Raw Story

A group of Donald Trump's conservative allies are growing angry over his refusal to endorse their candidates in 2024, according to a new report.

Members of the far-right Freedom Caucus members are accusing the former president of abandoning them — and pointing to Trump's endorsement of Chair Rep. Bob Good's (R-VA) opponent John McGuire as proof, sources tell nonprofit News of the United States journalist Reese Gorman.

“Generally, there is a belief that President Trump is endorsing a whole bunch of squishes across the country,” one source reportedly said. The source also claimed Trump backing McGuire over Good was “part of that pattern.”

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NOTUS found that Trump's endorsement "is often the difference in GOP primaries, with Trump’s endorsement record in primaries standing at 93% in 2022 and 97% in 2020. (His general election success rate is far lower: 83% in 2022 and 78% in 2020.)"

But Freedom Cause members such as Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) are concerned Trump's opposition to incumbents could backfire.

“Should the president win reelection, I think he will learn to regret having chosen some of the people he’s endorsed,” Roy told NOTUS. “Who will be in the foxhole with you when you’re wanting to actually try to challenge the swamp? If you want to drain it, then you should drain it.”

One Republican aide told NOTUS Trump's potential damage to the Freedom Caucus isn't exactly a top concern.

“The real story here is that these guys throw a temper tantrum every time Trump endorses against their preferred candidate, where most of the time their preferred candidate is a total s---bag," the aide reportedly said.

A Trump ally told NOTUS that Good lost his chance at a Trump endorsement when he threw support behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the 2024 Republican primary.

“Trump is the GOP nominee for president and is in cycle, so obviously he is going to endorse the members of Congress who endorsed his presidential campaign during the primaries,” the ally reportedly said.

“Inversely, he’s probably not going to support the campaign of the members who endorsed against him. Bob Good may be a good conservative, but if he didn’t want Trump to endorse against him, he shouldn’t have endorsed against Trump.”

Former President Donald Trump has taken an unusual shift in his approach to politics, wrote Jim Newell for Slate: He's actually swallowing his pride and biting his tongue to avoid attacking fellow Republicans he believes have wronged him.

This was made apparent during his visit to Capitol Hill to meet with Republican lawmakers last week — the first time he had visited since the January 6 attack.

"In the House meeting, he made a peace offering to California Rep. David Valadao, one of the two remaining House Republicans who’d voted to impeach Trump," wrote Newell. "No such peace offerings were on the table during the 2022 primaries. He endorsed Florida Rep. Laurel Lee, too, a privilege not previously granted to members of Congress who’d endorsed Ron DeSantis in the presidential primary. He congratulated South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, a former enemy whom he’d tried to take out in 2022, on her recent primary win. He joked around with Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’d recently directly defied his wishes by moving to oust Mike Johnson as House speaker. Greene nearly swooned recollecting the interaction in an interview afterward."

This stands in stark contrast to his "chaos agent" behavior during the 2022 midterm contests, wrote Newell, where Trump attacked lawmakers who had criticized or moved to impeach him. Republicans came out of those contests with significantly fewer gains than they were hoping to have.

Moreover, he wrote, this all coincides with Trump running a campaign operation that is less drama-charged.

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"Think about the inside-the-campaign drama from previous cycles, and the faucet of daily stories about staff anarchy and failed efforts to control the candidate. People like Corey Lewandowski, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Paul Manafort, Brad Parscale, and Bill Stepien became household names for their roles in overseeing the ramshackle Trump operation, the 'strategy' for which was determined by whatever the candidate had on his mind at any given moment. This year, there’s little news from inside the Trump campaign, and no one outside of politics addicts knows who Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita are."

What all this probably means, he concluded, is that "Avoiding potential jail time has a way of focusing even the most untamable of minds."

In 2022, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) privately begged a local Jewish leader in Westchester County for any photographic evidence of the two of them together so he could "show the world I’m friends with Jewish People,” Jewish Insider's Matthew Kassel reported on Tuesday.

This comes as Bowman, a member of the progressive "Squad" who is currently polling behind primary challenger George Latimer, is facing extensive criticism for his handling of issues surrounding the Israel-Hamas war, in a district with a substantial Jewish population.

"The Jewish leader, who described the exchange on the condition of anonymity to protect his privacy, did have at least one photo on hand from a Jewish community gathering in Bowman’s district months earlier at which the then-freshman Democrat had vowed to sign on to a House bill aimed at strengthening the Abraham Accords — a promise he fulfilled just a few days later," wrote Kassel. "But by the time Bowman sent his request to the Jewish leader in an apparent effort to counter mounting dissatisfaction with his record on Israel amid the campaign, the New York legislator had since reversed course and pulled his support for the bill aimed at further normalizing relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors — angering Jewish activists in the district who said they felt blindsided by his abrupt decision."

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The Jewish leader said of the text exchange, “I was uncomfortable. I kind of joked around with him about it. I said, ‘Oh, I’m sure you guys have it. Don’t worry about it.’” He ultimately declined to share the photo.

In recent months, Bowman has triggered outrage after he claimed that "there's no evidence of ... raped women" in Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel that led to over 1,000 people killed and hundreds taken hostage, and that the reports of rape were "propaganda." He later backtracked after U.N. reports found extensive evidence of sexual violence committed by Hamas terrorists.

This also comes as Bowman has been criticized for old writings in which he pushed a number of conspiracy theories, including 9/11 trutherism, and a YouTube channel where he followed Flat Earther accounts and the screeds of the antisemitic Black supremacist Louis Farrakhan — as well as a bizarre incident in which he pulled a fire alarm in a House office building.

Alt-right Freedom Caucus chair Rep. Bob Good took a surprising jab at former President Donald Trump ahead of a Virginia primary that has more resting on it than his own claim to power, according to a new report.

Good — who will find out Tuesday how his staunch Trump support matches up against a political outsider who has the former president's endorsement in Virginia's 5th Congressional district — shared his views on a cease and desist letter he received from the former president over campaign signs.

“I’m not talking about stupid topics," Good told Politico Tuesday. "That’s a stupid topic.”

Good's opinion stands in contrast to Trump's, who ordered his lawyers late last month to take action against the Virginia Republican he has declared is "bad."

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At question was Good's usage of Trump's name on his campaign yard signs, despite the former president's endorsement of former Navy SEAL John McGuire.

"That is a fraud on the donors," lawyers told Good.

Good has maintained his support for Trump notwithstanding and created what one political analyst described as a civil war within Trumpworld, pitting MAGA bigwigs such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Steve Bannon against each other.

Politico's Olivia Beavers argued the conclusion of Tuesday's primary could reverberate beyond Virginia and signal a dark future for the MAGA movement as a whole.

"If Rep. Bob Good were to lose, he would be the first sitting chair in the Freedom Caucus’ nearly decade-long history to be defeated — a loss that would embolden critics of the increasingly fractious bloc," she wrote.

"If he wins, he’ll have done it despite strong opposition from former (and possibly future) President Donald Trump and only mild backing from Republican leaders, including House Speaker Mike Johnson — signaling friction ahead."

Former President Donald Trump is dragging the whole Republican Party off a cliff with his "bone-headed" proposal to replace income taxes with tariffs on imported goods, wrote Catherine Rampell for The Washington Post.

Economists have broadly panned the idea, warning that it would amount to a massive tax increase for everyone but the ultra-rich, by making everything more expensive, and would make maintaining government revenue for essential services impossible.

But the GOP has closed ranks around the idea, with RNC spokesperson Anna Kelly saying, “The notion that tariffs are a tax on U.S. consumers is a lie pushed by outsourcers and the Chinese Communist Party.”

It's not a lie at all, said Rampell.

"Multiple careful studies found that the costs of those tariffs were either mostly or entirely passed on to Americans in the form of higher prices. A more recent analysis estimated that his new tariff proposals would cost the median U.S. household an additional $1,700 per year," wrote Rampell. "But the modern GOP being what it is, party apparatchiks must defend every bone-headed idea their presumptive presidential nominee utters. Thus, critics must be 'outsourcers' (which seems unlikely for most economists, who rarely own manufacturing plants) or, naturally, Marxists."

"The expected costs of Trump’s recent tariff proposals would be staggering," she continued. "For example, his plan for a universal 10 percent tariff coupled with a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods would more than wipe out any savings most Americans would get from extending his 2017 income tax cuts, according to estimates from the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

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The bottom 80 percent of households would see a tax increase on net." Meanwhile, we would be losing $3 trillion in tax revenue per year, and there's no way to make that much from tariffs — $3 trillion is roughly the total value of all the goods we import annually.

The worst part of it all, wrote Rampell, is that while Trump at least had some sensible advisers last time pushing back on ideas like this, he is setting himself up now to have an army of loyalists at his disposal who will obey his every command.

"Project 2025, a Trump-aligned group, is already screening a more professionalized army of second-term loyalists, all of whom will obediently execute Trump’s orders, and dot their I’s and cross their T’s — on trade and everything else," she wrote. "Unless they’re also secret communists, of course."

Alan Dershowitz thinks a Hunter Biden acquittal would heal America as it would prove former President Donald Trump's guilty verdict to be a "laughing stock."

"The best thing that could possibly happen to Donald Trump is if Hunter Biden gets acquitted," the Harvard law professor emeritus said Monday night during an appearance on Fox News's "Hannity". "Because the evidence against Hunter Biden is so much more compelling of the legal issues which were compelling than anything against Donald Trump and it will prove beyond any doubt that this is all about where the trial was conducted and that if you're Trump and you're tried in New York, it'ss automatic guilt, and if you're Biden and you're tried in Delaware — it's a different bird."

He continued: "The best thing that could possibly happen to Donald Trump is the acquittal of the Biden base... it would also be a good thing for America.

"It would uncover and disclose the horrible double standard that our criminal justice system is going through; maybe we can get some reform. Maybe we can do something about it."

Last week, Trump became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes when New York jurors found him guilty of all 34 charges in a conspiracy to cover up a plot to unlawfully corrupt the 2016 election by shielding six-figure hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, who said they had sex.

Trump has denied the two had an affair and vowed to appeal after he's sentenced July 11.

A jury was deliberating Monday in the federal gun case against Hunter Biden where he stands accused of using drugs but lying about it on a gun application back in 2018.

The 54-year-old also accomplished a first by being criminally prosecuted as the son of a sitting U.S. president.

For Dershowitz, who defended Trump when he was impeached back on 2019, the verdict has indelibly shaken his trust in the law itself.

"I've been able to 60 years of my life to try to defend and explain the legal system based on neutral principles," he said. "That legal system is gone. The trump case destroyed it.

"And if there were an acquittal in this case, at least it will expose that."

Dershowitz added that America is not a pillar in the law but being pilloried after last week's conviction.

"Right now our criminal justice system is the laughingstock of the world and i feel you're so horrible about it," he said.