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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House

Joe Biden has raised $28mn for his re-election campaign from a star-studded fundraiser in Los Angeles that shows how Hollywood is sticking with the Democratic president in his race against Donald Trump.

Biden arrived in California on Saturday after flying to the event from the G7 summit in Italy, as his geopolitical priorities quickly made way for the need to bolster his campaign coffers ahead of the November vote.

The fundraiser in California will feature former president Barack Obama as well as actors George Clooney and Julia Roberts.

Hollywood remains a bastion of Democratic support even as Silicon Valley has shifted towards the right and is becoming a more prominent source of Republican money. Donald Trump recently raised $12mn there at a fundraiser with venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.

Biden’s Hollywood fundraiser is the biggest in the history of the Democratic party, eclipsing his earlier blockbuster campaign finance event in March at Radio City Music Hall in New York City that raised $26mn for the campaign.

Biden Campaign finance chair Rufus Gifford told the Financial Times that it had sought to build on the success in New York by aiming “to create something similar on the west coast”.

“Folks are fired up and we were able to exceed our own expectations,” he said.

Biden built up a $70mn cash advantage in the early months of the year, but Trump has been fundraising frantically to catch up, tapping Republican donors from Wall Street to Florida and Texas in an effort to help him return to the White House.

Trump’s campaign says it benefited from a fundraising surge since his criminal conviction in a New York court in late May. Full campaign finance reports for the second quarter will be released in mid-July.

According to the Fivethirtyeight.com polling average, Trump has a national lead of 1.1 percentage points over Biden, and an edge in the key battleground states that will decide the election.

Later this month Biden and Trump will face each other in their first televised debate in Atlanta, which could be a pivotal test for both candidates. That will be followed by their parties’ nominating conventions, which will take place in July for the Republicans and August for the Democrats.

Trump rallies involve a lot of merch – vendors will sometimes set up overnight before a rally, preparing for the huge crowds. There are hats, socks, flags, buttons and, especially, t-shirts.

I go to a lot of these rallies. In the middle of it all, I’ve gotten a little obsessed with this one particular shirt.

Miranda Barbee bought one in the hours before a Trump rally on the beach in Wildwood, New Jersey, and held it up, reading aloud.

“I just bought this shirt for $20. It says ‘Biden sucks, Kamala –’ what does that even — ‘swallows’? I didn’t even see the front! That is so funny.” She flipped it around. “And the back says, ‘F**k Joe and the Hoe.’”

She and the friend she came with laughed.

“I honestly didn’t know the front said that,” Barbee added. “But I think that’s hilarious.”

These shirts have been sold prominently at recent rallies – vendors who specialize in these particular shirts often stand right outside the entrances and exits, catching the eyes of the streams of Trump fans.

They’re not official campaign apparel. When asked for comment, a campaign spokesperson didn’t address the shirts directly, instead pointing to a Biden official campaign shirt (slogan: “Free on Wednesdays”) that pokes fun at Donald Trump’s legal troubles.

Still, I wanted to know: why? Why do these shirts exist, and who’s buying them? Sooner or later, I had spent so much time thinking about it, I wanted to know if there was anything to be learned here.

The infamous Hillary Clinton nutcracker

“The Hillary Nutcracker & Corkscrew Bill”, a boxed set of a nutcracker and bottle corkscrew were available for sale during the 2009 holiday season.

Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images

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Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images

Sexism isn’t exactly new in politics.

Consider America’s decades of Hillary-Clinton hatred. One t-shirt slogan around the time of her 2008 presidential campaign read “I wish Hillary had married O.J.,” referring to O.J. Simpson who famously faced trial for his wife’s murder. He was acquitted.

And then there was the Hillary Clinton nutcracker…described gleefully by MSNBC’s Willie Geist in 2007 as “a Hillary doll with serrated stainless steel thighs that, well, crack nuts.” To this, Tucker Carlson — then also of MSNBC — responded, “When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs” and declared that he would be buying one.

Over the years, Michelle Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Sarah Palin would also be the targets of demeaning, often obscene merchandise.

But still, the open lewdness of the Trump t-shirts. That’s new, right? I asked Tim Miller, a Republican strategist who worked for Jon Huntsman and Jeb Bush’s presidential campaigns.

“It’s not like you couldn’t find a guy standing outside the RNC in 2012 selling some misogynistic Hillary stuff. It was there, but just the intensity of it,” he said, “just how crass it is, it’s definitely a category difference.”

That crassness has been around from the beginning at Trump rallies. As my colleague Don Gonyea reported in 2016, vendors then were selling shirts reading, “Hillary sucks, but not the way Monica does.”

The difference between parties

“What’s different about Donald Trump is that his campaign is not particularly worried about this type of misogyny being attached to his campaign, because at least to date, it hasn’t hurt him that much,” explained Kelly Dittmar, director of research for the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

A vendor sells t-shirts at a May 1, 2024, Trump rally in Freeland, Michigan.

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One example: Even after a jury found him civilly liable for sexual abuse last year, polls didn’t budge.

Part of what’s going on is partisan, Dittmar adds — a reflection of an existing gender gap.

“I think there’s more kind of internal policing among Democrats about the fact that ‘this is contrary to our brand and it hurts us, by the way, with the constituency that is our most reliable one, which is women.’”

Furthermore, she says, this kind of language is often particularly directed at women of color, like Kamala Harris. The word “ho’” on the shirt undeniably makes this about race as well as sex.

Meanwhile, Dittmar says, the Republican base is majority-men.

“And of course,” she said, “of the women who do support [Republicans], they are more likely to say that this is just, you know, a joke.”

That was true of voter Christena Kincaid, who talked to me just after she had bought one of these shirts at a rally in Freeland, Michigan.

“It’s just a slang. That’s all it is,” she said. “It’s a goofy – it is a little over the top. I get it. But they’re just words.”

That idea, that they’re just words, fits with Trump’s brand as an anti-PC crusader who “tells it like it is,” which has involved loudly insulting women, from Clinton to Megyn Kelly to Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar.

But also, the idea that words don’t matter that much – that echoes the response to the infamous Access Hollywood tape, which Trump’s defenders shrugged off as “locker room talk.”

Trickle-down incivility

Rina Shah is a political strategist and a former Republican congressional aide, and a Republican who opposes Trump. She told me she thinks the shirts very much matter.

“If we’re allowing our kids to see this visually, even if it’s contained at a rally, the person who wears that shirt at that rally isn’t just going to wear that one day,” she said. “This flavor of incivility is permeating our nation’s social fabric.”

I did ask Bob Berger, who I met at that Freeland, Mich., rally, about wearing the shirt outside of a rally.

“Are you worried about offending anyone when you wear it?” I asked.

“No.”

“Do you think you’ll be careful where you wear it? Like around, I don’t know, grandkids?” I continued.

“Oh, maybe around the grandkids. I probably would be,” he replied.

What Rina Shah said about Trump’s incivility trickling down to his supporters seems true, whether it’s via clothing or simply their willingness to get nasty in talking about Biden and Harris.

“As much as I hope Joe Biden gets arrested, whatever, is not in office anymore. I’m like, we’re still stuck with the bitch.  I don’t want her either,” said Barbee, the voter I met at that New Jersey rally, referring to Harris.

I asked her: Does that language feel demeaning to you as a young woman – using words like bitch?

“I mean, she is a bitch,” she responded.

On top of that, you can also see all this — the t-shirt slogans, the cuss words, Trump’s vulgarity — as a marker of a gap in American politics: A yawning partisan gap in attitudes about gender.

“Those differences in gender beliefs are going to make it more permissible or not to put forth these types of messages without some sort of a backlash or pushing down,” Dittmar of Rutgers University said.

Studies have found that Trump voters — including women — in 2016 were particularly likely to have beliefs that political scientists term “hostile sexism.” Furthermore, some found that these beliefs were prominent in a way they weren’t in 2012. Those “hostile sexist” beliefs include, for example, the idea that women are too easily offended.

Barbee, at that New Jersey rally, the voter who talked to me the longest about her shirt, echoed some of those beliefs.

“I feel like feminism is becoming like a huge thing these days, but I also feel like it’s – people are overly sensitive, like they’re reacting to things they shouldn’t be reacting to. “

It’s an attitude that’s been around for a long time. But her new t-shirt? That represented something new.

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

France’s new leftwing unity pact is showing signs of cracking, barely two days after it was formed in a move which threatened to eclipse the centrist alliance of Emmanuel Macron in forthcoming snap elections.

Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon launched an overnight purge of moderates in his party who had advocated for unity, prompting a furious backlash from other leftwing leaders. Olivier Faure, the socialist chief, called it “scandalous”.

The creation of NPF could seriously harm the prospects of pro-Macron candidates by making it much harder for them to qualify for the second round run-off on July 7. The first round takes place on June 30.

The possibility of a far-right government with the left as the largest opposition force — both of which have massive unfunded spending plans — has rattled financial markets, prompting a sell-off of French debt and equities this week.

Some 75,000 people took part in a demonstration in Paris on Saturday afternoon against the far-right, the police said. The CGT union said 250,000 had taken part in the capital, and 640,000 in protests nationwide.

The NPF was only agreed on Thursday after intense negotiations between four leftwing parties. The parties are deeply divided on the economy, EU policy and Ukraine but have buried their differences to maximise their chances against Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National.

But Mélenchon’s purge has put the NPF under strain. The head of France Insoumise (France Unbowed) removed several colleagues who had previously criticised his extreme positions from the LFI list of election candidates. He included in the list Adrien Quatennens, a protégé and controversial LFI MP who has been accused by his wife of domestic violence.

The move by Mélenchon, a deeply polarising politician, prompted a furious reaction from the purged members and their sympathisers.

“It’s totally petty, small of him, settling scores when the challenge now is to prevent the far-right from taking power,” Alexis Corbières, one of the MPs removed as a candidate, told France Info.

Another, Raquel Garrido, posted on X: “Shame on you, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. This is sabotage. But I can do better. We can do better.”

Mélenchon’s critics say his loyalty to Quatennens is a betrayal of the left’s feminist principles.

His choice of candidates risks destabilising the united front. Martine Aubry, the socialist mayor of Lille where Quatennens is standing, said she would back another candidate to run against him, contravening the unity pact.

Political parties are scrambling to assemble their lists of candidates for the election before the deadline on Sunday afternoon.

Former French president François Hollande confirmed on Saturday he will run for parliament for the NPF.

Hollande’s candidacy in his home region of Corrèze took his colleagues by surprise. Faure, the socialist leader, said he “was not in the loop”.

If elected, Hollande would become only the second former head of state to take a seat in the National Assembly during the fifth republic. The other was Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

Hollande said it was “an exceptional decision for an exceptional situation”, given that the far-right is closer to power than at any moment since France’s liberation from Nazi occupation in 1945.

To salvage as many seats as possible, Macron’s centrist alliance is trying to strike reciprocal local deals not stand against each other with centre-right candidates that refuse to back RN.

The centre-right Les Répubicains party is also in disarray after its leader Eric Ciotti unilaterally agreed an alliance with the far-right. Furious colleagues on the party’s executive unanimously voted to expel Ciotti, but the decision was overturned by a Paris court on Friday night, leaving it unclear who was in charge of the list of candidates.