Ron DeSantis

As 2022 draws to a close, the vast majority of prominent Republicans are still afraid to openly criticize former President Donald Trump. But that doesn’t mean that behind closed doors, they aren’t hoping that someone other than Trump wins the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

Although Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell avoids talking about Trump, he clearly wants his party to nominate someone else. Right-wing firebrand author Ann Coulter, once a Trump supporter, is openly calling for the GOP to nominate Ron DeSantis, not Trump, in 2024, assuming the Florida governor decides to run. And former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, a former Trump loyalist, is saying that Trump shouldn’t be his party’s 2024 nominee, although he won’t rule out the possibility of voting for him if he is.

In Arkansas, Gov.-Elect Sarah Huckabee Sanders is turning to the Ron DeSantis playbook for public education, announcing that she will be nominating Florida education official Juan Oliva to head the Arkansas Department of Education.

Sanders, the daughter of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and a former White House press secretary in the Trump Administration, is promising to use Oliva to “transform” education in Arkansas. And critics of DeSantis fear that the transformation won’t be a positive one for Arkansas teachers and schoolchildren.

Former President Donald Trump has shared an article suggesting that he should run as a third-party candidate if the Republican Party doesn’t choose him as its nominee for the 2024 presidential election.

Trump shared the article, entitled “The Coming Split,” on his Truth Social page. The article asked, “What should we do when a majority of Republicans want Trump, but the Republican Party says we can’t have him?”

On Tuesday, December 27, Maricopa County Judge Peter Thompson ordered far-right MAGA Republican and conspiracy theorist Kari Lake to compensate Democratic Gov.-Elect Katie Hobbs for some of the legal expenses she incurred because of her lawsuit challenging the election results of Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial race. This ruling came only three days after Thompson rejected the lawsuit, ruling that Hobbs’ victory was perfectly legitimate and that there was no evidence of misconduct in the election as Lake claimed. Lake is appealing Thompson’s ruling and is seeking a review from the Arizona Supreme Court.

Hobbs had requested sanctions against Lake, arguing that her lawsuit challenging the election results was frivolous. Thompson, however, decided against sanctioning Lake, although Lake’s legal team was sanctioned by U.S. District Judge John Tuchi in a separate lawsuit.

Larry Keefe, an advisor to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, was in conversation with Vertol Systems Company CEO James Montgomerie regarding the coordination of migrant flights using a private Gmail account, Politico reports.

According to NBC6, which first reported the email records, the private email channel was created by DeSantis’ “public safety czar” Keefe when Montgomerie requested a contract in August to send migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard.

Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday promoted an editorial suggesting that he run as a third-party candidate if the Republican Party does not make him its 2024 presidential nominee.

On his Truth Social website, Trump posted a link to an editorial from MAGA publication American Greatness in which author Dan Gelernter compared Trump to the late President Teddy Roosevelt, whose unsuccessful third-party bid in 1912 handed the White House to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

The so-called Republican "Red Wave" ultimately looked a little more like a red mud puddle once the dust settled on the 2022 midterm election. Donors are now starting to ask questions about where their money disappeared to when it comes to Republican Party investments.

The New York Times explained that GOP chairperson Ronna Romney McDaniel was put into her office by Donald Trump, but now she's in the fight of her political life as she has to justify her success as a party leader. Bubbling under the surface of that issue, however, is the larger problem the party is facing: they're losing swing voters and there's no plan to get them back.

With the Republican party taking control of the House of Representatives in January, many Republican-controlled state legislatures have been emboldened to propose controversial legislation related to gender identity and sexual orientation, according to a new report in Politico.

Enclosed are some of the more high-profile proposed state legislation that GOP representatives will be attempting to pass in 2023:

An aide to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used a private email account to help a former client obtain a contract with the state to conduct a controversial program to fly migrants to Democratic states.

Email records released just before Christmas by the governor's office suggest public safety czar Larry Keefe, using the alias "Clarice Starling," wrote some of the language Vertol Systems Company used in its bid proposal to fly migrants from Texas to other states, reported the Miami Herald.

In her recently released interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Chaya Raichik, the bigot behind the Libs of TikTok social media account, accused LGBTQ people and their allies of grooming children for sexual abuse.

“The LGBTQ community has become this cult and it’s so captivating, and it pulls people in so strongly, unlike anything we’ve ever seen," Raichik told Carlson in the hour-long interview, released Tuesday on the Fox Nation streaming platform, which was developed by Fox News. "They brainwash people to join and they convince them of all of these things, and it’s really, really hard to get out of it.”