Donald Trumpdidn’t show up to the first Republican debate last month and has said he won’t participate in any future ones, robbing voters of the chance to see how he would answer substantive questions from moderators and handle confrontation from fellow candidates for the GOP nomination. But what about a debate with Meghan Markle, the former Suits actor who marriedPrince Harry in 2018? The Meghan Markle who does not now and has not ever held public office, and who we can say with near-absolute certainty will not be jumping into the GOP primary in this or any other lifetime? Well, that’s someone Trump would show up to a debate stage for. Happily, in fact!
In an interview that aired Wednesday, conservative radio show host Hugh Hewittasked Trump if he would debate Meghan and Prince Harry, who “don’t like you much,” for the ratings. Naturally, the ex-president’s first instinct was to scoff at the idea that the pair doesn’t like him—even though they clearly don’t—and then suggest that the late Queen of England was a huge fan of his, which he’s done before. “I don’t know that they don’t like me,” Trump told Hewitt. “I said that I don’t think they are very appropriate, what they’re saying, what they’re doing, and I didn’t like the way she dealt with the queen. I became very friendly with the queen. She was an incredible woman. At 95, she was so sharp. She was 100%. When you watch Biden, you say, this is a different planet. But they treated her with great disrespect, and I didn’t like it. And I didn’t like the idea that they were getting US security when they came over here. No, I think it’s not a good situation going on with the two of them, but I didn’t know that they don’t like me.”
Reminded of the actual question, i.e. would he debate the couple, Trump responded, “Oh, if you want to set it up, let’s set it up. Let’s go do something. I’ll, I’d love to debate her. I would love it. I disagree so much with what they’re doing.”
X content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
A Trump vs. Markle debate, is, of course, about as likely to occur as “Infrastructure Week.” But the ex-president is a carnival barker at heart and could obviously not pass up the opportunity to pretend that, yeah, maybe this will actually happen. Of course, it’s not hard to see why Trump would rather engage with this absurd scenario than actually show up on the GOP debate stage, where he would no doubt be asked about the many criminal charges against him and likely incriminate himself. (Here we have to tell you that Trump has pleaded not guilty to everything.)
As for whether the former guy will participate in the general election debates*, that is not clear at this time. In 2020, he demanded that Joe Bidenbe tested for performance-enhancing drugs before he would agree to show up to the first debate, and while that precondition was obviously not met, Trump nevertheless made an appearance anyway (possibly in an effort to give people COVID). Then he skipped the next one in favor of a town hall with Savannah Guthrie, during which he said QAnon had made some good points that he “strongly” agreed with. So, truly, who knows.
*Assuming he wins the nomination, which,against all odds, he seems poised to do.
If you would like to receive the Levin Report in your inbox daily, clickhereto subscribe.
Real Americans don’t want the weather politicized, okay, they want that reserved for Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck
The biggest problem facing Ron DeSantis at the moment is that when people think of him, they think of a grown man eating chocolate pudding with three fingers in place of a spoon and, more than likely, getting said pudding all over his face. The second biggest problem is that Donald Trump is beating him by double digits in the race for the GOP nomination. Rounding out the top three? That the mega-donors DeSantis previously relied on for massive checks have effectively lost his number.
Yes, just days after the leaking of audio in which the chief strategist of the pro-DeSantis super PAC is heard telling wealthy would-be benefactors, “We need 50 million bucks,” comes word that a significant number of donors who helped underwrite DeSantis‘s political ambitions in the past want nothing to do with him, financially speaking. “I think he’s done a terrific job as governor of Florida, and I’ve been, as I think you know, a big supporter of him in that role,” former Illinois governor Bruce Rauner, who contributed tens of thousands of dollars to DeSantis’s 2022 reelection bid, told Politico. “[But] I think Nikki Haley probably has the best chance to win the general election.” Rauner has not given any money to DeSantis since last year—and he’s far from the only one closing his checkbook. Per Politico:
Of the 50 donors who gave at least $160,000 in the years leading up to his 2022 reelection campaign, only 16—less than a third—provided funds to the super PAC Never Back Down, which can receive unlimited contributions, through the end of June. Eight other major donors gave directly to his presidential campaign but not the super PAC. The top 50 list includes five donors who are now financially supporting rival presidential candidates. And of those who are giving money to the DeSantis campaign or his super PAC, five are splitting their funds with other candidates.
In August, Robert Bigelow, who donated a whopping $20 million to DeSantis’s super PAC, said he wouldn’t give the governor another dime “until I see that he’s able to generate more [contributions] on his own.” Billionaire Ken Griffin, one of DeSantis’s biggest 2022 campaign donors, has likewise kept his money to himself, saying he is “assessing how the policies of each candidate will address the challenges facing our country.” And last spring, Thomas Peterffy, who reportedly contributed $3.6 million to DeSantis’s reelection, told the Financial Times that he and “a bunch of friends, are holding our powder dry” because of DeSantis’s extreme positions on social issues; according to Politico, Peterffy has since contributed $2 million to a political committee supporting Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, who some wealthy donors hope will jump into the Republican primary.
While DeSantis’s Never Back Down super PAC has a not-so-insignificant $97 million in its coffers, as Politico notes, a huge chunk of that money came from “an $82 million transfer from the Florida-based political committee that backed DeSantis’s reelection bid.” In other words, the cash was not actually donated by people trying to get him elected president.
In a statement, a spokesman for the DeSantis campaign insisted the donor exodus is much ado about nothing, and that no one is in any way freaking the f–k out. “Ron DeSantis outraised both Biden and Trump last quarter, and we continue to see overwhelming enthusiasm from grassroots and major supporters chipping in to help our campaign,” he told Politico. “We look forward to continued fundraising success this quarter as we capitalize on his strong debate performance and momentum in the early states.”
Rolling Stonereports that conservative nightmares Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kari Lake are currently in a “death race” to be named Trump‘s 2024 VP, a job that we again must emphasize involves working for a guy who thinks nothing of siccing his blood-thirsty followers on individuals he’s mad at. (That is, of course, if he’s the GOP nominee, which very much looks like will be the case). While the women have kept it civil in public, the outlet reports, “behind the scenes, the two view one another with intense distrust and disdain, each seeing the other as direct competition for Trump’s political affections,” according to several people familiar with the matter. Viewing Lake as a direct threat for the gig, Greene has reportedly “gone beyond simple attempts to raise her own profile in the ongoing Trump veepstakes,” and has recently taken to “trash-talking” the failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate to “to others in the MAGA elite, political circles, and conservative media, multiple.” (Last spring, Peoplerevealed that in an effort to win the VP nod, Lake had practically moved into Mar-Lago, and was spending more time there than Melania Trump, a.k.a. the ex-president’s wife.)
Hilariously—if the notion of an accused criminal returning to power with a VP whose grasp on reality is nonexistent is funny—Greene’s biggest complaint about Lake is said to be that she is not “serious” enough to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. (Obviously, that’s one hundred percent true, but it’s also true that an individual best known for promoting QAnon, harassing a school shooting survivor, and the whole Jewish space lasers business should also not be allowed anywhere near the halls of power.) “MTG thinks [Lake] is a scammer and not even a conservative,” a source told Rolling Stone, adding that the Georgia congresswoman has said that “Lake is a grifter and [is] trying to keep riding Trump’s coattails because she lost [in Arizona], so she’s cozying up on the election-integrity messaging.” Said another person familiar with Greene’s point of view, Greene “thinks it’s complete nonsense that anyone would think it’s a good idea for Donald Trump to consider [Kari] for VP.”
As for whether or not either woman has any chance whatsoever of being named Trump’s running mate, that is unclear as this time. According to Rolling Stone, the ex-president has “made a point of repeatedly commending each of them for their frequent efforts—both publicly and behind the scenes with lawmakers and grassroots activists—to aid his 2024 campaign.” On the other hand, numerous people close to Trump have put the odds of either Greene or Lake being added to the ticket at slim to none, with several boldly declaring that even Trump is not “stupid enough” to make one of them his running mate. (In July, the Daily Beast reported that Lake’s strategy of being in Trump’s face as much as possible had backfired, and that the he’d become “less enthusiastic” about her, having decided she was too much of a “spotlight hound.”)
But don’t go thinking that a second Trump administration would be a Greene-free affair, because even if Rep. Gazpacho Police (R-Crazy Town) doesn’t make it to the ticket, it seems there’ll still be a place for her somewhere:
>Trump has suggested to close associates that Greene would be “great” in some position of seniority in his potential second administration, whether in the cabinet, at an agency, or in the West Wing at his side. The ex-president even floated the idea of installing her at the Justice Department; this confused some in Trump’s orbit because, as a source bluntly put it: “I don’t think she’s a lawyer.”
As for Lake, it’s possible she might take herself out of the running, having suggested she may run for Senate.
If you would like to receive the Levin Report in your inbox daily, clickhereto subscribe.
“Do you want my most subversive hot take?” a friend recently asked me over dinner. I nodded, as a writer can never say no to a question like that. “Biden is the best president of our lifetime.” They might be right. Despite being very much on the fence about Joe Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary, and even writing a Washington Post piece saying he should drop out after he lost primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, I have come around to the 46th president, impressed with the sheer amount of progressive legislation the administration has championed, from infrastructure to climate to prescription drugs.
But a lot of people haven’t come around to the president, who has struggled with Donald Trump–level approval ratings despite seeming to have pulled off a postpandemic soft landing for the economy, with strong job growth, cooling inflation, and fading recession chatter. Yet this financial marvel is not reflected in Biden’s poll numbers. A Wall Street Journal poll found that “58% of voters say the economy has gotten worse over the past two years, whereas only 28% say it has gotten better, and nearly three in four say inflation is headed in the wrong direction.”
“I’ve never seen this big of a disconnect between how the economy is actually doing and key polling results about what people think is going on,” Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, toldThe New York Times. The question is not only why does Biden not get more credit for this economic recovery, but also why does the media seem so deeply disinterested in the impact of Biden’s presidency? I think these two phenomena are linked. Bidenworld’s biggest problem is likely also its superpower: its boringness.
This past week I was interviewing Franklin Foer about his new Biden biography, The Last Politician, for my Fast Politics podcast, and we got onto the subject of the president’s major win in negotiating prescription drug costs, a result of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). This is something that multiple presidents have promised, and none have achieved. If it works, it will be one of the very few times in American history where the government has won against the lobbyists (or, for lack of a better term, the DC “swamp,” which I seem to remember a certain former guy complaining about). It’s a change, the Timesnoted, “that the pharmaceutical industry and Republicans have opposed for decades.”
George W. Bushauthorized the creation of Medicare Part D nearly two decades ago, but it wasn’t until the IRA that the government could negotiate lower prices on both Medicare Part D and Part B drugs. Last week the Biden administration announced that Medicare had selected 10 drugs on which to negotiate. One of them, Entresto, which people take for heart failure, could no longer cost about $713 for a month of pills. Such negotiation could lead to a sea change in the way elderly people live “We know that 80% of the public is with us,” Senator Amy Klobuchartold the Times, adding that the IRA would be key to her 2024 reelection campaign. The Biden administration’s attempts to rein in drug prices could prove wildly popular with voters—if they’re aware of them.
But you probably didn’t spend the weekend reading about these negotiations, just like you might’ve missed Biden’s big Camp David meeting last month with Japanese and South Korean leaders, which The Washington Postdescribed as “another major step toward the establishment of a new trilateral alliance that could help all three nations cope with the growing threats from North Korea and China in a world destabilized by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.” However, you probably caught how Florida governor and 2024 wannabeRon DeSantisrefused to tour Hurricane Idalia damage with Biden, a story that seemed to dominate the news cycle over the Labor Day weekend—surely more than the president’s touting of his administration’s actions to protect workers.
The problem for Team Biden is that its superpower, its ability to slide under the radar while getting a lot done for the American people, may also be its Achilles heel, holding back the administration from getting the credit it deserves. Whether negotiating drug prices with Big Pharma, helping fund the building of semiconductor factories, or investing in cleaner forms of energy, the Biden administration is doing a lot of positive stuff for Americans. Yet certain initiatives, like spending hundreds of millions of dollars on broadband for rural communities, can get easily drowned out by Republicans threatening to shut down the government or calling to impeach Biden for some reason.
It’s not that boringness can’t win elections, as Wisconsin governor Tony Evers can attest. “Boring wins,” he declared after winning reelection in 2022 by 3.4 points, which could be considered a landslide in such an evenly split state. And in a way, we’ve been here before. “It was a key theme of Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, unstated but powerful, and a vivid contrast with the public-train-wreck incumbent: If elected, he was going to be boring,” Michael Schafferwrote last year in Politico. “Promise kept.”
But one problem with Biden’s “boring” plan heading into 2024 is the news media. Not only is the media more interested in covering Trumpworld than Bidenworld, but it seems like journalists are somewhat resentful toward the current administration for its disinterest in playing ball these past few years. Remember, Trumpworld was filled with blockbuster leaks and White House feuds, leading to increased subscriptions and sky-high ratings—the “Trump bump,” as it was called. “The media became addicted to the constant excitement and danger of Trump,” Guardian media columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote in an email. “Biden offers something apparently far less compelling: decency, sanity, and a sense of reasonable calm.”
And Foer warns of the media overcorrecting from the Trump years. “All the coverage of Trump was very emotional, unusually impassioned, and rightly so,” he told me. “But I find the press is overcorrecting for that in its coverage of Biden. There’s a drive to reassert authority and objectivity, which leads them to be quite rough on the current guy.”
Republicans are still seeking revenge for their 2020 election losses. In Wisconsin, they’ve put a target on the back of Meagan Wolfe, the state’s nonpartisan elections chief, who they’re apparently still mad at for refusing to take Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud more seriously. Wolfe called the 2020 election “an incredible success that was a result of years of preparation and meticulously, carefully following the law.” Nevertheless, state Republicans heeded Trump’s election lies, launching a review of the 2020 results, which was led by a former right-wing judge—who attended a symposium on election fraud headed by MyPillow founder Mike Lindell. The investigation cost taxpayers over $1.1 million and ultimately, in 2022, reported no evidence of fraud. Unsatisfied, and still without a smoking gun, Wisconsin Republicans have made Wolfe a scapegoat. Nearly a year from the 2024 election, it looks like they want to fire her, subject to a possibly illegitimate confirmation hearing last week. Wolfe’s future as elections administrator remains in limbo.
The power struggle playing out around her post serves as a portent of the machinations to come in 2024—when it’s highly possible Trump will once again be on the ballot. It also comes as Democratic secretaries of state are sounding the alarm of continued and emergent threats facing American democracy. Trump allies are already deploying the same playbook as they did in 2020.
“The attack on democracy has not stopped—very specifically Trump’s efforts to undermine American democracy have not stopped,” Colorado secretary of state Jena Griswold tells Vanity Fair.
The breadth of Trump’s election denialism was thrust back into focus last month, when Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis released a damning indictment laying out an alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election in not only Georgia, but in other states including Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and New Mexico. “It is sort of a roadmap in a sense. It gives us an idea about what to expect and what to guard against,” Minnesota secretary of state Steve Simon said of the indictment. “If there’s a similar plot or scheme by anyone in 2024, they won’t necessarily follow the same roadmap as in 2020. But it does give us an idea about what the pressure points are.”
Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes—who served as the election recorder for Maricopa County, one of the fiercest battlegrounds, in 2020—points out that Trump continues to push election disinformation. Trump was “mildly inciting folks to violence” in his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Fontes said, referring to the ex-president saying that his political opponents were “savage animals; they’re people that are sick,” and entertaining Carlson’s suggestion that the former president could be assassinated. The indictments haven’t stopped Trump from pushing election denialism and engaging in dangerous hyperbole. And at the state level, his supporters are following suit with organized attacks on the system, such as that against Wolfe. Both Fontes and Griswold said they regularly receive death threats, as do other elections officials.
As Democratic secretaries of state are sounding the alarm ahead of the 2024 presidential election, some Republican officials are amplifying Trump’s unfounded claims. For instance, as the Associated Press reported, secretaries of state in Ohio, West Virginia, and Missouri—three states Trump won—have supported increased voter restrictions, which appears to buy into the former president’s false rhetoric that Biden stole the presidency, despite being the very individuals tasked with ensuring election integrity. In a recent interview, West Virginia secretary of state Mac Warner summed up the balance he and other Republicans are trying to strike. “I will admit Biden won the election, but did he do it legitimately? Or did that happen outside the election laws that legislatures in certain states had put in place? That’s where I balk and say no,” he said. As Republican officials continue to engage in election denialism, they are only adding to the confusion and challenges ahead of next year’s election.
As 2024 approaches, there is a real fear of what Griswold described as “insider threats” to the system—something she experienced firsthand in Colorado. Former Colorado county clerk Tina Peterswas indicted in 2022 in a breach of Mesa County’s election system; she was accused of allowing an unauthorized individual access to the voting system in search of evidence to support Trump’s claims of election fraud (Peters pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial). Griswold says Conan Hayes, who has also been identified in media reports as individual 27 in Georgia’s Coffee County indictment for accessing election data, and, as the Times reported, was associated with Peters, was the one to physically compromise the voting equipment in Mesa County. A second breach occurred in Colorado when an Elbert County clerk, Dallas Schroeder,gained unauthorized access and made copies of the county’s election system. (Schroeder did not face charges.) In legal filings, Schroeder said he had help from an individual named Shawn Smith, who leads pro-Trump election denial groups and has been associated with John Eastman, the former Trump attorney behind the 2020 fake electors scheme, and one of the central figures of the Georgia indictment. Griswold recalls, “Eastman was on the stage as a far-right militia called for me to be hung.” (Smith said onstage at an event in February 2022, where Eastman was reportedly in attendance: “I think if you’re involved in election fraud, then you deserve to hang. Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.”)
After the 2020 election, Colorado governor Jared Polissigned into law new legislation aimed to protect against “insider threats” and impose greater protections for election workers against harassment and intimidation. “Every state needs to pass that legislation immediately because it’s a tremendous risk for the ’24 election,” Griswold told VF.
The secretaries of state who spoke with VF described an ongoing game of whack-a-mole when it comes to election denialism and disinformation. “I always make a distinction between disinformation and disagreement. Disagreement is welcome and normal and a sign of health, I think for a democracy for people to disagree on issues. But I’m not talking so much about what the election system ought to be as what it is. Let’s agree on what it is, whether you like what it is or isn’t,” Simon said. But, “There are some people who are pushing election disinformation knowing that it’s false and doing it for political purposes.”
The hope, Simon added, is that greater transparency into the election process will cut through the barrage of mis- and disinformation. But he added, “I’m not naive… It’s not a binary thing. It’s not that someone’s going to hear something and completely change their mind,” he said. However, “They might do some incremental changing.” The 2024 election is only poised to be more combustible, as it will likely happen in tandem with Trump’s multiple criminal trials. “We’re heading into a presidential election year, which always means more passion, more drama, more intensity,” Simon says. “It’s worth revisiting 2020 if for no other reason than to talk about the lessons learned and what we can do to stabilize democracy in America.”
“[Trump] is the sexy clickbait right now, but that’s not what this is about,“ Fontes told VF. “There are so many things that go into the day-to-day of election administration. It is 365 days a year that every once in a while something pops up like a new lawsuit, a new scandal, a new headline, a new indictment. Nowadays they’re coming fast and furious.”
Donald Trump’s changing line of attack on Joe Biden ― from focusing on the president’s age to now alleging that he is some kind of a criminal mastermind ― is down to one thing, according to former Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.).
Jolly, appearing Monday as a commentator on MSNBC, was asked if voters would buy the new right-wing talking point, given how Trump now faces mounting legal woes and multiple days in court.
“Not if they spot the projection from Donald Trump,” Jolly responded.
When Trump “usually makes an accusation, there’s some truisms about his own behavior and personality,” noted Jolly.
But the narrative of the “Biden crime family” does “hold tight within the Republican constituency,” he admitted.
That could be countered, though, by what appears to be the motivations of the pair. Trump only “wants to wrangle over his own personal jeopardy issues and try to blame Joe Biden for the deep state,” Jolly said. “Joe Biden’s got a strong message on how he’s helping Americans. Donald Trump just on how he’s trying to help himself.”
Watch Jolly’s commentary on MSNBC, posted by Raw Story, here:
As Donald Trump’s federal and state criminal cases are putting an unwanted legal spotlight on his business and political dealings, the former president is responding in predictable fashion: vowing to imprison his opponents.
“The Crooked Joe Biden Campaign has thrown so many Indictments and lawsuits against me that Republicans are already thinking about what we are going to do to Biden and the Communists when it’s our turn,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday evening. “They have started a whole new Banana Republic way of thinking about political campaigns. So cheap and dirty, but that’s where America is right now. Be careful what you wish for!”
In addition to multiple civil cases, Trump currently faces four criminal indictments, including one in federal court for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and one in Georgia for his election meddling scheme there. He has consistently claimed that the indictments are unfounded and politically motivated. In another Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump alleged that “the Fake Indictments and lawsuits against me, 8 of them, all come out of the Biden Campaign for purposes of Election Interference.”
And yet, Trump’s baseless charges don’t seem to be landing. According to a Politico Magazine/IPSOS poll from earlier this month, a majority of Americans—including two-thirds of independents—believe the DOJ’s federal indictment was based on “a fair evaluation of the evidence and the law.” More voters believe Trump weaponized the DOJ than Biden. Trump’s actions and statements in the criminal cases unfolding against him were rated far less favorably by voters than those of Joe Biden and DOJ officials like Attorney General Merrick Garland and special counsel Jack Smith.
An overwhelming majority of polled voters, moreover, said they wanted Trump to stand trial in the federal election overturning case before the 2024 presidential election. Last week, they got their wish: Federal judge Tanya Chutkanset a trial date for March 2024, just a day before Super Tuesday. Trump’s lawyers were asking for a 2026 trial date.
Trump’s Truth Social post isn’t the only disturbing promise he made this week. In an interview with Glenn Beck last week, Beck asked the former president about his 2016 “Lock her up” promise, and whether he’d make good on imprisoning his political opponents if elected in 2024. “You have no choice because they’re doing it to us,” Trump replied.
These are themes Trump has sounded throughout the campaign. During his first campaign rally in Waco, Texas in March, Trump said, “For those who have been wronged and betrayed…I am your retribution.” At that event, Trump played a song he recorded with the “J6 Prison Choir,” a group of January 6 rioters imprisoned in Washington.
None of this has appeared to dim the former president’s 2024 prospects, both against the GOP primary field and against the current president. In FiveThirtyEight’s compilation of GOP primary polls, Trump currently holds a commanding 37-point lead over second-place Ron DeSantis. The first New York Times poll of the 2024 race showed Trump and Biden in a dead heat.
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) isn’t ruling out the possibility that both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump won’t appear on the ballot in 2024. (You can check out his comments in the clip below)
“It’s not going to be that way. Look, I think there’s a good shot that neither of them are actually on that ballot,” Sununu said on Sunday’s edition of “Meet the Press.”
“I think Trump can very much lose if they winnow it down to one-on-one. I think there’s a lot of issues that are going to come to bear with President Biden over the next year and a lot of opportunity for the Democrats to find another, another candidate.”
Sununu’s comments follow a recent poll that suggests 75% and 69% of U.S. adults wouldn’t like to see either Biden or Trump, respectively, run for president.
“Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd, earlier in the interview, asked the governor whether he supports the No Labels political organization putting up their own candidate on the ballot next year.
“Well, look, according to the polls you just showed about 70% of America is supportive of that idea to not see Trump and Biden on that ticket,” Sununu said.
“I heard someone put it once, ’70% of America, if it’s a Trump-Biden ticket, will be politically homeless.′ And I think that’s a very good way to put it. They won’t have any inspiration. They won’t feel very confident about going forward…”
The governor, a Trump critic who turned down a possible GOP presidential campaign, later declared that No Labels has an opportunity in the election “like never before.”
“It would have to be the right candidate. It would have to be somebody very energizing, positive, transparent, someone with a good record,” he said.
Sununu, when asked whether another Biden term or another Trump term concerns him more, pointed to his concerns with having both on the ticket.
“I think you’re bringing up the exact right point: This is not what America wants,” Sununu told Todd.
“It doesn’t mean our primary system is broken. It means more of us have to be engaged in the system to make sure that our voice is heard as that 70% of Americans who always want to look forward. With Biden and Trump, all you’re doing is looking backwards and re-litigating a lot of drama. Nobody wants that.”
“Donald is running scared and this is what he does, he needs to vent and the only way that he can vent right now is to do it through his postings on Twitter or on his Truth Social situation,” Cohen said on the latest episode of the “Political Beatdown” podcast from the MeidasTouch Network.
“He needs to vent in order to make himself feel better, better about the situation,” continued Cohen, who flipped on Trump in the Stormy Daniels hush money case and was sentenced to three years in prison.
“He technically knows his ass is cooked,” he added, noting the mounting indictments of Trump.
In one of the dozens of clips, Trump called President Joe Biden a “lunatic” and a “mental catastrophe” who was leading America “to hell.”
“Yeah, he’s leading our country to hell while ‘Donald Diaper’ is sitting there, crapping in his Pampers,” Cohen swiped in response.
He also slammed “the shit that’s coming out of” Trump’s mouth as one of his “dumbest” moves yet.
President Joe Biden’s hands-off attitude to his chief rival’s four criminal indictments is an approach that some top Democrats feel is a potential missed opportunity, NBC News reported Sunday.
The president has rarely acknowledged the sprawling criminal cases that are currently ensnaring his chief 2024 rival, and avoids mentioning Trump even in conversations with donors. In early August, both the White House and the Biden campaign declined to comment on Trump’s indictment on federal charges relating to his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The day after Trump was arrested in Georgia a few weeks later, the Biden campaign released an ad in battleground states that was exclusively focused on abortion.
Some Democrats think Biden should more explicitly engage in the former president’s legal issues, especially with Trump and Biden virtually tied in the polls and Trump attacking him at every turn. “What Trump has done is so egregious, so beyond the pale that I think we all have to take a very firm and aggressive and hostile stand against him,” former Ohio Democratic Representative Tim Ryan told NBC. “There needs to be a unifying approach here.”
Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha, who served as a senior aide on Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, praised the president’s messaging strategy but admitted that Biden and his aides are “banking on Trump making his own contrast” with the current president.
There’s certainly evidence supporting Biden’s decision to avoid the appearance of undue influence on the Justice Department by remaining silent on the cases. According to a Politico Magazine/IPSOS poll from earlier this month, a majority of Americans—including two-thirds of independents—think the DOJ’s indictment was based on “a fair evaluation of the evidence and the law.” More voters believe the Trump administration weaponized the DOJ than the Biden administration, and Trump’s conduct in criminal cases is rated far less favorably by voters than that of Biden and DOJ officials.
“When a train wreck is occurring, you don’t need someone standing off to the side saying, ‘Look at that train wreck.’ It’s obvious,” said Democratic strategist Tom Bonier. Focusing on policy issues and attacking “Republican extremists” is a better strategy than wading into the minutiae of Trump’s legal cases, he said.
Biden aides say that a core element of the president’s strategy this year is to focus on convincing voters of the strength of his economy, as polls show voter perceptions remaining stubbornly low on the issue. On Sunday, Biden published an op-ed in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel touting his economic achievements. “Bidenomics is working in Wisconsin,” he wrote. “We’re investing in American workers.”
“He’s being present this year. He’s talking about his accomplishments and his vision,” a Biden adviser said. “That’s the main focus.” The campaign’s plan, according to NBC, is to “take this approach through 2023, then lean in more to being a candidate in 2024.” It’s a strategy that would mirror the approach taken by former president Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012.
There will, however, be somewhat of a messaging shift after Labor Day, according to one presidential advisor. But that doesn’t mean Biden will begin talking more about the Trump prosecutions. A Democrat close to his campaign told Politico Playbook Sunday not to expect “changes on how we [don’t] speak about legal issues.” Instead, Biden is likely to lean into the message of “defending democracy”—a central plank of his campaign launch video, which opened with footage of the January 6th attack but did not mention Trump by name.
Trump’s next legal challenge will come in October, when the former president and his sons Eric and Don Jr. are expected to stand trial for alleged civil fraud in New York. The state’s Attorney General Letitia James is seeking a $250 million judgment and says the family created false valuations of assets.
The head of Ron DeSantis’s mammoth super PAC privately admitted to spreading opposition stories on upstart candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, whose recent rise in the polls is threatening the Florida Governor’s increasingly tenuous hold on (a very distant) second place in the GOP primary race.
“Everything you read about him is from us,” Jeff Roe, who runs the pro-DeSantis Never Back Down political action committee, told a gathering of donors just before the first GOP primary debate in Milwaukee on August 23. “Every misstatement, every 360 he’s conducting or 180 that he is going through in life, is from our scrutiny and pressure. And so, he’s not going to go through that very well, and that will get worse for him.”
A recording of the comments, parts of which had previously been reported by CNN and The New York Times, was obtained by Politico and reported on Sunday.
The official DeSantis campaign has struggled to fundraise from small-dollar donors, and much of the day-to-day campaign activity has been overtaken by Never Back Down, even as super PACs are barred from explicitly coordinating with any campaign.
Roe will be launching a $50 million fundraising push following Labor Day, and told donors he hoped to raise the bulk of it before the second GOP debate on September 27, the Times previously reported.
“Now the good news is that we have all the money we need in this room,” Roe told the donors gathered in Milwaukee. “The bad news is it’s still in your wallet.”
“We’ve just been playing without pads, practicing without pads,” he said in the part of the recording reported by Politico Sunday.
The Ramaswamy campaign responded to the report Sunday morning. “When DeSantis’s Super Pac campaign, Chris Christie, the New York Times, MSNBC and the rest of the bipartisan establishment are all going after you at the same time, you know you’re right over the target,” Ramaswamy spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told Politico. “America watched Vivek dominate the debate stage, it’s no wonder Never Back Down is pissing away another $20+ million after Labor Day.”
The campaign is laser-focused on the early primary states, added Roe. “Iowa is a real state for us because of its education — it’s a highly educated state — because of income, because of bible reading,” he said. “New Hampshire is a terrible state for Donald Trump. But he’s going to lose the first two states. We’re going to beat him in Iowa.”
The AFL-CIO, the country’s largest federation of labor unions, did not make any demands of President Joe Biden in return for the group’s earliest-ever endorsement of a presidential candidate, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler told HuffPost in an interview last week.
Shuler, instead, believes that Biden’s record helping labor unions was more than enough to secure its early endorsement, which it coordinated in June with numerous member unions and several unions that are not in the AFL-CIO, such as the Service Employees International Union and the National Education Association.
“An endorsement for the president ― the earliest we’ve ever done it, in the most unified way … was a statement because this is the most pro-union president in our lifetimes, and he has shown time and time again that he has put the interests of workers first,” Shuler said. “It’s not a transaction. But he basically shows up to work every morning thinking about what’s in the best interests of working people.”
HuffPost followed up, asking whether the AFL-CIO hopes Biden will deliver specific pro-union policies in his second term.
“We’ll continue to make sure these investments in clean energy and chips and science and infrastructure materialize as we envision, which is to unleash unprecedented growth in new industries that are going to create good union jobs,” Shuler replied. “So that’s all already underway, but we just think it’s going to be this trend line that goes up, up, up and we’ll be able to organize workplaces that we never thought possible because of the support that we’re seeing.”
“The future looks really bright,” she continued. “And that’s what we would just hope: That we can finish the job as [Biden] says and keep that upward trajectory going and opportunities for working people in the labor movement.”
In total, the AFL-CIO’s member unions represent more than 13 million workers, and its political organizing operation is expected to play a critical role in Biden’s reelection campaign. The federation even has a political outreach arm, Working America, for working-class people who do not belong to unions.
Biden has indeed been a historically strong ally for organized labor. His American Rescue Plan Act provided a massive injection of cash to state and local governments, which benefited public-sector unions. The CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act have spurred a rise in factory construction, allowing unions to expand their ranks in the industrial sector.
Biden speaks in July at the Philadelphia shipyard where union workers are building an offshore wind vessel. Organized labor has a long way to go to reverse a decades-long decline.
Biden’s Executive Branch has also provided critical support for workers seeking to organize. Just last week, Biden’s appointees to the National Labor Relations Board ruled that if an employer violates labor law such that the results of a union election get canceled, that employer must immediately recognize the union and begin bargaining. Experts believe the decision will discourage companies from issuing illegal threats or misleading promises during a union vote.
With union membership in the U.S. at its lowest rate in recorded history, however, there are still plenty of other policy changes that Biden could either enact by executive order or encourage Congress to pass to lift the labor movement’s fortunes.
For example, Biden could impose stricter conditions on federal contractors to encourage them not to interfere with workers’ unionization efforts. Labor advocates have long called for Congress to reclassify FedEx’s Express arm such that its employees would be subject to the National Labor Relations Act and would thus have an easier time organizing.
Finally, the labor movement’s coveted legislative prize would be the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, a vast overhaul of U.S. labor law that Democrats first introduced in 2019. The bill would, among other things, dramatically increase fines for violations of labor law perpetrated by employers against workers during a union drive or collective bargaining, putting real muscle behind the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 that many unionists believe is inadequate for the current era of employer opposition to unions. The legislation would also ban state-level right-to-work laws and require gig economy companies to treat their workers like employees, entitling them to more protections and benefits.
But while the PRO Act has passed the House twice under Democratic rule ― in 2020 and 2021 ― the Democratic Senate effectively shelved it in 2021.
Asked whether the AFL-CIO had a plan to pass core elements of the PRO Act, perhaps in modified form, Shuler did not outline a specific plan.
“There’s a number of provisions in the PRO Act that we’d like to see happen, and of course, we are recalibrating our approach based on how we see the Senate and the House terrain ahead,” Shuler said. “But what we do know is that workers are fired up about it, and so it’s also a tool for us to keep members and workers engaged in the process.”
She added, “Certainly Biden has said he will sign it if it arrived at his desk, so he’s doing everything he can.”
In the five months since April, former president Donald Trump has nearly doubled his lead over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is currently barely holding on to the second-place spot in the race for the GOP presidential nomination.
Trump, who currently faces four criminal indictments, is the first choice of nearly 6 in 10 GOP primary voters, according to a Wall Street Journal poll released Saturday. That’s up 11 points since April.
The results appear to show the GOP primary electorate consolidating around the former president in the wake of multiple indictments for attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election. 60% said each of the Trump indictments was politically motivated and meritless. Nearly four in five believe that Trump’s actions in the wake of the 2020 election were legitimate attempts to ensure the integrity of the vote; only 16% said his actions were illegal. Nearly half said Trump’s actions made them more likely to vote for him next November.
DeSantis’s precipitous decline is another major finding of the new poll. He’s lost over 11 points of support since April, and is barely squeaking out a lead over the rest of the primary field. “DeSantis collapsed,” said Democratic pollster Michael Bocian, who conducted the survey with Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio. “The one candidate who back in April really seemed to be a potential contender, seemed to have a narrative to tell, has totally collapsed, and those votes went to Trump.”
The rest of the poll provides sobering news for the GOP primary field. Though former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy received positive responses for their August 23 debate performances, they still are languishing in the single digits. Mike Pence, whose criticism of his former running mate has escalated as Trump’s indictments piled up, has seen his favorability among the GOP primary electorate plummet: while 54% viewed him favorably in April, now 63% view him unfavorably. And the two candidates who have criticized Trump most vociferously—former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie—are at a combined 4%, with Christie the most unpopular candidate in the entire field.
With over three months until the Iowa caucuses, there’s still a lot of time for Trump’s overwhelming lead to shrink, especially as his various criminal cases proceed in court. Just last week, Judge Tanya Chutkan scheduled Trump’s federal election overturning case for March 4, 2024—one day before Super Tuesday, when 15 Republican primaries are scheduled. And yet, the poll found that over three-quarters of Trump supporters are fully committed to him and don’t see themselves changing their votes.
The poll also tested a head-to-head matchup between Trump and Biden and found the two in a dead heat, with 8% of overall voters undecided.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis′ office said Friday that he has “no plans” to meet with President Joe Biden when the Democrat flies to Florida this weekend to survey damage from Hurricane Idalia, suggesting that doing so could hinder disaster response.
“In these rural communities, and so soon after impact, the security preparations alone that would go into setting up such a meeting would shut down ongoing recovery efforts,” DeSantis spokesman Jeremy Redfern said in a statement.
Gov. DeSantis’s press secretary says he won’t meet with President Biden in Florida tomorrow. “We don’t have any plans for the Governor to meet with the President tomorrow,” Jeremy Redfern says. “In these rural communities, and so soon after impact, the security preparations alone…
Idalia made landfall Wednesday morning along Florida’s Big Bend region as a Category 3 storm, causing widespread flooding and damage before moving north to drench Georgia and the Carolinas. Biden is set to fly to Florida on Saturday to tour the damage personally.
DeSantis preemptively heading off a meeting contradicts Biden himself, who, when asked after an event at the White House earlier Friday whether he would meet with DeSantis during his trip to Florida, replied, “Yes.”
It’s also a break from the recent past, since Biden and DeSantis met when the president toured Florida after Hurricane Ian hit the state last year, and following the Surfside condo collapse in Miami Beach in summer 2021. But DeSantis is now running for president, and he only left the Republican primary trail last week with Idalia barreling toward his state.
White House spokeswoman Emilie Simons responded, “President Biden and the first lady look forward to meeting members of the community impacted by Hurricane Idalia and surveying impacts of the storm.”
“Their visit to Florida has been planned in close coordination” with the Federal Emergency Management Agency “as well as state and local leaders to ensure there is no impact on response operations,” Simons said in her own statement.
Another 2024 presidential candidate, former Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, was widely criticized in GOP circles for embracing then-President Barack Obama during a tour of damage 2012′s Hurricane Sandy did to his state. Christie was even asked about the incident last month, during the first Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee.
Both Biden and DeSantis at first said helping storm victims would outweigh politics, but DeSantis began suggesting that logistical problems could complicate a presidential visit as the week wore on.
“There’s a time and a place to have political season,” the governor said before Idalia made landfall. “But then there’s a time and a place to say that this is something that’s life threatening, this is something that could potentially cost somebody their life, it could cost them their livelihood.”
WATCH: Gov. Ron DeSantis says hurricane response is more important than being on campaign trail
“There’s a time and a place to have political season, but then there’s a time and a place to say that this is something that’s life threatening.” pic.twitter.com/UwhGjvy0lM
By Friday, the governor was telling reporters of Biden, “one thing I did mention to him on the phone” was “it would be very disruptive to have the whole security apparatus that goes” with the president “because there are only so many ways to get into” many of the hardest hit areas.
“What we want to do is make sure that the power restoration continues and the relief efforts continue and we don’t have any interruption in that,” DeSantis said. The statement about not planning to meet came later, and Redfern pointed to the governor’s previous comments when asked how Idalia’s aftermath might differ from that of Ian or the Surfside collapse when DeSantis and Biden met.
DeSantis has built his White House bid around dismantling what he calls Democrats’ “woke” policies. DeSantis also frequently draws applause at GOP rallies by declaring that it’s time to send “Joe Biden back to his basement,” a reference to the Democrat’s Delaware home, where he spent much of his time during the early lockdowns of the coronavirus pandemic.
Still, Biden suggested earlier in the week that he and DeSantis were cooperating easily. While delivering pizzas to workers at FEMA’s Washington headquarters, the president said he’d spoken to DeSantis so frequently about Idalia that “there should be a direct dial” between the pair.
Homeland Security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall pointed to the experiences after Ian and Surfside when telling reporters at the White House this week that Biden and DeSantis “are very collegial when we have the work to do together of helping Americans in need, citizens of Florida in need.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks with the owners of Shrimp Boat, Horseshoe Beach’s only restaurant, which was damaged by storm surge during the passage of Hurricane Idalia one day earlier, in Horseshoe Beach, Florida on Thursday.
AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell
And yet, the post-Idalia politics could be complicated for both sides.
The president announced his bid for reelection in April but has mostly refrained from campaigning, preferring instead to lead by governing. The White House is now seeking an additional $4 billion to address natural disasters as part of its supplemental funding request to Congress — bringing the total to $16 billion and illustrating that wildfires, flooding and hurricanes that have intensified during a period of climate change are imposing ever higher costs on U.S. taxpayers.
DeSantis, meanwhile, is facing questions about whether his campaign can survive for the long haul. Four months before the first ballots are to be cast in Iowa’s caucuses, DeSantis still lags far behind former President Donald Trump, the Republican primary’s dominant early front-runner. And he has cycled through repeated campaign leadership shakeups and reboots of his image in an attempt to refocus his message.
The super PAC supporting DeSantis’ candidacy has halted its door-knocking operations in Nevada, which votes third on the Republican presidential primary calendar, and several states holding Super Tuesday primaries in March — a further sign of trouble.
Associated Press writer Brendan Farrington in Tallahassee, Florida, contributed to this report.
There are rules about when and how a politician can use music. Technically Republican primary combatant Vivek Ramaswamy had actually followed them before he performed Eminem’s self-hype anthem “Lose Yourself” in a half-viral moment at the Iowa State Fair on August 12. In May, Ramaswamy’s campaign signed an agreement with the performing rights organization BMI, giving him the rights to play songs from the thousands of artists they represent. But there are also a few unwritten codes that supersede the licensing business, and something about the biotech entrepreneur turned MAGA stan’s lackluster performance must have violated them in the rapper’s eyes. Less than two weeks later, BMI asked the campaign to stop using Eminem’s music. According to the letter, which Deadline obtained, the artist reached out to his longtime licensing company and asked them to exclude his music from the agreement with the Ramaswamy campaign. (ASCAP, another rival rights organization, advises campaigns to seek permission from the artists’ management before playing a song to ensure the use doesn’t infringe on the artists’ rights to publicity or represent a false endorsement.) Ramaswamy’s campaign spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said the campaign will comply with the request to stop using Eminem’s music. “To the American people’s chagrin, we will have to leave the rapping to the real Slim Shady.”
Eminem’s politics surely had something to do with the complaint, but I would be surprised if “don’t be cringe” wasn’t an equal part of the subtext. It’s likely a coincidence that the letter went out the same day that Ramaswamy’s profile rose significantly in the first GOP presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle, but it’s fitting. Perched in the center of the stage, Ramaswamy’s lively performance impressed the likes of Matt Gaetz and earned attacks from his fellow debaters. In any case, the Eminem letter was its own strange mark of legitimacy. In Republican politics, you’re no one until someone is beseeching you to please, for the love of god, stay away from their back catalog.
The tussles between right-wing politicians and left-leaning musical artists are nothing new. In the wake of the 1984 Reagan campaign’s appropriation of “Born in the U.S.A.,” Bruce Springsteenquipped about the president missing, well, the whole point of the song. The visibility of these technical and legal matters changed after Donald Trump’s 2016 run for president, if only because celebrity outcry against Trump was loud and the campaign had the bad habit of continuing to use music long after rights organizations tried to intervene. “Musicians who oppose Donald Trump’s use of their music” now has its own Wikipedia page and entries ranging from Adele to the White Stripes, with Elton John, Neil Young, and the Village People among the names in between. Despite intervention from the rightsholders, performances of “Macho Man” were still taking place at Mar-a-Lago as recently as May, and that’s unlikely to change. Trump is set in his ways.
Eminem’s quiet rebuke of Ramaswamy recalls the sad saga of Springsteen and his former number-one fan, Chris Christie. Ever the New Jersey man, Christie was devoted to the artist, never mind their obvious political differences. But Springsteen rebuffed his invitation to perform at a state event and publicly criticized his policy positions. It’s not just that Christie wanted the songs, he wanted an embrace from the man himself. He wanted to be cool enough for Bruce. Christie soon switched his allegiance to another son of the Garden State and struck up a friendship with Jon Bon Jovi.
If stars were once hesitant about rebuking politicians they disagreed with, the Trump era broke the seal for good. Though close observers know that Eminem circa 2023 is a fairly progressive guy, the contingent of his fan base who might remember him, approvingly, as the avatar of early 2000s homophobia got a shock when he used his 2017 BET Hip-Hop Awards performance to announce his proud membership in the Resistance. In a rap, he called Trump a “racist 94-year-old grandpa” who would “probably cause a nuclear holocaust.”
Sure, there were a few fans who expressed outrage on Twitter, complaints from the type of person who might also find themselves in Tom Morello’s mentions lamenting that Rage Against the Machine got so political. For many sectors of the culture industry, the lesson of the Trump era was that Republicans do buy sneakers too, but not that many of them, and not the ones the trendsetters want to wear.
Now that we’re in the middle of another election cycle, more Republican presidential campaigns will inevitably face headlines like this. We’re also in the middle of a ferocious backlash against the vaguely liberal urban consensus over racial equality and tolerance that coalesced in the 2010s. While its most dire consequences have been laws that criminalize abortion or gender-affirming care, it’s also been waged widely in the culture, from the war on Disney to uproar about rainbows at Target. The right is now realizing that the decades-long groundwork they laid to capture American politics did little to net them the cultural supremacy they desperately crave.
This is quite clearly a part of what motivates Ramaswamy. In a profile by The New Yorker’s Sheelah Kolhatkar which labeled him “the CEO of anti-woke,” he lamented conservatism’s image problem on Ivy League campuses. “He mentioned a white, heavyset conservative male classmate at Harvard who was considered uncool,” Kolhatkar wrote, “and argued that the social pecking order was stacked against him ‘more than some athletic Black kid who came and got a place on the basketball team.’ Ramaswamy blamed affirmative action and similar policies for forcing élite institutions to lower their standards.”
For the most part, the attempts to change the tide have the quixotic air of Ben Shapiro’s efforts to make Nashville a conservative Hollywood. But there have been a few successful campaigns to seize the means of popularity, from a depressingly effective boycott of Bud Light over a single influencer’s sponsored post to the lackluster Jason Aldean provocation that spent a few weeks on the chart this summer.
So it was darkly hilarious to hear the newly minted folk hero Oliver Anthony react with dismay after his song “Rich Men North of Richmond” was played before the Fox debate last week. Anthony’s would-be corporate media boosters had impeccable right-wing bona fides, but Anthony still has the muddled, anti-establishment centrist politics of a regular guy. “It’s aggravating seeing people in conservative news try to identify with me like I’m one of them,” he said in a YouTube video. “It was funny seeing my song at the presidential debate. Cause it’s like, I wrote that song about those people. So for them to have to sit there and listen to that, that cracks me up.”
The brand is strong—just turns out even their own hand-selected standard-bearers don’t want to be associated with it.
On this last, slow, hot week in August, we are trapped in a Vivek Ramaswamy news cycle. Ramaswamy has figured out the path to free media is lined with saying extreme things like how “the climate change agenda is a hoax” at last week’s first Republican debate, or more recently, doubling down on calling Rep. Ayanna Pressley a member of the “modern KKK” (CNN’s State of the Union) or suggestingMike Pence should’ve implemented new voting reforms before certifying the 2020 election (NBC’s Meet the Press). He was still pushing that bizarre January 6 scenario days later on MSNBC.
What’s important about Ramaswamy is not his ideology—he has no coherentone—but how susceptible our political and media ecosystem is to a charismatic phony. He’s become a recurring character on cable news, recently claiming on CNN that he was misquoted in The Atlantic when raising questions about the 9/11 attacks. But The Atlantic’s John Hendrickson had the tape, which of course included Ramaswamy asking, “How many police, how many federal agents were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers?” Denying something that is actually on tape, how very Trumpy.
Two days later, at the Fox News–hosted GOP debate, Ramaswamy claimed to be “the only candidate onstage who isn’t bought and paid for” when decrying the climate “hoax.” But it turns out that Ramaswamy is “bought and paid” or at least “paid for” because his investment firm, Strive, has a fund called DRLL, which, as Semafor reports, “invests in US energy companies and urges them to keep drilling for oil so long as it’s profitable.” As Heated’s Emily Atkinput it, “Ramaswamy makes money from climate denial.”
And yet, in the past, Ramaswamy has acknowledged that climate change is “real,” just one of his campaign flip-flops. On recognizing Juneteenth, for instance, he went from supportive—“Let it be a celebration of the American Dream itself,” he said on video—to against the holiday just two months later, telling Iowa voters,“Cancel Juneteenth or one of the other useless ones we made up.”
Obviously, the outrage-to-free-media pipeline was something Donald Trump took advantage of in 2016 to the tune of $2 billion. Ramaswamy has managed to once again exploit this media weakness, making incendiary or contradictory claims on one show or stage, only to be asked about them on another. But worse than that, it seems clear from his polling that Republican voters are way more fixated on personality over policy and seem to long for another smooth-talking showman.
Perhaps we shouldn’t find this surprising, as Fantasyland author Kurt Andersen put it in an email, “Americans historically have a special weakness for charismatic charlatans especially in religion—from Joseph Smith two centuries ago to the past half century of televangelists. Now that we have a political party dominated by quasi-religious and actually religious charlatanism, voilà.”
In Vivekmentum we see that Trumpism (or the con that is Trumpism) can in fact scale. Stuart Stevens, a former GOP operative who is firmly in the Never Trump camp, told me on the phone, “The party has become less educated and with that comes a higher susceptibility to conspiracy, fraud, and snake oil salesman.”
It’s easy to see Ramaswamy as an heir to Trumpism—at least according to Trump. “He’s a very, very, very intelligent person,” Trump toldGlenn Beck, when asked about the idea of becoming his VP. “He’s got good energy,” he said, adding: “I tell you, I think he’d be very good.”
I always believed that Trump was appealing because he was not bound by the truth and could promise things that were completely undeliverable. This is my answer to the very annoying discourse of “Why people voted for Trump.” In a speech in North Carolina, in 2020, Trump told the audience, “Under the America First Healthcare Plan, we will ensure the highest standard of care anywhere in the world, cutting-edge treatments, state-of-the-art medicine, groundbreaking cures, and true health security for you and your loved ones. And we will do it rapidly, and it’s in very good order, and some of it has already been implemented.” Trump was paradoxically promising something that he said he’d already delivered.
Of course, promisinga health care overhaul that never materializes is a Trump mainstay, just like declaring over and over that Mexico is paying for a border wall. Yet, as John Harwoodwrote in 2019, “Trump’s ‘great wall’ is a fantasy that even he knows will never be real.”
I remember watching one of those painful debates between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016 and realizing that a conventional politician with normal political embellishments couldn’t compete with pure unadulterated fabulism, a kind of brazen lying that Trump seemingly patented. We know politicians lie; we’ve grown to expect it. But Trump lied on the kind of scale that the American people couldn’t process. He’d lie about serious matters down to nonsensical, provably untrue things, from the weather during his inauguration to how the noise from windmills causes cancer. The Washington Post tallied more than 30,000 false and misleading claims over his presidency, reaching new heights of dishonesty that has helped tip his party, and its supporters, into unreality.
Since 2015, we’ve gone through a pandemic, cultural reckonings, a supply chain crunch, a tight labor market, inflation, and other destabilizing events. During this time, Trump’s base has gotten smaller but it’s also hardened into something of which there is no historical precedence. This Republican base now occupies a kind of Earth-Two space, in which they still believe Trump won the 2020 election. “Among registered voters who say they cast a ballot for Trump in 2020, 75% say they have doubts about [Joe] Biden’s legitimacy,” CNN found in a recent poll. Other polling this month found that “more Trump voters trust him than trust their own friends and family, conservative media, or even religious leaders.”
If Trump does somehow win the electoral college, we could see him completely dismantle the federal government—the Heritage Foundation is already workshopping the idea—or even end democracy as we know it. But perhaps even scarier than another Trump term—and that’s already terrifying—is the possibility that someone theoretically worse, like a competent Trump or a charismatic Ron DeSantis, comes along and claims this MAGA base, already tipped into unreality and primed for a prophet. Such a person could do more damage than we can imagine.
INDIANOLA, Iowa ― A wealthy businessman and political newcomer accuses his rivals in the Republican presidential primary of being “bought and paid for.” He promises to use extreme methods to secure the United States’ borders and rails against the “deep state.” And while he sees China as an existential threat, he plans to cut a deal with Russia to end the war in Ukraine.
The comparisons between former President Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old biotech investor and self-funding Republican candidate running as a younger, more articulate tribune of Trump’s vision, are obvious. Ramaswamy’s populist brand has brought him within striking distance of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in some 2024 GOP presidential polling and allowed him to stand out on the Republican presidential debate stage in Milwaukee last Wednesday.
“It’s going to take an outsider to dismantle the mechanisms of government that the others, the long-term politicians, have come to rely on,” said Bryant Alexander, an officer in the Marion County, Iowa, Republican Party, who is deciding between Trump and Ramaswamy, and summed up the two candidates’ shared appeal. “They created these institutions, and they’ve corrupted these institutions.”
Lost in Ramaswamy’s provocative rhetoric and self-styled image as a Trumpian maverick, however, is the world of difference between him and Trump on questions of economic policy. Unlike Trump, Ramaswamy supports free trade and unfettered legal immigration, wants to deprive the Fed of its mandate to reduce unemployment, and sees deregulation and tax cuts as the sole means with which to help struggling workers.
Those disagreements have not yet hurt Ramaswamy’s rise in the Republican primary. But Ramaswamy’s economic views could undermine his ability to replicate Trump’s appeal to working-class voters with a dim view of traditional Republican policies. And it’s already raising red flags for New Right devotees who see Trump’s presidency as a core set of nationalistic beliefs that supersede loyalty to Trump as an individual.
“If you go down to the real, basic philosophy of what MAGA is … it’s that all of our large decisions ― from foreign policy to immigration to trade ― have benefited the very few, while working-class Americans, specifically white working-class Americans, have been on the losing end for decades,” said Ryan Girdusky, a populist-aligned GOP consultant who is staying neutral in the Republican primary. “What of Vivek’s plans that he has specifically talked about, aside from his appreciation of Trump as a man, relates to any of those problems?”
Then-President Donald Trump holds up an executive order levying tariffs on solar panel and washing machine imports from China and other countries in January 2018.
Mike Theiler/Getty Images
A Free Trader With Libertarian Roots
Given Ramaswamy’s status as a first-time candidate, his bare-bones voting history and recent books provide the best insight into his core beliefs.
Ramaswamy has voted in just two presidential elections, 2004 and 2020. As a college student in 2004, and a then-registered Libertarian Party member, he says he cast a ballot for Libertarian Party nominee Michael Badnarik. And in 2020, Ramaswamy says he voted for Trump.
In a speech at a Polk County Republican Party event in Clive, Iowa, on Friday evening, Ramaswamy described his Libertarian vote, and subsequent abstention from the process, as a product of being “badly disaffected from politics” during his young adulthood.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner in July, Ramaswamy elaborated on his transition from “libertarian to conservative,” which he said began in law school and intensified when he became a parent in 2020.
“The gist of my journey to being a conservative rather than a libertarian doesn’t actually involve abandoning most of my libertarian convictions,” he told the conservative outlet. “It actually involves caring about more issues than libertarians care about. Like, I think culture actually matters. Family actually matters.”
Unlike libertarians, who, in theory, focus solely on lifting government barriers to individual freedom, Ramaswamy wants to deport all of the country’s undocumented immigrants, identifies as “pro-life” (though he’d leave abortion restrictions to the states), and wants to ban algorithm-based social media applications for Americans under the age of 16. The 10 “truths” Ramaswamy touts at every campaign speech include at least three socially conservative declarations a devout libertarian would not touch: “God is real,” “There are two genders,” and “The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.”
But in other ways, Ramaswamy’s libertarian roots remain apparent. He wants to decriminalize marijuana and is open to making psychedelic drugs available as a way to wean people off of opiates. He would decline to reinstate Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the U.S. military (though he would enact a “limited ban” for combat roles), and has no problem with adults getting gender reassignment procedures. Ramaswamy’s campaign website allows supporters to donate in Bitcoin, a popular cryptocurrency championed by libertarians.
The starkest example is Ramaswamy’s unabashed support for free trade. In his 2022 book, “Nation of Victims” ― the second of three he has published since 2021 ― Ramaswamy wrote that while he voted for Trump in 2020, he “disapproved of his large-scale government spending and his tariff policies.”
“My first and best choice is definitely bilateral agreements with each of those countries where we each get something out of the trade.”
– Vivek Ramaswamy
Indeed, Ramaswamy wants to expand U.S. trade with other countries, including in the developing world, rather than restrict trade with tariffs. He has called for reentering the modified Trans-Pacific Partnership ― a 12-nation Pacific Rim trade accord that former President Barack Obama negotiated and Trump shelved ― maintaining that the deal is part of “declaring independence” from China.
In his interview with HuffPost on Friday though, Ramaswamy emphasized his preference for two-country trade agreements with TPP signatories and other Asian nations like India.
“My first and best choice is definitely bilateral agreements with each of those countries where we each get something out of the trade, but without a whole bunch of garbage related to climate change to go along with it, which is one of my main problems with multilateral agreements,” he said.
More broadly, Ramaswamy views making the U.S. less dependent on Chinese and Taiwanese imports as a means of securing U.S. geopolitical power vis-a-vis China, rather than restoring American manufacturing as an end in itself. (He would end the U.S.’ reliance on microchips made in Taiwan too, since China’s hopes to subsume the island nation could effectively make the U.S. dependent on China for an essential technology.)
Asked whether, when he describes in his speeches a two-term presidency after which Americans are “no longer dependent on our enemy, Communist China, for the shoes on our feet and the phones in our pockets,” he means to have those products made in the U.S., he replied: “Preferably, but that’s a separate point from actually the need to declare independence from China.”
In “Nation of Victims,” Ramaswamy described the predicament of displaced manufacturing workers in ways that sound an awful lot like a Clintonian Democrat from the 1990s ― the type of person now regularly derided online as a “neoliberal.” He wrote in the book that he sees the “conscious policy choices” that lead to manufacturing job loss as worth the economic benefits they provide, calling them “the right policy choices for America to make,” even as he insists, “we also owe it to American workers in our manufacturing sector to acknowledge that their plight is a direct consequence of these policy choices.”
As for remedies to the collateral damage caused by free trade, Ramaswamy envisions displaced workers taking up jobs in education and elder care where demand is high and there are often personnel shortages. To ease these workers’ path to a decent standard of living in those professions, he proposes improving outdated job retraining programs, loosening housing construction regulations, and reducing occupational licensing regimes.
“It’s actually less fancy approaches of getting government out of the way and driving supply side-driven competition that makes housing and other important attributes of the American dream more attainable, while also actually offering individuals the ability to self determine where they want to go and produce more so you can get that productivity growth,” he told HuffPost.
Unlike Trump or figures like Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Ramaswamy is also unconcerned about an influx of skilled, legal immigrants undercutting the earning power of current American workers.
While maintaining a hard line against illegal immigration, Ramaswamy would allow a “merit-based” legal immigration based on applicants having skills that align with job openings, as well as compliance with the U.S. civics exam currently only required to become a citizen. He would not require a hard cap on this form of legal immigration, instead allowing in as many people who meet the “meritocratic criteria” ― a change that would potentially increase the number of legal immigrants to the country from its current level.
“I’m a little bit of a departure from what I think is the Republican consensus here,” he conceded while outlining his plans on the “All In” podcast in July.
Former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), left, and his son Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), right, favor radical reform of the Federal Reserve. Ramaswamy would seek a Fed chair in their “mold.”
A Radical Vision For The Federal Reserve
One of Ramaswamy’s most radical goals is to pass legislation shrinking the Federal Reserve’s mission from its current “dual mandate” ― limit inflation and maximize employment ― to a “single mandate” of containing inflation alone.
Assuming it would take time to undo the 1978 law that established the Fed’s dual mandate, he would begin by appointing inflation hawks to lead the Federal Reserve, citing late 1980s Fed Vice Chair Manuel “Manley” Johnson as a model.
“Rand or Ron Paul, intellectually, would be a good mold for that,” he added, citing the father-son duo of libertarian-leaning Republican lawmakers whose plans to curb the Fed’s power are far outside the mainstream. (Former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), the father, wants to “end the Fed” and return to the gold standard, while his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), would merely audit the Fed and have a commission study a potential return to the gold standard.)
The Federal Reserve’s use of interest rate reductions to improve the job market has been uncontroversial among mainstream Republicans for decades.
Trump himself took it a step further, accusing the Fed of letting its wariness of inflation get in the way of allowing a tight labor market that benefits workers. He repeatedlythreatened to fire Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, whom he appointed, if Powell did not keep interest rates as low as possible.
“Without the corrupting influence of cronyism, capitalism, left unto itself, is still the best system known to man to lift everyone up from poverty, and everyone up from struggle.”
– Vivek Ramaswamy
How does Ramaswamy plan to ensure that the displaced former manufacturing workers he expects to join the service sector have adequate bargaining power vis-a-vis employers, particularly since he would not use the Fed to foster tighter labor markets?
“I reject the premise of there being a bilateral, zero-sum game between the owners of capital and laborers in the sort of Karl Marx view,” Ramaswamy said. “Without the corrupting influence of cronyism, capitalism, left unto itself, is still the best system known to man to lift everyone up from poverty, and everyone up from struggle.”
To that end, Ramaswamy maintains that he can create annual economic growth in excess of 5% GDP by, among other things, removing all barriers to fossil fuel extraction; firing 75% of federal employees; and passing legislation reducing federal income, capital gains and inheritance taxes to a single flat rate of 12%.
Ramaswamy’s embrace of a 12% inheritance tax appears to be at odds with a non-libertarian position he articulated in “Nation of Victims.” In the book, Ramaswamy called for, at minimum, an inheritance tax rate of 59% so that Americans cannot “become billionaires just by having rich parents.”
Ramaswamy told HuffPost the passage in his book was a “thought experiment” for a far-fetched, hypothetical scenario in which there are no federal income taxes at all.
“Is it realistic to get rid of the income tax? It is not,” he said.
In fact, while Ramaswamy panned progressive plans to raise income taxes in “Nation of Victims,” and says he would favor a “flat (and low) income tax regime,” he does not explicitly state what he sees as the ideal income tax rate.
During the first Republican debate, Nikki Haley blasted Ramaswamy for his foreign policy stances. But many GOP voters are seeking someone with anti-establishment credibility.
Will Voters Care?
In short, while Ramaswamy has much in common with Trump, he is not an economic populist in the New Right mold. His worldview diverges significantly from that of Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.), Marco Rubio (Fla.) and J.D. Vance (Ohio) ― the Republican members of Congress most interested in reining in corporate power and most open to federal intervention for working families.
In some ways, he more closely resembles Blake Masters, the Peter Thiel protégé and unsuccessful U.S. Senate candidate in Arizona. Masters’ nationalistic rhetoric and Trumpian provocations helped obscure libertarian-leaning positions on topics like Social Security.
Ramaswamy need not be consigned to Masters’ fate of an embarrassing loss, which was determined in significant part by the latter’s penchant for conspiracy theories and a strong opponent. That’s especially true in a Republican primary where populist-minded, Rust Belt swing voters, who typically oppose free trade, are not as much of a factor in early contests.
“He’s the one on stage last night who appeals the most to the really anti-establishment, anti-politician MAGA base,” David Kochel, a veteran strategist for Republican candidates in Iowa, said in a Thursday interview.
Asked whether Ramaswamy’s more libertarian views on trade would create problems for him with GOP voters, Kochel predicted that the candidates’ style would matter more than policy details for most voters.
“I’m not sure that voters in Iowa are going over policy positions in that manner. It’s more about the vibe and the rhetoric,” said Kochel, who identifies strongly with the non-MAGA wing of the party. “They’re not gonna say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know he wanted to go into TPP.’ Most Iowa voters aren’t sure what TPP is.”
“I’m not sure that voters in Iowa are going over policy positions in that manner. It’s more about the vibe and the rhetoric.”
– David Kochel, GOP strategist
Sure enough, in conversations with a dozen voters who came to hear Ramaswamy speak at campaign stops in Indianola, Pella, and Clive, Iowa, on Friday, the excitement was as much about Ramaswamy’s speaking chops and outsider status as it was about policy.
Karen Hogue, a retired college administrator who came to see Ramaswamy in Indianola, told HuffPost that she was considering Ramaswamy, Trump, DeSantis, and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.). She appreciated how Ramaswamy “defended himself” on the debate stage and likes his plan to redirect U.S. military resources away from Ukraine so they can be used to secure the southern border. When asked about the TPP, Hogue did not know what the accord was.
Trump, however, remains her top choice given the degree to which she believes he is being unfairly persecuted.
“We need to show them that what they’re doing is entirely wrong, and we can’t let it happen again in this country,” she concluded.
In that context, Ramaswamy’s adversarial stance toward the federal bureaucracy and willingness to slay sacred foreign policy cows is perhaps more important to GOP voters than his stances on trade or the Federal Reserve. He believes that his promise to tear down entrenched institutions ― whether by slashing the headcount in regulatory agencies or breaking up elements of the national-security state ― explains why he has elicited so much criticism, including from rivals in the first debate.
“We are seeing the broad establishment and the managerial class within government … threatened by my rise,” Ramaswamy said. “And I think people behave in unpredictable ways when they’re threatened.”
Former prosecutor Glenn Kirschner on Monday called out Donald Trump lawyer John Lauro for making spurious arguments during his unsuccessful attempt to delay the trial of the former president’s election interference case.
Lauro “did not do himself any favors,” Kirschner, a former U.S. Army prosecutor and current legal analyst for MSNBC, told the network’s Joy Reid.
“He was a bomb thrower. It sounded like he was making arguments to Donald Trump’s base, not to the judge,” he added.
Chutkan described as “misleading” Lauro’s claim that some cases were taking months and months to come to trial, said Kirschner, who was in court for the trial date announcement.
Some pandemic-era cases did, Kirschner noted, but it’s not usual now.
“I’m sure people would agree with me that when a judge tells you that you’ve put something in a legal filing that is ‘misleading,’ it’s kind of like a dagger to the heart, we don’t take it kindly,” said Kirschner. “But that’s what she told the defense counsel. And she was right.”
Long before he was indicted an astonishing fourtimesover less than fivemonths, Donald Trump spent decades in and out of civil court as a plaintiff and defendant in literally thousands of lawsuits. Because of this, he developed a go-tolegal strategy, the basis of which was: stall, stall, and stall some more. Since this tactic worked out for him on at least a few occasions, the ex-president has unsurprisingly attempted to use it for his criminal cases. For instance, when it comes to the federal government’s case against him for allegedly trying to overturn the election, Trump’s lawyers asked a judge to put the trial off until April 2026, which would greatly benefit the former guy in that (1) it’s more than two freaking years from now, and (2) should he win the 2024 election, he’d be well into a second term and could attempt to just pardon himself. Unfortunately, said judge thought about the proposal, decided it was absurd, and told Trump as much today.
On Monday, Judge Tanya Chutkanannounced a March 4, 2023, start date for Trump’s trial versus the DOJ on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election. That date is sure to rankle the ex-president, as it is well before the one his legal team asked for—and means he’ll potentially have to juggle multiple criminal trials at once. Per The New York Times:
The district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., has proposed taking Mr. Trump to trial on charges of tampering with the election in that state on March 4 as well. Another case, in Manhattan, in which Mr. Trump has been accused of more than 30 felonies connected to hush money payments to a porn actress in the run-up to the 2016 election, has been scheduled to go to trial on March 25.
And if the trial in Washington lasts more than 11 weeks, it could bump up against Mr. Trump’s other federal trial, on charges of illegally retaining classified documents after he left office and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them. That trial is scheduled to begin in Florida in late May…. While Judge Chutkan noted that she had spoken to the judge in the Manhattan case, it remained unclear how the judges, prosecutors, and defense teams would address the problem of scheduling four criminal trials next year as Mr. Trump is campaigning.
Of course, if Trump didn’t want to deal with the logistical headache of simultaneous trials, he probably should have thought of that before holding on to classified documents and allegedly attempting to overturn the results of a free and fair election, among other things. (Trump has repeatedly claimed he did nothing wrong.) While announcing the March 2024 date, Judge Chutkan said, “Mr. Trump, like any defendant, will have to make the trial date work regardless of his schedule,” adding that “there is a societal interest to a speedy trial.” In arguing for the trial to start in 2026, attorneys for Trump said they needed that much time to go through discovery; on Monday, Chutkan countered that such an amount of time was “far beyond what is necessary.”
As the Times notes, Trump “has made no secret in conversations with his aides that he would like to solve his uniquely complicated legal woes by winning the election”; “if either of his two federal trials is delayed until after the race and Mr. Trump prevails, he could seek to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general dismiss the matters altogether.” And while, wildly, Trump could theoretically stay in the presidential race from prison, and then attempt to pardon himself from behind bars should he be elected, that would obviously be…significantly more complicated!
Surprise: Trump is not, in fact, taking his trial date well
Twitter content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
Pope Francis tells conservatives to stop living in the past
Twitter content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
MSNBC’s Jen Psaki said it’s “hard to imagine” former President Donald Trump’s mug shot making him “more appealing” ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
The host, in a newsletter ahead of Sunday’s episode of her MSNBC program, argued that Trump thinks the mug shot is a “political winner” for him following his arrest at Georgia’s Fulton County Jail on charges tied to efforts to change the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state.
“He thinks this is a political winner for him. But as New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu told me in an interview that airs Sunday, ‘independents hate it,’” wrote Psaki, a former White House press secretary in the Biden administration.
“The fact remains that Trump is going to need to expand his voting base to win a general election.”
Psaki went on to declare that while Trump has “turned politics on its head,” it’s “very unlikely” that the Georgia booking will make independents and moderates in a number of U.S. cities “more likely” to vote for him.
“This photo will be shared on every text thread in America. Sometimes, images are more persuasive than anything,” Psaki wrote.
“And it is hard to imagine that this image, of Trump scowling into the police camera, will make him more appealing to anyone who is not already a hardcore supporter.”
Atlanta, Georgia – Former President Donald Trump poses for his booking photo at the Fulton County Jail on Thursday. Trump was booked on 13 charges related to an alleged plan to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
Others including Ty Cobb, a former lawyer in the Trump White House, likened the former president’s mug shot look to a “Batman villain” while a Trump spokesperson argued that the release is “probably one of the best things” that has ever happened to the former president.
