Republicans

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Marco Rubio says he would not accept 2024 election results ‘if it’s unfair’

      by

      The Republican Florida senator Marco Rubio said on Sunday he would not commit to accepting the 2024 presidential election results, insisting that “if it’s unfair” his party will “go to court and point out the fact that states are not following their own election laws”.Rubio’s statements on Meet the Press come as he is considered among former president Donald Trump’s top candidates for vice-president. Trump has continuously said falsely that the 2020 election was stolen.Those claims spurred the 6 January 2021 insurrection, during which participants stormed the Capitol building as lawmakers were in the midst of certifying the election results. Trump is facing a variety of charges related to alleged election meddling.When asked by host Kristen Welker: “Will you accept the election results of 2024, no matter what happens, senator?” Rubio replied: “No matter what happens? No.“If it’s an unfair election, I think it’s going to be contested … by either side.”Welker kept pushing Rubio to answer whether he would contest the results “no matter who wins”.“Well, I think you’re asking the wrong person,” Rubio said. “The Democrats are the ones that have opposed every Republican victory since 2000, every single one.”Welker repeatedly pointed out that Democrats who had issues with election results nevertheless conceded. Rubio, in turn, asked repeatedly whether Welker had asked Democrats this same question.Rubio – who did certify the 2020 election results, and said on that day that “democracy is held together by people’s confidence in the election and their willingness to abide by its results” – would not directly respond to whether Trump’s unwillingness to accept election results served to undermine confidence in democracy.He also refused to criticize Trump for his comments on Florida’s six-week abortion ban, during which Trump called the law a “terrible thing, a terrible mistake” – despite also repeatedly claiming credit for overturning the federal protection for abortion.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I support any bill that protects unborn human life, but I don’t consider other people in the pro life movement who have a different view to be apostate,” said Rubio, who has long pushed for strict limits on abortion. “They just have a different view about the best way to approach this issue. We are not like the Democrats where, unless you are in favor of their bills that basically say, ‘Let’s just put in all this fancy language, but it’s not meaningful in terms of any restrictions.’”He played coy about whether he would agree to be Trump’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election, saying he had not discussed the possibility with Trump, but adding, “I think anyone who’s offered that job, to serve this country in the second highest office, assuming everything else in your life makes sense at that moment, if you’re interested in serving the country, it’s an incredible place to serve.” More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Missouri Republican party fails to boot KKK-linked candidate from gubernatorial ticket

      by

      A long-shot Missouri gubernatorial candidate with ties to the Ku Klux Klan will stay on the Republican ticket, a judge ruled on Friday.Cole county circuit court judge Cotton Walker denied a request by the Missouri GOP to kick Darrell McClanahan out of the August Republican primary.McClanahan is running against the Missouri secretary of state, Jay Ashcroft; the lieutenant governor, Mike Kehoe; state senator Bill Eigel; and others for the GOP nomination to replace Governor Mike Parson, who is barred by term limits from seeking re-election.McClanahan’s lawyer, Dave Roland, said the ruling ensures that party leaders do not have “almost unlimited discretion to choose who’s going to be allowed on a primary ballot”.“Their theory of the case arguably would have required courts to remove people from the ballot, maybe even the day before elections,” Roland said.McClanahan, who has described himself as “pro-white” but denies being racist or antisemitic, was among nearly 280 Republican candidates who officially filed to run for office in February, on what is known as filing day. Hundreds of candidates line up at the secretary of state’s Jefferson City office on filing day in Missouri, the first opportunity to officially declare candidacy.The Missouri GOP accepted his party dues but denounced him after a former state lawmaker posted photos on social media that appear to show McClanahan making the Nazi salute. McClanahan confirmed the accuracy of the photos to the St Louis Post-Dispatch.In his decision, Walker wrote that the Republican party “has made clear that it does not endorse his candidacy, and it remains free to publicly disavow McClanahan and any opinions the plaintiff believes to be antithetical to its values”.“I’m not sure they ever actually intended to win this case,” said McClanahan’s lawyer, Roland. “I think the case got filed because the Republican party wanted to make a very big public show that they don’t want to be associated with racism or antisemitism. And the best way that they could do that was filing a case that they knew was almost certain to lose.”The Associated Press’s emailed requests for comment to the Missouri GOP’s executive director were not immediately returned on Friday. But Missouri GOP lawyers have said party leaders did not realize who McClanahan was when he signed up as a candidate back in February.McClanahan has argued that the Missouri GOP was aware of the beliefs. He previously ran as a Republican for US Senate in 2022.In a separate lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) last year, McClanahan claimed the organization defamed him by calling him a white supremacist in an online post.In his lawsuit against the ADL, McClanahan described himself as a “pro-white man”. McClanahan wrote that he is not a member of the Ku Klux Klan; he said he merely received an honorary one-year membership in the white supremacist terrorism organization. And he said he attended a “private religious Christian identity cross lighting ceremony falsely described as a cross burning”. More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘She’s in the pantheon now’: Kristi Noem and the politicians who hit self-destruct

      by

      She could have been a contender. But then she wrote a book. And suddenly Kristi Noem was caught like a rabbit – or a rambunctious puppy – in the headlights.The governor of South Dakota found herself insisting that a false claim she met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un had been put in her book by accident. Wait, said Elizabeth Vargas of NewsNation, you recorded the whole audiobook version and read this passage out loud. Why didn’t you take it out then?Noem blinked, nodded and waffled. She was pressed on the point twice more. Finally she asked in desperation: “Did you want to talk about something else today?”It was a car crash interview at the end of a train wreck week. Noem went on to abruptly cancel further appearances on CNN and Fox News, sparing herself further vilification over both the Kim lie and an admission that she had once dealt with a misbehaving puppy by shooting it dead in a gravel pit.Branded a fabulist and a dog murderer, her hopes of becoming Donald Trump’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election lay in ruins. Noem had become the latest in a long line of politicians – from Gary Hart’s affair to Sarah Palin’s gaffes to Mark Sanford’s cover up – to perform a spectacular act of self-immolation.“She’s in the pantheon now,” said Rick Wilson, a strategist who has worked on many Republican election campaigns. “The arrogance of a lot of political candidates who think they’re good with the press is they’re good with the press until they realise they’ve been skating on thinner and thinner ice and, when that ice goes, they are under the water.”The rise and fall of Kristi Noem happened with dizzying speed. The rancher and farmer served in the South Dakota legislature for years then entered Congress in the rightwing populist Tea Party wave of 2010. She became South Dakota’s first female governor in 2019 and won plaudits from Republicans for resisting coronavirus pandemic lockdowns.View image in fullscreenIn 2022 Noem published a book, Not My First Rodeo, with a front cover that shows her wearing a cowboy hat on horseback, reins in one hand, giant American flag in the other. “From humorous barnyard battles with feisty cattle and rodeo horses … ” was part of the PR pitch. The book seemed to shore up her status as a serious player in the Make America Great Again (Maga) universe.There were concerns over Noem’s hardline stance on abortion and media reports of an affair with the former Trump aide Corey Lewandowski. But in February this year, when the Conservative Political Action Conference held a straw poll for Trump’s vice-presidential pick, she came in joint first with Vivek Ramaswamy among 17 possible candidates.But things began to unravel when Noem appeared in a bizarre infomercial-style video lavishing praise on a team of cosmetic dentists in Texas. Then she went a book too far. In No Going Back, as first reported by the Guardian, she wrote that she took Cricket, her 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, on a bird-hunting trip with older dogs in hopes of calming down the wild puppy.Instead Cricket chased the pheasants, attacked a family’s chickens during a stop on the way home and then “whipped around to bite me”, she recalled. Later she led Cricket to a gravel pit and killed her. For good measure, she added that she also shot a goat that the family owned, claiming that it was mean and liked to chase her kids.Although Trump once famously asserted that he could shoot someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters, it soon transpired that shooting a dog is the last taboo of American politics, the one sacrilegious act that Democrats and Republicans can unite to condemn in an otherwise hyper-partisan time.Joe Biden’s re-election campaign posted on social media a photo of the president strolling on the White House lawn with one of his three German Shepherds. The Democrat Hillary Clinton reposted a 2021 comment in which she warned: “Don’t vote for anyone you wouldn’t trust with your dog.” She added now: “Still true.”The former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich told the Politico website: “Killing the dog and then writing about it ended any possibility of her being picked as VP.” The far-right extremist Laura Loomer, a Trump devotee, posted on X: “Wow. No coming back from this. This is so heartless. She killed a puppy? As a dog lover, that is just too much for me.”What was she thinking? Some speculated that, because the story has circulated for years among state politicians that Noem killed a dog in a “fit of anger” – and there were witnesses – she was going public now because she was being vetted as a candidate for vice-president.Others felt sure it was a misguided attempt to curry favor with Trump, who admires “killers” and has no love of dogs. Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “Writing about killing a dog was not about writing about killing a dog for her.“Corey Lewandowski or someone around her told her: you need to show Trump that you’re tough and mean and bad, you can do the hard thing, you can be the one who would never be like Mike Pence, you can be counted on by Trump to be as brutal and ugly as he needs, no matter what the order is.”View image in fullscreenHe added: “That’s why she wrote that way, to say, I’d kill a puppy and isn’t that good enough for you, Donald? But even Donald Trump, who hates dogs, hates bad PR more. Kristi Noem became the definition of bad PR.”Then came the catastrophic book tour. Noem gave interviews on CBS, NewsNation, Newsmax and Fox Business, where the normally Maga-friendly Stuart Varney pushed her on the dog story until she snapped: “Enough, Stuart. This interview is ridiculous – what you are doing right now. So you need to stop.”Wilson commented: “By the third or fourth day of her getting humiliated over and over again in public, even I felt like somebody should put her out of her misery and take her to the gravel pit and end this pain. She was absolutely just flailing at every moment and did not have a sense of clarity.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“If you’re on a PR tour trying to appeal to the Maga base, there is this belief in the Maga world that you never ever apologise, never say you were wrong, never back down. But unfortunately that’s not how humans work. Even in the Maga media space, she started getting her head caved in on this thing and rightly so. She deserved it.”Noem faced a particular grilling over the passage in her book that stated she remembered meeting Kim: “I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor after all).” She subsequently conceded that no such encounter took place and promised to correct later editions.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “Being a woman in the Republican party, she wanted to project the image of toughness and she’s trying out for the position of running mate. It’s not really the dog; the giveaway is Kim Jong-un. That could have been any foreign leader.“Why did she pick and lie about meeting Kim Jong-un? Because she remembered the ‘love affair’ between Trump and Kim Jong-un, so she thought that Trump would be particularly impressed if she met and talked with him. That’s something they have in common – except they don’t.”Noem is not the first American politician to push the self-destruct button.View image in fullscreenEarl Butz, a secretary of agriculture, was on a flight after the 1976 Republican National Convention when he said: “I’ll tell you what the coloreds want. It’s three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit.” The remark was reported in the media, prompting a reprimand from the then president, Gerald Ford, and the resignation of Butz, who claimed “the use of a bad racial commentary in no way reflects my real attitude”.The senator Gary Hart, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, told a reporter: “Follow me around. I don’t care. I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’d be very bored.” The Miami Herald duly did watch Hart, who was married, and report that he spent a night with a young model named Donna Rice. He withdrew from the race.John Edwards, a young and charismatic star of the Democratic party, ran for president in 2008 while conducting an affair and fathering a child with a woman even as his wife was battling cancer. The scandal was exposed and destroyed his political career.The Republican Sarah Palin was John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 election but became a liability with gaffes revealing her lack of foreign policy experience or knowledge of the supreme court. Asked what newspaper or magazine she regularly reads, Palin replied: “Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.”Mark Sanford was the governor of South Carolina when, in 2009, he flew to Argentina to be with a woman who was not his wife but told his staff he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. The deceit was quickly uncovered, made vivid headlines and ended his 20-year marriage.View image in fullscreenSanford told the Guardian this week: “The reality of life is ups and downs and I think the measure of all of us is how we respond to the down more than the up. The record stands for itself in terms of I was honest and laid my cards out on the table and dealt with things as they came and that’s best you can do in those situations.“Anybody who’s failed publicly at anything, if they’ve learned anything from it, they’ve learned to do exactly what the Bible says in not judging others. It’s just recognising the nature of the human condition is imperfect. Those who pretend to be most perfect aren’t and inevitably live in a glass house.”But Sanford admits that he is baffled how Trump, who faces 88 charges in four criminal cases, seems to get a free pass and is once again the Republican presidential nominee. “The higher you climb, the further you fall and, appropriately, there’s a magnifying glass that’s applied to people in public office that frankly ought to be there.“People shouldn’t be above the law and get away with things that other people don’t and there is an added level of scrutiny that that goes with public life, which may have something to do with the fact that we live in country of 330 million people and, remarkably, [Trump and Biden] are the best two folks the country has to offer on the Republican and Democratic side. Are you kidding me?”Other politicians undone by a fatal flaw include Andrew Gillum, Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner. Some appear destined to fly too close to the sun. Sabato commented: “They want it all and they’re used to being very lucky. That’s what does them in. They assume they’re going to continue to be lucky. That’s fatal for anybody. If you’re lucky, go have a drink but don’t expect to get lucky every day. It doesn’t happen.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      The Darkness Has Not Overcome: limp pro-Trump piety for a second coming

      by

      The Darkness Has Not Overcome is a far cry from Team of Vipers, Cliff Sims’s kiss-and-tell from 2019. Under the subtitle My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House, that book sold well and spawned a brief legal spat with Donald Trump himself. But in a somewhat less stirring second outing, the Alabama son of two generations of Baptist ministers who became a reporter then a White House aide pays greatest attention to the lessons he takes from scripture and faith.Back in the Trumpian fold, this viper’s venom is distinctly diluted.Sims was cast out of Trumpworld in 2018 but returned to work as a speechwriter for Trump family members at the Republican convention in 2020. Then he landed a slot as a deputy to John Ratcliffe, a congressman turned director of national intelligence.Donald Trump Jr offers his praise for Sims’s new book, calling Sims “his friend”. The younger Trump – not noted for public displays of piety, let’s say – also laments that “American Christians are under attack every day by leftwing activists, mainstream media and liberal politicians”.Sims aches to land a punch for the team, but is reduced to trading on old glories. In his prologue, he rehashes near-verbatim a Team of Vipers story involving Trump and Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, then chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.Richmond purportedly praised the president to his face in a closed meeting, then intimated he was a bigot when the cameras rolled.“Congressman Richmond had been so sincere and complimentary of him behind closed doors, I thought he might at least be willing to say he didn’t personally believe Trump was racist. But he didn’t,” Sims writes – in both Team of Vipers and The Darkness Has Not Overcome.“‘You’d have to talk to the people who made those allegations and ask them what they would say about it,’ [Richmond told reporters]. ‘I will tell you that he’s the 45th president of the United States …’”If it had not been offered before, in greater detail – there’s no Omarosa Manigault this time – the anecdote might add a pinch of zest to a bland book. After all, Richmond now co-chairs Biden’s re-election campaign.Elsewhere, under a new, less fun subtitle – “Lessons on Faith and Politics from Inside the Halls of Power” – Sims decides to examine the legacy of Adolf Hitler, the “big lie” and the nature of tyranny. Those of a naive disposition, look away: Sims proves oddly unwilling to consider Trump’s affections for and frequent rhetorical echoes of Hitler, and his yearning to be an American strongman.“A psychological analysis of Hitler commissioned by the [Office of Strategic Services] during world war two described his obsession with lying as a way to manipulate the masses,” Sims writes.“Hitler’s policy of lies propelled him into power and ultimately played a significant role in his ability to perpetrate mass genocide. The truth matters a lot more than you might think.”So how does Trump, the man Sims backs to return to the White House and who lies as he breathes, think about Hitler?Trump reportedly kept a collection of the Führer’s speeches at his bedside.Jeremy Peters of the New York Times has captured Steve Bannon, a close Trump ally, giving this judgment of Trump’s history-making escalator ride in spring 2015, to enter the Republican race: “That’s Hitler, Bannon thought.”Jim Sciutto of CNN has quoted John Kelly, Trump’s second chief of staff, on Trump’s fondness for Hitler.Trump: “Well, but Hitler did some good things.”Kelly: “Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing. I mean, Mussolini was a great guy in comparison.”In the White House, relations between Sims and Kelly were sulfurous. “In the past 40 years, I don’t think I’ve ever had a subordinate whose reputation is worse than yours,” Sims quotes Kelly as saying in Team of Vipers.Now, Sims also avoids discussion of Trump’s stated intention to act as a dictator for at least a day if re-elected, and his own big lie: that the 2020 election went to Joe Biden because of electoral fraud.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJust last weekend, Trump compared the Biden administration to Hitler’s Gestapo. Can you say, “projection”?Sims still has scores to settle. He luxuriates in the downfall of Robert Bentley, an Alabama governor whose affair with a campaign consultant went public. Oddly demure, Sims omits Bentley’s name while describing obtaining a damning recording from a source at midnight at a gas station, carrying a gun just in case.“The episode felt like a dramatic scene out of a spy movie … Ruger nine-millimeter pistol tucked in my waistband,” Sims writes. “I plugged the drive into my computer, opened the file and within a few minutes knew indeed that it would change the course of Alabama’s political history.”Bentley, a church deacon, resigned in the face of impeachment. He pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors, for misuse of state funds.After reveling in the details of Bentley’s descent, Sims delivers a killer coda: he called Bentley to let him know he “had been praying for his family”.You can’t make such stuff up. But it doesn’t end there: Sims spikes the football.“Even after he had lost everything, including the powerful office to which he had violently clung, he returned to his dermatology practice and hired as his office manager, believe it or not, his former political advisor and mistress.”Bentley never mounted an insurrection or claimed immunity from prosecution. Sims, of course, doesn’t even mention January 6.He also stays mum about Trump’s alleged hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, an adult film star and a Playboy model who claimed affairs. The adjudicated sexual assault of E Jean Carroll? Nothing.The Darkness Has Not Overcome is an audition for a return trip to the White House. In that, Sims is not alone. Heck, even Ivanka wants in.
      The Darkness Has Not Overcome is published in the US by Hachette More

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Harrison Butker’s jersey sales rise as right wing lauds Chiefs kicker after rant

      by

      Harrison Butker’s university commencement address at Benedictine College excoriating Pride month, working women, abortion rights activists and others has prompted the National Football League to disavow his remarks – but the Kansas City Chiefs placekicker’s jersey sales have spiked as conservatives seize on their latest culture war.Butker has also drawn an impassioned statement of support from Josh Hawley, the far-right US senator from Missouri known for his opposition to abortion and a viral video which showed him running away from the mob he incited during the US Capitol attack on 6 January 2021.“We need a different generation of kids that are willing to say no that’s not right, there is such a thing as right and wrong, I’m not going in for all of this lefty garbage and I just thought that his calls for folks to stand up and be bold was great,” Hawley said in reference to Butker during an interview on Wednesday with Spectrum News.An NFL spokesperson on Thursday said the comments Butker delivered as the graduation speaker at Benedictine College five days earlier ran contrary to the league’s “commitment to inclusion”.“Harrison Butker gave a speech in his personal capacity,” said the statement from the NFL senior vice-president Jonathan Beane, the league’s chief diversity and inclusion officer. “His views are not those of the NFL as an organization.”The NFL’s statement aligned relatively closely with a separate one issued by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (Glaad), which dismissed Butker’s 20-minute address as “a clear miss” and “woefully out of step with Americans about Pride, LGBTQ people and women”.Another notable rejection of Butker’s opinions came in the form of a statement from the Benedictine Sisters of Mount Saint Scholastica, which co-founded the college where the kicker spoke.“The sisters … do not believe that Harrison Butker’s comments … represent the Catholic, Benedictine, liberal arts college that our founders envisioned and in which we have been so invested,” their statement said. “Instead of promoting unity in our church, our nation, and the world, his comments seem to have fostered division.”Yet, in scenes that called to mind the political right wing’s enthrallment with the film Sound of Freedom last year, Butker’s jersey was among the most sold as of Thursday, according to NFL.com.His jersey sales still trailed that of his Chiefs teammate Travis Kelce, whose support for vaccines and the Black Lives Matter movement – as well as his relationship with Taylor Swift – have infuriated the far-right set that is now coddling Butker. However, Butker’s jersey sales were outpacing that of the Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who has led Kansas City to three Super Bowl victories since the 2019 season.The Kansas City news station KCTV reported that a local store named the Rally House had completely sold out of Butker jerseys amid his speech’s controversy.“Just the demand after the speech – it’s been men and women. It’s been both calling to get his jersey,” the store’s manager, Aaron Lewis, reportedly told KCTV.Hawley on Wednesday then offered himself as one of the most public faces of the conservative delight inspired by the offense Butker caused with his speech.“He talks about not being too nice when you’re standing up for your convictions,” Hawley said to Spectrum News, a little more than three years after he threw up a clenched fist at – and then was caught on video running from – a mob of Donald Trump supporters who carried out the deadly Capitol attack after the former president’s 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden. “And I just think he’s right about that.”In his speech to the conservative Catholic school’s graduating class, Butker referred to “dangerous gender ideologies” in an apparent allusion to Pride month, which has been celebrated annually in June since the Stonewall riots in 1969.He also told the women in the audience that “homemaker” should be the “most important title” they hold.“I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world,” Butker said.Among a host of other arguments, Butker contended that access to abortion – which most Americans favor – stemmed from “pervasiveness of disorder”.The 28-year-old Butker’s conservative Catholic beliefs are well known, and so are his on-field exploits, including booting a field goal that forced the decisive overtime period in Kansas City’s Super Bowl victory over the San Francisco 49ers in February.Benedictine, a private liberal arts school about 60 miles north of Kansas City, invited Butker to be its commencement speaker nearly three years to the day after the college removed its chaplain from his position after he disclosed “inappropriate conduct” with a female student.Meanwhile, a report on Friday from the Chicago Sun-Times documented how an Illinois-based monk belonging to the religious order which is associated with Benedictine pleaded guilty to a felony battery charge against a former student of the school where he taught – and has now landed on a list of organization members deemed to have been credibly accused of child sexual abuse.
      The Associated Press contributed reporting More

    • 163 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden and Trump are betting on debates to help magnify the other’s weaknesses

      by

      It’s game on for a pair of presidential debates between two unpopular candidates most Americans wish weren’t running for the nation’s highest office.In a ratatat social media exchange on Wednesday, Joe Biden and Donald Trump agreed to participate in two debates on 27 June, hosted by CNN, and on 10 September, hosted by ABC.“Make my day, pal,” Biden said in a video, challenging his predecessor and rival to a high-stakes showdown. Trump, who had been insisting for months he would debate Biden “anytime, anyplace”, quickly accepted the offer: “Let’s get ready to Rumble!!!”The arrangement jolted a general election campaign that had begun to feel stagnant. And if their plans hold, Americans will be treated to a presidential matchup far earlier than usual – before either candidate will have formally accepted his party’s nomination.“The candidates realize the value of the debates, especially given their ages,” said Aaron Kall, director of debate at the University of Michigan. “They need to show that they have the stamina to debate for 90 minutes or two hours to reassure the country.”The decision to square off at least twice before the November election reflects a careful calculation by both candidates who believe televised confrontations will help magnify the other’s weaknesses.Trump has repeatedly cast the 81-year-old president as greatly diminished. At his rallies, Trump, just four years the president’s junior, often mocks Biden as confused in an exaggerated impersonation that draws laughter and applause.But Democrats argue that Biden can more easily draw a contrast with Trump and remind voters why they rejected his Republican rival in 2020.“We need voters to see Trump 2024 with their own eyes,” the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg wrote on Thursday, “a candidate who is far more extreme and dangerous; whose performance is far more erratic, wild, impulsive and disturbing.”Biden is clearly eager for an opportunity to change the trajectory of the race, which has remained largely unchanged despite the start of Trump’s criminal trial in New York, a brightening economic outlook and tens of millions of dollars in advertising touting the president’s record and blaming Trump for the wave of unpopular abortion bans.While both campaigns are bracing for an extremely close contest in November, a series of recent New York Times/Siena College surveys found Biden trailing Trump in five of six critical battleground states.Widespread discontent over his handling of the economy, immigration and Israel’s war in Gaza have hurt the president’s standing with key Democratic constituencies, particularly young people.Even in a polarized media environment, presidential debates remain the “SuperBowl” of politics, Kall said, offering candidates what is likely to be the most prominent platform of the election cycle. For both Biden and Trump, the events are high-risk, but also potentially high-reward.“Everyone is expecting the election to be decided by half a dozen states. Those states will be decided by thousands or tens of thousands of votes,” he said. “So a debate that 70 or 80 million people watch could certainly change enough votes to matter.”In 2020, Biden and Trump’s first face-off drew 73 million viewers, according to Nielsen ratings, while Trump’s debate against the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016 captured 84 million viewers.Many more Americans will not watch the events live but will pay attention to reactions on social media.“A lot of people who don’t tune into the actual debate will likely know what the breakout moments of the debate are,” said Yanna Krupnikov, professor of communication and media at University of Michigan. “What happens afterward is going to be really, hugely important.”Americans are arguably more familiar with Biden and Trump than any pair of presidential challengers in American history. Voters may still tune in to hear what the president and former president have to say about major issues, such as the Israel-Hamas war. But Emily Van Duyn, an associate professor of communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who specializes in political communication, expects most will be watching for how the candidates perform.“For the most part, it’s going to be an assessment of: can these dudes hold up?” Van Duyn said.Democrats say Biden must deliver an energetic performance that reassures voters unsure whether the oldest president in American history is up for a second term.“The debate is the hurdle he has to cross,” David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, said on CNN. “He needs to dispel that notion in that debate.”Voters tend to express fewer concerns about the 77-year-old former president’s age, but Democrats believe a debate could highlight Trump’s tendency toward verbal slips and gaffes.He is also likely to be pressed on his criminal cases. By then, the Manhattan hush-money case should be finished. Polls suggest a sizable share of Republican and independent voters would be uncomfortable voting for a candidate convicted of a felony.The format poses different challenges for each candidate.Trump feeds off the energy of a crowd. CNN has said its debate at the network’s Atlanta studios will take place without an audience, which was a prerequisite for the Biden campaign.Trump turned off voters in 2020, when he repeatedly hectored and interrupted Biden during their first debate. “He needs to play to the voters that may like his policies but not his temperament,” Kall said.Biden, meanwhile, has built a political brand around defying expectations, as he did earlier this year with a rousing State of the Union speech and in the 2020 debates.. “People will say he can’t do it, it’s too late at night,” Kall said. “Then as long as he doesn’t fall down or forget something, people will say he did OK.”The terms of the campaigns’ agreement, which bypasses the non-partisan commission that has hosted presidential debates for more than three decades, was designed to ensure a head-to-head between Biden and Trump.In a tweet, Robert Kennedy Jr, the independent candidate for president who is unlikely to qualify for the CNN debate, accused the frontrunners of “colluding” to exclude him. “Keeping viable candidates off the debate stage undermines democracy,” he said.While jumpstarting the debate season creates an opportunity for an early reset, it also makes the events less “existential” for the campaigns, said Tommy Vietor, a co-host of Pod Save America, discussing the development on his podcast with the former White House press secretary Jen Psaki.After the September debate, there are still weeks to recover from a potentially subpar performance or embarrassing gaffe. Though momentum from a strong showing could fade before election day, early voting ​m​eans millions of Americans will have already cast their ballots.Psaki said the back-and-forth between Biden and Trump this week was part of a new approach. Whereas four years ago, Biden led with sophisticated appeals to democracy and civility, he’s now playing humor as a way to tweak his famously thin-skinned opponent.“It’s figuring out how to land the best needles,” Psaki said.In a sign of Biden’s more pugnacious approach, the president opened public negotiations over the general election debate on Wednesday, the one day a week Trump is not confined to a New York courtroom. “I hear you’re free on Wednesdays,” Biden said in the video, suggesting a date for their face-off. His campaign is now selling merchandise that read: “Free on Wednesdays.”On Thursday, Biden’s re-election campaign also announced that it had accepted an offer from CBS News to participate in a vice-presidential debate and proposed two dates for that fall after the Republican national convention in July. Trump has yet to choose his running mate, but a carousel of Republican hopefuls have been openly auditioning for the role.With just weeks before the first debate, both candidates have an abbreviated timeline to prepare.Neither has participated in a debate since their final showdown in 2020. This year, Trump declined to take part in the Republican primary debates and Biden as the incumbent faced only nominal challenges.In an MSNBC interview this week, Mitt Romney, the Utah senator and 2012 Republican presidential nominee, insisted that the debates still mattered to voters and predicted a “huge audience” would tune in for the spectacle.As far as what they would see, Romney quipped: “the image that comes to mind is those two old guys on the Muppets”. More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden asserts executive privilege to block release of special counsel interviews

      by

      Joe Biden asserted executive privilege to stop House Republicans obtaining recordings of his interviews with Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s retention of classified information after his time as a senator and as vice-president to Barack Obama.In a letter reported by the New York Times and other outlets on Thursday, the White House counsel, Edward Siskel, told the Republican chairs of the House judiciary and oversight committees: “The absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal – to chop them up, distort them and use them for partisan political purposes.“Demanding such sensitive and constitutionally protected law enforcement materials from the executive branch because you want to manipulate them for potential political gain is inappropriate.”The two chairs, Jim Jordan of Ohio (judiciary) and James Comer of Kentucky (oversight), both close allies of Donald Trump, have led Republican efforts to ensnare Biden in damaging investigations including a sputtering impeachment.Biden’s retention of classified information was discovered as Trump, Biden’s opponent in this year’s election, came to face 40 criminal charges on the same issue.Unlike Trump – who faces 48 other criminal charges and has been hit with multimillion-dollar civil penalties – Biden cooperated with the special counsel appointed to investigate the matter.Hur, who was appointed as a US attorney by Trump, cleared Biden of wrongdoing. But Hur caused uproar when in his report he made repeated reference to the 81-year-old president’s age, including saying if he had brought charges, jurors would have seen Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.Hur has defended his work. Republicans have clamoured for access to recordings of Hur’s interviews with Biden, particularly after Biden’s own angry claims about what was said were contradicted by transcripts.News organisations have sued to obtain the recordings.In Congress, Republicans threatened to hold the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, in contempt after he rejected subpoenas for the recordings and other materials.In a letter to Biden, reported by the Times, Garland said handing over Hur’s interviews “would raise an unacceptable risk” of undermining “similar high-profile criminal investigations – in particular, investigations where the voluntary cooperation of White House officials is exceedingly important”.The Department of Justice said the decision to withhold the interviews was not made for partisan reasons.Carlos Uriarte, assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, told Jordan and Comer: “It is the longstanding position of the executive branch held by administrations of both parties that an official who asserts the president’s claim of executive privilege cannot be prosecuted for criminal contempt of Congress.”In response, House Republicans cited comments in February in which a Biden spokesperson said the president had “nothing to hide”, and asked: “Why is Biden hiding behind executive privilege now?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionComer said: “It’s a five-alarm fire at the White House … Today’s Hail Mary from the White House changes nothing for our committee.”Jordan told reporters transcripts already handed over were not “sufficient evidence of the state of the president’s memory” and said: “This last-minute invocation does not change the fact that the attorney general has not complied with our subpoena.”Jordan’s House judiciary committee later voted to advance contempt proceedings against Garland. The oversight committee was due to take up the issue.Trump’s campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said Biden “and his feeble administration have irretrievably politicised the key constitutional tenet of executive privilege, denying it to their political opponents while aggressively trying to use it to run political cover for Crooked Joe”.But Glenn Ivey, a Maryland Democrat who sits on the House judiciary committee, told the Times Republicans’ demands were “purely political”.“The only reason they want the recording is to try to use clips for campaign ads, or something along those lines, which obviously doesn’t meet the legislative purpose standard that the supreme court set for congressional oversight.” More