Tulsa Schools, Under Threat of Takeover, Retain Control for Now - The New York Times

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The Oklahoma Board of Education imposed strict oversight over Tulsa public schools on Thursday, but it allowed the district to continue operating, averting a takeover of the state’s largest school system.

The decision came after a fraught standoff between Ryan Walters, the state’s hard-charging Republican superintendent, and the school district in left-leaning Tulsa.

Ryan Walters, center, prays along with state board members during an April meeting in Oklahoma City.Sue Ogrocki/Associated Press

Superintendent vs. Superintendent

Mr. Walters, the former state secretary of education who took over as Oklahoma’s education superintendent in January, has emerged as a provocative and divisive figure, waging cultural battles — often on social media — and defending prayer in public school settings.

He more recently focused his attention on Tulsa schools, citing their low academic outcomes and an embezzlement case that he said pointed to a culture of financial mismanagement. He threatened to take over or even dissolve the district, which serves nearly 34,000 students, a majority of whom are Hispanic or Black.

He had called for the removal of the superintendent, Deborah A. Gist, whom he blamed for poor outcomes.

Dr. Gist, who announced this week that she would step down in order to avoid a state takeover, said in an interview on Thursday that she believed Mr. Walters was using Tulsa as a “political football.”

She did not learn that Tulsa was at risk of being taken over, she said, until Mr. Walters held a rally outside the district’s offices this summer, defending a Tulsa school board member who had prayed at a public high school graduation. She said she had met with Mr. Walters only once, in a meeting a few weeks ago that lasted less than 30 minutes.

A spokesman for the State Department of Education said on Thursday that Dr. Gist was “misinformed” and that she had been “openly hostile” to Mr. Walters. Mr. Walters said he was concerned about low literacy rates and a lack of financial oversight in the district, among other things, and gave Tulsa’s school board until the end of the year to show progress.

Research Says: Takeovers Don’t Typically Work

If officials want to help Tulsa children read better — an outcome sorely needed in a district where just one in 10 students are reading proficiently — taking away local control and handing it over to the state is not a slam dunk, according to research.

“We find no evidence that this benefits student academic achievement outcomes, on average,” said Beth Schueler, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia who has studied school district takeovers. She added that some evidence suggests that “it can be disruptive to academic achievement in the early years of reform, especially in reading achievement.”

What’s Next: ‘We Need Results’

The school district has appointed an interim superintendent and will be required to make monthly updates to the state, including on its finances.

Mr. Walters has demanded a quick turnaround, no easy feat in a district where a majority of students come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. In 2022, just 8 percent of students were proficient in math and 11 percent were proficient in English language arts. (Statewide, about 20 percent of students were proficient in math and reading last year.)

“We need results,” Mr. Walters said. “To be clear: If they don’t fix their problems, I will.”

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South Carolina's new all-male highest court reverses course on abortion, upholding strict 6-week ban - ABC News

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- South Carolina’s newly all-male Supreme Court reversed course on abortion Wednesday, upholding a law banning most such procedures except in the earliest weeks of pregnancy.

The continued erosion of legal abortion access across the U.S. South comes after Republican state lawmakers replaced the lone woman on the court, Justice Kaye Hearn, who reached the state's mandatory retirement age.

The 4-1 ruling departs from the court’s own decision months earlier striking down a similar ban that the Republican-led Legislature passed in 2021. The latest ban takes effect immediately.

Writing for the new majority, Justice John Kittredge acknowledged that the 2023 law also infringes on “a woman’s right of privacy and bodily autonomy,” but said the state Legislature reasonably determined this time around that those interests don’t outweigh “the interest of the unborn child to live.”

“As a Court, unless we can say that the balance struck by the Legislature was unreasonable as a matter of law, we must uphold the Act,” Kittredge wrote.

Kittredge wrote that “we leave for another day” a determination on what the law’s language means for when exactly during a pregnancy the ban should begin, likely forecasting another long court fight on that question.

Chief Justice Donald Beatty provided the lone dissent, arguing that the 2023 law is nearly identical, with definitions for terms including “fetal heartbeat” and “conception" that provide no clarity on when the ban begins, exposing doctors to criminal charges if law enforcement disagrees with their expertise.

The Planned Parenthood South Atlantic clinic in Columbia had served only a “handful” of the roughly 30 patients scheduled for abortions Wednesday when the ruling came down, according to Dr. Katherine Farris, the group's chief medical officer. The center — one of three clinics in the state — has paused abortions while officials work to understand the ruling's implications.

Beatty warned that the majority's failure to address such a key question could lead to political retribution. He added that judicial independence and integrity were weakened by the court's decision to backpedal on its prior ruling.

Hearn wrote the majority’s lead opinion in January striking down the ban as a violation of the state constitution’s right to privacy. She then reached the court’s mandatory retirement age, enabling the GOP-led Legislature to put Gary Hill on what is now the nation’s only state Supreme Court with an entirely male bench.

Republican lawmakers then crafted a new law to address Justice John Few’s concern, expressed in the January ruling, that the Legislature had failed to take into account whether the restrictions were reasonable enough to infringe upon a woman's privacy rights.

Abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, sued again. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic’s lawyer said during oral arguments this summer that both laws limited abortions at the same point in pregnancy and were equally unconstitutional.

The 2023 law restricts most abortions once cardiac activity can be detected, declaring that this happens about six weeks after a pregnant woman's last menstrual period. Lawmakers defined this as “the steady and repetitive rhythmic contraction of the fetal heart, within the gestational sac.”

But Beatty wrote that at six weeks, the fetus doesn't exist yet — it's still an embryo — and the heart doesn't develop until later in a pregnancy. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says it's inaccurate to call such “cardiac activity” a heartbeat.

“The terminology is medically and scientifically inaccurate. As such, it is the quintessential example of political gaslighting; attempting to manipulate public opinion and control the reproductive health decisions of women by distorting reality,” Beatty wrote.

The newly sworn Hill joined Wednesday’s majority along with Few, who had previously voted to overturn the 2021 law. In a separate concurring opinion, Few wrote that the state constitution’s right to privacy does not provide blanket protections against “reasonable” invasions.

The majority opinion found a key difference in the lawmakers' deletion of a reference to a pregnant woman having the right to make an “informed choice." The 2023 law expanded “the notion of choice to the period of time before fertilization, certainly before a couple passively learns of a pregnancy,” Few wrote.

That change lengthens the window for couples to avoid unwanted pregnancies by promoting “active family planning.” In addition, the new law provides insured contraceptives to “almost all couples” and places responsibility on sexually active couples to actively use pregnancy tests, Few wrote.

Planned Parenthood South Atlantic’s lawyer had noted during oral arguments that such analysis ignored the possibility for failures in testing and contraceptives.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court last year overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that provided nationwide access to abortion, most GOP-controlled states have enacted or adopted abortion bans of some kind. All have been challenged in court.

Republican officials in South Carolina celebrated what Gov. Henry McMaster called “the culmination of years of hard work” to curtail abortion access. Republican legislative leaders scrambled at the end of the session to pass the new limits as the number of abortions increased rapidly under the state's reversion to a 22-week ban passed in 2016.

Republican South Carolina Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey said Wednesday that he anticipates future challenges based on the definition of cardiac activity. Still, he expects the new ruling will put the issue to rest next session.

That is, at least until 2024 elections possibly alter the composition of a state Senate that fell just shy several times this past year of clearing procedural hurdles to enact a near-total ban.

More court shakeups are also coming. Beatty must retire in 2024 because he, too, will reach the mandated retirement age of 72 for judges. Kittredge is the only judge who applied to replace him. The Legislature is expected to approve Kittredge and choose another new justice next year.

___

Associated Press writer Jeffrey Collins contributed to this report. Pollard is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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New South Carolina Abortion Ban Upheld by State Supreme Court - The New York Times

The ruling, by a newly all-male bench, allows the state’s new six-week abortion ban to take effect.

The South Carolina Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the state’s new near-total ban on abortion by a 4-1 vote, reversing a decision it had made in January that struck down a similar ban and declared that the State Constitution’s protections for privacy included a right to abortion.

The court’s decision was not unexpected, because the makeup of the bench had changed, and Republicans in the State Legislature had passed a new abortion law in the hopes that it would find a friendlier audience with the new court. The decision in January was written by the court’s only female justice; she retired and South Carolina now has the nation’s only all-male high court.

The decision repeated what the justices said in January about a right to privacy in the State Constitution, but said the Legislature had addressed the concerns in the first law and “balanced” the interests of pregnant women with those of the fetus.

“To be sure, the 2023 Act infringes on a woman’s right of privacy and bodily autonomy,” Justice John Kittredge wrote for the majority.

But, he added, “We think it is important to reiterate: we are constrained by the express language in the South Carolina Constitution that prohibits only ‘unreasonable invasions of privacy.’

“The legislature has made a policy determination that, at a certain point in the pregnancy, a woman’s interest in autonomy and privacy does not outweigh the interest of the unborn child to live.”

The new law bans abortion after fetal cardiac activity can be detected, which is generally around six weeks of pregnancy. Until now, South Carolina had allowed abortion until 22 weeks, which had increasingly made the state a haven for women seeking abortions as other Southern states banned the procedure.

The leaders of the Republican majority in the Senate celebrated the decision, saying in a statement that South Carolina was “no longer an abortion destination but a refuge for the unborn.”

They suggested they would push for a total ban on abortion, which is the goal of anti-abortion groups.

Jenny Black, the chief executive of Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, said the decision would force women to carry pregnancies against their will, and puts the “dangerous politicization of South Carolina’s highest court on full display.”

“This abortion ban is nearly identical to the ban struck down by this court just months ago — the only thing that has changed is the makeup of the court,” she said in a statement.

South Carolina, one of the nation’s most reliably red states, has become an unlikely battleground over abortion rights in the year since the United States Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, which for 50 years protected a right to abortion under the federal constitution.

The state’s Republican-controlled Legislature had passed a law in 2021 banning abortion when cardiac activity can be detected, typically around six weeks of pregnancy, and that law took effect when Roe was overturned. Abortion rights advocates and medical providers sued, as they did against bans in other states, arguing that a right to abortion was protected in the state’s constitution, which clearly states a right to privacy.

The court surprised many reproductive rights supporters in January when it agreed with them. But the court’s 3-2 decision also said that right “was not absolute, and must be balanced against the state’s interest in protecting unborn life.”

Anti-abortion lawmakers had been trying to pass an even stricter ban, one starting at conception, and quickly set about trying to craft a law that would satisfy the justice’s concerns in the January decision.

They hoped to take advantage of a key change on the bench: the January decision had been written by Kaye Hearn, the court’s only female justice, who has since retired. The legislature replaced Justice Hearn with a man, who joined the majority Wednesday.

Still, Republican leadership had run into unexpected opposition from female lawmakers. Nicknaming themselves “the Sister Senators,” the only five women in the State Senate — a group that included three Republicans — blocked a near-total ban on abortion by filibustering until the legislative session ran out.

Gov. Henry McMaster, also a Republican, then called a rare special session to get the legislature to vote on a bill for a six-week ban. While the Sister Senators held out on their opposition, the men who had joined them in blocking a total ban supported the six-week law.

As long as the Legislature could not pass a new law, abortion remained legal in South Carolina until 22 weeks of pregnancy. Many lawmakers worried about statistics showing that the number of abortions in South Carolina had increased largely because so many women were coming from other states that had passed bans.

The oral arguments in the case in June revolved around whether a six-week ban affords women enough time to have what one justice in his January concurrence called “meaningful choice” in deciding whether to end a pregnancy.

A lawyer for the plaintiffs argued the law was “materially indistinguishable” from the one the court struck down in January, and that six weeks is too early for many women to know they are pregnant and make arrangements for an abortion.

Doctors date pregnancy to the first day of a woman’s last monthly period, so six weeks is roughly two weeks after she has missed a regular period. The state requires her to have multiple doctor visits and scans before she can get an abortion.

Lawyers for the state argued that the Legislature had “in very good faith” addressed the objections in the court’s January decision, adding three provisions including one that explicitly states that emergency contraception — known as the morning after pill, which prevents rather than terminates pregnancy — would remain legal.

Women could “adjust their behavior accordingly,” they argued, using pills instead of resorting to abortion.

The lawyers noted that according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 45 percent of abortions nationwide in 2020 occurred in the first six weeks, arguing that this indicated many women did in fact know they were pregnant at six weeks. (Most abortions — 93 percent — take place in the first trimester.)

Grayson Lambert, a lawyer for the state, argued that women could know they were pregnant seven to 10 days after conception, or at three to four weeks of pregnancy — before she would be expecting her regular period.

Chief Justice Donald W. Beatty, who sided with the majority to overturn the earlier ban, was dubious: “Could know?” he asked. “Anything is possible, what about probable?” He was the sole dissenter in the court’s decision on Wednesday.

In his dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Beatty wrote: “The result will essentially force an untold number of affected women to give birth without their consent. I am hard-pressed to think of a greater governmental intrusion by a political body.”

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Trump ex-chief Mark Meadows asks judge to protect him from arrest as he seeks to move Georgia case to federal court - CNBC

White House Acting Chief of Staff Mark Meadows listens during the daily coronavirus task force briefing at the White House in Washington, D.C., April 18, 2020.

Al Drago | Reuters

Former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows asked a federal judge Tuesday to immediately move the Georgia criminal election interference case out of state court in order to protect him from being arrested, court filings showed.

As an alternative, the federal court could simply issue an order barring Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from arresting Meadows this week, his attorney proposed in the 19-page filing.

Willis has already rejected Meadows' request for an extension, the filing noted.

Meadows and 18 other co-defendants in Willis' case, including Trump, face a Friday deadline to surrender to jail.

At least two defendants have already done so: Pro-Trump attorney John Eastman and Georgia bail bondsman Scott Hall were booked and released earlier Monday.

Former President Donald Trump has said he will surrender on Thursday.

Meadows seeks to move the state-level case to federal court. A federal judge in U.S. District Court in Atlanta scheduled a Monday morning hearing on Meadows' request.

But Meadows' attorney John Moran argued in the latest court filing that his bid to move the case will be harmed if he is arrested before that hearing.

"Absent this Court's intervention, Mr. Meadows will be denied the protection from arrest that federal law affords former federal officials, and this Court's prompt but orderly consideration of removal will be frustrated," Moran wrote.

The attorney wrote that Willis has already "rejected out of hand" a request to defer his arrest deadline until one day until after the federal court hearing.

The filing included an email from Willis, who on Monday morning wrote, "I am not granting any extensions. I gave 2 weeks for people to surrender themselves to the court. Your client is no different than any other criminal defendant in this jurisdiction."

But Moran argued that Meadows "would be irreparably injured if the state criminal proceeding is not stopped."

"He would be subject to arrest, to the State's pre-trial criminal restrictions, and, ultimately, to risks of criminal sanction," the defense attorney wrote.

The request came two days after Meadows asked the federal court to dismiss the charges stemming from Willis' probe of the efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden in Georgia's 2020 election.

Meadows is charged in the indictment with one count of racketeering and one count of solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer. The latter count is related to Meadows' participation in a Jan. 2, 2021, phone call in which Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" enough votes to undo Biden's win in the state.

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FTX's Bankman-Fried 'subsisting on bread and water' in jail, lawyer says - Reuters

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NEW YORK, Aug 22 (Reuters) - FTX cryptocurrency exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried is "subsisting on bread and water" because the federal jail where he is being held ahead of his fraud trial has not provided him with a vegan diet as he requested, his lawyer said on Tuesday.

Bankman-Fried, 31, pleaded not guilty in Manhattan federal court to seven criminal charges contained in a new indictment during a hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn.

His lawyer, Mark Cohen, told Netburn during the hearing that a lack of adequate food and medication provided at Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center was hampering Bankman-Fried's ability to prepare for his scheduled October trial.

The former billionaire was led into court wearing leg restraints and a beige-colored uniform for his first appearance since his bail was revoked on Aug. 11 by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who found that Bankman-Fried had tampered with witnesses at least twice.

"Not guilty," Bankman-Fried told Netburn in entering his plea.

After the hearing, Bankman-Fried spoke to his mother, Stanford Law School Professor Barbara Fried, across the low partition between the courtroom well and the galley.

The new indictment, returned on Aug. 14, charged Bankman-Fried with seven counts of fraud and conspiracy over the November 2022 collapse of FTX, which is now in bankruptcy.

Prosecutors accused him of stealing billions of dollars in FTX customer funds to plug losses at his hedge fund, Alameda Research. Bankman-Fried has acknowledged inadequate risk management at FTX, but has denied stealing customer funds.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, arrives at court as lawyers push to persuade the judge overseeing his fraud case not to jail him ahead of trial, at a courthouse in New York, U.S., August 11, 2023. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights

The indictment no longer charges Bankman-Fried with conspiring to violate U.S. campaign finance laws. Prosecutors said the Bahamas, which extradited Bankman-Fried to the United States in December 2022, objected to him being tried on that count.

Prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan said they would nevertheless seek to show that the $100 million Bankman-Fried allegedly donated to U.S. political campaigns and causes was part of his wider-ranging fraud scheme.

At Tuesday's hearing, his lawyers said the jail's failure to provide him with the medication Adderall to treat attention deficit hyperactive disorder - despite a court order for the facility to do so - and serve him vegan food would hinder his ability to participate in preparing his defense case.

"Because he's following his principles, he is literally now subsisting on bread and water," Cohen said, adding that his client's supply of the medication Emsam to treat depression was running low.

Kaplan, who will oversee Bankman-Fried's trial, on Aug. 14 ordered the jail to provide the defendant with the two drugs.

Netburn said during the hearing she would ask the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Prisons, which runs the jail, to address the issues with Bankman-Fried's medication. Netburn said she was "reasonably confident" the facility - long plagued by conditions public defenders have called "inhumane" - offered vegetarian food, but was not sure vegan food was available.

In a statement, the Bureau of Prisons said MDC inmates had access to "appropriate" healthcare, medicine and hot meals. It said the facility "provides nutritionally adequate meals" following the requirements of a national menu that is "analyzed yearly to ensure all dietary requirements are met."

Bankman-Fried was jailed after sharing the personal writings of his former romantic partner and colleague, Caroline Ellison, with a New York Times reporter. Ellison, who had been Alameda's chief executive, is one of three former members of his inner circle who have pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against him at trial.

Reporting by Luc Cohen and Jody Godoy in New York Editing by Will Dunham and Matthew Lewis

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Luc Cohen

Thomson Reuters

Reports on the New York federal courts. Previously worked as a correspondent in Venezuela and Argentina.

Jody Godoy

Thomson Reuters

Jody Godoy reports on banking and securities law. Reach her at jody.godoy@thomsonreuters.com

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Evacuations in place as 3 wildfires burn in eastern Washington state - ABC News

Evacuations are in place as three wildfires burn in eastern Washington state, officials said.

The largest of the blazes -- known as the Gray Fire, located in and around Medical Lake in Spokane County -- has burned approximately 9,500 acres and is 0% contained, according to the Washington State Department of Natural Resources.

One person has been confirmed dead in the fire, the agency said. No additional details were available.

In this screen grab from a video, the Gray Fire burns near Spokane, Wash., on Aug. 19, 2023.

Spokane Co. FD8 Firefighters

The fire spread rapidly after igniting on Friday amid high temperatures, authorities said. Hundreds of firefighters "engaged in a very active fire fight" overnight, Spokane County Fire Chief Cody Rohrbach said during a press briefing Saturday.

As of Saturday morning, 185 houses and outbuildings have burned in the fire, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources said, noting that there currently is "problematic weather" for firefighting.

In this screen grab from an aerial video, the Gray Fire burns near Medical Lake outside Spokane Wash., on Aug. 19, 2023.

Spokane Valley Fire Department

A house burns after the Gray Fire swept through the area near Medical Lake, Wash., on Aug. 18, 2023.

Aaron Reese

The southwest side of the fire is more "challenging," with "very active fires" on both sides of Interstate 90, Rohrbach said. On the northern perimeter of the fire, more favorable winds are helping firefighters secure those lines, though there are still "a lot of hotspots," he said.

Thiis photo posted to the social media account for Washington State Department of Transportation shows conditions on 1-90 in Washington, on Aug. 19, 2023.

@WSDOT_East

Evacuations are in place for the cities of Medical Lake and Four Lakes. The Spokane County Sheriff's Office deployed flight crews on Friday to evacuate residents trapped in fire areas.

A fire is also active outside the town of Elk, in Spokane County. The blaze, known as the Oregon Road Fire, has burned 3,000 acres and is 0% contained, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources said.

About 30 structures have been lost in the fire. Approximately 150 homes are threatened, with evacuations in place.

Spokane County officials said they plan to declare a state of emergency at noon Saturday to help bring in additional resources as they respond to the fires.

Authorities urged people to heed evacuation orders amid the active fires.

The remnants of a house still burn after the Gray Fire swept through the area near Medical Lake, Wash., on Aug. 18, 2023.

Aaron Reese

Houses and cars are burned after the Gray Fire swept through a neighborhood near Medical Lake, Wash., on Aug. 18, 2023.

Aaron Reese

"We've seen reports of citizens bragging that they're able to get beyond scene and security lines to come in and check on their loved ones or their animals or the status of their homes. I ask, please don't do that," Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels said during the briefing, noting that resources are stretched thin. "We will let people know when it's safe to come back into their homes."

Nowels said there is no power in parts of Medical Lake, and that the region has been a "lot of devastation."

"I've never seen anything like it in my entire life," he said. "This has been a terrible event."

A farmer digs a fire line with his tractor in Medical Lake, Wash., on Aug. 19, 2023.

@eriksmithphotos/Twitter

Farther south, a wildfire outside the rural town of Winona in Whitman County has burned 5,000 acres and is 0% contained, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources said.

Evacuation orders are in place for the town of Winona -- approximately 40 to 50 people -- the agency said.

The cause of each fire is under investigation.

ABC News' Vanessa Navarrete contributed to this report.

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Republicans gather in city where Trump was indicted but mention former president gingerly, if at all - The Associated Press

ATLANTA (AP) — For much of the Republican presidential field, Donald Trump is the candidate who must not be named — or at least not criticized too harshly.

Multiple GOP White House contenders took the stage Friday in Atlanta, the city where the former president was most recently indicted and where he must surrender next week on racketeering charges related to the 2020 election. They dealt gingerly with the man they’re trying to catch in the 2024 GOP primary campaign.

Radio host Erick Erickson’s annual convocation of conservative leaders and activists mostly sidestepped the dominant figure in Republican politics. The Gathering, Erickson said, “is our time to come together and hear from people when they’re running for office, why should we vote for you … what’s your vision.”

Trump dominates the primary polls and media attention despite criminal indictments for alleged actions before, during and after his presidency. Those four indictments seem to have hardened Trump’s support among core GOP voters, even as a majority of people in the United States disapprove of him. Many party loyalists who say they are open to alternatives aren’t necessarily enthusiastic about criticizing the former president.

The event offered a potential preview of how Trump may factor into the conversation when many of the same Republican contenders gather Wednesday for the first presidential debate of the 2024 campaign. Trump has signaled he might not attend, but the forum in Atlanta was a reminder that the former president is hard to avoid — even when he’s physically not present.

Former Vice President Mike Pence told a friendly audience that he has “real differences” with Trump “about the future of the country.” He nodded to the Capitol insurrection that is the focus of one of the pending indictments against Trump. He called it “that fateful day” and repeated that he fulfilled “my constitutional duty” — his way of affirming why he did not grant Trump’s wish of blocking Democrat Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.

But before any of those carefully qualified statements, Pence said, “I always stood loyally by President Donald Trump.”

Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador during the Trump administration, offered a critique by pairing it with a compliment.

“Trump did a good job of getting attention on China’s trade practices, but he didn’t do nearly enough on the fact that they have bought 400,000 acres of U.S. soil,” she said as part of a statement addressing the growing rivalry between Washington and Beijing.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis repeated his attacks on so-called “wokeness” and reminded attendees of his ongoing fight with entertainment giant Disney. The closest he came to confronting Trump was a call for the party to look ahead, and he did that with a swipe at familiar foils beyond the Republican fold.

Donald Trump boasts that his standing among Republicans only improves as he faces a series of criminal charges. A new AP-NORC poll supports Trump’s claim in the primary election, but the general election could be a different story. (August 16)

“There’s nobody that wants us to be looking backwards more than the Democrats and the media,” he said, adding a seeming allusion to Trump’s lies that his loss to Biden was rigged. “They would love to have us have to relitigate all this stuff from 2020,” DeSantis said.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott took a similar route, emphasizing his “optimism” about the “future” of the party and the country. Scott saved his presidential barbs for Biden.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, nearly alone among Republican hopefuls in criticizing Trump for his behavior and related legal peril, could shift the dynamics Saturday when he appears with Erickson. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, making his first bid for public office, will appear as well.

Explained Whit Ayres, a national Republican pollster, “You can’t win the nomination by attacking (Trump) frontally.”

Ayres said the dynamics reflect the realities of the GOP primary electorate. About 10-15% are “Never Trumpers,” Ayres said, while about 30-35% hardcore Trump supporters. The rest, half or a slim majority, “have doubts about his electability” in a general election but are still “reliable Republicans who voted for him twice,” Ayres said.

As a Republican, “you can’t call him unfit for office,” Ayres said. “That’s basically requiring half the party to admit they screwed up and put someone unfit for office into the Oval Office. That’s just a psychological step too far for most people.”

Brad Raymer, an attendee from Marietta, Georgia, was among the attendees who has cast two November ballots for Trump. But he called the Friday conversation refreshing.

“I don’t want to hear any more about Trump,” Raymer said. “It’s good to hear these candidates’ actual ideas.”

Indeed, Erickson picked their brains on matters from the Ukraine war and trade policy to regulation of artificial intelligence. Still, those policy discussions largely yielded similar ideological positions — promises of smaller government, lower taxes, increased military spending — that are routine in any Republican forum.

Raymer acknowledged that those overlaps make Trump’s “big personality” and “antics” stand out in a party he has dominated since launching his first presidential campaign eight years ago.

But Raymer said he knows plenty of Republicans who, unlike him, embrace Trump’s “antics” or at least tolerate “his election lies” about 2020. “I try to tell them to see reason,” he said, emphasizing that he accepted Biden’s victory in Georgia and nationally.

Making a more muted version of the same argument was Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who notably defied Trump in 2020 by certifying Biden’s slate of Georgia electors. Erickson and others celebrated Kemp’s 2022 reelection romp over Democratic star Stacey Abrams even after enduring Trump’s public ire. They hailed Georgia’s economy, crediting the governor, of course, rather than a Democratic administration in Washington.

Kemp himself urged Republicans to look ahead.

“You can believe whatever you want about the 2020 election. That is your right,” Kemp said. But “if you’re still mad about that,” he continued, then “sign up to be a poll worker, be a poll watcher, get involved in the process, door knock, phone calls, do something that will help us win in 2024. Complaining is not going to help us.”

It was all about Trump. Without a mention of his name.

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