Gallego’s Newest Recruit to Retire Kyrsten Sinema: Nancy Pelosi

Nancy Pelosi may not be speaker anymore, and she’s not constantly flying here and there to raise money like she once was. But that doesn’t mean she’s out of the game totally. The New Republic got a copy of an invitation to an event she’s doing Wednesday, which is interesting both for who it’s for—Arizona Congressman Ruben Gallego—and who it’s obviously against—Kyrsten Sinema, who was a Democratic member of the House when Pelosi led the Democratic caucus.

Sinema, of course, left the Democratic Party earlier this year and is now a registered independent. She has not said whether she plans to run for reelection. But Sinema has held meetings laying out her potential battle plans should she run for reelection.

It’s far from clear how competitive Sinema would be should she run, however. Her most recent fundraising filings indicate anemic support among small-dollar donors. And while there isn’t much public polling, what’s out there doesn’t look good for her. A PPP poll from April had Gallego in the low 40s, three different GOP candidates in the mid-30s or high-20s—and Sinema dead last, around 15.

Pelosi’s presence at a Gallego fundraiser is a stark statement. It means she is directing her donor community, built over decades in Congress and congressional leadership, toward Gallego rather than either tacitly or overtly directing them to stay neutral.

Senate Democratic leadership has stayed fairly mum on the race. In an interview with The New Republic on Monday, Democratic Senatorial Committee Chairman Gary Peters did not signal whether his committee, the campaign arm for Senate Democrats, plans to endorse in the primary. That’s possibly because an enraged Sinema could be a legislative headache for Democrats if she feels they have unfairly abandoned her in 2024. Sinema, it’s important to note, still caucuses with the Democratic Party. But Peters did not throw out the possibility that the DSCC could back Gallego at some point in the cycle.

Donald Trump regularly made lewd comments about his daughter Ivanka and fantasized about what it would be like to have sex with her, according to a former Trump administration official.

Trump’s comments were part of a general culture of misogyny and sexism in the White House during his administration, Miles Taylor details in his upcoming book, Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy From the Next Trump, which was first reported on by Newsweek on Wednesday.

“Aides said he talked about Ivanka Trump’s breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her, remarks that once led [former Chief of Staff] John Kelly to remind the president that Ivanka was his daughter,” Taylor, who served as a Department of Homeland Security chief of staff under Trump, wrote in his book.

“Afterward, Kelly retold that story to me in visible disgust,” Taylor writes. “Trump, he said, was ‘a very, very evil man.’”

Taylor was the author of an anonymous (and infamous) 2018 New York Times op-ed claiming several Trump staffers were part of a “resistance” to stop the president from within his own administration. Taylor said in 2020 that he would be voting for Joe Biden for president, and he officially quit the Republican Party last year.

Taylor’s allegations should not come as a huge shock, given the other disturbing things Trump has publicly said about his daughter.

In 2004, he told radio host Howard Stern that it was perfectly fine to refer to Ivanka as “a piece of ass.”

In 2006, Trump engaged in another conversation with the radio host about the size of Ivanka’s breasts. “She’s actually always been very voluptuous,” Trump said, telling Stern that she had not gotten breast implants. “She’s tall, she’s almost six feet tall and she’s been, she’s an amazing beauty.”

That same year, in an interview on The View, Trump was asked what he would do if Ivanka posed for Playboy.

“I don’t think Ivanka would do that, although she does have a very nice figure,” Trump replied. “I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.

“Isn’t that terrible? How terrible? Is that terrible?”

In 2013, Trump made yet another disgusting comment about his daughter on the Wendy Williams Show. When asked what the two have in common, Trump replied, “Well, I was going to say sex, but I can’t relate that to her.”

In 1997—when Ivanka was just 16 years old and hosting the Miss Teen USA pageant—Trump reportedly asked the then Miss Universe, “Don’t you think my daughter is hot?”

This is not even close to a comprehensive list of comments he has made about his daughter’s body, or about what it would be like to have sex with her.

Taylor’s book details other allegations of Trump behaving inappropriately toward women, including Kirstjen Nielsen, who was secretary of homeland security from 2017 to 2019.

“He’s setting a very vile tone within the Republican Party, and in a sense has normalized pretty derisive views towards women in general,” Taylor writes.

One of President Biden’s hallmark achievements thus far is his $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law. Even though Biden compromised with Republicans, and even though the law was so beneficial for their constituencies, a majority of Senate and House Republicans still voted against it in 2021. And now these same Republicans are suddenly trying to take credit for the historic investment they actively tried to stop.

Biden’s law is distributing upward of $42 billion across America to expand internet access and help bring rural and isolated communities into the increasingly digital world. The White House on Monday released estimates of what that means for each state—and Republicans who voted against the bill were quick to claim the victory.

Senator Tommy Tuberville lauded the news Tuesday, celebrating the law’s impact on Alabama’s rural communities:

Senator John Cornyn also tweeted an article boasting about Texas receiving a whopping $3.3 billion for broadband, more than any other state in the nation.

Of course, the spanning infrastructure package includes other popular provisions as well.

Representative Nancy Mace on Wednesday hosted a press conference celebrating the law’s allocation of nearly $26 million to a Charleston, South Carolina, regional bus hub featuring electric buses. Mace has previously called the bipartisan infrastructure law “absurd” and a “fiasco,” and specifically derided funding electric mass transportation as “socialism.”

If it is socialist, so be it: Perhaps Mace’s celebration of the project shows how popular socialist policies might actually be!

Tuberville and Cornyn are among the 30 Republican senators who voted against the bipartisan infrastructure law. Mace is among the 200 House Republicans who voted against it.

For his part, Biden appears to be looking forward to more celebration:

John Bolton, who served as national security adviser to Donald Trump, said his former boss “flouted” the law by hoarding classified documents and that any 2024 Republican candidate who believes otherwise doesn’t deserve to be president.

On CNN Tonight on Tuesday, Bolton was asked what he thinks of the candidates who say Trump should not be prosecuted. “I think that disqualifies those people from being president, and I think I would say the same for any of them who have said he should be pardoned,” he replied.

Bolton added:

You know, part of the equal application of the law is that everybody has to be held to the same standard, and frankly, I’ll just show my biases here, when it comes to national security information—I can’t think of a higher duty for the president, a higher example of leadership to sit, for everybody below him in the executive branch who deals with classified information, than to handle it carefully. Which Trump has flouted. He did for four years in office, he’s done it since then, and I think there’s something to be said to show to people that you’re held to the highest standards because everybody else is, including the president, and when you fail to uphold those standards, you pay the penalty.

The fact that Bolton—an Iraq War architect, radical nationalist and neocon, and former Trump staffer—is calling out Republican 2024 candidates for their meekness speaks volumes. Most of the candidates have been wary of criticizing Trump, even after he was charged with 37 criminal counts for willful retention of national security documents, for fear of alienating his followers. They’re either promising to pardon him or toeing the line by expressing some concern about the allegations while not forcefully condemning him. Only Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson have been unapologetically critical of the former president.

Bolton also addressed a recently leaked audio recording revealing that Trump bragged about keeping a classified Pentagon document detailing a potential attack on Iran. “As this unfolds,” Bolton said, “I think the public will get a more profound sense of the danger potentially caused to American national security by Trump’s obsession with having these things because, as he says in that excerpt, it’s just ‘cool’ to have it.”

Thirty-four years after being indicted by both the media and the criminal justice system, and sent to jail for a crime he never committed, Yusef Salaam of the Central Park Five has won the New York City Council primary elections, almost guaranteeing he will serve for the same city government that oversaw his unjust imprisonment.

Salaam was one of five Black and Latino teenagers falsely accused of assaulting and raping a white female jogger in Central Park in 1989. Now, decades later, after spending nearly seven years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, Salaam is poised to represent his home district of Harlem, one of the most historic neighborhoods in New York City, and one that overlooks the north end of Central Park itself.

“This campaign has been about our Harlem community, who has been pushed into the margins of life and made to believe they were supposed to be there,” Salaam said on election night. “Having to be kidnapped from my home as a 15-year-old child, to be launched in the belly of the beast, I was gifted to turn that experience into the womb of America. I was gifted because I was able to see it for what it really was: a system that was trying to make me believe that I was my ancestors’ wildest nightmare. But I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.”

Running for the city’s ninth district, which includes Harlem, Salaam far outpaced a field that included two elected officials currently representing the neighborhood. The race was the only one in which Mayor Eric Adams made an endorsement, backing state Assembly member Inez Dickens, who currently trails Salaam by over 25 points.

While the election was a primary race, Salaam is all but guaranteed to be elected to the council come November.

Since being released from his false imprisonment, Salaam has become a motivational speaker and board member of the Innocence Project, an organization dedicated to fighting against wrongful convictions and bettering the criminal justice system.

In 1989, amid the apprehension of the Exonerated Five, former President Donald Trump bought full-page advertisements in all four of New York City’s major newspapers, including The New York Times, calling to “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY.” He has still not apologized for doing so, even while all five of the individuals wrongfully arrested have been proven innocent.

In March, after twice-impeached Trump faced his first of now two criminal indictments, Salaam released a one-word response: “Karma.”

This article has been updated.