Tag: political organizations

Republicans are having a ‘malaise’ moment | CNN Politics

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The Make America Great Again movement isn’t so sure that’s possible anymore.

That’s according to a new CNN poll of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents conducted by SSRS. While the poll is most focused on the political landscape ahead of the 2024 presidential election, the number that stands out most is the one that suggests a deep pessimism about what’s to come.

This is from CNN’s Jennifer Agiesta and Ariel Edwards-Levy:

Just 30% of all Republicans and Republican-leaners say the country’s best days are still ahead of it – a dramatic shift from 2019, when Trump held the White House and 77% were optimistic that the best was ahead, and lower even than the 43% who said the same in the summer of 2016, prior to Trump’s election.

It’s natural that Republicans and Republican-leaning independents would have a dimmer view during a Democratic administration, but the decline from the end of the Obama administration is noteworthy.

Toward the end of the Trump administration, strong majorities on both sides of the political aisle (67% of those who lean toward Democrats and 77% of those who lean toward Republicans) said the country’s best days were ahead.

That less than a third of those who lean toward the GOP say the same thing today suggests a dramatic mood shift.

Note: When we refer to poll respondents in this story, we’re referring both to Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.

There have been warnings about a general national depression before. Then-President Jimmy Carter addressed the nation in July 1979 – 10 days after scuttling a previously planned speech about the energy crisis and subsequently trying to speak to a cross section of Americans – and declared a “crisis of confidence” in the country.

“For the first time in the history of our country, a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years,” Carter said in the remarks, which were mocked by his opponents as his “malaise” speech, although he did not use the word “malaise.”

The lack of optimism he transmitted to the country has been blamed for contributing to his loss in the presidential election a year later.

The opinion columnist David French recently wrote in The New York Times that Carter’s speech sounds almost prophetic when read through the lens of today’s political climate.

“It’s an address better suited to our time than to its own,” according to French.

It’s certainly true that some of the themes Carter touched on – inflation, energy prices, political divisions and an intractable political process – hit a nerve today.

“The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America,” Carter said back then.

He added: “Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.”

It’s hard not to read that last line from Carter and consider another detail from the new CNN poll. More than halfway into Joe Biden’s presidency and after all the allegations of 2020 voter fraud have been examined and rejected, a solid majority of Americans who lean toward the GOP – 63% – still do not believe Biden legitimately won enough votes to win the presidency.

Telling hard truths and encouraging a national therapy session turned out not to be winning politics for Carter and may have actually teed up Ronald Reagan to argue that he could chart a new and more optimistic course than Carter.

There’s a lot of overlap here. Of the Republicans-leaners who think Biden did not legitimately win, 78% also think the country’s best days are behind us.

Among the White Republicans and Republican-leaning independents without a college degree who form Trump’s political base, 75% said the best days are behind us in CNN’s poll.

There’s some more optimism among Republican-leaning Americans with a college degree, who were more likely to prefer Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the new poll: 64% said the best days are behind us.

Trump, who has officially launched his campaign, has the strongest support among potential GOP primary voters in the CNN poll. DeSantis, who has not formally launched a campaign, is close behind. Neither man has the support of more than 40% of that potential electorate.

Both men are pushing the idea to their followers that government has been weaponized against them by a racially and culturally sensitive elite – which both Trump and DeSantis derisively refer to as “woke.”

There is another shift Agiesta and Edwards-Levy note:

Most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (61%) say that the country’s increasing racial, ethnic and national diversity is enriching American culture, but a sizable and growing share see it as a threat.

The 38% who consider those changes a threat now is about twice as high as four years ago, and similar to where the party stood in 2016.

Meanwhile, a broad 78% majority of Republican-aligned Americans say that society’s values on sexual orientation and gender identity are changing for the worse.

And 79% say the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses, just a touch below the share who felt that way at the height of the Tea Party movement during Barack Obama’s presidency.

I couldn’t help read that portion of CNN’s poll and think of the new column by CNN’s Ronald Brownstein, about how Republican-controlled state governments are working to seize the powers of local governance from Democratic-run cities and counties.

From Brownstein:

These range from Georgia legislation that would establish a new statewide commission to discipline or remove local prosecutors, to a Texas bill allowing the state to take control of prosecuting election fraud cases, to moves by Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey to dismiss from office elected county prosecutors who are Democrats, and a Mississippi bill that would allow a state takeover of policing in the capital city of Jackson.

While the specifics of these efforts vary from minimum wage and family-leave laws to recycling policies, he argues the larger political struggle is over crime and political justice reform.

Brownstein notes “an unmistakable racial dimension to these confrontations.”

He writes, “In many instances, state-level Republicans elected primarily with the support of White, non-urban voters are looking to seize power from, or remove from office, Black or Hispanic local officials elected by largely non-White urban and suburban voters.”

CNN’s John King put an interesting segment on his “Inside Politics” show in which he applied those current poll numbers to how the GOP primary actually works.

The fact is that many states award all of their delegates to the highest vote-getter in the primary even if that vote-getter does not receive anywhere near a majority of votes.

King noted that in 2016, when Trump first secured the GOP nomination, he lost the first contest in Iowa and won in New Hampshire and South Carolina, but with only about a third of the primary vote.

He ultimately got about 45% of primary votes compared with the 50% split among his three chief rivals. That means the votes are likely out there to defeat Trump. But for now, it would mean Republicans would likely have to coalesce around a single alternative.

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March 14, 2023
DeSantis moves his presidential ambitions into the open with Iowa visit | CNN Politics

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Davenport, Iowa
CNN
—

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made his first appearance in Iowa on Friday, an unmistakable flirtation for a top-tier Republican presidential contender that brings his expected bid for the White House a step closer to reality.

Though DeSantis doesn’t plan to make a formal announcement on his political future until May or June, the Iowa visit, followed by a stop in Nevada on Saturday, highlighted the increasing priority of his presidential ambitions and a desire to send a clear signal to GOP donors, activists and potential campaign staff in early voting states about his intentions.

At a stop at a casino in the eastern Iowa town of Davenport, DeSantis acknowledged it was his first time in the state, which typically lures political aspirants much sooner. He told the audience that his record in Florida compared favorably with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, who is popular among Republicans here and has championed similar education policies.

“I always tell my legislators, you watch Iowa – do not let them get ahead of us on any of this stuff,” DeSantis told a standing-room-only crowd.

Reynolds introduced DeSantis at the event Friday and later joined him onstage to lead a conversation. She also traveled to Des Moines to appear with DeSantis at the State Fairgrounds later in the day.

DeSantis did not speak to the buzz around his 2024 decision, though Reynolds hinted at it in her remarks.

“He is just getting warmed up. This guy is a man on a mission,” she said in Davenport.

DeSantis’ visit to Iowa came amid high anticipation from state Republicans, who have watched him closely from afar and were eager to take his measure up close.

“Our grandkids live in Florida, so we’ve had a chance to see and hear what he’s done down there,” Kim Schmett, a longtime Iowa GOP activist, told CNN before the visit. “But everyone in Florida tells us, we don’t want him to run for president because we want to keep him here. That’s a good thing to hear about somebody holding public office.”

DeSantis’ carefully crafted travel schedule brought him to many of Iowa’s neighbors during last year’s midterm cycle and to friendly audiences from Staten Island to Southern California in recent weeks. But he had avoided public events in the GOP’s first nominating state and in New Hampshire, home of the party’s first primary.

He broke the seal Friday, becoming the latest potential 2024 hopeful to begin courting Iowa’s Republican caucus voters in person. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who declared her candidacy last month, is wrapping up her own three-day tour of the state, and potential candidates such as South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu held events in Iowa as early as last year.

At the outset of the year, sources close to the Florida governor were unsure if DeSantis would visit Iowa before he officially became a candidate. Reynolds, who attended his donor retreat in Palm Beach last month, personally urged DeSantis to visit the state sooner than later, her aides said. The release of his second book, “The Courage to Be Free,” and the ensuing national tour provided DeSantis the opportunity to touch down in Iowa on his terms.

In Davenport, people lined up as early as 6 a.m. to enter the event room. DeSantis signed books after he concluded his remarks, which saw him recount many of his political battles of the past two years, from his management of the Covid-19 pandemic in Florida to fighting Disney over legislation that banned certain instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom.

Besides the events in Davenport and Des Moines, DeSantis’ Friday itinerary was also filled with several private meetings with key Republican leaders.

He met with a group of state legislators at the Capitol, where a robust debate has been underway all week on legislation similar to many of his signature proposals in Florida. Those involved in forming his political action committee had made calls to several influential Iowa Republicans, aides familiar with the conversations said, inviting them to meet with DeSantis on Friday.

Top advisers to the Florida governor have spoken to several key Iowa GOP operatives about the possibility of joining his team in the state. No firm hiring decisions have been made, people familiar with the matter say, but veterans of Reynolds’ and former Gov. Terry Branstad’s campaigns are among those in discussions with Team DeSantis.

At the same time, former President Donald Trump has been making his own calls into Iowa over the past two weeks – targeting some of the same legislators and longtime supporters and urging them to endorse his candidacy again.

“President Trump is twisting arms and looking for endorsements, but many of us are keeping our powder dry for now,” a top Republican elected official told CNN, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid alienating the former president or the DeSantis team.

Trump will hold his first Iowa event of the 2024 cycle in Davenport on Monday just days after DeSantis leaves town. Jeanita McNulty, chairwoman of the Scott County GOP, said many local Republicans are uncommitted and she expects to see familiar faces attend both the DeSantis and Trump events.

“Republicans here are not closing a chapter or opening a new chapter,” she said. “They want to hear from both candidates, see what they have to say.”

DeSantis did not mention Trump in his remarks in Davenport, but he contrasted his administration against the chaos and leaks that at times engulfed the Trump White House.

“There’s no drama in our administration,” DeSantis said. “There’s no palace intrigue. (My staffers) basically just sit back and say, ‘OK, what’s the governor going to do next?’ And we roll out and we execute.”

Nevertheless, in the state where the first votes of the Republican contest are expected to be cast early next year, caution signs abound for DeSantis.

“He’s riding high for a lot of good reasons. He’s done a great job leading the state of Florida,” Bob Vander Plaats, president of influential Christian group The Family Leader, told CNN before the governor’s visit.

“But in 2008, [Rudy] Giuliani was the nominee. In 2012, Rick Perry was the nominee. In 2016, Scott Walker was the nominee,” he said, referring to past candidates who failed to live up to lofty early expectations and fizzled before voting began. “For Gov. DeSantis, he has to not just take in all of the poll numbers right now but show he’s really willing to work.”

Vander Plaats met privately with DeSantis near Naples, Florida, last month.

In conversations with more than two dozen Republican voters and party activists this week in Iowa, DeSantis’ name came up again and again. To many, his decision to add Iowa to his national book tour highlights his intention to run, though he’s in no hurry to make it official.

“Pushing a book in Iowa is a fishing expedition,” said Kelley Koch, chairwoman of the Dallas County Republican Party. “I think he will be pleasantly surprised to see how many people come out to the Fairgrounds to see him. People are very curious.”

It remains unclear the extent to which DeSantis will prioritize Iowa and other early nominating states as he lays the groundwork for a campaign focused on outlasting Trump in the GOP primary. Two people with knowledge of the planning, who asked not to be named, said DeSantis’ political operation is plotting an ambitious, nationwide strategy that will focus as much on competing in Trump strongholds and large, winner-take-all contests as it will in the initial battlegrounds. His travel in recent days to Alabama, Texas and California is an early indication that DeSantis will not be singularly focused on winning over Iowa or New Hampshire, county by county.

“I think you’ll see some things that are unconventional unfold in short order,” one source said.

DeSantis has consistently flouted traditional political protocols amid his rise to become Trump’s top GOP rival, and there’s no playbook for challenging a former president in a primary. He has also built a fundraising juggernaut that is carrying over more than $70 million from his 2022 reelection and has raised another $10 million this year through his Florida political committee before even jumping into the mix. CNN previously reported that the governor’s political team expects to shift that money to a DeSantis-aligned federal committee should he run.

Still, for a first-time presidential candidate who was unknown to most of the country two years ago, forging a national campaign out of the gate would be a precarious and expensive endeavor. It carries the added risk of turning off voters in early states such as Iowa.

“They expect to meet the candidates, shake their hands and look them in the eye,” said McNulty, the Scott County GOP chairwoman. “That’s the beauty of the first-in-the-nation caucus. It would be unwise to overlook the power of retail politics here.”

The most recent Republican winners of the Iowa caucuses – Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (2016), Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (2012) and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (2008) – all spent considerable time in the state to secure victory. Though, none of them ultimately secured the Republican nomination.

A source close to DeSantis’ political team said there is a sense among his operation that the political landscape has changed since 2016 to allow for a less conventional campaign.

“Ron DeSantis has never been successful because he’s the best campaigner. He’s been successful because he’s been the best governor,” the source said. “Primary voters are less concerned if you’re having coffee with them than if you are authentic and doing what you say you’re going to do. I get it that Iowa and New Hampshire voters are used to a certain campaign style, and he’ll have to consider those factors. But Republican primary voters are so concerned with the direction of the country, and those things will be less important.”

Routine favorable coverage from Fox News and other conservative outlets has allowed DeSantis to introduce himself to many prospective GOP voters already. He will spend much of the coming weeks promoting his book and creating reasons to speak to out-of-state voters, as he did when he rallied with law enforcement unions in New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois last month, sources said. Back home, a fully aligned GOP-led state legislature is expected to send to his desk a slate of ideological bills that will generate more headlines and could become a platform for his campaign.

“Gov. DeSantis in some ways has an unfair advantage,” Vander Plaats said, “and that’s he’s governor of Florida. That is a large state, and he gets a lot of coverage.”

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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March 11, 2023
Why Joe Biden is playing defense on crime | CNN Politics

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CNN
—

The Senate this week passed a Republican-led resolution to overturn a Washington, DC, crime law, which critics have argued is soft on violent criminals.

Almost two-thirds of Senate Democrats backed the measure after President Joe Biden announced an about-face by saying he wouldn’t veto the legislation to nullify that law. His move came after a majority of House Democrats had opposed the same measure in their chamber, and Biden’s decision angered many of them, including vulnerable members who opposed the bill believing the president was going to veto it.

So just what was Biden thinking? Why would he leave members of his own party out to dry?

A look at the political terrain and certain crime statistics indicate that Biden probably felt boxed in and didn’t want to be seen as soft on crime heading into the 2024 presidential election.

Let’s start with the political reality of the situation: Americans don’t like where the country is when it comes to efforts to reduce crime.

A Gallup poll taken at the beginning of this year revealed that 70% of adults were dissatisfied with the nation’s efforts to reduce or control crime. This marked only the second time this century in which at least 70% of Americans registered dissatisfaction on this metric.

The dissatisfaction crosses party lines and includes a majority of Democrats (65%), independents (68%) and Republicans (82%).

Although the political reality on crime can differ from the reality of crime statistics, you can understand where voters are coming from. The homicide rates in the country’s three most populated cities – New York, Los Angeles and Chicago – were all up in 2022 from where they were in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic started. Homicides are up in Washington, DC, too.

When it comes to car thefts (something that can easily be seen in everyday life), there’s a clear upward trend nationwide over the same time period. It’s up 59% across 30 major cities.

The concerns over crime can be seen in certain election results too, including a recent one in a deeply Democratic city, where concerns over crime abound.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot became the first elected mayor from the nation’s third-largest city to lose reelection in 40 years. And Lightfoot didn’t just lose – she was embarrassed, failing to make the runoff after procuring a mere 17% of the primary vote, by far the lowest share for an incumbent Chicago mayor in the modern era.

Now, the defeat of one incumbent doesn’t mean very much, but it comes in the aftermath of other important races where crime was a major issue.

In 2022, Republicans nearly won their first governor’s race in New York since 2002. GOP nominee Lee Zeldin lost by single digits (in a state Biden won by over 20 points) by hammering away at Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul on the issue of crime.

While Zeldin was ultimately unsuccessful, his strong performance buoyed GOP House candidates in the Empire State. Republicans had a net pickup of three seats in New York, which helped the party win a narrow five-seat majority in the House.

Zeldin’s near-win came a year after Eric Adams, a former police captain in the New York Police Department, was elected mayor of the country’s largest city (New York) in a race where, again, crime was the No. 1 issue.

But perhaps no election illustrates the electoral impact of rising crime than the recall of Chesa Boudin as San Francisco’s district attorney last year. There’s probably no major city more associated with left-wing politics than San Francisco. Yet, 55% of city voters decided to recall Boudin, after he was tagged with being too soft on crime.

These elections, from coast to coast, may have spooked Biden. They indicate that crime is an issue that not only resonates in Democratic primaries and cities but can be used to move voters away from Democratic candidates in general elections.

Indeed, the polling shows that crime is one of Democrats’ worst-performing issues. An ABC News/Washington poll from late 2022 found that Republicans were trusted over Democrats on the issue of crime by 20 points. It was the best issue for Republicans of any tested in the poll. Democrats even did better on inflation, a topic that has plagued them over the past year.

One of the last things Biden wants going into 2024 is being seen as soft on crime, given the strong advantage Republicans already hold on the issue. Remember, Biden was a lead author of the 1994 crime law, which he was criticized for during the 2020 Democratic primary campaign.

Biden likely will lean into his past support of crime measures and his actions on the DC crime law to try to fend off crime-related criticisms from Republicans.

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March 11, 2023
Biden and Trump agree on one big thing | CNN Politics

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CNN
—

Joe Biden and Donald Trump are bizarrely on the same page on the top issue so far in the 2024 White House race, as they aim huge, possibly campaign-defining swings at Republicans who they claim will shred retirement benefits.

The current and former presidents – bitter rivals who agree on little else – are both forcing their foes into political retreats and attempts to whitewash past support for changes that could cut Medicare and Social Security payouts.

Their strategy is reinforcing a truism of presidential election campaigns that candidates who even entertain the notion of “reforming” these cherished entitlement programs for seniors are playing with fire.

With typical bluntness, Trump has blasted his potential top rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, as a “wheelchair over the cliff kind of guy” after he voted, as a member of the US House, for non-binding resolutions that would have raised the age at which most seniors can collect their benefits to 70. As a 2012 congressional candidate, he supported privatizing Social Security, CNN’s KFile has reported. But trying to ease his vulnerability on the issue, DeSantis insisted in a Fox News interview last week: “We’re not going to mess with Social Security.”

Despite his own proposed cuts to these programs as president, Trump has kept up the attacks. “We’re not going back to people that want to destroy our great Social Security system – even some in our own party; I wonder who that might be – who want to raise the minimum age of Social Security to 70, 75 or even 80 in some cases, and who are out to cut Medicare to a level that will be unrecognizable,” he said at the Conservative Political Action Conference last Saturday.

A few days later, another Republican hopeful gave both Biden and Trump a new opening to exploit.

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley was forced to make clear Thursday that her striking and unspecific call the day before for raising the retirement age was only supposed to refer to Americans currently in their 20s, who are in effect a half century away from drawing their pensions. But her clarification won’t protect the former ambassador to the United Nations from Trump, who is splitting his party down the middle, yet again, by pouncing on competitors who have voiced traditional conservative orthodoxy on cutting or changing the programs. Biden is sure to also highlight Haley’s remarks as he claims only he can thwart a secret GOP agenda to kill off the vital programs.

“I guarantee you, I will protect Social Security and Medicare without any change. Guaranteed,” the president vowed in Philadelphia on Thursday. “I won’t allow it to be gutted or eliminated as MAGA Republicans have threatened to do.”

Biden browbeat Republicans during his “State of the Union” address last month to confirm on camera that they support shoring up Social Security and Medicare. And he’s anchoring his likely reelection bid on the most forceful campaign by a Democratic candidate in years on the issue. Some of his attacks are fair; others take statements by GOP leaders out of context. But they’re still potent – since both he and Trump know that when conservatives are explaining that they don’t plan to cut Medicare or retirement benefits, they are usually trying to dig out of a losing position.

And Biden has public opinion on his side. A Fox News poll last month, for instance, showed that Democrats are preferred over Republicans to better handle Medicare (by 23 points) and Social Security (by 16 points). No wonder Biden seems to relish this particular political battlefield.

The odd confluence of approaches – from a former president who sought to overturn an election and a successor who sees his administration as vital to saving democracy – says so much about each man’s political instincts, backgrounds and campaign strategy. It is also reflects the shifting character of the Republican Party, which Trump has torn from its corporate, ideologically pure conservative roots to build a new coalition that includes working class voters, often in the Midwest, that Biden is battling hard to win back.

In one sense, possibly the most thorny domestic issue of the years to come should, of course, have a place in a presidential campaign. But when candidates use it to inflame their political bases, it only makes it harder to address in government. This is especially the case with entitlements since they cut into the DNA of each party and have defined the dividing lines between them for decades – at least until Trump came along and took over the GOP.

Ever since the New Deal reforms of Franklin Roosevelt, who was president from 1933 to 1945, Democrats – through presidents Lyndon Johnson, Barack Obama and Biden, especially – have sought to use government power to secure the living standards and health care of less well-off and elderly Americans. Republicans, from 1980s President Ronald Reagan onwards, have increasingly sought to find ways to shift the burden of some of this care to the private sector and to reduce or eliminate government’s role in an attempt to whittle away the New Deal reforms of FDR and the Great Society program of LBJ, who was president in the 1960s. They have often paid a heavy price. Republican President George W. Bush’s failed attempt to partially privatize Social Security contributed to a disastrous second term. And Trump still rails against former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who promoted a similar plan.

While raising the alarm about threats to social programs for seniors might be a shrewd political tactic – especially in mobilizing older voters more likely to show up at the polls – it usually does nothing to address the program’s increasingly dire solvency challenges.

The latest Congressional Budget Office projection found that Social Security’s retirement trust fund could be exhausted by 2032. At that point, with fewer workers paying into the program and with a rapidly aging population, benefits could be cut by at least 20%, CNN’s Tami Luhby reported. Medicare is even more precarious since its hospital insurance trust fund, known as Part A, will only be able to fully pay scheduled benefits until 2028, its trustees said in their most recent forecast.

Biden, who released a new budget on Thursday that will help shape the message of his likely reelection bid, has proposed a plan to raise taxes on people earning more than $400,000 a year to shore up the program and would expand the range of drugs for which its managers can negotiate prices. He says the move would keep Medicare solvent until 2050 and would involve no cuts in benefits. The president also wants to target those who earn more than $400,000 with increasing payroll taxes to secure Social Security for the future. There is an infinitesimal chance, however, that the Republican-led House will agree to tax increases, so Biden’s plan represents more a device to deliver a political message than a viable plan.

Despite warning his fellow Republicans to avoid cutting these programs, it’s unclear how Trump would save them if he wins back the White House – and doing nothing isn’t an option. And while other Republicans insist they don’t want to cut benefits or raise taxes, it’s unclear how they can square the circle.

Florida Sen. Rick Scott has now excluded Social Security and Medicare from his proposal for all spending programs to be reviewed every five years. His original plan, released when he was leading the Senate GOP’s campaign arm, sparked the ire of his Republican Senate colleagues, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who quickly identified it as a political liability. That hasn’t stopped Biden from repeatedly claiming that it represents Republican policy.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has, meanwhile, said that cuts to Social Security and Medicare are “completely off the table” in what he insists must be negotiations with Biden over raising the government’s borrowing limit later this year. But that position has put him in a bind because it means that in order for the GOP to honor their pledge to slash spending, they will probably have to take aim at other social programs that could also prove unpopular with voters.

America is not the only country staring down a crisis.

French President Emmanuel Macron sparked nationwide strikes and protests with his plan to raise the retirement age to 64 from 62. Even China’s Communist Party is struggling as a falling birthrate threatens to inflict severe costs on the world’s most dynamic emerging economy.

Back in the US, whoever wins the 2024 elections for the White House and Congress, there seems no easily identifiable solution to safeguard these vital programs on which millions of Americans depend. And time is running out.

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March 10, 2023
Oklahoma GOP senator tells union leader ‘shut your mouth’ in heated exchange over union intimidation | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma told a witness to “shut your mouth” during a heated exchange at a Senate hearing on Wednesday.

The witness, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Sean O’Brien, went toe-to-toe with Mullin at the hearing before the Senate Health, Labor, Education and Pensions Committee. The panel’s chairman, Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, had to intervene multiple times to get the questioning back on track.

“I want to make it very clear. I’m not against unions. I’m not at all. Some of my very good friends work for unions, they work hard, and they do a good job,” Mullin said. “Please don’t make an assumption that I’m anti-union, but I also want to set the record straight.”

Mullin then criticized the panel for not discussing allegations of unions intimidating workers who do not want to join their organizations, and pointed to his own experience where he alleges unions tried to intimidate him and his employees.

“I’m not afraid of physical confrontation, in fact sometimes I look forward to it. That’s not my problem,” he said. Mullin is a former mixed martial arts fighter.

He asked O’Brien his salary. “Well, I’m glad you asked that question,” began O’Brien, before Mullin cut him off by reading off his 2019 annual income. O’Brien and Mullin went back and forth on what UPS drivers make, with O’Brien saying Mullin’s numbers were “inaccurate.”

O’Brien told Mullin that his line of questioning was “out of line,” at which point Mullin replied, “Sir, you need to shut your mouth.”

“You’re gonna tell me to shut my mouth?” O’Brien fired back. “Tough guy. ‘I’m not afraid of physical confrontation.’”

Sanders banged his gavel and told Mullin to let O’Brien answer the questions.

“It was rhetorical,” Mullin said.

“You ask a question, he has a right to answer that,” Sanders told him.

Sanders repeatedly had to stop the witness and senator from criticizing each other, as Mullin said this was showing how union leaders behave.

“No, this shows your behavior,” Sanders ordered. “Stay on the issue, please.”

Mullin’s time expired without O’Brien answering another question.

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March 9, 2023
Senate votes to block controversial DC crime bill | CNN Politics

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CNN
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The Senate passed a Republican-led resolution on Wednesday to block a controversial Washington, DC, crime bill that opponents have criticized as weak on crime. The measure will next go to President Joe Biden, who has said he won’t veto it.

The effort to block the crime bill divided Democrats and highlighted the difficult balance the party is attempting to strike as Republicans accuse them of failing to tackle the issue of crime.

While a large number of Democrats ultimately supported the resolution, Biden’s announcement that he would not veto it surprised and upset members of his party as many believe Congress should not interfere in the political affairs of the district.

Democrats control a narrow 51-to-49 majority in the Senate, where most legislation requires at least 60 votes to pass to overcome a filibuster. The resolution of disapproval to block the DC crime bill, however, required only a simple majority vote in the Senate. The final vote was overwhelmingly bipartisan with a tally of 81-14.

The DC Council chairman attempted to withdraw the legislation from congressional review after it became clear the resolution of disapproval was on track to pass the Senate with widespread support. But that attempted withdrawal did not stop the Senate vote from moving forward.

The vote marked the latest effort by Republicans to put vulnerable Senate Democrats on the spot and expose divides within the party over politically charged issues.

Earlier this month, the Senate passed a resolution to overturn a Biden administration retirement investment rule that Republicans claim pushes a liberal agenda on Americans and will hurt retirees’ bottom lines. Democrats have countered, saying it’s not about ideology and will help investors, and the administration has said the president will veto the measure.

Biden’s announcement that he would not veto the effort to block the DC crime bill caught many congressional Democrats off guard – and came after the administration had earlier put out a statement saying it opposed the resolution of disapproval. “Congress should respect the District of Columbia’s autonomy to govern its own local affairs,” the statement said.

The House passed the resolution in February before Biden’s veto announcement, with 173 Democrats voting against it. At the time, the understanding among Democrats was that Biden opposed the bill – in no small part because of the White House statement saying it opposed it.

In an apparent effort to outline his rationale, Biden tweeted in early March, “I support D.C. Statehood and home-rule – but I don’t support some of the changes D.C. Council put forward over the Mayor’s objections – such as lowering penalties for carjackings. If the Senate votes to overturn what D.C. Council did – I’ll sign it.”

The controversial crime bill was initially vetoed by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, with Bowser saying in a statement at the time that the bill “does not make us safer.” In a letter to the DC council chairman, Bowser expressed concern that “the council substantially reduced penalties for robberies, carjackings and home invasion burglaries.”

The council, however, voted to override the mayor’s veto. “Decades of dramatic increases in incarceration have not been a solution to rising crime,” a release from the council said on the veto override.

Some Democrats contend that public debate over the crime bill has lacked nuance, pointing to policies that run counter to the “weak on crime” messaging around the bill.

“The debate over the DC crime law has gone a bit off the rails. It lowers the carjacking maximum to 24 years, but that’s IN LINE with many states. And the bill INCREASES sentences for attempted murder, attempted sexual assault, misdemeanor sexual abuse and many other crimes,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy tweeted earlier this week.

Republicans, meanwhile, have called the DC crime bill dangerous and irresponsible.

“Congress is tasked with overseeing Washington, D.C.—a federal district where people should be safe to live and work. The district should set a nationwide example by enacting legislation that makes its residents and visitors safer—not less safe,” Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, a lead sponsor of the resolution in the Senate, said in a statement.

This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.

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March 9, 2023
This is the dynamic that could decide the 2024 GOP race | CNN Politics

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CNN
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The same fundamental dynamic that decided the 2016 Republican presidential primaries is already resurfacing as the 2024 contest takes shape.

As in 2016, early polls of next year’s contest show the Republican electorate is again sharply dividing about former President Donald Trump along lines of education. In both state and national surveys measuring support for the next Republican nomination, Trump is consistently running much better among GOP voters without a college education than among those with a four-year or graduate college degree.

Analysts have often described such an educational divide among primary voters as the wine track (centered on college-educated voters) and the beer track (revolving around those without degrees). Over the years, it’s been a much more consistent feature in Democratic than Republican presidential primaries. But the wine track/beer track divide emerged as the defining characteristic of the 2016 GOP race, when Trump’s extraordinary success at attracting Republicans without a college degree allowed him to overcome sustained resistance from the voters with one.

Though the early 2024 polls have varied in whether they place Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the lead overall (with the latest round tilting mostly toward Trump), that same overriding pattern of educational polarization is appearing in virtually all of those surveys, a review of public and private polling data reveals.

“Trump does seem to have a special ability to make this sort of populist appeal [to non-college voters] and also have a special ability to make college-educated conservatives start thinking about alternatives,” GOP pollster Chris Wilson said in an email. “I think we’ll continue to see a big education divide in his support in 2024.”

The stark educational split in attitudes toward Trump frames the strategic challenge for his potential rivals in the 2024 race.

On paper, none of the leading candidates other than DeSantis himself seems particularly well positioned to threaten Trump’s hold on the non-college Republicans who have long been the most receptive audience for his blustery and belligerent messaging. By contrast, most of the current and potential field – including former Governors Nikki Haley and Chris Christie; current Governors Chris Sununu of New Hampshire and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia; former Vice President Mike Pence; and Sen. Tim Scott – appear better suited to attract the white-collar Republicans who have always been the most skeptical of Trump.

That could create a situation in which there’s too little competition to Trump for voters on the “beer track” and too many options splintering the voters resistant to him on the “wine track.” That was the dynamic that allowed Trump to capture the nomination in 2016 even though nearly two-thirds of college-educated Republicans opposed him through the primaries, according to exit polls, and he didn’t reach 50% of the total vote in any state until the race was essentially decided.

While the political obstacles facing Trump look greater now than they were then, his best chance of winning in 2024 would likely come from consolidating the “beer track” to a greater extent than anyone else unifies the “wine track” – just as he did in 2016. In each of the past three contested GOP presidential primaries, the electorate have split almost exactly in half between voters with and without college degrees, analyses of the exit polls have found.

“Right now, unless somebody cracks that code to get competitive with Trump there [among blue-collar Republican voters], it could fall into the old pattern which is the best scenario for him,” said long-time GOP strategist Mike Murphy, who directed the super PAC for Jeb Bush in the 2016 race.

Jennifer Horn, the former GOP state chair in New Hampshire, added that while Trump’s ceiling is likely lower than in 2016, he could still win the nomination with only plurality support if no one unifies the majority more skeptical of him. “He isn’t going to need 50% to win,” cautioned Horn, a leading Republican critic of Trump.

The wine track/beer track divide has been a consistent feature of Democratic presidential primary politics since 1968. Since then, a procession of brainy liberal candidates (think Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Gary Hart in 1984, Paul Tsongas in 1992 and Bill Bradley in 2000) have mobilized socially liberal college-educated voters against rivals who relied primarily on support from non-college educated White voters and racial minorities (Robert F. Kennedy, Walter Mondale, Bill Clinton and Al Gore in those same races). In the epic 2008 Democratic primary struggle, the basic divide persisted in slightly reconfigured form as Barack Obama attracted just enough white-collar White and Black voters to beat Hillary Clinton’s coalition of blue-collar Whites and Latinos. Joe Biden in 2020 was mostly a beer track candidate.

Generally, over those years, the educational divide had not been as important in Republican primary races. More often GOP voters have divided among primary contenders along other lines, including ideology and religious affiliation. Both the 2008 and 2012 GOP races, for instance, followed similar lines in which a candidate who relied primarily on evangelical Christians and the most conservative voters (Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012) ultimately lost the nomination to another who attracted more support from non-evangelicals and a broader range of mainstream conservatives (John McCain and Mitt Romney).

The conservative columnist Patrick J. Buchanan, in his long-shot 1992 and 1996 bids for the GOP nomination, pioneered a blue-collar conservatism centered on unwavering cultural conservatism and an economic nationalism revolving around hostility to foreign trade and immigration. Huckabee and even more so Santorum advanced those themes, clearing a path that Trump would later follow – with a much harsher edge than either.

In 2008, there was no educational divide in the GOP race: McCain won exactly the same 43% among Republican voters with and without a college degree, according to a new analysis of the exit poll results by CNN polling director Jennifer Agiesta. But by 2012, Santorum’s blue-collar inroads meant Romney won the nomination with something closer to the Republican equivalent of a wine-track coalition: Of the 20 states that conducted exit polls that year, Romney won voters with at least a four-year college degree in 14, but he carried most non-college voters in just 10.

Wilson, the GOP pollster, said that an educational divide also started appearing around that time in other GOP primaries for Senate, House and governor’s races more frequently though by no means universally.

“This wasn’t always the driving demographic or ideological difference in primaries before Trump,” Wilson said. “Sometimes a candidate [who] was particularly strong in sounding populist themes would create this type of gap, but often a more traditional issue difference either on social issues or on issues like tax increase votes or support for Obamacare or something adjacent to it would be a stronger signal in a primary.”

In 2016, Trump turned this traditional GOP axis on its head. He narrowed the big divisions that had decided the 2008 and 2012 races. He performed nearly as well among voters who identified as very conservative as he did among those who called themselves somewhat conservative or moderate, according to a cumulative analysis of all the 2016 exit polls conducted by ABC’s Gary Langer. Likewise, Trump performed only slightly better among voters who were not evangelicals than those who were, Langer’s analysis found.

Instead, Trump split the GOP electorate along the wine-track/beer-track divide familiar from Democratic primary contests over the previous generation. According to Langer’s cumulation of the exit polls, Trump won fully 47% of GOP voters without a four-year college degree – an incredible performance in such a crowded field. Trump, in stark contrast, carried only 35% of Republican voters with at least a college-degree across the primaries overall. But the remainder of them dubious of him never settled on a single alternative. Sen. Ted Cruz, who proved Trump’s longest-lasting rival, captured only about one-fourth of the white-collar GOP voters, with the rest splitting primarily among Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Trump himself.

In October 2015, I wrote that Trump’s emerging strength in the GOP nomination race could be explained in two sentences: “The blue-collar wing of the Republican primary electorate has consolidated around one candidate. The party’s white-collar wing remains fragmented.” That same basic equation held through the primaries and largely explained Trump’s victory. The question now is whether it could happen again.

There’s no question that some of the same ingredients are present. Recent national polling by the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute, according to detailed results shared with CNN, shows that Republicans without a college degree are more likely than those with advanced education to agree with such core Trump themes as the belief that discrimination against Whites is now as big a problem as bias against minorities; that society is growing too soft and feminine; and that the growing number of immigrants weakens American society.

The educational divide is also appearing more regularly in other GOP primaries for offices such as senator or governor, especially in races where one candidate is running on a Trump-style platform, Republican strategists say. It is also reappearing in polls measuring GOP voters’ early preferences for 2024. Recent national polls by Quinnipiac University, Fox News Channel and Republican pollsters including Whit Ayres, Echelon Insights and Wilson have all found Trump still running very strongly among Republicans without a college degree, usually capturing more than two-fifths of them, according to detailed results provided by the pollsters. But those same surveys all show Trump struggling with college-educated Republican voters, usually drawing even less support among them than he did in 2016, often just one-fourth or less.

Wilson, for instance, said that in his national survey of prospective 2024 GOP voters, Trump’s support falls from about half of those with a high school degree or less, to about one-third of those with some college experience, one-fourth of those with a four-year degree and only one-fifth of those with a graduate education. In a recent national NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, half of Republicans without a college degree said nominating Trump again would give the party the best chance of winning in 2024; two-thirds of the Republicans with degrees said the party would have a better chance with someone else.

State polls are showing the same pattern. The latest University of New Hampshire survey showed Trump attracting about two-fifths of GOP voters there without a high school degree, about one-third of those with some college experience, and only one-sixth of those with a four-year or graduate degree. A recent LA Times/University of California (Berkeley) survey in that state produced very similar results. Trump also ran much better among Republicans without a degree than those with one in the latest OH Predictive Insights primary poll in Arizona, according to detailed results provided by the firm.

Craig Robinson, the former GOP state party political director in Iowa, said he sees the same divergence in his daily interactions. “The people that I hang out with or have breakfast with on Saturday, it’s the more business, more educated guys, and they are like, ‘Hey, we just want to move on [from Trump],’” Robinson told me. “But if I go back home to rural Iowa, they are not like that. They are looking for the fighter; they are looking for the person that they think will stand up for them and that’s Trump by and large.”

Republicans who believe Trump is more vulnerable than in 2016 largely point to one reason: the possibility that DeSantis could build a broader coalition of support than any of Trump’s rivals did then. In many of these early state and national polls, DeSantis leads Trump among college educated voters. And in the same polls, DeSantis is generally staying closer to Trump among non-college voters than anyone did in 2016. “DeSantis may be able to do some business there,” said Murphy, referring to the GOP’s blue-collar wing.

When DeSantis spoke on Sunday at the Ronald Reagan presidential library about an hour northwest of Los Angeles, he smoothly displayed his potential to bridge the GOP’s educational divide. For the first part of his speech, he touted Florida’s economic success around small government principles – a message that could connect with white-collar GOP voters drawn to a Reaganite message of lower taxes and less regulation. In the speech’s later sections, DeSantis recounted his clashes with what he called “the woke mind virus” over everything from classroom instruction about race, gender and sexual orientation, to immigration and crime and his collisions with the Walt Disney Co. Those issues, which drew the biggest response from his audience, provide him a powerful calling card with GOP voters, especially those without degrees, drawn to Trump’s confrontational style, but worried he can’t win again.

“There is a lot of energy in the party right now around these cultural issues,” said GOP consultant Alex Conant, who served as the communications director for Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. “If you watch Fox prime time, they are not talking about tax cuts and balancing budgets. They talk about the same cultural issues that DeSantis is putting at the core of his campaign.”

The risk to DeSantis is that by leaning so hard into cultural confrontation on so many fronts he could create a zero-sum dynamic in the race. That approach could allow him to cut into Trump’s blue-collar base, but ultimately repel some college educated primary voters, who view him as too closely replicating what they don’t like about Trump. (If DeSantis wins the nomination, that same dynamic could hurt him with some suburban voters otherwise drawn to his small government economic message.)

That could leave room in the top tier of the GOP race for another candidate who offers a sunnier, less polarizing message aimed mostly at white-collar Republicans. “I think there is absolutely room for more than two candidates, especially two candidates who are both competing very hard for the Fox News audience,” Conant said. Almost anyone else who joins the race beyond Trump and DeSantis (assuming he announces later this year) may ultimately conclude that lane represents their best chance to win.

In many ways, Trump looks more vulnerable than he did in the 2016 primary. But assembling a coalition across the GOP’s wine-track/beer-track divide that’s broad enough to beat him remains something of a Rubik’s Cube, and the countdown is starting for the field that’s assembling against him to solve it.

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March 7, 2023
DeSantis agenda — and potential campaign platform — in the spotlight as Florida lawmakers return to work | CNN Politics

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CNN
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In the coming weeks, Gov. Ron DeSantis is poised to show Floridians – and the country – just how much further he is willing to go than any other Republican leader to turn his state into a conservative vision where abortion is nearly outlawed, guns can be carried in public without training, private schools are subsidized with taxpayer dollars and “wokeness” is excised.

DeSantis’ agenda is expected to dominate the debate in Tallahassee when state lawmakers return to action on Tuesday for what is perhaps the most anticipated legislative session in recent memory. With a decision on his presidential ambitions waiting on the other side of the 60-day session, DeSantis has hyped the humdrum of parliamentary proceedings and legislative sausage-making into a spectacle worth following.

“People look at Florida like, ‘Man, the governor has gotten a lot done,’” DeSantis told “Fox & Friends” last month. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

With DeSantis’ backing or urging, Republican lawmakers have filed a slate of bills that will keep Florida at the forefront of the culture wars that are raging in statehouses across the country. There are legislative proposals targeting drag shows, treatments for transgender children, diversity and equity programs at public universities, gender studies majors, professor tenure, teachers unions, libel protections for the media, so-called “woke” banking and in-state college tuition for undocumented residents. Other proposals would extend DeSantis’ powers as governor, including to control the hiring of professors on every public campus through his political appointees and put him in charge of picking the board that oversees scholastic athletics in the state. Another would amend a longstanding “resign to run” law so DeSantis could launch a bid for president without stepping down as Florida governor.

Though no governor in Florida’s modern history has wielded executive power or the bully pulpit quite like DeSantis, it’s the closely aligned, Republican-held legislature that has handed the governor many of the policy wins that have fueled his political rise. Already this year, the legislature has met in special session to shore up several of DeSantis’ priorities, including the freedom to transport migrants from anywhere in the country to Democratic jurisdictions and fewer hurdles for his new election crime office to charge people for voting errors and violations.

Lawmakers in the special session also approved DeSantis’ plans for a takeover of Disney’s special government powers – punishment for the entertainment giant’s objection last year to the Parental Rights in Education law, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics, which prohibited the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity until after third grade. Under the new law, DeSantis chooses the board members that oversee the taxing district around Disney’s Orlando-area theme parks. Last week, he appointed to the board a political donor, the wife of the state GOP chairman and a former pastor who once suggested tap water could turn people gay.

Now, lawmakers have proposed taking up the legislation at the heart of that feud once again, by extending the prohibited topics in the Parental Rights in Education law to eighth grade. The bill also declares “it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex” and it prohibits school districts from requiring teachers or other employees to use a student’s preferred name or pronouns.

For his part, DeSantis will deliver the state of the state address on Tuesday and then spend much of the following weeks on the road to promote his new book, “The Courage to be Free,” a memoir transfixed on the political battles from his first term. It will be up to Republican lawmakers to give DeSantis fresh material from which he can build a narrative for a presidential campaign, should he choose to run. DeSantis has said he intends to decide after the session if he will jump into the 2024 contest.

Privately, DeSantis’ political team believes that as a sitting governor, DeSantis’ ability to stack policy wins is critical to mounting a campaign against former President Donald Trump. Like Trump and former Gov. Nikki Haley, the only other major declared candidate, many potential contenders for the nomination are out of office and unable to dictate an agenda for other Republicans to match. And, unlike DeSantis, their records may not reflect what animates GOP primary voters at the moment.

In a speech behind closed doors last week to the conservative Club for Growth, DeSantis also suggested he is a singular force among elected Republicans in pushing the party to engage in ideological battles.

“I’m going on offense,” DeSantis said, according to audio of his speech obtained by CNN. “Some of these Republicans, they just sit back like potted plants, and they let the media define the terms of the debate. They let the left define the terms of debate. They take all this incoming, because they’re not making anything happen. And I said, ‘That’s not what we’re doing.’”

Democrats, a perennial minority in Tallahassee with even fewer members after the last election, have little recourse to stop DeSantis and Republican lawmakers. Democrats have asserted that the Republican agenda is failing to address the problems many Floridians are facing, including skyrocketing rents, a housing shortage and fast-rising property insurance rates.

“Just a reminder, eggs are still $5 for a dozen,” Senate Minority Leader Lauren Book said Monday. “It’s $3.50 for a gallon of gas. If you live in the state of Florida in a high rise, you still have to buy flood insurance. But the Republicans want to fight about drag and which bathroom people use.”

Still, there are signs of dissent among Republicans in how hard to push on several fronts. Some Republicans have raised concern at the price tag for a DeSantis-backed expansion of a school voucher program that currently allows low-income parents to offset the cost of sending their children to private and religious school. Under the latest proposal, the program would be open to virtually all parents regardless of income, including those who choose to home school their kids.

At a committee meeting last week, state Sen. Erin Grall, a Republican, warned that the “potential for abuse rises significantly with the dollar amount and keeping a child at home.”

Republicans also have not settled on a new legislative framework for the future of abortion access in the state. Before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, DeSantis signed a bill to ban abortion at 15 weeks without exception. He recently signaled he would support legislation that banned abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected; however, he has not publicly advocated for it with the same fervor as his other priorities. Meanwhile, the state’s Senate President Kathleen Passidomo previously said she wanted a 12-week ban that included exemptions for rape and incest.

John Stemberger, president of the Florida Family Policy Council, an influential conservative group, said he expects a compromise heartbeat bill will pass that includes some exceptions. Other anti-abortion groups want to see DeSantis sign a complete ban on abortion.

“While exceptions are important and represent real human beings, the bottom line is they are small in number, so it’s a huge victory even with exceptions and I think the governor and his staff are thinking the same way,” Stemberger said. “He’s certainly committed to signing a heartbeat bill.”

It remains to be seen, too, how Republicans respond to DeSantis’ immigration agenda. DeSantis has proposed repealing a measure that granted in-state tuition for undocumented students who were brought to the US by their parents. The law, championed by his own lieutenant governor, Jeanette Nuñez, when she was a state representative, was a top priority of his predecessor, then-Gov. Rick Scott, and passed the GOP-controlled legislature with help from many of the party’s Latino members. Additionally, DeSantis wants lawmakers to mandate that employers check the immigration status of all workers against a federal database called E-Verify, a proposal opposed for years by the state’s influential hospitality and agriculture industries that bankroll many Republican campaigns.

Republicans have also faced pressure from the right on another DeSantis priority: eliminating the state permit to carry a concealed weapon in Florida. Under the proposal, eligible Floridians could carry a concealed gun in Florida without seeking approval from the state, which currently requires proof of training and a background check to obtain.

While Democrats and gun-control advocates have criticized DeSantis for removing one of the few checks on firearms in the state, gun-rights activists have said the measure doesn’t go far enough. They want Florida to allow people to carry a gun in public in the open and for the state to eliminate gun-free zones. In Florida, it’s currently illegal to carry a firearm at a school or on a college campus.

“The title of ‘constitutional carry’ for this bill is a lie,” Luis Valdes, the Florida director of Gun Owners of America, said during a recent committee hearing on the bill. “Why are Republicans defending (former Democratic attorney general) Janet Reno’s gun control policies?”

DeSantis has suggested, at times, that it is up to the legislature to put these bills on his desk. But for some conservatives, DeSantis has set the expectation that he can bully Republican lawmakers into supporting any measure he gets behind.

DeSantis himself has said his political philosophy is guided by taking political risks that others won’t.

“Boldness is something that voters reward,” DeSantis said Sunday in California. “The lesson is swing for the fences. You will be rewarded.”

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March 6, 2023
Republicans grapple with how to nominate someone other than Trump in 2024 | CNN Politics

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How to stop Donald Trump is the question lighting up Republican circles as some in the party grapple with what it might take to nominate someone other than former president in 2024.

The disagreement boils down to the other options – and how many of them there should be. Some think a small field with a clear alternative to Trump – perhaps Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis – is how the party can best set a new course. Others maintain that a larger field with more competing ideas is needed to reorient the GOP away from the former president.

“I think the focus here has got to be on eliminating Trump from the nomination process as early as possible,” former Trump national security adviser and now critic John Bolton told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “CNN This Morning” Monday, “and I think it’s very clear that the mistake candidates made in 2016 was in going after each other instead of going after Trump. It’s 20/20 hindsight, but I think it’s the right analysis.”

This debate was on full display Sunday, when former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a moderate voice in the party who had signaled interest in a White House bid, announced he would not run.

“The stakes are too high for me to risk being part of another multicar pileup that could potentially help Mr. Trump recapture the nomination,” Hogan said in a statement. His warning harkened back to the 2016 primary, when Trump – whom many observers had initially dismissed – emerged victorious from a heavily splintered group.

“Right now, you have Trump and DeSantis at the top of the field, soaking up all the oxygen, getting all the attention, and then a whole lot of the rest of us in single digits,” Hogan said in an interview with CBS News that aired Sunday on “Face the Nation.”

But another former governor who was term-limited from running again in 2022 – Arkansas’ Asa Hutchinson – is still weighing a run, and therefore thinks “more voices” in the race are “good for our party.”

“I actually think more voices right now in opposition or providing an alternative to Donald Trump is the best thing in the right direction. So hats off to Larry for what he’s done, what he’s contributed. And I’m glad that he will continue to do so,” Hutchinson told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” Sunday.

Of course, Hogan and Hutchinson, both critics of Trump, come from different political geographies, which could also be informing their views of the race and their place in it. Hogan governed a blue state that voted for President Joe Biden by more than 30 points in 2020, while Hutchinson — who said he’ll make a decision in April — led a state that backed Trump by nearly 30 points.

Hutchinson argued that “this is not 2016” and 2024 will be “different” because Trump is a “known quantity.” He also said that evangelical Christian voters “are convinced that we need to have a different type of leadership in the future.”

“In the early stages, multiple candidates that have an alternative vision to what the president has is good for our party, good for the debate, good for the upcoming debate that will be in August,” Hutchinson said.

“So, sure, that will narrow, and it will probably narrow fairly quickly. We need to have a lot of self-evaluation as you go along, but I think more voices now that provide alternative messages and problem-solving and ideas is good for our party,” he added.

At this point, there are just two major declared GOP candidates — Trump and former US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. But plenty of others are circling the waters, such as former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu.

“He’s not going to be the nominee. That’s just not going to happen,” Sununu said of Trump on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, predicting that if nominating contests were held today, DeSantis would win in New Hampshire.

The entrance of Haley last month, however, may have already helped prove Hogan’s point. As CNN data reporter Harry Enten wrote this weekend:

Trump is a clear, though not prohibitive, favorite to win next year’s Republican nomination for president. Right now, he’s averaging about 44% in the national primary polls. He’s 15 points ahead of DeSantis, who is at 29%.

A 15-point lead may not seem impressive at this early stage of the primary campaign, but it’s notable for two reasons.

The first is that most candidates in Trump’s position right now have gone on to win their primary. … The second reason Trump’s advantage over DeSantis is notable is that it’s growing. …

DeSantis has also had to deal with former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley declaring her bid for the presidency. The twice-elected South Carolina governor is polling a little better than she previously was (though still below 10%), but that only further divides the non-Trump vote.

Haley has already taken the gloves off, speaking at a private retreat in Palm Beach, Florida, hosted by the conservative anti-tax group Club for Growth, where DeSantis was also a featured speaker. The former South Carolina governor took a shot at Trump, who was headlining the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, on Saturday.

“I know there’s a Republican candidate out there who you did not invite to this conference,” Haley said, according to the text of her speech as prepared for delivery.

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March 6, 2023
Turkey’s earthquake caused $34 billion in damage. It could cost Erdogan the election | CNN
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Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, a three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here.

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CNN
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The devastating earthquake that hit Turkey on February 6 killed at least 45,000 people, rendered millions homeless across almost a dozen cities and caused immediate damage estimated at $34 billion – or roughly 4% of the country’s annual economic output, according to the World Bank.

But the indirect cost of the quake could be much higher, and recovery will be neither easy nor quick.

The Turkish Enterprise and Business Confederation estimates the total cost of the quake at $84.1 billion, the lion’s share of which would be for housing, at $70.8 billion, with lost national income pegged at $10.4 billion and lost working days at $2.91 billion.

“I do not recall… any economic disaster at this level in the history of the Republic of Turkey,” said Arda Tunca, an Istanbul-based economist at PolitikYol.

Turkey’s economy had been slowing even before the earthquake. Unorthodox monetary policies by the government caused soaring inflation, leading to further income inequality and a currency crisis that saw the lira lose 30% of its value against the dollar last year. Turkey’s economy grew 5.6% last year, Reuters reported, citing official data.

Economists say those structural weaknesses in the economy will only get worse because of the quake and could determine the course of presidential and parliamentary elections expected in mid-May.

Still, Tunca says that while the physical damage from the quake is colossal, the cost to the country’s GDP won’t be as pronounced when compared to the 1999 earthquake in Izmit, which hit the country’s industrial heartland and killed more than 17,000. According to the OECD, the areas impacted in that quake accounted for a third of the country’s GDP.

The provinces most affected by the February 6 quake represent some 15% of Turkey’s population. According to the Turkish Enterprise and Business Confederation, they contribute 9% of the nation’s GDP, 11% of income tax and 14% of income from agriculture and fisheries.

“Economic growth would slow down at first but I don’t expect a recessionary threat due to the earthquake,” said Selva Demiralp, a professor of economics at Koc University in Istanbul. “I don’t expect the impact on (economic) growth to be more than 1 to 2 (percentage) points.”

There has been growing criticism of the country’s preparedness for the quake, whether through policies to mitigate the economic impact or prevent the scale of the damage seen in the disaster.

How Turkey will rehabilitate its economy and provide for its newly homeless people is not yet known. But it could prove pivotal in determining President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s political fate, analysts and economists say, as he seeks another term in office.

The government’s 2023 budget, released before the earthquake, had planned for increased spending in an election year, foreseeing a deficit of 660 billion liras ($34.9 billion).

The government has already announced some measures that analysts said were designed to shore up Erdogan’s popularity, including a near 55% increase in the minimum wage, early retirement and cheaper housing loans.

Economists say that Turkey’s fiscal position is strong. Its budget deficit, when compared to its economic output, is smaller than that of other emerging markets like India, China and Brazil. That gives the government room to spend.

“Turkey starts from a position of relative fiscal strength,” said Selva Bahar Baziki of Bloomberg Economics. “The necessary quake spending will likely result in the government breaching their budget targets. Given the high humanitarian toll, this would be the year to do it.”

Quake-related public spending is estimated at 2.6% of GDP in the short run, she told CNN, but could eventually reach as high as 5.5%.

Governments usually plug budget shortfalls by taking on more debt or raising taxes. Economists say both are likely options. But post-quake taxation is already a touchy topic in the country, and could prove risky in an election year.

After the 1999 quake, Turkey introduced an “earthquake tax” that was initially introduced as a temporary measure to help cushion economic damage, but subsequently became a permanent tax.

There has been concern in the country that the state may have squandered those tax revenues, with opposition leaders calling on the government to be more transparent about what happened to the money raised. When asked in 2020, Erdogan said the money “was not spent out of its purpose.” Since then, the government has said little more about how the money was spent.

“The funds created for earthquake preparedness have been used for projects such as road constructions, infrastructure build-ups, etc. other than earthquake preparedness,” said Tunca. “In other words, no buffers or cushions have been set in place to limit the economic impacts of such disasters.”

The Turkish presidency didn’t respond to CNN’s request for comment.

Analysts say it’s too early to tell precisely what impact the economic fallout will have on Erdogan’s prospects for re-election.

The president’s approval rating was low even before the quake. In a December poll by Turkish research firm MetroPOLL, 52.1% of respondents didn’t approve of his handling of his job as president. A survey a month earlier found that a slim majority of voters would not vote for Erdogan if an election were held on that day.

Two polls last week, however, showed the Turkish opposition had not picked up fresh support, Reuters reported, citing partly its failure to name a candidate and partly its lack of a tangible plan to rebuild areas devastated by the quake.

The majority of the provinces worst affected by the quake voted for Erdogan and his ruling AK Party in the 2018 elections, but in some of those provinces, Erdogan and the AK Party won with a plurality of votes or a slim majority.

Those provinces are some of the poorest in the country, the World Bank says.

Research conducted by Demiralp as well as academics Evren Balta from Ozyegin University and Seda Demiralp from Isik University, found that while the ruling AK Party’s voters’ high partisanship is a strong hindrance to voter defection, economic and democratic failures could tip the balance.

“Our data shows that respondents who report being able to make ends meet are more likely to vote for the incumbent AKP again,” the research concludes. “However, once worsening economic fundamentals push more people below the poverty line, the possibility of defection increases.”

This could allow opposition parties to take votes from the incumbent rulers “despite identity-based cleavages if they target economically and democratically dissatisfied voters via clear messages.”

For Tunca, the economic fallout from the quake poses a real risk for Erdogan’s prospects.

“The magnitude of Turkey’s social earthquake is much greater than that of the tectonic one,” he said. “There is a tug of war between the government and the opposition, and it seems that the winner is going to be unknown until the very end of the elections.”

Nadeen Ebrahim and Isil Sariyuce contributed to this report.

This article has been corrected to say that the research, not the survey, was conducted by the academics.

Sub-Saharan African countries repatriate citizens from Tunisia after ‘shocking’ statements from country’s president

Sub-Saharan African countries including Ivory Coast, Mali, Guinea and Gabon, are helping their citizens return from Tunisia following a controversial statement from Tunisian President Kais Saied, who has led a crackdown on illegal immigration into the North African country since last month.
Background: In a meeting with Tunisia’s National Security Council on February 21, Saied described illegal border crossing from sub-Saharan Africa into Tunisia as a “criminal enterprise hatched at the beginning of this century to change the demographic composition of Tunisia.” He said the immigration aims to turn Tunisia into “only an African country with no belonging to the Arab and Muslim worlds.” In a later speech on February 23, Saied maintained there is no racial discrimination in Tunisia and said that Africans residing in Tunisia legally are welcome. Authorities arrested 58 African migrants on Friday after they reportedly crossed the border illegally, state news agency TAP reported on Saturday.

Why it matters: Saied, whose seizure of power in 2021 was described as a coup by his foes, is facing challenges to his rule at home. Reuters on Sunday reported that opposition figures and rights groups have said that the president’s crackdown on migrants was meant to distract from Tunisia’s economic crisis.
Iranian Supreme Leader says schoolgirls’ poisoning is an ‘unforgivable crime’

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Monday said that the poisoning of schoolgirls in recent months across Iran is an “unforgivable crime,” state-run news agency IRNA reported. Khamenei urged authorities to pursue the issue, saying that “if it is proven that the students were poisoned, the perpetrators of this crime should be severely punished.”
Background: Concern is growing in Iran after reports emerged that hundreds of schoolgirls had been poisoned across the country over the last few months. On Wednesday, Iran’s semi-official Mehr News reported that Shahriar Heydari, a member of parliament, said that “nearly 900 students” from across the country had been poisoned so far, citing an unnamed, “reliable source.”

Why it matters: The reports have led to a local and international outcry. While it is unclear whether the incidents were linked and if the students were targeted, some believe them to be deliberate attempts at shutting down girls’ schools, and even potentially linked to recent protests that spread under the slogan, “Women, Life, Freedom.”
Iran to allow further IAEA access following discussions – IAEA chief

Iran will allow more access and monitoring capabilities to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), agency Director General Rafael Grossi said at a press conference in Vienna on Saturday, following a trip to the Islamic Republic. The additional monitoring is set to start “very, very soon,” said Grossi, with an IAEA team arriving within a few days to begin reinstalling the equipment at several sites.
Background: Prior to the news conference, the IAEA released a joint statement with Iran’s atomic energy agency in which the two bodies agreed that interactions between them will be “carried out in the spirit of collaboration.” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said he hopes the IAEA will remain neutral and fair to Iran’s nuclear energy program and refrain from being affected “by certain powers which are pursuing their own specific goals,” reported Iranian state television Press TV on Saturday.

Why it matters: Last week, a restricted IAEA report seen by CNN said that uranium particles enriched to near bomb-grade levels have been found at an Iranian nuclear facility, as the US warned that Tehran’s ability to build a nuclear bomb was accelerating. The president of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), Mohammad Eslami, rejected the recent IAEA report, which detected particles of uranium enriched to 83.7% at the Fordow nuclear facility in Iran, saying there has been ‘“no deviation” in Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities.
A new sphinx statue has been discovered in Egypt – but this one is thought to be Roman.

The smiling sculpture and the remains of a shrine were found during an excavation mission in Qena, a southern Egyptian city on the eastern banks of the River Nile.

The shrine had been carved in limestone and consisted of a two-level platform, Mamdouh Eldamaty, a former minister of antiquities and professor of Egyptology at Ain Shams University said in a statement Monday from Egypt’s ministry of tourism and antiquities. A ladder and mudbrick basin for water storage were found inside.

The basin, believed to date back to the Byzantine era, housed the smiling sphinx statue, carved from limestone.

Eldamaty described the statue as bearing “royal facial features.” It had a “soft smile” with two dimples. It also wore a nemes on its head, the striped cloth headdress traditionally worn by pharaohs of ancient Egypt, with a cobra-shaped end or “uraeus.”

A Roman stela with hieroglyphic and demotic writings from the Roman era was found below the sphinx.

The professor said that the statue may represent the Roman Emperor Claudius, the fourth Roman emperor who ruled from the year 41 to 54, but noted that more studies are needed to verify the structure’s owner and history.

The discovery was made in the eastern side of Dendera Temple in Qena, where excavations are still ongoing.

Sphinxes are recurring creatures in the mythologies of ancient Egyptian, Persian and Greek cultures. Their likenesses are often found near tombs or religious buildings.

It is not uncommon for new sphinx statues to be found in Egypt. But the country’s most famous sphinx, the Great Sphinx of Giza, dates back to around 2,500 BC and represents the ancient Egyptian Pharoah Khafre.

By Nadeen Ebrahim
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March 6, 2023
Trump and DeSantis stake out sharpest preview yet of possible 2024 showdown | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Ex-President Donald Trump and his most serious potential rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, laid out with unprecedented clarity this weekend how their sharply contrasting personalities and approaches would define the 2024 race for the Republican nomination.

Trump served up his familiar brew of fury, falsehoods and dishonest braggadocio at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, billing himself as the only man who could save the planet from World War III, girding his adoring supporters for their “final battle” against communists, globalists and the “Deep State,” and declaring: “I am your retribution.”

“We will beat the Democrats, we will rout the fake news media, we will expose and appropriately deal with the RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). We will evict Joe Biden from the White House and we will liberate America from these villains and scoundrels once and for all,” Trump told the crowd at a Maryland convention center outside Washington on Saturday.

DeSantis, who is yet to declare a campaign, used an appearance at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California on Sunday to channel the same conservative anger at what he claims is a left-wing “woke” elite takeover of politics, education, Covid-19 public health policy and big business, tapping into the modern Republican Party’s driving ideological force. Yet he offered a far more specific blueprint than Trump for a disruption of government as Americans know it, strongly implying that after implementing hardline conservatism in the Sunshine State, he could deliver the policy goals that often eluded Trump in his chaotic White House term.

“I can tell you in four years, you didn’t see our administration leaking like a sieve, you didn’t see a lot of drama or palace intrigue,” said DeSantis, whose punch-by-punch speaking style is far more ordered and methodical than Trump’s wild flights of rhetoric. “What you saw was surgical, precision execution. Day after day after day. And because we did that, we beat the left day after day after day.”

The back-to-back speeches, which highlighted two Republicans who would be the early favorites if DeSantis gets into the GOP nominating race, came with a slice of irony. The split screen captured their party’s unresolved ideological split that Trump engineered in 2016 when he crushed establishment candidates. CPAC, where Trump spoke, for decades kept alive the flame of the two-term president Reagan, who redefined the conservative movement when he won the 1980 election and left a legacy that dominated the GOP until Trump arrived. Once a rite of passage for potential GOP presidential candidates, CPAC has since become a platform for Trump’s personality cult. DeSantis did not speak there, instead appearing last week at a dueling Club for Growth donor conference to which Trump was not invited.

Speaking in the shadow of Reagan’s former Air Force One on Sunday, DeSantis appeared to be staking a claim to both the reforming zeal of the 40th president and offering an updated, more targeted – yet still searing – version of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” populism, although stripped of the uproarious distractions typical of the most recent Republican president. He seemed to be trying to build a conservative coalition that would appeal to Republicans who have soured on Trump after his record of two impeachments, a US Capitol insurrection and a disastrous intervention in the 2022 midterm elections, but that might also peel away some Trump supporters who still love their champion but doubt that he has the discipline and appeal needed to win a national election again.

Still, if DeSantis were to win the Republican nomination, there would likely be questions over whether his own radicalism would hurt him in the same swing state districts where Trump lost the 2020 election – even notwithstanding a public persona that is more disciplined than Trump’s. There’s not much subtlety in his rhetoric about a “woke mind virus”: Much of the Florida governor’s phrasing comes with the implication that anyone who does not share his views is, by definition, a left-wing extremist. And he would essentially be promising Americans one of the most right-wing presidencies of modern history.

DeSantis was not the only possible alternative to Trump who laid out his case in recent days. Former US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who has already launched a campaign, and ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who may do so, both braved the lions’ den at CPAC, and both launched veiled attacks on their former boss.

“If you’re tired of losing, put your trust in a new generation,” Haley said, playing into criticisms that both Trump, 76, and Biden, 80, should yield to younger leaders.

Pompeo, who, like his former Cabinet colleague got a fairly tepid reception on the ex-president’s turf, stacked his speech with plausible deniability to avoid taking on Trump directly. But one remark could be read as as much of a criticism of the ex-president as the Democrats he specifically targeted when he said: “We can’t become the left, following celebrity leaders with their own brand of identity politics, those with fragile egos who refuse to acknowledge reality.”

Another potential Republican candidate, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, was on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday and attacked Trump’s fearsome culture war talk.

“If you want to heal our land and unite our country together, you don’t do it by appealing to the angry mob,” Hutchinson told Dana Bash.

“Wherever you’re looking at the leader of our country, you don’t want him to be engaged in a personal vendetta. And when he talks about vengeance, he’s talking about his personal vendettas, and that’s not healthy for America. It’s certainly not healthy for our party.’

One other potential anti-Trump GOP candidate, former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, however, announced on Sunday that he would pass on the 2024 race to avoid splintering the opposition to the ex-president.

“Right now, you have Trump and DeSantis at the top of the field soaking up all the oxygen, getting all the attention, and then a whole lot of the rest of us in single digits. And the more of them you have, the less chance you have for somebody rising up,” Hogan told CBS News.

If Hogan’s reluctant decision to bow out foreshadows similar decisions by other long-shot candidates, it could point to a Republican nominating race that does not replicate the fracturing of the anti-Trump vote that helped his remarkable rise to power in 2016. But that would also fuel the possibility of a long and bitter nominating race between Trump and DeSantis through a swathe of winner-take-all primaries – if the Florida governor decides to get into the race.

Given his strong hold on the Republican base, Trump is likely to be seen as the favorite for the nomination, but he appears to recognize the potential threat he faces from DeSantis, and has already accused him of disloyalty after endorsing him in his first race for the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee.

But DeSantis, in his new book published last week, puts his success in that first gubernatorial campaign down to a “massive swing” powered by a strong Republican primary debate performance that took place after he won Trump’s endorsement. And he is seeking to distinguish himself as a winner compared to Trump by citing his thumping reelection victory last fall, which stands in implicit contrast to the ex-president’s national reelection loss.

“We went from winning by 32,000 votes in 2018 to winning by over 1.5 million votes in 2022. We earned the largest percentage of the vote that any Republican governor candidate received in Florida history,” DeSantis said on Sunday.

Yet the events of the weekend also pointed to some of the potential liabilities for DeSantis in any attempt to take down Trump. While his speech at the Reagan Library demonstrated a talent for explaining policy and a conversational style, he lacked the showmanship skills that Trump has long used to dominate Republican politics. Trumpism has always been more of a visceral and emotional backlash than an exercise in actually implementing ideological conservatism.

Perhaps GOP voters are so keen to win back the presidency that they will look for a change. But in his speech at CPAC, which echoed the “American Carnage” themes of his inaugural address, Trump gave notice to DeSantis and the rest of the country that he will fight with everything he has to win the White House again. He told reporters that even if he is indicted in federal or state investigations against him, he will still not drop out of the race.

“At the end of the day, anyone else will be intimidated, bought off, blackmailed or ripped to shreds. I alone will never retreat,” Trump said.

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March 6, 2023
Fact check: Trump delivers wildly dishonest speech at CPAC | CNN Politics

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CNN
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As president, Donald Trump made some of his most thoroughly dishonest speeches at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

As he embarks on another campaign for the presidency, Trump delivered another CPAC doozy Saturday night.

Trump’s lengthy address to the right-wing gathering in Maryland was filled with wildly inaccurate claims about his own presidency, Joe Biden’s presidency, foreign affairs, crime, elections and other subjects.

Here is a fact check of 23 of the false claims Trump made. (And that’s far from the total.)

Crime in Manhattan

While Trump criticized Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who has been investigating Trump’s company, he claimed that “killings are taking place at a number like nobody’s ever seen, right in Manhattan.”

Facts First: It isn’t even close to true that Manhattan is experiencing a number of killings that nobody has ever seen. The region classified by the New York Police Department as Manhattan North had 43 reported murders in 2022; that region had 379 reported murders in 1990 and 306 murders in 1993. The Manhattan South region had 35 reported murders in 2022 versus 124 reported murders in 1990 and 86 murders in 1993. New York City as a whole is also nowhere near record homicide levels; the city had 438 reported murders in 2022 versus 2,262 in 1990 and 1,927 in 1993.

Manhattan North had just eight reported murders this year through February 19, while Manhattan South had one. The city as a whole had 49 reported murders.

The National Guard and Minnesota

Talking about rioting amid racial justice protests after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, Trump claimed he had been ready to send in the National Guard in Seattle, then added, “We saved Minneapolis. The thing is, we’re not supposed to do that. Because it’s up to the governor, the Democrat governor. They never want any help. They don’t mind – it’s almost like they don’t mind to have their cities and states destroyed. There’s something wrong with these people.”

Facts First: This is a reversal of reality. Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, not Trump, was the one who deployed the Minnesota National Guard during the 2020 unrest; Walz first activated the Guard more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself. Walz’s office told CNN in 2020 that the governor activated the Guard in response to requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul – cities also run by Democrats.

Trump has repeatedly made the false claim that he was the one who sent the Guard to Minneapolis. You can read a longer fact check, from 2020, here.

Trump’s executive order on monuments

Trump boasted that he had taken effective action as president to stop the destruction of statues and memorials. He claimed: “I passed and signed an executive order. Anybody that does that gets 10 years in jail, with no negotiation – it’s not ’10’ but it turns into three months.” He added: “But we passed it. It was a very old law, and we found it – one of my very good legal people along with [adviser] Stephen Miller, they found it. They said, ‘Sir, I don’t know if you want to try and bring this back.’ I said. ‘I do.’”

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. He did not create a mandatory 10-year sentence for people who damage monuments. In fact, his 2020 executive order did not mandate any increase in sentences.

Rather, the executive order simply directed the attorney general to “prioritize” investigations and prosecutions of monument-destruction cases and declared that it is federal policy to prosecute such cases to the fullest extent permitted under existing law, including an existing law that allowed a sentence of up to 10 years in prison for willfully damaging federal property. The executive order did nothing to force judges to impose a 10-year sentence.

Vandalism in Portland

Trump claimed, “How’s Portland doing? They don’t even have storefronts anymore. Everything’s two-by-four’s because they get burned down every week.”

Facts First: This is a major exaggeration. Portland obviously still has hundreds of active storefronts, though it has struggled with downtown commercial vacancies for various reasons, and some businesses are sometimes vandalized by protesters. Trump has for years exaggerated the extent of property damage from protest vandalism in Portland.

Russian expansionism

Boasting of his foreign policy record, Trump claimed, “I was also the only president where Russia didn’t take over a country during my term.”

Facts First: While it’s true that Russia didn’t take over a country during Trump’s term, it’s not true that he was the only US president under whom Russia didn’t take over a country. “Totally false,” Michael Khodarkovsky, a Loyola University Chicago history professor who is an expert on Russian imperialism, said in an email. “If by Russia he means the current Russian Federation that existed since 1991, then the best example is Clinton, 1992-98. During this time Russia fought a war in Chechnya, but Chechnya was not a country but one of Russia’s regions.”

Khodarkovsky added, “If by Russia he means the USSR, as people often do, then from 1945, when the USSR occupied much of Eastern Europe until 1979, when USSR invaded Afghanistan, Moscow did not take over any new country. It only sent forces into countries it had taken over in 1945 (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968).”

NATO funding

Trump said while talking about NATO funding: “And I told delinquent foreign nations – they were delinquent, they weren’t paying their bills – that if they wanted our protection, they had to pay up, and they had to pay up now.”

Facts First: It’s not true that NATO countries weren’t paying “bills” until Trump came along or that they were “delinquent” in the sense of failing to pay bills – as numerous fact-checkers pointed out when Trump repeatedly used such language during his presidency. NATO members haven’t been failing to pay their share of the organization’s common budget to run the organization. And while it’s true that most NATO countries were not (and still are not) meeting NATO’s target of each country spending a minimum of 2% of gross domestic product on defense, that 2% figure is what NATO calls a “guideline”; it is not some sort of binding contract, and it does not create liabilities. An official NATO recommitment to the 2% guideline in 2014 merely said that members not currently at that level would “aim to move towards the 2% guideline within a decade.”

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg did credit Trump for securing increases in European NATO members’ defense spending, but it’s worth noting that those countries’ spending had also increased in the last two years of the Obama administration following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and the recommitment that year to the 2% guideline. NATO notes on its website that 2022 was “the eighth consecutive year of rising defence spending across European Allies and Canada.”

NATO’s existence

Boasting of how he had secured additional funding for NATO from countries, Trump claimed, “Actually, NATO wouldn’t even exist if I didn’t get them to pay up.”

Facts First: This is nonsense.

There was never any indication that NATO, created in 1949, would have ceased to exist in the early 2020s without additional funding from some members. The alliance was stable even with many members not meeting the alliance’s guideline of having members spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense.

We don’t often fact-check claims about what might have happened in an alternative scenario, but this Trump claim has no basis in reality. “The quote doesn’t make sense, obviously,” said Erwan Lagadec, research professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and an expert on NATO.

Lagadec noted that NATO has had no trouble getting allies to cover the roughly $3 billion in annual “direct” funding for the organization, which is “peanuts” to this group of countries. And he said that the only NATO member that had given “any sign” in recent years that it was thinking about leaving the alliance “was … the US, under Trump.” Lagadec added that the US leaving the alliance is one scenario that could realistically kill it, but that clearly wasn’t what Trump was talking about in his remarks on spending levels.

James Goldgeier, an American University professor of international relations and Brookings Institution visiting fellow, said in an email: “NATO was founded in 1949, so it seems very clear that Donald Trump had nothing to do with its existence. In fact, the worry was that he would pull the US out of NATO, as his national security adviser warned he would do if he had been reelected.”

The cost of NATO’s headquarters

Trump mocked NATO’s headquarters, saying, “They spent – an office building that cost $3 billion. It’s like a skyscraper in Manhattan laid on its side. It’s one of the longest buildings I’ve ever seen. And I said, ‘You should have – instead of spending $3 billion, you should have spent $500 million building the greatest bunker you’ve ever seen. Because Russia didn’t – wouldn’t even need an airplane attack. One tank one shot through that beautiful glass building and it’s gone.’”

Facts First: NATO did spend a lot of money on its headquarters in Belgium, but Trump’s “$3 billion” figure is a major exaggeration. When Trump used the same inaccurate figure in early 2020, NATO told CNN that the headquarters was actually constructed for a sum under the approved budget of about $1.18 billion euro, which is about $1.3 billion at exchange rates as of Sunday morning.

The Pulitzer Prize

Trump made his usual argument that The Washington Post and The New York Times should not have won a prestigious journalism award, a 2018 Pulitzer Prize, for their reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election and its connections to Trump’s team. He then said, “And they were exactly wrong. And now they’ve even admitted that it was a hoax. It was a total hoax, and they got the prize.”

Facts First: The Times and Post have not made any sort of “hoax” admission. “The claim is completely false,” Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said in an email on Sunday.

Stadtlander continued: “When our Pulitzer Prize shared with The Washington Post was challenged by the former President, the award was upheld by the Pulitzer Prize Board after an independent review. The board stated that ‘no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.’ The Times’s reporting was also substantiated by the Mueller investigation and Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the matter.”

The Post referred CNN to that same July statement from the Pulitzer Prize Board.

Awareness of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline

Trump claimed of his opposition to Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany: “Nord Stream 2 – Nobody ever heard of it … right? Nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along. I started talking about Nord Stream 2. I had to go call it ‘the pipeline’ because nobody knew what I was talking about.”

Facts First: This is standard Trump hyperbole; it’s just not true that “nobody” had heard of Nord Stream 2 before he began discussing it. Nord Stream 2 was a regular subject of media, government and diplomatic discussion before Trump took office. In fact, Biden publicly criticized it as vice president in 2016. Trump may well have generated increased US awareness to the controversial project, but “nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along” isn’t true.

Trump and Nord Stream 2

Trump claimed, “I got along very well with Putin even though I’m the one that ended his pipeline. Remember they said, ‘Trump is giving a lot to Russia.’ Really? Putin actually said to me, ‘If you’re my friend, I’d hate like hell to see you as my enemy.’ Because I ended the pipeline, right? Do you remember? Nord Stream 2.” He continued, “I ended it. It was dead.”

Facts First: Trump did not kill Nord Stream 2. While he did approve sanctions on companies working on the project, that move came nearly three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already around an estimated 90% complete – and the state-owned Russian gas company behind the project said shortly after the sanctions that it would complete the pipeline itself. The company announced in December 2020 that construction was resuming. And with days left in Trump’s term in January 2021, Germany announced that it had renewed permission for construction in its waters.

The pipeline never began operations; Germany ended up halting the project as Russia was about to invade Ukraine early last year. The pipeline was damaged later in the year in what has been described as an act of sabotage.

The Obama administration and Ukraine

Trump claimed that while he provided lethal assistance to Ukraine, the Obama administration “didn’t want to get involved” and merely “supplied the bedsheets.” He said, “Do you remember? They supplied the bedsheets. And maybe even some pillows from [pillow businessman] Mike [Lindell], who’s sitting right over here. … But they supplied the bedsheets.”

Facts First: This is inaccurate. While it’s true that the Obama administration declined to provide weapons to Ukraine, it provided more than $600 million in security assistance to Ukraine between 2014 and 2016 that involved far more than bedsheets. The aid included counter-artillery and counter-mortar radars, armored Humvees, tactical drones, night vision devices and medical supplies.

Biden and a Ukrainian prosecutor

Trump claimed that Biden, as vice president, held back a billion dollars from Ukraine until the country fired a prosecutor who was “after Hunter” and a company that was paying him. Trump was referring to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, who sat on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.

Facts First: This is baseless. There has never been any evidence that Hunter Biden was under investigation by the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who had been widely faulted by Ukrainian anti-corruption activists and European countries for failing to investigate corruption. A former Ukrainian deputy prosecutor and a top anti-corruption activist have both said the Burisma-related investigation was dormant at the time Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin.

Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, told The Washington Post in 2019: “Shokin was not investigating. He didn’t want to investigate Burisma. And Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation.” In addition, Shokin’s successor as prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, told Bloomberg in 2019: “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws – at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing.”

Biden, as vice president, was carrying out the policy of the US and its allies, not pursuing his own agenda, in threatening to withhold a billion-dollar US loan guarantee if the Ukrainian government did not sack Shokin. CNN fact-checked Trump’s claims on this subject at length in 2019.

Trump and job creation

Promising to save Americans’ jobs if he is elected again, Trump claimed, “We had the greatest job history of any president ever.”

Facts First: This is false. The US lost about 2.7 million jobs during Trump’s presidency, the worst overall jobs record for any president. The net loss was largely because of the Covid-19 pandemic, but even Trump’s pre-pandemic jobs record – about 6.7 million jobs added – was far from the greatest of any president ever. The economy added more than 11.5 million jobs in the first term of Democratic President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

Tariffs on China

Trump repeated a trade claim he made frequently during his presidency. Speaking of China, he said he “charged them” with tariffs that had the effect of “bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into our Treasury from China. Thank you very much, China.” He claimed that he did this even though “no other president had gotten even 10 cents – not one president got anything from them.”

Facts First: As we have written repeatedly, it’s not true that no president before Trump had generated any revenue through tariffs on goods from China. In reality, the US has had tariffs on China for more than two centuries, and FactCheck.org reported in 2019 that the US generated an “average of $12.3 billion in custom duties a year from 2007 to 2016, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb.” Also, American importers, not Chinese exporters, make the actual tariff payments – and study after study during Trump’s presidency found that Americans were bearing most of the cost of the tariffs.

The trade deficit with China

Trump went on to repeat a false claim he made more than 100 times as president – that the US used to have a trade deficit with China of more than $500 billion. He claimed it was “five-, six-, seven-hundred billion dollars a year.”

Facts First: The US has never had a $500 billion, $600 billion or $700 billion trade deficit with China even if you only count trade in goods and ignore the services trade in which the US runs a surplus with China. The pre-Trump record for a goods deficit with China was about $367 billion in 2015. The goods deficit hit a new record of about $418 billion under Trump in 2018 before falling back under $400 billion in subsequent years.

Trump and the 2020 election

Trump said people claim they want to run against him even though, he claimed, he won the 2020 election. He said, “I won the second election, OK, won it by a lot. You know, when they say, when they say Biden won, the smart people know that didn’t [happen].”

Facts First: This is Trump’s regular lie. He lost the 2020 election to Biden fair and square, 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. Biden earned more than 7 million more votes than Trump did.

Democrats and elections

Trump said Democrats are only good at “disinformation” and “cheating on elections.”

Facts First: This is nonsense. There is just no basis for a broad claim that Democrats are election cheaters. Election fraud and voter fraud are exceedingly rare in US elections, though such crimes are occasionally committed by officials and supporters of both parties. (We’ll ignore Trump’s subjective claim about “disinformation.”)

The liberation of the ISIS caliphate

Trump repeated his familiar story about how he had supposedly liberated the “caliphate” of terror group ISIS in “three weeks.” This time, he said, “In fact, with the ISIS caliphate, a certain general said it could only be done in three years, ‘and probably it can’t be done at all, sir.’ And I did it in three weeks. I went over to Iraq, met a great general. ‘Sir, I can do it in three weeks.’ You’ve heard that story. ‘I can do it in three weeks, sir.’ ‘How are you going to do that?’ They explained it. I did it in three weeks. I was told it couldn’t be done at all, that it would take at least three years. Did it in three weeks. Knocked out 100% of the ISIS caliphate.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim of eliminating the ISIS caliphate in “three weeks” isn’t true; the ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019. Even if Trump was starting the clock at the time of his visit to Iraq, in late December 2018, the liberation was proclaimed more than two and a half months later. In addition, Trump gave himself far too much credit for the defeat of the caliphate, as he has in the past, when he said “I did it”: Kurdish forces did much of the ground fighting, and there was major progress against the caliphate under President Barack Obama in 2015 and 2016.

IHS Markit, an information company that studied the changing size of the caliphate, reported two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project,” an analyst there said in a statement at the time.

Military equipment left in Afghanistan

Trump claimed, as he has before, that the US left behind $85 billion worth of military equipment when it withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. He said of the leader of the Taliban: “Now he’s got $85 billion worth of our equipment that I bought – $85 billion.” He added later: “The thing that nobody ever talks about, we lost 13 [soldiers], we lost $85 billion worth of the greatest military equipment in the world.”

Facts First: Trump’s $85 billion figure is false. While a significant quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan government forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion – a chunk of about $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And some of the equipment left behind was rendered inoperable before US forces withdrew.

As other fact-checkers have previously explained, the “$85 billion” is a rounded-up figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the total amount of money Congress has appropriated during the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. A minority of this funding was for equipment.

The Afghanistan withdrawal and the F-16

Trump claimed that the Taliban acquired F-16 fighter planes because of the US withdrawal, saying: “They feared the F-16s. And now they own them. Think of it.”

Facts First: This is false. F-16s were not among the equipment abandoned upon the US withdrawal and the collapse of the Afghan armed forces, since the Afghan armed forces did not fly F-16s.

The border wall

Trump claimed that he had kept his promise to complete a wall on the border with Mexico: “As you know, I built hundreds of miles of wall and completed that task as promised. And then I began to add even more in areas that seemed to be allowing a lot of people to come in.”

Facts First: It’s not true that Trump “completed” the border wall. According to an official “Border Wall Status” report written by US Customs and Border Protection two days after Trump left office, about 458 miles of wall had been completed under Trump – but about 280 more miles that had been identified for wall construction had not been completed.

The report, provided to CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, said that, of those 280 miles left to go, about 74 miles were “in the pre-construction phase and have not yet been awarded, in locations where no barriers currently exist,” and that 206 miles were “currently under contract, in place of dilapidated and outdated designs and in locations where no barriers previously existed.”

Latin America and deportations

Trump told his familiar story about how, until he was president, the US was unable to deport MS-13 gang members to other countries, “especially” Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras because those countries “didn’t want them.”

Facts First: It’s not true that, as a rule, Guatemala and Honduras wouldn’t take back migrants being deported from the US during Obama’s administration, though there were some individual exceptions.

In 2016, just prior to Trump’s presidency, neither Guatemala nor Honduras was on the list of countries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) considered “recalcitrant,” or uncooperative, in accepting the return of their nationals.

For the 2016 fiscal year, Obama’s last full fiscal year in office, ICE reported that Guatemala and Honduras ranked second and third, behind only Mexico, in terms of the country of citizenship of people being removed from the US. You can read a longer fact check, from 2019, here.

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March 5, 2023
Ex-Arkansas governor says ‘more voices’ in 2024 GOP race are ‘good for our party’ | CNN Politics

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Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who’s weighing a run for the Republican presidential nomination, said Sunday that “more voices” in the 2024 race are “good for our party.”

Hutchinson made his remarks on CNN’s “State of the Union” after a fellow former GOP governor, Maryland’s Larry Hogan, announced that he would not run for president because he didn’t want his candidacy to help Donald Trump nab the Republican nomination.

“Larry Hogan is a star. He’s governed well in Maryland, elected in a blue state. I think the fact that he indicates that he’s going to continue to fight in the Republican Party for alternatives to Donald Trump and a new direction is a good sign,” Hutchinson told CNN’s Dana Bash.

“I actually think more voices right now in opposition or providing an alternative to Donald Trump is the best thing in the right direction. So, hats off to Larry for what he’s done, what he’s contributed. And I’m glad that he will continue to do so,” he added.

Hogan said in a statement Sunday that he wanted to avoid a “pileup” in the GOP primary that could result in Trump clearing the field and securing the nomination.

Hutchinson disagreed with that stance, telling CNN that “this is not 2016” and that 2024 will be “different” because Trump is a “known quantity” He also said that evangelical Christian voters “are convinced that we need to have a different type of leadership in the future.”

“In the early stages, multiple candidates that have an alternative vision to what the president has is good for our party, good for the debate, good for the upcoming debate that will be in August,” Hutchinson said.

“So, sure, that will narrow, and it will probably narrow fairly quickly. We need to have a lot of self-evaluation as you go along, but I think more voices now that provide alternative messages and problem-solving and ideas is good for our party,” he added.

Hutchinson told Bash he was troubled by Trump’s comments at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday that he can deliver conservatives “retribution” against Democrats and establishment Republicans.

“It’s troubling. First of all, if you want to heal our land, unite our country together, you don’t do it by appealing to the angry mob. And that’s true whether you’re talking about an angry mob from the left or the right,” Hutchinson said. “And when he talks about vengeance, he’s talking about his personal vendettas, and that’s not healthy for America; it’s certainly not healthy for our party.”

Hutchinson was also asked about the Republican National Committee’s proposal for 2024 contenders to sign a pledge to back the party’s ultimate nominee in order to participate in primary debates. The former governor said the pledge should instead be a promise not to run as a third-party candidate if the candidate doesn’t win the nomination. He did not directly say whether he’d sign the loyalty pledge but said he anticipates participating in the RNC debates if he’s a candidate.

Hutchinson, who has traveled to the early-voting states of Iowa and South Carolina, said April is when he’ll make his decision about whether he’d run for president.

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March 5, 2023
Fact check: Republicans at CPAC make false claims about Biden, Zelensky, the FBI and children | CNN Politics

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The Conservative Political Action Conference is underway in Maryland. And the members of Congress, former government officials and conservative personalities who spoke at the conference on Thursday and Friday made false claims about a variety of topics.

Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio uttered two false claims about President Joe Biden. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia repeated a debunked claim about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama used two inaccurate statistics as he lamented the state of the country. Former Trump White House official Steve Bannon repeated his regular lie about the 2020 election having been stolen from Trump, this time baselesly blaming Fox for Trump’s defeat.

Rep. Kat Cammack of Florida incorrectly said a former Obama administration official had encouraged people to harass Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina inaccurately claimed Biden had laughed at a grieving mother and inaccurately insinuated that the FBI tipped off the media to its search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence. Two other speakers, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and former Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka, inflated the number of deaths from fentanyl.

And that’s not all. Here is a fact check of 13 false claims from the conference, which continues on Saturday.

Marjorie Taylor Greene said the Republican Party has a duty to protect children. Listing supposed threats to children, she said, “Now whether it’s like Zelensky saying he wants our sons and daughters to go die in Ukraine…” Later in her speech, she said, “I will look at a camera and directly tell Zelensky: you’d better leave your hands off of our sons and daughters, because they’re not dying over there.”

Facts First: Greene’s claim is false. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky didn’t say he wants American sons and daughters to fight or die for Ukraine. The false claim, which was debunked by CNN and others earlier in the week, is based on a viral video that clipped Zelensky’s comments out of context.

19-second video of Zelensky goes viral. See what was edited out

In reality, Zelensky predicted at a press conference in late February that if Ukraine loses the war against Russia because it does not receive sufficient support from elsewhere, Russia will proceed to enter North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries in the Baltics (a region made up of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) that the US will be obligated to send troops to defend. Under the treaty that governs NATO, an attack on one member is considered an attack on all. Ukraine is not a NATO member, and Zelensky didn’t say Americans should fight there.

Greene is one of the people who shared the out-of-context video on Twitter this week. You can read a full fact-check, with Zelensky’s complete quote, here.

Right-wing commentator and former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon criticized right-wing cable channel Fox at length for, he argued, being insufficiently supportive of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Among other things, Bannon claimed that, on the night of the election in November 2020, “Fox News illegitimately called it for the opposition and not Donald J. Trump, of which our nation has never recovered.” Later, he said Trump is running again after “having it stolen, in broad daylight, of which they [Fox] participate in.”

Facts First: This is nonsense. On election night in 2020, Fox accurately projected that Biden had won the state of Arizona. This projection did not change the outcome of the election; all of the votes are counted regardless of what media outlets have projected, and the counting showed that Biden won Arizona, and the election, fair and square. The 2020 election was not “stolen” from Trump.

Bannon has a harsh message for Fox News at CPAC

Fox, like other major media outlets, did not project that Biden had won the presidency until four days later. Fox personalities went on to repeatedly promote lies that the election was stolen from Trump – even as they privately dismissed and mocked these false claims, according to court filings from a voting technology company that is suing Fox for defamation.

Rep. Jim Jordan claimed that Biden, “on day one,” made “three key changes” to immigration policy. Jordan said one of those changes was this: “We’re not going to deport anyone who come.” He proceeded to argue that people knowing “we’re not going to get deported” was a reason they decided to migrate to the US under Biden.

Facts First: Jordan inaccurately described the 100-day deportation pause that Biden attempted to impose immediately after he took office on January 20, 2021. The policy did not say the US wouldn’t deport “anyone who comes.” It explicitly did not apply to anyone who arrived in the country after the end of October 2020, meaning people who arrived under the Biden administration or in the last months of the Trump administration could still be deported.

Biden did say during the 2020 Democratic primary that “no one, no one will be deported at all” in his first 100 days as president. But Jordan claimed that this was the policy Biden actually implemented on his first day in office; Biden’s actual first-day policy was considerably narrower.

Biden’s attempted 100-day pause also did not apply to people who engaged in or were suspected of terrorism or espionage, were seen to pose a national security risk, had waived their right to remain in the US, or whom the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement determined the law required to be removed.

The pause was supposed to be in effect while the Department of Homeland Security conducted a review of immigration enforcement practices, but it was blocked by a federal judge shortly after it was announced.

Rep. Ralph Norman strongly suggested the FBI had tipped off the media to its August search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and resort in Florida for government documents in the former president’s possession – while concealing its subsequent document searches of properties connected to Biden.

Norman said: “When I saw the raid at Mar-a-Lago – you know, the cameras, the FBI – and compare that to when they found Biden’s, all of the documents he had, where was the media, where was the FBI? They kept it quiet early on, didn’t let it out. The job of the next president is going to be getting rid of the insiders that are undermining this government, and you’ve gotta clean house.”

Facts First: Norman’s narrative is false. The FBI did not tip off the media to its search of Mar-a-Lago; CNN reported the next day that the search “happened so quietly, so secretly, that it wasn’t caught on camera at all.” Rather, media outlets belatedly sent cameras to Mar-a-Lago because Peter Schorsch, publisher of the website Florida Politics, learned of the search from non-FBI sources and tweeted about it either after it was over or as it was just concluding, and because Trump himself made a public statement less than 20 minutes later confirming that a search had occurred. Schorsch told CNN on Thursday: “I can, unequivocally, state that the FBI was not one of my two sources which alerted me to the raid.”

Brian Stelter, then CNN’s chief media correspondent, wrote in his article the day after the search: “By the time local TV news cameras showed up outside the club, there was almost nothing to see. Websites used file photos of the Florida resort since there were no dramatic shots of the search.”

It’s true that the public didn’t find out until late January about the FBI’s November search of Biden’s former think tank office in Washington, which was conducted with the consent of Biden’s legal team. But the belated presence of journalists at Mar-a-Lago on the day of the Trump search in August is not evidence of a double standard.

And it’s worth noting that media cameras were on the scene when Biden’s beach home in Delaware was searched by the FBI in February. News outlets had set up a media “pool” to make sure any search there was recorded.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a former college and high school football coach, said, “Going into thousands of kids’ homes and talking to parents every year recruiting, half the kids in this country – I’m not talking about race, I’m just talking about – half the kids in this country have one or no parent. And it’s because of the attack on faith. People are losing faith because, for some reason, because the attack [on] God.”

Facts First: Tuberville’s claim that half of American children don’t have two parents is incorrect. Official figures from the Census Bureau show that, in 2021, about 70% of US children under the age of 18 lived with two parents and about 65% lived with two married parents.

About 22% of children lived with only a mother, about 5% with only a father, and about 3% with no parent. But the Census Bureau has explained that even children who are listed as living with only one parent may have a second parent; children are listed as living with only one parent if, for example, one parent is deployed overseas with the military or if their divorced parents share custody of them.

It is true that the percentage of US children living in households with two parents has been declining for decades. Still, Tuberville’s statistic significantly exaggerated the current situation. His spokesperson told CNN on Thursday that the senator was speaking “anecdotally” from his personal experience meeting with families as a football coach.

Tuberville claimed that today’s children are being “indoctrinated” in schools by “woke” ideology and critical race theory. He then said, “We don’t teach reading, writing and arithmetic anymore. You know, half the kids in this country, when they graduate – think about this: half the kids in this country, when they graduate, can’t read their diploma.”

Facts First: This is false. While many Americans do struggle with reading, there is no basis for the claim that “half” of high school graduates can’t read a basic document like a diploma. “Mr. Tuberville does not know what he’s talking about at all,” said Patricia Edwards, a Michigan State University professor of language and literacy who is a past president of the International Literacy Association and the Literacy Research Association. Edwards said there is “no evidence” to support Tuberville’s claim. She also said that people who can’t read at all are highly unlikely to finish high school and that “sometimes politicians embellish information.”

Tuberville could have accurately said that a significant number of American teenagers and adults have reading trouble, though there is no apparent basis for connecting these struggles with supposed “woke” indoctrination. The organization ProLiteracy pointed CNN to 2017 data that found 23% of Americans age 16 to 65 have “low” literacy skills in English. That’s not “half,” as ProLiteracy pointed out, and it includes people who didn’t graduate from high school and people who are able to read basic text but struggle with more complex literacy tasks.

The Tuberville spokesperson said the senator was speaking informally after having been briefed on other statistics about Americans’ struggles with reading, like a report that half of adults can’t read a book written at an eighth-grade level.

Rep. Jim Jordan claimed of Biden: “The president of the United States stood in front of Independence Hall, called half the country fascists.”

Facts First: This is not true. Biden did not denounce even close to “half the country” in this 2022 speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. He made clear that he was speaking about a minority of Republicans.

In the speech, in which he never used the word “fascists,” Biden warned that “MAGA Republicans” like Trump are “extreme,” “do not respect the Constitution” and “do not believe in the rule of law.” But he also emphasized that “not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans.” In other words, he made clear that he was talking about far less than half of Americans.

Trump earned fewer than 75 million votes in 2020 in a country of more than 258 million adults, so even a hypothetical criticism of every single Trump voter would not amount to criticism of “half the country.”

Rep. Scott Perry claimed that “average citizens need to just at some point be willing to acknowledge and accept that every single facet of the federal government is weaponized against every single one of us.” Perry said moments later, “The government doesn’t have the right to tell you that you can’t buy a gas stove but that you must buy an electric vehicle.”

Facts First: This is nonsense. The federal government has not told people that they can’t buy a gas stove or must buy an electric vehicle.

The Biden administration has tried to encourage and incentivize the adoption of electric vehicles, but it has not tried to forbid the manufacture or purchase of traditional vehicles with internal combustion engines. Biden has set a goal of electric vehicles making up half of all new vehicles sold in the US by 2030.

There was a January controversy about a Biden appointee to the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, Richard Trumka Jr., saying that gas stoves pose a “hidden hazard,” as they emit air pollutants, and that “any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” But the commission as a whole has not shown support for a ban, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a January press briefing: “The president does not support banning gas stoves. And the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is independent, is not banning gas stoves.”

Rep. Ralph Norman claimed that Biden had just laughed at a mother who lost two sons to fentanyl.

“I don’t know whether y’all saw, I just saw it this morning: Biden laughing at the mother who had two sons – to die, and he’s basically laughing and saying the fentanyl came from the previous administration. Who cares where it came from? The fact is it’s here,” Norman said.

Facts First: Norman’s claim is false. Biden did not laugh at the mother who lost her sons to fentanyl, the anti-abortion activist Rebecca Kiessling; in a somber tone, he called her “a poor mother who lost two kids to fentanyl.” Rather, he proceeded to laugh about how Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene had baselessly blamed the Biden administration for the young men’s deaths even though the tragedy happened in mid-2020, during the Trump administration. You can watch the video of Biden’s remarks here.

Kiessling has demanded an apology from Biden. She is entitled to her criticism of Biden’s remarks and his chuckle – but the video clearly shows Norman was wrong when he claimed Biden was “laughing at the mother.”

Rep. Kat Cammack told a story about the first hearing of the new Republican-led House select subcommittee on the supposed “weaponization” of the federal government. Cammack claimed she had asked a Democratic witness at this February hearing about his “incredibly vitriolic” Twitter feed in which, she claimed, he not only repeatedly criticized Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh but even went “so far as to encourage people to harass this Supreme Court justice.”

Facts First: This story is false. The witness Cammack questioned in this February exchange at the subcommittee, former Obama administration deputy assistant attorney general Elliot Williams, did not encourage people to harass Kavanaugh. In fact, it’s not even true that Cammack accused him at the February hearing of having encouraged people to harass Kavanaugh. Rather, at the hearing, she merely claimed that Williams had tweeted numerous critical tweets about Kavanaugh but had been “unusually quiet” on Twitter after an alleged assassination attempt against the justice. Clearly, not tweeting about the incident is not the same thing as encouraging harassment.

Williams, now a CNN legal analyst (he appeared at the subcommittee hearing in his personal capacity), said in a Thursday email that he had “no idea” what Cammack was looking at on his innocuous Twitter feed. He said: “I used to prosecute violent crimes, and clerked for two federal judges. Any suggestion that I’ve ever encouraged harassment of anyone – and particularly any official of the United States – is insulting and not based in reality.”

Cammack’s spokesperson responded helpfully on Thursday to CNN’s initial queries about the story Cammack told at CPAC, explaining that she was referring to her February exchange with Williams. But the spokesperson stopped responding after CNN asked if Cammack was accurately describing this exchange with Williams and if they had any evidence of Williams actually having encouraged the harassment of Kavanaugh.

Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana boasted about the state of the country “when Republicans were in charge.” Among other claims about Trump’s tenure, he said that “in four years,” Republicans “delivered 3.5% unemployment” and “created 8 million new jobs.”

Facts First: This is inaccurate in two ways. First, the economic numbers for the full “four years” of Trump’s tenure are much worse than these numbers Kennedy cited; Kennedy was actually referring to Trump’s first three years while ignoring the fourth, which was marred by the Covid-19 pandemic. Second, there weren’t “8 million new jobs” created even in Trump’s first three years.

Kennedy could have correctly said there was a 3.5% unemployment rate after three years of the Trump administration, but not after four. The unemployment rate skyrocketed early in Trump’s fourth year, on account of the pandemic, before coming down again, and it was 6.3% when Trump left office in early 2021. (It fell to 3.4% this January under Biden, better than in any month under Trump.)

And while the economy added about 6.7 million jobs under Trump before the pandemic-related crash of March and April 2020, that’s not the “8 million jobs” Kennedy claimed – and the economy ended up shedding millions of jobs in Trump’s fourth year. Over the full four years of Trump’s tenure, the economy netted a loss of about 2.7 million jobs.

Lara Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law and an adviser to his 2020 campaign, claimed that the last time a CPAC crowd was gathered at this venue in Maryland, in February 2020, “We had the lowest unemployment in American history.” After making other boasts about Donald Trump’s presidency, she said, “But how quickly it all changed.” She added, “Under Joe Biden, America is crumbling.”

Facts First: Lara Trump’s claim about February 2020 having “the lowest unemployment in American history” is false. The unemployment rate was 3.5% at the time – tied for the lowest since 1969, but not the all-time lowest on record, which was 2.5% in 1953. And while Lara Trump didn’t make an explicit claim about unemployment under Biden, it’s not true that things are worse today on this measure; again, the most recent unemployment rate, 3.4% for January 2023, is better than the rate at the time of CPAC’s 2020 conference or at any other time during Donald Trump’s presidency.

Multiple speakers at CPAC decried the high number of fentanyl overdose deaths. But some of the speakers inflated that number while attacking Biden’s immigration policy.

Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump administration official, claimed that “in the last 12 months in America, deaths by fentanyl poisoning totaled 110,000 Americans.” He blamed “Biden’s open border” for these deaths.

Rep. Scott Perry claimed: “Meanwhile over on this side of the border, where there isn’t anybody, they’re running this fentanyl in; it’s killing 100,000 Americans – over 100,000 Americans – a year.”

Facts First: It’s not true that there are more than 100,000 fentanyl deaths per year. That is the total number of deaths from all drug overdoses in the US; there were 106,699 such deaths in 2021. But the number of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone, primarily fentanyl, is smaller – 70,601 in 2021.

Fentanyl-related overdoses are clearly a major problem for the country and by far the biggest single contributor to the broader overdose problem. Nonetheless, claims of “110,000” and “over 100,000” fentanyl deaths per year are significant exaggerations. And while the number of overdose deaths and fentanyl-related deaths increased under Biden in 2021, it was also troubling under Trump in 2020 – 91,799 total overdose deaths and 56,516 for synthetic opioids other than methadone.

It’s also worth noting that fentanyl is largely smuggled in by US citizens through legal ports of entry rather than by migrants sneaking past other parts of the border. Contrary to frequent Republican claims, the border is not “open”; border officers have seized thousands of pounds of fentanyl under Biden.

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March 4, 2023
Texas GOP censures Republican congressman for ‘lack of fidelity’ to party principles and priorities | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas was censured Saturday by the state GOP for “for lack of fidelity to Republican principles and priorities,” the party announced.

The Texas Republican Party took issue with several House votes and stances by the second-term congressman, including his vote for the Respect for Marriage Act, his opposition to a GOP-led border security measure and the fact that he was the lone House Republican to vote against his conference’s rules package earlier this year.

Gonzales represents Texas’ 23rd Congressional District, which stretches along the US-Mexico border between El Paso and San Antonio. The district is home to Uvalde, where a mass shooting at an elementary school last year killed 19 children and two teachers. After the shooting, Gonzales voted in favor of bipartisan gun-safety legislation – another vote cited in the censure resolution.

Under the penalties imposed on Gonzales as a result of the censure, the state GOP is not permitted to spend on his behalf during a primary campaign and could fund a primary opponent. The party is also discouraging him from running as a Republican. The penalties would expire after a primary runoff, according to the state GOP.

In response to the censure, a Gonzales campaign spokesperson told CNN: “Today, like every day, Congressman Tony Gonzales went to work on behalf of the people of TX-23. He talked to veterans, visited with Border Patrol agents, and met constituents in a county he flipped from blue to red. The Republican Party of Texas would be wise to follow his lead and do some actual work.”

The House GOP campaign arm stressed its support for Gonzales following Saturday’s developments in Texas.

“Congressman Gonzales is a valued member of the House majority, and we look forward to supporting his re-election,” Delanie Bomar, regional press secretary at the National Republican Congressional Committee, said in an email. Gonzales served as a co-chair of the committee’s Young Guns program for top recruits in the last election cycle.

At Saturday’s censure vote, 57 members of the State Republican Executive Committee backed the motion, five voted against it and one abstained.

The censure resolution was originally bought by the Republican Party in Medina County, which is in Gonzales’ district. Fifteen other local party organizations in his district passed concurring resolutions.

Gonzales was first elected in 2020 to succeed retiring Republican Will Hurd. He easily won election to a second term in his Hispanic-majority district last fall.

The only other time the Texas GOP has voted to censure a Republican official was in 2018, when Texas House Speaker Joe Straus was censured, according to the state party.

This story has been updated with additional information and reaction.

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March 4, 2023
Why Biden flipped a 180 on DC’s ability to self-govern | CNN Politics

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A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.

CNN
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President Joe Biden is siding with Republicans and moderate Democrats to slap down local leaders of Washington, DC, as they try to update a 100-year-old criminal code that is showing its age.

Progressive Democrats are furious about the message this sends on criminal justice reform, and some DC residents feel betrayed by the president who lives in their midst.

But the headline version of this story, while it neatly fits the Republican political narrative that American cities are crime-infested and rotting, is incomplete.

Except for Biden’s move betraying DC residents who want to govern themselves. That part is hard to argue with.

The basic points are these:

DC’s local government has been trying for years to update its antiquated criminal code, much of which was written before anyone alive today was born.

For more on just how old and bizarre some of DC’s criminal laws sound today, I recommend reading this story from DCist’s Martin Austermuhle. He mentions laws about archaic stickball games being played in the city’s streets and regulating the movement of livestock through the city.

The criminal code reform passed by DC’s city council would have ended many mandatory minimum sentences and lowered sentence maximums, even for violent crimes like carjackings.

The updates have split local leaders on the council, which is dominated by Democrats. The most notable opponent of the new criminal code is DC’s Democratic mayor Muriel Bowser, no ally of national Republicans. In fact, DC’s council overrode her veto of the proposal earlier this year.

Bowser agrees with most of the measures but has questioned the lowering of some maximum sentences and greatly increasing the number of jury trials.

A special commission that has been working for years on the new code has argued the new maximum sentences are more in line with sentences that judges actually impose. Bowser has argued that lowering the maximum will lead judges to impose lower sentences too.

While Democrats want to make DC a state, the Constitution gives Congress control over the federal district that houses the seat of the US government.

Republicans in Congress, joined by some Democrats, have vowed to use their power over the capital city to throw out the criminal code reform.

Under the home rule law that gave DC’s local government more autonomy back in the ’70s, Congress can review legislation passed by the city council, and simple majorities can reject anything.

The House, in a bipartisan but mostly Republican vote, rejected DC’s new criminal code in a vote last month. The Senate could vote next week, and with Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia on board, is on track to reject the new criminal code.

Biden could allow the new criminal code to take effect by vetoing the measure running through Congress. It would only take 34 Democrats to sustain the veto. Instead, he’s made it clear he’ll kill the new criminal code reform.

Here’s how Biden explained his position in a tweet, as noted in the last edition of What Matters, but which is no less hard to follow today:

I support D.C. Statehood and home-rule – but I don’t support some of the changes D.C. Council put forward over the Mayor’s objections – such as lowering penalties for carjackings.

If the Senate votes to overturn what D.C. Council did – I’ll sign it.

If you are confused about how a person can both be for home rule and yet willing to side with his normal political enemies to not let DC rule itself, you’re starting to understand why this move feels to a lot of Democrats like a betrayal.

“Any effort to overturn the District of Columbia’s democratically enacted laws degrades the right of its nearly 700,000 residents and elected officials to self-govern,” said the district’s attorney general Brian Schwalb in a statement.

It’s all created a weird situation where Bowser, the mayor, opposes both the council’s new criminal code and Biden’s decision to kill it.

“Until we are the 51st state, we live with that indignity,” Bowser told the local NPR station WAMU, referencing the “effects of limited home rule.”

Two words: Lori Lightfoot. She’s the Chicago mayor who was unceremoniously defeated in her reelection campaign when she finished third in voting this week. The main issue in the campaign was crime and controlling it, a turnaround from four years ago when Lightfoot was elected on promises to pursue police reform.

Crime is turning into a potent issue in local city elections, and Republicans are primed to use it against Democrats in the coming presidential election.

CNN’s Kyle Feldscher, Manu Raju and Kevin Liptak write that Biden’s move “reflects a rising desire among more moderate Democratic lawmakers to avoid being seen as soft on crime.”

They note that Biden was actually for home rule before his decision to oppose the reform of DC’s criminal code. The official statement laying out his administration’s policy said Congress should respect DC’s autonomy.

Even Sen. Tom Carper, the Delaware Democrat who in January reintroduced a bill to grant DC statehood, would not call out Biden for rejecting the decision of DC’s city council.

Carper appeared on CNN on Friday morning and made clear he would support Biden’s decision to side with Republicans and throw out the new criminal code.

“What needs to happen here is the Washington, DC, council and the mayor need to work together,” Carper said. “The criminal code hasn’t been updated for 100 years. They didn’t get it entirely right when they went through the exercises over the last year.”

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March 4, 2023
Why the American far right adopted Brazilian ex-President Jair Bolsonaro | CNN

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Sao Paulo
CNN
—

This Saturday, as American conservatives flock to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, they’ll get a taste of just how far and wide their own ideas have spread. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro will speak on the same stage where a few hours later former US leader Donald Trump will deliver the event’s closing remarks — a man the Brazilian leader has intentionally mirrored from the beginning of his presidency.

Far from his home country, Bolsonaro has found a warm reception in America: on social media, mostly Brazilian fans post videos of meeting Bolsonaro outside his south Florida rental and running into him in parking lots, food courts, and grocery stores, where the former president appears in shorts and sandals, grinning and posing for photos with children.

Bolsonaro has made a number of appearances in US hotel conference rooms and evangelical churches targeting Brazilian expats, giving speeches that come across as both timid and awkward, as he pauses to wait for interpreters to catch up to him, not always seeming certain of what is being said.

In early February, he spoke in the auditorium of a Trump hotel just outside Miami, hosted by none other than conservative activist and far-right organizer Charlie Kirk. Kirk, who admitted to not knowing much about Brazil, was nonetheless flanked by the flags of both nations: a gold-fringed, star-spangled banner and Brazil’s unmistakeable bright green flag with a yellow diamond and blue circle in the center. “The fight against socialism and Marxism knows no borders,” Kirk said by way of introduction to an audience of mostly Brazilians who were there to see Bolsonaro – “the myth,” or legend, as they call him.

In a separate podcast interview, Kirk and Bolsonaro enthusiastically described common ground between the Brazilian and American right. Describing his decision to snub Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s swearing in, Bolsonaro said: “I didn’t want to be accused of collaborating with the clumsy way they began their mandate, because we have completely opposing political views: conservative, on the right, and theirs, closer to socialism on the left.”

“Sounds very similar to what we’re dealing with in the United States,” Kirk responded.

The commonalities go on. From expanding gun rights and downplaying COVID-19 to opposing abortion and advocating for tougher immigration policies, Bolsonaro and Trump had plenty in common while in office. The two have continued to mirror each other since then; both shunned their successors’ inauguration ceremonies and fled to the embrace of conservative society circles in Florida, where Trump moved his residence and where Bolsonaro has been living for more than two months.

But there’s another reason for Bolsonaro’s tour of the United States: his continued appearances on US stages serve strategic purposes for far-right movements in both countries.

For Bolsonaro, participating in US political events shores up his claims that he has not exited politics and will eventually assume again leadership of Brazil’s rightwing opposition, despite his current sojourn abroad.

For the American right, publicly allying with a foreign figure helps expand their reach and creates the appearance of confirming conspiracy theories that originate in the US. In 2022, it was Hungarian hardline leader Viktor Orban who made headlines at CPAC. This year, it’s Bolsonaro.

Deputy Director of Rapid Response at Media Matters Madeline Peltz, who researches right wing media and has been tracking the way extreme rightwing figures like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones talk about Brazil, says American and Brazilian activists can see each others’ countries as laboratories in which to test and observe tactics.

After a bruising midterm election, Peltz adds, Republicans are now wondering whether to continue down the path of being pushed farther to the right or to take a more measured approach, distancing themselves from election denialism and the violent acts of January 6, 2021, conveniently chalking that kind of behavior to the radicals of their party.

“The Republican Party was sort of testing this thesis about, do we continue down this path of Trumpism, of extreme election denial, and that was being reflected in the right wing media’s commentary on Brazil as well — they were testing that thesis both in the American elections and in the Brazilian elections,” Peltz said.

The blueprint hasn’t shown the expected results, she said. “Republicans underperformed, to be charitable, and Bolsonaro lost.”

In this balancing act, Bolsonaro is trying to figure out where he fits in. Though he denounced the invasion of Brasilia on January 8 by his supporters, in the days following the election he welcomed peaceful demonstrations while his party filed petitions for an audit of voting machines, alleging fraud. He fed his followers crumbs of misinformation about election fraud and made vague comments hinting at a potential coup.

Isa Soares speaks with an arrested Bolsonaro supporter

When asked if Bolsonaro was not too problematic and messy to be brought into American politics — as a one-term president who infamously defended rape, torture, and a military dictatorship and is currently facing multiple criminal investigations at home — Peltz quipped, “They get their power from problematic and messy.” Shock value and controversy can actually confer clout in the American political universe, she said.

Prominent American conservatives have long lent support to Bolsonaro. “(Steve) Bannon has long considered himself to sort of be the international boogeyman of the left,” and his “next act” after leaving the White House was to form a sort of global coalition of far right movements, Peltz said. Brazil was one winning example of his political penetration.

Bolsonaro brought in Bannon to advise his first presidential campaign back in 2018 – and Bannon in turn began mentioning the South American leader more and more to his American audience, posing for photos with Bolsonaro’s children on US visits, and voicing his support for the president on his social media whenever he was under fire.

He is not the only one. In the days that followed the Brazilian presidential elections in November, as Bolsonaro and his party filed petitions for tens of thousands of votes to be thrown out, another prominent conservative voice joined in. Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson raised questions about whether the vote was legitimate – despite Brazilian courts rejecting fraud claims and a military investigation finding no evidence of rigged voting machines.

Rodrigo Nunes, a philosophy professor at University of Essex and author of “From Trance to Vertigo,” a book of essays about Bolsonarismo, said that Bolsonaro’s value to US conservatives comes from two factors.

First, “he’s a former president of a fairly important country. Geopolitically, he was a fairly important ally to Trump, because he was 100% aligned with Trump.” As a former leader in the global far-right and part of the “ecology,” Bolsonaro’s voice can be amplified in the US whenever his ideas are relevant, Nunes said.

Second, Bolsonaro frequently mimics and echoes the discourse of the far right in the US, which can be fed back into the US as offering further confirmation of what the far right are saying there, Nunes explained.

“That’s a lot of how this ecological approach to political organization works. When you’re using the internet, how do you make something real? You spread sufficient sources of it so that it looks like it’s coming from several different places at the same time, and suddenly, this produces an effect of reality, it looks like it’s real, because there’s a lot of people saying it and where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

In a way, the cycle is exemplified in the copycat insurrection that took place in Brasilia on January 8. It’s impossible not to see the influence of January 6 in the actions of the rioters there, and yet “the Brazilian Jan 6” was defended by Carlson and Bannon even as the reaction from Bolsonaro and many in his camp was mixed.

In pictures: Bolsonaro supporters storm Brazilian Congress

The day after the Brasilia riots, Bolsonaro condemned the acts in a tweet. “Peaceful demonstrations that follow the law are part of democracy. However, depredations and invasions of public buildings as occurred today, as well as those practiced by the left in 2013 and 2017, escape the rule,” he said.

But in American politics, what Bolsonaro thinks or says matters less than what the invasion of public buildings thousands of miles away means for American voters who believe that their own election was stolen.

“The way his narrative is built, to a large extent, as a copy or a mirror image of the narrative that they have in the US is very useful in the sense of showing people this is happening in other places, too. This proves the whole idea that there is a global conspiracy, a global left wing conspiracy to keep us, the people who represent the real people, out of power,” Nunes said.

In another recent speaking event, Bolsonaro took the pulpit of an evangelical church in Boca Raton, Florida, and told a crowd of Brazilians, “My mission is not over yet.”

In the same breath as he exalted the wonders of Brazil, (“There is nothing like our own land”), he urged his supporters to not be discouraged, and said he was planning to return to Brazil in the coming weeks to lead the opposition against Lula. If that is true, CPAC could be his last appearance in American politics before going home to an uncertain political future.

To Peltz, it would be the natural conclusion of what she described as Bolsonaro’s “strange, directionless detour to America,” given CPAC’s waning influence in the American political landscape. “CPAC no longer launches the careers of hopefuls looking to make an impact, rather, it’s now simply a box to check off. And without much otherwise on his to-do list, Bolsonaro might as well check it off.”

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March 3, 2023
Ron DeSantis knocks Republicans who act ‘like potted plants’ in remarks to GOP donors | CNN Politics

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CNN
—

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in a closed-door speech to donors Thursday, sought to cement himself as the governor who will go places other Republicans will not as he accused fellow GOP leaders of sitting back in the cultural fights “like potted plants,” according to audio of his remarks obtained by CNN.

“I’m going on offense,” DeSantis said at a retreat hosted by the conservative Club for Growth. “Some of these Republicans, they just sit back like potted plants, and they let the media define the terms of the debate. They let the left define the terms of debate. They take all this incoming, because they’re not making anything happen. And I said, ‘That’s not what we’re doing.’”

DeSantis’ remarks come as the Club for Growth searches for a new 2024 party standard-bearer to support over former President Donald Trump. In addition to DeSantis, the anti-tax group has summoned other potential 2024 contenders – including former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley – to Trump’s backyard in Palm Beach to speak with its backers.

David McIntosh, the Club’s president who introduced DeSantis at The Breakers Palm Beach resort, told CNN that the governor “gave a great speech that was well received.” The 40-minute address received multiple rounds of applause.

DeSantis notably did not reference the 2024 presidential race during his lengthy remarks. However, he defined himself as a leader of not only Florida but the country as a whole, detailing what he saw as his “courage to lead” in a political environment when others are afraid to “step out and fight back.” It’s a theme that DeSantis leans into in his new book,”The Courage to Be Free,” which he released on Tuesday and has spent the week promoting on Fox News and in events throughout Florida.

DeSantis’ remarks to the Club for Growth were first reported by Fox News. A spokesperson for the governor did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A source familiar with DeSantis’ remarks told CNN that the governor showed up late to Thursday’s event and immediately left after his speech without talking to anyone. CNN previously reported that GOP donors have expressed frustration that DeSantis rarely lingers at gatherings, and he has earned a reputation for ducking out of events with guests still waiting for a photo. DeSantis hosted his own donor gathering in Palm Beach last weekend that was aimed at addressing those concerns.

In his speech before the traditionally business-friendly audience, DeSantis also defended his strong-arming of corporations and Wall Street, and criticized CEOs as being “just weak” for giving into what he described as the “woke mob” that pushes environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) policies, among other “leftist” issues.

“I think these companies should just stay out of this stuff. I don’t think it’s good for our economy,” the governor said. “I don’t think it’s good for society to have every decision that’s made in politics have corporate America weighing in.”

Some Republicans have bristled at DeSantis’ heavy-handed use of executive power to impose his ideology on private businesses. His moves to punish Disney for speaking out against a Florida measure to restrict certain lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity in schools has especially attracted criticism from the right. Several potential 2024 rivals, including Pence and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, have seized on DeSantis’ top-down governing style to draw sharp contrasts with the popular governor.

DeSantis on Thursday dismissed the criticism from people who “claim to be on the right.”

“Republicans need to not shy away from these fights just because the media and the left are going to call you names,” he said.

Ahead of DeSantis’ upcoming visit this weekend to California, where he’ll appear at the Reagan Library and also deliver a speech at a fundraiser for the Orange County Republican Party, he took a shot at the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, for being “preoccupied” with DeSantis and Florida.

Newsom often posts criticism of DeSantis on social media and this past July 4, he took to the Sunshine State’s airwaves, paying $105,000 to run an ad on Fox News in Florida that declared, “Freedom is under attack in your state.”

“Literally, how many other governors does anyone even care about? I mean, when you go to California, they got all these problems there. Their governor’s preoccupied with me and what we’re doing in Florida. … It’s incredible,” DeSantis said Thursday. “And honestly, I just know that game. If they’re not shooting that means you’re not getting anything done. That they’re coming after me because I’m standing up for the people that I represent. I view that as positive reinforcement.”

DeSantis also spoke at length about his recent legislation giving him more control over Disney’s special tax district, and described the entertainment giant’s management as caving in to “woke ideology.”

“I believe woke ideology is pernicious. I believe what’s at stake is not just ‘My policies are good,’” he said. “We should not all be suffering under the cloak of wokeness. … This issue with Disney is a good example of that. … They were basically a law unto themselves, and they got away with it for a long time because they were so powerful. They were the 800-pound gorilla, but they made the mistake of trying to stick their nose into sensitive matters involving children, involving education, and involving family.”

DeSantis also went into detail about stacking Florida’s school boards with conservatives and his plan to fight “critical race theory” in schools.

“Gender ideology … not happening in Florida, critical race theory, not allowed in the state of Florida,” the governor said, garnering applause from the audience.

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March 3, 2023
Why Biden is only just about to face his first veto | CNN Politics

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A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.

CNN
—

Spend some time reading about how the presidential veto has fallen into disuse and you can’t help but think it coincides with an era where the filibuster and other forms of Capitol Hill obstruction have been put on steroids.

It’s an indication of how the constitutional vision of the US government – with its separation of powers – has contorted to what we have today, where very little can pass out of one branch of government and the executive is taking more and more power.

The Constitution spells out specific instructions for use of the veto as a means to separate power. The filibuster is a custom that isn’t mentioned in the Constitution, but has complete control over modern Washington and is leaving a vacuum for presidents to fill.

Still, issuing a veto is a rite of passage for every modern president, and Joe Biden is about to experience his first.

There are two issues where lawmakers from both chambers are testing Biden.

The first relates to a Biden administration retirement investment rule, which according to CNN’s report, “allows managers of retirement funds to consider the impact of climate change and other environmental, social and governance factors when picking investments.”

Normally, Democrats would have used filibuster rules to block action against the rule in the Senate. But since lawmakers are looking to repeal an executive rule and not a law, Republicans were able to vote to repeal it on Wednesday with help from two red-state Democrats, Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana. Biden is expected to veto the measure, which was passed by the House on Tuesday.

It would take two-thirds supermajorities in both chambers (usually 67 of 100 senators and 290 of 435 representatives) to override the expected veto.

As for the second issue testing Biden, there had been talk that the president could veto a bill pushed by congressional Republicans to invalidate the DC city council’s effort to rewrite its criminal law. Critics argue the new law is soft on violent criminals.

But Biden told Democratic senators on Thursday that he won’t use his veto power in this case and would sign the measure to repeal DC’s new crime law. In a subsequent tweet, he noted, “I support D.C. Statehood and home-rule – but I don’t support some of the changes D.C. Council put forward over the Mayor’s objections – such as lowering penalties for carjackings.”

Regardless, it took more than two years to get to this point, when a Republican-controlled House is testing Biden and a slim Democratic majority in the Senate is unable to protect him from pulling out his veto pen.

That it’s taken more than two years for Biden to face his first veto, after Republicans took control of the House in January, is about in line with when former President Donald Trump issued his first veto, more than two years into his presidency.

The levers of government were completely reversed back then. The Republican president was usually protected by a slim Republican majority in the Senate from legislation passed out of a House controlled by Democrats.

The trend away from vetoes has carried through several presidents as use of the filibuster has increased.

Trump threatened to veto lots of things, but he only ended up issuing 10. Just one of those – his veto of a bill to authorize defense spending – was overridden.

Note: Read this explanation of the difference between a regular veto and a pocket veto. The latter occurs when a president simply declines to sign a bill and Congress goes into recess. But there hasn’t been one of those in more than 22 years.

Barack Obama issued 12 vetoes as president and also had one overridden. Lopsided votes in the House and Senate enacted a law allowing citizens to sue Saudi Arabia for the 9/11 attacks.

George W. Bush was more than five years into his presidency before he issued his first veto, but there was a flurry of activity in his final two years, when he, like Obama, ultimately used his veto 12 items.

Unlike Obama, Bush had four vetoes overridden, although one of those was due to a clerical issue that required him to veto (and be overridden) twice on the same farm bill. He was also overridden by lawmakers in order to avoid a slash in payments to Medicare providers.

The first veto was issued by the first president after the first census. George Washington, a Southerner, opposed Congress’ plan to reapportion congressional seats to each state by the state’s population, which would have given more seats to Northern states.

He issued the veto because the Constitution said there shouldn’t be more than one lawmaker per 30,000 people, and the plan approved by Congress included eight states exceeding that ratio. Thomas Jefferson, who encouraged the veto, according to the National Archives, ultimately devised a new plan to apportion seats based on the population as a whole.

The first master of the veto was Grover Cleveland, who cracked down on Congress’ practice of acting to individually grant pensions to people who had been rejected by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Most presidents up to that point had issued either zero or a handful of vetoes. Cleveland, however, issued 414 vetoes during his first term. His most notable veto was to reject crop subsidies requested by Texas. Only two of his hundreds of vetoes were overridden during his first term. In total, across two terms, he issued more than 580 vetoes.

Andrew Johnson, who ascended to the presidency after Abraham Lincoln’s death, suffered the most veto overrides: 15. It makes sense since Johnson, a Southern Democrat, clashed with the Northern Republicans who controlled Capitol Hill at the time.

The veto practice has fallen into general disuse for a number of reasons, according to Steven Smith, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, who has pointed out that for starters, Congress simply doesn’t send as many bills to presidents as it used to.

Rather than congressional committees writing bills, since the mid-’90s, when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich squared off with then-President Bill Clinton, congressional leaders have taken over much of the process. That means there’s more coordination between the White House and Capitol Hill when the same party is in control of both.

When there is a split between the White House and Congress, the president’s allies in the Senate usually offer protection.

“Many of the partisan, controversial measures die in the Senate before they can be sent to the president for signature or veto,” Smith wrote in his newsletter in 2021. Presidents have also assumed more power from Congress, giving Congress less incentive to act.

“Every president really in the modern era, especially in the last three or four decades, has stretched the use of unilateral action,” Smith told me on the phone, noting as an example that instead of waiting for Congress, Biden has tried to enact student loan debt relief on his own. While these actions are frequently challenged in court, they are rarely completely repealed.

“And because of the gridlock on Capitol Hill, everyone has to live with that,” he said.

Congressional obstruction seems counterproductive in this way. Less legislation has meant fewer vetoes, but also more power for presidents.

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March 3, 2023
Senate votes to overturn Biden administration retirement investment rule Republicans decry as ‘woke’ | CNN Politics

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CNN
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The Senate passed a politically charged resolution on Wednesday to overturn a Biden administration retirement investment rule that allows managers of retirement funds to consider the impact of climate change and other environmental, social and governance factors when picking investments.

Republicans complain the rule is “woke” policy that pushes a liberal agenda on Americans and will hurt retirees’ bottom lines, while Democrats say it’s not about ideology and will help investors.

The measure, which would rescind a Department of Labor rule, will next go to President Joe Biden’s desk as it was passed by the House on Tuesday. The administration, however, has issued a veto threat. As a result, passage of the resolution could pave the way for Biden to issue the first veto of his presidency.

Opponents of the rule could try to override a veto, but at this point it appears unlikely they could get the two-thirds majority needed in each chamber to do so.

The resolution, authored by GOP Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana, only needed a simple majority to pass. It passed on a vote of 50 to 46 with Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana voting with Republicans.

Republican lawmakers advanced it under the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to roll back regulations from the executive branch without needing to clear the 60-vote threshold in the Senate that is necessary for most legislation.

Opponents of the rule have argued that it politicizes retirement investments and that the Biden administration is using it as a way to push a liberal agenda on Americans.

“The Biden Administration wants to let Wall Street use workers’ hard-earned savings to pursue left-wing political initiatives,” Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell said in remarks on the Senate floor on Tuesday morning.

Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming said at a news conference on Tuesday, “What’s happened here is the woke and weaponized bureaucracy at the Department of Labor has come out with new regulations on retirement funds, and they want retirement funds to be invested in things that are consistent with their very liberal, left-wing agenda.”

Supporters of the rule argue that it is not a mandate – it allows, but does not require, the consideration of environmental, social and governance factors in investment selection.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Wednesday that Republicans are “using the same tired attacks we’ve heard for a while now that this is more wokeness. … But Republicans are missing or ignoring an important point: Nothing in the (Labor Department) rule imposes a mandate.”

“This isn’t about ideological preference, it’s about looking at the biggest picture possible for investments to minimize risk and maximize returns,” he said, noting it’s a narrow rule that is “literally allowing the free market to do its work.”

The statement of administration policy saying that Biden would veto the measure similarly states, “the 2022 rule is not a mandate – it does not require any fiduciary to make investment decisions based solely on ESG factors. The rule simply makes sure that retirement plan fiduciaries must engage in a risk and return analysis of their investment decisions and recognizes that these factors can be relevant to that analysis.”

Republicans are also working to advance a measure to rescind a controversial Washington, DC, crime law – which critics argue is soft on violent criminals – with a simple majority vote in the Senate.

Many Democrats oppose overriding the DC law. They argue local officials should make their own laws free of congressional interference and decry Republicans as hypocrites since they typically promote state and local rights.

A Senate vote on the DC measure is expected next week.

This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.

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March 1, 2023