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      As Trump’s star wanes, rivals signal presidential nomination campaigns

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      As Trump’s star wanes, rivals signal presidential nomination campaignsRepublicans vying for the party’s nomination have taken the ex-president’s midterm losses as a sign for them to step up Potential rivals to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination will this week be reading the runes of political fortune with their families ahead of the New Year – typically the time that nomination contenders begin to make themselves formally apparent.January 6 report review: 845 pages, countless crimes, one simple truth – Trump did itRead moreAmid a lackluster start to Trump’s own campaign and a string of scandals and setbacks to hit the former US president due to his links to far-right extremists and his own legal problems, a field of potential rivals is starting to emerge for a contest that only a few months ago many thought was Trump’s alone for the taking.They include multiple ex-members of Trump’s own cabinet, including his own former vice-president, his former UN ambassador and his former spy chief. Adding to that are a raft of rivals with their own political power bases, such as Florida’s increasingly formidable right-wing governor, Ron DeSantis.Now the hints of ambitions to taking on Trump are coming thick and fast, especially in the wake of the defeat of a host of Trump-backed candidates in November’s midterm elections which have triggered a reckoning with Trump’s grip on the Republican party.“I can tell you that my wife and I will take some time when our kids are home this Christmas – we’re going to give prayerful consideration about what role we might play,” former vice-president Mike Pence, 63, told CBS’ Face the Nation last month.Maryland’s term-limited Republican governor Larry Hogan, and Nikki Haley, South Carolina’s former governor and US ambassador to the UN, have said the holidays would also be a time for deliberation.“We are taking the holidays to kind of look at what the situation is,” Haley said in November. Hogan, a fierce critic of Trump, told CBS last week “it won’t be shocking if I were to bring the subject up” with his family during the break. Come January, he said, he would begin taking advice to “try to figure out what the future is”.“I don’t feel any pressure or any rush to make a decision … things are gonna look completely different three months from now or six months from now than they did today,” Hogan, 66, added.Others in the running are also readily apparent. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s team has reached out to potential campaign staff in early primary states, the Washington Post reported over the weekend. “We figured by the first quarter next year, we need to be hard at it if we’re going to do it,” Pompeo, 58, said in an interview with Fox News.Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson is reportedly talking to donors to determine his ability to fund the 18-month “endurance race” of a nomination process. Hutchinson has said that Trump’s early declaration, on 15 November, had “accelerated everyone’s time frame”.“So the first quarter of next year, you either need to be in or out,” the outgoing, 72-year-old governor told NBC News earlier this month.New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu, 48, said this week he doesn’t believe Trump could win in 2024. He’s voiced concerns that the Republican party could repeat the nomination experience of 2016, when he was a contender, when a large, divided field allowed Trump’s “ drain the swamp” insurgent candidacy to triumph.“We just have to find another candidate at this point,” Sununu told CBS News. While Trump could be the Republican nominee, he added, he’s “not going to be able to close the deal”.Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, 56, has said he’s “humbled” to be part of the 2024 discussions but in the convention of most candidates, he’s focused on his day job.Youngkin telegraphed his fiscal conservative credentials to wider Republican big-money interests by pushing $4bn in tax cuts through the Virginia legislature and meeting with party megadonors in Manhattan in June.“2024 is a long way away,” he recently told Fox News. “We’ll see what happens”.Helping to break the gender-lock on potential candidates is also South Dakota governor Kristi Noem. Her name has emerged as a potential Trump running mate, but she recently said he did not present “the best chance” for Republicans in 2024.“Our job is not just to talk to people who love Trump or hate Trump,” Noem, 51, told the New York Times in November. “Our job is to talk to every single American.”The biggest dog in the potential race – aside from Trump himself – is by far Florida’s DeSantis, who recently won re-election in his state by a landslide. Some of the Republican party’s biggest donors have already transferred their favors from Trump, 78, toward the 44-year-old governor.Republican mega donor and billionaire Ken Griffin, who moved his hedge fund Citadel from Chicago to Miami last year, described Trump as a “three-time loser” to Bloomberg a day after the former president’s declaration.“I don’t know what he’s going to do. It’s a huge personal decision,” Griffin said of DeSantis. “He has a tremendous record as governor of Florida, and our country would be well-served by him as president.”Similarly, Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of private-equity giant Blackstone, told Axios he was withdrawing his support from Trump for 2024 but stopped short of backing DeSantis. “America does better when its leaders are rooted in today and tomorrow, not today and yesterday,” he said. “It is time for the Republican party to turn to a new generation of leaders.”DeSantis has yet to rule a run in or out, but has signaled his interest by beginning to plant ads on Google and Facebook that target an audience beyond Florida.But in the post-midterm political environment, with Trump-backed candidates performing poorly in most contests, and the former president besieged by investigations and questions about his associations, the running is open.Maryland’s Hogan has described Trump as vulnerable, and “he seems to be dropping every day”. Hutchinson has said “you never know when that early front-runner is going to stumble”. Polls suggest Trump trails DeSantis in a nomination head-to-head, but leads over Pence and Haley.Other potential names in the pot include Texas governor Greg Abbott, 65; Florida senator Rick Scott, also 65; former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, 60; and Texas senator Ted Cruz, 52, who ran for the Republican nomination in 2016.In a provocatively titled “OK Boomers, Let Go of the Presidency” column last week, former George W Bush advisor Karl Rove warned that 2024 may resemble 1960 when voters were ready for a generational shift. In that year, they went for the youngest in the field, John F Kennedy, aged 43.“Americans want leaders who focus on the future,” Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “The country would be better off if each party’s standard bearer came from a new generation … It’s time for the baby boomers and their elders to depart the presidential stage. The party that grasps this has the advantage come 2024”.TopicsRepublicansDonald TrumpRon DeSantisUS politicsNikki HaleyMike PompeoMike PencefeaturesReuse this content More

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      Arkansas city elects 18-year-old as youngest Black mayor in US

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      Arkansas city elects 18-year-old as youngest Black mayor in USJaylen Smith, who lives at home with his parents, will be next leader of Earle, population 1,785 It is not even a year since Jaylen Smith was learning the power of the youth vote as a student government leader at his high school in Arkansas. Now the pioneering teenager is about to put his knowledge into practice as the youngest elected Black mayor anywhere in the US.On Tuesday, as the Georgia Senate runoff was capturing the attention of the nation, Smith, 18, was steadily amassing the votes he needed to become the next leader of the small city of Earle, population 1,785.“You have to start somewhere, you really do,” Smith, who graduated from Earle high school last summer after three years as Student Government Association president, told the Washington Post.“I didn’t want to be 30 or 40 and become a mayor when I could be one right now.”Smith, who lives at home with his parents, said his mother could not stop crying about his success, which came with a 235-183 vote defeat of Nemi Matthews, the city’s street and sanitation superintendent.Matthews was one of the first to offer his best wishes, writing: “I congratulate mayor-elect Jaylen Smith for a well ran race, I wish you well.”Smith credited younger voters, having proved his credentials to them by negotiating a deal with a high school cafeteria vendor, among other issues.“I worked time after time to get them what they wanted,” he said, adding that his achievements in school matters had made him “passionate and determined” to serve the wider community.While not the first 18-year-old to become an elected mayor – an honor that fell to Michael Sessions in Hillsdale, Michigan, in 2005 – Smith is the youngest Black candidate to achieve the feat.“I’m excited for Jaylen and the entire community in Earle as he becomes the youngest-ever African American mayor elected in the country,” Frank Scott Jr, mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas, and president of the African American Mayors’ Association, told CNN.“I’m proud of his willingness to enter into public service at such a young age and his aspirational goals for the city.”Smith said he consulted several mayors across the state before his campaign, and thanked them for their guidance. In his own message posted to Facebook, he said it was “time to build a better chapter” for his city.Among his first orders of business after he is sworn in next month, Smith said, would be to move the city’s police department to 24-hour operation. Other policy goals include ridding Earle of abandoned homes, creating jobs for city youth and providing transportation for elderly or infirm residents to grocery stores.Smith was set to return to Earle high school on Thursday, for a celebration of what supporters billed as “a monumental moment for our town”.TopicsArkansasUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Only the Strong review: Tom Cotton as hawk … too chicken to take on Trump?

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      Only the Strong review: Tom Cotton as hawk … too chicken to take on Trump?The Arkansas senator’s book may be a calling card for 2024 but he must know he is highly unlikely to be the next GOP nominee Together, Tom Cotton and Mitch McConnell worked to undermine Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. On 6 January 2021, both Republican senators refused to take the path paved by their colleagues Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and object to results in key states. Cotton, from Arkansas, branded those who stormed the Capitol “insurrectionists” – a label he had used before, for those who rioted in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.Senator Tom Cotton brags about ignoring Trump impeachment evidenceRead moreUnlike Cruz, Cotton didn’t back down or simper before Tucker Carlson. In contrast to Hawley, he is southern but not neo-Confederate, more Andrew Jackson than John C Calhoun. Cotton’s new book, Only the Strong, name-checks Abraham Lincoln. He has previously opined on slavery, saying the founders viewed it as “the necessary evil upon which the union was built”, a remark that angered the left (most likely pleasing its author). More recently, Cotton condemned David DePape, the man who attacked Paul Pelosi. The US needs to “get tough on crime”, the senator said.Cotton’s consistency, however, is limited. He knows his party belongs to Trump. In his new book, he avoids mention of January 6.Cotton is happy of course to castigate Joe Biden on Ukraine, writing: “His weakness enticed Vladimir Putin to invade.” The senator is a decorated combat veteran who served in Afghanistan and Iraq (though not as an army ranger, as he has previously said). Against the backdrop of the botched US pullout from Afghanistan, his critique is comprehensible. Not surprisingly, though, Cotton is loth to criticize Trump, a Vietnam-era draft-dodger who in early 2022 lavished praise on his idol, Putin, and derided Nato as “not so smart”.“I don’t speak on behalf of other politicians,” the normally loquacious Cotton told ABC in response.There is also the fact Cotton received more than $40,000 in campaign donations from a commodities speculator who profiteered from Ukraine’s misfortune.The subtitle of Cotton’s book is “Reversing the Left’s Plot to Sabotage American Power”. He seeks to pin all that is wrong on the Democrats, their allies and their voters. He slams Bill Clinton and Barack Obama for their lack of military service – but again his gaze is selective. He omits George W Bush’s spotty time in the Texas air national guard, rather than go to Vietnam, and Trump’s “bone spurs” which kept him out of the same ghastly war.Practically speaking, Only the Strong is best viewed as an obligatory pre-presidential campaign book, penned to distinguish its author from the rest of the Republican field. Cotton pays lip service to Trump but his heart clearly belongs to Ronald Reagan, the last president to win in a landslide.Cotton approves of Reagan’s stance toward a Sandinista-run Nicaragua but is silent on Iran-Contra. He rightly praises Reagan’s arms treaty with the Soviets, but doubles down on his contention that Vietnam was a “noble cause”. Cotton has only scorn for Daniel Ellsberg, the source for the Pentagon Papers, which cast light on US handling of Vietnam. Cotton is unmoved by evidence the government was less than forthright.He avoids substantive criticism of the Iraq war. Bush should be faulted for failing to “dedicate enough troops during the early days”, Cotton writes, without elaboration. It’s a far cry from calling Bush a “stupid moron”, which Trump did in an interview with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post.Cotton would look foolish or worse if he tried. He is an unbowed war hawk. In 2013, he attended a campaign fundraiser hosted by Dan Senor, the Bush administration spokesman who once told reporters: “Well, off the record, Paris is burning. But on the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq.” Senor’s event netted more than $100,000. Donors included the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who memorably urged the US to bomb Iran.“You pick up your cellphone and you call somewhere in Nebraska and you say, ‘OK let it go,’” Adelson said in 2013. “And so, there’s an atomic weapon, goes over ballistic missiles, the middle of the desert, that doesn’t hurt a soul. Maybe a couple of rattlesnakes and scorpions, or whatever.”Predictably, Cotton goes full bore at Biden for, he claims, doing “next to nothing to protect America from our greatest threat, Communist China”. Biden’s efforts to restrict US companies and citizens from helping China make semiconductor chips seem to have escaped the senator’s notice.Likewise, Cotton supports arming Taiwan against China but fails to comment on Trump’s willingness to cut Taiwan loose. Trump once remarked that the island was “like two feet from China” and the US was “8,000 miles away”, chillingly adding that if the Chinese invade, “there isn’t a fucking thing we can do”.At a September rally, Trump contrasted Biden with Xi Jinping and Putin: “I’ve got to know a lot of the foreign leaders, and let me tell you, unlike our leader, they’re at the top of their game.”Pence blames Trump for events leading to January 6 in new memoirRead moreFrom Cotton? Nada. From the looks of things, he wishes to maintains his viability as a possible Republican nominee. At 45 he is decades younger than Trump and in far better condition than Cruz. He has plenty of time.But don’t expect Cotton to take on Trump in 2024, unless Trump is indicted. Cotton lacks Ron DeSantis’s war chest, and would probably get crushed. For what it’s worth, even DeSantis is suddenly reported to be suffering from cold feet. Beyond that, Sarah Sanders, once Trump’s press secretary, is a shoo-in to be the next governor of Arkansas. With her assistance, Trump would crush Cotton in his home state.On Friday, reports said Trump was set to announce his bid for re-election in a matter of days. Within the GOP, there shall be no god before Him, and Him does not include Cotton. His book’s shelf-life may be limited.
      Only the Strong: Reversing the Left’s Plot to Sabotage American Power is published in the US by Hachette
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      Don’t Buy the Republican Appeal to Workers

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      J.D. Vance, the Ohio Republican Senate candidate, states on his campaign website that he “fiercely defended working-class Americans.” In Pennsylvania, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican Senate hopeful, sports a plaid shirt and jeans in a campaign ad, as he shoots guns of varying sizes. Guitar twangs in the background complete the scene.Mr. Vance, a venture capitalist and best-selling author, and Dr. Oz, the heart surgeon and TV personality, aren’t alone in their self-presentation as ordinary Joes. As November’s midterm elections near, many Republican candidates are all about pickup trucks, bluejeans and guns, as they perform the role of champions for the working stiff. Scratch the surface, though, and it’s a different story.This Republican working-class veneer is playacting. Their positions on workers’ rights make that crystal clear. Nationwide, most Republicans rail against liberal elites and then block a $15 an hour minimum wage, paid leave laws and workplace safety protections. They stymie bills to help workers unionize, and top it off by starving the National Labor Relations Board of funding, even as it faces a surge of union election requests. Several Republican attorneys general have sued to stop wage hikes for nearly 400,000 people working for federal contractors. Republicans also opposed extending the popular monthly child tax credit that helped so many working families afford basic necessities. The “issues” section on the campaign websites of Mr. Vance and Dr. Oz contain virtually no labor policy. Howling about China, as they do, isn’t a comprehensive labor plan.In other instances, what superficially seemed to be examples of Republican support for worker rights were really Trojan horse incursions to advance their culture war.For example, legislators or policymakers in at least six conservative states last year swiftly expanded eligibility for unemployment insurance to workers who quit or were fired for refusing to comply with employer Covid-19 vaccination mandates. The sudden largess was at odds with these states’ generally miserly approach to such benefits: They’d previously done most everything possible to limit the lifeline of unemployment insurance, including prematurely cutting off federally funded benefits in the summer of 2021.Only a sliver of the national work force dug in and refused to be vaccinated, including a small number of New York City employees recently granted reinstatement to their jobs by a Staten Island trial court judge. But anti-vax‌ workers were stark outliers in relation to the vast majority of their peers, from United Airlines employees to Massachusetts state employees, who overwhelmingly complied with mandates.Why did ‌these conservative Republicans suddenly want a safety net for unvaccinated workers? Because it served a culture war narrative, one that frames everything in divisive us-versus-them terms and in the case of vaccines, sees them as a nefarious liberal plot and vaccine-or-test mandates as one more example of government overreach.To that point, consider two legal cases, one brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission when its enforcement arm was led by a Trump appointee, and another heard by the Supreme Court, where six of the nine justices are Republican appointees. Both cases involved workers — but neither touched on pocketbook or dignity issues central to most workers’ concerns.The E.E.O.C. case involved two Kroger workers who claimed religious discrimination after being fired for refusing to wear company-issued aprons bearing a heart-shaped logo they saw as promoting gay rights. (In pretrial depositions, both workers were shown a range of corporate logos, and the workers said several of them also represented gay rights and were incompatible with their religion; they included the logos of NBC, Google, Southwest and Apple, as well as the Olympic rings.) A Trump-appointed federal judge in Arkansas rejected Krogers’ motion to end the case, ordering the case to trial, and earlier this month, the company and commission said they had reached a deal to resolve the dispute.In a Supreme Court case that became a national right-wing cause célèbre, the six conservative justices ruled that a Washington State school district violated the free speech and religious rights of a public school football coach who insisted on praying very publicly after games with students at midfield, rejecting more private locations that were offered.In light of genuine worker struggles in our country, these are the workers conservatives go to bat for? It seems the trickle-down crowd finds their inner Norma Rae only if it helps them “own the libs.” These aren’t workers’ rights issues. They’re divisive culture war battles that happen to occur in the employment arena. For ordinary workers, living paycheck to paycheck, who just want a safe place to work, decent pay, and some dignity, conservatives are AWOL.The praying coach and Kroger worker cases involved First Amendment and religious rights. But the most common example of silenced expression occurs when workers get fired for reporting labor law violations or supporting a union. How many Republicans have spoken up to support the expressive rights of unionizing Starbucks or Amazon workers?Similarly, Republicans may prioritize benefits for their favored workers (such as people who are unvaccinated), but all workers need a functioning safety net, including an adequately funded and functional unemployment insurance system. What’s also essential are robust and broadly available programs for paid family and medical leave, paid sick leave and universal health care, measures most Republicans have repeatedly opposed. In this context, the rush to ensure unemployment benefits to people refusing a lifesaving vaccine is cynical, indeed.Workers need safe conditions, good wages, fair treatment and a collective voice on the job. The culture war labor incursions are divorced from what matters most to our country’s working people.As the midterms approach, Republican candidates may play dress-up in plaids and work boots, as they vie for the votes of our nation’s workers. But even a pickup truck laden with bluejeans and hard hats can’t camouflage the callous facts. The absurdity of the worker causes Republicans champion should drive home the truth to wavering voters: these candidates don’t care about the real needs of working people.Terri Gerstein is a fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and the Economic Policy Institute. She spent more than 17 years enforcing labor laws in New York State, working in the state attorney general’s office and as a deputy labor commissioner.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Republican senator Tom Cotton brags about ignoring Trump impeachment evidence in new book

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      Republican senator Tom Cotton brags about ignoring Trump impeachment evidence in new bookThe Arkansas senator, a Republican presidential hopeful, also suggests president did not know military procedures In January 2020, the rightwing Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton said he would vote to acquit Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial because despite senators having “heard from 17 witnesses … and received more than 28,000 pages of documents”, Democrats had not presented their case correctly.Trump bragged about new US nuclear weapons, Woodward tape showsRead moreAccording to Cotton, the senators who sat through so much evidence would “perform the role intended for us by the founders, of providing the ‘cool and deliberate sense of the community’, as it says in Federalist 63.”In a new book, however, Cotton boasts that he spent his time refusing to pay attention – pretending to read materials relevant to the president’s trial – but hiding his real reading matter under a fake cover.He writes: “My aides delivered a steady flow of papers and photocopied books, hidden underneath a fancy cover sheet labeled ‘Supplementary Impeachment Materials’, so nosy reporters sitting above us in the Senate gallery couldn’t see what I was reading.”“They probably would’ve reported that I wasn’t paying attention to the trial.”Reporters did report that Republicans were not paying attention. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee named the book she chose to read instead of participating in only the third presidential trial in history: “It was Resistance (At All Costs) by Kim Strassel.”Other Republicans fidgeted or doodled. But reporters noted that Blackburn violated decorum guidelines on relevant reading: “Reading materials should be confined to only those readings which pertain to the matter before the Senate.”Admitting the same infraction, Cotton – a leading China hawk – says he was reading “about the science of coronaviruses, the methods of vaccine development and the history of pandemics”.He adds: “I was paying attention – to the story that mattered most. The outcome of the impeachment trial was a foregone conclusion, and it wouldn’t impact the daily lives of normal Americans.”Cotton’s book, Only the Strong: Reversing the Left’s Plot to Sabotage American Power, will be published next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.Cotton is now among senators, governors and former members of the Trump administration jostling for position in the developing contest for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. Publishing a book is a traditional preparatory step.The senator, 45, is a former soldier who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and at Arlington Cemetery before entering politics as a foreign policy hawk. His book takes aim at Joe Biden and Barack Obama – and equally persistently, from the prologue to the note on sources, Woodrow Wilson, the president who took office in 1913, took the US into the first world war in 1917, left office in 1921 and died in 1924.Trump is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination 100 years later, despite facing legal jeopardy for inciting the Capitol attack, trying to overturn the 2020 election, retaining classified records and being the subject of criminal and civil suits over his business affairs and an allegation of rape.Cotton voted to acquit Trump at both his impeachment trials, the second for inciting the Capitol riot, but he was not among the eight Republican senators who supported Trump’s attempts to overturn election results in key states.In his book, however, the Arkansan skips over domestic concerns, including his own advocacy of using the military against “Antifa terrorists” during protests for racial justice in summer 2020, a position which stoked huge controversy and brought down an editor at the New York Times.Cotton is largely careful to target only Democratic presidents. Hitting Bill Clinton and Barack Obama for not serving in the military before running for the White House, he omits mention of George W Bush’s avoidance of service in Vietnam by securing a post in the Texas air national guard, to which he did not always show up.Unchecked review: how Trump dodged two impeachments … and the January 6 committee?Read moreBut Cotton does risk angering Trump, by criticising him for “waiting too long to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal” and by dishing on a private call in which the then president professed ignorance of military protocol.Early in Trump’s term in power, Cotton writes, the president called him about a potential nominee – common Senate business.But Trump then said: “The other night, they called me and asked for approval to kill some terrorist. I never heard of the guy.”Cotton asked if Trump approved the strike.“Trump replied, ‘Oh yeah, but I asked why they called me in the first place. Didn’t they have some captain or major or someone who knew more about this guy? I mean, I’d never heard of him.’”With nudging, Cotton says, Trump worked out that the military was working according to protocols laid down by Obama, who he accuses of “impos[ing] needless layers of bureaucratic and legal review” on strikes on terrorist targets.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationTrump impeachment (2019)RepublicansUS elections 2024ArkansasReuse this content More

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      Sarah Huckabee Sanders ‘cancer-free’ after thyroid surgery

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      Sarah Huckabee Sanders ‘cancer-free’ after thyroid surgery‘By the grace of God, I am now cancer-free’, Sanders, 42, formerly Trump’s press secretary, says after successful operation Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former Donald Trump White House press secretary turned Republican candidate for Arkansas governor, said on Friday she was “cancer-free” after undergoing surgery for thyroid cancer.In a statement, Sanders, aged 42, said the cancer was discovered during a check-up this month.“Today I underwent a successful surgery to remove my thyroid and surrounding lymph nodes and by the grace of God, I am now cancer-free,” she said. “I want to thank the Arkansas doctors and nurses for their world-class care, as well as my family and friends for their love, prayers and support. I look forward to returning to the campaign trail soon.”Sanders added: “This experience has been a reminder that whatever battles you may be facing, don’t lose heart. As governor I will never quit fighting for the people of our great state.”In May this year, Sanders strolled to victory in the Arkansas Republican primary to succeed Asa Hutchinson, a relative moderate in Trump’s GOP, as governor next year.She will face the Democrat Chris Jones in November. All major polling and predictions sites rate Arkansas “solid Republican”.Sanders’s father, Mike Huckabee, was governor of Arkansas and twice ran from the Christian right for the Republican presidential nomination.His daughter became Donald Trump’s second White House press secretary after the resignation of Sean Spicer, the party operative who endured a hapless spell in the role.Under Sanders, White House press briefings were first combative then dwindled as Trump sought to bypass what he deemed hostile media coverage.As the Guardian said when Sanders left the White House in 2019, as press secretary she “provided stability after Spicer’s series of wayward gaffes and, unlike other Trump officials, stayed in his good graces with her unswerving, often ostentatious shows of loyalty.”02:43Earlier that same year, she told the Christian TV network CBN that God “wanted Donald Trump to become president”.Sanders featured in Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow. The special counsel showed that her claim that “the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director”, James Comey, was a lie.As reported by Mueller, Sanders called the remark a “slip of the tongue” made “in the heat of the moment” and “not founded on anything”.After leaving Trump’s employ, Sanders took aim at Arkansas politics, releasing a typically loyal memoir, Speaking for Myself, in September 2020.Among other anecdotes about her time working for Trump, the book did reveal the odd potentially embarrassing story. In one such passage, Sanders said Trump joked about her “tak[ing] one for the team” when North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un apparently took a liking to her during summit talks.TopicsUS politicsArkansasnewsReuse this content More

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      Arkansas violated the Voting Rights Act by limiting help to voters, a judge rules.

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      A federal judge ruled that Arkansas violated the Voting Rights Act with its six-voter limit for those who help people cast ballots in person, which critics had argued disenfranchised immigrants and people with disabilities.In a 39-page ruling issued on Friday, Judge Timothy L. Brooks of the U.S. District Court in Fayetteville, Ark., wrote that Congress had explicitly given voters the choice of whom they wanted to assist them at the polls, as long as it was not their employer or union representative.Arkansas United, a nonprofit group that helps immigrants, including many Latinos who are not proficient in English, filed a lawsuit in 2020 after having to deploy additional employees and volunteers to provide translation services to voters at the polls in order to avoid violating the state law, the group said. It described its work as nonpartisan.State and county election officials have said the law was intended to prevent anyone from gaining undue influence.Thomas A. Saenz is the president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represented Arkansas United in the case. He said in an interview on Monday that the restrictions, enacted in 2009, constituted voter suppression and that the state had failed to present evidence that anyone had gained undue influence over voters when helping them at the polls.Read More About U.S. ImmigrationA Billion-Dollar Business: Migrant smuggling on the U.S. southern border has evolved over the past 10 years into a remunerative operation controlled by organized crime.Migrant Apprehensions: Border officials already had apprehended more migrants by June than they had in the entire previous fiscal year, and are on track to exceed two million by the end of September.An Immigration Showdown: In a political move, the governors of Texas and Arizona are offering migrants free bus rides to Washington, D.C. People on the East Coast are starting to feel the effects.“You’re at the polls,” he said. “Obviously, there are poll workers are there. It would seem the most unlikely venue for undue voter influence to occur, frankly.”Mr. Saenz’s organization, known as MALDEF, filed a lawsuit this year challenging similar restrictions in Missouri. There, a person is allowed to help only one voter.In Arkansas, the secretary of state, the State Board of Election Commissioners and election officials in three counties (Washington, Benton and Sebastian) were named as defendants in the lawsuit challenging the voter-assistance restrictions. It was not immediately clear whether they planned to appeal the ruling.Daniel J. Shults, the director of the State Board of Election Commissioners, said in an email on Monday that the agency was reviewing the decision and that its normal practice was to defend Arkansas laws designed to protect election integrity. He said that voter privacy laws in Arkansas barred election officials from monitoring conversations between voters and their helpers and that this made the six-person limit an “important safeguard” against improper influence.“The purpose of the law in question is to prevent the systematic abuse of the voting assistance process,” Mr. Shults said. “Having a uniform limitation on the number of voters a third party may assist prevents a bad actor from having unlimited access to voters in the voting booth while ensuring voter’s privacy is protected.”Chris Powell, a spokesman for the secretary of state, said in an email on Monday that the office was also reviewing the decision and having discussions with the state attorney general’s office about possible next steps.Russell Anzalone, a Republican who is the election commission chairman in Benton County in northwestern Arkansas, said in an email on Monday that he was not familiar with the ruling or any changes regarding voter-assistance rules. He added, “I follow the approved State of Arkansas election laws.”The other defendants in the lawsuit did not immediately respond on Monday to requests for comment.In the ruling, Judge Brooks wrote that state and county election officials could legally keep track of the names and addresses of anyone helping voters at the polls. But they can no longer limit the number to six voters per helper, according to the ruling.Mr. Saenz described the six-voter limit as arbitrary.“I do think that there is a stigma and unfair one on those who are simply doing their part to assist those who have every right to be able to cast a ballot,” he said. More