As death toll from Maui fire reaches 93, authorities say effort to count the losses is just starting

LAHAINA, Hawaii — As the death toll from a wildfire that razed a historic Maui town reached 93, authorities warned Saturday that the effort to find and identify the dead was still in its early stages. It’s already the deadliest U.S. wildfire for over a century.

Crews with cadaver dogs have covered just 3% of the search area, Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said.

“We’ve got an area that we have to contain that is at least 5 square miles and it is full of our loved ones,” noting that the death toll is likely to grow and “none of us really know the size of it yet.”

He spoke as federal emergency workers picked through the ashen moonscape left by the fire that razed the centuries-old town of Lahaina. Teams marked the ruins of homes with a bright orange X to record an initial search, and HR when they found human remains.

Pelletier said identifying the dead is extremely challenging because “we pick up the remains and they fall apart ... When we find our family and our friends, the remains that we’re finding is through a fire that melted metal.” Two people have been identified so far, he said.

Dogs worked the rubble, and their occasional bark — used to alert their handlers to a possible corpse — echoed over the hot and colorless landscape.

“It will certainly be the worst natural disaster that Hawaii ever faced,” Gov. Josh Green remarked Saturday as he toured the devastation on historic Front Street. “We can only wait and support those who are living. Our focus now is to reunite people when we can and get them housing and get them health care, and then turn to rebuilding.”

At least 2,200 buildings were damaged or destroyed in West Maui, Green said, of which 86% were residential. Across the island, he added, damage was estimated at close to $6 billion. He said it would take “an incredible amount of time” to recover.”

The confirmed death toll was later raised to 93 from the total of 89 announced in a press conference with Green and other officials.

At least two other fires have been burning on Maui, with no fatalities reported thus far: in south Maui’s Kihei area and in the mountainous, inland communities known as Upcountry. A fourth broke out Friday evening in Kaanapali, a coastal community north of Lahaina, but crews were able to extinguish it, authorities said.

Green said the Upcountry fire had affected 544 structures, of which 96% were residential.

Emergency managers in Maui were searching for places to house people displaced from their homes. As many as 4,500 people are in need of shelter, county officials said on Facebook early Saturday, citing figures from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Pacific Disaster Center.

He encouraged those with missing family members to go to the family assistance center.

“We need you to do the DNA test. We need to identify your loved ones,” Pelletier said.

Those who escaped counted their blessings, thankful to be alive as they mourned those who didn’t make it.

Retired fire captain Geoff Bogar and his friend of 35 years, Franklin Trejos, initially stayed behind to help others in Lahaina and save Bogar’s house. But as the flames moved closer and closer Tuesday afternoon, they knew they had to get out. Each escaped to his own car. When Bogar’s wouldn’t start, he broke through a window to get out, then crawled on the ground until a police patrol found him and brought him to a hospital.

Trejos wasn’t as lucky. When Bogar returned the next day, he found the bones of his 68-year-old friend in the back seat of his car, lying on top of the remains of the Bogars’ beloved 3-year-old golden retriever Sam, whom he had tried to protect.

Trejos, a native of Costa Rica, had lived for years with Bogar and his wife, Shannon Weber-Bogar, helping her with her seizures when her husband couldn’t. He filled their lives with love and laughter.

“God took a really good man,” Weber-Bogar said.

The newly released death toll surpassed the toll of the 2018 Camp Fire in northern California, which left 85 dead and destroyed the town of Paradise. A century earlier, the 1918 Cloquet Fire broke out in drought-stricken northern Minnesota and raced through a number of rural communities, destroying thousands of homes and killing hundreds.

The wildfires are the state’s deadliest natural disaster in decades, surpassing a 1960 tsunami that killed 61 people. An even deadlier tsunami in 1946, which killed more than 150 on the Big Island, prompted development of a territory-wide emergency alert system with sirens that are tested monthly.

Hawaii emergency management records do not indicate the warning sirens sounded before fire hit the town. Officials sent alerts to mobile phones, televisions and radio stations, but widespread power and cellular outages may have limited their reach.

Fueled by a dry summer and strong winds from a passing hurricane, the wildfires on Maui raced through parched brush covering the island.

“It outpaced anything firefighters could have done in the early hours,” U.S. Fire Administrator Lori Moore-Merrell said, adding that it moved horizontally, structure to structure and “incredibly fast.”

“It was a low-to-the-ground fire. It was grass-fed by all evidence that we could observe today,” she said.

The most serious blaze swept into Lahaina on Tuesday and destroyed nearly every building in the town of 13,000, leaving a grid of gray rubble wedged between the blue ocean and lush green slopes.

Maui water officials warned Lahaina and Kula residents not to drink running water, which may be contaminated even after boiling, and to only take short, lukewarm showers in well-ventilated rooms to avoid possible chemical vapor exposure.

Maui’s firefighting efforts may have been hampered by limited staff and equipment.

Bobby Lee, president of the Hawaii Firefighters Association, said there are a maximum of 65 county firefighters working at any given time, who are responsible for three islands: Maui, Molokai and Lanai.

Green said officials will review policies and procedures to improve safety.

“People have asked why we are reviewing what’s going on and it’s because the world has changed. A storm now can be a hurricane-fire or a fire-hurricane,” he said. “That’s what we experienced, that’s why we’re looking into these policies, to find out how we can best protect our people.”

Lahaina resident Riley Curran said he doubted that county officials could have done more, given the speed of the onrushing flames. He fled his Front Street home after seeing the oncoming fire from the roof of a neighboring building.

“It’s not that people didn’t try to do anything,” Curran said. “The fire went from zero to 100.”

More than a dozen people formed an assembly line on Kaanapali Beach Saturday to unload water, toiletries, batteries and other essentials from a catamaran that sailed from another part of Maui.

David Taylor, marketing director of Kai Kanani Sailing, which owns the boat, said many of the supplies were for hotel employees who lost their homes and were living with their families at their workplaces.

“The aloha still exists,” he said as the group applauded when they finished unloading the boat. “We all feel it really intensely and everybody wants to feel like they can do something.”

Caitlin McKnight, who also volunteered at an emergency shelter at the island’s war memorial, said she tried to be strong for those who lost everything.

“It was evident that those people, those families, people of the Maui ohana, they went through a traumatic event,” McKnight said, using a Hawaiian word for family. “You could just see it in their face.”

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Taiwan’s VP defies Beijing with New York City transit stop

Taiwan’s vice president Lai Ching-te defied pressure from Beijing to make a transit stop in New York City on Saturday en route to a state visit to Paraguay.

Lai, the leading presidential candidate in Taiwan’s upcoming election, is using the Big Apple stop to meet with members of the Taiwanese American community. On Saturday, China began conducting a three-day military exercise in the East China Sea a few hundred miles from Taiwan — a typical show from Beijing to express its displeasure with the island’s foreign political activities.  

But China’s reaction was relatively muted given that China’s ambassador to the U.S., Xie Feng, told a crowd at the Aspen Security Forum last month that aborting Lai’s stopovers was his “top priority.” These travel visits often attract the eyes of watchers in Beijing and Washington, given their contentious nature for China, but American protocol dictates that they remain low key.

Lai announced his arrival in New York on Saturday evening in a post on X, the platform previously known as Twitter.

“Happy to arrive at the #BigApple, icon of liberty, democracy & opportunities,” he wrote, attaching a photo alongside Bi-Khim Hsiao, who leads Taiwan’s unofficial embassy in the U.S., and Ingrid Larson, a managing director at America’s de facto embassy in Taiwan. “Looking forward to seeing friends & attending transit programs in #NewYork.”

His first stopover will only be about 24 hours. Lai will leave New York City on Sunday to attend the inauguration of Paraguay’s new president, Santiago Peña Palacios. Paraguay is one of Taiwan’s 13 remaining diplomatic allies, and attending the event gives Lai — who isleading the polls in the race to succeed outgoing President Tsai Ing-wen in January — a chance to show off his foreign policy chops and connect with supporters.

Lai will get another chance to do that when he transits overnight in San Francisco on Aug. 15 on his way back to Taiwan.

In Saturday remarks before leaving Taiwan, Lai briefly mentioned making a transit stop in New York but talked broadly about engaging with different leaders.

“On this trip, I will have confident exchanges with world leaders and speak with representatives from like-minded countries,” Lai said. “I will show the international community that Taiwan is committed to values of freedom, democracy, and human rights, is an active participant in global affairs and has made many efforts to help maintain peace in the Indo-Pacific region.”

The Taiwanese vice president’s arrival in South America will occur amid reports that China has paid outlets in Paraguay to spread negative reports about the visit, according to a release from Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemning the action.

During a previous U.S. transit stop in January 2022, Lai held video meetings from his Los Angeles hotel with 17 U.S. lawmakers. Beijing responded bylodging a “solemn representation” with the U.S. government that included a demand that the Biden administration “stop the erroneous acts of having official exchanges with Taiwan.” Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-Wen visited the U.S. earlier this year, meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and several other members of Congress, which China retaliated against by conducting three days of military exercises around the island.

Beijing “should not use as a pretext any transit by Vice President Lai for brazen coercion or other provocative activities [and] should not be a pretext for interference in Taiwan's election either,” a senior administration official told reporters last month.

Lai’s profile as the leading candidate to replace outgoing Tsai in the self-governing island’s January 2024 elections makes him doubly problematic for Beijing. He has reinforced his pro-Taiwan independence credentials by declaring in January that Taiwan “is already an independent and sovereign nation.”

Lai’s pro-independence rhetoric “is his [electoral] market share. He's not going to walk away from that,” said Douglas Paal, former unofficial U.S. envoy to the self-governing island at the American Institute in Taiwan from 2002 to 2006.

And eyeing a possible election victory, Lai said last month that elected leaders of Taiwan should be welcomed to the White House, a prospect which would represent a drastic departure to how the U.S. and the island have maintained relations since 1979 — as well as a deep offense to Beijing.

“It's up to the Chinese how they want to play it,” said Daniel Russel, a former senior Asia hand in the Obama administration. “Every serious [Taiwan presidential] candidate in the past has come to the United States for kind of an informal base touch — there is nothing new, radical or different about this.”

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Georgia prosecutor will present witness testimony to grand jury as another Trump indictment appears imminent

A Georgia prosecutor appears on the verge of bringing criminal charges in her investigation into former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in that state.

Two witnesses confirmed Saturday that they will appear before a grand jury in Fulton County, Ga., early next week — the clearest sign yet that Fani Willis, the district attorney there, soon plans to ask the grand jury to approve criminal indictments against Trump or his allies.

If Trump is charged in Georgia, it would be his fourth indictment in the past five months. He is already facing federal criminal charges over 2020 election interference and his hoarding of classified documents, as well as New York criminal charges related to hush money payments.

The Fulton County indictment would cap off a yearslong investigation into the former president’s efforts to change the outcome of the Georgia election, which Joe Biden narrowly won. In the weeks after Election Day, Trump spread falsehoods online about the outcome, made a personal call to a state official asking to overturn the will of the voters and plotted using fake electors to falsify results. Willis launched the probe in early 2021.

“I can confirm that I have been requested to testify before the Fulton County grand jury on Tuesday,” Geoff Duncan, a Republican who was Georgia's lieutenant governor during the 2020 election, wrote Saturday afternoon on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “I look forward to answering their questions around the 2020 election. Republicans should never let honesty be mistaken for weakness.”

An Atlanta-area journalist, George Chidi, also posted on X that he was asked to testify Tuesday.

An indictment would likely follow soon after witness testimonies, perhaps as early as Tuesday afternoon or evening. Legal observers had expected that the charges would come down in mid-August.

At the beginning of the month, Trump was indicted on federal charges for conspiring against the U.S. in his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

On Truth Social, Trump has been railing against the Georgia investigation — and the other three indictments he has faced — as politically motivated, while also making unsubstantiated personal attacks against Willis.

“How can they charge me in Georgia?” he wrote on Saturday. “The phone call was PERFECT. WITCH HUNT!”

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New Jersey bids final farewell to Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver, capping a 3-day celebration

NEWARK, N.J. — Sheila Oliver's place in history might have been much different before she read Charles Dickens and John Steinbeck.

She had originally planned to be an archaeologist, thinking it would be fun to travel to places like Greece, Egypt and Rome and dig up the past. But, as she said in a past video interview played at her funeral Saturday, she then read Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" and Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," two classic novels exploring themes of class, hardship and renewal.

And growing up in Newark during the race riots of 1967, Oliver witnessed the Civil Rights movement and, she said, "I began to have a heightened consciousness" about being Black in America.

Oliver's journey away from digging up history to making it then began.

Over four hours on Saturday at the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Oliver's hometown, hundreds of mourners bid their final farewell to New Jersey's first Black woman to hold statewide office and, before that, first Black female speaker of the Assembly.

Her funeral capped a three-day tribute to Oliver that began Thursday with her body lying in state at the Capitol building in Trenton and again at the Essex County courthouse on Friday.

Oliver died earlier this month at age 71, one day after being hospitalized for undisclosed reasons. She had been serving as acting governor at the time because Gov. Phil Murphy was on an overseas vacation, but she transferred those duties to Senate President Nick Scutari until Murphy returned. Murphy and the Oliver family have not publicly disclosed her cause of death.

On Saturday, the majestic French Gothic cathedral in Newark — North America's fifth largest — filled with mourners that included her family; the legendary performer Dionne Warwick; members of New Jersey's congressional delegation and the state Legislature; four former governors; and her predecessor, the state's first lieutenant governor, Kim Guadagno. Rev. Al Sharpton delivered the eulogy.

Murphy, who wore a large button with Oliver's image on it, recalled in a speech how days of fires during the riots — known as the Newark Rebellion — "lit a fire in Sheila’s heart" as a teenager. It inspired her to become a "champion" of her community, he said.

"And in the decades since, Sheila rolled up her sleeves — again and again — and dedicated herself to extinguishing the embers of inequality, injustice and indigence," Murphy said.

Oliver's political career began in the 1990s with the school board in East Orange, the town outside Newark she lived in until her death. She then rose to become elected an Essex County freeholder and then a member of the state Assembly.

Oliver also worked for Essex County, whose executive, Joe DiVincenzo, said during a speech he plans to rename the county's family assistance and benefits building after her and commission a bust of Oliver to be displayed at the county courthouse. Oliver already had a school in East Orange named after her, and Murphy said he intends to commission an official portrait of her (and Guadagno) to hang in the Statehouse along with those of the state's past governors.

In 2010, Oliver became speaker, the first Black woman in the country to lead a legislative chamber.

Oliver held enormous influence in that position, determining what legislation made it to a vote and how the state spent taxpayer money. She was one of the state's most powerful officials alongside two white men — Governor Chris Christie and Senate President Steve Sweeney.

Multiple speakers said Oliver felt duty-bound to advocate for the interests of her community, which was mostly people of color, disadvantaged and, as Murphy said, "the forgotten families of our state."

That advocacy included fighting for same-sex marriage and raising the hourly minimum wage as speaker even if those efforts failed, and it continued as lieutenant governor by championing affordable housing, investing in schools and combating gun violence, Murphy said. She was described by speakers as a calm "warrior" who led with compassion and didn't posture for political gain, and who always remembered why she went into public service.

"She never forgot and she never let the folks in the room forget why she was in the room," Sharpton said. "She came not for a season, she came for a reason, and that’s the reason we’re here."

In one of the lighter moments of the funeral, Warwick, a native of East Orange, recalled that she nicknamed Oliver "my hat lady" for how well she wore one, and that Oliver "loved to laugh — and she loved a good piece of gossip, too." Warwick called Oliver a "dear friend" she considered family, and said when she heard Oliver had died, she could hardly breathe.

"We're all going to miss her because we're very selfish. But that's OK," Warwick said.

"God said you're going to grieve, you're going to cry, you're going moan and do all the things that affect you now. But then all of a sudden all of those wonderful, laughing memories are going to flood your hearts, and all that moaning, groaning, crying and grieving will fly out the window. Only the good, warm, loving memories will you continue to have, as I will. God rest, God bless you, Sheila Y. Oliver."

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Trump blames left for legal costs

Former President Donald Trump on Saturday blamed his political enemies for legal fees he’s incurred over the course of three recent indictments.

Trump posted on his social media site Truth Social slamming the “Lunatic Left” for his “vast” legal fees, less than two weeks after FEC filings revealed that his operation is bleeding campaign funds to pay bills related to his mounting legal challenges.

Trump’s Save America PAC shrank from over $100 million at the beginning of last year to $3.6 million after bankrolling legal fees for the former president and his allies, according to filings first reported in The Washington Post. Filings also show that Save America and five other Trump committees have spent a total of over $40 million in legal fees since the start of 2021.

“The Lunatic Left, working closely with Crooked Joe Biden and his corrupt DOJ, is not only focusing on Election Interference, but on getting the Trump Campaign to spend vast amounts of money on legal fees, thereby having less to spend on ads showing that Crooked Joe is the WORST PRESIDENT IN U.S. HISTORY!” Trump wrote Saturday on the way to the Iowa State Fair.

Trump is currently facing federal indictments in both Florida and Washington, D.C. — the former for the mishandling of highly classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence and the latter in relation to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The former president is also facing state charges in New York in connection to hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and is under investigation for alleged election interference in Georgia.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is expected to begin presenting the election interference case before a grand jury as early as next week.

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Jamaal Bowman on hip-hop’s ‘eff you’ response to bad politics

A version of this story originally appeared in The Recast.

While I have to literally chase most politicians to get a question in, there is always one who makes himself available: Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.).

This guy has an affinity for viral on-camera moments: telling Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) to “take her ass back to Washington” during a visit to his state — or lambasting GOP members for being "gutless" on guns. And just like the punchline to your favorite song, you’re guaranteed to remember what he said the next day.

He was born and raised in New York City, and before he became a lawmaker, Bowman served as a principal at a middle school he founded in the Bronx. Now he’s using his 20 years of experience as an educator to legislate on some of the most controversial issues, including student debt and how African American history is taught in schools.

Beyond education policy, he also introduced the RAP Act, a bill that would limit the use of lyrics as evidence in court — very fitting for a congressman who represents the birthplace of hip-hop: The Bronx.

There is no doubt that the art form was born in the Bronx. But there is some controversy on exactly when. Some historians consider the birth date of hip-hop to be Aug. 11, 1973, while others predate it just a year earlier — and others still date it a year later. One thing they all agree on: DJ Kool Herc, a Jamaican American DJ, was the godfather of rap, marrying rhymes to beats at parties in the Bronx. And so, today, fans around the world are paying homage to the art form Kool Herc created, celebrating 50 years of hip-hop.

With that in mind, I talked to Bowman about the golden anniversary of this prolific genre of music and its ties to politics. He shares how his “bombastic” style of communicating is linked to hip-hop’s “eff you” response to bad politics.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you help me understand hip-hop’s connection to politics? How do you see those two things converging?

Hip-hop has always been very critical of our political system, as well as the people within that system, especially during the time of hip-hop in which I was raised.

I was raised during a time where people refer to it as the golden age of hip-hop. So pretty much like the mid- to late eighties where artists like Eric B. & Rakim and KRS-One and Big Daddy Kane and X Clan and, you know, so many artists that put first and foremost consciousness and political social justice into their music, sort of laid the foundation for what hip-hop was going to continue to be.

What do you think the impact of those within your generation, this golden age of hip-hop, that are now in positions of leadership, have on politics and policy today?

Myself, Leader [Hakeem] Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Joe Neguse (D-Colo.), and not just African Americans, you know, Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), Chairman [Pete] Aguilar, [Jared] Moskowitz (D-Fla.), all of these people, were influenced in one way or another by hip-hop music.

It creates the consciousness where, you know, we are governing from the perspective of communities that have been historically marginalized. What you didn't learn in your history books or in your school textbooks about these communities, hip-hop provided that curriculum.

That's why I think many of us govern the way we govern. It really has been an integrating force in our society in ways in which politics is still behind. We still have schools that are segregated, communities that are segregated. We still have these levels of wealth inequality. Hip-hop is one of the only things that literally brings everyone together.

You mentioned Katherine Clark. What instance are you referencing in terms of her and hip-hop?

We talk all the time on the House floor and not just about bills and laws and politics, but we talk about each other like, you know, where were you born? Where were you raised? What were some of the artists that you listened to growing up?

I had a conversation with Katherine Clark about this, like who would she attribute herself mostly to. And with Katherine Clark, the conversation landed on Lauryn Hill or Queen Latifah.

The real Queen Latifah is Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi.

She is the multi-time speaker, and she is a badass leader in her own right in American history. So she would be Queen Latifah and Katherine Clark would probably be Lauryn Hill.

[Jeffries] is smooth. He's from Brooklyn. He's an orator. He's linguistically gifted. That's Jay-Z.

OK! And you said Pete Aguilar, who would you attribute to him?

I don't want to use like racial stereotypes, but it fits too well. Like he's Mexican from California, he has to be B-Real from Cypress Hill. Even though his first response was Tupac. I told him, “You not radical enough to be Tupac.”

And you said you would be Busta [Rhymes]. Why?

There was a series of events that took place where I was loud and bombastic in public. And there was a lot of conversation around decorum and that style and “can you get things done with that style?”

So this was around the time where I was arguing with Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) about gun violence and doing something about it. I was very loud there. I had a debate with Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) about a few things and, you know, showing a particular style there. But then also Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) came to New York, and I was very loud and told her to get the hell out of New York.

I guess Busta Rhymes is known to be loud and bombastic. And people initially may not put him as a top-five rapper or top-10 rapper because the style overwhelms the pen. But the people who really know, know Busta Rhymes is one of the greatest rappers of all time in terms of his verbal linguistics.

Is this style advantageous to you? Do you see it working?

I don't know. I mean, I think so. You know, I hate talking about it that way because it makes it seem like it's orchestrated, it's choreographed, and it really isn't. Everything that has happened has been organic.

If I am being intentional about anything, it's not allowing hate or fear or lies or misinformation to stand on its own without there being a response to that.

After my engagement with Marjorie Taylor Greene in Washington, she literally had a press conference the next day saying that my “aggressive mannerisms” intimidated her and that people need to watch Jamaal Bowman.

I had to talk to reporters about how dangerous and reckless those words were made by a white woman about a Black man in America. And I had to remind people of the history of that, whether it's Emmett Till or Medgar Evers or Malcolm X or any outspoken Black man across history.

And that's the kind of thing that hip-hop always shines a light on. You know what I mean? A lot of art is really ahead of what we do in Congress when it comes to this stuff. Congress still hasn't gone through a process of truth and reconciliation regarding the genocide of the Indigenous and the enslavement of Africans. We can't even do that, you know, but art can, because art should be about holding a mirror up to who we are so that we could become better, better Americans and better people.

You’ve brought certain policies related to hip-hop to the floor. How is that going?

The RAP Act is something that the hip-hop community and the arts community can galvanize around because we have brothers, and it's mostly Black men being put in jail and their lyrics being used against them, which is unconstitutional. Freedom of speech is protected, and art is protected. It's also unconstitutional in terms of the way rap has been stereotyped and weaponized in courts of law.

One of the common things that I'm getting from our conversation is that there's this overarching theme of how sometimes people want to police the way in which Black folks communicate.

With rap, it's “why are you putting this in your lyrics?” 

And what you are explaining to me about how other people have written about you, it's “why are you talking like this? Why must you raise your voice?”

There seems to be some sort of common thread there. Do you think that’s a fair characterization?

Yeah, I think that's fair. The policing of Black people is as American as apple pie.

What hip-hop is, is an “eff you” response to that. It's “this is who I am. This is me and my full, authentic self. Deal with me or get out of my way.” That's what hip-hop is.

And so, yeah, let's target these aspiring artists and their lyrics, and let's get them out of here and put them in jail if we can, because this movement is producing Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Summer Lee (D-Pa.) and Jamaal Bowman and Hakeem Jeffries and others. And these people are talking about white supremacy out loud, publicly on the House floor in a way that maybe others didn't do before. And that's what it is. Hip-hop is about our power.

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Pence finds the spotlight. And it’s all about Trump

DES MOINES — Mike Pence worried about how he looked, squinting at a Fox News camera leveled at him in the midday sun.

“This is not good,” Pence said last week, during a warm-up in Indiana for the Iowa State Fair. "My eyes look really dark." In a flash of uncharacteristic sternness, he pleaded with the cameraman, “You with me?”

It was the question beating beneath the surface of his entire campaign. Are donors with him? Are Trump-skeptical Republicans with him? Does he have any real shot at winning his party’s nomination after his actions on Jan. 6 to certify the 2020 election?

In a donor call later that day, Pence’s campaign manager, Steve DeMaura, would acknowledge the “question that the media seems to be obsessed with, which is: Will the vice president make the debate?”

A week later, now at the Iowa State Fair, the picture around Pence has improved. The maw of reporters at his press events has grown. He has racked up the 40,000 donors needed to qualify for the first debate, including 7,400 the day after the indictment, and seems a virtual lock for the second one as well. His campaign noted that he qualified in nine weeks, faster than Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy at 21 weeks, and Tim Scott at 13 weeks.

But he also is still registering in single digits in the polls, punished by rank-and-file Republicans for his refusal to overturn the results of the 2020 election. And as he arrived at the fair here Friday, his presidential campaign these days can feel like it's engineered as much for his place in history as the Iowa caucuses.

After being left for political dead, Pence is leaning into his actions on Jan. 6 and promises to be relevant long past Iowa — win or lose — as the government's star witness in special prosecutor Jack Smith's case against former President Donald Trump. Trump is for the first time attacking Pence, and recruiting surrogates to do the same.

In a fire-side chat with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds on Friday, Pence brought up his own role on Jan. 6 without prompting, then, walking to the Iowa Pork Tent at the state fair, said he welcomed questions about that day.

“Over the last two and half years, President Trump has continued to tell the American people things that just aren’t so,” Pence told POLITICO. “I had no right to overturn the election. I welcome the opportunity to set the record straight. And I’ll continue to.”

Mike Murphy, a former Republican member of the Indiana House of Representatives and a longtime friend of Pence, said, “He’s kind of like, ‘act on my principles and the future will take care of itself.’”

There were signs here this week that the controversy surrounding Jan. 6 may not be as debilitating for Pence as advertised. He drew a sizable crowd at the Des Moines Register Soap Box on Thursday, and the two toughest questions he received — “Why did you commit treason on Jan. 6?” and “How’s life going since Tucker Carlson ruined your career?” — were asked by a Democrat and a Kari Lake staffer, respectively.

As he made his way to the pork tent the following day, at least a half dozen fair goers thanked Pence for standing up to Trump.

“I appreciate what you did,” a man in a cutoff T-shirt, shorts and hiking boots told him.

“You gotta beat the other guy,” Troy Hazelbaker, a 54-year-old landlord and Trump voter from Pleasant Hill, told Pence of Trump.

“Keep smiling,” a man somewhat inexplicably handing out packaged toothbrushes told Pence.

And before the first debate, Pence is receiving the most intense media interest yet in his still-young candidacy.

“We’re coming up to the end of the summer, and all things Pence are coming together at the right time,” said Scott Reed, the co-chair of the Pence-allied Committed to America super PAC. “Trump is in another legal spotlight and those clouds are only going to darken. DeSantis is really struggling. He’s not meeting any expectations at any level. And Biden continues to not be ready for another four-year term. The contrasts with Pence are clear.”

Still, at times the Pence campaign has brought with it an element of dramatic irony. One elected official who has endorsed Pence, granted anonymity to assess the campaign candidly, confessed they don’t know whether he’ll catch on.

“What else can he do? He’s in a corner on it,” said David Kochel, the veteran Iowa Republican strategist. “He’s gotta lean on it. It’s true. He will have to testify in the trial. Why avoid it? There is still a percentage of the Republican Party that is very much anti-Trump. The people that are really pro-Trump are not going to be for Mike Pence under any circumstances. You might as well own your role in the whole thing.”

Pence’s camp is looking forward to the debate, where Pence is relishing the opportunity to deploy the skills he honed as part of high school National Forensic League speaking tournaments all the way to a vice presidential debate with Kamala Harris.

“I think if they’re being realistic, the goal is the debate where he has traditionally done really well and hope that provides him a platform where people see leadership and navigate conservative politics,” a Pence confidant, granted anonymity to frankly assess his campaign, told POLITICO.

Last year, a Pence ally speculated to POLITICO that Pence has “to decide whether he wants to be a Jim-Baker-like statesman that can just always be principled and speak the truth for the rest of his life, with no calculation of political cost,” the person said, granted anonymity to assess Pence’s campaign. “Or do you want to get the nomination?”

In Iowa, Pence was hoping he could do both. The world was his oyster — or pork burger, at least.

“This is my strike zone,” he told reporters.

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