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Trump charges $250,000 for midterms forum – to boost his own Super Pac
Trump charges $250,000 for midterms forum – to boost his own Super PacFebruary event notionally focused on 2022 midterms Former president has amassed huge war chest of $122m Donald Trump will charge top-paying guests $250,000 to attend a “Take Back Congress Candidate Forum” at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida this month – with proceeds going to his own Super Pac, rather than Republicans who will actually try to take back Congress.Nor is the top price tag, which guarantees a private dinner and picture with Trump as well as VIP seating at the forum, necessarily the full cost for any couple who chooses to pay it. On Twitter on Wednesday, the New York Times reporter and Trump watcher Maggie Haberman said: “$250k lets you pay for a Mar-a-Lago guest room.”Trump and his enablers unwittingly offer Democrats the best hope in the midterms | Robert ReichRead moreFurther down the menu, a couple paying $100,000 will get a photo with Trump and seating at a private dinner with endorsed candidates, with comments from Trump. For $50,000, guests will get the dinner and the Trump comments, but a picture only with “endorsed candidates”.Price tags descend to $5,000 per couple, for attendance – but presumably less than primo seating – at the dinner with comments from Trump.Emphasising Trump’s grip on the Republican party, Haberman pointed out that the former president “is spending almost no money on other Republicans so far. But he’s trying to raise for his group using congressional Republicans.”The Mar-a-Lago event is notionally aimed at the midterm elections in November this year, when Republicans are favoured to take back the House and possibly the Senate.A House takeover would see Trump well positioned to dictate to loyalists in party leadership, under Kevin McCarthy, the current minority leader.They are expected to pursue aggressive investigations of the Biden administration including a revenge impeachment and even, should the former speaker and McCarthy adviser Newt Gingrich be believed, the attempted jailing of members of the committee currently investigating the January 6 insurrection.Trump has his eyes on the 2024 presidential election, when he has strongly hinted he will run for the White House again.At a rally in Texas last week, he promised to pardon January 6 rioters and urged supporters to stage huge protests against prosecutors in New York and Georgia investigating his business affairs and election subversion.Trump has amassed a huge campaign war chest, of $122m.In a statement this week, spokesman Taylor Budowuch said the former president had “built a political organisation that continues to capture and define the future of the Republican party.“There is no question that the Make America Great Again (Maga!) wave is set to crash across the midterms and carry forward all the way through 2024.”But Trump’s leadership committee, Save America, this week declared donations of just $205,000 to endorsed candidates in the second half of 2021 – $45,000 less than the tag for a top-priced ticket to the dinner and forum at Mar-a-Lago on 23 February (not including guest room).CNN also reported that Trump’s Make America Great Again, Again! committee has spent around $1.7m on legal expenses as Trump fights investigations and congressional oversight. It has been widely reported that the Republican National Committee has helped to pay Trump’s legal bills.Trump’s Super Pac includes among its officers Pam Bondi, a former attorney general of Florida to whom Trump once controversially donated; the former ambassador to Germany and controversial former acting director of national intelligence Ric Grenell; and Matt Whitaker, briefly and controversially acting attorney general in the Trump administration.Kimberley Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr’s fiancee, is national finance chair.TopicsDonald TrumpRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More
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Trump and his enablers unwittingly offer Democrats the best hope in the midterms | Robert Reich
Trump and his enablers unwittingly offer Democrats their best hope in the midtermsRobert ReichThe former president and his allies may doom the Republicans by reminding the public of their attempted coup The midterm elections are just over nine months away. What will Democrats run on? What will Republicans run on?Trump reportedly directed Giuliani to press officials to seize voting machinesRead moreOne hint came at a Houston-area Trump rally Saturday night. “If I run and if I win,” the former guy said, referring to 2024, “we will treat those people from January 6th fairly.” He then added, “and if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.”Trump went on to demand “the biggest protest we have ever had” if federal prosecutors in Washington or in New York and Atlanta, where cases against him are moving forward, “do anything wrong or illegal”. He then called the federal prosecutors “vicious, horrible people” who are “not after me, they’re after you”.Trump’s hint of pardons for those who attacked the Capitol could affect the criminal prosecution of hundreds now facing conspiracy, obstruction and assault charges, which carry sentences that could put them away for years. If they think Trump will pardon them, they might be less willing to negotiate with prosecutors and accept plea deals.His comments could also be interpreted as a call for violence if various legal cases against him lead to indictments.But if Trump keeps at it – and of course he will – he’ll help the Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections by reminding the public of the attempted coup he and his Republican co-conspirators tried to pull off between the 2020 election and January 6. That would make the midterm election less of a referendum on Biden than on the Republican party. (Don’t get me wrong. I think Biden is doing a good job, given the hand he was dealt. But Republicans are doing an even better job battering him – as his sinking poll numbers show.)Last week, Newt Gingrich, who served as House speaker from 1995 to 1999, suggested that members of the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol should face jail time if the Republican party returns to power. “The wolves are gonna find out that they’re now sheep, and they’re the ones who – in fact, I think – face a real risk of jail for the kind of laws they’re breaking,” Gingrich said on Fox News.Gingrich’s remark prompted Representative Liz Cheney, Wyoming Republican and vice-chair of the select committee, to respond: “A former speaker of the House is threatening jail time for members of Congress who are investigating the violent January 6 attack on our Capitol and our constitution. This is what it looks like when the rule of law unravels.”Trump and Gingrich are complicating the midterm elections prospects for all Republicans running or seeking reelection nine months from now.Many Republican leaders believe they don’t need to offer the public any agenda for the midterms because of widespread frustration with Biden and the Democrats. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, recently asked what the Republican party’s agenda would be if it recaptured Congress, quipped “I’ll let you know when we take it back.”But if Republicans fail to offer an agenda, the Republican party’s midterm message is even more likely to be defined by Trump and Trumpers like Gingrich: the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen along with promises to pardon the January 6 defendants, jail members of the select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, and other bonkers claims and promises.This would spell trouble for the GOP, because most Americans don’t believe the big lie and remain appalled by the attack on the Capitol.House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (who phoned Trump during the attack on the Capitol but refuses to cooperate with the House’s January 6 committee investigation) will have a central role in defining the Republican message for the midterms. And whom has McCarthy been consulting with? None other than Newt Gingrich. The two have been friends for years and McCarthy’s chief of staff in his leadership office, Dan Meyer, served in the same role for Gingrich when he was the speaker.McCarthy knows Gingrich is a master huckster. After all, in 1994 Gingrich delivered a House majority for the Republicans for the first time in 40 years by promising a “contract with America” that amounted to little more than trickle-down economics and state’s rights.But like most hucksters, Gingrich suffered a spectacular fall. In 1997 House members overwhelmingly voted to reprimand him for flouting federal tax laws and misleading congressional investigators about it – making him the first speaker panned for unethical behavior. The disgraced leader, who admitted to the ethical lapse as part of a deal to quash inquiries into other suspect activities, also had to pay a historic $300,000 penalty. Then, following a surprise loss of Republican House seats in the 1998 midterm election, Gingrich stepped down as speaker. He resigned from Congress in January 1999 and hasn’t held elected office since.I’ve talked with Gingrich several times since then. I always come away with the impression of a military general in an age where bombast and explosive ideas are more potent than bombs. Since he lost the House, Gingrich has spent most of his time and energy trying to persuade other Republicans that he alone possesses the strategy and the ideas entitling him to be the new general of the Republican right.Gingrich has no scruples, which is why he has allied himself with Trump and Trump’s big lie – appearing regularly on Fox News to say the 2020 election was rigged and mouth off other Trumpish absurdities (such as last week’s claim that members of the House select committee should be jailed).Gingrich likes to think of himself as a revolutionary force, but he behaves more like a naughty boy. When he was Speaker, his House office was adorned with figurines of dinosaurs, as you might find in the bedrooms of little boys who dream of becoming huge and powerful. Gingrich can be mean, but his meanness is that of a nasty kid rather than a tyrant. And like all nasty kids, inside is an insecure little fellow who desperately wants attention.Still, as of now, the best hope for Democrats in the midterms lies with Trump, Gingrich and others who loudly and repeatedly remind the public how utterly contemptible the Republican party has become.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
TopicsDonald TrumpNewt GingrichRepublicansDemocratsUS politicscommentReuse this content More - in US Politics
Republicans to field more than 100 far-right candidates this year
Republicans to field more than 100 far-right candidates this yearAnti-Defamation League list includes at least a dozen with links to white supremacists, anti-government extremists and Proud Boys More than 100 far-right candidates are running for political office across the country as Republicans this year according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a non-profit that monitors hate groups.Aside from those expressing extremist rhetoric and far-right views, the ADL has found at least a dozen of the candidates had explicit connections to ‘“white supremacists, anti-government extremists and members of the far-right Proud Boys”. It includes primary challengers running to the right of some sitting Republicans.‘The most dangerous man in Congress’: how Paul Gosar became a darling of the far rightRead moreIn Arkansas’s third district Neil Kumar, who the ADL found has written for white supremacist publications, is challenging the incumbent congressman, Steve Womack, who broke with Republicans in voting in favor of creating the January 6 commission to investigate the Capitol attack. The openly racist views of Kumar prompted the Arkansas state Republican party to take the unusual step of declaring him a “non-recommended candidate” in the upcoming primary.The wave of far-right candidates includes sitting legislators like the Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers, who has admitted to being a member of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia with 11 members currently under federal indictment for seditious conspiracy.Other militia groups have candidates running or already in local office. The Washington Three Percent militia claims members in dozens of elected offices throughout the Pacific north-west, the Washington Post found, “including a mayor, a county commissioner and at least five school board seats”.In Idaho the far-right anti-government activist Ammon Bundy – who led an armed standoff against federal agents at Malheur wildlife refuge in 2014 – is running for the governor’s office. Bundy’s group, the People’s Rights network, has now increased its national membership to 33,000 members and has at least 398 activists in 39 states, according to a report by Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights.Many far-right candidates have no direct links to violent extremist groups, but do support a range of far-right views. The ADL tracked at least 45 candidates running for office this year that have “lent credence in some way” to the QAnon conspiracy theory movement. Many more hold on to Donald Trump’s “big lie” – the false belief that the 2020 election was stolen.Nationwide there are 207 current elected officials who aided former president Trump in efforts to overturn the 2020, according to data compiled by the Insurrection Index, a project of the voting rights group Public Wise. The index includes senators like Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, who voted against certifying the 2020 election and spread misinformation including suggesting that the January 6 attack was carried out by “fake Trump voters”.While many candidates are seeking local or national legislative seats, some are purposely running for bureaucratic offices whose chief responsibility is to certify elections. Thirty are standing in contests for attorney general, according to tracking by the States United Democracy Center, a non-partisan group that monitors election races nationwide.Fringe political candidates are a part of every US election cycle, but while these 2022 candidates hold far-right views they are also part of a wave within the Republican party that is no longer fringe but increasingly represents a powerful – even dominant – wing in the party.“The real danger is not just the wave of extreme candidates, it’s their embrace, their mainstreaming by the Republican party,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and the co-author of How Democracies Die. “The United States has always had nutty, extremist, authoritarian politicians around the fringe. What is new and really dangerous for democracy is that they’re increasingly running as Republican candidates.”Levitsky added: “At first you had a flirtation and tolerance with a handful of extremists at the fringes. We’re now seeing an army of extremists embraced by the former president. They’re marching in and taking over the Republican party at the state and local level.”In Oregon, Daniel Tooze, a prominent associate of the Proud Boys who has participated in street brawls with anti-fascists in Portland, is running for Oregon’s state legislature in the 40th district. Tooze ran for the same seat in 2020, failing to secure the Republican nomination in the primary, but he received 40% of the Republican vote in the primary. This year Tooze is the only Republican who has filed to run again.“When mainstream parties take onboard figures who deny the legitimacy of elections, refuse to accept electoral defeat, condone or even engage in political violence, you are putting democracy at risk,” said Levitsky.Tooze declined to be interviewed for this article but stated in correspondence: “I’m just a regular guy.”A review of Tooze’s campaign website and filing statement show no mention of affiliation with the Proud Boys. Tooze campaign messaging uses the language of mainstream Republican talking points. The Guardian has previously reported on far-right groups shifting their focus to local communities. Since the Capitol attack members of groups such as the Proud Boys have shown up to local venues including school board meetings to stand alongside mainstream conservatives, especially around issues such as Covid-19 restrictions.This month Tooze tweeted a video of Thomas Renz, a far-right anti-vaccine influencer, speaking at a panel convened by Senator Johnson that promoted misleading information about Covid-19 and vaccines. The video of Renz went viral in alt-tech platforms but also within mainstream social media. Tooze wrote of the video: “It’s time to hold the government accountable for what they’ve done to the people.”TopicsThe far rightRepublicansUS politicsUS midterm elections 2022newsReuse this content More
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Republicans’ redistricting maps are motivated entirely by race – not politics | Michael Harriot
Republicans’ redistricting maps are motivated entirely by race – not politicsMichael HarriotThere has been a subtle campaign to redefine racism by the intent and not the effects of discriminatory actions, even as gerrymandered maps diminish the power of Black voters Although the phrase “All politics is local” is usually attributed to Tip O’Neill Jr, a former speaker of the US House of Representatives, the aphorism probably originated in the February 1932 Associated Press column “Politics at Random”, when the Washington bureau chief, Byron Price, wrote: “All politics is local politics.” As valid as Price’s summarization of inside-the-Beltway politics may be, there is probably a more accurate way to describe the All American sport of civic power-brokering:All politics is racial.Over the last quarter-century, white voters have overwhelmingly identified with the GOP while every other racial and ethnic group – Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters – consistently identify with the Democratic party. This unwavering reality reduces the machinations of each political party to a game of demographic mathematics, especially in racially diverse parts of the country, where one truisim dominates local politics: when non-white people can’t vote, Republicans win.Perhaps the starkest example of this racial divide is Alabama, where white people make up 69% of the population and are 89% of the Republican electorate. By comparison, the state is 27% African American, 80% of whom identify as Democrat. Six of the seven Democrats in the Alabama senate are Black, as are 26 of the 27 Democratic members of the house. In 2022, Kenneth Paschal became the first Black person to represent the Republican party in the Alabama state legislature since Reconstruction. Contrary to what Price would say, politics is not local here. In Alabama, regardless of the location, “white voter” is synonymous with “Republican” and “Black” means “Democrat”.Perhaps this reality is why last Monday, a federal court threw out the state’s congressional map that disenfranchised Black voters across the state. The three-judge panel explained that the congressional redistricting plan created by Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature meant that “Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress.” The previous map packed the two Blackest cities in one congressional district, splitting the rest of the state’s Black population – three of the five largest cities in the state – among three majority-white districts that have been safely Republican for years. The judges gave the white (Republican) lawmakers 14 days to draw new districts that did not violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965.Alabama Republicans vowed to appeal the ruling to the US supreme court, where the court’s conservative majority ruled in 2019 that disenfranchising Black voters is perfectly fine as long as the gerrymanderers’ intent was partisan and not racial. “If district lines were drawn for the purpose of separating racial groups, then they are subject to strict scrutiny because ‘race-based decisionmaking is inherently suspect,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion. “But determining that lines were drawn on the basis of partisanship does not indicate that the districting was improper. A permissible intent – securing partisan advantage – does not become constitutionally impermissible, like racial discrimination, when that permissible intent “predominates”.Herein lies the problem with politics, conservative ideology and America in general. For years, there has been a subtle campaign to redefine racism by the intent and not the effects of discriminatory actions. According to this new American translation, disenfranchising entire communities by suppressing their voting power is not necessarily racist as long as the person didn’t mean to be racist. And, because there are very few people willing to stand in front of the world and confess to their racial prejudices, anyone is allowed to discriminate as long as they don’t articulate their racism out loud. However, this cleverly constructed loophole only applies to racism. America’s jurisprudence system has found a way to convict people for unintentional murder and hold people accountable for car accidents, but somehow white people are innocent until proven racist.But in the case of the Alabama Republican-controlled legislature, there is actual proof.A few weeks after justices sitting on America’s highest court decided that there was nothing they could do about North Carolina disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of Black citizens, the daughter of the man who pioneered using race to redraw political maps leaked the contents of her recently deceased father’s hard drive, revealing that North Carolina’s redistricting plan was about race all along. Known as the “Master of the Modern Gerrymander”, Thomas Hofeller had only considered race when drawing the maps for North Carolina. The proposed maps even included a plan that would have allowed the state to elect an all-white legislature.But the leaked files also revealed that Hofeller was the main architect of redistricting plans for states across the country, including Alabama. Hofeller’s files included emails and proposals from then Alabama state House redistricting commission chair Representative Jim McClendon, who included racial data, census maps broken down by race and … well, nothing else. The basis for McClendon and Hofeller’s plan for Alabama wasn’t mostly about race; it seems as if it was only about race. After serving in the Alabama house for 12 years, McClendon was elected to the state senate in 2014, where he co-chaired the senate commission whose gerrymandered maps were thrown out by the federal court. It was probably a coincidence. I’m sure he didn’t mean to do it.Alabama is not an outlier in this phenomenon. Republican-controlled legislatures in Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, Missouri and Wisconsin have submitted gerrymandered maps that diminish the power of Black voters. Of course, they won’t admit that the redistricting plans are solely motivated by race because, according to the New American definition, that would make it racist. According to America’s highest legal authorities, there is nothing wrong with stealing the voices of Black people and accidentally murdering their opportunity to participate in democracy. After all, it has nothing to do with racism.It’s just politics.
Michael Harriot is a writer and author of the upcoming book Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed Story of America
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Quiet part loud: Trump says Pence ‘could have overturned the election’
Quiet part loud: Trump says Pence ‘could have overturned the election’In statement protesting against reform of Electoral Count Act, ex-president appears to admit Joe Biden won Donald Trump was accused of “saying the quiet part loud” on Sunday night, when he protested that Mike Pence, his former vice-president, could have overturned his election defeat by Joe Biden.Trump tours the country in support of candidates pushing the ‘big lie’Read moreThough he has appeared to admit Biden won before, Trump usually insists he won and his opponent stole the election through voter fraud – the “big lie” which animates rallies like one in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday.On Sunday Trump attempted to seize on moves by a bipartisan group of senators to reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which Trump tried to use to have Pence refuse to certify Biden’s victory.Pence concluded he did not have the authority to do so. On the same day, 6 January 2021, supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” attacked the US Capitol.Seven people died and more than 100 police officers were hurt. More than 700 people have been charged, 11 with seditious conspiracy. Trump and his aides are the target of congressional investigation.But Trump survived impeachment when enough Senate Republicans stayed loyal and is free to run for office.On Saturday, he promised pardons for 6 January rioters if re-elected and exhorted followers to protest against investigations of his business and political affairs in New York and Georgia.In a statement on Sunday, Trump claimed “fraud and many other irregularities” in the 2020 election – no large-scale fraud has been found – and asked: “How come the Democrats and … Republicans, like Wacky Susan Collins, are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow the vice-president to change the results of the election?“Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power. He could have overturned the election!”Collins, of Maine, was one of seven Republicans to vote to convict Trump over the Capitol attack. Such is his grip on her party, on Sunday she would not say she would not support him if he ran again. But she did tell ABC why she wanted to reform the Electoral Count Act.“We saw, on 6 January 2021, how ambiguities, simple law, were exploited. We need to prevent that from happening again. I’m hopeful that we can come up with a bipartisan bill that will make very clear that the vice-president’s role is simply ministerial, that he has no ability to halt the count.”Dick Durbin of Illinois, a member of Democratic Senate leadership, said reform to the electoral college process was merited because Trump gambits including false slates of electors “really raise a question about the integrity of that process. It hasn’t been looked at for 150 years. Now’s the time.”Pundits seized on Trump’s latest apparent blunder into the truth.Trump pardon promise for Capitol rioters ‘stuff of dictators’ – Nixon aideRead moreBill Kristol, a conservative writer, said: “Talk about saying the quiet part loud. Trump here admits or rather boasts [about] what he wanted Mike Pence to do.”Chris Krebs, fired as head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under Trump but who pronounced the 2020 election “the most secure in US history”, said: “In the last 24 hours the former president: (1) floated pardons for [January 6] defendants, (2) encouraged civil unrest if he’s indicted in [Georgia or New York], (3) once again confirmed he pressured Pence to overturn a lawful election.“He’s radicalizing his base to be his personal Brown Shirts.”Olivia Troye, a former Pence aide, wrote: “Every Republican candidate and official should go on record with their answer: Do you support sedition and pardoning domestic terrorists?”TopicsDonald TrumpUS elections 2020US elections 2024US politicsRepublicansUS CongressUS SenatenewsReuse this content More
