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      Never Trumpers get ‘brutal wake-up call’ as Republican candidates flounder

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      For Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas, there were boos and chants of “Trump! Trump!”. For Francis Suarez, mayor of Miami, there were jeers and cries of “Traitor!” And perhaps most tellingly, there was no Florida governor Ron DeSantis at all.The recent Turning Point USA conference brought thousands of young conservatives to Florida and there was no doubting the main attraction: former president Donald Trump, who made a glitzy entrance accompanied by giant stage sparklers. In a less than rigorous poll, 86% of attendees gave Trump as their first choice for president; DeSantis, who polled 19% last year, was down to 4%.Events and numbers like this are cause for sleepless nights among those Republican leaders and donors desperate to believe it would be different this time. The Never Trump forces bet heavily on DeSantis as the coming man and the premise that Trump’s campaign would collapse under the weight of myriad legal problems.But six months away from the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, none of it seems to be working. DeSantis’s campaign is flailing and leaving some with buyers’ remorse. Hutchinson and Chris Christie, outspoken Trump critics, are polling in single digits, sowing doubts about voters’ appetite for change. Never Trumpers have reason to fear that his march to the Republican nomination may already be unstoppable.“They’re experiencing a brutal wake-up call that the party is not interested in hearing critiques of Trump,” said Tim Miller, who was communications director for Jeb Bush’s 2016 campaign. “The Trump challengers’ candidacies have been astonishingly poor and learned nothing from 2016. When the leading candidate gets indicted and all of his opponents besides Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson just echo his fake persecution complex talking points, it’s going to be hard to beat him.”The Never Trump movement is almost as old as the celebrity businessman’s hostile takeover of the Republican party. In 2016, 50 senior Republican national security officials from past administrations signed a letter saying they would not vote for him, even though Trump was the nominee. Republicans including Colin Powell, a former secretary of state, openly backed his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, albeit in vain.Hopes that Trump would “grow” into the presidency were soon dashed. In 2018, White House whistleblower Miles Taylor wrote an anonymous column in the New York Times under the headline “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”, describing the president as unfit for office. Taylor went on to build a network of former government officials and advisers aiming to deny Trump a second term.Former Republican operatives in groups such as the Lincoln Project and Republican Accountability Project welcomed Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election and hoped his part in a subsequent insurrection at the US Capitol would finally break the fever. But Senate Republicans squandered a chance to end his political career by failing to convict him in an impeachment trial.Since then certain members of Congress have proved willing to criticise Trump on certain issues and a few, such as Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, are implacably opposed to him. But many others, such as Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, have either retired or been purged.As the 2024 election looms, there is no coordinated plan on how to derail the Trump train or alter the trajectory of a race that is still his to lose. Even critics admit that the external events many were counting on to thwart his candidacy have not hurt his standing.Indeed, criminal indictments in New York and Florida have led some voters who were entertaining an alternative to return to Trump’s fold while handing him another fundraising bonanza. His campaign announced that he raised more than $35m during the second fundraising quarter, nearly double what he raised during the first three months of the year and well ahead of his competitors.Trump’s opponents within the party are running out of time and ideas. Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman, said: “They were all hoping that Trump’s legal troubles would kick him to the side of the road but every indictment or potential indictment just strengthens him among the base, eats up all the oxygen in the room and makes him the likely nominee. They’re probably as frustrated as can be.”Many Never Trump hopes were pinned on DeSantis but the governor is already cutting staff and experiencing fundraising setbacks. Donors ignored the warnings of longtime political operatives who said DeSantis was “undercooked”, had a glass jaw and lacked the personal warmth and charisma required for retail politics. These appear to be have been borne out by a stagnant campaign in which the more exposure he receives, the less popular he becomes.Walsh, who challenged Trump in the 2020 Republican primary, said: “They all bet on DeSantis without knowing who the fuck he was, without understanding that he’s really bad and weird with people and also mean and cruel, even more so than Trump. They put all their chips on DeSantis before they knew who he was. That was a mistake because they don’t have an alternative.“There’s only one lane in this Republican party. That’s the Trumpy lane and DeSantis is in that lane with Trump. His problem is he can’t get past Trump but the base wants somebody like that and so there’s no other alternative. They’re really kind of screwed.”Ominously for DeSantis, Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, who had previously given the governor copious airtime and favourable coverage, has reportedly gone cold on him and resigned himself to the prospect of another Trump nomination. Fox News this week unveiled a line up of prime time hosts who have lauded the former president.Republicans are doing little to dispel an air of inevitability around the former president securing the nomination again. When it emerged this week that he faces a third indictment, this time over his attempt to subvert democracy, rivals including DeSantis again parroted his claim that the cases are politically motivated.Kevin McCarthy, speaker of the House of Representatives, where Trump had notched far more endorsements than his rivals, told reporters: “If you noticed recently, President Trump went up in the polls and was actually surpassing President Biden for reelection. So what do they do now? Weaponize government to go after their number one opponent.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJust as in 2016, Trump is also benefiting from a divided opposition. Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, suggests that Never Trumpers coalesced around DeSantis too soon. “The strategy shouldn’t have been necessarily backing that horse but sitting out a little bit to see how the field settled, to see if someone would emerge. Then you come in.”Individual ambition has prevented Republicans from uniting around a strategy to stop Trump. Steele observed: “The party was unwilling in the first instance to have a come to Jesus meeting with all the candidates other than Trump and say, ‘OK, I get it, y’all want to be president but none of you is going to get there if you all stand so I need one of you to do that duty. So that means the rest of you get behind that one.“‘Is it Nikki? [Haley] We’re all behind Nikki. Is it Christie? We’re all behind Christie. But one of you.’ And so that’s the word we send out to the party faithful … At the end of the day, this game is about winning general elections, not winning primaries and the Republican party is stuck on winning primaries to prove a point. And what’s that point? Oh, we lose general elections.”The election is still more than 470 days away and the race is far from done. During the 2008 election campaign, for example, Hillary Clinton appeared to have a decisive lead for the Democratic nomination over Barack Obama while the eventual Republican nominee, John McCain, did not emerge as the frontrunner until January 2008.In theory, Trump should be vulnerable. He comes with excess personal baggage including legal troubles that appeared to converge this week with fresh momentum. On Tuesday Trump revealed that he had been named as a target in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of interference in the 2020 election.On the same day Dana Nessel, the attorney general of Michigan, announced criminal charges against 16 people who signed paperwork falsely claiming Trump won the election in that battleground state. Meanwhile Fani Willis, district attorney for Fulton county, Georgia, is preparing to present a case to a grand jury over Trump’s election subversion efforts there.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington and former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, said: “There’s still a chance that the steady drip, drip, drip of indictments and other problems will open up a larger portion of the party to an alternative because they see him as increasingly risky, as someone who might well not only be indicted but convicted of a major crime, or more than one, during the presidential campaign.“Will a lot of Republicans quietly come to the conclusion that’s not a risk worth taking? I don’t know. I find it very difficult to understand my own party and impossible to understand the other side.”Christie and other critics have also made the case that Trump is an electoral liability, pointing out that, after his narrow win in 2016, Republicans lost the White House, House and Senate. They did regain the House in last year’s midterms but underperformed expectations. Trump’s campaigns are always risky and haphazard: he recently criticised Iowa’s popular governor, Kim Reynolds, for her seemingly cosy relationship with DeSantis while she purports to be neutral.Several groups that oppose Trump’s candidacy have begun spending big money on efforts to undermine his support. Win It Back Pac, an independent Super Pac with ties to the conservative Club For Growth Action, recently spent $3.6m on an advert that features a purported Trump supporter who has grown tired of the former president’s antics. Americans for Prosperity Action, part of a network founded by the billionaire Koch brothers, has also sought to weaken Trump through door knocking and phone calls.But for now, Trump is still the 800lb gorilla of the Republican party. He is dominating polls, drawing huge crowds and shaping the narratives by which other candidates define themselves. Just as in past recent elections, that leaves Never Trump Republicans with few palatable options except to put country before party.Walsh, the former congressman, said: “If you really believe Trump is unfit then you have to do what me and Liz Cheney and so many others have done and that’s just say we’re going to throw our support behind the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, even though it goes against our policy interests, because Trump has to be stopped. Clearly he can’t be stopped in the primary so he has to be stopped in the general.” More

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      Struggling DeSantis and Pence attack criminal justice law they championed

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      As a Republican congressman, Ron DeSantis was a supporter of legislation that made moderate reforms to the federal prison system intended to reduce recidivism and mass incarceration – a cause that was also championed by then president Donald Trump and his deputy, Mike Pence.Five years later, DeSantis, now Florida’s governor, and Pence are struggling to overtake Trump’s lead among Republicans as they vie for the party’s presidential nomination, and have turned against the criminal justice measure they both supported in an effort to win over conservative voters.“Under the Trump administration, he enacted a bill, basically a jailbreak bill. It’s called the First Step Act. It has allowed dangerous people out of prison, who have now reoffended and really, really hurt a number of people,” DeSantis told the rightwing pundit Ben Shapiro in a May interview, vowing that “one of the things I want to do as president is go to Congress and seek the repeal of the First Step Act.”Pence echoed a similar message, telling the Washington Examiner that as president he would “take a step back from” the law.Their comments were the latest instances of Republicans wooing voters with promises to crack down on crime, a time-tested tactic for the GOP that last year helped the party win back control of the House.But conservatives who supported the First Step Act in 2018 say there’s no reason to repeal it, nor do they believe attacking it will help Pence and DeSantis overtake Trump’s substantial popularity advantage among Republican voters.“You’re in a political, what I call, silly season of you say a lot of things, and crime is a concern, public safety is a concern across the country,” said Doug Collins, a former Republican congressman from Georgia who introduced an early version of the act.He said the law was “not an issue until it was brought up, and it’s not an issue that seems to be gaining a lot of traction out there, especially when the facts of the bill were put out there for Republican voters.”One of the biggest pieces of criminal justice reform legislation Congress has passed in years, the First Step Act reduced mandatory minimum sentences for some drug-related crimes, created new rehabilitation programs for released inmates, banned the shackling of pregnant women and expanded time-served credit for most federal prisoners.Only a minority of America’s prison population, the largest in the world, is incarcerated in the federal system, but one of the act’s chief goals was to create programs that helped people released under the act keep out of prison for good.According to justice department data, the recidivism rate for those released under the law is just over 12%, as compared to the 45% rate the Government Accountability Office says is the baseline for federal prisoners overall.“When we see policymakers talking about the First Step Act, and trying to make some sort of misguided connection with crime, we have to be really realistic that the research and the evidence doesn’t point that way,” said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive non-profit.The act’s passage represented one of the few instances in which Trump and his Republican allies in Congress joined together with Democrats, and their legislative push was endorsed by outside groups as diverse as the American Civil Liberties Union and the conservative benefactors Koch Industries.The version of the act Collins introduced mostly dealt with ways to reduce recidivism, and DeSantis voted for the bill before resigning later in 2018 to mount his successful campaign for Florida governor. The Senate then added provisions dealing with sentencing reform, and as he signed it, Trump said the legislation “brings much-needed hope to many families during the holiday season”.Two years later, Covid-19 broke out and crime spiked nationwide, a phenomenon that appears to be relaxing but which has had an enduring impact on American politics. The former president currently leads the polls among Republican presidential candidates, but doesn’t say much about the First Step Act, having now shifted his demands to calling for Congress to slash the FBI and justice department’s funding over their investigations against him.DeSantis, meanwhile, has made an about-face on criminal justice policy since announcing his presidential run in May. While he signed a major criminal justice reform bill in 2019, he last month vetoed two measures dealing with expungements and probation violations, despite them passing with overwhelming support in Florida’s GOP-dominated legislature.Writing in RealClearPolitics, Steve Cortes, a spokesman for the DeSantis-aligned Never Back Down Pac, said that as a congressman, the governor only supported the initial “law-and-order version” of the First Step Act, and not the one that Trump enacted.“This obfuscation on Trump’s jailbreak points to an even more serious problem for the 45th president as he seeks re-election: he remains unable or unwilling to admit policy mistakes and to propose appropriate reversals or reforms,” Cortes wrote.Arthur Rizer, a conservative advocate for the act who co-founded ARrow Center for Justice Reform, remembers DeSantis as a supporter of the law during his time in Congress. Pence, meanwhile, at one point went to the Capitol to personally negotiate with GOP senators on getting the bill passed.The former vice-president is currently polling in the single digits among Republican candidates, while DeSantis is in a distant second place to Trump.“I think that they sense that there is a potential to create another wedge issue. And they are taking this opportunity to distinguish themselves from Trump. They can’t go out for Trump for the indictment stuff, so they’re looking for ways to pick at him,” Rizer said of the attacks on the First Step Act.“It actually breaks my heart to see people turning on something that’s done a lot of good for people who were in prison for relatively minor stuff. And now that they’re out with their families, and we’re using it as a political football, to score points and to dunk on the other side.” More

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      DeSantis attacks DoJ’s Trump letter during rare CNN interview – as it happened

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      From 1h agoRon DeSantis is defending Donald Trump, his chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, during his first non-Fox News interview.Florida’s governor is speaking on CNN now, repeating the former president’s claim that the justice department is being “weaponized”, though, notably, trying to distance himself from Trump over his January 6 conduct.DeSantis told host Jake Tapper:
      This country is going down the road of criminalizing political differences. And I think that’s wrong. [Manhattan district attorney] Alvin Bragg stretched the statute to be able to try to target Donald Trump.
      Most people, even people on the left, acknowledge if that wasn’t Trump, that case would not have likely been brought against the normal civilian.
      As president, my job is to restore a single standard of justice to end weaponization of these agencies. We’re gonna have a new FBI director on day one, we’re gonna have big changes at the department of justice.
      Americans across the political spectrum, need to have confidence that what is going on is based on the rule of law, not based on what political tribe you’re in.
      DeSantis’s interview looks like it’s going to be played in chunks throughout the coming hour, rather than as one big block.Before it began, Tapper wondered at the timing of Trump’s decision to announce he had received the “target” letter from justice department special counsel Jack Smith, noting it was suspiciously close to the DeSantis interview.The Trump target letter story has dominated the day’s headlines and assuredly stolen some of DeSantis’s thunder.Ron DeSantis’s brief interview on CNN has finished, and we’re closing the US politics blog now. But look out shortly for my colleague Martin Pengelly’s analysis of what DeSantis had to say.We’ll leave you with news, as promised, of the decision by authorities in Michigan to charge 16 “fake electors” over the scheme to keep Donald Trump in power after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden.Please join us again tomorrow for what is shaping up to be another lively day.Ron DeSantis claims he’s “doing better than everybody else” in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, despite overwhelming evidence he is far behind Donald Trump.The eye-raising claim came as he attempted to explain his lackluster recent polling in his CNN interview, which, as we’ve noted, is the first time the rightwing Republican governor has strayed beyond the friendly confines of Fox News.He referenced his re-election in Florida in November:
      I took a state that had been a one-point state, and we won it by 20 percentage points, 1.5 million votes. Our bread and butter were people like suburban moms, we’re leading a big movement for parents be involved in education, school choice, get the indoctrination out of schools.
      I was getting a lot of media attention at the time coming off the victory. I had to do my job as governor with my legislative session, and we had a great legislative session. I had to do that and I was basically taking fire.
      A lot of people view me as a threat. I think the left views me as a threat because they think I’ll beat Biden and actually deliver on all this stuff. And then of course people that have their allegiances … [and people] have gone after me.
      But the reality is this is a state by state process. I’m not running a campaign to try to juice you know, whatever we are in the national polls, and then whatever we did in the CNN [poll]. It’s fine. I’m definitely doing better than everybody else.
      Ron DeSantis is insisting that “nobody really knows what wokeness is” as he attempts to defend his attacks on the US military for being “woke”.The Florida governor and presidential hopeful gave a campaign speech earlier today condemning “woke” in the armed forces that he says is becoming a deterrent to recruitment.Jake Tapper, the CNN host of DeSantis’s interview, is pushing back, citing recruitment statistics that say “wokeness” in the military is a long way down the list.DeSantis said:
      People see the military losing its way, not focusing on the mission, and focusing on a lot of these other things, which we see that in other aspects of society.
      People want to join the military because they think it’s something different. And I think some of the civilian leaders in the military are trying to have the military mimic corporate America, academia, that’s ultimately not going to work.
      Nobody really knows what wokeness is. I defined it, but a lot of people who railed against wokeness can’t even define it. There’s huge amount of concern about the direction that the military is going with all this.
      DeSantis brushed off a question on the war in Ukraine, calling it a “secondary or tertiary” priority for the US:
      The number one threat to our country is from China. We are going to approach the world instead of Europe being the focus, like it has been since world war two, and it was understandable why it would be, Nato stopping the Soviets, but now the Asia Pacific really needs to be to our generation what Europe was to the post-world war two generation.
      Prosecutors in Michigan have filed felony charges against 16 state residents “for their role in the alleged false electors scheme” that followed the 2020 US presidential election.The scheme, repeated in several swing states, attempted to install voters to falsely certify that Donald Trump had won the state, and deny Joe Biden victory.We’ll have more details soon.The court hearing in Fort Pierce, Florida, has wrapped up, with federal judge Aileen Cannon indicating she is not minded to move towards a quick trial for Donald Trump over his hoarding of classified documents.According to the CNN account of proceedings, Cannon, a Trump appointee, called the justice department’s proposed timeline for a December start as “rushed”, and she “challenged prosecutors to explain to her exactly how this was not what is called a complex trial”, referring to the espionage element of some of the charges against Trump.Lawyers for the defense also spoke, arguing Trump “is unlike any other defendant”, and repeating their request to delay the trial until after the 2024 election.While Cannon reportedly does not look minded to grant that request, she said she would look at the timeline and make a ruling shortly.Ron DeSantis is defending Donald Trump, his chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, during his first non-Fox News interview.Florida’s governor is speaking on CNN now, repeating the former president’s claim that the justice department is being “weaponized”, though, notably, trying to distance himself from Trump over his January 6 conduct.DeSantis told host Jake Tapper:
      This country is going down the road of criminalizing political differences. And I think that’s wrong. [Manhattan district attorney] Alvin Bragg stretched the statute to be able to try to target Donald Trump.
      Most people, even people on the left, acknowledge if that wasn’t Trump, that case would not have likely been brought against the normal civilian.
      As president, my job is to restore a single standard of justice to end weaponization of these agencies. We’re gonna have a new FBI director on day one, we’re gonna have big changes at the department of justice.
      Americans across the political spectrum, need to have confidence that what is going on is based on the rule of law, not based on what political tribe you’re in.
      DeSantis’s interview looks like it’s going to be played in chunks throughout the coming hour, rather than as one big block.Before it began, Tapper wondered at the timing of Trump’s decision to announce he had received the “target” letter from justice department special counsel Jack Smith, noting it was suspiciously close to the DeSantis interview.The Trump target letter story has dominated the day’s headlines and assuredly stolen some of DeSantis’s thunder.Here’s a recap of today’s developments:
      A new indictment for Donald Trump could be imminent after the former US president announced on Tuesday morning he had received a letter from special prosecutor Jack Smith identifying him as a “target” in the justice department’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection. People who receive target letters from federal authorities are often – but not always – indicted. It is unclear what specific charges Trump could face.
      Federal prosecutors have reportedly interviewed officials from all seven battleground states targeted by former Trump and his allies in their efforts to overturn the 2020 election results – Nevada, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and New Mexico.
      Republicans defended Trump after news of the latest development, criticizing the Biden administration for his prosecution. Speaker Kevin McCarthysuggested the government was targeting Trump out of fear he could win next November, while House majority leader Steve Scalise questioned the timing of the new development in the January 6 investigation.
      President Joe Biden “respects the Department of Justice, their independence”, the White House’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during a briefing.
      Lawyers for Trump and federal prosecutors have appeared before US district judge Aileen Cannon for a first hearing in Florida that could decide the crucial timing of the former president’s criminal case concerning the mishandling of classified documents. Tuesday’s session is Cannon’s first time hearing arguments in the case since Trump’s indictment last month.
      Trump is already facing criminal charges in Florida for illegally hoarding classified documents from his presidency, and prosecution in New York for a hush-money payment to an adult movie star.
      Trump is also under investigation in Fulton county, Georgia, for efforts to overturn his defeat to Biden there. Georgia’s supreme court on Monday unanimously rejected a request by Trump to block the prosecutor, Fani Willis, from prosecuting the case. His lawyers had argued that a special grand jury report that is part of the inquiry should be thrown out.
      Ron DeSantis is formally a candidate in South Carolina’s 2024 presidential primary after the Republican Florida governor filed paperwork during a campaign stop. He’s the first presidential candidate from either major political party on the ballot for the primary, which will take place on 3 February, the first of any other southern state.
      Democratic divisions over Israel were on stark display, as lawmakers prepared to welcome Isaac “Bougie” Herzog, the president of Israel, for an address to a joint session of Congress. Several progressive House members, including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, intend to boycott Herzog’s speech on Wednesday to protest the treatment of Palestinians under the government of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
      US district judge Aileen Cannon said a proposal from federal prosecutors that a trial in the classified documents case against Donald Trump and his aide, Walt Nauta, be held in mid-December was “a bit rushed”, CNN is reporting. Cannon did not decide on a trial date but said she plans to “promptly” issue an order on the matter, the news channel said.Florida Governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis is due to sit down with CNN’s Jake Tapper for a rare interview that will air at 4pm ET.It will be his first discussion with a major news organization other than Fox News.The interview comes days after a report said DeSantis had reduced campaign staff as his campaign has struggled to meet fundraising goals. Fewer than 10 staffers were reportedly laid off.Democratic divisions over Israel were on stark display on Tuesday, as lawmakers prepared to welcome Isaac “Bougie” Herzog, the president of Israel, for an address to a joint session of Congress.Several progressive House members, including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, intend to boycott Herzog’s speech on Wednesday to protest the treatment of Palestinians under the government of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.“In solidarity with the Palestinian people and all those who have been harmed by Israel’s apartheid government, I will be boycotting President Herzog’s joint address to Congress,” Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat of Michigan, said on Monday.
      I urge all members of Congress who stand for human rights for all to join me.
      House Democratic leaders have struck a much more conciliatory tone toward Herzog, embracing the opportunity to hear from the Israeli president.“President Bougie Herzog has been a force for good in Israeli society,” Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, said on Friday.
      I look forward to welcoming him with open arms when he comes to speak before Congress.
      The tension between House Democrats reached a boiling point over the weekend, after Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, described Israel as a “racist state” while speaking at a conference in Chicago. More

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      Ron DeSantis says Trump January 6 charges would not be good for country

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      Ron DeSantis said charges against Donald Trump over his election subversion, culminating in the deadly January 6 attack on Congress, would not be good for the country.“I hope he doesn’t get charged,” the Florida governor told CNN in a much-trailed interview on Tuesday. “I don’t think it’ll be good for the country.”Earlier in the day, Trump seized the news agenda when he said he had been told he was a target of the investigation by the special counsel Jack Smith into his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and had been told to appear before a federal grand jury in Washington DC on Thursday.Trump already faces 71 criminal charges, over hush-money payments and his retention of classified information.But he still leads DeSantis by around 30 points in polling regarding the Republican presidential primary while DeSantis reportedly experiences fundraising problems and staff changes.Still, when asked on CNN if Trump should be held accountable for his election subversion, culminating in the incitement of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress, DeSantis declined a chance to hit out at his rival.“So here’s the problem,” he said. “This country is going down the road of criminalising political differences. And I think that’s wrong.”The Florida governor went on to repeatedly namecheck the state-level indictment of Trump in New York over his hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels, who claims an affair, and the investigation of links between Trump and Russia during the 2016 election, which closed in 2019.“As president,” he said, reaching for a Republican talking point, “my job [will be] to restore a single standard of justice, to end weaponisation of these [federal] agencies.”He added: “This country needs to have a debate about the country’s future. If I’m the nominee I will be able to focus on President [Joe] Biden’s failures, then I’ll be able to articulate a positive vision for the future.“I don’t think it serves us good to have a presidential election focused on what happened four years ago in January and so I want to focus on looking forward. I don’t want to look back, I do not want to see [Trump charged], I hope he doesn’t get charged. I don’t think it’ll be good for the country. But at the same time, I’ve got to focus on looking forward and that’s what we’re going to do.”DeSantis did look backwards to Trump’s election subversion earlier in the day, at a press conference in West Columbia, South Carolina, that was meant to focus on his rollout of a policy regarding the US military but which featured repeated questions about Trump and his extreme legal predicament.DeSantis said then: “Look, there’s a difference between being brought up on criminal charges and doing things. Like for example, I think it was shown how [Trump] was in the White House [on January 6] and didn’t do anything while things were going on [at the Capitol]. He should have come out more forcefully, of course.”Nine deaths including law enforcement suicides are now linked to the Capitol riot, which Trump incited in an attempt to block certification of his defeat by Biden and which he did nothing to call off for some hours.“But to try to criminalise that” inaction, DeSantis said, “that’s a different issue entirely.”With his announcement of developments in the Smith investigation, Trump had once again hijacked an attempt by DeSantis to reset his campaign make an impact on the campaign trail.In a statement, Jason Miller, a senior Trump advisor, called the CNN interview “an afternoon hit that nobody will watch” but said: “The real story here is that the DeSantis campaign doesn’t know how to turn things around with their current candidate.” More

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      Republicans have their most diverse primary slate ever – yet they’re still denying racism exists

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      An African American man whose grandfather dropped out of school to pick cotton. A daughter of Indian immigrants raised in the Sikh faith. A son of Cuban immigrants, an Indian-American entrepreneur, a Black talk radio host and a former undercover CIA officer who is mixed race.A casual observer might assume that these candidates for the White House in 2024 must be from the same Democratic party that produced Barack Obama. In fact, they are all contenders in the Republican presidential primary field – the most diverse in the party’s history.But what should be an important breakthrough for a party long criticised for racist dog-whistling is overshadowed by some significant caveats. First, the opinion polls are dominated by Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, two white men whose words and deeds have alienated many Black voters.Second, they are, critics say, seeking to benefit from identity politics and deny the existence of racism at the same time. Senator Tim Scott, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, Miami mayor Francis Suarez, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, conservative radio host Larry Elder and ex-congressman Will Hurd refer to their own struggles but are reluctant to acknowledge a wider social and historical context.“It’s great to see the quality and diversity of the candidates who have emerged and are emerging,” said Michael Steele, who was the first Black chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC). “It does matter what they say and how they sound and how they represent not just Republican values but the values of the communities they come from, and that’s always been where the wheels start to come off. You can’t be authentically you if you’re parroting what white Republicanism is.”Steele’s elevation to RNC chairman after the 2008 election of Obama, America’s first Black president, implied that the party of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had finally recognised the need to broaden its appeal. There was early vindication in 2010 when Steele successfully backed Haley for governor of South Carolina, Scott for Congress in the same state and Susana Martinez for governor of New Mexico.But the following year, Steele lost his re-election bid to Reince Priebus, a white man from Wisconsin who would later become Trump’s White House chief of staff. When Republicans were defeated by Obama again, the RNC produced an “autopsy report” that urged them to diversify or die. Yet in 2016 Trump effectively tore that up with attacks on immigrants and Muslims that were cheered by white nationalists. He lost the popular vote but won the electoral college.There have been gains and setbacks since then. In last year’s midterm elections, the RNC said its lineup of candidates was more diverse than ever: 32 Latinos, 22 Black candidates, 11 Asian Americans and two Native Americans. Among them was Herschel Walker, who denied the existence of racism and lost a Senate race in Georgia to Raphael Warnock, a Democrat steeped in the civil rights legacy of Martin Luther King.Now the presidential primary candidates vying to take on Joe Biden, an 80-year-old white man, seem unwilling to discuss racial politics, except in the past tense or with an individual anecdote rather than a societal diagnosis. Haley, the first Asian American woman to compete for the Republican nomination, has described the discrimination that she and her family suffered as immigrants in the south while rejecting the idea of systemic racism.Launching his presidential campaign, Scott, the sole Black Republican in the Senate, spoke of feeling angry and disillusioned until a mentor “told me in the most loving way possible to look in the mirror and to blame myself”, leading Scott to choose “personal responsibility over resentment. I became the master of my fate.”It was a message that implied: if Scott could live the American dream, any Black person can. He accordingly likes to frequently swipe at the left with lines such as, “My life disrupts their narrative. The truth of my life disrupts their lies,” – even though has in in the past described incidents in which he was racially profiled by police, including US Capitol police.Steele, for one, is not impressed. He said: “Tim knows me, he knows I’m not going to sugarcoat shit; I’m going to be straight up. That’s just playing to a white audience because that’s not his own experience. He’s the one who told us of the time he was profiled as a member of Congress. So what are you talking about?“You can be aspirational about your own story and your own future while at the same time being honest and recognising the history of your story as it’s related through your parents, grandparents, neighbours, friends, who I would probably argue with Tim would not necessarily view their experience with America as exclusively, ‘I did all this by pulling myself up by my bootstraps and white America appreciated me as an American’. That’s just not how that narrative plays out.”Republicans have taken pains to reject the New York Times’s 1619 Project and the concept of slavery being part of America’s origin story. A fashionable reflex is to selectively quote King’s “I have a dream” speech about a nation where children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” in an effort to justify colour blindness. This is seen by critics as disingenuous cherry picking from a civil rights leader who also highlighted police brutality and systemic poverty.Like previous Black Republican candidates, such as Herman Cain and Ben Carson, this year’s field has little incentive to dwell on the party’s divisive past and risk being accused of going “woke”. Leah Wright Rigueur, a political historian at Johns Hopkins University, told the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast: “There is no reward for calling the party out on racism or bigotry. There’s none for Black Republicans.“In fact, we have documented evidence that the Black Republicans who get support from within the party … are the ones who either support the party uncritically, who echo whatever the party’s standard bearer is saying, or who find this space to carve out where they don’t alienate their audience while also adhering to certain conservative principles.”Rigueur, author of The Loneliness of the Black Republican, added: “The latter is where Tim Scott is, and so that’s why you hear him say things like, ‘I have experienced racism on an individual level but I don’t believe America is a racist place.’ And so it becomes something which alleviates the conscience of the base, where they can say, well, it doesn’t affect me, that’s something he experienced, that’s his individual experience. That can be true, but it has nothing to do with me, and I can feel OK in this moment.”Although the current Congress has more Black Republicans than at any point since 1877, the number is still only five. Efforts to recruit diverse candidates and appeal to voters of colour have been repeatedly undermined by party leaders and allies. Trump, the runaway leader in primary polls so far, dined last year with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken antisemite and racist.Last month, the former president’s appointees to the supreme court were instrumental in ruling against affirmative action in colleges and universities. Scott told Fox News that it was “a good day for America”; Haley tweeted, “Picking winners & losers based on race is fundamentally wrong”; Ramaswamy told Politico: “Affirmative action is the single greatest form of institutional racism in America today.”This week Tommy Tuberville, a senator for Alabama, gave several media interviews in which he repeatedly declined to describe white nationalists as racist before finally backing down. And Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public instruction, said teachers should tell students that the Tulsa race massacre was not racially motivated.Tara Setmayer, a political commentator who received a torrent of online racist abuse following a recent TV interview, argues that the diversity of the Republican primary slate will not address the deeper malaise. “The irony in this is that the diversity is on paper and the party that claims that they’re so against affirmative action is seemingly intent on putting up racial numbers to show, look, we’re not racist, we have diversity. You can’t have it both ways.“Taking away the rights of women, the rights of minorities – these are all issues that are being advocated by a Republican party that wants to laud itself for ‘diversity’? They’re perfectly OK with a governor of a major state like Ron DeSantis banning diversity and inclusion programmes. They’re OK with book-banning on Black history. It doesn’t make sense.Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project and former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, criticised Haley, Scott and others for denying that systemic racism has an impact on Black communities.“To try to whitewash that, I’m embarrassed for them, because you cannot tell me that they don’t go home at night and watch the news, read the newspaper, look at the bills and the laws that are being passed in their own states and the experiences of people of colour in this country and not acknowledge privately that, guess what, racism still exists in America.“It’s so disingenuous for them to say that, and Tim Scott more infuriatingly, given that he’s a Black man in the south, who himself claims he was racially profiled as a senator, but turns around and denies that there is still a problem with race in this country when he’s speaking in front of predominantly white audiences. He’s not going to go to the NAACP convention or the Urban League convention or speak in front of the Congressional Black Caucus saying those things.”The Democratic party remains more diverse by every measure. Some 80% of racial and ethnic minority members in the current Congress are Democrats. A new Pew Research Center analysis of last year’s midterm elections shows that 93% of Black voters supported Democrats while just 5% backed Republicans.Hispanic voters favoured Democratic candidates by a 21-point margin in 2022 – but that was a sharp drop from the 47-point margin they enjoyed in 2018. Such shifts give Republicans hope that they will continue to make inroads next year – with or without a Black nominee.Antjuan Seawright, a party strategist based in Columbia, South Carolina, said: “That word diversity means different things to different people and for us as Democrats, not only have we talked the talk when it comes to diversity, but we walk the walk with age, race, gender, geographics and demographics.“The browning of America is happening right before all of our eyes and, truth be told, is that Republicans have not given any voters of colour a reason to even think about joining their chorus.” More

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      DeSantis reduces staff as campaign struggles to meet fundraising goals – report

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      Florida governor and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has reduced campaign staff as his campaign has struggled to meet fundraising goals.Fewer than 10 staffers were laid off, according to an anonymous staffer, reported Politico. The staffers were involved in event planning and may be picked up by the pro-DeSantis super Pac Never Back Down. Two senior campaign advisers, Dave Abrams and Tucker Obenshain, left the campaign this past week to assist a pro-DeSantis nonprofit group.Sources within the campaign reported an internal assessment that the campaign hired too many staffers too early.“They never should have brought so many people on; the burn rate was way too high,” said one Republican source familiar with the campaign’s thought process to NBC News. “People warned the campaign manager but she wanted to hear none of it.”More shake-ups within the campaign are expected in the coming weeks after two months on the presidential campaign, with DeSantis still lagging substantially in second place behind former president Donald Trump.Even in DeSantis’s home state of Florida, Trump still has a 20-point lead over the governor, according to a recent Florida Atlantic University poll.“Early state voters are only softly committed to the candidates they select on a ballot question this far out – including many Trump supporters,” read an internal campaign memo obtained by NBC News as the DeSantis campaign is refocusing resources on early primary states. “Our focus group participants in the early states even say they do not plan on making up their mind until they meet the candidates or watch them debate.”The DeSantis campaign raised $20m since launching his presidential campaign, but over one-third of the donations were received during the first 10 days of his campaign, and financial fundraising data shows his campaign has been reliant on wealthy donors who have already reached their maximum permitted individual contributions. His campaign has spent significantly on a payroll of 90 staffers and fundraising efforts, including over $900,000 on merchandise, $883,000 on digital consulting, $867,000 on media placements and $730,000 on direct mail.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDeSantis faced scrutiny this week following an investigation by the Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times reported several veterans resigned and reported abuse within Florida’s state guard training, likening training to a militia for the civilian disaster relief force. The governor reactivated the state guard in 2022 after it had been dormant since the end of the second world war.In May, DeSantis signed a bill to expand the state guard and make it permanent, expanding the group from 400 to 1,500 members and expanding its budget from $10m to $107.6m. More

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      Donald Trump’s legal team urges Georgia court to block 2020 election investigation – as it happened

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      From 3h agoLawyers for former US president Donald Trump are asking Georgia’s highest court to prevent the district attorney who has been investigating his actions in the wake of the 2020 election from prosecuting him and to throw out a special grand jury report that is part of the inquiry, the Associated Press reports.AP writes:
      Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been investigating since early 2021 whether Trump and his allies broke any laws as they tried to overturn his narrow election loss in Georgia to Democrat Joe Biden. She has suggested that she is likely to seek charges in the case from a grand jury next month.
      Trump’s Georgia legal team on Friday filed similar petitions in the Georgia Supreme Court and Fulton County Superior Court naming Willis and Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who oversaw the special grand jury, as respondents. A spokesperson for Willis declined to comment. McBurney did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
      Trump’s legal team — Drew Findling, Jennifer Little and Marissa Goldberg — acknowledged that the filings are unusual but necessary given the tight time frame. Willis has indicated she will use the special grand jury report to seek an indictment “within weeks, if not days.” Two new regular grand juries were seated this week, and one is likely to hear the case.
      “Even in an extraordinarily novel case of national significance, one would expect matters to take their normal procedural course within a reasonable time,” the filings say. “But nothing about these processes have been normal or reasonable. And the all-but-unavoidable conclusion is that the anomalies below are because Petitioner is President Donald J. Trump.”
      Republicans and Democrats in Congress are on a collision course after rightwing lawmakers inserted provisions targeting Pentagon policies on abortion access, transgender care and diversity into a must-pass defense spending bill that cleared the House this morning. Democrats are outraged that the GOP used the measure, which usually attracts bipartisan support, to push culture war goals, but there’s no word yet on what will become of the legislation when it arrives in the Senate, where Joe Biden’s allies rule the roost and are unlikely to support attempts to prevent service members from accessing abortions services or gender-affirming care. Expect to hear lots more about this in the days to come.Here’s what else happened today:
      Tucker Carlson might be unemployed, but that apparently has not changed his views on US support to Ukraine, as he made clear in an exchange with GOP presidential contender and senator Tim Scott.
      Mike Pence tried to explain to a rightwing crowd in Iowa why he did not go along with Donald Trump’s wishes on January 6. It did not go well.
      Speaking of Trump, his lawyers are trying to stop Atlanta-area prosecutor Fani Willis’s investigation of his campaign to overturn the 2020 election result in Georgia.
      A federal appeals court panel blocked a judge’s ruling that prevented some Biden administration officials from holding talks with social media companies intended to fight misinformation.
      Four House Democrats from swing districts crossed party lines to support the defense funding bill, while four conservative Republicans opposed it, with one saying it was too expensive.
      Former US vice president Mike Pence earlier at the Tucker Carlson-anchored event in Iowa, reiterated his disapproval of Donald Trump’s encouragement on January 6, 2021, of protesters to seek the overturning of the 2020 election results.Having already defended his refusal to block the certification by the US Congress of Joe Biden’s victory, Pence gladly repeated for the highly-pro-Trump crowd his assertions that he’s made before that Trump’s exhortations (and tweets) on January 6 exhorting the crowd to take action to keep him in office were reckless.“Trump’s words that day were reckless…whatever his intentions in that moment, it endangered me, my family and everyone else in the Capitol,” Pence said.He added, as the audience remained eerily quiet: “The law will hold him accountable.”He later added, perhaps in a desperate attempt to win more warmth from the crowd: “And Kamala Harris will have no right to overturn the election when we beat them in 2024.”The now-stayed federal judge’s ruling restricting how some Biden administration officials may interact with social media companies was evidence of a “weaponization of the court” that benefits pedalers of misinformation, an expert on combating such lies told the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington earlier this month:Restricting the ability of the Biden administration to work with social media companies in countering online conspiracy theories is a “weaponisation of the court system” that could devastate the fight against misinformation ahead of the 2024 presidential election, a leading expert has warned.Nina Jankowicz, a specialist in disinformation campaigns, told the Guardian that an injunction imposed by a federal judge on Tuesday against key federal agencies and officials blocking their communication with tech platforms could unleash false information in critical areas of public life. She said that election denialism and anti-vaccine propaganda could be the beneficiaries.“This is a weaponisation of the court system. It is an intentional and purposeful move to disrupt the work that needs to be done ahead of the 2024 election, and it’s really chilling,” she said.A federal appeals court has stayed a judge’s ruling from earlier this month that put limits on how certain White House officials could interact with social media companies, Reuters reports.The lower court’s ruling in response to a lawsuit from Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri complicated efforts by the Biden administration to work with platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to address misinformation around elections and the Covid-19 pandemic.Here’s Reuters reporting from when the lower court’s ruling was first handed down on what it means for the fight against conspiracy theories:
      The ruling said US government agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services and the FBI could not talk to social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech” under the free speech clause of the first amendment to the US constitution.
      A White House official said the US justice department was reviewing the order and will evaluate its options.
      The order also mentioned by name officials, including the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, and Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in its restrictions.
      Judge Terry Doughty, in an order filed with the US district court for the western district of Louisiana, made some exceptions for communications between government officials and the companies, including to warn about risks to national security and about criminal activity.
      The injunction was first reported by the Washington Post.
      Tuesday’s order marks a win for Republicans who had sued the Biden administration, saying it was using the coronavirus health crisis and the threat of misinformation as an excuse to curb views that disagreed with the government.
      US officials have said they were aiming to tamp down misinformation about Covid vaccines to curb preventable deaths.
      Democratic and Republican lawmakers have plenty to say about the defense spending bill that just passed the House, with one GOP congressman saying his party wanted to use the legislation to align the military’s policies with “traditional America”.Here are Tim Burchett’s comments to CNN:Then there’s the ever-puzzling Nancy Mace, a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina who does not seemed pleased with the bill’s provisions barring the Pentagon from paying for service members to travel for abortions, but voted for it anyway:Donald Trump’s attorneys are attempting to disrupt Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis’s investigation into the campaign to overturn the 2020 election result in Georgia days after she impaneled two grand juries specifically tasked with deciding who should face charges in her inquiry. Here’s coverage from the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly of that development, from Tuesday:A grand jury selected in Georgia on Tuesday is expected to say whether Donald Trump and associates should face criminal charges over their attempt to overturn the former president’s defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election.The district attorney of Fulton county, Fani Willis, has indicated she expects to obtain indictments between the end of July and the middle of August. Trump also faces possible federal charges over his election subversion, culminating in his incitement of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.Trump already faces trials on 71 criminal charges: 34 in New York over hush money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels and 37 in Florida, from federal prosecutors and regarding his retention of classified documents after leaving office.Lawyers for former US president Donald Trump are asking Georgia’s highest court to prevent the district attorney who has been investigating his actions in the wake of the 2020 election from prosecuting him and to throw out a special grand jury report that is part of the inquiry, the Associated Press reports.AP writes:
      Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been investigating since early 2021 whether Trump and his allies broke any laws as they tried to overturn his narrow election loss in Georgia to Democrat Joe Biden. She has suggested that she is likely to seek charges in the case from a grand jury next month.
      Trump’s Georgia legal team on Friday filed similar petitions in the Georgia Supreme Court and Fulton County Superior Court naming Willis and Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who oversaw the special grand jury, as respondents. A spokesperson for Willis declined to comment. McBurney did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
      Trump’s legal team — Drew Findling, Jennifer Little and Marissa Goldberg — acknowledged that the filings are unusual but necessary given the tight time frame. Willis has indicated she will use the special grand jury report to seek an indictment “within weeks, if not days.” Two new regular grand juries were seated this week, and one is likely to hear the case.
      “Even in an extraordinarily novel case of national significance, one would expect matters to take their normal procedural course within a reasonable time,” the filings say. “But nothing about these processes have been normal or reasonable. And the all-but-unavoidable conclusion is that the anomalies below are because Petitioner is President Donald J. Trump.”
      The sound of silence. Or, to be fair, the whisper of sporadic applause. That’s what just greeted Mike Pence when he again defended his refusal on January 6, 2021, to refuse to block the certification by Congress of Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump.The presidential candidate did not impress the right-wing crowd at Tucker Carlson’s event when he said: “I did my duty” and upheld the US constitution, after thousands of extreme Trump supporters had invaded the US Capitol in a deadly insurrection as they tried to overturn Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election.A few hands clap. This is hardly surprising, but very interesting to hear live.“It’s important that we hold those accountable that perpetrated acts of violence in our nation’s Capitol,” he said, to almost total silence in the hall. He quickly added that there needed to be more vigor in prosecuting people who ended up rioting during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. That drew cheers.Carlson asked Pence: “Do you think the last election was fair?”In short, Pence indicated he did. He noted that there were some irregularities and that changes made by states to voting procedures as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic undermined public confidence in the system. But he noted that there were recounts and lawsuits and in the end, in terms of the votes “states certified and courts upheld and ultimately we were able to establish that” nothing “would change the outcome of the election in any way,” adding: “I knew I had to do my duty that day” when he endorsed the certification of Biden’s victory, in the early hours of January 7, 2021.Former US vice president Mike Pence has taken the stage at the event in Iowa hosted by Tucker Carlson, as he eyes a comeback after being fired from Fox News, a forum together with Blaze Media feature Republican presidential candidates Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and Asa Hutchinson.Pence begins by slamming Biden economic policy, Biden policies at the US-Mexico border and celebrating the Iowa legislature passing a ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, when many people don’t even know they’re pregnant.Pence noted the bill will be signed into law later today by Iowa governor Kim Reynolds.Now Pence is talking about the insurrection by extremist supporters of Donald Trump at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. More in a moment.Hello again, US politics live blog readers, it’s been a lively morning and there is more action to come, on Capitol Hill and elsewhere.Here’s where things stand:
      Tucker Carlson has been one of the most prominent public skeptics of America’s support for Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion, and he’s carrying on in this bent at the event he’s hosting today. “Why not force a peace?” he asked GOP presidential candidate Tim Scott today.
      The House approved the annual defense bill that rightwing Republicans packed with culture war amendments, including provisions blocking the Pentagon’s policies on abortion, gender-affirming care and diversity.
      The White House today announced it had forgiven $39bn in student loan debt held by 804,000 borrowers after making fixes to a program intended to provide relief for certain people who had been paying for 20 years or more.
      House Democrats accused GOP of ‘extreme and reckless legislative joyride’ in defense bill. In a joint statement, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, whip Katherine Clark and caucus chair Pete Aguilar encouraged their members to vote against the NDAA, saying “extreme MAGA Republicans have chosen to hijack” legislation that is typically passed with bipartisan support.
      After House conservatives packed it with culture war amendments, this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed by a party line vote – with a few exceptions.Democrats generally opposed the legislation, while Republicans approved it, except for the following crossover votes, as compiled by CNN:The four Democrats who voted for it all hail from swing districts, while the four Republicans who opposed it are generally seen as belonging to the party’s right wing.Among the Republican opponents was Colorado’s Ken Buck, who in a statement cited the legislation’s price tag as the reason he voted against it: More

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      Ron DeSantis cannot ‘out-Trump Trump’ in primary, Ocasio-Cortez says

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      Ron DeSantis has made “very large, critical errors” in the Republican presidential primary, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, the biggest of which is the Florida governor’s attempt to “out-Trump Trump” and appeal to the hard-right GOP base.“The dynamics of these races change from day to day,” the New York progressive congresswoman told MSNBC. “I think that Governor DeSantis has made some very large, critical errors.“You can’t out-Trump Trump, right? And that’s what he’s really been trying to do. His attacks on teachers, on schools, on LGBTQ+ Americans, I think, go way too far in the state of Florida. And I think that they are a profound political miscalculation and an overcompensation.”DeSantis is a clear second in polling regarding the Republican nomination but lags as much as 30 points behind Donald Trump.The former president is the clear frontrunner despite an unprecedented 71 criminal indictments, a $5m civil penalty after being held liable for sexual assault and defamation, and the prospect of more charges to come regarding attempted election subversion.DeSantis, a former US congressman, won a landslide re-election in Florida last year. He has pursued a hard-right agenda, including signing a six-week abortion ban, loosening gun controls and attacking the teaching of race and LGBTQ+ issues in public schools.But he has struggled to make an impact on the campaign trail, observers suggesting he lacks the skills to truly connect with voters, even in a Republican primary, let alone in a general election.On Sunday, DeSantis told Fox News: “The media does not want me to be the nominee. I think that’s very, very clear. Why? Because they know I will beat [Joe] Biden. But, even more importantly, they know I will actually deliver on all these things.”Head-to-head polling shows Biden and DeSantis in a tight race. Recent surveys from Emerson and Yahoo News gave Biden leads of six and three points respectively. NBC News found the two men in a tie.DeSantis listed hard-right priorities he said he would pursue in power: “We will stop the invasion at the border. We will take on the drug cartels. We will curtail the administrative state. We will get spending under control.“We will do all the things that they don’t want to see done, and so they’re going to continue doing the type of narrative.”Ocasio-Cortez was not convinced.Speaking on Sunday to the former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, now an MSNBC host, she said: “He may be trying to win a base, but that base belongs to Donald Trump.“And he has sacrificed, I think, the one thing that others may have thought would make him competitive, which is this idea that he would somehow be more rational than Donald Trump, which he isn’t.” More