery from the pandemic, so the large rational part of me judges that unfair. But another part of me, perhaps the irrational, can no longer watch any Biden speech or address without picturing his aides also watching backstage, mainlining cortisol, every fibre of their brace-positioned beings willing him to get over the line without making any unforced errors – and to then exit the stage without trying to use a flag as a door.I’m sure this is complete fantasy and the only cortisol levels going through the roof are my own. Nevertheless: vibes. Can’t fight ’em. I remember my heart feeling similarly in my mouth during the aforementioned Tory leadership contest when runaway favourite Truss walked the wrong way off stage after her campaign launch. Did I think Liz Truss literally wasn’t even up to finding her way off a stage? Of course not. Rationally, I knew it was just a silly mistake, of the sort that all of us make every day. At the same time, the irrational half of me felt the satisfying click of the right key turning in the lock. I knew that Liz Truss metaphorically wasn’t even up to finding her way off a stage. There was some kind of ineffable psychological truth to it all that was far more powerful than the facts.As someone who believes the likely Republican candidate is hideously, overwhelmingly worse, I fear that Joe Biden is gearing up for a gruelling election at precisely this vibes-based disadvantage. Both he and Trump are at the stage of life when sensible ordinary people find the strength to turn to their families and ask: be honest, should I still be driving? Yet Trump’s great power is defying rationality, like some dark lord of the vibes. He is possessed of a mesmerising ability to make every single thing feel like it is playing into his hands, which is why we now all watch news reports of various criminal charges being brought against him and go, “Oh this’ll play well for him”. Will it? And if so, why should it? Who really knows, but the vibes say so.After the last time I touched on the gerontocracy in these pages, the Guardian printed three letters from older male readers under the headline, What’s age got to do with it, Marina Hyde? Ageism was mentioned, with one of the correspondents advancing details of how he spent his days, as an argument against what we might kindly have termed my own argument about when big hitters should leave the professional stage. Now, no one more than me welcomes a good bollocking on the letters page, and all the three men were very nice about the rest of my output. Thank you!However. At the risk of drawing further correspondence, I feel I still have to hold to the position that being president of the United States is not the same as “writing, teaching, and volunteering in a residential home”, and is a job for a younger man than either Biden and Trump. Not a younger woman, of course – that would be genuinely insane in the strictest clinical sense of the term. But younger than 86 at conclusion of office. So I end this column with a challenge: if any readers of this newspaper are able to get to the end of the lengthy forthcoming US election campaign and think it showcased a vibrant, healthy and sprightly democracy, then I urge them to write in on 6 November, and suggest mandatory retirement for me.
      Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist More

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      Who tanked the border bill? – podcast

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      Illegal immigration via the US-Mexico border remains one of the most pressing problems for Congress. And yet the much anticipated $118bn border security bill, which included aid packages to Ukraine and Israel, was blocked by senators after a chaotic week.
      Why did this crucial piece of legislation with bipartisan support get rejected by the very people who demanded it? This week, Joan E Greve is joined by Marianna Sotomayor, the congressional reporter for the Washington Post, to discuss why the border bill failed

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