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      Judge imposes gag order on Trump in hush-money trial – as it happened

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      The judge in Donald Trump’s hush money criminal case has imposed a gag order that forbids him to attack witnesses, prosecutors or jurors involved in the criminal trial that’s due to begin next month, the New York Times has just reported.The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, asked the judge, Juan Merchan, to impose the order.The trial in New York is scheduled to begin on 15 April.More details soon.The supreme court heard arguments in a case brought by a conservative group that sought to restrict access to abortion medication mifepristone. The justices seemed skeptical of claims that the drug should be restricted due to its health risks and the Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory decisions, after an attorney representing the drug’s manufacturer warned that a court ruling against it could have ripple effects across the entire pharmaceutical industry. Meanwhile, an attorney for the Biden administration said cutting off access would “inflict grave harm on women across the nation”. By the hearing’s end, only conservative justice Samuel Alito sounded open to the challenge, and a ruling in the case is expected this summer.Here’s what else happened today:
      Donald Trump is reportedly prohibited from attacking witnesses, prosecutors or jurors in his trial on hush money-related charges under a gag order handed down by judge Juan Merchan.
      Robert F Kennedy Jr announced attorney and philanthropist Nicole Shanahan as his running mate in an event in Oakland, California.
      Joe Biden said the federal government will “move heaven and earth” to reopen the port of Baltimore and rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which collapsed early this morning after being struck by a container ship.
      Ken Paxton, Texas’s attorney general and a force in the conservative legal world, reached a deal with prosecutors to resolve securities fraud charges.
      A federal appeals judge who ruled against mifepristone last year has ties to one of the groups trying to keep it off the market.
      Donald Trump-supporting Super Pac Make America Great Again Inc unleashed an attack on Robert F Kennedy Jr, after he announces Nicole Shanahan as his running mate.“Robert F Kennedy Jr is a far-left radical that supports reparations, backs the Green New Deal, and wants to ban fracking. It’s no surprise he would pick a Biden donor leftist as his running mate,” said spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer.Third party candidates with dedicated followings can add an element of unpredictability to tight presidential races – just ask Al Gore. But despite Team Trump’s vitriol, polls have shown Kennedy may sap support from Biden in states where he’s on the ballot.The Democratic National Committee has gone on the attack against Kennedy’s campaign, including by filing a complaint accusing him of improperly coordinating with a political action committee:Independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr has announced attorney and wealthy philanthropist Nicole Shanahan as his running mate.He made the announcement in Oakland, California, at an event attended by hundreds of supporters, as well as protesters outraged by his opposition to vaccines.Wendy Bloom, a registered nurse who has worked in pediatric cancer units for 37 years, said she disagrees with many of Kennedy’s ideas, and was particularly enraged by his opposition to vaccines.“Besides being anti-vaccines, he’s not pro-science, and anti-research,” she said. She also dismissed the choice of Shanahan as a running mate.“His choice of VP tells us everything we need to know,” Bloom said. “She has no experience. She’s just a wealthy individual can help raise money. Voters deserve someone with experience.”Kennedy supporter Marilyn Chin, 71, said she voted Democrat for most of her life, but is now supporting Kennedy.“Get out of the duopoly,” she said. “Don’t vote Republican, don’t vote Democrat, start looking for something else.”In seeking a gag order against Donald Trump, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office argued the former president had a “longstanding history of attacking witnesses, investigators, prosecutors, judges, and others involved in legal proceedings against him”, the New York Times reports.Judge Juan Merchan agreed, writing in the order that, “his statements were threatening, inflammatory, denigrating.”The Times notes that earlier today, Trump called his former fixer Michael Cohen “death”, in a post on Truth Social – just the sort of statement that Merchan’s gag order is meant to prohibit.The supreme court heard arguments in a case that sought to restrict access to abortion medication mifepristone, and seemed skeptical of claims that the drug should be restricted due to its risks and the Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory decisions. An attorney representing the drug’s manufacturer warned that a court ruling against the drug could have ripple effects across the entire pharmaceutical industry, while an attorney for the Biden administration said cutting off access would “inflict grave harm on women across the nation”. By the hearing’s end, only conservative justice Samuel Alito sounded open to the challenge, and a ruling in the case is expected this summer.Here’s what else happened today:
      Joe Biden said the federal government will “move heaven and earth” to reopen the port of Baltimore and rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which collapsed early this morning after being struck by a container ship.
      Ken Paxton, Texas’s attorney general and a force in the conservative legal world, reached a deal with prosecutors to resolve securities fraud charges.
      A federal appeals judge who ruled against mifepristone last year has ties to one of the groups trying to keep it off the market.
      The judge in Donald Trump’s hush money criminal case has imposed a gag order that forbids him to attack witnesses, prosecutors or jurors involved in the criminal trial that’s due to begin next month, the New York Times has just reported.The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, asked the judge, Juan Merchan, to impose the order.The trial in New York is scheduled to begin on 15 April.More details soon.Liz Cheney, the Donald Trump foe who ended up being forced out of Congress due to her opposition to the former president, also described NBC’s elevation of McDaniel as a danger, the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports:The Republican National Committee chair turned NBC politics analyst Ronna McDaniel “enabled criminality and depravity” in her support for Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the former congresswoman Liz Cheney said as controversy swirled over McDaniel’s media role.“Ronna facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome,” Cheney, a Republican who was vice-chair of the House January 6 committee, wrote on social media.“She spread his lies and called January 6 ‘legitimate political discourse’. That’s not ‘taking one for the team’. It’s enabling criminality and depravity.”McDaniel rose in Republican politics as a member of the powerful Romney family before reportedly dropping the name at Trump’s behest and becoming RNC chair in 2017.In February 2022, the RNC said Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the other anti-Trump Republican on the committee that investigated the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021, were engaged in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse”.Cheney lost her seat in Congress that year. Kinzinger chose to retire. McDaniel was eased out of the RNC last month, to be replaced in part by Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law.The White House said that meetings over the last two days between the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, have been “productive”.The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, yesterday canceled a high-level delegation from Israel to the White House to discuss Rafah, with the visit meant to take place today. He withdrew his agreement for talks after the US abstained from – rather than vetoed – a UN security council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the release of hostages held by Hamas.Gallant was already in Washington for longer-planned talks at a lower level. Meanwhile, in the Middle East earlier today, Israel recalled its negotiators from Doha, in Qatar, after deeming mediated talks on a Gaza truce “at a dead end” due to demands by Hamas, Reuters reported earlier, citing an Israeli official.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said to reporters board Air Force One moments ago: “We are committed to supporting Israel in its fight against Hamas … We cannot expect Israel to live under active threat.” She added that it was critical for Israel to do “whatever is possible” to protect civilians in Rafah.There, about 1.7 million Palestinians are trapped under Israeli siege and suffering bombardment and food deprivation as international talks about a ceasefire and access for more aid founder.Aid agencies and international bodies including United Nations officials have said that people stranded further north in Gaza are on the brink of famine.The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, has just been speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One, on the way to Raleigh, North Carolina.Joe Biden and the vice-president, Kamala Harris, are holding a joint event there to talk about healthcare.Reporters were firing off their questions, in a short gaggle on a short flight. Jean-Pierre is confirming the US president’s position is he will “move heaven and earth” to reopen the port and rebuild the bridge.She’s being asked about the state of US infrastructure but emphasizes that although the government pledges to work with Congress for funding to rebuild the bridge, the search and rescue effort that’s still under way in Baltimore is the main focus.Here’s what Yale University historian Timothy Snyder had to say about the danger of NBC News hiring former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, as told by the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly:The former Republican National Committee chair turned NBC politics analyst Ronna McDaniel “tried to disassemble our democracy” by supporting Donald Trump’s electoral fraud lies and should not be given such a media role, a leading historian said amid uproar over the appointment.“What NBC has done is they’ve invited into what should be a normal framework someone who doesn’t believe that framework should exist at all,” Timothy Snyder, a Yale professor and author of On Tyranny, told MSNBC, part of the network now employing McDaniel.“What NBC has done of its own volition is bring into a very important conversation about democracy, one which is going to take place for the next seven months or so, someone who … tried to disassemble our democracy. Who personally took part in an attempt to undo the American system.”NBC announced the hire on Friday. Carrie Budoff Brown, the senior vice-president for politics, said McDaniel would contribute analysis “across all NBC News platforms”.On Sunday, McDaniel told Meet the Press Joe Biden won the 2020 election “fair and square”, adding that she did “not think violence should be in our political discourse”.NBC News will drop former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel after an outcry from its top talent over her promotion of Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election, Puck reports:McDaniel’s hiring by the network attracted criticism from former lawmakers and historians, who argued they were elevating a voice who had helped Trump attack US democracy. On Sunday, McDaniel acknowledged that the 2020 election had not been stolen, though maintained it was acceptable to say there were “problems” with the vote:Joe Biden did not say when he expected the Francis Scott Key Bridge to be rebuilt or, more crucially for the nation’s economy, the port of Baltimore to be able to resume operations.The president also gave no update on the six people still missing from the collapse, but said the search and rescue operation to find them is a “top priority”.For the latest on this developing story, follow our live blog:Joe Biden says he has instructed the federal government to “move heaven and earth” to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore and reopen its economically vital port.The government will also cover the cost of the reconstruction, the president added in a speech from the White House.“I’m directing my team to move heaven and earth to reopen the port and rebuild the bridge as soon as humanly possible,” Biden said.“We’re going to work with our partners in Congress to make sure the state gets the support it needs. It’s my intention that federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge, and I expect the Congress to support my effort. It’s gonna take some time, and people of Baltimore can count on us so to stick with them at every step of the way till the port is reopened and the bridge is rebuilt.”The port is currently closed due to the span’s collapse, which occurred early this morning after the cargo ship Dali collided with it. The president noted that 15,000 workers rely on the its operations, and “we’re gonna do everything we can to protect those jobs and help those workers”.As we wait for Joe Biden to begin his speech on the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, here are some scenes from earlier today in Baltimore: More

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      Netanyahu has been spoiling for a fight with the US. He may not survive this one | Alon Pinkas

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      How do you gaslight an entire nation about a war and then try to do the same to a superpower that is your ally? And how do you turn a just war into global isolation and widespread condemnation? Just ask Benjamin Netanyahu. He has the patent.Netanyahu has been deliberately and intently seeking a confrontation with the US ever since late October. The UN security council resolution 2728, demanding an “immediate ceasefire”, is just the latest pretext for this premeditated showdown. This may sound counterintuitive and imprudent to you, given that the two countries are close allies, given Israel’s heavy reliance on US military aid and its diplomatic umbrella, and particularly given President Biden’s sweeping and unwavering support for Israel since the 7 October catastrophe.But Netanyahu has two reasons to instigate such a confrontation. The first is pure gaslighting on a grand scale. He concocted a narrative that supposedly explains the war’s context and consequently absolves him from the responsibility and accountability he persistently refuses to assume. It also distracts from his stated policy of imploring Qatar to funnel more funds to Gaza to strengthen Hamas, all in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority and render any political negotiations impossible.According to this narrative, 7 October was simply a debacle that could have been averted had the Israel Defense Forces and Shabak intelligence not failed. The bigger problem now, according to Netanyahu, is the possibility of a Palestinian state that the world, especially the US, has been trying to impose on Israel since the attack. According to this narrative, only a heroic Netanyahu can stand up to the US, defy an American president and prevent this travesty.Now of course it is impossible that a new Palestinian state could be “imposed” from outside. But this framing allows Netanyahu to placate his rightwing extremist coalition and partners, who have long opposed any form of Palestinian statehood. And it lets him make conflict with the US a focal point, rather than his own failures. It’s not about the Louis XIV wannabe prime minister. It never is.The second reason is more current and practical: the confrontation is about setting up Biden as the scapegoat for Netanyahu’s failure to achieve “total victory” or “the eradication of Hamas”, two fortune cookie-type slogans that he spews regularly.The security council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire, adopted by 14 members with the US abstaining, puts Israel on a double collision course: with the UN security council but more critically, with the US. Netanyahu’s sanctimonious tantrums about how “surprised” he was and how the US abstention is a departure from policy that would prevent victory is mendacious. He was warned repeatedly by the Biden administration that this would be an inevitable outcome if he persisted with his endless recalcitrance, defiance and effective refusal to engage with the US, ostensibly Israel’s staunch ally and protector.When you ignore US requests, dismiss the president’s well-intentioned advice, inundate the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, with duplicitous spin, casually deride US plans and ideas for a reconfigured region, show crude intransigence by refusing to present a credible and coherent vision for postwar Gaza, hold a video call with Republican senators (a group that Netanyahu feels he is a life member of) and actively pursue an open confrontation with the administration, there’s a price to pay. Most recently, Blinken’s state department has warned Israel that it is increasingly isolated and is in danger of inflicting “generational damage” to its reputation and image.Had Israel seriously engaged with the US on any of the above issues, without necessarily agreeing to everything, it would have prevented this rift. The US has one long-running fundamental contention with Israel: the lack of a coherent political objective for the war, with which military means must be aligned. The US inquired time after time about Israel’s goals and got nothing but “topple Hamas”, which is a worthy goal, but does not address the “day after”.In respect of the security council, Israel will conveniently explain to itself that the resolution is not a big deal, that there is no imminent threat of sanctions and anyway, the UN was always and remains anti-Israeli. Perhaps. But that’s not the point. The resolution puts Israel in a very unpleasant and precarious place to be for a country, let alone a democracy and a US ally. The more critical and consequential arena is US-Israel relations. Their deterioration under Netanyahu has been well documented over the past year, but the security council resolution represents a new low.Since around January time, the US has negatively revised its assessment of Israel under Netanyahu. He does not behave as an ally, he has accrued a debilitating credibility deficit over the years on a multitude of issues, and he has intentionally failed to come up with a plan for postwar Gaza – to the point where he is now seriously suspected in Washington of prolonging the war for his own political survival antics. The current showdown over the security council resolution widens the rift to the point that it is impossible to see how the trajectory will change as long as Netanyahu is in power.At the moment, the US has three points of disagreement with Israel regarding the details of the prosecution of the war: the notion that Israel is impeding humanitarian aid; the number of civilian non-combatant deaths; and a possible military invasion of Rafah, on the southern tip of Gaza. These differences could have been resolved had Netanyahu and Biden had a working, honest and good-faith relationship. They do not. In fact, Netanyahu has a track record of confrontations and frequent spats with US administrations, from George HW Bush through to Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and now Biden. His – unsuccessful, it must be added – meddling in US politics is also a familiar trait of his since the 1990s.The current state of relations is close to an inflection point, and could go in one of two directions: either Netanyahu is ousted or leaves or loses an election, or the US will be convinced that the bilateral ecosystem has faltered and warrants a major reassessment of relations. Under Netanyahu, Israel has reached the point at which its very value as an ally is being questioned. It took the US some time, but it finally seems to realise a simple fact: Israel may be an ally, but Netanyahu most certainly is not.
      Alon Pinkas served as Israel’s consul general in New York from 2000 to 2004. He is now a columnist for Haaretz
      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Pretty bad’: NBC condemned by top US historian over role for Ronna McDaniel

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      The Republican National Committee chair turned NBC politics analyst Ronna McDaniel “tried to disassemble our democracy” by supporting Donald Trump’s electoral fraud lies and should not be given such a media role, a leading historian said amid uproar over the appointment.“What NBC has done is they’ve invited into what should be a normal framework someone who doesn’t believe that framework should exist at all,” Timothy Snyder, a Yale professor and author of On Tyranny, told MSNBC, part of the network now employing McDaniel.On Friday, NBC announced it had hired the former RNC chair and the network’s senior vice-president for politics, Carrie Budoff Brown, said that McDaniel would contribute her analysis “across all NBC News platforms”.“What NBC has done of its own volition is bring into a very important conversation about democracy, one which is going to take place for the next seven months or so, someone who … tried to disassemble our democracy. Who personally took part in an attempt to undo the American system,” Synder said.“And so … what NBC is doing is saying, ‘Well, [it] could be that in ‘24 our entire system will break down. Could be we’ll have an authoritarian leader. Oh, but look, we’ve made this adjustment in advance because we’ve brought into the middle of NBC somebody who has already taken part in an attempt to take our system down.’“So, yeah, I think this is pretty bad.”On Sunday, days after joining the network, McDaniel said on the Meet the Press that Biden won “fair and square” and said she did “not think violence should be in our political discourse”.But McDaniel also claimed it was “fair to say there were problems [elections in battleground states] in 2020” and said she had supported Trump’s election fraud lies as a way of “taking one for the whole team” .That stoked an on-air protest from Chuck Todd, a former Meet the Press host. On Monday, MSNBC hosts including Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Nicole Wallace, to whom Snyder spoke, also condemned the McDaniel hire. The day also saw a protest from a union group representing NBC News staff.McDaniel and NBC did not comment.Snyder, who has written for the Guardian, said: “If you are going to be on American media, you should be somebody who believes there is something called truth, there are things called facts and you can pursue them. You shouldn’t be someone who has over and over and over again pushed the idea of fake news, educated Americans away from the facts, away from belief in the facts.”Describing such work by McDaniel, the anti-Trump conservative ex-congresswoman Liz Cheney said that as RNC chair, McDaniel “facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome. She spread his lies and called January 6 ‘legitimate political discourse’. That’s not ‘taking one for the team’. It’s enabling criminality and depravity.”McDaniel became RNC chair in January 2017. In that role, she defended Trump through his scandal-ridden presidency; his refusal to accept his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, culminating in his incitement of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress; and through his surge to another presidential nomination despite facing 88 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil penalties and regularly admitting to authoritarian ambitions.Despite such support, Trump last month pushed McDaniel out of the RNC, to be replaced by his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.Snyder said: “If we’re going to be putting people on the news who have participated in an attempt to overthrow the system, then we have to ask at the very beginning, ‘Why did you do that? Why is that legitimate?’ And we have to ask ourselves, ‘Why is it that we are taking this step to bring people into the middle of our discussion?’“So my two red lines are, you should be somebody who’s at least trying for the facts, and you shouldn’t be somebody who has taken part in an attempt to undo the system, which is what we’re talking about here. We shouldn’t mince words about it.” More

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      US election officials face ‘new era’ of violent threats, taskforce chief warns

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      Election officials across the US are facing an onslaught of unfounded hostility for “dutifully and reliably doing their jobs”, the head of a federal taskforce set up to protect the election community from violent threats said on Monday.John Keller, who leads the day-to-day efforts of the election threats taskforce, based in Washington, told reporters that the wave of violent threats – unleashed by Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen – amounted to an attack “on the very foundation of our democracy – our elections”.He said that the US had entered a “new era” in which the election community “is scapegoated, targeted and attacked”.On Monday, the taskforce, founded in June 2021, secured its 10th sentence of a perpetrator of violent threats against an election official.Speaking in Phoenix, Arizona, after the sentencing, Keller said robust public scrutiny of government authority and officials was “desirable and necessary”. But he added: “Death threats are not debate; death threats are not first-amendment protected speech. Death threats are condemnable criminal acts that will be met with the full force of the Department of Justice.”Monday’s sentencing at a federal district court in Phoenix saw Joshua Russell of Bucyrus, Ohio, given 30 months in prison. He had pleaded guilty to one count of making a threatening communication across state lines.According to court documents, between August and November 2022 Russell recorded three threatening voicemails on the phone of Katie Hobbs, the current Democratic governor of Arizona. At the time she was Arizona’s secretary of state, its top election administrator.In his voicemails, Russell accused Hobbs of committing election fraud in Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election which Joe Biden won in Arizona by about 10,000 votes. He called her a communist, a traitor, and “an enemy of the United States”.“You better put your [expletive] affairs in order, ‘cos your days are extremely numbered. America’s coming for you, and you will pay with your life.”In a November voicemail, Russell said: “A war is coming for you. The entire nation is coming for you. And we will stop, at no end, until you are in the ground.”Russell was the second sentenced this month for threatening Hobbs when she was Arizona’s secretary of state. Earlier this month, James Clark from Massachusetts was sentenced to three and half years in prison for threatening to detonate explosives he claimed to have planted in her personal space.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKeller, who is the principal deputy chief of the public integrity section of the DoJ’s criminal division, said the taskforce was working with state and local law enforcement to stop the onslaught as Arizona and the country approaches November’s presidential election. He said: “This behavior is insidious, with potentially grave consequences for individual victims and for the institution of election administration as a whole.”Arizona, which has been a critical battleground state in recent presidential contests, has become the ground zero of threats against election officials in the US. Seven of the 16 cases that have been prosecuted nationally under the election threats taskforce were targeted on the state, especially on Maricopa county, the largest constituency, which covers Phoenix.In the wake of the attacks, there has been a severe shortage of election officials who have quit after they and, in some cases, their families have been violently threatened. Twelve out of the 15 counties in the state have lost at least one of their two top election administrators since Trump launched his attack on democracy in 2020.Gary Restaino, US attorney for Arizona, said the common denominator of the cases handled by the taskforce was “election denialists announcing an intent to violently punish those who they believe have wronged them”.He said: “There’s no constitutional right to vigilantism. Let these cases be a lesson not to take the rule of law into one’s own hands.” More

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      Trump says he would testify in hush money trial; court lowers bond in fraud case to $175m for now – as it happened

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      Asked if he would testify in his defense at the hush-money trial, Donald Trump said yes.“I would have no problem testifying. I didn’t do anything wrong,” Trump said.He was then asked if he was worried that a conviction would hurt his presidential campaign.It could “make me more popular because the people know it’s a scam”, Trump replied. “It’s a Biden trial.”The former president has inhabited the witness stand before, including in author E Jean Carroll’s second defamation trial earlier this year:Donald Trump will go to trial on 15 April in New York City on charges related to making hush-money payments, after a judge rejected his attorney’s arguments that prosecutors had committed misconduct and the trial should be delayed, or canceled outright. The decision raises the possibility that the former president could be convicted or exonerated of one of the four sets of criminal charges he faces before the November presidential election – which could upend the campaign. However, things could still change. Trump says he’ll appeal the ruling, and scored a win at an appeals court in a separate matter earlier today, when his attorneys managed to get the bond he must produce in his civil fraud judgment reduced, and his payment date delayed.Here’s what else happened today:
      The supreme court will on Tuesday hear a case brought by a conservative group against abortion pill mifepristone, which Joe Biden’s allies warn is a preview of a second Trump administration’s aspirations.
      Before the appeals court ruling, Trump came close to blowing his deadline to produce at $454m bond, which he said he was struggling to find backers for.
      The UN security council passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza after the United States abstained.
      Trump encouraged Israel to wrap up its invasion of Gaza, warning that it was risking its international reputation.
      Biden mocked Trump after he gave himself an award for golfing at his own club.
      In an interview with a conservative publication, Donald Trump encouraged Israel “to finish up your war” in Gaza and warned “you’re losing a lot of the world”.Trump’s comments came the same day as the United States allowed the UN security council to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, reversing months of obstruction. Joe Biden has seen some Democratic supporters defect recently over his support for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and earlier this month, the Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer accused him of inhibiting peace and called for Israel to hold new elections.In an interview with Israel Hayom, which is owned by the family of Sheldon Adelson, a conservative mogul and supporter of both Trump and Netanyahu who died in 2021, Trump expressed support for Israel’s response to the 7 October attack.“I would act very much the same way as you did. You would have to be crazy not to,” he said.But he also criticized Israel for harming its reputation, as images of destroyed infrastructure and dead civilians poured out of Gaza:
      You have to finish up your war. To finish it up. You gotta get it done. And, I am sure you will do that. And we gotta get to peace, we can’t have this going on. And I will say, Israel has to be very careful, because you’re losing a lot of the world, you’re losing a lot of support, you have to finish up, you have to get the job done.
      With the supreme court set to weigh a conservative challenge against abortion pill mifepristone, the Guardian’s Carter Sherman reports on a study showing more and amore Americans are relying on the medication to end their pregnancies:In the six months after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, roughly 26,000 more Americans used pills to induce their own at-home abortions than would have done so if Roe had not fallen, according to a new study.Published on Monday in Jama, one of the leading peer-reviewed medical journals in the United States, the study comes ahead of a key Tuesday hearing at the US supreme court at which the justices will hear oral arguments in a case that could determine the future of a major abortion pill, mifepristone.Pills are used in 63% of all abortions within the US healthcare system, and the study suggests they are being used by even more people than previously known in order to evade abortion restrictions that now blanket much of the US.Analyzing data from abortion pill suppliers who operate outside of the US healthcare system, the study provides a rare window into the growing practice known as “self-managed abortion”. Although definitions of self-managed abortion can vary, the practice generally refers to abortions that take place outside the formal healthcare system, without the aid of a US-based clinician.Ahead of the supreme court’s hearing on Tuesday on the availability of a widely used abortion pill, Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren warned that a future Trump administration would seek to ban abortion nationwide.Warren said the case brought by a conservative group, which centers on the drug mifepristone, highlighted the stakes of the 2024 election.“Republicans have gone to the courts acting as if they know better than the scientific experts at the FDA about the safety of medication abortion,” she said today on a press call organized by the Biden campaign. “What does that tell us? Donald Trump and Maga Republicans are prepared to use every tool in their toolbox to control women’s bodies: banning abortion nationwide, ending access to IVF and even attacking contraception access.”Julie Chavez Rodriguez, manager of Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, said they planned to make abortion a central theme, noting that Democrats had performed strongly in elections where the issue was on the ballot. The campaign, she said, would keep reminding voters that it was Trump who laid the groundwork to overturn Roe v Wade with his appointment of three conservative supreme court justices.Mini Timmaraju, the CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said Trump’s support of a national abortion ban at 15 or 16 weeks of pregnancy would backfire.“A 15-week abortion ban is still an abortion ban,” she said on the call. “And as we showed in Virginia, Americans hate abortion bans, they will not fall for it, they will not stand for it.”Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has released a statement attacking Donald Trump after a weekend the former president spend awarding himself while struggling to secure a bond for his civil fraud conviction.“Donald Trump is weak and desperate – both as a man and a candidate for president,” said James Singer, a spokesman for the Biden-Harris campaign.“His campaign can’t raise money, he is uninterested in campaigning outside his country club, and every time he opens his mouth, he pushes moderate and suburban voters away with his dangerous agenda. America deserves better than a feeble, confused, and tired Donald Trump.”National security spokesman John Kirby has just wrapped up his part of the press briefing at the White House and left the room, leaving press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre handing questions about congressional matters now involving the stuck legislation over aid to Ukraine.Kirby said of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s canceling of the high level delegation visit to the White House tomorrow for talks on Gaza:“It’s disappointing, we would have preferred to have had that meeting.”Kirby said that Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant is currently at the White House for a long-scheduled visit, meeting with national security adviser Jake Sullivan.“Humanitarian assistance will be on the agenda,” Kirby emphasized.He said that the US abstained in the UN security council resolution vote this morning calling for an immediate ceasefire and the release of the remaining hostages by Hamas, which controls Gaza.“We chose to abstain [rather than veto] because it did not include language condemning Hamas,” Kirby said. And it did link a ceasefire to a hostage deal. The US put forward a ceasefire resolution last Friday but it was more conditional than the one it abstained on today. The US resolution last week was vetoed by Russia and China.Kirby added: “Hamas could solve all these problems right now by putting down their arms and releasing the hostages.”Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant is in Washington, meeting with national security adviser Jake Sullivan today and will meet with US defense secretary Lloyd Austin tomorrow.My colleague Julian Borger wrote earlier that after the vote at the UN [this morning], the office of Benjamin Netanyahu cancelled a planned visit to Washington by two of his ministers, intended to discuss a planned Israeli offensive on the southernmost Gazan city of Rafah, which the US opposes. The White House said it was “very disappointed” by the decision. However, a previously arranged visit by the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, went ahead.US national security spokesperson John Kirby said just now at the White House press briefing underway that Israel was still “a friend and ally” and that the US was still supplying Israel with aid and weapons.But the US is adamant that Israel should not only agree to a ceasefire tied to a hostage deal but should not invade Rafah, the city closest to Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, which is packed with more than 1.5 million desperate Palestinians who fled the military operation that has decimated a lot of Gaza further north.“We have the same concerns about a ground offensive in Rafah that we had yesterday and the day before,” Kirby said.The Israeli military bombed parts of Rafah overnight.National security spokesperson John Kirby just spoke to the press about the US abstaining on the vote at the UN security council in New York earlier today calling for an immediate ceasefire in Israel’s war in Gaza.“Our vote does not represent, repeat, does not represent, a shift in our policy,” he said.Kirby added: “We wanted to get to a place where we could support this resolution.”The US did not support it because it did not contain language condemning Hamas, he said.He was just asked about Israel then cancelling the high-level diplomatic delegation visit to the White House tomorrow.“We are kind of perplexed by this,” he said. He said it was a non-binding resolution at the UN so does not hamper “Israel’s ability to go after Hamas”.He emphasized that the US has not changed its policy, no matter what the Israeli government is implying.The White House press briefing is running later than originally scheduled today.Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is due to be joined in the west wing briefing room by national security spokesperson John Kirby.Jean-Pierre usually deals with most of the domestic issues while Kirby deals with foreign policy issues.The situation in Russia after the probable-Islamic State attack last Friday night at a concert hall and the latest on Israel-Gaza will be prominent on the agenda.The US abstained on a UN security council vote on an immediate ceasefire and hostage release earlier today, following which Israel cancelled its diplomatic government visit to Washington to discuss Rafah.The briefing is getting underway now.Donald Trump will go to trial on 15 April in New York City on charges related to making hush-money payments, after a judge rejected his attorney’s arguments that prosecutors had committed misconduct and the trial should be delayed, or canceled outright. The decision raises the possibility that the former president could be convicted or exonerated of one the four sets of criminal charges he faces before the November presidential election – which could upend the campaign. However, things could still change. Trump says he’ll appeal the ruling, and scored a win at an appeals court in a separate matter earlier today, when his attorneys managed to get the bond he must produce in his civil fraud judgment reduced, and his payment date delayed.Here’s what else is going on:
      Before the appeals court ruling, Trump came close to blowing his deadline to produce at $454m bond, which he said he was struggling to find backers for.
      The UN security council passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza after the United States abstained.
      Trump gave himself an award at his own golf club, drawing mockery from Joe Biden.
      Asked if he would testify in his defense at the hush-money trial, Donald Trump said yes.“I would have no problem testifying. I didn’t do anything wrong,” Trump said.He was then asked if he was worried that a conviction would hurt his presidential campaign.It could “make me more popular because the people know it’s a scam”, Trump replied. “It’s a Biden trial.”The former president has inhabited the witness stand before, including in author E Jean Carroll’s second defamation trial earlier this year: More

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      Linda L Bean, LL Bean heiress who backed Trump, dies aged 82

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      Linda L Bean – a granddaughter of the famed outdoor retailer LL Bean who became an entrepreneur, philanthropist and Republican activist – has died. She was 82.Bean died on Saturday, her business manager, Veronika Carlson, confirmed in a written statement on Sunday. No cause was given.Her support for Donald Trump when he won the presidency in 2016 prompted some on the political left to call for a boycott of her family’s clothing company. But a statement from Carlson said Bean also “was known for her amazing work ethic, entrepreneurial spirit as well as her pride and dedication to her home state of Maine and LL Bean, the company her grandfather founded”.“Our hearts go out to her family and friends,” Carlson’s statement said.Bean’s grandfather, Leon Leonwood Bean, founded the company in 1912. It grew through its popular catalogue, offering durable products such as rubber-bottomed boots that came with a lifetime guarantee.Linda Bean served on the company’s board for nearly half a century. She also bought lobster dealerships, founded the Perfect Maine Lobster brand in 2007, and owned general stores, inns and vacation rentals on Maine’s central coast, where she lived in Port Clyde.She helped lead the effort to have Maine’s lobster industry certified as sustainable in 2013 by a London-based non-profit, the Marine Stewardship Council – a certification that was pulled in 2022 over concern about harm to whales.Her philanthropic efforts included supporting LifeFlight of Maine medical helicopters and the Maine Botanical Gardens at Boothbay, as well as promoting the life of the early 20th-century illustrator and artist NC Wyeth – the father of the famous painter Andrew Wyeth – and preserving the family’s properties.“Linda Bean loved the state of Maine. Its coastal communities, islands, and art, particularly by the Wyeths, had a special place in her heart,” the Republican US senator Susan Collins said in a written statement on Sunday. “Linda also was an astute businesswoman who promoted Maine lobster through her restaurants. Many a time while waiting for my plane in Portland, I had a cup of her famous lobster stew at her airport restaurant.”Bean was also a big donor to Republican causes and twice campaigned unsuccessfully for Congress, in 1988 and 1992. She ran as an opponent of abortion rights, gay rights legislation and gun control, and she believed in cutting taxes to spur the economy.She also supported efforts to repeal a Maine law outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation, and she urged the Department of Defense to overturn Obama-era policies allowing transgender individuals to serve in the military.In 2017, the Federal Election Commission said Bean made excessive contributions to a political action committee she bankrolled to support Trump’s presidential campaign. That prompted some liberal groups to call for a boycott of LL Bean – which she described as harassment by “a small kernel of hardcore bullies out on the left coast, west coast, in California, trying to control what we do, what we buy, what we sell in Maine”.Trump came to her defense – the Republican urged his supporters to buy the company’s products.“While her politics did not align with mine, Linda and I found common ground in our mutual love of our home state, of the coast of Maine and our working waterfronts, of Maine inspired art and of the perfect Maine lobster roll,” the state’s governor, Janet Mills, a Democrat, said in a written statement. “I enjoyed her company and admired her business acumen.”No information about survivors was immediately available. More

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      ‘Lincoln had something to say’: historians ponder lessons for the age of Trump

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      Asked what Abraham Lincoln might have to say to Americans in 2024, an election year in a country as divided as at any time since the civil war Lincoln won, the NPR host Steve Inskeep said the 16th president would advise that a big part of “building a political majority is making alliances with people you believe to be wrong”.“One of the things that drew me to the topic of Lincoln was the present and the dilemmas and difficulties of democracy right now,” Inskeep said on Saturday, appearing in connection with his book Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America, at the 27th Annual Abraham Lincoln Institute Symposium, at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC.“I did feel like Lincoln had something to say,” Inskeep said, “and I’ve tried to express it. And it has to do with dealing with differences in a fractured society. And it has to do with building a political majority, which is a skill that I think some of us perhaps have forgotten, or we’re being told to forget.“And part of building a political majority is making alliances with people you believe to be wrong. And hopefully you don’t believe they’re wrong on everything. But maybe out of 10 things, you think they’re very wrong about three things and can find some way to agree on some of the other seven and move forward and at least agree fundamentally on the idea that we have a constitution, we have a republic, we have a democracy. We have a system to mediate our differences. We have institutions and we should uphold them.”The 46th president, Joe Biden, has made Donald Trump’s threat to that constitution, republic and democracy a central plank of his re-election campaign.Trump, the 45th president, refused to admit defeat in 2020, inciting the deadly January 6 attack on Congress in an attempt to stop certification of that election. Despite that – and while facing 88 criminal charges, multimillion-dollar civil penalties and attempts to keep him off the ballot by constitutional means – he stormed to a third successive presidential nomination by the party that still calls itself the party of Lincoln.Three weeks short of the 159th anniversary of Lincoln’s death – he was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s on 14 April 1865, Good Friday, and died the following morning – Inskeep and other historians gathered in the very same theatre. James Swanson, author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, now the basis for an Apple TV drama, was among those in the stalls.The event took place at the end of another tumultuous week in US politics, in which Trump railed against Democrats while struggling to pay a $454m bond in his New York civil fraud case; sought to have federal criminal charges over his election subversion dismissed; was accused by the White House of employing “unhinged antisemitic rhetoric”; called for the jailing of Liz Cheney, a conservative opponent; and stoked huge debate over what he meant when he predicted a “bloodbath” if Biden beat him again.View image in fullscreenAppealing to the better angels of Americans on both sides of the partisan divide, Inskeep said Lincoln’s example, including his magnanimous approach to defeated Confederates after the civil war, might help voters decide not “to simply denounce, isolate or ostracise those we believe to be wrong.“It is an approach to political difference that I think is a little bit out of fashion now, but it is fundamentally what Lincoln did. It is fundamentally the reason we decided the civil war” and thereby ended slavery.Lincoln “understood that the north had the population, they had the economy, they had the advantages that become real in wartime, that eventually come to tell on the battlefield. And Lincoln had to keep enough people unified to have that political majority, and in order to have that majority win.“It’s a central message and matter for our time.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlso appearing were Callie Hawkins, chief executive of President Lincoln’s Cottage, a national monument in Washington; Gordon Leidner, author of Abraham Lincoln and the Bible; George Rable, author of Conflict of Command: George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of War; and Michael Zuckert, author of A Nation So Conceived: Abraham Lincoln and the Paradox of Democratic Sovereignty.As moderator, Lucas Morel, professor of politics at Washington & Lee University in Virginia, returned to a persistent theme of audience questions: how can Americans use Lincoln’s example today.Inskeep said: “Lincoln … understood that people would act in their self-interest but tried to harness that into something larger. And part of recognising that people have self-interest lay in trying to work out who that person was, which I feel is another thing we’re discouraged from doing.“We’re encouraged to speak our truth, which is great, because there’s lots of truths, lots of experiences that were suppressed and ignored and less so now. But the next step is to put yourself in the shoes of the other person, to understand where they’re coming from. And an additional step for a politician, of course, is to appeal to them.”Rable, meanwhile, said voters could learn from viewing Lincoln not as some perfect figure from the past, but as a politician and leader with faults like any other.“Here you have a full-bodied human being” Rable said. “He has strengths, he has weaknesses. And I think [we should] look at leaders that way, rather than saying, ‘OK, this leader does this, I’m just going to dismiss him,’ or, ‘I’m going to believe everything that this leader says’.” More

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      One Way Back review: Christine Blasey Ford faces down Brett Kavanaugh again

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      In September 2018, Christine Blasey Ford testified that Brett Kavanaugh, then an intermediate appellate judge nominated by Donald Trump to the US supreme court, sexually assaulted her 36 years earlier when they were high school students, fixtures of the suburban-DC country club set.“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” Ford, then 51, told the Washington Post. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”Kavanaugh vehemently denied it. He also professed his penchants for suds.“We drank beer … I liked beer,” the judge memorably told Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, at his Senate hearing. Pressed by Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota over whether he had ever blacked out because of drinking beer, Kavanaugh ratcheted up the heat. On SNL, Matt Damon memorialized the rabid performance. PJ, Squi, Handsy Hank and Gang-Bang Greg: all are now part of TV lore. The Senate confirmed Kavanaugh anyway, 50-48, a party-line vote.Ford now returns to retell her story, in One Way Back: A Memoir. In essence, she dares Kavanaugh to sue her for defamation. Both know truth constitutes an absolute defense.Kavanaugh is not a “consummately honest person”, Ford writes. “The fact is, he was there in the room with me that night in 1982. And I believe he knows what happened. Even if it’s hazy from the alcohol, I believe he must know.”Ensconced on the high court, Kavanaugh holds his peace.Ford is a professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a faculty member of Stanford medical school. She is an avid surfer. Metallica is her favourite band. She invokes personal circumstance to explain why she delayed coming forward, electing not to bring her story to the attention of law enforcement as Kavanaugh rose in the Washington legal firmament.“Honestly, if it hadn’t been the supreme court – if my attacker had been running for a local office, for example – I probably wouldn’t have said anything,” Ford writes, adding that this is “a sad, scary thing to admit”.From Kavanaugh’s clerkship to Anthony Kennedy, his immediate predecessor on the supreme court, to his time in the White House of George W Bush and on the US court of appeals, Ford stayed silent. Even with her explanation, the reader is left wondering why.Ford also sheds light on her own college days.“I’d tried mushrooms and pot occasionally before, but now also explored MDMA, which helped me get outside of myself,” she writes, adding: “At the time, I just knew that they seemed to call bullshit on everything, including my self-esteem issues … I never got into anything harder, since cocaine didn’t help with my anxiety and heroin never crossed my path until I was out of college, and by that point I’d kind of missed the window of experimentation that heroin would have required.”Should any rightwingers seeking vengeance think of pouncing on such admissions, it should be noted that Trumpworld is littered with tales of drugs and alcohol. Consider the very public cases of Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former lawyer, and Ronny Jackson, the Trump White House physician turned congressman from Texas. The GOP likes to hound Hunter Biden, who has struggled with addiction. But he never held office.For Ford, the Kavanaugh confirmation fight took a heavy personal toll. There were threats on her person and family. There were wounds to her psyche. One day, she recalls, she stared at a construction site and imagined it to be a Lego set. “That’s so cool,” she thought. “I wish I was a construction worker. Perhaps people were right. Perhaps I was crazy.”Ford writes favorably of meeting Anita Hill, the staffer who in 1991 confronted Clarence Thomas over his alleged sexual harassment, stoking another epically nasty supreme court nomination fight. Like Kavanaugh, Thomas was confirmed. In 2019, in the aftermath of the Kavanaugh fight, Hill told Ford time can help salve wounds.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFord’s politics shade left. In One Way Back, she records her satisfaction with the “blue wave” of 2018, “progressive wins” and in particular the victory in a New York House race that year of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker, praises One Way Back on its jacket. So does Hill.Kavanaugh is a consequential and controversial figure. In 2022, he cast his lot with four other conservatives in Dobbs v Jackson, voting to overturn Roe v Wade. Those five justices eviscerated the concept of a constitutionally protected right to privacy. In a separate concurrence, Kavanaugh said that in doing so the court had not undercut precedents protecting contraception, interracial marriage and same-sex unions. Other justices differed.The tremors of Dobbs reverberate across the political divide. In the 2022 midterms, a much-anticipated red wave failed to materialize, thanks in part to Dobbs. In reliably Republican Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio, voters have conferred legal protections for abortion rights.On Capitol Hill, Pelosi’s successors as House speaker are also subject to the whims of Republican zealots. Kevin McCarthy is no longer even a congressman. Mike Johnson holds the gavel by the narrowest of margins. In February, Democrats flipped the seat previously held by George Santos, the indicted fabulist. Postmortems found that abortion rights played an outsized role in that Republican defeat. The threat of a national abortion ban drove voters to the polls. For the moment, for Democrats, Dobbs is a gift that keeps on giving – thanks to Kavanaugh and co.“I’d like to believe we’re in the middle of a revolution that will only be recognizable in the years to come,” Ford writes.Maybe sooner than that.
      One Way Back: A Memoir is published in the US by Macmillan More