Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a South Dakota Republican party rally in Rapid City, South Dakota, September 8, 2023.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
Former President Donald Trump is about to deliver a pair of headline speeches Friday night at two socially conservative Christian groups’ gatherings in Washington, D.C., his first trip to the nation’s capital since his criminal arraignment last month.
Trump’s top Republican rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, can also be scheduled to talk on the two summits hosted by the Concerned Women for America Legislative Motion Committee and the Family Research Council.
The ladies’s group, which espouses staunch opposition to abortion, gay marriage and a progressive view of transgender rights, bills itself because the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization. The Family Research Council takes a similarly hard-line tack on social issues.
Also slated to talk on the CWA event are a half-dozen Republican senators, including Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Marco Rubio of Florida and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, together with a “pro-life activist” and a “detransition activist,” amongst others.
Three other GOP primary candidates — former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy — were invited but haven’t been confirmed to talk, in accordance with the group’s event website.
Pence and Ramaswamy are each slated to talk on the Family Research Council’s “Pray Vote Stand” summit, nevertheless.
Women within the GOP primary
In a distinct political moment, Trump’s personal baggage on women’s issues is perhaps a liability for him within the GOP primary.
Certainly one of his 4 energetic criminal cases is targeted on hush money paid to a porn star who alleges she had an extramarital affair with Trump, which he denies.
In May, he was found chargeable for sexually abusing the author E. Jean Carroll and ordered to pay $5 million in her civil rape and defamation case. Trump has also been found chargeable for defaming Carroll in an analogous separate case, which is nevertheless set to go to trial in January.
Greater than a dozen women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct.
Meanwhile, former first lady Melania Trump has been absent from the campaign trail — a stark contrast with Casey DeSantis, who’s frequently by her husband’s side as he crisscrosses key primary states.
Casey DeSantis can also be taking a lead role in “Mamas for DeSantis,” a campaign initiative aimed toward moms. Trump’s campaign has no clear matching platform: searches for “women, “woman” or “mother” on his “Agenda47” campaign policy page yield no results.
And yet, national polls of the Republican primary field give Trump a commanding lead amongst each men and girls.
A Quinnipiac University survey released Wednesday, as an illustration, showed 58% of Republican or Republican-leaning women backing Trump within the presidential primary, compared with 64% of their male counterparts.
Just 14% of girls in the identical group picked DeSantis, while 5% selected former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, the one woman within the running for the GOP nomination.
The poll also showed that while Trump and President Joe Biden are in a dead heat overall, the Democratic incumbent holds a double-digit edge over Trump amongst women registered voters: 56% said they might pick Biden in an election against Trump, who was chosen by 37% of respondents.
A part of that split could also be attributable to Trump’s role in last yr’s hugely consequential Supreme Court decision striking down the constitutional right to an abortion that had been upheld by Roe v. Wade for nearly a half-century.
The three conservative justices appointed by Trump all voted to strike down Roe. The ruling immediately became a rallying cry for Democrats, who went on to outperform expectations within the 2022 midterm elections.
A big majority of U.S. adults still say they disapprove of the highly unpopular court’s decision, recent surveys have shown.
But the ladies’s group Trump is addressing Friday has strongly cheered the choice, with Penny Nance, the organization’s president, calling it a “huge victory for human rights and life.”
Trump’s DC case
Trump was last in D.C. in early August for his arraignment on federal charges stemming from special counsel Jack Smith’s probe of the previous president’s efforts to overturn his loss within the 2020 election.
Trump pleaded not guilty to a four-count indictment accusing him and several other co-conspirators of illegally perpetrating three criminal conspiracies to attempt to subvert the election results. He was arraigned at a federal courthouse just a number of minutes’ walk from the U.S. Capitol, the scene of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot by hundreds of Trump’s supporters who temporarily halted the peaceful transfer of presidential power.
Certainly one of Trump’s alleged conspiracies involved an effort to impede Congress from confirming Biden’s victory on the Capitol on Jan. 6. Because the scene devolved right into a violent riot, Trump and his allies “exploited the disruption” to further their conspiracy, Smith alleged within the indictment.
The case is about for trial next March.
Trump’s latest appearance in D.C. will happen at a hotel ballroom a number of blocks from the White House Ellipse. Shortly before the riot kicked off on Jan. 6, Trump held a “Stop the Steal” rally at that site, urging his followers to march to the Capitol and pressure GOP lawmakers to reject key electoral votes.
The D.C. indictment was the primary of two separate criminal cases charging Trump with attempting to reverse his election loss. The opposite, a sweeping state-level case in Georgia, has yet to set a trial date for Trump and plenty of of his co-defendants.
