Educating the Public about Gender and Sexual Issues: The Case of Florida gov. Ron DeSantis, aka Glenn Youngkin

In March, he signed legislation prohibiting classroom instruction and discussion about sexual orientation and gender identity in some elementary school grades, a law that opponents derided as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. It placed him in the middle of the debate over cultural-war issues, a theme he has addressed. In a debate last night against his Democratic challenger, former Gov. Charlie Crist, DeSantis gave a graphic and inaccurate description of gender-affirming care for transgender children, suggesting falsely that doctors were “mutilating” minors.

The biggest cheers the Florida governor received, however, came when he recounted how he arranged for Florida to send nearly 50 migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, a stunt that has faced intense scrutiny and legal challenges.

Amid growing chatter about his political future and in the face of recent outbursts directed his way from an increasingly agitated Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis rarely engaged in the speculation or mudslinging. He insisted that any discussion of 2024 should start with a victory in his campaign for a second term.

“If Glenn Youngkin decides to run for president, that’s his choice. John Fredericks, who chaired the campaigns of Donald Trump in Virginia in 2016 and 2020 says that Team Trump will be making a big effort to get the delegates to Milwaukee.

He embraced many of the issues rally the base on policy. He has called for a ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, as well as banning the teaching of critical race theory, and restricted the rights of trans students. He acknowledges that Biden won the 2020 election, but has campaigned for election deniers, including Lake.

Youngkin says that he isn’t thinking about running for president in 2024. His carefully crafted national profile and his meetings with megadonors suggest otherwise.

The Story of a Ugly President: A Tale of Two More Elections (and One More) Years (and More) Than Just One Other Party

A professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, Zelizer is a CNN political analyst. He is the author and editor of 24 books, including his forthcoming co-edited work, “Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends About Our Past” (Basic Books). Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. This commentary is his own and the views expressed are not of another person. View more opinion on CNN.

It looks like former President Donald Trump is going to launch another bid for the White House. On Thursday, Trump told his followers to “get ready” for his return to the presidential campaign trail – and top aides have been eyeing November 14 as a potential launch date, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. It appears Trump is hoping to be the first person since Cleveland to win two elections in a row.

While Trump has been hinting at another run for months, the news would certainly send shockwaves through the political world. Trump is arguably one of the most controversial and destabilizing political leader in contemporary US history. His presidency was consequential, as evidenced by the recent Supreme Court decisions like Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the toxic rhetoric within the GOP.

In order for Trump to be a factor on the top of the ballot, he will have to convince the GOP that he is worth more than a small amount of votes. That task comes amid a fraught intraparty debate over the GOP’s bruising midterm outcome, with some Republicans claiming Trump’s involvement – including an eleventh-hour 2024 campaign tease at a rally on the eve of Election Day – did more to hurt the party than help. They have blamed leaders for failing to articulate clear policy priorities, the party’s money gap against Democrats in key races and the squabbling between two of the biggest campaign committees.

Just two years ago, the party failed to pass a policy platform, instead issuing a statement of loyalty to Trump. When party elites inched away from Trump after his election loss and the insurrection that followed, they did not manage to bring the party with them. In the House of Representatives, the majority of Republicans voted to overturn the election and the majority of GOP voters still believed that the election was stolen.

The Republican Party is in a good shape going into Tuesday’s election despite the fact that there are candidates such as Herschel Walker and Dr. Mehmet Oz running. Meanwhile, Democrats are scrambling to defend several seats and even candidates in reliably blue states such as New York are at risk.

While standing in the shadow of Reagans former Air Force One, he claimed to have an updated, more targeted version of Trumps’s “Make America Great Again” populism, although stripped. He seemed to be trying to build a coalition that would appeal to Republicans who had soured on Trump after his record of two impeachments, the US Capitol insurrection and a disastrous intervention into the 2020 elections but he may have been attempting to peel away some of the Trump supporters who still love him

A GOP victory would embolden Trump. At this point, he is largely free of accountability. Despite ongoing criminal investigations and the House select committee investigating January 6, Trump is still a viable political figure.

The future president signaled that he would use his campaign to try and undermine the Justice Department’s effort to prosecute him for his election-stealing activity.

If Trump avoids prosecution, he’d surely unleash a fierce assault on the President, who could very well still be struggling with a shaky economy and divisions within his own party. If the election deniers are put in power and Trump gets a break for January 6, they will likely use the disloyalty to his advantage and make sure that their victory is his. Since Trump has been to this rodeo before, this will allow him to perfect the technique and rhetoric that helped him get into office. And now that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter, Trump could be reinstated – giving him a way to direct and shape the media conversation once again. (Trump, who founded Truth Social, where he has been active since he was banned from Twitter, has not publicly indicated that he will return).

The Tapping of Donald Trump and the Heart of the GOP: The Case for Two Type A Partisans, One at the Fingers of the Spear

The midterms have shown that the Democrats’ focus on the radical nature of the GOP and the dangers posed to democracy are not necessarily enough to rally voters. The dangers have been outlined over and over again but Democrats are struggling to maintain power.

The midterm results made Trump not the most electable Republican in the long term. A Marist College poll in mid-November found that just 35% of Republicans thought he gave them the best chance to take back the presidency. In late 2021, that percentage was 50%.

In a preview of a potential Republican presidential primary showdown, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis will hold dueling Florida rallies on Sunday as the two men battle for supremacy of the Sunshine State and the heart of the GOP.

He is expected to travel to other states to raise money and to grow his brand. For most of his first term, Ron DeSantis avoided public events, but in August he decided to attend rallies in support of Republican candidates in competitive races for governor and the US Senate. He traveled up until 10 days before the election.

One Republican official who did not want to be named said that two type A politicians are at the tip of the spear for the GOP in Florida. “They both command attention but they both have their own political operations and that’s what you’re seeing. It’s already exhausting to talk about.”

DeSantis recently endorsed Republican businessman and Colorado Senate candidate Joe O’Dea, as O’Dea vowed in October to “actively campaign” against Trump.

Trump followed up by sharing a clip of former Fox News host Megyn Kelly predicting GOP voters would remain firmly in Trump’s camp if DeSantis decided to challenge the former president in a Republican presidential primary. According to CNN, the next presidential bid by Trump could be as soon as this month.

Overall, I found the hectoring quality of DeSantis oppressive. He has a heart of ice and a need to destroy those who do not agree with him. He would deny the courage he claims for himself. I don’t think he would do much if he gave the bully pulpit.

A campaign ad for Ron DeSantis claims he was created by God to fight for Florida and that he is a fighter who stood up against medical experts when the state needed to reopen after the Pandemic.

It has already proven it can raise money at an impressive clip, so DeSantis will continue to build out his political operation. His reelection effort pulled in $200 million between his two political committees, shattering national records for a governor’s campaign. On November 3, the committees had $65 million of unspent cash. CNN previously reported that DeSantis’ political team has explored how to transfer the unused money into a federal committee that could support a presidential campaign. Sources confirmed that the plan is still alive.

CNN reported this week that part of Trump’s motivation is his desire to launch a third campaign for the White House. During his visit to Iowa on Thursday, Trump told voters to prepare for his return as a presidential candidate. Trump stopped in Pennsylvania on Saturday – home to the tight Senate race between his endorsee, Republican Mehmet Oz, and Democrat John Fetterman – and he’ll spend election eve in Ohio, where the former president endorsed Republican J.D. Vance in the Senate race against Democrat Tim Ryan.

Republicans are particularly encouraged by the result in Latino-majority Miami-Dade County, where DeSantis won 55 percent of the vote, because of what it might suggest about the governor’s ability to engage with and message to Latino communities around the country. A GOP gubernatorial candidate hadn’t won the county in two decades. A CNN exit poll shows that in the Florida governor’s race, Republican Ron Paul leads Democrat Charlie Crist by 18 points among Florida Latino voters.

But as Sen. Marco Rubio, a one-time frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, knows, neither success in Florida nor success in theory naturally translates into national victory. Part of that is due to the particulars of Florida. The electorate there has become more conservative in recent years as the country as a whole has coalesced around center-left policies including Medicaid expansion and abortion protections.

DeSantis believes that Biden touches it and turns it into something worse than gold. The majority of Americans think that the country has seen its best days. They think that we’re clearly on the wrong track. But you know, I think Florida provides the blueprint that other states can follow.”

On the surface, DeSantis looks like he might be Trump’s heir. Since winning the governorship, he has unconsciously molded himself after Donald Trump, picking up everything from his hand gestures and speech to his media-bashing and calculated viciousness. In his zeal to push the politics of resistance and resentment, he dumped asylum-seekers in Massachusetts as a part of an anti- immigrant publicity stunt, as well as attacked schools for teaching about racism and sexuality.

The nickname DeSanctimonious refers to how Trump sought to bring down Ted Cruz, his main competitor in the Republican nomination.

In February last year, Trump predicted that Cruz would go down. “I think a guy can’t be – I’m a Christian – but you know Ted holds up the Bible and then he lies about so many things.”

Trump is the real man of the people, who wouldn’t believe he is better than anyone. (That Trump has a super-sized ego and routinely casts himself as special seems to go unnoticed in this equation.)

What Has the Future Come to (In)direct Control of the House of Representatives? A Commentary on Trump, Beck, and the Future of the Party

Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, (@fridaghitis) a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is an opinion contributor to CNN, columnist for The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. The views she gives in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

The crucial question of who will control Congress has not been answered. We can draw some initial conclusions on this day after.

Glenn Beck, the right-wing talk radio host, was half-joking when he made this suggestion the day after Tuesday’s elections, but he voiced a longing that a number of Republicans had after the midterms: a hope to linger with the visions of a red tsunami that wiped out Democratic power across the country. The reality – that the party had an unusually poor showing in a midterm that many expected would be a historic blowout – felt too sour to linger on.

The movement spearheaded by Trump and his election deniers performed worse than expected. Even some of the most dramatic Republican victories looked like a rebuke of Trump and his band of anti-democratic activists.

The polls show that a high percentage of voters chose their vote to oppose Donald Trump. Only 37% of people said they had a favorable view of the former president before the election. That should alarm the party.

Trump said on election night that if Republicans win, he should get all the credit. If they lose, I don’t have to be blamed. The evidence shows that he deserves a lot of the blame.

The Republicans were badly affected in the last elections of the year. The GOP lost 41 seats in the House of Representatives, and Democrats beat GOP candidates by more than 10 million votes — the largest raw vote margin in a House midterm election ever. Democrats gained seven governorships that year.

They may well do it. Even if Kevin McCarthy was to replace Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, the Democrats would still do an amazing job. Biden presided over the best performance by the party in power since George W. Bush in 2002, the first election after 9/11.

In fact, Biden claims to have decided to run for president in order to save US democracy. Given Tuesday’s results – even if his party loses control of Congress – he can take comfort in having made significant progress in achieving that goal. The elections were a win for democracy.

Which isn’t wrong! Doug Mastriano lost the Governor’s race in Pennsylvania to John Fetterman by 15 points after Oz lost by 4 points.

The football star Herschel Walker could still win the runoff in December. He should never have been on the ballot, people who heard him campaign or knew of his past know that. Trump apparently thought fame would do the trick, just as it did for him. So, he also backed TV star Mehmet Oz for the Pennsylvania seat. Oz lost to John Fetterman, who after suffering a stroke struggled to regain his verbal prowess, a key skill for a political candidate.

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

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp won reelection in a repeat of the race he ran against her in the first place. Trump despises Kemp because, like other Georgia officials, he refused to overturn the 2020 vote, despite enormous pressure from the then-president.

Trump will soon declare his candidacy despite his poor showing. Most Republicans would like him to focus on his golf game instead of worrying about the prospect. The congress showed that he is a threat.

The Florida Tea Party: Why Donald Trump versus Ron DeSantis and Hispanic Evangelicals voted Republican in 2024

Soon, Americans will probably have to begin enduring another season of presidential campaigning by the most disruptive candidate in living memory, a man who has shown only disdain for democracy. It is good to know the country took a step toward sanity and that democracy was doing well.

According to a new CNN poll, most of the Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters have a favorable view of Donald Trump compared to the favorability of Ron DeSantis.

DeSantis in his new book explains the changes in the GOP base that led to Trump and that the Florida governor will seek to harness if he makes a run for president in 2024.

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

Republicans are divided at home but prefer DeSantis. According to an exit poll conducted for CNN and other news networks, 45% of Florida’s voters think Rondales should run for President again in 2024, even though 33% of voters want to see Trump run again.

Hispanic evangelicals have long had outsize influence in Florida, where Latinos make up roughly 27 percent of the population and 21 percent of eligible voters. Though they are outnumbered among Hispanics by Roman Catholics, evangelicals are far more likely to vote for Republicans. Overall, Hispanic voters in the state favored Republicans for the first time in decades in the midterm elections in November.

Donald Trump is a Florida resident. The Dump Trump crowd, though bigger at the moment than at perhaps any time since 2016, does not seem to fully understand how deep and unquestioning the cult of personality around Trump still is within parts of the party.

Pat Toomey: The End of the Day in the House of Representatives? Is Tuesday the Final Singularity for Trump?

Republican Pat Toomey is retiring from his Pennsylvania Senate seat at the end of the term. Before he leaves, he is sharing hard truths to his party.

The man wasn’t done. There is a correlation between big losses and candidates from the left, or at least a very high correlation.

Trump, for his part, is entirely unwilling to consider that he was – and is – anything but an unalloyed good for his party, declaring a “Big Victory” on his Truth Social website Friday.

There is, without question, a portion of the Republican Party that believes that – and will follow Trump wherever he leads them (even if it’s to electoral destruction).

The Point: Toomey can’t be congratulated too strongly for his bravery in speaking out against Trump, given that he has one foot already out the door. Republicans are suggesting that Tuesday was the final straw for Trump, as his voice is part of that chorus. Will base voters listen?

The Changing Face of Reply Politics: Opinion Takes of the Florida House of Representatives Ron DeSantis, a Republican Activist

Georgia lieutenant governor, Republican who has been critical of Donald Trump said that there is no way to deny he was fired. “The search committee has brought a few names to the top of the list and Ron DeSantis is one of them. I think Ron DeSantis is being rewarded for a new thought process with Republicans and that solid leadership.”

They say that he keeps a tight circle of friends around as he ponders his options, but he hasn’t made a final decision about his future. The governor’s brain trust is small. It consists of himself and his wife, Casey. Sources said that the DeSantises are aware that he had a chance to make a move in 2024, and that it might not stay open forever.

The legislative session will be “as red meat as you can possibly imagine,” a GOP consultant said. “Whatever he proposes, they will pass it, and it will become law.”

The Republican fundraiser said that “anything ‘woke’ they can find to kill within their path, they’re going to do that” and predicted that financial institutions, in particular, would be a DeSantis target this spring.

However, DeSantis stuck largely to midterm battlegrounds and avoided early nominating states where appearances can set off presidential buzz. The chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party said there had been no interaction with the governor after his political operation refused to address voters there. Stepanek predicted that it will be difficult for the governor of Florida to defeat the president in the first primary in New Hampshire. Trump’s victory in the 2016 New Hampshire primary served as the launching point to him winning the GOP nomination.

Bob Vander Plaats, a leader in the early nominating state of Iowa, told CNN earlier this year that he brings up Scott Walker when people mention Florida congressman Ron DeSantis.

“If in fact you go into a presidential primary with Donald Trump and think you’re going to kick his ass, you got another thing coming,” one Republican consultant in Florida told CNN.

You should sign up to get this weekly column as a newsletter. We are looking at the best opinion takes of the week from CNN and other outlets.

Doyle’s Silver Blaze: The Making of a Phantom Racehorse, and the Implications It Had to Forget

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s story, “Silver Blaze,” Sherlock Holmes investigates the disappearance of a famous racehorse and the “tragic murder of its trainer.” The detective was asked by the police inspector if there was any point to which he would want to draw his attention.

It was only a little more than a week ago that Republicans thought they’d be savoring a crushing victory – and some Democrats were starting to blame each other for what they feared would be a disaster.

GOP campaign strategists told The New Yorker on November 4 that their candidates wereheading for a clean sweep in the Senate races of Georgia and Pennsylvania. Wallace- Wells wrote, “The word that kept coming up in these conversations was bloodbath.”

“People sometimes wonder what it will take to get young people to the polls,” wrote Dolores Hernandez, a junior at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. They have to guess after the 2020 elections.

“Place in front of us an existential issue that could determine our future. Give us the knowledge that we can have a say about issues that affect us with our votes, and we will turn out in droves.” The Gen Z friends saw abortion as being an important issue.

Students waited for more than four hours on the University of Michigan campus to register to vote for the upcoming election. There was a palpable sense of excitement and urgency around the election on campus. There was a motivating issue that drove the participation of many young people, especially young women.

Nationally, exit polls showed that voters between the ages of 18 and 29 supported Democrats over Republicans by a 63% to 35% margin; no other age group was nearly as pro-Democratic, with voters over 45 strongly favoring Republicans.

Some analysts argued that the anger of many voters after the Supreme Court decided to reverse the decision to abortion was over and inflation would distract people from other issues. They argued that the President was out of touch for focusing on the threat election deniers posed to democracy in a major pre- election speech. Both of those issues were heard.

The abortion rights side seemed to go a perfect five for five when it came to recognizing a state right to abortion in California, Michigan and Vermont, wrote law professor Mary Ziegler. “Kentucky, a deep red state, turned away an attempt to say that the state constitution did not protect a right to abortion. Montana’s abortion measure, which threatened to impose criminal penalties on health care providers, was rejected by voters in Tuesday’s referendum.”

The election was seen as a repudiation of Donald Trump’s election lies, and many of the top-ticket candidates who parroted them.

“What a relief,” wrote Roxanne Jones. It feels like a lot of voters want to change the course of American politics away from the poisonous rhetoric and conspiracy theories we have experienced in the past.

“Plenty of voters are worried about unchecked progressivism on the left, but they’re even more worried about unchecked extremism on the right,” observed Tim Alberta, in the Atlantic.

Extremis takes many forms: spreading lies about the assault on the House Speaker’s husband, deluding our elections system, and endorsing the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Donald Trump embodied all of this extremism which so many swing voters rejected on Tuesday.

Some careers were made – and others broken – in Tuesday’s election. Peniel Joseph wrote that the first Black governor of Maryland is a rising star. “A campaign based on championing equal opportunity, compassion for the incarcerated, education for all children, and hope in the future can not only win, but prove infectious enough to spread across the country,” observed Joseph. “Wes Moore’s victory has recaptured some of the magic that has been lost in our politics in the tumult of the past few years. Hopefully, this is just the beginning.

The loss of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to the opposition candidate for governor was familiar to Sophia A. Nelson, as she was beaten by him four years ago.

In Texas, Democrat Beto O’Rourke lost to incumbent Republican Greg Abbott for governor. Nicole Russell wrote that after his third huge loss it was time to stop running for offices in Texas. We have had enough Beto for a long time. … His liberal policies are unwelcome and unwanted in Texas.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/13/opinions/five-lessons-midterms-opinion-columns-galant/index.html

Five-lessons: Putin’s sexiest man alive or not? Why men should not be objects of lust in the newsstand

His reputation as a mastermind in the Middle East is in tatters as his military machine is broken and his country’s economy is so scarred that it will take years to recover. Putin-the-man may still cling to power for years, but Putin-the-legend is dead.”

The actor Chris Evans received an accolade that was first bestowed on Mel Gibson in 1985, “a candidate whose appeal, I think we can agree, has not aged well,” Sara Stewart observed.

This year’s Sexiest Man Alive was announced recently by People magazine, making it a good time to ask if we should stop using the title.

“Think about the inherent ridiculousness of declaring anyone the sexiest person alive. Sexiness is a subjective thing. So it’s a winky joke that People offers up its own tastes as if they are everyone’s. They made their subject male to make it appear that they are not objectifying women. Men can also be objects of lust. Playboy, Penthouse and other magazines may have said that in the 1980s, when they imposed misogynist ideal of sexiness at the newsstand. But now? Not a lot.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/13/opinions/five-lessons-midterms-opinion-columns-galant/index.html

Fivelessons Midterms: Twitter Disruption after The Crown: A Little Bit of Wisdom for the Founder, Princess Diana, and Queen Elizabeth II

The new season of “The Crown,” which Netflix dropped on Wednesday, “charts the royals’ course through the turbulent 1990s, including Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s agonizing divorce and Elizabeth’s ‘annus horribilis’ in 1992, when a fire destroyed much of Windsor Castle,” wrote Holly Thomas.

“Details of the show’s storylines doing the rounds earlier this fall quickly drew ire, and one reportedly involving Charles, now King, lobbying for the Queen’s abdication prompted former UK Prime Minister John Major to describe the series as a ‘barrel-load of nonsense.’” Dame Judi Dench also warned that the series might “blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism” as the nation continues to mourn Queen Elizabeth II, who died two months ago.

Without Roxanne Jones, Musk will have to find an alternative for fixing the micro-blogging site. She’s had enough. “I deleted Twitter on the day Elon Musk became the platform’s new owner,” Jones wrote. “After a mostly dysfunctional 12-year relationship with Twitter that I admit brought some moments of joy, it was time to exercise my freedom of speech to say goodbye and good riddance.”

“That small act may not change much in the Twitter-verse of 237.8 million users. quitting Twitter was an act of power and self-care for me. I was setting boundaries for what I will, and will not, allow in my life.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/13/opinions/five-lessons-midterms-opinion-columns-galant/index.html

What do they do with all that money? The story of the Powerball Superman and its connection to a Cleveland woman, Deborah Shuster, and Bill Carter

Bill Carter and his wife don’t normally buy lottery tickets, “having long concluded that it felt like burning a $10 bill (sometimes a $20 bill) on a barbecue grill.”

They went to the store to get some tickets for the $2 billion Powerball that was going to be won last week. Think of the things we could do with all that money.

“Really: What would we do with all that money? After helping the kids, donating to charities, buying several homes, etc., what else? Build a ‘money bin’ and swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck? (Unwise. Money can make you liquid, but it is not, in fact, liquid.)”

The origin story of the Man of Steel is well known. As pop culture historian Roy Schwartz noted, “In 1934, at the age of 18, (Joseph) Shuster and classmate Jerome Siegel came up with a revolutionary idea: Superman. He was the first superhero, a concept so unprecedented that, as Siegel detailed in his unpublished memoir, every newspaper syndicate in the US rejected it for being too fantastic for children to relate to.”

But as Schwartz wrote, Shuster had a relationship with Helen Louise Cohen, a fellow resident of Cleveland, who might have borne a resemblance to Superman’s eventual wife Lois Lane. She sent sketches of Superman, a drawing of Cohen, and letters in neat script.

She was forced to break it off, marrying a person she later awarded the Legion of Merit, and then becoming a colonel in the Army. During World War II, Shuster was too far off to join the military.

Cohen would later tell her sons, as Schwartz noted, that “Shuster was simply too mild-mannered for her.” But she kept his letters and sketches and now the family is sharing them with the world, Schwartz wrote.

Did Donald Trump lose the Midterm elections? Dan Cox, a Republican Party Supporter, and the Reality that Donald Trump Defeated

Did Donald Trump lose in the midterms? Plenty of people declared that he did, from liberal pundits to the Murdoch newspapers — the latter delivering a double whammy from the front page of The New York Post (“TRUMPTY DUMPTY”) and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal (“Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser”).

The strength of the Trump forces waned at a time when the calendar leaf was turned over on the Trump era. But how do you declare defeat for a movement that is built around refusing to accept defeat? Mr. Trump and his supporters have been feeding off each other’s worst tendencies for so long, it’s impossible to separate his temperament or strategy from that of the Republican Party.

Dan Cox lost the Maryland governor’s race by more than 25 points, and he was a Trump loyalist. In defeat, Mr. Cox issued a statement saying he had called the victorious Democrat Wes Moore to “recognize him on his being declared the winner.” Here, softly phrased, was the Trumpist version of concession: The other side had been declared the winner, according to what someone else said were the facts. Mr. Cox wrote, “Our internal data demonstrated a massive shift of swing voters our way and a huge turnout of Republicans — neither of which is reported to have occurred.”

Donald Trump Kicked the Republicans: Mehmet Oz and the Pain for the CPCP: The Fake Story About Me and Me

It’s hard to marry. Even the happiest couples will occasionally bicker, nitpick or wear on each other’s nerves. Imagine how rough things would get if her thin-skinned, emotionally erratic husband began to criticize her for their high-profile mistakes.

Donald Trump is flipping out his key role in the Republicans’ face plant in the Pennsylvania Senate race, where he had been a part of. Mehmet Oz was a loser when Mr. Trump backed him. According to The Times, the former president has blamed everyone but himself for his bad pick, including his wife. Mr. Trump took to Truth Social to say that he wasn’t at all angry, but he did go there to condemn the “Fake Story”.

By now, Mrs. Trump must be used to her husband making a lot of noise. This round of finger-pointing must be particularly upsetting since Mr. Trump did not only undermine Republicans’ chances in the Senate race. He helped kneecap the party up and down the Pennsylvania ballot, giving the Democrats in the crucial swing state one of their best Election Days in ages.

The Republican Party found itself in a tight fight for the House majority after its hopes of controlling the Senate in 2023 were dashed.

There are still several uncalled House races that will determine control. The election to decide the majority in the Senate will not take place until December 6.

Trump’s Campaign for 2024: What the Heck Is Saying About Me? An Iterative Candidate Whose Party Is Not About Something

Trump is eager to launch his 2024 campaign for a variety of reasons, including, but not limited to, his desire to close off momentum for other contenders (most notably Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) and, perhaps, to try to insulate himself from his own mounting legal problems. He is coming under heavy criticism for his role in the elections and he wants to change the narrative from the GOP blaming game.

Instead, the Republican Party – thanks to Trump – will be thrust directly into the 2024 race, with the former president demanding endorsements and fealty from elected officials who are still in the midst of trying to figure out what the heck just happened last week.

The point is that Trump is about something. The leader of the Republican Party does not prioritize the party’s good over his own.

What to do with Mr. Trump is what everyone doesn’t know. What is this campaign? He is a candidate without opponents who has made less public appearances since he announced and the other members of his party still don’t say so publicly. This iteration of Mr. Trump is probably a trap, because he keeps losing and forcing others to join him, even though Republicans might not be able to win.

Seven years ago, the New York businessman entered the political fray on defense, working vigorously to cast himself as a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination to the incredulity of veteran political operatives and his primary opponents. This time, Trump plunges as the party’s obvious nominee, but once again, he finds himself in a defensive crouch.

Trump is not going to leave the Democratic Party: How will he run if he wins and when does he decides his next campaign?

On Saturday, CNN projected that Democrats will retain control of the Senate in the 118th Congress, an outcome that has fractured Republicans and left the party on tenterhooks as Trump readies his “big announcement.”

Three sources familiar with the matter said the former president believed Youngkin was supportive of comments his lieutenant governor, Winsome Earle-Sears, made during a Fox Business appearance last week. She told the network she would no longer support Trump if he runs for president a third time.

A true leader knows when they have become a liability, according to Earle-Sears. The voters have told us that it is time for us to step away from the stage, and a true leader understands that.

Sears later declined to tell The Washington Post whether Youngkin knew prior to the interview that she planned to split from Trump, a detail that caught the former president’s attention, according to one of his aides.

I am aware that there is a lot of criticism and people that say just focus on Georgia, but he thinks there is no point in waiting. If Herschel loses, he’ll be blamed for distracting from the runoff but if he wins, he doesn’t believe he will get any credit for energizing the base,” said a current Trump adviser.

Nobody should be surprised. This is how Trump does primaries,” said Michael Caputo, a former Trump administration official who remains close to the former president. You have to ask: can the format work for him again?

“One of our biggest challenges will be the fundraising component but I do think [Trump] has proved that he doesn’t need deep-pocketed donors, per se,” said a person close to Trump, noting the enduring strength of his small-dollar operation.

Some Trump allies said the donor challenges, the outcome of the referendum and the questions about his stature have left a lack of seasoned campaign operatives ready to join his next campaign. Though the president has told allies he wants to keep his operation lean, much like his 2016 presidential campaign, some have privately questioned whether it’s out of preference or due to recruitment troubles. CNN has previously reported that Trump’s likely campaign is expected to be helmed by three current advisers – Susie Wiles, Chris LaCivita and Brian Jack – with assistance from a group of additional aides and advisers with whom the former president is already familiar. According to multiple sources, his apparatus is expected to dwarf that of his reelection campaign two years ago.

As Trump tries to find his footing on the verge of a presidential campaign that could coast to the party’s nominating convention or encounter any number of unforeseen troubles, allies who have stuck by him said they were ready for battle one last time.

Trump, the Democrats, the Fox News, the Wall and the Wall : The Trump Organization, Tax Fraud, and Falsifying Tax Business Records

Trump never did, that is the key to his appeal. The ex-president’s tearing at democratic norms after the election in 2020 was his version of telling voters what they, and he, wanted to hear. He was able to allow millions of Americans to believe that he did not lose to Biden, even though there was no evidence to support his claims. The Fox News opinion hosts were guilty of the same thing, they amplified his false statements, not to protect political careers but to keep their lucrative jobs.

Donald Trump supporters are paying a higher price for their support. The former president has gone through one of the most tumultuous weeks possible, with fresh evidence of why the party’s connection to him – and his potential nomination in 2024 – could be extraordinarily damaging.

A Manhattan jury found two of the companies in the Trump Organization guilty of criminal tax fraud and falsifying tax business records on Tuesday, though Trump and his family were not charged in the case.

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.

This week did not have a sort of one-off. For instance, it comes after his decision to dine with Kayne West soon after Ye, as he’s now known, made more antisemitic comments. Also at the table that evening was Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, who is a notorious promoter of racism of all kinds.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/opinions/trump-terrible-week-message-republican-zelizer/index.html

What has happened to Scott Reed in the past six years? What have we learnt about the Trump presidency and the future of the Democratic Party?

Scott Reed is a Republican strategist and he said this week that the two that came before were devastating for Trump’s future viability. Reed told the New York Times that there is writing on the wall. “Abandonment,” he said, “has begun.”

Why are all of this matters now? After all, turmoil is Trump’s main currency. As businessman, reality television celebrity and president, he has always counted on generating controversy as his central strategy for garnering media attention. He has used the investigations and attacks that come his way as a basis to position himself as a perpetually anti-establishment figure who can sympathize with the “common” person.

He seeks to weaponize the anger that he creates and never wants to be loved. Despite Trump’s name-calling and personal drama, he twice won the GOP presidential nomination – and the 2016 election. His one-term presidency held the same dynamic.

While many speculate about whether Trump has “gone too far,” this has never proven to be a concern to Republican powerbrokers such as Sen. Mitch McConnell. This is not the motivating issue for 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 entered politics. He was a president that continually broke the limits of power. He has made remarks that invoke antisemitic tropes in the past.

Over the past six years, Republican officials, and the rank and file, have learned how to live with Trump because they believe that he can win, and that his loyal base can help them be victorious. Republicans showed that they would stand by him no matter what, even if it meant trying to overturn an election.

Nonetheless, the frustration is mounting. The most recent elections, which put Trump in genuine danger with the party because of legal peril, are the only problems facing Trump right now. 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. Having to serve as minority leader isn’t one of the things McConnell can be forgiving of.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu makes one thing clear: His vision for the future of the Republican Party does not include former President Donald Trump.

Sununu said it was un-American for the country to be a country where the best opportunity for future leadership was in the past.

What Has Happened in Stefanik’s Life After the 2018 Midterms? The Insights of a Newly-elected Congresswoman

However, the survey also found that if Trump wins the party’s 2024 nomination, a likely majority of Republican-aligned voters would back him in the general election.

In the wake of the 2018 midterms, the young congresswoman was sick of commuting to Washington from upstate New York and weary of dialing for campaign dollars. She was demoralized that Republican primary voters had spurned so many of the women she had helped persuade to run for Congress. She was annoyed that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the democratic socialist who had displaced her that fall as the youngest woman ever elected to the House, had not shown her the respect she felt was her due.

But it was bigger than that. For years, Ms. Stefanik had crafted her brand as a model moderate millennial — “the future of hopeful, aspirational politics in America,” as her mentor, Paul Ryan, would describe her in Time magazine. But as her third term unfolded, according to current or former friends and advisers, it was becoming painfully clear that she was the future of a Republican Party that no longer existed. The party was now firmly controlled by Donald J. Trump, a populist president she didn’t like or respect — a “whack job,” as she once described him in a message obtained by The New York Times. Fox hosts attacked her for not supporting Mr. Trump enough. Her friends criticized her for not fighting him as forcefully. She would tell them that you don’t understand. You don’t get how hard this is. The Democrats had regained control of the House. Mr. Ryan was gone, driven into early retirement. She told friends she was thinking of joining him.

Few have settled on an answer yet, not surprisingly given that the first votes of the 2024 campaign are over a year away. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis have been courting evangelicals for years, and both have leaned into the cultural battles that appeal to many conservative Christians.

The morals of one party reflects the morals of all the churches in the network, said Dionny Bez, a Miami pastor. We must not be afraid to say we have values that the Republicans are willing to fight for. I need to make sure we know what we think. It’s no longer taboo.

He signed a law last year prohibiting abortions after 15 weeks at the megachurch Nacin de Fe. On the day before the election, he declared it “Victims of Communism Day” and appealed to both Cubans and immigrants who have come to Florida from Venezuela and other Latin American countries. His campaign aides frequently spoke with Hispanic pastors, cultivating support that many expect Mr. DeSantis to try to capitalize on in a presidential campaign.

DeSantis: The Pity of the Fool Who Runs Against the President Trump in Arizona, and the FL-Density Debate during the First 2024 Open House

The host of the SiriusXM radio show is a former attorney named Dean Obeidallah. He can be followed by @DeanObeidallah. The opinions he has in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

“I pity the fool who runs against President Trump,” failed GOP Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake tweeted this weekend as the former President kicked off his first 2024 presidential campaign event.

Fans of “Rocky III” will instantly recognize the iconic line that Lake, an election-denying Trump acolyte, borrowed as the same famous phrase uttered by James “Clubber” Lang, a vicious, hard-hitting boxer played in the 1982 film by Mr. T.

“I had governors that decided not to close a thing and that was up to them,” Trump said. He took aim at the governor of Florida, accusing him of changing his tune a lot.

In March 2020, in response to the rapidly spreading pandemic, the Florida governor issued an executive order closing bars and nightclubs, and urged people to follow US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines limiting gatherings on beaches to no more than 10 people.

But his recent remarks and pronouncements have veered sharply away from sensible, government-imposed Covid-19 protections in what appears to be a desperate bid to appeal to the GOP’s Covid-denying base voters ahead of an anticipated presidential run.

DeSantis’ decisions on Covid-19 are prime examples of how this recipe worked. He was decisive, even when public opinion started out against him. He was harshly criticized by public health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the nation’s highest ranked official on infectious disease. They did not hurt him politically, but he was more popular with Americans who wanted a champion to stand up against lockdowns.

A Face-Off with Donald Trump: The Case for a Possible Donald Trump-DeSantis Showdown in the Spacetime After “Rocky III”

But any potential run inevitably means a face-off with Trump, who is, as yet, the only Republican to have formally announced in the race. 40th anniversary of the release of “Rocky III” might mean that the presidential campaign in twenty years might be a reprise of Clubber Lang and Balboa.

There’s another moment in the film that springs to mind as I consider a possible Trump vs. DeSantis showdown. That’s the scene where Clubber Lang, having lost his boxing title, trash-talks Rocky in an effort to goad him into a fight.

If the former President is not an underdogs in the White House nomination contest, he has been on the ropes lately with polls showing Trump fatigue among many of his party’s voters.

During the 2016 GOP presidential race, Trump and Rubio were among the Republicans vying for the opportunity to square off against the eventual Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. Early in the primary campaign, Trump was the favorite to win.

The gloves came off, when he called Trump a demagogue and an embarrassment. But it was too little, too late for Rubio, who lost the Florida GOP primary, and ended up dropping out of the race the next day.

When it came to the rules of engagement, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wore a flight suit with a cockpit as the “Top Gov.” and said, “No fire unless fired upon, but when they fire you fire back with overwhelming force.” He said never to ever back down from a fight.

It seems that DeSantis is waiting to see if Trump is indicted so that he doesn’t have to deal with him on the battlefield. The Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney told a judge that she was close to making a decision in the investigation into the actions of Trump and his associates.

You need to put up a fight to get the victory. There could come a time when Republicans think of his refusal to defend himself and fight back as weakness.

When he is silent in the face of Trump, people will ask themselves if he is cowardice or just a mean person.

When the last election fell: Trump’s outburst to a Democratic leader after his failure to win the Arizona gubernatorial nomination

It was upsetting that a former president who tried to steal the last election was embraced by his supporters as if nothing happened.

The sense that Trump is owed the Republican nomination is clear, as is his feelings that certain sections of his party are not adequately grateful for his turbulent one-term presidency.

The president talked about his loyalty while attacking evangelicals for not supporting his bid in the first place, saying they showed “disloyalty” by not supporting him. The comments were a reminder of Trump’s transactional view of politics – and also that a man who dumped aides, staff and Cabinet members at a fearsome clip in office often tends to view loyalty as a purely one-way allegiance.

“He comes to New Hampshire, and, frankly, he gives a very mundane speech. The response we have received is, he read his teleprompter, he stuck to the talking points, he went away,” Sununu told Bash. A lot of people saw that fire and the energy that came with it, but he is not really bringing that fire. I think, in many ways, it was a little disappointing to some folks. He will be a candidate, but he needs to earn it, I think a lot of people understand that. And that’s New Hampshire.”

Trump is not ready to acknowledge the reality that he’s not ready for yet. Though his decision to visit an ice cream parlor late in the day in South Carolina was an unusual foray into retail politics and first-person contact with voters.

Trump appeared Saturday to understand that his two years of fury over the 2020 election, which he still falsely says was stolen from him, may have turned off voters in 2022, when many of the election-denying candidates he promoted in swing states lost – potentially costing the GOP the Senate.

The campaign will be about the future. This campaign will be about issues. At a small event Saturday in the South Carolina State House, Trump said he would ensure that Biden didn’t get another four years in office.

He hasn’t given up on his standard rhetoric. On Sunday evening, he called into a rally for one on his favorite election-denying midterm candidates – failed Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, who is still falsely insisting she won in November. The former president took aim at institutions that are revealing the true course of events in 2020 during a speech on Saturday in New Hampshire.

The justice system is being weaponized. There’s never been a justice system like this. It’s all investigation, investigation,” Trump said. And he branded his resistance to such probes as more proof of the very quality that many Republicans embraced in 2016 and that helped propel him to the White House.

“There’s only one president who has ever challenged the entire establishment in Washington, and with your vote next year, we will do it again and I will do it again,” he said Saturday.

Can the Ex-President Of The United States Stop Trump From Facing the Phenomenology of Elections? On the Case Of Trump, Biden, and Haley

A major stop for potential Republican presidential candidates, Trump is slated to appear this weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Haley, the other major announced candidate, will also attend.

The indications of several forming campaigns show that Trump is not so formidable that he can’t face off against serious rivals.

Still, having multiple rivals would help Trump, as it did in 2016, since the winner-take-all nature of most Republican primaries allows a candidate with a mere plurality of votes to build up big delegate leads in a crowded field.

If Trump can split the opposition, then he can win the primary, but it is not a sure thing for the general election since the former president tried to steal an election in Washington and was subsequently impeached.

Unlike many of his Cabinet members, she engineered a smooth exit from the Trump administration on her own terms. She looked like potential footage for a future Republican primary campaign after her Oval Office photo-op with Trump. Haley is not being subtle about her pitch – one that could allow her to gently argue that it’s time to move on from the ex-president and President Joe Biden without directly repudiating the Trump presidency and his fans.

“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.

Yet the most fundamental question that Haley will face is whether the Republican base, which has rewarded culture warriors, extreme “Make America Great Again” rhetoric and election denialists, has any interest at all in what she plans to sell.

Her credentials are formidable, but not as so when considering the values of the party she is seeking the nomination for. Do the GOP have a market for a more unifying, multicultural, less strident delivery vehicle for Trump? The ex-president creates an emotional connection with his biggest fans by his frequent profanity, but he doesn’t really have any ideological connection with them.

For instance, after leaving the administration on good terms, she rebuked her party for following Trump down a “path he shouldn’t have” taken with his election denialism that led to the January 6, 2021, insurrection. She made a change in October of 2021, when Trump still dominates the GOP.

And the former South Carolina governor’s casting around for the GOP sweet spot has some observers wondering exactly how she will build a sufficiently wide support base to take her to the nomination.

There are other possible alternatives to Trump that were laid out in recent days. Former US ambassador to the United NationsNikki Haley, who already launched a campaign, and ex-Secretary of StateMike Pompeo both launched veiled attacks on their former boss at the CPAC.

I have spent time in both Iowa and New Hampshire. He said at the forum in Washington, DC, that this is not random. We are just trying to figure it out. He said, “It is an unbelievably significant decision to say you believe you should lead the United States of America.”

Are Freedoms the Only Way to Preserve Business? An Argument against DeSantis’s Right-Winging Sensitivity to Government Power

Like Haley, Scott, more marginal candidates and even Mike Pence, if he gets in the race, Pompeo faces the same problem. They don’t fear Trump but they can’t beat him.

Is there anything liberals can do about Ron DeSantis other than quietly seethe, loudly condemn him every time he makes headlines and hope that his political flaws — his distaste for glad-handing, his less-than-inspiring public-speaking style, his conspicuous unlikability — will take him down before he gets anywhere close to the presidency? It would be tempting to write off DeSantis, the bombastic Republican governor of Florida, as another unelectable right-wing lunatic unfit for national office.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has made freedom his calling card, but some conservatives have become skeptical of how liberally the Republican leader is using government power to impose his will.

As Florida state lawmakers met earlier this month to give new authority to Ron DeSantis over Disney World, the Republican Gov. of New Hampshire took a shot at the power grab.

“I’m a principled free-market conservative,” said Sununu, who is also weighing a bid for president. For some people out there that think that business should be punished for political reasons, that isn’t very conservative.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education was a right-of-center First Amendment group that argued for white nationalist Richard Spencer’s right to speak on a Florida campus. Nevertheless, the group has repeatedly criticized Florida’s heavy-handed approach to forcing conservative beliefs on universities and is suing the state over the Stop WOKE Act, a DeSantis-backed measure that legislated how professors teach certain topics.

Will Cannone, the legal director of Fire, said that freedom of expression cannot be suppressed. One orthodoxy can’t be traded for another. What we’ve seen recently in Florida is a troubling willingness to do just that.”

While speaking at the National Conservatism conference, the governor of Florida stated that corporate America does not qualify as free enterprise nor is it the same as limited government. I believe that free enterprise is the best economic system, but it is a means to an end.

The CPAC-Campus for Growth (CPAC) platform for the political party nominee, and a Democratic supporter of DeSantis

Being perceived as racist is not a good place to be in the long term according to a Republican supporter who was speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The supporter pointed out that the governor could hurt some voters who would otherwise support him if he were to lose the fight over an African American studies course.

But Republicans voters have yet to be introduced to many potential contenders for the party nomination. Meanwhile, outside groups such as the Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity have signaled they intend to get involved in the primary.

The back-to-back speeches highlighted two Republicans that would be the early favorites to win the GOP nomination if he were to run. When Trump crushed establishment candidates, the ideological split in the party was captured by the split screen. 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.

I am a real libertarian, and I like to live-and-let-live kind of girl, I told CNN. She said she has no problem with candidates espousing strongly held personal beliefs on social issues but said she objects to DeSantis “putting the power of his state behind his socially conservative views.”

“DeSantis is always talking about he was not demanding that businesses do things, but he was telling the cruise lines what they had to do,” former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a fellow Republican, said of DeSantis last year. Hogan has criticized the Florida governor for entering the Republican nomination.

Meanwhile, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, another potential GOP contender, has also compared her Covid19 record against DeSantis in ways that suggest Florida was too hands-on – for ideologically disparate reasons. Noem said Friday that her state set an example of freedom by refusing to shut down. Early in the Pandemic there were closed schools and bars, and other economic activity restricted in Florida.

Implications of the deSantis ad use of state power to undermine public universities: The frustration and frustration of a man who isn’t ruled by state power

But his approach has often included more government programs (creating an office to pursue voter fraud and a new program to conduct missions to surveil, house and transport migrants from border states to Democratic jurisdictions), more regulation (dictating bank lending practices) or flexing government power in unprecedented manners (ousting an elected state prosecutor).

“I’m troubled by this trend, because what I think the interpretation will be is that this is working,” Katherine Mangu-Ward, the editor-in-chief of the libertarian magazine Reason, said in a recent podcast episode centered around DeSantis’ tactics. Every week, DeSantis is raising his profile. He is putting himself in a better position to potentially win the presidency. And he is doing it through indiscriminate use of state power, not only to achieve kind of broader ends, but also just to score points.”

Rufo was appointed by the governor to the board of New College, a liberal arts college that the governor wants to remake into a more conservative university.

“The complaint about using ‘state power,’ meaning constitutionally-mandated democratic governance, to correct the ideological corruption of public universities, i.e., state institutions funded by taxpayers, is ridiculous,” Rufo tweeted. “Amounts to ‘the people can’t regulate the state.’”

At that time, he didn’t appreciate Gov. DeSantis going after Disney’s tax status. “It can be portrayed or feel or look like retaliation. And I believe that the people who serve our nation need to rise above these moments in time in their conduct and behavior.”

In an interview with the online political newspaper, he said he would back the Florida governor in the GOP primary for president.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: How President Biden and Donald Trump have impacted the political discourse after the 2020 State of the Union

President Biden is seeing his highest approval ratings in almost a year, while former President Donald Trump, who is hoping to take the job back, is getting his worst scores among potential Republican voters in years, according to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.

Lots of surveys, including Marist’s, have shown that members of Biden’s own party think he’s too old and they’d have a better chance of winning the White House with someone else – although there’s been little agreement on who that should be.

That’s good news for the president. He’s at his highest mark in over a year, and hasn’t been below it since the Afghanistan withdrawal in August of 2021. He’s benefitting in the survey from a rebound with Democrats, and in this hyper-partisan atmosphere, a president needs his base shored up.

The biggest shifts are coming from whites without college degrees, those who make less than $50,000 a year, voters under 45 and women who live in small cities or the suburbs. All are key target demographic groups, who helped Biden win in 2020. They were the kind of voters he removed away from Trump, who made inroads with them.

They’re at least open to Biden’s message because they are both democrats and independents. But three potential reasons:

That’s significantly better than Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who the poll also tested.

The percentage saying they would be a better off with someone else hasn’t budged. And there are clear cleavages – voters with college degrees, ones who make more than $50,000 a year and parents with children under 18 are far more likely to say they’d be better off with someone else, by 20 points or more in some cases.

A survey using cell phones and landlines to get feedback from 1,300 adults was conducted the week after the president’s State of the Union address. Where all adults are referred to, the survey has a margin of error of +/- 3.3 percentage points, meaning results could be about 3 points lower or higher. It has a 3.5 percentage point margin of error where registered voters are mentioned.

There are a lot of Democrats and independents. Where they’re referenced, it’s a +/- 5.1 percentage point margin. There were people that were Republican and Republican-leaning. The margin for this subgroup is +/- 5.7 percentage points.

Murdoch, Fox, Politics: The Rise of an Unstoppable Social Democratic Revolution and the Rise of a Radically Inspiraled Congress

The Republican Party and a vast conservative media empire are all based on the same principle: giving the party base exactly what it wants to hear, whether it is true or not.

Murdoch suggested firing the Washington bureau chief shortly after the network projected Joe Biden would win in Arizona, which meant the election was all but out of reach for Trump.

The new details underscored how key players on the right feel they have no choice but to appease, satisfy and further inflame the voters and viewers on whom their profits or hopes of political power depend.

Murdoch’s entire business model has evolved from using television stations in his native Australia and tabloid newspapers in Britain to feeding political anger, according to some media commentators. And while he’s more known for backing conservatives, Murdoch has switched sides when business demands – for instance, when The Sun endorsed the British Labour Party’s Tony Blair over the fading Conservative Party in a 1997 general election.

The billionaire publisher is getting buyer’s remorse over Donald Trump after the headline of his New York Post read, “Been there, Don that.”

As he said in a deposition made public in a court filing on Monday in the Dominion case: “It is not red or blue, it is green,” referring to the color of a dollar.

The calculation of what the political market will be influenced by the Republicans who appear on Fox. Their unfiltered adoption of much of the doctrine favored by the conservative grassroots ultimately stretched American democracy to the limit.

In his rise to the presidency, Trump fed to that base and shattered the Republican establishment field. GOP lawmakers whose hold on power depended on not crossing the reality-star-turned-president then allowed Trump to run riot. That helped ignite an unstoppable radical tide that led to the US Capitol insurrection in 2021, and eventually to Republicans acquitting him in not one but two impeachment dramas.

The huge power of the Republican base was the secret sauce that forced new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to make concessions to the most radical representatives in the conference after 15 rounds of voting he needed to win his job. McCarthy had earlier watched as two predecessors, former Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, tried to resist the GOP’s far right insurgency and lost their job. As McCarthy showed by handing Fox host Tucker Carlson access to hours of Capitol Hill security footage last week – despite Carlson’s conspiracy theories about January 6, 2021 – his speakership is a totally owned subsidiary of the GOP’s most extreme elements.

One of the reasons why many financial experts are worried about a government default is McCarthy’s dominance by the same Republican base that Murdoch worried about driving away.

The straddle between winning base voters of a party and trying to connect with middle America has always been a challenge for the nominees in a general election. This political leap could require a lot of skill from the person who emerges from the GOP’s “America First” primary.

This is what made Trump a good candidate for the moment, after he spent most of his life in New York and flew around the country on a private plane with gold-plated bolts, no one wanted him. liberals were against him for his language and rhetoric. The early rallies for Trump were more like stand up comedy shows than presidential events. There was someone who shouted out loud what millions of Americans had believed for decades but felt restricted from saying it because of social convention. Many commentators decried Trump’s demagoguery but fewer examined the social, economic and political reasons for his rise.

The theme of Republicans in Washington failing to represent the values of the people who elected them foretold the nomination of Donald Trump, according to the book “The Courage to be Free”.

“The chasm between the aspirations of the GOP voter base and the behavior of party leaders in Washington would continue to grow wider in the ensuing years.”

DeSantis complains that politicians who go to Washington forget where they come from – and soon become instruments of a political system that works against their constituents’ interests. Yet issues like the need to raise the debt ceiling to keep the government solvent and the economy running or key foreign policy questions, like US support for Ukraine, sometimes require leaders to take a different view of the national interest than prevails back at home.

Trump had foreshadowed this marriage of convenience between his presidency and the conservative media infrastructure in an appearance at the annual Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City in 2018.

You have to stick with us. These people are fake news, so don’t believe them. He said what you are seeing and reading is not what is happening.

Fox News Sustained by President Donald Trump: The Defamation of Fox News and the Real Reasons Why Democrats Are Outraged

The truth is that when your company is sued, you never know which message will be publicly released.

The message appears to show that you are knowingly allowing false information on the air as a result of Fox News anchors and executives.

Lawyers for a voting systems company released unflattering messages and depositions in a defamation lawsuit against Fox after they broadcast conspiracy theories about their involvement in the 2020 presidential election.

Tucker Carlson tried to get a Fox News White House correspondent fired after fact-checking Donald Trump on the issue of election fraud.

You have to notice that he said company. The Fox leaders and top talent were focused on the company, not the country. Fox News is concerned about Newsmax gaining traction after Trump attacked them for their 2020 election loss.

Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch didn’t mind the politics of putting the conspiracy theory-pushing MyPillow CEO on Fox News, he said in a deposition, according to court records.

Ryan said he believed Fox News would have to be involved in the solution if we were to solve the problem of conservatives.

“Because there isn’t a bigger platform than this in America,” Ryan said. I think the conservative movement is in turmoil at the moment and I don’t like where it is.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/01/politics/fox-news-republicans-what-matters/index.html

The Freedom Caucus of Ron DeSantis: A Corresponding CNN Observer Report on his Presidential Candidate Experiences in the United States

If Russia invadedUkraine one year ago, Fox would have been a major backer of military aid. On the network, many guests talk about the importance of Ukraine aid.

But its top stars, like Carlson, are mimicking Trump and questioning whether the US should be opposed to Russia’s authoritarianism and invasion of Ukraine.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s current chief rival as they look ahead to the 2024 presidential race, represents the evolution in his own policy positions, as CNN’s KFile notes: “DeSantis wanted to send weapons to Ukraine when he was a congressman – as a presidential hopeful he questions US involvement.”

CNN’s Melanie Zanona and Manu Raju interviewed two dozen or so lawmakers that Raju described as “hardcore Trump supporters, people who are part of the Freedom Caucus, people who were essentially his staunchest defenders during his four years in office.”

The Freedom Caucus traveled to Florida not to meet with Trump, but to talk to him. They were impressed.

Editor’s Note: Jay Parini, a poet and novelist, teaches at Middlebury College. His most recent book, the memoir “Borges and Me,” is an account of his travels through the Scottish Highlands of Scotland with Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in 1971. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. CNN has more opinion articles.

A Conversation with Mike DeSantis about His Childhood in the U.S. and his Expulsion from a Class of Upperclass Migrants

That isn’t likely. Only fans or parties actively looking for someone to back in 2024 will read the book, and within a few months unsold copies will lie on the remainder tables, rubbing shoulders with Mike Pompeo’s new memoir, “Never Give an Inch,” or past examples of campaign self-advertisements such as “A Call to Service” by John Kerry, “A Time for Truth” by Ted Cruz or even Trump’s “Crippled America.”

I am not responsible for that lousy prose. Like most politicians, he is a busy man who will often hire someone to write his book. The governor has a team of literary professionals that he talked to long and hard, and these writers had his speeches, social media feeds, appearances and policy papers to draw on.

And we can be sure the governor read the book and approved of its contents before publication. So we must assume the ideas (and “ideals”) in this book, such as they are, belong to him.

The book talks about his love of baseball and his working class roots in Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as his parents and their struggles to support themselves. They were Italian-Americans — a family of immigrants, although DeSantis has shown little interest in helping recently-arrived migrants on their American journey: he famously flew two planeloads, primarily comprised of Venezuelan migrants, from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in 2022, a cruel, calculated political stunt designed to embarrass the Biden administration and liberal elites with their “sanctuary cities.” That he would play politics with the lives of these poor souls doesn’t, I fear, speak well for him – nor that he performed throughout the ensuing media cycle with such glee.

But this hard-heartedness is a core part and parcel of the narrative, which offers a litany of resentfulness. “Before my time at Yale,” DeSantis writes of his undergraduate years studying history at the Ivy League school, “I had never seen a limousine, much less a limousine liberal. The students who were the most strident in their leftism came from the most privileged background. The experience of leftism on campus pushed him far to the right.

One can sense his anger against political correctness all over the book. He rails, on nearly every page, about “the woke agenda” that he sees permeating almost every level of life in America.

In DeSantis’ mind, a dire phalanx of “woke” fanatics is led “by the likes of Dr. Anthony Fauci,” who is seen as public enemy #1. He devotes a whole chapter of this book to railing against Dr. Fauci and people who used the powers of the federal government to implement “heavy-handed public health ‘interventions’” during the Covid-19 pandemic. The governor felt that the measures did not do anything to slow the course of the disease and were harmful to public health.

Again and again, DeSantis shows little interest in the First Amendment — except when his own free speech is concerned. Thomas Jefferson wrote “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” Jefferson understood that we each have a right, even a patriotic duty, to speak without permission from the authorities.

Instead, DeSantis rails against the “legacy media” — by which he means The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and so forth. These are “the praetorian guard of the nation’s failed ruling class, running interference for elites who share their vision and smearing those who dare of oppose it.” (I suspect he would, no doubt, wish to exempt Rupert Murdoch’s media empire from this judgment.)

In Defense of Civil Liberation: Justin Sayfie and the State of Florida During the 2019-2020 Pandemic. CNN Report on his Life and Times

Editor’s Note: Justin Sayfie has served in the administration of three Republican presidents and was a top adviser to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Sayfie is the publisher of SayfieReview.com, which is a website on Florida politics. The views expressed here are his own. CNN has more opinion.

He became a hero to millions for filling a void of leadership during the global crisis and uncertainty of 2020 and then went on to become a national hero.

In Florida, frail older adults were the ones who witnessed how he prioritized safety by not allowing patients with the coronaviruses to be transferred from hospitals into long-term care facilities. Parents of children who attend schools in Florida saw how he was focused on keeping the schools open so that students wouldn’t fall behind. Small-business owners witnessed how he battled to get and keep businesses open, so they and their employees could continue to feed their families during the pandemic.

DeSantis’ governance style during the pandemic not only earned him respect from many around the country, but it also became a weathered template for other battles he has fought.

Step 1: Take decisive action. A political principle that is contrary to what the man gets is that it is more important for a leader to be decisive than for the decision to be popular. Voters are not in favor of weathervanes for leaders. They value a leader who takes bold action, and doesn’t let themselves be tied down by a sense of direction or not knowing what direction to go next.

More than half of Americans believe it is completely or somewhat true that the United States is experiencing an invasion at the southern border, with 76% of Republicans and 47% of independents holding this view, according to an NPR/Ipsos poll in August. A recent survey shows that more than half of the Democrats and Democrat leaning independents say border security is very or somewhat important. The decision to relocate migrants was made because of this widespread bipartisan dislike of border enforcement.

A New York Times- Siena College poll in September found Republicans overwhelmingly opposed to classroom teaching in first through fifth grades, while 42% of democrats were against it. More interestingly, 71% of independent voters strongly or somewhat opposed classroom instruction of gender identity to children in elementary school, the poll found.

Florida native Emma Weyant was declared the winner of the NCAA Division I women’s 500-yard freestyle final after the NCAA declared Lia Thomas the victor. According to a NPR/Ipsos poll, Republicans and Independent Voters were strongly in favor of the position that DeSantis had articulated, while Democrats were split almost evenly.

The former President Richard Nixon referred to thesilent majority as the “cancel culture”, which had unique emotions of its own. That term is more politically potent now than it was then, because those voters who consider themselves part of this group – regardless of whether they are a majority – feel more silenced than ever.

In 2020, despite Trump beating Biden in Florida, Biden beat him by 11 points on the basis of independent voters. Yet two years later, DeSantis won back this important bloc of nonpartisan voters, winning a majority of independents and besting his Democratic opponent by 8 points among independents.

It’s a recipe that has worked brilliantly in Florida – an incredibly diverse, multicultural and fast-growing megastate. In 2024, anyone who thinks it can’t work elsewhere may be regretting it.

Why Did Trump Win the White House? The Case Against Donald DeSantis and the State of the Republican Gov. Gavin Newsom

“I’m going on offense,” DeSantis told the audience at the conservative Club for Growth event at The Breakers Palm Beach resort. Some of the Republicans who are in this debate just sit back and let the media define the terms of the debate. They let the left define the terms of debate. They are not making anything happen so they take it all in. I said that wasn’t what we were doing.

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.

Donald Trump is a favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination next year. He has an average of 42% in the national primary polls. He’s 15 points ahead of DeSantis who is at 29%.

The first is that most candidates in Trump’s position have been able to win their primary. Look at all the candidates who averaged at least 35% in past national primary polls in the first half of the year preceding the 2020 primary.

75% of these candidates have won the nomination when they faced at least one major challenger. The pollsters polling between 25% and 50% have won more than sixty percent of the time.

It would be easy to dismiss Trump’s numbers as merely the product of high name recognition, but history suggests something different. The eventual nominees from this group include, among others, President Gerald Ford for 1976, Vice President George H.W. Bush for 1988 and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole for 1996.

Candidates in DeSantis’ position haven’t been nearly as successful. Those polling between 20% and 35% have gone on to win their party nods about 40% of the time since 1972.

The Republicans had a poor performance in the fall of last year. His once 40-point polling lead over DeSantis declined to 10 points, on average, over the latter half of November through December. Trump’s share of GOP support went from north of 50% to about 40%.

The reason was pretty clear: Much of the blame for the GOP’s historical midterm underperformance for an opposition party was laid at Trump’s feet. Many candidates he supported, including those who backed the falsehood that the 2020 election was illegitimate, lost winnable races.

The Democratic Party of the Midterms. I Will Not Run for President. I’m a Democrat and I am your Retribution

I am thankful to everyone who has encouraged me to run for president. After eight years of pouring my heart and soul into serving the people of Maryland, I have no desire to put my family through another grueling campaign just for the experience.

I wouldn’t run for president to sell books or for a position in the cabinet. I have said before that I care less about my future in the Republican Party than I do about the future of the Republican Party. That’s the reason I will not be seeking the Republicans’ nomination for president.

Since Donald Trump won the nomination in 2016, I have fought to make clear that our party cannot be successful if we put personality before principle, if our elected officials are afraid to say publicly what they freely admit behind closed doors, and if we can’t learn from our mistakes because of the political cost of admitting facts to be true. The party didn’t bother to pass a platform in 2020. For too long, Republican voters have not been able to debate what their party stands for more than loyalty to Mr. Trump. A cult of personality is not a substitute for a party of principle.

I believe the tides are finally turning. Republicans are becoming tired of the drama and are looking for a new leader. I am concerned about the upcoming election and I am optimistic about the future of the Republican Party. We can’t afford to have Donald Trump be our nominee and suffer a defeat in the election. To once again be a successful governing party, we must move on from Mr. Trump. There are several competent Republican leaders who have the potential to step up and lead. The stakes are too high for me to be a part of a pileup that could help Mr. Trump regain the 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 expose the fake news media and deal with the RINOs, and we will beat the Democrats. We will remove Joe Biden from the White House so we can free America from these bad guys once and for all.

“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 very well executed. Day after day after day. We beat the left days after days after days because we did that.

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.

Like his former cabinet colleague, who got a somewhat lackluster reception on the ex-president’s side, the man with the plausible deniability stacked his speech 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.

You do not want the leader of the country to get into 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.’

When Donald Trump Decides to Run for the White House: The Case for Replacing the Maryland Gov. Larry Hutchinson in the 2016 Primary

That 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.

“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.”

How to stop Donald Trump, a question that lighting up Republican circles, is something that the party is considering, as some are contemplating what it will take to nominate someone besides the former president.

There is a disagreement in regards to the other options and how many should be. A small field with a clear alternative to Trump is how the party can set a new course. A larger field with more competing ideas is required to move the GOP away from the former president.

“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.

Asa Hutchinson was the governor of Arkansas who decided against running for re-election in 2022, and he 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.

Hogan and Hutchinson are both from different political climates which could inform their views of the race and their place in it. Hogan ruled a state that voted for Biden by more than 30 points in 2020, while Hutchinson ruled a state that backed Trump by nearly 30 points.

Resolving a Problem: What Comes Next for the House Selective Caucus on Social Issues in the House of Representatives

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.

“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.