Romney stands by Trump criticism but says MAGA is now the Republican Party
CNN
Sen. Mitt Romney, a frequent Donald Trump critic who will soon retire from Congress, stood by his criticism of the president-elect’s character but said Trump and his MAGA movement now define the Republican Party.
Sen. Mitt Romney, a frequent Donald Trump critic who will soon retire from Congress, stood by his criticism of the president-elect’s character but said Trump and his MAGA movement now define the Republican Party. “I’m, as you know, not a supporter of President Trump’s. I didn’t support him in this election. I didn’t the last time he ran either, largely for matters of character,” the Utah Republican, who was the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, told CNN’s Jake Tapper in a wide-ranging interview on “State of the Union” on Sunday. But Romney acknowledged Trump’s grip on the party he once led. “MAGA is the Republican Party and Donald Trump is the Republican Party today,” he said. Asked about his sustained criticism of Trump, which dates to the president-elect’s first White House run in 2016, Romney described himself as “kinda outspoken” and said he felt that Trump “was wrong for the country, wrong for our party, that he wouldn’t win,” but he noted, “I was wrong about that.” “I think most people disagree with me. I’m willing to live with that. I just put emphasis on different things than I think the public at large does right now,” he said.
Speaker Mike Johnson is a political survivor, weathering crisis after crisis since his unlikely ascent two years ago.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan are well matched, rhetorically forceful opposites. And they have been clashing for more than a decade over an increasingly relevant question of presidential power: How easy should it be for the president to fire the heads of independent agencies?
The Army gynecologist described in a recent lawsuit as a “predator in uniform” is now being held in the Bell County Jail in Texas, “after apparently violating conditions of liberty imposed by his commander,” according to an Army spokesperson.
Brian Walshe on Thursday came face-to-face for the first time with the man who had been having an affair with his wife before her death, as he took the stand to testify in Walshe’s murder trial.
The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed Texas to use a congressional map that will boost President Donald Trump’s effort to keep Republicans in control of Congress, blocking a lower court decision that found the new boundaries were likely unconstitutional because they were drawn based on race.
The US military carried out a strike Thursday on a suspected drug boat in the Eastern Pacific, killing four people on board, according to a social media post from US Southern Command.
A grand jury voted against indicting New York Attorney General Letitia James after being asked to look at the mortgage fraud case against her a second time, according to multiple people familiar with the development Thursday.
National Guard troops deployed to Washington, DC, can remain there for now, after a federal appeals court on Thursday temporarily froze a judge’s ruling that would have soon required them to leave the city’s streets.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s bad week just got worse. That’s after the long-awaited release Thursday of an inspector general’s report on his sharing of highly sensitive military attack plans on the unclassified app Signal earlier this year.
President Donald Trump has hired a new architect for the White House ballroom amid disputes between the president and his architect originally contracted to complete the project, several sources have told CNN.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth risked compromising sensitive military information that could have endangered US troops through his use of Signal to discuss attack plans, a Pentagon watchdog said in an unclassified report released Thursday. It also details how Hegseth declined to cooperate with the probe.
If nothing else, the controversy over the Trump administration’s second strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean has surfaced a long-overdue debate about its already legally dubious first strikes.
Two top House lawmakers emerged divided along party lines after a private briefing with the military official who oversaw September’s attack on an alleged drug vessel that included a so-called double-tap strike that killed surviving crew members, with a top Democrat calling video of the incident that was shared as part of the briefing “one of the most troubling things” he has seen as a lawmaker.