By BILL BARROW and ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON, Associated Press

ATLANTA (AP) — Florida conservative Joe Gruters, a Donald Trump cheerleader dating back to the president’s days as a reality TV star, is now the Republican National Committee chairman.

Having no opposition after being tapped by the president, Gruters was elected Friday at the Republicans’ summer meeting in Atlanta.

For Gruters, the vote completes a steady climb from county party leader into the top ranks of Trump’s second presidency. For Trump, Gruters’ ratification reflects his penchant for loyal lieutenants and evolution from a new president disinterested in party machinery to an Oval Office veteran intent on gripping all levers of power.

After the vote Friday, Gruters thanked Trump for choosing him and promised RNC members he would focus on “election integrity,” expanding Republican voter registration and preventing internal party discord. Elections, Gruters said, are won by “whatever party does a better job of uniting the factions and bringing everybody together.”

Here is a look at Gruters’ history with Trump and Republicans and what that means as he becomes chairman.

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Gruters was with his ‘Statesman of the Year’ from the start

Trump’s decade of domination over Republican politics is replete with rivals and critics who melted into the fold. Vice President JD Vance once compared Trump to Adolf Hitler, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio labeled Trump a “con artist” and mocked his manhood.

But Gruters was a true believer years before Trump launched his first campaign in 2015.

“Joe bet on the horse before the track was even built,” said Christian Ziegler, a former Florida Republican chair and friend of Gruters.

In 2012, Gruters led the Sarasota County GOP, and Republicans were nominating Mitt Romney for president at their convention in nearby Tampa, Florida.

Romney, then the kind of moderate Republican that is now almost extinct in public office, had embraced Trump even as the businessman falsely questioned then-President Barack Obama’s birthplace and citizenship. Still, Trump was widely considered a liability for Romney against Obama, and Romney’s team was circumspect about whether Trump would have a convention role. While Trump was eventually confirmed as a speaker, an approaching tropical storm shortened the convention schedule, and his slot was among the casualties.

Enter Gruters.

The eager Sarasotan had already picked Trump as his county party’s “Statesman of the Year,” slotting a dinner gala at Sarasota’s Ritz-Carlton hotel on convention eve with 1,000 guests. It cemented an enduring friendship.

Gruters climbed the Florida ladder alongside Trump

Gruters’ support for Trump’s first presidential bid in 2015 stood out in Florida, given that Rubio and former Gov. Jeb Bush also were running.

In October, Gruters became co-chairman of Trump’s Florida campaign. His fellow chair was Susie Wiles, who is now Trump’s White House chief of staff. Bush didn’t make it to the Florida primary, and Trump trounced Rubio, ending the senator’s campaign.

Gruters was elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 2016 at the same time Trump won Florida’s electoral votes and the presidency. And Wiles, Gruters’ old Trump campaign partner, was the mastermind behind Florida Gov. DeSantis’ narrow 2018 victory.

So when it mattered, Gruters was well-positioned with a friend in the Oval Office and the governor’s office — buoyed by Wiles, who had distinguished herself as a Florida kingmaker.

Gruters navigated nasty party splits and Trump’s election lies

All those powerful allies backed Gruters’ successful bid for Florida GOP chairman in 2019.

Gruters and the party increased GOP registration across the state and helped push battleground Florida to a clearer conservative advantage. In 2020, as Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden flipped Sun Belt battlegrounds Arizona and Georgia, Trump won Florida comfortably.

That helped Gruters navigate Trump’s falsehoods that Biden’s national victory was rigged. Gruters chose his words carefully, stopping short of Trump’s election denialism yet ensuring he never drew the defeated president’s ire. Leaning on local results, Gruters called Florida the “gold standard.” He said there were “questions” about “shenanigans” in other states.

“Florida has been the center of everything,” said current state Chairman Evan Power. “Joe knows the successes and the lessons from Florida — he can bring that to the national level.”

Florida’s rightward shift yielded dominating reelection victories for DeSantis and Rubio in 2022. The win made DeSantis a presumed front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

A certain Palm Beach resident, however, was not finished.

As Trump built his third campaign, Wiles stuck with him — not DeSantis. The governor ultimately broke with Wiles and Gruters. Then Trump buried DeSantis, just as he’d crushed Bush and Rubio. DeSantis made peace with Trump, but not with Gruters, describing him as recently as last month as having a “linguine spine.”

Gruters reaffirms Trump’s hold on the Republican Party

Trump has cycled through multiple national GOP chairs. Reince Priebus in 2016 was the reluctant Trump backer who became the president’s chief of staff in 2017, only to be fired via social media post. Trump then turned to Ronna Romney McDaniel, Mitt’s niece. He eventually pushed out McDaniel and tapped North Carolina’s Michael Whatley as chairman, with daughter-in-law Lara Trump as family stand-in at party headquarters.

As chairman, Gruters will be a fundraising partner with the White House. The RNC is a key cog in joint party fundraising efforts that the president headlines.

Trump has always been his own primary messenger, but Gruters will be another notable face as the president approaches the 2026 midterms. That doesn’t just mean policy and branding but also the mechanics of elections. Gruters sidestepped Trump’s election denialism, but he’ll now be partly responsible for building teams of lawyers and poll watchers for a president who openly questions the efficacy of U.S. elections.

Beyond the midterms, Gruters will help set the presidential primary calendar, debate rules and other nuts and bolts of the 2028 campaign. While Trump is term-limited by the Constitution, he’s made clear that he will not stay in the shadows as voters choose his successor. With Gruters, he has a direct line into that process.

Gomez Licon reported from Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

By COLLEEN SLEVIN, MATTHEW BROWN and JESSE BEDAYN, Associated Press

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — It’s been two years since nearly 200 decaying bodies were discovered throughout a fetid, room temperature building in rural Colorado. On Friday, the man responsible, a funeral home owner, is set to be sentenced in state court for 191 counts of corpse abuse.

Jon Hallford and his wife, Carie, ran a morbid racket for four years out of their Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado Springs: assuring people they were handling loved ones’ cremations only to stash the bodies in a bug-infested building and give them dry concrete resembling ashes.

Jon Hallford is already headed to prison after pleading guilty to federal fraud charges. Friday’s sentencing hearing will focus on state charges related to mistreatment of the bodies. Family members will have the chance to describe the anguish of learning a loved one slowly decayed among piles of others.

FILE – This image provided by the Muskogee County, Okla., Sheriff’s Office shows Jon Hallford, who was arrested, along with Carie Hallford, the owners of a Colorado funeral home Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2023, in Oklahoma, on charges linked to the discovery of multiple sets of decaying remains at one of their facilities. (Muskogee County Sheriff’s Office via AP, File)

“To me it’s the heart of the case. It’s the worst part of the crime,” said Tanya Wilson, who is traveling from Georgia to speak at the sentencing. She hired the funeral home to cremate her mother and later discovered the supposed ashes the family spread in Hawaii weren’t from her mother’s body, which had been wasting away in the building in Penrose, a small town 35 miles from Colorado Springs.

A plea agreement calls for Hallford to receive a 20-year prison sentence for the corpse abuse charges.

Some families who were victims in the case want Judge Eric Bentley to reject the agreement because Hallford’s state sentence is expected to run concurrently with his 20-year federal sentence, meaning he could be freed many years earlier than if the sentences ran consecutively.

“The scale of this is staggering. Why does the state believe they deserve a plea deal?” Wilson asked. “There needs to be accountability.”

FILE – A hearse and van sit outside the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colo., on Oct. 6, 2023. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)

If the court rejects the agreement, Hallford could withdraw his plea agreement and go to trial, Bentley said to a packed courtroom as Friday’s hearing got underway. The judge cautioned family members objecting to a plea deal that they could be “opening Pandora’s box” since a trial would drag out the case for many months and extend their grief.

Colorado has struggled to effectively oversee funeral homes and for many years had some of the weakest regulations in the nation. It’s had a slew of abuse cases, including an estimated 20 decomposing corpses discovered this week at a funeral home in Pueblo.

Carie Hallford is accused of the same crimes as her husband and also pleaded guilty. Her sentencing on the corpse abuse charges has not been scheduled.

The couple was accused of letting 189 bodies decay. In two other instances the wrong bodies were buried. Four remains were yet to be identified, the district attorney’s office said this week.

The Hallfords got a license for their funeral home in 2017, and authorities said the bodies started piling up by 2019. Many languished for years in states of decay, some decomposed beyond recognition, some unclothed or on the floor in inches of fluid from the bodies.

As the gruesome count grew, Jon and Carie Hallford were also defrauding the federal government out of nearly $900,000 in COVID-19 era aid.

With the money from families and the federal government, the Hallfords bought ritzy items from stores like Tiffany & Co., a GMC Yukon and Infiniti worth $120,000 combined, laser body sculpting and $31,000 in cryptocurrency.

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In 2023, a putrid smell poured from the building and the police turned up. Investigators swarmed the building, donning hazmat suits and painstakingly extracting the bodies. Hallford and his wife were arrested in Oklahoma, where Jon Hallford had family, more than a month later.

Families learned that their cathartic moments of grief — spreading a mother’s ashes in Hawaii or cradling a son’s urn in a rocking chair — were tainted by a deception. It was as if those signposts of the grieving process had been torn away, unraveling months and years of working through their loved ones’ deaths.

Some had nightmares of what their relatives’ decayed bodies must have looked like. Others were anguished by the fear their family members’ souls were trapped, unable to go free.

A mother, Crystina Page, demanded to watch as her son’s body, rescued from the Return to Nature building, was cremated for real. Wilson, who had thought she already spread her mother’s ashes in Hawaii, said the family cremated her mother’s remains after they were recovered by authorities. She is waiting for the court cases to conclude before returning to Hawaii again to spread the ashes.

Brown reported from Billings, Montana.

By KONSTANTIN TOROPIN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered that National Guard troops patrolling the streets of Washington for President Donald Trump’s law enforcement crackdown will be armed, the Pentagon said Friday.

The Defense Department didn’t offer any other details about the new development or why it was needed.

National Guard soldiers salute as the motorcade carrying President Donald Trump, passes by near the White House, Thursday, Aug. 21, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

The step is a escalation in Trump’s intervention into policing in the nation’s capital and comes as nearly 2,000 National Guard members have been stationed in the city, with the arrival this week of hundreds of troops from several Republican-led states.

Trump initially called up 800 members of the District of Columbia National Guard to assist federal law enforcement in his bid to crack down on crime and homelessness in the capital. Since then, six states have sent troops to the city, growing the military presence.

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It was unclear if the guard’s role in the federal intervention would be changing. The guard has so far not taken part in law enforcement but largely have been protecting landmarks like the National Mall and Union Station and helping with crowd control.

The Pentagon and the Army said last week that troops would not carry guns. The new guidance is that they will carry their service-issued weapons.

The city had been informed about the intent for the National Guard to be armed, a person familiar with the conversations said earlier this week. The person was not authorized to disclose the plans and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Spokespeople for the District of Columbia National Guard and a military task force overseeing all the guard troops in Washington did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

AP writer Anna Johnson contributed to this report.

The St. Thomas-St. John’s rivalry effectively ceased to exist when the Tommies made the jump to Division-I athletics after being dumped from the MIAC.

But some traditions die hard.

The rivalry will be renewed on the hardwood in December, with the men’s basketball teams squaring off Dec. 11 at the new Lee & Penny Anderson Arena in St. Paul.

Division-III games have no bearing on postseason metrics for Division-I schools, so they’re effectively exhibitions. Every Summit League School schedules three Division-III opponents each season as a way to get non-conference home games, which are a bear for smaller mid-major Division-I programs to schedule.

Tommies coach John Tauer said it is “a game that we felt would be attractive to both fan and alumni bases, as well as the entire basketball community in the state of Minnesota.”

Tauer also cited his respect for St. John’s coach Pat McKenzie and the Johnnies program. St. John’s won the MIAC title again last season.

“It is common for Division I men’s basketball programs to play select Division III programs,” St. Thomas athletic director Phil Esten said, “and the Johnnies are a fitting opponent, as we continue to honor our past while welcoming a new era of Tommie Athletics.”

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For St. Thomas athletics, a shot at the big time