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      Larry Hogan: splitting anti-Trump vote ‘pretty good reason’ not to run in 2024

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      Larry Hogan: splitting anti-Trump vote ‘pretty good reason’ not to run in 2024Ex-Maryland governor tells Meet the Press: ‘I care about making sure we have a future for the Republican party’ The danger of splitting anti-Trump Republicans and helping the former president win the nomination again “would be a pretty good reason to consider not running” for the White House in 2024, the former Maryland governor Larry Hogan said. Bernie Sanders: Nikki Haley’s demand for mental tests is ageist and ‘absurd’Read more“I don’t care that much about my future in the Republican party,” Hogan told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “I care about making sure we have a future for the Republican party.“And if we can stop Donald Trump and elect a great Republican common-sense conservative leader, that certainly would be a factor.”A relative moderate in a GOP marched far right, Hogan has long been thought likely to run. He told NBC he would decide whether to do so, as “a small government common-sense conservative”, in a “relatively short period of time”, most likely this spring.Trump and the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley are the only two declared candidates so far. Polling has shown Haley splitting a non-Trump vote dominated by Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and thereby handing Trump the win.Trump did not win a majority of voters in 2016, when he first captured the nomination. Hogan barely registers in polling regarding 2024.On NBC, Hogan was asked about culture war issues, chiefly around education and LGBTQ+ issues, on which DeSantis has based much of his appeal to voters.Hogan said: “I was a Republican governor in the bluest state in America and got things done, working across the aisle with Democrats. So I can tell you, it’s not what everyone’s talking about.“But I think some people are making the calculation that base primary voters in the Trump lane, that’s what they want to hear about. And so a lot of candidates are focusing on that. You can’t dismiss it, but I don’t think it should be the only thing we’re talking about.”Haley said this week DeSantis’s so-called “don’t say gay” law, restricting how gender and sexual orientation are taught in elementary schools, did not go “far enough”.She has refused to comment about other Republican candidates, Trump in particular, claiming only to be interested in attacking Joe Biden.Hogan was asked about Republican attempts to have candidates commit to supporting the eventual nominee.Election denier Kristina Karamo chosen to lead Michigan Republican partyRead more“I think it’s kind of silly because it’s not going to happen,” he said. “We already know President Trump has said numerous times he refuses to” do so.“If they say you’re not going to be on the debate stage if you won’t commit to support the nominee, then President Trump won’t be on the debate stage. And I don’t think anybody believes that’s going to happen.”Looking to Michigan, an electoral battleground where on Saturday a supporter of Trump’s election fraud lie became head of the state party, Hogan said: “There’s a lot of misinformation out there. And I am concerned about some of the parties.“And people are taking over that are believing conspiracy theories. And I think we’ve got to get back to a bigger-tent party that can appeal to more people, otherwise we’re going to keep losing elections.”In 2020, while still in office, Hogan publicly refused to support Trump. He did not vote for Biden, however, writing in “Ronald Reagan” instead.On Sunday, Hogan said he wanted “to support the nominee of the party, whoever that is. However, I’ve said before I didn’t support Trump, I wouldn’t support Trump. I put the country ahead of party and not somebody [who] should not be the president.”TopicsRepublicansUS politicsDonald TrumpUS elections 2024newsReuse this content More

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      Election denier Kristina Karamo chosen to lead Michigan Republican party

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      Election denier Kristina Karamo chosen to lead Michigan Republican partyKaramo lost secretary of state race in 2022 after mounting a campaign in support of Trump’s lie about electoral fraud The election conspiracist Kristina Karamo, overwhelmingly defeated last year in her bid to become Michigan secretary of state, was chosen on Saturday to lead the state Republican party for the next two years.Karamo defeated a 10-candidate field dominated by far-right candidates to win the position after a party convention that lasted nearly 11 hours.The latest threat to democracy? A Trump-backed candidate willing to ‘find extra votes’Read moreIn 2022, the former community college professor lost her secretary of state race by 14 points after mounting a campaign in support of Donald Trump’s lie that his 2020 election defeat was the result of electoral fraud.Karamo inherits a state party torn by infighting and millions in debt. She will be tasked with helping win back the legislature and flipping one of the most competitive US Senate seats, while helping a presidential candidate win the battleground state.Addressing delegates, Karamo said “our party is dying” and needs to be rebuilt into “a political machine that strikes fear in the heart of Democrats”.Karamo rose to prominence following the 2020 election when she began appearing on conservative talk shows claiming that as a poll challenger in Detroit, she saw “ballots being dropped off in the middle of the night, thousands of them”.The decision to elect Karamo, who will lead through the 2024 elections, solidifies the hold far-right activists have on the state party after sweeping losses last year.It took three rounds of voting at the convention in Lansing for delegates to pick Karamo over the former attorney general candidate Matthew DePerno, who was endorsed by Trump.Contemplating a field dominated by grassroots activists running on far-right messaging, the former Republican congressman Fred Upton said: “We lost the entire statehouse for the first time in 40 years, in large part, because of the top of the ticket. All deniers. It turned off a lot of voters.”The party may take “a cycle or two to correct itself and to get out of the ditch that we’ve been in for the last couple of years”, Upton said.The Michigan Republican party has been led by figures including the former education secretary Betsy DeVos and the current national Republican chair, Ronna McDaniel.Trump won Michigan in 2016 but Democrats now control all levels of power for the first time since the 1980s. In 2022 they won both houses of the legislature and defeated Republicans by significant margins for governor, attorney general and secretary of state.Longtime donors withheld millions as Republicans grew increasingly loyal to Trump. Tudor Dixon, a Trump loyalist who lost for governor to Gretchen Whitmer, said her campaign was hurt by the state party not having as much money as in the past.TopicsMichiganRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Trump claims he will ‘never call’ Ron DeSantis ‘Meatball Ron’

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      Trump claims he will ‘never call’ Ron DeSantis ‘Meatball Ron’Ex-president tests new nickname for Florida governor, chief rival in 2024 polls, by saying he would not use it Donald Trump road-tested a new nickname for his chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination by claiming he would not use it, saying he would “never call” Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, “Meatball Ron”.How Florida’s Republican supermajority handed Ron DeSantis unfettered powerRead moreNo less an authority than the New York Times has reported that Trump has been floating the nickname for the only Republican who challenges him in polling regarding the forming field for 2024.Trump is one of two declared candidates so far. Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and UN ambassador, announced her campaign this week. DeSantis is expected to run.In his surge to the White House in 2016, Trump made hay by coining nicknames for Republican opponents he relentlessly belittled at rallies and in debates.In a late-night post to his Truth Social platform on Saturday, the former president used an extant nickname when he wrote: “I will never call Ron DeSanctimonious ‘Meatball’ Ron, as the Fake News is insisting I will.”Trump linked DeSantis to two Republican establishment figures, “lightweight” Paul Ryan, the former House speaker and Trump critic, and “Low Energy” Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor who Trump beat easily in 2016.Trump also took a crack at DeSantis’s initial response to the Covid pandemic in 2020, a strict slate of measures the governor is now trying to place in the rearview mirror, as he courts a Republican base hostile to vaccine mandates and other public health rules.“His loyalty skills are really weak,” Trump wrote. “It would be totally inappropriate to use the word ‘meatball’ as a moniker for Ron!”Earlier this month, Maggie Haberman and Michael Bender of the Times, two of the best connected reporters on Trump, reported on the former president’s preparations for an expected DeSantis challenge.According to Bender and Haberman, Trump recently “insulted Mr DeSantis in casual conversations, describing him as ‘Meatball Ron’, an apparent dig at his appearance, or ‘Shutdown Ron’, a reference to restrictions the governor put in place at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic”.They also said Trump advisers were “amassing data about Mr DeSantis’s actions in response to the pandemic, in part to try to depict him as a phony”.DeSantis has largely avoided responding to Trump’s attacks. In an interview published on Saturday by the New York Post, he remembered “bad words” being used in nicknames in his high-school baseball days but said no one called him DeSanctimonious then.“No,” he said. “There weren’t enough letters to be able to do that. I don’t know if anyone even can spell that.”Elsewhere this week, Stephen Colbert, host of the Late Show on CBS, gleefully picked up on the Times “Meatball Ron” report.“Ooooh, I do not like how much I love that,” Colbert said in a monologue this week, calling the “Meatball Ron” nickname “so dumb and accurate”.Trump, Colbert said, was “never gonna do better than the crystallized genius that is ‘Meatball Ron’”.The host proceeded to sing “Meatball Ron” to the tune of Uptown Girl by Billy Joel, a song peppered with references to culture war policies including DeSantis’s “don’t say gay” law about teaching sexuality and gender in elementary schools and his focus on critical race theory, or CRT, as a way to fire up Republican voters.“Meatball Ron/ He’s a walking talking beef baton / And he tells you that you can’t say gay / And that Covid will just go away / That’s not OK.“Meatball Ron / Marinara is his big turn on / Very scared of CRT / Loves to roll around in spaghetti / With extra cheese.”TopicsDonald TrumpRon DeSantisUS elections 2024US politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      The Lincoln Miracle review: how Republicans chose their great redeemer

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      ReviewThe Lincoln Miracle review: how Republicans chose their great redeemer As the Republican Party marches right, Edward Achorn’s second book on the 16th president makes instructive readingThe party of Lincoln is dead. A half century after the civil rights backlash begat Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, Donald Trump announced on Fox News that his accomplishments may have surpassed those of the 16th president.Why Abraham Lincoln’s meetings with Black Americans matterRead more“So, I think I’ve done more for the black community than any other president, and let’s take a pass on Abraham Lincoln, ’cause he did good, although it’s always questionable.”Descendants of those freed from slavery under Lincoln? They would probably differ.Trump grew up in Queens, a New York borough, but his heart belongs to Dixie. He called the Confederate Robert E Lee one of the greatest US generals and said there were good people on both sides in Charlottesville, Virginia, when white supremacists marched in August 2017 and a counter-protester was murdered. Truly, Trump has cast the Republican party in his own image.Against this bleak backdrop, Edward Achorn delivers The Lincoln Miracle, an in-depth examination of Abraham Lincoln’s successful quest for the Republican presidential nomination at the convention of 1860.Achorn is Pulitzer finalist, particularly interested in the 19th century and baseball. The Lincoln Miracle is Achorn’s fourth book but second on Lincoln, after Every Drop of Blood, about the second inaugural address of 1864. The Lincoln Miracle is beautifully written, filled with vivid and easily digested prose.The reader knows Lincoln will prevail, the US will shortly be at war with itself and the Union will triumph at great cost. Foreknowledge does not detract. The Lincoln Miracle’s themes are timeless, its subtitle apt: Inside the Republican Convention that Changed History.Achorn deftly lays out the personas, demographics and rivalries that shaped the nominating contest and the 1860 election. The Whig party was spent, riven by slavery and nativism. Anti-Catholicism was a force. Anti-German sentiment too. The nation was buffeted by the competing pulls of abolitionism and preservation of the Union. Republicans were divided, Democrats fractured. The Democratic convention was an abject failure. Compromise was not in the air.Three years earlier, the supreme court had issued its infamous Dred Scott decision, reading slavery into the constitution. Short of constitutional amendment or war, there was little to be done. Slavery had morphed into a right.At the Illinois Republican convention in 1858, Lincoln delivered what would come to be known as the House Divided speech. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he quoted from the Book of Matthew, his Baptist upbringing manifest. Lincoln may have been a deist but he appreciated Scripture. According to Achorn, he believed “pain and failure were endemic to human life”. People could only do so much. The rest was in the hands of an “inscrutable” God.“I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half-slave and half-free,” Lincoln said. “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”Lincoln had served one term in Congress, back in the 1840s. His antipathy to slavery was well known. So was his opposition to popular sovereignty, the notion that new states could decide for themselves if slavery would be legal within their borders. In 1858, Lincoln was running for a US Senate seat. He battled the Democrat Stephen Douglas on that very point. Lincoln won the debates but lost the election. In 1859, John Brown seized the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in an attempt to arm the enslaved. He was put to death for treason. The glue that held the country together was quickly coming undone.Lincoln had a rematch with Douglas. In the fall of 1860, in a four-way election, both men vied for the White House. Lincoln had been an underdog for the Republican nomination, never mind the presidency. How he won the first prize before he won the second is a tale worth telling. His political march signaled how he would govern, how he would impose his vision and will on the country.Lincoln respected the foundational documents, wedding his opposition to slavery to the founders’ stated ideals.“He was acceptable,” writes Achorn, “because he celebrated the founding fathers and Declaration of Independence. Lincoln believed intensely that the founders had opposed slavery as an obvious contradiction of the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and had set it on the road to extinction.”Nowadays, the 1619 Project takes a different view. The issue is live once more.Lincoln knew patience could be a virtue, that he could bend time to his side. At the Republican convention, in a huge wooden “wigwam” in Chicago, he was the darkest of dark horses. With each round of balloting, his odds improved. After the first round, Lincoln was more than 70 votes behind William Seward, the New York senator and favorite to be the nominee. After the second ballot, Seward’s margin collapsed. Lincoln’s victory, in the third round, was inevitable. Seward became Lincoln’s secretary of state.Every Drop of Blood review: how Lincoln’s Second Inaugural bound America’s woundsRead moreThe Lincoln Miracle describes political battles on a stage long vanished. The book lands in an America transformed. The last president from Lincoln’s party demands the constitution be terminated. He considers a return to the White House – and dines with an anti-Semite and a white supremacist.But 19th-century dynamics have not completely vanished. On the right, John C Calhoun, father of the filibuster, proponent of white supremacy and secession, is praised. Into the Republican presidential race strides Nikki Haley, a Trump appointee turned rival who once told the Sons of Confederate Veterans states had the right to secede. There’s more. The civil war the Confederacy fought to maintain slavery? A matter, in Haley’s weasel words, of “tradition versus change”.More than 150 years after Lincoln’s assassination, the embers of civil war still glow. The Lincoln Miracle is relevant reading indeed.
      The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention that Changed History is published in the US by Grove Atlantic
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      Ron DeSantis sees ‘freedom’ in Florida – thanks to Republican supermajority

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      Ron DeSantis sees ‘freedom’ in Florida – thanks to Republican supermajorityThe governor – believed by many to mount a 2024 presidential campaign – is ramping up an ‘anti-woke’ crusade with a veto-proof supermajority in state legislature If there’s one word Floridians have heard plenty of since their Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, was sworn in for a second term last month, it is “freedom”. The rightwing politician, expected by many to seek his party’s 2024 presidential nomination, sprinkles the word freely as he ramps up the “anti-woke” crusade he believes can propel him to the White House.Nikki Haley says Florida’s ‘don’t say gay’ law does not go ‘far enough’Read moreIt turns out, following a special legislative session last week that handed DeSantis victory after victory in his culture wars against big corporations, the transgender community, students, migrants and racial minorities, the person with the greatest freedom in Florida to do exactly as he pleases is the governor himself.In November, voters granted DeSantis’s wish of a veto-proof Republican supermajority in the state legislature. In a five-day session, those politicians validated every one of his demands.They granted DeSantis total control of the board governing Disney, the theme park giant with whom he feuded over his anti-LGBTQ+ “don’t say gay” law.They gave him permission to fly migrants from anywhere in the US to destinations of his choosing, for political purposes, then send the bill to Florida’s taxpayers.And they handed unprecedented prosecutorial powers to his newly created, hand-picked office of election “integrity”, pursuing supposed cases of voter fraud.The special session is over but DeSantis’s devotion to seeking retribution against those who disagree with him is not.Last week, after a backlash, the Florida High School Athletic Association backed away from forcing female students to chronicle their menstrual histories on medical forms, a requirement seen by many as a thinly-veiled attempt to keep transgender athletes out of girls’ sports.Exactly one week later, a Republican House committee proposed allowing DeSantis to turf out those who made the decision and replace them with his own appointments.It’s a familiar playbook: the Disney legislation allows the governor to supplant sitting officials on its governing tax authority with his own picks; his “hostile takeover” of the liberal New College of Florida last month was accomplished by swamping its board of trustees with hand-picked allies and conservative Christians.In what critics say was a particularly petty act earlier this month, DeSantis moved to strip the liquor license from the non-profit Orlando Philharmonic Plaza Foundation because it hosted a drag show, which some children attended with parents.The threats keep coming. The notoriously thin-skinned DeSantis wants to cut state ties with the College Board, which criticised him for a “PR stunt and posturing” when he demanded it revise an advanced placement college course on African American studies he said “lacked educational value”.“No politician should silence the stories of Black and brown people who helped create our country. Our democracy and constitutional values must transcend such hateful and callous political agendas,” said Tiffani Lemon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.Others accuse DeSantis of fascism, among them the progressive Democratic congressman Maxwell Frost, whose vocal criticism of the governor long predated his election in November.“If you disagree with Ron DeSantis he’ll abuse his power to close down your business, take over your school, remove your classes and unconstitutionally fire you,” Frost said in a tweet. “I encourage folks to look up the definition of fascism then read these headlines.”Other Florida Democrats see the DeSantis-ordered special legislative session as his “get out jail free card”, sweeping away legal obstacles and other hurdles that threatened to stall his policy objectives.His original plan to abolish the Disney authority would have saddled residents with $1bn in bond debt, so instead he asked the legislature to rename and restructure it.Judges threw out charges against several ex-felons the governor said voted illegally because his state office lacked prosecutorial authority, so a new law was drafted to give it.DeSantis’s administration was sued for flying migrants from Texas to Massachusetts in a “vile political stunt” stunt last year, because the existing law restricted migrant removals to those physically in Florida. So he changed the law.“It’s just a clear example of DeSantis changing the law because he broke the law,” said Anna Eskamani, a Democratic state congresswoman who voted against the new measure to allow the governor to fly migrants anywhere.“Republicans like Ron DeSantis don’t care about the rules. If they don’t like the rules, they change them. And if they can’t change them they try to destroy them, as we saw with the [January 6] insurrection.”Gregory Koger, chair of political science at the University of Miami, said the issues the legislature addressed suggested “speed over thought” when the DeSantis administration was planning its strategies.“It’s not unusual at all to see legislators and executives fixing problems in the laws that they have passed,” he said.DeSantis wins new power over Disney World in ‘don’t say gay’ culture warRead more“You could have had a slow, bipartisan, well-thought-out approach to changing the relationship between Florida and Disney, but that isn’t what we observed. We saw a law being drafted and passed as an act of retribution, and now they have to come back and say, ‘Well, when we passed our act of retribution, here’s what we actually meant.’“Same with changing the guidelines for Florida to fly migrants. That seems like an effort to back out of a legal challenge to their behavior by retroactively saying the legislature is actually OK tricking people into getting on a plane in Texas and flying them from there, rather than finding actual undocumented people in Florida.”In an email to the Guardian, DeSantis’s press secretary, Bryan Griffin, defended the governor, saying he was bringing “a new era of accountability and transparency” to Disney, Florida’s biggest employer.“Businesses in Florida should operate on a level playing field,” Griffin said. “In 1967, the Florida legislature created the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which gifted extraordinary special privileges to a single corporation.“Until Governor DeSantis acted, the Walt Disney Company maintained sole control over the district. This power amounted to an unaccountable corporate kingdom.”TopicsRon DeSantisRepublicansFloridaUS politicsUS elections 2024US domestic policyfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Nikki Haley says Florida’s ‘don’t say gay’ law does not go ‘far enough’

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      Nikki Haley says Florida’s ‘don’t say gay’ law does not go ‘far enough’Republican presidential candidate makes comments in New Hampshire on controversial law signed by governor Ron DeSantis02:41Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley told a New Hampshire audience the controversial “don’t say gay” education law signed by the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, does not go “far enough”.DeSantis wins new power over Disney World in ‘don’t say gay’ culture warRead more“Basically what it said was you shouldn’t be able to talk about gender before third grade,” Haley said. “I’m sorry. I don’t think that goes far enough.”DeSantis’s law bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity through third grade, in which children are eight or nine years old. The law has proved hugely controversial, stoking confrontation with progressives but also corporations key to the Florida economy, Disney prominent among them.Some pediatric psychologists say the law could harm the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth already more likely to face bullying and attempt suicide than other children.Haley, a former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, this week became the second declared major candidate for the Republican nomination in 2024, after Donald Trump.Widely expected to run, DeSantis is the only candidate who challenges Trump in polling. Surveys have shown Haley in third place, with the potential to split the anti-Trump vote and hand the nomination to the former president.New Hampshire will stage the first primary of the Republican race. In Exeter on Thursday, Haley said: “There was all this talk about the Florida bill – the ‘don’t Say gay bill’. Basically what it said was you shouldn’t be able to talk about gender before third grade. I’m sorry. I don’t think that goes far enough.“When I was in school you didn’t have sex ed until seventh grade. And even then, your parents had to sign whether you could take the class. That’s a decision for parents to make.”As reported by Fox News, Haley also said Republicans should “focus on new generational leadership” by putting “a badass woman in the White House”.Speaking to Fox News, Haley was asked about DeSantis and the “don’t say gay” law and she doubled down on her comments.She said: “I think Ron’s been a good governor. I just think that third grade’s too young. We should not be talking to kids in elementary school about gender, period.Nikki Haley: video shows Republican candidate saying US states can secedeRead more“And if you are going to talk to kids about it, you need to get the parents’ permission to do that. That is something between a parent and a child. That is not something that schools need to be teaching. Schools need to be teaching reading and math and science. They don’t need to be teaching whether they think you’re a boy or a girl.”Haley also claimed to be focused not on Republican rivals but on “running against Joe Biden”, adding: “I’m not kicking sideways. I’m kicking forward.”Haley, 51, has also attracted attention by controversially proposing mental competency tests for politicians over the age of 75.She said: “This is not hard. Just like we go and we turn over our tax returns … why can’t you turn over a mental competency test right when you run for office? Why can’t we have that?”Biden is 80. Trump is 76.TopicsNikki HaleyUS politicsRepublicansRon DeSantisFloridaNew HampshireLGBTQ+ rightsnewsReuse this content More

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      How big a threat does the hard right pose to US support for Ukraine?

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      AnalysisHow big a threat does the hard right pose to US support for Ukraine?Julian Borger in WashingtonA year after the conflict began, the consensus against Russian aggression has held but alarm bells are ringing in Congress Vladimir Putin has proven adept at exploiting the US political divide, so the solid bipartisan consensus behind arming Ukraine over the past year may well have come as a surprise to him. The question one year into the war is: how long can that consensus last?Two weeks before the first anniversary of the full-scale invasion on 24 February, a group of Trump-supporting Republicans led by Matt Gaetz introduced a “Ukraine fatigue” resolution that, if passed, would “express through the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States must end its military and financial aid to Ukraine, and urges all combatants to reach a peace agreement”.The resolution is sponsored by 11 Republican members of Congress on the far right Freedom Caucus faction, and is highly unlikely to pass. But it marks a shot across the bows of the leadership, which has mostly vowed to stay the course in supporting Ukraine.Justifying the resolution, Gaetz pointed to the risks of escalation of the Ukraine war into a wider global conflict and to the economic cost to the US.“President Joe Biden must have forgotten his prediction from March 2022, suggesting that arming Ukraine with military equipment will escalate the conflict to ‘World War III’,” the Florida Republican said. “America is in a state of managed decline, and it will exacerbate if we continue to haemorrhage taxpayer dollars toward a foreign war.”The influence of this faction is heightened by the fact that the Republicans have a slim nine-seat majority in the House, and the new speaker, Kevin McCarthy, only scraped into the job after 15 rounds of voting among Republican members, during which he gave promises to listen to the concerns of hard-right holdouts like Gaetz.“I’ve been sounding the alarms on Republican opposition to Ukraine aid for the last 12 months,” the Democratic senator Chris Murphy said. “Right now, there are enough Republicans in the Senate who support Ukraine aid along with all of the Democrats, so we can continue to deliver support, but I don’t know what’s going to happen in the House.”“I think there’s going to be tremendous pressure on Speaker McCarthy to abandon Ukraine … and it’s possible he could wilt under the pressure,” Murphy said. “We know the Russians see this as a real opportunity.”European diplomats have been lobbying Republicans, underlining the importance of maintaining western solidarity in the face of Russian aggression and arguing that support for Ukraine is an extremely inexpensive way to degrade the military of a hostile power seen by the Pentagon as an “acute threat”.The diplomats report reassuring noises from the party leadership, but unwavering resistance from the rightwingers, many of whom follow the lead of the Trump camp, particularly the former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, who has railed against western backing for Ukraine, and ridiculed its president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.“The divide in the US is now more tangible than in Europe. The Republican leadership is absolutely adamant that there will be no lessening of support for Ukraine, but it’s just words,” one European diplomat said. “With such a narrow Republican majority in the House, the Freedom Caucus has a lot of influence. And you don’t need to cut off help overnight. You just need to slow it down with procedure. That’s the danger.”Some of Washington’s European allies are less concerned. One noted how upbeat McCarthy was on the issue, and the commitment to Ukraine of the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell.Frank Luntz, a Republican political consultant, also argued the pro-Russian lobby in the party had been permanently diminished.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Trump used to call Putin a genius. You don’t hear him saying that anymore,” Luntz said. “Most of these people have backed down because they realise they were completely wrong. Donald Trump blew it in Ukraine and there are people who hold it against him to this day.”“You have a few dozen members who are hostile now and that will increase, and could even double. But I don’t expect our support for Ukraine to ebb,” he added.However, a recent opinion poll has shown support softening for the continued arming of Ukraine as the war approached its one-year milestone. In the survey by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center, 48% of those questioned said they were in favour of providing weapons, with 29% opposed. Last May, 60% of Americans surveyed supported arming Ukraine.It is against that backdrop that Biden will fly to Poland on Monday to mark the approach of the anniversary and to restate the case for western solidarity with Ukraine.Murphy predicted that the House speaker, who has himself warned that there would no longer be a “blank cheque” for Ukraine with a Republican majority, might seek a compromise with the right of the party that could eventually prove devastating.“I worry that McCarthy will try to split the baby and support funding for hard military infrastructure but not support economic and humanitarian aid,” the Democratic senator said. “If that’s the direction that US funding goes, it’s a recipe for the slow death of Ukraine.”TopicsUS politicsA year of war in UkraineUkraineEuropeUS foreign policyRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Sarah Palin says Ron DeSantis ‘should stay governor’ and not run for president

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      Sarah Palin says Ron DeSantis ‘should stay governor’ and not run for presidentPalin, who quit as Alaska governor in 2009 amid talk of a run for president, envisions DeSantis running one day ‘but not now’ Ron DeSantis of Florida should stay as governor “a bit longer” and not run for president in 2024, said Sarah Palin – the former Alaska governor who was John McCain’s running mate in 2008 but resigned rather than complete her term after Republican defeat.Nikki Haley calls for ‘new generation’ of leaders in presidential campaign launchRead moreDeSantis, 44, has not declared a run but is widely expected to do so as the only strong challenger to Donald Trump in polling regarding the forming field.Palin, a Trump supporter, told Newsmax: “DeSantis doesn’t need to [run]. I envision him as our president someday but not right now.“He should stay governor for a bit longer. He’s young, you know. He has decades ahead of him where he can be our president.”The field of declared candidates is now two-strong, with the entry of Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador. One recent poll showed Haley splitting the anti-Trump vote with DeSantis and thereby handing the nomination to the legally embattled, electorally unpopular former president.In office, DeSantis has aped Trump with hardline and often theatrically cruel policies, focusing on culture war issues including education and the Covid pandemic. But he stormed to re-election last year and is the party establishment favourite. He is widely reported to be readying a run.Palin, 59, said she was “all about healthy, competitive primaries. That makes everybody debate more articulately and work harder and let the people know what records are and visions for this country are.“… But when you talk about the specific people, the individual people who are looking at putting their hat in the ring … they got a lot of guts thinking they’re gonna go up against Trump.”Asked if she would be willing to be Trump’s pick for vice-president, Palin said: “What President Trump and I have talked about is kind of the same thing that we’re talking about.”Palin was plucked from relative obscurity to be McCain’s running mate against Barack Obama in 2008, a risky choice McCain reportedly made by miming rolling a dice and saying: “Fuck it. Let’s do it.”Palin proved a hit with the Republican base – many see her selection as the birth moment of the populist far right which now dominates the party – but not with the electorate at large.She quit as Alaska governor in July 2009, prompting widespread criticism for walking away from the job before her term was up. Many suspected she would run for president. That prospect never materialised but Palin has remained prominent on the US far right.Last year, an attempt to win a seat in Congress fell short despite Trump’s support, with Alaska sending the Democrat Mary Peltola to Washington instead.Palin also fell short in court, when she sued the New York Times for libel.TopicsSarah PalinRon DeSantisDonald TrumpUS elections 2024US politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More