Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. And for Trump, things are getting bad, even before the indictments.
Tuesday delivered a spate of bad news for Donald Trump and the Republican party. First, Bennie Thompson, chairman of the January 6 committee, announced that criminal referrals to the US Department of Justice would be forthcoming. A few hours later, a Manhattan jury convicted the Trump Organization on 17 counts of tax fraud, conspiracy and falsification. According to prosecutors, the former president was complicit.
And now, the incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock has prevailed in a hard-fought runoff. Georgia again rejected Herschel Walker and Donald Trump, his patron.
Come January, Mitch McConnell and his Republican colleagues in the US Senate will be staring at an actual 51-49 Democratic majority. The president’s nominees will have an easier time winning confirmation. In the end, the minority leader and his caucus will bear a portion of the cost of those abortions Walker reportedly paid for.
The ex-University of Georgia football great now joins the ranks of other Trump-endorsed casualties: Pennsylvania’s Dr Oz and Doug Mastriano; Arizona’s Kari Lake and Blake Masters; Michigan’s Tudor Dixon. Unfortunately for them, swing-state America yearned for normal.
But wait, there's more. Alayna Treene at Axios:
- A series of polls pitting Trump against his expected 2024 rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has stirred unease within Trumpworld..
- Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed local election officials in Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin for their communications with Trump and his allies as part of the department's investigation into Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election....
- Trump drew massive backlash from Republicans for hosting a dinner with antisemitic rapper Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) and white nationalist Nick Fuentes, as well as pushing for the suspension of the Constitution.
- An appeals court dropped the Trump team's effort to appoint a special master to review documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.
- The Supreme Court denied Trump's bid to block the House Ways and Means Committee from obtaining his tax returns.
- A federal judge ordered Trump's former White House lawyers to provide additional grand jury testimony, dealing a blow to Trump's attempt to exert executive privilege in the Justice Department's investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
