Ron DeSantis visits Iowa as Republican 2024 race heats up – as it happened

That’s it for the US politics blog for today, and indeed for the week. Thanks for joining us.

Here’s what we’ve been following:

• Ron DeSantis has been in Iowa, railing against what he calls “woke ideology”, and signing books, as he prepares to launch his likely run for the Republican party’s 2024 presidential nomination. Please read my colleague Joan E Greve’s account of his visit here.

• Republican support for Donald Trump in Iowa, meanwhile, has taken a nose dive. A Des Moines Register poll found that while 69% said they would “definitely” vote for Trump in the 2024 election when last asked in June 2021, only 47% say now that they will.

• Trump’s legal peril worsened (again) on three fronts. The former president is “likely” to be charged in New York over a illegal pay-off to an adult movie actress; federal prosecutors want his attorneys to testify again over his mishandling of classified documents; and a judge says an infamous video of him bragging about grabbing women inappropriately can be used in a lawsuit by a woman who accused him of raping her.

• Joe Biden urged “extremist Maga Republicans” to join him in rebuilding the US economy. In remarks from the White House, the president hailed a better than expected economic report that showed 311,000 jobs were added in February.

• Lachlan Murdoch, Fox Corp chief exec, said a $1.6bn defamation lawsuit brought against Fox News by the voting machine company Dominion, related to the network pushing lies about the 2020 presidential election, is “noise”.

• Biden met EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen at the White House to try to resolve a spat over electric vehicle tax credits. The leaders were expected to agree to open talks on a deal to open the US market to EU components eligible for the credits.

The White House has confirmed Joe Biden will meet prime ministers Rishi Sunak of the UK and Anthony Albanese of Australia in California on Monday for a conference to discuss areas of partnership between the countries.

The president will also meet the leaders bilaterally, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre announced at her Friday afternoon briefing.

Jean-Pierre did not reveal any other details of the summit that will take place in San Diego, but Sunak is known to be keen to discuss the Northern Ireland protocol with Biden.

The war in Ukraine, and western support for the country’s battles against the Russian invasion, are also likely to be high on the agenda.

Biden last met with Sunak in Bali, Indonesia, in November. The president’s first efforts at pronouncing the prime minister’s name, at a Diwali event at the White House in November shortly after Sunak took office, caused mirth when he called his fellow leader “Rashi Sanook”.

Sunak will sit down with NBC News anchor Lester Holt for an interview to be aired in the US on Monday night, the network announced.

Will veteran Vermont senator Bernie Sanders run for reelection? That’s the question being posed by an interesting article in New York magazine’s Intelligencer.

On one hand, Sanders, who has run for the Democratic presidential nomination in each of the last two elections, would seem to be at the peak of his powers. A respected authoritative figure whose voice carries great weight in progressive circles, he is the new chair of the Senate health committee, an issue he is extremely passionate about.

On the other, Sanders, who has been a senator since 2007, and a congressman before that since 1991, is 81 now, and would be 89 at the end of a subsequent term. He has not discussed his plans, either publicly or with his staff, Intelligencer says, but is acutely aware of his advancing years and overall health: he had a heart attack in 2019.

The article notes Vermont’s filing deadline is not until August 2024, so Sanders has no urgency to make up his mind. Some are also speculating he won’t make any announcement or decision until Joe Biden decides whether he’s running again for the White House.

You can read the Intelligencer article here.

Ron DeSantis has been wooing the Republican faithful in Iowa on Friday, ahead of a widely expected campaign for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination.

At a casino in Davenport, in the east of the state whose caucuses will kick off next year’s nomination season, the hard right Florida governor wasted little time in reaching for the cultural messaging popular with his supporters back home.

“We will never surrender to the woke mob,” he in a speech alongside Kim Reynolds, Iowa’s Republican governor.

“Our state is where the woke mob goes to die.”

Today’s visit is being seen as the unofficial launch of his presidential campaign, and a formal declaration is not expected until after the current session of the Florida legislature concludes its business in May.

DeSantis won reelection in Florida in November, and is building his second term on even more restrictive legislation. He has seized significant control of the state’s biggest employer, Disney; fired an elected state attorney he disagreed with; and engineered a “hostile takeover” of a historically liberal arts college to turn it into a model of conservative higher education.

New laws in Florida proposed this week would introduce a six-week abortion ban, allow the carry of firearms without a need for training or permits; and further curb freedoms in education and for the LBGTQ+ community.

It’s a message he hopes will resonate on a national scale as prepares to challenge Donald Trump for the Republican nomination. Trump will visit Iowa on Monday.

DeSantis was heading to the capital city of Des Moines later in the day to meet with a small contingent of Republican lawmakers, and to promote his newly released book, The Courage to be Free.

In Davenport, he was keen to brag about the margin of his reelection, according to the Des Moines Register, which reported he “railed against the ‘woke ideology’ that he said infected American education, health care and business.

“There’s certain little enclaves in our country that may be popular,” he told a crowd of several hundred.

“But it’s not popular with the vast majority of people. And I think it showed. From what we showed in Florida, not only can you have a good agenda and deliver, you can make big inroads with the electorate. And that’s exactly what we did. To go from a 32,000 to 1.5m margin, it doesn’t happen by accident.”

There’s an update on the health of Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, currently in hospital with concussion after a fall at an event on Wednesday night.

According to a “senior adviser”, cited by CNN, the 81-year-old Kentucky senator is “acting like his usual self” and is “eager to be released.”

The network’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju is also reporting McConnell has no physical signs of injury.

McConnell was taken to hospital on Wednesday after tripping at a private dinner and hitting his head. A childhood polio survivor, he suffered a fall at his Kentucky home in 2019, and fractured a shoulder.

The number of Iowa Republicans who say they “definitely” would vote for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election has slumped by more than 20% in barely a year and a half, a new poll has found.

The study for the Des Moines Register also revealed a swell of support for Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis, who is making a series of public appearances in the state today as he prepares a likely White House run of his own.

Trump’s favorability rating is 44%, compared to 42% for that of DeSantis. But it’s the plummeting number of Iowans who say they will definitely vote for Trump that will alarm his campaign the most.

In June 2021, the last time the newspaper posed the question, 69% of state Republicans said they would definitely back Trump in 2024. Now, that’s true for only 47% of them.

“Iowa is where the competition starts,” pollster J Ann Selzer told the Register.

“And someone who has already held the office and who won the state twice would be presumed to be the frontrunner. I don’t know that we can say that at this point.”

Trump will visit Iowa on Monday. DeSantis is there today. And Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who announced her candidacy last month, was wrapping up her own three-day trip Friday.

The House voted unanimously on Friday to declassify US intelligence information about the origins of Covid-19, which the Associated Press said was a sweeping show of bipartisan support near the third anniversary of the pandemic.

The 419-0 vote was final approval of the bill, sending it to Joe Biden’s desk to be signed into law.

Debate was brief and to the point: Americans have questions about how the deadly virus started and what can be done to prevent future outbreaks.

“The American public deserves answers to every aspect of the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Ohio Republican Michael Turner, chair of the House intelligence committee.

Despite the unanimous vote today, the origins of the virus have sparked furious partisan debate, as my colleague David Smith noted here earlier this month:

A quick reminder that the clocks go forward for most in the US in the early hours of this Sunday. Don’t be late for that power brunch.

Joe Biden continues his attacks on the GOP’s far right wing. Following his remarks earlier on this month’s strong jobs figures, he’s taken to Twitter.

“Extreme Maga [Make America Great Again] House Republicans are showing us what they value: tax breaks for the rich. They demand the biggest Medicare benefits cut in decades, ship jobs overseas, defund law enforcement, devastate our national and border security. It’s a gut punch to the middle class,” the US president tweeted earlier this afternoon.

It’s a response to the right-wing House Freedom Caucus group of Republican members of congress putting out a list of conditions involving cutting the federal budget in order to win their support for raising the US debt ceiling.

The HFC wants to end Biden’s forgiveness program for student loans, take away unspent funds issued for emergency relief relating to the coronavirus pandemic, take back funding for the federal tax authorities and action towards reversing the climate crisis that were included in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, putting restrictions on welfare programs, and more.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has previously assured that the GOP won’t force the US into a catastrophic default on its this year, but the stakes are high.

It’s been a busy Friday so far in US politics.

Ron DeSantis has made the first of two appearances in Iowa as the Republican Florida governor unofficially launches his campaign for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination.

He’s been signing books and posters, and hugging supporters and children as he prepares to meet lawmakers and influential party figures this afternoon.

Here’s what else we’ve been following:

• Joe Biden urged “extremist Maga Republicans” to join him in rebuilding the US economy. In remarks from the White House, the president hailed a better than expected economic report that showed 311,000 jobs were added in February.

• Donald Trump’s legal peril worsened (again) on three fronts. The former president is “likely” to be charged in New York over a illegal pay-off to an adult movie actress; federal prosecutors want his attorneys to testify again over his mishandling of classified documents; and a judge says an infamous video of him bragging about grabbing women inappropriately can be used in a lawsuit by a woman who accused him of raping her.

• Lachlan Murdoch, Fox Corp chief exec, says a $1.6bn defamation lawsuit brought against Fox News by the voting machine company Dominion, related to the network pushing lies about the 2020 presidential election, is “noise”.

• Biden meets EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen at the White House shortly to try to resolve a spat over electric vehicle tax credits. The leaders are expected to agree to open talks on a deal to open the US market to EU components eligible for the credits.

There’s more bad legal news for Donald Trump: the infamous Access Hollywood tape in which he bragged of grabbing women in a sexually aggressive manner, can be used in a lawsuit against him by a writer who alleges he raped her.

Federal court judge Lewis Kaplan ruled Friday that E Jean Carroll, who says Trump assaulted her in a New York department store changing room in the 1990s, can introduce the video as evidence.

He dismissed a motion from Trump’s attorneys to exclude it from the proceedings, the second time in three months he has ruled against them.

In January, he rejected as “absurd” their motion to dismiss the case entirely, based on a statute of limitations argument.

Carroll has sued Trump for defamation, for remarks while denying her allegation including that she was not his “type”. The case was brought under New York’s new Adult Survivor’s Act which opens a one-year window to sue alleged attackers even if statutes of limitations have expired.

Republicans in Iowa seem happy that Ron DeSantis is in town, at least if this tweet by CBS chief campaign correspondent Robert Costa is anything to go by.

Somewhere in the scrum is Florida’s governor, who has been, according to Costa: “Working the rope line in Davenport, taking selfies, signing posters, and holding kids put in his arms by fans for past 10-15 minutes and still going.”

DeSantis has also been signing copies of his book, The Courage to be Free, which is top of the bestseller lists of the New York Times and Amazon.

While the boss is out of town, his team back in Florida has also been hard at work. A press release from the governor’s office on Friday proudly announces that “nearly 11,000 migrants have been repatriated after attempting to enter the state illegally” since 21 August last year.

DeSantis, whose hardline immigration stance is expected to become a centerpiece of his expected run at the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has repeatedly bashed Joe Biden over border policy.

In January he signed a state of emergency for Florida in response to a surge of migration along the state’s coastline.

DeSantis is scheduled to address supporters in Iowa at lunchtime.

Joe Biden has just been speaking at the White House, urging Republican lawmakers to “join me” in rebuilding the US economy, and attacking again the extremist wing of the party.

The president was hailing a better than expected jobs report released Friday, showing 311,000 positions were added nationwide in February. He said “Maga Republicans”, named for Donald Trump’s make America great again slogan, were “the biggest threat to our recovery” by suggesting they would not support the lifting of the national debt.

“I urge our extreme my Republican friends in the Congress to put their threats aside. Join me in continuing the progress we’ve built. We got a lot more to do. So let’s finish the job,” Biden said, repeating the mantra from last month’s State of the Union address.

The president on Thursday unveiled a $6.8tn budget proposal in Philadelphia, a plan immediately declared “dead on arrival” by House Republicans, according to The Hill.

Biden said on Friday:

.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The biggest threat to our recovery is the reckless talk of my Maga friends. They’re threatening to default our national debt. In fact planning to default, as some Republicans seem to be doing, puts us very much at risk. I believe we should build on our progress, not go backwards.

Read more:

Lachlan Murdoch, son of Fox News tycoon Rupert Murdoch, has been defending the company as the fallout continues into the network’s airing of skewed January 6 Capitol riot footage earlier this week and its lies over the 2020 election.

The younger Murdoch was speaking at an industry conference hosted by Morgan Stanley on Thursday. A $1.6bn defamation lawsuit against Fox by the voting machine company Dominion was just “noise”, he asserted, and insisted that “middle America” loved the news channel so much because it reported “without fear or favor”.

“They see Fox News as not just a news channel, but really a channel that speaks, to sort of, middle America and respects the values of middle America as a media business that is most relevant to them,” Murdoch, Fox Corp chief executive, said, according to NPR.

“I think a lot of the noise that you hear about [the lawsuit] is actually not about the law, and it’s not about journalism,” he added, according to CNN.

The “fear or favor” claim in particular has raised eyebrows, given that numerous Fox News personalities repeatedly pushed Donald Trump’s “big lie” that his 2020 defat to Joe Biden was fraudulent, even as they privately acknowledged it was false.

Those pushing the lie included Tucker Carlson, who aired a slanted presentation on his prime time show this week dismissing the January 6 rioters as tourists, and Sean Hannity.

CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter on Friday was having none of it. “Text messages, emails, and deposition transcripts show that Fox’s coverage after the 2020 election was, in fact, shaped by fear of the audience and most definitely was in favor of Republicans. To claim otherwise is an affront to the truth,” it said.

The Dominion case may feature heavily in an upcoming defamation lawsuit Lachlan Murdoch is bringing against an Australian magazine Crikey, Vanity Fair reported Friday.

The Guardian reported in September that a Crikey article that said the Murdoch family was an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the January 6 riots was “self-evidently hyperbolic”, publisher Private Media argued in court documents defending the lawsuit.

Here’s background on that case:

Joe Biden is attempting to draw a line under a spat with the European Commission over electric vehicle tax credits on Friday, the Associated Press reports.

He will meet the commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen this afternoon. They are expected to agree to open negotiations between the US and EU on a deal that could boost the use of European minerals critical in the production of electric vehicle batteries eligible for US tax credits through Biden’s $375bn climate and clean energy law that passed last year.

The AP cites administration officials speaking on condition of anonymity before the leaders meet.

Biden and von der Leyen are also expected to use their Oval Office meeting to discuss Western coordination to support Ukraine in its war against Russia, joint efforts to decrease Europe’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels and concerns that China is considering providing weapons to Russia.

The summit is scheduled for 2pm.

Here’s some background reading on the dispute between the EU and US over the tax credits:

There are few days when Donald Trump isn’t at, or close to the center of attention in US politics, and today is no exception. The former president has trouble on two fronts.

Firstly, his lawyers have reportedly been told he’s likely to be facing criminal charges for allegedly paying off the adult film actor Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to cover up an affair.

In a series of angry, rambling messages on his Truth Social site, Trump denied the affair, or making a pay-off. Prosecutors in Manhattan have invited him to give testimony to a grand jury next week ahead of a probably indictment.

Secondly, federal prosecutors want to speak to Trump’s attorneys as their investigation into his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida intensifies.

As the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports: “Prosecutors… argued to a US judge on Thursday that one of the former US president’s lawyers should answer more questions before a grand jury over objections of attorney-client privilege.

“US prosecutors have been seeking to invoke the so-called crime-fraud exception that allows them to compel testimony about communications between an attorney and a client when they have evidence to suggest legal advice was used in furtherance of a crime.”

US district judge for the District of Columbia Beryl Howell has yet to rule.

The episodes highlight the legal jeopardy Trump is still in as he pursues his third White House run as a Republican. But whether they hamper his campaign, or rally support around him as Trump complains bitterly about a “witch hunt” remains to be seen

Read more:

It’s launch day on Friday, kind of, for Ron DeSantis’s 2024 presidential campaign.

The Republican Florida governor is in Iowa, an important state that will host early primary-season caucuses next year, for two public appearances and a round of meetings with lawmakers and other influential senior party figures.

It’s the clearest sign yet that the hard right politician is committed to challenge Donald Trump for the party’s nomination, even though he is not expected to declare it formally until after the Florida legislature closes its business in May.

He’ll be at a casino in Davenport, the state fairgrounds in Des Moines, and at the capitol building pressing the flesh in the company of Iowa governor and close ally Kim Reynolds.

His political action committee has a bulging moneybag in excess of $80m by some reports, his self-serving political tome, The Courage to Be Free, is riding high at the New York Times bestselling list, and he’s been wooing a raft of influential senior Republican figures at home in Florida, and on a tour of states including Texas, California, Alabama and New Hampshire.

But not everything in the DeSantis garden is rosy. Politico on Friday takes a look at the growing number of influential Republicans, an assortment of more moderate officials and donors, who are increasingly seeing the two-term governor as another incarnation of Trump himself.

They include Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, who according to Politico had harsh words for DeSantis last month at a Republican donor conference in Austin, Texas.

“[Let’s not] just nominate Trump Lite,” Christie told the gathering.

Christie also reportedly took a dig at DeSantis’s positioning on China and warning that the US risked siding into a proxy war, Politico said.

“Don’t be fooled by false choices” being pushed by “a fellow governor,” Christie said, wondering how “they teach foreign policy in Tallahassee”.

The episode suggests, in Politico’s view, that the moderates’ “Stop Trump” campaign has already widened to encompass DeSantis before he has even declared.

On CNN on Friday, Asa Hutchinson, the Republican former governor of Arkansas, who is mulling his own run, also weighed in.

“We need to have alternatives when it comes to who’s going to represent the Republican party, who’s going to potentially be our next president, and we need to have alternative voices,” he said.

“I’m pleased that I get encouragement for that. We’ll make a decision down the road. But in terms of the chaos that surrounding Donald Trump and his candidacy, that’s not the future of the Republican party. That’s not the leadership that we need in our country.”

As for the two declared Republican candidates, Trump will be in Iowa on Monday. More of him coming up. And Nikki Haley is wrapping up a three-day visit there today.

Read more:

Good morning US politics followers! We’ve made it to Friday and our final blog of the week, but there’s plenty still to talk about.

The race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination heats up today, with Florida governor and bestselling author Ron DeSantis visiting Iowa – which will host early caucuses next year – for two public appearances and a round of meetings with lawmakers and other influential senior party figures.

DeSantis, whose self-serving political memoir The Courage to Be Free has supplanted Prince Harry at the top of the New York Times bestsellers list, isn’t expected to formally declare his candidacy for at least another couple of months. But analysts see today’s events as the unofficial campaign launch for the politician a growing number of Republican detractors see as “Trump Lite”.

The former president, meanwhile, has his own troubles. Also heading to Iowa, on Monday, Donald Trump has been told he’s likely to face criminal charges in New York for allegedly paying off an adult film actor ahead of his 2016 victory.

We’ll be looking at all that this morning. Here’s what else we’re following today:

• The fallout from this week’s airing on Fox News of skewed footage from the January 6 Capitol attack continues, with Lachlan Murdoch, son of the embattled Fox empire owner Rupert Murdoch, raising eyebrows over his defense of the network.

• Mitch McConnell remains in hospital recovering from concussion after a fall at a dinner in Washington DC on Wednesday night. Joe Biden says he’s spoken to the family of the 81-year-old Republican Senate minority leader, and says “he’s gonna be alright”.

• There’s growing retirement speculation over the future of another Senate veteran, 81-year-old progressive Bernie Sanders, who has represented Vermont as an independent since 2007.

• There’s good economic news for Biden, one day after the president unveiled his budget proposals. The US added 311,000 jobs in February, a higher than expected figure.