Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) appeared on Trump-boosting Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show on the eve of the New Hampshire primary and defended President Donald Trump’s ouster of two key impeachment witnesses just two days after his acquittal.Last Friday, after celebrating being acquitted of abuse of power charges, the president fired National Security Council official Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and U.S Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. Vindman, specifically, was marched out of the White House by security, along with his twin brother, who was also terminated from his NSC position.Gabbard, who has become a frequent Fox News guest in recent months, defended the firings to Fox News’ Neil Cavuto over the weekend, telling him that while she disagrees with many of Trump’s decisions “as it relates to foreign policy,” the public needs to realize that “there are consequences to elections.”“The president has, within his purview, to make the decisions about who he'd like serving in his Cabinet,” she added.Appearing on Hannity on Monday night, the Hawaii congresswoman first called for Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez to resign over the chaotic Iowa caucuses, saying “he’s had a failure of leadership” and has been unable to “uphold that faith and trust.”After telling Gabbard that she’s “been treated horribly” by the Democratic Party and that he supports her outspoken criticism of former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (Gabbard is suing Clinton for defamation), Hannity applauded her defense of Trump’s retaliatory firings.“I thought that was courageous,” he stated. “Just acknowledging a simple truth that a president gets to hire and fire the people he wants, not people that disagree with his policy.”Gabbard said the “deeper issue” is that her defense of Trump isn’t based on opinion but “on the Constitution,” noting at the same time that she’s still an active soldier in the National Guard.“Thank you for your service,” Hannity interjected.“Thank you, thank you very much, but as a member of Congress, I took an oath to the Constitution as does every member of Congress,” she continued. “And it is the Constitution that provides that our foreign policy is set by the president of the United States as well as, in some significant ways, by Congress, not by unelected bureaucrats and not by the military.”“And the reason why our founders had the wisdom to do this, they knew if voters were unhappy with the foreign policy decisions being made, they could make that decision at the ballot box to hire or fire where they can’t do that with unelected bureaucrats or others,” the Democratic lawmaker concluded.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

The president fired up thousands of supporters at first rally since his acquittal in the Senate impeachment trialAn emboldened Donald Trump celebrated his acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial at a campaign rally in New Hampshire, where he hoped his presence would rattle his Democratic opponents on the eve of the state’s first-in-the-nation primaries.While the Democratic candidates tore into the president at rallies and events across the battleground state, Trump fired up thousands of his most ardent supporters at the Monday night rally, his first since the Senate cleared him of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.“Our good Republicans in the United States Senate voted to reject the outrageous partisan impeachment hoax and to issue a full, complete and absolute total acquittal,” Trump thundered to a packed arena in downtown Manchester. “It wasn’t even close!”Trump tweeted ahead of the rally that he hoped to “shake up the Dems a little bit” as they face a competitive contest, in which Vermont senator Bernie Sanders leads the field in many surveys. The New Hampshire primary has always played an outsized role in the presidential nomination process, but it has taken on a heightened significance following the disastrous failure of the Iowa caucuses to produce a clear winner.Trump delighted in the debacle, playfully asking the crowd if anyone knew who had won the Democratic caucuses. "(“Nobody knows. Flip a coin!” he said.)He added later: “The Democrat party wants to run your healthcare but they can’t even run a caucus in Iowa.”As the Democratic hopefuls crisscrossed the state, Trump supporters came from across the region, braving rain and snow, to attend the rally in Manchester, a one-time manufacturing city of 110,000 people. The line to enter the arena snaked around the arena for several blocks; those at the front had arrived more than 24 hours in advance.Inside the arena, concession stands sold cotton candy, popcorn and Dippin’ Dots to people in red Make America Great Again hats and pink Women for Trump T-shirts.Trump’s hour-long speech reprised some of his most incendiary remarks, including the claim that undocumented immigrants entering the country are “murderers, rapists and some other things”. But he also made fresh references. He lashed out at the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, for her behavior during his State of the Union speech last week when she tore up a copy of his remarks after he finished.“I’m speaking and a woman is mumbling terribly behind me. Angry – there was a little anger back there,” Trump complained. “We’re the ones that should be angry!” The arena erupted in a round of “Lock her up!!”, a cry once directed at Hillary Clinton.​But Trump ​also credited the House speaker for his rising poll numbers. Last week, as the Democratic Iowa caucus collapsed into disarray, ​he recorded his highest ever approval rating in a Gallup poll. (“Thank you, Nancy,” he roared.)​Unlike the Democrats, Trump faces no real competition in the New Hampshire Republican primary on Tuesday, which four years ago delivered his first primary victory. Only Bill Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts, remains in the race as an alternative for the fast-dwindling faction of Never Trump Republicans.Noting his lack of opposition in the state’s open primary, Trump repeatedly returned to the prospect of his supporters influencing the result by voting for the Democrat who they believe Trump would have the best chance of defeating. New Hampshire election laws allow independents to cast ballots for either Democrats or Republicans. “A lot of Republicans tomorrow will vote for the weakest candidate possible of the Democrats,” he said. “My only problem is I’m trying to figure out who is the weakest candidate. I think they’re all weak.”The event on Monday night was part of a strategy to steal the attention from Democrats at a critical moment, as Trump did with a rally in Des Moines on the eve of the Iowa caucuses.The Trump campaign is using the primary on Tuesday as an opportunity to “flex its organizational muscles” and to reach Republican and independent voters who they hope to win over in November, said spokesman Tim Murtaugh.Trump lost the state by less than 3,000 votes but his campaign has it firmly in their sights this time around. At the rally, Trump again falsely claimed that he lost the state in 2016 due to voter fraud but said this year should be “a lot different”.Ray Buckley, the chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, called Trump’s visit a “blunder” that will remind voters “why it’s so important to vote” in November 2020. He said the party is investing heavily in the battleground state – which Trump once maligned as a “drug-infested den” on a 2017 call with the leader of Mexico – in case the eventual nominee needs its four electoral votes.While Trump spoke, the Democrats were spread across the state. Joe Biden held a campaign event across the city at Saint George Greek Orthodox Cathedral; Pete Buttigieg held a rally in Exeter and Bernie Sanders joined the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and The Strokes for a concert-rally in Durham.Like Trump, many of his supporters at the event were emboldened by his acquittal in the Senate on Wednesday. Few expressed any doubt about the president’s prospects of being re-elected in November, pointing to a strong economy and the specter of “socialism” if a Democrat wins.“They’ll take our freedom away,” said Joanne Guimond, 64, from Bristol, Connecticut. “We’ll end up like Venezuela.”Attending a Trump rally is a “bucket list” event for Guimond, who came with her husband Emile, 69.Not only do they find Trump’s tell-it-like-it-is approach to politics refreshing, but they believe it has helped restore the US to a position of strength at home and abroad.“Trump’s the only one who’s got balls to do anything for our country,” he said. “He goes to other countries and fights for us. The Democrats? Forget it. He’s the one saving this country.”Michelle McBride, 58, a New Hampshire state government employee, is confident Trump will win re-election and is encouraged by the state of the economy under his stewardship. The unemployment rate in New Hampshire had already fallen to 2.8% under Barack Obama, but has reduced to 2.6% under Trump.McBride is alarmed that young people are attracted to the economic policies put forward by the Democratic candidates.“Today’s youth don’t understand what socialism means,” she said. “And they don’t know what’s going on because there’s no free speech on campuses anymore.”“The Democratic party is not the John F Kennedy party that we grew up with,” she said ruefully. “I don’t even know what they stand for anymore other than socialism. It’s scary.”

(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump bragged about his “full, complete” acquittal in his first rally since the Republican-led Senate cleared him in his impeachment trial, while assailing Democrats and undocumented immigrants and repeating a false claim about his 2016 election.Trump addressed thousands of supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire the day before Democrats running to challenge his re-election will hold their primary election in the state. The president’s rally was his latest effort to steal the spotlight from his rivals; he held a similar rally in Des Moines, Iowa, before the error-plagued Democratic caucus there last week.In between the two rallies, the Senate voted to reject two articles of impeachment against Trump the Democratic-led House passed in response to his attempt to pressure Ukraine’s government to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.Senate Republicans “voted to reject the outrageous, partisan impeachment hoax, and to issue a full, complete and absolute, total acquittal. And it wasn’t even close,” Trump said. “In the House, we won 196 to 0, and then we got three Democrats. And in the Senate, other than Romney, we got 52 to nothing.”Senator Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican, became the first senator in U.S. history to vote to remove a president of his own party from office. He supported one of the two articles of impeachment.“The radical left’s pathetic partisan crusade has completely failed and utterly backfired with 18 votes, think of that, 18 votes to spare,” he said. The Senate fell 18 votes shy of the two-thirds majority necessary to convict Trump.Dover StopAfter the rally, Trump planned to fly to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to witness the return of the remains of two service members killed in Afghanistan. Army Sergeant First Class Javier Gutierrez and Army Sergeant First Class Antonio Rodriguez were killed on Saturday in Nangarhar Province, according to the Pentagon. Both men were 28 years old.“These visits and the visits to Walter Reed are the toughest thing the president does,” National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien told reporters traveling with Trump. “He thinks it’s important to be there for the families.”NBC News reported that the two soldiers were killed by a person wearing an Afghan uniform during a joint operation with the country’s military.The solemn visit to the airfield was a contrast to the rally, where Trump reveled in his supporters’ adulation and mocked his political rivals. He has repeatedly jabbed Democrats for the chaotic Iowa caucuses last week that yielded no clear winner. He said Monday he would travel to New Hampshire in order to “shake up the Dems a little bit.”The rally is part of the Trump campaign’s strategy to try to spook Democrats by showing off its financial and organizational might in key early states, even without Trump facing a serious primary challenge.“We have the highest poll numbers that we’ve ever had,” Trump told his New Hampshire audience. “Thank you Nancy,” he said, referring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.At one point the Manchester audience changed “lock her up” about Pelosi, re-purposing a chant Trump’s supporters usually apply to his 2016 opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.But a poll published Monday by Quinnipiac University shows that the president has reason to worry about the general election: All of the top Democratic candidates lead him in hypothetical matchups, with Michael Bloomberg beating him the worst at 51% to 42%, and Bernie Sanders defeating him 51% to 43%.The poll surveyed 1,519 registered voters nationwide and had a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.(Bloomberg is the co-founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)False ClaimTrump narrowly lost to Clinton in New Hampshire during his 2016 victory, and on Monday revisited a false conspiracy theory about the election: That Democrats illegally bused voters from more liberal Massachusetts to New Hampshire to swing the vote for Clinton.“We should’ve won the election but they had buses being shipped up from Massachusets,” Trump falsely told his audience. He pointed out that Republican Chris Sununu is now governor of New Hampshire and said: “Now you get prosecuted if you do what they did.”He later encouraged his audience to vote for “the weakest” candidate in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary on Tuesday. The state has open primaries, meaning voters can choose to participate in either party’s nominating contest regardless of their registration.“If you want to vote for a weak candidate tomorrow, go ahead, vote for one,” Trump said. “Pick the weakest candidate, I don’t know who it is.”Return to ‘The Snake’Trump recited a poem he popularized during his 2016 election, “The Snake,” which he has re-purposed from its original meaning to apply to immigrants. The poem tells the story of a well-meaning woman who encounters a “half-frozen” snake on her way to work and brings it to her home to revive it, only for the snake to later bite and kill her.“This is illegal immigration,” Trump said before reciting the poem. It was originally written by civil-rights activist Oscar Brown in the 1960s, according to the Washington Post.“Got to come in legally and through merit,” Trump said after he had finished.Trump grabbed front page headlines in the Des Moines Register days before the Iowa caucuses by holding a rally and flooding the state with campaign and administration officials. He has since capitalized on the bungled caucus to argue that Democratic candidates would be incapable of governing the country.The campaign is using a nearly identical approach in New Hampshire, announcing last week that Republican Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky would be among more than a dozen surrogates deployed to the Granite State before Tuesday’s primary.“While the Democrats are still shaking off the embarrassment of their Iowa caucuses disaster, Team Trump remains organized and focused, and we intend to move New Hampshire into the win column in November,” Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said in a statement.Trump’s appearance comes at a pivotal moment in the Democratic primary race. The final Boston Globe/Suffolk/WBZ tracking poll showed Senator Bernie Sanders in the lead in New Hampshire with 26% of likely primary voters, followed by former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 19% and Senator Amy Klobuchar at 13%. Former Vice President Joe Biden, once the field’s front-runner, and Senator Elizabeth Warren are each polling around 11%.Trump has seized on the popularity of Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, to argue the entire Democratic field as too far left. Murtaugh said the campaign’s main goal would be to “remind voters of the dangers of the Democrats’ big-government socialist agenda.”(Updates with Trump stop at Dover Air Force Base, beginning in seventh paragraph)To contact the reporters on this story: Jordan Fabian in Washington at jfabian6@bloomberg.net;Josh Wingrove in Washington at jwingrove4@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, John HarneyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Republicans are doing little to rein in a vengeful president.

Five days after President Donald Trump was acquitted in the Senate’s impeachment trial, whatever restraints the Republican Party envisioned for him going forward are being utterly obliterated.

The president is ousting impeachment inquiry witnesses like Alexander Vindman and Gordon Sondland with hints at more to come and attacking senators whom he may need down the stretch to support his agenda. He’s defeated the GOP’s free-traders and is continuing to shift billions of Pentagon funds toward the border wall, despite Republicans’ reservations about his use of the national emergency statute.

And after initially treating Trump-sought investigations of Joe and Hunter Biden with skepticism, key Senate Republicans are now plowing ahead with probes of their own into their old colleague.

The upshot is the Senate GOP’s robust anti-Trump wing from four years ago has been whittled down to a handful of Maybe Trumpers. And those who had hoped the president would be chastened by becoming the third president ever to be impeached by the House are doing little to rein him in even though he emerged with a different lesson entirely.

“Presidential personnel matters are for the president to make,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who criticized Trump for requesting probes into the Bidens but found his conduct not impeachable. He declined to reassess his belief that Trump may be humbled after impeachment: “My hope is that the president will have learned something.”

Trump almost surely would have faced outrage from Republicans three years ago for ousting two impeachment witnesses, targeting Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and belligerently going after his critics at the National Prayer Breakfast. But what once was a frantic push and pull between congressional Republicans and the president has now become a nearly party-wide synergy with Trump.

They don’t embrace the actions or rhetoric of the confrontational and controversial head of their party, but Republicans are done fighting with him as they head together into a November election in which their fates are tied.

“I hope that’s a last-week phenomenon. And it’s not going to carry on in the future,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) of Trump’s retributions since being acquitted. He declined to implore Trump to put an end to it: “I’m not going to tell him how to do his job.”

Efforts to dial back Trump’s tariffs have been abandoned. Shifting new money from military priorities to the border wall is met with little outrage. The Senate has yet to pass sanctions on Turkey for its Syrian incursion, which came after Trump withdrew troops in the fall and prompted loud handwringing from Republicans.

GOP critics like former Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee are gone, replaced by stalwart allies like Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), who was appointed to the seat previously held by the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

“The style of how he does things — he’s different in that sense,” said Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), a freshman senator. “In general, I like how he’s trying to shake things up around here.”

And attacks on colleagues like Romney, the lone congressional Republican to support impeaching and removing Trump, are met with only mild concern that the GOP’s whip counts could be affected.

“The president’s never been a legislator. And his view of those relationships would be different than ours would,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), a member of GOP leadership. “Our view is the next vote’s the most important vote. And we’re going to have it before too long.”

Where there is occasional dissent, it is on votes forced upon the GOP by Democrats. The minority party is using its procedural powers to try to curb Trump’s authority to attack Iran and block the national emergency Trump declared to seize wall funding.

But the number of Republicans that support rebuking the president in those areas consistently falls far short of the 67 votes needed to override Trump’s impending veto. And even on those symbolic votes, most in the GOP are loath to break with Trump.

Overall for Republicans, the story of Trumps’ presidency is one of a daily outrage only to be replaced by another. GOP senators have learned to embrace the upbeat economy, the tax cuts, the conservative judges and the deregulation. When Trump finds himself embroiled in controversy, these days they wait until the storm passes, knowing another will follow.

“Things have a short shelf life around here. I think the president, like all of us, is going to be ready to move on,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.).

Whereas Corker once responded to the president by calling the White House an “adult daycare,” the current targets of Trump’s barbs mostly try not to fire back at him. Manchin, who Trump called a “munchkin,” said being on the receiving end of Trump’s vitriol is “to be expected.”

“I've dealt with a lot of people like the president before so I can work with anybody and everybody. Sometimes they can't control their own emotions,” said Manchin, who Trump savaged during his 2018 re-election campaign. “It’s not a good way to live your life.”

Romney mostly refused to engage with Trump’s attacks on him Monday, which have ranged from calling him a “failed presidential candidate” that didn’t work hard enough to beat former President Barack Obama to alluding to him as among the people “who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong,” a reference to Romney’s remarks on why he chose to vote to remove Trump from office.

“I don’t really have any comment on his reaction. I expect he’ll say what he believes,” Romney said.

Romney, like every Republican interviewed for this story, said that Trump was entitled to fire Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, and reassign Vindman, a lieutenant colonel, out of the National Security Council after they testified in the impeachment inquiry. The Utah senator did say he admired them for responding to congressional subpoenas.

A handful of Republicans did try to delay the firing of Sondland — a longtime donor to Senate Republicans — in a bid to shield Trump from allegations that he was punishing those who testified against him in the impeachment inquiry. But it doesn’t appear there was a full-scale effort to save Sondland’s job.

“Ambassador Sondland was planning on leaving. He had been there for two years,” said Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who Sondland donated to in the past. Tillis, who did not speak directly to Trump, suggested to the White House that “we have a little bit longer glide path. But now it is what it is.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) was also working to delay Sondland’s firing but downplayed it as “a couple phone calls” aimed at letting Sondland resign rather than be fired.

Johnson was more enthusiastic about digging into Hunter Biden’s role at a Ukrainian energy company during the time his father was vice president. Johnson and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) are requesting the State Department release any documents related to Hunter Biden.

The Wisconsin Republican said so far, he’s received “virtually none.” Now that Trump’s trial is over, he expects things to pick up as Republicans join the president's call for probes into his enemies rather than urge Trump to move on from the Ukraine saga.

“We have not been getting document production and the White House has been reluctant during the impeachment,” Johnson said. “So hopefully now that that's past we'll start getting” documents.