Joe Biden is increasingly thinking of his possible reelection and a rematch against former President Trump.
“He knows it’s a very real possibility,” said one longtime adviser to Biden.
In an interview with Axios that aired Sunday evening, White House chief of staff Ron Klain said Biden is anticipating the possibility of running against Trump again. Continue reading.
In the last few months, Fox News’ Laura Ingraham has repeatedly hosted Paul Alexander, former science adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services under President Donald Trump and key aide to Trump loyalist and former HHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Michael Caputo. While working for Caputo at HHS, Alexander sought to politicize public health guidance from inside the government bureaucracy, seeking to alter reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which reflected poorly on the Trump administration.
Politico reported in September 2020 that Alexander “was effective at delaying the famed Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports and watering down guidance” from the CDC. (The reports are a key CDC communications product that provides updates on the state of the pandemic, among other things.) In one email reported by Politico, Alexander wrote, “Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk….so we use them to develop herd…we want them infected.” This strategy is deadly flawed, to say the least.
The erroneous political hackery of Alexander makes him the ideal guest for Ingraham, Fox’s worst COVID-19 misinformer. In fact, Alexander has pushed misinformation during every one of his seven appearances on The Ingraham Angle: Continue reading.
Say what you will about Lindsey Graham; he has a knack for saying enlightening — and subtly honest — things about why the official Republican Party remains in Donald Trump’s grip.
It’s because it has no idea how to do anything else.
The most recent episode came when the Republican senator from South Carolina weighed in on Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-Wyo.) impending excommunication from House GOP leadership. Continue reading.
Republicans would very much like you to know that they are not punishing Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) because she said mean things about former president Donald Trump. It’s not about that! What it is about is focusing on the future, rather than the past.
Since that became the talking point, though, Republicans including Trump have set about reinforcing its speciousness.
“I think you saw Congresswoman Cheney giving a press conference and talking about the last election when all of us — the vast majority of members — are talking about the next election,” the No. 2 House Republican, Rep. Steve Scalise (La.), has said. Continue reading.
Democracy in America could end and the cause could be the refusal of Republicans to hurt Donald Trump’s feelings.
At a campaign rally in October, Trump worried about what would happen if he lost to Joe Biden.
“Could you imagine if I lose?” Trump said at a rally in Georgia. “My whole life, what am I going to do? I’m going to say, ‘I lost to the worst candidate in the history of politics.’ I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country. I don’t know.” Continue reading.
House Republicans ousted Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) as conference chair in a voice vote Wednesday, capping months of growing backlash over her criticisms of former President Trump, according to two sources in the room.
Why it matters: The stunning removal of the No. 3 House Republican over her condemnation of Trump’s election lies reflects the influence the former president still retains over the GOP.
The big picture: The vote marks the most significant turning point in an internal party feud that is unlikely to subside any time soon. Continue reading.
The House Republican leader gets blasted after attempting to redefine “free thought.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced Monday that he was leading an effort to boot Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from her GOP leadership post.
Cheney is on the outs because she has refused to endorse former President Donald Trump’s “big lie” about the 2020 election being “stolen” and has blamed him for the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that was carried out by his supporters.
That makes one line in McCarthy’s letter to his Republican conference stand out:
“We are a big tent party. We represent Americans of all backgrounds and continue to grow our movement by the day. And unlike the left, we embrace free thought and debate.”
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), the only woman in Senate Republicans’ elected leadership team, compared efforts to oust Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from leadership to “cancel culture,” and argued that the party should be focused on unifying heading into 2022.
“I feel it’s OK to go ahead and express what you feel is right to express and, you know, cancel culture is cancel culture no matter how you look at it. Unfortunately, I think there are those that are trying to silence others in the party,” Ernst told reporters on Monday asked about Cheney’s likely ouster.
House Republicans will vote Wednesday on whether to remove Cheney as their conference chair. Though she survived a similar attempt earlier this year, she’s all but guaranteed to be ousted Wednesday amid growing frustration over her criticism of former President Trump and the false claim he and some of his ardent supporters have made that the 2020 election was “stolen.” Continue reading.
Washington (AFP) – Donald Trump encouraged the Capitol rioters and so earned his Facebook ban, but the social media giant’s rules are in “shambles” and need fixing, the co-chair of the network’s oversight panel said Sunday.
The panel agreed just days ago that Facebook was right to oust the ex-president for his comments regarding the deadly January 6 rampage, though it sidestepped an overall decision on whether he will ever be allowed back.
“He issued these statements which were just egging on — with perfunctory asking for peace — but mostly he was just egging them on to continue,” oversight body co-chair Michael McConnell told Fox News Sunday. Continue reading.
In Glastonbury, Connecticut near Hartford, Chip Beckett was a fixture in the local Republican Party. But Beckett, a member of the Glastonbury Town Council and its former minority leader, is now an ex-Republican — and he discussed his reasons for leaving the GOP and joining the Independent Party during an interview with the Hartford Courant.
Beckett’s big problem with the national GOP of 2021 can be summed up in one word: Trumpism. Beckett told the Courant that while he thinks Republicans are doing some good work locally in his area, he believes the national GOP has been overtaken by extremists.
Arguing that the national GOP has been “going in the wrong direction for a long time,” Beckett noted that he switched to the Independent Party in December in response to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filing a frivolous lawsuit to delay now-President Joe Biden’s Electoral College certification in four states. Beckett was also disillusioned with his former party because of former President Donald Trump’s policy of separating families at the U.S./Mexico border. Continue reading.
