Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Revisiting election predictions

This prediction was from 2023 by David Frum/The Atlantic:

The Coming Biden Blowout

Republicans thought about running without Trump in 2024—but lost their nerve. They’re heading for electoral disaster again.

‘The Republican plan for 2024 is already failing, and the party leadership can see it and knows it.

There was no secret to a more intelligent and intentional Republican plan for 2024. It would have gone like this:

(1) Replace Donald Trump at the head of the ticket with somebody less obnoxious and impulsive.

(2) Capitalize on inflation and other economic troubles.

This one is from the last few days, from a podcast with Greg Sargent/The New Republic:

Why Trump’s Lunacy Is Suddenly Raising GOP Fears of Down-Ballot Losses

Republicans facing tough races seem to have realized that having Donald Trump at the top of the ticket might pose a problem. What took them so long?

GOP members of Congress facing tough races are suddenly worried that having Donald Trump at the top of the ticket might present them with a problem, according to new reports. They fear having to answer for Trump’s degeneracy and extremism, even as the GOP’s small-donor base is not delivering at the very moment that Trump is siphoning off party money for legal fees. What explains this sudden GOP epiphany about Trump? How likely is it that these fears will materialize? We chatted with Tim Persico, a top Democratic operative involved in House races in 2022, who provided insights into how this Trump effect really works.

House Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good endorsed Derrick Evans, a convicted Capitol rioter, in his primary challenge against a sitting House Republican. https://t.co/1ezbnWrCvz

— Mike Walker (@New_Narrative) April 3, 2024

Rep. Carol Miller's spokeswoman responds to Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good endorsing her opponent in her West Virginia district primary. The GOP member v member tensions continue on the campaign trail: https://t.co/3STihhHsPw https://t.co/ZFXKXrFie5

— Marianna Sotomayor (@MariannaReports) April 3, 2024

Tom Nichols/The Atlantic:

Supporting Trump Means Supporting a Culture of Violence

The former president is encouraging threats against his enemies—again.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump sent out a video with an image of Joe Biden bound like a hostage, and linked to an article with a photo of the daughter of the judge in his hush-money trial in New York. Voters need to confront the reality of what supporting Trump means.

On Good Friday, Donald Trump shared a video that prominently featured a truck with a picture of a hog-tied Joe Biden on it. I’ve seen this art on a tailgate in person, and it looks like a kidnapped Biden is a captive in the truck bed.

The former president, running for his old office, knowingly transmitted a picture of the sitting president of the United States as a bound hostage.

Of course, Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung quickly began the minimizing and what-abouting: “That picture,” he said in a statement, “was on the back of a pick up truck that was traveling down the highway. Democrats and crazed lunatics have not only called for despicable violence against President Trump and his family, they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him.”

POLITICO:

Hill GOP to Trump: Tamp down the talk of grudges and Jan. 6

They’re concerned about a rerun of the hair-pulling past — where Republican candidates in battleground races are constantly challenged to answer for his more erratic statements.

Trump is unlikely to heed such warnings to pivot to a more consistent general election message. So far this month, he has said that Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats “hate” their religion and described some migrants as “not people.”

But the fact that Hill Republicans are even attempting to refocus him, underscored by nearly 20 interviews with lawmakers and aides, illustrates their real worries about a 2024 cycle where their electoral fates are inescapably tied to the man at the top of the ticket.

POLITICO:

Republicans are rushing to defend IVF. The anti-abortion movement hopes to change their minds.

The groups are not advocating banning IVF but want new restrictions that would significantly curtail access to the procedure.

Anti-abortion advocates worked for five decades to topple Roe v. Wade. They’re now laying the groundwork for a yearslong fight to curb in vitro fertilization.

Since the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last month that frozen embryos are children, the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups have been strategizing how to convince not just GOP officials but evangelicals broadly that they should have serious moral concerns about fertility treatments like IVF and that access to them should be curtailed.

In short, they want to re-run the Roe playbook.

Today, Trump said he'd spoken with the family of Ruby Garcia, who was recently murdered by an undocumented immigrant in Michigan. Ruby Garcia's family says that isn't true. https://t.co/ikiNcd8kr5

— Zack Stanton (@zackstanton) April 2, 2024

Craig Gilbert/Milwaukee Journal sentinel:

For Donald Trump, Wisconsin in 2024 looks a lot like Wisconsin in 2016

Eight years ago in Wisconsin’s GOP primary, Donald Trump suffered his last big defeat on his way to the nomination, undone by a huge geographic divide over his candidacy.

Trump won the Republican vote in the rural north and west but was thrashed in metropolitan Milwaukee and Madison.

This year, Trump wrapped up his party’s nomination long before Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary (and will campaign today in Green Bay).

But the regional schisms in the GOP over the former president have re-emerged, a polling analysis shows.

Gregg T Nunziata/The Dispatch with a conservative opinion about what went wrong:

The Conservative Legal Movement Got Everything It Wanted. It Could Lose It All.

Trump-era advances in jurisprudence came at a deep civic cost.

Contrary to the fears of liberals and the misplaced hopes of Trump, conservative judicial appointees upheld the principle of judicial independence. They refused to serve as reliable partisans and handed Trump and his administration important legal defeats. Crucially, Trump’s nominees rejected his baseless claims of a stolen election.

But these advances in jurisprudence came at a deep civic cost. The president with whom legal conservatives allied themselves used his office to denigrate the rule of law, mock the integrity of the justice system, attack American institutions, and undermine public faith in democracy. Beyond the rhetoric, he abused emergency powers, manipulated appropriated funds for personal political ends, and played fast and loose with the appointments clause, all at the cost of core congressional powers.

Republicans in Congress barely resisted these actions and increasingly behaved more like courtiers than members of a co-equal branch of government. They failed to treat either of his impeachments with appropriate constitutional gravity. House Republicans dismissed his first impeachment process. Leading senators not only ignored centuries of precedent by refusing to conduct a meaningful trial, but they debased themselves by traipsing to the White House to guffaw and applaud while the president celebrated his acquittal.

News: Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola brought in an eye-popping $1.7 million in the first three months of the year, bringing her war chest to $2.5 million as she prepares to defend the Trumpiest seat held by a Democrat. https://t.co/AT2TR4lpxz

— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) April 2, 2024

That’s what happens when you’re pro fish.

Cliff Schecter covers Stacey Plaskett taking down Jim Jordan:

Trump eyes dual strategy to flip script against Biden amid legal hurdles: ‘We have the messaging’

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Donald Trump heads out on the stump Tuesday in Michigan and Wisconsin, two Midwestern battleground states he narrowly lost to President Biden four years ago, as he looks to take advantage of a weekday campaign rally ahead of his upcoming hush-money trial in a couple of weeks.

The former president's team said the presumptive GOP nominee will take aim at what they charged was President Biden's "Border Bloodbath" during the first stop in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Trump's campaign swing is his first in two and a half weeks since he headlined a rally in Ohio on March 16 on behalf of the Republican candidate he was backing in the Buckeye State's GOP Senate primary.

The infrequent weekday campaign rallies may become even rarer this spring and summer as Trump becomes the first current or former president in the nation's history to go on trial.

TRUMP AIMS TO TOP BIDEN'S NEW $26 MILLION FUNDRAISING RECORD

As of now, Trump's hush-money trial is set to begin in New York City on April 15. The former president – who is being tried on 34 state felony charges – is accused of falsifying business records in relation to hush-money payments during the 2016 election he made to Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about his alleged affair with the adult film actress.

Trump has repeatedly denied falsifying business records as well as the alleged sexual encounter with Daniels.

TRUMP HUSH-MONEY TRIAL SET TO START ON THIS DATE

During the Republican presidential primaries, Trump used the multiple criminal and civil cases he faces – including two for his alleged attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden and another for mishandling classified documents – to cast himself as a victim, which fired up support among GOP voters and boosted fundraising.

"HAPPY EASTER TO ALL, INCLUDING CROOKED AND CORRUPT PROSECUTORS AND JUDGES THAT ARE DOING EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO INTERFERE WITH THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2024, AND PUT ME IN PRISON," Trump said Sunday in a social media post.

The former president is required to attend the court proceedings in the hush-money trial, which are scheduled for weekdays, except Wednesdays, and will ground the 74-year-old Trump in the city where he was born and raised and called home until changing his residence to Florida nearly five years ago.

Sources in the former president's political orbit tell Fox News that a schedule's being mapped out that includes making the most of Wednesdays, when court is not in session, as well as weekends, when Trump usually holds rallies and other campaign events.

"We have the message, the operation, and the money to propel President Trump to victory on November 5," Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita predicted last week in a statement.

While Trump's been mostly off the campaign trail, Biden has stopped since delivering the State of the Union address in early March in all six of the crucial battleground states where he narrowly edged Trump to win the White House in 2020. And last week Biden visited North Carolina, which Trump won by a razor-thin margin four years ago.

The trips are aimed at pumping up the president's anemic poll numbers and also to paint a contrast with Trump, who has been sidetracked due to numerous court appearances in New York City and Florida.

In a video posted on X last week, the president's re-election team highlighted Biden's busy schedule and contrasted it with Trump playing golf.

"I’ll tell you this: There’s a difference between the two candidates in this election," Biden wrote in the social media post after Trump bragged on his Truth Social platform about winning two golf championships at a course he owns.

But Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt predicted that the upcoming trial would give the former president a boost against his successor in the White House, and she said in a statement that "Joe Biden and the Democrats’ entire strategy to defeat President Trump is to confine him to a courtroom."

"President Trump has been attacked by the Democrats for eight years. He has stood strong through two sham impeachments, endless lies and now multiple baseless political witch hunts," Leavitt told Fox News Digital in February. "The Democrats want Donald Trump in a courtroom instead of on the campaign trail delivering his winning message to the American people, but nothing will stop him from doing that."

While he'll be sidetracked four out of five weekdays when the trial gets underway, Trump is expected to continue his practice of grabbing the cable news spotlight with his courtroom arrivals and departures. 

And the former president has also used his social media postings on his Truth Social platform to make headlines and drive the campaign conversation.

"Trump can dominate the message environment anytime he wants," longtime Republican strategist Dave Carney told Fox News. "We've never seen anything like this where one guy – whatever he says – gets full coverage. It's a phenomenon. Whether it's social media or cable TV or even broadcast TV, he just dominates the news."

And Carney, a veteran of numerous presidential campaigns, forecast "there will be such coverage of his court cases that at times I would bet there will be more reporters covering his stakeout than covering the president."

Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.

Hunter Biden seen with president at White House Easter Egg Roll as House GOP mulls criminal referrals

Hunter Biden was spotted attending Monday's White House Easter Egg Roll alongside his father, President Biden, as House Republicans reportedly mull potential criminal referrals against them to the Department of Justice.

Hunter arrived at the White House on Sunday evening with his wife, Melissa Cohen, and their son, Beau, after spending the Easter weekend at Camp David with the president and First Lady Jill Biden. The five were photographed exiting Marine One at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C.

The family getaway came as Republicans on the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees are jointly investigating alleged Biden family corruption as part of an impeachment inquiry into the president, and are reportedly floating possible criminal referrals in lieu of an impeachment vote.

SWING STATE HOUSE HOPEFUL CHANGES TUNE AFTER SCRUBBING VIOLENT CRIME DEFENSES FROM LAW FIRM WEBSITE

Reports that Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., was considering criminal referrals followed the two committees' joint hearing last week that included testimony from multiple former business associates of Hunter who testified to the extent of Biden's involvement in his son's business dealings, which the White House has denied.

Although Comer hasn't specified who these criminal referrals would target, they could provide a way for Republicans to please those anxious for the Biden family to face some sort of consequences from the alleged influence-peddling scheme as the party looks unlikely to have the votes to successfully impeach the president.

NEW JERSEY DEMOCRAT FACING PRESSURE TO RESIGN AFTER MOCKING EASTER ONLINE WITH DRAG, ABORTION REFERENCES

Hunter's appearance at the White House capped a multi-day schedule that included his attendance at his dad's swanky, but controversial, New York City fundraiser held last Thursday, the same day as the wake of an NYPD officer killed in the line of duty.

Last year, the White House faced flak for omitting Hunter's visits and extended stays from its visitor logs from the beginning of the Biden administration through Feb. 2023 despite claiming it was "the most transparent administration in American history."

While many of the events attended by Hunter were ceremonial and a tradition at the White House, Fox News Digital previously reported how Hunter sought to use such events for his personal financial gain during the Obama administration

Republicans warm to Social Security, Medicare reform as 2024 election nears

Lawmakers have long shied away from serious discussions about entitlement reform, but the issue appears to be coming back into focus for Republicans who are wary about the growing national debt.

"I definitely have noticed it," veteran GOP strategist Doug Heye told Fox News Digital of the uptick in GOP-led discussions on the issue. "Republicans have talked about this for a long time, not always with specifics. But what tends to happen is, they talk about it, they get attacked, they fall back."

Congress just ended the fiscal year 2024 government-funding fight with President Biden signing a $1.2 trillion spending package into law last week and averting a partial government shutdown. But the ugly battle, which took six additional months after the end of fiscal year 2023, only accounted for the government’s discretionary spending – which makes up just over a quarter of annual federal funds.

The vast majority of federal funding is classified as mandatory spending, which includes entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), known colloquially as "food stamps."

HOUSE PASSES $1.2 TRILLION GOVERNMENT SPENDING BILL TO AVERT GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

Discussions about raising the Social Security eligibility age or cuts to Medicare are always politically fraught. But economists are now warning that without changes, those programs are headed for forced cuts anyway, due to insufficient funds – with Medicare expected to become insolvent in 2028, and Social Security in 2033.

"I do think we should be willing to have real conversations about this, but I wouldn’t say this is a new issue," Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., chair of the pragmatic House Main Street Caucus, told Fox News Digital.

Johnson noted that "every ten years" or so, Washington officials assemble task forces and commissions to discuss the national debt or the solvency of programs like Social Security and Medicare.

TERM LIMITS, PREVENTING LEADER ‘MONARCHY’ BECOME TOP CONCERNS IN POST-MCCONNELL GOP

"I think what is maybe ripening this issue a bit more now is the [threat of insolvency]," he said. "It is closer than ever."

Johnson himself has led the charge in pushing for work requirements for federal food benefits, something Democrats have used as a political cudgel, despite the programs’ ballooning costs. But in recent months, more Republicans are declaring their support for curbing entitlements.

Meanwhile, House Rules Committee Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., openly called for entitlement reform in his announcement that he would be running for House Appropriations chair.

"You cannot solve the U.S. deficit problem exclusively in the Appropriations Committee, as discretionary spending only amounts to roughly 28 percent of U.S. expenditures," Cole said earlier this month. "If we are going to produce a balanced budget, which I strongly believe we should be striving to do, we should be having serious discussions on how to fund and reform our entitlement programs, which makes up approximately 60 percent of all spending."

The Republican Study Committee, a 175-member House GOP group led by Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., recently released a budget proposal that called for raising the "retirement age for future retirees to account for increases in life expectancy" as well as restructuring Medicare to compete with private options.

Democrats up to the White House pounced on the proposal, accusing Republicans of trying to gut Social Security and Medicare. Seizing on the looming November election as well, Biden’s campaign has sought to link any Republican victory to deep cuts to the programs.

HOUSE SPEAKER JOHNSON SAYS WHITE HOUSE DOESN'T 'CALL THE SHOTS' ON WHEN IMPEACHMENT IS OVER

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Bob Good, R-Va., told Fox News Digital that he expects that Republicans will take on entitlement reform if they win the White House, House and Senate.

"My hope would be that if we have full control of government that we will take the steps necessary to preserve and protect Social Security and Medicare for the current retirees who are depending on it, those nearing retirement, depending on the next few years, [and] so that it's there also for people like you," Good said.

Former President Donald Trump, the presumed GOP nominee for 2024, has not been explicit about his stance regarding entitlement reform. 

He told CNBC earlier this month that "there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting." His spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, later told NBC News, "President Trump will continue to strongly protect Social Security and Medicare in his second term."

But Paul Winfree, Trump’s former White House budget policy director and current president of the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC), backed entitlement reform to reduce the national deficit and save the programs themselves.

"Interest rates are significantly higher and so too are debt service payments. At the same time, the Fed has had a hard time getting inflation fully under control," Winfree told Fox News Digital. "Those are market signals that the deficit really needs to come down. And the sooner policymakers begin to confront the biggest drivers of the deficit, specifically what is spent on federal health programs, the more likely it will be that they can protect programs for the most vulnerable."

The federal government spent $2.2 trillion on Social Security and Medicare in 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office, out of $3.8 trillion in mandatory spending.

Strategist Doug Heye, who’s pessimistic about the talk becoming action, suggested that it was precisely because reforms seem too out of reach that Republicans are able to be vocal.

"Entitlement reform, depending on who you talk to, is – it's a tool to show either voters or portions of conservative media that you're fighting, and it doesn't mean that any of this is going to happen. In fact, that's sort of irrelevant to the process, showing the willingness to fight becomes paramount," Heye explained.