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    What to expect from this year’s CPAC: Biden bashing, 2024 Republican primary chatter and lawsuit gossip

    What to expect from this year’s CPAC: Biden bashing, 2024 Republican primary chatter and lawsuit gossipThe gathering of conservatives returns to Washington and could prove to be a crystal ball into the GOP’s 2024 outlookIts impresario is facing allegations of sexual assault. Its headline act is a twice impeached former US president under criminal investigation. And its after-dinner speaker is a local news anchor turned far-right election denier.Classified Trump schedules were moved to Mar-a-Lago after FBI search – sourcesRead moreWelcome to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which claims to be the biggest and most influential gathering of conservatives in the world. It is also a perennial window to the soul of the Republican party.After going on the road to Florida and Texas because of their more relaxed coronavirus pandemic restrictions, CPAC returns to the Washington area on Wednesday for the first time since 2020, offering a four-day festival of political incorrectness, Maga merchandise and Joe Biden-slamming bombast.But this time the cavernous corridors of the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, will fill with chatter about the Republican presidential primary in 2024 – and gossip about CPAC’s own organiser and public face, Matt Schlapp.An unnamed Republican staffer has filed a lawsuit accusing Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, of groping his genitals as he drove Schlapp to a hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, last October. The man, who is in his late 30s, is seeking nearly $9.4m in damages in a complaint that included screenshots of purported text messages.Schlapp strenuously denies the allegation. Last month he tweeted a statement from lawyer Charlie Spies that said: “The complaint is false, and the Schlapp family is suffering unbearable pain and stress due to the false allegation from an anonymous individual.”Schlapp, who was director of political affairs in the George W Bush White House, is an influential supporter of former president Donald Trump. His wife, Mercedes Schlapp, served as Trump’s communications director between 2017 and 2019. The lineup of CPAC speakers announced so far suggests that the Schlapps remain firmly in Trump’s camp as he campaigns to win back the presidency in 2024.That lineup also includes Trump allies such as former housing secretary Ben Carson, senators Marsha Blackburn and Ted Cruz, representatives Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ronny Jackson, Jim Jordan, Scott Perry and Elise Stefanik, former White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, ex-White House press secretary Sean Spicer and Truth Social chief executive Devin Nunes.Then there is Trump’s son, Don Jr, his fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle – infamous for hollering “The best is yet to come!” at the 2020 Republican national convention – and the main event: a speech by Trump himself that will be akin to an indoor campaign rally.It is a chorus that will try to make the case that reports of Trump losing his grip on the Republican base after seven years have been greatly exaggerated. But the 76-year-old celebrity businessman, whose electability has been questioned after last year’s midterms, will not have it all his own way.CPAC will also hear from both of his officially declared Republican primary rivals in next year’s presidential race so far: Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Mike Pompeo, a former secretary of state and potential candidate, will also speak. Each address will be closely analysed for veiled critiques of Trump – and for applause and cheers, boos and heckles, or polite indifference from the crowd.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, believes that it would be a “massive mistake strategically” for hopefuls to tiptoe around Trump. “How do you expect to beat a guy if you’re not willing to talk about him directly and contrast yourself with him?” he said. “You’re not giving the voters a reason to change the channel.”CPAC’s tweets mockingly point out that Nancy Pelosi, former speaker of the House of Representatives, and Joy Behar, a comedian and co-host of television’s The View, have not been invited to the conference. But a more striking absence, at least according to what has been announced so far, is Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, widely seen as the most credible threat to Trump.Rick Wilson, who attended many CPACs before cofounding the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “DeSantis is not going: I think that’s because Schlapp, like many other Republicans, has made the probably correct calculus that Ron DeSantis is an overpriced stock and Donald Trump is still the best known quantity in the Republican party.”Florida-based Wilson, who has met DeSantis in person and found him to have to the “charisma of a toaster oven”, argues that the current audience for the governor falls into three groups. “Culture war weirdos who believe this whole ‘woke’ thing, which is a meaningful but not enormous part of the party. National Review writers who are desperate, desperate, desperate, desperate, desperate for anything other than Trump so they can say, ‘See, we’re past that. We can go back to normal.’“I have some bad news for them. Nobody’s ever inviting them back in the room in the Republican party of tomorrow, just as nobody’s ever inviting guys like me back in the room. It’s over. The party’s run by the mob, not by the intellectuals, and it’s never going to go back. Once a movement becomes a populist movement dominated by the grassroots of the base, it never goes back to being a thoughtful, intellectually driven movement.”The third and final group, he added, “are liberal Republican hedge fund billionaires from New York. The open borders, globalist US Chamber of Commerce are going out of their way to help DeSantis! The irony is DeSantis thinks he can have the most elite support and then trick the Maga base into thinking he’s a rah-rah like Trump. It just defies imagination.”CPAC traditionally ends with a less than scientific “straw poll” of attendees’ preferences for the Republican presidential nomination. Trump has dominated it for years. Last summer in Dallas, Texas, he won with 69% of the vote, ahead of DeSantis on 24%. Anything other than a victory for Trump next week would cause political shockwaves.Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who estimates that he attended four of five CPACs, said: “Trump and DeSantis will be the number one and two in the poll. Haley and Pompeo and anybody else who might speak at CPAC right now has no shot, no chance, no nothing. It’s the party of Trumpism and Trumpism will be reflected in CPAC.”Border security, crime, culture wars and parents’ rights are likely to feature prominently at the conference. CPAC’s Twitter bio has the hashtags “#AwakeNotWoke” and “#FirePelosiSaveAmerica” – an outdated reference to the retired House speaker. CPAC’s website promotes a documentary entitled The Culture Killers with the warning: “The woke wars are coming to a neighborhood near you.”CPAC will also give the biggest platform yet to growing dissent in the nativist wing of the Republican party over US support for Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression, roughly $50bn and rising. Biden is likely to face criticism for having travelled to Kyiv in the same week that Trump headed to the scene of a toxic train disaster in East Palestine, Ohio.A group of Trump-aligned Republicans led by Gaetz recently introduced a “Ukraine fatigue” resolution calling for an end to military and financial aid to the embattled nation. Greene tweeted this week, “Ukraine is the new Iraq”, while DeSantis condemned the aid as an “open-ended blank cheque”, telling Fox News: “The fear of Russia going into Nato countries and all that, and steamrolling, that has not even come close to happening.”Walsh predicted: “You’ll hear anti-support for Ukraine, pro-Russia, pro-Putin, take care of our borders. You’ll hear that isolationist build-a-wall-around-America attitude at CPAC because that is an animating force now in the party. I doubt Nikki Haley, who is not an isolationist, will even talk about Ukraine, because that’s not what the people in that auditorium want to hear.”Ronald Reagan spoke at the first CPAC in 1974 and towered over it for years. A showpiece dinner is named in the 40th president’s honour, though it might be argued that CPAC has drifted far from his views on immigration, Russia and the definition of conservatism itself. This year Kari Lake, a former TV host who ran for governor of Arizona last year and still refuses to accept her defeat, is the featured speaker at the Reagan dinner.Bardella, who attended CPAC when he was previously a Republican congressional aide, said: “I remember a CPAC that had keynotes from figures like Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty and Paul Ryan. Now we’re seeing figures like Donald Trump and Sean Spicer and, in the past, Steve Bannon.“CPAC at one point in time thought of itself as the establishment conservative cattle call for presidential candidates and now it’s become completely overrun by the extremists and the fringe who are the new establishment of the Republican party. There was a time where someone with the last name Cheney would be welcomed as a hero at an event like CPAC. Now someone with the last name Cheney is considered an enemy of the Republican party.”Another familiar CPAC staple is an exhibitors’ hall where conservative groups promote their work, sell books and seek recruits. Ronald Solomon, president of the Maga Mall, a clothing and merchandising company, will be there as always. Speaking from his home near Palm Beach, Florida, he said his range contains about a hundred Trump or Trump-related hats, compared to around eight for DeSantis.“After that lacklustre midterm he waned a little bit but now the popularity is coming back,” he said. “I am convinced that Trump will be the nominee.”TopicsCPACDonald TrumpUS politicsRepublicansRon DeSantisWashington DCJoe BidenfeaturesReuse this content More

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    Pompeo says Israel has biblical claim to Palestine and is ‘not an occupying nation’

    Pompeo says Israel has biblical claim to Palestine and is ‘not an occupying nation’Trump’s secretary of state makes comments on podcast to defend former administration siding more openly with Israel Mike Pompeo, the former US secretary of state, has defended Israel’s decades-long control of the Palestinian territories by claiming that the Jewish state has a biblical claim to the land and is therefore not occupying it.Pompeo told the One Decision podcast that his religious beliefs, US strategic interests and his view of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, as a “known terrorist” underpinned his support as the Trump administration’s top diplomat for the shift in US policy away from mediating a two-state solution and toward more openly siding with Israel.Democrats’ Ilhan Omar defence weakened by party’s own attacks over IsraelRead more“[Israel] is not an occupying nation. As an evangelical Christian, I am convinced by my reading of the Bible that 3,000 years on now, in spite of the denial of so many, [this land] is the rightful homeland of the Jewish people,” he said.Pompeo, who referred to the occupied West Bank by its Israeli name of Judea and Samaria, declined to support a two-state solution of an independent Palestine alongside Israel – an increasingly diminishing prospect after years of failed negotiations and the rise to power of politicians in Israel who advocate annexing the occupied territories.“I’m for an outcome that guarantees Israeli security and makes the lives better for everyone in the region,” he said.Pompeo, who once suggested that God sent Trump to save Israel, was speaking ahead of publication of a book, Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love, that has fuelled speculation he is laying the groundwork for a presidential run.As secretary of state he reversed a number of longstanding US policies, including overturning legal advice from 1978 that declared Israel’s settlements in the West Bank “inconsistent with international law”. Most western governments, such as the UK, say the settlements and Israel’s annexation of occupied East Jerusalem are a breach of the Geneva conventions and are therefore illegal.Pompeo was Trump’s CIA director before his appointment as secretary of state in 2018. He played an instrumental role in an administration thatrecognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the US embassy to that city from Tel Aviv. The move was widely criticised, including by Washington’s allies, as pre-empting a final agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.Pompeo said it is in the US’s interests to back Israel whatever its policies, and he blamed the Palestinians for the failure of peace negotiations.“What’s in America’s best interest? Is it to sit and wait for Abu Mazen [Abbas], a known terrorist who’s killed lots and lots of people, including Americans … to draw a line on a map? That’s what the state department would do,” he said.“The previous secretary of state ran back and forth from Tel Aviv to Ramallah and tried to draw lines on a map. We said: ‘That’s not in America’s best interest. Let’s go create peace,’ and we did.”Pompeo was part of the Trump administration team that negotiated the Abraham accords normalisation agreements between Israel and several formerly hostile countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Sudan. At the time he said the accords were part of the administration’s efforts to ensure that “that this Jewish state remains”.“I am confident that the Lord is at work here,” he said.TopicsMike PompeoIsraelRepublicansPalestinian territoriesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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    Breakfast with Chad: Who sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines?

    The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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    Never Give an Inch review: Mike Pompeo as ‘heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass’

    ReviewNever Give an Inch review: Mike Pompeo as ‘heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass’ The former secretary of state wants to be president. His vicious memoir will sell, but he may not find buyers at the pollsMike Pompeo is prescient, at least. Back in 2016, as a congressman, he warned Kansas Republicans of the danger posed by Donald Trump. Pompeo lamented that the US had already endured more than seven years of “an authoritarian president who ignored our constitution” – meaning Barack Obama – and cautioned that a Trump presidency would be no different.Schiff calls Mike Pompeo ‘failed Trump lackey’ after classified records claimRead more“It’s time to turn down the lights on the circus,” he said.Pompeo is an ex-army captain who graduated first in his class at West Point. But in the face of Trump’s triumphs, he turned tail and sucked-up. Pompeo was CIA director then secretary of state. On the job, his sycophancy grew legendary.“He’s like a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass,” a former ambassador recalled to Susan Glasser of the New Yorker.Never Give an Inch is Pompeo’s opening salvo in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. On cue, he puckers up to Trump, the only declared candidate so far, and thanks Mike Pence, a likely contestant, for bringing him into the fold. But where others are concerned, Never Give an Inch doubles as a burn book.Pompeo strafes two other possible contenders: Nikki Haley, Trump’s first United Nations ambassador, and John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser.Trump, Pompeo says, branded Bolton a “scumbag loser”. Pompeo thinks Bolton should “be in jail, for spilling classified information”. The Room Where it Happened, Bolton’s tell-all book, evidently ruffled feathers. As for Pompeo’s own relationship with classified documents? “I don’t believe I have anything classified.” It’s not exactly a blanket denial.Turning to Haley, Pompeo dings her time as UN ambassador – “a job that is far less important than people think” – and her performance in that post.“She has described her role as going toe-to-toe with tyrants,” he observes. “If so, then why would she quit such an important job at such an important time?”Trump is largely spared criticism but his family isn’t. Ivanka Trump makes a dubious cameo. Jared Kushner is depicted as someone less than serious.Pompeo edited the Harvard Law Review. He can write. His memoir is tart and tight. Filled with barbs, bile and little regret, it is an unexpectedly interesting read. It is not the typical pre-presidential campaign autobiography. This one comes with teeth. Pompeo is always self-serving but never bland.He heaps praise on Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and has kind words for Volodymyr Zelenskiy.“I’m troubled by the evil that has befallen his country,” Pompeo writes of Ukraine, a year into the Russian invasion. He also says he is “encouraged” that Zelenskiy, a “onetime Jerry Seinfeld” has “turned into a kind of General Patton”.But while Pompeo deploys the word “authoritarian” more than a dozen times, he never does so in reference to Trump. Trump, remember, has lauded Vladimir Putin as “smart”; praised the Russian president’s war strategy as “wonderful” and “genius”; derided Nato as “dumb”; and unloaded on Joe Biden as “weak”.Pompeo, the brown-noser-in-chief, has zero to say about this.As for Netanyahu, Pompeo is silent on Trump’s reported “fuck him” for the Israeli leader. No Trump appointee has ever dared grapple with that breach of decorum.Pompeo is happy, of course, to blame Obama for alienating Viktor Orban from the US and western Europe, and to sympathize with the Hungarian leader’s efforts to “root his time in office in his nation’s history and Christian faith”. Pompeo’s loyalties are clear. In Hungary this week, Yair Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister’s son, slammed George Soros, the “global elite” and “radical leftist” control of the media.Pompeo is a fan of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s defeated former leader, who he says “largely modeled his candidacy for president on President Trump”. Words written, presumably, before the mini January 6 in Brasília. Birds of a feather, etc.Pompeo also takes Pope Francis and the Catholic church to task over their relationship with China, and derides both the reformist Pope John XXIII and the liberation theology movement of the 1970s. In 2014, five decades after his death, John XXIII was canonized. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, blurbed Pompeo’s book.As expected, Pompeo basically ignores the insurrection Trump stoked and the attack on Congress it produced. He refers to “mayhem at the Capitol” on 6 January 2021 and targets the “left” for looking to exploit the day’s events, but says nothing of Trump’s concerted effort to subvert democracy and overturn an election.Pompeo knows the GOP base. Three in five Republicans believe voter fraud birthed Biden’s victory. The same number say Trump did nothing wrong on January 6. Not surprisingly, Pompeo omits mention of his own tweets that day or his appearance before the House January 6 committee.“The storming of the US Capitol today is unacceptable,” Pompeo tweeted. “Lawlessness and rioting here or around the world is always unacceptable. Let us swiftly bring justice to the criminals who engaged in this rioting.”Asked about the tweets by committee staff, he responded: “I stand by it.”He also told Liz Cheney, on the record: “I thought the courts and the certification that took place were appropriate … the vice-president [Pence] made the right decision on the evening of 6 January” to certify Biden’s win.None of this appears on the page. Instead, Pompeo gleefully recalls how Trump approved of his loyalty.How well is all this working? Pompeo may well sell books but fail to move the needle. Polls show him at 1% in the notional presidential primary, tied with the likes of Paul Ryan, the former House speaker, and Ted Cruz, the Senate’s own squeegee pest. Pompeo trails Haley and Pence.The appetite for a Pompeo presidency seems … limited. Like Ron DeSantis, he is grim and humorless. Unlike the governor of Florida, Pompeo has no war chest.
    Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love is published in the US by HarperCollins
    TopicsBooksPolitics booksMike PompeoTrump administrationDonald TrumpRepublicansUS elections 2024reviewsReuse this content More

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    Washington Post condemns Pompeo for ‘vile’ Khashoggi ‘falsehoods’

    Washington Post condemns Pompeo for ‘vile’ Khashoggi ‘falsehoods’Fred Ryan says former secretary of state ‘outrageously misrepresents’ Post journalist murdered by Saudi Arabian regime The publisher of the Washington Post, Fred Ryan, has blasted the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo for “outrageously misrepresenting” and “spreading vile falsehoods” about Jamal Khashoggi, the Post columnist murdered by the Saudi Arabian regime in 2018.Nikki Haley plotted with Kushner and Ivanka to be Trump vice-president, Pompeo book saysRead more“It is shameful that Pompeo would spread vile falsehoods to dishonor a courageous man’s life and service and his commitment to principles Americans hold dear as a ploy to sell books,” Ryan said.Pompeo’s memoir of his time in Donald Trump’s presidential administration, Never Give an Inch, was published on Tuesday.One of a slew of books from likely contenders for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination – if in this case one who barely registers in polling – the book recounts Pompeo’s time as CIA director and secretary of state under Trump.The Guardian obtained and reported a copy last week. In its own review, published on Tuesday, the Post called Pompeo’s book “vicious … a master class in the performative anger poisoning American politics”.The reviewer, the Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Tim Weiner, added: “Hatred animates this book. It’s got more venom than a quiver of cobras.”The murder of Khashoggi caused outrage around the world and stoked criticism of the Trump White House over its reluctance to criticise the Saudi regime, particularly the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who grew close to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser.US intelligence believes the prince approved the killing of Khashoggi, whose remains have not been found.On the page, Pompeo deplores Khashoggi’s murder. But he also writes that Khashoggi was not a journalist but “an activist who had supported the losing team” and criticises what he calls “faux outrage” over a killing that “made the media madder than a vegan in a slaughterhouse”.On Monday, Khashoggi’s widow, Hanan Elatr Khashoggi, told NBC News: “Whatever [Pompeo] mentions about my husband, he doesn’t know my husband. He should be silent and shut up the lies about my husband. It is such bad information and the wrong information … This is not acceptable.”Elatr Khashoggi also said she wanted “to silence all of these people who publish books, disparage my husband and collect money from it”.On Tuesday, Ryan said it was “shocking and disappointing to see Mike Pompeo’s book so outrageously misrepresent the life and work of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.“As the CIA – which Pompeo once directed – concluded, Jamal was brutally murdered on the orders of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. His only offense was exposing corruption and oppression among those in power – work that good journalists around the world do every day.”Pompeo responded on Twitter, writing: “Americans are safer because we didn’t label Saudi Arabia a pariah state. I never let the media bully me. Just because someone is a part-time stringer for the Washington Post doesn’t make their life more important than our military serving in dangerous places protecting us all. I never forgot that.”Ryan said Khashoggi, who wrote for the Post while resident in the US, “dedicated himself to the values of free speech and a free press and held himself to the highest professional standards. For this devotion, he paid the ultimate price.”TopicsBooksMike PompeoJamal KhashoggiPolitics booksUS politicsTrump administrationUS foreign policynewsReuse this content More

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    Nikki Haley accuses Pompeo of ‘lies and gossip to sell book’ after vice-president plot claim

    Nikki Haley accuses Pompeo of ‘lies and gossip to sell book’ after vice-president plot claimFormer UN ambassador hits back at former secretary of state as jockeying for Republican presidential primary hots up Nikki Haley said the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s claim that she plotted to replace Mike Pence as Donald Trump’s vice-president was “lies and gossip to sell a book”.Nikki Haley plotted with Kushner and Ivanka to be Trump vice-president, Pompeo book saysRead moreThe former United Nations ambassador spoke to Fox News on Thursday evening, after the Guardian obtained a copy of Pompeo’s forthcoming memoir, Never Give An Inch, and reported his comments about Haley.Haley resigned from the Trump administration in October 2018. Before that, Pompeo says, she set up a personal meeting with Trump in the Oval Office without checking with him.Pompeo writes that John Kelly, then Trump’s chief of staff, thought Haley had in fact been accompanied by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner as they presented “a possible ‘Haley for vice-president’ option”.Pompeo also writes unfavourably of Haley’s performance as UN ambassador and criticises her resignation.Speaking to Fox News, Haley said: “I don’t know why he said it, but that’s exactly why I stayed out of DC as much as possible, to get away from the drama.”She also pointed out that Pompeo says in his book he does not know if the story is true.Haley and Pompeo are among possible contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, a contest in which Trump remains the only confirmed candidate.But Haley seems set to run.She told Fox News: “We are still working through things and we’ll figure it out. I’ve never lost a race. I said that then I still say that now. I’m not going to lose now.”Haley turns 51 on Friday. In a remark seemingly directed at Joe Biden, who is 80, but also Donald Trump, who is 76, she said: “I don’t think you need to be 80 years old to go be a leader in DC. I think we need a young generation to come in, step up and really start fixing things. Can I be that leader? Yes, I think I can be that leader.”The former South Carolina governor has attracted support from Kushner’s family. She told Fox News Kushner and his wife were her friends, though she expected they would support Ivanka’s father.She said: “May the best woman win.”Pence, the senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and even the former national security adviser John Bolton are among other possible candidates for the Republican nomination. But two men, Trump and the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, dominate polling so far.Confidence Man review: Maggie Haberman takes down TrumpRead moreOn Thursday, Ben Rhodes, a former foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, wrote: “Pompeo and Haley poised for a real battle to see who can crack 1% in a Republican primary.”Pompeo’s description of Haley’s supposed meeting with Trump chimed with reports that in 2019 prompted Trump to deny considering replacing Pence as vice-president.On Thursday, Maggie Haberman, the New York Times reporter and author of the bestselling book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, noted that Kushner and Ivanka Trump “insisted to disbelieving colleagues and Pence allies that they had no role in the Haley/VP rumors”.TopicsBooksNikki HaleyMike PompeoRepublicansUS politicsUS elections 2024Politics booksnewsReuse this content More

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    Nikki Haley plotted with Kushner and Ivanka to be Trump vice-president, Pompeo book says

    Nikki Haley plotted with Kushner and Ivanka to be Trump vice-president, Pompeo book saysIn book aimed at 2024 run, ex-secretary of state also says Trump asked him to be secretary of defense at same time, a ‘nutty idea’ In a new memoir peppered with broadsides at potential rivals in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, accuses Nikki Haley of plotting with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump to be named vice-president, even while she served as Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.DeSantis and Pence lead Republican wave – of presidential campaign booksRead moreDescribing his own anger when Haley secured a personal Oval Office meeting with Trump without checking with him, Pompeo writes that Haley in fact “played” Trump’s then chief of staff, John Kelly, and instead of meeting the president alone, was accompanied by Trump’s daughter and her husband, both senior advisers.“As best Kelly could tell,” Pompeo writes, “they were presenting a possible ‘Haley for vice-president’ option. I can’t confirm this, but [Kelly] was certain he had been played, and he was not happy about it. Clearly, this visit did not reflect a team effort but undermined our work for America.”The gossipy nugget is contained in Pompeo’s new book, Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love, which will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.The Haley story is not the only startling scene in a book which also says Trump had the “nutty idea” that Pompeo could be secretary of state and secretary of defense at the same time.But the story about Haley is firmly in the vein of Washington reportage and tell-alls that Pompeo claims to disdain. It also adds weight to stories which said Trump did indeed consider dumping his vice-president, Mike Pence, for Haley, a rumor Trump was compelled to deny in 2019.It will also add to intrigue around reports that Kushner’s family is fundraising for Haley ahead of her 2024 run.A year out from the primary, Trump is still the only declared candidate for the Republican nomination. But jockeying for position is increasing. Among campaign books from possible contenders, Pompeo follows Pence into print but is a month ahead of Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is Trump’s only serious polling rival.Pompeo is studiedly respectful in his descriptions of Pence, a self-proclaimed fellow devout Christian, and mostly of Trump himself. Unlike Pence in his memoir, So Help Me God, Pompeo avoids overt criticism of his former boss. Pompeo is also more comfortable with the former president’s often vulgar language.For instance, Pompeo describes Trump calling John Bolton, his third national security adviser, a “scumbag loser”. After being fired, Bolton produced a memoir of his own, The Room Where It Happened. Trump sought to prevent publication but the book was a bestseller, relaying the president’s private conversations and what Pompeo considers highly sensitive material.Bolton has now floated a White House run of his own, to try to block Trump. Pompeo fires salvos Bolton’s way, at one point comparing him to Edward Snowden, who leaked surveillance secrets to the media in 2013, but saying the National Security Agency contractor “at least had the decency not to lie about his motive”.Bolton, Pompeo writes, should “be in jail, for spilling classified information”. Pompeo also says he hopes one day to testify at Bolton’s trial on criminal charges.Regarding Haley, who has also published books as she considers a presidential run, Pompeo disparages both the role of UN ambassador – “a job that is far less important than people think” – and Haley’s performance in it.“She has described her role as going toe-to-toe with tyrants,” Pompeo writes. “If so, then why would she quit such an important job at such an important time?”Haley resigned – or, in Pompeo’s words, “flat-out threw in the towel” – in October 2018. By quitting, Pompeo writes, Haley “abandoned” Trump as she had “the great people of South Carolina”, by resigning as governor.True to his title, Pompeo does not give an inch in his descriptions of his own success, first as CIA director and then atop the state department.But the former soldier and congressman does spill details of a private conversation in which, he says, the president’s chief of staff said Trump wanted him to add secretary of defense to his portfolio while remaining secretary of state.According to Pompeo, on 19 July 2020, midway through the tempestuous summer of the coronavirus pandemic and protests for racial justice, Trump’s last chief of staff, Mark Meadows, told him Mark Esper was “not going to make it” at the Pentagon for much longer.So Help Me God review: Mike Pence’s tortured bid for Republican relevanceRead morePompeo says Meadows told him Trump wanted his secretary of state to “dual hat”, meaning to “take on leading the department of defense as an additional duty”.Pompeo says he told Meadows that was “a nutty idea” as he had “plenty” to do at state and “couldn’t possibly command defense at the same time”.Nor, Pompeo writes, was that the only time Trump asked him to do two jobs. After Bolton left, he writes, “someone had reminded the president that Henry Kissinger had been both national security adviser and secretary of state” to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.“President Trump pitched the idea to me,” Pompeo writes. “I think he was half-kidding.”Trump may not feel in a kidding mood when he reads Pompeo’s descriptions of such “nutty ideas” which, the former secretary of state writes, quickly “faded, all for the good”.TopicsBooksUS elections 2024US politicsRepublicansDonald TrumpTrump administrationMike PompeonewsReuse this content More

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

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