Shared from/by Niall Stanage

The Hill

Former President Trump’s legal woes are overshadowing everything else in the political world — but they are causing much more serious political problems for his GOP rivals than for his own candidacy.

It’s become next to impossible for the Republicans chasing Trump to get traction, or even attention for their ideas, while the maelstrom swirls around him.

Trump was indicted in a third case last week, relating to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. He has previously been indicted in New York in April regarding the alleged falsification of business records, and in June in Florida relating to the sensitive documents uncovered at Mar-a-Lago.

An investigation in Georgia into efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the election result in that state could produce more charges any day now.

In aggregate, those events would be politically fatal to any other candidate. To be sure, they could wound Trump badly in a general election if he becomes the GOP nominee.

An ABC News/Ipsos poll released Friday indicated that 52 percent of Americans believe Trump should indeed have been charged in the latest indictment, compared to 32 percent who thought he should not have been charged.

But Trump is leading the GOP field by almost 40 points in national polling averages and, if his previous two indictments are any guide, he will likely get a fundraising boost in response to his most recent legal troubles.

Meanwhile, his rivals trail far in his wake.

“Look, they are on an impossible road,” said former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), who ran a long-shot campaign against Trump for the GOP nomination in 2020.

Walsh argued that Trump’s rivals can’t win by frontally opposing him, because of his popularity with the Republican base, “but if they embrace him, they can’t then really differentiate themselves from him.”

That conundrum is made all the more difficult when Trump commands the news headlines, even for negative reasons.

Walsh drew a comparison with the initial publicity his own bid received in its early days of the 2020 cycle before news broke of the Ukraine-related events that led to Trump’s first impeachment.

“That became the biggest story in the country for three months,” he noted.

Far from trying to move past his legal troubles, Trump has instead sparked further controversies that could be designed, at least in part, to keep controversy blazing — and perhaps to prolong the period before any trial.

On Sunday, he demanded the recusal of U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who has been randomly assigned to his case, contending that “there is no way I can get a fair trial” under her.

Previously, special counsel Jack Smith had cited a Trump social media post — “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!,” it said — in a Friday court filing seeking a protective order to curb public disclosure of information provided under the discovery process in the case.

There are some signs that Trump’s rivals are recalibrating their approach in response to the most recent developments.

Former Vice President Mike Pence has been direct in outlining his differences with Trump over the then-president’s efforts to pressure him to overturn the 2020 election result.

“President Trump was wrong then and he’s wrong now,” Pence said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “I had no right to overturn the election.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest, if distant, GOP rival told NBC News in an interview broadcast Monday “of course he lost,” in reference to Trump’s fate in the 2020 election. “Joe Biden’s the president.”

DeSantis’s comment is plainly true, but polling has consistently shown around 70 percent of Republican voters refuse to accept the legitimacy of President Biden’s victory.

“The new Ron DeSantis view — ‘Of course Trump lost’ — is a new, big change in the DeSantis approach,” said Jamil Jaffer, who served as associate counsel to former President George W. Bush. “That should not be undercounted, because this is the first time his principal rival is saying that he lost and there is no question about it.”

Others argue that, for all of Trump’s strengths with the Republican base, questions about his capacity to win a general election will ultimately undercut his candidacy. His nomination is far from a foregone conclusion, they contend.

Barry Bennett, who was a senior adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign but is supporting Miami Mayor Francis Suarez (R) in this campaign, contended that questions over “winnability” were Trump’s Achilles’ heel.

“Trump’s path is like the Titanic; you don’t turn 90 degrees just like that,” Bennett claimed. “It takes a while. There is not going to be this one day where there will be a poll and people will have abandoned Trump. That’s just not the way it works. They have to get comfortable with their next choice. I think it is a much slower, more deliberative process.”

But even Bennett acknowledged that Trump’s long shadow over the news agenda was a problem for this GOP rivals.

“It certainly makes it more difficult, because every time you do a TV hit or a media interview, the only questions are what you think about Trump,” he said.

Independent experts agree — and argue that no competitor to Trump has yet found a way to thread the needle.

Floating barriers and razor wire now line the Rio Grande along the US-Mex border, one of many obstacles migrants face as they seek to enter the country

by Peter White

The border at Eagle Pass, Texas, has razor wire and a 1000-foot line of big round buoys. The floating barriers are meant to deter migrants looking to cross from the city of Piedras Negras, on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande River.

For journalist Manuel Ortiz, they are part of what he says is a more militarized atmosphere along this stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border.

“This is the first time that it seems to me like a war zone,” says Ortiz, founder of Peninsula 360 Press, who has covered the border off and on for decades. Driving southwest from San Antonio, he describes helicopters overhead and military vehicles along the road.

Last week, state troopers found a body stuck to one of the border buoys.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott began Operation Lone Star in March 2021 in response to rising border crossings. In May of that same year, Abbott issued a disaster declaration, later sending National Guard troops to the border. Two state agencies, the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Military Department are in charge of the operation. When 16,000 migrants suddenly arrived in Del Rio in November 2021, Abbott sent 10,000 guardsmen to the border in response. Del Rio is about 55 miles north of Eagle Pass.

“The only winners from Abbott’s actions seem to be the human traffickers,” said Ortiz during an EMS media briefing. Speaking to migrants, he noted human smugglers, called coyotes, used to charge $500/per person to get across the border. The price has gone up to $1500, he says, after the floating barriers were installed.

On the other side of the border, Ortiz noted Mexican authorities appear to be “doing nothing against the smugglers,” adding there are unverified rumors that local officials there may in fact be involved in the trafficking.

The Trump administration essentially stopped processing asylum claims along the US southern border during the pandemic by invoking Title 42, a public health order that allowed for the immediate expulsion of migrants.

That program ended in May. The Biden Administration subsequently announced that would-be asylum seekers would now be required to first schedule an appoint with Customs and Border Protection through a mobile app prior to their arrival at the border.

Gianna Borroto is the head litigator with the American Immigration Council (AIC). It’s an impossible situation,” she says, describing the CBP One app as a “cruel measure” designed to limit who can seek asylum in this country.

AIC and its partners filed a class action lawsuit July 27 in the district court for the Southern District of California over the CBP One app. The lawsuit challenges the Biden administration’s policy of turning away asylum seekers at ports of entry who didn’t make an appointment. The suit names ten plaintiffs who claim they couldn’t.

Besides a smartphone you need internet access to use the app. Many migrants are living in encampments without electricity or water, much less internet service. Borroto says many migrants don’t have money to buy minutes for their phones because they need what they have to buy food.

She also cited a number of problems with the CBP One app.  One man couldn’t get tech support, just lines of code; one woman tried every day for months but couldn’t get an appointment; the app has just three languages but border migrants speak 20 or more, so unless they speak English, Spanish, or Creole, it’s useless; the app doesn’t upgrade easily and freezes a lot.

“Access to asylum simply cannot be restricted to a glitchy smart phone app lottery,” Borroto says. A recent ruling in a similar 2017 case gives her hope. A previous version of a turn back policy that limited access to asylum at the border was declared unlawful and in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Borroto says AIC filed suit to protect the fundamental right to seek asylum which is enshrined both in US and international law.

Professor and author Cal Jillson is a recognized authority on Texas politics and the politics of the US southern border. “The current situation at the border has been replayed many times over the course of American history,” Jillson said.

In the early 20^th Century, when the American economy was strong and labor was needed, there was a welcoming of people across the border from Mexico into the United States on the presumption that they would work cheap and go home when the work was completed.”

Beginning in the 1950s, migrant workers started staying year-round.

“I see the current events at the border as part of an American—particularly white American—ambivalence about immigration, specifically of immigration of nonwhite people… and it has ever been thus,” he said.

When it comes to immigration as a political issue, Jillson believes Republicans have the advantage. Their message is simple: we oppose illegal immigration, and we are worried about legal immigration. “That’s a kind of bumper sticker slogan,” he said.

Democrats, meanwhile, are hoping immigration will not become the driving issue in the upcoming presidential race. They have a tougher sell, said Jillson, with a more complex coalition, some of who “recognize that the Republican charge that Democrats stand for open borders is a political killer.”

It’s Republicans who are setting closed border policies, Jillson noted, and it’s likely to remain that way for some time.