Oprah Winfrey to speak at DNC Wednesday night: Sources

(WASHINGTON) — Former President Donald Trump and his campaign are reeling from the surprise announcement that President Joe Biden was ending his reelection bid, forced to pivot their infrastructure toward a new candidate as Trump himself airs out his frustrations publicly.

Trump campaign officials have publicly expressed confidence they can defeat any Democratic candidate; however, privately, sources have aired out frustrations surrounding new advertisement and messaging strategies.

Since Biden’s announcement, Trump has taken to his social media platform to post more than 10 times, offering real-time insight into the changes Trump is going to have to make as he now has to prepare for competing against a new candidate, likely Vice President Kamala Harris.

The former president is still focusing much of his attacks on Biden, barely mentioning Harris, as he pushed unfounded claims that Biden isn’t actually recovering from COVID, questioned how Biden would be able to serve the rest of his term, and even argued the Republican Party should be reimbursed for the money they’ve spent on challenging Biden.

“Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve – And never was!” Trump first posted, continuing to post well into Sunday night — then started up early Monday morning.

Though campaign officials have already started to pivot their focus to Harris, posting new ads and highlighting her gaffes, Trump unveiled the realities of the wasted money and resources the Trump team now has to deal with.

“Now we have to start all over again. Shouldn’t the Republican Party be reimbursed for fraud in that everybody around Joe,” he said in a post Sunday night.

Sources have complained to ABC News that they won’t be able to use ads they had ready to go, including ones that highlighted Biden’s poor debate performance.

It’s unclear how much exactly the Trump campaign had spent on ads directly attacking Biden this election cycle, but pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again Inc., which has stricter disclosure requirements on ads than the campaign, had spent more than $30 million on ad placements attacking Biden.

However, the super PAC is already attacking Harris with several “flashbacks” using her own words in an attempt to remind voters on what they believe is a failed record — rolling out a $5 million ad campaign in battleground states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona.

In the immediate aftermath of Sunday’s decision, it appears the Trump campaign and his allies’ messaging is focused on linking the Biden administration’s policies to Harris as well as criticizing Democrats for the unprecedented actions to the electoral process.

Much of Biden’s campaign has been centered around labeling Trump a “threat to democracy,” pointing to his legal cases and continuously highlighting the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Now, Trump is flipping the argument, saying Democrats “stole” the race from Biden after primary voters chose him as the party’s nominee.

“The Democrats pick a candidate, Crooked Joe Biden, he loses the Debate badly, then panics, and makes mistake after mistake, is told he can’t win, and decide they will pick another candidate, probably Harris,” Trump said. “They stole the race from Biden after he won it in the primaries — A First! These people are the real THREAT TO DEMOCRACY!”

Last week, Trump’s vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance floated that if Biden doesn’t seek reelection, then he should resign. Trump picked up this rhetoric following Biden’s decision to step down saying, “If he can’t run for office, he can’t run our Country!!!”

“If Joe Biden can’t run for president, he can’t serve as president. And if they want to take him down because he’s mentally incapable of serving, invoke the 25th Amendment,” Vance said during a sit-down interview with Fox News’ Jesse Waters taped on Saturday.

“You don’t get to sort of do this in the most politically beneficial way for Democrats. If it’s an actual problem, they should take care of it the appropriate way,” Vance continued.

Trump, who clinched the Republican nomination for a third time at the Republican National Convention, suggested that the election was stolen in 2020. He classified his new campaign as competing for a “fourth time.”

“Crooked Joe just got knocked out, so now I’ll have to do it a FOURTH TIME!!!” Trump posted.

While Democrats try to lock in enough delegates for Harris to assume the top of the ticket in the coming days, the Trump campaign is forced to move forward with a new campaign strategy this week. It’s a significant shift with a little more than 100 days until Election Day, in which Trump said he believed he would win by a “monumental landslide,” picking up wins in battleground states and expanding the map to Minnesota, New Jersey and Virginia.

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(WASHINGTON) — Climate change may not be a top concern for voters for the 2024 presidential election, but that hasn’t stopped many Republicans from making misrepresentations about environmental and energy policy – a departure from the previous tactic of majority climate change denial, according to experts on environmental politics who spoke with ABC News.

Debates around energy policy, specifically regarding renewable energy versus fossil fuels, are inherently connected to climate change, in large part because fossil fuels are the largest contributor to climate change, according to the United Nations, accounting for more than 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions and almost 90% of carbon dioxide emissions.

In recent years, Republicans have been finding opportunities to condemn green energy, like in February 2021, when a historic freeze caused widespread power outages in Texas, affecting more than 4.5 million people and killing hundreds. At the time, some Republican politicians used the crisis to make false claims about renewable energy, claiming that it was unreliable and the cause of the outages. However, a failure to adequately winterize power sources – particularly the state’s natural gas infrastructure, which “represented 58 percent of all generating units experiencing unplanned outages, derates or failures to start” during the outage – is what caused the grid failure, according to a report by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission released the following November.

While many Republicans previously denied the science that human-caused emissions exacerbated climate change, experts on environmental politics say the conversation has evolved to focus less on the climate science.

“There’s been a real shift in the rhetoric in the past few years,” according to Leah Aronowsky, a science historian at the Columbia Climate School, whose research has focused on the history of climate science and climate denialism. “We’ve seen this shift in rhetoric from denying the reality of climate change to maybe kind of problematizing some of the major solutions that are on the table, like wind and solar energy in particular.”

The effects of climate change are worsening in every part of the U.S., according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a breakdown of the latest in climate science coming from 14 different federal agencies, published in November.

Even so, climate change policies are not among the top of concerns for Republican voters, according to January 2024 polling from the Pew Research Center. While 54% of Americans overall view climate change as a major threat, just 12% of Republicans and those who lean Republican say dealing with climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress.

While denying climate change no longer resonates with some GOP voters as strongly as it once did, the policies that are required to transform the energy economy in the U.S. and around the world to address climate change are still unfavorable to a lot of them – hence the change in messaging, according to David Konisky, a professor of environmental politics at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

“It’s very difficult for Republicans to reconcile any interest in addressing climate change along with messaging and a commitment to maintain reliance on fossil fuels,” Konisky told ABC News.

In the end, the widespread opposition to climate policy reform has little to do with disputing climate science and more to do with objections to the monetary cost of addressing it, according to Aseem Prakash, a professor of political science at University of Washington and director of the Center for Environmental Politics.

The Democratic and Republican divide concerning environmental issues began during the Reagan administration in the 1980s, according to Aronowsky. However, the politics of climate have changed a lot in recent years, according to Prakash. For example, Republicans rarely use the term “climate change” anymore – “it’s become a trigger word,” Prakash said – and instead are framing the subject as “renewable energy” and the problems they claim could arise from policies implementing it.

During a rally in South Carolina in September 2023, former President Donald Trump lambasted offshore wind turbines, claiming that the “windmills are driving [whales] crazy” and are causing an increase in the number of dead whales washing ashore – one of many false claims the former president has made about wind power. During a Republican fundraising dinner in 2019, Trump also claimed that noise from the wind turbines causes cancer, and that they are a “graveyard for birds.”

The rhetoric has surfaced in local politics, too, according to the experts. A protest against offshore wind turbines that took place in February 2023 in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, featured several local Republicans, including the mayors of New Jersey’s Seaside Park and Point Pleasant Beach, and U.S. Rep. Chris Smith.

Despite the claims, there are “no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Many Republicans are also talking about oil in new ways, touting domestic oil as cleaner and more pristine than imported oil, though supporting data has been absent. Trump has vowed to boost U.S. oil production if elected to a second term, promising to “drill, baby, drill” to lower the costs of energy. Yet data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration in March showed that the United States “produced more crude oil than any nation at any time, according to our International Energy Statistics, for the past six years in a row” – 12.9 million barrels per day in 2023, during the Biden administration, breaking the record set in 2019 of 12.3 million during the Trump administration.

Playing into those politics are gasoline prices, which have become a partial barometer of economic security, Matt Huber, a professor in Syracuse University’s geography and environment department, told ABC News. He also noted that that the oil and gas industry has history of funding research that contradicts climate science.

The state of modern American politics includes heavy investment by the fossil fuel industry into the Republican Party and its candidates, Konisky said: “I think that has become almost religious doctrine for many in the Republican Party … whatever the U.S. energy future looks like, it must rely heavily on fossil fuels.”

Donald Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, received $354,937 in funding from the oil and gas industry as of March 2023, according to Open Secrets, a research group that tracks money in U.S. politics. While the vice-presidential hopeful spoke publicly about the country’s “climate problem” as recently as 2020, he changed his position in 2023 after he was elected to the Senate, championing fracking and decrying clean energy ever since, Politico reported.

Neither the Republican National Committee nor the Trump/Vance campaign responded to an ABC News request for comment.

Other established Republican senators have received much more funding from oil companies than Vance has. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney has received nearly $8.7 million from the oil and gas industry. Texas Sen. John Cornyn has received $5.1 million, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has received more than $5 million, according to Open Secrets.

Another explanation for the Republican departure from climate denial is that it’s becoming an increasingly untenable position to assert that climate change is not real, Lise Van Susteren, a general and forensic psychiatrist who has researched how climate change has affected people’s psychological health, told ABC News.

The main reason is that the effects of climate change are now happening in people’s backyards, she said. Those effects include extreme wildfires, drought, a higher frequency of major hurricanes, and sea level rise.

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(WASHINGTON) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with President Joe Biden at the White House Thursday to discuss the U.S.-Israeli relationship amid tensions over the ongoing conflict in Gaza and a changing political landscape in the U.S.

“Welcome back, Mr. Prime Minister. We got a lot to talk about,” Biden said in brief remarks shortly before cameras left the room.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who is seeking to succeed Biden, is scheduled to meet with Netanyahu later Thursday. She has been more outspoken than Biden about killed Palestinian civilians and called on Israel to allow in more humanitarian aid.

The meeting comes just hours after Biden, in an Oval Office address, told Americans that getting peace in Gaza — ending the fighting between Israel and Hamas and freeing hostages — is one of his top goals in his remaining six months in office. Netanyahu so far has resisted Biden’s efforts, rejecting his calls for a cease-fire.

Netanyahu brought up their long relationship and other Israeli leaders Biden has known throughout his career.

“From a proud Jew Zionist to a proud Irish American Zionist, I want to thank you for 50 years of public service and 50 years of support for the state of Israel. And I look forward to discussing with you today and working with you in the months ahead on the great issues before us,” Netanyahu said.

Biden reflected on that first meeting, joking, “I was only 12 then.”

Other U.S. officials attending included Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters that the president was going to press Netanyahu to help “close the gaps” with the peace deal that would return the Israeli hostages.

“We are closer now than we have ever been before,” he said.

The meeting is the first time the leaders have come face-to-face since Biden announced he was dropping out of the presidential race and endorsed Harris’ run.

Kirby said that both leaders would meet with American families of Israeli hostages.

Kirby would not comment on why Harris was meeting with Netanyahu later but noted that she had campaign events during the same time as Biden met with the prime minister.It also comes a day after Netanyahu addressed a joint meeting of Congress, which Harris did not attend, holding a previously scheduled campaign event instead.

The prime minister has praised Biden for “half century of friendship to Israel” and U.S. support following the Oct. 7 attacks.

“He rightly called Hamas ‘sheer evil.’ He dispatched two aircraft carriers to the Middle East to deter a wider war. And he came to Israel to stand with us during our darkest hour — a visit that will never be forgotten,” Netanyahu said in his speech to lawmakers on Wednesday.

The prime minister did not mention Harris. But he did he did laud former President Donald Trump for his support of Israel during his four years in office.

Netanyahu is scheduled to meet with Trump Friday at Mar-a-Lago.

The prime minister has called on the U.S. to provide bipartisan support for Israel during the conflict and urged leaders to, “Give us the tools faster and we’ll finish the job faster.”

“Israel will fight until we destroy Hamas’ military capabilities and its role in Gaza and bring all our hostages home. That’s what total victory means. And we will settle for nothing less.”

In May, Biden paused a shipment to Israel of unguided bombs citing concerns that they could be used on civilians.

Congress sent $26 billion in aid to Israel and provided humanitarian relief for people in Gaza in April as part of a foreign aid package.

About $4 billion of that was dedicated to replenishing Israel’s missile defense systems. More than $9 billion of the total went toward humanitarian assistance in Gaza.

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