Category Archives: Donald Trump

Former President Donald Trump sued former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Thursday because, according to him, she wrongly linked him to Russias Trump-friendly election interference during his run against Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Earlier in the week, Clinton announced shed tested positive for Covid. Laughing can be painful during a respiratory illness, but one could guess shed gladly bear it for this joke of a lawsuit. The Washington Post reports that her spokesperson, Nick Merrill, responded to Trumps suit in a statement that was a single word long: Nonsense.

Neither Trump nor the party should wish to return to 2016 unless the goal is for voters to remember Trumps repeated fawning over Russian President Vladimir Putin.

To the extent that there remain sensible Republicans who want to move forward, attract more voters and have something more to say than Trump is great, Trump has just ruined their plans and signaled that he, the unelected leader of the Republican Party, is fixated on the past. But neither Trump nor the party should wish to return to 2016 unless the goal is for voters to remember Trumps repeated fawning over Russian President Vladimir Putin and his public plea to Russia to hurt Clintons campaign.

Naming 47 people as defendants, Thursdays lawsuit begins with typical Trumpian hyperbole: Hillary Clinton and her cohorts orchestrated an unthinkable plot that shocks the conscience and is an affront to this nations democracy. ... Defendants maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative that Donald J. Trump was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty. It was a plot so outrageous, Trump claims, that even the events of Watergate pale in comparison.

Lest you believe it was outrageous to suspect Trump of collaborating with Russia, led by a dictator hed fawned over and described as highly respected within his own country and beyond in a report of almost 1,000 pages, a Republican-led U.S. Senate committee concluded Russia used Paul Manafort, a former chairman of Trumps campaign, and Wikileaks to boost his chances in 2016.

Nothing Clinton said about Trump counts as an affront to democracy. Nor is it the case that Trump even cares about affronts to democracy. He defended the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and more than seven months after that was reportedly still lobbying for a way back inside the White House.

Trumps win in 2016 got him four years as arguably the most powerful and catered-to person on the planet. But not even that heaping spoonful of sugar was sweet enough to help him move past the bitterness of being linked to Russia, at least not when Russias character is more fully on display. Trump is temperamentally incapable of moving on. But whats worse for the GOP is Trumps demand that the party remain as stuck in the past as he is and his willingness to punish even his sycophants who dare to look ahead.

Fewer elected officials have worked harder to keep Trumps ego pumped up and fully inflated than Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala. Hes a devoted spreader of the lie that Trump won in 2020 and was the Jan. 6 hype man who told a crowd at the Ellipse that "Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking a--! Even so, Trump summarily rescinded his endorsement of Brooks this week. And his stated reason is as laughable as the lawsuit against Clinton.

Fewer elected officials have worked harder to keep Trumps ego pumped up and fully inflated than Rep. Mo Brooks.

At a campaign rally seven months ago, Brooks said, There are some people who are despondent about the voter fraud and election theft of 2020. Folks, put that behind you. Put that behind you. Yes, look forward! Look forward! Look forward! Beat them in 2022! Beat them in 2024!

Thats it. Thats the offense. Even though Brooks faithfully lied about the election being stolen, he asked Republicans to move on, and Wednesday, 212 days later, Trump issued a statement: "Mo Brooks of Alabama made a horrible mistake recently when he went 'woke' and stated, referring to the 2020 Presidential Election Scam, 'Put that behind you, put that behind you.' I am hereby withdrawing my Endorsement of Mo Brooks for the Senate."

In his own statement Wednesday, Brooks decided to show the world just how high on his own supply Trump is. President Trump asked me to rescind the 2020 elections, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put President Trump back in the White House and hold a new special election for the presidency." This ridiculous demand was made more than seven months after Bidens inauguration, Brooks told NBC News.

If you keep repeating the lie that elections are rigged, then you might discourage your supporters from voting. That may be why Democrats secured a majority in the Senate in 2020. Weeks after President Joe Biden defeated Trump, two Democrats prevailed in Georgia in an election that Trump had said would certainly be rigged against the GOP.

Theres reason to believe that Trump is lying about why hes withdrawing support from Brooks. The last two Senate candidates in Alabama he put his weight behind lost, and poll results suggest that Brooks would be the third. And Trump, we all know, is a winner. He hates losers. Except, of course, when hes the loser.

And its just as likely that Trump has filed an unwinnable lawsuit against Clinton as part of another fundraising appeal that will separate suckers from their money.

But neither of those alternative explanations changes the fact that Trump is declaring to Republicans where their focus should be. The next elections are not to be about looking forward. They should be only about avenging Trump.

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Donald Trump's lawsuit against Hillary Clinton reveals he's stuck in the past - MSNBC

Outspoken radio host Howard Stern said on his show Monday that Will Smith and Donald Trump are the same guy, claiming they both managed to skirt accountability because of who they are.

Stern, however, made the remark before Smith publicly apologized on Monday to Chris Rock for striking him on stage at the Oscars for a joke the comedian had made about his wife.

My behavior at last nights Academy Awards was unacceptable and inexcusable, Smith said as he apologized to Rock. I was out of line and I was wrong.

The consequences Smith may face for hitting Rock remain unclear. And critics continued to question why no action was taken immediately.

Stern said he was stunned to see Smith stride onstage at the Oscars in Los Angeles and strike Rock after he made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smiths shaved head. Pinkett Smith, Smiths wife, suffers from the medical condition alopecia, which causes hair loss and balding.

The first thing I said to myself was: What the fuck is going on ... because wheres security? This is a live television event, said the SiriusXM host.

Not one person came out because hes Will Smith, Stern added. This is how Trump gets away with shit. Will Smith and Trump are the same guy.

Smith was allowed to sit there for the rest of the awards after assaulting Rock for making a joke, said Stern. And hes laughing it up and having a good time with his wife.

A short time after the violence, Smith walked to the stage again to be applauded and honored with the Best Actor award for King Richard. He apologized to the academy but pointedly not to Rock in that speech, yet also appeared to excuse his actions by insisting: Love will make you do crazy things.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, which organizes the Oscars, issued a statement Sunday saying that it does not condone violence, but did not mention Smiths name. It announced on Monday that its launching an investigation into the incident.

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The academy also said it would explore further action and consequences in accordance with our Bylaws, Standards of Conduct and California law.

Comedian Rosie ODonnell also tweeted Monday about the Trump years when we dont hold anyone accountable.

She was responding to a post by journalist Maria Shriver, who wrote: We should never get to a place where we sit and watch a movie star hit someone on global television then, moments later, get a standing ovation while talking about love.

CNN analyst Asha Rangappa wondered why no one at the event walked out. She asked: Are we getting an independent psychological case study on how Trump got normalized?

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

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Howard Stern: Will Smith And Donald Trump 'Are The Same Guy' - Yahoo News

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Why Donald Trump is obsessed with windmills | National | indexjournal.com - Index-Journal

(Chris Pizzello | AP) Presenter Chris Rock, left, reacts after being hit on stage by Will Smith while presenting the award for best documentary feature at the Oscars on Sunday, March 27, 2022, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

By Cody Gold | The Public Forum

| March 28, 2022, 7:07 p.m.

I dont know why I am so shocked about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences acceptance of such childish violent behavior. But after Will Smith commits what appeared to be a Class B Misdemeanor (that in Utah is punishable up to six months in jail) and is allowed to stay in the building I just couldnt believe it.

This is a symptom of a sickened culture which has become accustomed to childish rants, bullying behavior, outright lies accepted as truth, racism, sexism and many other disgusting acts performed daily by Donald Trump.

It sickens me that we are not all disgusted by the acceptance of such behavior. Would you allow someone to go up and attack someone at your church, school, work, social event and allow them to stay there? Let me answer that for everyone. No! However, many applaud it when people with power or money do it.

Cody Gold, West Valley City

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Letter: Will Smith, Donald Trump and a sick culture - Salt Lake Tribune

Twitter Inc(NASDAQ:TWTR) has come under fire in India for not doing enough to stop disparaging posts centered around Hindu gods.

What Happened:The Delhi High Court on Monday asked Twitter why it could not act against objectionable content against Hindu gods or goddesses, while it could suspend former U.S. President Donald Trump's account, according to areportfrom the Indian daily Hindustan Times.

A two-judge bench of the court asked Twitter to explain how it undertook the blocking of accounts and noted instances where individuals had been blocked for similar instances in the past involving other religions, according to the report.

The hearing was centered around posts by a user named AtheistRepublic who had posted about a Hindu goddess.

When Twitter reportedly said it couldnt block users without court orders, the court said, if this is the logic, then why have you blocked Mr. Trump?

See Also:How To Buy Twitter (TWTR) Shares

Why It Matters:The court said that prima facie, Twitters stand that it cannot block accounts was not entirely correct, reported the Hindustan Times.

The court said it ultimately boiled down to what Twitter found sensitive.

You are not bothered about sensitivities of other people in other regions of the world, of ethnicities. We dare say that if these kinds of things were done in relation to another religion, you would be much more careful, more sensitive, said the court, according to the Hindustan Times.

Recently,Tesla Inc(NASDAQ:TSLA) CEOElon Muskquestionedif it was time to establish an alternative to Twitter given the latters failure to adhere to free speech principles. Musk has said that he was givingserious thoughtto building a Twitter alternative.

Last year, IndiaaccusedTwitter of dominating and maligning the country in order to conceal its wrongdoings. At the time, police in the country had swooped down on the companys New Delhi offices.

Price Action:On Monday, Twitter shares closed 1.35% higher at $39.12 in the regular session and fell 0.3% in the after-hours trading.

Read Next:3 Twilio Engineers Charged By SEC For Insider Trading During Early Pandemic: What You Should Know

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2022 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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Why An Indian Court Is Questioning Twitter Over Donald Trump Ban - Benzinga - Benzinga

Summing up the Republicans appalling conduct at the Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearing, and Sen. Mike Brauns interview where he said interracial marriage should be a question for the states, The New Abnormal co-host Molly Jong-Fast says theyre never gonna be happy. Theyre not gonna be happy when they take away abortion. They wanna go back to antebellum times. This ends with less and less rights.

Thats anything but a joke, but its funny because I remember thinking before the 2016 election, Well, Trump wont get elected, but even when he did I thought, Wow, its so terrible, but theyll get what they want and theyll see how much it sucks. And they didnt. They were thrilled. And then when Trump started killing his own people and telling them that the virus wasnt a big deal, I thought, Well, hell kill his own people. And theyll see this guys a monster, but it seems like he can pretty much do anything. These Republicans can pretty much do anything and (their supporters) dont notice that its against their interests.

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If not antebellum times, says co-host Andy Levy, the most charitable thing you can say about them is that they want to go back to the 1950s. Thats the latest time-frame you can give them. They all think that the 1950s were grand, with the white picket fences and the nuclear families that all loved each other and to them, thats the garden of Eden that they dont care that first of all never really existed. And second of all, to the extent that existed, it existed for white Christians only, and it wasnt even so great for white Christian women. But they dont care, thats their end game.

Meantime, Kid Rock of all damn people is boasting about how Donald Trump would call him up after Sarah Palin introduced him and Ted Nugent to the president, and ask things like What do you think we could do about North Korea?

Im like, What? I dont think Im qualified to answer this.

Then again, it could always be worse with this set. As Molly asks, Do you think Kid Rock is stupider than Junior? And, notes Andy, at least Kid Rock was self-aware enough to know that he shouldnt be talking, giving advice about North Korea.

Plus, Florida Agriculture Commissioner and gubernatorial candidate Nikki Friedwho went to high school with Judge Jacksonjoins to explain how she won office in a red state and her bid to become its first female governor. She says the party needs to follow my lead to win again in the Sunshine State:

The Democrats need to understand, once again, that it is always about the economyit always has been and always will be. Of course, we have to stand up and we have to fight and we have to advocate for our people and our principles. But at the end of the day, the people of our state want leaders. They dont want their elected officials to be falling into these cultural war traps, which Republicans are trying to do. We have an opportunity under my leadership to bring our party together, to unite our party and to fight for fundamental principles thatyou know, might have been electing Republican governors for 25 years, but its by the smallest of margins by, by less than one percent, Ron DeSantis won by 34,000 votes out of almost 8.3 million votes.

Fried concludes: So to say that our state is red is not consistent with how we vote. And for those same 25 years, the people of our state have consistently voted for very progressive constitutional amendments, from a $15 minimum wage to medical marijuana to environmental issues to restoration of civil rights. But we as Democrats have not done a good enough job running campaigns, and making sure we are on the same page as the rest of the people of our state. So we have to take some playbooks by the Republicans on the economy, on home rule, on the free market. But really weve got to rise above this chaos and this nonsense and be ready to fight. Theres no one out there who doesnt know that I am willing and able to throw punches. And most of the times I land them, and make the governor squirm every time that we are in the same room together. And thats what its going to take to stand up against this bully and show the people of our state that there is a better way to lead.

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Donald Trump Asked Kid Rock About North Korea and There Is No Bottom - The Daily Beast

Two of the conservative movements favorite claims are that the media is biased against it and that conservative voices are constantly being censored. In the case of the latter, that led Donald Trump to start Truth Social, a social media network where one can presumably incite a violent insurrection without violating the platforms terms of service. As for the alleged media bias, Donald Trump Jr.s got it covered.

Axios reports that Trumps eldest son, alongside some other former Trump staffers, is starting a news aggregation app called MxM News, which the group believes has the potential to compete with the likes of Apple News and Google News. [Pause for laughter.] According to Axios, the service is looking to disrupt the mobile news space similar to how [the] Drudge [Report] disrupted web publishing and Fox News disrupted cable television in the 1990s. Enjoy the nightly ravings of Tucker Carlson? MxM may be right for you.

While the companys tagline is mainstream news without mainstream bias, its unlikely that mainstream outlets will be heavily featured in the apps feed, given what Juniors father has had to say about them (pathetic, fake,corrupt, deranged, sick,the enemy of the people). In 2019, the then president reportedly had plans to tell federal agencies not to renew their subscriptions to TheWashington Postand TheNew York Times, in what might have been the pettiest move in the history of the West Wing. Axios notes that the content will be curated by a small team of around eight staffers and that the apps founders expect early adoption to come from users [who] are right of center.

Don Jr., a true bastion of reliable information, told Axios: As I travel around the country, the complaint I hear more than almost anything else is that people dont know what media outlets, journalists, or stories they can actually trust.... We created the MxM News app to help people cut through that clutter and get trustworthy news and information about topics that matter and impact their lives. We view it as an important public service and also believe it will be a great business. Yes, it appears he was actually serious about that public service line. No, its not clear if he plans to actually use his own app or instead take a page from his fathers playbook and pretend it doesnt exist.

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In late February, as daily deaths from COVID-19 tallied in the thousands across the country, Florida governor Ron DeSantis announced his latest effort to dismantle his states response to the coronavirus pandemic. Private businesses, he insisted, should stop requiring their employees to wear masks at work. Here was a perfectly selected message to build the brand he has established: Ron DeSantis, scourge of public-health bureaucrats, enemy of woke corporations, and friend of the little guy.

Both the form and content of the message reflected careful planning. As DeSantis spoke, he looked like a man who had been mimicking Donald Trumps speeches in front of the mirror. He performed a series of hand thrusts, in which he drew his thumbs together until they were almost touching, then jerked them apart in quick horizontal motions, as if he were playing an invisible accordion. After five such accordion pulls, he swung his right hand, thumb pointing up, in a semi-circular motion back inward to the center. DeSantis tweeted out the clip, and any MAGA fan watching, even without the sound on, would have grasped the gist just through the eerie physical impersonation.

Republicans have collectively recognized that however much Trump may exasperate them, their president-in-exile will not be purged, nor will the changes he brought to their party be rolled back. He might, however, be co-opted. And if this is to happen, they have settled with remarkable unanimity on DeSantis as the person to do it.

People who do not ingest large amounts of conservative media may have difficulty comprehending the extent of the adulation both the Trumpist and the Trump-skeptical wings of the party have lavished on DeSantis. On a daily basis, the right-wing press churns out stories with headlines like The Promise of Ron DeSantis, Could Gov. Ron DeSantis Be the Favorite GOP Frontrunner for 2024?, A Ron DeSantis Master Class in Rope-a-Dope, Media Keep Trying and Failing to Take Down Floridas Ron DeSantis, Karol Markowicz on What Gov. Ron DeSantis Is Really Like: So Real and Down to Earth, and on and on.

The Florida governor has reportedly provoked Trump by refusing to preemptively endorse his likely candidacy for a second term, and DeSantis is putting himself in a position to challenge the former president for the 2024 nomination. An annoyed Trump has privately told associates that hes not worried about DeSantis because he has no personal charisma and has a dull personality, according to Axios. But Trump has cause for concern: DeSantis has blitzed the national Republican donor circuit and turned most of the conservative media into his personal messaging apparatus. You should be my governor, cooed Sean Hannity in one interview. We see him as the future of the party, a Fox News producer wrote to DeSantiss office in an email obtained by the Tampa Bay Times. This work has already yielded fruit: DeSantiss polling has crept up steadily, while every other Republican who had once been whispered about as a potential nominee Tom Cotton, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Josh Hawley has barely registered.

There are other, more troubling signs for Trump that his stranglehold over the party may be loosening. In December, during an interview in Dallas with disgraced former Fox News host Bill OReilly, Trump was booed by members of the crowd when he confirmed that he had received a COVID booster shot. Since he left office, the Republican Party has by and large turned against the measures designed to ameliorate the impact of the pandemic, giving upstarts like DeSantis a chance to outflank him on what has become the central battleground of the culture wars. What weve done is historic, a confused Trump told his skeptical supporters in Dallas, claiming credit for the production of lifesaving vaccines. Dont let them take it away. Dont take it away from ourselves.

Trump is right that DeSantis cant compete as a performer with him or even with past Republicans who have built national brands. DeSantis has the anti-tax zealotry of Paul Ryan without the winsome affect and sculpted torso. He has the social conservatism of George W. Bush with none of the folksiness. He has the partisan fire of Newt Gingrich without the mesmerizing hair. He speaks in a nasal tone nobody has described as pleasant on the ears and has yet to utter an eloquent or memorable turn of phrase. Reporters have noted his puzzling lack of interest in human relationships outside his family, which has resulted in heavy staff churn. You will be in the car with Ron DeSantis and hell say nothing to you for an hour, one associate told Politico. He would prefer it that way. But in some respects, DeSantiss distant middle-management energy is the point, especially when compared to Trumps garish star power.

It is crucial to understand that the critique of Trump that prevails among Republican officials is far narrower than the one proffered by Democrats or Never Trumpers. They dont object to Trumps racism, corruption, lying, or contempt for democratic norms, except to the extent that these qualities hurt the partys brand. What irritates, instead, is Trumps constant disregard for basic political self-preservation. DeSantis offers them the prospect of a party leader who can harness all the right-wing populist energy generated by Trump without the latters childlike inability to focus on what his advisers tell him. One DeSantis ally, confiding to the New York Times, summed up his appeal as competent Trumpism.

His proto-candidacy reflects a handful of working assumptions. First, that any former Republican voter who opposed Trump on moral rather than aesthetic grounds is gone and not worth trying to bring back. Second, that the right-wing groups Trump brought into the Republican fold or whose creation he inspired are either political assets or simply too important to be culled. And third, that Trumps attempt to secure an unelected second term was a failure of tactics, not a disqualifying ambition that merited rebuke and ostracism. The DeSantis pitch is to wrest the MAGA movement from the grifters who built it and place it in the hands of a trusted professional politician.

This project raises two questions: Can it succeed in prying the nomination from Trumps grip? And what would it mean if it did? Just imagine what a Trumpified party no longer led by an erratic, deeply unpopular cable-news binge-watcher would be capable of.

One of the reasons political analysts dismissed the possibility Trump could win the Republican nomination when he first ran is that such an outcome violated what was taken as virtually a scientific truth. A 2008 book written by a quartet of political scientists, The Party Decides, argued that presidential nominations only appeared to be controlled by the voters of Iowa, New Hampshire, and so on but were actually determined by party insiders. The elites, coordinating with one another, made their preferences known through the media, and the primary voters would absorb those messages and act accordingly.

This thesis perfectly described the next contested primary that happened. The 2012 Republican nominating contest featured a succession of flamboyant right-wing populists Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, Gingrich who would enthrall the base and shoot up in the polls only to collapse as if pulled down by some gravitational force detectable solely by political science. But Trumps 2016 nomination, in the face of near-total opposition from the Republican elite, obviously shows the party does not always decide. The voters might pick a nominee their partys elites oppose if that candidate offers them something unique.

Many Republicans have tried to discern the source of Trumps appeal and replicate it. As early as 2016, Ted Cruz was tacking to Trumps right on abortion and guns, and Marco Rubio briefly tried to match Trumps schoolyard insults, at one point making fun of the size of his hands. But Trumps secret sauce with the base turned out to be his unwavering pugilism. Having spent more time than perhaps any other Republican candidate consuming conservative media, Trump had absorbed its message that conservative America is under assault by sinister liberal elites. He built a political style designed for the world depicted on Fox News, in which the Republican Party is always losing because its leaders are too weak to fight back.

Conservatives sum up his appeal with the phrase But he fights. As the but implies, they often acknowledge Trumps flaws before praising his overriding instinct to attack their enemies. Even his errors can turn to his benefit. The more Trump draws howls of outrage from liberals and the media, the more he proves his tribal bona fides.

DeSantis has undertaken an almost clinical effort to manufacture and bottle this aspect of Trumps style. He has repeated the Trumpian narrative that the partys leaders have failed to take the fight to the enemy. We cannot, we will not, go back to the days of the failed Republican Establishment of yesteryear, he promised in 2021. DeSantiss brand is, like Trumps, a Republican who never compromises, never apologizes, and always fights whether the issue is education, the pandemic, or even Trumps misconduct. At the CPAC conference in his home state in February, he claimed that Democrats want us to be second-class citizens and assailed the corrupt and dishonest legacy media.

Photo: David A. Grogan/CNBC/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images (top left); Joe Raedle/Getty Images (top right); Federic J Brown/AFP via Getty Images (middle left); Joe Raedle/Getty Images (middle right); CNN/Youtube (bottom left); Storms Media for Delray Beach Market/MediaPunch/Shutterstock (bottom right).

The Republican elites rallying to DeSantis are calculating that his synthetic version of Trumpism will serve as an adequate substitute. The party is trying to regain its control of the process by offering the voters a more attractive product than, say, Jeb Bush. If you loved Trump, you will like DeSantis. And if you liked Trump, or maybe just tolerated him through gritted teeth, you will love DeSantis.

One irony of DeSantiss attempt to become the new Trump is that his trajectory was almost precisely the opposite of the latters. Trump grew up wealthy but was an indifferent student who allegedly cheated his way into college and retained a working-class affect when he inherited his fathers real-estate empire. DeSantis grew up middle class in Dunedin, Florida (his mother was a nurse and his father installed Nielsen boxes on televisions), before attending Yale and then Harvard Law School. At Harvard, he joined the Navy as a JAG officer, later putting his legal skills to use during stints in Iraq and at Guantnamo Bay.

After active duty in the Navy, DeSantis ran for a House seat in 2012 in the Sixth Congressional District in the middle of a two-decade stretch when the state was trending from purple to red. DeSantis prevailed in a crowded primary in part by winning endorsements from national tea-party groups. The way Republicans established their right-wing credentials at the time was by adopting radical libertarian stances on fiscal policy, and DeSantis duly proposed to abolish the graduated income tax and phase in cuts to entitlement programs i.e., Medicare and Social Security. In Congress, he helped found the Freedom Caucus, a right-wing faction, though he didnt participate in the destructive displays of rebelliousness, such as forcing government shutdowns to stage impossible demands, that made other caucus members intolerable to the party leadership.

After Trumps election, DeSantis could see that the energy on the right was flowing through different channels. When he ran for governor in 2018, he overcame a better-known Republican rival by positioning himself as Trumps staunchest defender. In Congress, he proposed to defund the Mueller investigation. He attacked his primary opponent for having failed to attend a Trump rally in 2016 and cut a cheeky ad showing himself reading Trumps The Art of the Deal to his young son and instructing his daughter to build the wall with her toy blocks. He made frequent appearances on Fox News, where he caught Trumps attention and won his blessing. Ron is strong on Borders, tough on Crime & big on Cutting Taxes Loves our Military & our Vets, Trump tweeted. He will be a Great Governor & has my full Endorsement!

A common assumption of mainstream-media analysis of DeSantis is that he is merely pandering to Trump and his supporters and, as a graduate of Yale and Harvard, is too smart to actually believe what he is saying. This is a failure of imagination. DeSantis developed reactionary suspicions of democracy before Trump ever came along, which positioned him perfectly to straddle the elite-base divide within his party. In fact, DeSantis once wrote a book warning of the dangers of a megalomaniacal president who threatened to destroy the foundations of the republic. That presidents name was Barack Obama.

DeSantis published Dreams From Our Founding Fathers in 2011, when he was running for Congress. It is out of print and has received barely any attention in the media. DeSantis joked recently that the book was read by about a dozen people. But it provides deep insight into the worldview that has propelled him to this point.

Published at the height of the tea-party movement, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers made the case that Obama and his agenda were inimical to the Constitution and this countrys founding ideals. It is sprinkled with passages DeSantis would never have written after Trump took office. He notes accurately that the Founders worried about the emergence of popular leaders who utilized demagoguery to obtain public support in service of their personal ambitions. He flays Obama for alienating traditional allies, meeting with foreign dictators, and impugning American innocence with statements like We sometimes make mistakes, a far more measured assessment than Trumps There are a lot of killers. You got a lot of killers. Well, you think our country is so innocent? He devotes an entire chapter to the importance of the president being personally humble, depicting Obamas alleged excessive self-confidence as a disqualifying trait.

DeSantiss obsession with media bias, which has since become a motif of his political style, clearly developed before he ran for office. He laces the book with bitter complaints that the media failed to vet Obama or expose his allegedly radical influences, while extensively citing criticisms of Obama that appeared in the mainstream press, oblivious to the contradiction. DeSantis is an exceedingly unreliable narrator, wrenching heavily abridged quotations out of context to distort their meaning. For example, he plucks the phrase At a certain point youve made enough money to characterize Obama as a radical socialist who wants to confiscate all income above some level, neglecting to note that Obamas follow-up was: But, you know, part of the American way is that you can just keep on making it if youre providing a good product or youre providing a good service.

Still, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers is much more interesting than a typical partisan screed. Its author, who majored in history and spent a year teaching the subject at a tony boarding school, has clearly given a great deal of thought to the books thesis: that Obamas agenda of raising taxes on the rich and spending more money on the non-rich is an attack on the Constitution.

As legend has it, Benjamin Franklin once said that when the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic, he writes. While acknowledging that the quote is apocryphal it was probably concocted by reactionaries many decades later and attributed to various Founding-era statesmen he proceeds to try to prove this was the real view of the Founders and the Constitution.

The Constitution, he argues, was designed to prevent the redistribution of wealth through the political process. The danger is that, as his fake Franklin quote suggests, people will support programs funded by taxing the rich that benefit themselves. Popular pressure to redistribute wealth or otherwise undermine the rights of property, he laments, will ever be present. The Constitutions role, as DeSantis sees it, is to prevent popular majorities from enacting the economic policies they want.

DeSantis does not believe the Constitution merely establishes a set of ground rules for how policy should be written. He thinks the Constitution requires that conservative Republican policy prevail forever. This is not an original belief. It was the dominant right-wing position from the late-19th century through the middle of the New Deal, and conservative courts routinely struck down all sorts of progressive legislation on the grounds that the Constitution prohibits active government intervention in the economy.

DeSantis treats any further expansion of government as a mortal threat to the Constitution. Sentences like Obamanomics represents a dramatic departure from the nations founding principles and Obamas quest to fundamentally transform the United States of America represents the type of political program that the Constitution was designed to prevent are found in nearly every chapter. The word redistribution and its variants appear more than 150 times.

DeSantiss core conviction is that an outcome in which Democrats win majorities through free and fair elections and vote to expand social spending by taxing the rich is fundamentally illegitimate. He is far from the only Republican to hold this view. The American right has never fully accepted the legitimacy of democratically elected majorities setting economic policy.

This principle helps explain why even most Republicans who get queasy over Trumps authoritarianism ultimately support him anyway. The prospect of Democrats winning elections poses a graver threat to the Constitution than Republicans stealing them. For those Republicans who always considered Trump no worse than the lesser evil, who feared more that he was squandering his power than that he was abusing it, DeSantis is not just an acceptable vehicle. He is one of them.

What has brought DeSantis near the pinnacle of Republican politics barely a decade into his career is not only his deep commitment to the principles of the conservative movement but also a keen understanding of the power centers within the party. As those centers have changed throughout his career, DeSantis has adjusted nimbly from tea-partyer to Trumpista. The identity he recognized in the spring of 2020, and embraced with deepening militancy, is founded on opposition to social-distancing policies during the coronavirus pandemic.

DeSantiss skepticism of public-health authorities paid economic and political dividends, at least for a while. During the 202021 academic year, when most states stuck with remote learning, Florida opened its schools, a position even Democrats belatedly recognized as correct. He has used COVID as a stage to pick successful fights with the media, which has sometimes overreached in its criticism of his pandemic policy. Last year, a 60 Minutes segment accused him of corruption for steering vaccine distribution to the Publix chain of pharmacies, which had donated to his PAC, though many acknowledged the popular outlet was a logical partner for the program. DeSantis deftly used the episode to thrill conservatives with sharp counterpunches against the media. The whole thing is a big lie, he fumed, using a PowerPoint presentation to make his case.

But DeSantiss aggressive COVID politics have also seen him take increasingly extreme positions. Over the past year, DeSantiss defense of what he calls freedom over Faucism which, in addition to keeping schools open, has involved blocking towns from mandating masks and businesses from requiring vaccines and at one point scolding high-school students for wearing masks at a photo op has drawn him into the arms of the anti-vaccine movement. He has appeared at a press conference with an anti-vaxxer, suspended a state health official for encouraging his staff to increase their vaccine uptake, and appointed vaccine skeptic Joseph Ladapo to serve as the states top health official. (People are being forced to put something in their bodies that we dont know all there is to know about yet, Ladapo claimed. No matter what people on TV tell you, its not true. Were going to learn more about the safety of these vaccines.) After confirming he received his first shot last year off-camera, DeSantis has refused to say whether he got a booster.

One result of DeSantiss support for the anti-vaccine movement is that, as of February, his state ranked 46th nationally in its share of elderly citizens who have received a booster shot. During the COVID wave last winter, Floridas death rate significantly outstripped Californias. At his February 2021 CPAC speech, DeSantis boasted that his state had a (slightly) below-average COVID death rate. His COVID riff at this years CPAC made no mention of mortality statistics.

DeSantiss oppositional approach to politics borrows heavily from Trumps style but with noticeable adjustments. Compared with the original, DeSantiss version of Trumpism is much more methodical, which robs it of its organic spontaneity yet also eliminates the frequent blowback. He has followed Trumps practice of using Twitter to launch unhinged attacks on the media and liberals, with the important revision of outsourcing the job to his spokespeople, most notably press secretary Christina Pushaw. This allows DeSantis to get much of the benefit of Trumps fire hose of abuse, exciting conservative activists and flustering reporters with wild accusations, all while his underlings absorb the reputational damage.

Trumps genuine ignorance and limited vocabulary allowed him to effortlessly channel the Republican bases contempt for the educated elite. DeSantis has to work at it. Last fall, he mockingly cited a Wall Street Journal article on the declining number of men attending college. I guess there was a decline in the number of men, the percentage of men going to college or whatever, he told his audience. And they acted like this was a bad thing. And honestly, like, you know, to me, I think that is probably a good sign. This is not, of course, advice that the double-Ivy DeSantis took himself.

DeSantiss culture-war appeals usually steer clear of Trumps overt racism. (The one exception was during the 2018 general election, when he warned voters not to monkey this up by electing his Black Democratic opponent, a phrase that might have been a deliberate racist appeal but could also have been an unfortunate slip of the tongue.) He often attempts to formulate positions that could drive a wedge between the left and the center. Most important, while Trumps culture-war gestures often produced nothing but ephemeral content for conservative media, DeSantis has placed real state power behind the right-wing social agenda.

DeSantis on Monday signed a bill into law that would restrict classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, preventing teachers from explaining things like why some children have two fathers or two mothers. (Democrats offered an amendment to ensure the law would be limited to discussions of sex. Republicans voted it down.) The laws deepest potential for harm lies in its details. It bans such discussions either before the fourth grade or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate. Not only is the standard of appropriateness inherently subjective, but its enforcement mechanism enables parents who dont like the instruction their child gets on gender to sue.

You dont need to be a social liberal to see the potential for havoc. The law will open a lawsuit factory for culture war organizations to go after schools, the libertarian magazine Reason notes, forcing schools to shell out money to defend themselves and giving the most conservative parents the ability to veto school discussions that other parents are perfectly fine with.

DeSantis has appeared undaunted, tearing into a reporter who quoted Democrats who called it the Dont Say Gay bill before it was signed. This allowed him to highlight, once again, his martyrdom at the hands of the media without having to address the more serious objections to the bill. Pushaw went on Twitter to reframe the law as an Anti-Grooming Bill, writing, If youre against the anti-Grooming bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you dont denounce the grooming of 4- to 8-year-old children. It was a perfectly orchestrated DeSantis culture-war set piece.

DeSantis is also preparing to sign what he calls the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, a measure preventing uncomfortable racial discussions at any public school or college in the state that is so broad it would ban teachers or professors from defending affirmative action. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech group that has frequently denounced left-wing indoctrination and censorship on campus, describes the bill as flatly unconstitutional.

This spring, DeSantis staked out a position to the right of his own party by promising to veto a congressional map designed by Republicans. DeSantis insisted instead on a more aggressive map that would eliminate two of the states five Black-held seats. DeSantis believes this maneuver can both increase his partys strength in Congress and provoke a legal fight that would lead to the Supreme Courts striking down the remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act that protect minority representation in legislative redistricting. In meetings, he would just demand, Pass my maps! My maps! My maps! Hes just bizarrely obsessed with this, a Republican told NBC.

A measure that received less attention than either, but has enormous significance, is one DeSantis signed with little fanfare. In 2018, nearly two-thirds of Florida voters approved a ballot initiative to allow former felons to vote. Felon disenfranchisement is a relic of the post-Reconstruction era, when white southern states used it, in combination with laws heavily targeting Black men, as a tool to limit voting. The referendum granted eligibility to more than a million Floridians.

DeSantis, who was elected governor at the same time the initiative passed, acted quickly to nullify it once in office. Republicans pushed through a law requiring former felons to pay off any outstanding fines or court debt before they could vote. At least three-quarters of eligible voters owe court debt, and of those, the vast majority cant pay it back.

The point of the bill was not to compel payments. Indeed, because the state has no central database listing all fines, many voters who had the money, and an intense enough desire to vote, to pay for the privilege could not do so. The bills purpose was to disenfranchise those voters. Republicans have been implementing voting-rights restrictions across the country since about 2011, but no state has enacted a measure as sweeping and draconian as Floridas. DeSantis is the only governor since the Jim Crow era to institute a literal poll tax.

After signing the law, DeSantis proclaimed on his official Twitter account, Voting is a privilege that should not be taken lightly. He conveyed his beliefs with chilling accuracy: Voting is a privilege, not, as many Americans believe, a right.

Trump and DeSantis have been circling each other since the 2020 election, and their budding rivalry has so far been shaped by the GOPs two great preoccupations of the immediate post-Trump era: the pandemic and Trumps attempts to steal the election.

The incipient contest broke into public view in December. It began when DeSantis appeared on Fox News with Maria Bartiromo, who asked if he had gotten a booster shot. DeSantis evaded the question and changed the subject to his fight against vaccine requirements. A couple of weeks later, Pushaw announced that DeSantis was refusing to disclose his status as a matter of medical privacy.

The next week, Trump appeared on One America News and, without naming him, ridiculed DeSantis for being afraid to come clean. I watched a couple of politicians be interviewed and one of the questions was Did you get the booster? Trump said. Because they had the vaccine, and theyre answering like in other words, the answer is Yes, but they dont want to say it because theyre gutless. You gotta say it, whether you had it or not. Say it.

Quickly afterward, DeSantis hit back. The lobbyist Josh Holmes, an ally of Mitch McConnells, asked DeSantis on his podcast if he had any regrets about his term in office. DeSantis replied that he wished he had spoken out more forcefully against Trumps early, intermittent endorsements of social distancing when the coronavirus pandemic began, which he described as locking down the country. In other words, DeSantis considers his biggest mistake in office failing to push back against something Donald Trump did.

The most revealing aspect of the episode was how the conservative media covered it. If you listened to the Trump-critical outlets on the right the ones aligned with the GOP Establishments belief that Trumps personality is a liability for the party the first shots had been fired in DeSantiss uprising. National Review, which has become the premier intellectual organ of the anti-anti-Trump right while pining for his replacement, ran columns with headlines like Could DeSantis Beat Trump? and The DeSantis-Trump Tensions Will Lead to a Test of Strength.

Meanwhile, the most loyal Trumpist corners of the conservative media denied the entire premise that DeSantis and Trump were in conflict. American Greatness, an online magazine invented in response to the Trump campaign and premised on turning his slogans into a political program, insisted that the New York Times story on the Trump-DeSantis feud is kayfabe (a staged conflict). In a column headlined Why the Medias Attempt to Split DeSantis and Trump Isnt Working, the Federalists Mollie Hemingway argued that the corporate media is trying to pit Trump and DeSantis against each other because theyre a threat to the Establishment.

If youre a Republican who wants Trump gone, DeSantis is the man with the guts to take him on. If youre a Republican who adores Trump, DeSantis remains his loyal ally. Both wings of the party are jostling for DeSantiss approval and broadcasting DeSantis-friendly messages to their audiences.

The same dynamic can be seen in DeSantiss courtship of the anti-vaccine movement. Pro-vaccine conservatives maintain the pretense that DeSantis only opposes vaccine mandates, calling him a vocal proponent of the COVID vaccines and insisting that the claim he is encouraging doubt about the safety or efficacy of the vaccines is a lie. Meanwhile, anti-vaccine activists have hailed DeSantis as their champion. Vaccine skeptic Robert Malone, appearing on Steve Bannons podcast, gushed, Ron DeSantis and surgeon general Joe Ladapo are giving hope to the rest of the world. They are listening to the key messages we are putting forth.

If you completely dismiss the possibility that DeSantis could pry the Republican base away from a president to whom it has formed a cultlike attachment, you may not be considering the potential effect of two more years of DeSantis being given the sort of coverage in the right-wing media that Pravda devoted to Joseph Stalin.

What a DeSantis-led Republican Party would look like is perhaps best captured in his response to the claims that the 2020 election was stolen. DeSantis began by playing the familiar role of Trump defender, complaining the day after the election about Fox News decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden. (The network, he speculated, had some type of motive, whether it was ratings, whether it was something else.) He went on Hannitys show to warn of vote dumps, a Republican term designed to cast suspicion on the results coming out of Democratic counties: I tell you, what Im seeing in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania is troubling, Sean.

Later that day, DeSantis went on Fox News again and floated the possibility that Republican-controlled legislatures in battleground states won by Biden could override the election results and appoint Trump electors.

On the day of the insurrection, DeSantis issued a perfunctory rebuke (Violence or rioting of any kind is unacceptable) before pivoting back to his comfortable posture of offense. In the past year, he has assailed Liz Cheney for cooperating with the investigation of the attack (We want people that are going to fight the left), refused to say whether Biden legitimately won the election, and similarly declined to clarify whether Pence was correct to certify the Electoral College results.

By the time the anniversary of the insurrection arrived, DeSantis was floating the right-wing rumor that the violence on January 6 had actually been ginned up by undercover FBI agents. But mostly he resented the media for covering the issue at all. This is their Christmas: January 6, he complained. They are going to take this and milk this for anything they could to be able to smear anyone who ever supported Donald Trump.

DeSantis also marked the anniversary by wooing right-wing social-media personalities with an invitation to his office, dinner at the governors mansion, and rooftop drinks. One of the less visible aspects of DeSantiss political operation has been its appeals to conservative activists who have gained clout and influence during the Trump era and who have legitimized vaccine skepticism, support for Vladimir Putin, and dismissing or even participating in the January 6 insurrection. Pushaw attended an event to promote the anti-gay education bill held by Brandon Straka, who was recorded at the Capitol on January 6 urging the crowd to seize a police officers shield and yelling Go, go, go! Esther Byrd, whom DeSantis appointed to the states board of education, has reportedly defended the January 6 rioters, QAnon, and the Proud Boys.

DeSantiss unembarrassed courtship of right-wing extremists has broadened his array of media advocates. Perhaps most important, his no-enemies-to-the-right strategy has sent a message about his brand: Unlike the weak Republican Establishment, DeSantis will stand with conservatives.

In January, a small band of white supremacists converged in Orlando, where they chanted White power! and roughed up a Jewish student. Pushaw suggested on Twitter that the white supremacists were actually Democrats pretending to be Nazis to make DeSantis look bad, a charge that was quickly debunked.

When DeSantis was asked about the episode at a press conference, he could have confined himself to a rote denunciation of the racist hoodlums, as several of his fellow Florida Republicans did. Instead, he launched an extended diatribe against Democrats who are trying to use this as some type of political issue to try to smear me. He then wound his way through such talking points as Ilhan Omar, the BDS movement, Louis Farrakhan, inflation, illegal immigration, crime, and the supposed failures of the Biden administration which the press was allegedly trying to obscure by bringing up the Orlando attack. Rubio, standing behind DeSantis, shuffled his feet uncomfortably as DeSantiss rant went on. Were not playing their game, he insisted, falling back on his occasional habit of narrating his own political strategy. Their game, in this case, meant accepting the terms of debate as defined by what he has called the corrupt media.

In a high-profile editorial denouncing Trump six years ago a cover story with the glittering tagline Against Trump National Review asked, If Trump were to become the president, the Republican nominee, or even a failed candidate with strong conservative support, what would that say about conservatives? More recently, National Reviews editor, Rich Lowry, made the case for DeSantis on the grounds that he is the closest possible thing to Trump. The challenge to Trump, he reasoned, will have to come from the Trump wing at this point, more like the Trump fuselage, wing and landing gear of the party.

The paradigmatic DeSantis constituent within the Republican elite would be William Barr. The former attorney general, who released a memoir in March describing his clashes with Trump over the 2020 election, has called Trump delusional and says he wants to nominate young candidates who will fight for principle but dont have the sort of obnoxious personal characteristics that alienate a lot of voters. But Barr eagerly supported many of Trumps efforts to weaponize the Justice Department and has conceded that he will vote for Trump again should he be nominated. Its worth noting that the one major difference between Barr and DeSantis is that the former drew the line at Trumps attempt to overturn the results of the last election. With DeSantis, theres no telling where that line might be.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the March 28, 2022, issue of New YorkMagazine.

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Is Ron DeSantis the Future of Trumpism? - New York Magazine

Mr. Pavlovski and Rumble representatives did not respond to interview requests.

But he has made clear in streamed remarks to Rumble creators and to others that his ambitions are far greater than increasing traffic to his website and app. With investments from like-minded critics of Big Tech like Mr. Thiel, Mr. Pavlovski has described a vision for building a new internet a kind of alt-web that is entirely distinct from the dominant players in the industry.

Rumble has already built out its own cloud service infrastructure and video streaming capacity, offering it and its partners greater independence from the Amazons and Microsofts of the internet and the assurance that they cant be shut down if one of those providers decides to pull the plug over objectionable content. Looming large in the minds of Rumble fans is the experience of the social media network Parler, which effectively shut down once Amazon said it would no longer host the site on its computing services after the Jan. 6 attacks last year.

The promise of independence from the tech giants led Mr. Trump to have Rumble provide technology and cloud services for Truth Social, which has struggled to become fully operational on its own. In a statement announcing the partnership in December, Mr. Trump said he had picked Rumble because its among the service providers who do not discriminate against political ideology.

Rumble has also secured exclusive arrangements with popular content creators who have a following beyond conservatives and Trump supporters, such as the journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been vocal about his beliefs that technology behemoths and the mainstream media have too much power to quash speech. Rumble highlighted its partnership with Mr. Greenwald as an example of its content-neutral approach. (As for what it considers out of bounds, Rumble says it does not tolerate anything that is overtly racist, promotes violence or breaks the law.)

But there are also the popular Rumble creators the company doesnt talk about in news releases, like Alex Jones of Infowars, who was barred from YouTube and other mainstream platforms in 2018 and now has more than 100,000 Rumble followers.

Thats a small number compared with the millions on YouTube who followed Mr. Jones, who has spread bogus theories that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre was staged as part of a government plot to confiscate firearms. Those who study the right-wing media ecosystem say it is difficult to tell how large the overall audience for hard-right content is, in large part because the traffic data available for individual sites includes a lot of overlap from users who frequent more than one.

Its an intensely engaged population, said Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School who is a co-author of a book about the ways conservative outlets reinforce their messages through repetition and shut down dissent. For an individual platform like Rumble, he added, the audience is likely to be larger than whatever the size is on paper.

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Rumble, the Rights Go-To Video Site, Has Much Bigger Ambitions - The New York Times

Donald Trump has promised supporters that he will return to the White House in 2024 during a speech in Florida on Saturday.

The former president appeared on stage as part of an American Freedom Tour event in Fort Lauderdale.

With the support of everyone in this room, we will take back the House, we will take back the Senate and we will take back our country, said Mr Trump, according to a report by Insider.

He continued: And then most importantly in 2024, we are going to take back our beautiful White House.

You had a president that always put America first, he added. I will be back and we will be better and stronger than ever before.

The former president, 75, has continued to drop big hints about a 2024 run but has not announced any formal plans.

At the Florida rally he also repeated false claims that he had won the 2020 US presidential election.

"We won twice. We did much better the second time, and we may have to do it again," he said.

Mr Trump lost the election by 74 electoral college votes, and approximately 7 million votes, getting 46.9 per cent of the popular vote to President Joe Bidens 51.3 per cent.

Other speakers scheduled for the Florida event included his eldest son Donald Trump Jr, rightwing commentator Candace Owens, and conservative radio host Dan Bongino.

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I will be back: Trump promises 2024 return to White House at Florida rally - The Independent