Hillary Clinton

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares24 Views

    Tulsi Gabbard repeats false Hillary Clinton ‘grooming’ claim in new book

    by

    Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman, has repeated a discredited claim about Hillary Clinton that previously saw Gabbard lodge then drop a $50m defamation suit in a new book published as she seeks to be named Donald Trump’s running mate for US president.Accusing Democrats of making up “a conspiracy theory that [Trump] was ‘colluding’ with the Russians to win the election” in 2016, Gabbard claims: “Hillary Clinton used a similar tactic against me when I ran for president in 2020, accusing me of being ‘groomed by the Russians’.”Gabbard ran for the Democratic nomination. Clinton did not accuse her of being “groomed by the Russians”.What Clinton said, in October 2019 and on a podcast hosted by the former Barack Obama adviser David Plouffe, was that she thought Republicans would encourage a third-party bid in 2020, aiming to syphon votes from the Democratic candidate in key states as Jill Stein, the Green candidate, and the Libertarian, Gary Johnson, did four years before.“They are also going to do third-party again,” Clinton said, “and I’m not making any predictions but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate.”Gabbard was then in the Democratic primary, though she never made any impact.Clinton continued: “She is a favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far. And, that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian asset. Totally. And so they know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee they’ll have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most need it.”Amid uproar, a spokesperson for Clinton said she had been referring to Gabbard and the Russians – saying “If the nesting doll fits”, thereby stoking media coverage in which Clinton’s remarks about “grooming” and “assets” were conflated.Clinton’s meaning was soon cleared up, but Gabbard seized on the “grooming” remark. She penned an op ed in the Wall Street Journal under a headline, I Can Defeat Trump and the Clinton Doctrine, that might now prove an awkward fit with her political ambitions.Later, after dropping out of the Democratic primary and endorsing Joe Biden, who she said had “a good heart” and would “help heal” a badly divided country, Gabbard sued Clinton for $50m over the “Russian asset” comment, rather than the remark about “grooming”. That lawsuit was dropped in May 2020.Four years on, Gabbard has completed a remarkable journey across the political aisle, from being seen as a rising Democratic star in the US House to hosting on Fox News and speaking at events including CPAC, a hard-right annual conference. Her book – For Love of Country: Why I Left the Democratic Party – will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.On the page, Gabbard presents a mix of memoir – from growing up in Hawaii to service in Iraq, from entering Congress to her failed presidential run – and pro-Trump screed. Light on detail and heavy on invective, the book includes excoriations of US support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. It will hit shops, however, in the aftermath of the passage in Congress of billions of dollars in new Ukraine aid.Gabbard is widely reported to be a contender for Trump’s running mate in his rematch with Biden. In her book, she defends the 88-times criminally charged former president on many legal fronts.Her complaint about Clinton’s remarks about Russia seems designed to stir up familiar Trump campaign furies over Clinton and the investigation of Russian election interference in 2016, which US intelligence agreed was carried out in his support but which prompts Gabbard to write: “None of it was true.”She also accuses Democrats of planting evidence and stories with a compliant press, aided by a “deep state” consisting of “active and retired officials from within the justice department and other national security agencies”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe deep state conspiracy theory, which holds that a permanent government of operatives and bureaucrats exists to thwart populist leaders, is popular with Trump and followers notably including Liz Truss, a former UK prime minister. However, one of its chief creators and propagators, the Trump aide and ally Steve Bannon, has said it is “for nut cases”.Gabbard does not only repeat conspiracy theories in her book, but also makes elementary mistakes. In rehashing her inaccurate complaint about Clinton saying she was being “groomed” by Russia, she writes that Clinton was speaking to David Axelrod, also a former Obama advisor but the host of a separate podcast to Plouffe’s.Gabbard also claims that “the propaganda media repeated Clinton’s lies over and over, without ever asking for evidence or fact-checking her themselves”.In fact, Gabbard’s claims against Clinton were widely fact-checked or made the subject of article corrections.In October 2019 – months before Gabbard filed suit – the Washington Post, a leading exponent of the fact-checking form, said: “The initial news reports got it wrong, perhaps fueled by the ‘nesting doll’ comment, with many saying Clinton said the Russians were grooming Gabbard for a third-party bid.”Clinton, the paper added, “certainly said Gabbard was backed by Russian bots and even suggested she was a Russian asset”. But “within a 24-hour news cycle, Clinton’s staff made it clear she was talking about the GOP, not the Russians, eyeing Gabbard as a possible third-party candidate. A simple listen to the podcast confirmed that.“In other words, this was all cleared up 12 days before Gabbard published her [Wall Street Journal] article, making the inaccurate version of [the] ‘grooming’ statement the very first sentence. So there’s little excuse for getting this wrong.”The paper therefore awarded Gabbard three Pinocchios – denoting “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions” – out of a possible four. More

    More stories

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Jimmy Carter, Biden and Clintons pay tribute at Rosalynn Carter memorial

      by

      A tribute service for Rosalynn Carter took place on Tuesday, as politicians and public figures gathered to celebrate the former first lady’s life following her death last Sunday.Former president Jimmy Carter, 99, attended the tribute for his late wife of 77 years, traveling from his hospice care at home to the Glenn Memorial church in Atlanta. His attendance marks a rare public appearance for the former president, who has been in home hospice care for 10 months.A funeral motorcade left for Glenn Memorial around noon, with the tribute beginning shortly after 1.30pm ET and ending after 3pm.Military guards transported Rosalynn’s casket from the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, where the former first lady was in repose, to make the trip to Glenn Memorial church.Tributes to Rosalynn were delivered by the journalist Judy Woodruff, longtime aide and friend Kathryn Cade and Rosalynn’s children and grandchildren.Jason, Rosalynn’s grandson, spoke about his grandmother’s commitment to advocating for better mental health care.“Her advocacy for mental health was a 50-year climb that is as remarkable as any other and has been mentioned already,” Jason said during the tribute, adding that Rosalynn “decided in 1970 to tackle the anxious and stigma associated with mental illness”.“That effort changed lives and it saved lives, including in my own family,” Jason added, referring to Rosalynn’s advocacy.Rosalynn’s children, Amy and James, also spoke at the tribute. James, who goes by “Chip”, called Rosalynn the glue that held the Carter family together through turbulent times.Chip added that his mother was influential in him into rehab treatment for a substance use disorder.“She saved my life,” Chip said at the tribute.Amy spoke about the enduring relationship between Jimmy and Rosalynn, sharing a love letter he had written to Rosalynn while he was serving in the navy.“My darling, every time I have ever been away from you, I had been thrilled when I returned to discover just how wonderful you are,”he wrote in the letter, recited by Amy.“Their partnership and love story was a defining feature of her life. Because he is unable to speak to you today, I’m going to share some of his words about loving and missing,” Amy said.Rosalynn’s other grandchildren and great-grandchildren read selections of the Bible during the tribute.Every living former first lady attended Tuesday’s invitation-only service. Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris and the second gentleman, Douglas Emhoff, also attended, but did not give remarks.Other guests included the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, the Atlanta mayor, Andre Dickens, and other Georgia politicians.Donald Trump, Barack Obama and George W Bush were invited to Tuesday’s tribute, the Associated Press reported, but did not attend.Public tributes for Rosalynn began on Monday, as her family planned three memorials to honor the former first lady.Hundreds of supporters paid their respects on Monday at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum .Besides Tuesday’s tribute, there will be a funeral on Wednesday for family and invited friends in Plains, Georgia, where the Carters lived.The former first lady died last week at 96 at her Georgia home. She was diagnosed with dementia in May and died shortly after entering hospice care alongside her husband.“Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” Jimmy Carter said in a statement released last week by the Carter Center. “She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”Rosalynn is widely regarded for her commitment to public service and her work as an advocate for mental health.During her tenure as first lady, Rosalynn addressed the World Health Organization, arguing that mental health was a component of physical health and that health, more broadly, was a human right.Rosalynn and her husband also supported several humanitarian causes, including Habitat for Humanity. More

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Media gave much less play to Trump’s ‘vermin’ comment than Clinton remark

      by

      Major US news outlets devoted significantly less time and space to covering Donald Trump’s description of his enemies as “vermin” this month than they did in a similar period in 2016 to Hillary Clinton’s reference to Trump’s supporters as “deplorables”, a new study has found.Findings by the progressive watchdog Media Matters included 18 times more coverage of Clinton’s remark than Trump’s by the “Big Three” broadcast networks (NBC, ABC and CBS) in the first week after the remark was made; and print reports among the top five circulating newspapers (Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today) in which mention of Clinton’s remark outnumbered Trump’s 29-1 in the same period.“Coverage decisions like these … shape the political landscape during presidential election cycles,” wrote Matt Gertz, a Media Matters senior fellow.Media Matters describes itself as “a web-based, not-for-profit … progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analysing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the US media”.It has recently made headlines by highlighting far-right content on X, prompting advertisers to withdraw, an effort now the subject of a lawsuit from Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of the platform formerly known as Twitter.Clinton’s “deplorables” remark was a famous feature of the 2016 presidential election, which she lost to Trump.In September that year, the Democrat told a New York audience: “To be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.” Trump lost to Joe Biden four years later but is the clear frontrunner to be the Republican nominee again in 2024, dominating polling despite facing 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats.Earlier this month, in New Hampshire, he told supporters he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections”.Biden joined pundits and historians in pointing out how authoritarian leaders have called opponents “vermin”, Adolf Hitler prominently among them.Acknowledging such comparisons and warnings, Gertz wrote: “The former president … added that those forces want ‘to destroy America and to destroy the American dream’ and that ‘the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within’.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“By contrast, the right weaponised Clinton’s relatively mundane ‘basket of deplorables’ comment … [though] she went on to stress that attendees shouldn’t write off all of his backers because they also include ‘people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change’, adding: ‘Those are people we have to understand and empathise with as well.’”The new Media Matters research, Gertz said, illustrated how major news outlets responded to “weaponisation” of Clinton’s remark, “rewarding the right for its disingenuous act, showering Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ remark with coverage.“By contrast, the same outlets largely ignored Trump’s description of his political enemies as ‘vermin’, continuing a pattern of relatively muted coverage of Trump’s abhorrent and incoherent commentary.”According to the research, ABC, CBS and NBC spent 54 minutes on the “deplorables” remark in the first week after it was uttered (making 1,662 mentions of it) but only three minutes (through 191 mentions) on the “vermin” remark in the same period.The only print article in the five main papers to consider the “vermin” remark was published by the Washington Post. In 2016, it ran nine print articles on the “deplorables” comment in the first week after it was made, Media Matters said.Gertz said: “When experts are sounding the alarm about the similarities between a likely US presidential nominee’s rhetoric and that of genocidaires, it warrants much more significant attention from journalists at leading news outlets.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Hillary Clinton likens Trump to Hitler and warns he would end democracy

      by

      Hillary Clinton has compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler as she offered a blunt warning about the dangers of a second Trump presidency.Trump back in the White House, Clinton said during an appearance on ABC’s daytime talkshow The View on Wednesday, “would be the end of our country as we know it, and I don’t say that lightly”.The former first lady, senator and secretary of state said: “When I was secretary of state, I used to talk about ‘one and done’. What I meant by that is that people would get legitimately elected and then they would try to do away with elections, and do away with opposition, and do away with a free press.”Then Clinton added: “Hitler was duly elected. All of a sudden somebody with those tendencies, dictatorial, authoritarian tendencies, would be like ‘OK we’re gonna shut this down, we’re gonna throw these people in jail.’ And they didn’t usually telegraph that. Trump is telling us what he intends to do.”Clinton’s comments came days after a Washington Post report detailing how Trump is discussing how to use the justice department to investigate political rivals and former allies who have been critical of him should he return to the White House. He is also discussing invoking the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, which would allow him to use the US military domestically to quell protests and dissent, something he was talked out of by military leaders during his one-term presidency.Trump’s team is also preparing to staff a potential administration with more radical rightwing lawyers who are less likely to stymie efforts to get in his way as he pushes the bounds of presidential power, the New York Times reported.A New York Times/Siena poll released on Sunday shows Trump leading Joe Biden in several key battleground states. Trump faces criminal charges in four different cases, set to go to trial next year. Winning the presidency is widely understood to be Trump’s best chance of escaping liability. And the poll shows that many voters who were asked would switch back to Biden if Trump is convicted.But Clinton gave a clear warning.“Trump is telling us what he intends to do,” Clinton said on The View. “Take him at his word.” More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Hillary Clinton says Trump supporters may need to be ‘deprogrammed’

      by

      Supporters of Donald Trump may need to be “deprogrammed” as if they were cult members, Hillary Clinton said.“Sadly, so many of those extremists … take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure,” the former first lady, senator, secretary of state and Democratic nominee for president told CNN.“He’s only in it for himself. He’s now defending himself in civil actions and criminal actions. And when do they break with him? Because at some point maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members. But something needs to happen.”In 2016, in one of the most seismic shocks in US history, Clinton lost the presidential election to Trump.The billionaire spent four chaotic years in power before losing to Joe Biden in 2020. Refusing to accept that loss, Trump stoked the deadly January 6 attack on Congress. That brought his second impeachment, which, like the first, he survived. He now faces 91 criminal charges (17 related to election subversion) and assorted civil threats but is nonetheless the clear Republican frontrunner to face Biden again next year.Clinton said: “I think, sadly, he will be the nominee and we have to defeat them. And we have to defeat those who are the election deniers, as we did and 2020 and [in the midterms of] 2022. And we have to just be smarter about how we are trying to empower the right people inside the Republican party.”Clinton was speaking after the fall of Kevin McCarthy, who became first US House speaker ever ejected by his own party thanks to pro-Trump extremists.Clinton called Trump “an authoritarian populist who really has a grip on the emotional [and] psychological needs and desires of a portion of the population and the base of the Republican party, for whatever combination of reasons.”Republicans, she said, “see in him someone who speaks for them and they are determined they will continue to vote for him, attend his rallies and wear his merchandise, because for whatever reason he and his very negative, nasty form of politics resonates with them.“Maybe they don’t like migrants. Maybe they don’t like gay people or Black people or the woman who got the promotion at work they didn’t get. Whatever reason.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionClinton said Trump’s “Make America great again” slogan, first in 2016, “was a bid for nostalgia, to return to a place where people could be in charge of their lives, feel empowered, say what they want and insult whoever came in their way.“And that was really attractive to a significant portion of the Republican base.“So it is like a cult and somebody has to break it, break that momentum. And that’s why I believe Joe Biden will defeat them and hopefully then that will be the end and the fever will break.” More

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      US presidents are a sum of their actions, not their years | Letters

      by

      Timothy Garton Ash’s plea for Joe Biden to step aside reveals the hollowness at the core of much of centrist ideology (Unless Joe Biden stands aside, the world must prepare for President Trump 2.0, 29 September).Garton Ash is wholly correct in pointing out that concerns about Biden’s age and fitness have played a meaningful role in his dismal approval ratings heading into next year’s presidential election. However, his emphasis on youth, absent anything of actual substance, betrays the centrist obsession with narratives and optics that artificially inflated the failed presidential primary campaigns of figures such as Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg.The three contenders that Garton Ash puts forward as potential replacements for Biden – governors Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom – are united only by their youth relative to Biden. While age certainly appears to be an issue to US voters, it is hard to see how simply having a younger Democratic candidate for president would have the impact that Garton Ash imagines. How would Shapiro, Whitmer or Newsom “rejuvenate the image of the US in the world”? Garton Ash doesn’t say. Public opinion of the US, especially in the global south, is based largely on what the country does, not the identity of the person occupying the Oval Office.Biden stepping down would probably be in the best interests of the Democratic party and the country. As a Canadian, I know all too well the global implications of who the US president is, but a candidate with little to offer beyond being younger than Biden is not the answer that the US or the world needs. David BeamishBonn, Germany Like Timothy Garton Ash, I spent two months this summer in the US, and sadly can echo most of what he writes about President Biden. I would add two points, however.First, Donald Trump’s support in the states I visited – Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas – is visceral and implacably opposed to liberal outreach. They will not be persuaded by better arguments. They cannot be swayed by a buoyant economy. They will vote for Trump and they must therefore be defeated. This reality has to be recognised if the Democratic candidate is to win in November 2024.Second, the possible Democratic candidates that Garton Ash mentions – Shapiro, Whitmer and Newsom – cannot defeat the Trump campaign: they have no national profile, they have no political base outside their states, and they show no stomach for the vicious fight that awaits them. No liberal does.There is a Democrat who can win, if she can be persuaded to run again: Hillary Clinton. She commands nationwide support, retains international recognition and won’t be cowed by Trump. But, most of all, Clinton will fight relentlessly. Consensus building can wait for 2028. Only political conflict will save us from Trump 2.0 in 2024.Dr Gareth JonesHong Kong Unusually, Timothy Garton Ash has gotten this completely wrong. Joe Biden stepping aside would start a frenzied fight within the party for the nomination for an election only a year away, generating hard feelings and attack lines for Republicans to use in the election. Taking Mr Garton Ash’s advice is the surest way for Donald Trump to win.Lee HartmannAnn Arbor, Michigan, US More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump said president under indictment would create ‘constitutional crisis’

      by

      The election of a president under indictment and facing criminal trial would “create an unprecedented constitutional crisis” and “cripple the operations of government”, Donald Trump said.But the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, who faces 71 criminal counts in state and federal cases and is expected to face more, was not speaking about himself – or speaking this year.As reported by CNN, which unearthed the comments, Trump was speaking on 3 November 2016, at a rally in North Carolina during his first presidential campaign, against Hillary Clinton.“She is likely to be under investigation for many years,” Trump said, “and also it will probably end up – in my opinion – in a criminal trial. I mean, you take a look. Who knows? But it certainly looks that way.”Clinton did not face indictment or a criminal trial over her use of a private email server while secretary of state to Barack Obama. An FBI investigation did prove politically damaging, in a campaign Trump won.Seven years later, Trump has become the first former president ever indicted – and he has been indicted twice.In New York, he faces 34 counts regarding hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels during that 2016 race. In a federal investigation, he faces 37 counts relating to his retention of classified material after leaving the White House in 2021.In New York, his trial is set to begin in late March. In the federal case, a judge in Florida has said a trial could begin as soon as 14 August.Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges and continues to deny all accusations of wrongdoing.Further indictments are expected, not least in state and federal investigations of Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, culminating in his incitement of the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021.Back before he became president, in Concord, North Carolina, in November 2016, Trump also said Clinton “has no right to be running, you know that. No right.”He returned to the subject two days later, CNN reported, telling a crowd in Reno, Nevada: “We could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and ultimately a criminal trial. It would grind government to a halt.”The same day, CNN said, Trump told rally-goers in Denver, Colorado, that because Clinton was “the prime suspect in a far-reaching criminal investigation”, it would be “virtually impossible for her to govern”.In 2023, Trump’s legal problems have not made his campaign grind to a halt, or even slow significantly.He dominates polling averages, leading his nearest challenger, Ron DeSantis, by about 30 points. The Florida governor is well clear of the rest of the field.Trump did not immediately respond to the CNN report about his comments about Clinton.He has continued to complain that Clinton was not indicted, alleging investigatory bias and a political witch hunt against him.Responding to such complaints, Joe Conason, a reporter, commentator and biographer of Clinton’s husband, former president Bill Clinton, wrote: “Contrary to Trump’s lying mantra, Hillary Clinton kept no classified documents, defied no subpoenas, engaged in no conspiracies, and stole nothing. So unlike him she is innocent of wrongdoing.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘They will bend the knee’: Lincoln project cofounder cautions against dismissing Trump

      by

      ‘They will bend the knee’: Lincoln project cofounder cautions against dismissing TrumpRick Wilson, a veteran Republican strategist, suggests the ex-president still holds sway despite multiple crises Donald Trump, the former US president, is all washed up. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is poised to dethrone him. This is the view currently in vogue among many in Washington.Not so fast, argues Rick Wilson, a veteran Republican strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group that shot to prominence with go-for-the-jugular advertisements before becoming mired in scandals of its own.Who’s next? Republicans who might go up against Trump in 2024Read more“The greatest danger in American politics is not recognising that there are great dangers,” Wilson, who lives in Florida, says in a phone interview. “The same people in 2015 and 2016 were confidently asserting Donald Trump could never, ever under any circumstances win the Republican nomination, and there were never any circumstances where Donald Trump could beat Hillary Clinton, and then he could never have almost a million people die because of his mishandling of Covid and on and on and on and on.“I know that the Republicans who right now are acting very bold and the donors who are acting very frisky – as Trump starts winning primaries, they will bend the knee, they will break, they will fall, they will all come back into line.”When Trump scheduled his announcement of a third run for the White House this month, he had hoped to ride a “red wave” of midterm election successes and sweep aside potential rivals within the Republican party. But the red wave ebbed and his anticlimactic campaign launch had the opposite effect.With Trump at arguably his weakest point since last year’s January 6 insurrection, senior Republicans are criticising his losing habit, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is ridiculing him and big money donors such as Ken Griffin and Stephen Schwarzman are deserting what they perceive as a sinking ship.The new conventional wisdom – or wishful thinking – among numerous pundits is that, after surviving crisis after crisis, Trump has finally met his Waterloo. A slew of federal, state and congressional investigations and opinion polls showing DeSantis ahead or level lend credence to this view.Some have noted, however, that Trump maintains an iron grip on his base and, just as in 2016, that might be enough to win a Republican primary race in which the anti-Trump vote is split among several candidates.Wilson, 59, author of the books Everything Trump Touches Dies and Running Against The Devil: A Plot To Save America from Trump and Democrats From Themselves, says: “He controls a quarter, at the minimum, of the Republican base. Even if it’s 15% and he goes into Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and he wins primaries because he has 15% going in, that’s the ballgame. It’s over. It’s done. Everybody else, it’s all over bar the crying.”He adds: “Right now they’re all talking so much shit: ‘I’m not going to get with Trump. I’m going to be with the hot new number, DeSantis.’ When DeSantis gets his ass handed to him, when he gets his clock cleaned in a debate or forum or just by Trump grinding away at him, eating him alive mentally for weeks on end, and suddenly Donald Trump’s numbers start posting up again, all the conservative thinkers who are right now like, ‘We will never vote for Trump again, we have integrity!’ will find themselves some excuse. ‘Well, you know, we don’t like Trump’s tweets, but otherwise it’s pure communism!’“It’s all bullshit, it’s all a fucking game, and that game is going to play out in a way that does not result in the outcome that the donor class thinks they’re going to get.”Wilson, who began his career on the 1988 presidential campaign of George HW Bush, worked as a consultant and political ad maker for numerous candidates and state parties. In December 2019 he and other Republican operatives founded the Lincoln Project, a political action committee that assailed Trump with a punch-in-the-mouth brio eschewed by “when they go low, we go high” Democrats.Some of the co-founders have acknowledged their part in the Republican party’s descent into bloodsport, hypocrisy and extremism. Wilson told an audience at the group’s launch event: “We have, as the great political philosopher Liam Neeson once said, a particular set of skills. Skills that make us a nightmare for people like Donald Trump.”He produced slick advertisements that got under the president’s skin and helped make the Lincoln Project the best known of the so-called Never Trump groups, raising tens of millions of dollars.But its meteoric rise was followed by an equally spectacular fall. The group’s co-founder John Weaver was revealed to have sent sexually charged messages to multiple men, sometimes with offers of employment or advancement. There were allegations of opaque accounting and financial impropriety that Wilson and others adamantly deny. A glut of high-profile figures resigned.But the Lincoln Project has survived in slimmed down form and continued to wage war on Trump and Trumpism in the midterms. Paradoxically, its continued relevance partly depends on Trump’s own; without him, it loses the principal reason for its creation. It has already launched attacks on DeSantis as a “new ultra-Maga megastar” who poses his own threat to American democracy.Living in the Florida state capital, Tallahassee, Wilson is ideally placed to take stock of the governor, a former US navy lawyer and congressman whose own brand of conservative populism and “anti-wokeness” helped him win re-election by nearly 20 percentage points over the Democrat Charlie Crist.He says: “Ron DeSantis won an election in Florida against a three-time loser, a campaign that was run by the best Republican party in the country, and I mean that because I’m a guy who helped over many years elect many people in the great state of Florida. The quality of our operation here made it look easy.“Has Ron DeSantis been to the rodeo? Has he been out there in the fight? Has he actually faced up against a full campaign of the brutality and the cruelty that Donald Trump will level against him? He has not. It’s like he’s walked on to the field on to third base and thought he hit a grand slam home run. It’s easy for Republicans to win in Florida. It’s how it’s supposed to be: we built it that way. In a Republican primary against Trump, even Trump in a weakened state still has an innate feral sense of cruelty and cunning that Ron DeSantis does not have. How does Trump know that? He watched the debate.”Wilson is referring to a gubernatorial debate in which Crist asked his opponent to commit to another full four-year term in the governor’s mansion; like a rabbit caught in headlights, DeSantis, 44, struggled to answer directly.“It was nine seconds of the gears moving in his head and you could see the agony on his face, like ‘I don’t know what to say.’ Trump never has a doubt. He may be an asshole but he never has a doubt. Ron is over-intellectualising it and I’m telling you: this guy has a glass jaw.”This, Wilson predicts, will become apparent on the debate stage, a setting where Florida Republicans such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio struggled against Trump in 2016. “All of a sudden, all that donor money is going to go, ‘Oh, fuck,’ and then they’re going to call Ron’s people and go, ‘Hey, listen, we love Ron but we’re worried. We’re gonna have to sit this one out for a little while. Let’s see what it looks like in a month.’“And then a month will pass and all of a sudden Donald Trump is the nominee. That’s how it’s going to go and I don’t say this out of any joy; I say this because I’ve just been to this fucking party too many times now.”Wilson also suggests that DeSantis may lack the personal touch and knack for retail politics that is crucial in a Republican primary. A recent New Yorker magazine profile noted several people describing “his lack of curiosity about others, his indifferent table manners, his aversion to the political rituals of dispensing handshakes and questions about the kids”.Wilson opines: “You’re telling me you’re going to send Ron DeSantis to New Hampshire where he has to go and sit in a diner with the Merrimack county GOP chairman and that 79-year-old codger is going to want to talk to Ron DeSantis about the gold standard or whatever and Ron DeSantis is going to sit there and get bored and restless and leave or be angry? I’m sorry. Sell me another fantasy of Ron DeSantis the perfect candidate.”TopicsRepublicansRon DeSantisDonald TrumpFloridaUS politicsHillary ClintonUS elections 2016featuresReuse this content More

    • 38 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      Kenneth Starr obituary

      by

      Kenneth Starr obituaryAmerican lawyer whose 1998 Starr report led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton Kenneth Starr, who has died aged 76 after complications from surgery, was the independent prosecutor whose investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s investment in a real-estate project called Whitewater began in somewhat pious partisanship and descended into prurience. It led to President Clinton’s impeachment for perjury based on his lying about his relationship with a White House aide, Monica Lewinsky.The Clinton impeachment was an American watershed. Following the OJ Simpson trial of the mid-1990s, it established scandal as the fuel that powered television news, but more importantly it pointed the way to use congressional investigation in order to disrupt a presidency, a tactic followed repeatedly against the Barack Obama administration, including six House investigations, lasting more than two years, of the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, over the assault on the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya.His proteges, including the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, and justice Brett Kavanaugh, Starr’s key Whitewater aide, spoke highly of him following his death. His career was inexorably bound to sex scandals, starting with his 1993 review of the Republican Senator Bob Packwood’s diaries in Senate ethics committee hearings over accusations of sexual abuse and assault.As part of Jeffrey Epstein’s legal team, Starr crucially lobbied federal authorities to drop their sex-trafficking prosecution and allow Epstein to plead guilty, in 2008, to lesser state charges with a far lighter sentence in Florida.Towards the end of his career, in 2016, Starr was forced to step down as president of Baylor University over that institution’s failure to pursue rape charges against football players.And while supporters rejected accusations of partisan hypocrisy, the man whose Whitewater mantra was “there’s no excuse for perjury – never, never, never. There is truth and the truth demands respect,” wound up defending the then president Donald Trump during his first impeachment trial, in 2020, having already, as an analyst on Fox News, advised that Trump’s impeachment would be “bad for the country”.Starr’s Washington career had its roots in his religious upbringing. Born in Vernon, Texas, he grew up in small towns in the state’s panhandle where his father, Willie D Starr, was a barber and sometime minister in the Churches of Christ; his mother, Vannie (nee Trimble), was a homemaker. They moved to San Antonio, where Kenneth was voted “most likely to succeed” in his high school.Following two years at what is now Harding University in Arkansas, he transferred to George Washington University in DC, graduating in 1968 with a BA in history. In 1970 he took a master’s in political science at Brown University, Rhode Island, and married Alice Mendell, who worked in public relations, before getting his law degree from Duke University, North Carolina, in 1973.After working as a clerk for the supreme court chief justice Warren Burger, in 1977 Starr joined the law firm Gibson Dunn. He went on in 1981 to become chief of staff to William French Smith, Ronald Reagan’s attorney general; two years later Reagan appointed Starr to the US court of appeals for the district of Columbia.In 1989 Starr left the bench to become George HW Bush’s solicitor general; Roberts was his assistant. The following year Bush considered Starr for a place on the supreme court, but Republicans in Congress feared Starr was not conservative enough. Ironically, Bush’s appointee, David Souter, turned out to be far less conservative than they had hoped. Two years later, Starr’s review of Packwood’s diaries convinced the ethics committee chair, Mitch McConnell, of Starr’s deft conservativism.So, when the original Whitewater independent counsel, Robert B Fiske, issued his interim report clearing the Clintons of fraud and of any involvement in the suicide of the White House lawyer Vince Foster, Fiske was ousted and, in August 1994, Starr appointed.By 1997, despite plea bargains and imprisoning witnesses who refused to implicate the Clintons, Starr had done little but endorse Fiske’s findings about Foster. He wanted to leave and become dean of public policy at Pepperdine College, but was convinced to stay until the 1998 elections.In January 1998, Clinton gave a deposition in a civil suit for sexual harassment filed by Paula Jones, saying he had never had a workplace affair; one of the women included in his denial was a White House staffer named Monica Lewinsky.Ken Starr: ‘There are eerie echoes of the past’Read moreTwo days later, Starr, who had advised Jones’s lawyers, was given tapes made secretly of Lewinsky admitting her affair with Clinton. This led to the orgy of coverage about semen-stained dresses and inserted cigars, as Lewinsky’s grand jury testimony set up a perjury trap for Clinton sprung by Kavanaugh, who aimed “to make his pattern of revolting behaviour clear, piece by painful piece”.As the case grew steamier, Kenneth Starr was rebranded “Ken” in the media, in an effort to make his shock more like an average Joe’s. Clinton was forced to answer a series of graphically explicit questions about the details of his relationship with Lewinsky. The House duly impeached, but the Senate acquitted Clinton. Starr rejoined the corporate law firm Kirkwood and Ellis, best known for defending the tobacco group Brown & Williamson.In 2004 he finally went to Pepperdine, as dean of the law school. In later cases he argued for Blackwater mercenaries accused of murdering civilians in Iraq, claiming they had “constitutional immunity”, and against California’s legalisation of gay marriage.He became president of Baylor, in Waco, Texas, in 2010, and chancellor in 2013. Although at least 17 women had accused football players of rape since he became president, he claimed during an investigation that “never was it brought to my attention there were issues”.He was found to have mishandled the accusations of sexual assault against members of the football team and removed as president in 2016; he then resigned as chancellor and as a professor of law.In his 2018 memoir, Contempt, Starr wrote: “I deeply regret that I took on the Lewinsky phase of the investigation, but there was no practical alternative.”He is survived by Alice, their son, Randall, and two daughters, Carolyn and Cynthia, and by a sister, Billie Jeayne, and a brother, Jerry.TopicsUS newsBill ClintonHillary ClintonMonica LewinskyOJ SimpsonBrett KavanaughJeffrey EpsteinobituariesReuse this content More