CNN political analyst Julian Zelizer: The cost of the presidency for Donald Trump, the tumultuous presidency and the ugly tale of two companies
There is a professor of history and public affairs at the University who studies CNN political analyst Julian Zelizer. He is an author and editor of 24 books, including his co-edited work,Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest lies and legends about our past. Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. CNN has more opinion on it.
The price of support for Donald Trump is getting more expensive. The former president is going through one of the most tumultuous weeks and fresh evidence shows that his potential nomination in 2024 could be damaging to the party.
A jury in Manhattan found two companies in the Trump Organization guilty of criminal tax fraud on Tuesday, though Donald Trump and his family were not charged in the case.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/opinions/trump-terrible-week-message-republican-zelizer/index.html
Trump’s 2016 campaign in Florida was not a one-off: He became more controversial after dining with Kayne West, Nick, and the Holocaust Denier Nick
And in Tuesday’s Senate runoff election in Georgia, Trump’s handpicked candidate, former football star Herschel Walker, lost to Sen. Raphael Warnock, giving Democrats a 51-seat majority in the Senate. The day that Trump posed for photos with a conspiracy theorist, he was at Mar-a-Lago.
On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that a team of investigators hired by the former president’s lawyers, under a federal judge’s order, found two documents with classified markings in a Florida storage unit.
Add it all up, the news is not good for those who argue that Trump is still the best option for the GOP’s hopes of recapturing the White House. It is now clear that the former president has cost the GOP political power in three election cycles because of his baggage and he just became much more controversial than he was before. There seems to be no end in sight.
This week was not just any one-off. He made more antisemitic comments after dining with Kayne West, for instance. At the table that evening was holocaust denier Nick, who is a notorious promoter of racism.
What have Republicans been saying and what are they saying? Does Trump have a lot of respect for the party, but doesn’t really care about it?
Commenting on everything that has happened, Republican strategist Scott Reed called this week, and the two that came before, “devastating for Trump’s future viability.” The New York Times quotes Reed as saying the writing on the wall seems clear. He said the bandonment has begun.
Why are all of this matters now? Trump’s main currency is turmoil. As businessman, reality television celebrity and president, he has always counted on generating controversy as his central strategy for garnering media attention. He’s utilized the investigations and attacks that come his way to position himself as an anti- establishment figure who can sympathize with the common person.
Right now, Trump isn’t beloved by Republican voters. We see this in the percentage of Republicans who hold a strongly favorable (or very favorable) rating of him. Strongly favorable means you love a politician and do not merely like him.
Republican powerbrokers like Sen. McConnell, have never been concerned about whether or not Trump has gone too far. This is not the issue that motivates them.
Almost nothing that happened in recent weeks is totally new to Trump, unless a person hasn’t been paying attention. He has been involved in scandal from the moment he set foot in politics. He did not conform to the limits of power as president. He’s made remarks that invoke antisemitic tropes before.
But now things might start to look different. The Trump-Republican relationship is likely to be at odds in the upcoming midterms. In Republican politics, decision-making is driven by partisan power.
The rank and file of the Republican party have learned how to be loyal to Trump because they believe he can win. Whether it was out of fear or hope, Republicans showed that they would tolerate almost anything – even trying to overturn an election – to protect him.
These developments are not meant to mean that he is done. It’s possible for Trump to win the nomination in 2024, as many commentators have argued, and it can be done through a number of different ways.
The frustration is growing. Besides actual legal peril, of all the political problems facing Trump right now, it is the most recent elections that put him in genuine peril with the party. More than the documents and more than his companies’ tax fraud, Republicans are paying attention to the ways in which Trump and the candidates he supported cost the party majority power. McConnell might be forgiving of many things, but having to serve as the minority leader is not one of them.
If Trump is going to solidify his position, he will need to convince more Republicans that he can deliver votes and that he is not a “loser,” in his own parlance. This has become much more difficult with Republicans seeing Democrats in power in the White House, Senate, and many state legislatures and governorships they were hoping to win. Trump will have a much harder road ahead if Republicans conclude that by not fighting his nomination tooth and nail, they might end up handing Democrats a united government two years down the road.
Five Takeaways from the Final Jan. 6-Commission-Hearing: Why he’s Running for the Post-Delta Insurrection
The congressional committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol referred former President Donald Trump for four criminal charges related to an insurrection that he inspired because he couldn’t publicly accept that he’d lost an election.
That’s the state of American politics, with a divided populace and millions purposely not paying attention to the evidence presented by the committee, just two weeks ahead of the two-year anniversary of the riot.
The committee doesn’t have time. Republicans are set to take control of the House, and the committee is expected to dissolve. The political one is going to be put in the hands of the voters while the legal one is going to be in the hands of the Justice Department.
“Accountability that can only be found in the criminal justice system,” committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. said. “We have every confidence that the work of this committee will help provide a roadmap to justice and that the agencies and institutions responsible for ensuring justice under the law will use the information we’ve provided to aid in their work.”
The members of the committee believe there is enough evidence to charge former President Trump with four things.
Now, that doesn’t mean Trump will be charged. The committee doesn’t have power over what the Justice Department does. The Justice Department has its own investigation of Trump that’s been ongoing and currently run by special counsel Jack Smith.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith once Trump announced he was running for president again as a way to show independence from the investigation.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/20/1144303656/5-takeaways-from-the-final-jan-6-committee-hearing
Five Takes Away From The Final Jan 6 Committee-Hearing Trump Against Fraud And Votes: What Happened When Trump and His Team Learned About It
“Ours is not a system of justice, where people are given free passes, and foot soldiers are put in jail for doing their jobs,” said committee member Jamie Raskin.
Their resistance in the face of the rules has been indicative of the way U.S. politics has been growing prior to the arrival of Trump.
McCarthy is in line to become the next speaker of the house, so it’s not certain whether anything will happen to them.
That’s been clear to us who have covered Trump for a long time but it was even more evident when Hope Hicks, a former communications adviser in the Trump White House, affirmed it.
Hicks, whom we heard from for the first time Monday in the course of these hearings, said in taped testimony that she told Trump she was becoming concerned that these false claims of fraud were damaging his legacy.
“He said something along the lines of, ‘You know nobody will care about my legacy if I lose,’ ” Hicks said, ” ‘So that won’t matter, the only thing that matters is winning.’ “
There is a lot of evidence that Trump and his team knew he lost and that the allegations of fraud were false, according to testimony from multiple former Trump administration officials.
Bill Stepien, the Trump 2020 campaign manager, said that he had ” pretty clear eyes.” This was stated in a report by the committee. “Like, he understood, you know — you know, we told him where we thought the race was, and I think he was pretty realistic with our viewpoint, in agreement with our viewpoint of kind of the forecast and the uphill climb we thought he had.”
Stepien said, “We would have to relay the news that someone told you about the fraud or the votes, that it wasn’t reported, you know, nothing came of it.” It’s easier to tell the president about wild allegations if we’re the truth telling squad. It’s a harder job to be telling him on the back end that, yeah, that wasn’t true.”
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/20/1144303656/5-takeaways-from-the-final-jan-6-committee-hearing
The Mueller Report and the Special Counsel’s Report on the ‘Trump Hater’s Defamation’ by Rep. Mark Meadows
One of Trump’s campaign lawyers, Alex Cannon, in a mid-to-late November phone call with former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, said, per the report, that he found nothing “sufficient to change the results in any of the key States.”
A federal judge noted that Trump was told by email “that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and in public.” He swore under oath that the numbers are accurate, or at least they are to the best of his knowledge and belief.
The former president likes to say that they are not people who were “Never Trump” or “Trump Haters”. In most of the testimony that’s aired by the committee, the opposite is true.
The country is deeply divided politically and partisanship has become entrenched among Republicans. Despite the testimony from Republicans who supported Trump, people have been watching.
“Although the Committee’s hearings were viewed live by tens of millions of Americans and widely publicized in nearly every major news source, the Committee also recognizes that other news outlets and commentators have actively discouraged viewers from watching, and that millions of other Americans have not yet seen the actual evidence addressed by this Report.”
So the committee said it’s releasing video summaries with each relevant piece of evidence. It’s probably a reason why the beginning of the hearing included so many clips from past hearings, like the recap of a previous season of a series.
There is evidence to show that people who watched were moved. Before the hearings, just 48% of independents in an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll said they thought Trump was to blame a “great deal” or “good amount” for what happened that day. A survey in July showed that a majority of respondents blamed Trump.
Progressives have been irritated with Attorney General Merrick Garland’s methodical (read: slow) pace of pursuing charges against Trump. It’s up to the special counsel who to bring charges or not.
They do not have to act on what the Jan. 6 committee recommends, though investigators are paying close attention to the details of its findings. But don’t expect to hear much about the special counsel’s progress, as the DOJ tends to stay pretty quiet, if not wholly silent, on the details of ongoing investigations until they present them in court.
Politically, it’s going to be up to voters to choose. Trump will likely retain support with his base. Republicans have been least likely to pay attention to the hearings. Trump remains the front-runner for the GOP nomination.
He lost many of his preferred candidates in swing states, as well as legal trouble in multiple states, for which he is responsible. Whether it’s because of the chaos or because his brand is not popular in competitive states where Republicans need to win the White House and Congress, Trump poses a threat to U.S. democracy.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/20/1144303656/5-takeaways-from-the-final-jan-6-committee-hearing
When Kevin McCarthy Becomes the House Speaker: The First Time in 150 Years of his Presidency in the U.S. House of Representatives
And the members of this committee — some of whom won’t be returning to Congress because of the wrath, or potential wrath, of Trump’s base — certainly hope voters respond.
Kevin McCarthy became the House speaker early Saturday morning. The California Republican had a lower majority on the 15th ballot, thanks to the votes of six holdouts.
McCarthy is just the latest indication that Trump’s brand among Republicans has been weakened. Trump is no doubt still a powerful presence in the GOP, but he’s very vulnerable in his bid to win the Republican presidential nomination for a third time.
Let’s discuss the facts of what happened. McCarthy was backed by Trump from the start of his speakership campaign. McCarthy made his endorsement known by trumpeting it, while Trump made his preference well known.
It would be difficult to imagine Republicans defying Trump at the height of his power. This time, it happened. Despite the many appeals from Trump, this year’s speakership process was the longest in over 150 years. More than one ballot was required for the speaker’s election, the first time that’s happened in a century.
There are some people in this group that have voting records that are from the very conservative part of the GOP. This is where Trump’s strength among Republicans had been most evident at the end of his presidency. Trump was just enough to keep these hardcore conservatives in line.
Trump started 2022 with 65% of very conservative Republican voters saying they wanted him to be the Republican nominee. This was way higher than Republicans overall (50%). He ended the year with 42% of very conservative Republican voters believing he should be the GOP nominee, not too different from the 38% of Republicans overall who felt the same.
It is not the case that Republicans dislike Trump. His overall favorable rating among Republicans in the same Fox News poll from last month was 77%. (Other polls put his favorable rating with Republicans in the 60s.) They don’t love the former president. It wasn’t enough to scare Republican politicians into following his words.
The difference between where we are and where we were is stark, even when we zoom in on conservatives like McCarthy. Our CNN/SSRS poll asked GOP voters if they wanted Trump or someone else to be the Republican nominee in a few years, and whether or not they wanted him or her to be president.
The flurry of events have made it very clear that the former president is still the leader of the GOP.
House Republican leaders have made it clear that no one in the party wants the party to distance itself from the former president, even though many strategists would like that to happen. Horn said the language McCarthy uses when he calls for an investigation echoes what could be heard in an authoritarian state. She said that it was outrageous. “We call everything an outrage in this country lately, but to have the speaker of the House suggest that a legitimate, detailed legal investigation should somehow be undermined by the US Congress because it’s against their guy – it’s anti-democracy. It is anti-American.
“You would think they would have learned their lesson” from Trump’s defeat in 2020 and the GOP’s surprisingly weak showing in 2022, said Jennifer Horn, a former state Republican party chair in New Hampshire, who has emerged as a staunch Trump critic. “It’s like they are addicted to him. The GOP can not break their addiction to Trump.
While indictments could well inspire a rally-around-the-flag reaction from Trump’s core supporters, more legal trouble for the former president could simultaneously harden the hesitations of the substantial party block worried about his ability to win in 2024, many GOP strategists believe.
“I think there are core Trump voters that this galvanizes,” says Dave Wilson, a conservative strategist in South Carolina with close ties to the evangelical community. There is more than one group of Republican/conservative voters that this may give enough pause to take a hard look at the other candidates.
Once Trump posted that he could be arrested as soon as Tuesday, his allies hurried to declare that any such action would increase the odds of him winning the nomination and the presidency. If the Manhattan district attorney indicts President Trump, he will win more than he is already going to win, says a far-right lawmaker. Likewise, the conservative commentator Erick Erickson insisted, “the people who want to lock him up, do not appreciate the backlash to arresting Trump that’ll happen.”
Those drawn to Trump are likely to dominate the initial party reaction to any indictments, Robinson said. He also believes those voices will not win the vote when it is cast next year. Amid the firestorm over any indictment, the mostly college-educated Republicans hesitant about nominating Trump a third time “might kind of quiet down a little bit,” Robinson said. They don’t want this stuff. This is the stuff that causes headaches. This is the kind of stuff they would prefer to leave behind.
There is no guarantee that broad sentiment will lead to enough GOP support for a specific alternative to deny Trump a third nomination. The latest CNN national poll of GOP primary voters, conducted by SRSS, highlights that difficulty.
Robinson said it was unrealistic for the candidates to believe enough Republican voters would reach that conclusion. If another candidate wants voters to pass over a figure that looms as large over the party as Trump, Robinson maintains, they will need to give them an explicit reason to do so – and the prospect of sustained legal trouble could provide them a powerful argument in making that case. “The alternative to Trump would be someone to say, ‘We can’t be having this, this isn’t what the election should be about,’” Robinson said something.
The House GOP attack on Bragg comes after McCarthy has already provided thousands of hours of January 6 security footage to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who used it to try to whitewash the attack. McCarthy has allowed the investigation of jails in Washington DC where the January 6 rioters were housed, and the alleged mistreatment of the inmates, to be led by Greene. Trump has continued to insist that he would pardon the January 6 rioters, even though he has admitted that he wouldn’
Defending Donald Trump: Why Democrats are tashing the Trump stamp onto the White House… and why he’s going to hell
Republicans were unable to match the historical patterns of the White House because too many swing voters discontented about the economy and still viewed the GOP alternative as too extreme. The races in which Trump virtually hand-picked candidates lost include those in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona, five of the 10 states that decided the presidential race in 2020. The exit polls showed that nearly a third of voters in the critical states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona viewed Trump unfavorably.
Which is why Democrats are watching with such amazement – and a spreading sense of opportunity – as McCarthy so indelibly tattoos the Trump stamp onto the House GOP. “You now have multiple elections from 2018 forward showing that this playbook is not only extremely dangerous [for the country], it is completely ineffective” politically, said Dan Sena, former executive director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Defending Donald Trump has never been a winning electoral strategy-ever.”
Matt Bennett, executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group, thinks that Republicans may be getting the broader electorate very wrong. But whatever the near-term partisan consequences, Bennett, like Sena and Horn, believes the much larger and more ominous signal is the continuing indication that Republicans, especially in the House, are willing to break almost any convention to protect Trump.
“It’s profoundly dangerous and bad,” Bennett said. “This is the conduct, the quisling approach to strong men, that gets countries into very serious trouble.”