The emails to and from Jeffrey Epstein released this week shine a light on the delicate relationship between reporters and their sources. And, as can be the case, bright light isn’t always flattering.
Messages between Epstein, the convicted sex offender who died by suicide in 2019, and journalists Michael Wolff and Landon Thomas Jr. are frequently chummy and, in one case, show Wolff giving Epstein advice on how to deal with the media —- a line journalists are taught not to cross. Wolff specializes in the “you are there” inside accounts that are possible with intensive reporting, though some of his work has been questioned.
People frequently see journalists in public settings, conducting an interview or asking questions at a news conference. Private phone calls, texts or messages — where reporters try to ingratiate themselves with sources who may not otherwise be inclined to give information — are inherently different. But ethical rules remain and are followed by most in American journalism.
Wolff’s advice came in a December 2015 exchange, where the writer said he heard CNN was going to ask then-presidential candidate Donald Trump about his relationship with Epstein. If we could craft an answer for him, Epstein wondered, what would it be?
“I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff replied. “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.”
Advice on media relations for convicted sex offender
The exchange left some experts aghast.
Independence is vital for a journalist, and Wolff compromised it, said Dan Kennedy, a media writer and professor at Northeastern University.
Kathleen Bartzen Culver’s voice rises in anger just contemplating the example. Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin, said there are plenty of ethical issues to maneuver every day, like whether a reporter should give $20 after interviewing a poor person who lost benefits during the government shutdown.
“Giving PR advice to a convicted sex offender isn’t one of them,” she said.
Wolff, a two-time National Magazine Award winner, wrote books like “Fire and Fury,” about the opening days of the first Trump administration, and “The Man Who Owns the News,” a biography of Rupert Murdoch. “Historically, one of the problems with Wolff’s omniscience is that while he may know all, he gets some of it wrong,” the late David Carr of The New York Times wrote in a review of the Murdoch book.
Wolff, who did not immediately return a message from The Associated Press, admitted on the “Inside Trump’s Head” podcast that some of the email messages were embarrassing. But he said his knowledge of the media offers “the kind of cachet that gives me a place at the table, which has gotten me the Epstein story, if anybody wanted to pay attention.”
At one point in 2016, Wolff turns the table, seeking counsel from Epstein on what he should ask during an upcoming interview with Trump. That’s a legitimate journalistic exercise, part of the reporting that goes into preparing for an interview.
A 2016 exchange with Epstein mixed a plea for an interview with some advice: “There’s an opportunity to come forward this week and talk about Trump in such a way that could garner you great sympathy and help finish him off. Interested?”
Wolff said on the podcast that part of his role is “play-acting” to get sources to reveal things they would not tell other people. And he took on his critics.
“These are not people that have written the kind of books that I have written,” he said, “and I often make the distinction between journalists who do what they do — daily reporters working for organizations, working within a very prescribed set of rules — and what I do. I’m a writer who manages to make relationships that let me tell a story in the ways that The New York Times or other very reputable journalistic organizations are unable to tell.”
Author Michael Wolff discusses his latest book on March 14, 2025, in New York. (Photo by CJ Rivera/Invision/AP, File)
Author Michael Wolff discusses his latest book on March 14, 2025, in New York. (Photo by CJ Rivera/Invision/AP, File)
A distinction that not every reader makes
Not everyone sees the difference when considering works of nonfiction. Culver cited journalism that took courage and skill to report and said, “I find it heartbreaking when that kind of work is sullied by this kind of garbage.”
Should a journalist act differently in public or private? They’re not supposed to. That explains why Connie Chung had a hard time living down her 1995 exchange with then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s mother. Gingrich initially ducked when Chung asked how her son felt about Hillary Clinton until Chung asked — on camera — “why don’t you just whisper it to me — just between you and me.”
Many of the exchanges between Epstein and the journalists are chatty, gossipy — seemingly harmless, yet not the sort of things one would like to see published years later. Northeastern’s Kennedy read some of the emails between Wolff and Epstein and said “it just seemed like kibbitzing with a child molester for no apparent purpose.”
In one email conversation, the former New York Times reporter Thomas mentions that he’s been getting calls from another journalist who is writing a book on Epstein. “He seems very interested in your relationship with the news media,” Thomas wrote. “I told him you were a hell of a guy :).”
Thomas also didn’t hide his feelings about Trump in one conversation — a personal opinion that most reporters learn to keep to themselves. “I am getting worried,” Thomas wrote in July 2016. “Is he ever going to implode?”
Relations between journalist and source: Step carefully
Journalists should take care to maintain boundaries, especially when dealing with people who are inexperienced with the media. There’s admittedly a fine line: A reporter needs a source’s trust, but it’s a form of deception if a source begins to think of the journalist as a friend who would never betray them.
People most commonly think of politics when considering bias in journalism. More frequently, bias shows up in relationships, whether a reporter likes or dislikes someone they are dealing with, Culver said.
“I advise my students to be human with their sources,” she said. “Not to be friendly or sweet, but to come at it with respect and understanding.”
Thomas stopped working at The Times in 2019 after editors discovered a violation of its ethical standards. National Public Radio reported that Thomas had solicited a $30,000 contribution from Epstein for a charity the journalist supported.
In one exchange that was widely noticed online, Epstein asked Thomas in 2015 if he would like photos of Trump and girls in bikinis taken in his kitchen. “Yes!!!” the reporter replied.
But The Times said no such photos were forthcoming.
House Speaker Newt Gingrich joined Face the Nation in 1995 to discuss his plans for the “Contract with America,” a series of legislative measures meant to shrink the size of the federal government.
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GREENSBORO, N.C. — He’s argued his four criminal indictments and mug shot bolstered his support among Black voters who see him as a victim of discrimination just like them.
He’s compared himself to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison imprisoned by Vladimir Putin, and suggested that he is a political dissident, too.
And in nearly every public appearance, he repeats falsehoods about the election he lost.
Candidates on the verge of winning their parties’ nominations generally massage their messaging and moderate positions that may energize hardcore primary voters but are less appealing to a broader audience. In political terms, they “pivot.”
Not Donald Trump. The former president is instead doubling down on often-incendiary rhetoric that offends wide swaths of voters, seeming to be doing little to rein in his most irascible and oftentimes self-defeating instincts. That’s even as some of his most loyal allies have suggested he shift his focus and tone down rhetoric that risks offending independent voters and people outside his base.
“Donald Trump is Donald Trump. That’s not going to change,” said senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita. “Our job is not to remake Donald Trump.”
LaCivita and other top campaign officials instead say their role is to provide the organization “to amplify and to force project” Trump’s message.
The campaign, he said, had already assumed a general election posture before voting began, running ads attacking President Joe Biden before the Iowa caucuses. So while Trump is now talking less about his last remaining GOP rival, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, his campaign is focused on building out a general election infrastructure as it turns its focus from early voting states to November battlegrounds.
That includes efforts to take over the Republican National Committee, with plans to consolidate the party’s and campaign’s fundraising, political operations, communications and research operations. LaCivita is in line to become the RNC’s chief operating officer while retaining his role on the campaign.
“The campaign’s pivot,” LaCivita said, “is just a realization that we’ve already secured what we need to win. That manifests itself in not only the messaging but the mechanics.” He said to expect “more of the same” after Trump clinches the nomination, which is expected later this month.
Trump’s hardest edges, no matter how familiar to Americans nine years after he first ran for president, produce welcome fodder for Biden’s reelection team, which wants to motivate disaffected Democrats and independent voters by warning about a second Trump term.
Trump’s speeches at rallies can stretch for two hours as he meanders between policy proposals, personal stories and jokes, attacks on his opponents and complaints that he is being persecuted by the courts, and dire warnings about the country’s future. Trump often adds asides that were not in his prepared remarks. But some of his most divisive comments are part of his script.
He has bragged about nominating three Supreme Court justices who voted to end a national right to abortion, even as he urges Republicans not to be too extreme on an issue Democrats have credited for several victories. In promising to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, he has talked about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing Adolf Hitler. And he once described his enemies as “vermin,” language opponents deride as authoritarian.
At one rally this past weekend, Trump went so far as to cast Biden’s handling of the border as “a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America.”
“Donald Trump is still Donald Trump — the same extreme, dangerous candidate voters rejected in 2020, and they’ll reject him again this November regardless of the team he has around him,” said Biden spokesman Kevin Munoz.
Trump’s advisers have at times encouraged him to speak less about grievance and retribution and more about his vision for a second term. But after three campaigns for the White House and four years in office, Trump is set in his ways. Former aides learned long ago that trying to pressure Trump to rein in his impulses often only led him to dig in deeper. And his campaign team seems to respect and trust the former president’s political instincts, pointing to his sweep of the GOP primaries so far.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said Trump would not change. Americans “deserve a president who will not sugarcoat what’s happening in the world,” he said.
Interviews with Republicans, including Trump supporters and those still backing Haley’s beleaguered bid, reflect concerns that Trump risks fumbling a clear opportunity against Biden, who faces low approval ratings and widespread voter questions about his age and readiness for a second term.
“At some point (Trump) needs to take the spotlight off himself,” said Tom Davis, a former Virginia congressman who backs Haley. Davis noted improving economic indicators but said Biden remains burdened by concerns about inflation and “has been bad on the border” and “terrible on the deficit.”
Even Trump voters seem to recognize the problem: According to AP VoteCast data, about half of Republicans in conservative South Carolina — including about a quarter of Trump’s own supporters — are concerned he is too extreme to win the general election. While Trump dominates among conservative voters, those voters represented just 37% of the electorate in the November 2020 presidential election.
Trump held rallies Saturday in North Carolina and Virginia, two states that hold primaries on Super Tuesday but are also potential swing states in November’s general election.
Both states highlight Trump’s potential problems in November: He dominates among conservatives, especially in rural and small-town America, but struggles with more moderate voters in more urban settings.
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat who was re-elected in 2020 even as Trump won his state, said he welcomes the contrast between Trump and Biden.
“Do you want a president who wakes up every morning thinking about the American people?” he asked in an interview. “Or do you want a president who wakes up every morning thinking about himself?”
Biden won Virginia in 2020. A year later, Virginians elected Republican Glenn Youngkin as governor. Youngkin emphasized education and economic policy, and attracted urban and suburban moderates who rejected Trump. Some of the states’ suburban and exurban congressional districts have become more favorable to Democrats in the Trump era.
Notably, Youngkin has not endorsed Trump. He declined an interview request through aides.
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally who sometimes speaks to the former president, compared 2024 to 1980, when Republican Ronald Reagan won a landslide over Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter, who was saddled with inflation, high unemployment and international conflict. Reagan, dubbed “the happy warrior,” won 44 states and a new Republican Senate with “a positive vision,” Gingrich said, that was about more than Carter’s record.
“When you have the kind of numbers Biden has, what people need is about 70% positive, 30% anti-Biden,” Gingrich said, insisting Trump could usher in a Republican wave like when he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Just as possible, however, is a repeat of 2018, when Republicans lost the House majority, or 2020, when Trump lost and Democrats reclaimed Senate control, or 2022, when Republicans lost winnable Senate races and failed to flip the chamber.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham suggests Trump and his campaign should “just keep doing what they’re doing.”
But Graham himself has pivoted. After he ran for president in 2016, Graham vowed that “if we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.” Now, he is a Trump confidant.
“Everybody that wants to give him advice, he beat like a drum,” Graham said at Trump’s South Carolina victory party.
Michael Smart chuckled as he thought back to their banishment.
Truthfully he couldn’t say for sure what the problem had been, why it was that in 2012, the John Birch Society—the far-right organization historically steeped in conspiracism and opposition to civil rights—had found itself blacklisted by the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Nobody knows the official reason, because they don’t tell you that,” Smart, a field coordinator for the group, told me.
He has theories, of course. Perhaps the Birchers’ unapologetic crusade against “globalism” had started to hit too close to home for the Republican Party of 12 years ago; perhaps their warnings about, of all people, Newt Gingrich—a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” whose onetime membership on the Council on Foreign Relations, as Smart saw it, revealed his “globalist” vision for conservatism—had rankled the Republican powers that be.
In any event, the ouster had made the news, coming as it had after a change in leadership at the American Conservative Union, the host of CPAC, the annual gathering of conservative politicians, commentators, and activists. “When they applied, I said, ‘I don’t want any segregationist groups at CPAC; it sends the wrong message,’” Al Cárdenas, the ACU chair from 2011 to 2014, told me recently. “And that was that.” For some optimistic observers, the decision had signified a small but symbolic effort to purge the movement of its most “highly offensive” elements, as one report put it.
Though CPAC has long catered more to the activist base of the Republican Party than to its establishment, the event has marched steadily closer to the fringes in the years since Donald Trump’s election, the barrier to entry for speakers and organizations being little more than a sufficient appreciation of the 45th president. But even Smart seemed a touch surprised by the ease of it all in 2023; when he applied on behalf of the John Birch Society for a booth at CPAC, and when, after the fuss and hand-wringing of 11 years earlier, the application was approved.
“It was a very basic process,” he recalled with a shrug. (CPAC organizers did not respond to a request for comment about the John Birch Society’s presence at the conference.)
It was half past noon yesterday, day two of the 2024 gathering, and Smart, a soft-spoken, genial man wearing a trim blazer and slacks, was standing before the red-white-and-blue curtained backdrop of the John Birch Society booth. He occasionally paused our conversation to direct curious passersby to the literature spread across a nearby table—brochures outlining the history of the organization (“How are we unique?”); copies of its latest “Freedom Index,” or congressional scorecard; issues of TheNew American, the group’s in-house journal, including a “TRUMP WORLD” collector’s edition featuring such articles as “Trumping the Deep State” and “The Deplorables.” It was the contemporary output of an organization with an older and more controversial heritage than probably any other group featured this year at CPAC. And yet what was most striking about the John Birch Society of 2024 was how utterly unremarkable it appeared among the various booths lining this hotel conference center.
The John Birch Society, once the scourge of some of the nation’s most prominent conservatives, relegated to the outermost edges of the movement, now fits neatly into the mainstream of the American right. David Giordano, another field coordinator for the organization who was attending CPAC, credited Trump for hastening the shift, challenging the global elite in ways that past Republican presidents had only ever talked about doing. “What were the things they said about him? ‘Racist’ and ‘anti-Semitic’—that got my attention,” Giordano told me, smiling. “What’d they say about the John Birch Society? ‘Racist’ and ‘anti-Semitic.’ That’s when you know you’re over the target.” Longtime members and officers of the organization exuded the polite but unmistakable air of I told you so at the conference. “A lot of people will say, ‘Oh, my grandmother or my dad was a member. We used to think he was crazy, but now, not so much,’” Smart said, beaming. “Because we’ve been warning people about a lot of this stuff for decades, obviously.”
The John Birch Society, so named for a U.S. Army intelligence officer and Christian missionary killed by Chinese Communists toward the end of World War II, was founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, a retired candy manufacturer who made his fortune by way of Sugar Daddies and Junior Mints. Welch persuaded a handful of the country’s wealthiest anti–New Deal businessmen to join him in a mission to extinguish the “international communist conspiracy” he believed had penetrated the U.S. government and was set to consume every facet of American life. President Dwight Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA Director Allen Dulles—all of them, Welch insisted, were dedicated agents of the U.S.S.R.
For Welch, the Warren Court was incontrovertible evidence of the Soviet mandate in motion, given its decision outlawing prayer in public schools and, crucially, its ushering of America into a racially desegregated future. Donations flooded in as the John Birch Society took aim at the civil-rights movement, the United Nations, local public libraries and school boards, and the diabolical plot apparently enshrouding all of them. As the organization grew in prominence, a number of conservative leaders, including National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., agonized over how to contain Welch’s influence without alienating the electrified legion of Americans—many of them subscribers to Buckley’s magazine—whom Welch had brought into the movement. In the early 1960s, Buckley would publish a series of editorials critical of Welch and his worldview, urging conservatives to unite in rejection of his “false counsels.” By the mid-’70s, the organization’s formal ranks and funding had significantly dwindled.
Yet the Bircher worldview never really went away. On the margins of the right, it continued to find purchase in new candidates and new personalities who adapted it to meet new moments. The society’s anti-communist crusade translated into alarm over a post–Cold War plot by the global elite to construct a “new world order” defined by porous borders and centralized, socialist rule; the birther conspiracy theories of the Tea Party era fit well within the Bircher tradition. And then, in 2016, the John Birch Society saw many of its core instincts finally reflected in the White House.
Giordano was at first skeptical of Trump’s candidacy. But then he watched as President Trump in short succession scrapped the Trans-Pacific Partnership and withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accords—dramatic blows, in Giordano’s view, to plans for the new world order. Giordano counts COVID—the lockdowns, the vaccines—as the wake-up event for many Americans, himself and others in the John Birch Society included. “I’ve been a member since 1994. And I said to my wife, ‘I wonder if this new world order will come in my lifetime,’” he recalled. And then came 2020. “They said, ‘Go home and flatten the curve.’ And I said, ‘This is the new world order. It’s here.’” He refused to take a vaccine or ever wear a face covering in public, recalling to me the time he successfully wore down a sales associate at Designer Shoe Warehouse who’d asked him to abide by the store policy on masks.
The John Birch Society, Giordano claimed, has been in a “growing phase” in the years since. “I’m constantly signing people up—I’ve got a new chapter in Ocean County; we had no chapters in Delaware, and now I’ve got a new chapter right in Wilmington.” Oddly enough, it’s a Trump victory in November that he fears could reverse the tide. “If Trump wins—which I personally hope—our membership will drop,” he predicted. “‘Oh,’ they’ll all say, ‘he’s gonna save us.’ And I explain to people, we’re the watchers on the Wall. The Founders said, ‘Here’s a constitution; this is forever; you got to fight every day to keep it.’”
Giordano’s claims of growth dovetail with the recent uptick in references to the John Birch Society by right-wing celebrities. Last May, in conversation with the Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich on his War Room podcast, Steve Bannon mocked left-wing efforts to deploy the “Bircher” label as a smear. “They say, ‘Oh! Moms for Liberty is just the modern version of the John Birch Society,’” Bannon said, laughing, before turning back to Descovich: “You’re doing something right, girl.” A few months before that, Nick Fuentes, a far-right vlogger and white supremacist who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust, heralded the John Birch Society as a “prelude to the Groypers”—the army of neo-Nazi activists and online influencers Fuentes counts as followers.
Some national Republicans, moreover, no longer try to maintain even a nominal distance from the organization. Joining the John Birch Society for its return to CPAC in 2023 were lawmakers including Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Ronny Jackson of Texas, both of whom sat for livestreamed interviews with The New American as throngs of conference-goers listened from the sidelines. At this year’s conference, a woman helping staff the booth urged me to check out the magazine’s January issue, the cover of which featured a close-up portrait of Andy Biggs; the Arizona congressman—former chair of the House Freedom Caucus—had sat for an exclusive interview on “many of the issues facing our country,” including President Joe Biden’s “corruption,” as the magazine put it, “immigration, and China.”
It’s unclear just how large the John Birch Society is today—even Smart told me, “They keep those numbers close”—but to measure its influence by membership is to miss the point. Naturally, as the principles and positions of the John Birch Society have insinuated themselves into the mainstream on the right, the Birchers’ own claim to those ideas has weakened. The organization’s rogue crusades of the past are now so familiar and universal that the original fingerprints are no longer visible.
Consider fluoride. At the height of the group’s relevance in the ’60s, the John Birch Society railed against fluoridated drinking water as a communist conspiracy to poison Americans en masse, a go-to data point for the National Review set and others invested in the political exile of the Birchers. As soon as I stepped off the escalator at the convention center outside Washington, D.C., that hosted CPAC, though, I came upon cocktail tables scattered with brochures listing “Fun Facts on Fluoride,” among them that “Fluoride was used by Hitler and Stalin” and that “it will kill you.”
There was no stated affiliation with the John Birch Society, and no person around to discuss the pamphlets. And perhaps that was telling; far from the niche boogeyman of one conservative organization, the perils of fluoride had become part of the generic paraphernalia of the movement. (The “Myth vs Facts” section of the John Birch Society website, I should note, currently states that “while the JBS doesn’t agree with water fluoridation because it is a form of government mass medication of citizens in violation of their individual right to choose which medicines they ingest, it was never opposed as a mind-control plot.”)
Plenty have noted the John Birch Society’s echoes in the GOP’s oft-invoked specter of the “deep state,” the conspiracism that immediately hijacked the memory of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer murdered in July 2016. Yet to attend CPAC today is to see those instincts taken to their most troublingly banal ends. Lifestyle and wellness products are hawked as solutions that the medical establishment never wanted you to find; a payment-processing company warns, with a massive image of a human-silhouette target riddled with bullet holes, “Your business is a target.”
For the John Birch Society, returning to CPAC has meant slipping seamlessly back in among groups and personalities that for years have been operating within its legacy, whether they knew it or not. The organization has been “eclipsed by many different groups and offshoots, so they’re not controversial in the same way that, say, Richard Spencer was a few years ago,” Matthew Dallek, a historian at George Washington University and the author of Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, told me.
Why was the John Birch Society invited back to CPAC? The better question, in Dallek’s view: “Why wouldn’t it be?”
For more than four decades, South Carolina has been the decisive contest in the Republican presidential primaries—the state most likely to anoint the GOP’s eventual nominee. On Saturday, South Carolina seems poised to play that role again.
Since the state moved to its prominent early position on the GOP presidential-primary calendar in 1980, the candidate who has won there has captured the nomination in every contested race except one. Given Donald Trump’s overall lead in the GOP race, a victory for him in South Carolina over Nikki Haley, the state’s former governor, would likely uphold that streak.
“We all underestimate how deeply ingrained the Trump message is in the rank and file of our party,” Warren Tompkins, a longtime South Carolina–based GOP strategist and lobbyist, told me. “Take the personality out of it: What he stands for, what he says he’ll do, and what he did as president; he’s on the money.”
This year, though, there may be a twist in South Carolina’s usual role of confirming the eventual GOP winner: Even as the state demonstrates Trump’s strength in the primary, it may also spotlight his potential difficulties as a general-election nominee. Like the first contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina may show that though most Republican voters are ready to renominate Trump, a substantial minority of the GOP coalition has grown disaffected from him. And in a general-election rematch, that could provide a crucial opening for President Joe Biden, despite all of his vulnerabilities, to attract some ordinarily Republican-leaning voters.
“Trump is essentially the incumbent leader of the party who is not able to get higher than, say, 65 percent” in the primaries, Alex Stroman, a former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party, told me.
Local observers say Haley has run a textbook South Carolina campaign, barnstorming the state in a bus, appearing relentlessly on national television, spending heavily on television advertising, and notably intensifying her criticism of Trump as “unhinged” and “diminished.” Trump, meanwhile, has breezed through the state as quickly as a snowbird motoring down I-95 from New York to Florida for the winter. Yet he has retained an imposing lead reaching as high as two to one over Haley in the polls.
“I think you can argue Haley is running a fantastic campaign” in South Carolina, Jordan Ragusa, a political scientist at the College of Charleston and a co-author of a history of the South Carolina primary, told me. “But the pool of available voters is just so small that no matter what she does, it’s going to be hard for her to move the needle.”
Over the past generation, South Carolina has had an extraordinary impact in shaping the outcome of GOP presidential-nomination contests. The state moved near the front of the GOP primary calendar in 1980, when Republicans were just establishing themselves as a competitive force in the state. GOP leaders created the primary, with its unusual scheduling on a Saturday, as a way to generate more attention for the party, which had previously selected its delegates at a convention attended by party insiders.
The other key factor in creating the primary was support from Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, including Lee Atwater, a prominent GOP strategist then based in South Carolina. South Carolina did what Atwater hoped when Reagan won it in a rout, after unexpectedly losing the Iowa caucus to George H. W. Bush.
Reagan’s victory in South Carolina placed him back on the path for the GOP nomination and cut a mold that has endured, with only one exception, in every contested GOP presidential-primary race through 2016. Each of those races followed the same formula: One candidate won the Iowa caucus, a second candidate won the New Hampshire primary, and then one of those two won South Carolina and eventually captured the nomination. (The exception came in 2012, when a backlash to a debate question about his marriage propelled Newt Gingrich to a decisive South Carolina win over Mitt Romney, who recovered to claim the nomination.)
In 2016, Trump’s narrow victory in South Carolina effectively cemented the nomination for him after he had lost Iowa to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and then recovered to win in New Hampshire. A victory for Trump on Saturday would allow him to equal a feat achieved only by incumbent GOP presidents: sweeping Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.
Three factors, above all, explain South Carolina’s enduring influence in the GOP race. One is that it reflects the overall Republican coalition better than either of the two states that precede it. In Iowa, the Republican electorate leans heavily toward evangelical Christians who prioritize social issues; in New Hampshire, where there are few evangelicals, economic conservatives focused on taxes and spending, as well as a sizable group of libertarian voters, have dominated. South Carolina is the synthesis of both: It has a large evangelical population and a substantial cohort of suburban, business-oriented Republicans outside its three principal population centers of Greenville, Columbia, and Charleston.
“In a lot of ways, the state party here is a microcosm of the national party,” Jim Guth, a longtime political scientist at Furman University, in Greenville, told me. “We replicate the profile of the national party maybe better than New Hampshire [or] Iowa.”
It has been possible for candidates over the years to win Iowa or New Hampshire primarily by mobilizing just one group, such as social conservatives in Iowa and moderate independents in New Hampshire. But because the South Carolina GOP contains so many different power centers, “you have to have a broader appeal,” Tompkins, who has worked in every GOP presidential primary since Reagan, told me.
The second key factor in South Carolina’s importance has been its placement on the GOP calendar. From the outset, in 1980, the primary was designed by its sponsors as a “First in the South” contest that they hoped would signal to voters across the region which candidate had emerged as the favorite. As more southern states over the years concentrated their primaries on Super Tuesday, in early March, that multiplied the domino effect of winning the state.
“Given the demographic alignment between South Carolina and a lot of the southern Super Tuesday states, and the momentum effect, it really made South Carolina pivotal,” Ragusa said.
The third dynamic underpinning South Carolina’s influence has been its role as a fire wall against insurgent candidates such as John McCain in 2000 and Patrick J. Buchanan in the 1990s. South Carolina’s Republican leadership has usually coalesced predominantly behind the candidate with the most support from the national party establishment and then helped power them to victory in the state. That model wavered in 2012, when Gingrich won his upset victory, and even in 2016, when Trump won despite clear splits in the national GOP establishment about his candidacy. But most often, South Carolina has been an empire-strikes-back place where the establishment-backed front-runner in the race snuffs out the last flickers of viable opposition.
All of these historic factors appear virtually certain to benefit Trump this year. Super Tuesday no longer revolves as much around southern states. But it remains a huge landscape: 15 states and American Samoa will all pick a combined 874 Republican delegates on March 5, nearly three-fourths of the total required to win the nomination.
In the limited polling across the Super Tuesday states, Trump now leads, usually commandingly, in all of them. Haley has already announced campaign appearances in Super Tuesday states through next week. But with all of the Super Tuesday states voting just 10 days after South Carolina, it will be virtually impossible for Haley to close the gap in so many places at once without winning her home state or at least significantly exceeding expectations. Like earlier underdogs, she faces a stark equation: To change the race anywhere on Super Tuesday, she must change it everywhere through her showing in South Carolina.
Saturday’s result could also reconfirm South Carolina’s other key historic roles. Trump is now the candidate of most of the GOP establishment—a dynamic reflected in his endorsement by virtually all of the leading Republicans in Haley’s home state. He’s also become the contender with the broadest appeal inside the Republican Party. Because Trump is so polarizing for the general public, it’s difficult to see him in that light. But South Carolina is likely to buttress the indications from Iowa and New Hampshire that Trump, as a quasi-incumbent, now has a broader reach across the Republican Party than Haley does, or, for that matter, than he himself did in 2016. In most South Carolina polls, Trump is now leading her with every major demographic group, except among the independents who plan to participate in the primary.
Yet South Carolina, like Iowa and New Hampshire before it, will also provide important clues about the extent of the remaining resistance to Trump within the Republican coalition.
Haley is likely to perform best among well-educated voters around the population centers of Columbia and Charleston. “Haley must run up the score with traditional Reagan Republicans who want to actually nominate a candidate who can win in the general election,” Stroman told me. “She is going to be absolutely swamped in the MAGA-rich right-wing upstate, and in rural areas across the state—so she needs the suburbs and cities to turn out to hopefully keep her closer than expected.”
In New Hampshire, Haley finished closer to Trump than most polls projected, because a large number of independent voters, and even a slice of Democrats, turned out to support her. She’ll need a similar dynamic to finish credibly in South Carolina, where she has said her goal is to exceed her 43 percent of the vote in New Hampshire. The better the showing for Haley among independents, and among college-educated voters in the suburbs, the stronger the general-election warning signs for Trump.
Democratic voters could be a wild card on Saturday after relatively few of them turned out for the party’s own primary earlier this month. South Carolina does not have party registration, which means that any voter who did not participate in the Democratic primary can vote in the Republican contest. A group called Primary Pivot has launched a campaign to encourage Democrats and independents to swarm the GOP primary to weaken Trump. If Haley exceeds expectations in South Carolina, it will be because, as in New Hampshire, more independents and Democrats turn out for her than pollsters anticipated.
Besting Trump for the nomination may no longer be a realistic goal for Haley if she loses her home state. But, after mostly dodging confrontation with Trump for months, she is now delivering a more cogent and caustic argument against him, and showing a determination to force Republicans to wrestle with the general-election risks they are accepting by renominating him. The biggest question in South Carolina may not be whether Haley can beat Trump, but whether the state provides her more evidence, even in defeat, to make that case.
The phrase one percentcould be used to describe Doug Burgum’s socioeconomic status and, less gloriously, his national-polling average. On a recent Thursday night in New Hampshire, the North Dakota governor squared up to the reality of his presidential campaign: “The first question I get is ‘When are you going to drop out?’”
He was speaking to about 100 people in a private back room at Stark Brewing Company, in downtown Manchester. Republicans had come together to celebrate the state GOP’s 170th birthday, sheet cake and all. Burgum was the biggest star on the program, along with former Representative Will Hurd, who was a no-show after ending his own campaign three days earlier. The next-biggest name? Perry Johnson, a businessman who attempted to deliver his remarks by phone and, about a week later, would also drop out.
Burgum is an affable midwestern guy with virtually zero national name recognition. He spins his long-shot bid for the Republican nomination as “an entrepreneur’s dream”—huge market potential. Like another one-percenter, Succession’s Connor Roy, Burgum is fighting for his 1 percent in the polls: “Polling trails, you know, people’s impressions.” He’s been running for president for about five months. His campaign profile on X (formerly Twitter) has just over 13,000 followers. He’s not a fixture on Fox News. He hasn’t written a best-selling book, or any book, offering voters a glimpse of his life. As you’re reading this sentence, can you even conjure what his voice sounds like?
This summer, to qualify for the first Republican debate, each candidate had to secure at least 40,000 individual donors. As July 4 approached, Burgum’s campaign had the idea to sell American flags for donations as a way to boost his numbers. But they soon pivoted to a savvier pitch: free money. Burgum’s team would mail anyone who donated $1 a $20 prepaid Visa or Mastercard, dubbed a “Biden inflation relief card,” netting the supporter $19 in profit. Burgum, who made millions in the software business, has described this plan as “a hack.” Though he was criticized for it, he’s executing it again as he hopes to qualify for this month’s debate in Miami. The new thresholds are stricter: at least 70,000 donors and 4 percent of support in two national polls to make the cut. Currently, Burgum has the donors but not the polls. “We are optimistic he will make it,” his spokesperson told me.
“Newt Gingrich said it the other day, twice to two different news outlets: Everybody should drop out because the race is already over. I heard that Newt’s already picked the Super Bowl winner. So we’re gonna cancel the NFL season. No games need to be played,” Burgum told the brewery crowd. Most people in the room laughed. The woman standing next to me, scrolling through her phone, muttered that he had just reminded her to set her fantasy-football lineup.
Former President Donald Trump enjoys a ridiculously large lead in what has come to feel almost like a Potemkin primary. Burgum is among a handful of candidates who seem to earnestly believe that Republicans are still maybe, possibly, you never know, searching for an alternative. But whereas someone like Ron DeSantis has fashioned himself into a wet-blanket version of Trump, Burgum refuses to support book bans or cosplay as MAGA. He does not appear to be courting members of the old guard in the manner of Nikki Haley or Tim Scott. He’s not firing off rhetorical napalm like Vivek Ramaswamy, or casting himself as the anti-Trump, like Chris Christie. What, then, is he doing? I spent a few days following him in New Hampshire, trying to figure that out.
Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, and first lady of North Dakota, Kathryn Burgum, at the New Hampshire state house filing the paperwork to be on the 2024 Presidential ballot in New Hampshire.
B
urgum presents as a down-to-earth, slightly nerdy guy who spent most of his life in business and speaks softly, with a thick Fargo accent. (He’s heard all of your wood-chipper jokes.) He has the requisite ego to run for president but freely admits that pretty much nobody outside North Dakota has any clue who he is. He insists that the modern electoral system is broken, and that, if he is to find any national GOP success, he’ll need to be his honest, authentic, inoffensive self—nothing more. He says he is committed to avoiding the ugly reality-TV tropes of modern electoral politics. It is a noble goal. Is it doomed? Week after week, he presses on, spreading the gospel of Doug Burgum to small groups of people.
I watched Burgum and his entourage roll into Airport Diner, in southern Manchester. (Another long-shot candidate, the Democrat Marianne Williamson, had her campaign bus parked in the adjacent Holiday Inn lot; Burgum was traveling in a black SUV.) He stopped to chat with an elderly couple in matching blue shirts, but the conversation didn’t seem to go anywhere. (“We’re Democrats,” the wife sheepishly told me a few minutes later.) At another table, a 78-year-old woman told me that some man had just come by, but she had no idea who he was. She said that God speaks to her and has told her that Trump is returning to office, but that there won’t even be an election next year—Trump will merely resume his prior presidency. She was reluctant to share her name on the record. “I have lost a lot of friends,” she said. Because of Trump? “Oh, yeah. But, hey, that’s life.”
Out on the trail, Burgum rolls his eyes at The Narrative—capital T, capital N—and scoffs at what he sees as the “nationalization” of the primary system. Cable news, coastal elites, anyone trying to pull a lever inside the Beltway—these are the forces stripping power away from regular people, in Burgum’s view. In almost every speech, he takes umbrage at what he describes as the Republican National Committee’s “clubhouse rules.” Burgum disagrees with, among other things, the RNC’s apparent eagerness to narrow the presidential field. He counters that Americans benefit from a large pool of qualified applicants, and that early-state voters should do the winnowing themselves. He often quotes his favorite president, Theodore Roosevelt: “Let the people rule!”
Like Roosevelt, Burgum projects an Americana-heavy image. He usually steps out in blue jeans and brown cowboy boots. He has praised those who take a shower at the end of the day versus at the beginning. He’s eager to talk about his experience working at his family’s grain elevator and his stint as a chimney sweep. He has a mop of thick hair, a strong jawline, and a hard-to-explain “just happy to be here” vibe. In August, on the eve of the first Republican debate, Burgum blew out his Achilles while playing pickup basketball. (“The skies were clear, but it was raining threes,” he told a reporter.) He’s been using a knee scooter to get around ever since, and told me that when he encounters long ramps, he likes to “let it rip” on his way down. His name is embroidered in big block letters on the blue puffer vest he wears almost every day. He’s rarely in a rush to get out of interactions with strangers, and will be sure to ask, with genuine curiosity, “Where’s home for you?” Burgum himself is from Arthur, North Dakota, population 323. No one from North Dakota has ever won the presidency or, for that matter, been a major party’s nominee.
After finishing at the diner, he traveled north to Hanover, specifically Dartmouth College, where he sat for an interview with a reporter from the school’s conservative newspaper, The Dartmouth Review, and taped an episode of a campus podcast. Later, during a town hall at the college’s public-policy school, he told students that, thanks to AI, they were all “going to live to be a hundred.” This sort of techno-optimism is something that separates Burgum from his competitors. Whereas Trump paints a picture of a failing, dystopian country in need of a supreme leader, Burgum’s focus remains narrow and future-oriented. He waxes long about energy, the economy, and national security. His stump speech isn’t exactly thrilling, yet it can be refreshing—if only because he avoids campaigning on the standard GOP culture-war themes.
Still, as governor, he’s signed several hard-right bills: a near-total abortion ban, a bathroom bill, legislation preventing transgender children from receiving gender-affirming surgery. Additionally, in North Dakota, teachers must now notify parents or guardians if one of their students identifies as trans, and they are permitted to misgender their students. North Dakota is a deep-red state, and many of these bills reached his desk veto-proof. When I asked Burgum to help me understand the motivation behind all of this legislation, he grew defensive, insisting that it’s not about discrimination.
“But like other things,” he said, “what goes on in one state, it’s not going to go in another … As president, I’m focusing on economy, energy, national security, and the limited set of things the federal government is actually supposed to do.”
Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, at Dartmouth College speaking at a town hall with students.
In high school, basketball was Burgum’s passion, and it served as the backdrop of one of the defining moments of his life. He told me about a particularly cold Friday night during his freshman year. He was climbing aboard the team bus to an away game when the school principal pulled him aside. Burgum’s father was in the hospital battling brain cancer; Doug had planned to visit the following day. The principal told him that he had to go to the hospital right away. Burgum was shocked; he’d believed that his dad was on the path to recovery. “No one was being honest with me about the fact that it was imminent,” he said. His father died that night.
As Burgum told me this story, his stoicism slipped. His eyes welled up, and he let out a deep exhale. His family was not wealthy, and his stay-at-home mother immediately started working full-time more than 30 miles away in Fargo, at North Dakota State University. His two elder siblings were now also living in Fargo. His mom wanted to move there, but he says he was stubborn, and refused to leave the basketball team in Arthur. “I didn’t understand the level of economic insecurity,” he said. In practical terms, this meant that his mom would often stay in Fargo overnight instead of commuting back and forth. Burgum told me he spent most of his high-school years alone, fixing things around the house in his father’s absence.
“My mom was good at all these things, but she didn’t know how to grieve. Her solution to grieving was to go back to work and just kind of bury it,” he said, later adding, “So I developed this incredible work ethic that kind of mirrored my mother, which was: Just work your way through.”
After finishing his undergraduate degree at North Dakota State, Burgum went on to Stanford for business school, spent two years in Chicago working for McKinsey, then returned home. He likes to say he “literally” bet the farm when he mortgaged his family farmland in order to get a computer-accounting business, Great Plains Software, off the ground. “There is a bit of, I think, geographic bigotry that actually exists in our country, where people that haven’t been to places, they assume that we’re still, you know, plowing fields with horses or something.”
His wife, Kathryn, is the sister of one of Burgum’s fraternity brothers from North Dakota State. Burgum almost always uses the first-person plural pronoun we when discussing his political career. On the campaign trail, he praises his wife’s courage.
She later told me some of her story. When the couple first started dating, about two decades ago, Kathryn was newly in recovery. She had begun drinking during high school, using alcohol to self-medicate. “I had anxiety and depression and didn’t really have anybody to talk to about it,” she said. She then spent 20 years trying, and failing, to stop. She was constantly blacking out. She told me she didn’t know people who could have only a single glass of wine, or who could choose not to drink, because they were driving home. “I didn’t have deep relationships even with my family, because addiction gets in the way of all that,” she said. During her darkest days with booze, she became suicidal.
For years, Kathryn worked to keep her recovery a secret from most everyone in her life, and she credits Burgum with being supportive throughout her sobriety. In 2016, when he told her about his plan to run for governor, she had a flash of panic: How am I going to handle all these people all the time? All of these events have alcohol. The couple reached an agreement: She could leave, or simply skip, any event she wanted to. When Burgum won the election, Kathryn decided to finally talk publicly about her addiction.
At a USA Today–network town hall in Exeter, Burgum described his wife’s journey as she looked on from the front row. He also made a plea for more compassion toward people with drug addiction who have committed crimes. He decried the obstacles that nonviolent offenders face after they leave prison, including trouble finding housing and employment: “We have legalized discrimination against people who had a disease—a brain disease that led them into that spot.” His stance is forward-thinking. It’s also out of step with much of the GOP. Were he to move up in the polls, he’d almost certainly be attacked by his peers as soft on crime.
Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, at Dartmouth College speaking at a town hall with students.
While Trump continues to float miles above his Republican competitors, the rest of them dutifully show up to various “cattle calls” in the early states. One such event, the New Hampshire GOP’s First in the Nation Leadership Summit, took over a Sheraton the weekend I was following Burgum. Reporters and camerapeople and the cast of Showtime’s The Circus stalked the grounds looking for something—anything—resembling a story. As Burgum and Mike Pence momentarily exchanged pleasantries in the lobby, journalists materialized en masse, then vanished; no meat to be had. (Pence would drop out just over two weeks later.)
Burgum navigated the crowded hallways on his scooter. He recorded a podcast next to an area where Kevin Sorbo, the Hercules actor turned right-wing culture warrior, sold copies of his books. He also sat on a national-security panel with Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa. (At one point, Burgum fired off a seemingly improvised joke about how Iowa is “Canada’s Florida.”) During the Q&A, an audience member asked what could prevent someone like Bill Gates from buying up all of America’s farmland. Burgum gently pointed out that agriculture is far less concentrated than people believe. Gates, he said, is already among America’s largest private owners of farmland, but that means he has a fraction of a percent of what’s out there. It was a surprising statistic—though perhaps not as surprising as watching Burgum instinctively defend one of the GOP’s biggest bogeymen.
In 2001, Burgum and his associates sold Great Plains to Microsoft for $1.1 billion. That deal has led many people to infer that Burgum himself is a billionaire. During our interview, after he continually sought to portray himself as an underdog, outsider candidate, I asked him if the phrase billionaire underdog might be considered an oxymoron. He strongly denied that he’s worth $1 billion. Even after much prodding, though, he refused to share his exact net worth. (It’s reportedly in the hundreds of millions of dollars.) So far this year, he’s lent his campaign more than $12 million of his own fortune. His super PAC, Best of America, has raised about that same amount, notably with the help of his cousin Frederick Burgum, who donated $2 million. But I was most interested in his relationship with Gates, the single biggest donor to Burgum’s 2016 gubernatorial bid.
I asked Burgum what Gates is like as a person.
“It’d be a good question for him, I suppose.”
“Well, I mean, aren’t you friends?”
He said that he has observed an “evolution” in Gates over the four decades they’ve known each other, then remarked, “He’s the most, you know, one of the most misunderstood people that we have in America right now.”
Burgum said that Gates and his ex-wife, Melinda, have saved more lives than anyone “probably in the history of the planet.” I asked Burgum how he plans to reckon with the portion of the GOP electorate—those who adhere to conspiracies such as QAnon and Pizzagate—who believe that Gates drinks the blood of children.
Burgum said that he knows how to talk to voters “of all stripes and beliefs,” and that, if you’re going to lead people, you have to meet them where they are. Still, he said, “there are some people that believe things, and they believe ’em like it’s religion. And you’re sort of asking me, What would I say to them? Well, you can’t tell them to stop believing [their] religion if they believe it. In politics, you have to say, then, that that voter may or may not be available.”
I found his willingness to draw lines admirable, but it didn’t extend to Donald Trump. He likes to say that, as governor of North Dakota, nukes are in his backyard. (“I have friends who, literally, they farm here and the nuclear silo is right there,” he told me.) I asked him if voters can trust Trump with the nuclear codes. He paused. “Voters will have to decide that,” he said. I asked him if he, Doug Burgum, trusts Trump with the nuclear codes. He dodged: “Nuclear weapons exist for one reason.” I asked him for a yes-or-no answer. He responded, “So when you say ‘trust him,’ what does that mean?” I noted that people in the Department of Defense—including former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley—have specifically said that Trump can’t be trusted with the nuclear codes, and that although many questions understandably have gray answers, this one seemed black-and-white. He paused again, then eventually offered another trained-politician answer.
“I think it’s a question of, do we think that nuclear weapons act as a deterrent for our country? And if you think we have a president that will never use them, then they don’t work. If you have a president that will use them, they do work. And it’s partly not what we think. It’s partly what the enemy thinks. And if the enemy thinks that we have a president that will actually launch a nuclear weapon, then the deterrents work. And so, I think we have to look at who they’re pointed at, not just who’s pulling the trigger.”
Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, and his wife, Kathryn, at Stark Brewing Company in Manchester, NH for a GOP 170th birthday event.
The next morning, Burgum and his team wandered among rows of tailgaters outside a University of New Hampshire football game. A Fox News reporter filmed a quick-hit interview with the governor while students played touch football in the background. (One wide receiver dramatically spiked the ball after completing a slant route that took him right past Burgum and toward a Dumpster.) Tailgaters looked on quizzically, or not at all, as Burgum and his entourage sauntered by.
“Oh, it’s Doug!” someone in dark sunglasses called out. The man, 28, told me that he’s from Boston and has the type of job where he can’t share his political views with his name attached. He said he voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but lost respect for him after he appeared to go back on his implicit promise to serve only one term. He added that he appreciates how Burgum seems like “a genuinely good person” and isn’t a career politician, though he’d like to see him move up in the polls.
A middle-aged woman offered Burgum a homemade cheesesteak. He accepted, and held the greasy bread in his bare hand for minutes before another tailgater offered him a napkin. He took a bite, but not before wisely asking the Fox News person not to film him eating.
Kickoff was soon approaching. The tailgaters showed no signs of packing it in. Grills sizzled; beers were pounded; beanbags thunked against cornhole sets. Burgum waved and smiled.
Three girls were standing at a distance, alternately watching him with the cheesesteak and fiddling with their phones.
I asked one of them if she knew anything about Doug Burgum.
“What’s he running for?” she asked.
“President.”
“Good for him,” she said.
Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, at Stark Brewing Company in Manchester, NH for a GOP 170th birthday event.
Representative Jim Jordan may or may not break down the last few Republican holdouts who blocked his election as House speaker yesterday. But the fact that about 90 percent of the House GOP conference voted to place him in the chamber’s top job marks an ominous milestone in the Republican Party’s reconfiguration since Donald Trump’s emergence as its central figure.
The preponderant majority of House Republicans backing Jordan is attempting to elevate someone who not only defended former President Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election but participated in them more extensively than any other member of Congress, according to the bipartisan committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection. As former Republican Representative Liz Cheney, who was the vice chair of that committee, said earlier this month: “Jim Jordan knew more about what Donald Trump had planned for January 6 than any other member of the House of Representatives.”
Jordan’s rise, like Trump’s own commanding lead in the 2024 GOP presidential race, provides more evidence that for the first time since the Civil War, the dominant faction in one of America’s two major parties is no longer committed to the principles of democracy as the U.S. has known them. That means the nation now faces the possibility of sustained threats to the tradition of free and fair elections, with Trump’s own antidemocratic tendencies not only tolerated but amplified by his allies across the party.
Ian Bassin, the executive director of the bipartisan group Protect Democracy, told me that the American constitutional system “is not built to withstand” a demagogue capturing “an entire political party” and installing “his loyalists in key positions in the other branches of government.” That dynamic, he told me, “would likely mean our 247-year-old republic won’t live to celebrate 250.” And yet, he continued, “those developments are precisely what we’re witnessing play out before our eyes.”
Sarah Longwell, the founder of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, told me that whether or not Jordan steamrolls the last holdouts, his strength in the race reflects the position inside the party of the forces allied with Trump. “Even if he doesn’t make it, because the majorities are so slim, you can’t argue that Jim Jordan doesn’t represent the median Republican today,” she told me.
Longwell said House Republicans have sent an especially clear signal by predominantly rallying around Jordan, who actively enlisted in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, so soon after they exiled Cheney, who denounced them and then was soundly defeated in a GOP primary last year. “Nominating Jim Jordan to be speaker is not them acquiescing to antidemocratic forces; it is them fully embracing antidemocratic forces,” she said. “The contrast between Jim Jordan potentially ascending to speaker and Liz Cheney, who is out of the Republican Party and excommunicated, could not be a starker statement of what the party stands for.”
In one sense, Jordan’s advance to the brink of the speakership only extends the pattern that has played out within the GOP since Trump became a national candidate in 2015. Each time the party has had an opportunity to distance itself from Trump, it has roared past the exit ramp and reaffirmed its commitment. At each moment of crisis for him, the handful of Republicans who condemned his behavior were swamped by his fervid supporters until resistance in the party crumbled.
Even against that backdrop, the breadth of Republican support for Jordan as speaker is still a striking statement. As the January 6 committee’s final report showed, Jordan participated in virtually every element of Trump’s campaign to subvert the 2020 result. Jordan spoke at “Stop the Steal” rallies, spread baseless conspiracy theories through television appearances and social media, urged Trump not to concede, demanded congressional investigations into nonexistent election fraud, and participated in multiple White House strategy sessions on how to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to reject the results.
Given that record, “‘undermining the election’ is too soft a language” to describe Jordan’s activities in 2020, Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, told me. “He was involved in every step to try to destroy American democracy and the peaceful transfer of the presidency.” If Jordan wins the position, she said, “you could no longer count on the speaker of the House to defend the United States Constitution.”
Jordan didn’t stop his service to Trump once he left office. Since the GOP won control of the House last year, Jordan has used his role as chair of the House Judiciary Committee to launch investigations into each of the prosecutors who have indicted Trump on criminal charges (local district attorneys in Manhattan and Fulton County, Georgia, as well as federal Special Counsel Jack Smith). Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, has described Jordan’s demand for information as an effort “to obstruct a Georgia criminal proceeding” that is “flagrantly at odds with the Constitution.”
The willingness of most GOP House members to embrace Jordan as speaker, even as he offers such unconditional support to Trump, sends the same message about the party’s balance of power as the former president’s own dominant position in the 2024 Republican race. Though some Republican voters clearly remain resistant to nominating Trump again, his support in national surveys usually exceeds the total vote for all of his rivals combined.
Equally telling is that rather than criticizing Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, almost all of his rivals have echoed his claim that the indictments he’s facing over his actions are unfair and politically motivated. In the same vein, hardly any of the Republican members resisting Jordan have even remotely suggested that his role in Trump’s attempts to subvert the election is a legitimate reason to oppose him. That silence from Jordan’s critics speaks loudly to the reluctance in all corners of the GOP to cross Trump.
“If Jordan becomes speaker, it would really mean the complete and total takeover of the party by Trump,” former Republican Representative Charlie Dent, now the executive director of the Aspen Institute’s congressional program, told me. “Because he is the closest thing Trump has to a wingman in Congress.”
All of this crystallizes the growing tendency at every level of the GOP, encompassing voters and activists as well as donors and elected officials, to normalize and whitewash Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. In an Economist/YouGov national poll earlier this year, fully three-fifths of Trump 2020 voters said those who stormed the Capitol on January 6 were participating “in legitimate political discourse,” and only about one-fifth said they were part of a violent insurrection. Only about one-fifth of Trump 2020 voters thought he bore a significant share of responsibility for the January 6 attack; more than seven in 10 thought he carried little or no responsibility.
That sentiment has solidified in the GOP partly because of a self-reinforcing cycle, Longwell believes. Because most Republican voters do not believe that Trump acted inappropriately after 2020, she said, candidates can’t win a primary by denouncing him, but because so few elected officials criticize his actions, “the more normal elements of the party become convinced it’s not an issue or it’s not worth objecting to.”
The flip side is that for the minority of House Republicans in highly competitive districts—18 in seats that voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 and another 15 or so in districts that only narrowly preferred Trump—Jordan could be a heavy burden to carry as speaker. “Everyone is worried about their primary opponents, but in this case ameliorating the primary pressures by endorsing Jordan could spell political death in the general election in a competitive district,” Dent told me. Even so, 12 of the 18 House Republicans in districts that Biden carried voted for Jordan on his first ballot as a measure of their reluctance to challenge the party’s MAGA forces.
The instinct for self-preservation among a handful of Republican members combined with ongoing resentment at the role of the far right in ousting Kevin McCarthy might be enough to keep Jordan just below the majority he needs for election as speaker; many Republicans expect him to fail again in a second vote scheduled for this morning. Yet even if Jordan falls short, it’s his ascent that captures the shift in the party’s balance of power toward Trump’s MAGA movement.
Bassin, of Protect Democracy, points to a disturbing analogy for what is happening in the GOP as Trump surges and Jordan climbs. “When you look at the historical case studies to determine which countries survive autocratic challenges and which succumb to them,” Bassin told me, a key determinant is “whether the country’s mainstream parties unite with their traditional opponents to block the extremists from power.”
Over the years, he said, that kind of alliance has mobilized against autocratic movements in countries including the Czech Republic, France, Finland, and, most recently, Poland, where the center-right joined with its opponents on the left to topple the antidemocratic Law and Justice party. The chilling counterexample, Bassin noted, is that during the period between World War I and World War II, “center-right parties in Germany and Italy chose a different course.” Rather than directly opposing the emerging fascist movements in each country, they opted “instead to try to ride the energy of [the] far-right extremists to power, thinking that once there, they could easily sideline [their] leaders.”
That was, of course, a historic miscalculation that led to the destruction of democracy in each country. But, Bassin said, “right now, terrifyingly, the American Republican Party is following the German and Italian path.” The belligerent Jordan may face just enough personal and ideological opposition to stop him, but whether or not he becomes speaker, his rise captures the currents carrying the Trump-era GOP ever further from America’s democratic traditions.
The fall of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy today demonstrated again that the one sin that cannot be forgiven in the modern Republican Party is being seen as failing to fight the Democratic agenda by any means necessary.
Of all the accusations that could be leveled against McCarthy, the notion that he was insufficiently committed to battling Democrats would not seem high on the list. As the GOP minority leader in the previous Congress, McCarthy voted to reject the 2020 election results in two key states and tried to impede the House committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection. Then, as speaker this year, he backed the GOP vote last summer to censure Democratic Representative Adam Schiff over his role in investigating former President Donald Trump while Democrats held the majority; empowered hard-line Republican conservatives to undertake sweeping investigations of President Joe Biden’s administration as well as his son Hunter; and even launched, on his own authority, an impeachment inquiry into the president without any hard evidence of wrongdoing.
Yet on two occasions this year, McCarthy refused to risk chaos in the domestic and global economy, choosing instead to accept bipartisan deals with Democrats, first to avoid default on the federal debt and then to keep the federal government open when it faced a possible shutdown last weekend. And that was simply too much collaboration for the eight hard-line conservative Republicans who voted to remove him today, making him the first speaker ever forced out by a motion to vacate the position.
The proximate cause of McCarthy’s fall was his decision, during his agonizing 15-ballot ascent to the speakership in January, to accept a change in House rules that allowed a single member to file a motion to remove him. That let Representative Matt Gaetz trigger the process that doomed McCarthy, even though the majority of the GOP conference voted to maintain him as their leader.
Yet McCarthy’s removal also underscored how the incentives in the modern GOP coalition now almost entirely push in one direction: toward greater conflict with Democrats and the embrace of polarizing policies that reflect the priorities and grievances of the GOP base. It’s no coincidence that critics accused McCarthy of not fighting hard enough for conservative demands at the same moment Trump and the other 2024 GOP presidential contestants are advancing militant ideas once considered politically radioactive, such as deploying the U.S. military into Mexico to attack drug cartels, ending birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants, ripping up civil-service protections for government workers, and dispatching the National Guard into blue cities to fight crime.
“Certainly if you step back at 30,000 feet, whatever the particular causes or idiosyncrasies of this decision, it will be part of a general sense of the party going further and further in this hard-line direction,” Bill Kristol, a conservative strategist, told me.
In one respect, McCarthy’s demise continues a cycle among House Republicans that now traces back nearly half a century. From the late 1970s through the ’80s, a coterie of combative young House members led by Newt Gingrich and Vin Weber rose to prominence by founding a group, called the Conservative Opportunity Society, that accused Republican congressional leaders—and, at times, even then-President Ronald Reagan—of negotiating too many deals with Democrats.
Gingrich’s pugnacious rejection of cooperation carried him to the speakership when Republicans recaptured the chamber in 1994, after four decades in the minority. But within a few years, Gingrich faced his own rebellion on the right from critics who thought he was too quick to cooperate with then-President Bill Clinton. Gingrich eventually resigned from the speakership under pressure after the GOP suffered unexpected House losses in the 1998 midterm election, following its move to impeach Clinton over his affair with a White House intern.
The pattern resurfaced after Republicans won a sweeping House majority in 2010. Representative John Boehner, an old-school Republican who ascended to the speakership, faced an unending barrage of criticism from conservatives rooted in the new Tea Party movement over his attempts to reach agreements with Democratic President Barack Obama to avoid a debt default or government shutdown. Boehner resigned from the speakership and Congress itself in 2015, one step ahead of conservative critics in his conference determined to remove him. The same dynamic unfolded under Boehner’s successor as speaker, Representative Paul Ryan, who only lasted two tumultuous terms before deciding to leave Congress and not seek reelection in 2018.
McCarthy found himself caught in the same undertow as Boehner and Ryan, with a portion of his conference immovably convinced that he was conceding too much ground to Democrats. “We saw it with Boehner and saw it with Ryan, and now this is, of course, the epitome of it,” former Democratic Representative David Price, a political scientist who has written several books on Congress, told me.
In the first speech from critics during the debate over McCarthy’s removal, Republican Representative Bob Good of Virginia echoed the arguments that the right had raised against Boehner and Ryan. After arriving in Congress in 2021, Good declared, he was frustrated that Republicans “had not used every tool at our disposal to fight against the harmful, radical Democrat agenda that is destroying the country.” McCarthy had promised something different, Good insisted, but had failed to take the fight to Democrats hard enough. “We need a speaker who will fight for something, anything, other than just staying or becoming speaker,” Good said.
The key difference from those earlier episodes is that the attack on McCarthy came even though he conceded far more to his critics on the right than Boehner or Ryan did. McCarthy’s strategy as speaker generally was to give the right almost everything it demanded and to expect the members from more competitive districts (including the 18 in districts that voted for Biden in 2020 and another 16 in seats that only narrowly preferred Trump) to eventually support him. By and large, they did so. And today, the members from that competitive terrain stood indivisibly beside McCarthy, perhaps fearful that whoever comes next would create even more problems for them. The Republicans from more competitive seats “are very much at risk in 2024, and yet I don’t know what their limits might be,” Price said. “They haven’t revealed that yet. And so all the attention is on the far right.”
As today’s vote demonstrated, most House Republicans were comfortable with McCarthy’s leadership. Yet the fact that a rump group of conservatives still rejected him after all his concessions to the right captures the seemingly boundless sense of urgency and threat that now animates the GOP coalition. For years, Trump and other party leaders have told their voters that the Democratic agenda represents an effort to erase and uproot America as these voters understand it; in his last public rally before the January 6 insurrection, Trump declared that if Democrats won control of the Senate, “America as you know it will be over, and it will never—I believe—be able to come back again.”
As Trump’s commanding lead in the GOP presidential race demonstrates, there’s enormous receptivity in the party for that apocalyptic message. And it’s those fears of being displaced in a changing America that have created the cycle in which the pressure on Republican congressional leaders perpetually pushes them toward harsher tactics and more aggressive policies. Former Republican Representative Tom Davis, who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, notes that the hard-liners who deposed McCarthy are accurately reflecting the views of their own voters. “It’s frustration and anger at Washington, and we are going to throw sand in the wheels at whatever they are going to do there,” Davis told me a few hours before McCarthy’s fall. “That’s the level of anger out there in these districts. Blame it on members, but voters elected these folks.”
The January 6 attack on the Capitol provided one grim measure of how that anger bubbling through large swaths of the Republican base can trigger tumultuous and destabilizing events. McCarthy’s removal today showed another. It’s not likely that either was the last.
“Democrats have a passion for stealing them,” the Republican former House speaker said without a hint of shame.
Gingrich, a Fox News contributor, also claimed without evidence that union workers railroaded nursing-home residents to vote for Democrats, and that fair elections are now impossible.
Bartiromo was a prominent figure in Dominion Voting System’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News in which it said the network falsely claimed machines were rigged in 2020. The channel agreed to pay $787.5 million in its settlement of the suit.
But there she was on Sunday throwing obvious setup questions to Gingrich so he could spout more right-wing claptrap about election “integrity.” Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump continues to use his 2020 defeat as a campaign platform, encouraging the likes of Bartiromo to extend the conversation on the air. However, Mediaite noted that Bartiromo and Gingrich were careful to make no specific allegations.
“Are the Republicans doing enough to ensure a free and fair election in 2024?” Bartiromo asked Gingrich.
“I think it’s probably almost impossible under current law to ensure an accurate election,” Gingrich replied. “And I think the only Republican strategy in the long run is to pick issues and win by margins so big that they can’t steal it. If you have a very close election, Democrats have a passion for stealing them.”
And then this unsubstantiated doozy from the former lawmaker:
“When you have the local union, which takes care of people in a nursing home going in to vote, the people who literally don’t cognitively know what they’re doing, you know that that union is going to vote every single one of them for a Democrat no matter what their personal beliefs were,” Gingrich said, perhaps referring to Trump claims that have been debunked.
“In states dominated by Democrats, like New York, Illinois, California, you just have to assume that the machine will steal as much as it can,” he added.
“Wow!” Bartiromo said.
Bartiromo has been named as a defendant in Smartmatic’s pending suit that claims Fox News repeated falsehoods that Smartmatic voting machines tilted the election in President Joe Biden’s favor.
Trafalgar voting group pollster Robert Cahaly got the ball rolling in the segment by stoking fears of “untraceable” votes.
My father was a registered independent for most of my childhood because he resented having to choose. But choosing was not hard for my mother. She was an MSNBC devotee, a liberal Pennsylvania transplant who took her adopted role as an Iowa Democrat seriously. She wanted me to take politics seriously, too.
Which is why, on a freezing January night in 2000, Mom zipped up our coats, buckled 7-year-old me into our white Toyota Previa, and drove us along five miles of gravel to the nearest town: Danville, population 919. It would be my very first Iowa caucus, with New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley and Vice President Al Gore vying for the Democratic nomination. Mom thought Bradley had more personality, so she stood, with me at her side, in his corner of the Danville Elementary School gymnasium. When Bradley was considered not “viable,” per caucus rules, Mom walked us over to Gore’s group, and he was soon declared the winner. Mom recounted all of this recently; I remember little from that night, except the outlines of bulky puffer jackets and a general tingliness at being the only kid in a room full of adults doing something that seemed important.
Accuse me of harboring a pro-caucus bias and you’d be right; I love them and I always have. A caucus is like a primary, but not: There’s no secret ballot. You demonstrate your preference for a candidate by physically moving your body to a different chair or another corner of the gym. Only a few states do it this way, and “this way” looks different everywhere.
After that night in 2000, Mom took me with her at each opportunity. Every four or eight years, we held hands and navigated icy sidewalks after dark. We explored student-less school hallways and cozy church luncheon rooms. We stood under basketball hoops and listened to neighbors argue about candidates as though their opinions really mattered, because that night they actually did.
Over the past half century, Iowa’s prominence in politics became part of its identity—something the state was known for besides its acres of corn and millions of hogs. Iowa doesn’t have any major-league teams to root for, or the kind of glittering cities that draw visitors from all corners of the world. But the caucuses helped make Iowa special—and on the national political stage, they made it relevant.
Still, it’s possible to hold two truths in tension. The caucus is part of Iowa’s identity, and deeply rooted in my own, yet the process has never really been fair—not to many Iowans, and not to other Americans. So, even though I felt a sharp pang of sorrow earlier this month when President Joe Biden suggested that my home state should give up its spot on the early-voting roster, I wasn’t surprised. Most Iowans have seen this day coming. Some are more prepared than others.
Thanks to the caucus, I never thought it was strange that I’d met Barack Obama twice before I turned 20. Nothing seemed shocking about Newt Gingrich showing up to speak at the restaurant where my parents have happy hour on Fridays. I was only slightly unsettled to discover that my high-school friend was having a summertime fling with a political reporter I knew from D.C.
For 50 years, these meet-cutes and history-making appearances have been normal, tradition. Iowans heard Howard Dean make the animalistic roar that supposedly ended his campaign. They sheltered in place with Elizabeth Warren during a tornado. They watched Fred Thompson rolling around the state fair in style, and bore witness to John Delaney’s sad ride down the Giant Slide.
Iowa’s prominence in the process dates back to the 1970s, when the caucuses helped put George McGovern, and later Jimmy Carter, on the proverbial map. State law requires that Iowa holds its caucuses eight days before the first primary happens, hence the quadrennial Iowa–New Hampshire pairing. Most people know this by now; it’s the process they don’t get—the appeal of the thing. The magic.
That’s how many Iowans see the caucus: a messy, intimate project that represents politics in its most sublime form—a dose of pure democracy smack-dab in the middle of Iowa’s fields and farms. I’m not sure about all that. But the caucuses are intimate. You discuss electability with your legs wedged beneath a lunch table designed for children. You look your neighbor in the eye and tell him why he’s wrong. On a school night! During one of his first-ever caucuses, my father, sitting at Senator Bernie Sanders’s table, was approached by a neighbor from Hillary Clinton’s. “Didn’t you hear that Sanders was a conscientious objector?” the man asked. Dad replied that he didn’t realize it was a liability for a presidential candidate to have a conscience. I remember thinking that this was a good comeback.
As a sophomore in college, I viewed the caucus as a noble process, probably because I was reading a lot of Hannah Arendt for class. The German philosopher wrote often about the polis—from which politics is derived—and in The Human Condition she defined it as “the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together.” The caucus, I thought. How romantic. But at the time, I was unaware—being young and able-bodied and generally self-absorbed—that caucuses don’t allow all people to act and speak together.
Mailing in your candidate preferences has never been an option in the caucuses. And many Iowans are not free at seven on a weeknight in January or February. That includes people working shift jobs, people working late, people with little kids, people with relatives to take care of, people with disabilities, people who don’t drive at night, people who have important plans, people who are simply out of town. Over the summer, state Democratic officials, in a bid to keep their place, finally did propose an absentee option. The DNC was apparently unimpressed.
The other most common criticism of the caucus is that Iowa is too white to make a decision that sets the political tempo for the rest of the country. Iowans would counter that their state proved to be the launching pad for America’s first Black president, but the point is well taken. In 2020, Biden finished fourth in mostly white Iowa, and it took the Black voters of South Carolina to push him to the front of the pack.
Iowa’s critics were vindicated that year, when the caucus became synonymous with chaos. The actual process went relatively smoothly, but a faulty new app and jammed phone lines disrupted the reporting of the results. That year, I’d invited my boyfriend to come to my hometown while I covered the caucuses. I’d wanted him to be charmed by the quaint small-town-ness of it all; instead, I was embarrassed. The entire state was. That was the final straw. This summer, a Democratic National Committee panel required every state to make the case for going early in the primary season. Earlier this month, with Biden’s support, the committee passed a proposal that would reorder which states vote first: South Carolina would start, and Michigan and Georgia would be part of the first five. Iowa was not on the list.
Long-time party activists are suffering varying degrees of disappointment at the news. Some lean more toward acceptance. “We’ve taken our role seriously. I think that it was probably time to move on,”Kurt Meyer, a retiree who’s led caucuses for years in northeast Mitchell County, told me. “As an Iowan who cares about such things, I’m sorry to see it go … but it’s okay.” Then he chuckled: “It’s like an aging ball player saying, It was a good runandI enjoyed those World Series games, but now I’m ready to watch from the comfort of the den with a drink in my hand.”
Others are left with a bitter taste. They have some arguments in their favor, after all: Candidates with no money can travel across Iowa easily and purchase ads cheaply. The caucus process itself allows people to rank their preferences and enables coalition-building among supporters of different candidates. “I don’t think people understood the nuance that was there, and that might be the party’s biggest failure,” Sandy Dockendorff, a longtime caucus leader in the southeast, told me. The result, she said, is that people in flyover country will feel even more neglected than they already do.
“That’s telling a lot of rural folks—a lot of the breadbasket—that we don’t matter,” Dockendorff said. “That’ll be felt for generations.”
Three years ago, I wrote a story about the Iowa Democratic Party’s plan to offer “satellite” caucuses that would let some people with work commitments or disabilities participate remotely. I was critical of the proposal because it wouldn’t solve all of the caucus’s inclusivity problems. After my article ran, a well-known Iowa labor leader emailed me. “I can tell you really dislike Iowa!” he wrote. The note was short, and I was crushed. My chest hurt. Had I betrayed my state with a single, 1,300-word article? But I think I understand how he was feeling. I get it now.
Americans outside the Midwest may soon forget about the Butter Cow. Iowa will take an economic hit if the state doesn’t go first in the Democrats’ nominating process. The restaurants serving tenderloins and chicken lips to eager-to-please politicians won’t make as much; the hotels and bars frequented by the national press corps will suffer. But the real reason these changes will be hard for many Iowans to accept is that a whole lot of pride is tied up in this thing. I hear it when I’m talking on the phone with my parents, and when I’m listening to people like Dockendorff and Meyer reminisce. Caucus advocates claim that Iowans are perfectly suited for the part because they are a particularly discerning people. I don’t think that’s true. But Iowans do take the role seriously—at least the ones who participate.
Iowa Democrats have invested decades of effort into hosting bright-eyed, young campaign staffers from California and Massachusetts in their homes. They’ve given rookie candidates with few resources the space to make a case and a name for themselves. That all of this might soon be ripped away by a faceless group of people in D.C.—who seem to harbor, if not ill will, then at least a light disdain toward Iowa—is hard to swallow. Identity is a tricky thing.
No one is totally sure what happens next. The DNC will vote on the new order in February, and this summer, states will submit plans for the upcoming election. Iowa will have to decide how to play it. If state Democrats agree to move the caucus, in theory that breaks state law; the state attorney general could sue them. Some party leaders seem eager to say “Screw it!”and hold a first-in-the-nation caucus anyway, which could mean that Iowa’s delegates aren’t counted at the national convention. Candidates who campaign for such an unsanctioned event could face repercussions. But whatever happens, after committee members vote and state leaders draw their line in the sand, the Iowa caucus probably won’t look the same.
I don’t get to decide what the best outcome would be, for the state or for the process itself. But for all of my life and 20 years before that, Iowa has enjoyed a very particular feeling—a heady mix of relevance and attention—that has become enmeshed, irrevocably, into Iowans’ sense of their home and themselves. I learned to cherish that feeling as a 7-year-old. Maybe it’s time for other people, in some other state, to feel it, too. It will be hard to let go.
ATLANTA (AP) — The Georgia prosecutor investigating whether then-President Donald Trump and others illegally tried to interfere in the 2020 election filed paperwork Friday seeking to compel testimony from a new batch of Trump allies, including former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis filed petitions in court seeking to have Gingrich and Flynn, as well as former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann and others, testify next month before a special grand jury that’s been seated to aid her investigation.
Flynn didn’t immediately respond to email and phone messages seeking comment, and his lawyer also didn’t immediately return an email seeking comment. Gingrich referred questions to his attorney, who declined to comment. Herschmann could not immediately be reached.
Willis has said she plans to take a monthlong break from public activity in the case leading up to the November midterm election, which is one month from Saturday.
Each of the petitions filed Friday seeks to have the potential witnesses appear in November after the election. But the process for securing testimony from out-of-state witnesses sometimes takes a while, so it appears Willis is putting the wheels in motion for activity to resume after her self-imposed pause.
Compelling testimony from witnesses who don’t live in Georgia requires Willis to use a process that involves getting judges in the states where they live to order them to appear. The petitions she filed Friday are essentially precursors to subpoenas.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who’s overseeing the special grand jury, signed off on the petitions, certifying that each person whose testimony is sought is a “necessary and material” witness for the investigation.
The petition for Gingrich’s testimony relies on “information made publicly available” by the U.S. House committee that’s investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
It says he was involved along with others associated with the Trump campaign in a plan to run television ads that “repeated and relied upon false claims about fraud in the 2020 election” and encouraged members of the public to contact state officials to push them to challenge and overturn the election results based on those claims.
Gingrich was also involved in a plan to have Republican fake electors sign certificates falsely stating that Trump had won the state and that they were the state’s official electors even though Democrat Joe Biden had won, the petition says.
The petition seeking Flynn’s testimony says he appeared in an interview on conservative cable news channel Newsmax and said Trump “could take military capabilities” and place them in swing states and “basically re-run an election in each of those states.”
He also met with Trump, attorney Sidney Powell and others at the White House on Dec. 18, 2020, for a meeting that, according to news reports, “focused on topics including invoking martial law, seizing voting machines, and appointing Powell as special counsel to investigate the 2020 election,” Willis wrote.
Herschmann, who featured prominently in the House committee hearings on the Capitol attack, was a senior adviser to Trump from August 2020 through the end of his term and “was present for multiple meetings between former President Trump and others related to the 2020 election,” Willis wrote in the petition seeking his testimony.
She wrote that the House committee also revealed that Herschmann had “multiple conversations” with Eastman, Giuliani, Powell “and others known to be associated with the Trump Campaign, related to their efforts to influence the results of the November 2020 elections in Georgia and elsewhere.” Specifically, he had a “heated conversation” with Eastman “concerning efforts in Georgia,” she added.
Willis also filed petitions Friday to compel testimony from Jim Penrose and Stephen Cliffgard Lee.
She identified Penrose as “a cyber investigations, operations and forensics consultant” who worked with Powell and others known to be associated with the Trump campaign in late 2020 and early 2021.
He also communicated with Powell and others regarding an agreement to hire data solutions firm SullivanStrickler to copy data and software from voting system equipment in Coffee County, about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, as well as in Michigan and Nevada, Willis wrote. Penrose did not immediately respond to an email and phone message seeking comment.
Willis wrote in a petition seeking Lee’s testimony that he was part of an effort to pressure elections worker Ruby Freeman, who was the subject of false claims about election fraud in Fulton County. He could not immediately be reached for comment.
Special grand juries are impaneled in Georgia to investigate complex cases with large numbers of witnesses and potential logistical concerns. They can compel evidence and subpoena witnesses for questioning and, unlike regular grand juries, can also subpoena the target of an investigation to appear before it.
When its investigation is complete, the special grand jury issues a final report and can recommend action. It’s then up to the district attorney to decide whether to ask a regular grand jury for an indictment.
