Trump fears rebuke if he dropped 2020 election lies, bashes DeSantis: interview
In his interview with the Messenger, Donald Trump stuck to his guns when it came to his 2020 election lies and dislike of Florida governor Ron DeSantis. But in a sign of the former president’s reported unease over Roe v Wade’s end last year, he stayed evasive on just how far he would go in cracking down on abortion.
“He has to do what he has to do,” Trump said when asked if he supported the ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy DeSantis signed into Florida law. “He signed six weeks, and many people within the pro-life movement feel that that was too harsh.”
Pushed further by interviewer Marc Caputo on whether he thought the law was “too harsh”, Trump said, “I’m looking at many alternatives. But I was able to get us to the table by terminating Roe v. Wade. That’s the most important thing that’s ever happened for the pro-life movement.” Again, Caputo pressed, asking him to say definitively whether or not he’d sign such a bill into law. “I’m looking at all [options].” Trump said.
That evasiveness is in line with how he reacted when questioned about the subject at the CNN town hall last week. Last year, the New York Times reported the former president worried Roe v Wade’s end could hurt Republicans, and indeed, the party performed worse than expected in the midterm elections held later in 2022.
For all his waffling, the former president’s was much more definitive in how he feels about DeSantis, who has used his governorship of Florida over the past few years to position himself to succeed Trump as the GOP standard bearer.
“He’s got no personality. And I don’t think he’s got a lot of political skill,” Trump said.
Those who watched the CNN town hall last week will notice just how closely Trump stuck to his guns when it came to repeating his debunked theories that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Caputo unearths one potential reason why.
The interviewer asks Trump is he doesn’t worry that the constant election fraud talk might pose a liability. “No. Because if you look at the polls, almost 80% in our party think the election was rigged,” he replies, adding that if he stopped talking about it, “I think if I didn’t I would actually be rebuked by a large portion of the Republican party.”
Key events
Over the weekend, Joe Biden (while on a bike ride) was asked by reporters about the situation at the southern border.
Here’s what he had to say, including his response to the oft-repeated demand from Republicans that he visit the frontier with Mexico:
Reporter: How do you think things are going at the border, sir?
Pres. Biden: Much better than you all expected ha ha.
Reporter: Do you have any plans to visit the border?
Biden: Not in the near term, no. No, it would just be disruptive, not anything else. pic.twitter.com/GXvv32APOu
— The Recount (@therecount) May 15, 2023
The Guardian’s Alexandra Villarreal has more on just how Joe Biden is trying to discourage migrants, and why advocacy groups say in this area, he’s not that different from Donald Trump:
Last week, the Biden administration toughened its stance against migration at the US-Mexico border through a new federal regulation that severely restricts access to asylum. This “Circumvention of Lawful Pathways” rule effectively replaces the Title 42 public health order, which Donald Trump introduced ostensibly to stem Covid-19 but has functioned increasingly as an immigration enforcement tool, allowing border officials to quickly expel migrants without the chance to request asylum in the US. Title 42 ended on 11 May.
The new regulation means people fleeing their home countries because of unlivable violence and instability are rendered ineligible for asylum unless they can meet one of a handful of exceptions.
As a result, the US will probably return many more vulnerable people to dangerous situations. The rule is being challenged in federal court by advocacy groups.
US border crossings dropped by 50% since Title 42 ended: DHS
Unauthorized border crossings have fallen by about half since the United States ended pandemic-era restrictions known as Title 42 and replaced them last week with new, stringent rules, a top homeland security official said.
“Over the last three days, we have seen approximately a 50% decrease in encounters compared to the days leading up to the end of Title 42,” the department’s assistant secretary for border and immigration policy Blas Nuñez-Neto told reporters.
“It is important to note that while Title 42 has ended, the conditions that are causing hemispheric migration at unprecedented levels have not changed. We continue to see more displaced people in the hemisphere than we have in decades.”
First imposed by Donald Trump as the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, Title 42 allowed the United States to turn away many asylum seekers. The rule expired at midnight last Friday, raising fears of a new surge in migrants across the southern border. Under Joe Biden, authorities announced new restrictions on migrants, including banning asylum seekers who passed through another country on their way to the United States but did not seek refuge there.
“Since Friday, individuals who crossed the border unlawfully to enter the United States without using the lawful pathways that we have significantly expanded over the last two years now face tougher consequences at the border, including a minimum five-year bar on reentry and the potential to be criminally prosecuted if they try again,” Nuñez-Neto said.
He noted that since Friday, US authorities returned hundreds of people including Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Cubans to Mexico, and sent thousands of others from Peru, Colombia and Honduras to their home countries.
One of the biggest legacies of Donald Trump’s presidency is the supreme court’s large conservative majority, which has already handed down decisions with major import to life in the United States. The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington reports on a new book that explores one of the tools that conservative justices have used to get their way:
Conservative justices on the US supreme court consciously broke with decades-old congressional rules and norms to shift laws governing religious freedom sharply to the right through a series of shadowy unsigned and unexplained emergency orders, a new book reveals.
Five of the six conservatives who now command the majority on the US’s most powerful court have rammed through some of their most contentious and extreme partisan decisions using the so-called “shadow docket” – unsigned orders issued frequently late at night, in literal and metaphorical darkness. The orders do not reveal who voted for them or why, often providing one-line explanations of the legal thinking behind them.
The switch from openly argued cases, aired in public, to the unaccountability of the shadow docket was made purposefully during the pandemic in cases dealing with religious liberty, concludes Stephen Vladeck, an authority on the federal courts at the University of Texas law school. He warns that the trend is merging with the current ethics scandals surrounding the conservative justice Clarence Thomas to damage the legitimacy of the court and threaten a full-blown constitutional crisis.
Besides negotiating over the debt ceiling, House Republicans have been preoccupied with a campaign of investigations targeting the Biden administration. But as the Guardian’s David Smith reports, the evidence they’ve turned up thus far doesn’t quite deliver on their promise:
“This is a very serious investigation,” James Comer, chairman of the US House of Representatives’ oversight committee, told the rightwing channel Newsmax recently. “The allegations and the things that we’re investigating make Watergate look like jaywalking.”
The Watergate scandal needed a whistleblower, John Dean, to bring down President Richard Nixon half a century ago. Republican Comer claims that he, too, has a “highly credible” whistleblower who will provide evidence that Joe Biden has been compromised by a foreign power.
Such a monumental allegation from such a senior politician would once have been front page news. Even if Republicans were assumed to have partisan motivations, many observers would have begun with the premise that there is no smoke without fire.
McCarthy says still ‘far apart’ with Democrats on debt ceiling
Despite encouraging signs from the White House over the weekend, the Republican speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, gave a gloomy assessment of talks on raising the debt ceiling when CNN caught up with him today:
Speaker McCarthy offered a reality check this morning on debt limit talks, insisting they are still “far apart,” while the administration paints a rosier picture. pic.twitter.com/v3hLWjkdnz
— Haley Talbot (@haleytalbotcnn) May 15, 2023
The US government earlier this year hit the legal limit on how much debt it can accrue, and around 1 June is expected to exhaust its cash on hand and potentially default on its obligations for the first time in history. McCarthy has demanded Democrats agree to spending cuts and other conservative priorities in exchange for the GOP voting to raise the limit.
Joe Biden and Senate Democrats, meanwhile, say the limit must be raised without preconditions. The two sides met last week and continued talking, and over the weekend, Biden administration officials signaled some progress was being made.
“I’m hopeful. I think the negotiations are very active. I’m told they have found some areas of agreement,” Treasury secretary Janet Yellen said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal published on Saturday.
While Donald Trump presses ahead with his new presidential campaign, Florida governor Ron DeSantis continues laying the groundwork for his, The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports, with a formal announcement of candidacy expected within weeks:
Ron DeSantis is using the final weeks before he reportedly launches a presidential campaign to modify Florida law to allow him to run while serving as governor and reduce transparency over political spending and his travel.
DeSantis is poised to sign a bill that would exempt him from Florida’s “resign-to-run” law, so that he won’t have to give up his office in order to run for president. Under existing state law, if he were to run, DeSantis would have had to submit a resignation letter before Florida’s qualifying deadline this year and step down by inauguration day in 2025. Last month, Republicans in the state legislature passed a measure that says the restriction does not apply to those running for president or vice-president.
Speaking of last week’s CNN town hall, Axios has more details this morning of why Donald Trump acted the way he did at the much-critiqued event.
As the first half of the town hall concluded, Trump was met backstage by adviser Jason Miller, Axios reported, who “as if psyching up a boxer in his corner or egging on a bully – showed Trump moments-old tweets from Democrats blasting CNN and saying Trump was winning.”
He then came back out swinging, metaphorically. His tone grew more combative, and he at one point called moderator Kaitlan Collins a “nasty person”.
“He was the leader of the free world again,” a confidant of the former president told Axios.
The tweets Trump was shown included one from progressive House Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as another from his foes at The Lincoln Project.
We’ve wrung most of the news out of the Messenger’s interview with Donald Trump, but the former president makes one policy announcement in the piece that’s worth mentioning.
If returned to the White House next year, Trump pledged to release the rest of the US government’s classified files related to president John F Kennedy’s assassination. He had overseen the declassification of some of the documents during his time as president, as has Joe Biden.
“I will tell you that I have released a lot. I will release the remaining portion very early in my term,” Trump told the Messenger.
Trump fears rebuke if he dropped 2020 election lies, bashes DeSantis: interview
In his interview with the Messenger, Donald Trump stuck to his guns when it came to his 2020 election lies and dislike of Florida governor Ron DeSantis. But in a sign of the former president’s reported unease over Roe v Wade’s end last year, he stayed evasive on just how far he would go in cracking down on abortion.
“He has to do what he has to do,” Trump said when asked if he supported the ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy DeSantis signed into Florida law. “He signed six weeks, and many people within the pro-life movement feel that that was too harsh.”
Pushed further by interviewer Marc Caputo on whether he thought the law was “too harsh”, Trump said, “I’m looking at many alternatives. But I was able to get us to the table by terminating Roe v. Wade. That’s the most important thing that’s ever happened for the pro-life movement.” Again, Caputo pressed, asking him to say definitively whether or not he’d sign such a bill into law. “I’m looking at all [options].” Trump said.
That evasiveness is in line with how he reacted when questioned about the subject at the CNN town hall last week. Last year, the New York Times reported the former president worried Roe v Wade’s end could hurt Republicans, and indeed, the party performed worse than expected in the midterm elections held later in 2022.
For all his waffling, the former president’s was much more definitive in how he feels about DeSantis, who has used his governorship of Florida over the past few years to position himself to succeed Trump as the GOP standard bearer.
“He’s got no personality. And I don’t think he’s got a lot of political skill,” Trump said.
Those who watched the CNN town hall last week will notice just how closely Trump stuck to his guns when it came to repeating his debunked theories that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Caputo unearths one potential reason why.
The interviewer asks Trump is he doesn’t worry that the constant election fraud talk might pose a liability. “No. Because if you look at the polls, almost 80% in our party think the election was rigged,” he replies, adding that if he stopped talking about it, “I think if I didn’t I would actually be rebuked by a large portion of the Republican party.”
Trump remains evasive on six-week abortion ban in new interview
Good morning, US politics blog readers. Days after participating in a contentious and criticized town hall with CNN, Donald Trump continued what appears to be a mainstream media blitz by granting an interview to online startup The Messenger. Journalist Marc Caputo is not successful in getting the former president to clarify his stance on abortion, including the six-week ban now in place in Florida, but Trump does hold forth on potential primary foe Ron DeSantis, and shines some light on why he remains so adamant with his baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Here’s a rundown of what we expect to happen today:
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Debt limit talks continue and comments from Joe Biden and his top officials over the weekend indicate progress may actually be being made ahead of the 1 June deadline for a potential US government default.
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There’s no White House press briefing today, and Biden is spending it flying from Delaware to Philadelphia and finally back to Washington DC.
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Kamala Harris is having a similarly quiet one, at least when it comes to interactions with the masses. She has no public events scheduled.
