Republicans turn on each other after midterms defeat

Well, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been very outspoken over the course of the last several days regarding the outcome of America's midterm election campaign and the absolute drubbing that was delivered by the voters to President Donald Trump and Republican candidates up and down the land. Indeed, his critique of President Trump actually began even before Election Day. He was one of those Republican voices warning that the president essentially He essentially had not told the American public the truth about the implications of the war in Iran for the American economy. And it was the war in Iran that he returned to as a topic of conversation in this interview that aired on CNN. Kind of the Republican mantra since Trump came on the scene was, you know, we don't want to get in these open-ended conflicts. And that's what this has become, a little bit different than Iraq for sure. But I think this one was important because that had a direct effect on people's pocketbooks. Every time they went to the gas pump, they saw the gas higher. And I've criticized some of our Republican congressmen and Senate candidates running around the country trying to blame the the high gas prices on Biden. Gas was $3 a gallon a year and a half ago, and now it's $4. Now, why all of this matters is that Ron DeSantis has got a completely open diary for the whole of 2027, the whole of 2028 and beyond, because he's stepping down as Florida's governor at the end of this year. He is term limited, and therefore he's going to be replaced at the helm of the Sunshine State. And it is absolutely clear that he is positioning himself for a possible. run for the Republican Party's presidential nomination in 2028, and unlike many of the other presidential aspirants within the Republican Party's fold, Ron DeSantis has the relative luxury of having been outside Donald Trump's inner circle. He's not a member of Donald Trump's cabinet. He hasn't been present at key meetings at the White House over the course of the last two years. So Ron DeSantis is relatively free to run for. ...before that Republican Party's presidential nomination without any risk of being tarnished by too close an association with President Donald Trump and that, he hopes, is going to give him an advantage and it certainly indicates that even as the very nascent stages of runners and riders preparing to saddle up in the presidential race are underway, Ron DeSantis is not afraid to come forward publicly And criticise President Donald Trump. And he may well, by association or perhaps even directly, criticise men like Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who are likely also to challenge for that 2028 position as the Republican Party's standard bearer. And what I want for my family, I want for your family too. It's going to be very, very difficult for J.D. Vance to continue serving President Trump. As his deputy remaining, you know, a heartbeat away from the Oval Office in the Trump administration while trying to distance himself from a conflict in Iran that he really never wanted to see. When the conflict was first mooted, we know that J.D. Vance, the vice president, advised Donald Trump, if you're going to do this, go quickly and go heavy. And of course, that is not the way the conflict has turned out. It is not, much as Donald Trump might have wanted it to be, a repeat of that very rapid intervention in Venezuela. That resulted in the overthrow of President Nicolas Maduro, now of course residing in American detention up in New York as he awaits trial along with his wife on narco-terrorism trafficking charges. But J.D. Vance was an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump on the campaign trail in 2024 when Donald Trump said the last thing that he would ever think about doing was dragging America back into. Another forever conflict, like the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and those military deployments had become for the United States. So J.D. Vance has some capacity to say to voters, I told him that if he was going to do this, he needed to go heavy and go quickly. He just didn't listen to me, the president of the United States. And as a result of that, we are where we find ourselves. But whether he can go that far while he is still a serving vice president to President Donald Trump, I think is a very complicated issue for him to have to try and deal with. The only thing I wish he would have said there. If he felt it, and you'd have to ask him about that, but if you had it to do again, would you do it? You know, he's part of a decision-making process. And my answer is an emphatic yes, because you can't let Iran have a nuclear weapon. Well, I think it's got every possibility of getting ugly. I mean, we've certainly heard... President Trump over the weekend engaging in actions that would appear to be putting some distance between himself and his deputy, who himself has put distance between the office of the vice president and the war on Iran. Let's take a listen to what Donald Trump said over the weekend. Has J.D. Vance's comments about Iran, questioning some of those decisions, has that impacted your relationship at all? No, not at all. But a lot of people didn't like his comments, but not me. He was right. Other than one thing, he should have made one other statement, one statement that I think is very important. If you had it to do again, would you do it again? The answer is yes. I can tell you if I had it to do again, this historically for history will go down as one of the best things we ever did. If they ever had a nuclear weapon, they would blow up the world. You know why? Because they're crazy. Thank you very much, everybody. So Donald Trump, not there directly breaking with his vice president, but certainly indicating that there is daylight between them over the issue of the Iran war. And for J.D. Vance, you know, he's going to have to decide how much further he wants to go. The Wall Street Journal was reporting over the weekend that some of his advisers are telling him not to seek the presidency in 2028, Deep Pocketed funded funders and donors of Republican Party potential candidates would prefer to put their money behind men and women who have not been directly involved serving in the Trump administration's cabinet. That the big money within the Republican Party, at least the big money that's talking currently, is saying we want to find an outsider, not J.D. Vance, not... Secretary of State Marco Rubio. So that also is putting a considerable crimp in what Vice President J.D. Vance had said previously were his plans to go and talk to Donald Trump right after the midterm elections and have a natter about 2028. Well, for neither man, the president or his deputy, has the election's outcome sort of helped propel that conversation down a potentially... ...positive path, especially as far as J.D. Vance's advisers are concerned, as they reflect what they're hearing from the donors and funders that would be all-important for any campaign that the vice-president wanted to mount. Oh, look, he's here. Marco Rubio. Can you believe it? Whoa. He's getting a little bit too popular. I'm not happy about this. Well, it's very unclear what he might gain from steadfastly backing the president's decision to go to war with Iran, apart, of course, from sparing himself the anger of the president that he serves. And the big question here in Washington remains, how long is Marco Rubio going to stay on as secretary of state? Last week, there were rumours in the immediate aftermath of the election results that he was going to leave the administration in order to pursue his own race for the presidency. Mr Rubio then vehemently denied those reports, insisted that he plans to continue working as Secretary of State in Donald Trump's administration until the very last day of the administration, all the way up until January of 2029. Now, whether Marco Rubio's comments over the weekend offering Donald Trump some support amid criticism of his decision to go to war to Iran indicate a rethink about Rubio's own intentions to seek the presidency. The presidency is unclear, but let's take a listen to what Marco Rubio did have to say over the weekend. I think the President took on something that other Presidents have failed to do, and sometimes when you do the right thing, I don't know if it's popular or not, but it's the right thing to do, and Presidents are elected to do the hard things, sometimes difficult things, but necessary things. So is he a man planning to run a presidential race of his own? Is he happy globetrotting on behalf of the president that he serves and perhaps thinking that it might be more sensible to keep his powder dry for any presidential run until 2032, given that the scale of the Republican losses in this year's midterm elections suggest that the 2028 presidential race is going to be a very uphill battle for whoever the candidate may be. We simply don't know, but Marco Rubio certainly remains a man to watch within Donald Trump's inner circle and maybe further down the line outside it if he ever does decide to exit the administration. For The egg. The politicians involved in the current White House all and what they hope will be the next US administration t is just a massive hostage to fortune by because they simply do not know, CastingWords number one, how the war on Iran is going to work out. Number two, what kind of political settlement we're going to find arising out of Israel's disputed general election with both Gadi Eisenkot and Prime Minister Netanyahu hoping that they may end up forming the government. So there are all sorts of... unknowns in that regard and there's another big factor domestically here in the United States and that is that the midterm elections demonstrated that public support in America for Israel and particularly for the Israeli government and approach of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. ...is absolutely evaporating and President Trump has already indicated a desire to terminate $4 billion in annual support from the US taxpayer for Israel. He's trying to get out in front of that particular train. Leftists within the Democratic Party, the Democratic Socialists of America, the progressives on the left wing of the Democratic Party are very critical of the positions that were taken by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris during their administration. talking about ironclad U.S. support for Israel. So this issue of the Middle East broadly... This is a huge issue domestically and therefore politically, and none of the candidates for the presidency, Republicans or Democrats, can at this point, those potential aspirants, have any notion of exactly where things are heading in the region, which is why on both sides of the political aisle, events in the Middle East are going to have potentially very significant consequences.