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Donald J. Trump and his allies are scheduling events and raising money for initiatives intended to make the former president a central player in the midterm elections, and possibly to set the stage for another run for the White House.

He and groups allied with him are planning policy summits, more rallies and an elaborate forum next month at his Mar-a-Lago resort for candidates he has endorsed and donors who give as much as $125,000 per person to a pro-Trump super PAC.

The efforts seem intended to reinforce the former presidents grip on the Republican Party and its donors amid questions about whether Mr. Trump will seek the partys nomination again or settle into a role as a kingmaker.

Taken together, the pro-Trump groups form a sort of shadow political party that could help start another presidential campaign and, if that were successful, shape his administration. They include Mr. Trumps own PACs, which amassed more than $100 million by last summer, employ an overlapping roster of former top officials from his administration and have signaled that they intend to embrace policies and candidates supported by Mr. Trump.

The groups have also helped reinforce his properties as a center of Republican power, holding events at his private Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., and at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J. Mr. Trump has welcomed to the clubs a stream of Republicans seeking his political blessing, issuing nearly 100 endorsements to aligned candidates, including challengers to G.O.P. incumbents who voted for Mr. Trumps impeachment or supported the certification of his defeat to President Biden in the 2020 election.

The candidate forum at Mar-a-Lago is being planned for Feb. 23 by a super PAC run by some of Mr. Trumps closest allies called Make America Great Again, Again! Inc., according to an email to donors from Roy W. Bailey, a Texas businessman and Republican fund-raiser.

There will be an all-day candidate forum with back-to-back speeches from the endorsed candidates and familiar faces in the Trump orbit, wrote Mr. Bailey, who was a leading fund-raiser for Mr. Trumps campaigns and inaugural committee, then registered to lobby his administration. We want those who attend to leave thinking that it was the best political event they have ever attended, he wrote.

Donors who raise $375,000 will be invited to a private dinner with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Bailey noted that the PACs national finance director was Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is dating Mr. Trumps son Donald Trump Jr., and that its board included Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general who advised Mr. Trump during his first impeachment; Richard Grenell, who was Mr. Trumps ambassador to Germany and acting head of national intelligence; and Matthew G. Whitaker, who was acting attorney general.

The forum is for federal candidates endorsed by Mr. Trump. It is not clear how many of them intend to attend. But some, including Harriet Hageman, who is mounting a primary challenge against Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of Mr. Trumps harshest Republican critics, and Kelly Tshibaka, who is running in the primary against Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, have been asked to hold the date, according to a person familiar with the planning who was not authorized to discuss it.

Still, Mr. Trumps political activities have generated some grumbling within his circle of supporters.

One donor who had supported Mr. Trumps campaigns said he was leery about donating to Make America Great Again, Again! because of concerns that the money would be wasted. Citing events at the former presidents properties as an example, the donor, who insisted on anonymity to avoid antagonizing Mr. Trump and his allies, said he declined invitations to the February candidate forum and to a $125,000-a-plate fund-raising dinner with Mr. Trump held by the super PAC last month at Mar-a-Lago.

Other donors and party leaders worry about the damage that could be done by Mr. Trumps backing of primary challenges to Republicans who pushed back against his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Mr. Trump was impeached twice, including after his supporters stormed the Capitol seeking to disrupt the certification of Mr. Bidens victory. Since then, he has been banned from the social media accounts he had wielded so effectively to generate attention and punish enemies without spending any money.

While Mr. Trump has announced the formation of his own media company, including a new social network to reinsert himself into the conversation, it has yet to launch and its financing has come under scrutiny from securities regulators.

Mr. Trumps team also has continued fund-raising voraciously online for various PACs that he directly controls, which had compiled a war chest of more than $100 million last summer, and his team has continued financing campaign-style rallies. He has plans for one in Arizona this month, and more to follow, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Many of Mr. Trumps rallies in 2021 were paired with private donor round tables to raise money for his super PAC. He is planning more rallies in 2022 at locations chosen to help the candidates he has endorsed, according to people familiar with the plans.

Groups allied with him have stepped up their fund-raising in recent months, indicating they intend to spend funds to promote his causes and endorsements.

A nonprofit group called America First Policy Institute, which was started last year to serve as a think tank for Trump world, has the look of a Trump administration in waiting. It raised more than $20 million last year and has 110 employees, including Ms. Bondi, Mr. Whitaker and a number of former Trump cabinet members, such as David Bernhardt (who ran the Interior Department), Rick Perry (Energy Department) and Andrew Wheeler (Environmental Protection Agency).

The group held two events with Mr. Trump at his properties a fund-raising gala at Mar-a-Lago in November, and an event at Bedminster in July with Ms. Bondi to promote a lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump against tech companies that barred or limited his use of their platforms and it is planning twice-a-year policy summits around the country.

The next summit, planned for April in Atlanta, could feature Mr. Trump, according to the groups president, Brooke Rollins, who served as director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under Mr. Trump and says she remains in contact with Mr. Trump about her groups efforts.

She said her groups goal was to persuade Americans to support policies like those Mr. Trump pursued as president, and not about getting anyone re-elected, though she said she hoped the groups efforts would shape the debates around the midterms and the 2024 presidential election.

The metric of a successful policy organization is how much those policies are part of the debate, she said.

A linked nonprofit group called America First Works is promoting policies that comport with Mr. Trumps agenda. They include voting rules that make it hard to cheat, according to a fact sheet that seems to echo Mr. Trumps false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which his allies have been relying on to reshape election laws in a manner that could favor Republicans.

But the raft of new groups has brought with it some of the drama and infighting that marked Mr. Trumps campaigns and presidency.

A previous iteration of the super PAC behind the Mar-a-Lago forum was replaced after one of its founders, the former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, was accused of sexual misconduct by a donor.

That super PAC, which reported $5.6 million in the bank in mid-August, was supplanted by the new PAC, according to a statement announcing the shift in October that said the assets of the old PAC would be transferred to the new one.

The statement called the new group the ONLY Trump-approved super PAC.

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As Midterms and 2024 Loom, Trump Political Operation Revs Up - The New York Times

If Donald Trump runs for president again in 2024, Robert Palmer, a 54-year-old Florida man, will still be in prison for assaulting U.S. Capitol Police officers during the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Palmer, who was sentenced to 63 months, has received the longest sentence of the more than 150 defendants who have pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the storming of the U.S. Capitol. He was just one of the hundreds of Trump supporters who rushed law enforcement in an attempt to overturn a free and fair election.

After losing to Democrat Joe Biden in November 2020, Trump spent weeks promoting the lie that the election was stolen from him, culminating in the attack the following January.

Trump incited the riot that left five people dead and dozens of law enforcement officers injured. But while countless people are facing consequences for what they did that day, Trump still hasnt.

Instead, in a darkly ironic twist, Palmer and countless others will watch behind bars should Trump launch his next presidential bid.

The punishments for the insurrection have ranged widely. Texas real estate agent Jenna Ryan, who famously said she definitely wasnt going to jail because she has blond hair and white skin, received 60 days. Paul Hodgkins, a Floridian, was sentenced to eight months in prison for entering the Senate chamber. Hundreds of people have been charged with various crimes, so there are more sentences for defendants on the way. But one year later, its becoming increasingly likely that Trump will not be held accountable.

Ive heard this question from Democrats in my life and seen tweets from large public interest groups: Why isnt Donald Trump in prison?

The answer is simple: People like him rarely end up behind bars.

As his supporters languish, incarcerated, Trumps inner circle will continue plotting to finish destroying whats left of American democracy.

It seems as if the worst thing thats happened to Trump as a result of the insurrection is that hes been banned from Twitter. Although its still early, Trump is still leading among Republicans as a choice for the 2024 presidential nominee. And, more important, according to an AP/NORC poll, only 30% of Republicans believe the U.S. Capitol insurrection was somewhat violent, despite the multitude of videos depicting just how much violence occurred that day. Republican lawmakers are either busy promoting the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, keeping quiet out of a desire to keep their office or, in the case of Rep. Liz Cheney, being ostracized for embracing reality. Are these the conditions under which Trump is supposed to face consequences for his actions?

Heres how the criminal justice system really functions in this country. Marginalized people, such as people of color, poor people, and religious and gender minorities, are more likely to be swept up in the system. Black people are more likely to receive life in prison and death sentences. Those with fewer resources often face harsher punishments due to insufficient counsel. Meanwhile, whiter and wealthier people often receive more lenient sentences if they are charged at all.

Many of the people facing charges in the insurrection are awaiting their day in court at the federal jail in the District of Columbia, known for its harsh conditions. Trump supporters see the insurrectionists as political prisoners, but nonetheless they dont seem too concerned about the conditions under which they are held. Aside from some camera-ready moments from Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), when they inexplicably linked horrific conditions of the jail to critical race theory, conservatives have paid scant attention to their actual state of incarceration. Instead, the GOP machine is working to change voting laws to circumvent that pesky problem of not having enough votes to win an election outright.

During his inauguration speech, President Joe Biden vowed to combat right-wing extremism, music to the ears of the people who had just witnessed the horror of Jan. 6. But, of course, thats easier said than done. Congress, for its part, has been engaged in an investigation of the insurrection, and though many more details have been brought to light, its unlikely to end in the imprisonment of the former president.

The issue at hand is that there isnt a precedent for this type of crisis. Before Trump, every outgoing president graciously accepted a loss and peacefully handed over power because that was simply the norm; its what every president did before him. As a result, were ill-equipped to handle norm-breakers. I guess the Founding Fathers, beloved as they are to many in the U.S., forgot to write into the Constitution what to do when a president incites an insurrection.

Its important to remember that Trump going to prison would be a long way from solving the countrys current problem. A prison sentence may not even stop him from running for president, and there are plenty of Trumps-in-training waiting in the wings who would be more than thrilled to carry the mantle.

The damage he and his ilk wrought on our democracy is here to stay. Its better to embrace the obvious. Donald Trump is not going to prison. But at least he cant tweet.

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OPINION: Donald Trump Is Not Going To Prison - HuffPost

Based on demonstrated public behavior, of course Jan. 6 was a step toward authoritarianism, Mr. Meijer said. But he has tempered such statements with criticism of Democrats, saying, authoritarian populism is alive and well in both parties.

The system is not providing the recourse that we need, Mr. Meijer said, tying together Jan. 6 and racial justice protests in 2020 that sometimes turned violent. Thats the through line between the riots of last summer, Jan. 6 and now. The system itself has been delegitimized.

Ms. Cheney, by contrast, laid the responsibility with Republicans alone.

Our party has to choose, she said. We can either be loyal to Donald Trump, or we can be loyal to the Constitution, but we cannot be both. And right now, there are far too many Republicans who are trying to enable the former president, embrace the former president, look the other way and hope that the former president goes away.

For now, he is very much present. Senate Republicans had an opportunity to banish Mr. Trump permanently from politics; if 17 of them had joined Democrats in voting to convict him at this impeachment trial, it would have yielded the two-thirds majority needed to remove him and paved the way for a separate vote to bar him from office. But only seven Republicans voted to convict.

One of them, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, lamented that in her partys haste to get this behind us, Republicans lost the opportunity to do just that.

Like so many of her House Republican counterparts, Ms. Murkowski is facing a primary challenge this year from a Trump-endorsed candidate.

I am ever the optimist when it comes to the greatness of our country, and I want to continue to have that level of optimism, that when we get too close to the brink, we have the ability to pull ourselves back, she said. Thats one of the reasons that Im signing up to run again because I feel its important to be one of those voices that hopefully can pull us back.

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10 Republicans Voted to Impeach Trump. What's Become of Them? - The New York Times

Former White House trade advisor Peter Navarro says he would prove that ex-President Donald Trump "is innocent" in the January 6 Capitol riot if he were to be criminally referred by the House Select Committee over his "Green Bay Sweep" strategy.

In an interview with Newsweek, Navarro insisted that his so-called "Green Bay Sweep" strategy for January 6 that he coordinated with former chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon was "within the boundaries" of the U.S. Constitution and will ultimately clear Trump's name.

The end goal of the scheme was to keep Trump in office by pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of the Electoral College votes in six battleground states, by drawing out the proceedings in 24 hours of televised hearingstwo hours of debate in each chamber per state.

"Everything that was prescribed in the Green Bay Sweep conforms with existing constitutional law," said Navarro. "We basically peacefully came to a process to examine whether the votes cast in the election were legal."

The strategy, named after the football play famously used by Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers, involved more than 100 congressmen and senators, including Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona and Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. The pair were the first to challenge election results in the swing state of Arizona.

Navarro described himself as "the guy who provided what we called the receipts."

"I did the the analysis that these congressmen would use in order to challenge the results," he said.

Navarro served as the Assistant to the President, Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and the national Defense Production Act policy coordinator under the Trump administration.

His remarks come as the House panel probing the events that unfolded on January 6 begins to examine whether there is enough evidence to recommend that the Department of Justice (DOJ) pursue criminal cases against Trump and othersknown as sending a criminal referral.

The House Select Committee, according to people briefed on their efforts, is now looking into two specific areas of crimewhether wire fraud was committed by lawmakers off assertions that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and obstruction of Congress by attempting to stop the certification of electoral votes.

When pressed on whether he is concerned that his "Green Bay Sweep" strategy could then be damaging to himself, the former president or his allies, and result in a criminal referral, Navarro told Newsweek he believes he is "the last person that the committee wants to mess with."

"Because I'm the guy who proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that there was no way that Donald Trump instigated any of those plots," he said.

"The notion [of a criminal referral] is absurd," Navarro continued. "I mean, there's nothing, like, they want to go there? They're barking up the wrong tree as I'm the guy who basically proves that Donald Trump is innocent. Innocent, not guilty."

"He's innocent, of instigating any of that violence along with Steve Bannon."

"We wanted peace and calm to execute a plan that was within the boundaries clearly, of the U.S. Constitution," Navarro added. "I mean, if you start charging people for doing things like that, we might as well be in the Soviet Union."

Leading constitutional law experts however are challenging Navarro's assertion that the "Green Bay Sweep" was lawful.

Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law in California, told Newsweek that as a matter of constitutional law, what Navarro is claiming is "nonsense."

"The Electoral College had voted in accord with the procedures set out in the Constitution and federal laws. There was no basis for Vice President Pence to reject the results of the Electoral College," said Chemerinsky.

"The so-called Green Bay Sweep, as Navarro describes it, was to pressure Pence to do this or to delay the vote in Congress, with the ultimate goal of overturning the results from the Electoral College."

"There is no basis in the Constitution for this," Chemerinsky added. "It would have been an unconstitutional, illegal coup."

He added that he believes the House Select Committee "very well may" refer Navarro to the DOJ for prosecution.

Laurence H. Tribe, an American legal scholar and a University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, told Newsweek that Navarro's strategy "wouldn't have been within the spirit, and probably not even the letter, of the U.S. Constitution."

"Navarro's plans took the bare form of legal and constitutional vessels and poured the equivalent of poisonous fluid into them," Tribe said.

"It's true that challenging the credentials of people purporting to be electors from one of the states is well within the constitutional design," he added. "But using the formality of credentials challenges to concoct factually unfounded claims of fraud that every court has rejected not only isn't constitutional; it may well be criminal, in light of the federal criminal prohibitions of seditious conspiracy and giving aid and comfort to an insurrection."

Navarro said that so far, he has not been contacted by the panel over "Green Bay Sweep."

Newsweek contacted the House Select Committee for confirmation of Navarro's remarks, but didn't hear back by press time.

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Peter Navarro Says He'd Prove Donald Trump's Innocence Over Jan. 6 If Criminally Referred - Newsweek

Its been said that the hardest words to utter in the English language are I am sorry, I need help and I was wrong.

Lately, you can add to that: Trump was right.

Not about everything, of course, as some of his most ardent fans say on T-shirts and bumperstickers. But there is some evidence that history may not judge former President Donald Trump quite as harshly as critics did last year about his response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two such admissions came from, of all places, the White House last month. First, President Joe Biden credited the former administrations role in making vaccines available with the promised warp speed. It was a rare compliment offered by Biden to his predecessor, although others have said as much, including former Biden aide Andy Slavitt, who said last year, I would absolutely tip my hat. The Trump administration made sure that we got in record time a vaccine up and out.

Later, Biden told governors on a conference call, There is no federal solution (to COVID-19). This gets solved at the state level. People on social media were quick to point out that this was basically Trumps position. Trump told governors in April 2020 they would be calling their own shots on their respective states pandemic response.

Similarly, in 2020, Trump wanted schools to stay open, which is what Biden said Tuesday needs to happen despite some calls to temporarily return to virtual learning amid the omicron surge.

While largely critical of Trump, KFF (formerly Kaiser Family Foundation), a nonprofit that provides health policy news and analysis, credits Trump for the administrations actions taken before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Trump established a White House COVID-19 task force on Jan. 27, 2020, and days later, declared a public health emergency and barred foreign nationals coming from China from entering the U.S. These actions, of course, stand in contrast to Trumps cheery insistence that the virus would soon be history, but his attitude was consistent with what he later told Bob Woodward: that hed deliberately downplayed the threat so Americans wouldnt panic.

Few people would say thats an effective strategy or even an ethical one in the face of a virus that has now killed more than 800,000 Americans. National Review editor Rich Lowry wrote that Trumps strategy was a mistake, one that made him seem out of touch with reality, an incredibly perilous position for a president.

But now, looking at what COVID-19 has wrought under two presidents, Lowry is asking wheres the apology due Trump from people who blamed him for virus deaths in 2020. Lowry notes that during one of the presidential debates, Biden said, Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America.

In fact, as it turned out, more Americans died of COVID-19 in 2021 than 2020, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Johns Hopkins University. And while this was in part because of the emergence of more contagious variants, these deaths occurred under Bidens watch with vaccines available and no shortage of personal protective equipment like the U.S. saw in 2020.

As Lowry wrote, you cant make an apples-to-apples comparison of the administrations COVID-19 response, as Biden only took office in late January, and any policy changes would take time to show up in real-world results. Also, the U.S. didnt begin counting COVID-19 deaths until late February of 2020. And Biden has largely failed to achieve what he believes to be a key weapon in the fight: vaccination mandates.

But infectious-disease specialists told The Wall Street Journal that public-health officials failed to do what needed to be done this year. Thats language that wouldnt have been afforded to Trump, who was often decried as personally responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.

Theres plenty that Trump did wrong, including (and most obviously) his remarks about the coronavirus going away magically. The Washington Post, which keeps track of such things about Trump, counted 40 times that Trump said the virus would soon disappear. He also said repeatedly that it was basically the flu, despite his own experience with being sick.

But the longer the pandemic continues under the Biden administration, with attendant problems such as a shortage of tests, the more normal the Trump administrations response looks in the face of a once-in-a-century (we hope) pandemic. Trump is no COVID hero, but history may not judge Trump quite as harshly as his critics have, at least when it comes to the pandemic. With three years left in his administration, Biden may yet become the president who got COVID-19 under control. Unfortunately for Biden and the country, hes now the president under which the pandemic got even worse.

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Did Trump or Biden handle the pandemic better? Heres what we know | Opinion - Deseret News