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      George Santos: Republican fabulist praises ‘genuine’ actors in Oscars picks

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      George Santos: Republican fabulist praises ‘genuine’ actors in Oscars picksNew Yorker with mostly made-up CV and multiple investigations calls nominee Angela Bassett ‘Meryl Streep, the Black version’Asked for his Oscars predictions, the Republican congressman and fabulist George Santos said he liked actors who were “genuine”.“I have my favorite actors,” said the New Yorker, who has been shown to have made up most of his résumé and whose behaviour before and after entering politics is the subject of multiple investigations.Oscars 2023: final predictions, timetable and how to watchRead more“And then I have the actors I think are charismatic. JLo, The Rock. Melissa McCarthy. They’re genuine.”None of them were however nominated for the Academy Awards set to be handed out in Hollywood on Sunday night.Santos has admitted “embellishing” a résumé shown to include false claims about his family, educational and professional background, fueling questions about his very identity, given activities under another name, Anthony Devolder.He has repeatedly said he has done nothing illegal, even as his campaign finances, an allegation of sexual harassment and multiple claims of financial wrongdoing are investigated at local, state, federal, congressional and international levels.He has rebuffed calls to resign from constituents in Queens and Long Island as well as Democrats in Congress and his fellow New York Republicans.He withdrew from committee assignments but retains the support of Republican leaders, after backing Kevin McCarthy through 15 votes for House speaker, a role the Californian must play with a narrow majority, prey to rightwing rebellion.Santos discussed the Oscars and his film tastes with Matthew Foldi, a reporter who has also interviewed him for the Spectator, in an interview published on Sunday on Pirate Wires, a site “focused on the intersection of technology, politics, and culture”.The discussion started with “the Slap”, the moment last year when Will Smith left the Oscars audience to hit the host, Chris Rock, over a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith, Smith’s wife.“Quite frankly, it was fucking stupid,” Santos said. “Chris Rock is a genius.”Santos said he would not watch the Oscars this year, because “they won’t really put box [office] sellers there” and he did not want to see a celebration of “fancy people” and “elitists” such as Quentin Tarantino and James Cameron.Those two directors and Steven Spielberg (who has three nominees for The Fabelmans to one for Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water) had “fallen to the woke”, Santos said.Santos said he liked comedy and horror films, adding: “Let’s be honest, Saw was a fucking great horror movie. But the Oscars don’t have a horror category. Resident Evil, great cinematics. Milla Jovovich is arguably one of my favorite actresses of all time. It’s her, Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett and Gerard Butler.”Bassett is nominated this year for best supporting actress, for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Santos said she should be up for best actress, because: “I’m not trying to be racist, but she’s Meryl Streep, the Black version. She’s just as good. She’s fantastic.”The congressman lamented the academy’s relative neglect of Leonardo DiCaprio (who won best actor for The Revenant in 2016) but criticised Tom Cruise, producer and star of Top Gun: Maverick, a best picture nominee this year.“Tom Cruise has given me enough evidence of what he thinks of America to make me not like him,” Santos said, going on to criticise the actor Jane Fonda in similar terms, for “decid[ing] to make her entire life political”.The professional politician professed not to know the “political beliefs” of actors including Bassett, Freeman, Denzel Washington and Mel Gibson, “because they don’t share them. And you know why that is? Because we look to them for entertainment. I appreciate these people so much because they’re not activists.”Of Gibson, Foldi wrote: “We do know his views on Jews … and they are not favorable.”Santos’s claim to be Jewish has been debunked. Openly gay, he was once married to a woman. Accusing Hollywood of caving to Chinese censors – although “as a good old capitalist, I don’t blame them” – he told Foldi: “Woke wants everything gay, and pro-China-beholden-Hollywood can’t have that.“To me, it becomes a cannibalistic event that I would actually enjoy watching. That’s a movie I would watch. Woke Hollywood takes on Chinese-influenced Hollywood.”Santos also lamented the declining fortunes of other favourites including Steven Seagal, the pro-Putin action star who Santos said once shone in “hyper-action police movies” but was out of favour because “instead of giving the police a platform, we just want to defund them and burn them to the ground”.In comedy, Santos said, “You’re not going to see another Adam Sandler or Vince Vaughn or Chris Rock or Kevin Hart. Well, Kevin Hart survives because – I guess he gets a pass because he’s a little Black guy. People aren’t gonna want to make his life miserable.”Towards the end of the interview, Foldi said, the man whose performance as a politician has captured the national spotlight “turned reflective”.“I’m very, very close-minded about actors these days,” Santos said. “Because the more I learn about your non-performative career, the less interested I am in you.”A spokesperson for Santos did not immediately reply to a request for comment.TopicsGeorge SantosOscarsOscars 2023Awards and prizesUS politicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesReuse this content More

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      Trump should quit 2024 race if indicted in New York, Republican rival says

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      Trump should quit 2024 race if indicted in New York, Republican rival saysEx-Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson: man facing charge over porn star payment should ‘respect institution of the presidency’Donald Trump should quit the race for the Republican nomination in 2024 if he is indicted in New York over a hush money payment to a porn star during his victorious run in 2016, a prospective rival said.Is Fox News finally falling out of love with Trump? It’s complicatedRead more“It doesn’t mean that he’s guilty of it or he should be charged,” said Asa Hutchinson, a former governor of Arkansas. “But it’s just such a distraction that would be unnecessary for somebody who’s seeking the highest office in the land.”Hutchinson has not declared a run. Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor, remains Trump’s only declared opponent from the Republican mainstream. The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, is Trump’s only serious challenger in polling.Like other relative moderates, Hutchinson is a vanishingly small presence in polls regarding the nascent field.He told USA Today: “When you’re looking at Trump, it’s going to be a circus.”Widespread reporting has said an indictment is expected soon in the hush money case, which involves the payment of $130,000 to Stormy Daniels, an adult film maker and actor who says she had an affair with Trump in 2006.Trump denies the claim, often abusing Daniels in misogynistic terms. But the man Trump directed to pay Daniels, his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, is due to testify before a grand jury on Monday.Trump has also been invited to testify, a sign an indictment is near. The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, is reported to be preparing to criminally charge Trump for false accounting business records with an intent to defraud, in relation to New York election law.Mark Pomerantz, a prosecutor who quit Bragg’s team, recently called the Daniels payment a “zombie case” that would not die.But David Shapiro, a former FBI agent who now lectures at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told the Associated Press it could be “especially difficult” for Bragg to prove intent and knowledge of wrongdoing.Trump, Shapiro said, is “loud, he’s brash, so proving that he had specific intent to fraud, one is almost left with the idea that, ‘Well, if he has that specific intent of fraud, he has it all of the time, because that’s his personality.’”Trump claims Bragg is politically motivated, as a Democrat, and racist because he is Black.At CPAC earlier this month, the former president told reporters he “won’t even think about leaving” the race, as an indictment would “probably … enhance my numbers”.Optimistically, Hutchinson told USA Today the man who left office twice impeached, the second time for inciting a deadly attack on Congress in an attempt to stay in power, should withdraw “out of respect for the institution of the presidency of the United States.“And that’s a distraction [and it] is difficult to run for the highest office in the land under those circumstances.Mike Pence: Donald Trump was wrong, history will hold him accountableRead more“I know he’s going to say [the charges are] politically motivated and all of those things, but the fact is, there’s just a lot of turmoil out there with the number of investigations going on.”Trump also faces federal investigation of his election subversion attempts, incitement of the January 6 attack and retention of classified records. A state investigation of his election subversion in Georgia is well advanced.In New York, his business faces a civil fraud suit and his chief financial officer was sentenced on tax charges in January. Trump also faces trial in a defamation suit from a writer who says he raped her.Trump denies all wrongdoing, claiming witch hunts by his political enemies.On Sunday, on NBC’s Meet the Press, Kevin Cramer, a Republican senator from North Dakota, was asked if Trump should step aside if he is indicted in “Manhattan or Atlanta or Washington”.“Donald Trump’s not going to take advice from the party or from me,” Cramer said.“But I think what will happen is, if he’s indicted, that becomes one of the factors in whether he wins primaries or not. The other factor is who else is in the race and who can make the best case.”DeSantis, Cramer said, “has certainly earned the right to be at the head of the class, not just through his political rhetoric but through his successful governing of a very large state.“We’ve seen him out on the stump a little more now doing the things that potential presidential candidates do. I think it will help that debate along. The challenge becomes if there are too many people in the race.”Polling has shown how a split field could hand Trump the nomination without a majority, as happened in 2016.Cramer said: “Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, certainly my friend Tim Scott would all be good candidates who understand the Trump doctrine but have a demeanor that’s probably more suitable to the swing voter.“And at the end of the day, what’s most important for primary voters to think about is not just who they love the most but who can win for the country and who can win for the party. Because we’re in desperate need of some new leadership.”TopicsUS elections 2024Donald TrumpRepublicansUS politicsArkansasNew YorknewsReuse this content More

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      Mike Pence: history will hold Donald Trump accountable over Capitol attack

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      Mike Pence: history will hold Donald Trump accountable over Capitol attackFormer vice-president, speaking at Gridiron dinner, says it ‘mocks decency’ to portray January 6 as anything other than a ‘disgrace’Mike Pence has offered a rebuke of his one-time boss Donald Trump, saying history will hold the former president accountable for his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.Judge who told Pence not to overturn election predicts ‘beginning of end of Trump’Read morePence, then vice-president, was in the Capitol when thousands of Trump supporters breached the building in an attempt to stop Congress certifying the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost to Joe Biden.As Senate president, Pence presided over the ceremonial task of approving the votes of the electoral college.Throughout the siege, Trump sent several tweets, one calling on Republicans to “fight” and others making false claims of voter fraud. He also criticised Pence for certifying the results.Some rioters chanted “Hang Mike Pence”. A makeshift gallows was erected outside. Pence was spirited to safety by Secret Service agents.On Saturday at the Gridiron dinner in Washington, Pence told journalists and their guests: “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.”Pence is now considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 – against Trump, the clear leader in polling.Pence rarely addressed January 6 in the months after the riot but he has now upped his criticism of the rioters and Trump. In a memoir released in November he accused Trump of endangering his family.“What happened that day was a disgrace,” Pence told the Gridiron audience. “And it mocks decency to portray it any other way. For as long as I live, I will never, ever diminish the injuries sustained, the lives lost, or the heroism of law enforcement on that tragic day.”A Trump spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Pence’s remarks came a few days after the Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired highly selective, misleading security footage of the Capitol attack, in an attempt to claim many rioters were “orderly”.Carlson’s depiction was sharply criticised by Democrats and Senate Republicans. Many other Republicans, particularly in the House of Representatives, shrugged off the episode.On Sunday, a relatively moderate House Republican was asked if Pence was right to say history would hold Trump accountable for January 6. Nancy Mace, from South Carolina, sidestepped the question.“I see this in two parts,” she told CNN’s State of the Union. “I think both sides are really struggling, looking at the nomination process. You’ve got some on the left that don’t want Biden to run, you’ve got those on the right that don’t want [Trump] to run.“You know, a lot of folks on both sides keep bringing up January 6, and it’s keeping us from moving our country forward.”Mace was not among the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump over the Capitol attack, making Trump’s second impeachment the most bipartisan in US history.Nonetheless, she also saluted her own success in defeating a challenger endorsed by Trump last year, and said Republicans should unite behind a candidate “who can win the White House”.Asked again if Trump would be held accountable, Mace said: “He is one of the only candidates in right now … we have a long way to go for additional candidates to jump in and see how the field lays out.”Asked if the Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, was right to have released more than 40,000 hours of Capitol security footage to Carlson – a decision for which McCarthy has faced fierce criticism – Mace said: “I said early on … it was important that it should be released to every outlet including CNN, every media outlet, every defense attorney so that the public can see for itself.“There was violence on that day. You cannot deny that and you know, it was a dark day in our history. But so was the summer of 2020.”Mace proceeded to compare the deadly attack on Congress – now linked to nine deaths, more than a thousand arrests and hundreds of convictions including some for seditious conspiracy – to protests for racial justice after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020.“We saw very few arrests when there were attacks by … members of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. I had my house spray painted two summers ago and no one’s been held to account for that.”
      Reuters contributed reporting
      TopicsUS Capitol attackMike PenceDonald TrumpUS politicsRepublicansTrump administrationUS elections 2024newsReuse this content More

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      Colorado Republicans pick election denier as ‘wartime’ state party leader

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      Colorado Republicans pick election denier as ‘wartime’ state party leaderDave Williams backs Trump voter fraud lie and tried to insert ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ anti-Biden meme into his name on ballotThe Colorado Republican party on Saturday selected as its new chair a former state representative and committed election denier who promised to be a “wartime” leader.The election-denying Republicans who aided Trump’s ‘big lie’ and got promotedRead moreSeveral other state Republican parties have recently elected far-right figures and election conspiracy theorists to top posts.The move in Colorado comes with the party on the brink of irrelevance in a state moving swiftly left.Dave Williams, who unsuccessfully tried to insert the anti-Biden meme “Let’s Go Brandon” into his name on the Republican primary ballot last year and backs Donald Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election, was selected by the state executive committee from a seven-person field.Williams crossed the required 50% threshold on the third ballot after being endorsed by the indicted former Mesa county clerk Tina Peters, who failed to pass 10%. Peters faces seven felony charges for illegally accessing voting machines. She has denied the allegations while becoming a prominent figure in the election conspiracy movement.A three-term state representative from Colorado Springs, Williams challenged Doug Lamborn in the Republican congressional primary last year. The Colorado secretary of state rejected his effort to include a popular conservative phrase denigrating Joe Biden on the ballot.In a speech to nearly 400 hardcore activists and party leaders on Saturday, Williams reprised a key theme from his campaign: that poor performance in Colorado is simply due to not fighting hard enough, not any disconnect with voters.“Our party doesn’t have a brand problem,” Williams said. “Our party has a problem with feckless leaders … We need a wartime leader.”Election deniers have won state party chair positions in Idaho, Kansas and Michigan.In Colorado, Republicans lost every statewide election last year by double digits and are down to their lowest share of the state legislature in history. They have not won a major statewide race since 2014 and lag well behind Democrats and unaffiliated voters in registration.Like six of the seven candidates who ran for chair, Williams advocated trying to overturn a ballot measure that requires the party to allow unaffiliated voters to take part in its primary. All of the candidates except Kevin McCarney, a former Mesa county party chairman, expressed skepticism that Biden won the 2020 election.Election denier Kristina Karamo chosen to lead Michigan Republican partyRead moreWilliams’s main rival was Erik Aadland, a combat veteran and political novice who ran an unsuccessful race for a congressional swing seat in the Denver suburbs last year.Aadland has also questioned the 2020 election results but this time advocated for discussing elections in less aggressive language, basing his speech on Saturday around the theme of how “love trumps hate”.But Aadland also spoke in combative terms about how the party should move forward after Williams’s selection.“We are besought by a radical left that wants to destroy this country, and we need to come together and win elections,” Aadland said.TopicsColoradoRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      A crime bill was supposed to fix Washington DC’s problems. Instead, it polarized a city

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      A crime bill was supposed to fix Washington DC’s problems. Instead, it polarized a cityThe new code revised 120-year-old criminal laws, but the effort was stymied by Joe Biden and an unlikely alliance of Republicans and DemocratsIn Washington DC, the law prohibits the playing of bandy and “shindy” in the streets, the arson of one’s own steamboat and potentially even being a “common scold” – a common law offense levied against those who quarreled with their neighbors.Aware of the need to clean up this 120-year-old criminal code, lawyers in America’s capital city have spent more than a decade and a half going through the law books in a modernization campaign described by those involved as long overdue, only to see the effort stymied this week at the hands of Joe Biden and an unlikely alliance of Republicans and Democrats.“Many residents are worried about taking their kids to school or going to the grocery store. But rather than attempt to fix this problem, the DC city council wants to go even easier on criminals,” Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy said in February, when the chamber’s lawmakers approved a resolution blocking the city council’s passage of the new code.Weeks later, Biden surprised his allies by announcing he would sign the House bill, and last Wednesday, the Senate passed it overwhelmingly – even though the president and many Democratic lawmakers support making Washington DC, the country’s only federal district, a full-fledged state.That Republicans would meddle in Washington DC’s politics is no surprise: they have few friends among the leadership of the overwhelmingly Democratic city. But for Democrats, their willingness to go along with the GOP effort is a sign of just how nervous the party has become to accusations of being weak of crime, which played a role in their loss of the House in last November’s elections. Residents’ frustrations with violence are also seen as a reason why Democrat Lori Lightfoot failed in her bid for a second term as mayor of Chicago.No city in America has political dynamics quite like Washington’s, where Congress has the power to overturn the city council’s will – which it did, for the first time in 30 years, over what local officials say was merely an update that would bring its criminal code in line with national standards.“We are an easy mark,” said Charles Allen, a city councilman who chaired its judiciary committee as the body was considering the revisions. “We don’t have representation in Congress, we have no senators out there that are arguing for us. We don’t have any full members of Congress in the House.”Sandwiched between Virginia and Maryland, Washington DC’s population of nearly 700,000 is greater than Vermont or Wyoming, but unlike those two states, the capital city’s only representation in Congress is a House delegate who can’t cast votes. The city government officially backs Washington DC becoming America’s 51st state, which Republicans universally oppose.In 2006, the council started reviewing the city’s criminal laws, which date back to 1901, and sought out the thoughts of the public defenders office, local prosecutors and criminal justice reform advocates across the city. The outcome of the 16-year process was a new code that removed mandatory minimum sentences for nearly all crimes, aligned sentences with what judges were actually handing down, added new offenses and raised the potential penalties for others, while also stripping out common law penalties that lingered in the turn-of-the-century document.But after the council unanimously passed the revised code last November, the city’s Democratic mayor Muriel Bowser announced she would veto it, citing its reduction in maximum sentences for gun offenses, among other issues. Republicans pounced after the council overrode her veto in January, and the following month, Biden unexpectedly signed on to the GOP effort.“I support DC statehood and home-rule – but I don’t support some of the changes DC council put forward over the mayor’s objections – such as lowering penalties for carjackings,” the Democratic president tweeted.Although police department data indicates overall crime in the city fell by about 4% last year, carjackings have jumped dramatically since the pandemic. Under the current code, armed carjackers could face jail sentences of between 15 and 40 years, but the new code sets the highest penalty at 24 years, in line with what judges were actually giving defendants and comparable to similar penalties nationwide, said Jinwoo Park, executive director of the DC Criminal Code Reform Commission.“I do think this has been completely inaccurately and unfairly painted as some kind of bizarrely radical bill, when really it’s just not the case when you compare it to the norms across the country,” Park said.Studies have repeatedly shown that long prison sentences don’t act as deterrents for criminals. And for Washington’s current batch of carjackers, the code’s revisions would not have made much difference: it was only supposed to come into effect in 2025.“Every crime people are talking about, from yesterday to today to tomorrow, happens under our current criminal code,” said Allen.There’s little evidence that message was received by Congress, particularly not by Republicans, who cast the code revision as consequence of left-wing government run amok – even though they held no hearings on the code before voting to overturn it.“It seems to me that DC is trying to compete with other liberal-led cities to see just how woke they can be. So, just imagine if Congress didn’t have this authority and the DC council was left to its own devices, and this dangerous bill would’ve become law,” said Bill Hagerty, Tennessee’s Republican senator, after almost all the chamber’s Republicans and most Democrats voted for the disapproval resolution.Yet the new code doesn’t address progressive concerns such as mass incarceration or racial equity, which Park said weren’t included in the commission’s mandate.“There’s an enormous amount of compromise built into the bill,” said Patrice Sulton, executive director of the DC Justice Lab, which advocates for reforms of the city’s system of crime and punishment.Local leaders scrambled to react to Congress’s renewed meddling in the city’s affairs, with city council president Phil Mendelson withdrawing the revised code from the legislature’s consideration, and Bowser proposing another round of revisions to the code.“What’s important for this issue is to try to put Democrats in the light of being soft on crime,” Mendelson said as he announced his ill-fated attempt to stop the Senate from blocking the code. “But citizens don’t understand that because [of] the way this has been demagogued, and that’s the challenge we have to overcome.”The GOP has signaled it’s not done yet: House Republicans now want to override a city council bill that would change, among other procedures, how the police department uses force.While he believes there’s still momentum for reform in many cities nationwide, Nick Turner, president of the Vera Institute of Justice, warned that the episode in the capital underscores how rising crime presents a headwind to the calls for change in policing and punishment that George Floyd’s death sparked nearly three years ago.Biden’s veto tell “opponents of good, evidence-based criminal justice policy that scare tactics work. And the risk is that what it signals to other responsible government leaders is that it will show efforts to make sure that we have both safety and justice,” Turner warned.To Sulton, the revised code’s downfall also represents a setback in the city’s desire to take full control of its affairs.“Until we have a new code, we continue to live under laws that are vague, overlapping gaps in law, and just a penal code that the district didn’t make itself,” she said. “And I don’t think you can talk about local control if we don’t have control over our most fundamental freedoms. And I can’t think of anywhere that the stakes are higher than when we’re talking about whether to put a person in a cage.”TopicsWashington DCUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansUS crimenewsReuse this content More

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      Is Fox News finally falling out of love with Trump? It’s complicated

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      Is Fox News finally falling out of love with Trump? It’s complicatedCourt revelations of the network’s private views about the former president suggest no love lost – but experts suggest each needs the other“He’s a demonic force, a destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us … We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait … I hate him passionately.”These were not the text messages of a liberal journalist feeling their spirit crushed by the Donald Trump era. They were, according to US court papers, the words of Tucker Carlson, one of the former US president’s biggest cheerleaders on the rightwing Fox News network.‘Lachlan’s in the mire’: Fox News case spells trouble for Murdoch heirRead moreA $1.6bn defamation lawsuit, brought by a voting machine maker that claims it was wrongly maligned, has pulled back the curtain on one of the most consequential relationships in modern political history: Trump and Fox News.The private venting of Fox News’s primetime stars, expressing contempt for Trump and his election lies even as they told millions of viewers the opposite, has fueled perceptions that the long-running affair between America’s 45th president and most watched cable news network is on the rocks.However, a glance at Fox News’s output over the last week suggests that, like love, it’s complicated. While Carlson and other primetime hosts may quietly be rooting for the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, to beat Trump to the 2024 Republican primary nomination, they are already dropping hints about a readiness to jump back onboard the Trump train.“It’s a toxic relationship,” said Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC). “They are good and bad for each other at the same time. You’ve got to look at it through that prism to understand what’s going on here. Fox can’t do without Trump and Trump ultimately can’t do without Fox because he knows, at the end of the day, that’s the media vehicle through which he will be able to reach the widest audience of his supporters.”The lawsuit has plunged Fox News, the dominant media force among conservatives, into one of the biggest crises in its 26-year history. Dominion Voting Systems argues that the network knowingly broadcast false claims that the election technology company was responsible for fraud in the 2020 presidential election.Publicly released internal documents and depositions have revealed that, while Fox News hosts were promulgating Trump’s “big lie” of a stolen election, off air they were messaging their colleagues to say they did not believe a word of it.In one text message exchange, Carlson, who hosts one of the most watched shows on cable news, said Trump has a talent to “destroy things. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”Later, addressing Trump’s four years as president, Carlson texted: “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”Yet for years Carlson had been an enthusiastic champion of Trump. In a 2017 conversation with colleague Greg Gutfeld on the network, Carlson agreed that Trump was “the greatest president that ever will be”.The paper trail goes all the way to the top. Rupert Murdoch, chair of Fox Corp, told the Fox News chief executive, Suzanne Scott, that hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham maybe “went too far” in pushing Trump’s election fraud claims on the network. Murdoch also called the voter fraud claims “really crazy stuff” in a text message.The documents also paint a portrait of Fox News living in fear of bleeding its audience to even more extreme rivals such as Newsmax and the One America News Network. Bill Sammon, a Fox Washington news executive, is quoted as saying: “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.”On election night the network called – correctly – that Democrat Joe Biden had beaten Trump in the battleground state of Arizona, prompting a furious backlash from Trump’s supporters. One internal email said: “Holy cow, our audience is mad at the network.” Another noted: “They’re FURIOUS.”Fox News dropped from first to third in the news network ratings between the 3 November 2020 election and Biden’s inauguration on 20 January 2021, according to Nielsen. Thousands of its viewers flocked to the more conservative Newsmax, where primetime viewership shot from 58,000 the week before the election to 568,000 the week after.Carlson wrote to a producer: “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real … an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.”Dominion argues that Fox executives decided to push false narratives to entice their audience back. It points to outlandish conspiracy theories promoted by Trump allies such as lawyer Sidney Powell on programs hosted by Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs.Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the watchdog group Media Matters, said: “You can see the hosts worried that the network they had helped to build for years was basically going to collapse, that their viewers were turning on them, that executives were scrambling for a way to get the viewers back.”There had effectively been a revolving door between the Trump White House and Fox News; his last press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, is a regular on the network. But as the dust settled after the January 6 insurrection and Biden’s inauguration, the relationship cooled. Trump no longer called in to Fox & Friends to ramble at will. The network dropped his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as a contributor, ostensibly because of a ban on political activity.It was a potentially serious blow to the man looking to win back the White House in 2024. Frank Luntz, a consultant and pollster, said: “Donald Trump needs Fox News more than Fox needs Donald Trump because Trump doesn’t have easy access to an uncritical media like he did in 2016. There is no alternative for him. He can’t go to CNN or MSNBC. He does have to go to Newsmax, and that just does not have the reach of these other cable news channels.”Worse still for Trump, Fox News found a new Chosen One. It reportedly asked DeSantis to appear on air 113 times, or nearly once a day, during one four-month spell and was given exclusive access to his signing of a contentious election law. Reelected in a landslide last November, DeSantis is a culture warrior with a flair for “owning the libs”. The attraction was obvious.Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman, explained: “Fox News knows exactly what their audience wants. Their audience wants a guy like Trump. They want a bully. They want a son of a bitch. They want somebody who will go after woke. They want an authoritarian. So Fox is going to give them what they want.“Fox has made the determination that they don’t think Trump can win in ‘24, which is why they’re pushing DeSantis. Once they realise that Trump is going to be the nominee, then everybody will fall in line like they did last time.”When Trump supporters gathered at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Oxon Hill, Maryland, both DeSantis and Fox News’s big names stayed away. Instead the Newsmax and other fringe rightwing media held sway. Trump ally Steve Bannon accused Fox News of disrespecting the former president, stating: “You’ve deemed Trump’s not going to be president. Well, we deem you’re not going to have a network.”It was, perhaps, the equivalent of a cathartic marital row. A day later, something changed: Fox News carried the whole of Trump’s one hour, 45 minute address to CPAC, a departure from its distinctly tepid response to his 2024 campaign events. “I hope Fox doesn’t turn off, but we did much better in 2020 than we did in 2016,” he said pointedly.Then, on Monday, Carlson presented selective excerpts of security footage from the US Capitol attack to spin the false narrative that January 6 was in fact a peaceful protest. He was widely condemned by both Democrats and Republicans – but Trump said on his social media platform, “congratulations to Tucker Carlson on one of the biggest ‘scoops’ as a reporter in US history”.As the week wore on, Carlson praised Trump’s “bold plans” for 2024, telling viewers: “He is saying things that are really interesting, not rehashes at all.” Host Sean Hannity, “privately disgusted” with Trump according to court documents, played clips of an interview Trump had done on his radio show.To observers, it was a sign that the on-off Trump-Fox affair could soon be on again, especially if, as opinion polls currently suggest, the former reality TV star surges ahead the Republican primary.Walsh observed: “If you did a private poll of every conservative media talker and conservative network and every Republican elected official, 80 to 90% of them privately would want Trump gone and want DeSantis to be the guy. Tucker Carlson doesn’t want Trump to run again. Hannity, Trump’s cheerleader, doesn’t want Trump to run again.“That’s how they all feel privately and they’re all hoping that somebody does their dirty work. Fox News is hoping that Trump will implode or get indicted or die or whatever but Fox News, we know, will follow their audience and, if Trump stays in and he’s the man, Fox News will be right there, his biggest cheerleader again.”The bottom line is ratings or, to put it another way, dollars.Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “Fox have already demonstrated that they will move and calibrate their news coverage based on what the audience demands and, as of right now, the demand still overwhelmingly is for Donald Trump.”Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, added: “This an example of a dysfunctional co-dependent relationship. They need each other, whether they want to admit it or not.”TopicsFox NewsDonald TrumpUS television industryRepublicansUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Trump/Steinbrenner: how the Yankees owner fired a president’s ego

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      Trump/Steinbrenner: how the Yankees owner fired a president’s egoDonald Trump is exiled in Florida but he was made in New York – in part by a friendship with a controversial baseball ownerWhen Donald Trump was looking to make his mark in 1980s Manhattan, he found a role model up in the Bronx: the New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Trump was also a professional team owner: his New Jersey Generals competed in the short-lived United States Football League. But though Trump and Steinbrenner would ultimately become good friends, they didn’t get off to the best start.Trump to publish book of letters from Kim Jong-un, Oprah Winfrey and othersRead moreAs Maggie Haberman of the New York Times writes in her bestselling book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, the two men sat on the board of the New York State Sportsplex Corporation, which was looking into building new stadiums. Trump was eyeing one in Queens, where the Generals could play.“At a press conference following the board’s first meeting, in 1984, Steinbrenner complained that Trump was hogging the microphone. ‘This isn’t going to be a one-man show or I’m not going to stick around,’ he said, raising his arms to obscure Trump so that photographers could not capture them together.“That show of ego, and willingness to set the terms of debate, did not stop the men from becoming friends, and Trump was a constant presence in the owner’s box at Yankee Stadium.”Years later, Steinbrenner provided inspiration for Trump on his hit TV show, The Apprentice.“He ad-libbed the ‘You’re fired’ line used to dispatch each week’s loser as an apparent, and unacknowledged, homage” to Steinbrenner, Haberman writes, describing how the Yankees owner’s “revolving door of managers was one of New York’s great ongoing tragicomedies.“As he was still trying to figure out how to be a boss of a company, Trump looked upon Steinbrenner – and the ease, even glee, with which he fired people – and other members of Steinbrenner’s social circle as examples. When he had to play an executive on television, Trump adopted Steinbrenner’s voice and recast The Apprentice’s spirit as gleefully punitive.”Memorably, Steinbrenner cashed in on the catchphrase in a 1978 Miller Lite commercial, which shows him clashing with manager Billy Martin.Steinbrenner says: “Tastes great.”Martin insists: “Less filling.”“Billy,” Steinbrenner.“Yeah, George?”“You’re fired,” Steinbrenner says, with a grin.“Not again!” Martin replies, as the two men chuckle.In real life, Martin had five stints as Yankees manager.Steinbrenner and Trump became etched into popular culture – as executives who made firing people an art form.In 2010, following Steinbrenner’s death, Jim Caple on ESPN wrote: “During his prime, Steinbrenner single-handedly raised the national unemployment rate by a percent, firing managers so regularly that he made Donald Trump look like the head of a teachers union.”Trump told the writer Mark Leibovich Steinbrenner had been his best friend, calling him a “big time winner”. Those comments were published in 2017, when Trump had taken Steinbrenner’s human resources philosophy to the White House, dispensing with officials the way Steinbrenner fired executives and managers.However, when, in 1973, the syndicate Steinbrenner led bought the Yankees, he gave no indication he would be so involved in personnel matters.“‘I won’t be active in the day-to-day operations of the club at all,” he said, making arguably the least accurate prediction in sports business history.“We plan absentee ownership as far as running the Yankees is concerned,” Steinbrenner added. “We’re not going to pretend we’re something we aren’t. I’ll stick to building ships.”Steinbrenner’s stint with the Yankees did feature one thing more scarce in Trump’s business career: eye-catching financial success. His group bought the team from CBS for a measly $10m. Last year, Forbes pegged the Yankees’ value at $6bn.There was a reason for the bargain price. Steinbrenner, then 42, chairman of the American Ship Building Company and part‐owner of the NBA’s Chicago Bulls, purchased the most successful franchise in baseball at close to rock bottom, at least by its standards. The year before, the Yankees finished fourth in the American League East and drew just 966,000 fans: their first time under a million since the second world war, when attendance was down across baseball. Steinbrenner’s group got the Yankees for less than the small-market Cleveland Indians had recently fetched.Around the same time, Steinbrenner and Trump both got into trouble with the US justice department.In 1973, the department sued Trump’s real estate firm for discriminating against Black tenants and thereby violating the Fair Housing Act, a case eventually settled.The following year, the justice department indicted Steinbrenner for illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign. That case ended in a guilty plea in August 1974, two weeks after Nixon resigned, and Steinbrenner being suspended from running the team. (Trump would also befriend Nixon – he will include 25 letters from the former president in a book due out in April.)Untouchable review: Trump as ‘lawless Houdini’ above US justiceRead moreSteinbrenner wound up returning the Yankees to the pinnacle, spending liberally on star players, especially in the early years of free agency, and winning 11 pennants and seven World Series titles.In 2006, with the Yankees on their way to a ninth straight AL East title, Trump threw out the ceremonial pitch at Fenway Park before a game against the Boston Red Sox. In August 2020, as president, he said he had canceled plans to throw the opening pitch at Yankee Stadium, also against the Red Sox – citing his “strong focus” on the coronavirus pandemic. The Times said no invitation was made for that specific game.We’ll never know how Trump would have been received. But he has weighed in from the peanut gallery himself. In 2013, with the Yankees on their way to a first playoff miss in five seasons, he called out the team.“The Yankees are sure lucky George Steinbrenner is not around,” Trump tweeted, before going back to the firing imagery that marked both men’s careers.“A lot of people would be losing their jobs.”
      Frederic J Frommer’s books include Red Sox vs Yankees: The Great Rivalry and You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals
      TopicsNew York YankeesDonald TrumpMLBBaseballUS sportsUS politicsRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Republicans try to reframe January 6 as a sightseeing tour – will it work?

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      Republicans try to reframe January 6 as a sightseeing tour – will it work?Now in control of the House, Republicans are making light of the violence of the day and assailing the investigation into the Capitol attackIt might be thought that Republicans would prefer not to remind Americans of the day their president nearly destroyed US democracy.But the party’s right wing is going all in to rewrite the history of the 6 January 2021 storming of the Capitol by Donald Trump’s supporters, and to make political martyrs of those imprisoned for assaulting police officers and sending politicians fleeing as the mob attempted to stop Congress from endorsing Joe Biden’s election victory.Fox News produced ‘zero’ evidence to back election lie, defamation case hearsRead moreTrump himself has waded in by appearing on a song sung by the “J6 Prison Choir” of men locked up for their part in the insurrection while Republican supporters in Congress are setting up a delegation to visit the prisoners in what will be seen as an act of solidarity.Meanwhile, after taking control of the House of Representatives in January, the Republicans have launched an investigation into the then Democratic-led original congressional investigation of the January 6 Capitol attack which recommended Trump’s prosecution for inciting the riot.But leading the charge in the Orwellian attempt to control the past in the hope that it will lead Republicans to control the future is the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who pressured Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House of Representatives, into releasing to him thousands of hours of video of Trump supporters swarming the Capitol.Carlson presented selected snippets on his nightly show that he claimed proved the rioters were really no more than tourists who “obviously revered the Capitol”.“These were not insurrectionists. They were sightseers,” he said.Carlson, who has claimed that the January 6 attack was a “false flag” operation by the Washington establishment to discredit Trump’s supporters, said the video shows “mostly peaceful chaos”.“Taken as a whole the video record does not support the claim that January 6 was an insurrection. In fact, it demolishes that claim,” he said.Republicans in Washington are not universally happy with this revisionism. Senator Kevin Cramer said that the attack “was not just some rowdy protest of Boy Scouts” and that the Fox News interpretation was “a lie”. Senator Thom Tillis called Carlson’s description of events “bullshit”.Asked if it was a mistake for McCarthy to hand the footage over to Fox News, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the US Senate, distanced himself from the consequences.“My concern is how it was depicted,” he said.McCarthy defended the release of the video in the name of transparency although that did not explain why he gave it only to Fox.Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said McCarthy was driven principally by thirst for power as the Republican right made release of the video a condition of support for his election as speaker in January.“Everybody knows that McCarthy, who was once very upset about what happened on January 6 and said so, is just using this for his own purposes. This was simply an action designed to get him the final few votes needed to become speaker. He sold out his country. It was absolutely spineless,” Sabato said.“Carlson and McCarthy have given the crazies, the far-right extremists, the neo-Nazi white supremacists who are obsessed with January 6, the counter reality they’ve been looking for of a bunch of patriots taking a tour in the Capitol.”Sabato said Carlson, who is working to shore up his own credibility with Trump’s followers amid revelations that the Fox News host regularly derided the then president and said “I hate him passionately”, was a driving force behind the move.“Tucker Carlson on his own show said that if McCarthy wants these votes to become speaker then show us by releasing all of the information on the film. Everybody knew from the instant Carlson got it he was going to put together snippets that were very misleading, and which excluded all of the real action that day, all of the criminal action that day. It was totally predictable,” he said.While Carlson’s selective interpretation of the video was rapidly derided by some Republicans, as well as by the Capitol police chief and the family of an officer who died after being assaulted as “unscrupulous and outright sleazy”, plenty of others were onboard.The House Republicans’ Twitter account said that Carlson’s take on the footage was a “MUST WATCH”.Congressman Mike Collins of Georgia said the clips were proof of the innocence of the more than 1,000 people charged with crimes as the mob stormed the Capitol. Hundreds have already been convicted including some jailed for violence.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I’ve seen enough. Release all J6 political prisoners now,” Collins tweeted to considerable derision.The attempt to turn the imprisoned rioters into martyrs gained steam after Trump appeared in a song by a choir of men jailed over their involvement in the January 6 attack. They sing the national anthem as the former president recites the pledge of allegiance. Trump has praised the insurrectionists and said that if he were to win the presidency again he would “very, very seriously” consider giving them all pardons.The prisoners’ cause has been taken up by other Republicans.The far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was among those pressing McCarthy to release the January 6 video as a condition for her support for his election as speaker. She is expected to lead a congressional delegation to a Washington DC federal prison where some of the rioters are being held, ostensibly to check on their welfare, as the result of another of her conditions for supporting McCarthy.Meanwhile, after taking control of the House of Representatives in January, the Republicans have launched an investigation of Congress’s original investigation into the events of 6 January 2021, which recommended Trump’s prosecution for inciting the assault.The latest committee to look into the riot will be led by Congressman Barry Loudermilk, who contested Biden’s victory and likened Trump’s impeachment to the crucifixion of Jesus.Loudermilk was found by the earlier House investigation to have a given tours of the Capitol to a group of people the day before the insurrection even though it was closed to visitors. They included at least one man seen photographing corridors and staircases who was later identified outside the Capitol on 6 January making threats against members of Congress.Loudermilk tweeted that he intends to revisit the January 6 investigation because, he said, the earlier inquiry was politicised.“The J6 committee chose to ignore the facts and pursue a particular political narrative. I will not do this. As chairman of the subcommittee on oversight, I’m focused on finding out what really happened on J6 to ensure it never happens again,” he said.Former congresswoman Liz Cheney, one of only two Republicans who served on the January 6 committee, and who then lost a primary race against a Trump-backed rival, challenged Loudermilk, who declined to testify at the hearings she helped chair.“If @HouseGOP wants new Jan 6 hearings, bring it on. Let’s replay every witness & all the evidence from last year. But this time, those members who sought pardons and/or hid from subpoenas should sit on the dais so they can be confronted on live TV with the unassailable evidence,” tweeted Cheney, who was hired by Sabato earlier this month as a professor at the Center for Politics.Whether revisiting what many Americans regard as a shameful day for democracy will work in the Republicans’ favor remains to be seen.Opinion polls show that views about what happened on 6 January 2021 have not shifted dramatically in the intervening two years. According to a Quinnipiac university poll in December, 45% of Americans said that Trump bears “a lot” of responsibility for the storming of the Capitol. Just 21% did not blame him at all. The country was almost evenly split over whether the former president committed a crime that day.Polls also show a deep divide over the significance of the January 6 Capitol attack, with 50% of Americans saying it represented an assault on democracy that should not be forgotten while 44% say events are being overstated.Sabato said that while the reimagining of events will play well with hardcore Republicans, it may ultimately not be good for the party as a whole.“This will stir some of the base. But it’s not all positive for Republicans because it helps Trump, the one guy who probably will lose to Biden if it turns out to be Biden versus Trump again,” he said.TopicsUS Capitol attackRepublicansJanuary 6 hearingsUS politicsHouse of RepresentativesLiz CheneyKevin McCarthyfeaturesReuse this content More