Over the weekend, the Charleston Post and Courier ran an editorial urging South Carolina Senator Tim Scott to drop out of the presidential race, something that has looked pretty inevitable since he flubbed the first debate. Maybe he doesn’t want to be the first to slink away. Maybe wants Mike Pence to withdraw first. Everyone but Pence seems to know you can stick a fork in his campaign too. The editors of the Post and Courier (like Washington Post columnist George Will) would like to see Nikki Haley given a clear shot to take Trump down mostly because they think she is more likely to beat Biden than he is… but also because they see another Trump presidency as “a chilling prospect.”
They wrote that “Haley is the one Republican who is clearly ascending— in the polls, in fundraising, in her willingness to challenge the former president. And the Hamas attack on Israel should convince all but the most Trumpian of Republicans that international matters matter… Although Haley should never be confused with a moderate, she could easily be next year’s choice of independents and traditional Republicans. But that requires the other candidates getting out of the way.”
Yesterday, Politico made similar points about the need for consolidation. “We are 85 days away from the Iowa caucuses,” wrote Eugene Daniels, Ryan Lizza and Rachel Bade, “and unfortunately for nearly every single Republican candidate not named Donald Trump, the fundamentals of the race haven’t really budged. The GOP base is still largely with the former president. His legal troubles aren’t sending party leaders— or, for that matter, primary voters— running away from him. And his opponents’ campaigns are doing little to inspire confidence that they’ll be able to eke out a win.”
Did anyone outside of the political media and that crazy right wing guy from Oracle ever think Tim Scott had even a 1% chance to become the Republican nominee? Spoiler: NO. But—keeping up the charade— Daniels, Lizza and Bade wrote that “Scott’s campaign started with a whole lot of promise. For years, the South Carolinian’s compelling background— raised by a single, working mother, rising up to become [appointed by Haley whose campaign has lately made sure everyone know he’s a closet case] the lone Black Republican in the Senate— and hopeful tone made him a uniquely promising politician in the Trump-era GOP: a happy warrior amongst some very angry ones. But Scott’s presidential campaign continues to struggle, notching somewhere ‘below 2 percent in national polls,’ underperforming at the two debates so far and forcing a shift in strategies in a hope to find a foothold… Even big fans of Scott [they mention Mark Sanford and John Cornyn] are publicly acknowledging his bid is in big trouble. That’s how you know the agita is real.”
Cornyn (R-TX), who is absolutely desperate to stop Trump and the MAGA movement, noted that “At some point, there’s going to have to be consolidation when the outcome is inevitable.” Our trio of Politico writers report that “that consolidation seems far from likely at this point.”
Over the weekend, DeSantis was turning up the volume against Trump, fine, but too late to save him. “Trump said you can’t just force Mexico to pay [for the wall because] there was no legal mechanism,” he thundered, bringing up an absurd and illegal but MAGA-pleasing proposal. “What we’ll do is impose fees on all the remittances that people that work here send back to Mexico and Central America and South America.” He also called for repealing restrictions on weapons of mass murder— bump stocks and pistol braces.
Lately though, he’s been spending more of his energy— including rapidly draining cash— trying to take down his rival for second place than his rival for first place— aiming his ire at Haley. “On Friday, Never Back Down, the DeSantis super PAC, released the above ad accusing Haley of flip-flopping on Gazan refugees… Yesterday, Haley responded and didn’t mince words. ‘You know, [the] first thing I’ll say is, God bless Ron DeSantis, because he continues to try and bring up this refugee situation. He has said that I want to take Gazan refugees. I have never said that. And he’s got an ad on TV, and I will tell you, from CNN to Newsmax, they have all said that his ad is a lie.’ When asked about the ad, DeSantis doubled down, both in remarks in Iowa and then to ABC in South Carolina, and criticized Haley for expressing ‘a lot of support for [the United Nations Relief and Works Agency] and stuff in the past.’”
The whole spectacle feels a lot like 2016, as the non-Trump candidates continue to fight with each other rather than the clear frontrunner, each candidate thinking that they should be the one to take on Trump— that if they could just get into a one-on-one race, they could win.
Meanwhile, the field isn’t consolidating. Could the Georgia case derail Trump. Nope, not in the primary. MAGAts never heard of Sidney Powell or Kenneth Cheseboro and for all they know they could be Biden’s pet parakeets, though CNN’s Zachary Cohen and Marshall Cohen reported that their plea deals are a stark display of the reality that the Georgia case against Trump and his co-defendants is getting stronger… Chesebro directly implicated Trump in a criminal conspiracy, and his plea establishes for the first time that the fake electors plot was illegal. Notably, Chesebro has now admitted that ‘the purpose’ of the fake electors conspiracy was to ‘disrupt and delay the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021,’ which is a key element of the federal charges Trump is facing.”
What’d Trump say about shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and none of his supporters caring? Yesterday, he claimed Sidney Powell was never his attorney anyway (although she was an official member of Trump’s legal team in 2020). Yesterday:
He must have forgotten this one, which he wrote right after he lost the 2020 election and was plotting how to overthrow the U.S.government:
She was at the now-notorious late December Oval Office meeting with Trump just before the insurrection when he wanted to promote her to special counsel to investigate voter fraud.
On State of the Union yesterday, Liz Cheney told Jake Tapper that she isn’t ruling out a presidential run. She noted that Trump “shared Israeli intelligence with the Russians very early in his term. He also, as we know now from the indictments that we have seen from Jack Smith, shared highly classified military documents apparently relating to military action potentially against Iran. He shared that with Mark Meadows' ghostwriters and political consultants, it seems, according to the indictments." She forgot to mention all the state secrets he shared with Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt. Pratt's take-- "He’s outrageous. He just says whatever the fuck he wants, and he loves to shock people." Would Trump love the shock he deserves from an electric chair?
"So, Cheney continued, "if you think about not only is he out there advocating for complimenting America's adversaries and, in fact, terrorist organizations that slaughter innocents; he also seems to have shared very highly classified intelligence information, both ours and the Israelis, in fact, with adversaries. So I think it's simply the latest example of why Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States… I think that it's really important that people recognize the efforts that he's putting in to try to tear down every institution of our democracy. And I think that we have— we all need to be very clear about the extent to which the judges and the justices in this country, and, again, as I said, almost without exception, whether they have been appointed by Democratic presidents or Republican presidents, have a very clear understanding of the danger here and a very clear understanding and dedication to the rule of law. And, as a nation, we all ought to be very grateful for that. And we ought to reject the kind of attacks that we're seeing, obviously, launched by Donald Trump, but also the kind of lies coming out of Jim Jordan and some other House Republicans, the notion that the entire judiciary system or the FBI is weaponized against us. And I would urge that people think about, as we look at the threats globally, the notion that we have got Republicans saying, we're going to defund the FBI, we're going to defund the Department of Justice, Jim Jordan wants to stop a number of the programs that have kept us safe since 9/11, that is very dangerous. And people like that don't understand the threat we face… I think Donald Trump is the single most dangerous threat we face.”
