Digested week: Biden’s travails and why the UK election isn’t big news in the US | Emma Brockes

Monday

School’s out in the US, sleep-away camp has started, and as 4 July falls on a Thursday this year, lots of Americans prepare to take the week off. What should be a pleasant ease into summer is disrupted, however, by the ongoing insanity of the political news: as the swell from President Biden’s debate performance last week worsens, the supreme court makes a ruling that vastly improves Donald Trump’s chances of getting off scot-free for trying to overturn the 2020 election.

The chief justice, John Roberts, reading the majority 6-3 opinion, said: “The president may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for his official acts.” In other words, Trump can’t be held accountable for “official acts” made in office, raising weird questions about whether, for example, fomenting insurrection constitutes an official or an unofficial act. Seems pretty unofficial to me. Then again, I don’t have the insight of the conservative justices, who make it clear that a president’s motivation may not be taken into account.

Within 24 hours of the ruling, it is already being turned to Trump’s advantage. Next week the former president was supposed to receive sentencing for his 34 felony convictions for falsifying business records. That date has now been pushed to September, to work out the implications of the supreme court ruling, and there may be further delays. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, reading her dissent from the bench in an apparent state of cold fury, said: “It makes a mockery of the principle … that no man is above the law.” It is hard to find an upside to her frankly terrifying conclusion: “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

Tuesday

Let’s retreat, for consolation, to the soothingly small controversy of socks. For once in my life I have noticed a trend before it shows up in an avalanche of trend pieces That trend is this: the disdain within which gen Z (and my own two gen alphas) hold the sock preferences of their elders and betters.

What are known in the US as crew or tube socks – ankle or knee socks in the UK – are, in line with everyone else under 25, the only socks my kids will wear, while they thoroughly despise the scanty trainer socks of the average millennial. To wit: Jennifer Lawrence, 33, recently wore a pair of low-slung trainer socks in public and Vogue called her “brave”.

Gen X has not, as usual, been asked for its thoughts, but I’ll offer them anyway, since trainer socks started with us. The trend among young people towards higher-altitude socks is, for my money, either part of my kids’ generation’s return to grunge, or – stand by – because they believe every surface is an opportunity to advertise their “aesthetic”, including their own legs below the knee. Along with everything else that has happened since 2014, this is, obviously, thanks to the influence of “social media”, an insight I offer for free!

Wednesday

“Biden ‘absolutely not dropping out’”, runs the headline in the Washington Post on Wednesday afternoon, shooting for and achieving the double meaning familiar to all of us who totally, absolutely overdo our language when lying. The story follows up on the New York Times’ bombshell of earlier in the day disclosing that Biden has discussed with a key ally whether or not to stay in the race.

This all happens after a day of multiple further comments by Democrats urging Biden, in the politest code they can manage, to “think carefully” about his ongoing candidacy. These include Representative Don Davis of North Carolina, Senator Robert Peters of Illinois and 400 retired business executives making up a pressure group called Leadership Now Project.

Meanwhile Biden’s press secretary fields questions about one of the president’s many excuses for his bad debate performance – that it was a side-effect of jetlag. It was, says Karine Jean-Pierre, “not an excuse” but “an explanation”. (He’d been back in the US for a week.) Asked if the president was dropping out of the race, she said “absolutely not” – the Post had truncated the line – which makes it sound very much like a question of not if but when.

Thursday

The UK election is not big news in the US, partly because the result feels like a foregone conclusion and partly because since the clowns of Downing Street all moved on, there’s not much for a foreign audience to see. “Who governs Britain should matter to Americans,” wrote NBC News rather desperately midweek, and it tried to get some mileage out of Keir Starmer’s “blue collar background”.

As Britons go to the polls on Thursday, the Washington Post strains to drum up some interest by characterising Rishi Sunak, Starmer and Nigel Farage as “the rich one, the ‘boring’ one, and Trump’s buddy”. (In the New York Times, Starmer is characterised as “earnest, intense, practical and not brimming with charisma”.)

But it is NPR that really goes for it on the eve of election day, enticing Americans to share in the excitement of Britain’s presumptive new prime minister by bumping a piece of dodgy trivia to the top of the bio and introducing him as the man “rumoured to be the inspiration, in the late 1990s, for actor Colin Firth’s brooding character in the Bridget Jones movies”. If only they’d had the guts to go the whole hog and illustrate the piece with a photo of Renée Zellweger.

Friday

If the to-hell-in-a-handcart vibe of the moment feels overwhelming at times, remember: very occasionally, hippos can fly. Researchers at the Royal Veterinary College in North Mymms, Hertfordshire, concluded this week, after scrutinising the movement of hippos when they run at top speed, that 15% of the time they become technically airborne, with all four feet off the ground. If a 2,000kg beast can take flight, we must tell ourselves that it is entirely possible that everything will work out OK.