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Republican National Committee pulls resolution declaring Trump as the 'presumptive 2024 nominee'
The Republican National Committee has pulled a resolution to consider declaring Donald Trump the party’s “presumptive 2024 nominee" before he formally clinches the requisite number of delegates, a person familiar with the decision said Thursday.
News of the withdrawal came shortly after Trump posted on his Truth Social site that, while he “greatly” appreciated the notion, he felt, “for the sake of PARTY UNITY, that they should NOT go forward with this plan, but that I should do it the ‘Old Fashioned’ way, and finish the process off AT THE BALLOT BOX.”
Trump celebrates DeSantis' decision to drop out, ending a bitter feud that defined the 2024 campaign
The measure, according to a draft obtained Thursday by The Associated Press, had said it “declares President Trump as our presumptive 2024 nominee for the office of President of the United States and from this moment forward moves into full general election mode welcoming supporters of all candidates as valued members of Team Trump 2024.”
The withdrawal was confirmed by a person familiar with the decision who was not authorized to publicly discuss the proposal and spoke on condition of anonymity Thursday night.
Vivek Ramaswamy endorses Trump, suspends 2024 Republican presidential bid
If approved, the measure would have further solidified Trump's control of the party and its operation at a time when former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley is still competing against Trump for the GOP nomination.
RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel had earlier signaled her approval for the resolution. On Tuesday, after Haley finished second to Trump in New Hampshire, McDaniel said that while she felt the former ambassador had “run a great campaign,” Republicans “need to unite around our eventual nominee, which is going to be Donald Trump.”
The Supreme Court will decide if Donald Trump can be kept off 2024 presidential ballots
The resolution had been expected to be discussed at the RNC's winter meeting in Las Vegas next week, even though only two states have voted and the former president had nowhere near the requisite number of delegates to secure the nomination.
Haley’s camp said Thursday that it wasn’t up to the RNC to decide who the GOP nominee would be.
“Who cares what the RNC says? We’ll let millions of Republican voters across the country decide who should be our party’s nominee, not a bunch of Washington insiders,” said campaign spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas.
The AP has a policy to not refer to any candidate as the “presumptive nominee” until he or she has captured the number of delegates needed to win a majority vote at the national party conventions this summer. The earliest that could happen is March.
But there were no party rules prohibiting the RNC from making such a move. If it had been adopted, it could have given the Republican Party a jump-start on planning a general election matchup with Democratic President Joe Biden, who has begun framing his reelection campaign as a 2020 rematch against Trump.
There was also precedent for the committee to declare a candidate the presumptive nominee before winning the 1,215 requisite delegates to clinch the nomination. Then-RNC Chair Reince Priebus did so with Trump in May 2016.
Despite losing both the Iowa and New Hampshire contests to Trump, Haley has argued that her performance — outlasting all the other Trump rivals — shows the strength of her candidacy.
Trump currently has 32 delegates to Haley's 17. There is one delegate left to be assigned after the New Hampshire contest.
During a rally Wednesday night in her home state of South Carolina, Haley — the former governor — noted that her campaign had brought in more than $1 million since her second-place finish in New Hampshire. Trump followed up with a remark that appeared aimed at intimidating her donors.
“Anybody that makes a ‘Contribution’ to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp,” Trump wrote, using the nickname he has crafted for Haley and the abbreviation for his “Make America Great Again” slogan. “We don’t want them, and will not accept them, because we Put America First, and ALWAYS WILL!”
Haley's campaign said Thursday that it raised an additional $1.2 million “after Trump’s unhinged pledge to ‘permanently bar’ any individual who contributed to Haley’s campaign.”
“Donald Trump’s threats highlight the stark choice in this election: personal vendettas or real conservative leadership,” said Haley spokesperson AnnMarie Graham-Barnes. “Trump’s scheme blew up in his face. The contributions to the Haley campaign are pouring in — proof that people are sick of the drama and are rallying behind Nikki’s vision for a strong and proud America.”
Trump’s dismissal of any Haley donors had no effect on T.J. Petrizzo, a former top Capitol Hill staffer and now lobbyist who supports Haley.
“That’s something out of a ‘Godfather’ movie. Never betray the family? Come on,” he added. “You’ve got to play this through.”
Petrizzo said he understands that some Republicans may be ready to pivot to a head-to-head contest between Trump and Biden, but he notes that there is a lot of time left before a general election.
“I’ve heard a lot of elected officials in the Republican Party, including the RNC chair, say, ‘We need to rally around a candidate.’ That this is going to be our candidate. ‘It was chosen by Iowa and New Hampshire, so we must go ahead and rally around Trump,’” Petrizzo said. “Well, there’s 285 days until the election. There’s plenty of time on the clock.”
Trump celebrates DeSantis' decision to drop out, ending a bitter feud that defined the 2024 campaign
Donald Trump set aside months of criticism and mockery of Ron DeSantis on Sunday night, celebrating his onetime Republican rival as his newest supporter after the Florida governor ended his presidential campaign and endorsed the former president.
For Trump, it's become a familiar ritual to welcome the backing of someone who once tried to take him on. Nonetheless, it was notable at Sunday's rally in New Hampshire to see Trump praise DeSantis without calling him “DeSantimonious” or “DeSanctus,” putting an end to perhaps the most bitter rivalry of Republicans' 2024 campaign.
“I just want to thank Ron and congratulate him on doing a very good job,” Trump said at the outset of his remarks. “He was very gracious, and he endorsed me. I appreciate that, and I also look forward to working with Ron.” Trump described DeSantis as "a really terrific person.”
Earlier in the day, DeSantis said via video that he would be ending his campaign two days before New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation GOP primary. But, Trump's glee Sunday night aside, it wasn't the warmest of endorsements.
“It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance,” DeSantis said, offering matter-of-fact analysis through a forced smile without adding plaudits for Trump.
“I signed a pledge to support the Republican nominee, and I will honor that pledge," he continued, before adding a dig at the remaining contender, Nikki Haley. DeSantis described the former U.N. ambassador and onetime South Carolina governor as a stand-in for “the old Republican guard of yesteryear, a repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism.”
Trump seemed unbothered by DeSantis' approach, striking a tone of camaraderie as fellow political combatants. “I will tell you it's not easy,” Trump said Sunday night in Rochester. “They think it's easy doing this stuff, right? It's not easy.”
Brenda Moneypenny, a 64-year-old from Alton, waited in the cold for two hours to see Trump on Sunday night. She whipped out her driver’s license to prove her last name and explained she is a registered independent who often votes Republican. Moneypenny said she has considered Haley, especially because of the chance to elect the first woman to the presidency. But she never considered DeSantis.
“Too flim-flamsy,” Moneypenny said of the governor. “He needs better campaign people. He doesn’t have anybody that’s doing him any favors right now.”
Ultimately, she settled on Trump: “Tried and true,” she said.
The former president seemed to revel in skewering DeSantis throughout the campaign, often making clear it was a personal grudge because he considered the governor's decision to run in the first place an act of disloyalty. Trump endorsed DeSantis, then a congressman, in a competitive 2018 GOP primary for Florida governor. DeSantis went on to win the nomination and the general election. By the time DeSantis won a landslide reelection four years later, though, he was positioning himself for his own White House campaign.
As recently as November, Trump came to Florida and addressed a boisterous crowd at a state GOP meeting standing in front of a sign that read: “Florida is Trump Country.” That evening, Trump did not mention DeSantis until more than 30 minutes into his speech. Even then, it was to brag about polls showing his advantages over the governor.
“I endorsed him, and he became a rocket ship in 24 hours,” Trump said, claiming that DeSantis had begged for his endorsement. “Now he’s like a wounded falling bird from the sky.”
Trump never did debate DeSantis or any other 2024 rival. He has said he wouldn't until one proves they are a legitimate threat to him winning the nomination.
DeSantis concentrated his campaign in recent months in Iowa, where he finished in second place in last week's caucuses — 30 percentage points behind Trump and barely ahead of Haley. Haley, meanwhile, has long prioritized New Hampshire as a potential springboard ahead of her home-state South Carolina primary next month.
In Iowa, APVoteCast surveys of caucusgoers suggested DeSantis's supporters were much more likely than Haley's to consider themselves conservatives who would back Trump no matter what if he wins the nomination and faces President Joe Biden in November. If that trend holds in New Hampshire, then Trump could expect at least some boost from DeSantis dropping out, and whatever he gets could stretch out his margin and frustrate Haley's ability to claim any momentum. Indeed, Trump's aides have said they expect DeSantis' support around the country will shift heavily to Trump.
Trump noted Sunday that he won New Hampshire's 2016 primary by about 20 points. He lost the battleground state twice in general elections.
On Monday, he plans to be in New York at a civil defamation trial stemming from a columnist’s claims he sexually attacked her. Then he is scheduled to return to New Hampshire for an evening rally in Laconia.
Vivek Ramaswamy endorses Trump, suspends 2024 Republican presidential bid
Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy suspended his bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination on Monday and endorsed former President Donald Trump after finishing a distant fourth in Iowa’s leadoff caucuses.
Ramaswamy said he made the decision after determining there was no path forward for him in the race, "absent things that we don’t want to see happen in this country.”
The 38-year-old political novice, who sought to replicate Trump’s rise as a bombastic, wealthy outsider, said he called the former president earlier Monday evening to congratulate him on his victory in Iowa. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis came in second, with former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley just behind in third.
Read: The Supreme Court will decide if Donald Trump can be kept off 2024 presidential ballots
Ramaswamy told supporters gathered at a Des Moines hotel that Trump “will have my full endorsement for the presidency."
He added: "And I think we’re going to do the right thing for this country. And so I’m going to ask you to follow me in taking our America First movement to the next level.”
Trump, in his victory speech a few minutes earlier, said Ramaswamy “did a helluva job" in the campaign. Ramaswamy said he would likely appear with Trump in New Hampshire Tuesday night and suggested DeSantis and Haley should “follow suit" in withdrawing from the race.
During the campaign, Ramaswamy needled most of his opponents but praised Trump as “the best president of the 21st century.” He argued, though, that Republicans should opt for “fresh legs” while still supporting the America First agenda.
The approach, including his call for “revolution,” vaulted Ramaswamy into the mix of candidates vying to overtake Trump — or at least become a viable alternative. His decision to drop out, though, becomes the latest confirmation that the former president, even at 77 years old and under multiple criminal indictments, still dominates Republican politics and remains the overwhelming favorite to win the GOP nomination for the third consecutive time.
Ramaswamy’s failure also affirms how difficult it is for any Republican other than Trump to push the bounds of party orthodoxy, as the first-time candidate found little political reward for positions such as his opposition to aid for Israel and Ukraine.
Ramaswamy said he would be open to vice presidential consideration.
“I’m not somebody who’s going to be able to speak anyone’s convictions but my own," he said. "So if that’s a role that I can perform from the vice presidency or any other one, I’m going to evaluate whatever is best for the future of this country. But my No. 1 commitment is to truth.”
The son of Indian immigrants, Ramaswamy entered politics at the highest level after making hundreds of millions of dollars at the intersection of hedge funds and pharmaceutical research, a career he charted and built while graduating from Harvard University and then Yale Law School. He brought to his campaign the same brash approach he used to coax money from investors even when the drugs he touted never made it to the market.
“Do you want somebody who grew up in this system who’s going to deliver incremental reform? Or do you want somebody coming in from the outside?” he said earlier in the campaign, framing his business success as a harbinger of what he could do in the Oval Office.
Read: Harvard president Claudine Gay resigns amid plagiarism claims, backlash from antisemitism testimony
In a rapid-fire presentation on a range of issues, Ramaswamy wowed many GOP audiences by seamlessly mixing his biography and detailed policy positions with conservative talking points.
He advocated deporting the American-born children of immigrants who reside illegally in the country. He questioned the government’s account of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and called for firing 75% of the federal workforce. He also called for raising the U.S. voting age. He hammered corporate America for its emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion. Ramaswamy called hawkish GOP rivals “Dick Cheney in 3-inch heels” and laughed when one of them called him “scum.” But he always navigated Trump carefully, promising to pardon the former president for any federal crimes, including those related to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Yet alongside the bravado, Ramaswamy often ignored contradictory details, and his confidence sometimes brought him trouble.
He did not tell voters that he once described Trump’s denial of his 2020 defeat as “abhorrent” or that he saw Jan. 6 as a “dark day for democracy.” He didn’t say he invested in companies whose diversity, equity, and inclusion programs he calls “woke.” His isolationist views and his assertions that U.S. politicians back Israel because of their personal financial interests drew the ire of influential conservative commentators, including Sean Hannity of Fox News.
Ramaswamy insisted he had a nobler purpose: “I’ll keep us out of World War III and then revive national pride in this country.”
A weekend of ferocious winter weather could see low-temperature records set in the US heartland
A long weekend of ferocious winter weather loomed across the U.S. on Saturday, as a continuing wave of Arctic storms threatened to break low-temperature records in the nation's heartland, spread cold and snow from coast to coast and cast a chill over everything ranging from football playoffs to presidential campaigns.
As the three-day Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend began, the weather forecast for the U.S. was a crazy quilt of color-coded advisories, from an ice storm warning in Oregon to a blizzard warning in the northern Plains, high wind warnings in New Mexico and flood warnings in the mid-Atlantic.
Fallout from the storm included a 100-vehicle stall on Interstate 80 in Iowa, after semitrailers jackknifed on the slippery roadway and blocked traffic. Some cars were stuck in the same spot for five hours as blowing snow encircled the vehicles. Tow trucks had to be brought in to get them off the roadway.
“Many roads are drifted shut,” Sgt. Alex Dinkla of the Iowa State Patrol said. “They (road crews) are working the snow-blowers like crazy to get some roadways open, but they’re actually struggling. The minute they get them open, they’re actually blowing right back shut because of such high winds we’re seeing right now.”
Parts of Montana fell below minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 34 degrees Celsius) Saturday morning, and the National Weather Service said similar temperatures were expected as far as northern Kansas, with minus 50 F (minus 46 C) possible in the Dakotas.
Read: Winter weather kills 1, injures 8 in southern Germany
“Certainly, it's been very active across a large portion of the country. We've had, now, multiple back-to-back storms” parading across the country, weather service meteorologist Zach Taylor said. That typically happens at least a couple of times in the U.S. winter, he said, and “we're in the heart of it.”
Governors from New York to Louisiana warned residents to be prepared. Some states already had reported weather-related deaths earlier this week from avalanches in California and Idaho and cold exposure in Illinois' Chicago suburbs. In Wisconsin, a man died snow-blowing his driveway.
Power was out Saturday morning in hundreds of thousands of households and businesses, mainly in Michigan and Wisconsin, according to poweroutage.us. In Illinois, officials pleaded with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to stop sending migrants to Chicago, where city-run shelters were full and some new arrivals were staying in parked “warming buses.” Abbott refused, while urging Texans to get ready for a chill with ice on the way Monday.
In St. Louis, the National Weather Service warned of rare and “life-threatening” cold.
In Iowa, an electronic billboard read 3 degrees F( minus 16 degrees C) Saturday morning in the capital of Des Moines.
Des Moines residents Katy Becker, 26, and her fiance, Dalton Gustafson, 30, were hoping to fly to Florida for a trip to celebrate their engagement and Becker’s birthday on Jan. 16. They got snowed in, but will try again Sunday.
“We’ll trade the dusty snow for some sandy beaches,” Becker said.
“Negative 20 to 80 degrees — 100 degree flip in temperature,” Gustafson added.
The air temperature in parts of the state could dip as low as minus 14 F (minus 26 C) on Monday, when Iowa's caucuses kick off the U.S. presidential primary season. And that was to say nothing of the wind: Forecasters said it would be Wednesday before below-zero windchills go away.
Republican contenders Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and former President Donald Trump all canceled weekend campaign events because of the winter storm.
Iowa plow operators struggled Saturday to keep roads clear amid heavy snow and winds gusting up to 30 mph (48 km per hour), which blew snow back onto roads as soon as they were cleared. The Iowa Department of Transportation warned against travel across the state.
Read: Rain, snow fall as California braces for brunt of storm
Dinkla said troopers had handled 86 crashes and 535 motorist assists since Friday. Most of the assists were to help stalled cars and trucks get unstuck. Fifteen people have been hurt in accidents. In one wreck on an icy interstate highway, a semitrailer hit a state patrol car and virtually destroyed it. The trooper escaped injury.
Even snow-free roads aren’t safe.
“The thing that we’re seeing is that people think that roadways are clear in a lot of areas, but they’re not able to slow down because the roadways are a sheet of ice,” Dinkla said.
In South Dakota, the air temperature Saturday morning was minus 17 F (minus 27 C) at the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation, but a whipping wind of 30 mph (48 kph) made it feel like minus 48 F (minus 44 C). With a homeless shelter already at capacity, tribal leaders opened a gym for others needing shelter.
Near-record cold in Kansas City will make for a frigid NFL playoff game Saturday night, when the Chiefs host Miami. Fans will be allowed to bring in blankets and first-aid stations were set up at Arrowhead Stadium. The Buffalo Bills’ playoff game against the Pittsburgh Steelers was moved from Sunday to Monday because of dangerous weather conditions.
Coastal areas in southern Maine and New Hampshire were pounded by between 1 and 2 inches (2.5 to 5 cm) of rain on Saturday morning, causing some roads to flood, said Justin Arnott, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Maine. He said Portland, Maine, was also bracing for flooding from a potentially record high tide in the early afternoon.
Read also: At 7.4 degrees, Tetulia records lowest temperature so far this winter
Biden condemns white supremacy in a campaign speech at a church where Black people were killed
Courting Black voters he needs to win reelection, President Joe Biden on Monday denounced the “poison” of white supremacy in America, declaring at the site of a deadly racist church shooting in South Carolina that such ideology has no place in America, “not today, tomorrow or ever.”
Biden spoke from the pulpit of Mother Emanuel AME Church, where in 2015 nine Black parishioners were shot to death by the white stranger they had invited to join their Bible study. The Democratic president’s speech followed his blunt remarks last Friday on the eve of the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, in which he excoriated former President Donald Trump for “glorifying” rather than condemning political violence.
At Mother Emanuel, Biden said “the word of God was pierced by bullets of hate, of rage, propelled not just by gunpowder, but by a poison, a poison that has for too long haunted this nation."
That's "white supremacy,” he said, the view by some whites that they are superior to other races. “It is a poison, throughout our history, that's ripped this nation apart. This has no place in America. Not today, tomorrow or ever.”
It was a grim way to kick off a presidential campaign, particularly for someone known for his unfailing optimism and belief that American achievements are limitless. But it’s a reflection of the emphasis Biden and his campaign are placing on energizing Black voters amid deepening concerns among Democrats that the president could lose support from this critical constituency heading into the election.
Biden’s campaign advisers and aides hope the visit lays out the stakes of the race in unequivocal terms three years after the cultural saturation of Trump’s words and actions while he was president. It's a contrast they hope will be paramount to voters in 2024.
Biden also used his second major campaign event of the year to thank the state's Black voters. After an endorsement by Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn, one of the highest-ranking African Americans in the U.S. House, the state made Biden the winner of its Democratic presidential primary in 2020. That, in turn, set him on a path to become the party's nominee and defeat Trump to win the presidency.
“I owe you,” he said.
Biden was briefly interrupted when several people upset over by his staunch support for Israel in its war against Hamas called out that if he really cared about lives lost he would call for a cease-fire in Gaza to help innocent Palestinians who are being killed under Israel's bombardment. The chants of “cease-fire now” were drowned out by audience members chanting “four more years.”
The president also swiped at Republican presidential candidates Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, and Trump, without naming either one.
Haley was governor at the time of the shooting and gained national attention for her response, which included signing legislation into law removing the Confederate flag from the state Capitol. But she has been on the defensive recently for not explicitly naming slavery as the root cause of the Civil War when the question was posed at a campaign event. Her campaign responded Monday with a list of comments attributed to Biden that it said showed he's racially insensitive.
Biden called it a “lie” that the war was about states' rights. “So let me be clear, for those who don't seem to know: Slavery was the cause of the Civil War. There's no negotiation about that.”
Haley, speaking at a Fox News town hall on Monday, pushed back that it was “offensive” for Biden to give a political speech at the church. She also raised Biden’s ties to Democratic segregationist senators early in his career.
During his successful 2020 run for the White House, Biden faced criticism from fellow Democratic contenders for alluding to his work with Sens. James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia while trying to make a point about lost civility in national politics.
“I don’t need someone who palled around with segregationists in the '70s and has said racist comments all the way through his career lecturing me or anyone in South Carolina about what it means to have racism, slavery, or anything related to the Civil War,” Haley said.
On more current events, Biden noted the scores of failed attempts by Trump in the courts to overturn the 2020 election in an attempt to hold onto power, as well as the former president's embrace of the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
“Let me say what others cannot: We must reject political violence in America. Always, not sometimes. Always. It's never appropriate,” Biden said. He said “losers are taught to concede when they lose. And he's a loser,” meaning Trump.
It was June 17, 2015, when a 21-year-old white man walked into the church and, intending to ignite a race war, shot and killed nine Black parishioners and wounded one more. Biden was vice president when he attended the memorial service in Charleston.
Biden's aides and allies say the shootings are among the critical moments when the nation's political divide started to sharpen and crack. Though Trump, the current Republican presidential front-runner, was not in office at the time and has called the shooting “horrible,” Biden is seeking to tie Trump’s current rhetoric to such violence.
Two years after the attack, as the “Unite The Right" gathering of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, erupted in violent clashes with counterprotesters. Trump said merely that “there is blame on both sides."
Biden and his aides argue it’s all part of the same problem: Trump refused to condemn the actions of the white nationalists at that gathering. He’s repeatedly used rhetoric once used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country,” yet insisted he had no idea that one of the world’s most reviled and infamous figures had used similar words.
And Trump continues to repeat his false claims that he won the 2020 election, as well as his assertion that the Capitol rioters were patriotic and those serving prison time are “hostages.”
At Mother Emanuel, Biden revisited themes from the Jan. 6 anniversary speech he delivered Friday.
Biden has repeatedly suggested that democracy itself is on the ballot, asking whether it is still “America’s sacred cause.”
Trump, who faces 91 criminal charges stemming from his efforts to overturn his loss to Biden and three other felony cases, argues that Biden and other top Democrats are themselves seeking to undermine democracy by using the legal system to thwart the campaign of Biden's chief rival.
South Carolina is the first official Democratic nominating contest where Biden wants another strong showing.
In an interview with The Associated Press before Biden's appearance, Malcolm Graham, a brother of Charleston church victim Cynthia Graham-Hurd, said the threat of racism and hate-fueled violence is part of a needed national conversation about race and American democracy.
“Racism, hatred and discrimination continue to be the Achilles' heel of America, of our nation,” said Graham, a city councilman in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Certainly, what happened to the Emanual Nine years ago is a visible example of that. What happened in Buffalo, years later, where people were killed under similar circumstances, shows that racism and discrimination are still real and it’s even in our politics.”
After the speech, Biden met privately with religious leaders and family members and survivors of the church shooting. He also dropped in at Hannibal's Kitchen, a soul food restaurant, to shake hands.
Later Monday, Biden flew to Dallas to make a brief stop at a memorial service for Eddie Bernice Johnson, the influential former Texas congresswoman who died on New Year's Eve. Johnson was 89.
Biden said in a statement last week that he and Johnson had worked together during her 30 years in Congress and he was grateful for her friendship and partnership.
The Supreme Court will decide if Donald Trump can be kept off 2024 presidential ballots
The Supreme Court said Friday it will decide whether former President Donald Trump can be kept off the ballot because of his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, inserting the court squarely in the 2024 presidential campaign.
The justices acknowledged the need to reach a decision quickly, as voters will soon begin casting presidential primary ballots across the country. The court agreed to take up Trump’s appeal of a case from Colorado stemming from his role in the events that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Read: An election that could determine fate of American democracy: Biden starting campaign year
Underscoring the urgency, arguments will be held on Feb. 8, during what is normally a nearly monthlong winter break for the justices. The compressed timeframe could allow the court to produce a decision before Super Tuesday on March 5, when the largest number of delegates are up for grabs in a single day, including in Colorado.
Trump, speaking at a campaign event in Iowa, said: “All I want is fair. I just hope that they’re going to be fair.”
The court will be considering for the first time the meaning and reach of a provision of the 14th Amendment barring some people who “engaged in insurrection” from holding public office. The amendment was adopted in 1868, following the Civil War. It has been so rarely used that the nation’s highest court had no previous occasion to interpret it.
Colorado’s Supreme Court, by a 4-3 vote, ruled last month that Trump should not be on the Republican primary ballot. The decision was the first time the 14th Amendment was used to bar a presidential contender from the ballot.
Trump is separately appealing to state court a ruling by Maine’s Democratic secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, that he was ineligible to appear on that state’s ballot over his role in the Capitol attack. Both the Colorado Supreme Court and the Maine secretary of state’s rulings are on hold until the appeals play out.
The high court’s decision to intervene, which both sides called for, is the most direct involvement in a presidential election since Bush v. Gore in 2000, when a conservative majority effectively decided the election for Republican George W. Bush. Only Justice Clarence Thomas remains from that court.
Three of the nine Supreme Court justices were appointed by Trump, though they have repeatedly ruled against him in 2020 election-related lawsuits, as well as his efforts to keep documents related to Jan. 6 and his tax returns from being turned over to congressional committees.
At the same time, Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh have been in the majority of conservative-driven decisions that overturned the five-decade-old constitutional right to abortion, expanded gun rights and struck down affirmative action in college admissions.
Some Democratic lawmakers have called on Thomas to step aside from the case because of his wife’s support for Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. Thomas is unlikely to agree, and there was every indication Friday that all the justices are participating. Thomas has recused himself from only one other case related to the 2020 election, involving former law clerk John Eastman, and so far the people trying to disqualify Trump haven’t asked him to recuse.
The 4-3 Colorado decision cites a ruling by Gorsuch when he was a federal judge in that state. That Gorsuch decision upheld Colorado’s move to strike a naturalized citizen from the state’s presidential ballot because he was born in Guyana and didn’t meet the constitutional requirements to run for office. The court found that Trump likewise doesn’t meet the qualifications due to his role in the U.S. Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021. That day, the Republican president had held a rally outside the White House and exhorted his supporters to “fight like hell” before they walked to the Capitol.
Read: Biden, Trump poised for a potential rematch that could shake American politics
The two-sentence provision in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states that anyone who swore an oath to uphold the constitution and then “engaged in insurrection” against it is no longer eligible for state or federal office. After Congress passed an amnesty for most of the former confederates the measure targeted in 1872, the provision fell into disuse until dozens of suits were filed to keep Trump off the ballot this year. Only the one in Colorado was successful.
Trump had asked the court to overturn the Colorado ruling without even hearing arguments. “The Colorado Supreme Court decision would unconstitutionally disenfranchise millions of voters in Colorado and likely be used as a template to disenfranchise tens of millions of voters nationwide,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
They argue that Trump should win on many grounds, including that the events of Jan. 6 did not constitute an insurrection. Even if it did, they wrote, Trump himself had not engaged in insurrection. They also contend that the insurrection clause does not apply to the president and that Congress must act, not individual states.
Critics of the former president who sued in Colorado agreed that the justices should step in now and resolve the issue, as do many election law experts.
“This case is of utmost national importance. And given the upcoming presidential primary schedule, there is no time to wait for the issues to percolate further. The Court should resolve this case on an expedited timetable, so that voters in Colorado and elsewhere will know whether Trump is indeed constitutionally ineligible when they cast their primary ballots,” lawyers for the Colorado plaintiffs told the Supreme Court.
The issue of whether Trump can be on the ballot is not the only matter related to the former president or Jan. 6 that has reached the high court. The justices last month declined a request from special counsel Jack Smith to swiftly take up and rule on Trump’s claims that he is immune from prosecution in a case charging him with plotting to overturn the 2020 presidential election, though the issue could be back before the court soon depending on the ruling of a Washington-based appeals court.
And the court has said that it intends to hear an appeal that could upend hundreds of charges stemming from the Capitol riot, including against Trump.
An election that could determine fate of American democracy: Biden starting campaign year
President Joe Biden is starting the campaign year by evoking the Revolutionary War to mark the third anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and visiting the South Carolina church where a white gunman massacred Black parishioners — seeking to present in the starkest possible terms an election he argues could determine the fate of American democracy.
On Friday, Biden will travel to near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where George Washington and the Continental Army spent a bleak winter nearly 250 years ago. There, he'll decry former President Donald Trump for the riot by a mob of his supporters who overran the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Biden, Trump poised for a potential rematch that could shake American politics
Three days later, the president will visit Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, where nine people were shot and killed in a June 2015 white supremacist attack.
Biden's kicking off 2024 by delving into some of the country’s darkest moments rather than an upbeat affirmation of his record is meant to clarify for voters what his team sees as the stakes of November's election. During both events, he will characterize his predecessor as a serious threat to the nation's founding principles, arguing that Trump — who has built a commanding early lead in the Republican presidential primary — will seek to undermine U.S. democracy should he win a second term.
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“We are running a campaign like the fate of our democracy depends on it, because it does,” Biden reelection campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said on a conference call with reporters.
Trump, who faces 91 criminal charges stemming from his efforts to overturn his loss to Biden and three other felony cases, argues that Biden and top Democrats are themselves seeking to undermine democracy by using the legal system to thwart the campaign of his chief rival.
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“Joe Biden and his allies are a real and compelling threat to our Democracy,” Trump campaign senior advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles wrote in a memo this week. “In fact, in a way never seen before in our history, they are waging a war against it.”
Biden's channeling of personal grief and national traumas, often into calls for action, has become his political calling card. Tragedies have defined the president's own life, from the 1972 car crash that killed his first wife and infant daughter to his son Beau's death from brain cancer at age 46 in 2015.
In 2020, Biden won the White House by promising to heal the “soul of the nation” after he said that seeing hate groups marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, with torches and swastikas in 2017 propelled him to run.
Rather than promising to bridge the nation’s partisan divide as he did four years ago, Biden will instead stress how Trump and top supporters of his “Make America Great Again” movement pose existential threats.
The president’s reelection campaign has publicized Trump’s repeating rhetoric used by Adolf Hitler when he suggested that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country,” as well as the former president joking that he’d only seek to serve as a dictator on the first day of his second term.
“The leading candidate of a major party in the United States is running for president so that he can systematically dismantle and destroy our democracy," said Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler.
Even if another Republican beats Trump in the GOP primary, Biden's reelection team argues the victor would be similar enough to the former president that the campaign's themes would change little.
“Anybody who wins the MAGA Republican nomination is going to have done so by hard-tacking to the most extreme positions that we have seen in recent American history,” Tyler said.
The Jan. 5 address at Montgomery County Community College was initially scheduled to be delivered a day later, on the three-year anniversary of the Capitol attack, but was moved due to inclement weather forecast for the area.
A majority of Americans are concerned about the future of democracy in the upcoming election — though they differ along party lines on whom poses the threat.
The White House said that Biden had lunch Wednesday with historians and scholars to discuss “ongoing threats to democracy and democratic institutions both here in America and around the world.”
The Biden campaign also promised it would be “out in full force” to mark the Jan. 22 anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide for nearly 50 years, before the high court overturned the ruling in June 2022.
Biden's team has argued that abortion access and democracy are intertwined in the upcoming election — building on the president's warnings about Trump and “MAGA extremists” that helped Democrats defy historical precedent by retaining control of the Senate and only narrowly losing the House majority to Republicans in the 2022 midterms.
Harvard president Claudine Gay resigns amid plagiarism claims, backlash from antisemitism testimony
Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned Tuesday amid plagiarism accusations and criticism over testimony at a congressional hearing where she was unable to say unequivocally that calls on campus for the genocide of Jews would violate the school's conduct policy.
Gay is the second Ivy League president to resign in the past month following the congressional testimony — Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned Dec. 9.
Gay, Harvard's first Black president, announced her departure just months into her tenure in a letter to the Harvard community.
Following the congressional hearing, Gay's academic career came under intense scrutiny by conservative activists who unearthed several instances of alleged plagiarism in her 1997 doctoral dissertation. The Harvard Corporation, Harvard's governing board, initially rallied behind Gay, saying a review of her scholarly work turned up "a few instances of inadequate citation" but no evidence of research misconduct.
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Days later, the Harvard Corporation said it found two additional examples of "duplicative language without appropriate attribution." The board said Gay would update her dissertation and request corrections.
The Harvard Corporation said the resignation came "with great sadness" and thanked Gay for her "deep and unwavering commitment to Harvard and to the pursuit of academic excellence."
Alan M. Garber, provost and chief academic officer, will serve as interim president until Harvard finds a replacement, the board said in a statement. Garber, an economist and physician, has served as provost for 12 years.
Gay's resignation was celebrated by the conservatives who put her alleged plagiarism in the national spotlight — with additional plagiarism accusations surfacing as recently as Monday in The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication.
Christopher Rufo, an activist who has helped rally the GOP against higher education, said he's "glad she's gone."
"Rather than take responsibility for minimizing antisemitism, committing serial plagiarism, intimidating the free press, and damaging the institution, she calls her critics racist," Rufo said on X, formerly Twitter. "This is the poison" of diversity, equity and inclusion ideology, said Rufo, who has led conservative attacks on DEI both in business and in education.
Gay, in her letter, said it has been "distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus."
But Gay, who is returning to the school's faculty, added "it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge."
Yoel Zimmermann, a visiting research undergrad from Munich, Germany, studying physics at Harvard, said that as a Jewish student he's noticed fellow members of the Jewish community have felt uncomfortable with the climate on campus.
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"I think it was about time that Claudine Gay resigned," Zimmerman said. "She just did too many things wrong, especially with her testimony in Congress. I think that was just the kind of final tipping point that should have led to her removal immediately."
Supporters of Gay lamented her resignation.
"Racist mobs won't stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism," award-winning author Ibram X. Kendi, who survived scrutiny of an antiracist research center he founded at Boston University, said in an Instagram post.
The Rev. Al Sharpton in a statement called pressure for Gay to resign "an attack on every Black woman in this country who's put a crack in the glass ceiling" and an "assault on the health, strength, and future of diversity, equity, and inclusion."
Critics welcomed her decision.
House Committee on Education and the Workforce Chairwoman Rep. Virginia Foxx called Gay's resignation welcome news but said the problems at Harvard are much larger than one leader.
"Postsecondary education is in a tailspin," the North Carolina Republican said in a statement. "There has been a hostile takeover of postsecondary education by political activists, woke faculty, and partisan administrators."
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, in a statement on X, also weighed in on Gay's resignation.
"A little context. A failure in leadership and denial of antisemitism have a price. I hope that the esteemed Harvard University will learn from this dismal conduct," he wrote.
Gay, Magill and MIT's president, Sally Kornbluth, came under fire last month for their lawyerly answers to a line of questioning from New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, who asked whether "calling for the genocide of Jews" would violate the colleges' codes of conduct.
The three presidents had been called before the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce to answer accusations that universities were failing to protect Jewish students amid rising fears of antisemitism worldwide and fallout from Israel's intensifying war in Gaza, which faces heightened criticism for the mounting Palestinian death toll.
Gay said it depended on the context, adding that when "speech crosses into conduct, that violates our policies." The answer faced swift backlash from Republican and some Democratic lawmakers as well as the White House. The hearing was parodied in the opening skit on "Saturday Night Live."
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Gay later apologized, telling The Crimson student newspaper that she got caught up in a heated exchange at the House committee hearing and failed to properly denounce threats of violence against Jewish students.
"What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged," Gay said.
The episode marred Gay's tenure at Harvard — she became president in July — and sowed discord at the Ivy League campus. Rabbi David Wolpe later resigned from a new committee on antisemitism created by Gay, saying in a post on X that "events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped."
The House committee announced days after the hearing that it would investigate the policies and disciplinary procedures at Harvard, MIT and Penn. Separate federal civil rights investigations were previously opened at Harvard, Penn and several other universities in response to complaints submitted to the U.S. Education Department.
Biden, Trump poised for a potential rematch that could shake American politics
U.S. presidential elections have been rocked in recent years by economic disaster, stunning gaffes, secret video and a pandemic. But for all the tumult that defined those campaigns, the volatility surrounding this year’s presidential contest has few modern parallels, posing profound challenges to the future of American democracy.
Not since the Supreme Court effectively decided the 2000 campaign in favor of Republican George W. Bush has the judiciary been so intertwined with presidential politics.
In the coming weeks, the high court is expected to weigh whether states can ban former President Donald Trump from the ballot for his role in leading the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Meanwhile, a federal appeals court is weighing Trump’s argument that he’s immune from prosecution.
The maneuvers are unfolding as prosecutors from New York to Washington and Atlanta move forward with 91 indictments across four criminal cases involving everything from Trump’s part in the insurrection to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his hush money paid to a porn actress.
Depending on how Trump’s appeals play out, he could be due in court as early as March 4, the day before Super Tuesday, raising the unprecedented prospect that he could close in on the GOP nomination from a courtroom.
On the Democratic side, President Joe Biden is seeking reelection as the high inflation that defined much of his first term appears to be easing. But that has done little to assuage restless voters or ease widespread concerns in both parties that, at 81, he’s simply too old for the job.
And at least three serious candidates who have launched outsider presidential bids threaten to scramble the campaign and eat into the support from independent voters who were critical to Biden’s success in 2020.
Facing such uncertainty, few expect the traditional rules of politics to apply in 2024. Jim Messina, who managed former President Barack Obama’s reelection, said Trump could very well defeat Biden in the fall, even if the former president is in prison.
“We just don’t know,” Messina said. “Everyone in the world knows, especially me, that this election is going to be really, really close.”
Implications for abortion, immigration and U.S. role in the world
The results will have long-term implications on everything from the future of abortion rights and immigration policy to the role of the U.S. in the world. A Trump victory would raise the possibility of the U.S. largely abandoning Ukraine as it seeks to repel Russia’s invasion. Domestic politics could also test Biden’s commitment to Israel, a policy that threatens to erode his standing with young voters and people of color who are critical elements of his coalition.
One of the few certainties at this point is that Biden is a virtual lock to be the Democratic nominee again, facing only token opposition in this year’s primary despite overwhelming concerns within his own party about his physical and mental fitness. And though a few rivals are fighting furiously to stop Trump, he is well positioned to win the GOP nomination for the third consecutive election.
The strength of the GOP opposition to Trump will become more clear on Jan. 15 when the Iowa caucuses launch the nomination process. Trump holds a commanding lead in most national polls, although former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are fighting to stop him.
That hasn’t been easy, however, as DeSantis has struggled to connect with voters and has embraced culture war topics that often left him competing for the same base of support as Trump. And Haley’s pitch as a more sensible, moderate candidate was threatened last week when she was pressed on the cause of the Civil War and didn’t mention slavery.
Allies of DeSantis and Haley privately concede that their best chance to wrestle the nomination away from Trump would come in a long-shot push for a contested convention in Wisconsin in July.
Many leaders in both parties are already convinced that Trump will be the GOP nominee. More than 90 House Republicans, 18 senators and seven governors have endorsed Trump. Haley and DeSantis have secured the endorsements of just six House Republicans, no senators and two governors combined.
“This will be one of the earliest primaries wrapped up in my lifetime,” Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who endorsed Trump back in November 2022, said in an interview. “I’m already focused on the general election. ... There is going to be a political earthquake next November.”
Biden vs. Trump
Public polling strongly suggests that voters do not want a rematch between Trump and Biden.
Most U.S. adults overall (56%) would be “very” or “somewhat” dissatisfied with Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024, according to a poll conducted last month by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. A similar majority (58%) said they would be very or somewhat dissatisfied with Trump as the GOP’s pick.
Perhaps because of such apathy, some voters simply don’t believe Biden and Trump will end up on the general election ballot, despite strong evidence to the contrary. That’s an idea that conservative strategist Sarah Longwell, who founded the Republican Accountability Project, says she hears regularly during weekly focus groups with voters across the political spectrum.
“Voters really aren’t thinking about it, so they don’t see the thing that’s coming right at us — the most likely scenario, which is Trump vs. Biden,” Longwell said. “But Trump is so dangerous. ... I wish the level of urgency from everybody matched the reality of where we are headed.”
Threats to democracy
While concerns about Biden are centered on his age, Trump has increasingly embraced authoritarian messages that serve as clear warnings of his plans to dismantle democratic norms if he returns to the White House.
Echoing strongmen leaders throughout history, Trump has framed his campaign as one of retribution and has spoken openly about using the power of government to pursue his political enemies. He has repeatedly harnessed rhetoric once used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He said on Fox News last month that he would not be a dictator “ except for day one. ” And he shared a word cloud last week to his social media account highlighting words like, “revenge,” “power” and “dictatorship.”
Biden, like his party more broadly, has leaned into concerns about the future of democracy should Trump return to the White House, but that has done little to improve his standing. Early polls reveal weakness among core segments of his coalition, including voters of color and young people.
People on Biden’s team do not fear that his base will defect to Trump in the general election, but they privately worry some of the Democratic president’s supporters may not vote at all. They’re betting that Biden’s achievements, which include landmark legislation on gun control, climate change and infrastructure, will eventually help overcome pervasive concerns about his age.
Ultimately, however, Biden’s campaign believes that voters will rally behind the president once they fully understand that Trump could realistically return to the White House.
‘This election will be a choice’
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, who sits on Biden’s advisory council, said the president’s reelection campaign “knows it can’t take any vote for granted,” which is why the campaign has already invested heavily in efforts to mobilize Biden’s diverse coalition.
“This election will be a choice — a choice between a president who has delivered historic results for the American people and someone who poses an existential threat to our democracy and freedoms,” Dickens said. “We will win in November once we fully make the case, explain the stakes and make the choice clear.”
Meanwhile, there is a sense of deep uncertainty on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire, where Republican presidential candidates in particular have been showering primary voters with attention for much of the last year.
Rodney Martell, a 65-year-old Republican from Loudon, New Hampshire, said he’s ready for the voting to begin. He’s supporting Haley’s primary bid, but said he’d support Trump in the general election if he had no other choice — even if Trump is a convicted felon.
Martell said he doubts the 2024 election will ultimately be a rematch of Trump and Biden, however: “Honestly, if it comes to that kind of race again, I think it could get pretty ugly.”
More than 1,000 miles to the west, Susie Fortuna offered a similar assessment during a recent Haley campaign event in Coralville, Iowa. Fortuna lives in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, but she was in Iowa to visit family.
She isn’t convinced that Biden and Trump will emerge as their party’s nominees, either. The political year ahead, she said, feels “unsettling.”
“I feel like there are things out there that we don’t know yet, to be honest,” Fortuna said.
3 killed and several wounded in separate shootings early New Year's Day in Los Angeles area
Two people were killed and eight others were wounded in a shooting early New Year's Day at a party in a commercial neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles, authorities said.
Officers responding to reports of a shooting around 1 a.m. Monday heard gunfire and found a crowd fleeing the area and several wounded people lying on the street and sidewalk, police said in a news release.
A man and woman died at the scene, police said. Officials initially said three people had been hospitalized but an afternoon update reported eight wounded. Their conditions weren't known Monday evening.
Investigators believe the shooting stemmed from a dispute at the party, held in an industrial area with warehouses and commercial buildings. No information on any suspects was immediately available.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department was investigating a separate shooting that killed a woman and wounded four other people early Monday in the city of Hawthorne.
One of the victims was hospitalized in critical condition and the three others were listed as stable, KABC-TV reported.
There were no arrests and no information about suspects.