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- in US Politics
Joy derision: Democrats turn Trump’s deadliest weapon against him
In Trump in Exile, her recent book on the former president’s life after losing power, the reporter Meridith McGraw describes how aides to Donald Trump set about destroying Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who threatened to lure Republican voters away.“One Trump adviser referred to Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals,” McGraw writes. “Rule number five: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”Alinsky was a Chicago community organizer who died in 1972 but is still influential on the left and demonized on the right. Trumpworld put his fifth rule – which also says: “It infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage” – into concerted action.DeSantis was ridiculed for his lack of height and his heightened sanctimoniousness but most effectively for his simple weirdness: a discomfiting public manner the Trump camp indelibly linked to an alleged incident on a donor’s jet in which, lacking a spoon, the governor chose to eat a cup of chocolate pudding using his fingers.DeSantis disintegrated. Trump swept to the nomination.With Joe Biden as his opponent, it seemed Trump would once again dominate with nicknames and ridicule, based on “Sleepy Joe’s” (even more) advanced age. But then Biden dropped out, and something unexpected happened. Kamala Harris and her running mate, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, turned fierce ridicule back on Trump and his VP pick, the Ohio senator JD Vance, deriding both for their simple weirdness: personal, social and of course political.If polling is any guide, the tactic has worked like a dream.To Molly Jong-Fast, a podcaster and MSNBC commentator now touring Politics as Unusual, a live show with the Republican operative turned anti-Trump organizer and ridicule merchant Rick Wilson, Trump, Vance and the rest of the GOP are simply easy targets.“They’ve just gone so far afield, this Republican party, that you can mock it all because it’s just so weird,” Jong-Fast said. “All this stuff about women’s reproductive cycles” – support for abortion bans, Vance attacking women who do not have children, endless tangles over IVF – “that stuff is quite weird from an adult man, and so it does lend itself to mockery.“I also think they got so high on their own supply that they didn’t pause and think, ‘Well, perhaps people won’t like this,’ you know?”Ridicule certainly worked for Trump in the past. In 2016, the Texas senator Ted Cruz was “Lyin’ Ted”, the Florida senator Marco Rubio was “Liddle Marco”, and, most infamously, Hillary Clinton was “Crooked Hillary”. Fair or not, the labels stuck.Eight years later, though, Trump “just can’t do it”, Jong-Fast said. “Maybe because he’s almost 80. Maybe because he just doesn’t have it any more.”Trump has road-tested nicknames for Harris but nothing has stuck. He tried “Kamabla”, arguably racist, and “Comrade Kamala”, alleging communist leanings. He tried more.Jong-Fast said: “‘Laffin’ Kamala?’ It just doesn’t do it because their whole plan of attack was that she laughs and somehow that makes her unserious, and being unserious is somehow bad for being president. But the problem with Trump is that his whole thing was that he was unserious, right? Like, you were supposed to vote for him because he was a reality television host, not because he was some genius.“I think Trump is just tired. He’s been running for president for a decade, and he’s just scared [of defeat and potentially jail in four criminal cases] and sick of it. One of the things that Trump was able to do really well was ridicule. He would pick these nicknames and you would always be a little bit horrified by them but a lot of times they actually were right … he was very good at summing people up.”Now, not so much.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCompounding Republican problems, under Harris and Walz – whose decision to call Trump and Vance weird on TV did much to put him on the ticket – Democrats have abandoned the political squeamishness, or just good manners, that long deterred them from firing back in kind.“I think Biden was in a different generation of politics and he just couldn’t meet the moment in the same way,” Jong-Fast said. “He wouldn’t let his people do that aggressive stuff. I think of Democrats now as trying to push back aggressively, which they have to, right? I mean, it’s completely asymmetrical otherwise.”As Walz led in ridiculing Trump and Vance, so party grandees followed. At the Democratic convention in Chicago last month, Barack and Michelle Obama mocked Trump from the podium. The former president even appeared to question the size of Trump’s penis. It was all a long way from “When they go low, we go high”, Michelle Obama’s 2016 appeal to purity of political action and thought.“They know it gets him mad,” Jong-Fast said. “Part of what’s happening here is this ‘audience of one’ idea, which is they know it gets Trump kind of upset when you make fun of him, so they’re doubling down. They know the way to beat him is to get him so agitated that he acts out and alienates voters.”Trump has certainly been acting out – and Jong-Fast’s colleague Wilson, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, is well-practiced in making him do so, attracting threats to sue. Asked about Wilson’s insult-comic style, ridiculing Trump onstage and on the Fast Politics podcast and his own platforms, Jong-Fast laughed and said: “It makes for good podcasting. I think it would make for scary live television.”Probably true. Nonetheless, live television will host the next huge campaign set piece, the debate between Trump and Harris on ABC on Tuesday. Ridicule seems sure to be on the menu. Saul Alinsky’s ghost will watch with interest.Recently, David Corn, Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, a progressive magazine, pondered Harris’s likely tactics.“I would offer the same advice to Harris as I did to Biden,” Corn wrote. “Deride, deride, deride. But it looks as if she got the memo.” More
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West Bank residents tell of teargas then shots before US woman’s death
US officials have insisted that a ceasefire in Gaza is close even as fighting rages unabated in the blockaded Palestinian territory and violence spirals in the occupied West Bank, where witnesses told the Observer an American-Turkish dual national was killed by Israeli forces on Friday.William Burns, who is also the US’s chief negotiator in the indirect talks between Israel and Hamas, echoed secretary of state Antony Blinken during a speech in London on Saturday in which he said that “90% of the text had been agreed but the last 10% is always the hardest”.But pressure from the US, Israel’s most important ally, and the two mediators speaking to Hamas, Qatar and Egypt, has done little to assuage the fighting in Gaza or rising tensions in the West Bank.The US has also said it is urgently seeking more information about the killing of Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, who witnesses said was shot in the head by Israel Defence Forces (IDF) troops during an anti-settlement protest in the West Bank on Friday. Several of Israel’s western allies, including the US, have recently imposed sanctions on individuals and organisations associated with Israel’s settler movement, despite blowback from prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which includes far-right supporters of Israeli extremism in the West Bank.Eygi’s family have called for an independent investigation into her killing, adding to the pressure on the Biden administration to end what critics say is US complicity in the Israeli occupation.On Saturday, IDF troops, some of whom appeared to be forensic investigators, visited the town of Beita, near Nablus, to examine the scene where Eygi was killed. For the residents, it was yet another case of the IDF investigating itself: about 1% of army inquiries result in prosecutions, according to rights groups.All of the Beita residents the Observer spoke to gave very similar accounts of the shooting. A group of demonstrators had gathered on the hillside, as they have every Friday for midday prayers in recent years, to protest against Eyvatar, an Israeli settlement on the next hill built on land belonging to Palestinian farmers.On this occasion, there were some 20 Palestinians from Beita, 10 foreign volunteers from the anti-occupation International Solidarity Movement, including Eygi, and about a dozen children from the district.“The kids were throwing stones here at the junction, and the soldiers fired tear gas at them,” Mahmud Abdullah, a 43-year-old resident said. “Everyone scattered and ran into the olive grove and then there were two shots.” One of the bullets hit something along the way and a fragment hit a protester in the stomach, wounding him slightly, the witnesses said. The other bullet hit Eygi in the head, passing through her skull. Neighbours pointed out both the spot where Eygi was shot and where the bullet came from: a house on a ridge.The owner, Ali Mohali, said a group of soldiers, perhaps half a dozen, had gone on to his roof, 200m from where Eygi was shot. He said he heard one shot, but was not sure if there had been a second from that position.The IDF statement on the incident said it was looking into the report that troops had killed a foreign national while firing at an “instigator of violent activity who hurled rocks at the forces and posed a threat to them”.View image in fullscreenMoneer Khdeir, Mohali’s 65-year-old neighbour, was derisive of the IDF account. “They said that the stones posed a threat to the soldiers. They were stones thrown by kids from all the way down there, yet they talk about it like it was a Yassin [rocket propelled grenade],” Khdeir scoffed.Across the West Bank, army units on the ground are increasingly seen by Palestinians as a protective military wing of the settlers, taking their cues from the far right elements of Netanyahu’s government. Palestinian officials and rights groups have long accused the IDF of standing by during or even joining in settler attacks.Hisham Dweikat, 57, a science professor from Beita, said Eygi was the 15th person to be killed protesting against Eyvatar over the three years since the settlement was reoccupied, but hers was the first killing the IDF has investigated. He did not put much faith in the result. “It is clear that the army is with the settlers,” he said.Fifteen kilometres south of Beita in the village of Qaryut, Amjad Bakr and his family buried his 12 year-old daughter Bana on Saturday afternoon. She was shot dead while opening the window in her bedroom at about the same time on Friday that Eygi was killed in Beita.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“As usual on Friday, settlers came to raid the town and the people of the town went to defend themselves. There was a confrontation and the army came,” said Bakr, 47.“We went back home, because we thought that if the army was here, maybe they could stop the settlers. But unfortunately the army did not stop the settlers. They stand with the settlers,” he said.“The bullet that hit my daughter came through the window and hit her in the heart,” he said. “She was innocent, and shy, and clever. She had memorised three sections of the Holy Quran.”As to what Bana had planned to do with her life, Bakr shrugged: “An Israeli bullet doesn’t care about the future of any Palestinian.”In a statement, the IDF said that soldiers were dispatched to disperse violent confrontation between dozens of Palestinians and Israelis, and had fired shots in the air. “A report was received regarding a Palestinian girl who was killed by shots in the area. The incident is under review,” it said.Since Hamas’s 7 October assault that triggered the war in Gaza, Israeli troops or settlers have killed at least 662 Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian health ministry, which does not differentiate between militant and civilian deaths. The toll is almost five times higher than the 146 killed in 2022, which was already an almost 20-year record high.At least 23 Israelis, including security forces, have been killed in Palestinian attacks during the same period, according to Israeli officials. Meanwhile, in the Gaza Strip, another 61 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes across the territory in the past 48 hours, the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said, putting the death toll at 40,939 people. Around 1,200 Israelis and other nationals were killed in Hamas’s 7 October assault that triggered the war, according to Israeli tallies.The latest round of ceasefire talks have stalled over Netanyahu’s insistence that Israeli troops will not withdraw from the Gaza-Egypt border – a dealbreaker for Hamas – despite agreeing to the measure in talks held in July.Tensions between Israel and its regional foes – Iran and the powerful Lebanese militia Hezbollah – have brought the Middle East to the brink of regional war on several occasions in the past 11 months. More
- in US Politics
What’s at stake in the US election? The climate for the next million years | Bill McKibben
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This is the first part of the standfirst This is the second part of the standfirst Headline what’s at stake?
View image in fullscreenHere is the biggest thing happening on our planet as we head into the autumn of 2024: the Earth is continuing to heat dramatically. Scientists have said that there’s a better than 90% chance that this year will top 2023 as the warmest ever recorded. And paleoclimatologists were pretty sure last year was the hottest in the last 125,000 years. The result is an almost-cliched run of disasters: open Twitter/X anytime for pictures of floods pushing cars through streets somewhere. It is starting to make life on this planet very difficult, and in some places impossible. And it’s on target to get far, far worse.Here’s the second-biggest thing happening on our planet right now: finally, finally, renewable energy, mostly from the sun and wind, seems to be reaching some sort of takeoff point. By some calculations, we’re now putting up a nuclear plant’s worth of solar panels every day. In California, there are now enough solar farms and wind turbines that day after day this spring and summer they supplied more than 100% of the state’s electric needs for long stretches; there are now enough batteries on the grid that they become the biggest source of power after dark. In China it looks as if carbon emissions may have peaked – they’re six years ahead of schedule on the effort to build out renewables.And here’s the third biggest thing in the months ahead: the American presidential election, which looks as if it is going down to the wire – and which may have the power to determine how high the temperature goes and how fast we turn to clean power.Donald Trump gave an interview last week, in which he laid out his understanding of climate change:
“You know, when I hear these poor fools talking about global warming. They don’t call it that any more, they call it climate change because you know, some parts of the planet are cooling and warming, and it didn’t work. So they finally got it right, they just call it climate change. They used to call it global warming. You know, years ago they used to call it global cooling. In the 1920s they thought the planet was going to freeze. Now they think the planet’s going to burn up. And we’re still waiting for the 12 years. You know we’re down almost to the end of the 12-year period, you understand that, where these lunatics that know nothing, they weren’t even good students at school, they didn’t even study it, they predict, they said we have 12 years to live. And people didn’t have babies because they said – it’s so crazy. But the problem isn’t the fact that the oceans in 500 years will raise a quarter of an inch, the problem is nuclear weapons. It’s nuclear warming … These poor fools talk about global warming all the time, you know the planet’s going to global warm to a point where the oceans will rise an eighth of an inch in 355 years, you know, they have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s weather.”
I’ve quoted this at length because this could again be the most important man on the planet, talking about the most important issue the planet has ever faced. And he’s gotten every word of it wrong. It’s gibberish.View image in fullscreenBut it’s gibberish in the service of something very important and very dangerous: doing all that he can to block the energy transition, in America and around the world. His friends at Project 2025 have laid out in considerable detail how you translate that gibberish into policy. It lays out in loving detail many of the steps his administration would use to bolster oil, gas and coal while sidetracking sun and wind. These include ending the effort to spur EV production in Detroit; ending support for renewables (Trump has promised to “kill wind”, whatever that means); and reversing a crucial 2009 finding from the EPA that carbon dioxide causes harm, a position that undergirds much of the federal effort to rein in climate pollution. He has also – chef’s kiss – promised to close down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, otherwise known as the people who measure how much the temperature is rising. That’s on the grounds that those measurements are “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry”.‘Drill, baby, drill’In return for this endless largesse (beginning on day one, Trump said, he would become a dictator in order to “drill, baby, drill”), he has asked the industry for only (Austin Powers moment here) “one billion dollars” in campaign contributions. Big oil is doing its best. As the Washington Post reported a couple of weeks ago, Harold Hamm, one of the country’s most prominent frackers, is working the phones to come up with as much cash as possible. Hamm is working “incredibly hard to raise as much money as he can from the energy sector”, said a Trump campaign aide. “We’ve gotten max-out checks from people we’ve never gotten a dollar from before.”Can Trump reverse the tide towards renewable energy? No, not entirely – it’s too strong, based on the ever-falling cost of sun, wind and batteries. Even in Texas, HQ of the hydrocarbon cartel where the state legislature has tried to pass laws limiting renewables, the undeniable economics of clean power continue to surge. The Lone Star state is now leading the nation in installing batteries on its grid, a good thing given the ongoing spate of climate disasters that strain and stress the state’s system.But he can slow it down considerably. America’s buildout of renewables is dependent, among other things, on overcoming the bewildering array of permitting requirements that make every transmission line a harrowing bureaucratic battle. At the moment, the Biden-Harris White House has a dedicated team at work, with senior officials assigned to senior projects, constantly bird-dogging them to make sure that they get built on schedule. That would disappear, replaced with a new set of bureaucrats deeply invested in making sure these projects didn’t happen.At least as bad would be the effect around the world. Last time, Trump withdrew America from the Paris climate accords, badly denting the momentum those talks had produced. This time he’d do the same and more – he’s promised, for instance, to end Biden’s pause on liquefied natural gas export terminals. These are designed to take huge volumes of US gas and ship it to Asia, where it will undercut the move to renewables. It is the last real growth strategy the oil industry has, and it is the biggest greenhouse gas bomb on the planet.View image in fullscreenIn essence, Trump would give every other oligarch in the world – Vladimir Putin, the king of Saudi Arabia, and on down the list – license to keep pumping away. If the biggest historical emitter of greenhouse gases is not going to play a role, why should anyone else feel any pressure? As Project 2025 quite clearly declares, Trump would “rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs” and “cease its war on fossil fuels in the developing world”. (Though Trump has claimed not to know anything about Project 2025.) The global climate talks in Brazil next year and the 2026 version in Australia – currently shaping up to be the last huge chance for global cooperation – would be turned on their heads.There are ways to calculate the meaning of all this. The UK-based NGO Carbon Brief, for instance, said earlier this year that “a victory for Donald Trump in November’s presidential election could lead to an additional 4bn tonnes of US emissions by 2030 compared with Joe Biden’s plans”. Just for perspective, that’s a lot: “This extra 4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) by 2030 would cause global climate damages worth more than $900bn, based on the latest US government valuations. For context, 4GtCO2e is equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the EU and Japan, or the combined annual total of the world’s 140 lowest-emitting countries.” It’s like finding an extra continent full of greenhouse gases.But worse than the totals is the timing. If a Trump administration was merely going to be a four-year interregnum, it would be annoying. But in fact it comes at precisely the moment when we need, desperately, acceleration. We’re on the edge of breaking the planet’s climate system – we can see it cracking in the poles (the Thwaites glacier now undermined by warm seawater), in the Atlantic (the great currents now starting to slow) and in the Amazon (where savannafication seems to be gathering speed). The earth’s hydrological system – how water moves around the earth – has already gone kaflooey, as warm air holds far more water vapor than cold.The world’s climate scientists have done their best to set out a timetable: cut emissions in half by 2030 or see the possibilities of anything like the Paris pathway, holding temperature increases to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, disappear. That cut is on the bleeding edge of the technically possible, but only if everyone is acting in good faith. And the next presidential term will end in January of 2029, which is 11 months before 2030.If we elect Donald Trump, we may feel the effects not for years, and not for a generation. We may read our mistake in the geological record a million years hence. This one really counts. More - in US Politics
The right’s obsession with childless women isn’t just about ideology: it’s essential to the capitalist machine | Nesrine Malik
A woman without biological children is running for high political office, and so naturally that quality will at some point be used against her. Kamala Harris has, in the short period since she emerged as the Democratic candidate for US president, been scrutinised over her lack of children. The conservative lawyer Will Chamberlain posted on X that Harris “shouldn’t be president” – apparently, she doesn’t have “skin in the game”. The Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, called Harris and other Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies miserable at their own lives”.It’s a particularly virulent tendency in the US, with a rightwing movement that is fixated on women’s reproduction. But who can forget (and if you have, I am happy to remind you of a low point that still sticks in my craw) Andrea Leadsom, during the 2016 Conservative party leadership election, saying that Theresa May might have nieces and nephews, but “I have children who are going to have children … who will be a part of what happens next”. “Genuinely,” she added, as if the message were not clear enough, “I feel that being a mum means you have a real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake.”It’s an argument about political capability that dresses up a visceral revulsion at the idea that a woman who does not have a child should be vested with any sort of credibility or status. In other comments, Vance said that “so many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children, that really disorients me and disturbs me”. He appears so fixated on this that it is almost comical: a man whose obsession with childless women verges on a complex.But his “disorientation and disturbance” is a political tendency that persists and endures. It constantly asks the question of women who don’t have children, in subtle and explicit ways, especially the higher they rise in the professional sphere: “What’s up with that? What’s the deal?” The public sphere becomes a space for answering that question. Women perform a sort of group plea to be left the hell alone, in their painstaking examinations of how they arrived at the decision not to have kids, or why they in fact celebrate not having kids, or deliberations on ambivalence about having kids.Behind all this lies some classic old-school inability to conceive of women outside mothering. But one reason this traditionalism persists in ostensibly modern and progressive places is that women withdrawing from mothering in capitalist societies – with their poorly resourced public amenities and parental support – forces questions about our inequitable, unacknowledged economic arrangements. A woman who does not bear children is a woman who will never stay home and provide unremunerated care. She is less likely to be held in the domestic zone and extend her caregiving to elderly relatives or the children of others. She cannot be a resource that undergirds a male partner’s career, frailties, time limitations and social demands.A mother is an option, a floating worker, the joker in the pack. Not mothering creates a hole for that “free” service, which societies increasingly arranged around nuclear families and poorly subsidised rights depend on. The lack of parental leave, childcare and elderly care would become profoundly visible – “disorienting and disturbing” – if that service were removed.“Motherhood,” writes the author Helen Charman in her new book Mother State, “is a political state. Nurture, care, the creation of human life – all immediate associations with mothering – have more to do with power, status and the distribution of resources … than we like to admit. For raising children is the foundational work of society, and, from gestation onward, it is unequally shared.”Motherhood, in other words, becomes an economic input, a public good, something that is talked about as if the women themselves were not in the room. Data on declining birthrates draws comment from Elon Musk (“extremely concerning!!”) . Not having children is reduced to entirely personal motivations – selfishness, beguilement with the false promise of freedom, lack of values and foresight, irresponsibility – rather than external conditions: of the need for affordable childcare, support networks, flexible working arrangements and the risk of financial oblivion that motherhood frequently brings, therefore creating bondage to partners. To put it mildly, these are material considerations to be taken into account upon entering a state from which there is no return. Assuming motherhood happens without such context, Charman tells me, is a “useful fantasy”.It is a binary public discourse, obscuring the often thin veil between biological and social actualisation. Women who don’t have children do not exist in a state of blissful detachment from their bodies and their relationship with maternity: a number have had pregnancies, miscarriages, abortions and periods. A number have entered liminal stages of motherhood that don’t conform to the single definition from which they are excluded. A number extend mothering to various children in their lives. Some, like Harris herself, have stepchildren (who don’t count, just as May’s nieces and nephews didn’t). A number have become mothers, just not in a way that initiates them into a blissful club. They experience regret, depression and navigate unsettlement that does not conform to the image of uncomplicated validation of your purpose in life.But the privilege of those truths cannot be bestowed on creatures whose rejection of the maternal bond has become a rejection of a wider unspoken, colossally unfair contract. Women with children are handed social acceptance for their vital investment in “the future”, in exchange for unrewarded, unsupported labour that props up and stabilises the economic and social status quo. All while still suffering sneeriness about the value of their work in comparison with the serious graft of the men who win the bread.On top of that, women have to navigate all that motherhood – or not – entails, all the deeply personal, bewildering, isolating and unacknowledged realities of both, while being subject to relentless suffocating, infantilising and violating public theories and notions that trespass on their private spaces. With that comes a sense of self-doubt and shame in making the wrong decision, or not being as content with those decisions as they are expected to be. It is a constant, prodding vivisection. That, more than anything clinical observers feel, is the truly disorienting and disturbing experience.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More
- in US Politics
Elizabeth Warren condemns Trump for ‘changing his tune’ on IVF
The US senator Elizabeth Warren has accused Donald Trump of trying to have it “both ways” with in vitro fertilization (IVF), two days after the former president vowed to force health insurance companies or the federal government to pay for the treatments if he is elected in November.Speaking on MSNBC, Warren said Trump was simply adapting his positions according to what he perceived his audience’s preference to be.“So when he thinks he’s talking to his radical base, he says: how radical do you need for me to be?” Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, said Saturday.“Donald Trump will go there and go further. But when he’s talking to the overwhelming majority of Americans, who very much oppose that radical approach to abortion and IVF, he tries to change his tune, and then is shocked when each side now is starting to call him out on that.”The Republican nominee for November’s presidential election has recast his position on IVF as a strong supporter of the pricey treatment – a characterization Democrats reject, accusing him of shifting his position only after US voters signaled broad support for reproductive rights.Similarly, Democrats accuse Trump of shifting his position on abortion rights. On Friday, he said he would vote against a ballot measure in his home state of Florida that would protect abortion rights beyond six weeks after facing backlash from conservative supporters.A day earlier, Trump upset anti-abortion activists when he told NBC News that he supported the measure. “You need more time than six weeks,” said Trump, who has repeatedly boasted about how his three appointees on the US supreme court created a conservative supermajority which eliminated federal abortion rights in 2022.“I’ve disagreed with that right from the early primaries when I heard about it.”Kamala Harris issued a statement saying her opponent “just made his position on abortion very clear”.“He will vote to uphold an abortion ban so extreme it applies before many women even know they are pregnant,” Harris said.On Saturday, Warren accused Trump of playing games on IVF.She said: “Are you kidding me? He also supports – and it’s also there in his platform – that IVF will effectively be banned all across the United States. Sorry, Donald, can’t have it both ways.”Warren also accused the former president of lacking principles – which is why, she said, women do not trust him.“There’s no principle here for him other than, ‘Does it help Donald Trump?’” Warren said. “That is his single guiding principle, and American women are just flat calling him out on that and saying we are not going to trust Donald Trump.” More
- in US Politics
Trump appears to tie high bacon prices to ‘horrible’ wind energy
Donald Trump revived questions about his mental acuity after appearing to say that wind energy was to blame for the increased price and decreased consumption of bacon.The former president’s bizarre remarks came at a town hall-style campaign gathering in Wisconsin on Thursday, when an audience member asked the Republican nominee for November’s White House election what he would do to help bring inflation down.Trump delivered a lengthy answer, apparently saying that he blamed wind power for bacon being more costly and therefore eaten less.“You take a look at bacon and some of these products – and some people don’t eat bacon any more,” Trump said. “We are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down, you know … this was caused by their horrible energy – wind. They want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow, we have a little problem.”Video clips of Trump’s comments quickly made the rounds online and brought out critics in full force. Some detractors dismissed his answer as “incoherent” and “word salad”.On Friday, Mehdi Hasan – a broadcaster and author and a Guardian US columnist – posted the video of Trump’s remarks on X and asked whether his answer would draw the same level of editorial scrutiny as comments from Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris or her running mate Tim Walz.“Will any of the army of factcheckers obsessed with Tim Walz’s dog or Kamala Harris’s McDonald’s summer job be giving any attention to Donald Trump suggesting windmills cause high bacon prices?”In another post featuring the video clips, Hasan argued that Trump should face the same kind of media pressure to end his run for president that preceded Joe Biden’s decision to halt his re-election campaign after a poor performance at a 21 June debate.Hasan wrote: “Historians will scratch their heads about 2024, in which 1 candidate was forced to quit the race for being old & having a bad debate while the other candidate said mad, rambling stuff like this & not only stayed in the race but didn’t get pressured to step aside by the media.”In what seemed like a reference to Trump’s recent comments about bacon, a Thursday night cooking-themed virtual Harris campaign fundraiser hosted by the Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell featured some recipes with bacon.Swalwell on Friday sent out an email touting the success of the cooking call, which included some well-known chefs, and a “notable moments” list conspicuously mentioned the bacon recipes. More
- in US Politics
The future of the world may depend on what a few thousand Pennsylvania voters think about their grocery bills | Timothy Garton Ash
On 5 November, people around the globe will tune in to watch the world election. It’s not a “world” election in the sense of the World Cup – a football championship in which many nations actively participate – but it’s much more than a World Series, the curiously named baseball championship that involves only teams from North America. This year has been called the biggest election year in history. By the end of it, something approaching half the world’s adult population will have had the possibility to put a cross against a name on a ballot paper. But the US presidential election is the year’s big match.Why? Because this is a genuine democratic election that will result in a single person holding exceptionally concentrated executive power in what is still the world’s most powerful country. It’s a highly watchable soap opera, with a classic plot familiar to all. And one of this year’s two contenders, Donald Trump, is a danger to his own country and the world. If the “election” of the president of China, the world’s other superpower, were a genuine democratic choice, that event would perhaps be as consequential. But it isn’t, so it isn’t. Russia had a presidential “election” earlier this year, but at issue was only the size of Vladimir Putin’s declared majority.Equally, if the US were a parliamentary democracy, and especially if it had an electoral system of proportional representation, the stakes would not be so high. The resulting government would depend on the party-political composition of parliament and in many such countries you routinely end up with coalition governments. Even in Britain’s “elective dictatorship”, as the Conservative politician Lord Hailsham (Quintin Hogg) once characterised the British political system, the prime minister has significantly less power than a US president. President Emmanuel Macron of France is now behaving as if he thinks he is the US president, with an unrestricted right to form the nation’s government, but that’s not what his country’s constitution says.As the American political scientist Corey Brettschneider reminds us in his new book, The Presidents and the People, the danger inherent in this concentration of power was already highlighted by Patrick Henry, a hero of the American war of independence, when the US constitution was debated at the Virginia ratifying convention in 1788. What if a criminal were elected president, Henry asked. What if he could abuse his position as singular head of the executive branch and commander in chief of the military to realise his criminal ambitions? Well, here we are 236 years later, and a convicted felon and notorious fan of autocrats is neck-and-neck with the newly crowned Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris.If her opponent were Nikki Haley, the runner-up in the Republican primary contest, the drama would be nothing like as intense. This would be something like a normal election. But it’s Trump, so it isn’t.I arrived in the US the day before Joe Biden finally conceded that he would not stand again. Since then we have witnessed a tidal wave of hope flow into the candidacy of Harris and her folksy running mate, Tim Walz. This culminated in the Democratic national convention in Chicago, where the usual orgy of razzmatazz was accompanied by genuine joy and unabashed flag-waving patriotism.View image in fullscreenTo their own and everyone else’s surprise, the Democrats give every impression of being united. Harris raised about $500m for her campaign in just a month. She is not a great orator, like Bill Clinton and both Obamas, but she gave an excellent acceptance speech. She introduced herself to the American public as the child of an indomitable Indian immigrant mother. She elaborated on her campaign’s brilliantly chosen theme of freedom – therefore taking what has been for years a Republican leitmotif and reconnecting liberty with liberalism. She listed some of those freedoms from that are also freedoms to: women’s freedom to decide about their own bodies, the freedom to live safe from gun violence, the freedom to love whom you choose, the freedom to breathe clean air, the freedom to vote.Importantly for a female candidate with a left-liberal background, Harris successfully conveyed the image of a strong leader who would give the US “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world” and enable it to out-do China in the competition for the 21st century and “stand strong with Ukraine and our Nato allies”. In substance, 90% of this could equally have been said by Biden, but the way she said it – not least in seeming credibly to care about the heartbreaking scale of Palestinian suffering – made it feel new and promising.As a result, enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate has soared – but only to the point where this election has become too close to call. Recalling his own electrifying slogan from the 2008 election, “Yes we can”, Barack Obama told the convention, “Yes she can!”Yes, she can; but that doesn’t mean she will. She may be marginally ahead in nationwide polling, but with the antiquated electoral system that the US uses for its presidential election, she could win the popular vote, as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, and still lose because of a few tens of thousands of swing voters in battleground states in the midwest and the sun belt.One leading pollster tells me that the top three issues for the electorate are the economy, crime and immigration, and on all three, Republicans typically have the edge. Trump himself looks all over the place, giving long rambling speeches, but he’s a formidable political counter-puncher.The social aquifers of white working-class anger are still very full, especially among men. (The gender gap is very marked in the Harris v Trump contest.) Moreover, if it’s a narrow victory for Harris, Trump will immediately declare the election “stolen”, and we will be set for a long bout of bitter litigation, as happened in 2000, but with the supreme court now seen by many as biased towards the Republican side.All of which is a long way of saying: nobody knows. And that, after all, is the hallmark of a genuine democratic election. But here’s the uniquely curious thing about this one. Millions of people all over the world, from Austria to Zimbabwe, not only follow it closely but also know many of the sometimes arcane psephological details that may decide the result in the electoral college. This is not just because Washington is the world’s political theatre, as much as Netflix is now the world’s movie theatre, but because the result will have important consequences for them. If you are Ukrainian or Palestinian, it may literally be a matter of life and death.Ultimately, what is most peculiar about this world election is the sheer incongruity of cause and potential effect. Whether women and children in Kharkiv or Rafah live or die may depend on what Mike the mechanic in Michigan and Penny the teacher in Pennsylvania think about their grocery bills.
Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist More
