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Ms. Harris faces the prospect of being called on to break ties on confirming Mr. Biden’s cabinet nominees, some of whom have drawn GOP criticism and would likely have to be confirmed on party-line votes. She is also expected to be a negotiator—and potentially a tiebreaking vote—for the administration’s legislative priority: passing a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package.

Mr. Biden, who served in the Senate for 36 years, has a long and respectful relationship with GOP leader Mitch McConnell.

North Dakota GOP Sen. Kevin Cramer said Senate Republicans have a cordial relationship with Ms. Harris and will have to be open to working with her. “I think the fact that she was a senator is helpful—both to her and to us,” he said. “Because she understands the culture of the Senate and personality of the Senate.”

“I became confident then that she was running for president,” said Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah) of Ms. Harris’s questioning of Mr. Kavanaugh in 2018.

Representative John Katko of New York was the first Republican to publicly announce that he would back impeachment. Not holding the president accountable for his actions would be “a direct threat to the future of our democracy,” he said.

Mr. Newhouse also offered a mea culpa, chiding himself and other Republicans for “not speaking out sooner” against the president.

Rice doesn't represent a swing district.

"Compared to the often raucous members of the state's congressional delegation, Rice has been more low-profile and focused on his legislative work,"

But Rice hadn't made a mistake or accidentally pressed the wrong button. His vote to impeach was real -- and without question, the most surprising of the 10 Republicans who bucked the President.

"Once the violence began, when the Capitol was under siege, when the Capitol Police were being beaten and killed, and when the Vice President and the Congress were being locked down, the President was watching and tweeted about the Vice President's lack of courage.

"... It has been a week since so many were injured, the United States Capitol was ransacked, and six people were killed, including two police officers. Yet, the President has not addressed the nation to ask for calm. He has not visited the injured and grieving. He has not offered condolences. Yesterday in a press briefing at the border, he said his comments were 'perfectly appropriate.'"

The combination of Trump's incitement of the crowd, his attacks on Vice President Mike Pence during the riot itself and his total lack of remorse over his role in the overrunning of the Capitol added up to be more than Rice could take.

While Rice did vote in favor of the Electoral College objections raised by Republicans in Arizona and Pennsylvania, he expressed some misgivings about doing so in the wake of the Capitol violence. "I am incredibly disappointed in the President," Rice told a local TV station last Wednesday. "The President needs to step up right now and say this election is over. I'm tired of it. He needs to concede. He needs to say that this election is over and tell these folks to calm down."

"Donald Trump was backed by an overwhelming majority in my district and in South Carolina," Rice said. "And while I don't necessarily agree with his tactics, I agree with 95% of his policies."

"People don't pay me for smiling," Rice said. "They pay me to get results."That's not the typical quote from a politician. And as Rice showed with his vote on Wednesday, he's no normal politician.

He said that he used bankruptcies for his businesses "brilliantly," a move that left creditors holding the bag. He was even more brashly unrepentant when he was not convicted by the Senate after his first impeachment. And then he retaliated against those who bore witness against him.

In addition to drafting the impeachment document, members of Congress searched for a way to further punish Trump. Connolly said he believes they have found it in the 14th Amendment which bars insurrectionists from public office.

During Trump's so-called "Save America Rally," just before the mob stormed the Capitol, he gave a speech in which he used the word "fight" 20 times and as he inflamed their emotions people in the crowd chanted, "Fight for Trump, fight for Trump." After repeating the big lie that the election had been stolen from him, Trump declared, "We will never give up. We will never concede."

In the days that followed the attack, evidence showed that it was even more gravely dangerous than first thought. One man in the mob had come with zip ties, which are used to restrain captives, and appeared to have been bent on taking hostages. Chants of "Hang Mike Pence," which were recorded and played on television, suggest that some considered committing murder.

This time around Trump will be charged with a single count -- "Incitement of insurrection." Democratic Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island told me that he began drafting the charge with colleagues Rep. Ted Lieu of California and Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland within hours of the attack on the Capitol.

As this all unfolds, it's important to remember that the invasion of the Capitol by a huge mob of American citizens happened not just because of a single deranged and inciting speech but because for years others have failed to stop Trump.

Chansley, who calls himself the “QAnon Shaman” and has long been a fixture at Trump rallies, surrendered to the FBI field office in Phoenix on Saturday.

More than 80 people are facing charges stemming from the violence, including more than 40 people in federal court. The federal charges brought so far are primarily for crimes such as illegal entry but prosecutors have said they are weighing more serious charges against at least some of the rioters.

During a hearing in Texas on Thursday, a prosecutor urged a judge to keep Col. Larry Rendall Brock Jr. locked up, saying the man meant to “take hostages.”

“He means to kidnap, restrain, perhaps try, perhaps execute members of the U.S. government,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Weimer, without providing specifics.

At the very least, the emergence of a “Trump-made-me-do-it” defense could serve to undercut the baseless narrative by some of the president’s congressional allies and his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who have sought to push the story that outside agitators or disloyal servants were responsible for the Capitol attack.

Mr. Trump began promoting his Washington event well before it happened, urging his allies to join him for a speech outside the White House. During the address, attended by thousands, he told the crowd “to walk down to the Capitol” where Congress, overseen by Mr. Pence, was certifying the final count of the election results.

When Jennifer L. Ryan flew from Texas to Washington on a private plane with friends, she did so, as she later told a reporter, because Mr. Trump “asked us to go.”“He said, ‘Be there,’” Ms. Ryan explained. “So I went and I answered the call of my president.”

Mr. Watkins did not deny that Mr. Chansley was inside the Capitol that day, but suggested he had gone there because he, like others, “hung on the words of the president” for comfort and guidance. “What you’ve got here are people like my client who take the president seriously,” Mr. Watkins added, “and look to him to make them feel relevant in a system that has made them feel neglected.”

In other parts of Europe, populist movements that embraced Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the election also attract a significant proportion of voters, and hope to make gains amid an economic crisis and a pandemic.

The Falun Gong religious movement, persecuted in China, and its U.S.-based Epoch Times newspaper, became leading proponents of efforts to overturn the Nov. 3 election. Some opponents of the governments in Venezuela, Cuba and Iran have also joined this effort.

The fact that Vice President Mike Pence, U.S. federal and state courts and other American government institutions have resisted Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his electoral defeat demonstrated the resilience of American democracy, said Mr. Siemoniak. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. T

n Germany, far-right extremists and protesters against coronavirus restrictions—some of them bearing symbols of the QAnon conspiracy theory that lionizes Mr. Trump and alleges that hundreds of establishment politicians world-wide are involved in satanic child-sex rings—attempted to storm the country’s parliament last August, but were blocked by police.

“We have plenty of work cut out here. We have plenty of parties that challenge fact-based policies and use a rhetoric that is very problematic.”

Former reeducation camp detainees have told CNN they experienced political indoctrination and abuse inside the camps, such as food and sleep deprivation and forced injections.

CNN reporting has also found that some Uyghur women were forced to use birth control and undergo sterilization as part of a deliberate attempt to push down birth rates among minorities in Xinjiang.

China denies allegations of such human rights abuses in Xinjiang. It has insisted that its reeducation camps are necessary for preventing religious extremism and terrorism in the area,

Bates said -- apparently referring to a claim by former national security advisor John Bolton that Trump previously encouraged Chinese President Xi Jinping to continue building detainment camps in Xinjiang.

The treatment of Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang has been widely condemned by the international community. In July 2019, twenty-two countries including Japan and the UK signed a letter urging China to end its "mass arbitrary detentions and related violations" and called on Beijing to allow UN experts to access the region.

Earlier this month, the US also banned imports of cotton products and tomatoes produced in Xinjiang over forced labor concerns.

The great theme of the Trump years, the one historians will note a century from now, was the failure of America’s expert class. The people who were supposed to know what they were talking about, didn’t. 

Reports of his defeat, accurate though they were, meant little coming from news organizations that cared so much about discrediting him and so little about factual truth.

For the left, “democracy” is another word for progressive policy aims, especially the widening of special political rights and welfare-state provisions to new constituencies. By that definition any Republican president is carrying out an “assault on democracy.”

Mr. Trump assaulted democracy in the ordinary sense of the word, but he did so only after the 2020 election. That effort was discreditable and disruptive, but it was also delusional and ineffective. It was not the assault the president’s expert-class critics had foreseen.

It took a 22-month investigation by a special counsel to establish an absence of evidence that Mr. Trump’s campaign had conspired with the Russians.

Reporters treated every turn of events as evidence of Mr. Trump’s unique evil.

When intellectuals and journalists of the left use the word “democracy,” they typically are not referring to elections and decision-making by popularly elected officials

Meanwhile the administration pressed ahead with a diplomatic push to strike commercial and diplomatic deals between Israel and Arab states

political talking points aside, this much is apparent: No nation—or anyhow no nation that values individual liberty and isn’t an island—has managed even to slow the spread of Covid-19 without causing economic ruin and attendant disorder.

The Trump administration made its share of mistakes during the early stages of the pandemic, although its chief failing was the president’s lack of rhetorical clarity

By any set of criteria outside the self-contained system of public-health best practices, the lockdowns failed. They purchased minor slowdowns in the spread of the virus at the cost of punishing economic destruction, untold social dysfunction, and mind-blowing public debt. 

many parts of the country didn’t lock down, or did so only loosely and briefly, and managed to keep their hospitals running just fine.

Controlling the spread of Covid-19 in the U.S. was always going to be a messy business: Many infected people don’t get sick and have no compelling reason to burrow in their homes, and America is an unruly nation with a long tradition of nonconformity

The experts might have accounted for these realities. They might have realized that the measures prescribed by their textbooks—contact tracing, forced quarantines, shelter-in-place orders—were mostly unworkable in America. They didn’t.

If this was an attempted coup, it was a comically inept one. Hardly anyone in Mr. Trump’s own administration, including the vice president, wanted anything to do with it.  

The most regrettable part of this class failure is that, with rare exceptions, the experts themselves acknowledge no error. Nothing about the Trump years has occasioned soul-searching or self-criticism on their part

Trump's departure amounts to a blissful lifting of a four-year pall on American life and the end to a tortured stretch of misconduct and indignities

At least some of the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump in November are sad to see him go. Scores of them attempted an insurrection at the US Capitol this month to prevent it from happening at all. The less violent view him as a transformative President whose arrival heralded an end to political correctness and whose exit marks a return to special treatment for immigrants, gays and minorities.

In his final days, Trump has been surrounded by a shrinking circle of associates, many of them decades younger. Old friends who used to speak with him regularly said they can no longer reach him

The violent mob attack on the citadel of American democracy capped a presidency built upon disregard for democratic norms, antagonizing government institutions and willful ignorance of the far right's violent and racist tendencies.

There is no evidence the President has reckoned with the consequences of his actions; the opposite appears to be true. He came to regret a concession video he had recorded at the urging of his family and advisers, who told him he was seriously close to being removed from office.

Freshly impeached for a second time, this time with support from a few Republicans, Trump ends his term with the lowest approval rating of his tenure. Republicans remain divided on whether he represents the future of their party.

One thing Trump's presidency undoubtedly accomplished: revealing in stark fashion the racist, hate-filled, violent undercurrents of American society that many had chosen previously to ignore. It became impossible to overlook as Trump's presidency concluded with violent riots of White nationalists and neo-Nazis at the Capitol.

He even had a falling-out with his vice president, Mike Pence, whose characteristic fealty was severed after he heard nothing from Trump while mobs appeared to be hunting him during the insurrection attempt

They appeared to reconcile, but other senior Republicans began breaking with the President, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican.

Ten Republicans voted for his impeachment in the most bipartisan impeachment vote in history.

Instead of attending his successor's inauguration, Trump is departing the White House early to attend a military-style sendoff at Joint Base Andrews. He balked at the idea of leaving Washington an ex-president and did not particularly relish the thought of requesting use of the presidential aircraft from Biden

Trump is the first president in 150 years to stage such a boycott. While Pence will attend Biden's swearing-in, other members of Trump's family, including wife Melania and daughter Ivanka, will be absent.

Trump enters his post-presidency facing swirling legal matters and with the fate of his business empire in doubt.

Without some of the protections afforded him by the presidency, Trump will become vulnerable to multiple investigations looking into possible fraud in his financial business dealings as a private citizen.

Even as he exits the White House, there is little question that Trump's shadow will cloud the capital for the foreseeable future. The matter of his impeachment still lingers in the Senate, which will begin a trial after Biden is sworn in. And Trump's influence on his party's direction going forward will amount to a reckoning for conservatives, who now must decide whether theirs is the party of a president who incited an insurrection on his way out of office.

Trump has left the Republican Party in civil war.

Trump has amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in a leadership PAC formed after the election that he will be able to use for future political activity, including boosting candidates. There are few restrictions on how the money can be used.

But since then, officials have cast doubt on his intentions, suggesting instead he was more interested in keeping the potential 2024 GOP field in limbo rather than seriously contemplating another run.

The results of Trump's presidency are not particularly mixed. While there have been some achievements -- a reshaped Supreme Court, a dismantled regulatory state and the brokering of diplomatic achievements in the Middle East -- Trump's overarching legacy is one of division and rancor capped by the catastrophic events of January 6, when he had 14 days left in his term.

"This is more work than in my previous life," he told Reuters 100 days into the job. "I thought it would be easier."

Trump had spent his previous decades cultivating a public profile as a savvy businessman and larger-than-life New York City mogul, despite a succession of bankruptcies and collapses. His second act as a reality television star with a penchant for race-baiting conspiracies (such as questioning President Barack Obama's birthplace) led into his third act as president, and along with it an eye toward artifice and spectacle.

Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump's ties to Russia proved an immense distraction that preoccupied both the President and his White House. It resulted in the convictions of several Trump associates, many of whom he pardoned.

Instead of rising to the difficulties, Trump amended the job to fit his own liking. He mostly skipped reading lengthy intelligence documents, preferring in-person briefings that on some occasions left out important information about which Trump would later claim ignorance.

Most tragically, Trump showed little interest in leading the nation through the coronavirus pandemic, self-styling himself a "wartime leader" for a few days before reverting to downplaying the crisis and eventually pretending it did not exist

. A fateful invitation to attend Bastille Day in Paris in 2017 turned Trump on to the thrills of a military parade, which he unsuccessfully lobbied for in Washington for another three years.

Worried that Mr. Trump might use any unruly demonstrations as pretext for a federal crackdown of the kind seen last summer in Portland, Ore., progressives organized mass gatherings only sparingly and in highly choreographed ways after Nov. 3.

Since the violence of Jan. 6, progressive leaders have not deployed large-scale public protests at all.

For the organizers of the effort, it represents both a good-news story — Mr. Trump was thwarted — and an ominous sign that such exhaustive efforts were required to protect election results that were not all that close.

Michael Podhorzer, an A.F.L.-C.I.O. strategist who was one of the architects of the coalition, said it presented both a political model and a cautionary tale about a badly frayed democratic system.

They worried that a traditional political campaign might never attain victory if it did not also prepare to battle a would-be strongman during a deadly pandemic.

A cluster of a few strategists became a coalition of 80 groups, and then of more than 200.

“This whole defending the election once we won it — making sure the election stayed won — was not something a lot of others were focused on.”

the group asked a Washington law firm, Arnold & Porter, to compile a report on how votes would be tabulated and electors assigned in every swing state, including a catalog of the pressure points someone like Mr. Trump could exploit.

Among those listed were Republican state legislative leaders in battlegrounds like Michigan and Pennsylvania; the Michigan Board of State Canvassers; and Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state. Mr. Trump would soon seek to twist every one of them to his advantage.

They held de-escalation training sessions around the country, aimed at giving people the tools to ease potentially violent conflict.

“We prepared for the worst of the worst: We’re going to get shot at, killed, on Election Day and afterward,” said Ms. Stamp, adding, “You have to understand that a lot of this is coming from movements that have been dealing with a lot of death.”

during the long hours of election night, the strategy needed a tweak. Mr. Trump’s declaration of victory had been treated by television networks as a galling stunt, and Fox quickly called the key state of Arizona for Mr. Biden. Vote counting was proceeding without major inhibition.

The rallies were canceled, in favor of more targeted actions: Instead of throngs of protesters carrying Biden-Harris signs and competing for street space with Trump supporters, progressives assembled in smaller groups around vote-counting facilities in Philadelphia and Detroit, aiming to head off any intimidation tactics from the right.

“Organizing any kind of massive ‘It’s a coup’ mobilization, in the midst of those contested days, would have just been bait for the right,” she said.

Art Reyes, leader of the activist group We the People Michigan, directed a two-pronged effort, bombarding legislators’ offices with phone calls and deploying several dozen volunteers to meet the two Republican leaders, Lee Chatfield and Mike Shirkey, at the airport on their way to Washington. A corresponding group was waiting when they landed.

Democratic litigators had been in contact before Election Day with Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, about the possibility of an attempted electoral heist. “We were prepared to counter it,” Ms. Nessel said in an interview.

“We may have walked back from the brink of a dangerous moment in this country, but this cannot be the norm,” said Rahna Epting, executive director of MoveOn. “It’s not sustainable for democracy.”

Anti-equality forces are trying to use the framework of religious liberty to strip away individual rights

Ensure that LGBTQ rights are a priority for U.S. foreign policy

After Perón lost power, Peronism became a myth of a lost golden age—a fantasy of restoration and redemption—and always a rejection of the frustrations of normal politics, of the tedium of legality. Who needed policies when the solution to every problem was a magic name? Politicians who hoped for the old leader’s blessing trudged to his place of exile, were photographed with him, and then sabotaged by him. The only plan he followed was somehow to force himself again upon his country, one way or another.

We’re past the point of pretending it was antifa that did January 6, past the point of pretending that Trump didn’t want what he fomented and what he got. In his interview on July 11—as in the ever more explicit talk of his followers—the new line about the attack on the Capitol is guilty but justified. The election of 2020 was a fraud, and so those who lost it are entitled to overturn it.

Trump’s no Hitler, obviously. But they share some ways of thinking. The past never repeats itself. But it offers warnings. It’s time to start using the F-word again, not to defame—but to diagnose.

Hundreds of forces that were partnering with the United States to fight ISIS are now relocating and refocusing to fight Turkey and defend themselves. The Washington Post reports that the pace of Kurdish operations against ISIS has "significantly tapered off," as the Kurds have had to deprioritize their battle against the Islamic State because they've lost our support -- and because they have to focus on protecting themselves from Erdogan.

What's more, the United States' withdrawal from Syria will hurt our ability to gather intelligence there, as we lose eyes and ears on the ground and direct access to human intelligence networks. Our mission against ISIS in Syria was not over, and our withdrawal has only increased the risks posed by the thousands of ISIS members still on the loose in Syria.

Trump's reckless decision will impede our future ability to persuade partners to work with us on counterterrorism missions around the world.

Putin has hosted summits with key players in Syria before -- including one last February in Sochi between Russia, Iran, Turkey and Syria. Putin is scheduled to meet again with Erdogan this week and will probably try to trump the Trump administration's efforts to negotiate a "pause" in Turkey's military operations.

With Russian and Syrian forces now occupying former US bases in northeastern Syria and former US allied forces turning to both Assad and Russia for protection, we may have to rely on one of our biggest enemies -- Russia -- to work with Turkey to ensure the bloodshed stops.

Trump says he doesn't care if Russia (or China, or Napoleon Bonaparte) ends up protecting the Kurds, but he probably doesn't understand what Russia stepping in to fill our shoes means longer-term, as more countries turn to Putin, instead of to the United States, for support.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo flew to Israel last week to try to assuage Israeli officials' concerns about what a US withdrawal would mean for Iran's ability to operate in Syria. US support for Israel has been a central piece of US foreign policy for decades, and President Trump likes to paint himself as the best friend Israel has ever had. Concurrently, he's also made countering Iran one of the pillars of his foreign policy approach.Yet even though Trump is leaving a contingent of US troops at the al-Tanf base in south-central Syria to deter Iran, the downgrade in US troop presence in Syria, and Trump's tweets about how Syria isn't a US problem, are likely causing Israeli officials to question how serious Trump is about protecting Israel from Iranian attacks from within Syria.

Trump's policy, then, is to gamble on some shady characters to keep Iran in check. That's a dangerous game to play based on Iran's history of attacking Israel from anywhere it can.

Foreign policy on the fly is Trump's calling card. Other leaders are probably banking on the fact that speaking with him alone -- without experts around -- is a sure way to get what they want out of him. Now that Erdogan's gotten Trump to go against his own experts' advice during one-on-one phone calls at least twice, the President is scrambling to come up with some semblance of a strategy. He's outsourcing our security to Erdogan, Putin and maybe even Assad to take care of what should be key US missions.

You know the Kurds, when I arrived in Northern Iraq as a two-star general up in Mosul and would go up there and they used to say, 'You know General, the Kurds' only friends are the mountains.' And I say, 'No, no, no. You have the Americans.' Well I don't think you could ask that now of General Mazloum who has also been highly critical."

His comments come amid backlash over Trump's decision to withdraw US forces from northern Syria. Vice President Mike Pence announced Thursday that he and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had reached an agreement on a ceasefire in the country.

He supported the Obama administration's plan in 2013 for military action in Syria following a chemical weapons attack against opposition forces. The US carried out military strikes against ISIS in Syria along with five Arab nations in September 2014.

The United States entered its longest expansion on record in July and the jobless rate is at a 50-year low, yet the deficit has continued to widen.

The deficit is growing in large part because tax receipts are falling, as Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts continue to siphon revenue from the Treasury. The numbers reflect the fact that Mr. Trump’s most significant legislative achievement is not paying for itself, as Republicans have said it would.

“The biggest factor was the tax cuts, which gave a short-term sugar high but now are just contributing to a larger deficit,”

Fears of trillion-dollar deficits could renew the desire of Republicans in Congress to propose cuts to social programs, like food stamps, Social Security and other safety net benefits. Republicans have long pointed to swelling deficits as a reason to pursue their long-held vision of smaller government, including undoing many of the programs ushered in during the New Deal and Great Society to help the most disadvantaged Americans.

Senator Mike Enzi, a retiring Republican from Wyoming who leads the budget committee, called the country’s fiscal path unsustainable and said spending must come down.

Republicans, who have shut down the government in their quest to cut spending, have enabled the increases that are exacerbating the deficit.

With the deficit growing, it remains unclear how Mr. Trump and the Democrats will address the issue during the election. Democratic candidates such as Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have introduced broad expansions of social safety net programs and have proposed paying for them with big tax increases on the rich.

On Friday, before the deficit figures were released, Mr. Trump remained focused on recent increases in the stock market and the low jobless rate. “The economy is booming,” he said.

Trump and Vice President Mike Pence were notified about Baghdadi's possible location "earlier in the week" and told Thursday that there was a high probability he was in the compound.

g: "Something big has just happened."

"Russia treated us great. They opened up. We had a fly over certain Russia areas, Russia-held areas. Russia was great. Iraq was excellent. We really had great cooperation," the President told reporters Sunday.

"world's number one terrorist leader" is dead.

ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi "blew himself up"

He formed ISIS in 2014, he led to establishing the physical caliphate throughout the region, so this is a major blow to them,

The midterm electorate typically tends to be more male, white and conservative than in presidential years. But door-knocking this cycle, Jacobs said she has met many women who don't normally vote in midterm elections but answer the door eager to talk about the possibility of increasing female representation in Congress."They have done their research; they know who the candidates are," she said during an interview at a picnic table on Moonlight Beach. "They are excited to be voting for female candidates," she said, noting her focus on issues like affordable childcare, the link between gun violence and domestic violence, and the challenges confronting both women in the military in this veteran-heavy district.

Voters have also approached her after debates dispensing advice about her appearance, her hairstyle and demeanor -- telling her, for example, that she needs to speak slower or that her voice is too high. ("I get that one a lot," she says)."I think that's partially because I'm young, partially because I'm a woman, people do feel more comfortable coming up and giving me that type of feedback," Jacobs said. "It's also that the subconscious image of a leader in people's minds is a very specific thing. In some cases my voice sounds too high to them, because it's not a male voice. And I don't look like a leader to them. So part of it is explaining to them -- it feels weird because you haven't seen it before."

There has been little reliable public polling in California-49. A number of internal polls have shown Jacobs, environmental advocate Mike Levin, and Applegate, an attorney and retired Marine colonel, bunched together in second place. Several California strategists said they believe Paul Kerr, a small business owner and US Navy veteran who has sent several negative mailers about Jacobs' credentials, appears to be trailing that pack.

"She's been so supportive of us as this grassroots movement, and us as women," Shaewitz said. "She's so young, and some people see that as a negative. I look it as a positive. I asked her the other day 'How are you not tired?' and she said 'Youth.' She said, 'It's my generation that is being affected by these policies,'" Shaewitz recalled."Look at this tough race that she's in; people have asked her to get out of it for the sake of the Democratic Party, and she won't," Shaewitz said. "I have so much respect for that. She's 29. She could be doing anything."

There are eight Republicans on the ballot in the 49th, but Republican support appears to have consolidated behind Diane Harkey, who was endorsed by Issa.

Responding to the latest evidence published by CNN last week, a UAE official said: "There were no instances when US-made equipment was used without direct UAE oversight. Except for four vehicles that were captured by the enemy." The Saudi government has not responded to CNN's requests for comment on this issue.

Saudi Arabia has led a coalition, in close partnership with the UAE and including various militia groups, to fight the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen since 2015. But, in a clear break with its Saudi partners, the UAE said in July that it was reducing its forces in the country, and fighting escalated between separatists and government forces on the ground in August. The UAE has since thrown its support behind the separatist movement.

In June 2019 the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) reported that the total number of reported fatalities in Yemen is more than 91,000 since 2015.

Apart from offering a primer in Chinese political invective, Ms. Hua’s scornful response illustrated how brittle Chinese-American relations have become.

“A bunch of American politicians led by Pence have thrown into confusion right and wrong on these issues, made thoughtless remarks and concocted slanders,” Ms. Hua said. “Any schemes to dishonor China and pour filth on it are destined to be nothing more than vain delusions tossed aside by history.”

Mr. Pence’s speech “exuded sheer arrogance and hypocrisy, and was packed with political prejudice and lies,” Ms. Hua said. “China expresses its strong indignation and adamant disapproval.”

Beijing and Washington agreed this month to a partial truce in their trade war of tariffs and countertariffs. But distrust remains high, and tensions over technology, investment and economic ties have become increasingly entangled in ideological divisions.