Republicans Face Political Challenges In Trump Impeachment Trial
The pending prosecution of former President Donald Trump has Republicans caught between a rock and a hard place as they look to chart their political future, strategists say.
Five GOP senators -- Romney, U.S. Sens Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pensylvania -- then voted against a Republican-led attempt to dismiss Trump's second impeachment trial as unconstitutional.
Still, Republican strategists Ford O'Connell said Democrats want to forge ahead with the trial in part to "create a divide within the Republican base between traditional GOP voters and Trump voters, because they are concerned that if the GOP gets its act together, that (the Democrats are) probably going to lose the House and could conceivably lose the Senate."
Trump’s $207.5M Post-Election Fundraising Shows He’s Still A ‘Major Force’ In Republican Politics: Analysts
President Trump, fundraising off claims of widespread election fraud, raked in $207.5 million after Election Day — a massive sum GOP strategists say shows he will remain a “major force” in Republican politics for some time to come.
Trump and the Republican National Committee’s joint fundraising operations brought in a whopping $495 million between Oct. 15 and Nov. 23 — with $207.5 million of it pouring in after Nov. 3 as the president’s campaign inundated inboxes with emails blaring “FRAUD ALERT” and sent texts like “We MUST defend the Election from the Left!”
Republican strategist Ford O’Connell said Trump “definitely has the potential to freeze the field” for the next GOP presidential primary, “but he also has the potential to be kingmaker, too.”
“There is no doubt,” O’Connell said, “that this is the party of Donald John Trump for the foreseeable future.”
Trump Campaign Pledges ‘Full Speed’ Ahead As Coronavirus Diagnosis Upends Already Chaotic Presidential Race
President Trump’s campaign pledged to keep operating at “full speed” on Saturday despite his coronavirus diagnosis — a stunning turn of events that has sidelined the incumbent in the home stretch of his re-election campaign and cast uncertainty over his electoral prospects.
Trump vowed to return to the campaign trail Saturday evening in a video address from Walter Reed military hospital, where he decamped to Friday to seek treatment for COVID-19, hours after his campaign said it would deploy top surrogates to key battleground states as a stopgap until the president can return to rallies that have long been his lifeblood.
“I have to be back, because we still have to make America great again,” Trump said in the video. “I’ll be back. I think I’ll be back soon. And I look forward to finishing up the campaign the way it was started and the way we’ve been doing it.”
Republican strategist Ford O’Connell said it’s “full steam ahead” for the campaign with the goal of making the debates scheduled for Oct. 15 and Oct. 22 that are now shrouded in uncertainty.
And he said the effects of Trump being temporarily off the trail could be negligible as the president resumes calling into radio and television shows and the campaign leans into its ground game.
“In the short run, this hurts because Biden can talk about the virus,” O’Connell said. But depending on the swiftness of Trump’s recovery, “he may be able to have the upper hand, because everyone hasn’t voted yet.”
Kamala Harris Is A ‘Dream’ Rival For Trump
Kamala Harris might be the “dream” Democratic vice presidential pick — for President Trump.
In picking a liberal-on-paper senator whose attempts to thread the needle between her party’s center and left in her own presidential bid proved ineffectual, analysts say presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden may have just handed Trump one of the Republican’s greatest weapons yet.
Congressional watchdog groups have listed Harris as one of the most liberal senators in Washington over her three years on the job. Voteview.com, which analyzes members’ ideology based on their voting records, rates Harris as more liberal than 97% of her Democratic colleagues. In the statistic currently favored by Trump’s team, the nonpartisan GovTrack.usranked Harris as the most liberal senator of 2019 — ahead of even U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who’s perceived as one of the nation’s leading progressives — based on the bills she cosponsored.
“They have to be pushing back immediately and hard with a singular mind on the moderate Harris narrative,” GOP strategist Ford O’Connell said. “This idea that she’s a moderate is insane because she’s only a moderate if (House Speaker) Nancy Pelosi is only considered a bastion of conservative thinking.”
Tough Task For Democrats — President Trump Impeachment Hearings Start This Week
A top Massachusetts Democrat says he believes the formal impeachment hearings that get underway this week will convince Americans that President Trump has to go.
U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch, who sits on the House Oversight Committee, told the Herald that the key for Democrats is to get the witnesses before the public, so everyone can hear the testimony he and other congressmen have been listening to behind closed doors over the past couple of weeks.
The House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings, which begin on Wednesday, will center around Trump’s summer phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Big TV networks — NBC, CBS, ABC and PBS — all plan to pull normal programming in favor of coverage of the impeachment hearings.
Trump is accused of pushing the Ukrainian president to investigate former vice president and 2020 presidential hopeful Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Days before that reported phone call, Trump froze nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine. The president has insisted he did nothing wrong and denied that any request for help was tied to the aid freeze.
But Democrats face a difficult task convincing a lukewarm public ahead of the 2020 elections that Trump should be removed from office, political operatives tell the Herald.
But Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist, said this will ultimately backfire on Democrats in 2020.
“They’re spending all their time on this and not on the issues that most Americans care about,” he said. “This could re-elect Trump and also put the House in play.”
Read more from Rick Sobey and Sean Philip Cotter at the Boston Herald
President Trump’s Re-Election Machine Revs Up In New Hampshire
Supporters of President Trump are cooking up countermeasures to their Democratic foes — from handing out free cheeseburgers outside an Elizabeth Warren event to poke fun at the Green New Deal, to using a bullhorn to amplify their chants outside a Joe Biden rally.
With more than a year to go before the general election, the GOP is growing its ground game in New Hampshire — a key battleground state Republicans want to turn red after narrowly losing to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016.
“What’s so enticing about New Hampshire is that Clinton won it by less than 3,000 votes,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “So they recognize there is an opportunity.”
The impeachment proceedings against Trump are only adding fuel to the fire for the president’s backers, supporters said.
O’Connell called Trump’s 2020 campaign a “well-oiled machine” and “a dramatic improvement” over the ragtag operation he ran as an outsider in 2016.
With incumbency on their side, Trump and his team are working in lockstep with the RNC and many of the state parties — much to the chagrin of the president’s three primary challengers, who are facing canceled contests in some states, but not New Hampshire.
Trump’s re-election campaign and the RNC are also sitting on a massive war chest, with a combined $125.7 million raised in the third quarter and $158 million in cash on hand.
“They’re in a good spot right now to be able to move people around” as needed in key states, O’Connell said. “They know this is potentially going to be a really tight election.”
Mitt Romney Calls President Trump’s Pressuring Of Ukraine Leader ‘Appalling’
U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney has revived his feud with President Trump — slamming his calls for Ukraine and China to investigate presidential rival Joe Biden and his family as “wrong and appalling” — in an apparent bid to raise his profile as the leading GOP Never-Trumper in the Senate.
“When the only American citizen President Trump singles out for China’s investigation is his political opponent in the midst of the Democratic nomination process, it strains credulity to suggest that it is anything other than politically motivated,” Romney tweeted Friday. “By all appearances, the President’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling.”
Romney is ramping up his criticism of the president as the House of Representatives pursues an impeachment inquiry against Trump.
Romney has a tumultuous history with Trump. After criticizing Trump during the 2016 election, Romney buttered up to the president-elect to become one of the finalists for Secretary of State — only to be publicly bypassed by Trump. Winning a Senate seat in Utah last year, he resumed his attacks on Trump.
“It would be one thing if this was the first time he criticized Trump,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. But, he said, “Romney doesn’t achieve anything by doing this but trying to elevate himself … It only gives the Democrats ammo.”
Democratic, Republican Strategies Emerge As Impeachment Inquiry Rolls On
President Trump continued his rampage against the Democrats pursuing his impeachment on Thursday in what appears to be a strategy of going on the offensive, political observers say, by deriding the proceedings as a “scam” and “election interference.”
Democrats are pushing forward with their impeachment inquiry as quickly as possible, with former special U.S. envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker testifying before House committees Thursday. It’s a strategy political observers say is necessary to keep impeachment from bleeding too far into the 2020 election and clouding Democrats’ chances at both taking back the White House and flipping the U.S. Senate.
But Trump has his own plan — to fight.
“He’s going to play offense and basically argue this is a premeditated political setup” by the Democrats, said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “Trump wants to make the case that once again they’re crying wolf and if people see this as it’s a partisan base that refuses to accept him as a legitimate president, then he wins.”
O’Connell said the Democrats “want Trump’s head. They want to make him a one-term president. And if they can find a way to force him out of office before 2020, all the better.
“They’re trying to out-maneuver each other in what is a very big political gamble on the Democrats’ side, but they feel this is the best way to beat Trump in 2020,” O’Connell said. “But it is an enormous political gamble that could backfire on them.”
Democrats Pressed Ukrainians To Cooperate With Mueller investigation
President Trump, facing an impeachment inquiry for pressing Ukraine’s president to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, is not the first American official to encourage Ukrainians to help with a probe.
In May 2018, three Democratic senators wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general — pushing the foreign office to cooperate with the Mueller investigation into Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“We are writing to express great concern about reports that your office has taken steps to impede cooperation with the investigation of United States Special Counsel Robert Mueller,” wrote Sens. Robert Menendez, Richard Durbin and Patrick Leahy.
“If these reports are true, we strongly encourage you to reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation,” added the senators from New Jersey, Illinois and Vermont.
The letter was written after a New York Times report revealed that Ukraine had frozen investigations into four open cases there, “thereby eliminating scope for cooperation with the Mueller probe into related issues.”
“As strong advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine, we believe that our cooperation should extend to such legal matters, regardless of politics,” the senators stated.
As vice president in 2016, Biden reportedly threatened to freeze $1 billion of U.S. aid to Ukraine if the foreign leaders didn’t fire the nation’s top prosecutor. “Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden … who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general,” The New York Times reported.
The Democrats who are now trying to impeach Trump were the “first to open the door with Ukraine,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “Ukraine seems to be a one-stop-shop for everyone who wants to get political dirt on their opponents.”
Election-year Supreme Court Fight Would Be ‘Armageddon,’ Pundits Say
A potential Supreme Court vacancy in 2020 will turn into a “battle royal” if Senate Republicans flip the script and nominate a conservative judge during a presidential election year, pundits tell the Herald.
“Both sides would be fighting it out as if it’s Armageddon,” pollster John Zogby said Sunday. “Democrats would be saying, ‘This is the end of the world and the end of America as we know it.’ It would be a battle royal.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 86, who’s firmly seated on the left, appears to have survived another cancer scare. On Friday, it was announced doctors discovered a malignant tumor on her pancreas.
It was the second time Ginsburg, who had surgery to remove cancerous growths from her lung in December, has been treated for cancer in less than nine months.
Her health remains a constant concern for both liberals because the court is expected to shift right for decades if President Trump were to get the ability to nominate someone to replace her. The conservative court would have a 6-3 majority.
David Axelrod, who was senior adviser to President Barack Obama, tweeted: “If there is a SCOTUS vacancy next year and @senatemajldr carries through on his extraordinary promise to fill it — despite his own previous precedent in blocking Garland — it will tear this country apart.”
But Ford O’Connell, a GOP national pundit, said a Supreme Court nomination battle could actually boost Trump in 2020.
“Because Republicans control both the Senate and White House, it’s well-within their right to appoint a new judge,” O’Connell said. “I really think it would help Trump more with enthusiasm from voters.”
Read more from Rick Sobey and Sean Philip Cotter at the Boston Herald
