On Wednesday, ICE distributed new vehicle stop policy guidelines, though it’s not clear if all of ICE’s regional offices will resume the stops.
The post Not Everyone at ICE Went Along With Trump’s Order to Reinstate Vehicle Stops appeared first on The Intercept.
Top Democratic National Committee officials met this week to determine the order of the party’s 2028 primaries, and on Friday voted to keep South Carolina as the first state on the calendar. Michigan, Nevada, and New Hampshire are also slated to hold early primaries, although the full DNC must still ratify the decisions of the Rules and Bylaws Committee when it meets next month. But the process to set the primary calendar has been extremely contentious, with various factions in the party debating which states should go first and Black officials suggesting that Black voters would feel dissed if South Carolina had been moved back. This is all nonsense; much ado about little. It doesn’t really matter which state(s) vote first. The eventual Democratic nominee will have to win voters across racial, class, and geographic lines. All factions in the party will be heard. And the primary calendar likely will have no impact at all on the 2028 general election.For decades, political journalists like me have focused obsessively on the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, traditionally the first two contests in the presidential nomination process. So obviously the winners of those early races go on to win, right? Not quite. In the last six competitive Democratic presidential primaries (1992, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2016, 2020), the winner of the Iowa caucuses eventually won the nomination four times (Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton). That’s a bit more than half the time—hardly a guarantee of victory. The New Hampshire victor is just two for six (Gore in 2000, Kerry in 2004). Bill Clinton, and then Joe Biden almost three decades later, won the nomination after losing both states. Since South Carolina became one of the earliest voting states in 2008, all the winners there (Obama, Hillary Clinton, Biden) have gone on to win the nomination. But that isn’t because all of their rivals dropped out after South Carolina. Rather, South Carolina showed that those three candidates had strong support among Black voters, which was then replicated throughout the South, helping them amass a huge advantage in delegates. So looking at that history, we don’t need to worry that South Carolina will alone determine the Democratic nominee. The early states aren’t likely to choose the same candidates. If they do, as 1992 and 2020 showed, later states might override those early results. Also, the Democratic Party these days emphasizes that it has a slate of several early primaries, trying to ensure the first or first two don’t overwhelm the process. So in 2020, even as Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders did very well in Iowa and New Hampshire, the results in the other two other states, Nevada and South Carolina, were closely watched too. Biden’s strong showings in the latter two helped catapult him to the nomination. This emphasis on the entire slate of early primaries also means the calendar doesn’t give any one candidate that much of an advantage. Kamala Harris will probably be strong in South Carolina, a state with a lot of center-left African Americans like her, but might lose in New Hampshire to Buttigieg, whose base is college-educated white voters. The early states are diverse enough that either different candidates will win them or one person will rightly become a huge front-runner for the nomination by winning four or five contests in places that are demographically and geographically distinct from one another. The primary calendar also doesn’t matter for the general election, despite the claims of people who should know better. David Axelrod, who was a top adviser on Obama’s presidential campaigns, wrote on X this week, “Dems would be wise to pick states to start the process that will be swing states in ’28. Candidates spend a lot of time in these early states and it lays an organizational foundation to compete in the fall. SC won’t be a swing state.” Hmm. There is no research showing that having an intense primary in a state helps a party win there in the general election. And it’s easy to disprove Axelrod’s argument. The Democrats won Iowa in November 2012 after not having a competitive primary, then lost the state in November 2016 and November 2020, after the party’s presidential candidates held dozens of events across the Hawkeye State during primary season. South Carolina has remained red, while Georgia has become purple, even though the former is a huge part of the nomination process and the latter isn’t. What if … primaries and general elections are completely different contests whose results aren’t connected to one another? So if the order that the states vote in doesn’t tell us much about who will win the primary or the general election, doesn’t it at least show which groups the party cares about most? Not really. If you are a Black political operative or Black Democratic official in South Carolina, having the first primary in your state is a coup.
President Donald Trump has come back around to a potential MAGA heir for a surprising – and entirely superficial – reason, according to a new report.The 80-year-old president's months-long habit of quietly weighing Vice President JD Vance against Secretary of State Marco Rubio as his potential 2028 successor appears to have run its course — and the tipping point was a book tour, reported MS NOW.According to five people familiar with Trump's private commentary, the president has shifted from treating the two officials as rival contenders to openly signaling that Vance is his guy. "It's become, 'JD's our guy, we gotta help JD,'" one senior administration official said.The inflection point, sources say, was Vance's press run for his new memoir, "Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith," which sent him into friendly and semi-hostile media terrain alike — a notably warm appearance on ABC's "The View," a sit-down with Bill Maher (who later said he'd consider voting for Vance in 2028), heavy rotation on Fox News, and a podcast appearance with Megyn Kelly where he criticized MAGA infighting over Iran as "very immature."Trump reportedly took note of how comfortably Vance handled himself across that stretch, and another person said the president has taken to remarking that his vice president has been looking good lately.“There’s been a lot of that,” the person added.Adding to the goodwill: Trump has also been privately complimentary of Vance's weight loss, tied to a sauerkraut-heavy diet several administration officials — including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — have adopted.Still, the shift isn't without friction. Trump reportedly expressed disappointment over the collapse of a U.S.-Iran memorandum Vance helped negotiate, and some senior staff have grumbled that Vance's team is overly fixated on online chatter about him.The White House downplayed any formal succession race, with a spokeswoman calling Vance the president's "right-hand man" and pointing to his role leading Iran negotiations and the SAVE America Act push.Vance himself has publicly waved off talk of a competition with Rubio, calling him "probably my best friend in the administration."
GOP lawmakers claim foreign-linked organizations tied to China and Russia are working to undermine U.S. data centers and AI infrastructure development.
