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      ‘Four-time loser’ Trump may not be nominee for 2024, Republican insists

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      Donald Trump is a “four-time loser” who will not necessarily be the Republican presidential nominee despite dominating primary polling, the New Hampshire governor said on Sunday.“Donald Trump is positioning himself to be a four-time loser in 2024,” Chris Sununu said. “We need candidates that can win.”A Republican governor in a Democratic part of the country – and of a key early voting state – Sununu is seen as a potential candidate in the moderate lane, should such a lane still exist in a party dominated by Trump.Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press, Sununu was confronted by comments to the same network just two months ago, when he said Trump was “not going to be the nominee”.“We’re just moving on as a party, as a country,” Sununu said in February. “He’s not going to be the nominee. That’s just not going to happen. Here’s the good news … Ready? … You’re dead wrong. He’s not going to be the nominee.”Since then, particularly since Trump was this month arraigned on criminal charges in New York, relating to his hush money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels, the primary paradigm has shifted.Trump dominates polling, expanding his lead over Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who has not declared a run, and other actual or likely candidates.Trump also faces legal jeopardy over his election subversion and incitement of the January 6 attack on Congress, his handling of classified material, his business and tax affairs and a civil rape case due to go to trial in New York next week.He denies wrongdoing and claims victimisation by Democrats. On Sunday, NBC released a poll in which a fraction under 70% of Republicans agreed.Sununu told NBC there had “definitely [been] a shift” but insisted: “I still don’t think he’s necessarily going to be the nominee.“Look, I think your poll is spot on in all these areas. I think that’s actually a great poll. I hope folks listen to it.“I’ll say this. Republicans are rallying. They’re supporting former president Trump over these indictments, right? … Now, does it actually translate into a vote? We will see, I mean, most folks don’t decide who they’re voting for until about three weeks before the election.“… There’s not even a single debate has been had. Other candidates are going to get in the race. I just think it’s so far away.“And at the end of the day, we want a winner, right? Republicans want someone who can win in November of ’24. Donald Trump is a loser. He has not just lost once. He lost us our House seats in 2018. He lost everything in ’20. We should have 54 US senators right now and we don’t because of his message.“So, Donald Trump is positioning himself to be a four-time loser in 2024. We need candidates that can win.”Many within and without Republican ranks are questioning whether DeSantis is that sort of candidate. The Florida governor has fallen away in polling, experiencing problems including a pause by a major donor who said he was turned off by hard-right policies including school book bans and a six-week abortion ban.Thomas Peterffy, an online trader, did not say he would not support DeSantis at all. But he also gave $1m to the Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin, who has not declared a run.On Sunday, Rolling Stone quoted a source formerly allied to DeSantis but now “in the Trump orbit” as saying: “If Ron thinks the last couple months have been bumpy, he’s in for a painful ride.”As Florida Republicans in Congress have endorsed Trump, so DeSantis has come under fire for an alleged lack of personal warmth. Rolling Stone described an evolving attempt by Trump to trash his rival personally as well as politically.The unnamed source said: “The nature of the conversations among the people who used to work for Ron is just so frequently, ‘OK, how can we destroy this guy?’ It is not at all at a level that is normal for people who hold the usual grudges against horrible bosses. It’s a pure hatred that is much, much purer than that.“People who were traveling with Ron every day, who worked with him very closely over the years, to this day joke about how it was always an open question whether or not Ron knew their names … And that’s just the start of it.”Unlike DeSantis, Sununu barely registers in polling. On NBC, he was asked for his timetable for deciding on whether to run.“Probably by lunch,” he joked.“I think everybody will have to make a decision by 4 July … There’s a lot of opportunity here … a lot of folks want to get on that stage. I think the threshold for the debate are going to be very low to start in terms of polling numbers and donors, so I think we’re going to have a very crowded stage early on.”That stage may yet include Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence. In Iowa on Saturday, at a Faith & Freedom Coalition event which Trump addressed by video, the former Indiana governor flirted with confirming a run.“I think if we have an announcement to make, it’ll be well before late June,” Pence told CBS’s Face the Nation, adding: “Anyone that would be serious about seeking the Republican nomination would need to be in this contest by June.“If we have an announcement to make it will be well before then.” More

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      Mike Pence will enter presidential race ‘well before late June’ – if he does at all

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      Mike Pence has not decided whether to enter the Republican presidential primary but if he does he will enter “well before late June”.The former congressman, Indiana governor and vice-president to Donald Trump has been moving towards a run for months, releasing a memoir, visiting early voting states and establishing a political staff.He made his less-than-bold prediction in an interview with CBS Face the Nation.“I think if we have an announcement to make, it’ll be well before late June,” Pence said, adding: “Anyone that would be serious about seeking the Republican nomination would need to be in this contest by June.“If we have an announcement to make it will be well before then.”Pence must perform a balancing act, distancing himself from Trump, the rival candidate whose supporters chanted for Pence to be hanged when they attacked the US Capitol, while trumpeting their achievements together in office.It seems a doomed effort in a party and primary dominated by Trump, particularly as Pence recently dropped attempts to avoid testifying in the justice department investigation of the January 6 attack.In March, in perhaps his boldest break from Trump, Pence told a Washington dinner: “President Trump was wrong. I had no right to overturn the election, and his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”On CBS, asked if he was “leaning in or leaning away”, Pence said: “Well, I’m here in Iowa.”His interviewer, Robert Costa, said: “Sounds like you’re leaning in.”Pence said: “I would tell you that I’m very humbled by the encouragement that we’re receiving. And I promise when we have something to announce, you’ll be among the first to know.”Pence spoke on Saturday at an event in Clive, Iowa, staged by the Faith & Freedom Coalition, a rightwing nonprofit.Trump also addressed the event. Responding to a recent rebuke from a leading anti-abortion group, which called his opposition to a federal abortion ban “morally indefensible”, the former president highlighted the decision by which a supreme court including three justices he named removed the right to abortion last year.“Those justices delivered a landmark victory for protecting innocent life,” Trump said, in a speech delivered by video. “Nobody thought it was going to happen. They thought it would be another 50 years. Because Republicans had been trying to do it for exactly that period of time, 50 years.”The Roe v Wade decision which protected the right to abortion came in 1973 – 49 years before it was overturned by Dobbs v Jackson.The Iowa caucuses will kick off the Republican primary in February. Ten months out, Trump enjoys clear leads in polling.The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, has maintained a hold on second place without declaring a run.But DeSantis’s numbers are tanking. The governor faces his own difficulties at state level while Trump surfs a wave of support generated by his criminal indictment in New York, over a hush money payment to an adult film star, and other forms of legal jeopardy including a civil rape trial due to open next week.Trump denies wrongdoing and claims to be the victim of Democratic witch-hunts: a potent combination for attracting donations and support. On Sunday, an NBC poll said 68% of Republican voters thought Trump was the victim of politically motivated attacks and it was important to support him.Pence is contesting third place with Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who declared her run in February. Both are at around 4% support.The other mainstream Republican to have declared, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, struggles to break 1%. The South Carolina senator Tim Scott has all but declared a run but remains all but invisible in polling.Polls do not provide uniformly good news for Trump. A poll this week from the Associated Press and the University of Chicago said 44% of Republicans (and 70% of Americans) do not want him to be the nominee.The Dispatch, a conservative anti-Trump site, said Pence was planning a launch in Indiana, followed by another trip to Iowa.Pence, the site said, “plans to campaign as the traditional conservative he is, eschewing momentary cultural flashpoints that inflame passions and attract eyeballs … [to] instead focus on wonky topics fraught with political peril, like how to address the ballooning federal debt and reforming popular programs like Social Security and Medicare.“On abortion, Pence is eager to highlight his opposition – and his commitment to signing federal legislation limiting the procedure.”Such positions have proved unpopular with general election voters. The Dispatch also said Pence planned to “aim fire directly at” Trump. More

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      Republican Graham loses cool over abortion after supreme court pill ruling

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      Republican frustration with the supreme court decision which on Friday blocked restrictions on a widely used abortion pill spilled into public on Sunday, as the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham lost his cool in a television interview when challenged on his flip-flopping position.Graham, who last September proposed a national 15-week abortion ban only a month after insisting it was an issue for states to decide, became angry on CNN’s State of the Union, deflecting questions with false claims Democrats wanted a law allowing abortions until birth on demand.The flustered senator accused his interviewer, Dana Bash, of covering for opponents he said wanted to see “barbaric” late-term abortions “out of line with the rest of the civilised world” and commonplace, he said, only in China and North Korea.“No, no, no, you [in the] media keep covering for these guys,” Graham shouted. “They introduced legislation that allowed abortion on demand with taxpayer funds to the moment of birth, that’s the law they want to pass and nobody in your business will talk about it.”Bash replied she was covering for nobody and had frequently challenged Democrats on the issue.The official position of the Democratic party is to codify federal protections for abortion, guaranteed by the Roe v Wade decision of 1973 until overturned by the supreme court last year, that permitted the procedure until “fetal viability”, generally accepted to be at about 24 weeks’ gestation.The spectacle of Graham’s anger underscored how Republicans are struggling to find a cohesive response to Friday’s ruling over the abortion pill mifepristone and on abortion in general.Many analysts and party members believe the issue cost votes in last year’s midterms, following the supreme court Dobbs v Jackson ruling that overturned Roe v Wade.Moves by several Republican-led states to tighten abortion restrictions, including the signing by the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, of the nation’s most extreme ban, at six weeks, have prompted voter backlash. Polling shows three in five Americans approve of abortion access in most or all cases.On ABC’s This Week, the South Carolina Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace said the court was right to block restrictions last month placed on mifepristone by a Texas judge appointed by Donald Trump.“This was a hand-picked case with a hand-picked judge to get this outcome,” she said. “And when you look at the ruling in Texas, in part at least, it used a law that the supreme court in 1983 said was unconstitutional.“So the basis for his ruling, I argue, was debunked and it should not have been.”Mace, who has spoken of being raped as a teenager, said the approach of her party to the wider issue was too rigid, and colleagues needed to show more sympathy and compassion for victims of rape who found it difficult or impossible to obtain an abortion.“I want us to find some middle ground,” she said. “As a Republican and conservative, a constitutional conservative who’s pro-life, I saw what happened after Roe v Wade [fell] … I saw the sentiment change dramatically.“As Republicans, we need to read the room because the vast majority of folks are not in the extremes. We just saw a fetal heartbeat bill signed in the dead of night in Florida. In my home state a very small group of state legislators filed a bill that would execute women who have abortions and gave more rights to rapists than women who have been raped.“That is the wrong message heading into 2024. We’re going to lose huge if we continue down this path of extremities. It hurt us in the midterms. We actually lost seats. We’ve buried our heads in the sand. We want to go to the extreme corners of this issue, but that’s not where the vast majority of Americans are right now.”Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic senator for Minnesota and a leading voice for abortion rights, also hailed the mifepristone decision.“Senator Graham knows where the American people are on this,” she told CNN. “They are with Democratic leaders, and the people of this country believe that the women of this country should be able to make their own decisions about their healthcare and not politicians.”Klobuchar also attacked the legal arguments advanced by those seeking to ban mifepristone, which in part relied on the 150-year-old Comstock Act prohibiting the mailing of contraceptives, “lewd” writings and any “instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing” that could be used in an abortion.The law has not been enforced since the 1930s, according to NPR.“It was literally passed in 1873,” Klobuchar said. “That is 10 years before the Yellowstone prequel, at a time when we were treated for pneumonia through bloodletting, back in the age of the Pony Express.“The American people do not want to go backwards. And what I heard today is that Republican leaders in Washington aren’t backing down on their opposition to reproductive freedom. They are doubling down.” More

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      Rough week, Ron? DeSantis flounders with Disney feud and abortion stance

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      One of the most entertaining Ron DeSantis stories of the week was only a parody, although he might wish it was not so. The satirical website The Onion had Florida’s rightwing governor settling his ongoing feud with Disney by taking a guest role in its hit Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian.Behind the mocking comedy was hard truth for a vain politician embroiled in the energy-sapping scrap with Florida’s biggest private employer over LBGTQ+ rights.There’s clear evidence the Disney fight, and his numerous other cultural battles, including his signing of an extreme six-week abortion ban, are costing DeSantis significant political capital on the national stage as he prepares a likely presidential run. And while the road to the 2024 Republican nomination is likely to have many ups and downs ahead, there is little doubt DeSantis has hit a rough spot.He has fallen well behind Donald Trump in the polls, can’t seem to find a Florida congressman to endorse him, and is hemorrhaging support from influential Republican donors.But there’s no easy way out, even if he wanted to find one.“It’s a combination of vanity and vengeance for him. He suffers from what a lot of politicians do, which is vanity, and this is about retribution,” said David Jolly, a Republican former Florida congressman who served with DeSantis in the House, and was briefly a rival in the 2016 race for Marco Rubio’s Senate seat until the incumbent reversed his decision to stand down.“On Disney, his ego’s gotten the best of him and he’s been called out for it. He has to win this [but] the momentum is going in the wrong direction, and it’s getting serious.“To use a hockey analogy, he’s always known how to skate to where the puck is going. But the puck’s going to the wrong goal right now.”By any measure, DeSantis has had a rough week. It began with a torrent of criticism when he suggested building a state prison on land next to Disney’s theme parks as payback for being outfoxed over control of the company; and continued with a humiliating odyssey to Washington DC in search of congressional endorsements, only to find a succession of former allies defecting to Trump.At home in Florida, there has also been irritation with DeSantis and his extremist agenda, according to Politico.“People are deeply frustrated,” Republican former state senator Jeff Brandes told the outlet, adding that party colleagues he had spoken to felt “they are not spending any time on the right problems”.It’s a view echoed by Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor mulling his own challenge for the party’s nomination. DeSantis’s obsession with vengeance on Disney, a private company, for opposing him is not conservative, in Christie’s view.“If you express disagreement in this country, the government is allowed to punish you?” he told Semafor.“That’s what I always thought liberals did. And now all of a sudden here we are participating in this with a Republican governor.”According to Jolly, however, it’s not attacks by such as Christie that should set alarms ringing for DeSantis’s advisers.“The most damning criticism of him on Disney is from Justin Amash, the founder of the House freedom caucus, who was a colleague of his, and who condemned DeSantis for his take on Disney. That stings for DeSantis that the freedom caucus leader came out against him on it,” he said.“He also goes to Washington and four of his Florida colleagues turn around and endorse his competitor.“A lot of politicians are affable, some are cerebral [but] from the time he stepped on the stage, DeSantis has been a loner. He considers himself the smartest person in the room, but has not built relationships or loyalty and in return there are no loyal members of the delegation to him now.“The credit to him is it works. He’s the governor of the third largest state and could be the next president. So it’s an observation of his personality more than a criticism, but it’s no surprise that now when he needs people they’re not there for him.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUltimately, Jolly believes, DeSantis might not be ready for the demands of the national stage.“His confidence for the past few years has been because everything has been scripted, with friendly crowds. He doesn’t speak to the press, and when he does it often becomes adversarial,” he said.“The question is, how long can he run out that model in a presidential race before he really has to suffer the spotlight? His greatest strength nationally is not polling, it’s that he’s a fundraising juggernaut who for five years has captured the attention of the nation’s largest Republican donors.“If they’re worried about either his culture war overreach, or that he’s unprepared for the national stage, that’s real. They want a winner.”Some analysts believe the feuding with Disney, which began last year with the company promising to help overturn DeSantis’s flagship “don’t say gay” law banning classroom discussion of sexual orientation or gender preference, could be a campaign killer.“He declared thermonuclear war on a cartoon mouse,” the Orlando Sentinel political columnist Scott Maxwell wrote.“The governor’s scriptwriters seemed to envision this as the ultimate power play. They’d teach Disney a lesson, rev up the base and show every other employer in Florida what happens if they don’t bow down before DeSantis.“Instead, he became a punchline. This may be remembered as the moment the wheels came off.”Others are more cautious. Susan MacManus, distinguished professor emeritus of political science at the University of Florida, warned that “one bad week is not enough” to discount a candidate’s viability.“If you decide to run for president, and everyone assumes [he will], you know going into it you’ll have bad weeks and good weeks, and DeSantis has never been a traditional campaigner,” she said.“There are different portions of the electorate for whom things resonate more, so some Republicans were disappointed that he was going after Disney and making a joke about the jail. Others were disappointed by his statement about Ukraine way back, others about the endorsements.“But in the big picture, it’s way too soon to tell the damage done by one week, nine months ahead of the primary season, and the first Republican debate scheduled for August.“As an analyst, I can see people’s assessment of this as a bad week. But as someone who studies historical presidential campaigns, I don’t see it as an end-all week.” More

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      Ron DeSantis is flaming out – and Trump is on course for a Republican coronation | Lloyd Green

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      The Ron DeSantis boomlet is done. He consistently trails Donald Trump by double-digits. A Wall Street Journal poll out Friday pegs Florida’s governor in severe retrograde, slipping 27 points since December. DeSantis mistakenly conflates his campaign’s bulging war chest with adulation. Wrong!He forgot that working-class Americans dominate the Republican party and that mien matters. Voting to gut social security comes with fatal backlash, and eating pudding with your fingers is gross. Said differently, largesse from the party’s donor base coupled with little else is a losing recipe.Charles Koch has but a single vote and David Koch is gone. Before he goes any further, DeSantis needs to be reminded of past campaign flame-outs – Jeb Bush, John Connally and Mike Bloomberg – if he is to avoid their inglorious endings.In 2016, Trump bludgeoned Bush to an early primary exit. His name recognition bought a ton of campaign donations but little else. A son and brother to presidents and a grandson to a US senator, Bush left the race with a grand total of four convention delegates and zero primary victories.He sat in the Florida governor’s mansion between 1999 and 2007. The gig doesn’t scream springboard.Connally is another cautionary tale. Lee Harvey Oswald seriously wounded him as he was riding with President Kennedy that fateful November day in Dallas. Fast forward, Ronald Reagan left Connally in the dust in 1980.The jut-jawed former Texas governor garnered just a single convention delegate after parting with $500,000 from his own pockets and nearly $12m from everyone else’s.And then there’s Mayor Bloomberg. He dropped $900m of his own money, netted 58 delegates and a lone victory – American Samoa. As a coda, he tussled with campaign staff over unpaid wages.If primaries were held tomorrow, DeSantis would probably suffer beatings in New Hampshire, Georgia and South Carolina, and lags in Florida. And if he can’t win in the Sunshine state, he is not likely to win anywhere else.Home-state losses are fatal. Just ask Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar. Joe Biden resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Warren and Klobuchar continue to toil in the Senate.Don’t expect DeSantis to regain traction any time soon. He has not benefited from Trump’s legal woes. DeSantis also remains plagued by a likability deficit, and his war on “woke” is beginning to bite him.When news broke in March of Trump’s indictment, DeSantis reflexively rushed to his defense. In the moment, he accused Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s district attorney, of pushing an “un-American” political “agenda”. DeSantis also stood ready to fight Trump’s extradition to New York, a meaningless gesture. Trump voluntarily surrendered days later.Subsequently, DeSantis took a swipe at Trump’s extracurricular hobbies, but it was too little, too late. Subtlety doesn’t work on Trump. To be the man, you need to beat the man.This coming week, E Jean Carroll’s defamation and sexual assault civil case against Trump begins in a Manhattan courtroom. Trump is noncommittal about attending. Expect the infamous Access Hollywood tape to be re-aired. The circus is back.Regardless, there is no indication that DeSantis will have much to say about any of that. Whether Casey DeSantis, his wife, offers any empathetic words for Ms Carroll or Melania Trump is also unknown. A former television broadcaster, Casey DeSantis knows how to wield a shiv with a smile, not a snarl.On that score, DeSantis’s lack of social skills has cost him plenty. At Politico, the headline blares: “How to lose friends and alienate people, by Ron DeSantis.”This past week, his gambit to woo Florida’s House Republicans flopped. He flew up to Washington only to be met by a passel of Trump endorsements.“A great group of supportive Florida Congressmen and Congresswomen, all who have Endorsed me, will be coming to Mar-a-Lago,” the 45th president posted. “Our support is almost universal in Florida and throughout the USA.”Trump takes the time to wine, dine and threaten. DeSantis can’t be bothered. Voters in early primary states expect to be stroked or entertained. The governor appears incapable of doing either.Last, Disney is fighting back, to DeSantis’s chagrin and Trump’s delectation. To burnish his stock with social conservatives, DeSantis attempted to put the torch to one of his state’s biggest business and largest employers. By contrast, when Trump taunted the National Football League, he was playing with other people’s money.Right now, Mickie, Minnie and Trump are winning. The path to the 2024 Republican nomination looks ever more like a coronation.
      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992 More

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      Rightwing extremists defeated by Democrats in US school board elections

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      Scores of rightwing extremists were defeated in school board elections in April, in a victory for the left in the US and what Democrats hope could prove to be a playbook for running against Republicans in the year ahead.In Illinois, Democrats said more than 70% of the school board candidates it had endorsed won their races, often defeating the kind of anti-LGBTQ+ culture warrior candidates who have taken control of school boards across the country.Republican-backed candidates in Wisconsin also fared poorly. Moms for Liberty, a rightwing group linked to wealthy Republican donors which has been behind book-banning campaigns in the US, said only eight of its endorsed candidates won election to school boards, and other conservative groups also reported disappointing performances.The results come as education and free speech organizations have warned of a new surge in book bans in public schools in America. Over the past two years conservatives in states around the US have removed hundreds of books from school classrooms and libraries. The targeted books have largely been texts which address race and LGBTQ+ issues, or are written by people of color or LGBTQ+ authors.“Fortunately, the voters saw through the hidden extremists who were running for school board – across the [Chicago] suburbs especially,” JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, said after the results came in.“Really, the extremists got trounced yesterday.”Pritzker added: “I’m glad that those folks were shown up and, frankly, tossed out.”The Democratic party of Illinois spent $300,000 on races in Illinois, the Chicago Tribune reported, endorsing dozens of candidates. The party said 84 of 117 candidates it had recommended won their races.Teachers unions, including the Illinois Education Association, endorsed candidates in school board elections around the state. The IEA backed candidates in about 100 races, and around 90% of those candidates won, said Kathi Griffin, the organization’s president.“I would hope that the tide is turning, to make sure that people who want to have those [school board] positions because they want to do good for our kids, continue [to get elected],” Griffin said.“I think that oftentimes these fringe candidates are funded with dark money. That dark money comes from outside our state.”The results were disappointing for conservative groups, who had pumped money into races.The 1776 Project, a political action committee which received funding from Richard Uihlein, a billionaire GOP donor, said only a third of the 63 candidates it had backed in Illinois and Wisconsin had won their races. Politico first reported on the lackluster performances.Union-endorsed candidates won two-thirds of their school board races in Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, although Republican-supported candidates performed better in rural areas.Ben Hardin, executive director of the Democratic party of Illinois, said “values were on the line in these races”.“We knew this work wouldn’t be easy, especially given the organized movement from the far right to disguise their true agenda, but we’re grateful that voters saw through the falsehoods and turned out to support credible community advocates,” he said.“I’m proud that Illinoisans once again voted for fairness, equity and inclusion in our state.”With other states holding school board elections later this year – and a critical presidential election in 2024 – the successes offered some hope for Democrats.At the local level, at least, Griffin said the results “showed the value of having relationships within the community”.“When you have teachers who are part of the community, who have relationships with parents, with other community members who engage in community activities and support that community, there’s a level of trust that is built and that has happened across our state,” she said. More