Category: NEWS
Trump’s risky primary play: Rallying for a longtime ally accused of sexual misconduct
Former President Donald Trump’s aides earlier this month told him about explosive allegations: That Charles Herbster, his endorsed candidate in the Nebraska governor’s race and a longtime top donor and ally, had sexually assaulted eight women.
But Trump did not withdraw his support for Herbster, or scrap plans to hold a Friday evening rally for the candidate in Nebraska. Instead, he doubled down: The former president relayed word that Herbster wasn’t fighting back hard enough, backing plans for Herbster to hold a press conference aggressively denying the allegations and pushing back at his adversaries.
Herbster followed suit, blasting the allegations as a “smear campaign” taken from the same “playbook” used to target Trump and Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, when they faced accusations of sexual misconduct. And Herbster, a multimillionaire agricultural executive who owes his fortune in part to selling bull semen, boasted to reporters that he had brought on a law firm used by Trump to defend himself.
Trump’s unflinching support of Herbster, who served on a Trump White House agricultural panel and has known the former president since 2005, starkly illustrates the all-encompassing emphasis the former president places on loyalty. When Trump associates have faced allegations of misconduct, the question of what they did has often taken a back seat to how close they’ve been to Trump — who has then offered allies everything from pardons to campaign support in their time of need.
But this time, Trump’s involvement is especially loaded with political risk for the former president, who is famously obsessed with his win-loss record in GOP primaries. Nebraska Republicans say that despite Trump’s early involvement, the race for the Republican nomination on May 10 is a three-way dead heat between Herbster and two other candidates, multimillionaire hog farmer Jim Pillen and state Sen. Brett Lindstrom.
“It’s neck-and-neck-and-neck,” said Ryan Horn, a Nebraska-based Republican strategist.
One measure of Trump’s devotion to Herbster: He is the only local candidate Trump is expected to voice support for at the Friday event, unlike many past Trump rallies, which he has used to boost multiple contenders. Those in Trump’s orbit point out that, in contrast to many other states, the former president has few close allies in Nebraska’s statewide offices or congressional delegation, and he has not endorsed any other candidates in the state.
“He is a man of his word. When he says something, he has delivered, in all the years that I’ve known him,” Herbster said in an interview. “It’s easy to be someone’s friend and be around someone when something’s perfect. But when something is imperfect, many people … flee, and he’s not that type of person.”
Matt Schlapp, a high-profile Trump ally who has endorsed Herbster, and Mike Lindell, the pillow businessman and election conspiracy theorist, are among those also slated to speak at the rally, which is being held at a NASCAR racetrack halfway between Lincoln and Omaha.
Despite that support, Herbster is facing aggressive opposition from the state’s term-limited Republican governor, Pete Ricketts, who has spent the last year savaging Herbster as unfit for office. Even after Trump’s October endorsement of Herbster, Ricketts refused to stand down: The governor and his father, billionaire TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, have contributed a combined $600,000 to an outside group that has been airing slashing anti-Herbster TV ads.
Pete Ricketts, who is co-chair of the powerful Republican Governors Association and whose family owns the Chicago Cubs, has also been appearing in TV ads being run by Pillen, whom he has endorsed. Ricketts, whose antipathy toward Herbster dates back nearly a decade, also donated $100,000 directly to Pillen’s campaign, and earlier this year flew around the state with the candidate to announce his support. He is expected to make additional joint appearances with Pillen before the primary.
The 67-year-old Herbster, meanwhile, has denied the allegations against him, which have become a late focal point in the race. While a new POLITICO/Morning Consult national poll showed that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to call accusations of sexual misconduct against a candidate a “major problem,” 66 percent of Republicans did say that would be a “major problem for that candidate to earn your support.”
One of the women accusing Herbster, state Sen. Julie Slama, said that during a Republican Party function in 2019, Herbster reached up her skirt without her consent. The Nebraska Examiner, the political website which broke the story, also quoted a witness to the incident who confirmed Slama’s account.
During his press conference, Herbster said he was later invited to Slama’s wedding in the Dominican Republic and that she solicited a contribution from him, asserting that “those don’t seem to be the normal responses of someone who has done something very, very wrong to them.”
Herbster has filed a defamation lawsuit against Slama. And his campaign has accused Ricketts of helping to orchestrate the allegations, running a TV advertisement noting that the state senator once worked for the governor.
Ricketts pushed back in an interview, saying that it’s “ridiculous to think that somebody could coordinate eight different people to talk to a reporter about this.”
Trump has taken an interest in the race, aides say, venting about the governor’s intense push to defeat his ally. The former president has privately called Ricketts a “stiff,” has said he views the governor’s ongoing involvement as a personal slight against him and has complained Ricketts has “never done anything for me,” said one person familiar with the remarks. (The Ricketts family initially spent heavily to prevent Trump from winning the Republican nomination in 2016, though since then the Rickettses have donated millions of dollars to support him.)
Ricketts, who last year unsuccessfully tried to persuade Trump to not endorse Herbster, shrugged off the split.
“President Trump and I have worked together on a lot of different issues, and we agree on a lot of policy,” the governor said in an interview. “On this topic, we disagree on the primary. We’re backing two different candidates,” added Ricketts, who was not invited to attend the rally.
Herbster is hardly the first under-siege loyalist to whom Trump has given backup. During the final days of his presidency, Trump pardoned two of his former top political advisers, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort. After White House aide Rob Porter was fired following accusations of battering two of his ex-wives, Trump remarked that Porter had said he was “innocent” and added that he “did a very good job when he was in the White House.”
After former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly was accused of sexual harassment, Trump called O’Reilly a “good person” and said he didn’t think he “did anything wrong.” And after Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, was accused of sexual assault during his high school years, Trump called him “one of the finest human beings you will ever have the privilege of knowing or meeting.”
Those close to the former president — who himself has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women — say he often takes a skeptical view of accusations of impropriety directed at candidates he supports, believing that once he endorses someone, they become targets of unsubstantiated allegations. Trump has privately said he doubts the accusations confronting Herbster.
“I’ve been through thick and thin with Donald Trump and he’s always had my back,” said Michael Caputo, who was a top spokesperson at the Department of Health and Human Services during the Trump administration but later stepped down following revelations that he had made inflammatory social media postings.
Herbster is a consummate Trump ally. He was there at the beginning of the Trump era, when the then-candidate came down the Trump Tower escalator, and at the end, at the rally that preceded the deadly 2021 Capitol riot. In between, Herbster was a prolific donor to the former president, contributing more than $1.1 million to pro-Trump groups during the 2020 campaign. He was also present at the 2016 debate in St. Louis between Trump and Hillary Clinton, just after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, which showed Trump speaking in sexually graphic terms about women.
As the race enters its final days, Nebraska Republicans say the major outstanding question is whether Trump’s decision to venture into Nebraska on a Friday night puts his friend over the top in a race that’s essentially tied. Herbster has had Trump’s endorsement in hand for months, but there is recent evidence that Trump’s support can pay dividends for candidates down the stretch: After the former president endorsed “Hillbilly Elegy” author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance in the Ohio GOP Senate primary, the candidate’s poll numbers skyrocketed.
“No one, no one out there in the Republican Party,” Herbster said, “has ever or can now generate excitement [and] enthusiasm like Donald J. Trump.”
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https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/28/politics/georgia-bill-limits-race-discussions-classrooms/index.html
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Surprise GDP slump undercuts White House recovery story
The contraction of the U.S. economy in the first quarter may be more of a political than an economic problem for the White House: The negative news disrupts the administration’s narrative that growth is healthy despite decades-high inflation.
Gross domestic product shrank at a 1.4 percent annual rate as strong demand drew a flood of imports, the Commerce Department said Thursday, well below the 1 percent growth that economists had expected. It marked the first quarterly decline in activity since the spring of 2020, when pandemic-related shutdowns triggered mass layoffs that plunged the economy into a brief but deep recession.
The surprise presents a major messaging challenge for a White House that is grappling with waning consumer confidence, despite months of strong job gains, rapid wage increases and declining layoffs. It comes after GDP grew at a blistering 6.9 percent pace in the last three months of 2021 — and less than a week before the Federal Reserve is expected to accelerate its efforts to raise interest rates to curb inflation, which may further slow growth.
In the latest Gallup poll released Wednesday, 4 in 5 adults rated current economic conditions as only fair or poor, and more than three-quarters of Americans say the economy is getting worse. The resulting Economic Confidence Index has fallen since last July and is now worse than it was in April 2020, at the start of the pandemic.
Voters from both parties will hold President Joe Biden and the Democrats accountable for whether things feel on the right or wrong track, said Sarah Binder, a political science professor at George Washington University.
“Slow growth — potentially still coupled with high inflation — inevitably makes it harder for the president’s party to win elections,” Binder said Wednesday, before the latest numbers were released. “With slim majorities and Biden’s popularity sagging, there’s a strong risk that Democrats could lose control of both chambers.”
The White House was girding itself for criticism.
A senior administration official, in an interview Wednesday, said the quarterly slump would largely be due to two technical factors — a large increase in the trade deficit as imports surged, and a significant slowdown in inventory building — and doesn’t signal that the economy is weakening.
Thursday’s report showed the trade deficit dragged down growth by 3.2 percent in the first quarter, while the decline in inventory investment shaved off 0.84 percent.
Under the hood, the economy still looks very strong, the senior official said Wednesday.
Final sales to domestic private purchasers — a metric that economists often point to as a true reflection of the underlying health of the economy — rose 3.7 percent, according to the latest report. Consumer spending rose 2.7 percent, gross private investment expanded at a 2.3 percent pace and residential investment rose 2.1 percent.
In fact, demand was so strong that domestic production couldn’t keep up, forcing businesses to import more goods from overseas, Amherst Pierpont chief economist Stephen Stanley said Wednesday.
“This is what an overheating economy looks like,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist for RSM US LLP, after the GDP data was released.
A single quarter of negative growth does not mean the U.S. economy is in recession — that determination is made by a panel of experts at the National Bureau of Economic Research and factors in data over many months. Still, Wells Fargo economists Jay Bryson and Shannon Seery said in a note to clients Wednesday, “the probability of a recession next year is not insignificant.”
Broadly speaking, this is what one might expect or even hope to see when policymakers are trying to cool an overheating economy, said Tony Fratto, a former White House spokesperson for President George W. Bush and now a partner at Hamilton Place Strategies.
“The prescription when you have full employment and inflation is to take the froth out of the economy for a little bit,” Fratto said Wednesday. “But the politics of negative growth, even for a quarter — at this time, in a midterm election year — are really, really risky for the White House.”
Democrats need to be ready to contend with Republicans ready to hammer them over the growth slowdown, which, coupled with high inflation and rising interest rates, may start to feel more like malaise, he added.
“They’re not going to be talking about inventories,” he said of the GOP. “They’re purely going to be talking about how the Democrats’ big spending caused inflation and a slowdown in the economy, and now it’s only going to get worse.”
Republicans jumped on the news.
“Accelerating inflation, a worker crisis, and the growing risk of a significant recession are the signature economic failures of the Biden Administration – and will likely get worse,” said Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee.
The senior Biden administration official pointed to a thread Wednesday from Jason Furman, former chair of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, explaining why technical factors in the first quarter masked the economy’s underlying strength.
But one analyst said that kind of messaging from the White House wouldn’t work.
“Any time you’re relying on a 12-tweet thread from Jason Furman to explain why actually the economy is better than it looks — particularly when GDP is already an abstract thing that people are not necessarily intuitively feeling, unlike inflation — I think it makes the story they’re trying to tell now even tougher,” said Liam Donovan, a principal at Bracewell LLP and a former GOP operative. “There’s only so many indicators left that can provide good news. The last thing they need is further bad news.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/28/gdp-slump-white-house-recovery-story-00028536