And it’s a difference Trump’s team is happy to exploit. Trump’s long-standing and well-managed personal relationships stand in contrast with what some lawmakers have said about DeSantis who spoke with members of Congress at a conservative think tank this week in the nation’s capital. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) who represents DeSantis’s old congressional district, joined his colleagues on Thursday in endorsing the former president. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) met with the governor, then promptly issued a statement backing Trump for 2024. John Rutherford and Brian Mast endorsed Trump just ahead of DeSantis’s visit to Washington, D.C., this week. If something happened in a member’s personal life, Trump would often reach out. When Trump endorsed a lawmaker for office over the past few years, he would frequently try to call or meet with them or host them for a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago. Since he endorsed Trump, Steube said, he hasn’t “heard from anyone in DeSantis’s camp.”Ī spokesperson for DeSantis’s campaign did not respond to The Hill’s request for comment for this story.Īs president, Trump would invite members of Congress to fly with him aboard Air Force One when traveling to their states or districts. In Steube’s case, he recounted this week, Trump made a point to call him personally and check in after the congressman was admitted to the hospital after falling off a ladder at his home earlier this year. Greg Steube (R-Fla.), who endorsed Trump on Monday. “It was actually the DeSantis people that started all of a sudden, after five years, kind of reaching out to me,” said Rep. Others said that they never received any outreach from the former president or his political operation but noted that Trump had maintained an open line of communication with them, while they had only begun to hear from DeSantis’s team recently. In some cases, the endorsements came as a direct result of lobbying efforts by Trump and his team. So far, three members of Congress - including only one from Florida - have backed his presidential ambitions. "You need to know the symptoms in order to cure the disease," he said.The spate of endorsements for Trump amounted to a disappointing series of defections for DeSantis, who is expected to announce a 2024 presidential bid in May or June after the Florida state legislature wraps up its annual session. The team is searching for new partnerships, with the likes of Google or news organisations, to be able to feed fresh data and quotes into its Quotebank, he said.īut even without fresher data, West said the findings helped shine a light on something that could indicate US democracy is ailing. West said the data indicated that there may have been another increase in negativity in mid-2019, when Trump's campaign against current President Joe Biden ramped up.īut it remains unclear if this is just a temporary campaign increase, since the team's access to fresh data stopped in 2020. "That initial jump was not just a spike that came from a toxic campaign," he said. Interestingly, West said, the negativity did not just spike as Trump ramped up the rhetoric in his bid to win the highest office. "It's the whole system that basically became more negative." He stressed though that even without Trump's own quotes, political speech still markedly deteriorated. "When you remove Donald Trump's quotes, the size of the jump becomes much smaller, dropping by a magnitude of 40 percent," he pointed out. There is another indicator that Trump himself "is one of the main perpetrators of this negativity", he said. "And it happened the month Trump started his campaign, so that is one sign that Trump might be an important factor behind this." "That is actually a massive jump," West said. West said that during president Barack Obama's time in office from 2009 to 2016, the frequency of negative emotion words in political speech decreased steadily.īut in June 2015, when Trump launched his campaign, negativity swelled significantly, jumping eight percent compared to the baseline level in the previous seven years. It contains a corpus of 235 million unique quotes extracted from 127 million online news articles published between 20, allowing the researchers to carry out detailed analysis of the tone of US politicians' public language. So they set about building a giant dataset, dubbed Quotebank. When they started looking at the issue shortly after Trump won the presidency, they realised they did not have the data at hand to determine scientifically how the political tone had evolved over time. "But we are data people, so we asked: 'Can we check if the data actually says the same thing?'" A survey by the Pew Research Center showed that more than half of those polled believed the blame lay with Trump, who served as president from 2016 to 2020 and hopes to win a fresh term in next year's election.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |