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    Kamala Harris to urge voters to ‘turn the page’ on era of Trump

    With the presidential race deadlocked a week before election day, Kamala Harris will call on voters to “turn the page” on the Trump era, in remarks delivered from a park near the White House where the former president spoke before a mob of his supporters stormed the US Capitol in a last effort to overturn his 2020 loss.The Harris campaign has described the remarks as a major address that will underline the vice-president’s closing message, in a location she hopes will remind voters precisely why the electorate denied Trump a second term four years ago. She is expected to cast Trump as a divisive figure who will spend his term consumed by vengeance, leveraging the power of the presidency against his political enemies rather than in service of the American people.“Tomorrow, I will speak to Americans about the choice we face in this election—and all that is at stake for the future of this country that we love,” she wrote on X.Although the vice-president frames the stakes of the 2024 election as nothing less than the preservation of American democracy, her speech is anticipated to strike an optimistic and hopeful tone, standing in stark contrast to the dark, racist themes that animated Trump’s grievance-fueled rally at Madison Square Garden.In New York on Sunday, Trump repeated there that the gravest threat facing the US was the “enemy within”. In recent days, Harris has amplified warnings of her opponent’s lurch toward authoritarianism and open xenophobia. Her campaign is running ads highlighting John Kelly, a marine general and Trump’s former chief of staff, saying that the former president met the definition of a fascist. Harris has said she agrees.“Just imagine the Oval Office in three months,” Harris said, previewing her message at a rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Saturday. “It is either Donald Trump in there stewing over his enemies’ list, or me, working for you, checking off my to-do list.”

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    In her remarks, Harris will attempt to balance the existential and the economic – focusing on the threat Trump poses to American institutions while weaving in the Democrat’s plans to bring down costs and build up the middle class. She is expected to cast Trump as a tool of the billionaire class who would eliminate what is left of abortion access and stand in the way of bipartisan compromise when it does not suit him politically.Polls consistently show the economy and the cost of living are the issues most important to voters this election. Protecting democracy tends to be a higher priority for Democrats and voters planning to support Harris.In the final stretch of the campaign, Harris has emphasized the breadth of her coalition, especially her endorsements from a slew of former Trump administration officials and conservative Republicans such as Liz Cheney and her father, the former vice-president, Dick Cheney.Trump has sought to rewrite the history of 6 January, the culmination of his attempt to cling to power that resulted in the first occupation of the US Capitol since British forces set it on fire during the war of 1812. Trump recently declared the attack a “day of love” and said he would pardon the 6 January rioters – whom he has called “patriots” and “hostages” – if he is elected president.Hundreds of supporters have been convicted and imprisoned for their conduct at the Capitol, while federal prosecutors have accused Trump of coordinating an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. Trump maintains that he played no role in stoking the violence that unfolded, and still claims baselessly that the 2020 election was stolen from him.Harris’s campaign has sought to lay out the monumental stakes of the election while also harnessing the joy that powered the vice-president’s unexpected ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket.In an abbreviated 100-day campaign that Harris inherited from Biden after he stepped aside in July, the Democratic nominee has unified her party, raised more than a billion dollars, blanketed the airwaves and blitzed the battleground states. And yet the race remains a dead heat nationally and in the seven swing states that will determine who serves as the 47th president of the United States.After her speech, Harris will return to the campaign trail, where she will keep a frenetic pace until election day. More

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    US presidential election briefing: Obama, Sanders and AOC, rally for Harris as Trump says he is ‘opposite of a Nazi’

    With eight sleeps to go until Americans head to the polls on Tuesday 5 November, campaigning kicked up another notch on Monday as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz appealed to young, first-time voters in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen spoke in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – where the former US president described Donald Trump’s event in Madison Square Garden as featuring “the most racist, sexist, bigoted stereotypes”.In Wisconsin, the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, appearing with the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, also addressed the racist remarks, specifically those made by a comedian about Puerto Rico. AOC, who is of Puerto Rican descent, said: “They knew exactly what they were doing; let’s dispense with this idea that this is a joke,” and added that Trump’s words echoed those of Adolf Hitler.Trump, meanwhile, told voters in Atlanta, Georgia, that he was the “opposite of a Nazi”; and the billionaire Jeff Bezos wrote a column in the Washington Post, the paper he owns, explaining the decision taken by its editorial board not to endorse a candidate this election, for the first time in 30 years.Here’s what else happened on Monday:Kamala Harris election news and updates

    Campaigning for Harris in Wisconsin, Bernie Sanders said: “You have Mike Pence saying I can’t support the guy I worked with for four years” and “We cannot allow someone to be president of the United States who is a pathological liar and who is working night and day to undermine American democracy.”

    Sanders also released a video addressing voter concerns over the Biden-Harris administration’s record on Gaza, saying: “After Kamala wins, we will together do everything that we can to change US policy towards Netanyahu.”

    Before performing at a rally with Obama in Pennsylvania, Bruce Springsteen said: “I’m Bruce Springsteen and I’m here today to support Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and to oppose Donald Trump and JD Vance … I want a president who reveres the constitution, who does not threaten but wants to protect and guide our great democracy, who believes in the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power, who will fight for women’s rights … [and] create a middle-class economy that works for all our citizens.”

    Anita Hill, a former clerk to the US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, has said “racist, misogynist and sexist insults” aimed at Kamala Harris “must sting”. In a New York Times opinion piece published on Monday, the Brandeis University professor – who was famously brought before Thomas’s confirmation hearings only to have her sexual harassment allegations against him picked apart by sitting senators – wrote that she sympathises with the US vice-president.
    Donald Trump election news and updates

    Donald Trump faced mounting suspicion of hatching a plot to steal next week’s presidential election as Democrats and commentators focused on his references to a “little secret” at Sunday night’s tumultuous Madison Square Garden rally.

    Outrage is continuing to mount following the racist anti-Puerto Rican remarks at that rally in New York as Democrat politicians, celebrities and even some Republicans condemned the scenes there.

    The Philadelphia district attorney’s office has filed a lawsuit seeking to stop Elon Musk’s political action committee giving $1m daily to registered voters in swing states. The lawsuit by the district attorney, Larry Krasner, accuses the tech billionaire and his America Pac group of attempting to influence voters in the US presidential election with hopes of winning a cash prize.

    Trump’s aides have floated the idea of granting immediate security clearances to officials in a second term and doing away with FBI background checks for appointees who might otherwise fail the process, according to a person familiar with the matter.
    Elsewhere on the campaign trail

    Hundreds of early ballots cast for the US presidential election have been burned in two suspected attacks in Washington and Oregon, exacerbating tensions ahead of next Tuesday’s knife-edge contest. Police believed the fires in the two states were connected and a vehicle involved had been identified, the Associated Press reported.

    Jeff Bezos argued that the Washington Post editorial board’s decision not to endorse a candidate was taken in order to avoid the perception of bias. Bezos – who founded Amazon – said he had taken the decision because he was worried that people had lost trust in the traditional US media and were getting their news from social media, leaving them vulnerable to disinformation. The decision not to endorse has rocked the Post and seen the loss of 200,000 subscribers who have cancelled their subscriptions.

    Just before Trump took the stage on Monday afternoon, Georgia’s early vote count crossed the 3m mark. More than 40% of Georgia voters have already cast a ballot. About 5 million people in Georgia voted in the 2020 presidential race.
    Read more about the 2024 US election:

    Presidential poll tracker

    Harris and Trump policies

    What to know about early voting More

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    Outcry over Trump’s hint at ‘little secret’ with House Republicans

    Donald Trump faced mounting suspicion of hatching a plot to steal next week’s presidential election as Democrats and commentators focused on his references to a “little secret” at Sunday night’s tumultuous Madison Square Garden rally.The allusions initially attracted little notice amid the angry backlash provoked by racist jokes and incendiary rhetoric from a succession of warm-up speakers, including an offensive comment about Puerto Ricans that even Trump’s own campaign felt obliged to disavow.However, some observers and Democratic politicians believed the most telling remark of the night came from the Republican nominee himself after he introduced Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, on stage and alluded to a shared secret.“We gotta get the congressmen elected and we gotta get the senators elected,” Trump told the crowd, referring to the congressional elections at stake next week.“We can take the Senate pretty easily, and I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House. Our little secret is having a big impact. He and I have a little secret – we will tell you what it is when the race is over.”Trump embellished the tease with no further clues. But commentators and some Democrats drew their own conclusions.In its Playbook column, Politico described the aside as “potentially … sinister comments that could be a reference to the House settling a contested election”.Dan Goldman, a Democratic representative from New York, was more explicit, telling CNN that Trump’s motivation for staging the rally – in a state he has no chance of winning – was boosting Republican candidates in an effort to ensure a Republican majority in Congress at a time when it will have the role of certifying the presidential election result.“Why did Donald Trump come to New York nine days before the election? The state is going to go to Kamala Harris,” Goldman said.“The answer is that the House really runs through New York. There are seven races that could go either way in the house, and that will likely determine the majority.“On January 6, the certification of the electoral college will happen again, and as we know from 2021, whoever is in control of the House of Congress will have a lot of say on what happens on January 6. I suspect Donald Trump’s little secret plan with Mike Johnson is a backup plan for when he loses and he tries to go to the House of Representatives to throw out the electoral college.”The situation under a Republican-controlled Congress would be a reverse of the certification process that followed the 2020 election, Goldman said. Then, Trump tried to deploy the then vice-president, Mike Pence – presiding over affairs in his constitutional role – to block the procedure at a time when the Senate and the House were controlled by the Democrats.The gambit failed when Pence refused to play along, precipitating the attack on the US Capitol by a Trump-supporting mob, some of whom called for Pence to be hanged.“If it’s the reverse, the Republicans have a lot more opportunity and a lot more possibilities for overturning this election,” Goldman said. “That I believe is what Donald Trump’s secret with Mike Johnson was.”Johnson, a constitutional lawyer, played a key role in Trump’s attempt to reverse Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, supporting a Texas lawsuit that attempted to overturn the results in four swing states. He also voted with 146 other Republicans in Congress in favour of overturning the results.

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    On Monday, he responded obliquely to accusations that he and Trump were planning a repeat scenario but did not deny it – instead switching the focus to supposed “secrets” the Democrats had withheld.“Speaking of secrets, Harris knew Biden was physically and mentally impaired and kept it a secret,” he wrote, referring to unproven accusations that the White House had covered up an age-related decline in the president’s cognitive abilities.“They also knew that Russia collusion was a fake and kept that secret too. It appears that all those secrets didn’t matter to the media because they all helped Democrats. But this one might help Donald Trump and now they care?“By definition, a secret is not to be shared – and I don’t intend to share this one.” More

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    Anita Hill empathizes with ‘irritatingly familiar’ insults against Harris in op-ed

    Anita Hill, former clerk to US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, has said “racist, misogynist and sexist insults” aimed at Kamala Harris “must sting”.In a New York Times opinion piece published Monday, the Brandeis University professor who was famously brought before Thomas’s confirmation hearings only to have her sexual harassment allegations against him picked apart by sitting senators, wrote that she sympathizes with the US vice-president.“Maintaining integrity in politics can be a hard needle to thread,” Hill acknowledged, and advised Harris to “defend herself against the assaults and also vigorously prosecute the case against Mr Trump”.But she said it is “not easy to remain calm and collected in the glare of intense public scrutiny, especially when the opposition is set on denying your integrity, competence and accomplishments”.“No presidential nominees in modern history have faced such a direct challenge to the authenticity of their identity and by extension their qualifications to be the president,” she added.Hill said that interruptions by Fox News’s anchor Bret Baier during his recent interview with Harris was “irritatingly familiar”, though Baier later explained these were efforts to “redirect” the Democrat presidential candidate because otherwise her “long answers” would “eat up all the time of this interview that was live-to-tape”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDonald Trump has viciously attacked Harris repeatedly, including questioning her racial identity. Harris is the daughter of an Indian American mother and a Jamaican American father and has embraced both her Black and south Asian heritage.Thomas’s former clerk went on to advise Harris to “never let the people who despise you define you” and wrote that Harris should not allow herself to be influenced by other people’s perceptions of her.“Her refusal to be thrown on the defensive by personal attacks – Ms Harris is showing people how to protect and nurture their own self-worth,” she wrote, noting that “hubris, dissembling, anger, fear mongering and personal grievances are brandished and accepted as proof of power, confidence and competence” in politics.But her central call was for Harris to restore respect for the US legal system in a way that makes clear “we have moved beyond the historical understandings that freedom, rights and liberty are limited to the powerful and rich”.Irrespective of the result of next week’s election, Hill said, the vice-president “has already introduced an American political future that promises a recognition of human dignity as its bedrock”. More

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    Groping, greed and the lust for great power: what Wagner’s Ring Cycle tells us about Trump v Harris

    ‘America is ready for a new chapter,” Barack Obama declared to the Democratic National Convention in August, “America is ready for a better story.” Many would agree, but as commentators try to explain the bewildering reversals and bizarre dynamics of this long and unprecedented election campaign they have often instead reached for stories that are old and familiar.Shakespeare has been a popular reference point: Joe Biden has frequently been compared to King Lear in his reluctance to relinquish power, Donald Trump to everyone from Richard III to Macbeth. Yet a rather different form of drama, ostensibly less realistic and less obviously relevant to contemporary politics, may in fact offer analogies that are more illuminating still.Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung was first performed in its entirety in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth almost 150 years ago. As the cycle of dramas begins, the dwarf Alberich, the Nibelung from whom it takes its name, gropes the beautiful Rhinemaidens and lasciviously compares their charms. They carelessly reveal that their river contains gold that could make its owner master of the world, but only if he renounces love. Alberich accepts this condition and steals the gold, an act of despoliation whose consequences ripple out through the work’s four evenings. With his brother Mime as his apprentice, he makes a ring and a magic helmet that bring him supreme authority. Similarities with Donald Trump, his beauty contests and gameshows, his misogyny, his exhortations to “drill, baby, drill” and his amoral lust for power, are not hard to find.View image in fullscreenLike Trump, Alberich holds on to power for much less time than he hopes. His enemies exploit his vanity to trick him out of the ring, effecting a transition whose legitimacy he will never accept. Alberich exhorts his followers to revolt, but without success, and regaining the ring is an obsession that endures for the rest of the story. In the final drama, Twilight of the Gods (Götterdämmerung), Alberich enlists the help of Hagen, the son he has fathered in a loveless union with a mortal woman. Trump, too, relies on younger family members to prosecute his interests: Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner were crucial figures in his presidency, Eric and his wife Lara have recently risen to prominence, Donald Jr is a constant presence.Trump’s latest surrogate is his vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, reputedly selected at Donald Jr’s behest. Like Hagen, Vance is a vociferous advocate of marriage: in Twilight of the Gods, Hagen seeks matches for his half-siblings Gunther and Gutrune, supposedly for their benefit but in fact as part of an elaborate strategy to trick Siegfried into giving up the ring. Both Vance and Hagen offer plausibility, engaging in social interactions and vice-presidential debates with a superficial courtesy of which Trump and Alberich are incapable.But both are less interested in serving their promoters than in securing for themselves the ultimate prize, whether that is the ring or the 2028 Republican nomination.View image in fullscreenThe parallels between Biden and Wotan – the character who seizes the ring from Alberich – are equally striking. Like the 46th president, the king of the gods has accomplished much during his long career as a legislator, notably building the magnificent fortress of Valhalla.But he is tormented by his waning abilities, and the reluctant realisation that the task he wants to accomplish himself – the recovery of the ring from the dragon, Fafner – can only be achieved by a younger proxy: stronger, fearless and less tarnished by a lifetime of compromise. Ultimately, it is a female authority figure, older even than himself, who persuades him to abandon his ambitions. Few people know what Nancy Pelosi said to Biden in July, but the agonised confrontation between Wotan and Erda in Act III of Siegfried gives some idea of the likely emotions involved.Wotan’s daughter, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, ends The Ring with an impassioned soliloquy. It is now impossible to predict whether Kamala Harris can emulate Brünnhilde by having the last word in this year’s election drama – but millions across the world cling to the hope that she will. Through most of Twilight of the Gods, Brünnhilde is exploited and humiliated by Siegfried, the hero she thought was her husband, and Hagen, the villain who uses her for his own ends. But in the drama’s final minutes, she emerges from her torment to convey a commanding message of love, laughter and joy. Harris’s willingness to embody these same values, conspicuously absent from recent political discourse, fuelled her swift transformation from patronised vice-president to plausible candidate. Journalists covering her campaign frequently comment on her personal warmth; her equally exuberant running-mate, Tim Walz, observes that “she brings the joy”.View image in fullscreenOf course, as many have noted, joy is not a political programme, and despite Harris’s success in changing the campaign’s character, she has struggled to define what she would do differently from the unpopular administration she has served. Late in the day though it came, Harris’s incursion into the hostile territory of Fox News, where she insisted that her presidency would not be a continuation of Biden’s, was a notable effort to do just that. The interview’s equivalent in The Ring is Brünnhilde’s searing encounter with Waltraute in act I of Twilight of the Gods, when she resists her sister’s pleas to halt their father’s decline by returning the ring to the Rhine. By doing so, she condemns Wotan to irrelevance, but also articulates what is most important to her, establishing the moral authority that allows her to command the cycle’s ending as she does.Needless to say, the parallels between Wagner’s story and that of the election only stretch so far. Incest and immolation, key motifs in The Ring, have not surfaced as themes even in the most surreal of Trump’s ramblings – though with a week to go, anything remains possible. Nor are there many swords and spears, dragons or talking birds in today’s American politics. Intrepid heroes, too, are notably absent, though perhaps there have been enough would-be Siegfrieds among Biden’s 45 predecessors. But if we take The Ring less literally, it offers extraordinary insights into how power passes from one generation to another, into the consequences of denuding the Earth of its resources, and into the transformative potential of love.Wagner has often been appropriated by the political right, notoriously during the Third Reich, and there is plenty in his writing to encourage fascists and authoritarians, not least the disgustingly antisemitic tracts that disfigure his posthumous reputation. But at the time he conceived The Ring, Wagner was a leftwing revolutionary, working to overthrow the regime in Saxony that employed him as Kapellmeister. As his idealism curdled into resignation, he experimented with different endings, giving Brünnhilde words that echoed the philosophy of renunciation of his new intellectual hero, Arthur Schopenhauer. He ultimately decided not to set these words, giving the final say instead to music, and to an ecstatic melody that he told his wife Cosima represented the “glorification of Brünnhilde”.View image in fullscreenThe Ring is many things: a practical realisation of a revolutionary theory of musical theatre; a compendium of brilliant orchestral sounds; a monumental physical and psychological challenge for singers; for some, a philosophical meditation or political tract. But it is also, perhaps above all, a supreme piece of storytelling, one that only truly exists when played out in a theatre. This need for perpetual recreation makes The Ring inescapably not just a story of its own time but of ours too, one that absorbs and reflects its audience’s preoccupations. And by allowing music to take flight in his drama’s final moments, Wagner invites his listeners to fill the imaginative space he has opened up, connecting his concerns with our own.Like The Ring, this election campaign still permits many possible endings, and like Wagner, the American electorate is leaving it uncomfortably late in the process to clarify which will prevail. The ultimate fate of Alberich is left ambiguous: almost uniquely among The Ring’s major characters, he is neither shown nor described as dying, though his world-view is discredited and his scheming thwarted, and he plays no part in the cycle’s final act. Perhaps the one certainty about this election is that whether defeated or victorious, Trump will not remain similarly silent. But whatever the outcome, old stories like Wagner’s can help us understand the newest chapters in our own. More

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    ‘We have to blow it up’: can never-Trumpers retake the Republican party?

    The former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney “hopes to be able to rebuild” the Republican party after Donald Trump leaves the political stage. Mitt Romney, the retiring Utah senator and former presidential nominee, reportedly hopes so too.Among other prominent Republicans who refuse to bow the knee, the former Maryland governor Larry Hogan is running for a US Senate seat in a party led by Trump but insists he can be part of a post-Trump GOP.“I think there are a lot of people that are very frustrated with the direction of the party and some of them are giving up,” Hogan told the Guardian. “I think we’ve got to stand up and try to take the Republican party back and eventually get us back on track to a bigger tent, more [Ronald] Reagan’s party, that can win elections again.”Michael Steele, the former Republican National Committee chair turned MSNBC host, advocated more dramatic action: “We have to blow this crazy-ass party up and have it regain its senses, or something else will be born out of it. There are only two options here. Hogan will be a key player in whatever happens. Liz Cheney, [former congressmen] Adam Kinzinger and Joe Walsh – all of us who have been pushed aside and fortunately were not infected with Maga, we will have something to say about what happens on 6 November.”That’s the day after election day, when Trump will face Kamala Harris. If Trump wins, all bets will be off. If he loses, the never-Trumpers could try to reclaim their party. Few are under any illusions about the size of the task.“It’s going to take somewhere between six, eight, 10 years to defeat the Maga piece of the party resoundingly and definitively,” said Reed Galen, son of the late GOP stalwart Rich Galen. Galen is an adviser to George W Bush and John McCain, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, and now running Join the Union, a coalition of pro-democracy groups.“If you think about it, 85% of Republican primary voters this year voted for Trump. Now, is that bad for somebody who owns the party and is a former president? Yeah, electorally, it could be. But it also says that the people who actually choose nominees are Maga, right?“Do I think there will be some erosion if Trump loses? Yeah, but I don’t think it’s going to be below 50% and I don’t think that anybody who considers themselves a diehard Republican or a Maga Republican is looking to go back to the days of George W Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney, or even Nikki Haley.“If the establishment, such as it is, wants its party back, then it’s going to have to do some pretty serious work to destroy the parts of it that are anti-democratic and fundamentally dangerous to the country. I don’t know, based on their track record, whether they’re willing to do that. Frankly, I don’t think they are. I think they’re going to try and figure out how to survive long enough that maybe the thing burns itself out on its own.”Among elected or formerly elected Republicans with national profiles, Cheney has gone furthest, campaigning for Harris in battleground states. Romney has stayed quiet. He might thus seem better positioned to shape a post-Trump party but Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist turned publisher of the Bulwark, an anti-Trump conservative outlet, recently called his stance “genuinely insane”.View image in fullscreenShe said: “‘I can’t come out and endorse Kamala Harris because I have to maintain some juice to help rebuild the Republican party?’ No.”Trump and Trumpists’ grip on Romney’s party is too strong, Longwell said, to allow for such passivity.Cheney has hinted at interest in building a new rightwing party, telling an audience in Wisconsin that “it may well be [necessary] because … so much of the Republican party today has allowed itself to become a tool for this really unstable man”. But starting afresh would be tremendously difficult, not least because rightwing donors and advocacy groups have so successfully capitalized on Trump’s capture of the GOP, achieving epochal policy wins, not least the removal of the federal right to abortion.Galen said: “All of the people who built all of these front groups, whether the Heritage Foundation [originator of the controversial Project 2025 plan for a second Trump term] or the Conservative Partnership Institute, or [the dark money impresario] Leonard Leo, all these people have spent decades and billions of dollars building out this stuff. It’s not like they’re simply going to fold up their tent and say, ‘You guys in the establishment, take your party back.’ These people are true believers.”So are the younger donors, strategists and elected officials now led by JD Vance, the 40-year-old Ohio senator who once opposed Trump but became his vice-presidential pick with backing from billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.“The worst kept secret in the world is that JD Vance or [Texas senator] Ted Cruz or [Missouri senator] Josh Hawley all desperately want Trump to lose, because they want their shot,” Galen said. “Trump is [nearly] 80. They’re in their 40s, maybe early 50s, and they want him to go the hell away.“But even if he loses, they can’t separate themselves from them him completely. They they may try but the truth is we’re talking not just about the Republican party, but the American body politic. This a decade-long program, at least, to get this thing back into some sort of healthy state.“Beating Donald Trump is like surviving a car crash. It doesn’t mean you’re not in the hospital, and it doesn’t mean you’re OK. It just means that they got the jaws of life out and they yanked you out of the car.”To Galen, wondering if the Republican establishment can take back its party is ultimately a waste of time – with the emphasis on “time”. Cheney is 58, Hogan 68, Romney will be 78 next year. Mike Pence, the vice-president Trump abandoned to the mob on January 6 but who stays quiet, is 65 himself.“They’re the dinosaurs of the Republican party,” Galen said. “The comet has hit, the cloud has covered, it’s just a matter of accepting your fate.”In his late 40s, Galen professes energy for the fight to come. Nonetheless, he describes a sobering recent experience in London, when he sat with “Mehdi Hasan on Al Jazeera, and he was battering some Trump spokesperson in a debate”. That was fun, but Galen had a confrontation of his own. One of the panel participants, a younger Trump supporter, leaned over and told him: “You know, we killed your party, and we couldn’t be happier about it.”“The Republican party is a nationalist, nativist party,” Galen said. “All of this stuff that I grew up with as far as the party was concerned, the idea of moral and muscular foreign policy, fiscal responsibility, individual liberty?“All that stuff’s gone. It’s gone.” More

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    Polling has turned the US election into a game. We need to take a reality check | Peter Pomerantsev

    In Washington DC, I measure out my life in polls and heart palpitations. The polls are relentless, nail-biting, maddeningly contradictory. There are national polls, swing state polls, polls from tiny counties that predict a whole election, partisan polls designed to demoralise the other side.There are polls on whether a candidate inspires confidence, compassion, leadership. I’ve noticed how, after a bad poll, I start looking for another that tells me numbers I like. I’ve also noticed how, after a good one, I will look for a bad poll to bring me down, as if I’m trying to prick the balloon of self-confidence and remind myself of “reality”.But the polls never do quite take you to reality. Instead, they shape it. It’s not just what the polls are saying, or even how they were put together, that’s the great problem here – it’s how the obsessive focus on polls is symptomatic of how we view politics.Polls make politics feel like a race, a game, a sport of feuding personalities. Who’s up? Who’s down? What tactics have they used to get one over on each other? What does it say about their personality? Words are seen as weapons with which politicians show off their ability to subvert or scare the opposition – not as substantive statements about what they intend to do.And what sort of politician will thrive in this world where political speech is just a game? A candidate such as Donald Trump.It was the communications professors Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella who first noticed the connection between describing politics as a series of strategies and a growing cynicism among voters.This was back in the mid-1990s, when the media was constantly analysing the rivalry between US president Bill Clinton and speaker of the house Newt Gingrich, the early iteration of today’s identity-based partisanship. Jamieson and Cappella found the media was focusing less on the issues the two were debating – often around health reform – and more on how they were competing.The coverage fixated on who was winning, utilised the language of games and war, emphasised the performance and perception of politicians, put a new weight on polls.This sort of coverage activated people’s cynicism about politics – the sense that it’s just a game between self-serving schemers – and then made them more cynical about the media.Decades later, this “spiral of cynicism” is all around us: from the exploding popcorn of polls to the headlines. After Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly compared him to a fascist last week, the Wall Street Journal wrote: “Harris uses ex-Trump chief of staff’s remarks to paint him as unfit for office”.The question of whether Trump is a fascist or not was reduced to highlighting a rhetorical tactic. The idea that all politics is just a cynical game, and that the “mainstream media” is not really looking out for the cares of the voter, has become so pervasive it has helped pave the way for politicians who stand on sweeping away the whole edifice of democracy as we know it.It’s no coincidence that this turn began in the 1990s, when the cold war had finished and the big philosophical debates about policy seemed to be over. Instead, politics became about entertaining performance – the era of Blair, Clinton, Zhirinovsky, Yeltsin. And the media began overgenerating coverage that replaced ideological debate with personality and tactics.The 1990s were also when the reality show emerged as the dominant entertainment format. It initially grew out of observational documentaries seeking to understand society better by ceaselessly filming ordinary people in their homes in such a way that they would forget about the cameras and be more themselves.It quickly became the opposite: a circus where all behaviour was for the cameras. Contestants learned to say and do the most vile things just to engineer scandal and generate attention for themselves.American political TV debates started to imitate the same logic. In a busy primary debate, candidates only get a little sliver of airtime. The way to get more is to attack another candidate in the meanest and most personal way possible, and thus provoke them to attack you back. If you are attacked, then you are allowed more time to respond.So you quickly got debates where supremely clever candidates sling personal abuse at each other to get more attention. The debate stage was set for reality show host Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe design of most social media has followed the same incentives: rewarding taking the most extreme and often nasty statements to generate attention. And Trump has flourished on that as well.The 1990s is when World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) boomed, with its cabaret wrestlers pulling obviously fake fighting moves, where violence is theatre. Trump was always an aficionado of WWE, even taking part in mock fights, and a member of its hall of fame.This year the 1990s wrestling star Hulk Hogan spoke at the Republican National Convention; Trump enters his own rallies to the theme tune of the Undertaker, who, at the height of WWE, was the “evil” foil to Hogan’s all-American “goodie”. Many of Trump’s followers apply the cultural logic of WWE to his statements. Sure, the argument goes, Trump might say some very authoritarian-sounding things – but it’s just a game.So can we ever find a way back to reality? To issues rather than strategies? We can, and we can even use polling to do so. When pollsters recently gave voters a choice of policies, rather than personalities, to choose from in this election, the majority, including Trump supporters, preferred Kamala Harris’s.Partisan polarisation dissolves when we change how we cover politics. We can also develop different TV political debates, which preserve the excitement of competition but repurpose them to reward collaboration instead of abuse.Imagine a debate format where candidates had to solve a real policy problem, and show how they would work with each other and with the opposition party to achieve it. We could also scale social media platforms that algorithmically detect the commonalities in political disagreements to generate common policy solutions. Such platforms are already being used in Taiwan.Of course, there’s appeal in fleeing from reality to the grotesque circus of politics. But if we can’t face facts, others will force us. This month, at the Wilson Center in DC, Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute and Sam Cranny-Evans of the Open Source Centre presented a chilling analysis of Russian weapons manufacturing and supply chains.The slideshow featured satellite photos of munitions factories where freshly cleared tracts of land are being readied to produce more weapons. Vladimir Putin is preparing for a vast war. China’s arms production is on a wartime footing. They are not playing. More