Donald Trump’s political rivals have denounced him as an “unhinged madman” and a “dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual” after he directed a string of expletives at the Iranian regime. “Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell!” the US president said on his Truth Social platform .

But Trump is far from the only potty-mouthed politician, and trends suggest that swearing in politics is increasingly going from taboo to mainstream.

‘Profanity seal’

Woodrow Wilson “broke the profanity seal” in 1919, when the then president recalled a time he made a “conspicuous ass of himself”, said Joseph Phillips, a politics lecturer at Cardiff University. “Since then, presidents, their seconds-in-command, and presidential hopefuls have used profanity at least 692 times” – but the vast majority of curse words, 87%, occurred in the last 10 years.

We’ve “come a long way from our shock” at John Major, not knowing he was being recorded, using the word “bastards” while prime minister in 1993, said Robert Crampton in The Times. Although “tough talk is nothing new in politics”, leaders “long avoided flaunting it”, said The Independent. But now, public vulgarity is “in vogue”. During a political rally in 2025, Trump “used profanity at least four times”. J.D. Vance has also sworn publicly, and former vice president Kamala Harris “earned a roar of approval from her audience” last October when she said of the Trump administration that “these mother******* are crazy”.

Members of Congress and the Senate have also sworn as a “volley of vulgarities underscores an ever-coarsening political environment” on social media. Posts that “evoke the strongest emotions are rewarded with the most engagement”.

‘Anti-intellectualism’

There’s a “misguided belief” that “profanity is more ‘honest’ or ‘authentic’ than polite speech”, said Solomon D. Stevens in the Illinois paper the Journal-Courier. This suggests that politicians who swear are “telling it like it is” or “being real”, while those who don’t must be “holding back and not telling the truth”. But “politicians who swear are just politicians who swear. They can lie just as easily as those who don’t swear.”

There’s also “an anti-intellectualism at work”, as politicians who swear imply that those who don’t are “putting on airs”. While some intellectuals can “certainly be pretentious”, “refraining from coarse language” is not in itself a sign of that.

Trump’s “disinhibited language” sounded like a “tantrum”, said Melanie Phillips in The Times. It “suggested that he’d lost self-control because Iran wouldn’t do what he wanted”. Swearing points to an “emotional release and thus a loss of reason”.

The president’s recent profanity also distracted from “the message itself”, said the Deseret News. A “rousing and well-crafted argument” could have “built a compelling case for ousting the country’s ruling regime”, because “when it comes to war, calm self-assurance speaks louder than ranting expletives”.

Politicians aren’t “bawling swear words because they can’t contain their outrage”, said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. They do it because, “like preteen boys trying to sound tough”, they believe “the odd public expletive enhances their authenticity” and gives them “an air of pugnacity apropos to the moment”. But they are mistaken. “Most Americans still prefer their leaders to talk like grown-ups.”

Nevertheless, Democrats are pushing back against the right, using bad language themselves and embracing more confrontational and crass tactics. They see it as a way to beat Maga at its own game, attempting to “step outside the bounds of the political correctness that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing”, said The New York Times.

Have the Democrats found a new saviour? Some in the party believe so, said Adam Wren in Politico. They're pinning their hopes on James Talarico, a 36-year-old Presbyterian seminarian who, following his recent primary victory, is set to contest a Senate seat in Texas in November's midterm elections.

The Democrats haven't won a statewide race there since 1994, and the last time Texas elected a Democrat to the US Senate was back in 1988. But the strong performance of the “disciplined and studious” Talarico has rekindled Democrat dreams of turning Texas blue.

He's a deft communicator, and his centrist, positive style seems to appeal to a wide variety of voters. In the words of the veteran political adviser Mark McKinnon, Talarico could be the “Moses who leads the Lone Star Democrats out of the desert they've been in for 35 years”. This would also give them a “wider than expected path” to flipping the Republican majority in the Senate in November.

Talarico has “clear gifts as a campaigner”, said Lauren Egan on The Bulwark. He seems popular across the various ideological factions of his party and with Latino voters, an increasingly important demographic. But Democrats shouldn't get their hopes too high. They've been let down by Texas candidates before. Remember Beto O'Rourke? Chances are, Talarico will also crash and burn, said National Review. Sure, he's a polished performer whose overt Christianity marks him out from most Democrats, but voters ultimately care about policies – and Talarico's agenda is just too progressive. He has talked of God being “non-binary”, and argues that the Bible is pro-abortion. He uses the trendy gender-neutral term “Latinx”. That stuff won't fly in Texas.

As a conservative Christian, I disagree with Talarico on many matters of theology and ideology, said David French in The New York Times. But it's inspiring to be reminded that “Christian politicians can actually act like Christians”. Talarico campaigned with genuine compassion, declaring in his primary-night speech that he was “tired of being told to hate my neighbour”, tired of “politics as blood sport, politics as trolling and owning, politics as total war”. Compare that with Maga Christianity, where “cruelty in the name of Trumpism is no vice”. Talarico may not win the Senate seat in November, but he has given a lot of people hope, by showing that “kindness still has a place in the public square”.

What happened

A coalition of two dozen Democratic-led states on Thursday sued President Donald Trump at the U.S. Court of International Trade, arguing that the 10% global tariffs he imposed after the Supreme Court struck down his earlier sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs are similarly illegal. The lawsuit was filed a day after a judge on the trade court ordered the Trump administration to start refunding the more than $130 billion collected under the nullified tariffs.

Who said what

Trump imposed his new tariffs, which he plans to raise to 15%, using the never-before-invoked Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. “The president has once again exercised tariff authority that he does not have — involving a statute that does not authorize the tariffs he has imposed — to upend the constitutional order and bring chaos to the global economy,” the lawsuit said.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai said Trump was using his legal authority to address America’s ”large and serious“ trade deficit, and the administration ”will vigorously defend” the tariffs in court. The legal question is whether Section 122’s reference to “fundamental international payments problems” — originally meant to address a 1960s crisis tied to gold-backed dollars — applies to modern trade deficits. “They are not the same thing at all,” Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said. “The president either doesn’t know the difference or he doesn’t care,” but “he is breaking the law” either way.

What next?

The states want the trade court to “declare the new tariffs illegal” and “refund states the cost of the new tariffs while they were in effect,” Politico said. “The focus right now should be on paying people back,” said Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield.

Donald Trump has said his administration is “reviewing everything” after an intensive-care nurse was shot dead by Ice agents in Minneapolis on Saturday.

The US president’s advisers have been discussing his “aggressive deportation policies” for weeks, said The Wall Street Journal, but the shooting of Alex Pretti has “brought new urgency to those conversations”. Some of Trump’s aides see the “increasingly volatile situation” in Minneapolis as a “political liability, even as the White House has publicly doubled down on its operations”.

What did the commentators say?

Federal agents have not only killed a US citizen “like authoritarian thugs”, said Zack Beauchamp on Vox, but “their superiors in Washington justified that killing with the kind of bald-faced lie that recalls Tehran and Moscow”.

Trump’s “sycophantic lieutenants” reacted to the shooting “with characteristic mendacity”, said Simon Marks in The i Paper. Officials described the 37-year-old nurse as a “domestic terrorist” and, despite video evidence and witness testimony to the contrary, said the federal agents acted in self-defence in the middle of an “armed struggle”. These brazen attempts to blacken Pretti’s memory, coming so soon after the shooting of Renee Good, “may serve as a turning point that sparks mass resistance towards the President and the thuggish regime that he leads”.

“Your eyes don’t lie,” Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar told NBC. The contrast between what administration officials have claimed and what millions of Americans have seen on their phones this past weekend could be “crucial” in emboldening Trump’s “Congressional critics to confront him”, said Susan Page on USA Today.

Democrats, and even some staunch Republican supporters of the president, have called for an independent investigation into the shooting. Some have indicated they would block a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security until restrictions on Ice operations are put into place. This could lead to a stand-off in Congress or even another government shutdown – something the Trump administration is keen to avoid.

In this fight, “Democrats will prevail if they focus on a narrow set of reasonable demands”, while the president “will gain the upper hand if the left clamours for abolishing Ice” altogether, said The Washington Post editorial board.

What next?

Today, Trump sent his Border Czar, Tom Homan, to Minnesota. He had previously threatened to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act and flood Minneapolis with even more military force but he seemed to change course late on Sunday. Such a “violent approach” is “unlikely to succeed in a country like the US”, said Beauchamp on Vox. Its domestic security forces “are not equipped for the level of extreme brutality necessary to make it work in the face of growing public outrage”.

“How Trump responds to the democratic outpouring” on Minnesota’s streets and to the “growing unease” even in his own party “will determine just how dark and brutal the next few months will be”.

Since Patrick Joseph Kennedy entered the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1884, the Kennedy name has been associated with US politics. From the battle for civil rights to setting fashion trends, the dynasty has been at the forefront of American public life for more than 100 years. While the younger generations may not have the global recognition of JFK or RFK, they continue to uphold the family legacy of political engagement and social clout. Here are the ones to watch:

Jack Schlossberg

The only grandson of JFK, Jack Schlossberg’s public persona was crafted on social media, where he has upwards of 1.6 million followers across Instagram and TikTok. Often posting controversial content, he uses the platforms to “get people talking” and, said the BBC, to “make politics accessible for younger voters”.

He joined Vogue as a political correspondent ahead of the 2024 presidential election, a position he was offered, he said, partly due to his “silly goose” antics. He told the magazine he was inspired by his family’s “legacy of public service”, a drive that has resulted in the 32-year-old announcing, last November, he is to run for Congress.

Schlossberg said he feels the Democratic Party needs more voices to “push back on perceived abuses of power” by the current administration – he is critical of his cousin, the US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, calling him a “loser” – and told his followers: “This is our last chance to stop Trump – it won’t come again.”

Michaela Kennedy-Cuomo

The youngest of three sisters, Michaela Kennedy-Cuomo comes from a “long line of Empire State power players”, said People Magazine. Granddaughter of RFK and daughter of Kerry Kennedy and New York mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo, she too has built a following as a social media influencer.

Close to her twin siblings, Mariah and Cara, Kennedy-Cuomo was a staunch supporter of her father’s campaign last year, and showed grace in defeat, posting “Proud of Team Cuomo, and the commitment to the greater good”.

The 28-year-old uses her public platform to advocate for mental health awareness, sexual assault prevention and LGBTQ+ rights. She revealed in 2021 that she identifies as demisexual.

Patrick Schwarzenegger

The Kennedy line is almost as entrenched in Hollywood as it is in politics. And the latest to have his name in lights is Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of actor-turned-politician Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver, the second child of Eunice Kennedy.

The 32-year-old actor and model’s career began in the 2000s with TV and movie roles, following one of his first jobs, a music video with Ariane Grande, and he was most recently seen starring as Saxon Ratliff in season three of "The White Lotus".

The actor has shown no interest in following the family into politics and has told how he and his siblings “hated” it when their father gave up his movie career to become the Governor of California, said The Independent.

Joe Kennedy III

Following his time as US special envoy to Northern Ireland for economic affairs, Joe Kennedy III has taken a step back from international relations to concentrate on the “work to do in red states”, said The New York Times.

Since returning to the US at the end of November 2024, the 45-year-old former Democratic congressman is concerned with “retracing the steps of his grandfather”, Robert F. Kennedy, in Mississippi. “I know a bit about my grandfather’s visit to the Delta back in the 60s, and how it changed and outraged him to see this in the richest country in the world,” he said. Kennedy now intends to honour this spirit with the Groundwork Project, a non-profit association to develop “a network of grassroots resistance” in states that receive “little attention from left-leaning organisations”.

In 2020, Kennedy lost his bid to become senator for Massachusetts – the first in his family not to win a senatorial contest – and while his pivot to grassroots work keeps him “engaged and energised” at some point down the road, he says, he wouldn’t “rule anything out”.

America is “finally awakening to an ongoing scandal of massive proportions”, said National Review. Prosecutors are investigating a mass of Covid fraud schemes in Minnesota, which has led to 86 people, mostly Somali-Americans, being charged with stealing over $1 billion in public funds.

To take advantage of the state’s generous welfare policies, rings of fraudsters based in and around Minneapolis’s tightly knit Somali diaspora created fake schemes purportedly aiding groups such as autistic children and the homeless.

‘Culture of criminality’

When the US opened its doors to refugees from the African nation’s civil war in the 1990s, sadly it also “imported an element of Somalia’s culture of criminality”. This scandal should make us think hard about “our national immigration policy”. This reckoning was overdue, said Jason L. Riley in The Wall Street Journal. Democrat state officials had long turned a blind eye to the fraud for fear of being accused of racism or alienating Minnesota’s 80,000 Somalis, an important voting bloc.

The problem certainly needs tackling, said Patricia Lopez on Bloomberg, but the response of the Trump administration has been predictably disproportionate. Swarms of federal agents are descending on Minneapolis to target Somalis specifically. Trump has blamed Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, calling him “retarded” – and describing Somali migrants as “garbage” who “contribute nothing”. He should stop “the hateful attacks” and “let the agencies do their work” of prosecuting individual criminals.

Proud bigot

Trump’s attacks on the Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar have been particularly reprehensible, said Ana Radelat on MinnPost. She came to the US as a child refugee from Somalia and became a citizen more than 25 years ago. “I love this Ilhan Omar, whatever the hell her name is,” he told a crowd last week. “With the little turban... She comes in, does nothing but bitch... We gotta get her the hell out.” The crowd chanted “Send her back!”. Trump also revived the long-debunked myth that Omar married her brother to get US citizenship.

With his ratings in freefall, Trump seems to believe that such “gutter racism” can shore up his position, said Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. His targeting of Somalian people echoes his previous attacks on Haitian migrants. It’s America’s shame that a proud bigot like Trump is president, and that he pays “so low a political price” for his expressions of hatred.

The longest government shutdown in US history ended with a whimper, said Nitish Pahwa on Slate. For 43 days, Congress had been in a stalemate as Senate Democrats withheld support for a government funding bill in a bid to force the Republicans to extend Covid-era healthcare subsidies.

The subsidies are set to expire next month, at which point the average health insurance premiums of millions of Americans will more than double. But last week, enough Democrats – eight senators – “caved”, allowing the budget to pass in return for the mere promise of a future vote on whether to revive the subsidies.

‘Angry activists’

How pathetic, said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times. The Democrats had been winning the stand-off. Polls showed that many voters blamed the GOP for the shutdown. Even as senators were preparing to capitulate, President Trump was booed by a crowd at an American football game. Talk about stealing defeat from the jaws of victory.

The Democrats were right to back down, said Michael Powell in The Atlantic. The shutdown was hurting too many people. Poor families were going hungry without food stamps. Federal employees were struggling to pay mortgages and bills without paycheques. Unpaid air traffic controllers meant flight cancellations. The Democrats, who take pride in defending the less fortunate, couldn’t sustain their position.

It’s always the way with government shutdowns, said The Washington Post. Parties instigate them to placate “angry activists”, only to have to fold, prompting a backlash from those same activists.

Democrats ‘may have dodged a bullet’

The recriminations among Democrats have indeed been bitter, said Ed Kilgore in New York Magazine. There have been calls for the replacement of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. But “losing” the subsidy-extension battle is no disaster for the party. On the contrary, the Democrats “may have dodged a bullet”. Securing the extension would have neutralised one of the GOP’s key political vulnerabilities: the Republicans have “emerged from the shutdown row having abundantly displayed their lack of interest in soaring healthcare costs”.

That’s not a good look at a time when “affordability” has become such a big election issue, and voters will remember it when their insurance premiums soar. “The short-term stakes of the shutdown fight may soon be overshadowed by more enduring public perceptions” of what the two parties stand for.

What happened

Democrats won every major election Tuesday, sweeping the races to run Virginia, New Jersey and New York City. Pennsylvania voters also reelected all three Democratic-backed state Supreme Court justices on the ballot, and California voters approved Proposition 50, allowing Democrats to redraw more favorable congressional districts.

Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D) cruised to a double-digit victory over Republican Jack Ciattarelli in New Jersey’s gubernatorial race. Former Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D) will be Virginia’s first woman governor after beating Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, and Democrats also flipped the state’s lieutenant governor and attorney general offices and significantly expanded their majority in the House of Delegates. Virginia’s incoming lieutenant governor, Ghazala Hashmi, became the first Muslim elected statewide anywhere in the country. Zohran Mamdani will be the first Muslim to serve as New York City mayor after defeating former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa.

Who said what

Democrats “routed the Republicans” in a “blue tide” that “washed further than most pollsters had predicted,” said Semafor. From democratic socialist Mandami to centrists like Spanberger and Sherrill, “every victorious Democrat ran on ‘affordability,’ betting correctly” that voters “would be angry” that President Donald Trump has not brought down prices, as promised.

“The Democratic Party is back,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said on social media. “TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,” Trump posted, citing pollsters. Democrats still have “plenty of work to do, but the future looks a little bit brighter,” wrote former President Barack Obama.

What next?

The “demoralized” Democratic Party showed it could “still accomplish the most important goal in politics: They can win. And win big,” said The New York Times. But the party “still hasn’t coalesced around a coherent political identity or a clear electoral playbook,” and an “intraparty battle may be looming” next year and beyond. The election was a “barometer of how Americans are responding to Trump’s tumultuous nine months in office,” Reuters said, but the “midterm election is a year away, an eternity in the Trump era.”

Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory in the New York City mayoral election may be awkward for senior Democrats who failed fully to endorse him – including New York’s two senators.

The 34-year-old socialist was elected mayor of America’s most populous city with the highest voter turnout in more than 50 years. But House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who represents a Brooklyn district, only endorsed him late last month. Chuck Schumer, the party’s leader in the Senate and another New Yorker, refused to say if he’d voted for Mamdani or not.

Mamdani says his victory has shown how to defeat Donald Trump in the next election: with a left-wing populist, anti-establishment ticket. But the Democratic Party also won decisive victories in two other gubernatorial races – with moderate, centrist candidates. Abigail Spanberger easily overturned a Republican majority in Virginia, while Mikie Sherrill defied expectations of a tight race with 13-point win in New Jersey. Now, the party is divided over which lesson to learn.

What did the commentators say?

Moderate Democrats and their media allies will now try to claim Mamdani’s “improbable victory” doesn’t matter, said Alex Shephard, senior editor of The New Republic. They will say a young, inexperienced Muslim democratic socialist can become mayor of New York City but New York City is “not like the rest of the country”. They will say his campaign – although built on “a series of tactile, eminently achievable and, frankly, small-scale promises” – is “all a fantasy”. “Make no mistake: they are afraid of Mamdani.” And they should be: “Mamdani is not a warning shot; he is a sign of things to come.” Democratic voters want “radical, transformative change”.

Democrats showed that their “demoralised party” can still win – “and win big”, said Lisa Lerer, political correspondent at The New York Times. Yet the party “still hasn’t coalesced around a coherent political identity or a clear electoral playbook that can win in swing states and safe states alike”. Mamdani, Sherrill and Spanberger all “benefited from showing independent streaks and a willingness to break with party leaders”.

There was a “common theme” that emerged from this trio of wins, said Ry Rivard and Madison Fernandez on Politico: affordability. For all their “ideological differences”, Mamdani, Sherrill and Spanberger found “a shared language that aims at the heart” of Trump’s populism: “the high cost of everyday life”. In a political landscape “dominated by culture-war battles and Trump’s omnipresence, Democrats found traction by talking about rent, utilities and groceries, instead of ideology”.

“It will be hard to resist” seeing the New York result “as a stunning endorsement of Mamdani’s particular flavour of progressivism”, said Poppy Coburn in The Telegraph. But, actually, his popular Leftism “doesn’t care about winning over the centre, and certainly doesn’t care about the deficit”. Trump has “little reason to fear Mamdani and his ilk”. And each victory like this will only make it harder for the Democrat establishment to resist demands from “its hyper-polarised base to shift left”.

“Sure, a guy like Mamdani can win in New York. But a woman like Kamala Harris can win in California. There’s still everything to play for in 2028.”

What next?

Senator Bernie Sanders heralded Mamdani as “the future of the Democratic Party”. When asked on CNN if he agreed, Hakeem Jeffries said, “No.” It’s clear “the Democrats remain a party teeming with tensions over age, ideology, tactics and tone, and they are still rebuilding their damaged brand,” said Lerer in the NYT. These results suggest “an intra-party battle may be looming” as they get ready for the midterms next year, and “a wide-open presidential primary contest” in 2027.

Are they more competitive as “a centrist party in the mould of Sherrill and Spanberger”? Or are they better positioned with “a populist vision”, like that of Mamdani? Democratic leaders “want to have it both ways”. They think the lesson is “combining winning issues like the high cost of living with a be-everywhere, be-authentic style of campaigning and communicating”.

“There’s mounting evidence that voters want to fire Donald Trump and the people loyal to him, but we still have more to do convince people to hire us,” said veteran Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson. “Voters right now feel like their government is betraying them and it’s costing them. We have to be not just the response to that but the antidote.”

We live in strange times, said Holly Hudson on The Daily Beast. Who’d have thought, for instance, that the day would come when Marjorie Taylor Greene began “sounding... kind of reasonable”?

The Georgia congresswoman has until now been best known as a conservative firebrand and conspiracy loon. She famously suggested that wildfires might have been started by “Jewish space lasers”, and railed against the “Gazpacho police” (she meant “Gestapo”).

Over recent weeks, however, this once-staunch Donald Trump loyalist has started taking the administration to task. She has blamed Republican leaders for the government shutdown; sided with Democrats in calling for an extension of tax credits for health insurance; railed against high inflation; and stated that her party has “no plan”.

‘Dipping a toe in the pool of Trump defiance’

Greene’s independent streak has not gone unnoticed by Trump, who has apparently been calling around and asking: “What’s been going on with Marjorie?” Trump is right to ask, said Melanie Zanona on NBC News, as Greene is “arguably more in tune with the Maga base than any other member of Congress”. Her attacks may, in fact, be partly motivated by pique: sources say she’s cross that the White House talked her out of running for the Senate, and is disappointed not to have been given a cabinet role.

But there’s also political calculation at work, said Rex Huppke in USA Today. Greene is positioning herself for the post-Trump era. She can see that the president’s popularity is sliding and that the economy is not working well for most Americans. She’s a “gifted grifter dipping a toe in the pool of Trump defiance to see if it makes waves she can ride”.

‘Echoing the frustrations she’s hearing’

Greene’s rebellion is a warning to the Republicans, said Matt Wylie in The State. “She’s not going rogue; she’s echoing the frustrations she’s hearing from her own base.” Trump keeps insisting that prices are falling, yet it’s clear his trade tariffs are hitting people in the pocket. Grocery bills are rising; pay cheques are shrinking. Some voters, meanwhile, are unhappy about Trump launching legal assaults on his political enemies and deploying troops in cities.

“Economic pain, institutional mistrust and political exhaustion are converging into something volatile – a storm of disillusionment that no amount of populist rhetoric can overcome.” The GOP needs to start governing more effectively, or “the cracks in the Maga movement will only widen”.

Israel confirmed today that the proposed Gaza ceasefire – the first of the 20 points in the agreement – has gone into effect, with the Israel Defense Forces beginning its withdrawal from parts of the strip.

If the peace plan is successful, it would be a “massive blow to Joe Biden’s legacy”, said The Independent. Few Democrats still defend his administration’s “hug Bibi closer” strategy, and recent developments appear to have validated Donald Trump’s “brash, demanding approach” towards Benjamin Netanyahu.

What did the commentators say?

If this agreement holds, it could stand as the “signature achievement” of Trump’s second term, said the BBC. Where Biden’s relationship with Netanyahu was more “tenuous”, Trump’s friendship with Israel’s prime minister and popularity with Israeli voters allowed him to put “pressure” on Netanyahu after the strikes on Iran and Qatar. Trump’s close ties to the Gulf states, business agreements with Qatar and the UAE, and presidential visits to Saudi Arabia have all won favour with leaders in the region.

Though much of the diplomacy has been conducted far outside the US, near-unconditional party support at home played a significant part, said Gerard Baker in The Times. In the last 50 years, no Republican president has “enjoyed such a level of trust” from his administration. With the party becoming something of a “personality cult”, if Trump “wants to move diplomatic mountains, he faces no resistance” from within.

That was an advantage certainly not shared by his Democrat predecessor, said the BBC. While Trump’s “solid Republican base” has allowed him “room to manoeuvre”, “every step Biden took risked fracturing his own domestic support”, due to split opinion on the Gaza conflict within the Democratic Party and voter base.

Trump’s diplomacy skills may even be evolving, said David Ignatius in The Washington Post. In addition to his familiar “imperious”, “go-it-alone” personality, the president arguably displayed “more flexibility and cooperation than are typical of him” by involving Middle Eastern partners like Turkey, Egypt and Qatar in diplomatic discussions.

The “boldness” of the president’s recent tactics left little room for “interagency”, Joel Braunold, managing director at the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, told Lawfare. But Trump’s “just try and get it done” attitude – “there’s something to be said for that”. Of course, Trump is no stranger to an eye-catching announcement, so the “proof will be in the pudding” as to whether his unique brand of diplomacy creates fair and lasting change.

“There are many unresolved details” and a degree of scepticism is in order, said Baker in The Times. The recent past is “littered with too many ceasefires, accords and peace deals” in the Middle East, and it would be misguided “to express any confidence now that this latest one will endure”.

What next?

The history of political turbulence in the region suggests that there is a long road ahead, said The New York Times. Questions over the proposed interim “technocratic” leadership in Gaza overseen by the US, and the extent of Palestinian Authority involvement, have yet to be answered satisfactorily.

Working out peace deals in the region is “a little like cleaning up after volcanic eruptions: There is a certainty it will happen again. It is just hard to know when, or how ferociously.”

With just over a year to go until the 2026 midterm elections, Democrats are looking for new ways to win over voters at the ballot box. One of their strategies is to push a faith-based agenda that’s often more associated with conservatives. This isn’t the first time the Democrats have used religion to their advantage (former President Barack Obama made large gains with religious voters in 2008). But as elections creep ever closer, Democrats are hoping an appeal to religion will help make the contest a referendum against the conservative movement.

How are the Democrats using religion?

The party is testing “whether church-going, Bible-quoting Democrats can connect with voters — and provide an early gauge of whether messages rooted in spirituality will appeal to the party’s base,” said CNN. This is especially noteworthy given the continuing demographic skews among the parties; Democrats are “increasingly secular, while growing shares of those who attend church regularly identify themselves as Republicans.”

These trends “come in part as a reaction to Republicans using religious messages to advance conservative positions on issues like gay rights and abortion," said CNN, but also “reveal deep divides within the Democratic Party over the role of religion in government.” Only 38% of Christians, including just 24% of Evangelicals, identify as Democrats, according to a February 2025 Pew Research Center poll (though the figures are higher among Jews, 66%, and Muslims, 53%).

The push to reverse these slumping trends and bring in more religious voters continues. While former President Joe Biden often touted his Catholic faith, the Democratic pivot toward religion is "signaling that he is no longer the exception to the rule," said The New York Times. Democrats now “see discussion of faith as a way to introduce themselves, explain their values and find common ground.”

Who are some Democratic candidates doing this?

Two notable names include Iowa politician Rob Sand and Texas state Rep. James Talarico, though Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, a pastor, is another high-profile figure. Both Sand and Talarico have tried to use their own faith to generate buzz about their campaigns.

Sand has been the Iowa state auditor since 2019 and is the “only Democrat elected to statewide office in Iowa,” said The Wall Street Journal. He is a candidate in Iowa’s 2026 gubernatorial election and has “mentioned his Lutheran faith” on “numerous occasions.” Despite his religious background, Sand “backs several positions traditionally supported by Democrats, including abortion rights.”

Iowa Republicans have cautioned their party that Sand’s candidacy should be taken seriously. “Churchgoer, gun-toter, state auditor, taxpayers’ watchdog. Sounds a little bit like us, right?” Bob Vander Plaats, a prominent Christian conservative in Iowa, said of Sand earlier this year, calling him a “very real opponent.”

A few states away is Talarico, who has served in the Texas House since 2018. He is a candidate in Texas’ 2026 Senate race and represents a “young, charismatic foe of Christian nationalism, who is himself studying to be a minister,” said Rolling Stone. Talarico is “far from an atheist — so when he speaks out against power-hungry Christians, he does so from his own religious convictions.”

“What you’re seeing is a perversion of Christianity,” Talarico told Rolling Stone. “You can call it Christian fascism or Christian nationalism. Essentially, it’s the worship of power.” Republican extremism is “gonna go down swinging. I just hope it doesn’t hurt too many people on its way down.”

The Democratic Party is in trouble. A new poll shows a record share of voters view the party unfavorably, leaving party leaders scrambling to figure out how to broaden their brand's appeal.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans have an "unfavorable view" of Democrats, said The Wall Street Journal, which commissioned the poll. That is the "highest share" of negative ratings for a political party in the paper's surveys going all the way back to 1990. Democrats hoping for a "voter backlash against the president" ahead of next year's midterm elections have a long way to go to persuade the public "they can do a better job" than the GOP. Republicans do not come off well, either — the poll shows the public dislikes President Donald Trump's "handling of the economy, inflation, tariffs and foreign policy." But Democrats "don't have the credibility to be a critic of Trump" or the GOP, said Democratic pollster John Anzalone.

'Hit rock bottom'

Democrats have "hit rock bottom," said Nick Catoggio at The Dispatch. Despite all the terrible events that have happened in America since 1990, "at no point" have voters disliked a party as much as they do Democrats at this moment. It is possible that voters will "come around." But the Journal's poll shows that Republicans get higher marks than Democrats even on "issues on which Trump receives bad marks." That looks like a "catastrophic decline in confidence in the left's basic ability to govern."

Democrats "express much less warmth" toward their own leaders than Republicans, said Philip Bump on his website. It is no coincidence that the "most vibrant expressions of opposition" to Trump come from figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who "sit at a distance from the party." If party leadership continues to stumble, Democratic candidates should "run against or apart from the party as much as possible."

"These are some tough numbers for Democrats," said G. Elliott Morris at Strength in Numbers. There is a bright spot: The same poll also shows that Democrats have a three-point advantage in the "generic congressional ballot," which measures which party voters would want to represent them if the election were held today. That seemingly slim lead "would be large enough for the Democrats to win somewhere around 230-235 seats" in the House.

'Nobody's voting on anything'

There is a "silver lining" for Democrats, said Jim Geraghty at The Washington Post. "If you're going to be unpopular, do it when almost nobody's voting on anything." There are a "handful" of special elections for the House of Representatives this year, but there is still more than a year to go before the 2026 midterm elections. The Journal's poll may be "ominous," but at the moment, "it doesn't count for anything."

"Democrats don't need to be popular," said Ed Kilgore at New Yorkmagazine . Right now, the party's candidates are favored to win "most of the competitive off-year races in 2025, including the New Jersey and Virginia governorships." If Democrats win a few elections, "that will take care of most of their morale problems."

As President Donald Trump pushes Texas Republicans to adopt a controversial new redistricting plan to pad their congressional majority by up to five seats, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has begun to float a similar scheme of his own. He's considering redrawing his state's legislative districts to further benefit Democrats; as Newsom said on X, "two can play that game."

Newsom, who has spent much of the second Trump administration pitching himself as a party leader for Democrats, justified his California redistricting plan as necessary to reporters on Wednesday. The "existential threat of what Donald Trump and some of these Republican states are trying to do" necessitates equally drastic measures from liberals, Newsom said, framing himself and his plan as at the forefront of the Democrats' growing opposition to this White House.

While Newsom's blue gerrymandering plan has excited some in the party looking for a more aggressive response to the Trump administration, not all Democrats are eager to delve into the messy business of redistricting. As befits a plan as audacious and disruptive as the one Newsom has proposed, opinions vary.

'Not going to fight with one hand tied behind my back'

Democratic supporters of blue-state gerrymandering deem it an "essential offensive posture" that could "make the difference in reclaiming the House" next year, The Texas Tribune said. The party needs to "fight fire with fire," said one Democrat to the outlet. "I'm not going to fight with one hand tied behind my back," said another, adding that "we shouldn't be so nice" if Texas' redistricting moves forward. Voters are "looking for a fight from the Democratic Party," said former Biden administration official Neera Tanden to Politico. Newsom's "response to Texas is the kind of thing I think they are looking for."

For some Texas Democrats, there is even a hope that efforts to counter their state's potential redistricting with similar measures in blue states might "dissuade Republicans from going ahead with the plan" altogether, said the Tribune. The notion of "lowering themselves to Trump's level" has "some Democrats feeling uneasy," said Ja'han Jones at MSNBC. The "counterpoint" to that, though, is that no matter how "concerned about the civil rights implications of California's responsive gerrymander" one may be, the "implications of sitting idly as Texas implements its own are arguably worse."

Redrawing California's electoral maps to "squeeze between five and seven more Democratic seats" for the party is a "brazen political gamble," said Punchbowl News. It's also "exactly the kind of ploy that the Democratic Party base has been demanding," even though it will be "extremely hard to pull off."

'Legitimizing the race to the bottom'

Newsom's plan is "all hat and no cattle," said the Los Angeles Times, using a Texas expression. To successfully redraw California's congressional districts, Newsom would have to break the state's 2010 law that left redistricting to a bipartisan commission, leading to an "inevitable lawsuit" in which he'd "prevail with a sympathetic ruling from the California Supreme Court." Alternately, Newsom could put the redistricting question back to voters "through a new constitutional amendment, in a hurried-up special election ahead of the 2026 midterms."

Ultimately, there is "no downside" for Newsom to try either method, said redistricting expert Paul Mitchell to the Sacramento Bee. Even if both fail, "maps that are really pretty good for Dems are still in place." But by "legitimizing the race to the bottom of gerrymandering, Democrats will ultimately lose," said California Assemblymember Alex Lee (D) at Politico. The "optics" of politicians retaking power formerly delegated to a non-partisan panel are "horrendous and indefensible," said an unnamed Democratic consultant to the outlet. "That's a crazy hill to die on."

As an "ambitious governor" who is ostensibly arguing that the state's constitutionally enshrined redistricting commission "ought to be ignored," Newsom risks "violating his oath," said the National Review. Doing so offers "ample justification for impeachment and removal from office."

Newsom's "inclination to want to retaliate" is understandable in the "national context," said Pomona College Politics Professor Sara Sadhwani to the San Francisco Chronicle. But the people of California have "made it clear at the ballot that the governor does not have that power."

America has just witnessed "one of the most significant victories by an unabashedly left-wing candidate" in its history, said Ross Barkan in New York Magazine. A few months ago, few had even heard of Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old socialist assemblyman in New York's state legislature. But last week he won the Democratic nomination for one of the most powerful positions in US politics: mayor of New York.

He beat Andrew Cuomo, a veteran New York politician who spent vastly more on his campaign. Whereas outside fundraising groups had backed Cuomo to the tune of $25 million, Mamdani received just $1.2 million. He relied on small contributions from individual donors – the average donation was $78 – and made brilliant use of social media. The victory instantly established Mamdani as the progressives' new figurehead – and the Republicans' "great new bogeyman".

As the Democratic nominee, Mamdani is the runaway favourite to win the mayoralty in November, said National Review. That's too bad for New York, as his "pie-in-the-sky socialist agenda" – state-run grocery stores, rent controls, free buses, free childcare, all funded by taxes on the rich – is a recipe for disaster. His past support for defunding the police, and fervent criticism of Israel, are also worrying. This sort of "self-soothing progressivism" goes down well with hipsters in Brooklyn, said Carine Hajjar in The Boston Globe. But those in high-crime areas of New York won't be keen to "gamble their safety and economic well-being" so that Mamdani, the son of an Ivy League professor and a Hollywood director, can play the working-class hero.

Whether Mamdani could turn his agenda into reality is unclear, said Karen Tumulty in The Washington Post. But his victory holds important lessons for the Democrats. The main one: "candidate quality matters". Voters are fed up with being presented with "deeply flawed" candidates by the party establishment. Mamdani is charismatic and energetic; he engages with younger voters. Cuomo, by contrast, came across as "joyless" and entitled. It's barely four years since he left the governor's office in disgrace amid "credible allegations" of sexual harassment by 11 women. That Cuomo's mayoral campaign was nonetheless endorsed by a raft of party elders, including former president Bill Clinton, "speaks to a breathtaking level of cluelessness".

New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani's unexpected victory in New York City's Democratic mayoral primary makes him the presumptive favorite to be the city's next chief executive. While the city has not released a final result due to ranked choice votes still being tallied, his leading opponent, scandal-plagued former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, has already conceded.

A campaign that started with almost no chance of success came out of virtually nowhere to best household-name Cuomo. Mamdani's rise to prominence has been swift, and observers are already grappling with the implications of his victory for national politics.

Background

Mamdani was born in Uganda to Indian Muslim parents but raised in New York City after his family moved there when he was seven. His mother, Mira Nair, is an "award-winning filmmaker whose credits include 'Monsoon Wedding,'" said The Associated Press. He attended Bowdoin College in Maine, where he "co-founded the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine," said the BBC. He became an American citizen in 2018. After working as a foreclosure prevention housing counselor in New York City, Mamdani was elected to the New York State Assembly in 2020 and is currently serving his third term. There, he "focused primarily on housing and transportation reform" and was "praised by progressive voters for the ambition of his bills," said Time.

The latest

New York City's incumbent mayor, Democrat-turned-independent Eric Adams, is running for re-election but was indicted by a federal grand jury on bribery charges in September 2024 before the Department of Justice dismissed the case under pressure from President Donald Trump in April 2025. Adams' legal troubles and unpopularity left this year's race wide open, and in March, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo threw his hat in. Cuomo had resigned from office in disgrace in 2021 after a flurry of sexual harassment allegations were levied against him. While Cuomo began the race with high name recognition and a significant early polling lead, Mamdani was able to consolidate the support of anti-Cuomo factions and emerge as the Democratic Party's nominee. That was in spite of the Democratic Party's old guard getting behind Cuomo, providing him an "impressive list of endorsements, including from former president Bill Clinton, former mayor Michael Bloomberg and South Carolina Representative Jim Clyburn," said The Nation.

Despite being "underrated by his opponents, and by the press," Mamdani pulled off his stunning victory by campaigning on an unapologetically progressive platform of "slightly higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, a rent freeze for rent-stabilized apartments, free buses, universal child care and more," said The New Yorker. Mamdani also courted the city's 750,000 Muslims and "released ads in Urdu, Hindi and Bangla to reach Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi voters," said New York magazine, even as he was being attacked as antisemitic. Finally, he deftly maneuvered through the city's ranked-choice voting system by forging voting alliances with other progressive candidates, most significantly with City Comptroller Brad Lander.

The reaction

Republicans relished the opportunity to tie national Democrats to Mamdani. The National Republican Congressional Committee called him the "new face of the Democrat Party" and said his policies are "straight out of a socialist nightmare." Some criticism of Mamdani certainly appeared to be racially motivated. "Many a frothing xenophobe can't fathom the idea" of New York City electing a Muslim mayor, said Rolling Stone. And his win is already "sparking fresh clashes between moderates and liberals about Democrats' best path back to national relevance," said The Washington Post.

Yet even in victory, there were warning signs for Mamdani. He appears to have won with the "support of New York City's white, Hispanic and Asian voters" but "not its Black voters," said National Review. That should worry national Democrats still smarting from Trump's gains with Black voters in 2024.

Mamdani's big win should convince national Democrats that "you don't have to choose between economic populism and protecting vulnerable people," said Parker Molloy at The Present Age. And while a Mamdani victory in the November general election is "not quite a foregone conclusion," it helps that his opponents, including Adams, Republican Curtis Sliwa and possibly even Cuomo himself in an independent run, will "all be running on similar law-and-order themes," said Nate Silver at The Silver Bulletin.

At just 33 years old, Zohran Mamdani is not only poised to become the next mayor of New York City but has emerged as a potent national figure. That's thanks in large part to the unabashed progressivism and massive grassroots support that contributed to his surprise victory over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the NYC Democratic mayoral primary race this past week. As Mamdani prepares for a bruising general election against incumbent Eric Adams and possibly an unbowed Cuomo, opinions vary on Mamdani's future in the Democratic Party.

'Serious setback' for the party's 'more pragmatic wing'

As a state Assembly member with a "history of controversial comments about Israel and policing," Mamdani is seen by some Democratic insiders as "politically toxic" to their broader effort to "attract votes in less progressive places nationwide," Axios said. Mamdani's political positions have already been used as "fodder" by Republicans targeting Democrats in New York "and beyond," said The Hill.

Mamdani's win is a "gift" to Donald Trump and Republicans, Jon Reinish, a New York-based Democratic strategist, said to The Hill. Mamdani's policies "only translate and only are a thing in the most liberal districts in a primary." For the party's "more pragmatic wing," Mamdani's win represents a "serious setback" in a project to "broaden Democrats' appeal" and move past the progressive agenda they claim "alienated would-be voters in recent elections," The Associated Press said.

Mamdani's platform is "ideologically extreme, but structurally unsound," freshman Rep. Laura Gillen (D-N.Y.) said in an interview with Time. But while others in the party have fretted over Mamdani's impact on the Democrats at large, Gillen downplayed his position as "hardly a mandate or some grand proclamation about where Democrats are."

'Powerful reproach' to the Democratic Party

While many Democratic insiders "publicly embraced" the enthusiasm Mamdani was able to generate among younger voters, they've also taken pains to avoid "associating too closely" with his more progressive policies, CNN said. Halfhearted embrace notwithstanding, Mamdani's victory is a "clear inflection point in the roiling debate" over how Democrats must reinvent the party in the wake of their 2024 drubbing, The Nation said. His campaign against Cuomo was a "distilled version" of the "same ideological and generational battle now convulsing the national Democratic Party" — a victory that was a "powerful reproach" to some mainstream Democrats.

If Mamdani wins the general election, the lessons for Democrats will be "less about ideology" and "more about tactics," said The Atlantic: "having energy, communicating clearly and frequently and focusing on personal economic issues." Mamdani's strength, said Teen Vogue, has been his ability to speak to "constituencies who either felt burned or simply ignored by Democratic centrist campaign strategies."

Inherent in Mamdani's rise is a broader message for Democrats, said Sen. Bernie Sanders, himself no stranger to hyperbolic examinations of his relationship to the Democratic Party base, at The Guardian: "Address the real economic and moral issues that face the majority of our people, take on the greed and power of the oligarchy and fight for an agenda that can improve life for working families."

Conversely, failure to learn from Mamdani's successes could have detrimental effects on Democrats, said longtime party consultant Lis Smith at The New York Times. If the party can't "adapt" and "change" away from their 2024 electoral failures, Smith said, then "establishment Democrats are going to continue to lose to people like Mamdani because they're not offering the change that voters want."

To use a phrase favored by his SpaceX engineers: Elon Musk's volatile friendship with President Donald Trump experienced a "rapid unscheduled disassembly," as the two titans of politics and industry clashed with increasing ferocity last week over everything from electoral prowess to allegations of pedophilia. Although their schism may seem inevitable in hindsight, the rift has snowballed into more than just a doomed friendship. It is looming as the sort of seismic shakeup that could alter the course of contemporary politics.

With Republicans largely waiting for the dust to settle before assessing how best to move forward, Democrats have been watching the Trump-Musk falling-out with a strategic eye. Some party figures have begun cautiously calling for Democrats to make overtures to Musk, given his political largesse, while others are strongly warning against inviting the self-proclaimed "Dark MAGA" billionaire into their liberal fold.

Democrats have 'values that he agrees with'

While Musk has a "unique capability" for "wildly distorting" a group's politics, politics is ultimately a "zero-sum game," said Liam Kerr, cofounder of last week's centrist WelcomeFest rally, at Politico. Any overture that brings Musk "more toward Democrats hurts Republicans." To that end, had it been former President Joe Biden whose high-profile political partnership had imploded in full public view, Trump would have "hugged" Biden's theoretical Musk-equivalent the "next day," said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) on X, citing the Democrats' effort to keep Robert F. Kennedy Jr., at a distance, only for Trump to successfully invite him into the MAGA movement.

"We can be the party of sanctimonious lectures," said Khanna, "or the party of FDR that knows how to win & build a progressive majority." Party figures can "convince him that the Democratic Party has more of the values that he agrees with," the lawmaker said at Politico, citing Musk's shared "commitment" to science and clean technology.

"I think we call that a gettable voter," said commentator Bill Maher on his HBO talk show "Real Time," highlighting Musk's fight with Trump and pointed criticism of Trump's "big, beautiful bill." Democrats "do have to win them back," said Maher of figures like Musk and fellow right-wing influencer Joe Rogan. "The good news is you can."

"The left should focus on why it lost Elon," said former Trump administration Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci on X, "rather than demonizing him." Democrats should be "trying to woo him back," Scaramucci added on his "The Rest is Politics: US" podcast. By moving to the center, Democrats can bring Musk "back into the fold as a prodigal son."

Musk, the 'enemy of liberal democracy'

Khanna's claims notwithstanding, a "brief review of Musk's entrepreneurial track record" reveals a "total lack of the 'values' that Democrats purport to espouse," said columnist Belén Fernández at Al Jazeera. For Democrats espousing the virtues of courting Musk, "ideology matters little when you're just in the business of buying power."

While it may be "hard to resist the temptation" of reaching out to Musk amid his ongoing rift with Trump, Democrats should bear in mind that Musk is a "thoroughgoing enemy of liberal democracy, a backer and promoter of authoritarian parties ranging from Trump's GOP to Germany's AfD," said conservative commentator William Kristol at The Bulwark. While it may be "enjoyable (if not productive)" for Democrats to make hay of the Trump-Musk discord, the electoral reality is that Musk will be no help with "swing voters in marginal districts or competitive states."

By welcoming Musk, Democrats would be "shooing more working-class voters away from the party," said Progressive Caucus chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) at Axios. Calling out "billionaire villains" like Musk "works for us, and we should keep on doing what works."

Broadly, there's "nothing wrong" with an opposition party seeking to maximize its leverage against the president, said Eoin Higgins at MSNBC. But given the "key role" the Tesla CEO has played in the Trump administration's assault on governmental institutions, "outright mending fences with Musk would be a mistake." When it comes to damaging the Trump administration, Democrats "don't even need to do anything" to contribute to Musk and Trump's self-inflicted wounds, "they can just sit back and watch."

Is it possible to stage a political cover-up over something that's obvious to everyone? Weirdly, it is, said Alex Shephard in The New Republic. If you don't believe it, just read "Original Sin", the new book by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson about how Joe Biden's family and colleagues conspired to hide his growing frailty and confusion during his time in the White House.

It was a vain effort in some respects, as Biden's decline was evident to anyone who saw him walk or talk. Poll after poll showed that voters were all too aware of the issue. Yet the White House succeeded in suppressing talk about it, at least until Biden's disastrous TV debate with Donald Trump. It used "tactics that can only be described as Trumpian – denying any and all accusations", and attacking the credibility of any reporter or politician who raised legitimate questions about the president's fitness.

We can't let sympathy with Biden over his recent cancer diagnosis stand in the way of a "reckoning" for this cover-up, said Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. Thanks to "Original Sin", we now know that "the most powerful nation in the world and its nuclear arsenal were left in the hands of a man who could not reliably recognise people he'd known for years, maintain his train of thought or speak in coherent sentences". By late 2023, Biden's staff were apparently pushing as much of his schedule as possible to midday, when he was at his sharpest. Even for small meetings, he often relied on a teleprompter. The hiding of Biden's decline represents a "near-treasonous dereliction of duty" by his staff. Democrats and the liberal press have a lot to answer for, too.

Biden and his backers were lying to themselves as much as to others, said Carlos Lozada in The New York Times. They were in thrall to the "Biden mythology" of the scrappy leader beating the odds. Because of their misgivings about Kamala Harris, and their hatred of Trump, they felt justified in concealing the truth.

But Democrats now need to resist the temptation to pin the whole election debacle on Biden. If he'd dropped out of the race earlier, it's not clear that any other nominee would have done better than Harris. For too long, the Democrats have acted as the anti-Trump party, offering no positive sense of what they believe in. History won't be kind to Biden, but Democrats should be mindful that "it's easier to find a scapegoat than an identity".

One of the most persistent narratives to come out of the 2024 election cycle is the effect the vast right-wing digital media ecosystem had on the national electorate, with figures like Theo Von and Joe Rogan assuming an outsized influence in the conservative space. As Democrats plot a return from the electoral wilderness, a growing chorus of party figures has begun to push for a liberal-leaning alternative to the right's digital dominance. But while many Democrats agree that they've been thus far outmaneuvered online, not everyone is on board with what they should do about it.

Serious plan, or 'shiny new object'?

Many Democrats "take it as gospel " that Trump's 2024 victory came not only from friendly outlets like Fox News and OAN but through an "ecosystem of supporters on YouTube, TikTok and podcasts," said The New York Times. That belief has led to party mega-donors being "inundated with overtures" to open their wallets for the development of an "army of left-leaning online influencers." At the same time, liberal critics argue the pitches to the party's financiers are simply efforts to "meet donors' demand for a shiny new object" rather than something that will actively help electorally.

The notion that victory is possible if they "spend enough billionaire money" to create a Rogan equivalent "speaking in Democratic talking points" is "laughable," said Emily Jashinsky at UnHerd. Trump and his ilk succeeded in winning over figures like Rogan by being "critics of their own party." Do Democratic operatives and donors who are mulling their media weaknesses want to "spend money paying influencers to talk trash about the party?" Rogan, in particular, was "not created by conservative philanthropists," said Vox's Eric Levitz on Bluesky. Moreover, the type of content that has been shown to give Democrats real traction online and electorally "seems pretty different."

While journalism is the "practice of telling the public about stuff that is happening," said columnist Hamilton Nolan on Substack, what "most wealthy political donors want" is something else: propaganda that "seeks to produce a specific outcome." Accordingly, Democrats find themselves in a complicated position, said the Columbia Journalism Review. Existing progressive outlets that do "engage in rampant spin" are "typically tethered to the realm of basic fact" — something that "no longer constrains many right-wing commentators."

'Virtually impossible' struggle against elitism

For some Democrats, the challenge is ultimately a question of scope. "There needs to be a recognition that we need to go beyond the political sphere," said political consultant Jared Leopold at Campaigns & Elections. Enter Hasan Piker, the progressive streamer frequently compared to Rogan for his focus on not only political content, but fitness and gaming as well. But Piker doesn't see himself as a liberal Rogan, focusing instead on "directly countering Rogan, as he spreads misinformation," he said to The Independent. Piker also reserves most of his ire for the Democratic party, which is "trying to repackage" its "smug" and "elitist" identity to appeal to voters. But "because they're so elitist, I think it's virtually impossible," Piker said.

As liberals and progressives debate the merits of their digital tactics, the volume of pitches to left-leaning donors grows. One political operative "described compiling a spreadsheet of 26 active projects related to creators," said the Times, even as few have "ties to major donors" who could "give them liftoff." For now, there are simply "more ideas than hard, committed money."

The 2024 elections were defined for many by damning allegations that then-President Joe Biden was not only experiencing mental and physical decline, but that his inner circle was obfuscating the true severity of his health challenges. As Democrats eye a return to the White House in 2028, those allegations have resurfaced — this time haunting a party split over how to regain voters' trust. While some have advocated for a full postmortem to enable the party to move on once and for all, others insist the Democrats should focus on the future without relitigating the past.

'Renewed questions' are 'sending shivers' through the party

Democrats face a "fresh reckoning" over Biden's health, with "potential presidential contenders" avoiding debate on whether the party should have "forcefully called on him to abandon his reelection bid earlier," said Politico. Whether or not to criticize Biden or to address his camp's insistence that he was fit for campaigning is "fast becoming the first real litmus test of the 2028" race, given how many Democrats "with 2028 ambitions" were "defending him at the time."

The upcoming publication of "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again" by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson has contributed to the "renewed questions" about who knew what about Biden's health when, "sending shivers" through the party, said The Washington Post. To "regain the trust of voters," some have argued that party leaders must "state openly that Biden should never have sought reelection" last year.

That Democratic Party leadership has been "unwilling to reckon publicly" with supporting Biden's campaign "for as long as it did" suggests a "lasting fear of speaking out," said The New York Times. There is an awareness among some that by speaking out against Biden's 2024 fitness now, they have exposed themselves to "questions about why they said nothing when it mattered."

"We're not looking backward," House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said of rehashing Biden's health at a press conference last week. "We're looking forward at this moment in time."

Not just about Biden

While backward-looking "self-flagellations" by Democrats are often "excessive and pointless," in this case they are "needed," said Michael Tomasky at The New Republic. It's necessary not only for unpacking who may have inappropriately protected Biden's candidacy, but also for the "automatic anointing of Kamala Harris after Biden dropped out," which Democrats should "examine and learn from."

Mainstream political media is also implicated in questions about knowledge of Biden's health. There is an "unhealthy confluence of interests" between White House staff and White House reporters, said John Fund at the National Review. By failing to recognize "how powerful a motivation their sources had to deceive them," the political media "failed in their duty to probe more deeply and question the official White House line."

Fallout from questions about Biden's health may also affect other future candidates for office who played roles in his administration. Such potential candidates may find their campaigns "forced to address what they knew and what they did," USA Today said. Conversely, high-profile Democrats with "some distance" from the Biden 2024 team (people like Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker or New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) could see their careers "boosted as the sort of fresh faces the party needs."

There is generally no right or wrong way to be a failed presidential nominee. While some past candidates have gone on to have a second act in public service, others have receded from the public eye. Former Vice President Kamala Harris spent the first few months of the Trump administration hewing to the latter — until this week. Delivering her first major speech since President Donald Trump assumed office on Wednesday, Harris reemerged into the political spotlight, raising speculation about her future.

A 'calculated return'

Although Harris has made several lower-profile appearances since losing the 2024 presidential election, this speech (delivered at a fundraiser for Emerge, an organization focused on Democrats recruiting and electing women) was her "most pointed to date," said the Los Angeles Times. It also marked the "first time since leaving office that she's publicly mentioned Trump by name."

Harris used the address to encourage supporters to "speak out and fight back" against what she framed as the White House's "efforts to roll back decades of progress," said The Washington Post. Her return to public life comes at a "moment of deep anger and frustration" within the party, with some Democrats "ready to turn the page on the Biden era and a disappointing 2024 election." Harris conveyed a "very negative, often angry-sounding message," said Fox News, accusing Trump of the "wholesale abandonment" of American ideals.

The remarks were part of a "calculated return," said The New York Times, in which the former vice president "acknowledged her monthslong departure from public life" while "not once" mentioning her future plans. The speech retained the "cautious approach" that has long defined Harris' "political brand."

'Ramping up' her public presence

Harris' speech and the interest it has generated come as she is "set to possibly re-enter politics in the coming months," said ABC News. Her "shadow" has "shaped the early months" of the upcoming California gubernatorial race, into which she would "probably vault to the top of the field" should she decide to run, said the Post. It is "no longer certain," however, that her candidacy would "clear the field" of high-profile Democrats vying to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). Her speech was attended by "several prominent Democrats already vying for governor in 2026" who sat in the front row, Politico said. While she didn't raise any "explicitly state-related issues or political fights" in her remarks, she might be "saving her powder until she's made a decision."

By "ramping up her public presence" while Democrats "search for a path forward after November's election," Harris is leaning into the fact that she "retains unique influence and would reshape any future race she chooses to enter," said The Associated Press. She has "not discouraged speculation" about joining future elections — including another potential run for the White House — and "continues to fundraise, using a joint committee that includes Harris for President, the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic parties."

Ending her speech on Wednesday, Harris struck a tone of cautious optimism, telling attendees that "things are probably going to get worse before they get better." But, she said, "we are ready for it."

The Democratic Party has been discombobulated by the Trump administration's "shock and awe" upending of American government. With Republicans in control of the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court, Democrats are left hamstrung by their opposition.

The Democratic Party "got off to a slow start" in opposing President Donald Trump's dramatic moves, said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) to The New Yorker. But the new administration's acts to eliminate federal agencies, end birthright citizenship and fire government workers have all been challenged in court, showing the Democrats "may be out of power" but are "not powerless." Trump is "still constrained by federal law and the Constitution," said Schatz. And a public backlash might encourage Republicans to curtail their ambitions a bit. "Every political party is constrained by that which is unpopular," he added.

Some of Schatz's colleagues think more is needed. The party has been "too timid" in opposing Trump, said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) to The Washington Post. His suggestion: Make a public villain out of Elon Musk, the billionaire eviscerating agencies, like the U.S. Agency for International Development, on Trump's behalf. Trump is "really good at naming enemies, particular individuals or particular groups." Democrats should do the same.

Combatting 'aggressive presidents'

Democrats are "not helpless," said Princeton University historian Julian E. Zelizer at Foreign Policy. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer can "create effective roadblocks for Trump" if they can maintain party unity. In Congress, at least, Republicans have narrow majorities. Any splinters in the GOP have the "potential to quickly bring down a Trump proposal," and history shows that opposition unity is an "enormously effective tool in blocking aggressive presidents making bold moves."

"Where are the Democrats?" said David Corn at Mother Jones. The party should have a "war room" to generate a "nonstop firehose of social media" in opposition to Trump and Musk. Media-savvy elected Democrats like Murphy and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) should be out in front, "denouncing and decrying on a daily basis." But all of that takes a commitment to boldness that Democrats haven't shown so far, Corn added. "You cannot win a war you are not fighting."

'Democrats are fighting back'

Senate Democrats waged an "all-night talkathon" last week to prevent the confirmation of Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget, said The New York Times. He was confirmed anyway: Democrats had "no hope" of stopping Vought while in the minority. But the delaying tactics served the message that "Democrats are fighting back," said Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.).

Congressional Republicans will probably need Democratic assistance to avoid a government shutdown when funding runs out on March 14, said New York magazine. They'll also need Democrats to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a default. There is some talk, then, that Democrats "may shut down government to keep Trump from gutting it." Without guarantees that Trump will rein in Musk, one staffer said, Democrats may decide that "bipartisan cooperation becomes an overwhelming negative for us."

Democrats are in a fragile period of possibility and peril following their monumental drubbing in the 2024 national elections and ahead of Donald Trump's return to office with a unified Republican Congress. Amid this period, several Democrats have tossed their hats in the ring to lead the party as the next chair of the Democratic National Committee.

Some in the running already enjoy a national profile, like former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley. Others, like Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chair Ken Martin and his Wisconsin counterpart Ben Wikler, are less known outside their respective circles. But all the candidates have an eye on the party's precarious future in a new era of American politics.

An 'out-of-touch' party?

After the Democrats' stinging loss to Trump and shedding of "non-white, non-college educated" supporters that once made up the party's grassroots backbone, "fixing the DNC's culture and structure must be at the top of the list of priorities," said DNC members David Atkins and Michael Kapp at Washington Monthly. As it exists now, the institution is "top-heavy, lacks transparency (even to its members), relies on often-out-of-touch Beltway consultants, and endows its chair with too much power."

"Many insiders" see the race as a two-man contest between Wikler and Martin, said Politico. Both are "white guys from Upper Midwestern states" with "little daylight between them." Martin, considered more of a "behind-the-scenes political operative" wants to see the party "focus more on economic issues and less on culture war topics," said The Wall Street Journal. Voters think the GOP "best represents the interests of the working class and the poor" and "don't believe the Democratic Party is fighting for them anymore," Martin said to the Journal.

By comparison, the recent candidacy of Faiz Shakir, former campaign manager for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), could "shake up a contest that has largely focused on party mechanics rather than its ideology," Politico said. "We cannot expect working-class audiences to see us any differently if we are not offering anything new or substantive to attract their support," Shakir said in a letter to DNC members announcing his candidacy obtained by The Nation.

Ending a 'deference to economic elites'

Acknowledging it "may be too late for him to win," Shakir justified his candidacy as something "needed to shake up the race," said The Associated Press. There seemed to be an appetite for Shakir's brand of progressive populism even before he entered the race. Just days earlier, the progressive Sunrise Movement group challenged candidates to "revive President Obama's ban on contributions from corporate lobbyists and PACs to the DNC." Simply by entering the race, Shakir has ensured the contest "will be more sharply focused on ending the DNC's deference to economic elites," said The Nation.

For others, the choice of DNC chair is a question of sheer political skill, rather than an ideological refocusing. Supporters of O'Malley "see him as someone who brings about real change" and a "proven political winner," said The Baltimore Sun. At the same time, he has "expressed some degree of openness to working with the Trump administration."

Members of the DNC are set to meet in early February to elect their new chair. Whoever wins "must be open to reforms and help the organization adapt to modern campaign and media environments," said Atkins and Kapp. It's the only way Democrats can "regain their lost footing."

What happened

The casket carrying Jimmy Carter arrived in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday and was transported by a horse-drawn caisson to the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, where the 39th president now lies in state on the catafalque first used for Abraham Lincoln. Carter, who died at age 100 on Dec. 29, was eulogized by Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), kicking off three days of tributes and ceremonious farewell in the nation's capital.

Who said what

The "bipartisan praise and ceremonial pomp" for Carter "carried some irony," given he "often flouted" ceremonial trappings and "rarely enjoyed" such political plaudits or bonhomie as president, The Associated Press said.

Thune and Johnson focused their eulogies on Carter's stalwart Christian faith, "character, decency and post-presidential humanitarian work," The New York Times said — Thune lauded his labor with Habitat for Humanity and near-eradication of Guinea worm disease — but Harris "made a point of praising his policies while in office as well." Between his environmental stewardship, energy policies, promotion of women and minorities and the Camp David Accords, Carter was a "forward-looking president with a vision for the future" that "will echo for generations," Harris said. "He served the people and he left the world better than he found it," and in the end, his "work, and those works, speak for him — louder than any tribute we can offer."

What next?

Carter's casket will be on public display in the Rotunda until 7 a.m. Thursday, when it will move to Washington National Cathedral; President Joe Biden will deliver the eulogy at his state funeral. Carter will then be flown back to Plains, Georgia, to be buried next to his late wife, Rosalynn.

The U.S. Constitution is more than two centuries old. It hasn't been amended for three decades. Is it finally time for a rewrite?

Some Republicans have been pushing for a new constitutional convention for "more than a decade," said NC Newsline. North Carolina legislators in December voted to ask Congress to convene a convention to address congressional term limits, adding to a "pile of requests" already in the hopper. A conservative group called Convention of States is pushing a broader effort to call a convention for amendments to "limit federal power and rein in reckless spending." That could put America in uncharted territory. Amendments have been passed over the years, but the convention method of changing the Constitution has "never been used," said NC Newsline.

Democrats worry about a "'runaway convention' where anything and everything is on the table," Hayes Brown said at MSBNC. There is a precedent, after all: The original Constitutional Convention in 1787 was called to amend the Articles of Confederation. The founders instead "abolished the articles" and came up with the Constitution instead.

How would a convention work?

"A simple line" in Article V of the Constitution lets Congress call a convention "if two-thirds of state legislatures have called for one," said The New York Times. It's possible the threshold has already been met. Scholars say most states have "long-forgotten requests on the books" that could trigger the provision if Congress chose to act. (Twenty-eight states have asked for a convention just to pass a balanced budget amendment, for example.) Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) has introduced a bill that would require the head of the National Archives to track already-passed applications. But it is "not clear how seriously Republicans would pursue a convention," said the Times.

An Article V convention is "one of the few provisions of the Constitution that has never been implemented," the Congressional Research Service said in a 2016 report. Because of that, there are no precedents to show how a gathering could and should work — instead, there is a "wide range of policy and procedural questions" that would have to be settled by Congress before the work begins. If a convention does occur, any amendments would have to be approved by 38 states. That "arguably acts as a deterrent" to any big changes.

What are the cases for and against a convention?

The Constitution needs "significant, even drastic, revision" to function properly in the modern era, University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson said in the Journal of Legislation & Public Policy. A convention would make it possible for Americans to "imagine what kind of system would make the most sense for 21st-century realities."

Many Democrats disagree. California State Sen. Scott Wiener (D) is sponsoring a bill to rescind his state's call for a convention. There's a danger Republicans could change the Constitution to "restrict voting rights, to eliminate reproductive health access and so forth," he said to the Los Angeles Times. The lack of clear guidelines poses a risk, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law School. "There's no way to know" what choices Congress might make about how a convention would work, "since it's never happened."

When former President Jimmy Carter died on Dec. 29, remembrances and tributes began pouring in, mostly related to his accomplishments after leaving the White House. Carter, whose death at age 100 makes him the longest-living president in American history, rose from beginnings as a Georgia peanut farmer to become the leader of the free world, but it was his efforts post-presidency that have endeared him to subsequent generations.

While his decades after the presidency were defined by numerous humanitarian efforts, including massive advancements for Habitat for Humanity and the near-eradication of the deadly Guinea worm disease, most historians consider his actual presidency a failure. This is largely due to his botched handling of the Iranian hostage crisis and a series of economic issues that confounded his four years in office.

Carter's life is now set to be remembered in the history books, and political analysts and those who knew him seem to be reconsidering the Carter administration and its consensus as a "failure." While his post-presidency will always be what he is remembered for the most, a reevaluation of his presidency itself may also be needed.

What did the commentators say?

Conventional history "holds that Jimmy Carter was a failure as a president, redeemed only by his philanthropy and efforts to promote democracy in his post-presidential years," but this is "palpably wrong," Stuart E. Eizenstat, Carter's chief White House domestic policy adviser, said at The Washington Post. Rather, what Carter achieved both domestically and foreign policy-wise was "more extensive and longer lasting than those of almost all modern presidents." Carter also "helped restore trust in the presidency through ethics reforms more relevant today than ever before" in the years after the Watergate scandal fell on Washington, D.C.

So while Carter left office with disastrously low approval ratings, he "should also be remembered as a consequential president whose single term produced lasting accomplishments," Eizenstat said at The Wall Street Journal. His "success rate at passing major legislation was among the highest of modern presidents," and he also "respected the institutions of government and the free press, no matter how brutal its coverage." But "many major successes remain unappreciated."

This is why viewing Carter as a failed president "doesn't bear scrutiny: He was not a weak president," said Jonathan Alter at the Post. While Carter dealt with several crises during his administration, they were "largely beyond his control," including the "seizure of 52 American hostages in Iran and the failed rescue mission to free them." And while Carter is blamed for the poor American economy during his tenure, this "resulted largely from disruptions in Middle Eastern oil supplies."

Carter will "face history's judgment in determining whether" his presidency "resulted from sheer misfortune or Carter's miscalculations," said Barbara A. Perry at Newsweek. But judicially, his "commitment to egalitarianism on matters of race and gender manifested itself in his approach to federal court nominations," and his attempts to "balance the representative characteristics of appointees, especially in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender, gave him an influential role in shaping the national judiciary."

If "you're president and you're defeated for a second term — that, in our system, is the definition of failure," Les Francis, a strategist who worked for Carter, said to the Los Angeles Times. But Carter "also had a self-righteousness that could present as starchy and sanctimonious, a trait he exhibited even in his good works once he left the White House" but hindered him while in office, Mark Z. Barabak said at the Times.

What next?

Carter's state funeral will take place on Jan. 9, which President Joe Biden also declared a National Day of Mourning. The president will deliver a eulogy at Carter's memorial service, reportedly at the behest of Carter himself; there was a "unique relationship Biden developed with Carter early on in his political career," NPR said.

The 39th president is set to be buried in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, where he was born and died. He will be laid to rest alongside his wife, Rosalynn Carter, who died in November 2023 at the age of 96.

As Democrats "sift through the wreckage of their shattered coalition", one question should jump out at them, said Ruy Teixeira in The Liberal Patriot: "Who is the Democratic Party for, exactly?"

It was no surprise that Donald Trump made further inroads with his base of white, working-class men in the election. But he also improved on his 2020 vote share with Latinos, Asians, urban voters, and young voters. Even women, predicted to turn out in droves to protect abortion rights, voted for Kamala Harris by a smaller margin than for Joe Biden. It was a truly bleak result for the Democrats, said Jonathan Martin on Politico. Unlike in 2016, they couldn't even claim the consolation of winning the popular vote. The only upside is that the depth of the defeat presents them with an opportunity for a total rethink. "Democrats now have a mandate for change."

The first thing they need to change, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, is their preoccupation with group-based identity politics. Although Harris didn't make a big deal of her gender or ethnicity during the campaign, that didn't compensate for the fact that the Democrats in the Trump years became the party of "condescension and cancellation". As the nation's self-appointed language police, they shamed anyone not fluent in gender-fluid pronouns or in "faculty-lounge terminology" such as "Latinx" and "Bipoc" (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour). They embraced ideas such as defunding the police and letting biological males play women's sports. This intellectual and moral preening played well with college-educated women – the only cohort where Democrats made gains – but it "alienated half the country, or more". Most Hispanic and Latino people do not like the term Latinx; and there is data showing that more white progressives think "racism is built into" US society than black and Hispanic Americans.

The Democrats have an image problem, agreed Mike Pesca in The Atlantic. Despite Harris' efforts to sell them as "the party of change, freedom and not being weird", many voters see them as prigs, killjoys and scolds. With its stultifying "rules-bound persnicketiness", the party "resembles that most American of institutions: the HR department".

Still, the Democrats shouldn't lose all perspective on this, said Jackie Calmes in the Los Angeles Times. The result was a shock but it was not a total rejection of their agenda. In historical terms, Trump's margin of victory was slim. He may have won votes by using the issue of transgender rights against Harris, but voters in many states took the Democrats' side on ballot measures for abortion rights, a higher minimum wage and mandatory paid leave; and polls suggest strong support for irregular migrants being able to apply for legal status, a policy the Democrats favoured. In short, the party is in a stronger position than it seems. It should learn the lessons and move on.

There goes Joe Biden's legacy, said Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker. Had Kamala Harris won last week's election, the president might have been remembered for some of his achievements in office. As it is, he'll now just be known as the man who beat Donald Trump, and then let him straight back into the White House through his own stubborn refusal to cede power.

It was clear long before this year that Biden was too old to stand for re-election. Yet having originally presented himself as a transition candidate, he decided to run again anyway, only pulling out in July after his disastrous debate performance. Biden should have resigned a year ago, said Holman W. Jenkins Jr in The Wall Street Journal. Harris could then have been tested as a president, and in a proper Democratic primary. Republican voters might have "taken the cue that Mr Trump's era was over too".

It was Biden's agenda that really messed things up for the Democrats, said Isaac Schorr in the New York Post. One of the main reasons he beat Trump in 2020 was because he "offered the American people some semblance of normalcy". He promised to govern from the centre as a benign moderate. Yet once in power, he suddenly thought he could be Franklin D. Roosevelt. He started governing "as if he were president of some far-left campus club", relaxing controls on the borders and pushing through a series of massive spending bills that exacerbated the inflation problem.

The president hoped to solve three problems at once with his multibillion-dollar climate and infrastructure spending bills, said Kate Aronoff in The New Republic. He wanted to revive America's industrial heartland, challenge China's dominance in clean energy, and win back disaffected working-class voters. In economic terms, the approach has reaped dividends: America is today enjoying a manufacturing boom and low unemployment. But politically, "Bidenomics" has proved a complete dud. It hasn't alleviated the cost-of-living crisis, and it isn't helping the Democrats win elections.

The cruel irony, said Franklin Foer in The Atlantic, is that these long-term investments, which have provided the foundations for economic growth, will probably start paying off politically under Trump, who opposed the legislation. "Biden will have passed along his most substantive legacy as a gift to his successor."

One reason Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election: Democratic voters simply didn't go to the polls.

Voters in traditional "liberal strongholds" failed to show up for Vice President Kamala Harris, said The New York Times. Those strongholds — cities and suburbs, along with traditionally blue states like New Jersey — gave Harris nearly 2 million fewer votes than Joe Biden won four years earlier, while Republican-dominated areas gave Donald Trump an additional 1.2 million votes over 2020. Turnout was also down among traditional Democratic constituencies like Black Christians and Jewish voters. "Many Democrats sat this election out," said the Times.

Harris "tried to build it, but they didn't come," said The Wall Street Journal. It wasn't just Democrats: Overall voter turnout was down from four years ago, but the Democratic losses were "especially sharp." Harris actually did better in the battleground states than in the rest of the country where "turnout plummeted," said the Journal. "What really happened," political science professor John Aughenbaugh told WTOP News, was a "whole bunch of previous Democratic voters were upset with the Democratic Party."

What did the commentators say?

The election was dominated by "fury from the middle class over how much it costs to get by in today's America," Will Bunch said at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Democrats embraced "big money" instead, highlighting billionaires like Mark Cuban and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, the latter of whom taunted Trump at the Democratic National Convention by referring to himself as an "actual billionaire." That's not a winning message for a party that built itself in the 20th century "by turning out the working class," Bunch said. It's time to return to those roots and find candidates who "will reject all billionaire and corporate contributions."

"Not nearly enough people turned out to vote for what the Democratic Party was selling nationally," said MSNBC's Jen Psaki, who previously served as President Joe Biden's press secretary. The party's messaging in the campaign's final days — that Trump represented a fascist turn away from democracy — was "geared too much" toward college-educated white voters. "Clearly that message just didn't connect with enough people," Psaki said. Trump, meanwhile, increased his support among every demographic group, including men, women, young people and Latinos. "If that's not a hard truth," Psaki said, "I don't know what is."

What next?

How bad did the election get for Democrats? More self-identified independents went to the polls than Democrats, said Reuters. Independents piled up 34% of the vote — same as the GOP share — while registered Democrats came in at 32% of the electorate. The independent share was up 8 points from 2020, when independents were a "distant third" to both Democrats and Republicans.

The sharp drop in Democratic turnout has fed some conspiracy theories on the left, suggesting that Harris was robbed of rightful votes, said PolitiFact. That's simply not true. "There is no evidence that any votes disappeared," said Ishan Mehta, director of media and democracy at Common Cause. Turnout simply "ebbs and flows" from election to election. If Democratic voters didn't turn out, that just means they "made a decision not to cast a ballot, either not turn out at all, or not check the top contest," said Paul Gronke, a political science professor. "That's the end of the story."

Many top Democrats thought it for years. Now they are saying it out loud: They think Donald Trump is a fascist.

While Trump's potential ties to fascism have been debated in public for nearly a decade, many Democrats running for federal office thought the term was "best left unsaid," said The New York Times. That is changing. Trump is "about fascism," Charlemagne Tha God said during his podcast interview with Kamala Harris. "Can't we just say that?" "Yes, we can say that," Harris said. That followed revelations in a new book that retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had called Trump "fascist to the core." Trump's Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly agreed.

There is pushback. "The fascist meme is all over the place," The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. It's true that Trump's language is "often coarse and divisive," and he has a penchant for praising dictators. Still, he did win the GOP nomination for a third time. "Are tens of millions of Americans really falling for a fascist takeover?" Probably not. Trump was "hemmed in" by checks and balances during his term in office, the Journal said. In a second term, those same institutions "would resist any attempt to subvert the Constitution."

'Beast out of 1930s Germany'

"The left doesn't know any other way to make its case," Rich Lowry said at National Review. Democrats can't merely oppose Republican Party principles and candidates. "No, the GOP always has to be a slouching beast out of 1930s Germany." Democrats don't understand the restraints in place — or that the Supreme Court decision granting Trump immunity from prosecution for "official acts" might "benefit President Biden" when he leaves office. Instead, we get "irrational and unhinged" attacks on Trump and his agenda, Lowry said. "It always has to be the F-word with these people."

"Let's be honest, Trump's running as a fascist," Will Saletan said at The Bulwark. Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. He has advocated a "really violent day" of anti-criminal action, promised to protect police from prosecutions for following his orders, threatened to use the military against his domestic opponents and threatened the broadcast license of networks whose reporting he doesn't like. The word "fascist" fits perfectly, Saletan said. "That's not hype; it's a textbook application of the term."

'I don't fear Donald Trump'

Republicans say Democratic charges of fascism are themselves a kind of incitement. "All of the rhetoric needs to stop," Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) said on CBS' "Face the Nation." On NBC's "Meet the Press," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) took aim at Milley's "fascist to the core" comment about Trump: "You have a right to your opinion, but I don't fear Donald Trump," Graham said.

Others do. "There is no precedent for such a thing in American history," Jamelle Bouie said at The New York Times. Milley's warning about Trump is unusual: There is "no example" of another high-ranking general who felt the need to "warn the public of the danger posed by its once and perhaps future chief executive." With good reason. During his first term, Trump had people around him who curbed his worst impulses. That won't happen in a second term. "Next time, we won't be so lucky."

On paper, Kamala Harris is a solid choice, arguably better qualified than any incoming president since George H.W. Bush. 

She has been both attorney general and senator of the nation's most populous state, California; she has served on the Senate Intelligence Committee and Judiciary Committee. As vice-president, she has presided over the Senate for four years, shepherding though major laws such as the Inflation Reduction Act, and she has met more than 150 world leaders. 

Harris is, though, the first Democratic presidential nominee in 50 years to have been selected outside the usual system of primary elections, because of Joe Biden's abrupt decision to drop out. And, of course, if she wins the election on 5 November, she will be the first woman, the first black woman and the first Asian American to be the US president – as she has been in so many of her previous roles.

Where did she grow up?

Harris was born in Oakland, California, in October 1964. Her Indian-born mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a breast cancer researcher at Berkeley, University of California; her father, Donald Harris, is a distinguished Marxist economist from Jamaica. Both were civil rights activists: they met at Oakland's influential AfroAmerican Association, and took Kamala to protests from a young age. 

They separated when she was five, and she was largely raised by her mother, who immersed her and her sister in Oakland's black culture, taking them to a Baptist church as well as a Hindu temple. Harris was bussed from her largely black neighbourhood to a majority white school in a rich part of Berkeley, as part of a controversial desegregation plan. 

After high school, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington DC, one of the bastions of black American political and cultural life. She majored in political science and economics before attending law school in California.

What did she achieve in her legal career?

In 1990, Harris took a job at the Alameda County district attorney's office; she specialised in prosecuting sex crimes. In 2003, at 39, she was elected as San Francisco's district attorney. Eight years later, she became attorney general of California. 

Serving as a prosecutor was controversial in her milieu, because the criminal justice system was seen as oppressive to African Americans. Harris says in her memoir, "The Truths We Hold", that she thinks the system is "broken", but wanted to be "on the other side" to effect change. 

She was a "progressive" prosecutor who opposed the death penalty and launched rehabilitation initiatives to cut reoffending, but she was also not afraid to be "tough on crime". As California's attorney general, she tripled the number of felony offenders sent to state prison.

What explains her political rise?

Harris is said to be an excellent networker, and she has many influential allies. She was an early backer of Barack Obama, and is good friends with Gavin Newsom, California's governor. She's also a formidable campaigner: she beat Loretta Sanchez, a congresswoman of 20 years' standing, to the Democratic Senate nomination in 2016; she won the seat on the night that Donald Trump won the presidency. 

On the Senate Judiciary Committee, she became known for her grillings of Trump officials and Supreme Court nominees: "Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?" she asked the conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh, to his clear discomfort. Her performances cemented her status as a rising star of the Democratic Party; before long she was being touted as a possible presidential candidate to take on Trump in 2020.

Why did her first presidential bid fail?

It started well, with a rally 20,000 strong in Oakland in January 2019, and she outshone Joe Biden in the first candidates' debate in June. But she failed to capitalise on her early momentum, quitting the race in December, before the primary votes began. Pundits agreed that she'd failed to articulate a clear narrative and that, by trying to appeal to both moderates and progressives in her party, she had pleased neither. 

Yet she was chosen by Biden in August 2020 to be his presidential running mate; Republican critics often scornfully describe her as a "diversity hire", because the decision came at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement.

How has she fared as VP?

She got off to a rough start. Biden handed her the thorny portfolio of addressing the "root causes" of illegal immigration to the US from Central America – a vague brief which left her indelibly linked with the administration's failure to curb the flow of migrants across the Mexican border. At her lowest point, fully 55% of voters had an unfavourable opinion of her; there was even speculation that Biden would drop her from the ticket to improve his re-election chances. 

But her standing improved after the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion in 2022: she became the White House's leading voice in defending reproductive rights, and on gun control. That endeared her to the Democratic base, helping her cruise to the nomination this year.

What does she believe in?

Harris is still seen as something of a political chameleon (not helped by her penchant for rather convoluted "word salad" public statements). Her positions on healthcare funding and immigration have notably hardened in recent years: she now supports a hardline bipartisan border security package put forward by Biden. But on reproductive rights and gay marriage she retains clear liberal positions. 

On foreign policy, she has vowed to support Ukraine against Russia "for as long as it takes". On Israel, she has been a long-term supporter of a two-state solution, and she was one of the first members of the Biden administration to call for an "immediate ceasefire" in Gaza.

Momala: the co-parent

Harris first stepped into the public eye in 1994, when Clint Eastwood spilt champagne on her at the 60th birthday party of Willie Brown, then the speaker of the California State Assembly, whom Harris was dating at the time. San Francisco Chronicle gossip columnist Herb Caen described Harris, then a 30-year-old deputy district attorney, as "something new in Willie's love life. She's a woman, not a girl." They split after two years.

In 2013, she met Doug Emhoff, an LA-based entertainment lawyer, now her husband. They were set up on a blind date by a mutual friend. "It felt like we had known each other for ever," Emhoff remembered, but Harris warned him that she was a busy woman. "I didn't want it to end," he said. "And so the next morning, I pulled the move of emailing her with my availabilities for the next four months, including long weekends." 

A year later, when Harris was 49, they were married. Harris became a stepmother (or "Momala") to his son Cole, 30, and daughter Ella, 25. When J.D. Vance, Trump's running mate, complained that the Democrats were led by "a bunch of childless cat ladies", Emhoff's first wife, Kerstin, retorted that Harris was an excellent "co-parent" to her children: "loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present".

Two parties are too few for some Americans. Yes, Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris are the two major contenders for the presidency in November 2024. But many voters would like to see additional choices.

A recent poll of progressive activists found that “one in four activists knew someone who was considering a third party protest vote,” Dave Weigel said at Semafor. That’s a sign that Harris is having trouble with working class voters who have “drifted right” in recent years. And it's the latest manifestation of a longstanding American desire to shake up politics — albeit one that's always fallen short.

In just this election cycle, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. mounted his own independent bid for the presidency, as did celebrity scholar Cornel West. Both men fought battles to get on state ballots for the election, with mixed degrees of success — Arizona rejected West's efforts, while New York rebuffed several attempts by Kennedy. It proved to be hard work: Kennedy finally dropped out of the race in late August and endorsed Donald Trump.

Those are just the latest attempts to disrupt the two-party system since Democrats and Republicans emerged as the main rivalry in the mid-19th century. None of these third parties have lasted over the long term — or won a presidential election — but a few notable efforts have left their imprint on American politics and history.

American Independent Party

The notorious segregationist George Wallace formed the American Independent Party in 1968 in order to run for president. (He had failed in his effort to win the Democratic Party nomination from President Lyndon Johnson four years earlier.) Curtis LeMay, the former Air Force general who urged President Kennedy to bomb Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, was his running mate.

Wallace didn't think he could win the presidency outright — but he did think he could game the system and play kingmaker. PBS' American Experience described the strategy in its history of the 1968 campaign: Although Wallace campaigned "as though he believed he were a viable candidate for president," the real goal was to sap enough votes from Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, the Republican and Democratic nominees, to deny both men an electoral college victory, and thus throw the election to the House of Representatives. "There, Wallace could demand that the other candidates support him on his issues before he would deliver the presidency," said PBS.

Here's the crazy thing: it nearly worked. Wallace carried five states — Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia — and came close to Nixon in North Carolina and Tennessee. Nixon barely beat Humphrey in the national popular vote, eking out a 1% win, but claimed 301 electoral votes, which were more than needed to spoil Wallace's dream of spoiling his election. Wallace's consolation: He was the last third-party candidate to win electoral votes. He tried again in 1972 but was shot and paralyzed on the campaign trail.

Reform Party

Like the American Independent Party, the Reform Party started out as a vehicle for one man's outsized presidential ambitions. Ross Perot, the billionaire Texas businessman, had made a splashy, on-again, off-again run for president as an independent candidate in 1992 — and performed respectably, capturing nearly 19% of the popular vote. (Bill Clinton won that election, and many Republicans have long blamed Perot for spoiling George H.W. Bush's re-election in that campaign.) In 1995, he decided to make it formal, announcing the launch of the Reform Party, and predicting it would eventually replace either the Democratic Party or GOP. "One of those two parties is going to disappear," Perot said to an interviewer, "one of those special interest parties is going to melt down."

Unsurprisingly, Perot was the Reform Party's first nominee for president in 1996. But he didn't do as well as his first run — he earned just 8.4% of the popular vote. (For what it's worth, that was just about the margin of Clinton's victory over GOP nominee Bob Dole.) That was good enough that, under federal law, the Federal Election Commission in 2000 provided $12.6 million in matching funds to the party's 2000 nominee, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan. But the Reform Party has never again made quite the impact it did during Perot's first runs for the presidency.

Instead, its legacy might be best remembered for two things. In 1998, former professional wrestler Jesse "The Body" Ventura won the Minnesota governorship under the Reform Party banner — albeit with 37% of the vote. And in 2000, another celebrity businessman in the tradition of Ross Perot made a brief, aborted run for the party's presidential nomination. You might have heard of him: His name was Donald Trump.

Green Party

No discussion of modern third parties is complete, of course, without the Green Party. It originally formed in the 1980s with an emphasis on environmental justice, but it really came to prominence in 2000 when consumer crusader Ralph Nader won the party's nomination and made a bid for lefty voters who had become disenchanted with the Democratic Party's "third way" neoliberalism under Bill Clinton. Nader won just 2.74% of the vote.

That might not be worth mentioning — except, of course, that was the year George W. Bush lost the popular vote and won the electoral vote, barely. The race between Bush and Al Gore came down to Florida, which ended up infamously mired in a weeks-long haze of hanging chads amidst a recount of the votes to see who would win the state's electoral votes, and thus the presidency. Officially, Bush won the state by 537 votes, after a controversial Supreme Court ruling that stopped the recount. Nader received more than 97,000 votes in the state. And Democrats have blamed him ever since for costing the party the White House.

"Lots of factors can be blamed for such a paper-thin defeat," Bill Scher said at Real Clear Politics. But if Nader had "chosen not to embark on an obviously quixotic campaign, Al Gore would have been elected president." Nader has always denied culpability for Gore's loss. "The two-party tyranny is spoiled to the core," Nader wrote in 2016 at the Los Angeles Times. "The least-worst choices are getting worse every four years."

Forward and No Labels

The 2024 election brought several new groups into the fray. In 2022, former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and one-time presidential candidate Andrew Yang — who came to prominence as a Republican and Democrat, respectively — announced the formation of Forward, a centrist party designed to appeal to Americans frustrated with the country's two dominant political factions. "Some call third parties 'spoilers,'" the pair said in a Washington Post op-ed, "but the system is already spoiled."

The party didn't end up nominating a presidential candidate in 2024, but it is working on several state-level races.

It is No Labels, though — a coalition of Republicans, Democrats and independents that was formed to fight partisanship — that drew the most attention and criticism. The group was seen by critics as a means of attracting centrist votes that might otherwise go to the Democratic ticket, and thus assisting Donald Trump's election efforts. In April, though, No Labels announced it would not nominate a presidential candidate.

The idea will probably remain popular, at least in the abstract. Gallup said that 58% of Americans say a third party is needed because Republicans and Democrats "do such a poor job" of representative voter preferences. "It is unclear," Gallup said, "whether they are genuinely expressing a desire for a third option or are simply frustrated with the two existing parties."

The elevation of Kamala Harris has transformed the presidential race, said Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine. As well as re-energising the Democrats, the move has had a secondary effect: sending Donald Trump around the bend. Having survived an assassination attempt and enjoyed a rapturous reception at the Republican National Convention, he was confident of beating Joe Biden – and this kept his more self-destructive traits in check. But Biden's withdrawal from the race, and the surge of momentum behind Harris, have led Trump to "indulge his most deranged instincts". In rambling press conferences and rallies, he has raged against Harris, even claiming that the crowds at her events have been concocted through using artificial intelligence. 

Denied a rematch

Trump has not responded well to being denied his rematch with Biden, said Jeet Heer in The Nation. He has repeatedly referred to Biden in "surprisingly wistful terms", suggesting, without any basis, that the president might yet force his way back onto the Democratic ticket. Trump just can't get over losing to Biden in 2020, agreed Chuck Todd on NBC News.

"He also doesn't seem to respect Harris as an opponent." That's a dangerous attitude for a candidate. Voters pick up on such "disdain", and don't react positively to it – as Trump should know all too well. One of the reasons he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, after all, is because she looked down on him, and referred to his supporters as a "basket of deplorables".

'Trump must do it himself'

"Ugly, personal attacks" on Harris will get Trump nowhere, said Jason L. Riley in The Wall Street Journal. He needs to concentrate on issues, and to draw a contrast between his record and that of the current administration. Harris has taken many unpopular stances in the past. She supported a ban on fracking; said she would "eliminate" private health insurance and impose a state-run system; endorsed slavery reparations; and backed efforts to defund the police. Her campaign is now busily trying to walk back some of these positions. Trump can't count on the mainstream media to take Harris to task over her record – Washington's shamelessly biased journalists are giving her an easy ride. "Trump must do it himself."

To better get his message across, he should consider dispensing with rallies, said Daniel Henninger in the same paper. He loves them, and so do his fans – I met a man recently who said he'd attended more than 70. But the events don't win new converts. Trump should instead hold town hall meetings with uncommitted voters. He's "much better than Ms. Harris in these more intimate settings". 

'Insane claims and random stories'

Trump's handlers are trying to do something like that by holding pared-down speaking events at which, in theory, he restricts himself to one topic, said Edith Olmsted in The New Republic. Last week he held a press conference about inflation, next to a table of groceries. He began reading from notes, but soon veered "off script into an array of insane claims and random stories".

Of course he did, said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. Expecting Trump to stick to the script is "like betting Godot will be punctual or Lucy won't yank the football from Charlie Brown". It won't happen, and it wouldn't make much difference anyway. Thanks to the "reality show politics" that Trump helped create, substantive issues no longer count for much in US elections. It's all about personality and "vibes" now – and the reality is that Harris has the edge here because she has a novelty factor. "Trump and his enablers created the vibe petard, and now they're being hoisted on it."

Tim Walz has formally accepted the vice-presidential nomination, telling Democrats that "we'll sleep when we're dead".

Kamala Harris's running mate was "emotional" as he "touted his small-town upbringing" at the Democratic National Convention, said the BBC, but although his party seems "energised" by his place on the ticket, polls still suggest a "very close race" with Donald Trump and his own running mate, JD Vance.

What did the commentators say?

Walz's address in Chicago was a "political speed date" for a man "with limited time to show what he stands for", wrote James Matthews, US correspondent for Sky News. In the "huge" speech, he "won over delegates' hearts and minds", said Ed Pilkington, chief reporter for The Guardian US.  Trump has claimed that vice-presidential running mates make "virtually no impact" on elections, and after Walz's speech, the Republican "better pray he's right".

"At moments", wrote Philip Elliott for Time, it was "plenty clear" that Walz could "make inroads" to moderates and conservative voters who "mightn't be entirely on-board with Harris".

Walz "seems entirely comfortable", if "cornily so", in his "persona as the Dad Next Door" who "never found a cliche he didn't find useful as a proxy for his feelings", and he "also brought sufficient fire" to keep the Democratic base "fired up" without "alienating the centrist core that is this nation".

Allies believe Walz can "broaden" Harris's appeal to "rural and working class voters", wrote Sam Cabral for BBC News. The 60-year-old "brings with him a folksy, plain-spoken and sharp-tongued approach" and political experience, "representing a Republican-leaning district in Congress" and "then later passing left-wing policies as Minnesota's governor", which could have "broad appeal" at a time when US politics is "so polarised".

"In recent years", Bruce Schulman, the William E. Huntington Professor of History at the Boston University College of Arts & Sciences, told BU Today, "the idea of 'balance' has reappeared" in demographic terms. The Democrats have balanced gender on their tickets three times and the Republicans have done it once. "You could consider this a case of both gender and ethnic-racial balance", he added.

Reporting on the first Harris-Walz event, in Philadelphia earlier this month, The Independent's Andrew Feinberg said the arena was "literally packed to the rafters" with an energy that "hasn't been present at any Democratic event in nearly a decade".

The "multiracial, multigenerational" crowd "mirrored the scenes I witnessed during Donald Trump's first campaign for the presidency" and was also "something I hadn't seen since" Barack Obama's campaign for a second term. Harris and Walz may be the underdogs, but Feinberg thinks we could see an "underdog victory on election night".

What next?

With one more day to go, the convention will climax with a speech by Harris this evening, when she'll "face the biggest test of her political life", said Lauren Gambino in The Guardian.

With Walz watching, she is expected to try and "lay out her personal story" as she "bids to become a historic president: the first woman president and the first woman of colour", but she "will also lay out a sharp contrast" between her "positive view of the country's future prospects" and Trump's "almost wholly grim warnings about the state of the nation" and his "focus on immigration and crime".

Trump is "reportedly fretting" over whether Harris's speech will "draw more viewers than his did", said The Independent. The "notoriously ratings-fixated" former president has been asking some media and political allies "what they think the Democratic convention's TV ratings will be like", said Rolling Stone.

For years, Democrats (and a small number of Republicans) have been working on how best to frame Donald Trump and his MAGA movement to persuadable voters. At various points over the past decade, Trump has been portrayed as a "threat to democracy," a "fraud," and a "con man," all in an attempt to impart a sense of looming and existential endangerment over his political ascendency. 

This year, however, as a reenergized Democratic party rallies around Vice President Kamala Harris as its new standard-bearer following President Joe Biden's decision to end his reelection campaign, a growing number of lawmakers have rolled out a new line of attack on Trump and his vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance: They're just weird. Although perhaps not the most sophisticated line of attack, it's a message that has nevertheless gained traction, first among campaign surrogates and potential vice presidential nominees like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and then Harris' own team and the Democratic party at large. 

It remains to be seen whether the Democrats can ride this "weird" wave all the way to an electoral victory, but it seems clear that the party sees this tonal shift as impactful — at least for now. 

'Weird people' was an online hit

While the trend arguably began with Minnesota's Walz, whose "description last week of 'weird people on the other side' was an online hit with Democrats," The New York Times said, the Harris campaign's embrace of that same framing should come as little surprise. Preparing for a one-on-one debate with Trump in 2018, Harris went so far as to tell aides that if he attempted to stalk behind her onstage as he did Hillary Clinton in 2016, she would turn and ask him "why are you being so weird?" CNN said. Recently, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg similarly described Trump as getting "older and stranger," and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Vance is "weird" and "erratic." Harris added her campaign's official seal of approval, writing in a memo of takeaways from a recent Trump interview that "Trump is old and quite weird?" 

The Democratic National Committee itself followed suit shortly thereafter.

Previous attempts by Democrats to use "high-minded defenses of our principles or elegant rhetorical phrases aren't doing the job," said The Bulwark. "Neither is existential dread." Labeling Trump and Vance as weird is "less lofty and more grounded in daily reality." The tactic "conspicuously stands apart from the Democrats' usual 'when they go low, we go high' modus operandi," ABC News said. Notably, the "weird" attacks make up a "unified Democratic firing line" that stands in "sharp contrast to the Republicans, who have yet to emerge with their own effective message to counter Harris' 'honeymoon' period," The Independent said. 

Biden couldn't "authentically call his opposition 'weird,'" said Amanda Litman, co-founder of the progressive group Run for Something, to Politico. Harris' embrace of the term is in part "about being free from the obligation to speak in Biden's voice." The previous era of 'strained decorum is — or at least should be — over,' said Rolling Stone. 

'Cut the crap please'

To a lesser extent, Republicans have "also gotten in on the action," including releasing a campaign memo for Senate candidates highlighting Harris' "weird" behavior, such as loving Venn diagrams, Semafor said. 

The GOP's attempt to flip the "weird" attack back at Harris might be "one way to undermine Harris' personal appeal without getting into more sensitive territory" like race and gender, Semafor said. Not all Republicans seem to agree, however. Former GOP presidential candidate and fervent Trump backer Vivek Ramaswamy decried the Democrats as acting "dumb & juvenile" and urged them to "win on policy if you can, but cut the crap please" in a post on X. 

Vance, for his part, has denied being affected by the "weird" attacks. "It doesn't hurt my feelings," said Vance in a brief Fox News interview this week. Vance also called the "weird" label the "price of admission" for running for high office, and "ultimately an honor."

In the wake of President Joe Biden's historic decision to abandon his reelection campaign and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris in his stead, nearly everyone has pointed to Biden's disastrous debate performance as the moment when his capacity to run for office truly came into broad public question. Not only did Biden falter during the debate itself, but his halting, unsteady performance stood in stark relief against the campaign's fervent claims that the president was both physically fit and mentally acute enough to wage a national campaign — to say nothing of leading the nation for another four and a half years. Biden did not simply have a bad debate night, but he did so at the expense of a longstanding effort by his team to portray the 81-year-old chief executive as spry and vigorous. 

Questions about Biden's record-setting presidential age are nothing new, having played a not-insubstantial role in his last presidential election four years ago. Despite — or perhaps because of — those longstanding concerns, the president's unmistakably frail showings not only led to his ultimate decision to end his reelection campaign, but prompted many to ask whether some among Biden's aides and advisers have been publicly denying age-based concerns they privately know to be true. Biden's own claims of mental and physical fitness notwithstanding, was the president enabled by some to run for high office to the detriment of the voting public, and himself? 

'An increasingly protective circle'

"While it's clear the president had aged in the past year," many White House staffers were taken aback by the "version of Biden, faltering and dazed, that showed up at last month's debate," CNN said. Many of those same staffers "blamed the president's inner circle of advisers and family" for orchestrating a "painstakingly choreographed daily operation designed to prevent him from being in unscripted settings for extended periods of time." 

"It's not like Biden's inner circle didn't know this," said one Democratic strategist to the network. But while his inner circle may have, many in the wide constellation of Democratic operatives and donors feel "misled by what they say is an effort to tamp down concerns, raised well before the debate, about whether Biden is fit for a second term," The Wall Street Journal said. The president's "small clutch of advisers have built an increasingly protective circle around him," Politico said. That his difficulties during the debate "came as such a shock" to so many was the "result of how effectively his top aides and the White House on the whole has, for three and a half years, kept him in a cocoon."

That alleged cocoon not only prevented the public from seeing the extent of Biden's aging, but may have prevented Biden himself from understanding this moment in history as well. "There was a belief that the president isn't getting an accurate assessment of where the race stands right now," said one member of Congress to Puck, following a phone call between lawmakers and the president in the weeks before he dropped his campaign. 

'The price they will pay'

For their part, Republicans have seized upon the dissonance between Biden's alleged vigor and his apparent frailty by alleging the president and his team colluded to perpetrate a "whopper" of a "coverup" for which the Democrats will ultimately pay an electoral price, The Wall Street Journal said. Democrats "underestimate the price they will pay for lying this way" because for "all our willingness to forgive and forget, Americans don’t like being played for suckers." To that end, some conservative lawmakers have demanded audio from Biden's interviews with then-special counsel Robert Hur this past October, which would "show exactly what we all saw on the debate stage a couple weeks ago," and which Democrats "want to cover up," said House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) earlier this month. 

Biden's decision to run and remain in the race for as long as he did may have been the result of a close cabal of advisers shielding him, and the public, from the reality of his political viability, but in a way so too was his ultimate decision to drop out. Even as Biden was finishing his concession letter on Sunday afternoon, "unaware White House officials and the president's allies were still pressing reporters with comments about how determined the president was to stay in the race," The New York Times said. 

There are just under four months to go before the 2024 presidential campaign. Have Democrats already given up on winning? Maybe. "We've all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency," an anonymous Democrat told Axios, after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. That quote produced an angry reaction from not-so-anonymous Democrats, said The Guardian. "If you're a 'senior Democrat' that feels this way you should absolutely retire and make space for true leadership that refuses to resign themselves to fascism," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said on social media. 

But other observers also wonder if Trump's near-miss cemented a November victory. "The presidential contest ended last night," another unnamed Democratic consultant told NBC News. The pushback has been fierce. "Get a grip, Democrats, you can still win this," said Bill Scher at Washington Monthly. The events of 2024 have already been wildly unpredictable. Who's to say what happens between now and November? "Political professionals," Scher said, "should know better than to predict defeat four months before Election Day."

'The ship is going down'

"It's hard to see any way out for the Democrats," Matthew Continetti said at National Review. Even before the assassination attempt, the party's divisions over President Joe Biden were already on display after his disastrous debate performance against Trump. Stick with Biden and the party heads into November "with an unpopular incumbent the public believes is too old for the job." If Biden steps aside, he'll be replaced by an "unknown and untested candidate." Bottom line? "The ship is going down."

Democratic defeatism is "sad and pathetic," Jonathan Chait said at New York magazine. The party is apparently responding to the attack on Trump by "standing down its efforts to deny him office." That's reminiscent of the days and weeks after 9/11, when Democrats decided that national unity meant praising President George W. Bush instead of holding him accountable for failing to prevent the attacks. "The result of this dangerously unbalanced equation was a comprehensive political and moral disaster." The same will happen if Democrats abdicate now. 

Trump: Not a 'normal politician'

"The 2024 presidential election is not over yet," Gideon Rachman said at Financial Times. It's true that a "normal politician" could expect to pick up sympathy votes in the wake of a failed assassination. Donald Trump is not a normal politician. "Millions of 'never Trump' voters are unlikely to become 'Yes Trumpers,' however appalled they are by the vile attempted murder." The biggest factor going forward is probably not the shooting, but concerns about Biden's age. That's the "most probable game-changer in the 2024 election." 

Biden may have actually gotten a reprieve, Andrew Prokop said at Vox. "Trump's shooting has knocked Biden's fate out of the headlines." For the two weeks leading up to the shocking violence, talk of the president's age and electoral fate dominated the news. That's over, for the moment. "It's far too early to write off an election that is months away." That's the good news. But the defeatism of Democrats does accomplish one thing: "It helps Biden hang on."

President Joe Biden has been adamant that, despite his widely panned performance in the first presidential debate against Donald Trump, he will nevertheless continue running for a second term in office. Defying a growing chorus of Democratic figures demanding he step aside for the good of the country, "the bottom line here is that we're not going anywhere," said Biden in an interview with MSNBC's "Morning Joe." 

Biden's refusal to entertain leaving the race has done nothing to tamp down concerns that, at 81, he is simply not the politician he was when he defeated Trump four years ago. Betting markets have already begun circling around Vice President Kamala Harris as a replacement candidate. At the same time, major campaign donors have started "wielding their fortunes as both carrot and stick" to convince Biden to stand aside," The New York Times said. No matter how much the president and his team have worked to move past worries around his age and mental acuity, it's clear that a sizable portion of Biden's base remains deeply unconvinced. 

There has been ample speculation as to who might replace Biden on the presidential ticket should he eschew his party's nomination, but the truth is that there are multiple steps to consider before any successor is chosen. 

What did the commentators say?

Currently, Biden has nearly 4,000 Democratic primary delegates — almost twice as many as necessary to lock in his party's nomination. If he voluntarily drops out of the race before the Democratic National Convention later this summer, those delegates "would be free to support another candidate of their choice" at the convention, USA Today said. Not only would this be the "most straightforward scenario," it would also most closely resemble the historical precedent set by past conventions when candidates would "go from one state delegation to another to make their case." Dropping out before the convention would be "legally easy but politically difficult," said CBS News. Dropping pre-convention also means Biden would "likely have significant influence" in helping coalesce support around his preferred successor — likely Harris — within the party's base.

If Biden doesn't step down, "there is currently not enough opposition within his own party to remove him from the ticket," said University of Portsmouth teaching fellow and election researcher Dafydd Townley. The "mechanics" of forcing a candidate to step down against their will would be "chaotic at best, if it is even possible," agreed ABC Action News. Nearly every Democratic delegate is currently pledged to Biden, and while party rules allow for a "conscience clause" that lets them break that pledge it is "rarely, if ever, exercised," The New York Times said. 

If Biden were to exit the race after accepting the party's nomination during the convention, things get slightly more complicated and considerably more straightforward at the same time. While the process differs between Democrats and Republicans, should Biden drop out post-nomination, the Democratic National Committee is "empowered to fill a vacancy on the national ticket," — thereby avoiding a messy convention-floor fight — but only "after the party chair consults with Democratic governors and congressional leadership," CNN said. 

What next? 

Biden himself has publicly precluded any chance that he will drop out pre-DNC and even dared party figures and potential challengers in an interview with MSNBC this week to "run against me. Go ahead. Announce for president. Challenge me at the convention."

In fact, by the time Democrats gather in Chicago for the DNC, Biden may already have been officially nominated by the party to "meet a ballot certification deadline in Ohio on that date," CBS News said. Because of that, "I don't know what that looks like in the event that there's going to be a contested convention," University of Notre Dame Political Science Professor Derek Muller said to the network. 

For those looking to history for some analogous precedent, the last time an incumbent dropped out of a race mid-campaign was in 1968, when Lyndon Johnson abandoned his reelection bid ahead of that year's chaotic DNC in, coincidentally, Chicago. As the "only time a major party had to replace its candidate in mid-cycle," Politico said, the "result was disastrous."

The New York primary may come to be seen as a key tipping point for the Democratic Party, said Li Zhou on Vox. Last week, Jamaal Bowman, a member of the ultra-progressive faction in Congress known as "the Squad", and a fierce critic of Israel, lost the race to George Latimer – a pro-Israel moderate. 

It was a contest that highlighted stark divisions among Democrats over the war in Gaza. Bowman had received strong support from fellow squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and from the veteran senator Bernie Sanders, who called the primary "one of the most important elections in the modern history of this country". While some might challenge Sanders over that claim, what is certainly true is that it was the most expensive congressional primary in history. The American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) funnelled some $15 million into the campaign. 

The "obscene sums" spent on defeating Bowman will "serve as a warning to other politicians about the cost of breaking with Washington's pro-Israeli political consensus", said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. In one sense, his defeat is not surprising. The district, comprising a slice of the Bronx and parts of suburban Westchester County, is heavily Jewish. And Bowman has been "reckless" in his language about Gaza. He has "fallen into the left-wing habit of using 'Zionist' as an insult", and he stupidly dismissed reports of Israeli women being raped during Hamas's 7 October raid on Israel as a "lie" used for "propaganda". (He later apologised.) Nevertheless, it will be a shame if his defeat stops Democrats voicing legitimate qualms about the Gaza conflict. And the race has set a worrying precedent for "big money interference in local politics". 

It suits Bowman and his supporters to blame his loss on AIPAC money, said Liz Wolfe in Reason, but it's not that simple. His strident criticism of Israel certainly "didn't play well", and nor did his "far-left progressivism", following a spike in street crime. Bowman is the Democratic version of his fellow New York demagogue Donald Trump, said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post. Like Trump, he has a history of foul-mouthed public rants, of "playing the martyr" and peddling conspiracy theories (such as that 9/11 was an inside job). But while the Republicans have embraced Trump, the Democrats have tired of Bowman's act and now given him the boot. "Good riddance."

"Get ready for the Great Democratic Freakout," said Karen Tumulty in The Washington Post. 

"Even the most creative of spinners" in Joe Biden's camp will struggle to "manufacture a victory narrative out of his dreadful performance" against Donald Trump in last night's televised debate. The president's voice was hoarse, his answers  sometimes muddled and he appeared to struggle his way through the 90 minutes. And though Trump spouted a "litany of lies", he was "better prepared and more disciplined than most anyone might have expected". 

The "once unspeakable" is now an active discussion among Democrats, said Politico: is it time to replace Biden on the ticket?  

'The world needs America at its best'

It was so bad, I wept, said Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times. The debate revealed that Biden, "a good man and a good president, has no business" running for a second term. "I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime."  

Trump was "preposterous", but "he emerged the undisputed winner", said Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect. Biden was "too old and infirm" to dispute even the "most blatant fabrications" levelled at him by the former president – "or to persuasively defend his demonstrably superior record and positions". 

Come election day in November, I don't see any "plausible way" Biden can beat Trump, Meyerson said. The Democrats "should heed the lessons imparted by leading Republicans in 1974", when they convinced then-president Nixon to stand down following the Watergate scandal. They succeeded then – and "now, it's up to the Democrats". 

"If there was ever a time that the world needs an America at its best, led by its best, it is now," said Friedman. A younger Biden "could have been that leader, but time has finally caught up with him". He is no longer "up to the job", and that became "painfully and inescapably obvious" yesterday. The president can "keep the dignity he deserves" if he stands aside – and "if he does, everyday Americans will hail Joe Biden" for putting the country's needs ahead of his own ambitions.  

'Slim' chance of changing course

"There have been bad, even disastrous, debate performances in the past," said Jonathan Tobin on Newsweek. But never before did "the spinners wave the white flag and concede that their candidate was beaten". Few Democrats "bothered to conceal the panic they felt" watching a debate which "confirmed the country's worst fears" about the sitting president's capacity. 

It was a "catastrophe" for Biden, but the "really bad news" is for the Democrats, because the odds of replacing him with another candidate "are slim no matter how many of them are now screaming for it", he continued. 

To pick a new nominee now would throw the party into "turmoil", said the Post's Tumulty. Besides, said Tobin, there is no "realistic mechanism for toppling an incumbent president who already has the nomination sewed up". The national party has "no power" to stop a candidate "sweeping to the nomination on the basis of primary victories in which ordinary voters have the final word". 

Biden's "arrogance, contempt for critics and loathing of his opponents", he continued, "makes me think that he will never give up the chance for another term under virtually any circumstances".

Even Democrats who have "privately complained about Biden's performance acknowledged" the unlikeliness of "a brokered convention or Biden stepping aside", said Politico. The "only bright spot" in the debate, an unnamed senior adviser to Democratic officials told the news site, "is that this happened in June and not October".

Donald Trump is the first American president to have a felony conviction on his record. That's a big deal. But some critics say that Democrats aren't doing enough to keep that fact in front of voters. President Joe Biden is being "prodded by Democrats" to highlight Trump's felony conviction, said The New York Times. Biden has started to include his rival's legal problems as an occasional talking point on the campaign trail, but some allies have "called for him to be more aggressive."

They might have to keep prodding. Other Democrats are "far from certain that Trump's criminal record matters to voters at all," said The Associated Press. Whether to emphasize that record — or whether to sidestep it — "could prove pivotal in the evolving Biden-Trump rematch." There are skeptics, like former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell. "We've got to get out and win the election talking about the things that are important," he said. But others want to hit the topic harder. "This conviction makes voters really queasy," said one pollster.

What did the commentators say?

"The conviction has the potential to hurt Trump," Michael Tomasky said at The New Republic. But that damage will happen only if Democrats decide to make it happen. One poll taken after Trump's conviction showed that 10% of Republicans — and 35% of independents — were less likely to vote for him as a result. That 10% "is a huge number" in an era when presidential elections are decided by a few thousand votes either way. This is why Democrats should spend the campaign referring to the former president as "convicted felon Donald Trump." 

"It's doubtful the conviction will have any lasting impact on Trump's election prospects in November," Jamie Dettmer said at Politico. The percentage of Republicans hesitant to back Trump after the conviction is roughly equal to the number who voted for Nikki Haley during the GOP primaries. "So, essentially, no Republican minds seem to have been changed by the hush-money trial." That means the conviction won't alter the election results — but it will accelerate the "downward spiral in tit-for-tat partisan retaliation."

What next?

Some Democrats are already making their choice, NewsNation said. "I try to stay away from anything that isn't a uniting topic," said Rep. Mary Peltola (D-Alaska), one of several "vulnerable Democrats" in Congress who are sticking to other topics in their campaigns this fall. "If anyone running in a competitive state right now wants to talk about Trump, they don't want to talk about a New York courtroom," said one operative. There isn't total silence on the topic though: The party also sent out an email criticizing GOP incumbents who "have endorsed the now-convicted criminal."

There is one candidate who will try to use the conviction to his advantage: Donald Trump. In interviews with Dr. Phil and Sean Hannity, Trump has suggested he would use his return to the White House to pursue revenge prosecutions against Democrats, said The Hill. "Well, revenge does take time, I will say that," Trump told the TV doctor. "And sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil, I have to be honest. Sometimes it can."

Joe Biden faces a moment of "searing personal anguish" today when his son, Hunter, goes on trial for allegedly lying about illegal drug use while purchasing a handgun.

Four days after Donald Trump became the first president convicted in a court of law, Biden Junior will become the first child of a US president to face a criminal trial, a development that will further "deepen the election's legal entanglement", said CNN.

What is Hunter Biden accused of?

In September, prosecutors said they had indicted 54-year-old Biden on three gun charges related to his purchase of a Colt Cobra revolver handgun in October 2018, two months after a stay in rehab. 

Two of the counts relate to Biden allegedly lying about his drug use on a federal application form he filled in to buy the weapon, with a third charge of possessing an illegally obtained firearm for 11 days in October 2018. Biden has pleaded not guilty.

A plea deal, which had been expected to lead to Biden admitting to a series of tax and gun offences in order to avoid prison time, fell through last summer, after Republicans argued Biden was receiving a "sweetheart deal", and tax investigators said politics had hampered their probe.

The trial, which is expected to take between three and five days, will be held in Delaware "within walking distance" of his father's campaign headquarters in Wilmington, said The New York Times (NYT). 

Two of the charges each carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, while the third carries a maximum prison sentence of five years. But non-violent first-time offenders "rarely get serious prison time for the charges", said the NYT.

Does this relate to the laptop saga?

Hunter Biden's notorious laptop has "become a symbol of the legal and political controversy surrounding the president's son in recent years", said ABC News, and prosecutors hope to use its contents as evidence in the firearms trial.

The "seedy contents" of the laptop, left by Hunter at a Delaware repair shop, featured prominently in the 2020 presidential campaign, said the BBC. It has already "provided proof" of Hunter's considerable earnings from his work in China and Ukraine, which are "stoking the nascent impeachment inquiry" into President Biden.

And what about that tax case?

In December, federal prosecutors filed nine new tax charges against Biden, claiming that he avoided paying at least $1.4 million (£1.1 million) in self-assessed federal taxes he owed for between 2016 and 2019.

Announcing charges that include failure to file and pay taxes, false tax return and evasion of assessment, the prosecutors claimed that, instead of paying what he owed, Biden splashed his money on "drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature".

They said he "individually received more than $7m in total gross income" between 2016 and mid-October 2020, but "wilfully failed" to pay his 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 taxes on time. He belatedly paid all his taxes and fines in 2020.

What impact might the gun trial have on the election?

The hearing will "hand a political weapon" to Republicans "desperate for a distracting issue" in the wake of Donald Trump's 34-count conviction last week, said The Guardian.

But the Democrats could try and turn it to their favour, said CNN, as the trial could "blunt claims by the GOP" that the Justice Department targets only Republicans, particularly at a time when a Democratic senator, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, is also on trial in New York.

The White House has ruled out a pardon for Hunter, but the president insists his son did nothing wrong. In a "symbolic show of support", the president was seen with his son on a bike ride near his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, over the weekend.

Does history repeat itself? It seems that way to some observers of the campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war. "The turmoil we're seeing brings back memories of the widespread student protests of 1968," Princeton University's Julian Zelizer said at CNN. That crucial, chaotic year saw roiling protests against the Vietnam War — and ended with Democrats losing the presidency to Richard Nixon's "law and order" campaign. President Joe Biden "must surely be worried now that history will repeat itself."

The '68 turmoil wasn't contained to campus quads, though. Thousands of protesters famously descended on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where demonstrators and police battled in the streets. Chicago is where this year's DNC will be held. "We'll be marching with or without permits," said one pro-Palestinian organizer. The historical echoes are making some Democrats uncomfortable. "This is all playing out again," Charles Blow said at The New York Times. 

'Era of Republican dominance'

If we're experiencing a redux of 1968, that could spell long-term trouble for Democrats. "Nixon's victory marked the beginning of an era of Republican dominance of the presidency," William Kristol and Andrew Egger said at The Bulwark. Jimmy Carter was the only Democrat to win a term between 1968 and Bill Clinton's victory in 1992. That should serve as a warning to Biden's party: "A Republican victory in November could also be a historic inflection point."

"Here we go again," Charles Sykes said at The Atlantic. Sykes attended the 1968 Democratic convention as a teen accompanying his father, a delegate. "I had a front-row seat to a political party tearing itself apart." This summer's convention probably won't have the "Sturm und Drang of 1968's violent fiasco," mostly because police have better learned how to handle convention security. "But the parallels between 2024 and 1968 are ominous."

Protests can produce an electoral backlash. "The lesson of 1968 is that while the fireworks are on the left, the votes are on the right," James Traub said at The Wall Street Journal. Biden's best path is to work out a solution in Gaza before time runs out his reelection hopes. "He needs to make peace — in Israel, at home — so that the rest of the country can hear his message."

Hopes for a peace deal

Not everybody buys the parallels. "It's not 1968 to Joe Biden," Gabriel Debenedetti said in New York. The president believes that this time around, protesters "are not representative of the broader youth population" and that the campus tents will come down as summer vacation sets in. Still, some of the president's allies are also hoping for a ceasefire in Gaza. "If a peace deal gets brokered," said one former adviser, "then Biden could enjoy a well-deserved bump."

"Protests of any kind, even those most justified, produce a sense of unease among the public," Jeff Greenfield said in Politico. Biden has condemned "the more violent and disruptive of the current campus protests." The question now is whether that will be enough to save his presidency. "It would be folly to draw exact parallels between today's unrest and those of 60 years ago," Greenfield said. "But some do resonate."

"That's a wrap, folks – the match is set," said Jeffrey Blehar in National Review. The departure of Nikki Haley from the Republican nomination contest, in the wake of her "entirely predictable walloping" in last week's Super Tuesday primaries, means that the presidential race has finally come down to a straight battle between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The US must choose between a "senile" president "run by his handlers", or a "stupid" president "incapable of listening to his advisers". That's all that's on offer. 

Polling shows that a majority of US voters are deeply depressed by the prospect of a Trump-Biden rematch, said Jim Geraghty in The Washington Post, but they can't really complain. Haley did everything she could to prevent this situation. "America, if you wanted different nominees than Trump and Biden, you had to come out and vote for them."

Going Trump's way

Trump is on a roll, said David A. Graham in The Atlantic. The day after the Super Tuesday "romp", the US supreme court dismissed a claim by three states that Trump was ineligible for the ballot in November owing to his role in instigating the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol. The dates of some of Trump's trials have also been pushed back, reducing the chances that he'll receive a criminal conviction before the election. Trump's political success has often appeared to come in the face of "difficulty and disaster", but today everything seems to be going his way. It helps that, for once, the former president is showing a touch of "actual political discipline", said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. He has some serious people running his campaign, has "kept his more bizarre rants confined to the weird microworld of Truth Social", and – partly as a result of all his legal commitments – is doing fewer rallies. The rule of the Trump era is "the lower his profile, the higher his polls".

Biden's advantage

Biden hopes that that will work in his favour, said Elena Schneider on Politico. His campaign has a $41m cash advantage over Trump, who is weighed down with legal bills. His team is preparing "an onslaught of ads to turn voters' attention away from Biden's age and remind them of Trump's chaotic first term". Biden may be "the most unpopular president in the history of polling", said Marc A. Thiessen in The Washington Post, but he could easily win. The GOP is deeply divided between the dominant Maga wing, which encompasses about two-thirds of its voters, and the non-Maga wing. Trump needs the support of the latter group. According to Fox News analysis, 53% of non-Maga Republicans in Iowa, 57% in South Carolina and 65% in New Hampshire say they won't vote for Trump in November. "If even a fraction follows through on that promise", it could cost him the White House.

The GOP's gamble

The GOP is taking a big gamble with Trump, said The Wall Street Journal. In every vote since his win in 2016, "Republicans have lost or underperformed". It's a bad bet, agreed Eric Levitz on Vox. Polls suggest that Haley's nomination would have all but guaranteed a GOP triumph. In the key swing state of Wisconsin, for instance, where Trump is level-pegging with Biden, Haley polled 15 points ahead of the president. She could have led a proper Republican landslide. With Trump, by contrast – "a candidate that a majority of voters disdain" – the GOP faces the prospect of either a defeat or a narrow win that will tightly constrain its future room for manoeuvre. The conservative movement is missing a "golden opportunity". "Republicans won't get to run against an 81-year-old man with a 56% disapproval rating every election cycle."

There was good news and bad news for Joe Biden in last week's report on his handling of classified documents, said David A. Graham in The Atlantic. 

The good news is that it found that his careless storage of government documents didn't warrant criminal charges. The bad news is that special counsel Robert Hur delivered "a devastating portrayal of Biden's mental acuity". There was no chance of a conviction, Hur said, because any jury would view Biden as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory". 

In interviews, the 81-year-old had allegedly struggled to recall when his term as vice-president began and ended. Nor could he remember, "even within several years", when his son Beau died. Biden hit back at the report, insisting that his memory was fine; and his allies accused Hur, a Trump appointee, of bad faith.

Plenty of evidence

Biden's problem is that there is plenty of supporting evidence for Hur's point, said Peter Bergen on CNN. At one event last week, Biden confused Emmanuel Macron with the former French leader François Mitterrand, who died in 1996. At another, he struggled to remember the name of the terrorist group Hamas. Even at the press conference in which he angrily defended his memory, he referred to Egypt's Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the president of Mexico. No wonder Biden's handlers keep his unscripted appearances to a minimum, said Noah Rothman in National Review. The "enfeebled" president "just isn't up to this aspect of the job, and Americans have noticed".

Trump is not immune to mix-ups

Clearly, Biden is bad at names and dates, said Andrew Prokop on Vox. It's embarrassing, but not in itself "disqualifying for the presidency". There's still no evidence that his governing ability has been impaired in any way. Besides, Trump is hardly immune to such mix-ups. In recent months, he has claimed at least seven times either that Barack Obama is president, or that he ran against Obama; mixed up his Republican rival Nikki Haley with the former Democratic speaker Nancy Pelosi; and identified a picture of E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of rape, as a picture of his ex-wife, Marla Maples. America isn't spoiled for choice when it comes to its presidential nominees-in-waiting, said Ingrid Jacques in USA Today. On one side is a doddery 81-year-old with a poor memory; on the other is a demagogic 77-year-old facing four criminal cases. "How can this be our reality?"

Donald Trump has claimed another victory in his battle for the White House by adding former Republican primary rival Ron DeSantis to his ever-growing flock of supporters. 

DeSantis, the governor of Florida, spent tens of millions of dollars pitching himself as a younger, less chaotic version of the former president. But there was a "fatal flaw in the plan," said The Telegraph's deputy US editor Rozina Sabur. DeSentis "reckoned on a Republican Party that had tired of the 77-year-old, criminally indicted Trump", yet "it took just one state to vote in the party's nomination contest to shatter that illusion".

DeSantis quit the GOP nomination race on Sunday, after Trump won last week's Iowa caucus with more than 50% of the vote.

What the papers said

The biggest lesson for DeSantis is that "personality matters more than policy in presidential races", said The Telegraph's Sabur. And the more time voters had to get to know DeSantis, "the less they seemed to like him".

Things might have been different, suggested Vox, had not the Republican's "anti-Trump wing" invested "so many resources into Florida's exceptionally uncharismatic governor". But that miscalculation doesn't explain the "scale of Trump's polling advantage", nor the "tolerance" of the GOP's primary electorate for the former president's "authoritarian criminality". 

Rather, the site argued, "the Republicans' inability to oust Trump is a symptom of deep, structural pathologies in American political life – specifically, the decades-long decay of our nation's political parties and the radicalisation of the GOP base".

Polls suggest that Trump is now in a "stronger position to win the presidency in November than he was at this time in 2016".

The former leader "may have grown in power", said The Spectator's deputy editor Freddy Gray, "but he's essentially the same ego-crazed maniac that he was eight years ago". What has changed is the "soul of conservative America". 

"The religious right, which dominated conservatism from the 1960s to the end of the George W. Bush era, has become less pious and more political," Gray continued. "It has been Trumpified."

That Trump won more than three-quarters of the white evangelical vote in 2016 and 2020 is of little surprise. What is strange is that "white people, rather than voting for Trump because they are Christian, have started to declare themselves Christian because they support Trump".

"Politics has become the master identity," Ryan Burge, a Baptist professor of political science, told The New York Times. "Everything else lines up behind partisanship."

Another surprise – and one that will greatly concern Democrats – is that Trump is also winning the backing of the young. A pollby The New York Times and Siena College published in December showed Trump leading Joe Biden, by 49% to 43%,  among voters aged 18 to 29.

The latest Harvard Youth Poll found that Americans under 30 trusted Trump more on the economy, national security, the Israel-Hamas war, crime, immigration and strengthening the working class, while Biden won on issues including climate change, abortion, gun violence and protecting democracy.

The Harvard findings appear to be borne out by reports from the ground, said The Economist. Joe Mitchell, a former Iowa state representative who runs a group called Run GenZ that recruits young conservative candidates, told the site that what he hears most is that "we had more money in our pockets when Donald Trump was president".

Two supporters in the midwestern state of Iowa summed up Trump's basic appeal. "The economy was great when he was in power, I love that," a rodeo attendee told Newshub. "I think everybody could use a mean tweet and some cheap gas," another added.

What next?

DeSantis's exit leaves former UN ambassador Nikki Haley as the only viable candidate standing in the way of a Trump coronation. 

The next GOP primary, on Tuesday, is in New Hampshire, where Haley has slowly been building support. A shock victory by her there would give Trump and his supporters pause for thought, but with the former president holding a commanding lead in national polling, the chances of Haley ultimately winning the Republican nomination are slim.

At times, said Newshub, it seems like Trump is "the bronco that keeps on bucking – refusing to go down". But with Trump facing four criminal trials that will play out in the run-up to November's presidential election, "his biggest challenge is still ahead of him".

His legal woes represent the "biggest imponderable" of 2024, agreed The Spectator's Gray. "It's so complicated that even the most ardent Trump lovers and loathers struggle to keep up." 

The reality is that nobody really knows how voters will react to a conviction. For now, however, Trump "appears to be invincible, at least as far as the Republican race goes, and everything that doesn't kill him makes him stronger".

The Senate isn't going home for the holidays quite yet. The New York Times reported that the upper chamber will stay in session next week, in hopes of passing a bill that tightens border security in exchange for Republican support for military aid to Ukraine. The proposed deal would expand detention of migrants at the border and include "expedited removal" of newcomers seeking asylum.

But the proposal is pitting Democrats against each other.

"We shouldn't be scapegoating immigrant lives" over a deal for Ukraine aid, said Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.). Immigrant advocates are reportedly "livid" with President Joe Biden about the possibility. But Politico reported that a growing number of Democrats disagree. "The situation at the border is not sustainable," said Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.). "And that means that you have to either accept it when it's not sustainable, or you've got to address it."

"More and more Democrats have grown uncomfortable with the border and asylum situation in the Biden years," Vox reported. The proposed deal means the party would have to accept "Trumpian immigration restrictions Democrats have long condemned." But some Democrats now believe those restrictions are the necessary price of aiding Ukraine. Others think the deal is "politically or substantively necessary" to neutralize the immigration issue in 2024. Other progressives, though, think the deal is "immoral."

What the commentators said

"Biden's re-election becomes more likely" if he can strike an immigration deal with Republicans, conservative columnist Ross Douthat argued in The New York Times. The estimated foreign-born population is reaching new highs, which "unsurprisingly, has pushed some number of Biden voters back toward Trump." But a deal might actually make life easier for immigrant advocates as well. "High rates of immigration make native voters more conservative" — so policies that allow those high rates are "a good way to elect politicians who prefer the border closed."

"Joe Biden is melting on the issue of immigration," added The Arizona Republic's Phil Boas. A recent poll showed that three-quarters of New York Democrats — Democrats — believe migration is a serious issue in their state. The result? One-time pro-immigration politicians like Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) are starting to sound like border hawks. "When the Democratic incumbent president finds himself trailing the latest polls to a twice-impeached, four-time indicted former president, it's time to start asking what's up?"

"We should not be normalizing these type of cruel proposals," countered the ACLU's Maribel Hernández Rivera in an interview with Mother Jones. The Trump administration tried to "eviscerate" the asylum system; Biden came into office promising to reverse those measures — the proposed deal would cement them. "What has happened? I don't know," Rivera said. "But what I can tell you is that immigrants are still human beings."

What next?

If Biden doesn't make a deal on immigration, The Hill reported, Senate Republicans are unlikely to give him support on Ukraine aid. Even Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a national security hawk, is on board tying the two issues. "I feel like my country's border policies are an immediate threat to the safety of the American people," he said this week. "There will be no [foreign aid] supplemental without border security reforms that address the problem."  

But Biden could lose support from Hispanic Democrats if the proposal passes. "Republicans are pitting vulnerable groups against each other to strong-arm policies that will exacerbate chaos at the southern border," said Rep. Nanette Barragán, (D-Calif.), chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. "We are urging the Biden administration to say no, do not take the bait."

The Biden administration, meanwhile, is warning its critics not to panic. "The White House has not signed off on any particular policy proposals or final agreements, and reporting that ascribes determined policy positions to the White House is inaccurate," a spokesperson told NBC News. Whatever ends up in the final deal, though, seems likely to make some of the president's allies angry. 

Israel is winning the battle for Gaza – but losing the war

Michael Day on i news 

 Israel claims to be "winning the war against Hamas", says Michael Day on the i news site, but "in reality, the fight is on a knife-edge". By "destroying the Gaza Strip" – killing thousands of civilians in the process and "alienating" Arab states, the Global South and even some of Israel's allies – Benjamin Netanyahu "is doing Hamas’s bidding". If he "is not able to defeat Hamas before it too becomes a global pariah, then the terror group will have succeeded in one of its key aims".

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It would be a mistake for the Tory Right to go with Suella Braverman

Janet Daley in The Daily Telegraph

There is talk of sacked Suella Braverman "becoming the heroine of the Tory Right" and using her exit from government "as a basis for a leadership bid", writes Janet Daley for The Telegraph. "If this happens it will be profoundly misjudged." For the party's Right to adopt her brand of leadership "will not just put it out of touch with a huge swathe of the British electorate: much more important, it will discredit the political and economic policies which should be its true mission".

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What Republicans don't understand about how Biden really wins elections

Jason Chaffertz for Fox News

With Joe Biden's approval rating "underwater on nearly every critical issue", writes Jason Chaffetz for Fox News, Republicans "should have the wind at their backs on the economy and inflation, on energy, on foreign policy, on border issues, on crime and many more". Yet GOP candidates repeatedly underperform expectations, proving it "isn’t enough to be right on the issues". Election-winning campaigns "need appealing candidates and a plan to get out the vote", and "this is the challenge for Republicans".

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China, Russia, Iran and the prospect of American retreat

Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times

Joe Biden "is not just an old guy", says Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. The US leader is also a "representative of an old idea" dating back to the 1940s – that his nation and the wider world are safer if the US plays the role of world policeman. But the prospect of a second Trump presidency "raises a huge question mark over the future of America’s global leadership", with China, Russia and Iran all ready to "take advantage of the resulting power vacuum".

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It's been nearly five years since hundreds of thousands of federal employees were furloughed for more than a month in what eventually became the longest government shutdown in United States history. That extended closure — the second of then-President Donald Trump's time in office — was ostensibly predicated on an extended fight over funding the administration's long-promised border wall between the United States and Mexico, and only ended after Trump relented from his hardline stance and allowed congressional budget negotiations to resume, bringing to a close what Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mt.) dubbed "the most stupid shutdown I’ve ever seen in my life."

Now, as the country hurtles headlong into another looming shutdown, that description will be put to the test, thanks to the ongoing internecine squabbles between congressional Republicans which have propelled the government once more toward the edge of a fiscal cliff. If a stopgap appropriations bill isn't passed by the House before Sept. 30, everything from student loans to food and housing assistance could be affected, and tens of thousands of federal workers will once again be furloughed, or asked to work without assurances of when their next paycheck will arrive. As with all government shutdowns, the stakes are high both politically, and for ordinary Americans who rely on various federal services in their day-to-day lives. 

So what, exactly, is behind this latest impasse and why are so many lawmakers particularly frustrated with the threat of a looming government closure? 

What the commentators said

This could be the "first-ever shutdown about nothing," right-wing American Enterprise Institute economic policy studies director Michael Strain told The Washington Post. Dubbing this "the ‘Seinfeld’ shutdown," Strain added that House Republicans don't seem to "have any demands" that can be negotiated, as in the past. "What is it that they’re going to shut the government down for? We simply don’t know.”

Pushing the government toward a shutdown is more about "creating drama, publicity and campaign fundraising for certain lawmakers than it is about seriously reducing the deficit," agreed University of Virginia public policy professor Raymond Scheppach for The Conversation. 

Earlier this month GOP hardliners rejected a budget proposal from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (D-Calif.) that "called for cutting domestic agencies’ budgets by 8% and imposing a flurry of immigration restrictions, including reviving construction of former President Donald Trump’s border wall," Bloomberg reported. Despite the fact that such extreme measures would be dead on arrival in the Democrat-held Senate and White House, it was "deemed insufficient" by the rightmost wing of the GOP. "With a narrow majority, McCarthy can afford only four defections. By Sept. 19, there appeared to be at least 15."

House hardliners said they "will not" take up a Senate bill to fund the government through Nov. 17, according to Reuters, which pointed out that the Senate bill has "broad bipartisan support, including that of top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell." Rather, the GOP holdouts are fighting over a "relatively small slice of the $6.4 trillion U.S. budget for this fiscal year," the news agency continued, highlighting their demands for "another $120 billion in cuts plus tougher legislation that would stop the flow of immigrants at the U.S. border with Mexico."

But with Republicans busy fighting amongst themselves over which cuts to prioritize and how, Senate Democrats — and Republicans to a degree as well — have "declined to offer concessions, because they don’t know which ones would suffice," the Post concluded. 

What next?

With just hours to go before the funding deadline, "it’s becoming harder by the minute" to see lawmakers making it to "any of the potential off-ramps" that might avert the looming shutdown, Politico reported, concluding "THE BOTTOM LINE: A shutdown is coming."

If and when that happens, it's the "wrong time for Republicans to take a stand on reducing the deficit," Prof. Scheppach said, noting both that the cuts being haggled over are too small to have a long term impact, and that "the public blamed Republicans for [past] shutdowns, polls show." Some conservative lawmakers are already bracing for that seeming inevitability, with Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) complaining earlier this month to Politico that "we always get the blame. Name one time that we’ve shut the government down and we haven’t got the blame.”