Hillary Clinton should relinquish her role at Queen's, challenge Kneecap on stage over Gaza... and see how far that gets her
Donald Trump's dubious recent boast about 'total obliteration' of Iran's nuclear facilities made headlines, but he wasn't the first leading figure in US politics to coin that highly inflammatory phrase.
No siree: some 17 years ago, a high-profile Democrat uttered this on Good Morning America: 'I want Iranians to know that... in the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them...'
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NBC News
3 hours ago
- NBC News
A red-state Democrat test-drives a 2028 message: From the Politics Desk
Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team's latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail. In today's edition, Alexandra Marquez files a dispatch from the not-so-subtle 2028 shadow primary campaign trail. Plus, Jonathan Allen explores what the Jeffrey Epstein files fight reveals about the future of the MAGA movement — and Donald Trump's role in it. — Adam Wollner A red-state Democrat test-drives a 2028 message GREENVILLE, S.C. — In an early preview of a potential 2028 presidential campaign, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear hit the road across South Carolina this week, testing a message focused on how to grow the Democratic coalition. Beshear laid out a blueprint for the party to win back rural voters, union voters, independent voters and even Republicans — music to the ears of Democrats still feeling the sting of 2024's losses and eager to hear about how the party can rise again. 'The actions of the Trump administration are providing a huge opportunity for Democrats to go out and regain the trust of the American people to be the party of common sense, common ground and getting things done,' Beshear, 47, told union members gathered at the South Carolina AFL-CIO convention in Greenville. 'When we deliver and make people's lives better, they're willing to vote in different ways. They're willing to support different people, and that's where we've got to be,' added Beshear. Red-state credentials: At stop after stop, Beshear noted that he knows how to win voters in traditionally Republican areas. After all, he's done it twice. The first time was in 2019, when he won his first gubernatorial election by less than half a percentage point, beating GOP Gov. Matt Bevin. In 2023, Beshear improved his margins, beating then-state Attorney General Daniel Cameron, a Republican, by 5 points. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump won Kentucky by almost 26 points in 2020 and by over 30 points in 2024. South Carolina focus: Though he insisted that his travel to South Carolina came about partly because of his son's baseball tournament near Charleston, Beshear hasn't been coy about his presidential aspirations before arriving in the state that voted first in last year's Democratic presidential primaries. In an interview with 'Meet the Press' just days before he arrived in South Carolina, Beshear said he would ' take a look ' at launching a presidential campaign in 2028. He's at least the fourth Democratic elected official to publicly visit the state this year, arriving just a week after California Gov. Gavin Newsom and several weeks after Govs. Wes Moore of Maryland and Tim Walz of Minnesota. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., also has an event planned in the state later this week. Analysis by Jonathan Allen Whatever is in the Jeffrey Epstein files, Americans haven't learned much about the content because the Justice Department hasn't released them and appears to be in no rush to do so. But the fight over them has told the public a lot about the future of the MAGA movement and President Donald Trump's place in it. The truth that grows more glaringly obvious with each passing day is that Trump is a temporary leader of a modern Republican base that fashioned itself in his image. But countless elected officials and right-wing influencers hope to remain prominent once Trump has exited the presidency. Their timeline simply isn't the same as his. These folks, from Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk to megabroadcasters Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, simply can't afford to alienate the hardcore MAGA base that is calling for transparency on a matter that speaks directly to their antipathy for powerful institutions and players. That's the most logical explanation for echoing criticism of Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi. It's not that Trump's longtime allies don't support his presidency — Kirk went so far as to say this week that pushing the Epstein issue is done out of love for Trump — but they aren't about to risk their own credibility with his voters. Trump, who watched some of his most prolific backers distance themselves from him on arming Ukraine and bombing Iran, can expect more of the same as his second term progresses. Over time, ambitious figures in the MAGA wing of the GOP are sure to cling tighter to the base than to Trump. That's the new reality for a president who faces a constitutional bar to running for another term. The lesson for him is that despite being the most powerful person in the world, his political capital will continue to diminish each time he picks a fight with his own movement. The Epstein files represent the first major MAGA rift of his second term. If he's not careful, it won't be the last. DOJ fires Maurene Comey, daughter of James Comey and a prosecutor in Sean Combs' and Ghislaine Maxwell's cases, by Ryan J. Reilly, Jonathan Dienst, David Rohde and Zoë Richards
NBC News
3 hours ago
- NBC News
Republican Winsome Earle-Sears shakes up campaign staff in Virginia governor's race
Virginia Republican Winsome Earle-Sears' gubernatorial campaign said Thursday that it demoted one key staffer and parted ways with another as it lags in the polls and fundraising less than four months out from the general election. Will Archer, a pastor with no prior major political experience, was removed from his post as Earle-Sears' campaign manager, Mark Harris, a general consultant for the campaign, said on a call with reporters. Archer will remain on the campaign in a role that focuses on voter turnout in the Northern Virginia area, said Harris, who also indicated there was not a plan to announce a new campaign manager imminently. 'Will, who was the campaign manager, is transitioning out,' Harris said. Asked when a new campaign manager would be announced, Harris replied, 'When we decide to let you guys know.' Harris also told reporters that Richard Wagner, Earle-Sears' political director, has left the campaign. 'Richard has moved on to another race,' Harris said. The Washington Post first reported news of Archer's new role in the campaign. The staff shakeup comes as Earle-Sears, the state's Republican lieutenant governor, has struggled to gain traction against Democrat Abigail Spanberger, a former congresswoman, in the race to succeed GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin. A poll released Wednesday by Virginia Commonwealth University found Spanberger leading Earle-Sears 49% to 37% among registered voters. Those results were outside of the poll's margin of error of plus or minus 4.16 percentage points. And new fundraising reports released this week showed Spanberger with an advantage over Earle-Sears. Spanberger raised $4.3 million during the most recent reporting period, June 6 to June 30, and had $15.2 million in cash on hand. By comparison, Earle-Sears raised $2.4 million and had $4.5 million in cash on hand. Republicans have criticized Earle-Sears' campaign, saying that it lacks discipline and consistency. In interviews last month, Republican operatives in Virginia and elsewhere grumbled that the campaign has lacked a central message. But they also cautioned that it remained far too early to write off Earle-Sears — a message that was reiterated by the campaign itself on Thursday. 'We are at the very beginning of this fight,' said Harris, who noted that Youngkin won four years ago after starting the race behind. 'Our goal is to win and beat Abigail Spanberger,' he said. 'I know that everyone is treating this race much like a fait accompli, and I think much like that was wrong in 2021, once again it will be wrong in 2025.' Harris acknowledged that, 'we definitely are the underdog' but that 'there is a clear path to victory for us to win.' 'We need high turnout. We have to work hard to get high turnout,' he said.
Telegraph
3 hours ago
- Telegraph
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is an embarrassment to the Democrats
It has been some time since US President Donald Trump has asked his supporters 'are you tired of winning yet?', but in recent weeks the president has piled up so many victories at the Supreme Court that keeping up with them all could well prove an exhausting task. The judiciary has not always been so amenable to Trump. In the months after his return to office in January, dozens of Democrat-appointed judges, and some Republican-appointed ones, too, blocked or stayed numerous policies and directives from the executive branch, obstructing much of Trump's agenda and the electoral mandate behind it. Almost all of those rulings, however, were issued by lower-level federal district courts or mid-level circuit courts. At the Supreme Court – America's final court of appeal – matters have been rather different. Despite much frustration over adverse lower court rulings, Trump's Justice Department has deftly appealed many of them, frequently via the Supreme Court's emergency petition procedure. Emergency rulings are generally handed down without a written justification explaining the Court's legal reasoning and without a statement of how its nine justices voted, though the justices are free to issue such statements and publicly declare how they voted. This gambit of appealing to the Supreme Court on an emergency basis has paid off. In rapid succession, the court has ruled that Trump can legally deport illegal immigrants en masse, including to places other than their countries of origin. It chose not to immediately quash his inauguration day executive order ending birthright citizenship – a longstanding policy that automatically confers citizenship on all children born on US soil to foreign parents. The Court has temporarily allowed Trump's Defence Department to ban transgendered individuals from military service. It has permitted the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) to examine private Social Security records and avoid scrutiny under the Freedom of Information Act. It has upheld Trump's dismissal of appointed officials from independent government boards. Last week, a hotly contested emergency ruling allowed the president to sack large numbers of federal government employees, whose jobs had been temporarily saved by lower-level court injunctions. Perhaps most significantly, the Supreme Court has limited the ability of lower-level federal courts to issue universal injunctions, a much-needed step towards stopping relatively junior activist judges from assuming the power to effectively dictate national policy. Even in cases that continue to be adjudicated in the federal court system, which can take years to conclude, an emergency ruling's immediate effect can often render continuing litigation moot. Illegal immigrants who are deported to distant countries are unlikely to return, whether or not they eventually prevail in the US legal system. Sacked federal workers might, even if successful in litigation, find it hard to go back to radically altered workplaces in which their positions might well have been eliminated. Dismissed federal board appointees who prevail in court will almost certainly have been replaced by new officials by the time they theoretically win, leaving them with little more than a moral victory. Even so, many Democrats are still looking to the Supreme Court for salvation. Divided, demoralised, and unpopular, they seem to believe that they have found an effective leader of the resistance in the one justice who has proved willing to oppose practically everything the president stands for. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was nominated by Joe Biden to fulfil a cynical campaign promise to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court. The former president made that pledge reportedly because he required the support of South Carolina kingmaker Rep Jim Clyburn to win the decisive South Carolina primary in his 2020 quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. An early sign that she was a poor choice came during her Senate confirmation hearings. She refused to provide a definition of the word 'woman', despite Biden being quite open that she had been chosen in part because of her own sex. Although Jackson has since reliably turned up among the dissenting faction in many of the recent pro-Trump Supreme Court rulings, even her own judicial colleagues have been unable to hide their disdain for some of her arguments. In the case that reined in the universal applicability of lower federal court decisions, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority of the Court, said she found Jackson's arguments 'extreme' and 'at odds with more than two centuries' worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself'. In the case evaluating whether Trump could dismiss federal employees, in which Jackson cast the only dissenting vote, her Democrat-appointed counterpart Sonia Sotomayor dismissed her argument in short order. Even Jackson doesn't seem to claim any particular interest in trenchant legal analysis. 'I just feel that I have a wonderful opportunity to tell people in my opinions how I feel about the issues. And that's what I try to do', she bizarrely told ABC News in a recent interview. If Democrats 'feel' she can lead any form of opposition, they would do well to remember that their last presidential candidate largely based her campaign on 'joy' – and lost.
