Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis said definitively that rival Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, an acknowledgement the Florida governor made after years of equivocating answers.

“Of course he lost,” DeSantis said an interview with NBC News posted Monday. “Joe Biden’s the president.”

DeSantis has often sidestepped questions about whether he believes the 2020 election results were legitimate. But in recent days he has started publicly questioning the lies that Trump and his allies have made about the election’s legitimacy.

Federal and state election officials and Trump’s own attorney general said there was no credible evidence the election’s outcome was affected by fraud. The former president’s allegations were also roundly rejected by courts at the time, including judges he appointed.

Last week, Trump was charged by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith with four felonies related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the violent riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

DeSantis’ shift in rhetoric has come as he seeks to reset his stagnant 2024 White House campaign. Trump, who remains widely popular with the Republican Party base, is the early and commanding front-runner in next year’s Republican presidential primary.

DeSantis in his interview at first didn’t offer a clear answer when asked if Trump lost, saying, “Whoever puts their hand on the Bible on January 20 every four years is the winner.” But he gave a more direct answer when pressed again.

The governor repeated his concerns about voting methods from the 2020 election, criticizing mail voting and so-called “ballot harvesting,” but like other Republicans he said he would embrace the methods he had criticized.

“We are going to do it, too. We’re not going to fight with one hand tied behind our backs,” DeSantis said.

Academic research has shown that mail voting increases turnout but doesn’t benefit either party. Campaigns have normally pushed for it, allowing them to lock in votes early and focus their efforts on Election Day to encourage straggling supporters to get to the polls.

“The issue is, I think, what people in the media and elsewhere, they want to act like somehow this was just like the perfect election. I don’t think it was a good-run election, but I also think Republicans didn’t fight back. You’ve got to fight back when that is happening,” he said.

DeSantis has cast himself on the campaign trail as someone who could more successfully implement Trump’s politics and has walked a wobbly line criticizing his actions.

Last month, he said Trump should have offered a stronger condemnation of the January 6 attack. But he also said it was not an insurrection but a “protest” that “ended up devolving, you know, in a way that was unfortunate.”

DeSantis has argued Republicans will lose in 2024 if they’re focusing on the past election and the former president’s legal problems, which also includes federal charges of mishandling classified documents, including those stored at Mar-a-Lago in a ballroom and bathroom, among other spaces.

“If the election is a referendum on Joe Biden’s policies and the failures that we’ve seen and we are presenting a positive vision for the future, we will win the presidency,” DeSantis told NBC. “If, on the other hand, the election is not about Jan. 20, 2025, but Jan. 6, 2021, or what document was left by the toilet at Mar-a-Lago, if it’s a referendum on that, we are going to lose.”
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Washington has never been a particularly friendly place for Donald Trump. And after pleading not guilty to federal charges that he had tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election, Trump was quick to show that the feeling was mutual.

“It was also very sad driving through Washington, D.C., and seeing the filth and the decay and all of the broken buildings and walls and the graffiti,” he said on the tarmac of Reagan National Airport in Virginia, just a few kilometers away. “This is not the place that I left. It’s a very sad thing to see it.”

Trump’s comments drew some skepticism due to the fact that he basically was on two blocks of the district’s streets. His route to and from the airport took him past one of the district’s larger shelters for homeless people, but “filth and decay” drew some eye rolls from longtime Washington defenders.

“He’s just talking off the top of his head and angry to be back in D.C.,” said Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington’s non-voting delegate in the House of Representatives. “He saw D.C. for less than a minute.”

Norton also pointed out that when Trump last left Washington as president, the downtown federal area was essentially a militarized zone, with massive fences around the U.S. Capitol after Trump supporters overran the building on Jan. 6, 2021.

In fairness, heavily Democratic Washington — while generally cool to all Republican presidents — was distinctly hostile to the Trump administration. Multiple Trump Cabinet members were publicly berated by activists while eating in district restaurants. And Trump’s decision to skip the Kennedy Center Honors every year was usually a relief for organizers, who would have faced annual boycott threats from different artists if he did attend.

Trump received just over 4% of the presidential election vote in the district in 2016 and 5.4% in 2020.

He continued his attacks on the city Sunday, calling for a federal takeover of the nation’s capital. In a post on Truth Social, he called Washington a “filthy and crime ridden embarrassment to our nation” and said he wouldn’t be able to get a fair trial there.

“It has always been [Trump’s] pattern to vilify the district,” said Bo Shuff, executive director of DC Vote, one of the organizations leading the uphill fight for statehood. “It is easy to vilify a people who have no voice in the government.”

Republicans in Congress have taken up the anti-Washington mantra, as has Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, one of Trump’s challengers for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Trump was indicted by a grand jury of Washington residents, and DeSantis has joined in with Trump’s lawyers in arguing that he can’t receive a fair trial in Washington.

“Washington, DC is a ‘swamp’ and it is unfair to have to stand trial before a jury that is reflective of the swamp mentality,” DeSantis said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, after Trump’s indictment.

Schuff said Trump’s behavior Thursday mimicked the pattern of his presidency. “He didn’t spend any time in D.C. when he was in D.C. He spent it at one of two buildings, the White House and his hotel,” Shuff said.

He noted that “every bit of land” that Trump was on when he was in town for the court appearance was under federal control.

During Trump’s turbulent four years in office, he and the local government publicly sparred multiple times — in tones ranging from playful to deeply personal. When Trump floated the idea of a massive July 4 military parade complete with tanks rolling through the streets, the D.C. Council mocked him.

When mass protests broke out in the summer of 2020 over the death of George Floyd and wider police brutality and racial issues, Trump and Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser faced off multiple times. Trump accused Bowser of losing control of her city; he eventually declared his own multi-agency lockdown that included low-flying helicopters buzzing protesters. Bowser responded by having “Black Lives Matter” painted on the street in giant yellow letters one block from the White House.

After Trump’s departure, a newly Republican-held House of Representatives continued the fight, with the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability aggressively using its powers to essentially vet new Washington laws and manage its government. In March, the committee summoned Bowser and two members of the D.C. Council and grilled them for three hours about the district’s rising crime rates.

Shuff said Trump’s portrayal of Washington in such dystopian terms hasn’t necessarily spread throughout the Republican Party. But it has established itself among the wing of the party that holds Trump in the highest esteem.

“I believe that the folks who utilize this tactic are not numerous, but they’re boisterous,” he said. “The rhetoric is a little stronger, but the tactic is the same we’ve seen.”

During the March hearing on crime in Washington, several conservative Republican members spoke of the district in terms that indicated a fairly thin understanding of the on-the-ground situation.

Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado repeatedly asked D.C. Council Member Charles Allan why public urination was legal in Washington; it isn’t.

Rep. Gary Palmer of Alabama asked why 25-year-old defendants in Washington are allowed to be charged as minors; they aren’t.

Undeterred, Palmer told the assembled Washington political leadership, “You’ve got crappy schools. Your schools aren’t only dropout factories, they’re inmate factories.”
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U.S. scientists have achieved net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the second time since December, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said on Sunday.

Scientists at the California-based lab repeated the fusion ignition breakthrough in an experiment in the National Ignition Facility (NIF) on July 30 that produced a higher energy yield than in December, a Lawrence Livermore spokesperson said.

Final results are still being analyzed, the spokesperson added.

Lawrence Livermore achieved a net energy gain in a fusion experiment using lasers on Dec. 5, 2022. The scientists focused a laser on a target of fuel to fuse two light atoms into a denser one, releasing the energy.

That experiment briefly achieved what’s known as fusion ignition by generating 3.15 megajoules of energy output after the laser delivered 2.05 megajoules to the target, the Energy Department said.

In other words, it produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it, the department said.

The Energy Department called it “a major scientific breakthrough decades in the making that will pave the way for advancements in national defense and the future of clean power.”

Scientists have known for about a century that fusion powers the sun and have pursued developing fusion on Earth for decades. Such a breakthrough could one day help curb climate change if companies can scale up the technology to a commercial level in the coming decades.
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Calls are growing for Donald Trump’s criminal trials to be broadcast live, as the United States grapples with the prospect of seeing a former — and possibly future — president in the dock.

Lawyers and politicians are lining up to urge that cameras be allowed inside the courtroom, particularly when the one-time reality TV star faces a jury on charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

“Given the historic nature of the charges brought forth in these cases, it is hard to imagine a more powerful circumstance for televised proceedings,” read a letter signed Thursday by California congressman Adam Schiff and dozens of his Democratic Party colleagues. 

“If the public is to fully accept the outcome, it will be vitally important for it to witness, as directly as possible, how the trials are conducted, the strength of the evidence adduced and the credibility of witnesses,” the letter said.

A Trump lawyer, John Lauro, said he would favor having a televised trial, but in several appearances on Sunday talk shows he emphasized this was merely his own opinion

“I personally would love to see that,” he told Fox News Sunday, adding he believed the Biden administration “does not want the American people to see the truth.”

Trump has now been charged in three separate criminal cases: lying about hush-money payments to a porn star, mishandling secret documents, and trying to subvert the election.

An indictment looms in a fourth, related to a phone call in which Trump pressured a Georgia election official to “find” the 11,780 votes that would reverse his defeat to Joe Biden in the southern state.

Despite extensive media coverage of Trump’s alleged crimes, an overwhelming majority of Republican voters – 74% — and a third of all voters believe he has done no wrong, according to a poll by The New York Times and Sienna College.

Trump himself insists he is innocent, the victim of a “witch hunt” by an establishment desperate to silence him as he runs again for the White House.

Clarifying Trump’s exact role and actions is a prime reason to show the trial to a wide audience, said Alan Dershowitz, a constitutional law specialist.

“If the Trump trial is not televised, the public will learn about the events through the extremely biased reporting of today’s media,” he wrote in The Hill.

“It will be as if there were two trials: one observed by reporters for MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times and other liberal media, the other through the prism of reporters for Fox, Newsmax and other conservative outlets. 

“There will be nowhere to go to learn the objective reality of what occurred at trial.”

The OJ Simpson precedent

While some state-level proceedings have been shown on U.S. television – O.J. Simpson’s nation-stopping murder trial was a ratings blockbuster — federal trials cannot be photographed or broadcast, courtesy of rules dating to 1946.

Neal Katyal, a law professor at Georgetown University, argued in The Washington Post it was time to update this “antiquated” edict.

“We live in a digital age, where people think visually and are accustomed to seeing things with their own eyes,” he wrote.

The decision on whether to allow cameras into the courtroom will ultimately rest with the Judicial Conference — the policy-making body of the federal court system, which is run by U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts.

Alternatively, Congress could change the law.

Katyal, who was a prosecutor in the murder trial of Derek Chauvin, the white Minnesota police officer who killed African American George Floyd, said the broadcasting of those proceedings had helped a highly divided public to accept the guilty verdict when it came.

The same would be true of the Trump trial, Katyal maintained.

“We have a right to see it. And we have the right to ensure that rumormongers and conspiracy theorists don’t control the narrative,” he said.

Broadcast risks

The problem with putting it all on the small screen, said Christina Bellantoni, an expert in media and political journalism at the University of Southern California, is Trump’s formidable ability to dominate discourse and bend the narrative.

“My prediction… would be that his public opinion ratings would go up, no matter what evidence is presented,” she told AFP.

The risk is that a trial about an alleged attempt to overthrow democracy becomes little more than entertainment, where no one’s mind is changed.

People are not on the fence about Trump, she said. “People will hate-watch it; people will rally and root for him. And there’s not going to be anybody that’s like, ‘Gee, I think I’ll watch this and see how justice plays out.'”
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Maksym Bunchukov remembers hearing rockets explode in Zaporizhzhia as the war in Ukraine began.

“It was terrible,” he said. He and his wife sent their adult daughter west to Lviv for safety and joined her later with their pets.

Now, about 18 months after the war broke out, Bunchukov is in North Dakota, like thousands of Ukrainians who came over a century ago.

He is one of 16 new arrivals who are part of a trade group’s pilot effort through the Uniting for Ukraine humanitarian program to recruit refugees and migrants during a workforce shortage. Twelve more Ukrainians are scheduled to arrive by Aug. 15 as part of the North Dakota Petroleum Council’s Bakken Global Recruitment of Oilfield Workers program.

Some workers want to bring their families to North Dakota while others hope to return to Ukraine.

“I will try to invite my wife, invite my daughter, invite my cat and invite my dog,” Bunchukov told The Associated Press a week after his arrival.

The Bakken program has humanitarian and workforce missions, said Project Manager Brent Sanford, a former lieutenant governor who watched the Bakken oil rush unfold during his time as mayor of boomtown Watford City from 2010 to 2016.

The oil boom initially was met by an “organic workforce” of western North Dakotans with experience in oil field jobs elsewhere, but as the economy reeled from the Great Recession, thousands of people flocked to the Bakken oil field from other states and even other countries to fill high-wage jobs, Sanford said.

Technological advances for combining horizontal drilling and fracking — injecting high-pressure mixtures of water, sand and chemicals into rocks — made capturing the oil locked deep underground possible.

“People came by planes, trains and automobiles, every way possible from everywhere for the opportunity for work,” Council President Ron Ness said. “They were upside down on their mortgage, their life or whatever, and they could reset in North Dakota.”

But the 2015 downturn, coronavirus pandemic and other recent shocks probably led workers back to their home states, especially if moving meant returning to warmer and bigger cities, Sanford said. Workforce issues have become “very acute” in the last 10 months, Ness said.

Ness estimated there are roughly 2,500 jobs available in an oil field producing about 1.1 million barrels per day. Employers don’t advertise for every individual job opening, but post once or twice for many open positions, he said.

An immigration law firm told Ness that Uniting for Ukraine would fit well for North Dakota given its Ukrainian heritage, similar climate and agrarian people, he said.

The program’s sponsors, including company owners, managers and employees, agree to help Ukrainians find work, health care, schools for their children and safe and affordable housing.

About 160 Ukrainians have arrived in North Dakota, the majority in Bismarck, as part of Uniting for Ukraine, according to State Refugee Coordinator Holly Triska-Dally.

Applications from prospective sponsors from around the state have “gone up considerably” in recent months, likely due to more awareness but also Ukrainians who are “working and beginning to thrive” and filing to support their family, she said.

The two dozen or so Ukrainians might not seem like many arrivals on national or statewide scales, but they will make a significant difference for cities like Minot and Dickinson. The cities haven’t traditionally been major resettlement hubs, but now “there’s a strong likelihood” the workers’ families will join them, adding to the economy and schools, Triska-Dally said.

Bunchukov, who had jobs in mechanics and furniture sales in Ukraine, works for road contractor Baranko Bros. Inc. He and other new arrivals have experience in Alaska’s seafood industry. Others have worked on cruise ships or held different seasonal jobs. Because of those jobs, many workers already hold Social Security numbers and have studied English, Sanford said.

Dmytro Haiman, who said his English skills steered him toward the Bakken program, recalled sheltering with relatives in his grandmother’s cellar as the war began and bombs fell on his hometown, Chernihiv. In the first months of the war he drove people west to safety and brought canned food, medicine and even generators to Chernihiv amid supply shortages.

He told the AP he expected to work in water transportation and hopes to earn enough money to help his family, “to help us to rebuild our country.”

The Bakken program aims to recruit 100 workers by the end of 2023, and 400 after one year. Those 400 may not all be Ukrainians. Some will drive, start in shops or build roads, pads and fences, “everything from there up to well site operations,” Ness said.

The workers will start in construction and other basic jobs starting at $20 an hour and can rise quickly. They also can leave their jobs or the state while they’re in the Uniting for Ukraine program, which grants “humanitarian parole” lasting two years with a goal of a longer path beyond, but that depends on the federal government, Sanford said.

Four translators help workers with forms, training and community acclimation, Sanford said. One employer has rented eight apartments for workers, while others are in extended-stay hotels until they can find apartments.

Glenn Baranko, president of the contractor building paths to drilling rigs and providing environmental services in the oil field, planned to assign jobs to five initial workers based on their skillsets.

The labor shortage led his company to hire a full-time recruiter, “but there’s still a need,” said Baranko, whose great-grandfather came to the area from Ukraine.

At a recent lunch for several workers hosted by the Ukrainian Cultural Institute in Dickinson, the new arrivals crowded around a map to point out their hometowns. The cooks laid out dishes of rice rolls, beet bread, deviled eggs and filled dumplings called perogies.

The institute preserves the area’s Ukrainian heritage and has raised more than $10,000 for humanitarian aid since the war began in February 2022, institute Executive Director Kate Kessel said.

Mannequins wearing traditional garb, displays of decorated eggs and a Ukrainian library fill the institute’s space. A large banner bearing “Peace to Ukraine” stood over the people eating lunch at tables.

Ivan Sakivskyi, who works for Baranko, said he looks forward to opportunities for promotion, such as driving heavy equipment, and gaining new experience.

Though he doesn’t plan to live long-term in the U.S., Sakivskyi said he would like to return for work after visiting loved ones in his home country.

“My heart and my soul” are in Ukraine. “It’s my friends,” the Odesa native said. “It’s my family.”
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