Day: July 9, 2024

Analysis | Trump’s VP choice may be down to 3. Here’s what each brings.  The Washington Post

Trump plans to block hearings in January 6 case before 2024 election  The Guardian US

Russia, China and Iran are ‘the new Axis powers’, according to outgoing army chief General Sir Patrick Sanders, who said that they pose an even greater threat than the Nazis did in 1939.

Having called Trump an ‘idiot’ and a potential ‘American Hitler’, the Republican senator now fawns over him

There’s one thing Donald Trump knows how to do well: maximizing suspense in an elimination contest and treating contestants with exquisite cruelty. Competing for a spot on his presidential ticket is as close as politics can get to The Apprentice, the show that fooled millions of Americans into thinking that Trump was a successful businessman.

A number of Republican candidates for running mate, from the endlessly self-humiliating Tim Scott to the nondescript Doug Burgum, are vying for what surely looks like a political suicide mission: they must know that Trump betrays everyone eventually, yet they seem to think that their fate as a faithful no 2 will be different. Not all aspirants are equally threatening to American democracy, though. The top prize not just for sycophancy, but for clear and present authoritarian danger must go to the man widely considered the “veepstakes” frontrunner, JD Vance.

Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and a Guardian US columnist

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The case for talking to Brussels and seeking improvements is undeniable – except to those like Johnson, in a world of their own

We are seeing a Conservative movement so bereft, so out of ideas, that it’s replaying its old hits. At the end of their reign, with Britain poorer, sicker and less free, it is unclear where the Tories go now. Still, idiocy does adore a vacuum, and so it’s time to talk about Boris Johnson again.

On Sunday, the disgraced former occupant of No 10 suggested Keir Starmer would be putting Britain “on the road to serfdom” if he sought improvements to the shambolic Brexit deal that Johnson struck. Even now, he and those who still laud him seem incapable of understanding the damage they have done. Where once we could travel, live and work freely across the continent, Britons now face time limits, visa fees and roaming charges. Where once our businesses could sell as easily to someone in Berlin as someone in Birmingham, they now get red tape, delays and additional charges. And pertinent to the allegation levelled by Johnson, where once the British people had a say in the rules that govern our trade with our largest market, we now have none.

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The bigger story is Donald Trump’s appalling unfitness for office. He tried to overturn a legitimate election and is a felon

It’s possible for two conflicting ideas to be true at once.

And so it is with the mainstream media’s unrelenting focus on Joe Biden’s mental acuity, following his terrible debate performance earlier this month.

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