The Biden-Harris campaign released their 30-second ad — titled “Hope” — early Tuesday morning, slamming the former president over his stance on abortion and his role in the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

“In 2016, Donald Trump ran to overturn Roe v. Wade. Now, in 2024, he’s running to pass a national ban on a woman’s right to choose. I’m running to make Roe v. Wade the law of the land again. So women have a federal guarantee to the right to choose. Donald Trump doesn’t trust women. I do,” Biden says in his short ad, following a clip of Trump saying he is “proud” to have ended the nearly 50-year-old law.

Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign, meanwhile turned its attention to immigration, taking a full minute to showcase a series of violent crime victims allegedly harmed by a so-called illegal immigrant.

“Stop Biden’s border bloodbath,” the ad reads before a series of news clips, each describing a crime allegedly committed by a migrant. “Stop Biden’s border bloodbath,” it reads again.

Michiganders have felt the tragic consequences of Biden's Border Bloodbath.

President Trump will end it on Day One. pic.twitter.com/KHilsUnrz1

— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) April 2, 2024

Both campaigns hammered home their points with later statements.

Trump’s team shared a lengthy list of crime victims along with a short statement from the former president. Biden, the campaign said, “has launched an invasion of our country — resettling dangerous illegal aliens from all over the world into American communities to prey on our people and endanger our citizens.”

“Under Biden, we now have a new category of crime, it’s called Migrant Crime,” Trump said.

Biden’s campaign held a press call Tuesday afternoon to highlight a court ruling out of Florida which will allow a six-week abortion ban to go into effect next month. Trump, the Biden campaign said, is of the same mind.

“Make no mistake, Donald Trump will do everything in his power to try and enact a national abortion ban if he’s reelected. In the last few months alone, Trump has doubled down on his support for a national abortion ban – and his allies have plans for him to do it with or without the help of Congress,” Biden-Harris 2024 Campaign Manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said.

Biden leads former President Donald Trump by just two points — 44% to 42% — according to a Morning Consult poll of more than 6,000 registered voters released Tuesday, but only if they’re the only candidates on the ballot.

“The presumptive Republican nominee has rarely led Biden since the Super Tuesday primary contests, compared with consistent advantages he enjoyed throughout January and February. However, the race remains incredibly close, with 8% of voters threatening to vote third party and 5% undecided,” pollsters wrote.

Biden, according to the poll, is more popular than Trump for the first time since the start of the year, with the 46th President’s net favorability 6 points into the negative and the 45th President 8 points under water.

“This edge comes as Biden’s advantage over Trump on net buzz — the share of voters who heard something positive about each candidate minus the share who heard something negative — ticked up to 21 points, which is the largest margin since mid-November,” pollsters wrote.

The survey also shows that Republicans, as a whole, do better among those surveyed when it comes to the economy, national security, and immigration, while Democrats outperform regarding health care, entitlement programs, climate change, reproductive rights and abortion. The economy is top of mind among surveyed voters, according to pollsters.

“The economy remains voters’ top issue for the 2024 elections. And though the share who said it’s ‘very important’ in deciding their vote dropped during much of 2023, the economy’s salience has ticked back up in recent months,” they wrote.

The slight edge shown for the incumbent president in Tuesday’s poll matches a Quinnipiac University survey of 1,407 registered voters released last week, which shows Biden up by 3 points. That’s in line with polls put out by the university in February.

However, the same Quinnipiac poll once again showed that if voters are offered the chance to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein or independents Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West, they pull enough of the vote to potentially give Trump the edge.

“Way too close to call on the head-to-head and even closer when third party candidates are counted. The backstretch is months away and this is about as close as it can get,” Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Tim Malloy said with the release of that poll.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) — Donald Trump accused President Joe Biden of unleashing a “bloodbath” at the U.S.-Mexico border Tuesday, escalating his inflammatory rhetoric as he campaigned in two midwestern swing states likely to be critical to the outcome of the 2024 election.

Trump, who has accused migrants of “poisoning the blood of the country” and vowed to launch the largest domestic deportation operation in the nation’s history if he wins a second term, accused Biden of allowing a “bloodbath” that was “destroying the country.” In Michigan, he referred to immigrants in the U.S. illegally suspected of committing crimes as “animals,” using dehumanizing language that those who study extremism have warned increases the risk of violence.

“Under Crooked Joe Biden, every state is now a border state. Every town is now a border town because Joe Biden has brought the carnage and chaos and killing from all over world and dumped it straight into our backyards,” Trump said in Grand Rapids, where he stood flanked by law enforcement officers in uniform before a line of flags.

While violent crime is down, Trump and other Republicans have seized on several high-profile crimes alleged to have been committed by immigrants in the U.S. illegally to attack Biden as border crossings have hit record highs. Polls suggest Trump has an advantage over Biden on issues as many prospective voters say they’re concerned about the impact of the crossings.

Trump continued to hammer the theme at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Tuesday evening as the state was holding its presidential primaries. Trump accused rogue nations of “pumping migrants across our wide open border,” and “sending prisoners, murders, drug dealers, mental patients, terrorists” — though there is no evidence any country is engaged in that kind of coordinated effort.

He also claimed that migrants would cost the country trillions of dollars in public benefits and cause Social Security and Medicare to “buckle and collapse.”

“If you want to help Joe Biden wheel granny off the cliff to fund government benefits for illegals, then vote for Crooked Joe Biden,” he said. “But when I am president, instead of throwing granny overboard, I will send Joe Biden’s illegal aliens back home.”

On Tuesday, the White House emphasized that immigration is a positive for the U.S. economy. They argued that recent gains in immigration have helped to boost employment and sustained growth as the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates to bring down inflation.

“We know immigrants strengthen our country and also strengthen our economy,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at Tuesday’s briefing, noting that immigrants were the ones doing the “critical work” on the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore when it collapsed after being struck by a ship.

Trump on Tuesday focused on the killing of Ruby Garcia, a Michigan woman who was found dead on the side of a Grand Rapids highway on March 22. Police say she was in a romantic relationship with the suspect, Brandon Ortiz-Vite. He told police he shot her multiple times during an argument before dropping her body on the side of the road and driving off in her red Mazda.

Trump incorrectly referred to the 25-year-old Garcia as a 17-year-old.

Authorities say Ortiz-Vite is a citizen of Mexico and had previously been deported following a drunken driving arrest. He does not have an attorney listed in court records.

Trump in his remarks said that he had spoken to some of her family. Garcia’s sister, Mavi, however, disputed his account, telling FOX 17 that they had not. “No, he did not speak with us,” the outlet said she told them in a text message, declining to comment further.

She also pleaded on Facebook last week for reporters to stop politicizing her sister’s story, and on Tuesday asked for privacy, saying she only wanted “justice to be served” and to “be left alone.”

Trump also again mentioned the killing of Laken Riley, a nursing student in Georgia. A Venezuelan man whom officials say entered the U.S. illegally has been charged. Riley’s family attended Trump’s rally in Georgia last month and met with him backstage.

Trump referred to the suspect in Riley’s death as an “illegal alien animal.”

“The Democrats say, ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals,’” he said.

FBI statistics show overall violent crime dropped again in the U.S. last year, continuing a downward trend after a pandemic-era spike. In Michigan, violent crime hit a three-year low in 2022, according to the most recent available data. Crime in Michigan’s largest city, Detroit, is also down, with the fewest homicides last year since 1966.

Top Republicans from across Michigan had packed into a conference room in downtown Grand Rapids to hear Trump speak in a county he won in 2016 but lost to Biden in 2020. Outside the event center, over 100 supporters stood in the cold rain to line the street where Trump’s motorcade was expected to pass.

At a nearby park, a small group advocating for immigration reform gathered to hold a moment of silence for Garcia while holding signs that read “No human being is illegal” and “Michigan welcomes immigrants.”

In Green Bay, some supporters braved snowfall for three hours outside to enter the venue.

“Tomorrow, Donald Trump is coming to Grand Rapids where he is expected to once again try to politicize a tragedy and sow hate and division to hide from his own record of failing Michiganders,” said Alyssa Bradley, the Biden campaign’s Michigan communications director.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, said Monday that there is “a real problem on our southern border” and that it’s “really critical that Congress and the president solve the problem.”

“There was a solution on the table. It was actually the former president that encouraged Republicans to walk away from getting it done,” Whitmer said. “I don’t have a lot of tolerance for political points when it continues to endanger our economy and, to some extent, our people as we saw play out in Grand Rapids recently.”

Trump has been leaning into inflammatory rhetoric about the surge of migrants at the southern border. He has portrayed migrants as “poisoning the blood of the country,” questioned whether some should even be considered people, and claimed, without evidence, that countries have been emptying their prisons and mental asylums into the U.S.

He has also accused Biden and the Democrats of trying to “collapse the American system, nullify the will of the actual American voters and establish a new base of power that gives them control for generations.”

In Green Bay, Trump spoke beside an empty podium that read, “Anytime. Anywhere. Anyplace.” Trump said it was meant for Biden, whose campaign has not committed to participating in debates.

Gomez Licon reported from Green Bay, Wis. Colvin reported from New York. Associated Press writers Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin and Josh Boak in Washington contributed to this report.

ABORTION RIGHTS

The proposed amendment would protect the right to an abortion after the state in back-to-back years passed tougher restrictions currently being challenged in court. Republican Attorney General Ashley Moody argued that the proposed amendment is deceptive and that voters won’t realize just how far it will expand access to the procedure.

The ruling could give Democrats a boost in the polls in a state that used to be a toss-up in presidential elections. While many voters aren’t enthusiastic about a rematch between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, it could inspire more abortion rights advocates to cast a ballot. Trump won Florida four years ago.

The proposed amendment says “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” It provides for one exception that is already in the state constitution: Parents must be notified before their minor children can get an abortion.

Proponents of the measure argued the language of the ballot summary and the proposed amendment are concise and that Moody was playing politics instead of letting voters decide the issue.

Florida is one of several states where voters could have a direct say on abortion questions this year.

RECREATIONAL MARIJUANA

Voters will decide whether to allow companies that grow and sell medical marijuana to sell it to adults over 21 for any reason. The ballot measure also would make possession of marijuana for personal use legal.

Moody also argued this proposal is deceptive, in part, because federal law still doesn’t allow use of marijuana for recreational or medical use of marijuana. She argued that the court previously erred when it approved the language for the medical marijuana ballot initiative voters passed in 2016.

This, too, could be an issue that motivates more Democrats to vote.

The court’s review of the ballot language was limited to whether voters could understand it and that it contained a single issue, not on the merits of the proposal itself. The measures need 60% approval from voters to pass.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is raising gobs of cash. And it has an election-year strategy that, in a nutshell, aims to spend more — and spend faster.

Not only has Biden aimed to show himself off as a fundraising juggernaut this month, but his campaign is also making significant early investments both on the ground and on the airwaves — hoping to create a massive organizational advantage that leaves Republican Donald Trump scrambling to catch up.

But while the money pouring in has given Biden and the Democrats a major cash advantage, it’s also becoming clear Biden will need it. Throughout his life in business and politics, Trump’s provocations have earned him near limitless free media attention. Biden, meanwhile, has often struggled to cut through the noise with his own message despite holding the presidency.

That means Biden is going to need oodles of cash to blanket battleground states where a few thousand votes could mean the difference between victory or defeat. Add to that the challenge of reaching millennials, as well as even younger voters, who formed an important part of his 2020 coalition, in a far more fractured media ecosystem that skews toward streaming services over conventional broadcast and cable.

Biden’s organizational and outreach effort began in earnest this month, with the campaign using his State of the Union address as a launching pad to open 100 new field offices nationwide and boosting the number of paid staff in battleground states to 350 people. It’s also currently in the middle of a $30 million television and digital advertising campaign targeting specific communities such as Black, Hispanic and Asian voters.

In one example of the incumbent president’s organizational advantage, his reelection campaign in February had 480 staffers on the ground, compared with 311 to that of Trump and the Republican National Committee, according to Biden campaign officials.

“We’re ramping up campaign headquarters and field offices, hiring staff all across the country before Trump and his MAGA Republicans have even opened one single office,” Biden boasted Friday in New York during a meeting of his national finance committee, which included 200 of his largest donors and fundraisers from in and around the city.

A massive ground game disadvantage didn’t prevent Trump from winning the presidency in 2016, a fact Democrats keenly remember.

“It’s one of the stubborn challenges of Trump,” said Robby Mook, campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid. “Trump is Trump’s best organizer, and Trump can motivate people from the podium.”

But, Mook added, the Biden campaign is doing what it needs to do, pointing to the State of the Union as a powerful example of how to effectively mobilize the base and harness the anti-Trump energy that will inevitably motivate many Democrats this year.

“The most magical and the scariest part of politics is, you never know until Election Day,” Mook said. “And so I wouldn’t want to leave anything on the table if I were them, and the great part about having a resource advantage is, you get to have all these different things.”

Even Biden’s bricks-and-mortar campaign is likely to be far more costly this year.

Unlike 2020, when many Americans were hunkered down due to the pandemic, Biden will need to travel more while also building a political infrastructure that will be far more expensive than the socially distanced, virtual campaign he waged from his basement the last time around.

His reelection campaign will also have expenses that Trump won’t have to confront, such as reimbursing the federal government for use of Air Force One. So far, it has reimbursed $4.5 million for use of the official presidential aircraft for political activity, according to the campaign.

Mook said decisions about how to strategically invest the campaign’s cash are never as nimble as the staff wants them to be, and there is not only a risk in spending too much, too fast — but also spending far too late in an election year.

Last fall and summer, Democrats fretted about Biden’s early lack of fundraising and campaign activity. Writers’ and actors’ guild strikes in Hollywood didn’t help, either — effectively sidelining the pro-labor union president from raising money in a region that has long bankrolled the party’s political ambitions.

Now, even donors lukewarm to the president are contributing, Democratic Party donors and fundraisers say.

“I think people really want to hear what they have to say,” said Michael Smith, a major Hollywood donor and fundraiser, who hosted a Los Angeles event earlier this year featuring rocker Lenny Kravitz and held another event last week in Palm Springs with the president’s wife, Jill Biden. “They realize this is an investment.”

Trump campaign officials concede that Biden and the Democrats will likely have more cash to spend, though they argue that Trump will still be able to run an effective campaign given his ability to attract media coverage.

“Our digital online fundraising continues to skyrocket, our major donor investments are climbing, and Democrats are running scared of the fundraising prowess of President Trump,” said Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign. “We are not only raising the necessary funds but we are deploying strategic assets that will help send President Trump back to the White House and carry Republicans over the finish line.”

But given Trump’s propensity for making explosive remarks, that can also cut both ways, which Democrats are sure to exploit by using their cash advantage to run ads. Trump’s legal fees from the myriad of court cases he is tied up with are also sure to be a drag on his cash situation. Records show his political operation has shelled out at least $80 million to cover court costs over the past two years.

“Trump promises to be a Dictator on Day 1, suspend our Constitution and bring back political violence even worse than January 6. His MAGA agenda is so toxic and extreme that hundreds of thousands of Republicans in swing states voted for Nikki Haley over him, even after she dropped out — how unique!” Biden campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt said. “Donald Trump has no resources or even the will to bring those critical voters back.”

There’s also the open question of whether Trump will be able to break through in the same ways he did in 2016, when he was a political novelty. Or as he did during the 2020 election, when he held the presidency and was a ubiquitous presence at a time when locked-down Americans were glued to their TVs.

“The media landscape and where voters get their news has changed and so assumptions based on Trump’s ability to dominate mainstream media conversations should be questioned,” said Josh Schwerin, a Democratic strategist who formerly worked at Priorities USA, the Democrats’ primary super PAC during the 2020 presidential campaign.

“Fewer voters are getting their news from traditional outlets and finding ways to get information in front of them is getting harder and harder — and that takes money,” he said. “Both candidates are going to have to do this. And this is one place where having a financial advantage is going to be a big benefit to the Biden campaign.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The video shared by former President Donald Trump features horror movie music and footage of migrants purportedly entering the U.S. from countries including Cameroon, Afghanistan and China. Shots of men with tattoos and videos of violent crime are set against close-ups of people waving and wrapping themselves in American flags.

“They’re coming by the thousands,” Trump says in the video, posted on his social media site. “We will secure our borders. And we will restore sovereignty.”

In his speeches and online posts, Trump has ramped up anti-immigrant rhetoric as he seeks the White House a third time, casting migrants as dangerous criminals “poisoning the blood” of America. Hitting the nation’s deepest fault lines of race and national identity, his messaging often relies on falsehoods about migration. But it resonates with many of his core supporters going back a decade, to when “build the wall” chants began to ring out at his rallies.

President Joe Biden and his allies discuss the border very differently. The Democrat portrays the situation as a policy dispute that Congress can fix and hits Republicans in Washington for backing away from a border security deal after facing criticism from Trump.

But in a potentially worrying sign for Biden, Trump’s message appears to be resonating with key elements of the Democratic coalition that Biden will need to win over this November.

Roughly two-thirds of Americans now disapprove of how Biden is handling border security, including about 4 in 10 Democrats, 55% of Black adults and 73% of Hispanic adults, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in March.

A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 45% of Americans described the situation as a crisis, while another 32% said it was a major problem.

Vetress Boyce, a Chicago-based racial justice activist, was among those who expressed frustration with Biden’s immigration policies and the city’s approach as it tries to shelter newly arriving migrants. She argued Democrats should be focusing on economic investment in Black communities, not newcomers.

“They’re sending us people who are starving, the same way Blacks are starving in this country. They’re sending us people who want to escape the conditions and come here for a better lifestyle when the ones here are suffering and have been suffering for over 100 years,” Boyce said. “That recipe is a mixture for disaster. It’s a disaster just waiting to happen.”

Gracie Martinez is a 52-year-old Hispanic small business owner from Eagle Pass, Texas, the border town that Trump visited in February when he and Biden made same-day trips to the state. Martinez said she once voted for former President Barack Obama and is still a Democrat, but now backs Trump — mainly because of the border.

“It’s horrible,” she said. “It’s tons and tons of people and they’re giving them medical and money, phones,” she said, complaining those who went through the legal immigration system are treated worse.

Priscilla Hesles, 55, a teacher who lives in Eagle Pass, Texas, described the current situation as “almost an overtaking” that had changed the town.

“We don’t know where they’re hiding. We don’t know where they’ve infiltrated into and where are they going to come out of,” said Hesles, who said she used to take an evening walk to a local church, but stopped after she was shaken by an encounter with a group of men she alleged were migrants.

Immigration will almost certainly be one of the central issues in November’s election, with both sides spending the next six months trying to paint the other as wrong on border security.

The White House has also mulled a series of executive actions that could drastically tighten immigration restrictions, effectively going around Congress after it failed to pass the bipartisan deal Biden endorsed.

“Trump is a fraud who is only out for himself,” said Biden campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz. “We will make sure voters know that this November.”

Trump will campaign Tuesday in Wisconsin and Michigan this week, where he is expected to again tear into Biden on immigration. His campaign said his event in the western Michigan city of Grand Rapids will focus on what it alleged was “Biden’s Border Bloodbath.”

The former president calls recent record-high arrests for southwest border crossings an “invasion” orchestrated by Democrats to transform America’s very makeup. Trump accuses Biden of purposely allowing criminals and potential terrorists to enter the country unchecked, going so far as to claim the president is engaged in a “conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America.”

He also casts migrants — many of them women and children escaping poverty and violence — as “ poisoning the blood ” of America with drugs and disease and claimed some are “not people.” Experts who study extremism warn against using dehumanizing language in describing migrants.

There is no evidence that foreign governments are emptying their jails or mental asylums as Trump says. And while conservative news coverage has been dominated by several high-profile and heinous crimes allegedly committed by people in the country illegally, the latest FBI statistics show overall violent crime in the U.S. dropped again last year, continuing a downward trend after a pandemic-era spike.

Studies have also found that people living in the country illegally are far less likely than native-born Americans to have been arrested for violent, drug and property crimes.

“Certainly the last several months have demonstrated a clear shift in political support,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of the immigrant resettlement group Global Refuge and a former Obama administration and State Department official.

“I think that relates to the rhetoric of the past several years,” she said, “and just this dynamic of being outmatched by a loud, extreme of xenophobic rhetoric that hasn’t been countered with reality and the facts on the ground.”

Part of what has made the border such a salient issue is that its impact is being felt far from the border.

Trump allies, most notably Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, have used state-funded buses to send more than 100,000 migrants to Democratic-led cities like New York, Denver and Chicago, where Democrats will hold this summer’s convention. While the program was initially dismissed as a publicity stunt, the influx has strained city budgets and left local leaders scrambling to provide emergency housing and medical care for new groups of migrants.

Local news coverage, meanwhile, has often been negative. Viewers have seen migrants blamed for everything from a string of gang-related New Jersey robberies to burglary rings targeting retail stores in suburban Philadelphia to measles cases in parts of Arizona and Illinois.

Abbott has deployed the Texas National Guard to the border, placed concertina wire along parts of the Rio Grande in defiance of U.S. Supreme Court orders, and has argued his state should be able to enforce its own immigration laws.

Some far-right internet sites have begun pointing to Abbott’s actions as the first salvo in a coming civil war. And Russia has also helped spread and amplify misleading and incendiary content about U.S. immigration and border security as part of its broader efforts to polarize Americans. A recent analysis by the firm Logically, which tracks Russian disinformation, found online influencers and social media accounts linked to the Kremlin have seized on the idea of a new civil war and efforts by states like Texas to secede from the union.

Amy Cooter, who directs research at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, worries the current wave of civil war talk will only increase as the election nears. So far, it has generally been limited to far-right message boards. But immigration is enough of a concern generally that its political potency is intensified, Cooter said.

“Non-extremist Americans are worried about this, too,” she said. “It’s about culture and perceptions about who is an American.”

In the meantime, there are people like Rudy Menchaca, an Eagle Pass bar owner who also works for a company that imports Corona beer from Mexico and blamed the problems at the border for hurting business.

Menchaca is the kind of Hispanic voter Biden is counting on to back his reelection bid. The 27-year-old said he was never a fan of Trump’s rhetoric and how he portrayed Hispanics and Mexicans. “We’re not all like that,” he said.

But he also said he was warming to the idea of backing the former president because of the reality on the ground.

“I need those soldiers to be around if I have my business,” Menchaca said of Texas forces dispatched to the border. “The bad ones that come in could break in.”

Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writers David Klepper in Washington and Matt Brown in Chicago contributed to this report.

President Joe Biden’s Easter message was issued by the White House just after 9 a.m. Sunday.

“Jill and I send our warmest wishes to Christians around the world celebrating Easter Sunday. Easter reminds us of the power of hope and the promise of Christ’s Resurrection.

“As we gather with loved ones, we remember Jesus’ sacrifice. We pray for one another and cherish the blessing of the dawn of new possibilities. And with wars and conflict taking a toll on innocent lives around the world, we renew our commitment to work for peace, security, and dignity for all people. From our family to yours, happy Easter and may God bless you,” the president wrote.

Former President Donald Trump’s first message of the day was a reminder to his supporters to “never forget our cowards and weaklings.”

“Such a disgrace,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social media platform to go along with a Washington Examiner article on the departure of Wisconsin’s U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher.

“HAPPY EASTER,” he said in a post that came right after.

Several hours later the 45th President issued what might be called a standard-Trump holiday message, delivering an all-caps Easter missive heavy with attacks on his perceived enemies.

After wishing a “happy Easter to all” the former president went on to make clear he included “crooked and corrupt prosecutors and judges” and people that he “completely” and “totally” despises “because they want to destroy America, a now failing nation.” Trump then called out “deranged” Special Counsel Jack Smith, “sick” Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis, and “lazy” Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg directly. All three have brought criminal charges against the former president.

“Happy Easter everyone,” he wrote after.

“Today, we send a message to all transgender Americans: You are loved. You are heard. You are understood. You belong. You are America, and my entire Administration and I have your back,” Biden declared.

While the Transgender Day of Visibility is not new — the event has been held annually by international human rights advocates since 2009 — this year March 31 happened to coincide with Easter, and the timing of Biden’s proclamation was not entirely well received.

Karoline Leavitt, former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign press secretary, went so far as to call the president’s proclamation “blasphemous.”

“We call on Joe Biden’s failing campaign and White House to issue an apology to the millions of Catholics and Christians across America who believe tomorrow is for one celebration only — the resurrection of Jesus Christ,” she said in a statement.

Leavitt and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson also called out Biden over this year’s White House Easter Egg Roll event, claiming the president prohibited the use of religious symbols in egg design submissions, after a flier for the event put out by the American Egg Board requested only submissions that did not “include any questionable content, religious symbols, overtly religious themes, or partisan political statements.”

“The Biden White House has betrayed the central tenet of Easter — which is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Banning sacred truth and tradition—while at the same time proclaiming Easter Sunday as ‘Transgender Day’—is outrageous and abhorrent. The American people are taking note,” Johnson said via the social media app formerly known as Twitter.

The Biden White House has betrayed the central tenet of Easter — which is the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Banning sacred truth and tradition—while at the same time proclaiming Easter Sunday as “Transgender Day”—is outrageous and abhorrent. The American people are taking note. pic.twitter.com/ZCExyVkAVS

— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) March 30, 2024

“It is appalling and insulting that Joe Biden’s White House prohibited children from submitting religious egg designs for their Easter Art Event, and formally proclaimed Easter Sunday as ‘Trans Day of Visibility.’ Sadly, these are just two more examples of the Biden Administration’s years-long assault on the Christian faith,” Leavitt said.

Despite any blowback over the proclamation, the White House’s official social media accounts and those of both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were used to express support for the March 31 Transgender Day of Visibility, with both 2024 Democratic candidates declaring that “trans rights are human rights.”

On Transgender Day of Visibility, we celebrate transgender and nonbinary Americans. Their courage has given countless others strength, but no one should have to be brave just to be themselves.

We see you. We stand with you. We won’t stop fighting for you. pic.twitter.com/pVPLDolpjk

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) March 31, 2024

“Transgender Americans are part of the fabric of our nation. On Transgender Day of Visibility, our Administration honors the extraordinary courage of transgender Americans and reaffirms our commitment to forming a more perfect union – where all people are treated equally,” a post by the White House account read.

Transgender Americans are part of the fabric of our nation.

On Transgender Day of Visibility, our Administration honors the extraordinary courage of transgender Americans and reaffirms our commitment to forming a more perfect union – where all people are treated equally. pic.twitter.com/ElRf9l62Nk

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 31, 2024

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey also joined the conversation, posting her own message of support for the Bay State’s transgender community.

Our trans friends, family, and neighbors should feel seen, safe, and celebrated for being exactly who they are.

On Transgender Day of Visibility, and always, we’re committed to protecting your freedom to live fully and authentically.

— Maura Healey (@MassGovernor) March 31, 2024

“Our trans friends, family, and neighbors should feel seen, safe, and celebrated for being exactly who they are. On Transgender Day of Visibility, and always, we’re committed to protecting your freedom to live fully and authentically,” she wrote.

According to White House staff, uproar over the family-friendly Easter Egg Roll tradition is misplaced. The event has held the same non-denominational standard for submitted egg designs through all presidential administrations over the last several decades, including the four years of the Trump White House.

“Fyi on all the misleading swirl re White House and Easter: the American Egg Board flyer’s standard non-discrimination language requesting artwork has been used for the last 45 years, across all Dem & Republican Admins—for all WH Easter Egg Rolls —incl previous Administration’s,” deputy assistant to the president Elizabeth Alexander wrote on X.

Easter and Transgender Day of Visibility were not the only occasions marked this March 31, which was also National Farm Workers Day, Cesar Chavez Day, National Baked Ham with Pineapple Day, National Crayon Day, National Tater Day, Transfer Day (for residents of the U.S. Virgin Islands), and Eifel Tower Day.

Next year, Easter will fall on April 20th, a day associated with both marijuana slang and the birth Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, though it’s unlikely either event will receive a White House proclamation. It will again fall on March 31 in the year 2086.

Herald wire service contributed.

Before Biden was even joined on stage Thursday evening in New York by his Democratic forerunners in front of 5,000 paid attendees, with a sold out show and second row seats going for $500,000 a piece the campaign was apparently able to pull in an eye-popping $25 million for just the one event.

“This historic raise is a show of strong enthusiasm for President Biden and Vice President Harris and a testament to the unprecedented fundraising machine we’ve built,” Biden-Harris 2024 campaign co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg said.

The evening event, hosted by comedian Mindy Kaling and featuring musical guests Queen Latifah, Lizzo, Ben Platt, Cynthia Erivo, and Lea Michele, was billed as an “armchair conversation with the three presidents, moderated by none other than Late Night’s Stephen Colbert.”

Tickets went for a range of prices, starting as low as $225 and going up to half-a-million. The most expensive tickets came with a chance to join the current and former presidents for a photo.

Biden’s campaign took the opportunity to point out they were continuing a “trend of Team Biden-Harris absolutely lapping the Trump campaign in fundraising.”

“The Trump campaign raised $20 million in February, comically less than half the $53 million Team Biden-Harris raised in February. Today, the Trump campaign has less than $42 million cash on hand, which is less than one-third of the $155 million cash on hand that Team Biden-Harris has,” Biden’s campaign said in a statement, citing figures provided by the Federal Elections Commission.

The campaign, according to staffers, was able to raise more ahead of Thursday’s event than Trump managed through the entire month of February.

“​Trump is ‘scrambling’ to raise cash as he lags behind President Biden in fundraising. Instead of closing the gap to fund his campaign, he is fundraising to pay his legal bills and relying on donors to finance his bond,” Biden’s campaign said.

Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said that the fact Biden is leaning on the former presidents for campaign energy is telling, despite how much money they may bring in.

“Crooked Joe is so mentally deficient that he needs to trot out some retreads like Clinton and Obama,” he said.

Herald wire services contributed.

Any attempt to invoke the 14th Amendment would likely trigger an outcry from voters who backed Trump, plunging the country into political turmoil.

Leaders of the party in Congress of course are now denying they’ll use the emergency tactic – a sure sign they will do it if necessary.

“We’re not election deniers,” U.S. Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) said. “This is about the ballot box. So this is about democracy, and the voters get to decide.”

Democrats will never admit they are considering the fail-safe tactic to circumvent the will of the voters, but you can be sure they will not rule out any means to disqualify the former president.

“I think that it’s divisive to raise it at this point,” Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) said.

The key phrase there is “at this point.” Who knows how desperate Democrats will be if Trump wins the popular and Electoral College vote?

The Supreme Court ruling allowing Trump to stay on the ballot in Colorado and other states left it to Congress to enforce the insurrection clause.

It would take a two-thirds vote of the joint session of Congress to keep Trump out, which is why Democrats are so keen on winning as many House and Senate seats as possible this fall. With a strong majority of Congress in their pocket, Democrats may be emboldened to use the strategy to block Trump.

A lawyer from Colorado during arguments before the Supreme Court said if the court would not disqualify Trump then the question of his eligibility “could come back with a vengeance” – a reference to when Congress meets to certify the election.

Democrats could invoke their powers to refuse to certify Trump’s win based on the 14th Amendment, arguing that he led an insurrection on Jan. 6.

Section 3 of the Amendment bans current and former federal, state and military officials  who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the country from holding office again.

It was that clause that triggered partisan Democrats in Colorado, Maine and other states to keep Trump off the primary ballot – an effort that failed because of the Supreme Court.

But party leaders in Congress don’t want to admit that Trump could beat Joe Biden, so for now they are dismissing disqualifying him post-election with a vote.

“Any creating expectations that there is an alternative to beating Trump at the ballot box, I think, is a source of false hope and potentially detracts from our very necessary efforts to beat him there,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal told Roll Call.

But Democratic voters may feel differently if Trump wins, and look to Congress to hit the panic button and do whatever is necessary to keep the former president from serving another term.

A nation in which officials abuse the legal system is a nation less reliant on law and order than tricks and disorder, which is what we got when the Democrat Letitia James, attorney general of New York, sued Trump for fraud in misleading lenders about how much his assets were worth. The thing is that the banks absolutely knew what they were doing, did not lose a penny and in fact made millions in their loans to this cherished head of a rejuvenating New York City real estate empire and upswinging golf courses.

But none of that halted the attorney general’s legal case exalted by a weird, obviously prejudiced, jury-replacing judge who decided Trump owed the government  —  the government, not the banks  — $454 million in quickly paid cash and the right of government agents to temporarily manage his businesses in return for a supposed kind of financial cheating that never cheated anyone out of anything.

Well, the consequence looked like financial disarray, campaign crashes, a business future far less shining than Trump and his sons had anticipated, and quite likely ego damage except that an appeals court said nope. It reduced the cash payment to $175 million that Trump could easily pay while thus obtaining opportunities to wrestle again with James through appeal courts and maybe make her do the complaining this time out.

He has also just made a deal with his social media company apparently increasing his net worth to maybe $5.6 billion from less than half of that, although good days are not exactly here again. He goes to trial April 15 for supposedly disguising $130,000 in campaign money paid to a sex actress to keep her from doing what she does, talk about their years-old encounter.

Here is nothing new, of course.  At the very start of his own presidency, there was this alleged Russian collusion causing overreaching, confused bureaucrats to disrupt Trump administrative actions for two years despite the fact that nothing like that existed except in the Hillary Clinton campaign. We had two congressional impeachment efforts, including one meant to evict Trump from office when he no longer held office. This ultra-obvious Democratic farce was intended to misuse a constitutional clause saying that those who were evicted could also be prohibited from running again and that assumed congressional literacy.

It’s not that Trump is innocent of multiple and outrageous misdoings but that Democrats are determined to squash him even if it means hitting him with four trials and an absurd 91 felony indictments and thereby imprisoning democracy.

Tribune News Service

Former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, was either up very late or very early Wednesday morning, when he took to his Truth Social media platform at 2 a.m. to offer his thoughts on the pseudo-scion of the once-powerful Kennedy political family.

“RFK Jr. is the most Radical Left Candidate in the race, by far. He’s a big fan of the Green New Scam, and other economy killing disasters. I guess this would mean he is going to be taking votes from Crooked Joe Biden, which would be a great service to America,” Trump wrote, capitalization his.

The only person leaning left of Kennedy in the 2024 race for the White House, according to the former president, is the Silicon Valley millionaire lawyer he’s attached to his campaign.

“His running mate, Nicole Shanahan, is even more ‘Liberal’ than him, if that’s possible. Kennedy is a Radical Left Democrat, and always will be,” Trump wrote.

As is usual for the former president, he found a way to view Kennedy’s political moves through a Trump-colored lens, suggesting his own legal predicaments mean that the son of assassinated former Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and his new running mate should have their lawyers’ contact information close at hand.

“It’s great for MAGA, but the Communists will make it very hard for him to get on the Ballot. Expect him, and her, to be indicted any day now, probably for Environmental Fraud,” Trump wrote.

Kennedy teased a White House bid as a Democrat last year but soon dropped his party affiliation in favor of an independent run at the office once held by his uncle, 35th President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Since he entered the race, it’s been rumored he was running a “spoiler” campaign aimed at taking votes away from President Joe Biden.

“He’s a spoiler. He’s tried to coast on his family legacy and the goodwill they have in the African American community,” Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Austin Davis said of Kennedy on a conference call with reporters organized by the DNC. “But the Kennedy family has denounced this lame attempt and they’ve quite frankly stood with President Biden.”

According to Kennedy, that’s only about half right.

“Our campaign is a spoiler. I agree with that. It is a spoiler for President Biden and for President Trump,” Kennedy said Tuesday.

Polling averages show Kennedy pulls about 10% of the vote nationally in surveys that include both major party candidates and other third party contenders like Jill Stein and Cornel West. In a race with just Trump, Biden, and Kennedy, polling averages show RFK Jr. in third at 12.3%.

In both circumstances, Trump comes out on top.

“He is Crooked Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, not mine. I love that he is running,” Trump wrote.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The case against Donald Trump seemed relatively straightforward in August 2022 when FBI agents searched his Mar-a-Lago estate, with authorities citing evidence that the former president hoarded enough classified documents to fill dozens of boxes and obstructed the government’s efforts to retrieve them.

But nine months after he was indicted, there are mounting doubts that the case can reach trial this year.

The Trump-appointed judge in the case has yet to set a firm trial date despite holding two hours-long hearings with lawyers this month. Multiple motions to dismiss the case are still pending, disputes over classified evidence have spanned months and a bitterly contested defense request to disclose the names of government witnesses remains unresolved. Complicating matters further is a recent order suggesting that the judge, Aileen Cannon, is still entertaining a Trump team claim about his rightful possession of the documents that she had appeared openly skeptical of days earlier.

“This does seem to be moving more slowly and less sequentially than other cases that I have seen” concerning classified information, said David Aaron, a former Justice Department national security prosecutor.

To a certain extent, the delays are the product of a broader Trump team strategy to postpone the four criminal cases confronting the presumptive Republican nominee in this year’s presidential race. But the case in Florida is unique because of the startlingly few substantive decisions that have been made to move closer to a trial. That raises the prospect that a resolution in the case may be unlikely before this year’s presidential election. If he were to win the White House, Trump could appoint an attorney general who would dismiss the federal charges against him in Florida and other jurisdictions.

Prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith’s team have strenuously fought to press the case forward. Though they’ve taken care not to mention the upcoming election, they’ve repeatedly cited a public interest in getting the case resolved quickly and have pointed to what they say is overwhelming evidence — including surveillance video, a defense lawyer’s notes and testimony from close associates — establishing Trump’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

“This case should be over already,” said Jeffrey Swartz, a professor at Cooley Law School and former judge in Florida. “There was nothing in this case that complex.”

That’s what distinguishes the classified documents case from the other — more legally intricate — criminal cases against Trump, which revolve around everything from allegations of hush money paid to a porn actress to complex racketeering charges and his role in seeking to overturn the 2020 election.

But defense lawyers see it differently, and Cannon — a former federal prosecutor who was appointed to the bench in 2020 and has limited trial experience as a judge — has proved receptive to some of their arguments since even before the case was filed last June.

The judge first made headlines weeks after the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago when, responding to a Trump lawsuit seeking to recover the seized documents from the federal government, she appointed an independent arbiter to sift through all the records. That appointment was overturned by a unanimous federal appeals panel, which said Cannon had overstepped her bounds.

“My sense of it is, when she did get reversed by the 11th Circuit that made her gun-shy, so she’s gone at a very slow pace” and issued “very few public, written decisions about important issues,” said John Fishwick, Jr., a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia.

Soon after Trump was charged, Cannon set the case for trial on May 20, 2024. But last fall she signaled she would reconsider that date during a March 1 hearing. The hearing took place as scheduled — but no replacement date was picked, even though both sides operating on the assumption that the May 20 date is moot have suggested the trial could begin this summer.

That’s not the only unresolved question. Defense lawyers have filed about a half-dozen motions to dismiss the case, including on grounds that the prosecution is vindictive and that Smith’s appointment as special counsel was illegal.

Cannon this month heard hours of arguments on two of the dismissal motions — whether Trump was entitled under a statute known as the Presidential Records Act to retain the classified documents after he left office and whether the Espionage Act law at the heart of the case was so vague as to be unconstitutional.

Cannon appeared skeptical of the defense assertions and, after the hearing, issued a terse two-page order rejecting the vagueness argument while permitting Trump to raise it again later.

She has not yet acted on the Presidential Records Act motion, but legal experts noted her direction last week to lawyers for both sides to weigh in on proposed jury instructions that appeared to tilt in Trump’s favor. She asked them to respond to a premise that said in part: “A president has sole authority under the PRA to categorize records as personal or presidential during his/her presidency. Neither a court nor a jury is permitted to make or review such a categorization decision.”

That wording was notable because it echoes arguments Trump’s lawyers have been making for months. They insist that law allowed him to designate the records he was charged with retaining as his own personal files. Smith’s team, by contrast, says the law has no relevance in a case concerning illegal possession of top-secret information, including nuclear secrets.

“It seems a little early in the game to be talking about jury instructions when there are substantial questions of law that have been raised that need to be resolved,” said Aaron, though he said the jury instructions order could be a way to tee up those resolved questions.

Besides the pending motions to dismiss, Cannon has yet to rule on a defense motion seeking to compel prosecutors to turn over a raft of information they insist would show that President Joe Biden’s administration had “weaponized” the criminal justice system in bringing the Trump case.

That assertion is in keeping with campaign-trail claims by Trump and his allies that he’s a victim of political persecution by the Biden Justice Department. He’s complained that he was charged when Biden, who was also investigated for retaining classified information, was not — prompting Smith’s team to lay out the abundant differences in the investigations.

An even more contentious dispute centers around a defense request to file on the public docket a motion that would identify potential prosecution witnesses. Cannon initially consented to the filing but paused her order after prosecutors argued that such a disclosure could jeopardize the safety of the witnesses.

“It may be that the judge is just afraid of making a mistake, but delaying it just puts it off,” said Kevin McMunigal, a Case Western Reserve University law professor. “Eventually she’s going to have to make a decision about these.”

ATLANTA (AP) — Many Americans are unenthusiastic about a November rematch of the 2020 presidential election. But presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump appears to stoke more anger and fear among Americans from his opposing party than President Joe Biden does from his.

A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that Democrats are more likely to report feeling “fearful” or “angry” about the prospects of another Trump term than Republicans are about the idea of Biden remaining in the White House.

The emotional reaction Trump inspires may work in his favor too, though, since the poll also found that Republicans are more excited about the prospect of a Trump win than Democrats are about a Biden victory.

Seven in 10 Democrats say the words “angry” or “fearful” would describe their emotions “extremely well” or “very well” upon a Trump victory. A smaller majority of Republicans – 56% – say the same about a Biden triumph. About 6 in 10 Democrats cite both emotions when contemplating a Trump victory. Again, that exceeds the roughly 4 out of 10 Republicans who said they would feel both angry and scared about Biden prevailing.

The findings are notable in an unusual campaign pitting an incumbent president against his predecessor, with both men facing doubters within their own parties and among independents. Consolidating support from Republicans who backed Nikki Haley in the GOP primary could be a challenge for Trump. Biden faces disenchanted progressives to his left and concerns over whether his age, 81, is a liability in the job.

Excitement about the two candidates will be an important factor in a race where turnout from each side’s base will be key. But dislike can motivate voters as much as enthusiasm.

“If there was a third-party candidate who had a chance in hell I would vote for them,” said Austin Healey, a 26-year-old Democrat. Healey, who describes himself as “very liberal,” said his mixed reviews of Biden take a back seat to his concerns that Trump’s comeback bid “looks like a clear ploy for trying to abolish democracy.”

Though he is “not excited about it,” Healey said, that means a vote for Biden.

Derrick Johnson, a Michigan voter who identifies as a liberal independent, offered plenty of critiques against Biden, as well. But the 46-year-old caregiver and food service worker made his bottom line clear: “Donald Trump is a madman. I’m afraid he’ll have us in World War III. My message is anybody but Trump.”

The poll’s findings on negative emotions could be especially important for Biden given his other weak spots, including that Republicans remain more excited about electing Trump again than Democrats are about reelecting Biden. Slightly more than half of Republicans, 54%, said “excited” describes their feelings about another Trump term “extremely well” or “very well.” For Biden, that number was just 4 in 10 among Democrats.

“We know what we’re getting with Trump,” said Republican John Novak, a 54-year-old maintenance worker who lives in swing-state Wisconsin and counted himself among those GOP loyalists who would be excited by another Trump term.

“I knew who he was when he came down that escalator in 2015, and we were never getting Boy Scout material,” Novak said. “But he put conservatives on the Supreme Court, he was firm on immigration … and he’s a conservative who handled the economy.”

The latest AP-NORC poll showed Biden with an overall approval rating of 38%. U.S. adults also expressed discontent about his handling of the economy and immigration – and not all of the disapproval is driven by partisan loyalties. About 4 in 10 U.S. adults approve of Biden’s stewardship of the economy, roughly equal to his overall job approval rating.

On specific issues, about 3 in 10 Democrats disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy; about 4 in 10 disapprove of his approach to immigration or border security.

“The situation at the border really bothers me,” said Johnson, the Michigan liberal. “The border crossings are just getting out of control.”

The president and his campaign advisers tout the Biden administration’s legislative record, especially on infrastructure, an improving economy and new spending intended to combat climate change. But the president and his allies are also unsparing in lambasting Trump as interested only in “revenge and retribution” for his defeat in 2020 and the pending criminal prosecutions and other legal troubles that have followed.

They have seized on Trump’s praise of authoritarians like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Victor Orban and recirculated the former president’s statement that he would be willing to act like a dictator for a day to close the border and expand drilling for fossil fuel.

Trump has countered with searing attacks on Biden’s mental acuity and physical fitness for the presidency and even mocked Biden’s stutter. But the latest poll results suggest Trump has not yet maximized the potential benefits of those attacks — or perhaps that they simply have a lower yield for him.

Biden sometimes turns his version of the argument into a humorous quip he used often in 2020, when he was vying to unseat Trump: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.”

Indeed, that is what resonates with reluctant Democrats and some independents.

“I voted for Trump (in 2016) because I wanted somebody to shake up Washington,” said Neil Murray, a 67-year-old retiree in Jonesboro, Arkansas, who identifies as an independent. “He certainly did that, but he couldn’t do anything productive with it.”

Frustrated with Trump’s negative qualities that he overlooked in 2016, Murray voted for Biden in 2020 — but not enthusiastically. He called Biden “disingenuous on some things” and too close to his left flank on economic policy.

But in November, Murray said, he will have no reservations when casting a second vote for the Democrat, because, “Donald Trump is a screaming lunatic.”

___

Sanders reported from Washington.

___

The poll of 1,282 adults was conducted March 21-25, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

NEW YORK (AP) — In his bid to retake the White House, few states hold as much promise for Donald Trump as Michigan.

The former president has already won the state once and President Joe Biden, who reclaimed it for Democrats in 2020, is confronting vulnerabilities there as he seeks reelection. Trump’s campaign promises an aggressive play for Michigan as part of a robust swing-state strategy.

But, at least for now, those promises appear to be mostly talk. The Trump campaign and its partners at the Republican National Committee haven’t yet made significant general election investments in the state, according to Michigan Republican Party Chairman Pete Hoekstra. The national committee, he said, hasn’t transferred any money to the state party to help bolster its operations heading into the general election. There are no specific programs in place to court voters of color. And there’s no general election field staff in place.

“We’ve got the skeleton right now,” Hoekstra said. “We’re going to have to put more meat on it.”

It’s much the same in presidential battleground states across the country, according to Republican operatives and party officials involved in campaign planning elsewhere.

Widely praised for its professionalism and effectiveness throughout the primary phase of the 2024 election, Trump’s political operation has been slow to pivot toward the general election in the weeks after executing a hostile takeover of the Republican Party’s national political machinery. In fact, the former president’s team has rolled back plans under previous leaders to add hundreds of staff and dozens of new minority-outreach centers in key states without offering a clear alternative.

Indeed, just six months before the first early votes are cast in the general election between Trump and Biden, Trump’s Republican Party has little general election infrastructure to speak of.

Officials on the ground in top swing states are not panicking, but the disparity with the Biden campaign is stark.

This month alone, Biden opened 100 new offices and added more than 350 new staffers in swing states from Arizona to Georgia to Pennsylvania, according to campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa. That’s in addition to the Democratic president’s existing battleground-state staff of 100 that was already in place.

Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita, who is now also running operations at the RNC, declined to detail any of the Republican campaign’s plans.

“By combining forces, the Trump campaign and the RNC are deploying operations fueled by passionate volunteers who care about saving America and firing Joe Biden,” he said. “We do not feel obligated, however, to discuss the specifics of our strategy, timing, or tactics with members of the news media.”

Trump may be discussing strategy with some state Republican officials behind closed doors.

Hoekstra was among a handful of Michigan Republican leaders who trekked to Florida last week to meet privately with Trump and members of his senior campaign team about plans for the general election. The conversation, Hoekstra said, left him optimistic about the former president’s commitment to his state.

“I feel good about where we are,” he said. “The Trump team is engaged.”

Earlier this month, Trump replaced Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel with his new hand-picked leadership team, including daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who is now RNC co-chair. LaCivita, who took over as the committee’s chief of staff, promised sweeping changes in the GOP’s political infrastructure across the country.

In the days since, more than 60 Republican staffers across the country were issued layoff notices. They included virtually all the people who staffed the RNC’s minority outreach community centers and others inside the committee’s department of State Parties Strategies.

“There was never a fully cohesive bond between the Trump campaign and the RNC in the past, and we are now operating as one entity,” Lara Trump said Tuesday on David Webb’s SiriusXM Patriot channel program. “We have cut a lot of fat.”

Facing internal pushback on some of the cuts, Lara Trump has vowed that the committee’s half-dozen existing community centers would remain open. But it’s unclear whether Trump’s team will follow through on McDaniel’s plans to open an additional 40 community centers in the coming months.

“It seems that there’s a consensus that community centers are vital for the Republican Party in general,” said Shawn Steel, a RNC member from California who credits a community center in Orange County’s Little Saigon with helping his wife, Rep. Michelle Steel, R-Calif., win her seat.

Democrats, Steel said, have been effectively engaging in minority communities since New York City’s Tammany Hall more than two centuries ago. “We’re trying to catch up,” Steel said. “I’m optimistic.”

Amid such optimism, however, there is also a deep sense of uncertainty as Trump’s team rewrites the party’s 2024 battleground-state strategy after burning the previous playbook.

Trump’s lieutenants have already postponed plans in place before McDaniel’s ouster that would have begun adding hundreds of Republican staffers in presidential battleground states beginning this month, according to people with direct knowledge of the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations.

It’s unclear if or when the field staff will eventually be in place. Recently laid-off staffers have recently begun interviewing for new positions, although some have been told they must relocate to Florida or new states.

Georgia GOP Chair Joshua McKoon said he has had several meetings with RNC leadership about “the deployment of additional resources” to his state, although there is no set timeline.

“What wins elections is having the staff necessary to carry out your get-out-the-vote plan, so that’s what I’m most interested in,” McKoon said. “I certainly expect to have further discussions in the very near future about the timeline and having some more specifics.”

He added, “I feel like we’re going to have what we need.”

Aware of a building sense of urgency, newly elected RNC Chair Michael Whatley issued a memo to party officials over the weekend promising that the committee is “building on our existing programs and expanding our outreach at the RNC.”

He vowed to “re-engage America’s working voters,” continue to engage rural voters, and grow Trump’s support “with demographics who have not traditionally voted for our candidates…”

Whatley did not offer any specifics, however, aside from mentioning a new battleground-state program that would direct officials within the committee’s State Parties Strategies department to work with “auxiliary Republican groups and other grassroots organizations” in addition to state parties.

Trump’s team did not clarify, when asked, which grassroots organizations Whatley meant, although the chairman before his recent election had aggressively courted leaders at Turning Point USA, a leading group in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement that had been a driving force in McDaniel’s ouster.

On Tuesday, Lara Trump wrote “Awesome!” in sharing a social media post from Turning Point founder and CEO Charlie Kirk that highlighted the group’s efforts to organize “full-time ballot chasers” in Arizona and other states.

Meanwhile, Biden’s campaign earlier in the month launched a $30 million six-week advertising blitz targeting swing-state voters with a particular focus on Black and Hispanic-owned outlets and “culture and sports programming such as Comedy Central and ESPN.”

Biden is also hitting the campaign trail with more intensity.

He has campaigned in Pennsylvania, Georgia, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Michigan in recent days. He was in North Carolina on Tuesday, signaling the president’s ambition in a state that Trump narrowly won in 2020.

Trump, by contrast, has been hardly seen in public this month aside from his court appearances.

Moussa, Biden’s spokesman, slapped Trump for embracing a general election strategy focused on “apparently hiding at his country club.”

“Meanwhile, the RNC fires staffers, shutters community centers and shuts down their minority outreach programs. Not exactly how to win the hearts and minds of the American people — or get to 270 electoral votes,” Moussa said.

This story has been corrected to show the California congresswoman’s surname is Steel, not Steele.

NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump lashed out Wednesday at the New York judge who put him under a gag order ahead of his April 15 hush-money criminal trial, suggesting without evidence that the veteran jurist was kowtowing to his daughter’s interests as a Democratic political consultant. The former president objected in particular to what he claimed was her posting of a social media photo showing him behind bars.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, complained on social media that the gag order issued Tuesday was “illegal, un-American, unConstitutional.” He said Judge Juan M. Merchan was “wrongfully attempting to deprive me of my First Amendment Right to speak out against the Weaponization of Law Enforcement” by Democratic rivals and urged him to step aside from the case.

The gag order, which prosecutors had requested, bars Trump from either making or directing other people to make public statements on his behalf about jurors and potential witnesses in the hush-money trial, such as his lawyer turned nemesis Michael Cohen and porn star Stormy Daniels. It also prohibits any statements meant to interfere with or harass the court’s staff, prosecution team or their families.

It does not bar comments about Merchan or his family, nor does it prohibit criticism of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the elected Democrat whose office is prosecuting Trump.

Merchan’s daughter, whose firm has worked on campaigns for President Joe Biden and other Democrats, “makes money by working to ‘Get Trump,’” and recently posted a fake photo on social media depicting her “obvious goal” of seeing him behind bars, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. He argued those circumstances make it “completely impossible for me to get a fair trial.”

Trump did not link to the purported photo, but an account under the name “LM” on X, formerly known as Twitter, showed a photo illustration of an imprisoned Trump as its profile picture Wednesday morning. It was later changed to an image of Vice President Kamala Harris as a child. Loren Merchan’s consulting firm had linked to that account in its social media posts in past years. The account is now private with no posts displayed. It says it joined the platform in April 2023, raising questions about whether it belongs to her or was taken over by someone else.

Messages seeking comment were left with Merchan, his daughter, and a spokesperson for New York’s state court system. Bragg’s office declined to comment.

“So, let me get this straight,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “the Judge’s daughter is allowed to post pictures of her ‘dream’ of putting me in jail … but I am not allowed to talk about the attacks against me, and the Lunatics trying to destroy my life and prevent me from winning the 2024 Presidential Election, which I am dominating?”

“Maybe the Judge is such a hater because his daughter makes money by working to ‘Get Trump’ and when he rules against me over and over again, he is making her company, and her, richer and richer,” Trump continued. “How can this be allowed?”

Trump’s three-part Truth Social post was his first reaction to the gag order. His focus on Merchan’s daughter and her ties to Democratic politics echoed his lawyers’ arguments last year when they urged the judge to exit the case. The judge had also made several small donations totaling $35 to Democratic causes during the 2020 campaign, including $15 to Biden.

Merchan said then that a state court ethics panel found that Loren Merchan’s work had no bearing on his impartiality. The judge said in a ruling last September that he was certain of his “ability to be fair and impartial” and that Trump’s lawyers had “failed to demonstrate that there exists concrete, or even realistic reasons for recusal to be appropriate, much less required on these grounds.”

“The Judge has to recuse himself immediately, and right the wrong committed by not doing so last year,” Trump wrote Wednesday. “If the Biased and Conflicted Judge is allowed to stay on this Sham ‘Case,’ it will be another sad example of our Country becoming a Banana Republic, not the America we used to know and love.”

In a recent interview, Merchan told The Associated Press that he and his staff were working diligently to prepare for the historic first trial of a former president.

“There’s no agenda here,” Merchan said. “We want to follow the law. We want justice to be done.”

Trump’s hush-money case, set to be the first of his four criminal cases to go to trial, centers on allegations that he falsely logged payments to Cohen as legal fees in his company’s books when they were for Cohen’s work during the 2016 campaign covering up negative stories about Trump. That included $130,000 Cohen paid Daniels on Trump’s behalf so she wouldn’t publicize her claim of a sexual encounter with him years earlier.

Trump pleaded not guilty last April to 34 counts of falsifying business records, a felony punishable by up to four years in prison, though there is no guarantee that a conviction would result in jail time. He denies having sex with Daniels and his lawyers have said that the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses, not part of any coverup.

In issuing the gag order, Merchan cited Trump’s history of “threatening, inflammatory, denigrating” remarks about people involved in his legal cases. A violation could result in Trump being held in contempt of court, fined or even jailed.

Though not covered by the restrictions, Merchan referenced Trump’s various comments about him as an example of his rhetoric. The gag order mirrors one imposed and largely upheld by a federal appeals court panel in Trump’s Washington, D.C., election interference criminal case.

Trump’s lawyers fought a gag order, warning it would amount to unconstitutional and unlawful prior restraint on his free speech rights.

Merchan had long resisted imposing one, recognizing Trump’s “special” status as a former president and current candidate and not wanting to trample his ability to defend himself publicly.

But, he said, as the trial nears, he found that his obligation to ensuring the integrity of the case outweighs First Amendment concerns. He said Trump’s statements have induced fear and necessitated added security measures to protect his targets and investigate threats.

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Associated Press reporter Jennifer Peltz contributed to this report.

In announcing the decision in a memo, NBC Universal News Group Chairman Cesar Conde apologized to staff members who felt let down by the hire, acknowledging he had signed off on it.

“No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned. Over the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal,” Conde said. But he said the network remained committed to centering “voices that represent different parts of the political spectrum.”

There was no immediate comment from McDaniel, who stepped down as RNC leader just over two weeks ago. She found out she lost her job through media reports, not from NBC directly, said a person close to her who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it publicly.

NBC announced Friday that McDaniel would contribute commentary across network platforms. It said it wanted the perspective of someone with inside knowledge about the Republican Party and former President Donald Trump heading into the 2024 election, in which Trump is seeking a second term.

The response from journalists and others within the network was swift — and public. Former “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd criticized his bosses on the air Sunday for the hire, saying he didn’t know what to believe from her after she supported former President Donald Trump in “gaslighting” and “character assassination” following the 2020 election.

An extraordinary succession of MSNBC hosts — Joe Scarborough, Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, Nicolle Wallace, Jen Psaki and Lawrence O’Donnell — all publicly protested the decision to hire McDaniel on their shows Monday.

Republicans countered that the protest indicates that people at NBC News, particularly at MSNBC, were unwilling to countenance opposing viewpoints. The hiring, and quick firing, represents one of those rare instances likely to unite the left and right — in anger.

“NBC caving in to the censors,” Elon Musk, owner of X, formerly Twitter, posted on his platform.

On his Truth Social site, Trump said, “These Radical Left Lunatics are CRAZY, and the top people at NBC ARE WEAK.”

Those who protested her hiring claimed that it wasn’t because McDaniel is a Republican, but it was because she helped promote Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election and assisted in efforts to overturn the results.

Efforts by news organizations to hire former politicians is hardly new. NBC News hired Psaki directly from her job as press secretary to President Joe Biden, and another former Republican National Committee chairman, Michael Steele, hosts a weekend show on MSNBC.

But there are concerns that the McDaniel episode may make it difficult for networks to find voices this year that can provide insight into Trump and his campaign. Former Trump chief of staff Reince Priebius is an ABC News contributor and Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former White House communications director during the Trump administration, is a CNN commentator.

Conde said that NBC News remains committed to the principle that there must be diverse voices on the network. “And to that end, we will redouble our efforts to seek voices that represent different parts of the political spectrum.”

McDaniel’s tenure at NBC may have lasted less than a week, but a mess surrounding it could last much longer. She was dropped Tuesday by Creative Artists Agency, who she hired to negotiate her TV deal, and has been consulting with lawyers since learning that deal had ended.

The succession of MSNBC stars who denounced McDaniel and the hiring reached its apogee during the weekly show by Maddow, the network’s most popular personality. She spent nearly half an hour on the issue, drawing a comparison between crackpot efforts by authoritarians to gain power in the U.S., and the GOP backing of Trump under McDaniel’s leadership. She called her hiring by NBC News “inexplicable,” comparing it to a mobster being given a position in a district attorney’s office.

Maddow appeared Tuesday on Reid’s show. Reid said she was grateful for the decision to oust McDaniel, and Maddow echoed that.

“To see essentially the unanimous feeling among all the journalists … and all of the senior staff and producers and everybody in this building about this was one thing,” she said. “Then to see the executives and the leadership hear that and respond to it and be willing to change course … I have deep respect for that.”

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David Bauder writes about media for The Associated Press. Follow him at http://twitter.com/dbauder

Shanahan, a lawyer and business owner who grew up amidst poverty in Oakland, California, is also the very wealthy 38-year-old ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Her addition to the race, Kennedy said during an announcement made from her hometown, will help connect his campaign with “the working poor who feel forgotten.”

“She’s gonna fight for all those Americans who know what it’s like to skip meals to pay for gasoline and watch food prices climb ever higher and wonder how in the world they’re gonna make it through the grocery store checkout line,” he said.

Shanahan’s presence on the ticket — and the money she brings with it — may increase the chances that Kennedy’s campaign can get the pair of them on the ballot in all 50 states, a fact she seemed to acknowledge.

“It is time for a realignment. It is time, as Bobby Kennedy says, to focus on our unifying values rather than our divisions,” she said. “Take a look at his vision for America. It is a vision that I share too, as I spend the next seven months of my life getting him on each and every ballot in this country.”

Kennedy’s campaign cited Shanahan’s work in “honest governance, racial equality, regenerative agriculture, and children’s and maternal health” as reasons for picking her over other potential running mates.

An environmental lawyer, Kennedy is the outspoken outsider of the once-powerful Massachusetts political family. The son of assassinated former U.S. Attorney General and presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy is perhaps best known for his stance on vaccines and his work suing regulatory agencies.

He teased a White House bid as a Democrat, but soon dropped his party affiliation in favor of an independent run at the office once held by his uncle. Since he entered the race, it’s been rumored he was running a “spoiler” campaign aimed at taking votes away from President Joe Biden.

According to Kennedy, that’s only half right.

“Our campaign is a spoiler. I agree with that. It is a spoiler for President Biden and for President Trump,” Kennedy said Tuesday.

Polling averages show Kennedy pulls about 10% of the vote nationally in surveys that include both major party candidates and other third party contenders. In a race with just Trump, Biden, and Kennedy, polling averages show RFK Jr. in third at 12.3%.

WASHINGTON — The presidential election is shaping up as a classic tortoise-versus-hare tale.

Presumed Republican nominee Donald Trump, of course, is the high-energy rabbit. The 45th president’s full-throttled, zig-zagging campaign style, so far, is reminiscent of his successful 2016 campaign. Trump’s unsuccessful 2020 reelection bid was more subdued, his high-octane style hamstrung by the COVID-19 pandemic.

President Joe Biden, the presumed Democratic nominee, has settled in as the methodical tortoise. A top campaign aide last week acknowledged on a call with reporters that Trump-Biden II, a rematch that polls show most voters don’t want, likely will be “a very tough, close race.” Still, Biden campaign aides and his allies on Capitol Hill expressed confidence last week that, despite Trump’s ability to garner near-constant attention, the 46th president can again beat him with a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race approach.

“I think, by the end of it, the president will be able to get his message out. And the contrast between them will be evident,” said Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., a close Biden ally who is often by the president’s side when he campaigns in the Keystone State, which once again is expected to be a crucial battleground.

Like other Democratic members, Casey said time is on Biden’s side: “It’s seven-and-a-half months of a long campaign [to go].”

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, a former Democratic National Committee chair, predicted most voters would — if they have not already — become exhausted by what she called Trump’s “venomous explosions of a lunatic.”

“It’s very simple. Americans want normal, not team extreme. And so Joe Biden needs to do exactly what he has been doing, which is focus on the priorities of the American people,” said Wasserman Schultz, advising the president to “talk about how much he’s improved the quality of people’s lives since he became president.” Specifically, she pointed to Biden’s record on prescription drug costs, job creation and a bipartisan infrastructure package his White House negotiated with congressional Democrats and Republicans.

To that end, Biden hit on each topic at just about every stop on a swing last week through two southwest battleground states, Nevada and Arizona, and one that polls suggest should again land in Trump’s column, Texas.

Biden and other Democrats have sounded warnings about Trump’s plans, should he lose his second consecutive presidential race — especially after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, for which Trump faces criminal charges over his role in revving up an angry crowd he knew was armed. In recent days, the Biden campaign has highlighted comments Trump made about a potential “bloodbath” during a March 16 campaign rally near Dayton, Ohio.

Trump later insisted he was talking about the impact on the auto workers from competitors in Mexico if he wasn’t the next president.

“We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those guys if I get elected. Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it,” Trump said at the March 16 rally.

But Trump’s attempts to blame others for the uproar over his use of the word “bloodbath” show the challenge facing Biden.

In the days since, Trump has ranted and raved on his social media platform and in interviews with friendly media outlets. He has deflected blame, called it yet another “hoax,” tried to change the meaning of his words and used the statement to raise more campaign cash — which he also is using to pay his hefty legal bills.

“At a rally … I predicted a bloodbath for American auto manufacturing if Crooked Joe Biden were to win in November,” stated a Trump campaign fundraising email blasted out on March 20. “You already know what happened next. The FAKE NEWS used edited clips to viciously misquote me.”

To be sure, some media outlets, at least initially, did publish reports that did not mention that Trump was discussing the American auto industry under a second Biden term. But his deflections ignore what could be the key words from that Ohio rally: “That’ll be the least of it.”

Trump and his surrogates contend that his words should be translated into a blanket warning about the state of the country if Biden wins a second term. Not so fast, Democratic members said late last week.

They want Biden to do just what he did during the southwest tour: Call out such statements by his expected general election foe just about anytime he’s in front of a microphone.

“I think the president needs to make sure, as he has been, that he focuses on voters understanding and being aware of the impact that his presidency has had on improving their lives, and that we don’t want to go back to a time of chaos of having someone who is a wannabe autocrat,” Wasserman Schultz said, referring to Trump. “Someone who would allow [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to run over Ukraine, someone who also would withdraw us from NATO, someone who would make … the United States and Americans less safe.”

Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon said Biden and his campaign should find ways to capitalize on its “ground game advantage,” and focus primarily on issues like the economy and safeguarding programs like Social Security. When it comes to calling out Trump by name, Wyden said the campaign should “pick your spots.”

“I mean, again, you know, if you operate under the assumption that this is going to be eight more months, you want a mix of those kinds of messages to focus on, you know, economics … and taking this vast machinery of the federal government and moving it so that it actually helps people,” Wyden said. “That’s what people want to hear about — not just this noisy kind of rhetoric.”

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©2024 CQ-Roll Call, Inc. Visit at rollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

NEW YORK (AP) — A New York judge issued a gag order Tuesday barring Donald Trump from making public statements about witnesses, prosecutors, court staff and jurors in his upcoming hush-money criminal trial.

Judge Juan M. Merchan cited the former president’s prior comments about him and others in the case, as well as a looming April 15 trial date, in granting a prosecution request for what it termed a “narrowly tailored” order barring Trump from making certain out-of-court statements.

“It is without question that the imminency of the risk of harm is now paramount,” Merchan wrote.

Prosecutors had asked for the gag order, citing what they called Trump’s “long history of making public and inflammatory remarks” about people involved in his legal cases.

The gag order does not bar comments about Merchan or Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat. But it prohibits Trump from attacking key figures in the case, like his former lawyer-turned-nemesis Michael Cohen or porn star Stormy Daniels.

he prosecutors’ office declined to comment. Messages seeking comment were left for Trump’s campaign.

The gag order adds to restrictions put in place after Trump’s arraignment last April that prohibit him from using evidence in the case to attack witnesses.

After a hearing Monday where Merchan set the April 15 trial date, Trump tore into prosecutor Matthew Colangelo on social media, referring to the former Justice Department official as a “radical left from DOJ” sent to the D.A.’s office “to run the trial against Trump and that was done by Biden and his thugs.”

Merchan cited that comment in his ruling.

The Manhattan case centers on allegations that Trump falsified internal records kept by his company to hide the true nature of payments made to Cohen. The lawyer paid Daniels $130,000 as part of an effort during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign to bury claims he’d had extramarital sexual encounters.

Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records, a felony punishable by up to four years in prison, though there is no guarantee that a conviction would result in jail time.

Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, has lashed out about the case repeatedly on social media, warning of “potential death & destruction” before his indictment last year, posting a photo on social media of himself holding a baseball bat next to a picture of Bragg and complaining that Merchan is “a Trump-hating judge” with a family full of “Trump haters.”

“Self-regulation is not a viable alternative, as defendant’s recent history makes plain,” prosecutors wrote in court papers. Trump, they said, “has a longstanding and perhaps singular history” of using social media, campaign speeches and other public statements to “attack judges, jurors, lawyers, witnesses and other individuals involved in legal proceedings against him.”

The gag order mirrors portions of an order imposed on Trump in October in his separate Washington federal case, where he is charged with scheming to overturn the results of his 2020 election loss to Democratic rival Joe Biden.

A federal appeals court panel in December largely upheld Judge Tanya Chutkan’s gag order but narrowed it in an important way by freeing Trump to criticize special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the case. Manhattan prosecutors echoed that ruling by excluding Bragg from their proposed gag order.

Last May, Merchan issued what’s known as a protective order, warning Trump and his lawyers they risked being held in contempt if they disseminated evidence from the hush-money case to third parties, used it to attack witnesses or posted sensitive material to social media.

Merchan, noting Trump’s “special” status as a former president and current candidate, tried to make clear at the time that the protective order shouldn’t be construed as a gag order, saying, “It’s certainly not my intention to in any way impede Mr. Trump’s ability to campaign for the presidency of the United States.”

Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. merged Monday with a blank-check compan y called Digital World Acquisition Corp. Trump Media, which runs the social media platform Truth Social, has now taken Digital World’s place on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

Shares closed at $57.99, up 16.1%, giving the company a market value of $7.85 billion. At one point the stock was up about 59%. Trump holds a nearly 60% ownership stake in the company, now worth about $4.6 billion.

Many of those investing in Trump Media are small-time investors either trying to support Trump or aiming to cash in on the mania, instead of big institutional and professional investors. Those shareholders helped the stock of Digital World more than double this year in anticipation of the merger going through.

Truth Social launched in February 2022, one year after Trump was banned from major social platforms including Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, following the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. He’s since been reinstated to both but has stuck with Truth Social.

On Truth Social Tuesday, users were posting about being shareholders or seeking tips on how to buy shares.

One user urged conservatives to “get behind the DJT stock and sent it over $100 per share” to “drive the liberals insane!” Another declared: “Get yourself a piece of #DJT stock if your a true MAGA supporter.”

A day earlier, Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes, a former House Republican, said, “As a public company, we will passionately pursue our vision to build a movement to reclaim the Internet from Big Tech censors.”

Despite the enthusiasm, investors could experience a bumpy ride. For one, they’re betting on a company with uncertain prospects of turning a profit. Trump Media lost $49 million in the first nine months of last year, when it brought in just $3.4 million in revenue and had to pay $37.7 million in interest expenses.

In a recent regulatory filing, the company cited the high rate of failure for new social media platforms, as well as its expectation that its operations will lose “for the foreseeable future” as risks for investors.

Research firm Similarweb estimates that Truth Social had roughly 5 million active mobile and web users in February. That’s far below TikTok’s more than 2 billion and Facebook’s 3 billion — but still higher than other “alt-tech” rivals like Parler.

However, Trump Media has said it doesn’t keep track of some numbers that rivals use as key measures of their performance, such as average revenue per user or active user accounts. It says it wants to focus on the long-term instead of “short-term decision-making.”

For that long term, though, skeptics see struggles ahead for a company that’s estimated to have far fewer users than rivals in a business where gaining a critical mass is key.

“I think there is a possibility of, sooner or later, the stock price falling by 95%,” said Jay Ritter, a professor and expert on initial public offerings of stock at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business.

Brian Dunn, director of the Institute for Compensation Studies at Cornell University, compared the fervor for Trump Media shares to the meme stock craze that boosted shares of companies such as GameStop and AMC Entertainment to exorbitant heights in 2021.

“Like any meme stock or fad, as long as there’s a greater fool to buy you out for what you paid for it, than you can continue to prosper,” Dunn said, warning that small investors “could end up holding the bag when the music stops.”

On Monday, Trump told reporters that “Truth Social is doing very well. It’s hot as a pistol and doing great.” On Tuesday, he posted “I LOVE TRUTH SOCIAL, I LOVE THE TRUTH!,” on the platform.

The company, which is based in Florida, said in a recent regulatory filing that it “is highly dependent on the popularity and presence of President Trump.” Trump Media has acknowledged that there are risks associated with Trump’s outsized influence.

If the former president were to limit or discontinue his relationship with the company for any reason, including due to his campaign to regain the presidency, the company “would be significantly disadvantaged,” it said in a filing ahead of the merger with Digital World.

Acknowledging Trump’s involvement in numerous legal proceedings, the company noted that “an adverse outcome in one or more” of the cases could negatively affect Trump Media and Truth Social.

Another risk, the company said, was that as a controlling stockholder, Trump would be entitled to vote his shares in his own interest, which may not always be in the interests of all the shareholders generally.

Democrats and Joe Biden and the media carrying their water are once again trying to silence a voice they don’t agree with by bouncing the former Republican National Committee chair from TV.

The network in this case is NBC, which is taking heat for hiring McDaniel for nearly $300,000 a year as an analyst.

NBC already caved by announcing that McDaniel, niece of Mitt Romney, won’t appear on liberal MSNBC. And don’t be surprised if they give in totally to liberals by rescinding their contract with McDaniel, even though NBC executives were all in favor of the hiring.

Fox News Digital reported NBC is considering cutting ties with McDaniel because of the intense backlash the network has received. More NBC News personalities and journalists came out against McDaniel on Monday – despite the fact that she is not particularly close to Trump.

Is she such a big threat to Democrats that they have to silence her, trampling on her First Amendment rights? Is that what the network stands for?

What about former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile? There was no such outcry when she was hired as an analyst by CNN.

Yet on the dying talk show “Meet the Press” over the weekend, host Kristen Welker interrogated McDaniel like she was a Russian spy, calling her an election denier and insisting repeatedly that she agree Biden won the 2020 election “fair and square.”

McDaniel, who obviously learned flip flopping from Uncle Mitt, caved to Welker.

Then former “Meet the Press” host and pseudo-journalist Chuck Todd – who is no Tim Russert – came on the show to condemn NBC for hiring McDaniel in what seemed like a prearranged attack.

Todd is one of the big reasons the once formidable “Meet the Press” has declined to the point of almost irrelevancy. Takes a lot of courage for him to go after the network that canned him.

If that’s the kind of Meet the Press Welker is presiding over, then the show will tank even more.

If that weren’t enough, MSNBC’s liberal blabber Joe Scarborough predictably came out to denounce NBC – once again towing the line for Biden and Democrats.

“It goes without saying that she will not be a guest on ‘Morning Joe’ in her capacity as a paid contributor,” Scarborough huffed.

It’s only a matter of time before Rachel Maddow piles on.

Even NBC”s powerless Guild union joined in the act, accusing the network of laying off a dozen employees before hiring McDaniel to her lucrative contract.

“Ronna encouraged a lie that many of our own journalists have spent countless hours debunking,” the Guild wrote on social media. “Our journalism is tarnished by @NBCNews execs elevating a liar over the workers who have spent years delivering the kind of reporting that our newsrooms are typically known for.”

You mean biased journalism?

Hard to believe NBC could be even more tarnished than they already are.

The bill will ban social media accounts for children under 14 and require parental permission for 15- and 16-year-olds. It was slightly watered down from a proposal DeSantis vetoed earlier this month, a week before the annual legislative session ended.

The new law was Republican Speaker Paul Renner’s top legislative priority. It takes effect Jan. 1.

“A child in their brain development doesn’t have the ability to know that they’re being sucked into these addictive technologies and to see the harm and step away from it, and because of that we have to step in for them,” Renner said at the bill-signing ceremony held at a Jacksonville school.

The bill DeSantis vetoed would have banned minors under 16 from popular social media platforms regardless of parental consent. But before the veto, he worked out compromise language with Renner to alleviate the governor’s concerns and the Legislature sent DeSantis a second bill.

Several states have considered similar legislation. In Arkansas, a federal judge blocked enforcement of a law in August that required parental consent for minors to create new social media accounts.

Supporters in Florida hope the bill will withstand legal challenges because it would ban social media formats based on addictive features such as notification alerts and auto-play videos, rather than on their content.

Renner said he expects social media companies to “sue the second after this is signed. But you know what? We’re going to beat them. We’re going to beat them and we’re never, ever going to stop.”

DeSantis also acknowledged the law will be challenged on First Amendment issues, and bemoaned the fact the “Stop Woke Act” he signed into law two years ago was recently struck down by an appeals court with a majority of Republican-appointed judges. They ruled it violated free speech rights by banning private business from including discussions about racial inequality in employee training.

“Any time I see a bill, if I don’t think it’s constitutional, I veto it,” said DeSantis, a lawyer, expressing confidence that the social media ban will be upheld. “We not only satisfied me, but we also satisfied, I think, a fair application of the law and Constitution.”

The bill overwhelmingly passed both chambers, with some Democrats joining a majority of Republicans who supported the measure. Opponents argued it is unconstitutional and government shouldn’t interfere with decisions parents make with their children.

“This bill goes too far in taking away parents’ rights,” Democratic Rep. Anna Eskamani said in a news release. “Instead of banning social media access, it would be better to ensure improved parental oversight tools, improved access to data to stop bad actors, alongside major investments in Florida’s mental health systems and programs.”

In a letter Monday — obtained by The Associated Press — Reps. James Comer and Jim Jordan demanded that Garland comply with the subpoena the two Republican chairmen sent last month as part of their emerging investigation into Special Counsel Robert Hur’s decision not to charge the president.

Comer, chair of the Oversight Committee, and Jordan, chair of the Judiciary Committee, ordered the Justice Department to turn over the unredacted audio and transcripts of Hur’s hourslong interviews with Biden and his ghostwriter by April 8.

“If you fail to do so, the Committees will consider taking further action, such as the invocation of contempt of Congress proceedings,” the two lawmakers wrote.

The Justice Department reacted to the letter late Monday, saying the department “has been extraordinarily transparent with Congress” throughout the process.

“The Attorney General released Mr. Hur’s report to Congress and made no redactions or changes, the Department provided documents to Congress including a copy of the President’s interview transcript, and Mr. Hur testified before Congress for more than five hours about his investigation,” Emma Dulaney, a department spokesperson, said in a statement to AP. “Given the Department’s ongoing and extensive cooperation, we hope they will reconsider this unnecessary escalation.”

The threat is just the latest tension point between Republicans and the GOP-appointed federal prosecutor who appeared before lawmakers two weeks ago for a more than four-hour interrogation surrounding his 345-page report that questioned Biden’s age and mental competence but ultimately recommended no criminal charges for the 81-year-old president. Hur said that he found insufficient evidence to make a case that would stand up in court.

“What I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows, and what I expect jurors would perceive and believe,” Hur said. “I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the president unfairly.”

Despite his defense, Hur faced an onslaught of criticism from both sides of the aisle for the commentary in his report and the decision to withhold pressing charges against Biden.

Hours before his testimony, the Justice Department released a redacted transcript that provided a more nuanced picture of the roughly yearlong investigation, filling in some of the gaps left by Hur’s and Biden’s accounting of the exchanges.

Republicans, including Comer and Jordan, have insisted for the past year that unlike Biden, former President Donald Trump has been treated unfairly in his own Justice Department case for mishandling classified documents. During the hearing, GOP members reiterated that while Biden was let off the hook, Trump has been singled out and vilified, questioning if the facts of the two cases were all that different.

Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., called it a “glaring double standard.”

“Donald Trump’s being prosecuted for exactly the same act that you documented Joe Biden committed,” he told Hur.

However, there are major differences between the two probes. Biden’s team returned the documents after they were discovered, and the president cooperated with the investigation by voluntarily sitting for an interview and consenting to searches of his homes. Trump, by contrast, is accused of enlisting the help of aides and lawyers to conceal the documents from the government and seeking to have potentially incriminating evidence destroyed.

Following a hearing on what was supposed to be the first day of the trial before the recent release of old court records tied to Michael Cohen threw the timeline into disarray, state Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan found no truth to Trump’s claims that the Manhattan district attorney’s office had illegally sought to sabotage his defense through evidence suppression.

Trump’s lawyers had asked Merchan to dismiss the DA’s case based on filings tied to his former fixer’s 2018 conviction recently provided by feds in the Southern District of New York, which they claimed helped his case and should have been obtained sooner by prosecutors, or delay the trial, and to issue sanctions against prosecutors.

DA Alvin Bragg’s office, in turn, asked Merchan to disregard the “wild and untrue allegations” and said they diligently sought to procure evidence from Cohen’s case and shared with Trump what they got. Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo said a tiny portion of the newly released paperwork — around 300 pages out of 195,000 — was relevant to the charges against Trump; on Trump’s side, they considered it to be more in the ballpark of “tens of thousands.”

Merchan said starting the trial on April 15 gave Trump’s side enough time to review the new docs. He said it was “really disconcerting” that Trump attorney Todd Blanche couldn’t cite “case law, (a) statute, anything” to support the defense’s position that the federal prosecutor’s office was under the DA’s control or direction.

“Because the allegation that the defense makes — in all of your papers — about the people’s misconduct is incredibly serious, unbelievably serious,” the judge said.

“You are literally accusing the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the people assigned to this (case) of engaging in prosecutorial misconduct and of trying to make me complicit in it, and you don’t have a single cite to support that position?”

Trump scowled as he walked into the 15th-floor courtroom with his Secret Service entourage just before 10 a.m. and whispered to his lawyers throughout the hearing. He didn’t look over at Bragg seated in the gallery.

“This is a witch hunt and a hoax,” he said on his way into the courtroom.

The Republican front-runner for president has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records that allege he concealed checks to Cohen in 2017 to disguise that they were repayment for a hush money payoff to Daniels before the 2016 election.

NEW YORK (AP) — A New York appeals court on Monday agreed to hold off collection of former President Donald Trump’s more than $454 million civil fraud judgment if he puts up $175 million within 10 days.

If he does, it will stop the clock on collection and prevent the state from seizing the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s assets while he appeals. The appeals court also halted other aspects of a trial judge’s ruling that had barred Trump and his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., the family company’s executive vice presidents, from serving in corporate leadership for several years.

In all, the order was a significant victory for the Republican ex-president as he defends the real estate empire that vaulted him into public life. The development came just before New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, was expected to initiate efforts to collect the judgment.

Trump, who was attending a separate hearing in his criminal hush money case in New York, hailed the ruling and said he would post a bond, securities or cash to cover the $175 million sum in the civil case. Speaking in a courthouse hallway, Trump revisited his oft-stated complaints about civil trial Judge Arthur Engoron and the penalty he imposed.

“What he’s done is such a disservice and should never be allowed to happen again,” said Trump, who argues that the fraud case is discouraging business in New York.

James’ office, meanwhile, noted that the judgment still stands, while collection is paused.

“Donald Trump is still facing accountability for his staggering fraud,” the office said in a statement.

Trump’s lawyers had pleaded for a state appeals court to halt collection, claiming it was “a practical impossibility” to get an underwriter to sign off on a bond for such a large sum, which grows daily because of interest. The Trump attorneys had earlier proposed a $100 million bond, but an appellate judge had said no late last month.

Monday’s ruling came from a five-judge panel in the state’s intermediate appeals court, called the Appellate Division, where Trump is fighting to overturn Engoron’s Feb. 16 decision. Trump attorneys Alina Habba and Christopher Kise characterized Monday’s ruling as a key first step.

Siding with the attorney general after a monthslong civil trial, Engoron found that Trump, his company and top executives lied about his wealth on financial statements, conning bankers and insurers who did business with him. The statements valued Trump’s penthouse for years as though it were nearly three times its actual size, for example.

Trump and his co-defendants denied any wrongdoing, saying the statements actually lowballed his fortune, came with disclaimers and weren’t taken at face value by the institutions that lent to or insured him. The penthouse discrepancy, he said, was simply a mistake made by subordinates.

Engoron ordered Trump to pay $355 million, plus interest. Some co-defendants, including Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, were ordered to pay far smaller amounts. Monday’s ruling also puts those on hold if the $175 million bond is posted.

After James won the judgment, she didn’t seek to enforce it during a legal time-out for Trump to ask the appeals court for a reprieve from paying up.

That period ended Monday, though James could have decided to allow Trump more time.

James told ABC News last month that if Trump doesn’t have the money to pay, she would seek to seize his assets. She didn’t detail the process or specify what holdings she meant, and her office has declined more recently to discuss its plans. Meanwhile, the office has filed notice of the judgment, a technical step toward potentially moving to collect.

Trump maintained on social media on Friday that he has almost $500 million in cash, but he said at a news conference on Monday that he’d like to use some on his presidential run. He asserted that James and Engoron, who’s also a Democrat, “don’t want me taking cash out to use it for the campaign.”

But that could be complicated in Trump’s case.

“Finding buyers for assets of this magnitude is something that doesn’t happen overnight,” noted Stewart Sterk, a real estate law professor at Cardozo School of Law.

Under New York law, filing an appeal generally doesn’t hold off enforcement of a judgment. But there’s an automatic pause if the person or entity posts a bond covering what’s owed.

Many defendants are able to get such a bond, but “judgments of this size are rare,” said Joshua Naftalis, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice.

“What makes this one unusual is someone who is subject to an enormous amount of money and has to come up with it himself,” Naftalis said.

The ex-president’s lawyers have said underwriters wanted 120% of the judgment and wouldn’t accept real estate as collateral. That would mean tying up over $557 million in cash, stocks and other liquid assets, and Trump’s company needs some left over to run the business, his attorneys have said.

They asked an appeals court to freeze collection without his posting a bond. The attorney general’s office objected, saying he hadn’t explored every option for covering the amount.

The appeals court “chose a middle ground” by still requiring Trump to put up money but lowering the amount, Naftalis said.

Associated Press writer Larry Neumeister contributed.

Follow the AP’s coverage of former President Donald Trump at https://apnews.com/hub/donald-trump.

That is one takeaway from the appearance of the top two U.S. generals, now retired, who oversaw Joe Biden’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week,

Another is how ordinary they looked, being out of uniform and testifying before the committee dressed in their new civilian dress suits, white shirts and sporty neckties.

The two were the perpetually grim Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the less grim-looking U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Frank McKenzie, former head of the U.S. Central Command.

Both had advised Biden against his hasty 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan without leaving a substantial military presence behind. It was their first appearance before Congress since they retired.

With their military uniforms left at home along with the pinned general stars, gold braid and salads of military decorations, the pair looked like ordinary joes you regularly run into on the streets of Boston.

Milley, in his new attire, could have passed for a beat-up Boston cop headed for a double at J. J. Foley’s in the South End, while McKenzie could have passed as one of Foley’s bartenders, if not a Foley himself.

This is not to demean either man. Both entered the military at an early age and served their country with distinction, Milley for 39 years and McKenzie for 42.

However, in life you are not remembered much for how you began your career, but how you ended it.

And in this case neither man went out with a bang, but with a whimper.

The whimper in both cases was their testimony that they heartily advised President Joe Biden—as the intelligence community did– against his 2021 hasty withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

If Milley, Biden’s principle military advisor, felt so strongly about it back then he could have made his feelings publicly known—even if the information was leaked– when it would have meant something.

And forget the nonsense that a leak would have been traitorous or unethical. Washington thrives on leaks.

And Milley was the general who, without President Donald Trump’s consent or knowledge, secretly called his counterpart in Communist China during the Jan, 6 riots to let the Chinese know that the U.S. would not invade. And then he leaked what he had done to his friends at the Washington Post.

Milley was a woke political general who played up to the anti-Trump progressives by standing up to Trump while rolling over for Biden.

And it leaves open the question what advice, if any, Milley would have given President Trump over an Afghanistan pullout were Trump president at the time, and not Joe Biden.

Milley liked to talk about how military men like him do not take an oath of office to an individual like the president, but to the Constitution, meaning the people.

In the case of Afghanistan, it sounds more like his oath was to an individual, Joe Biden, and not to the people.

Coming as it has after the Afghanistan disaster, their testimony was much too little and way too late to have any meaning anyway.

That botched Afghanistan effort cost the lives of 13 Americans at the Abbey Gate entrance to the Kabul airport who were killed by a suicide Taliban terrorist bomber who could have been killed earlier but was not.

No one has been held responsible for that, or for anything else that went wrong.

But at least Gen. McKenzie, the commander on the ground at the time, took responsibility for the death of the 13 American soldiers, if not the policy that created the environment that led to their deaths. Milley not so much.

With parents of some of those young Americans killed in the hearing room, McKenzie said, I, and I alone, bear full responsibility for what happened at Abbey Gate.”

That, at least, was something. Milley should say the same. Joe Biden, too.

Peter Lucas is a veteran political reporter. Email him at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com

In an apparent response to the backlash against the former chairwoman’s recently announced role at NBC, Meet the Press host Kristen Welker preempted her Sunday sit down with McDaniel by offering a disclaimer that the meeting was arranged well before anyone learned the Republican would join the network as a $300,000-per-year contributor.

“In full disclosure to our viewers, this interview was scheduled weeks before it was announced that McDaniel had become a paid NBC news contributor. This will be a news interview and I was not involved in her hiring,” Welker said.

Welker did not go easy on her new co-worker, asking the ex-chairwoman why the viewing public should trust her thoughts on the upcoming election, considering her alleged involvement in efforts to keep former President Donald Trump in power after he lost in 2020. Despite those allegations and Trump’s continued assertions the election was somehow stolen, McDaniel said that it is her current position that President Joe Biden won “fair and square.”

She also spoke out against the events of January 6, 2021 and the hundreds of people imprisoned as a result. Trump, on several occasions, has said that if he wins a second term he will pardon those prisoners on his first day in office.

“I do not think people who committed violent acts on January 6 should be freed,” McDaniel said.

Asked why she didn’t speak out against Trump’s positions earlier, she said it was her job to walk the party line.

“When you are the RNC chair, you kind of take one for the whole team,” she said. “Now I get to be a little bit more myself.”

McDaniel recently lost her position on top of the Republican party in favor new leaders hand picked by Trump, one of whom is his daughter-in-law.

Her appearance Sunday — Welker said it was McDaniel’s first since losing her job — came following uproar among viewers of MSNBC, who wondered how a person who previously denied the results of the 2020 election and attacked the media alongside Trump could land a job at the news network.

The outcry led to executives at the company issuing assurances to employees that McDaniel would not appear on liberal-leaning MSNBC, but would be asked to provide insight into the 2024 election for NBC shows.

Former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd, who joined Sunday’s program after the McDaniel interview, said he wanted to “deal with the elephant in the room.”

“I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation,” he told Welker. “Because I don’t know what to believe. She is now a paid contributor by NBC News. So I have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn’t want to mess up her contract.”

Ex-party boss Jim Lyons has founded an independent nonprofit political group and scheduled a series of events in the hope of finding “Freedom Fighters” to support his vision for a more conservative Massachusetts.

“We need your help. More importantly, we need your presence. The small number of people financially benefiting from the current alliance between Elite Democrats and Go-Along-To-Get-Along Republicans aren’t going to just walk away. They need pressure put on them. Pressure from ‘We The People,’” Lyons wrote in an email to potential supporters.

“When you join Freedom Fighters, you’re joining an organization committed to networking with like-minded activists across Massachusetts,” he wrote.

The group held their first meeting in Somerset on Saturday, Lyons told the Herald, where dozens joined the former chairman and his wife in launching their efforts at electing their brand of Republicans to a range of offices, from local school boards on up to the State House.

“We believe that the vast majority of grassroots Republicans are America First, in the mold of President Trump. They include everyone from the small business owner to the pro-life volunteer, from the parents fighting obscene materials in schools, to the old-school Tea Party activist fighting to restrain government spending and the inflation it causes,” Lyons wrote.

Lyons was ousted from his position atop the state’s diminished Republican Party in January of 2023, after a disastrous showing in the previous year’s statewide elections.

His replacement, Amy Carnevale, according to Lyons, is allowing a “never-Trumper” to run against U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren out of the party’s offices while the chairwoman kowtows to the state’s Democratic party.

Lyons said he isn’t trying to cause a schism in the party or start a new GOP, but that the current crop of Republicans in the state House and Senate have lost touch and helped pass new laws on gender affirming care for minors, protecting abortion providers, and allowing “illegal immigrants” to attend state colleges as if they were residents.

“Conservatives don’t feel like they have a home in the party,” he said. “This is a fight for the soul of Massachusetts. We have to come back to some sense of normalcy.”

The next scheduled event for Lyons’ new group is 10 a.m. on April 13, at the American Legion in Wareham.

The MassGOP did not return a request for comment by press time.

The unidentified crew members died Friday while the Florida-based Nieuw Amsterdam was at Half Moon Cay in the Bahamas, Holland America said in a statement. The ship set sail out of Fort Lauderdale on March 16 for a seven-night trip.

Authorities were notified and the cause of the accident is being investigated, the cruise line said. Crew members were being offered counseling.

“All of us at Holland America Line are deeply saddened by this incident and our thoughts and prayers are with our team members’ families at this difficult time,” the statement said. “The safety, security and welfare of all guests and crew are the company’s absolute priority.”

The cruise line did not offer any further details about the crew members. It later said the Bahamas Maritime Authority was leading the investigation.

Trump says he has nearly $500 million in cash but doesn’t want to use it to pay New York judgment

Donald Trump says he has almost a half-billion dollars in cash but would rather spend it on his presidential run than the $454 million civil fraud judgment against him in New York.

The Republican ex-president hopes to have a court excuse him from a requirement that he prove he’s good for the money while appealing the staggering verdict.

A judge in February found Trump repeatedly lied about his wealth on financial statements given to banks and others to secure loans and make deals. Trump denies deceiving anyone. Trump’s lawyers have struggled to obtain a bond covering the judgment because underwriters insisted on cash, stocks or other liquid assets instead of real estate as collateral.