Adam Schiff
| Photo Credit: AFP

Representative Adam Schiff on July 17 became the most heavyweight Democrat so far to publicly urge U.S. President Joe Biden to step aside for another candidate to face Donald Trump.

He called on his ally to “pass the torch.”

Mr. Schiff, a key congressional powerbroker, praised Mr. Biden but told the Los Angeles Times that he doubts that the 81-year-old incumbent can defeat Trump – a threat to “the very foundation of our democracy.”

The Californian, who is expected to win a Senate seat this November, is one of the party’s most influential members and a key ally in the legislature for the White House.

He served as chairman of the House intelligence panel when Democrats had the majority in 2019 and shot to nationwide prominence as lead prosecutor during then-president Trump’s first impeachment trial.

In a statement to the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Schiff aired the worry gripping the party, although often in private, that questions over Biden’s age and health will doom him in the November election.

Those concerns rocketed after Mr. Biden performed badly in a televised debate with Trump last month, often looking confused or unable to articulate.

Since then, Mr. Biden has repeatedly said he intends to stay in the race, arguing that he remains the best person to defeat Trump. Polls show a tight overall contest, but with Trump pulling ahead in key swing states.

Mr. Schiff called Mr. Biden “one of the most consequential presidents in our nation’s history.”

However, “a second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the president can defeat Donald Trump in November.”

Mr. Biden should “secure his legacy” by stepping aside, he said.

Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, is now one of Trump’s fiercest allies and defenders and among those short-listed to be Trump’s vice presidential pick.
| Photo Credit: AP

J.D. Vance appeared on the scene of American public life with his 2016 best-seller memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. President Barack Obama cited it while explaining the cultural and economic reasons that made the disruptive politics championed by Donald Trump appealing to the white working class. Mr. Vance, then 32, was a strong critic of Mr. Trump, who he said was unfit to be the President of the U.S. Two weeks shy of 40, Mr. Vance — now a U.S. Senator from Ohio — will be among the star speakers at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and could even become the running mate of Mr. Trump. Whether Mr. Trump chooses him or not, Mr. Vance has emerged as a frontrunner to inherit the former’s America First politics.

Mr. Vance’s book portrayed the crisis of the white working class from his personal vantage point, and in the years that followed, he presented himself as someone who overcame that crisis through faith and hard work. He was once an atheist but gradually moved towards faith and in 2019, he baptised and became a Catholic. He told an interviewer that he “spent a lot of his life buying into the lie that you had to be stupid to be a Christian.”

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Defining politics

Speaking at a conservative conference in Detroit, Michigan, on June 16, he called for defining politics in terms of what it stands for, not merely what it stands against. “We stand for an American nation built by American people, American workers,” he said. “We have to see the problem and find the solution. Make more of the stuff that we need in our own country. That is the solution. Twenty million people who have no business to be here, are here, because of Joe Biden. The solution is to deport each one of them.”

“America is not an idea as Democrats say. Seven generations of my family, from the Civil War to the 21st century are connected to this land. We are not just an idea, this is our home. That is the single principle at stake in this election.”

In an interview with Steve Bannon, a fellow traveller, during his Senate campaign in 2022, he said: ‘I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.’

As a strong votary of America First politics Mr. Vance is preferred by the nationalist base of the Republican Party. In a straw poll at the Turning Point convention in Detroit, 43% preferred him as Vice President on Mr. Trump’s ticket, which was three times the support for the next popular candidate.

From being a strong critic of Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance transformed himself into an ardent supporter and moved to the centre stage of U.S. politics as a highly visible and articulate lawmaker. “When Donald Trump was President, there was peace around the world. Now, there is a conflict in every corner of the world,” he told the Detroit gathering. Young, sharp and articulate, Mr. Vance presents himself as someone who is more structured, coherent and methodical than his leader.

Mr. Vance is married to Usha Chilukuri, his former Yale Law School classmate. “Like Mr. Obama, he is also a writer and a story teller,” a Democrat who served in the Obama administration said. “He’s a leader to watch.”

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally.
| Photo Credit: AP

A Florida judge appointed by Donald Trump has dismissed the criminal case against the former president on charges of mishandling top secret documents, saying the way that Special Counsel Jack Smith was appointed was improper.

The decision is a huge victory for Trump, who had been accused of endangering national security by holding onto top secret documents after leaving the White House.

Also read | Prosecutors in Trump’s classified documents case sharply rebuke judge’s unusual and ‘flawed’ order

Judge Aileen Cannon made her ruling after lawyers for the 78-year-old argued for a partial stay of proceedings to allow for an assessment of a Supreme Court ruling that a former president has broad immunity from prosecution.

“Former President Trump’s Motion to Dismiss Indictment Based on the Unlawful Appointment and Funding of Special Counsel Jack Smith is GRANTED,” Judge Aileen wrote in her order.

“The Superseding Indictment is DISMISSED because Special Counsel Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution.”

It comes as Trump is set to be annointed as his party’s champion at the Republican National Convention, days after surviving an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania.

In the Florida case, Trump was facing 31 counts of “willful retention of national defense information,” each punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

He also faced charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice and making false statements.

Trump allegedly kept classified documents – which included records from the Pentagon and CIA – unsecured at his Mar-a-Lago home and thwarted efforts to retrieve them.

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump arrives for a campaign rally at Trump National Doral Miami, Tuesday, July 9, 2024, in Doral, Florida.
| Photo Credit: AP

Donald Trump, the former U.S. president and presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party, has attacked Vice President Kamala Harris, raising questions on her competence and describing her as an “insurance policy” for incumbent President Joe Biden.

His attack against Ms. Harris, who is of Indian and African heritage, came amid chatter in the Democratic Party about whether President Biden should remain the nominee in the November 5 presidential election.

Mr. Biden, 81, has faced calls from some Democrats to step aside as the nominee following his disastrous performance during a June 27 debate with Mr. Trump in which he struggled to complete sentences or land any significant blows against his opponent.

“Whatever else can be said about crooked Joe Biden, you have to give him credit for one brilliant decision, probably the smartest decision he ever made. He picked Kamala Harris as his vice president. No, it was brilliant. Because it was an insurance policy. Maybe the best insurance policy I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Trump, 78, told his supporters in Florida.

“If Joe had picked someone even halfway competent, they would have bounced him from office years ago, but they can’t because she’s gotta be their second choice,” he said as he repeatedly mispronounced her name.

Mr. Trump said as Vice President, Ms. Harris was given two very important tasks – border security and to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine.

“First, she was put in charge of the U.S. border security. She never showed up. She’s never gone. She never went there once. And the border is the worst border in the history of the world,” he alleged.

“We have the best border in history because she has the worst border in the history of the world. Then, she was sent to Europe to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine. How did that work out? Not too good. Both times, the result was a deadly failure. Since Kamala was made border czar, the Biden-Harris administration has lost track of an estimated 150,000 children, many of whom have undoubtedly been raped, trafficked, killed, or horribly abused,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Trump accused Ms. Harris, 59, of being a socialist.

“I don’t think Kamala Harris’ California socialism is going to go down well with the people of Doral, the people of Miami, or the people of Florida. Because in Florida, we don’t like socialism. We want our freedom, right? We want our freedom,” he said.

“Joe, Kamala and the entire Democrat establishment have been caught red-handed in the thick of the biggest scandal and the biggest coverup…it’s a cover-up. It’s the biggest cover-up in political history. As you know, they are all co-conspirators in the sinister plot to defraud the American public about the cognitive abilities of the man in the Oval Office,” alleged Mr. Trump.

Former US President Donald Trump recently slammed the anti-Israel protests erupting across college campuses as a “radical revolution” and vowed to deport foreign student protesters if he wins the upcoming presidential election. According to the Washington Post, Mr Trump, while speaking at a donor event in New York, called the demonstrators part of a “radical revolution” and promised to crush pro-Palestinian protests on US college campuses. He also praised the New York Police Department for clearing the campuses at Columbia University and said other cities needed to follow suit, saying “It (anti-Israel protests) has to be stopped now”. 

“One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,” Donald Trump said on May 14, the outlet reported citing donors at the event. 

“If you get me elected, and you should really be doing this, if you get me reelected, we’re going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years,” he added. 

Washington Post cited donors who were present at the event. Speaking behind closed doors, the former president also said that he supports Israel’s right to continue “its war on terror” and boasted of his White House policies toward Israel. 

Meanwhile, Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt blamed US President Joe Biden for empowering the protesters. “Joe Biden has sided with radical leftist Democrats like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Talib and empowered antisemitic protestors destroying our college campuses and threatening to undermine our democracy,” Ms Leavitt said.

“President Trump will side with Jewish Americans and American citizens, period, and he will not tolerate terrorist sympathizers on our college campuses,” she added. 

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Previously, Mr Trump had publicly vowed to clamp down on anti-Israel protesters. Weeks after the October 7 Hamas attack, Mr Trump pledged to deport the “Resident aliens” who joined “pro-jihadists protest”. “If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel, if you sympathize with jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country, and you’re not going to be getting into our country,” Mr Trump said, as per New York Post. 

“I will cancel the student visas of Hamas sympathizers on college campuses and all resident aliens who join in pro-Jihadists protests,” he went on. “Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” he said. 

In the recent meeting, Mr Trump again supported Israel’s right to continue its attack on Gaza. “But I’m one of the only people that says that now. And a lot of people don’t even know what October 7th is,” he said. 

With just over six months left for the American general elections, some South Asian election activists are mobilizing to re-elect U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to the White House. The all-volunteer group, South Asians for Mr. Biden, kicked off its activities for the election season with a virtual event held on April 25 that featured messages from lawmakers and functionaries of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and focused on issues such as reproductive rights and gun control.

The group, like other groups working in this space, is motivated by the idea that South Asian populations in battleground States had exceeded the margins of victory for Democrats in previous election cycles (2020 and 2021 for example). This makes South Asians, like other Asian American and Pacific Islander groups (AAPI or  AANHNPI to include Native Hawaiians ), a potential deciding factor in who wins in battleground states.

 In a close election, such as the 2020 race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden,  winning swing states could be key to winning the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. However, Democrats and Republicans are focused not just on the Biden v Trump rematch this year but also other ‘down ballot’ races –  crucial Senate and House seats as well as contests for  state offices.  

South Asians for Biden had reached out to  a few hundred thousand South Asian and AAPI voters directly and via its digital and video campaigns in 2020 and 2021, according to Neha Dewan, National Co-Director of the group. Ms Dewan listed the group’s outreach in States such as Georgia and Wisconsin where Mr Biden won by wafer-thin margins ( around 12,000 votes in Georgia for example).

During the virtual event, titled, ‘Mobilizing the South Asian Community to be the Margin of Victory’, Ms Dewan highlighted the work of the Biden administration in areas she said were of importance to the community : reproductive rights (e.g., women’s access to contraception and abortion), curbing gun violence and hate crimes against Asian Americans.

“I know that the calls that were made into Georgia and into Wisconsin, were beyond the winning margin,” said Principal Deputy Campaign Manager for Biden-Harris 2024, Quentin Fulks, in a recorded video message.

The AAPI vote was 4% of the electorate in Georgia, and an important part of the margin (just under 3%) that got Senator Raphael Warnock re-elected the Senate (December 2022), Mr Fulks said. Democrats retained control (51-49) of the U.S. Senate with Mr Warnock – who initially came to the chamber after winning a partial term in 2020 – getting elected for full term in the 118th Congress that began in 2023.

“It’s going to take all of us again in 2024 to make sure that we hit 270 electoral votes,” Mr Fulks said.

The majority of U.S. born and foreign-born Indian Americans lean towards the Democratic Party (as per 2020 data), a statistic the group appears to capitalise on. One of the speakers at the virtual event, Washington (State)  Democrat, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal cited data to support the view that South Asian social and political priorities were aligned with those of the Biden-Harris platform.

Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Ro Khanna, an Indian American California Democrat emphasized that South Asian voters were critical  to electoral victories  in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona. Mr Biden won the electoral college votes in each of these States in 2020.

“We were key to President Biden and Vice President Harris’s 2020 historic win. We need to mobilize again,” he said.

Mr Khanna, whose constituency includes a part of Silicon Valley,  highlighted his involvement with the CHIPS and Science Act, one of the Biden administration’s big ticket policies aimed at increasing semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. (Mr Khanna was one of the lawmakers who introduced one of the  two pieces of legislation that later went on to become the Act).

“There are so many South Asians involved in creating good jobs and Arizona, in upstate New York, in Ohio, as a result of that act,” he said.

Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) AAPI Caucus Bel Leong Hong described the 2024 elections in existential terms.

“We are fighting for a place for us to be in, we are fighting to be who we are,” she said.

Democrats rallying around abortion rights and gun control

Issues important to South Asian Americans – especially reproductive rights, voting rights and gun violence – featured repeatedly through the event. This mirrors the overall approach of Democrats – starting at the top with Mr Biden and Ms Harris – to rally voters, especially women, will who would otherwise have not voted or voted for Mr Trump, to vote for Mr Biden.

Anita Somani, a physician who is a representative in the Ohio State Assembly had a message about voting officials in who would  protect reproductive rights.

Abortion and — more broadly — reproductive rights, have been a key electoral issue, especially since June 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, a judgement that broadly protected a woman’s right to have an abortion. With reproductive rights becoming a state issue since the judgement was overturned, a number of States have enacted measures to protect these rights, with Ohio residents voting in November 2023 to do the same.  

“Imagine that kids are now the experts on how to dodge bullets while sitting at their desks are walking to the corner store,” said Shikha Hamilton,  the parent of bi-cultural Indian and Black daughter , who has worked for over two decades on gun violence prevention.

Anita Somani, a physician who is a representative in the Ohio State Assembly had a message about voting officials in who would  protect reproductive rights.

Editorial | Square one: On the 2024 U.S. Presidential election as a Biden-Trump rematch

Ballot access is an issue

Battle lines this year are also drawn around voting rights with a number of Republican governed states passing tightening access to the ballot. Last year (data as of October) at least 14 States had passed laws making it harder to vote while 23 had made it easier to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

At the South Asians for Biden re-launch, Gen Z candidate for Georgia State Senate, Aswhin Ramaswami, a former election security official, discussed the growing legislative challenges to voting in Georgia. The 24 year old is  running against State Senator Shawn Still, who was indicted, along with Mr Trump and others, for illegally trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Americans will elect the next President of the United Sates, as well as a number of U.S. Senators and Congressmen, State governors and local officials on November 5 this year.

After a poll revealed that Michelle Obama, former First Lady of the United States, was the leading choice to replace President Joe Biden as the Democratic party’s candidate for the presidential elections, her office has revealed her stand regarding the upcoming presidential elections, as per a report in NBC News.

Michelle Obama has no intentions to run for President, even though many of her supporters are looking forward to this development. She is actively supporting the reelection campaigns of Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden.

In a statement to NBC News, the former first lady’s office made it clear that her plans do not include running for the post of President. Crystal Carson, Director of Communications for her office, said “As former First Lady Michelle Obama has expressed several times over the years, she will not be running for president. Mrs. Obama supports President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ re-election campaign.”

Meanwhile, Obama’s adviser cited her conversation with Oprah Winfrey from last year as evidence of her way of thinking and the reason she would probably never run for office. In a Netflix special, she said, “Politics is hard. And the people who get into it … you’ve got to want it. It’s got to be in your soul, because it is so important. It is not in my soul.”

Last month, she expressed deep fear about the upcoming elections, saying it “haunts” her. “The fact that people think that government-‘eh,, does it really even do anything?’ – and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, does government do everything for us, and we cannot take this democracy for granted.’ And I worry sometimes that we do. Those are the things that keep me up,” she had said.

It is to be noted nearly half of the Democrats who voted in the Rasmussen Reports polls, expressed their choice for someone other than Biden to fight the US Presidential elections. About 48 per cent of the Democrats polled said they approve of the party “finding another candidate to replace Joe Biden before the election in November,” compared to 38 per cent who disapprove.

Michelle Obama got about 20 per cent of votes among other options to replace 81-year-old Joe Biden. The other contenders were Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, California Governor Gavin Newsom and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.