Donald Trump

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Republican who said she held Trump accountable for January 6 endorses him

      by

      The Republican South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace faced widespread accusations of hypocrisy after she endorsed Donald Trump – the presidential candidate she previously said she held “accountable” for the January 6 attack on Congress.On Monday, Mace announced her endorsement, a day before the New Hampshire primary, in which Trump enjoys comfortable polling leads over the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, his only remaining opponent.“I don’t see eye to eye perfectly with any candidate,” Mace said. “And until now I’ve stayed out of it. But the time has come to unite behind our nominee.”Saying “it’s been a complete shit show since [Trump] left the White House”, the congresswoman said the US “needs to reverse all the damage Joe Biden has done”. Trump, she said, would be better on the economy, immigration and national security.“Donald Trump’s record in his first term should tell every American how vital it is he be returned to office,” Mace said.“Good Lord,” said Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who sat on the House January 6 committee then quit Congress over his opposition to Trump. “Nancy Mace is just the worst.”At present, Trump faces 91 criminal charges (17 for election subversion), attempts to keep him off the ballot for inciting an insurrection and assorted civil trials. Still, he has dominated the Republican primary, winning comfortably in Iowa last week.Observers were quick to point to what Mace made of Trump at the end of that term, in the aftermath of January 6.On that day, supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” to block certification of his defeat by Biden attacked Congress, seeking lawmakers to capture and possibly kill in a riot now linked to nine deaths, more than 1,200 arrests and hundreds of convictions.“Everything that he’s worked for … all of that, his entire legacy, was wiped out yesterday,” Mace told CNN on 7 January 2021. “We’ve got to start over.”On 11 January, Mace said: “We have to hold the president accountable for what happened. The rhetoric leading up to this vote, the lies that were told to the American people – this is what happens, rhetoric has real consequences. And people died.”Trump was impeached a second time for inciting the Capitol attack.On 13 January, Mace said on the House floor she would vote against impeachment but added: “I believe we need to hold the president accountable. I hold him accountable for the events that transpired for the attack on our Capitol last Wednesday.”While 10 House Republicans voted to impeach Trump, he was acquitted at his Senate trial when enough members of his party stayed loyal.Trump turned against Mace, endorsing a primary rival in her district in South Carolina. Mace fought off the challenge – with campaign help from Haley.Also on Monday, Steve Benen, an MSNBC producer, said: “Remember when Trump called Nancy Mace ‘absolutely terrible’ and tried to end her career? And when Nikki Haley scrambled to rescue her? A lot can happen in 18 months.”Mace is not the only senior South Carolina Republican to desert the former governor: the US senator Tim Scott, who Haley appointed in 2012, endorsed Trump on Friday.Jose Pagliery, a politics reporter for the Daily Beast, pointed to another widely remarked irony in Mace’s decision to endorse Trump this week, writing: “Rape survivor Nancy Mace just endorsed Donald Trump in the middle of his second rape trial.”In April last year, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Mace discussed both her work to improve the processing of rape kits by law enforcement and her support for exceptions for victims of rape or incest in abortion bans passed in Republican states.She also said: “I am a victim of rape, I was raped by a classmate at the age of 16. I am very wary and the devil is always in the details, but we’ve got to show more care and concern and compassion for women who’ve been raped.”In August, a New York judge dismissed a counterclaim by Trump in a defamation suit brought by the writer E Jean Carroll over her claim that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store changing room in the 1990s.Explaining why the jury decided Trump “sexually abused” Carroll but did not endorse Carroll’s claim that he raped her, Lewis A Kaplan discussed the difference, under New York law, between forcible penetration with the penis or with fingers.The jury said Trump did the latter to Carroll. Kaplan, however, wrote: “Mr Trump did in fact ‘rape’ Ms Carroll as that term is commonly used and understood in contexts outside of the New York penal law.”The case has now reached a second trial, though a hearing scheduled for Monday was postponed due to juror illness.A representative for Mace did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Speaking to Fox News, Mace said Haley had been a “great governor” but voters in her South Carolina district were “overwhelmingly with Donald Trump”.“People want the primary to be over,” Mace said, pointing to an eventuality most pundits expect sooner rather than later, given Trump’s leads over Haley in New Hampshire, South Carolina (the third state to vote) and elsewhere.Mace also said that for voters in her district, “women’s issues” including abortion were “gonna be really important in the 2024 cycle”. More

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Judge unseals divorce case as conflict of interest claims threaten Trump Georgia trial

      by

      A Georgia judge on Monday unsealed the divorce case involving a special prosecutor at the center of allegations concerning an improper relationship with the Fulton county district attorney who brought the racketeering case against Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.The judge also stayed the deposition of the Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis in the divorce, until the special prosecutor Nathan Wade – whom she hired for the high-profile Trump case – had first testified about his relationship and financial conditions himself.Trump’s co-defendant and 2020 campaign elections day operations chief, Michael Roman, has put forward a motion seeking to have the district attorney’s office disqualified from bringing the case because the alleged relationship between Willis and Wade was a conflict of interest.The judge vacated the consent order sealing the divorce proceeding because no court hearing had been held at the time to shield the records. Roman and a coalition of media organizations, including the Guardian, had separately filed to unseal the case.The allegations made by Roman threaten to undercut one of the most complex and high-profile criminal cases against Trump that could go to trial before the 2024 election. Trump, who won the Iowa caucuses last week with a 30-point margin, is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.Trump and his allies, including Roman, were charged last year with violating the Georgia racketeering statute over their efforts to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election in the state, including by advancing fake Trump slates of electors and pressuring state officials to toss vote totals.The complaint about the relationship inside the district attorney’s office surfaced in January after Roman sought the dismissal of Willis, alleging that she personally profited from hiring Wade because he billed at least $653,000 in fees and used that money to pay for vacations together.The reasoning from Roman, as it goes, suggests that even though Wade could spend his earnings as he liked, it was a conflict of interest when the money was being used to benefit Willis.Roman’s filing included no concrete proof that Willis personally benefited from hiring Wade. Roman’s lawyer Ashleigh Merchant, a respected local attorney who once endorsed Wade to be a judge in 2016, said the claims were based on sources and records from Wade’s divorce proceeding.But in a court filing submitted by Joycelyn Mayfield Wade in the divorce case last week, Wade’s bank records attached as exhibits showed that he had paid for at least two trips to Miami, Florida, and to Napa Valley, California, with Willis as the listed travel companion.The first trip, dated 4 October 2022, showed Wade paid for flights from Atlanta to Miami for himself and for Willis. Separately, on the same date and without names listed, Wade made two purchases with Royal Caribbean Cruises, for $1,248 and $1,387.The second trip, dated 25 April 2023, showed Wade paid for flights from Atlanta to San Francisco for himself and for Willis. On 14 May 2023, Wade made two purchases, for $612 and $228, at a Doubletree hotel in Napa Valley.Willis has not directly addressed the allegations. A spokesperson has said the district attorney’s office would speak through its court filings.The allegations are scheduled to be addressed next month after the Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee, who is presiding in the Trump case, set an evidentiary hearing for 15 February. The date comes two weeks after the judge in the divorce case holds a hearing on whether to unseal.Wade started divorce proceedings the day after he was hired as a special prosecutor on the Trump case. The divorce turned contentious last year, after Joycelyn Mayfield Wade complained that her husband had failed to disclose his finances, including income from working on the Trump case.The complaint resulted in Wade being held in contempt by the Cobb county superior court judge and, in January, Willis herself was subpoenaed for information relating to Wade’s work.The subpoena ordered Willis to sit for a taped deposition on 23 January. At the hearing on Monday, the judge also stayed the subpoena until after Wade himself had been deposed by his wife about his financial situation.Willis accused Wade’s wife of “conspiring with interested parties in the criminal election interference case to use the civil discovery process to annoy, embarrass and oppress District Attorney Willis” in a motion to quash, and sought a protective order to avoid the deposition. More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump holds wide lead over Nikki Haley in New Hampshire, polls show

      by

      The ignominious end of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign is unlikely to boost Donald Trump’s last challenger, Nikki Haley, to the Republican nomination , according to two New Hampshire polls released on the eve of the primary in the north-eastern state.DeSantis also endured a round of scathing critiques of his campaign which started off being seen as a major source of opposition to Trump. But his White House bid never fully took off and fizzled into failure and a major blow to the rightwing Florida governor’s political reputation.In a poll released on Sunday, the day the hard-right Florida governor contradicted his own Super Pac, Never Back Down, and backed down, NBC News, the Boston Globe and Suffolk University put Trump 19 points clear of Haley, at 55% to 36% support.Ending his campaign, DeSantis looked past months of personal attacks from Trump to offer the twice-impeached, 91-times criminally charged former president – whose lie about a stolen 2020 election DeSantis has disowned – his endorsement to face Joe Biden.On Monday, the Washington Post and Monmouth University put Trump at 52% support in New Hampshire, to 34% for Haley.That represented a near-doubling of support for the former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador since November. But, the Post said, that was primarily a result of the withdrawal of Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who campaigned as an anti-Trump candidate.DeSantis had 8% support in the Post-Monmouth poll, which was carried out before he ended his campaign.“If DeSantis’s supporters in the poll are allocated based on their second choice,” the Post said, “Trump’s support rises by four points while Haley’s increases by two.”On Sunday, Haley staged a rally in New Hampshire with Judy Sheindlin, better known to millions of Americans as Judge Judy, a former Manhattan family court judge made famous by a small claims, arbitration-based TV show.“What a crowd, Exeter!” she said. “The energy on the ground is electric, and it’s clear Granite Staters are ready to make a difference on Tuesday! An extra special thanks to America’s favorite judge, Judge Judy Sheindlin, for joining us! She gets it: this country needs no drama, no chaos, no nonsense – just results!”But despite such determined boosterism, polling results undeniably show Haley well adrift of Trump in New Hampshire and even further behind in South Carolina, her home state which next month will be the third to vote.According to the polling site FiveThirtyEight.com, Trump leads Haley by 61% to 25% in the southern state.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “I wish I had a dollar for every Republican who’s told me over the last three years, ‘We’ve learned our lesson. No way will Trump be our nominee again.’”Speaking to CNN, Sabato added: “If [Haley] loses on Tuesday, it almost certainly marks the end of her run. She may continue through her home state of South Carolina though I think she’d be hesitant to do it because she wouldn’t want to lose her home state. That’s really difficult to explain to people.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“But for all practical purposes, once DeSantis left and once the other candidates were knocked out of the race, it was Trump’s to lose and Trump has to lose significantly and he’s not going to lose it.”DeSantis exited the race with a statement containing both a Churchill quote it turned out Churchill never said and his endorsement of Trump.Sabato was asked about DeSantis’s decision to back Trump after, only last week, attacking Republicans he said had chosen to “kiss the ring” and endorse the former president.“I guess he saw some good examples of ring kissing and decided to imitate it,” Sabato said.“Look, who knows what was going through his mind other than the fact that he certainly wants to run the next time. Now, whether he’ll be credible as a candidate after this disastrous run? Remember, he was supposed to be Trump’s main challenger and most of the establishment in the Republican party was betting on him. And his campaign crashed and burned.“This was really a disgraceful enterprise in so many different ways. But in [DeSantis’s] mind, at least right now, as he’s coming to terms with the the demise of his dream, he’s thinking about running in 2028. Well, being associated with Nikki Haley is not going to help you, because this party has already become the Donald Trump party or the Maga party and it will be in all likelihood even more so as the years go on.” More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      ‘May the best woman win’: Haley reacts as DeSantis ends presidential campaign – video

      by

      Ron DeSantis has ended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and endorsed Donald Trump. The Florida governor’s withdrawal leaves Nikki Haley as the last remaining challenger to Trump for the party’s nomination. ‘He’s been a good governor and I wish him well,’ Haley said of DeSantis at a campaign event on Sunday. ‘Having said that, it’s now one fella and one lady left.’ Trump set aside months of criticism of DeSantis and welcomed his onetime rival as his newest supporter More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      DeSantis drops out, Trump rallies and Haley brings out Judge Judy – podcast

      by

      Two days before voters in New Hampshire were due to head to the polls, Ron DeSantis announced he was suspending his campaign to become the presidential nominee for the Republican party.
      Donald Trump had already focused his attack lines on his remaining opponent, Nikki Haley, but can she pull a shock win out of the bag? Jonathan Freedland heads out on the campaign trail, talking to voters along the way

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

    • 188 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Ron DeSantis put nearly all his eggs in the basket of a ‘war on woke’

      by

      It began in a glitch-filled disaster on Twitter. It ended with a misattributed quotation on X. Just like Elon Musk’s social media platform, efforts to rebrand Ron DeSantis’s US presidential election campaign could not mask its fundamental flaws.When in May the Florida governor announced his run during a chat with Musk on Twitter Spaces, the platform’s audio streaming feature, there were technical breakdowns that drew comparisons with one of Musk’s space rockets blowing up on the launchpad.Eight months, dozens of staff departures, tens of millions of dollars and one crushing defeat in Iowa later, DeSantis announced he was dropping out in a video posted on the renamed X that quoted Winston Churchill as saying: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal – it is the courage to continue that counts.” According to the International Churchill Society, the British wartime prime minister never said that.Two days before the New Hampshire primary election, DeSantis’s humiliation was complete. “This is probably the biggest collapse of a presidential campaign in modern American history, if not all American history,” David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida, told the MSNBC network on Sunday. “Ron DeSantis had everything going for him.”A year ago, DeSantis had stormed to re-election as governor of Florida by nearly 20 percentage points in what not so long ago was a swing state. He was beating Donald Trump in some opinion polls. He was drawing attention, donor money and headlines such as “DeFuture” in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post newspaper.The argument seemed compelling: DeSantis could offer the former president’s Maga (“Make America great again”) politics in purer, perfected form, unencumbered by Trump’s age, chaos or court cases. Some said he was therefore more dangerous than Trump. Comedian Trevor Noah suggested that, if Trump was the original Terminator, DeSantis was the T-1000, a smarter and slicker upgrade.DeSantis was billed as Trump without the baggage. He turned out to be Trump without the votes.The governor made a series of bad gambles. He bet big on May and Twitter Spaces as the right time and place to start. He bet big on a moral crusade against wokeness. He bet big on outsourcing central parts of his campaign to a Super Pac (whose boss spent significant time during the last days in Iowa working on a jigsaw puzzle). He bet big on Trump’s candidacy imploding under legal pressures. He bet big on the Iowa caucuses. None of them paid off.Longtime political observers in Florida had doubts from the start. They knew that DeSantis had conquered the heavily populated Sunshine state with heavy TV advertising and an unusually weak Democratic opponent. They suspected that the retail politics of Iowa – shaking hands, kissing babies, holding long conversations in diners about ethanol – would expose his lack of people skills. They were right.Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican operative and cofounder of the Lincoln Project, says: “This guy was politically overpriced stock from the very beginning. He represented Diet Trump but no Trump voter wants the low sugar, low fat, no caffeine version of Trump. They want the real thing.”But while much has been written about DeSantis’s joyless, low charisma campaign, this was a failure not only of style but of substance. The governor ran to the right of Trump on many issues and put nearly all his eggs in the basket of a “war on woke”.His timing was off. Culture war issues had been all the rage during the coronavirus pandemic – masks, vaccines, school closures – then morphed into a parents’ rights movement around book bans, critical race theory and transgender children’s access to bathrooms and sports. If it worked for Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, why not DeSantis in the US?But by the time the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary came around, the pandemic had faded and masks were rarely seen. DeSantis’s accusations that Trump palled around with Dr Anthony Fauci and forced national lockdowns, while Florida stayed open had lost their resonance.The limitations of anti-wokeness were also exposed. Groups such as Moms for Liberty, which aim to keep race and LGBTQ issues out of school curricular, underperformed in last year’s elections in states such as Virginia, where Youngkin seemed to have lost his touch.Polls show that DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban is unpopular in Florida and nationwide. His actions against the Walt Disney Co after the company spoke out against Florida legislation that limited discussion of gender and sexuality in classrooms went down badly among pro-business Republicans.Aware of such trends, Trump is trying to be vague on abortion and talk less about culture war issues these days. At a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire on Saturday, it took him an hour and 15 minutes to promise a crackdown on schools “pushing” critical race theory and transgender content as well as vaccine mandates. The crowd cheered heartily, suggesting that these topics have not lost all their potency, but Trump quickly moved on.Wilson comments: “Trump may not be smart, but he’s got a kind of feral cunning and he recognises that the culture war stuff has run out too far. That’s why he said, oh, you have to have a few exceptions [for abortion].“A guy like DeSantis was on the very bleeding edge of six-week abortion bans and the most punitive approaches to all the culture war things – book banning and everything else – and he thought that was going to get him over the finish line. But when Trump is in the race, he still could never put it together.DeSantis is still just 45 and aware that other candidates – Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden included – have lost primaries only to try again and win the presidency. He recently claimed that Trump voters in Iowa told him they will back him in four years’ time, telling reporters: “They were coming up to me saying: ‘We want you in 2028, we love you, man.”The timing of his withdrawal and endorsement of Trump, which frees the former’s president voters to back him against Haley in New Hampshire in South Carolina, will earn him a few points in Trump World.Florida congressman Matt Gaetz said on Sunday: “Welcome home Ron, welcome back to the Maga movement where you’ve always belonged.” More

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Why New Hampshire could be the last chance for Republicans to beat Trump

      by

      Brightly dressed in a red-and-white starry jacket, Melinda Tourangeau was waiting eagerly at Grill 603, a casual diner in small-town New Hampshire, for a US presidential candidate not named Donald Trump.Tourangeau, 57, who lives in Milford, was “reluctantly forced to vote for Trump” in 2016 and 2020, she said. “I had to leave my morals at the door.”But this time she is supporting Nikki Haley. “She has gone all over the state to meet people, and when she meets you, and when you meet her, you feel raised, you feel like you’re a better person after you’ve met her. And her platform is brilliant – clear, concise, cogent – and she intends to do everything she says. She’s the right candidate.”Whether this is a minority view, or indicative of tectonic plates shifting among Republicans in New Hampshire, will be put to the test in Tuesday’s first-in-the-nation primary election. It comes one week after Trump’s record victory over Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and Haley, an ex-US ambassador to the UN, in the Iowa caucuses.For half the century, no candidate who won both Iowa and New Hampshire has failed to secure their party’s presidential nomination. Victory for Trump here would probably seal the deal and set up a rematch with Democrat Joe Biden in November.But if Iowa played to Trump’s strengths among evangelical Christians and rural conservatives, New Hampshire is a different proposition. Its voters pride themselves on an independent streak – the state motto is “Live free or die” – and are generally wealthier, more educated and less religious. Both states are about 90% white.Voters who are registered without a party affiliation make up about 40% of the electorate in New Hampshire and are eligible to cast a Republican primary ballot, which makes them more moderate than in Iowa. New voters can also register at the polls on Tuesday.For Trump, whose authoritarian language, criminal charges and brash populism play less well among college-educated voters, this represents something of an away game. Even in the Iowa suburbs last week, he won only a third of the votes.Haley has a more “Republican classic” image – less extreme on issues such as abortion, more hawkish on foreign policy – and has been barnstorming New Hampshire for months. Although her third place finish in Iowa blunted her momentum, and some opinion polls still show Trump well ahead in New Hampshire, others put Haley running neck and neck.That makes Tuesday a make-or-break moment. EJ Dionne, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said at a panel discussion organised by the thinktank: “There is a road for her but it’s rocky, it’s rutted, it’s narrow and it runs along the edge of a cliff. She has to win New Hampshire, I believe, to have any chance of going on. I don’t think running Trump close in New Hampshire will really cut it any more, especially after running third in Iowa.”Trump apparently senses the danger and has stepped up his attacks on Haley. At a rally in Concord on Friday, he told supporters: “All you need to know about Nikki Haley is that every corrupt and sinister group we’ve been fighting for the past seven years is on her side … Nikki Haley is backed by the deep state and the military-industrial complex. She’s never seen a war she doesn’t like.”He has also resorted to his default tactic of using race and ethnicity as a political cudgel. In a post on his Truth Social account, Trump repeatedly referred to Haley, the daughter of immigrants from India, as “Nimbra”. She was born as Nimarata Nikki Randhawa but has always gone by her middle name.Asked about Trump’s false claim that her heritage disqualifies her from running from president, Haley told reporters: “I’ll let people decide what he means by his attacks. What we know is, look, he’s clearly insecure if he goes and does these temper tantrums, if he’s spending millions of dollars on TV. He’s insecure, he knows that something’s wrong.”She has also been returning fire by making a case that, while Trump was the right choice for president in 2016, he is now too old and chaos follows him wherever he goes. She is seeking to thread a needle, appealing to independents as the more acceptable face of the Republican party while not entirely alienating Trump’s “Make America great again” base.Such calculations have led her into trouble. Last month, when she was asked by a New Hampshire voter about the reason for the civil war, she did not mention slavery in her answer. Last week, in an interview on Fox News, she claimed: “We’ve never been a racist country.”But even if Haley does pull off a stunning upset, she would then head into less favourable territory next month in Nevada and her home state of South Carolina. It is also difficult for any candidate to compete with the attention-grabbing spectacle of Trump, facing 91 charges across four cases, showing up in courtrooms even as he runs for president.Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, predicts that he will win the New Hampshire primary. “There are some people who are hoping and praying and wishing that Nikki Haley can overtake him, which would be interesting, but again, fleeting in her success because she will go to South Carolina and lose by 30 points in her own home state. I cannot think of any example in political history where losing in your own home state by double digits has been a momentum booster.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe added: “Some are looking at New Hampshire and thinking, well, depending on how Trump does, this could be indicative of his weakness in the general election. Perhaps. But there is a certain desire by the political media for a story and the horse race, and they’re looking for anything to write other than the inevitability of Trump, because once that happens, then people may tune out because they’re bored.”DeSantis got about 21% of the vote in Iowa, 30 points behind Trump’s narrow majority and two points ahead of Haley. He has spent little time in New Hampshire, aware that his mini-Trump persona and joyless campaign are unlikely to gain traction with either the Maga base or independents. He may soldier on to Nevada and South Carolina, playing for second in case Trump is unexpectedly felled by his age or legal troubles, and with an eye on another run in 2028.Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute thinktank in Washington last week: “His appeal overlaps so much with Donald Trump. Even though he and Donald Trump have sparred a little bit throughout this race, it hasn’t got super nasty. And all of the polling I see, Nikki Haley’s favourables are not great-great but Ron DeSantis’s are still pretty great-great among Republican voters.“Even though I don’t see a path for him – he’s going to get single digits in New Hampshire and go to South Carolina, I don’t know where this all ends – I do think I can see why he wants to stay in and be relevant as long as he can, because he does have a shot at being able to say: ‘I’m the second place guy if there is an in-case-of-emergency-break-glass situation.’”Meanwhile Democrats are also holding a primary on Tuesday but Biden is skipping it because the state defies new Democratic rules he advocates. The president will not be on the ballot alongside nearly two dozen candidates but his allies in the state have mounted a campaign to get voters to write in his name. The result will have no bearing on the Democratic nomination but could deal Biden a symbolic blow.Another tradition missing from the final week in New Hampshire is debates. Haley, angling to frame the primary as a battle between Trump and herself, had suggested that she would debate only if he was on stage. But the former president has skipped every debate so far and paid no price. Two televised debates for the final New Hampshire sprint were duly cancelled.Indeed, Trump is already campaigning as if he were already in a general election against Biden, focusing his invective on border security and rising prices. At a rally in Atkinson, New Hampshire, this week he told supporters: “Our country is dying … And I stand before you today as the only candidate who is up to the task of saving America.” He promised to “make our country rich as hell again”.There are also ominous signs of the Republican party coalescing around him, just as it did in 2016. Primary rivals Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota; Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur; and Tim Scott, a senator for South Carolina, all endorsed Trump after dropping out of the race. A constellation of senators, representatives, governors, and former White House and cabinet officials have done likewise, lending his nomination a sense of inevitability.Back in Milford, despite all the criminal charges and his past conduct towards women, Tourangeau admitted that she would still vote for Trump if he is the Republican nominee come November, not least because of her retirement savings plan.“I will have the sickest feeling in my stomach as I begrudgingly walk to the polls with my head down, and I will cast a vote for him,” she said. “But it’s only because my 401k will be bursting.” More

    • 213 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Jamie Dimon thinks Trump was ‘kind of right’ about a lot of things. What? | Robert Reich

      by

      On Wednesday, speaking from the World Economic Forum’s confab in Davos, Switzerland, Jamie Dimon – chair and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest and most profitable bank in the United States, and one of the most influential CEOs in the world – heaped praise on Donald Trump’s policies while president.“Take a step back, be honest,” Dimon said. Trump “was kind of right about Nato, kind of right on immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked. He was right about some of China. He wasn’t wrong about some of these critical issues.”What?Mr Dimon, take a step back, be honest.Kind of right about Nato? Trump wanted the US to withdraw from Nato – and may get his way if he becomes president again. This would open Europe further to Putin’s aggression.Kind of right on immigration? Even the conservative Cato Institute found that Trump reduced legal immigration but not illegal immigration. Trump refused to grant legal status to children of immigrants born in the United States or who grew up in the US. He banned Muslims from the US, and when the Muslim ban was found to be unconstitutional, banned people from Muslim countries. He fueled the flames of nativism by describing poorer nations as “shitholes” and has used terms redolent of Nazism to describe foreigners as “poisoning the blood” of Americans.Grew the economy quite well? In fact, under Trump the economy lost 2.9m jobs. Even before the pandemic, job growth was slower than it has been under Biden. The unemployment rate increased by 1.6 percentage points to 6.3%. The international trade deficit that Trump promised to reduce went up. The US trade deficit in goods and services in 2020 was the highest since 2008 and increased 40.5% from 2016. The number of Americans lacking health insurance rose by 3 million. The federal debt held by the public went up, from $14.4tn to $21.6tn.Tax reform worked? Trump’s tax cut conferred most of its benefits on big corporations and the rich, while enlarging the budget deficit. Giant banks and financial services companies got huge gains based on the new, lower corporate rate (21%), as well as the more preferable tax treatment of pass-through companies.If not for the Trump cuts – along with the Bush tax cuts and their extensions – federal revenues would keep pace with federal spending indefinitely, and the ratio of the debt to the national economy would be declining.Instead, these tax cuts have added $10tn to the debt since their enactment and are responsible for 57% of the increase in the debt ratio since 2001, and more than 90% of the increase in the debt ratio if the one-time costs of bills responding to Covid-19 and the Great Recession are excluded. Eventually, the tax cuts are projected to grow to more than 100% of the increase.Right about China? As the Brookings Institution found, Trump’s China policy only made China less restrained in pursuit of its ambitions. Confrontation has intensified, areas of cooperation have vanished, and the capacity of both countries to solve problems or manage competing interests has atrophied.Oh, and then there are the pesky matters of Trump’s seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election, facing 91 criminal indictments, causing the US to be more divided than at any time since the Civil War, lying every time he opens his mouth, and planning to use the justice department for “vengeance” against his political enemies if elected again.Why is Jamie Dimon – the most influential CEO in America – spouting these talking points in favor of Trump?Because he thinks Trump has a good chance of becoming president, and Dimon wants to be in his good graces.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAsked which candidate would be better for his business, Dimon said: “I have to be prepared for both. I will be prepared for both. We will deal with both.”Dimon knows that his support for Nikki Haley irked Trump.“Highly overrated Globalist Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMORGAN, is quietly pushing another non-MAGA person, Nikki Haley, for President,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social in late November. “I’ve never been a big Jamie Dimon fan, but had to live with this guy when he came begging to the White House. I guess I don’t have to live with him anymore, and that’s a really good thing.”So now, Dimon – like Republican lawmakers across the US, like too many other leaders of American institutions – feels it necessary to cave into the integrity-crushing intimidation of a Trump administration, and lick Trump’s backside.And when Dimon does this, you can bet many other CEOs and financial leaders will now follow his example.At a time in American history when the most influential leaders of the US need to stand up loudly and clearly for the rule of law, for democracy, for decency, and against Donald Trump, Dimon is leading the charge in the opposite direction.This is how fascism takes root and spreads.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More