<....In these states, we are seeing the self-marginalization of the Republican Party. No outside force came along and forced these state parties to spend money, alienate traditional supporters and donors, pick nasty fights with their own lawmakers, turn loyalty to Trump into the preeminent litmus test on all issues and disputes, and alienate and repel once-persuadable swing voters. No, the people who took over these parties chose this path.

Yes, the pre-Trump Republican Party had its faults, and there’s no getting around that. Perhaps you remember it as being boring, stuffy, and predictable, with the state and local parties largely being run by nice old ladies who liked to wear big hats. But those allegedly boring types also tended to get the basics right: get more money coming in than is going out, pay attention to down-ballot races, and avoid infighting and messy public squabbles. Prudence, diligence, coalition-building, and cooperation — sure, those traits might not quicken your pulse, but they are required to get the job done. You cannot bellow, snarl, table-pound, and rage your way to an effective state or local party organization.

Again, the pre-Trump GOP state parties weren’t perfect, and they lost some races they ought to have won. But they also managed to win a bunch of races in states that now seem utterly repelled by the modern Republican Party. In 2014, the Arizona Republicans trounced Democrats up and down the ballot; now, Democrats hold the top three statewide offices and the GOP is hanging on to the state legislative chambers by its fingernails. That same year in Colorado, Republican Cory Gardner won a hard-fought Senate race, and Republicans won the attorney general, secretary of state, and treasurer races. Last year, Colorado voters reelected the state’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, by 19 percentage points, reelected its Democratic U.S. Senator, Michael Bennet, by 14 percentage points, gave Democrats expanded legislative majorities, and handed easy victories to many down-ballot Democratic candidates.

In 2014 in Michigan, GOP governor Rick Snyder won reelection, as did Secretary of State Ruth Johnson and Attorney General Bill Schuette, and Republicans added seats to their majorities in the state house and state senate. Today, Democrats hold all the statewide offices and narrow majorities in both chambers.

In 2014 in Minnesota, the statewide races were a disappointment for Republicans, but the state GOP actually won a majority in the state house, picking up eleven seats to bring its total to 72. Today, Minnesota Republicans have just 64 seats in the state house.

The modern, very Trumpy Republican Party attracts certain people and repels certain people. It attracts people with passion, a sense that the fate of the country is at stake, and an eagerness to denounce any Republican official they deem insufficiently devoted to the cause. They also often adamantly insist that the 2020 election was stolen and see conspiracies at work everywhere. This same party repels the old guard and anyone with the old guard’s positive traits.

These state party leaders are not interested in attracting the votes of anyone they deem insufficiently dedicated to the MAGA vision. That includes a lot of suburbanites, white-collar professionals, soccer moms — the kinds of voters who are fine with voting for the likes of Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, Georgia governor Brian Kemp (who’s at odds with the leaders of his state’s GOP), Ohio governor Mike DeWine, Iowa governor Kim Reynolds, and New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu. Sometimes you hear this rejection of past Republican voters expressed explicitly, as when Kari Lake declared at a rally shortly before the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election, “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we? Get the hell out!”

A movement driven by a sense of a culture war requires enemies, and a lot of members of the MAGA crowd are perfectly happy to cast the old Republican base of boring, sensible, prudent suburbanites as one of its many enemies.

Unsurprisingly, those voters start to leave the party, both formally and informally, and they close their checkbooks. When the lunatics come in, the sane people want to leave.

The MAGA crowd now running these state parties insisted they didn’t need anyone else. And now we see where that got them.>

<Earlier this year, I was introduced to a Republican at a small gathering. I asked him what he made of the new theory sweeping the right, which held that radical leftists had conducted a “long march through the institutions,” seizing control of American culture, education, and business, and thus forcing Republicans to use government to dislodge their power.

This theory has largely been associated with the new, Trumpier factions of the right that have risen up as alternatives to traditional conservatism. Since the man I met was exactly the sort of Republican the Trumpists are plotting to displace from power — (Jewish coastal elitist, donor, mortified by Donald Trump, vocally pro–gay marriage yet intrigued by Ron DeSantis, etc.) — I assumed he would express either ignorance of the long-march theory or else outright opposition.

Instead, to my surprise, the only portion of my account he questioned was the word “theory.” To his mind, the long march and its grim implications for the party’s strategy were simply an obvious truism. The idea has spread so rapidly through the conservative elite that, before it has even gotten a name, the segments of the party most predisposed against it have adopted it.

Ron DeSantis has placed this theory at the center of his governing vision (“elected officials who do nothing more than get out of the way are essentially greenlighting these institutions to continue their unimpeded march through society,” he writes in his campaign book.) Donald Trump is personally sub-ideological, but the intellectuals around him have embraced it too.

Two new books expound upon Longmarchism, as you might call it. America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, by Christopher Rufo, attempts a sweeping historical theory tracing the ascent of a brand of left-wing identity politics from the 1960s New Left to its present position (according to Rufo) of dominance of the commanding heights of American society.

Up From Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right After a Generation of Decay, a collection of essays edited by the Claremont Institute’s Arthur Milikh, uses the long march as its premise and proposes an array of retaliatory actions.

Rufo’s version, which is the most developed iteration of the theory, posits that the 1960’s far left hit a wall when the working class failed to support its revolutionary program, and instead decided to gain control of society from above by burrowing into its elite sectors. Rufo initially, erroneously, attributed this strategy to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, before correctly crediting his disciple Rudi Dutschke, who proposed a “long march through the institutions.”

The notion that ex-hippies have burrowed into the Establishment (especially universities) has been floating around the right for many years. But it was only at the tail end of the Trump administration that a more comprehensive version of the idea suddenly burst forth into the frontal cortex of the conservative mind. Longmarchism served as an all-purpose explanation of everything that angered the right during the Trump era: the belligerence of the news media, increasingly overt hostility from respectable Americans, and the final collapse into failure of the Trump administration. All these vexing developments could be explained by the single phenomenon of the left having successfully taken over America’s institutions.

And accepting this theory, in turn, implied a new focus for Republicans if and when they next gained control of government. The left’s long march had given it control of nongovernmental organs of power, from which position it had waged relentless guerrilla war that had rendered Trump impotent and finally defeated. The right’s new task was to use government power to strike back.

We should begin by acknowledging that the theory contains elements of reality. Conservatives are not fantasizing when they perceive that their beliefs are being anathematized by elites and elite institutions. Over the last couple decades, polarization has injected politics into peoples’ lives to a much greater extent — during the 1990s, it was common, even in Washington, D.C, to attend a party and never discuss politics. Simultaneously, the increasingly liberal cast of college-educated Americans has made all sorts of elite institutions more liberal even as they have grown more political. It is a real sea change in American life for giant corporations to endorse a left-wing group like Black Lives Matter....>

<....This trend exploded during the Trump administration. From a liberal point of view, the mobilization of Blue America looked like a necessary response to the national emergency of a bigoted authoritarian running loose through the West Wing. But it is easy to see how conservatives could perceive the same thing as something like a hostile conspiracy. “Conservatives have come to feel that practically everything that can reasonably be called an ‘institution’ — from sports journalism to the federal bureaucracy — is against them,” writes Richard Hanania in Milikh’s compendium.

Since 2020, Rufo has done a fair amount of legwork digging up documentation of the often-ridiculous Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs spreading through corporate, educational, and government human-resources departments. He fleshes out his theory with a series of historical synopses of left-wing theorists like Herbert Marcuse and Derrick Bell that take their ideas seriously. Rufo is also at least intermittently capable of recognizing deep disagreements within the left, a refreshing counterpoint to the common practice among right-wing polemicists of lumping together everything to the left of the Republican Party.

But Longmarchism suffers three serious defects which, working in conjunction, transform a reasonable set of objections to left-wing social-justice fads run amok into a paranoid, authoritarian ideology.

First, the Longmarchers are prone to catastrophizing. It is not just that left-wing ideas are spreading — those ideas are literally tantamount to Soviet-imposed totalitarianism. “Although the left-wing cultural revolution had self-destructed in the Third World,” writes Rufo, “over time it found a new home in America.” And not only have these ideas gained currency, they formed “a new ideological regime.”

“The Constitution cannot be said to be governing the nation when there is no real presidency (but rather an intelligence apparatus and an administrative state that operates, more or less, on their own); no real Congress (which delegates its powers away to the administrative state); and no real independence of the states (which, with the aid of the Supreme Court, have become mere federal fiefdoms,)” claims Milkh, arguing along similar lines. “In terms of political and moral power, the Left currently rules every consequential sector of society, from the nation’s educational institutions (K–12 and higher education), to large parts of the media, corporate America, Big Tech, and the federal administrative apparatus.”

Rufo’s analysis, despite its depth and specificity, relies upon a sleight-of-hand technique: He assumes that any organization that has adapted left-wing rhetoric in its training or branding has been wholly captured by the ideology of the activists who devised their underlying concepts.

So, for instance, he proclaims, “The final conquest in the long march through the institutions is the extension of the critical theories into America’s largest corporations.” How did critical theorists gain control of corporate America? Well, after George Floyd’s murder, they made supportive statements toward the Black Lives Matter movement, and “The largest fifty companies in America immediately pledged $50 billion toward ‘racial equity.’”

That certainly sounds like an ideological commitment that has redirected the priorities of corporate America. But if you look at the footnotes, 90 percent of those funds are loans or mortgages, and almost all of the sum comes from two banks, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. Of the grants, just $70 million went to groups promoting criminal-justice reform.

Likewise, when reporting on defense contractors employing some loopy DEI training materials in 2020, he asserts, “Even federal defense contractors have submitted to the new ideology.” And when he notes the same thing happening at the Treasury Department the same year, he arrives at the sweeping conclusion, “After fifty years, the long march had been completed. The radical left had finally won its Gramscian ‘war of position’ and attained ideological power within the American state.”....>

<.....Of course, the military-industrial complex and the Treasury Department are massive bureaucracies. The fact their human-resources departments circulated some wild left-wing rhetoric hardly means those agencies were enlisted in the cause of left-wing revolution. Their general operations have not appreciably changed. It is safe to assume that, if they were actually under the control of Angela Davis’s disciples, the Pentagon and Treasury would probably be acting very differently than they are now.

The second flaw in the long-march theory is that it fails to understand how social-justice ideology exploded specifically in reaction to events that are now receding.

The most striking thing about both Rufo and Milikh’s books is that the events they cite as evidence of the left’s inexorable rise overwhelmingly took place during the Trump presidency. Primarily, they return again and again to the George Floyd protests and their aftermath. They also point to outrages like public-health guidance in 2020, a source of ongoing anger. Very little of the evidence they muster of a left-wing march through the institutions takes place since Trump left office.

One reason, of course, is that the murder of George Floyd was a high-profile event that happened to occur in 2020. But Floyd was killed after Trump had spent several years engaging in public displays of racist bullying. Trump repeatedly promised to roll back police reforms undertaken by his predecessor and unleash the cops to brutalize suspects. “The Obama administration and the handcuffing and oppression of police was despicable,” Minneapolis Police Union president Bob Kroll announced at a Trump rally in Minneapolis, seven months before a Minneapolis cop killed Floyd. “The first thing President Trump did when he took office was turn that around, got rid of the Holder-Loretta Lynch regime and decided to start … letting the cops do their job, put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of us.” And Trump bullied protesters for police reform, like Colin Kaepernick, boasting that he had blackballed the quarterback from being hired by the league again.

None of the Longmarchers mention this context. In their accounts, the explosion of protests instead spring directly from a 50-year-long left-wing plot.

There is a common psychological phenomenon called the fundamental attribution error. It describes the way in which people habitually assess their own actions within the context of their environment, but assess the actions of other people as if they represent an innate character trait.

The political version of the fundamental attribution error is that ideologues can easily perceive how the other side’s extremists are radicalizing us, but fail to see how our side’s extremists are radicalizing them. It is very obvious to the Longmarchers of the right that the excesses of the George Floyd protest era produced a backlash on the right. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that these protests were spurred in large part not simply by the outrageous torture captured on video, but also the years of goading by the most famous person in the world that preceded it.

The Milikh volume has two essays specifically chastising conservatives for being too anti-racist. Not only can they not grasp that anti-racism protests draw more support when there is public evidence of racism, they argue that the movement has nothing to do with opposing actual racism. Indeed, at points they seem to deny its existence. “No amount of black outreach, Juneteenth celebrations, or expressions of sympathy for George Floyd will ever get them to stop calling us racists,” argues David Azzerad. “Their political movement thus requires the existence of racists. When they do not exist, they must be manufactured.” How would he know what progressives would do in the absence of actual racism, unless he thinks such a condition actually exists?

A more important corollary, which the Longmarchers ignore, is that Trump’s defeat has drained the energy from the left.....>

<....Rufo draws an extended scene of racial-justice protesters confronting Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey with a demand to endorse police abolition, then shaming him when he refuses. The narrative structure of the episode, as Rufo constructs it, depicts the protesters as triumphant, and Frey slinking away shamed and defeated. What Rufo does not mention is that Frey went on to win reelection in 2021 and then a city ballot initiative to reduce police funding lost. Indeed, after a brief flirtation, the Democratic Party turned sharply against defunding the police. Joe Biden has promised to “fund the police.”

The fact that so many of the horrors cited by the Longmarchers occurred under Trump confirms a finding by the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi. A critic of the far left on social issues, al-Gharbi has compiled a number of metrics showing the “great awokening” has already begun winding down. University students are less fearful of discussing controversial topics, and professors are facing less retaliation on campus. Corporate DEI bureaucracy, whose growth Rufo portrays as an unstoppable terror, is collapsing; the Wall Street Journal reports that chief-diversity-officer searches are down 75 percent over the previous year amid plummeting demand.

It is difficult to empirically prove something as amorphous as the rise and fall of an ideological tendency, but these findings paint the same picture as the Longmarchers’ reliance on circa-2020 anecdotes: The worst excesses of social-justice activism peaked under Trump, and Uncle Joe has managed to calm things down.

This problem is worth bearing in mind when you consider the third defect of Longmarchism: It implies a radical program that its advocates fail to articulate clearly.

Both tomes brim with militant sloganeering language exhorting their allies to take merciless, decisive action against the enemy. “We like to say that one must govern, but a truer expression is that one must learn to rule,” writes Milikh in one essay.

Rufo displays even more clearly Leninist thought patterns. Politics is a struggle of willpower, and the forces of his side (the counterrevolution) “must ruthlessly identify and exploit the vulnerabilities of the revolution, then construct its own logic for overcoming it … The task is to meet the forces of revolution with an equal and opposite force.” Having convinced himself of the success of the Marxist left, he believes the right must fashion itself as a mirror image.

Rufo’s self-conception as a reverse Leninist, agitating for his anti-revolution, even extends to constructing his own dialectical analysis. “The working class is more anti-revolutionary today than at any time during the upheaval,” he posits. “Their quality of life has plummeted into a revolving nightmare of addiction, violence and incarceration.” The proletariat in Joe Biden’s Amerika, immiserated into radicalization, is ready to take to the barricades.

But exactly what this all means in practice is a little harder to say. Milikh’s volume offers a series of mostly vague proposals to extend (or, the Longmarchers would say, join) political combat to almost every sphere of American life. Many of them point to DeSantis’s campaign to punish Disney for the sin of criticizing his restrictions on gender education as a model.

“Destruction followed by reconquest is necessary and proper,” proposes Milikh in regard to the education system. One contributor suggests starting up a new clothing line to replace “woke Patagonia’s clothing” and creating dating apps that reject hookup culture. Another argues, “This rolling sexual revolution cultivates a new sexual ethic supporting that may be called the Queer Constitution (in contrast to our former Straight Constitution), which has become central to Americanism and its ruling class,” and thus, “the family must be self-consciously repoliticized....>

<....Of course, all these maneuvers would generate a backlash on the left. This response would obviously freak out conservatives even more, in turn promoting yet more panicked demands for another counteroffensive (or, perhaps, counter-counter-counteroffensive) in the culture war. If the militant language of the Longmarchers expresses anything cogent, it is that the mere existence of opposition is intolerable to them.

One notable characteristic of the Longmarchers, and the post-liberal movement on the right in general, is that every new escalation in tactics they demand serves as justification for the next one. Michael Anton’s famous “Flight 93” essay justified a vote for Trump as a final, desperate gambit (akin to passengers on the doomed hijacked flight charging the cockpit) to save America from the left-wing takeover. Now Anton — who has contributed two essays to Up From Conservatism — needs an explanation for why Trump’s presidency failed to save the country.

The long march supplies that explanation. It turns out, writes Anton, “the people we nominally elect do not hold real power.” So now, they must not only win control of government, but also extend its power into nearly every sphere of American life. They have abandoned completely the notion they can roll back left-wing excess through persuasion — the very thing that appears to be happening now, under a moderate Democratic president — and instead convinced themselves it can and must be accomplished through coercion.

Perhaps they will try this. If so, they will discover they have generated a backlash far more severe than they anticipated. Indeed, they will have brought about the very thing they had set out to destroy.>

<A growing number of House Republicans are involved in an effort to remove language from an annual spending bill restricting access to abortion pills, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: The bloc has the numbers to kill legislation to fund the Department of Agriculture, where language about the pills is buried, and further heightens the risk of a government shutdown.

At a minimum, the rebellion threatens to delay the passage of the bill until September. Spending bills must be passed by September 30 to avoid a shutdown.

"There's at least 10 to a dozen individuals that have made it very clear that it is an issue," said D'Esposito.

The language nullifies Food and Drug Administration guidance allowing the drug mifepristone, which is used in medical abortions, to be sold by mail and at retail pharmacies.

What they're saying: Several members — who, like Molinaro and D'Esposito, represent districts President Biden won in 2020 — went on the record on Wednesday with their opposition to the language.

"Some states allow [mifepristone] to be mailed, some states don't, but that should be a decision with the states and the FDA, not Congress," said Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.). "If that language stays as is, we won't be able to vote for that appropriations [bill]," said Rep. Laurie Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore.). Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.) said he told voters he "wasn't looking to disrupt the existing policy" on abortion being a states issue, adding, "I intend to fulfill that commitment." It's not just moderates — the right-wing Freedom Caucus is trying to extract policy concessions in virtually every spending bill in addition to limiting overall government spending.

"All of these [appropriations] bills, with the slim majority we have, are going to be discussed up until the last minute," said Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas), a Freedom Caucus member who sits on the Appropriations Committee.

The group has been pushing to set new work requirements for food assistance in the Ag-FDA bill, which could further inflame moderates.

State of play: House Republican leaders had aimed to pass the bill this week, ahead of the August recess, but some Republicans are openly voicing skepticism about that timeline.

"It's not looking real good on that right now," Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), the chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee, told reporters on Wednesday morning. Moderates have been meeting with leadership on the mifepristone language, but so far a deal has not been struck.>

<Wednesday did not go how Hunter Biden probably hoped.

The president’s son was supposed to finalize a plea deal, admitting he broke the law but avoiding jail time for misdemeanor tax crimes and agreeing to a diversion program on a gun charge.

Instead, a federal judge in Wilmington, Delaware, questioned the scope of Hunter Biden’s plea deal with prosecutors, asking for more clarity from both sides.

But rather than suggesting the deal reached between federal prosecutors in Delaware and Hunter Biden’s legal team was too lenient, as Republican lawmakers have done, the judge wanted to know if the deal would settle the five-year federal investigation into the president’s son.

Hunter Biden’s attorneys thought it did. The prosecutors said there would be ongoing investigations.

So Wednesday ended not with the legal cloud behind the president’s son, but rather with the plea deal on hold and him pleading “not guilty.”

The two sides will now have to offer more explanation to the judge, Maryellen Noreika, who was appointed to the bench by former President Donald Trump.

Read CNN’s full report. Catch up on updates posted throughout the day.

Key background from CNN’s Marshall Cohen, Holmes Lybrand and Kara Scannell:

The Trump-era Justice Department started investigating Hunter Biden in 2018, and the probe steadily expanded to examine whether he violated money laundering and foreign lobbying laws with his multimillion-dollar overseas business dealings. Federal investigators also looked into Hunter Biden’s unpaid taxes and lavish spending, which came amid a struggle with addiction.

US attorney David Weiss has led the investigation. He was appointed by Trump, and Joe Biden kept him at his post so he could continue handling the probe. There is no public indication that Joe Biden or the White House ever tried to intervene in the probe.

There is also a separate mini-drama. Noreika previously threatened to sanction Hunter Biden’s lawyers after questions about whether one of them misrepresented herself in a phone call to the court. The issue “did not come up at Wednesday’s hearing,” according to CNN’s report.

What else was not mentioned in the proceedings Wednesday Calls by Republicans that the plea deal should be reexamined while lawmakers pursue complaints by two IRS whistleblowers about the process that led to the agreement did not feature in the proceedings Wednesday.

The IRS employees, who testified before Congress last week, says Weiss, the Trump-appointed US attorney leading the investigation, should have pursued more serious crimes against Hunter Biden.

The double standard accusation

The idea that the DOJ is applying different standards of justice to Republicans has become orthodox thinking among Republican lawmakers, who frequently try to create some equivalence between the Hunter Biden plea deal for tax infractions and the prosecution of Trump for conspiracy and mishandling of classified information.

If Trump also ultimately faces charges for his effort to overturn the 2020 election, look for Republicans to deflect questions about his conduct with flicks at this perception of a double standard.

And the political prosecution of Hunter Biden will continue long after the issue of his plea deal is resolved....>

<....Coming attractions

Weiss has volunteered to testify in public on Capitol Hill this fall.

Associating the president with his wayward son has been the goal of his political rivals for years, and it won’t end as a result of the confusion at the court in Delaware Wednesday.

Republicans are conducting their own investigations of Hunter Biden’s business dealings, although they have so far failed to tie any of his questionable arrangements or foreign dealings to his father.

More open to a Biden impeachment
Meanwhile, there is a notable shift in the thinking of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

CNN’s Capitol Hill team, including Melanie Zanona, Manu Raju and Annie Grayer, writes that McCarthy has suddenly warmed to the idea of pursuing an impeachment investigation against the president. Read their full report.

It details how McCarthy has heard advice to prioritize an impeachment of Joe Biden over a member of his Cabinet, like Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who was grilled Wednesday by House Republicans over the Biden administration’s border policies.

Why the shift?

Here are key lines from Zanona, Raju and Grayer:

Part of the thinking, according to multiple sources familiar with the internal discussions, is that if House Republicans are going to expend precious resources on the politically tricky task of an impeachment, they might as well go after their highest target as opposed to the attorney general or secretary of homeland security.

And McCarthy – who sources said has also been consulting with former House GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich on the issue – has warmed up to an idea that has long been relegated to the fringes of his conference. This week, he delivered his most explicit threat yet to Biden, saying their investigations into the Biden family’s business deals appear to be rising to the level of an impeachment inquiry.

One problem for a presidential impeachment effort is that, as McCarthy admitted to CNN Tuesday, Republicans have not verified the most salacious allegation against Joe Biden, documented in a single FBI interview, that as vice president he engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national in order to benefit Hunter Biden’s career – an allegation the White House furiously denies.

“How do you get to the bottom of the truth? The only way Congress can do that is go to an impeachment inquiry,” McCarthy said Tuesday, according to CNN’s report – suggesting the new thinking that an impeachment inquiry could act as something of a fishing expedition to find something worthy of impeachment.>

<ouse Republicans appear to be moving rapidly in the direction of supporting an impeachment investigation against President Joe Biden, without a clear understanding of what they're even impeaching him for, much less evidence. The theory appears to be allegations that Biden was somehow involved in bribery in Ukraine, based on claims that were debunked years ago — and comes as the president's son struggles to reach a plea agreement over unrelated charges.

But former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) offered his party a warning on CNN Wednesday: this will only hurt the country.

"Of course, Congressman, that's what leads to the continued drum beat about the president," said anchor Erin Burnett. "The White House calls this entire case a personal matter. President Biden stayed out of public view today. But, obviously, these developments on Hunter Biden come as Republicans have been escalating threats to impeach President Biden. So does the collapse of this deal, do you think it moves the needle for moderate republicans who have been loath to go along with that rhetoric so far to now jump on board?"

"So, it gives them an excuse," said Kinzinger. "When you're in that — I was in that position many times as kind of the moderate, I guess. The temptation is to look for a reason to say, hey, I'm still a reasonable person, however, this is now causing me to reconsider. This can give ammo to that. The bigger picture is, look, this is not a case against Joe Biden, this is a case against his son. There are accusations surrounded by the president, but no more."

It's important to remember, Kinzinger continued, that "an impeachment inquiry is not just a fact-finding mission, it is a serious thing."

"But I said back in January that they would impeach Joe Biden, simply because the pressure is going to be so great on other news networks, and in the base to do that," said Kinzinger. "So I think they're going to find any excuse to get there. I certainly hope some of my former colleagues that are more sane and reasonable understand that this is really bad for the country.">

<'We’ve got to work hard to make sure that we continue Florida going in a good direction, let’s build off the success we’ve had on Governor Scott, the last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state.'>

<Lawyers for former President Donald Trump met Thursday morning with special counsel Jack Smith's team as a potential indictment of the former president looms, sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.

Posting later on his Truth Social platform, Trump said "No indication of notice was given" during the meeting regarding a pending indictment.

Trump attorneys John Lauro and Todd Blanche met with Smith's team following the receipt of a target letter alerting Trump he is a target of the special counsel's investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Trump's lawyers were there to make the case for why they believed Trump shouldn't be indicted. Smith was present for the meeting, sources said.

The meeting ended after an hour, sources told ABC News.

An indictment would be the third one for the former president, who was indicted last month on 37 criminal counts related to his handling of classified materials. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges. In April, Trump pleaded not guilty to a 34-count indictment from the Manhattan DA charging him with falsifying business records in connection with a hush money payment made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

No former or current president had ever been indicted prior to Trump's being charged in the hush money case.

Trump confirmed Thursday's meeting in a post on his Truth Social platform.

"My attorneys had a productive meeting with the DOJ this morning, explaining in detail that I did nothing wrong, was advised by many lawyers, and that an Indictment of me would only further destroy our Country," he wrote.

The target letter, which Trump said he received on July 16, mentions three federal statutes: conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud the United States, deprivation of rights under a civil rights statute, and tampering with a witness, victim or an informant, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

Trump confirmed the letter in a post on Truth Social.

Smith was appointed in November by Attorney General Merrick Garland to oversee the investigation into efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election, as well as Trump's handling of classified documents after leaving the presidency.

Trump has denied all wrongdoing and has dismissed the probes as a political witch hunt.>

<Civil rights activists cheered when Ron DeSantis pardoned four Black men wrongfully convicted of rape as one of his first actions as Florida's governor. But four years later, as DeSantis eyes the presidency, their hope that the Republican would be an ally on racial justice has long faded.

Instead, African American leaders decry what they call a pattern of “policy violence” against people of color imposed by the DeSantis administration that reached a low point after the recent release of an “anti-woke” public school curriculum on Black history. Specifically, Florida's teachers are now required to instruct middle-school students that enslaved people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

DeSantis has repeatedly defended the new language while insisting that his critics, who include Vice President Kamala Harris and at least one high-profile Republican congressman, are intentionally misinterpreting one line of the sweeping curriculum. Civil rights leaders who have watched DeSantis closely dismiss such explanations.

“DeSantis has perfected the art of using policy violence that we must stop," said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP. His organization issued a travel advisory for Florida in May warning African Americans against DeSantis' “aggressive attempts to erase Black history and to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Florida schools.”

The divisive debate highlights the political and practical risks of DeSantis’ approach to racial issues as he seeks to catch Donald Trump in the crowded 2024 primary and the Republican Party works to strengthen its dismal standing with voters of color.

Ambitious Republican leaders have long seized on white grievance to animate the party's most passionate voters, who are almost exclusively white. But DeSantis, a combative conservative who leads one of the nation's largest states, has embraced far-right positions on race perhaps more aggressively than anyone in the 2024 presidential contest as he tries to position himself to the right of Trump.

Facing fierce backlash this week over the new curriculum, the 44-year-old governor was as defiant as ever.

“We believe in true history,” DeSantis said in an interview Tuesday with conservative commentator Clay Travis. “The standards that were developed, these are Black history scholars, many of whom were African American themselves, they worked on this. It's very, very thorough. It is every little aspect, of not just slavery, but the Black experience in America.”

DeSantis is now facing criticism from Florida teachers, civil rights leaders and the Biden White House. Harris, the nation's first Black vice president, traveled to Florida last week to condemn the curriculum. Many of DeSantis' GOP presidential opponents have stayed silent, including Tim Scott, who is the Senate's sole Black Republican member. He declined to comment for this story.

Other Black conservatives have begun to speak out. Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., one of the most powerful Black Republicans in the state, said he has a problem with the part of the curriculum that suggests enslaved people derived any benefit from their situation.

“To me, yes, that section needs some adjustments," he told southwest Florida's WINK News this week.

"The talking point narrative around it, yeah, it sounds awful,” said Donalds, who, like almost every Republican in Florida's congressional delegation, has endorsed Trump over DeSantis in the primary. “Nobody should be accepting of that. But when you read through the standards, they actually did a very good job in covering all aspects of Black history in the United States.”

Donalds said he planned to work with the State Board of Education to “bring refinement" to that topic.

The DeSantis administration later went on the attack against Donalds, a popular conservative seen as a rising star in the GOP.

The state's education commissioner, Manny Diaz Jr., vowed on social media Wednesday not to change the teaching standards “at the behest of a woke @WhiteHouse, nor at the behest of a supposedly conservative congressman.” DeSantis’ spokesperson, Jeremy Redfern, piled on, posting that “supposed conservatives in the federal government are pushing the same false narrative that originated from the @WhiteHouse.”....>

<....As the dynamic unfolds under the bright spotlight of presidential politics, DeSantis' approach risks alienating would-be conservative supporters while undermining his core message to Republican voters, which relies on the notion that he is more electable than Trump against President Joe Biden in the general election.

Republican strategists acknowledge that the curriculum fight could undermine the party's modest gains with some voters of color in recent elections. African Americans and Latinos, particularly young men, have shifted slightly toward the GOP, although both groups still overwhelmingly backed Democrats.

“There are much more valuable issues that DeSantis should focus on,” said Republican strategist Alice Stewart, who added that the current debate could “absolutely” alienate voters of color and suburban whites alike.

Still, she suggested DeSantis was being unfairly criticized.

“It’s important as always to make sure that you read everything before you take one part and blow it up," Stewart said. "This is one part of a larger curriculum. And this was written and approved and signed off by an African American scholar.”

The group that revised the Black history curriculum included William B. Allen, a Black professor emeritus at Michigan State University who has defended the wording about slavery.

Former Republican strategist Tara Setmayer, now an adviser with the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said the debate reflects an unfortunate political reality in today's GOP: Far-right positions on race have become incredibly popular since Trump's rise. She argued there is virtually no short-term downside to emphasizing the issue for candidates running in Republican primaries, which are dominated by the party's white base.

“I was a Republican for 27 years, and at no time did the Republican Party try to whitewash American history," she said. “Now, that’s a mainstream Republican talking point.”

DeSantis is far from alone in pushing the limits of the GOP's rightward shift on race.

Trump dined last fall with noted white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. and Paul Gosar, R-Ariz. spoke at a gathering of white supremacists in Florida earlier in the year. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., has repeatedly refused to denounce white nationalists serving in the U.S. military in recent weeks. Rep. Eli Crane, R-Ariz. referred to Black people as “colored people” on the House floor this month.

In the GOP's presidential primary, all the candidates have come out against critical race theory, the idea that racism is systemic in the nation’s institutions, which function to maintain the dominance of white people in society. They regularly insist that America is not a racist nation, accusing Democrats of perpetuating that notion to score political points.

In many cases, however, DeSantis has gone further than his 2024 rivals in using the levers of government to enshrine the conservative position — much of it coming after his presidential ambitions came into view.

Even before he was sworn in, DeSantis faced allegations of racism for saying Florida voters would not “monkey” up the election by voting for his Black Democratic opponent in 2018. But DeSantis then drew praise for opening his governorship by pardoning the Groveland Four, a group of four Black men convicted of a 1949 rape they did not commit.

The praise didn't last....>

<....In 2020, DeSantis pushed the Florida Legislature to approve the so-called anti-riot act, which was designed to crack down on violence associated with African American demonstrations against police violence. That's even as he’s downplayed the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

More recently, DeSantis pushed through the Stop WOKE (Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) Act, a law that limits discussions on race in schools and by corporations. The law was intended, at least in part, to prevent white people from feeling guilty or uncomfortable about racial injustices committed by other white people.

DeSantis has also banned state universities from using state or federal money for diversity programs.

In a move that has not gained as much attention, he has declined to select individuals for the Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame in four years, despite a state law that requires nominees to be submitted to him annually. He has continued to name people to the Florida Artists Hall of Fame and the Florida Women’s Hall of Fame.

DeSantis also demanded that former Democratic Rep. Al Lawson’s congressional district be redrawn to dilute the influence of Black voters in north Florida. As a result, Florida no longer has Black representation in Washington for an area stretching about 360 miles (580 kilometers) from the Alabama line to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Georgia line south to Orlando.

Still, Black Republican activist Quisha King of Jacksonville says she's been thrilled by DeSantis' leadership, especially on education.

King said it's “ignorant” and “simple-minded” to condemn the provision of Florida's new education curriculum related to slavery.

“My great, great, grandfather was born a slave. He bought his freedom. How do they think he was able to buy his freedom?” she asked. “They used the skills that they had to make some money and save it up and buy their freedom."

The Department of Education said Wednesday that it released a statement on the new Black history curriculum last week and would not comment further.

Meanwhile, state Democratic Sen. Shevrin Jones, who is Black, said that painting a rosier picture of atrocities does not benefit anyone.

“Their idea is to teach history in a way to make white people not be looked at in a bad light,” Jones said. “There’s no silver bow that you can tie around the history of Black people. You can’t make lynching look good, you can’t make the raping of women look good."

“There’s no benefit to that," he added. "There was nothing right about that. There was nothing just about that. It was torture.”>

<Inflammatory rhetoric and policy proposals from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — calling for “a national divorce” between red and blue states, supporting a ban on abortion and labeling Democrats as pedophiles — have helped her informal rise to the top ranks of House Republicans.

Now, Democrats are about to give her a new informal title: the face of the chamber’s GOP.

A study released Thursday shows that Republicans in potentially vulnerable districts vote with Greene an overwhelming amount of the time. The analysis by CAP Action, the political arm of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, is likely to lead to dozens of television ads over the course of the next year portraying swing-seat Republicans as clones of the extremist lawmaker.

“This analysis underscores that the ideology of House leadership and the average Republican member of Congress has shifted toward Rep. Greene’s extreme MAGA ideas and demonstrates how House Republicans have grown more tolerant of her unacceptable and unethical behavior,” the group said, using an abbreviation for the “Make America Great Again” slogan.

As Donald Trump (with his election-denying stance) leads GOP polls in the party’s presidential primary contest, Democrats are eager to depict Republicans as extreme, a tactic that helped them contain losses in 2022 and almost pull off a midterm upset. Linking them to Greene, who had only a 28% favorability rating in February, could help paint that picture.

Greene, for her part, does not mind the idea of Democrats using her as a political cudgel against fellow Republicans.

I’m so tired of hearing about the so-called moderates, because I don’t see them. There is no difference if someone says they’re a moderate but they vote with her, they vote with this extremist agenda. Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.)

“Am I worried about how they’re going to use me? Not at all,” she told reporters Wednesday in Washington. “I think they’re aware that I’m a very serious lawmaker and that I’ve been able to make changes in the Republican Party here, especially in our conference.”

Saying that voters support her views in general, she added, “If they want to use my views like that and they want to run against those views, well, good luck to them because they’re going to lose.”

In New York, five Republicans in competitive seats voted with Greene at least 85% of the time, the study found. Among them, the lowest rate came from Rep. Mike Lawler, at 85%, while the highest came from Rep. George Santos — a controversial figure himself after coming under federal indictment — at 93%.

California, where Republicans eked out wins in several hard-fought elections last year, showed a similar pattern. Reps. David Valadao, Michelle Steel and John Duarte voted with Greene 90% of the time, according to the analysis, while Rep. Mike Garcia voted with her 92% of the time.

Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.), who has sponsored a resolution to censure Greene in the House, said the patterns show that Greene’s extremism is no longer restricted to the right wing of the chamber’s already conservative Republicans.

“This is basically what this party is now about, what this [House Republican] conference is about,” Balint said on a video call with reporters that was hosted by CAP Action.

“I’m so tired of hearing about the so-called moderates, because I don’t see them. There is no difference if someone says they’re a moderate but they vote with her, they vote with this extremist agenda.”

The study results may also reflect the past success of Democrats’ work to limit GOP advantages. With only 222 Republicans in a House where 218 seats are needed for control, there has been much less room than usual for the chamber’s majority to allow members to take a walk on key votes. In other words, Republicans have had to vote in almost total lockstep or avoid votes where they could splinter.

According to the study, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) voted with Greene 96% of the time, and 92% of all House Republicans voted with Greene at least 90% of the time. Of those who didn’t, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) had the lowest percentage of voting with Greene, at 70%.

President Joe Biden’s campaign has already dipped its toes into using Greene for an ad, but not in the way one might expect. On social media, it posted footage of Greene, in worried tones, describing what Biden has done, such as boosting programs related to “urban problems,” “rural poverty” and “labor unions,” but with an ironic “I approve this message” slapped above the video.

Greene said her speech had been chopped up to look like praise.

<The Democratic-led Senate passed its version of the annual defense-policy bill with broad bipartisan support, putting the legislation on a collision course with the Republican-controlled House, which narrowly voted earlier this month to add contentious provisions that would restrict abortion access and transgender healthcare for troops.

The vote was 86-11.

“What’s happening in the Senate is a stark contrast to the partisan race to the bottom we saw in the House, where House Republicans are pushing partisan legislation that has zero chance of passing,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), ahead of the Senate vote. Schumer noted that the Senate process included votes on 98 amendments, many of them bipartisan.

“This is really important for our country,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.).

The Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2024, or NDAA, does share some central similarities with the House-passed version: Both would authorize $886 billion in spending on national security, including a 5.2% pay raise for service members and the Defense Department’s civilian workforce, and green light $300 million in security assistance for Ukraine.

But senators largely sidestepped the polarizing social issues that had roiled the House a few weeks earlier, when members of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus demanded and won amendment votes related to abortion and transgender care for service members.

Both amendments narrowly passed the House, mostly along party lines. One would overturn a Pentagon policy allowing troops leave and travel funds for reproductive healthcare—including abortion—and the other would prevent the Defense Department or Tricare, the military’s healthcare program, from providing gender-related surgeries and hormone treatments for transgender people.

House Republicans said they were delivering on their promise to end what they saw as the Biden administration’s inappropriate “social experiment” on the military, while Democrats complained that Republicans had hijacked a national-security bill to push a far-right political agenda.

Senators mostly avoided the controversy—for now—by skipping floor votes on any amendments dealing with abortion access and transgender treatments in the military.

Sen. John Kennedy (R., La.), who opposes abortion, said adding an abortion amendment was too controversial to consider. “One way to gum up the works at this point is to get off into divisive issues like abortion,” Kennedy said.

Lawmakers will now work behind closed doors to negotiate a compromise that combines the House and Senate NDAAs. Typically centrists from both parties come together to ensure the final product of these talks can pass both chambers by large margins, but the process could be complicated this year by divided government and culture-war politics as the country heads into next year’s elections.

The NDAA increases funding for military recruiting and advertising, implements higher standards for enlisted barracks and boosts investments in microelectronics, hypersonic weapons and drones.

One amendment, added to the bill with support from senators of both parties, would prevent any president from leaving the North Atlantic Treaty Organization without Senate approval. Another bipartisan provision would give the administration emergency powers to stop the trafficking of fentanyl.....>

<....Other notable measures relate to:

Aid to Taiwan

As with last year’s authorization, the Senate NDAA would bolster U.S. assistance to Taiwan. The Senate version envisions a closer relationship between the U.S. and Taiwan militaries, with the bill requiring the defense secretary to develop a comprehensive training program for Taiwan’s armed forces. That effort, the bill says, should enhance the two militaries’ capabilities to operate jointly and encourage information sharing.

The bill also aims to push forward a measure in last year’s defense authorization that gave the president the authority to draw from U.S. military stockpiles to aid Taiwan. Implementation has been slow, in part because the administration is already drawing on those stocks to arm Ukraine. To address that, this year’s bill authorizes replenishment of those stockpiles once tapped, whether for Ukraine or Taiwan.

Foreign Investment in Farmland

The Senate added a provision largely preventing foreign entities from China, Russia, Iran or North Korea from buying U.S. farmland, in response to national security concerns about such purchases.

The measure also authorizes the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or Cfius, to review foreigners’ purchases or leases of more than 320 acres of farmland, or those valued at $5 million or more. The multiagency panel can advise the president to block or unwind foreign acquisitions for security concerns.

U.S. Investment in China

One provision would require American investors to notify the Treasury Department about stakes they make in certain Chinese technology sectors including artificial intelligence, advanced semiconductors and satellite communications. The Biden administration has also been working on an executive order that would in some ways go further than the Senate amendment by banning certain investments in China—as well as requiring disclosure of others. The goal of the efforts is to stop American money and knowledge from helping China develop technology that could be used for military purposes.

UFO Documents

Another bipartisan amendment that made it into the legislation would give federal agencies 300 days to hand over documents related to unidentified anomalous phenomena to a newly established review board with the power to declassify them. The proposal is modeled after a 1992 law declassifying documents related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, requiring public release within 25 years.

AI Push

Several provisions relate to artificial intelligence, which Schumer described as “early initial steps” in his push for the Senate to legislate on AI, in response to mass consumer adoption of ChatGPT and other new AI systems. It calls for two federal studies of AI risks, one covering vulnerabilities in AI-enabled military applications and the other looking at use of AI in the financial industry. It also tells the Pentagon to create a “bug bounty” program offering rewards for identifying flaws in large AI systems being integrated into military operations.

Microchip Manufacturing

A proposal led by Sens. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.) and Todd Young (R., Ind.) would speed up permitting projects for domestic microchip manufacturing by streamlining approval for projects already under construction, such as two manufacturing centers in Arizona for chip manufacturers Intel and TSMC.>

<Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) slammed the new charges brought against former President Trump in the case over his handling of classified documents Thursday, arguing that “we cannot allow this to stand.”

“It’s so brazen right now, what they’re doing,” Hawley said on Fox News. “It is really a subversion of the rule of law. I mean, they’re taking the rule of law, turning it on its head, and we cannot allow this to stand.”

“The American people are not gonna be safe,” he added. “Our system of government is not gonna be safe if this is gonna be the new standard.”

The Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a superseding indictment Thursday evening, accusing the former president of attempting to delete surveillance footage at his Mar-a-Lago property. It also included an additional Espionage Act charge based on a military document that Trump boasted of having in a 2021 meeting.

The new indictment added Carlos de Oliveira, the property manager of the Mar-a-Lago resort, as a co-conspirator, accusing him of working with Trump and the former president’s other co-defendant Walt Nauta to try to delete the surveillance footage.

Hawley suggested that the DOJ is now “charging random people” following de Oliveira’s addition to the indictment and claimed that the new charges were brought in order to distract from Hunter Biden’s legal problems. The plea deal that the president’s son had reached with the DOJ over tax and gun charges was put on hold Wednesday, after the federal judge presiding over the case raised concerns about the agreement.

“Is it any coincidence that the DOJ rushes to add these new indictments today, after the Hunter debacle, after their own self-dealing and two-timing is exposed, after they tried to us the true extent of this plea deal,” Hawley said.

“That gets blown up, and then it’s like, ‘Oh well, we’ve got to go indict Trump on something else,’” he added.>

<A new Supreme Court decision could bolster the ongoing probe into claims Donald Trump attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

In a jointly penned column for Slate magazine on Tuesday, Harvard law expert Laurence Tribe, and erstwhile federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut, shed light on a recent SCOTUS ruling that could allow the probe to employ Trump's own tweets against him.

The pair argue that the case could hone in on Trump's tweet to his then-vice president during the Capitol riot: "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to... protect our Country."

The theory behind the potential indictment is that Trump's tweet on January 6, at 2:24 p.m., may have constituted a threat or attempt to intimidate Pence. This would have been an effort to deprive Pence and by extension the voters whose ballots his role was meant to count, of their constitutional right to have the electoral votes lawfully counted during the Joint Session of Congress.

Minutes before the joint session kicked off at 1:05 pm on January 6, Pence had informed Trump that he intended to exercise his right as VP and oversee the vote count. Trump's tweet came 11 minutes after the Capitol breach and after White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows had alerted Trump to the violence.

Trump’s tweet could be interpreted as having one or more of three objectives. First, it may have been a direct attempt to intimidate and threaten Pence into following Trump's demands using the mob's presence at the Capitol. Second, it could have aimed to incite the insurrectionists to threaten or intimidate Pence to abandon his duty as presiding officer and have the votes lawfully counted. Lastly, it could have sought to seek revenge on Pence for not complying if the first two attempts failed, thereby attempting to punish him for exercising his constitutional right, which would be a violation of the statute.

Counterman v Colorado

The June 27 Supreme Court ruling in Counterman v Colorado is significant to understand how this civil rights statute charge might be supported. The Court held that a mental state of recklessness for threatening violence is sufficient to prove "true threats," which lie outside the protection of the First Amendment.

The civil rights non-profit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression described the ruling as “largely good news for the First Amendment because it sets a higher bar for punishing speech as a ‘true threat.’ Fewer prosecutors will be able to criminalize speech tomorrow than was possible yesterday.”

Tribe and Aftergut highlight that “Recklessness” in this case, meant that the individual issuing a threat “consciously disregarded a substantial risk that his communications would be viewed as threatening violence.”

They also claim that the context of Trump’s tweet was clear, with the Capitol mob already inside Congress. His words appeared to target Pence and were recklessly inflammatory. Unlike a conditional statement in another case, Trump's tweet lacked any conditions. Testimonies from witnesses who saw the tweet in real time further indicate its impact and recklessness.

Pence’s Life ‘in Danger’ on January 6

Last year the House January 6 committee revealed a court filing from the Department of Justice that highlighted the threat to Vice President Mike Pence's life during the Capitol attack.

The Proud Boys, an extremist group, had plans to kill Mike Pence, and some rioters chanted "Hang Mike Pence" during the attack, and the panel’s chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) has argued that “Mike Pence’s courage put him in tremendous danger.

Multiple witnesses testified about Trump's actions and the impact on the crowd's anger, leading to chants for Pence's hanging.

The committee played footage showing Trump telling his supporters that Pence could stop the election certification.

Pence refused to comply and was rushed to a secure location due to the threat posed by the mob.

Trump Outpaces Republican Rivals
Trump continues to vehemently deny any wrongdoing and recently told a Fox News Town Hall in Iowa that special counsel Smith was a "deranged prosecutor" in a post on his Truth Social platform, where he disclosed the existence of the target letter on Tuesday evening.

Still, his lead in the race for the GOP nomination continues to widen.

A recent Fox Business survey found that 46 percent of potential Iowa Republican caucus-goers expressed support for Trump. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott received 16 per cent and 11 percent of supporters respectively.

<Damian Lillard has requested a trade away from the Portland Trail Blazers, and he's made it clear through his representation that he's only interested in being traded to the Miami Heat. This stance, and some of the recent reporting around it, has prompted the NBA to send a memo to all 30 teams, according to Shams Charania of The Athletic. The memo made clear that any further comments from Lillard, or his agent Aaron Goodwin, could result in discipline from the league. It also stated that similar behavior from other players in the future could also result in discipline.

Here's the memo in full, via Chris Haynes of Bleacher Report:

"Recent media reports stated that Damian Lillard's agent, Aaron Goodwin, called multiple NBA teams to warn them against trading for Lillard because Lillard's only desired trade destination is Miami. Goodwin also made public comments indicating that Lillard would not fully perform the services called for under his player contract if traded to another team.

We interviewed Goodwin and Lillard and also spoke with several NBA teams to whom Goodwin spoke. Goodwin denied stating or indicating to any team that Lillard would refuse to play for them. Goodwin and Lillard affirmed to us that Lillard would fully perform the services called for under his player contract in any trade scenario. The relevant teams provided descriptions of their communications with Goodwin that were mostly, though not entirely, consistent with Goodwin's statements to us.

We have advised Goodwin and Lillard that any future comments, made privately to teams or publicly, suggesting Lillard will not fully perform the services called for under his player contract in the event of a trade will subject Lillard to discipline by the NBA. We also have advised the Players Association that any similar comments by players or their agents will be subject to discipline going forward."

Despite the fact that Lillard's trade request came nearly a month ago, no deal appears imminent. Ultimately, the Blazers are in complete control of the situation, as Lillard still has three years remaining on his current contract, plus a player option, and doesn't possess a no-trade clause. So, Portland could technically ship Lillard wherever they want -- it doesn't have to be Miami.

At the same time, Lillard is probably the best player in franchise history and has been immensely important to the team over the past decade-plus, so there's certainly some desire on the team's part to accommodate his wishes. Ultimately, though, the Heat might not be able to offer the best package for the star guard, and at that point Lillard might have to be willing to compromise.

It will be extremely interesting to see how the situation plays out. In the meantime, the league has made it clear that it doesn't want to hear any more chatter from Lillard or his agent about his desire to be moved to Miami.>

<Former IndyCar and NASCAR racer Danica Patrick was once hailed as among the most prominent and successful female drivers in motorsport. She now finds herself at the centre of a controversy following her recent comments about the potential for female drivers in Formula 1.

Patrick, who is currently a part of the Sky F1 broadcast team, expressed scepticism about the likelihood of women breaking into the male-dominated world of F1. She suggested that the skill set and mindset required for success in the sport are not natural for females.

Her response when asked by a young girl about seeing more women in F1 left many viewers disappointed. Her answer suggested that the nature of motorsport is inherently masculine and aggressive. It implied that the mindset required to excel in F1 does not align with a feminine mind or a female way of thinking.

She mentioned how she would go into an "aggressive kill mode" when facing challenges on the track and asserted that such a mindset is not a natural thought process for women.

In response to her remarks, social media platforms were flooded with negative reactions from motorsport fans, particularly those aspiring to see more women in the sport. Many expressed their disappointment, feeling that her comments perpetuated harmful stereotypes and hindered the progress of aspiring female drivers....

....During a Sky F1 broadcast segment called 'F1 Juniors', Danica Patrick engaged with a young girl's question about seeing more women competing in Formula 1. She answered:

"As I've always said in my whole career, it takes 100 guys to come through to find a good one, and then it takes 100 girls. That takes a long time to find a good one, right?" She continued:

"It's just, the odds are not in favour of there always being one or being many of them. And at the end of the day, I think that the nature of the sport is masculine. It's aggressive. "You have to, you know, handle the car – not only just the car because that's skill, but the mindset that it takes to be really good is something that's not normal in a feminine mind, a female mind."...>

Et cetera.

<Former President Donald Trump charged ahead with his bid for the 2024 GOP nomination Friday at a major Republican event in Iowa, largely ignoring the new charges he faces in the federal classified documents probe.

“If I weren’t running, I would have nobody coming after me. Or if I was losing by a lot, I would have nobody coming after me,” Trump said in Des Moines at the Iowa GOP’s Lincoln Dinner, a high-profile gathering of party officials, donors and supporters in the state set to kick off the 2024 nominating process in January.

It was Trump’s only indirect reference to the recent news that the former president, an aide and a Mar-a-Lago worker face expanded charges in the special counsel investigation into Trump’s possession of classified documents. Those updated charges are the beginning of a legal process that will play out at the same time as next year’s presidential race.

Trump used his speech – which was limited to 10 minutes, a time restraint also faced by the 12 other GOP presidential candidates who spoke at the dinner – to highlight a litany of his administration’s accomplishments, particularly those with Iowa connections. He pointed to tariffs on Chinese goods and sales of agricultural products to China, his support for ethanol and the replacement of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

He also took credit for Iowa remaining the first state to vote in the GOP presidential nominating process – a status state Republicans maintained even as Democrats made changes to their primary calendar.

“Without me, you would not be first in the nation right now,” Trump said.

He pointed to selectively chosen unnamed polls that he said showed him defeating President Joe Biden in 2024 and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis losing to Biden.

“I wouldn’t take a chance on that one,” Trump said of his top-polling GOP rival.

Trump, like all other candidates at the dinner, walked out to the Brooks & Dunn song “Only in America.” As he took the stage, the lyrics that played were: “One kid dreams of fame and fortune. One kid helps pay the rent. One could end up going to prison. One just might be president.”

The former president appeared uncomfortable at times Friday under the time-constrained format and without a teleprompter. He looked down at his notes for much of his speech and at one point tried to explain why he was speeding through his remarks.

“I’m going quickly because we’re given … 10 quick minutes, so I’m gonna go quickly, but we did a lot of things. It’s hard to do it that quickly,” he told the crowd.

Earlier Friday, Trump again did not directly address the new charges brought against him during brief remarks at his Iowa campaign headquarters, instead repeating his past claims that the Department of Justice had been “weaponized.”

Some rivals speak out

Some of his rivals did take direct aim at Trump, the front-runner to win the GOP nomination for the third consecutive presidential election, in their remarks Friday night in Iowa.

Will Hurd, the former Texas congressman and noted Trump critic, was jeered and shouted down as he unleashed the strongest attack on the former president of any candidate at the dinner.

“Donald Trump is not running for president to make America great again. Donald Trump is not running for president to represent the people who voted for him in 2016 and 2020. Donald Trump is running to stay out of prison,” Hurd said, as crowd members erupted in boos.

He blamed the former president for the GOP’s electoral losses in 2018, 2020 and 2022, and said Trump alienated key constituencies that the party needs to win elections: college-educated suburban women; Black and brown communities; and people age 35 and under.

“The truth is hard,” Hurd said, leaning into the blowback. “But if we elect Donald Trump, we are willingly giving Joe Biden four more years in the White House, and America can’t handle that.”

Former Vice President Mike Pence implicitly urged Republicans to leave behind Trump, his ex-ticket mate. Pence pitched himself as a stronger ideological ally as he told the crowd it was time for “new Republican leadership” with a “proven commitment to the conservative agenda.”

“We must resist the politics of personality and the siren song of populism, unmoored to conservative values, because different times calls for different leadership,” Pence said....>

<....Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who for months has urged the GOP to move on from Trump, also called on Iowa Republicans to steer the party away from the former president in January’s caucuses.

“As it stands right now, you will be voting in Iowa while multiple criminal cases are pending against former President Trump. Iowa has an opportunity to say, we as a party, we need a new direction for America and for the GOP,” he said. “We are a party of individual responsibility, accountability and support for the rule of law – we must not abandon that.”

Attacks on Biden

Several 2024 GOP hopefuls used the dinner to attack Biden, frequently in personal terms.

Hutchinson and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley both cracked jokes about the number of grandchildren Biden has – a reference to presidential son Hunter Biden’s child with an Arkansas woman. The jokes came just hours after the president publicly acknowledged his seventh grandchild, 4-year-old Navy, for the first time.

Haley said politicians over age 75 should be required to pass “mental competency tests” that include questions such as “How many grandchildren do you have?”

“What? I don’t know what you all are laughing at,” she said wryly. Her remark also came two days after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the 81-year-old Kentucky Republican, froze for 30 seconds during a news conference on Capitol Hill and was escorted away by his colleagues from the microphone. An aide said later he was feeling light-headed.

DeSantis told the crowd there would be “no cocaine in my White House” and noted that his son is 5 years old and therefore won’t be “lining his pockets” with foreign governments’ money – another clear shot at Biden’s son.

Appeals to donors

Some candidates whose campaigns have yet to gain traction with grassroots donors also used the dinner to plead for contributions as they seek to hit the Republican National Committee’s threshold of 40,000 unique contributors to qualify for the first presidential debate next month.

“The key to being in the debate in in [sic] your pocket tonight,” Hutchinson said.

Perry Johnson, the long-shot Michigan businessman, said anyone who donates even $1 to his campaign would get a ticket to a concert by country duo Big & Rich.

Larry Elder, the California talk radio host and former gubernatorial nominee, also asked for donations, pledging to raise at the debate topics such as the “epidemic of fatherlessness,” school choice, combating criticism of the United States as systemically racist, and limiting federal spending. He pointed out that he is the only member of his family who did not serve in the military.

“If I can put these issues front and center,” he said, “then I will feel that I have given back to my country.”>

<A northern Indiana gun shop police have called a key supplier of Chicago's criminal firearms market announced this week it is closing its doors in what gun violence prevention advocates say is a win for public safety in a city that grapples with thousands of shootings a year.

Westforth Sports Inc. in Gary, Indiana, located 10 miles from the Illinois border, is liquidating its assets and has not finalized a timeline for closure, attorney Timothy Rudd said Friday. Store owner Earl Westforth, who has been in business for more than 50 years, is retiring, Rudd said.

"For years, Westforth was the No. 1 supplier of out-of-state crime guns recovered by Chicago police, fueling our city’s gun violence crisis," Chicago city attorney Mary Richardson-Lowry said in a statement Friday, calling the store's closing a "significant victory."

The development comes after Chicago sued Westforth Sports in 2021, claiming the gun store "engaged in a pattern of illegal sales that has resulted in the flow of hundreds, if not thousands, of illegal firearms" into Chicago, according to the lawsuit filed in Cook County.

Attorneys for the gun store moved to dismiss the case last year, arguing the city's suit concerned dealings between the gun shop and Indiana residents. A Cook County judge dismissed the suit in May, finding Westforth's contacts with Illinois were not sufficient for the court to exercise jurisdiction in the case.

The city responded in June by requesting the court modify its order. The city also requested leave to file an amended complaint that establishes a "direct causal connection" between Westforth Sports and Chicago, including allegations that employees knew guns were being straw-purchased for the purpose of re-sale in Chicago. Attorneys for Westforth Sports opposed the motion, and a status conference in the case is expected next month.

Rudd said he could not comment on why the store is not staying in business in the wake of Westforth's retirement. He said the store's closure is unrelated to the litigation.

"The truth is, Westforth Sports could continue to stay in business as long as it wants to, and Earl is choosing to go out on his own terms and his own time," Rudd said.

Alla Lefkowitz, senior director of affirmative litigation for Everytown Law, a gun violence prevention advocacy group, attributed the closure to heightened scrutiny of Westforth Sports in recent years.

"The fact that Westforth Sports will shutter its doors is a testament to the importance of holding bad actors in the gun industry accountable," Lefkowitz said, adding, "There is no question that Westforth’s decision to cease operations will make Chicagoans safer from the threat of gun violence."....>