ATLANTA (AP) — Donald Trump told Republican donors at his Florida resort this weekend that President Joe Biden is running a “Gestapo administration,” the latest example of the former president employing the language of Nazi Germany in his campaign rhetoric.

The remarks Saturday at Mar-a-Lago were described by people who attended the event and spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private session.

The “Gestapo” comment, one person said, came as Trump renewed his complaint that Biden’s White House is behind the multiple criminal prosecutions of the presumptive GOP nominee, including his ongoing hush money and fraud trial in New York and additional cases stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The Gestapo was the secret police force of the Third Reich that squelched political opposition generally and, specifically, targeted Jewish people for arrest during the Holocaust. Trump’s unfounded comparison to Nazi-era tactics comes as he denies and tries to deflect from the charges against him — most notably his effort to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory, before a mob of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Republican Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, appearing Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” essentially confirmed Trump’s statement, but tried to diminish its importance.

“This was a short comment deep into the thing that wasn’t really central to what he was talking about,” said Burgum, who is among the contenders to be Trump’s running mate.

Burgum affirmed that Trump drew the parallel as part of his accusation that Biden’s White House is behind his legal troubles. “A majority of Americans,” Burgum said, “feel like the trial that he’s in right now is politically motivated.”

The New York Times first reported Trump’s comments after obtaining an audio recording of the Mar-a-Lago event.

“These people are running a Gestapo administration,” Trump told GOP donors, according to the newspaper. “It’s the only way they’re going to win.”

Biden’s reelection campaign blasted the reference.

“Trump is once again making despicable and insulting comments about the Holocaust, while in the same breath attacking law enforcement, celebrating political violence, and threatening our democracy,” said James Singer, spokesman for the Democrat’s campaign, in a statement.

Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to an Associated Press request for comment. The AP has not obtained audio of Trump’s speech at the fundraiser.

Previously in the 2024 campaign, Trump has called political opponents “vermin” and said migrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border are “poisoning the blood of our country,” rhetoric that echoes Adolf Hitler’s statements during his authoritarian rule of Germany.

“I know nothing about Hitler,” Trump insisted in a December interview on conservative talk radio. “I have no idea what Hitler said other than (what) I’ve seen on the news. And that’s a very, entirely different thing than what I’m saying.”

A second person who was at Mar-a-Lago this weekend described to the AP a stem-winding luncheon appearance in which Trump mixed his grievances with optimistic GOP cheerleading.

Speaking for at least 90 minutes, Trump promised “the gloves are coming off” against Biden, the second Republican recalled. At another point, Trump called up several GOP congressional figures to the stage and referred to the many Republicans vying to be his vice presidential pick.

“They’re lining up and begging,” Trump said, according to one attendee.

Several presumed contenders circulated in the crowd and were given strategic speaking roles or lead panel discussions. Among the standouts, the Republican said, were Republican Sens. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Marco Rubio of Florida and JD Vance of Ohio.

Trump, the person said, singled out Rubio for special praise and referenced a “Florida problem,” referring to a constitutional requirement that the president and vice president not claim the same state as their residences.

Rubio and Scott both demurred when asked about their prospects on the Sunday talk shows.

On “Fox News Sunday,” Rubio sidestepped a question about whether he would be willing to move to another state to join the GOP ticket.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., was in attendance, as well, shoring up support from Trump. Johnson coordinated one of the legal challenges against the 2020 election that Trump lost, but the speaker now faces the threat of his own ouster by far-right Republicans led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

With his time on stage, Johnson said the U.S. needs a “strongman” in the White House, one attendee told the AP.

Johnson, who often talks about the need to return to the national security principle of “peace through strength,” explained the necessity of having a “strong, resolute” president at a time of conflict around the world, said a person familiar with the speaker’s remarks. This person was not authorized to publicly discuss Johnson’s comments and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Republican National Committee said after the event that joint fundraising efforts by the RNC and the campaign for April topped $76 million, by far the best monthly effort of this campaign cycle and a step toward closing Biden’s financial advantage. RNC Chairman Michael Whatley hailed an uptick in small-dollar donors, but the Mar-a-Lago event clearly focused on the party’s deepest pockets. At one point, one attendee said, Trump offered an open microphone to anyone who immediately pledged a $1 million contribution to the party. Two people eventually agreed, the source said.

Additionally, the Times reported that Trump told his audience that Democrats effectively purchase votes through economic safety net programs, while repeating his false claims that U.S. elections are riddled with systemic fraud.

“When you are Democrat, you start off essentially at 40% because you have civil service, you have the unions and you have welfare,” Trump said, according to the Times. “And don’t underestimate welfare. They get welfare to vote, and then they cheat on top of that — they cheat.”

Biden’s victory was affirmed by multiple recounts across many battleground states, and Trump’s assertions of fraud were rejected by multiple state and federal courts, including by judges he nominated to the bench. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and his role in his supporters’ riot on Jan. 6 are the subject of two additional indictments.

Trump is not the first Republican presidential candidate to privately connect social programs with Democrats’ electoral fortunes. In 2012, then-GOP nominee Mitt Romney was captured on tape at a fundraising event declaring that Democrat Barack Obama had a built in advantage because of people he said did not have to pay federal income taxes.

“There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president (Obama) no matter what” because they are “dependent upon government” and “believe that they are victims,” Romney said, adding that “my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

Obama’s campaign, with Biden as vice president, used those comments to bolster Democrats’ argument that Romney, a wealthy businessman, was out of touch with most Americans. Obama was reelected.

___

Mascaro reported from Washington.

WILMINGTON, N.C. (AP) — This North Carolina voter is nervous.

Will Rikard, a 49-year-old father of two, was among several hundred Democrats who stood and cheered for Joe Biden as the first-term president delivered a fiery speech recently about the billions of dollars he has delivered to protect the state’s drinking water.

But afterward, the Wilmington resident acknowledged he is worried about Biden’s political standing in the looming rematch with former Republican President Donald Trump.

“There’s not enough energy,” Rikard said of Biden’s coalition. “I think people are gonna need to wake up and get going.”

Exactly six months before Election Day, Biden and Trump are locked in the first contest in 112 years with a current and former president competing for the White House. It’s a race that is at once deeply entrenched and highly in flux as many voters are only just beginning to embrace the reality of the 2024 campaign.

Wars, trials, the independent candidacy of Robert Kennedy Jr. and deep divisions across America have injected extraordinary uncertainty into a race for the White House in which either man would be the oldest president ever sworn in on Inauguration Day. At the same time, policy fights over abortion, immigration and the economy are raging on Capitol Hill and in statehouses.

Hovering over it all is the disbelief of many voters, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Biden and Trump — their respective parties’ presumptive nominees — will ultimately appear on the general election ballot this fall.

“I think we have an electorate that’s going through the stages of grief about this election,” said Sarah Longwell, who conducts regular focus groups with voters across the political spectrum as co-founder of Republican Voters Against Trump. “They’ve done denial — ‘Not these two, can’t possibly be these two.’ And I think they’re in depression now. I’m waiting for people to hit acceptance.”

Trump is in the midst of the first of potentially four criminal trials and facing felony charges. The Constitution does not prevent him from assuming the presidency if convicted — or even if he is in prison.

Biden, who will turn 82 years old just weeks after Election Day, Nov. 5, is already the oldest president in U.S. history; Trump is 77.

Privately, Democratic operatives close to the campaign worry constantly about Biden’s health and voters’ dim perceptions of it. In recent weeks, aides have begun walking at Biden’s side as he strolls to and from Marine One, the presidential helicopter, on the White House South Lawn in an apparent effort to help mask the president’s stiff gait.

Still, neither party is making serious contingency plans. Whether voters want to believe it or not, the general election matchup is all but set.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, said many voters are recovering from what he called “a knock-down, drag-out fight” that was the 2020 presidential election.

“Many of them have not wrapped their heads around the fact that it is, in fact, going to be a rematch,” Cooper said in an interview. “When they do, I don’t think there’s any question that Joe Biden is going to win the day.”

Even before voters begin paying close attention, the political map in the fight for the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency is already taking shape.

Biden’s campaign is increasingly optimistic about North Carolina, a state he lost by just 1 percentage point in 2020. Overall, the Democratic president’s reelection campaign has several hundred staff in more than 133 offices in the seven most critical states: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin and North Carolina.

Trump’s team has barely begun to roll out swing-state infrastructure, although he campaigned in Wisconsin and Michigan over the past week, sending a clear signal that he wants to block Biden’s path to reelection via the Democrats’ Midwestern “blue wall.”

Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita said Trump is making plans to invest new resources in at least two other Democratic-leaning states.

At a private donor retreat in Florida on Saturday, LaCivita discussed the campaign’s plans to expand its electoral map into Virginia and Minnesota, based on the Trump team’s growing optimism that both states are within reach.

“We have a real opportunity to expand the map here,” LaCivita told The Associated Press. “The Biden campaign has spent tens of millions of dollars on TV ads and in their ‘vaunted ground game’. And they have nothing to show for it.”

Biden’s campaign welcomed Trump’s team to spend money in Democratic states. “The Biden campaign is going to relentlessly focus on the pathway to 270 electoral votes, and that’s what our efforts represent,” campaign communications director Michael Tyler said.

Biden has been spending far more aggressively on election infrastructure and advertising heading into the six-month stretch toward Election Day.

In the eight weeks since Trump essentially clinched the Republican nomination, his campaign has spent virtually nothing on television advertising, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. Outside groups aligned with Trump have spent just over $9 million.

Over the same period, AdImpact found, Biden and his allies have spent more than $29 million spread across Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Trump’s team has been unusually conservative, in part, to avoid the perceived mistakes of 2020, when his campaign essentially ran out of money and was forced to cut back on advertising in the election’s critical final days, but also because it has struggled to reignite its appeal with small donors and because of the diversion of some dollars to the former president’s legal defense.

Trump’s team insists it will soon ramp up its advertising and on-the-ground infrastructure, although LaCivita refused to offer any specifics.

It is clear that Biden and Trump have serious work to do to improve their standing with voters.

While optimistic in public, Biden allies privately acknowledge that his approval ratings may be lower than Democrat Jimmy Carter’s numbers at this point in his presidency. Trump’s ratings are not much better.

Public polling consistently shows that voters don’t like their 2024 options.

Only about 2 in 10 Americans say they would be excited by Biden (21%) or Trump (25%) being elected president, according to an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in March. Only about one-quarter of voters in the survey say they would be satisfied about each.

A CNN poll conducted in April found that 53% of registered voters say they are dissatisfied with the presidential candidates they have to choose from in this year’s election.

Another major wild card is Kennedy, a member of the storied political dynasty and an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who is running as an independent. Both major campaigns are taking him seriously as a potential spoiler, with Trump’s allies notably ramping up their criticism of Kennedy in recent days.

For now, Biden’s team is most focused on reminding voters of Trump’s divisive leadership. Three years after Trump left office, there is a sense that some voters may have forgotten what it was like with the former reality television star in the Oval Office — or his efforts to overturn the 2020 election that have landed him in legal peril.

“The plan is reminding voters of what life was like with Trump and also demonstrating to voters that the ways in which the world feels uncertain to them now are not, in fact, caused by the president, but can actually be navigated by this president,” Biden pollster Mary Murphy told the AP. “Voters will trust his leadership and stewardship, knowing that things can be a lot worse if it’s Donald Trump.”

Biden’s team is also betting that fierce backlash to new restrictions on abortion, which Trump and Republicans have largely championed, will drive voters to Democrats like it did in the 2022 midterm election and 2023 state races.

But Biden’s success also is dependent on the Democrat’s ability to reassemble his winning coalition from 2020 at a time when enthusiasm is lagging among critical voting blocs, including Blacks, young voters and Arab Americans unhappy over the president’s handling of the war in Gaza.

Trump has been forced to adapt his campaign to his first criminal trial in New York. Prosecutors allege he committed financial fraud to hide hush money payments to a porn actor, Stormy Daniels, who says she had a sexual encounter with Trump. He denies her claim and has pleaded not guilty.

For now, Trump is forced to attend the trial most weekdays. A verdict is likely still weeks away. And after that, he faces the prospect of more trials related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents. The Supreme Court is weighing whether Trump should be granted immunity, or partial immunity, for the actions he took while in office.

Trump over the past week wedged in campaign stops around his court schedule, rallying voters in Wisconsin and Michigan, where the abortion debate is raging.

Trump seemed to be searching for a way to lessen the political sting from the upheaval over the Supreme Court’s overturning of national abortion rights. The former president suggested the issue will ultimately bring the country together as states carve out differing laws.

“A lot of bad things will happen beyond the abortion issue if you don’t win elections, with your taxes and everything else,” he told Michigan voters.

Trump’s camp privately maintains that his unprecedented trial in New York will dominate the news — and voters’ attention — for the foreseeable future. His campaign has largely stopped trying to roll out unrelated news during the trial.

Even if Trump were to be convicted by the New York jury, his advisers insist the fundamentals of the election will not change. Trump has worked aggressively to undermine public confidence in the charges against him. Meanwhile, more traditional issues work in his favor, including stubbornly high inflation and the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, in the view of the Trump team.

LaCivita said that such issues constantly reinforce Biden’s weakness as “the news of the day keeps getting worse.”

Both sides seem to agree that the dynamics of the race may yet shift dramatically based on any number of factors, from how the economy fares or the course of the wars in Gaza and Ukraine to crime or migration trends or other foreseen events. Potential candidate debates this fall could be another wild card.

Such uncertainty, said Biden’s battleground states director Dan Kanninen, can play to their favor.

“That dynamic is an opportunity as much as a challenge for us,” he said, “because we will have the resources, the infrastructure and the operation built to be engaging voters throughout all those difficult waters.”

____

Miller reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Linley Sanders in Washington and Michelle L. Price in Freeland, Michigan, contributed to this report.

By Doina Chiacu

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump accused Democratic rival President Joe Biden of running a “Gestapo administration” in a private address to donors in which he also attacked prosecutors involved in his criminal indictments, according to a recording heard by U.S. media outlets.

Trump, whose own rhetoric has drawn accusations of fascist tendencies from civil rights groups and other critics, made the comparison with the Nazi police in Germany’s World War Two regime at a donor retreat Saturday night at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

The comments came after Trump reprised his complaint that the multiple indictments against him were politically motivated. He had just concluded 11 days of a New York hush money trial in which he is charged with falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 payment made to a porn star.

“These people are running a Gestapo administration,” Trump said, according to an audio recording heard by the New York Times and the Washington Post. “And it’s the only thing they have. And it’s the only way they’re going to win, in their opinion, and it’s actually killing them. But it doesn’t bother me.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on the reported remarks.

The former president, who held office from 2017 to 2021, faces an array of legal troubles in criminal and civil cases while he seeks to regain the presidency in the Nov. 5 election. He denies wrongdoing in all the cases.

Trump has made a series of inflammatory and racist statements on the campaign trail, using violent imagery to lambaste immigrants and opponents. He has warned of possible violence if he doesn’t win the 2024 election and has compared immigrants to animals.

In November, Biden attacked Trump for using the word “vermin” to refer to his political enemies, saying it echoed the language of Nazi Germany. Also last year, Trump said immigrants who entered the country illegally were “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Some historians say such comments mirror that of autocrats who have sought to dehumanize their foes. The Trump campaign has previously rejected comparisons to Nazis, Adolf Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini.

The Jewish Council for Public Affairs denounced the Nazi comparison on Sunday.

“It’s always wrong, offensive, and despicable to make comparisons like this — even more so when taken alongside the former president’s long history of normalizing antisemitism,” said Amy Spitalnick, chief executive of the public policy group.

It was “especially heinous to use Nazi comparisons in the service of a bigoted, authoritarian agenda,” she said.

The Biden campaign said the reported comments underscored the Republican candidate’s anger and desire for revenge.

“Trump is once again making despicable and insulting comments about the Holocaust, while in the same breath attacking law enforcement, celebrating political violence, and threatening our democracy,” spokesperson James Singer said in a statement.

On Saturday night, Trump again took swipes at the federal and Georgia prosecutors working on cases against him, according to the media reports.

Trump, a former New York businessman and reality television host, described Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug smugglers as he declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination in the 2016 election. He drew widespread criticism after a violent 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, for equating white supremacists with counter-protesters and saying “both sides” were to blame.

Biden has said the events in Charlottesville, where one woman was killed, motivated him to run for president against Trump in 2020.

(This story has been corrected to fix the spelling of name in paragraph 11)

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Andrea Ricci and Deepa Babington)

NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial is full of terms you don’t typically hear in a courtroom.

Centering on allegations Trump falsified his company’s records to conceal the nature of hush money reimbursements, it’s the first ever criminal trial of a former U.S. president and the first of Trump’s four indictments to go to trial. It also has some unique terminology.

Here are some examples:

DEFINITION: According to Merriam-Webster, it’s money paid so that someone will keep information secret. In other words, money that a person pays someone to hush up something.

EXAMPLE: Three payments that prosecutors say were made on Trump’s behalf to bury marital infidelity claims during his 2016 presidential campaign. They are the National Enquirer’s $30,000 payment to a Trump Tower doorman and $150,000 payment to former Playboy model Karen McDougal, and the $130,000 that Trump’s then-lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen arranged to pay porn actor Stormy Daniels.

Paying hush money isn’t illegal on its own, but authorities say the payments made to suppress stories about Trump amounted to illegal campaign contributions. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to a federal campaign violation, among other unrelated crimes. The National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., entered into a nonprosecution agreement in exchange for its cooperation with prosecutors. The Federal Election Commission fined the company $187,500, declaring that the McDougal deal was a “prohibited corporate in-kind contribution.”

DEFINITION: As prosecutor Matthew Colangelo told jurors in his opening statement, “catch-and-kill” is when a tabloid newspaper such as the National Enquirer “buys up damaging information about someone, demands that the source sign a nondisclosure agreement to prevent them from taking that information or that story anywhere else, and then the tabloid declines to publish the story to prevent it from ever seeing the light of day.” A nondisclosure agreement is also known as a confidentiality agreement.

EXAMPLE: Tabloids typically pay sources and story subjects for information they end up publishing. But sometimes they pay for stories to prevent their publication. Former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker testified that he agreed, at a Trump Tower meeting in August 2015, to be the “eyes and ears” of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Under the arrangement, Pecker said he would notify Cohen of women who were seeking to sell stories about Trump so Trump’s team could “take them off the market or kill them in some manner.”

Pecker testified that he had suppressed stories about other celebrities and politicians over the years using the same “catch and kill” methods, including actor and ex-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and golfer Tiger Woods. Pecker said he sometimes suppressed stories simply to help a friend or further his business interests, but often he did so to leverage the story subject into doing something else, like agreeing to an interview or posing for a magazine cover.

DEFINITION: This is the criminal charge that’s being decided at Trump’s New York trial. He is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. It is a felony punishable by up to four years in prison, though there is no guarantee Trump would be sentenced to any time if convicted. He has pleaded not guilty.

Under New York law, a person is guilty of falsifying business records in the first degree when he makes or causes a false entry to be made in a company’s business records and does so with an intent to defraud, including intent to commit or hide another crime.

EXAMPLE: Prosecutors allege Trump misrepresented payments to Cohen in Trump’s company records as legal fees when they were actually a reimbursement for the $130,000 that Cohen arranged to pay Daniels. The records at issue include general ledger entries, invoices and checks. Prosecutors argue Trump’s actions were a way of hiding the hush money scheme and concealing other crimes arising from it, including alleged election law violations. Trump denies the allegations. His lawyers have said the payments to Cohen were for legitimate legal expenses.

DEFINITION: Trump isn’t charged with the crime of conspiracy, but prosecutors at his New York trial have used the term repeatedly to describe his “eyes and ears” agreement with Pecker and the hush money arrangements that ensued.

According to Merriam-Webster, conspiring involves joining “in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement.” Under New York law, a conspiracy involves at least two people acting with intent to commit a crime.

EXAMPLE: Colangelo, the prosecutor, said in his opening statement that Trump’s trial involves “an illegal conspiracy to undermine the integrity of a presidential election.” To convict Trump of felony falsifying business records, prosecutors must show that he had intent to commit another crime. Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass said in court that one of the crimes Trump intended to commit was a violation of a New York election law — a misdemeanor involving a conspiracy to promote or prevent an election.

DEFINITION: Any attempt to alter the outcome of an election through nefarious means, such as fraud, voter intimidation or efforts to overturn the outcome of a race.

EXAMPLE: Prosecutors allege the hush money scheme amounted to election interference because it involved a concerted effort to hide important information from voters in order to boost Trump’s chances in the 2016 race.

Not only was the National Enquirer acting as the “eyes and ears” of Trump’s campaign, identifying negative stories so they could be suppressed, Pecker testified that the tabloid, at Cohen’s behest, printed stories that tarred Trump’s opponents. It also published stories that boosted Trump’s image.

It’s a different kind of election interference allegation from what Trump is charged with in his Washington and Georgia cases, where he’s accused of attempting to subvert his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Meanwhile, Trump claims that being put on trial while he’s campaigning as this year’s presumptive Republican nominee is its own form of election interference.

DEFINITION: Generally speaking, a gag order is “a judicial ruling barring public disclosure or discussion (as by the press) of information related to a case,” according to Merriam-Webster. In Trump’s case, it’s known as an Order Restricting Extrajudicial Statements, with extrajudicial meaning outside of court.

EXAMPLE: Judge Juan M. Merchan, acting on a request from prosecutors, imposed a limited gag order on Trump on March 26. It bars the former president from making or directing other people to make public statements on his behalf about potential witnesses regarding their participation in the case. It also prohibits comments about jurors, prosecutors other than District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and any statements meant to interfere with or harass the court’s staff, prosecution team or their families.

Merchan expanded the order on April 1, barring Trump from commenting about his family or Bragg’s family. The change came after Trump assailed the judge’s daughter and made false claims about her on social media.

Last Tuesday, Trump was assessed a $9,000 fine — $1,000 for each of nine separate gag order violations that the judge identified. Prosecutors later requested an additional $4,000 penalty for what they said were additional breaches of the order.

Merchan lamented that $1,000 per violation is the maximum fine allowed by law and floated the possibility of jailing Trump if he continues to run afoul of the gag order, an unprecedented outcome for a former American president.

Trump’s lawyers insist he needs leeway to respond to criticism, including from witnesses like Cohen and Daniels, and that the gag order impedes his ability to answer questions and defend himself amid a crush of media coverage of his case and his candidacy.

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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A church volunteer stood at an apartment door, beckoning inside a Congolese family for their first look at where they would live in America.

“Your new house!” volunteer Dan Davidson exclaimed as the couple and the woman’s brother stepped into the two-bedroom apartment in South Carolina’s capital, smiling tentatively at what would come next.

Inside, church volunteers had made quilts for the beds and set out an orange and yellow plastic dump truck and other toys for the couple’s son. The family watched closely as a translator showed them key features in their apartment: which knob matched which burner on the stovetop, how the garbage disposal and window blinds worked. They practiced working the thermostat and checked the water in the shower.

“We are so happy to get this place,” Kaaskile Kashindi said through a translator.

Now 28, Kashindi was born in Congo and fled with his family at age 3 to a refugee camp in Tanzania, where he lived until this spring. That’s when he, his wife, little boy and brother-in-law moved to Columbia, a university town of 140,000 people.

“We’re still new. We just need help right now,” Kashindi said.

Scenes like this are becoming more common as the American refugee program, long a haven for people fleeing violence around the world, rebounds from years of cutbacks under Donald Trump’s administration. The Biden administration has worked to streamline the process of screening and placing people in America while refugee resettlement agencies have opened new sites across the country.

If President Joe Biden meets his target of 125,000 refugees admitted this year, it would be the highest number of arrivals in more than three decades.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in a 2020 rematch with Biden this fall, has pledged to bar refugees from Gaza and reinstate his Muslim ban if elected, while also putting in place “ideological screening” for all immigrants. Trump’s website highlights his first-term decision to temporarily suspend the refugee program.

Even with immigration — legal or not — a divisive campaign issue, many who help refugees settle in the United States say the growing numbers of refugees have been generally welcomed by communities and employers in need of workers.

The word refugee is sometimes broadly used to refer to anyone fleeing war or persecution. Often it’s conflated with asylum-seekers who come directly to the U.S.-Mexico border. People like the family from Congo are coming through a different process, starting with an application abroad and with thorough vetting that can take years.

Usually they are referred to U.S. officials by the U.N. refugee agency, then interviewed by American immigration officials. There are background checks and medical screening.

The lucky few who are approved fly to towns across America to start new lives with the help of a nationwide network of resettlement agencies. They are eligible to become citizens eventually.

For decades, America led the world in refugee admissions in a program that had wide bipartisan support. Trump cut the program to the quick. By the time he left office in January 2021, he had set a record low goal of 15,000 refugees admitted a year. But even that mark wasn’t hit: Only 11,814 refugees came to the U.S. in Trump’s last year, compared with 84,994 at the end of the Obama administration.

Biden said he would reestablish the U.S. as a haven for refugees. It took a while.

His administration is now admitting more refugees and added about 150 new resettlement sites nationwide, said Sarah Cross, deputy assistant secretary for the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.

To reach a goal of 125,000 refugees admitted this year — the highest number since 1992 — the department has been increasing its overseas processing and making changes that streamline all the checks refugees undergo while keeping screening rigorous, Cross said. It has hired more staff and is doing more trips to interview prospective refugees overseas.

In 2020, Lutheran Services Carolinas resettled about 40 refugees in Columbia. This year, the organization expects to welcome about 440, said Seth Hershberger, the nonprofit’s refugee resettlement and immigration director. It has opened new sites in Charleston, Greenville and Myrtle Beach.

“It is chaotic sometimes,” Hershberger said from the agency’s office, tucked into a Lutheran church. “But with the support we’ve had … it’s been a good, good journey.”

The office is a bustle of case managers, employment specialists and other staffers; some were once refugees themselves. These staff and volunteers usually meet arriving refugees, making sure a meal they recognize is waiting for them.

From there, it’s a whirlwind of medical appointments, registration at government offices, opening a bank account, enrolling kids in school and eventually moving into permanent housing such as the Kashindi family’s apartment. They take classes in what is called “survival English” — how to call 911 if someone is sick, for example, or remembering your address so you can tell someone if you get lost.

In one recent class, five refugees sat at desks at a local church. Down the hall, a volunteer watched their kids so they could work on learning a new language.

The lesson was focused on calendars and days of the week, interspersed with a bit of American culture.

“In America, the calendar is very important. … There’s a lot of dates you’ll need to know,” said teacher Sarah Lewis, such as their children’s birthdays, doctor’s appointments and much more.

Two students were sisters from Honduras who had fled their homes and traveled to Mexico, where they lived for about a year until they learned they had been approved to come to South Carolina.

Leliz Bonilla Castro said she didn’t know much about Columbia when she arrived but she liked the warm weather and welcoming people. She said the refugee program had given her and her three children a future.

“For those who want and have the opportunity to come (to this country), it is the best way to save your life and to have a better future for your kids, which are the ones we think about the most as parents,” she said through a translator.

It wasn’t too long ago that South Carolina was one of many Republican-leaning states that balked at efforts to bring in Syrian refugees.

Hershberger, the Lutheran Services resettlement chief, pointed to another event — the U.S. evacuation of tens of thousands of Afghans from Kabul during the 2021 troop withdrawal — as a game-changer. It led to an outpouring from Americans wanting to help.

“When they saw people grabbing onto the planes and fleeing for their lives, I think that really struck a chord with a lot of people,” he said.

The nonprofit also hears from employers eager for workers, Hershberger said.

One of them is Jordan Loewen, whose Columbia-based company cleans facilities or fleets like big garbage trucks. It’s “dirty, hard work,” he said.

During the pandemic when it was tough to find workers, someone suggested he hire refugees. Loewen gave it a shot, and now refugees account for nearly half his staff. He also recommends the resettlement program to other employers.

In addition to getting workers, he said, “It’s amazing hearing what these guys have come out of and the struggles that they’ve gone through in their life to get to this point of being in America.”

Global Refuge, one of 10 national resettlement agencies that work with local networks like the one in Columbia, is preparing for what a Trump presidency might mean for its work.

“It’s a huge cloud. We feel like we may be running up against a cliff here,” said Megan Bracy, the organization’s resettlement director.

Cross, from the State Department, said the focus is on the momentum in bringing more refugees and the nationwide support that’s followed.

“It’s also a program that we see so many Americans eager to continue,” she said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s election campaign and the Republican National Committee said on Saturday that they raised more than $76 million in April, over half of it from small donors.

The monthly fundraising haul exceeded the $65.6 million raised in March by Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, and the RNC.

“With half of funds raised coming from small dollar donors, it is clear that our base is energized. The Republican Party is united, and voters nationwide are ready to FIRE Joe Biden and elect Donald J. Trump,” Trump campaign senior advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles said in a statement.

Democrat Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has routinely surpassed Trump’s in fundraising ahead of the Nov. 5 election.

Saturday’s announcement came as Trump and the RNC hosted a retreat in Florida for donors and high-profile politicians including vice-presidential hopefuls.

The event was expected to help shore up Trump’s finances, which have been drained by legal fees, and to reassure donors about the state of the campaign with Trump currently spending the bulk of his time in a Manhattan courtroom at his criminal trial over a hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.

(Reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — The student protest movement disrupting university campuses, classes and graduation ceremonies over the war in Gaza is also roiling Senate contests across the nation as Democrats tread cautiously over an internal divide and Republicans play up their rivals’ disagreements.

The political impact of the protests on the White House campaign has drawn considerable attention, with opposition to President Joe Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war reverberating from Columbia to UCLA. The fast-evolving landscape of the demonstrations is shaping pivotal Senate races, too.

Tent encampments have popped up at universities in many states where Democrats this election year are defending seats essential to maintaining the party’s razor-thin Senate majority. At some schools, police crackdowns and arrests have followed.

The protests have sharpened the campaign rhetoric in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Ohio and Michigan, among other places. Republican candidates in California and Florida have stepped up their criticism of the Democratic president for the U.S. response to the war or for chaotic scenes on American campuses.

Some Republicans have shown up at encampments, including one at George Washington University, not far from the White House. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., who is facing reelection, said on social media that he went there to show solidarity with Jewish students. “We need to do all we can to protect them,” he said.

Republican candidate David McCormick, during a visit to the University of Pennsylvania, said protesters at the Ivy League school did not know the “difference between right and wrong, good and evil,” and were creating a hostile atmosphere for Jewish students.

McCormick has decried what he frames as a lack of leadership and moral clarity on the part of his Democratic opponent, Sen. Bob Casey, as well as by Biden and administrators at the school buffeted by accusations of harboring antisemitism.

“What’s happening on campuses is clearly a test of leadership and moral courage, both for the college presidents and for our leaders and for Sen. Casey and President Biden,” McCormick said in an interview.

Israel and its supporters say the protests are antisemitic, a charge that Israel’s critics say is sometimes used to silence legitimate opposition. Although some protesters have been caught on camera making antisemitic remarks or violent threats, protest organizers, some of whom are Jewish, say it is a peaceful movement aimed at trying to save the lives of Palestinians civilians.

Many Democrats, from Biden on down, avoided saying much about the situation until recently as universities began to crack down and comparisons were made to anti-war protests of the 1960s.

Even then, Democrats balanced their criticism of antisemitism and rule-breakers with the need to protect the right to free expression and peaceful protest. Some have tried to avoid taking sides in protests that have pitted pro-Israeli versus pro-Palestinian Democrats and divided important parts of the party’s base, including Jewish, Arab American and younger voters.

Republicans, meanwhile, have railed at what they characterized as equivocating or silence by Democrats. Republicans professed solidarity with Jews against antisemitism while condemning the protests as lawless.

Mike Rogers, a Republican seeking an open Senate seat in Michigan, said student protesters at Columbia were “Hamas sympathizers.” In California, GOP Senate candidate Steve Garvey called them “terrorists” practicing “terrorism disguised as free speech.”

In five states, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, is using the protests in digital ads about student loan forgiveness, saying Democrats want to pay off the loans of students “radicalized by the far left” who are “threatening Jews,” “attacking police” and “acting like terrorists.”

McCormick and others say universities that, in their view, tolerate antisemitism should lose federal subsidies and that visas should be revoked for any foreign student inciting violence or expressing pro-Hamas sentiments at the encampments.

Casey, long a staunch supporter of Israel, has criticized acts of antisemitism on campuses and pointed to legislation he sponsored as a way to make sure the Education Department takes action.

“Students of course have the right to peacefully protest, but when it crosses the line either into violence or discrimination, then we have an obligation to step in and stop that conduct,” Casey said Thursday as he urged colleagues to pass his bill.

Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada, who is Jewish and facing reelection, said she was “horrified” by displays of antisemitism on campuses and, like Casey, called for the department to hold schools accountable.

In California, U.S. Rep Adam Schiff, the Democratic nominee for an open Senate seat, took aim at the Columbia demonstration and said “antisemitic and hateful rhetoric is being loudly and proudly displayed.” Accused by Garvey of being “incredibly silent” on the protests, Schiff, who is Jewish, voted for a House bill similar to Casey’s and released a statement that condemned violence and the “explicit, repeated targeting and intimidation of Jewish students.”

Republicans elsewhere contended statements by Democrats were equivocating and inadequate.

Republicans called out Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, after he told an Axios reporter last week that he was “not going to talk about the politics of that. People always have the right to speak out and should.”

His Republican opponent, Bernie Moreno, charged that Brown had “wholeheartedly endorsed these vile and violent antisemitic demonstrations.”

Later, at a news conference, Brown gave more expansive comments. “Students want to make their voices heard, they need to do it in a way that’s nonviolent, they need to do it in a way that doesn’t spew hatred, and laws need to be enforced,” he said.

In Michigan, which has a relatively significant Muslim population, Biden’s handling of the war is expected to factor heavily into the presidential and Senate races.

Rogers, a favorite for the GOP nomination, thanked New York City police for confronting protesters and “standing up to protect Jewish students at Columbia from the visceral hatred we’ve witnessed from Hamas sympathizers on their campus.”

Republicans argued that U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin, the front-runner for the Democratic nominationfor Senate, had not spoken out strongly against protests at Columbia, her alma mater, and that she took five days after they began to say anything at all.

Slotkin, who is Jewish, said in an April 22 statement — the most recent wave of demonstrations began at Columbia on April 17 — that “the use of intimidation, antisemitic signs or slogans, or harassment, is unacceptable.”

It was, she suggested, a complicated topic.

“I would rather be thoughtful and take more time than have a knee-jerk answer for any issue,” Slotkin said in an interview. “But especially this one.”

__

Associated Press reporters Adam Beam in Sacramento, California; Joey Cappalletti in Lansing, Michigan; Mike Catalini in Trenton, New Jersey; Tassanee Vejpongsa in Philadelphia; and Stephany Matat in West Palm Beach, Florida, contributed to this report.

GENEVA (AP) — The IOC suspended former Olympic power broker Sheikh Ahmad of Kuwait for 15 years on Saturday after his conviction for forgery was upheld on appeal this year at a Swiss criminal appeals court.

Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah’s sanction for “a betrayal of his IOC Member’s oath, as well as the seriousness of the damage to the IOC’s reputation” was approved by the Olympic body’s executive board on a recommendation from its ethics commission.

The 15-year suspension starts from the date of his previous ban for a separate issue of unethical conduct, in an Olympic Council of Asia election. That was a three-year sanction imposed on July 27 last year.

The sheikh, who turns 61 on the day after the Paris Games close in August, will be 74 when the latest punishment expires. The Olympic Charter also allows the annual meeting of IOC members to expel a colleague for betraying their oath.

“The IOC Ethics Commission notes that during this period of suspension, Sheikh Ahmad Al-Sabah will not fulfill the necessary ethical criteria to be proposed for re-election at the end of his current term,” the published ruling noted, suggesting his IOC career is effectively over.

Sheikh Ahmad led the Olympic Council of Asia, that was created by his father in Kuwait, before joining the IOC in 1992. He was a longtime close ally of current IOC president Thomas Bach, whose election in 2013 he campaigned for.

The Kuwaiti royal “self-suspended” as an IOC member after being indicted in Geneva in 2018. He also stepped aside as leader of the global group of national Olympic bodies, known as ANOC.

In January, Sheikh Ahmad, his English former lawyer, a Kuwaiti aide and a lawyer based in Geneva had their convictions from September 2021 upheld on charges linked to orchestrating a sham arbitration case a decade ago.

The appeal court judges in Geneva changed the sheikh’s prison sentence to a suspended sentence of two years deferred for a probationary period of three years.

In 2013, he presented video footage to Kuwaiti authorities alleging to show a former prime minister, Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammed al-Sabah, and a former speaker in parliament, Jassim al-Kharafi, discussing a coup. They could have faced the death penalty for treason.

Lawyers for Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammed and the al-Kharafi family filed a criminal complaint in Geneva relating to the arbitration case. The arbitration which was later judged to be fake had been presented to the High Court in London as part of a process that sought to verify the videos.

Sheikh Ahmad also was a senior FIFA official from 2015-17 until withdrawing his candidacy for re-election when implicated by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn in steering bribes to soccer officials in Asia. He denied wrongdoing and was not indicted.

___

AP coverage of the Paris Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games

ATLANTA (AP) — It was Election Day last November, and one of Georgia’s top election officials saw that reports of a voting machine problem in an eastern Pennsylvania county were gaining traction online.

So Gabriel Sterling, a Republican who had defended the 2020 election in Georgia amid an onslaught of threats, posted a message to his nearly 71,000 followers on the social platform X explaining what had happened and saying that all votes would be counted correctly.

He faced immediate criticism from one commenter about why he was weighing in on another state’s election while other responses reiterated false claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

“It’s still the right thing to do,” Sterling told a gathering the following day, stressing the importance of Republican officials speaking up to defend elections. “We have to be prepared to say over and over again — other states are doing it different than us, but they are not cheating.”

Sterling, the chief operating officer for the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, is part of an effort begun after the last presidential election that seeks to bring together Republican officials who are willing to defend the country’s election systems and the people who run them. They want officials to reinforce the message that elections are secure and accurate, an approach they say is especially important as the country heads toward another divisive presidential contest.

The group has held meetings in several states, with more planned before the Nov. 5 election.

With six months to go before the likely rematch between Democratic President Joe Biden and former Republican President Donald Trump, concerns are running high among election officials that public distrust of voting and ballot counting persists, particularly among Republicans. Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, continues to sow doubts about the last presidential election and is warning his followers — without citing any evidence — that Democrats will try to cheat in the upcoming one.

This past week, during a campaign rally in Michigan, Trump repeated his false claim that Democrats rigged the 2020 election. “But we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election,” he said.

Just 22% of Republicans expressed high confidence that votes will be counted accurately in November, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll last year.

“It’s an obligation on Republicans’ part to stand up for the defense of our system because our party — there’s some blame for where we stand right now,” said Kentucky’s secretary of state, Michael Adams, who is part of the group and won reelection last year. “But it’s also strategically wise for Republicans to say, ‘Hey Republicans, you can trust this. Don’t stay at home.’”

The effort, which began about 18 months ago, is coordinated by the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the center-right think tank R Street Institute. The goal has been to start conversations about trust in elections, primarily among conservative officials, and to develop a set of principles to accomplish that.

“This has never been and will never be about Trump specifically,” said Matt Germer, director of governance for the R Street Institute and a lead organizer of the effort. “It’s about democratic principles at a higher level –- what does it mean to be a conservative who believes in democracy, the rule of law?”

He said an aim is to have a structure in place to support election officials who might find themselves in situations like that of Georgia’ secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger in 2020, when he supported Trump but rejected false claims that the election was stolen. Prosecutors in Georgia have since charged Trump and others, alleging a plot to overturn the results. Trump has pleaded not guilty.

“You can be a Republican and you can believe in all the Republican ideas without having to say the election was stolen,” Germer said.

A guiding principle for the group is that Republican officials should “publicly affirm the security and integrity of elections across the U.S. and avoid actively fueling doubt about elections in other jurisdictions.”

Kim Wyman, a Republican who previously served as Washington state’s top election official, said it’s imperative when officials are confronted with questions about an election somewhere else that they don’t avoid the question by promoting election procedures in their own state.

It’s OK to say you don’t know the various laws and procedures in another state, Wyman said, but she urged fellow Republicans to emphasize what states do have in common — “the security measures, the control measures to make sure the election is being conducted with integrity.”

Kansas’ secretary of state, Scott Schwab, a Republican who has participated in meetings organized by the group, said he believes there are certain aspects of elections that officials should feel comfortable talking about. But he said he would remain cautious of speaking directly about something specific happening in another state.

“If I start going beyond my realm and my role, then they don’t trust me. And if they don’t trust me, then they don’t trust the elections in Kansas, and that’s pretty important,” Schwab said in an interview.

Some election officials who have questioned election procedures outside their state have a different perspective.

Secretary of State Mac Warner of West Virginia, a Republican who has questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election, said the focus should be on improving policies, such as putting in place voter ID requirements across the country, not silencing those who have questions.

“Our primary job as election officials is to build confidence, and that comes from strengthening protocols and not weakening them,” he said.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican who has raised questions about the way elections are run in other states, criticized what he called “activist lawsuits” and state officials who seek to change voting rules previously set by legislators.

“The things that happen in other states that go wrong are not the result of some cloak and dagger, secretive cabal conspiracy,” he said in an interview. “That’s the far-fetched stuff that makes for great YouTube videos and what have you. But the real things that go wrong in other states, are out in the open, are in full public view.”

Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who is the state’s top election official and has been participating in the group’s discussions, said avoiding criticism of other states and vouching for the legitimacy of election procedures is important for another reason: It can help reduce the threats and harassment directed toward election workers.

A recent survey by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s Law School found that nearly 40% of local election officials had experienced such abuse. It’s caused many to leave their jobs. Of 29 clerks in Utah, Henderson said 20 are new since 2020 and nine have never overseen an election.

“It’s one thing to suggest that someone could do something better. It’s another thing to impugn their integrity, their character, accuse them of cheating, accuse them of nefarious things that don’t happen,” Henderson said. “It’s exhausting.”

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Associated Press writer Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

By Andrea Shalal and Bianca Flowers

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A deep generational divide, anti-war protests on college campuses and a looming Chicago Democratic convention invite comparisons between today’s protests against Israel’s attacks in Gaza and the movement against the Vietnam War.

The 54th anniversary of the Kent State University shooting on Saturday, marks the day when the Ohio National Guard troops sent to quell campus protests shot 13 students, killing four and unleashing a surge of unrest across the country.

The campus protests over the past two weeks differ in both scale and motivation. Student bodies have changed, as has the Democratic Party. But given the tight rematch incumbent President Joe Biden, a Democrat, faces with Republican Donald Trump, they could hold political sway.

DEATH TOLLS

By 1970, the Vietnam War had been raging for five years, and Republican President Richard Nixon had announced an expansion of the war into Cambodia. By the end of 1970, nearly 1.8 million young American men had been enlisted and nearly 30,000 had died.

There are no U.S. troops fighting in Israel’s war in Gaza, but many U.S. citizens have lost family members there.

Israel’s assault on Gaza was triggered by the Oct. 7 attack by Islamist Hamas militants, which by its tallies killed 1,200 with 253 taken hostage. The subsequent Israeli bombardment has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians according to Palestinian medics, and displaced the majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million people.

Students at dozens of schools across the U.S. have rallied or camped out to oppose Israel’s war in Gaza, demanding institutions stop doing business with companies that support the war. Police have arrested over 2,000 protesters.

SUPPORT FOR THE WAR SHIFTS

The growing death toll in Gaza and images of the widespread destruction there have swayed public opinion, with support for Israel’s military assault dropping from 50% in a November Gallup poll to 36% in late March.

Biden, who last month signed legislation to provide $14 billion more aid to Israel, has faced growing criticism over his handling of the crisis, with hundreds of thousands of voters casting “uncommitted ballots” in Democratic primaries in recent months to express their frustration and anger.

Senator Bernie Sanders also drew comparisons with Vietnam, noting former President Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run in 1968 amid growing anger over the war in Vietnam.

“I worry very much that President Biden is putting himself in a position where he has alienated, not just young people, but a lot of the Democratic base, in terms of his views on Israel and this war,” Sanders told CNN.

SIZE, SCOPE AND INTENSITY

By 1970, the protests had grown in size and intensity, with some rallies attracting tens and even hundreds of thousands of people, said Kevin Kruse, a professor at Princeton University. Many students were personally affected given the draft.

Some of those protests were also violent, unlike the largely peaceful demonstrations seen thus far in response to Israel’s war in Gaza, he said.

“The night before the shooting, they burned down the ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) building. This wasn’t a bunch of students sitting in tents on the lawn,” he said.

The shooting sparked fresh anti-war protests across the United States and as far away as Melbourne, Australia, where 100,000 gathered to protest. Nearly 100,000 people converged on Washington, DC a few days after the shooting.

On a much smaller scale, Columbia University’s initial response in April also triggered solidarity protests, Kruse said, adding that the Columbia protest might have petered out if administrators had opted to quietly ride it out until summer.

TONE-DEAFNESS AND HARD HATS

Biden’s first comments on the escalating protests have sparked fresh allegations that he’s tone deaf to the issues, just as Arab American and Muslim activists say the White House hasn’t listened to their concerns about support for Israel.

“There is a right to protest, but not a right to cause chaos,” Biden said.

Shortly after the Kent State shootings, Nixon invited to the White House a group of construction workers after the so-called Hard Hat Riot, when 400 construction workers and 800 office workers attacked some 1,000 demonstrators in New York City.

MORE RACIAL, GENDER DIVERSITY

In 1970, there were some 7.2 million students enrolled in college in the U.S. and women accounted for 41% of students, while Black students were just 7% of the total.

Now, the U.S. has over 15 million undergraduate students, with white students accounting for about 41%, Latino students 18%, Black students 11% and Asian students 6%, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Women outnumber men on college campuses.

While the women’s movement and the civil rights movements were also boiling over in the late 1960s, the groups were less integrated and more at odds than today, said Jim Zogby, a Vietnam era protester and founder of the Arab American Institute.

“This is an intersectional generation. It’s the same kids who were leading the Black Lives Matter movement or the women’s march or the protests against the Muslim ban or the gun safety rally,” he said.

DEMOCRAT DIVISIONS

Then, as now, there are sharp divides between generations, including in the Democratic Party.

Democratic strategist James Carville, 79, on Sunday warned protesters in a viral and profanity-laden video on X that they could help Trump win a second term by dividing the party.

A YouGov poll released Thursday showed that 53% of adults felt that college administrators’ decision to suspend and expel some pro-Palestinian protesters was “about right” or “not harsh enough.” That number jumps to 68% for those aged 65 and over.

Dilara Sayeed, president of the Muslim Civic Coalition, a Chicago-based non-profit, said the party is still out of touch with its electorate of young voters and people of color.

“The government had a policy that young people and Americans of color disagreed with – using our tax dollars and sending troops to go fight in a war we didn’t agree with,” Sayeed said. That’s where we are now.”

Abbas Alawieh, a former senior congressional aide and community organizer who helped lead Michigan’s “Uncommitted” campaign, said the party’s leadership was at grave risk of repeating the mistakes of the Vietnam era.

“In 1968, one of the great failures of the party establishment was that they ignored anti-war youth and continued the horrific war in Vietnam and alienated young voters, and I feel like they’re at risk of doing the same thing,” he said.

The Biden campaign is engaging actively with young voters, spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg said, noting that those efforts were launched months earlier than in the previous election cycle. Biden has also been endorsed by 15 youth vote groups, who will hire hundreds of organizers and mobilize hundreds of thousands of volunteers, the campaign said.

Matt Hill, spokesperson for the Democratic National Convention, underscored the importance of peaceful protest to American democracy, arguing that the convention would highlight what he called “the unity and excitement of Democrats … in stark contrast to the chaos and extremism stewing in the GOP.”

OFFLINE, ONLINE

Media coverage of the war in Vietnam, known as America’s first “television war” with daily images of dead soldiers returned to the United States (images now banned by the U.S. military) provided momentum for the anti-war movement.

Although students today aren’t facing the draft, they are watching the war unfolding in real-time on their phones, said Christianna Leahy, a former Amnesty International board member and professor at McDaniel College in Maryland.

“It is through Instagram, Tik Tok, social media that they’re just getting images every day,” she said. “This is on everyone’s phone 24 hours a day.”

ANOTHER RAUCOUS CONVENTION

The divisions may boil over during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. But there will be fewer chances to challenge Biden inside the event than in 1968, Zogby said.

“The party no longer exists, as it did in ’68 when there was internal dissent in the party,” he said, noting that Biden had locked down the nomination and no other candidates had a chance to emerge during a fight on the convention floor.

Another key difference this year: the ’68 convention took place just months after the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King and leading Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, which roiled a nation already divided by the Vietnam War and social revolution.

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and local law enforcement agencies are girding for protests.

“There’s no place in these United States where the DNC was going to have a convention where they were not going to be met by their base and the frustration from their base and wanting to see their priorities reflected in the Democrats’ platform,” said Nsé Ufot, founder of the New South Super PAC.

“You can’t hide, baby.”

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Bianca Flowers, additional reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt and Jarrett Renshaw; editing by Heather Timmons and Diane Craft)