WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans say they can hardly imagine former President Donald Trump trying to stay in power for a third term if he’s reelected for a second in November — even after Trump has twice suggested he’d become a president for life “I have no idea what you're talking about,” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) told Raw Story . “I'm sure it's not as worrisome as some of you guys are making it out to be.
” ALSO READ: We asked 10 Republican senators: ‘Is Kamala Harris Black?’ Things got weird fast . Trump recently told attendees at a Turning Point Action event in West Palm Beach, Fla.: "Christians, get out and vote, just this time.
You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians." Last week, when given repeated chances to correct the record with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Trump tripled down.
“I said, ‘vote for me, you’re not going to have to do it ever again.’ It’s true,” Trump told Ingraham. Even Trump’s closest allies in the Senate — and Raw Story exclusively interviewed 10 Senate Republicans on the topic in recent days — were left stunned when we ran the former president’s own words by them.
“What do you make of Trump saying, ‘vote for me once and you’ll never, ever vote again’?” Raw Story asked. “I’ve got no comment on that,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) told Raw Story.
“I'm sure that's out of context.” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) speaks to reporters at the U.
S. Capitol Building on July 25, 2024 in Washington, D.C.
(Photo by Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images) The disbelief teeters toward confusion for many. “I didn’t hear it,” Sen.
Rick Scott (R-FL) told Raw Story. “I’ll have to look.” “Democrats are worried he’ll never release the reins of power,” Raw Story pressed.
“I don't think that's true,” Scott said. “I didn't see it, though.” ‘Sounds preposterous’ Even the Republicans who did catch Trump’s comments are confused.
“I don't understand that statement,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) told Raw Story. “I personally want every voter to vote in every election.
” ALSO READ: Texas sheriffs engage conspiracy theorist who created Trump enemies 'target list' “Democrats say, ‘Look, this is proof that he wants to pull a 2020 again and not give up the reigns of power,’” Raw Story said. “I don't think you can conclude that,” Collins said. Still other Republicans were left asking Raw Story to parse the former president’s comments.
“No, I didn't. I saw it in a headline,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) told Raw Story.
“What did it mean? What did he say exactly?” “I don’t know. I can’t interpret him,” Raw Story replied. “But it’s: ‘vote in November and you never have to vote again.
’” “Like, ever in your whole life?” Murkowski inquired. Sen. Kelly spoke to reporters on Republican vice presidential candidate Sen.
J.D. Vance's (R-OH) recent comments on women and calling Democrats "childless cat ladies.
" (Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images) “That's kind of what he implied,” Raw Story said. “I'm assuming what it must mean is ‘you'll never have to vote for me again, because I'll be termed out,’” Murkowski said. “Maybe, but that's an assumption your Democratic colleagues don't give after what happened in 2020,” Raw Story replied.
“Oh, no, no. Come on. He's served once, and if he’s successful and he serves twice, there are those that think that he would find a way to give himself a third term?” Murkowski asked.
“Yeah,” Raw Story replied as the senator’s face contorted with constitutional confusion. “So that sounds preposterous to you?” “Yes. It sounds preposterous to me,” Murkowski said.
“Yes.” Assuming the best Just like Senate Republicans did throughout Trump’s four years in the White House, most now refuse to publicly contemplate the worst from Trump — and instead just assume the best from the party’s standard bearer. “You know, I don’t try to interpret what President Trump means.
I assume he just means, get him in there and he’ll fix all the issues,” Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) told Raw Story. “If you take things literally with him, you're always gonna need interpretation.
” And plenty of Republicans are interpreting Trump’s comments in the best light. “It sounded to me like he was saying, ‘I'm not gonna be on the ballot again, so you don't have to vote for me again,’” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) told Raw Story.
“So, you know, I didn't see the full context of it, but I don't take it seriously.” Other Republicans take Trump seriously, if not literally. “I caught it,” Sen.
John Kennedy (R-LA) acknowledged to Raw Story. “When the president gives speeches and answers questions and interviews, he often adopts a stream of consciousness model, and I think that was just part of his stream of consciousness.” Sen.
John Kennedy (R-LA) at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on July 30, 2024 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) “Is that one where the media — we take it too literally?” Raw Story asked.
“With President Trump, you can't take everything literally,” Kennedy said. “He's very forthcoming in terms of answering questions, and there's both risk and reward to that.” Even after being passed up as Trump’s running mate, Sen.
Marco Rubio (R-FL) is still quick to defend his fellow Floridian. “It’s being taken out of context like everything else he says,” Rubio told Raw Story. “He doesn't speak in the dialect of Washington.
” While Rubio failed to illuminate what the former president meant, Democrats say, in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S.
Capitol, instead of making excuses for Trump, their Republican colleagues should start listening to him and then take him both seriously and literally. “Here's a president who doesn't just joke about undermining our democracy but has taken actions to do that with ..
. his decision to stop the certification of our last election,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told Raw Story.
“So when he makes jokes like that they have a chilling effect on our nation, and I think it's really problematic.” Donald Trump made a frantic call to a political fixer soon after his son Don Jr. claimed a powerful position in the former president's second bid to reclaim the White House, a new book reveals.
Trump called conservative consultant Susie Wiles in March 2022 as he and his son mounted a furious revenge campaign against Republicans such as former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WI) who had spoken out against the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021, writes political correspondent Meredith McGraw.
“It’s a f---ing mess,” Trump reportedly told Wiles. “I don’t know who’s in charge. I don’t know how much money I have.
I don’t know if they’re stealing from me. I don’t know who’s who. I need you to fix it.
” This anecdote appears in McGraw's new book "Trump in Exile" which was excerpted Monday morning in Vanity Fair . The book reveals a campaign in chaos as Trump's daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner took a large step away from Trump world politics and toward a jet-setting life in New York City. It was a "strange and empty time" for Trump's Florida club Mar-a-Lago, which had plummeted in social ranks on the heels of an attempted White House takeover and amid an ongoing global pandemic, reports McGraw.
A meeting of political advisers in February to discuss political endorsements, targeting Republicans upon whom Trump was "hell-bent" on inflicting revenge, was stark, McGraw writes. "Being associated with someone who inspired a bloody attack on the Capitol didn’t have the same social clout as being associated with a president," McGraw writes. ""The meeting was held in the empty tea room at Mar-a-Lago, a dining room just off the main living room.
..There was no set agenda.
No one was in charge." But Trump's advisers walked away with a distinct impression that Trump Jr. would play a larger role, according to McGraw.
"Trump Jr. looked forward to disappearing into the wilderness of Pennsylvania to hunt deer and was eager to make his own mark on the MAGA movement," she writes. A target for Trump's wrath also emerged.
ALSO READ: We asked 10 Republican senators: ‘Is Kamala Harris Black?’ Things got weird fast . "For the next year, it would be an all-hands-on-deck effort to identify and elevate a competitive candidate that could take down Cheney, the one Republican who dared to stand up against Trump and challenge the former president on January 6 and his falsehoods about the 2020 election," writes McGraw. "Trump’s political fate, they believed, rested on taking Cheney down.
" Cheney would ultimately lose the Republican primary to the Trump-endorsed challenger, Harriet Hageman in August 2022, but it would take Wiles' help to get started, reports McGraw. Wiles has worked for Trump twice before but did not consider herself a Trump insider, and was therefore surprised when Trump pleaded for just a "couple weeks of her time," according to McGraw. "Except that getting Trump’s current operation in line, from fundraising to personnel, didn’t take two weeks—it took around two months," writes McGraw.
"Wiles—much to the relief of Trump’s family, who viewed her as trustworthy, and his longtime aides, who were happy to see an adult in the room—was now in charge." CONTINUE READING Show less Lynne Ingram cuts a peaceful figure as she tends to a row of humming beehives in a leafy corner of Somerset, southwest England. But the master beekeeper, who has been keeping hives for more than 40 years, has found herself in a fight against a tricky and evolving foe -- honey fraudsters.
The practice of adulterating honey is well known, and historically adulterants such as ash and potato flour have been used. Now, advancements in technology and science have made it much easier, with "bespoke, designer or bioengineered" syrups used as diluting agents capable of fooling authenticity tests, Ingram said. She founded the UK Honey Authenticity Network (HAN UK) in 2021 to raise awareness about natural honey and warn of the threat posed by fraud.
"One of the impacts we're seeing all over the world is beekeepers going out of business," she said. Adulterated honey can be sold to retailers for a price several times lower than genuine producers can afford. As well as producing their own honey, many larger-scale beekeepers have crop pollination contracts with farmers, delivering thousands of colonies to growers across the country.
If they go out of business due to unfair competition, this vital natural method of pollinating crops is reduced and food production suffers. The British Beekeepers Association, which represents more than 25,000 producers and where Ingram is a honey ambassador, wants the risk of fraud to be recognized to protect the industry and consumers. "I'd like to see an acknowledgement that there is actually an issue here," she said.
- Better labelling - In May, the European Union updated its honey regulations to ensure clearer product labelling and a "honey traceability system" to increase transparency. On the labelling for blended honeys, for example, all countries of origin are now required to appear near a product's name, where previously it was only mandatory to state whether blending had occurred. Labelling in the UK, which has now left the EU, is not as stringent and Ingram believes consumers are "being misled" by vague packaging.
Behind the EU action is an apparent increase in adulterated honey arriving in the 27-nation bloc. The substandard adulterates can have adverse effects on consumers' health, such as raising the risk of diabetes, obesity, and liver or kidney damage. Between 2021 and 2022, 46 percent of the honey tested as it entered the EU was flagged as potentially fraudulent, up from 14 percent in the 2015-17 period.
Of the suspicious consignments, 74 percent were of Chinese origin. Honey imported from the UK had a 100-percent suspicion rate. The EU said this honey was probably produced in third countries and blended again in the UK before being sent to the bloc.
The UK is the second largest importer of honey in terms of volume in the whole of Europe. China is its top supplier. Not all of the UK's imported honey leaves the country, however.
Considerable quantities stay on the domestic market. "We think there's an awful lot of it on the shelves," said Ingram, adding that adulterated honey was "widely available" in big supermarkets. - Lasers - Behind the closed blinds of a research laboratory at Aston University in Birmingham, central England, researchers fighting honey fraud are harnessing cutting-edge technology.
Aston scientists and beekeepers, including Ingram, are using light to reveal the contents of honey samples at the molecular level. The technique -- known as Fluorescence Excitation-Emission Spectroscopy (FLE) -- involves firing lasers into samples. The light frequencies re-emitted are then collated into a three-dimensional image -- or "molecular fingerprint" -- of the honey tested.
Alex Rozhin, the project lead and a reader in nanotechnology, said the test "can trace different molecules through the spectrum and confirm which type of biochemicals are present". In the darkened lab, the light from different honeys is clearly visible. The first gives off a vivid green and the second a cooler blue, indicating distinct chemical compositions.
Using FLE, Rozhin says his team "can immediately trace a concentration of fraud inside samples" with "different spectral bands corresponding to syrup (or) to natural honey". Rozhin said FLE is more accurate than existing tests and can provide results far quicker, at a greatly reduced cost and without the need for highly trained personnel. One of the Aston team's aims is to create a version of FLE that can be used by honey producers or even consumers with scaled-down equipment or eventually just a smartphone.
Rolling the test out like this would also accelerate the creation of a honey database which, through machine learning, could be used as a catalogue of biometric signatures. "If we get a new sample and it's been tampered with and it's different from how the database is built up, we'll know there's something obscure," said Steven Daniels, an Aston research associate specializing in machine learning. Ingram said the test could close international gaps in testing methods by establishing a unified standard, but the government needed to monitor the sector too.
"We really need to get to grips with this," she said. CONTINUE READING Show less Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned on Monday as thousands of protesters defied a military curfew and stormed her official residence. Army chief Waker-Us-Zaman said in a televised address that Hasina, 76, had left the country and that an interim government would be formed.
Waker's announcement comes after more than 90 people were killed on Sunday in the deadliest day of violence in anti-government demonstrations that began in July. Bangladesh 's army chief Waker-Uz-Zaman said Monday he would "form an interim government" after the prime minister resigned and fled the capital in the face of overwhelming protests. "I am taking full responsibility," the general said, dressed in military fatigues and cap, although it was not immediately clear if he would head a caretaker government.
"We will form an interim government," Waker said in a broadcast to the nation on state television, adding that Sheikh Hasina had resigned. "The country has suffered a lot, the economy has been hit, many people have been killed -- it is time to stop the violence," he added. "I hope after my speech, the situation will improve.
" He said he would talk to the president to form the interim government and had held talks with the main opposition parties and civil society members -- but not Hasina's Awami League. Waker is a career infantry officer who has spent nearly four decades in the military, serving two tours as a UN peacekeeper as well as in the prime minister's office. "If the situation gets better, there is no need for emergency", he said, vowing the new authorities would "prosecute all murders" following weeks of deadly protests .
"Now the task of the students is to keep calm and help us," he said. Bedecked with medal ribbons on his green uniform, the mild-looking and spectacle-wearing officer was appointed to the military's top job as chief of army staff earlier this year. (AFP) CONTINUE READING Show less.
