Beshear: Democrats will ‘have strong candidates' in rural states
'Your name frequently comes up as a contender for the 2028 Democratic primary for president. You said, 'I'll think about it after next year.' What will make you decide that that's going to be a yes, you'll run for president?' CNN's Dana Bash asked Beshear on 'State of the Union.'
'So, my primary obligation and what I'm putting all my energy towards is to be the best governor of Kentucky that I can be,' the Bluegrass State governor responded.
'Next year, I'll also be the head of the Democratic Governors Association. And I think, especially in these rural states where Republican governors have not spoken up whatsoever to stop this devastating bill, we're going to have strong candidates,' he added, talking about President Trump's 'big, beautiful bill.'
'We're going to win a lot of elections. And, hopefully, that paragraph about who's speculated in '28 gets bigger because we've brought in more leaders,' he continued.
Beshear is notable among Democratic governors for holding his state's top job in deep-red Kentucky. He was also considered a possible running mate for Vice President Harris after former President Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race.
The Kentucky governor also slammed the Trump megabill in a post on the social platform X on Thursday, the day it passed the House.
'The passage of the 'big, ugly bill' marks a sad day for our country and commonwealth. This bill risks 200,000 Kentuckians' lives, the jobs of 20,000 health-care workers, 35 rural hospitals and our economy,' Beshear said in his post.
'Kentucky deserves better. I'm going to keep fighting for our people.'
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Time Magazine
8 minutes ago
- Time Magazine
Netanyahu Backs Trump's Vision for Redeveloping Gaza
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday backed a proposal by President Donald Trump to relocate Palestinians from Gaza and turn the war-ravaged coastal enclave into a luxury waterfront development—a plan that has drawn international condemnation and could further complicate fragile cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas. 'It's called free choice,' Netanyahu told reporters before a private dinner with the President in the White House. 'If people want to stay, they can stay. But if they want to leave, they should be able to leave.' Netanyahu added that Israel was working 'very closely' with the United States to identify countries that would be willing to accept displaced Palestinians from Gaza, and suggested that discussions with several nations were already 'getting close' to fruition. Trump, seated across from the Israeli leader, said that 'we've had great cooperation' from countries surrounding Israel and added that 'something good will happen.' Netanyahu's comments marked the most explicit endorsement yet of a controversial idea Trump first floated earlier this year: that Gaza could be emptied of its Palestinian population and redeveloped into what he once called the 'Riviera of the Middle East.' The proposal was met with quick backlash from U.S. allies, Arab leaders, and human rights organizations, who said it amounted to ethnic cleansing under the guise of economic development. The White House later attempted to walk back elements of Trump's language. But Netanyahu's renewed support for the vision—paired with his insistence on rejecting the creation of a Palestinian state—offers a stark preview of the kind of 'peace' he and Trump may ultimately seek: one in which the Palestinian population is displaced or resettled abroad. It also represents a sharp break from decades of U.S. policy, which has long held that the path toward peace in the Middle East must include a two-state solution—an independent Palestinian state existing alongside Israel. Netanyahu made clear that any peace deal to end the war with Hamas should not include the recognition of a Palestinian state.x 'I think the Palestinians should have all the powers to govern themselves, but none of the powers to threaten us,' Netanyahu said. 'And that means that certain powers like overall security will always remain in our hands.' 'We'll work out a peace with our Palestinian neighbors, those who don't want to destroy us,' he added, 'and we'll work out a peace in which our security, the sovereign power of security, always remains in our hands. Now, people will say, 'It's not a complete state, it's not a state. It's not that — we don't care.' Negotiators will meet in Doha later this week for cease-fire and hostage talks. Though Trump has said he believes a deal could be reached 'during the coming week,' Netanyahu's endorsement of mass relocation could deepen mistrust among Palestinian negotiators and potentially derail progress. 'It shouldn't be a prison,' Netanyahu said of Gaza, which had a pre-war population of 2 million. 'It should be an open place.' The war in Gaza, now in its 21st month, began after Hamas launched a terror attack on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages. Since then, Israel's military campaign has killed over 57,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, and displaced more than 80% of the population. U.N. agencies warn that half a million people face imminent famine. The Prime Minister's remarks echoed a growing sentiment within his far-right coalition, where calls to permanently remove Palestinians from Gaza have become more open in recent months. The private dinner capped a day of closed-door diplomacy for Netanyahu, who also met earlier with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump's foreign envoy Steve Witkoff. Netanyahu is scheduled to meet with House Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday. The two leaders appeared to use the dinner to take a victory lap after the United States and Israel carried out coordinated airstrikes on Iran's nuclear facilities last month. Before taking questions from reporters, Netanyahu said that he had nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Yahoo
11 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Who's Running American Defense Policy?
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Remember when the United States engaged in an act of war against a country of some 90 million people by sending its B-2 bombers into battle? No? Well, you can be forgiven for letting it slip your mind; after all, it was more than two weeks ago. Besides, you've probably been distracted by more recent news. The United States has halted some weapons shipments to Ukraine, despite the increased Russian bombing of Ukrainian cities as Moscow continues its campaign of mass murder. Fortunately, last Thursday Donald Trump got right on the horn to his friend in Russia, President Vladimir Putin. Unfortunately, Putin apparently told Trump to pound sand. 'I didn't make any progress with him today at all,' Trump said to reporters before boarding Air Force One. Meanwhile, the president has decided to review AUKUS, the 2021 security pact between the United States, Australia, and Great Britain, a move that caught U.S. diplomats (and their colleagues in Canberra and London) off guard and has generated concern about the future of the arrangement. Technically, the president didn't decide to review it, but rather his handpicked secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, did. Well, it wasn't him, either; apparently, the review was ordered by someone you've likely never heard of: Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, a career-long Beltway denizen who initiated the process on his own. But at least someone's keeping an eye on Asia: CNN is reporting, based on a Ukrainian intelligence report, that North Korea is planning to send as many as 30,000 more soldiers to assist Russia in its war of conquest. Of course, this is largely based on a single source, but Pyongyang has already sent at least 10,000 troops into the European battlefield over the past nine months, and things are going poorly for Russia's hapless conscripts, so perhaps a deal really is in the works to provide the Kremlin with another shipment of foreign cannon fodder. All of this raises an obvious question: Who's running America's foreign and defense policies? It's not the president, at least not on most issues. Trump's interest in foreign policy, as with so many other topics, is capricious and episodic at best. He flits away from losing issues, leaving them to others. He promised to end the war in Ukraine in a day, but after conceding that making peace is 'more difficult than people would have any idea,' the president has since shrugged and given up. It's not Marco Rubio—you may remember that he is technically the secretary of state, but he seems to have little power in this White House. It's not Hegseth, who can't seem to stop talking about 'lethality' and trans people long enough to deliver a real briefing that isn't just a fawning performance for Trump. (As bad as Hegseth can be, he seems almost restrained next to the State Department's spokesperson, Tammy Bruce, whose comments about Trump—she thanks God for him from her podium and says he is 'saving this country and the world'—have an unsettling Pyongyang-newsreader lilt to them.) It's not the national security adviser. That's also Rubio. Apparently, American defense policy is being run by Bridge Colby, and perhaps a few other guys somewhere in the greater Washington metropolitan area. Their influence is not always obvious. The order to halt shipments, for example, came from Hegseth, but the original idea was reportedly driven by Colby, who backed the moves because, according to NBC, he has 'long advocated scaling back the U.S. commitment in Ukraine and shifting weapons and resources to the Pacific region to counter China.' (Per the NBC reporting, an analysis from the Joint Staff showed that Colby is wrong to think of this as an either-or situation; the Ukrainians need weapons that the U.S. wouldn't even be using in a conflict in the Pacific.) In this administration, the principals are either incompetent or detached from most of the policy making, and so decisions are being made at lower levels without much guidance from above. In Trump's first term, this kind of dysfunction was a lucky break, because the people at those lower levels were mostly career professionals who at least knew how to keep the lights on. In Trump's second term, though, many of those professionals have been either silenced or outright replaced by loyalists and inexperienced appointees. Ironically, allowing various lower offices to fill the policy void empowers the unknown appointees whom MAGA world claims to hate in other administrations. The Trump White House's policy process—insofar as it can be called a 'process'—is the type found in many authoritarian states, where the top levels of government tackle the one or two big things the leader wants done and everything else tumbles down to other functionaries, who can then drive certain issues according to their own preferences (which seems to be what Colby is doing), or who will do just enough to stay under the boss's radar and out of trouble (which seems to be what most other Trump appointees are doing). In such a system, no one is really in charge except Trump—which means that on most days, and regarding many issues, no one is in charge. In Trump's current administration, irrational tariffs and brutal immigration enforcement are the two big ideas. Both have foreign-policy ramifications, but they are being pursued by Trump and his team primarily as domestic political issues. Everything else is on the periphery of the White House's vision: Pakistan and India, nuclear weapons, the Middle East (or nuclear weapons and the Middle East), the Ukraine war. All of these get Trump's temporary attention in the form of a quick evaluation of their utility to Trump personally, and then they're dumped back outside the door of the Oval Office. Even the Iran strike—one of the most important military actions taken by the United States in years—has apparently lost its luster for the president. Trump said that Iran's nuclear program was 'obliterated'; other parts of the U.S. defense and intelligence communities said they weren't sure; Israel thanked America; Trump moved on. This might be because the political advantage of the bombings never materialized: The American public disapproved of Trump's actions, and so the president is now looking for some other shiny object. Today, that trinket seems to be in Gaza. Over the weekend, Trump claimed that he has a 'good chance' of making a deal, perhaps in the coming week, with Hamas for the release of more hostages. This is foreign policy in the Trump era: Announce deals, push their resolution out a week or two, and hope they happen. If they don't—move on and declare success, regardless of any actual outcomes. No one in Trump's administration has any incentive to fix this, because serious changes would be admissions of failure. Repopulating the National Security Council with people who know what they're doing means admitting they were needed in the first place. Hegseth or top people resigning would admit the enormity of the mistake that Trump made in hiring them. Reining in policy freelancers and curtailing the power of lower-level policy makers (as Rubio has at least tried to do with regard to diplomacy) is to admit that senior leaders have lost control of their departments. This administration was never directed or staffed with any coherent foreign policy in mind beyond Trump's empty 'America First' sloganeering. Less than a year into his second term, it's clear that the goals of Trump's 2024 run for the presidency were, in order of importance, to keep Trump out of prison, to exact revenge on Trump's enemies, and to allow Trump and his allies to enrich themselves by every possible means. No one had to think much about who would defend America or conduct its diplomacy; Trump's appointees were apparently chosen largely for shock value and trolling efficacy rather than competence. The rest of the world's most powerful nations, however, are led by grown-ups and professionals. Some of them are enemies of the United States and are quite dangerous. 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Yahoo
11 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Zohran Mamdani's opposition struggles to unite in New York City mayoral race
Fresh off losing New York's Democratic primary for mayor to Zohran Mamdani, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Monday ramped up his efforts to push the incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, out of the race. Cuomo's latest gambit to keep alive his mayoral bid — and his political comeback after resigning as governor — is backing a proposal that all Mamdani challengers adhere to the results of a poll that would be taken in September, weeks before the November election. Whichever candidate is deemed by the survey to be the strongest challenger to Mamdani would continue their campaign. The rest of the field would agree to suspend their campaigns and endorse that challenger. The proposal would need the approval of the city's campaign finance board. Speaking on CNBC's 'Squawk Box' on Monday, Adams said Cuomo recently called him to suggest he should step aside and clear a lane for him to compete against Mamdani, the 33-year-old state assemblyman and democratic socialist. 'I'm the sitting mayor of the city of New York and you expect me to step aside when you just lost to Zohran?' Adams said during the interview. Adams, who opted to sit out the Democratic primary and is running as an independent, described Cuomo's request as 'the highest level of arrogance.' Cuomo remains on the November ballot as the candidate of the 'Fight and Deliver Party' but has not held any public events since primary night or committed to campaigning through November. In a statement issued by Cuomo campaign spokesperson Rich Azzopardi on Monday, the former governor's campaign did not appear any closer to bowing out of the race. 'Mayor Adams did not run in the Democratic primary because he knew he was anathema to Democrats and unelectable. Nothing has changed. We do not see any path to victory for Mayor Adams,' Azzopardi said. New York City's political establishment, which was shaken by Mamdani's resounding win, has struggled to coalesce behind a single candidate. For now, observers think Cuomo could split the city's Black vote with Adams. Also in the field is a third independent candidate, Jim Walden, who originally pitched the survey idea. Curtis Sliwa, a radio personality and founder of the Guardian Angels, a crime-prevention group, is running as the Republican nominee. He has also declined requests to drop out to send GOP support to Adams, who has drawn closer to President Donald Trump and had his corruption charges dismissed by Trump's Department of Justice. The scramble was on display Monday during a news conference in Midtown Manhattan. Former Gov. David Paterson, who endorsed Cuomo in the primary, said a single independent candidate should challenge Mamdani in the general election. But he refused to answer when asked who he thought the candidate should be. 'We can do this, but it's going to take a united effort, and it's going to take some sacrifice that someone is going to have to make,' Paterson said.
