Miami Mayor Francis Suarez enters crowded GOP presidential race days after Donald Trump’s indictment
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez filed paperwork Wednesday to launch his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, jumping into the crowded race just a day after GOP front-runner Donald Trump appeared in court on federal charges in Suarez’s city. The 45-year-old mayor, the only Hispanic candidate in the race, declared his candidacy with the Federal Election Commission. He had teased an announcement, noting that he would be making a “big speech” Thursday at the Reagan Library in California. Before Trump arrived at the courthouse Tuesday, Suarez toured the media encampment wearing a T-shirt with a police logo, as his city’s police force had jurisdiction over the downtown area. “If I do decide to run,” he told CNN, “it’s starting a new chapter, a new conversation of a new kind of leader who maybe looks a little different, speaks a little different, had a little bit of a different experience, but can inspire people.” Suarez, the president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, is the son of Miami’s first Cuban-born mayor. He has national attention in recent years for his efforts to lure companies to Miami, with an eye toward turning the city into a crypto hub and the next Silicon Valley. Suarez, who is vying to become the first sitting mayor elected president, joins a GOP primary fight that includes Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Despite having a candidate field in the double digits, the race is largely seen as a two-person contest between Trump and DeSantis. But the other competitors are hoping for an opening, which Trump has provided with his myriad legal vulnerabilities — none more serious than his federal indictment on charges of mishandling sensitive documents and refusing to give them back. He pleaded not guilty Tuesday in Miami federal court to 37 felony counts. Suarez has said he didn’t support Trump in either the 2016 or 2020 presidential elections, instead writing in the names of U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio and then-Vice President Pence. In 2018, Suarez publicly condemned Trump after reports came out that he had questioned why the United States would accept more immigrants from Haiti and “shithole countries” in Africa. But times have changed, with Trump advisers now praising Suarez’s work and helping him promote what he calls “the Miami success story.” Trump’s former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway has even floated Suarez’s name as a possible vice presidential pick. Suarez, who is married with two young children, is a corporate and real estate attorney who previously served as a city of Miami commissioner. He has also positioned himself as someone who can help the party further connect with Hispanics. In recent months, he has made visits to early GOP voting states as he weighed a possible 2024 campaign. He is more moderate than DeSantis and Trump but has threaded the needle carefully on cultural issues that have become popular among GOP politicians. Suarez has been critical of DeSantis, dismissing some of the state laws he has signed on immigration as “headline grabbers” lacking in substance. He has said immigration is an issue that “screams for a national solution” at a time when many Republicans back hard-line policies. The two-term mayor previously expressed support for a Florida law championed by DeSantis and dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” that bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, but he has not specified whether he supported the expansion of the policy to all grades. Like other Republicans, Suarez has criticized DeSantis’ feud with Disney over the same law, saying it looks like a “personal vendetta.” Further ingratiating himself with the Trump team, Suarez has echoed Trump’s attacks on DeSantis’ demeanor, saying the governor doesn’t make eye contact and struggles with personal relationships with other politicians. In 2020, the mayor made a play to attract tech companies to Florida after the state relaxed its COVID-19 restrictions. He met with Big Tech players and investors such as PayPal founder Peter Thiel and tech magnate Marcelo Claure, began appearing on national television, and was profiled by magazines. Suarez, who has said he takes his salary in Bitcoin, has also hosted Bitcoin conferences and started heavily promoting a cryptocurrency project named Miami Coin, created by a group called City Coins. But the hype dissipated as virus restrictions eased elsewhere, eliminating Miami’s advantage on the COVID-19 front. Suarez’s vision also hit roadblocks with the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which was set to move its U.S. headquarters to Miami’s financial district before its founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas last December. The only cryptocurrency exchange that traded Miami Coin suspended its trading, citing liquidity problems, and not living up to its promise to generate enough money to eliminate city taxes. Miami also ranks among the worst big U.S. cities for income inequality and has one of the least affordable housing markets. Republished with the permission of The Associated Press.
Right to the end, Donald Trump campaign spent less than Hillary Clinton’s
Donald Trump‘s campaign spent about $94 million in its final push for the White House, according to new fundraising reports filed Thursday. The Republican continued his campaign-long trend of spending far less than Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Her campaign blew through almost $132 million in its closing weeks, according to reports filed Thursday with the Federal Election Commission. The latest reports cover Oct. 20 through Nov. 28. Over the course of the primary and general elections, the Trump campaign raised about $340 million. That included $66 million that the billionaire businessman contributed from his own pocket. The Clinton campaign, which maintained a longer and more concerted fundraising focus, brought in about $581 million. Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital director who was empowered with spending decisions across the campaign, credited strategic last-minute investments with helping propel the political newcomer to victory. Specifically, he told The Associated Press, the campaign and Republican Party spent about $5 million in get-out-the-vote digital advertising targeted in the final few days to Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida. That proved critical; some of those states were won by razor-thin margins. “You think, what if we hadn’t spent that?” Parscale said. “We might not have won.” Another investment that he said paid dividends was $7 million to air a two-minute “closing” television commercial. “Our movement is about replacing the failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people,” he said as images from his rallies rolled across the screen. The final FEC report showed the extent of the Trump advertising splurge. The campaign spent nearly $39 million on last-minute TV ads and another $29 million on digital advertising and consulting work done by Parscale’s firm. Clinton’s campaign placed a far greater emphasis than Trump on television advertising, a more traditional way of reaching swaths of voters. She spent $72 million on TV ads and about $16 million on internet ads in the final weeks. The former secretary of state also spent more than $12 million on travel — about double what Trump spent. Clinton, who not only had a money advantage over Trump but a staffing edge, spent more than $4 million on a nearly 900-strong payroll. Still, Clinton’s top campaign aides have acknowledged in post-election appearances that it didn’t always spend money in the right places. Her campaign manager Robby Mook said at a gathering of political strategists and journalists last week at Harvard University that he regretted not putting more staff in Michigan. When the state certified its results — 20 days after the election— Trump had won by just under 11,000 votes. Outside groups that spent money on the presidential election also filed reports Thursday. Trump got help from the super political action committees Future 45, Make America Number 1 and Rebuilding America Now. Future 45 and a partner nonprofit that does not disclose donors spent late in the campaign but became Trump’s biggest outside investors. Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, together gave $10 million to Future 45 in the final weeks of the campaign, the new reports show. Former wrestling executive Linda McMahon, who Trump named this week as head of the Small Business Administration, gave $1 million to the group in October. She’d earlier given $6 million to Rebuilding America Now. Make America Number 1 benefited from a $1 million donation by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, now an executive on the Trump transition team. On Clinton’s side, Priorities USA — which raised and spent more than any super PAC in history — landed $16 million in the final weeks of the campaign. That brought its total haul to about $192 million. Some of the group’s final seven-figure contributions came from its most loyal donors: media mogul Haim Saban and investors James Simons and Donald Sussman. The 2016 election is over — but the fundraising continues. The president-elect has raised millions of dollars since Nov. 8. That money is coming in mostly through purchased merchandise such as hats and ornaments and is paying for Trump’s “thank you” tour, which took him to Ohio and Iowa on Thursday. Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
Diane Roberts: Donald Trump feels presidency is ‘man’s job’
Hillary Clinton is sick. Important white men-types, such as Rudy Giuliani, Sean Hannity and Donald Trump, say so. She sits down at some of her campaign appearances — ON A STOOL! Or with a PILLOW BEHIND HER BACK! Clearly, her spine is disintegrating before our very eyes. She has Parkinson’s. A blood clot. A brain tumor. She has no stamina. She’s feeble. She has fits, seizures, rolling her eyes around and laughing. Or she’s possessed by demons. Giuliani, now: there’s an hombre! His intellect is so honed, so energetic, so like a cheetah about to pounce on a gazelle, that at a recent campaign event, he forgot 9/11. Which happened while he was mayor of New York. Last week, he praised Republicans thus: “Under those eight years before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the United States. They all started when Clinton and Obama got into office.” Giuliani’s been all over television, insisting that the press ignores the obvious fact that Clinton is Not Long for This World. Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson, she of the necklace made of bullets and the assertion that “Obama invaded Afghanistan,” went on CNN and concurred: she diagnosed Clinton with “dysphasia,” a language disorder resulting from brain damage. You will have noticed that Hillary Clinton can barely string three words together while Pierson’s boss is a silver-tongued master of Ciceronian rhetoric. Donald Trump says Clinton sleeps all the time. She takes “too many naps.” Trump only needs three or four hours of shut-eye. No naps. He says himself: “no naps for Trump!” Only losers and weaklings nap. But here’s the thing about womenfolk: they are always sick. When they’re young, the monthly cycles make them moody and weird. When they get pregnant, the rampant hormones invade their brains, turning them pretty much crazy. Then it’s the menopause, attacking what little rationality they have left. After that, it’s downhill into dementia. You can’t allow one of them to become the most powerful person on the planet. There was a movie about this very thing: it came out in 1964 and was called “Kisses for My President,” Polly Bergen plays the first woman president; Fred MacMurray is her husband, the First Gentleman. What ensues is, to put it in Trumpian terms: A Disaster! Madam President spends so much time on working with Congress, containing dangerous dictators and dealing with the Russians, she doesn’t even notice that her daughter’s running around with an unsuitable boy, and her emasculated husband, installed in an office with ruffled curtains and other girlie stuff, nearly runs off with an old flame. It’s chaos. Until one day this bad mother of a president faints, and it is revealed she’s pregnant. She resigns (because hormones, obvs) and the natural order is restored. There’s a reason why American women were not allowed to vote until 100 years ago (the anniversary of the 19th Amendment’s final passage is Aug. 26), despite all that stuff about equality and democracy in our founding documents. Because they’re weak. Their uteruses tell them what to do. They get hysterical — that’s from the Greek word for uterus! They’re not strong-minded. Peter Thiel, the gazillionaire founder of PayPal and Trump delegate, thinks it’s a pity women ever got the franchise, since they turn around and vote for welfare, disaster relief, the environment, other women. Bunch of suckers. Or else they’re unfeminine. When Donald Trump divorced his first wife Ivana, he said it was because she no longer had her “softness.” She’d become “an executive, not a wife.” Trump left her, as he told Vanity Fair magazine, for “a piece of ass — a good one!” but when the POA (AKA Marla Maples) took to working outside the home, he balked again: “When I come home and dinner’s not ready, I go through the roof.” Yeah, women are just too emotional and petty to be president. Especially Hillary Clinton. A female Trump voter at a recent rally clarified it for Daily Show reporter Jordan Klepper and the rest of us: “The presidency is a man’s job,” she said. “A female has more hormones she could start a war in 10 seconds.” Ladies, don’t you just want to go lie down? Maybe take a Valium? ___ Diane Roberts’s book “Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America” will be out in paperback this fall. She teaches at FSU.
Former rivals, military leaders, actors to take stage at RNC
Former presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio — the latter by video link — are among those set to speak at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Military leaders, members of Congress, actors, faith leaders and family members of presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump are also set to speak in what the Republican National Committee calls “an unconventional lineup” that will challenge the status quo and press for Trump’s agenda. Speaker highlights at the four-day convention, which begins Monday at the Quicken Loans Arena. MONDAY Theme: Make America Safe Again Headliners: Trump’s wife, Melania; Lt. Gen. (ret.) Michael Flynn, U.S. Army; Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa; and Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont. Others: Willie Robertson, star of “Duck Dynasty”; former Texas Gov. Rick Perry; Marcus Luttrell, retired U.S. Navy SEAL; Scott Baio, actor; Pat Smith, mother of Sean Smith, killed in the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya; Mark “Oz” Geist, member of a security team that fought in Benghazi; John Tiegen, member of Benghazi security team and co-author of the book “13 Hours,” an account of the attacks; Kent Terry and Kelly Terry-Willis, siblings of Brian Terry, a Border Patrol agent whose shooting death revealed the botched “Fast and Furious” gun-smuggling operation; Antonio Sabato Jr., actor; Mary Ann Mendoza, Sabine Durden and Jamiel Shaw, immigration reform advocates; Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas; David Clarke, sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wis.; Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis.; Rachel Campos-Duffy, LIBRE Initiative for Hispanic economic empowerment; Darryl Glenn, Senate candidate in Colorado; Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark.; Karen Vaughn, mother of a U.S. Navy SEAL killed in Afghanistan; Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala.; former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani; and Jason Beardsley of Concerned Veterans for America. ___ TUESDAY Theme: Make America Work Again Headliners: Tiffany Trump, candidate’s daughter; Kerry Woolard, general manager, Trump Winery in Virginia; Donald Trump Jr.; Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va.; former GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson; and actress Kimberlin Brown. Others: Sharon Day, co-chairwoman of Republican National Committee; Dana White, president, Ultimate Fighting Championship; Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson; Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge; former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey; Andy Wist, founder of Standard Waterproofing Co.; Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.; Chris Cox, executive director, NRA Institute for Legislative Action; golfer Natalie Gulbis; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.; House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.; House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.; New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. ___ WEDNESDAY Theme: Make America First Again Headliners: Former presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio; Eric Trump, son of the candidate; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich; and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Trump’s pick to be vice president. Others: radio host Laura Ingraham; Phil Ruffin, businessman with interests in real estate, lodging, manufacturing and energy; Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi; retired astronaut Eileen Collins; Michelle Van Etten, small business owner; Kentucky state Sen. Ralph Alvarado Jr.; Darrell Scott, senior pastor and co-founder of New Spirit Revival Center Ministries, Cleveland; Harold Hamm, oil executive; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; Lynne Patton, vice president, Eric Trump Foundation; Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. (by video); Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas; Callista Gingrich, wife of Newt Gingrich. ___ THURSDAY Theme: Make America One Again Headliners: Peter Thiel, co-founder PayPal; Tom Barrack, CEO of Colony Capital; Ivanka Trump, daughter of the candidate; and Donald Trump, GOP nominee for president. Others: Brock Mealer, motivational speaker; Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.; Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin; Dr. Lisa Shin, owner of Los Alamos Family Eyecare in New Mexico; RNC Chairman Reince Priebus; Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University and evangelical leader. Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
