The Grotesque Reason Why Some Biden Officials Don’t Want a Cease-fire

A temporary cease-fire has gone into effect in Gaza, halting the bombing that has gone on for more than a month. Qatar, which brokered negotiations, announced Wednesday that fighting will cease for four days. Hamas will release 50 hostages, and Israel will release 150 Palestinian prisoners. All released prisoners will be women and minors.

Administration officials are feeling tentatively vindicated over the cease-fire deal, Politico reported Wednesday. The White House is taking it as a sign that Joe Biden’s strategy is working, although one official, speaking anonymously, acknowledged that there’s still “more to do.”

But the White House now has another issue on its hands. “There was some concern in the administration about an unintended consequence of the pause: that it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel,” according to the Politico report.

At least 11,000 Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children, have been killed in Israel’s retaliation to the October 7 Hamas attack. Health officials in Gaza said Tuesday that they are no longer able to get an accurate death toll because of the ongoing Israeli attacks.

The fighting has also killed at least 53 journalists and media workers. But now that fighting will pause, more journalists can enter Gaza and show the full extent of destruction, which the administration has so far seemed content to ignore.

The majority of U.S. citizens back a cease-fire, and support has slowly but steadily grown among Democratic members of Congress. Biden, however, has until now resisted calling for an all-out cease-fire, even telling reporters two weeks ago that there was “no possibility” of one. His resistance to a cease-fire has contributed to a major disconnect between Biden and younger voters.

Even Floridians don’t like Matt Gaetz.

A mere 21 percent of Floridians responded that they approve of the man they elected to congress while another 57 percent said they flat out disapprove of the job Gaetz has done since being elected, according to a Florida Atlantic University Mainstreet PolCom Lab survey. That’s a far cry from Gaetz’s results in the 2022 election, when he swept Florida’s 1st Congressional District by a margin of 35 percentage points.

The poll comes on the heels of several weeks of high drama sparked and stoked by the far-right congressman, in which he led a charge to oust former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy for daring to coordinate a bipartisan effort to avert a government shutdown. Since then, Gaetz has worked to aggressively divide and strong-arm the caucus alongside a minority cohort of conservative colleagues.

All that time in the limelight drew more attention to some of Gaetz’s other scandals, including the House Ethics Committee’s investigation into allegations of sexual assault and misuse of funds by the congressman.

In February, the Justice Department concluded its own investigation into Gaetz, opting against criminal charges relating to allegations of sex trafficking and sex with a minor, determining that they couldn’t bring a strong enough case to court.

“I am the most investigated man in the United States Congress,” Gaetz said during an October ethics inquiry

Despite all the bad press, Gaetz has trudged ahead, with rumors swirling that the controversial politician may run to unseat Florida Governor Ron DeSantis during the 2026 gubernatorial election. Gaetz has since snubbed the report as “overblown clickbait,” clarifying that his singular focus is getting Donald Trump elected to a second term in the White House.

Failing the longshot bid, Gaetz may be pushed out of politics altogether if he falls short on gathering the numbers to keep his current seat.

“The poll was not great for the congressman, but it’s early and these assessments can change,” Kevin Wagner, a pollster and political science professor at FAU, told Newsweek. “Even people that disapprove can still vote for him if they like the other choices less.”

Ron DeSantis’s team can’t decide how to respond to Nikki Haley’s growing success in the presidential race. The infighting is so bad that some advisers are turning on each other.

Two leaders of DeSantis’s Never Back Down super PAC nearly got into a fistfight during a private meeting last week to discuss how to push back on Haley, NBC News reported Tuesday.

“You have a stick up your ass,” Never Back Down’s top consultant, Jeff Roe, told fellow board member Scott Wagner, according to an anonymous source who was in the room.

“Why don’t you come over here and get it?” demanded Wagner, a longtime DeSantis adviser. He had to be restrained by two other board members.

After the meeting, three close DeSantis allies launched a second super PAC for the Florida governor called Fight Right Inc. The move was partly urged by DeSantis and his wife, Casey, who are growing increasingly frustrated with Never Back Down’s leadership team, NBC reported.

DeSantis was once lauded as the natural successor to Donald Trump, but his campaign has failed to launch. When Haley first announced her candidacy, her support was in the single digits. She was far behind DeSantis, and even further behind front-runner Donald Trump.

But a Monmouth University poll released last week showed that Haley has surpassed DeSantis and now boasts a sizable lead over the Florida governor—even though she still trails the former president by a significant distance. Trump is still comfortably in first place with 46 percent support. But Haley has taken second place with 18 percent. DeSantis, meanwhile, trailed behind at a paltry 7 percent.

DeSantis’s major donors have grown frustrated with his lack of momentum, and one of his biggest former backers is considering switching to team Haley. Billionaire Ken Griffin, a Republican megadonor, told Bloomberg last week that he is “actively contemplating” donating to Haley’s campaign.

Griffin was DeSantis’s biggest donor during the 2022 election, giving $5 million to his gubernatorial reelection campaign. Griffin also repeatedly said he would “love” to see DeSantis run for president in 2024. But Griffin changed his mind in September, withdrawing his support from DeSantis in part due to the governor’s weird feud with Disney.

Biotech millionaire Vivek Ramaswamy seems to be making all the wrong moves on his Iowa tour, raising the question—is the GOP presidential candidate even trying to win?

With the January 15 Iowa caucuses around the corner, Ramaswamy is still trailing behind his Republican opponents, failing to curry favor with new audiences or differentiate himself enough from Trump, in a way that has relegated him to mid-to-high single-digit percentage points.

“If viability were the reason to stay in a race, he’s long since left that behind,” David Kochel, a Republican strategist, told the Associated Press. “If you like Vivek Ramaswamy and what he is saying in this campaign, you already have a candidate, and his name is Donald Trump.”

Ramaswamy’s tactics in the battleground state are questionably counterintuitive for someone actually trying to get his foot in the White House.

On Monday, Ramaswamy nearly begged a diner full of Iowa voters to ask him about his controversial and baseless foreign policy positions, which rival Nikki Haley slammed as Putin-centric during the last GOP debate. “Putin and President Xi are salivating at the thought that someone like that could become president,” Haley said.

Still, one voter took Ramaswamy up on it. “My foreign policy is clear: Stay out of World War III; declare economic independence from Communist China,” Ramaswamy responded.

Yet there may be more to the entrepreneur’s failures in the battleground state than just his eyebrow-raising policy positions. In fact, Ramaswamy’s campaign has spent just a fraction of its marketing budget, booking only $162,000 worth of ads compared to the $8 million it said it would earlier this month, according to data from the media tracking firm AdImpact.

That’s a far cry from the amount invested by the other Republican presidential candidates. So far, Haley and her allied super PAC have spent nearly $3.5 million on advertising while DeSantis and his allies have spent more than $3.3 million, reported the AP.

It appears that Donald Trump has crafted a win-win situation for himself out of the gag order in his federal election subversion trial.

On Monday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals indicated that it may pare back the October 17 gag order preventing the former president and his team from talking smack about court staff, the prosecution, and any potential witnesses as he runs for a second term in the White House. Still, the panel noted, Trump is not above the law and should be restricted from engaging in witness intimidation. 

“There’s a balance that has to be undertaken here, and it’s a very difficult balance,” said Judge Patricia Millett, who ruled on the appeal, according to The Washington Post.  “We’ve got to use a careful scalpel here and not step into really sort of skewing the political arena, don’t we?”

But either way that the panel rules, Trump will likely come out on top. If Trump wins the appeal, he’ll have an open floor to vilify special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the prosecution behind two of Trump’s criminal trials. Previously, Trump has lambasted Smith as a “lunatic” and referred to his staff as “thugs.”

However, if Trump loses the appeal, it will effectively add a new weapon to his arsenal on the campaign trail, the claim that the state is preventing him from running for president again. As CNN’s Stephen Collinson wrote, this is part of the former president’s larger assault on American institutions. “It’s hard to see how the legal system escapes the fate of other institutions of accountability whose images have been tarnished after seeking to contain or expose the ex-president’s unique brand of rule breaking,” Collinson argued. 

Trump’s legal team has argued that restricting his speech in any matter is an unconstitutional assault to his freedom of political speech, but that may not fly with the judge’s panel, which is responsible for the scope of rights permitted to a criminal defendant, especially one accused of thwarting the 2020 election, reported CNN.

Meanwhile, the original gag order, issued by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, never prevented Trump from attacking his opponents on the campaign trail. Instead, it explicitly permitted the former president to assail any of his formal political rivals, from President Joe Biden to former Vice President Mike Pence.

Trump has been charged with four felonies related to his efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election results. He has pleaded not guilty.