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Tag: GOP

  • Chris Christie To Launch GOP Presidential Campaign Next Week

    Chris Christie To Launch GOP Presidential Campaign Next Week

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    NEW YORK (AP) — Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is expected to launch a Republican presidential campaign next week in New Hampshire.

    Christie, who also ran in 2016, is planning to make the announcement at a town hall Tuesday evening at Saint Anselm College’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics, according to a person familiar with his thinking who spoke on condition of anonymity to confirm Christie’s plans.

    The timing, which was first reported by Axios, comes after several longtime Christie advisers started a super political action committee to support his expected candidacy.

    The Associated Press had previously reported that Christie was expected to enter the race “imminently.”

    Christie has cast himself as the only potential candidate willing to aggressively take on former President Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the nomination. Christie, a former federal prosecutor, was a longtime friend and adviser to Trump, but broke with Trump over his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election. Christie has since emerged as a leading and vocal critic of the former president.

    Christie, who is currently polling at the bottom of the pack, dropped out of the 2016 presidential race a day after finishing sixth in New Hampshire’s primary.

    In addition to Trump, Christie would be joining a GOP field that includes Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and biotech entrepreneur and “anti-woke” activist Vivek Ramaswamy.

    North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum is expected to announce his candidacy on June 7, according to two GOP operatives. And former Vice President Mike Pence is also expected to launch a campaign soon.

    Allies believe that Christie, who has been working as an ABC News analyst, has a unique ability to communicate. They say his candidacy could help prevent a repeat of 2016, when Trump’s rivals largely refrained from directly attacking the New York businessman, wrongly assuming he would implode on his own.

    Christie has also said repeatedly that he will not run if he does not see a path to victory. “I’m not a paid assassin,” he recently told Politico.

    While Christie is expected to spend much of his time in early-voting New Hampshire, as he did in 2016, advisers believe the path to the nomination runs through Trump and they envision an unconventional, national campaign for Christie with a focus on garnering media attention and directly engaging with Trump.

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  • Ron DeSantis Launches His Presidential Campaign Like the Right-Wing Troll that He Is

    Ron DeSantis Launches His Presidential Campaign Like the Right-Wing Troll that He Is

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    After a monthslong shadow campaign, Ron DeSantis finally made it official Wednesday: He’s running. The Florida governor, whose bigoted culture wars have made him a hero to the far-right, formally entered the race for the 2024 Republican nomination in a Twitter Spaces announcement, casting himself as a more electable version of Donald Trump — whose movement DeSantis hopes to inherit. 

    “We must end the culture of losing that has infected the Republican Party in recent years,” DeSantis said on Twitter Wednesday, in a chat with Elon Musk and their mutual ally, David Sacks, a venture capitalist. “The tired dogmas of the past are inadequate for a vibrant future.” 

    The Twitter Space with Musk and Sacks, which was initially mired in nearly 30 minutes of technical difficulties, was accompanied earlier in the day by a one minute video in which DeSantis touted his Florida policies. The announcement — which adds to a field that already includes Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Asa Hutchinson, Larry Elder, Tim Scott, and of course, Trump — seemed a harbinger of the campaign to come: a bid fueled by the very-online right, launched on the platform Musk has helped make a home for that very extremism. During the live stream, DeSantis repeatedly called for fighting against a “woke mind virus,” and entertained questions from sympathetic figures like Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who has endorsed DeSantis for president, and Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University economist and health policy expert who criticized the COVID-19 lockdowns and who has became part of DeSantis’s Covid-19 response brain trust. 

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    DeSantis, who had long been expected to launch a White House run, has enjoyed a meteoric rise in GOP politics in recent years, thanks to his battle against this so-called “wokeness” in his home state — which is to say, a cruel crusade against Black Floridians, the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, and abortion rights. “Florida is where woke goes to die,” he said after winning his second term as governor last year, in a victory speech that was also something of a soft launch of his presidential campaign. 

    But his rising star has dimmed somewhat more recently as he’s weighed his bid; He’s faced incessant attacks from Trump, who regards his run as a personal betrayal; the former president, meanwhile, has reasserted his place at the top of the Republican Party; and DeSantis’s ambitions have shone a spotlight on his personal idiosyncrasies, lack of personality, and overall unlikability. A few months ago, he seemed like the GOP’s next big demagogue. As he formally opens his campaign, though, he’s already drawn some unflattering “Jeb!” comparisons: His feud with Disney has irked even some in his own party; he’s lost Republican endorsements to Trump, including from nearly half of Florida’s congressional delegation; and some donors have gotten cold feet, as he takes his culture wars to new extremes on abortion and book bans. “I think he’s in trouble,” as former Republican Senatorial Committee finance chair Ron Gidwitz told NBC News last month. 

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    Eric Lutz

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  • The GOP Is Escalating Its War on Ideas

    The GOP Is Escalating Its War on Ideas

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    No one ever died from reading a book about gay people. And yet, Republicans, who are determined to loosen or eliminate gun laws in the midst of an epidemic of mass shootings, consider books—and the ideas in them—the real threat to American life. It’s why Republicans have declared war on education, putting the livelihoods of teachers, librarians, and academics at risk. 

    Florida has been ground zero for this anti-education crusade, with Governor Ron DeSantis auditioning for the GOP 2024 presidential primary by selling himself as an even more far-right version of Donald Trump. The DeSantis-led “Don’t Say Gay” hysteria has helped put LGBTQ+ education under assault across the country. “Don’t Say Gay” is a Republican response to a manufactured crisis in which, somehow, learning about people being gay or transgender hurts children. The Washington Post, analyzing challenges to books in school districts across several states this week, found that nearly half of those targeted—43%—were “titles with LGBTQ characters or themes, while 36 percent targeted titles featuring characters of color or dealing with issues of race and racism.” Many of the challenges, according to the Post, are linked to “a network of volunteers gathered together under the aegis of conservative parents’ groups such as Moms for Liberty.”

    Of course, this moral panic isn’t only playing out in Florida. Take a look at Ohio, the same state that was one of the first to birth the wildly restrictive and deeply unscientific “heartbeat” abortion ban bills. There, Republicans have cooked up a bill—“the Ohio Higher Education Enhancement Act”—which would prevent state colleges and universities from endorsing “any controversial belief or policy.” Yes, you read that right, the goal here is to keep academics from getting involved with anything controversial like, you know, ideas. These Republicans want to scare academics, just like they’ve scared doctors treating pregnant or miscarrying women. “What a Frankenstein’s monster of a bill,” said PEN America’s Jeremy C. Young, adding that it “is the longest and most complex educational gag order I’ve ever seen; it is also one of the two or three most censorious.”

    One of the hallmarks of Trumpism is badly written legislation that is wildly popular with the base but often too fraught to be enacted (or make any sense at all to the non–Fox News obsessive). The GOP base is often just so delighted by the “own the libs” news cycle that they don’t really care if the law is passed. Since Trumpism is largely about stunts anyway, it doesn’t much matter if promised legislation (a full Muslim immigrants ban) ever comes to pass. And sometimes these red state house legislators have success with badly written bills, like Texas’s SB8, which put the country on a path toward the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority overturning Roe. While some of the far-right bills cooked up by Republican-state lawmakers will never come to pass, others will. The “Ohio Higher Education Enhancement Act,” for one, just moved closer to becoming law. 

    Republicans in Texas have also been trying to undermine higher education. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has gone after academic tenure because he couldn’t get Texas universities to disavow critical race theory. (You’ll remember Republicans became obsessed with critical race theory, seeing this decades-old, legal scholarship as racist against white people after it was thrust into the spotlight by activist Christopher Rufo.) The University of Texas faculty earlier this year “approved a resolution defending their freedom to decide for themselves how to teach about race,” which according to the Associated Press, Patrick viewed as a message to “go to hell.” Enter SB18, a bill that would completely eliminate tenure for newly hired professors, and which passed the Texas Senate last month. All this because a guy saw some academic legal framework from the 1980s as “the perfect villain” for today’s culture wars.

    Everything from stripping tenure to banning books comes from the same Republican fever dream, a desire to quelch ideas and kill free thought. In Arkansas, Republicans have passed a bill (SB81) that “says school and public librarians, as well as teachers, can be imprisoned for up to six years or fined $10,000 if they distribute obscene or harmful texts,” according to The Washington Post. The Arkansas law, which will take effect on August 1, isn’t the only one being proposed to target librarians or school staffers. But as the Post notes, “most of the laws do not spell out precisely who will decide what counts as obscene but suggest the judgment should come from the courts.” The lack of clarity serves to create an atmosphere of fear, which can lead to self-censorship. The hope is teachers and librarians will be so afraid of possible punishment they won’t even try to educate kids about topics the right deems too controversial. 

    These same children who Republicans pretend they want to protect are routinely asked to do active shooter drills. Republicans in Texas passed permitless carry in 2021, despite that in the last eight years, five of the 10 most deadly mass shootings in America have happened in the state. Instead of addressing gun violence, the Texas Senate this week advanced its own “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, a bill (HB 890) which, as the Texas Tribune noted, “would severely limit classroom lessons, teacher guidance and school programming about sexual orientation and gender identity through 12th grade in Texas schools.” (Texas, by the way, also ranked first in a recent PEN analysis of book removals, followed by Florida and Missouri.) 

    Republicans have decided that threatening—or even jailing—librarians will keep American children safer than sensible gun control. It’s important to realize none of these bills are about actually keeping children safe; they are about delighting the base, getting Fox News watchers excited, and giving Republicans something to run on. This is not about safety, but power, and trying to control educators, just like how Republicans are controlling OBGYNs since overturning Roe. This is all ripped from the Lee Atwater playbook. The question is, will these manufactured crises fool enough of the American people that Republicans can continue their regressive policies, or will these moves alienate swing voters once and for all?

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    Molly Jong-Fast

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  • Biden: GOP Must Move Off ‘Extreme Positions’ On Debt Limit

    Biden: GOP Must Move Off ‘Extreme Positions’ On Debt Limit

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    HIROSHIMA, Japan (AP) — President Joe Biden said Sunday that Republicans in the U.S. House must move off their “extreme positions” on the now-stalled talks over raising America’s debt limit and that there would be no agreement to avert a catastrophic default only on their terms.

    In an effort to get negotiations back on track, Biden planned to call U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., from Air Force One on the way back to Washington after a Group of Seven summit in Japan. World leaders at the gathering expressed concern about the dire global ramifications if the United States were to be unable to meet its financial obligations.

    “It’s time for Republicans to accept that there is no bipartisan deal to be made solely, solely, on their partisan terms,” Biden said at a closing news conference before he departed. The president said he had done his part in attempting to raise the borrowing limit so the U.S. government can keep paying its bills, by agreeing to significant cuts in spending. “Now it’s time for the other side to move from their extreme position,” he said.

    Biden had been scheduled to travel from Hiroshima to Papua New Guinea and Australia, but cut short his trip in light of the strained negotiations with Capitol Hill.

    “My guess is he’s going to want to deal directly with me in making sure we’re all on the same page,” Biden said about McCarthy before their expected conversation. A compromise remained within reach, the president said, despite their differences.

    “I’m hoping that Speaker McCarthy is just waiting to negotiate with me when I get home,” he said. “I’m waiting to find out.”

    GOP lawmakers are holding tight to demands for sharp spending cuts, rejecting the alternatives proposed by the White House for reducing deficits.

    McCarthy tweeted on Saturday that it was the White House that was “moving backward in negotiations.” The speaker contended that Biden would “rather be the first president in history to default on the debt than to risk upsetting the radical socialists who are calling the shots for Democrats right now.”

    Republicans want work requirements on the Medicaid health care program, though the Biden administration has countered that millions of people could lose coverage. The GOP also introduced new cuts to food aid by restricting states’ ability to waive work requirements in places with high joblessness. That idea, when floated under President Donald Trump, was estimated to cause 700,000 people to lose their food benefits.

    GOP lawmakers are also seeking cuts in IRS money and asking the White House to accept parts of their proposed immigration overhaul.

    The White House has countered by keeping defense and nondefense spending flat next year, which would save $90 billion in the 2024 budget year and $1 trillion over 10 years.

    “I think that we can reach an agreement,” Biden said, though he added this about Republicans: “I can’t guarantee that they wouldn’t force a default by doing something outrageous.”

    Republicans had also rejected White House proposals to raise revenues in order to further lower deficits. Among the proposals the GOP objects to are policies that would enable Medicare to pay less for prescription drugs and the closing of a dozen tax loopholes. Republicans have refused to roll back the Trump-era tax breaks on corporations and wealthy households as Biden’s own budget has proposed.

    Biden, nonetheless, insisted that “revenue is not off the table.”

    For months, Biden had refused to engage in talks over the debt limit, contending that Republicans in Congress were trying to use the borrowing limit vote as leverage to extract administration concessions on other policy priorities.

    But with the U.S. Treasury Department saying that it could run out of cash as soon as June 1 and Republicans putting their own legislation on the table, the White House launched talks on a budget deal that could accompany an increase in the debt limit.

    The decision to set up a call with McCarthy came after another start-stop day with no outward signs of progress. Food was brought to the negotiating room at the Capitol on Saturday morning, only to be carted away hours later. Talks, though, could resume later Sunday after the Biden-McCarthy conversation.

    Biden tried to assure leaders attending the meeting of the world’s most powerful democracies that the United States would not default. U.S. officials said leaders were concerned, but largely confident that Biden and American lawmakers would resolve the crisis.

    The president, though, said he was ruling out the possibility of taking action on his own to avoid a default. Any such steps, including suggestions to invoke the 14th Amendment as a solution, would become tied up in the courts.

    “That’s a question that I think is unresolved,” Biden said, adding he hopes to try to get the judiciary to weigh in on the notion for the future.

    Associated Press writer Colleen Long in Washington contributed to this report.

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  • Speaker McCarthy: 100 Days In Power And A Tough Road Ahead

    Speaker McCarthy: 100 Days In Power And A Tough Road Ahead

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — When Rep. Kevin McCarthy emerged from a messy 15-ballot election and ascended to House speaker, he was emboldened rather than chastened by the fight, declaring that his father taught him early on in life: “It’s not how you start; it’s how you finish.”

    But as the embattled Republican leader from California rounds the first 100 days at the helm of a slim House Republican majority, it is proving hard to shake off the spectacle of the unsteady launch that has become a defining backbeat to McCarthy’s speakership.

    So far, McCarthy has logged surprise successes in the new Congress: The Republican House has passed dozens of bills, many of them bipartisan, including politically potent efforts targeting crime and the COVID-19 pandemic that left President Joe Biden almost no choice but to sign the bills into law.

    McCarthy has opened the Capitol more fully to visitors, relishing the onlookers who stop to snap selfies during his impromptu hallway news conferences. He hosted his first foreign leader, President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan, with a diplomatic flourish, leading a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers standing up to China.

    On Monday, McCarthy will deliver a speech at the New York Stock Exchange, another sign of his rising influence.

    It’s 100 days into the new Congress, and McCarthy’s speakership is what one senior congressional Democratic aide compared to the spotlight on the theater stage, with the audience waiting for the play to begin and then suddenly, the realization there is no script.

    McCarthy is performing the role as speaker — second in line to the presidency — but the Republican leader allied with Donald Trump remains stubbornly limited in action because of his uneasy grip on the gavel. Any single lawmaker is able to call for a vote to oust the speaker from office.

    As such, McCarthy has been unable to steer House Republicans to start delivering on broader pursuits — the GOP promises for border security or budget cuts to prevent a debt ceiling crisis, for starters. How he handles them will be the defining challenge that makes or breaks his next 100 days.

    “This is where McCarthy finds himself,” said Jeffery A. Jenkins, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California who has written about House speakers.

    “The power of any single speakership is endogenous,” he said. “This Congress, McCarthy will always have little wiggle room. He will have to walk a tightrope.”

    In many ways, it was inevitable that whoever followed the last House Speaker, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., would operate differently because of the oversize role she played as one of the most powerful congressional leaders in modern times. She often quips it has become a shrinking speakership under the Republican.

    But McCarthy is remaking the speaker’s office in his image, including reclaiming a private room just steps from the House floor for meetings. The silver-haired father shuns many of the formal trappings of Congress — he may never return to the televised briefing room at the Capitol for formal news conferences — as he begins to tap into the enormous powers at his disposal.

    He often suggests he’s being underestimated. House Republicans stunned Washington with some unexpected early victories when they took control in January for the first time in four years.

    Republicans all but forced Biden into signing early bills into law, including one to roll back the District of Columbia’s criminal code. Democrats were furious when the White House abandoned efforts to veto the measure and played into the GOP’s tough-on-crime rhetoric.

    On other measures, McCarthy found Democrats willing to cross party lines — to create a select committee focused on U.S. competition with China, to require the administration to declassify as much intelligence as possible about the origins of COVID-19 and to require an abrupt end to the national pandemic emergency.

    Hard-right critics who withheld their support of McCarthy during the excruciating 15 ballots it took to become speaker until he agreed to their demands seem relatively satisfied at the outcome.

    “He’s performed better than I thought he would,” said Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., the past chairman of the Freedom Caucus, in an interview. “I can’t complain.”

    To establishment conservative observers, the House under McCarthy is a welcome contrast to the past two years of Democratic party rule in Washington.

    “Now there’s actually a check and balance,” said Eric Cantor, a former GOP leader. “He is delivering that every day and very effective, obviously, at holding his troops together.”

    But the struggle to become speaker is never far behind, thanks to a Trump-aligned power center in Congress that propped McCarthy up and could just as easily tear him back down.

    Trump’s support ensured McCarthy won his race to become speaker, both men have said, but the former president’s backing can easily be lost.

    As McCarthy balances his own Reagan-styled optimism against the more extremist Trump-aligned populists in his conference, he has kept close to Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a top Trump ally. She has been leading efforts to ease detention conditions for defendants facing some of the most severe charges stemming from the Capitol insurrection.

    In another gesture toward his right flank, McCarthy released thousands of hours of the riot video footage about the riot to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who has fanned false conspiracy theories of the attack. McCarthy was among those members of Congress who voted on Jan. 6, 2021, against certifying Biden’s 2020 election victory over Trump.

    The House Democrats’ campaign arm issued a memo last week saying the new House GOP majority is “too extreme to lead.”

    Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., and a longtime leader of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, said in an interview that the drawn-out election to make McCarthy speaker “was the most embarrassing week of all in the history of Congress — and I don’t think things have gotten much better.”

    Even the House investigations into Biden and his family that were supposed to be a capstone of the new Republican majority have spun into a free-for-all with several committees examining all aspects of the federal government.

    “Tough job,” said GOP Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, told The Associated Press about the speaker. “But he’s doing great.”

    Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., a Freedom Caucus member who was among the holdouts during the weeklong speaker’s election, said it all may make McCarthy “the best speaker” in his lifetime.

    “We are proud of him,” said Clyde, whose crime bill was the first Biden signed into law.

    “I mean, he’s proven he can fight. He’s proven that he’ll stick it out. Well, that should terrify the White House and terrify the Senate. The House is in control.”

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  • TikTok Ban Gets Final Approval By Montana’s GOP Legislature

    TikTok Ban Gets Final Approval By Montana’s GOP Legislature

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    HELENA, Mont. (AP) — Montana’s House gave final passage Friday to a bill banning the social media app TikTok from operating in the state, a move that’s bound to face legal challenges but also serve as a testing ground for the TikTok-free America many national lawmakers envision due to concerns over potential Chinese spying.

    The state House voted 54-43 to pass the measure, which would make Montana the first state with a total ban on the app. It goes further than prohibitions in place in nearly half the states — including Montana — and the U.S. federal government that prohibit TikTok on government-owned devices.

    The measure now goes to Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte, who declined to say Friday if he plans to sign it into law. A statement provided by spokesperson Brooke Metrione said the governor “will carefully consider” all bills the Legislature sends to his desk.

    Gianforte banned TikTok on state government devices last year, saying at the time that the app posed a “significant risk” to sensitive state data.

    TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter promised a legal challenge over the measure’s constitutionality, saying the bill’s supporters “have admitted that they have no feasible plan” to enforce “this attempt to censor American voices.”

    The company “will continue to fight for TikTok users and creators in Montana whose livelihoods and First Amendment rights are threatened by this egregious government overreach,” Oberwetter said.

    TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance, has been under intense scrutiny over worries it could hand over user data to the Chinese government or push pro-Beijing propaganda and misinformation on the platform. Leaders at the FBI, the CIA and numerous lawmakers of both parties have raised such concerns but have not presented any evidence that it has happened.

    Ban supporters point to two Chinese laws that compel companies in the country to cooperate with the government on state intelligence work. They also cite troubling episodes such as a disclosure by ByteDance in December that it fired four employees who accessed the IP addresses and other data of two journalists while attempting to uncover the source of a leaked report about the company.

    Congress is considering legislation that does not single out TikTok specifically, but gives the Commerce Department the ability more broadly to restrict foreign threats on tech platforms. That bill is being backed by the White House, but it has received pushback from privacy advocates, right-wing commentators and others who say the language is too expansive.

    Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, whose office drafted the legislation, said in a social media post Friday that the bill “is a critical step to ensuring we are protecting Montanans’ privacy,” even as he acknowledged that a court battle looms.

    Montana’s ban would not take effect until January 2024 and would become void if Congress passes a national ban or if TikTok severs its connections with China.

    TikTok has said it has a plan to protect U.S. user data.

    Montana’s bill would prohibit downloads of TikTok in the state and would fine any “entity” — an app store or TikTok — $10,000 per day for each time someone “is offered the ability” to access or download the app. There would not be penalties for users.

    The bill was introduced in February, just weeks after a Chinese spy balloon drifted over Montana, but had been drafted prior to that.

    A representative from the tech trade group TechNet told Montana lawmakers that app stores do not have the ability to geofence apps on a state-by-state basis, so the Apple App Store and Google Play Store could not enforce the law.

    Ashley Sutton, TechNet’s executive director for Washington state and the northwest, said Thursday that the “responsibility should be on an app to determine where it can operate, not an app store.”

    Knudsen, the attorney general, has said that online gambling apps can be disabled in states that do not allow it, so the same should be possible for TikTok.

    Hadero reported from New York.

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  • Justice Clarence Thomas’ GOP Megadonor Has A Nazi Memorabilia Collection: Reports

    Justice Clarence Thomas’ GOP Megadonor Has A Nazi Memorabilia Collection: Reports

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    Harlan Crow, the Republican billionaire and megadonor to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, allegedly has a collection of Adolf Hitler artifacts and Nazi memorabilia on display at his home, according to news reports.

    Crow’s million-dollar estate in Dallas, Texas, houses Adolf Hitler artifacts, including two paintings by Hitler and a signed copy of his book “Mein Kampf,” along with a stockpile of other Nazi mementos such as a swastika medallion, statues of dictators of the 20th century in the backyard and more, according to the Washingtonian.

    Inspired by his hatred for communism and fascism, the Washingtonian reports, Crow’s collection faced major backlash in 2015 after he hosted a fundraiser at his estate on the eve of Yom Kippur, a Jewish holiday. An anonymous source who attended the fundraiser told the Washingtonian that the house felt like a museum, describing it as “strange” given the assortment of family photos in one room, World War II artifacts in another and a backyard full of dictators.

    Researcher Danah Boyd tweeted on Saturday that she was “deeply shaken” by the displayed Nazi memorabilia when she attended a meeting at Crow’s house a few years ago.

    “Years later, I still shudder thinking about the Nazi uniform decorations in Harlan Crow’s house. And the painting. And the book. And the statues. And the ‘antebellum’ (pro-slavery) artifacts. I’m glad others are questioning the acceptability of those materials,” Boyd said in a tweet, adding that she left the meeting after seeing the Nazi artifacts.

    Boyd pointed out that this topic is not new and that Dallas reporters have been “covering this for years.”

    In a 2014 home walk-through and interview with the Dallas Morning News, Crow described the home display as “not an art collection, but a historical nod to the facts of man’s inhumanity to man.” He received online backlash about his artifacts but maintained that the motivation behind the display is “based on patriotism and living generations’ debt to the past.”

    He added: “We all, collectively — whether we’re a little bit blue or a little bit red, or a lot — owe a huge debt. We need to understand how we all got here and to try to do in our own time what we can do for our future.”

    The resurfaced controversy surrounding Crow’s house comes days after a ProPublica report revealed undisclosed ties between the megadonor and Thomas. Democrats and judicial advocates are calling for action after ProPublica found that Thomas failed to report the “lavish trips” he had accepted from Crow for over two decades.

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  • The GOP’s ‘Abusive Relationship’ With Trump

    The GOP’s ‘Abusive Relationship’ With Trump

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    It’s a measure of Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party that his unprecedented criminal indictment is strengthening, not loosening, his grip.

    Trump was on the defensive after November’s midterm election because many in the GOP blamed voter resistance to him for the party’s disappointing results. But five months later he has reestablished himself as a commanding front-runner in the Republican presidential primary, even as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has delivered the first of what could be several criminal indictments against him.

    “It’s almost like an abusive relationship in that certain segments of MAGA voters recognize they want to leave, they are willing to leave, but they are just not ready to make that full plunge,” the GOP consultant John Thomas told me.

    David Frum: Never again Trump

    Trump’s ability to surmount this latest tumult continues one of the defining patterns of his political career. Each time Trump has shattered a norm or engaged in behavior once unimaginable for a national leader—such as his praise of neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election result and instigating the January 6 insurrection—most Republican elected officials and voters have found ways to excuse his actions and continue supporting him.

    “At every point when the party had a chance to move in a different direction, it went further down the Trump path,” Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, told me.

    Trump’s latest revival has dispirited his Republican critics, who believed that the party’s discouraging results in November’s election had finally created a pathway to forcing him aside. Now those critics find themselves in the worst of both worlds, facing signs that Trump’s legal troubles could simultaneously increase his odds of winning the GOP nomination and reduce his chances of winning the general election.

    Coincidentally, the former president’s indictment came on the same day that Wisconsin voters sent the GOP a pointed reminder about the party’s erosion in white-collar suburbs during the Trump era. The victory of the liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz in an election that gave Democrats a 4–3 majority on the state supreme court continued a clear trend away from Republicans since Trump unexpectedly captured Wisconsin in 2016. En route to a double-digit victory, she won more than 80 percent of the vote in economically thriving and well-educated Dane County (which includes the state capital of Madison), more than 70 percent in Milwaukee County, and she dramatically cut the Republican margin in the Milwaukee suburbs, which the GOP had dominated before Trump.

    Protasiewicz’s resounding victory followed a similar formula as the Democrats’ wins last November in the governorship races in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  In all three states, Democrats beat a Republican gubernatorial candidate whom Trump had backed. Like Protasiewicz’s victory yesterday, each of those 2022 results showed how the Trump stamp on the GOP, as well as Republican support for banning abortion, has allowed Democrats to regain an advantage in these crucial Rust Belt swing states. Those Rust Belt defeats last November, as well as losses for Trump-backed candidates in Arizona and Georgia, two other pivotal swing states, sparked a greater level of public GOP backlash against Trump than he’d faced at almost any point in his presidency.

    Amid Republican frustration over the midterm results, Trump started to look like a former Las Vegas headliner who had been reduced to playing Holiday Inns somewhere off the New Jersey turnpike. Many of his former fans turned on him. Two days after the election, The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial whose headline flatly declared, “Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser.” The New York Post ran a front-page cartoon picturing Trump as a bloated “Trumpty Dumpty” who “had a great fall” in the election. Fox News reduced Trump’s visibility on the network so sharply that he did not appear on its programs between Sean Hannity interviews on September 22, 2022, and March 27, 2023, according to tracking by the progressive group Media Matters for America.

    It wasn’t just the Rupert Murdoch–verse that showed signs of Trump fatigue. Powerful interest groups such as the Club for Growth and the donor network associated with the Koch family openly called for Republicans to put Trump in the rearview mirror.

    Read: The humiliation of Donald Trump

    Even when Trump formally announced his 2024 candidacy, a week after the election at his Mar-a-Lago resort, the event had a frayed, musty feel. “On vivid display in this chapter of Trump’s life and political rise and (perhaps) fall,” Politico wrote, “was a crowd that was thick with ride-or-die conspiracists and conspicuously light on more prominent and powerful figures from the party he once totally held in his thrall.” Trump’s speech that night was a greatest-hits set delivered without conviction.

    Trump’s first few weeks as an announced candidate didn’t project any more energy or verve. “The Trump thing looked kind of haggard and worn,” Sarah Longwell, the founder of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, told me. “It was deprived of any of its pizzazz. ” In her focus groups with GOP voters, Longwell said, former Trump voters “weren’t done with him [and] they weren’t mad at him,” but they were expressing an emotion that probably would horrify Trump even more: “People did feel a little bored.”

    From November through about mid-February, both state and national polls consistently showed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gaining on Trump. Thomas, who started a super PAC encouraging DeSantis to run, said that in the midterm’s immediate aftermath, he saw polls and focus groups that suggested GOP voters had reached “an inflection point” on Trump. Concerns about his future electability, Thomas said, outweighed their support for his policies or his combative demeanor. Thomas believes that DeSantis’s landslide reelection in Florida created “such a stark contrast” to the widespread defeat of Trump-backed candidates that many GOP voters started to view the Florida governor as a better bet to win back the White House. “That’s why you saw such huge movement in state and local polling over the next few months,” Thomas told me.

    But that movement away from Trump seemed to crest in late February or early March—and polls since have shown the current inside the GOP steadily flowing back toward him.

    Republicans both supportive and critical of Trump remain somewhat unsure about why the polls shifted back in his direction at that point. But Trump’s revival did coincide with him visibly campaigning more, starting with his truculent appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March. Even by Trump’s overheated standards, his latest rallies have offered incendiary new policy proposals, such as more federal intervention to seize control of law enforcement in Democratic cities. He now routinely declares that he will serve as his voters’ “warrior” and as their “retribution.”

    Trump also made a more explicit and extended argument against DeSantis; the former president has simultaneously attacked DeSantis from the left (calling him a threat to Social Security and Medicare) and the right (portraying him as a clone of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan). Many Republicans, meanwhile, thought DeSantis looked unsteady as he took his first national tour, to promote his new book. DeSantis flipped from emulating Trump’s skepticism of aiding Ukraine to (somewhat) distancing himself from his rival’s position; then, regarding the Manhattan indictment, DeSantis flopped from lightly criticizing Trump to unreservedly defending him.

    DeSantis’s “stumble on Ukraine” in particular “really caused more traditional Republicans to doubt whether he was the best alternative to Trump,” Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster, told me.

    Around the same time, almost all of the other announced and potential GOP candidates, such as former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence, rushed to defend Trump against the pending indictment—before seeing the charges. Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who has announced his candidacy, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who’s still considering the race, have been the only potential 2024 contenders to criticize Trump in any way over the indictment.

    Longwell says the candidates who have chosen to rally around Trump have boxed themselves into an untenable position. With Trump’s legal challenges now dominating both conservative and mainstream media, if the other Republican contenders do nothing but echo Trump’s accusations against those investigating him, “it creates this dynamic where all of the other 2024 contenders actually end up being supporting cast members in Donald Trump’s drama, and there is no other room for them to make an affirmative case for why they should be the 2024 nominee,” Longwell told a television interviewer this week.

    Fox and other conservative media have boosted Trump by echoing his claim that prosecutors were targeting him to silence his voters—the same argument those outlets made after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents last summer, notes Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters. Those outlets “are reinforcing his position by telling their viewers that if they don’t defend Donald Trump, the left will be coming for them next,” Gertz told me. “That’s a very potent, very powerful argument, and one that really cuts off a lot of potential avenues” for Trump’s GOP critics and rivals.

    The reluctance by most declared and potential 2024 GOP hopefuls to criticize Trump over the indictment extends their refusal to publicly articulate any case for why the party should reject him. “As a rule of thumb, if you are running against someone and you are afraid to say your opponent’s name, that’s not a positive sign,” Stuart Stevens told me.

    Read: Why won’t Trump rivals just say it?

    One reason Trump’s rivals have been so reticent is that there is not much room in a GOP primary to criticize Trump over policy. On issues such as immigration and international trade, “it is incredibly difficult to create real daylight on policy, because he’s a good fit for the primary electorate,” John Thomas told me. That’s probably even more true now than in 2016, because Trump’s blustery messages tend to attract non-college-educated voters and drive away white-collar voters.

    Even so, Whit Ayres said that in his polling, only about one-third of GOP primary voters are immovable Trump supporters. He estimates that only about one-tenth are irrevocably opposed to him. Ayres classifies the remaining 55 to 60 percent of the GOP coalition as “Maybe Trump” voters who are not hostile to him but are open to alternatives.

    Trump has reached 50 percent support in some recent national polls of GOP voters, but more often he attracts support from about 40 percent of Republicans. That was roughly the share of the vote that Trump won while the race was competitive in 2016, but he captured the nomination anyway, because none of his rivals could consolidate enough of the remaining 60 percent.

    Many of Trump’s Republican critics see the 2024 field replicating the mistakes of his 2016 opponents. The other candidates’ refusal to make a clear case against Trump echoes the choice by the 2016 candidates to avoid direct confrontation with him for as long as possible.

    Now, as then, GOP strategists think Trump’s rivals are reluctant to engage him directly because they want to be in position to inherit his voters if he falters. Rather than face the danger of a full-scale confrontation with Trump, the 2024 candidates all are hoping that events undermine him, or that someone else in the field confronts him. “They all want to be the one that the alligator eats last,” says Matt Mackowiak, a GOP consultant and the chair of the Republican Party in Travis County, Texas.

    But every Republican strategist I spoke with agreed that a key lesson of 2016 is that Trump won’t deflate on his own; the other candidates must give voters a reason to abandon him. Mackowiak, like Thomas and Longwell, told me that the prospect of multiple indictments could exacerbate Trump’s greatest potential primary weakness—concerns about his electability—but it’s unlikely that enough voters will consider him too damaged to win unless the other candidates explicitly make that case. “For Trump to pay a political price for all this uncertainty and the legal vulnerability he’s facing, Republican challengers are going to have to force that,” Mackowiak said.

    Nor is it clear that enough GOP voters will turn on Trump even if they do come to doubt his electability. Trump’s Republican critics fear that the cumulative weight of all the investigations he’s confronting will lower his ceiling of support and diminish his ability to win another general election. But a CNN poll last month found that only two-fifths of Republican primary voters put the highest priority on a candidate who can win the general election, while nearly three-fifths said they were most concerned with picking a nominee who agrees with them on issues. Katon Dawson, a former chair of the South Carolina Republican Party now supporting Haley, told me that “Republicans don’t care” about electability when voting in primaries. “They vote their values; they vote their wants and needs,” he said. “I’ve never ever seen them say ‘I am going to vote for who I think is the most electable.’”

    Trump’s rivals for the nomination still have many months left to formulate a case against him, particularly once the GOP presidential debates begin in August. But for Republicans resistant to Trump, the months since the November midterm have reversed the trajectory of the seasons. As winter began, many were blooming with optimism about moving the party beyond him. Now, as spring unfolds, they are seeing those hopes wither—and confronting the full measure of just how difficult it will be to loosen Trump’s hold on the GOP.

    “I’ve always believed Trump was going to be the nominee,” Stevens said. “Within so much of what we used to call the Republican establishment, there is still this denial” even after all these years of dealing with the former president “that Trumpism is what the party wants to be.”

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Trump’s Legal Problems Are Putting the GOP in a Vise

    Trump’s Legal Problems Are Putting the GOP in a Vise

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    The dilemma for the Republican Party is that Donald Trump’s mounting legal troubles may be simultaneously strengthening him as a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination and weakening him as a potential general-election nominee.

    In the days leading up to the indictment of the former president, which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced two days ago, a succession of polls showed that Trump has significantly increased his lead over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his closest competitor in the race for the Republican nomination.

    Yet recent surveys have also signaled that this criminal charge—and other potential indictments from ongoing investigations—could deepen the doubts about Trump among the suburban swing voters who decisively rejected him in the 2020 presidential race, and powered surprisingly strong performances by Democrats in the 2018 and 2022 midterms.

    “It is definitely a conundrum that this potentially helps him in the primary yet sinks the party’s chances to win the general,” says Mike DuHaime, a GOP strategist who advises former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a potential candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination. “This better positions [in the primary] our worst candidate for the general election.”

    That conundrum will only intensify for Republicans, because it is highly likely that this is merely the beginning of Trump’s legal troubles. As the first indictment against a former president, the New York proceeding has thrust the U.S. into uncharted waters. But the country today is not nearly as far from shore as it may be in just a few months. Trump faces multiple additional potential indictments. Those include possible charges from Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis, who has been examining his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in that state, as well as the twin federal probes led by Special Counsel Jack Smith into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to block congressional certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.

    “I think I had a pretty good track record on my predictions and my strong belief is that there will be additional criminal charges coming in other places,” says Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “I think you are going to see them in Georgia and possibly [at the] federal” level.

    The potential for such further criminal proceedings is why many political observers are cautious about drawing too many firm conclusions from polling around public reaction to this first indictment, which centers on Trump’s payment of hush money to the porn star Stormy Daniels late in the 2016 campaign.

    Read: The first electoral test of Trump’s indictment

    The multiple legal nets tightening around Trump create the possibility that he could be going through one or even multiple trials by the time of next year’s general election, and conceivably even when the GOP primaries begin in the winter of 2024. In other words, Trump might bounce back and forth between campaign rallies in Iowa or New Hampshire and court appearances in New York City, Atlanta, or Washington D.C.  And such jarring images could change the public perceptions that polls are recording now.

    “You are just looking at a snapshot of how people feel today,” Dave Wilson, a conservative strategist, told me.

    Yet even these initial reactions show how Trump’s legal troubles may place his party in a vise.

    Polls consistently show that Trump, over the past several weeks, has widened his lead over DeSantis and the rest of the potential 2024 field. That may be partly because Trump has intensified his attacks on DeSantis, and because the Florida governor has at times seemed unsteady in his debut on the national stage.

    But most Republicans think Trump is also benefiting from an impulse among GOP voters to lock arms around him as the Manhattan investigation has proceeded. In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College poll released this week, four-fifths of Republicans described the various investigations targeting Trump as a “witch hunt,” echoing his own denunciation of them. “There’s going to be some level of emotional response to someone being quote-unquote attacked,” Wilson said. “That’s going to get some sympathy points that will probably bolster poll numbers.”

    Republican leaders, as so many times before, have tightened their own straitjacket by defending Trump on these allegations so unreservedly. House GOP leaders have launched unprecedented attempts to impede Bragg’s investigation by demanding documents and testimony, and even Trump’s potential 2024 rivals have condemned the indictment as a politically motivated hit job; DeSantis may have had the most extreme reaction by not only calling  the indictment “un-American” but even insisting he would not cooperate with extraditing Trump from Florida if it came to that (a pledge that is moot because Trump has indicated he plans to turn himself in on Tuesday.)

    As during the procession of outrages and controversies during Trump’s presidency, most Republicans skeptical of him have been unwilling to do anything more than remain silent. (Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a long-shot potential 2024 candidate, has been the most conspicuous exception, issuing a statement that urged Americans “to wait on the facts” before judging the case.) The refusal of party leaders to confront Trump is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy: Because GOP voters hear no other arguments from voices they trust, they fall in line behind the assertion from Trump and the leading conservative media sources that the probes are groundless persecution. Republican elected officials then cite that dominant opinion as the justification for remaining silent.

    But while the investigations may be bolstering Trump’s position inside the GOP in the near-term, they also appear to be highlighting all the aspects of his political identity that have alienated so many swing voters, especially those with college degrees. In that same NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey, 56 percent of Americans rejected Trump’s “witch hunt” characterization and described the investigations as “fair”; 60 percent of college-educated white adults, the key constituency that abandoned the GOP in the Trump years, said the probes were fair. So did a slight majority of independent voters.

    In new national results released yesterday morning, the Navigator project, a Democratic polling initiative, similarly found that 57 percent of Americans, including 51 percent of independents, agreed that Trump should be indicted when they read a description of the hush-money allegations against him.

    Read: What Donald Trump’s indictment reveals

    The Manhattan indictment “may keep his people with him, it may fire them up, but he’s starting from well under 50 percent of the vote,” Mike DuHaime told me. “Somebody like that must figure out how to get new voters. And he is not gaining new voters with a controversial new indictment, whether he beats it or not.” Swing voters following the case in New York, DuHaime continued, “may not like it, they may think Democrats have gone too far, and that might be fair.” But it’s wishful thinking, he argues, to believe that voters previously resistant to Trump will conclude they need to give him another look because he’s facing criminal charges for paying off a porn star, even if they view the charges themselves as questionable.

    The NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist survey underlines DuHaime’s point about the limits of Trump’s existing support: In that survey, a 61 percent majority of Americans—including 64 percent of independents and 70 percent of college-educated white adults—said they did not want him to be president again. That result was similar to the latest Quinnipiac University national poll, which found that 60 percent of Americans do not consider themselves supporters of Trump’s “Make America great again” movement. The challenge for the GOP is that about four-fifths of Republicans said they did consider themselves part of that movement, and about three-fourths said they wanted him back in the White House.

    The open question for Trump is whether this level of support, even in the GOP, may be his high-water mark as the investigations proceed. Eisner and John Dean, the former White House counsel for Richard Nixon, both told me they believe that the New York case may be more threatening to Trump than many legal analysts have suggested. “I think that the New York case is much stronger than people perceive it to be,” Dean told me yesterday. “We really don’t know the contents of the indictment, and we really won’t know for a much longer time the evidence behind the indictment.”

    Whatever happens in New York, Trump still faces the prospect of indictments on the more consequential charges looming over him in Georgia and from the federal special prosecutor. Dean says that Bragg’s indictment, rather than discouraging other prosecutors to act “may have the opposite effect” of emboldening them. Trump “has escaped accountability literally his entire life and it finally appears to be catching up with him,” Dean says. Academic research, he adds, has suggested that defendants juggling multiple trials, either simultaneously or sequentially, find it “much harder to mount effective defenses.”

    Bryan Bennett, the senior director of polling and analytics at the Hub Project, the Democratic polling consortium that conducts the Navigator surveys, says the potential for multiple indictments presents Trump with a parallel political risk: The number of voters who believe he has committed at least one crime is very likely to rise if the criminal charges against him accumulate. “It’s hard to imagine any scenario where multiple indictments is useful” to him, Bennett told me.

    DuHaime and Wilson both believe that multiple indictments eventually could weigh down Trump even in the GOP primary. “The cumulative effect takes away some of the argument that it’s just political,” DuHaime said. Each additional indictment, he continued, “may add credibility” for the public to those that came before.

    Wilson believes that repeated indictments could reinforce the sense among Republican voters that Trump is being treated unfairly, and deepen their desire to turn the page from him. He likens the effect to someone living along a “Hurricane Alley,” who experiences not one destructive storm in a season but several. “The weight of a single hurricane blowing through is one thing,” Wilson told me. “But if you have several hurricanes of issues blowing through, you will get conservatives [saying], ‘I don’t know if I want to continue living in Hurricane Alley’ with Trump, and they are going to look at other candidates.”

    Given Trump’s hold on a big portion of the GOP coalition, no one should discount his capacity to win the party nomination next year, no matter how many criminal cases ensnare him. And given the persistent public dissatisfaction with the economy and lackluster job approval ratings for Biden, no one dismisses the capacity of whoever captures the Republican nomination to win the general election.

    The best-case scenario sketched by Trump supporters is that a succession of indictments will allow him to inspire even higher turnout among the predominantly non-college-educated and non-urban white voters who accept his argument that “liberal elites” and the “deep state” are targeting him to silence them. But even the heroic levels of turnout Trump inspired from those voters in 2020 wasn’t enough to win. For the GOP to bet that Trump could overcome swing-voter revulsion over his legal troubles and win a general election by mobilizing even more of his base voters, Bennett said, “seems to me the highest risk proposition that I can imagine.”

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Does Trump Stand a Real Chance to Repeat 2016?

    Does Trump Stand a Real Chance to Repeat 2016?

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    Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Well-placed Republican insiders are mobilizing to block Donald Trump from winning the GOP presidential nomination.

    For instance, Trump is conspicuously excluded from the roster of potential 2024 candidates whom the Club for Growth has invited to speak this weekend at a retreat the conservative group is hosting for its biggest donors in Palm Beach, Florida—Trump’s backyard. Likewise, the sprawling network of donors associated with the Koch brothers declared last month that it would work in the 2024 GOP primaries to elect a nominee who “will turn the page on the past several years,” an unmistakable reference to moving beyond Trump. And though they’re still a minority, a steady stream of prominent Republican strategists, donors, and elected officials are openly predicting that the party will lose in 2024 if it nominates Trump again.

    David Frum: Trump’s running, and Republicans have only themselves to blame

    If all of this sounds like an echo of the 2016 Republican primary race, that’s because it is. Both the Club for Growth and the Koch network opposed Trump’s nomination then too. Big donors almost entirely shunned him, hardly any elected officials endorsed him until after he had already secured the nomination, and party leaders such as Senator Lindsey Graham warned that “if we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.”

    None of this stopped Trump from winning the nomination, and, except for the relatively small band of Never Trump conservative activists, all of that internal Republican opposition evaporated after he won the White House.

    Whether this institutional opposition to Trump will prove more effective and durable now is an open question. Republicans resistant to Trump are cautiously optimistic that this time will be different. That’s partly because of signs that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis might unify the party’s anti-Trump forces more effectively than any of his rivals did in 2016. But it’s also because those who oppose Trump are mobilizing earlier than they did in the 2016 race.

    “The thing about 2015 is that Trump had the initiative; he surprised everyone,” says the conservative strategist Bill Kristol, who became one of Trump’s leading GOP critics. “The establishment was always on the back foot trying to react to him, and the candidates were diffuse, so there was never a coming together. Here, at least in theory, you have big institutions mobilizing against him early, and they are ready from the beginning.”

    Yet even with those undeniable shifts in the landscape, many Republicans remain dubious that opposition from party leaders and big donors will have much impact on Trump’s fate in 2024.

    Almost everyone in the GOP agrees that Trump faces political challenges now that he didn’t then—in particular, more widespread concerns among Republican voters about whether he can win a general election. But some believe that, if anything, more overt opposition to Trump from the party elite will help him convince his die-hard supporters that he alone is fighting for them. “Trump is such a unique political figure that, in some ways, you could argue that having all these institutional forces mobilize against him makes him stronger,” Craig Robinson, the former political director for the Republican Party in Iowa, told me.

    Trump’s camp is ready to make those sort of arguments against the groups and party leaders that oppose him. Hogan Gidley, Trump’s former White House deputy press secretary, says it is “naive” to assume that the party establishment could really unite behind a single alternative, as many of Trump’s critics hope. But, he adds, “if in fact there is a coalescing this time,” Trump and his allies are prepared to argue that it represents a continuation of “a concerted effort by the establishment to try to take down someone they couldn’t control.”

    Given how quickly top Republicans bent the knee to Trump after he was elected, it may be hard to remember that in 2016, he was more distant from his party’s leadership than any candidate who had won either side’s presidential nomination since the Democratic outsiders George McGovern in 1972 and Jimmy Carter in 1976. The McGovern and Carter victories were the direct products of the rule changes that Democrats instituted after their bitter nomination fight in 1968 to shift power for selecting the presidential nominee from party bosses, elected officials, and other insiders at their quadrennial national convention to voters through primaries and caucuses. Republicans quickly followed suit.

    Over time, though, political scientists began to perceive a striking pattern in which the new system took on more characteristics of the old one. Although the reformed rules ostensibly empowered voters to select the nominees during the marathon of primaries and caucuses, in fact, the winners were usually those around whom party insiders coalesced during what became known as “the invisible primary.” That phrase referred to the rolling courtship of donors, other elected officials, and party interest groups that the contenders slogged through for a year or more before the first voters cast a ballot in Iowa and New Hampshire.

    The “invisible primary” didn’t always have a clear winner, but when it did, that candidate almost always won the nomination—as demonstrated by the Democrats Walter Mondale in 1984, Bill Clinton in 1992, Al Gore in 2000, and Hillary Clinton in 2016, and by the Republicans George H. W. Bush in 1988, Bob Dole in 1996, George W. Bush in 2000, John McCain in 2008, and Mitt Romney in 2012. The race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in 2008 probably stood as the premier example of a contest in which the invisible primary ended in a standoff.

    The pattern of primary voters eventually choosing the candidate who had first secured the most support from elected officials, interest groups, and donors became so reliable that the political scientist Marty Cohen and his three colleagues could flatly declare, per the title of their 2008 book, The Party Decides. “The reformers of the 1970s tried to wrest the presidential nomination away from insiders and to bestow it on rank-and-file partisans,” they wrote, “but the people who are regularly active in party politics have regained much of the control that was lost.”

    Trump’s march to the 2016 GOP nomination represents the most explicit recent exception to the “party decides” theory. Trump amassed almost none of the assets that usually boost nominees. During the 2016 primaries, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio all outraised him. Those rivals also won far more endorsements than Trump did; only Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama and three governors endorsed Trump at any point in the primaries. And to describe Trump’s ground-level political organizations in the early states as skeletal would be to overstate the meat on their bones.

    Trump in 2016 overcame these limitations with forceful and flamboyant performances at Republican debates, arena-size rallies in the key states, and, above all, a wave of unprecedented national-media coverage in which he appealed to white voters’ anxieties over racial and cultural change more openly than any national candidate in either party had since George Wallace. “Trump was able to run a national media campaign to win the nomination, and that is something that we just didn’t expect to be a successful path,” Cohen, a political scientist at James Madison University, told me this week.

    Cohen, like many others, believes that one principal reason Trump survived such widespread resistance from party leaders is that those opposed to him never united behind a single alternative, splintering instead among Cruz, Rubio, Bush, and former Ohio Governor John Kasich. “I think that when the party is able to coalesce on an acceptable candidate, they still have a pretty good chance at getting them nominated,” Cohen said. “The question that’s pressing is how difficult is it now to solidify around one particular candidate?”

    That exact question is looming again for the Republicans skeptical of Trump. Many in the party believe the ceiling on Trump’s potential support is lower now than it was in the 2016 primaries—particularly among college-educated Republican voters, who mostly voted against him even then. But Trump’s solid hold on about one-third of GOP voters could still allow him to win if no one consolidates the remainder of the party.

    To many of Trump’s GOP skeptics, the biggest difference from 2016 is the possibility that DeSantis might unify the party’s anti-Trump forces more thoroughly than anyone did then. “I think you are going to see a lot of folks coalesce around DeSantis this summer after he runs around the track and does his formal announcement,” predicts the GOP strategist Scott Reed, who served as Dole’s campaign manager in 1996.

    DeSantis is certainly generating enormous interest: A retreat he convened in Florida last weekend drew a procession of elected officials, conservative activists, and donors. And all of the Republican strategists I spoke with in recent days expect donors to be much more conscious than they were in 2016 of concentrating their dollars on a few candidates to reduce the chances that Trump can again divide and conquer a large and unwieldy field. DeSantis will likely be lavishly funded, but that calculation could make it difficult for many others contemplating the race to raise enough money to truly compete.

    However, many of those strategists also remain unconvinced that the party’s Trump skeptics will move en masse to the DeSantis side until they see more evidence that he can handle the rigors of a national campaign—and of running against Trump. Mike Murphy, a GOP strategist who helped direct the super PAC supporting Jeb Bush in 2016, told me that though “the donor mentality is going to be a lot different … it’s not going to be binary: ‘We’re all going to be for DeSantis, and nobody else can raise any money.’”

    Read: The coming Republican amnesia

    In fact, several GOP strategists I spoke with predicted that with DeSantis and Trump both defining themselves primarily as pugnacious culture warriors, there might be room in the top tier for a third candidate who offers a less polarizing and more optimistic message. And one name came up repeatedly as a possibility for that role: South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, the sole Black Republican in the chamber. “I think he could come here and do very well,” Robinson, the former Iowa GOP political director, said.

    What’s clear already is that, for groups, donors, and candidates alike, opposing Trump won’t be for the fainthearted. Without identifying specific targets, Gidley, for instance, says Trump’s allies are prepared to argue that big donors organizing against him are doing so to protect business interests in China. “That’s going to be a massive point that was not talked about in 2016 that will most assuredly be exposed in 2024,” says Gidley, now an official at the America First Policy Institute, which was founded by former Trump aides.

    Even against such threats, the conditions seem to be in place for the GOP institutions skeptical of Trump to move back toward the “party decides” model in 2024. Jennifer Horn, the former Republican state party chair in New Hampshire and a leading Trump critic, told me that it’s likely the institutional resistance to him this time “will be stronger and more organized” than it was in 2016. Doubts about Trump’s electability, she added, could resonate with more GOP primary voters than opponents’ 2016 arguments against his morality or fealty to conservative principles did. “His biggest vulnerability in a primary is whether or not he can win a general election,” she said.

    But Horn cautions that such internal resistance could melt away again after a few primaries if it looks like Trump is on track to win the nomination. “If we get into the primaries and Trump is winning, it will all go to the side, just as in 2016,” Horn predicted. “We saw the degree to which the party and the donors and everyone else completely sold their soul and became all Trump, all the time. If he becomes the guy again, he’s going to be everybody’s guy.”

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Inside the New Right’s Next Frontier: The American West

    Inside the New Right’s Next Frontier: The American West

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    Food plays an outsize role in the political imagining of the right these days. Last October, Carlson released a documentary titled The End of Men, which features, among other self-proclaimed right-wing bodybuilders, an anonymous farmer who tweets under the name William Wheelwright, one of the better-known figures in the sphere where preppers, techies, hippies, farmers, naturalists, health bros, and hard-core dissident-right types—many of whom are unapologetically racist—mingle, argue, and plan with each other. The documentary advanced a view that our technologies and agricultural system are physically poisoning us, destroying our connection to our corporeality, leading to a generation of men with declining sperm counts and low testosterone. The globalist “regime,” as Mike Cernovich described it in the documentary, has weakened America on a cellular level. The film called for men to take up weight lifting and a meat-based diet. “Well-ordered, disciplined groups of men bound by friendship are dangerous, precisely because of what they can do,” the masculinist health guru known as “Raw Egg Nationalist” said, over images of the American and Haitian revolutions. “A few hundred men can conquer an entire empire,” Raw Egg Nationalist continued. “That’s why they want you to be sick, depressed, and isolated.”

    “Things are going to get worse before they get better,” he said. “How much worse isn’t exactly clear.”

    I drove north toward Montana, where I visited with a man named Paul McNiel, whom I’d first met back during the fervid summer of 2020, at a Fourth of July picnic and anti-government rally headlined “Rage Against the State.” “I think that Livingston has the highest per-capita concentration of contributors to The New Yorker of any city in America,” he’d said when I introduced myself as a writer. McNiel is extraordinarily well read, and friendly with a number of literary types. He is a bit of a prepper, and while he is deeply Christian, he doesn’t consider himself right wing. “I don’t think the division is right-left anymore. It’s us against the machine,” he said, borrowing a phrase from the English writer Paul Kingsnorth—whose writings critiquing the power of tech and money in modern life have become popular among dissident types. He was dismissive of the local armed groups being flooded with new members. “At the end of the day,” he said, “if you’re not willing to shoot federal agents, then you’re not serious about it. They aren’t serious.”

    McNiel had served in Afghanistan after college, and when he left the military, he’d taken out an almost unbelievable amount of debt, largely on credit cards, so that he could get himself in the position of buying his crown jewel, a trailer park in the small town of Belgrade, Montana, just outside of Bozeman. He now owned trailer parks as far away as Alaska. He had ridden the wave. “I always tell myself: No more deals. I want to stop, and I know I have to. But I can’t.”

    He’d just bought a run-down country resort and tavern in the tiny town of Story, Wyoming. It was in a beautiful and secluded creekside cove of Ponderosas, a shady island amid the surrounding sagebrush desert. “Pretty good hideout, right?” he asked me, as we had a glass of wine and talked guns, European fiction, and the possibility of civil war. The place was a furious hive of activity. He was paying a couple dozen young members of Christian families to get it ready to open for the public. He was openly conflicted about his role in the churn shaping the West. “My guess,” he said, “in 10 years, there won’t be any blue-collar people left in Story.” A lanky and bearded minister from Iowa had come out with his family to help him work on the place, and there were a dozen or so kids in denim and homemade dresses rushing around, cooking, and doing some light demolition. The scene was a prime example of “crunchy conservatives,” an ecosystem described by the writer Rod Dreher—who champions localism and has long advocated that conservative Christians withdraw as a way of preserving their culture. It’s a process that eventually led Dreher himself to move to Hungary, where he has become a vocal supporter of the country’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán. “I love localism, but there is definitely a point where it can turn into blood and soil,” McNiel said. “I feel like my role is to argue for a localism that doesn’t go off the rails into exclusion.”

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    James Pogue

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  • “The Florida of Today Is the America of Tomorrow”: Ron DeSantis’s New College Takeover Is Just the Beginning of the Right’s Higher Ed Crusade

    “The Florida of Today Is the America of Tomorrow”: Ron DeSantis’s New College Takeover Is Just the Beginning of the Right’s Higher Ed Crusade

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    But that sort of lament has largely left the new trustees unmoved. When a current LGBTQ+ student told reporters about her grief, Rufo quoted her comments on Twitter, adding a laughing-crying emoji. 

    The invocation of Hillsdale College, a 1,500-student private Christian school in rural Michigan, might seem a surprising model for overhauling a public Florida institution, but it shouldn’t. The college, sometimes called “the citadel of conservatism,” has long had an outsized political influence in movement conservatism. Right-wing politicians and advocates vie for slots in its speaking program, the speeches of which are then distributed to a claimed audience of 6 million through a monthly Hillsdale publication. Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist who sought to overturn the 2020 election, and who is married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, facilitated the launch of Hillsdale’s Capitol Hill campus in Washington. This magazine called Hillsdale a “feeder school” for the Trump administration. 

    Hillsdale has also spent the last 12 years proselytizing its Western civilization-focused model of “classical education” through a nationwide charter school-planting network, a bundle of freely-licensed right-wing K–12 curricula (including its ahistorical post-Trump “1776 Curriculum”), and its extensive connections with conservative state leaders. It’s largely thanks to Hillsdale that the idea of “classical education”—despite its varied forms and perspectives—has become right-wing shorthand for anti-“woke” American exceptionalism and an antidote to critical race theory. Last year, Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee announced plans to open 50 Hillsdale charters across the state; the year before, Hillsdale president Larry Arnn, who is also the former president of the Claremont Institute, claimed that South Dakota governor Kristi Noem offered to build him an entire campus. (Noem’s office did not respond to a request for comment.) 

    But in Florida, Hillsdale’s footprint is uniquely large. The state boasts the highest number of Hillsdale-affiliated K–12 publicly-funded charter schools, several launched or directed by spouses of prominent state Republicans, including Corcoran and Republican congressman Byron Donalds. Hillsdale was instrumental in helping DeSantis overhaul the state’s K–12 civics standards along more “patriotic” lines. Last year the state hired a Hillsdale duo—one staffer, one undergraduate—to assess whether math textbooks Florida teachers submitted for approval contained prohibited concepts like critical race theory. And a number of prominent Florida officials, including Corcoran and DeSantis himself, have addressed gatherings hosted by the college, where Arnn praised both men as among the most important people in America today. 

    Rufo has addressed Hillsdale audiences too: once in early 2021, where he laid out what quickly became Republican talking points about critical race theory, and again last spring, in a speech entitled “Laying Siege to the Institutions,” which he recently described as his “theory of action.” In the latter address, delivered while Rufo was teaching a journalism course for the college, he called on state legislators to use their budgetary power to reshape public institutions, including higher education. 

    “We have to get out of this idea that somehow a public university system is a totally independent entity that practices academic freedom—a total fraud, that’s just a false statement, fundamentally false—and that you can’t touch it or else you’re impinging on the rights of the gender studies department to follow their dreams,” he said. Instead, conservatives must have the guts to say, “‘What the public giveth, the public can taketh away.’ And so we get in there, we defund things we don’t like, we fund things we do like.” 

    In terms of the former, he elaborated, states should defund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and find creative ways to undermine university departments perceived as too liberal, like changing state teacher accreditation laws as a means of rendering teachers colleges irrelevant. Both suggestions have become common conservative talking points over the last year. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reported this week, South Carolina legislators have requested information from its state’s 33 public colleges and universities regarding training around race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, following similar moves in Florida and Oklahoma.

    In terms of what the right does like, Rufo advised state legislators to fund the creation of new, independently-governed “conservative centers” within flagship public universities to attract conservative professors, create new academic tracks, and serve as a “separate patronage system” for the right. 

    “Some people don’t like thinking about it that way,” Rufo said. “But guess what? The public universities, the DEI departments, the public school bureaucracies are, at the end of the day, patronage systems for left-wing activists. And as long as there’s going to be a patronage system, wouldn’t it be good to have some people who are representing the public within them?” 

    In many ways, that’s an old idea. Big-money donors on the right like the Olin and Koch foundations have been establishing “beachhead” academic centers in universities across the country since the 1970s, as a means of shoring up academic arguments for right-wing policies, creating a pipeline of conservative talent, and endowing professorships for right-wing scholars—some of whom, more moderate academics suggest, are unemployable on their own merits. (Of possible note here: Corcoran’s appointment to New College follows his failed bid to become Florida State University’s president in 2021, when he was passed over, apparently, in part for lack of qualifications.) 

    But these days, the model has been adapted, so that funds for such programs and institutes are increasingly coming from state legislatures directly, as numerous red states have passed bills establishing new “classical” and “civics” institutes with barely-disguised agendas. In Arizona, the legislature effectively replaced private donations from the Koch foundations with taxpayer funds in order to create a new School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State, to address a claimed lack of ideological diversity. In Texas, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has sought to establish a free-market think tank at University of Texas Austin, partly as a response to critical race theory. In Tennessee, Governor Lee paired his proposal to create dozens of Hillsdale charters with a call to build a $6 million, Hillsdale-inspired civics institute at University of Tennessee Knoxville to combat “anti-American thought.”

    Florida already has several, including a politics institute at Florida State; the Adam Smith Center for the Study of Economic Freedom at Florida International University; and the University of Florida’s freshly-approved Hamilton Center for Classical and Civics Education, dedicated to “the ideas, traditions, and texts that form the foundations of western and American civilization,” and tasked with helping create anti-communist content for Florida’s new K–12 civics curricula. 

    Last spring, this track record prompted another Florida school, St. Augustine’s private Flagler College, to worry that it was being, well, groomed to become “the Hillsdale of the South.” The legislature was considering a multimillion dollar grant for the school to establish its own “Institute for Classical Education”—money that was certainly needed and might also be used to shore up existing programs, but which faculty feared would come with intolerable strings. Professors there brought a resolution to the faculty council, declaring that, if the funding came through, faculty would retain control over how it was used for hiring and curriculum creation. In Flagler’s case, the administration readily agreed. 

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    Kathryn Joyce

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  • George Santos “Shouldn’t Be There”: Republican Infighting Spills Over at Joe Biden’s State of the Union

    George Santos “Shouldn’t Be There”: Republican Infighting Spills Over at Joe Biden’s State of the Union

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    Kevin McCarthy pledged that he and Republicans would not engage in “childish games” Tuesday night. He would not be ripping up the copy of Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech, he said, taking a shot across Nancy Pelosi’s bow who tore the pages of Donald Trump’s speech three years ago. McCarthy and Republican leaders reportedly reminded the party that the “cameras are on” and “mics are hot.” “We’re members of Congress. We have a code of ethics of how we should portray ourselves,” McCarthy added in a CNN interview. McCarthy, finally Speaker of the House after a protracted and painful election in early January, however, sat at the lectern next to Vice President Kamala Harris, watching over a Republican party that had a very different idea of how Tuesday would play out.

    Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, an ally of McCarthy, spent much of the day walking around the Capitol complex with a large white balloon in hand, a jab at the Biden Administration’s handling of the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon in United States’ airspace earlier this week. The balloon didn’t join Greene in the House chamber, where the Georgia firebrand sat in the back of the room, notably apart from Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, who took a swipe at her balloon antics earlier in the day when asked if she was preparing any forms of protest Tuesday. “Well, I won’t be bringing a white helium balloon, if that’s what you’re asking,” Boebert told The Hill. 

    That kind of GOP infighting defined the start of the evening, particularly when reporters noticed a tense exchange between Utah Republican senator Mitt Romney and George Santos, who apparently got to the chamber early to save a seat by the main aisle where Biden entered the chamber. “He is a sick puppy,” Romney said of Santos after the speech. “He shouldn’t be there,” he said, noting his disappointment in how McCarthy has handled the New York Republican who has been caught in a litany of lies. 

    “Given the fact that he’s under ethics investigation he should be sitting in the back row and being quiet instead of parading in front of the president,” Romney added. When asked if he was disappointed that Speaker McCarthy had not called on Santos to resign, the Utah Senator bluntly responded, “Yes.” 

    Just after 9:07 PM on Tuesday night, Biden took the lectern to applause. For weeks, Biden toiled away with a number of his top aides—Mike Donilon, Bruce Reed, Steve Ricchetti, Anita Dunn, Vinay Reddy, being the most influential—crafting the president’s address. The group spent this past weekend cloistered at Camp David, to finetune and polish the prose, according to a White House official. Throughout his roughly hour-long speech, Biden pulled from the same pantry of rhetorical staples that have contoured his political career — the importance of bipartisanship, his working class roots — and sought to highlight the accomplishments of his administration. 

     McCarthy sat aloof behind him, largely expressionless. He clapped at the obvious areas of agreement. He even laughed at some of Biden’s jokes. For much of Biden’s speech, Republicans responded civilly—until they didn’t. Biden’s declaration that some Republicans were intent on cutting Social Security and Medicare, prompted boos from members of the party. McCarthy shook his head as Biden doubled down, seemingly enjoying pushing Republicans deeper in a corner against the very entitlement cuts that conservatives have long called for. But when one Republican was heard shouting “liar” at the president, McCarthy appeared to shush his own.

    McCarthy’s subtle signal to his ranks to simmer down was soon lost. When Biden boasted of his administration’s efforts to curb China’s influence, Greene shouted, “China is spying on us!” in between laughs. Minutes later, Greene invoked China again when the president noted that 700,000 Americans die from Fentanyl overdoses each year. “It is coming from China,” she said. At this point, other Republicans shouted, “Close the border.” And one Republican sunk even lower, heard saying, “It is your fault!” 

    China was something of a theme of the night. Greene’s balloon aside, McCarthy invited former NBA player turned activist Enes Kanter Freedom, who has been an outspoken critic of human rights abuses in Turkey and China. “I have so much respect for the speaker as both a leader, and a friend. His support for me doesn’t go unappreciated for even a moment, and I hope he can lead by example to others to stand for what is right,” Freedom told Vanity Fair. 

    To be sure, Democrats also made political statements with their guests. Pelosi invited Sergeant Aquilino Gonnell who served as a Capitol Police officer during the January 6, 2021 insurrection and her husband Paul Pelosi, who had become the subject of right-wing conspiracies after being brutally attacked in his own home. Freshman Democrat Maxwell Frost, a longtime gun activist before he ran for Congress, invited Manuel Oliver, father of Parkland shooting victim Joaquin Oliver.

    But the Republicans’ performance Tuesday night was something of a roadmap for the next two years. Grappling with a silver of a majority in the House, McCarthy will have a difficult time wrangling his own fractious caucus, let alone shepherd legislation that survives the House, the Democrat-controlled Senate and Biden’s veto. Meanwhile, as early as this week House Republicans are poised to launch a series of investigations into everything from the border, to the Chinese spy balloon, to Hunter Biden’s laptop and foreign business dealings. And then there’s Santos, who is now officially under investigation by the House’s ethics committee — and is certainly good at taking up a lot of oxygen in the room.

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    Abigail Tracy

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  • Republicans’ 2024 Magical Thinking

    Republicans’ 2024 Magical Thinking

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    Press them hard enough, and most Republican officials—even the ones with MAGA hats in their closets and Mar-a-Lago selfies in their Twitter avatar—will privately admit that Donald Trump has become a problem. He’s presided over three abysmal election cycles since he took office, he is more unstable than ever, and yet he returned to the campaign trail this past weekend, declaring that he is “angry” and determined to win the  GOP presidential nomination again in 2024. Aside from his most blinkered loyalists, virtually everyone in the party agrees: It’s time to move on from Trump.

    But ask them how they plan to do that, and the discussion quickly veers into the realm of hopeful hypotheticals. Maybe he’ll get indicted and his legal problems will overwhelm him. Maybe he’ll flame out early in the primaries, or just get bored with politics and wander away. Maybe the situation will resolve itself naturally: He’s old, after all—how many years can he have left?

    This magical thinking pervaded my recent conversations with more than a dozen current and former elected GOP officials and party strategists. Faced with the prospect of another election cycle dominated by Trump and uncertain that he can actually be beaten in the primaries, many Republicans are quietly rooting for something to happen that will make him go away. And they would strongly prefer not to make it happen themselves.

    “There is a desire for deus ex machina,” said one GOP consultant, who, like others I interviewed, requested anonymity to characterize private conversations taking place inside the party. “It’s like 2016 all over again, only more fatalistic.”

    The scenarios Republicans find themselves fantasizing about range from the far-fetched to the morbid. In his recent book Thank You for Your Servitude, my colleague Mark Leibovich quoted a former Republican representative who bluntly summarized his party’s plan for dealing with Trump: “We’re just waiting for him to die.” As it turns out, this is not an uncommon sentiment. In my conversations with Republicans, I heard repeatedly that the least disruptive path to getting rid of Trump, grim as it sounds, might be to wait for his expiration.

    Mark Leibovich: The most pathetic men in America

    Their rationale was straightforward: The former president is 76 years old, overweight, appears to maintain the diet of a college freshman, and believes, contrary to all known science, that exercise is bad for you. Why risk alienating his supporters when nature will take its course sooner or later? Peter Meijer, a former Republican representative who left office this month, termed this strategy actuarial arbitrage.

    “You have a lot of folks who are just wishing for [Trump’s] mortal demise,” Meijer told me. “I want to be clear: I’m not in that camp. But I’ve heard from a lot of people who will go onstage and put on the red hat, and then give me a call the next day and say, ‘I can’t wait until this guy dies.’ And it’s like, Good Lord.” (Trump’s mother died at 88 and his father at 93, so this strategy isn’t exactly foolproof.)

    Some Republicans are clinging to the hope that Trump might finally be undone by his legal troubles. He is currently the subject of multiple criminal investigations, and his detractors dream of an indictment that would derail his campaign. But most of the people I talked with seemed resigned to the likelihood that an indictment would only boost him with the party’s base. Michael Cohen, who served for years as Trump’s personal attorney and now hosts a podcast atoning for that sin titled Mea Culpa, grudgingly told me that his former boss would easily weaponize any criminal charges brought against him. The deep-state Democrats are at it again—the campaign emails write themselves. “Donald will use the indictment to continue his fundraising grift,” Cohen told me.

    David A. Graham: A guide to the possible forthcoming indictments of Donald Trump

    Others imagine a coordinated donor revolt that sidelines Trump for good. The GOP consultant told me about a private dinner in New York City that he attended in the fall of 2021, when he saw a Republican billionaire give an impassioned speech about the need to keep Trump from returning to the Oval Office. The man said he would devote large sums of money to defeating the former president and urged his peers to join the cause. The others in the room—including several prominent donors and a handful of Republican senators—reacted enthusiastically that night. But when the consultant saw some of the same people a year later, their commitment had waned. The indignant donors, he said, had retreated to a cautious “wait and see” stance.

    This plague of self-deception among party elites contains obvious echoes of Trump’s early rise to power. In the run-up to the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, a fractured field of feckless candidates spent time and money attacking one another, convinced that the front-runner would eventually collapse. It was widely believed within the political class that such a ridiculous figure could simply never win a major party nomination, much less the presidency. Of course, by the time Trump’s many doubters realized they were wrong, it was too late.

    Terry Sullivan, who ran Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, told me that Trump’s rivals failed to beat him that year in large part because they were “always convinced that his self-inflicted demise was imminent.”

    “There is an old quote that has been attributed to Lee Atwater: ‘When your enemy is in the process of drowning, throw him a brick,’” Sullivan told me. “None of Donald Trump’s opponents ever have the balls to throw him the damn brick. They just hope someone else will. Hope isn’t a winning strategy.”

    For conservatives who want to prevent a similar fiasco in 2024, the emerging field of GOP presidential prospects might seem like cause to celebrate. After all, the healthiest way to rid their party of Trump would be to simply beat him. But a sprawling cast of challengers could just as easily end up splitting the anti-Trump electorate, as it did in 2016, and allow Trump to win primaries with a plurality of voters. It would also make coalescing around an alternative harder for party leaders.

    One current Republican representative told me that although most of his colleagues might quietly hope for a new nominee, few would be willing to endorse a non-Trump candidate early enough in the primary calendar to make a difference. They would instead “keep their powder dry” and “see what those first states do.” For all of Trump’s supposedly diminished political clout, he remains a strong favorite in primary polls, where he leads his nearest rival by about 15 points. And few of the other top figures in the party—Ron DeSantis, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley—have demonstrated an ability to take on Trump directly and look stronger for it.

    Meijer, who voted to impeach Trump after January 6 and went on to lose his 2022 primary to a far-right Trump loyalist, attributes Republican leaders’ current skittishness about confronting Trump to the party’s “ideological rootlessness.” The GOP’s defenestration of long-held conservative ideals in favor of an ad hoc personality cult left Republicans without a clear post-Trump identity. Combine that with what Meijer calls “the generalized cowardice of political figures writ large,” and you have a party in paralysis: “There’s no capacity [to say], ‘All right, let’s clean the slate and figure out what we stand for and build from there.’”

    Read: What the GOP does to its own dissenters

    Even if another Republican manages to capture the nomination, there’s no guarantee that Trump—who is not known for his grace in defeat—will go away. Last month, Trump caused a minor panic in GOP circles when he shared an article on Truth Social suggesting that he might run an independent spoiler campaign if his party refuses to back him in 2024. The Republicans I talked with said such a schism would be politically catastrophic for their party. No one had any ideas about how to prevent it.

    Meanwhile, the most enduring of GOP delusions—that Trump will transform into an entirely different person—somehow persists.

    When I asked Rob Portman about his party’s Trump problem, the recently retired Ohio senator confidently predicted that it would all sort itself out soon. The former president, he believed, would study the polling data, realize that other Republicans had a better shot at winning, and graciously bow out of 2024 contention.

    “I think at the end of the day,” Portman told me, “he’s unlikely to want to put himself in that position when he could be more of a Republican senior statesman who talks about the policies that were enacted in his administration.”

    I let out an involuntary laugh.

    “Maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part,” Portman conceded.

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    McKay Coppins

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  • “Election Denial Took It on the Chin”: Americans Bailed Out Democracy—For Now

    “Election Denial Took It on the Chin”: Americans Bailed Out Democracy—For Now

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    I got Jocelyn Benson on the phone the day after last fall’s midterms. I was expecting some exhaustion. It had been a long night of returns and a punishing election cycle, and I assumed that everyone was nursing the same kind of civic hangover I was. But the Michigan secretary of state was ebullient, still riding an adrenaline high from the night before. “Though we’re in the middle of this multiyear effort, this is a significant victory that we never got to celebrate in 2020,” Benson tells me. That year had also been a Democratic (and democratic) success: a high-turnout election, carried out in the chaos of a pandemic, that saw Joe Biden make Donald Trump a one-term president. But it was followed by weeks of challenges and frenzied protests, including an armed protest outside Benson’s own home that December as she put up Christmas decorations with her young son.

    Benson was sworn in to her second term in January after not only presiding over the highest-turnout midterm in her state’s history, but also decisively beating Kristina Karamo, her Republican challenger, who’d made lies and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election the centerpiece of her political identity. Her win—and those of other Democrats—hadn’t exactly extinguished Trump’s “big lie.” But it seemed they’d managed to get it somewhat contained.

    Observers had been bracing for a “tsunami” that would wash all manner of election deniers, conspiracy theorists, and pro-Trump radicals onto Capitol Hill, into statehouses and governor’s mansions and positions of power over the democratic process. Some of them are, in fact, now in office. But the red “tsunami”? That never quite crested.

    “We’ve had, in my view, three elections running—2018, 2020, and 2022—where the American electorate as a whole, but also state by state, county by county in some cases, has had this choice between democracy and autocracy, or democracy and Trumpery, on the ballot, and three times America has rejected it,” Norm Eisen, the Democratic impeachment counsel and Obama White House ethics czar, tells me.

    Raphael Warnock’s win in Georgia’s December runoffs cemented Democrats’ 51-seat Senate majority. Where some had anticipated a bloodbath similar to the one they suffered during Barack Obama’s first term, in 2010, Kevin McCarthy is instead navigating a razor-thin majority in the House (the challenges of which he became intimately familiar during his drawn out and chaotic speaker vote). And, perhaps most symbolically, Trump’s third presidential campaign is starting at perhaps the weakest point of his political career. His handpicked candidates badly underperformed; when Trump announced his 2024 White House bid exactly one week after the midterms, he did it as a growing contingent of Republicans grumbled about the drag his election denialism had on the GOP. “It’s never one thing, but I think that it’s clear that running on relitigating the 2020 election is not a winning strategy,” Senator John Thune of South Dakota said then. Well into January, his presidential campaign, which some who know him have speculated is having money issues, has had a muted start. 

    Americans “have widely divergent views on a broad array of topics, but not on democracy,” Eisen says. “As you go around the country, it’s clear that election denial took it on the chin.” It wasn’t eradicated from our politics, of course. But it seemed to be “substantially beaten back,” Eisen tells me. In Michigan, Democrats now control every branch of the state government for the first time in 38 years.

    In 2022, the process played out relatively peacefully—no mobs tried to break into vote-count centers in Detroit; no bullhorns outside Benson’s home; no kidnapping plots against Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The threats of intimidation at drop boxes, of pro-Trump partisans infiltrating election boards, of postelection chaos? There were scattered incidents, sure, but not enough to seriously shake the system. And those election deniers nearly two thirds of Americans had on their ballots? Most lost—and conceded as much.

    That’s a pretty low bar to clear, as election expert David Becker tells me. “We need to raise our expectations, to some degree,” says Becker, executive director at the Center for Election Innovation & Research and coauthor, with CBS News’s Major Garrett, of The Big Truth, an exploration of Trump’s election lies. “It’s good when candidates concede. It also should be expected.”

    But when democracy has been brought so close to the brink, perhaps even a small step away from the ledge can seem a tremendous relief. “We’re succeeding in communicating to voters how important it is to have leaders that will tell the truth and will stand up for democracy,” Benson says.

    The Democrats have managed to buck the usual electoral headwinds—headwinds made all the more powerful by uncertain economic times. But it remains to be seen how they will ultimately fare against the broader trend toward far-right authoritarianism, which has gained a foothold both in the US and across the globe. “We’ve all had a very intense lesson in how fragile our democracy is,” says Susan Stokes, director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago. “We don’t feel like we’ve lost it entirely. But we feel like we could.”

    That existential dread hasn’t evaporated in 2023. There are still the GOP-led state legislatures, many entrenched through gerrymandered maps, which have functioned for years as petri dishes for right-wing policy. There are new demagogues rising, including Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who was emboldened by a Republican sweep in his state’s 2022 vote, and the failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who was among the few who did refuse to concede when her race was called. And, of course, there’s the Supreme Court, whose conservative majority killed abortion rights in 2022 and could this year lend its imprimatur to the independent state legislature theory, the idea that legislatures should be empowered to override the popular vote, which underpinned Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss. During oral arguments in December, the conservative majority didn’t exactly dispel concerns they could ultimately embrace the fringe legal theory, though some justices did appear somewhat skeptical of it. There’s some new cause for anxiety as well: More than 200 antidemocratic candidates have either been sworn in or are about to be sworn in this year, including the secretaries of state in Indiana and Wyoming, giving proud election deniers control over their states’ election process. And while Trump was left humiliated and angry after the midterms, shame and rage are what powered his movement in the first place. Republicans, with control of the House, have already begun discussing their plans to impeach Biden. The GOP has passed up plenty of opportunities to actually move on from Trump. “There is a pro-democracy majority in the US,” Becker tells me. They may disagree on various issues, “but they agree the way to resolve those disputes is through the ballot box and our elected officials. But there is a significant minority in this country that doesn’t seem to believe that.”

    Even so, it may finally be time for the pro-democracy coalition to embrace a somewhat unfamiliar feeling: optimism. “On balance, the fearmongering on election denial…did not prevail, and I think that’s an extremely important signal,” says Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

    It’ll take some getting used to, maybe, to feel hopeful about politics after spending the better part of the decade batting back the relentless forces of Trumpism. But it may ultimately be necessary to actually, finally, eventually close this ugly chapter in our politics. “We’ve gotta be organizing for the long haul,” says Yasmin Radjy, executive director at Swing Left, a progressive group founded in response to Trump’s 2016 win. “This is a generational fight for our democracy.”

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    Eric Lutz

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  • Why Kevin McCarthy Can’t Lose George Santos

    Why Kevin McCarthy Can’t Lose George Santos

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    The Republican Party has had no better friend than Nassau County in the past few years.

    Of America’s largest counties, few have turned more sharply toward the GOP than New York City’s neighbor to the east. This collection of Long Island suburbs swept Democrats out of local office in 2021, and last fall, Nassau County voted resoundingly Republican in New York’s gubernatorial race. Most important for the national GOP, the county helped elect three Republicans to Congress, including two candidates who flipped Democratic seats in districts that President Joe Biden had carried in 2020.

    Representative George Santos was one of those recent winners, and now Nassau County Republicans are worried that his abrupt fall from grace will cost the GOP far more than the seat that his lies helped the party pick up in November. They want Santos to step down, even though that means his seat would be vacant until a special election later this year, which the Democrats would aggressively contest. Local Republicans are flummoxed that national party leaders, starting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, haven’t joined their united call for Santos to resign. And they see McCarthy’s continued tolerance of Santos as an attempt to hold on to a Republican vote in the near term without enough consideration for whether he’d lose it—and cause Republicans to lose many others—in the longer term.

    Tom Nichols: Amazingly, George Santos is a member of Congress

    “It’s the right thing to do morally, ethically, and politically,” former Representative Peter King, a Long Island Republican who represented the district next to Santos’s in the House for 28 years, told me about trying to oust Santos. “If you want to keep controlling the Congress, you can’t just have the short-sighted view that you need his vote next week or next month. You’re gonna lose all the votes in two years when you’re no longer in the majority.”

    With 2024 in mind, and as the list of Santos’s biographical fabrications grows (seemingly by the day), Nassau County’s GOP machine has treated the congressman-for-now as a boil to be lanced.

    “As far as I’m concerned, he’s nonexistent. I will not deal with him. I will not deal with his office,” Bruce Blakeman, the Republican who was elected Nassau County executive in 2021, told me. Last week, Blakeman joined a group of local GOP leaders, including county Republican Party Chairman Joseph Cairo and Representative Anthony Garbarino, in demanding that Santos resign.

    Yet for the moment, the political imperatives of Long Island Republicans no longer align with those of McCarthy, who plainly cannot afford to lose Santos’s vote with such a narrow margin in the House. Santos backed McCarthy in all 15 ballots for speaker earlier this month, and McCarthy’s allies rewarded him with a pair of committee assignments earlier this week. The new speaker said that Santos has “a long way to go to earn trust” but has made no move to sanction him.

    “The voters of his district have elected him. He is seated. He is part of the Republican conference,” McCarthy told reporters last week.

    Democrats have already filed a complaint about Santos with the House Ethics Committee, and he is under investigation by federal and local prosecutors in New York who are reportedly looking into whether he committed financial crimes or violated federal campaign-disclosure laws.

    Santos has defied calls to resign, and McCarthy might need his vote even more should another House Republican, Representative Greg Steube of Florida, miss an extended period of time after he sustained serious injuries from a 25-foot fall off a ladder earlier this week.

    McCarthy’s office did not respond to requests for comment. The National Republican Congressional Committee, which traditionally backs GOP incumbents, echoed McCarthy’s ambivalence toward Santos. “Voters in New York will have the final say on who represents them,” NRCC spokesperson Jack Pandol told me by email. “Rep. Santos will have to earn back their trust as he serves them in Congress.”

    Steve Israel: How a perfectly normal New York suburb elected a con man

    King and others in Nassau County are trying to impress upon McCarthy that the longer he stands by Santos, the more damage he will do to a Republican brand that has been on the rise. “The only reason Kevin McCarthy has the majority is because of the very close marginal seats that Republicans won in New York,” King said. “We can lose all of them in the next election.”

    Even if McCarthy wanted to force Santos out, however, there’s not much he can do. He could try to expel him, but that would take the support of two-thirds of the House, and members of both parties might be leery of setting precedent by kicking out a member who has not been charged, much less convicted, of a crime. King suggested that McCarthy insist on an expedited investigation by the Ethics Committee—the panel’s probes tend to drag on for months—but there’s little history of that either.

    Election to the House “is an unshakable contract for two years,” Doug Heye, a former House GOP leadership aide who has advised lawmakers ensnarled in ethics investigations, told me. “Unless two-thirds of the House say, ‘Get out of here,’ or you give it up yourself, nothing happens.”

    Santos has almost no incentive to leave of his own accord anytime soon, especially now that Long Island Republicans have all but foreclosed the possibility of his winning renomination to his seat. “He’s not going to have a career. He’s not going to have a public life, and he’s going to be ostracized in his own community,” Blakeman told me. Santos was wealthy enough to lend his campaign $700,000. But his present personal finances are, like so much else about his life, a mystery, so he may need the paychecks that come with a $174,000 annual salary. And his seat could be a crucial bit of leverage in potential negotiations with prosecutors, Heye noted; resigning his seat, in that scenario, could help him avoid other penalties, including prison time.

    As his struggle just to get the speakership demonstrated, McCarthy doesn’t exactly have an ironclad grip on his conference. The Republicans from Nassau County seem to realize that the new speaker has limited sway over Santos. But McCarthy’s decision to protect and even validate Santos’s standing inside Congress is at odds with a party clinging both to its House majority and to its precarious stronghold on Long Island. “I’ve dealt with people with all sorts of issues,” Blakeman told me,” and enabling them is not a good thing.”

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    Russell Berman

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  • Iowa GOP Official’s Wife Charged For Voter Fraud Scheme

    Iowa GOP Official’s Wife Charged For Voter Fraud Scheme

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    SIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP) — The wife of a northwestern Iowa county supervisor has been charged with 52 counts of voter fraud after she allegedly filled out and cast absentee ballots in her husband’s unsuccessful race for a Republican nomination to run for Congress in 2020, federal prosecutors said.

    Kim Phuong Taylor, 49, was arrested Thursday and pleaded not guilty to the charges before being released on a personal recognizance bond, the Sioux City Journal reported. Her trial is scheduled to begin March 20.

    Prosecutors allege in an indictment unsealed Thursday that Phuong Taylor filled out voter registration forms or delivered absentee ballots for people in Sioux City’s Vietnamese community who had limited ability to read and understand English.

    She filled out “dozens of voter registrations, absentee ballot request forms, and absentee ballots containing false information,” and delivered absentee ballots, sometimes without the knowledge of the people whose names were used, according to the indictment.

    Pat Gill, who is Woodbury County’s auditor and election commissioner, said Thursday that he notified the Iowa secretary of state’s office after someone contacted his office because a ballot had been fraudulently cast in their name in November 2020.

    He said his office later provided the FBI with suspected fraudulent registration forms and absentee ballots.

    Phuong Taylor committed the fraud before the June 2020 primary, in which her husband, Jeremy Taylor, a former Iowa House member, finished a distant third in the race for the Republican nomination to run for Iowa’s 4th District congressional seat, prosecutors allege. The winner of that race, Randy Feenstra, easily won election to Congress that November.

    Prosecutors contend that Phuong Taylor committed the same fraud before the November 2020 election in which Jeremy Taylor was elected to the Woodbury County Board, according to the indictment.

    Jeremy Taylor is not named in the indictment and is not accused of wrongdoing.

    Kim Phuong Taylor’s attorney, John Greer of Spencer, Iowa, declined to comment on the charges, the Journal reported.

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  • Brand New Florida GOP Rep. Cory Mills Jokes About Vicious Attack On Paul Pelosi

    Brand New Florida GOP Rep. Cory Mills Jokes About Vicious Attack On Paul Pelosi

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    A brand new Republican member of Congress from Florida tweeted a shocking joke about the 2022 vicious home invasion beating of 82-year-old Paul Pelosi, husband of former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

    “Finally,” slammed new Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.), “one less gavel in the Pelosi house for Paul to fight with in his underwear.”

    The ugly tweet was apparently Mills’ version of a celebration of the ascendency to House speaker of Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

    Mills was also making fun of the brutal attack on Paul Pelosi, who was beaten with a hammer in the middle of the night last October by a violent Republican sympathizer allegedly out to get a list of Democratic targets.

    Suspect David DePape pleaded not guilty last month to six criminal charges in the attack, including attempted murder and elder abuse.

    Officials said DePape had planned to kidnap Nancy Pelosi — who was in Washington at the time of the attack — when he broke into the couple’s San Francisco home. Instead, law enforcement authorities said the 42-year-old defendant severely beat her husband with a hammer in an attack that was witnessed by two police officers. The assault shocked America.

    Pelosi was knocked unconscious and woke up in a pool of his own blood. He underwent surgery to repair a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands.

    GOP conspiracists at the time spread wild conspiracy theories and tried in vain to baselessly spin the violence as a a gay tryst gone wrong.

    The message by Mills, who is an Army combat veteran, was retweeted by Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who said he wanted the public to “see the indecency that makes up the House GOP.”

    “He owes Speaker Pelosi an apology,” Swalwell added.

    Mills flippantly responded to Swalwell: “You owe America an apology.”

    Mills could not immediately be reached for comment.

    Mills was roundly bashed by critics. Twitter users’ responses to Mills appeared to be almost universally, scathingly negative.

    Mills apparently later deleted the tweet, but it had already been retweeted by countless aghast followers.

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  • Kevin McCarthy, Still Not Speaker

    Kevin McCarthy, Still Not Speaker

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    For the second day in a row, Kevin McCarthy suffered a remarkable humiliation in the House when he failed, repeatedly, to win enough votes among Republicans to become the next Speaker. Though, despite all odds, the California Republican maintains he’s hopeful that he will stop losing: “We will get 218, will solve our problems and we will all work together,” he told reporters, leaving the House floor to talk with his detractors.

    The scene on Wednesday was one of déjà vu. On Tuesday, a group of hard-right Republicans blocked McCarthy’s bid for speaker three times over. By midday Wednesday, the vote totals had not changed: 20 Republicans stood firmly in the anti-McCarthy camp. By the sixth vote, McCarthy’s campaign for 218 Republican votes only looked more doomed. On Tuesday these holdouts were voting en masse for Jim Jordan, who himself had personally nominated McCarthy for the post. On Wednesday, the group of GOP rebels held firm in their defiance of McCarthy, with a new alternate: Florida Republican Byron Donalds, nominated by Chip Roy, then by Lauren Boebert, then by Scott Perry. “The reality is Rep. Kevin McCarthy doesn’t have the votes,” Donalds, who became the 20th Republican member to switch his vote from McCarthy to Jordan on Tuesday, said. Donalds voted for himself Wednesday.

    Why Donalds? Roy said his nomination would be historic: for the first time, “there have been two Black Americans placed in nomination for the Speaker of the House”—a statement met with a standing ovation from both Republicans and Democrats. But Donalds’s nomination never seemed to be meant as some kind of consensus alternate, but rather a symbol of McCarthy’s failure. In the fourth round of voting, the same 20 Republicans that had defected the day prior cast their votes en masse for Donalds and one, Victoria Spartz—previously a McCarthy supporter—voted “present.” Colorado’s Ken Buck said to CNN, “what I’ve asked is that if Kevin can’t get there, that he step aside and give Steve a chance to do it.”

    It didn’t even matter that Donald Trump had both posted on Truth Social, and reportedly personally called the holdout Republicans, urging them to vote for McCarthy. “Even having my favorite president call us and tell us we need to knock this off—I think it actually needs to be reversed,” Boebert said on the House floor. “The president needs to tell Kevin McCarthy that, sir, you do not have the votes and it’s time to withdraw.” 

    By mid-afternoon, McCarthy and his allies were telling reporters that they wanted to pause the voting proceedings and negotiate behind closed doors. McCarthy told reporters he intends to “work” for more votes. According to CBS News’ Robert Costa, part of this push came from a place of fear: the more failed votes for McCarthy, the worse the situation could become for the California leader. Republicans expected some drama (McCarthy could only afford four Republican defections). “We all have family up here for the swearing-in,” one member told CNN’s Jake Tapper following Tuesday’s session. “Let’s just say many of us told our families to dress in their second best outfits today.” But the spectacle has been worse, perhaps, than even they could have imagined. By 5 p.m., the House pause its voting and gave Republicans times to deliberate.

    McCarthy is now the first Speaker candidate in a hundred years not to be voted in on the first ballot. As the realities have set in among Republicans, there is a growing appetite within the party’s ranks for an alternate, unifying candidate. Among the names being floated are Steve Scalise and Fred Upton. But McCarthy, whose ambitions for the speakership have been well documented for nearly a decade, remains undeterred.

    The race for Speaker has been a perfect picture of the GOP’s disarray. Republicans, fresh off an underperformance in the November midterms, were at least supposed to be able to celebrate their House majority. But instead of a victory lap, they are having a battle between the extreme Trump wing and the…well, very extreme Trump wing—all to the bemusement of the unified Democrats. 

    Tensions between Republicans have spilled into the open. Speaking with reporters on Wednesday, Dan Crenshaw didn’t hold back in criticizing the McCarthy holdouts in his party’s ranks. “I’m tired of your stupid platitudes that some consultant told you to say on the campaign trail, alright. Behind closed doors tell us what you actually want, or shut the fuck up,” he said of the 20 defectors to a reporter for The Washington Post. The proceedings have opened a new rift between Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and other hard-line defectors, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who somehow, against all odds, is practically sounding like an establishment Republican. “If the base only understood that 19 Republicans voting against McCarthy are playing Russian roulette with our hard earned Republican majority right now,” Greene tweeted. “This is the worst thing that could possibly happen.”

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    Abigail Tracy , Eric Lutz

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  • Kevin McCarthy’s Reckoning

    Kevin McCarthy’s Reckoning

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    Republicans today could take control of the House of Representatives, giving them a foothold of power in Washington from which to smother Joe Biden’s agenda and generally make life hell for the president and his family.

    Or they might not.

    It all depends on whether Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the GOP House leader, can lock down the final votes he needs to become speaker. As of this morning, McCarthy was short of the 218 required for a majority. He can afford to lose only four Republicans in the party-line vote if all members are present. So far, at least five and potentially more than a dozen far-right lawmakers remain opposed to McCarthy’s candidacy or are withholding their support.

    Should McCarthy falter on the first vote, to be taken shortly after the 118th Congress gavels into session at noon, the House would remain in a state of limbo. (Democrats and more than a few Republicans might call it purgatory.) Without a speaker, the House can do nothing. It cannot adopt the rules it will use to operate for the next two years; it cannot debate or pass legislation; it cannot form committees and name chairs; it cannot unleash the torrent of subpoenas that Republicans have vowed to send the Biden administration’s way. Without a speaker, in other words, the GOP has no majority.

    So for the moment, the functioning of the legislative branch depends on McCarthy’s ability to wrangle votes. And like any deadlocked negotiation on Capitol Hill, his—and the GOP’s—predicament could be resolved quickly, or it could endure for quite a while. If no candidate receives a majority of votes on the first ballot for speaker this afternoon—the only candidate who has a legitimate chance on that roll call is McCarthy—then the House must keep voting until someone does. McCarthy has said he will not drop out after the first ballot, effectively hoping to wear down his GOP opposition or cut deals that will secure him the votes he needs. (His office did not respond to a request for comment last night.) He has little hope of appealing to Democrats, who neither trust nor respect a Republican leader who has spent the past seven years cozying up to Donald Trump.

    Read: The new majority

    The vote for speaker is the most formal of congressional roll calls and lasts well over an hour. Beginning alphabetically by last name, the clerk calls out the name of each of the 435 members, who then reply verbally with the candidate of their choice. No speaker vote has gone to a second ballot in more than a century, leaving no modern precedent for what happens if McCarthy does not get the support of 218 members. He could strike a quick deal and win on a second ballot by nightfall, or the series of ballots could drag out for days or even weeks, especially if the House recesses so that Republicans can convene privately to figure out what to do.

    McCarthy is known for being affable but has no reputation for tactical or legislative brilliance. He has desperately tried to placate the five most ardent holdouts—a quintet that includes the Trump loyalist Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida—with concessions that would empower individual members at the expense of McCarthy’s sway as speaker. The most contentious of these involves what’s known as the “motion to vacate,” a mechanism by which members can force a vote to depose the speaker.

    Until recent years, the motion to vacate was a rarely used relic of procedural arcana. But in 2015, then-Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina—an ambitious conservative who would go on to greater notoriety as Trump’s final chief of staff—dusted off the motion to vacate and essentially pushed Speaker John Boehner into retirement. When Democrats regained the House majority in 2019, Nancy Pelosi, who’d once again ascended to the speakership, engineered a rules change so that only members of the party leadership could deploy the motion to vacate. McCarthy was hoping to keep that change largely in place, but his GOP opponents have demanded that the House revert to the old rules, which would make it much easier for them to oust the speaker as soon as he antagonized them (say, by going around conservatives to pass legislation with Democrats). Over the weekend, McCarthy told Republicans he’d be willing to create a five-member threshold for forcing a vote on the speaker—a significant move on his part but still not as far as his critics on the right would like.

    Although the speaker vote today could be the most suspenseful in memory, McCarthy himself is not in an unfamiliar position. In 2015, he was the presumed successor to Boehner, but a poorly timed gaffe and mistrust among conservatives forced him to withdraw before the vote. He seems intent on avoiding that fate this time around. Nonetheless, McCarthy’s opponents see him as a stooge of the party establishment that they ran to dismantle; they also just don’t seem to like him very much. As yet, McCarthy has no real challenger. But the hardline holdouts have teased a mystery candidate who could step forward on the second ballot, and McCarthy’s ostensibly loyal second-in-command, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, could emerge as a potential consensus choice.

    “Governance will be a challenge,” Oklahoma’s Tom Cole, a longtime Republican lawmaker and McCarthy ally, told me a couple months ago. He said it back when Republicans seemed to be on the verge of a resounding midterm victory, one that likely would have smoothed McCarthy’s path to the speakership. Now it sounds like a significant understatement.

    The high likelihood is that eventually, perhaps even today, Republicans will claim the narrow House majority that they won at the polls. But even if McCarthy squeaks by on the first or second ballot, the party’s struggle simply to organize itself behind a leader won’t soon be forgotten. It will stand as a painful reminder of the GOP’s electoral underperformance in November, and, almost certainly, it will serve as a harbinger of a rocky two years to come.

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    Russell Berman

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