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      Of course Trump is dominating the primaries. That doesn’t mean he’ll beat Biden | Robert Reich

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      The mainstream media is flabbergasted at Trump’s success in sweeping the Iowa caucuses, dominating the polls and destroying all his rivals but Nikki Haley before Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.CNN is awestruck, calling Trump’s “landslide victory in Iowa” a “stunning show of strength”.The New York Times is dumbfounded, talking of an “expected Trump coronation” and also the “power of his political machine”.Time magazine marvels at his “commanding position” to secure the Republican nomination, and that “nothing has slowed him down”.The Washington Post’s Dan Balz writes that “the end of any real competition could come very soon”.Headline after headline offers the same breathless, spellbound story: “Trump is dominating.” “Disciplined”. “Ruthless”. “Hugely effective”. “Remarkable”.Earth to the mainstream media: this is dangerous nonsense.Why should Trump’s dominance be surprising? He’s dominated the Republican party since 2016. He dominates by ridiculing opponents, blasting anyone who stands in his way, bullying, browbeating and bellowing. The media eats it up. He’s outrageous and entertaining.Trump’s success in last week’s Iowa caucuses wasn’t a “stunning show of strength”. It was a display of remarkable weakness. He got just 56,260 votes. There are 2,083,979 registered voters in Iowa. Fewer than 3% of Iowans voted for him.According to an entrance poll, only 46% of the Republican caucus-goers considered themselves part of the Maga movement. Nearly 50% said they were not. Three-quarters of these non-Maga Republican voters opposed Trump.Over 30% said they would not consider Trump fit to be president if he were convicted of a crime.His performance in New Hampshire will probably reveal similar weaknesses.What seems to be lost on the media is that Trump was president for four years. In effect, he’s the incumbent Republican president.That’s not because he says he won the 2020 election. It’s because he was in fact president.Former presidents have a huge advantage in their party’s primaries because they control their party apparatus. Presidents who have served just one term and seek the nomination for another are always re-nominated by their party, as was Trump in 2020 – and presumably will be again in 2024.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOf course Trump will be the Republican nominee. Trump was the party’s presumptive nominee before he even announced he was running again.What’s remarkable is that he nonetheless attracted so many competitors for the nomination, who raised a lot of money for their primary runs. Tim Scott, Niki Haley, and Ron DeSantis finished September with a total of $26.7m available for use in the primary. That’s no small change.It’s also easy to forget that Trump began his third bid for the White House just days after Republicans took a beating in the midterms. That was the third straight national election in which Trump was a drag on his party. Across the country, his hand-picked candidates, who embraced his big lie that the 2020 election was stolen, lost critical races.The danger in the mainstream media’s awestruck coverage of Trump right now – making a big deal out of his winning the Iowa caucuses, dominating the polls, pushing out all rivals except Haley, and almost surely winning today’s New Hampshire primary – is that it creates a false impression that Trump is unstoppable, all the way through the general election.But no one should confuse Trump’s performance in the Republican primaries for success in the presidential election.When Americans actually focus on the presidential election and the stark reality of choosing between Biden and Trump, I expect they will once again choose Biden.Even if Trump is not yet criminally convicted, I doubt that a majority of Americans will want for their president a man who has 91 criminal charges against him, who has been impeached twice, who has orchestrated an attempted coup, who has profited financially while president, who has stolen top-secret documents and who has been judged to be a rapist.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Nikki Haley chases an upset in bitter New Hampshire face-off with Trump

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      New Hampshire will hold its first-in-the nation primary on Tuesday in what may be the last chance Republicans have to stop Donald Trump from running away with the nomination, as Nikki Haley chases an upset in the Granite state.Eight days after the former president’s record-setting victory in the Iowa caucuses, he is now locked in an increasingly bitter showdown with Haley, who has staked her candidacy on a strong showing in the more moderate New Hampshire. Ron DeSantis, the former Florida governor, exited the race on Sunday, adding his name to the stack of Republican officials consolidating behind Trump.Trump leads by double-digit margins but is considered more vulnerable in the state, where independent voters make up nearly 40% of the electorate and can choose to vote in either party’s primary.“We always buck the trend in New Hampshire,” the state’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu, told voters as he escorted Haley across the state on the eve of the election.Sununu, one of the few Trump critics left in the party, said a show of support in New Hampshire would vault her into next month’s contest in South Carolina. He has suggested Haley could win the primary outright. More recently, he has moderated expectations, insisting that she has already exceeded expectations as the only candidate still standing in the primary against Trump.Republicans are predicting record turnout – and good weather, seen as a possible boon to Haley who is relying more heavily on voters who don’t typically participate in the party’s primary.The stakes could not be higher for Haley. She is barnstorming the state, from the “suburbs to the seacoast”, trying to persuade anti-Trump independents and open-minded conservatives to back her long-shot bid.Trump by contrast has been in and out of the state, holding raucous evening rallies between appearances in court. New Hampshire propelled Trump to the Republican nomination in 2016 after he came in second in the Iowa caucuses. This year, Trump hopes to notch a victory large enough to effectively extinguish Haley’s campaign.For much of her nearly year-long campaign, Haley carefully avoided Trump, instead drawing implicit contrasts with calls for a “new generation” of leaders in Washington and a proposal to instate cognitive tests for older politicians. But in the final days before New Hampshire’s primary, she went after him more aggressively, questioning his mental fitness and accusing him of cozying up to dictators and autocrats.Trump responded with insults and misrepresentations while accusing her campaign of relying on the support of “globalists” and liberals to win. In an ugly series of social media posts, he revived the birtherism conspiracy that she was ineligible to be president because her parents were not US citizens when she was born. This is false; Haley, the South Carolina-born daughter of immigrants from India, is eligible. Trump also appeared to mock her Indian ancestry by referring to – and mispelling – her given name, Nimarata. Haley has always gone by her middle name, Nikki.Haley and her allies insist she has a path forward even if she doesn’t pull off an upset. Improving on her third-place finish in Iowa would be enough. But if she can’t win in New Hampshire, with an electorate seen as far more friendly to her brand of Republicanism, analysts said it will be hard to make the pitch to voters – and donors – that she can win anywhere else.Haley has scheduled a rally in North Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday night. It will be accompanied by the launch of a $4m investment in television, radio and digital advertising to air across South Carolina.Democrats will also hold a primary on Tuesday, but Joe Biden’s name won’t be on the ballot. Though turnout is expected to be low, Democrats will have the choice between voting for Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, and Marianne Williamson, an author and self-help guru who ran for president in 2020. Meanwhile, some of the president’s supporters in the state have urged Democrats to write in Biden’s name on their ballots. More

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      Biden campaign calls for investigation of New Hampshire robocalls impersonating US president – as it happened

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      Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has called on New Hampshire authorities to investigate a spate of robocalls to voters in which a voice that sounds like the president encourages them not to participate in Tuesday’s primary.Biden’s name is not appearing on the primary ballot, since Democrats have decided to hold their first nominating contest in South Carolina next month. But some in the party are encouraging their voters to write in the president’s name, both as a show of support and to pressure the Democratic National Committee to give New Hampshire, which has historically been the second state to vote, a more prominent role in the nominating process.In a statement, Biden-Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said:
      This matter has already been referred to the New Hampshire Attorney General, and the campaign is actively discussing additional actions to take immediately. Spreading disinformation to suppress voting and deliberately undermine free and fair elections will not stand, and fighting back against any attempt to undermine our democracy will continue to be a top priority for this campaign.
      Nikki Haley made the most of the hours remaining before tomorrow’s primary in New Hampshire, crisscrossing the Granite state alongside governor Chris Sununu in a bid to lure votes away from Donald Trump. But polls continue to show the former president with a big lead, underscoring the difficulty Haley will have in overcoming his status as the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.Trump is expected in New Hampshire later today, after appearing this morning in a New York City courtroom for a hearing in author E Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against him, where he was set to testify. The session was unexpectedly adjourned after a juror felt ill, and one of Trump’s lawyers was exposed to Covid-19.Here’s what else happened today:
      Kamala Harris assailed Trump for his role in overturning Roe v Wade on the 51st anniversary of the supreme court decision that allowed abortion access nationwide.
      Nikki Haley has avoided talking much about abortion, even though she has signalled she would be fine with restricting the procedure federally. Some voters who support abortion rights are fine with that.
      Judge Judy delivered her verdict on the presidential race by stumping for Haley in New Hampshire.
      Elise Stefanik, who is seen as potential running mate for Trump, said the adjournment of his defamation trial was “blatant election interference”. In reality, it was requested by the former president’s legal team.
      Someone is making robocalls to New Hampshire voters that sound like Joe Biden and encourage them not to vote in Tuesday’s primary, prompting the president’s re-election campaign to call for an investigation.
      As she blitzes the state, Nikki Haley talks about keeping taxes low, the military strong and the border secure. One issue she does not mention: abortion.On the 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade, Joe Biden and Democrats across the country are railing against Republicans, calling them “anti-abortion extremists” who would impose a federal ban on the procedure if they win back power this fall.Haley calls herself “pro-life” but has promised to seek consensus as president. In Iowa, where evangelical Christians dominate the caucuses, Haley signaled her willingness, if elected, to sign any restrictions that reached her desk.But in comparatively moderate New Hampshire, she has mostly shut down inquiries about what kind of federal limit she would support, insisting that any legislation is purely theoretical without 60 votes in the Senate – as she told one curious onlooker at a stop in Epping on Sunday.Across the state, several pro-choice independent voters said the risk of a Trump presidency worried them more than Haley’s views on abortion.“I’ve long ago accepted that I can’t agree with a candidate on everything,” said Carole Alfano, an independent who met Haley at the campaign stop in the town of Epping. “We’ll part ways on that.”Alfano backed Biden in 2020, but plans to support Haley in Tuesday’s primary.In Derry, Marie Mulroy is ecstatic about the prospect of a Haley nomination even though she believes abortion should remain legal.“We’ll agree to disagree on that,” she said.Can Nikki Haley pull a shock win in New Hampshire out of the bag?She’s the last candidate standing against Donald Trump, after Florida governor Ron DeSantis exited the race and endorsed the former president on Sunday. Host of the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast Jonathan Freedland headed out on the campaign trail in the Granite state to find out the answer:Joe Biden’s re-election campaign marked Roe v Wade’s 51st anniversary by debuting an advertisement in which Texas obstetrician-gynecologist Austin Dennard discusses how she had to leave the state to get an abortion after finding out that her fetus would not survive.Who’s to blame? Donald Trump, as Dennard makes clear. Expect to see tons of this sort of messaging coming from the campaigns of the president and other Democrats over the coming months:On the 51st anniversary of the supreme court’s Roe v Wade decision, Kamala Harris attacked Donald Trump for his role in appointing justices who overturned the precedent and allowed states to ban abortion.The vice-president spoke during a visit today to Wisconsin, a battleground state that will be crucial to deciding the outcome of the November election. Democrats plan to campaign on restoring access to abortion, after the 2022 decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization that curtailed abortion access in many states.Harris did not hold back from assailing the former president, citing his comments that he was “proud” of his role in getting three justices confirmed to the court, all of whom voted to overturn Roe. Here’s what she had to say:Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has called on New Hampshire authorities to investigate a spate of robocalls to voters in which a voice that sounds like the president encourages them not to participate in Tuesday’s primary.Biden’s name is not appearing on the primary ballot, since Democrats have decided to hold their first nominating contest in South Carolina next month. But some in the party are encouraging their voters to write in the president’s name, both as a show of support and to pressure the Democratic National Committee to give New Hampshire, which has historically been the second state to vote, a more prominent role in the nominating process.In a statement, Biden-Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said:
      This matter has already been referred to the New Hampshire Attorney General, and the campaign is actively discussing additional actions to take immediately. Spreading disinformation to suppress voting and deliberately undermine free and fair elections will not stand, and fighting back against any attempt to undermine our democracy will continue to be a top priority for this campaign.
      David Scanlan, the New Hampshire secretary of state, predicted Republican voter participation in the primaries will reach 322,000, eclipsing 2016’s total, when Republicans set a record of 287,652 votes. In 2020, it was Democrats who saw record turnout for their competitive primary, with 300,368 votes cast.Before a deadline in October, as many as 4,000 registered Democrats changed their party affiliation to “undeclared,” suggesting some plan to vote in the Republican primary.A Monmouth University Poll-Washington Post poll released today found that the number of registered New Hampshire independents who plan to vote in the Republican primary increased from 52% in November to 63%.More than a third of these voters said they voted for Biden in 2020, suggesting there could be a “measurable influx of Democratic-leaning independents” who will participate in Tuesday’s primary.In a conversation on Friday, Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire GOP chairman and prominent Trump opponent, said he did not see evidence that Haley had “lit a spark” among these voters in the way that might foretell “some kind of surge coming her way.”“People turn out when they are inspired, or they’re pissed off,” said Cullen, who had seen Haley on the campaign trail four times. “What we’re seeing is that people are not inspired, and they’re apathetic. And that means that they don’t show up.”New Hampshire’s secretary of state David Scanlan is predicting record turnout in the Republican primary, while governor Chris Sununu is joking that he is cashing in all of his political capital to ensure balmy weather for voters headed to the polls on Tuesday.That would be a stark contrast from Iowa, where arctic temperatures were blamed for the low turnout last week. Recent polling has shown Trump with a double digit lead in the state. But New Hampshire has a record of unpredictability, thanks to the large number of voters who proudly belong to neither party. They are not a monolith, but analysts believe that the more of them who choose to vote in the Republican primary, the better for Haley.“The only big X factor I see: how big is turnout?” said Dante Scala, a professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the University of New Hampshire.According to Scala, Haley is attempting something novel in New Hampshire. Republican presidential candidates who have pulled off wins in New Hampshire – such as John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 – managed to appeal to the state’s independents while still pulling in a sizable chunk of the party faithful. (Independents, called “undeclared” voters in New Hampshire, can vote in either party’s primary.)This year, Trump has a lock on Republican base voters. To win, or even to come within striking distance of Trump, Scala said Haley will need to run up the score with these independent voters, some of whom could choose to vote in the sleepy Democratic primary or not at all if they feel the contest is a foregone conclusion.Scala said Haley’s test is whether she “inspired enough people to show up, who don’t normally show up, to get a turnout big enough that it swamps the Trump people and your mainstream Republican in New Hampshire.”Joe Biden spoke to UK prime minister Rishi Sunak on Monday about Gaza, Ukraine, and the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, White House spokesperson John Kirby said, AFP reported.From White House correspondent for AFP Danny Kemp:Judy Sheindlin, widely known as Judge Judy, told CNN on Monday that she would endorse Nikki Haley if she “were a frog”.During the interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Judge Judy was asked if the reason she endorsed Haley was because Haley is a woman.“No, I would support her if she were a frog,” said the ever-colorful Sheindlin.“She’s capable. She’s poised,” Sheindlin added.Sheindlin said that neither Trump nor Biden have the “intellectual gravitas” to be US president.According to Sheindlin, she has only endorsed one presidential candidate before –the former New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, during the 2020 presidential election.Sheindlin has campaigned for Haley ahead of the highly watched New Hampshire primary on Tuesday.Nikki Haley is making the most of the hours remaining before tomorrow’s primary in New Hampshire, crisscrossing the Granite state alongside governor Chris Sununu in a bid to lure votes away from Donald Trump. But polls continue to show the former president with a big lead, underscoring the difficulty Haley will have in overcoming his status as the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. Trump is expected in New Hampshire later today, after appearing this morning in a New York City courtroom for a hearing in author E Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against him, where he was set to testify. The session was abruptly adjourned after a juror felt ill, and one of Trump’s lawyers was exposed to Covid-19.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      Judge Judy delivered her verdict on the presidential race by stumping for Haley in New Hampshire.
      Elise Stefanik, who is seen as potential running mate for Trump, said the adjournment of his defamation trial was “blatant election interference”. In reality, it was requested by the former president’s legal team.
      Someone is reportedly making robocalls to New Hampshire voters that sound like Joe Biden and encourage them not to vote in Tuesday’s primary. Supporters of a campaign to write in his name – he is not appearing on the ballot, in line with Democratic National Committee rules – say the calls are meant to undermine them.
      Donald Trump is clearly smarting from the ongoing defamation lawsuit against him by author E Jean Carroll, and a jury’s verdict last year that he sexually abused her. As the Guardian’s Sam Levine reports, his campaign yesterday barred a NBC News reporter who had pressed his ally Elise Stefanik for her thoughts on the verdict:Donald Trump’s presidential campaign reportedly blocked an NBC News journalist from covering campaign events in New Hampshire on Sunday.Sunday’s exclusion of NBC News correspondent Vaughn Hillyard came when he was set to serve as a pool reporter. Instead of having a pack of reporters follow a candidate everywhere, campaigns will often allow television, print, and radio news organizations to send a single pool reporter to travel with them – and those reporters in turn then send a readout to other news outlets.But on Sunday, Hillyard wrote in an email to the pool: “Your pooler was told that if he was the designated pooler by NBC News that the pool would be cut off for the day.”The email, which was subsequently published by several news organizations, added: “After affirming to the campaign that your pooler would attend the events, NBC News was informed at about 2.20pm that the pool would not be allowed to travel with Trump today.”Hillyard a day earlier had pressed New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik – said to be a potential Trump running mate – on whether she believed the ex-president had sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll.NBC News and Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, did not immediately return a request for comment.You don’t have to be Joe Biden for someone to make a robot of your likeness. As the Guardian’s Dan Milmo reports, Democratic congressman and presidential candidate Dean Phillips has his own AI impersonator:OpenAI has removed the account of the developer behind an artificial intelligence-powered bot impersonating the US presidential candidate Dean Phillips, saying it violated company policy.Phillips, who is challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic party candidacy, was impersonated by a ChatGPT-powered bot on the dean.bot site.The bot was backed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Matt Krisiloff and Jed Somers, who have started a Super Pac – a body that funds and supports political candidates – named We Deserve Better, supporting Phillips.San Francisco-based OpenAI said it had removed a developer account that violated its policies on political campaigning and impersonation.“We recently removed a developer account that was knowingly violating our API usage policies which disallow political campaigning, or impersonating an individual without consent,” said the company.The Phillips bot, created by AI firm Delphi, is now disabled. Delphi has been contacted for comment.A factor working against Nikki Haley in her quest to win the New Hampshire Republican primary is Donald Trump’s resounding victory in last week’s Iowa caucus.His triumph in the first state to vote in the GOP’s nomination process confirmed his status as the frontrunner for the nomination. But election turnout was low in the Hawkeye state, a fact Haley was keen to remind voters of in New Hampshire:Nikki Haley is spending the final moments before New Hampshire’s make-or-break primary getting out the vote with the state’s popular Republican governor, Chris Sununu by her side.“This is it. Twenty-four hours to go,” Sununu told the crowd at a packed, dimly lit veteran’s hall in Franklin. “All the momentum is at Nikki Haley’s back.”He told the voters not to pay any mind to the polls – unless it’s the ones showing Haley trouncing Joe Biden in a general election – and reminded them of their fiercely guarded reputation as the state that delivers political upsets.“We always buck the trend in New Hampshire,” he said. “It’s going to start tomorrow.”Haley reminded voters of the stakes of tomorrow’s primary – not that they needed any reminding, since some say they’ve received upwards of 10 campaign mailers a day in recent weeks, in addition to the political ads flooding the airwaves.“Don’t complain about what happens in a general election if you don’t play in this primary tomorrow,” she charged. “It matters.” More

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      Republican who said she held Trump accountable for January 6 endorses him

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      The Republican South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace faced widespread accusations of hypocrisy after she endorsed Donald Trump – the presidential candidate she previously said she held “accountable” for the January 6 attack on Congress.On Monday, Mace announced her endorsement, a day before the New Hampshire primary, in which Trump enjoys comfortable polling leads over the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, his only remaining opponent.“I don’t see eye to eye perfectly with any candidate,” Mace said. “And until now I’ve stayed out of it. But the time has come to unite behind our nominee.”Saying “it’s been a complete shit show since [Trump] left the White House”, the congresswoman said the US “needs to reverse all the damage Joe Biden has done”. Trump, she said, would be better on the economy, immigration and national security.“Donald Trump’s record in his first term should tell every American how vital it is he be returned to office,” Mace said.“Good Lord,” said Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who sat on the House January 6 committee then quit Congress over his opposition to Trump. “Nancy Mace is just the worst.”At present, Trump faces 91 criminal charges (17 for election subversion), attempts to keep him off the ballot for inciting an insurrection and assorted civil trials. Still, he has dominated the Republican primary, winning comfortably in Iowa last week.Observers were quick to point to what Mace made of Trump at the end of that term, in the aftermath of January 6.On that day, supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” to block certification of his defeat by Biden attacked Congress, seeking lawmakers to capture and possibly kill in a riot now linked to nine deaths, more than 1,200 arrests and hundreds of convictions.“Everything that he’s worked for … all of that, his entire legacy, was wiped out yesterday,” Mace told CNN on 7 January 2021. “We’ve got to start over.”On 11 January, Mace said: “We have to hold the president accountable for what happened. The rhetoric leading up to this vote, the lies that were told to the American people – this is what happens, rhetoric has real consequences. And people died.”Trump was impeached a second time for inciting the Capitol attack.On 13 January, Mace said on the House floor she would vote against impeachment but added: “I believe we need to hold the president accountable. I hold him accountable for the events that transpired for the attack on our Capitol last Wednesday.”While 10 House Republicans voted to impeach Trump, he was acquitted at his Senate trial when enough members of his party stayed loyal.Trump turned against Mace, endorsing a primary rival in her district in South Carolina. Mace fought off the challenge – with campaign help from Haley.Also on Monday, Steve Benen, an MSNBC producer, said: “Remember when Trump called Nancy Mace ‘absolutely terrible’ and tried to end her career? And when Nikki Haley scrambled to rescue her? A lot can happen in 18 months.”Mace is not the only senior South Carolina Republican to desert the former governor: the US senator Tim Scott, who Haley appointed in 2012, endorsed Trump on Friday.Jose Pagliery, a politics reporter for the Daily Beast, pointed to another widely remarked irony in Mace’s decision to endorse Trump this week, writing: “Rape survivor Nancy Mace just endorsed Donald Trump in the middle of his second rape trial.”In April last year, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Mace discussed both her work to improve the processing of rape kits by law enforcement and her support for exceptions for victims of rape or incest in abortion bans passed in Republican states.She also said: “I am a victim of rape, I was raped by a classmate at the age of 16. I am very wary and the devil is always in the details, but we’ve got to show more care and concern and compassion for women who’ve been raped.”In August, a New York judge dismissed a counterclaim by Trump in a defamation suit brought by the writer E Jean Carroll over her claim that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store changing room in the 1990s.Explaining why the jury decided Trump “sexually abused” Carroll but did not endorse Carroll’s claim that he raped her, Lewis A Kaplan discussed the difference, under New York law, between forcible penetration with the penis or with fingers.The jury said Trump did the latter to Carroll. Kaplan, however, wrote: “Mr Trump did in fact ‘rape’ Ms Carroll as that term is commonly used and understood in contexts outside of the New York penal law.”The case has now reached a second trial, though a hearing scheduled for Monday was postponed due to juror illness.A representative for Mace did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Speaking to Fox News, Mace said Haley had been a “great governor” but voters in her South Carolina district were “overwhelmingly with Donald Trump”.“People want the primary to be over,” Mace said, pointing to an eventuality most pundits expect sooner rather than later, given Trump’s leads over Haley in New Hampshire, South Carolina (the third state to vote) and elsewhere.Mace also said that for voters in her district, “women’s issues” including abortion were “gonna be really important in the 2024 cycle”. More

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      Nikki Haley bets on New Hampshire as best chance of wresting nomination from Trump

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      Plodding across frigid New Hampshire ahead of Tuesday’s primary, Nikki Haley offered the state’s proudly freethinking voters a tantalizing proposal: choose her and save America from the presidential rematch seemingly nobody wants.“Seventy percent of Americans have said they don’t want to see a Donald Trump-Joe Biden rematch,” Haley exclaimed on Sunday, drawing head nods and murmurs of agreement from attendees packed into a middle school library in Derry. Haley leaned in: “Do we really want to have two presidential candidates in their 80s?”Biden, the 81-year-old Democratic president, is coasting to his party’s nomination and Trump, the 77-year-old former president, is marching toward the Republican one as the field narrows and he consolidates support from across the party. But Haley, who celebrated her 52nd birthday hopscotching the state on Saturday, insisted there was a different – viable – path.Haley, the former “Tea Party governor” of South Carolina who served as Trump’s first United Nations ambassador, has staked her presidential aspirations on a strong showing in the first-in-the-nation primary.“New Hampshire is do-or-die for Nikki Haley,” said Mike Dennehy, a veteran Republican strategist in New Hampshire who worked on John McCain’s winning presidential primary campaigns in the state in 2000 and 2008 and is unaffiliated. “She needs to go all in and speak specifically to independent voters who want change in this country.”Trump demolished his rivals in the Iowa caucuses. Haley finished third, behind the Florida governor Ron DeSantis who dropped out of the race on Sunday and threw his support behind Trump, the latest sign of Republicans closing ranks around the former president.A Suffolk University/Boston Globe/NBC10 Boston daily tracking poll of New Hampshire voters on Monday had Trump ahead of Haley by double digits, 57% to 38%, with his lead ticking slightly higher in recent days.A competitive night in the Granite state, she hopes, will deliver enough momentum to vault her campaign into her home state of South Carolina, which holds the south’s first presidential primary next month.The secretary of state is predicting record turnout for the Republican primary. And unlike in Iowa, where arctic temperatures likely dampened turnout, Tuesday’s forecast in New Hampshire is several degrees above freezing, or, as locals joke, “shorts weather”.High turn-out is expected to favor Haley, who is relying on outsized support from the nearly 40% of registered voters who do not belong to a political party and can choose to participate in either primary. New Hampshire’s famously freethinking independents have long injected a degree of unpredictability into the state’s contest, setting it apart from socially conservative Iowa.Haley’s best chance of wresting the nomination from Trump may depend on voters like Marie Mulroy, 76, a self-described political moderate from Manchester who despises Trump and voted for Biden in 2020.“I’m sick of it,” Mulroy said. “Two incumbents. Two lame ducks. I’m tired of the forced choices.” On Tuesday, she’ll choose a Republican ballot and vote for the candidate she has seen on the campaign trail 12 times and believes could be the nation’s first female president.Though Mulroy disagrees with Haley on some social issues, particularly abortion, she is impressed by Haley’s approach to foreign policy and the federal debt. Importantly, Mulroy added, she was confident that if Haley were the Republican nominee and lost the election, she would concede. “We won’t have a January 6th with her,” Mulroy said.Haley will also need support from conservative voters like Erin Williams of Newmarket. Williams supported Trump in 2020 but says it’s time to usher in a younger generation of leaders. Drawn to Haley’s “energy and no-nonsense approach,” Williams cringed at the possibility of a Biden-Trump repeat.“I don’t even want to think about that,” she said after Haley’s Sunday night rally at a high school in Exeter.‘One fella and one lady’On Sunday, just two days before voters go to the polls, DeSantis’s departure set the stage for the one-on-one showdown with Trump in New Hampshire that Haley has been seeking.Moments after DeSantis announced his departure Haley shared the news with the mix of patrons and supporters gathered at Brown’s Lobster Pound on New Hampshire’s seacoast.“It’s now one fella and one lady left,” she said, sending the crowd into a frenzy of cheers and applause. “May the best woman win.”Haley has invested heavily in New Hampshire, where Trump is potentially more vulnerable in the highly educated, less religious state. Deep-pocketed allies have helped knock doors and troll Trump on her behalf.SFA Fund Inc, a Haley aligned Super Pac, taunted Trump with mobile billboards outside one of his rallies this week. A spokesperson for the group said the ads were targeting “Trump supporters who are tired of losing”.Americans for Prosperity Action, the political network backed by conservative billionaire Charles Koch, has contacted more than 210,000 voters in the state since endorsing Haley in November, said Greg Moore, the group’s New Hampshire director.In a briefing with reporters, he said that those conversations made it clear that, true to form in a state known for “breaking late”, many voters were still making up their minds.“Some of the narrative is that it’s all moderates for Haley and all conservatives for Trump. I know that’s not true,” Moore said. “She is pulling from both conservatives and moderates.”A Monmouth poll released on Monday found that the number of registered independents who planned to take a Republican ballot has increased from 52% in November to 63%, suggesting a “measurable influx of Democratic-leaning independents” in Tuesday’s primary.Haley is walking a fine line in icy New Hampshire, chasing both independent voters who despise Trump and conservatives who voted for him but are open to an alternative.The effort has earned her the backing of New Hampshire’s popular Republican governor, Chris Sununu, who has escorted her around the state. On Sunday, Haley won the endorsement of the Union-Leader, a state newspaper which praised her as a candidate who could “run circles around the dinosaurs from the last two administrations, backwards and in heels”.“She has the difficult task of trying to reach out to two very different parts of the electorate,” said Dante Scala, a professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the University of New Hampshire. “There’s a real chasm.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn stops around the state, Haley has played up her conservative credentials and hawkish foreign policy, rebutting Trump’s attacks on her, with vows to crack down on the southern border, stand up to China and never raise taxes.Early in her 2024 campaign, Haley stepped gingerly around the topic of her former boss. But with Trump holding firmly to his lead in New Hampshire – and several of her would-be supporters in the state clamoring for more – Haley began to confront him head-on.On the eve of Tuesday’s contest, she questioned Trump’s mental acuity, accused him of spreading “lies” about her record, berating his relationship with dictators and slamming his support from “Washington insiders”.Yet she continues to sidestep questions about Trump’s web of legal troubles, which has only hardened the extraordinary loyalty he inspires from the Republican base. As president, she said she would pardon Trump if he’s convicted but not preemptively. Separately, she has committed to supporting the Republican nominee.One of her campaign’s most consistent knocks on Trump is that he’s bad for Republicans. During his time in office, the party lost the House, Senate and White House during his time in office. They also repeatedly lost New Hampshire in the general election. Even then, she has left some of the sharpest attacks to her allies.“I am tired of losing,” Sununu, his voice hoarse from days of campaigning, told a crowd in Exeter. “I’m tired of losers. And I’m sure as hell tired of Donald Trump.”‘The sound of a two person race’Trump hopes to extinguish Haley’s path with a decisive victory on Tuesday before the race turns to an even friendlier contest in Nevada.“We need big margins,” Trump said at a rally in Manchester.A memo by the Trump campaign argued that Haley “must win” in New Hampshire. If she doesn’t, it said, she had two choices: suspend her campaign and endorse Trump or prepare to be “absolutely DEMOLISHED and EMBARASSED [sic] in her home state of South Carolina”.Haley has vowed to ride on. Her campaign scheduled a rally in South Carolina on Wednesday, 24 hours after polls close in New Hampshire.Part of Haley’s pitch is that she is more electable than the former president. She frequently points to polling that shows her beating Biden in a hypothetical matchup. But there is a creeping sense that the race for the Republican nomination is a foregone conclusion no matter what happens in New Hampshire.In Manchester, Carter Crumley, 60, a retired engineer and registered independent, said Haley had “a lot of great qualities” but felt she didn’t have a chance. He plans to vote for Trump.“You don’t just want to waste a vote because you like someone,” he said. “You want them to be electable.”Haley is embracing her status as an underdog, reminding voters that she’d been underestimated and counted out for much of her career only to prove the “fellas” wrong: besting a 30-year Republican incumbent to win a seat in the state legislature and surging past a field of more prominent Republicans when she ran for governor in 2010.And unlike Trump’s rowdy rallies, Haley has been doing the time-honored work of retail politics that New Hampshire voters expect – and demand – of their candidates. In recent days, she has answered interrogatories at Mary Ann’s diner in Amherst, tossed back a Guinness at the Peddler’s Daughter Irish Bar in Nashua before zipping to Chick-fil-A in the governor’s red mustang.At a seafood restaurant in Epping, Haley dropped down to sign a drawing made for her by five-year-old Cora. The girl’s mother, who gave only her first name, Jessica, said her daughter was drawn to Haley because she was the only woman in the stack of campaign literature flooding their mailbox.As for herself, she had hoped to support the former Arkansas governor, Asa Hutchinson, who dropped out of the presidential race after his anti-Trump candidacy failed to break through. Now, she said she will follow Hutchinson’s lead and support Haley.In a sign of the times, protesters have disrupted multiple Haley’s events in recent days. As supporters booed, Haley quieted the crowd to say that she is always “happy to see a protester” because her husband, who is deployed, and other armed service members are serving to protect their right to free speech. It is one of her strongest applause lines.An electric crowd filled a high school gymnasium in Exeter for Haley’s final campaign stop on Sunday. Her campaign shot T-shirts into the audience. A young supporter danced on stage.“Can you hear that sound?” Haley asked as she began her remarks. “That’s the sound of a two-person race.”But it was Judy Sheindlin, the straight-talking television arbiter known and loved by American viewers as Judge Judy, who delivered Haley’s closing argument.“Please, New Hampshire. Use your brains and your heart,” Sheindlin said. “Bring her home on Tuesday.”David Smith contributed reporting. More

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      How Winston Churchill became a mascot for anti-woke warriors | Zoe Williams

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      ‘Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts,” Ron DeSantis said, as he pulled out of the race to lead the Republican party. It was a strange way to announce that what counts – the continuing bit – is the thing you don’t have. Also, it is quite contestable, for such a short statement; failure isn’t necessarily fatal, but it does depend on what you have failed at. Still, what set most pedants afire wasn’t the substance but the attribution: DeSantis said it was Winston Churchill; the International Churchill Society disagreed. Meh, let’s not split hairs. It is a sort of obvious notion, made of words, so it is surely the kind of thing Churchill would have said, had he said it.This is my favourite kind of Churchill-eering, where politicians summon his ghost simply by adopting similar rhetoric. Penny Mordaunt’s fabulous “Stand up and fight! Stand up and fight!” before going on to add, “Never forget those who went before us and remember that without a Churchill, you can’t have a Zelenskiy” during her speech to last year’s Tory conference was a classic of the genre: a pitch-perfect throwback to “We shall fight on the beaches”, having first removed the beaches, the landing grounds, the fields, the streets, the hills, any obvious enemy, any clear sense of what was being defended and any endgame. Churchill here stands in as an all-purpose fighty-man, and as such wouldn’t make much of a cultural export, since everyone’s history has those.It took Boris Johnson to repackage Churchill for an international audience, not so much with his book, The Churchill Factor, as in his strategically idiotic attack on Barack Obama in 2016. He was mayor of London then, when the most he could screw up was planning on the Vauxhall gyratory which, to be fair, quickly cohered as a literal and figurative shrine to the emptiness of late capitalism, and is probably the most coherent thing he ever did. But in his downtime, he wrote a column for the Sun, enraged that Obama had moved a bust of Churchill out of the Oval Office (a full seven years previously), contending that the “part-Kenyan president” was motivated by anti-colonialism, “ancestral dislike” of the British empire. To follow the logic, Johnson, having German heritage, would also have reason to dislike Churchill, but he is not doing logic, he is focusing on Obama’s race, which I feel Obama should have met with unending hellfire, rather than a mild: “No, we just moved Churchill to a different corridor.”Too late to worry about that now: Churchill, in Johnson’s new frame, stood not only for nostalgia, a comforting world order with the posh at the top, but also for white supremacy and colonial brutality as an essential part of that past. Winston was now a mascot for the anti-woke warriors, the embodiment of their core principles: the past is better than the present; the world makes more sense with the posh at the top, just listen to their lovely cadence; the dicey bits – racist exploitation and carnage – are expiated by nostalgia (it was all a long time ago) and implicitly celebrated by it (weren’t things better then?), and anyone who disagrees hates their country.It makes no sense as an export, least of all to the US, which had made its feelings plain about the yoke of the British empire 99 years before Churchill was born. It doesn’t even make much sense as a British narrative, which had previously been happy to dial down Churchill’s imperialism, concentrating on its more nuanced expressions, and use him mainly as the totem of Britain’s successful fight against fascism. In Johnson’s revision, Churchill the Coloniser is as valorised as Churchill the anti-Nazi. Its nonsensical nature is why it’s the perfect cultural export: stripped of all meaning, just some loud, posh vibes, caricatured to the point where you can’t remember what the original looks like, political rhetoric’s answer to Saltburn.Loth as I am to get into combat about who knows Churchill the best, between me, Johnson and DeSantis, we all know this, right? He was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid; he would have hated this. He would be turning in his grave. More

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      Trump holds wide lead over Nikki Haley in New Hampshire, polls show

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      The ignominious end of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign is unlikely to boost Donald Trump’s last challenger, Nikki Haley, to the Republican nomination , according to two New Hampshire polls released on the eve of the primary in the north-eastern state.DeSantis also endured a round of scathing critiques of his campaign which started off being seen as a major source of opposition to Trump. But his White House bid never fully took off and fizzled into failure and a major blow to the rightwing Florida governor’s political reputation.In a poll released on Sunday, the day the hard-right Florida governor contradicted his own Super Pac, Never Back Down, and backed down, NBC News, the Boston Globe and Suffolk University put Trump 19 points clear of Haley, at 55% to 36% support.Ending his campaign, DeSantis looked past months of personal attacks from Trump to offer the twice-impeached, 91-times criminally charged former president – whose lie about a stolen 2020 election DeSantis has disowned – his endorsement to face Joe Biden.On Monday, the Washington Post and Monmouth University put Trump at 52% support in New Hampshire, to 34% for Haley.That represented a near-doubling of support for the former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador since November. But, the Post said, that was primarily a result of the withdrawal of Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who campaigned as an anti-Trump candidate.DeSantis had 8% support in the Post-Monmouth poll, which was carried out before he ended his campaign.“If DeSantis’s supporters in the poll are allocated based on their second choice,” the Post said, “Trump’s support rises by four points while Haley’s increases by two.”On Sunday, Haley staged a rally in New Hampshire with Judy Sheindlin, better known to millions of Americans as Judge Judy, a former Manhattan family court judge made famous by a small claims, arbitration-based TV show.“What a crowd, Exeter!” she said. “The energy on the ground is electric, and it’s clear Granite Staters are ready to make a difference on Tuesday! An extra special thanks to America’s favorite judge, Judge Judy Sheindlin, for joining us! She gets it: this country needs no drama, no chaos, no nonsense – just results!”But despite such determined boosterism, polling results undeniably show Haley well adrift of Trump in New Hampshire and even further behind in South Carolina, her home state which next month will be the third to vote.According to the polling site FiveThirtyEight.com, Trump leads Haley by 61% to 25% in the southern state.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “I wish I had a dollar for every Republican who’s told me over the last three years, ‘We’ve learned our lesson. No way will Trump be our nominee again.’”Speaking to CNN, Sabato added: “If [Haley] loses on Tuesday, it almost certainly marks the end of her run. She may continue through her home state of South Carolina though I think she’d be hesitant to do it because she wouldn’t want to lose her home state. That’s really difficult to explain to people.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“But for all practical purposes, once DeSantis left and once the other candidates were knocked out of the race, it was Trump’s to lose and Trump has to lose significantly and he’s not going to lose it.”DeSantis exited the race with a statement containing both a Churchill quote it turned out Churchill never said and his endorsement of Trump.Sabato was asked about DeSantis’s decision to back Trump after, only last week, attacking Republicans he said had chosen to “kiss the ring” and endorse the former president.“I guess he saw some good examples of ring kissing and decided to imitate it,” Sabato said.“Look, who knows what was going through his mind other than the fact that he certainly wants to run the next time. Now, whether he’ll be credible as a candidate after this disastrous run? Remember, he was supposed to be Trump’s main challenger and most of the establishment in the Republican party was betting on him. And his campaign crashed and burned.“This was really a disgraceful enterprise in so many different ways. But in [DeSantis’s] mind, at least right now, as he’s coming to terms with the the demise of his dream, he’s thinking about running in 2028. Well, being associated with Nikki Haley is not going to help you, because this party has already become the Donald Trump party or the Maga party and it will be in all likelihood even more so as the years go on.” More

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      ‘They hate God’: US anti-abortion activists aim to fight back on 51st Roe anniversary

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      Within the subterranean levels of a fancy hotel in downtown Washington, just a few days before the 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade, the anti-abortion movement was trying to mount a comeback.Kevin Roberts stood on stage in a cavernous ballroom aglow with neon shades of blue, purple and pink. As president of the Heritage Foundation, Roberts leads one of the main thinktanks behind recent conservative attacks on abortion. And he is not happy with how things are going.“We meet today amid a pro-abortion media narrative of smug triumphalism,” Roberts told hundreds of young abortion foes, who had gathered in the ballroom from across the country to hear him and other anti-abortion leaders speak.“You’ve heard the story. Less than two years after the supreme court overturned Roe, the abortion-industrial complex is celebrating an unprecedented political winning streak. Across the country, pro-life bills have failed. Abortion referenda have passed. Democrat leaders are crowing while too many Republican leaders are cowering from the fight.”Roberts was speaking at the annual National Pro-Life Summit, a one-day organizing camp for high school- and college-aged anti-abortion activists. This year, the summit faced a monumental task: organizers and attendees alike hoped to reinvigorate a movement that, 18 months ago, soared to the height of its power with the overturning of Roe – and then, in the months that followed, has repeatedly crashed-landed back on earth.Since Roe’s demise, seven states have voted on abortion-related ballot referendums. In each case, voters have decisively moved to protect abortion rights, even in ruby-red states like Kentucky, Kansas and Montana.The stakes are even higher in 2024. Not only are roughly a dozen more states gearing up to potentially vote on abortion-related referendums, but the future of the White House is on the line. If abortion hurts Republicans the election – as it’s widely thought to have done in the 2022 midterms – anti-abortion activists may see the GOP brand their movement as ballot-box poison.The National Pro-Life Summit is generally a peek into what the anti-abortion movement is telling itself about itself – and at present, it is not happy with Republicans. For years, the anti-abortion movement has corralled voters for Republicans. On Saturday, they repeatedly condemned the GOP for failing to adequately support their cause.The last Republican president appointed the justices who overturned Roe, while red states have enacted more than a dozen near-total abortion bans since the ruling fell. But many Republicans have begun to back away from the issue. Before the 2022 elections, several quietly downplayed their stances, while dozens of House Republicans have delayed signing onto a bill to nationally ban abortions.“Our friends in the Republican party need to touch some grass,” said Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America, the organization behind the summit. “Those who say now that we shouldn’t be talking, that Republican candidates, those seeking for office, should hide from the abortion issue – they continue to be wrong. We won’t win if we put our head in the sand.”Democrats are already attempting to use Roe’s impact on doctors to win votes, as Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has launched a blitz of events and ads timed to the Roe anniversary on Monday. Vice-President Kamala Harris will kick off a tour devoting to spotlighting abortion access, while Biden will assemble a meeting of his reproductive health taskforce.His administration has also announced plans to expand access to contraception under the Affordable Care Act as well as an initiative to spread information about a law that, the administration says, guarantees Americans’ legal rights to emergency abortions, even in states that ban the procedure.A thin lineThe mood on Saturday wasn’t totally dour.Attendees could buy baseball caps that read “I’m just out here saving babies,” sweatshirts that bore an image of a newspaper front page that proclaimed “ROE REVERSED”, as well as red hats adorned with the words “Make America Pro-Life Again” in the unmistakable style of Trump’s Maga hats. Young people excitedly posed for group photos in front of a backdrop that read, “EQUAL RIGHTS FOR THE PREBORN!” An illustrated fetus was curled up in one corner.Yet, in speech after speech, activists told young people that they were the victims of vast forces arrayed against them. They accused abortion rights supporters of spreading misinformation about ballot referendums and said they were simply outspent by the opposition. In Ohio, abortion rights supporters reported receiving about three times as much money as a coalition that opposed abortion rights.“These people love chaos. That is the left. The left is inherently chaotic at its core,” said Will Witt, a conservative influencer who, like Roberts, spoke at the morning address to all attendees.After quoting from the Bible in an effort to demonstrate that God originated order, Witt continued: “This is why the left, this is why these pro-choicers, this is why they hate God. Because God represents order in the world, whereas they love chaos.”The summit speakers were attempting to walk a fine line. At the same time that they were attempting to convince attendees that they were the victims of a world turned against them, they also had to make the case that opposition to abortion is a majority view – and one issue that can get Republicans elected.“Our opinion on this issue, the issue, is not outside of the mainstream, no matter how many times ABC wants to try to tell me it is,” Hawkins told attendees at a workshop dedicated to understanding what went wrong with the abortion referendums. Most millennials and members of Gen Z, she added, “want some sorts of limits on abortion”.Polling on abortion is complex, since respondents’ answers can vary widely depending on how a question is asked or how much context is provided. Most Americans believe that abortion should be restricted after the first trimester of pregnancy, according to polling from Gallup. However, over the last two decades, more and more people have become open to keeping abortion legal later into pregnancy. Republicans in Virginia failed to take control of the state legislature last year after they ran on a promise of banning abortion past 15 weeks of pregnancy.Gallup has also found that, since 2020, more Americans identify as “pro-choice” than “pro-life”. More people have started to call themselves “pro-choice” since the US supreme court overturned Roe in 2022.Hawkins is not in favor of only “some sorts of limits on abortion”.“I want to see no abortions be legal, ever,” she said in an interview. She rejected the notion that abortions performed to save women’s lives qualify as abortions. “When you’re looking at a case where a woman’s life is at risk, where the physician believes that she can no longer safely carry her child in her womb, or she may lose her life – we wouldn’t consider that an abortion unless the abortionist goes in with the intention to killing the child.”Instead, she said, it’s a “maternal-fetal separation”.Hawkins’ point was an effort to contend with a phenomenon that has been particularly damaging for the movement: stories from women who have sued after they said they were denied medically necessary abortions.Every state with an abortion ban has some kind of exception for cases of medical emergencies, but doctors in those states have widely said that the exceptions are so vague as to be unworkable. In a recent study of 54 OB-GYNs in states with post-Roe abortion restrictions, more than 90% said that the law prevented them from adhering to the best clinical standards of care.‘You vote pro-life’Last year, when the National Pro-Life Summit held a straw poll asking attendees about their preferred 2024 president candidate, Ron DeSantis won. This year, with DeSantis a day away from dropping out of the presidential primary, Hawkins cheerfully proclaimed the latest straw poll victor: Donald Trump.As much as their leaders may lock heads with Republicans or Trump – who has suggested that hardline abortion stances hurt Republicans – they are ultimately unlikely to withhold votes from the GOP. Even Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, who was a target of the January 6 riot and who spoke at the summit, indicated that people need to simply get on with it.“That’s why we have primaries. We sort ’em out at every level. But after the primary’s over, you vote pro-life,” Pence said. “You go get behind men and women who are going to stand for the right to life.”A booth for the Heritage Foundation was emblazoned with logos for its “Project 2025”, which includes a playbook for the next conservative president. It recommends that the US government stop funding or promoting abortion in international programs, turbocharge the government’s existing “surveillance” efforts to collect data about abortion, and enforce the 19th-century Comstock Act to ban the mailing of abortion pills. That would effectively result in the removal of abortion pills from the market, which Hawkins said is a policy goal of hers.“If Donald Trump would be elected again, the people he would appoint to his presidential administration would not be abortion activists,” Hawkins said in an interview. “Hands down, that’s a guarantee. And they’re going to be coming to Washington to protect the people and the people includes the pre-born children.” More