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      Pence won’t say if criminal conviction should rule Trump out as president

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      Donald Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, refused to say if Trump should be barred from returning to the White House if he is convicted on any of 91 criminal charges against him.“I think that he’s to be left to the American people,” Pence told ABC’s This Week, on Sunday. “Let’s have the former president have his day in court. Let’s maintain a presumption of innocence.”Trump faces charges concerning federal and state election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments to a porn star. He also faces civil cases involving defamation, alleged rape and his business affairs, contributing to a schedule of trials in the election year.Nonetheless, he leads polling by wide margins nationally and in key states.On Sunday, ahead of the first debate in Milwaukee on Wednesday, CBS News released a new poll. Among Republicans, a whopping 62% picked Trump to just 16% for Ron DeSantis, the hard-right Florida governor in second place. Pence received 5% support, placing fourth.Pence and other qualifiers for the debate – a contest Trump will skip for an interview with Tucker Carlson – have backed a Republican National Committee pledge requiring support for the nominee.On ABC, Pence was asked about the case of James Traficant, an Ohio Democrat who in 2002 became one of only five people ever expelled from the US House after being convicted on corruption charges. Then a congressman from Indiana, Pence voted for that expulsion.Pence’s host, Jon Karl, asked: “Would you hold that same standard for the White House?”Pence said: “I would tell you that it is the function of the Congress to determine membership where there’s ethical violations and I remember the Traficant case from 20 years ago, it was really quite outrageous.“But if you’re saying would I apply that to my former running mate in this race, look, I think that he’s to be left to the American people. Let’s have the former president have his day in court. Let’s maintain a presumption of innocence and in this matter, and any other matter that unfolded this week here in Georgia” – a reference to Trump’s state-level election subversion case – “but I’ve said many times, I would have preferred that these matters be left to the judgment of the American people.“No one’s above the law. But with regard to the president’s future, my hope is when we get to that debate stage, and I’m still kind of hoping maybe he’ll come, is that we can really have a debate about the challenges facing the American people.”Elsewhere, the former Arkansas governor turned Trump critic Asa Hutchinson said he had qualified for the debate and would sign the pledge. Insisting that Trump would not be the nominee, Hutchinson refused to say what he would do if he were.Speaking from Des Moines, Iowa, Hutchinson told CNN’s State of the Union: “I am pleased to announce that we have met … the polling criteria and now we have met the 40,000 individual donor criteria. We submitted to the RNC 42,000 individual donors and I’m delighted.”FiveThirtyEight.com puts Hutchinson at 0.7% support – to 53.7% for Trump.“I’ll sign the pledge,” Hutchinson said. “I’m confident Donald Trump is not going to be the nominee of the party. And I’ve always supported the nominee. So I’m gonna sign the pledge.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPressed on whether he would support the man who sought to overturn the 2020 election and incited the deadly January 6 attack on Congress, Hutchinson repeated: “I’m going to support the nominee of the party. I do not expect it to be Donald Trump. And that I’m sure question will come up in the debate, so stay tuned for that.”’Conviction would not disqualify Trump from the presidency. But some say the US constitution might.Hutchinson said: “You can’t be asking us to support somebody that’s not perhaps even qualified under our constitution. I’m referring to the 14th amendment. A number of legal scholars said that [Trump] is disqualified because of his actions on January 6.”The 14th amendment says: “No person shall be a senator or representative in Congress, or elector of president and vice-president … who, having previously taken an oath … to support the constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same … ”Hutchinson said: “There would have to be a separate lawsuit that would be filed, in which there would be a finding that the former president engaged in insurrection, and that would disqualify him. That’s one avenue. The other way would be that if a specific state made that determination on their own … Either way … I think it’s a serious jeopardy for Donald Trump.”Trump’s longtime leading challenger, DeSantis, has long been falling back. No dominant alternative has emerged but Hutchinson insisted his party was not risking a repeat of 2016, when voters did not coalesce around one alternative to Trump.“I don’t see that happening,” Hutchinson told CNN. “First of all, it’s really early. I talked to voters in Iowa and New Hampshire and they’re gonna be late deciding, and that’s why you’re gonna see in Iowa, where Trump’s numbers come down first, it will be here.“… This debate is important … this is really a reduced number [of candidates] from 2016 with eight or nine on the stage. We’ll see who else qualifies for it but the voters are gonna be able to lock in on it, make decisions, and they’re not gonna be in a hurry to move. So everybody needs to be patient, including the media, and let this unfold over the next three or four months.“The right alternative to Donald Trump will surface.” More

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      Ron DeSantis calls Trump supporters ‘listless vessels’ in Republican broadside

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      His presidential campaign widely seen to be listing badly, Ron DeSantis fired a broadside at supporters of Donald Trump on Saturday, calling them “listless vessels”.“A movement can’t be about the personality of one individual,” DeSantis told the Florida Standard.“The movement has got to be about what are you trying to achieve on behalf of the American people and that’s got to be based in principle, because if you’re not rooted in principle, if all we are is listless vessels that’s just supposed to follow … whatever happens to come down the pike on Truth Social every morning, that’s not going to be a durable movement.”Truth Social is Trump’s social media platform, set up when he was suspended from mainstream platforms after the January 6 attack on Congress.Running for re-election under four criminal indictments and 91 separate charges, Trump nonetheless dominates the Republican primary, leading polling by as much as 40 points nationally and by wide margins in key states.DeSantis, the hard-right governor of Florida, has long been established as the strongest challenger. But amid campaign firings and reported financial struggles, that status has begun to erode, with the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy creeping up in polling.Trump is set to skip the first Republican debate, in Milwaukee on Wednesday, in favour of an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.Responding to DeSantis’s remarks to the Florida Standard, Trump aides sought to link the governor to the Democrat Trump beat for the presidency in 2016.“DeSantis goes full-blown Hillary [Clinton] and call[s] MAGA supporters ‘listless vessels,’” Steven Cheung wrote.A spokesperson for a Trump-aligned fundraising committee, Maga Inc, made explicit the claimed connection to remarks by Clinton which Trump successfully weaponised.“To Hillary Clinton, Trump supporters are ‘deplorables’. To Ron DeSantis, they are ‘listless vessels’,” Karoline Leavitt said. “The truth is, Trump supporters are patriots. DeSantis must immediately apologize for his disgraceful insult.”DeSantis’s spokesperson, Bryan Griffin, said the governor was referring to supporters of Trump in Congress, not among voters.“The dishonest media refuses to report the facts,” Griffin wrote. “Donald Trump and some congressional endorsers are ‘listless vessels’. Why? Because Trump and DC insiders feel he is entitled to your vote.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“… That’s why Ron DeSantis will be showing up on Wednesday night to debate, and Donald Trump will not.”The Florida Standard is a conservative website run by a young Republican, Will Witt, to whom DeSantis has regularly granted interviews.In the passage of the interview in question, the governor repeatedly targeted “establishment Republicans” and “Rinos”, meaning “Republicans in name only”.“I think that we have a stream in our party that views supporting Trump as whether you are a Rino or not,” he said. “And so you could be the most conservative person since sliced bread, unless you’re kissing his rear end, they will somehow call you a Rino.”DeSantis also said “there’ll be people who are huge Trump supporters, like in Congress, who have like incredibly liberal leftwing records that [are] really just atrocious and … then you have other people like [Texas] congressman Chip Roy, who’s endorsed me, [Kentucky] congressman Thomas Massie, these guys have records of principle.“… Ultimately, a movement can’t be about the personality of one individual. The movement has got to be about what are you trying to achieve on behalf of the American people and that’s got to be based in principle, because if you’re not rooted in principle … all we are is listless vessels.” More

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      Florida’s attacks on academic freedom just got even worse | Moira Donegan

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      Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign is flailing: the Florida governor, once considered a formidable contestant for the Republican nomination, is polling at a pathetic 14.8% among the Republican contenders. His camp is struggling to raise money, and the candidate’s public appearances have revealed him to be interpersonally unpleasant – coming off stiff, judgmental and creepy.At the Iowa state fair last week, DeSantis was caught on video telling a little girl, who was clutching a fairground treat, “that’s probably a lot of sugar”. The governor, a man so joyless that he scolded a child for eating candy, was later the subject of a taunting banner flown over one of his events: “Be Likable, Ron!”But just because DeSantis will not become president doesn’t mean that his constituents in Florida will be relieved of the policies he put in place there while trying to draw national attention to himself. In a years-long campaign that now seems destined to end with a third-place finish in Iowa, DeSantis reshaped Florida in his image, pursuing culture-war fights that he hoped would grab media attention and convince Republican primary voters that he was hurting their most hated enemies.Among these was the seizure and restructuring of New College of Florida, a public liberal arts college in Sarasota that was long known in the state for its curious students, eclectic faculty and countercultural bent. DeSantis overhauled the college’s board of trustees, appointing his own loyalists. The man newly in charge of New College is Christopher Rufo, a rightwing influencer known for whipping up moral panics. He’s been given a mandate to make the school conservative, bringing the curriculum in line with the governor’s ideological preferences, and reshaping it in the image of Hillsdale College, a private conservative Christian school in Michigan.Now Rufo has escalated his attacks on New College, transforming a board of trustees meeting into an ideologically driven attack on academic freedom – and eliminating the school’s gender studies department.Last Thursday’s trustees meeting was supposed to be mostly about the college’s quest to hire a new president: three far-right candidates were interviewed earlier that day. The meetings were already tense. New College’s students and faculty, along with staff, alumni and many ordinary Floridians, are appalled at what is being done to the school. The candidate interviews were livestreamed, but they had to be conducted in a secure separate building, cordoned off by police tape. When the board met in public in front of an audience, the proceedings became so contentious that four different onlookers were removed by police.For his part, Rufo seems to be courting this controversy. Like DeSantis, his is a politics of contempt, made up largely of sneering attempts to elicit an outraged reaction from his victims. At the board meeting, he brought up the proposal to eliminate gender studies abruptly, without advance notice to the full board, and without allowing any time for public comment. When student and faculty trustees – including Grace Keenan, the student body president, and Amy Reid, the director of the gender studies program – pointed out that the proposal violated procedures required by Florida state law, Rufo, who appeared at the meeting on Zoom, bulldozed through anyway. When Reid spoke movingly in defense of her program and its importance to students, Rufo could be seen in mute on the projector screen above her, laughing.Rufo’s own plans for the school are vague. Earlier in the meeting, he and his fellow DeSantis appointees had voted to overhaul the college’s course load, so as to require students to take courses in fields he designated using the Greek words “logos” and “technos”. It’s unclear what these terms are supposed to signify, or how exactly Rufo is translating them: “logos” is often interpreted as “word” but “technos” can mean either “technology”, “art” or “skill”. But perhaps the old-timeyness of the ancient Greek is all that Rufo is really going for: like much of the modern right, and indeed like DeSantis himself, he is solemn only in his style, and merely peevishly cruel in his substance.More to the point might be the fact that the end of New College’s gender studies department mirrors the broader project of Rufo’s boss, the terminally unlikable Ron. DeSantis has long been modeling his governorship of Florida on the rule of the autocratic Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, a darling of the American right who hosted 2023’s Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC. DeSantis’s “don’t say gay” ban on LGBTQ+ content in instruction for K-12 students was an imitation of an Orban-backed law banning “gay propaganda” anywhere minors might see it; the destruction of the gender studies program at New College follows Orban’s ban on gender studies programs in 2018.But DeSantis’s attacks on education go beyond the strictly defined gender studies field. Florida’s 2023 high school social studies curriculum advances the insultingly reductive lie that “slaves developed skills” that could be used “for personal benefit”. The attempt is to twist historical fact to legitimize a brutal and unjust racial hierarchy, and the same could be said of DeSantis’s attack on gender studies: to render natural and right what is in fact unnatural, constructed and violent.For his part, Rufo framed the attack on gender studies at New College in flippant, even blase terms: “The best universities, when they have programs that do not fit in with the mission … make hard calls to discontinue those programs.”Thanks to Rufo, New College is no longer among Florida’s best universities. And the “mission” Rufo was assigned to pursue there had less to do with scholarly integrity than with DeSantis’s culture-war fight-picking and presidential aspirations. It is a mission that is doomed to fail. Students and faculty at New College, however, are the ones who will suffer the consequences.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Florida wants to let a rightwing group teach history to children. This is appalling | Nancy Jo Sales

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      In July, the Florida department of education announced that it had approved the use of content by PragerU Kids for the coming school year. PragerU Kids was recently described by Time magazine as “a resource for schools”. But it is only a “resource” because the state of Florida has deemed it so. PragerU is not an actual university. It has no accreditation. It is a conservative media company whose goal since its founding in 2009 has been to spread rightwing ideology to adults and children.And it has been incredibly successful at doing that. PragerU’s latest annual report says that the company’s self-described “edutainment” videos racked up more than 1.2bn views in 2022, with more than 7bn since its founding. Its content has been mostly available online, particularly on Facebook and YouTube, but now it is making its way into US classrooms with the promise of fighting the so-called “woke agenda”.PragerU makes no secret of its agenda. Its co-founder, Dennis Prager – a conservative radio talkshow host and writer who has been attacking progressive causes since the 1980s – was recently glib in responding to claims that PragerU “indoctrinates kids”. “Which is true,” Prager said in a speech to the conservative “parental rights” group Moms for Liberty. “We bring doctrines to children. That is a very fair statement. I said, ‘But what is the bad of our indoctrination?’”PragerU Kids’ cartoon videos for children as young as kindergarten age not only soft-pedal the history of slavery, racism, colonialism and police brutality – they show sympathy for them. In one video, Leo and Layla Meet Christopher Columbus, Columbus tells young Leo and Layla: “Slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world … Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?”Another PragerU Kids video describes George Floyd, who was murdered by the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020, as a “Black man who resisted arrest”. Another features a cartoon version of the Black American educator and author Booker T Washington comforting white children by saying, “Future generations are never responsible for the sins of the past.” To which his young listener responds: “OK, I’ll keep doing my best to treat everyone well and won’t feel guilty about historical stuff.”Another video says that British colonialism transformed India “in many positive ways”.PragerU Kids’ videos for teens often focus on sexuality and gender, promoting traditional gender roles in ways that could be considered anti-feminist. In one, How to Embrace Your Femininity, a young blond woman with perfect hair and makeup tells viewers: “Most gender stereotypes exist because they reflect the way that men and women are naturally different. And those differences aren’t bad … So don’t let anyone tell you it’s bad to fit stereotypes. Those people are just trying too hard to be cool.”And climate change denial? A PragerU video for kids compares pushing back against the science of the climate crisis to Jews in the Warsaw ghetto uprising who fought the Nazis. As they say, you can’t make this stuff up. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the initial funding for PragerU came from the Wilks brothers, petroleum industry billionaires.It wouldn’t be a stretch to call this content rightwing propaganda, which the state of Florida has now all but legitimized as suitable learning materials for kids. This isn’t surprising in a state with a governor, Ron DeSantis, who has staked his political career on fighting “wokeness”. Alarmingly, however, Florida may be just the first of other states to follow in adopting PragerU’s anti-progressive materials. The company is now reportedly going through the process of being approved as an education “resource” in other states. Which is next? Texas? Oklahoma? And how many more after that?American education has never been perfect. I can remember, as a teenage girl growing up in Florida in the 1970s, being frustrated by the fact that my public high school curriculum included almost nothing on the history of women in the US – which hasn’t changed so very much since then. It was also appalling how little time we spent on the history of slavery, the history of Native people or the contributions of people of color to our society, which schools still fail to teach.But the adoption of PragerU Kids content by a state’s department of education is something on another level. This is admittedly indoctrination, propaganda full of lies and half-truths specifically designed to manipulate and mold young minds to serve a rightwing political agenda. You could argue that this has always been the problem – a problem that critical race theory and its proponents have been trying to combat and change.The reaction against this has been swift and severe, and the embrace of PragerU Kids could be just be one of the many unseemly moves we’ll be seeing in the continued fight to finally teach the truth in American schools.
      Nancy Jo Sales is the author, most recently, of Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno More

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      Prosecutor suspended by DeSantis says he’s a ‘weak dictator’ seeking attention

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      Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, suspended the top prosecutor in Orlando on Wednesday, claiming “dereliction of duty” on crime. In return, the prosecutor said DeSantis, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, was a “weak dictator” acting undemocratically and for political reasons.Monique Worrell, the ninth judicial circuit state attorney, is the second Democratic prosecutor DeSantis has removed.Last year, the governor suspended Andrew Warren of Tampa over his supposedly “woke” agenda, including pledging not to enforce a 15-week abortion ban and supporting gender transition for minors. A legal battle over that decision continues.Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Worrell said: “Elected officials are being taken out of office solely for political purposes … Under this tyranny, elected officials can be removed simply for political purposes and by a whim of the governor and no matter how you feel about me, you should not be OK with that.“This is simply a smoke screen for Ron DeSantis’ failing and disastrous presidential campaign. He needed to get back in the media in some positive way. That would be red meat for his base. And he will have accomplished that today.”Trailing Donald Trump in the Republican primary, and having recently replaced his campaign manager amid reports of a campaign in free-fall, DeSantis made his announcement about Worrell on a break from the presidential trail.“Worrell’s practices and policies have too often allowed violent criminals to escape the full consequences of their criminal conduct, thereby endangering the innocent civilians of Orange and Osceola counties,” DeSantis’s office said in a statement.In an executive order, DeSantis accused the second African American elected state attorney of “neglecting her duty to faithfully prosecute crime in her jurisdiction”.The 15-page order accused Worrell of allowing practices and policies that “systematically permitted violent offenders, drug traffickers, serious-juvenile offenders, and pedophiles to evade incarceration”.It alleged such practices and policies included “non-filing or dropping meritorious charges or declining to allege otherwise provable facts to avoid triggering applicable lengthy sentences, minimum mandatory sentences, or other sentencing enhancements, especially for offenders under 25 years old”.Worrell was also accused of overseeing low prison admission rates “for crimes involving lewd and lascivious behavior, which includes possession of child pornography and other sex crimes against children”.In his own news conference, DeSantis said that while prosecutors “do have a certain amount of discretion about which cases to bring and which not”, Worrell “abused that discretion”.DeSantis said he was nominating a former judge, Andrew Bain, to serve during Worrell’s suspension.Worrell told reporters: “If we are mourning anything this morning, it is the loss of democracy. I am your duly-elected state attorney for the ninth judicial circuit. Nothing done by a weak dictator can change that.“I am a fighter and I intend to fight. I will not be quiet. I will not sit down … I will continue to stand for democracy. I will continue to protect the rights of the disenfranchised. I am proud to tell you that this will not stop me from running for re-election. My re-election will continue.”Earlier this year, DeSantis and Worrell exchanged barbs over the case of Keith Moses, a 19-year-old believed responsible for the killings of three people, including a journalist and a nine-year old girl, in shootings in Orange county in March.According to reports, Moses’s criminal history includes eight felonies and 11 misdemeanor cases, all bar one having occurred while he was a juvenile. His only crime as an adult was possession of drug paraphernalia and cannabis, in 2021. Worrell’s office did not prosecute, due to the amount found.Following the shootings, DeSantis said Worrell’s office, which announced in May that it would seek the death penalty against Moses, “may have permitted this dangerous individual to remain on the street”.“You have to hold people accountable,” DeSantis said, adding: “[The] state attorney in Orlando thinks that you don’t prosecute people and that’s the way that you somehow have better communities. That does not work.”Worrell fired back, saying: “For this tragedy to be politicized, it’s shameful and we should all feel that way about it.“Painting a narrative that there’s something that prosecutors could have done to keep this individual off the streets is just not true.” More

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      DeSantis claims agents can tell traffickers from migrants in call for deadly force

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      The rightwing Florida governor and 2024 presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis has sparked controversy by outlining a hardline border policy of deadly force despite acknowledging that drug traffickers could be difficult to distinguish from migrants crossing into the US.DeSantis, whose ailing campaign has failed to cut into the lead of the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, said that under his direction as president, US law enforcement on the lookout for drugs would not mistakenly use lethal force on migrants because US agents would have “rules of engagement” similar to police or US forces in war zones like Iraq.In an NBC interview broadcast on Monday night, the Republican Florida governor was asked about a campaign-trail promise: “If cartels are trying to run product into this country, they’re going to end up stone-cold dead.”“How do you know you’re using deadly force against the right people?” his interviewer, Dasha Burns, asked.“Same way a police officer would know,” DeSantis said. “Same way somebody operating in Iraq would know.“You know, these people in Iraq at the time, they all looked the same. You didn’t know who had a bomb strapped to them. So those guys have to make judgments.”Data analysis by Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit, shows police killed at least 1,201 people in the US in 2022.John Pfaff, a law professor at Fordham University in New York, called DeSantis’s proposal “terrifying”.“That ‘same way in Iraq’ line is terrifying,” Pfaff wrote. “It’s an open embrace of any sort of false positive rate and the large-scale murder of innocent people. DeSantis really is really being quite openly murderous. (And imputing that same murderous indifference to police, as a compliment.)”Pfaff also pointed to a 2020 ruling in which conservatives on the US supreme court said the family of a 15-year-old Mexican boy shot dead by a US border patrol agent could not sue, because the shooting was a matter of national security.In Iraq, between the invasion in 2003 and the large-scale US withdrawal in 2011, American forces were often attacked with bombs either vehicle-borne, remote-controlled or carried or propelled by suicide bombers.The US defense department puts the US military and civilian death toll between 2003 and 2010 at 4,431. Iraq Body Count, a British non-profit, says 15,162, or 13%, of documented civilian deaths in Iraq from 2003 to 2011 were caused by US-led coalition forces.As a US navy lawyer, DeSantis deployed to Iraq in 2007, advising special forces. He has touted his military service, also at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, saying it sets him aside from the rest of the Republican field.But he has struggled to make his mark on the primary, falling further behind Trump despite the former US president’s criminal indictments and other forms of legal jeopardy.Amid a widely reported campaign reset, the hard-right governor, who has targeted LGBTQ+ rights, the teaching of race in US history and other progressive priorities, also attempted to show a softer side. Joined by his wife, Casey, to discuss their children and life at home, DeSantis told NBC he was “really good” at making waffles, adding that his children “actually do like the eggs”, as well as macaroni and cheese from a box.With his children, he said, “I’m very even keeled, but if I do raise the voice a little bit, they do, they snap to attention.”On the campaign trail, DeSantis has faced fierce criticism after using violent imagery, including a promise to “start slitting throats” among federal workers once elected.Discussing his hardline border policy, DeSantis said his proposal to authorise lethal force against cartels would be “similar to like if you’re in the military.“You have rules of engagement. Anyone that’s hostile intent or a hostile act, which … cartels are, you know, you would then engage with lethal force.“I think these cartels are basically foreign terrorist organisations. They are responsible for killing more Americans on an annual basis than any other group or country throughout the entire world. And yet, this is just happening, and it’s happening in communities all across the United States.”Hardline rhetoric about the border and law enforcement is common among Republican candidates. In office, Trump reportedly wanted to bomb cartel facilities in Mexico but was blocked by aides.DeSantis continued: “It really hit me when I was down in Arizona. You know, most of the border doesn’t have a wall, of course, but there was parts where there was a wall. And these guys are working on the wall. I’m like, ‘What are you doin’?’ They’re like, ‘We’re repairing the hole the cartels cut through the steel beams.’“So if you see that happening, and they’ve got the satchel of fentanyl strapped to their back, you use deadly force against them, you lay them out, you will see a change of behaviour. You have to take the fight to the cartels; otherwise we’re going to continue to see Americans dying.” More

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      DeSantis says Trump ‘of course lost’ in 2020 when pressed in interview

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      “Of course” Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Ron DeSantis said in an interview broadcast Monday – after being pressed on the issue.Appearing on NBC, the Florida governor and nearest challenger to Trump for the nomination in 2024 was asked: “Yes or no – did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”DeSantis said: “Whoever puts their hand on the Bible on 20 January every four years is the winner.”His interviewer, Dasha Burns, said: “If you can’t give a yes or no on whether or not Trump lost –”DeSantis said: “No, of course he lost!”Burns said: “Trump lost the 2020 election?”DeSantis said: “Of course! Joe Biden’s the president.”Trump continues to lie that the 2020 election was decided by voter fraud, even after the former president was last week indicted on four criminal charges related to his attempts to overturn the result.Despite those charges and 74 others over hush-money payments and retention of classified records, and despite the prospect of more election-related charges in Georgia, Trump leads DeSantis by more than 30 points in most polling averages and by healthy margins in early voting states.DeSantis’s campaign is widely seen to be tanking. He and the rest of the Republican field have struggled to find a way to attack Trump, given his hold on the party. Discomfort when asked to say Biden won in 2020 or to condemn Trump’s lie is widely seen to be a symptom of that malaise.DeSantis told NBC the 2024 election should be a “referendum on Joe Biden’s policies, and the failures that we’ve seen and we are presenting a positive vision for the future”.If it is, he said, “We will win the presidency, and we will have a chance to turn the country around.“If, on the other hand, the election is not about 20 January 2025 [inauguration day] but 6 January 2021 [the day of the deadly attack on Congress by Trump supporters] or what document was left by the toilet at Mar-a-Lago, if it is a referendum on that, we are going to lose, and that’s just the reality.”A Trump spokesperson, Steve Cheung, told NBC: “Ron DeSantis should really stop being Joe Biden’s biggest cheerleader.”Another Trump aide, Liz Harrington, said: “If you think Joe Biden got 81 million votes, you’re an idiot. If you’re just saying that, you’re either a coward or corrupt. Either way it’s disqualifying.”In 2020, Biden received 81,282,916 votes to 74,223,369 for Trump. Biden won the presidency in the electoral college by 306-232, the result by which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.DeSantis did offer Trump support, echoing his claim that his proliferating legal problems are the results of political persecution.DeSantis also said the 2020 election was not a “good-run election”.“But I also think Republicans didn’t fight back,” DeSantis added. “You’ve got to fight back when that is happening.“But here’s the issue that I think is important for Republican voters to think about: Why did we have all those mail votes? Because of Trump turned the government over to [former Covid task force leader Dr Anthony] Fauci.“They embraced lockdowns. They did the Cares Act, which funded mail-in ballots across the country.”As NBC pointed out, Florida has long allowed voting by mail.In the interview, scheduled to air on NBC Nightly News on Monday night, DeSantis was also asked about new standards for teaching history in Florida schools, which have proved controversial for saying some Black people benefited from being enslaved.DeSantis said: “We’ve been involved in education, not indoctrination. Those standards were not political at all.”Kamala Harris, the vice-president, has attacked DeSantis on the issue.Asked about criticism from Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the US Senate and a rival for the presidential nomination, DeSantis said: “Don’t take that side of Kamala Harris against the state of Florida. Don’t indulge those lies.” More

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      Trump claims protective order against him would infringe his free speech rights – live

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      From 19m agoAhead of an afternoon deadline for his lawyers to respond to a request from special counsel Jack Smith for a protective order in the January 6 case, Donald Trump said such a ruling would infringe on his free speech rights.From his Truth social account:
      No, I shouldn’t have a protective order placed on me because it would impinge upon my right to FREE SPEECH. Deranged Jack Smith and the Department of Injustice should, however, because they are illegally “leaking” all over the place!
      The former president’s attorneys have until 5pm eastern time to respond to the request from Smith, who asked for the protective order after Trump on Friday wrote, “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” on Truth.Smith wants Trump’s attorneys barred from publicly sharing “sensitive” materials including grand jury transcripts obtained during the January 6 case’s pre-trial motions.Aileen Cannon, the federal judge presiding over Donald Trump’s trial on charges related to keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, appeared to disclose an ongoing grand jury investigation in a court filing today, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports:Cannon was appointed to the bench by Trump, and faced scrutiny last year for a decision in an earlier stage of the Mar-a-Lago case that some legal experts viewed as favorable to the former president, and which was later overturned by an appeals court.Cannon’s is presiding over Trump’s trial in Florida on charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith, who alleges the former president illegally stored classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, and conspired to hide them from government officials sent to retrieve them.In response to the charges filed against him over January 6, Donald Trump’s lawyers have argued the former president did not know that he indeed lost the 2020 election. But as the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports, that defense may not be enough to stop prosecutors from winning a conviction:Included in the indictment last week against Donald Trump for his efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election was a count of obstructing an official proceeding – the attempt to stop the vote certification in Congress on the day his supporters mounted the January 6 Capitol attack.The count is notable, because – based on a review of previous judicial rulings in other cases where the charge has been brought – it may be one where prosecutors will not need to prove Trump knew he lost the election, as the former president’s legal team has repeatedly claimed.The obstruction of an official proceeding statute has four parts, but in Trump’s case what is at issue is the final element: whether the defendant acted corruptly.The definition of “corruptly” is currently under review by the US court of appeals for the DC circuit in the case titled United States v Robertson. Yet previous rulings by district court judges and a different three-judge panel in the DC circuit in an earlier case suggest how it will apply to Trump.In short: even with the most conservative interpretation, prosecutors at trial may not need to show that Trump knew his lies about 2020 election fraud to be false, or that the ex-president knew he had lost to Joe Biden.“There’s no need to prove that Trump knew he lost the election to establish corrupt intent,” said Norman Eisen, special counsel to the House judiciary committee in the first Trump impeachment.“The benefit under the statute is the presidency itself – and Trump clearly knew that without his unlawful actions, Congress was going to certify Biden as the winner of the election. That’s all the corrupt intent you need,” Eisen said.Donald Trump’s team has clearly been paying attention to Ron DeSantis’s NBC News interview, with a spokeswoman attacking the Florida governor for his comments dismissing the ex-president’s false claims about his 2020 election loss:Speaking of Republican presidential candidates, NBC News scored a sit-down interview with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and got him to again say that his chief rival Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.DeSantis, whose campaign for the White House is in troubled waters, had been vague on the issue until last week, when he started saying publicly that he did not believe the former president’s false claims about his election loss.Here he is saying it again, on NBC:In his final days as vice-president, Mike Pence faced pressure from Donald Trump to go along with his plan to disrupt Joe Biden’s election victory. Pence refused his then-boss’s request, and the two running mates are now foes, but could Pence potentially be a witness in the trial on the federal charges brought against Trump over the election subversion plot?In an interview with CBS News broadcast over the weekend, Pence, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, said he has “no plans to testify”, but added “people can be confident we’ll obey the law. We’ll respond to the call of the law, if it comes and we’ll just tell the truth.”Far from being worried about what Trump’s former deputy might have to say about him, the former president’s attorney John Lauro said his legal team would welcome Pence’s testimony.“The vice-president will be our best witness,” Lauro said in a Sunday appearance on CBS, though he didn’t exactly say why he felt that way. “There was a constitutional disagreement between the vice-president [Pence] and president Trump, but the bottom line is never, never in our country’s history, as those kinds of disagreements have been prosecuted criminally. It’s unheard of.”Good morning, US politics blog readers. Mere days have passed since special counsel Jack Smith indicted Donald Trump for his failed effort to reverse his 2020 election loss, but the two sides are already battling over what the former president can say and do. On Friday, Trump wrote “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”, prompting Smith’s prosecutors to request a protective order that would restrict what the former president’s legal team can share publicly, saying it is necessary to guard people involved in the case against retaliation.Trump’s lawyers have until 5pm eastern time today to respond. It’s an early salvo in what is expected to be the lengthy process Smith’s case is expected to take, and which will undoubtedly hang over the 2024 election, where Trump is currently the frontrunner. Either way, the former president has not been shy about sharing his thoughts regarding the unprecedented criminal charges leveled against him, and do not be surprised if today is no different.Here’s what else is happening:
      Voters in Ohio are gearing up to decide on Tuesday whether to approve a Republican-backed proposal that will raise the bar for changing the state’s constitution. What this is really about is a ballot initiative scheduled to be put to a vote in November that would enshrine abortion protections in the state’s laws, but which would face a much more difficult road to passage if tomorrow’s vote succeeds.
      Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor whose presidential campaign appears to be floundering, just sat down for an interview with NBC News, where, among other things, he reiterated that he believed Trump lost the 2020 election.
      Joe Biden is hosting World Series winners the Houston Astros at the White House today, before heading to the Grand Canyon. More