Category Archives: Donald Trump

Summing up the Republicans appalling conduct at the Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearing, and Sen. Mike Brauns interview where he said interracial marriage should be a question for the states, The New Abnormal co-host Molly Jong-Fast says theyre never gonna be happy. Theyre not gonna be happy when they take away abortion. They wanna go back to antebellum times. This ends with less and less rights.

Thats anything but a joke, but its funny because I remember thinking before the 2016 election, Well, Trump wont get elected, but even when he did I thought, Wow, its so terrible, but theyll get what they want and theyll see how much it sucks. And they didnt. They were thrilled. And then when Trump started killing his own people and telling them that the virus wasnt a big deal, I thought, Well, hell kill his own people. And theyll see this guys a monster, but it seems like he can pretty much do anything. These Republicans can pretty much do anything and (their supporters) dont notice that its against their interests.

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If not antebellum times, says co-host Andy Levy, the most charitable thing you can say about them is that they want to go back to the 1950s. Thats the latest time-frame you can give them. They all think that the 1950s were grand, with the white picket fences and the nuclear families that all loved each other and to them, thats the garden of Eden that they dont care that first of all never really existed. And second of all, to the extent that existed, it existed for white Christians only, and it wasnt even so great for white Christian women. But they dont care, thats their end game.

Meantime, Kid Rock of all damn people is boasting about how Donald Trump would call him up after Sarah Palin introduced him and Ted Nugent to the president, and ask things like What do you think we could do about North Korea?

Im like, What? I dont think Im qualified to answer this.

Then again, it could always be worse with this set. As Molly asks, Do you think Kid Rock is stupider than Junior? And, notes Andy, at least Kid Rock was self-aware enough to know that he shouldnt be talking, giving advice about North Korea.

Plus, Florida Agriculture Commissioner and gubernatorial candidate Nikki Friedwho went to high school with Judge Jacksonjoins to explain how she won office in a red state and her bid to become its first female governor. She says the party needs to follow my lead to win again in the Sunshine State:

The Democrats need to understand, once again, that it is always about the economyit always has been and always will be. Of course, we have to stand up and we have to fight and we have to advocate for our people and our principles. But at the end of the day, the people of our state want leaders. They dont want their elected officials to be falling into these cultural war traps, which Republicans are trying to do. We have an opportunity under my leadership to bring our party together, to unite our party and to fight for fundamental principles thatyou know, might have been electing Republican governors for 25 years, but its by the smallest of margins by, by less than one percent, Ron DeSantis won by 34,000 votes out of almost 8.3 million votes.

Fried concludes: So to say that our state is red is not consistent with how we vote. And for those same 25 years, the people of our state have consistently voted for very progressive constitutional amendments, from a $15 minimum wage to medical marijuana to environmental issues to restoration of civil rights. But we as Democrats have not done a good enough job running campaigns, and making sure we are on the same page as the rest of the people of our state. So we have to take some playbooks by the Republicans on the economy, on home rule, on the free market. But really weve got to rise above this chaos and this nonsense and be ready to fight. Theres no one out there who doesnt know that I am willing and able to throw punches. And most of the times I land them, and make the governor squirm every time that we are in the same room together. And thats what its going to take to stand up against this bully and show the people of our state that there is a better way to lead.

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Donald Trump Asked Kid Rock About North Korea and There Is No Bottom - The Daily Beast

Two of the conservative movements favorite claims are that the media is biased against it and that conservative voices are constantly being censored. In the case of the latter, that led Donald Trump to start Truth Social, a social media network where one can presumably incite a violent insurrection without violating the platforms terms of service. As for the alleged media bias, Donald Trump Jr.s got it covered.

Axios reports that Trumps eldest son, alongside some other former Trump staffers, is starting a news aggregation app called MxM News, which the group believes has the potential to compete with the likes of Apple News and Google News. [Pause for laughter.] According to Axios, the service is looking to disrupt the mobile news space similar to how [the] Drudge [Report] disrupted web publishing and Fox News disrupted cable television in the 1990s. Enjoy the nightly ravings of Tucker Carlson? MxM may be right for you.

While the companys tagline is mainstream news without mainstream bias, its unlikely that mainstream outlets will be heavily featured in the apps feed, given what Juniors father has had to say about them (pathetic, fake,corrupt, deranged, sick,the enemy of the people). In 2019, the then president reportedly had plans to tell federal agencies not to renew their subscriptions to TheWashington Postand TheNew York Times, in what might have been the pettiest move in the history of the West Wing. Axios notes that the content will be curated by a small team of around eight staffers and that the apps founders expect early adoption to come from users [who] are right of center.

Don Jr., a true bastion of reliable information, told Axios: As I travel around the country, the complaint I hear more than almost anything else is that people dont know what media outlets, journalists, or stories they can actually trust.... We created the MxM News app to help people cut through that clutter and get trustworthy news and information about topics that matter and impact their lives. We view it as an important public service and also believe it will be a great business. Yes, it appears he was actually serious about that public service line. No, its not clear if he plans to actually use his own app or instead take a page from his fathers playbook and pretend it doesnt exist.

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In late February, as daily deaths from COVID-19 tallied in the thousands across the country, Florida governor Ron DeSantis announced his latest effort to dismantle his states response to the coronavirus pandemic. Private businesses, he insisted, should stop requiring their employees to wear masks at work. Here was a perfectly selected message to build the brand he has established: Ron DeSantis, scourge of public-health bureaucrats, enemy of woke corporations, and friend of the little guy.

Both the form and content of the message reflected careful planning. As DeSantis spoke, he looked like a man who had been mimicking Donald Trumps speeches in front of the mirror. He performed a series of hand thrusts, in which he drew his thumbs together until they were almost touching, then jerked them apart in quick horizontal motions, as if he were playing an invisible accordion. After five such accordion pulls, he swung his right hand, thumb pointing up, in a semi-circular motion back inward to the center. DeSantis tweeted out the clip, and any MAGA fan watching, even without the sound on, would have grasped the gist just through the eerie physical impersonation.

Republicans have collectively recognized that however much Trump may exasperate them, their president-in-exile will not be purged, nor will the changes he brought to their party be rolled back. He might, however, be co-opted. And if this is to happen, they have settled with remarkable unanimity on DeSantis as the person to do it.

People who do not ingest large amounts of conservative media may have difficulty comprehending the extent of the adulation both the Trumpist and the Trump-skeptical wings of the party have lavished on DeSantis. On a daily basis, the right-wing press churns out stories with headlines like The Promise of Ron DeSantis, Could Gov. Ron DeSantis Be the Favorite GOP Frontrunner for 2024?, A Ron DeSantis Master Class in Rope-a-Dope, Media Keep Trying and Failing to Take Down Floridas Ron DeSantis, Karol Markowicz on What Gov. Ron DeSantis Is Really Like: So Real and Down to Earth, and on and on.

The Florida governor has reportedly provoked Trump by refusing to preemptively endorse his likely candidacy for a second term, and DeSantis is putting himself in a position to challenge the former president for the 2024 nomination. An annoyed Trump has privately told associates that hes not worried about DeSantis because he has no personal charisma and has a dull personality, according to Axios. But Trump has cause for concern: DeSantis has blitzed the national Republican donor circuit and turned most of the conservative media into his personal messaging apparatus. You should be my governor, cooed Sean Hannity in one interview. We see him as the future of the party, a Fox News producer wrote to DeSantiss office in an email obtained by the Tampa Bay Times. This work has already yielded fruit: DeSantiss polling has crept up steadily, while every other Republican who had once been whispered about as a potential nominee Tom Cotton, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Josh Hawley has barely registered.

There are other, more troubling signs for Trump that his stranglehold over the party may be loosening. In December, during an interview in Dallas with disgraced former Fox News host Bill OReilly, Trump was booed by members of the crowd when he confirmed that he had received a COVID booster shot. Since he left office, the Republican Party has by and large turned against the measures designed to ameliorate the impact of the pandemic, giving upstarts like DeSantis a chance to outflank him on what has become the central battleground of the culture wars. What weve done is historic, a confused Trump told his skeptical supporters in Dallas, claiming credit for the production of lifesaving vaccines. Dont let them take it away. Dont take it away from ourselves.

Trump is right that DeSantis cant compete as a performer with him or even with past Republicans who have built national brands. DeSantis has the anti-tax zealotry of Paul Ryan without the winsome affect and sculpted torso. He has the social conservatism of George W. Bush with none of the folksiness. He has the partisan fire of Newt Gingrich without the mesmerizing hair. He speaks in a nasal tone nobody has described as pleasant on the ears and has yet to utter an eloquent or memorable turn of phrase. Reporters have noted his puzzling lack of interest in human relationships outside his family, which has resulted in heavy staff churn. You will be in the car with Ron DeSantis and hell say nothing to you for an hour, one associate told Politico. He would prefer it that way. But in some respects, DeSantiss distant middle-management energy is the point, especially when compared to Trumps garish star power.

It is crucial to understand that the critique of Trump that prevails among Republican officials is far narrower than the one proffered by Democrats or Never Trumpers. They dont object to Trumps racism, corruption, lying, or contempt for democratic norms, except to the extent that these qualities hurt the partys brand. What irritates, instead, is Trumps constant disregard for basic political self-preservation. DeSantis offers them the prospect of a party leader who can harness all the right-wing populist energy generated by Trump without the latters childlike inability to focus on what his advisers tell him. One DeSantis ally, confiding to the New York Times, summed up his appeal as competent Trumpism.

His proto-candidacy reflects a handful of working assumptions. First, that any former Republican voter who opposed Trump on moral rather than aesthetic grounds is gone and not worth trying to bring back. Second, that the right-wing groups Trump brought into the Republican fold or whose creation he inspired are either political assets or simply too important to be culled. And third, that Trumps attempt to secure an unelected second term was a failure of tactics, not a disqualifying ambition that merited rebuke and ostracism. The DeSantis pitch is to wrest the MAGA movement from the grifters who built it and place it in the hands of a trusted professional politician.

This project raises two questions: Can it succeed in prying the nomination from Trumps grip? And what would it mean if it did? Just imagine what a Trumpified party no longer led by an erratic, deeply unpopular cable-news binge-watcher would be capable of.

One of the reasons political analysts dismissed the possibility Trump could win the Republican nomination when he first ran is that such an outcome violated what was taken as virtually a scientific truth. A 2008 book written by a quartet of political scientists, The Party Decides, argued that presidential nominations only appeared to be controlled by the voters of Iowa, New Hampshire, and so on but were actually determined by party insiders. The elites, coordinating with one another, made their preferences known through the media, and the primary voters would absorb those messages and act accordingly.

This thesis perfectly described the next contested primary that happened. The 2012 Republican nominating contest featured a succession of flamboyant right-wing populists Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, Gingrich who would enthrall the base and shoot up in the polls only to collapse as if pulled down by some gravitational force detectable solely by political science. But Trumps 2016 nomination, in the face of near-total opposition from the Republican elite, obviously shows the party does not always decide. The voters might pick a nominee their partys elites oppose if that candidate offers them something unique.

Many Republicans have tried to discern the source of Trumps appeal and replicate it. As early as 2016, Ted Cruz was tacking to Trumps right on abortion and guns, and Marco Rubio briefly tried to match Trumps schoolyard insults, at one point making fun of the size of his hands. But Trumps secret sauce with the base turned out to be his unwavering pugilism. Having spent more time than perhaps any other Republican candidate consuming conservative media, Trump had absorbed its message that conservative America is under assault by sinister liberal elites. He built a political style designed for the world depicted on Fox News, in which the Republican Party is always losing because its leaders are too weak to fight back.

Conservatives sum up his appeal with the phrase But he fights. As the but implies, they often acknowledge Trumps flaws before praising his overriding instinct to attack their enemies. Even his errors can turn to his benefit. The more Trump draws howls of outrage from liberals and the media, the more he proves his tribal bona fides.

DeSantis has undertaken an almost clinical effort to manufacture and bottle this aspect of Trumps style. He has repeated the Trumpian narrative that the partys leaders have failed to take the fight to the enemy. We cannot, we will not, go back to the days of the failed Republican Establishment of yesteryear, he promised in 2021. DeSantiss brand is, like Trumps, a Republican who never compromises, never apologizes, and always fights whether the issue is education, the pandemic, or even Trumps misconduct. At the CPAC conference in his home state in February, he claimed that Democrats want us to be second-class citizens and assailed the corrupt and dishonest legacy media.

Photo: David A. Grogan/CNBC/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images (top left); Joe Raedle/Getty Images (top right); Federic J Brown/AFP via Getty Images (middle left); Joe Raedle/Getty Images (middle right); CNN/Youtube (bottom left); Storms Media for Delray Beach Market/MediaPunch/Shutterstock (bottom right).

The Republican elites rallying to DeSantis are calculating that his synthetic version of Trumpism will serve as an adequate substitute. The party is trying to regain its control of the process by offering the voters a more attractive product than, say, Jeb Bush. If you loved Trump, you will like DeSantis. And if you liked Trump, or maybe just tolerated him through gritted teeth, you will love DeSantis.

One irony of DeSantiss attempt to become the new Trump is that his trajectory was almost precisely the opposite of the latters. Trump grew up wealthy but was an indifferent student who allegedly cheated his way into college and retained a working-class affect when he inherited his fathers real-estate empire. DeSantis grew up middle class in Dunedin, Florida (his mother was a nurse and his father installed Nielsen boxes on televisions), before attending Yale and then Harvard Law School. At Harvard, he joined the Navy as a JAG officer, later putting his legal skills to use during stints in Iraq and at Guantnamo Bay.

After active duty in the Navy, DeSantis ran for a House seat in 2012 in the Sixth Congressional District in the middle of a two-decade stretch when the state was trending from purple to red. DeSantis prevailed in a crowded primary in part by winning endorsements from national tea-party groups. The way Republicans established their right-wing credentials at the time was by adopting radical libertarian stances on fiscal policy, and DeSantis duly proposed to abolish the graduated income tax and phase in cuts to entitlement programs i.e., Medicare and Social Security. In Congress, he helped found the Freedom Caucus, a right-wing faction, though he didnt participate in the destructive displays of rebelliousness, such as forcing government shutdowns to stage impossible demands, that made other caucus members intolerable to the party leadership.

After Trumps election, DeSantis could see that the energy on the right was flowing through different channels. When he ran for governor in 2018, he overcame a better-known Republican rival by positioning himself as Trumps staunchest defender. In Congress, he proposed to defund the Mueller investigation. He attacked his primary opponent for having failed to attend a Trump rally in 2016 and cut a cheeky ad showing himself reading Trumps The Art of the Deal to his young son and instructing his daughter to build the wall with her toy blocks. He made frequent appearances on Fox News, where he caught Trumps attention and won his blessing. Ron is strong on Borders, tough on Crime & big on Cutting Taxes Loves our Military & our Vets, Trump tweeted. He will be a Great Governor & has my full Endorsement!

A common assumption of mainstream-media analysis of DeSantis is that he is merely pandering to Trump and his supporters and, as a graduate of Yale and Harvard, is too smart to actually believe what he is saying. This is a failure of imagination. DeSantis developed reactionary suspicions of democracy before Trump ever came along, which positioned him perfectly to straddle the elite-base divide within his party. In fact, DeSantis once wrote a book warning of the dangers of a megalomaniacal president who threatened to destroy the foundations of the republic. That presidents name was Barack Obama.

DeSantis published Dreams From Our Founding Fathers in 2011, when he was running for Congress. It is out of print and has received barely any attention in the media. DeSantis joked recently that the book was read by about a dozen people. But it provides deep insight into the worldview that has propelled him to this point.

Published at the height of the tea-party movement, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers made the case that Obama and his agenda were inimical to the Constitution and this countrys founding ideals. It is sprinkled with passages DeSantis would never have written after Trump took office. He notes accurately that the Founders worried about the emergence of popular leaders who utilized demagoguery to obtain public support in service of their personal ambitions. He flays Obama for alienating traditional allies, meeting with foreign dictators, and impugning American innocence with statements like We sometimes make mistakes, a far more measured assessment than Trumps There are a lot of killers. You got a lot of killers. Well, you think our country is so innocent? He devotes an entire chapter to the importance of the president being personally humble, depicting Obamas alleged excessive self-confidence as a disqualifying trait.

DeSantiss obsession with media bias, which has since become a motif of his political style, clearly developed before he ran for office. He laces the book with bitter complaints that the media failed to vet Obama or expose his allegedly radical influences, while extensively citing criticisms of Obama that appeared in the mainstream press, oblivious to the contradiction. DeSantis is an exceedingly unreliable narrator, wrenching heavily abridged quotations out of context to distort their meaning. For example, he plucks the phrase At a certain point youve made enough money to characterize Obama as a radical socialist who wants to confiscate all income above some level, neglecting to note that Obamas follow-up was: But, you know, part of the American way is that you can just keep on making it if youre providing a good product or youre providing a good service.

Still, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers is much more interesting than a typical partisan screed. Its author, who majored in history and spent a year teaching the subject at a tony boarding school, has clearly given a great deal of thought to the books thesis: that Obamas agenda of raising taxes on the rich and spending more money on the non-rich is an attack on the Constitution.

As legend has it, Benjamin Franklin once said that when the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic, he writes. While acknowledging that the quote is apocryphal it was probably concocted by reactionaries many decades later and attributed to various Founding-era statesmen he proceeds to try to prove this was the real view of the Founders and the Constitution.

The Constitution, he argues, was designed to prevent the redistribution of wealth through the political process. The danger is that, as his fake Franklin quote suggests, people will support programs funded by taxing the rich that benefit themselves. Popular pressure to redistribute wealth or otherwise undermine the rights of property, he laments, will ever be present. The Constitutions role, as DeSantis sees it, is to prevent popular majorities from enacting the economic policies they want.

DeSantis does not believe the Constitution merely establishes a set of ground rules for how policy should be written. He thinks the Constitution requires that conservative Republican policy prevail forever. This is not an original belief. It was the dominant right-wing position from the late-19th century through the middle of the New Deal, and conservative courts routinely struck down all sorts of progressive legislation on the grounds that the Constitution prohibits active government intervention in the economy.

DeSantis treats any further expansion of government as a mortal threat to the Constitution. Sentences like Obamanomics represents a dramatic departure from the nations founding principles and Obamas quest to fundamentally transform the United States of America represents the type of political program that the Constitution was designed to prevent are found in nearly every chapter. The word redistribution and its variants appear more than 150 times.

DeSantiss core conviction is that an outcome in which Democrats win majorities through free and fair elections and vote to expand social spending by taxing the rich is fundamentally illegitimate. He is far from the only Republican to hold this view. The American right has never fully accepted the legitimacy of democratically elected majorities setting economic policy.

This principle helps explain why even most Republicans who get queasy over Trumps authoritarianism ultimately support him anyway. The prospect of Democrats winning elections poses a graver threat to the Constitution than Republicans stealing them. For those Republicans who always considered Trump no worse than the lesser evil, who feared more that he was squandering his power than that he was abusing it, DeSantis is not just an acceptable vehicle. He is one of them.

What has brought DeSantis near the pinnacle of Republican politics barely a decade into his career is not only his deep commitment to the principles of the conservative movement but also a keen understanding of the power centers within the party. As those centers have changed throughout his career, DeSantis has adjusted nimbly from tea-partyer to Trumpista. The identity he recognized in the spring of 2020, and embraced with deepening militancy, is founded on opposition to social-distancing policies during the coronavirus pandemic.

DeSantiss skepticism of public-health authorities paid economic and political dividends, at least for a while. During the 202021 academic year, when most states stuck with remote learning, Florida opened its schools, a position even Democrats belatedly recognized as correct. He has used COVID as a stage to pick successful fights with the media, which has sometimes overreached in its criticism of his pandemic policy. Last year, a 60 Minutes segment accused him of corruption for steering vaccine distribution to the Publix chain of pharmacies, which had donated to his PAC, though many acknowledged the popular outlet was a logical partner for the program. DeSantis deftly used the episode to thrill conservatives with sharp counterpunches against the media. The whole thing is a big lie, he fumed, using a PowerPoint presentation to make his case.

But DeSantiss aggressive COVID politics have also seen him take increasingly extreme positions. Over the past year, DeSantiss defense of what he calls freedom over Faucism which, in addition to keeping schools open, has involved blocking towns from mandating masks and businesses from requiring vaccines and at one point scolding high-school students for wearing masks at a photo op has drawn him into the arms of the anti-vaccine movement. He has appeared at a press conference with an anti-vaxxer, suspended a state health official for encouraging his staff to increase their vaccine uptake, and appointed vaccine skeptic Joseph Ladapo to serve as the states top health official. (People are being forced to put something in their bodies that we dont know all there is to know about yet, Ladapo claimed. No matter what people on TV tell you, its not true. Were going to learn more about the safety of these vaccines.) After confirming he received his first shot last year off-camera, DeSantis has refused to say whether he got a booster.

One result of DeSantiss support for the anti-vaccine movement is that, as of February, his state ranked 46th nationally in its share of elderly citizens who have received a booster shot. During the COVID wave last winter, Floridas death rate significantly outstripped Californias. At his February 2021 CPAC speech, DeSantis boasted that his state had a (slightly) below-average COVID death rate. His COVID riff at this years CPAC made no mention of mortality statistics.

DeSantiss oppositional approach to politics borrows heavily from Trumps style but with noticeable adjustments. Compared with the original, DeSantiss version of Trumpism is much more methodical, which robs it of its organic spontaneity yet also eliminates the frequent blowback. He has followed Trumps practice of using Twitter to launch unhinged attacks on the media and liberals, with the important revision of outsourcing the job to his spokespeople, most notably press secretary Christina Pushaw. This allows DeSantis to get much of the benefit of Trumps fire hose of abuse, exciting conservative activists and flustering reporters with wild accusations, all while his underlings absorb the reputational damage.

Trumps genuine ignorance and limited vocabulary allowed him to effortlessly channel the Republican bases contempt for the educated elite. DeSantis has to work at it. Last fall, he mockingly cited a Wall Street Journal article on the declining number of men attending college. I guess there was a decline in the number of men, the percentage of men going to college or whatever, he told his audience. And they acted like this was a bad thing. And honestly, like, you know, to me, I think that is probably a good sign. This is not, of course, advice that the double-Ivy DeSantis took himself.

DeSantiss culture-war appeals usually steer clear of Trumps overt racism. (The one exception was during the 2018 general election, when he warned voters not to monkey this up by electing his Black Democratic opponent, a phrase that might have been a deliberate racist appeal but could also have been an unfortunate slip of the tongue.) He often attempts to formulate positions that could drive a wedge between the left and the center. Most important, while Trumps culture-war gestures often produced nothing but ephemeral content for conservative media, DeSantis has placed real state power behind the right-wing social agenda.

DeSantis on Monday signed a bill into law that would restrict classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, preventing teachers from explaining things like why some children have two fathers or two mothers. (Democrats offered an amendment to ensure the law would be limited to discussions of sex. Republicans voted it down.) The laws deepest potential for harm lies in its details. It bans such discussions either before the fourth grade or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate. Not only is the standard of appropriateness inherently subjective, but its enforcement mechanism enables parents who dont like the instruction their child gets on gender to sue.

You dont need to be a social liberal to see the potential for havoc. The law will open a lawsuit factory for culture war organizations to go after schools, the libertarian magazine Reason notes, forcing schools to shell out money to defend themselves and giving the most conservative parents the ability to veto school discussions that other parents are perfectly fine with.

DeSantis has appeared undaunted, tearing into a reporter who quoted Democrats who called it the Dont Say Gay bill before it was signed. This allowed him to highlight, once again, his martyrdom at the hands of the media without having to address the more serious objections to the bill. Pushaw went on Twitter to reframe the law as an Anti-Grooming Bill, writing, If youre against the anti-Grooming bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you dont denounce the grooming of 4- to 8-year-old children. It was a perfectly orchestrated DeSantis culture-war set piece.

DeSantis is also preparing to sign what he calls the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, a measure preventing uncomfortable racial discussions at any public school or college in the state that is so broad it would ban teachers or professors from defending affirmative action. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech group that has frequently denounced left-wing indoctrination and censorship on campus, describes the bill as flatly unconstitutional.

This spring, DeSantis staked out a position to the right of his own party by promising to veto a congressional map designed by Republicans. DeSantis insisted instead on a more aggressive map that would eliminate two of the states five Black-held seats. DeSantis believes this maneuver can both increase his partys strength in Congress and provoke a legal fight that would lead to the Supreme Courts striking down the remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act that protect minority representation in legislative redistricting. In meetings, he would just demand, Pass my maps! My maps! My maps! Hes just bizarrely obsessed with this, a Republican told NBC.

A measure that received less attention than either, but has enormous significance, is one DeSantis signed with little fanfare. In 2018, nearly two-thirds of Florida voters approved a ballot initiative to allow former felons to vote. Felon disenfranchisement is a relic of the post-Reconstruction era, when white southern states used it, in combination with laws heavily targeting Black men, as a tool to limit voting. The referendum granted eligibility to more than a million Floridians.

DeSantis, who was elected governor at the same time the initiative passed, acted quickly to nullify it once in office. Republicans pushed through a law requiring former felons to pay off any outstanding fines or court debt before they could vote. At least three-quarters of eligible voters owe court debt, and of those, the vast majority cant pay it back.

The point of the bill was not to compel payments. Indeed, because the state has no central database listing all fines, many voters who had the money, and an intense enough desire to vote, to pay for the privilege could not do so. The bills purpose was to disenfranchise those voters. Republicans have been implementing voting-rights restrictions across the country since about 2011, but no state has enacted a measure as sweeping and draconian as Floridas. DeSantis is the only governor since the Jim Crow era to institute a literal poll tax.

After signing the law, DeSantis proclaimed on his official Twitter account, Voting is a privilege that should not be taken lightly. He conveyed his beliefs with chilling accuracy: Voting is a privilege, not, as many Americans believe, a right.

Trump and DeSantis have been circling each other since the 2020 election, and their budding rivalry has so far been shaped by the GOPs two great preoccupations of the immediate post-Trump era: the pandemic and Trumps attempts to steal the election.

The incipient contest broke into public view in December. It began when DeSantis appeared on Fox News with Maria Bartiromo, who asked if he had gotten a booster shot. DeSantis evaded the question and changed the subject to his fight against vaccine requirements. A couple of weeks later, Pushaw announced that DeSantis was refusing to disclose his status as a matter of medical privacy.

The next week, Trump appeared on One America News and, without naming him, ridiculed DeSantis for being afraid to come clean. I watched a couple of politicians be interviewed and one of the questions was Did you get the booster? Trump said. Because they had the vaccine, and theyre answering like in other words, the answer is Yes, but they dont want to say it because theyre gutless. You gotta say it, whether you had it or not. Say it.

Quickly afterward, DeSantis hit back. The lobbyist Josh Holmes, an ally of Mitch McConnells, asked DeSantis on his podcast if he had any regrets about his term in office. DeSantis replied that he wished he had spoken out more forcefully against Trumps early, intermittent endorsements of social distancing when the coronavirus pandemic began, which he described as locking down the country. In other words, DeSantis considers his biggest mistake in office failing to push back against something Donald Trump did.

The most revealing aspect of the episode was how the conservative media covered it. If you listened to the Trump-critical outlets on the right the ones aligned with the GOP Establishments belief that Trumps personality is a liability for the party the first shots had been fired in DeSantiss uprising. National Review, which has become the premier intellectual organ of the anti-anti-Trump right while pining for his replacement, ran columns with headlines like Could DeSantis Beat Trump? and The DeSantis-Trump Tensions Will Lead to a Test of Strength.

Meanwhile, the most loyal Trumpist corners of the conservative media denied the entire premise that DeSantis and Trump were in conflict. American Greatness, an online magazine invented in response to the Trump campaign and premised on turning his slogans into a political program, insisted that the New York Times story on the Trump-DeSantis feud is kayfabe (a staged conflict). In a column headlined Why the Medias Attempt to Split DeSantis and Trump Isnt Working, the Federalists Mollie Hemingway argued that the corporate media is trying to pit Trump and DeSantis against each other because theyre a threat to the Establishment.

If youre a Republican who wants Trump gone, DeSantis is the man with the guts to take him on. If youre a Republican who adores Trump, DeSantis remains his loyal ally. Both wings of the party are jostling for DeSantiss approval and broadcasting DeSantis-friendly messages to their audiences.

The same dynamic can be seen in DeSantiss courtship of the anti-vaccine movement. Pro-vaccine conservatives maintain the pretense that DeSantis only opposes vaccine mandates, calling him a vocal proponent of the COVID vaccines and insisting that the claim he is encouraging doubt about the safety or efficacy of the vaccines is a lie. Meanwhile, anti-vaccine activists have hailed DeSantis as their champion. Vaccine skeptic Robert Malone, appearing on Steve Bannons podcast, gushed, Ron DeSantis and surgeon general Joe Ladapo are giving hope to the rest of the world. They are listening to the key messages we are putting forth.

If you completely dismiss the possibility that DeSantis could pry the Republican base away from a president to whom it has formed a cultlike attachment, you may not be considering the potential effect of two more years of DeSantis being given the sort of coverage in the right-wing media that Pravda devoted to Joseph Stalin.

What a DeSantis-led Republican Party would look like is perhaps best captured in his response to the claims that the 2020 election was stolen. DeSantis began by playing the familiar role of Trump defender, complaining the day after the election about Fox News decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden. (The network, he speculated, had some type of motive, whether it was ratings, whether it was something else.) He went on Hannitys show to warn of vote dumps, a Republican term designed to cast suspicion on the results coming out of Democratic counties: I tell you, what Im seeing in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania is troubling, Sean.

Later that day, DeSantis went on Fox News again and floated the possibility that Republican-controlled legislatures in battleground states won by Biden could override the election results and appoint Trump electors.

On the day of the insurrection, DeSantis issued a perfunctory rebuke (Violence or rioting of any kind is unacceptable) before pivoting back to his comfortable posture of offense. In the past year, he has assailed Liz Cheney for cooperating with the investigation of the attack (We want people that are going to fight the left), refused to say whether Biden legitimately won the election, and similarly declined to clarify whether Pence was correct to certify the Electoral College results.

By the time the anniversary of the insurrection arrived, DeSantis was floating the right-wing rumor that the violence on January 6 had actually been ginned up by undercover FBI agents. But mostly he resented the media for covering the issue at all. This is their Christmas: January 6, he complained. They are going to take this and milk this for anything they could to be able to smear anyone who ever supported Donald Trump.

DeSantis also marked the anniversary by wooing right-wing social-media personalities with an invitation to his office, dinner at the governors mansion, and rooftop drinks. One of the less visible aspects of DeSantiss political operation has been its appeals to conservative activists who have gained clout and influence during the Trump era and who have legitimized vaccine skepticism, support for Vladimir Putin, and dismissing or even participating in the January 6 insurrection. Pushaw attended an event to promote the anti-gay education bill held by Brandon Straka, who was recorded at the Capitol on January 6 urging the crowd to seize a police officers shield and yelling Go, go, go! Esther Byrd, whom DeSantis appointed to the states board of education, has reportedly defended the January 6 rioters, QAnon, and the Proud Boys.

DeSantiss unembarrassed courtship of right-wing extremists has broadened his array of media advocates. Perhaps most important, his no-enemies-to-the-right strategy has sent a message about his brand: Unlike the weak Republican Establishment, DeSantis will stand with conservatives.

In January, a small band of white supremacists converged in Orlando, where they chanted White power! and roughed up a Jewish student. Pushaw suggested on Twitter that the white supremacists were actually Democrats pretending to be Nazis to make DeSantis look bad, a charge that was quickly debunked.

When DeSantis was asked about the episode at a press conference, he could have confined himself to a rote denunciation of the racist hoodlums, as several of his fellow Florida Republicans did. Instead, he launched an extended diatribe against Democrats who are trying to use this as some type of political issue to try to smear me. He then wound his way through such talking points as Ilhan Omar, the BDS movement, Louis Farrakhan, inflation, illegal immigration, crime, and the supposed failures of the Biden administration which the press was allegedly trying to obscure by bringing up the Orlando attack. Rubio, standing behind DeSantis, shuffled his feet uncomfortably as DeSantiss rant went on. Were not playing their game, he insisted, falling back on his occasional habit of narrating his own political strategy. Their game, in this case, meant accepting the terms of debate as defined by what he has called the corrupt media.

In a high-profile editorial denouncing Trump six years ago a cover story with the glittering tagline Against Trump National Review asked, If Trump were to become the president, the Republican nominee, or even a failed candidate with strong conservative support, what would that say about conservatives? More recently, National Reviews editor, Rich Lowry, made the case for DeSantis on the grounds that he is the closest possible thing to Trump. The challenge to Trump, he reasoned, will have to come from the Trump wing at this point, more like the Trump fuselage, wing and landing gear of the party.

The paradigmatic DeSantis constituent within the Republican elite would be William Barr. The former attorney general, who released a memoir in March describing his clashes with Trump over the 2020 election, has called Trump delusional and says he wants to nominate young candidates who will fight for principle but dont have the sort of obnoxious personal characteristics that alienate a lot of voters. But Barr eagerly supported many of Trumps efforts to weaponize the Justice Department and has conceded that he will vote for Trump again should he be nominated. Its worth noting that the one major difference between Barr and DeSantis is that the former drew the line at Trumps attempt to overturn the results of the last election. With DeSantis, theres no telling where that line might be.

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Is Ron DeSantis the Future of Trumpism? - New York Magazine

Mr. Pavlovski and Rumble representatives did not respond to interview requests.

But he has made clear in streamed remarks to Rumble creators and to others that his ambitions are far greater than increasing traffic to his website and app. With investments from like-minded critics of Big Tech like Mr. Thiel, Mr. Pavlovski has described a vision for building a new internet a kind of alt-web that is entirely distinct from the dominant players in the industry.

Rumble has already built out its own cloud service infrastructure and video streaming capacity, offering it and its partners greater independence from the Amazons and Microsofts of the internet and the assurance that they cant be shut down if one of those providers decides to pull the plug over objectionable content. Looming large in the minds of Rumble fans is the experience of the social media network Parler, which effectively shut down once Amazon said it would no longer host the site on its computing services after the Jan. 6 attacks last year.

The promise of independence from the tech giants led Mr. Trump to have Rumble provide technology and cloud services for Truth Social, which has struggled to become fully operational on its own. In a statement announcing the partnership in December, Mr. Trump said he had picked Rumble because its among the service providers who do not discriminate against political ideology.

Rumble has also secured exclusive arrangements with popular content creators who have a following beyond conservatives and Trump supporters, such as the journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been vocal about his beliefs that technology behemoths and the mainstream media have too much power to quash speech. Rumble highlighted its partnership with Mr. Greenwald as an example of its content-neutral approach. (As for what it considers out of bounds, Rumble says it does not tolerate anything that is overtly racist, promotes violence or breaks the law.)

But there are also the popular Rumble creators the company doesnt talk about in news releases, like Alex Jones of Infowars, who was barred from YouTube and other mainstream platforms in 2018 and now has more than 100,000 Rumble followers.

Thats a small number compared with the millions on YouTube who followed Mr. Jones, who has spread bogus theories that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre was staged as part of a government plot to confiscate firearms. Those who study the right-wing media ecosystem say it is difficult to tell how large the overall audience for hard-right content is, in large part because the traffic data available for individual sites includes a lot of overlap from users who frequent more than one.

Its an intensely engaged population, said Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School who is a co-author of a book about the ways conservative outlets reinforce their messages through repetition and shut down dissent. For an individual platform like Rumble, he added, the audience is likely to be larger than whatever the size is on paper.

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Rumble, the Rights Go-To Video Site, Has Much Bigger Ambitions - The New York Times

Donald Trump has promised supporters that he will return to the White House in 2024 during a speech in Florida on Saturday.

The former president appeared on stage as part of an American Freedom Tour event in Fort Lauderdale.

With the support of everyone in this room, we will take back the House, we will take back the Senate and we will take back our country, said Mr Trump, according to a report by Insider.

He continued: And then most importantly in 2024, we are going to take back our beautiful White House.

You had a president that always put America first, he added. I will be back and we will be better and stronger than ever before.

The former president, 75, has continued to drop big hints about a 2024 run but has not announced any formal plans.

At the Florida rally he also repeated false claims that he had won the 2020 US presidential election.

"We won twice. We did much better the second time, and we may have to do it again," he said.

Mr Trump lost the election by 74 electoral college votes, and approximately 7 million votes, getting 46.9 per cent of the popular vote to President Joe Bidens 51.3 per cent.

Other speakers scheduled for the Florida event included his eldest son Donald Trump Jr, rightwing commentator Candace Owens, and conservative radio host Dan Bongino.

Read more here:

I will be back: Trump promises 2024 return to White House at Florida rally - The Independent

To the editor:

There is one thing I know for sure about Donald Trump. History will remember him as the worst president of the United States. Unless of course a worst one comes along in the future.

How do I know this? Its because historians look at what the subjects contemporaries have written about him.

Is there a person who has been closely associated with Trump who has not written a book that puts him in a very bad light?

Yes, there may be a few, but you can bet most of them will soon write about their time with Trump, too; and it wont be pretty.

Historians will have a trove of information to choose from. An embarrassment of riches, if you will. And, because they will not quite understand the emotions of our time, they will wonder how it was possible for him to win in the first place, and how close he came to winning a second time. That, I think will be the focus of historians.

How the people with the best standard of living the world had ever known up to that time, could feel so downtrodden (do you see the dont tread on me flags along with the Trump ones?) that they would want such a freak of nature to be their president.

They will wonder how that human wrecking ball (just take a look at all his business failings, and the squandering of his inheritance) could possibly be thought of as a builder of a greater America. There is a saying When the only tool you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. Trump and his chum, (Russian President) Vladimir Putin, see the world that way; a nail that sticks up and needs to be hammered down.

And heres another prediction. Joe Biden will be known as the most consequential,one-term president the U.S. will see. The man who came along too late to run for a second term, but just in the nick of time to save America, and perhaps the world, from a new age of despotic darkness.

Dominic Cuc

North Attleboro

Original post:

Historians will have the final say on Donald Trump - The Sun Chronicle

Republicans must protect some challenging districts as well, with 15 GOP members in President Joe Biden-won seats, and any Democratic path to another majority involves picking off a number of those.

But the new midterm math of the House landscape shows Democrats are in a much tougher spot, grappling with a potentially lethal brew of factors including a contracting battlefield and a diminished president. The sitting presidents party has gotten wiped out of most of their crossover districts along with plenty of others where the previous presidential race was close in each recent midterm election. And a net loss of just five seats will be enough to flip the House.

Its hard to run away from an unpopular president, especially in the midterm, said Democratic Rep. Ron Kind, who is retiring from a rural southwestern Wisconsin seat Trump won by 5 points. And so the presidents numbers have to get healthier going into the fall, or there will be a lot of Democrats struggling this year.

So far redistricting has shrunk the number of truly competitive seats those decided by less than 5 points at the presidential level in 2020 down to just 31, according to a POLITICO analysis. (Before the redraws, there were about 50 seats decided by that margin.) Democrats have bolstered a number of incumbents districts, but they have also seen potential offensive targets disappear, leaving them with less room for error.

With Bidens approval in the low 40s, Republicans expect their swing-seat incumbents will need less outside help, freeing up party resources and time to target Democratic incumbents in blue-leaning districts and potentially catch them sleeping.

There really are not very many swing seats left, said Dan Conston, the president of the Congressional Leadership Fund, the chief House GOP super PAC. That is forcing us to look at many more Democrat-leaning districts. But the political environment is good enough that we should be able to compete in traditional Democrat territory that we couldnt in a normal election cycle.

Outside of redistricting-created problems, theres not going to be a lot of defense that will need to be played, he added.

Thanks to redistricting, retirements and increased polarization and a decline in ticket splitting, the number of members in a district carried by the opposite partys presidential nominee is relatively low. But if history is any indication, its also possible that Republicans could take back the House by sweeping away all the Democrats in Trump districts.

When Democrats won control of the House in 2006, 10 of the 18 Republicans lost reelection in districts carried by John Kerry in 2004. When the GOP wrested back the gavel in 2010, 36 of the 48 Democrats in John McCain-won seats were defeated. And four years ago, victorious House Democrats captured all but three of the 25 Republicans districts Hillary Clinton carried.

That gives the Trump-district Democrats the look of an endangered species heading into November 2022. The list of those running consists of: Reps. Tom OHalleran of Arizona, Jared Golden of Maine, Cindy Axne of Iowa, Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania.

Cartwright has a special distinction of being the only Democrat to win in a Trump district in 2016, 2018 and 2020. The rest lost, retired or were not in a Trump seat for all of the past three elections.

Itll be four times if Im able to pull it off, Cartwright said, referencing his previous wins since Trumps 2016 victory. Part of his strategy: I know why people voted for Trump in my district and I have never condemned them for doing it.

And even though Bidens numbers are sagging, Cartwright said he is still upbeat about his chances against the same GOP candidate he beat in 2020.

What was different about Donald Trump was that he was refreshing, Cartwright said. He didnt speak like other candidates. Its a very difficult act to replicate and when they run garden-variety Republicans against me, they cant do it.

Trump notched a 3-point win Carthwrights northeastern Pennsylvania seat. OHalleran was redrawn into a rural Arizona seat that Trump won by 8 points. Kaptur, meanwhile, saw her northern Ohio seat swing from one of the bluest in the country to one of the most competitive. (There is still a chance Ohios map could change due to a court challenge.) They could be joined by Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas of New Hampshire, a state that has not yet completed redistricting.

The number of open, Trump-won seats speaks to the difficulty Democratic incumbents face in 2022. Kind retired rather than run again. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) and Andy Levin (D-Mich.) both abandoned districts Trump carried narrowly to run in neighboring seats. (Levin will have to beat a fellow Democrat incumbent, Rep. Haley Stevens, to return next year.)

GOP legislatures also transformed districts in Georgia and Tennessee into deep red seats and automatic pickups that forced Democratic incumbents to retire or run elsewhere.

But Democrats will have to defend members in Biden-won seats too especially those in the 14 districts the president carried by 5 points or less. That group includes: Reps. Susan Wild (D-Pa.), Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), Elaine Luria (D-Va.) and Dan Kildee (D-Mich.).

Its mostly about winning in those Biden seats, but not always, not exclusively, Tim Persico, the executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said of the Democratic strategy this cycle. And we have really, really strong candidates across the country in districts that the president won by a million and districts that the president lost.

Still, Democrats have signaled that they will be selective about offensive opportunities. When the DCCC named a dozen challengers to its Red to Blue program for top-tier candidates, the committee only added two candidates in Trump-won districts, both in swingy Iowa seats.

They are most focused on picking off the 15 Republicans who were drawn into Biden-won districts. Three of those seats are open because Reps. Lee Zeldin and John Katko are not seeking reelection in New York and Rep. Rodney Davis decided to run in a redder neighboring district in Illinois.

Three other top targets Reps. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.), David Valadao (R-Calif.) and Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) all hold seats Biden carried by double digits.

The DCCC also hopes to oust Reps. Andy Harris (R-Md.), David Schweikert (R-Ariz.), Yvette Herrell (R-N.M.), Don Bacon (R-Neb.), Peter Meijer (R-Mich.), Young Kim (R-Calif.), Michelle Steel (R-Calif.), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and Steve Chabot (R-Ohio). All hold seats Biden won in 2020, but his current standing will determine just how tough their reelections will be.

I dont think hes particularly popular there now, Chabot said of his Cincinnati district, which backed Biden by nearly 9 points. Although that can always be in flux. But I think if you look at his policies, theyve been pretty disastrous for the community.

The remaining four maps could change these numbers slightly, especially Florida which has not yet finalized its 28 congressional seats. New Hampshire, Louisiana and Missouri have also not completed redistricting.

Democrats have done a decent job recruiting challengers to take on the Biden Republicans, though they notably lack a well-funded candidate against Fitzpatrick in the Philadelphia suburbs. But the GOPs strength is that theyve landed solid candidates across the map, from the easily won districts to the tougher ones.

Theres Jeremy Hunt, a Black Army veteran challenging Rep. Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.); former La Porte Mayor Blair Milo, a Navy veteran running against Rep. Frank Mrvan (D-Ind.); Tanya Wheeless, a former Phoenix Suns executive competing against Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.); and George Logan, an ex-state senator challenging Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.).

GOP strategists believe they can contest seats Biden carried by low double-digit margins if the current environment holds. And Democrats are bracing for the worst-case scenario.

I think the general feeling right now is: Its better to be prepared to go to battle in a larger numbers of districts and not have to do it, said Dan Sena, a former DCCC executive director. And if those are not competitive races, youre still prepared for a fight.

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The new midterm math: How redistricting, Biden and Trump shaped the battle for the House - POLITICO

WASHINGTON

The last time (and maybe the first time) most Americans heard of Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president was at the center of a scandal that would lead to the impeachment of then-President Trump.

Trump in 2019 threatened to hold up weapons deliveries to Ukraine caught even then in a simmering war with Russian proxies unless Zelensky helped him dig up political dirt on rival Joe Biden.

Today, the shadow of that scandal lingers. How much did Trumps toying with Ukraine, cozying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin and, ultimately, Trumps acquittal on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress influence Putins decision to invade Ukraine?

Putin had already bitten off bits of Ukraine with the illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014, and a swath of neighboring Georgia six years earlier. But nothing compared with the massive attack he launched across Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, on Feb. 24.

Numerous experts and current and former officials say Putin was emboldened by the Trump years. The former KGB officer turned president ably manipulated Trump into publicly backing his denials of having interfered to Trumps benefit in U.S. elections. And, according to former aides, Putin convinced Trump to accept his claim that Ukraine was part of Russia.

It is impossible to know all of Putins thinking as he launched the ferocious war that has already claimed thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives and obliterated parts of the fledgling democracy that sought to strengthen ties with the West.

By most accounts, Putin stewed in grievances for years the expansion of NATO farther east into his sphere of influence, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and a post-Cold War world order that marginalized Russia waiting for an opportunity to build back his vision of a grand Russian superpower empire.

He sensed that opportunity with the election of cynical, norms-busting Trump, who at one point declared the North Atlantic Treaty Organization obsolete and has repeatedly, to this day, praised the Russian leader.

I think Putin saw how Trump viewed Ukraine as a pawn, Marie Yovanovitch, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who testified against Trump in the impeachment trial, said in a recent TV appearance. Putin saw that we had an administration that was willing to trade our national security for personal and political gain.

Fiona Hill, a highly regarded Russia expert who served on Trumps National Security Council and also testified during the impeachment trial, said the former administration did take steps against Moscow on other issues, expelling diplomats and imposing sanctions. But at a critical period, when Ukraine was fighting Russia and needed weapons, Trump had his own political future in mind.

It sent a message to Putin that Ukraine is a plaything for him and for the United States. And that nobodys really serious about protecting Ukraine, Hill added. And that was ultimately a sign of weakness.

It was not Trump alone. During the Obama administration, Putin invaded parts of eastern Ukraine, annexing the Crimean peninsula and installing Russian proxies to fight Ukrainian forces in the Donbas region with minimal U.S. or international rebuke.

Trump supporters and some Republicans say President Biden has to share in the blame. The ugly withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in the summer last year, ending a 20-year war but sacrificing that nation to chaos, also illustrated an administration unable to lead, they say.

Putin watched the United States do just about everything it could to undermine alliances and partnerships under Donald Trump, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder said in a recent conference sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. Then, Daalder added, Biden took over and talked about America being back and yet struggled, initially, to rebuild those alliances.

Still, Trumps actions, and the lack of significant consequences he faced, represented a unique opening, a bright green light for Putin in Ukraine.

Trumps impeachment the first of two began in the Democratic-led House on Dec. 18, 2019, and ended with a trial and acquittal in the GOP-controlled Senate on Feb. 5, 2020. It stemmed from an infamous call on July 25, 2019, that the then-president made to Zelensky, a fellow novice politician, who had just been elected.

In the call, a transcript of which the White House released after a whistleblower complaint, Zelensky pleaded for more military weaponry including the Javelin missile systems that are now helping to stall Russian advances on Ukrainian cities. Trump agreed but said that first, he wanted Zelensky to do us a favor.

The favor involved investigating Bidens son Hunter and his lucrative position with the Ukrainian oil conglomerate Burisma. Zelensky resisted, with his staff insisting on a formal request for an investigation if the U.S. wanted one. His staff also emphasized to State Department officials that Zelensky was leery about getting involved in U.S. politics.

Trump had already frozen the aid, a $391-million package of military equipment and other assistance that had been approved by Congress with bipartisan support. At least 25 Ukrainians died in fighting in the east in the weeks that followed, according to an investigation at the time by the Los Angeles Times, although a direct link is impossible to prove.

Only after members of Congress on both sides of the aisle learned about the halt in aid was it finally released on Sept. 11, 2019. It was the first time the U.S. provided lethal military aid to Ukraine, an important, albeit delayed, milestone.

That chapter, which resulted in the president, former presidents, impeachment, sadly was an encouragement to Putin and weakened Ukraine even in this fight, said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), who led the first Trump impeachment inquiry.

What Americans need to understand about that sordid chapter of our history is Ukraine was even then at war with Russia ... Ukrainians were even then dying every week, sometimes every day, Schiff said.

What that told Putin, tragically, is the United States doesnt care about Ukraine, it doesnt care about its people, it doesnt care about its democratic aspirations. It doesnt care if Ukrainians get killed by Russians. I think thats the message Trumps conduct sent, that we would use Ukraine as a political plaything.

Schiff added that Putin anticipated if he started a broader invasion of Ukraine, he could count on Trump either to praise him or to criticize Biden.

Trump has done both.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said last week that Putin was more influenced by Biden.

I think Putin has wanted Ukraine for a long time. He was waiting for an opportunity where he thought America was in retreat, pulling back from the rest of the world, McConnell told PBS NewsHour. There was a vivid picture of the evacuation of Afghanistan for everybody in the world to see that America was coming home and pulling in our horns and not inclined to take the forward position we have in the past. It was like a green light to Vladimir Putin.

But Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who has been critical of Trump, said it was absurd to excuse the former president or think his presence in the White House would have deterred Putins invasion of Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin, [North Koreas] Kim Jong Un, Xi [Jinping] of China were getting everything they wanted with Trump, Kinzinger told CNN on Thursday.

Link:

News Analysis: Trump delayed weapons to Ukraine and praised Putin. Did that trigger war? - Los Angeles Times

Weeks after the 2020 election, at least one Trump White House aide was named as secretly producing a report that alleged Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden because of Dominion Voting Systems research that formed the basis of the former presidents wider efforts to overturn the election.

The Dominion report, subtitled OVERVIEW 12/2/20 History, Executives, Vote Manipulation Ability and Design, Foreign Ties, was initially prepared so that it could be sent to legislatures in states where the Trump White House was trying to have Bidens win reversed.

But top Trump officials would also use the research that stemmed from the White House aide-produced report to weigh other options to return Trump to the presidency, including having the former president sign off on executive orders to authorize sweeping emergency powers.

The previously unreported involvement of the Trump White House aide in the preparation of the Dominion report raises the extraordinary situation of at least one administration official being among the original sources of Trumps efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The publicly available version of the Dominion report, which first surfaced in early December 2020 on the conservative outlet the Gateway Pundit, names on the cover and in metadata as its author Katherine Friess, a volunteer on the Trump post-election legal team.

But the Dominion report was in fact produced by the senior Trump White House policy aide Joanna Miller, according to the original version of the document reviewed by the Guardian and a source familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The original version of the Dominion report named Miller - who worked for the senior Trump adviser Peter Navarro as the author on the cover page, until her name was abruptly replaced with that of Friess before the document was to be released publicly, the source said.

The involvement of a number of other Trump White House aides who worked in Navarros office was also scrubbed around that time, the source said. Friess has told the Daily Beast that she had nothing to do with the report and did not know how her name came to be on the document.

It was not clear why Millers name was removed from the report, which was sent to Trumps former attorney Rudy Giuliani on 29 November 2020, or why the White House aides involvement was obfuscated in the final 2 December version.

Miller did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Dominion report made a number of unsubstantiated allegations that claimed Dominion Voting Systems corruptly ensured there could be technology glitches which resulted in thousands of votes being added to Joe Bidens total ballot count.

Citing unnamed Venezuelan officials, the report also pushed the conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems used software from the election company Smartmatic and had ties to state-run Venezuelan software and telecommunications companies.

After the Dominion report became public, Navarro incorporated the claims into his own three-part report, produced with assistance from his aides at the White House, including Miller and another policy aide, Garrett Ziegler, the source said.

Ziegler has also said on a rightwing podcast that he and others in Navarros office seemingly referring to Trump White House aides Christopher Abbott and Hannah Robertson started working on Navarros report about two weeks before the 2020 election took place.

Two weeks before the election, we were doing those reports hoping that we would pepper the swing states with those, Ziegler said of the three-part Navarro report in an appearance last July on The Professors Record with David K Clements.

The research in the Dominion report also formed the backbone of foreign election interference claims by the former Trump lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who argued Trump could, as a result, assume emergency presidential powers and suspend normal law.

That included Trumps executive order 13848, which authorized sweeping powers in the event of foreign election interference, as well as a draft executive order that would have authorized the seizure of voting machines, the Guardian has previously reported.

The claims about Venezuela in the Dominion report appear to have spurred Powell to ask Trump at a 18 December 2020 meeting at the White House coincidentally facilitated by Ziegler that she be appointed special counsel to investigate election fraud.

Millers authorship of the Dominion report was not the last time the Trump White House, or individuals in the administration, prepared materials to advance the former presidents claims about a stolen election and efforts to return himself to office.

The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack revealed last year it had found evidence the White House Communications Agency produced a letter for the Trump justice department official Jeffrey Clark to use to pressure states to decertify Bidens election win.

Link:

Trump White House aide was secret author of report used to push big lie - The Guardian

It looks like exhausted news consumers battered by polarized cable channels that elevate opinion over facts are finally being heard.

Piece by piece, a post-Trump media world is starting to take shape. It looks something like a universe where resentment and resistance are pushed to the side and straight news steps back into the spotlight.

In just the past few weeks, several high-profile developments point to an emerging correction in journalism:

Spectrum, a cable distributor which operates more than 30 local newsrooms around the country, has announced it will soon launch a national newscast, headed up by a former executive producer of NBC Nightly News. The move comes, Spectrum says, after a survey of 10,000 viewers showed a high level of trust in the companys local newscasts.

At the same time, cable outlet NewsNation said it would continue to expand the number of newscasts on the service reaching 21 hours a day by June. NewsNation, owned by The Hills parent company Nexstar Media Group, was launched in 2020 with a mission to deliver straight news.

And it is now apparent that CNNs new bosses will move quickly to bring the network back to the journalistic center. David Zaslav, who takes over as CEO of CNNs parent company later this spring, has said that overall wed probably be better off if we just had news networks in America rather than partisan opinion. To head CNN, Zaslav has tapped CBS producer Chris Licht, someone he calls a true news person.

Zaslav also labelled competitor Fox News much more of an advocacy network than a news network.

All of this is a tacit acknowledgement that journalism and cable news especially lost its way during the Trump years, when blatant calls to tribal instincts became the easiest pathway to ratings success.

But, just like the politics that placed Donald TrumpDonald TrumpNow is the time to rebuild America's refugee resettlement program Is a post-Trump media world beginning to take shape? Major government surveillance revelations fail to make a big splash MORE in the White House, that media development didnt appear out of thin air. It began slowly during George W. Bushs administration, when figures like MSNBCs Keith Olbermann and FOXs Bill OReilly came to dominate their networks and appeal to distinct political factions. The Tea Party revolt during the Obama years raised the stakes elevating additional star commentators like Glenn Beck and Rachel MaddowRachel Anne MaddowIs a post-Trump media world beginning to take shape? Ukraine proves cable can still do news, but does it really want to? Journalist: Rachel Maddow's hiatus from MSNBC could leave working class audience behind MORE.

Still, the opinion gloves truly came off during the Trump administration. Even CNN felt compelled to join the fray or suffer the ratings consequences. Bare-knuckled competition for tribal loyalty led to deep extremes, places in mass media where authoritarians are praised and a discredited dossier stays in the headlines far longer than it should.

The shift now underway includes a reassessment from top business leaders. Former Disney chief Bob Iger last week asserted theres a problem of profiting from, I call it inaccuracy, from opinion and from presenting things in an inaccurate fashion. Too many viewers, he said think of news in the wrong way, not how we knew it when we were growing up and we were taught news should be. Cable chieftain John Malone has talked about returning the industry to actual journalism.

Thats important. It could signal that certain titans of television may be willing to sit through some softening of revenue as key parts of the news environment readjust.

The most crucial unknown in this incipient shift is, as always in media, the audience. Too often, viewers tell researchers they want news sources they can trust, they want balance but dont follow through with their content choices. For these viewers, trust means loud voices I agree with, and balance means just the facts that bolster my views.

But some evidence does point to the existence of an exhausted majority. They will need to get off the sidelines and seek out news posts and programming that deliver what they say they want. Media leaders and investors are starting to make big bets on those viewers and readers. Its up to them to respond.

Just-the-facts journalism is important to a functioning democracy. People tired of where weve been are now being given an opportunity to vote with their time and attention and maybe help change where were going.

Joe Ferullo is an award-winning media executive, producer and journalist and former executive vice president of programming for CBS Television Distribution. He was a news executive for NBC, a writer-producer for Dateline NBC and worked for ABC News. Follow him on Twitter@ironworker1.

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Is a post-Trump media world beginning to take shape? | TheHill - The Hill