We begin today with Ben Jacobs of Vox evaluating Number 45’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and finding Trump to be at war with the Republican Party of the past.
Even if Trump hadn’t tipped his hand when he declared early in his remarks to a mostly full ballroom of diehards in MAGA hats that “we are never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove and Jeb Bush,” the rest of his speech represented a fundamental repudiation [of] that era of the Republican Party. But more than that, it represented a reversion toward a pre-World War II GOP, with doses of both populism and paleo conservatism.
Perhaps the most jarring change from the past was Trump’s derision of U.S. aid to Ukraine, just days after as the Eastern European country marked the one-year anniversary of Russia’s unprovoked invasion. For over a half-century, hawkish interventionist foreign policy—-especially towards Russia—had been one of the fundamental principles of the Republican Party. Trump’s election, especially given the questions about Russia’s efforts to sway the 2016 presidential race, put this into question. But Trump’s speech, which followed harsh attacks on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky throughout the three-day conference from speakers like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), made it clear how severely that the GOP had shifted towards isolationism in recent years.
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The speech felt like yet another milestone for the Republican Party, not just as the conference embraced Trumpism, but as the American right embraced a more continental conservatism. Trump spoke only hours after former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s speech, and Brazilian flags could be spotted throughout the crowd, alternating in patches with the Stars and Stripes and, above all, red MAGA hats. CPAC has increasingly embraced the global right—-holding a pro-Viktor Orban event in Hungary last year, and partnering with those who minimized and denied war crimes in World War II in Japan. Not all of this is foreign to American politics—after all, the America First slogan was first used by the isolationists who railed against the United States supporting the Allies in World War II before Pearl Harbor. But this strain of politics had remained submerged on the right, popping up in Pat Buchanan’s speeches and Ron Paul’s newsletters. That’s not the case anymore. The question is just how dominant it will be in 2024 and moving forward.
Katie Robertson and Stuart A. Thompson of The New York Times report that, in spite of the wall-to-wall coverage given to the Fox News revelations, conservative media, with few exceptions, has not mentioned the story.
On 26 of the most popular conservative television news networks, radio shows, podcasts and websites, only four — National Review, Townhall, The Federalist and Breitbart News — have mentioned the private messages from Fox News hosts that disparaged election fraud claims since Feb. 16, when the first batch of court filings were released publicly, according to a review by The New York Times.
The majority — 18 in all, including Fox News itself — did not cover the lawsuit at all with their own staff. (Some of those 18 published wire stories originally written by The Associated Press or other services.)
Four outlets mentioned the lawsuit in some way, but did not mention the comments from Fox News hosts. One of those, The Gateway Pundit, published three articles that included additional unfounded allegations about Dominion, including a suggestion that security vulnerabilities at one election site using Dominion machines could have led to some fraud, despite no evidence that votes were mismanaged.
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Even in a media world often divided along partisan lines, the paucity of coverage stands out, media experts said. And it means that many of the people who heard the conspiracy theories about election fraud on Fox’s networks may not be learning that Fox’s leaders and on-air stars privately dismissed those claims.
Kyle Pope of Columbia Journalism Review takes a look at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ war on the media.
… American newsrooms have reason to be very nervous. In the race for the Republican nomination for president, DeSantis is widely expected to run against Donald Trump, who, both as a candidate and in office, made antipathy towards the press a central tenet of his politics. Perhaps in an attempt to differentiate himself from his Florida neighbor—or as part of a wider ploy to show he’s Trumpier than Trump—DeSantis is doubling down on press threats to an extent never before seen in a (presumed) major-party candidate.
Some of DeSantis’s anti-media ploys are old favorites, like stonewalling public-records requests and bullying reporters who write articles that he doesn’t like. Trump did these things, too, but in a sense, DeSantis is playing the bad cop to Trump’s Pick me! approach, in which he seemed to grant reporters nearly unlimited access even as he publicly pilloried their employers. DeSantis, by contrast, largely shut out the mainstream media during his reelection campaign in Florida last year.
DeSantis is dangerous in more insidious ways, too. Last month, according to a report in Politico, he urged Florida’s Republican-controlled state legislature to consider a slate of breathtaking anti-press measures. The proposals go beyond the usual efforts to gut libel laws, including lowering the threshold for when a “public figure” can sue a media outlet. In a serious threat to investigative reporting, Florida’s legislature is now looking at a provision to specify that comments made by anonymous sources in news stories would be presumed false for the purposes of defamation lawsuits.
And as if things couldn’t get any worse in Florida...
Quinn Yeargain of Bolts magazine writes that laws passed in Republican states in response to Obamacare are now being used successfully in defense of abortion rights.
Reproductive rights advocates in Wyoming have sued to strike down the state’s abortion ban, saying that this “right to make . . . health care decisions” protects abortion access. A lawsuit in Ohio has made the same case using a similar provision in Ohio’s constitution that was adopted by voters in 2011.
“If you have an amendment that says you have the freedom to choose your health care, then that’s going to apply to all health care: that’s the argument being made,” says David Cohen, a professor of law at Drexel University who studies constitutions and abortion. “It’s like, ‘you used broad words, and these broad words have certain meanings, and we’re just applying those meanings to this context.’”
In both Ohio and Wyoming, these claims have seen early success in courts.
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Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in June, legal organizations that are working to defend abortion rights have looked increasingly toward state courts and constitutions. This strategy’s most recent success came in January in South Carolina. Few states have constitutional language that explicitly protects abortion but many state courts have pointed to equal protection, due process, and privacy clauses to affirm a right to abortion under the state constitution, and strike down restrictions or bans on the procedure.
Brad Franklin writes for the Mississippi Free Press that when it comes to the Mississippi legislature, it’s all about the racism.
For years, the state has watched us deal with 100-year-old water pipes, dilapidated school buildings, a shrinking police force and a shrinking tax base. A huge chunk of that base was white folks who fled from the city like it was on fire in 1997 when Jackson elected its first Black mayor, Harvey Johnson, which added to the white disinvestment that blew up after forced school integration in early 1970.
Every ask, every request and every plan (former Mayor Tony Yarber presented the Legislature with one plan in 2015) was met with a “NO.” The benign neglect has gone on for years. Finally the current Lumumba administration, realizing that Jacksonians were being left for dead, went out and secured $600 million in federal funds and $195 million from other funding sources to help fix the city’s water woes.
Systemic racism is the state Legislature introducing new bills designed to undermine the Black leadership of their own capital city and trying to usurp power away from them. David Parker’s Senate Bill 2889 looks to divert the monies Congress approved outside Jackson and put a regional board in charge of our water and sewer systems. That bill is headed to the House.
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Listen, I know a lot of folks don’t like Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba. A lot of it is just personal animus. He’s too light-skinned, looks like Drake, he’s too young, he’s a socialist, communist, Black radical, etc. All things being equal, Lumumba and his administration do bear some culpability in all of this. But the most damage being done to Jackson, possibly irreparable damage, is the Legislature’s campaign this session clearly has against Black leadership. They’re trying to neuter our leadership and take voting power out of our hands. Which is not only unconstitutional, it’s illegal.
Andrew Marr of The New Statesman gives British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak a pat on the back for his successful negotiation of the “Windsor deal”—an agreement on post-Brexit trade between Northern Ireland and the EU.
There’s always a danger in exaggerating turning points, but we should cheer this deal, rubber-stamped in Windsor. Ahead of its announcement, Sunak was frequently criticised for being “bad at politics” because he failed to properly square the Democratic Unionist Party and his internal Tory critics.
Instead, he is revealed as patient, wily and ruthless, and rather good at politics. The details of the negotiation were kept tight. Key parts of it had been carried out by hardcore Brexiters such as the Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly; the one-time “Spartan” leader Steve Baker was placated with impeccable timing, and his endorsement proved more useful than anyone in selling the deal.
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We shouldn’t exaggerate. The Sunak administration continues to face deep domestic discord. Having thrown himself into the protocol talks, the Prime Minister needs to throw himself personally into resolving the strikes in the NHS. The Budget will be difficult and I’d expect Johnsonian rebels to focus on defence spending and national security. While the Ukraine war goes on, and with cold economic winds beginning to blow from the US, it’s hard to see the return of much prosperity this year.
Finally today, Nicolas Camut of POLITICO Europe reports that Turkish opposition parties cannot agree on a single candidate to put up against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for the upcoming national elections scheduled for May 14.
Cracks in the wide-ranging alliance, which mixes parties from left to right, started to show on Thursday, when the six parties met to discuss their pick for a joint candidate for the upcoming presidential elections, and failed to settle on a name.
On Friday, Akşener expressed her preference for Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavaş, or the high-profile mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoğlu, instead of the head of the main opposition party, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, considered to be the favorite for the spot.
The next Turkish general election, scheduled for May 14, promises to be one of the world’s most strategically significant elections of the year.
The outcome will be keenly watched as observers seek to determine whether Erdoğan — who is taking treading a difficult political tightrope over Russia’s war against Ukraine — will push the country of 85 million in a more traditionalist, religiously conservative direction, or whether a new leader will be able to reset damaged relations with the West.
Have the best possible day, everyone!