News, Analysis and Opinion from POLITICO
The president also took on his age and the media during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
President Joe Biden ribbed his political rival, former President Donald Trump, at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, saying, "I'm a grown man running against a 6-year-old.”
The president took the former president to task for recently predicting a “blood bath for the country” if the election doesn’t go Trump’s way this November.
The wild card independent candidate has been a source of increasing anxiety for the GOP as he threatens to pull votes from Donald Trump in November.
Former President Donald Trump launched a social media tirade against Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Friday night, saying a vote for the independent candidate would be a “wasted protest vote” and that he’d “even take Biden over Junior.”
The wild card independent, a thorn in the side of the Democratic Party for siphoning voters from President Joe Biden, has become a source of increasing anxiety for the GOP as he threatens to also pull votes away from Trump in November.
New York and Arizona have suddenly become the focus of America’s media-soaked political culture.
NEW YORK — The backdrop of the 2024 presidential election has shifted to unexpected territory.
New York and Arizona have suddenly become the focus of America’s media-soaked political culture as former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden find themselves enmeshed in both states in ways that no one could have predicted and will likely reverberate for the rest of the year.
David Pecker's testimony delivered a win for the prosecution. The Supreme Court hearing in D.C. was another story.
The prosecution in the Trump trial got what they wanted from former American Media CEO David Pecker this week — a concession that the hush money payments he made on behalf of Trump were done in order to help Donald Trump’s campaign for president.
Over the course of five days, Pecker made more than a few assertions that were useful in the case against Trump. He testified that he made “catch and kill” deals with a former Trump Tower doorman and former Playboy model Karen McDougal to keep potential bombshell stories quiet in the midst of the election.
The Trump operation and the third-party entities could conceivably get on the same page about their plans.
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign is inviting prominent outside groups to a private meeting next week in Palm Beach, Florida, to talk about working together and planning for the election.
On Tuesday, the Trump campaign sent a letter to pro-Trump, external organizations asking them to attend an “entirely off-the-record, private,” and “invite-only” meeting with senior campaign officials, according to a copy of the letter obtained by POLITICO. The sit-down, which the letter describes as a “meeting of the political minds,” is aimed at discussing “collaborat[ion]” and “priorities and plans” for the general election.
Susie Wiles helped dismantle Ron DeSantis and salvaged Donald Trump’s campaign. Is she a MAGA hero or an enemy of democracy?
WEST PALM BEACH — Susie Wiles, the people who know her the best believe, is a force more sensed than seen. Her influence on political events, to many who know what they’re watching, is as obvious as it is invisible. The prints leave not so much as a smudge. It’s a shock when she shows up in pictures. Even then it is almost always in the background. She speaks on the record hardly ever, and she speaks about herself even less. Last month, though, on the afternoon of the day of the Republican primary in Florida, here Wiles was — sitting outside a Starbucks, at a table with an umbrella she picked for protection from the glare, wearing sensible flats and a cream-colored top and the sunglasses she likes with the lenses like mirrors, not far from the campaign headquarters of Donald J. Trump.
Wiles is not just one of Trump’s senior advisers. She’s his most important adviser. She’s his de facto campaign manager. She has been in essence his chief of staff for the last more than three years. She’s one of the reasons Trump is the GOP's presumptive nominee and Ron DeSantis is not. She’s one of the reasons Trump’s current operation has been getting credit for being more professional than its fractious, seat-of-the-pants antecedents. And she’s a leading reason Trump has every chance to get elected again — even after his loss of 2020, the insurrection of 2021, his party’s defeats in the midterms of 2022, the criminal indictments of 2023 and the trial (or trials) of 2024. The former president is potentially a future president. And that’s because of him. But it’s also because of her. Trump, of course, is Trump — he can be irritable, he can be impulsive — and this campaign is facing unprecedented stressors and snags. It’s a long six-plus months till Election Day. For now, though, nobody around him is so influential, and nobody around him has been so influential for so long.
His whirlwind day included a New York press conference, attending his criminal trial and a case before the Supreme Court.
Donald Trump strode down the Manhattan courthouse hallway Thursday morning, approaching the news cameras — already his second gaggle of the day — and began to talk about what was on his mind in such a historic, unprecedented moment in American presidential politics.
“The big news today, I think,” Trump said, “is the 1.6 percent. When you look at 1.6 GDP, that’s a number that nobody thought was possible. That’s a real bad number.”
POLITICO reporters take you inside the courtroom that could decide the 2024 election.
The stakes couldn’t be higher for Donald Trump. As he stands trial in Manhattan in the first-ever criminal prosecution of a U.S. president, stuck in a courtroom four days a week, he’s also running a reelection bid that, if successful, could effectively save him from his various criminal prosecutions.
Meanwhile, the gritty lower-Manhattan courtroom at 100 Centre Street where Trump is spending his days remains something of an enigma to the public. There are no cameras, and much of the trial proceedings have been withheld from public view thanks to New York’s antiquated court system and some unusual practices that the judge has adopted, like concealing certain court filings.
He spoke early Thursday during a stop in New York.
Former President Donald Trump on Thursday criticized the judge in his ongoing hush-money trial while arguing for presidential immunity during an early morning visit to a New York construction site.
“We have a big case today but the judge isn't allowing me to go. We have a big case today in the Supreme Court on presidential immunity,” Trump told reporters. “A president has to have immunity, otherwise you just have a ceremonial president."
Half of voters in a new POLITICO-Morning Consult poll support states making their own laws about abortion access, compared with just 35 percent who oppose that.
Donald Trump’s leave-abortion-to-the-states tack may be the least harmful position the former president can take as reproductive rights remain the favorite campaign trail cudgel of Joe Biden and Democrats in the post-Roe era.
Half of voters in a new POLITICO-Morning Consult poll support states making their own laws about abortion access, compared with just 35 percent who oppose that.
The hush money case will resume in New York while the Supreme Court hears arguments on Trump’s immunity bid in his federal election case.
Former President Donald Trump may be spending Thursday on trial in a cold, drab Manhattan courtroom, but he’d prefer to be in Washington, where the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the most acute criminal threat he faces: his federal prosecution for interfering with the 2020 election.
It will be a historic and surreal split screen: a former president, current presidential candidate and four-time criminal defendant whose lawyers will be fighting two very different sets of felony charges in two courthouses simultaneously. It’s a reminder of Trump’s ability — even while sitting in his New York trial about hush money payments to a porn star — to command the attention of every branch of the government he once again seeks to lead.
The May event in Palm Beach is expected to attract around 400 donors.
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign will host a major donor retreat next week in Florida featuring prominent Republicans widely regarded as prospective running mates.
A copy of the invitation obtained by POLITICO lists 16 special guests for the May 3-5 event in Palm Beach. Among them are some of the top names being mentioned for Trump’s general election ticket: Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Tim Scott of South Carolina and J.D. Vance of Ohio, as well as Govs. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and Kristi Noem of South Dakota, and Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and Byron Donalds (R-Fla.).
The move clears the path for a similar vote in the Senate — which appears to have the support to pass the measure.
The Arizona House voted Wednesday to repeal a 19th-century abortion ban that the state Supreme Court revived earlier this month.
The move, which tees up passage in the state Senate next week, is likely to come as a relief for abortion-rights proponents — and former President Donald Trump.
Trump’s bid for immunity from prosecution in Washington is an absurd farce. Will the court’s conservatives bail him out?
This week at the Supreme Court, a simple question will sound difficult: Can a former president be criminally prosecuted if he tried to steal a presidential election through a campaign of lies and political bullying that apparently violated multiple federal criminal laws?
That is the question the justices have chosen to confront on Thursday, when they hear oral argument in Trump’s pretrial appeal from the Justice Department’s prosecution in Washington. The outcome will undeniably shape the 2024 election.
The former president is a voracious press consumer. Here’s how his media diet has changed since his last presidential campaign.
Donald Trump has always had a symbiotic relationship with the media. Back when he was a Manhattan bachelor and real estate mogul, he would feed tabloids fodder about his dating and dealmaking. He remained a savvy media player as president, wielding his knowledge of influencing news narratives to divert and distract. Even as he railed against the “fake news,” he was obsessed with how the press portrayed him, keeping track of TV ratings and cable coverage so closely that officials knew to appear on certain shows to deliver a message to him.
Now, as he makes his third run for president, the media landscape of 2024 is markedly different than it was in 2016, in no small part due to Trump himself. Trump remains no less obsessed, but this has changed some of how Trump engages with the media. Twitter is now X but the real MAGA crowd is on Truth Social. Fox still matters, but OAN and Steve Bannon’s The War Room also thrive online. And this time around, Trump and his team have also been strategic about appearing on podcasts that reach younger or more diverse audiences. But while Trump has dabbled in this new universe, some things haven’t changed: He still prefers reading print papers and will catch recordings from his favorite cable news shows.
No day demonstrated the extreme asymmetry of the unfolding campaign more than Tuesday.
In New York on Tuesday, Donald Trump suffered through a hearing on whether he should be held in contempt of court and testimony from a tabloid publisher on a “catch and kill” scheme allegedly used to help Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Back in his home state of Florida, his opponent, Joe Biden, was unloading on him over abortion.
If the opening week of Trump’s hush-money trial laid bare the courtroom’s constraints on Trump, no single 24-hour stretch demonstrated the extreme asymmetry of the unfolding campaign more than Tuesday. There was Biden making campaign stops with fawning supporters of abortion rights in Tampa, Florida, while Trump was sitting in a “freezing” Manhattan courtroom, with barely any supporters in sight.
Democrats have signaled that Florida could be competitive but have yet to commit resources to the state. But winning here is almost secondary.
MIAMI — President Joe Biden probably won’t carry Florida in November. But he hopes the state serves as a warning to voters elsewhere about what could happen if he doesn't win.
Biden plans to denounce Florida’s policies, especially a six-week abortion ban taking effect next week, during a campaign event in Tampa on Tuesday. It’s just one example of how the campaign in the coming months will try to designate the now conservative-leaning state as “ground zero for Trump’s MAGA blueprint,” citing not just abortion but also looser gun laws and book removals from school libraries.
“This to me seems like a campaign who’s saying, ‘Holy shit, we’ve got to get out, and early, and we have to be in front of people,’” one Democratic operative said.
Joe Biden has largely shied away from lengthy sit downs with national news outlets — but he made an exception for Univision last week.
The interview with the Hispanic media giant wasn’t just a tit-for-tat with Donald Trump, who had appeared on the network months prior. It was an implicit admission from Biden that he has to do more to reach Hispanic voters who have soured on him.
The major presidential candidates latest filings hardly could have been more different from one another.
Donald Trump is spending as much on legal bills as he is on campaigning. Joe Biden, meanwhile, is building a reelection behemoth.
Campaign finance reports filed this week underscored the unusual nature of this campaign: the current president running against his predecessor, who is more preoccupied with his criminal trial than the campaign trail.
