Letters to the Editor: Trump is the grade-school bully running for class president

Los Angeles Tines – Opinion

Letters to the Editor: Trump is the grade-school bully running for class president

Los Angeles Times Opinion – March 26, 2024

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump gestures to the crowd at a campaign rally Saturday, March 16, 2024, in Vandalia, Ohio. (AP Photo/Jeff Dean)
Former President Trump during a campaign rally in Ohio on March 16. (Jeff Dean / Associated Press)

To the editor: The false claims and empty promises made by President Biden’s predecessor remind me of when I was in the fourth grade. (“Trump has big plans for California if he wins a second term. Fasten your seatbelts,” column, March 18)

It was time to elect a student body president. Two candidates were running. The first was a hard-working, successful student who promised to do their best to serve our school and students. The second was a boisterous bully running on promises that water fountains would dispense soda and there would be mandatory class parties every Friday.

We voted for the first candidate. I have faith America will have the same sense as Palm View Elementary’s fourth-grade class of 1967.

Kevin Ferguson, Capistrano Beach

..

To the editor: For the first time in forever, I’m happy to hear the former president babble nonsense such as his ”plans” for California and about “bloodbaths.”

With every word, he reveals his increasing mania and should show the ”tipping point” to any voters uncertain of his qualifications for the presidency.

Remember that old cliche that if someone tells you who they are, believe them? Trump is a malignant narcissist, a liar, a grifter and, most importantly, someone who openly admires dictators.

He’s telling us who he is. Please pay attention.

Pam Wright, Pasadena

Judge in Trump hush money case sets trial date, rejecting delay bid

Good Morning America

Judge in Trump hush money case sets trial date, rejecting delay bid

Aaron Katersky, Peter Charalambous, Olivia Rubin and Emily Shapiro – March 25, 2024

Former President Donald Trump will stand trial over alleged hush payments to porn star Stormy Daniels beginning with jury selection on April 15, Judge Juan Merchan ruled Monday, rejecting Trump’s request for an additional delay.

The case, which was initially scheduled to begin jury selection on Monday, was adjourned for 30 days by Merchan earlier this month, after defense attorneys raised issues with the late production of over 100,000 pages of potential evidence by federal prosecutors.

The judge decided Monday that the District Attorney of New York County is not at fault for the late production of documents from the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York.

“The Manhattan District Attorney’s office made diligent, good faith efforts” to retrieve appropriate material, the judge said, adding that Trump will not suffer any prejudice as a result of the late disclosure.

During the hearing, the judge appeared skeptical that the case needed to be delayed or dismissed because of a dispute over potential evidence, and called the defense’s claims of prosecutorial misconduct “very disconcerting.”

“You are literally accusing the Manhattan DA’s office and the people assigned to this case of prosecutorial misconduct and to make me complicit in it, and you don’t have a single cite to support that position,” Merchan told defense attorney Todd Blanche.

“This court is of the opinion that there really are not significant questions of fact to be resolved,” Merchan said earlier about the defense’s arguments to delay or dismiss the case.

The defense accused the Manhattan district attorney’s office of “widespread misconduct” and “serious discovery violations” and argued they warranted a dismissal of the indictment, an adjournment of the trial and the prohibition on former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and Daniels from testifying.

“This is a witch hunt. This is a hoax. Thank you,” Trump told the media before entering the courtroom this morning.

PHOTO: Former President Donald Trump arrives for his hearing to determine the date of his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments linked to extramarital affairs, at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York City on March 25, 2024. (Justin Lane/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
PHOTO: Former President Donald Trump arrives for his hearing to determine the date of his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments linked to extramarital affairs, at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York City on March 25, 2024. (Justin Lane/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo aggressively pushed back on the allegation that the District Attorney’s Office actively suppressed potential evidence from defense attorneys.

“No, we are not actively suppressing … discovery or impeachment materials,” Colangelo said, reiterating the claim that most of the documents in question are irrelevant to the case against Trump.

Blanche argued that reviewing each document takes time and merits a delay. “Every document is important,” he said. “Every single one.”

Merchan set Monday’s hearing to resolve a recent defense motion related to the potential evidence and set a final trial date for the case.

MORE: Prosecutors blast Trump’s effort to further delay his criminal hush money trial

“[T]here are significant questions of fact which this Court must resolve before it may rule on Defendant’s motion,” Merchan wrote in a ruling earlier this month.

Defense attorneys have demanded a lengthier delay of the trial and limits on key testimony or the dismissal of the case based on the new materials, which they said damage the credibility of star witness and former Trump attorney Michael Cohen and contain “exculpatory information that undercuts the People’s theory of the case.”

Last week, prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office pushed back on the defense’s request, arguing that the recently disclosed potential evidence is “a red herring” and part of a “strategic delay.” While the 30-day adjournment provided defense attorneys with a “reasonable amount of time for defendant to review the information,” no further delay was necessary, according to the prosecutors’ filing.

“Defendant has taken every possible step to evade accountability in this case for more than a year,” prosecutors wrote in a filing last week. “Enough is enough. These tactics by defendant and defense counsel should be stopped.”‘

Trump last April pleaded not guilty to a 34-count indictment charging him with falsifying business records in connection with a hush money payment Cohen made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels just days before the 2016 presidential election.

Here are three things to know about the hearing.

How did defense lawyers find the new materials?

Two months after Trump was indicted last year, prosecutors turned over 3 million pages of documents, beginning the discovery process in which prosecutors share with the defense evidence obtained during their investigation.

“In the Manhattan DA’s office, they do what’s called open file discovery, which means their practice is to basically turn over every piece of paper that they get in the course of their investigation,” former federal prosecutor Josh Naftalis told ABC News.

While the DA’s office said that, in June 2023, they turned over all the materials they received from U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York — which in 2018 secured a guilty plea from Cohen on campaign finance charges related to the Stormy Daniels payment — Trump’s lawyers sent a subpoena to the federal prosecutors on Jan. 18, 2024, seeking additional materials.

In their subpoena, defense lawyers requested Cohen’s tax filings, bank records, files from his iPhone and email accounts, records memorializing statements made by Cohen, and communications with other law enforcement offices.

MORE: Judge rules evidence related to ‘Access Hollywood’ tape admissible in Trump hush money trial

By Feb. 23, federal prosecutors with the SDNY agreed to disclose some of the records requested, including 10,778 pages of bank records and files from two iPhones and three email accounts, according to a defense filing. In total, federal prosecutors turned over 119,000 pages of records to Trump’s defense team, according to a filing earlier this month.

“That’s a lot of information for the defense to go through very quickly, so that kind of explains why the DA’s office agreed to at least a 30-day extension of the time,” former federal prosecutor Jarrod Schaeffer told ABC News.

What was included in SDNY’s production?

The exact breakdown of the 119,000 pages of documents remains unclear, but the DA’s office argues that most of the files are irrelevant to the case or have already been produced. In total, prosecutors said the materials contained fewer than 270 new documents, including 172 pages of new witness statements.

“[T]he People now have good reason to believe that this production contains only limited materials relevant to the subject matter of this case and that have not previously been disclosed to defendant: fewer than an estimated 270 documents, most of which are inculpatory and corroborative of existing evidence,” prosecutors with the DA’s office said.

MORE: Stormy Daniels says she is ‘absolutely ready’ to testify at Trump’s hush money trial

Defense lawyers have argued that the documents are highly relevant and include materials that could be used to discredit Cohen or absolve Trump of wrongdoing.

While defense lawyers have highlighted the sheer number of pages produced by federal prosecutors, Naftalis cautioned that the documents’ contents will ultimately determine Judge Merchan’s next move.

“My guess is that 30 days is all that Trump’s going to get because the volume of documents at issue really isn’t that large in the grand scheme of things,” Naftalis said. “That doesn’t mean that these are all new documents, and there could be substantial overlap.”

Why are Trump’s lawyers arguing for dismissal?

Defense lawyers have accused the DA’s office of misconduct in their push for a dismissal of the case, the limiting of key testimony, and a lengthier delay of the trial.

“The People have engaged in widespread misconduct as part of a desperate effort to improve their position at the potential trial on the false and unsupported charges in the Indictment,” defense attorney Todd Blanche wrote in a recent filing.

Attorneys with the Manhattan DA’s office pushed back on that motion, describing it as a inaccurate “grab-bag of meritless discovery arguments in the latest of a long series of attempts to evade responsibility for the conduct charged in the indictment.”

MORE: Trump, in hush money trial, won’t use ‘advice of counsel’ defense — but will still argue lawyers were involved

“Defendant’s accusations are wholly unfounded, and the circumstances here do not come close to warranting the extreme sanctions he has sought,” assistant district attorney Matthew Colangelo said in a filing last week.

If Judge Merchan does not dismiss the case, defense lawyers asked for a longer adjournment and preclusion of the testimony of Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels, and an expert witness.

Merchan will ultimately have to consider who, if anyone, should be culpable for the late production of evidence.

“It’s really going to come down to have the prosecutors done what they’re supposed to do — meaning, have they been diligent and made a good-faith effort to get material that they believe exists and should be turned over,” Schaeffer said.

Judge Rips Into Trump Lawyers, Sets Hush Money Trial for April

Daily Beast

Judge Rips Into Trump Lawyers, Sets Hush Money Trial for April

Jose Pagliery – March 25, 2024

Spencer Platt/Reuters
Spencer Platt/Reuters

Just a couple weeks ago, before prosecutors handed over about 200,000 new documents to the former president’s defense team and the judge delayed the proceedings, March 25 was supposed to be the start date of Donald Trump’s first criminal trial. And until a pre-trial hearing for the hush money case started on Monday, March 25 was supposed to be the day—as the former president’s lawyers believed—the judge might excoriate prosecutors over the missing evidence and potentially issue sanctions against them.

But when the hearing was over Monday, it was clear March 25 will instead be remembered as the day the judge slammed Trump’s lawyers for more waiting games and set the new trial date for April 15.

New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan declined to issue sanctions against attorneys on either side, but he determined that a short-lived document scandal had essentially amounted to nothing.

“The defendant has been given a reasonable amount of time to prepare,” he said, ordering jury selection to begin in 21 days.

These Under-the-Radar Rulings in the Stormy Daniels Hush Money Case Are Really Bad for Trump

The judge indicated that the trial will commence days before the Jewish holiday of Passover and New York City’s spring break, but he promised not to hold court on any day that week if it would violate a person’s religious views.

Trump walked out of the courtroom with a grim look on his face, tossing a thumbs up at an acquaintance in the audience and whispering “thank you.”

Monday’s hearing knocked down what was perceived to be Trump’s last-ditch attempt to push back his trial, but it also served as the latest example of a judge running out of patience with Trump’s disruptive legal strategy.

Merchan questioned Trump’s legal team for more than an hour for what he eventually called a “misleading” tactic that threw trial plans into chaos this month, following a confusing moment when the feds suddenly dumped 200,000 pages of evidence.

Merchan laid the blame entirely at Trump’s feet, appearing flummoxed that the former president’s lawyers managed to briefly derail the trial with over-the-top accusations. He implied that this amounted to nothing more than continuing delay games.

The judge took particular aim at Trump defense lawyer Todd Blanche, saying that he should have known to seek out records for his client instead of sitting back and waiting for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office to produce them—only to complain about it on the eve of trial. And Merchan didn’t hold back, noting that Blanche is a former federal prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, the very same office now at the center of a storm over missing evidence.

“You were there for 13 years. So you know that the defense has the same ability as the prosecution to obtain these documents. So when you received the people’s first production, you could have very easily done exactly as you did in January. but for whatever reason you waited until two months before trial,” Merchan said.

“Your Honor,” Blanche began to say.

“Why didn’t you do it in June? Or July?” the judge continued.

Blanche tried to deflect blame back to the DA, citing a New York law that requires turning over evidence.

“It’s not our job to get it,” he said.

“It’s not the people’s job either,” the judge shot back.

The judge seemed perturbed that Trump’s team never brought up any of these issues during what was supposed to be the final pre-trial hearing on Feb. 15—only to have this issue crop up a month later, just weeks before the start of the first ever criminal trial against a former American president.

In court, Blanche continued to blame the DA’s office, claiming that the batch of records his team had just received from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York proved that DA prosecutors held back evidence.

For more than a year, the former president’s legal team has been trying to probe the personal life of Michael Cohen—the one-time Trump confidante who has since become a key witness in the DA’s case—and they scored a win by prodding SDNY for Cohen’s emails despite resistance from the DA and even the judge.

“There’s tremendous amounts of bank records that were produced, and people think we can simply ignore those,” Blanche said in court. “I mean, thousands and thousands… meetings with witnesses and the FBI related to the 2016 election.”

“You mean the Mueller investigation?” the judge asked impatiently, referring to the Justice Department’s Trump-Russia investigation.

“Yes,” Blanche responded.

“That’s not relevant,” Merchan shot back. “That has nothing to do with this case. I decide if it’s relevant. If you’re going to offer something from the Muller investigation, it’s not coming in.”

“The witness discussed what his job was,” Blanche said.

Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen Can Testify in Trump Hush Money Case, Judge Rules

Prosecutors have decried the invasive maneuver as nothing but a vengeful payback scheme to discredit a valuable witness and distract from the real issue: how Trump engaged in a coverup, using Cohen as a cutout to deliver Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her quiet about their one-night stand in order to save his 2016 presidential campaign from an embarrassing scandal and faking business records to hide Cohen’s reimbursement.

When the judge turned to the DA’s team, he heard an alternate take from Matt Colangelo, an assistant district attorney who has investigated Trump for years at the Attorney General’s office and now with the DA. Colangelo told the judge that most of the documents recently produced by the feds were mostly copies that Trump already had—and actually strengthened the case, not weakened it. Merchan pointedly asked how many records were actually new.

“Three hundred records or fewer… almost exclusively cumulative and largely inculpatory,” Colangelo said.

“Largely inculpatory?” the judge asked.

“Right, your Honor,” the prosecutor responded.

Although DA Alvin Bragg Jr. was in the courtroom, he remained quiet and seated with the audience a few feet behind the table where his prosecutors argued the case.

But the judge appeared almost enraged when he called attention to the way Trump tried to fabricate a scandal and drag in the court itself, noting how Trump has alleged in documents that the DA has held back evidence and was attempting to make the judge “complicit” in an “unethical strategy.” The judge narrowly defined the DA’s responsibilities, then when Blanche couldn’t cite cases that said otherwise, Merchan let it rip.

“If you don’t have a case right now, that is really disconcerting, because the allegation the defense makes in all of your papers about the people’s misconduct is incredibly serious. Unbelievably serious,” Merchan said. “You are literally accusing the Manhattan DA’s office… of engaging in prosecutorial misconduct—and of trying to make me complicit in it. And you don’t have a single cite to support that position, that the people by not obtaining the documentation at the US Attorney’s Office had somehow committed some sort of fraud on the court?”

While Trump was in court, he managed to score a temporary victory in his other ongoing legal nightmare in New York State. An appellate court gave him an extra 10 days to come up with the money necessary to halt the New York Attorney General from seizing his various properties as a result of losing a three-month bank fraud trial. Trump had previously failed to find a surety company willing to prove him a half billion dollar lifeline to halt last month’s $464 million judgment before a Sunday night deadline, but the appeals court lowered the sum needed to pause seizures down to $175 million.

Monday marked the first day that New York AG Letitia James could have moved to seize his various properties, something that Trump earlier in the morning was raging about on his Truth Social media site.

“Why should I be forced to sell my ‘babies,’” he complained in a post just before heading to the Manhattan courtroom for the day’s hearing.

James has already effectively put a blanket lien on his 212-acre, forested estate of Seven Springs north of the city earlier this month.

Biden Is Building a ‘Superstructure’ to Stop Trump From Stealing the Election

Rolling Stone

Biden Is Building a ‘Superstructure’ to Stop Trump From Stealing the Election

Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley – March 24, 2024

For years, Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that if he doesn’t win the 2024 presidential election, he is willing to cheat and steal it. Since President Joe Biden’s inaugural address, according to sources with intimate knowledge of the situation, Biden and his inner circle have been drawing up meticulous plans and creating a large legal network focused on wargaming a close election finish, in which the former president and Republican Party launch a scorched-earth, Big Liefueled crusade.

Long before Trump began leading in battleground-state polling — and years before he was a declared 2024 candidate — the ex-president and many of his influential allies were already busy plotting ways to tilt the election in his favor. These yearslong efforts, conducted both secretly and out in the open, have already yielded tangible results for Trump and the conservative election denier movement. These wide-ranging operations have alarmed the Democratic Party elite, who aren’t just worried about Biden’s sagging poll numbers. Numerous Democratic lawmakers, operatives, Biden campaign advisers, and administration officials tell Rolling Stone that if the president does ultimately beat Trump this November, the election will be exceedingly close.

Over the past year, Team Biden has been conducting war games, crafting complex legal strategies, and devoting extensive resources to prepare for, as one former senior Biden administration official puts it, “all-hell-breaks-loose” scenarios. The preparations include planning for a contingency in which Biden’s margin of victory is so razor-thin that Trump and the GOP launch a tidal wave of legal challenges and political maneuvers to rerun his 2020 election strategy: declare victory anyways, and try to will it into existence.

“President Biden has been worried, for a while now, that Donald Trump is going to try to steal the election, if it’s very close on Election Day,” says a source familiar with Biden’s thinking. “If that ends up being the case, we are… also expecting the Republican Party to go into overdrive to help him steal it. We are continuing to build out the infrastructure to ensure that doesn’t happen — again — if President Biden wins and Trump and MAGA Republicans try to confuse [everyone] and sow chaos.”

After the 2020 race was called for Biden, Trump and much of the GOP embarked on a sprawling campaign — a blitz of lawsuits, rabid conspiracy theories, attempts to block certification, and slates of fake electors — to nullify Biden’s clear win. This culminated in the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which Trump instigated, and led to years of criminal investigations and various indictments, as well as the mainstreaming of the MAGA election-denial movement. The efforts to overturn the election were unsuccessful, largely because Biden had won too many battleground states — unlike when the 2000 presidential race came down to the single state of Florida, and the Republican Party was able to successfully halt the recount of an extremely close vote.

This time around, the race could be much closer, and Trump’s efforts appear significantly more organized. He also has more of the party’s elite behind him and his anti-democratic election lies than he had during the last presidential election. If the 2024 election margins end up being wafer-thin, that level of institutional backing could, of course, redound to Trump’s benefit.

Top officials in both the Trump and Biden camps are expecting an uncomfortably tight election outcome in November, sources in both campaigns have told Rolling Stone on numerous occasions over the past year. Advisers to both candidates say they expect the race will turn on a margin of just tens of thousands of votes in a handful of key battleground states, if not a single state. One Trump adviser says that they had privately told the ex-president and presumptive 2024 GOP nominee to anticipate an electoral “knife fight to the death” on, and likely in the wake of, Election Day.

Team Biden’s in-house counsels and network of outside lawyers are currently preparing legal strategies for scenarios involving recounts that would make, in the words of one Biden official, “make Florida in 2000 look like child’s play.”

Sources in and around the president’s legal and political operations say the Biden campaign’s current wargaming is informed by questions aides asked themselves in the wake of the 2020 election: What if there’s a rematch in four years with Donald Trump? What do we do if Joe Biden wins and Trump tries to steal the election again?

Bidenworld spent a lot of time pondering such a scenario even before the 2020 election.

In the months leading up to November 2020, Trump offered repeated, public signals that he would try to delegitimize any outcome in which he lost the election. As the threats mounted, Biden’s campaign brass began preemptively working through different nightmare scenarios.

That prep work accelerated in the final weeks of the campaign as an armada of lawyers, numbering in the hundreds, sketched out various unconventional scenarios in which the then-president tried to cling to power in the face of defeat, according to current and former senior Biden campaign officials.

Democratic aides walked through a range of authoritarian possibilities, including one scenario in which Trump called out the National Guard either as a show of force or in an attempt to enforce his fictitious victory, the sources say. Another scenario involved gameplans for how to handle Trump refusing to leave the White House the day of Biden’s inauguration, even if the swearing-in had already concluded.

“Biden HQ and the lawyers were essentially preparing for every insane scenario that anyone could think of, so that the campaign wouldn’t be stuck in neutral if the worst actually transpired,” says one attorney familiar with the extensive 2020 wargaming. “Even then, I’m not sure everybody was predicting just how crazy it would become and what Trump would actually do.”

Any attempt by Trump to try and undermine the 2024 election would likely look different than 2020, if only because he lacks the legal authority and access to federal resources he enjoyed as president.

Still, Team Biden has been planning for years sketching out what Trump could do as the leader of the GOP, and has partnered with the Democratic National Committee and a vast network of liberal attorneys and legal groups to conduct similar doomsday-style wargaming.

One swing-state Democratic election official involved with these efforts refers to it as a “superstructure” of various legal teams and liberal operatives who “are going to fight [Team Trump and election deniers] on all fronts and let them have it from all sides, if MAGA wants to tear down our democracy.”

According to two Biden campaign officials and two other sources with knowledge of the operation, draft pleadings and legal motions, for all kinds of possible Trump-related emergencies, are already written and at the ready. In critical swing states such as Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, Team Biden is regularly in contact with an array of outside counsels and local law firms that have been retained to actively monitor what is happening on the ground, including with regards to the activism of election-denying Trump allies.

Bidenworld’s closely-held list of nightmare scenarios — in which Democratic legal teams would have to battle it out tooth and nail with Republican counterparts before, during, or after Election Day 2024 — has grown “comically long,” says one source with direct knowledge of the matter. Biden campaign officials and other Democrats familiar with the topic tell Rolling Stone that a key concern, for which step-by-step gameplanning has already begun, is how to robustly respond if Trump and other leading Republicans try to engineer another Jan. 6-style power grab.

In these internal wargames among Bidenworld and Democratic attorneys in key states, this kind of Jan. 6 sequel has included scripts in which House Republicans or state officials refuse to certify a Biden victory — an act that prominent GOP politicians, including on Capitol Hill, have publicly dangled as an option.

A spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee tells Rolling Stone that the national party is also setting aside “tens of millions of dollars in a robust voter protection program to safeguard the rights of voters to make their voices heard against relentless attacks from Donald Trump and the GOP.”

“Meanwhile, the Trump campaign and the RNC have invested in an army of conspiratorial, election-denying legal staff to undermine our elections and make it harder for Americans’ ballots to be counted,” says the DNC spokesperson. “We won’t let Republicans get away with these baseless attacks on our democracy, and we will continue to use every tool at our disposal to strengthen our democracy as MAGA extremists attempt to tear it down.”

Of course, if much of the current national and swing-state polling holds, Trump could defeat his successor outright in a 2024 rematch. However, that is almost irrelevant to Trump and his MAGA brain trust’s goals of cementing their “heads I win, tails you lose” philosophy of election administration.

Trump, after all, has continued to falsely claim that the 2016 presidential race was somehow “rigged” in Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s favor. And that was the election he won.

Meet the surging ‘double haters’ who could decide whether Biden or Trump wins the election

USA Today

Meet the surging ‘double haters’ who could decide whether Biden or Trump wins the election

Joey Garrison, USA TODAY – March 25, 2024

WASHINGTON ― Jana Pender is no fan of Donald Trump. “All his lies. He’s despicable,” said the 67-year-old retired casino housekeeper from Detroit.

Yet despite voting for President Joe Biden in the 2020 election, Pender is not backing him in 2024. She said Biden has “blood on his hands” for supporting Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

“If nothing changes, I know I won’t vote for Trump and I know I won’t vote for Biden,” Pender said. “I just know I can’t vote for either of these people.”

Pender falls squarely within a group of voters known as the “double haters”− those who dislike Biden, the incumbent Democratic president, and Trump, the former president and presumptive Republican nominee.

This year, this group of skeptics is large and powerful. Double haters make up about 15% of the electorate, according to a poll this month by USA TODAY/Suffolk University, giving them significant sway in deciding the outcome of the November election. Other polls have found double haters make up as much as one-fifth of likely voters.

President Joe Biden walks across the South Lawn upon return to the White House in Washington, DC on March 21, 2023. Biden returned from a three-day campaign trip in Nevada, Arizona and Texas.
President Joe Biden walks across the South Lawn upon return to the White House in Washington, DC on March 21, 2023. Biden returned from a three-day campaign trip in Nevada, Arizona and Texas.

They pose a challenge for Biden as his campaign looks to keep the Democratic coalition united − amid signs of splintering − and not jump ship to one of the third-party candidates or sit the election out altogether. But double haters are also a wild card for Trump, whose divisiveness turns many of them off.

The USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll, taken March 8-11, found Trump leading Biden 40%-38% among registered voters, followed by independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, 9%.

Twenty-five percent of the double haters supported Trump in the survey, compared to 18% for Biden. About 44% of the double haters currently back various third-party candidates. Kennedy drew more of these voters, 21%, than Biden did. Green Party candidate Jill Stein had the backing of 7% of double haters, while independent Cornel West was supported by 6%.

“He would be top on my list of people to vote for,” Sally Power, 73, of Pittsburgh, Pa., said of Kennedy. Power, who runs a nonprofit women’s retail shop, doesn’t approve of Trump’s “statements and interactions with others,” but has concerns about Biden’s age and capacity to effectively serve another term until he’s 86 years old.

“I don’t want to vote for either one of them, honestly. That’s the problem. And I think I’m not alone in saying that,” said Power, who voted for Trump in 2016 but Biden in 2020. “I find both of them not representative of my views. And I don’t see them as being representative of the country.”

VANDALIA, OHIO - MARCH 16: Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a rally at the Dayton International Airport on March 16, 2024 in Vandalia, Ohio. The rally was hosted by the Buckeye Values PAC. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ORG XMIT: 776119694 ORIG FILE ID: 2089688852
VANDALIA, OHIO – MARCH 16: Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a rally at the Dayton International Airport on March 16, 2024 in Vandalia, Ohio. The rally was hosted by the Buckeye Values PAC. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ORG XMIT: 776119694 ORIG FILE ID: 2089688852More
Who are the double haters?

In the 2016 election, Trump performed 17 percentage points better than Hillary Clinton among the double-hater voters − who made up about 20% of the vote − steering him to victory.

In 2020, Biden enjoyed higher favorability marks than Trump − 49% to Trump’s 45% in October of that year, according to Gallup − producing fewer double haters. They accounted for only 3% of voters in 2020. But this year, 55% of registered voters have an unfavorable opinion of Biden, according to the USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll, while 55% also have an unfavorable opinion of Trump.

“I think they will end up being the key swing vote because they’re the ones that could go third-party,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who conducted polling for Biden’s 2020 campaign. “They are the ones that could decide to stay home. They are the ones that swing back and forth because they’re not anchored by affection, they’re anchored by disaffection. These are the voters who decided 2016.”

Double haters are composed of an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. Many consider themselves independents. They skew younger. Most are white but Latino voters also make up a sizable share. Double haters are among those voters who have lingering concerns about the state of the economy despite a robust jobs market, low unemployment and a booming stock market.

Forty-percent of double haters in the USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll said the economy is the most important issue that will determine their vote, followed by immigration, 21%.

Many double hates are wary of Biden’s age − even though Trump, 78, isn’t significantly younger − and convinced Biden has been weak and ineffective in office. But they have a fear factor with Trump − what they perceive as self-centeredness, the constant drama with his court cases, his controversial statements that echo dictators, and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

“I think Biden’s been an abject failure,” said Robert Brown, a 35-year-old from Minneapolis, who works in marketing and advertising. “Trump’s a piece of s—, too. Just to be real.” Brown said he’s leaning toward voting for Kennedy. “He’s a third option. How many times do we have to pick the lesser of two evils, right?”

Peter O’Connor, a 26-year-old student studying strategic communications at The Ohio State University, voted for Biden in 2020 and doesn’t like Trump. He is considering a vote for Kennedy this year. “I’ve heard a little bit about this Robert Kennedy guy. He sounds interesting to me,” O’Connor said.

Jim Meikle, 80, from Albrightsville, Pa., called Trump “an egotistical maniac” who cares about himself, not the country. Still, he said he will likely vote for Trump again, like he did in 2016 and 2020, over Biden, who he criticized over migration at the southern border, pushing the expansion of electric vehicles and his administration’s rocky military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

“You know, it’s really a shame. We’ve got a population of over 300 million people in this country, and this is the best that we can offer to be our president?” said Meikle, an 80-year-old retired manager at a sheet metal plant.

President Joe Biden speaks at the Washoe Democratic Party Office in Reno, Nev., Tuesday March 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) ORG XMIT: NVJM326
President Joe Biden speaks at the Washoe Democratic Party Office in Reno, Nev., Tuesday March 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) ORG XMIT: NVJM326
Can Biden win the double haters back?

In a troubling sign for Biden, 87% of the double-hater voters in the USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll said they believe the country is on the wrong track. Only 11% said they approve of Biden’s job performance, compared to 41% who said they approved of the job Trump did as president from 2017 to 2021.

“If you’re Biden, you have to say, ‘Hey, your memory is wrong, his presidency was awful compared to mine,'” said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center. “Or if you’re Trump, you have to say, ‘All of this boogeyman stuff against me, is unfounded. I was president for four years, the world didn’t fall apart and people have pretty good impressions of what I did.'”

This week, Biden started to embrace an age-old election question that Trump has posed: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

“I hope everyone in the country takes a moment to think back what it was like in March of 2020 – COVID had come to America and Trump was president,” Biden told supporters Wednesday at a fundraiser in Dallas. He described a period in which hospitals were overcrowded, nurses wore garbage bags for protection, unemployment soared to 14% and the stock market crashed.

Independent Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during a campaign rally at Legends Event Center on December 20, 2023 in Phoenix, Arizona.
Independent Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during a campaign rally at Legends Event Center on December 20, 2023 in Phoenix, Arizona.

Paleologos said double-haters’ fixation on the economy presents an opportunity for Biden, pointing to growing optimism among Americans that the economy has recovered from the pandemic. Thirty-three percent of registered voters now believe an economic recovery is underway, compared to a low of 9% in July 2022.

“To me, there’s an opportunity for Biden to do something that Hillary Clinton was not able to do in 2016, which is to either make Trump more unfavorable,” Paleologos said, or make inroads among double haters over the economy. “The fact of the matter is if the economy continues to rebound, that’s Joe Biden’s economy.”

Lake, who regularly conducts focus groups with likely voters, said the Biden campaign must first crystalize the choice before voters when it comes to Biden and Trump.

“Do you want someone who you think may be a little old or do you want someone who you think may be a little crazy? And God knows where he would take the country,” Lake said of Trump.

Yet that contrast alone might not be enough. “Right now, they’re headed to third party,” she said, arguing it puts the onus on Democrats for voters to understand that the third-party candidates “are not viable, and they may not be who you think they are.”

Data suggests the popularity of third-party candidates is often inflated when voters are given their names in a poll. It’s also unclear how many states they will make it on the ballot.

Yet even if Kennedy, Stein and West don’t match their current polling in November, they could be major factors in battleground states potentially decided by a few thousand votes or less.

Ultimately, whether Biden can win over double haters mulling a third-party vote could come down to their perceptions of the economy. Lake said they must connect how the president’s policies have improved their outlook.

“These are downscale voters who need steady progress,” Lake said. “They need six months of good news. So the most important thing for them is going to be what’s the economy in May and June. You tell me what their perceptions of the economy are in May and June, and I’ll tell you where they’re headed.”

Reach Joey Garrison on X, formerly Twitter, @joeygarrison.

Millions of Americans could soon lose home internet access if lawmakers don’t act

CNN

Millions of Americans could soon lose home internet access if lawmakers don’t act

Brian Fung – March 23, 2024

Every week, Cynthia George connects with her granddaughter and great-grandson on video calls. The 71-year-old retiree reads the news on her MSN homepage and googles how to fight the bugs coming from her drain in Florida’s summer heat. She hunts for grocery deals on her Publix app so that her food stamps stretch just a little further.

But the great-grandmother worries her critical lifeline to the outside world could soon be severed. In fact, she fears she might soon have to make a difficult choice: Buy enough food to feed herself — or pay her home internet bill.

George is one of millions of Americans facing a little-known but fast-approaching financial cliff, a catastrophe that policy experts say is preventable but only if Congress acts, and quickly.

By as soon as May, more than 23 million US households risk being kicked off their internet plans or facing skyrocketing bills that force them to pay hundreds more per year to get online, according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The looming disaster could affect nearly 1 in 5 households nationwide, or nearly 60 million Americans, going by Census Bureau population estimates.

Such broad disruptions to internet access would affect people’s ability to do schoolwork, to seek and do jobs, to visit their doctors virtually or refill prescriptions online, or to connect to public services, widening the digital divide between have and have-nots and potentially leading to economic instability on a massive scale.

‘I have to account for every penny’

The crisis is linked to a critical government program expected to run out of funding at the end of April. Known as the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), the benefit provides discounts on internet service valued at up to $30 per month to qualifying low-income households, or up to $75 per month for eligible recipients on tribal lands.

Lawmakers have known for months about the approaching deadline. Yet Congress is nowhere close to approving the $6 billion that President Joe Biden says would renew the ACP and avert calamity for tens of millions of Americans.

This past week, congressional leaders missed what advocates say was the last, best legislative opportunity for funding the ACP: The 11th-hour budget deal designed to avert a government shutdown. The bill text released this week includes no money for the program, heightening the odds of an emergency that will plunge millions into financial distress just months before the pivotal 2024 election.

Now, with time running out for the ACP, the FCC has been forced to begin shutting down the program — halting new signups and warning users their benefits are about to be suspended.

The US Capitol in Washington, DC, on March 22. - Pedro Ugarte/AFP/Getty Images
The US Capitol in Washington, DC, on March 22. – Pedro Ugarte/AFP/Getty Images

“Because of political gameplay, about 60 million Americans will have to make hard choices between paying for the internet or paying for food, rent, and other utilities, widening the digital divide in this country,” said Gigi Sohn, a former top FCC official. “It’s embarrassing that a popular, bipartisan program with support from nearly half of Congress will end because of politics, not policy.”

Without the aid, low-income Americans like George would be priced out of home internet service. The prospect of losing a critical lifeline to the modern economy has put ACP subscribers on edge. Many tell CNN they are irate at Congress for letting them down and, through inaction, taking away a basic, essential utility.

“My grandkids, they make fun of me,” George said with a chuckle. “They say I’m cheap. I go, ‘No, Grandma’s thrifty.’ I don’t have any choice; I have to account for every penny. And this would mean that that food bill would have to be cut down. There’s no place else I would be able to take it from.”

Military families, older Americans and rural residents most at risk

The ACP has quickly gained adoption since Congress created the program in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. It is overwhelmingly popular with both political parties, surveys show.

Military families account for almost half of the ACP’s subscriber base, according to the White House and an outside survey backed by Comcast.

More than a quarter of ACP users live in rural areas, the same survey said, with roughly 4 in 10 enrolled households located in the southern United States alone. As many as 65% of respondents said they feared losing their job without the ACP; 3 out of 4 said they worry about losing online health care services, and more than 80% said they believe their kids would fall behind in school.

Large swaths of the ACP’s user base trend older; Americans over 65 account for almost 20% of the program. And as many as 10 million Americans who use the program are at least age 50.

Michelle McDonough, 49, works part time at a tobacco shop in Maine and lives off Social Security disability payments. She is one statistics class away from earning an associate degree in behavioral health. Not only does she go to class virtually, but she also sees a psychiatrist who only meets patients through telehealth visits.

Michelle McDonough says she would have to cut back on groceries if the ACP goes away. - Courtesy Michelle McDonough
Michelle McDonough says she would have to cut back on groceries if the ACP goes away. – Courtesy Michelle McDonough

Like George, McDonough also expects she’ll have to cut back on groceries if the ACP goes away. There’s a library roughly five miles from her home with internet access, but having to go out of her way would cost her even more time and money she doesn’t have, she said. Besides, McDonough added, her car is dying and the library is rarely open in snowy weather.

If politicians allow the ACP to collapse, it will be a sign of how out of touch they are with their voters, McDonough said.

“I’m trying to become a productive member of society, something that they say people on low income are not,” McDonough said. “I’m trying. And, you know, one of the programs that’s helping me, they’re talking about taking it away — when there are definitely a lot of other things that they probably could take the funding from.”

How the ACP works to bring American communities online

Congress authorized the ACP with an initial $14 billion in funding in 2021. That money has now spread to virtually every congressional district in the country. It is the largest internet affordability program in US history, the government has said, describing it as working hand-in-glove with billions of dollars in new infrastructure spending.

Building out high-speed internet cables is costly; even more so to places that internet providers have traditionally overlooked as unprofitable or hard to reach. Historically, that has left millions of people with no or spotty service or facing sky-high prices just to get a basic internet plan.

Ethernet cables are seen running from the back of a wireless router in Washington, DC on March 21, 2019. - Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
Ethernet cables are seen running from the back of a wireless router in Washington, DC on March 21, 2019. – Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Investing in infrastructure is a first step, but it means nothing if Americans cannot afford the connectivity it provides. So the ACP helps bridge that price gap for consumers while also benefiting internet providers, many of whom say the program ensures a base of demand to support building in otherwise money-losing markets.

“I can think of lots of examples where we’re boring under a river to get to two customers, and that was extremely costly,” said Gary Johnson, CEO and general manager of Paul Bunyan Communications, a Minnesota-based telecom cooperative serving some of the furthest reaches of the state. “To get fiber in the most rocky areas, we’re literally using a rock saw and we’re cutting, slicing a path through that rock so we can put our fiber cable in. The fact you’re dividing that [cost] over a very small number of customers? That’s ultimately challenging.”

In a recent FCC survey, more than half of rural respondents — and 47% of respondents overall — said the ACP was their first-ever experience with having home internet.

Extra shifts, grocery cuts: What an ACP collapse would mean

If the ACP collapses, some, like George and McDonough, will make cuts to their budget to stay online.

Kamesha Scott, a 29-year-old mother in St. Louis who works two jobs delivering Amazon packages and handling restaurant takeout orders, told CNN she would have to pick up extra shifts to make ends meet. And that would mean seeing her two kids even less, she said.

Kamesha Scott, 29, says she would have to work extra shifts to make ends meet if her internet bills go up. - Courtesy Kamesha Scott
Kamesha Scott, 29, says she would have to work extra shifts to make ends meet if her internet bills go up. – Courtesy Kamesha Scott

Expect others to resort to a mishmash of ad hoc solutions, policy experts say.

That could include using the free Wi-Fi at fast-food restaurants, school parking lots, and other public spaces. Or it could mean falling back on cellphone data service, at least where it’s available and plans are still affordable.

Roughly a third of the country’s 123,000 public libraries offer mobile hotspot lending, allowing visitors to borrow palm-sized devices that pump out a cellular signal that can substitute for home internet service in a pinch, said Megan Janicki, a policy expert at the American Library Association. But they aren’t a perfect solution: The cell signal may be weak, or users could have to wait to check one out.

“Depending on how long the waitlist is, they’re waiting at least three weeks, if not longer,” Janicki said.

ACP subscribers could turn to other government aid. The FCC’s Lifeline program, which dates to the Reagan administration, similarly gives low-income households a monthly discount on phone or internet service. But the benefit pales in comparison: It’s worth only $9.25 a month, or $34.25 for tribal subscribers — a fraction of what ACP subscribers are currently eligible for.

Turning low-income Americans into political pawns

Despite the ACP’s popularity, routine congressional gridlock and the politics of an election year have turned low-income Americans into unwitting — and in many cases unwilling — pawns in a much larger battle.

Earlier this year, a bipartisan group of Senate and House lawmakers unveiled legislation to authorize $7 billion to save the ACP — that’s $1 billion more than the Biden administration asked for.

The bill has not moved.

“The House Republicans attempting to demonstrate that they are cutting back on government spending makes re-funding the ACP very difficult,” Blair Levin, a telecom industry analyst at New Street Research, wrote in a research note in January. “It is unlikely the House Republican leadership will allow the bill to go to the floor.”

A crew works on a cell tower in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., on Tuesday, August 24, 2021. - Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images
A crew works on a cell tower in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., on Tuesday, August 24, 2021. – Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images

But there is growing evidence that money spent through the ACP ends up saving taxpayers in the long run. In a recent study, Levin said, researchers estimated that every $1 of ACP spending increases US GDP by $3.89, while other research has outlined how telemedicine can lead to substantial savings in health care.

Even though extending ACP benefits could help lawmakers from both parties as they head home to campaign, perhaps the biggest political beneficiary may be Biden as his campaign touts the administration’s economic record ahead of the election.

Jonathan Blaine, a freelance software engineer in Vermont and an ACP subscriber, pins the blame on certain Republicans that he says would rather hurt working-class people than give Biden a political victory.

“You guys seem to promote that you’re for the working-class people, but realistically, the working-class people are the ones that you’re screwing over most of the time,” Blaine said, speaking directly to GOP lawmakers. “You’re taking ACP away from the farmers that can check the local produce prices and be able to reasonably negotiate their prices with retailers. You’re removing disabled people’s ability to fill their prescriptions online.”

Lawmakers are likely to feel voters’ wrath in November if the ACP falls apart, Blaine added.

He called it “sickening” that lawmakers keep removing these benefits for poorer Americans from legislation “left and right.”

“But the fact that you sit there and smile to our faces trying to say you’re for the working class? You’re for the poor? You’re for the less fortunate? It’s absolute bulls**t,” he added. “And most of us see right through your bulls**t, and that is why you’re losing seats.”

Some Republicans who supported Nikki Haley are still refusing to back Donald Trump

Associated Press

Some Republicans who supported Nikki Haley are still refusing to back Donald Trump

Meg Kinnard and Thomas Beaumont – March 25, 2024

FILE - Republican presidential candidate former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley speaks at a campaign event, Jan. 14, 2024, in Adel, Iowa. Haley's base of voters and donors was never big enough to seriously challenge Donald Trump. But her supporters are still splintered weeks after she dropped out of the GOP primary. If that holds, it could hurt Trump's general election chances. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr, File)
 Republican presidential candidate former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley speaks at a campaign event, Jan. 14, 2024, in Adel, Iowa. Haley’s base of voters and donors was never big enough to seriously challenge Donald Trump. But her supporters are still splintered weeks after she dropped out of the GOP primary. If that holds, it could hurt Trump’s general election chances. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr, File)
FILE - Republican presidential candidate former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley speaks at a caucus night party in West Des Moines, Iowa, Jan. 15, 2024. Haley's base of voters and donors was never big enough to seriously challenge Donald Trump. But her supporters are still splintered weeks after she dropped out of the GOP primary. If that holds, it could hurt Trump's general election chances.(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)
Republican presidential candidate former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley speaks at a caucus night party in West Des Moines, Iowa, Jan. 15, 2024. Haley’s base of voters and donors was never big enough to seriously challenge Donald Trump. But her supporters are still splintered weeks after she dropped out of the GOP primary. If that holds, it could hurt Trump’s general election chances.(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Now that Nikki Haley has shuttered her presidential campaign, one person who voted for her refuses to back former President Donald Trump and plans to reluctantly vote for President Joe Biden.

Another Haley primary supporter acknowledges that he was probably always a “closet Trump fan” and will vote for the former president again in November.

The former U.N. ambassador’s base was never big enough to seriously challenge Trump before he clinched a third straight Republican nomination. But in what’s shaping up to be a tight rematch between Trump and Biden, the apparent splintering of Haley’s voters and donors could hurt Trump’s general election chances, particularly in battleground states full of suburban voters who remain dubious of a Trump return to the White House.

For now, interviews with Haley’s supporters suggest they could go in a variety of directions — some backing Trump, some going to Biden and others seeking third-party options or avoiding making a decision about the presidential race yet.

Haley has not spoken publicly since leaving the race and urging Trump to reach out to all Republicans. She has not endorsed Trump and suggested she may not at all.

“She said it’s up to him to earn the support of those who supported her, and he’s got to earn it,” said Eric Tanenblatt, a longtime GOP donor who was Haley’s Georgia campaign’s co-chairman. “Right now, I’m definitely not there. It tells me there are things that are still up in the air among other key Haley donors waiting for a sign.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

A reluctant return to Trump for some voters

Glenn Swanson caucused for Haley after seeing her campaign in his hometown of Cedar Falls, Iowa. At the time, the retired architect said he was open to a Trump alternative. Now, he’s coming back to the candidate he supported in both 2016 and 2020, despite his concerns about the four felony indictments and other civil cases facing Trump.

“For sure I’m going to vote for Trump,” Swanson said in an interview. “In a sense I was kind of a closet Trump fan all along, but I really wanted to see if somebody else would emerge to get away from some of the drama.”

John Wynstra, a database administrator who attended that same event, had been deciding between Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis before choosing to caucus for her. Wynstra said he’s strategically supporting Trump and the party’s platform — as a stance primarily against Biden — although he seemingly left the door open to possibly supporting a third-party candidate like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“I will vote against Joe Biden and the Democrats,” Wynstra said this week. “If Kennedy were viable and if his positions were palatable, I would consider him.”

In Haley’s home state of South Carolina, high school teacher Michael Burgess said that save an unlikely independent run by Haley or a moderate like former Rep. Liz Cheney, he would be supporting Biden and criticized Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

“I will reluctantly vote Biden,” Burgess said. “We can survive bad policy, but we cannot survive the destruction of the Constitution at the hands of a morally bankrupt dictator lover in Trump who, supported by his congressional MAGA minions, would do just that.”

Her donors say they haven’t heard from Trump camp

Like many who were drawn to Haley, Tanenblatt, who was her Georgia campaign’s co-chairman, became disenchanted with Trump for what he called “inflammatory rhetoric,” chiefly in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by his supporters on the Capitol.

But he also says Trump’s opposition to military aid to Ukraine is a fundamental policy difference. Tanenblatt has talked individually with former Haley supporters weighing a role with No Labels, the third-party group that is moving forward with attempting a unity ticket of opposing party presidential and vice-presidential nominees.

By and large, Haley’s donors have paused, with key bundlers noting they have not heard from Trump’s team as well as their reluctance to make any decisions.

“I really think there’s a period of recalibrating for a number of us who were very involved in Nikki’s campaign. This was a calling, something bigger than any one of us,” said Simone Levinson, a Florida-based Haley fundraiser who hosted events for her in New York and Florida.

Those donors could be helpful to Trump were they to come to the former president’s side.

For now, Trump and national Republicans are lagging far behind Biden and national Democrats in fundraising, with Trump’s campaign and allied groups holding $37 million cash on hand at the end of February compared to the $155 million in Democratic coffers.

In one sign of her influence going forward, Haley ended last month with $11.5 million, just days before she suspended her campaign. That’s slightly more than the Republican National Committee at $11.3 million.

Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa.

Trump pushed away his closest allies – he’s finally paying the price

The Telegraph – Opinion

Trump pushed away his closest allies – he’s finally paying the price

David Kaufman – March 25, 2024

Trump's bad behaviour is coming back to bite him
Trump’s bad behaviour is coming back to bite him – Seth Wenig /AP

When it comes to his personal life, former president Donald Trump is far from wholesome: from the legendary Aspen face-off between his first and second wives in 1989, to the public humiliation Melania endured at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, the women in Trump’s life haven’t always had an easy time.

Although Trump paid millions to divorce Ivana and Maples, those sums are nothing compared to the hundreds of millions owed as a result of the myriad civil and criminal trials currently facing the former president. True, the most spectacular of those settlements – the $454 million Trump must begin paying today as part of a fraud settlement in New York – is not directly tied to Trump’s unseemly bad-boy behavior. But like the tens of millions more that are, today’s massive bill, and the possibility that his assets will be seized to cover it, suggest Trump can no longer hide from his history.

Beyond his actual wives, there are ladies like Stormy Daniels and E. Jean Carroll, the former a prostitute reportedly paid $130,000 back in 2016 to keep silent about her alleged relationship with Trump. Nearly eight years later, Daniels is still in the headlines as Trump seeks to have their case delayed or dismissed as his legal team continues to pour over thousands of pages of potential new evidence.

Carroll, meanwhile, was awarded some $83.3 million by a New York jury back in January who found Trump guilty of both disparaging her and denying her allegations of rape nearly two decades earlier. This was on top of the $5 million Carroll was awarded the previous year in a similar proceeding. Trump, of course, has appealed the latter Carroll decision via a $91 million bond earlier this month. The strain of that nearly nine-figure penalty is part of the reason Trump is now scrambling to come up with the far larger half-billion bond he must post later today. The chickens, it seems, are coming home to roost – and Trump is running out of coops to house them.

The financial crises Trump now faces reflect his clear indifference for even the most basic standards of decency. How else to explain Trump’s behavior during Campaign 2016, which kicked off with his derision of Sen. John McCain’s years of brutal captivity during the Vietnam War, continued with his mocking of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski – who suffers from a serious joint condition – and concluded with the release of that now infamous “grab ‘em by the pussy” tape weeks before election day in 2016.

The latter example, delivered in raucous ribald tones, is typical of Trump’s self-aggrandising and entitlement. This attitude may well explain the reluctance of his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, both billionaires in their own rights, to bail out Trump with a “very small loan” of $500 million dollars.

The former president needs all the allies he can get in the long, tough battle to November. Even so, he seems determined to push people away, launching barbs at everyone from his niece Mary – whose 2020 family tell-all resulted in him branding her “a mess” on Twitter – to even perhaps his own kids. At an Iowa rally in 2022, Trump bizarrely told the crowd that “some of us have horrible children,” as he spoke about inheritance taxes.

Donald Trump is hardly the only former president with a paper trail of bad behavior behind closed doors – Clinton, Kennedy and the elder Bush also come to mind. But no commander in chief has been so reckless with their disdain for the conventions of domesticity quite like the Donald. It’s not that being a good father and husband are the most important requirements when running a nation, but they’re certainly a solid start.

Ukraine ramps up spending on homemade weapons to help repel Russia

Associated Press

Ukraine ramps up spending on homemade weapons to help repel Russia

Hanna Arhirova – March 25, 2024

A worker assembles mortar shells at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
A worker assembles mortar shells at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
A mortar shell on a lathe at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
A mortar shell on a lathe at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Workers check 82mm mortars at a factory in Ukraine, on Friday, December 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Workers check 82mm mortars at a factory in Ukraine, on Friday, December 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Workers weld reinforced steel for artillery vehicles at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Workers weld reinforced steel for artillery vehicles at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
An engineer installs components in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Wednesday, February 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
An engineer installs components in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Wednesday, February 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
An engineer assembles parts on a combat drone in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Monday, February 6, 2023. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
An engineer assembles parts on a combat drone in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Monday, February 6, 2023. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
A worker stores mortar shells at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
A worker stores mortar shells at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Workers moving by crane an armored artillery vehicle hood at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Workers moving by crane an armored artillery vehicle hood at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Armored vehicles are worked on at a factory in Ukraine, on Friday, December 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Armored vehicles are worked on at a factory in Ukraine, on Friday, December 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
An engineer assembles an antenna for guiding an exploding drone in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Saturday, February 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
An engineer assembles an antenna for guiding an exploding drone in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Saturday, February 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
FILE - A sea drone cruises on the water during a presentation by Ukraine's Security Service in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Tuesday, March 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)
A sea drone cruises on the water during a presentation by Ukraine’s Security Service in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Tuesday, March 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)
Engineers install components on exploding drones in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Wednesday, February 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Engineers install components on exploding drones in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Wednesday, February 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Exploding drones are ready to be shipped to the battlefield in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Wednesday, February 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Exploding drones are ready to be shipped to the battlefield in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Wednesday, February 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
A worker walks past artillery vehicles at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
A worker walks past artillery vehicles at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Engineers install antennas on a land drone in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Wednesday, February 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Engineers install antennas on a land drone in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Wednesday, February 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Workers weld reinforced steel for armored vehicles at a factory in Ukraine, on Friday, December 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Workers weld reinforced steel for armored vehicles at a factory in Ukraine, on Friday, December 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine needs any edge it can get to repel Russia from its territory. One emerging bright spot is its small but fast-growing defense industry, which the government is flooding with money in hopes that a surge of homemade weapons and ammunition can help turn the tide.

The effort ramped up sharply over the past year as the U.S. and Europe strained to deliver weapons and other aid to Ukraine, which is up against a much bigger Russian military backed by a thriving domestic defense industry.

The Ukrainian government budgeted nearly $1.4 billion in 2024 to buy and develop weapons at home — 20 times more than before Russia’s full-scale invasion.

And in another major shift, a huge portion of weapons are now being bought from privately owned factories. They are sprouting up across the country and rapidly taking over an industry that had been dominated by state-owned companies.

A privately owned mortar factory that launched in western Ukraine last year is making roughly 20,000 shells a month. “I feel that we are bringing our country closer to victory,” said Anatolli Kuzmin, the factory’s 64-year-old owner, who used to make farm equipment and fled his home in southern Ukraine after Russia invaded in 2022.

Yet like many aspects of Ukraine’s war apparatus, its defense sector has been constrained by a lack of money and manpower – and, according to executives and generals, too much government red tape. A more robust private sector could help root out inefficiencies and enable factories to churn out weapons and ammunition even faster.

The stakes couldn’t be higher.

Russia controls nearly a quarter of Ukraine and has gained momentum along the 1,000 kilometer (620 mile) front line by showing a willingness to expend large numbers of troops to make even the smallest of advances. Ukrainian troops regularly find themselves outmanned and outgunned, and this has contributed to falling morale.

“You need a mortar not in three years, you need it now, preferably yesterday,” said Taras Chmut, director of the Come Back Alive Foundation, an organization that has raised more than $260 million over the past decade to equip Ukrainian troops with machine guns, armored vehicles and more.

WARTIME ENTREPRENEURS

Kuzmin, the owner of the mortar factory, fled the southern city of Melitopol in 2022 after Russia invaded and seized his factory that mostly made spare parts for farm equipment. He had begun developing a prototype for mortar shells shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, when it illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula.

Kuzmin took over a sprawling warehouse in western Ukraine last winter. His long-term goals include boosting production to 100,000 shells per month and developing engines and explosives for drones.

He is just one of many entrepreneurs transforming Ukraine’s weapons industry, which was dominated by state-owned enterprises after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Today, about 80 percent of the defense industry is in private hands — a mirror image of where things stood a year ago and a stark contrast with Russia’s state-controlled defense industry.

Each newly made projectile is wrapped in craft paper and carefully packed into wooden crates to be shipped to Romania or Bulgaria, where are loaded with explosives. Several weeks later, they’re shipped back and sent to the front.

“Our dream is to establish a plant for explosives,” said Kuzmin, who is seeking a partner to make that happen.

OBSTACLES TO GROWTH

Ukraine’s surge in military spending has occurred against a backdrop of $60 billion in U.S. aid being held up by Congress and with European countries struggling to deliver enough ammunition.

As impressive as Ukraine’s defense sector transformation has been, the country stands no chance of defeating Russia without massive support from the West, said Trevor Taylor, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank.

“Ukraine is not capable of producing all the munitions that it needs for this fight,” Taylor said. “The hold up of $60 billion of American help is really proving to be a significant hindrance.”

Russia is also pumping more money into its defense industry, whose growth has helped buffer its economy from the full brunt of Western sanctions. The country’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, recently boasted of huge increases in the manufacture of tanks, drones and ammunition.

“The entire country has risen and is working for our victory,” he said.

Compared with last year, Ukraine’s output of mortar shells is about 40 times higher and its production of ammunition for artillery has nearly tripled, said Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine’s minister of strategic industries. There has also been a boom in drone startups, with the government committing roughly $1 billion on the technology — on top of its defense budget.

“We now produce in a month what we used to produce in a year,” said Vladislav Belbas, the director general of Ukrainian Armor, which makes a wide array of military vehicles.

For the Ukrainian army’s 28th brigade, which is fighting near Bakhmut, delays in foreign weapon supplies haven’t yet posed any problems for troops “because we are able to cover our need from our own domestic production,” said Major Artem Kholodkevych.

Still, domestic weapons factories face a range of challenges — from keeping up with changing needs of battlefield commanders, to their own vulnerability to long-range Russian missile strikes.

But perhaps the greatest immediate hindrance is a lack of manpower.

Yaroslav Dzera, who manages one of Ukrainian Armor’s factories, said he struggles to recruit and keep qualified workers, not least because many of them have been mobilized to fight.

CUTTING THROUGH RED TAPE

Weapons companies say another roadblock to growth is bureaucracy.

The government has tried to become more efficient since the war began, including by making its process for awarding contracts more transparent. But officials say the country has a long way to go.

Shortly before he was replaced by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s former top general, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, highlighted the problem in an essay he wrote for CNN, saying Ukraine’s defense sector remained “hamstrung” by too many regulations and a lack of competition.

In spite of the challenges, one success story has been Ukraine’s drone industry. Ukrainian-made sea drones have proven to be an effective weapon against the Russian fleet in the Black Sea.

There are around 200 companies in Ukraine now focused on drones and output has soared — with 50 times more deliveries in December compared with a year earlier, according to Mykhailo Fedorov, the country’s minister of digital transformation.

Russia’s war in Ukraine is not a standoff over whose got better drones or missiles, said Serhii Pashynskyi, head of the National Association of Ukrainian Defense Industries trade group.

“We have a war of only two resources with Russia — manpower and money,” he said. “And if we learn to use these two basic resources, we will win. If not, we will have big problems.”

___

Associated Press reporter Volodymyr Yurchuk contributed to this report.

NBC News in revolt over Ronna McDaniel hiring. Will the network reverse course?

Los Angeles Times

NBC News in revolt over Ronna McDaniel hiring. Will the network reverse course?

Stephen Battaglio – March 25, 2024

FILE - Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel speaks before a Republican presidential primary debate hosted by NBC News, Nov. 8, 2023, at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County in Miami. Facing a cash crunch and harsh criticism from a faction of far-right conservatives, McDaniel, on Friday, Feb. 2, 2024, called for the party to unite behind the goal of defeating President Joe Biden. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)
Then-Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel speaks before a GOP presidential primary debate hosted by NBC News. (Rebecca Blackwell / Associated Press)

The hosts at NBC News’ cable outlet MSNBC continued to pound away at their parent organization’s decision to hire former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel as an on-air analyst.

The blowback unfolded throughout the day on the progressive cable news network, presenting a highly unusual situation in which well-known TV personalities went directly to viewers to challenge a decision made by their top managers.

The open rebellion could make it difficult for Comcast-owned NBC News to move forward with any plans to use McDaniel, who resigned from the RNC last month. A representative for NBC News said Monday there was no change in her status. But people familiar with the situation who are not authorized to comment publicly said McDaniel will probably be out before she even begins.

Chuck Todd, the ex-“Meet the Press” moderator, opened the door to the criticism when he appeared on his former program Sunday and blasted the network’s decision to make McDaniel a paid contributor, citing her record of supporting former President Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

MSNBC hosts weighed in on Monday, starting with “Morning Joe” co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski saying McDaniel will not be welcome on their daily program, a favorite of politicians and opinion leaders in Washington, D.C., and New York.

“We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring, but, if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons.” Scarborough said.

Brzezinski said she hoped NBC News management will reconsider its decision to bring McDaniel aboard.

“Deadline: Washington” anchor Nicolle Wallace praised Todd for his Sunday remarks. “He did something really brave,” Wallace told her viewers. “I talked to him yesterday. I said I’m knitting you a cape.”

Wallace, a former George W. Bush White House communications director who has long been anti-Trump, and Joy Reid both devoted lengthy segments critical of the McDaniel hiring. Reid described McDaniel as “a major peddler of the big lie,” referring to the Trump’s election falsehoods. Reid cited how McDaniel was on Trump’s phone calls to GOP officials in Michigan, urging them not to certify the state’s 2020 election results.

MSNBC host Jen Psaki cited a Liz Cheney tweet that noted how McDaniel once described the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol as “legitimate political discourse.”

“This is about truth versus lies,” Psaki, formerly the Biden White House press secretary, said.

Read more: Nicolle Wallace won’t just be a never-Trumper as her role expands at MSNBC

Rachel Maddow, MSNBC’s biggest star, also asked NBC News management to reverse the decision.

“The fact that McDaniel is on the payroll at NBC News — to me that is inexplicable,” Maddow said on her program. “You wouldn’t hire a wise guy, you wouldn’t hire a made man, like a mobster to work in a D.A.’s office.”

Former NBC News executives took to social media to chastise the move as well. Cheryl Gould, a producer and executive at the division for 37 years, wrote an open letter on her Facebook page to Carrie Budoff Brown, the senior vice president of politics for NBC News who was involved in McDaniel’s hiring.

“We all make mistakes,” Gould wrote. “This happens to be a colossal one that unfortunately makes the network, your bosses and yourself look misguided at best, craven at worst.”

NBC has a long history of hiring former government and political officials as contributors to its news operation. Such deals are done to get exclusive access to insider knowledge — and to keep prominent talking heads from appearing on the competition.

In 1977, the network gave Gerald Ford a $1-million deal — brokered by William Morris Agency — to be a commentator and contributor to a series of specials about his presidency.

In the same year the network signed a similar deal to former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. The move prompted a top news executive at the network, Richard Wald, to leave the company in protest, as he believed the deal siphoned resources from journalism projects. Wald also believed Kissinger owed it to the country to appear on NBC for free.

Political figures have segued into TV news commentary and lucrative TV anchor roles ever since.

NBC already has another former RNC chair on its payroll in Michael Steele, a co-host on the MSNBC program “The Weekend.” Psaki headed to MSNBC immediately after her departure from the Biden White House. Wallace worked on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign after her time in the George W. Bush administration.

All TV news organizations stock up on paid contributors during election season.

But the internal hostility toward McDaniel is linked to her support of Trump’s denial of the 2020 voting results, disqualifying her as a credible source to many inside the news organization. Before her appearance Sunday on “Meet the Press,” she had never acknowledged that President Biden won the election fairly.

McDaniel attributed her previous defense of Trump’s claims to her role in the RNC and said she can be “a little bit more of myself” now that she is no longer a party official. But she continues to say there were problems with the 2020 vote due to the dependence on mail-in ballots.

In a memo sent Friday to NBC News staff that was provided to the Times, Brown said McDaniel would provide a valuable perspective to the division’s coverage of the 2024 election with Trump as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

“It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team,” Brown said. “As we gear up for the longest general election season in recent memory, she will support our leading coverage by providing an insider’s perspective on national politics and on the future of the Republican Party — which she led through some of the most turbulent and challenging moments in political history.”