<It’s rare for a day to go by without some headline insinuating that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a fascist – or even a Nazi sympathizer. The Republican firebrand has “earned” the reputation by backing an agenda that pushes back against what he calls the “woke mob.”

From critical race theory to gender ideology, DeSantis has built his brand on curbing the leftist agenda that has infiltrated K-12 classrooms and higher education.

While liberals and many in the news media like to portray him as “dangerous,” it seems a growing number of Americans are empathetic to his cause.

Conservatism is on the rise

DeSantis is far from the only Republican governor who is standing up against wokeness. He just gets most of the attention because he’s running for president. Many states are debating policies related to transgender athletes, book bans and abortion, among other contentious cultural topics.

Are they really book bans? Book ban debate plays into deepening divides. Are we either 'fascists' or 'groomers'?

These discussions come at a time when conservatism is on the rise.

A new poll from Gallup found that 38% of Americans say they are conservative or very conservative on social issues – a nearly 30% increase since 2021. It’s the highest percentage claiming to be socially conservative since 2012.

In the past two years, those identifying with liberal or very liberal social views fell to 29% from 34%.

The percentage of social moderates – 31% – remained constant.

It's all very interesting because it runs contrary to the narrative we hear frequently in popular culture and the media. Conservatives are often painted as outsiders or on the fringes for their views.

Maybe that’s not true.

This poll, Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs survey, indicates social conservatives are a larger group than either moderates or social liberals (who clocked in as the smallest cohort).

The same is true for economic issues, with 44% saying their views are conservative or very conservative. That’s more than double those who describe their economic views as very liberal or liberal (21%).

Are liberals overplaying their hand?

Gallup also found that 69% of Americans believe transgender athletes “should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender” – up from 62% in 2021. Similarly, fewer people (26%) support transgender athletes playing on teams that align with their gender identity – down from 34%.

I’m sure Democrats and LGBTQ activists see these numbers and conclude Americans are becoming more bigoted and intolerant.

Shouting down opponents: Liberals call drag queen protesters 'bigots.' So what's it called when they attack free speech?

But it’s more complicated than that. Liberals have taken an agenda of LGBTQ acceptance to an extreme, especially when it comes to policies surrounding children. Parental rights are taking a back seat in hugely important decisions around gender identity, and that’s not sitting well with a lot of families.

Take, for instance, California, the breeding ground for some of the worst Democratic ideas. Legislation in that state would insert whether parents are affirming their child’s chosen gender into custody disputes. The same goes for foster parents, who would be expected to affirm the child’s gender of choice.

A bill sponsor offered the example of a child as young as 7 as needing gender identity affirmation from foster parents.

That’s absurd. And it’s only a matter of time before such policies would expand to all parents.

This is the kind of extremism that governors like DeSantis are fighting, and a growing number of Americans are on their side.>

<Daniel Ellsberg, the history-making whistleblower who by leaking the Pentagon Papers revealed longtime government doubts and deceit about the Vietnam War and inspired acts of retaliation by President Richard Nixon that helped lead to his resignation, has died.

He was 92.

Ellsberg, who announced in February that he was terminally ill with pancreatic cancer, died Friday morning, according to a letter from his family released by a spokeswoman, Julia Pacetti.

Until the early 1970s, when he revealed that he was the source for the stunning media reports on the 47-volume, 7,000-page Defense Department study of the U.S. role in Indochina, Ellsberg was a well-placed member of the government-military elite. He was a Harvard graduate and self-defined "cold warrior" who served as a private and government consultant on Vietnam throughout the 1960s, risked his life on the battlefield, received the highest security clearances and came to be trusted by officials in Democratic and Republican administrations.

He was especially valued, he would later note, for his "talent for discretion."

But like millions of other Americans, in and out of government, he had turned against the yearslong war in Vietnam, the government's claims that the battle was winnable and that a victory for the North Vietnamese over the U.S.-backed South would lead to the spread of communism throughout the region. Unlike so many other war opponents, he was in a special position to make a difference.

"An entire generation of Vietnam-era insiders had become just as disillusioned as I with a war they saw as hopeless and interminable," he wrote in his 2002 memoir, "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers." "By 1968, if not earlier, they all wanted, as I did, to see us out of this war."

As much as anyone, Ellsberg embodied the individual of conscience — who answered only to his sense of right and wrong, even if the price was his own freedom. David Halberstam, the late author and Vietnam War correspondent who had known Ellsberg since both were posted overseas, would describe him as no ordinary convert. He was highly intelligent, obsessively curious and profoundly sensitive, a born proselytizer who "saw political events in terms of moral absolutes" and demanded consequences for abuses of power.

As much as anyone, Ellsberg also embodied the fall of American idealism in foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s and the upending of the post-World War II consensus that Communism, real or suspected, should be opposed worldwide.

The Pentagon Papers had been commissioned in 1967 by then-Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, a leading public advocate of the war who wanted to leave behind a comprehensive history of the U.S. and Vietnam and to help his successors avoid the kinds of mistakes he would only admit to long after. The papers covered more than 20 years, from France's failed efforts at colonization in the 1940s and 1950s to the growing involvement of the U.S., including the bombing raids and deployment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops during Lyndon Johnson's administration. Ellsberg was among those asked to work on the study, focusing on 1961, when the newly-elected President John F. Kennedy began adding advisers and support units.

First published in The New York Times in June 1971, with The Washington Post, The Associated Press and more than a dozen others following, the classified papers documented that the U.S. had defied a 1954 settlement barring a foreign military presence in Vietnam, questioned whether South Vietnam had a viable government, secretly expanded the war to neighboring countries and had plotted to send American soldiers even as Johnson vowed he wouldn't.>

<The Justice Department (DOJ) has responded to demands from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) for information on the documents investigation into former President Trump.

Assistant Attorney General Carlos Felipe Uriarte sent letters — obtained by The Hill — to Jordan on Friday in response to requests he made for information about the August FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property for classified and sensitive documents taken there after his presidency ended and the staffing and scope of the probes that Special Counsel Jack Smith is leading.

Jordan asked Attorney General Merrick Garland in the original letter to provide information on which personnel are working on the case, the scope and the Mar-a-Lago search earlier this month.

The requests came after the release of a report last month from John Durham, a special counsel appointed during the Trump administration, that criticized the FBI’s decision-making process for opening an investigation into alleged ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

The request on personnel also concerned the report from Durham. Uriarte noted that Durham is scheduled to appear before the Judiciary Committee next week, and the deputy attorney general plans to brief the committee after that.

On the personnel request, he also said staffing for Smith’s investigations into the documents and Trump’s role in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election have fluctuated over time based on their statuses and the resources needed.

He said the DOJ plans to issue a statement of expenditures in the coming weeks to detail the special counsel’s office’s financial activity, including personnel compensation expenditures. It will include financial activity through March.

Uriarte said the statement will show expenditures for about 26 special agents who worked full time or part time on Smith’s investigations in some capacity at some point. He added that additional agents have been used at times for specific, discrete tasks related to the investigations.

The assistant attorney general said on Jordan’s request for information on the scope of the investigations by Smith and Robert Hur — who is investigating the classified documents found at President Biden’s office and residence — that their scopes were provided in the orders that Garland issued appointing them to their positions in November and January, respectively.

He included copies of those orders in his response.

Smith is authorized to investigate if any person or entity violated the law in relation to efforts to interfere with the transfer of power after the 2020 election or the certification of the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6, 2021, and to conduct the probe into the classified documents and other records and any efforts to obstruct the investigation, Garland said at the time he appointed Smith.

Uriarte said Jordan’s request asks for non-public information about an ongoing criminal investigation, and the DOJ has longstanding practices to protect that information’s confidentiality to maintain the integrity of its work. He argued that disclosing this information could violate statutory requirements or court orders and interfere with the DOJ’s ability to gather facts, interview witnesses and bring criminal prosecutions.

“Judgments about whether and how to pursue a matter are, and must remain, the exclusive responsibility of the Department,” Uriarte said.

He pointed to the indictment against Trump as providing detailed information about the investigation and charges filed against him.>

<Evidence that COVID came from a Chinese lab mounted toward a conclusive level last week: “Multiple government sources” say the very first people infected by the bug were Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers, a new report reveals.

More, they were allegedly modifying a close relative of the virus with a key feature unique to it.

The report — by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag, posted on the outlet Public — names Ben Hu, Yu Ping and Yan Zhu as WIV scientists who developed COVID symptoms as early as November 2019, a month before the world even heard of the outbreak, and who now appear to be “patients zero.”

A source said officials were “100%” certain these three were the ones who developed the symptoms.

It’s “a game changer if it can be proven that Hu got sick with COVID-19 before anyone else,” marvels World Health Organization expert Jamie Metzl. “That would be the ‘smoking gun.’ Hu was the lead hands-on researcher” in the WIV lab.

Add in all the other evidence — especially the scientists’ gain-of-function work using a close relative of the COVID bug — and it’s now impossible to ignore the extreme likelihood that a leak from the lab sparked the global pandemic behind nearly 7 million deaths and untold economic harm.

Ben Hu, Yu Ping and Yan Zhu are reportedly the “patients zero” for COVID-19. AP It also points a damning finger at China for having waged the greatest coverup in history of the world — abetted by Westerners from Dr. Anthony Fauci to Big Tech to countless liberals and left-leaning media voices who misled the public by pooh-poohing the lab-leak theory early on, and actively suppressing those who pointed to evidence backing the theory.

Most tragically, per another report last week citing newly released cables, State Department officials believed the entire pandemic could’ve been contained early on if China had alerted the world of the outbreak instead of censoring news of it.

Oh, and guess who paid for at least some of Wuhan lab research that now appears to have sparked the pandemic? That’s right: you.

A Government Accountability Office breakdown Wednesday shows at least $2 million in US taxpayer funds went to the lab between 2014 and 2021, via the National Institute of Health, the University of California and a group called the EcoHealth Alliance.

Dr. Fauci denied that the virus came from a lab in Wuhan. REUTERS Tuesday’s report on Patients Zero, meanwhile, came on the heels of another in the Sunday Times (of London), in which a US investigator says it’s now become “increasingly clear” the WIV “was involved in the creation, promulgation and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

US scientists working with those at the WIV acknowledged their counterparts inserted “furin cleavage sites” into SARS-like viruses in 2019.

And it’s COVID’s unique furin cleavage sites that make it so much more transmissible.

It’s not fully clear exactly when government officials learned of the scientists or other key facts, but as early as April 30, 2020, President Donald Trump said he’d seen evidence that COVID came from a WIV lab, though he provided no details.

Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cited “enormous evidence.”

And Taibbi reports at Racket that “numerous federal agencies appear to have designed their probes of Covid-19’s origins so as to discount the possibility of lab origin in advance.”

That is, they worked to avoid evidence that they presumably didn’t want to know.

At least one intel agency even “overruled a majority of its in-house investigators” to produce a report discounting the lab-leak hypothesis.

The obvious motive for such suppression: avoiding any chance of stories linking US-funded research at WIV to the eventual deaths of millions — even if it meant covering for Beijing, too.

At some point, Washington is going to have to confront China on its horrific role in releasing the COVID plague and then covering it up.

A whole lot of US officials — and journalists — will also have a whole lot of explaining to do.>

<Former South Carolina governor and presidential hopeful Nikki Haley took shots at former President Barack Obama on social media, and Twitter users weren't having it.

On Friday evening, Haley argued in a Twitter post that Obama "set minorities back by singling them out as victims instead of empowering them."

"In America, hard work & personal responsibility matter," she explained. "My parents didn't raise me to think that I would forever be a victim. They raised me to know that I was responsible for my success."

While that rhetoric would work great at a MAGA rally, Twitter users mocked her for the post, pointing out that although she too is a minority, she used the term "them" instead of "us."

Others even went as far as to criticize her for "whitewashing" her public image, arguing that Haley uses the fact that she's "white passing" to her advantage, even changing her religion and opting to go by her middle and last name by marriage as a politician instead of her birth name – Nimrata Nikki Randhawa.

While Haley regularly slams "woke" culture and identity politics, the presidential hopeful brings up her race and gender in a very meticulous manner, seemingly to ensure she doesn't alienate the Republican base she wants to win over.

Nikki Haley strongly believes that "America is not a racist country"

Although Haley was born in the US to immigrant parents from India and grew up in a segregated town, she regularly pushes the right-wing ideal that "America is not a racist country," per the Associated Press.

During her term as governor, she pushed back against attempts to have confederate flags and monuments removed from federal buildings in South Carolina, only to briefly change her stance following a mass shooting in a local church where a white supremacist killed nine African-Americans.

The "About Nikki" section of her website describes her upbringing as "different" while also pointing out that she was the "first minority female governor in America.">

<Former United States Secretary of Labor Robert Reich on Saturday identified five factors that underscore how far down the right-wing rabbit hole twice-indicted ex-President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have dragged American politics.

"'Authoritarianism' isn't adequate" to "describe what Trump wants for America," Reich wrote in a Guardian opinion column. "It is fascism. Fascism stands for a coherent set of ideas different from – and more dangerous than – authoritarianism."

Reich noted what he believes differentiates fascism from mere authoritarianism.

According to Reich, Trump and the GOP have embraced the following:

Rejection of democracy in favor of a strongman depends on galvanizing popular rage.

Popular rage draws on a nationalism based on a supposed superior race or ethnicity.

That superior race or ethnicity is justified by social Darwinist strength and violence, as exemplified by heroic warriors.

Strength, violence and the heroic warrior are centered on male power.

Those tenets, Reich concluded, "are not the elements of authoritarianism. They are the essential elements of fascism.">

<Former President Trump claimed on Saturday that President Biden pushed the Justice Department to bring a “fake indictment” against him over his handling of classified materials.

“Crooked Joe Biden pressed deranged Jack Smith to do this fake indictment on me,” Trump said in a video posted to Truth Social, alleging that the president is using the indictment as a distraction.

Trump pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to 37 counts related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents. The indictment, which was unsealed last week, accused the former president of improperly retaining national defense information, sharing it with individuals who did not have proper security clearances and blocking the federal government’s efforts to recover the documents.

Trump and his Republican allies have repeatedly accused the Justice Department and Biden administration as a whole of targeting the former president in an effort to damage his 2024 campaign.

“This is called election interference in yet another attempt to rig and steal a presidential election,” Trump said in a speech after his arraignment on Tuesday. “It’s a political persecution like something straight out of a fascist or communist nation.”

“This day will go down in infamy and Joe Biden will forever be remembered as the most corrupt president in the history of our country,” he added.

However, Biden and his aides have emphasized in recent days that they have had no contact with special counsel Jack Smith or Attorney General Merrick Garland in the case.

“You’ll notice I have never once, not one single time, suggested to the Justice Department what they should do or not do, relative to bringing a charge or not bringing a charge. I’m honest,” Biden said last week.>

<California Governor Gavin Newsom took a bare-knuckled pugilistic approach in a combative appearance with Sean Hannity on Fox, repeatedly challenging the conservative host’s assumptions about the state of the nation.

Facing a question about how his state’s liberal policies allegedly hurt his state’s economic power, Newsom — irritated and perplexed — asked Hannity: “What are you arguing for, Mississippi’s economic policies?”

Newsom asserted that California was on its way to being the “fourth largest economy in the world” — that’s not measuring it against other states, but other countries.

Then Newsom dropped a truth bomb that continues to be largely overwritten in the national narrative by a distracting focus on the culture wars. Newsom tossed this economic fact in Hannity’s lap, with a lit fuse:

“71 percent of the GDP in America are blue counties. Progressive policies. Seven of the top ten dependent states are your states. We're subsidizing your states because of your policies.”

Hannity squirmed and took offense — “I’m in New York,” he responded pridefully, “you’re not subsidizing anything for me.”

Then, remembering the cameras were on and who was watching, Hannity tried to walk back on his reaction: “I’m getting the hell out of New York, though. Mississippi, Alabama, I’m all for it over New York or California.”

Hannity, who reportedly makes nearly $40 million a year, has not offered a timetable on his plans to move to Mississippi from New York, where, perhaps significantly, he chose to raise his children.>

<As the 2024 U.S. presidential election approaches, we can expect tensions between the political left and right to intensify.

That being said, it's essential to understand the psychological forces at play that may predict a rise not just in disagreement, but in violence. The social psychology theory known as terror management theory offers a powerful lens through which to view the growing polarity and potential hostility, and how that could manifest as violence depending on what happens with Donald Trump — legally and politically — in the coming year.

Terror management theory explains how existential terror — the fear provoked by anything seen as a threat to one's existence — motivates us to adopt cultural worldviews. Examples of cultural worldviews are religions, national identities and political ideologies. To keep our fear in check, we often cling to philosophies that make us feel safe and give us a sense of purpose amid chaos and uncertainty.

Terror management theory is particularly relevant to current political events because it provides a scientific explanation for tribalism. The theory suggests that in the face of threat or fear, we bolster our worldviews, and become more ideological. We also become more tribal, which will strengthen our support for like-minded others, while at the same time making us more prone to aggression toward those who are not like us, and who do not share our worldview.

This is precisely what studies have shown.

A particularly amusing experiment demonstrated this by weaponizing hot sauce. Scientists divided students into two groups and tasked them with writing an essay — either about their own death or a neutral, non-threatening topic.

The students were then introduced to someone who either disparaged or respected their political views, and then asked to choose the amount of mouth-burning hot sauce this person would have to consume. Consistent with the hypothesis of terror management theory, participants induced with existential terror wanted to punish those with an opposing worldview with more hot sauce. The control group did not. While this study was designed to be completely safe, the results suggest that, in real life, the same psychological effect could lead to actual violence, and likely does all the time.

A more disturbing terror management theory study conducted with Iranian and U.S. college students found similar results. One group was instructed to ponder their physical death and describe the ensuing emotions, while the control group was given analogous questions related to dental pain.

The results were revealing: Iranian students contemplating death were more supportive of martyrdom attacks against the U.S., while those in the control group opposed them. Similarly, existential fear led U.S. conservative students to endorse severe military attacks on foreign nations that would kill large numbers of civilians.

Through these studies, one can clearly see how fear and polarization can strengthen nationalism, exacerbate bias against other groups and fuel hostile behavior.

Not only does existential fear increase tribalism and aggression, we also know that it can directly increase support for Trump, who is again seeking the Republican presidential nomination after losing the presidency in 2020.

In a study at the College of Staten Island, 152 students were split into two groups. Similar to the previous example, one group was exposed to exercises triggering thoughts about death, while the other underwent similar exercises about pain. Afterward, both groups were questioned about their support for Trump and their likelihood of voting for him in the coming election. The results were telling: the group primed with death-related thoughts showed increased support for Trump, irrespective of their initial political leanings....>

<....This suggests that an atmosphere of existential fear would simultaneously promote aggression while strengthening support for Trump, who regularly projects a “strongman” image and suggests violence as a remedy to political matters.

This is a very scary combination of psychological effects. For this reason we must be aware of this problem, which will become increasingly salient as the 2024 presidential election begins to heat up.

How do we know that the threat is real — that this is not just more fear mongering? I would argue that we have already seen the dynamic that terror management theory describes in action. Heather Heyer, a counter-protester protesting the Unite the Right rally held in Charlottesville in 2018, was run over by a white supremacist, and 19 others were injured. In 2020, a man drew a hunting bow on protestors in Salt Lake City before being taken out by the crowd, a chilling moment that was captured on video. And on the day of the Capitol riot — a collective display of Trump-inspired aggression — a pipe bomb was found a few blocks from the Capitol building. Earlier this month, purported Ku Klux Klan members threatened LGBTQ activists with guns at a peaceful rally in Kentucky.

Now that the election is on the horizon, we can expect similar events to transpire.

For example, what will the response from Trump supporters be if their political messiah is found guilty on a charge that warrants prison time? What if Democrats attempt to ban Trump from running for president over his legal issues? What if he is allowed to run again but loses? What might we expect if Trump rallies his loyal troops and commands them to retaliate? Is another Jan. 6 attack inevitable? Is one that’s even more destructive possible?

It’s not just the cult of Trump we have to worry about, though. The left is not immune to the effects of existential fear, and there is no doubt that we are seeing increased tribalistic behavior among liberals, too. This means that conscious effort must be taken to keep cool, calm and collected as our fear centers are activated and we inevitably become prone to aggression, be it written, verbal or physical.

To use Newton’s third law as a metaphor — for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Since aggression from one side provokes fear and aggression among the other side, a dangerous feedback loop gets created, which will continue to divide the nation to such a degree that something like a civil war emerges. It may be a “cold civil war,” but such a development would almost assuredly result in violence, destruction and death.

As we stride toward an uncertain future, it's crucial that we understand and educate the public about the psychological dynamics at play at both the individual and collective level. A keen awareness of the cognitive factors contributing to our emotional and tribal responses can cultivate more conscious decision-making and potentially diffuse the threat of aggression and violence.

So, we must be empathetic during these times, but we must also be vigilant. If we stay on the current trajectory of increasing polarization, we can almost be certain that a whole new level of unrest is headed our way. Now the question is whether we have the ability to use this knowledge to avert the coming train wreck. But I’m an optimist, and I think if we can predict something ahead of time, we can figure out how to prevent it. That is precisely why science has been such a powerful force for human civilization, and it’s time we start applying that knowledge to solving the existential threat that is the culture war in America.>

<The mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, has joined the Republican primary for the 2024 presidential election. There are now a remarkable thirteen candidates in that primary, with two others who may enter. The first primary contest – the Iowa Republican caucus – does not occur for another seven months (January 22).

It is remarkable to have a field this crowded this early – particularly when there is an obvious front-runner. Former President Donald Trump leads the pack and has for months. Even his recent indictment has not reduced his lead. He is forty-five percentage points ahead of his closest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Where is the Anti-Trump GOP Primacy Candidate?

The most important structural effect of this proliferation of candidates is the prevention of a single, unifying anti-Trump candidate. There is substantial evidence now that Republican elites and, especially, the GOP donor class would like to find an alternative to Trump. Trump’s procession of scandals and bad behavior have damaged his appeal outside the Republican party.

Trump is not a proven winner. He slipped into the presidency in 2016 via the Electoral College. In the midterms of 2018 and 2022, Republicans under-performed, and in 2020, Donald Trump lost the election to current Democratic President Joseph Biden. This will likely happen again in 2024.

The 2024 general election is shaping up to be a repeat 2020 – Trump vs Biden. The result will almost certainly be the same too. Trump and Biden are basically the same candidates today which they were in 2020, and there is no obvious reason to think that Trump can suddenly move five percent of the country’s electorate to achieve victory.

Trump will claim, inevitably, that the election was stolen, but this claim has far less resonance now than it did in 2020. Today, losing GOP candidates routinely claim that elections were rigged against them. The implication of all these allegations is that the whole US voting system is stacked against GOP candidates. Trump voters may go that deeply into conspiracism with him, but it is doubtful that he can pull most of the country with him. These claims routinely fail in the courts. Trump’s 2024 claims will probably fail also.

All this creates room for an anti-Trump Republican candidate to push Trump aside in the primary. The message is obvious: Trump is too polarizing. He lost the popular vote in 2016 and 2020. His endorsed candidates did poorly in 2022. It is time for a new, cleaner, less polarizing Republican to win back the middle, which Trump cannot do.

Primary Fragmentation Helps Donald Trump

This obvious pathway to sidelining Trump requires one figure to unite the disparate anti-Trump Republicans. Trump has a strong personal following in the GOP. Indeed, those voters’ bond to Trump is cult-like. Nothing Trump does seems to shake their support for him. When Trump was indicted this month on a highly specific list of charges, those voters immediately rejected the allegations as politic.

Overcoming this committed Trump bloc in the GOP will require consolidating all other GOP primary voters around an alternative. The most likely figure to do this is DeSantis, but he is an awkward figure. He is cold and bland, and Trump, with his fiery, made-for-TV persona, is already outmaneuvering him. This is likely why others have jumped in. They sense that there is an anti-Trump lane to the nomination, and that DeSantis is not closing the deal.

Positioning for 2028?

The GOP primary is evolving in exactly the opposite manner necessary to displace Donald Trump. Anti-Trumpers have not coalesced around one opposition candidate. DeSantis is flailing, while Trump’s legal troubles only bolster his popularity within the primary. And the growing list of primary opponents only worsens the chances of a single, anti-Trump unity candidate.

We have seen this before, of course. In 2016, the GOP primary played out almost exactly the same way. Trump solidified a committed bloc but not a majority. The other candidates danced around, not quite attacking him, waiting for him to implode, sniping at each other, and so on. After a few primaries, it was too late. Trump had momentum, and despite huge misgivings from many who could see how unfit Trump was, he took the nomination.

It is still early in the race, but this primary is unfolding with surprising parallels to 2016 already. If an anti-Trump coalition does not congeal around someone – likely DeSantis – by the end of the year, it is hard to see Trump losing. All these new candidates joining make that even more likely.

<It remains to be seen whether the judge assigned to Donald Trump's federal case, who was appointed by him three years ago, can act independently in light of her past rulings related to the former president, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said Sunday on ABC's "This Week."

Whitehouse, D-R.I., likened U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to a "Trump advocate in a robe" but said she may correct herself going forward given that her biggest ruling to-date in Trump's federal case was summarily rejected by an appellate panel.

"As we all know, her first intervention in the case was very badly smacked down by the 11th Circuit, a conservative circuit, that not only overruled her but schooled her. And as a new judge, I'm not sure how often you want to do that," Whitehouse told "This Week" co-anchor Jonathan Karl.

He was referring to Cannon initially approving the appointment of a third party to review documents seized from Trump's home during the federal investigation, which halted part of the case.

"We will find out whether she goes back to regular normal judging or continues to be a Trump advocate in a robe," Whitehouse said.

"I suspect there's a pretty good chance that she will just decide this is a good time in her career for her to act like a real judge and she'll take the correction of the 11th Circuit and act accordingly," he said.

Cannon was named to the federal bench by then-President Trump in 2020. She has been randomly selected to oversee Trump's prosecution in federal court in Florida, where he is charged with illegally holding onto government secrets. He has pleaded not guilty.

Whitehouse said on "This Week" that "there's going to be a lot of proceedings beforehand for special counsel Jack Smith to test [Cannon's] behavior, to see how she's conducting herself and have time to move for her recusal if she's not providing proper rulings."

Trump is the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, according to early polling, and has argued he is being unfairly targeted by law enforcement in the Biden administration's Department of Justice -- something Smith has pushed back on.

Whitehouse echoed that, saying there are "at least two firewalls" between President Joe Biden and the case: Biden doesn't discuss criminal matters with Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Garland named Smith as an independent prosecutor to look into Trump.

Karl noted that Trump has made his charges "the centerpiece of his campaign" while Biden has largely avoided discussing it.

"I don't think that works well for Trump, to tell you the truth," Whitehouse said. "He goes into this sort of bullying, bombastic mode where he tries to make the other side as miserable as possible and hopes that they'll go away or settle on good terms," the senator continued. "When you're dealing with a federal prosecutor, that stuff just doesn't work. It doesn't matter. It's just background noise."

Whitehouse defended Biden "steering well clear of" Trump's case and his decision to slowly ramp up his 2024 campaign.

The president held his first campaign rally in Philadelphia on Saturday, 54 days after announcing his bid for reelection.

"He's got a lot of time ahead of him, a lot of runway," Whitehouse said, adding, "I don't know that people are interested in a whole lot of campaign noise out of him, and I think he's doing it right."

Karl pointed to a comment from the senator last week regarding Biden's age, when Whitehouse said, "I think everybody would certainly like a younger Joe Biden." At 80, Biden is already the oldest-ever president. (Trump is 77.)

But in responding to concerns about his age -- which voters have repeatedly worried about in polls -- Biden can tout his experience, wisdom and record, Whitehouse said: "He can [address] that by continuing to talk about his successes."

"He's got a really good story to tell about the end of COVID, the reduction of inflation, the explosion in infrastructure jobs and manufacturing," he said of Biden, "and I think that's going to be a really solid baseline for him."

Karl also asked about Whitehouse's relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has mounted a long shot bid to challenge Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination. Whitehouse and Kennedy attended law school together, with Kennedy supporting Whitehouse's campaigns and even joining him on the trail.

When asked if the two are still in touch, Whitehouse said "not so much, particularly since this political episode has begun," and he pledged his full support to Biden.

He said he disagrees with Kennedy's criticisms of vaccines and America's response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"I think Joe Biden has those issues and others right," he said.>

<Judge Aileen Cannon could present "three enormous concerns" for officials handling Donald Trump's classified documents case, according to legal analyst Glenn Kirschner.

Trump became the first former president in United States history to face federal criminal charges last week, when a grand jury voted to indict him on dozens of charges stemming from the Department of Justice's (DOJ) Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. Among the 37 counts in the indictment are 31 counts of willfully retaining documents containing sensitive national defense information, including "information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its Allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack."

Trump was arraigned at a federal court in Miami on Tuesday where he pleaded not guilty. Despite mounting evidence, he has consistently claimed his innocence in all of the legal battles that he is currently facing.

Aside from the indictment itself and its historic nature, significant conversation has also been generated about Judge Cannon, who was assigned to oversee Trump's federal trial. Cannon was nominated for the position by Trump and appointed to the bench in the final days of his presidency after he had already lost the 2020 election.

Cannon was at the center of a considerable legal controversy earlier in the classified documents case after she made a ruling that was deemed inordinately preferential to the former president and later overturned by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals as unlawful. Many have since speculated that she will continue to rule in ways that will benefit Trump, leading to calls for her to recuse herself from the case, which she has given no indication that she will do.

During a Saturday interview with journalist and YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen, Kirschner, a veteran federal prosecutor and legal analyst specializing in the many cases facing Trump, put forward three potential problems that Cannon could cause for the upcoming trial.

"First of all, because this is unprecedented, we've never tried a criminal former president of the United States for his crimes before, we've never had to confront the issue about whether the appointed federal judge or the assigned federal judge is conflicted out if that is the president, if the defendant in the case is the president that appointed the judge," Kirschner said.

He further argued that, since the law requires a judge to recuse themselves for even the appearance of a conflict of interest, any judge should do so if the defendant in a case is the president who appointed them.

Secondly, Kirschner said that Cannon lacks the experience to oversee such an unprecedented and high-stakes trial, given that she has reportedly only overseen short, run-of-the-mill trials so far. Lastly, the legal analyst put forward the federal law requiring a judge to disqualify oneself under certain circumstances, as he discussed previously.

Newsweek reached out to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida via email for comment.>

<Gun violence is already a pressing public health concern in the U.S., and a new study has found a troubling link between it and the overheating of our planet.

What’s happened?

As temperatures across the country soar and unseasonably warm days continue, the number of gun deaths across the country has gone up.

Nearly 8,000 gun shootings can be attributed to extreme temperatures, according to research published by JAMA Network.

The study analyzed 100 major U.S. cities with the highest proportion of gun violence between 2015 and 2020. It found that out of 116 ,511 shootings, roughly 6.85% (or 7,973) were attributable to above-average temperatures.

Gun violence, as well as other types of violence, such as road rage, is known to worsen in the summer. Warmer temperatures increase the body’s stress hormones in the nervous system, which may heighten violent impulses.

People also spend more time outdoors when the weather is warm, which makes encounters with others — and the potential for lethal clashes — more likely.

Why extreme heat’s impact on gun violence is concerning Gun violence is on the rise in the U.S., with more shootings recorded in 2020 than any other year. With daily temperatures expected to continue rising in the coming years, the number of injuries and fatalities from shootings could worsen, too.

It only takes a small rise in temperature to push instances of gun violence up. In fact, the study found that more shootings were attributable to moderately hot days than to extremely hot ones.

This escalation in violence isn’t linked to any specific temperature range. Instead, an increase in the city’s average temperature was all it took to drive up shootings.

By 2100, average temperatures in the U.S. are expected to climb anywhere between 3 and 12 degrees Fahrenheit. Instances of extreme heat waves will also increase unless we can cool down our planet.

The study warns that if temperatures do continue to go up, then gun violence in the U.S. could get much worse.

What’s being done to tackle the issue?

Just as soaring temperatures and gun violence are linked, the study suggests that measures to slow down the overheating of our planet could reduce shootings, too.

Increasing green spaces in cities have been shown to bring gun violence down, multiple studies have shown.

This is partly because greenery reduces the urban heat island effect, where cities have a hotter average temperature than suburbs because they tend to have more heat-absorbing asphalt and fewer trees and grass. This urban heat island effect tends to impact Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous-dominated communities the most.

The study’s authors have called for more analysis to be done on the link between structural racial inequalities and ambient heat, and how that impacts gun deaths.>

<As 2023 got underway, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan wrote to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, demanding information about, among other things, the investigation into an ongoing criminal investigation into Donald Trump. The Ohio Republican’s request was not well received.

As regular readers know, Main Justice sent a polite and professional response, explaining that federal law enforcement “stands ready” to work with congressional investigators, while also making clear that the Justice Department has a longstanding policy against divulging private information on ongoing investigations — and it wasn’t about to start making exceptions because some conspiracy theorists in Congress want to run interference for a former president.

Late last week, it was hard not to have a sense of deja vu. Politico reported:

For those who might want a refresher, NBC News reported a couple of weeks ago that Jordan, who makes no secret of his unyielding allegiance to Trump, asked the Justice Department to turn over internal documents laying out the scope of the criminal investigation into the former president’s classified documents scandal.

The far-right Judiciary Committee chairman told the attorney general that he and his panel want “an unredacted copy of the memorandum outlining the scope of Mr. Smith’s probes regarding President Trump and any supporting documentation related to his appointment as special counsel.” Jordan gave Garland a June 20 due date.>

<As a Republican presidential candidate struggling to break through in a crowded field, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson has an incentive to take positions different from his intra-party rivals. It was against this backdrop that the Arkansan said something unusual on ABC News’ “This Week” yesterday.

Lamenting the fact that so much of the GOP is talking about the “weaponization of the Justice Department,” Hutchinson told Jonathan Karl, “Let’s back off of these accusations, and let’s get back to being the party of the rule of law, of the justice system supporting law enforcement and equal application of the law. Let’s don’t undermine the greatest justice system and criminal justice system and rule of law in the world today, this side of heaven.”

Given the current state of Republican rhetoric, especially in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s federal criminal indictment, the former governor is a lone voice in the wilderness.

Different GOP contingents have responded to the charges against the former president in competing ways, but the dominant partisan message has been unmistakable: Whether Trump is guilty or not, Republicans are largely united in their belief that the real problem is with federal law enforcement and the nation’s system of justice.

The former president is clearly going to great lengths to lash out wildly against the Justice Department, the FBI, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and special counsel Jack Smith, but as the Associated Press noted last week, Trump’s Capitol Hill allies are following suit.

The mounting legal jeopardy Trump finds himself in has quickly become a political rallying cry for the Republicans, many of whom acknowledged they had not fully read the 49-page federal indictment but stood by the indicted former president, adopting his grievances against the federal justice system as their own. It’s an unparalleled example of how Trump has transformed the Republican Party that once embraced “law and order” but is now defending, justifying and explaining away the grave charges he faces.

All the while, talk among GOP officials about “defunding“ federal law enforcement seems to grow louder by the day.

This isn’t just about undermining specific agencies and their leaders. It’s about convincing Americans that the system itself is unworthy of its trust and confidence.

Republicans are pushing this line — relentlessly and without regard for consequences — not because they’re uncovered evidence of systemic wrongdoing. Rather, the party is motivated by far cruder considerations: Law enforcement is holding a Republican accountable for alleged felonies, which necessarily means that system must be smeared — in part to protect their corrupt leader, and in part to discourage similar attempts at accountability in the future.

And why does that matter? For a few reasons.

1. This campaign is dangerous. The United States only has two major political parties. When one of them tries to convince its base that the justice system is not to be trusted — in effect, delegitimizing federal law enforcement — the consequences are worth worrying about.

As a Washington Post report summarized last week, “Experts on extremism have raised alarms about the potential for violence stemming from rhetoric that demonizes law enforcement and in some cases encourages Trump supporters to resist.”

Sen. Marco Rubio responded to Trump’s latest indictment by insisting that “these people” — he didn’t identify his rhetorical target — are “shredding public faith in the institutions that hold our republic together.” It was among the more ironic complaints the Florida Republican has ever made: It’s his party that’s waged a deliberate campaign against institutions that have long stood as the pillars of modern American life. Just in recent years, Republicans have told their base not to trust independent news organizations. Or historians. Or election administrators. Or business leaders the party considers “woke.” Or economists. Or scientists. Or public-health officials.

No good can come from the fact that the GOP is now adding the justice system to its target list.....>

<....2. The GOP's claims aren’t true. To hear Trump and his allies tell it, a corrupt and politicized justice system has been weaponized by President Joe Biden and his administration, who are hellbent on using law enforcement as a tool against their perceived enemies.

To bolster their claims, Republicans point to ... nothing in particular. The House GOP came up with a special “weaponization” panel, specifically tasked with uncovering evidence to support the party’s conspiracy theories, and it has failed so spectacularly that even other Republicans have complained about the lack of results.

But it’s not entirely Chairman Jim Jordan’s fault: He hasn’t found evidence because there is no evidence to find. The party’s claims are baseless.

3. The campaign is hysterically hypocritical. For all of the partisan nonsense, what Republicans routinely fail to notice is that Trump did exactly what they’re falsely accusing Biden of doing.

We don’t even need to speculate: The former president’s own team has acknowledged this publicly. When John Bolton was recently asked whether Trump’s Justice Department had been weaponized, Trump’s former White House national security advisor replied, “I can attest to it personally.” John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, similarly told The New York Times about the “broader pattern” of the former president “trying to use the Justice Department and his authority as president against people who had been critical of him.”

For those who aren't inclined take their word for it, there’s an avalanche of related evidence. In Trump’s first year in the White House, he publicly pleaded with the Justice Department to go after his foes. A year later, the then-president told the White House counsel that he wanted to order the Justice Department to prosecute Hillary Clinton. Ahead of Election Day 2020, Trump called for Clinton’s incarceration and lobbied then-Attorney General Barr to go after Biden for reasons unknown.

The New York Times reported last year that Trump and his team “tried to turn the nation’s law enforcement apparatus into an instrument of political power” to carry out the then-president’s wishes. It’s a subject we’ve discussed on multiple occasions: There were far too many examples of the Justice Department taking extraordinary steps to intervene in cases of interest to Trump, as Barr tried to steer prosecutorial decisions in ways consistent with the White House’s political wishes.

A Washington Post analysis published soon after highlighted not only the many instances in which Trump not only leaned on the Justice Department to follow his wishes, but also Trump’s efforts to push federal law enforcement to validate the Big Lie in the wake of his election defeat.

The same Republicans who are now desperate to malign the Justice Department and the system it helps undergird said absolutely nothing about Trump’s efforts — during or after his time in the White House. Now, however, we’re expected to find their baseless partisan whining to be credible, despite the fact that it’s literally and demonstrably unbelievable.

Making matters vastly worse, Trump is making no secret of his plans to finish the job in a second term, vowing to appoint his own anti-Biden prosecutor after the 2024 elections — another promise GOP lawmakers are choosing to ignore while they complain about politicized law enforcement.

Asa Hutchinson gave his party some excellent advice yesterday. It’s a shame Republicans will ignore him.>

<Former President Donald Trump claimed in an interview on Fox News that he was too busy to sift through government records to return classified materials before he was indicted by the Justice Department earlier this month.

Trump, who pleaded not guilty last week to illegally retaining national security information and obstructing government efforts to retrieve it, told anchor Bret Baier that he was too busy to separate the documents sought by the National Archives from his personal items they were stored with in the dozens of boxes he took from the White House to Mar-a-Lago.

"Because I had boxes, I wanted to go through the boxes and get all of my personal things out," Trump said. "I don't want to hand that over to NARA yet. And I was very busy, as you've sort of seen."

Baier noted that the indictment alleges that he told his aide Walt Nauta to move the boxes "to other locations after telling your lawyers to say you'd fully complied with the subpoena when you hadn't."

"Before I send boxes over, I have to take all of my things out," Trump replied. "These boxes were interspersed with all sorts of things."

"DOJ really had no choice": Experts say non-lawyer Tom Fitton's advice horribly backfired on Trump

Baier also pressed Trump on an alleged recording cited in the indictment in which Trump discusses a plan for a potential attack on Iran but says he cannot show it to others because it is not declassified.

"There was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else, talking about Iran and other things. And it may have been held up or it may not, but that was not a document," Trump told Baier, "These boxes were interspersed with all sorts of things; golf shirts, pants, shoes, all sorts of things."

"Iran war plans?" Baier asked.

"Not that I know of," Trump said.

Baier throughout the interview repeatedly challenged Trump, including his false claim that he "won in 2020 by a lot."

"You lost the 2020 election," Baier pushed back.

Trump went on to criticize Fox, noting that a "lot less" people are watching the network.

"I'm no great fan of Fox," Trump said.

"You're sitting here," Baier fired back.

During another portion of the interview, Baier read off a list of critical comments from numerous former Trump Cabinet and administration officials.

"Why did you hire all of them in the first place?" Baier asked.

"Because I hired ten to one that were fantastic," Trump responded, "For every person you named, I can name 20 people that loved the administration."

Legal experts questioned Trump's decision to do a TV interview while facing a 37-count indictment and suggested that he may have given special counsel Jack Smith even more evidence to use against him.

"The defendant seems utterly incapable of exercising his constitutional right to remain silent," tweeted conservative attorney and frequent Trump critic George Conway.

"Keep confessing," wrote national security attorney Bradley Moss. "No criminal defense attorney worth their salt would ever advise their indicted client to do a media tour. That helps explain the problems Mr. Trump has had retaining qualified counsel," he added....>

<...Even George Washington University Law Prof. Jonathan Turley, who previously defended Trump amid his legal woes, warned that "statements of this kind are generally admissible at trial."

"This is one more inculpatory statement," former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman told MSNBC. "Every time he opens his mouth, it gets worse."

"Mr. Trump, good luck with that defense," former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal told MSNBC.

"If it were just newspaper articles, why in the world are you saying on the tape that it's classified? It's totally incoherent," he said. "And the other parts of the tape… really is an admission of guilt. Like, if you just think about the Espionage Act, what is the prosecution need to show? They needed to show the defendant had unauthorized possession of national defense documents, that he willfully retained the document, and failed to give the documents to an officer of the U.S. Those are the elements. So, the Trump admission goes to all of that."

Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who served on special counsel Bob Mueller's team, warned that it would be a "colossal blunder" by Trump to "continue down this road."

"What he had to say is preposterous," Weissmann said. "He is saying that he didn't have enough time to take out personal things. So first, he has already said that everything is his — everything is personal. There's no triage that needs to be done, because according to his prior defense, everything is personal, because they are quote, 'mine.' It's an inconsistency, something that Jack Smith can easily point out. Second, people should understand when you get subpoenaed, if you don't have time to comply, if the deadline is not there, it's not like you don't have the ability to have your lawyer call up and say, you know what? I need more time or I can partially comply, but I need more time. If that was true, what you don't do is send something to the Department of Justice that says, 'I fully complied.' Now he is saying, in spite of the fact that he said I fully complied, he's now saying, no, no, no, I just needed to take out my golf shirts."

"This is the kind of thing that Jack Smith has to be salivating over," he added.>

<Former President Donald Trump has a complex new real estate deal in Oman — and it could compromise how he approaches U.S. interests if he becomes president once again, reported The New York Times on Tuesday.

"Mr. Trump’s name is plastered on signs at the entrance of the project and in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel in Muscat, the nearby capital of Oman, where a team of sales agents is invoking Mr. Trump’s name to help sell luxury villas at prices of up to $13 million, mostly targeting superrich buyers from around the world, including from Russia, Iran and India," reported Eric Lipton. "Mr. Trump has been selling his name to global real estate developers for more than a decade. But the Oman deal has taken his financial stake in one of the world’s most strategically important and volatile regions to a new level, underscoring how his business and his politics intersect as he runs for president again amid intensifying legal and ethical troubles."

The Times interviewed people familiar with the project who describe it as unlike any Trump has done in a foreign country.

According to the report, the Omani government, a controversial ally of the United States with whom Jared Kushner cultivated ties while Trump was last in office, is providing the land for the project. In addition to this potential foreign policy conflict, the project is also under scrutiny for the treatment of migrant workers, who are being paid less than $400 a month and housed in cramped trailers in the desert.

"Mr. Trump’s business ties in the Middle East have already been under intense scrutiny," noted the report. "Federal prosecutors who brought criminal charges against him in the case stemming from his mishandling of classified documents issued subpoenas for information about his foreign deals and the agreements with the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour" — an arrangement that triggered outrage even before the embattled proposed merger with PGA, because of the Saudi government's ties to 9/11 and the brutal murder of a Washington Post journalist.

Furthermore, Trump constantly raised the appearance of financial conflict in office because at the time he owned a hotel in Washington, D.C., where foreign dignitaries looking to curry favor constantly stayed and spent money.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington's lead ethics counsel, Virginia Canter, told The Times, “This is as blatant as it comes. How and when is he going to sell out U.S. interests? That is the question this creates. It is the kind of corruption our founding fathers most worried about.”

When Trump was in office, he bragged extensively about his Middle East policy, which among other things thawed relations between Israel and its neighbors, but did next to nothing to hold despots in the region accountable for human rights abuses; at one point even joking about Khashoggi's murder in calls with the Saudi crown prince.>

His raison d'etre has not changed one iota, as he plays the victim/bully at every turn:

<Fox News anchor Bret Baier covered a lot of ground in his must-watch interview with former President Donald Trump on Monday. The classified documents case. China. Russia and the war in Ukraine. All made news. But perhaps the most revelatory moment came when Trump returned to a topic he has discussed many, many times: the 2020 presidential election.

Trump made a decision, likely when he was still president, that he would not concede defeat in the event that he lost the 2020 contest. If he won, no problem. If he lost, he would claim that he was cheated out of a rightful victory. And that is what he has done.

Why? Some of it is just Trump's personal makeup. He has sold himself as a winner throughout his career. Admitting a huge, consequential loss would not be in character. But perhaps a bigger reason is the way losers are treated in American politics. When a presidential candidate loses in a general election, his party is pretty much done with him. He can try to come back, but it won't work. (The exception: Richard Nixon, who lost in 1960 and came back to win in 1968.)

Before Trump, in the last 100 years, there have been just three presidents who were defeated in their bid for a second term: George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Herbert Hoover. Are any of them remembered as winners today? That's precisely the status Trump would never accept. So his position is that he won the 2020 election.

In the Fox interview, Baier asked a question, not about 2020, but about Trump's appeal to 2024 voters "who really liked many of your policies, but they can't handle the scandals or the controversies or the name-calling or the vitriol." Specifically, Baier mentioned a key voting group — "the female independent voter in the suburbs who struggled with family financing because of inflation, she is now against Biden, disapproves of Biden, but wasn't with you in 2020 and, so far, is a 'hard no' for you in 2024. ... What do you say to that female independent suburban voter who feels that way to win her back?"

It wasn't a hard question. Trump could have answered by talking about all the great things he will do if elected again in 2024. But he didn't do that. Instead, Trump said: "First of all, I won 2020 by a lot, OK? Let's get that straight. I won in 2020."

Baier immediately responded, "You know that's not what the votes show." And then, it was off to the races:

TRUMP: And if you look at all of the tape, you look at everything that you want to look at, you take a look at [True the Vote] where they have people stuffing the ballot boxes on tapes or —>

<....BAIER: Mr. President, that's all been looked into.

TRUMP: But wait a minute, let's go to recent — FBI, Twitter, let's go to recent, the 51 agents, all corrupt stuff, Bret.

BAIER: I understand about the Hunter Biden, that's fair things.

TRUMP: But that's cheating an election.

BAIER: But you lost the 2020 election.

TRUMP: Bret, you take a look at all of these stuffed ballots, you take a look at all of the things, including things like the 51 intelligence agents —

BAIER: There were recounts in all the swing states, and there was not significant, widespread fraud.

TRUMP: We're trying to get recounts, real recounts.

BAIER: There were investigations of widespread corruption. There was not a sense of that. There were lawsuits, more than 50 of them by your lawyers, some in front of judges, judges that you appointed, that came up with no evidence.

TRUMP: Look at Wisconsin. Wisconsin practically admitted it was rigged. Other states are doing the same right now, and it's continuing.

BAIER: There have been reviews of every potential case of voter fraud in six battleground states. And they found fewer than 475 cases.

TRUMP: You know why? Because they didn't look at the right things, Bret. They were counting — they were counting ballots, not the authenticity of the ballot. The ballots were fake ballots you had — this is a very rigged election.

BAIER: I asked — this is how you're going to tell that independent suburban woman voter to vote for you?

Trump was all over the place, trying to cite any factor in the 2020 race that might support his contention that the whole thing was rigged. He cited "the tape," meaning video from the group True the Vote's research featured in Dinesh D'Souza's film 2000 Mules. He cited the FBI, Twitter, and the "51 agents," meaning Twitter's censorship of the Hunter Biden story in the final weeks of the campaign, plus the 51 former intelligence officials who, in an effort to help candidate Joe Biden, falsely suggested that the Hunter Biden story was Russian disinformation. He cited various allegations of "stuffed ballots" and his contention that none of the audits and recounts done after the election detected the massive fraud that he believes took place. And he concluded with a simple statement: "This is a very rigged election."

But remember the original question: How is Trump going to win the support of those independent suburban women on whom his election might depend in 2024? Does anyone believe that going on about True the Vote or "fake ballots" will appeal to those voters? Bill Clinton used to say that elections are always about the future. That's true. A candidate focused on 2020 will not be successful in 2024.>

<In early July 2008, Samuel Alito stood on a riverbank in a remote corner of Alaska. The Supreme Court justice was on vacation at a luxury fishing lodge that charged more than $1,000 a day, and after catching a king salmon nearly the size of his leg, Alito posed for a picture. To his left, a man stood beaming: Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire who has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes.

Singer was more than a fellow angler. He flew Alito to Alaska on a private jet. If the justice chartered the plane himself, the cost could have exceeded $100,000 one way.

In the years that followed, Singer’s hedge fund came before the court at least 10 times in cases where his role was often covered by the legal press and mainstream media. In 2014, the court agreed to resolve a key issue in a decade-long battle between Singer’s hedge fund and the nation of Argentina. Alito did not recuse himself from the case and voted with the 7-1 majority in Singer’s favor. The hedge fund was ultimately paid $2.4 billion.

Alito did not report the 2008 fishing trip on his annual financial disclosures. By failing to disclose the private jet flight Singer provided, Alito appears to have violated a federal law that requires justices to disclose most gifts, according to ethics law experts.

Experts said they could not identify an instance of a justice ruling on a case after receiving an expensive gift paid for by one of the parties.

“If you were good friends, what were you doing ruling on his case?” said Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor and leading expert on recusals. “And if you weren’t good friends, what were you doing accepting this?” referring to the flight on the private jet.

Justices are almost entirely left to police themselves on ethical issues, with few restrictions on what gifts they can accept. When a potential conflict arises, the sole arbiter of whether a justice should step away from a case is the justice him or herself.

ProPublica’s investigation sheds new light on how luxury travel has given prominent political donors — including one who has had cases before the Supreme Court — intimate access to the most powerful judges in the country. Another wealthy businessman provided expensive vacations to two members of the high court, ProPublica found. On his Alaska trip, Alito stayed at a commercial fishing lodge owned by this businessman, who was also a major conservative donor. Three years before, that same businessman flew Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, on a private jet to Alaska and paid the bill for his stay.

Such trips would be unheard of for the vast majority of federal workers, who are generally barred from taking even modest gifts.