Tag: Trumps

Democrats step up pressure on Biden to reverse Trump’s decision on space HQ

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And one of the state’s senators is even seizing on the politics surrounding abortion and LGBTQ issues, arguing that sending the command from a blue state to a red one takes away the rights of service members.
Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) “has raised the issue of reproductive health care access in his conversations about the Space Command basing decision,” said one congressional aide, who asked for anonymity to discuss private conversations between Bennet and the Pentagon.
The senator, the aide added, “has serious concerns about the impact that abortion ban laws have on readiness and our national security.”
It’s the latest turn in a saga that’s dragged on for three years after Trump personally directed the Air Force to choose Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, as the command’s permanent headquarters. Alabama and Colorado were the two finalists in the Air Force’s search.
The decision, if given the final signoff by the Biden administration, would uproot the fledgling command from its current location at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs. Since the original decision, members of Colorado’s delegation in both parties have decried the move to a Trump-friendly state as political favoritism that will delay the organization from achieving full operating status.
“I haven’t found any Democratic senator who thinks it’s a good idea to allow a precedent to stand that encourages politics to overrule the judgment of our military command,” Colorado Sen. John Hickenlooper said in an interview.
The Biden White House vowed to reassess the choice after lawmakers blasted the basing decision. The Air Force secretary must still determine whether to follow through with Trump’s decision or keep the command in Colorado.
The Air Force was expected to announce a final decision at the end of 2022, but the deadline passed with no ruling.

“We don’t have anything new on the decision timeline,” the service said in a statement. The service declined to say why a choice has not been made.
Lawmakers on both sides of the argument say they’re in the dark on when the Air Force might finally make a call, but both states’ delegations have said they believe they will prevail.
“I do think the delay is, in my view, a positive thing,” said Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.). “My read of that is that the administration is taking a harder look and a fresh look at it and revisiting certain elements of the decision. That’s what I hope they’re doing.”
The commander, Gen. James Dickinson, has said Space Command won’t be fully operational until the final basing decision is made.
Pros and cons
U.S. Space Command was restarted by the Trump administration in 2019 as it sought to emphasize the importance of the military’s space mission, coinciding with the creation of the Space Force. Space Command, which oversees the operations of military space assets and defending satellites, had been its own outfit since the 1980s, but was folded into U.S. Strategic Command following the creation of Northern Command in 2002.
Colorado Springs and Huntsville were two of six finalists selected by the Air Force in late 2020 for the permanent headquarters. The list included military installations in Florida, Nebraska, Texas and New Mexico.
Colorado lawmakers contend permanently keeping Space Command in its temporary home is more efficient and will ultimately prove better for national security because it will be near Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command.
With a large military space presence already in the state, Colorado’s leaders argue that politics alone was the deciding factor in the Trump administration selecting Alabama.
They point to comments Trump made after leaving office boasting that he made the call to move Space Command.
“I hope you know that. [They] said they were looking for a home and I single-handedly said ‘let’s go to Alabama.’ They wanted it. I said ‘let’s go to Alabama. I love Alabama.’” Trump said on an Alabama-based radio show in August 2021.
Alabama’s almost entirely GOP delegation says Huntsville — dubbed Rocket City because of the large aerospace industry presence there — checks all the boxes for the new command.
The Pentagon visited each of the six prospective headquarters sites between Dec. 8, 2020, and Jan. 7, 2021, where experts gathered data and refined cost estimates. Those cost estimates were not released publicly, according to the Defense Department’s inspector general.
“Democrats said it was political, but the best place to put it is in Huntsville,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said in an interview.
“The only reason you would leave it in Colorado is because that’s where it’s at right now,” Tuberville said. “But we need to make sure it’s in the right spot. We have the missile defense. We have Redstone Arsenal, NASA. You name it, we got it.”
Since a headquarters decision was announced in January 2021, both the Defense Department IG and the Government Accountability Office released reports that questioned whether the selection process was adequate.
DoD IG found the Air Force base analysis that was conducted under the Trump administration’s direction “complied with law and policy” when selecting Alabama as the headquarters location, while the GAO asserted the service’s base location analysis had “significant shortfalls in its transparency and credibility.”
Neither report determined whether Trump meddled in the decision.
Both oversight groups agree a resolution was reached during a White House meeting with high-ranking officials on Jan. 11, 2021.
Meeting attendees included the former president and top Pentagon leaders who have since left — the acting defense secretary, the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs, the Air Force secretary and the assistant secretary of the Air Force for installations, environment and energy.
Days before the meeting, the Pentagon received new information that if Colorado was selected the military could renovate a building instead of having to construct a new one to house the new headquarters.
But the Space Force did not deliver an updated estimate to Air Force officials ahead of the White House meeting, according to GAO.
The Pentagon is keeping the cost estimates private and are not included in the GAO report because the information is designated as “sensitive and privileged.”
Opting for renovation instead of new construction would allow for the command to reach full operational much sooner than the estimated six years.
In interviews with the GAO, the head of Space Command, the top Space Force general, and the former vice Joint Chiefs chair, all said they conveyed in the meeting that the headquarters should remain in Colorado because that was the best way to reach full operational capability as quickly as possible.
Bennet echoed the same concerns during a speech on the Senate floor this month.
It is important the Biden administration not ratify “a political decision that was made in the last few days of the Trump administration,” Bennet said, referring to the former president dismissing the counsel of Pentagon officials who recommended the headquarters remain in Colorado.
Bennet underscored it is not only expected to be cheaper and faster to keep Space Command in Colorado, but the military would not have to worry over the number of civilian workers who won’t opt to move to Alabama. Roughly 60 percent of the Space Command workforce are civilians, he said.
“Decisions of this importance shouldn’t be made this way. It should be in the interest of our national security. And the Biden administration has the opportunity to restore the integrity of this process,” Bennet said.
Renewed fight
The Colorado delegation fought the move when it was initially announced, but had gone quiet in the following months. They rekindled their efforts last month when Hickenlooper and Bennet were the only Democrats to join Republicans in opposition to the confirmation of Brendan Owens, the nominee to oversee facilities and energy programs at the Pentagon. The pair said they opposed him because the Pentagon had brushed off their efforts to meet with Austin to discuss Space Command.
Owens was still confirmed despite most Republicans also opposing him.
Bennet also threatened to hold up other nominees to secure a meeting with Austin. Hickenlooper and Bennet met with Austin to discuss the decision on Jan. 26, though no resolution was reached.
“He’s got a lot on his plate, so he wasn’t versed in the details of the issue,” Hickenlooper said. “But he listened very thoughtfully and I think he took it very seriously.”

Hickenlooper, left, and Bennet met with Austin to discuss the decision on Jan. 26, though no resolution was reached.
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Drew Angerer/Getty Images
But Bennet continued to press the issue. A spokesperson said Bennet placed a hold on Ravi Chaudhary, Biden’s nominee to oversee Air Force installations. He dropped the hold this month after meeting separately with Chaudhary and Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall where he “reiterated his longstanding concerns” with the basing decision. The behind-the-scenes maneuvering has not been previously reported.
Some opponents are also highlighting how the climate in the U.S. has changed since an initial decision was made in January 2021. Many Democrats are unsettled by moving service members from a blue to a red state after the Supreme Court dealt a blow to abortion rights last year.
With the end of nationwide federal protections for abortion, many Democrats have raised the impacts on troops stationed in states where the procedure is now banned or significantly limited. Bennet has publicly raised similar concerns in the proposed Space Command move.
“I’m deeply concerned about how the Dobbs decision and state abortion bans will affect Space Command’s workforce and readiness if the command leaves Colorado,” Bennet said in a statement to Military.com in August.
Another driver for the Biden administration to keep the headquarters in Colorado and not move to a conservative state are rights for LGBTQ people.
“It’s hard not to think about the dramatically more hostile environment in Alabama when it comes to reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights,” said one Democratic aide. “It’ll mean many of the civilians who work for Space Command may not move with it. And service members will be forced to move somewhere where they’ll lose those rights.”
Though both Tuberville and Hickenlooper downplayed the role the Supreme Court decision would play in the basing move, the impact on troops has been in focus after the reversal of abortion protections under Roe v. Wade.
Even Austin, who is usually not outspoken on political issues, moved to shore up troops’ access for abortion. He issued a memo in October directing the Pentagon to pay for service members to travel costs for abortions, though not for the procedure itself, arguing the “practical effects of recent changes” in laws will hurt military readiness.
Formal policies issued this month cover travel costs for obtaining abortions as well as administrative leave, as many troops are stationed in states where the procedure is now illegal.
Tuberville was among the GOP lawmakers who slammed the move. He vowed to hold up civilian Pentagon nominations as well as top military promotions over the new policy.
The issue, however, isn’t purely about red states vs. blue states. If Space Command doesn’t move to Alabama, the headquarters will remain in reliably conservative Colorado Springs. The area and its military assets are represented by Republican Doug Lamborn, who chairs the House Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee. Lamborn has also criticized the move as one of political favoritism over national security needs.
The state’s other two Republican House members, Reps. Ken Buck and Lauren Boebert, have also protested the decision and signed several letters with Democrats arguing to keep the command in Colorado.
Yet if the Biden administration decides to reverse the earlier decision, it could open itself up to criticism that it’s making a political call, just like the Trump White House. A reversal also would draw pushback from Alabama’s delegation, including Rep. Mike Rogers, who has new tools at his disposal as the House Armed Services Committee chair.
In the meantime, Alabama lawmakers are confident the Trump administration’s decision will be upheld.
“Nobody’s saying, but they’ve done several more reviews on it in the last two years,” Tuberville said of the final decision. “And we’ve pretty much passed all the tests.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 28, 2023
Judge won’t unseal details of Trump’s privilege fight over Jan. 6 grand jury

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POLITICO and The New York Times had both petitioned Howell to unseal portions of the grand jury proceedings in October, citing the historic nature of the secret rulings she had issued. The Justice Department opposed the unsealing, prompting Howell’s decision.
“The continued secrecy of certain details about that investigation is required for the sake of grand jury witnesses and the government’s investigation,” Howell wrote.
Both POLITICO and The Times indicated they were considering whether to appeal.
“POLITICO is committed to the principle that a government of, for and by the people is transparent with the people on such an important matter,” company spokesperson Brad Dayspring said. “We are reviewing the decision and evaluating next steps.”
A spokesperson for The Times, Danielle Rhoades Ha, said: “We are disappointed in the ruling. We will make a decision about whether to pursue further legal steps once we’ve had time to process the opinion that sets forth the rationale for the decision.”
In recent months, aides to former Vice President Mike Pence have appeared at the courthouse to testify behind closed doors after Howell rejected an effort by Trump to claim privilege over their testimony. Other top Trump allies have been seen heading into the federal courthouse’s sealed grand jury rooms — including former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and his onetime deputy Pat Philbin.
Press reports, typically attributed to people familiar with the proceedings, have also detailed a series of fights over legal privilege issues and a bid by Trump to assert executive privilege to keep some aides from testifying.
One grand jury-related dispute, involving an objection by Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) to prosecutors’ seizure of his cellphone last year in an election-related probe, was argued before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday in a session held partly in public and partly in secret. POLITICO revealed the details of that grand jury fight ahead of the appeals panel’s decision to partially unseal the arguments.

Howell seemed to evince discomfort about aspects of her latest ruling, particularly what she termed the “ironic” result that because cases of significant interest to the public often draw extensive news coverage and speculation about grand jury activities, the governing legal standards can require courts to withhold information in such cases even though court rulings on grand jury subpoenas in routine cases are often released with the names of those involved blacked out.
Redaction would be ineffective in the current dispute, the chief judge said, because it would simply be too easy for those reading the opinions or filings to infer the identities of those involved in the litigation.
“Redacting information in those materials would not sufficiently uphold that secrecy because matters occurring before the grand jury are so deeply intertwined with non-secret information would prove useless, or worse, misleading,” the chief judge wrote.
Howell, who will hand over the chief judge’s post and decision-making authority in grand jury matters to a colleague next month, also dinged the Justice Department for failing to address how Attorney General Merrick Garland’s public announcement in November of the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith might have undercut the justification for secrecy in the ongoing probe.
“When asked to address the impact of this DOJ announcement on grand jury secrecy in the instant applications … the government simply ignored this portion of the Order and chose not to respond to the fact of the Special Counsel’s appointment,” Howell wrote.
Howell used her 32-page opinion to throw considerable shade at a 2019 decision in which the D.C. Circuit overruled her and held that judges lack discretion to release grand jury materials for reasons not specifically enumerated in a federal court rule governing disclosures. In that ruling, the appeals court said historical interest was not a sufficient basis for a judge to make grand jury-related information public.
Howell pointed to what she portrayed as a series of oversights in the appeals court’s decision, even as she acknowledged that it binds her legally.
The Supreme Court declined to review the D.C. Circuit ruling, leaving it as the established law for federal grand juries in Washington.
However, then-Justice Stephen Breyer issued a statement noting that three other federal appeals courts had found more flexibility for judges to release grand jury-related records. Calling it an “important question,” Breyer urged a federal panel overseeing court rules to dive into the issue and determine whether changes to the policy are appropriate.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 24, 2023
Trump’s visit to Ohio derailment gives Biden’s team some breathing room

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Other Trump critics were more blunt in dismissing the motives behind his visit.
“It’s clear that it’s a political stunt,” said former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a Republican and former member of Congress who led DOT during President Barack Obama’s first term. “If he wants to visit, he’s a citizen. But clearly his regulations and the elimination of them, and no emphasis on safety, is going to be pointed out.”
Buttigieg took his own veiled shot at Trump — though not by name — when answering a POLITICO reporter’s question about the tension between Trump’s rail safety record and his criticisms of the Biden administration.
“There is a chance for everybody who has a public voice on this issue to demonstrate whether they are interested in helping the people of East Palestine or using the people of East Palestine,” Buttigieg said. “A lot of the folks who seem to find political opportunity there are among those who have sided with the rail industry again and again and again as they have fought safety regulations on railroads and [hazardous materials] tooth and nail.”
Buttigieg said he was trying to be careful not to violate the Hatch Act, which restricts federal employees’ political speech, by speaking about a presidential candidate from his position as Cabinet secretary.
Ahead of Wednesday’s appearance, the Democratic National Committee sent reporters a list of Trump’s deregulation efforts, with the subject line: “REMINDER: Trump Slashed Transportation Safety and Environmental Rules, Funding.”
A spokesperson for Trump defended his record and said that he was not to blame for the tragedy in East Palestine.
Trump, who launched his latest presidential bid in November, said on his social media network Truth Social that he was venturing to Ohio to visit “great people who need help, NOW!”

On Wednesday Trump appeared in East Palestine, bringing with him Trump-branded water and cleaning supplies. Speaking in front of an East Palestine Fire Department truck, Trump took shots at the Biden administration’s response, including the EPA, Buttigieg and even Biden himself.
While handing out red MAGA hats, Trump told reporters, “Buttigieg should’ve been here already.” He also had a message for Biden: “Get over here.”
Buttigieg plans to travel to East Palestine Thursday, after taking intense heat from Republicans for not going sooner. The Biden administration has said that high-ranking officials, aside from EPA chief Michael Regan, did not visit East Palestine in the derailment’s immediate aftermath to comply with the evacuation order in place and to avoid impeding investigation and emergency response efforts.
Trump also called on Norfolk Southern to “fulfill its responsibilities and obligations” to the village. The EPA formally put the rail company on the hook Tuesday for covering all costs of the clean up, which the railroad had already pledged to do.
“If our ‘leaders’ are too afraid to actually lead real leaders will step up and fill the void,” his son Donald Trump Jr. wrote on Twitter last week.
Among other criticisms, lawmakers of both parties have questioned DOT’s oversight of the railroad industry’s labor and safety practices in light of the fiery Ohio crash, which unleashed plumes of toxic smoke and left lingering worries about air and water contamination. They have also faulted the Biden administration for not sending any senior leaders to the derailment site until EPA Administrator Michael Regan traveled there last week.
Buttigieg has not yet gone there but said he plans to, and the heads of DOT’s Federal Railroad Administration and its hazardous materials agency are expected to be in East Palestine on Wednesday. Biden administration officials have said that top leaders held off from visiting the site to comply with evacuation orders and to avoid creating a distraction. Still, lower-level investigators and employees from agencies such as the FRA and EPA swarmed to East Palestine within hours after the 150-car Norfolk Southern train went off the track with a cargo that included flammable chemicals such as vinyl chloride.
Because the disaster was a chemical spill, White House officials said, Regan was the lead agency official tasked with responding. Regan’s agency has faced skepticism from residents about its assurances that East Palestine’s air is safe to breathe, despite a lingering odor that has left residents in the village complaining about rashes and headaches.
Buttigieg told reporters Monday that he plans to go to the site “when the time is right.”
“I am very interested in getting to know the residents of East Palestine and hearing from them about how they’ve been impacted and communicating with them about the steps that we were taking,” he said.
Even some less partisan observers have questioned why the Biden administration didn’t send a high-profile official sooner to show its support for people in East Palestine.
“There’s a tremendous value when a catastrophe occurs of a high-ranking official taking charge,” William Reilly, who led EPA during the George H.W. Bush administration, told POLITICO’s E&E News for a story Tuesday. He said the purpose of those visits can include “communicating to the locally impacted people and to the country. The communication part is enormously important. And that did not happen here.”
Local and state political leaders said they welcome high-level attention — to a point. They include East Palestine Mayor Trent Conaway, a registered Republican who on Monday had called President Joe Biden’s decision to visit Ukraine before coming to his Ohio village “the biggest slap in the face.”
At a news conference Tuesday, Conaway said Trump is welcome to visit but that he does not want the village to become “political pawns.”
“We don’t want to be a soundbite or a news bite,” Conaway said. “We just want to go back to living our lives the way they were.”
A spokesperson for Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Daniel Tierney, declined to comment when asked whether Trump is welcome in East Palestine.
One senior administration official, granted anonymity to speak freely because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said Biden’s appointees are “supporting people in East Palestine” while Trump and other Republicans “see the people there as political props.”
“Trump’s visit validates that this is all about politics for him and Republicans who have been quick to criticize and bizarrely blame Secretary Pete yet are the same people who have done Norfolk Southern’s bidding on rolling back major safety requirements,” said the official. “Trump more than anyone.”
Watering down rail regs
As president, Trump made rescinding regulations a major priority for his agencies, even signing an order requiring them to revoke two rules for every one they enact. At the same time, he said he wanted to “ensure that America has among the very cleanest air and cleanest water on the planet.”
His administration’s most high-profile action on rail safety was its withdrawal of a 2015 rule mandating more advanced brakes on some trains carrying especially hazardous materials.
That withdrawal, however, stemmed from intervention by Congress, which required regulators to put the rule through a more stringent cost-benefit analysis after the Obama administration had issued the regulation. The rule ultimately failed that analysis.
Even if that rule had taken effect, it would not have applied to the train that derailed in East Palestine, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board — the lead agency investigating the crash — wrote on Twitter last week. Still, environmental groups pressed Buttigieg last week to restore the Obama-era brake rule, writing that “[i]t should not take a tragedy like the recent hazardous train derailment in Ohio … to turn attention to this issue again.”
Trump’s DOT also took several rulemaking actions sought by railroad companies that could weaken safety, including its withdrawal of a rule requiring that a crew of at least two people be present on freight trains. The Obama administration had proposed that rule in response to a fiery oil-train derailment that killed 47 people in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in 2013.
The Trump administration argued that “a train crew staffing rule would unnecessarily impede the future of rail innovation and automation.”
Railroad companies say no factual justification exists for mandating crews of more than one person. Such a requirement, they argue, would make U.S. railroads less competitive and could even undermine climate efforts if it makes shippers turn to trucking, which emits more pollution than trains do.
The Norfolk Southern train that derailed in Ohio had three crew members aboard. After the derailment, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) asked in a letter to Buttigieg whether that was too few people to control such a long train.
The Trump administration also dropped a ban on shipping liquefied natural gas by rail tank car, saying the expansion of U.S. natural gas production necessitated the rollback. The ban had been a response to concerns about possible explosions.
In addition, Trump’s Federal Railroad Administration stopped conducting regular rail safety audits of railroads — which the Biden administration later reinstituted — and allowed railroads to replace some human safety inspections with automation.
Under Trump, “railroads could apply for relief from federal regulations, and FRA would grant them,” said Gregory Hynes, the national legislative director of the country’s largest rail union, SMART Transportation Division.
“It’s really shocking what they’ve been able to get away with,” he said.
On chemicals, a rollback of ‘almost everything’
Advocates of tougher regulations on toxic chemicals expressed just as much frustration.
Under Trump, “there was a rollback of, you know, almost everything,” said Sonya Lunder, the Sierra Club’s senior toxics adviser.
Trump’s EPA repealed regulations intended to prevent chemical accidents at industrial facilities and rolled back requirements for companies to regularly assess whether safer technologies or practices have become available. It also withdrew requirements that companies have third-party audits to determine the root causes of accidents.
The Biden administration last year proposed reinstating all those requirements.
Public health advocates also criticized the Trump administration’s implementation of the Toxic Substances Control Act, a longstanding law that Congress gave a bipartisan overhaul in 2016.
Advocates say the law was designed to require EPA to look at the overall health dangers of chemicals, but the Trump administration took steps to look at risks in only a piecemeal fashion. For instance, it declined to factor in chemicals Americans breathe from the air or drink in their water, limiting analyses to only direct exposure from products or uses. The Biden administration has reversed that policy and reconsidered some chemicals’ risks, with potential restrictions or bans on the way.
A federal court in 2019 faulted the Trump-era EPA for avoiding studying certain health risks of some chemicals like asbestos.
Trump’s political appointees also overruled career scientists on a health assessment for a type of PFAS, or so-called “forever chemicals,” that contaminates almost a million Americans’ drinking water and tried to bury internal reports that warned of unsafe chemicals in the air and water.
In addition, Trump proposed shuttering the Chemical Safety Board, a tiny agency that investigates accidents at industrial facilities but has no regulatory or enforcement power.
These rollbacks were carried out by several political appointees with industry ties. Those included Nancy Beck, a former expert for the trade group American Chemistry Council, who became the top political appointee in EPA’s chemical office and limited the agency’s study of hazardous chemicals. Trump later tried to appoint Beck to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, but her nomination stalled in the Senate.
Kayla Guo contributed to this report.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 22, 2023
Trump’s White House accomplishments aren’t so easy to sell on the campaign trail

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Elsewhere, Trump has praised the anti-abortion movement and his role in picking conservative justices, but has also criticized some leaders in that movement for not doing enough in the 2022 midterm election. He has also said the issue was “poorly handled” by Republicans, pointing to members and candidates who advocated for no exceptions to bans on abortion.
Trump’s team believes that he can thread the needle between touting the work he did in facilitating the end of Roe while staying on the popular side of public opinion about abortion restrictions.
“Especially in the primary, it’s a very strong talking point for the president. He’s got a good record, and he’s on good ground going into the primary and general election,” said John McLaughlin, a Republican pollster who advises Trump. “His position since he ran for office and since he was in office has been consistent.”
But navigating those twin achievements from his time in office could become tricky to handle over the course of a potential primary and general election run. Trump has begun taking steps to try and maneuver that political landscape.
At the Council for National Policy summit last weekend at Trump Doral in Miami, he called in to praise the group’s work promoting conservative policies and touted his anti-abortion legacy, according to a recording of the call shared with POLITICO. The call came amid reports that evangelicals and pro-life leaders have been keeping their options open going into the 2024 Republican primary.
“We appointed 300 judges. We appointed, as you know, the three Supreme Court judges that made your whole right to life, and everybody was trying to get this for many, many years, for many, many decades, and we were able to get that done. And we’re very proud of it, and it was a tremendous tribute to many of the people in the room that worked so hard with us,” Trump said in the roughly five-minute call. “But it was the whole pro-life movement. They say I’m the most pro-life president in American history.”
Steve Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, called the former president’s record “unmatched” when it came to “nominating pro-life federal judges and Supreme Court justices that overturned Roe v. Wade.” Of his boss, he added, “there has been no bigger advocate for the [anti-abortion] movement.”
Trump is not the only Republican grappling with the issues of vaccines and abortion.

His only official challenger in the race, Nikki Haley, ignored the latter issue in her launch speech but was confronted on it after in interviews. Haley, who has said she is “pro-life” because of her experiences as a mother and as governor of South Carolina, signed a law banning abortions past 20 weeks, said she would not support a “full-out federal ban” on abortion, but wouldn’t articulate exactly what she would stand behind now, only saying that there should be “consensus” on when exactly abortion should be banned.

Nikki Haley arrives for an event launching her candidacy for the presidency Feb. 15 in Charleston, South Carolina.
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Win McNamee/Getty Images
The issue confronting both Haley and Trump is that any abortion policy stance that plays well in a primary may present problems in a general election. While only 35 percent of Republicans said they disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the decision is overall unpopular among Americans, with a majority — 56 percent — saying they did not support the decision, according to a recent Ipsos poll.
Trump could be rewarded by GOP voters for putting conservatives on the Supreme Court. But Erick Erickson, a conservative radio host who does not plan to endorse any candidate in the GOP primaries, said the former president had an altogether different “vulnerability” on the topic: “that it is no longer an issue.”
“The conservative voters don’t need Donald Trump now to put conservatives on the court, he did it. If anything, he’s kind of hurt himself among social conservatives after Dobbs, by coming out and saying maybe it wasn’t a good idea,” Erickson said.
The more complicated issue, Trump allies say, will be how he navigates his role in the Covid-19 pandemic. Privately, Trump has expressed pride in the historic efforts to produce a vaccine. But he is also quite aware that the far-right has made vaccinations and especially mandates a toxic issue. He was personally booed for telling a crowd he had gotten a booster shot.
Cheung called Operation Warp Speed a “once-in-a-lifetime initiative that gave people the option of utilizing therapeutics if they wished to do so.” But he also stressed that Trump “fought against any attempt to federalize the pandemic response by protecting every state’s right to ultimately decide what is best for their people because of the unique challenges each state faced.”
Since launching his campaign, Trump has attacked another likely 2024 political foe, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for trying to “rewrite history” on his coronavirus response. Trump’s campaign has built up an arsenal of video clips showing DeSantis as supportive of the Covid vaccine even as he has become favored by the anti-vaccine right. The video moments include DeSantis personally greeting a FedEx truck with the first batch of Pfizer vaccines arriving in Florida.
And one person close to the campaign suggested trying to turn former Vice President Mike Pence and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner into the faces of Operation Warp Speed, noting that they had leadership roles in the vaccine’s development. But it’s unclear just how effective those lines of attack would be as time passes since the pandemic.
“There may be a small faction in the Republican Party that this applies to, but I don’t see how many Republicans are going to hold it against anyone for promoting the vaccine back in 2020, whether it was Trump, DeSantis or anyone,” said Matt Wolking, a former Trump campaign official and Republican strategist. “The true hardcore anti-vaccine [crowd is] found on the right and the left and it’s been that way for decades. So I think most Republicans are going to continue to advocate for personal choice and not mandates.”
But distrust of the Covid-19 vaccine — not just the mandates — has been a central theme of far-right broadcasts, including Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, which regularly features skeptics on the show. Bannon, a former Trump strategist, has called vaccines and vaccine mandates a “major issue” for Republican voters and Trump’s base. He has warned against Trump leaning into his role promoting the development of the vaccine.
Still, McLaughlin said he doesn’t see any risk to how Trump handles the vaccine. Some conservative voters may recoil at it. But, he said, the more significant dynamic was that the issue itself was no longer as animating as it once was.
“I think people have moved on,” McLaughlin said. “I think there are more pressing issues that people are looking at. When you talk to the average person, they’re struggling to buy food or buy gas.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 20, 2023
Pence to fight special counsel subpoena on Trump’s 2020 election denial

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“He thinks that the ‘speech or debate’ clause is a core protection for Article I, for the legislature,” said one of the two people familiar with Pence’s thinking, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss his legal strategy. “He feels it really goes to the heart of some separation of powers issues. He feels duty-bound to maintain that protection, even if it means litigating it.”
Pence’s planned argument comes on the heels of an FBI search of two of his homes after his attorney voluntarily reported classified material in his home last month — drawing him into a thicket of document-handling drama that’s also ensnared Trump and President Joe Biden. While Pence aides say he’s taking this position to defend a separation of powers principle, it will allow him to avoid being seen as cooperating with a probe that is politically damaging to Trump, who remains the leading figure in the Republican Party.
Pence is preparing to launch a presidential campaign against his onetime boss. Aides expect the former vice president to address the subpoena — and his plans to respond it — during a visit to Iowa on Wednesday.
But regardless of its political consequences, the argument from Pence’s camp means Smith could be in for a legal mess.
That’s because the legal question of whether the vice president draws the same “speech-or-debate” protections as members of Congress remains largely unsettled, and constitutional scholars say Pence raising the issue will almost certainly force a court to weigh in. That could take months.
“It is admittedly a constitutionally murky area with no clear outcome,” said Mark Rozell, a George Mason University political scientist who specializes in executive privilege. “Since there is a legislative function involved in the vice president presiding over the Senate, a court very well could decide that it must address the scope of the speech or debate privilege and whether it would apply in this case.”
Although vice presidents aren’t technically senators, they are charged with breaking tie votes in the upper chamber. And every four years, on Jan. 6, they lead the electoral vote count that facilitates the transfer of power from one administration to the next. Trump’s months-long crusade to pressure his vice president to derail Biden’s win — which is central to Smith’s investigation — focused entirely on Pence’s duties as Senate president, which legal scholars say lends credence to Pence’s case.
“I do think there’s a plausible [speech or debate] argument here,” echoed Josh Chafetz, a Georgetown University constitutional law professor. “And I’d be surprised if Pence doesn’t eventually make it. After all, a lot of the action here took place in terms of arguments about how he should rule from the chair.”

The clash arrives at a sensitive moment in Smith’s probe, which appears to be nearing its conclusion. Typically, prosecutors wait to subpoena top officials until right before making charging decisions. In addition to the demand for Pence’s testimony, a parade of high-level Trump administration witnesses has marched into the sealed grand jury rooms of Washington’s federal courthouse in recent weeks.
And it presents a new wrinkle for Pence as he makes moves typical of a White House hopeful, including his trip to Iowa this week. After confronting the 2020 election head-on late last year with a book and op-ed, he’s largely avoided a topic that risks courting confrontation with his former boss and possible future presidential opponent.
Most commentary since Smith subpoenaed Pence has focused on whether Trump might prevent Pence from testifying by asserting executive privilege — an unwritten constitutional protection that lets presidents maintain the confidentiality of high-level conversations (a Trump attorney told CNN Sunday that Trump intends to assert executive privilege over Pence’s testimony).
But seeking congressional immunity would further help Pence avoid a Trump collision and might prove more effective — a point legal scholars say is being overlooked. That’s because unlike executive privilege, which has limits that can be overcome in criminal proceedings, “speech or debate” clause protections have remained mostly impenetrable in investigations relating to the official duties of lawmakers, their aides or other congressional officials.
DOJ has, notably, argued in civil litigation that the “speech or debate” clause protects the vice president when working on Senate business. The department explicitly asserted in 2021 that Pence was shielded by the “speech or debate” clause in a civil lawsuit related to his role presiding over Congress’ Jan. 6 session.
The Senate, too, has long maintained that vice presidential involvement in its business “would fall within the legislative sphere and be protected by the speech or debate Clause.”
Courts have never explicitly ruled on that front, but have hinted over the years that vice presidents should enjoy some level of constitutional privilege stemming from their unique role in two branches of government.
A ‘first time’ argument
Roy Brownell, former counsel to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and author of a prominent paper on vice presidential privilege, said that if Pence ultimately asserts “speech or debate” protections, it will be “the first time it’s ever been clearly expressed that the vice president is claiming his own constitutional privilege.”
Even when Dick Cheney sought to expand the powers of the vice presidency to a historically unprecedented degree — triggering numerous court battles — he never formally invoked the protection, Brownell noted.
Brownell also emphasized that court rulings have found that “speech or debate” protection applies to congressional officials performing “fact-finding” related to their jobs. Pence, he said, could characterize his pre-Jan. 6 conversations with Trump and others as research into how he might rule on matters related to the Electoral College.
It’s still unresolved whether the Jan. 6 session of Congress legally counts as “legislative” business, however. In addition, even if courts deem Pence’s role a legislative one, judges would still have to decide whether the “speech or debate” clause protects him from having to testify about his conversations with Trump world about the bid to upend the election.
“It’s a fair question,” said Stan Brand, who was general counsel of the House of Representatives under former Speaker Tip O’Neill. “Procedurally, it creates another layer of potential judicial adjudication and that will certainly complicate the effort to enforce the subpoena.”
Some experts pointed to the recent 11th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that paved the way for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to testify to local investigators in Georgia — who are also probing Trump’s effort to subvert the election. Graham initially protested, contending the “speech or debate” protection should shield him from testifying at all.
But the circuit ruled that Graham could be compelled to testify so long as investigators steered their questions away from anything involving his legislative responsibilities. The Supreme Court declined to step in.
Pence may ultimately land in the same place, but it’s unclear which aspects of his involvement in the Jan. 6 session of Congress would fall outside of his official duties. High-level Trump administration witnesses, as they warned the then-president not to pressure Pence over how he counted electoral votes, made clear they viewed him as occupying a uniquely legislative role on Jan. 6.
“The Vice President is acting as the President of the Senate,” former assistant attorney general Steven Engel recalled telling colleagues in testimony to the Jan. 6 select committee. “It is not the role of the Department of Justice to provide legislative officials with legal advice on the scope of their duties.”
The counterpoint
Not all legal scholars agree that vice presidents enjoy congressional privileges, however. Former White House counsel Neil Eggleston said the text of the “speech or debate” clause doesn’t apply to anyone but lawmakers.
“The literal language is that this applies to ‘senators and representatives,’” said Eggleston, who advised former President Barack Obama from 2014 to 2017. “I think, by the language, this does not apply and the argument is completely frivolous.”
Still, predicting exactly how courts would handle the argument is difficult. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the executive privilege wielded by presidents, despite the Constitution making no reference to the concept.
Meanwhile, the GOP House is fighting a grand jury proceeding of its own against Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who is citing the same constitutional protections to shield his communications from Smith and his team.
Perry, a key ally in Trump’s bid to seize a second term, has contended the “speech or debate” clause should bar prosecutors from accessing his phone — which the FBI seized last year — but a federal judge ruled against him in December. An appeals court secretly put that ruling on hold last month and scheduled oral arguments on the matter for Feb. 23. The House filed a lengthy brief Monday to defend Perry’s argument.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 14, 2023
DeSantis on Trump’s attack: ‘I don’t spend my time trying to smear other Republicans’

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When asked about Trump’s social media post Wednesday and whether any proposed defamation legislation would apply to Trump, DeSantis said he has a “thick skin” and brushed off the former president’s broadside. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images
OCALA, Fla. — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday responded to former President Donald Trump’s latest attack, saying he won’t “smear” fellow Republicans.
Speaking at a press conference in Ocala, Fla., the GOP governor and likely 2024 presidential candidate was responding to questions on Trump’s latest broadside. On Tuesday, Trump, who already announced he’s running for president, reposted a message on social media sarcastically insinuating DeSantis is grooming teenage girls.
“I spend my time delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting against Joe Biden — That’s how I spend my time,” DeSantis said. “I don’t spend my time trying to smear other Republicans.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 9, 2023
Trump’s ‘24 game plan: Be the dove among the hawks

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The claims are a continuation of a posture Trump sought to project both as a candidate for president in 2016 and while in the White House — one occasionally contradicted by his record.
But his renewed focus on international affairs also comes as the Republican primary field is expected to get crowded with potential challengers likely to pitch their own foreign policy bona fides. That includes two former Trump lieutenants: former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and former secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Those close to Trump’s campaign operation say he plans to try and paint himself as an anti-war dove amongst the hawks. They believe doing so will resonate with GOP voters who are divided on, but growing wary of, continued support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.
“Trump is the peace president and he’s the first president in two generations to not start a war, whereas if you look at DeSantis’ congressional record, he’s voted for more engagement and more military engagement overseas,” said a person close to the Trump campaign, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
“Trump is the only person who has said no more funding for the Ukraine war. I haven’t heard Nikki Haley say anything like that… Pompeo or Pence? Where do they stand on Ukraine?”
In fact, Haley, Pence and Pompeo have all, to varying degrees, called for the U.S. to fund Ukrainians and even, on occasion, criticized the Biden administration for not doing enough.
Still, Trump’s modernized “America First” framework has already had profound implications, both in upending establishment Republican and neo-conservative orthodoxy on foreign policy and in muddying the consensus on issues ranging from military intervention to how to handle ruthless dictators.
And as multiple Republican officials noted for this story, last week the conservative and once-hawkish Heritage Foundation stepped away from its long standing demands for a robust defense budget and said cuts to Pentagon spending should be on the table as part of the debt limit negotiations.

“I do think national security is going to be a much more important issue in 2024 than in many of the most recent presidential elections,” said Trump’s former national security adviser-turned-public critic John Bolton, who also is considering a 2024 run. “You may have noticed there’s a Chinese balloon floating over the country today.”
Aware that his instincts aren’t as hawkish as some of his potential Republican challengers, Trump and his aides have started to draw contrasts and set the parameters of the debate.
On Thursday, Trump said Pompeo “took a little bit more credit than he should” for accomplishments made while he was secretary of State, a sign that Trump may try to minimize his opponents’ foreign policy experience, despite having been appointed by him. Later that day, the super PAC supporting Trump highlighted recent attacks on Haley by right-wing conservative commentators, some of whom called her a “warmonger” and “Neocon Nikki.”
Trump’s team was also eager to tout a Wall Street Journal op-ed endorsement this week from Sen. J.D. Vance, the populist Republican from Ohio, who touted Trump’s inclination against getting into foreign entanglements.
“Every Republican running is going to be opposed to [critical race theory]. Every Republican running is going to say we need to secure the border and we need to oppose amnesty. Every Republican running is for lower taxes and less regulation,” a Vance adviser said of Trump’s early foreign policy play. “It makes sense for Trump to drag the race where his opponents don’t want to be.”
Trump’s team also sees foreign policy as an area to draw distinctions with his potential top political foe, DeSantis, who gained national attention for his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and embrace of cultural wars but who, as governor, has a limited track record internationally.
“The governors will have a tough time proving their foreign policy chops because it’s not in their job description so they’re going to have to do something to step up and prove to voters that they’re capable of handling all these issues that present themselves on the global stage,” said David Urban, a Republican strategist who remains close to numerous potential 2024 contenders.
“[Potential] candidates such as Pompeo and Haley and Pence and the [former] president can say, ‘Here’s me sitting down with Kim Jong Un, and here’s what we were able to accomplish with the Abraham Accords or on USMCA.’ Everyone has something they can talk about on concrete terms, where governors can’t and that will be a point of differentiation among a wide group of them.”
There are already signs that DeSantis is making moves to address this likely line of attack. He has had phone calls and meetings with foreign leaders and ambassadors in recent months, including a face-to-face session in Tallahassee last week with Mario Abdo Benítez, the president of Paraguay. Relatives of Paraguay’s first lady – Silvana Abdo – were killed in the deadly Surfside condominium collapse of 2021.
Back in December, DeSantis met in his office with Michael Herzog, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., along with Yousef Al Otaiba, the ambassador from the United Arab Emirates. Right after DeSantis handily won re-election he met top officials from Japan, including Koji Tomita, ambassador to the United States, as well as Japanese business leaders.
“Florida continues to be an important political and economic partner to many countries around the world, and as foreign officials request meetings with our office it is appropriate to further develop these ties,” said Bryan Griffin, a spokesman for DeSantis.
Bolton, for his part, said he thought Trump would prove vulnerable on foreign policy when it became clear that he had none.
“He doesn’t have policy on much of anything, he has Donald Trump,” he said. “So his most recent musing is that if he were president he could solve Ukraine-Russia dispute in 24 hours — I think it is so ridiculous it falls on its own weight. …I think people over time and self-identified Republicans just don’t buy it.”
But so far, Trump’s other likely opponents aren’t taking the bait. DeSantis this week hit back on Trump’s digs about the governor’s Covid response, touting his margin of victory in Florida’s November election, but has not sought to defend his record on foreign policy.
A person close to Haley’s political operation, meanwhile, said the former U.N. ambassador will tout her own foreign policy record, one that involved helping Trump secure some of his top accomplishments abroad. They include moving the United States embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, repealing a nuclear deal with Iran and securing buy-in from China on sanctions against North Korea.
While some big gulfs do exist between Haley and her former boss — she has championed U.S. support of Ukraine and became a vocal critic of Putin and Moscow during her tenure in the Trump administration — she likely won’t take swings at Trump, choosing instead to criticize Biden’s approach to China, Iran and the U.S withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“That is not the focus,” the Haley ally said of contrasting with Trump. “We are focused on Biden.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 6, 2023
Opinion | Trump’s Most Brazen Attack Yet?

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The “free state of Florida”? No, despite what you might recall, or have experienced at the time, or find when looking up the record for yourself, it was really the “shut down Sunshine state.”
“Florida was actually closed, for a great, long period of time,” Trump told reporters during his first campaign swing. “Remember, he closed the beaches and everything else? They’re trying to rewrite history.”
He followed up with a Truth Social post touting “the revelations about Ron DeSanctimonious doing FAR WORSE than many other Republican governors, including that he unapologetically shut down Florida and its beaches, was interesting, indeed.”
The supposed revelations were, of course, the dubious things that Trump himself had said.
This is brazen even by Trump’s standards. It will take all of his powers as a political sloganeer, marketeer and wrecking-ball to counter the DeSantis brand on Covid, which has the advantage of being grounded in reality.
For Republicans, DeSantis’ approach to the pandemic of getting out of shutdowns as soon as possible and resisting mandates and restrictions has been vindicated and has appeal to nearly all factions of the party.
For populists, he resisted the elites and self-appointed experts. For limited-government conservatives, he (although this is complicated) lightened the heavy hand of government. For everyone right of center, he forged his own path in the face of conventional wisdom and got attacked for it in the media and by the left — demonstrating the paramount GOP virtues of having courage and the right enemies.
DeSantis would have much to brag about in his record in Florida absent Covid, but it is his response to the pandemic that sets him apart and makes him, for the moment, a near-legend for many Republicans. There’s no wonder that Trump feels compelled to try to deny him this foundational strength.

Trump is correct that DeSantis issued shutdown orders like nearly everyone else at the outset of the pandemic. In March 2020, the governor issued statewide restrictions and then more far-reaching measures in Palm Beach and Broward counties. Beaches, as Trump said, were shut down.
The trouble Trump has is that DeSantis was initially acting in keeping with the guidance of the federal government that Trump led. Trump’s argument amounts to a version of the famous Flounder line from Animal House — DeSantis fucked up, he trusted us.
Despite Trump’s occasional grousing, he had at his right hip during the entire pandemic the man that has come to represent for Republicans all that was wrong with the pandemic response: Anthony Fauci. If Trump had a tense relationship with the long-time federal official, he largely went along with Fauci’s advice.
It tends to be forgotten, but Georgia went first in re-opening in late April 2020, and Trump hit GOP Gov. Brian Kemp for it.
At one of his signature coronavirus briefings, Trump said, “I told the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, that I disagree strongly with his decision to open certain facilities.” Trump opined that Kemp had moved “just too soon,” and was “in violation” of step one of his administration’s phased re-opening plan. He urged Georgians to “wait a little bit longer, just a little bit — not much — because safety has to predominate.”
When DeSantis, too, moved to re-open, Trump’s coronavirus adviser, Fauci, attacked the state for moving too quickly. “Certainly Florida I know, you know, I think jumped over a couple of checkpoints,” Fauci told the 538 podcast. He said that the state needed to shutter bars and prevent crowds.
By May 2020, Florida had a clearly distinguishable approach to the pandemic. I interviewed DeSantis then, and he already was skeptical of shutdowns and focused on protecting the most vulnerable rather than population-wide measures.
Florida had begun easing restrictions, cautiously and on a phased basis at first, but more rapidly than in almost all other states. In September 2020, DeSantis lifted capacity limits on restaurants, arguing that the experience of Miami-Dade, which closed restaurants, and Broward, which didn’t, showed they were ineffectual.
Crucially, the state was absolutely insistent that schools return to in-person instruction. Now there’s a consensus that remote learning was largely a debacle, but at the time DeSantis was believed to be making a risky choice. As the Washington Post reported in August 2020, “Florida is making a high-stakes gamble on school openings, with superintendents pressured into decisions that some fear will result in coronavirus outbreaks.”
The state had to bludgeon some counties to go along, and fight off a lawsuit from the Florida Education Association.
Another problem that Trump has is that during this period he was lavishing Florida with praise for its emphasis on re-opening. In July 2020, he enthused, “Look at what’s going on in Florida, it’s incredible,” and at an October campaign rally in Florida he called DeSantis “one of the greatest governors in our country,” specifically citing how “you’re open and you didn’t close, and you’re just amazing.”
Trump is endlessly flexible and can try to talk his way out of anything, but un-ringing this bell is likely going to be beyond even his powers.
Over time, DeSantis shifted into a different mode, using the power of his office and the state to block further Covid restrictions by localities, school boards and private businesses. He kept localities from obstructing businesses from opening or fining people for violating mask ordinances. He forbid vaccine passports. He prevented schools from forcing parents to mask their children.
All of this was a frank use of state power, although toward the goal of allowing as much individual discretion in reacting to the virus as possible.
DeSantis began talking of choosing freedom over Faucism and of his opposition to the “biomedical security state,” capturing and leading conservative sentiment that had lost all patience with anything associated with the sense of emergency around the pandemic. He took particular aim at vaccine mandates, and called for an investigation of alleged misinformation around the vaccines.
While DeSantis was a sitting governor who could take concrete and symbolic steps to advance a wholly anti-Fauci perspective, Trump, by this point, was out of office and powerless to revise what had been his partnership with Fauci or take measures more in keeping with the Republican mood in April 2022 as opposed to April 2020.
DeSantis’ response to Covid isn’t going to be decisive in a prospective 2024 primary battle with Trump. It is, however, what has put him in the game. It also is a large part of the reason that Republicans feel vested in and defensive of the governor, making it harder for Trump to mock and belittle him — not that he isn’t going to try.
Trump accuses DeSantis of disloyalty. If developing a record on covid that is going to be almost impossible for Trump to counteract counts, he’s guilty as charged.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 2, 2023
Opinion | Trump’s Most Brazen Attack Yet?

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The “free state of Florida”? No, despite what you might recall, or have experienced at the time, or find when looking up the record for yourself, it was really the “shut down Sunshine state.”
“Florida was actually closed, for a great, long period of time,” Trump told reporters during his first campaign swing. “Remember, he closed the beaches and everything else? They’re trying to rewrite history.”
He followed up with a Truth Social post touting “the revelations about Ron DeSanctimonious doing FAR WORSE than many other Republican governors, including that he unapologetically shut down Florida and its beaches, was interesting, indeed.”
The supposed revelations were, of course, the dubious things that Trump himself had said.
This is brazen even by Trump’s standards. It will take all of his powers as a political sloganeer, marketeer and wrecking-ball to counter the DeSantis brand on Covid, which has the advantage of being grounded in reality.
For Republicans, DeSantis’ approach to the pandemic of getting out of shutdowns as soon as possible and resisting mandates and restrictions has been vindicated and has appeal to nearly all factions of the party.
For populists, he resisted the elites and self-appointed experts. For limited-government conservatives, he (although this is complicated) lightened the heavy hand of government. For everyone right of center, he forged his own path in the face of conventional wisdom and got attacked for it in the media and by the left — demonstrating the paramount GOP virtues of having courage and the right enemies.
DeSantis would have much to brag about in his record in Florida absent Covid, but it is his response to the pandemic that sets him apart and makes him, for the moment, a near-legend for many Republicans. There’s no wonder that Trump feels compelled to try to deny him this foundational strength.

Trump is correct that DeSantis issued shutdown orders like nearly everyone else at the outset of the pandemic. In March 2020, the governor issued statewide restrictions and then more far-reaching measures in Palm Beach and Broward counties. Beaches, as Trump said, were shut down.
The trouble Trump has is that DeSantis was initially acting in keeping with the guidance of the federal government that Trump led. Trump’s argument amounts to a version of the famous Flounder line from Animal House — DeSantis fucked up, he trusted us.
Despite Trump’s occasional grousing, he had at his right hip during the entire pandemic the man that has come to represent for Republicans all that was wrong with the pandemic response: Anthony Fauci. If Trump had a tense relationship with the long-time federal official, he largely went along with Fauci’s advice.
It tends to be forgotten, but Georgia went first in re-opening in late April 2020, and Trump hit GOP Gov. Brian Kemp for it.
At one of his signature coronavirus briefings, Trump said, “I told the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, that I disagree strongly with his decision to open certain facilities.” Trump opined that Kemp had moved “just too soon,” and was “in violation” of step one of his administration’s phased re-opening plan. He urged Georgians to “wait a little bit longer, just a little bit — not much — because safety has to predominate.”
When DeSantis, too, moved to re-open, Trump’s coronavirus adviser, Fauci, attacked the state for moving too quickly. “Certainly Florida I know, you know, I think jumped over a couple of checkpoints,” Fauci told the 538 podcast. He said that the state needed to shutter bars and prevent crowds.
By May 2020, Florida had a clearly distinguishable approach to the pandemic. I interviewed DeSantis then, and he already was skeptical of shutdowns and focused on protecting the most vulnerable rather than population-wide measures.
Florida had begun easing restrictions, cautiously and on a phased basis at first, but more rapidly than in almost all other states. In September 2020, DeSantis lifted capacity limits on restaurants, arguing that the experience of Miami-Dade, which closed restaurants, and Broward, which didn’t, showed they were ineffectual.
Crucially, the state was absolutely insistent that schools return to in-person instruction. Now there’s a consensus that remote learning was largely a debacle, but at the time DeSantis was believed to be making a risky choice. As the Washington Post reported in August 2020, “Florida is making a high-stakes gamble on school openings, with superintendents pressured into decisions that some fear will result in coronavirus outbreaks.”
The state had to bludgeon some counties to go along, and fight off a lawsuit from the Florida Education Association.
Another problem that Trump has is that during this period he was lavishing Florida with praise for its emphasis on re-opening. In July 2020, he enthused, “Look at what’s going on in Florida, it’s incredible,” and at an October campaign rally in Florida he called DeSantis “one of the greatest governors in our country,” specifically citing how “you’re open and you didn’t close, and you’re just amazing.”
Trump is endlessly flexible and can try to talk his way out of anything, but un-ringing this bell is likely going to be beyond even his powers.
Over time, DeSantis shifted into a different mode, using the power of his office and the state to block further Covid restrictions by localities, school boards and private businesses. He kept localities from obstructing businesses from opening or fining people for violating mask ordinances. He forbid vaccine passports. He prevented schools from forcing parents to mask their children.
All of this was a frank use of state power, although toward the goal of allowing as much individual discretion in reacting to the virus as possible.
DeSantis began talking of choosing freedom over Faucism and of his opposition to the “biomedical security state,” capturing and leading conservative sentiment that had lost all patience with anything associated with the sense of emergency around the pandemic. He took particular aim at vaccine mandates, and called for an investigation of alleged misinformation around the vaccines.
While DeSantis was a sitting governor who could take concrete and symbolic steps to advance a wholly anti-Fauci perspective, Trump, by this point, was out of office and powerless to revise what had been his partnership with Fauci or take measures more in keeping with the Republican mood in April 2022 as opposed to April 2020.
DeSantis’ response to Covid isn’t going to be decisive in a prospective 2024 primary battle with Trump. It is, however, what has put him in the game. It also is a large part of the reason that Republicans feel vested in and defensive of the governor, making it harder for Trump to mock and belittle him — not that he isn’t going to try.
Trump accuses DeSantis of disloyalty. If developing a record on covid that is going to be almost impossible for Trump to counteract counts, he’s guilty as charged.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 2, 2023
Trump’s slow-rolling 2024 bid cobbles together new Senate support

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The freshman duo’s moves come after just two other upper-chamber Republicans, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), have backed Trump since the 2022 midterms. And though four Senate GOP endorsements is an early indicator that Trump is the frontrunner in the 2024 primary, it’s still a far cry from the show of support on the Hill that Trump enjoyed four years ago as an incumbent president.
But much has changed since then: two impeachments, the violent Capitol riot and a presidential campaign that’s only inched along in the two-plus months after launching. Not to mention the intra-party ground Trump lost with primary endorsements of Republican Senate candidates who went on to lose races in Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania. What’s more, Trump has a legitimate potential primary rival in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, on top of several other contenders eyeing a run.
Given that significantly altered landscape, Tuberville described the slow buildup of Trump’s effort as intentional. He said he spoke to Trump recently, and that the former president told him “we’re gonna do small ones early and kind of build our momentum, build our teams in each state.”
“I’m gonna be disappointed in the summertime if we don’t have more [endorsements]. I’ll put it that way. Right now, it’s no big concern,” Tuberville said.
Trump kicked off his campaign this weekend in New Hampshire and South Carolina, taking preemptive shots at DeSantis. Back on Capitol Hill on Monday, the foray got a mixed reception, particularly in the Senate. House Republicans have been far quicker to endorse Trump during his third bid for the White House.
Some Republicans, particularly those in senior positions, said there’s a lot of hope for a different candidate. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said “there seems to be a growing desire to get some new blood.”
“There will be alternatives this time around, it sounds like,” said Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.), who called DeSantis “very formidable. There may be others, too.”
A Trump spokesperson did not return a request for comment.

Trump’s backers and his skeptics sound alike in one respect: They say the campaign is very early and that many Capitol Hill Republicans are reluctant to make an endorsement before the field is settled. Fellow senators like Tim Scott (R-S.C.) may yet run, in addition to other top GOP names like DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Many senators are reluctant to make early enemies.
In presidential races, though, things accelerate quickly. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) announced his 2016 presidential campaign in March 2015, with Trump declaring in June — and winning almost no establishment support until he began thumping his rivals in the primaries.
“It’s up to them to figure that out for themselves … they’re all politicians,” said Graham. “Nobody endorsed him the last time he won.”
And some say they won’t weigh in, period. Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.), another first-term senator, said that being on an RNC advisory council precludes her from making an endorsement. Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who chairs the conference’s campaign arm, said he would be neutral as well: “That’s a fair question, and I’m focused on the Senate. Politics is about addition, not subtraction.”
Other Republicans are watching to see if Trump’s early rumblings about running a more traditional campaign this time around will come to fruition.
“What I did like is, he said he’s talking about the future,” Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), who is running for governor of his state in 2024, said of Trump. “If he sticks on the future and only refers to the past about how good his record was pre-Covid, he could put together a winning formula.”
Still, Braun’s ambivalence is telling. He was one of Trump’s strongest defenders during the former president’s first impeachment trial, and other longtime allies like Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), and Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) are not weighing in on the primary yet.
Trump’s campaign has also been off to a chaotic start. Within weeks of his announcement, he dined with antisemites and suggested terminating the Constitution. Yet, despite those controversies and ongoing federal investigations, Republicans privately acknowledge there’s a real likelihood Trump could be their nominee again, especially if the field is crowded and he maintains his base of support.
Even senators who practice a different style of politics said they remained open to evaluating his bid for another term.
“I’m going to look at it. I’m going through the process everybody else is,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who described DeSantis as “pretty effective” but wants to see if his style of politics works nationally. “It’s just not something, in my relatively short time in politics, that I ever remember talking about two years out.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

January 31, 2023