Mediaboss Marketing

Days after the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion, Michigans Republican candidates for governor were asked if it was also time to roll back constitutional protections for gay rights.

None of the five candidates came to the defense of same-sex marriage.

They need to revisit it all, one candidate, Garrett Soldano, said at the debate, in Warren, Mich.

Michigans constitution, said another candidate, Ralph Rebandt, says that for the betterment of society, marriage is between a man and a woman.

Since the Supreme Court decision last month overturning Roe v. Wade, anti-gay rhetoric and calls to roll back established L.G.B.T.Q. protections have grown bolder. And while Republicans in Congress appear deeply divided about same-sex marriage nearly 50 House Republicans on Tuesday joined Democrats in supporting a bill that would recognize same-sex marriages at the federal level many Republican officials and candidates across the country have made attacking gay and transgender rights a party norm this midterm season.

In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton said after the Roe reversal that he would be willing and able to defend at the Supreme Court any law criminalizing sodomy enacted by the Legislature. Before that, the Republican Party of Texas adopted a platform that calls homosexuality an abnormal lifestyle choice.

In Utah, the Republican president of the State Senate, Stuart Adams, said he would support his states joining with others to press the Supreme Court to reverse the right of same-sex couples to wed. In Arizona, Kari Lake, a candidate for governor endorsed by Donald J. Trump, affirmed in a June 29 debate her support for a bill barring children from drag shows the latest target of supercharged rhetoric on the right.

And in Michigans governors race, Mr. Soldano released an ad belittling the use of specific pronouns by those who do not conform to traditional gender roles (My pronouns: Conservative/Patriot) and accusing the woke groomer mafia of wanting to indoctrinate children.

Some Democrats and advocates for L.G.B.T.Q. communities say the Republican attacks have deepened their concerns that the overturning of Roe could undermine other cases built on the same legal foundation the right to privacy provided in the Fourteenth Amendment and lead to increases in hate crimes as well as suicides of L.G.B.T.Q. youth.

The state of the midterms. We are now over halfway through this years midterm primary season, and some key ideas and questions have begun to emerge from the results. Heres a look at what weve learned so far:

The dominoes have started to fall, and they wont just stop at one, said Attorney General Dana Nessel of Michigan, a Democrat who was the first openly gay person elected to statewide office there. People should see the connection between reproductive rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, womens rights, interracial marriage these things are all connected legally.

This year, Republican-led states have already passed numerous restrictions on transgender young people and on school discussions of sexual orientation and gender.

In June, Louisiana became the 18th state, all with G.O.P.-led legislatures, to ban transgender students from playing on sports teams that match their gender identity. Laws to prohibit transitioning medical treatments to people under 18, such as puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries which advocates call gender-affirming care have been enacted by four states. And after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a law in March banning classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in early grades, more than a dozen other states moved to imitate it.

In all, over 300 bills to restrict L.G.B.T.Q. rights have been introduced this year in 23 states, according to the Human Rights Campaign, the nations largest L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy organization.

The bills under consideration focus not on same-sex marriage but on transgender youth, on restricting school curriculums and on allowing groups to refuse services to L.G.B.T.Q. people based on religious faith. Most of the measures have no chance of passage because of opposition from Democrats and moderate Republicans.

Still, the Human Rights Campaign had characterized 2021 as the worst year in recent history for anti-L.G.B.T.Q. laws after states passed seven measures banning transgender athletes from sports teams that match their gender identity. So far in 2022, those numbers are already higher.

Officials and television commentators on the right have accused opponents of some of those new restrictions of seeking to sexualize or groom children. Grooming refers to the tactics used by sexual predators to manipulate their victims, but it has become deployed widely on the right to brand gay and transgender people as child molesters, evoking an earlier era of homophobia.

July 21, 2022, 7:00 p.m. ET

Some conservative advocacy groups that poured resources into transgender restrictions insist that they are not focused on challenging the 2015 Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage. But many L.G.B.T.Q. advocates say they believe their hard-won rights are under attack.

The far right is emboldened in a way they have not been in five decades, said State Representative Daniel Hernandez Jr. of Arizona, a Democrat and a co-founder of the Legislatures L.G.B.T.Q. caucus. In addition to trying to create even more restrictions on abortion, they are going after the L.G.B.T.Q. community even more.

Republicans say the laws focused on transgender youth are not transphobic as the left sees them but protect girls sports and put the brakes on irreversible medical treatments.

They said the issues have the power to peel away centrist voters, who polling shows are less committed to transgender rights than to same-sex marriage. A Washington Post-University of Maryland survey in May found 55 percent of Americans oppose letting transgender girls compete on girls high school teams. In a Gallup poll last year, 51 percent of Americans said changing ones gender is morally wrong.

I believe these are enormous issues for swing voters and moderates, said Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, a group that opposes civil rights protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people and plans to spend up to $12 million on ads before November.

One of the groups ads goes after Representative Peter Meijer, a Michigan Republican facing a primary challenge next month, for co-sponsoring a House bill that pairs anti-discrimination protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people with exemptions for religious groups. Saying the bill would put men in girls locker rooms, the ad asks, Would you trust Meijer with your daughter?

By contrast, Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, said hate has no place in the state after he vetoed an anti-transgender sports bill. Had it become law, he said, the ban would have a devastating impact on a vulnerable population already at greater risk of bullying and depression.

A 2022 survey by the Trevor Project, a suicide prevention group, found that nearly one in five transgender or gender-nonconforming young people had attempted suicide in the past year. L.G.B.T.Q. youth who feel accepted in their schools and community reported lower rates of suicide attempts.

The surge in transgender restrictions reflects a reversal of fortune for social conservatives from just a few years ago, when a focus on bathroom bills produced a backlash. A North Carolina law passed in 2016 requiring people to use public restrooms matching their birth gender contributed to the defeat of the Republican governor who signed it.

It made a lot of folks wary of going after transgender rights, said Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist for the A.C.L.U. who is transgender.

But that changed with the focus on sports teams and transitioning medicine for minors, she said.

On the right, the transgender restrictions have been pushed by advocacy groups that have long opposed L.G.B.T.Q. rights and in some cases consulted in the drafting of legislation. And on the left, the wave of legislation has been used by liberal organizations to mobilize their base, fund-raise and help turn out voters in midterm primaries in a hostile national political climate for Democrats.

In Arizona, where Republicans control the Legislature and the governors office, a law enacted this year bars trans girls from competing on sports teams aligned with their gender and on transitioning surgery for people under 18.

My colleagues on the right have spent more time demonizing me and the L.G.B.T.Q. community than Ive ever seen, said Mr. Hernandez, the state representative, who is running in the Democratic primary for Congress on Aug. 2 in a Tucson-area seat.

In the Arizona primary for governor, Ms. Lake, the Trump-endorsed candidate who is leading in some polls, seized on a recent uproar over drag performers in response to a viral video of children at a Dallas drag show to demonstrate her sharp shift to the right.

They kicked God out of schools and welcomed the Drag Queens, Ms. Lake said in a tweet last month. They took down our Flag and replaced it with a rainbow. And Republican leaders in the Arizona Legislature, denouncing sexual perversion, called for a law barring children from drag shows.

But a drag performer in Phoenix, Rick Stevens, accused Ms. Lake, who he said had been a friend for years, of hypocrisy. Ive performed for Karis birthday, Ive performed in her home (with children present) and Ive performed for her at some of the seediest bars in Phoenix, he wrote on Instagram.

Mr. Stevens, who goes by the stage name Barbra Seville, posted photos of the two of them together one with Ms. Lake next to him while he is dressed in drag, and another when he is in drag and wearing Halloween-style skull makeup while she poses alongside him dressed as Elvis.

In a debate, Ms. Lake insisted Mr. Stevens was lying about performing at her home and her campaign threatened to sue him for defamation.

In Michigan, meanwhile, Ms. Nessel, the Democratic attorney general, joked at a civil rights conference in June that drag queens make everything better, and added, A drag queen for every school. In response, Tudor Dixon, a Republican candidate for governor, called this month for legislation letting parents sue school districts that host drag shows, despite there being no evidence that a district had ever done so.

Were taking the first step today to protecting children, Ms. Dixon said.

Link:
Republicans Sharpen Post-Roe Attacks on L.G.B.T.Q. Rights - The New York Times

When Joe Manchin announced an abrupt end to Senate negotiations over major climate legislation last week, activists and even fellow Democrats expressed outrage against the West Virginia lawmaker. Manchin was attacked as a modern-day villain who had delivered nothing short of a death sentence to a rapidly heating planet.

Some Democratic leaders, however, including Joe Biden, have since attempted to redirect that anger toward congressional Republicans instead.

Not a single Republican in Congress stepped up to support my climate plan. Not one, Biden said, speaking at a coal turned wind power plant in Massachusetts on Wednesday. So let me be clear: climate change is an emergency.

Although congressional Republicans have refused to embrace Bidens policy ideas, the party has largely abandoned its past climate denialism. But climate experts and activists say the ideas Republicans have proposed are insufficient or misguided and fail to address the magnitude and urgency of this crisis.

Republicans have not generally been viewed as champions when it comes to combating the climate crisis at the federal level. Donald Trump famously withdrew the US from the Paris climate agreement, and his administration rolled back nearly 100 environmental rules during his presidency, eliminating important regulations for the fossil fuel industry.

More recently, the conservative-dominated supreme court handed down a decision, in West Virginia v the Environmental Protection Agency, that will severely hamper that government agencys ability to curtail greenhouse gas emissions.

There have, however, been some modest signs of change among Republicans when it comes to climate policy. While it was once quite common to hear Republican lawmakers reject the very idea of climate change, many members of the party are now at least willing to discuss the issue.

I think theres been a really significant narrative shift over the last five years, said Quill Robinson, vice-president of government affairs for the American Conservation Coalition, a right-leaning environmental advocacy group. A lot of elected Republicans and also the broader conservative movement is a lot more comfortable, willing and honestly interested in engaging on this issue of climate change.

Signs of that change are visible in Congress. Last year, Republican congressman John Curtis announced the formation of the Conservative Climate Caucus, which counts more than 70 Republicans as members.

The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, has released his own climate platform. The proposal, unveiled last month, outlines how Republicans would work to address environmental and energy issues if they regain control of the House, as they are expected to do after the midterm elections this November.

Critics say McCarthys platform is a perfect example of Republicans failure to grasp the enormity of the climate crisis. The plan calls for increasing domestic fossil fuel production and boosting exports of US natural gas. In the past several months, Republicans demands to boost US oil production have grown louder, as the war in Ukraine drives gas prices to record highs.

Environmental experts have said that global reliance on fossil fuels needs to be drastically reduced in order to substantially cut greenhouse gas emissions and avoid disastrous climate breakdown. Republicans proposals threaten to accelerate this looming calamity, Democrats argue.

This House Republican proposal simply recycles old, bad ideas that amount to little more than handouts to oil companies, Democrat Frank Pallone, chair of the House energy and commerce committee, said last month. It is a stunning display of insincerity to admit climate change is a problem but to propose policies that make it worse.

Republicans have also called for taking additional steps to protect American wildlife, but climate activists have again criticized those proposals as too incremental to meet the moment. In contrast, the Biden administration has set a goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

Kidus Girma, a spokesperson for the youth-led climate group Sunrise Movement, said even Bidens policy objectives fall far short of the changes necessary to help protect the planet.

We fundamentally dont have that timeline, Girma said of Republicans incremental approach. Emissions cut by 2030 is incrementalism in itself. So I dont know how much more incremental we could get.

Robinson argued that Democrats failure to pass Build Back Better and the supreme courts decision to limit the EPAs regulatory power demonstrate the urgent need for bipartisan compromise on this issue even if the end product falls short of what climate activists have demanded.

You cant rely on nine justices of the supreme court, one man in the White House, and one single party in Congress to pass durable, lasting climate policy, Robinson said. This has to be done on a bipartisan basis in Congress.

Excerpt from:
No Republican senator supported a climate plan where is the party on the issue? - The Guardian US

The House January 6 committee on Thursday played Capitol security footage which showed the Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley, who famously raised a fist to protesters outside, running for his safety once those protesters breached the building. It prompted a flurry of online memes ridiculing Hawley fleeing from the very people he had earlier encouraged.

Presenting the committees case, the Virginia Democrat Elaine Luria showed pictures of House members and senators leaving their chambers.

She said: Senator Josh Hawley also had to flee.

Earlier that afternoon before the joint session [of Congress] started, he walked along the east front of the Capitol.

As you can see in this photo, he raised his fist in solidarity with protesters already amassing at the security gates.

The committee showed the famous image of the senator raising his fist, which was taken by a photographer for E&E News, subsequently bought by Politico.

Later that day, Senator Hawley fled after those protesters he helped to rile up stormed the Capitol. See for yourself.

The committee then played video of Hawley trotting across a corridor and hurrying down a staircase next to an escalator.

In the room, the clips were greeted with laughter.

Online, some took a similarly lighthearted view, one user scoring the footage of Hawley running to a soundtracks including Stayin Alive by the BeeGees, Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen and the Benny Hill theme.

Hawley had been the first Republican senator to say he would object to results in key states won by Joe Biden, in the certification process Trump ultimately sent a mob to delay or destroy.

Hawley has denied trying to incite violence with his raised fist, telling the Huffington Post: This was not me encouraging rioters At the time that we were out there, folks were gathered peacefully to protest, and they have a right to do that. They do not have a right to assault cops.

Luria said: We spoke with a Capitol police officer who was out there at the time. She told us that Senator Josh Hawleys gesture riled up the crowd and it bothered her greatly because he was doing it in a safe space, protected by the officers and the barriers.

The senator has also used the image for fundraising purposes.

The Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump conservatives, said: Hawleys legacy will forever be fleeing from the same mob he helped incite.

After the mob had been cleared from the Capitol a riot now linked to nine deaths and nearly 900 criminal charges Hawley was one of 147 Republicans who went through with their objections to results in key states.

Go here to see the original:
Republican Josh Hawley fled January 6 rioters and Twitter ran with it - The Guardian US

WASHINGTON One hundred million Americans from Arizona to Boston are under heat emergency warnings, and the drought in the West is nearing Dust Bowl proportions. Britain declared a national emergency as temperatures soared above 100 degrees Fahrenheit and parts of blistering Europe are ablaze.

But on Capitol Hill this week, Republicans were warning against rash action in response to the burning planet.

I dont want to be lectured about what we need to do to destroy our economy in the name of climate change, said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina.

One Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, last week blocked what could have been the countrys most far-reaching American response to climate change. But lost in the recriminations and finger-pointing is the other side of the aisle: All 50 Republicans in the Senate have been as opposed to decisive action to confront planetary warming.

Few Republicans in Congress now outwardly dismiss the scientific evidence that human activities the burning of oil, gas and coal have produced gases that are dangerously heating the Earth.

But for many, denial of the cause of global temperature rise has been replaced by an insistence that the solution replacing fossil fuels over time with wind, solar and other nonpolluting energy sources will hurt the economy.

In short, delay is the new denial.

Overwhelmingly, Republicans on Capitol Hill say that they believe that the United States should be drilling and burning more American oil, gas and coal, and that market forces would somehow develop solutions to the carbon dioxide that has been building in the atmosphere, trapping heat like a blanket around a sweltering Earth.

Im not in a position to tell you what the solution is, but for the president to shut down the production of oil and gas in the United States is not going to help, said Senator Mike Crapo, Republican of Idaho.

President Biden is not proposing to shut down fossil fuel production. He wants to use tax credits and other incentives to speed up the development of wind, solar, and other low-carbon energy, and to make electric vehicles more affordable.

The fact that scientists say nations must quickly cut greenhouse gas emissions or global rising temperatures will reach catastrophic levels does not appear to faze many conservatives.

In many ways, elected Republicans mirror the views of their voters. A May poll commissioned by Pew Research Center found 63 percent of Democrats named climate change as a very big problem, while just 16 percent of Republicans felt the same.

Build Back Better. Before being elected president in 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. articulated his ambitious vision for his administration under the slogan Build Back Better, promising to invest in clean energyand to ensure that procurement spending went toward American-made products.

A two-part agenda. March and April 2021:President Biden unveiled two plans that together formed the core of his domestic agenda: the American Jobs Plan, focused on infrastructure, and the American Families Plan, which included a variety of social policy initiatives.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Nov. 15, 2021: President Biden signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill into law,the result of months of negotiations. The president hailed the package, a pared-back version of what had been outlined in the American Jobs Plan, as evidence that U.S. lawmakers could still work across party lines.

The Democratic Party has made climate change a religion and their solutions are draconian, said Mr. Graham, who accepts the science of global warming. He is among a handful of Republicans who support putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions to encourage industries to clean up their operations.

But Mr. Graham dismissed Mr. Bidens goal of cutting U.S. emissions by half by 2030, to try keep average global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels. Thats the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic impacts increases significantly. The planet has already warmed by about 1.1 degrees Celsius.

Mr. Graham repeated a common refrain among Republicans that it would be foolish for the United States, historically the country that has emitted the most carbon dioxide, to reduce its pollution unless other big polluters like China and India do the same.

The point to me is to get the world to participate, not just us, he said.

So it has gone with the Republican Party, where warnings of a catastrophe are mocked as hyperbole, where technologies that do not exist on a viable scale, such as carbon capture and storage and clean coal, are hailed as saviors. At the same time, those that do, such as wind and solar power and electric vehicles, are dismissed as unreliable and overly expensive. American leadership on a global problem is seen as a fools errand, kneecapping the domestic economy while Indian and Chinese coal bury Americas good intentions in soot.

When China gets our good air, their bad airs got to move, Herschel Walker, a former football star and now a Republican candidate in Georgia for the Senate, explained last week. So it moves over to our good air space. Then now weve got to clean that back up.

The partys political attacks often center on the symptoms of the climate crisis as they point to Central American climate refugees massing at the southern border, poor forest management as wildfires burn, and environmentalists who deprive farmers of water in record droughts.

For decades, Republicans and the fossil fuel industry denied the science of climate change. That has slowly started to change as the evidence that the Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate has become undeniable, and started to resonate with moderate and independent voters.

Last month Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, made public a conservative road map to address climate change. Lawmakers also have started a House Conservative Climate Caucus to discuss solutions that Republicans can support.

But Mr. McCarthys climate plan calls for increasing fossil fuel production. And last Thursday, when the Conservative Climate Caucus met with business executives to discuss climate change, the gathering was dominated by talk of more oil and gas drilling. Executives from fossil fuel companies also criticized new federal rules that require them to disclose their business risks from global warming, according to a Republican lawmaker who was at the meeting.

Denial used to be the way to delay, said Jon Krosnick, a social psychologist at Stanford University. Now, he said of Republican lawmakers theyve got to come up with some other way to delay.

Republicans involved in the issue say there has been clear movement from the day in 2015 when Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, brought a snowball to the Senate floor as evidence that global warming was a myth. Some Republicans privately acknowledge that bipartisan trips to see the glaciers melting in Greenland have settled any doubts they had about what is happening to the planet.

House Republicans have a series of incremental steps that they say they will pass if they win the majority in November: encouraging investments in American renewable energy and the restoration of forests and wetlands to absorb carbon dioxide. Senators Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, and Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, have proposed a carbon tariff on imports from countries that are doing less than the United States to stem climate change.

Yet many of those same lawmakers reject the idea that climate change is an urgent threat.

If Republicans win the House or Senate in Novembers midterm elections, I think you can expect a much more aggressive approach to domestic energy production, Mr. Cramer said this week. That doesnt mean we abandon climate as part of the agenda, but rather focus more on technologies that advance all forms of American energy.

One Republican senator, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, called on Tuesday for a reasonable transition to clean energy. Democrats, he said, are trying to move far more quickly than technology and the economy can absorb.

Republicans say Mr. Biden, pushed hard by uncompromising climate activists on the left, took such a maximalist approach to climate legislation that its collapse was inevitable.

The far left has screwed this up so badly that Republicans might actually enact the first real action on climate change, said Benjamin Backer, president of the American Conservation Coalition, a right-of-center environmental organization.

But even Republicans who are trying to address the effects of climate change in their home states appear to find it difficult to recognize the root cause of the problem. Last week, three Utah Republicans, Senator Mitt Romney and Representatives Chris Stewart and Burgess Owens, proposed legislation to save the shriveling Great Salt Lake before its dusty remains choke the capital city that shares its name.

But absent from the proposal which included Army Corps of Engineers monitoring programs, ecosystem management and potential technologies to redirect water, reinforce canals and address drought was any mention of climate change.

The same went for an appeal on Friday from Mr. McCarthy, to save the giant sequoias in his district from fire and drought. In an opinion piece he co-authored in Time, Mr. McCarthy blamed decades of fire suppression and misinformed policies for year-round forest fires in his state, obliquely referring to worsening drought conditions and extreme heat without once mentioning climate change.

One of his co-authors, Representative Scott Peters of California, a Democrat who helped draft the Save Our Sequoias bill, declined to say why climate change went unmentioned in the Time piece, but he did say, I wholeheartedly believe climate change is fueling catastrophic wildfires in the southwest. He added of the bill, As far as Im concerned, they can tell the world that birthday cakes are starting these fires as long as we get the damn thing to the presidents desk.

Republicans grappling with the undeniable reality of climate change still struggle with a philosophical aversion to intervening in energy markets or, they would most likely say, in any markets at all. Left unsaid are federal tax breaks totaling as much as $20 billion a year that the fossil fuel industry enjoys and that Republicans, and some Democrats, support.

Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina and a founding member of the Conservative Climate Caucus, said she recognized the policy imperative to address climate change. But she called tax credits to steer consumers to electric vehicles or electric utilities toward renewable energy sources like wind or solar power picking winners and losers. She said Congress should simply cut taxes and let consumers and businesses decide how to use the extra money.

Id personally love to buy an electric vehicle, so lets cut taxes for everybody and allow people to afford things they otherwise could not afford, she said.

In a back-and-forth on Tuesday with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, dismissed the administrations push for electric vehicles, saying the price was $55,000, beyond the reach of most Americans even with the presidents proposal for a $7,500 federal tax credit on some vehicles. Mr. Buttigieg replied that a Chevrolet Bolt costs $26,595, and electric pickup trucks like Chevy Silverado or Ford F150 Lightning start around $39,000. He added that he bought a used plug-in Ford C-Max hybrid with 15,000 miles on it for $14,000.

Bob Inglis, a former Republican House member who lost his 2010 primary in part because he backed climate action, insisted that his party had made huge progress since then.

Im convinced were going to act on climate change, Mr. Inglis said. Its just whether were going to act soon enough to avoid the worst consequences.

Go here to see the original:
Delay as the New Denial: The Latest Republican Tactic to Block Climate Action - The New York Times

Then-Republican Conference Chair Rep. Liz Cheney, flanked by House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy, right, and Republican Whip Rep. Steve Scalise, criticizes Democrats' impeachment of then-President Donald Trump in December 2019. Now she is trying to convince the public that Trump is to blame for the Jan. 6 insurrection. Samuel Corum/Getty Images hide caption

Then-Republican Conference Chair Rep. Liz Cheney, flanked by House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy, right, and Republican Whip Rep. Steve Scalise, criticizes Democrats' impeachment of then-President Donald Trump in December 2019. Now she is trying to convince the public that Trump is to blame for the Jan. 6 insurrection.

In the midst of former President Donald Trump's first impeachment, then-White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham says he called her into his office at the front of Air Force One. He had been watching one of the hearings and didn't like what he saw.

"He screamed at me, lots of expletives, told me how useless I was," she said. Her sin: "not enough people were on TV defending him."

Despite the former president's apparent dissatisfaction, in 2019 and early 2020 there was a wide-reaching, highly coordinated effort to defend him in the court of public opinion. That isn't the case now, as the House Select Committee on January 6th wraps up its series of summer hearings in prime time Thursday night.

Republican leaders boycotted the hearings, so unlike Trump's televised impeachment trials, viewers haven't seen a vigorous defense of his actions from the dais. And there's not much of a broader outside defense of Trump, either.

During the first impeachment, over Trump's withholding of military assistance to Ukraine and efforts to strong-arm the country's leader into launching an investigation of Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, the Republican National Committee, congressional Republicans, outside groups, the Trump campaign and a large team at the White House all had a coordinated strategy.

"The president had a dedicated White House staff of press relations people and communications people and lawyers to put together rapid responses," said Steven Groves, who as a deputy press secretary worked on Trump's impeachment defense.

Outside groups ran dozens of TV ads targeting members of Congress over impeachment and defending Trump, calling it "the radical left's impeachment obsession" and a "witch hunt" and a "travesty." There were nonstop cable hits from Trump-friendly surrogates and regular press conferences at the Capitol.

At a press conference in late September 2019, none other than Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney came to Trump's defense.

"Ever since President Trump was elected, the House Democrats have been careening from impeachment theory to impeachment theory," she said in her capacity as a member of the House Republican leadership. "But what we see repeatedly is a complete lack of focus on concern about evidence and facts."

Today, excommunicated from leadership for her criticism of Trump and Jan. 6, Cheney is vice chair of the House select committee, arguing Trump is a threat to democracy. But other congressional Republicans, still in his corner, simply aren't defending Trump in the same way they did during the first impeachment.

A decision by Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House, not to name anyone to the committee means the Jan. 6 hearings are a one-sided presentation of evidence, more like a grand jury proceeding than a trial. They are nothing like a traditional congressional hearing with the whiplash of representatives from both parties scoring partisan points and asking leading questions. But the sorts of press conferences led by Trump allies in Congress that were standard during impeachment have all but disappeared along with the flood of cable appearances.

"There hasn't been as much of a sort of day-to-day focus from the congressional members who go on Fox as there was in the past," said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the progressive group Media Matters for America. Part of the reason for that, he said, is they aren't on the committee, so they don't have insight to add about the committee's inner workings and they don't have clips of explosive hearing exchanges to talk around.

"Fox News and others in the right wing media are spending less time engaging on a point-by-point basis than they did, say, during Donald Trump's first impeachment," said Gertz, whose job is to closely monitor the conservative media ecosystem.

And there isn't a defense during the commercial breaks, either. An analysis from the tracking firm AdImpact found more than 120 different anti-impeachment ads in 2019 and 2020. Some were from candidates, including Trump, but most were from outside groups. This time around there have been fewer than 20 ads mentioning the Jan. 6 investigation and those are mostly ads for primary candidates running against anti-Trump Republicans.

Groves says a big reason for the lower-octane public defense is simply that Trump is no longer president. The infrastructure that was around the president doesn't exist for the post-presidency.

"It's just not there anymore," said Groves. "He can't even go on Twitter and rapid-response on his own."

Trump was kicked off of Twitter on the day of the riot at the Capitol.

Other than a skeleton crew of staff working for Trump in his post-presidential office, who didn't respond to a request for comment, there's no one whose job it is to publicly defend him. Doug Heye, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee, says there's no reason the RNC should be going to bat for him, especially with the midterms coming.

"The RNC and Republicans on Capitol Hill know they are poised for a great election year and what's the biggest thing that could be a hurdle to that? Donald Trump, who is not their principal anymore," Heye said. "So it's not their job to defend him and sometimes you just don't want to defend the indefensible."

A big argument from Trump allies is that these hearings are one-sided and dull. Filling inboxes and airwaves with rapid response messaging could undermine that argument.

"We really prepared for this epic battle and we also prepared for it to be a dud," said Matt Schlapp, who runs the pro-Trump group CPAC. It created a "J6Facts" Twitter account, which has about 2,000 followers now, and hired extra consultants, Schlapp said.

"It was a little dramatic in the beginning but over time it's been more of a dud," he said.

Of course, he has a reason to say that. When he is invited to appear on Fox News and its competitors, Schlapp largely discusses inflation, immigration and crime, themes that are getting a lot more airtime than the hearings, and that Republicans see as a winning message for the midterms.

Schlapp says the stakes just feel lower with these hearings than they did with impeachment because "They can't do anything to the president. They can't prevent him from running."

If the hearings break through, with no coordinated defense of Trump's reputation, it could hurt his chances should he run for president again.

See more here:
With midterms in sight, few Republicans are defending Trump as they did in 2019 - NPR