Harris calls potential government shutdown ‘completely irresponsible’

Several issues are swirling this week with potential economic and political fallout, including the ongoing auto workers strike, a looming government shutdown and the first hearing in the impeachment inquiry into President Biden. Geoff Bennett spoke to Vice President Kamala Harris about all of it at Morehouse College in Atlanta where she courted young voters as part of a month-long college tour.

Amy Walter and Kay Henderson on voter reaction to the House impeachment inquiry

Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter and Kay Henderson of Radio Iowa and Iowa PBS join Geoff Bennett to discuss the latest political news, including analysis of the 2024 campaign and how voters are reacting to the House impeachment inquiry of Biden.

What led to Hunter Biden’s indictment on firearms charges and the legal battle ahead

Hunter Biden was indicted Thursday on gun charges, setting up a high-profile legal battle ahead of his father's reelection campaign. The indictment comes days after House Republicans opened an impeachment inquiry into the president and his family's business dealings. A plea deal for Hunter Biden collapsed in federal court in July. Amna Nawaz discussed the latest developments with Devlin Barrett.

Raskin says Trump ‘met his match’ in special counsel Jack Smith

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said Sunday he thinks former President Trump has “met his match” in special counsel Jack Smith, as Trump has managed to avoid facing repercussions for actions he’s taken in the past, including in the events surrounding Jan. 6.

“I think that he's met his match now in his special counsel, who is holding him to the letter of the criminal law,” Raskin said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Raskin pointed to Trump’s second impeachment, when all 50 Democrats and seven Republicans voted to convict the former president — falling short of the necessary threshold — as an example of Trump avoiding repercussions.

“It was a 57-43 vote to convict him of inciting a violent insurrection against the Union, which was the most widespread bipartisan vote in American history to convict a president. And of course, Trump is bragging about the fact that only 57 senators voted to convict him of that. He beat the constitutional spread in his way,” Raskin said. 

Raskin noted that many Republicans who voted against convicting Trump still believed that Trump was responsible for his actions, but they voted against conviction because he was a former president. 

Raskin said he was hopeful the former president would now be held accountable.

Smith led investigations that resulted in two federal indictments against the former president, one for his alleged mishandling of classified documents and another related to his efforts to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election. 

Trump is also seeking another term in the White House and is currently the front-runner among GOP presidential primary candidates.

GOP Rep. John James slams DeSantis for curriculum comments on slavery: ‘You’ve gone too far’

Rep. John James (R-Mich.) criticized Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Friday for his response to Republican lawmakers who called him out on his state’s new Black history education standards Friday.

“@RonDeSantis, #1: slavery was not CTE!” James posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “Nothing about that 400 years of evil was a ‘net benefit’ to my ancestors. #2: there are only five black Republicans in Congress and you’re attacking two of them.”

Both Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) have criticized the new standards, which indicate that American slavery helped enslaved people develop “skills” that benefited them, in the past few days.

Scott rebuked the language during a campaign stop in Iowa on Thursday, claiming "there is no silver lining in slavery."

“Slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives," he said. "It was just devastating."

DeSantis responded to the lawmakers by saying they were falling in line with Vice President Kamala Harris, who called the guidelines "propaganda."

“They dare to push propaganda to our children,” Harris said earlier this week in Jacksonville, Fla. “Adults know what slavery really involved. It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother.”

James pleaded with DeSantis to change course.

“My brother in Christ… if you find yourself in a deep hole put the shovel down,” he wrote. “You are now so far from the Party of Lincoln that your Ed. board is re-writing history and you’re personally attacking conservatives like [Scott] and [Donalds] on the topic of slavery."

"You’ve gone too far. Stop," he added.

Trump and DeSantis debut dueling military policies

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign and former President Trump this week rolled out dueling plans for the U.S. military, with both GOP candidates' proposals light on details and heavy on gripes over Biden administration efforts. 

While DeSantis’s proposition took aim at Pentagon diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, recruiting woes and policies impacting transgender service members, Trump’s plan focused largely on seeking reimbursements for U.S. aid to Ukraine, lambasting Europe for what he decried as only a “tiny fraction” of what Washington had contributed. 

But as both candidates strive to stand apart from each other’s messaging, choosing to focus on different aspects of national security, experts say there appears to be little difference between the two proposals.   

“There doesn't seem to be very much daylight between the two of them on a couple of different fronts,” said Katherine Kuzminski, an armed forces expert and society at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington, D.C., think tank. 

Former President Trump pumps his fist as he departs after speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2023, on Saturday, March 4, 2023, at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Md. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

“I think there's a real focus on bringing resources back to the U.S. and not extending American leadership abroad. And then, certainly, when it comes to the domestic politics, the pushes for reform within the Department of Defense when it comes to DEI policies and transgender policy,” she said.

“There isn't really a debate between the two of them on these specific issues ... When you look at their policies, they're not actually all that different,” Kuzminski said.

Here are both candidate’s messages on the U.S. military and national security: 

DeSantis’s culture war complaints 

DeSantis’s plan, unveiled at a brief news conference last Tuesday in South Carolina, doubled down on past campaign promises to “rip the woke” out of the U.S. military and overhaul the institution.  

The “Mission First” proposal includes potential six-month performance reviews for all four-star generals and admirals, and possible dismissals should anyone be found to have “promoted policies to the detriment of readiness and warfighting.” 

He also pledged to rescind Biden’s executive order that allows transgender individuals to serve under their preferred sex, rip out DEI initiatives in the services or military academies, end Pentagon efforts to combat extremism in the ranks and reinstate personnel who were dismissed for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine as well as give them backpay.  

In addition, he promised to end programs meant to prepare military installations and troops for future climate change, bashing the Pentagon for shifting, in part, to electric vehicles. 

In an interview with CNN the evening after the press conference, DeSantis claimed his policy targets Pentagon efforts that hinder recruitment and said the military is currently suffering from America’s loss in confidence in the institution. 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis rolls out his military policy proposal during an event for his 2024 presidential campaign on Tuesday, July 18, 2023, in West Columbia, S.C. (AP Photo/Meg Kinnard)

“At this level, everybody has acknowledged these recruiting levels are at a crisis. ... I think it’s because people see the military losing its way, not focusing on the mission and focusing on a lot of these other things,” DeSantis said. 

DeSantis isn’t straying far from his policy proposals already enacted as Florida governor.

While head of the state, he has banned higher education institutions from putting dollars toward diversity and inclusion programs, forbade the use of federal resources to teach students about sexual activity, sexual orientation or gender identity, and prohibited some teachings about race and U.S. history. 

But Michael O'Hanlon, a security fellow at the Brookings Institution, called DeSantis’s stance a “missed opportunity” for the former Navy officer, who served in the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps in Iraq. 

“Cleary DeSantis is fighting the culture wars and he’s sort of staying true to his M.O.,” O'Hanlon told The Hill.  

“I think it’s probably a missed opportunity for him. … He should be trying to show he is actually capable of developing serious views on the big strategic issues of the day, which are fundamentally not about diversity, equity and inclusion within the armed forces,” he said. “I think he ought to be engaging on China and Russia, how to solve the Ukraine, how to prevent war over Taiwan.” 

And Kuzminski said there’s a misperception that the Florida governor is capitalizing on “wokeness” as a recruiting challenge in the U.S. military,  

“That is the perception of some who may have served a long time ago, but the reality of military service is that it needs to reflect the population from which it's drawn,” she said. “That's a challenge that I think a President Trump 2.0 or President DeSantis is going to run ... into if they were to win the election.” 

On Ukraine, Desantis has offered tentative comments on the conflict, insisting it wasn't a U.S. national security priority and downplaying the Russian invasion. 

“While the U.S. has many vital national interests [such as] securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural and military power of the Chinese Communist Party, becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them,” DeSantis said in March. 

He has since walked back his comments on the war being a “territorial dispute.” 

A firefighter walks with of a resident through smoke coming from a house on fire, after cluster rockets hit a residential area, in Konstantinovka, eastern Ukraine, on Saturday, July 9, 2022. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)

Trump’s Ukraine-Russia War focus 

Trump, meanwhile, has long made pledges to cut back U.S. involvement in foreign wars, starting with campaign promises ahead of the 2016 presidential election.  

Trump coasted through the 2016 GOP primaries under his so-called “America First” foreign policy, intended to diminish Washington’s role on the world stage and focus more dollars at home than overseas.  

During his presidency, he continued that line of thinking, calling for a reduction in service members serving abroad and criticizing the U.S. foreign intervention as being too expensive and ineffective. 

Trump seems to be doubling down on that track with his plan for “Rebuilding America’s Depleted Military,” also released last week. 

In a prerecorded video put out by his campaign, the former president focuses largely on foreign policy, repeating criticisms over Biden’s handling Russia’s war on Ukraine. 

If reelected, he claimed, he would demand Europe pay the U.S. to rebuild its weapons stockpiles — which have pulled from heavily since February 2022 to help bolster Kyiv in its fight.  

“Less than three years ago, I’d fully rebuilt the United States military and steered America into such a strong global position,” Trump boasted. 

“Twenty-nine months later, the arsenals are empty, the stockpiles are bare, the Treasury is drained, the ranks are being hollowed out, our country has been totally humiliated, and we have a corrupt, compromised president, crooked Joe Biden, who is dragging us into World War III,” he said. 

Trump also claimed Washington’s European allies were only giving a “tiny fraction” of the assistance to Ukraine compared to the United States, and suggested Biden was “too weak and too disrespected to even ask” for reimbursement.  

Trump also said in a recent interview that he could end the war in 24 hours, a claim many found dubious. 

O’Hanlon, who called Trump’s assertions on lagging European assistance to Ukraine “incorrect,” said he appears to be banking on his past arguments on making America first. 

Kuzminski agreed that Trump’s campaign looks to be “hitting harder on making Ukraine repay us,” and “doubling down" on those statements.

While Trump hasn’t been as vocal on culture war issues in the military this time around, he has a well-documented history when it comes to his stance on transgender service members in the military.

In July 2017, he announced on Twitter, apparently out of the blue, that transgender individuals would no longer be allowed “to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military.” 

That ban was eventually rescinded by Biden via executive order shortly after he entered the White House in January 2021. 

McCarthy questions whether Trump is ‘strongest’ Republican against Biden

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) questioned whether former President Trump is the strongest Republican candidate to run against President Biden in 2024, even as he expressed confidence Trump could beat Biden.

“Can he win that election? Yeah, he can. The question is, is he the strongest to win the election? I don’t know that answer,” McCarthy said on CNBC on Tuesday morning. “But can somebody, anybody beat Biden? Yeah, anybody can beat Biden. Can Biden beat other people? Yes, Biden can beat ‘em. It's on any given day.”

"Squawk Box" co-host Joe Kernen mentioned how Trump’s legal woes are complicating his candidacy. Those include indictments over his handling of classified documents after he left office and a 2016 hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

The comments prompted pushback from some on the right, with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon saying on his “War Room” show that Trump made a mistake supporting McCarthy as Speaker.

The Speaker appeared to clean up his comments hours later to Breitbart News, saying that Trump is “stronger today than he was in 2016” and is “Biden’s strongest political opponent,” pointing to his poll numbers.

“As usual, the media is attempting to drive a wedge between President Trump and House Republicans as our committees are holding Biden’s DOJ accountable for their two-tiered levels of justice,” McCarthy told Breitbart. “The only reason Biden is using his weaponized federal government to go after President Trump is because he is Biden’s strongest political opponent, as polling continues to show.”

McCarthy on CNBC had earlier expressed confidence in Trump defeating Biden if he is the GOP nominee.

“Can Trump beat Biden? Yeah, he can beat Biden,” McCarthy said.

“The Republicans get to select their nominee. If you want to go for sheer policy to policy, it’s not good for Republicans; it’s good for America. Trump’s policies are better, straight-forward, than Biden’s policies,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy’s uncertainty about whether Trump is the strongest candidate is notable given how close the Speaker has remained to the former president. Although McCarthy said in the aftermath of the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, that Trump bore some responsibility for the attack, he visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago weeks later. Last week, McCarthy backed proposals to expunge Trump’s two impeachments.

But there is skepticism about Trump in McCarthy’s conference. A few members are outwardly critical of the former president in the wake of the indictments, and others have endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

McCarthy has not yet endorsed any candidate in the presidential race, but he has said he might. 

Updated at 3:49 p.m.

Trump jumps into 2024 race with GOP at crossroads

President Trump is mounting a comeback bid with the hope that the GOP will once again rally behind him — just as some Republicans worry nominating him for president for a third time is a recipe for failure at the ballot box.

The former president announced the launch of his 2024 presidential campaign from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida Tuesday night, claiming the country has slipped into anarchy under President Biden and arguing he could repeat the policy successes of his first term. 

But he did so at a time when the calls from some party members to move on from Trump are as loud as they’ve been since he left office under the cloud of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and a second impeachment.

Trump pointed to a strong economy before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, reworked trade deals and a brash approach to international relations that kept the U.S. out of foreign conflicts as a case for another term.

But he ignored the major concerns some in the party have about his viability, steering clear of his pandemic response and his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and absolving himself of blame for the party’s underwhelming midterm showing.

“The voting will be much different. 2024. Are you getting ready?” Trump said to applause. “I am, too.”

Republicans are sifting through the aftermath of last week’s midterm elections, where expected sweeping victories never materialized. Democrats will hold on to their majority in the Senate, while Republicans appear poised to retake the House with a smaller margin than many hoped.

For some prominent figures in the party, it served as an inflection point. And while many did not name Trump explicitly, their message was clear: The party can choose to move away from making Trump central to everything it does, or it can risk more stinging defeats in 2024.

“We underperformed among independents and moderates, because their impression of many of the people in our party in leadership roles is that they’re involved in chaos, negativity, excessive attacks, and it frightened independent and moderate Republican voters,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, who served alongside Trump for four years, said on SiriusXM that the candidates who fared best in the midterms offered forward-looking solutions to major problems like inflation and crime, while “candidates that were focused on relitigating the last election, I think, did not fare as well.”

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) called the 2022 midterms “the funeral for the Republican Party as we know it.”

And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who is viewed as perhaps Trump’s chief rival for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, expressed concern that the party was unable to capitalize on Biden’s unpopularity with many voters.

“These independent voters aren’t voting for our candidates, even with Biden in the White House and the failures that we’re seeing. That’s a problem,” DeSantis said Tuesday.

Some of the blame for the GOP’s underwhelming midterm performance has fallen on Trump, whose endorsements helped carry candidates through Senate, House and gubernatorial primaries but not to victory in the general elections. 

Trump made a point to address the midterm outcome during his speech, and he even acknowledged the party was facing deserved criticism. But the criticism should not be directed at him, Trump said.

Many of Trump’s highest profile and most meaningful endorsements lost in the general election: Mehmet Oz and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania’s Senate and gubernatorial races, respectively; Blake Masters and Kari Lake in Arizona’s Senate and gubernatorial races, respectively; Tudor Dixon in Michigan’s gubernatorial race; Tim Michels in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race; and Don Bolduc in New Hampshire’s Senate race.

Trump instead blamed voters for the poor showing for Republicans, suggesting they did not yet realize how bad the Biden administration’s policies would be for them.

“Citizens of our country have not yet realized the pain our country is going through … they don’t quite feel it yet. But they will very soon,” Trump said. “I have no doubt that by 2024 it will sadly be much worse, and they will see much more clearly what happened.”

The midterm results have left Trump’s influence within the party at perhaps its most precarious point since right after he left the White House, when many Republicans appeared ready to distance themselves from Trump after he spent months whipping supporters into a frenzy over the 2020 election, culminating in the riot at the Capitol.

While that criticism faded and much of the GOP has remained loyal to Trump in the two years since, the question now is whether the former president can stave off the push among some conservatives to move on to a candidate who can carry on Trump’s brand of politics without the baggage.

Pence has indicated he is giving thought to a 2024 presidential bid, as has former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Both have said Trump’s campaign launch will not affect their decisions.

DeSantis, meanwhile, has become the star of the moment for many conservatives, earning fawning coverage from Fox News and the New York Post after a landslide reelection win last week.

The conservative Club for Growth, which broke with Trump on some of his midterm endorsements, released a poll on the eve of his 2024 announcement showing DeSantis leading Trump in head-to-head match-ups in early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire, as well as their home state of Florida.

A Politico-Morning Consult poll released this week, however, was more favorable for Trump, finding that 47 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they would back him in a presidential primary if it were held today, compared to 33 percent who said they’d support the Florida governor.

Since 2015, the party has been molded in Trump’s image. He reshaped the way the GOP discusses immigration, international alliances and trade. He brought scores of new voters into the fold, solidified the party’s hold on states like Ohio and Florida and developed a devoted following, giving him a remarkably high floor of support within the party.

But Trump has also turned off independent and moderate voters with his unpredictability, his constant personal attacks on those who criticize or oppose him, his fixation on the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen and his legal entanglements over his business dealings and handling of classified documents, the latter of which involved a search of the property where he made Tuesday night’s announcement.

Tuesday’s speech served as the start of what will be a lengthy decisionmaking process for the GOP about whether it will remain Trump’s party for the foreseeable future, or if the electorate is ready to move on.

"The journey ahead of us will not be easy,” Trump said. “Anyone who truly seeks to take on this rigged and corrupt system will be faced with a storm of fire that only a few could understand.”

Cheney: ‘Any interaction’ Trump has with Jan. 6 committee will be under oath, subject to perjury penalties

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) emphasized on Saturday that “any interaction” former President Trump has with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol will be “under oath and subject to penalties of perjury.”

Cheney, who serves as the vice chair of the committee, has remained tight-lipped about many aspects of the panel’s investigation into the Jan. 6 riot, as have her fellow committee members.

In a Saturday interview with Texas Tribune CEO Evan Smith, Cheney declined to specifically say whether the panel would like to hear from the former president, instead noting that if it does he will be required to tell the truth.

Cheney, a prominent Trump critic, did not otherwise hold back in speaking against the former president, however, calling him “fundamentally destructive” for the Republican Party. The congresswoman pointed to responses from her fellow members of the GOP to presidential records being recovered from the former president's Mar-a-Lago home as the latest example.

“You look at how many senior Republicans are going through contortions to try to defend the fact that the former president had stored in a desk drawer apparently, in an unsecure storage room, in a resort … documents that had the highest classification markings,” Cheney told Smith at the Tribune’s annual festival.

Despite her views on the former president, Cheney told Smith she does not regret voting against Trump’s first impeachment based on the evidence. She also noted that those proceedings have informed her current work on the Jan. 6 Committee.

“They would have had more Republican votes if they had enforced their subpoenas, and that is certainly a lesson that we have taken into [the] Jan. 6 Select Committee’s work,” Cheney said.

The Jan. 6 Committee has taken a strong stance on enforcing its subpoenas, referring several Trump allies for criminal contempt of Congress.

Cheney said she would "do everything I can" to ensure Trump is not the Republican nominee for president in 2024.

"And if he is the nominee," she added, "I won’t be a Republican.”