March 19, 2024
In Florida, Kansas, Ohio, Illinois, and Arizona, Republican voters chose their presidential candidate today. The results highlight the weaknesses former president Trump is bringing to the 2024 presidential contest.
Trump, who is the only person still in the Republican race, won all five of today’s Republican races. But the results showed that his support is soft. Results are still coming in, but as I write this, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who has suspended her campaign, received between 13% and 20% of the vote, Florida governor Ron DeSantis—who has also suspended his campaign—picked up votes, and “none of the names shown” got more than 5% in Kansas.
Even in Ohio, where Trump’s preferred Senate candidate won, Trump received less than 80% of the Republican vote. After NBC News conducted an exit poll in Ohio, MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin reported that of Ohio Republican primary voters—who are typically the most committed party members—11% said they would vote for Biden in November and another 8% said they wouldn’t vote for either Trump or Biden.
Trump has money problems, too. This morning, Brian Schwartz of CNBC reported that while Trump has pushed Haley voters away, Biden’s team has courted both voters and Haley donors to help Biden defeat Trump. Schwartz said that at least a half dozen former Haley fundraisers have decided to help Biden.
Aside from the Haley supporters who are moving to Biden, Trump’s campaign faces a money crunch. As Schwartz reported yesterday, small donors have slowed down their financial support for Trump considerably, possibly because of fatigue after 9 years of Trump’s supercharged fundraising pitches. Big donors have also been holding back funds out of concern that they will not go toward electing Republicans, but rather will be used to pay Trump’s legal fees.
On March 14, Trump’s people organized a new joint fundraising committee, called the Trump 47 Committee. It is designed to split the money it gets between state Republican parties, the Republican National Committee, and Trump’s Save America Political Action Committee (PAC). As Schwartz notes, Save America spent $24 million on Trump’s legal bills in the last six months of 2023.
While running for president is pricey, so is breaking the law. The former president continues to rail against the law that he must deposit either money or a bond to cover the court-ordered $454 million he owes in penalties, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, and interest, after he and the Trump Organization were found liable for fraud. “I would be forced to mortgage or sell Great Assets, perhaps at Fire Sale prices, and if and when I win the Appeal, they would be gone. Does that make sense? WITCH HUNT. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!” Trump posted on his social media channel.
Lisa Mascaro, Mary Clare Jalonick, and Jill Colvin of the Associated Press wrote today that Trump is putting the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol at the heart of his presidential campaign, rewriting the five deaths and the destruction to claim that the rioters were “unbelievable patriots” whom he will pardon as soon as he takes office again. His new hires at the Republican National Committee to replace staff he fired are strengthening the idea that Biden stole the 2020 election.
He’s being helped by loyalists in Congress who are trying to rewrite the history of that day to claim that Trump and the rioters have been persecuted by the Department of Justice. They are attacking the testimony of witnesses like Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, about what she saw that day, although she testified under oath and they are not similarly bound to tell the truth. Trump has said former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, a Republican who served as vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!”
But while Trump’s supporters are willing to sing along to a recording of incarcerated participants in the riots singing their version of the national anthem—the song lyrics are credited to “Donald J. Trump and J6 Prison Choir”—the fact that more than 1,200 people have been charged for their actions that day and many of them have been sentenced to prison seems likely to dampen enthusiasm for trying something like that again.
Today, former Trump advisor Peter Navarro also had to report to prison, in his case a federal prison in Miami, for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the January 6th committee for documents and testimony. Last September, a jury found Navarro guilty of contempt of Congress, rejecting his insistence that he didn’t have to answer to Congress because Trump had invoked executive privilege over their conversations about overturning the 2020 presidential election.
Navarro vowed to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court, but a federal appeals court agreed with the verdict, and yesterday, for the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts rejected Navarro’s plea to stay his sentence. “I am pissed—that’s what I am feeling right now,” Navarro told reporters just before he reported to prison for his four-month sentence.
Trump is also facing renewed scrutiny on his past behavior. With the election interference case in Manhattan heating up, Trump sought to block his former fixer Michael Cohen, adult film actress Stormy Daniels, and former model Karen McDougal from testifying. All of them say Trump paid to keep voters from hearing negative stories about him before the 2016 election. Judge Juan Merchan denied those motions.
And there was a surprise announcement today. Tomorrow, the House Oversight Committee will hold another hearing in the Republicans’ ongoing attempt to impeach President Joe Biden. Today the Democrats on the committee announced they have invited Lev Parnas as their witness. The Ukrainian-born Parnas was an associate of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and was deeply involved in the effort to create dirt to smear Biden before the 2020 election.
In 2022, Parnas was convicted of wire fraud, false statements, and breaking campaign finance laws by funneling money illegally to Trump and other Republican lawmakers. Since he broke with Giuliani, he has been eager to explain what happened and how. He will likely bring up stories that Trump would prefer that voters forget.
Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, told reporters: “Lev Parnas can debunk the bogus claims at the heart of the impeachment probe and, in the process, explain how the GOP ended up in this degraded and embarrassing place.”
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/19/us/elections/results-key-races.html
https://docquery.fec.gov/cgi-bin/forms/C00867937/1763592/
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-jan-6-pardons-2024-campaign-2401ead35cb1402a7b289c2c99761373
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24485357-scotus-ruling-on-navarro
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-news-cuts-away-to-fact-check-peter-navarros-prison-speech
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/19/politics/peter-navarro-jail-contempt-of-congress/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/29/politics/lev-parnas-giuliani-sentence/index.html
Twitter (X):
In the firehose of tffg news the past week, despite the apparent strength of the Biden-Harris campaign, I have felt a sense of gloom that tffg may yet evade justice, somehow. BUT your last sentence in tonight's essay, regarding the impeachment attempt against Biden made me actually laugh for the first time in a while of reading Substacks. Thank you.
"Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, told reporters: “Lev Parnas can debunk the bogus claims at the heart of the impeachment probe and, in the process, explain how the GOP ended up in this degraded and embarrassing place.”"
HCR has had the siren on as she keeps us informed about the battle for Democracy in the US. We look to Ukraine as well to keep Democracy alive. World Central Kitchen is working as no other organization to feed people in need. Learn about their recent shipment of food to the people in Gaza.
'WCK is first to the frontlines, providing meals in response to humanitarian, climate, and community crises. ... WCK has created a new model for disaster relief ...'
https://wck.org/
'Operation Safeena: Aid shipment reaches northern Gaza'
'World Central Kitchen provided almost 200 tons of food in northern Gaza that arrived on our first maritime aid shipment. The food that reached families facing starvation arrived aboard the first humanitarian shipment to reach the Gazan coast in nearly two decades. Alongside local and international partners, WCK has provided more than 39 million meals by land, sea, and air to Palestinians in need.'
https://wck.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=06ac91679649ec3adc1c73cc3&id=5c0f294604&e=8c2d0f0321
'For months, our teams across the region have worked nonstop to open this maritime aid route into Gaza. We are sourcing and loading food onto boats in Cyprus and built our own jetty in Gaza using rubble, including from bombed buildings, to safely unload cargo.'
'WCK will eventually be able to provide “huge quantities of food daily into the shores of Gaza,” said José Andrés, WCK’s founder. Our teams are currently preparing to dispatch our second maritime shipment that will include food and heavy machinery that will expedite the offloading process.
WCK's next maritime shipment will include food and heavy machinery to expedite offloading.'
'Still, much more needs to be done. José has called for a ceasefire and opening of as many land crossings as possible as the best ways to ensure Palestinians get the meals and water they need. To date, we have dispatched more than 1,500 trucks and know that many more are needed to meet the urgent needs of communities all across Gaza.'
'At the same time we deliver food to northern Gaza, WCK is supporting families fleeing south who pass through our Welcome Center in Deir al-Balah. '
Our mailing address is:
World Central Kitchen
PO Box 96538
Washington, DC 20090
Add us to your address book
https://wck.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=06ac91679649ec3adc1c73cc3&id=5c0f294604&e=8c2d0f0321