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Donald Trump: Pence is 'innocent' after classified records discovery - Business Insider
OPINION:
Since former President Donald Trump boldly announced his campaign for the next presidential election in 2024 just two months ago at Mar-a-Lago, the media and the establishment havent known exactly what to do.
There have been the usual smears and phony scandals, there have been predictable attempts by the Republican establishment to blame the GOPs midterm disappointments on Mr. Trump, and there has been plenty of wishful thinking in the media on how he cant win again.
This is all nonsense. Mr. Trump has the strongest record of anyone running for president in 2024, the best chance of any Republican in the general election, and a serious and impressive agenda for his second term on America First policies.
Mr. Trump has a solid record of delivering on his promises. During his presidency, the economy boomed, the stock market soared, and unemployment fell to a 50-year low. Mr. Trump kept us out of foreign wars and fought every day to build the wall and enforce our immigration law. He also reshaped the judiciary and named three Supreme Court justices who handed power back to the states and the people, all while fighting the fake news attacks and hoax investigations every step of the way. He is, without a doubt, the most effective conservative leader in a generation.
President Bidens administration is working hard and fast to undo all the good that Mr. Trump accomplished. The stock market closed out with the worst year since the Great Recession of 2008. The border is wide open, inflation is crushing Americans, and the United States is once again sending billions overseas while our veterans are forgotten and left behind. Sixty-three percent of Americans think this country is on the wrong track, and so do I.
As impressive as Mr. Trumps first term was, hes not just running on that for 2024. Only two months into his campaign, the former president has already outlined several ambitious proposals for a second term.
Mr. Trump understands, above all else, the massive threat that Mr. Bidens open border poses to America and is focused on permanently fixing Americas immigration policy. A second Trump term means no amnesty ever, finishing the wall, and it means a serious look at our legal immigration policies.
He has also announced a bold plan to support free speech and fight Big Tech censorship, perhaps one of the most significant issues of our time. Mr. Trump plans to pass a digital bill of rights to protect your free speech online, to fire any federal bureaucrat who has engaged in censorship, and to revise Section 230.
Its possible that the 2020 election could have gone very differently if not for the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story just before the election. Free speech online is crucial to conservative victory now and in the future, and Mr. Trump understands more than anyone the importance of it.
The effort to effectively staff the next Trump administration with conservatives who agree with Mr. Trumps ideas is already underway. Moreover, Mr. Trump will clean house of the deep state federal employees who threaten to stall his America First priorities. Personnel is policy, and Mr. Trump knows this better than ever. This administration will put America first, not the D.C. swamp.
A second Trump administration will accomplish many important conservative goals. There is no better Republican candidate, not electorally, not on the issues, and not on governance. Thats why every RealClearPolitics poll shows Mr. Trump leading the primary field because Republican voters know who they want and trust to deliver them victory.
Mr. Trump is the best hope for American greatness in 2024.
Rep. Troy E. Nehls, a Republican, represents Texas 22nd Congressional District. From 2013 to 2021, he served as the sheriff of Fort Bend County, Texas.
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Donald Trump: America's clear choice in 2024 - Washington Times
Former US President Donald Trump departs after speaking at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, Nov. 15, 2022.
Photo: Alon Skuy/AFP via Getty Images
NFL fans know what that means: Trump is Just a Guy.
In professional football slang, being a JAG means that a player is average, nothing special. A JAG lacks game-changing talent and unique status. A JAG is not a star. If a JAG makes too many demands, hell be kicked off the team and thrown out on the street.
Trump is finally finding out that being a former president is not the same thing as being president. Both in the courts and in politics, it turns out that being a former president is a lot like being a JAG.
For four years, Trump used his special status as president to shield himself from criminal investigations and other legal actions. Trumps position was clearly a factor in the decision by Robert Mueller, the special counsel in the Trump-Russia case, not to bring charges against him. The nations main recourse for holding Trump accountable while he was president was impeachment, and he became the first president in history to be impeached twice by the House of Representatives. But the Republican-controlled Senate failed to convict him each time, and so Trump came to believe that he was bulletproof.
But now that he is out of office, Trump is finally fair game for an entire legion of lawyers. The legal system grinds slowly, but nearly two years after Trump left the White House, a dizzying number of cases against him are finally ramping up, seemingly all at once. Prosecutors are having a field day with Trump. He is facing a legal perfect storm.
Trumps status as just a guy was confirmed Tuesday by a jury in New York, when his real estate company was convicted of tax fraud and other crimes. The jury found the Trump Organization guilty of all 17 counts of financial crimes the company was facing. Donald Trump was not personally charged in the case, but prosecutors did say during the trial that he was complicit by explicitly sanctioning tax fraud.
The criminal prosecution against Trumps company came as he, his children, and their family business are also facing a civil case brought in September by the New York attorney general, charging them with fraud for radically overstating the value of company assets. If they are found guilty, Trump and his children could be barred from running businesses again in New York.
The New York criminal case against Trumps company now appears to be leading to a renewed effort by local prosecutors to investigate Trump personally. After Tuesdays verdict in the criminal case, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said that the case against Trumps company was just one chapter in the book, and that his offices investigation of Trump is still underway.
In fact, the verdict came as Bragg was also reportedly gearing up to revive a long-stalled criminal investigation into Trumps secret hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. The money was designed to buy Danielss silence during the 2016 presidential campaign about her erstwhile affair with Trump.
Separately, E. Jean Carroll, a writer who claims Trump raped her in the mid-1990s, also sued the ex-president in late November for battery and defamation in New York. She had originally sued Trump for defamation while he was president, after he claimed he hadnt assaulted her because she was not my type. That earlier lawsuit is still tied up in court over Trumps claims that he cant be sued for the comments because he was acting in his official capacity as president when he made them.
Similarly, a federal appeals court heard arguments Wednesday over whether Trump should be immune from lawsuits brought against him in connection with statements he made on January 6. A district judge ruled against Trump in February, saying that the three lawsuits, brought by police officers who were at the Capitol on January 6 and Democratic members of Congress, could proceed despite Trumps claims of presidential immunity for his speech.
Last week, the Supreme Court showed that it also now considers Trump a JAG. The court sided with the Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee, ruling that the panel had the right to obtain Trumps tax returns. The legal battle between Trump and the committee over his tax returns had gone on for years, beginning when he was president. But once he left office, he could no longer count on the support of the Justice and Treasury departments to shield his returns. Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., the New Jersey Democrat who chairs the Ways and Means subcommittee on oversight, noted that the Supreme Court ruling came after the panel had waited almost as long as it took to fight the Civil War.
On yet another front, an appeals court ruled in favor of the Justice Department and against Trump last week in the ongoing case involving his apparent theft of government documents. The appeals court overturned the decision by a lower court judge to create a so-called special master to review documents that the government took from Trumps Mar-a-Lago home during an FBI raid in August. The ruling clears the way for the newly appointed special counsel, Jack Smith, to finish the criminal investigation in the documents case. The legal maneuverings around the special master had slowed the case to a crawl over the last few months, but in its ruling, the appeals court made it clear that the lower-court judge had been wrong to give any special treatment to Trump in the way in which materials seized under a search warrant are handled.
Smith, the new special counsel, has also been put in charge of the criminal investigation of Trumps role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and he has been busy on that front since taking over on November 18. Two of Trumps White House lawyers were forced to testify last week before a federal grand jury about their former bosss efforts to overturn the election; this week, meanwhile, Smith has sent grand jury subpoenas to officials in Michigan, Arizona, and Wisconsin, seeking any communications with Trump or his aides in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 vote. Smith seems to be intensifying the criminal probe of efforts by Trump and his allies to upend the results in key swing states so that he could win in the Electoral College.
While Smith ramps up his investigation, the House January 6 Committee, which will effectively go out of business when Republicans take over the House in January, plans to make criminal referrals to the Justice Department based on its investigation, the committees chair said Tuesday.
Separately, a Florida appeals court on Tuesday ordered Michael Flynn, Trumps national security adviser who later became a key figure in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, to testify as early as Thursday before a grand jury in Atlanta investigating Trumps efforts to overturn the election in Georgia. Flynn is expected to be one of the last witnesses before the Atlanta grand jury, which is a special purpose body and will not issue indictments; instead, it will recommend whether anyone should be prosecuted. The Georgia case, in which Trump may face charges of leading a conspiracy to send fake electors from Georgia to the Electoral College, may eventually pose a grave legal threat to the ex-president personally.
Another new verdict in a January 6-related case also is bad news for Trump. Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right militia known as the Oath Keepers, was convicted last week of seditious conspiracy in connection with the Capitol insurrection. The verdict, showing that a jury believes there was a conspiracy behind the riot, raises the legal stakes for Trump and his lieutenants.
To once again try to shield himself from the legal tidal wave, Trump announced right after the midterm election in November that he was running for president again in 2024. But just as he no longer enjoys special legal status, his political power also seems to have ebbed. Almost all the major candidates Trump endorsed lost in the recent election, dragging Republicans down to one of the worst midterm performances in modern history for a party out of power. In a final insult on Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock defeated the Trump-anointed Republican, former football player Herschel Walker in the Georgia runoff election. Failure in the midterms has finally led more Republicans to call for an end to the partys addiction to Trump. (His rant last weekend demanding that the Constitution be suspended so he could be reinstalled as president apparently didnt help.)
As the year ends with Trumps JAG status confirmed, he can only console himself with right-wing dregs, like Elon Musks laughable efforts to publish Hunter Bidens dick pics.
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Donald Trump Is Out of Power and Out of Luck
When Donald Trump was preparing to announce his third run for office, he likely assumed the announcement would spark the beginning of a two-year period in which he would be fted the world over. Everywhere he went, people would spontaneously break into song and dance, thanking their favorite president for stepping up to rescue the country. In towns and villages throughout the United States, parades would be thrown daily in his honor, and not the kind featuring balloons depicting him as a giant, angry baby. No, these would be extremely flattering ones, giving him six-pack abs and hair that doesnt look like it could blow away in the wind. Hed call into Fox News and theyd tell the audience, We are in the presence of greatness!The Republican Party would introduce legislation abolishing the presidential primary, and just give him the nomination. And maybe theyd throw in an addendum that, once he won the general, theyd get rid of the entire electoral process.
Of course, in reality, things didnt entirely pan out that way. Almost no one in the GOP has come out to support his bid, despite his threats to punish Republicans who dont endorse him ASAP. Rupert Murdochs media empire has spent considerable time and effort telling people hes a loser. A Yahoo News/YouGov pollreleased Thursday had Florida governor Ron DeSantis beating him in 2024 by five points. Instead of 24/7 parades, he was hit this week with a guilty conviction for his family business, which a jury said committed 17 different crimes. His own daughter, the one he really likes, wouldnt even show up to his big announcement and has made it clear she wants nothing to do with his future political endeavors.
And while no one would ever accuse Donald Trump of accurately reading a room or having even the slightest grasp on reality, theres at least one indication he seems to have an inkling of an idea that his candidacy has not been as well-received as hed hoped: the fact that he reportedly has barely left the house in nearly a month.
Yes, The Washington Post reports that since kicking off his third White House bid three weeks ago, Donald Trump has barely left his private South Florida clubexcept to play golf at his course across Lake Worth Lagoon, a situation that underscores his current pariah status within the GOP.
Per The Post:
Trumps seclusion within the ornate walls of his club and a series of controversiesfrom the dinner with antisemites Ye and Nick Fuentes to a social media postsuggesting the termination of the Constitutionhave left him increasingly isolated within his party as he tries to mount a political comeback. [Herschel] Walkers loss in a Tuesday runoffelectionbecame the latest blow, prompting more Republicans to join the chorus faulting him for dragging down the partys performance in this yearsmidterms. The former president presents our biggest risk of losing for 2024, and conservatives are tired of losing, said Bob Vander Plaats, head of the Family Leader, an Iowa-based social conservative group. Even the former presidents announcement is being greeted like it never happened. Theres no buzz amongst my network at all.
The criticism of Trump for hurting Republicans at the ballot box is showing no sign of abating, and grew even louder after [the Georgia loss on] Tuesday. Its a formula that doesnt work, said Brian Robinson, a GOP operative in Georgia, explaining that the partys candidates needed to reach voters outside the Trump base. I dont think moving forward youre going to have another primary season where the litmus test is vowing to talk about the 2020 election.
For its part, Team Trump insists that the fact that the ex-president has basically become a shut-in at Mar-a-Lago is nothing to read into, with The Post reporting that they never planned to follow up his announcement with a bunch of rallies or public events. Were still two years out, the official told the outlet. Therell be a time to do events and a time to do rallies.
And of course, no one should assume that the GOP currently giving Trump the cold shoulder actually means anything when it comes to 2024. While its true that few if any people are enthused about his candidacy, thats more or less what happened when he announced his first run in 2015before they all got on board. Still, theres no harm in hoping his Howard Hughes era becomes permanent!
On the other hand, Mitt Romney would like to go on the record that hed sooner vote for Seamus the roof-shitting Irish setter for president than Trump
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Report: Trump Has Been Hibernating at Home for Almost a Month