Trump Lies About South Africa

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.  His dishonesty is even more intense than in his first term.

Riley Mellen and Aric Toler at NYT:

In a White House meeting on Wednesday, President Trump showed President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa a social media video of a rural road lined with white crosses and hundreds of vehicles.

Mr. Trump told Mr. Ramaphosa that the footage showed “burial sites” of “over 1,000” white farmers in South Africa.

A New York Times analysis found that the footage instead showed a memorial procession on Sept. 5, 2020, near Newcastle, South Africa. The event, according to a local news website, was for a white farming couple in the area who the police said had been murdered in late August of that year.

The crosses were planted in the days ahead of the event and were later removed.

The misrepresentation of the footage took place during a stunning meeting in which Mr. Trump made false claims about a genocide against white farmers. Mr. Trump dimmed the lights to play the footage, presenting it as evidence of racial persecution against white South Africans.

Bill McCarthy at Yahoo:

US President Donald Trump brandished a stack of printed articles at the White House Wednesday that he claimed documented a genocide taking place against white people in South Africa.

Mixed into the deck of papers he unveiled before South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa, however, was a months-old blog post featuring a photo from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"Death of people, death, death, death, horrible death, death," Trump said as he flipped through the headlines, which he said were published in "the last few days."

A Special Election in NY

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.  It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Jared Gans at The Hill:

Democrat Sam Sutton has won a special election for a New York state Senate seat, repelling Republican efforts to flip the conservative-leaning district, Decision Desk HQ has projected.

Sutton, a businessman who has led a nonprofit for years, defeated Republican Nachman Caller, an attorney who previously ran for state Assembly a decade ago. His win keeps the seat in Democratic hands after the resignation of former state Sen. Simcha Felder, who resigned from his position last month to take a seat on the New York City Council.

The result seemed uncertain as Felder is a conservative Democrat who previously caucused with the state GOP conference for years. Felder repeatedly ran unopposed on the party line for the Democratic and Republican parties.

State Senate District 22 encompasses a part of Brooklyn that overwhelmingly voted for President Trump in the November presidential election.

But the district includes a heavily Orthodox Jewish area. Sutton has close ties to the Sephardic community as a co-leader of the Sephardic Community Federation.

Elderly, Confused Trump Defers to Putin

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. Trump is giving Putin nearly everything he could want.

Barak Ravid and Dave Lawler at Axios:

Ukrainian President Zelensky and five other European leaders joined a conference call with President Trump immediately after his call with Vladimir Putin on Monday hoping to hear that Putin had agreed to a ceasefire — or the U.S. would impose penalties on him for refusing to do so.

Instead, Trump said Putin had agreed to negotiate, stressed the U.S. wouldn't be involved in those negotiations, and pushed back against the idea of imposing sanctions on Putin at the current time, two sources who were on the call and a third source briefed on the call told Axios.

Why it matters: Trump gave the impression he was getting closer to withdrawing from the issue altogether. Some leaders on the call seemed "surprised" or "shocked," the sources said."I think something's going to happen. And if it doesn't, I just back away and they're going to have to keep going. Again, this was a European situation, and should have remained a European situation," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office several hours after his calls.

...

Trump told the leaders that Putin agreed to start direct negotiations on a ceasefire immediately. A source on the call said there were a few seconds of puzzled silence.Zelensky then pointed out that Putin had previously agreed to negotiate, and the first round of ceasefire talks took place on Friday in Istanbul. Trump didn't directly respond, the sources said.

The sources said Zelensky and several other leaders on the call told Trump it had been his idea to start the peace talks with an immediate 30-day ceasefire.

Friction point: Other European leaders on the call asked about the possibility of U.S. sanctions against Russia, but Trump said he didn't think was a good idea and stressed that he thought Putin wanted a deal. 

Polarized Reactions to Biden's Cancer

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses Biden's late withdrawal from the 2024 race.

At Politico Playbook, Jack Blanchard and Dasha Burns quote Trump's pro forma staff-written reaction to Biden's cancer diagnosis.

And in years gone by, that would have been it. A bipartisan show of support for a former president of the United States upon their diagnosis with what would appear to be incurable cancer.

But this is 2025. So, no, it didn’t go like that.

MAGA-adjacent social media is lit this morning with accusations that this announcement is suspicious, on two grounds. And you can hardly ignore just the noise, given all we’ve learned this past week.

First is the extraordinary timing, coming with Biden at the center of a firestorm of accusations that he was losing his mental faculties while in office and that his closest aides covered it up. The book helping shape those allegations, “Original Sin” by Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper, is literally out tomorrow. The conversation around those claims will inevitably feel different now.

Just check out this quote from David Axelrod, the former Obama aide and frequent Biden critic, who told CNN any discussion about the former president’s mental acuity “should be more muted and set aside for now as he’s struggling through this.” You can imagine how that’s going down on the right.

Second, and more significantly, there are accusations spreading like wildfire — including from Trump’s son, Don Jr. — that aspects of this tragic diagnosis stretch back further than last week, and that Biden’s cancer was kept quiet while he was in office. Certainly, plenty of doctors say it would be unusual — though far from impossible — for prostate cancer this serious to suddenly emerge out of the blue. Far-right activist Laura Loomer’s claims from back in July 2024 that Biden had a terminal illness are now being reamplified by his critics. Pro-MAGA X users are also reupping Biden’s statement to camera in 2022, when he bluntly said he had cancer, which aides insisted at the time was a misunderstanding.

None of which proves anything. Publicly available facts are sparse, and plenty of people are outraged this is even being discussed at such a sensitive time. But it does matter.

Given the already intense scrutiny of Biden’s mental and physical state — and that he insisted he was in good health while trying to secure another four-year term as president with his party’s fulsome support — these accusations are not going away quietly.

Ramming Reconciliation: "Close Your Eyes"

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

At The Bulwark, Jonathan Cohn notes the lack of deliberation about the budget reconciliation bill:

Consider where this process was just one week ago, with no legislative language and no commitment to specific proposals. The only indications of what GOP leaders had in mind were broad statements they made in speeches and other appearances, along with ambiguous leaks to the press.

When they released an actual bill last Sunday evening, they announced at the same time that the Energy and Commerce Committee would take it up on Tuesday—not even two days later, and so quickly that the Congressional Budget Office wouldn’t have time to produce a full, detailed cost estimate. Then came the hearings themselves: an uninterrupted, 26-hour run through deliberations (the “markup” of the legislation) that ended with a party-line vote to approve the bill and send it to the Budget Committee, where it now sits.

In all, lawmakers had less than 72 hours to digest, debate, and vote on deep Medicaid cuts that—according to CBO’s preliminary, partial estimate—will cause more than 7 million Americans to lose health insurance and millions more to face higher medical costs.1

...

But the longer the debate goes on, the more indefensible those claims look. Every passing day gives analysts more time to publish damning information, like these analyses showing coverage losses by state and congressional district. And the more this information gets out, the easier it is for organizations and activists to press their case.

Something along these lines happened in 2017, when Republicans were trying to pass legislation that would repeal the Affordable Care Act. Every time a new projection showed big coverage losses, every time a major organization announced it opposed legislation, every time activists showed up at a congressional town hall, passing repeal became more difficult politically—until, finally, the effort failed.

As it happens, the GOP leaders from that time tried to do what the current GOP leadership is doing now: ram legislation through before the opposition could stop it. And they were doing so even after having, for years, insisted Democrats somehow hadn’t given the original Affordable Care Act enough time for debate

In April, Trump told House Republicans: "Close your eyes and get there." 

Moody's Blues

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. Trump and his congressional supporters are on track to blow up the federal debt.

Tony Romm,Andrew Duehren and Joe Rennison at NYT:

The credit rating of the United States received a potentially costly downgrade on Friday, as the ratings firm Moody’s determined that the government’s rising debt levels stood to grow further if Republicans enact a package of new tax cuts.

The downgrade, to one notch below the highest triple-A rating, amounted to a repudiation of Washington, where President Trump only hours earlier had pushed his party to adopt a legislative package that might add trillions of dollars to the nation’s fiscal imbalance.

The downgrade from Moody’s means that each of the three major credit rating agencies no longer gives the United States its best rating. Fitch downgraded the United States in 2023, citing fiscal concerns, and Standard & Poor’s downgraded the country in 2011.

The new rating decrease could send ripple effects throughout the economy if it prompts investors to demand higher payments on bonds, which in turn could raise consumers’ borrowing costs. So far, though, past downgrades have proved largely symbolic, as the American government’s debt remains the bedrock of the global financial system.

The Bill of Particulars Against Trump

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start

 J. Michael Luttig at The Atlantic:

As Trump turns the federal government of the United States against Americans and America itself, the bill of particulars against him is already longer than the Declaration of Independence’s bill of particulars against King George III and the British empire.

For not one of his signature initiatives during his first 100 days in office does Trump have the authority under the Constitution and laws of the United States that he claims. Not for the crippling global tariffs he ordered unilaterally; not for his unlawful deportations of hundreds of immigrants to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), El Salvador’s squalid maximum-security prison; not for his deportation of U.S. citizens to Honduras; not for his defiantly corrupt order from the Great Hall of the Department of Justice to weaponize the department against his political enemies; not for his evil executive orders against the nation’s law firms for their representation of his political enemies and clients of whom he personally disapproves; not for his corrupt executive orders against honorable American citizens and former officials of his own administration, Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security chief of staff who dared to criticize Trump anonymously during his first term; not for his unlawful bludgeoning of the nation’s colleges and universities with unconstitutional demands that they surrender their governance and curricula to his wholly owned federal government; not for his threatened revocation of Harvard University’s tax-exempt status; not for his impoundment of billions of dollars of congressionally approved funds or his politically motivated threats to revoke tax exemptions; not for his attempt to alter the rules for federal elections; not for his direct assault on the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright-citizenship guarantee; not for his mass firings of federal employees; not for his empowerment of Musk and DOGE to ravage the federal government; not for his threats to fire Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell; not for his unconstitutional attacks on press freedoms; and finally, not for his appalling arrest of Judge Dugan.

Trump Is Soliciting Bribes

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.  The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.  Its corruption is unprecedented.  Qatar's gift of a jet is just one example.

Dan Merica and Matthew Choi at WP:

Trump launched his meme coin — $Trump — just days before his inauguration and has not been shy about promoting it. The coin thrust the president into an unregulated and volatile world where public figures can launch a cryptocurrency, use their notoriety to draw attention to the coin and benefit when the price surges.

The coin has no intrinsic value and is instead seen as a sign of support for Trump — the people behind it openly say it is “not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type,” and Trump said when the coin launched that it was meant to “celebrate everything we stand for.” But The Washington Post has found that small-time buyers have seen their investments in the coin collapse, while Trump allies and his businesses have benefited from the project in a host of ways.

The coin is now being used to buy direct access to Trump. The group behind the coin — a Trump Organization affiliate and a company run by a Trump friend — has been encouraging purchases of the coin with the promise of an “intimate private dinner” with the president for the top 220 Trump-coin holders. Democrats and government ethics experts have expressed concerns that the meme-coin dinner could be used in a foreign influence scheme. After its promoters offered access to Trump, the coin’s price surged from around $9 to more than $14. Drew Harwell and Jeremy B. Merrill found that nearly two dozen crypto wallets acquired more than 100,000 meme coins, worth roughly $100 million.

David Yaffe-Bellany and Eric Lipton at NYT:

A struggling technology company that has ties to China and relies on TikTok made an unusual announcement this week. It had secured funding to buy as much as $300 million of $TRUMP, the so-called memecoin marketed by President Trump.

GD Culture Group, a publicly traded firm with a Chinese subsidiary, has only eight employees, its public filings show, and recorded zero revenue last year from an e-commerce business it operates on TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing app.

But on Monday, GD Culture Group became the latest business with foreign ties to seize on Mr. Trump’s crypto venture, which channels profits directly to the Trump family and has generated conflicts of interest that have alarmed ethics experts. (Memecoins like $TRUMP are a type of cryptocurrency based on an online joke or celebrity mascot and have traditionally not had any utility beyond speculation.)

In its statement, GD Culture Group, which is traded on the Nasdaq, said it would spend $300 million on a stockpile of Bitcoin and $TRUMP, using proceeds from a stock sale to an unnamed entity in the British Virgin Islands, a popular tax haven. It confirmed that investment plan in a securities filing late Tuesday.

The purchase would create clear ethical conflicts, enriching Mr. Trump’s family at the same time that the president tries to reach a deal that would allow TikTok to keep operating in the United States rather than face a congressionally approved ban.

The announcement also shows how investors around the world, including some that have virtually no public footprint, have latched on to the president’s crypto ventures to boost their own business prospects.

Just asserting a connection to Mr. Trump’s business can quickly raise a company’s profile. GD Culture Group’s struggling stock rose 12 percent on Monday, before losing those gains the next day.

“Make no mistake. These foreign entities and governments obviously want to curry favor with the president,” said former Representative Charles Dent, a Pennsylvania Republican who was the chairman of the House Ethics Committee. “This is completely out of bounds and raises all sorts of ethical, legal and constitutional issues that must be addressed.”

 

DOGE Debacle

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. Trump and his congressional supporters are on track to blow up the federal debt.

 Jessica Riedl at The Atlantic:

These spending data do not flatter the Musk project. Total federal outlays in February and March were $86 billion (or 7 percent) higher than the levels from the same months a year ago, when adjusted for timing shifts. This spending growth—approximately $500 billion annually—continues to be driven by the three-quarters of federal spending allocated to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, veterans’ benefits, and interest costs. These massive expenses have been untouched by DOGE’s focus on small but controversial targets such as DEI contracts and Politico subscriptions.

...

Cost reductions from laying off federal employees have been too small to show up in the data. This is not surprising, because even laying off one quarter of the 2.3 million federal civilian employees would shave off just 1 percent of federal spending. To be fair to DOGE, more savings will materialize in October, when the salaries of the 75,000 federal employees who took a buyout come off the books. That should save Washington $10 billion a year, or 0.1 percent of federal spending—except even that is an overestimate, because Washington will surely end up hiring contractors to perform at least some of the work previously handled by those civil servants, and many contractors cost more than employees.

That, by the way, is the good news for DOGE. The bad news is that the project seems quite likely to expand long-term budget deficits. Slashing IRS enforcement will embolden tax evasion and reduce revenues by hundreds of billions of dollars over the decade. Laying off Department of Education employees who ensure collection of student-loan repayments will increase the deficit. Illegally terminated federal employees are already being reinstated with full back pay, leaving the government with little to show for its trouble besides mounting legal fees.

Even if DOGE somehow manages to end up in the black, any modest savings it achieves will be completely overwhelmed by the GOP’s push to expand the 2017 tax cut at a cost of roughly $500 billion annually. Claims that Washington can no longer afford to spend 0.1 percent of its budget providing lifesaving HIV treatments to 20 million impoverished Africans cannot be taken seriously when the administration and Congress are preparing to cut taxes and expand other spending by trillions of dollars.

 

Why Qatar is Bribing Trump

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.  Its corruption is unprecedented.  Qatar's gift of a jet is just one example.

Judd Legum:

Appearing Monday on Fox News, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that she was "absolutely" sure that Qatar did not "want something in return" for the $400 million 747 airplane because "because they know President Trump and they know he only works with the interests of the American public in mind."

This is not a credible position.

Qatar is the second-largest purchaser of U.S. military equipment, just behind Saudi Arabia, and has a keen interest in ongoing access to high-tech weaponry. In March, the Trump administration "approved the sale of eight MQ-9B Predator drones and a large package of bombs and missiles to Qatar in a deal valued at nearly $2 billion." Arming Qatar with advanced unmanned aircraft, a development that may not be welcomed by all of its neighbors, marked a policy shift for the United States. Included in the deal were "200 Joint Direct Attack Munitions, 300 500-pound general-purpose bombs, 110 Hellfire II missiles, [and] Seaspray 7500 maritime radars." These transfers can be controversial due to Qatar's ties with several radical groups, including political and financial support for Hamas.

Qatar is also home to Al-Udeid Air Base, "the largest U.S. military facility in the Middle East" with about 13,000 American troops. The presence of the base serves as a security umbrella for the country and enhances its diplomatic stature in the region. Qatar has spent about $1.8 billion to modernize the facility, reflecting its commitment to a long-term American presence.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Trump acknowledged the relationship between Qatar's gift and security guarantees. He said that Qatar offered him the plane because the United States "kept them safe."

Open Corruption

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.  Its corruption is unprecedented.

Karen DeYoung, Natalie Allison and Mariana Alfaro at WP:

Qatar is discussing donating an aircraft to the U.S. government for President Donald Trump to use temporarily, but no final agreement has been reached, according to Qatar’s media attaché to the United States. The subject remains in talks between lawyers at the U.S. Defense Department and Qatar’s Defense Ministry.

While the deal is not final, ethics experts are raising concerns about the possible donation from a foreign government, which they say would be unconstitutional, violating the emoluments clause, which forbids U.S. officials from accepting gifts or other things of value from foreign officials without congressional approval.

Trump appeared to confirm the discussions in a social media post Sunday evening, criticizing those who say that Washington should pay for the plane. He said the Pentagon would be receiving the 747 aircraft free to use temporarily as an Air Force One plane.

Eric Lipton and David Yaffe-Bellany at NYT:

The sale of face-to-face access to President Trump using the Trump family’s own cryptocurrency has done more than benefit him financially, though it has certainly done that.

Mr. Trump announced last month that leading buyers of a digital coin his family is marketing would be rewarded with a private dinner with him at one of his golf courses and that the very top bidders would win a tour of the White House.

The auction, which ends Monday, has set off a spectacle that has drawn bipartisan criticism, triggered a suspicious trading pattern, and left a sitting United States president wide open to attempts to corruptly influence him.

Since the announcement, crypto investors around the world have raced to expand their holdings of $TRUMP — a digital currency called a memecoin, which is typically treated more as a novelty investment than an actual currency.

 Certain buyers, in interviews and statements, have said they bought the coins or entered the dinner contest with the intention of securing an action by Mr. Trump to affect United States policy.

...

The contest has presented a straightforward opportunity for foreign-based investors to interact with the president. Under federal law, noncitizens are barred from donating to political campaigns. But nothing stops them from buying a $TRUMP memecoin.

In Mexico, Javier Selgas, the chief executive of a transportation logistics company, announced last month that he intended to buy $20 million worth of $TRUMP tokens to try to convince Mr. Trump to lower tariffs targeting Mexico, which would benefit his company. (After the announcement drew international attention, a spokesman said the firm “currently does not have plans” to send a representative to Mr. Trump’s dinner.)

The Best People

 Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.  MAGA people (e.g., Hegseth) have replaced the normals (e.g., Mattis) that populated the first Trump administration.

Jessica Glenza at The Guardian:

Donald Trump nominated Casey Means, a wellness influencer and medical doctor with an inactive license for US surgeon general this week – his second nominee to serve as “the nation’s doctor”.

Trump abruptly withdrew his first nominee, Dr Janette Nesheiwat, before her Senate confirmation hearing, amid criticism from the right and confusion about her medical credentials.

His new nominee, Means, is a 37-year-old Los Angeles-based medical entrepreneur who shot to prominence in right-leaning wellness circles by criticizing mainstream medicine and advocating for a healthier food supply.

...

 “We should not toss out the window everything Casey is saying, but I would proceed with caution given her training,” said Prof Gabby Headrick, as assistant professor and director of nutrition programs at George Washington University’s Milken School of Public Health.

“Typically and historically, the person appointed to that role and confirmed is someone who has an active medical license, someone who has completed residency, and has held a leadership role in a medical institution. Casey Means does not have the resumé … She also is not trained in nutrition.”

Means also faces opposition from the far right. Activist Laura Loomer, who was critical of Trump’s first nominee, is skeptical of Means – calling her “unfit” for surgeon general and promoting events with Means’s critics.

Loomer previously described Nesheiwat as “a pro-Covid vaccine nepo appointee who is currently embroiled in a medical malpractice case”. Covid vaccines and the technology that underpins them have become a target of right-leaning politicians.

Paul Schwartzman, Spencer S. Hsu and Jeremy Barr at WP:

Jeanine Pirro, the Fox News host chosen by President Donald Trump to become interim U.S. attorney in D.C., is the archetype of what he has shown to prefer in his appointees: combative, camera-ready and loyal enough to have sought to discredit the results of the 2020 election that he lost.

Yet Pirro, a former New York judge and prosecutor, also possesses enough political baggage that she is sure to provoke fierce partisan debate if Trump nominates her as the permanent leader of the nation’s largest U.S. attorney’s office.

Less than 24 hours after Trump announced Pirro’s appointment, hailing her as “incredibly well qualified,” Democrats and Republicans staked out vastly divergent positions on her looming arrival in Washington. She’ll replace the president’s first interim choice, Ed Martin, who is departing after 15 turbulent weeks in office.

Rich Shapiro at NBC:

Long before she was a Fox News host who pushed pro-Trump election conspiracy theories, Jeanine Pirro was an ambitious New York politician whose career stalled after she was recorded plotting to bug her then-husband’s boat to catch him in an affair.

The revelation rocked Pirro’s campaign for New York attorney general nearly 20 years ago, resulting in days of front-page headlines in the city’s tabloids (“BUG THIS LOVE BOAT!” blared the Daily News cover).

The conversation took place in 2005 between Pirro and the former commissioner of the New York Police Department, Bernard Kerik, a close ally of Rudy Giuliani’s.

“What am I supposed to do, Bernie? Watch him f--- her every night?” Pirro said, according to a transcript obtained by WNBC-TV’s Jonathan Dienst in 2006. “What am I supposed to do? I can go on the boat. I’ll put the f-----g thing on myself.”

Peter Aitken at Newsweek:

Pirro is the 23rd current or former Fox News employee Trump has recruited for his administration since taking office earlier this year. However, his relationship with the network runs far deeper and longer than just this year nominees.

During his first administration, Trump regularly called Fox News hosts live on air to have impromptu, off-the-cuff interviews. He also allegedly would consult any number of hosts off the air, including Fox News powerhouse Sean Hannity.

Trump, however, decided to elevate that special relationship in his second administration by appointing hosts, many of whom have only ever had glowing praise for Trump during their broadcasts, to key Cabinet positions and high-profile roles. Comedian and TV host Bill Maher quipped on Friday night during Real Time with Bill Maher that "I've heard of state-run TV; this is TV run state."

A Millionaire Tax?

 Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.  It includes a discussion of tax issues.

Trump has reportedly floated the idea of raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Emily Brooks at The Hill:

Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, who has long worked to have politicians sign pledges to not raise taxes, said that Trump called him to ask his opinion about the matter on Wednesday.

“I told him I thought that it was a job killer, that it was bad for the economy, that it was political death,” Norquist said, reminding him of the many times he promised to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent. And suggestions from staff to the contrary, Norquist said, would not serve him politically.

“That’s what Darman did to Bush,” Norquist said, referencing the Office of Management and Budget director for former President George H.W. Bush — who lost reelection after making the promise, “Read my lips: no new taxes,” before agreeing to tax increases.

“That’s kind of a disgusting thing for a staffer to do to a president, is to tell him to go out and change his mind and say, ‘Oh, I lied when I ran for office,’” Norquist added.

Trump referenced the infamous Bush quote in a Truth Social post on Friday when he said Republicans should “probably not” raise on those pulling multi-million-dollar incomes, musing that Democrats could use it against Republicans.

But Trump also said it was not that broken promise that lost Bush in 1992: “NO, Ross Perot cost him the Election!” Trump said, referencing the independent presidential candidate who pulled nearly 19 percent of the popular vote.

 

Along with Newt, Grover has been warning against this move for some time. 

Leo XIV on Trump and Vance

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

Zach Kessel and Jon Levine at The Washington Free Beacon

Pope Leo XIV, formerly known as Robert Prevost, voted in several Republican primaries before being elevated as successor to Pope Francis, election records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show.

Leo XIV, who previously lived in Chicago, voted in Republican primaries during the 2012, 2014, and 2016 election cycles, according to records from conservative polling firm Pulse Decision Science.

Illinois does not allow voters to register with a political party, so the pope’s voting record does not mean he was a registered Republican. The records do, however, indicate that he only voted in primary elections on the GOP side.

Federal Election Commission and Illinois State Board of Elections databases do not list the newly elected pope as having donated to any political campaigns.

Matt Knee, Pulse Decision Science’s chief data officer, told the Free Beacon the pope’s voting history and public pronouncements lead him to believe Leo XIV is a former Republican.

"The fact that he hasn’t voted in a Republican primary since 2016 and, in fact, didn’t vote in the general in ‘16—and his public statements—if I had to guess, he certainly would fit the profile of a former or Never Trump-type ex-Republican," Knee said.

 Isaac Schorr at Mediaite:

Pope Leo XIV’s social media presence is causing quite the stir.

Shortly after news broke that he had been selected as the new pontiff, observers began scouring over his X account for clues as to his leanings.

It wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to decipher them. His last post on the platform was a retweet that read “As Trump & Bukele use Oval to 🤣 Feds’ illicit deportation of a US resident (https://bit.ly/3ROMjnP), once an undoc-ed Salvadorean himself, now-DC Aux +Evelio asks, ‘Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?'”

A few posts down, Leo XIV shared articles about Vice President JD Vance’s explanation of ordo amoris, one of which bore the headline “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

 

JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others https://t.co/hDKPKuMXmu via @NCRonline

— Robert Prevost (@drprevost) February 3, 2025

As a result, President Donald Trump’s most faithful fans online are not taking to the new pope especially well. “THIS IS THE NEW POPE!” wrote Laura Loomer, the self-proclaimed “white nationalist” with considerable influence on the president. “His name is Robert Prevost. He’s the first American Pope. He is anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis. Catholics don’t have anything good to look forward to. Just another Marxist puppet in the Vatican”