From his podium at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Donald Trump reminded his base how he differed from past presidents. “It turned out that I was able to stop wars from happening,” he said.

That was in 2024, said Natalie Allison at The Washington Post. A year later, the newly installed president was back at CPAC, boasting about being “a peacemaker, not a conqueror”.

Notable absences

This year, Trump skipped the jamboree for the first time in a decade: he was too busy managing the war with Iran he’d launched a month earlier. And he wasn’t the only high-profile no show, said Katy Balls in The Sunday Times. At the last event, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio spoke, and Elon Musk ramped up the carnival atmosphere by brandishing a chainsaw on stage; this time, one attendee noted that there were more journalists present than politicians. That the event was rather more subdued than usual was due to several factors – including its relocation from DC to Texas; but the lack of buzz was indicative of the troubled state of the GOP as it gears up for the midterms.

A little over a year into his second term, Trump is discovering that for all his efforts to extend his authority, there are still constraints on what he can do, said Gerard Baker in The Times. Public revulsion has forced him to temper his migrant deportation policy; the Supreme Court has struck out his signature tariffs policy; the markets are squealing about the war in Iran. And even in his own backyard, the voters are restive: in late March, a Florida Democrat seized a red seat that takes in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

Base betrayal

The die-hards remain intensely loyal, said Elaine Godfrey in The Atlantic, but polls show that Trump is losing support among the coalition of younger Americans and Latinos that gave him his victory in 2024. Many already felt betrayed by his attempt to block the Epstein files and by the impact of his Big Beautiful Bill on the deficit. Now, they’re furious that he has taken the US into a war that is costing billions and further driving up the cost of living.

In the manosphere, prominent voices who rallied behind his “anti-woke” rhetoric in 2024 are complaining that Americans were duped. The podcaster Joe Rogan has called the war “insane, based on what [Trump] ran on”. There is dissent within Maga too, some of which has veered into antisemitism: Tucker Carlson and others have been peddling the line that Israel manipulated Trump into the war. Disenchanted Trump fans are unlikely to vote Democrat in November; but they might easily just tune out of the election – and so inadvertently deliver a “blue wave”.

It’s too early to tell how the military intervention in Iran is going to play out, said Emma Ashford in Foreign Policy, but we can already state one thing with certainty: this is not what Donald Trump’s “base or the American people wanted”.

Trump campaigned as a peace candidate. He promised an “America First” agenda that prioritised pocketbook issues and kept the US out of dangerous foreign entanglements. His adviser, Stephen Miller, depicted him as the opposite of Kamala Harris, whose team was, he said, made up of “warmongering neocons [who] love sending your kids to die for wars they would never fight themselves”.

‘Disgusting and evil’

But it seems Trump is not so different after all. Although only a quarter of Americans polled last week said they’d support military action against Iran, the president ploughed ahead with strikes without even bothering to make the case for war. Several Republicans, including former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, have condemned the attack on Iran as a betrayal. The populist commentator Tucker Carlson called it “absolutely disgusting and evil”.

Trump is hardly the first president to grow more hawkish in office, said Jim Geraghty in The Washington Post. It has been the pattern with every US leader since Bill Clinton: they campaign on domestic issues, then get drawn into foreign interventions. Their previously expressed fears about military overreach tend to dissipate once power is in the hands of someone they trust completely: themselves. But they’re also more aware, once in office, of the gravity of the threats facing the US.

Military muscle

While the Iran strikes have upset some of Trump’s erstwhile backers, he has “calculated that he can strong-arm his base into line”, said Hugh Tomlinson in The Observer. As one Republican strategist noted over the weekend: “Maga is still whatever Trump says it is.” The important thing, said Jim Antle in The Daily Telegraph, is that Trump has so far limited his military actions to things that US forces are good at, such as killing enemies, rather than trying to emulate the neocon agenda of nation-building and democracy promotion.

As long as he can avoid a protracted conflict, he’ll be OK, said Mikey Smith in the Daily Mirror. Displays of US military muscle play quite well with his base: polls suggest that Maga supporters were not that averse to the idea of quick, punitive action against Iran. However, the second this military adventure “stops looking like a surgical strike and starts looking like a forever war”, Trump will find himself in a lot of political trouble.

What happened

President Donald Trump on Tuesday told House Republicans “you got to win the midterms” or “I’ll get impeached.” If Democrats retake the House, “they’ll find a reason to impeach me” for a third time, he said, claiming that his two first-term impeachments were “for nothing.” The GOP “can own health care” as an issue in the midterms, he told House Republicans at their annual retreat in Washington, but “you gotta be a little flexible” on abortion funding to reach a deal on health insurance subsidies.

Who said what

Trump’s remarks were a “rare acknowledgment” of his “political vulnerability as Republicans prepare to face a Democratic Party buoyed by a string of off-year election victories, favorable polling and voter anxiety over an economy now fully under Trump’s stewardship,” The Washington Post said. A Democratic victory “could stall his agenda and expose him to congressional investigations,” Reuters said.

“They say that when you win the presidency, you lose the midterm,” Trump said. “I wish you could explain to me what the hell’s going on with the mind of the public.” Trump’s 84-minute “election-year pep talk,” Roll Call said, “veered between familiar topics” from his rallies and “verbal jabs at longtime political foes,” plus first lady Melania Trump’s advice that he stop dancing. “I think I gave you something,” Trump concluded. “It’s a road map to victory.”

What next?

Trump’s exhortation to lean in on health care puts House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) “in a bind,” Axios said. The “vast majority of House Republicans” oppose extending Affordable Care Act credits without added abortion restrictions and “many Republicans see health care as a losing issue for the party, especially in the 2026 midterms.”

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.

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.”

A Reform government would turn Britain into “Trump’s America”, Ed Davey has said, as he tried to tie the policies of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump together in voters’ minds.

“Imagine living in the Trump-inspired country Farage wants us to become,” said the Lib Dem leader in his keynote speech at his party’s conference in Bournemouth. Davey painted “a nightmarish vision”, said the BBC, of the end of the NHS, a countryside destroyed by fracking, lax gun laws, racism, misogyny and “a constant state of chaos”.

Farage duly rubbished those claims but Davey’s warning about the Trumpification of British politics should be taken seriously, said Peter Geoghegan in Prospect: the American president is a “lodestar, the harbinger of a populist revolution that could be emulated on this side of the pond”.

What did the commentators say?

The year is 2029, and Donald Trump “holds two titles”, said Politico’s Paul Dallison: “US President-for-Life and UK prime minister”.

That sentence “would have been firmly in the realm of science fiction even a couple of years ago. But now, it doesn’t sound quite so far-fetched.” After all, the US president, with his British mother, would be eligible for the UK premiership, as former Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg pointed out on GB News during Trump’s state visit.

For the past decade, “some of Trump’s biggest donors have been secretly funding a clutch of the most influential groups on the right of British politics”, said Prospect’s Geoghegan.

Former Conservative bigwigs Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel and Liz Truss have “all traipsed to Washington” and spoken at the Heritage Foundation, the “hugely influential” think tank behind Project 2025, the “blueprint for a state-eviscerating” second Trump administration.

But few UK politicians are “as close to Trump as Nigel Farage”. He is “plugged into the very top” of the Republican party and has recently claimed Trump “knows” that he will be Britain’s next prime minister. He told the Harry Cole Saves the West YouTube show that Trump’s team saw “similarities in what they’ve done and what we’ve done, and you know what, we speak the same language”.

Farage has “enjoyed a friendship with Trump for almost a decade”, said Dominic Penna in The Telegraph. He joined him on the US presidential campaign trail in 2016 and told his supporters that a Republican victory would be “Brexit plus, plus, plus”.

What next?

Regardless of Trump’s next political endeavour, it’s clear that the tech billionaires who have supported him are already having their own impact on politics abroad.

Palantir founder Peter Thiel and his fellow Silicon Valley “political kingmakers” are heavily influenced by far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin’s “dark enlightenment” ideas, said The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi. They believe “super-rich elites should have dictatorial powers” while the “hoi polloi should suck it all up”.

Elon Musk, Tesla boss and Trump’s former “first buddy” is “increasingly taking his political meddling worldwide”, from Canada and Germany to the UK. He “spent January posting about grooming gangs”, then, at the “Unite the Kingdom” rally, called for a “change of government”. Over a video link, he told the crowd, “Violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.”

It feels as if Musk is increasingly trying to “destabilise democracies worldwide so he can accumulate more power”, said Mahdawi. It is “not inconceivable” that a tech mogul “could effect regime change in Britain”.

Donald Trump wasn't kidding when he promised "the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history", said Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. Since his 20 January inauguration, Trump has passed an avalanche of executive orders (139 and counting) designed to dismantle traditional constraints on presidential power, and to advance his agenda: threatening law firms, universities and media owners into compliance; authorising Elon Musk's Doge to "cripple" the federal bureaucracy; firing the heads of 18 federal watchdogs; "disappearing" innocent migrant workers; and deporting foreign students who have written anti-Israel articles.

It's "less a new administration", said Andrew Sullivan in The Times, and more a "vengeful monarchy". The "trappings of a republic remain", but they are increasingly mere "facades". And for what, asked Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. King Donald's assault on US universities has triggered a brain drain. His attack on the global order has been "ruinous" for the reputation of the US. He promised Americans he would bring down costs, but his trade war is set to fuel inflation and perhaps trigger a recession. "Make America Great Again? Trumpism doesn't do what it says on the baseball cap."

Tell that to Trump's supporters, said Kimberley A. Strassel in The Wall Street Journal. "Creative destruction" is exactly what they wanted: they're fed up of the waste and "indolence" of Washington elites, and they voted for Trump to tear it all up. Besides, said Harry Cole in The Sun, who says his "manic" approach isn't working? "Woke and trans sacred cows have been slaughtered" by presidential decree; wasteful spending has "gone up in smoke". Countries are begging for new trade deals, and illegal border crossings, according to the administration, are down by 95%.

I've "detested" almost all of Trump 2.0, said David Brooks in The New York Times, but even I have to admire his team's "energy". It's like "a supercar with 1,000 horsepower", while his Democratic opponents coast around on "mopeds". If they want to win back power, they'll need to whip up some of that élan vital.

The resistance is already building, albeit not yet in Congress, said the FT. The bond markets have forced Trump to rein in his tariffs. The Supreme Court has taken a stand against illegal deportations. American voters, fretting about their wallets and retirement plans, are starting to abandon him too: Trump has one of the lowest approval ratings of any president after 100 days, at 40%.

If Democrats win next year's midterm elections, said Katie Stallard in The New Statesman, he could spend his last two years in office fighting off investigations and impeachments, ensuring his authoritarian agenda is derailed. But that's assuming, of course, the midterms actually happen. On the current trajectory, we may not get "free and fair elections in 2026, let alone a peaceful transfer of power in 2028".

"Few public figures have exploded onto the world stage quite like US Vice-President J.D. Vance," said Dominic Sandbrook in The Times.

In his first major foreign speech, at the Munich Security Conference, he caused a stink by berating European leaders about free speech. After that, he laid into Ukraine's President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office for supposedly showing insufficient gratitude to President Trump. And he then upset more people by dismissing talk of UK and French peacekeepers in Ukraine, saying a US mineral deal would protect the nation better than "20,000 troops from some random country that hasn't fought a war in 30 or 40 years". One assumes copies of Vance's misery memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy", aren't "flying off the shelves in Royal Wootton Bassett". Vance has swiftly established himself as a hate figure among critics of the Trump administration, said Marina Hyde in The Guardian. The internet is so awash with parodies that he is now "more meme than man".

This mockery by progressives won't bother Vance, said Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic. He's used to being "the outlier in the room – whether as a conservative in liberal spaces" such as Yale Law School, or as a self-styled hillbilly "in the halls of Washington and Silicon Valley". The vice-presidency has traditionally been the "booby prize" of US politics, but Vance has proved effective and versatile in the role so far. He has "played the pugilist provocateur on conservative podcasts and the civil conciliator on the vice-presidential debate stage"; he also spends a lot of time on X/Twitter deftly skewering Trump's opponents. If the administration completes its term in decent shape, he'll be well-positioned to replace Trump in the White House.

I suspect Vance and his boss will fall out before then, said Alison Phillips in The i Paper. That partly comes from reading Vance's memoir, in which he angrily relates how, in his youth, he tried to ingratiate himself with his mother's successive boyfriends in a vain attempt to stop them leaving. He got his ear pierced to impress Steve, "a midlife-crisis sufferer", pretended to love police cars to please Chip, an alcoholic police officer, and was kind to the children of Ken, an odd-job man.

Reading this, one can't help but see Trump as just another "father figure" who is destined to let Vance down. The president is "the ultimate transactional politician" – for him, it's all about deals. Vance, at heart, is an "ideologue", with little interest in deals. Sooner or later, that difference in outlook will lead to a rupture.

Less than six years ago and before she became President Donald Trump's pick for Director of National Intelligence, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, then a Hawaii Democrat, ran for the Democratic nomination for president. She had raised her national profile in 2016 as a backer of Sen. Bernie Sanders' (D-Vt.) campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. During that era, Gabbard was known as a critic of U.S. military interventions and domestic surveillance.

Gabbard dropped out of the race after failing to gain traction following her participation in televised debates and endorsed eventual nominee Joe Biden. After leaving Congress, she became a frequent guest on Fox News, where she criticized the Biden administration. In 2022, she left the Democratic Party, saying that it was "now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness." Even before she switched parties, Gabbard was a controversial figure whose frequent ideological shifts have left many observers wondering about the nature of her core principles.

Has a history of hostility to LGBTQ rights

Gabbard's father founded an organization called the Alliance for Traditional Marriage that helped pass a constitutional amendment in 1998 giving the "Hawaii state legislature power to 'reserve marriage to opposite-sex couples,'" said CNN. She continued to oppose same-sex marriage as a member of the Hawaii state legislature. Her past work and comments about LGBTQ issues came under fresh scrutiny during her 2019 run for the White House. She was "viewed suspiciously by many on the left because of her opposition to civil unions for same-sex couples while a state legislator," said The Washington Post.

In January 2019, she posted a video apologizing for many of her past views. "In my past, I said and believed things that were wrong, and worse, they were hurtful to people in the LGBTQ community and to their loved ones," said Gabbard in the video. Gabbard "has repeatedly voted in Congress to protect gay rights," said Politico in 2019 about her record in the U.S. House. Near the end of her final term in the House, she received criticism from trans-rights organizations "after she joined Republican Rep. Markwayne Mullin to introduce legislation specifying that Title IX protections for female athletes are based on "biological sex," said USA Today.

Resurrected anti-LGBTQ rhetoric after leaving the Democratic Party

After switching parties, Gabbard's rhetoric about LGBTQ issues seemed to change again. At the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference, Gabbard "baselessly claimed that the LGBTQ+ community was trying to gain acceptance for pedophiles," said the Anti-Defamation League. In 2022, she backed Florida's controversial parental rights bill that "prohibits schools from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity with students from kindergarten through third grade," said Fox News. Critics dubbed the law "Don't Say Gay."

Connected to a controversial religious leader

Gabbard also has ties to Chris Butler, the leader of the Science of Identity Foundation, who has adopted the name Siddhaswarupananda. The Foundation is "a secretive offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement vehemently opposed to same-sex relationships and abortion, and deeply suspicious of Islam," said The New York Times. Gabbard's parents were "both deeply enmeshed in Butler's movement" and had sent her to a boarding school in the Philippines operated by Butler when she was a teenager, said The Daily Beast. Butler has "a long history of espousing anti-gay rhetoric," said Honolulu Civil Beat. While Gabbard claims to no longer be associated with the group, she included a blessing from Butler in her 2015 wedding ceremony. "Some ex-members describe the Foundation as an abusive cult," said Business Insider.

Held a clandestine 2017 meeting with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad

In 2017, Gabbard participated in a weeklong junket to Syria, which was embroiled in a long-running civil war that had already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. According to Gabbard, she visited "refugees, Syrian opposition leaders, widows and family members of Syrians fighting alongside groups like al-Qaeda, and Syrians aligned with the Assad regime," said the Associated Press. She also secretly met with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose embattled regime had repeatedly deployed chemical weapons in attacks against Syrian rebels and civilians in an effort to maintain power. Her visit with Assad drew flak from both Democrats and Republicans. Her visit with Assad was "so dispiriting" because she returned to the United States "with an assessment that undoubtedly pleases the Assad regime," said National Review. Gabbard "viewed it all as a 'regime change war' fueled by the West and aimed at removing the dictator from power," said the Independent.

Maintains ties to Hindu extremists

While Gabbard's views on a number of issues have changed over time, "she has held steadfast in her Islamophobia, one of the few consistent commitments in her volatile political career," said Jeet Heer at The Nation. In her campaigns for Congress, Gabbard received "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in donations from supporters of Sangh Parivar, "a network of religious, political, paramilitary and student groups that subscribe to the Hindu supremacist, exclusionary ideology known as Hindutva," said The Intercept.

Hindu supremacists are known for their hostility to Islam, particularly in India, where Muslims constitute a significant and persecuted minority. Gabbard is a supporter of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been accused of "stoking the othering of Muslims via disinformation, hate speech, opening old religious wounds, manipulating a servile media, silencing progressive voices and empowering Hindu supremacist vigilante groups," said Time.

Shared Russian propaganda

Gabbard shared false claims from her account on X shortly after Russia's unprovoked February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. There are "25+ U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine, which if breached would release & spread deadly pathogens to the U.S./world," said Gabbard in the video. There is no evidence to support these claims, which were "widely debunked and identified as Russian propaganda," said Fox News. "This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia's legitimate security concerns," said Gabbard in a post on X immediately following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a claim that echoed Moscow's rationale for the invasion. Such comments "were taken seriously in Russia, where the state-controlled media has often praised Gabbard," said the Associated Press. In an October 2022 episode of her podcast, Gabbard referred to U.S. backing of Ukraine as a "regime-change war that the United States and NATO are waging via their proxy in Ukraine," said National Review.

Publicly supported leakers of classified information

In 2013, Edward Snowden leaked "a trove of highly classified documents accessed while working as a contractor at the National Security Agency," said The Guardian. Gabbard has repeatedly declined opportunities to denounce Snowden's actions since becoming the nominee to lead U.S. intelligence operations. Snowden currently lives in exile in Russia. Toward the end of her time in Congress, Gabbard cosponsored a resolution with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) asking for all charges against Snowden to be dropped. During her Senate confirmation hearings, a number of senators "pressed Gabbard to call Snowden a traitor. She steadfastly refused," said Time. Instead, she "​​conceded Snowden broke the law and that she would no longer push for his pardon," said Responsible Statecraft.

A few years ago, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and her brand of conspiracy-minded, populist politics seemed to be on the outside looking in. One of several members of the House who was openly aligned with the January 6 Capitol rioters, Greene's close relationship with President Trump looked less like an act of strategic genius and more like she had lashed herself to the bow of a sinking ship. With the then-former president facing a litany of legal and financial difficulties and Democrats holding a trifecta in Washington, D.C., her story might have ended there — if not for Trump's stunning political comeback in 2024. This ultimately led to pardons for everyone convicted in connection with January 6 and the sudden elevation of once-fringe figures like Greene into the political mainstream. After serving as mocked and maligned sidekicks to more serious GOP figures during the first Trump administration, Greene and her allies are now firmly in the driver's seat of national politics. While she has left some of her most outlandish theorizing behind, she continues to say things out loud that most people might leave tucked safely away in the nooks and crannies of their internal monologues.

The co-owner of a general contracting firm and CrossFit franchise before she was elected to the House, Greene rose to prominence as a conservative media figure during the first Trump administration when she published a series of articles for a website called American Truth Seekers. At the now-shuttered website, she "wrote favorably of the QAnon conspiracy theory, suggested that Hillary Clinton murdered her political enemies and ruminated on whether mass shootings were orchestrated to dismantle the Second Amendment," said NBC News. She further boosted her profile prior to her 2020 House campaign with viral stunts, including "a since-deleted Facebook Live" video in which she tried to visit Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in her office and referred to it as "a day care" while "mocking the staff for keeping the door locked," said CNN. But her relentless antics have never seemed to bother voters in her district — she ran unopposed in the 2024 Republican primary for her seat and won a third term in the general election by almost 30 points.

Allegedly conducted extramarital affairs at a CrossFit gym

In 2012, Greene reportedly had affairs with two men at the CrossFit gym where she was employed in Alpharetta, Georgia, "one with a tantric sex guru named Craig Ivey, and another with a gym manager named Justin Tway," said the Independent. She filed for divorce from her husband, Perry, that year but the couple got back together before finalizing a divorce in December 2022. Greene denied the allegations. The episode did not prevent Greene from publicly accusing Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) of having an affair with a Chinese spy during a House Homeland Security committee meeting on April 25, 2023. Republicans had hoped to land blows against Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, whom they would later impeach, but "Greene's performance sidetracked that conversation," said Fox News.

Promoted QAnon and other conspiracy theories

The QAnon conspiracy theory held that an "anonymous person called Q was revealing secrets about a child trafficking ring orchestrated by Democrats and global elites," said The Washington Post. Prior to her election to Congress, Greene contributed to the extremist website American Truth Seekers, where she promoted QAnon beliefs. She also "further pushed conspiracy theories on her Facebook page," including the idea that the 2019 mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 51 people was a false-flag operation designed to undermine American gun rights, said Rolling Stone. Greene also used social media to back conspiracy theories about 9/11 as well as "casting doubt on school shootings," said The Washington Post. "I was allowed to believe things that weren't true and I would ask questions about them and talk about them, and that is absolutely what I regret," said Greene when her past behavior caused Democrats to strip her of her committee assignments in February, 2021.

Blamed California wildfires on space lasers

In a 2018 Facebook post written before her election to Congress, Greene speculated that the deadly Camp Fire was deliberately sparked by Jewish elites in cahoots with the governor of California and power company PG&E to clear land for a high-speed rail project. Her conclusions were based on the observation that "oddly there are all these people who have said they saw what looked like lasers or blue beams causing the fires," leading many observers to claim that Greene believed in "Jewish space lasers." Critics blasted the ludicrous ideas in her post. "Aren't there easier ways to get your rail stations approved by the state legislature?" said Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine. Greene's post was not just absurd but also anti-semitic because "people have used claims that this one particular wealthy family controls the world to cast aspersions on Jews in general" for centuries, said Zack Beauchamp at Vox.

Compared masks and vaccine mandates to the Holocaust

On May 20, 2021, during an interview with David Brody of the far-right news network Real America Voice, Greene complained about the requirement to wear masks during House proceedings. Forcing Jews to wear gold stars and sending them by rail to concentration camps "is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about," said Greene. She later apologized, saying "there are words that I have said, remarks that I have made, that I know are offensive, and for that, I want to apologize." She continued to use analogies to compare vaccine mandates to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. "People have a choice, they don't need your medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations," said Greene in a July 6, 2021, post on X.

Opposed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election

Following President Donald Trump's defeat in the 2020 presidential election, Greene quickly embraced his lies about Democrats using fraud to change the outcome. "I will not certify a stolen election," she wrote in a January 3, 2021, post on X. There remains no credible evidence that there was systematic fraud in the 2020 election. "Biden won the election, fairly and legally," said CNN.

Greene was one of the 139 House Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election during the counting of electoral votes on January 6, 2021, a process which was interrupted by the Capitol insurrection. Greene continued to insist that the 2020 election was stolen, and prior to the 2024 election claimed in an interview with far-right extremist Alex Jones that voting machines were switching early votes in Georgia. After Trump's victory in 2024, she did not make any further accusations of election fraud.

Blamed the January 6, 2021, insurrection on Black Lives Matter and Antifa

Greene has vacillated between blaming the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot on left-wing agitators and complaining about how Black Lives Matter protesters allegedly got away with violence during the summer of 2020. Initially, she scoffed at the idea that Trump supporters could really have been behind the riot. "If the #Jan6 organizers were Trump supporters, then why did they attack us while we were objecting to electoral college votes for Joe Biden?" she said in a February 9, 2021, post on X. Greene still sometimes groundlessly blames the insurrection on left-wing agitators. "I fully believe they were Antifa/BLM [Black Lives Matter] rioters," said Greene in a November 2023 appearance on Triggered, Donald Trump, Jr.'s podcast.

Endorsed violence against Democrats

In social media posts prior to her election to Congress, Greene repeatedly endorsed violence against prominent Democratic officials, including former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In one video posted to Facebook in 2019, Greene accused Pelosi of treason, which is "a crime punishable by death," said Greene. In another 2020 Facebook post prior to her election, Greene posted a picture of herself holding an assault rifle next to pictures of Reps. Rashida Tlaib (R-Mich.), Ilhan Omar (D-MInn.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) with the caption "Squad's Worst Nightmare." That history of violent rhetoric and imagery was part of the reason Democrats voted to remove her from committees in 2021.

Suggested Democrats manipulated Hurricane Helene to influence the 2024 election

Greene's history of building conspiracies around natural disasters got longer in October 2024, when Hurricane Helene ravaged parts of the U.S. Southeast a month before the presidential election, including the electoral battleground state of North Carolina. "Yes they can control the weather," said Greene in an October 3, 2024 post on X. "It's ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can't be done." The post remains live and undeleted on her timeline. The congresswoman "is no stranger to misinformation" and her comments were "met with a wave of criticism," said The Guardian. Her comments even prompted some in her own party to disavow the conspiracy, including Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.). "Nobody can control the weather," said Edwards in an October 8, 2024 press release. Many observers, however, were not shocked. "Some things in this world that are inevitable: death, sunrise and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene responding to tragedies with pure insanity," said Rolling Stone. Following the Texas flooding disaster over the July 4 weekend that killed 138 people, Greene introduced a bill that will "prohibit the release of chemicals into the atmosphere intended to change the weather, temperature, climate or block out sunlight," said Politico.

Traded stocks during the rollout of President Trump's new tariffs

Greene was one of a number of Republicans whose stock trading in April 2025, as President Trump was rolling out his "Liberation Day" tariff policies, raised suspicions. Greene "purchased between tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of stock on April 8 and 9, the day before and the day of" the tariff rollout, said The New York Times. Those dealings caused even fellow Republican Congressman Mike Lawler to argue that "stock trading by members of Congress or their spouses should be banned." She has also drawn criticism for investing in the company Palantir shortly before it received a massive contract from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Greene has "has long been dogged by allegations of insider trading, which she denies," said The Independent. The issue may yet cause a more problematic rift for the GOP, given that Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna "will attempt to force a House vote on a congressional stock trading ban in September," said Politico.

Claimed the death of Pope Francis was a blow struck by God against evil

Following the death of Pope Francis on April 21, 2025, Greene posted inflammatory remarks on X suggesting that his passing was a deliberate part of God's battle against wickedness. "Today, there were major shifts in global leaderships," said Greene. "Evil is being defeated by the hand of God." Greene never elaborated on exactly what she meant and "did not issue any clarification after coming under fire for the post," said The New Republic. "While it's unclear if the post was directly referencing Pope Francis," she has "been critical of church leadership" during the reign of Francis, said Yahoo News. According to the congresswoman, she left the church years ago after she became a mother, "because I realized that I could not trust the Church leadership to protect my children from pedophiles," said Greene in an April 27, 2022 post on X. That post was itself an attempt to mitigate the fallout from an interview she had given in which she claimed that "Satan's controlling the church."

Feuded with Trump advisor Laura Loomer

In August 2025, a deposition of Laura Loomer stemming from her defamation lawsuit against HBO talk show host Bill Maher was leaked to the press. In the deposition, the conspiracy-theorist-turned-Trump-consigliere who wields extraordinary power inside the White House unleashed a series of wild accusations against Greene, including that the Georgia congresswoman routinely puts Arby's roast beef in her pants. When pressed for details about how she knows this, Loomer responded, "Because I know she likes to eat at Arby's." In the deposition, Loomer also accused Greene of being a "political prostitute" who performed sex acts on former House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as well as a "raging anti-semite" who is disliked by senior members of President Trump's staff. Loomer has also attacked Greene for her criticisms of the U.S. backing Israel. "It's the most truthful and easiest thing to say that Oct. 7 in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis and starvation happening in Gaza," said Greene in a July 28 post on X. Loomer and Greene have traded accusations of corruption, with Greene claiming Loomer is an Israeli intelligence asset and Loomer accusing Greene of funneling campaign cash to her daughter. Given that Loomer appears to have the power to make consequential personnel decisions on bodies like the National Security Council, her feud with Greene may lead to her falling out of favor with President Trump, a cruel fate for those who yoke their political fortunes to the MAGA leader.

Donald Trump, America's past and present commander-in-chief, was inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States on Monday, an unprecedented return to power for a former president who was ousted from office four years ago amid a raging pandemic, following two impeachments and an attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters. Trump, 78, becomes the oldest person ever to be sworn in as president, and the first president since Grover Cleveland to serve non-consecutive terms in the White House.

Trump, who is also the first convicted felon to be elected president, will now begin serving his second and final term in office after defeating former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. He will serve as president through Jan. 20, 2029.

What happened at the inauguration?

For the first time since Ronald Reagan's swearing-in in 1985, the inauguration took place indoors due to cold temperatures in Washington, D.C., held in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. The inauguration was attended by outgoing President Joe Biden, as well as former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. All former first ladies also attended the ceremony except for Michelle Obama. Many of the world's wealthiest individuals were also in attendance, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla founder and Trump confidante Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Vice President J.D. Vance took his oath of office first, administered by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, while Trump took his oath at 12:02 p.m. ET, administered by Chief Justice John Roberts. The national anthem was performed by tenor Christopher Macchio. Minutes after taking office, Trump reportedly sent a text message to supporters stating, "I AM THE PRESIDENT NOW!" and announcing a "24-hour presidential fundraising blitz," according to CNN.

What did Trump say in his inaugural address?

Trump declared that the United States needs a "revolution of common sense," but also that the "golden age of America begins right now." Under his leadership, the U.S. "would be respected again all over the world," the president said during his address, and he said he was "saved by God" from his July 2024 assassination attempt to lead the country.

The president will "put America first" during "every single day of the Trump administration," Trump said. He also took aim at large swaths of the federal government, most notably the U.S. Department of Justice. The "scales of justice will be rebalanced," and the "vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end."

The president often used large, sweeping comparisons that have become a hallmark of his vocabulary. We are "at the start of a thrilling new era of national success. A tide of change is sweeping the country. Sunlight is pouring over the entire world," Trump said.

The U.S. "can no longer deliver basic services," Trump said, though he noted that "some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country" are "sitting here right now." The president also cited executive orders he planned to sign, and said he would "declare a national emergency at our southern border" and halt all illegal immigration.

Trump said he would "direct all members of my Cabinet" to use the "vast powers at their disposal" to bring down inflation. The U.S. will also "end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life," Trump said. He also pledged to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and change the name of Alaska's Mt. Denali back to Mt. McKinley.

The speech itself was a "lot more specific than you usually hear in an inaugural address," as Trump "avoided the lofty themes and language you normally hear in these speeches, and instead went through a detailed roster of his priorities," said CNN's Kevin Liptak. However, "many of the things Trump is calling for are not supported by all Americans," said NPR, as the outlet's latest poll "found Americans split evenly on deportations and think tariffs will hurt the economy more than help it."

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."

In his farewell address to the US nation on Wednesday, Joe Biden listed the accomplishments of his presidency but acknowledged "it will take time to feel the full impact of all we've done together".

The outgoing president opened his 17-minute speech by stressing that the new ceasefire deal in Gaza had been "developed and negotiated by my team". It remains to be seen if this tentative truce will be a lasting legacy of Biden's term but his administration's support for Israel "at every turn", despite its "relentless outpouring of violence", has left an "indelible moral stain", said Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy.

Presidential legacies are "complicated matters", said The Atlantic, but, as Biden leaves The White House, he seems "less a transformational figure than a historical parenthesis". His four years in office will be remembered for his failure both to "grasp the political moment" and to achieve "the essential mission of his presidency": to "preserve democracy by preventing Donald Trump's return to power".

Withdrawal from Afghanistan

Biden's "first misstep as president came half a world away", with the shambolic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, said the BBC's North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher. Backing the Trump-negotiated end to "the forever war", Biden promised there would be no "a hasty rush to the exit" but "we'll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely".

The reality was anything but, as "scenes of chaos at Kabul airport dominated world news", said The Guardian. Despite the majority of Americans backing the US exit plan, the chaotic and hurried withdrawal painted a picture of a great power in decline, and Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee claimed it "degraded" US national security.

For a president who prided himself on his foreign-policy experience, it was a particularly disastrous moment. Biden's Gallup approval rating dipped below 50% for the first time – a mark it would never reach again.

Inflation hitting hard

On the domestic front, Biden "has much to point to", said The Washington Post, perhaps most notably "an economic recovery out of the pandemic" that is "the envy of other countries".

Biden's landmark "American Rescue Plan" delivered nearly $2 trillion in new government spending, and was quickly followed by a trillion-dollar bi-partisan infrastructure investment bill. But rampant inflation – due, in some part, to these policies – proved stubborn to shift, and voters came to blame Biden's presidency for the high prices in stores.

The fault lay with Biden's focus on policies that took too long to translate into economic benefits for the average American worker. By the summer before the 2024 presidential election, the monthly inflation numbers had dropped below 3%, economic growth was steady, unemployment rates low, and "the US had outperformed the world's other industrialised nations" but "voters continued to have a pessimistic view of the economy," said the BBC's Zurcher. And "they did not forgot nor forgive" at the ballot box.

"The time horizon" associated with Biden's major pieces of legislation was "way out of sync with the exigencies of the presidential election," Brent Cebul, associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, told the BBC.

Support for Ukraine

The Biden administration was quick to support Ukraine following Russia's invasion in February 2022. And Biden's continued support, including $183 billion in military aid, "has been critical to Ukraine's effort to repel the Russian invasion, and has inspired Nato allies to do the same", said international security expert Dafydd Townley on The Conversation.

But fierce fighting "continues on the frontlines with no clear plan for a peace deal", said CBS News.

Biden also faced criticism early in the conflict "for holding back on sending the most lethal weapons", and then, later, Republicans attacked him for "spending too much money on Ukraine aid".

The White House was pursuing a "Goldilocks strategy," said Phillips Payson O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, in The Atlantic. Biden and his aides were "hoping to help Ukraine fight without provoking Putin too much".

What this meant in practice is that the Biden administration "has treated the Ukraine conflict like a crisis to be managed, not a war to be won".

Decision to run in 2024

Biden ran for president in 2020 as a transition candidate – an "implicit but clear pledge that he intended to serve a single term", said The New York Times. Yet, despite record low approval ratings, voters' concern about his age and clear signs of physical and mental decline, Biden made the decision to run again in 2024, claiming that he was the only person capable of beating Donald Trump.

A disastrous first presidential debate in June led to pressure from Democrat big-hitters for him to stand down but the damage to the party's re-election hopes had already been done. His replacement, Kamala Harris, had only 100 days to introduce herself to the electorate as presidential candidate, and distance herself from Biden's more unpopular policies.

While history may judge Biden's record more favourably with the passing of time – as it has fellow one-term president Jimmy Carter – the fact that he ran again in 2024 "in the face of voters' broad discontent and on top of the specific concerns they had about his age" will surely "be a part of" his legacy, said The Washington Post.

"He'd like his legacy to be that he rescued us from Trump," Democratic strategist Susan Estrich told the BBC's Zurcher. "But sadly, for him, his legacy is Trump again. He is the bridge from Trump One to Trump Two."

The Hunter pardon

Having repeatedly vowed not to pardon his son Hunter, who was convicted of three felony gun charges, Biden did just that, only weeks after Trump was voted back in. His decision was widely criticised by both Republicans and Democrats, with The Atlantic's Jonathan Chait branding it the "hypocrisy of fatherly indulgence".

Biden said he would "abide by the results of the justice system as a matter of principle", Chait wrote, but "in breaking his promise" and "issuing a sweeping pardon of his son for any crimes he may have committed over an 11-year period", he has prioritised "his own feelings over the defence of his country".

The Hunter pardon put Democrats in the "almost impossible position of demanding equal treatment under the law for convicted felon Trump, while trying to excuse Biden's whitewashing of his son's own criminal record", said Time.

"A father’s love is admirable; a president's lie is not," said The New York Times, "In one of his last major political acts in office, Joe Biden forgot who he was." And the consequence? "History won't be kind."

Republicans are poised to take control of the House of Representatives this month by the narrowest seat margin in nearly 100 years, with a 220-215 majority that will be thinned out even further in the coming weeks as two members take roles in the Trump administration. And if the drama on the floor of the chamber surrounding the election of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was any indication, Republicans might be in for a wild ride, including the possibility of losing their majority.

Republicans' challenge

Johnson's victory is a "chance for the Republican majority in the House to show the American people it can govern," said Roll Call. But the procedural struggle to choose Johnson as speaker "seems like a skirmish in a wider fight that will go on for the next two years," said David Dayen at The American Prospect. Republicans will have "no wiggle room to push their agenda through the House of Representatives," especially given a "rather unruly caucus that feuded bitterly in the past," said the New York Post. Johnson's job will be especially hard until special elections are held to fill the vacancy of former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), as well as Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), who have been tapped for jobs in President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet.

If Trump "were to continue to raid" the narrow House majority to "fill out his White House and Cabinet, Republicans could lose their edge altogether," said The New York Times. If Democrats were to win all three of the special elections, control of the chamber would flip. It is also possible that unforeseen events could make the GOP's hold on the chamber more secure. The history of such narrow majorities may offer us some insight into what will unfold over the next two years.

Lessons from the past

The last time the House was this closely divided, the United States was in crisis. As the Great Depression deepened, it was not clear if Herbert Hoover's Republicans had maintained their majority in the 1930 elections. While Democrats gained 52 seats, when the dust settled Republicans still held a 218-216 majority, with one third-party lawmaker joining the minority. But a "truly insane thing happened" between the election in November 1930 and when Congress convened in March 1931, which is that 14 members-elect of the House died, said The Washington Post. After a series of special elections were held to fill the vacancies, Democrats emerged with a narrow majority for the remainder of the term. But with Republicans still in charge of the Senate, it is remembered as the "do-little Great Depression's 72nd Congress" that failed to address the horrors of the unfolding economic crisis, said The Hill.

Sixteen years earlier, Republicans won a 215-214 plurality of the chamber's 435 seats in the 1916 elections, but with neither party winning a majority, it gave enormous power to four third-party representatives who sided with Speaker Champ Clark's Democrats, "thus enabling the Democrats to — just barely — retain control of the chamber," said Pew Research Center. In April 1917, the House voted to declare war on the Central Powers by a 373-50 vote. While the narrow margin and coalition-government might have seemed like a recipe for gridlock, a rally-around-the-flag effect made the new Congress "remarkably productive," as the two parties worked together on several issues including alcohol prohibition, said the Post.

The House elections in 1848 resulted in neither Democrats nor their major-party counterparts the Whigs gaining an outright majority of seats in the House. The anti-slavery Free Soil Party won 9 seats but even adding them to the Whigs' 106 did not produce a majority. It therefore took 63 ballots to elect a speaker, Georgia Democrat Howell Cobb, who "played an important role in negotiating and securing the passage of the Compromise of 1850," which temporarily defused tensions that would later erupt in the Civil War, said The Miller Center.

President-elect Donald Trump's pick to be the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights is an attorney, conservative activist and Fox News personality who raised her national profile during the Covid-19 pandemic by challenging stay-at-home, quarantine and mandatory face mask policies. Harmeet K. Dhillon, 56, has long served as a key part of the right-wing culture war's legal arm and will now be tasked with leading the Department of Justice's civil rights program, which she is expected to reorient toward conservative positions on a variety of hot-button issues.

Corporate attorney turned MAGA warrior

Dhillon was born in Chandigarh, India, to a Punjabi Sikh family and moved to the United States as a child. She was awarded her BA in Classical Studies at Dartmouth College, where she "bristled at the political correctness of liberal classmates," said SF Gate. She obtained her JD from the University of Virginia School of Law, after which she served a clerkship on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. After joining a series of law firms working on issues from securities to employment, Dhillon founded a private California law firm in 2006.

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Dhillon worked with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in cases involving discrimination or harassment of Sikhs. Dhillon served as vice chair of the Republican Party of California from 2008 to 2010 and was one of San Francisco's leading Republican voices, which was the "loneliest job in politics," said SFGate. In 2018, she founded the Center For American Liberty, a legal nonprofit that maintains "nationwide network of attorneys to zealously advocate for individual liberty and to combat illegal discrimination," said the organization.

During the first Trump administration, she took on a number of conservative legal causes and clients, including Google employee James Damore, who was fired after writing a memo which "which said that biological gender differences make women less effective programmers" said Time. The National Labor Relations Board rejected his claim in February 2018, ruling that "companies are allowed to set their own policies and enforce them," said Inc.

Dhillon also filed lawsuits against California early in the Covid-19 pandemic, representing "pastors, gun shop owners, protesters, cosmetologists and beachgoers" who claimed they were harmed by Gov. Gavin Newsom's stay-at-home orders and business closures, said Politico. After the 2020 election, Dhillon "emerged as a fierce advocate of Trump's baseless assertions of widespread election fraud" and asked the Supreme Court to intervene and overturn the result, said The Washington Post. She also challenged Ronna McDaniel for the leadership of the Republican National Committee in 2023, "seeking to make the party organization more Trump-friendly," said The Guardian.

Reactions split along familiar ideological lines

Conservatives lauded the pick. She is "regarded as smart, articulate and tough," said National Review. Dhillon is an "ardent opponent of the left and a proven legal fighter," and her appointment means that "Trump is seizing what may well be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to undo all of the damage" that the left has done with the power of the DOJ, said Jonathan Tobin at Jewish News Syndicate. While it is "not unusual for Republican administrations to significantly scale back the work in the Civil Rights Division," Dhillon is a "lawyer active in the culture wars" who is expected to target DEI practices and shut down investigations of police violence and misconduct in her new role, said The New York Times.

Dillon's nomination was met with hostility in liberal and progressive circles. The pick "signals an alarming shift that could make life increasingly difficult for transgender people nationwide," said Erin Reed at Truthout, citing Dhillon's work representing detransitioners. Dhillon is "one of the leading legal figures working to roll back voting rights across the country" through her involvement in cases "challenging voting rights laws, redistricting, election processes or Trump's efforts to appear on the ballot in the 2024 election," said Democracy Docket. Her career has been spent "eroding public trust in our electoral process and participating in a larger effort to undermine racial equity initiatives," said the Legal Defense Fund.

Conservative Christians backed Donald Trump's presidential campaign solidly and vociferously; many even suggested that he had been chosen by God. Weeks before the vote, Franklin Graham, son of Billy and one of America's most famous preachers, prayed aloud for him to win the election at a Trump rally in North Carolina while supporters cried: "Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!".

The TV evangelist Hank Kunneman described the election as "a battle between good and evil", adding: "There's something on President Trump that the enemy fears: it's called the anointing." Another celebrity evangelist, Lance Wallnau, prophesied his victories, describing them as "part of God's plan to usher in a new era of Christian dominion around the world".

Trump, for his part, has embraced the role. Referring to his attempted assassination in July, he declared on election night: "Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason, and that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness."

How important was their support?

Very. About 13% of Americans are white white evangelical Protestants, and they have been a crucial section of the Republican Party's political base since the 1960s (black evangelicals, by contrast, tend to support the Democrats). White conservative Christians in general tend strongly to lean Republican, and their support has recently become more pronounced as the demographics of the US have changed. (According to Robert P. Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute, polls suggest that the Republican Party is now "70% white and Christian", and the Democratic party is "only a quarter white and Christian".)

The strong backing given to Trump by white Christians was a bedrock of his recent victory. According to the official exit polls, 82% of white evangelicals backed Trump, along with 63% of white Catholics and similar numbers of white non-evangelical Protestants.

Isn't Trump an odd choice for religious voters?

As a divorcee, a philanderer and a convicted felon, perhaps he is. He's not a regular churchgoer, either, though in recent years he has identified himself as a "true believer" (and a "non-denominational Christian"). Politically, though, he has promised to champion Christianity. In his first term, he made good on his promise to appoint conservative Christians to the Supreme Court; this led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which had protected the right to abortion. He has also often played up fears of a cultural takeover by the Left that would undermine Christian values. "They want to tear down crosses where they can, and cover them up with social justice flags," he has said. He has pledged to tackle "anti-Christian bias", and "to bring back Christianity in this country".

What does he mean by that?

It has been taken as an endorsement of "Christian nationalism": a broad movement based on the belief that the United States is a country founded by and for Christians, and that Christianity is under attack in modern America.

Christian nationalists demand a bigger role for the religion in the government of the US (although the First Amendment prohibits the government from establishing a state religion). They see being a Christian as an essential part of being a "real American". Such beliefs have permeated large swathes of government across the US, from school boards to state legislatures.

How influential are such beliefs?

Recent surveys suggest that only about 10% of the population are committed Christian nationalists; according to Pew Research, a majority of Americans support the separation of Church and state, but think the US should be informed by Christian values. Critics worry that Christian nationalism nevertheless may form a threat to democracy, because its fusion of theology and right-wing politics has become so influential in the Maga movement: as America becomes less white and less Christian, a minority cling fiercely to the idea that it is a divinely ordained promised land for European Christians. There is evidence, for instance, that some 6 January rioters were inspired by Christian nationalism.

What will Trump do for conservative Christians?

He has promised to "bring back prayer" in schools (until recently prayer was deemed unconstitutional in some circumstances); and to create a federal task force to fight anti-Christian bias. He says he will affirm that God made only two genders, male and female. And he will give enhanced political access to conservative Christian leaders. "It will be directly into the Oval Office – and me," Trump told pastors in Georgia in early November.

He has, though, pushed back against some demands from the evangelical movement: he has distanced himself from the prospect of a federal ban on abortion, saying that he supports leaving the issue to individual states. Perhaps most significant, though, will be the appointments of conservative Christians to important roles.

Which appointments?

He has selected Mike Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist pastor, as ambassador to Israel. Huckabee, like many in the evangelical movement, believes the US has a divine mandate to protect Israel. "Without any apology, I believe those who bless Israel will be blessed, those who curse Israel will be cursed," he has said.

Pete Hegseth, Trump's pick for secretary of defence, is an avowedly militant Christian, who has the Crusader battle cry "Deus vult", meaning "God Wills It" tattooed on his bicep, and wants to create a network of Christian schools so as to provide the "recruits" for an army that will eventually launch an "educational insurgency" to take over the nation. Probably most influential, though, are the religious conservatives, such as Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, whom Trump has already appointed to the Supreme Court.

Donald Trump swept to an emphatic victory over Kamala Harris in the US presidential election, to seal a historic return to the White House as America's 47th president. With some results still to be declared, Trump looked on course to win the popular vote too – a feat that has eluded every Republican candidate since 2004. Trump also becomes the first former president in 132 years to be returned to the White House after having previously lost a presidential contest.

Speaking at a campaign event in Florida early on Wednesday morning, he said his victory would usher in a new "golden age" for the US. "America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate," he declared. In a further boost for the 78-year-old, the Republicans seized control of the Senate, and looked well-placed to retain their majority in the House of Representatives.

The result was first called by Fox News just before 2am Eastern Time, and world leaders were quick to congratulate the president-elect. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu hailed what he called "history's greatest comeback"; and Britain's Keir Starmer said that he was looking forward to working with Trump to ensure that the "special relationship" prospers. President Zelenskyy, whom Trump has pressured to strike a deal with Vladimir Putin in order to end the war in Ukraine, also sent his congratulations. Markets reacted positively to Trump's victory: the dollar was on track to record its biggest one-day rise since 2020 on Wednesday, and US stocks surged as traders bet on lower taxes and deregulation.

Pollsters had predicted that the race was going to be so close that its outcome could take days to emerge. But, in the event, it became apparent within a few hours of polls closing that Trump was on course to secure the 270 or more electoral votes he needed for victory. Exit polls indicated that more women had rallied behind Harris – who ran on a pledge to protect reproductive rights – than Trump; but perhaps not to the degree that they had supported Joe Biden in 2020. Trump, meanwhile, enjoyed a solid lead among white voters, and made significant gains among black and Latino voters (who have traditionally supported the Democrats in larger numbers) since the last presidential election. Analysts said that Trump's efforts to court younger voters, and male ones in particular, via social media – by, for instance, appearing on Joe Rogan's podcast, which has 18 million subscribers – may have paid dividends.

Trump's 'supersized promises'

This extraordinary win marks "a political comeback for the ages", said The Wall Street Journal. Trump had been "all but written off as a future candidate after the Capitol riot" on 6 January 2021; but Democrats "helped revive him" with their one-sided investigation into that day, and "partisan use of lawfare". Over this campaign he not only retained the support of his Maga base, but also gathered a broader coalition that included young people and ethnic minorities. His "supersized promises" to carry out mass deportations of irregular migrants, to "drill baby drill" and to "end all wars" resonated with millions of Americans, said David Charter in The Times. The image of him, raising a defiant fist and shouting "fight, fight, fight" moments after the first of two attempts on his life, "summed up why so many Americans wanted him back".

Harris' campaign, by contrast, was a mess, said Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. Joe Biden could point to economic successes, but all voters noticed was the soaring cost of living. Paired with his physical enfeeblement, this gave Americans a sense that their nation was on a "downward spiral". The Democrats seemed incompetent, "distracted by woke", incapable of bringing "peace in Ukraine or Israel; humiliated in Afghanistan". Incumbent parties don't win in those circumstances; and though Harris achieved a significant bounce after taking over from Biden, she "failed to follow through" with bold policies to address voters' concerns. Instead, she tried to "waltz into the White House" on "vibes" and a pledge to "end the dramala".

Trump will be much more dangerous in his second term than in his first, said Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker. He has vowed to "go after his opponents" once in office, and to pack federal institutions with loyalists who'll pursue his "extreme and radical agenda". He threatens to sow chaos abroad, by undermining Nato and pressuring Ukraine to cede territory to Russia. And all the while, he'll be subject to less scrutiny from a Republican-controlled Senate, and a conservative-dominated Supreme Court. Harris warned that Trump had spent years trying to keep Americans divided and fearful of each other; but millions chose him regardless.

The next steps

Trump will take office on 20 January. He is expected to eschew Washington insiders when he fills his top team, in favour of unorthodox loyalists, the FT reports. Among those tipped for roles are Elon Musk, whom Trump has earmarked to head a new "efficiency commission" to audit government spending; and Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the anti-vaccine activist and onetime presidential hopeful, who is set to take up a role shaping health policy.

As the Democrat blame game began, party strategists said that Biden had damaged their party's chances by staying in the race too long. Others said that Tim Walz had been a poor choice of running mate, who hadn't improved Harris' chances in swing states.

A little bit of history came out of the presidential election. Usha Vance, the wife of Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, will be the first Indian American second lady. And she'll be the first Hindu.

Vance, 38, took a "more behind-the-scenes role on the campaign trail," said ABC News. She did introduce her husband at the Republican National Convention in July, but that was the end of her public remarks in the runup to the election. "The thing that J.D. asked, and the thing that I certainly agreed to do, is to keep him company," she said to NBC News. Now the Vances and their three children will be moving to the Naval Observatory, the traditional vice presidential residence. Her intent? "Giving them a stable, normal, happy life and upbringing," she said.

Usha Vance has a "conspicuous resume" for a political spouse, said The New York Times. She was a law clerk for Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., then went to work as a litigator for a "prestigious San Francisco law firm." She is the daughter of Indian immigrants who grew up near San Diego, eventually landing at Yale Law School, where she met her husband. But her own views on today's big issues are mostly unknown. Usha Vance is "something of a political cipher," said the Times.

A couple in 'lockstep,' moving right

Even at Yale, Usha Vance's politics were mostly a mystery, said Business Insider. "She was more tight-lipped, at least in my experience, with her political views," said Marvin Lim, a Yale Law School classmate who went into Democratic politics. Usha Vance was a registered Democrat until 2014 — and the law firm she worked for, Munger, Tolles & Olson, has been described as "woke" — but in 2021 she made a donation to conservative Arizona Republican Blake Masters. (She stepped away from the firm when her husband joined the Trump ticket.) The thread through it all? "Her devotion to her husband" since they met at Yale, said Business Insider.

J.D. Vance has "leaned heavily on his wife over the past decade-and-a-half" as he emerged into the national spotlight, said USA Today. Usha Vance's politics may make her an "enigma" in public, but friends and family of the couple say the pair have been in "lockstep" as her husband moved from the Never Trump camp to one of Donald Trump's most reliable allies in the U.S. Senate and eventually to his running mate. The Vances are "a team in every sense of the word," said Jai Chabria, a family friend.

'Some real good for the country'

Usha Vance has told interviewers that she and her husband "don't always agree politically," said Politico. But she told "Fox & Friends" that she's on board for another Trump presidency. "If I didn't feel that the ticket, the Trump-Vance ticket, was able to do some real good for the country, then I wouldn't be here supporting him and J.D. wouldn't have done this," she said. Even when the couple disagrees, she said, Usha Vance trusts her husband's intentions. "There's a nice give and take, but I think it's a pretty happy one."

When Keir Starmer met Joe Biden for the first time this summer, Starmer insisted that the special relationship between the UK and the US was "stronger than ever". Now, he has been forced to insist he still has a "good relationship" with potential incoming president Donald Trump, after the Republican candidate's campaign filed a legal complaint against the Labour Party for sending volunteers to campaign for Kamala Harris.

Labour's head of operations, Sofia Patel, triggered the transatlantic row with a now-deleted post on LinkedIn, seeking additional volunteers to join nearly 100 current and former staff heading to key US swing states, and suggesting the party would "sort housing" for the volunteers.

Trump's team has accused "far-left" Labour Party members of "attempting to influence our election" in an official complaint with the Federal Election Commission. The campaign seized on the offer of housing, claiming it amounts to a "foreign national contribution for the Harris campaign" – prohibited under federal election law.

What did the commentators say?

Trump's legal team were "clearly having fun" when they announced the complaint in a Revolutionary War-flavoured website post entitled "The British Are Coming!", said Politico's London Playbook. But "worryingly for Starmer, the tone was far less playful" from Trump's senior allies. Richard Grenell, tipped as Trump's pick for secretary of state, said that "whenever a foreign government tries to interfere in an election – that's desperation".

Labour volunteers "have gone over pretty much every election" to help the Democrats, said Starmer, and indeed, federal election law allows foreign nationals to campaign in the US provided they aren't paid or given influence on party decision-making. But any current or former Labour employee who travels to the US to campaign for the Democrats is "likely to break electoral law" in a different way, said The Daily Telegraph's US editor Tony Diver.

Labour staff have been instructed to pay for their own flights and car hire, which could easily amount to more than $1,000 (£770), the threshold at which volunteering expenses are considered political donations to the party in US electoral law. Any foreign national who makes a financial contribution is at risk of criminal prosecution and fines, Lawrence Otter, a constitutional and electoral law expert, told the paper. The Harris campaign, which "certainly has to know there is a cost of getting here from England", could also be sanctioned with a potentially "substantial" fine.

Either way, the row is "seriously awkward" for Labour, said the BBC's chief political correspondent Henry Zeffman. All year Labour has "invested significant energy into trying to forge links to the Trump campaign". Last month Starmer met Trump for the first time, inviting David Lammy, the foreign secretary who has infamously described Trump as "racist" and a "neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath", to join them. These recently forged links, said Zeffman, could now be at risk.

This is "appalling, dumb diplomacy", agreed Camilla Long in The Times. More to the point, it was "completely unnecessary". "Americans want hobbits and royals and Shakespeare and pervy actors and dried goods, not rubbish 'we can fix you' politics from a country that's tobogganing at light speed down the G7," said Long. "It would be better if lefties stayed away."

What next?

Playing down the row at PMQs today, deputy PM Angela Rayner said "people in their own time often go on campaigns", adding that "it happens in all political parties". Meanwhile, Defence Secretary John Healey insisted that the "special, deep relationship" had "withstood the political ups and downs on both sides of the Atlantic and we are determined to make that work in future".

Trump's complaint is merely part of a "broader campaign to sow distrust in the election and ward off any accusations of their own campaign coordinating with foreign governments", David Andersen, professor of US politics at Durham University, told the BBC.

During the televised debate between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris on Sept. 10, Trump was unable to respond to moderators pressing him for details on his plan to replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA). "I have concepts of a plan," Trump said, inviting widespread ridicule.

But Trump was telling the truth — neither he nor his party have released a health care plan since their efforts to repeal the ACA fell apart early in Trump's presidency. The U.S. health care system is both extraordinarily complex and deeply resistant to change, and the Trump campaign appears to be gambling that voters would mostly prefer the status quo to any significant reforms.

A focus on pharmaceuticals

Trump's policy blueprints are compiled on a section of his website labeled Agenda 47. One item is dedicated to drugs and drug prices. The former president continues to promise lower Medicare drug prices, although details are sparse. His campaign has also pledged to tackle a shortage of certain critical drugs by bringing their production back to the United States. The campaign assails "the extreme national vulnerability caused by the lack of an adequate domestic manufacturing capability for critical pharmaceuticals" and promises to ramp up domestic production. It is an assessment that is shared by a 2023 report produced by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Trump is critical of U.S. reliance on drugs exported from China. And drug shortages, particularly those used to treat diabetes, as well as some cancers, are a real problem. "A significant majority of the ingredients in the drugs people take in the U.S. are produced overseas, mostly in China and India," said Jen Christensen at CNN. Trump says he will take executive action to address the problem by supporting U.S. manufacturers.

Vague promises about bigger changes

Apart from drugs and drug prices, the Trump campaign is not openly campaigning behind health care ideas. While Republican-aligned think tanks have certainly offered proposals to reform the health care system, the party itself has been unwilling or unable to go on record with concrete specifics in recent years. "Republicans will increase Transparency, promote Choice and Competition, and expand access to new Affordable Healthcare and prescription drug options," said the 2024 Republican Party platform in its only effort to address the issue.

The uncertainty was also reflected in remarks by the GOP's vice presidential candidate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), speaking about health care during his Oct. 1 debate with Democratic vice presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.). The campaign hasn't released policy details about health care because "you're not going to propose a 900 page bill standing on a debate stage," said Vance. Reforms would happen, instead, as part of "the give and take of bipartisan negotiation." Vance talked about how it does not make sense to force younger, healthier people into the same risk pools as older Americans with more expensive needs. "We're going to actually implement some regulatory reform in the health care system that allows people to choose a health care plan that works for them," Vance said at a September rally in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Competing interpretations of the Trump-Vance plan

The Trump campaign says it will protect Medicare funding, and both Trump and Vance have promised to protect Americans with preexisting conditions. However, critics have noted that Vance's comments about separating sick from healthy Americans sound ominously like a return to the days before the Affordable Care Act was passed. "This would appear to roll back some of the Affordable Care Act, which got rid of insurance companies' ability to deny coverage based on preexisting conditions," said Hafiz Rashid at The New Republic.

Not everyone shares that assessment. "The reforms recommended by Senator Vance would protect people with preexisting conditions and give people better health-coverage options, aims that are not mutually exclusive," said Brian Blase at the National Review. But unless the Trump campaign releases a policy blueprint, it will likely have a hard time settling these disagreements about the intent and outcomes of their ideas.

Former President Donald Trump appeared to acknowledge for the first time last month that he might lose the 2024 presidential election. He also hinted that he would likely not attempt a fourth bid for the White House in 2028 if he were to lose, a rare look toward the future from a presidential candidate who has long been claiming he will cruise to victory this November.

"No, I don't. No, I don't. I think that will be, that will be it. I don't see that at all," Trump said during a Sept. 22 interview with Sinclair Broadcast Group when asked if he would run for president in 2028. The former president would be 82 that year, which is why it would seem unlikely that he would run for the highest office again. But if Trump does not regain the White House, there is something else waiting for him: a continued barrage of legal troubles that are unlikely to go away if he loses to Vice President Kamala Harris on Nov. 5.

What did the commentators say?

There is a chance that "if Trump loses, he backtracks" from his 2028 claim, reporter and political analyst Ron Brownstein said at CNN. It is "in fact, unlikely" Trump would run in 2028, but "he's going to want to keep open the possibility that he will do so to keep the Republican Party in line, particularly because if he loses, the risk of these criminal trials going forward obviously continues." The former president is "going to want to keep Republicans under the threat of another Trump candidacy."

But whether he keeps to his word or not, Trump's insistence is "notable both because Trump seemed to rule out a fourth bid for the White House and because he rarely admits the possibility he could legitimately lose an election," said The Associated Press. The former president "normally insists that could only happen if there were widespread cheating, a false allegation he made in 2020 and he's preemptively made again during his 2024 presidential campaign."

This is also "not the first time Mr. Trump has made such a comment," said Maggie Astor at The New York Times, as he pledged in 2020 that he wouldn't run again if he lost to Joe Biden. But the "question of whether Mr. Trump would try again in four years if he lost is a step ahead of a more immediate matter: whether he would accept a loss this year to begin with."

Despite what he has said, Trump's claims "should always be taken with a grain of salt, and his decision about 2028 is a particularly hard one to fact-check," said Rachel Treisman at NPR. Given his prior efforts to sow doubts about elections, Trump on Election Night "could move quickly and announce he had won before a final result comes," said Katherine Fung at Newsweek. He will "most likely call the election early no matter what the results are showing," Bob Beatty, the chair of Washburn University's political science department, said to Newsweek.

What next?

In the immediate aftermath of a potential Trump loss, there will likely be efforts by the former president to sow doubts about the election. Both Democrats and the GOP are "engaged in a sprawling legal fight over the 2024 election through a series of court disputes that could even run past Nov. 5 if results are close," said the AP. Republicans have already "filed more than 100 lawsuits challenging various aspects of vote-casting after being chastised repeatedly by judges in 2020 for bringing complaints about how the election was run only after votes were tallied."

One of the most notable efforts has come in Georgia, where the state's Trump-aligned election board attempted to push through rules that would seemingly work in the former president's favor on election day. This includes a rule that would have "empowered county election board members to investigate discrepancies" and another that would have required poll workers in each precinct to hand-count ballots, said Reuters. The Georgia Supreme Court struck down the rules, but similar GOP efforts are expected in other battleground states.

If Trump does lose, though, his legal issues would "keep moving forward as they have been, proceeding to trial without the ex-president's office posing any impediment," said Forbes. Even if Trump were to win the election, it wouldn't "erase his conviction in New York state court for falsifying business records, but it does make it likely any sentence wouldn't be carried out until after he leaves office."

In the months since President Donald Trump took the oath of office and returned to White House for a second term, the United States has experienced a seismic upheaval perhaps familiar to residents of the former Soviet Union — but largely unprecedented in modern American history itself. Declaring this the start of a "golden age of America," Trump's effort to dismantle whole swaths of the Federal government while working to deport a growing list of political adversaries and marginalized people alike has propelled the country into what seems to be both a continuation and a reinvention of his first term. Where this all will lead, no one truly knows.

While the full extent of Trump's imperial designs remains to be seen, we do have an extensive reservoir of past experience to inform this current moment. Although initially deployed to harken back to a mythologized national past, Trump's repeated promise to "Make America Great Again" is in many ways a nod to his first four years in office. Despite a perpetual sense of tumult and crises, Trump did, in fact, accomplish enough political wins during that first term to hint at what his current administration might have in store.

The judiciary

Trump's "most lasting impact on the country" is likely the drastic reshaping of America's courts, Business Insider said. By installing more than 200 federal judges, including 54 who "reshaped the ideological makeup of federal appeals courts" and three who drove a "generational shift in the highest court in the land," Trump's first-term impact on the judicial branch of government overall will "continue shaping the American legal and political landscape for decades," CNN said.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act

Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was arguably his "biggest legislative achievement," intended, per Trump, to "super-charge the economy," said Politico. It was also the "biggest tax overhaul since the Tax Reform Act of 1986," the Brookings Institute said, but "skewed toward the rich" and "failed to deliver promised economic benefits," said the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. One unambiguous takeaway: "U.S. corporations got to keep more of their money, and the U.S. government got less," said Bloomberg.

Space Force

One year after its official founding in 2019, Space Force had "developed from a theoretical concept to an operational service fully engaged in a broad spectrum of activities," West Point's Lieber Institute said. While the Space Force's annual budget grew over the first four years of its existence, that upward trend "will stop in fiscal 2025, for which the service is requesting $29.4 billion, down $0.6 billion from last year," Defense One said.

Criminal justice reform

Trump's historic First Step Act was one of the "most sweeping set of changes to the federal criminal justice system since the 1990s," NBC said. The bipartisan-backed law "allows thousands of people to earn an earlier release from prison and could cut many more prison sentences in the future," said Vox, and represents "modest steps to alter the federal criminal justice system and ease very punitive prison sentences at the federal level."

The law has shown "promising results thus far," with beneficiaries showing recidivism rates "considerably lower than those who were released from prison without benefit of the law," The Sentencing Project said.

The death of ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

Although Trump did not launch America's offensive against ISIS, the militant group responsible for acts of violence and terrorism across the Middle East, he did oversee one of the county's most significant victories in that effort: the death of founder and leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019. Al-Baghdadi's death was an "important milestone in the war against the Islamic State — and, more generally, in the struggle against terrorism," Brookings said. Trump's "personal involvement" in the military effort was largely centered around having implemented "new 'rules of engagement' that involved greater risks in return for faster, more decisive operations," said Peter R. Neumann, a professor of security studies.

America's biggest right-wing think-tank, The Heritage Foundation, has set aside $22m for Project 2025, a detailed blueprint for the next Republican presidency. It aims to provide "both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration". Its 922- page main document, "Mandate for Leadership", gives specific action plans for many parts of the federal government. 

This was actually published last April, to little fanfare. Now, though, with Trump the favourite to win the election, Project 2025 is receiving a lot of attention from the Democrats, the liberal media, and social media. It "offers a terrifying vision for America", wrote one critic; on TikTok, it has been called "a far-right manifesto that would destroy the federal government as we know it", and "a 1,000-page bucket list of extremist policies". 

What are the proposals? 

The Mandate is a grab-bag of policies, including permanent, sweeping tax cuts; sharp limits on abortion; a ban on pornography; the rejection of transgender rights; the curtailing of clean-energy projects and promotion of fossil fuels; the removal of employment quotas for racial minorities; the use of the military to suppress crime and protest; and the mass internment and expulsion of illegal migrants. It advocates the abolition of federal agencies such as the Department of Education. 

It's not one unified document: 38 writers contributed, and they're divided on economic policy (some favour protectionism and others free trade). But they're united in wanting to dismantle or take over the federal bureaucracy, and to put the Department of Justice and the FBI under the direct control of the president. The Heritage Foundation's president, Kevin Roberts, called it a plan for "a second American Revolution" that would be "bloodless, if the Left allows it to be". 

Why do the authors deem this necessary? 

In part it stems from a long-standing aversion to big government on the US Right, but it is also a reaction to Trump's first term in office. His transition to power in 2016 is generally agreed to have been chaotic; Trump also believes that his plans were repeatedly thwarted by the liberal-leaning "deep state". 

The New Yorker recently reported a former White House official saying: "Trump was constantly enraged that his cabinet wouldn't break the law for him. He wanted the Department of Homeland Security to shoot migrants crossing the Rio Grande, the Defence Department to draw up plans to invade Mexico, and the Internal Revenue Service to audit his critics." He also wanted to fire large numbers of federal workers to remove resistance to his agenda. The second time around, Trump is determined that there'll be no such impediments. 

So is Trump behind Project 2025? 

On the face of it, no. After it started receiving negative press, he explicitly disavowed it, saying: "I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it." He added that some of it was "absolutely ridiculous and abysmal". However, the team that created it is, in fact, full of former senior Trump staffers, many of whom would be very influential if he returned to the White House. 

For instance, Russell Vought, a former Trump administration official who wrote a key chapter, doubles as the Republican Party's policy director. And there is a lot of crossover between Project 2025's aims, official Republican policy, and Trump's own "Agenda 47". 

Which bits is Trump likely to adopt? 

He is likely to ignore some proposals. Trump is against federal restrictions on abortions, as he is aware that the issue could cost him votes. On immigration, however, Republican policy and Project 2025 are closely aligned: the party promises the "largest deportation programme in American history". 

Trump has also repeatedly declared that he will take control of the administrative state. "Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state," he said at a recent rally. In 2020, the Trump administration issued an executive order that stripped protections from civil servants perceived as disloyal to the president. Trump has also stated that he would use the FBI and the Justice Department to "go after" political rivals. So it's not unreasonable to describe Project 2025 as a plausible plan for the next Trump administration, drawn up by the people who'd staff it. And the question of staffing may turn out to be critical.  

Why is staffing important?

Trump has little interest in the granular detail of policy; he relies on staffers for that. And each incoming president has to fill around 4,000 government roles with political appointees. In his first term, Trump struggled to do this, causing parts of the government machine to break down. The Heritage Foundation's team has tried to fix the problem by assembling a database of pre-vetted potential appointees, excluding, for example, anyone who blamed Trump for the Capitol riot in 2021. 

They also have plans to replace tens of thousands of civil servants with Trump loyalists, by reissuing Trump's 2020 executive order (which Joe Biden rescinded). Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, said the team was "systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army – aligned, trained, and essentially weaponised conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state".

Is all this affecting the election?

It is providing a rallying call for liberals. In Kamala Harris' first statements as the leading Democratic candidate, she vowed to defeat two enemies: Donald Trump and "his extreme Project 2025 agenda". Trump's advisers acknowledge that the issue is hurting them. Paul Dans unexpectedly resigned this week, and the Trump campaign issued a warning to "any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign – it will not end well for you".

Donald Trump Jr. has long lived under his father's considerable shadow — understandably so, given his namesake's legacy as a business tycoon, reality TV icon, and political figurehead. But as the elder Trump's third presidential campaign solidifies his MAGA movement's wholesale consumption of the Republican party, a man who had for years seemed, as GQ said in a 2018 profile, "contentedly inattentive to politics" has emerged as not only one of his father's biggest boosters and the ultra-conservative celebrity he's been for years but as a significant political power in his own right. 

Where the former president's eldest daughter Ivanka, along with her husband Jared Kushner, were the dominant familial political force during her father's administration, Trump Jr.'s ascension through the Republican ranks in the intervening years has positioned him as both a gatekeeper and kingmaker in the upper echelons of conservative politics. While the name at the top of the GOP ticket this year is "Donald John Trump," it's Junior who is increasingly a locus of influence and authority moving forward.

'A MAGA bench for the future'

Trump Jr.'s most pointed political flex to date is arguably his successful push to add Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance to the Trump ticket. While Vance is the obvious veepstakes winner, it's Trump Jr. who "won the behind-the-scenes fight for his father's ear," the Washington Examiner said. Trump Jr. has "spent years carving out his own place in the Republican movement," and his successful support for Vance suggests an "even greater role Trump Jr. could play in a second Trump presidency."

The eldest Trump child is the "Republican party's next-generation kingmaker," said Financial Times. He not only works on "pushing alternative forms of media" such as the Rumble streaming platform favored by conservatives, but "also the next crop of Republican officials." It's a vocation he has embraced. "My biggest role is just making sure that we have an America First, a MAGA bench for the future," he said to The New York Times. As a "top confidant not only to the Republican presidential nominee but also the vice-presidential nominee," Trump Jr. is a "political force to be reckoned with in his own right," the Times said, citing a network in which "his former chief of staff is running the main pro-Trump super PAC. His longtime political consigliere has played a similar role for Mr. Vance. And his business partner in a publishing company is running a second pro-Trump super PAC."

The Vance episode in particular is "one of a series of signs of Trump Jr.'s rising influence within his father's political orbit," NBC News said, with one person close to Junior telling the network that "once we get into the fall, he'll be on the road nonstop."

"There are two endorsements that every candidate wants," said GOP strategist Alex Bruesewitz to Axios. "No. 1 is they want President Trump, and No. 2 is they want Donald Trump Jr."

'I want a veto power'

For his part, Trump Jr. sees his role for a potential second Trump administration as less about placing the right people in positions of authority so much as it is about keeping the wrong ones out. "I don't want to pick a single person for a position of power," said Trump Jr. in an interview with Axios' Mike Allen during the Republican National Committee. "All I want to do is block the guys that would be a disaster."

"I just want to block the bad actors. I just want to be a block. That's it," Trump said. "You guys pick the guy, that's right. I want a veto power to cut out each and every one of those people."

As for his political future beyond his father's potential administration, when asked in January about a run for office of his own, Trump Jr. said "I'm not going to say no, because if you do, they say 'liar!'"

Donald Trump may have put the US-UK special relationship in jeopardy with his pick for vice-president, pundits are warning. 

Hours before the Republican National Convention kicked off in Milwaukee yesterday, the former president named Ohio's Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate for the November election. In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said former venture capitalist Vance – a one-time "Never Trump" Republican who once dubbed him an "idiot" and suggested he could be "America's Hitler" – was "best suited" to the role of prospective VP. 

The UK may disagree. Last week, Vance described Britain under the new Labour government as "the world's first 'truly Islamist country' to have a nuclear weapon", said Politico. Speaking at the right-wing National Conservatism conference in Washington, the 39-year-old acknowledged that he was "beating up on the UK", but added: "To my Tory friends I have to say, you guys really gotta get a handle on this." 

What did the commentators say?

Trump has "sent a clear message to Britain" with his VP pick, said MailOnline, as the former US leader gets back on the campaign trail following Saturday's failed assassination attempt. Vance's claim about the UK being an "Islamist" country has added to existing fears that the UK's special relationship with the US could "decline sharply" if Trump returns to power. 

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said she "doesn't recognise" Vance's characterisation of the UK. "I think he's said quite a lot of fruity things in the past," Rayner told ITV's "Good Morning Britain". But the US is a "key ally of ours", and should Trump and Vance prove victorious "we'll work together constructively". 

Labour is "scrabbling to cement a better relationship with the Republicans", said The Telegraph. David Lammy, now foreign secretary, has been meeting senior Republicans for months to smooth relations between Labour and the GOP, which is in "pole position" to take power in the US in November. 

Having previously called Trump a "woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath" and a "profound threat", Lammy has since tempered his remarks. "It doesn't matter who is in Number 10, you work with the United States," he said. After meeting Vance in May, the foreign secretary described him as a "friend" and praised "Hillbilly Elegy", Vance's bestselling book about growing up in poverty-stricken Appalachia, with Lammy drawing parallels with his own upbringing.

All the same, Vance's latest comments could "complicate" Keir Starmer's relationship with a Trump administration. The "Islamist" barb could have also been aimed at Sadiq Khan, who has a long and contentious history with Trump. The London mayor called him a "racist, sexist homophobe"; Trump retaliated by describing Khan as a "stone cold loser" who had been "foolishly nasty".

Beyond "fruity" rhetoric, Vance is a champion of "America first" isolationist mentality on trade and foreign policy, said Euractiv. That could "cause trouble" for Europe and intensify fears that Trump would undermine Washington's commitment to Nato. Vance has echoed Trump's stance that Nato states have relied on the US for a "blanket of security" for "far too long" and should take more responsibility for their defence.

What next?

Diplomats expect Vance to "support a hawkish China policy, pushing Europeans even further on the confrontational path with Beijing", said Euractiv, amid "tit-for-tat probes into trade barriers over a series of products from electric vehicles to pork and brandy". "I'm much more interested in some of the problems in East Asia right now," said Vance earlier this year. East Asia will be "the future of American foreign policy for the next 40 years, and Europe has to wake up to that fact".

But several commentators are "particularly worried" about Vance's "vocal opposition to US aid for Ukraine". Labour has reasserted its commitment to supporting the war-torn nation, but Vance has made his "disdain" for Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelenskyy "palpably clear", said Jacob Heilbrunn in The Spectator. Vance has also said he does not believe Vladimir Putin poses an existential threat to Europe. 

An increasingly tense world needs the special relationship "more than ever", said US ambassador to the UK Jane D. Hartley in The Times in January. The two militaries "underpin global security and defend democracy around the world". Amid spiralling violence in the Middle East, tensions with China, Russia and Iran, and issues such as AI safety and the climate crisis, maintaining the alliance is "vital".

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.

As the final guilty verdict was read in Donald Trump's hush-money trial yesterday, attention immediately turned to the impact it would have on the US presidential election on 5 November. 

The unanimous 34 guilty verdicts delivered in the Manhattan court cement Trump's place in the history books as the first former president of the United States to be a convicted felon. 

The "immediate impact is undeniable", said Axios's Zachary Basu and Sophia Cai. "America's political fabric has been fundamentally altered." But a rush of Republican donor support and little change in the polls suggest the result may have a less seismic impact on the outcome of the next presidential election.

A damaged candidacy

The verdict hands President Joe Biden and his Democratic allies "a weapon that they badly needed", said The Hill's Niall Stanage. Biden, who has been flagging in battleground state polls, "can now argue the American people must not vote for a criminal as president".

"I do think it will have an impact and damage him as a candidate," Ariel Hill-Davis, co-founder of Republican Women for Progress, a group that has sought to move the party away from Trump, told the BBC. College-educated and younger voters are "really hesitant to get back in line with the Republican Party headed by Donald Trump". This verdict will "further shore up those concerns".

The question now "isn't just how voters react", David Axelrod, an architect of the Obama presidency campaigns, told The New York Times – it's about "how Trump himself reacts".  

If the former president decides to "retreat further into rage and self-pity, obsessing over his own grievances rather than addressing the concerns of voters, it may make the difference for people on the bubble". 

And while the verdict may feel "momentous", said The Washington Post, Trump still faces a long list of legal challenges that could prove to be more important. 

Perhaps the biggest effect will be on the quality and tenor of the debate in the coming months. "We've entered new political & legal territory as a Nation," said US historian Tim Naftali on X. 

"Donald Trump will now force every GOP candidate to trash our judicial system. There will be a chorus of poison likely worse than what we heard before Jan. 6th." 

'Long forgotten' by November

Trump's conviction during an election campaign "is truly remarkable", said ABC News's Averi Harper. What's "even more remarkable" is that it probably won't significantly dent the broad support he receives from the Republican party or their voters. 

Major Republican donors rapidly rallied behind Trump yesterday, said Reuters, "pledging millions of dollars" to support his campaign. A number of those who spoke to the news agency were "broadly upbeat" about his chances in November.

Their optimism is reflected in recent polling. Two-thirds (67%) of Americans said they wouldn't change their vote in light of Trump's criminal conviction, an NPR/"PBS NewsHour"/Marist poll released yesterday suggested. The results chime with surveys assessed by FiveThirtyEight's senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich, which show Trump drops six points of support when a conviction was taken into account – "but Biden gains only one point". 

It's likely that the "conviction will make some Trump supporters squeamish about the idea of pulling the lever for him", said Rakich, "so they will stop identifying as Trump supporters for a while". But "most of them won't go so far as to vote for Biden".

This verdict "may ding Trump's poll numbers slightly in the short run", said CNN's Patrick Brown, "but by November it will almost certainly be long forgotten". Or perhaps, come election day, it will be remembered by Republicans only as "more proof that the 'elites' were willing to bend every rule in the book to go after Trump, and he refused to back down".

If this trial ends up determining the presidential race, agreed Rakich, it will be "because the campaign was a game of inches anyway".

"Donald Trump has an abortion problem," said Eric Levitz on Vox. He's ahead of Joe Biden on most election issues, but trailing badly on this one. It's an awkward subject for him. It was his judicial appointments that enabled the overturning two years ago of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 supreme court ruling that introduced a constitutional right to abortion. The fulfilment of a decades-long Republican goal, this was perhaps the most significant achievement of his presidency. 

But voters haven't responded well to "the avalanche of abortion bans" that have followed Roe's demise, making the issue a growing liability for Trump and his party. Last week, he sought to neutralise the matter with a neat bit of triangulation. In a statement, he voiced his objection to late abortions, and his belief that rape victims should always be able to get the procedure, but said it should be left to each state to decide its own policies.

This was smart positioning, said Marc A. Thiessen in The Washington Post. No president has delivered the "pro-life movement" more victories than Trump. Some are upset that he has chosen not to back a federal abortion ban at 15 weeks, but he's just being "honest": a national ban would never have got through congress. Trump's move defuses the issue; individual states, America's "laboratories of democracy", have always been the appropriate place to decide this question. It also allows Republicans to go on the offensive, pointing out that Democrats, who object to any limits, are the real "abortion extremists".

But the ripple effects from Roe's demise are going to cause plenty more problems for the Republicans, said Jim Newell on Slate. The day after Trump's statement, the Arizona supreme court ruled that an 1864 law banning almost all abortions could come back into effect. Trump rushed to distance himself from the decision, insisting that the situation would somehow be "straightened out". Among those now trying to repeal the 1864 ban is the Republican US senate candidate Kari Lake, who back in 2022 called it a "great law". 

For 50 years, GOP politicians have been able to get away with "mouthing off" about abortion to pro-life supporters, safe in the knowledge that Roe would prevent any of their plans coming into effect. Now that Roe is gone, the political bill is coming due as red states bring in those illiberal measures. And the reminders "will come again, again, and again".

Jury selection has begun in the first ever criminal trial of a former US president, with Donald Trump accused of 34 counts of falsifying business records.

Dubbed Trump's "Trial of the Century" by The New Yorker, the case relates to a hush-money payment made to adult film star Stormy Daniels, to cover up an alleged affair she had with him in 2006.

"Far from being about sex or small-time fraud," said Jeffrey Abramson on CNN, "it is about Trump's alleged attempt to win the 2016 presidential election by burying a last-minute story that could have cost him votes." 

What is Trump accused of?

The allegations date back to the months before the 2016 US presidential election. Following the release of the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape (in which Trump could be heard boasting about grabbing women by the genitals), Daniels' agent contacted the National Enquirer about the alleged affair in 2006, when he was married to his current wife Melania.

With attention focused on Trump's relationships with and attitude towards women, the magazine's editor contacted Trump's friend and lawyer Michael Cohen, who according to Daniels (real name Stephanie Clifford), negotiated a $130,000 fee to buy her silence. Cohen, it is claimed, paid the fee himself and was reimbursed by the Trump Organization in instalments identified on company records as "retainer" payments for "services rendered".

Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to campaign finance violations in 2018 related to the payments. He said that he had coordinated with Trump to pay Daniels and  a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, who received $150,000 from the National Enquirer and also claims to have had an affair with Trump.

The case has become known as the "Stormy Daniels hush-money case", which has "made it easier for the public to dismiss, because it seems like small potatoes" said The New Yorker. But "the argument that the prosecutors have made in court filings is focused on something closer to election interference".

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg claims this was part of a scheme to "conceal damaging information and unlawful activity from American voters before and after the 2016 election". Prosecutors argue that Trump could have lost the election had the Daniels revelations been made public, so "the case is about Trump lying his way into office", said The New Yorker.

Trump's lawyers say the payment was meant to spare him and his family embarrassment, not to help him win the election. He has denied all 34 counts against him and has also denied having sexual encounters with the two women.

What will it mean for Trump?

Most legal experts believe it is an open and shut case, but "the verdict may well depend on whether the jury of 12 understands the gravity of the matter", said Abramson. "The case will require jurors to focus on the actual charges and not become distracted by the tawdry sexual details surrounding the case."

The big unknown is the jury, with just one required to dissent to trigger a mistrial. In a state that voted overwhelming against Trump, finding 12 people and six alternates deemed impartial by both the defence and prospection could prove difficult.

The first day ended with no jury members being seated after they were subject to a 42-question survey that asked them about their news habits, whether they had ever attended a Trump rally, as well as hobbies and ability to travel. More than half of the first group of jurors available were excused, said The Times, after telling the judge they could not be fair and unbiased.

Jury selection could take up to two weeks because of the large pool of prospective jurors, said NBC News. With the trial expected to last for several months, and Trump required to be present in court most days, it will have a serious impact on his presidential campaign schedule. 

In the Republican primaries, Trump used his legal woes to "cast himself as a victim, which fired up support among GOP voters and boosted fundraising", said Fox News. The former president is expected to "continue his practice of grabbing the media spotlight – both on cable news and online – with his courtroom arrivals and departures, by holding impromptu press conferences". 

Leaving court on Monday, Trump told reporters: "It's a scam. It's a political witch hunt. It continues, and it continues forever. We are not going to be given a fair trial and it is a very sad thing."

"Trump's current legal limbo – charged but not yet on trial, repeatedly denying the evidence and accusations laid out against him by prosecutors – won't, on its own, doom his chances of winning back the White House", said ABC News. But NBC News polls have also indicated that a conviction could be a "game changer" for him.

Liz Truss is rebranding herself in a bid to relaunch her stalled political career over in the US. 

Following her stint as Britain's shortest-serving prime minister, the former Lib Dem-turned-centrist Tory is "plotting a new course back to relevance as a darling of the American far-right and as the bridge in a transatlantic conservative movement" said the Daily Mail's US political reporter Bob Crilly.

Since leaving No. 10 in October 2022,  Truss has doubled down on her free-market policies and "worked tirelessly to build ties with US conservatives, including key Members of Congress", said Nile Gardiner, a former aide to Margaret Thatcher, in The Telegraph. Truss is "widely admired in conservative circles" as "one of the few British politicians who really understand the United States and the direction America's conservative movement is taking".

'Martyr of the Conservative cause'

Following her year in the "political wilderness", said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman, Truss is now "ubiquitous". An appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland last week provided the latest opportunity for the former Tory leader to "try out the persona she has adopted since her enforced departure from Downing Street: the martyr of the Conservative cause".

The annual event has "long been one of the most influential conservative gatherings in the world", said Crilly in the Mail, and is now a "showcase for Donald Trump's Maga movement".

Making her CPAC debut alongside former Ukip leader Nigel Farage, Truss "positioned herself as a fierce defender of history against the mores of the left", said The New Statesman's Matt McDonald – and "then proceeded to retell her own". Rehashing the platform she stood on in the Tory leadership contest, Truss portrayed herself  as the "populist conduit for the policies of her party's base" and claimed the "deep state" brought down her her tax-cutting plans. 

Referencing the title of her upcoming book, Truss warned that there were only "10 years left to save the West". She derided "wokenomics," Joe Biden and "the usual suspects" in the media and corporate world who allegedly undermined her as PM. And she ended with a call for Americans to elect Republicans "who aren't going to cave into the establishment" and are willing to be unpopular with elites, even if it means "they don't get invited to any dinner parties".

'Differences with her new audience'

Whether Truss's US bid to "remake herself as a right-wing celebrity will succeed is anyone’s guess", said The Independent's White House correspondent Andrew Feinberg. Her CPAC debut appears to be part of a "new offensive" to gain "new allies in the populist, antidemocratic milieu inhabited by Trump, Farage, and other authoritarian-friendly gadflies such as ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon".

Yet while her focus on the "enemies within" might have come straight from the Trump playbook, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times, there are "lots of reasons" why Truss might not want to "explicitly endorse" the former president. She knows "full well" that it is "hard" to "reconcile" her hawkish positions on foreign policy, particularly her support for Ukraine, with Trump's stances. 

Her foreign policy views "might be a harder sell to the American right, which is held in Trump's isolationist grip", agreed Crilly in the Mail. And she faces other "potential differences with her new audience", including her rejection of the widespread belief amongst Maga supporters that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Little wonder that her CPAC appearance was met with a mixture of confusion and scepticism, said Jack Montgomery in The National Pulse. Her support for action against climate change and backing for "woke" policies while in government show that Truss "wasn’t ousted by the deep state", he wrote. "She is the deep state."

In truth, political in-fighting has been a feature of politics since the moment politics began. For as long as people have rallied around a cause or ideology, those rallies have been beset by disagreement and factionalism. In that sense, the intra-GOP rancor that defined much of the Republican Party's past year is not a fundamentally new phenomenon. Parties have wings, and wings vie for power and influence. What made this past year's Republican in-fighting so noteworthy is how disruptively widespread, and personally rancorous it was. 

From their historic struggle to select congressional leadership to the ongoing — and thus far wholly unsuccessful — effort to unseat Donald Trump from his dominant perch atop the presidential primary field, Republicans in 2023 have seemingly spent as much time fighting amongst themselves as they have passing bills. To the extent that there has been actual legislating that's taken place this year (and there has!) it's been overshadowed in no small part by the GOP's tone, tenor, and energy spent arguing among themselves. For as much as "Dems in disarray" has become political shorthand for left-leaning dysfunction, the past 12 months of Republican intransigence has proven that no party has a monopoly on self-sabotaging maladjustment. 

Whether electing a House speaker, deposing that speaker, electing another speaker of the House, breaking strangleholds on military promotions, or simply trying to stand out on a crowded debate stage, 2023 has been the year of — and for — Republican infighting. 

Who speaks for the speaker? 

Perhaps the biggest indicator of the coming year's frustrations and in-fighting came last January, just after Republicans narrowly regained control of a sharply divided House of Representatives in a midterm cycle that fell far short of expectations for a "red wave" that fall. Narrow majority in hand, California Rep. Kevin McCarthy — a longtime member of GOP House leadership — had initially "been seen as a shoo-in" to become the next Speaker of the House. Stung by their underwhelming showing in November, his fellow Republicans, however, disagreed, and forced McCarthy to endure a grueling and historic 15 rounds of voting before finally granting him the speaker's gavel — thanks to a slate of major concessions he'd made along the way including lowering the threshold for prompting his own ouster to just a single representative.

The raw opprobrium on display during the 15 rounds of speaker votes, coupled with his self-sabotaging agreement to accept a hair-trigger threat of ousting essentially set the tone for McCarthy's tenure as speaker, and the House GOP caucus at large. As The New York Times' Jonathan Swan and Annie Karni wrote just four months into McCarthy's speakership "[the] suspicions and divisions exposed during that process remain and are spilling out into the open."

If they were "spilling" in April, by the late summer those divisions had grown to a flood, as right-wing anger over McCarthy's willingness to negotiate away hardline conservative demands in order to avert a looming government shutdown exploded into full public view. Then, in early October, a small band of MAGA Republicans led by Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz pulled the trigger on the process to remove McCarthy from the speaker's chair in "a move without precedent that left the chamber without a leader and plunged it into chaos," according to The New York Times. Once McCarthy was successfully deposed, the intra-party acrimony only intensified, as Republicans spent weeks struggling to elect a successor who could unify the hardline MAGA wing with the main bulk of the caucus. It's telling that after Republicans finally selected "social conservative's social conservative" Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) to lead the chamber, both McCarthy and interim speaker Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) announced plans to leave the House of Representatives for good.

At the same time, while not rising nearly to the level of open hostility as their colleagues in the House, Republicans in the ordinarily (and by design) more congenial Senate experienced their own share of intra-party frustrations aimed largely at Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), whose nearly yearlong blockade of military promotions earned a round of rare public rebukes from his fellow conservatives. "I do not respect men who do not honor their word," Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst lamented on the Senate floor, while Alaska's Dan Sullivan, a Marine Corps Reserve colonel, asked, "how dumb can we be?" 

Donald, duck

Potshots and sideswipes against their fellow Republicans weren't limited to congressional lawmakers, either. Perhaps the most pointed — if slightly less immediately consequential — examples of Republican infighting over the past year have come from those striving to lead the party as standard-bearer and presidential nominee in 2024. Some candidates, like former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, have tiptoed around overt broadsides, eschewing personal attacks for calls to induct a "new generation" of conservative leadership — an indirect condemnation of septuagenarian party frontrunner and undeniable center of gravity Donald Trump. Other candidates, like onetime Trump sycophant and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, have been more frontal in their attempts to derail Trump's seemingly iron grip on the GOP. More than any of the other high-profile candidates, Christie has been fully willing to attack Trump as a "cheap grifter" and a coward for his refusal to join the Republican debates, even resorting to an attempt at decidedly Trumpian name-calling. 

Trump, meanwhile, has gone out of his way to attack Christie's health, and physique. 

At the same time Haley, long-promised "never Trump" savior Ron DeSantis, and "anti-woke" crusader Vivek Ramaswamy have been locked in a particularly vicious three-way race for second place far behind Trump. It's a collision that's led to perhaps some of the most overtly, unsubtle moments of debate stage hostility to date, with Haley calling Ramaswamy "scum" at one point, only for the political neophyte to attack Haley as "corrupt" a few weeks later. 

While a measure of mud-slinging is to be expected in a hotly contested primary race, the level of callousness and mean-spiritedness on display among this crop of GOP candidates is a testament to just how commonplace this level of political infighting has become — particularly thanks to, and in the wake of, Donald Trump's commanding dominance over the party. 

2024 will be the year that Republicans will, once again, line up behind a party nominee who will, ideally, unify the GOP's various wings and present a compelling, holistic vision of American conservatism moving forward. Perhaps that will actually happen, but if this past year has been any indication, Republicans will need to do a lot of work mending fences and rebuilding burnt bridges before they can move ahead, together. 

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days. With Julia Macfarlane, Guy Anker and Leaf Arbuthnot

You can subscribe to The Week Unwrapped wherever you get your podcasts:

• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts
• Global Player

In this week's episode, we discuss:

Nikki Haley

Donald Trump may be the front runner in the Republican presidential primary, but an influential network associated with Charles Koch has thrown its backing behind Nikki Hayley, the former governor for South Carolina. With just seven weeks before the Iowa caucuses, the endorsement could radically shake up the field. Has Trump finally met his match?

Leaseholds

The government plans to introduce new legislation prohibiting the creation of new leasehold properties in a bill set to be presented to parliament this week. Will this proposed law lead to an increase in leasehold prices? And what potential benefits could it offer to new homebuyers?

The death of funerals

Less than half of people want a funeral when they die, according to a new study, prompting the Archbishop of Canterbury to warn that society is forgetting how to "cope with loss". Are people seeking other options, or is the cost of funerals now just too high for many?

Keir Starmer posted on X that he was looking forward to working with Trump and that the "special relationship" between the UK and US would "continue to prosper on both sides of the Atlantic".

Trump comes to office facing several criminal charges, after being impeached twice and leaving the White House in 2021 under what The Hill called "ignominious circumstances".

But it is his messages on foreign affairs that have the world wondering what his second term in office will hold.

What did the commentators say?

After withdrawing the US from multiple international agreements in his first term, Trump has once again set his sights on the treaties and organisations he disagrees with most, said Vox.

Not only has he "explicitly" promised to pull the US out of the Paris climate accords again, he has warned he might limit Washington's cooperation with UN agencies, such as the World Health Organization, and impose tariffs as high as 100% on goods imported into the US.

He has also made "big promises" on ending the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East in 24 hours, but "the reality is likely to be much harder and messier than he's suggested". His first term, after all, saw little change from his attempt to negotiate with North Korea, while his talks with the Taliban led to the end of the civilian government.

Nor is it certain that Trump will put pressure on President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to settle with Moscow, as Europe's leaders fear, said The Telegraph. If he does not, then Vladimir Putin could feel he has no choice but to negotiate a peace, "and the outcome might not be so unfavourable to Ukraine, and hence to the UK and the West in general".

As for the Middle East, while many Israelis support a Trump presidency, believing it will help their country, his "actual" policies towards the region are "both fickle and entirely opaque", said Haaretz. His "instability and fits of pique" could see him throwing Israel "under the bus" and add to Israel's "strategic vulnerability".

There are also fears that Trump's hardline presidency could lead to challenges over disputed regions such as Taiwan and the South China Sea, reported Newsweek.

However, political analyst Xu Qinduo, from the Pangoal Institution in Beijing, told the magazine that the Trump presidency could actually ease local tensions.

They will all have to deal with "this unpredictable, powerful person in the White House", he said, "so, that may give these countries something in common. It may be easier for them to handle their relationship."

What next?

When it comes to the UK, Trump's presidency will probably be noticed first in the economy, said Bronwen Maddox, director of the Chatham House think-tank, in The Independent.

"Especially important" is his planned 10% tariff on British imports, said The Telegraph, but that may not be all bad news. The US dollar would likely rise "quite considerably", making British goods cheaper in the US while reducing the demand for American imports in the UK, boosting demand for British-made products.

Trump's victory will also be felt within the next few days "on the other side of the world", reported Le Monde. China's officials announce their own economic stimulus programme on Friday and will have been closely watching events in Washington.

During his campaign, Trump vowed to impose tariffs of at least 60% on all Chinese imports, which could have "catastrophic consequences" for the country and halve its growth in the first year.

But congratulating the president-elect, foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said Beijing would continue working with Washington "in accordance with the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation".

In the end, Mike Pence's decision to suspend his quixotic 2024 presidential bid in Las Vegas was a strangely fitting one; the incongruity of an evangelical Christian making his announcement to the Republican Jewish Coalition at their annual convention in a city that represents the antithesis of Pence's teetotaling moralist persona is, in a way, similar to the incongruity of Pence's broader campaign to represent a party under the thrall of a man whose supporters wanted Pence hanged just two years ago. That Pence would end his candidacy by acknowledging 2024 was simply "not my time" raises an obvious follow-up question: was it ever? 

With anemic polling numbers and moribund fundraising hauls, Pence's campaign had been "DOA for months," according to Politico, which called it "surprising" that former veep had held out for as long as he did "given the hostility he endured from Trump’s most ardent supporters." If anything, Pence was caught in something of a "political no-man's land," The Dispatch reported, citing GOP strategist Brad Todd, who told the outlet that Pence's ultimate failure wasn't one of ideology, but because "he was too Trumpy for Trump's detractors and not Trumpy enough for Trump’s admirers."

Although that sort of political limbo may have been fatal for his presidential aspirations, it does not mean Pence is wholly without options for his future. With the re-ascendency of his former boss looking more and more likely by the day, Pence's next steps as a non-candidate could end up being nearly as consequential as if he'd never dropped out to begin with.

What the commentators said

One thing Pence will most likely not do is follow his old boss' advice and throw his weight behind Trump's juggernaut of a campaign, In spite of Trump's call for Pence to "endorse me" now that he's out of the race  ("You know why?" he told RJC conference attendees. "Because I had a great, successful presidency and he was the vice president"), Pence had predicted his entire run on rejecting Trump's populist bombast, and seems unlikely to return to the MAGA fold anytime soon — especially after Trump conditioned his suggestion with the longtime critique that Pence was  "very disloyal."

If anything, Pence is now less encumbered to speak out against Trump where it matters — in court, MSNBC legal analyst Danny Cevallos predicted. Noting that Pence has "already provided evidence" for Special Counsel Jack Smith's various investigations into the former president, Cevallos put the odds of Pence actively testifying against Trump at "high to almost a certainty," with "absolutely nothing holding him back now." 

Blocking Trump politically, however, may be Pence's most immediate concern. He is "considering his options" for a potential endorsement of one of his many GOP rivals, Time Magazine reported, saying he's "likely to pray on the decision and consider who is most plausible to block Trump from the nomination." To that end, his onetime adversaries have largely reacted to Pence's exit by lauding the former veep, including Nikki Haley, "widely presumed to be the main beneficiary of Pence’s exit," who praised Pence as a "good man of faith," according to The Guardian. Florida Gov. Ron Desantis also hailed Pence as a "principled man of faith" while thanking the Pence family for "their willingness to put themselves forward in this campaign."

What next?

In the immediate future, Pence is likely focusing on the November 14 publishing date of his next book, "Go Home for Dinner," a series of anecdotes on "how faith makes a family and family makes a life" co-authored with his daughter Charlotte. Pence is also expected to continue his political advocacy through his Advancing American Freedom think tank created after he left office as "an alternative to The Heritage Foundation," The Associated Press reported. 

Ultimately, Pence seemed to be campaigning more "for his place in the history books than the Iowa caucuses," Politico said. With potential enforcement coming, and Trump's federal trials looming, his departure from the race is "not likely the last time Pence will make news in the coming months."

There was no white smoke issuing from a Capitol chimney, and no choreographed pageantry of a royal coronation, but after three weeks of internal strife and public disarray, lawmakers in Washington elected little-known Louisiana Republican Rep. Mike Johnson as 56th speaker of the House of Representatives, finally filling the void left by ousted California Republican Kevin McCarthy. With barely any national name recognition just one day earlier, Johnson is now third in line to the presidency, and one of the most politically powerful people on Earth. He is also, as Politico's Calder McHugh put it, a "social conservative’s social conservative" who has argued that "homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural" while serving, per New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait, as the congressional "mastermind" of former President Donald Trump's 2020 election subversion effort. 

With long ties to the Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group the Alliance Defending Freedom, Johnson is "the most culturally conservative lawmaker to ascend to the speakership in decades, if not longer," according to McHugh, and a "speaker for the MAGA movement," Axios reported. Although he was unanimously backed by his Republican colleagues this week, Johnson's path forward as speaker is by no means an easy one; his barely-there congressional majority is complicated by the ongoing intra-party struggle between MAGA hardliners and their comparatively moderate GOP counterparts, while Democrats have shown lockstep unity during the past few weeks of speaker drama. So where do Johnson, the Republicans, and Congress as a whole go from here? 

What the commentators said

Johnson's speakership win "immediately raised new questions about whether Johnson would help or hinder Republicans’ efforts to hold onto their fragile majority next year," The Washington Post reported, citing a lack of national fundraising skills and relationships as fueling "fears that he won’t be able to raise as much money to help the party hold the House" as his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, had. Republicans also worry that Johnson won't be able to "unite the conference or even staff his own speaker’s office fast enough," according to separate analysis from the Post. Ultimately Johnson "inherits many of the same political problems that have tormented past GOP leaders," according to The Associated Press. For as much as he earned his party's unanimous support in the speaker vote, that "goodwill toward Johnson blurs the political fault lines challenging the Louisianan’s ability to lead" the GOP for the remainder of the term. 

Democrats, meanwhile, are eager to pounce on the "blank slate" afforded by Johnson's low national profile, and are working to define him by his extremities ahead of the 2024 election, Axios reported. Johnson is a "rare and volatile combination of unvetted [and] conservative talk show host," one Democratic strategist told the website, pointing to "years of material, freestyle right-wing rhetoric, that nobody has looked under the hood on." By that same measure, however, some of the hardline Republicans who helped oust McCarthy see Johnson's speakership as a decisive victory for their gambit; "I promised the country that we would end up with a speaker who was more honest and more conservative," Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), whose motion to vacate set off the recent speaker battle, boasted to the Post. "We have."

What next?

For as much as the faultlines and future minefields still exist for Johnson, the "goodwill" referenced by AP does, at least in the short term, seem to bode well for a GOP weary of embarrassing public feuds. As hardline House Freedom Caucus chair Scott Perry (R-Penn.) explained to CNN's Manu Raju when asked about a short-term spending bill — the same issue that prompted Gaetz's deposition of McCarthy to begin with — "there was a trust factor with leadership last time." With Johnson holding the speaker's gavel, "you’re going to see a different viewpoint now."

Whether that goodwill lasts, Johnson himself has committed himself to an "ambitious schedule" in a letter to House Republicans, proposing 12 individual spending bills between now and the budget deadline of November 17. Acknowledging the challenges of his new office, Johnson stressed the need to "unify our membership and build consensus" across the GOP. If successful, he added, "we can achieve our necessary objectives."

Pushed south by pulverizing aerial bombardments, and faced with a looming ground invasion by Israeli forces, Palestinians in Gaza stand at the brink of a major refugee crisis. Hundreds of thousands of the strip's more than two million residents have already been displaced in the early days of Israel's military assault, according to United Nations estimates. Israel's standing order for more than a million Gazans to relocate within the narrow confines of the 150-square mile enclave is likely to "push people in Gaza into abyss” Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN's Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, predicted. 

While the sheer scale and immediacy of the unfolding humanitarian disaster have prompted some countries to call for restraint and diplomacy to deescalate the violence already ravaging the region, many of those same world leaders have waved off calls to open their borders to the flood of Gazans desperate to escape the violent confines of the strip. From Egypt's hesitance to fully open its Rafah crossing with Gaza, to Jordanian King Abdullah's vow this week that there would be "no refugees in Jordan, no refugees in Egypt," the question of which nations should and will accept Palestinian asylum-seekers has become an increasingly urgent global concern. 

Although the United States has not, to date, put forward any specific plan for accepting Gazan refugees, a number of conservative lawmakers — many of them 2024 presidential candidates — have jumpstarted any forthcoming debate on the issue by preemptively declaring their opposition to allowing any displaced Palestinians onto American soil. 

'Not all of them are Hamas, but...'

Speaking at a campaign rally this weekend, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) staked out a hardline position on the prospect of the United States accepting Palestinian refugees, telling the crowd that "the Arab states should be taking them," rather than America. Acknowledging that he didn't know what, if anything, the Biden administration planned to do, DeSantis claimed without evidence that "not all of them are Hamas but they are all anti-Semitic" to justify his stance. 

Pressed later by CBS's Margaret Brennan during an interview for Face The Nation, DeSantis insisted that "some of the far left" had proposed allowing Gazan refugees into the U.S., prompting him to "just put my stake in the ground" Moreover, DeSantis said, "everyone running for president on the Republican side should follow suit." In that spirit, DeSantis and his allies were quick to leap on former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley's comments to CNN's Jake Tapper that the U.S. is "sympathetic to the fact that you can separate civilians from terrorists." 

Haley was simply "trying to be politically correct" and "please the media and people on the left," DeSantis claimed on Monday to NBC's Dasha Burns, just before both Fox News host Laura Ingraham and the Never Back Down PAC that supports DeSantis credited the governor for Haley's subsequent clarification that she "opposes the U.S. taking in Gazans." 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, former President Donald Trump also proposed closing the country to Gazan refugees, citing his administration's banning incoming travelers "from all of the most dangerous places all over the world" during his first term. 

"In my second term, we’re going to expand each and every one of those bans," Trump told rally attendees in Iowa this weekend, naming "Gaza, Syria, Somalia, Yemen or Libya or anywhere else that threatens our security."

'The last thing we ought to do is trust their identity documents'

While much of the most heated rhetoric opposing Palestinian refugees has come from high-profile presidential contenders like Trump and Haley, similar sentiments have saturated deeper into the GOP at large. Last week, Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wisc.) announced plans "to introduce The Guaranteeing Aggressors Zero Admissions – or GAZA Act" that would "stop President Biden from issuing visas or 'paroling' holders of Palestinian Authority passports into the United States." Deeming them "trustworthy partners," Tiffany concluded, "the last thing we ought to do is trust their identity documents."

Echoing Trump's call to "revoke the student visas" of foreign nationals deemed "anti-American and antisemitic," Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton (R) on Monday urged Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to "immediately deport any foreign national—including and especially any alien on a student visa—that has expressed support for Hamas and its murderous attacks on Israel."

Before this week's historic deposition of California Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy, few people outside the cloistered world of congressional historians and parliamentary experts likely knew that when a person is elected speaker of the House, they create a secret list of potential replacements to assume the role in cases of emergency or incapacitation. That all changed this week, as Republicans ignominiously — and very publicly — booted McCarthy from GOP leadership, thereby revealing that the outgoing speaker had selected longtime ally Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) as his top choice to succeed him. 

Officially "speaker pro tempore," McHenry has emerged from the relative obscurity of the "proverbial smoke-filled rooms where legislative deals could be made" to fill an "uncomfortable and unexpected position" in the public eye — one he'd formerly eschewed, Roll Call reported. Though he'd stepped back from his own path through GOP leadership years earlier, the 10-term congressman now finds himself at the center of an unprecedented nexus of power and controversy, forced to preside over the selection of his requisite replacement from a caucus whose divisions have been on full, frequently unpleasant display. Thrust into the limelight under these fraught circumstances, McHenry's every move is sure to be scrutinized and dissected as Congress — and the country at large — treads carefully in these uncharted waters. 

Will this Republican insider become a pivotal figure at this historic political juncture, or will McHenry serve merely as a transitionary steward, facilitating a leadership change that downplays his own legislative imprimatur? 

What the commentators said

After texting with McHenry, North Carolina state Rep. Jason Saine (R), one of the congressman's constituents, told The Charlotte Observer that while he didn't believe McHenry wants to run for the full speakership, he would do so for the sake of "protecting the institution, Congress, the House and making sure that just because there is chaos today, doesn’t mean the chaos will reign supreme."

For now McHenry "appears to be playing it safe," The Washington Post reported, noting that his first few acts as interim speaker were to call multiple recesses "for the relative caucus and conferences to meet and discuss the path forward." In part, that relatively soft touch is a byproduct of the rules under which he must operate, which allow him to "only preside over floor debate and voting about the election" of his replacement, according to former House parliamentarian Charles Johnson. McHenry's is a position that's "temporary by the very name of it," agreed former House historian Ray Smock. 

Rules aside, McHenry's practical authority may ultimately extend to whatever "the majority party is willing to tolerate," Georgetown University Government Affairs Institute senior fellow Josh Huder speculated to The New York Times. As Brookings Institution scholar Molly Reynolds explained to Roll Call, McHenry's apparent reluctance to wield more expansive powers so far "might set the wrong precedent" for others in his situation moving forward, particularly if the transition process "takes longer than the week he's proposed."

This isn't to say that McHenry has been entirely hands-off when it comes to leaving his mark on Congress already. "One of the first actions taken by the new speaker pro tempore was to order me to immediately vacate my office in the Capitol," former speaker and current Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi told CNN, calling the eviction a "sharp departure from tradition" and probably "retaliation" for Democrats not supporting McCarthy's speakership. McHenry, who Roll Call dubbed the "GOP's attack dog-in-training" nearly two decades ago, may still have some teeth in his partisan bite, engaging in a "Republican revenge tour," according to the conservative National Review. 

What next? 

In spite of McHenry's accelerated timeline for electing a replacement, it's possible he could remain interim speaker for much longer than expected, Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.) told NPR, as "there is not a manual. There is not a book. This has never been done before."

No matter then if McHenry is interested in taking a more assertive stance in his inherently temporary role; the unprecedented nature of his ascension to the speaker's chair may ultimately force his hand to grasp the gavel even harder, whether he likes it or not. 

Mad, bad and dangerous to know: we are witnessing the Tories' final descent into absurdity

Rafael Behr for The Guardian

The Conservative conference has been a "festival of complaint" by a party that is "no longer serious about government", writes Rafael Behr for The Guardian. The Tories "don’t like a country that is shaped by 13 years of their rule" but "prefer not to take responsibility", so "have developed a keen reflex for diverting blame". This "spectacle" is "not just the endgame of a tired government" but also "the late stages of moral and intellectual putrefaction".
Read more

Suella Braverman's Tory conference speech was superb for its blunt honesty

The Sun Says

The Left "loathe her", and Suella Braverman's conference performance "showed why", says The Sun's leader article. The home secretary "nailed the complacency and denial at the heart of Labour’s facile approach to mass illegal immigration", in a speech that was "superb for its blunt honesty". Her critics "need only look at the vast numbers pouring illegally across the borders of the EU or America, as well as ours, to know she is right", the paper argues.

Read more

Nato won't win a long war in Ukraine

Thomas Fazi on UnHerd

 An "Afghanistan-style conflict could cripple Europe", warns Thomas Fazi. The Ukraine war "is perceived as an existential struggle" not only by Kiev, he writes for UnHerd, "but also by Russia and the US", who "know that the outcome of this conflict will have massive geopolitical ramifications". For both, "military defeat" is "not an option", but neither is a settlement that may be interpreted as "defeat". And "if American military assistance starts to wane", Europe "will need to carry more of the burden".
Read more

The Republican Party is an unserious mess

Rex Huppke for USA Today

The Republican Party's House Members are "clearly engaged in a civil war between far-right extremists and what passes these days for moderate Republicans", writes Rex Huppke for USA Today, "with 'moderate' meaning slightly less extreme". In causing "disarray" by "ousting their own speaker", as Donald Trump was "targeting an innocent law clerk and sitting in his own fraud trial", the GOP shattered "any illusions" that America has two "functioning" political parties.
Read more

The launch of an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden over his son Hunter's foreign business dealings has raised questions about Republican political prowess.

The House of Representatives has previously voted to impeach just three presidents: Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, who was impeached twice. But the move by Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to impeach the current president is "a risky political gamble", said the Financial Times (FT), that "may be as much about preservation of his own political power as the merits of the case".

A tax and firearms case against Hunter Biden does exist and federal prosecutors are reportedly confident they have enough evidence to indict him. However, said the Los Angeles Times, "despite their best efforts", congressional Republicans have "failed to develop credible evidence" that Biden as vice president profited from his son's business dealings. The Biden impeachment inquiry is "so thin you can see right through it", the paper's editorial board added.

The true motivation is personal, a top former Republican congressional and White House staffer told the FT. "Speaker McCarthy had to do this for his conference – and to keep his job." 

What did the papers say?

McCarthy's decision to unilaterally announce an impeachment investigation with no formal House vote "appeared to be a bid to quell a brewing rebellion among ultraconservative critics", said The New York Times (NYT).

McCarthy claims he has unearthed a "culture of corruption" surrounding the president. The inquiry will focus on whether Biden benefited from the charges of improper business dealings levelled against his son Hunter.

Months of investigations by Republicans, however, "have yet to unearth any concrete evidence of misconduct by Mr Biden, and the allegations have been widely panned by Democrats", said the BBC.

The true motivation for the inquiry, according to the NYT, appears to be that McCarthy is "working to appease far-right lawmakers who have threatened to oust him if he fails to accede to their demands for deep spending cuts that would force a government shutdown at the end of the month".

The apparent lack of evidence is problematic for both the case and the nation, according to two impeachment experts who spoke to Time magazine.

"This is very disturbing for people who study past impeachments, because impeachment is really a very extreme measure," said constitutional scholar Philip Bobbitt, a professor at Columbia Law School and expert on the history of impeachment. "I honestly don't know that there is any evidence tying the president to corrupt activities when he was vice president or now."

Frank Bowman, professor emeritus at the University of Missouri school of law and author of a book about impeachment, agreed, adding "Biden's Republican pursuers have got exactly zero, zip, bupkis, on any matter that might be impeachable."

What next?

Some Republicans have expressed doubts about the wisdom of bringing impeachment proceedings against the president. 

Asa Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor running for president in 2024 who managed Bill Clinton's impeachment proceedings in 1998, said that despite a "lot of smoke" the impeachment inquiry "seems premature". Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor also running in the Republican primary, said he didn't "see evidence yet that would support impeaching Joe Biden". He added: "I think we're cheapening impeachment by doing that kind of thing."

Talking to Time, impeachment experts Bowman and Bobbitt echoed this sentiment.

"This is supposed to be the most extreme sanction in American politics, and if you reach for it every time you think it'll help you in the polls, I fear it will become degraded," Bobbitt said. "It just becomes one more very divisive, poisonous event in a Congress that is already deeply divided and alienated."

Brendan Buck, a former Republican congressional aide, said it could have even worse impacts for Republicans, given Democrats could weaponise the matter against their political rivals.

"Certainly it will rile up the base," Buck said in the FT, “but absent some bombshell… this is something of a gift to the president politically."

Former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich, who launched Bill Clinton's impeachment proceedings 25 years ago, said that if Republicans "go too fast, it could backfire".

Clinton was "widely seen to have benefited politically, including with a better than expected performance in that year's midterm election", the FT said.

There’s talk — again — of a looming government shutdown. The Wall Street Journal reported that House Republicans returned to work this week “signaling they are ready to use tougher tactics to extract concessions” on the federal budget. Without a budget deal by October 1, there’s a real possibility the federal government will end up “furloughing hundreds of thousands of federal workers and closing national parks” though some “critical services” are expected to remain operational.

Also again: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s job might be on the line with this showdown. He won the job only by agreeing to a process that lets conservatives call a “quick vote” to replace him, the Associated Press reported. “That threat of an abrupt ouster hovers over McCarthy’s every move, especially now.” Indeed, Rep. Matt Gaetz has hinted that he may force that vote if McCarthy makes too many compromises with Democrats on a budget deal. "If Kevin McCarthy stands in our way,” Gaetz said during a radio appearance, “he may not have the job long."

One new wrinkle: McCarthy might try to buy off House conservatives by formally launching the long-expected impeachment inquiry against President Biden. McCarthy on Tuesday announced the impeachment effort, NBC News, “amid pressure from right-wing Republicans” who are pushing back against a short-term funding bill to avoid a shutdown. 

'Particularly messy'

"We should not be surprised by the next government shutdown," Kevin Kosar wrote for The Hill. Government is divided between House Republicans and Democrats who hold the Senate and White House: Only one of 10 previous shutdowns happened when one party controlled all three branches. But maybe we should hate that shutdowns have become so regular. “Until about 40 years ago, America did not have government shutdowns.” Now, however, “the divide is particularly messy.”

The GOP’s right-wing flank has a range of demands, Li Zhou reported for Vox. They want to restart construction of Donald Trump’s border wall, rein in funding for Ukraine and crack down on “woke” initiatives in the military, among other desires. But “the House GOP isn’t on the same page” about all those demands, and “they won’t be warmly received in the Democrat-controlled Senate.”

Which is why McCarthy is pivoting to impeachment, Jackie Calmes wrote at the Los Angeles Times. The speaker is pulling a “bread and circuses” routine in order to convince recalcitrant right-wingers not to shut down the government. “If we shut down, all of government shuts down — investigations and everything else,” McCarthy told Fox News. These are the things that happen “when a ‘leader’ feels beholden to anti-government zealots” to keep his job. 

No help from Mitch

McCarthy probably can’t expect much help from another notable Republican — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Hayes Brown at NBC News reported that McConnell isn’t interested in trying to slash funding levels that Democrats and Republicans agreed to back during spring’s debt ceiling crisis. The effort by House Republicans to reduce spending from those levels is “not going to be replicated in the Senate,” McConnell said. Brown’s take: “Senate Republicans are doing what’s best for Senate Republicans, rather than what might help bail out the speaker.”

But a shutdown might not be best for House Republicans, either. Politico reported that former Rep. Eric Cantor — who was in Republican leadership during the 2013 shutdown — is warning against a GOP-made crisis. “I think that politically, that’s not a winner,” Cantor said. That will especially be true unless Republicans coalesce around “single, clearly defined objective.” Right now there are too many demands — impeachment, spending, Ukraine — in play. “In any of those cases, where could there be a win?” Cantor asked. “I’m not sure.”

Ultimately, the shutdown and impeachment efforts both come down to McCarthy’s choices about “how far to go to satisfy Republican hardliners,” Bloomberg reported. He "might have to go through at least a little bit of a shutdown if for no other reason to establish some bona fides with the conservative wing,” one observer said. McCarthy, though, expressed confidence to reporters: “We are going to get our work done.”

The multimillionaire former biotech executive Vivek Ramaswamy took centre stage at the first Republican debate last week as he bids to win his party’s 2024 presidential nomination.

Going into the debate in Milwaukee, Politico predicted that “all knives will be out for the political newcomer”, who at 38 is the youngest candidate in the field and who had jumped to third favourite in the polls among Republican primary voters.

Ramaswamy, a “fierce defender of [Donald] Trump”, according to Reuters, has been “gaining on many of his rivals”, with Florida governor Ron DeSantis “now fighting to retain his second-place status”. The former hedge fund investor, who founded his own company, Roivant Sciences, in 2015, declared his bid for the presidency in February. Despite being a “longshot” for the nomination, “his campaign is picking up a little steam”, said Insider.

Who is Vivek Ramaswamy?

Ramaswamy was born on 9 August 1985 in Cincinnati, Ohio, to parents who had moved from Kerala, India. Although he was “raised in a traditional Hindu family”, he attended a private Catholic school where he “was considered an overachiever” and was nationally ranked at tennis, Insider said.

He graduated from Harvard with a degree in biology, then co-founded StudentBusinesses.com in 2007, a resource for young entrepreneurs. From 2007 to 2014, Ramaswamy worked at hedge fund QVT Financial, where “his knowledge of the potential of certain drugs impressed his bosses”. He became a partner at 28.

While working at QVT, he enrolled at law school and “established important connections” with the likes of current US senator J.D. Vance and the tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, said The New Yorker.

He the founded Roivant Sciences, which “bought patents from larger companies for drugs that had not yet been fully developed and marketed”, said Reuters, before resigning as CEO in 2021.

Right-wing star waging war on woke

Ramaswamy identifies as a libertarian whose “views and style rubbed some people the wrong way”, according to his former dorm mate and colleague Paul Davis, speaking to The New Yorker.

The Republican candidate has become “a fierce conservative” in recent years and wrote “Woke Inc.” in 2021, a book that “lambasts ‘wokeism’ as an insidious influence on hard work, capitalism, religious faith and patriotism”. This triggered his “rapid ascension as a right-wing star”, said Reuters.

“He thinks the climate crisis is a hoax, supports Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and would gladly pardon Donald Trump on day 1 of his would-be presidency,” wrote Margaret Sullivan in The Guardian, who has branded him “America’s demagogue-in-waiting”.

His policy positions “are mostly deeply conservative”, Reuters added. He wants to “greatly expand the powers of the president and dismantle much of the federal government” – including the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). He also believes Ukraine should “make concessions to Russia to end the war”, including letting the aggressor “retain parts of Ukraine it already occupies”.

Could he win the GOP nomination?

Nobody in the presidential race “has been as eager about getting in front of the media” as Ramaswamy, and “his ubiquity is paying off”, said Adam Wren in Politico. The presidential candidate “starts talking and doesn’t stop”, having done 30 interviews in one day alone, for example, and appeared in more than 150 podcasts since launching his campaign.

Many commentators “declared him victorious” in last week’s Republican Party debate, wrote Sullivan in The Guardian. For “this millennial tech bro”, his performance “couldn’t have gone much better” and “suddenly, this inexperienced and dangerous showoff is almost a household name”.

With Ramaswamy, however, placing third and sometimes second in polling, behind De Santis and Trump, Politico’s Wren asks: “But what state can he actually win? And what’s the path after that?”

Ramaswamy told the publication: “I increasingly think there’s a chance I could win Iowa”, which is the first state to vote in the Republican primaries on 15 January 2024. He was, however, seventh in a recent poll among Republican candidates in the state with just 4%. Despite this, he added: “If I can win Iowa, I can win any state.”

They think of themselves as “cold-eyed realists”, said Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal, yet leaders in the Republican party have long “indulged in comically wishful thinking” about Donald Trump.

When he emerged on the political scene, they dismissed him as a joke who’d never get to the White House. When he did, they told themselves that he’d grow into the role. When he didn’t, they switched to hoping that his demented energy could at least be harnessed in pursuit of their objectives. To be fair, some of these aims were fulfilled: “a solid legislative record, three fine supreme court justices, a robust economic performance”. But then came Trump’s disgraceful attempt to overturn the 2020 election result. Here was a moment to draw a line. Yet once again Republicans prevaricated, declining to impeach and convict Trump in the “misplaced belief that he was finished anyway”.

Trump on trial on TV?

Fast forward to today, and Trump has the Republican presidential nomination all but in the bag, said Robin Abcarian in the Los Angeles Times. And even his GOP rivals are still making excuses for him. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, for instance, has responded to each Trump indictment by warning about the “weaponisation of federal law enforcement”. Only former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and former US representative Will Hurd have dared to call Trump out. To what end? Christie is polling at 2.9%; the other two are each on less than 1%. Behold the “Republican Political Paradox”: you have to attack Trump to win, but if you do, you lose.

The problem is that most congressional Republicans have felt “inoculated from the Trump trauma”, because they represent hitherto safe districts or GOP-dominated states, said Walter Shapiro in Roll Call. Their main fear is being challenged from the right, so they keep their heads down. But their silence could cost them. There’s a “growing clamour” to allow TV cameras into the coming Trump trials. If that happens, Americans may spend 2024 gripped by a reality show that would severely damage the Republicans’ electoral prospects. Had they taken a stand earlier by joining apostate colleagues such as Wyoming’s Liz Cheney, they might have wrestled back control of the GOP. Now, though, it’s probably “too late for the Republicans to become anything other than the party of Trump toadies”.

Leading hopefuls for the Republican presidential nomination including Donald Trump, his former vice-president Mike Pence and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis kicked off their bids to win over voters in Iowa at the state fair last weekend.

The Midwestern state may be “small”, its population “overwhelmingly white” and its turnout for the caucuses “absurdly low”, wrote Andrew Prokop at Vox, but Iowa has become “super important” in deciding who is nominated by both Republicans and Democrats in the race for the White House.

The caucuses are not until January, but the summer Iowa State Fair is a “rite of passage for presidential candidates”, said John McCormick at The Wall Street Journal. It can be a “humbling place” for the “lesser-known candidates”, but the “massive media coverage” surrounding the annual event offers an invaluable “boost for candidate exposure”.

Why does Iowa matter so much?

It’s because Iowa is the first state where “actual voters across any US state get up and go say who they want to be president”, said Vox’s Prokop. The 2024 caucuses will be the first time since 1972, however, that only the GOP will begin its election process in Iowa, with the Democratic Party opting to start its presidential primary in South Carolina, in a bid to “empower minority voters”, said Brynn Holland at History.

After the primary elections were reformed for the 1972 presidential election to ensure “voters would have a direct say” in choosing the nominees, and given Iowa’s long nominating process, the state was given an “early slot on the voting calendar”.

That early slot means the media “hypes up” the results, wrote Prokop, but it is also the first chance for voters in other areas to “make sense of complex, multi-candidate fields”, while donors also weigh up whether a candidate is “still viable” after their performance in Iowa.

A strong result in Iowa can hand a candidate “momentum that can propel their campaigns forward”, wrote The Economist.

How much influence does Iowa really have?

While the Iowa caucuses may provide an early shot in the arm to a candidate’s campaign, they do not necessarily “translate to winning the general election”, said Candice Norwood at PBS.

There is also a difference in “the success of Republican and Democratic winners” in gaining their party’s nomination after winning in Iowa. Democrat winners in Iowa routinely gain the presidential nomination when compared to the Republicans. That is because the Republican votes tend to be “referendums on who is the most socially conservative candidate”, which is not “necessarily a reflection of the broader Republican coalition”, Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, told PBS.

Winning in Iowa can have a big effect on the national picture, however, said Harry Enten at CNN. On average, victorious candidates receive “a seven-point bounce in the national polls”.

What role does the Iowa State Fair play?

The Iowa State Fair is one of the “biggest political events” leading up to the caucuses and “unofficially kicks off the campaign season”, said Dylan Wells at The Washington Post.

While candidates will never give up a chance to augment their standing in the polls, the fair “offers an opportunity to meet directly with the Iowans” for the first time.

Most candidates who attend will make a “brief speech” but often face “hecklers and tough questions shouted from passing attendees”. They’ll also try to find “common ground with working-class people” by taking part in some of the fair’s activities, while also trying to “avoid awkward photos of themselves eating”.

Though the “good politicking” at the fair, which runs from 10-20 August, won’t necessarily decide the next president, it can “refresh a struggling campaign or lift political underdogs into the national spotlight”.

Who succeeded at this year’s fair?

Former president Trump showed he would “not concede even a moment of the spotlight” to his rivals after appearing in Iowa last weekend, said Lisa Lerer in The New York Times. He was given “a much warmer reception” than his main challenger, DeSantis, despite being on “rocky terms with leaders in Iowa”.

DeSantis has “struggled to connect with voters in more unscripted moments” and was booed at the fair by the Trump supporters he “hopes to win over”.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has replaced his campaign manager as he aims to reset his faltering bid for the Republican Party’s 2024 nomination.

DeSantis’s former top staffer Generra Peck has been shunted to the position of chief strategist, with Flordia chief of staff James Uthmeier assuming the national campaign manager post, according to The Messenger.

The changes come after DeSantis made two big staff cuts in recent weeks due to financial considerations. The Florida governor laid off about a third of his staff in late July.

Together the moves are an effort to “reset” his “stagnant presidential campaign”, Voice of America said. But however you look at it, the overhaul does not bode well, said The Washington Post’s Philip Bump. “While such moves do not always augur a campaign’s imminent demise, the demise of political campaigns often follow such shake-ups,” Bump said.

Why is DeSantis’s campaign flailing?

Analysts have seen signs that support among Republicans for Ron DeSantis is tailing off nationwide due to the positions he has taken. According to The Guardian, a “growing backlash” has emerged both in Florida and across the country as Republican voters have “recoiled at his extremist positions on slavery, education, abortion and immigration”.

From his prevarication over a new Florida curriculum teaching that forced labour during slavery benefited Black people, to his crackdown on transgender rights, and from his approval of permitless carrying of firearms to his hardline new immigration policies, DeSantis has watched as his views have left his presidential campaign “flailing”, The Guardian said.

According to the political polling website FiveThirtyEight, DeSantis’s average national polling result in the Republican presidential primaries as of 8 August is 15.6%.

DeSantis has long been second in the race behind former president Donald Trump, who is currently averaging 52.4% and maintains a lead in most polls. However, the gap has widened in recent months: DeSantis averaged 23.4% three months ago, and 34.4% six months ago.

What is behind the campaign team overhaul?

In recent weeks Peck has faced increased scrutiny from donors to DeSantis’s campaign, who have complained that the presidential candidate was burning through his funds too quickly and failing to gather support nationwide.

In mid-July, an unnamed DeSantis donor close to the campaign told NBC News that Peck was “hanging by a thread”.

However, DeSantis’s decision to replace Peck with Uthmeier has been seen as a gamble, given the 35-year-old has no previous campaign management experience.

Still, the changes were seen as necessary coming four days after the largest individual donor backing DeSantis told The Telegraph he would not give any more money unless the governor attracts more donors and tones down some of his more hardline positions.

Dan Eberhart, who has previously expressed concern about the campaign’s staffing, told the newspaper: “Governor DeSantis has to change the dynamics. That much is clear.”

Will Trump be knocked out?

Donald Trump’s mounting legal woes add an extra dynamic to DeSantis’s presidential bid. If Trump were found guilty and sent to jail, his position on the Republican ballot could be in jeopardy, opening a clear path for the Florida governor to the Republican nomination.

However, as CBS noted, there is nothing in the constitution that prevents someone who has been charged or convicted from seeking or taking office.

Whether Trump could serve as president from prison is less clear, said UCLA law professor Richard L. Hasen. “How someone would serve as president from prison is a happily untested question,” Hasen told CNN.

The former president’s legal cases have also directly boosted his campaign. In March, Trump had just 43% of the vote in Republican polling, according to a RealClearPolitics average. After he was indicted by a grand jury in New York in connection to a hush money payment to a porn actress his numbers had jumped to 50%.

Two months later, when he was indicted again at a federal level for alleged mishandling of classified documents, his polling average jumped to 55%.

As The Washington Post’s Bump asked: “Many observers thought that the looming indictments of Trump might shake things loose, which hasn’t happened. So what might?”

That question, Bump said, is “now one for James Uthmeier, DeSantis’s new campaign manager. Perhaps he has an answer. Or perhaps there is no answer.”

Donald Trump’s chances of facing Joe Biden in next year’s US presidential election received a significant boost after the Californian Republican Party changed the way it chooses its nominee.

With Trump already enjoying double-digit leads over his nearest rivals in the race to secure the Republicans’ nomination, he has now scored a “significant victory” in America’s most populous state, reported The Times. While California’s 169 nominating delegates had in the past been allocated proportionally, a rule change approved on Saturday means a candidate who wins 50% of the primary vote will now pocket all the delegates – “a significant slug of the 1,234 delegates needed for an overall victory”, said the paper, and “almost certainly a boost for Trump”.

With both parties’ nominating conventions over a year away, CNN’s Harry Enten reported that Biden is the “overwhelming favourite” for the Democratic nomination, while Trump remains the “clear front-runner” among Republicans.

“This puts a lot of Americans in a position they don’t want to be in,” he said. “A historically large share of them do not like either man at this point.”

What did the papers say?

The first New York Times/Siena poll of the 2024 campaign shows Trump is “dominating” his rivals for the Republican nomination. He leads his nearest challenger, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, by a “landslide” 37 percentage points nationally among likely Republican primary voters.

Trump held “decisive advantages” across almost every demographic group and region and in every ideological wing of the party, The New York Times reported, “as Republican voters waved away concerns about his escalating legal jeopardy”.

DeSantis, who was polling above the former president at the turn of the year, is “widely seen to be out of fuel and on a glide path to destruction”, said The Guardian. With every other Republican contender in single digits, Trump is in a “historically strong position for a nonincumbent to win the Republican nomination”, said Enten in a separate article on CNN.

With Biden committed to running for a second term and no serious challenger yet emerging for the Democratic nomination, America is “one step closer to Biden-Trump II”, said NBC News, even if it is “the rematch voters don’t want”.

Biden vs. Trump may be the story today, admitted Politico, “but it’s unlikely that voters will be satisfied choosing between a nearly 82-year-old incumbent and a 78-year-old challenger who may be a convicted felon”.

“We are underestimating how turbulent next year’s campaign will be and how likely, on the current trajectory, it is to become a three- or even four-person race,” said the news site.

What next?

Still six months out from the first primaries, the Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee on 23 August may be the last chance DeSantis has to turn the tide against Trump – and for any of the other candidates to make a breakthrough.

The debate stage “can provide the largest audience yet for many presidential hopefuls”, said The Assocated Press, “but it also can trip up candidates”. Given his commanding poll lead, Trump has hinted he may not even attend, instead holding a competing event, perhaps an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.

As for the Democrats, there are two markers to watch out for this autumn, said Politico: “the president’s fitness for the job and his approval numbers. Put less delicately”, said the website, “does Biden have more spills, as he did at the Air Force Academy, and does he finally get credit from voters for the improving economy?”

Biden’s team, at least, are not taking a Trump coronation for granted. Axios reported the president is expanding his re-election strategy beyond his predecessor to target the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement and its impact on US politics, “figuring it will endure even if Trump isn’t the GOP nominee”.

With huge question marks hanging over both parties’ front-runners, talk of a third-party candidate has grown in recent months, and could prove the wildcard in the election.

It is “increasingly certain”, said Politico, that a Biden-Trump rematch will lure a moderate candidate into the race as an independent, most likely under the bipartisan political group No Labels.

The conservative West Virginia Democrat senator Joe Manchin has been touted as a possible spoiler candidate, “causing deep tensions with the group’s ideological allies, congressional partners and Democratic Party officials who are scrambling to stop it”, said The New York Times. The paper noted that “third-party candidates siphoned enough votes to arguably cost Democrats elections in 2000 (Al Gore) and 2016 (Hillary Clinton)”.

The US president’s son will plead guilty to tax charges and admit to illegally possessing a gun, after reaching a plea deal with the US Department of Justice (DOJ).

The deal is likely to “spare” Hunter Biden “time behind bars”, said the Associated Press (AP), and ends a long-running investigation into the taxes and foreign business dealings of the 53-year-old, who has “acknowledged struggling with addiction” following the death of his older brother Beau in 2015.

It also avoids a public trial which would have “generated days or weeks of distracting headlines” for a White House that is “strenuously” seeking to keep its distance from the Justice Department, added the AP.

What did the papers say?

Republicans aiming to retake the White House have long “sought to tie Hunter Biden’s legal woes directly to his father”, said The Washington Post, in particular, homing in on Hunter’s involvement with Chinese firm CEFC and his position on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Critics claimed that Hunter’s “alleged wrongdoing goes far beyond a simple tax and gun case” and have accused the DOJ of trying to avoid prosecuting more serious matters.

The plea deal brings some closure, but nevertheless puts Hunter “once again in the cross-hairs” of the president’s Republican adversaries who “instantly complained that the wayward son got off too easy”, said The New York Times (NYT).

His well-publicised struggles with addiction have become “a fixation of the political right”, which sees the “presidential progeny” as a “walking, talking exemplar of the pay-to-play culture of the Washington swamp”, who they claim have “profited off proximity to power”.

The timing of the plea agreement, coming nearly two weeks after the indictment of former president Donald Trump on 37 felony counts of jeopardising national security and obstructing justice, has prompted comparisons between the two “vastly different” cases, added the NYT.

Supporters say the plea deal is evidence that the president has been “playing it straight” by letting a prosecutor appointed by Trump handle the case. But Trump and his backers have plumped to characterise the deal as “proof of selective justice”.

The “tentative” plea deal is “bound to displease partisans on both sides” of the political spectrum, which is at least “one sign that it’s a fair and suitable disposition” of the long-standing investigation, said The Los Angeles Times. Critics will undoubtedly see it as evidence of leniency, with Trump already accusing the “corrupt Biden DOJ” of giving Hunter a mere “traffic ticket”.

It is a “spurious” charge, said the paper, as President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland distanced themselves from the case, allowing Trump-appointed prosecutor David Weiss to oversee it. Indeed, Biden supporters could argue that Weiss’s presence “exerted a nearly irresistible pull toward bringing some charge” against Hunter. The “bottom line” is that both sides had “plenty to gain or lose” from the Biden case, “and that may well have helped produce a sensible bargain”.

However, the plea deal is likely to remain “grist” for the 2024 presidential race, said The Washington Post, “as the nation’s two main parties once again debate the influence of politics on law enforcement and the effects of law enforcement investigations on political campaigns”.

What next?

Hunter Biden may have “reached an end in terms of legal recourse”, said Sky News, but the politics around him will “continue to play out”.

In the wake of the plea deal, House Republicans have “vowed to continue” with their investigations into him and whether the president used his influence to benefit his son’s business ventures, said Forbes.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy claimed the deal reinforces the GOP’s protests that the DOJ is favouring Biden and unfairly pursuing Trump. McCarthy said the deal “continues to show the two-tier system in America”. Trump condemned the settlement on his Truth Social platform, labelling it a “massive COVERUP & FULL SCALE ELECTION INTERFERENCE ‘SCAM.’”

The plea deal awaits the approval of a federal judge who also has the authority to impose jail time, added Forbes.

Donald Trump has been charged over his handling of classified documents after he left the White House.

The former US president’s lawyer says the charges include conspiracy, false statements, obstruction of justice, and illegally retaining classified documents under the Espionage Act.

It is the first time a former president has faced federal charges. If he is convicted, Trump could face a maximum combined sentence of up to 100 years in prison, reported ABC News.

But what does this mean for Trump, his hopes for the 2024 White House election and the United States itself?

What did the papers say?

“It is often tempting to hype every Trump drama out of proportion and then lose sight of when something genuinely monumental has happened,” wrote David Smith from Washington for The Guardian. But this is “genuinely monumental” and Trump “really might be going to jail”.

There is a sense of “gathering momentum” as the electoral calendar and legal calendar “hurtle towards a great collision”, Smith added. “Could Trump accept the Republican nomination while wearing an ankle bracelet?”

Recalling that Trump was charged by the state of New York in April over a hush-money payment to a porn star, The New York Times said the new indictment “in many ways… eclipses the first in terms of both legal gravity and political peril”. This is because it was “brought by a federal prosecutor representing the nation as a whole” and “concerns the nation’s secrets”.

Many Republican voters “may not care if their leader slips money to a porn star to keep quiet”, but “will they be indifferent about impeding authorities seeking to recover clandestine material?” the paper asked.

Totting up his legal woes, the NYT noted that Trump was “recently… found liable for sexual abuse in a civil trial, his company has been found guilty of 17 counts of tax fraud and other crimes and he still faces two other possible indictments stemming from his effort to overturn his 2020 election defeat, leading to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021”.

Therefore, “the question, politically at least, is whether the accumulation of all those allegations will someday weigh him down among Republican voters who otherwise like him”, it added.

They won’t, predicted The Daily Telegraph’s US editor, Nick Allen. “It seems counterintuitive but the latest criminal charges against Donald Trump will probably boost his chances of winning the Republican nomination in 2024,” he wrote.

“There is a widespread – and growing – perception among Republican primary voters that the justice system has been weaponised by Democrats against the former president” and Trump “went up in the polls” after his hush-money indictment, said Allen.

But the significance of the latest development was not lost on CNN’s Stephen Collinson. It has “thrust the country into an unprecedented and perilous moment in its history” at a time when it is “already internally estranged over politics”.

Criminal investigations into the activities of former presidents and current presidential candidates “might be business as usual in tottering developing world states”, he added. “But there’s no parallel for an ex-commander in chief facing federal charges in the US.”

What next?

Trump has announced that he has been ordered to report to the federal courthouse in Miami on 13 June. However, “it’s possible that Trump could face further charges in Washington DC, where the documents investigation, led by special counsel Jack Smith, has been based”, said Politico.

In the meantime, the Secret Service will meet Trump’s staff and his security officers to plan his journey to the Miami courthouse, said the BBC. On Tuesday, Trump is “expected to be placed under arrest and booked before appearing before a judge”, said The Independent.

Under federal law, collection of a DNA sample is mandatory in felony cases. It is “unlikely” that Trump will be jailed following the arraignment, added the news site.

It might take more than a year for the case to go to full trial, said Politico. “Trump, historically, has sought to drag out litigation, and he’d have many tools in his arsenal to do so here,” it said.

Trump can continue his campaigning as there is no constitutional impediment to running for president from prison – or even being elected while behind bars.

Meanwhile, Trump remains defiant and bombastic. “I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former president of the United States,” he wrote on his platform Truth Social.

He added: “This is indeed a dark day for the United States of America. We are a country in serious and rapid decline, but together we will Make America Great Again!”

“This was not an easy decision to make but I believe it is the right one.”

With these words, Josh D’Amaro, the head of Disney’s theme parks division, announced to staff that the company had abandoned its plans to construct a $1 billion corporate campus in Florida for 2,000 employees – the latest front in its bitter dispute with the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis.

Tensions have been rising since the Republican governor revoked Disney’s special tax status, which had been created by a 1967 law that allowed the company to self-govern the roughly 25,000-acre Orlando area where its Walt Disney World theme park complex is located.

The stripping of its tax breaks was widely seen as retaliation for Disney’s opposition to a new “don’t say gay” law limiting discussion of LGBTQ+ issues in schools.

But as DeSantis prepares to officially launch his 2024 presidential bid this week, “picking a fight with Mickey Mouse has backfired”, said The Times.

“Poll watchers are sensing a miscalculation,” the paper said, as voters see DeSantis’s showdown with the company as “too much like political theatre”. The Florida public regards his interest in waging “culture wars” as being “less important to them than hard issues such as inflation, breaching the debt ceiling, border security and abortion rights”.

Picking the wrong battle isn’t just a problem for DeSantis but his entire party, said Sacha Pfeiffer, the host of the NPR’s Morning Edition. Across the country, Republican lawmakers have been “pursuing legislative crackdowns on social issues, from abortion and transgender rights to drag performances”, said Pfeiffer, but by doing so the party “risks being out of step with voters”.

The Republican focus on social issues simply isn’t winning votes, said Intelligencer. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, for example, polls show “public opinion on abortion in the US has moved sharply leftward”, the news site said.

Despite this, culture wars are undoubtedly set to be a feature of the 2024 presidential campaign, said Kamy Akhavan, from the University of Southern California.

“Creating outrage often works to win elections,” Akhavan told Newsweek. “The so-called culture wars are a symptom of the bigger problem of polarisation and tribalism that has taken our country hostage.”

In Florida, that polarisation was on display in a recent poll by Yahoo! News and YouGov, which found the state almost entirely split on DeSantis’s run-in with Disney. The poll of 1,584 voters found that 40% of people considered DeSantis’s actions against Disney inappropriate, while 38% felt they were appropriate, with 22% undecided.

Yet as hurricane season approaches, the governor’s “inaction on skyrocketing property insurance rates – one of the most pressing issues here – has drawn criticism”, said The Times, as DeSantis and the Republican-controlled legislature pursue a culture wars-heavy agenda.

Ironically, DeSantis “built his reputation in Florida on competent and smart governance… rather than culture war issues,” said Discourse magazine. “But it seems that in DeSantis’ mind, the culture war strategy is a winning one.”

But is he correct? According to the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls, he trails Republican frontrunner Donald Trump by more than 30 percentage points.

As Kellyanne Conway, the former senior adviser to Trump, recently told Fox Business, DeSantis “spends way too much time on the culture wars, and that begins with Disney and includes many other things.”

“Woke is important,” Conway said, “but you can’t have that as a replacement for an economic plan.”