Donald Trump does not really care about the Republican Party

Confinement and Reality: Where did Donald Trump go? Why did he lie? How does interviewing Donald Trump help to capture reality when you are not confined by reality?

The key to Trump’s appeal, however, is that he never did. After the 2020 election, the ex- president told voters what he thought they wanted to hear and that was tearing at democratic norms. Millions of people believed he had lost the election to Biden, even though there was no proof for his claims. The Fox News opinion hosts who amplified his falsehoods were guilty of exactly the same transgression – not to protect political careers but apparently to save their lucrative livelihoods.

The man isMaggie: He is a potential future candidate with big influence over the party. Interviews help illuminate how he keeps that influence, including his obsession with us-versus-our politics, salesmanship and presenting a version of himself that is very different from who he actually is.

Back in the 1990s when you were a New York Post reporter, you spent more time observing Trump than any other reporter. You’ve also pointed out that he lies a lot. Given that, I’m curious: How does interviewing him help you better capture reality when he is not confined by reality?

The Corrupt Campaign of the Ex-President: How Trump’s Demonstrated Insurrection Cost the GOP and What he Can Do to Keep His Word

The congressional committee decided to bring criminal charges against the President for inciting an insurrection because he couldn’t accept that he lost the election.

But as the panel wrapped up what was likely the last of its evidentiary hearings on Thursday, it was not at all clear that it had persuaded the jury. Americans who already blamed the rampage on Mr. Trump came away from four months of sensational and at times jaw-dropping hearings with more evidence for their belief, while those who started out in his camp largely remained there.

It is remarkable how tight a hold Trump’s unprecedented attempt to overturn a presidential election still has on Washington politics – even if many Americans are more concerned with feeding their families and paying rent amid raging inflation. The damaging impact of Trump’s campaign of lies is being felt. Even after Republicans won the House last month, a new CNN/SSRS poll published Monday found that only 34% of Republican-aligned adults are even somewhat confident that elections reflect the will of the people – down from 43% in October.

But the ex-president launched a characteristic effort to discredit attempts to call him to account, trying to intimidate prosecutors, mobilize his grassroots supporters and pressure top GOP officials to rally to his side. Every American has a constitutional right to political self-expression, but the ex-president’s call this weekend for his loyalists – “Protest, take our nation back” – struck an ominous tone since he showed on January 6, 2021, that he was willing to incite violence to further his interests.

Since Trump left office, the nation is nowhere near working through the enormous trauma of his term. And if the events of recent days are any indication, Americans may be in for another round of turmoil.

Trump dropped his clearest hint yet Saturday of a new White House run at a moment when he’s on a new collision course with the Biden administration, the courts and facts.

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. In each of the last three election cycles, it has been shown that the former president has cost the GOP political power and that he carries a lot of baggage with him. There seems to be no end in sight.

Republican vice chair Liz Cheney lost her seat in Wyoming because of her determination to hold Trump to account and has argued that it is performing a service for the future and has left a large impression on him.

The Ex-President’s Case for Political Persecusion and its Implications for the Future of the American Electoral System

Those controversies also show that given the open legal and political loops involving the ex-President, a potential 2024 presidential campaign rooted in his claims of political persecution could create even more upheaval than his four years in office.

Things may start to look different now. It could become a dividing line in the history of the Trump-Republican relationship after the elections in the fall of 2022. Decision-making is made by partisan power in Republican politics.

Among the people who will be interested in what Trump has to say about the legal issues facing former president, his business, and his allies are prosecutors, investigators, and lawmakers.

In Arizona, one of the ex-President’s favorite candidates, GOP gubernatorial hopeful Kari Lake – a serial spreader of voter fraud falsehoods – is again raising doubts about the election system. Lake said that it probably isn’t going to be fair.

Trump will have to run for the presidency again in the next few months and it will take multiple days to sort it out,” says Nancy Mace

One of the most powerful pro-Trump Republicans told the New York Post that the party was considering impeachment of Biden. Nancy Mace stated on CNN that she did not want to see impeachment proceedings after Trump was impeached twice. She said she was against the process being “weaponized.” But when asked whether Biden had committed impeachable offenses, she said: “That is something that would have to be investigated.”

There is a likelihood that the Republican presence in Washington will expand after the elections. The platform of scores of Trump endorsed candidates raises questions as to whether they will accept the results if they lose their races in two weeks.

Trump, who denies any wrongdoing, is yet to be charged in any of the cases and there’s no certainty he will be. But the pattern of recent days appears to show the legal clouds around him darkening.

Democrats are trying to get Trump back in the political spotlight. President Joe Biden equated the followers of the white supremacist group, “MAGA”, with “semi-fascism,” and some campaigns have tried to scare suburban voters by warning that pro- Trump candidates are a danger to democracy.

The party in power in Washington could face bad news when voters head to the polls because of raging inflation and spikes in gasoline prices.

The ex-President told supporters at a rally in Texas on Saturday regarding the possibility of a new White House bid, “I will probably have to do it again.”

“It may take multiple days, and it will be done with a level of rigor and discipline and seriousness that it deserves,” Cheney told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“This isn’t going to be, you know, his first debate against Joe Biden and the circus and the food fight that that became. This is a serious set of issues.

Corrupt obstructing the will of the voters: what did the former president say about the mob attack on the White House?

The committee cites Section 1512 (c) (2) of Title 18 of the US code, which makes it a crime to “corruptly” obstruct, influence or impede any official proceeding or attempt to do so. Based on what the panel presented, that seems exactly what Trump did, with a cocktail of schemes apparently aimed at thwarting the will of voters in the run-up to the mob attack on Congress.

The committee’s televised hearings did not include a cross examination of witnesses, so it is hard to say how much of the most incriminating testimony about Trump would hold up in court. The report and transcripts of its depositions are expected to be sent to the DOJ, which could be useful in fleshing out any criminal case by the special counsel and in preparing the public for any move by Smith to charge Trump.

It would be harder for the former President to control how his testimony was used, if he were to testify over an intensive period of days or hours.

This could become an academic topic. The issue could drag on for months and become pointless if the new Republicans take over the House, as one of their first acts they would likely sweep the January 6 committee away.

If a moment of truth is approaching for Trump, the same can be said of Garland and the DOJ. Any decision to charge the former president in either case is bound to trigger a furious political chain reaction. The ex-president and his movement have shown that violence is a legitimate tool for expressing their political grievances.

Already a 2024 candidate for the White House, Trump has both celebrated how an indictment would help him politically and complained about how “unfair” it would be. He’s toyed with the idea of trying to create a media spectacle around it and, at times, he’s ignored the prospect of criminal charges altogether, sources close to him told CNN.

The Power of the Prosectorial Overreach of a Public Adviser: Attacking the Presiding Judge Donald Trump in the Era of the Midterm Election

Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. 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). He can be followed on TWITCH at “julianzelizer”. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

Trump, who in the immediate aftermath of the midterms conceded that his party had suffered a “somewhat disappointing” outcome, has already moved on, settings his sights on winning a second term in Washington and attacking two GOP governors who could challenge his status as the party’s anchor in the months to come, Ron DeSantis of Florida and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia.

Republicans have gotten used to the fact that putting all their eggs in the MAGA basket can cost them a presidential reelection bid in 2020. Cementing Trump as the sole figurehead of GOP politics puts future general election victories at risk. Republican primary voters will punish those who want to keep Trump out of the election.

Even with unconventional and deeply flawed candidates such as Herschel Walker and Dr. Mehmet Oz running for key Senate seats, recent polls are showing that the GOP is in relatively good shape overall going into the midterm election on Tuesday. Democrats are in a race to defend seats while candidates are in jeopardy in blue states.

A GOP victory would make Trump even stronger. At this point, he has largely escaped accountability. Trump is still considered to be a viable political figure despite the ongoing criminal investigations.

So if charges are filed, expect a chorus of Republican voices attacking the prosecutorial overreach of a district attorney who pledged to focus on investigating the former president. The question of how far some will go to defend Trump in the court of public opinion might affect their ability to support other challengers to the GOP nomination, and they should choose their words wisely.

If Trump was to avoid prosecution, he would unleash a violent assault on the President who is still struggling with his own party and shaky economy. If election deniers enter positions of power after the elections, Trump will probably take advantage of them to make sure his victory is his. Trump will also come to the race having been to this rodeo before, which will mean he can perfect the technique and rhetoric that put him into office in 2016. With Musk buyingTwitter, Trump could be restored, giving him a way to 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).

“This campaign will be about the future. This campaign will be about issues. Joe Biden has put America on the fast track to ruin and destruction and we will ensure that he does not receive four more years,” Trump said at a small event Saturday in the South Carolina State House.

The Democrats focus on the dangers of democracy is not enough to get voters to go to the polls. These dangers have been outlined many times over, including in Biden’s closing speech Wednesday, but Democrats are nonetheless struggling to maintain power.

The Republican Party is reeling after seeing its hopes of controlling the Senate in 2023 dashed and finding itself in a nip-and-tuck battle for the House majority.

There are a lot of House races that can decide control. The Senate majority won’t be decided by the election in Georgia between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker, but the election will still take place on December 6.

If Trump is going to solidify his position, he will need to convince Republicans that he can do the job and not be a loser. 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. If Republicans conclude that they can hand Democrats a united government if they don’t fight his nomination tooth and nail, Trump will have a difficult road ahead.

Instead, the Republican Party will be thrust directly into the race by Trump, as the former president demands endorsements and fealty from officials who are still trying to comprehend what transpired last week.

The Point: Trump is about Trump. The leader of the Republican Party does a disservice to the good of the party over his own good.

Donald Trump will begin his political career under siege if he announces his third presidential bid on Tuesday.

When he entered the political arena seven years ago, the New York businessman sought to cast himself as a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination in order to impress the veteran political operatives and his primary opponents. After taking the plunge as the party’s indisputable leader this time, he finds himself in a defensive crouch.

Mehmet Oz, Adam Laxalt and Blake Masters, three Republican Senate candidates who earned Trump’s support in their primaries, respectively lost to Democratic opponents in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona. Meanwhile, Herschel Walker, a longtime Trump friend challenging Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, is headed to a December runoff after both failed to reach 50% support in Georgia.

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.”

When Donald Trump decides to run for the presidency, his former girlfriend Carole told Fox Business. The battle between Donald and Glenn Youngkin

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 not support Trump if he runs for president a third time.

A true leader understands when they have become a liability, and that was what she said when she was asked about Trump. A true leader understands that it’s time to step off the stage, and the voters have given us that very clear message.”

According to one of his aides, the former president was taken aback by the detail that Youngkin knew before the interview that she was going to split with Trump.

Glenn Youngkin can decide to run for president. But Team Trump will certainly mount a massive effort to win the Virginia delegates going to Milwaukee that is going to embarrass Youngkin,” said John Fredericks, a Virginia-based conservative radio host who chaired Trump’s campaigns in the state in 2016 and 2020.

Trump is cranking up the race for the Republican presidential nomination just as the former president’s legal problems seem to be getting worse. Ron is not an average Governor but the best by far in the country in public relations and he is number one in the country. “We don’t want Ronald as our President, because they don’t lie, just look at the facts and figures.”

“I know there’s a lot of criticism and people saying, ‘Just focus on Georgia,’ but he figures there’s no point in waiting. If Herschel loses, he will be blamed for distraction but if he wins he won’t be credited with energizing the base. said a current Trump adviser.

Trump has proven enormously resilient in the past at handling periods of adversity and his ability to command attention, by making outlandish remarks such as threatening to terminate the Constitution, perpetually draws attention in the media. He remains popular among his supporters, but it is not certain how many Republicans are willing to break with him. Every Republican alternative who looks good on paper might look more like former Texas Gov. Rick Perry in 2012 and 2016, or former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in 2016. Both GOP presidential candidates went from seemingly inevitable superstars to minor sideshows in primaries.

Nobody should be surprised. Michael Caputo is a former Trump administration official who is still close to the former president. “The question you have to ask is whether this format can work for him again.”

While the former president maintains significant support from grassroots Republicans, some of the party’s largest donors have been meeting with other potential presidential hopefuls and signaling they may be interested in bankrolling alternative candidates. Trump allies are confronting the issue of how to make a huge pile of cash he has raised since leaving office accessible to him as a presidential candidate. Billionaire Ken Griffin, who gave nearly $60 million to federal Republican candidates and campaigns in the 2022 cycle, told Politico in an interview last week that he would support DeSantis if the Florida governor tosses his hat into the ring for the 2024 GOP nod. Two other Republican donors who gave to Trump in 2016 and 2020 told CNN that they were also waiting to see what the outcome of the race was, but one of them said they would support Mike Pence should he challenge his old boss.

The biggest challenge will be raising money, but Trump has shown that he doesn’t need a lot of money, per se,” said a person close to Trump.

Some of Donald Trump’s supporters said the donors challenges, a lack of seasoned campaign operatives and questions about his stature made it hard for them 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. According to CNN, a group of additional aides and advisers are expected to help put together the likely Trump campaign, which is led by three current advisers and three new advisers. The apparatus is expected to dwarf his reelection campaign two years ago, multiple sources said.

Either way, as Trump works 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 his side said they are ready for battle one last time.

Investigating Donald Trump’s investigation of a Mar-A-Lago evidence collection and its violation of the Interior Department’s tax returns

The former commander in chief, who was an ex-reality TV star, is facing investigations after trying to overturn the 2020 election and over his handling of classified documents after leaving office. But his most immediate exposure may be in a case over an alleged hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

All matters, state and federal, have been denied by Trump and his company. Trump has also won dismissals of two lawsuits this week in cases brought by his niece and his former attorney.

Of the two investigations, legal experts say the one regarding classified documents may move ahead the fastest after several failed attempts by Trump in court to delay it. A judge on Monday formally dismissed Trump’s case challenging the Mar-a-Lago evidence collection and in which she had appointed a special master. There are tens of thousands of records and other items found among documents marked as classified in the private office and beach club of Trump.

It is not unusual for Trump to have difficulty in running two simultaneous cases on the same day.

But outgoing Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who is also considering a 2024 Republican presidential primary campaign, said on CNN on Tuesday that the fresh evidence of turmoil surrounding Trump could be a turn-off for GOP voters.

“It’s dizzying for the public to see this kind of chaos surrounding a candidate for president,” Hutchinson told CNN’s Brianna Keilar. I think that it is problematic and is a reflection of all the challenges that go with a Trump candidacy.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump refused to follow precedent and show his tax returns to the public. So the Supreme Court’s decision not to block the Internal Revenue Service from releasing his tax documents to the House Ways and Means Committee represented a significant personal defeat, as well as a political one.

The leadership of the committee wants the returns to determine whether or not there is a case for changing tax laws regarding sitting presidents. The possibility of hidden conflicts of interests or obligations owed by presidents or missed or under payments on such returns could be problematic given a chief executive’s power in setting tax policy. The lower court found that the committee had a legitimate purpose for seeing the returns. It is not clear how long it would take Democrats to examine the returns or make changes to the law after Republicans take over the House.

On the substance of the case, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, said that the Supreme Court had upheld a vital norm. The principle of oversight has been upheld since the birth of the original Magna Carta, and no different today. The committee will now conduct oversight that we have sought for the last three and a half years.

The top Republican on the committee warned that the court would make it impossible for a citizen to be safe from a majority political party.

One interesting wrinkle will be whether Trump’s loss in the tax returns fight will influence how future Republican presidential candidates will deal with their financial records. They couldn’t just reestablish a modern tradition of transparency for presidents by releasing them. They could possibly beat Trump.

A three-judge panel at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals expressed skepticism of Trump’s arguments for why he was entitled to a third party, known as a special master, to sift through around 22,000 pages of materials taken from his Florida resort. A key question at issue here is whether Trump, as a former president, is entitled to the kind of judicial intervention that could slow countless routine legal cases involving other Americans if it were widely adopted.

“We’ve gotta be concerned about the precedent that we would create that would allow any target of offense of a federal criminal investigation to go into district court and to have a district court entertain this kind of petition, exercise equitable jurisdiction (that allows a court to intervene) and interfere with the executive branch’s ongoing investigation,” Pryor told Trump lawyer James Trusty.

Other than the fact that this involves a former president, everything else about this is the same.

The judge rebuked Trusty for calling the FBI search a raid, as the former president has done multiple times. Do you believe a raid is the right term for the execution of a warrant? Grant asked. Trusty apologized for using the “loaded term.”

The court could overturn the special master’s decision in a way that would be a huge blow to the ex-president, according to a former special counsel.

Any such move could significantly speed up the documents case after Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to oversee it last week.

It might also offer the prospect of clarity to the public, who must now evaluate yet another unprecedented political scenario involving Trump. The former president’s multiple legal challenges have slowed both cases, but Tuesday offered signs that each could be moving closer to resolution.

The price of support for Donald Trump is going up. The former president has been through a lot of tumult, with fresh evidence of how his potential nomination for the presidency in 2024 could be damaging to the party.

Donald Trump is not Doing What Is Meant: The Case for a Dark Side of the Wall and the Future of the Democratic Party. Why Does Trump Go Too Far?

This week was not a one-off. After his decision to dine with Kayne West, he 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.

Republican Strategist Scott Reed said this week that the two previous events devastated for Trump’s future viability. The writing on the wall, Reed told the New York Times, seems clear. He said a bandonment has begun.

The legal troubles of Trump affect how he has packaged himself as a politician. For one, Trump thrives on media attention. This is his major weapon in political combat. He loves to dominate the news cycle, redirect national conversations, lash out at his enemies and eclipse all other issues. Trump, who has an instinctive feel for the rhythms of cable television and social media, did it again this week. As war rages in Ukraine and US officials try to contain a potential repercussions in the banking sector, there has been a lot of attention given to his possible arrest.

Trump does not seek to be loved but he seeks to weaponize the anger that he creates. Despite Trump’s name-calling and personal drama, he twice won the GOP presidential nomination – and the 2016 election. He had the same dynamic throughout his one-term presidency.

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 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. As president, he constantly flouted the limits of power. He has made antisemitic statements 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 tolerate almost anything, no matter how small, to protect him.

To be sure, none of these developments mean that he is done. There are various ways in which it is possible for Trump to win the nomination.

The problem is getting worse. 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 doesn’t mean to say that having to serve as the minority leader is not a bad thing.

There is a warning that the threat to truth and democracy remains acute, even though efforts to work through the trauma of the post- election period are heating up. The insurrection is causing controversy around a key member of the incoming GOP House majority that is likely to attempt to shut down or obstruct investigations.

The Georgia Republican said if she had her way, the mob would have been armed. She then rebuffed White House condemnations of her comments by insisting she was joking. This came days after the ex-president stepped up his voter fraud falsehoods by demanding the termination of the Constitution in a sign of how his potential second term might unfold if he wins the 2024 election and returns to the White House.

— In a third Trump legal entanglement, Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, said in January that charging decisions were imminent in an investigation into the ex-president’s attempt to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the critical swing state. CNN reported Monday that the office is considering racketeering and conspiracy charges, and might make a decision this spring. In a Hail Mary move, Trump’s lawyers have tried to get a court to throw out the special grand jury’s final report.

“It’s been over 700 days since the Washington Post published the full hour audio … of that highly incriminating phone call – 700 days for the DOJ to finally get around to subpoena him. When does it happen? Under Jack Smith.

Goodman also suggested that Trump’s legal team was guilty of wishful thinking if they believed that Smith’s appointment after a period spent abroad meant he was less likely to be influenced by the politicized aftermath of the January 6 attack and that a fresh mind would lean against indictments.

Smith’s appointment as the new US attorney for the Southern District of New York, while good news for Trump, was not good news for the entire country, according to a former US attorney.

They would have left their previous positions in private practice if there was a chance the Justice Department would take a turn for the worse. He said that it would happen in a month.

Progressives have been irritated with Attorney General Merrick Garland’s methodical (read: slow) pace of pursuing charges against Trump. The special counsel is in a situation to bring charges or not.

It is now a challenge for both cases to be finished before the election because of the deadlines in place, said CNN legal analyst Jennifer Rodgers.

They will bring a case on the documents side if it is possible, but it will probably take more time than before, Rodgers said.

Smith is following legal procedures, but the political context makes it more important for the DOJ to demonstrate that it had no choice other than to conduct an unprecedented search at the home of an ex-president.

The former president’s conduct is sure to face more withering scrutiny with the final report of the House January 6 committee, which wants to make its case for posterity before it is likely expunged by the incoming House GOP majority next year.

The committee is looking at three potential and rarely tried criminal charges against the former president, including insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the federal government, sources told CNN last week. The committee weighed referrals and other action against the Trump allies, such as an attorney and a former Justice Department official. The panel will consider possible ethics and legal sanctions against the lawmakers who defy committee subpoenas, according to Schiff on Sunday.

That makes the turn of the year and the early months of next year look like a good time for both Trump and the people who are investigating him.

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.

Could the act of sending criminal referrals to the DOJ risk furthering the perception of politicization of separate investigations into the aftermath of January 6?

A group of sceptics who voted against certifying the last presidential election will be wiped out next month by a new Republican House majority.

A summary and televised hearings from the committee were released Monday showing a devastating view of Trumps assaults on the constitution and peaceful transfers of power from one presidency to the next.

A Capitol Police officer told how she had slipped on spilled blood during the melee caused when the ex-president’s mob smashed its way into the Capitol. A mother and daughter who worked as election workers in Georgia received racist threats after Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, accused them of vote stealing. The speaker of the Arizona state house testified that he did not agree with Trump’s calls for him to interfere with the election.

Cassidy Hutchinson was one of many Republicans who testified about the assaults on the Constitution that were committed by Trump. The ex-aide to the White House chief of staff said it was unpatriotic. It was un-American. We were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie.”

The hearings claimed that Trump helped to plot a scheme to use fake electors to subvert the election in Congress. The committee argued that Trump incited a vicious attack on the Capitol and called a crowd to Washington after Vice President Mike Pence refused to use his powers. He was accused of violating his duty to protect Congress, the Constitution and the rule of law by not taking action as the violence raged.

The person is trying to get state officials to find votes that don’t exist. On CNN, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee said that the person was attempting to interfere with a joint session and was inciting a mob to attack the Capitol. I don’t know what it is if that’s not a crime.

The Mueller Committee’s First Look at Donald Trump’s Decay into Insurrection: Does the GOP Really Care? Or Does the Ex-President Tell Us About It?

Is it any wonder that Republicans will rally around Trump if he is hounded by any referrals after he left office?

At a time of high inflation and the aftermath of a once-in- a-century swine flu, does Americans really care about what happened to our democracy two years ago?

At one of the public hearings, Cheney said that every American had to think about it. “Can a president who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of January 6 ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?”

Americans rejected a lot of Trump’s candidates in swing state races that amplified his false claims of election fraud, suggesting a desire to protect American democracy.

It is impossible to quantify how the committee’s work affected voters in November. But it kept evidence of Trump’s insurrection in the news all this year, even as the ex-president launched a new campaign seen by many observers as a way to cast the probes into his conduct as politically motivated persecution. This is especially valuable as some pro-Trump Republicans, like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, escalate their attempts to distort what happened in the unprecedented attack on the Capitol.

“This is a massive investigation that the committee has undertook. A former federal prosecutor, who was on CNN on Saturday, told Pamela Brown that there were a lot of witnesses being identified.

The report will give a road map to the DOJ. It is kind of late for DOJ to this party as they are playing catch-up but that detail could be very helpful to them and will put a lot of pressure on them as well.

If nothing else, future generations will be able to judge the determination of the panel members, especially its two Republicans, and the courage of witnesses who told the truth to try save democracy.

Kinzinger explained his actions to hold Trump to account in his retirement speech on the House floor, because he served on the committee in defiance of his party and will not return to Congress.

According to the Illinois Republican, we now live in a world where a lie is Donald Trump’s truth.

I fear that the experiment will fall into the ash pile of history if elected leaders don’t look within themselves for a way out.

Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said that our system is not a system of justice where the masterminds and ringleaders get a free pass.

More broadly, the committee has now sketched the most urgent framing of a perennial question about Trump’s riotous careers in business and politics: Will he ever face accountability for his rule-breaking conduct? The question is very acute because the norm almost ruined US democracy.

The issue of accountability gets to the core of Raskin’s comment about foot soldiers – since many of those who were in the mob that trashed the Capitol have been convicted and jailed already. And since winning the White House in 2016, Trump repeatedly avoided paying political and legal prices as the ultimate example of a “ringleader” who skips past judgment. Former special counsel Robert Mueller, for example, unearthed a trove of information apparently showing Trump obstructed the Russia investigation but decided not to make a finding that the then-president committed crimes. And Trump was the first president to be impeached twice, but both times most Republicans in the Senate found reasons not to convict him.

Specifically, the panel said Trump should be charged with giving aid or comfort to an insurrection, obstructing an official proceeding, defrauding the US and making false statements. In an executive summary of its forthcoming final report, the committee argued: “The central cause of January 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump. The events of January 6 would not have taken place if it weren’t for him.

The DOJ has its own investigation into the events surrounding the insurrection and will have to weigh whether the case stands up as well in a court of law as it seemed to in the Capitol Hill committee room on Monday afternoon.

“The Justice Department has to go so much further on every single one of these people who was touched and interviewed and seen by the committee in any way,” former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe said on CNN on Monday.

The lawyers of Donald Trump would comb through every word, that is their job according to CNN legal analyst Elie Honig. They are going to look for any discrepancies in the witnesses’ statements, as well as any basis to attack them in court. That is what defense lawyers do.

The involvement of a former president makes this a rare case for the Justice Department. A good defense team could try to convince the prosecution that Trump was not trying to cheat in the election and that he truly believed there was fraud. They could claim that he was exercising his constitutional rights by telling his supporters to fight for their country. After considering the likely thrust of Trump’s defense, special counsel Jack Smith and Garland would have to satisfy themselves before laying charges that there was a substantial likelihood of obtaining a conviction.

Rod Rosenstein, who served as deputy attorney general in the Trump Justice Department, told CNN’s Erin Burnett that the most serious referral – accusing Trump of giving aid and comfort to an insurrection – would likely come up against a First Amendment defense.

The Department would have to prove that the president was inciting imminent lawlessness with his comments. In other words, they’d actually have to prove he intended for a mob to engage in violent activity. That would be a hurdle to prosecuting him under that charge,” Rosenstein said.

It is unlikely that prosecutors at the DOJ will be influenced by the opinion of the select committee, albeit one that is backed up by a mountain of evidence, that the former president should be indicted. The panel has amassed a large amount of testimony and other materials that can be used by the DOJ, which is one reason prosecutors have been wanting to get their hands on these materials for months.

With the DOJ already facing the enormous pressure of investigating Trump, which escalated when he declared his 2024 bid last month, it’s hard to say that Monday’s events will add to the burden. But at the same time, if Garland were to disregard multiple referrals, he would be certain to infuriate Democrats who already think the department has been slow to pursue Trump.

In the event that DOJ agrees with one of the lesser charges, the political earthquake caused by a prosecution might not be much different from if Smith believed Trump had aided an insurrection. In the past, America has never seen a situation where a sitting president indicted a successor who was trying to topple him. And of course, if no case is made over January 6, Trump is also facing the possibility of charges in another Justice Department investigation – into his hoarding of classified material at his Mar-a-Lago resort after he left office.

Smith would benefit from the depiction of Trump’s behavior being graphic enough to make the public question if a former president could go on trial. Attempted coups are, after all, more akin to fragile developing world democracies and dictatorships.

It is impossible for a man who would behave that way at that time in time to ever be considered for a position of authority again. Wyoming Republican said he is not suitable for any office.

Five Takeaways from the Final Jan 6: What Will Happen to the Explicit Investigating Committee on the Ethics of the Proposed 2020 Election?

“Accountability that can only be found in the criminal justice system,” committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. said. We have every confidence that information provided to the committee will be utilized to aid in the work of the agencies and institutions tasked with ensuring justice under the law.

Smith was appointed by Attorney General Garland to show his independence from the investigation after Trump indicated he was running for president again.

All are close allies of Trump, and their resistance in the face of the rules has been emblematic of the antagonistic style of U.S. politics that was growing even before Trump came on the scene.

Even though Republicans will control the ethics committee in the next congress, it’s not clear whether anything will happen to them.

That’s been evident to those of us who’ve covered Trump for a while, but it was affirmed by Hope Hicks, a former communications adviser in the Trump White House, someone who was very close to Trump.

During the course of the hearings, we heard from her who said she tried to warn Trump about false claims of fraud that were damaging his legacy.

“He said that if I lose, nobody will care about my legacies, it’s the only thing that matters,” he said.

According to testimony from multiple former Trump administration officials, there is plenty of proof that Trump knew he was losing and that he knew what he was doing.

According to testimony released by the committee, Bill Stepien, the campaign manager for the 2020 election, said that he had clear eyes. “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 added: “We’d have to, you know, relay the news that, yeah, that tip that someone told you about those votes or that fraud or, you know, nothing came of it. This is an easier job to be telling the president about wild allegations than it is to be telling the truth. It’s hard to tell him on the back end that that wasn’t true.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/20/1144303656/5-takeaways-from-the-final-jan-6-committee-hearing

The Commission on Investigations of Voter Fraud in the U.S. and the “President Trump Haters” (Cannon vs Cannon)

According to the report, Alex Cannon, one of Trump’s campaign lawyers, said in a late November phone call that he found no evidence that the results of the states could be changed.

The judge said that Trump was told by email that the specific numbers of voter fraud were incorrect but that he continued to tout them. He signed a verification swearing that the numbers are accurate, if not true, to the best of his knowledge and belief.

These people are not “Never Trump” or ” Trump Haters” as the former president likes to say. In most of the testimony that has been aired by the committee, the opposite is true.

“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.”

The committee said it will release summaries with each piece of evidence. It is probable that the beginning of the hearing included clips from past hearings, and similar to the recap of a previous season of a show on Netflix.

Democrats and independents said they pay a lot of attention to the hearings. Most of the Republicans said they were 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.

Voters will have the final say when it comes to politics. Trump will likely retain support with his base. As we noted, Republicans have been the least likely to be paying close attention to these hearings. In a multi-candidate primary, Trump remains the front-runner for the GOP nomination.

He lost many of his preferred candidates in swing states due to legal trouble, and he is also in legal trouble in multiple states. So whether it’s because of the chaos that often surrounds him, the threat he presents to U.S. democracy and faith in its elections, or simply because his brand is not a winner in competitive states where Republicans likely need to win to take over the White House and Congress, Trump is at his most vulnerable point since winning the presidency six years ago.

Griggs has known and worked alongside Willis in the city solicitors office and says she is a great lawyer and a good prosecutor. I think justice is somewhere in the middle. Griggs took a book from his shelf, read aloud from the state elections law, which bars “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud,” when I brought up Trump. Griggs told me they would indict Trump if you played the phone conversation to the grand jury and read the state codes. Griggs said it was interesting to see his side of the story, on the side of the prosecution. He sounded optimistic, even though he did not say if this particular prosecutor gave him hope, but he said that the former president’s due process would not be on Fox News or his Truth Social, but in a Georgia courtroom.

It was a remarkable statement, even for a president who had serially abused the powers of his office. Mr. Trump ordered the acting attorney general and his deputy to lie about the claims of fraud that had been investigated by the department.

Reply to Comment on ‘Constitutional Destruction of the First Ulysses S. Grant” by J. Fletcher Cheney

In making these referrals, the committee was certainly considering the past as well. Representative Liz Cheney spoke movingly of her great-great-grandfather, Samuel Fletcher Cheney, who served in the Union’s 21st Regiment, Ohio Infantry, during the Civil War. After the war, he marched with his fellow soldiers in the Grand Review of the Armies, passing President Andrew Johnson in the reviewing stand. Johnson would soon be impeached, she may have said. Like Donald Trump. He was acquitted like Donald Trump.

After Ulysses S. Grant won the election of 1868, Johnson went home to Tennessee, where he began to plot his comeback. It wouldn’t be easy, since he had a talent for unifying moderate and radical Republicans along with Democrats and former secessionists, and some of them hated him or wanted nothing to do with him. But it wasn’t illegal.

There is every sign that the dominance of this Republican base still reigns supreme as a new GOP presidential campaign dawns. Trump is still the biggest name in the race, but his top potential rival is expected to be DeSantis, who bills himself as a hardline leader who can implement Trumpism better than its author but without the chaos that enveloped his presidency. There was enthusiasm on the far right but many of the members of the House’s “MAGA” wing told CNN they weren’t ready to commit to Trump.

There was also something jarring about a former president who tried to steal the last election – and incited an insurrection to try to cling to power – campaigning and being embraced by supporters as if nothing happened.

Trump believes he is owed the Republican nomination by certain parts of his party, and that he doesn’t feel appreciated by some in his own party.

Trump’s musings about loyalty also recall his attack on evangelical leaders earlier this month, whom he said showed “disloyalty” by refusing to support his 2024 bid so far despite his delivery of a generational conservative Supreme Court majority. 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.

If he were to win the Republican nomination, there would likely be questions about his radicalism hurting him in the same places where Trump lost the 2020 election, despite his public persona being more disciplined. 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.

New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” on Sunday that right now DeSantis would probably win the Granite State’s GOP primary. Sununu, who told Bash he’s considering his own White House bid in 2024, also took a swipe at Trump’s demeanor and the size of his event, which was an address to party activists rather than one of his seething rallies in a state where he won the 2016 GOP primary.

Judging by his remarks about DeSantis and evangelical leaders, Trump is not yet ready to acknowledge that reality. 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.

But he hasn’t abandoned all of 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. And earlier on Saturday, in New Hampshire, the former president – who is facing criminal investigations by the Justice Department and a district attorney in Georgia over his attempt to overturn the 2020 election – could not resist taking aim at institutions that are revealing the true course of events in 2020.

We’re going to stop the terrible weaponization of our justice system. There’s never been a justice system like this. It is all an investigation, according to Trump. 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.

Detecting a Fake Trump Candidate: The Case of Burt Jones and the Investigating Overcrowded and Unseen Conditions at the Fulton County Jail

If she has ambitions other than the office of the district attorney, she has not spoken publicly about them. She has hosted a fund-raiser for a former colleague at the D.A. office who was running for lieutenant governor in a political race, her only real hiccup thus far. Bailey’s Republican opponent, Burt Jones, was one of 16 fake Trump electors Willis’s office was investigating, and the fund-raiser drew a sharp rebuke from Judge Robert McBurney of the Fulton County Superior Court — the same judge tasked with deciding whether to make public the special grand jury’s report — who called it a “what are you thinking” moment that created “horrific” optics and disqualified Willis from proceeding with her investigation of Jones.

There was a scenario in which a Democrat like Willis, with her tough-as-nails messaging on crime, could have been not entirely unlike Governor Deal before her, better positioned to deliver on some reforms the left wing of the party has been fighting for — especially considering how, over the past year, reformists have experienced backlashes in places like San Francisco and New York. Kim Jackson, the head of the protest, was elected to the State Senate and she told me that she was thrilled to support a black woman who was running on an anti deathpenalty platform. But three months into Willis’s tenure, a horrific mass shooting occurred at multiple spas in and around Atlanta, leaving eight dead, mostly Asian women, in what appeared to be a hate crime. The accused shooter would be seeking the death penalty. And though Willis campaigned on pretrial diversion in lieu of prison time as one of her major reform issues, a report released by the American Civil Liberties Union on overcrowded and unsafe conditions at the Fulton County Jail cited insufficient use of diversion and a failure to indict arrested individuals in a timely manner as two major factors.

Willis told me the report was “a joke” and offered several arguments for why the data was flawed. 25 people are in the Fulton County Jail on a conviction, and they are there for 48 hours. Many people with crimes that a regular citizen would say to stay in jail. That is not the kind of people that stay in jail here. People are given bail.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/magazine/she-took-on-atlantas-gangs-now-she-may-be-coming-for-trump.html

Tim Smith and the Atlanta Grand Jury: Implications for the 2020 Election and the Special Counsel to the Attorney General’s Investigative Team

Mark Binelli writes for the magazine. Before writing about Yuval Sharon and the tangled legal aftermath of a biker brawl in Texas he wrote about the opera director. Nydia Blas is an Atlanta-based visual artist who is interested in storytelling through a Black female perspective. She was one of the British Journal of Photography’s Ones to Watch in 2019.

Timothy Heaphy told CNN’s Kate Bolduan on “Erin Burnett OutFront” that “unless there is information inconsistent, which I don’t expect, I think there will likely be indictments both in Georgia and at the federal level.”

The grand jury in Atlanta that investigated former president Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the election recommended multiple indictments, according to a foreperson of the panel.

A telling under-told detail is that many of the 75 witnesses interviewed by Willis’ special grand jury — including this author — are Republicans who had voted for Trump in 2020. They had been to see his antics. Many had been on the receiving end of his wrath in his desperate unrealistic attempt to cling to power.

Now that the grand jury is finished, it’s up to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to review the recommendations and make charging decisions. The decisions made this case will have a significant effect on the presidential campaign in 2020 and beyond.

They were present for important events. The special counsel will want to hear from the president about what happened on January 6 and his understanding of the election results. They were both in touch with him about the events preceding the Capitol riot.

There is a lot of evidence that the special counsel needs to comb through, including evidence recently turned over by the House January 6 committee, subpoena documents provided by local officials in key states, and discovery done by lawyers for Trump allies late last year.

“He will not stop because of a family relationship, because of purported executive privilege,” Heaphy said of Smith. He wants to get the information that the law entitles him to.

The Fox News Story of the Ex-President, Rudolph-Murdoch, and the Phenomenology of the Conservative Party: A Tale of Two Faces

But the ex-president’s entire political career, the modern Republican Party and a vast conservative media empire are based on the exact opposite premise of the Rolling Stones’ song: giving the party base exactly what it wants to hear – whether it is true or not.

Fox News is the latest example of opinion formers on the right exposed for being held hostage to the fury they helped to incite. Murdoch admitted under oath that he had tried to stop viewers from defecting to the other side in the 2020 election after some stars endorsed false allegations that the election was stolen. Some of the Fox hosts were worried about alienating their audience if they told the truth about Trump.

Key players on the right feel like they have no choice but to appease, satisfy and further inflame the voters and the viewers of whom their profits or hopes of political power are dependent, according to new details.

The GOP’s leaders have always been led by fervent, self-radicalizing voters. GOP luminaries who resist the tide, like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, ex-Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake and former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, see their careers expire. Those that buy in – like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, now a member of the House GOP leadership team – can rocket to prominence.

Murdoch’s business model has evolved from seizing upon and feeding political anger, argues 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.

There are also signs that the billionaire publisher may finally be getting buyer’s remorse over Trump given the headline in his New York Post after the ex-president’s low energy 2024 campaign launch in November, which read, “Been there, Don that.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/01/politics/trump-fox-republican-party-2024/index.html

The Power of the Republican Base: Why Donald Trump Ends 2016 with a Patriotic Campaign and Why he’s Fighting for the Establishment

In the deposition he gave in the case, he said that a dollar is green rather than red or blue.

The Republican politicians who appear on Fox are influenced by a similar calculation of what the political market will bear. Their adoption of the doctrine favored by the conservative grassroots stretched America’s democracy to the limit.

Catering to the base helped fuel the rise of Trump in 2016 as he shattered the Republican establishment presidential field. GOP lawmakers whose hold on power depended on not crossing the reality-star-turned-president then allowed Trump to run riot. That helped foster 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 watched as two predecessors, John Boehner and Paul Ryan, tried to resist the GOP’s far right insurgency and lost their job. McCarthy gave Tucker Carlson access to hours of Capitol Hill security footage last week and it was obvious that his speakership was owned by the GOP’s most extreme elements.

Murdoch was worried about driving away the same GOP base that McCarthy was controlling, which is one of the reasons why so many financial experts are concerned about a possible default.

When the candidates have to pivot to a general election, the straddle between winning a party’s base voters and trying to court middle America is always tested. This political leap could require great political skill from whoever emerges from the GOP’s first ever “America First” primary.

Trump uses this to connect with Republican voters, many of whom are White men in rural areas who feel as if the world has left them behind. This allows Trump — a man of wealth, power and privilege — to paint himself as being “anti-establishment,” a message that continues to resonate in a post-Watergate America. As a result, Trump relates to his supporters, making the case that he is fighting against the forces they are up against as well.

The theme of Republicans failing to represent the values of the people who elected them foretold Donald Trump’s election, according to the book ‘The Courage to be Free’.

The chasm between GOP voter base and behavior in Washington would grow larger 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.

Don’t leave with us. Don’t be fooled by the fake news from these people. He said that what you’re reading isn’t what’s happening.

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

“We will beat the Democrats, we will rout the fake news media, we will expose and appropriately deal with the RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). Trump told a crowd of people at a Maryland convention center that they would evict Joe Biden from the White House and make America great again.

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

The speeches that highlighted two Republicans who would be favorites to win the GOP nomination if Ron DeSantis gets in, came with some irony. The split screen captured their party’s unresolved ideological split that Trump engineered in 2016 when he crushed establishment candidates. CPAC, where Trump spoke for decades, kept alive the flame of the two-term president Reagan who redefined the conservative movement when he won the 1980 election. 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.

There are other possible alternatives to Trump that were laid out in recent days. Former US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who has already launched a campaign, and ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who may do so, both braved the lions’ den at CPAC, and both launched veiled attacks on their former boss.

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

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

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

Hogan has decided to bow out of the Republican primary race, which could point to a GOP contest that does not mirror the fracturing of the anti-Trump vote that helped his rise to power. If the Florida governor decides to get into the race, the nomination race would be a long one with a lot of winner-take-all primaries.

Right now, you have Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis at the top of the field with a lot of other people in single digits. Hogan told CBS News that there’s less chance for someone to rise up if you have more of them.

We won by 1.5 million votes in 2022, a dramatic increase from the previous year when we won by just 32,000 votes. We earned the largest percentage of the vote that any Republican governor candidate received in Florida history,” DeSantis said on Sunday.

On Election Day in 2020, Americans proved that Trump could be defeated. If an indictment, or several indictments, come down in the next few months, voters — not courts and not prosecutors — will once again be the ultimate judges of his political fate.

No one can be surprised by the idea that Trump might have been involved in covering up the truth about an affair with an adult film actress. And no one should be so innocent as to believe prosecutors never respond to political incentives when choosing to file charges.

An indictment would again test the truism of the Republican Party in the age of Trump – that his grip on the GOP’s most fervent supporters is so great that most of its lawmakers and officials feel obliged to appease him in order to preserve their political careers.

Trump’s effort to politicize the case and to distract from the allegations against him has already worked as his top allies in Republican House leadership attack Bragg.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Sunday called it “the weakest case out there.” The California Republican told a news conference at which he had instructed GOP-led committees to investigate the hush money payment that he had already talked to Jim Jordan from Ohio.

The Case for a Second Donald Trump Presidential Indictment: Implications for the Future of the Republican Party and the American Psychological Landscape in South Carolina

The speaker insisted that Trump doesn’t want people protesting over what may or may not happen. “If this is to happen we want calmness out there … no violence or harm to anyone else,” McCarthy said.

Further underscoring Trump’s firm hold on the GOP base, his social media post prompted several of his Republican critics to line up beside him. The former Vice President thinks it’s a good idea to challenge Trump for the presidential nomination in twelve years. And I, for my part, I just feel like it’s just not what the American people want to see.”

New Hampshire Republican Governor Chris Sununu told CNN that the investigation was building a lot of sympathy for the former president, and that it was time for Republicans to move on from Trump. He said that a few of his friends had coffee this morning and all said they felt like the President was being attacked.

The issue of whether the political division and trauma of putting Trump on trial would be in the wider national interest is being examined, as is whether it would hold more lasting constitutional implications than the January 6 investigations. It may not look good on a failed prosecution.

The flurry of events has made clear that the former president is still the center of the GOP universe.

The former chair of the GOP in New Hampshire said that she would have expected the GOP to learn from its weak showing in the election. “It’s like they are addicted to him. The GOP can’t break their addiction to Trump.”

“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. This may give a lot of pause for a group of Republican and conservative voters who are not so focused on the rest of the field.

Yet there’s no guarantee that broad sentiment will translate into enough support for a specific GOP alternative to deny Trump a third nomination. CNN’s latest poll of GOP primary voters shows that it’s difficult.

And while Trump’s political brand has struggled in the past few months, recent polls show him leading the pack of potential Republican presidential candidates — with a significant gulf between him and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Wilson expects the same kind of reaction in South Carolina. While many might show their support for the president, Wilson said an indictment by Trump would reinforce what he considered to be the majority opinion at the conference the Palmetto Family Council, a social conservatives group, held in Charleston last weekend. He said that the sentiment was that Americans should focus on 2024 rather than dredge up issues from the past. He said, “People want to pay attention to what’s happening for the next four years, eight years, twelve years, and twenty years from now.”

Robinson said it was unrealistic for the candidates to believe enough Republican voters would reach that conclusion on their own. Robinson maintains that a viable argument could be made in favor of the candidate who wants voters to pass over a figure that looms as large over the party as Trump. “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.

House Republican leaders have made it clear that while many strategists would like the party to distance itself from the former president, they have not received that memo. Horn said McCarthy’s call to investigate the investigation echoes language that might be heard in an authoritarian state like China. “That is genuinely outrageous,” she said. “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’s anti-American.”

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. Donald Trump has never been a winning electoral strategy.

Matt Bennett, executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group, agreed that Republicans, “may be getting the broader electorate very wrong here, as they did in 2022.” Bennett believes the continued indication that Republicans are willing to break almost any convention to protect Donald Trump is the most ominous signal of all.

“It’s profoundly dangerous and bad,” Bennett said. The conduct, the quisling approach to strong men, gets countries into very serious trouble.

The investigation into Trump’s alleged role in Stormy Daniels’ case is underway, and a Manhattan district attorney is expected to prosecute

Two advisers said that the former president appears to have resigned himself to the likelihood of an indictment, with one close adviser calling his perceived distancing from the matter “compartmentalization.”

There are signs that the investigation into Trump’s alleged role in Stormy Daniels’ case is nearing an end, but it is not clear if the former president will be charged or when.

CNN exclusively reported Tuesday evening that Daniels communications with an attorney who is now representing Trump were turned over to the Manhattan district attorney. The possible exclusion of Joe tacopina from Trump’s defense stems from the exchanges that were said to date back to when Daniels was seeking representation.

CNN does not see the records in question and has not heard of the claims that confidential information was shared with his office. He says he neither met nor spoke to Daniels. The ethical experts said the impact of disclosure will depend on the substance of the communications.

An adviser wonders if an indictment from the New York grand jury could affect Trump’s plans for a big rally in Texas on Saturday.

“We’re in uncharted territory. We don’t know what this does in the long term. A source involved with Trump’s campaign told CNN that they would prefer he stayed out of trouble than get a boost.

On his social media page over the weekend, Trump called for protests and said he was going to be arrested. He moved away from that language after advisers and his allies called for him to tone down his rhetoric.

Still, federal officials, including those at the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, are monitoring what they say has been an uptick in violent rhetoric online, including calls for “civil war,” since Trump made those calls. But so far, it’s been limited to chatter and has lacked the actionable information, coordination and volume that preceded the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, US officials and security experts told CNN.

Why is Donald Trump indicted over hush money payments to an adult film actress? The case of Alvin Bragg, the Special Counsel, and the Public Defender

As speculation mounts that former President Donald Trump could soon be indicted over hush money payments to an adult film actress in 2016, Alvin Bragg may have to make a history-making decision.

It’s obvious that this is a sham. We want to know whether or not federal funds were involved. Did this stem from — it sure looks like it grew out of the special counsel investigation, because those are the legislative concerns we have as Congress.

Bragg would have to coordinate with the former president, his lawyers, the Secret Service, and the police if the grand jury indicts him. There are security concerns, including for Bragg and his staff. Trump has always said he is innocent, and he’s been lobbing abuse at the DA on social media all weekend.

We will not be intimidated by efforts to undermine the justice process, nor will we let baseless accusations deter us from fairly applying the law. In every prosecution, we follow the law without fear or favor to uncover the truth. Our skilled, honest and dedicated lawyers remain hard at work.

On Wednesday, he was thrown into more trouble after an appeals court ruled that Evan Corcoran, Trump’s defense attorney, had to testify before the grand jury regarding the case surrounding classified documents. The ruling is so important because the Justice Department must convince the court there is enough evidence to show that Trump committed a crime to puncture the convention of attorney-client privilege.

Cohen, who made the payment to Daniels, is seen by some analysts as a weak link in any trial since his credibility could be undermined by his own conviction for lying to Congress. CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams explained that Bragg would have to test the question of Cohen’s trustworthiness now before a grand jury or at trial. “It’s very much in their interests, to take a beat, step back and decide,” he said. “This kind of thing happens all the time, as prosecutors decide whether and how to bring cases.”

Is Donald Trump the Presumptive Candidate for the 2024 Presidential Nominee? A Post-Trump Strategy for the Republican Party

Patrick T. Brown is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank. He was a senior policy adviser to the congressional Joint Economic Committee. Follow him on social media. The views he expressed in this piece are his own. CNN has more opinion on it.

But the biggest political impact may be in creating a tightrope that Trump’s would-be challengers, and other Republicans interested in charting a post-Trump future, will need to walk.

Many Republicans will call the decision of an overzealous prosecutor a politicized decision on the legal question. Some will be tempted to back Trump to the hilt, arguing that the party should unify against the arrayed forces of the “deep state” and the media. The strategy of the Republicans will be convincing them that if they come for Trump, they will come for them.

“I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair,” DeSantis told a news conference Monday, while stressing that he sees the prosecutor’s potential charges as an example of “pursuing a political agenda and weaponizing the office.” Conservative stalwart Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, who has already endorsed DeSantis despite him not even having officially announced yet, offered a similar version of this strategy on a radio show.

The ancient Greeks used to say apophasis, or, not to bring up a topic in a debate by claiming not to be. A textbook example of the strategy was offered by Republicans who responded with implicit criticism of Trump and explicit criticism of the Manhattan District Attorney.

It runs the risk of being a little too clever. DeSantis’ quip infuriated the usual MAGA online crowd, including the former president himself. But solely concentrating their rhetorical ire on the legal adventures of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, without laying out subtle critiques of Trump, would make it harder for Republicans to then run or endorse other candidates for the 2024 nomination.

A compelling narrative is needed for successful candidates and parties. Without making a case, directly or indirectly, for why Trump should not be the presumptive nominee, the narrative of the Republican Party will center around Trump and his adversaries. The risk of allowing Trump to claim the nomination is mitigated by the focus on the sins of prosecutors in New York.

Geoff Duncan: CNN Investigates Gotham City, Trump’s 2020 campaign, and the case for a prosecuting action against Donald Trump

Editor’s Note: Geoff Duncan, a CNN political contributor and Republican, served as Georgia’s lieutenant governor from 2019 to 2023. He is a former baseball player and author of “GOP 2.0: How the 2020 Election Can Lead to a Better Way forward for America’s Conservative Party.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles on CNN.

There is a key difference between New York and Georgia when it comes to multiple and simultaneous investigations. The former involves a probe into Trump’s alleged role in a scheme to pay hush money to adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels, during his 2016 presidential campaign.

CNN reported that the Fulton County investigation is focusing on potential racketeering and conspiracy charges in connection with Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, charges that are more often associated with TV crime dramas like “The Sopranos” than a former president of the United States.

The Republicans are telling it. As the world braced for breaking news in Gotham City, most members of the GOP, from reliable allies like House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to potential presidential rivals, rushed to Trump’s defense. House Republicans denounced, “the unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority” and called for investigations into Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

In Georgia, the story could not be more different, with the prominent voice of Trumps legal team leading the counteroffensive. With very little exception, the state’s leading Republicans, including Gov. Brian Kemp, have remained out of the fray and have been conspicuously silent.

Next came the pressure campaign from Trump and his legal team urging Republican legislators in the Georgia General Assembly to call a special session overturning Biden’s victory. Georgia’s House speaker, who died in November, told Trump that he would do everything in his power, according to media reports.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/23/opinions/georgia-gop-trump-criminal-investigation-duncan/index.html

The Corrupt Campaign Against Fraud in 2019: Donald Trump, the Avatars of the Oval Office, and Joe Biden

Although detached from reality, these rumors achieved their objective of sowing doubt about an election where to this day no one has ever presented credible evidence of widespread fraud.

The results of 2020 need to be accepted and we need to begin writing the next chapters of the Republican Party. Rather than looking for ways to overturn the election, our effort should be to win hearts and minds before the votes are counted.

Trump knows how to weaponize attacks and turn on his opposition so that his supporters will believe that his opponents are abusing power. He used it with former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, as well as the media, FBI, and Special Counsel Robert Muller. After Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, Trump was even more aggressive in his attacks on the election system. He described Bragg as a “woke tyrant.”

There is a portion of Trump that has always liked the image of the mob boss. Professional wrestling fans will remember the gusto with which he embraced the fighting spectacle and the connections he forged to the world of professional boxing. He is not deterred by the idea that he is more popular than someone in the West Wing because he has risen to prominence in New York in the 1970s and 1980s.

This suits the cultural era of the anti-hero and allows Trump to get into the spirit of the role. And shortly after he entered the Oval Office, he surrounded himself with military officials who bolstered his image as a man of strength.

The Trump who does not seem to feel shame, has insulated himself from the psychological stress that others might feel to step down in the face of scandal.

Put all of this together and it becomes easier to understand why an indictment might not be the worst thing to happen to the former president. It must be said that the relationship with the porn star may no longer be a disqualifying issue. It’s also worth noting that this allegation about his personal life seems to pale in comparison to the full-throated campaign to reverse the will of the electorate and undermine our democratic system in 2020.

It is not important to those who work for the law and the Constitution if someone benefits from an investigation or indictment. And regardless of the outcome of the many investigations, they are — contrary to what Trump may claim — worthy pursuits of justice.

Ultimately, voters can still respond how they like in 2024, since an indictment or conviction would not bar Trump from becoming president again. While there are many factors that will determine whether we can reestablish the many guardrails that have disappeared in American politics, the electorate will be of utmost importance when it comes time to decide who should be given the responsibility of inhabiting the Oval Office.