Democrats learned absolutely nothing from the 2024 election and this proves it. The post THEY’VE LEARNED NOTHING: California Democrat Governor Candidate Tom Steyer Says ‘I’m Totally in Favor of Trans Athletes in High School’ (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Is President Trump’s grip on the party faltering? Tuesday’s Texas GOP primary race, particularly the contest between incumbent Sen. John Cornyn and state Attorney General Ken Paxton, will be a test. What comes next after the controversial autopsy on the Democratic Party’s 2024 losses? Join The Hill’s Amie Parnes and Editor in Chief Ian Swanson…
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday that the Iranian government is alone in pushing for itself to control passage through the Strait of Hormuz via a tolling system. “The Russians are not in favor of a tolling system, the Chinese are not in favor of a tolling system,” Rubio told reporters on board his…
President Donald Trump's Cabinet meetings have become somewhat infamous for the various secretaries sucking up to him in any way they can think of, but now, an exhaustive analysis of video footage by the New York Times has confirmed the biggest kiss-up of the group.In a new report this week, the Times broke down trends apparent across all of Trump's second-term Cabinet meetings. Based on roughly 12 hours of examined footage, the outlet explained, flattery and exaggeration were the name of the game.“On average, at least one of every six sentences either flattered Mr. Trump, gave him credit or criticized his political opponents,” the report detailed. “Many of these statements are exaggerated or not factually accurate.”Amid that overall trend, one name rose to the top as the most eager to please the president: Secretary of State Marco Rubio. According to the report's findings, Rubio "flattered the president the most" out of the entire Cabinet, though this may be more to do with the fact that he also spoke the most across all of the meetings.“There’s only one leader in the world that’s capable of bringing the two sides to a table, and that’s our president, the president of the United States, President Trump,” Rubio said in one meeting, as highlighted by the Times' report. “The only chance we have for peace is through the president’s leadership.”Rubio at one point also called Trump the "only leader in the world that can help end" the Israel-Hamas conflict and the Sudanese civil war. Trailing Rubio in the Times' ranking were Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who once hailed Trump as having, "saved this country by making it the best place in the world to do business again," and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who said that "no other president would have been willing to empower those warriors that way to be that effective," in the wake of the Venezuela operation earlier this year.As the Daily Beast noted about the situation in its own report, "The fact that Rubio has emerged as one of the most successful members of Trump’s Cabinet may not be a coincidence.""Rubio has now presided over a sweeping reorganization of foreign policy and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, while helping steer Trump’s lightning invasion of Venezuela and war with Iran," the Daily Beast explained. "He’s also become the only official since Henry Kissinger to hold the post of secretary of state and national security adviser. Trump has even joked he might make Rubio, who is of Cuban heritage, the president of Cuba if his administration topples the communist island nation’s regime."It added: "That success has buoyed Rubio in the polls. A survey released earlier this month put him at 45.4 percent among Republican voters for the 2028 nomination—comfortably ahead of the previous favorite, Vice President JD Vance at just 29.6 percent, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis at 11.2 percent."
When Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in Georgia in the United States' 2020 presidential election, there were two very different reactions among Republicans in the Peach State. Gov. Brian Kemp and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, much to Trump's chagrin, acknowledged Biden as the legitimate winner — while then- State Sen. Burt Jones (now lieutenant governor) promoted Trump's repeatedly debunked claim that Georgia was stolen from him. And according to New York Times reporters Danny Hakim and Richard Fausset, Georgia will have a major election denier in the governor's office if Jones replaces Kemp in January 2027.With Kemp term-limited, Georgia Republicans are having a gubernatorial primary race that finds Jones competing with Rick Jackson (described by Hakim and Fausset as a "brash, pro-Trump billionaire") for the nomination. A runoff primary election is scheduled for June 16."Burt Jones, the Republican frontrunner in the Georgia governor's race, presents his considerable efforts to overturn Donald J. Trump's election loss in 2020 as a badge of honor," Hakim and Fausset report in the Times. "On the stump, he even boasts about it…. Last week, Mr. Jones, with the help of an endorsement from President Trump, was the top vote-getter in the first round of Georgia's Republican primary for governor. "Jones, according to Hakim and Fausset, "still carries the baggage — or as some would have it, bragging rights" — from the 2020 election and played a major role in "efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power" even though he lost Georgia to Biden."Mr. Jones tried to organize a special state legislative session to overturn Mr. Trump's electoral loss," the New York Times reporters recall. "He helped arrange public hearings in the State Senate, where Rudolph W. Giuliani demonized Atlanta election workers and advanced false claims that the election had been stolen. He joined a fake Electoral College contingent from Georgia that sent its false votes to Washington as part of a multi-state effort to try to derail the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s victory."Hakim and Fausset continue, "He backed Texas litigation challenging his own state's election results…. If elected governor, Mr. Jones would join several Republican governors who are 2020 election deniers just as the Trump Administration is using the Justice Department to seize 2020 ballots and revive old conspiracies."When Trump "amped up his unsubstantiated claim of a stolen election" in 2020, there was "vigorous pushback from some state Republicans, including Gov. Brian Kemp, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and Mr. Raffensperger." But Jones "attacked the state's Republican leaders, including Mr. Duncan, for asserting — accurately — that there was no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud."
Texas will host a slate of high-profile primary runoff races Tuesday, with Republicans and Democrats alike eyeing the Lone Star State as a major battleground ahead of the midterm elections. Several races advanced to runoffs after no candidate received more than 50% of the vote in the March 3 primary, the first major nominating contest […]
Senate Republican sources say that President Trump’s agenda for the rest of the year is in serious trouble, including a budget reconciliation package to fund immigration enforcement operations through 2029, after tempers erupted at a meeting between GOP senators and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche last week. GOP senators say that Trump has no chance…
Out here in California, Democracy is a monthslong slog. The state effectively began engaging in big-D Democracy sometime around January—that’s when California’s ballot measures were gathering signatures. Every time you went to Ralphs or Vons, you could linger outside in the perpetual sunshine, pick up a box of Girl Scout cookies—and scribble your signature onto the latest ballot initiative. The people gathering those signatures are often gig workers, paid for each John Hancock they wrangle. They carry around armfuls of paper (usually collecting signatures for four or five ballot initiatives at once), and they’ve learned to lead with the most popular measures. A Californian hurrying through a milk run won’t always stop when asked to sign your petition to create an immunology research institute at the state university, but they might stop if you ask them to sign on to an easy-to-explain and broadly popular initiative like Voter ID or Prohibiting New Retirement Taxes. Their ears may especially perk up when they hear the signature hustlers mention this year’s billionaire tax.“Have you signed the billionaire tax yet?” was a popular refrain outside my local Ralphs. They’d buttonhole you with that or with the ballot measure prohibiting new retirement taxes, which sounded just as simple until you asked to see the language. I remember reading the retirement tax initiative and feeling uncomfortable; it was too wishy-washy. What’s this here about prohibiting new taxes on the worldwide value of my intellectual property? Are California’s firefighters and nurses really at risk of retroactive taxes on the future value of their 401(k)? I had the curious sensation that I was being astroturfed. Turns out, I was. The Retirement and Personal Savings Protection Act is one of six billionaire-backed measures, three of which are aimed at defanging the billionaire tax. All these measures are funded by Building a Better California, the $80 million nonprofit bankrolled by Google founder Sergey Brin, who has thrown a $40 million tantrum over the notion that he may have to pay the billionaire tax. A spokesperson for Building a Better California didn’t want to speak on the record, but Brin’s been telling the governor and every reporter who’ll listen that he’s leaving California and taking his toys with him. Why, he’s even threatening to move the company that manages his 466-foot-long superyacht out of the Golden State, per The New York Times. There’s a dystopian (and distinctly American) paradigm on display here, a scene akin to performance art: Gig workers sweating outside grocery stores, collecting signatures to keep billionaires from paying taxes. Those same billionaires insist they’d rather leave than pitch in to help keep afloat the system within which they built their empires. Sergey Brin built Google while on a taxpayer-funded grant from the National Science Foundation. Those grants, of course, have been slashed in the Trump era. Now that Brin has reached the top, he’s pulling the rope up after him, throwing his hissy fit from a ritzy hideaway somewhere in Nevada, presumably Lake Tahoe. But chances are—unless his ballot initiatives pass and/or he wins the lawsuits that will inevitably follow—Brin is going to have to pay the billionaire tax. (Who knows how much, but you might ballpark it at about 15 of his $240 billion.)“If it were so easy just to get a Nevada driver’s license or put your assets in the Cayman Islands, would the billionaires be this agitated?” asks Darien Shanske, the UC Davis tax law professor who helped write this year’s billionaire tax. Shanske told The New Republic that he began working on a wealth tax during the pandemic in 2020, but that it became an emergency after Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill cut nearly $1 trillion from health care assistance to low-income families, driving a hole into California’s budget. It’s no coincidence, he notes, that the billionaire tax’s signature-gathering effort is funded by the health care workers’ union, SEIU-UHW. Shanske was recruited into the effort by David Gamage, a University of Missouri tax law professor who advised Senator Elizabeth Warren on her wealth tax policy when she was running for president. Gamage says that he, Shanske, and two other law professors—Brian Galle and Emmanuel Saez, both of UC Berkley—worked on “several rounds of wealth tax proposals.” At first, it seemed like the California Teachers Association might put the billionaire tax on the ballot, but when that fell through SEIU-UHW picked it up. The Teachers Association is now backing a permanent structuring of Proposition 30—the 2012 referendum taxing high earners that has pumped nearly $100 billion into the state’s education system—so, technically, there are two wealth taxes jockeying for the ballot this year in California.
Republican voters in Texas get their final say Tuesday in a drawn out, vitriolic and expensive primary campaign for a US Senate seat, a race that Democrats are watching closely in hopes that they could flip both houses of Congress in November.