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      Ron DeSantis leads Donald Trump by 23 points in Republican poll

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      Ron DeSantis leads Donald Trump by 23 points in Republican pollFlorida governor takes enormous lead over embattled ex-president for 2024 race as Mike Pence nears a run of his own In a new poll regarding potential Republican nominees for president in 2024, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, led Donald Trump by a whopping 23 points.Republican and Republican-leaning voters dealt the significant blow to the former president’s ego in a survey carried out by USA Today and Suffolk University and released on Tuesday.There was good news for Trump in another poll covering the same time period, by Morning Consult, which gave him an 18-point lead over DeSantis. Furthermore, the polling website FiveThirtyEight still shows Trump in the lead in most surveys.Nonetheless, David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, told USA Today: “Republicans and conservative independents increasingly want Trumpism without Trump.”That much has been clear in the rise of DeSantis, a former US military lawyer and hard-right congressman who has pursued distinctly Trumpist hardline, theatrically cruel policies as governor of Florida, in particular on immigration and education.Last month, DeSantis marked a crushing re-election victory with a confidant speech, declaring his state “where woke goes to die” to chants of “two more years”.Trump declared his third consecutive run for the Republican nomination shortly after the midterm elections.But he has shown precious little momentum, particularly after elections in which most of his endorsed candidates for key state posts and in Congress went down to defeat, contributing to a disappointing Republican performance.Trump is also in extensive legal jeopardy, over his attempted election subversion, the retention of White House records and his business affairs.USA Today said its poll showed that among Republican and Republican-leaning voters, enthusiasm for another Trump run is receding.“In July, 60% of Republicans wanted Trump to run again. In October, that number had dipped to 56%. Now it has fallen to 47%, an almost-even split with the 45% who don’t want him to run for a third time.”The poll put Joe Biden, the president, up 47%-40% in a notional rematch with Trump.Biden is 80, Trump 76. Biden has said he will decide on whether to run again over the Christmas holidays.The new poll put DeSantis, 44, ahead of Biden in a notional match-up, 47%-43%.Paleologos sounded a familiar note of caution, saying a big primary field could divide Republican opposition to Trump and hand him the nomination again.“Add in a number of other Republican presidential candidates who would divide the anti-Trump vote and you have a recipe for a repeat of the 2016 Republican caucuses and primaries, when Trump outlasted the rest of the divided field.”Another likely candidate, the former vice-president Mike Pence, is edging closer to announcing a run.Speaking in New Hampshire, an early voting state, on Tuesday, the former vice-president told Fox News the reception accorded his recent memoir “has been a great source of encouragement as we think about the way forward and what our calling might be in the future”.Pence said he and his wife, Karen, would make a decision on whether to mount a run next year, after “prayerful consideration” over the holiday period.“We’ll continue to travel, we’ll continue to listen,” he said.TopicsUS elections 2024US politicsRepublicansRon DeSantisDonald TrumpMike PencenewsReuse this content More

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      ‘That’s Hitler, Bannon thought’: 2022 in books about Trump and US politics

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      ‘That’s Hitler, Bannon thought’: 2022 in books about Trump and US politics The former president continues to dominate political bestseller lists, from staffers’ tell-alls to his own compulsion to tell all to Maggie Haberman and Bob WoodwardDonald Trump has been out of office almost two years, but he is still lodged in America’s consciousness. In mid-November, he declared his 2024 re-election bid. Days later, Merrick Garland, the attorney general, appointed Jack Smith as special counsel.DeSantis and Pence lead Republican wave – of presidential campaign booksRead moreTrump has since demanded that the US constitution be terminated, and dined with Ye, the recording artist and antisemite formerly known as Kanye West, and Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist. This week, on a bleak Tuesday afternoon in New York, a jury found the Trump Organization guilty on all counts in a tax fraud trial.The Trump show is never dull. As expected, in 2022 the 45th president left his mark on what Americans read about politics.In February, Jeremy Peters of the New York Times delivered Insurgency, capturing how the party of Lincoln and Reagan morphed into the fiefdom of Trump. Peters caught Steve Bannon rating his former boss among the worst presidents, and likening Trump’s history-making 2015 escalator ride to a scene from Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film.“That’s Hitler, Bannon thought.” By extension, that makes Mar-a-Lago Trump’s Eagle’s Nest.As for Bannon, having burned through a Trump pardon, he awaits sentencing for contempt of Congress and will stand trial next year in Manhattan for conspiracy and fraud.In March came One Damn Thing After Another, another installment of Trump alumni performance art, this time by Bill Barr, the ex-attorney general.Barr took aim at Joe Biden for his stance on Russia, saying “demonizing [Vladimir] Putin is not a foreign policy”, nor “the way grown-ups should think”. Looks like the author didn’t have an invasion of Ukraine on his bingo card. In case anyone cares, Barr still loathes progressives, as his book makes abundantly clear. But he did spill his guts to the January 6 committee.May brought the first political blockbuster of the year, This Will Not Pass, in which Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns delivered 473 pages of essential reading. Kevin McCarthy denied having talked smack about Trump and the January 6 insurrection, so Martin appeared on MSNBC with tapes. The House Republican leader lied.Burns and Martin’s subtitle was “Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future”. They closed with an anxious meditation on the state of US democracy, quoting Malcolm Turnbull, a former prime minister of Australia: “You know that great line that you hear all the time, ‘This is not us. This is not America.’ You know what? It is, actually.”Later in May came A Sacred Oath by Mark Esper, Trump’s last defense secretary, and Here’s the Deal by the former White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway, Trump administration memoirs – and personas – as different as day and night.Esper pulled no punches, depicting Trump as unfit for office and a threat to democracy, a prisoner of wrath, impulse and appetite. His memoir was surgically precise in its score-settling, not just fuel for the pyre of Trump alumni revenge porn.Here’s the Deal was just that. Disdain unvarnished, Conway strafed Bannon, Jared Kushner and Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff. Unsurprisingly, she had few kind words for Biden, blaming him for the Ukraine invasion and for Iran threatening nuclear breakout. Trump junked the Iran deal and was Putin’s toady. Then again, Conway is the queen of “alternative facts”.In August came Breaking History, Kushner’s own attempt to spin his triumphs while playing the victim. His book was predictably self-serving and selective, even trying to spin as something understandable his ex-con dad luring his own brother-in-law into a filmed liaison with a prostitute. The Kushners and the Trumps are not your typical families.Breaking History also came with conflicting creation stories. The New York Times reported that Kushner took an online MasterClass from the thriller writer James Patterson, then “batted out” 40,000 words of his own. By contrast, the Guardian learned that Kushner received assistance from Ken Kurson, a former editor of the New York Observer, and two other Trump White House alumni. As luck had it, Trump granted Kurson a pardon for cyberstalking, though Kurson later pleaded guilty after being charged with spying on his wife.‘The first thing he told us was a lie’Labor Day signaled a pre-midterm publication rush. With The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser offered a beautifully written, utterly dispiriting history of the man who attacked democracy. In electing Trump, the New York Times and New Yorker, husband-and-wife pair wrote, the US empowered a leader who “attacked basic principles of constitutional democracy at home” and “venerated” strongmen abroad. Whether the system winds up in the “morgue” and how much time remains to make sure it doesn’t were the authors’ open questions.The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against AmericaRead moreThe results of the midterms – Republicans squeaking the House, Democrats holding the Senate, election deniers defeated in key states – offered a glimmer of hope. Truth, however, remains a scarce commodity for Trump.“When we sat down with [him] a year after his defeat,” Baker and Glasser wrote, “the first thing he told us was a lie.”Specifically, Trump claimed the Biden administration had asked him to record a public service announcement promoting Covid vaccinations.Baker and Glasser also depicted Hitler as a Trump role model. To John Kelly, his second chief of staff, a retired Marine Corps general and a father bereaved in the 9/11 wars, Trump complained: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”“Which generals?”“The German generals in World War II.”“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?”According to Baker and Glasser, Kelly used The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a study by 27 mental health professionals, as an owner’s manual.Next, a month before the midterms, Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man made its debut. A political epic, the book traced Trump’s journey from the streets of Queens to the Upper East Side, from the White House to Mar-a-Lago.Haberman gave Trump and those close to him plenty of voice – and rope. She caught Kushner gleefully asking a White House visitor: “Did you see I cut Bannon’s balls off?” To quote Peter Navarro, another Trump tell-all author, like Bannon now under indictment: “Nepotism and excrement roll downhill.”Confidence Man review: Maggie Haberman takes down TrumpRead moreHaberman interviewed Trump three times. He confessed that he is drawn to her like a moth to a flame. “I love being with her,” he said. “She’s like my psychiatrist.” But she saw through him, writing: “The reality is that he treats everyone like they are his psychiatrists.”Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, tried his hand with So Help Me God, a well-written and well-paced memoir that will, however, do little to shake the impression that he is the Rodney Dangerfield of vice-presidents: he gets no respect.Pence delivered a surprising indictment, cataloging Trump’s faults, errors and sins from Charlottesville to Russia and Ukraine. But Pence’s is a precarious balancing act. He upbraided Trump for his failure to condemn “the racists and antisemites in Charlottesville by name”, but also rejected the contention Trump was a bigot. As for Putin, “there was no reason for Trump not to call out Russia’s bad behaviour”, Pence wrote, while calling Trump’s infamous, impeachment-triggering phone call to Volodymyr Zelenskiy “less than perfect”. In the end, So Help Me God was a strained attempt to retain political viability.‘As long as you make the right friends’Not all the notable books of 2022 were about Trump himself. Some examined the people and movements that lie adjacent. We Are Proud Boys by Andy Campbell looked at the violence-addicted street fighters who have become best friends with many of Trump’s past and present supporters, from Ann Coulter to Roger Stone.As Campbell put it, the Proud Boys have “proven that you can make it as a fascist gang of hooligans in this country, as long as you make the right friends”.Andrew Kirtzman’s Giuliani provided a vivid reminder that Trump’s gravitational pull induces destruction. The author covered Rudy Giuliani when he was New York mayor. Rudy wasn’t always a buffoon. The book is masterly and engrossing.Broken News, by Chris Stirewalt, doubled as a critique of the media and a rebuke of Fox News, his former employer, and Trump. The Washington Post, the New York Times, MSNBC and Joe Scarborough fared poorly too. Substantively, Stirewalt contended that much of the news business is about the pursuit of ratings. These days, Fox is battling defamation lawsuits arising from repeatedly airing Trump’s “big lie”.Robert Draper’s Weapons of Mass Delusion dissected the Trumpian nightmare, focusing on the consequences of the world the internet created. Republicans like the far-right Arizona congressman Paul Gosar and his mentee, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, are much more likely to be rewarded than penalized for “outrageous, fact-free behavior”.Gabriel Debenedetti is the national correspondent for New York magazine. His first book, The Long Alliance, brought depth and context to the near-two-decade relationship between the 44th and 46th presidents, emphasizing that the pair’s time in power together was no buddy movie. Barack Obama was the star. Joe Biden played a supporting role – until he too seized the brass ring.‘It’s on the tape’: Bob Woodward on Donald Trump’s ‘criminal behavior’Read moreThe most memorable contribution to this year’s American political literature, however, was not a printed book. The Trump Tapes, subtitled “Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump” is an audio collection that offers a passport to the heart of darkness.In June 2020, Trump confided: “I get people, they come up with ideas. But the ideas are mine, Bob. Want to know something? Everything is mine.” Wow.Woodward’s tapes convincingly demonstrated that Trump knew in early 2020 that Covid posed a mortal danger to the US, but balked at telling the whole truth.Trump holds the press in contempt but yearns for its approval. He flattered Woodward as “a great historian”. Maggie Haberman knows the feeling.TopicsBooksUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS elections 2020US elections 2024Joe BidenfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Trump was fresh and new during his 2016 campaign. Has his fame fizzled?

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      Trump was fresh and new during his 2016 campaign. Has his fame fizzled?The failed ‘red wave’ during the midterm elections marked the beginning of a downward spiral of losses and lost support Instead of taking off like a rocket over the past three weeks, Donald Trump’s bid to win back the White House appears, so far at least, to be blowing up on the launchpad.The swagger of 2016 has given way to somnolence in 2022. Opinion polls are grim. Legal setbacks are piling up. A run of dismal results in the midterm elections, culminating in another Republican loss in Georgia this week, have punctured his aura of invincibility within the party.And Trump has performed astonishing acts of self-sabotage, from dining with antisemites to calling for the constitution to be shredded. He has eschewed a widely-anticipated spree of public rallies, instead remaining largely out of the public gaze.Trump’s act is ‘old and tired’, says his own former national security adviserRead moreFor any conventional candidate, such a list would be career-ending. For Trump, who has long defied political gravity, the fallout remains uncertain. But even the most ardent propagandist would be hard pushed to describe it as a flying start.“It couldn’t be going any worse,” said Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington. “And it’s not because Donald Trump is making mistakes. It’s because Donald Trump is being Donald Trump.“He was something new and fresh and interesting back in 2016. He has presided over three disastrous election cycles for Republicans in 2018, 2020 and 2022 and he’s the same old Donald Trump, caring only about himself, wrapped up in his own grievances and his own whining. It’s just not playing anymore for the American people.”It was not meant to be like this. When Trump first set the date for his campaign launch at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida for 15 November, it was based on the premise that Republicans would enjoy a “red wave” in the midterm elections, putting wind in his sails for the coming months.Instead the midterms were a nightmare as most of his handpicked candidates, including election deniers, were wiped out in swing states. This week’s defeat of former American football star Herschel Walker by incumbent Raphael Warnock in a Senate runoff in Georgia seemed to confirm that Trump has become ballot box poison, prompting a headline on the once loyal Fox News website: “Herschel Walker just wrote Donald Trump’s political obituary”.Gallingly, one of the biggest winners in the midterms was Ron DeSantis, re-elected as governor of Florida by nearly 20 percentage points, cementing his status as the biggest threat to Trump. A Yahoo News/YouGov poll conducted from 1 to 5 December found DeSantis leading the former president by five percentage points in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination.So it was that Trump’s Mar-a-Lago speech was widely derided as a damp squib, lacking his usual bombast and brio and even his daughter, Ivanka, has decided to sit this one out. Since then, the campaign has been running on autopilot and little has been seen of the former president hunkered down in Florida, venturing out only to play golf.Trump’s rambunctious campaign rallies, expected to give early momentum to his third consecutive run for president, have mysteriously failed to materialise. In June 2015, by contrast, he declared his candidacy after riding down an escalator in New York and held his first rally in Iowa just 10 hours later, moving on to New Hampshire a day later.Yet Trump is still making plenty of news from Mar-a-Lago. He dined with two antisemites: Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, and white supremacist Nick Fuentes (Ye subsequently expressed his admiration for Adolf Hitler). Still harping on the 2020 election, which he falsely claims was stolen, Trump mused about the “termination” of the constitution that he once swore to preserve, protect and defend. He also posed for photos with a reporter supporter of the QAnon and “Pizzagate” conspiracy theories.Such antics have shaken even the faithful. Larry Kudlow, who was Trump’s economic adviser in the White House, shared his concerns with Trump’s former counselor Kellyanne Conway during his Fox Business show. “I don’t understand what our former boss is doing,” Kudlow said. “I love the guy, but I do not understand Kanye West, hanging out with white nationalists, hanging out with antisemitic people, talking about ending the constitution or postponing the constitution.”He added: “I don’t get it, I don’t understand why he’s saying it, and if he says it why hasn’t he apologised for it or corrected the record or something, because he’s losing support left and right. I hear it everywhere.”Then there are the legal headaches, another contrast from the carefree days of 2016. Trump’s business was this week found guilty on all 17 counts in a tax fraud case in New York. The Trump Organization – which operates hotels, golf courses and other global assets – faces up to $1.6m in fines, denting his carefully constructed image as a businessman with the golden touch.Last month attorney general Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith special counsel for two justice department investigations. One is focusing on Trump for retaining government records, including some marked as classified, after leaving office. On 1 December Trump suffered yet another defeat when an appeals court reversed a judge’s appointment of an independent arbiter to vet documents seized by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago, clearing the way for all the records to be used in a criminal investigation of the former president.The other concerns of the far reaching effort to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 election; Smith this week issued grand jury subpoenas to local election officials in Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin. Separately, a prosecutor in Georgia is pursuing Trump’s alleged efforts to influence that state’s 2020 election results. And the House of Representatives panel investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol is expected to make criminal referrals to the justice department.Lichtman added: “Trump’s companies have been operating as a criminal enterprise. That’s now established in court: 17 counts. And of course he still could be indicted on a host of different charges: mishandling classified documents, meddling in the Georgia election, inciting a riot, interfering with Congress, tax fraud. There are any number of potential violations.”Georgia’s runoff was a resounding rebuke of Trumpism. Will Republicans hear it? | Lloyd GreenRead moreMany regard Trump’s early campaign launch as blatant attempt to head off such a prospect. He characterises the investigations as politically motivated “witch hunts” reminiscent of the Russian collusion “hoax”. His gamble is that the justice department will be reluctant to prosecute an active candidate lest it be accused of interfering in an election.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “It seems like it’s not really a campaign but more of an effort to use the illusion of a campaign to try and manage his legal situation. The Trump legal strategy is directly tied to the Trump 2024 strategy. They’re one and the same.”Garland’s actions so far suggest that the bid for legal immunity has failed. Trump’s effort to clear the Republican field, intimidating and chasing away potential challengers in 2024, has been equally futile, serving only to expose his vulnerabilities.DeSantis, former vice-president Mike Pence, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin and Senator Tim Scott have left a trail of clues about their intentions. Big money donors and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire have indicated that they are ready for an alternative.And yet, if these candidates divide the anti-Trump vote, his shrinking but hardening Maga base may help him prevail in a Republican primary just as in 2016. Loyalty to the former president runs deep in county and state parties. Even after his latest transgressions, the number of senior Republicans speaking out against Trump has been striking but so too has the number mincing their words or staying silent.Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “Show me the evidence where his grip on the party is breaking. The only thing we’ve heard from the party leadership is there’s no place for antisemitism in the Republican party. We haven’t heard anybody call for Donald Trump to be removed as a potential nominee of the party.“Ron DeSantis has said nothing about the Mar-a-Lago dinner. He is absolutely silent, so the idea that he’s going to be a leader is a joke because that was the moment to lead and he quivered in the corner because he was afraid of getting smacked by Donald Trump.”He added: “Trump still is the thing that animates and controls outcomes inside the Republican party for as long as the political leadership allows the tail to wag the dog. If you’re afraid of your own shadow, you’re not going to get out much.”There is no doubt that Trump’s political obituary has been prepared a thousand times, only to be torn up when the Republican party capitulates once more. Is there something different in the air this time? Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist who worked on Al Gore and John Kerry’s presidential campaigns, said: “The problem is we’ve said it so many times and it hasn’t been true. On the other hand, some time it will be true.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS elections 2024RepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Republican moderate refuses to disown Trump over constitution threat

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      Republican moderate refuses to disown Trump over constitution threatDave Joyce of Ohio, chair of the Republican Governance Group, says he will vote for Trump if he is nominee in 2024 A leader of moderate Republicans in the US House repeatedly refused to condemn Donald Trump on Sunday, even after the former president, running for re-election in 2024, said the US constitution should be “terminated” to allow him to return to power.DeSantis and Pence lead Republican wave – of presidential campaign booksRead more“Whoever the Republicans end up picking, I’ll fall in behind” them, Dave Joyce of Ohio told ABC’s This Week, adding that he thought Americans did not want to look back to the 2020 election, the subject of Trump’s lies about electoral fraud and demand for extra-constitutional action.Joyce’s host, George Stephanopoulos, said: “I don’t see how you can move forward if your candidate is for suspending the constitution but thank you for your time.”Trump maintains the lie that the 2020 election, which Joe Biden won by more than 7m votes and a clear margin in the electoral college, was subject to widespread voter fraud. In messages on his Truth Social account on Saturday, Trump said the constitution should therefore be “terminated”.The former president was condemned by Biden, Democrats and political commentators. On CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday another Ohio Republican, Mike Turner, said he “absolutely” did so too.“There is a political process that has to go forward before anybody is a frontrunner or anybody is even the candidate for the party,” Turner said. “I believe people certainly are going to take into consideration a statement like this as they evaluate a candidate.”Like Turner, Joyce was not among the 147 Republicans who objected to results in key states in the 2020 election, even after Trump supporters mounted their deadly attack on the Capitol, seeking to stop certification. But Stephanopoulos could not persuade Joyce to say he would not vote for Trump four years later.Joyce said: “Well, you know, when President Trump was in office, I didn’t make a habit of speaking out on his tweet du jour.“I don’t know what came out on … whatever his new social platform is. But, you know, people were not interested in looking backwards. The people who gave us the majority [in the midterm elections last month] … they gave us an opportunity, and we need to perform.”Ohioans, Joyce said, were more concerned about household budgets in a time of steep inflation.Stephanopoulos said: “But Donald Trump was your nominee in 2016 and 2020. You voted for him in 2016 and 2020. Now he’s talking about suspending the constitution. Can you support a candidate in 2024 who’s for suspending the constitution?”Joyce said: “Well, again, it’s early. I think there’s going to be a lot of people in the primary. I think, at the end of the day, whoever the Republicans end up picking, I’ll fall in behind because that’s – ”Stephanopoulos said: “Even if it’s Donald Trump and he’s called for suspending the constitution?”Joyce said: “Well, again, I think it’s going to be a big field. I don’t think Donald Trump’s going to clear out the field like he did in ’16.”Stephanopoulos said: “That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking you, ‘If he’s the nominee, will you support him?’”Joyce said: “I will support whoever the Republican nominee is. And I just don’t think that at this point [Trump] will be able to get there because I think there’s a lot of other good quality candidates out there.”To the host, that was “a remarkable statement. You’d support a candidate who’s come out for suspending the constitution?”Joyce said: “Well, you know, [Trump] says a lot of things. You have to take him in context. And right now I have to worry about making sure the Republican Governance Group and the Republican majority make things work for the American people. And I can’t be really chasing every one of these crazy statements that come out … from any of these candidates.”‘It’s on the tape’: Bob Woodward on Donald Trump’s ‘criminal behavior’Read moreStephanopoulos said: “But that’s an extraordinary statement. You can’t come out against someone who’s for suspending the constitution?”Joyce said: “Well, first off, he has no ability to suspend the constitution. Secondly, I don’t –”Stephanapolous pointed out that Trump said he wanted to take that step.Joyce said: “Well, you know, he says a lot of things but that doesn’t mean that it’s ever going to happen. So you’ve got to accept exact fact from fantasy. And fantasy is that we’re going to suspend the constitution and go backwards. We’re moving forward and we’re going to continue to move forward as a Republican majority and as a Republican conference.”With that, Stephanopoulos closed the interview.“Thank you for having me,” Joyce said.TopicsDonald TrumpUS elections 2024RepublicansUS CongressUS constitution and civil libertiesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Biden rebukes Trump for saying constitution should be ‘terminated’

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      Biden rebukes Trump for saying constitution should be ‘terminated’Former president must be ‘universally condemned’ for comments, says White House The Biden White House rebuked Donald Trump after the former president said the US constitution should be “terminated” over his lie that the 2020 election was stolen.DeSantis and Pence lead Republican wave – of presidential campaign booksRead moreAndrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, said: “Attacking the constitution and all it stands for is anathema to the soul of our nation and should be universally condemned.”Bates called the constitution a “sacrosanct document”, saying: “You cannot only love America when you win.”Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, by more than 7m votes and by 306-232 in the electoral college, a result he called a landslide when it was in his favour in 2016, against Hillary Clinton.Trump continues to claim that Biden won key states through electoral fraud, a lie that fuelled the deadly attack on the US Capitol by his supporters on 6 January 2021. Nine deaths have been linked to the riot, including suicides among law enforcement. More than 950 people have been charged. This week, two members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia were convicted of seditious conspiracy. Other members of far-right, pro-Trump groups face similar charges.Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter after the Capitol attack. He has not yet returned to the latter, despite its new owner, Elon Musk, saying he is free to do so. On Saturday, Trump used his own social media platform, Truth Social, to say of the 2020 election: “A massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the constitution.”Trump also said an “unprecedented fraud requires an unprecedented cure”.He was writing after Musk claimed he would show that Twitter was guilty of “free speech suppression” by releasing evidence of how the platform responded to requests from campaigns in the 2020 election.Trump is the only declared candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 but he has faced increased criticism from Republicans and Republican-supporting media since midterm elections in which many of his endorsed candidates were defeated, including election deniers running for governor and key elections roles in battleground states. Republicans took the House, but only by a narrow majority, and failed to retake the Senate.On Saturday, Trump also criticised the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, and “all of the weak Republicans who couldn’t get the presidential election of 2020 approved and out of the way fast enough”. Even after the Capitol riot, 147 Republicans in Congress objected to results in key states.Senior Republicans have recently criticised Trump over his decision to have dinner at his home in Florida with Nick Fuentes, a known white supremacist and antisemite. But though the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, has surged in polls regarding possible 2024 contenders, few in the party have broken decisively with Trump and those who have have largely been forced out.On Saturday, Brian Schatz, a Democratic US senator from Hawaii, pointed to such hard political reality, saying: “Trump just called for the suspension of the constitution and it is the final straw for zero Republicans, especially the ones who call themselves ‘constitutional conservatives’.”One such conservative is Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader battling to become House speaker. Not long before Trump said the constitution should be terminated, McCarthy said that when his party took control in January, it would demonstrate its constitutionalist bona fides by reading “every single word” of the hallowed document on the floor of the House.On Sunday, Hakeem Jeffries, the newly elected Democratic leader in the House, told ABC’s This Week Trump had made “a strange statement, but the Republicans are going to have to work out their issues with the former president and decide whether they’re going to break from him and return to some semblance of reasonableness or continue to lean in to the extremism, not just of Trump, but of Trumpism”.‘It’s on the tape’: Bob Woodward on Donald Trump’s ‘criminal behavior’Read moreTrump and Trumpism are becoming more and more of a headache for McCarthy, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and other senior Republicans.On Saturday, Mehdi Hasan, who hosts a show on the TV channel MSNBC, tweeted: “Do you support Donald Trump’s demand to ‘terminate’ the constitution? Doesn’t his demand disqualify him for running for the presidency? Two questions that every single Republican member of the House and Senate needs to be asked, again and again, in the coming days.”Hasan also pointed to Trump’s dinner at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, with Nick Fuentes, saying that in just two weeks the former president had “said or done things that would be lifelong scandals for other politicians … he truly knows how to flood the zone”. Trump critics on the political right did condemn the remark.John Bolton, George W Bush’s UN ambassador who became Trump’s third national security adviser, said: “No American conservative can agree with Donald Trump’s call to suspend the constitution because of the results of the 2020 election. And all real conservatives must oppose his 2024 campaign for president.”TopicsDonald TrumpJoe BidenUS politicsUS elections 2020US elections 2024RepublicansDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      DeSantis and Pence lead Republican wave – of presidential campaign books

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      DeSantis and Pence lead Republican wave – of presidential campaign books The GOP flopped in the midterms but its White House hopefuls still hope to find readers – and conservative group bulk-buyersIn one of the clearest signs that the 2024 Republican presidential primary will feature rivals to Donald Trump, a host of likely candidates have released or will soon release books purporting to outline their political visions.‘It’s on the tape’: Bob Woodward on Donald Trump’s ‘criminal behavior’Read moreSuch books often sell poorly, but that is rarely their point. They are markers of ambition. To judge from the political bookshelves, after midterm elections in which many Trump-endorsed candidates suffered humiliating losses, the former president will not be the only declared candidate for long.Among the first rank of likely challengers, Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, released a memoir last month and Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, will follow suit in February.Other possible candidates include the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo (book out next year); the Missouri senator Josh Hawley (one book done, another coming); the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley (two books out already); and the South Carolina senator Tim Scott (book published in August, including an inadvertent admission that he is going to run). Even Marco Rubio, the GOP’s great slight hope until Trump took him to the cleaners in 2016, has another book coming.Matt Dallek, a professor of political management at George Washington University, said: “These books serve as a way to generate free media and a way to put one’s name and platform, to an extent that it exists, in the eyes of voters you’re looking to reach.“It gives TV producers a hook. And so even though most of these books are, to be generous, pablum – filled with aphorisms and cliché – from the perspective of the candidate, it allows them to get their story out there, to put themselves before the public and to take a free media ride.”In short, these are not works of great literature, or even the sort of thing the great essayist Christopher Hitchens produced via “the junky energy that scotch can provide, and the intense short-term concentration that nicotine can help supply … crouched over a book or keyboard [in] mingled reverie and alertness”.It’s hard to picture evangelical hero Pence or culture warrior DeSantis like that, hunched over a desk, hammering out passages of memoir and policy to meet a publishing deadline. But perhaps their ghostwriters did.01:41The announcement this week of DeSantis’s book – The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Renewal – made the biggest splash. After all, the governor who won re-election in a landslide and declared his state “where woke goes to die” is Trump’s only serious polling rival.DeSantis has released a campaign book before, namely Dreams From Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama, published in 2011 when he was aiming for Congress. According to his publisher, HarperCollins, the Ivy League-educated ex-navy lawyer will now offer “a first-hand account from the blue-collar boy who grew up to take on Disney and Dr Fauci”. True to DeSantis’s success in pursuing distinctly Trumpist policies, the announcement was replete with such culture-war themes.How to beat a book ban: students, parents and librarians fight backRead moreDaniel Uhlfelder, a former Democratic candidate for Florida attorney general, tweeted: “Ron DeSantis, who has led a statewide effort to ban books, is writing a book called The Courage to be Free. This is not a joke.”Trump books are a publishing phenomenon but books about what the agent Howard Yoon recently called the “milquetoast” Biden administration have not sold so well. Neither, it seems safe to say, will the flood of Republican books.Asked if she was eager to read DeSantis’s book, Molly Jong-Fast, host of the Fast Politics podcast, laughed and said, “Are you kidding me?” She also pointed to the common fate of such books: bulk sales to political groups rather than bookstore crowds.“The DeSantis book is something the Heritage Foundation gives people at a lunch, and then goes on a shelf. This is book that is swag. When the Kochs have their big shindig with donors, it’ll be given away. Of course, that means publishers at least know it will earn out the advance.”In sales terms, Pence has an advantage. His campaign book, So Help Me God, is also in large part a Trump book. Pence has refused to testify to the House January 6 committee but on the page he provides detailed if partial testimony, written from the rooms where it happened. The result was a New York Times bestseller.Jong-Fast said: “The reason to read his book is because he’s such a liar. I think if you went through with a fine-tooth comb, you could find a lot of inconsistencies. But … at least Pence is charismatic. The irony is he’s probably more charismatic than Ron DeSantis.”So Help Me God review: Mike Pence’s tortured bid for Republican relevanceRead moreIt is possible to write a good campaign book. Barack Obama wrote two. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance was published in 1995, as he set out for the Illinois senate. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, came two years before the presidential run of 2008.“And he probably read them,” Jong-Fast said. “And also he knows good writing. So many people don’t. The constant problem with conservatives is that you’ve alienated most of the writers. Remember, Trumpworld didn’t have any intellectuals because they couldn’t find any. The thought leader was Newt Gingrich.”Asked what Guardian readers might glean from the new campaign books, and from DeSantis in particular, Dallek said: “If you know nothing or little about him, you could probably learn about the biggest political fights he’s had, you could get a sense of the soundbites he likes to use, you know, his war against so-called woke culture. Probably some sense of a why he thinks Florida is the greatest place on Earth, some of the attacks he’s going to use against Joe Biden, if he were to run.“But it will not be the most informative place to go if you want to learn about Ron DeSantis. There are many other places, including profiles in the Guardian, that would probably be much more fruitful.”TopicsBooksUS politicsUS elections 2024RepublicansRon DeSantisMike PenceMike PompeonewsReuse this content More

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      Newt Gingrich warns Republicans that Joe Biden is winning the fight

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      Newt Gingrich warns Republicans that Joe Biden is winning the fightFormer speaker who led charge against Bill Clinton raises eyebrows with column heralding Democrat’s first-term success Republicans must “quit underestimating” Joe Biden, the former US House speaker Newt Gingrich said, because the president is winning the fight.Biden tells Democrats to revise primary calendar to boost Black voters’ voicesRead moreWriting on his own website, Gingrich said: “Conservatives’ hostility to the Biden administration on our terms tends to blind us to just how effective Biden has been on his terms.“… We dislike Biden so much, we pettily focus on his speaking difficulties, sometimes strange behavior, clear lapses of memory and other personal flaws. Our aversion to him and his policies makes us underestimate him and the Democrats.”Gingrich’s words pleased the White House – Ron Klain, Joe Biden’s chief of staff, tweeted a link with the message: “You don’t have to take my word for it, any more.”The column also caused consternation among Washington commentators, in part because, as Axios put it, “a leader of the GOP’s ’90s-era New Right [is] arguing that Joe Biden is not just a winner – but a role model”.Gingrich has been a fierce partisan warrior ever since he entered Congress, in 1979, then as speaker led the charge against Bill Clinton, culminating in a failed attempt to remove the Democrat via impeachment. In the conclusion to his column, he used the term “Defeat Big Government Socialism” – a version of the title of his latest book.Gingrich told Axios: “I was thinking about football and the clarity of winning and losing. It hit me that, measured by his goals, Biden has been much more successful than we have been willing to credit.”Biden recently turned 80. He has said he will use the Christmas holiday to decide if he will run for re-election.Gingrich, 79, compared Biden to Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, the latter previously the oldest president ever in office, having been 77 when he left the White House in 1989.Reagan and Eisenhower, Gingrich said, “preferred to be underestimated” and “wanted people to think of them as pleasant – but not dangerous”, and thereby enjoyed great success.“Biden has achieved something similar,” Gingrich continued, by taking “an amazingly narrow four-vote majority in the US House and a 50-50 tie in the Senate and turn[ing] it into trillions of dollars in spending – and a series of radical bills”.Gingrich also accused Biden of pursuing “a strategy of polarizing Americans against Donald Trump supporters” – more than 950 of whom have been charged over the deadly Capitol riot they staged after the former president’s defeat in 2020 – and “grossly exaggerat[ing] the threat to abortion rights”, after the supreme court removed the right this year.But Gingrich also gave Biden credit on the chief foreign policy challenge of his first term in power. The president, the former speaker said, had “carefully and cautiously waged war in Ukraine with no American troops … US weapons and financial aid [helping] cripple what most thought would be an easy victory for Russian president Vladimir Putin”.The result, Gingrich said, was that last month “the Biden team had one of the best first-term off-year elections in history. They were not repudiated.”Gingrich advised Republicans “to look much more deeply at what worked and what did not work in 2020 and 2022”, as they prepare to face “almost inevitable second-time Democrat presidential nominee Biden”.According to Axios, Biden is thought likely to run. Friends of the first couple, the site said, “think only two things could stop him: health or Jill”, the first lady.TopicsJoe BidenBiden administrationNewt GingrichDemocratsRepublicansUS midterm elections 2022US elections 2024newsReuse this content More

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      Biden tells Democrats to revise primary calendar to boost Black voters’ voices

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      Biden tells Democrats to revise primary calendar to boost Black voters’ voicesPredominantly white New Hampshire reportedly could be scheduled later with South Carolina tipped to move up to first Democrats are poised to shake up the way in which they nominate presidential candidates, after Joe Biden said the primary process should better represent the party’s non-white voters.Biden has reportedly told Democrats that Iowa, the state that has led off the Democratic voting calendar since 1976, should be moved down the calendar, with South Carolina instead going first.The move would see New Hampshire, which has technically held the nation’s first primary since 1920 (Iowa uses a slightly different system of caucuses, or in-person voting), shunted down the calendar.Both Iowa and New Hampshire are predominantly white states. Clamor has been growing inside and outside the Democratic party for a different state, with a population more representative of the US as a whole, to be given the first go.Associated Press reported that Biden had written to the Democratic National Committee regarding the proposal. The DNC’s rules committee is meeting on Friday to vote on the primary calendar.“For decades, Black voters in particular have been the backbone of the Democratic party but have been pushed to the back of the early primary process,” Biden wrote.“We rely on these voters in elections but have not recognized their importance in our nominating calendar. It is time to stop taking these voters for granted, and time to give them a louder and earlier voice in the process.”In the letter Biden did not mention specific states he would like to see go first, but has told Democrats he wants South Carolina moved to the first position, Associated Press reported, citing anonymous sources. The Washington Post first reported the proposed shake-up of the primary process.Associated Press reported that the new schedule would see South Carolina hold the first primary, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada on the same day a week later.Georgia and Michigan, which were crucial to Biden’s 2020 election win, would follow, AP reported.Iowa came under fire after a series of technical glitches led to a three-day wait before the Democratic party declared Pete Buttigieg the winner. The results were so marred that the Associated Press ultimately did not declare any victor.Biden also criticized the caucus system, which is used in Iowa and three other states to nominate a presidential candidate. In a caucus voters have to physically travel to a location and stand in a section of the room designated for their chosen candidate, before potentially then changing their minds and going to a different part of the room to select a different candidate.Biden said caucuses were “restrictive and anti-worker” because they require voters “to spend significant amounts of time” on one night gathering to choose candidates in person, “disadvantaging hourly workers and anyone who does not have the flexibility to go to a set location at a set time”.Biden’s direction comes as the DNC rules committee gathers in Washington on Friday to vote on shaking up the presidential primary calendar starting in 2024. If Biden runs for a second term, as he has suggested he will, the changes will be largely meaningless until the 2028 Democratic primaries as he would probably win the nomination easily in 2024.The Republican National Committee, meanwhile, has already decided to keep Iowa’s caucus as the first contest in its 2024 presidential calendar, ensuring that GOP White House hopefuls – which include Trump – will continue campaigning there frequently.TopicsDemocratsJoe BidenUS elections 2024US politicsnewsReuse this content More