The Pantone Color Institute has been governing worldwide color trends since 2000, providing, according to its website, “a universal language of color that enables color-critical decisions through every stage of the workflow for brands and manufacturers.”

That means that, come spring, you can expect to see peach-toned clothing, shoes, home furnishings and wall paints dominating their respective domains as designers scramble to satisfy a trend-hungry public. You’ll also see a plethora of peachy plants at the nursery.

Breeding new plants takes much longer — at least a decade, in most cases — than making new textiles. But make no mistake: Garden centers will be stocking a dizzying array of existing peach-toned plants this spring, and many will be new to us.

Some of my favorites:

ROSES
At Last is a beautiful light-orange shrub rose that checks all the boxes: It’s highly fragrant, low-maintenance, disease-resistant, and blooms from early summer through fall in zones 5-9.

Peach Drift, too, offers disease resistance and repeat blooming from spring through frost, but with a spreading habit. This groundcover rose is ideal for hillsides or open areas in zones 4-11.

SHRUBS
Double Take flowering quince is a long-blooming, low-maintenance, heat- and drought-tolerant spring bloomer with soft peach flowers that grows in zones 5-9. Unlike older varieties, it doesn’t have thorns, so you can work around it and make bouquets without getting pricked.

Suntastic Peach abelia puts forth pretty white flowers all summer long, but the real star of the show is its bright-peach evergreen foliage. As a bonus, it offers superior drought resistance and heat tolerance and is smaller than standard abelias. Grow it in zones 6-10.

Peaches and Cream is a bushy, heat- and drought-resistant Grevillea shrub suited for zones 9-11. Its eye-catching, multi-toned flowers bloom year-round against bright green, dense, dissected foliage.

PERENNIALS
Firefly Peach Sky yarrow flowers emerge peachy and then fade to yellow as they age, creating a kaleidoscope of peach, orange, cream and yellow interest as some flowers in different stages of maturity converge. Thrives in zones 3-8.

Pyromania Hot and Cold, a Kniphofia or red hot poker plant, has spiky flowers that are peachy at their tips and creamy at their base, making for quite the garden conversation piece. They rebloom all summer in zones 5-9 over tall, grassy foliage, and resist drought, salt, deer and rabbits.

Venti Tequila Sunrise dahlia is a showy, vigorous plant that lives up to its name. Peach-toned double flowers with coral tips and yellow bases bloom on mounded plants from early summer through frost. Hardy in-ground in zones 8-10; dig up and store tubers indoors over winter in colder zones.

Fresco Apricot is a striking plant: It’s taller and narrower than most other echinaceas, and its large zinnia-like flowers are a delicious peachy-apricot shade. Expect nearly nonstop blooms from June through October in zones 4-9.

ANNUALS
Celway Salmon cockscomb boasts velvety, spiked flower clusters, each composed of one central plume surrounded by several smaller plumes atop tall, strong stems. The salmon-colored clusters bloom from spring through late summer, and their longevity in bouquets makes them well-suited for the cutting garden.

Vivacia Orange dianthus is a low-growing, creeping plant with grass-like foliage and large, solid, light-orange blooms. Although some cultivars are perennial, this one is categorized as annual.

Superbena Peachy Keen verbena is a vigorous grower that blooms continuously from spring through fall without deadheading. It’s also heat-tolerant and deer-resistant.

Toucan Coral Canna is a dramatic plant with pretty peach flowers and a strong tropical vibe. The long-blooming plant tolerates heat, humidity and drought, and deer tend to avoid it.

Begonia Cocoa Enchanted Sunrise has unusual, dark, chocolate-colored leaves with lime green veins that contrast strikingly with its large, peach-toned flowers. The shade lover is hardy in zones 8-11 and widely treated as an annual elsewhere.

FOLIAGE PLANTS
Northern Exposure Amber coral bells is a low-growing, densely mounded plant with evergreen leaves that performs equally well in full shade as in full sun. Tall, slender stems hold up tiny, bell-shaped, green flowers in late spring for added interest.

Coleus Fancy Feathers Copper is a mounding plant with a whimsical tuft of narrow, yellow-orange and pink leaves that will brighten shady spots, whether in the ground or in a container, as well as your mood.

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Conditioned by decades of trials and legal disputes, Trump is now poised to reprise his role as witness under extraordinary circumstances: as a former Republican president fighting to save the real estate empire that vaulted him to stardom and the White House.

Trump is set to testify Monday at his New York civil fraud trial, taking the stand in a deeply personal matter that is central his image as a successful businessman and threatens to cost him control of marquee properties such as Trump Tower. His highly anticipated testimony in the trial of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit follows that of his eldest sons, Trump Organization executives Eric and Donald Trump Jr., who testified last week. His eldest daughter, Ivanka, is set to testify on Wednesday.

As court ended Friday, a state lawyer teased the former president’s appearance. Asked who would be testifying Monday, Andrew Amer told the judge: “The only witness will be Donald J. Trump.”

Trump has testified in court in at least eight trials since 1986, according to an Associated Press review of court records and news coverage. He also has been questioned under oath in more than a dozen depositions and regulatory hearings.

In 1985, he was called to testify before Congress as owner of the USFL’s New Jersey Generals and he testified on behalf of lawyer and friend Roy Cohn at a state disciplinary hearing that led to Cohn’s disbarment. In an early flash of his firebrand persona, in 1986, Trump told New Jersey’s casino commission that plans for highway overpasses near one of his casinos “would be a disaster. It would be a catastrophe.”

Those testimonies, captured in thousands of pages of transcripts and some on videotape, offer clues to the approach Trump is likely to take when he testifies in Manhattan.

They show clear parallels between Trump as a witness and Trump as a president and current candidate for the office. His rhetorical style in legal proceedings over the years bears echoes of his political verve: a mix of ego, charm, defensiveness, aggressiveness, sharp language and deflection. He has been combative and boastful, but sometimes vague and prone to hedging or being dismissive.

Testifying in the USFL’s antitrust lawsuit against the NFL in 1986, Trump denounced allegations that he had spied on NFL officials at one of his hotels, calling the claim “such a false interpretation it’s disgusting.”

In 1988, as he sought to buy Eastern Air Lines’ Northeast shuttle service, Trump turned on the charisma, flashing a wide smile at the judge’s female law clerks and shaking hands with the bailiff during a break in his testimony at a federal court hearing in Washington. Trump testified that his $365 million purchase, later approved, would be a “major boost in morale” for employees.

On the stand in a boxing-related case in 1990, Trump described a Mike Tyson fight he planned for one of his casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, as “one of the greatest rematches you could have.” Accused by two men of cutting them out of a riverboat gambling project, Trump professed ignorance, testifying in 1999: “I was shocked by this whole case. I had no idea who these people were.”

Trump was briefly called to the witness stand in the New York case last month to explain comments outside of court that the judge said violated a limited gag order.

Before that, he last testified in a courtroom in 2013, two years before launching his winning presidential campaign. An 87-year-old suburban Chicago widower had sued him over changes to contract terms for a hotel and condominium tower she had bought units in as an investment. Trump grew increasingly agitated as his testimony wore on, at one point raising his arms and bellowing: “And then she sued me. It’s unbelievable!”

Chicago lawyer Shelly Kulwin cross-examined Trump on behalf of the plaintiff, Jacqueline Goldberg. He said the tenor of Trump’s testimony inside the federal courthouse in Chicago echoed the bruising ebb and flow later seen at campaign rallies and on TV.

“His demeanor was calm at first, and then argumentative, defensive, off-topic, speechmaking. Exactly what he does today,” Kulwin said in an interview.

“Based on my experience with him, you better be able to have super tight questions, with documents to support them, so that he cannot wiggle around,” Kulwin added. “I would approach the judge and have him admonished before he even got on the stand: ‘Mr. Trump, this is not a political campaign. These people, you’re not trying to get their vote. This is a judicial proceeding.’”

Goldberg lost to Trump but said she did not regret suing him, testifying: “Somebody had to stand up to him.” She died in August at age 97.

Trump has attended seven days of the New York trial, quietly studying witnesses from the defense table while also lashing out at the case, the judge and state lawyers in front of TV cameras in the hallway. He’s called the case a “sham,” a “scam,” and “a continuation of the single greatest witch hunt of all time.”

Opining about the case on social media, he thrills in what he calls the trial’s “Perry Mason” moments — testimony and arguments he feels have helped his side — as he pays homage to the classic TV courtroom drama.

In 1990, Trump testified in a losing effort in a lawsuit over his company’s failure to make pension contributions on behalf of about 200 undocumented Polish workers hired to tear down a building to make way for Trump Tower. A year later, he was in court again in Manhattan, testifying against a man who claimed he had a contract to develop Trump’s board game and was owed 25% of profits from “Trump: The Game.”

Trump won that one and another lawsuit in 2005, where he testified that a construction company had “fleeced” him by overcharging him by $1.5 million for work at a golf course in New York’s Westchester County.

Trump’s current New York trial hinges in part on how much he and other Trump Organization executives were involved in valuing his properties and calculating his wealth for the annual financial statements that were given to banks, insurers and others to make deals and secure financing.

James alleges the statements inflated Trump’s net worth by billions of dollars, making him appear to lenders as a more worthy credit risk and allowing him to obtain better interest and insurance rates. Trump has denied wrongdoing.

Eric and Donald Trump Jr. testified that they relied on an outside accounting firm and the Trump Organization’s finance team to prepare the statements and that they assumed those statements were accurate.

Trump testified in a deposition in a case in April that he never felt his financial statements “would be taken very seriously,” and that a disclaimer on them warned people doing business with him to do their own homework.

He insisted the banks that James alleges were snookered with lofty valuations suffered no harm, got paid in his deals and “to this day have no complaints.” Trump decried the lawsuit as a “terrible thing,” telling James and her staff “you don’t have a case.”

Before the trial, the judge ruled that the statements were fraudulent. He set in motion punishment that shifts control of some Trump companies to a court-appointed receiver. An appeals court has put that on hold, for now.

The nonjury trial, now into its second month, concerns allegations of conspiracy, insurance fraud and falsifying business records. James, who is suing Trump, his company and top executives, including his eldest sons, is seeking $250 million in penalties and a ban on the defendants doing business in New York.

When questioned in the past about his business and financial dealings, Trump has sometimes deflected responsibility and blame. In a 2013 deposition over a failed Florida condominium project, Trump blamed an employee for paperwork that said he was developing a project when, in reality, he wasn’t.

“I have a woman that does it,” he said. He then started parsing the wording at issue, saying: “But you know, developing, the word develop, it can be used in a lot of different contexts.”

Another refrain in Trump’s depositions is his incredulity that he would be taken so seriously for hyping up his real estate projects.

“You always want to put the best possible spin on a property that you can,” Trump said in a December 2007 deposition in his lawsuit against a journalist he had accused of playing down Trump’s wealth. “No different than any other real estate developer, no different than any other businessman, no different than any politician.”

Trump’s penchant for puffery is sure to come up on Monday. He and his company are accused of inflating his property values and using a variety of methods to maximize the results. For years, he even listed his Trump Tower penthouse in Manhattan as being three times its actual size. He now claims his financial statements undersold his wealth and that his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida is worth more than $1 billion.

Trump is portraying the civil fraud case and his four criminal cases as prongs of political persecution designed to impede his candidacy as the 2024 Republican front-runner for president. He has referenced his political standing in prior legal settings, including during a 2016 deposition when he noted, unprompted, how he had defeated his Republican primary opponents.

“I obviously have credibility because I now, as it turns out, became the Republican nominee running against, we have a total of 17 people that were mostly senators and governors, highly respected people. So it’s not like, you know, like I’ve said anything that could be so bad,” he said.

In his April deposition, Trump soberly described the presidency as the “most important job in the world” before bragging about saving lives by preventing North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un from launching a nuclear attack.

In an October 2021 deposition, Trump waxed about weapons of a different sort, warning of the dangers posed by tomatoes and other fruit, which he feared would be thrown at him on the campaign stage.

“You get hit with fruit it’s — no, it’s very violent stuff,” he said. Trump was testifying in connection to a lawsuit filed by a group of protesters who said they were roughed up by Trump’s private security guards when he was running in 2015.

Trump had been asked about a rally in which he told the crowd: “If you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, just knock the crap out of them, would you.”

“It was said sort of in jest. Buy maybe, you know, a little truth to it,” Trump said of his remarks.

“It’s very dangerous stuff. You can get killed with those things,” he warned. “I wanted to have people be ready because we were put on alert that they were going to do fruit. And some fruit is a lot worse than — tomatoes are bad by the way. But it’s very dangerous.”

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Right now, you may be highly motivated to solve every single one of your money issues in the next few months, but daily life is guaranteed to get in the way. Your financial to-do list, once so full of promise, can eventually get stuffed in the back of a drawer while you manage more pressing matters.

So how can you improve your odds of success? It comes down to accepting that you won’t have the time or energy to complete every task to perfection. Creating a system where you can prioritize, plan ahead and hold yourself accountable can help.

CONSIDER UNEXPECTED HIGH-IMPACT ACTIONS

Many start by setting a goal to trim frivolous costs, which can certainly be helpful, but there are other ways to make a big difference. Taylor Schulte, a certified financial planner and founder of Define Financial, an advisory firm in San Diego, recommends starting with a few overlooked financial tasks.

Freezing your credit is a quick, easy way to guard yourself against identity theft. It’s free to do, and you can temporarily lift the freeze when you’re applying for a loan or credit card. Schulte also suggests looking into umbrella insurance, which offers additional coverage beyond what your auto, homeowners and other insurance policies provide. This coverage can spare you from massive out-of-pocket costs in the event you get sued.

Basic estate planning, including creating a will, is another thing to put high on your list. Putting off this task can create a major headache for your loved ones if something happens to you unexpectedly. “I know it’s a pain point and it’s often kicked down the road,” Schulte says.

Paying attention to your spending is always important, but don’t neglect taking steps to protect your money, yourself and your loved ones.

FOCUS ON WHAT ACTUALLY MATTERS TO YOU

So many money goals are born out of social pressure. You “should” want to save up to own a home, even if you’re happily renting. You “should” sacrifice short-term needs and wants to stash away as much as possible for retirement, even though it leaves you feeling deprived. But money goals should be tied to the things that matter most to you. If they aren’t, you’ll quickly lose interest.

“If you don’t know what goals to choose, go back to your values and have them guide the goals you set,” says Eric Roberge, a certified financial planner and founder of Beyond Your Hammock, a financial advisory firm in Boston.

You can combine goal-setting with a little planning, so expenses are less likely to creep up on you throughout the year. Think about what expected costs will be coming up in the next six to 12 months, like recurring bills, vacations, anticipated home or car repairs, and other expenses. This approach allows you to set money aside each month to put toward planned costs, as well as longer-term goals.

HOLD YOURSELF ACCOUNTABLE

Forgetting your goals can be far too easy, so to make something stick, write it down. It can be as simple as a handwritten list you keep on the fridge, or online calendar reminders that will nudge you every so often.

For time-sensitive goals, set deadlines. One tactic is to make multiple lists based on what you need to complete within the next week, month or three months. As time passes and you check off items, you can update the list.

Enlist others’ help, too. Weekly or monthly household money meetings are useful if you’re completing financial tasks as a group. Or share your goals with a trusted friend or family member who can serve as an accountability partner. Looping in loved ones can help keep you on track. “We don’t mind letting ourselves down,” Schulte says. “But we hate to let other people down.”

RECOGNIZE WHEN ‘DONE’ IS BETTER THAN ‘PERFECT’

It’s easy to get stuck in decision-making mode when trying to pick a high-yield savings account, credit card or possible investments, but eventually, you need to make a good-enough choice. Taking action now can have more of a positive effect on your life than waiting until you’ve painstakingly considered each option.

Roberge says that though he’d prefer to optimize every financial decision, he doesn’t because if he did, he wouldn’t get things done. “Everything in moderation is one of the things that I live by,” he says. “Going to extremes in any one thing, at the detriment of other things that are important, doesn’t work long-term.”

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This column was provided to The Associated Press by the personal finance website NerdWallet. Sara Rathner is a writer at NerdWallet. Email: srathner@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @SaraKRathner.

Millennial Money: Up the odds of meeting money goals in 2023

The post Millennial Money: Up the odds of meeting money goals in 2023 appeared first on The Florida Daily Post.

The health crisis brought on the dawn of slow living, but it crushed many families forced to hustle for their lives. Karens went on the rise. Cryptocurrencies tanked. Pete Davidson’s love thing with Kim Kardashian made headlines.

A list of what we’re over as we hope for better times in 2023:

INCIVILITY BE GONE

The pandemic released a tsunami of overwrought Karens and Kens, but heightened incivility has stretched well beyond their raucous ranks.

Researcher Christine Porath restricted herself to rudeness, disrespect or insensitive behavior when she recently wrote about the subject in Harvard Business Review. The professor of management at Georgetown University found incidents of incivility way up, in line with a steady climb stretching back nearly 20 years.

Particularly hammered this year, Porath wrote, were frontline workers in health care, retail, transportation, hospitality and education. All were declared heroes when the pandemic struck. It didn’t take long for that to become a beat down.

Noting that incivility can and does escalate to physical aggression and other violence, Axios dubbed it the rudeness pandemic.

Stop it, mean people. We’re all stressed out, including you we’re quite sure.

CRYPTO CRAZINESS

Will the implosion of FTX, the world’s third-largest cryptocurrency exchange, bring on broader chaos in a digital world that millions of people already distrust?

Time will tell as other and otherwise, healthy crypto companies face a liquidity crisis. And there’s the philanthropic implications of the FTX bankruptcy collapse here in the real world, since founder Sam Bankman-Fried donated millions to numerous causes in “effective altruism” fashion.

The FTX bankruptcy filing followed a bruising of crypto companies throughout 2022, due in part to rising interest rates and the broader market downturn that has many investors rethinking their lust for risk. That includes mom-and-pop investors along for the ride.

While more people than ever before know what cryptocurrencies are, far fewer actually partake. Is it any wonder? Get it together, crypto.

ASMR, PIPE DOWN

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. It began, innocently enough, as brain tingles brought on by whispering, tapping, brushing or scraping. Then, bam, it took off on social media like a really loud rocket on a mission to annoy.

Today, we’ve got millions of videos filled with people attempting to calm themselves by speaking in low tones, armed with anything they can get their hands on in conjunction with their expensive, ultra-sensitive mics.

Companies are selling beer and chocolate, paint and home goods using ASMR. All the calming — and commerce — is deafening.

GRAY, THE COLOR

Gray walls, gray floors, gray furniture. Is gray passé? Here’s hoping.

The color spent much of 2022 as a purportedly neutral “it.” The problem was, we were already feeling gray on the inside.

Of course, gray has been around since color itself but it took over as an alternative to beige and Tuscan brown. Gray took a tumble mid-year but one doesn’t paint or swap out the couch as quickly as trends fade. We’ve been stuck with gray, thanks to TV home shows and social media loops.

“What would your reaction be if I told you that color is disappearing from the world? A graph suggesting that the color gray has become the dominant shade has been circulating on TikTok, and boy does it have folks in a tizzy,” wrote Loney Abrams in Architectural Digest in October.

By that, she explained, the upset folks she mentioned stand firmly behind the notion that a lack of color “spells tragedy.”

Abrams, a Brooklyn artist and pop culture curator, speaks of the fixer-uppers of Chip and Joanna Gaines and the Calabasas compound of Kim Kardashian. And she cites Tash Bradley, a trained color psychologist who works for the U.K. wallpaper and paint brand Lick.

Bradley, Abrams wrote, points to the hustle-bustle of pre-pandemic life as one villain leading to The Great Gray Washing. Bradley, the interior design director for Lick, sees no psychological benefits to gray.

Many actual colors are calming. Find one. And speaking of design trends, quit turning around your books, pages out. Read one instead, perhaps a volume on color theory.

PETE DAVIDSON’S LOVE LIFE

Not the King of Staten Island himself, per se. Look deeply into your hearts and decide for yourselves whether to love him or Ye him.

We’re talking about the vast quantities of air volume his love life has sucked up on a near-hourly basis, especially in 2022, otherwise known as his Kim Kardashian era (which actually started in late 2021 for the obsessives).

Davidson’s love roster has puzzled for years, stretching back to his MTV “Guy Code” days in 2013 while still a teenager, leading to his Carly Aquilino phase.

There were stops along the way with Cazzie David (Larry Davidson’s daughter), Ariana Grande, Kate Beckinsale (briefly), Kaia Gerber (even more briefly), and others, including his latest: model Emily Ratajkowski.

The “SNL” alum and self-described — in appearance — “crack baby” is a paparazzi, social media, gossip monger magnet. Rather, his love life is.

As Ratajkowski mouthed recently in a TikTok video to some random audio track while riding in a car: “I would be with multiple men. Also some women as well. Um, everyone’s hot but in an interesting way.”

So be it. Live your life, Pete. Can the rest of us stop chasing every relationship-confirming kiss?

MOVIE UPCHUCK MADNESS

The film industry, to state the obvious, has produced decades of genre-spanning grossness, much of it significant and legit to show on camera.

However, there’s one particular cinematic exclamation point we could do without, or at the very least, with significantly less of: The dispensable spew.

Implied vomiting with an urgent rush to a curb, hand to a mouth or turn of a head would sometimes suffice, thanks. Who spread the word in Hollywood that movie watchers actually desire all the nauseating details. The projectile-ness, the color combinations, the chunks.

Well, in some cases, audiences themselves.

That notable dress shop scene in the 2011 smash hit “Bridesmaids” was a gender test of sorts, according to the Daily Beast. Would audiences accept all the spewing and other grand scatology from women in a wedding-themed movie as they do for the bros of producer Judd Apatow’s other comedies?

Apatow and director Paul Feig extensively tested “Bridesmaids” with audiences and they were fine.

Fast forward to 2022′s notables. There’s the satire “The Triangle of Sadness,” which could hardly do without, but there’s also “Tár,” a far more serious film that wouldn’t make the vomit hall of fame with Lydia Tár’s one fleeting gush. We ask, what’s the point of that? Meaning, the upchuck as aside.

Cate Blanchett’s Tár has far bigger problems, so let’s rein in all the gratuitous spewing. Make it count, people!

THE ULTRA HUSTLE

Elon Musk put it thusly in an email to his remaining employees:

“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”

Musk is Musk, but he illustrates a moment: A need to remain in motion, to work harder, climb higher, sweat longer. With the volatile economy, political chaos, extreme weather and wars, it’s no wonder that a blanket of anxiety has kept the ultra hustle alive.

As if all the slow living and work-life balance talk is meaningless, or more to the point, can’t exist for many.

“We’re hustling to make ends meet, `building our brand,′ ensuring our startup doesn’t tank, or dreaming about the day our side hustle takes off and we can walk into the office and give everyone the bird,” wrote Benjamin Sledge on Medium.

It stands to reason, he said, that “most of us are hustling because we literally have to in order to survive.”

Bring on a 2023 that allows for all those long walks in the woods we’ve been hearing so much about.

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The pandemic, Karens, crypto craziness: We’re over you, 2022

The post The pandemic, Karens, crypto craziness: We’re over you, 2022 appeared first on The Florida Daily Post.

Past shootings targeted worshippers during a Sunday sermon, shoppers at a Walmart, students on a high school campus, and drivers on a highway. Among the latest victims were 19 children and two teachers in the small town of Uvalde, west of San Antonio, where on Tuesday a gunman opened fire inside an elementary school in the nation’s deadliest school shooting in nearly a decade.

Each of those tragedies in Texas — which resulted in more than 85 dead in all — occurred in the last five years.

But as the horror in Uvalde plunges the U.S. into another debate over gun violence, Texas and the state’s Republican-controlled government have by now demonstrated what is likely to happen next: virtually nothing that would restrict gun access.

Lawmakers are unlikely to adopt any significant new limits on guns. Last year, gun laws were actually loosened after a gunman at a Walmart in El Paso killed 23 people in a racist 2019 attack that targeted Hispanics.

“I can’t wrap my head around it,” said state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat whose district includes Uvalde. “It’s disturbing to me as a policymaker that we have been able to do little other than create greater access to these militarized weapons to just about anyone who would want them.”

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott identified the gunman as 18-year-old Salvador Ramos. The gunman was killed by authorities.

The cycle in Texas — a mass shooting followed by few if any new restrictions on guns — mirrors GOP efforts to block stricter laws in Congress and the ensuring outrage from Democrats and supporters of tougher gun control.

President Joe Biden angrily made a renewed push Tuesday evening after the tragedy in Uvalde. “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” he asked in an address from the White House.

The shooting in Texas happened days before the National Rifle Association is set to hold its annual meeting in Houston, where Abbott and other Republican leaders are scheduled to speak.

Even as Biden’s party has slim control of Congress, gun violence bills have stalled in the face of Republican opposition in the Senate. Last year, the House passed two bills to expand background checks on firearms purchases, but both languished in the 50-50 Senate where Democrats need at least 10 Republican votes to overcome objections from a filibuster.

“It sort of centers around the issue of mental health. It seems like there’s consensus in that area,” No. 2 Senate GOP leader John Thune said about how Congress should respond to the Uvalde shooting. He did not specify what that would be.

In Texas, any changes to gun access would not come until lawmakers return to the Capitol in 2023. In the past, calls for action have faded.

Abbott, who is up for reelection in November, said the shooting in Uvalde was carried out “horrifically, incomprehensibly” on children. He did not immediately say how or whether Texas would respond to this latest mass shooting on a policy level, but since he became governor in 2015, the state has only gotten more relaxed when it comes to gun laws.

Exactly one year before the Uvalde shooting, the GOP-controlled Legislature voted to remove one of the last major gun restrictions in Texas: required licenses, background checks, and training for the nearly 1.6 million registered handgun owners in the state at the time.

Abbott signed the measure, which came at the end of what was the Texas Legislature’s first chance to act after the Walmart attack.

A year later, a man went on a highway shooting rampage in the West Texas oil patch that left seven people dead, spraying bullets into passing cars and shopping plazas and killing a U.S. Postal Service employee while hijacking her mail truck.

Following a shooting at Santa Fe High School in 2018 that killed 10 people near Houston, Abbott signaled support for so-called red flag laws, which restrict gun access for people deemed dangerous to themselves or others. But he later retreated amid pushback from gun-rights supporters.

Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who won the GOP nomination for a third term Tuesday, told Fox News after the Uvalde shooting that the best response would be training teachers and “hardening” schools.

Democrat state Rep. Joe Moody recalled the hope he felt that the Walmart shooting in his border city might finally lead to reforms.

“And the only answer you get when we go to the Capitol is, ‘More guns, less restrictions,‘” Moody said. “That’s it.’”

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School massacre continues Texas’ grim run of mass shootings

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A decade ago, a Twitter executive dubbed the company “the free speech wing of the free-speech party” to underscore its commitment to untrammeled freedom of expression. Subsequent events put that moniker to the test, as repressive regimes cracked down on Twitter users, particularly in the wake of the short-lived “Arab Spring” demonstrations. In the U.S., a visceral 2014 article by journalist Amanda Hess exposed the incessant, vile harassment many women faced just for posting on Twitter or other online forums.

Over the subsequent years, Twitter learned a few things about the consequences of running a largely unmoderated social platform — one of the most important being that companies generally don’t want their ads running against violent threats, hate speech that bleeds into incitement, and misinformation that aims to tip elections or undermine public health.

“With Musk, his posturing of free speech — just leave everything up — that would be bad in and of itself,” said Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University. “If you stop moderating with automated systems and human reviews, a site like Twitter, in the space of a short period of time, you would have a cesspool.”

Google, Barrett pointed out, quickly learned this lesson the hard way when major companies like Toyota and Anheuser-Busch yanked their ads after they ran ahead of YouTube videos produced by extremists in 2015.

Once it was clear just how unhealthy the conversation had gotten, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey spent years trying to improve what he called the “health” of the conversation on the platform.

The company was an early adopter of the “report abuse” button after U.K. member of parliament Stella Creasy received a barrage of rape and death threats on the platform. The online abuse was the result of a seemingly positive tweet in support of feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, who successfully advocated for novelist Jane Austen to appear on a British banknote. Creasy’s online harasser was sent to prison for 18 weeks.

Twitter has continued to craft rules and invested in staff and technology that detect violent threats, harassment and misinformation that violates its policies. After evidence emerged that Russia used its platforms to try to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, social media companies also stepped up their efforts against political misinformation.

The big question now is how far Musk, who describes himself as a “free-speech absolutist,” wants to ratchet back these systems — and whether users and advertisers will stick around if he does.

Even now, Americans say they’re more likely to be harassed on social media than on any other online forum, with women, people of color and LGBTQ users reporting a disproportionate amount of that abuse. Roughly 80% of users believe the companies are still doing only a “fair or poor” job of handling that harassment, according to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults last year.

Meanwhile, terms like “censorship” and “free speech” have turned into political rallying cries for conservatives, frustrated by seeing right-leaning commentators and high-profile Republican officials booted off Facebook and Twitter for violating their rules.

Musk appeared to criticize Twitter’s permanent ban of President Donald Trump last year for messages that the tech company said helped incite the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last year.

“A lot of people are going to be super unhappy with West Coast high tech as the de facto arbiter of free speech,” Musk tweeted days after Trump was banned from both Facebook and Twitter.

Trump’s allies, including his son Donald Trump Jr., have even pleaded for Musk to buy out the company.

“If Elon Musk can privately send people into space I’m sure he can design a social network that isn’t biased,” Trump Jr. said in the caption of a video posted to Instagram last April.

Kirsten Martin, a professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame, said Twitter has consistently worked at being a “responsible” social media company through its moderation system, its hires in the area of machine learning ethics and in whom they allow to do research on the platform. The fact that Musk wants to change that, she added, suggests that he’s focused on “irresponsible social media.”

Twitter declined to comment on this story. A representative for Musk did not immediately respond to a message for comment.

New social media apps targeted at conservatives, including Trump’s Truth Social, haven’t come remotely close to matching the success of Facebook or Twitter. That’s partly because Republican politicians, politicians and causes already draw large audiences on existing, and much better established, platforms.

It’s also partly due to floods of inflammatory, false or violent posts. Last year, for example, right-wing social media site Parler was nearly wiped off the internet when it became evident that rioters had used the app to promote violent messages and organize the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol. Apple and Google barred its app from their online stores, while Amazon stopped providing web-hosting services for the site.

Musk himself regularly blocks social media users who have criticized him or his company and sometimes bullies reporters who have written critical articles about him or Tesla. He regularly tweets at reporters who write about his company, sometimes mischaracterizing their work as “false” or “misleading.”

His popular tweets typically send a swarm of his social media fans directly to the accounts of the reporters to harass them for hours or days.

“I only block people as a direct insult,” Musk tweeted in 2020, responding to a tweet from a reporter.

Evan Greer, a political activist with Fight for the Future, said Musk’s lack of experience in moderating an influential social media platform will be a problem if he successfully takes over the company.

“If we want to protect free speech online, then we can’t live in a world where the richest person on Earth can just purchase a platform that millions of people depend on and then change the rules to his liking,” Greer said.

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Musk’s ‘free speech’ push for Twitter: Repeating history?

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The 43-year-old Republican has repeatedly demonstrated an acute willingness to fight over the course of his decade-long political career. He has turned against former aides and rejected the GOP Legislature’s rewrite of congressional maps, forcing lawmakers to accept a version more to his liking and prompting voting rights groups to sue. He’s also leaned into simmering tensions with Donald Trump, which is notable for someone seeking to lead a party where loyalty to the former president is a requirement.

But DeSantis’ decision to punish Disney World, one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations and one of Florida’s biggest private employers, took his fighter mentality to a new level. In retribution for Disney’s criticism of a new state law condemned by critics as “Don’t Say Gay,” DeSantis signed legislation on Friday stripping the theme park of a decades-old special agreement that allowed it to govern itself.

To critics, including some in his own party, such a raw exercise of power suggests DeSantis is operating with a sense of invincibility that could come back to haunt him. Others see an ambitious politician emboldened by strong support in his state and a mountain of campaign cash-grabbing an opportunity to further stoke the nation’s culture wars, turning himself into a hero among Republican voters in the process.

“When you listen to Ron DeSantis, it’s righteous indignation: ‘Here’s why you’re wrong and here’s why I’m right,″” said Florida Rep. Blaise Ingoglia, a former state GOP chairman. “And it is that righteous indignation and that willingness to fight back that endears people to Ron DeSantis’ message. As long as he keeps on showing that he’s willing to fight, people are going to continue to keep flocking to him.”

DeSantis is up for reelection in November. But in the wake of his scrap with Disney, he will introduce himself to a key group of presidential primary voters this week when he campaigns for Nevada Senate candidate Adam Laxalt. The appearance marks his first of the year in a state featured prominently on the presidential calendar, although DeSantis aides insist it is simply a trip to help out a longtime friend.

Disney drew DeSantis’ wrath for opposing a new state law that bars instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. The DeSantis-backed bill has been condemned by LGBTQ activists nationwide as homophobic, although the measure, like others dealing with transgender athletes and racial history in schools, has emerged as a core piece of the GOP’s political strategy.

The Disney legislation, which does not take effect until June 2023, could cause massive economic fallout for the company, the surrounding communities and the millions who visit the Orlando amusement park every year.

There are risks to DeSantis’ embrace of the legislation, particularly if his antagonism towards Disney threatens the GOP’s standing with independents and women, who could play crucial roles in the fall campaign. Jenna Ellis, a former Trump administration attorney, called the DeSantis-backed legislation “vengeful.”

Democrats who are facing a tough election year are eager to highlight DeSantis’ moves as a way to portray the GOP as a party of extremists. In an interview, Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison described DeSantis’ attack on Disney as a continuation of a “divisive agenda” geared toward booking interviews on conservative media at the expense of his constituents.

“The people of Florida deserve a governor whose first priority is them, not his own political ambition,” Harrison said.

President Joe Biden said at a party fundraiser in Seattle that this “is not your father’s Republican Party.”

“I respect conservatives,” Biden told donors on Thursday. “There’s nothing conservative about deciding you’re going to throw Disney out of its present posture because … you think we should not be able to say, ‘gay.’”

In a statement, DeSantis’ spokesperson Taryn Fenske, called the governor a “principled and driven leader who accomplishes exactly what he says he will do.”

Indeed, DeSantis’ friends and foes in the GOP agree that his crackdown on Disney is a major political victory among Republican base voters already enamored by his pushback against pandemic-related public health measures over the past two years. They suggest it also taps into a growing Republican embrace of anti-corporate populism and parental control of education that resonates with a wider swath of voters.

Republican pollsters have been privately testing DeSantis’ political strength beyond Florida for several months, finding that the only Republican consistently with more support than DeSantis among GOP voters is Trump himself. At the same time, DeSantis is sitting on more than $100 million in campaign funds.

“He’s a very smart guy in what he’s doing and how he’s doing it,” Republican strategist David Urban, a close Trump ally, said of DeSantis.

Those close to the Florida governor say there is one message above all to take away from the Disney fight: that DeSantis, one of the few high-profile Republicans who has not ruled out running against Trump in a 2024 presidential primary, is not afraid of anybody, anything or any fight.

Tensions between the two men have been building for months.

In a Washington Post interview last month, Trump took credit for DeSantis’ rise. And last weekend, longtime Trump loyalist Roger Stone released a video clip in which Stone calls DeSantis an expletive while greeting Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida club.

So far, Florida voters seem to be on DeSantis’ side.

Nearly 6 in 10 Florida voters approved of DeSantis’ job performance in a February poll conducted by the University of North Florida. The poll also asked registered Republicans about a hypothetical presidential primary between Trump and DeSantis. The result? Trump and DeSantis were about even.

Brian Ballard, a Florida lobbyist and a major Republican fundraiser, said DeSantis has “a combination of popularity and instincts” that is shaping the modern-day GOP.

“No other elected official, maybe in the country, has the Republican base support that Ron DeSantis has. So he’s incredibly powerful, not only a powerful politician, but a powerful government leader,” Ballard said. “The guy really has the reins of power in his hands.”

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DeSantis tests limits of his combative style in Disney feud

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With those words, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson acknowledged both the struggles and progress of Black Americans in her lifetime.

Her words, delivered from the South Lawn of the White House on Friday, one day after her historic Senate confirmation, were a tribute to generations of Black Americans who she said paved the way for her elevation to the nation’s highest court.

“I have now achieved something far beyond anything my grandparents could have possibly ever imagined,” Jackson said, noting they had gained only grade-school educations before starting their family and later sending their children to racially segregated schools.

“The path was cleared for me so that I might rise to this occasion,” she said. “And in the poetic words of Dr. Maya Angelou, I do so now.”

Quoting Angelou’s famous poem, “And Still I Rise,” Jackson added: “I am the dream and the hope of the slave.”

Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator who was a prominent surrogate for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, said Jackson’s speech was an awe-inspiring reminder of how far Black Americans have come amid their ongoing struggle.

“Expressing that realization out loud for all of the world to hear, as she is about to take her place as the first Black woman Supreme Court justice, was just magnificent,” said Turner.

“It is vitally important that we, as Black people, continue to remind this nation from whence we came,” she said. “The pain that it took to get to a ‘Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’ could not be understated.”

Jackson, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, said that she has been lucky on her path to the high court. Although her arrival breaks one of the remaining racial barriers in American democracy, many Black Americans still struggle to surmount systemic blocks.

She namechecked the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights icon, as well as Black federal judicial trailblazers such as Justice Thurgood Marshall and Judge Constance Baker Motley, thanking them for their leadership and role modeling.

“For all of the talk of this historic nomination and now confirmation, I think of them as the true path-breakers,” Jackson said. “I’m just the very lucky first inheritor of the dream of liberty and justice for all.”

Melanie L. Campbell, president and CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation and convener of the Black Women’s Roundtable, watched Jackson’s speech from the White House lawn as an invited guest on Friday. With the sun shining through clouds over Washington, there was a palpable joy in the crowd over what Jackson symbolizes for the country, she said.

“It just felt like the ancestors were dancing.”

“I can see myself, in now-Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson,” Campbell added. “(Jackson) understands the significance of this moment for Black women, for women, for the nation. And it is a game-changer.”

Others watching the speech also noted the diversity at the event and the image at the center — President Joe Biden flanked by the first Black female Supreme Court justice and the first Black and Asian American vice president.

Just before Vice President Kamala Harris introduced the president, she gushed over what Jackson’s confirmation will one day mean to her young, Black goddaughter.

“When I presided over the Senate confirmation vote yesterday, while I was sitting there, I drafted a note to my goddaughter,” Harris said. “I told her that I felt such a deep sense of pride and joy about what this moment means for our nation and for her future.”

Speaking directly to Jackson, Harris added: “And I will tell you, her braids are just a little longer than yours.”

Although the occasion will be noted in history books as a symbol of racial progress, Turner said Jackson’s elevation to the Supreme Court should be celebrated by Americans of all races and creeds.

“Not only should the entire Black community be proud, but the entire country should also be proud because this has certainly been a long time coming,” she said. “And from this victory, we certainly have an opportunity to continue to build and create more victories. We’re not done yet.”

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Jackson’s speech highlights US race struggles, progress

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Biden folded his arms, rested on the lectern, leaned into the mic and lowered his voice.

“Hey, guys, I think it’s time to give ordinary people a tax break,” he said, almost whispering as he addressed his critics. “The wealthy are doing fine.”

It was the latest instance of Biden speaking volumes by whispering.

The White House and communications experts say Biden’s whispering is just this veteran politician’s old-school way of trying to make a connection while emphasizing a point.

Biden’s critics on the right as well as some late-night TV talk show hosts say the whispers are “creepy” and “weird.” Conservatives use the dramatic soft talk to fuel the narrative that the president is unfit for the job, and comedians deploy it to generate laughs.

“It’s an intimate form of communication,” said Vanessa Beasley, associate professor of communication studies at Vanderbilt University.

Biden whispered some of his answers to reporters’ questions during an impromptu White House news conference last month after he and a group of Senate Republicans announced they had reached a deal to spend $973 trillion on rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure.

As he stood in the East Room, Biden was questioned about his timeline for providing additional financial help to families. He leaned in, eyes wide, and whispered: “I got them $1.9 trillion in relief so far. They’re going to be getting checks in the mail that are consequential.”

During a lengthy response to a separate question, he whispered, “I wrote the bill,” before bending down to get closer to the microphone and adding, “on the environment.”

On the subject of employers’ hiring difficulties, Biden leaned into the mic again, arms resting on the lectern and said softly that the solution is to “pay them more.”

Beasley said the use of whispering by Biden, who was a U.S. senator and vice president for a total of more than 40 years, is a throwback to a long-ago time of chummier relations between lawmakers and members of the Washington press corps.

“I think it’s a symbolic gesture to a kind of intimacy and familiarity,” she said.

Beasley and others noted the contrast between Biden and former President Donald Trump, who often spoke loudly and angrily.

“One of the things that Trump never did was whisper,” said Robin Lakoff, professor emerita of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Public speakers — lawmakers, celebrities, corporate executives — often raise or lower their voices for dramatic effect or tell jokes to keep their audiences following along instead of falling asleep.

Beasley said the tone of political discourse these days seems set to loud so that “it sort of sets everybody back a little bit when you see someone going in a different direction and reducing their volume.”

Lakoff said what Biden does isn’t really whispering because his vocal chords vibrate and make sound.

“A true whisper is something you wouldn’t be able to hear very well,” she said, comparing what Biden does to a “stage whisper” in which an actor in a play steps out of character to share a secret with the audience or preview some action that’s about to happen.

The White House defended Biden, saying conservatives who criticize the way he speaks, including his stuttering, do so because they don’t have a better agenda to offer voters heading into the November 2022 midterm elections.

“Under President Biden’s leadership, COVID cases have plunged by over 90%, we’ve achieved a historic level of job creation, the economy is growing at its highest rate in 40 years, and we’ve achieved a breakthrough on the world stage to stop the offshoring of American jobs,” deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said.

“And this performative criticism is just the latest acknowledgment by Republicans that he’s running the table on them while they’re grasping for a case to make,” Bates whispered.

Kayleigh McEnany, a White House press secretary for Trump, called Biden’s whispering “peculiar” and “crazy” before panelists on the Fox News program she co-hosts discussed it. Other Fox News personalities and guests also panned Biden’s low-volume speech.

On the late-night talk show circuit, comedian Stephen Colbert featured what he called Biden’s “new rhetorical flourish” in a recent monologue on his CBS show.

After airing clips of the president, Colbert leaned into a hand-held microphone and whispered: “Mr. President, Mr. President. You know I’m a fan, but the way you lean forward and whisper. Guess what? It’s a little creepy. It’s a little creepy.”

On the flip side, Biden raises his voice, too, as he did while addressing the nation from the White House lawn on July Fourth.

“On this sacred day, I look out to those monuments on our National Mall, and beyond them, into the hearts of our people across the land and I know this,” he said, voice rising as he neared the conclusion of his speech. “It’s never, ever been a good bet to bet against America. Never.

“We just have to remember who we are. We are the United States of America,” Biden thundered. “And there’s nothing — nothing — we can’t do if we do it together.”

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Listen up: Biden speaks volumes in a whisper to make a point

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Trump’s discredited allegations about a stolen election did nothing to save his presidency when courtrooms high and low, state governments and ultimately Congress — meeting in the chaos of an insurrection powered by his grievances — affirmed the legitimacy of his defeat and the honesty of the process that led to it.

Now those “Big Lie” allegations, no closer to true than before, are getting a second, howling wind.

Republicans are expected to believe the falsehoods, pretend they do, or at the bare minimum, not let it be known that they don’t. State Republican leaders from Georgia to Arizona have been flamed by Trump or his followers for standing against the lies.

Only a select few Republicans in Washington are defying him, for they, too, know that doing so comes with a cost.

Liz Cheney, lifelong conservative and daughter of a vice president once loved by the Republican right while earning the nickname Darth Vader, was willing to pay it.

“History is watching,” the Wyoming congresswoman wrote as House Republicans prepared to strip her of her No. 3 leadership position this coming week over her confrontation with Trump. “Republicans need to stand for genuinely conservative principles, and steer away from the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.”

Everyone enmeshed in Trump’s relentless election claims agrees a “Big Lie” is at the heart of the matter. President Joe Biden says so. Cheney said so. Dominion Voting Systems alleges in a massive lawsuit that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani “manufactured and disseminated the ’Big Lie.’”

Trump tried to appropriate the phrase by turning it against his accusers, a pattern from his presidency when he railed against “fake news” after having his own called out.

“The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!” he said in a statement last week, delivered as if by force of proclamation.

Trump led his party in an election that cost Republicans the presidency and their Senate majority while leaving them short of taking over in the House. For all that, the party’s brute-force Trump faction is ascendant as Republicans place their bets on the energy and passions of his core supporters in the approach to the midterm elections next year.

That bet requires a suspension of disbelief when Trump makes his fantastical claims about a rigged election.

“This message is working,” said former Republican Rep. Denver Riggleman, driven from Congress by a Trump-aligned opponent in the party’s nomination race in his Virginia district last year. Riggleman pointed to strong local fund-raising success and poll numbers for Trump loyalists.

“If you’ve got to say things you don’t believe in, as long as that leads to a win, that’s what’s most important,” he told MSNBC. “If you think you can win by fanning these flames of disinformation, why wouldn’t you do that?” He added: “If you have no integrity.”

In the running to replace Cheney in the House GOP leadership, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York in recent days endorsed Trump’s false claims of voting fraud and of a ballot recount being conducted in Arizona’s Maricopa County by a company whose leader has shared unfounded conspiracy theories about the election.

Artifice unfolded in Florida as Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis staged a fake signing ceremony Thursday on Fox News for a bill he actually signed elsewhere. The bill imposes new voting restrictions to fix problems state officials acknowledged haven’t really been found, but might be in the future.

Republicans are pushing voting curbs in multiple states as well as the federal level even as state leaders have pronounced Trump’s case baseless.

“They can’t change the 2020 election but they can use it as a predicate for new restrictive voting laws,” election law scholar Richard Hasen of the University of California, Irvine, said of the Trump loyalists.

“It’s extremely troubling for American democracy and undermines voter confidence in the integrity of the election process. Very dangerous.”

Trump has been busy resurfacing election claims he’s aired countless times before. They’ve been systematically debunked.

In a statement Friday, Trump asserted: “At 6:31 in the morning on November 4th, a dump of 149,772 votes came in to the State of Michigan. Biden received 96% of those votes and the State miraculously went to him.”

No vote dump happened. The morning after November’s election, Trump allies shared a map of Michigan that appeared to show Biden getting a huge spike of votes in an update. But the online news organization that was tracking results and published that map confirmed the same day it had made a data error and corrected it.

Trump went on: “Likewise, at 3:42 in the morning, a dump of 143,379 votes came in to the state of Wisconsin, also miraculously, given to Biden. Where did these ‘votes’ come from?”

Nothing nefarious here, either. Biden’s early-morning comeback was simply the result of absentee and early votes being counted in Wisconsin’s largest city and reported at once. Milwaukee counts absentee ballots in one centralized location and reports the results in a batch.

Election officials finished counting the city’s roughly 169,000 absentee ballots and uploaded the results about 3 a.m. after Election Day. Milwaukee police then escorted the city’s elections director to the county courthouse to deliver thumb drives with the data.

The outstanding ballots at that point overwhelmingly broke for Biden. A Democrat winning in a big city surprises no one.

In Utah a week ago, Sen. Mitt Romney was roundly booed by members of his party, while prevailing in a censure vote, for criticisms of Trump that hecklers called treasonous. Romney voted in both of Trump’s impeachment trials to convict him; Cheney split her decision in the two House impeachments.

For four years Mike Pence epitomized the loyal vice president. But his pro forma certification of Biden’s victory Jan. 6 put him on the outs with Trump and clouded his political future, though he had no authority under the Constitution, congressional rules, the law or custom to stand in Biden’s way.

In one of his broadsides last week, Trump assailed Cheney, Pence and labeled Sen. Mitch McConnell “gutless and clueless” in one go. McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, voted for Trump’s acquittal but pronounced him “practically and morally responsible” for provoking the Jan. 6 insurrection, drawing the ex-president’s enduring enmity.

Since then, McConnell and Pence have turned the other cheek. Darth Vader’s daughter didn’t. But at the moment, the force seems to be with Trump.

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Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ imperils Republicans who don’t embrace it

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