Together, they delivered a post-election autopsy with a dire prediction: Republican survival requires embracing a message of tolerance and respect in an increasingly diverse United States.
Yet on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration four years later, the authors of the Republican National Committee’s 2013 «Growth and Opportunity Project» concede their report is little more than an afterthought as members gather in Washington to celebrate their party’s success. The authors tell The Associated Press they continue to believe the GOP must improve its standing with women, Hispanics and black voters in the age of Trump, but they disagree on a path forward.
One of the five authors quit the Republican Party to protest Trump. The others stayed, but as their party prepares to control the White House, House and Senate for the first time in nearly a decade, they have abandoned any sense of urgency to address Republicans’ persistent struggles with women and minorities.
«I don’t think there’s an issue. Trump won,» said Glenn McCall, an African-American committeeman from South Carolina who helped write the section of the report that said: «The Republican Party must be committed to building a lasting relationship within the African American community year-round, based on mutual respect and with a spirit of caring. »
The tough-talking Trump has refused to soften his tone with virtually anyone.
Only this past weekend, the president-elect lashed out at civil rights legend John Lewis as the nation prepared to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. The incoming president, responding to criticism from the Democratic congressman, called Lewis «all talk» and charged without evidence that his Georgia district is «crime-ridden» and «falling apart. »
Another author of the report, veteran Republican strategist Sally Bradshaw, determined there is no path forward with Trump in the White House.
«I still stand by the report, and so much so that I left the party over Donald Trump’s treatment of women and minorities,» Bradshaw told the AP. «That report was a roadmap for long-term sustained wins by Republicans — celebrity and anger really aren’t much of a long-term strategy. Absent engaging with the changing demographic make-up of our nation, any GOP victory is likely short-lived. »
Bradshaw, who most recently served as chief strategist for Jeb Bush’s failed 2016 presidential bid, now runs a bookstore in Florida.
Another author, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, has given up hope that Trump will adopt a «welcoming and inclusive tone,» as he called for in the autopsy.
«It ain’t happening. At least not for Donald Trump,» Fleischer said.
Trump’s 2016 success, he said, came from his unique ability to expand the Republican electorate by winning over new white working-class voters. His performance with women and minorities, however, was little better than Mitt Romney’s underwhelming showing four years ago.
«Donald Trump was able to come in and expand the party in a way that nobody anticipated,» Fleischer said. «That doesn’t change demographics. And the Republicans’ central issue remains: America is becoming more diverse. And Republicans have got to expand in order to be successful. »
Trump won the presidency by the narrowest of margins.
The president-elect lost the popular vote by more than 2.9 million votes, but he scored the necessary electoral votes with the help of unexpected victories across the industrial Midwest. He won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by a combined 82,000 votes out of roughly 13 million cast.
Trump struggled in swing states with larger minority populations, losing Colorado and Nevada where the Hispanic population is booming. And his margin of victory in Texas and Arizona, traditional Republican strongholds with large minority communities, was narrower than that of any other Republican presidential contender in at least two decades.
Among African-Americans, Trump got 8 percent of the vote, slightly better than Romney’s 6 percent against President Barack Obama, according to national exit polls.
For now, at least, the glass is half-full.
«Frankly, there’s a lot that those of us who wrote the report could have learned from Donald Trump,» said another author, Henry Barbour, a Republican national committeeman from Mississippi. «Be more the party of working-class folks. »
Yet Barbour described the report’s conclusion that the GOP must improve its standing with minority voters «a fundamental truth. »
«Trump’s come a long ways in that regard,» Barbour said. «And he’s made plain he wants to be the president for all of America. I’m encouraged. I think we’re making pretty good progress. »
Trump will take the oath of office Friday as the least popular incoming president in at least four decades, according to polls.
Perhaps more disturbing to some Republican strategists is Trump’s standing among women.
National exit polls showed that Trump lost women overall by 13 points last fall. Fleischer noted that he was the first Republican nominee to lose college-educated white women in the modern political era.
While Bradshaw thinks Trump is a lost cause, Fleischer predicts his performance over the next four years could improve the Republican Party’s standing with key demographics regardless of his harsh rhetoric.
«Donald Trump’s presidency, along with much of the future of the Republican Party, is going to rise and fall with the status of the economy,» Fleischer said, then added: «If the economy tanks, it’s a very different future for the Republican Party. «

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© Source: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/national-politics/article127163959.html
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Four strong earthquakes have shaken the same region of central Italy that suffered deadly tremors last year.
The quakes sent residents into panic and further isolated towns that have been buried under more than three feet of snow for days.
Premier Paolo Gentiloni said it appeared no one was killed, but that it was a «difficult day» for Italy.
The first tremor, with a preliminary magnitude of 5.3, hit Montereale at about 10.25am, according to the US Geological Survey.
A second quake with a magnitude of 5.7 hit the same area about 50 minutes later, and 10 minutes later a third was measured at a magnitude of 5.3. Several hours later another 5.1-magnitude quake shook the same area.
Throughout the day, seismologists registered more than 100 aftershocks.
Several towns and hamlets in the quake zone had already sounded the alarm in recent days that they were without electricity and were isolated from major roads due to the unusually heavy snowfall that has blanketed much of central Italy.
The quakes only made matters worse, knocking out some mobile phone service, hampering the emergency response and sending quake-weary residents into panic. The defence ministry promised to send in army units to help.
«The situation is really getting extreme,» said the mayor of Canzano, Franco Campitelli. «It’s snowing hard. We’re without electricity. We hope the army gets here soon with snow ploughs or we risk being completely isolated,» he said.
The quakes, which had their epicentres in the L’Aquila region, were felt as far away as Rome, 100 miles to the south-west.
In the Italian capital, the subway was closed for hours as a precaution, parents were asked to pick up their children from some schools, and offices, banks and shops were evacuated temporarily.
But elsewhere in Rome at the Vatican, Pope Francis’ Wednesday general audience went off without a hitch.
In the Umbrian pilgrimage town of Assisi, friars closed the Santa Maria degli Angeli basilica as a precaution. The basilica hosts the famed Porziuncola chapel, birthplace of the Franciscan order of the Pope’s namesake, St Francis of Assisi.
Three quakes in mountainous central Italy last year killed nearly 300 people in and around the medieval town of Amatrice and caused significant damage to older buildings. The tower of one of Amatrice’s churches toppled in Wednesday’s quakes.
L’Aquila itself suffered a devastating 6.3-magnitude earthquake in 2009 that killed more than 300 people.
Mayor Maurizio Pelosi of Capitagno, near the epicentre of Wednesday’s quakes, said even before the earth shook many roads into and out of the town were blocked due to the snow.
A hotel worker in town, Giuseppe Di Felice, said people could not get out of their homes.
«It’s apocalyptic,» he said.
AP

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© Source: http://www.independent.ie/world-news/four-strong-quakes-shake-italy-isolating-towns-blanketed-by-snow-35377432.html
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Of all of the scores of falsehoods Donald Trump has offered since he began running for president, few are as egregiously and obviously untrue as one he offered to Fox News Channel’s Ainsley Earhardt in an interview that aired Wednesday.
“Look,” Trump said, “I don’t like tweeting. I have other things I could be doing. But I get very dishonest media, very dishonest press. And it’s my only way that I can counteract.”
Of course, all evidence suggests that Trump loves tweeting. He loves it. Since May 4, 2009, he has tweeted an average of 10.8 times per day. Per day. On average. That’s not the behavior of someone who dislikes tweeting.
That’s the big falsehood. Then we get to the smaller falsehood: that he tweets only to counteract the media.
It’s certainly true that Trump would rather push out his own message to his 20 million followers than let his pronouncements be filtered by an outside party that might point out when he’s, say, saying untrue things. (By the way: Be sure to download our browser plug-in, which brings fact-checking to his Twitter feed.) It is not true, though, that he tweets only because he’s trying to get around the media. Trump has been on Twitter since 2009, and he tweeted more in 2013 than in any other year. (The numbers below come from the Trump Twitter Archive .)
In 2013, we can assert definitively, Trump wasn’t tweeting to get his message out to people around the biased lamestream media. He was tweeting for the same reason he tweets now: to berate people he doesn’t like, mock things he hates and praise what he loves. (That latter category includes Donald J. Trump.)
Fun fact! Since Election Day, an average of 7.8 minutes pass between tweets when Trump offers a series of threaded thoughts on a single subject.
What’s particularly weird about Trump’s defense of his tweeting is that his stated rationale doesn’t even seem to work that well.
A new NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll indicates that Americans overwhelmingly view Trump’s use of Twitter negatively. Nearly 7 in 10 Americans — including a plurality of Republicans! — think that his tweeting is a bad thing, because “in an instant, messages can have unintended major implications without careful review.”
Most Americans also disagree with his habit of using Twitter to announce policy positions and his opinions of things in the news.
So if Trump hates tweeting and the nation hates the way he tweets, it seems as though there’s a simple solution for the president-elect: Cut it out. But, we know, it’s important to Trump that he be able to communicate his thoughts on public policy and the state of the world without the biased media intervening. He simply has to tweet, to ensure that the American people get the real facts, direct from the man who on Friday will become their president. He hates to do it, but it’s critical that his thoughts be shared.

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HOUSTON — Former President George H. W. Bush has been hospitalized but the 92-year-old is “fine” and expected to go home in a few days, his chief of staff told area media early Wednesday.
Bush chief of staff Jean Becker tells the Houston Chronicle and KHOU-TV that the 41st president was recently admitted to Houston Methodist Hospital after becoming ill.
“He’s there. He’s fine and he’s doing really well,” Becker told the Chronicle.
Becker did not specify the reason the oldest living U. S. president was hospitalized. Both media outlets said his office expects him to go home in a couple of days.
Becker did not immediately return email or telephone calls to her office from The Associated Press.
Bush, who served as U. S. president from 1989 to 1993, has a form of Parkinson’s disease and uses a motorized scooter or a wheelchair for mobility. He was hospitalized in Maine in 2015 after falling at his summer home and breaking a bone in his neck, and was hospitalized in Houston the previous December for about a week for shortness of breath. He spent Christmas 2012 in intensive care for a bronchitis-related cough and other issues.
Despite the loss of mobility, he celebrated his 90th birthday by making a tandem parachute jump in Kennebunkport. Last summer, Bush led a group of 40 wounded warriors on a fishing trip at the helm of his speedboat, three days after his 92nd birthday celebration.
His office announced earlier this month that Bush and his wife, Barbara, would not attend Donald Trump’s inauguration this week because of the former president’s age and health.
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