Anger, betrayal and fear as America braces for the midterm elections

Published

3 years ago

October 31, 2022

admin

“I think it’s a civil war,” Zach Scherer told me.

We were sitting on the back of his Trump-branded pick-up truck earlier this week when he made the prediction.

“I think that’s the only thing that’s going to bring America back together after this election if we lose.”

Civil war? When I moved to America a year ago, I recall people raising this fear. I remember thinking they were mad. How could anyone possibly believe the ‘world’s greatest democracy’, as it’s sometimes fondly described, could be heading for civil war?

I’ve reported from numerous failed or failing states over the years. It seemed nonsensical to suggest that the United States of America could be among them.

Well, a year on, my view is shifting and I am profoundly concerned.

The armies and frontlines are not formed in the traditional sense. But make no mistake, there are armies and there are frontlines. The fault lines are alarmingly deep. It would be wrong to think America can just muddle its way through this inflection point in its history.

Recent polling suggests that a growing number of Americans believe political violence is acceptable. Just last week the husband of the nation’s third most senior politician, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was attacked in their home. Police say she was the target.

On the same day as the attack, authorities warned that threats of violence against politicians nationwide had massively increased.

The nation is bitterly divided and there is one thing causing this agitation – about a third of voting-age people in this country believe the 2020 election was stolen. They believe Donald Trump won.

Doubt sown into fabric of US society

If you spent the past two years thinking this was a fringe view peddled by a former president; a con which can now be dismissed as background noise, well think again.

Doubt has been sown into the fabric of American society. People have been duped. They are dismissing the institutions on which American democracy was built. They have been told not to trust their electoral process.

Back on the pick-up truck, Mr Scherer’s friend Corey Check was angry. These two young disciples of Mr Trump firmly believe the election was stolen by Joe Biden and the ‘woke radical left’.

“Everything. Everything is at stake. America is at stake. If we lose it, our country’s going to hell…” Mr Check said.

Loyalists still believe Trump won

Rattled by their stark predictions, I sought out a different generation of Republicans hoping for a more measured, nuanced perspective.

Local campaigner Cindy Hilderbrand had invited me to meet a group of six friends and activists at the local Republican party headquarters.

My first question – how many of them thought that Mr Trump was the rightful winner in 2020? All their hands went up.

“Absolutely did win,” retired US Marine Paul Garcia said.

He was interrupted by another in the group, Cheryl Guenther: “… and it wasn’t just the election day shenanigans. It was everything leading up to that. The suppression of the news, the suppression of everything that happened, brought on by media. The media is nothing more than a Democrat arm that is helping suppress all of this information.”

To be clear, there is no evidence at all that the 2020 election was fraudulent. Audits, recounts and court cases in states across the land concluded that nothing had occurred which would have changed the result of the election. Mr Biden won by a wide margin.

Even Mr Trump’s closest aides and his own family have said he lost. Yet he persists and his loyalists believe him.

Conspiracy theories spread faster than facts

Our conversation turns to the policy issues. On abortion, on crime, on drugs, on guns, on the economy, they all have perfectly legitimate conservative views. Broadly – abortion is wrong, crime and drugs are out of control, gun control is unconstitutional and the struggling economy is Mr Biden’s fault.

But here’s the problem. They believe they are failing to get their way on those policy issues not because a majority disagrees with them but because a minority stole the last election from them.

American society is siloed in echo chambers. They consume wildly partisan cable news, they believe nonsense on social media and dismiss factual reporting. Conspiracy theories spread faster than facts.

Threat to democracy ‘understated’

Not far away, at a rally for the local democratic party candidate, I got talking to a young Democratic Party voter, a man of similar age to Mr Scherer and Mr Check but poles apart in perspective.

Was this idea of a threat to democracy overstated, I asked.

“I think it might be understated. I think there’s a genuine threat to democracy in this country and it really scares the hell out of me,” Ryan told me.

“I don’t want to end up like what we’ve seen in Europe in the past. If we don’t learn from history, we’re doomed to repeat it and we need to uphold democracy to keep going, otherwise we are going to falter as well. I am worried.”

Click to subscribe to the Sky News Daily wherever you get your podcasts

As America heads to the polls for this midterm take on the country’s direction, the anger and the division cannot be overstated.

Reflecting on all the conversations I have had, it’s jolting and bewildering.

There is so much going on; so many issues and there is absolutely no trust for the other side. There is anger and a sense of betrayal but I felt fear too. There is a real sense that Americans on all sides don’t know what comes next or how they will react to it.

US

Donald Trump says he wants to meet North Korea’s Kim Jong Un again – as soon as ‘this year’

Published

2 days ago

August 26, 2025

admin

Donald Trump says he wants to meet North Korea's Kim Jong Un again - as soon as 'this year'

Donald Trump has said he wants to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un again.

Speaking at the White House as he held talks with the new South Korean president Lee Jae Myung, Mr Trump told reporters: “I’d like to meet him this year… I look forward to meeting with Kim Jong Un in the appropriate future.”

“I’d like to have a meeting. I got along great with him,” President Trump said, adding they “became very friendly” during his first term in office.

“We think we can do something in that regard,” he said, adding that he would like to help the relationship between the two Koreas.

Mr Trump and Mr Kim held three meetings between 2018 and 2019 during Mr Trump’s first term and exchanged a number of, what the president called, “beautiful” letters.

In June 2019, Mr Trump briefly stepped into North Korea from the demilitarized zone (DMZ) with South Korea.

The US president on Monday responded to a question about whether he would return to the DMZ by fondly recalling the last time he did so.

“Remember when I walked across the line and everyone went crazy?” especially the Secret Service, Mr Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

But “I loved it”, Mr Trump said. He added he felt safe because he had a good relationship with Mr Kim.

Mr Trump became the first sitting American president to set foot on North Korean soil six years ago.

However, little progress was made in curbing North Korea’s nuclear programme, and Mr Trump acknowledged in March this year that Pyongyang is a “nuclear power”.

Kim possible: Is Trump seeking another ‘Hermit Kingdom’ handshake?

It was Donald Trump’s first meeting with the new president of South Korea.

A highly unconventional platform for glowing words about the North Korean one.

He said he got along “great” with Kim Jong Un and would like to meet him again “this year”.

The US president’s renewed interest in North Korea appears less about policy and more about theatrics.

The historic image of President Trump stepping on to North Korean soil in 2018 gave him global headlines.

The timing is curious – North Korea has been busy polishing its nuclear credentials and vowing not to disarm without serious concessions.

In other words, Pyongyang is holding the same cards it held four years ago, only now they’re shinier.

But Trump seems eager to revive his image as the only US president bold, or brash, enough to break bread with the ruler of the “Hermit Kingdom”.

Supporters call it visionary diplomacy; critics call it reality TV masquerading as foreign policy.

Either way, President Trump clearly sees value in the spectacle.

Whether Kim Jong Un does is another story.

Since Mr Trump’s first-term meetings with Mr Kim ended, North Korea has shown no interest in returning to talks.

The White House said in June that Mr Trump would welcome communications with Mr Kim.

The attempts at rapprochement come after the election in South Korea of Mr Lee, who has pledged to reopen dialogue with North Korea.

As a gesture of engagement in June, Mr Lee suspended South Korean loudspeakers blasting music and messages into the North at the DMZ along their shared border.

Analysts say, however, that engaging North Korea will likely be more difficult for both Mr Lee and Mr Trump than it was in the president’s first term.

Since then, North Korea has significantly expanded its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes.

And it has developed close ties with Russia through direct support for Moscow’s war in Ukraine, with Pyongyang providing both troops and weaponry.

Mr Kim told Russian President Vladimir Putin that his country will always stand with Moscow, state media reported in June.

US

Lil Nas X pleads not guilty after being charged with assaulting police officer

Published

2 days ago

August 26, 2025

admin

Lil Nas X pleads not guilty after being charged with assaulting police officer

US rapper Lil Nas X has pleaded not guilty after being charged with assaulting a police officer while walking in downtown Los Angeles in his underwear.

The musician, real name Montero Lamar Hill, was taken to hospital and arrested after police responded to reports of a naked man shortly before 6am on Thursday.

The district attorney’s office said on Monday that Lil Nas X faces three counts of battery with injury on a police officer and one count of resisting an executive officer.

He was being held on a $75,000 (£55,457) bail, conditional on attending drug treatment. It is not immediately clear whether he had posted it and been released yet.

He is set to return to court on 15 September for his next pre-trial hearing.

During the hearing on Monday, Hill’s lawyer Christy O’Connor told the judge he had led a “remarkable” life, adding: “Assuming the allegations here are true, this is an absolute aberration in this person’s life.

“Nothing like this has ever happened to him.”

A law enforcement source told Sky’s US partner network, NBC News, on Thursday that the Old Town Road and Industry Baby hitmaker punched an officer twice in the face during the encounter.

The source added officers were unsure whether he was on any substances or in mental distress.

NBC News cited TMZ footage where Hill was seen walking down the middle of Ventura Boulevard at 4am on Thursday in a pair of white briefs and cowboy boots.

In the videos, Hill tells a driver to “come to the party” in one clip and in another tells the person: “Didn’t I tell you to put the phone down?”

“Uh oh, someone’s going to have to pay for that,” Hill says as he continues to walk away.

In some clips, Hill struts as if he’s on a catwalk, posing for onlookers, and at one point he places an orange traffic cone on his head.

US

Kilmar Abrego Garcia: Man wrongly deported from US to El Salvador detained by ICE again

Published

2 days ago

August 26, 2025

admin

Kilmar Abrego Garcia: Man wrongly deported from US to El Salvador detained by ICE again

A man who was wrongly deported from the US to El Salvador has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) again.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 30-year-old originally from El Salvador, handed himself into the ICE field office in Baltimore, Maryland, for a check-in on Monday.

The visit was a mandatory condition of his release from federal custody earlier this weekend. However, in a court filing on Saturday, his lawyers said they expected Garcia would be detained again upon attending.

Garcia is charged in an indictment, filed in federal court in Tennessee, with conspiring to transport illegal immigrants into the US.

According to a court filing by his lawyers, immigration officials made an offer to Garcia to be deported to Costa Rica in exchange for pleading guilty to the charges.

Otherwise, they would seek to deport him to Uganda.

Speaking at a news conference outside the ICE office on Monday morning, Garcia said via a translator: “This administration has hit us hard, but I want to tell you guys something: God is with us, and God will never leave us.

“God will bring justice to all the injustice we are suffering.”

Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, one of Garcia’s lawyers, also said: “There was no need to take him into ICE detention… the only reason they took him into detention was to punish him.”

A judge later ruled Garcia could not be deported after he filed a challenge asking to be allowed due process to fight any removal attempt.

Judge Paula Xinis ruled the 30-year-old must remain detained in the US until she can hold an evidentiary hearing – set for Wednesday.

She added there appeared to be “several grounds” for her to have jurisdiction to exercise relief, including that Uganda has not agreed to offer Garcia protections, such as being able to walk freely, being given refugee status, and not being re-deported to El Salvador.

After initially being detained in Maryland – where he lived with his American wife and children – by ICE in March, Garcia was sent to El Salvador, where he was then imprisoned in the country’s maximum security Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).

This was despite an immigration judge’s 2019 order granting him protection from deportation after finding he was likely to be persecuted by local gangs if he was returned to his native country.

The Trump administration admitted deporting Garcia was an “administrative error”, but said at the time they could not bring him back as they do not have jurisdiction over El Salvador.

After eventually returning him to the US in June, the Trump administration detained Garcia on criminal charges that were filed in May.

The criminal indictment alleges Garcia worked with at least five co-conspirators to bring immigrants to the US illegally and transport them from the border to other destinations in the country.

Minutes after his release on Friday, officials notified Garcia they intended to deport him to Uganda.

Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, US President Donald Trump, vice president JD Vance and other officials claim Garcia was a member of MS-13 – an international criminal gang formed by immigrants who had fled El Salvador‘s civil war to protect Salvadoran immigrants from rival gangs.

Garcia’s lawyers strongly deny the claims.