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    Crosstalk and weak zingers hand win to absent Trump at Republican debate

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    It’s hard to pick the low point of a debate that dissolved frequently into incoherent crosstalk and included former vice-president Mike Pence, a Christian conservative who has famously said he would never dine alone with a woman other than his wife, attempting to make a joke about his sex life. (“My wife isn’t a member of the teachers union, but I gotta admit I’ve been sleeping with a teacher for 38 years,” he said.)In a debate conducted not far from Ronald Reagan’s grave, seven GOP presidential candidates shouted and sniped at each other for two hours without producing a single standout moment.Whether echoing Donald Trump’s rhetoric, or attempting to criticize him – Chris Christie dubbed him “Donald Duck” for choosing not to participate – none of the presidential hopefuls succeeded in upending the expectations of the race. Once again, Trump won the GOP debate without even having to show up.On substantive issues, the Republican candidates endorsed virulent transphobia, with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy arguing that “transgenderism” is “a mental health disorder”. He said he wanted to end birthright citizenship, so that children born in the US to undocumented parents would not be given citizenship.Florida governor Ron DeSantis suggested he would address the fentanyl overdose crisis by using the US military against drug dealers in Mexico, and treat them like “foreign terrorist organizations”. He also did not believe Republican losses in the 2022 midterm elections should be blamed on the party’s embrace of extreme anti-abortion policies.Pence said his plan for preventing future mass shootings was not new gun control laws, but instituting “a federal expedited death penalty for anyone involved in a mass shooting”. (Research shows that many mass shooters are suicidal.)But some of the brutal Trumpian rhetoric seemed to have lost its punch. “Yes, we’ll build the wall,” DeSantis said, sounding almost bored.On Fox News after the debate, former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway argued that “nobody made the case” that they had something different from Trump to offer voters. “They want to build a wall, they want to secure the border, they sound a lot like him,” she said.Trump’s rivals also tried, and largely failed, to produce memorable attack lines against each other.South Carolina senator Tim Scott tried to criticize former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley for a set of $50,000 curtains at her residence as UN ambassador. “Do your homework, Tim, because Obama bought those curtains,” Haley responded.Haley, in turn, savaged 38-year-old entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy for doing business in China and for joining the social media app TikTok, which Ramaswamy defended as a logical thing to do to help the party attract younger voters, even as he said that people under 16 should not be “using addictive social media”.“TikTok is one of the most dangerous social media apps that we could have,” Haley said. “Honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say.”“We can’t trust you,” she said. “We can’t trust you.”The reviews were mixed. New York Times political correspondent Maggie Haberman wrote early in the debate, “This is unwatchable.” But Fox News’ Laura Ingraham argued after the debate that Haley and Ramaswamy were the most promising candidates in two flavors – Ramaswamy as the populist, Haley as the more traditional conservative supported by GOP donors.Ramaswamy seemed at one point to flaunt his youth and inexperience, acknowledging that as the “new guy”, he expected that voters would see him as “a young man who’s in a bit of a hurry, maybe a little ambitious, bit of a know-it-all”.“I’m here to tell you, no, I don’t know it all. I will listen. I will have the best people, the best and brightest in this country, whatever age they are, advising me,” he promised.Scott earned applause from the audience and praise from Sean Hannity for saying that, while he had experienced discrimination as a Black man, “America is not a racist country.”At the end of the debate, moderator Dana Perino of Fox News asked the candidates: “Which one of you onstage tonight should be voted off the island?” Almost everyone refused to reply. When Christie did, he attacked the one person who wasn’t on that particular island.Donald Trump. More

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      ‘Going against the grain’: is bipartisanship really possible in America?

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      On election night 2016, Van Jones, the criminal justice advocate and former Obama administration official turned CNN anchor, processed his shock on live television. “This was a whitelash against a changing country,” he said. “It was a whitelash against a Black president, in part. And that’s the part where the pain comes.” The clip, in which Jones appeared near tears and essentially called Donald Trump a “bully” and a “bigot”, went viral. For many, it was shorthand for shock and dismay, an articulation of unspeakable anger, and a rare example of a pundit calling it like it was.So it was confusing that over the next few years, Jones, a Black man from western Tennessee, was seen at the Trump White House, conducted the first (and uncomfortably chummy) TV interview with Trump’s son-in-law/adviser Jared Kushner, and touted his communication with the administration and congressional Republicans in the name of bipartisan criminal justice reform. In spring 2019, Jones appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference – the Maga hat-filled, far-right convention known as CPAC – as an avowed Democrat willing, for better and for worse and with a considerable amount of controversy, to engage with the opposition. He appeared on stage with the chairman of the American Conservative Union, prompting the question, from myself, from the panel’s moderator and surely from audience members: “Why are you here?”The answer – the distance between 2016 and 2019, and the messy, at times contradictory journey in between – forms the backbone of the The First Step, a new, wide-ranging and thoughtful documentary on his fraught activism and the bipartisan criminal justice legislation he championed. Created by the brothers team of director Brandon Kramer and producer Lance Kramer, The First Step opens with that CPAC appearance and takes it name from the First Step Act, the bill heralded by Jones and his criminal justice organization, #cut50, that was signed into law by President Trump in 2018. The measure barred punitive practices such as shackling pregnant prisoners, placed inmates in facilities closer to their families, cut down some federal sentences by anywhere from weeks to years and allowed those convicted of pre-2010 crack cocaine offenses to apply for resentencing to a shorter term.During the initial Trump years, Jones “felt like somebody needed to be engaging and reaching across the aisle and trying to see if there was any sliver of room to get something accomplished on some of the issues where there is some bipartisan support”, said Brandon Kramer. The First Step Act was thus a hodgepodge of reforms and concessions, with a wide range of supporters (people as ideologically opposed as Kamala Harris and Ted Cruz) and skeptics. Some Republicans interested in decreasing mass incarceration backed it; other hardliners, such as the then attorney general, Jeff Sessions, opposed it. Many progressives viewed the measure as too little, too patchwork, one whose passage would allow Republicans to claim criminal justice reform without meaningfully addressing mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Jones’s bipartisan approach – as in, courting Republicans, Jared Kushner and Democrats – drew plenty of critics; the bill was initially opposed by liberal groups including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU.It also makes for a fascinating, thorny watch, one which, Jones’s occasional foot-in-mouth moments or glad-handing aside, tangles with evergreen questions of political work: incremental change versus radical reform, resoluteness versus compromise, how and when to build a coalition. The Kramers, who worked with Jones on a 2016 web series called The Messy Truth, in which Jones spoke to people across the political spectrum, were interested in someone “going against the grain and doing something really tough and controversial and being able to tell those stories in a really complex way,” said Brandon. “It felt like no matter what would come out of that, it would be a really important document and story for the American public to have.” The First Step began production during the Women’s March in January 2017 and filmed into 2020, as the bill was worked and nearly killed, reworked and nearly killed and then passed, and beyond. “People talk about bridge-building, but it’s very rare that you get to see bridge-building in action,” said Brandon.The film proceeds along three intertwined tracks: first, the work to pass the bill itself, trying to nail down support from Democrats and attract Republicans with a Trump endorsement, as well as Trump’s Oval Office, on the day of signing. (Jones addresses Trump personally and gratefully.) Second, on Jones’s personal journey to activism, from shy, bookish kid to Yale Law School to fighting to shut down prisons in San Francisco in the 1990s, which convinced him that “you cannot help people en masse with one party or with one race. The only way you’re gonna help is you get everybody together.”Jones, whose style encompasses hard-won insights (“you can’t fight an opponent you don’t understand,” he says of researching the right), whiffs and bromides in one impassioned mix, is often a besieged island of one; “He who walks in the middle of the road gets hit on both sides,” says the bishop TD Jakes in a phone call with a fatigued Jones. We meet his small #cut50 team as well as some of his prominent liberal critics, from his friend Senator Cory Booker to progressive criminal justice advocates. The First Step Act is “not the law that we need right now”, says the Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors in the film. “This bill is going to jeopardize the work that we’ve done for the last couple decades.”And third, the film sits in on meetings facilitated by Jones between two grassroots groups grappling with addiction and incarceration: an organization of Black and Hispanic residents from South Central LA besieged by the crack epidemic and the “war on drugs”, and some predominantly white, Trump-voting citizens of McDowell county, West Virginia, reeling from the opioid crisis and cyclical arrests. Each group visits the other; most find common ground in shared trauma and frustration over a system that punishes rather than rehabilitates, if not in justifying the others’ vote in 2016. In one of the film’s most riveting scenes, Jones tries to convince the LA group members to visit Trump’s White House to tell their stories, because the people who shouldn’t be in power will make the trip, and “the right people won’t go” to make an impact. Some do make an uncomfortable visit, greeted by Kellyanne Conway; others view engagement as a bridge too far, certain that Trump and Conway “will find a way to misuse it”.The tension between engagement and non-engagement, incremental work versus comprehensive reform, course throughout the film with, of course, no definitive resolution. “There are very legitimate and important reasons why to engage, and there’s legitimate and important reasons why some people don’t engage or why they’re fighting for a more comprehensive reform,” said Brandon. “The hope is that you see people who represent your view, but you’re also given a window into a different strategy or opinion or view.”“It’s valuable for the human experience but also the political process to be able to engage with these kind of narratives but also just paradoxes in this space,” said Lance Kramer of the multitude of experiences and approaches professed in the film. “I think it’s a healing space, when you have that opportunity.”If anything, the US political environment has only grown more polarized, and the Republican party more untethered from reality, in the years since The First Step was filmed; it can feel weird to watch the film, and its depiction of bipartisan efforts, in a post-January 6 context. But, as Jones and the film-makers point out, there is still a point to political bridge-building. The First Step Act did get passed, allowing thousands of federal prisoners to go home early. The film ends with immediately eye-watering clips of former inmates reunited with their families, months or years ahead of time. “There’s virtues in still trying to get things done and not just throwing up our hands and giving up,” said Lance. “At the end of the day, it’s people’s lives that depend on it.”
      The First Step is now available digitally in the US More

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      Former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway and George Conway to divorce

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      Former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway and George Conway to divorceSplit unlikely to surprise many as their public positions on the divisive rightwing president diverged quickly and radicallyKellyanne Conway, a former senior adviser to Donald Trump as president, and her husband George Conway, who became a vociferously anti-Trump Republican, are to divorce, the Washington power couple announced on Saturday.The confirmation of the split is unlikely to surprise many in the politics-watching classes as, during the Trump administration, their public positions on the divisive rightwing president diverged quickly and radically.Kellyanne was Trump’s campaign manager during the 2016 presidential race becoming the first woman to successfully steer a White House bid, then became White House senior counsellor, where she served until August 2020.George Conway, meanwhile, had been considered as a possible solicitor general by Trump, but the powerful lawyer later became one of the most prominent anti-Trump critics in the Republican establishment, founding the Lincoln Project, a conservative political coalition dedicated to defeating the president.While Kellyanne was steadfastly at Trump’s side during almost his entire administration, George quickly became disenchanted with the chaos and dishonesty of the Trump presidency.He would slam the president frequently on Twitter, taking angry issue with Trump’s riding roughshod over the rule of law, such as when he fired FBI director James Comey after Comey declined to pledge blanket loyalty to the president.Both the Conways posted tweets on Saturday evening with a joint statement.It said, in part: “We are in the final stages of an amicable divorce. We married more than two decades ago, cherish the many happy years (and four corgis) we’ve shared, and above all else, our four incredible children, who remain the heartbeat of our family and our top priority.”pic.twitter.com/xxtFUi6jBB— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) March 4, 2023
      Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social, congratulating Kellyanne on being “free at last” and calling George her “wacko husband”, saying she had “finally gotten rid of that disgusting albatross around her neck”.TopicsKellyanne ConwayDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Kellyanne Conway seeks to shore up Trump support as legal troubles grow

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      Kellyanne Conway seeks to shore up Trump support as legal troubles growEx-White House counselor said on Fox News that Republicans should stick with her former boss as Democrats gain ground Donald Trump’s former White House counselor, Kellyanne Conway, does not think Republicans should move on from her former boss, despite signs his control of the party could cost it the chance to take Congress in November.Americans are starting to get it: we can’t let Trump – or Trumpism – back in office | Austin Sarat and Dennis AftergutRead moreSpeaking to Fox News on Tuesday, Conway said: “Those who want to move on from Trump: You go first.”Democrats are increasingly confident they can capitalize on Trump’s dominance of the Republican party, their own legislative successes and the need to protect abortion rights and hold the House and Senate.So much so, they have controversially boosted extremist Trump-endorsed candidates, including election deniers, in order to give independents and Republican moderates a stark choice at the polls.But Conway, who remains close to Trump, doubled down on the appeal of the Trumpist agenda.“Anytime Democrats tell you which Republican should be your nominee, run in the other direction, because they know that they’re fixing to make that person unpalatable,” she said.Democrats think Trump and his supporters are unpalatable given his refusal to admit defeat in 2020 and his lie about electoral fraud; his legal jeopardy on that front and over his business affairs; and his furious reaction to an FBI search at his Mar-a-Lago home, over his retention of classified White House material.Democrats have performed strongly in special elections, particularly by focusing on the supreme court’s removal of the right to abortion. In conservative Kansas, a ballot measure came out in favor of the right to choose. In key Senate races including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona and Georgia, Trump-backed candidates are struggling.Conway claimed voters were aligned with Republicans on key issues. Those obsessed with Trump, she said, “don’t spend a minute learning what the 74 million Trump-Pence voters want in these midterm elections. That’s what I study every single day.”More than 74 million Americans voted for Trump and Mike Pence in 2020. Unsaid by Conway: more than 81 million voted for Joe Biden.“When Trump is the leader of the party, when he’s involved in the conversation,” Conway said, Republicans enjoy results such as in 2018, when they celebrated “four [Senate] pick-ups from blue to red, the first time since John Kennedy in 1962 that a president in power’s party picked up a single Senate seat in a midterm election”.Republicans also lost the House in 2018, losing 40 seats under a so-called blue wave.On Fox News, the pollster Mark Penn contested Conway’s comments.“There’s a very hefty group, 10%, who voted for [Biden] last time who don’t like him this time,” he said. “Why aren’t they flocking [to Republicans]? They care about inflation. They care about crime, they care about immigration.“They’re not flocking because of Donald Trump, guns and abortion. Those three are Democratic core issues for them. And so that’s why this race is right now a lot closer than you would normally expect it to be.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsKellyanne ConwayRepublicansJoe BidenDemocratsFox NewsnewsReuse this content More

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      Here’s the Deal review: Kellyanne Conway on Trump – with plenty of alternative facts

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      Here’s the Deal review: Kellyanne Conway on Trump – with plenty of alternative facts The former White House counselor’s memoir is tart, readable and thoroughly selective when it comes to inconvenient truthsKellyanne Conway joined Donald Trump’s orbit after Ted Cruz’s presidential bid collapsed and Paul Manafort wore out his welcome. The Trump White House was a snake pit. Like most Trump memoirs, Conway’s book revels in selective recall as well as settling scores. After all, this is the woman who coined the term “alternative facts”.A Sacred Oath review: Mark Esper on Trump, missiles for Mexico and more Read moreConway strafes Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner and Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff. Her disdain is unvarnished, her language tart. Her book? Readable.Conway labels Bannon a “leaking dirigible” and an “unpaternal, paternalistic bore of a boor”. She dings his aesthetics and questions his stability. Confronted with the possibility Bannon might receive a presidential pardon, Conway says, she told him Trump didn’t owe him anything.“You were a leaker,” she remembers saying. “You were terrible to [Trump] in the press … You were the only source for at least two books riddled with lies.”He got the pardon anyway.Some who feel Conway’s sting are very close to home. She sticks a knife in her own husband, George, for trashing Trump and embarrassing her. Between the two men, Conway posits that Trump was the one who remained loyal. She may wish to reconsider. Her book has kindled Trump’s wrath.“I may have been the first person Donald Trump trusted in his inner circle who told him that he had come up short this time,” Conway writes, about the 2020 defeat Trump has refused to admit. But Trump denies she said any such thing.“If she had I wouldn’t have dealt with her any longer – she would have been wrong – could go back to her crazy husband,” he “truthed” on Thursday on his own ersatz Twitter, Truth Social.But Trump can’t say he wasn’t warned. The Devil’s Bargain, Joshua Green’s 2016 campaign exposé, captures Conway both badmouthing Trump’s chances and playing the sycophant.In 2019, Cliff Sims, once a junior White House staffer, framed things this way in his memoir, Team of Vipers: “Kellyanne stood in a class of own in terms of her machinations – I had to admire her sheer gall.”In Here’s the Deal, Kellyanne soft-pedals Green but is far less charitable to Sims. She rehashes his departure from the White House, dismisses him as a lightweight and gloats over Trump targeting him with a “brutal” takedown on Twitter.Left unsaid is that Sims played a significant role at the 2020 Republican convention, drafting speeches for two Trump children. And whatever his sins, he came to be re-embraced by senior Trump staff even after he challenged a Trump-induced non-disclosure agreement in court.On a matter of greater importance, Conway lauds Bob Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, the conservative mega-donors who invested in Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct psychographic profiling company which was linked to Bannon.Rebekah Mercer allegedly provided connective tissue for the January 6 insurrection, via Parler. Conway omits such details. Not surprisingly, she also ignores Bob Mercer’s tax woes. In 2021, with his business partners, Mercer reportedly entered into a $7bn settlement with the IRS.Like many in Trumpworld, Conway hits Facebook for its role in the 2020 election. But she omits the nexus between Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant and Cambridge Analytica, in 2016 and beyond. The two businesses shared more than a passing acquaintance.Cambridge Analytica illegally harvested personal data from Facebook. Conway takes Bannon to task for profiting from his investment in Cambridge Analytica but stays mum about the Mercers’ ownership.In 2016, the Cruz campaign spent more than $5.8m on Cambridge Analytica services. That same year, the unseen hand of the company put it sticky fingers on the scales of Brexit. This past week, the attorney general for the District of Columbia launched a lawsuit against Facebook in connection with the Cambridge Analytica data breach.Here’s the Deal also contains its fair share of semi-veiled ethnic reductionism. Conway writes of how she “made her bones” – a term with mafia origins – in Trump’s 2016 campaign. Elsewhere, she deploys “clever”, “shrewd” and “calculating” to describe Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who is Jewish. At the same time, she shares a desire to keep things “classy”.Some realities cut too close to the bone. Despite acknowledging Trump’s loss in 2020, Conway is silent on his infamous post-election call with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he sought to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump said. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated.”The only thing missing was the president telling Raffensperger he was receiving an offer he couldn’t refuse. Unsurprisingly, Conway has few kind words for Biden. She recounts the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and rightly tags his administration for inflation. But she also blames the president for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and for Iran threatening nuclear breakout.This Will Not Pass review: Trump-Biden blockbuster is dire reading for DemocratsRead moreHello, alternative facts. In February, Trump praised Vladimir Putin as smart and denigrated Nato. These days, Putin is under siege and Nato is the club to join. This somehow escapes Conway’s attention.As for Tehran, Axios reports that senior Israeli military officials now view Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal as having “brought Iran closer to a nuclear weapon and created a worse situation”. An attempt to placate Trump’s base had a cost.Conway remains in the arena. Here’s the Deal doubles as an audition for a campaign slot in 2024. In Trumpworld, few are ever permanently banished. Conway should ask Steve Bannon. He could tell her some things.
      Here’s the Deal is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
      TopicsBooksKellyanne ConwayUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationRepublicansUS elections 2016reviewsReuse this content More

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      Kellyanne Conway takes aim at Bannon in book but hits Trump in process

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      Kellyanne Conway takes aim at Bannon in book but hits Trump in processFormer senior counselor to Donald Trump says president was ‘too trusting of others who lacked transparency or talent’ In her new memoir, Kellyanne Conway lavishes abuse on Steve Bannon, calling the former White House strategist a “leaking dirigible” and an “unpaternal, paternalistic bore of a boor” more concerned with his own image than serving Donald Trump.The ‘straight, white, Christian, suburban mom’ taking on Republicans at their own gameRead moreBut in doing so, the former senior counselor to the ex-US president criticises Trump himself, otherwise a notable escapee from her book.“One of Trump’s biggest selling points,” Conway writes in one of many takedowns of Bannon, “was his refreshing lack of political experience. But the flip side of that quality was his occasional blind spots when it came to personnel decisions and political endorsements.”Trump’s endorsements are the focus of fierce attention. In Georgia primaries on Tuesday his candidate for governor, David Perdue, seems doomed to defeat while his Senate candidate, Herschel Walker, is widely deemed unsuitable for the role.Conway continues: “[Trump] was often too trusting of others who lacked transparency or talent, and insufficiently skeptical of those who were pushing the wrong people as candidates for office or as colleagues in the administration. I won some of those arguments and lost some.”Conway’s book, Here’s the Deal, has caused arguments since excerpts were reported last week. It is published in the US on Tuesday.The New Jersey Republican operative was both the first woman to manage a winning presidential campaign and a relatively rare senior staffer to last four years in the chaotic Trump White House.Her avoidance of criticising Trump has been widely reported. Her criticism of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and chief adviser, and her version of the strain placed on her marriage by her husband George Conway’s open disdain for Trump, have also been widely discussed.She charges that others in the Trump White House leaked to the media consistently.“As a frequent guest in mixed political company,” she writes, “I’d been much more transparent and much more reserved in my dealings than the leaking Bannon dirigible hovering about, and the taxpayer-funded Kushner image-curation machine stationed inside and outside the White House.”Bannon has been a source for multiple tell-alls, but Conway’s protestations of discretion might ring hollow to some.As the Guardian wrote in its review of Team of Vipers, a 2019 memoir by a former Trump aide: “[Cliff] Sims spills the beans on Conway repeatedly trashing Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon and Sean Spicer to the mainstream media, while recounting to the press ostensibly private conversations with the president.”Conway says her relationship with Bannon began well, though she found him to be “a strange dude, gruff, unkempt, prone to sweeping historical assertions and bold declarations about the current state of politics”.The two were introduced by Rebekah Mercer, a far-right mega-donor whose ownership of Cambridge Analytica, a Bannon-linked data firm which became enmeshed in scandal, remains unexamined by Conway.“Our arranged marriage got off to a promising start” before the 2016 election, Conway says of Bannon, as the two operatives “tried to shake up some stuck-in-the-mud Republicans and introduce fresh names to the candidate hunt”.‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblowerRead moreShe also says Bannon urged her to take a job in Trump’s White House, saying: “Fuck, girl, c’mon: you gotta do this.”But Conway says that in the White House, Bannon’s “main job seemed to be building his own fiefdom”. She also says Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, warned her Bannon was on his way out.Bannon left the White House in August 2017, amid uproar over Donald Trump’s courting of far-right activists with whom Bannon remains closely associated.Bannon is the only Trump aide to face a criminal charge related to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Charged with contempt of Congress, he has pleaded not guilty.TopicsKellyanne ConwayTrump administrationSteve BannonUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      It’s Trump’s time to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth | Lloyd Green

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      It’s Trump’s time to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truthLloyd GreenA New York judge has ruled Trump will have to testify in his fraud investigation, leaving Trump sweating and his investors shaking their heads Donald Trump’s bad luck continues. On Thursday afternoon, Arthur Engoron, a Manhattan judge, gave the thumbs up to subpoenas issued to Trump, favorite child Ivanka, and Donald Trump Jr, by Tish James, New York’s attorney general. The court’s ruling follows a decision by Trump’s accountants to walk away from the one-term president and disavow years of financial statements issued by his company.Much as the Trump trio tried, they could not shut down James’s investigation into the Trump Organization’s business practices, which could lead to a civil suit by James. Unlike a criminal prosecution, a civil action comes with a lower burden of proof for the government. At the same time, civil lawsuits can drag on – like right into 2024. Barring a stay, Trump and his two children have been ordered to appear at deposition within 21 days.Trump and two eldest children must testify in New York case, judge rulesRead moreIf they tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, who knows what liability may result? On the other hand, if they invoke their right to remain silent, they will probably be portrayed as criminals.“You see, the mob takes the fifth,” Trump observed on the campaign trail in 2016. “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the fifth amendment?”Time sure flies. And if the Trump family refuses to appear at deposition or simply stays mum when grilled, they risk being charged with contempt, a distinction presently held by Steve Bannon, Trump’s White House counselor and 2016 campaign guru.At this moment, Trump must be sweating while his lenders have to be shaking their collective heads. How much is Trump worth and how bad can things get are no longer hypothetical issues. In the absence of operative financial statements, restructurings and bank-called defaults have spilled into the realm of the real.As one Trump insider confided: “Hey, this might be serious. Could Donald Trump [and his business] be screwed? I don’t know, but I’m not as confident as I once was in saying, ‘No’.”Meanwhile, 2024 Republican presidential aspirants are likely stifling a collective smirk. Trump’s legal woes stand to broaden the Republican party’s presidential field, and for some it is downright personal.For Mike Pence, Trump’s hapless vice-president, these recent developments may well trigger a sense of schadenfreude. It wasn’t that long ago when Trump’s loyalists came with makeshift gallows for Pence as they stormed the Capitol, and Trump said nothing to deter the mob. Instead, he demanded loyalty from his No 2.As for Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, Trump’s troubles could not come at a better time. Trump has all but called DeSantis a coward for refusing to say whether he was vaccinated. Beyond that, Florida’s recent per capita Covid mortality rate is the seventh highest in the US, and DeSantis is having a hard time denouncing neo-Nazi violence.“So what I’m going to say is these people, these Democrats who are trying to use this as some type of political issue to try to smear me as if I had something to do with that,” the Sunshine state governor declared. “We’re not playing their game.”To be sure, Trump’s Maga base would stick with him through thick-and-thin. The party’s deep-pocketed donors are a different story. Trump may have delivered them a trove of tax cuts and ambassadorships, but he’s emotionally draining.Beyond that, his antics in the run-up to the 2020 Georgia runoff elections cost the Republicans control of the Senate. There are reasons Mitch McConnell rejects Trump’s lie that the election was stolen and is seeking to bypass the 45th president.Thursday’s ruling was scathing. At one point, the court concluded that the attorney general had uncovered “copious evidence of possible financial fraud”. Elsewhere, the judge excoriated Trump & Co for their flight to fantasy and fiction, invoking Alice in Wonderland, 1984 and Kellyanne Conway all in a single sentence.“The idea that an accounting firm’s announcement that no one should rely on a decade’s worth of financial statements that it issued based on numbers submitted by an entity somehow exonerates that entity and renders an investigation into its past practices moot is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll (‘When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said … it means just what I chose it to mean – neither more nor less’); George Orwell (‘War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength’); and ‘alternative facts.’”In the past, Trump managed to weather storms surrounding his finances and credibility. Trump University did not stop the ex-reality show host’s political ascent. What happens next remains to be seen.Right now, Joe Biden’s poll numbers are in the low 40s, inflation is on the loose, and Nancy Pelosi is poised to lose the speaker’s gavel. Against that tableau, Trump poses a distraction from Republican ambitions, an unwelcome detour from anticipated outcome.
      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York. He was opposition research counsel to George HW Bush’s 1988 campaign and served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
      TopicsDonald TrumpOpinionUS politicsDonald Trump JrIvanka TrumpMike PenceKellyanne ConwayNew YorkcommentReuse this content More

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      White House asks Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway to quit military academy boards – video

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      The White House has confirmed that Trump appointees to military service academy advisory boards, among them former press secretary Sean Spicer and adviser Kellyanne Conway, have been asked to step down or be fired. During a White House press briefing Jen Psaki responded to questions about whether this risked politicising these  appointments: ‘I will let others evaluate whether they think Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer and others were qualified, or not political, to serve on these boards, but the president’s qualification requirements are not your party registration, they are whether you’re qualified to serve and whether you’re aligned with the values of this administration.’

      Biden asks Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway to quit military academy boards More