Jeremy W. Peters

Key conservative allies of Trump, many of whom have expressed concern about the lack of focus and consistency in the White House’s public response to the impeachment inquiry against him, which continues with a second day of public hearings on Friday, have begun a campaign to shift public opinion before they lose any more ground.

The goal, according to the strategists behind the effort, is to cast the impeachment hearings unfolding in Washington as a circuslike distraction that does little to help people worried about health care, jobs and financial stability — concerns that are far more front of mind for most Americans.

And the intended audience is the relatively few Americans in roughly two dozen congressional districts in a handful of battleground states who do not already have strong opinions about the president, and whose ambivalence toward both political parties is largely overshadowed in national polls showing widespread support for impeachment.

The argument is not entirely novel. Democrats may recognize its similarity to the one they used against Republicans in 1998 when they successfully portrayed the impeachment of President Bill Clinton as a partisan-driven exercise in futility. Conviction in the Senate at the time seemed unlikely, opening the door for Clinton’s defenders to accuse Republicans of putting the country through a needless national trauma.

Today, Republicans have seen, in surveys they have conducted, that one of the most effective ways to defend Trump is to remind voters that they will have a say about his fate in less than a year, and that regardless of what happens in the Democratic-controlled House, the chances of the Republican Senate removing him from office are remote.

“Anyone running in a swing district or talking to voters in a swing state should be driving this very message: This is a complete waste of time, a complete waste of taxpayer dollars,” said Jason Miller, a former strategist for Trump’s 2016 campaign.

To that end, part of the way Republicans plan to discredit the impeachment process is by claiming the hearings so far have uncovered little that is new, revelatory or damning. Even before the witnesses in Wednesday’s hearing uttered a single word, the White House and its allies had already discussed how they should insist it was all a terrible bore that failed to live up to the hype.

The president’s boosters in conservative news media were delivering this message while witnesses were still testifying.

“It’s going to be a blockbuster. You’re not going to want to miss this,” Rush Limbaugh declared at the opening of his show on Wednesday, with several hours in the hearing yet to go. But then he concluded, “It has been flat-out boring.”

Sean Hannity told his radio listeners almost the same thing. “This was supposed to be their big day. This was supposed to be their takedown day,” he said. “It is just dull. It is just boring. It is just meaningless.”

(For its part, the White House has not been absent from the fight. It has been arming its high-profile supporters and news media surrogates with talking points in a “What You Need To Know” email blast several times a day that rebuts Democrats’ claims point by point. It also hosts regular messaging conference calls with conservative activists.)

Some of the groups and strategists involved in the push to reframe the impeachment hearings are veterans of the fight over the Supreme Court confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh last year — a multimillion dollar, nationwide campaign that marshaled the resources of virtually the entire conservative movement, from the libertarian-minded organizations funded by the Koch brothers to the National Rifle Association.

So far, impeachment has yet to galvanize that kind of broad-based coalition, in part because Trump remains a disliked and mistrusted figure by some conservatives, including among the leaders of the Koch network, whom he has personally attacked. And many of the policy-based groups that focus on guns, abortion or religion have no obvious role to play in a presidential impeachment.

But the groups that are involved are pressing ahead. Mike Davis, a Republican strategist who worked on the Kavanaugh confirmation, said his party’s goal, until impeachment is resolved, should be “just talk to Americans using common sense.” Republicans should not speak like lawyers, making points about “quid pro quo” as they often have, or invoke the names of Ukrainian officials, whom most Americans have probably never heard of. He advises them to “act like you are speaking to a high school-educated aunt you respect.”

The Judicial Crisis Network, which spent millions in ads targeting Democratic senators during the Kavanaugh battle, recently conducted a poll it shared with other conservative groups to determine how voters viewed the impeachment proceedings. It found that voters were most persuaded by the argument that the impeachment inquiry was a reckless act by a dysfunctional, do-nothing Congress. This message was especially potent, the survey found, with voters in districts where Democrats won in 2018 but where Trump secured a majority in 2016. The takeaway for voters, said one Republican who saw the results, was, “I voted for these folks to go to Washington and get things done, and now they are all focused on impeachment.”

And with the congressional hearings beginning their first public phase this week, conservative activists across the country have begun adopting this message in recent days.

“The Democrats are no longer a party, they are a circus,” Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, said.

The American Action Network, an outside political group that supports Republican lawmakers, started a digital ad campaign in 37 swing districts this week challenging House Democrats to “get back to work on the issues that will actually make a difference in the lives of Americans across our country,” the group said.

Democrats realize that they are not immune from these criticisms — especially in their most competitive districts. And lawmakers who represent these districts, many of whom initially resisted starting impeachment proceedings, said they needed to demonstrate that they were spending adequate time on issues more urgently connected to their constituents’ well-being.

Rep. Debbie Dingell, who represents a politically and economically diverse district outside Detroit, said that while she has heard from constituents who are upset about impeachment, there were also many who voiced concerns about maternal health care and prescription drug prices.

“We’ve got to keep doing our jobs,” she said, which at the moment also involves the enormously fraught and historic obligation of deciding whether Trump should be the third president ever impeached. Though she found the charges from Republicans ironic — “Mitch McConnell hasn’t been doing anything in the Senate,” she said — she acknowledged the pressure. “You’ve got to get back to doing the business of the country,” she said, paraphrasing what she often hears from voters.

And on Thursday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi indicated that she had received the message, too. She announced that the House was close to reaching an agreement with the Trump administration on a major trade deal to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement.

But in the end, it may be Trump who ultimately determines his party’s message. As his allies have learned, they can never predict whether he will work with them or improvise on his own.

“He’ll stick to his game plan,” said J. Kenneth Blackwell, a conservative activist who is on the board of directors of the NRA. “The question is, can we follow? Does he cut to the left, cut to the right or go straight up the field? If I’m ready to block to his right, and then all of a sudden he decides to cut left, well …” he added, trailing off.

This article originally appeared in

On the Right, Impeachment Is a Distraction, Not a 'Witch Hunt'

They’re not calling it a “coup” or a “witch hunt.” There’s no “deep state” hoax, and the phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s president wasn’t “perfect.”

In a statement, Sessions took pains to signal that he had remained loyal to the president despite their differences. “When I left President Trump’s Cabinet, did I write a tell-all book? No. Did I go on CNN and attack the president. No. Have I said a cross word about President Trump? No,” the statement said. “I was his strongest advocate. I still am. We must make America great again.”

The announcement came after several weeks of public leaks and private maneuvering during which the former attorney general tested the waters about running for what would be his fifth term in the Senate. He gave up his seat in 2017 after Trump nominated him and the Senate confirmed him.

But their relationship soon soured as Sessions, an adviser to Trump’s first presidential campaign, decided to recuse himself from overseeing the Justice Department’s investigation into whether Trump and his associates worked illegally with Russians to interfere in the 2016 election. Trump has never forgiven Sessions, who was the first member of the Senate to endorse his presidential bid.

In his first televised interview since leaving office, Sessions told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on Thursday that he had no regrets about the recusal. “I did the thing I had to do under the rules of the Department of Justice,” he said, acknowledging, “I know how painful this was for the president.” He added that he has not yet spoken with Trump about his Senate campaign but hopes to.

Trump’s dislike could make for a rough road ahead for Sessions: Republicans who find themselves in Trump’s political cross hairs rarely fare well with their party’s voters. And the president has sent word to the former attorney general through allies that he would publicly attack him if he went ahead with the campaign.

But Sessions, 72, has been an admired figure in Alabama Republican politics for four decades and, by many accounts, remains popular there despite the withering scorn Trump has leveled at him. Among other insults, Trump has accused Sessions of betrayal and of being a “total joke” of a leader at the Justice Department. More recently, the president has referred to him as a “jerk” in private conversations.

On the issues, at least, there are few Republicans who are as committed to Trump’s approach. Sessions was often a lone voice in the Senate arguing to restrict immigration and rescind global free trade agreements. His opposition to immigration reform, in fact, came years before Trump’s conversion on the issue.

In his Fox interview Thursday night, Sessions tried to remind people that he was a true believer in these policies long before Trump’s 2016 campaign. “I was for this agenda before President Trump announced.”

Sessions did not undertake the decision to run again lightly. He sought out advice on the race from dozens of friends and associates in Alabama, Washington and beyond in recent weeks. He commissioned polling to test how strong a contender he would be in a Republican primary that is already quite crowded with well known names. The numbers came back indicating that the race was winnable, according to one person who is close to him.

Alabama Republicans have a history of voting their will — regardless of what Trump tells them to do. Two years ago during the special election to fill Sessions’ old seat, Trump endorsed Luther Strange, the Republican leadership’s preferred candidate. Strange lost the primary to Roy Moore, the former state chief judge who has a large following among religious conservatives there.

In the general election, Trump endorsed Moore and stood by him even after several women came forward to say that the judge had touched them inappropriately when they were teenagers. Moore lost the race to Sen. Doug Jones, who is the first Democrat to represent Alabama in the Senate in a generation.

The prospect of another divisive primary is making many Republicans nervous that Jones could be re-elected, which would imperil the party’s ability to keep its Senate majority. Moore is running again and announced his bid in June. Two other candidates also appear to be formidable: Rep. Bradley Byrne, whose district is near Mobile; and Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn University football coach.

Sessions, Praising President, Announces Run for Senate

Jeff Sessions formally announced Thursday that he was entering the Senate race in Alabama, a decision that will likely put him on a collision course with President Donald Trump, who still harbors resentment toward the former attorney general a year after forcing him from office.

This scenario, presented in a pair of ads that are appearing on computer screens and smartphones across Kentucky, is the work of a little-known group funded by anonymous donors called the American Principles Project, which in recent years has focused on fighting more familiar clashes in the culture wars over same-sex marriage and abortion rights.

The group is limiting its work to Kentucky for now, but strategists say it has bigger ambitions. It is effectively running a pilot program for the 2020 election that will help it determine how it could use the debate over transgender rights to rally conservative voters in support of President Donald Trump.

The results could inform what type of campaigns social conservatives run in the future — and answer whether the delicate and deeply personal questions around gender identity are the next major wedge issue in American politics or, as recent experience suggests, something that most voters and politicians would rather not see politicized.

Terry Schilling, executive director of the American Principles Project, said conservative groups that focus on social issues other than abortion have been shying away from politics — and losing ground in recent years. “What we’re doing is trying to show Republicans how to win on these key issues,” he said.

Through online ads and text messages sent using phone numbers with local area codes, the group is trying to reach some 400,000 Kentuckians, many of whom identity as social conservatives but are not seen as reliable voters for the Republican candidate, Gov. Matt Bevin.

In one ad, called “Wrestler,” two high-school-age girls are shown facing off. “All any athlete wants is a fair shot in competition,” a female announcer says. The camera focuses in on the referee as he is about to declare a winner. The announcer asks: “But what if the rules change?” A teenage boy appears in the frame, and the referee announces that he is in fact the winner. The ad closes by urging a vote against the Democratic nominee for governor, Andy Beshear, declaring, “Beshear calls this equality. But is it fair?”

A text message the group recently sent to likely Kentucky voters said, “Andy Beshear wants boys to compete against girls in girls’ sports. You can’t make this stuff up!” and included a link to the ad.

The attack takes significant liberties with the facts, making it appear as if nondiscrimination laws that include gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, which Beshear supports, would open the door for boys to join girls’ sports leagues just because they want a competitive advantage, not because they are transitioning genders.

Kentucky was a logical place for the group to use as its test market. The election Tuesday is one of the few statewide elections taking place before 2020. It leans to the right. And Bevin, the Republican incumbent governor, has had difficulty shoring up his conservative base. The group says it is spending six figures on the campaign. Under law, it is not required to disclose its donors.

The campaign is an acknowledgment of a disappointing reality for social conservatives. The messages they have relied on to halt progress on transgender rights — mostly dire-sounding warnings about predatory men being allowed into girls’ locker rooms and women’s restrooms — have not done all they had hoped.

And despite efforts by Republican politicians across the country to deny transgender individuals legal protections, conservatives have been unable to make transgender people an effective focal point in their push to preserve traditional notions of gender, sexual orientation and marriage.

JoDee Winterhof, senior vice president for policy and political affairs at the Human Rights Campaign, said she believed the new ads revealed a sense of desperation among social conservative activists.

“This is where they had to land because none of the rest of it worked,” Winterhof said. “At what point do they get the memo? The ground has shifted underneath them across the country.”

Since 2013, Republican legislators in dozens of states — from Alaska to Texas to Tennessee — have introduced bills that would enact a wide assortment of limitations on transgender rights. This includes legislation to restrict what bathrooms people can use based on their sex at birth, prevent public funds from being used for any gender reassignment surgery, and preempt counties and municipalities from enacting transgender protections of their own.

Nearly all have failed or stalled. If anything, the tide has even turned among Republicans. The former governor of South Dakota, Dennis Daugaard, vetoed a 2016 bill that would have created a law stopping transgender people from using the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity. And when lawmakers tried again the next year, he threatened another veto. In Texas last year, Gov. Greg Abbott backed away from supporting a “bathroom bill,” as the proposals are known, even though he had pushed for one the previous year.

The biggest battle to date was in North Carolina, which passed and then repealed a bill that required people to use the bathroom in public facilities that matched the gender on their birth certificate. The backlash against the measure, which included a decision by the NCAA not to host basketball games in the state, was a factor in the 2016 defeat of former Gov. Pat McCrory, the Republican who had signed the law earlier that year.

According to a poll commissioned by the Human Rights Campaign after the election, 57% of voters said the bill was the top reason they had voted against McCrory. Public polling conducted after the measure passed found that 55% of voters wanted it repealed.

And the country as a whole has been growing more tolerant on trans issues. A survey released in June by the Public Religion Research Institute found that more than 6 in 10 Americans said they were more supportive of transgender rights than they had been five years ago. Though the report also added a caveat: “Conservative Republicans (40%) stand out as the only ideological group with less than half reporting increased support for transgender rights.”

Lately, a series of high-profile incidents involving transgender children has emboldened social conservatives, including a bitter custody dispute between two parents in Texas who disagree over how to treat their 7-year-old son’s gender identity issues. The father has become a cause célèbre in conservative media and drawn support from Republican politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas because he has said he does not believe the boy identifies as a girl, and does not want him to receive medical treatment to transition, if that becomes necessary in the future.

Admittedly, social conservatives have found themselves struggling with how to articulate their case.

“Look at the bathroom issue,” Schilling said. “It is the weakest ground we can fight on — on this slate of issues. And conservatives have been fighting on that almost solely over the last several years.”

In its research, the American Principles Project found that people mostly shrugged when asked whether there was such danger in allowing transgender women to use their preferred bathrooms that new laws ought to be passed.

“The world hasn’t fallen apart” since these kinds of laws have failed to pass, said Frank Cannon, the group’s president.

In its polling, it found that messages about bathrooms barely moved voters toward Bevin. But when shown the wrestler ad and others with a similar message, voters were more likely to swing toward Bevin by a margin of about four to seven points. The swing was most notable among voters over 65.

Cannon said that emphasizing children in sports made the case stronger because it focused on “the idea that you are taking something away from people. And that’s where they don’t like it.”

The group points to real-world examples of transgender athletes winning women’s competitions. In Texas, for example, a transgender boy has won the state girls’ wrestling championship two years in a row. Though the boy said he would have preferred to compete against other boys, the governing body that sets the rules for competition in Texas said that gender at birth was the decisive criteria.

“The issues of self-definition are really the most contentious and difficult issues in the country,” Cannon said.

But if Bevin buys into that school of thinking, his campaign isn’t reflecting it. And he has not expressed much interest in using transgender issues as a political wedge. Asked in 2016 if Kentucky needed a “bathroom bill” like the one in North Carolina, he responded, “Is it an issue? Is there anyone you know in Kentucky who has trouble going to the bathroom?”

A Conservative Push to Make Trans Kids and School Sports the Next Battleground in the Culture War

ARLINGTON, Va. — From the 12th floor of a glass office tower in the Washington suburbs, a campaign to sway the governor’s race in Kentucky on Tuesday is being waged with an alarmist claim that has little to do with the race itself: If Democrats have their way, soon boys will be able to compete against girls in school sports.

But every weekday for the next two months — or “until the day after the acquittal of Donald J. Trump,” in Bannon’s words — a rogue, freelance messaging operation to fight impeachment is being broadcast there. The people involved in the radio show, all former Trump aides and supporters, say their intentions are clear: They want to nudge the White House, its allies and the president himself into taking a more focused and aggressive posture to undermine the inquiry currently underway in the House of Representatives.

On Wednesday, during the third episode of the show, which is called “War Room,” the hosts sat at a dining room table covered in a spaghetti salad of microphone wires, and dispensed an hour’s worth of unsolicited advice.

Stop calling the inquiry a “witch hunt” and a “deep state” conspiracy, they said by way of advice to the president and his advisers, because it’s deluding too many Trump supporters into a sense of complacency.

Stop insisting that polls showing majority public support for the impeachment inquiry are “fake news” — because they aren’t.

Stop dismissing everyone who testifies about the Trump administration’s dealings with Ukraine as a radical unelected bureaucrat.

And stop letting Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, go on Laura Ingraham’s and Sean Hannity’s prime time Fox News programs to defend the president.

“We can’t do the Rudy thing anymore,” said Bannon, who in his days as a Trump adviser — and proud provocateur — pushed the nationalist ideology that the president adopted. “Too many Ukrainian names, too many moving pieces.”

This remark drew nods from his co-hosts: Jason Miller, the former communications director of the Trump campaign in 2016, and Raheem Kassam, a former editor at Breitbart. Giuliani’s defense of the president — often a nonlinear timeline of events; a lengthy cast of characters involving the events in question in Ukraine; and a blanket insistence of “no quid pro quo” — is too confusing, they agreed.

“Here’s our fundamental problem: We don’t have an elevator pitch to easily describe this to the right,” Miller said. He likened the explanations from the White House and its surrogates to the way someone solves the game “Clue,” with its menagerie of possible culprits, weapons and crime scenes.

The show, which is airing on a half dozen stations in Virginia and Florida and streams on the website WarRoom.org, is a remarkably blunt attempt by former Trump aides to criticize and influence the work of current Trump administration officials. Even the show’s name is something of an affront to the White House — and to Trump himself. He has told aides that he does not want to create a war room, as crisis response operations are often nicknamed, because he is concerned that people would see it as an acknowledgment that he views the impeachment inquiry as legitimate.

Though many in the White House may be tempted to dismiss the show as a bootleg operation run by people cut off from Trump’s inner circle, Miller said in an interview that the president ultimately cares about one thing when it comes to managing a crisis of this magnitude: “Are there people defending me or not?”

Miller added that with the exception of a handful of Trump loyalists, “There is a serious lack of Trump allies jumping out there and defending the president.” Too few Republicans, he said, are questioning the process of the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, which he said was being run in a clandestine fashion from “Schiff’s secret Capitol basement bunker.” It was a reference to the secure hearing room in the Capitol where Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. and the House Intelligence Committee chairman, is presiding over witness interviews.

The idea for the new program came to Bannon after he appeared last week on the radio show of John Fredericks, a conservative whose daily broadcast airs across Virginia. He was floored by the backlash he got when he stated what he said he assumed was accepted as fact among Republicans and Democrats alike: Trump is likely to be impeached.

“We’re like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ ” Fredericks said in an interview.

Many in Trump’s base, fed a heavy diet of talking White House talking points that House Democrats are attempting a “coup” without any evidence of wrongdoing, have come to believe that impeachment is a farce.

Fredericks faulted the White House. “That’s what the White House communications department pushed out for a month,” he said. “It’s fake news, deep state, witch hunt. It’s never going to amount to anything at all.”

While the hosts offered little praise for the White House messaging effort, their praise of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was effusive.

In a broadcast earlier this week, Bannon warned Trump’s supporters not to be blinded by their animosity toward the speaker. “I don’t care if you hate Nancy Pelosi,” he said. “This is a master, and she is teaching a master class.”

“Tough as boot leather,” he added.

Miller said Wednesday that Pelosi employs “the best communications directors on the planet,” who have been able to dominate news cycles by releasing key details from the closed-door testimony. That’s what Democrats did on Tuesday after William B. Taylor Jr., the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, described how Trump held up $391 million in assistance for the purpose of forcing Ukraine to help Trump discredit his potential 2020 political rivals.

Pelosi, added Kassam, has figured out how to use the Congressional investigative process to the Democrats’ advantage. And Trump’s supporters cannot belittle that.

“There’s a very serious failure to take this whole process seriously from the Republican side,” he said.

As Trump railed about the saboteurs inside his administration on Wednesday, tweeting that the “Never Trumpers” like Taylor were out to get him, Bannon offered some feedback on the air. “Every one of those people was either hired by Donald Trump or hired by someone Donald Trump hired,” he said.

In Steve Bannon's Basement, a Rogue 'War Room' to Fight Impeachment

WASHINGTON — It’s been more than a year since any sort of war room has been run out of the basement of Stephen K. Bannon’s Capitol Hill town house. And it’s been even longer since Bannon, who was pushed out as White House chief strategist in August 2017, ran a war room for President Donald Trump.

But Republicans also saw an opportunity to seize on debate moments over middle-class tax increases, health care reform and economic inequality to portray the Democrats as tax-and-spend liberals — in hopes of redirecting the national conversation at a time when public opinion is moving against the president.

In a series of morning tweets, Trump referred to the 12 Democrats onstage Tuesday night in Ohio as “clowns” who would wreck the economy if ever elected.

During the debate, he and his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, gloated about his prospects for reelection, sharing an image from a recent Moody’s Analytics model that showed Trump was favored to win virtually every swing state, including ones he failed to carry in 2016 like Virginia and New Hampshire.

This was consistent with the nonchalance that Trump has tried to project about impeachment and questions of his political vulnerabilities. What the tweets did not include, however, was a second graphic in the model showing a likely Democratic victory if voter turnout is historically high, as it was in the 2018 midterm elections.

Tuesday’s CNN/New York Times debate was the first since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House of Representatives would formally look into whether Trump committed impeachable offenses for soliciting Ukrainian assistance with his reelection campaign.

It was clear from the tenor of the Republican statements — which were laced with defiance, bluster and scorn — that the Trump campaign and its allies hope the president can still win over an American public that, polls show, increasingly supports the impeachment inquiry and does not believe that Trump has been truthful about his actions. The remarks also were a preview of the defense that GOP leaders said they were planning as the impeachment inquiry enters a critical new phase on Capitol Hill, with House Democrats calling witnesses and issuing subpoenas to associates of Trump, like Rudy Giuliani.

Republicans intend to argue, in effect, that a wide range of economic indicators — from the unemployment rate to job growth — show that Trump has been far more of a success than he gets credit for, while Democrats remain fixated on attacking him personally and politically.

“Democrats spent more time talking about President Trump’s Twitter account and their phony impeachment charade than they did a positive vision for America,” said Ronna McDaniel, chairman of the Republican National Committee. “That’s because they don’t have one, and it’s going to cost them at the ballot box next November.”

Republicans also hope that the more that Democrats talk about impeachment, the more opening they will have to cast it as illegitimate.

“It’s not lost on people that many of these candidates were actually on the record supporting impeachment before anyone was even talking about Ukraine,” said Andy Surabian, a Republican strategist and former Trump White House official.

The debate, held outside Columbus, Ohio, allowed Republicans to try to make their case in a state that Trump won by 8 percentage points in 2016 and has many of the middle-class, blue-collar voters that he hopes to turn out again in next year’s election. To underscore the point, the Trump campaign took out a full-page ad in the Columbus Dispatch on Tuesday that blared, “Democrats Will Kill Ohio Jobs … President Trump’s Fighting for the Economy.”

The president remains historically unpopular, however. The Gallup presidential approval poll has measured public support for his job performance at below 50% for his entire presidency. To overcome this skepticism, Republicans have attempted to define the Democrats as out of touch and too far to the left of where most Americans’ views are. Some of the Democratic candidates, like former Vice President Joe Biden and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, hold moderate and liberal views, while Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont are generally more progressive.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., on Wednesday expressed the kind of binary argument that Republicans hope prevails on voters.

“Last night’s debate was a reminder that while you may not always agree with everything Trump says or does, the leading alternatives to Trump mock people with traditional beliefs &amp; support socialism, gun confiscation &amp; free government funded health care for unlawful immigrants,” he wrote on Twitter.

With Warren the target of sustained attacks from the other Democrats onstage, Trump and his Republican allies moved to frame the race around the question of whether voters want a strongly liberal president and government in 2021.

On Tuesday night, after Sanders picked up the support of two high-profile liberals in the House Democratic caucus — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar — Republicans jumped at the chance to make them a focal point in the morning-after debate analysis. The two freshmen are a favorite target of conservatives, who have caricatured them as the true leaders of their party.

“With this endorsement,” McDaniel said later, speaking on Fox News, “everyone should be paying attention. They will take away our freedom, our fundamental rights.”

Other Republicans saw a bigger story in the leading Democrat who was a less prominent presence Tuesday: Biden, who seemed to veer from indignant at times to detached at others. They said his uneven performance was a sign that other candidates who displayed more gusto — like Warren, Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota — were gaining prominence at his expense.

Alex Castellanos, a veteran Republican strategist, said the debate could be a turning point when “a new race began, one without Joe Biden.”

Republicans, Defiant After Debate, Throw Punches on Impeachment and Economy

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and his allies sought to turn the Democratic debate Tuesday night into a referendum on the congressional impeachment inquiry, accusing the party’s presidential candidates and its leaders in Washington of pursuing a vendetta against Trump while ignoring more pressing pocketbook issues.

Last week, Erickson, a well-known conservative blogger, titled one of his pieces “I Support the President.” In three years, he had come completely around, a transformation that is a testament to President Trump’s remarkable consolidation of support inside the Republican Party. The effort to impeach the president, Erickson wrote, was a desperate move by people “who have never come to terms with him.”

“Never Trump” no more, conservatives have largely resigned themselves to a more accommodating state of mind: “Never mind Trump.” And their change in attitude helps to mute the much smaller group of conservative voices who remain highly critical of the president and have questioned his conduct.

Glenn Beck, the radio host who once called Trump “an immoral man who is absent decency or dignity,” now says that his defeat in 2020 would mark “the end of the country as we know it.” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who so bitterly feuded with the president during the 2016 primaries that Trump gave out Graham’s cellphone number on national television, declared last week that impeachment was nothing but “a political set up.”

It can be difficult to remember that indignation and contempt for Trump once simmered in every corner of the conservative world. In August 2016, dozens of the most senior Republican national security officials signed a letter warning he would “put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”

Women leaders of the anti-abortion movement joined together before the Iowa caucuses in 2016 and issued a joint statement declaring themselves “disgusted” at his behavior, saying he had “impugned the dignity of women.” National Review published an “Against Trump” issue that featured essays from 22 prominent conservatives who all made a case for why he should be not be the Republican nominee.

At least half of those writers are now on the record making supportive comments about the president. Some, including Erickson and Beck, now fiercely defend Trump, joining many former foes who are speaking out loudly against the impeachment inquiry. Others who contributed to the issue like Ed Meese, the attorney general under Ronald Reagan, have helped Trump plan his transition and build his administration.

The “Never Trump” taint still lingers 3 1/2 years later. National Review’s editor, Rich Lowry, said that, regrettably, that week’s magazine was remembered as the “Never Trump” issue. “I wish they’d never come up with that phrase,” he said. Lowry, who spent three weeks recruiting and assigning writers for the issue, still does not shy away from publishing or writing pieces that are harsh toward the president. But he acknowledges that Trump has helped conservatives like him “stress test your assumptions,” and has forced him to rethink issues like the need to take a tougher approach with China.

“Had I known this was going to be perceived as the bible of the anti-Trump movement, I never would have written it,” said L. Brent Bozell III, who in his National Review essay wrote, “Trump might be the greatest charlatan of them all.” He now counts himself as a Trump convert.

There is significant exposure in airing even the most mild criticism of the president, as Bozell was reminded the other day when he pointed out on Twitter that China, whom Trump had just congratulated on its 70th anniversary as a communist republic, was a repressive regime.

“The fury is absolutely there for anyone who criticizes this president,” he said. Still, he offered nothing but scorn for the few remaining Never Trump Republicans, whom he accused of being self-righteous and politically shortsighted. “For a lot of the purists, they would rather go down in flames than look at any political equation,” he said. “These are the people who supported George W. Bush when he did nothing for conservatives, and they don’t have any leg to stand on when it comes to passing judgment on Trump.”

Bozell has also discovered that there is a significant market for defending Trump against impeachment. Through the organization he founded, the Media Research Center, he has helped provide the Trump-friendly news media with a steady stream of videos and articles alleging bias in the mainstream news media’s coverage of impeachment. He has also co-authored a book this year on a similar theme: “Unmasked: Big Media’s War Against Trump.”

In the Republican national security community, many still openly criticize Trump. But some of the most prominent signatories of the 2016 letter have taken a more charitable view of the president today, like Tom Ridge, the former Homeland Security secretary, and John Negroponte, the former director of national intelligence, who said earlier this year: “I certainly don’t think his presidency has been catastrophic.”

And at least one of those officials who signed the letter, James Jeffrey, now works for the Trump administration. He has a high-profile posting in the State Department as the special representative dealing with Syria.

The motivations for getting on board are considerable: a job, a bigger audience, a white knight-like belief that you can change things from the inside. “Some of this is pure opportunism and careerism,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a State Department official in the second Bush administration who signed the letter and also helped recruit like-minded Republicans to join an earlier anti-Trump letter that called the then-candidate “fundamentally dishonest.”

“Some people have an inflated notion of the good they can do from the inside,” Cohen added. “One of my pet hobbies is the study of the technocrats of Vichy, and there were a lot of people like that — some of them indeed making things less bad. And sometimes they were getting seduced by power.”

Few changes of heart have been as head-spinning as the social conservatives and evangelical Christians who now consider Trump a hero. Many of the conservative women who once saw him as a boor have come to believe that for too long they were focused on the wrong qualities in presidential candidates. They wanted someone pious when they should have been looking for someone who could throw punches.

“I endorsed Rick Santorum in 2012. And Mike Huckabee,” said Penny Young Nance, who signed the statement in 2016 of anti-abortion activists opposing Trump. “But at the end of the day, I’m not sure those guys I love and admire would have had the guts to do what Trump has done,” she added.

Among the other considerations of “late adopters,” as Nance called herself, is how Trump relentlessly and savagely attacks the left and its leaders. “American women want a street fighter,” she said, “and this is the guy who puts the knife in his teeth and swims the moat.” She called Trump, “a gutsy New Yorker,” resisting the urge to use a less polite term that Trump might have used himself. “I could use a different word, but I won’t.”

For the few remaining holdouts, the willingness of so many conservatives to support Trump’s behavior is troubling. “I’ve heard from countless people who argue and believe that this is an existential moral moment and if a Democrat wins, darkness will descend on the land,” Peter Wehner, a speechwriter in the second Bush White House, said. “If that’s your mindset, then of course you’ll engage in a lot of unholy alliances to defeat Satan.”

“I’m trying to determine what’s the limiting principle for a person when it comes to casting a vote for Donald Trump,” Wehner added. “And I’m not sure there is one.”

The 'Never Trump' Coalition That Decided Eh, Nevermind, He's Fine

WASHINGTON — In 2016, Erick Erickson could not have been clearer. Donald Trump was “a racist” and “a fascist.” It was no wonder, Erickson wrote, that “so many people with swastikas in their Twitter profile pics” supported him. “I will not vote for Donald Trump. Ever,” he insisted, adding his voice to the chorus of Never Trump Republicans.

Rush Limbaugh cast himself in a similar light — part fact checker, part coach rallying the team at halftime. “You’re going to know everything you need to know about this latest faux scandal,” he promised, adding, “Everything you’re seeing is deception.”

Even Michael Savage, a conservative host who has been critical of the president at times, joined in circling the wagons. “There is a war going on right now,” he told his audience this week, adding, “They haven’t given up trying to destroy us.”

With the president facing an impeachment inquiry, and a whistleblower report made public Thursday that raised new questions about whether he tried to cover up his efforts to enlist Ukraine’s help in discrediting a political rival, allies of the White House in the pro-Trump media wasted no time constructing their own version of events.

Their narrative omits key facts, like Trump’s entreaty to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy: “I would like you to do us a favor.” It portrays the president’s political opponents and the mainstream media as contemptible and corrupt persecutors, blinded by hatred and their failure to bring him down so far. “Russia, Russia, Russia. Racism, racism. And recession. And now it’s going to be Ukraine,” Jeanine Pirro, a friend and fierce defender of Trump said on the Fox Business channel.

Their words echo those of the president himself, who once declared, “What you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” and beseeched his followers to “stick with us,” and not to believe what “you see from these people, the fake news.”

The potential political benefit is significant. Limbaugh, Levin and Sean Hannity have a combined weekly radio audience of nearly 42 million listeners. Combined with the programming on Fox News and stories from Trump-friendly outlets like Rasmussen Reports, which publishes a daily tracking poll of the president’s approval ratings that is typically several percentage points higher than other surveys, the conservative media is wrapping Trump and his supporters in a security blanket of their own facts, data points and story lines about the Ukraine controversy.

“It’s victory at the expense of truth,” said Michael Harrison, the publisher of Talkers Magazine, which tracks the talk radio industry. The desire to win the argument and the election, he added, has resulted in media where “you don’t hear debate anymore; it’s just preaching to the choir.”

In the world of conservative media, Trump is a popular, unbeatable figure. In reality, his numbers in the Gallup presidential approval poll have never climbed above 46% (he is the first president never to reach 50% in their survey, which dates back to the Truman administration). His campaign’s internal numbers have shown him losing badly to former Vice President Joe Biden in key battleground states. Trump has dismissed the numbers as “fake polls.”

A common defense from the right has been to flip the criticism and accuse liberals of fabricating their own reality. Levin, who has a Sunday evening Fox News show in addition to his daily radio show, said this week that Democrats and the mainstream media had created an “unreality” that was designed to “humiliate the president, to try and dispirit you, and to drag down his poll numbers and defeat him.”

The president’s media defenders often characterize the investigations and media coverage not merely as political attacks on Trump but as a culture war against people who support him.

Savage was one of Trump’s first talk radio boosters during his 2016 campaign. But he had been publicly doubting the president and criticizing him for failing to keep promises like building a wall on the southern border. The issue of impeachment has helped reignite Savage’s passions.

“It’s not about Trump is it?” he said on his show. “It’s about us. It’s about our love for America. It’s about our love for our own borders, language and culture.”

Richard Nixon played to similar “us versus them” grievances during the Watergate investigations and also blamed the media, which he said “hate my guts with a passion.” That approach helped keep a sizable chunk of Americans behind him even when he resigned. Roughly a quarter of Americans said at the time that Nixon’s conduct was not serious enough to warrant resignation, polls showed.

Nixon, of course, had nothing like the pro-Trump media to defend him. Talk radio in its current format, with its heavy tilt toward conservative provocateurs, did not develop until the 1990s. In Nixon’s day, cable news was still a few years away and the most popular hosts on the radio talked about subjects like extraterrestrial activity.

Trump’s allies repeatedly invoke the special counsel investigation into his campaign’s dealings with Russia during the 2016 election, which failed to produce the smoking gun-type revelations that many on the left had predicted. The president’s critics, they say, are once again engaging in a smear campaign to declare him guilty before all the evidence is out.

As Savage said on Wednesday, “He is already in the hay wagon on the way to the guillotine because of the fascist vermin in the media.”

They also appear to have learned an important lesson about how Trump and his attorney general, William Barr, managed the narrative of the release of the special counsel report: They are moving fast to tell the story on their terms. And that is a story in which Biden and his son Hunter Biden — not Trump — have covered up wrongdoing involving their Ukrainian interests.

Hannity, whose radio show each day begins with an announcer declaring that he is “Fighting the Trump-hating liberal media one day at a time,” called the Biden angle “the real story.”

Limbaugh told listeners, “Joe Biden may be the most corrupt politician in Washington bar none.” Then he offered a novel theory of the origins of the Ukraine-Trump investigations. “This effort going on here is actually a twofer,” he said. “It is designed by the Democrats to take out both Trump and Biden and clear the way for anybody else, probably Elizabeth Warren.”

Trump has also characterized the investigations as a Democratic conspiracy to weaken his standing, which he said is formidable. “Democrats feel they’re going to lose,” he said Wednesday, pointing to Rasmussen numbers that had his approval rating at 53%, which he insisted was too low. “They say you could add 10 to it. A lot of people say you can add more than 10 to it,” Trump said.

On Fox Business this week, Pirro made a similar point. Democrats, she said, were going to “shoot themselves in the foot and he’s going to win in 2020, and that’s the end of that chapter.”

Lou Dobbs, another friend of the president’s and Fox host, smiled and agreed. “That’s a pretty good chapter for America if he does indeed. And he will.”

'Everything You're Seeing Is Deception.' How Right-Wing Media Talks About Impeachment.

Mark Levin, the talk radio host who has been one of President Donald Trump’s most ardent defenders, tried to offer his listeners some reassurance this week as they processed the dizzying developments in Washington. “There’s a lot of disinformation and misinformation,” he warned. “I’m here to help us walk through this and defend this nation against a tyranny in our midst.”

Lawmakers accustomed to scheduling town hall meetings where no one would show up suddenly faced shouting crowds of hundreds, some of whom brought a holstered pistol or a rifle slung over the shoulder. One demonstrator at a rally in Maryland hanged a member of Congress in effigy. A popular bumper sticker at the time captured the contempt for the federal bailout of certain homeowners. “Honk if I’m Paying Your Mortgage,” it said.

Organizers convened mass gatherings across the country called “tea parties,” and they had a specific set of demands: Stop President Barack Obama’s health care law, tame the national deficit, and don’t let the government decide which parts of the economy are worth rescuing.

Ten years since that summer of rage, the ideas that animated the Tea Party movement have been largely abandoned by Republicans under President Donald Trump. Trillion-dollar deficits are back and on track to keep growing. The Affordable Care Act has never been repealed, and Republicans concede it may never be. When Congress approved $320 billion in new spending this month as part of its latest budget deal, most Republicans in the Senate voted yes, prompting a lament from Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who was first elected in 2010 as a slash-and-burn fiscal conservative.

“The Tea Party is no more,” he said.

But Paul and others who have signed the Tea Party’s death certificate overlook one way it continues to define the country today. It ignited a revival of the politics of outrage and mistrust in government, breathing new life into the populist passions that continue to threaten the stability of both political parties. Even if the Tea Party’s ideas are dead, its attitude lives on.

“The energy that was with the Tea Party then was not even so much about fiscal discipline, but about holding Washington accountable for the promises it makes,” said Rory Cooper, a former aide to the Republican House leadership. As voters watched one promise after another go unfulfilled, he said, the anger eventually erupted in 2016 with Trump’s election. Voters said, in essence, “‘We don’t trust any of you, but we will trust this guy who makes every promise under the sun,’ ” Cooper said.

“Then what happened,” he added, “was they stopped caring about the promises.”

In interviews with two dozen politicians, activists and Republican strategists who were on the front lines of the Tea Party’s rise, many described a movement stunted by its own success. Bringing Republicans to power in Washington actually undercut their cause, they said, because after winning the White House in 2016, Republicans did what politicians have always done when they have the unlimited checkbook of the U.S. government. They spend, and voters are largely fine with it.

“Unfortunately I could probably name you every senator and congressman who are alarmed by this — there are probably eight of them,” said Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks, a group that pushes for balanced budgets, lower spending and tax cuts and has backed Tea Party-inspired candidates like Paul.

But the bare-knuckle, brawling style that the Tea Party brought to American politics, Brandon added, is still very much intact. And in Trump, the movement has found a champion who is temperamentally suited to its way of practicing politics — even if he cares little for its founding ideas.

One significant limitation to the Tea Party is the contradiction in its DNA: It was a mass uprising based on notions of small-government libertarianism that are popular with think tanks but not so popular with most Americans. And as Obama’s allies saw the movement, its outrage over the debt and deficit had another purpose: giving cover and a voice to those who wanted to attack the first black president — people who in some cases showed up at rallies waving signs with racist caricatures and references.

“If the worry about the debt was so all-encompassing, so crucial, we would have had President Mitt Romney,” said Rebecca Mansour, a former adviser and speechwriter for Sarah Palin, whose rallying cries like “Don’t retreat, reload!” offered catharsis to Tea Party-goers in the movement’s early days.

A decade ago, people were concerned with government debt and spending and what it came to symbolize: politicians who were unresponsive to their concerns and an economy that wasn’t benefiting most Americans. Those concerns are very much still present. “The big problems, what Elizabeth Warren would say are structural problems, were never addressed,” Mansour said.

Jenny Beth Martin, who helped found one of the largest national Tea Party groups, Tea Party Patriots, recalled an encounter with a Republican member of the House Appropriations Committee and his staff during the budget negotiations when Obama was still in office. That committee member told her, in effect: “Everyone else who comes into this office asks us for something to spend money on. And you guys come in here and you are the only ones to ask us to not spend money. And we don’t know how to handle that.”

“That was such an important moment,” Martin added, “because I realized we were asking for something they don’t know how to give.” At the height of its influence in 2011 and 2012, Tea Party Patriots was bringing in $20 million a year in contributions and employed 30 people, its tax records show. In 2017 it collected $4.8 million and had a staff of 15.

While the group opposed the spending deal that Trump signed, most of its solicitations for donations these days are either about Trump or issues that are broadly popular with conservatives. Recent subjects of its fundraising emails have included condemnations of Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, gun control laws, big tech and liberal judges. For $24.99 the group sells a T-shirt with a quotation from the president, “America will never be a socialist country.”

The fact that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were committed conservative Republicans meant little when it came to balancing the budget. Deficits soared during each administration.

Trump promised during his first campaign to eliminate the national debt “over a period of eight years,” but huge debt does not seem to matter much to him now. In his State of the Union address this year, he did not utter the words “debt” or “budget deficit” once.

His biggest legislative success, for instance, was a $1.5 trillion package of tax cuts for individuals and corporations that has pushed the national debt higher than nonpartisan forecasters projected.

“This is Keynesian on crack,” said Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, referring to the theory — to which he is sympathetic — that the government can stimulate the economy through aggressive steps like cutting taxes and increasing spending. “We have the largest tax cut ever,” Bannon added, “and $4 trillion in government spending.”

Some conservatives see an irony in the fact that the Tea Party had more success — and political leverage — when it could extract concessions from a Democratic president and Senate, as it did in forcing Obama to agree to strict spending caps in exchange for raising the nation’s debt limit in the Budget Control Act of 2011. Those caps will be eliminated entirely after 2021 in the budget Trump signed into law this month.

Few Republicans in Congress identify as Tea Party today. The House Tea Party Caucus, which had 60 members in 2011, went inactive after the 2012 election.

Many elected in the midterm elections in 2010, like Bobby Schilling, were eventually voted out of office.

Schilling is running again for a House seat this year and acknowledges the landscape has changed. He hears less about fiscal discipline and more about topics like immigration or the Trump administration’s tariffs, which are affecting the district he is seeking to represent in Iowa.

And he hears a lot about Trump. At a county fair last month where he was campaigning, Schilling said, the biggest draw at the local Republican Party’s booth was a life-size poster of the president. “You would not believe people from all walks of life coming up getting their photos taken with this thing,” he said.

Of the 87 new Republicans elected to the House in 2010 — the most sweeping repudiation of a president and his political party in generations — one who has risen higher than most is Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s chief of staff.

In early September 2009, Mulvaney, then a state senator and part-owner of a chain of Mexican restaurants, sat in the back of a town hall in Rock Hill, South Carolina, a gathering that was typical for that summer. Seven hundred people filled the hall while another 200 listened on portable speakers outside. Constituents grilled the House Budget Committee chairman, John Spratt, a Democrat, and complained about how much the Obama health care plan would add to the nation’s trillion-dollar-plus deficit.

At one point, a man erupted over another false rumor making the rounds about coverage for immigrants in the country illegally. “Do not tell me that illegal alien invaders do not get health care free in America,” he said. “I see it every day.”

Mulvaney decided to challenge Spratt, and on the day he announced his campaign, in November 2009, he accused his opponent of selling out. “People can say a lot about me,” Mulvaney said at the time. “One thing they can never say is that I’ve sold out my principles.”

Since then, Mulvaney has risen to become the director of the Office of Management and Budget and acting chief of staff to Trump. In the three years that Trump has been in office, the nation’s deficit has increased each year. Last week the Congressional Budget Office said it would rise again every year for the next four. By 2029, the national debt is set to reach its highest level as a share of the economy since after World War II.

The Tea Party Didn't Get What It Wanted, but It Did Unleash the Politics of Anger

In the late summer of 2009, as the recession-ravaged economy bled half a million jobs a month, the country seemed to lose its mind.

Today, for $64.95, anyone who wants to make a political prop out of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Republican Party’s newest antagonist, can buy a 5-foot-6 cardboard cutout of her at Walmart’s online store.

After barely eight months in office, Ocasio-Cortez and three other progressive women of color have reached a level of notoriety that is virtually unheard-of for freshman House members, largely thanks to the kind of relentless conservative fire usually trained on far more senior Democrats.

Pelosi, the House speaker whose “San Francisco values” were the focus of tens of millions of dollars and nearly a decade’s worth of Republican attacks, is Public Enemy No. 1 no more. Even Hillary Clinton, who inspired President Donald Trump’s crowds to thunder “Lock her up!” or Barack Obama, whose ethnic background drew false speculation about his citizenship and religion, are no longer inspiring the kind of vitriol the right has leveled at the four women.

Led by Trump, Republicans have used the four congresswomen, known as “the squad” — Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — as a visual aid for the nationalist, us-versus-them message he seems eager to pursue for the 2020 election. Their attacks on the congresswomen, with only a handful of dissenters, show how broadly accepted Trump’s racial and cultural instigations have become in the Republican Party.

“Politics is supposed to be about ideas,” said Sanford, who won that election with the mock Pelosi debate in 2013 and served in the House until 2019 after losing to a more pro-Trump Republican in a primary. “What we’ve now done is to take it to another level, which is to say to some extent it’s about ideas, but it’s about personality more.”

WASHINGTON — When Mark Sanford was running for a South Carolina House seat in 2013 and wanted to make a point about the brand of liberalism he would fight in Washington, he staged a mock debate with a life-size picture of Nancy Pelosi, which his campaign staff had custom made at a local copy shop.

Jeremy W. Peters

Articles written by the author

On the Right, Impeachment Is a Distraction, Not a 'Witch Hunt'

Sessions, Praising President, Announces Run for Senate

A Conservative Push to Make Trans Kids and School Sports the Next Battleground in the Culture War

In Steve Bannon's Basement, a Rogue 'War Room' to Fight Impeachment

Republicans, Defiant After Debate, Throw Punches on Impeachment and Economy

The 'Never Trump' Coalition That Decided Eh, Nevermind, He's Fine

'Everything You're Seeing Is Deception.' How Right-Wing Media Talks About Impeachment.

The Tea Party Didn't Get What It Wanted, but It Did Unleash the Politics of Anger

Nancy Who? The Right Finds New Liberal Foils in 4 Young Firebrands

Is America Ready for a Gay President? 'You're Going to See the Wall Crumble'

With Polls and Private Meetings, Republicans Craft Blunt Messaging to Paint Democrats as Extreme

With Polls and Private Meetings, Republicans Craft Blunt Messaging to Paint Democrats as Extreme

Pete Buttigieg, Gay and Christian, Challenges Religious Right on Their Own Turf

Fear of 'career death sentence' kept buttigieg in closet until 33

Pete Buttigieg's life in the closet

Conservative radio host has doubts about Trump, his audience doesn't want to hear it

As passions flare in abortion debate, many Americans say 'it's complicated'

Buttigieg confronts race and identity in speech to gay group

Bill Weld on Nixon, Mueller and how he plans to beat Trump in the primary

Pete Buttigieg, gay and christian, challenges religious right on their own turf