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TIME magazine says Trump’s glass jaw may be exposed, dented

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Former US President Donald Trump’s “Glass Jaw” may have been exposed and dented by the eight hearings of the congressional committee on the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill riot, but most Republicans believe still that his policies are right for the country but his personality might not be for the high office and the search for an alternative candidate within the party might be really tough, says TIME magazine.

Making this analysis, TIME magazine writer analyst Brian Bennet says that the eighth hearing of the Senate Select Committee could have dented his image and quoting an unnamed official further added: “Trump’s Glass Jaw may have been exposed, dented and donors may be wary of funding his 2024 presidential run.”

The eighth hearing hearing has considerably damaged Trump’s image before a prime time audience of 20 million plus that showed explosive footage of the former leader’s behaviour on January 6, 2021 and the stars witnesses lined up like press aide Sarah Mathews and deputy national security advisor Mathew Pottinger who said they resigned immediately after they found Trump was not listening to any White House staff to quell the riotous mob, TIME said in its web edition.

Most Republicans feel Trump’s policies are the right ones for America but a candidate like him may not be the right choice for the Oval Office after the exposures and testimonies in the hearings.

Who is the alternative for Trump, who is still making his 3rd bid for the presidency to be nominated by the party for the 2024 presidential run, the magazine says indicating that his donors may be wary of funding his campaign trail with the kind of dents the eight hearings have made on his personality.

Republicans still supporting Trump were a target audience for all eight of the committee’s recent hearings. But on Thursday night, Representative Liz Cheney used her closing remarks to appeal to that group directly.

“The case against Donald Trump in these hearings is not made by witnesses who were his political enemies,” said Cheney, a Wyoming Republican and the committee’s vice chair.

“It is instead a series of confessions by Donald Trump’s own appointees, his own friends, his own campaign officials, people who worked for him for years, and his own family.”

The hearing on Thursday detailed Trump’s repeated refusal to quell the deadly mob, even when he knew that some of them were armed and that former Vice President Mike Pence’s life was in danger.

Cheney suggested the former President’s supporters should view his behavior related to that day as disqualifying for future office as many of Trump’s former allies do.

“Can a president who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of January 6th ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?” she asked.

“A lot more Republicans today than before the hearings have started to say, ‘No, I think we can find someone who has less baggage, who will do the same kinds of things that I want’,” says Whit Ayers, a Republican pollster and political consultant who appears to go ahead with Trump’s policies but not Trump as a personality.

Thursday night’s hearing included new searing moments of Trump’s disinterest in helping end the violence unfolding on Capitol Hill.

Video showed how he ad-libbed support for the rioters while recording a video message in the late afternoon of January 6, as his supporters continued to engage in hand-to-hand combat with police at the Capitol. Trump told them to “go home” but also validated their behavior by saying the election was “stolen” and calling the violent mob “very special” and saying “we love you”.

The committee also showed video outtakes from January 7, when Trump recorded a video message that aides had scripted to tell the public he knew the election had ended. He refused to go that far.

“I don’t want to say the election is over,” Trump says to aides in the room, including his daughter, Ivanka Trump. “I just want to say that Congress has certified the results without saying the election’s over, OK?”

Earlier in the hearing, investigators played video footage and radio transmissions showing Pence’s Secret Service detail frantically trying to find a clear path to evacuate him from a room near the Senate Chamber as a violent mob stood off against Capitol Police officers’ steps away.

A national security official who had listened to the radio transmissions that day told the committee that members of Pence’s security detail felt they were in such life-threatening danger, that they passed along messages to tell their loved ones if they didn’t survive.

Ayers says that it’s become “an article of faith” among Republicans that only Democrats are watching the hearings. But even if many Republicans are not watching them, they have not been able to avoid learning about the information coming out of them.

“Much of the testimony is so compelling and so shocking that it seeps into the political water,” Ayers says.

“Does Donald Trump have more of a glass jaw now than people realize?” a former administration official not wishing to be named was quoted by the magazine as saying. The official says the clearest impact on Donald Trump politically can be seen in the Republican Party’s powerful donor base, many of whom have been “rattled” by the barrage of testimony that has cast the White House after the 2020 election as chaotic and him as out of control.

The official says a consistent reaction has been” “Wow, it was more effed up than I realized.” The hearings have also raised questions among some large GOP donors about the polling that suggests Trump would be tough to beat in a Republican primary, and whether it may be masking a broader weariness among his base.

Unlike other Presidents who came from the Congress and Capitol Hill, Trump was a rank outsider, who contested for the post three times and was always on the front pages of the media for 30 years on despite not being in politics.

Thursday’s hearing continued the drumbeat of revelations over six weeks of testimony. Yet none of it so far has shown to markedly dent Trump’s approval ratings among Republican voters, which remains firmly in the mid-80s. And whenever the former President holds a public appearance, he still manages to draw supporters by the thousands.

In other words, he remains the biggest star in his party by a long shot, Bennet says in his article.

And yet, the hearings appear to have inflicted some political damage on Trump. Republican strategists are seeing signs that his grip on the party is easing slightly. While polling data confirms Republican voters still like Trump, it also shows that more of them are now open to backing a different presidential candidate for 2024, even if Trump chooses to throw his hat in the ring for a third time.

A different former aide to Trump said that the hearings were unlikely to have changed many minds among Republicans. “I don’t think it moved anybody,” the former aide said. “Donald Trump lived his life for 30 years on the pages of the New York tabloids before he ever ran for office. Everybody knew who he was. We knew the bargain.”

But the former aide acknowledged that some Republicans are looking for a candidate who is not Trump.

“There’s a segment of people who would be like, �If we could get Trump policies without the drama, I would take that’,” says the former aide. But there is concern that no candidate who fits that mold could win an election. Few potential Republican challengers have ever had to go head-to-head against Trump and face the type of withering political attacks Trump built his career on.

The hearings began on June 9. Surveys released at the beginning of the month and on June 29 from Morning Consult/Politico found Trump’s support in 2024 from Republican voters held steady at 53 per cent. But Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s support over those two surveys grew, from 16 per cent to 22 per cent. The same late-June poll found 51 per cent of Republican voters think Trump should continue to play a “major role” in theparty, down from 60 per cent in mid-May, before the hearings began.

For some former Trump supporters, the evidence presented by the committee has been impossible to ignore. Jeff Leach, a Republican in the Texas House of Representatives representing part of Collins County in the outskirts of Dallas, was a supporter of Trump throughout his presidency. On Twitter Thursday evening, he revealed he reached a “turning point” when he saw how Trump turned on his deputy Pence, who had been a “fiercely loyal” vice president. “That was THE moment for me,” Leach wrote, adding: “we Republicans need someone else running for President in 2024.”

The committee’s work isn’t done. The January 6 committee will spend August “pursuing emerging new information on multiple fronts,” Liz Cheney, vice chair of the senate select committee said. A Republican from Wyoming who is facing party ire for opposing Trump and stands the chance of losing her seat to a Trump nominated party member in the November 8 elections for house of reps this year. She pointed out that the committee has repeatedly succeeded in court in overcoming immunity and executive privilege claims. New witnesses have come forward, she added, and more information is coming in.

“Doors have opened, new subpoenas have been issued and the dam has begun to break,” Cheney said.

Shifting perceptions of Trump’s actions around January 6, and the possibility that he may be prosecuted for it, have colored discussions over whether he should run again, and, if so, when he should announce. As the Republican Party works to leverage Joe Biden’s dismal approval ratings into a takeover of the House and maybe even the Senate, Trump could throw a wrench in those plans by announcing before the mid-terms, as he’s repeatedly hinted, he might, the magazine said “The Republican’s best case is to make the midterms a referendum on the Biden Administration’s leadership and the Democrats’ leadership,” Bennet quoted Ayers as saying.

“But if Donald Trump announces before the midterms, it allows the Democrats to make it more of a choice, and take some of the focus away from the failures of the Biden administration ( searing inflation and soaring gas prices and the rock bottom job approval ratings for Joe Biden.”

Such a shift “would certainly help the Democrats”, Ayers is quoted by Bennet as saying.

International News

World Central Kitchen to halt Gaza operations due to supply depletion

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Gaza, May 8: The food relief organisation World Central Kitchen (WCK) has announced that it will halt cooking in the Gaza Strip due to the depletion of humanitarian supplies.

“After serving more than 130 million total meals and 26 million loaves of bread over the past 18 months, World Central Kitchen no longer has the supplies to cook meals or bake bread in Gaza,” the Washington, D.C.-headquartered charity said on Wednesday in a press statement.

“Since Israel closed border crossings in early March, WCK has been unable to replenish the stocks of food that we use to feed hundreds of thousands of Gazans daily,” the non-governmental organisation added.

WCK’s large-scale field kitchens have run out of the ingredients needed to prepare daily meals, and its mobile bakery has no flour left, it said, adding that more than 80 per cent of community kitchens in Gaza have run out of WCK-provided stock, Xinhua news agency reported.

Meanwhile, Amjad Shawa, director of the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organisations Network in Gaza, warned that the closure of community kitchens, given the depletion of their food supplies, could exacerbate the hunger.

“The repercussions of the severe humanitarian disaster will be significant on the health and lives of citizens, especially children, women, the elderly, and the sick,” Shawa told Xinhua.

“If all parties do not intervene to save the situation by opening the crossings and allowing the entry of humanitarian and medical aid, we will be facing an extremely dangerous situation in Gaza,” he said.

Israel halted the entry of goods and supplies into Gaza on March 2, following the expiration of the first phase of a January ceasefire agreement with Hamas.

The UN has warned of an impending humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, reporting increasing signs of acute hunger, particularly among children.

Israel has faced growing international pressure to lift an aid blockade that it imposed in March after the collapse of a ceasefire deal. Israel has accused agencies, including the United Nations, of allowing large quantities of aid to fall into the hands of Hamas, which seizes supplies intended for civilians for its own forces.

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UNSC raps Pak, poses tough questions concerning J&K terror attack: Reports

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United Nations, May 6: The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has pulled up Pakistan and asked tough questions concerning the terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam at its closed session amid the escalating tensions between New Delhi and Islamabad, reports said.

The members slammed Islamabad and questioned Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba’s involvement in the Pahalgam attack, which killed 26 people.

Though Pakistan claimed that the meeting largely served and achieved the objectives of the UNSC’s meeting, reports showed that it flopped miserably.

In the meeting, which was called at the request of Pakistan’s Permanent Representative Asim Iftikhar Ahmad, he claimed that his country was not involved in the terror attack.

Though the session was a closed consultation and had no official records, the UNSC members called for dialogue and restraint to resolve the issues.

After the meeting on Monday, UNSC President Evangelos Sekeris told reporters, “The Security Council is always helpful in such efforts” to de-escalate. It is the responsibility of the Council. It was a productive and helpful meeting. Since the meeting was a closed consultation, its proceedings are secret without official records.”

Assistant Secretary-General Mohamed Khaled Khiari, who briefed the meeting, said all want de-escalation. Russia’s Deputy Permanent Representative Anna Evstigneeva, who attended the meeting, said, “We hope for de-escalation”.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the situation was at a “boiling point” and asked the two countries to “step back from the brink”.

“It is also essential — especially at this critical hour — to avoid a military confrontation that could easily spin out of control,” he said.

Condemning “strongly” the terrorist massacre of 26 people in Pahalgam last month, he said, “I understand the raw feelings following the awful terror attack”.

Notably, The Resistance Front (TRF), an affiliate of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack, in which 25 Indians and one Nepalese national were killed.

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Putin dials PM Modi, offers Russia’s ‘full support’ to India in ‘uncompromising fight’ against terrorism (Lead)

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Moscow/New Delhi, May 5: Russian President Vladimir Putin called Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday and “strongly condemned” the April 22 terror attack in Pahalgam, offering “full support” to India in its ongoing fight against terrorism.

“He conveyed deepest condolences on the loss of innocent lives and expressed full support to India in the fight against terrorism. He emphasised that the perpetrators of the heinous attack and their supporters must be brought to justice,” Randhir Jaiswal, spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), stated after the call.

“Both leaders reiterated their commitment to further deepen India-Russia Special and Privileged Strategic Partnership. PM Modi conveyed greetings to President Putin on the celebration of the 80th anniversary of Victory Day and invited him for the Annual Summit to be held in India later in the year,” Jaiswal added.

The brutal assault on April 22, which resulted in the death of 26 innocent tourists, unfolded in the Baisaran Valley near Pahalgam when four heavily armed terrorists, two of them from Pakistan, emerged from the surrounding dense forests and opened indiscriminate fire on tourists. The attack has been described as one of the most horrific in the region in recent memory.

Monday’s call between the two leaders took place before the Russian President hosts Chinese President Xi Jinping, who will be on an official visit to the Russian Federation from May 7-10 and take part in the ceremonial events dedicated to the 80th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War.

In a statement issued later in the day, the Kremlin said that Vladimir Putin once again expressed sincere condolences to PM Modi over the death of Indian citizens as a result of the barbaric terrorist attack on April 22 in the city of Pahalgam in southern Kashmir. Both sides, it said, emphasised the need for an “uncompromising fight” against terrorism in any form.

“During the conversation, the strategic nature of Russian-Indian relations of a special privileged partnership was emphasised. These relations are not subject to external influence and continue to develop dynamically in all directions. Narendra Modi congratulated Vladimir Putin and the entire Russian people on the upcoming 80th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War. It was noted that Victory Day is a common holiday. The Indian representative will take part in the ceremonial events in Moscow,” read the statement issued by the Russian President’s office.

“The Indian leader reiterated his invitation to the Russian President to visit India for the traditional annual bilateral summit. The invitation was accepted with gratitude,” it added.

PM Modi, who had also been invited by Putin for the participation in the Victory Day celebrations, will however not be travelling to Russia.

The Russian President had earlier extended his condolences to President Droupadi Murmu and Prime Minister Modi over the tragic consequences of the terrorist attack in Pahalgam.

“Kindly accept the sincere condolences over the tragic consequences of the terrorist attack in Pahalgam whose victims were civilians — citizens of various countries. This brutal crime has no justification whatsoever. We expect that its organisers and perpetrators will face a deserved punishment. I would like to reiterate our commitment to further increasing cooperation with Indian partners in fighting terrorism in all its forms and manifestations. Please convey words of sincere sympathy and support to the near and dear ones of the deceased as well as wishes for a speedy recovery of all injured,” Putin wrote on April 22.

On May 2, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had dialled External Affairs Minister (EAM) S. Jaishankar do discuss topical issues of the Russian-Indian cooperation, as well as the “aggravation of Indian-Pakistani relations” following the terrorist attack near Pahalgam.

Lavrov called for the settlement of disagreements between New Delhi and Islamabad by political and diplomatic means on a bilateral basis in accordance with the provisions of the Simla Agreement of 1972 and the Lahore Declaration of 1999.

“Discussed the Pahalgam terrorist attack with FM Lavrov of Russia yesterday. Its perpetrators, backers and planners must be brought to justice. Also spoke about our bilateral cooperation activities,” Jaishankar posted on X after the phone call.

Putin had earlier invited Prime Minister Modi to attend the celebrations to mark the 75th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War in Moscow in May 2020.

Earlier, Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov had confirmed that the Russian President is expected to visit India in early 2025 following an invitation from Prime Minister Modi.

The visit is being planned as part of the ongoing commitment to annual meetings between the two leaders.

“Our leaders have an agreement to meet once a year. This time, it is our turn,” Ushakov had said during a press briefing.

The last visit by the Russian President to India took place on December 6, 2021, during the 21st India-Russia Annual Summit in New Delhi.

Meanwhile, PM Modi held two high-profile visits to Russia last year, attending the 22nd Russia-India Summit in July and later participated in the BRICS Summit held in Kazan in October.

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