World
Pence’s early exit from the presidential campaign offers a reminder of Trump’s grip on the GOP
LAS VEGAS (AP) — Mike Pence has a resume most White House hopefuls would dream of. A congressman. A governor of a big Midwestern state. A one-time vice president.
In normal times, someone with such credentials would be well positioned to win their party’s presidential nomination. But these are not normal times and Pence’s decision to end his campaign more than two months before the first contest in the Republican primary underscores the extent to which the party has been subsumed by former President Donald Trump and his lies about the 2020 election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Pence made his surprise announcement Saturday in Las Vegas, where he and other GOP presidential hopefuls spoke at a summit sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition. But in many ways, Pence’s campaign ended years before it officially began, in the days leading up to Jan. 6, 2021. That was when Trump, desperate to hang onto power, became convinced that Pence, as president of the Senate, could somehow reject the election results — a power the then-vice president did not possess.
After spending four years as Trump’s loyal defender, Pence was suddenly cast as a traitor, targeted by rioters who stormed the Capitol, some chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” Angry Trump supporters crossed his name off their “Trump-Pence” yard signs or shoved them deep into the ground to bury his name in the dirt. While the issue became less salient as the campaign went on, Pence was heckled and booed at times.
“From the very beginning, I think his supporters knew that the challenge was going to be some of the hardcore Trump supporters were never going to forgive him for upholding the Constitution on Jan 6.,” said Art Pope, a GOP donor from North Carolina who supported Pence’s campaign. “On the other hand, there were a group of Americans who were never going to forgive him for being in the Trump administration to begin with.”
“He just could not overcome that,” Pope said.
Pence tried to thread what often seemed like an impossibly fine needle. He ran on the record of what he fondly referred to as the Trump-Pence administration while also criticizing his former boss. He accused Trump of abandoning conservative principles on issues such as abortion and of putting himself above the Constitution to stay in power. During his campaign launch event, Pence addressed Jan. 6 head-on, defending his actions and saying Trump disqualified himself during that period.
“Anyone that puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States, and anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again,” Pence said.
The Wi-Fi password for the media at the event — “KeptHisOath!” — underscored his message, as did the first ad run by a supportive super political action committee, which featured footage from the insurrection, contrasting both men’s actions that day.
Though it was never part of his stump speech, Pence’s approach to Jan. 6 reflected his advisers’ belief that, if he addressed the Capitol attack directly and spent time explaining his position, voters would come to respect his adherence to the Constitution and see it as a point of strength.
“People respect him for upholding his oath under enormous pressure,” Marc Short, a longtime senior adviser, said over the summer.
That never translated into support from conservative primary voters, who in polls and focus groups made clear they preferred other options. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research from August found 57% of Republicans still believe Biden was illegitimately elected president, while a plurality believed Trump did nothing wrong in the run-up to Jan. 6.
Even at Pence’s opening campaign event, many in attendance said they liked and respected him, but had yet to make a decision.
“We always knew there was going to be a large portion of the electorate that was not going to be with him on Jan. 6, but the only way he could tarnish his career and his legacy and reputation was to be untrue to himself,” said Devin O’Malley, Pence’s longtime spokesman. “Ultimately there was one person who could change how he’ll be perceived through history and that was Mike Pence. And he stayed true to himself and he comes out with his legacy intact.”
Pence spent much of his campaign advocating traditional conservative policies, including more U.S. support for Ukraine, even as those ideas have fallen out of favor in a Republican Party increasingly aligned with Trump’s populist and isolationist leanings.
All the while, Trump only grew stronger, building his support even as he confronted multiple criminal indictments, including one tied to his efforts to overturn the election.
Supporters and those close to Pence, some of whom were granted anonymity to describe the final weeks of his campaign, said they realized the campaign was effectively over around the time of the second debate in September.
Several expected Pence would see a wave of momentum after the first debate, when he delivered an uncharacteristically pointed performance, tangling, in particular, with tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. But Pence saw no appreciable bump in the polls or fundraising. By the second debate, he was relegated to the far side of the stage.
Then came a campaign finance report that showed just how dire the situation had become. Pence already racked up more than $600,000 in debt and was burning through nearly as much cash as he was raising, despite an aggressive fundraising schedule.
While Pence staked his campaign on Iowa — where his super PAC had knocked on nearly 600,000 doors — making it to the January caucuses would have required him to go into the kind of debt that might have taken Pence, who is not independently wealthy, years to pay off.A
Aides insisted he would qualify for the third debate if he tried, but his calendar became suspiciously empty. This past week, Pence began dialing top supporters to let them know that he decided to end the campaign.
“He never got much traction,” said Larry Post, a retired money manager from Beverly Hills, California, who was among the Republican donors gathered in Las Vegas.
Pence chose the Republican Jewish Coalition summit — before a friendly crowd that has long appreciated his support for Israel — in part so he could make his case one last time that the U.S. must maintain its leadership role on the world stage to prevent attacks such as the one by Hamas against Israel.
Post blamed Pence for his predicament. “He’s kind of stiff,” Post said. “So I don’t think he had a lot of charisma.” But Post also said Jan. 6 may have played a role in Pence’s struggle to gain momentum as a candidate, “when he decided, you know, to pick a fight with Trump over what was right and what was wrong and what he should do.”
Lawrence Platt, an OB/GYN from Los Angeles who was also attending the meeting of the influential Jewish group, said he was “not shocked but surprised,” when Pence announced he was ending his campaign.
He called Pence “a respectful man,” but said there were other strong candidates in the field beyond Trump.
Pence was only polling in the single digits, so his departure is unlikely to give a major boost to any of his rivals. But former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has been running as the most vocal Trump critic in the race, said it was a sign the field was finally winnowing — something anti-Trump Republicans have long argued must happen for anyone to have a shot at taking on Trump directly.
“In the end, it just means this race is narrowing as everyone said that it would,” Christie said told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
Pope, who said Pence had reached out earlier this past week to let him know he had decided to end his campaign, said that was the right choice.
“If there is not a path to victory then I think it was a prudent thing to withdraw from the race earlier rather than later and let the field consolidate,” he said, voicing belief that Trump can be beaten.
___
Colvin reported from New York.
“The Last Frenzy,” a comedy film about a dying man’s last hurrah, retained the top spot in mainland Chinese cinemas for the third weekend of its four weeks on release. Other signs of theatrical malaise were plentiful.
“The Last Frenzy” earned $5.8 million (RMB41.5 million) between Friday and Sunday, according to data from consultancy firm Artisan Gateway. That lifted its total to within a whisker of the $100 million landmark, at $98 million (RMB696 million) since releasing on May 1.
“Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In,” the Soi Cheang-directed crime action film set in Hong Kong’s now demolished Kowloon Walled City, held on to second place. It earned $4.9 million and has a cumulative of $86.2 million.
“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” which two weeks earlier had been the biggest title before slipping to fourth, regained a position. In third, it earned $2.8 million for a cumulative of $25.6 million, since debuting in China on May 10.
“Three Old Boys,” a crime action film directed by Gao Qunshu (“Beijing Blues,” “Old Fish”) was the weekend’s highest opener. Starring Bao Bei’er, Han Geng and Guo Tao, the film earned $2.7 million (RMB19.0 million).
(“The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” opened outside the top ten. Other data providers estimate that it earned a fraction over $500,000 in its opening three days.)
Fifth place ove the latest weekend belonged to “Hovering Blade” with $1.8 million. The iQiyi-backed revenge-action film is a Chinese adaptation of a crime novel by Japanese author Keigo Higashino about a father on a revenge mission after discovering that his school-age daughter has been raped and murdered. After ten days in cinemas, it has a cumulative of $10.9 million.
Theatrical momentum, which has made China the world’s biggest cinema market so far this year, continues to slow in the flat spot between the May Day holiday and China’s own summer season.
Artisan Gateway calculates that year-to-date box office in China has now passed the $3 billion mark and totals $3.03 billion. The year-to-date score is now 1% below the comparable figure in 2023.
JERUSALEM – The Biden administration is facing new calls to sanction Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, which has links to Iran’s regime and the U.S.-designated terrorist movement Hamas.
Germany outlawed Samidoun in November and Israel classified the Palestinian organization as a terrorist entity in 2021.
“If the U.S. is going to get serious about the pro-Hamas mobs who’ve wreaked havoc on U.S. campuses, they will have to take action to ban Samidoun and investigate their allies and supporters,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the LA-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, told Fox News Digital.
Samidoun has chapters in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Iran, as well as in numerous European states: Sweden, France and Spain.
Nancy Faeser, German federal minister of the interior, said in a November statement, “Today, I banned all activity in Germany by Hamas, a terrorist organization whose aim is to destroy the State of Israel. Samidoun is an international network which disseminates anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda while claiming to promote solidarity with prisoners in different countries. Samidoun also supported and glorified various foreign terrorist organizations, including Hamas… Banning the activity of Hamas and Samidoun, and dissolving Samidoun Deutschland, will put a stop to such demonstrations of hate in Germany.”
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Samidoun protesters gather in Cologne, Germany. (Ying Tang/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
She added, “With its spontaneous ‘celebrations’ here in Germany following the horrific terrorist attacks by Hamas in Israel, Samidoun revealed its antisemitism and absolute lack of regard for human life in an especially abhorrent way.”
When approached about the German and Israeli bans of Samidoun, a U.S. State Department spokesperson told Fox News Digital, “We are aware that Germany banned Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. We do not comment on deliberations, or potential deliberations, related to the U.S. terrorist designation process.”
The State Department spokesman added, “Unlike many of our foreign partners, the United States, under the First Amendment, cannot designate organizations based solely on hateful speech. As a matter of law, in order to designate any group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization the Secretary of State must determine that it is a foreign organization that engages in terrorist activity that threatens the security of United States nationals or our national security.”
Terrorism experts have, however, noted that Samidoun’s links to U.S.-designated terrorist organizations such as Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) meet the criteria for a ban.
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German Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser gives a talk after a federal cabinet meeting. (Sebastian Gollnow/picture alliance via Getty Images)
The role of Samidoun during the pro-Hamas campus protests has drawn greater scrutiny from experts.
On May 16, Steven Stalinsky, the counterterrorism expert and executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), wrote on the Fox News op-ed page, “Also lending its support to U.S. students was a coalition of jihadi Gaza student organizations representing Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, PFLP, and others. Its statement of ‘solidarity’ with the ‘Student Intifada in the United States,’ translated into English and published by the PFLP affiliate Samidoun on April 25, saluted the American students who are ‘rising up to put an end to the Zionist-U.S. genocide’ and lauded their ‘work to transform their universities into ‘Popular Universities for Gaza.’”
MEMRI also posted a video of a speech by the Canadian-based Charlotte Kates, the international coordinator of Samidoun, who glorified Hamas’ mass murder of roughly 1,200 people on October in southern Israel. Hamas murdered over 30 Americans on Oct. 7 and kidnapped more than 250 people.
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Anti-Israel agitators protest at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada. (Mert Alper Dervis/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Kates said on April 26 in Vancouver, British Columbia: “We demand a free Palestine from the River to the Sea. And we stand with the Palestinian resistance and their heroic and brave actions on October 7. As they said, long live October 7th! And we say today: long live October 7th!”
The Canadian authorities arrested Kates for her pro-Hamas terrorism speech. On the other side of the Atlantic, Herbert Reul, the interior minister of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, dismantled and outlawed on May 16 the NGO Palestine Solidarity Duisburg because it provides support to Hamas and Samidoun.
Reul said, “This ban comes at the right time and sends the right signal. In many cases, solidarity with Palestine hides nothing other than hatred of Jews – as is the case with the organization that was banned today. We will use all legal options to combat antisemitism and ideological support for terrorism. Today, the state has shown a clear stance against extremism.”
Yet, the ban of Samidoun and its activities in Germany has not been a complete success. Dr. Rafael Korenzecher, the publisher of the German-Jewish newspaper Jewish Review (Jüdische Rundschau in German), told Fox News Digital, “The half-hearted bans on Samidoun and Hamas, which still leave too much leeway for anti-Jewish activities, come far too late and are purely alibi actions by the responsible political actors to divert attention from the fundamental.”
According to the recently released domestic intelligence report from North Rhine-Westphalia, the number of Hamas operatives rose from 150 in 2022 to 175 in 2023. In 2003, Germany along with the EU, formally sanctioned Hamas as a terrorist entity. Germany, however, did not strictly enforce the ban and it became a hotbed of Hamas membership, recruitment and fundraising.
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German police confront anti-Israel protesters in front of Humboldt University in Berlin. (Michele Tantussi/Getty Images)
The German state of Baden-Württemberg has taken a lax approach to Hamas. The state’s Green Party governor, Winfried Kretschmann, has refused to ban Palestine Committee Stuttgart – an NGO that has raised funds for Samidoun. The capital city of Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, allows the contact information of the Palestine Committee Stuttgart to appear on the municipal webpage.
Professor Michael Wolffsohn, a prominent German-Jewish historian and commentator on modern antisemitism and Islamism, told Fox News Digital that the “structural problem” in Germany can be grounded in former German Chancellor “Angela Merkel’s migration policy. Not just in the years 2015-16. Hundreds of thousands of times, Islamic antisemites were allowed into the country unchecked. Only attention was paid to right-wing extremism, which was also certainly dangerous, and left-wing extremism was downplayed as partners of the Islamists.”
Wolffsohn warned, “It’s not just about this or that federal government. You also have to look at the state governments and municipalities,” while noting that also includes the “the police and judicial authorities.”
The future for Jews in Germany appears bleak based on the massive outbreaks of Jew-hatred since Oct. 7. Just last week, nearly 4,000 German Muslims, leftists and ordinary Germans protested against Israel in front of the main synagogue in Munich, Bavaria.
“Jewish life in Germany is becoming increasingly impossible,” Korenzecher said. “Illegal migration from predominantly Islamic countries, where hatred of Jews and Israel is partly propagated by the state and is virtually part of the raison d’être there, is an existential threat to Jewish life.”
Fox News Digital approached Samidoun for a comment.
Palestinian medics say Israeli strikes in Gaza’s southern city of Rafah have killed at least 35 people, many of them displaced civilians.
Israeli airstrikes killed at least 35 people on Sunday and hit tents for displaced people in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, and numerous others were trapped in flaming debris, Palestinian health workers said.
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, women and children made up most of the dead and dozens of wounded.
The attacks came two days after the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to end its military offensive in Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million population had sought shelter before Israel’s incursion earlier this month.
Tens of thousands of people remain in the area while many others have fled.
Footage from the scene of the largest airstrike showed heavy destruction. Israel’s army confirmed the strike and said it hit a Hamas installation and killed two senior Hamas militants. It said it was investigating reports that civilians were harmed.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant was in Rafah on Sunday and was briefed on the “deepening of operations” there, his office said.
A spokesperson with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said the death toll was likely to rise as search and rescue efforts continued in Rafah’s Tal al-Sultan neighborhood about two kilometres northwest of the city center.
The society confirmed that Israel had designated the location as a “humanitarian area.” The neighborhood is not included in areas Israel’s military ordered evacuated earlier this month.
The airstrike was reported hours after Hamas fired a barrage of rockets from Gaza that set off air raid sirens as far away as Tel Aviv for the first time in months in a show of resilience more than seven months into Israel’s massive air, sea and ground offensive.
Southern Gaza largely cut off from aid
Southern Gaza has been largely cut off from aid since Israel launched what it called a limited incursion into Rafah on May 6. Since then over 1 million Palestinians, many already displaced, have fled the city.
Northern Gaza receives aid through two land routes that Israel opened during global outrage after Israeli strikes killed seven aid workers in April.
A few dozen trucks enter Gaza daily through a US-built floating port, far below the 150 trucks a day that officials hoped for. Aid groups say 600 trucks a day are needed.
Around 80% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have fled their homes, severe hunger is widespread and UN officials say parts of the territory are experiencing famine.
Israel detains man over mutiny threat
Israel’s military said it had detained a suspect over a widely circulated video in which a man dressed as a soldier threatens mutiny. The man says tens of thousands of soldiers were ready to disobey the defence minister over his suggestion that Palestinians should govern Gaza after the war, and pledged loyalty to Netanyahu alone.
Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said the man has been removed from reserve duty. It was not clear when or where the video was made. The prime minister’s office released a brief statement condemning all forms of military insubordination.
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