The GOP Primary Field is expanding, but so is President Trump’s lead.
(Note: Since these newsletters are long, Substack has indicated they may get cut off a bit when receiving them by email. If that happens, you can always access the full newsletter directly on Substack.)
In addition to Twitter, you can also follow us on Truth Social, Gettr, and Gab.
Table Of Contents
GOP Primary Heating Up
Over the past few weeks, the GOP Presidential Primary has seen two new additions: Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.
Senator Tim Scott went with the more traditional rally announcement.
The Tim Scott announcement was nothing special and instantly forgettable. The only clip that went viral from his speech was his cringe Howard Dean scream.
Senator Tim Scott may be loved by the GOP Establishment and Fox News, but he is at best an average GOP Establishment Republican. He also happens to be more closely aligned with the Woke Left’s views on crime than with the Right.
Revolver News and Tucker Carlson have done a great job exposing Scott’s weak record.
Revolver News: Don’t Believe the Hype: Tim Scott Is Not the Future of the Republican Party
At critical moments, Scott has repeatedly abandoned conservatives and nationalists to hand victories to globalists and the left, sometimes with lethal consequences.
Governor Ron DeSantis kicked off his campaign with a completely new approach, announcing on a Twitter Space with Twitter CEO Elon Musk and Silicon Valley Entrepreneur David Sacks.
Governor DeSantis’ announcement was much more talked about than Scott’s, but not for the reasons you would want for your big campaign kickoff. The Twitter Space Announcement drew a lot of attention, but was plagued with technical issues. Once those were fixed, the audience tuning in was significantly smaller and the conversation felt like an extremely boring conference call.
Megyn Kelly had a pretty good summary of the many issues with the DeSantis’ Twitter Space Announcement.
The Trump Team had fun reacting to the glitchy announcement.
It was a really risky and creative move, but it didn’t pay off. The biggest surprise has to be the lack of a visual component. This is all people saw of Governor DeSantis during his Campaign Announcement on Twitter.
Compare that to President Trump’s announcement last year and the iconic escalator announcement in 2015.
The DeSantis Team did put out a hype video after the Twitter Space, but it bizarrely featured a lot of pictures and videos of Elon Musk.
Even Fox News, which has been pretty Pro-DeSantis but is perhaps feeling slighted due to the Governor choosing to take his announcement to Twitter instead of them, took a shot at him after his Twitter Space Announcement.
Now while there were technical issues with the DeSantis Announcement, the Twitter Space did still generate a lot of buzz about his campaign. But did it have an impact on the polling?
Not in the Governor’s favor, according to a recent Yahoo News/YouGov Poll.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was surely hoping for a bump from his presidential campaign launch last week. But a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows no sign of improvement.
In fact, the survey of 1,520 U.S. adults, which was conducted from May 25-30, suggests that DeSantis may have actually lost ground against frontrunner and former President Donald Trump since officially entering the race for the 2024 GOP nomination during a glitchy Twitter Spaces event with the platform’s billionaire owner Elon Musk.
Among potential Republican primary voters — registered voters who identify as Republicans or GOP-leaning independents — Trump now leads the full field of seven declared candidates with 53%. That’s up from 48% in early May, before DeSantis threw his hat in the ring. And DeSantis now lags further behind than he did just a few weeks ago; his 25% is down from 28% in early May.
Put another way, DeSantis trailed Trump by 20 points in the previous Yahoo News/YouGov poll. Today, he trails by 28 points.
None of the remaining candidates — former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley (3%), Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (1%), South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott (3%), tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (3%) or radio host Larry Elder (1%) — clear the 5% threshold.
A hypothetical two-way matchup, meanwhile, is no better for DeSantis, with Trump leading 55% to 31% (up from 50% to 36% in early May).
It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next few months as the candidates travel around Iowa and New Hampshire, but President Trump is still looking strong despite the arrival of these new challengers.
And there may be even more who join in. Former Vice President Mike Pence is expected to announce next week and rumors are flying about people like Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire.
We’ll have more to say about this primary in the future, but one last thing we’d like to bring up is something Sean Hannity discussed with President Trump during the Fox News Town Hall this week. During the Town Hall, Sean Hannity brought up whether President Trump should “tone it down” on the campaign trail. The audience and President Trump had the perfect reaction.
President Trump smashed aside the GOP Primary Field in 2016 by being tough, and every time the Mainstream Media said it would hurt him it only made him more popular.
Our message to Trump and his Team remains the same.
President Trump thrives in the arena. It may not be the safe play according to many DC politicos, but Trump was not built to play it safe. It’s not in his nature, and it’s one of main reasons people love him. He’s an outsider who wasn’t built by the political class. Let him do what he does best.
“A ship is safest in the harbor, but that’s not what a ship was built for.”
Let Trump be Trump.
New January 6th Footage Developments
Before this week, we hadn’t seen any new footage from January 6th since Tucker Carlson was given access by Speaker McCarthy back in March.
Unfortunately, the new footage stopped after that week and Tucker Carlson is currently sidelined at the moment.
But this week, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene announced on Twitter that Speaker McCarthy has now given journalists John Solomon and Julie Kelly “unfettered access” to the January 6th tapes.
While it is still disappointing that the footage has not been released to the public, John Solomon and Julie Kelly have done excellent reporting on this topic and will know what to look for.
Additionally, they do bring up some understandable concerns.
Julie Kelly has been one of the leading champions in getting to the truth about January 6th. Here is her take on this limited release.
Still, this is an enormous amount of footage to go through and while we have a lot of faith in the reporters handling this, it is quite a large task. But we’ll wait and see how this goes for now.
Here is what has been released so far.
Julie Kelly’s Piece In The American Greatness About This Footage: J6 Footage Shows Camera Rolling as Pelosi Made Her ‘Insurrection’ Exit
The surveillance video shows a different angle than the recordings released to CNN by Alexandra Pelosi in October. In that footage, Pelosi appears to engage in a bit of play-acting as the camera rolls. “If they stop the proceedings, they will have succeeded in stopping the validation of the president of the United States,” she told McCullough through a face mask as they walked through unidentified hallways in the Capitol. “If they stop the proceedings, we will have totally failed.”
More to come.
Solomon, in conjunction with American Greatness, will release additional clips in the coming weeks.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Columbia Bugle to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.