Tag: senior adviser

The Governor Who Wants to Be Trump’s Next Apprentice

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As every politician knows, openly campaigning for the job of vice president is bad form. But Kristi Noem doesn’t seem to care.

Last week alone, the South Dakota governor sent out a dozen tweets praising Donald Trump. She went on Fox News’s Hannity to condemn attempts in Maine and Colorado to remove the former president from the ballot. And she hosted a get-out-the-caucus rally for him across the border in Iowa. “Show up for a couple hours and fight for the man that’s fought for you for years!” the 52-year-old governor told the crowd at the event in Sioux City. “The only reason that we have this country is because of the good that he did when he was in that White House—and how he still continues to tell the truth out there every single day.”

Asked by a reporter at the event whether she would consider the Trump VP slot, Noem smiled and replied, “I think anybody in this country, if they were offered it, needs to consider it.” Later, she retweeted the clip.

Noem’s name has been popping up on vice-presidential shortlists in the media—and in Republican focus groups—for a while now. The way that she has defended and mimicked Trump’s actions for the past several years suggests that as his VP, she would be more of an enabler than a moderating force—and aggressive on Trump’s behalf in a way that Mike Pence never was. Picking Noem as his running mate would signal that Trump will be even less willing in a second term to kowtow to the Republican establishment. Compared with two other names that also appear regularly in shortlists, Noem would be more comfortable in MAGA world than the GOP conference chair Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, but less kooky than the Trump loyalist and Senate candidate Kari Lake. Noem also has more actual governing experience than either.

Read: Trumpism has found its leading lady

It’s still early in the primary season. Republicans have yet to settle on a nominee, and although all signs point to Trump, even his own team claims it hasn’t officially begun the brainstorming process for a running mate. “Much too soon for any of that talk,” Jason Miller, a senior adviser on Trump’s campaign, told me. Typically, a VP candidate is not announced until around the time of the convention, months after the presidential primary is concluded. Unofficially, though, the audition process began long ago.

Noem will be “very competitive,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist, told me. “She’s burnishing her MAGA credentials, and the more she comes across as a fire-breathing populist, that’ll help her.” (The governor did not respond to my requests for an interview.)

Noem, a former farm girl and South Dakota beauty queen, was elected in 2018 as the state’s first female governor. Before that, she spent four years in the state legislature and another eight in the U.S. Congress as South Dakota’s sole House representative. But most Americans probably heard Noem’s name for the first time in 2020, when she made national news for her laissez-faire approach to the coronavirus pandemic.

Like most governors, at the start of the virus’s spread, Noem closed schools and ordered businesses to follow CDC guidelines. But quickly, taking cues from the Trump administration, she let up on those regulations. Noem never issued a statewide mask mandate, and she encouraged counties to return to business as usual sooner than other states did. She welcomed the return of the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in late summer of 2020, which ultimately resulted in “widespread transmission” of the virus throughout the Midwest, according to a study from the CDC. Her office used $5 million in pandemic-relief funds for an ad campaign promoting state tourism.

Her pandemic-era decisions were evidence of bold, freedom-loving leadership, Noem has said, and her handling of the crisis remains a top bragging point as she travels the country giving speeches and hosting fundraisers. In other ways, too, Noem has perfectly reflected the zeitgeist of the modern Republican Party. She has repeated Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.” In 2022, she signed legislation banning transgender girls and women from playing on female sports teams; last year, she called upon an adviser from the conservative Hillsdale College to rework the state’s social-studies curriculum as part of a broader effort to eliminate “critical race theory” from public schools. “She’s brought legislation that is increasingly far-right for South Dakota—more so than any previous governor,” Bob Mercer, a longtime journalist in the state’s capital, Pierre, told me.

Jonathan V. Last: Nikki Haley’s endgame

Noem has also seemed much more focused on securing national media attention than past state leaders. In 2020, she built the first TV studio in the state capitol, and she’s become a regular on Newsmax, Fox News, and other major conservative outlets. Last spring, she signed a gun-related executive order onstage during a speech at the annual NRA convention in Indiana. (In that address, Noem boasted that her 2-year-old granddaughter already had a shotgun and a rifle.)

She has also brought in several aides with national political experience, including the former Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski. And she kicked off a new national “Freedom Works Here” ad campaign that urges Americans living all over the country to move to South Dakota for jobs. Noem has starred in each of the spots, cosplaying as various members of the South Dakota workforce, including a welder, a plumber, and a nurse.

Trump has always favored a culture warrior, and Noem’s political choices alone are enough to warrant VP consideration. But the governor, who is married with three children, can also claim the kind of corn-fed American backstory that voters love and that most Republican politicians wish they had. She spent her childhood pulling calves and driving grain carts on the family farm. As a teenager, she was crowned South Dakota Snow Queen, and her 2022 memoir, Not My First Rodeo, is chock-full of folksy idioms and Bible verses; Noem’s political MO, she writes, citing Matthew’s Gospel, is to “be wise like snakes and gentle like doves.” The book also recounts her life’s biggest tragedy: When Noem was pregnant with her first child, her father was killed in a grain-bin accident, forcing her, she writes, to leave college and go home to run the farm. Noem ended up earning her college degree by taking online classes during her time in Congress.

Noem has always been adept at appealing to voters by using “the great mythology of America that you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” Michael Card, a political-science professor at the University of South Dakota, told me. Those rural bona fides could be effective if she makes the Republican presidential ticket. But gender could work in her favor at least as much.

“Trump is well aware of his deficiencies as a candidate,” Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist and the publisher of The Bulwark, told me. And his weakness among women voters—compounded by a penchant for baiting women he perceives as a challenge and the long list of sexual-harassment allegations against him—makes choosing a female running mate seem advisable. He’ll likely try to find “somebody who normalizes him somewhat,” Longwell said, and exploit “the excitement of a woman on the ticket, someone to push back on the idea that the party is sexist.” Bannon agreed: Trump’s MAGA movement is mostly woman-led, he claimed—“smart to engage that base and make your case to suburban women.”

Eric Schnurer: Kristi Noem’s National Guard deployment is America’s future

Noem has downsides as a VP contender. It’s not as though Trump would need her on the ticket to win over rural voters; they already love him. Vice-presidential candidates can be chosen to deliver a state that might not be in the nominee’s column, but South Dakota is a safe Republican state, and, with only three Electoral College votes, it’s not a particularly useful pickup. And although Noem has yet to come under national scrutiny, she’s already had her share of controversy. In the spring of 2022, a Republican-controlled panel of South Dakota lawmakers found that one of Noem’s daughters had received special treatment in an application for her real-estate-appraiser license. (Noem has denied any wrongdoing.) And last fall, the New York Post and the Daily Mail ran reports about an alleged affair between Noem and Lewandowski. (In response, the governor’s spokesperson dismissed the allegation as “a false and inflammatory tabloid rumor.”)

Trump has other options. He could run on a ticket with his current primary opponent Nikki Haley, as a way to appease moderate Republicans. The pairing doesn’t seem particularly plausible right now, given the sharp words both candidates have had for each other during this campaign, but Bannon sees it as a possibility—even if he and others in MAGA world don’t approve. “Haley has two constituencies—the Murdochs and the donors—and they are trying to buy her way on the ticket as VP,” he told me.

As for Noem’s other potential rivals for a Trump VP pick, a lawmaker with Stefanik’s Ivy League credentials and political experience on the ticket could help Trump shore up support from moderates, some strategists said. “Elise could at least pass as somebody who eats with a fork in Washington circles but would satisfy the MAGA base,” Jeff Timmer, a Republican strategist and senior adviser at the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, told me. But Stefanik perhaps has to work harder to win over the MAGA crowd—she was dutifully parroting Trump’s lines on Meet the Press this weekend by referring to the convicted January 6 rioters as “hostages.” Aside from Lake, the former newscaster and failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate whom I profiled in 2022, other women who could get consideration include Senator Katie Britt of Alabama and Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.

If Trump has secured the nomination, the VP-selection process could look very different from the way it did eight years ago. Back then, Trump was still looking to consolidate support among Republicans; now his lock on the party is airtight, unquestionable. “He gets to pick whoever he wants,” Timmer said. Which makes competition for the spot pretty unpredictable: Trump could follow his gut and pick a MAGA-style politician and relative outsider like Noem, or make a more strategic choice with a GOP insider like Stefanik. Regardless of whether Republican leaders like either, “they’re gonna smile and go along with it.”

One thing is certain: No candidate will be considered for the Trump VP slot without having demonstrated sycophantic devotion to the former president—a willingness to defend him no matter what. Noem is not the only one to clear that bar, but she has jumped higher than most.

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Elaine Godfrey

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January 10, 2024
A Military Loyal to Trump

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If Donald Trump wins the next election, he will attempt to turn the men and women of the United States armed forces into praetorians loyal not to the Constitution, but only to him. This project will likely be among his administration’s highest priorities. It will not be easy: The overwhelming majority of America’s service people are professionals and patriots. I know this from teaching senior officers for 25 years at the Naval War College. As president, Trump came to understand it too, when he found that “his generals” were not, in fact, mere employees of a Trump property.

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But the former president and the people around him have learned from that experience. The last time around, Trump’s efforts to pack the Defense Department with cranks and flunkies came too late to bring the military under his full political control. The president and his advisers were slow-footed and disorganized, and lacked familiarity with Washington politics. They were hindered as well by the courage and professionalism of the military officers and civilian appointees who, side by side, serve in the Defense Department.

Trump now nurses deep grudges against these officers and civilians, who slow-rolled and smothered his various illegal and autocratic impulses, including his enraged demand to kill the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2017, and his desire to deploy America’s military against its own citizens during the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020.

The 2020 election, of course, is the source of Trump’s chief grudge against senior military leaders. General Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was especially determined to keep the armed forces out of the various schemes to stay in office devised by the Trump team and its allies, including a delusional plan, proposed by retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, to have the military go into swing states and seize voting machines. Trump has since implied (in response to a profile of Milley by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg) that Milley should get the death penalty. Milley reportedly believes that Trump, if reelected, will try to jail him and other senior national-security figures, a concern shared by former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

From the November 2023 issue: Jeffrey Goldberg on how Mark Milley held the line

In a second term, Trump would combine his instincts for revenge and self-protection. He would seek not only to get even with an officer corps that he thinks betrayed him, but also to break the military as one of the few institutions able to constrain his attempts to act against the Constitution and the rule of law.

Publicly, Trump presents himself as an unflinching advocate for the military, but this is a charade. He has no respect for military people or their devotion to duty. He loves the pomp and the parades and the salutes and the continual use of “sir,” but as retired Marine General John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, said in 2023, Trump “couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably” when he was in office. Privately, as Goldberg has reported, Trump has called American war dead “losers” and “suckers,” and has said that wounded warriors are disgusting and should be kept out of sight.

Trump instead prizes military people who serve his ego and support his antidemocratic instincts. He thinks highly of Flynn, for example, who had to resign after 22 days as national security adviser and is now the marquee attraction at various gatherings of Christian nationalists and conspiracy theorists around the country. In late 2020, angered by his election loss and what he saw as the disloyalty within the national-security community, Trump fired or forced out top Defense Department leaders and tried to replace them with people more like Flynn. The brazen actions that the 45th president took in his final, desperate weeks in office—however haphazard—illustrate the magnitude of the threat he may pose to the military if he is reelected.

On November 9, 2020, Trump dumped Esper and named Christopher Miller, a retired colonel and Pentagon bureaucrat, as acting secretary of defense. Miller took along Kash Patel, a Trump sycophant, as his chief of staff. Trump sent Douglas Macgregor, another retired colonel and a pro-Russia Fox News regular, to Miller as a senior adviser. (Earlier, Trump had attempted and failed to make Macgregor the ambassador to Germany.) Trump installed Anthony Tata—a retired one-star Army general who has claimed that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that a former CIA director was trying to have Trump assassinated—in the third-most-senior job at the Pentagon. A few months earlier, the Senate had wisely declined to confirm Tata’s appointment to that position, but in November, Trump gave him the job in an acting capacity anyway.

These moves, among others, led all 10 living former secretaries of defense to issue a startling and unprecedented joint statement. On January 3, 2021, they directly enjoined Miller and his subordinates to uphold their constitutional duty and “refrain from any political actions that undermine the results of the election or hinder the success of the new team.” The letter pointedly reminded Miller and his team that they were “bound by oath, law and precedent,” and called upon them, “in the strongest terms,” to honor “the history of democratic transition in our great country.”

If reelected, Trump would attempt to gain authoritarian control of the Defense Department’s uppermost levels from the very beginning. There are more Anthony Tatas and Douglas Macgregors out there, and Trump’s allies are likely already seeking to identify them. If the Senate refused to confirm Trump’s appointees, it wouldn’t matter much: Trump has learned that he can keep rotating people through acting positions, daring the Senate to stop him.

The career civil servants underneath these appointees—who work on everything from recruiting to nuclear planning—would disobey Trump if he attacked the constitutional order. These civilians, by law, cannot be fired at will, a problem Trump tried to remedy in the last months of his administration by proposing a new category of government appointments (Schedule F) that would have converted some of the most important civil-service positions into political appointments directly controlled by the White House. President Joe Biden immediately repealed this move after taking office, but Trump has vowed to reinstate it.

Read: Trump’s open plot to dismantle the federal government

In his two-pronged offensive to capture the military establishment while eviscerating the civil service, Trump would likely rely on former officers such as Miller and fringe-dwelling civilians such as Patel, but he would also almost certainly find at least a few serving senior officers—he would not need many—who would accept his offer to abandon their oath. Together, they would make a run at changing the nature of the armed forces.

This is not abstract theorizing. The Heritage Foundation recently released “Project 2025,” a right-wing blueprint for the next Republican president’s administration. The Defense Department chapter was written by none other than former Acting Secretary Christopher Miller. It is mostly a rationalization for more spending, but it includes a clear call for a purge of the military’s senior ranks to clean out “Marxist indoctrination”—an accusation he does not define—along with demands for expelling trans service members and reinstating those service members who were dismissed for refusing COVID vaccinations.

The problems of ideological polarization and extremism in the armed forces are not as extensive as some critics of the military imagine, but they are more worrisome than the military leadership would like to admit. Military officers tend to be more conservative than the public, and as far back as the Clinton and Obama administrations, I occasionally heard senior officers speak of these liberal presidents in deeply contemptuous terms (potentially a crime under military regulations). Today, military bases are subjected to a constant barrage of Fox News in almost every area with a television, and toward the end of my teaching career (I retired in 2022), I often heard senior officers repeating almost verbatim some of the most overheated and paranoid talking points about politics and national affairs from the network’s prime-time hosts. Some of these officers would be tempted to answer Trump’s call.

The rest of the members of the professional military, despite their concerns, would likely follow their instincts and default to the orders of their chain of command. The American political system was never intended to cope with someone like Trump; the military is trained and organized to obey, not resist, the orders of the civilian commander in chief.

Trump’s plans would likely use this obedience to the chain of command to exploit an unfortunate vulnerability in the modern American armed forces: The military, in my experience, has a political-literacy problem. Too many people in uniform no longer have a basic grounding in the constitutional foundation of American government and the civil-military relationship. (Some of my colleagues who teach in senior-military educational institutions share this concern, and over the years, some of us have tried, often in vain, to push more study of the Constitution into the curricula.) These men and women are neither unintelligent nor disloyal. Rather, like many Americans, they are no longer taught basic civics, and they may struggle with the line between executing the orders of the president as the commander in chief and obeying the Constitution.

Trump’s appointees also would be able to influence the future of the armed forces through assignments and promotions (and non-promotions) within each branch—and through their behavior as examples to the rest of the military. With top cover from the White House, Trump’s functionaries in the Pentagon, working with his supporters in the ranks, could poison the military for years to come by ignoring laws, regulations, and traditions as they see fit. (Recall, for example, that Trump is an admirer of the disgraced Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, and intervened to make sure Gallagher kept his SEAL Trident after he was charged with war crimes and found guilty of posing for photos with a captive’s dead body.) America’s military is built on virtues such as honor and duty, but abusing and discarding the norms that support those virtues would change the military’s culture—and faster than we may realize.

Even if only some of the actions I’ve described here succeed, any number of disasters might follow. Trump could jeopardize national security by surrounding himself with military and defense officials who would help him dissolve our alliances (especially NATO), weaken our military readiness, undermine our intelligence services, and abandon our friends around the world, all while he seeks closer relations with authoritarian regimes—especially Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He could issue illegal orders to engage in torture or to commit other war crimes overseas. And he could bring the entire planet to disaster should senior military leaders obey his unhinged orders to kill foreign leaders, start a war, or even use nuclear weapons.

From the January/February 2024 issue: Anne Applebaum on how Trump will abandon NATO

At home, Trump could order unconstitutional shows of military support for his administration to intimidate his opponents. He could order American soldiers into the streets against protesters. (Trump’s allies are reportedly drawing up plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on Inauguration Day to quell any demonstrations against his return to office.) Officers refusing such orders could be dismissed or reassigned, which in turn could provoke a political confrontation between the Trump loyalists in the high command and the rest of the armed forces, itself a frightening and previously unthinkable prospect.

And if Trump succeeds in simultaneously capturing the U.S. military while gutting the other key institutions that protect democracy—especially the courts and the Justice Department—nothing will stop him from using force to put down opposition and stay in power.

Some Americans fear that the United States is already in a struggle with fascism. The firm constitutional loyalty of the armed forces during Trump’s presidency was a reminder that such fears are overblown, at least for the moment. But Trump and his allies understand that by leaving the military outside their political control the last time around, they also left intact a crucial bulwark against their plans. They will not make the same mistake twice.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “A Military Loyal to Trump.”

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Tom Nichols

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December 8, 2023
The Book-Bans Debate Has Finally Reached a Turning Point

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Across multiple fronts, Democrats and their allies are stiffening their resistance to a surge of Republican-led book bans.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the past month have conspicuously escalated their denunciations of the book bans proliferating in schools across the country, explicitly linking them to restrictions on abortion and voting rights to make the case that “MAGA extremists” are threatening Americans’ “personal freedom,” as Biden said in the recent video announcing his campaign for a second term.

Last week, Illinois became the first Democratic-controlled state to pass legislation designed to discourage local school districts from banning books. And a prominent grassroots progressive group today will announce a new national campaign to organize mothers against the conservative drive to remove books and censor curriculum under the banner of protecting “parents’ rights.”

“We are not going to let the mantle of parents’ rights be hijacked by such an extreme minority,” Katie Paris, the founder of the group, Red Wine and Blue, told me.

These efforts are emerging as red states have passed a wave of new laws restricting how classroom teachers can talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation, as well as measures making it easier for critics to pressure schools to remove books from classrooms and libraries. Partly in response to those new statutes, the number of banned books has jumped by about 30 percent in the first half of the current school year as compared with last, according to a recent compilation by PEN America, a free-speech group founded by notable authors.

To the frustration of some local activists opposing these measures in state legislatures or school boards, the Biden administration has largely kept its distance from these fights. Nor did Democrats, while they controlled Congress, mount any sustained resistance to the educational constraints spreading across the red states.

But the events of the past few weeks suggest that this debate has clearly reached a turning point. From grassroots organizers like Paris to political advisers for Biden, more Democrats see book bans as the weak link in the GOP’s claim that it is upholding “parents’ rights” through measures such as restrictions on curriculum or legislation targeting transgender minors. A national CBS poll released on Monday found overwhelming opposition among Americans to banning books that discuss race or criticize U.S. history. “There is something about this idea of book banning that really makes people stop and say, ‘I may be uncomfortable with some of this transitional treatment kids are getting, and I don’t know how I feel about pronouns, but I do not want them banning books,’” says Guy Molyneux, a Democratic pollster.

The conservative call to uphold parents’ rights in education has intensified since Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin in 2021 unexpectedly won the governorship in blue-leaning Virginia partly behind that theme. In the aftermath of long COVID-related shutdowns across many school districts, Youngkin’s victory showed that “Republicans really did tap into an energy there” by talking about ways of “giving parents more of a choice in education,” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center who specializes in family issues, told me.

But as the parents’-rights crusade moved through Republican-controlled states, it quickly expanded well beyond academic concerns to encompass long-standing conservative complaints that liberal teachers were allegedly indoctrinating kids through “woke” lessons.

Read: How Democrats avoided a red wave

New red-state laws passed in response to those arguments have moved the fight over book banning from a retail to a wholesale level. Previously, most book bans were initiated by lone parents, even if they were working with national conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty, who objected to administrators or school boards in individual districts. But the new statutes have “supercharged” the book-banning process, in PEN’s phrase, by empowering critics to simultaneously demand the removal of more books in more places. Five red states—Florida, Texas, Missouri, South Carolina, and Utah—have now become the epicenter of book-banning efforts, the study concluded.

Biden and his administration were not entirely silent as these policies proliferated. He was clear and consistent in denouncing the initial “Don’t Say Gay” law that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis passed to bar discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in early grades. But that was the exception. Even during the 2022 campaign, when Biden regularly framed Republicans as a threat to voting and abortion rights, he did not highlight red-state book bans and curriculum censorship. Apart from abortion and voting, his inclination has been to focus his public communications less on culture-war disputes than on delivering kitchen-table benefits to working families. Nor had Education Secretary Miguel Cardona done much to elevate these issues either. “We have not seen a lot of visibility” from the Education Department, says Nadine Farid Johnson, PEN’s managing director for Washington.

The administration’s relative disengagement from the classroom wars, and the limited attention from national progressive groups, left many grassroots activists feeling “isolated,” Paris said. Revida Rahman, a co-founder of One WillCo, an organization that advocates for students of color in affluent and predominantly white Williamson County, south of Nashville, told me that the group has often felt at a disadvantage trying to respond to conservative parents working with national right-leaning groups to demand changes in curriculum or bans on books with racial or LGBTQ themes. “What we are fighting is a well-funded and well-oiled machine,” she told me, “and we don’t have the same capacity.”

Pushback from Democrats and their allies, though, is now coalescing. Earlier this month, the Freedom to Learn initiative, a coalition organized mostly by Black educators, held a series of events, many on college campuses, protesting restrictions on curriculum and books. The Red Wine and Blue group is looking to organize a systematic grassroots response. Founded in 2019, the organization has about 500,000 mostly suburban mothers in its network and paid organizers in five states. The group has already provided training for local activists to oppose curriculum censorship and book bans, and today it is launching the Freedom to Parent 21st Century Kids project, a more sweeping counter to conservative parents’-rights groups. The project will include virtual training sessions for activists, programs in which participants can talk with transgender kids and their parents, and efforts to highlight banned books. “We want to equip parents to talk about this stuff,” Paris told me. “It’s moms learning from moms who already faced this in their community.”

Illinois opened another front in this debate with its first-in-the-nation bill to discourage book banning. The legislation will withhold state grants from school districts unless they adopt explicit policies to prohibit banning books in response to partisan or ideological pressure. Democratic Governor J. B. Pritzker has indicated that he will sign the bill.

Read: The contradictions of Ron DeSantis

Potentially the most consequential shift has come from the Biden administration. The president signaled a new approach in his late-April announcement video, when he cited book bans as evidence for his accusation that Republicans in the Donald Trump era are targeting Americans’ “personal freedom.” That was, “by far, the most we have seen on” book bans from Biden, Farid Johnson told me.

One senior adviser close to Biden told me that the connection of book bans to those more frequent presidential targets of abortion and democracy was no accident. “There is a basic American pushback when people are told what they can and cannot do,” said the adviser, who asked for anonymity while discussing campaign strategy. “Voters,” the adviser said, “don’t like to be told, ‘You can’t make a decision about your own life when it comes to your health care; you can’t make a decision about what book to read.’ I think book bans fit in that broader context.”

Biden may sharpen that attack as soon as Saturday, when he delivers the commencement address at Howard University. Meanwhile, Vice President Harris has already previewed how the administration may flesh out this argument. In her own speech at Howard last month, she cited book bans and curriculum censorship as components of a red-state social regime that the GOP will try to impose nationwide if it wins the White House in 2024. In passing these laws, Republicans are not just “impacting the people” of Florida or Texas, she said. “What we are witnessing—and be clear about this—is there is a national agenda that’s at play … Don’t think it’s not a national agenda when they start banning books.”

The Education Department has also edged into the fray. When the recent release of national test scores showed a decline in students’ performance on history, Cardona, the education secretary, issued a statement declaring that “banning history books and censoring educators … does our students a disservice and will move America in the wrong direction.”

His statement came months after the department’s Office of Civil Rights launched an investigation that could shape the next stages of this struggle. The office is probing whether a Texas school district that sweepingly removed LGBTQ-themed books from its shelves has violated federal civil-rights laws. The department has not revealed anything about the investigation’s status, but PEN’s Farid Johnson said if it concludes that the removals violated federal law, other districts might be deterred from banning books.

The politics of the parents’-rights debate are complex. Republicans are confident that their interconnected initiatives related to education and young people can win back suburban voters, especially mothers, who have rejected the party in the Trump era. Polling, including surveys done by Democratic pollsters last year for the American Federation of Teachers, has consistently found majority national support for some individual planks in the GOP agenda, including the prohibitions on discussing sexual orientation in early grades.

Brown said he believes that at the national level, the battle over book bans is likely to end in a “stalemate.” That’s not only, he argued, because each side can point to examples of extreme behavior by the other in defending or removing individual books, but also because views on what’s acceptable for kids vary so much from place to place. “We shouldn’t expect a national consensus on what book is appropriate for a 13-year-old to be reading, because that’s going to be different among different parents in different communities,” Brown told me.

Yet as the awakening Democratic resistance suggests, many in the party are confident that voters will find the whole of the GOP agenda less attractive than the sum of its parts. In that 2022 polling for the teachers’ union, a significant majority of adults said they worry less that kids are being taught values their parents don’t like than that culture-war fights are diverting schools from their real mission of educating students. Paris said the most common complaint she hears from women drawn to her group is that the conservative activists proclaiming parents’ rights are curtailing the freedoms of other parents by trying to dictate what materials all students can access. “What you’ll have women in our communities say all the time is ‘If you don’t want your kid to read a book, that’s fine, but you don’t get to decide for me and my family,’” she told me.

The White House, the senior official told me, believes that after the Supreme Court last year rescinded the right to abortion, many voters are uncertain and uneasy about what rights or liberties Republicans may target next. “There is a fear about Where does it stop?,” the official said, and book bans powerfully crystallize that concern. Trump and DeSantis, who’s expected to join the GOP race, have both indicated that they intend to aggressively advance the conservative parents’-rights agenda of attacks on instruction they deem “woke” and books they consider indecent. Biden and other Democrats, after months of hesitation, are stepping onto the field against them. The library looms as the next big confrontation in the culture war.

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Ronald Brownstein

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May 10, 2023
A Rare Reprieve From the Permanent Presidential Campaign

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Does anyone want to be president?

Typically, by the time a president delivers the State of the Union address at the start of his third year in office, as Joe Biden will on Tuesday, at least half a dozen rivals are already gunning for his job. When Donald Trump began his annual speech to Congress in 2019, four of the Democrats staring back at him inside the House chamber had already declared their presidential candidacies.

Not so this year. The only Republican (or Democrat, for that matter) officially trying to oust Biden is the former president he defeated in 2020. Trump announced his third White House run in November and then barely bothered to campaign for the next two months before holding relatively small-scale events in New Hampshire and South Carolina in January. Trump will finally get some company next week, when Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, plans to kick off her campaign in Charleston. More Republicans could soon jump into the presidential pool. But the 2024 campaign has gotten off to a decidedly slow start, and the first weeks of 2023 have brought a rare reprieve from what has become known—with some derision—as the permanent campaign. This pause is not the result of some collective cease-fire; it’s what happens when you have a former president who lost reelection but still inspires fear in his party, along with a Democratic incumbent—the oldest to ever serve—who is not exactly itching to campaign.

Even New Hampshire—normally one of the first states to welcome would-be presidents—has been subdued. “Other than Trump, I can’t think of a leading person being here for the last couple of months,” Raymond Buckley, the longtime chair of the state’s Democratic Party, told me. He said he’s used the lull to prioritize party building, “instead of constantly focusing on one Republican senator or governor after another.”

The same is true in Iowa, that other presidential proving ground with a year-round appetite for stump speeches. “It’s pretty quiet on the western front,” David Oman, a Republican strategist and former co-chair of the Iowa state GOP, told me. As my colleague McKay Coppins recently reported, most of the Republicans who want the party to nominate someone other than Trump are, once again, reluctant to actually do anything about it. Trump’s potential GOP rivals have been similarly shy about taking him on; until Haley put out word about her announcement last week, no one in the emerging field—which could include Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, among others—was willing to be the first target of the barrage of insults and invective Trump would surely hurl their way.

Read: Republicans’ 2024 magical thinking

The momentary quietude has dampened any pressure for Biden to shift back into campaign mode, and he’s in no rush anyway. Tuesday’s State of the Union address will likely yield even more performance reviews than usual, as pundits and viewers alike judge the toll that Biden’s advancing age has taken on his oratory. As for the substance of his speech, White House officials told me Biden will continue the project he began months ago: promoting the accomplishments of his first two years in office, especially his bipartisan infrastructure law and the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act that he signed last summer.

In the absence of a fully formed GOP presidential field, Biden has been content to use the new House Republican majority as a foil—adopting a strategy that Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama employed after Democrats lost power in Congress during their first terms. Biden has vowed to protect programs such as Medicare and Social Security from GOP budget cuts; refused to negotiate over the debt ceiling (although the White House said last week he’d entertain “separate” conversations on deficit reduction); and eagerly highlighted ill-fated GOP proposals to replace the federal income tax with a 30 percent national sales tax.

Yet with Speaker Kevin McCarthy seated behind the president on the House rostrum for the first time, Biden is expected to stress conciliation over confrontation. “The president will once again amplify his belief that Democrats and Republicans can work together,” a White House official told me, speaking anonymously to preview a speech that hasn’t been finalized, “as they did in the last two years and as he is committed to doing with this new Congress to get big things done on behalf of the American people.”

Biden allies expect the president to formally announce his reelection bid sometime after the State of the Union, but they note that could still be months away. Such a wait isn’t unusual for incumbents, who don’t need to introduce themselves to the electorate and generally want to be seen as focused on governing. But no president since Ronald Reagan has faced as much uncertainty about whether he would seek a second term. (Then the oldest president, Reagan was eight years younger in 1983 than the 80-year-old Biden is now.) Outgoing Chief of Staff Ron Klain pointedly referenced a reelection bid as he departed the White House last week, telling Biden he looked forward to supporting him “when you run for president in 2024.” But other White House officials routinely affix the qualifier “if he runs” to discussions about a potential campaign, suggesting it remains less than a sure thing.

Franklin Foer: How Joe Biden wins again

Aiding Biden is the fact that no Democrats of note (besides Marianne Williamson) have made any moves to challenge him for the nomination, and the president’s allies are operating under the assumption that he will have the field to himself. “I would be shocked at this point if this becomes a competitive primary,” Amanda Loveday, a senior adviser to the pro-Biden super PAC Unite the Country, told me.

The bigger question is how many Republicans will challenge Biden knowing they’ll have to get through Trump first—and when they’ll see fit to jump in. GOP officials told me they expect Haley’s announcement to prompt others to enter the race soon. But Trump clearly froze the field for a while. All through 2021 and most of 2022, Buckley told me, “rarely a week went by without a major visit” to New Hampshire from a White House aspirant. “It all came to a grinding halt once Trump announced,” he said. Jeff Kaufmann, the Republican Party chair in Iowa, told me that the first months of 2021—the brief period after January 6 when Trump’s political future was in doubt—were busier for GOP hopefuls than this past January, just a year before the caucuses.

For most of American history, the observation that barely anyone was campaigning more than a year and a half before the election would be entirely unremarkable. Only in this century has a two-year campaign for a four-year term in the White House become the norm. (As recently as 1992, the governor of a small southern state declared his candidacy only 14 months before the election, and he did just fine.)

For most of the country, this respite from presidential politics is probably welcome, especially for voters who were inundated with nonstop campaign ads leading up to the midterm election. The view is a bit different, however, in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the quadrennial pilgrimage of politicos brings welcome attention and a sizable economic boost. Republicans in both states want to ensure that the GOP does not follow the Democrats in trying to leave them behind. Kaufmann told me he wasn’t worried; Senator Tim Scott would be coming out to Iowa in a few weeks, and others were calling to schedule events, perhaps preparing their launches. By March, he assured me, all would be back to normal. This extended presidential halftime will be over, and America’s never-ending campaign will resume in full.

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Russell Berman

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February 4, 2023
The House GOP’s Investigation Conundrum

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The list of investigative priorities for the House Judiciary Committee that the incoming chairperson, Jim Jordan, sent to the Justice Department earlier this month reads like an assignment sheet for Fox News.

And that was before Jordan, with incoming House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair James Comer, repeatedly insisted the FBI had colluded with “Big Tech” to undermine former president Donald Trump by “suppressing” information about Hunter Biden’s laptop prior to the 2020 election.

It was also before reports surfaced that Kevin McCarthy, in his bid to secure the votes as speaker, promised far-right members of his caucus that he would authorize investigations into the Justice Department’s treatment of the insurrectionists who rioted in support of Trump on January 6. This was also before McCarthy threatened to launch impeachment proceedings against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Two months before taking power, the new House Republican majority has signaled that its investigative agenda will channel the preoccupations of the former president and his die-hard base of supporters. But it has set this course immediately after a midterm election in which voters outside the core conservative states sent an unmistakable signal of their own by repeatedly rejecting Trump-backed candidates in high-profile senate and gubernatorial races. That contrast captures why the GOP’s plans for aggressive investigations of President Joe Biden may present as much political risk for the investigators as it does for the targets.

Read: The new majority

House Republicans and their allies are confident that the investigations will weaken Biden in advance of the 2024 presidential election. “This is not just superficial stuff—this is damaging stuff,” former Republican Representative Tom Davis, who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, told me.

But the new majority’s focus on airing echo-chamber conservative obsessions risks further stamping the GOP as the party of Trump precisely as more Republican leaders and donors insist the recent election results demonstrate the need to move beyond him.

“All these folks are coming out saying, ‘Turn the page; move forward’ … and I think this is really a problem if some of these [House] members are going to continue to look back and embrace Trump at a time when we saw the most Trumpian candidates get their heads handed to them,” former Republican Representative Charlie Dent told me.

The choices confronting GOP leaders on what—and how—to investigate encapsulates the much larger challenge they will face in managing the House. This month’s midterm election left the GOP with a House majority much smaller than it expected. The results also created a kind of split-personality caucus operating with very different political incentives.

Most incoming House Republicans represent districts in Trump country: 168 of them hold seats that Trump won by 10 percentage points or more in 2020. Another three dozen represent more marginal Republican-leaning seats that Trump carried by fewer than 10 points two years ago.

But the GOP majority relies on what will likely be 18 members (when all the final votes are counted) who won districts that voted for Biden in 2020. Eleven of those 18 are in New York and California alone—two states that will likely become considerably more difficult for Republicans in a presidential-election year than during a midterm contest.

For the Republicans from the hard-core Trump districts, demonstrating a commitment to confronting Biden at every turn is crucial for preempting any possible primary challenges from their right, says the Democratic consultant Meredith Kelly, a former communications director at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. But, as Dent told me, the Republicans precariously holding the Biden seats have the “polar opposite” incentive: “They need to have bipartisan victories and wins.”

Amid that cross-pressure, many analysts second the prediction of outgoing Democratic Representative David Price of North Carolina, a political scientist who has written several books about Congress, that the new GOP House majority is not likely to pass much legislation. The problem, Price told me, is not only the partisan and ideological fracture in the GOP caucus, but that its members do not have “an agenda that they campaigned on or they are committed to.”

All members of the GOP caucus might agree on legislation to extend the Trump tax cuts, to promote more domestic energy production, or to increase funding for border security. But resistance from the Republicans in blue and purple districts may frustrate many of the right’s most ambitious legislative goals, such as repealing elements of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, passing a national ban on abortion, and forcing cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

With their legislative opportunities limited, House Republicans may see relentless investigation of Biden and his administration as a path of least resistance that can unite their caucus. And, several observers in both parties told me, all sides in the GOP are likely to support efforts to probe the White House’s policy record. Such targets could include the administration’s handling of border security, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and how it is allocating the clean-energy tax credits and loan guarantees that the Inflation Reduction Act established.

But Republicans have already indicated they are unlikely to stop at such conventional targets.

Jordan, in his letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this month, warned of coming investigations into the Justice Department’s treatment of Project Veritas; allegations that the department has targeted conservative parents as “domestic terrorists” for their actions at school-board meetings; and the department’s decision making in the choice to execute a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago.

At the press conference last week with Jordan, Comer declared that evidence from the GOP’s investigation of Hunter Biden’s business activities, including information obtained from his laptop, “raises troubling questions about whether President Biden is a national-security risk.”

Jordan, asked at that press conference about the reports that McCarthy has committed to an investigation of the prosecution and treatment of the January 6 rioters, refused to deny it, instead repeating his determination to explore all examples of alleged politicization at the Justice Department. At one point, Jordan, an unwavering defender of Trump through his two impeachments, delivered an impassioned attack on federal law enforcement that reprised a long list of familiar Trump grievances. “When is the FBI going to quit interfering with elections?” Jordan excitedly declared.

David Frum: Another flop from GOP Productions

Jordan doesn’t even represent the outer edge of conservative ambition to use House investigations to settle scores for Trump. Earlier this week, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida tweeted that when Republicans take the majority, they “should take over the @January6thCmte and release every second of footage that will exonerate our Patriots!”

That might be a bridge too far even for McCarthy. But as he scrambles to overcome conservative resistance to his bid for speaker, he has already shown deference to demands from the Trump-country members who constitute the dominant block in his caucus. One example was the report that he promised Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene that he would allow some investigation into treatment of the January 6 rioters. Another came in his appearance along the Texas border this week. McCarthy went beyond pledging oversight of the Biden administration’s border record to raise the much more incendiary (but also Fox-friendly) notion of impeaching Mayorkas.

Dent, the former GOP representative, told me that on all these fronts, House Republicans risk pushing oversight to a confrontational peak that may damage its members from marginal seats at least as much as it hurts Biden—particularly if it involves what he described as airing Trump grievances. “These rabbit holes are just fraught with political peril in these more moderate districts,” Dent said.

Democrats hope that the coming GOP investigations will alienate more voters than they alarm. Several Democratic strategists told me they believe that the focus on so many conservative causes will both spotlight the most extreme Trump-aligned voices in the Republican caucus, such as Jordan and Greene, and strike swing voters as a distraction from their kitchen-table concerns.

Leslie Dach, a veteran Democratic communications strategist now serving as a senior adviser to the Congressional Integrity Project, a group mobilizing to respond to the investigations, told me the GOP inquiries will inexorably identify the party with the same polarizing style of Trump-like politics that voters just repudiated in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. “We saw in this election that voters reject the Trump playbook and MAGA politics, but that is exactly what they will see in these hearings,” he said.

Congressional investigations always carry the risk of disclosures that could hurt or embarrass Biden and other officials. And whatever they find, investigations also promise to divert significant amounts of the administration’s time and energy. The White House has already staffed up a unit in the counsel’s office dedicated to responding to the inquiries. Cabinet departments are scrambling to do the same.

Recognizing the potential political risk, several Republican representatives newly elected in Biden districts have already urged their party to move slowly on the probes and instead to prioritize action on economic issues. Their problem is that McCarthy already has given every indication he’s likely to prioritize the demands for maximum confrontation from his caucus’s pro-Trump majority.

“If past is prologue, Kevin McCarthy will fall much on the side of the ruby-red Republican base and the pro-investigation, pro-culture-war side,” Kelly says. “He’s never proven able to stand up to the fringe.” And that means the new members from Biden-leaning districts who have provided the GOP its narrow majority have reason to sweat almost as much as the Biden administration over the swarm of investigations that House Republicans are poised to unleash.

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Ronald Brownstein

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November 24, 2022