The South Carolina Republican and foreign policy hawk shaped modern GOP politics as one of Trump's closest allies
CK Smith at Salon:
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina lawmaker whose three-decade career in Congress took him from one of Donald Trump’s fiercest Republican critics to one of the president’s closest allies, died Saturday after what his office described as a “brief and sudden illness.” He was 71.
Graham’s office announced his death in a statement early Sunday, saying he died Saturday evening. No cause of death was immediately released beyond describing it as a “brief and sudden illness.” His family asked for privacy and thanked the public for its prayers.
The longtime senator had celebrated his 71st birthday just two days earlier, making his death especially unexpected at a time when many of his Senate colleagues remain in office well into their late 70s and 80s. Graham had served in the Senate since 2003 after four terms in the House of Representatives and was campaigning for another six-year term after winning South Carolina’s Republican primary last month.
[...]
During the 2016 Republican presidential primary, Graham was among Trump’s sharpest critics, calling him a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” and warning that nominating him would damage the Republican Party. After Trump won the presidency, however, Graham gradually became one of his closest allies in the Senate, emerging as a frequent defender of Trump’s agenda, judicial nominees and foreign policy priorities. By Trump’s second term, Graham had become one of the president’s most trusted voices on Capitol Hill, particularly on national security issues.
[...]
Throughout his career, Graham cultivated a reputation for his focus on issues like immigration reform, national security and criminal justice, including reaching across the aisle for more bipartisanship politics in his earlier years in office. In later years, however, he became one of Trump’s most visible congressional allies, helping shepherd key nominations and serving as one of the administration’s most vocal defenders.
Graham’s death leaves South Carolina with a vacant Senate seat and removes one of the Republican Party’s most recognizable and influential voices on foreign policy after more than 30 years in Congress. Under South Carolina law, the vacancy will be filled through the state’s succession process until a special election can be held.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey “Lady G” Graham (R-SC) has died at 71 due to sudden illness.
Graham was once a staunch anti-Trumper, but once Trump got elected (and especially after John McCain died), he became a MAGA lapdog. There will be a special primary election to determine the Republican nominee.
We’re sorry to remind you of this, but it has officially been 10 years since Donald Trump announced his bid for presidency. Of course, he wo
Alix Kendall at Daily Kos:
We’re sorry to remind you of this, but it has officially been 10 years since Donald Trump announced his bid for presidency. Of course, he would have made the run a lot sooner if his spiritual adviser, Paula White, hadn’t told him that God thought it was too soon.
But when the now-convicted-felon announced his plans on June 16, 2015, he set in motion a whirlwind of changes to come over the next decade.
"Quite simply, it is time to bring real leadership to Washington,” Trump’s press release said at the time. “The fact is, the American Dream is dead—but if I win, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before. Together we will Make America Great Again!"
In his efforts to Make America Great Again, the two-time president—who still might be vying for a third term—has done quite a bit of damage.
Over the past ten years, Trump has made America healthy again by pulling out some weird tricks, like suggesting people inject bleach to fight off COVID-19. Then again, he did later appoint an anti-vax fanatic to head the department that oversees the production and promotion of vaccines, so at least he is consistent.
And while he managed to make enemies out of a chunk of his first-term GOPers, like former Vice President Mike Pence—perhaps for almost getting him killed—he finally got to turn the White House into the reality show he always wanted. From “MTV Road Rules” to “Fox & Friends” the administration has its fair share of TV stars.
10 years ago yesterday, Donald Trump made infamous escalator ride down to announce his run for President for the 2016 GOP nomination. Most Americans, including those who later supported Trump, dismissed the nomination as an unserious attempt at the time. However, as the campaign season went on, his run was a serious one that cannot be ignored.
In the space of the 10 years since, he was up for election 3 times, winning two (2016, 2024) and losing one (2020). He became the main figure of GOP elected politics and scrambled the political lines between pro-Trump and anti-Trump, leading to realignments going both ways.
The media once touted Marco Rubio as the "Latin Obama" ... now he's just comic relief
Joy-Ann Reid at Joy's House:
Marco Rubio has been many things.
He’s been a rising star in Florida politics; Jeb Bush’s perceived heir apparent, to whom the former Republican governor and scion of the Bush dynasty literally handed a golden scepter as Rubio ascended to the speakership of the Florida House — becoming the first Cuban-American to do so.
He’s been a rising national media star, who many of my fellow political journalists couldn’t stop gushing over from the moment of his 2010 U.S. Senate run, to the point where it wasn’t just a Republican diss: mainstream media repeatedly designated Rubio as the Republican’s Latin Obama: the literal Savior of the Grand Old Party. His immigrant background! His youthful Latin looks! His HAIR!!!
For those who’ve covered him for years, he’s been the ultimate shape-shifter: switching religions (from Catholic to Mormon, back to Catholic and then to evangelical Christian, seemingly depending on the political utility… and switching political religions too. Rubio started life as a traditional Bush-Reagan Republican but somehow morphed into a “tea party” U.S. Senate candidate in 2010, when that designation became politically convenient with the rabidly Obama-hating Republican base.
But Rubio was a Reaganite hiding in plain site.
[...]
During his 2016 presidential bid, he tried to trip of Donald Trump’s first romp to the White House by trying penis size humor in response to Trump mocking him as “Lil’ Marco.” Sadly, it just made him look even “Liller” (although Trump did feel obligated to defend his allegedly tiny endowment.) At least Trump didn’t imply that Rubio’s wife, who is a former Miami Dolphins cheerleader, is ugly, like he did to Ted Cruz’s missus — after which Cruz, following a brief complaint, also sidled up to The Donald and meekly handed over his manhood.
Like “Lyin’ Ted,” Lil Marco has gone on to become one of Trump’s most solicitous defenders, both during his first administration and now his second. So it should come as no one’s surprise that he has cast aside whatever is left of his dignity along with all remnants of his past positions supporting USAID and foreign aid in general as Trump’s obsequious secretary of state, along with his longtime loathing of the Kremlin and support for Ukraine’s freedom fight against Putin’s Russia, to bend the knee to Trump’s Putin adoration and hatred of any country Vlad wants to drag back into a Soviet Union. Not to mention getting on board with the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza so Trump can erect a ghoulish fantasy resort from Hell on top of all those graves and demolished schools, universities, homes, mosques and hospitals.
And that brings us to what was one of the most humiliating moments in the nearly 500 year history of the United States, when Rubio joined other benighted members of his soulless party in gang-tackling Ukranian president Volodomyr Zelenskyy in the Oval, where Zelenskyy was nagged about not wearing a suit and tie, badgered by Trump and Peter Thiel’s employee J.D. Vance for not being grateful enough or agreeing to quietly hand over his country’s rare earth minerals to Trump like the ransom business owners who wanted to see the sunlight in the 1940s handed in an envelope to the goons for the local mob boss. It was a display emblematic of the awful reality we are living in where Trump and his administration are proudly showing in full of the world, who the president of the United States really works for.
As one European leader put it: the free world is gonna need a new leader.
Former MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid has a solid column on the political evolution of Marco Rubio’s journey from establishment Republican in the Bush mold to MAGA shill.
There have been multiple pre-postmortems on Ron DeSantis' still-unannounced presidential campaign, and the most complete one might be David Lurie's piece in Public Notice. Mother Jones is also weighing in. The proximate cause of these new pieces was DeSantis' utterly cringeworthy world tour, during which the plastic dress-up doll underwhelmed foreign counterparts from Asia to Europe.
That's not to say that the foreign visits doomed him. The Republican base doesn't give a damn whether its would-be presidential candidates are liked or loathed by America's various allies, and would in general prefer candidates who are despised abroad to ones foreign leaders actually liked. The DeSantis "campaign" had already been on rough ground, though, as soon as the seditious Republican coup leader Donald Trump began publicly attacking him—only to have DeSantis prove himself unable or unwilling to respond.
Ron's foreign trip was seen as a way to dodge the topic while providing some needed footage of the candidate looking like a plausible diplomat, a way to salvage the campaign without engaging Trump directly. And it might have worked, if DeSantis had more charisma than a wooden spoon. He doesn't, so the result was yet more press footage of Ron DeSantis looking out of his element in every situation he could possibly put himself in.
The problems with Ron DeSantis as a plausible national personality remain twofold. First, the man has no personality of his own and no apparent ability to find one. And second, DeSantis has covered for his vacuousness by shamelessly borrowing all of the cruelest Republican Party ideas and fashioning his personality around those cruelties and nothing else. The man's campaign suit consists of over-the-top cultural resentments all stitched together and overlapping, but if you ask who Ron DeSantis is, as a person, there doesn't seem to be anyone who can answer that.
[...]
We have seen the speedy collapse of presidential ambitions before, and in countless variations. There have been a great many state politicians over the years who have thought themselves the next big thing, the genius idea-men who would turn around the shrinking Republican Party and turn it into something with principles, and proposals, and at least enough dignity to allow voters to pretend they were casting their vote for something other than spite and cruelty. Then, after polishing their alleged credentials through years of curated press glad-handing, they actually launch their presidential campaigns only to crash and burn the moment the wider public got a good look at them.
This would be the Scott Walker model, in which the candidate thoroughly prepares an agenda only to find that campaign crowds do not give a flying damn about an agenda, do not want to argue about an agenda, and especially do not want to be told what their agenda should be based on the say-so of the insufferable conservative opinion writers who imagine themselves to be the gatekeepers of such things.
Sen. Marco Rubio's ruined presidential run is another case of this, though he perhaps shares more ground with Sen. Ted Cruz when it comes to how the actual campaign death came about. Marco Rubio, like Walker, imagined himself a great idea-man and pitched himself as yet another young up-and-comer technocrat. He then got his ass handed to him (and then some) on the national stage, when the most boorish and mean-spirited Republican candidate in modern history began to insult him for little reason other than the sheer pleasure of doing so—and Marco was caught flat-footed, apparently unprepared to push back against a mere schoolyard bully, much less the world's autocrats. His leadership credentials evaporated in the span of a few debates, and the "ideas" behind his campaign, whatever they were, were lost to history.
Ron DeSantis is unambiguously not an idea-man. He visibly chafes when he is even in the same room as an idea, much less asked his opinion of one. The lesson Ron took from Marco Rubio being humiliated by the ignorant, vapid, and gleefully cruel Donald Trump is that Trump's politics work and Rubio's politics do not, and ever since Trump's victory Ron has turned that single lesson into the personality he was never able to find. Ideas: No. Gleeful cruelty: Yes, please, and then some.
So Ron DeSantis started to dress like Trump, with his slightly-oversized coats and power-red ties. DeSantis speeches began to sound more like Trump speeches in tone and mannerisms, with DeSantis mimicking even Trump's accordion-hands gestures. In Christina Pushaw, DeSantis found an arch-right press secretary who could compulsively tweet the insults, misinformation, and spite Trump was infamous for but that DeSantis himself has neither the obsessiveness nor quick-enough wit to muster.
Instead, Ron DeSantis has been utterly, monotonously one-dimensional. The Ron DeSantis method of politics is to watch enough television to learn what the new conservative culture war is supposed to be, upon which he adopts it as the newest fundamental aspect of his persona.
[...]
No, Ron DeSantis has exactly one shot at becoming the Republican candidate for the presidency in 2024. He can win if Donald Trump dies. If Donald Trump dies between now and the first Republican primary, that would be nothing but good news for Ron DeSantis.
Join the club, Ron. There are only a handful of Americans in the nation who would not be better off if Donald Trump fell off a balcony or choked on a cheeseburger, and if Donald didn't do it for Melania or for the rest of us, you'd be a fool to get your own hopes up.
Another Trump indictment might do the trick too, but probably not. The DeSantis cowardice, when it comes to confronting Trump on anything from boorish perversions to big-boy election crimes, is shared by his entire party. Trump could well run for the Republican nomination from a prison cell and run away with eight in 10 Republican votes.
There's no realistic path forward here for Ron. Oh, he can twist on the wind for as long as he wants, and likely will, but his borrowed public stances are near-universally toxic among the majority of U.S. voters, he is gutless when it comes to defending those toxic stances in anything but the most curated of crowds, he has fashioned himself as a cheap knockoff Trump when the real one is alive and kicking and staring right at him, and when stripped of his coat-of-many-evils the man is dull, painfully dull, agonizingly and teeth-grindingly dull.
Ron DeSantis began running for president under the presumption that Donald Trump would be a good little failure and run off to retirement. The moment Trump decided he wanted a second go at wrecking the country, the very premise of Ron's campaign fell apart.
Ron DeSantis is facing the same fate laid by Scott Walker and Rick Perry in previous nominations in making the assumption that conservative successes at the state level would translate to nationwide success... only to crumble when on the nationwide stage.
As part of his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump is now declaring war against transgender people – especially transgender children – even vowing to use DOJ and Congress to make being transgender illegal under federal law, if elected President. He also promised to promote the “nuclear family,” an attack on same-sex couples and families. And he pledged to use the Dept. of Education to file federal civil rights charges against local school teachers who support transgender children – or even the very concept of being transgender.
In 2015, as his first presidential campaign took shape, Trump was falsely hailed by some LGBTQ Republicans as being “pro-gay.” In 2016, for a short while, Trump said transgender people should “use the bathroom they feel is appropriate,” although less than 24 hours later he reversed course. But that same year he merged two powerful culture war issues, LGBTQ rights and illegal immigration, into a combined wedge issue to attack his Democratic opponent.
“Thank you to the LGBT community! I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people that will threaten your freedoms and beliefs,” he tweeted.
It was a lie.
Fast forward to 2023.
Trump’s promise on Tuesday afternoon to attack transgender Americans, despite medical evidence and expert opinions to the contrary. go much further than any other national Republican’s, and it’s clear he had help creating these new anti-LGBTQ policies. Right-wing extremist media promoted the ex-president’s assault on this highly-vulnerable population almost immediately.
In his video he calls gender-affirming care “child sexual mutilation” and “left wing gender insanity,” suggesting transgender people did not exist throughout history, which is false.
“The left wing gender insanity being pushed in our children is an act of child abuse very simple,” Trump, in his unique oratorical style, begins in a nearly four-minute video posted on Rumble and on his Truth Social platform. “Here’s my plan to stop the chemical, physical and emotional mutilation of our youth.”
Nearly every major medical organization recognizes and supports gender-affirming care for children.
[...]
Trump also promised to “sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age. I will then ask Congress to permanently stop federal taxpayer dollars from being used to promote or pay for these procedures and pass a law prohibiting child sexual mutilation.”
“In all 50 states it’ll go very quickly. I will declare that any hospital or health care provider that participates in the chemical or physical mutilation of minor youth will no longer meet federal health and safety standards for Medicaid and Medicare and will be terminated from the program immediately.”
Trump also promised to turn the executive branch into an anti-transgender machine for his personal political ends.
“The Department of Justice will investigate Big Pharma and the big hospital networks to determine whether they have deliberately covered up horrific long term side effects of sex transitions in order to get rich at the expense of vulnerable patients, in this case, very vulnerable. We will also investigate whether Big Pharma or others have illegally marketed hormones and puberty blockers which are in no way licensed or approved for this use.”
He also promised his “Department of Education will inform states and school districts that if any teacher or school official suggests to a child that they could be trapped in the wrong body, they will be faced with severe consequences including potential civil rights violations for sex discrimination, and the elimination of federal funding.”
Trump did not waver in using the full power of the federal government to target and attack transgender children and LGBTQ families, while using local school teachers to carry out his pogrom.
In his unhinged video on Tuesday calling for the wholesale elimination of trans existence, Donald Trump not only called for gender-affirming care to be banned but also urged the Department of Education to harm the safety of LGBTQ+ students, supports making male and female the only gender recognized by the US government, and promoting the “nuclear family” in education.
It is imperative that this anti-trans zealot not be re-elected in 2024.
See Also:
Daily Kos: Donald Trump goes full unhinged TERF in four-minute video posted to Truth Social
Hillary Clinton has shared for the first time what would have been her 2016 presidential victory speech.
Rachel Janfaza at CNN:
Hillary Clinton has shared for the first time what would have been her 2016 presidential victory speech.
In a soon-to-be-released Masterclass episode on "The Power of Resilience," the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee and former secretary of state reads from the remarks she had prepared to give in New York on November 8, 2016, before it became clear that Donald Trump had won the election.
“I've never shared this with anybody. I've never read it out loud. But it helps to encapsulate who I am, what I believe in and what my hopes were for the kind of country that I want for my grandchildren and that I want for the world, that I believe in, is America at its best," Clinton says in an excerpt of the Masterclass episode released Wednesday by NBC's "Today."
She then begins reading from her speech. "My fellow Americans, today you've sent a message to the whole world," Clinton says. "Our values endure, our democracy stands strong and our motto remains 'E pluribus unum.' Out of many, one. We will not be defined only by our differences. We will not be an us vs. them country. The American dream is big enough for everyone."
Clinton talks about what she describes as a "long, hard campaign" through which the country was "challenged to choose between two very different visions for America."
"Fundamentally, this election challenged us to decide what it means to be an American in the 21st century," she says.
Clinton -- who in 2016 became the first woman to capture a major-party nomination for president -- would have spoken in her victory speech about becoming the first female president of the United States.
"Today with your children on your shoulders, neighbors at your side, friends old and new standing as one, you renewed our democracy. And because of the honor you have given me, you changed its face forever," Clinton says in the video excerpt.
"I've met women who were born before women had the right to vote. They've been waiting 100 years for tonight. I've met little boys and girls who didn't understand why a woman has never been president before. Now they know, and the world knows, that in America every boy and every girl can grow up to be whatever they dream, even president of the United States," she says.
"This is a victory for all Americans, men and women, boys and girls, because as our country has proven once again, when there are no ceilings, the sky's the limit."
This week, we finally know what Hillary Clinton’s victory speech that she never had a chance to use would have looked like. A sizable portion of her speech would have focused on how she became the 1st woman to preside over the United States. Sadly, Clinton lost to Donald Trump that election, and that has made things worse for America.
Ex-fixer confirms WSJ bombshell report: Scheme with Liberty University’s IT director was carried out ‘at the direction and for the sole benefit’ of the president.
Jamie Ross at The Daily Beast:
Michael Cohen hired an IT firm to rig online polls in favor of Donald Trump ahead of the 2016 election and instructed the company to create the @WomenForCohen Twitter account to laud how sexually attractive he is, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Trump’s then-attorney—who has since spectacularly fallen out with the president—promised to pay $50,000 to the small tech firm run by a Liberty University staffer to help distort online polls on CNBC and the Drudge Report.
Cohen has confirmed the bombshell report to CNN, and claimed it was carried out “at the direction and for the sole benefit of Donald J. Trump.”
The IT firm doesn’t appear to have been particularly good at the task. Cohen reportedly asked for its help in a January 2014’s CNBC poll to name the country’s top business leaders. RedFinch Solutions founder John Gauger reportedly wrote a computer script to repeatedly vote for Trump—but was still unable to get him into the top 100 candidates.
Gauger is chief information officer at Virginia’s Liberty University, the evangelical Christian college run by Jerry Fallwell Jr., a close Trump supporter. Cohen reportedly helped arrange Falwell Jr.’s endorsement of Trump in January 2016.
Cohen, who has been sentenced to three years in prison for lying to Congress and campaign-finance violations, returned to Gauger a year later, in February 2015, according to the Journal report. Cohen asked for help in a Drudge Report poll of potential Republican candidates—he only managed fifth place, with about 24,000 votes.
Some of the work appeared to be more for Cohen’s benefit than Trump’s. It’s claimed that Cohen tasked Gauger with creating the @WomenForCohen Twitter account in May 2016, which heralded Cohen as a “sex symbol” and promoted his media appearances during the campaign.
