For four days, a Biden traveled across Northern Ireland and Ireland, meeting with the nations’ top dignitaries, waving to the crowds, and sentimentally retracing his family’s lineage throughout the Emerald Isle.
His father, Joe, was also there.
If ever there were a question as to Hunter Biden’s whereabouts, the answer this week was obvious: He was overseas, glued to President Joe Biden’s side during the entirety of a whirlwind trip that mixed global diplomacy with a sprawling exploration of his ancestral roots.
There was Hunter, chatting with U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on the tarmac in Belfast. There he was again in Dublin, huddled in the rain with Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. He was in County Louth, absorbing the sights. In a local Dundalk market, he surveyed the menu, interrupting his dad’s conversation to suggest he may order something.
Hunter was at the Irish president’s residence, shaking hands and telling its occupant, Michael D. Higgins, that he was “a fan of your poetry.” He was in the audience at Ireland’s Parliament as Biden addressed a joint session of the legislature. Later that night, he attended a banquet thrown in his father’s honor, mingling with Irish ministers before dining with the widow of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney.
For much of Biden’s presidency, Hunter has been at the center of controversy and the subject of heightened scrutiny. He is a fascination of the conservative mediasphere and a target of federal investigators and Republicans in Congress. But an ocean away, he was mostly just a son and close travel companion, tagging along with his aunt Valerie Biden Owen.
It was, ostensibly, a business trip for his dad. But the president himself explained that he’d decided to take family members “who hadn’t been there before.” And by all appearances, Hunter thoroughly enjoyed the jaunt.
He served as a particular point of pride for Biden, who has refused to distance himself from his son even as the attention on Hunter’s foreign business dealings, the “laptop from hell,” and his personal struggle threatened to cast a cloud over the administration's agenda.
“I’m here with my sister, Valerie, and my youngest son, Hunter Biden,” the president told residents at a pub in Dundalk. “Stand up, guys. I’m proud of you.”
It’s not unusual for a president’s family members to join trips abroad, and Hunter did not sit in on Biden's private meetings with heads of state. But his ubiquity nonetheless (and unsurprisingly) gained traction in conservative circles.
“Hunter Biden should not be on foreign trips with Joe Biden while under federal investigation,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.)tweeted. “Is this really the image America wants to project to the world?”
The White House dismissed criticism of Hunter’s involvement in the trip. "Historically family members of Presidents and First Ladies have frequently joined them during international travel," a spokesperson said. "Current practices are consistent with those used by prior Administrations." The spokesperson also confirmed that Hunter, as well as Biden Owen, were paying their own way.
At times, Hunter’s presence was something of a nuisance to the media on the ground. When Biden arrived in Dundalk, Hunter hopped out of the Beast before the president, inadvertently blocking reporters’ view of his father as they greeted the crowd and leaving the pool photographers with plenty of clear shots of Hunter, but not nearly as many of Biden.
Though he may not have had any formal role in Biden's entourage, Hunter did find ways to make himself useful. He held an umbrella at one point to shield Biden from the rain. At a noisy firehouse meet-and-greet with embassy workers,he helped moderate a brief Q&A between Biden and some children. And importantly for a president with a tendency to get off schedule, he sought to gently steer things back on task, though not always with much success.
“You’re supposed to do the rope line, Dad,” Hunter reminded Biden, as he chatted away with the kids. “Just to say hi to everybody.”
DUNDALK, Ireland — They came by the thousands, crammed several lines deep along the narrow sidewalks, clutching flags and braving rain and bitter cold in hopes of catching a glimpse of the most Irish of American presidents.
And for a moment, it seemed as if Joe Biden might greet every single one of them.
Wearing a blue cap and an ear-to-ear smile, Biden lingered in the main thoroughfare of this county town along Ireland’s eastern coast. He shook hands, posed for photos and soaked in the warm embrace that its residents had prepared for a president many refer to simply as “Joe.”
“When you’re here, you wonder why anyone would ever want to leave,” Biden marveled soon after his arrival at the Windsor Bar and Restaurant. A capacity crowd had waited for hours to see him in the rustic pub. “Coming here feels like coming home.”
When presidents travel abroad, they are traditionally tight, focused affairs calibrated with a specific goal in mind: To advance the White House’s interests and shape the place they will soon leave behind. But for three days in Ireland, as Biden roamed the countryside by motorcade with his sister Valerie and son Hunter in tow, the president seemed content to exist within it.
He met dignitaries and townspeople. He toasted his Irish ancestors, the Irish people, Irish Americans and even the “quite a few,” he said, “who wish they were lucky enough to be Irish.”
He took a selfie with nationalist politician and alleged former Irish Republican Army member Gerry Adams, as well as with an Irish reporter and nearly anyone else who wanted one. He kissed babies and had a close encounter with a sliotar.
He butchered the name of New Zealand's famed rugby team — badly. At one point he tried, unsuccessfully, to make friends with the Irish president’s dog. In a surprise to nobody, he quoted at least three different Irish poets but may have quoted his Grandpa Finnegan even more.
And all that came before Friday evening, when Biden traveled west across the country to County Mayo, where he was slated to recall “the history and hope and the heartbreak” of his ancestors in front of an estimated 20,000 gathered at a 19th-century cathedral along the River Moy.
Just hours before his remarks, Biden visited the Knock Shrine, a pilgrimage site for Catholics made all the more significant by a chance meeting with the priest who administered last rites to his late son, Beau, reportedly bringing Biden to tears.
Biden had come to Ireland to reaffirm its close relationship with the U.S. — and to reaffirm his own personal relationship with a place he credits for shaping him. It was here that the criticisms he faces at home seemed to fade away: His age didn’t make him old, it provided him wisdom. His gaffes didn’t make him shaky, they gave him charm.
Biden has made no secret of his deep fascination with his ancestral origins. And since visiting Ireland as vice president to trace his lineage, he'd eagerly sought a reason to come back. The White House found its justification in the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement that largely ended sectarian violence in Northern Ireland — a U.S. brokered deal that’s served as an integral element of the island’s tight relationship with America.
Yet Biden spent only a handful of hours in Northern Ireland before jetting off to his ancestral homeland. Combined with the dearth of policy announcements or apparent progress on political priorities, the move raised questions over whether the trip was, as one reporter put it, “a taxpayer-funded family reunion.”
The White House rejected the characterization, pointing to his speeches and meetings with Irish and U.K. leaders. Biden, though, appeared otherwise determined not to let thorny political demands intrude too much on his mutual lovefest with the people of Ireland.
The president has answered only a single question unrelated to his visit, on the search for the Pentagon document leaker. The most substantive answer he gave all week to any query came in response to the child who had asked about the key to success — prompting Biden to launch into a winding and often-told anecdote about the late conservative Sen. Jesse Helms and the importance of not judging people’s motives.
"That's a long answer to a real quick question," he conceded, well after the child had lost interest.
At times, it was tough to tell where Biden as president ended and Biden as tourist began. His tour through the country was sentimental and joyful. During a visit to Carlingford Castle, he peered across the water through gathering fog, chatting quietly with a local guide enlisted to bring him through the last Irish landmark Biden’s great-great-grandfather saw before embarking for America over 170 years ago.
“It feels wonderful,” Biden said of his emotions upon visiting the site, as a bagpipe and drum ensemble prepared to strike up an original piece entitled: “A Biden Return.”
In Dundalk, a short ride from the castle through the County Louth where his Finnegan ancestors once lived, Biden bantered with workers at a local market, debating which food and souvenirs to buy. (He left, the town paper later reported, with a bounty: Lemon meringue, chocolate eclairs, bread and butter pudding, pear and almond cake, and a mug with an image of a dog on it.)
And on Thursday, as he became the fourth U.S. president to address a joint session of Ireland’s Parliament, Biden paused to recognize the familial significance of what he would term “one of the great honors of my career.”
“Well mom,” he said, looking skyward, “you said it would happen.”
In between speeches and state dinners, the scenes at times bordered on chaos. Throngs of well-wishers lined Biden’s routes, some stationing themselves mere inches off the road as the motorcade whipped by. Others gathered on highway overpasses in the driving rain, waving Irish and American flags.
As Biden stopped in local towns and businesses, the tight spaces and swelling crowds caused visible alarm among his Secret Service detail. “A security nightmare,” one agent muttered at one point.
But Biden, basking in the middle of it all, seemed unconcerned.
“I wish our mom, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden, were here today. She’d be so damn proud,” he said in the Windsor Bar, surrounded by a mix of relatives, Irish officials and local residents. “Louth held such a special place in her heart, it really did.”
As the trip wore on and the outside world fell away, Biden appeared to feel increasingly at home — a sentiment he expressed so frequently that some reporters and aides joked he might actually stay.
“I don’t know why the hell my ancestors left here. It’s beautiful,” he said on Wednesday.
“I only wish I could stay longer,” he told Irish lawmakers on Thursday.
“I’m not going home,” he said, admiring the Irish president’s residence.
Biden, however reluctantly, would eventually have to head home, set as he was to depart the Irish coast late Friday for his family’s adopted shores of Delaware. But well before then, he made permanent his intention to return.
“Your feet will bring you to where your heart is,” Biden wrote in the guestbook at the Irish president’s residence, in reference to a line he attributed to William Butler Yeats that he said his grandfather often quoted.
It was a slightly more poetic way of reiterating a pledge that he’d already made at the Windsor Bar, before striding back into the cold, where the crowds stood eager and waiting: “The bad news for all of you is, we’ll be back,” Biden said. “There’s no way to keep us out.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence called for the quick execution of mass shooters as a solution to gun violence at the National Rifle Association’s annual leadership summit in Indianapolis Friday.
“I’m tired of the senseless violence and loss of life that could be prevented if our leaders would support law enforcement, protect our schools, institutionalize the obviously mentally ill, and enact legislation that would ensure that anyone who engages in these heinous acts of mass violence meets their fate in months, not years,” Pence said.
Pence, speaking in his home state, was met with boos from the crowd once he appeared on stage. Pence said that Democrats need to address the “very real problems of violent crime and mental health that are costing thousands of American lives every year.”
“Ignoring the motivations of the trans activist who killed three children and three adults at that Christian school in Nashville, and the ‘mental health challenges’ of the man who killed five people and injured eight others in Louisville, President Biden and the Democrats have returned to the same tired arguments about gun control and confiscation,” Pence said.
The event marks the first time both Pence and former President Donald Trump have shared a stage since they left office. Trump is expected to speak at the forum later this afternoon. Trump seemed to be the main draw, with his photo centered on a poster board at the event and plenty of MAGA hats in the audience.
In the wake of the recent mass shootings, Pence said America doesn’t need gun control but crime control.
“We don’t need lectures about the liberties of law-abiding citizens. We need solutions to protect our kids,” Pence said. “So to Joe Biden and the gun control extremists, I say: Give up on your pipe dreams of gun confiscation, stop endangering our lives with gun bans, and stop trampling on our God-given rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution!”
Few images captured the visceral violence and horror of Jan. 6 more clearly than the moment Patrick McCaughey — a 23-year-old from Connecticut — pinned a D.C. Police officer, Daniel Hodges, in a Capitol doorway as he howled in pain.
On Friday, more than two years later, McCaughey was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison for his role in the riot and attempt by supporters of Donald Trump to prevent the transfer of power to Joe Biden. His sentence is among the lengthiest handed down to Jan. 6 rioters so far, though it was less than half of the nearly 16 years that the Justice Department sought.
McCaughey, who stood before U.S. District Court Judge Trevor McFadden in an orange jumpsuit while he awaited his fate, delivered a profuse apology for his conduct, describing his behavior on Jan. 6 as “monumentally stupid.”
“I wish I had better control of myself,” he said, calling his behavior “less like a citizen and more like an animal.”
McCaughey pinned Hodges in a Capitol doorway for more than two minutes while another rioter ripped off the officer's gas mask, stole his baton and struck him with it. It became a symbol of the barbaric violence that unfolded in the Capitol’s lower West Terrace tunnel, famous before that day as the corridor through which presidents-elect emerge to take their oath of office.
McCaughey was at the “vanguard” of that violent section of the mob, McFadden noted, and arrived there only after spending 20 minutes taunting police before their line collapsed and they were forced to retreat into the tunnel. McCaughey became “a poster child of all that was dangerous and appalling” about Jan. 6, McFadden said.
McFadden found McCaughey guilty in September after a bench trial on three charges of assaulting or impeding police officers, obstructing Congress’ proceedings and participating in a civil disorder, among several other charges. He was tried alongside two other defendants who were nearby in the tunnel.
Despite the extraordinary aspects of McCaughey’s case, in some ways he cut a familiar profile for Jan. 6 defendants: He had no prior criminal record and was seen as a positive member of his Connecticut community prior to the 2020 election. Afterward, amid Trump’s false claims about the results, McCaugehy traveled down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, many amplified by Fox News and other Trump-aligned media outlets.
In McCaughey’s case, there was also the role of his father, whom family members described as a pernicious influence on him — encouraging his beliefs that the election was stolen.
McCaughey’s father accompanied his son to Washington but became separated from him before the assaults, McCaughey’s defense attorney, Dennis Boyle, said.
Hodges also addressed McFadden prior to sentencing, describing the daily trauma he still experiences as a result of the assaults he suffered on Jan. 6. He urged McFadden to reject claims by McCaughey and others of being simply “caught up in the moment.” But he also described McCaughey as a “foot soldier” in a larger effort by those seeking to overturn the 2020 election.
McCaughey’s sentence mirrors two handed down by U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson to rioters who assaulted D.C. Police officer Michael Fanone. Both men — Albuquerque Head and Kyle Young — were sentenced to just over seven years in prison for their crimes, which were also committed by the lower West Terrace tunnel. It also matches the sentence of Guy Reffitt, a Texas militia member who carried a gun at the Capitol and engaged in a lengthy standoff with police that helped rioters amass at the foot of the building.
The lengthiest Jan. 6 sentence to date belongs to Thomas Webster, a former NYPD cop who was convicted by a jury of a brutal assault against a police officer defending the line at the Capitol. U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta sentenced Webster to 10 years in prison, a steep sentence but one that fell more than 90 months shy of the Justice Department’s recommendation.
TALLAHASSEE — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is speeding toward long-term political risks as he runs to the right on abortion — and opponents are ready to pounce.
The putative presidential hopeful is poised to sign a six-week ban that the Florida state legislature passed Thursday, and Democrats, abortion-rights groups and fundraisers who oppose the measure are eager to use it to tarnish his White House ambitions.
DeSantis is banking on support in the primary from anti-abortion voters, particularly those angry at Donald Trump. The former president faced a backlash from some conservatives when he complained that the party’s far-right position on abortion hurt the GOP in last year’s midterm election.
But a six-week ban pushes the outer boundary of anti-abortion rights proposals. And it could spell trouble for DeSantis among independents and suburban voters in a general election, if he makes it that far.
“We’re going to make him own this, and his agenda, everywhere he goes,” said a national Democratic operative granted anonymity to discuss party strategy. “Goes to Michigan? Abortion ban. Goes to Ohio next week? Abortion ban. And that will take different forms but we’ll hang this incredibly toxic abortion ban and his agenda around his neck with different tactics.”
The operative added that this is one of many points on which to attack DeSantis who has taken several stances on social issues that Democrats believe won't sit well with swing voters.
A spokesman for DeSantis declined to comment for this story. But Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, told POLITICO that a six-week ban isn’t the millstone Democrats believe.
“Consensus is building across the country that once there’s a heartbeat, it’s a human being,” he said. “So the governor isn’t out of step at all. … In fact, it bolsters his standing.”
Though DeSantis has not formally entered the presidential race, the campaign to tie him to a six-week ban is already beginning, according to interviews with more than a dozen people from several battleground states.
Nascent plans include attack ads, knocking on doors in swing states where polling shows abortion has become a more prominent election issue since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, and registering voters throughout the country.
“Planned Parenthood advocacy and political organizations will make sure everyone knows his dangerous and radical record on abortion rights,” Jenny Lawson, vice president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund said in a statement. The organization is considering door-to-door canvassing, digital ads and direct mail, Olivia Cappello, a spokesperson said in a recent interview.
The Planned Parenthood network has poured millions of dollars into voter outreach in response to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade last year. In the leadup to the decision, arms of the organization announced a $16 million ad campaign, and spent more than $50 million on the 2022 midterms a few months later.
The head of the much smaller Women’s Voices of Southwest Florida organization, who rallied against the ban in the state capital this week, has also promised an aggressive voter outreach effort.
“We have all vowed to go knock on doors and go to other states to let people know what DeSantis has done to Florida,” Sarah Parker of the organization said in an interview. “We don’t have a lot of money, but we’ll mobilize.”
DeSantis does not share that problem. A PAC supporting his likely candidacy boasted of raising $30 million several weeks ago, and he’s proven himself a prodigious fundraiser in the past — a benefit that’s helped him cement himself as the leading Republican alternative to Trump.
And for many on the right, particularly those miffed at Trump, DeSantis’ support of a six-week ban is proof that he is a more reliable ally in their fight to end the procedure nationwide.
“I’ve known him since he hit the ground in Congress,” Perkins said. “He, from the start, has been making very solid decisions on a host of policy issues, from religious freedom to economic issues.”
Florida’s six-week abortion ban received final legislative approval as the issue of abortion access once again dominates the headlines. The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday agreed to allow the abortion pill mifepristone to remain on the market but with restrictions that will hamper access to millions of people unless the Supreme Court intervenes.
Florida now joins at least 12 other states — including Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky and Louisiana — that have approved bans on abortions after six weeks, a point at which many people don’t yet know they’re pregnant.
“This bill is atrocious,” said Ryan Stitzlein, NARAL’s senior national political director. “This issue may ignite a small part of their primary base but it’s deeply unpopular with voters in this country. … We’re activating our more than 4 million members across the country. They’ll be making calls, writing, knocking on doors.”
Democrats’ confidence is rooted in both public polling that demonstrates little bipartisan appetite for such strict abortion bans as well as recent case studies. Five months after Republicans failed to deliver widespread victories in the midterm elections, a Democratic candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court defeated her opponent by 11 points in a race centered around abortion. Even moderate Republicans crossed the aisle to donate to her winning campaign.
“You should ignore national polls because that’s not how people win a presidential nomination. They win by winning each state and if you look at the bellwether states that Trump or DeSantis need to win, they have major, major problems on the issue of abortion,” political fundraiser Patrick Guarasci — who worked on the winning campaign of Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz — said in an interview this week. “They’re being held hostage by their donors and their far-right-wing extremists.”
Guarasci said abortion ranked as the top issue in the recent election.
“Trump or DeSantis will have a hard time winning a presidential elections without some kind of answer to that question,” he added.
Several dozen opponents have been staging demonstrations in Tallahassee, even getting arrested in acts of civil disobedience. Though they knew they stood no chance of changing the course of the bill, they continued to gather as recently as Wednesday night to denounce it. State Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried warned DeSantis will "will not stop with Florida."
DeSantis isn’t the only Republican who will face pressure for his stance on abortion. Democrats are certain to note that Trump appointed the justices who overturned Roe. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), on his second day of campaigning since announcing a presidential exploratory committee, pivoted, deflected and avoided specifics when repeatedly pressed on where he stood on federal abortion restrictions.
But unlike Trump or Scott, DeSantis will have signed legislation limiting access. Democrats don’t intend to let voters forget.
“This man is clearly wrong for Michigan,” Michigan Lieutenant Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, a Democrat, said on a conference call ahead of DeSantis’ recent visit to the state. “But he is also wrong for America. He will be burdened by his anti-choice, anti-woman, anti-reproductive freedom stances.”
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva arrived in Washington earlier this year in the glow of a glorious comeback. Freed from prison, elected to a new term as president of Brazil and triumphant over a Jan. 6-style insurrection, the left-wing populist seemed to embody the endurance of democracy in an era of extremism.
But in private meetings with progressive lawmakers and labor leaders, Lula delivered a dire message, according to four people present for the discussions.
Though poisonous demagogues had fallen in both Brazil and the United States, Lula warned that a global web of right-wing forces continued to threaten political freedom. Voters crushed by economic inequality and confused by a torrent of social-media disinformation remained vulnerable to figures like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, the brutish strongman whom Lula barely defeated last fall.
In Washington, the 77-year-old Brazilian leader issued a call to battle: The left needed to build its own transnational network, Lula said, to fight for its political values and take on crises like economic deprivation and climate change.
Far-right leaders like Trump and Bolsonaro in the Americas had sought each other out and found fellow travelers in European hardliners like France’s Marine Le Pen and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. No comparable club has existed on the left. In Lula’s view it was time for that to change.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Lula wanted to mobilize left-leaning forces against “an international network of right-wing people and movements” that is seeking to “take over democratic countries.”
“He really was appealing to us, asking the Progressive Caucus to build something that can counter that,” Jayapal recalled.
An initial step may come later this year, with a possible trip to Brazil by congressional progressives. Rep. Ro Khanna of California, a leading House liberal who also met with Lula, said the Brazilian president urged lawmakers three times to visit.
Khanna said he had asked his staff to explore other international forums where U.S. progressives should make their presence felt.
Lula’s exhortation represents an overdue challenge for the U.S. left. For all the influence they have exercised on domestic policy, left-wing Democrats have not yet managed to articulate a distinctive transnational agenda.
That has been a missed opportunity.
It is not that progressives do not care about the rest of the world. They just tend to engage it as a scattered array of flashpoints and pet causes, without telling a more universal story about the struggles of the 21st Century.
In Washington, many progressives have embraced President Joe Biden’s chosen narrative about a grand contest between democracy and autocracy, while lamenting the gulf between Biden’s rhetoric and his tolerance of strategically useful tyrannies like Saudi Arabia. Yet they have made only fitful attempts to lay out an overarching left-wing agenda that starts with change in the United States and extends across the larger world.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has made the most developed effort, calling in 2018 for an “international progressive front” against oligarchs, despots, and multinational corporations. But his chief role these days is chairing the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee — a powerful post focused on the U.S. economy.
Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Sanders, said there was a “growing sensibility on the left” about engaging more consistently with partners in other countries, “not only in South America but in the Global South.” The moment appears right, he argued, for progressives to make their case for a transnational politics anchored in traditionally left-wing economic ideas.
But U.S. progressives do not currently have a rich network of relationships abroad to draw on.
“It’s an area where the left in particular needs to do a much, much better job,” Duss said.
It is easy to overstate the global influence of the U.S. right. Trump-linked provocateurs like Steve Bannon can barge into other countries, declare the dawn of a new age of ultra-right nationalism and generate anxious coverage in the mainstream press. But it has been harder for these forces to win power and govern. Trump’s endorsements in foreign elections have not amounted to much.
Earlier this year, my colleague Zoya Sheftalovich reported that panic about Bannon-style meddling had receded in Europe: Věra Jourová, the vice president of the European Commission, recalled a sense of fear after 2016 that a character like Bannon might help ignite a continental movement. “It didn’t happen,” Jourová said.
Still, there has been political value for extreme conservatives in thinking of themselves in global terms. It has helped them identify trends and cultural attitudes that have driven elections across national boundaries — anger about the Syrian refugee crisis, fear of China, resentment toward big tech — and sharpen a common vocabulary for discussing them.
On an intangible level, it has given a once-marginalized group of ideologues a certain esprit de corps that can translate into what Americans call swagger.
Lula, who previously served as Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010, may be uniquely positioned among foreign leaders to summon the U.S. left to the barricades.
Even before his return to power, Lula occupied a special place in the imagination of U.S. progressives: a populist crusader in one of the world’s largest democracies, a defender of the Amazon, an outspoken American leftist through the era of George W. Bush. His imprisonment in 2018, the result of a questionable corruption prosecution, made him a political martyr.
There is an aesthetic component to his appeal to progressives that helps obscure other inconvenient realities, like his equivocal view of Russian’s invasion of Ukraine.
Consider the images from Lula’s last candidacy, showing a roaring leftist fighter campaigning through destitute neighborhoods and greeting ecstatic crowds from an open-top car. These are scenes unknown to U.S. voters in our time. To many progressives, they look like the best version of politics.
Lula’s imprisonment strengthened his long-distance relationship with left-leaning lawmakers in Washington, who took up his cause. Sanders led the effort, repeatedly calling for Lula’s release during his own presidential campaign. Upon his release, the Brazilian politician singled out Sanders for thanks.
“I hope American workers will make you US president,” Lula wrote to Sanders on Twitter.
He continued expressing gratitude in Washington this year, meeting with Sanders and thanking him and other progressives for their support. When Lula sat down with union leaders, he was effusive. “He wanted to thank the labor movement for standing with him,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.
With labor officials, too, Lula urged a transnational mobilization. He pressed them to lead a “fight about working people and about lifting up their economic aspirations, their living wages,” as well as protecting the Amazon, Weingarten said.
In his meeting with congressional progressives, Khanna said Lula described a certain form of progressive politics — focused on economic advancement for the working class and fighting climate change — as the antidote to a mood of despair that feeds authoritarian politics.
“One of the interesting insights he had was that there was a movement, not just in Brazil but around the world, of anti-politics,” Khanna said, “and that people have so lost faith in organizing and political activity, they have bought into the narrative that everything is corrupt, everything is broken and politics doesn’t matter.”
The solution, according to Lula, was a “hopeful, aspirational politics” that gives voters confidence “that you can improve people’s economic conditions,” Khanna said.
In some respects that sounds like a figure from closer to home: Joe Biden.
The U.S. president and Lula have some deep policy disagreements, most of all on Ukraine. For now, they have muted their differences to present a united front against homegrown forces of autocracy and insurrection. At the White House, each hailed the other as a champion of democracy.
When I contacted Lula’s spokesman, José Crispiniano, about his meetings in Washington, he shared a statement emphasizing Lula’s admiration for Biden: “He was impressed and satisfied with the commitment of President Biden with unions and workers.” He declined to comment on Lula’s remarks about building up the global left.
Biden and Lula are similar in another important way. They are both longtime national leaders who led left-of-center coalitions to victory in part because they were resilient against right-wing attacks that might have felled any candidate less familiar to voters.
Brazil’s finance minister, Fernando Haddad, who joined Lula in D.C., made that point to congressional progressives. “He said no one other than Lula could have won,” said Khanna. According to Haddad, only Lula was capable of overcoming the avalanche of bile and disinformation directed at his candidacy.
There is no guarantee in either country that a leftist or center-left message can succeed with another messenger.
That, too, is a warning and a challenge to progressives.
