Democrats gather in New York in 1924 for the mother of all open conventions. Photo: Apic/Bridgeman via Getty Images
Pundits used to love the idea that somebody might challenge and defeat Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination. However, those hopes seem dead now that primary deadlines have come and gone and the Dean Phillips candidacy went nowhere very fast. The 46th president is going to lock up enough pledged delegates to make him the nominee very soon, and for all the private kvetching about the polls and the incumbent’s age, Democrats are for the most part publicly gearing down for a good, vicious Biden-Trump rematch.
But fantasies of something different happening haven’t totally gone away, and they don’t entirely depend on the remote possibility of Donald Trump being denied the GOP nomination because he’s a convicted felon or a bankrupt loser. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein has suggested Democratic fears about Biden’s age could be addressed by a real unicorn of a development in August: a wide-open Democratic National Convention that would choose a Biden replacement based on who wowed the delegates in Chicago.
Klein doesn’t go into great detail about how this would happen (he promises to do so in a future podcast), but his premise is that Biden would voluntarily withdraw from the contest and release his delegates not too long before the convention without dictating a successor (like, say, his hand-picked vice-president, Kamala Harris, who would presumably have to fight for the nomination if she wanted it without a heavy-handed presidential assist). In that case, Klein says, Democrats could choose from a deep bench of talented politicians in an unscripted televised drama that would capture a nation that had been dreading a 2020 rematch.
The first thing to understand about this scenario is that it would be entirely unprecedented. Yes, as Klein notes, conventions rather than primaries chose major-party nominees from 1831 through 1968 (from 1972 on, nearly all states have chosen delegates via primaries or caucuses with the limited exception of the Democratic experiment with “super-delegates”). But in each and every case, the conventions were preceded by carefully planned candidacies, some as sure a bet as any multiple-primary winner; the apparent spontaneity of the choice of a nominee was often as contrived as the bought-and-paid-for “spontaneous demonstrations” for candidates that abruptly ended in 1972. In addition, long before primaries dominated nomination contests, they still on occasion had a big impact on the outcome (way back in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft slugged it out in a long series of primaries before dueling in a closely divided convention that wound up splitting the GOP).
The last major-party convention in which the presidential nominee wasn’t known in advance (putting aside a few convention “revolts” that were doomed to fail) was the 1976 Republican confab. And there the gathering was the very opposite of “open”: All but a handful of delegates were pledged to Gerald Ford or Ronald Reagan, and the battle was over that undecided handful. Most delegates had zero “choice” over the nominee. There was “drama,” but no sense in which the party was free to choose from an assortment of possible candidates who proved their mettle at the convention itself. The only surprise was Reagan’s decision to announce a proposed running mate (Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker) before the presidential balloting. This was an innovation at the time, which (as it happens) failed.
Yes, the further back you go, there were plenty of major-party conventions that were “deliberative,” in the sense of the nomination not being locked up in advance. Occasionally, the outcome was something of a surprise, most recently in 1940, when a whirlwind propaganda effort by a few wire-pullers and packed galleries produced Indiana utility executive Wendell Willkie as a Republican nominee. But again, the delegates themselves weren’t generally free to deliberate, since many were controlled by state political leaders and others were chosen in primaries.
If you want a truly wide-open convention, the eternal ideal is the Democratic convention held one century ago in New York. The 1924 gathering featured 103 ballots before the exhausted remainder of delegates who hadn’t run out of money or patience chose dark horse James W. Davis as its nominee. Davis went on to win a booming 29 percent of the general-election popular vote and lost every state outside the former Confederacy.
That brings to mind another note of caution about the idea of an “open convention”: a nominee chosen not by primary voters or by a consensus of party leaders is just as likely to produce a calamitous general-election campaign as some burst of enthusiasm among united partisans. The last multi-ballot Democratic convention nominated Adlai Stevenson in 1952. He lost. The last multi-ballot Republican convention chose Thomas Dewey in 1944. He lost. The record of nominees chosen by deliberative (much less contested) conventions isn’t that great generally. Gerald Ford (winner of the aforementioned 1976 Republican convention) lost. His vanquisher, Jimmy Carter, lost in 1980 after a tough primary challenge and then a convention full of buyer’s remorse. The biggest general-election winners in living memory (Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1984, Bill Clinton in 1996, Barack Obama in 2008) were the products of conventions that were virtual coronations.
The 2024 Democratic convention will end on August 22 (assuming it doesn’t go into overtime like the 1924 affair), leaving ten weeks before the general election on November 5. Would a Democratic Party fresh from an “open convention” be able get its act together in that span of time, particularly if the nominee is someone other than a universally known figure? What if there are Democrats who are unhappy with the nominee? When does that get sorted out?
I’m interested in learning more about “open convention” scenarios. But at first blush it seems a far riskier proposition for Democrats than just going with the incumbent president of the United States, the man who was left for dead as a presidential candidate in 2020 more times than you could count.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan last week. Photo: Emily Elconin/Getty Images
The commercial just before the Super Bowl halftime show urging millions of Americans to vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as an independent was a clever re-creation of his uncle John F. Kennedy’s presidential ad from 1960. But the comparison between the two politicians frustrated some family members whose name was sung repeatedly in the 30-second spot. Kennedy’s cousin Bobby Shriver wrote that his mother, whose image appears in the ad, would be “appalled” by the “deadly health care views” held by RFK Jr., who has spent decades promoting debunked claims about vaccines.
Kennedy apologized, explaining that he was not aware of the ad’s contents as federal laws prohibit him from coordinating with the super-PAC that paid $7 million for the commercial. But Mark Gorton, the co-founder and co-chair of the PAC, American Values 2024, was not afraid to hit the Kennedy clan harder. “It’s really a shame that a bunch of them are caught so deeply in the Democratic censorship bubble that they don’t understand the real righteousness of the work that RFK Jr. has been doing,” Gorton says. “They are still following the big-pharma party line.”
For almost three years, Gorton, a hedge-fund multimillionaire, has been one of the great boosters of Kennedy, the exiled member of an American royal family who’s crusading against the pharmaceutical industry and government-funded health programs. Since 2021, Gorton has reportedly donated over $1 million to Children’s Health Fund, the nonprofit chaired by Kennedy that has been accused of promoting disproven anti-vaxx ideas. In 2022, after a private dinner, Kennedy told his inner circle he was considering a presidential run. Gorton vowed to help in any way he could: “I was one of the early people that found out, and I said, ‘If you’re running for president, I’m all in.’”
Kennedy, 70, has other wealthy backers from high society. Banking heir Timothy Mellon — the largest donor to Donald Trump’s super-PAC last year — has given $15 million to American Values 2024. Abby Rockefeller, the daughter of former Chase CEO David Rockefeller, has given $100,000. But few other donors have been as critical to the campaign as Gorton, who co-founded the PAC and pitched in $500,000 to support the campaign in its nascent days. (The other co-founder, Tony Lyons, is the publisher of the conservative book imprint Skyhorse Publishing, which has put out Kennedy’s most recent books.) Gorton says he was the de facto manager of the working group that got the campaign moving before its formal launch last year.
Insurgent presidential campaigns are rarely smooth operations, and this one is no exception. Kennedy first ran for the Democratic nomination against Joe Biden, but after getting little traction in polls, he announced he would run as an independent. (He has also flirted with running for the Libertarian nomination to ensure that he got ballot access, which is considerably more difficult without a party.) Gaffesensued. Epstein connections were revisited. Still, though, he has Super Bowl–level name recognition and is performing well enough in national polls to threaten Biden’s or Trump’s chances at retaking the White House. But Democrats seem more worried about Kennedy and are striking at him hard. Last week, the Democratic National Committee filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging that American Values 2024 was illegally coordinating with the Kennedy campaign by spending $15 million to get him on the ballot in battleground states such as Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Michigan.
“They have hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal and they’re willing to play dirty and they consider RFK Jr. to be a very significant threat and they’re desperate,” Gorton says of the DNC.
He is also ready to defend Kennedy on more controversial matters, such as when the candidate was caught on tape at a private dinner last July saying that COVID was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that the “people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
“I think there is some dream among the mad scientists inside the biowarfare Establishment to be able to develop targeted diseases that would only kill certain groups of people,” Gorton says, backing up the thrust of Kennedy’s claim. “And we know that that’s their dream. And we also know that the COVID disease was developed in a biowarfare lab in China. And so he was just making the observation that COVID seemed to target certain groups more than others.”
For Gorton, the response to Kennedy’s COVID comment was a telling look inside the news business. “Here’s all sorts of people who are functionally paid operatives of the DNC who are seeded throughout the media, and they’re just happy to take any sort of story like that, whether it’s true or not, and blow it out of proportion,” he says. “There’s a giant political hit machine out there, and the Democrats are not staying in power by putting forward a superior candidate and doing a good job representing the American people. They’re staying in power by running a giant propaganda hit machine and trying to subvert the mechanisms of democracy and keep RFK Jr. off the ballot.”
Gorton, who says he is involved in big-picture “strategic guidance” at the PAC, says it is committed to getting Kennedy on the ballot. That may involve spending more of his money. Gorton said in an interview last year that he did not plan on donating again to Kennedy, but he may have changed his mind on that front. “I think I might very well,” he says.
Gorton is relatively new to politics, having started his career on Wall Street. In 1998, he founded Tower Research Capital, one of the first firms to focus on high-frequency trading. Within a decade, his firm reportedly had over $117 million in assets.
Mark Gorton in LimeWire’s New York office in 2010. Photo: Ramin Talaie/Corbis via Getty Images
He has extracurricular interests, too. A devoted bicyclist frustrated by car congestion in New York City, Gorton founded an urbanist nonprofit in 1999 that advocated for pedestrian safety and more bike lanes. The group eventually launched the popular transportation site Streetsblog, for which he remains the publisher.
But Gorton would have been just another millionaire with a nonprofit if not for LimeWire, the peer-to-peer sharing service he founded in 2000. For tens of millions of young users of its free and premium services, it was a portal into a world of easily accessible music, movies, and pornography. It was also a preview of the streaming age to come. “I saw it very much as a First Amendment thing,” says Gorton. “We were creating a tool that let people share files, any sort of files, and that seems like a basic logical extension of the First Amendment.”
According to the major record labels that sued him, LimeWire was also a massive exercise in copyright infringement. After a federal judge found the company and Gorton personally liable for violating copyright law, his attorneys settled. LimeWire would shut down and pay out $105 million in damages. “Through that experience, I saw that our legal system is not developed off of rational reasoning, based off of the Bill of Rights, but instead has been more or less constructed to support the property interests of large corporations,” Gorton says.
He was learning other lessons at this time. Around 2007, after reading Robert Caro’s famous series of books on Lyndon B. Johnson, Gorton realized LBJ was behind the JFK assassination. “He describes the character of LBJ, and just how ruthless and power hungry he was, and how, even in college, he’s running fairly sophisticated political conspiracies,” says Gorton. “And through that, I was able to see or get hints that he was behind the Kennedy assassination. Then when I looked more deeply into it, sure enough, there was a mountain of supporting evidence for that.”
Gorton has discussed this conspiracy theory with Kennedy but treads lightly: “For me, it’s a historical event. For him, it’s his dad and his uncle.” He also says Kennedy “really understands the depth and corruption of the deep state. And this includes the fact that the CIA and Lyndon Johnson and the political Establishment killed his uncle and killed his dad.” (Kennedy has maintained that Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of assassinating his father during his presidential run in 1968, is innocent.)
Gorton says that he did not have a similar a-ha text for his realizations about the pharmaceutical industry’s influence over American politics, only that he has read widely in the field. “I have several shelves in my library filled with books about pharmaceutical-industry corruption,” he says. “Also, I read a lot of Substacks. I found that basically Substack is the place where I think some of the best independent voices are. And it’s a corner of the internet that is not completely dominated by corporate interests.”
Gorton’s own Substack page provides a clue to his current beliefs on vaccines and the government’s response to COVID. “You can no more expect to hear the truth from the CDC than you could from a panel put together by Andrew Cuomo to look into workplace harassment or the NYPD to look into placard abuse,” he wrote in an open letter to an unnamed New York politician in 2022. He praised Alex Berenson, the former Times reporter whom Tucker Carlson referred to as his favorite “COVID contrarian.” He linked to a Joe Rogan episode featuring a vaccine scientist accused of spreading COVID disinformation. Much like Kennedy himself, he referred to the U.S. response to the pandemic as a “medical genocide” and a “state-sponsored crime” protected by “a massive cover up and disinformation campaign.”
Like many of his supporters, Gorton sees Kennedy as a way out of this cycle of public-health failure and political corruption: the ostracized insider railing against the Establishment he grew up in. “The corruption is marbled into the very structure of the entire system,” Gorton says, referencing Kennedy’s books The Real Anthony Fauci and The Wuhan Cover-up. “You can see he has an encyclopedic knowledge of this corruption and how the system works.”
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the name of RFK Jr.’s nonprofit group.
The once and perhaps future star of the anti-abortion movement. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
There is a wide range of positions on the legality of abortion that are based on some belief or assertion related to biology, ethics, or metaphysics. Some people (particularly religious conservatives) famously claim that “life begins at the moment of conception,” and that banning any interference with the development of that life represents homicide. That is the foundation for the extremist “fetal personhood” position that would use force of law to compel women to carry every pregnancy to term. Some abortion opponents won’t go quite that far, but they argue that it’s morally essential to ban abortions from the point a fetal heartbeat can allegedly be discerned. That is the basis for the six-week “heartbeat laws” in place in many states after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. Other abortion opponents claim (on dubious medical grounds) that a fetus can feel pain at 15 weeks of pregnancy (or at either 20 weeks or 22 weeks of pregnancy) and promote abortion bans at that point.
Conversely, of course, there are many people who believe fetal viability is the crucial point at which a new life becomes distinct from its mother, making some restrictions on abortion appropriate at that point (roughly at 24 weeks of pregnancy). Viability, accordingly, was the standard for a constitutional right to choose abortion during the era of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Many pro-choice Americans are working very hard to restore the viability standard via state constitutional measures or statutes. But others believe that as a matter of bodily autonomy, any fetus at any state of development is part of its mother, and thus argue that the right to abortion should become unconditional.
I’ve gone through this exercise to establish that however shaky the rationale might be for this or that legal scheme governing abortion, there almost invariably is one. That’s not true of the 16-week standard that Donald Trump is reportedly planning to promote later this year or perhaps only if and when he takes office, according to the New York Times:
Former President Donald J. Trump has told advisers and allies that he likes the idea of a 16-week national abortion ban with three exceptions, in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother, according to two people with direct knowledge of Mr. Trump’s deliberations. …
One thing Mr. Trump likes about a 16-week federal ban on abortions is that it’s a round number. “Know what I like about 16?” Mr. Trump told one of these people, who was given anonymity to describe a private conversation. “It’s even. It’s four months.”
The Times characterizes the former president’s approach to this issue with what might be the understatement of the year: “Mr. Trump has approached abortion transactionally since becoming a candidate in 2015, and his current private discussions reflect that same approach.”
His allies in the anti-abortion movement certainly understand that, which is why they mostly pulled their punches when he began publicly blaming them for poor Republican performance in the 2022 midterms and then refused to sign onto the national 15-week abortion ban being proposed as a litmus test. Part of this extraordinary forbearance from people not known for flexibility undoubtedly represents gratitude for Trump’s huge role in reshaping the U.S. Supreme Court into one that would reverse Roe. But it is very likely that they also figure Trump’s public position on their favorite topic doesn’t necessarily reflect anything deeper than whatever ephemeral tactic he is pursuing at any given moment.
The proposed 16-week standard would, however, give anti-abortion activists something they want very badly: a presidential candidate committed to a national abortion ban. If it works like other national bans that have been proposed, it would create a floor on abortion restrictions rather than a ceiling: Abortions after 16 weeks would be banned in blue states, while red states would be free to ban abortion altogether.
What Trump’s “solution” would not do, however, is what he says it would do in his past comments on the subject. Per the Times:
[H]e talks about abortion as if it’s a real-estate transaction. He has taken credit for giving “great negotiating power” to anti-abortion activists.
“What’s going to happen is you’re going to come up with a number of weeks or months,” Mr. Trump said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in September. “You’re going to come up with a number that’s going to make people happy.”
His “number” isn’t going to make women whose rights are arbitrarily cut off at 16 weeks of pregnancy “happy,” and it won’t make the pro-choice majority of Americans happy, either. For that matter, anti-abortion activists won’t be “happy” with a 16-week national ban other than as a way station to the total prohibition that they want. The only happy party will be Trump, and only if it helps him get back to the White House.
Trump’s choice to co-chair the RNC: his daughter-in-law Lara. Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
It’s understandable that Donald Trump regards the 2024 election as his final shot at redemption after a 2020 defeat he still cannot admit. In August, he will very likely become a three-time presidential nominee at the age of 78. His principal agenda (beyond taking the steps necessary to quash criminal prosecutions) revolves around vengeance against his enemies, from the highest levels of the Democratic and Republican Party Establishments and major media organizations to the lowliest “deep state” bureaucrat. That’s a deeply personal undertaking, not something he can pass on to any political or ideological heirs.
If Trump loses again and cannot achieve the insurrectionary reversal of the outcome he attempted last time around, the odds are pretty good that he will wind up in the slammer or at least spend his declining years in courtrooms, watching his business empire dissolve in the acid of adverse civil judgments and astronomical legal fees.
So win or lose, in an existential sense it’s all or nothing in November for this turbulent man.
The former president’s bulletproof standing in the 2024 presidential-nomination contest has made it exceptionally easy for him to begin remolding his party in his own image. This project achieved an early milestone with his planned replacement of RNC chair Ronna McDaniel with an ultraloyalist North Carolina operative named Michael Whatley, along with Trump’s own daughter-in-law Lara, another North Carolinian (in blatant disregard of traditional notions of balanced leadership) as co-chair.
Lara Trump is not simply a political nepo baby, however. She could well represent the final subjugation of any broader goals or purpose of the national party beyond hailing the chief. Her first comment about what she wanted to do with her RNC post, as Fox News reported, was highly illustrative:
“The RNC needs to be the leanest, most lethal political fighting machine we’ve ever seen in American history,” Lara Trump told Newsmax …
“Every single penny will go to the No. 1 and the only job of the RNC — that is electing Donald J. Trump as president of the United States and saving this country.”
Sure, every presidential campaign and its party satraps treat victory as all-important, but we sometimes forget to notice how often Trump and his supporters identify a second term for him with the continued existence of the United States. That’s the subtext of their exceptionally vicious attacks on Joe Biden as “the destroyer of democracy” and their treatment of boring old mainstream Democrats as “the Radical Left,” “Marxists,” or even “communists.”
In other words, Trump is projecting his own intense desperation about winning in 2024 onto the party he increasingly controls. That could matter, and not just because making this one election seem like the eschaton is a good way to turn the GOP into “the leanest, most lethal political fighting machine we’ve ever seen.” Supposing Trump loses and again tries to take the election into overtime; Republicans would be more likely to support efforts to reverse the results if they had been told for months that their country could all but cease to exist if Biden remained president. They are already more favorably inclined toward the attempted insurrection than they were in the days immediately after January 6. Michael Anton (later a Trump White House official) earned great notoriety for an essay describing the 2016 presidential election as “the Flight 93 Election,” comparing a Trump victory over Hillary Clinton as a patriotic necessity as urgent as the self-sacrificing attack against 9/11 hijackers by airline passengers. An entire major political party infused with this attitude could become much more authoritarian-leaning than it already is.
Being a narcissist, Trump himself cannot be expected to distinguish his own fate from that of his party or his country. But Republicans can and should refuse to completely subordinate their party to its leader and force themselves to recognize there are values more basic than the desire to grind their opponents into dust. But they probably won’t.
Tom Suozzi speaks following his special election victory on February 13, 2024 in Woodbury, New York. Photo: Getty Images
In a special election to fill the vacancy left by the expulsion of Republican congressman George Santos, former Democratic congressman Tom Suozzi defeated first-time Republican candidate Mazi Pilip in New York’s Third Congressional District. Souzzi won by a narrow but incontestable margin: 54 percent to 46 percent with 93 percent of the expected vote reported. His win reduces the already-small GOP House majority to three seats. The win continues a streak of strong Democratic performances in special elections since the 2022 midterms.
Suozzi was helped by Santos’s messy exit from Congress and by snowy weather, which disproportionately affected Republican voters who prefer to cast ballots in person on Election Day. Pilip thought widespread unhappiness with crime and with the migrant crisis in the urban-suburban New York district (encompassing a small part of Queens and most of Nassau County) would be her ace in the hole. However, Suozzi closely identified himself with the bipartisan border-security legislation that House Republicans killed last month and has long been considered a party centrist (particularly during his unsuccessful primary challenge to Governor Kathy Hochul in 2022).
Pilip’s unusual biography (she is a Jewish Ethiopian immigrant by way of Israel who once served in the Israeli Defense Forces) was a positive and negative factor in her race. Certainly there were voters post-Santos who wanted more of a known quantity. But her inconsistent relationship with the GOP and the MAGA movement may have been an even bigger problem in a low-turnout special election where the Republican base needed to show up at the polls. Naturally, Donald Trump blamed her defeat on her uncertain attitude about him, making this Election Night comment on Truth Social:
Trump’s right that November could be a new ballgame in the Third District and generally. Turnout patterns in a general election differ from those of a special election — particularly if it doesn’t snow a lot on Election Day. There is also a significant chance that the district lines will be redrawn after the New York Court of Appeals tossed out the current map in December, as Politico reported:
New York’s top court is giving Democrats another shot at drawing congressional lines in 2024, smoothing the path for pickups for the party in a state where they underperformed in 2022 and helped hand House control to Republicans.
A 4-3 decision by Court of Appeals … ordered a bipartisan commission that deadlocked last year to reconvene and produce new draft plans by the end of February.
The Democratic-dominated state Legislature will then vote on the new maps. If the maps are voted down by the commission, legislators would have the power to draw maps themselves.
New York, along with its deep-blue West Coast counterpart, California, will likely offer a host of competitive House races that could determine control of the chamber in 2025. The Suozzi win, while a temporary victory, is a good sign for the Democratic Party’s prospects of flipping the House this fall.
Reporters have reached out to a number of neurologists and other experts on memory and aging since the Hur Report came out. Overall, they have have emphasized that a person’s cognitive abilities cannot be accurately assessed based on anecdotes, and with that acknowledged, there wasn’t anything particularly concerning or unusual about the president’s memory lapses as detailed in the report.
As several doctors made clear to the New York Times, neither they — nor Special Counsel Hur, nor any pundits — are in a position to diagnose Biden, and Hur’s conjecture on the matter (that Biden has a “faulty memory”) was definitely not based on science:
In its simplest form, the issue is one that doctors and family members have been dealing with for decades: How do you know when an episode of confusion or a memory lapse is part of a serious decline? The answer: “You don’t,” said David Loewenstein, director of the center for cognitive neuroscience and aging at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. The diagnosis requires a battery of sophisticated and objective tests that probe several areas: different types of memory, language, executive function, problem solving, and spatial skills and attention. The tests, he said, determine if there is a medical condition, and if so, its nature and extent.
A diagnosis might also require comparing recent memory test results to ones taken at least several years ago; understanding what precisely a person is and isn’t forgetting; interviewing family members and close associates; and ruling out various other factors that could be affecting a patient’s cognitive function, like medication they are taking or a recent injury.
And “neurologists say blanking on the names of acquaintances or having difficulty remembering dates from the past, especially when under stress, can simply be part of normal aging,” reports NBC News:
“If you asked me when my mother passed away, I couldn’t necessarily tell you the exact year because it was many years ago,” Dr. Paul Newhouse, clinical core leader for the Vanderbilt Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, said. Almost every older patient has trouble remembering people’s names, Newhouse said. “I think it’s by far the most universal complaint of every person as they age[.”] …
Dr. Dennis Selkoe, co-director of the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, agreed that forgetting names doesn’t actually provide much insight into potential memory problems. In fact, stress and a lack of sleep, can interfere with memory, no matter how old someone is. “Naming proper nouns is not an adequate basis to make a conclusion about whether an individual has a more consistent and more concerning substantive progressive memory disorder,” Selkoe said. …
Overall, neurologists tend to worry less about a patient’s ability to remember remote memories from many years ago and more troubled by an inability to recall more recent events.
And while everyone’s memory declines as they age, and recalling dates and names can become more challenging, it’s not necessarily some universal impairment, as several experts explained to the Washington Post:
“It’s very clear that there are a number of changes that occur with aging and cognition that are just part of getting older,” said Bradford Dickerson, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, who’s studied cognitive super-agers. Declines in the ability to think and remember among the elderly are broad and almost universal, he continued. “There’s just not much cognitively that’s better in an 80-year-old than in a 20-year-old.” …
Still, older brains can often compensate for their growing weakness, Dickerson and other researchers point out. “There’s evidence that older adults can strategically focus memory” on the most important information, [Harvard University psychology professor Daniel] Schacter said. Older brains often become more adept than younger brains at filtering irrelevant information or at making connections between experiences, the researchers agreed, because they’ve had more of them.
Joel Kramer, the director of the Memory and Aging Center at University of California, San Francisco, made a similar point to Stat News:
On average, an 80-year-old will not remember as well as a 60-year-old who won’t be remembering quite so much as a 40-year-old. But these are just general trends. And, you can’t really assume that this particular 80-year-old is going to remember less well than the average 40-year-old, or any 40-year-old. …
When there’s a considerable amount of disease, you might expect a more broad-based decline in memory as well as other [mental] skills. But they are really quite dissociable. And in fact, one of the ways that a lot of older people compensate for their memory problems is by having very good reasoning and planning and judgment. Some people argue that as we get older, you see an increase in wisdom and judgment.
There was a great study of airline pilots several years ago that showed that older pilots have slower reaction times, unquestionably, but they have more experience and better judgment. So this whole notion that because someone is 80 years old, they therefore have problems in memory and other skills, is completely bunk.
In a New York Times op-ed, Dr. Charan Ranganath, the director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at U.C. Davis, stresses that “there is forgetting and there is Forgetting”:
If you’re over the age of 40, you’ve most likely experienced the frustration of trying to grasp hold of that slippery word hovering on the tip of your tongue. Colloquially, this might be described as ‘forgetting,’ but most memory scientists would call this “retrieval failure,” meaning that the memory is there, but we just can’t pull it up when we need it. On the other hand, Forgetting (with a capital F) is when a memory is seemingly lost or gone altogether. Inattentively conflating the names of the leaders of two countries would fall in the first category, whereas being unable to remember that you had ever met the president of Egypt would fall into the latter.
Over the course of typical aging, we see changes in the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, a brain area that plays a starring role in many of our day-to-day memory successes and failures. These changes mean that, as we get older, we tend to be more distractible and often struggle to pull up the word or name we’re looking for. Remembering events takes longer and it requires more effort, and we can’t catch errors as quickly as we used to. This translates to a lot more forgetting, and a little more Forgetting. Many of the special counsel’s observations about Mr. Biden’s memory seem to fall in the category of forgetting, meaning that they are more indicative of a problem with finding the right information from memory than actual Forgetting.
Trump’s threat took the form of a story that is likely exaggerated or made up completely (one obvious sign of Trump’s fake stories is that he is always being called “sir” in them), but what he said nonetheless reveals his attitude toward the United States’ most important alliance:
The president of a big country stood up and said, “Well, sir, if we don’t pay, and are attacked by Russia, will you protect us?”
I said, “You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?”
He said, “Yes, let’s say that happened.”
“No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.”
Trump has long depicted NATO as a protection racket, in which America’s allies pay up or else they get invaded by Russia. His defenders have sought to sanewash this disturbing idea by treating it as just Trump’s way of encouraging NATO allies to spend more on defense — see, Trump isn’t a Russia simp, they say, but a kind of hawk.
During his presidency, many allies did implement an (already-planned) increase in military expenditures, and NATO supporters tried to sell this to him as a Trump “win” forcing the allies to pay their “dues.” But Trump has refused to take this win, because his goal isn’t actually a stronger NATO, but a weaker one.
Trump has claimed that Russia never would have invaded Ukraine if he were still president. He has also insisted his presidency would put an end to wars. But it’s clear a second Trump term would create incentives for Vladimir Putin to undertake even more risky military adventures.
The risk of a second Trump presidency bringing a destabilizing war in Europe is now enormous. Whether or not Trump actually would directly urge Russia to attack allied countries he considers to be deadbeats — or perhaps whose leaders merely fail to flatter him sufficiently — the fact that he has already publicly suggested this is provocation enough. He has now floated the idea that the United States would abandon its NATO allies. That bell can’t be unrung.
The Senate GOP’s unlikely champion. Photo: William B. Plowman/NBC via Getty Images
Larry Hogan, who just made a surprise announcement of a 2024 Senate bid, is a bit of a unicorn in today’s MAGA-flavored Republican Party: a relatively centrist politician who has twice won statewide in a deep-blue state while regularly dissing Donald Trump. He’s legitimately a moderate, though no liberal. For example, he opposed restricting abortion in his state before and after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, but he also opposed expanding abortion access. And he worked reasonably well with Maryland’s Democratic-controlled legislature — so well, in fact, that virtually no down-ballot Republicans were elected on his coattails.
Term-limited at the end 2022, Hogan got a lot of media attention for criticizing Trump and was even the subject of some ill-informed speculation that he might run for president in the 2024 Republican primaries. He also became active in that centrist fantasy land, the No Labels organization. And when Hogan stepped down from its board, there was some more ill-informed speculation that he might be preparing a presidential bid as part of a No Labels “unity ticket.” He said “no” to that prospect and then last month endorsed the presidential candidacy of Nikki Haley.
Perhaps this sign that Hogan wanted to remain within the general confines of the Republican Party signaled his next step, which surprised a lot of people: deciding to run for the Senate seat being vacated by three-term Democratic incumbent Ben Cardin. It’s quite the recruiting coup for Republicans, who last won a U.S. Senate race in Maryland in 1980. And although it’s been obvious for a bit that Hogan wasn’t actually looking in its direction, it’s a blow to No Labels, which has been making noises about wanting a Republican at the top if its “unity ticket” to allay concerns it was secretly or stupidly acting as Trump pawns. There’s really no other Republican in its orbit with the kind of recent electoral credibility Hogan has demonstrated.
Hogan’s interest in becoming a freshman senator at the age of 68 is a bit of a mystery. Yes, he’d have a shorter commute than most senators and is already a familiar figure to the beltway media types who determine which puffed-up lawmakers get attention in a Capitol crowded with big egos. But it would in other respects represent a demotion. Governors have entire state governments reporting to them and can make news whenever they want, while senators have small staffs mostly composed of children and must fight for headlines and sound bites. But presumably Hogan really wants the job.
Whether he wins it or not is another subject altogether. Surely Maryland Republican officials in Washington and in Maryland offered their first-borns to Hogan for giving them the best chance to win a Senate seat in the Old Line State in ages in an election cycle where they have high hopes of flipping control of the chamber. But you never know what sort of MAGA opposition might arise: In 2022, Hogan’s hand-picked candidate to succeed him as governor, Kelly Schulz, was waxed by Trump zealot Dan Cox in the GOP primary (Cox went on to lose badly to Democrat Wes Moore in the general election). Assuming he does brush aside intra-party opposition, Hogan will face either ultrawealthy congressman David Trone or Prince George’s county executive Angela Alsobrooks (who holds the same position in that large D.C. suburb as Hogan’s father once occupied back in the day).
While Hogan has obviously shown he can win a statewide campaign in Maryland, he hasn’t run for a federal office in a presidential year, much less one in a hyperpolarized election year like 2024. He has vowed not to back either Biden or Trump if they are the major-party nominees in November and has also let it be known he did not vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020. In that sense, he is positioned to run as someone who is fiercely independent, but Democratic partisanship will be hard for him to overcome this time around. If nothing else, he’ll force Democrats to spend money in Maryland they’d prefer to spend on crucial Senate races in Ohio or Montana. For that, even Trump-supporting Republicans will be grateful.
Ivanka Trump at New York State Supreme Court in New York on November 8, 2023. Photo: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Over the past few years, Ivanka Trump has made it very clear that she wants nothing to do with any of the headaches associated with her father Donald Trump’s business and political operations. Ivanka worked in the Trump Organization and then her father’s White House administration for the entirety of her adult life, but she and her husband, Jared Kushner, backed away as his term ended. Then, in November 2022, she skipped her dad’s 2024 campaign announcement and posted a statement online declaring, “I do not plan to be involved in politics. While I will always love and support my father, going forward I will do so outside the political arena.”
But it turns out she’s not averse to the perks that come with her dad’s political career, like letting his super-PAC cover her legal bills.
Business Insider reviewed Federal Election Commission records and found that Donald Trump’s Save America PAC spent a total of $2.3 million last year for two law firms that solely represented Ivanka:
In 2023, Save America disbursed a total of $1,303,667.11 to the law firm Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders and $1,042,479 to the firm Kellogg, Hansen, Todd, Figel, & Frederick.
Both firms represented Ivanka Trump in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ sprawling lawsuit against the Trump Organization, Donald Trump, his three eldest children, and several executives over its finances. The attorney general’s office alleged that the firm misrepresented its finances to obtain favorable tax, bank-loan, and insurance rates.
The PAC spent another $5.3 million on a law firm that represented Ivanka along with her father, her brothers Don Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization. None of the suits that incurred the fees were related to Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign (unless you subscribe to the idea that every bad thing happening in Trump’s life is the result of political persecution).
Trump founded the Save America PAC days after his 2020 election loss, and repeatedly solicited donated by telling supporters that he needed money for “election defense.” But much of the money Trump collected has gone to covering his legal expenses in various cases that have nothing to do with bogus “election fraud” claims. Save America and MAGA PAC, another political group controlled by Trump, have spent more than $50 million on legal fees, according to Business Insider.
It doesn’t appear that Ivanka really needed PAC donor money to cover her $2.3 million legal bills, as she and Jared have an estimated net worth of over $1 billion. And it certainly seems hypocritical for Ivanka to take money from her father’s political action committee after she dramatically declared that she wants nothing to do with politics. But in her defense, even obscenely wealthy people like free stuff. They essentially drove a dump truck full of money up to her house. She’s not made of stone!
This man isn’t going to be president, but he may help Trump or Biden win this November. Photo: Rebecca Noble/Getty Images
There’s no telling what the 2024 presidential general election is going to look like after what will probably seem like an endless campaign between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. But both the early polls and recent history suggest that the contest will be close, just like six of the last seven presidential elections. Thanks to widespread disgruntlement with this choice, the odds are also high that the non-major-party vote will be relatively high (more like 2016’s 5.7 percent than 2020’s 1.9 percent) — and that may decide the election.
But as Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times points out in an important column, the one thing we know for sure is that none of these third-party or independent candidates is going to win:
[T]o have any hope of fulfilling the constitutional requirement to win a majority of electoral votes, a third-party candidate would need at least a plurality of voters in a huge number of states. The party would need, on a state-by-state basis, to outcompete one of the other two parties, so that it could notch electors under the winner-take-all rules that apply in most states.
This, unfortunately for anyone with third-party dreams, has never happened.
Yes, there is an argument (being suggested most recently by the No Labels crowd, which is seeking ballot access for a yet-to-be-identified presidential candidacy) that a non-major-party candidate can crucially influence the direction of the nation by picking off a few states and deadlocking the Electoral College, thereby gaining massive leverage in the resolution of that deadlock in Congress. But to do that you need a very big regional base of support, as Bouie notes:
In 1948, with Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as its candidate, the States’ Rights Democratic Party — better known as the Dixiecrats — won four states and 39 electoral votes despite gaining just 2.4 percent of the national popular vote. Twenty years later, George Wallace and the American Independent Party won 46 electoral votes and 13.5 percent of the popular vote.
What both results suggest is that under the Electoral College, the next best alternative to a large and well-distributed national constituency is to have a small and intense regional one. It is, it seems, the only other way to win electoral votes as a third party.
Both those efforts failed, of course. And if you scan the list of likely non-major-party candidates in 2024 — independents Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West; Green Party aspirant Jill Stein; whoever the Libertarians choose to run; and the “centrist” worthies under consideration by No Labels — there’s no one with the kind of regional base Thurmond or Wallace (or Teddy Roosevelt in his Bull Moose run of 1912) enjoyed. There is a nascent argument that Kennedy might augment his already-significant but highly diffused support (13 percent in the national RealClearPolitics averages in a five-way race) by winning the Libertarian nomination. That’s a bit of a reach given Kennedy’s lefty background and erratic views; he’s just not the sort of person you can imagine as a hero in an Ayn Rand novel, and his support for strong environmental policies might be a deal-breaker for the Libertarian Party, which has plenty of true believers from whom to choose. In any event, whatever RFK Jr. might gain from the easy ballot access Libertarians might offer would be offset by the number of voters who are decidedly non-libertarian.
As for No Labels, the group may back away from its threat to run a “unity ticket” thanks to internal dissension and the fury of former allies who think the whole effort would just guarantee a Trump victory. But even No Labels’ own highly dubious polling shows any foreseeable candidate would struggle to win electoral votes. To cite one example, the West Virginia voters whose antipathy to Joe Manchin led him to give up his Senate seataren’t going to back him for president against Donald Trump.
What all of this suggests is that non-major-party candidacies should be viewed by voters and pundits alike strictly in the context of how they affect the Biden-Trump binary choice. Sure, there are ideological reasons some voters might pull the lever for the candidates of parties like the Libertarians and the Greens; those voters may believe that in the broader scheme of things it really just doesn’t matter whether Biden or Trump is the 46th president. For everyone else, the choice to go independent or third-party isn’t really a choice of that candidate, but of either Biden or Trump.
Things could change by November, of course, and the implications of non-party candidacies may depend on how many of them there are and who they are. But current polling shows that the current five-way race we are contemplating will likely help Trump defeat Biden, which makes sense when you consider the cohesiveness of Trump’s MAGA base and his inability to win a popular-vote majority. As Bouie puts it: “If Americans want different choices, they will need a different system.” But let’s not accept the premise that those who vote for Kennedy or Stein or Mapstead or Manchin or West are “choosing” any of these people to take office. Like it or not, the only real choice is binary.
In the moments after the verdict, Donald Trump would not be hauled off to prison right away. White-collar defendants are typically allowed to remain out on bail pending sentencing, which means, in the case of our former and maybe future commander-in-chief, that he could continue to campaign for president in the meantime. But let’s game it out: If Trump is found guilty, how long till he has to put on an orange (or, as we’ll learn, olive-green) jumpsuit?
The odds of such an outcome jumped this week, after a panel of appellate judges in Washington, D.C., rejected Trump’s argument that he is immune from prosecution in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case covering Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. “For the purpose of this criminal case,” the judges wrote, “former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant.” Trump might seek a rehearing before the whole court or an appeal to the Supreme Court, but make no mistake: When (and it should be when, not if) Smith’s trial gets back on track, Trump is in serious trouble.
Ninety-nine percent of the January 6 cases that have gone to trial have ended with a conviction. Also, Trump faces a particularly unfriendly jury pool in D.C., where polls suggest as many as two-thirds of residents believe he is guilty. Trump’s advisers are treating the case like the threat that it is. They’ve told him bluntly that he needs to win his reelection bid in order to avoid prison time. (Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump’s campaign, declined to make Trump available for an interview, telling me that the premise of the story was “designed to try to undermine President Trump.”)
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over the D.C. case, would set a sentencing date — say, two to three months from the date of the conviction. If the trial takes place by the end of the summer, sentencing could happen just weeks before the election.
According to federal sentencing guidelines, Trump’s potential exposure is very high, at least on paper. Mark Allenbaugh, who once worked as a lawyer for the U.S. Sentencing Commission, sketched out an aggressive calculation for me that would result in a recommended sentence north of 20 years based on the violence and physical injuries that resulted from the siege of the Capitol, Trump’s status as both a public official and the leader of the effort, and a provision of the guidelines that permits an increase in the recommended sentence when “the offense was calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion.”
Federal rules require judges to treat defendants equally “to avoid unwarranted sentence disparities among defendants with similar records who have been found guilty of similar conduct.” Here, we should look at what happened to the hundreds of people who have been sentenced in connection with the siege of the Capitol. Most of them — 467 out of 749 people, as of the start of the year — have been sentenced to a period of incarceration. Some of the most serious and defiant offenders, particularly those who engaged in violence or were carrying weapons, have received lengthy, yearslong terms of imprisonment. Others have received fairly modest sentences, measurable in single-digit months — perhaps because they pleaded guilty or their misconduct on the day was limited. Still others, like the “QAnon Shaman,” Jacob Chansley, were sentenced to several years in prison despite the fact that they did not engage in violence and ultimately pleaded guilty.
Put it all together, and it is far from clear why a nonviolent foot soldier in a campaign that Trump is accused of setting in motion should go to prison but Trump, if convicted, should not.
Judge Chutkan may also have been the worst possible draw for Trump among all of the judges in Washington. She has sentenced every single convicted January 6 defendant in her courtroom to a period of incarceration — at times ordering them to serve even more time than the proposal from prosecutors. At a hearing in late 2022, she gave a 50-year-old Ohio woman named Christine Priola 15 months after she pleaded guilty to obstructing Congress’s electoral certification. “The people who mobbed that Capitol were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man — not to the Constitution,” Chutkan said. “It’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.”
The exterior of Federal Prison Camp Pensacola in Escambia County, Florida. Photo: Federal Bureau of Prisons
The federal prison camp in Pensacola, Florida — an all-male minimum-security facility that currently holds about 500 convicts — is an eight-and-a-half-hour drive from Mar-a-Lago, not far from the border with Alabama. The complex contains 20 buildings, a track for jogging or walking, and designated recreational areas for inmates to play a variety of sports, including basketball, volleyball, soccer, and tennis. The prison has housed a variety of white-collar offenders, including former New York congressman Chris Collins (who was serving time for insider trading before being pardoned by Trump), and it is currently home to former reality-television star Todd Chrisley, who was sent there after being convicted of financial crimes.
FPC Pensacola, as it is known, is a leading contender for the prison that would house Trump. The process of selecting a facility for a convicted felon usually begins in the Designation and Sentence Computations Center of the Bureau of Prisons in Grand Prairie, Texas, where a specialist reviews the incoming prisoner’s file in order to generate a score that correlates to different levels of security — ranging from minimum- to high-security facilities. The relevant inputs include the nature of the offenses in generic terms (in Trump’s case, fraud and obstruction), the defendant’s criminal record, as well as his age, education level, and history of violent behavior or drug and alcohol abuse. The BOP is supposed to place each inmate in a facility that is reasonably close to where he will be released; in Trump’s case, that would presumably be Mar-a-Lago, which Trump designated as his legal residence in 2019.
Trump would likely “score out” at a minimum-security facility under the guidelines as written, but BOP officials retain wide latitude to change these designations. “They can find excuses to raise or lower his security designation if they want to,” said Hugh Hurwitz, a retired longtime career official at the BOP who served as the acting head of the agency for about 15 months during the Trump administration.
The idea of Trump serving time in a place like FPC Pensacola, with its open-air amenities and mild climate, might be disappointing to people who would prefer to see him in the sort of remote, high-security facility that houses terrorists, but it would be replete with indignities for the former president. Minimum-security prisons are still prisons. “You’re still not free to go wherever you want. You still have people telling you where to go, when to go, what have you,” Hurwitz told me. “You don’t have your freedom.”
The building directory of FPC Pensacola. The facility includes a sunbathing area and four gazebos. Photo: Federal Bureau of Prisons
What would the typical day look like for Trump? Inmates at FPC Pensacola are assigned to sleep with other inmates, either in a hostel-like room with bunk beds or in a cubicle. The day starts with breakfast at 5 a.m. The uniform is an olive shirt that must be tucked in at all times, olive pants, white socks, and black shoes, unless the inmate’s work assignment requires different clothing. (Cafeteria workers wear white while on duty.)
“Everybody that’s in federal prison is expected to have a job if they’re physically and mentally able to do so,” Hurwitz explained. “Maybe they’re working maintenance on the grounds — you know, cutting grass — maybe they’re working in the kitchen, doing dishes or serving food; maybe if they have some skill in plumbing, they can help out in there.” Inmates get paid between 12 and 40 cents per hour.
In addition to work, Trump could participate in vocational, occupational, and educational programs that are available to inmates to ease their reentry into society after release and can earn them time off their sentence. “Once he arrives, he’ll do a needs assessment with the staff,” Hurwitz said. “They’ll figure out what his needs are, they’ll make recommendations to what programs he should take in order to meet those needs, and then it’ll be up to him to take the programs. But if he does take the programs, then that will likely earn him reduced time on his sentence.”
Trump’s ability to communicate with the outside world would be extremely limited. Cell phones are not allowed in federal prisons, though they are often smuggled in to minimum-security facilities. “He won’t have legal access to the internet,” Hurwitz noted, and though he would have limited access to email, “it is a very old-style email without graphics and things like that.” “He will not be able to tweet,” he continued. “He will not be able to even get on the internet or Facebook — none of that stuff.”
It’s an open question how Trump would spend his days. After all, Trump — to be perfectly blunt — does not excel at spelling, reading, or writing. It seems unlikely he would be able to pass much time checking out books from the library or corresponding with family and friends.
The daily schedule for FPC Pensacola inmates. Photo: Federal Bureau of Prisons
On the plus side, however, a favorite Trump pastime — watching television, cable news in particular — could be readily accessible. There are televisions throughout the facility, and inmates use headphones with handheld electronic devices that allow them to tune in to different frequencies in order to switch between sets.
Television figures prominently in the life of an inmate in a federal prison camp, as Elton Thomas, who spent about nine years in a camp in California, told me. He was granted early release at the tail end of the Obama administration after a lawyer volunteered to prepare a commutation petition for him.
“For the most part,” when you are done with work, he recalled, “the rest of your day is watching television. You watch a lot of TV.” In Thomas’s particular facility, there was a television that was informally designated for news, and inmates could watch both local news and the major cable-news channels — including CNN, MSNBC, and Fox. Hurwitz told me that the availability of these channels in any given facility would ultimately depend on “what cable package they have.”
Federal prison facilities tend to be spartan, and opportunities for Trump to improve his material situation would be limited, though informal economies could help. In recent years, the commissary at FPC Pensacola has not carried Diet Coke, but another Trump favorite — ketchup — can be purchased for $2.55. A wide variety of other items are available — including candy, stamps, over-the-counter medicines, and packaged food — but inmates are limited to spending just $360 a month. One way around this limit is for you to have someone on the outside deposit money into the account of another inmate who is not spending their full allotment and then have that inmate purchase items for you in exchange for a cut.
The commissary order sheet for FPC Pensacola. Federal Bureau of Prisons.
The commissary order sheet for FPC Pensacola. Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Keeping Trump safe in a facility like this would not be a straightforward process. Although federal prison camps are generally designed for nonviolent offenders, the government in Trump’s case would likely need to “do some very careful checking into who the other inmates are in that facility” in order to minimize the physical risk to Trump, Hurwitz told me.
A spokesperson for the Secret Service told me that the agency has “no existing policies or protocols” for the protection of a president in prison. Still, he maintained that the Secret Service “has developed protective models for some of the most austere climates around the globe” — perhaps most memorably in recent years when agents protected Joe Biden during a visit to Ukraine in the midst of the country’s war with Russia — and that agents would handle any situation that might arise.
“I will tell you, if you can think of a way to kill the president, we’ve already thought of it and planned mitigations,” Jeff James, a retired agent who worked for the Secret Service for more than 20 years, told me. But the possibility of protecting someone in federal custody “is something that, at least in my time, the Secret Service absolutely never talked about.”
I asked James to consider how he would approach the situation if he were tasked with devising a protection plan for Trump if he had to serve time. A minimum-security facility, he said, “would be our ideal scenario,” at least compared to other prisons, but the agency would still want to separate Trump from the general population. That could mean ensuring that Trump has his own area — or even building — to sleep in and that he has an on-site protection detail. “Our goal,” he said, “is that someone always has eyes on the people we protect with the exception of at night, when they’re sleeping.” (At night, protectees have access to panic buttons that they can use to alert the Secret Service if, say, they have a heart attack or choke on something.)
Dormitory-style housing at a minimum-security prison in Kentucky, similar to what is provided for inmates at FPC Pensacola. Photo: Courtesy of The MPM Group, Inc.
Inmates watch television at a minimum-security federal prison. Photo: Courtesy of The MPM Group, Inc.
“The folks in prison are a cross-section of society, so you’re going to have people that even in prison are going to love him and people who are going to hate him,” James said. “Just because they’re confined doesn’t mean we could cut him loose, because maybe somebody doesn’t want to kill him — maybe they just want to punch him in the face.”
Still, Trump has also proved undeniably adept over the years at cultivating adoration in improbable settings, from improbable sources, including tens of millions of Americans who have never encountered the sort of privilege that has ensconced Trump throughout his entire life. Maybe he’d be popular!
Even so, routines as mundane as food service in the cafeteria might need to be revamped. Presidents do not have food tasters, but in large dining settings, the Secret Service might “have the chef make up a several dozen plates for the dinner and then someone would just go pick one of those at random,” James told me, “so if that chef wanted to kill the president, they would have to kill everybody.” In a prison setting, “maybe that protocol changes so they prepare 25 trays and somebody just goes and grabs one” for Trump.
Inmates are served three meals each day in the Food Service building. Photo: Courtesy of The MPM Group, Inc.
Bathroom and shower facilities at a minimum-security federal prison. All inmates are expected to shower daily. Courtesy of The MPM Group, Inc..
Bathroom and shower facilities at a minimum-security federal prison. All inmates are expected to shower daily. Courtesy of The MPM Group, Inc..
Weapons for the agents would pose another dilemma. The Bureau of Prisons does not allow people to carry firearms in its facilities — weapons are stored in on-site armories — but the Secret Service might insist on this for the agents protecting Trump. That in turn would introduce collateral risks, like the possibility that an inmate might be able to take a gun off an agent.
“There’s a whole new set of protocols that have to be developed just for” Trump, said Hurwitz, who added that staff on site would need to receive additional training and that there would be significant expenses associated with the effort. “The biggest ones probably will be in any security upgrades or communication upgrades that are going to be needed for that facility.”
In the end, all of this would be challenging and costly — but doable. “The men and women of the Secret Service are so mission oriented,” James told me, “that if that became the mission” — protecting Trump in prison — “there would be people who would, frankly, embrace it, and they’re going to make a lousy situation as good as they can. They’re going to make sure that the president is as safe as he can be.”
It is also possible that Trump would ultimately avoid the modest confines of a minimum-security facility and, like former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, serve out his time at home. “I have to believe there’s a way between the courts, the Secret Service, the Justice Department — they will find a way to have him serve in-home confinement,” Hurwitz said, because “it’s not in anybody’s best interest to have him in a prison.”
The Secret Service would likely be lobbying in favor of home confinement too, James said. “He just sits at Mar-a-Lago — maybe they take his passport, they order him not to travel, and he just has to just sit in Mar-a-Lago the whole time. Because we already have that facility secured, it would be a simple task for us.”
One wrinkle: Mar-a-Lago is both Trump’s home and a lavish private club — far nicer, of course, than the “Club Fed” stereotype associated with minimum-security prisons — which dramatically dilutes the punitive effect as well as Trump’s isolation. The property boasts more than a hundred rooms, a pool and spa, two ballrooms, a nine-hole “pitch and putt” golf course, five tennis courts, and more on the 20-acre property. According to an indictment prepared for some of Trump’s other alleged crimes, the club “hosted more than 150 social events, including weddings, movie premieres, and fundraisers that together drew tens of thousands of guests” between January 2021 and August 2022.
The standard methods of federal home confinement involve an ankle bracelet on the convict, which alerts a probation officer if he leaves a designated area. The traditional ankle bracelet model tends to be “challenging” when the defendants “have large residences,” Chris Maloney, the former chief U.S. probation officer in the district of New Jersey and the district of Massachusetts, told me.
Another option is a curfew system in which the defendant is required to be on-site during certain hours. Maybe they can go out during certain hours of the day but otherwise have to stay home in the evenings and on the weekends. “The officer uses other methods to monitor that — whether it’s a home visit or calling them on the phone,” Maloney explained. In Trump’s case in particular, an ankle bracelet might not be necessary given the fact that the Secret Service would be in close proximity and that it would be difficult for someone as recognizable as Trump to go anywhere without someone noticing.
The judge could restrict Trump’s movements to certain parts of Mar-a-Lago, but in the absence of some strict conditions, he could remain free to enjoy everything the property had to offer. “Nothing precludes somebody that’s on home confinement from doing those types of things unless the judge adds a condition on something like that,” Maloney told me. “If they’re within their home — let’s say you have a well-to-do defendant that has an 8,000-square-foot house and has lots of parties and lots of people over — there’s nothing wrong with that.”
This does not sound so bad on its face, I told Maloney, but he offered a countervailing view. “After a few months — especially for somebody who’s used to traveling on a whim and going wherever they want to go — it gets punitive pretty quick,” he said. Even Mar-a-Lago, he offered, could “start feeling like a prison after three months.”
Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
A home-confinement model could include allowances for Trump to travel to some of his other properties — including his penthouse in Trump Tower in Manhattan and his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey — with the approval of probation officers and the judge. Maloney said such allowances for felons with multiple homes are “not uncommon.”
Douglas Berman, a law professor and leading authority on federal sentencing law, sounded dovish when I asked him how he might advise Judge Chutkan. He told me he would encourage her to consider whether “the fact of a conviction alone, under these kinds of circumstances, is punishment enough” and whether putting Trump in prison for any period of time could do more harm than good.
“I somewhat fear Trump always ends up a winner in his own story, no matter what happens, so I’m not really worried about him,” Berman told me. “I am worried about the country.”
The prospect of Trump in some sort of modified political exile at Mar-a-Lago or a minimum-security prison is not likely to satisfy his most dogged critics, some of whom have recently taken to predicting that Trump will die in prison. But there would still be some measure of justice in seeing Trump in these loosely confined settings. He would be further stigmatized, and provided he loses to Biden in November, his legacy would be in tatters — a wildly unpopular one-term president, a political failure, a historically unprecedented criminal who tried to cling to power in shocking, anti-democratic fashion.
The other criminal cases against Trump may not significantly affect the contours of the result. A conviction in the classified-documents case being tried in Florida could result in additional time for Trump, but that could be designated by the sentencing judge to run concurrently with his other sentence, or it could simply be tacked on to whatever period of federal incarceration and/or home confinement he is already required to serve. Even assuming that Trump is convicted in the state cases, the state judges and prison officials would face even more difficult versions of the logistical and security problems that Chutkan and federal officials would confront; the most straightforward solution might simply be for the judges to impose sentences that would run while Trump is in federal custody, wherever that ultimately is.
This punishment would likely be much less dramatic, much less onerous than the supermax prison that many people have imagined for Trump, but it is also, in its own way, much more psychologically diminishing. The crudeness of the criminal-justice system has a way of flattening people, and at the end of the day, Trump may not warrant treatment as some sort of international criminal mastermind who could break free at any moment. He would be just another failed and frail elderly white-collar convict.
A South Carolina Democrat votes, probably for Joe Biden. Photo: ALLISON JOYCE/AFP via Getty Images
South Carolina is the rare state that allows each political party to choose the date for its own presidential primary. The primary matchup that could, for all practical purposes, end the GOP race is on February 24. You might have missed it, but South Carolina Democrats held their own primary on February 3 with President Joe Biden winning 96 percent of the vote over token opposition from Marianne Williamson and Dean Phillips. As one might expect in a lopsided contest involving an incumbent president, Democratic turnout was light; just 131,000 voters bothered to show up, or less than 5 percent of all registered voters in the state (South Carolina does not register by political party, making all primaries “open”).
What may ultimately matter most, however, is that these 131,000 voters have disqualified themselves from participating in the GOP primary three weeks away. Thus the pool of potential crossover voters available to save Nikki Haley’s bacon has shrunk. As polling has consistently shown, a big crossover vote aimed at stopping or at least complicating the nomination of Donald Trump provides the only hope of a Haley upset in the state she governed from 2011 until 2016, when she resigned to become Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.
If the nomination is left up to Republicans, in South Carolina and elsewhere, there’s no question Trump will be the winner by a big margin. The most recent survey, from the Washington Post–Monmouth, shows Trump leading Haley by 60 points among self-identified “strong Republicans” in South Carolina; he leads in the RealClearPolitics averages of national GOP polls (including all eligible primary voters) by 55 points. But as in New Hampshire, she’s leading Trump (by 46 percent, in the Post-Monmouth poll) among non-Republicans who have expressed interest in voting in the GOP primary.
There hasn’t been any organized movement of Democrats urging their colleagues to cross over and back Haley; indeed, her big problem may be, ironically, that South Carolina is her home state, and Democrats there know her very partisan record well. Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison happens to be from that state, and, as The Hill reports, he has made it abundantly clear that a rescue mission for Haley is way off the table:
While speaking during an event Saturday morning in Columbia, S.C., Harrison relayed a message to Haley that she should not expect assistance from Democrats, where the campaign is looking to close the gap between former President Trump and Haley in her home state …
“Nikki Haley is a governor in the state who blocked 250,000 people from getting health care in this country,” he continued. “Nikki Haley is the governor that signed the most one [sic] of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country …”
“My message to Nikki from you know, bless her heart from the very start, is that we’re not gonna vote for you, because you didn’t do anything for us,” he said.
A big crossover vote on Haley’s behalf remains theoretically possible thanks to the low turnout in the Democratic primary, which was about 400,000 below the number of people who voted in the red-hot 2020 primary that launched Biden toward the nomination. It’s enthusiasm for that option that is lacking, particularly since it is no secret that Biden would prefer Trump as a general-election opponent. Clearly, 131,000 South Carolina Democrats have already voted with their feet to foreclose any succor for Trump’s one surviving intraparty opponent.
Just keep posting. Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
As long as two major civil-court rulings hold up to appeal, Donald Trump is about to lose a lot of money. Last month, the former president was ordered to pay $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll in a defamation suit. Later this month, the Trump Organization could pay up to $370 million in penalties for years of inflating his net worth and other acts of business fraud. The former president is still extremely asset rich, but the next year would be a great time for him to come into some easy money.
There’s a chance that such a windfall could come from an unlikely place: Truth Social.
The Truth Social story has followed a similar arc to many of Trump’s failed businesses over the years: media attention and value inflation in the early days, followed by legal woes, allegations of shady financing, and financial struggles. Truth Social may yet defy that pattern. But like Trump’s hopes for staying out of prison, its potential success probably relies on him winning the presidency again.
But that’s not all. For Trump to make a bunch of money off Truth Social, it would need to go public in a SPAC merger, a route that has failed so far, in large part because of an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission into the accuracy of its disclosures to investors. In case you’ve forgotten, since it peaked in popularity around 2021, the process involves a real business combining with a shell company to go public without the scrutiny of an IPO. In this case, the shell company is called Digital World Acquisition Corp. and the real one is Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group. (Neither responded to requests for comment.) SPACs do not have a highsuccess rate, and tend to lose a lot of money for investors. The process has largely gone out of fashion and new regulations to protect investors make SPACs even less attractive to companies trying to get rich quick.
Trump’s SPAC deal has been stuck in limbo amid this general downward trend. In 2022, under SEC investigation and unable to rally shareholders, Digital World Acquisition Corp. missed its first deadline to go public, forcing it to return $1 billion in early investments. (The SEC eventually settled with the firm for misleading investors, resulting in an $18 million fine if the merger ever happens.) In 2023, in a separate inquiry, the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors accused three of Trump’s partners of insider trading on the proposed merger. Truth Social user numbers remain extremely disappointing, and financial statements show that its parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, is losing tens of millions in operating costs for every million they see in ad revenue. In an SEC filing from November, the company’s accountants wrote that they had “substantial doubts” about staying afloat. And as the merger deadline in September looms, there is no sign that they have gotten any closer to SEC approval of their financial disclosure to investors — a necessary step any SPAC needs to complete.
But hints of a potential Truth Social turnaround began at the Iowa caucuses in January. After Trump’s commanding win in the first primary state, stock in Digital World Acquisition Corp. surged by over 200 percent, suggesting that retail investors either view the social network as some kind of meme stock or, perhaps, see some genuine value in the company. “After the announcement of a SPAC merger, essentially all shares typically move into retail investors’ hands,” says Stanford Law professor and SPAC skeptic Michael Klausner. “This was true of Digital World Acquisition Corp. These people may think there is value in the merger, but I wouldn’t take a tip from them. I have no reason to believe they know anything.”
Any kind of comeback is contingent on what happens in November. “If he were to lose the election it would be really bad for the value of Truth Social,” says NYU law professor Michael Ohlrogge, another SPAC skeptic. After all, what value is there to a third-tier social-media company presided over by a two-time presidential loser? But if he were to win, not only could that valuation gain more momentum, it could give investors the confidence that the merger would actually happen. “It would take some time, but the president could appoint a majority of commissioners on the Securities and Exchange Commission and they could probably do one thing or another to make the merger go through,” says Ohlrogge. “That could be something that could be seen as useful.”
It is a long-shot prospect. SEC rules require SPACs to liquidate after three years, so Digital World would need to find a way to stay intact beyond the three-year mark in September. And there are bigger-picture problems: A merger would require competent management from a firm already associated with insider trading and fraud. It would also require a divisive politician winning the Electoral College with four criminal cases looming over him — though stranger things have happened, like Trump winning in the first place.
So how much money could Trump see from a successful Truth Social SPAC in the absolute best-case scenario? Parsing through Digital World’s latest SEC filing, Ohlrogge explains the numbers of a miraculous — and still very hypothetical — Truth Social windfall.
Trump owns 90 percent of Trump Media & Technology Group. At the current stock price of around $37.20, an estimated 135.7 million shares would be allocated to TMTG stockholders in the post-merger company, equaling about $5 billion. As the holder of 90 percent of that stock, Trump could receive $4.5 billion, which is close to double his current estimated net worth. “Would the stock price actually stay that high for very long post-merger?” Ohlrogge asked. “Especially if and when Trump started trying to unload some of those 135 million shares he owns? I myself find that rather doubtful. But, it’s clearly an area of some uncertainty.”
As with other Trump properties, it is hard to parse out what Truth Social is really worth. Two years ago, Trump Media & Technology Group was Trump’s most valuable asset on paper, with his shares in the company valued at $730 million on paper; that value was crucial in Trump’s return to the Forbes list of 400 most wealthy people on the planet. But Ohlrogge notes that SPACs often inflate values to make up for the high cost of going public that way. “There’s real concern here that Trump’s media company is inflating its valuation,” he says. Trump’s accountant also feels this way. In his disclosure with the Federal Election Commission last year, Trump valued his Truth Social holdings at somewhere between $5 million and $25 million — far short of the billion-dollar haul he could hypothetically gain from a merger.
The fact that Trump could still wring money out of his lackluster social network helps answer a common question: Why won’t he return to X? He was once quite fond of the app formerly known as Twitter; anyone who has used Truth Social knows that he basically ripped it off. And even though X has an increasing number of flaws, its audience of estimated monthly users is orders of magnitude larger than Truth Social — 500 million compared to around 600,000.
There appear to be some petty reasons for Trump’s refusal to return. With X’s diminished standing, Trump doesn’t really need it anymore — combative missives on Truth Social generally find their way into the news. He is constitutionally not a guy who likes to come crawling back; his party has gotten him quite used to being the one who is crawled to. It also looks like Trump has not resolved his spat from two years ago with X owner Elon Musk, in which he called Twitter “worthless” and made fun of Musk’s reliance on federal backing for Tesla and SpaceX. “I could have said ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, describing a conversation in which he claimed Musk asked for government support for a project.
But there is also a contractual reason for Trump’s fidelity to Truth Social. An SEC filing from January states that Trump is obligated to post first on Truth Social six hours before bringing that content anywhere else — a clause that will continue “in perpetuity” as long as Truth Social is around. Though Trump is not known for adhering to contracts, there is a compelling reason to do so here. Any value left in the app would plummet if he went back to X. The dream of getting even richer just by posting would end.
If you’re going to raid a former president’s compound looking for classified documents he allegedly pilfered from the White House, then attempted to conceal from authorities, it’s probably a good idea to search inside his locked closets and hidden rooms. But according to a new report from ABC News, FBI agents may have missed a few potential hiding places when they searchedDonald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August of 2022. Per the report, before indicting Trump and two employees in the classified-documents case, special counsel Jack Smith’s team questioned witnesses about two apparently unsearched spaces in Trump’s Florida residence:
According to sources, some investigators involved in the case came to later believe that [a] closet, which was locked on the day of the search, should have been opened and checked. As investigators would later learn, Trump allegedly had the closet’s lock changed while his attorney was in Mar-a-Lago’s basement, searching for classified documents in a storage room that he was told would have all such documents. Trump’s alleged efforts to conceal classified documents from both the FBI and his own attorney are a key part of Smith’s indictment against Trump in Florida …
In addition to the closet, the FBI also didn’t search what authorities have called a “hidden room” connected to Trump’s bedroom, sources said. Smith’s investigators were later told that, in the days right after the search, some of Trump’s employees heard that the FBI had missed at least one room at Mar-a-Lago, the sources said.
Per the same sources, when the agents “couldn’t locate a key for [the closet] and were told the space behind the door — an old stairwell turned into a closet with shelves — went nowhere, so they decided not to break it open.”
And they said that the FBI agents weren’t made aware of the so-called hidden room until afterward:
Though agents searched Trump’s bedroom, a small door in one of the walls was concealed behind a large dresser and a big TV, sources said. The space behind the wall was the “hidden room,” which maintenance workers sporadically entered to access cables running through it, sources said.
But an unnamed senior FBI official who spoke with ABC News maintained that the search went according to plan:
Based on information gathered throughout the course of the investigation, areas were identified and searched pursuant to the search warrant … Discussions took place that day about additional areas of the property and it was determined that actions already taken met the parameters of the search warrant.
The report stresses that it’s not clear Trump ever stored any classified documents in the closet or the “hidden room” to begin with. The classified documents the agents did recover during the raid were found in Trump’s office and in a basement storage room. There were additional classified documents at Trump’s properties, however. A Trump attorney subsequently found some and handed them over to the Justice Department after conducting another search of the former president’s properties, including Mar-a-Lago.
When we first learned of Donald Trump’s Diet Coke valet about 100 days into his presidency, he was just a guy who would come running with fizzy aspartame water whenever the “leader of the free world” pressed a red button on the Resolute Desk — an event that might occur a dozen times a day.
After Trump left office, we discovered that the valet’s name is Walt Nauta, and that he’d become one of the former president’s closest aides; eventually, he would also become his co-defendant in the classified-documents case. After serving Trump as a military valet in the White House, Nauta joined him at Mar-a-Lago as his “personal aide and general gofer.” A March 2023 Washington Postprofile depicted the Navy veteran as subservient, extremely loyal to Trump, and uniquely uninterested in stabbing colleagues in the back to advance himself. “Some staffers who worked in the White House with Nauta recalled that in the freewheeling world of the Trump administration, he was one of the few staffers who appeared to perform his role — no more, no less,” the paper reported.
But maybe, despite his apparent competence, Nauta is less of a rarity than he initially seemed. The Daily Beast reported on Friday that Nauta — like his boss and many other Trump-world figures — has been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women. The allegations against Nauta, which three female servicemembers reported to their supervisors in spring 2021, led to him being swiftly reassigned. Per the Daily Beast:
Weeks before Nauta — a Navy enlistee stationed with the White House Presidential Support Detail since 2012 — traded Washington, D.C., for Palm Beach, Navy officials had escorted him off of White House grounds, reassigned him to a new post, and docked his White House security clearance in response to accusations of fraternization, adultery, harassment, and other inappropriate sexual conduct, including “revenge porn,” two people with direct knowledge of the matter told The Daily Beast.
These accusations included “multiple overlapping and emotionally abusive romantic relationships” that took place over several years, while Nauta was married and serving as Trump’s Diet Coke valet at the White House. The report says: “The ‘revenge porn’ included supposedly compromising images of women that Nauta had allegedly retained and threatened to make public, according to the sources.”
The first claim surfaced in a “command climate survey” conducted around April 2021, as Nauta was recalled from a temporary postpresidential assignment at Mar-a-Lago. Nauta was reportedly among the group of Navy officers briefed on the then-anonymous accusation. A source told the Daily Beast that he emerged from the meeting “cool as a cucumber, ready to find the culprit.” When two additional women came forward and identified Nauta as the man in question, he reportedly admitted to the relationships and was escorted from the White House grounds.
It’s unclear if Nauta was ever officially charged by the Navy, or if he was just allowed to quietly retire. Either way, it seems the circumstances of Nauta’s exit from the White House didn’t bother Trump; he was hired as the former president’s body man in August 2021.
Trump’s indifference, assuming he was aware of the accusations, isn’t very surprising. Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women, and was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation against E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of rape. Trump has also repeatedly defended other men accused of sexual misconduct, from staffers to donors to candidates for political office (as long as they’re not Democrats).
This new information about Nauta may, however, shed some light on why he’s remained so loyal to Trump, the man who hired him as his Navy career was potentially imploding — even as his new gig led to seven federal charges.
Barnstorming through 99 Iowa counties isn’t cheap. Photo: BloombergaKathryn Gamble/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Inevitably, after Ron DeSantis dropped out of the 2024 presidential race three weeks into the election year and endorsed his bitter chief rival, his failed campaign was already as legendary as Jeb Bush’s expensive and disastrous 2016 effort. Like Bush, DeSantis started fast, had a lot of elite GOP support and almost limitless money, and proceeded to steadily lose altitude like a damaged aircraft until the final crash. Like Bush, DeSantis could not figure out how to beat Donald Trump despite outspending him significantly. How much did DeSantis spend? Well, the New York Times has added it all up, and it’s breathtaking given the very poor return on investment:
It cost more than $160 million for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to come in second place in a single nominating contest. That astounding sum makes Mr. DeSantis’s failed presidential bid among the most expensive in modern Republican primary elections. But the details of where the money went, laid out in filings to the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday, show just how free-spending Mr. DeSantis and his allied super PACs were. They directed at least $53 million through firms controlled or owned by Jeff Roe, the powerful Republican strategist who served as the top adviser to Never Back Down, Mr. DeSantis’s main super PAC. They spent $31.3 million on television advertising time. They spent at least $3.3 million on private airfare, between the campaign and Never Back Down.
About $130 million of the overall $160 million was spent by Never Back Down, and a lot of the criticism of Team DeSantis stemmed from its heavy reliance on a super-PAC with which it could not smoothly coordinate. But even more criticism was aimed at how NBD spent all that jack — particularly its renowned door-knocking operation in early caucus and primary states. Even former Jeb Bush operative Tim Miller thought it was hilarious:
What is all this “canvassing” getting them aside from embarrassing stories about “stoned” supporters acting stupid in people’s doorbell cameras? It’s sure not slowing the Trump juggernaut. … If the Never Back Down PAC had spent every dime that has thus far gone to TV ads and canvassers on sculpting a giant golden idol alongside I-80 in central Iowa that depicts DeSantis kicking an immigrant child in the ass, there is no available evidence that their candidate would be worse off than he is today.
Republican political strategists Curt Anderson and Alex Castellanos were even more brutal in a Politico op-ed:
The myth: An army of paid doorknockers would fan out across the country, even in states beyond the early primaries, and deliver the nomination to DeSantis. It’s hilarious. If you ever believed that it was possible to affect the trajectory of a presidential campaign with underemployed losers going door to door in between puffs of strawberry-flavored vapes, you are vaping an intoxicant yourself. …
Anyone near a campaign recently knows how this works: In 2023, no one in America wants a stranger coming to their door for any reason. And if they were given the choice between door knockers who were selling politicians or membership in a cult, it would be a close call.
Other critics of the DeSantis campaign have zeroed in on the candidate’s own shortcomings in the retail politics that are so necessary in Iowa. But on the other hand, there was nothing inherently wrong with the campaign’s grand strategy of portraying DeSantis as a more reliable MAGA standard-bearer and general-election winner than Trump, or with its ground-heavy approach to Iowa, which in many respects was a better-funded version of what worked for Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012, and Ted Cruz in 2016. So perhaps some of the wastage was attributable to DeSantis’s target rather than his clumsy choice of weapons or inadequate ammunition.
DeSantis was not, after all, the only Trump rival to blow through a lot of money with little to show for it. As the Times noted in its piece on RDS, backers of Tim Scott spent over $50 million before he dropped out well before Iowa, and Vivek Ramaswamy (who was mostly spending his own money) spent over $30 million to win three delegates. Another self-funder, Doug Burgum, blew through over $40 million between his campaign and his super-PAC before he quit in early December. And while we don’t have anything like a final tally for surviving Trump challenger Nikki Haley, her campaign and super-PAC had spent just south of $80 million prior to the voting in New Hampshire, where she was heavily outspending Trump.
There’s an old joke about a struggling dog-food company holding a board meeting in which, after hearing about how the company uses the finest ingredients and the best packaging and the most sophisticated marketing campaign, one listener sums up the problem: “Dogs don’t like it.” As in 2016 and 2020, Republican voters don’t like what Trump’s rivals are selling this year. It’s likely there wasn’t a campaign treasury deep enough or candidate attractive enough to deny them the leader they wanted.
Deal or no deal, Sinema is in trouble. Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Kyrsten Sinema’s claim to fame is that she’s one of those “bipartisan deal-makers” that the Senate periodically produces, particularly in times of divided partisan control of Congress. Some of her Democratic constituents in Arizona tend to believe her wheeling and dealing is a betrayal of the progressive principles she once embraced with wealthy interests the beneficiaries more often than not. It’s no accident that she faced a strong 2024 primary challenge from Congressman Ruben Gallego before changing her partisan self-identification to “independent.”
Sinema is now approaching various legal and practical deadlines for a 2024 reelection run as an independent. But true to her “brand,” she’s been focused less on Arizona politics than on tense and lengthy Senate negotiations on a border-security deal that has become the condition precedent to passage of a foreign-aid package containing emergency assistance for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. It’s unclear whether she hoped the deal would be a valedictory accomplishment before she retires from the Senate or a trophy that would prove her worth on an issue important to her border state and justify her reelection. If the latter is the case, she may be overestimating voter consciousness of murky inside-the-Beltway machinations, as the Washington Postexplains:
A Republican consultant familiar with the recent internal deliberations within Sinema’s tight-knit circle said that the team’s debate involves one central question: In today’s hyperpartisan environment, do voters value elected officials who bring both sides together to deliver legislation?
“If she is able to get a border security deal across, do you know she will have accomplished something that hasn’t been done in 30 years as a first-term senator,” the Republican asked. “But do voters even care?”
Maybe not so much, as limited polling of a projected three-way race showing Sinema trailing Gallego and Republican Kari Lake suggests. Perhaps announcement of a border-security deal could burnish her reputation and remind Arizonans of her rather unique standing in the Senate (with Joe Manchin retiring this year, Sinema really does stand alone in a position between the two parties; she’s always eager to use her leverage no matter how many former allies and current constituents she offends). But the really bad news for this deal-maker is that the deal itself is looking stillborn, as Politico reports:
As senators returned for a critical two-week sprint in D.C. before a lengthy recess, Republicans are starting to doubt whether the agreement — which would be tied to billions in foreign aid — can pass their chamber. GOP leaders first set out to find a compromise that could win a majority of Republican senators over, but that’s only grown more challenging as conservatives, Speaker Mike Johnson and former President Donald Trump hammer the deal.
Asked if the agreement appears to be on a path toward passing the Senate, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) replied: “It certainly doesn’t seem like it.”
“There are a number of our members who say, ‘Well, I’ll join a majority of the Republicans but if it doesn’t enjoy that sort of support, then count me out,’” Cornyn said in an interview. “The whole idea of passing something that the House won’t even take up is another challenge.”
So Sinema’s investment of precious time in a border-security deal is not going to produce pay dirt, it appears. Theoretically, she could run for reelection not as a regularly successful deal-maker but as a proponent of the spirit of compromise that ought to prevail in Congress but sometimes doesn’t because there just aren’t enough Kyrsten Sinemas in Washington. She has enough cash stored in her campaign account (nearly $11 million) to promote that message, though her fundraising has fallen into a hole and she has made few visible preparations for a tough campaign. Given her past Democratic affiliation and its own strong preference for incumbents, it’s possible Sinema could still get financial and logistical support from the Senate’s Democratic campaign committee, but if (as appears to be the case right now) Gallego looks like a better bet to keep Kari Lake out of the Senate, her former friends in that chamber will drop her decisively.
No one pretends to know Sinema’s plans for the rest of this year, but Arizona is going to be a red-hot battleground for both parties in the presidential and Senate contests, and her eccentric style of politics could clash with fierce partisan polarization. It’s a bad sign for her that she is dithering about running for reelection and can’t get visible results in the Senate. The odds are good that she will follow Manchin into retirement.
