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      Endorsements from Republicans and CEOs won’t help Kamala Harris win | Katrina vanden Heuvel

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      Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney’s campaign event last week in Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican party, was a dramatic component of Harris’s ongoing outreach to Republicans. That outreach, begun under President Joe Biden and continuing even more aggressively under Harris, was made clear in an open letter on Thursday in which two dozen Republican former officials and lawmakers in Wisconsin endorsed Harris and her running mate, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz.“We have plenty of policy disagreements with Vice President Harris,” the Republicans wrote. “But what we do agree upon is more important. We agree that we cannot afford another four years of the broken promises, election denialism, and chaos of Donald Trump’s leadership.”This statement comes after the Harris campaign touted the endorsements of more than 100 former staffers and national security leaders from past Republican administrations, 10 retired military generals and admirals, and more than 90 business leaders including former chairs or CEOs of companies such as UBS, Aetna, Visa, Merck and American Airlines, as well as former high officials like Robert Rubin and Larry Summers.The Harris campaign seems intent on convincing voters that she is the favored candidate of the bipartisan establishment. One problem with this strategy: voters probably already assume that about Harris. And if they didn’t, Trump reminds them regularly, painting her both as the “other” and as part of the establishment that has failed them. The danger: Harris is helping to make his case for him.Trump’s mendacity, duplicity, fraudulence and corruption are well known. So why is the race so close, and why does Trump enjoy such support from working-class voters, not simply white men, but growing numbers of Black people, Hispanics and single women? His poisonous racism and xenophobia surely play a part. But the central theme of his political campaigns since he came down the golden elevator in 2016 has been how working people have been fleeced by an establishment that enriched itself and failed them.In 2016, Trump’s focus was on trade, Nafta, China in the WTO. This year, his focus is on inflation and the cost of living. Even his slanders of immigrants focus on how they are taking jobs from working people, raising the cost of housing, the source of increasing crime, drugs and violence.And repeatedly, Trump indicts the establishment that has failed them. As he said in the 2016 campaign:“The political establishment has brought about the destruction of our factories and our jobs … Just look at what this corrupt establishment has done to our cities like Detroit and Flint, Michigan – and rural towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, and across our country. They have stripped these towns bare and raided the wealth for themselves and taken away their jobs.”As Jared Abbott, of the Center for Working Class Politics, concluded after a study of Trump’s rhetoric in 2016, “Unlike virtually any politician they had ever heard before, Trump not only spoke over and over again to the economic pain felt by so many working-class Americans but also called out the elite culprits by name, something that traditional politicians typically shy away from.”On foreign policy, Trump is similarly openly scornful of the generals and foreign policy “blob” who led us into losing wars, squandering the lives not of their own children, but those of working people. When the generals and national security managers announced their endorsements of Harris, Trump’s spokesperson, Steven Cheung, responded: “These are the same people who got our country into endless foreign wars and profited off of them while the American people suffered,” followed by the lie that “President Trump is the only president in the modern era not to get our country into any new wars.”Trump’s lies, libels and shambling vaudeville rallies simply reinforce his message that he not only isn’t part of the establishment, but he’s hated by them.In this election, voters are looking for dramatic change. Polls show that, as Stan Greenberg has reported, only a quarter of battleground voters think the country is headed in the right direction. The overwhelming concern is inflation and the cost of living. The average household grocery bill is 20% higher than in 2020. The costs of necessities – housing, healthcare, childcare, college – seem increasingly out of reach.More and more voters are clear that a big cause of this is entrenched and corrupt interests – big oil, the drug companies, monopolies, multinationals. Greenberg reports that the percentage of voters with little or no confidence in “big business” is the lowest since the financial crisis of 2008.Harris has an agenda and a message that can speak to these concerns: cracking down on monopolies, starting with price gouging on groceries. Taking on pharma. A child tax credit, help for new families, help for new homeowners and small businesses paid for by taxes on millionaires and billionaires. Moving forward on rebuilding America and generating good jobs by investing in the growth industries of the coming years.The contrast with Trump’s agenda – of tax cuts for the corporations and the rich, of trade wars and higher costs of goods from across-the-board tariffs, of promising big oil a blank check if they support his campaign – is telling.But Harris has to prove that she is prepared to take on the powerful interests, dislodge the failed establishment, and force the changes she’s begun to talk about. When she arrays her support from the establishment, she doesn’t build her credibility, she weakens it. If 90 CEOS stand with her, why believe she’s prepared to take them on or tax them? If the generals who led us into one failed war after another are with her, why believe she’ll focus on rebuilding America and not on global misadventures?Rather than gaining media acclaim for joining Liz Cheney in Ripon, she might have been better off walking the (blessedly, short-lived) picket line with striking dockworkers, reinforcing Biden’s statement that the companies and executives have enjoyed staggering and record returns, and it’s time for the workers to get their fair share.The mainstream media will broadcast the bipartisan support behind Harris. Those who worked with Trump and now oppose him will find a ready platform. In the little time left before the election, Harris and Walz need to focus on providing a compelling answer to the famous union question: which side are you on? Liz Cheney, Robert Rubin and Mike Pence don’t help with that answer.

      Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of the Nation, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has contributed to the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times More

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      Liz Cheney campaigns with Harris and urges voters to reject Trump’s ‘cruelty’

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      Liz Cheney, one of Donald Trump’s most prominent conservative critics, appealed to the millions of undecided Americans who could decide the outcome of the 2024 election, asking them to “reject the depraved cruelty” of the former president.A former representative from Wyoming, Cheney cast the stakes in November as nothing less than the future of American democracy as she appeared alongside Kamala Harris in Ripon, Wisconsin, on Thursday, the symbolic birthplace of the modern Republican party.The daughter of Dick Cheney, the Republican former vice-president, said she had never voted for a Democrat before, but would do so “proudly” to ensure Trump never holds a position of public trust again. Her father will join her in casting his ballot for Harris.“I know that the most conservative of conservative values is fidelity to our constitution,” Cheney said, speaking from a podium adorned with the vice presidential seal. The crowd broke into a chant: “Thank you, Liz!” A large sign looming over them declared: “Country over Party.”Harris praised Cheney’s “courage” for being willing to cross party lines to endorse – and campaign alongside – the Democratic nominee. During the event, a remarkable joint appearance that would have been unimaginable in the pre-Trump era, Cheney pitched Harris as a unifying leader who will safeguard American institutions.Cheney and Harris agree on little politically – only that Trump should not be allowed to serve a second term. But their union is part of an effort by the Harris campaign to win over Republican voters who, like Cheney, believe in “limited government” and “low taxes” but are repelled by Trump and his Maga movement.“No matter your political party, there is a place for you with us and in this campaign,” Harris said. “I take seriously my pledge to be a president for all Americans.”Harris touts a growing collection of endorsements from prominent Republican leaders and ex-Trump administration officials, including Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump White House who testified against him in the January 6 House hearings, as well as Anthony Scaramucci, former White House communications director, and Stephanie Grisham, a former press secretary.Adam Kinzinger, a former Illinois representative and the only other Republican to serve on the January 6 committee, also is backing Harris, and forcefully denounced Trump in a speech at the Democratic national convention in August.In a reprisal of her role as the vice-chair of the House select committee investigating the 2021 attack on the US Capitol, Cheney on Thursday methodically recounted for the crowd how Trump had refused for hours to intervene on January 6, instead watching the violence unfold on television.“After the Capitol had been invaded, he praised the rioters. He did not condemn them. That’s who Donald Trump is,” she said. Cheney rebuked Republicans who have sought to “minimize what happened” that day.“Do not let anyone lie about what happened and what they did,” she said, adding: “Violence does not and must never determine who rules us. Voters do.”Cheney was effectively exiled from her own party after she broke forcefully with the former president. But on Thursday, she said it was Trump, thrice chosen as the Republican nominee, who was failing to uphold the founding ideals of the “party of Lincoln”. With a dash of arch humor, she added: “I was a Republican even before Donald Trump started spray-tanning.”Harris’s appearance with Cheney came one day after a judge unsealed new evidence in a federal case against Trump for his attempt to cling to power in 2020. In the court filing, federal prosecutors allege that he amplified false claims of voter fraud and “resorted to crimes” in his failed bid to overturn the results of an election he lost.At a rally in Michigan earlier on Thursday, Trump repeated the false claim that he won the 2020 presidential election.“We won. We won,” Trump said in Saginaw, a swing county in the midwestern battleground. “We have to be too big to rig.”Harris will travel to Michigan on Thursday night, and campaign in Detroit on Friday, as the candidates battle for votes in the trio of “blue wall” swing states seen as the clearest path to the White House.Leaving the White House on Thursday, Joe Biden said he was hardly surprised by the razor-thin margins.“It always gets this close,” he told reporters. “She’s going to do fine.”He also praised her running mate, Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, for his performance against JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, during Tuesday night’s debate in New York. Near the end of the 90-minute exchange, Walz turned to the subject of the 2020 election: had Trump lost? he asked Vance.Vance replied that he was “focused on the future”.“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz replied, adding that Vance’s loyalty to Trump above all else was the reason he and not the former vice-president, Mike Pence, was there on stage that night. The response was clipped and immediately re-packaged by the Harris campaign into a television ad.On January 6, as protesters chanted: “Hang Mike Pence,” the then vice-president resisted pressure from Trump to reject the votes of the electoral college and returned to the Capitol after it was breached to certify Biden’s victory.On Thursday, Cheney claimed Vance, in Pence’s shoes, would have “thrown out the votes of the people of Wisconsin” because they had voted to elect Biden as president in 2020. “That is tyranny, and that is disqualifying,” she said.Cheney effectively ended her own political career by voting to impeach Trump over his role in stoking a mob of supporters that attacked the Capitol on 6 January 2021. She was one of just two Republicans willing to serve on the House select committee investigation into the attack that sought to hold Trump – and his Republican enablers – accountable for the sprawling effort to overturn his defeat.She lost a 2022 Republican primary, but has remained a vocal critic of the former president. Before Biden stepped aside, Cheney said she was mulling a third-party bid.But on Thursday, she made clear there was no other alternative to Trump. Cheney quoted from a letter that John Adams, the nation’s second president, wrote to his wife on the first night he spent in the White House: “May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.”“Now I am confident,” she said, her smile widening, “that John Adams meant women, too.” More

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      ‘Morally indefensible’ – but George W Bush will not come out against Trump

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      The MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell this week hit out at George W Bush, the Republican former president, for refusing to weigh in on America’s looming presidential election.“All any decent person wants him to do is to say, ‘Don’t vote for Donald Trump, and here’s why,’ and he won’t even do that,” O’Donnell told the Fast Politics podcast, of the Republican president who was in office from 2001 to 2009.Increasingly, Bush – and some other top Republicans from his political era – are looking lonely in their ongoing refusal to take a side in an election in which many have warned that US democracy is under threat from Trump’s open sympathies with autocracy.Bush’s vice-president Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney, whose January 6 committee role cost her a US House seat in Wyoming, have endorsed Kamala Harris. So have other senior Republicans, including more than 100 who this week signed a letter declaring that Trump, their party’s nominee for a third election running, must never return to the White House.“We believe that the president of the United States must be a principled, serious and steady leader,” the officials said. “We expect to disagree with Kamala Harris on many domestic and foreign policy issues, but we believe that she possesses the essential qualities to serve as president and Donald Trump does not.”Big-name signatories included Chuck Hagel, a former senator and defense secretary; Gen Michael Hayden, a former CIA and NSA chief; and John Negroponte, once ambassador to the UN. Robert Zoellick, a longtime aide to both presidents Bush and a deputy to James Baker, secretary of state to the elder Bush, was on the list too.Missing from the list, however, were Baker, the younger Bush and his own secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. As perhaps the three most senior Republicans who have not come out against Trump in this election cycle, Bush, Rice and Baker’s lack of comment excites growing comment itself.Bush’s office recently said he would not endorse, having “retired from presidential politics years ago”, perhaps ensuring that his most lasting comment on his successor will be the one he reportedly delivered on the dais at the Capitol after Trump’s inaugural speech in 2017, “American carnage” and all: “That was some weird shit.”Rice did oppose Trump in 2016. Amid the Access Hollywood scandal, over Trump’s boasts about sexual assault, Rice said he should withdraw as the Republican candidate, in favor of “someone who has the dignity and stature to run for the highest office in the greatest democracy on earth”.She has commented on Trump’s presidency too. In 2021, she said his appeal to people who felt let down by establishment politicians was “something that we probably still really need to pay attention to”. Earlier this year, Rice spoke out against isolationism, another central tenet of Trumpism. But that drew a rebuke from Adam Kinzinger, the former congressman from Illinois who sat with Cheney on the January 6 committee and who endorsed Harris at the Democratic national convention.“It’s time to speak up and do more,” Kinzinger said. “You’re not fighting against ‘isolationism’. You’re fighting against Trump and you need to say this out loud. No more straddling the fence, Republicans. You’re for Trump or against him. Pick a side.”Baker has not taken a public position on Trump but in 2020, his biographers reported that though the “myriad ethical scandals surrounding Trump were head-spinning, Baker kept telling himself it was worth it to get conservative judges, tax cuts and deregulation”.“I will vote for the Republican,” Baker was quoted as saying. “I really will.”Now 94 but still active in the public realm, Baker has not publicly indicated how he will vote this year. A source close to him said he had been sharply critical of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election in 2020. Nonetheless, the former secretary of state’s words in his biography ring loud.“I won’t leave my party. You can say my party has left me because the leader of it has. But I think it’s important, the big picture.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn most eyes, though, the big picture has only grown more alarming. Trump has incited a deadly attack on Congress; beaten a second impeachment arising from that attack; been convicted on 34 criminal charges with more than 50 pending; been ordered to pay hundreds of millions in civil cases regarding business fraud and a defamation suit arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”; and launched an election campaign of breathtaking racist invective and lies.“Taxes go up, taxes go down. Regulations are imposed, they are withdrawn. But a democracy? You can’t squander that. Our reputation in the world, the Nato alliance at a time of extreme danger – once those things are gone, they would be exceptionally hard to rebuild.”That was the view of one Washington Republican, a White House official under both Bushes whose job now precludes public endorsements but who was granted anonymity to speak frankly and said they would vote for Harris.With a laugh, the former official suggested George W Bush “may write in Condi Rice again”, a reference to the protest vote Bush said he lodged in 2020, rather than support Joe Biden.As for Baker, the former official said: “Don’t forget, he’s from Houston. I think if you spend 50 years around Houston, you just absorb the oil and gas view of the world. Many people in the oil and gas industry are very anti-Biden, very anti-Harris, largely because of the perception that Biden was for the Green New Deal, which is false, and then the natural gas export review.”For Republicans, the former official said, it is easier to come out against Trump in the national security space and what might be called the democracy space, given the enormity of Trump’s election subversion and January 6 and anxious questions about his relationships with autocrats including Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China and Kim Jong-un of North Korea.“There are the Dick Cheneys of the world, who basically say: ‘This is about democracy. This is about January 6. Donald Trump cannot be trusted with power.’ I would also suspect that in Cheney’s case, this goes back to his tenure in the defense department [under George HW Bush], and if you recall the op-ed that all the living secretaries of defense wrote on 3 January 2021, it’s all coming out of that.”That column, for the Washington Post, urged all Americans to ensure a peaceful transfer of power. Three days later, Trump ensured that did not happen.The former official continued: “While there have been a number of more moderate Republicans who have endorsed Harris, I do not see this as ideological. I see it as, principally, first stop Trump, then attempt to rebuild the party.”Such ambitions may also motivate establishment Republicans who have chosen to back Trump, among them the New Hampshire governor, Chris Sununu, and Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who fought Trump in the primary. All may have eyes on a post-Trump world – either in 2024 if he loses or 2028 if he wins.If so, the former White House official suggested, it may not prove a wise course.“I think it would be hugely, hugely difficult to rebuild the party, largely because the Trumpers just have control of pretty much everything in the states, in the state parties.“But I think that is the task of a generation, and even more moderate figures are going to have to make nods in the direction of Trumpism for the foreseeable future.” More

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      Liz Cheney calls Trump a ‘catastrophe’ and urges Republicans to vote for Harris

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      The former congresswoman Liz Cheney called Donald Trump an “unrecoverable catastrophe” on Sunday and urged fellow Republicans to vote for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in November’s election.“We see it on a daily basis – somebody who was willing to use violence in order to attempt to seize power, to stay in power, someone who represents unrecoverable catastrophe, frankly, in my view, and we have to do everything possible to ensure that he’s not re-elected,” Cheney said in an interview on ABC News This Week, a show on the network that is hosting Tuesday’s debate between Trump and Harris.Cheney also reaffirmed her endorsement of Harris and urged other prominent Republicans who have stated they plan on writing in a third option rather than vote for Trump to cast their ballots for the Democrat instead.“At the end of the day, you just have to wrestle with your own conscience when you’re there in the voting booth. And I would expect that you will see far more Republicans and independents, you know, when the time comes, and they’ve got to make that decision, make the right decision,” said Cheney. “Given the closeness of this election, particularly if you’re going to find yourself voting in a swing state, you’ve got to take the extra step if you really do recognize the threat that Donald Trump poses. Then it’s not enough to simply say, ‘I’m not going to vote for him.’”Asked whether she is still a Republican, Cheney claimed she is still a conservative. She said she hopes to “rebuild” the Republican party after the 5 November presidential election.A number of other Republicans have stopped short of endorsing Trump, who has been convicted of criminally falsifying business records while also facing other charges in connection with his attempts to reverse his defeat to Joe Biden while running for re-election in the 2020 presidential race.They include George W Bush, Trump’s former vice-president Mike Pence, US senator Mitt Romney and Maryland governor Larry Hogan.On Sunday, Nikki Haley – who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations and later challenged him unsuccessfully in the Republican presidential primary – refused to answer when asked on a CBS Face the Nation interview if Trump was a good candidate.But unlike Cheney, they have not lent their support to Harris.Cheney fell out of favor with many in the Republican party after criticizing Trump and serving on the congressional committee which investigated the attack that his supporters aimed at the US Capitol in early January 2021. She lost re-election in Wyoming in 2022 to a Republican primary challenger backed by Trump.On Friday, her father and Bush vice-president Dick Cheney announced he plans on voting for Kamala Harris in November, rebuking his own party. A statement from Dick Cheney cited Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.Harris told reporters covering a campaign stop in Wisconsin on Saturday that she was “honored” to have the Cheneys’ endorsement and credited them for putting “country above party”. More

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      Former vice-president Dick Cheney confirms he will vote for Kamala Harris

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      The former vice-president Dick Cheney, a lifelong Republican, will vote for the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, in November’s presidential election, he said in a statement on Friday.“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said of the former president and Republican nominee. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice-President Kamala Harris.”Liz Cheney, who herself endorsed Harris on Thursday, first announced her father’s endorsement when asked by Mark Leibovich of the Atlantic during an onstage interview at the Texas Tribune festival in Austin.“Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris,” Liz Cheney said to audience cheers.“Wow,” Leibovich replied.Like his daughter, Dick Cheney has been an outspoken critic of Trump, notably during Liz Cheney’s ill-fated re-election campaign in 2022.In a campaign ad for Liz Cheney as she sought a fourth term as Wyoming’s lone congressperson, Dick Cheney called the former president a “coward” for trying to “steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him”.The ad did little good for his daughter in a deep-red state that once held the Cheney family dear but is now thoroughly in Trump’s corner. By a two-to-one margin, Liz Cheney lost her Republican primary to the Trump-endorsed attorney Harriet Hageman.Notably absent from Friday’s endorsement announcement was the 83-year-old former vice-president, who has made few if any public appearances over the past year or more.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Liz Cheney urges US supreme court to rule quickly on Trump’s immunity claim

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      The former congresswoman and co-chair of the House January 6 committee Liz Cheney is urging the US supreme court to rule quickly on Donald Trump’s claim that he has immunity from prosecution for acts he committed while president – so that his 2020 election interference trial can begin before the 2024 election this November.“If delay prevents this Trump case from being tried this year, the public may never hear critical and historic evidence developed before the grand jury, and our system may never hold the man most responsible for January 6 to account,” Cheney wrote in an opinion article for the New York Times, published on Monday.Trump faces four federal election subversion charges, arising from his attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020, fueled by his lie about electoral fraud and culminating in the deadly attack on Congress by extremist supporters, urged on by the then president, on 6 January 2021.Cheney warned: “I know how Mr Trump’s delay tactics work,” adding: “Mr Trump believes he can threaten and intimidate judges and their families, assert baseless legal defenses and thereby avoid accountability altogether.”The special counsel Jack Smith, prosecuting the case against Trump, has urged the court to reject Trump’s immunity claim as “an unprecedented assault on the structure of our government”.Cheney, a Republican and the daughter of the former vice-president Dick Cheney, was ousted from her congressional seat, representing Wyoming, after she became one of the strongest voices from the GOP demanding Trump be held accountable for inciting and failing to stop the January 6 insurrection.She has since said she would prefer Democrats to win in the 2024 elections over members of her own party as it has become more extreme, because she feared the US was “sleepwalking into dictatorship” and that another Trump White House presented a tangible “threat” to American democracy.Cheney said in her New York Times article: “The special counsel’s indictment lays out Mr Trump’s detailed plan to overturn the 2020 election … [and that] senior advisers in the White House, Justice Department and elsewhere repeatedly warned that Mr Trump’s claims of election fraud were false and that his plans for January 6 were illegal.”She added: “If Mr Trump’s tactics prevent his January 6 trial from proceeding in the ordinary course, he will also have succeeded in concealing critical evidence from the American people – evidence demonstrating his disregard for the rule of law, his cruelty on January 6 and the deep flaws in character that make him unfit to serve as president. The Supreme Court should understand this reality and conclude without delay that no immunity applies here.”The court’s nine-member bench leans very conservative, especially after Trump nominated three rightwing justices while he was president. The court hears oral arguments in the immunity case on Thursday.Trump and his team urged the court to find that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts they take in office and therefore dismiss the federal criminal case. More

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      Liz Cheney says ex-RNC chair Ronna McDaniel ‘enabled’ Trump’s ‘criminality’

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      The Republican National Committee chair turned NBC politics analyst Ronna McDaniel “enabled criminality and depravity” with her support for Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the former congresswoman Liz Cheney said as controversy swirled over McDaniel’s new career in media.“Ronna facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome,” Cheney, a Republican who was vice-chair of the House January 6 committee, wrote on social media.“She spread his lies and called January 6 ‘legitimate political discourse’. That’s not ‘taking one for the team’. It’s enabling criminality and depravity.”McDaniel – a member of the powerful Republican Romney family who reportedly dropped the name at Trump’s behest – became RNC chair in 2017.In February 2022, the RNC said Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the other anti-Trump Republican on the committee that investigated the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021, were engaged in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse”.Cheney lost her seat in Congress later that year. Kinzinger chose to retire.McDaniel was eased out of the RNC last month, to be replaced in part by Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law.McDaniel’s move to NBC was announced last week. On Sunday, she appeared on Meet the Press, the flagship politics show.Characterising her support for Trump’s election fraud lies as “taking one for the whole team”, she said she did “not think violence should be in our political discourse” and that Biden won “fair and square” – but still claimed it was “fair to say there were problems [with battleground state elections] in 2020”.A former Meet the Press host, Chuck Todd, issued an on-air protest.“There’s a reason why there’s a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this,” he told the current host, Kristin Welker, “because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination”.Monday brought more reports of staff discontent – and its open expression by two of the network’s biggest names.On Morning Joe, the MSNBC show that often sets the Washington agenda, co-host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, said: “We’ve been inundated with calls this weekend, as have most people connected with this network, about NBC’s decision to hire” McDaniel.“We learned about the hiring when we read about it in the press on Friday. We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring but if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons including, but not limited to, as lawyers might say, Miss McDaniel’s role in Donald Trump’s fake elector scheme and her pressuring election officials to not certify election results while Donald Trump was on the phone.”Scarborough’s wife and co-host, Mika Brzezinski, said: “To be clear, we believe NBC news should seek out conservative Republican voices to provide balance in their election coverage.“But it should be conservative Republicans, not a person who used her position of power to be an anti-democracy election denier. And we hope NBC will reconsider its decision. It goes without saying that she will not be a guest on Morning Joe in her capacity as a paid contributor. Here’s why.”There followed a compilation of McDaniel’s comments about the 2020 election, which Brzezinski called “exhausting”.Disquiet was also reported over McDaniel reportedly being paid $300,000.“Across MSNBC they have been cutting contributors,” an unnamed host told Politico. “So everyone’s like, what the fuck? You found 300 for her?” More

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      Trump calls for Liz Cheney to be jailed for investigating him over Capitol attack

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      Donald Trump has renewed calls for Liz Cheney – his most prominent Republican critic – to be jailed for her role in investigating his actions during the January 6 Capitol attack launched by his supporters in 2021, a move that is bound to raise further fears that the former president could persecute his political opponents if given another White House term.In posts on Sunday on his Truth Social platform, Trump said other members of the congressional committee that investigated the Capitol attack – and concluded he had plotted to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat to Joe Biden – should be imprisoned.Those statements followed Trump’s previous comments that he would act like a “dictator” on the first day of a second presidency if given one by voters.Cheney, who served as vice-chair of the January 6 committee and was one of two Republicans on the panel, lost her seat in the House of Representatives to a Trump-backed challenger, Harriet Hageman, in 2022. She responded later on Sunday, saying her fellow Republican Trump was “afraid of the truth”.Trump has been charged with four felonies in relation to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including conspiracy to defraud the United States. The US supreme court is considering Trump’s claim that he has absolute immunity from prosecution in the case because he served as president from 2017 to 2021.Trump is also facing charges of 2020 election interference in Georgia, retention of government secrets after he left the Oval Office and hush-money payments that were illicitly covered up.On Sunday, Trump wrote that Cheney should “go to jail along with the rest” of the select January 6 House committee, which he sought to insult in his post on Truth Social by calling it the “unselect committee”.Trump founded Truth after he was temporarily banned from Twitter – now known as X – in the wake of the January 6 insurrection.In a separate Truth Social post, Trump linked to an article written by Kash Patel, a White House staffer in Trump’s administration. In the article, published on the rightwing website the Federalist, Patel claimed that Cheney and the committee “suppressed evidence” which “completely exonerates Trump” from charges that he had a hand in the January 6 insurrection.Patel, who was chief of staff in the defense department under Trump, said in December that if the former president was re-elected, his administration would “come after the people in the media” who had reported on Trump’s attempts to remain in power.Trump wrote: “She [Cheney] should be prosecuted for what she has done to our country! She illegally destroyed the evidence. Unreal!!!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe suggestions that Cheney and others should be targeted for their role in the January 6 investigation came after House Republicans released a report that they claim contradicts the testimony that Trump tried to grab the wheel of his presidential limousine on January 6 in his excitement to join his supporters attacking the Capitol.Cheney was one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump over the attack, which has been linked to nine deaths and sought to prevent the congressional certification of Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.After a series of retirements and Trump-backed primary challenges, only two of those Republicans remain in office.Cheney’s father, former US vice-president Dick Cheney, released a video in 2022 urging Republicans to reject Trump.“He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big,” Dick Cheney, who served as George W Bush’s vice-president, said in the video. More