“Trump would still be the runaway favorite. But the process of winnowing away the weaker candidates reveals something interesting about the Republican field: It’s not Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who seemingly has the best chance of consolidating the anti-Trump vote. It’s former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
That’s the main takeaway from a unique poll of the primary field released Friday by FairVote, a nonprofit that advocates for the adoption of ranked choice voting. The survey included about 800 Republican primary voters and operated under the principles of ranked choice voting: each participant was asked to rank the GOP field from first to last, and the candidate who finished in last place in each round of vote-counting was eliminated, with their votes reassigned elsewhere depending on the respondents’ preferences.”
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“Things get really interesting after former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is eliminated in round nine. The bulk of his support flows to Haley, who surges into second place with 20.3 percent of the total.”
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[If you did the ranked choice process until there were only two candidates, the results were: Trump 62.3%; Haley 37.7%]
“No matter what happens in the courtroom in Manhattan in the coming days, weeks and months, no matter what is revealed, no matter the evidence or even the outcome, say longtime Trump watchers, former Trump employees, Republican strategists and operatives and experts on political rhetoric and autocratic means, his supporters at this point don’t care who he was or was not. “It’s irrelevant to who he is now and what he’s become,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien told me.
“Trump’s rise in the American imagination rested on his appeal as an entrepreneurial guru and carnival barker. He has long since transitioned away from that role with his most loyal followers,” O’Brien wrote in his column for Bloomberg on Monday. The far more pertinent persona is the one he’s crafted since the summer of 2015. “He is an era-defining politician now, and he oversees a cult that cares little about his business foibles or setbacks …” Trump, after all, is “not an ex-president — he’s a right-wing, nativist, revolutionary leader,” as presidential historian Doug Brinkley once put it. “He has a movement that is massive with global implications …””
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“Trump could be fined $250 million. He could lose Trump Tower, the singular symbol of the image he sought from the start to convey. For most people, of course, unsavory aspects of their past can limit their prospects for the future. Not for Trump. Never have. He is, in the memorable words of an intimate, “the most present human being I ever met.” So the scenes this week are in some sense simply an extension of a time-tested Trump tactic and truth. He makes the past not matter.”
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“Last week, in a memo written by Club for Growth president David McIntosh to a Club-linked PAC called Win it Back, the takeaway was stark: Trump’s supporters do not care what he did or what he said before. They like him still. They like him now. “It is amazing,” McIntosh told me in a text. “All attempts to undermine his conservative credentials on specific issues were ineffective,” the memo said. “Even when you show video to Republican primary voters with complete context of President Trump saying something otherwise objectionable to primary voters, they find a way to rationalize and dismiss it.”
“What I saw there that really stood out to me was that people dismissed any negative information about Donald Trump as just another attack on Donald Trump,””
“California politicians have been unable to make meaningful headway on a deteriorating homelessness crisis, and the conflict has shifted to a new arena out of their control: courtrooms. A series of rulings in California and beyond has barred cities from clearing encampments even as mayors are contending with lawsuits that accuse them of failing to do so. Sacramento’s top prosecutor hit the city with such a complaint, and Los Angeles spent years in legal limbo after a judge ordered the city and county to shelter every person in a sprawling encampment.”
“In one video, children cry amid rubble. In another, explosions rip through residential neighbourhoods. The images have gone viral on X (formerly Twitter), purporting to be from the ongoing chaos in Israel and Gaza. They actually originate from the war in Syria – including my family’s besieged hometown of Aleppo, where the Assad regime’s tanks once fired on my grandparents’ home while they were still inside.
They are not isolated examples, and the proliferation of misinformation on X is now so extreme that the European Commission began an official investigation last week. The past week has proved that the site is now unable to effectively tackle the spread of falsehoods in a time of crisis.”
“Israel has resumed the supply of water to southern Gaza, Israel’s energy minister Israel Katz confirmed Sunday, following an agreement between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Biden. “This will push the civilian population to the southern (part of the) Strip,” Katz said in a statement, a week after Israel had cut off water and the provision of other supplies to the entire territory. The decision came as Israel demanded one million Palestinians evacuate from Gaza’s north, in advance of Israel’s anticipated ground invasion to confront Hamas. White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN’s State of the Union that Israeli counterparts had told him “they have in fact turned the water pipe back on in southern Gaza.” Sullivan said the Biden administration’s goal had been “to make sure that innocent Palestinians get access to those basic necessities and are protected from bombardment.””
“In the wake of the Hamas terrorist organization’s murderous attacks on Israel, the country’s government is admitting—not for the first time—that even Israel’s extensive security apparatus can’t be everywhere to protect everyone. Under the pressure of bloody events, officials are again making it easier for civilians to acquire and carry firearms for self-defense.
“Today I directed the Firearms Licensing Division to go on an emergency operation, in order to allow as many citizens as possible to arm themselves,” announced National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. “The plan will take effect within 24 hours.”
By no means does the order eliminate the country’s tight restrictions on guns. But it’s an acknowledgment that too many Israelis were caught with limited access to the means of self-defense when Hamas terrorists crossed the border from Gaza and attacked civilians.”