Contributing Writers

A march through downtown Milwaukee Thursday called for justice for Samuel Sharpe and D’Vontaye Mitchell, two Black men killed before and during the Republican National Convention amid a massive security buildup. Sharpe was a 43-year-old unhoused Black man who was shot dead by police officers from Ohio who were in Wisconsin as part of a group of 4,500 law enforcement officials in Milwaukee for the RNC. The shooting took place a mile from the RNC’s proceedings.

We host a roundtable the morning after Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president on Thursday, just five days after surviving an assassination attempt, delivering the longest acceptance speech in convention history. Trump began with a somber recounting of what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a bullet grazed his right ear, and soon went off script to deliver a rambling diatribe against various political enemies and repeatedly demonized immigrants.

The Democratic National Committee is moving ahead with a plan to virtually nominate Joe Biden ahead of the Democratic convention in Chicago despite growing calls for him to step aside and as a new Associated Press poll shows nearly two-thirds of Democrats want Biden to withdraw from the race following his disastrous debate with Donald Trump. Top Democrats including Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are reportedly privately lobbying for Biden to step aside.

American historian and the author of White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg, calls Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance a peddler of the “self-made man myth.” Isenberg criticizes Hilbilly Elegy, the memoir that propelled him to fame, as a deceptive way of selling this myth and the conservative politics it comes with.

Politico reporter Ian Ward interviewed Ohio Senator J.D. Vance at length for a recent profile and joins us to discuss Vance’s biography and ideology after he formally accepted the Republican vice-presidential nomination to run with Donald Trump, whom he once staunchly opposed.

We continue to look at the record of Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, Senator J.D. Vance, with a focus on his foreign policy actions, with Matt Duss of the Center for International Policy, former adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders.

After Ohio Senator J.D. Vance makes his nomination official as the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2024, we spend the show looking at his record. We begin with a discussion on Vance’s professed economic populism with independent journalist Zaid Jilani and The Nation’s Chris Lehmann. Jilani argues Vance’s pro-working class image is not only genuine, but that he may also hold enough sway to bring the Republican Party closer to the labor movement.

The Democratic National Committee is moving to confirm President Joe Biden as the party’s presidential nominee with a “virtual roll call” as early as next week, despite serious doubts from many Democratic lawmakers and voters about his viability following a disastrous debate performance in late June. “Joe Biden could be nominated for president next week, even though the convention is almost a month away,” says The Nation’s John Nichols.

Anti-immigrant hate speech and misinformation about the U.S.-Mexico border took center stage on the second day of the Republican National Convention. Donald Trump’s campaign screened an ad that scapegoated migrants and asylum seekers for rising crime in the U.S. and falsely claimed Biden’s so-called open border policies have facilitated the smuggling of fentanyl.

Ohio Senator J.D. Vance is preparing to make his first speech Wednesday at the Republican National Convention after being tapped by Donald Trump to be his running mate. On Tuesday, ProPublica published a newly uncovered speech Vance made a year before he was elected to the Senate in which he said “the devil is real,” praised conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, denigrated transgender people and more. We speak with reporter Andy Kroll, who says the video “gives this unvarnished look into what J.D.

Activists and community members in Milwaukee gathered in the streets Tuesday to condemn the police killing of 43-year-old Milwaukee resident Samuel Sharpe. The officers who killed Sharpe, an unhoused Black veteran, are from Ohio, part of a group of 4,500 law enforcement officials in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention. But the shooting took place a mile from the RNC’s proceedings.

A federal jury on Tuesday convicted New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of corruption on all 16 counts he faced. He was found guilty of bribery, wire fraud, extortion, obstruction of justice, conspiracy and acting as a foreign agent for Egypt. Award-winning investigative reporter Bob Hennelly, who has been covering Menendez for decades, says it’s a “condemnation of the political culture of New Jersey that’s corrupt.

A lawsuit led by Palestinians and Palestinian Americans that accused President Joe Biden and other top U.S. officials of enabling genocide in Gaza was rejected Monday by a federal appeals court, which upheld a lower court’s dismissal of the lawsuit. The three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court ruled that courts cannot review the executive branch’s decisions on foreign policy, even when there is a risk of breaking domestic and international law.

As Donald Trump and his new running mate J.D. Vance try to soften their anti-abortion position ahead of the 2024 election, new documents uncovered by The Lever show Vance lobbied just last year to let police track people who cross state lines for abortions.

We speak with journalist Robert Kuttner about Donald Trump’s selection of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance to be his running mate in the 2024 election. Vance rose to fame in 2016 after writing the memoir Hillbilly Elegy about his upbringing in Appalachia. He was elected to the Senate in 2022 with the backing of right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, who spent $10 million on his candidacy.

“We were given a genocidal man and a fascist man, and that is a terrible decision to pick from,” says one of the protesters who joined a broad coalition of progressive groups and unions to march in Milwaukee against the Republican Party Monday on the first day of the Republican National Convention. We speak with people calling for an end to racist policies supported by the GOP; defending the rights of women, LGBTQ people and abortion access; supporting Palestine and more.

As the Republican National Convention opened on Monday, Donald Trump scored a major legal victory when a Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida dismissed the criminal case against the former president for illegally keeping classified national security documents after his presidency ended. Judge Aileen Cannon ruled Attorney General Merrick Garland had no power to appoint Jack Smith as a special counsel. Her ruling stunned many legal experts, and the Justice Department plans to appeal.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, holds significance for today’s Republican Party, not only as the site of the 2024 Republican National Convention, but also as a bellwether for American conservatism, argues Dan Kaufman, author of The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics.

In Milwaukee, Democracy Now! speaks with members of an unhoused encampment that’s been set up just minutes from the site of the Republican National Convention to protest policies that have exacerbated poverty and a housing crisis nationwide. The encampment is organized by the Poor People’s Army, which is also set to host a protest rally and march on the first day of the convention. Cheri Honkala, the national spokesperson for the Poor People’s Army, also joins us in Milwaukee.

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, we speak to writer Jeff Sharlet, author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. Sharlet says, “The Trump campaign and this kind of authoritarianism is driven by not just the use of violence, not just the invocation of violence, but a kind of reverence of violence, a redemption through violence.

The Israeli military carried out one of its deadliest attacks in weeks when it bombed al-Mawasi in Khan Younis — designated as a “safe zone” — killing at least 90 Palestinians and injuring hundreds more on Saturday. Israel claimed it was targeting Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, but the group denied that Deif had been hit.

Saturday’s assassination attempt of Donald Trump is widely viewed as the Secret Service’s biggest failure since 1981, when a gunman shot President Ronald Reagan just over two months into his first term. Reagan was hospitalized for nearly two weeks. Three other people were injured, including Reagan’s press secretary James Brady, who was shot in the head and left partially paralyzed.

We speak with reporter Oren Ziv of +972 Magazine, whose latest investigation details how Israeli forces in Gaza have been authorized to open fire on Palestinians virtually at will. Six soldiers who fought in Gaza describe a near-total absence of firing regulations, with soldiers shooting as they please, setting homes ablaze, leaving corpses to rot on the streets and more.

As the world watched Thursday night, President Biden held his first solo press conference this year, after hosting a NATO conference in which he accidentally referred to Ukrainian President Zelensky as Russian President Putin before quickly correcting himself. While speaking with reporters, Biden defended his record and vowed to “finish the job,” but at one point referred to Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump.

Former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy discusses ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, the ruling party in the Gaza Strip, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s continued hostility to compromise and the Biden administration’s ineffectual mediation. Contrary to its claims of brokering peace, the U.S. “will continue to send the weapons” Israel uses to devastate Gaza, unremittingly fueling an increasingly unpopular war, says Levy, who is now president of the U.S.

As calls mount for President Joe Biden to step down as the presumptive Democratic Party nominee over concerns surrounding his mental and physical capacity to lead, we host a debate between two longtime members of the Democratic Party: Wajahat Ali, who recently authored a column subtitled “Biden Is Very Old and Out of Touch, and Here’s Why You Should Vote for Him,” and Norman Solomon of RootsAction.org, which sponsors the Step Aside Joe campaign.

We speak with reporter Oren Ziv of +972 Magazine, whose latest investigation details how Israeli forces in Gaza have been authorized to open fire on Palestinians virtually at will. Six soldiers who fought in Gaza describe a near-total absence of firing regulations, with soldiers shooting as they please, setting homes ablaze, leaving corpses to rot on the streets and more.

As the world watched Thursday night, President Biden held his first solo press conference this year, after hosting a NATO conference in which he accidentally referred to Ukrainian President Zelensky as Russian President Putin before quickly correcting himself. While speaking with reporters, Biden defended his record and vowed to “finish the job,” but at one point referred to Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump.

Former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy discusses ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, the ruling party in the Gaza Strip, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s continued hostility to compromise and the Biden administration’s ineffectual mediation. Contrary to its claims of brokering peace, the U.S. “will continue to send the weapons” Israel uses to devastate Gaza, unremittingly fueling an increasingly unpopular war, says Levy, who is now president of the U.S.

As calls mount for President Joe Biden to step down as the presumptive Democratic Party nominee over concerns surrounding his mental and physical capacity to lead, we host a debate between two longtime members of the Democratic Party: Wajahat Ali, who recently authored a column subtitled “Biden Is Very Old and Out of Touch, and Here’s Why You Should Vote for Him,” and Norman Solomon of RootsAction.org, which sponsors the Step Aside Joe campaign.