US Politics

Donald Trump was scheduled to speak on Saturday at a Republican National Committee event held at his Mar-a-Lago resort, amid a weekend of summits and dinners in the former president’s corner of Florida.The Republican rush to court Trump – and to pay for the use of his properties – is proving highly profitable. According to the Washington Post, attendees at the 400-person banquet planned for Saturday paid more than $100,000 each to attend.On Saturday night, Trump was reportedly set to tell attendees: “I stand before you this evening filled with confidence that in 2022, we are going to take back the House and we are going to reclaim the Senate – and then in 2024, a Republican candidate is going to win the White House.”Nonetheless, debate continues over Trump’s place in a party he led to victory in one presidential election but then shepherded to defeat in another while losing the House and the Senate after four years of chaos and two impeachment trials.His spokesman, Jason Miller, told the Post he was still “the biggest name in politics”.A leading presidential historian countered, telling the Associated Press that where once Trump was “like Zeus … shooting tweets like thunderbolts from up high”, now he only released “little squeaks from the mouse of Mar-a-Lago”.As Republicans begin to mull their choice of presidential nominee for 2024, senators, governors and other figures are jostling for prominence and courting major donors.An unnamed attendee at events in Florida this weekend, an adviser to a top donor, told Politico the party’s focus was on limiting Trump’s influence in order to win back suburban voters who deserted him for Joe Biden.“The thing on every donor’s mind,” the person was quoted as saying, “is how much sway Trump should have.”Trump, however, consistently tops polls of Republican voters.He is also fervently courted for endorsements. In Florida on Friday he both hosted and endorsed Marco Rubio, a senator and former presidential rival many had thought likely to attract a challenge from Trump’s daughter Ivanka.Public appearances are also keenly sought. Amy Kremer of Women for America First, a conservative group holding an event at another Trump property, his golf course in Doral, Florida, told the Post: “We would love to see him. If he came and spoke to the group spending the weekend here, that would be great. If he came and played golf and people watched him … that would be great too.”Nonetheless some observers think Trump’s grip is slipping, not least because he has lost access to Twitter, his most powerful communication platform, for inciting the Capitol attack.Trump’s power “is waning by the day”, Alex Conant, a Republican consultant, told the AP. “When you’re president of the United States it’s very easy to insert yourself into every news cycle. But once you’ve left office, it has to be more strategic.”Conant said Trump should have announced a book, sat for primetime interviews or delivered speeches. Instead he has taken to releasing short tweet-like statements, sent straight to journalists by email. Trump has said he is developing his own social media platform but he has also said his statements work better than online messages.Speaking to the AP, Miller insisted Trump was still “the greatest news generator in American history” and said: “There was never this type of media interest in the post-presidential careers of Clinton, Bush or Obama.”Ari Fleischer, a White House press secretary under George W Bush, disagreed. Though Trump “looms large” in the Republican party, he said, and “was unlike any prior president in the amount of oxygen he sucked up … he increasingly resembles many former presidents in how little oxygen he now gets.”Harold Holzer, director of Hunter College’s Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, said: “I don’t think it’s unnatural for coverage to diminish. I’m sure it’s tough on his ego, given … how much ink he generates, but it’s not unnatural for an ex-president to get less attention.”Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, was harsher.“I think he lost all momentum when he got pulled from the platforms,” he said. “Politics is about momentum and he has none now. Where it used to be he was shooting tweets like Zeus, they were like thunderbolts from up high. Now it’s little squeaks from the mouse of Mar-a-Lago.”One election result this week did show Trump’s influence on key electoral battles: voters in the small Illinois town of Mettewa re-elected a mayor who ran a write-in campaign after Trump pardoned him in a gambling investigation.Casey Urlacher, the brother of the former Chicago Bears star Brian Urlacher, pleaded not guilty to federal charges of recruiting bettors in exchange for a cut of their losses. After the president pardoned him, he beat Jess Ray – by 151 votes to 105. More

The Republican governor of Georgia stepped up his attack on Major League Baseball on Saturday, over its decision to pull its All-Star Game from the state in response to a new voting law.“It’s minority-owned businesses that have been hit harder than most because of an invisible virus, by no fault of their own,” Brian Kemp said. “And these are the same minority businesses that are now being impacted by another decision that is by no fault of their own.”The Fox News host Sean Hannity thundered this week that MLB “has now cost the people of Georgia almost $100m in revenue”.“Every person in Georgia should be furious,” he added.But experts dispute that losing the All-Star game will have so heavy an impact.Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross, told the Guardian this week: “There is some loss, so it’s not zero, but it’s a whole lot closer to zero than the $100m number Atlanta was throwing around.”On Saturday Kemp spoke alongside the Georgia attorney general, Chris Carr, also a Republican, at a seafood restaurant miles from the stadium in the Atlanta suburbs where the game would have been held. He said he didn’t think the business was minority-owned.The game will now be played in Denver. Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, has claimed the city will receive an economic boost of $190m.Matheson said: “There’s no real reason that you should believe economic impact numbers that are commissioned by people who are made to look good by big economic impact numbers.”Kemp noted that Denver has a much smaller percentage of African Americans than Atlanta.Critics say the Georgia voting law will disproportionately affect communities of color. Aklima Khondoker, state director of the voting rights group All Voting is Local, said Kemp’s news conference was an attempt to deflect from that as he gears up to try to win a second term.“He’s pivoting away from all of the malicious things that we understand that this bill represents to people of color in Georgia,” she said.Elsewhere in the state, about two dozen protesters turned out near Augusta National as the Masters golf championship continued, holding signs that said “Let Us Vote” and “Protect Georgia Voting Rights”.The MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred, has said he made the decision to move the All-Star game after discussions with players and the Players Alliance, an organization of Black players formed after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, and that the league opposed restrictions to the ballot box.On Saturday an MLB spokesman said the league had no immediate additional comment.Several groups have filed lawsuits over the Georgia voting measure, which includes strict identification requirements for voting by mail. It expands weekend early voting but limits the use of ballot drop boxes, makes it a crime to hand out food or water to voters waiting in line and gives the state election board new powers to intervene in county election offices and to replace local officials.That has led to concerns the Republican-controlled board could exert more influence over elections, including the certification of county results.The rewrite of Georgia’s election rules – signed by Kemp last month – follows Donald Trump’s repeated lies about electoral fraud after his loss to Joe Biden. The Democratic candidate won Georgia, before two Democrats won Senate runoffs there in January, tipping control of the chamber.Democrats have assailed the Georgia law as an attempt to suppress Black and Latino votes, with Biden calling it “Jim Crow in the 21st century”. Carr and Kemp blasted that comparison.“This made-up narrative that this bill takes us back to Jim Crow – an era when human beings were being killed and who were truly prevented from casting their vote – is preposterous,” Carr said. “It is irresponsible, and it’s fundamentally wrong.” More

A previously undisclosed document prepared by the Pentagon for internal use reveals dramatic new details about how authorities sought to quell the attack on the Capitol on 6 January and re-establish order – and how such help took agonising hours in coming.Two hours after the Capitol was breached, as supporters of Donald Trump pummelled police and vandalised the building, Vice-President Mike Pence tried to assert control. In an urgent phone call to the acting defense secretary, he issued a startling demand.“Clear the Capitol,” Pence said.The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, and House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, were making a similarly desperate appeal, asking the army to deploy the national guard.“We need help,” Schumer said, more than an hour after the Senate chamber had been breached.At the Pentagon, officials were discussing reports that state capitals were facing violence in what had the makings of a national insurrection.“We must establish order,” said Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, in a call with Pentagon leaders. But order would not be restored for hours.The Pentagon document was obtained by the Associated Press. It adds another layer of understanding about the fear and panic while the insurrection played out, lays bare the inaction by Trump, and shows how his refusal to call off his supporters contributed to a slowed response by the military and law enforcement.It shows that intelligence missteps, tactical errors and bureaucratic delays were eclipsed by the government’s failure to comprehend the scale and intensity of a violent uprising by its own citizens.With Trump not engaged, it fell to Pentagon officials, a handful of senior White House aides, the leaders of Congress and Pence, holed up in a secure bunker, to attempt to manage the chaos.Along with hours of sworn testimony, the Pentagon document provides a still incomplete picture about how the insurrection advanced with such swift and lethal force, interrupting the congressional certification of Joe Biden as president and delaying the peaceful transfer of power.Five people, including a police officer, died as a direct result of the riot. More than 400 people have been charged. Lawmakers, still protected by national guard troops, will hear from the inspector general of the Capitol police this week.“Any minute that we lost, I need to know why,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, chair of the Senate rules committee, which is investigating the siege, said last month.The Pentagon document provides a timeline that fills in some gaps.Just before noon on 6 January, Trump told supporters at a rally near the White House they should march to the Capitol. The crowd was at least 10,000 strong. By 1.15pm, the procession was well on its way. Some immediately became violent, busting through barriers and beating up officers who stood in their way.At 1.49pm, as violence escalated, the then Capitol police chief, Steven Sund, called Maj Gen William Walker, commander of the DC national guard, to request assistance. Sund’s voice was “cracking with emotion”, Walker later told a Senate committee. Walker immediately called army leaders to inform them of the request.Twenty minutes later, around 2.10pm, rioters broke through the doors and windows of the Senate. They marched through the halls in search of lawmakers counting electoral votes. Alarms announced a lockdown.Sund asked for at least 200 guard members “and more if they are available”. But no help was immediately on the way. The Pentagon document details nearly two hours of confusion and chaos as officials attempted to work out a response.By 4.08pm, as rioters roamed the Capitol yelling for Pence to be hanged, the vice-president called Christopher Miller, the acting defense secretary, to demand answers. The call lasted only a minute. Pence asked for a deadline for securing the building.Trump broke his silence at 4.17pm, tweeting that his followers should “go home and go in peace”. By about 4.30pm, the military plan was finalized. Reports of state capitals breached turned out to be bogus.At about 4.40pm, Pelosi and Schumer were again on the phone with Gen Milley and Pentagon leaders. The congressional leadership “accuse[d] the national security apparatus of knowing that protesters planned to conduct an assault on the Capitol”, the Pentagon timeline says.The call lasted 30 minutes, including a discussion of intelligence failures. It would be another hour before the first 155 national guard members arrived. Dressed in riot gear, they started moving out the rioters. There were few if any arrests.At 8pm, the Capitol was declared secure. More

The Texas Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw said on Saturday that he had undergone eye surgery and would be “effectively blind” for a month.Crenshaw, 37, is a veteran of the elite navy Seals force. He lost his right eye and sustained damage to his left eye in Afghanistan in 2012, when a bomb exploded.“The blast from 2012 caused a cataract, excessive tissue damage, and extensive damage to my retina,” Crenshaw said in a statement. “It was always a possibility that the effects of the damage to my retina would resurface, and it appears that is exactly what has happened.”Crenshaw said the retina to his left eye was found to be detaching after he went to an ophthalmologist because of dark, blurry vision, and that he underwent surgery on Friday.“The surgery went well, but I will be effectively blind for about a month,” according to Crenshaw.Crenshaw, a staunch conservative who has stoked controversy on the national stage, was re-elected in November representing Texas’ 2nd district, in the Houston area. More

The Florida congressman Matt Gaetz insisted on Friday “the truth will prevail” over allegations of sex trafficking and illegal drug use which have pitched him into the centre of a congressional scandal.Reaching for Trumpian rhetoric at the Trump National Doral Miami golf course, the Republican told an event organised by Women for America First: “I know this. Firebrands don’t retreat, especially when the battle for the soul of our country calls.”Women for America First helped stage a rally near the White House on 6 January where Donald Trump told supporters to fight to overturn his election defeat. A crowd attacked and breached the US Capitol. Five people died, including a police officer.Gaetz supported Trump’s attempts to overturn the election and offered to resign from Congress and defend the former president in his subsequent impeachment. The offer was not taken up and Trump was acquitted.The New York Times reported this week that in the final weeks of the Trump administration, Gaetz sought a blanket pre-emptive pardon. It was not forthcoming.Late last month, Gaetz floated retiring from Congress after a third term and entering conservative TV. That prospect seems to have receded.Multiple reports have linked the 38-year-old to an ally indicted on a federal sex trafficking charge and for other offences. Gaetz is reportedly being investigated for paying women for sex, for possibly trafficking a 17-year-old girl and for sharing nude images of women with colleagues in the US House. His ally, former tax collector Joel Greenberg, is reported to be nearing a deal with prosecutors.On Friday, the House ethics committee said it was opening an investigation. In a statement, the committee said it was aware of allegations Gaetz may have engaged in “sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift, in violation of House Rules, laws, or other standards of conduct.”Gaetz denies all allegations and has claimed he is the victim of attempted extortion. He has hired lawyers who have defended Trump and Eric Schneiderman, a New York state attorney general who stepped down amid allegations of violence towards women.Speaking to a small crowd on Friday, Gaetz said: “Big government, big tech, big business, big media – they’d all breathe a sigh of relief if I were no longer in the Congress fighting for you.”That was Republican boilerplate but most Republicans, including Trump, have stayed silent on the affair. Gaetz has attacked Republicans who do not support Trump. On Thursday Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois representative who voted to impeach the former president, called for Gaetz to resign.In Florida, Gaetz said the media “lie about me because I tell the truth about them, and I’m not gonna stop. So when you see the leaks and the lies and the falsehoods and the smears, when you see the anonymous sources and insiders forecasting my demise, know this. They aren’t really coming for me. They’re coming for you. I’m just in the way.”He also said he would not “be intimidated by a lying media … The truth will prevail.”The New York Times said: “A number of current and former congressional officials have described … occasions when Mr Gaetz smelled of marijuana on the House floor or shared videos and images of women with whom he claimed to be having sex.” More

An increasingly prominent Republican podcast is emerging as a conservative alternative to the type of political media progressives have had a monopoly on for years: the partisan, edgy-oftentimes-irreverent entertainment show that nevertheless attracts powerful newsmakers.The podcast, called Ruthless, is hosted by Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Michael Duncan, one of Holmes’s colleagues at the consulting firm they work for, and the lawyer pseudonymously known by his Twitter handle Comfortably Smug.The podcast started shortly before the 2020 presidential elections and the hosts from the beginning have hoped to offer right-leaning listeners an alternative to wildly popular leftwing podcasts like Chapo Trap House or Pod Save America.Ruthless is nowhere near as prominent as either podcast but in the seven months since the first episode the show has hosted eight senators, three members of the House of Representatives, one governor and a handful of prominent Republican operatives. Four prospective Republican presidential candidates have joined the show at timely moments – Ted Cruz came on around the time he was embroiled in a scandal over a trip to Cancún while Texas suffered a power crisis.Many of the host interviews have broken news which resulted in Ruthless being cited by the Washington Post, the Hill, CNN, the Wall Street Journal and Politico. They have lined up a queue of more guests, including likely 2024 presidential candidates in the coming weeks.This is not a podcast for liberals Democrats looking for comfort. Nor is it a venue for anti-Trump Republicans or media types looking for praise.The hosts love to ding establishment media outlets and prominent reporters and they revel in bashing leaders of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project and energetically cheer when Democratic officials suffer misfortune.There are other more widely listened to conservative podcasts but Ruthless is the only one whose emergence so closely resembles the ones at the left that young activists and voters love.Ruthless’s emergence comes at a time when Republicans are back in the political wilderness having lost control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. There’s an ongoing question of what exactly the Republican party stands for and who its actual leaders are. Longtime Republican media figures are gone as well – Rush Limbaugh is dead and the more reliable broadcast journalists like Shepard Smith have left Fox News.Enter two Republican consultants and a popular antagonistic Twitter user.They saw an opening for a podcast that wasn’t hosted by bowtie-wearing thinktank conservatives who want to recite the Federalist Papers or pontificate on Edmund Burke and William F Buckley. The 51st episode of the show on 1 April started out with Smug reading the papers and then joining the two other hosts saying April fools.“You get a yelling Federalist Papers brief on the conservative side or a rant about what’s happening at the border, but you don’t get a lot of attention to things that actually matter now. HR 1 is not something you can find on Fox prime time,” Holmes said, referring to Democrats’ voting rights bill. Ruthless wants to host a range of Republicans within the party, even when they don’t necessarily see eye to eye.“The party’s still a really big tent. And there are people that resonate with whole different segments,” Holmes said in an interview. “At least me personally I don’t think it makes any sense to get pigeonholed into one sect of the party. I think it makes a ton of sense to have a range of voices come in to make their pitch. Because ultimately what those interviews are all about are not litmus test questions about where you stand and the five things that voters care about, it’s your personality. That’s the only thing we aim to get out of it. It’s your personality.”Years ago Holmes and Cruz were on opposite sides of a vicious intra-party Republican civil war. In 2021 they found themselves in a Republican-friendly podcast.“If we were to jump into say a hot tub time machine and go back to 2013 and you were to tell the 2013 Josh Holmes ‘you’re going to be asking Ted Cruz to go on your podcast’ what would you say to that?” Cruz asked in one episode.“I would’ve strangled him to death,” Holmes said, chuckling.They say an ardently anti-Trump Republican politician is welcome on the program as well as ones who have defended him – like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.For Republicans, Ruthless is trying to offer the same partisan content that popular political podcasts or comedic TV shows have done for independents and Democrats for years – something the right always struggled to offer. For everyone else, the show is a window into part of the pugnacious base – not the fringe right or the anti-Trump sects. They aren’t always defending Donald Trump but they aren’t regular critics of him or his supporters either.The controversial Georgia voting law has been a popular subject recently and the Ruthless hosts have been outspoken defenders of it, arguing that it actually expands secure voting rather than limiting it or that it is intended to hinder voting among Black voters. They have warned about the consequences of passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act – and usually refer to it by its more opaque legislative moniker “SR1” or “HR1”. They say Washington DC statehood is a nefarious attempt by Democrats to cheat the system to gain more Senate seats.They are particularly proud of a special episode in which they did a dramatic reading of an Axios story on one of the most unusual and heated meetings of the Trump presidency.The Ruthless hosts are not sympathetic to the QAnon conspiracy movement or Trump amping up his supporters to storm the Capitol. The episode before the 6 January mob riot, was titled A Serious Talk and a big chunk of it was devoted to how Trump did indeed lose the election. Two days after the attack on the Capitol the hosts produced an episode titled Nobody’s Happy.“We don’t have a difference of opinion about what happened with the storming of the Capitol yesterday. I’m just going to say flat out from my standpoint it was terrible,” Holmes said in that episode. “It’s unhelpful. It was embarrassing to conservatives, to Republicans, to the country, to basically everything. I felt like it was a really serious moment.”Again, though, these are not the Republicans who want a massive overhaul of the party. They are the ones who see the Lincoln Project Republicans as equally fair game as Democrats.“I know we give the Lincoln Project people a lot of shit on this podcast, but the oldest grift in politics is a Republican who hates on other Republicans on cable news,” Duncan said in one episode. “I mean, it’s permanent employment.” More

In October 2015, John Boehner abruptly vacated the speaker’s chair. Confronted by a hyper-caffeinated Freedom Caucus, the Ohio congressman announced his retirement singing Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah. He walked before they made him run.By all indications, Boehner is happier on the outside – advising high-priced clients, pushing marijuana liberalization. The distance between Boehner’s unfiltered Camel cigarettes and Kona Gold is shorter than the chasm between the Republicans and Coca-Cola.Against the backdrop of the Trump-induced insurrection of 6 January, On the House delivers a merlot-hued indictment of Republican excesses and heaps praise on those who play the game with aplomb – regardless of party.Nancy Pelosi gets props for “gutting” the late John Dingell, a senior midwest Democrat, like a “halibut she found floating around San Francisco Bay”. Boehner posits that Pelosi may be the most powerful speaker ever.Likewise, Mitch McConnell receives a shoutout even after dressing down the author, saying: “I’ll never presume to know more about the House than you do. And trust me, you’ll never know as much about the Senate as I do.” Boehner offers no pushback.Boehner expresses contempt for Senator Ted Cruz and Mark Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman who became Donald Trump’s final chief of staff. As for Flyin’ Ted, Boehner is unsparing: “There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else.”PS, Ted Cruz: Go fuck yourselfNot surprisingly, Boehner finds the Cruz-led government shutdown of 2013 to have been senseless. On the other hand, the GOP recaptured the Senate a year later. Regardless, one audio clip of Boehner reading On the House concludes: “PS, Ted Cruz: Go fuck yourself.”As for Meadows, Boehner campaigned for him, only for Meadows to oppose Boehner’s election as speaker, then offer a surprising, moist-eyed apology.“I wondered what his elite and uncompromising band of Freedom Caucus warriors would have made of their star organizer on the verge of tears,” Boehner writes. “But that wasn’t my problem.”On the House also serves bits of vaguely remembered history, like Boehner’s attempt to make the late justice Antonin Scalia Bob Dole’s Republican running mate against Bill Clinton in 1996. Boehner met with Scalia. Scalia was open to the idea but Dole picked Jack Kemp, a former quarterback, congressman and cabinet officer. The senator from Kansas did Scalia a favor. Dole lost badly.More puzzling is Boehner’s continued embrace of Dick Cheney, George W Bush’s vice-president and a former Wyoming congressman. In Boehner’s words, Cheney was a “phenomenal partner” for the younger Bush and the two made a “great team”. He makes no mention of Cheney’s role in the run-up to the Iraq war, though he does detail his own deliberations on voting to authorize the Gulf war under Bush Sr.By the time George W’s time in the White House was done, his relationship with Cheney had grown distant and strained. The marriage of convenience reached its end. Perhaps Boehner knows something Cheney’s old boss doesn’t.On the House offers a clearer assessment of Newt Gingrich’s skillset and foibles. Like Boehner, Gingrich was speaker. He was also responsible for ending decades of Democratic control of the House. But Boehner crystalizes Gingrich’s inability to help run a co-equal branch of government. Politics isn’t always tethered to bomb-throwing. Governing is about the quotidian. Gingrich couldn’t be bothered.The book acknowledges the visceral hostility of the Republican base toward Barack Obama. After Boehner announced that he believed that Obama was born in the US, he caught a blizzard of grief. The GOP’s embrace of fringe theories remains.Boehner describes his attempts to reach compromises with Obama on “fiscal issues” and immigration. On the former, he acknowledges Obama’s efforts. On the latter, he contends that Obama would “phone it in” and “poison the well” for the sake of partisan advantage.Based upon the 2016 election, Obama bet wrong. Open borders are a losing proposition. On the other hand, so is opposing the Affordable Care Act amid an ongoing pandemic and the aftermath of the great recession. Specifically, Boehner claims credit for dismantling Obamacare “bit by bit”, pointing to the rollback of the medical device tax. Incredibly, he claims “there really isn’t much of Obamacare left.”Really? Boehner definitely gets this wrong.The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that the number of uninsured non-elderly Americans dropped from more than 46.5 million in 2010 to under 29 million in 2019. Also, about 9 million purchase subsidized health insurance with federal premium assistance.If the theatrics of the Trump administration and the Republican challenge pending before the supreme court teach us anything, it is that Obamacare is very much alive. When it comes to government spending, the Republican donor and voting bases don’t necessarily sing from the same hymnal.Like most people, Boehner’s relationship with Trump ended worse than it began. Early on, Trump reached out. Less so with the passing of time. Boehner chalked that up to Trump getting comfortable in his job but also surmises: “He just got tired of me advising him to shut up.”Days after the insurrection but before the Biden inauguration, Boehner said Trump should consider resigning. The 45th president had “abused the loyalty of the people who voted for him” and incited a riot.Boehner admits that he was unprepared for the aftermath of Trump’s defeat. The insurrection “should have been a wake-up call for a return to Republican sanity”. It wasn’t. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the congresswoman from QAnon, has amassed a $3.2m re-election war chest. “The legislative terrorism” Boehner had witnessed helped birth “actual terrorism”.Boehner is confident about Americans, “the most versatile people God put on earth”. As for the survival of the American conservative movement, he is less optimistic. More