ReportWire

Tag: GOP

  • The DeSantis Campaign Is Already Lowering Iowa Expectations: “A Strong Second-Place Showing”

    The DeSantis Campaign Is Already Lowering Iowa Expectations: “A Strong Second-Place Showing”

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    A floundering Ron DeSantis campaign is managing expectations for the Iowa caucuses set for January 2024. As polls continue to show former president Donald Trump as the first choice for most GOP primary voters in the Hawkeye State, a top DeSantis campaign official told Politico that the campaign is hoping for a “strong second-place finish.”

    “Our goal is to get this down to a two-person race on the ballot, especially as we head into South Carolina and beyond into March,” the official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the campaign’s strategy, said. “A strong second-place showing gives us an opportunity to go in[to] New Hampshire and show success.”

    The comments come as the Florida governor is more than halfway through a tour of Iowa’s 99 counties. The itinerary has come to be known as the “full Grassley,” named for one of the state’s two senators, who has visited each of Iowa’s counties every year for four decades. DeSantis has reportedly recruited organizing chairs in every county. Trump, meanwhile, has visited the state a grand total of six times. Both candidates are in Des Moines for Saturday’s Iowa-Iowa State college football game.

    The DeSantis official’s expectation-setting lowers the bar from just a few weeks ago, when the head of DeSantis’s mammoth super PAC, Never Back Down, was predicting a big win in the first GOP primary. “Iowa is a real state for us because of its education — it’s a highly educated state — because of income, because of Bible reading,” Never Back Down lead strategist Jeff Roe told a gathering of donors before the August 23 GOP debate in Milwaukee. “[Donald Trump is] going to lose the first two states. We’re going to beat him in Iowa.” A post-debate poll of Iowa caucus-goers found a slight increase in DeSantis’s favorability, but still showed him 20 points behind the former president.

    As the campaign continues to fail to close the gap, Roe and the official DeSantis campaign are playing the blame game, Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman reported Friday. “Ron is telling everyone that the biggest mistake he ever made was hiring Jeff Roe,” a prominent Republican close to the campaign told Sherman.

    But Never Back Down is still blanketing Iowa, and is hosting DeSantis this weekend on a bus tour through the state. The PAC, which has set up five offices that employ 20 people in the state, is also sponsoring an air-wave blitz and door-knocking operation.

    DeSantis’s deputy campaign manager, David Polyansky, told Politico that the amount of DeSantis facetime Iowa voters will have gotten by January will pay dividends. “On caucus night, every Republican caucus goer will have had the chance to meet the governor and probably the first lady at least once, and that’s a big advantage,” he said.

    The campaign also hopes that Trump’s relative lack of presence in the state and his multi-tentacled state and federal legal issues will help close the gap by January. “I think that former President Trump is not coming and mobilizing the people who support him,” Iowa state Senate President Amy Sinclair, a DeSantis supporter, told NBC News on Friday. “Will they even show up to a caucus? I think he’s making a bad choice.”

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    Jack McCordick

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  • Donald Trump’s First Post-Mugshot Rally Doesn’t Disappoint: “I’m Being Indicted For You”

    Donald Trump’s First Post-Mugshot Rally Doesn’t Disappoint: “I’m Being Indicted For You”

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    Facing a grand total of 91 charges across four criminal cases, former president Donald Trump was in South Dakota Friday for his first big event after having his mugshot taken in Georgia. “They’re just destroying our country,” Trump said to a crowd of about 7,000 gathered in Rapid City. “And if we don’t take it back — if we don’t take it back in ’24, I really believe we’re not going to have a country left.”

    “I’m being indicted for you,” Trump added. “That’s not part of the job description.”

    Trump spent parts of his rambling, 110-minute speech singling out competitors in the 2024 presidential race. “You know a guy who was very disloyal ’cause I got him elected, so I call him Ron DeSanctimonious,” he said, non-sequitur style, of his chief rival for the GOP nomination, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. President Joe Biden, Trump’s likely counterpart in the general election, was both “grossly incompetent and very dangerous”—a puzzling combination of attributes—and “the most crooked president in history.”

    Trump bragged that he is the “only person in the history of politics who has been indicted whose poll numbers went up.” While it’s certainly true that Trump’s stranglehold on the GOP primary has only grown stronger in the last six months despite two federal indictments and two state indictments, polling about his criminal cases is more of a mixed bag. Most Americans believe the criminal cases brought against him are warranted, and Trump’s conduct in the criminal cases is rated far less favorably than that of Biden and DOJ officials.

    Trump was also in South Dakota Friday to accept the endorsement of the state’s governor, Kristi Noem, who has long been a staunch Trump ally. “I will do everything I can to help him win and save this country,” Noem said before the former president took the stage. She added that other GOP candidates, including Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott, had been invited to Friday’s event, but “all of them told us that they had better things to do.” Noem’s endorsement makes her just one of a handful of the country’s 26 Republican governors who have endorsed so far.

    The early endorsement is stirring more speculation that Noem is angling to be Trump’s running mate. Several rally attendees sitting behind Trump held up Trump/Noem 2024 signs, and a Trump/Noem graphic momentarily appeared on the screen behind the stage during Noem’s address.

    Two Republican insiders familiar with Noem’s thinking told the Associated Press she planned the event to increase face-time with Trump as he considers potential running mate and cabinet picks. The clock is ticking for Noem, who will be term-limited in 2026 and is eyeing her next move to maintain prominence in the GOP.

    Trump continues to spend less time campaigning in early-voting states than most of his rivals, according to AP. But he will return to Iowa, the first state on the GOP nomination calendar, on Saturday to attend the college football game between Iowa and Iowa State.

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    Jack McCordick

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  • Mitch McConnell’s Health Scare and the Future of the GOP

    Mitch McConnell’s Health Scare and the Future of the GOP

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    Inside the Hive host Brian Stelter talked to Politico senior political columnist Jonathan Martin about Mitch McConnell’s refusal to step down despite a couple on-camera freeze-ups—and how Republican senators (for now, at least) are standing by him. Martin describes McConnell as “one of these rare modern American senators who never had an appetite to run for president,” explaining how “it is extraordinarily difficult for somebody like that to walk away from the pinnacle of their career in public life.”

    Stelter and Martin also discuss the state of America’s political gerontocracy, as well as the 81-year-old minority leader’s relationship with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, his response to Trumpism, and his support for Ukraine. McConnell’s “last big public fight,” Martin says, is “the effort to keep the Republican Party away from the temptation of isolationism and away from kind of what he views as the most virulent strain of Trumpism.” That’s McConnell’s “mission at this point,” he says, and perhaps “his final battle.”

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    Brian Stelter

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  • From Trump to Vivek: The GOP Is Primed for Another Charismatic Phony

    From Trump to Vivek: The GOP Is Primed for Another Charismatic Phony

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    On this last, slow, hot week in August, we are trapped in a Vivek Ramaswamy news cycle. Ramaswamy has figured out the path to free media is lined with saying extreme things like how “the climate change agenda is a hoax” at last week’s first Republican debate, or more recently, doubling down on calling Rep. Ayanna Pressley a member of the “modern KKK” (CNN’s State of the Union) or suggesting Mike Pence should’ve implemented new voting reforms before certifying the 2020 election (NBC’s Meet the Press). He was still pushing that bizarre January 6 scenario days later on MSNBC.

    What’s important about Ramaswamy is not his ideology—he has no coherent one—but how susceptible our political and media ecosystem is to a charismatic phony. He’s become a recurring character on cable news, recently claiming on CNN that he was misquoted in The Atlantic when raising questions about the 9/11 attacks. But The Atlantic’s John Hendrickson had the tape, which of course included Ramaswamy asking, “How many police, how many federal agents were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers?” Denying something that is actually on tape, how very Trumpy.

    Two days later, at the Fox News–hosted GOP debate, Ramaswamy claimed to be “the only candidate onstage who isn’t bought and paid for” when decrying the climate “hoax.” But it turns out that Ramaswamy is “bought and paid” or at least “paid for” because his investment firm, Strive, has a fund called DRLL, which, as Semafor reports, “invests in US energy companies and urges them to keep drilling for oil so long as it’s profitable.” As Heated’s Emily Atkin put it, “Ramaswamy makes money from climate denial.”

    And yet, in the past, Ramaswamy has acknowledged that climate change is “real,” just one of his campaign flip-flops. On recognizing Juneteenth, for instance, he went from supportive—“Let it be a celebration of the American Dream itself,” he said on video—to against the holiday just two months later, telling​​ Iowa voters,“Cancel Juneteenth or one of the other useless ones we made up.”

    Obviously, the outrage-to-free-media pipeline was something Donald Trump took advantage of in 2016 to the tune of $2 billion. Ramaswamy has managed to once again exploit this media weakness, making incendiary or contradictory claims on one show or stage, only to be asked about them on another. But worse than that, it seems clear from his polling that Republican voters are way more fixated on personality over policy and seem to long for another smooth-talking showman.

    Perhaps we shouldn’t find this surprising, as Fantasyland author Kurt Andersen put it in an email, “Americans historically have a special weakness for charismatic charlatans especially in religion—from Joseph Smith two centuries ago to the past half century of televangelists. Now that we have a political party dominated by quasi-religious and actually religious charlatanism, voilà.”

    In Vivekmentum we see that Trumpism (or the con that is Trumpism) can in fact scale. Stuart Stevens, a former GOP operative who is firmly in the Never Trump camp, told me on the phone, “The party has become less educated and with that comes a higher susceptibility to conspiracy, fraud, and snake oil salesman.”

    It’s easy to see Ramaswamy as an heir to Trumpism—at least according to Trump. “He’s a very, very, very intelligent person,” Trump told Glenn Beck, when asked about the idea of becoming his VP. “He’s got good energy,” he said, adding: “I tell you, I think he’d be very good.”

    I always believed that Trump was appealing because he was not bound by the truth and could promise things that were completely undeliverable. This is my answer to the very annoying discourse of “Why people voted for Trump.” In a speech in North Carolina, in 2020, Trump told the audience, “Under the America First Healthcare Plan, we will ensure the highest standard of care anywhere in the world, cutting-edge treatments, state-of-the-art medicine, groundbreaking cures, and true health security for you and your loved ones. And we will do it rapidly, and it’s in very good order, and some of it has already been implemented.” Trump was paradoxically promising something that he said he’d already delivered. 

    Of course, promising a health care overhaul that never materializes is a Trump mainstay, just like declaring over and over that Mexico is paying for a border wall. Yet, as John Harwood wrote in 2019, “Trump’s ‘great wall’ is a fantasy that even he knows will never be real.”

    I remember watching one of those painful debates between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016 and realizing that a conventional politician with normal political embellishments couldn’t compete with pure unadulterated fabulism, a kind of brazen lying that Trump seemingly patented. We know politicians lie; we’ve grown to expect it. But Trump lied on the kind of scale that the American people couldn’t process. He’d lie about serious matters down to nonsensical, provably untrue things, from the weather during his inauguration to how the noise from windmills causes cancer. The Washington Post tallied more than 30,000 false and misleading claims over his presidency, reaching new heights of dishonesty that has helped tip his party, and its supporters, into unreality.

    Since 2015, we’ve gone through a pandemic, cultural reckonings, a supply chain crunch, a tight labor market, inflation, and other destabilizing events. During this time, Trump’s base has gotten smaller but it’s also hardened into something of which there is no historical precedence. This Republican base now occupies a kind of Earth-Two space, in which they still believe Trump won the 2020 election. “Among registered voters who say they cast a ballot for Trump in 2020, 75% say they have doubts about [Joe] Biden’s legitimacy,” CNN found in a recent poll. Other polling this month found that “more Trump voters trust him than trust their own friends and family, conservative media, or even religious leaders.”

    If Trump does somehow win the electoral college, we could see him completely dismantle the federal government—the Heritage Foundation is already workshopping the idea—or even end democracy as we know it. But perhaps even scarier than another Trump term—and that’s already terrifying—is the possibility that someone theoretically worse, like a competent Trump or a charismatic Ron DeSantis, comes along and claims this MAGA base, already tipped into unreality and primed for a prophet. Such a person could do more damage than we can imagine.

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    Molly Jong-Fast

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  • Vivek Ramaswamy, Beelining for the 2024 MAGA Vote, Is Listed As “Unaffiliated”

    Vivek Ramaswamy, Beelining for the 2024 MAGA Vote, Is Listed As “Unaffiliated”

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    Ever since he entered the presidential race in February, Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has made a hard play for MAGA voters, an effort on full display in his debate performance last Wednesday. And yet, according to his voting records, the biotech multimillionaire is listed as an “unaffiliated” voter in Franklin County, Ohio, where he’s been registered to vote since moving to Columbus in 2021.

    Ramaswamy’s public voting history shows that he skipped half of the elections held since then, including two primary elections in 2022 and one this year. He did vote in favor of a Republican-backed ballot measure that would have made Ohio’s state constitution more difficult to amend, a move widely seen as an attempt to undercut an abortion rights measure on the ballot in 2024.

    In a major victory for abortion rights, the ballot measure was resoundingly defeated earlier this month. Ramaswamy also voted in the 2021 and 2022 general elections.

    This isn’t the first time Ramaswamy’s voting record has complicated his “hardcore” MAGA appearance. In digital interviews in June and July, Ramaswamy asserted that his first vote for president was for Donald Trump in 2020. Throughout the campaign, he chalked up his apathy to a lack of enthusiasm about the candidates on offer. In an August interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Ramaswamy said he was a “jaded person” in his 20s.

    But late in July, when The Washington Examiner confronted Ramaswamy with voting records showing he first cast a vote in 2004, his campaign initially said he could not remember who he voted for, before admitting he voted for Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik. During that campaign, Badnarik ran on a strong pro-choice platform, and supported ending “immigration restrictions for peaceful individuals who come to America to work, study and live.”

    Notably, Badnarik also flirted with 9/11 conspiracism. In a blog post commemorating the 10th anniversary of the attacks, he wrote, “We should assiduously follow the evidence until we uncover the cold, unvarnished truth, even if we discover that certain members of our own government were [knowledgeable], or even complicit in planning the attack.”

    In a wide-ranging profile in The Atlantic last week, Ramaswamy was quoted as claiming it is “legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers.” “It probably is zero for all I know, right?” he added. “I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero.”

    In an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Ramaswamy claimed he’d been misquoted, but The Atlantic later published audio of the interview proving the comments were authentic.

    Ramaswamy currently sits in third place in FiveThirtyEight’s average of GOP primary polls. His numbers have more than doubled since early July when he was sitting at around 4%.

    The second GOP debate will be held on September 27 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute in Simi Valley, California.

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    Jack McCordick

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  • “Covering the Junior Varsity”: Political Reporters Prepare for a Trump-Less GOP Debate

    “Covering the Junior Varsity”: Political Reporters Prepare for a Trump-Less GOP Debate

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    “It feels sort of surreal.” That’s how one political reporter sized up this week’s split screen media moment, with second- and third-tier 2024 Republican candidates taking the stage in Milwaukee as party front-runner Donald Trump is expected to surrender to 2020-election-related charges in Atlanta. The reporter continued: “If you were to have said to me six months ago, he’s gonna be indicted by two different states and twice by the federal government, and his numbers are gonna go up, and he’ll be saying, Keep indicting me, my numbers are gonna go up—I’m not sure I would have believed that.”

    Indeed, despite facing 91 charges across four separate criminal cases, the former president has 62% of the GOP primary vote, according to a CBS News poll released Sunday. Florida governor Ron DeSantis is trailing at 16%—the only other Republican presidential candidate whom the poll puts in the double digits. “We’re just in this really foggy period of time. Trump is such a unique and singular figure, where all of these negatives are so built into his brand and shocking things don’t seem to really affect him that much,” said a second political reporter. “We’re seeing a lot of signs the electorate doesn’t give a shit overall. All of this noise, and the signal hasn’t really changed.”

    Trump has cited his whopping lead in his decision to skip the first primary debate, hosted by Fox News, and perhaps the rest. He’ll surely dominate headlines regardless this week, as he is expected to turn himself in at a Fulton County jail in Georgia—and reportedly plans to counterprogram the debate through a pretaped interview with former top Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who was taken off the air earlier this year.

    “The most important news story this week, affecting the presidential election, is not going to be on that debate stage,” a third political reporter said, referring to the Georgia charges. But there’s still reason to pay attention to Milwaukee, they added. “I must admit that I am really excited to go, because despite this concept [that the debate doesn’t matter if Trump doesn’t show], the fact of the matter is that half the party, polling shows, doesn’t want Trump.” The debate presents an opportunity for the rest of the qualified contenders—DeSantis, Chris Christie, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Doug Burgum, and Mike Pence, as of this writing—to distinguish themselves, but they’ll likely do so based on how they handle questions about the former president.

    Fox News’ Martha MacCallum, who is co-moderating with Bret Baier, recently told me that it will “absolutely be incumbent” upon the candidates to address Trump’s criminal charges, acknowledging that it could be a “minefield” for them. “He’s completely blotting out the sun,” a fourth political reporter said of Trump. “I see it as a continuation of what’s gone on during this campaign and also what’s gone on in the last eight years,” they said of the dynamic. “It’s made it very hard for any of these other candidates to get any real attention. Does anyone know what Nikki Haley said yesterday?”

    “It’s gonna be a debate to see who can be number two,” the second political reporter said, likening Christie—the most vocal Trump critic of the bunch—to the scorpion in the “Scorpion and the Frog” fable. “If Donald Trump is not there, then Ron DeSantis is getting stung. And what better thing than to watch your two enemies destroy each other?” This reporter wasn’t very optimistic about the viewing experience. “Expectations are very low that it’s gonna be that interesting. This is covering, like, the junior varsity,” they said.

    Some I spoke to are most interested to see who, aside from Christie, will be willing to take the gloves off on Trump. “It’s sort of a bizarre situation where he’s ahead of them by 40 points and they won’t take him on most of the time—in fact, most of the time they defend him,” said the first political reporter. “The whole thing has been, throughout his presidency, these folks who view themselves as smart Republicans saying he’s gonna fade, or go away on his own, or the justice system will take care of it, or voters will change their mind. Clearly, eight years in, sitting back and hoping someone else does something about it has not worked for Republicans who want to take him on.”

    Unprecedented is a word that has been thrown around often since 2016 to describe Trump and his impact on national politics. Some journalists feel it has never been more fitting than it is now. “It’s really uncharted territory for American political reporters,” as one put it, especially given those on the trail who are not necessarily familiar with the intricacies of the federal and state criminal law they’re now reporting on and talking to voters about. “It’s become a story where the people who cover the Justice Department and FBI are as much a part of the 2024 story as political reporters,” the reporter said. “They’re just as essential.”

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    Charlotte Klein

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  • Ron DeSantis’s “Listless Vessels” Comment Roils MAGA Supporters, Sparks Feud With Vivek Ramaswamy

    Ron DeSantis’s “Listless Vessels” Comment Roils MAGA Supporters, Sparks Feud With Vivek Ramaswamy

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    Florida Governor Ron DeSantis‘s oblique reference to Donald Trump supporters as “listless vessels” has roiled the GOP primary, prompting demands for an apology from Trump surrogates and escalating a growing feud with biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy, who has been gaining ground on DeSantis in recent weeks.

    “A movement can’t be about the personality of one individual,” DeSantis said in an interview with The Florida Standard, an upstart outlet run by a former Trump supporter that has ingratiated itself with the governor.

    “If all we are is listless vessels that’s just supposed to follow, you know, whatever happens to come down the pike on Truth Social every morning, that’s not going to be a durable movement.”

    DeSantis had previously used the “listless vessel” barb to describe President Joe Biden during his May campaign launch.

    Trump surrogates immediately pounced on the comment, drawing comparisons to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 now infamous campaign speech comparing half of the former president’s supporters to a “basket of deplorables.” After an uproar, the former first lady apologized the next day: “I regret saying ‘half’ — that was wrong,” she said in a statement.

    “DeSantis goes full-blown Hillary and call[s] MAGA supporters ‘Listless Vessels,’” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung wrote on X. “Looks like Ron DeSanctimonious just had his ‘Basket of Deplorables’ moment,” chirped Trump adviser Jason Miller.

    In a statement, MAGA, Inc. spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called on the Florida governor to “immediately apologize for his disgraceful insult.” “To Hillary Clinton, Trump supporters are ‘deplorables.’ To Ron DeSantis, they are ‘listless vessels.’ The truth is, Trump supporters are patriots,” Leavitt said.

    Trump press secretary Bryan Griffin denied that DeSantis’s comment was referring to Trump supporters but rather allies in Congress. “The dishonest media refuses to report the facts—Donald Trump and some congressional endorsers are “listless vessels.” Why? Because Trump and DC insiders feel he is entitled to your vote,” Griffin said. “@RonDeSantis believes your trust should be earned and has the vision, plan, and record to beat Joe Biden and reverse the decline of our country. That’s why Ron DeSantis will be showing up on Wednesday night to debate, and Donald Trump will not.”

    In the interview, DeSantis did criticize Republican politicians who he said view support for Trump as the sole factor determining whether someone is a “RINO,” or “Republican in name only.” “You could be the most conservative person since sliced bread, unless you’re kissing his rear end, they will somehow call you a Rino,” he said.

    Without naming any names, DeSantis cited “huge Trump supporters, like in Congress, who have like incredibly liberal leftwing records that [are] really just atrocious” and proceeded to tout his support from “people like [Texas] congressman Chip Roy, who’s endorsed me, [Kentucky] congressman Thomas Massie,” who he said “have records of principle.”

    Republican presidential candidate and biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy, who currently sits third in the polls, got into the mix on Sunday and wrote that “the real danger to our movement is the rise of ‘listless-vessel’ robot politicians who blindly follow the commands of their Super PACs.”

    The jab appeared to be a veiled reference to a trove of documents posted by a firm associated with DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down ahead of Wednesday’s debate in Milwaukee. The memos, first reported by The New York Times, encourage the Florida governor to “take a sledgehammer to Vivek Ramaswamy,” even supplying him with the ready-made epithets of “‘Fake Vivek’ Or ‘Vivek the Fake.’”

    On Saturday, DeSantis acknowledged the memo in an interview with Fox News, but said he hadn’t read it. “It’s just something that we have and put off to the side,” he said. And in a campaign memo obtained by Axios on Saturday, DeSantis’s new campaign manager seemed to disavow the strategy outlined by the super PAC, telling donors and top supporters that the candidate would focus on promoting “his vision to beat Joe Biden, reverse American decline, and revive the American Dream.”

    The memo added that “we are fully prepared for Governor DeSantis to be the center of attacks and on the receiving end of false, desperate charges from other candidates and the legacy media.”

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    Jack McCordick

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  • Trump’s Will-He-Or-Won’t-He Debate Strategy Was a Ploy for Favorable Coverage: Report

    Trump’s Will-He-Or-Won’t-He Debate Strategy Was a Ploy for Favorable Coverage: Report

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    Former President Donald Trump tried to dangle his participation in the first Republican debate over Fox News in order to extract more favorable coverage of him, The New York Times reported Saturday. The news comes amid reports that the former president has decided to skip Wednesday’s debate in Milwaukee, and will instead post an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

    Trump has played a will-he-won’t-he game over the debate for months, leading to a number of requests from Fox News hosts and executives, as well as GOP officials, who have encouraged him to take the stage.

    Earlier this month, Trump hosted Fox News president Jay Wallace and chief executive Suzanne Scott at his Bedminster, New Jersey estate. During that dinner, Trump criticized the Fox executives over the network’s coverage of him and claimed Fox owner Rupert Murdoch was responsible for daytime coverage he found particularly unfair. Trump also reportedly told the execs that he couldn’t believe they had fired Carlson, who was the network’s top-rated host.

    “Why doesn’t Fox and Friends show all of the Polls where I am beating Biden, by a lot,” Trump posted Thursday morning on Truth social. “Also, they purposely show the absolutely worst pictures of me, especially the big ‘orange’ one with my chin pulled way back. They think they are getting away with something, they’re not.”

    Trump met with conservative contributor and columnist Charlie Hurt the following evening and during dinner, Fox News host Brett Baier, called the former president about the debate. The Times reported that Baier, who will moderate Wednesday’s event with Martha MacCallum, had spoken to the former president over the phone at least four times to push him to join the Republican field in Milwaukee on Wednesday.

    In late June, Baier hosted Trump’s first sit-down interview with a member of the network since he lost the 2020 election.

    Fox was the first network to call the crucial state of Arizona for Joe Biden, infuriating Trump and many of his supporters. Trump called the June interview “fair” but then complained that it was “nasty” and “hostile.”

    In his conversations with Baier, Trump left the door open to his participation. “But even as he behaved as if he was listening to entreaties,” The Times reported, “Mr. Trump was proceeding with a plan for his own counterprogramming to the debate.” Trump reportedly reached out to Carlson in July to ask about the possibility of a counterprogram. 

    The Murdoch-owned network was prepared with two sets of options for the debate. According to The Times, Baier and McCallum are still planning on making Trump, who currently leads the GOP field by a gargantuan margin, a focal point of the two-hour event. They have questions ready about Trump’s latest indictment in Georgia, and are reportedly considering including video of Trump in the questioning.

    Fox is reportedly expecting lower ratings than the record-breaking first GOP debate in 2015, which drew 25 million viewers. “President Trump is ratings gold, and everyone recognizes that,” Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung told The Times.

    The debate will be held at 9 p.m. ET on Wednesday.

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    Jack McCordick

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  • Donald Trump’s Legal Peril May Propel Him Into the GOP Debate: “He Wants to Be Center Stage”

    Donald Trump’s Legal Peril May Propel Him Into the GOP Debate: “He Wants to Be Center Stage”

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    Over the last several months, Donald Trump has indicated that he won’t attend the first Republican debate, which will be hosted by Fox News on August 23. Trump has argued that there is no political upside given his double-digit lead over his nearest rival, Ron DeSantis. That argument has gotten stronger as DeSantis has stumbled, complete with a campaign manager shake-up this week. “I feel it’s sort of foolish to be doing [the debate],” Trump told Breitbart News as recently as August 2.

    But according to two high-level Republican consultants, Trump’s calculus could be evolving, as his legal exposure has gotten worse. On August 1, in Washington, DC, Trump was indicted for a third time, on four federal charges related to his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. He may soon rack up a fourth indictment, this time in Georgia. Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis has been investigating Trump’s efforts to pressure local officials to flip the state’s vote totals from a Biden victory to a Trump one. Trump has publicly downplayed the severity of these indictments, but in private, he has reportedly grown increasingly angry and rattled by the mounting criminal charges.

    “He wants to be center stage,” one of the consultants told Vanity Fair. Trump’s walking onstage amid existential legal peril would create the sort of high drama that thrills his voters. The debate would also put Trump, a skilled verbal brawler, in an arena where he could rhetorically batter the other candidates. “No one there will handle him well at all. Each of the candidates [are] predictable,” the second consultant said.

    Multiple sources close to Trump, however, cautioned that nothing has changed about his intention to skip the debate. “I don’t think he will participate,” a senior Trump adviser said. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

    In the meantime, Fox News has continued to do a full-court press to get Trump to participate. On August 1, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and network president Jay Wallace dined with Trump at his Bedminster golf club just hours after Jack Smith unsealed the 2020-election indictment. According to two sources briefed on the dinner, the Fox executives made the case that the debate is important to the GOP base. The conversation was wide-ranging, the two sources said. Sources close to Trump said that Trump told Scott and Wallace that firing Tucker Carlson was “the worst business decision in history.” Trump asked why Carlson was ousted, but Scott and Wallace wouldn’t say.

    Fox News did not respond to a request for comment.

    One thing all the sources I spoke to agreed on is that Trump will stoke the will-he-or-won’t-he-appear speculation for as long as he can. “He’s the sort of person who makes up his mind in the last moments,” a source close to Trump said.

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    Gabriel Sherman

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  • Pence qualifies for first Republican debate: Here’s who else will be on stage.

    Pence qualifies for first Republican debate: Here’s who else will be on stage.

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    Former Vice President Mike Pence has become the eighth, and perhaps final, candidate to qualify for the first Republican presidential primary debate, setting up a possible prime-time clash with Donald Trump.

    That face-off with Trump is not certain, however, because the former president has not yet confirmed whether he will take part in the event.

    Several other GOP hopefuls, meanwhile, have also qualified for the debate. Here’s a look at details including who’ll be on stage and when and where the debate will be held.

    When and where is the debate?

    The first debate of the GOP primary season will be held Aug. 23 in Milwaukee, the same city that will host the party’s 2024 convention. The two-hour debate is scheduled to start at 9 p.m. Eastern time and is being hosted by Fox News.

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    Besides Pence, who has qualified?

    North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Trump have all met the debate requirements.

    Other GOP hopefuls including former Rep. Will Hurd of Texas and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez have not yet made the cut.

    Now read: Here are the Republicans running for president in 2024, before their first debate later this month

    Also read: Mike Pence says inflation is 16%, but CPI is 3%. This is his logic.

    What are the requirements for the Milwaukee debate?

    For the first debate, a candidate needs to have at least 1% support in three high-quality national polls or in a mix of state and national polls and must have secured at least 40,000 unique donors.

    Getting on stage for the second debate will be tougher. That contest, scheduled for Sept. 27 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, will require candidates to have at least 3% support in two national polls, or in one national poll as well as two polls from four of the early-voting states. Candidates must also have at least 50,000 unique donors, as the Associated Press has reported.

    Now read: Republican Party raising qualification bar for second presidential primary debate

    What has Trump said about attending the debate?

    Playing his cards close to the vest, the former president is asking his supporters whether he should be in Milwaukee on Aug. 23. In an email on Saturday, Trump said he thinks it’s “sort of foolish” for him to attend, given his outsized polling lead.

    “Hopefully, former President Trump has the courage to show up,” Pence’s communications adviser Devin O’Malley said in a statement on Tuesday.

    Read next: Pence, Trump attorney offer conflicting claims over what Trump said ahead of Jan. 6

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  • Ron DeSantis’s Largest Donor Closes His Wallet, Citing Abortion “Extremism”

    Ron DeSantis’s Largest Donor Closes His Wallet, Citing Abortion “Extremism”

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    Ron DeSantis’s largest individual donor, hotelier and real estate tycoon Robert Bigelow, is, at least for the time being, closing his coffers. He announced that he is no longer donating to the Florida governor’s floundering campaign, citing the candidate’s “extremism” on abortion. Bigelow’s about-face, which he revealed in an interview with Reuters Friday, is the latest sign of big-money skittishness around DeSantis, once the darling of conservative donors.

    Bigelow, who once said he’d “go without food” to push a DeSantis presidential bid, donated $20 million in March to Never Back Down, a super PAC supporting the Florida governor. That sum is ten times higher than the $2 million donated by the PAC’s second-biggest donor, venture capitalist Douglas Leone.

    But Bigelow’s donation was made a month before DeSantis signed a bill banning abortion after six weeks, a move Bigelow cited as his reason for withholding more money. “He does need to shift to get to moderates. He’ll lose if he doesn’t,” the Las Vegas-based businessman said. “Extremism isn’t going to get you elected.” (Bigelow said he still believes DeSantis is “the best guy for the country” and that the Florida governor was “spot on” in his attacks on “wokeism”.)

    Bigelow said he’d communicated his concerns to the campaign, and that he’d specifically told DeSantis campaign manager Generra Peck that the candidate needed to moderate his stance. He added that Peck, whom Bigelow described as a “very good campaign manager,” reacted with “a long period of silence where I thought maybe she had passed out.”

    Bigelow’s donation was included in Never Back Down’s first official filing, made public last week. The documents showed that the super PAC had nearly $100 million on hand at the end of June, putting DeSantis’s war chest far above the rest of the Republican primary field. That astronomical number contrasts with the official DeSantis campaign’s lackluster financial situation, which has forced it to shed staffers to remain financially solvent going into the fall. Some of those staffers are expected to move to Never Back Down.

    As its coffers grew, the PAC started taking over tasks that are traditionally handled by an official campaign, stretching federal rules that bar super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, from coordinating with a candidate. Never Back Down has staged events featuring DeSantis as a “special guest,” run a bus tour through Iowa, and funded a pro-DeSantis door-knocking effort. But The New York Times reported last week that “since the close of the filing period” that showed such high numbers for the PAC, “some top Republican donors have begun backing away” from the Florida governor, who is dealing with disappointing polling numbers and accusations of a poorly run campaign. In FiveThirtyEight’s average of primary polls, DeSantis trails the current Republican frontrunner, thrice-indicted former president Donald Trump, by nearly 40 points.

    Bigelow said he wouldn’t donate any more to DeSantis’s efforts “until I see that he’s able to generate more on his own.” “I’m already too big a percentage,” he said, adding that “a lot of [DeSantis] donors are still on the fence.”

    In a statement to Reuters, a DeSantis spokesperson said the campaign was “grateful” to donors for “the capacity to compete for the long haul,” but did not explicitly address Bigelow’s comments.

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    Jack McCordick

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  • Democrats Have Just About Had It With Kevin McCarthy Caving to the Right: “They’re on a Fast Track to a Shutdown”

    Democrats Have Just About Had It With Kevin McCarthy Caving to the Right: “They’re on a Fast Track to a Shutdown”

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    But he added, “Everybody picks their own hill to die on.”

    Speaking with VF, another Republican lawmaker dismissed the fight over the riders as little more than political theater. “None of this matters,” this person said, requesting anonymity to speak candidly. “We will see the rider process play out and at the end of it, we all know we’re getting a [continuing resolution]. And no one is happy about it.”

    Pocan said the House is “ceding much of the authority to the Senate to have some adults at the table.” The controversial riders will certainly be dead on arrival in the Democrat-controlled upper chamber. But their mere existence does put Republicans—particularly in districts Joe Biden won, and even some Democrats, in a tough position. “You really don’t want to have to take votes on these questions. They’re not helpful. And for what?… These things are not going to be included in the final bill,” former Republican congressman Charlie Dent, who resigned from Congress over frustrations with the increased partisanship, told VF.

    Reflecting on the current House dynamics, Dent said, “The hard-liners have leverage. They know it and they’re always willing to use it. The more pragmatic members are much more reluctant to exercise that kind of power, even though they have it. I mean, I’d be setting myself on fire right now if I were still in the House.” Republicans are having “private conversations” about their concerns, Pocan acknowledged. But Democrat DelBene isn’t holding her breath for her Republican colleagues to show some profiles in courage. “I think we’ve all heard some Republicans—and you’ve even seen it in the press—say, ‘Oh, this is terrible.’ But the reality is there aren’t any moderate Republicans,” DelBene, who sits on the Ways and Means Committee, said in an interview. “There’s lots of talk, but I think when it comes down to action, they all vote extreme.” 

    While the antiabortion and other culture-war riders have garnered a great deal of attention, Rosa DeLauro told me that it is even more concerning that Republicans are negotiating in what she sees as bad faith and not adhering to the spending levels set forth in the budget deal Biden struck with House leadership earlier this summer. “There was this negotiation, which everyone thought was in good faith, that we would come to a top line, and then proceed from there with regard to that framework with appropriations bills. But the ink wasn’t dry on the on the bill before the Republicans walked away from it,” DeLauro, who is the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said. The cuts, she said, go well beyond the 2022 spending levels agreed upon. “It is a savage cut across the board.” And the hubbub over the riders, she fears, is distracting from these cuts.

    When it comes to McCarthy, no one is under the illusion that the House Freedom Caucus and other members of his party’s fringe won’t continue to cause headaches for the Speaker. “Leadership is going to have to disappoint these folks again—just like they did on the debt ceiling,” Dent said. McCarthy is also feeling the squeeze from outside the Beltway. Specifically, Mar-a-Lago. Trump and McCarthy reportedly discussed the Speaker holding a vote to expunge the former president’s impeachments. There is certainly, and unsurprisingly, support within Trumpworld for expungement. In a text message to VF, Michael Caputo, a Trump ally who also worked in his administration, said it would be “vindicating” and characterized it as “both the easiest and the right thing” for McCarthy to do.

    An expungement vote is little more than a novel idea. In an interview with CNN former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said McCarthy is “playing politics” and added, “it’s not even clear if he constitutionally can expunge those things.” And much like the votes on some of these antiabortion and culture-war riders getting tacked onto funding bills, Pelosi noted that by bringing an expungement vote, McCarthy would put members in difficult districts—including the two remaining House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump—“on the spot” and “that is a decision he has to make.” Sources told CNN that the votes aren’t there. (McCarthy has disputed reporting that he promised the former president an expungement vote and told reporters any expungement would have to “go through committee like anything else.”)

    Perhaps as an effort to placate the more ornery members in the right-flank of his caucus, McCarthy did prop up the possibility of impeachment hearings against Biden this week. “How do you get to the bottom of the truth? The only way Congress can do that is go to an impeachment inquiry,” McCarthy said Tuesday, in reference to allegations that Biden, when vice president, engaged in a bribery scheme alongside his son Hunter Biden. (President Biden has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.)

    As for what the Republican House drama means for Biden, his cheerleaders say it only helps the president. “Republican overreach in 2010 certainly helped [Barack] Obama in 2012. Republican overreach in 1994 helped [Bill] Clinton in 1996. To the extent that the president has and can continue to kind of run on this position of not only being the elder statesman with competent, steady leadership, but also a backstop against extremism—that’s a good place to be,” Democratic strategist Steve Schale, who is CEO of the Biden-supporting PAC Unite the Country, told VF. “Biden says it himself like, ‘Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.’ Right now when you look at the US House—the alternative looks pretty good.” 

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    Abigail Tracy

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  • Who Is Will Hurd Actually For?

    Who Is Will Hurd Actually For?

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    The Republican field grew again Thursday, as former Texas Congressman Will Hurd entered the 2024 fray on a promise to restore “common sense leadership” to his party. The GOP hasn’t had much of that since Donald Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015, which is presumably why Hurd kicked off his bid with an explicit call for the party to move on from the former president. “Republicans deserve better,” Hurd said in a launch video Thursday. “America deserves better.”

    The questions facing Hurd: Does his entry give Republicans an actual moderate alternative to Trump? Or does it merely serve to further crowd a GOP field where candidates are already fighting for air as the former president uses up almost all of the oxygen on the right?

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    In theory, Hurd is just the guy the Never Trump right has been looking for: indisputably conservative but with an independent streak and little inclination to fight the culture wars Trump and Ron DeSantis so relish. He’s an ex-CIA officer in a party that has grown increasingly hostile toward federal law enforcement amid Trump’s worsening legal troubles. He’s a Black Republican from a diverse district, who stands apart from the congressional hardliners who have openly embraced racism and white supremacy. And he’s been perhaps the most consistent Trump critic of any of the Republicans currently in the 2024 field. Indeed, where Chris Christie has only recently fashioned himself as one such detractor, Hurd took high-profile stands against the former president all throughout his term—beginning with his call for Trump to drop out of the 2016 race following the Access Hollywood tape. “You can’t be afraid of Donald Trump,” Hurd told CBS Mornings Thursday. “Too many candidates in this race are afraid of Donald Trump.”

    But Hurd’s record on Trump is more complicated than his moderate branding makes it seem: He aligned with the former president on 80 percent of votes, voted against his first impeachment in 2019, and said that year that he would support Trump over fellow Texan and then-presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke—with whom he embarked on a bipartisan cross-country road trip in 2017, briefly scratching a national itch for political civility—in the 2020 election. Even in leveling the kind of harsh criticism against Trump Thursday that his fellow candidates have rarely been able to muster, he ultimately framed attack in electoral terms: “If we nominate a lawless, selfish, failed politician like Donald Trump, who lost the House, the Senate, and the White House, we know Joe Biden will win again,” Hurd said in his campaign video, chastising Biden and the Democrats for doing “nothing” to solve America’s problems. The ex-lawmaker may be the most reasonable of all the Republican hopefuls—but that’s a low bar to hurdle in today’s GOP. Is he trying to build a Republican Party that “talks about the future, not the past,” as he told CBS? Or would he simply bring the party back to the days when it pushed its hardline policies with a smile rather than a sneer?

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  • State Rep. Justin Jones Rips Tennessee House GOP’s ‘Interesting’ Juneteenth Tweet

    State Rep. Justin Jones Rips Tennessee House GOP’s ‘Interesting’ Juneteenth Tweet

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    Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones, one of two Black Democrats expelled from the state legislature by their Republican colleagues earlier this year, has called out an empty Juneteenth message from Tennessee House Republicans.

    “May no one suffer from slavery ever again #Juneteenth,” the @tnhousegop account posted to Twitter on Monday.

    “Interesting, wasn’t this y’all two months ago @tnhousegop??” Jones tweeted in response, sharing a headline about his expulsion.

    In April, a Republican supermajority expelled Jones and state Rep. Justin Pearson, both of whom are Black, for joining protesters who chanted in the House chamber in support of gun control following a school shooting. The House also held a vote on expelling Rep. Gloria Johnson, a white Democrat who similarly participated in the protest, but she managed to keep her seat.

    Local officials reinstated Jones and Pearson days later.

    “Yall really could’ve just kept quiet today,” Democratic state Sen. Charlane Oliver wrote in response to the @tnhousegop tweet. “Yall expelled two Black members 75 days ago.”

    June 19 has long been celebrated by Black Americans as a day commemorating the end of slavery in the 1860s. In 2021, Congress voted overwhelmingly to make Juneteenth National Independence Day a federal holiday.

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  • What It Would Take to Beat Trump in the Primaries

    What It Would Take to Beat Trump in the Primaries

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    This should be a window of widening opportunity and optimism for the Republicans chasing Donald Trump, the commanding front-runner in the 2024 GOP presidential race.

    Instead, this is a time of mounting uncertainty and unease.

    Rather than undermine Trump’s campaign, his indictment last week for mishandling classified documents has underscored how narrow a path is available for the candidates hoping to deny him the nomination. What should have been a moment of political danger for Trump instead has become another stage for him to demonstrate his dominance within the party. Almost all GOP leaders have reflexively snapped to his defense, and polls show that most Republican voters accept his vitriolic claims to be the victim of a politicized and illegitimate prosecution.

    As GOP partisans rally around him amid the proliferating legal threats, recent national surveys have routinely found Trump attracting support from more than 50 percent of primary voters. Very few primary candidates in either party have ever drawn that much support in polls this early in the calendar. In an equally revealing measure of his strength, the choice by most of the candidates running against Trump to echo his attacks on the indictment shows how little appetite even they believe exists within the party coalition for a full-on confrontation with him.

    The conundrum for Republicans is that polls measuring public reaction to Trump’s legal difficulties have also found that outside the Republican coalition, a significant majority of voters are disturbed by the allegations accumulating against him. Beyond the GOP base, most voters have said in polls that they believe his handling of classified material has created a national-security risk and that he should not serve as president again if he’s convicted of a crime. Such negative responses from the broader electorate suggest that Trump’s legal challenges are weakening him as a potential general-election candidate even as they strengthen him in the primary. It’s as if Republican leaders and voters can see a tornado on the horizon—and are flooring the gas pedal to reach it faster.

    This far away from the first caucuses and primaries next winter—and about two months from the first debate in August—the other candidates correctly argue that it’s too soon to declare Trump unbeatable for the nomination.

    Republicans skeptical of Trump hold out hope that GOP voters will grow weary from the cumulative weight of the multiple legal proceedings converging on him. And he still faces potential federal and Fulton County Georgia charges over his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election.

    Republican voters “are going to start asking who else is out there, who has a cleaner record, and who is not going to have the constant political volleying going on in the background of their campaign,” Dave Wilson, a prominent Republican and social-conservative activist in South Carolina, told me. “They are looking for someone they can rally behind, because Republicans really want to defeat Joe Biden.”

    Scott Reed was the campaign manager in 1996 for Bob Dole’s presidential campaign and is now a co-chair of Committed to America, a super PAC supporting Mike Pence. Reed told me he also believes that “time is Trump’s enemy” as his legal troubles persist. The belief in GOP circles that “the Department of Justice is totally out of control” offers Trump an important shield among primary voters, Reed said. But he believes that as the details about Trump’s handling of classified documents in the latest indictment “sink in … his support is going to begin to erode.” And as more indictments possibly accumulate, Reed added, “I think the repetition of these proceedings will wear him down.”

    Yet other strategists say that the response so far among both GOP voters and elected officials raises doubts about whether any legal setback can undermine Trump’s position. (The party’s bottomless willingness throughout his presidency to defend actions that previously had appeared indefensible, of course, points toward the same conclusion.) The veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres has divided the GOP electorate into three categories: about 10 percent that is “never Trump,” about 35 percent that is immovably committed to him, and about half that he describes as “maybe Trump,” who are generally sympathetic to the former president and supportive of his policies but uneasy about some of his personal actions and open to an alternative.

    Those “maybe Trump” voters are the key to any coalition that can beat him in the primary race, Ayres told me, but as the polls demonstrate, they flock to his side when he’s under attack. “Many of them had conflict with siblings, with parents, sometimes with children, sometimes even with spouses, about their support for Donald Trump,” Ayres said. “And they are very defensive about it. That makes them instinctively rally to Donald Trump’s defense, because if they suggest in any way that he is not fit for office, then that casts aspersions on their own past support for him.”

    This reflex helps explain the paradoxical dynamic of Trump’s position having improved in the GOP race since his first indictment in early April. A national CBS survey conducted after last week’s federal indictment found his support in the primary soaring past 60 percent for the first time, with three-fourths of Republican voters dismissing the charges as politically motivated and four-fifths saying he should serve as president even if convicted in the case.

    The Republicans dubious of Trump focus more on the evidence in the same surveys that voters outside the GOP base are, predictably, disturbed by the behavior alleged in the multiplying cases against him. Trump argues that Democrats are concocting these allegations because they fear him more than any other Republican candidate, but Wilson accurately pointed out that many Democrats believe Trump has been so damaged since 2020 that he might be the easiest GOP nominee to beat. “I don’t think Democrats really want someone other than Trump,” Wilson said. Privately, in my conversations with them, plenty of Democratic strategists agree.

    Ayres believes that evidence of the resistance to Trump in the wider electorate may eventually cause more GOP voters to think twice about nominating him. Polls have usually found that most Republican voters say agreement on issues is more important for them in choosing a nominee than electability. But Ayres said that in focus groups he’s conducted, “maybe Trump” voters do spontaneously raise concerns about whether Trump can win again given everything that’s happened since Election Day, including the January 6 insurrection. “Traditionally an electability argument is ineffective in primaries,” Ayres said. “The way the dynamic usually works is ‘I like Candidate X, therefore Candidate X has the best chance to win.’ The question is whether the electability argument is more potent in this situation than it was formerly … and the only answer to that is: We will find out.” One early measure suggests that, for now, the answer remains no. In the new CBS poll, Republicans were more bullish on Trump’s chances of winning next year than on any other candidate’s.

    Read: Will Trump get a speedy trial?

    Another reason the legal proceedings haven’t hurt Trump more is that his rivals have been so reluctant to challenge him over his actions—or even to make the argument that multiple criminal trials would weaken him as a general-election candidate. But there are some signs that this may be changing: Pence, Nikki Haley, and Tim Scott this week somewhat criticized his behavior, though they were careful to also endorse the former president’s core message that the most recent indictment is illegitimate and politically motivated. Some strategists working in the race believe that by the first Republican debate in August, the other candidates will have assailed Trump’s handling of the classified documents more explicitly than they are now.

    Still, Trump’s fortifications inside the party remain formidable against even a more direct assault. Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump’s campaign, points out that 85 to 90 percent of Republicans approve of his record as president. In 2016, Trump didn’t win an absolute majority of the vote in any contest until his home state of New York, after he had effectively clinched the nomination; now he’s routinely drawing majority support in polls.

    In those new national polls, Trump is consistently attracting about 35 to 40 percent of Republican voters with a four-year college degree or more, roughly the same limited portion he drew in 2016. But multiple recent surveys have found him winning about 60 percent of Republican voters without a college degree, considerably more than he did in 2016.

    McLaughlin maintains that Trump’s bond with non-college-educated white voters in a GOP primary is as deep as Bill Clinton’s “connection with Black voters” was when he won the Democratic primaries a generation ago. Ayres, though no fan of Trump, agrees that the numbers he’s posting among Republicans without a college degree are “breathtaking.” That strength may benefit Trump even more than in 2016, because polling indicates that those non-college-educated white voters will make up an even bigger share of the total GOP vote next year, as Trump has attracted more of them into the party and driven out more of the suburban white-collar white voters most skeptical of him.

    But if Trump looks stronger inside the GOP than he was in 2016, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may also present a more formidable challenger than Trump faced seven years ago. On paper, DeSantis has more potential than any of the 2016 contenders to attract the moderate and college-educated voters most dubious of Trump and peel away some of the right-leaning “maybe Trump” voters who like his policies but not his behavior. The optimistic way of looking at Trump’s imposing poll numbers, some GOP strategists opposed to him told me, is that he’s functionally the incumbent in the race and still about half of primary voters remain reluctant to back him. That gives DeSantis an audience to work with.

    In practice, though, DeSantis has struggled to find his footing. DeSantis’s choice to run at Trump primarily from his right has so far produced few apparent benefits for him. DeSantis’s positioning has caused some donors and strategists to question whether he would be any more viable in a general election, but it has not yet shown signs of siphoning away conservative voters from Trump. Still, the fact that DeSantis’s favorability among Republicans has remained quite high amid the barrage of attacks from Trump suggests that if GOP voters ultimately decide that Trump is too damaged, the Florida governor could remain an attractive fallback option for them.

    Whether DeSantis or someone else emerges as the principal challenger, the size of Trump’s advantage underscores how crucial it will be to trip him early. Like earlier front-runners in both parties, Trump’s greatest risk may be that another candidate upsets him in one of the traditional first contests of Iowa and New Hampshire. Throughout the history of both parties’ nomination contests, such a surprise defeat has tended to reset the race most powerfully when the front-runner looks the most formidable, as Trump does now. “If Trump is not stopped in Iowa or New Hampshire, he will roll to the nomination,” Reed said.

    Even if someone beats Trump in one of those early contests, though, history suggests that they will still have their work cut out for them. In every seriously contested Republican primary since 1980, the front-runner as the voting began has been beaten in either Iowa or New Hampshire. That unexpected defeat has usually exposed the early leader to a more difficult and unpredictable race than he expected. But the daunting precedent for Trump’s rivals is that all those front-runners—from Ronald Reagan in 1980 to George W. Bush in 2000 to Trump himself in 2016—recovered to eventually win the nomination. In his time as a national figure, Trump has shattered a seemingly endless list of political traditions. But to beat him next year, his GOP rivals will need to shatter a precedent of their own.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Even a Damning Federal Case Can’t Break the GOP’s Devotion to Donald Trump

    Even a Damning Federal Case Can’t Break the GOP’s Devotion to Donald Trump

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    When Special Counsel Jack Smith dropped a 38-count federal indictment Friday afternoon against Donald Trump and a coconspirator, complete with shocking allegations of stashing nuclear secrets around Mar-a-Lago, it felt like everyone was holding their collective breath. Just like in the immediate aftermath of January 6, this was a moment when Republicans might finally decide to rid themselves of Trump. 

    Like so many aspects of the Trump era, this was historic—and not in a good way. Trump became the first former president in history to face federal charges, 31 of which were related to the Espionage Act. Even Richard Nixon wasn’t indicted! While one might argue the Stormy Daniels hush money indictment from Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg was politically motivated (it wasn’t), or that it presents legal challenges (fair point), the gravity of the federal indictment against Trump was such that it would seem hard to simply shrug off. Here was a former president being portrayed as putting the nation’s security at risk. The filing includes photos of boxes allegedly filled with classified documents piled high in a strange chandelier-adorned marble bathroom, in office and storage rooms, and a ballroom which looks like it deeply missed the previous owner Marjorie Merriweather Post’s dulcet touch.

    For a minute, it felt like this indictment might move the needle. It was, after all, so detailed, and perhaps most damning was Trump’s apparent admission of guilt. “As president, I could have declassified them, now I can’t,” Trump reportedly said in a recording. So it seems we know what the (former) president knew and when he knew it. Legal experts have spoken about how devastating the case looks for the 45th president, with Trump’s own former attorney general Bill Barr saying that “if even half of it is true, then he’s toast.” The New York Times’ editorial board, arguing why Trump should never again be trusted with the nation’s secrets, noted that the potential prison sentences for these charges “add up to as much as 420 years.”

    And yet, if one hoped sanity might return to the GOP, anyone who’s been writing about this Trump-ruled party the past seven years knew Republicans would treat this federal indictment like they did the Access Hollywood tape, the first impeachment, the January 6 insurrection, the second impeachment, and the earlier indictment: They would rally behind him.  

    If Republicans could stand up to Trump, they could start taking their party back from this lawless lunatic and signal a return to a Republican Party that operated within the normal bounds of the law. But the writing was already on the wall shortly after the indictment was unsealed, with conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt brazenly tweeting, “First read of indictment and my reaction is ‘That’s it? The conspiracy is with the aide who moved the boxes? No documents were sold or given to third parties not in his close employ?’” The defense by a fairly mainstream GOP pundit—someone who has had a column in The Washington Post and stops on Meet the Press—was basically that if the former president hadn’t actually tried to sell the secrets, was it really so bad? This seems like a low standard even for Trump.

    The post-indictment news cycle quickly devolved into silly season. The editorial page at the Rupert Murdoch–owned Wall Street Journal proclaimed, “Do prosecutors understand the forces they are unleashing?” The editorial board continued, “The greatest irony of the age of Trump is that for all his violating of democratic norms, his frenzied opponents have done and are doing their own considerable damage to democracy.”

    Republicans framed this meticulously detailed federal indictment as an affront to democracy, and not as the only way to keep a rogue ex-president in check. The backlash was swift and fierce and it has included cameos from typical Trump loyalists, like Representative Jim Jordan, who claimed on CNN that Trump declassified everything (which is contradicted by Trump’s own statement about not declassifying a document), and Senator Lindsey Graham, who snapped at ABC’s George Stephanopoulos while trying to turn the conversation to Hillary Clinton. South Dakota senator Mike Rounds, one of the few GOP lawmakers to call out Trump’s election lies, said, “The unprecedented action of indicting in federal court a former president, who is also a current candidate for president, cannot be taken lightly as it is inherently political and will have a lasting impact on our nation.”

    Meanwhile, besides familiar Trump critic Senator Mitt Romney, the GOP messaging has been clear: Attempting to hold Trump accountable is worse than the former guy allegedly doing crimes. Sure, Scotland could arrest former first minister Nicola Sturgeon, France could send former president Nicolas Sarkozy to jail, and Italy could charge late prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in 35 criminal cases, but when it comes to Trump, that’s just American exceptionalism. The once Never Trump turned deeply Trumpy senator from Ohio, JD Vance, tweeted, “The question of whether Trump should have kept those documents is fundamentally a political question. Criticize it, attack it, vote against it. But prosecuting a president over his own government’s documents is turning a political issue into a legal one.”

    Republicans are trapped in a Möbius strip of their own misery, a spin cycle of fuckery that they created and that they deserve. Republican elected officials are presumably so scared of alienating the base (and potentially becoming targets themselves) that they continue to support the albatross that is losing them elections and undermining our democracy. Trump has somehow managed to make supporting his fight against the law a litmus test for GOP candidates, so the already slim possibility of defeating him in a primary gets slimmer. He’s effectively being supported by the people who are supposed to be running against him. 

    With every indictment, the GOP base gets more activated by Trump, but the chasm between the base and the general electorate grows. Yes, the GOP is reaping what it sowed. But we all risk getting buried in the process.  

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    Molly Jong-Fast

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  • Joe Biden’s Trump Indictment Strategy: Stay Quiet, Let It Play Out

    Joe Biden’s Trump Indictment Strategy: Stay Quiet, Let It Play Out

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    Donald Trump had recently been indicted—in New York state court, on charges connected to his alleged payoff to adult film actor Stormy Daniels—when I asked an aide to Joe Biden whether the former president’s legal troubles were good or bad news for the current White House. “We don’t talk about this at all,” the insider said in April, firmly. “We steer completely clear of it.” That resolve held through May, when a jury found Trump was liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll. Even when asked directly by the press about the jury’s decision in Carroll’s case, Biden said he could not comment.

    Trump’s latest indictment, on federal charges connected to his handling of classified government documents, will test that strategy yet again. The prevailing Biden team response on the political ramifications of Trump’s deepening legal entanglements has and will wisely continue to be no response, at least publicly. To say anything of substance would risk playing into Trump’s spin that the indictments are politically motivated, designed to damage the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. On Thursday, toward the end of an unrelated White House press conference, as action by Special Counsel Jack Smith seemed imminent, Biden answered a question about Justice Department independence in the Trump investigation. “I have never once, not one single time, suggested to the Justice Department what they should do or not do relative to bringing a charge or not bringing a charge. I’m honest,” Biden said, rapping his knuckles on the lectern for emphasis. Surely, in the coming days, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will repeat variations of that refrain: The matter is in the legal system, we don’t have any comment. 

    And the truth is that even the president’s most trusted aides can’t know where this all leads. Trump, who has pleaded not guilty, is scheduled to go on trial in New York in March 2024, which would add an enormous, volatile spectacle to the election cycle. “Just about everything in Trump’s political career is unprecedented,” a Biden adviser says. “Who really knows?” 

    Trump, counterintuitively, would bring an element of predictability in 2024, which is why a rematch with the former president is viewed as the Biden team’s preferred contest. “Against Trump, it’s an easy contrast, a known contrast,” says Cornell Belcher, a Democratic strategist for both of Barack Obama’s winning White House runs. “We have the receipts of what Trump is and who Trump is, and we know what he gets—he’s a 46% candidate in multiple elections. I don’t know what Nikki Haley’s ceiling is. I don’t know what Ron DeSantis’s ceiling is. Is it higher than 46%, 47%? It’s possible. That’s why they’re X factors that I’d rather not run against.” 

    All the legal uncertainty surrounding the former president complicates the picture somewhat. Two things seem fairly certain, though. Trump will continue to try to use the prosecutions as badges of martyrdom, and his hard-core followers will buy into that narrative. Maybe that will be enough to allow Trump to again emerge from a fractured Republican primary field. How it would play in a general election—where Biden’s allies, if not the president’s campaign, would likely then spend heavily to highlight Trump’s dubious legal record for swing voters—is more difficult to forecast. But the president’s highly disciplined team won’t allow itself to get caught looking that far ahead, and certainly not speculating about it to reporters. Instead, it will continue to promote Biden’s first-term accomplishments and draw attention to the restoration of relative normalcy in Washington. “America has made up its mind on the personalities of Trump and Biden,” the presidential adviser says. “It’s going to come down to, What have these people done for me?” That was the greater significance of the president’s Oval Office speech pegged to the resolution of the debt ceiling crisis—not the policy details, but underscoring Biden’s “bipartisan” message by reaching the deal. 

    “If you look at any incumbent’s campaign in the last 30, 40 years,” Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to Biden, told me earlier this spring, “you will see that part of the fun of being an incumbent is getting to watch the other party’s primary process.” With two indictments hanging over him, and possibly more to come, Trump keeps making the drama ever more queasily compelling. The larger question is whether the Republican primaries eventually yield an even wilder card general election opponent for Biden.

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    Chris Smith

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  • The 2024 GOP Field Is Basically Donald Trump and His Mini-Mes

    The 2024 GOP Field Is Basically Donald Trump and His Mini-Mes

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    Trumpism is about destruction, about burning it all down, about a kind of partisanship in which Republicans are unwilling or unable to make any kind of bipartisan compromise. And yet, even in a party consumed for years by Trumpism, 149 Republicans voted last week with 165 Democrats to raise the debt ceiling and spare the American economy an unprecedented meltdown. Clearly, the burn it all down wing isn’t going away, with Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, and Ken Buck among the 71 Republicans who voted “no.” And it’s not like all members of the “yes” group, which includes Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene, are suddenly sane. But the vote signaled that a majority of Republicans could embrace bipartisan governing, or at least some version of what that looks like in 2023.

    The 2024 Republican primary, however, is Trumpism run amok, with Donald Trump leading a pack of less charismatic mini-mes and little sign that the normal (a.k.a. pre-2016) GOP is coming back. Just head out to Iowa, where GOP candidates this past weekend were donning leather for Joni Ernst’s Roast and Ride. The New York Times noted that presidential candidates “barely touched” the economy, a subject “many voters expressed concern about.” Instead, the GOP primary crew, which didn’t include the field’s front-runner, railed “against ‘deep state’ bureaucrats, ‘woke’ corporations, and liberals indoctrinating and confusing America’s children.” Ron DeSantis’s team is clearly banking that MAGA red meat is what GOP primary voters will eat up. “The fight for the soul of the party isn’t about tax cuts or trade deals,” Jeff Roe, a top adviser to pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down, told Axios. “It is this cultural combat that we have as a country.” 

    Perhaps it’s no surprise then to see even Republicans once considered more moderate diving headfirst into the culture wars. During a CNN town hall on Sunday, Nikki Haley blamed teenage girls’ suicides on trans kids playing sports, a completely preposterous lie and the kind of unusual cruelty that is associated with Trumpism. In Rye, New Hampshire, Haley squandered her time with voters at a “No BS Barbecue” by making fun of transgender influencer and right-wing target Dylan Mulvaney. “Make no mistake, that is a guy dressed up like a girl making fun of women,” she said. “Women don’t act like that. And you’ve got companies glorifying that.” As Semafor’s David Weigel wrote, “The repeated riff was meant to be the applause line for one of the top candidates running on their ability to win back moderates in the suburbs who have fled the Republican Party in the Donald Trump era” and the best response the riff got was “a mixture of groans and murmurs.” 

    It’s baffling to me why Haley would want to mimic Trump’s cruelty, but she’s not the only one. The GOP primary field is beating up on transgender people in ways that are both morally wrong and wildly unpopular. According to Pew, “Roughly eight-in-ten US adults say there is at least some discrimination against trans people in our society, and a majority favor laws that would protect transgender individuals from discrimination in jobs, housing, and public spaces.” Yet we find GOP candidates running as furious culture warriors targeting trans kids and bodily autonomy. Candidates Tim Scott, Haley, and Pence have expressed support for a  federal abortion ban. 

    Few dare mention Trump’s name on the campaign trail. Instead, they make vague callouts to the man, speaking in code, saying things about “rejecting a culture of losing (DeSantis)” or “it’s time for a new generational leader (Haley).” Pence criticized his former boss for recently congratulating Kim Jong Un, but still refused to use Trump’s name. “Whether it’s my former running mate or anyone else, no one should be praising the dictator in North Korea—or praising the leader of Russia, who has launched an unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine.” Haley refused to criticize Trump for his Kim Jong Un bromance. 

    Some Republicans are talking loudly about the need to defeat Trump, like New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu, who at the same time announced Monday he wouldn’t be entering the 2024 race. Then there’s Chris Christie, who has been arguably the most critical of Trump so far and formally kicked off his bid Tuesday. But Christie has gone back and forth on Trump so many times he’s going to need his own lane on the George Washington Bridge. He took aim at Trump in 2016—and then endorsed him. Meanwhile, The Washington Post points out how Christie “is viewed negatively by many Republicans” and notes that “many prominent figures in the party who have vocally criticized Trump from a more traditional GOP posture in recent years have been rejected in party primaries.” 

    Another Republican candidate who has directly criticized Trump is former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, who, following a jury in the E. Jean Carroll case finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, called the former president’s behavior “indefensible.” Hutchinson’s poll numbers are also low.  

    This year is starting to feel a lot like 2016, a primary field that contains Trump and all the other not-Trump candidates. The only difference between this contest and 2016 is that other candidates then ran (ostensibly, at least) as their own selves and not just lesser versions of the OG. Perhaps this is because the current crop of candidates have seen polling which shows the GOP base continues to struggle with a pronounced case of brain worms. They dismiss Trump’s critics out of hand and election denial runs deep, with 75% in one poll saying that Trump actually won the 2020 election. It’s possible that these 2024 candidates can’t figure out how to recon with a GOP base existing in a post-truth bubble, and are just trying to keep up with an electorate that’s completely lost its mind.

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    Molly Jong-Fast

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  • Will Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis Ever Meet on the Debate Stage?

    Will Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis Ever Meet on the Debate Stage?

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    As Ron DeSantis kicked off his presidential campaign last week, Donald Trump was asked during a golf tournament about meeting the Florida governor on the debate stage. “They say he’s not a very good debater, but maybe he is,” Trump said of his acolyte turned adversary. “We’ll find out. Maybe we’ll find out. Because unless he gets close, why would anybody debate?”

    The question posed by Trump only adds to the uncertainty around the Republican primary debates, which are supposed to begin this summer. The Republican National Committee announced in April that the first debate would take place in August in Milwaukee, hosted by Fox News, along with Rumble, the conservative streaming platform, and the Young America’s Foundation as partners. But the RNC has yet to publicly announce a specific date or venue, nor the criteria for candidates to qualify for them. (Fox News declined to provide any details beyond pointing to the RNC’s prior comments.) Even less information is known about the second debate, other than that it will take place at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Southern California. 

    “It strikes me that they’re way behind schedule on everything,” said one media executive involved in discussions with the RNC. “I sort of expected by now that we would at least know the date of the first debate, and at least something of a schedule for the rest of the fall.”

    Though the RNC has yet to put out the criteria for candidates hoping to debate, chair Ronna McDaniel has been in frequent communication with candidates and campaigns about the process, according to a source familiar with discussions. Still, by this time in 2015, the last presidential cycle with a wide open Republican primary, the date and venue for the first debate had already been reported, and the GOP, after streamlining the debate schedule, was wrestling with how to fit the robust 2016 field onstage. 

    Behind the scenes, networks have been pitching the RNC to host debates, with Axios reporting Friday that CNN chief Chris Licht told the RNC “that CNN would air the debate not just on its linear feed, but also potentially on the linear networks of other Warner Bros. Discovery channels.” In addition, the outlet noted that “Licht also has offered to partner with a conservative-leaning outlet on the debates,” which could “include giving a journalist from the partner outlet a co-moderator spot.” Meanwhile, NBC News is making its pitch with Lester Holt as moderator alongside colleagues from CNBC and Telemundo. According to Axios, DeSantis’s team has pushed back against the RNC about CNN or NBC hosting debates. 

    Low-polling candidates—like Asa Hutchinson, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, and Vivek Ramaswamy—would presumably jump at the chance to enter a nationally televised debate—and DeSantis, running well behind Trump in the polls, could surely benefit. Asked whether DeSantis plans to participate in the primary debates, a spokesperson for the campaign referred Vanity Fair to a quote he recently gave Ben Shapiro, in which he said, “Debates are an important part of the process” and that he “look[s] forward to participating in them.” (Still, DeSantis also recently told Glenn Beck that “corporate media…shouldn’t be involved in our process because they’re hostile to us as Republicans.”) 

    By the time of the first debate, there could be several more declared candidates, like Mike Pence, Chris Christie, and Chris Sununu. The show will likely go on even if Trump skips it. “If we get announced as a sponsor of a debate, we’ll have that debate whether or not candidates decide to show up,” said the media executive involved in discussions.

    Trump is likely to opt out of “at least one of the first two debates of the 2024 Republican presidential nominating contest,” The New York Times reported last month. The former president, per the Times, “has made it clear that he does not want to breathe life into his Republican challengers by sharing the stage with them.” Trump, who opted out of a primary campaign debate in 2016, suggested as much during a talk radio appearance in April, claiming, “People don’t debate when they have these massive leads” in polling. He has privately complained, per multiple outlets, that the first debate is too early, and publicly grumbled about the setting of the second, the Reagan Library, where Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan is the longtime chairman of the board. 

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    Charlotte Klein

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  • Republicans Don’t Really Want to Cut Spending

    Republicans Don’t Really Want to Cut Spending

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    Shortly after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that he had struck a deal with President Joe Biden to raise the debt ceiling, Republican leaders began circulating a fact sheet to their members listing the victories McCarthy had secured. The first bullet point captured what was supposedly the whole point of the negotiations for the GOP: The newly christened Fiscal Responsibility Act would cut spending.

    An item further down the list, however, revealed far more about the agreement—and about how committed modern-day Republicans really are to their party’s small-government principles. That bullet point noted that the bill would “ensure full funding for critical veterans programs and national defense priorities, while preserving Social Security and Medicare.” At the end of a weeks-long negotiation, Republicans were bragging that they had exempted as much as half of the federal budget from the spending cuts they had fought so hard to enact. What they didn’t say was that for all of their rhetoric about reducing spending, they didn’t actually want to cut that much of it.

    The Fiscal Responsibility Act, which the House approved tonight on a vote of 314-117, will avert what would have been a first-ever national default, lift the debt ceiling through the next presidential election, and save Congress from a crisis of its own making. The bill, which is expected to clear the Senate in the next several days, is hardly what Democrats would have passed had they retained their House majority last fall. But in terms of “fiscal responsibility,” the proposal does vanishingly little. “It does nothing to change the unsustainability of the federal budget,” Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan fiscal-watchdog organization, told me. “It’s taken off the table everything that would have an effect.”

    Read: Why the GOP wants to rob Gen Z to pay the Boomers

    It’s not that Republicans lost the budgetary battle because of Biden’s tough negotiating. They didn’t even try for major spending cuts in this round of talks. McCarthy followed former President Donald Trump in abandoning the party’s long-standing push to tackle the biggest drivers of the national debt: Social Security and Medicare. Biden and the Democrats were willing to cut the Pentagon’s budget, which accounts for nearly half of all federal spending outside of entitlement programs. But the speaker nixed that idea too. “Spending cuts are very popular in the abstract, much less so in the specific,” Bixby said.

    By the time McCarthy and Biden began negotiating in earnest, there wasn’t much left to cut. “You just can’t get major savings from the rest of what’s left,” Bixby told me. McCarthy was ultimately able to trim a few billion dollars from last year’s budget. That’s enough for him to claim that the Fiscal Responsibility Act cuts year-over-year spending for the first time in a decade, but in the context of the nearly $6 trillion that the federal government spent in 2022, it’s a pittance.

    McCarthy succeeded in getting much of what he said he wanted, but that’s only because he didn’t ask for much. Congress will take back $28 billion in unspent COVID-relief funds, and Republicans chopped off as much as one-quarter of the $80 billion Democrats earmarked for the IRS as part of their Inflation Reduction Act last year. But the reduction in IRS funding could actually increase the deficit in the long term, because the purpose of the money was to secure higher revenue for the government by cracking down on tax fraud. The toughest provision for progressives to swallow is additional work requirements for childless adults ages 50 to 54 who receive food stamps and cash welfare. Other changes, however, will expand the food-stamp program to veterans and homeless people, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office yesterday estimated that the government will end up spending more money on food stamps, not less, as a result.

    The CBO projected that the bill would save $1.5 trillion over the next decade. But its estimate assumes that Congress will stick to lower spending levels for far longer than the two years that the legislation requires. The speaker has touted other reforms in the bill, such as a requirement that the administration find cuts to offset expensive new rules or regulations, and a provision that calls for an across-the-board 1 percent cut in spending if Congress fails to pass the 12 appropriations bills that fund the government each year. But neither of these is guaranteed.

    The best that fiscal hawks could say for the agreement was that it temporarily halted spending growth. Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told me that the most significant part of the deal was the “change in behavior” it represented. In recent years, she said, “lawmakers have only added to the deficit. They haven’t had any bipartisan deals that have brought the deficit down in a decade.”

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    McCarthy and his allies have argued that he extracted as many concessions as he could, considering that Democrats control the White House and the Senate whereas Republicans barely have a majority in the House. As speaker, McCarthy must protect the members most vulnerable to defeat next year, and he evidently determined that demanding cuts to some of the government’s most popular programs—Social Security, Medicare, the military, and veterans—could threaten the GOP majority.

    House conservatives were quick to denounce the agreement. To them, the cuts McCarthy secured were a woefully insufficient price for suspending the U.S. borrowing limit for the next year and a half. “Trillions of dollars of debt for crumbs,” Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the chair of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, told reporters yesterday. “This deal fails, fails completely.” Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado noted that by only freezing rather than cutting spending, the legislation would “normalize” the growth of the federal government that happened during the coronavirus pandemic, even after most of the COVID-specific spending wound down.

    A few conservatives accused McCarthy of betraying the commitments he made to the party when he narrowly won the speakership in January. But even the Freedom Caucus spared the Pentagon and the biggest safety-net programs in its own proposals.

    Republicans have flinched on cutting spending before. Although the House GOP passed a debt-ceiling bill last month stuffed with conservative priorities, the party did not adopt a spending blueprint that would have detailed how it planned to balance the budget without raising taxes. And last week, Republicans abruptly postponed committee votes on four traditionally noncontroversial appropriations bills that contained spending cuts. GOP leaders cited the ongoing debt-limit talks as a reason, but congressional observers suspected that the party lacked the votes to advance the bills to the House floor.

    The GOP’s supposed zeal for smaller government has long been inconsistent. Most Republican lawmakers were happy to support spending sprees led by Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Trump. Only when Democrats have occupied the White House has the GOP demonstrated any interest in spending restraint.

    But that may be changing. In the 2011 debt-ceiling talks, Republicans forced Barack Obama to bargain over entitlement programs and accept deep cuts that applied equally to the military and domestic programs. Now the GOP is poised to hand Joe Biden a debt-ceiling increase of roughly the same duration in exchange for hardly any spending cuts at all.

    The party’s hardliners fought the deal but could not stop it. They appear unlikely to try to oust McCarthy over the agreement, and Republicans might not get another opportunity to force their agenda through for the rest of Biden’s term. That they chose to fight over so little represents a huge concession of its own, an acknowledgment that despite all their denunciations of out-of-control spending, Republican leaders recognize that what the federal government funds is more popular than they like to claim.

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    Russell Berman

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