Comment on Trump and U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis Iran

Politico: “A week after Nikki Haley earned 22 percent of the vote in Indiana’s open GOP primary, the widespread expectation was that different rules in the states voting on Tuesday would take a huge chunk out of support for her zombie presidential candidacy.” “That didn’t exactly happen. Even though Haley likely won’t end up matching her Indiana total in Maryland, Nebraska or West Virginia, there are still some warning signs for Trump in the results.” Haley took 20% in Maryland, 18% in Nebraska and 9% in West Virginia.

Despite the Nebraska state Republican Party supporting challengers to the state’s GOP incumbents, they all won their primaries easily, the Lincoln Journal Star reports.

Playbook: “Indeed, Biden aides are most worried about the personal impact more than any political blowback. The father has repeatedly expressed fear to advisers and family members that his son could serve time in prison.” As one of the advisers put it: “He worries about Hunter every single day, from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to sleep.

“Donald Trump may be the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, but Nikki Haley isn’t offering him her support or donor network yet,” Politico reports. “During a private, two-day donor retreat in Charleston, South Carolina, the former South Carolina governor and U. N. ambassador thanked a group of around 100 donors and gave a presentation on her campaign’s fundraising and strategy.” “But Trump was barely mentioned even as Haley continues to rack up votes in primaries despite dropping out of the race in early March.

Reuters: “The rhetoric is inspiring widespread calls for violence. In a review of commenters’ posts on three pro-Trump websites, including the former president’s own Truth Social platform, Reuters documented more than 150 posts since March 1 that called for physical violence against the judges handling three of his highest-profile cases – two state judges in Manhattan and one in Georgia overseeing a criminal case in which Trump is accused of illegally seeking to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.” “Those posts were part of a larger pool of hundreds identified by Reuters that used hostile, menacing and, in some cases, racist or sexualized language to attack the judges, but stopped short of explicitly calling for violence against them.”

“As Republicans put pressure on the U. S. Secret Service to move an expected protest area farther from the Republican National Convention in downtown Milwaukee, the agency appears unlikely to change its plans,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.. “Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, Florida Sen. Rick Scott and aides to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell raised the security concerns in separate meetings Tuesday with Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle.”