Politics
Trump appears to take aim at potential 2024 GOP rivals, says he doesn’t have much ‘competition’
SALEM, N.H. – Former President Donald Trump took purpose at his potential rivals for the Republican presidential nomination as he kicked off a brand new part of this 2024 White Home marketing campaign with a cease within the state that first launched him in the direction of the presidency.
Pointing to his 2020 renomination because the sitting president, Trump on Saturday recollected throughout a speech within the first-in-the-nation presidential main state of New Hampshire that he did not have a lot competitors.
Then, as he seemed to a possible 2024 GOP main subject which may ultimately embody rivals comparable to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, and different well-known Republicans, Trump asserted that “I don’t suppose we have now competitors this time both to be trustworthy.”
The previous president additionally pushed again towards current criticism from political pundits that the primary months of his third White Home marketing campaign have been something however spectacular.
TRUMP STOPS IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, SOUTH CAROLINA, KICK OFF NEW PHASE FOR HIS 2024 CAMPAIGN
“They mentioned he’s not campaigning… perhaps he misplaced his step,” Trump mentioned as he imitated his critics.
The previous president then pressured that “I’m extra dedicated now than I ever was.”
Trump made his feedback as he gave the headline handle to a whole bunch of celebration leaders, elected officers and activists attending the New Hampshire GOP’s annual assembly.
New Hampshire, which for a century has held the primary main within the race for the White Home, was the scene of Trump’s first election victory in 2016, igniting him in the direction of the GOP presidential nomination and ultimately the White Home.
2024 WATCH: TRUMP’S IN — HERE’S WHO ELSE MAY JOIN THE GOP PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY FIELD
Trump’s go to to New Hampshire — first reported by Fox Information earlier this week — was his first cease of the day. He later headed for South Carolina, one other essential early voting state that holds the third contest within the GOP’s presidential nominating calendar, immediately after New Hampshire.
The Saturday afternoon gathering South Carolina’s state capitol constructing — the place he’s anticipated to announce his management staff within the Palmetto State with Sen. Lindsey Graham and Gov. Henry McMaster available — can be Trump’s first 2024 marketing campaign occasion since asserting his candidacy in mid-November at his Mar-a-Lago membership in Palm Seashore, Florida.
As he builds his management groups within the early voting states, the previous president introduced that Steve Stepanek is “approaching board because the senior adviser for my New Hampshire marketing campaign”
Stepanek, a former state lawmaker and businessman who co-chaired Trump’s 2016 marketing campaign within the Granite State, on Saturday completed up 4 years steering the state celebration committee.
The previous president acquired a really heat welcome from the gang in New Hampshire, as Trump supporters and allies have expanded their grip over the state celebration in recent times.
FIRST ON FOX: TRUMP STOPPING IN NEW HAMPSHIRE AHEAD OF SOUTH CAROLINA ON SATURDAY
“We’re beginning proper right here as a candidate for president…. That is just the start of our agenda. I look ahead to returning many occasions,” Trump touted.
And he predicted that “one 12 months from now we’ll win the New Hampshire main and the with the assistance of the nice individuals of this state… we’ll take again the White Home.”
Whereas Trump’s the one main Republican to this point to launch a 2024 presidential marketing campaign, and whereas he stays the preferred and influential politician within the GOP and the celebration’s most ferocious fundraiser with regards to energizing the grassroots.
However political pundits from each the left and the fitting torched his marketing campaign launch, and he’s been criticized by Democrats and a few Republicans for controversial actions and feedback he’s made in the course of the previous two months. Plus, within the wake of a lackluster efficiency by the GOP within the midterm elections — when the celebration underperformed in what might anticipated to be a purple wave election — Trump has additionally been blamed for elevating polarizing Republican nominees who ended up shedding in November.
Whereas he didn’t take sides in New Hampshire’s flamable GOP primaries in September, the MAGA-style candidates who gained the U.S. Senate and each congressional nominations went down in flames in November’s common election.
DESANTIS TOPS TRUMP IN CRUCIAL PRIMARY STATE POLL
Two days earlier than the previous president’s arrival within the Granite State, a brand new public opinion ballot by the College of New Hampshire Survey Middle recommended that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida held a double-digit lead over Trump in a hypothetical 2024 GOP presidential nomination matchup within the first main state.
DeSantis, whom pundits count on will declare his candidacy for president later this 12 months however who has but to say if he’ll launch a marketing campaign, stood at 42% assist within the survey of probably GOP presidential main voters in New Hampshire, with Trump at 30%. The ballot is energizing DeSantis supporters — together with two outdoors political teams with no ties to governor, one nationwide and one New Hampshire based mostly — which try to persuade the Florida governor to run for president. Each teams arrange cubicles on the NHGOP assembly in Salem.
Till just lately, Trump was the clear and overwhelming front-runner within the early 2024 GOP presidential nomination polls. However in a handful of nationwide surveys launched final month, Trump trailed DeSantis, whose standing with conservatives throughout the nation has soared over the previous three years. DeSantis was overwhelmingly re-elected in November for a second time period main Florida, a one-time battleground state that’s turned more and more purple the previous two cycles.
WHY THE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION RACE IS OFF TO A SLOW START
Trump allies and supporters spotlight that public opinion polling has lengthy undercounted the previous president’s assist, courting again to his first marketing campaign for the White Home in 2016.
And Trump, throughout his feedback in New Hampshire, touted his ballot place in quite a few surveys, claiming that “we’re to date forward within the polls.”
The previous president took purpose at his successor within the White Home, criticizing President Biden on a number of fronts, together with the present president’s proposal to maneuver New Hampshire down a notch within the Democratic Get together’s nominating calendar, which has infuriated each Democrats and Republicans within the Granite State.
Republicans are usually not altering their nominating calendar, retaining New Hampshire second of their schedule after the Iowa caucuses.
“I make this solemn pledge — once I’m again within the White Home I’ll be sure that New Hampshire stays the house of the primary within the nation Republican main for a lot of, a few years to return,” Trump highlighted.
Trump’s stops in New Hampshire and South Carolina look like a transfer to plant a flag as his marketing campaign begins to maneuver into the next gear.
“It’s going to be the primary of many journeys,” Trump marketing campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita advised Fox Information. “It’s one thing we’ve been wanting ahead to do. The early chicken will get the worm. It’s all about getting out, organizing, getting your individuals collectively, getting them motivated, getting them excited.”
LaCivita emphasised that “we’re beginning early and beginning aggressive and placing this group collectively, I believe bodes nicely for the long run.”
Whereas Trump was the primary candidate to announce, the sphere for the GOP presidential nomination will probably quickly develop. Among the probably or potential contenders hail from the 2 states Trump was stopping in on Saturday. Former two-term South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who served as ambassador to the United Nations in the course of the Trump administration and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina seem to transferring in the direction of launching attainable campaigns. And in New Hampshire, Republican Gov. Chris Sununu can be mulling a bid.
“New Hampshire is stuffed with tire kickers. We like to put candidates by their paces and Donald Trump isn’t any exception to that. He’s going to must work similar to another candidate who needs to win New Hampshire. He’s actually proven he can do this. He did that in 2016 fairly handily. And he has with out query the perfect infrastructure of any candidate, so he’s nicely positioned,” veteran New Hampshire conservative activist Greg Moore advised Fox Information.
However Moore, the longtime state director for People for Prosperity, emphasised that Trump is “nonetheless going to must show himself to New Hampshire voter similar to each different candidate.”
Politics
Tennessee Gov. Lee signs bill allowing concealed carry for public schoolteachers
Tennessee teachers and staff will be allowed to carry concealed handguns on public school grounds under legislation signed into law by Gov. Bill Lee on Friday.
Lee, a Republican, had announced his support for the proposal just the day before while flanked by top Republican legislative leaders who had helped shepherd the bill through the GOP-dominant General Assembly.
“What’s important is that we give districts tools and the option to use a tool that will keep their children safe,” Lee told reporters.
TENNESSEE NEARS LAW BANNING ADULTS FROM HELPING MINORS FIND, RECEIVE SEX REASSIGNMENT CARE
As the idea of arming teachers began to gain support inside the General Assembly, gun control advocates and families began swarming to the Capitol to show their opposition. During the final vote, protesters chanted “Blood on your hands” and many members of the public who oppose the bill harangued Republican lawmakers after the vote, leading House Speaker Cameron Sexton to order the galleries cleared.
According to the statute, which becomes effective immediately, parents and other teachers will be barred from knowing who is armed at their schools.
A principal, school district and law enforcement agency would have to agree to let staff carry guns, and then workers who want to carry a handgun would need to have a handgun carry permit and written authorization from the school’s principal and local law enforcement. They would also need to clear a background check and undergo 40 hours of handgun training. They couldn’t carry guns at school events at stadiums, gymnasiums or auditoriums.
The legislation is the biggest expansion of gun access in the state since last year’s deadly shooting at a private elementary school in Nashville where shooter indiscriminately opened fire and killed three children and three adults before being killed by police.
Lee initially asked lawmakers to keep guns away from people deemed a danger to themselves or others in response to the shooting, the Republican supermajority ignored that request.
Many of the Covenant families had met with Lee and lawmakers hoping to persuade them to drop the idea of arming teachers. In the final days of the legislative session, Covenant families said they had collected nearly 4,300 signatures from Tennesseans against having public school staffers carry weapons on school grounds.
“There are folks across the state who disagree on the way forward, but we all agree that we should keep our kids safe,” Lee said Thursday.
It’s unclear if any school districts would take advantage if the bill becomes law. For example, a Metro Nashville Public Schools spokesperson, Sean Braisted, said the district believes “it is best and safest for only approved active-duty law enforcement to carry weapons on campus.”
Politics
Opinion: The Supreme Court just showed us that Trump is not incompetent. He's a master of corruption
I have badly underestimated Donald Trump. Thursday was the day that his justices — it turns out that they are indeed his justices on the Supreme Court, just as he claimed — got it through my thick head: Trump is not just competent but masterful. He is not just capable, he is supreme.
Because Trump is clumsy at his alleged crimes, surrounding himself with flagrant thugs, telling obvious lies, leaving prolific trails of damning evidence, offering ridiculous defenses for indefensible conduct, I had long concluded that he is incompetent at crookery along with his other manifest failings. That’s true as far as it goes. But for all his mad greed and compulsive lawlessness, for all his sleaze and stupidity, crime is ultimately not Trump’s game. Trump is nothing like a master criminal. But he is a master of something far more sinister and complex: corruption.
Crime is a largely private endeavor. Corruption is public. It seeps into the muscle and sinew of democratic society and institutions; it devours from within. The Supreme Court, drunk on arrogated power, cut loose from rudimentary ethics, has been eaten alive by it. But the court is just one plot of a vast terrain that Trump has conquered — not with crime, but corruption.
Crime is when you launch a violent attempt to overthrow the republic. Corruption is when you convince an entire political party to pretend they didn’t watch it live on television, or cower from it inside the Capitol while dozens of police officers were being bludgeoned by the mob.
Crime is when you make off with top-secret documents. Corruption is when a MAGA judge can’t find time to schedule your trial, or process the mountainous evidence of your guilt.
Crime is when a U.S. resident is murdered and dismembered by Saudi hit men. Corruption is when the all but acknowledged killer invests $2 billion in your talentless son-in-law’s fund, which other investors shun.
Crime is when you fake business expenses to cover up a payoff to an adult film actress who wants to cash in on your campaign for president. Corruption is when the head of the nation’s greasiest tabloid, a perpetual fount of lies and nonsense, expresses concern that your deeds are too sleazy for him.
Crime is when your lawyers tell the Senate not to convict you in an impeachment trial because you can be charged in court. Corruption is when your lawyers inform the Supreme Court that you are immune from criminal courts and only the Senate can judge you — but, alas, the senators have missed their window.
Trump has already succeeded at corrupting much of what’s corruptible. Government. Elections. Foreign policy. Democracy. Religion. Above all, people, and mostly men. Truckloads, boatloads, tiki-torch-parade-loads, courtloads of weak men all standing in the shadow that Trump casts.
The Republican Party has been corrupted absolutely. House Republicans have combined McCarthyism with Larry, Moe and Curlyism to twist Congress to comically corrupt ends — all to serve the greater degeneracy of Trump. In the Senate, the young hyenas, Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), study Trump’s demagogy and lick their chops, hoping for a turn at democracy’s carcass.
The establishment has utterly caved. Former Atty. Gen. William Barr’s endorsement of Trump this week, after having called Trump unfit, a psychologically damaged incompetent who cares only about himself, was barely newsworthy. What is Barr but another in the long line of weak men, one more debased Republican offering fealty to the grease king? Trump thanked Barr by humiliating him again.
But it was the Republican Supreme Court — mostly men again — that put the shiv a little deeper in democracy’s back this week. Originalists or textualists, all sounded more or less Trumpist as they seriously entertained Trump’s argument that his assaults on the constitutional order are protected by the Constitution itself. There is no way to make honest sense of such a liar’s mash. But Larry, Moe and Curly aren’t just chairing committees in Congress. They wear robes and furrowed brows now, too. And they seem eager to pretend that crimes are just constitutional exercises of power, and that one ex-president is a king.
Richard Nixon, a self-made, and self-corrupted, man who studied geopolitics and government assiduously, never achieved such a broad subjugation of American values and institutions. Trump, the ignorant, n’er-do-well heir to his father’s crooked fortune, has achieved so much more. Trump hasn’t just captured the trenches of conservative America, he has taken the commanding heights. He owns all of it, from the most racist backwater saloon to the Federalist Society clubhouse. They are his corrupted subjects. He is their corrupt and demented king. If he can somehow get through the next few perilous months, he may yet render corruption sacred, and the republic irredeemable.
Francis Wilkinson is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. @fdwilkinson
Politics
Republican makes major announcement in push to grow GOP support from once-solid Dem voting bloc
EXCLUSIVE: A Republican running for re-election in a race key to a possible GOP Senate majority made a major announcement Friday aimed at keeping a crucial voting bloc away from the Democrats.
Florida Sen. Rick Scott announced the latest ad installment of a multimillion-dollar investment in Hispanic outreach, one that his campaign hopes will continue the demographic’s swing toward the GOP and further solidify the state as deep red.
“As parents, we teach values to our children, the difference between right and wrong, truth and lies. But then we send our kids to school where some radical socialist teacher doesn’t teach them math or English. No, they’re taught that men can have babies and become women, and that we should worship the god of government, not the God who created us. That is socialism,” Scott says in the ad, titled “Verdad,” which will run in both Spanish and English.
NEW POLL REVEALS HOW VOTERS’ VIEWS ON ABORTION HAVE CHANGED AS DEMS SEEK TO MAKE ISSUE A CENTRAL 2024 THEME
TRUMP LEADS BIDEN AMONG HISPANICS, REGISTERED VOTERS OVERALL: POLL
The ad will run in multiple TV and radio markets across Florida, as well as statewide on multiple digital platforms.
Socialism has been a major theme in Florida elections in recent years, especially considering the Hispanic population in the state has significant Cuban and Venezuelan heritage.
Some election experts argue that has been one of the major factors in the shift of Hispanics toward the Republican Party, which has expanded into other Hispanic groups, such as the Puerto Rican community.
According to the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, 55% of Florida’s Hispanics supported Republican Sen. Marco Rubio in his 2022 re-election bid, as well as Miami-Dade County — traditionally a Democratic stronghold that Hillary Clinton won by 29 percentage points in 2016.
Scott, who is expected to sail to victory in the Republican primary on Aug. 20, will likely face Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, the former representative of Florida’s 26th Congressional District ousted in the 2020 election.
Elections analysts rate the race as either “likely” or “solid” Republican.
Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.
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