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  • Major RFK Jr. Health Report Sows Vaccine Fears; Experts Push Back Hard

    This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

    The nation’s top health officials, regulators, and policy wonks huddled on the eighth floor of the Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday to take a victory lap for a new report on children’s health that was big on hype—128 ideas!—but slim on actual prescriptions.

    At a separate event called by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist from Vermont, there was railing about the massive hypocrisy coming out of the Trump administration when it comes to health priorities.

    Both fit the pattern of Washington right now: lots of noise around following the real science, but where that science leads depends on who is the tutor. Sanders had leading medical figures standing with him. But HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running the largest health operation in the world.

    At the unveiling of a report by Kennedy’s Make America Health Again Commission, the dog whistles were more like foghorns.

    Kennedy’s report raises questions about when children should get what vaccines when and whether fluoride in drinking water is at safe levels—two areas where leading experts have said he is spreading misinformation. A new National Institutes of Health center to study childhood chronic disease was also proposed, on top of wanting more information on the patterns behind how kids were prescribed anti-depressants and medicines to treat ADHD. The report also wants a closer look at the effects of electromagnetic radiation, the microbiome, and the root causes of autism. Oh, and the reports’ authors want a public-education campaign aimed at improving fertility. (Yes, that made its way into a report about children’s health.)

    More broadly, the report criticizes ultra-processed foods, chemical over-exposure, and overmedication. Kennedy called for more studies into vaccine injuries, which he argued are far under-reported, and the over-prescription of drugs. But the recommendations stopped short of a ban on pesticides and processed foods for kids, which had some industry insiders on K Street thinking they had dodged one of their biggest fears of the Secretary’s crusade.

    In short: it’s a list of goals but not real concrete steps to achieve any of them. The vagueness may be the point to give Kennedy cover from his growing camp of critics while letting the MAHA folks think they’re getting their wish list. It may be too cute by half.

    “There’s never been an effort like this across all the government agencies,” Kennedy boasted as other Cabinet and top administration officials surrounded the made-for-TV debrief.

    Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. prepares for a TV interview outside of the West Wing of the White House on Sept. 9, 2025. Saul Loeb—AFP via Getty Images

    Hours earlier, Sanders was bashing Kennedy and Republicans for their skepticism about vaccines, hostility to expertise, and purge of medical talent—including top hands at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. 

    “At this unprecedented moment in American history, it is important to share the facts as clearly as we can,” Sanders said, flanked by representatives from major medical associations that count more than 100,000 professionals as members. “Vaccines work. Period.”

    The United States, Sanders said, is “witnessing a full-blown war on science, on public health and on truth itself.”

    The dueling events in Washington on Tuesday illustrated just how Kennedy’s typically grunt role as the nation’s health secretary has roiled Washington, ignited a public discussion about normally administrative backwaters, and scrambled the public’s view of what the federal government should and shouldn’t be doing around the country’s biggest health challenges.

    “We are now the sickest country in the world,” Kennedy said, sliding back into one of his familiar talking points. Yet it was hard to take Kennedy’s prescriptions at face value amid the glaring contradictions. While he called for improving the quality of food available to Americans, the Trump spending regime has cut support for poor families to reach it. “Nutrition drives disease,” Kennedy’s deputy, Jim O’Neill, said. The report seeks better data on environmental factors, while in practice the Trump team slashed money for those numbers. At one point, Kennedy dodged a question on gun violence by turning to the conservative talking point that the problem is not firearms but rather mental health and maybe even video games.

    The MAHA takeover in Washington is having noticeable ripple effects. The sloganeering has cajoled some of the nation’s biggest food brands to shift its offerings, curb the use of some dyes, and even redo recipes of iconic goods like Coca-Cola and day-to-day items like baby formula. Yet the moves have mostly been symbolic and voluntary. For small-government evangelists sitting in the conference room up on the HHS penthouse level, there was a whole lot of talk about reaching into private companies and family fridges to shape options for consumers. But it was precisely this strain of easy fixes that helped Donald Trump win the presidency a second time.

    Tuesday’s report included platitudes about making school meals healthier and to limit accessibility to junk food in food stamp programs. Days after Florida announced plans to become the first state to make school vaccinations voluntary, Kennedy called for a revision to childhood vaccine schedules and for new research about chronic diseases. The report also carried praise for whole milk over skim.

    The report largely tracks with what Kennedy and his allies in the White House have been pushing from the start. In reading from their scripts, the officials returned to a familiar pattern of heaping praise on Trump, who later in the day signed an order putting limits on how drugmakers advertise their products. It was like watching a Cabinet meeting that Trump skipped.

    His MAHA Commission repeatedly said it was rebuilding the food pyramid to limit processed foods and emphasize home-grown whole foods. (The FDA Commission on Tuesday called the widely-seen pyramid a huge source of “misinformation.”) In other matters, Kennedy’s team diagnosed corporate interests and prescription medications as causes to sick, stressed, and screen-fixated kids. But the culture wars always find a way to creep in. The discussion touched on ADHD, autism, psychiatric drugs, video games, and social media. The clang of a political gong is deafening.

    Childhood health, on its face, should not be a politically divisive subject. But here we are, when political needs supplant decades of medical science. Where piles of research point to one conclusion, the MAGA and MAHA bases—and they are often at different aims—demand something else that feeds their gut. And leading medical experts find themselves having to stand with a Senator from Vermont instead of the top government official in their field. Over the course of a few hours in Washington on Tuesday, the increasingly muddled state of public health unfolded.

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    Philip Elliott

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  • Senators Chose to Yell at RFK Jr. Instead of Trying to Stop Him

    This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

    As a practical matter, it’s not normal for Senators to tussle with the nation’s top health official. But amid a spiraling, three-hour hearing on Thursday, Senators from both parties couldn’t hide their aggravation with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose tumultuous defense of his alienation of top health officials, abrupt changes in vaccine policies, and even his own continued employment was both a low point for public health and a reminder that, as much as lawmakers object to his bedside manner, they are the ones who installed him and preserve his gig.

    RFK Jr. found his place in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet in no small measure thanks to his reputation as a skeptic of vaccines. The chamber’s Republicans—save for Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, himself a polio survivor—confirmed him to his powerful perch anyway. During Thursday’s contentious hearing, the Secretary raised his voice in clear frustration and indignation as lawmakers pressed him on why he removed the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and expressed concern that access to Covid-19 vaccines were being limited. And a host of Democrats called on him to resign.

    But here’s the rub: despite a bipartisan frustration with Kennedy’s tenure, nothing is going to dislodge him. The government faces an end-of-month funding deadline but there are no serious plans by Democrats or Republicans in Congress to tie RFK Jr. or the nation’s vaccines policies to keeping the dollars flowing. Scores of CDC experts have been outcast but they remained dismissed. And Americans who want a Covid booster are left in a lurch because Kennedy’s antipathy  now limits what is covered by insurance plans.

    Yet, despite a salty hearing and their obvious frustration with many of RFK Jr.’s decisions, Republican lawmakers who know better will continue to defend him because Trump has the run of Washington. Contradicting Trump is a recipe for political demise and no GOP lawmaker—even the doctor who runs the health committee—is going to risk exile.

    “I would say, effectively, we’re denying people vaccines,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who is also a physician. Still, in the hours after the heated hearing, Cassidy doubled-down on his campaign to give the President a Nobel Prize for his work on vaccines.

    Another Senate doc, John Barrasso, underscored the substance of the risk from inside the government. “I’m a doctor. Vaccines work. Secretary Kennedy, in your confirmation hearings, you promised to uphold the highest standards for vaccines. Since then, I’ve grown deeply concerned,” the Wyoming Republican said.

    But when asked later about RFK Jr.’s future, Barrasso deferred to the White House. “I have confidence in what the President of the United States is doing, and I will not second guess,” Barrasso said.

    And Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who was originally on the fence about the confirmation vote earlier this year, seemed uneasy with the situation. 

    “I’m concerned that we’re diminishing the credibility of the CDC,” said Tillis, who is not running for re-election. “We could be diminishing the credibility of the U.S. government in terms of keeping kids safe.”

    Still, nothing is moving, at least for now. Senate Majority Leader John Thune sidestepped questions Thursday on if he maintained confidence in RFK Jr. So, too, did Sen. Susan Collins of Maine; she is seen as one of the most imperiled Republicans on the ballot next year.

    Kennedy provided a scattershot series of thoughts on Thursday on everything from Covid-19 vaccines, anti-depressants, and hepatitis B. As Senators tried to keep the discussion focused on accepted science, Kennedy refused to be confined. Withdrawn studies were at the fore and autism seemed everywhere. The heated, loud, and absurdist spectacle offered little new information—and a fair share of misinformation. The circular logic was as aplenty as it was problematic coming from the person who helms the largest health operation in the world. At one point, RFK Jr. simultaneously critiqued mRNA technology—the cornerstone of Covid vaccines—as the “deadliest” vehicle ever, while insisting its rollout merits Trump a Nobel.

    Sen. Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democrat, pointed out the contradictions. “When were you lying, sir?” she asked. “When you told this committee that you were not anti-vax, or when you told Americans that there’s no safe and effective vaccine?”

    Kennedy seemed nonplused. “Both things are true,” he said.

    Pressed by Sen. Ben Ray Luján, a New Mexico Democrat, Kennedy showed open contempt: “You’re talking gibberish.”

    Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, returned the fury: “You are sitting as Secretary of Health and Human Services. How can you be that ignorant?”

    Sen. Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire Democrat, was similarly indignant: “Sometimes when you make an accusation, it’s kind of a confession, Mr. Kennedy.”

    Despite all of this, though, the show was just that: a show. Kennedy dismissed criticism that he has fired thousands of career employees at the CDC. He brushed off questions about why he fired all the members of a vaccine panel, repeating the disproven line that they had financial conflicts of interest. Kennedy seemed completely at ease in a fact-optional environment. The bluster and bravado seemed completely out of step with how Red State lawmakers are heading into a flu season when risk of Covid steps up.

    The sense among Republicans on the Hill was that the hearing went about as poorly as possible. But, as evidenced by the grumbling as Senators shuffled around the room, the immutable fact is that Kennedy still has Trump’s confidence. This is the kind of performance Trump likes. Their shared disbelief in science and disrespect for expertise unites them. It’s only an added bonus that Kennedy showed contempt to lawmakers.

    As if a perfect coda to a day of acrimony, Kennedy pulled out his phone and scrolled as Senators were winding down the day. Asked if he’d like to make any closing statement, Kennedy curtly declined. “I think I’ll have mercy on everybody,” Kennedy said, “and let us adjourn.”

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    Philip Elliott

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  • Trump Built His Brand Bashing Obamacare. Now it’s More Popular Than Him

    Trump Built His Brand Bashing Obamacare. Now it’s More Popular Than Him

    This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

    A decade and a half ago, the Affordable Care Act set the stage for Donald Trump’s White House victory. The conservative backlash to Democrats’ massive and agenda-setting health care proposal was so strong that it gave rise to a newly empowered far-right faction in Congress, inspired a whole generation of angry political neophytes, and almost made Barack Obama a one-term President. Now, a solid 14 years later, those same rabble rousers seem to have convinced Trump, who spent years raging against the law informally known as Obamacare, that it might be good politics, if not also good policy.

    It may be hard to remember now but Trump built his 2016 campaign on the twin cornerstones of the false and racist claims that Obama was not born in the United States and an unflinching scorn for Obamacare. He rarely passed up an opportunity to decry the law as a “disaster” or proclaim that it “sucks,” and repeatedly said a new effort was just “two weeks” away. As recently as a few months ago, he was vowing to destroy it if granted a second term. “We should never give up!” he declared in a Truth Social post in November.

    A funny thing has happened in the last few years, though. Obamacare’s popularity has grown as more and more Americans interact with a health care system fundamentally rebooted in bite-sized pieces, and the potency of the hatred toward the Obamas has faded. (Some ugly comments, however, continue to crop up.) The result is the jabs against the 44th President’s legacy-worthy legislation no longer land with the same thwack, crackling barely as a thud.

    Now, in 2024, it seems Obamacare will not be detonating, but maybe even stand to be firmed up if Trump wins a return to the White House. In a new series of messages, the former President is telling voters… Well, here is one of his social media musings in all of its glory:

    I’m not running to terminate the ACA, AS CROOKED JOE BUDEN DISINFORMATES AND MISINFORMATES ALL THE TIME, I’m running to CLOSE THE BORDER, STOP INFLATION, MAKE OUR ECONOMY GREAT, STRENGTHEN OUR MILITARY, AND MAKE THE ACA, or OBAMACARE, AS IT IS KNOWN, MUCH BETTER, STRONGER, AND FAR LESS EXPENSIVE. IN OTHER WORDS, MAKE THE ACA MUCH, MUCH, MUCH BETTER FOR FAR LESS MONEY (OR COST) TO OUR GREST AMERICAN CITIZENS, WHO HAVE BEEN DECIMATED BY BIDEN, HIS RECORD INFLATION, BAD ECONOMY, AFGHANISTAN CATASTROPHE, AND JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE. CROOKED JOE BIDEN IS, BY FAR, THE WORST PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES! MAGA2024

    This typo-laden turnaround—if that’s what it in fact is—was not always guaranteed. When the law was still taking shape, opponents convinced true believers that it would yield a rationing of health care services and perhaps even “death panels” that would do a cost-benefit analysis of treatments. Ultimately, after months of legislative hoop-jumping, the bill cleared Congress without a single Republican vote in support in March of 2010, and 34 House Democrats were against its final passage.

    Polling immediately found the overall package to be an electoral clunker. A plurality 44% of voters held an unfavorable opinion of it in May of 2010, and those numbers didn’t really move all the way through Election Day that November, when Democrats suffered a seven-seat net loss in the Senate and dropped 63 seats in the House—the biggest wave since 1948. The unfavorable view of Obamacare was shared by 85% of Republicans that May, according to Kaiser Family Foundation polling. Months of Democratic explaining only shaved that number to 79% as voters headed toward the ballot box.

    Put plainly: Obamacare might have been good policy, but it was lousy politics. The 14-month slog to pass the law left even its defenders with a bit of a chip on their shoulders. It wasn’t until fall of 2013 that people were able to sign up for private health insurance through the federal portal that was mired in glitches and bad P.R. For a long stretch there, Obamacare only brought ailments and not ointment. That’s where Trump picked up his initial instincts to seize on an often overlooked portion of the GOP’s base and feed the distrust. 

    And that tactic worked, at least until the upsides of the law kicked in. Over time, the polling got better. Parents of young adults realized their children could stay on their health plans as they got their careers going. The price tag for health care hasn’t exactly shrunk; the numbers tell the opposite story, actually. But the patient experience has gotten better even as medical bankruptcies and debts remain high. Still, there has not been a harsh rationing of care, and killing a regime that touches 45 million people—or roughly two-thirds of the size of all Social Security programs—is not a political winner.

    That wasn’t necessarily the understanding when Trump and his nominal allies took over Washington in early 2017. Then, nixing Obamacare was atop their agenda. Trump unfurled executive actions—that later were rejected by the Supreme Court—and cajoled allies at the Capitol to move on his demands. But a revolt among moderates and GOP lawmakers in at-risk seats put that sect of the party on a collision course with the conservative ideologues. Party leaders pulled down the whole effort. Trump vowed revenge on those in the party whom he viewed as traitors.

    “Obamacare unfortunately will explode,” Trump said in March 2017, trying his best to put shine on a loss. “It’s going to have a very bad year.”

    Trump’s predictions of collapse proved faulty and now he’s hoping a national amnesia that has excused so many of his reversals carries into this realm. By this point, most Americans are numb to his flip flops; no one was truly surprised when Trump voiced support for TikTok not long after trying to ban it as President. But a TikTok ban was not integral to Trump’s political brand. For years, opposition to Obamacare was, almost as much as his support for a border wall.

    It seems Trump has finally wised up to the fact that the health care law—while far from perfect—is doing good work for millions of Americans, perhaps becoming as sacrosanct as Social Security. The Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected efforts to scrap the law. Kaiser’s polling has 59% of Americans holding a favorable view of the Affordable Care Act, including 33% of Republicans. One report, released March 22, shows 45 million Americans benefiting from some aspect of the law. The days of “repeal and replace” seem to have faded as Trump finally realizes that even the law’s loudest critics lack a backfill program.

    Republicans have quietly been positioning their most vulnerable members in this way, telling them that ending a program that has so quickly become enmeshed with day-to-day lives is a losing promise. Forty states, including some Republican-led ones, and the District of Columbia are participating in the Obamacare Medicaid expansion programs. Even weeks ago, as Trump was again thumping his ideas for canceling his loathed predecessor’s legacy law, Republican lawmakers were telling Trump he was on his own with no pals to “walk the plank” with him.

    Biden seems eager to goad Trump to either defend his longstanding position or cop to a monumental flip-flop. In his State of the Union speech, the current President poked the former with plenty of pluck: “My predecessor, and many in this chamber, want to take those prescription drugs away by repealing the Affordable Care Act. I’m not going to let that happen. We stopped you 50 times before, and we’ll stop you again.”

    For his part, Trump seems to finally realize the 51st time could be the most consequential to him yet: his own campaign this fall. So strong is his desire to reclaim power (and perhaps shut down some federal prosecutions against him), he will set aside more than a decade of anti-Obamacare language with barely a blink.

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    Philip Elliott

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  • Why the Primary Calendar Is Stacked in Trump's Favor

    Why the Primary Calendar Is Stacked in Trump's Favor

    This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

    As Nikki Haley raced to catch her overnight charter from Des Moines to Manchester, her team kept double-checking the numbers. The former South Carolina Governor and ex-Ambassador to the United Nations had posted a disappointing third-place finish in Iowa’s lead-off caucus on Monday, but the result doesn’t much alter the math that really matters: the chase for 1,215 delegates to the nominating convention in Milwaukee come July. As the wind raged outside their mini-motorcade, aides confirmed that the deflating results in Iowa had netted them seven of Iowa’s 40 delegates—just one fewer than won by silver medalist Ron DeSantis. Haley’s team was preparing for the long trek to New Hampshire’s North Country on Tuesday to show she was all-in on the Granite State.

    For now Trump’s blowout victory shapes the narrative, as will the New Hampshire results on Jan. 23. But both are small prizes from a delegate perspective. Iowa offers less than 2% of the total delegates on the table for White House hopefuls. Polls show Haley has a shot at New Hampshire, which would, at least temporarily, end talk that the race is over as soon as it began. But New Hampshire offers just 22 seats on the convention floor. After that comes Nevada, whose 26 delegates, like Iowa and New Hampshire’s, are awarded proportionally; you get your share if you credibly show. 

    But that’s where the rules of the nominating contest grow increasingly friendly to the frontrunner. At Trump’s behest, Nevada Republicans passed a rule that blocks super PACs like the one doing a heavy lift for DeSantis’ day-to-day operations from being in the mix. The party also will now offer delegates through a caucus rather than a primary, a change seen as a favor to hardcore activists over casual voters. These were among the many insider-driven tweaks the Trump campaign has put in place nationwide as an insurance policy. (As of now, Haley isn’t even on the caucus ballot in order to show support for the party-run affair. She will instead appear on the symbolic primary ballot that offers no delegates.) Both New Hampshire and Nevada award delegates proportionally: New Hampshire has treats for candidates topping 10%, while Nevada has a threshold of 4%.

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    But starting with South Carolina and its 50 delegates, winner-take-all rules kick in. Second place in a lot of these early-nominating contests still amounts to First Loser. Idaho (March 2), Michigan (February 27 and March 2), and North Dakota (March 4) are all set up so the winner gets most of the delegates. In Idaho, for instance, any candidate getting above 50% gets the whole pot of 32 delegates. In Michigan, too, there are new party rules that set up a two-step process for picking up delegates; the change is widely seen as a pro-Trump move given his allies control the state political machinery and could summarily block rivals’ access to the process. Unlike eight years ago, Trump now has party insiders minding the stores to keep the process tilted in his favor. 

    Come Super Tuesday on March 5, things get even tougher for runners-up. Of the 15 states (plus American Samoa) having nominating contests that day, just two have plausible ways for non-winners to gain a meaningful number of delegates: Alaska and Colorado. (Of note: it’s not clear Trump will even be on Colorado’s ballot.) In others, there are provisions in state party rules that candidates topping 50% of the vote take home the lion’s share, setting up massive gains. For the first time, California’s 169 delegates will be awarded to the winner statewide and not by congressional district during a primary that leapfrogged ahead to offer a huge boost to its winner. Trump’s team was instrumental in this shift. 

    Running the table on Super Tuesday, when 874 delegates are on the table, can get a candidate 72% of the way to the total required for the nomination. Trump’s own internal projections have him in a position to win the nomination a week later.

    The upshot is that the long-nurtured hopes of the Never Trump Republicans—defeat the former President by finally getting him one-on-one—doesn’t look like a recipe for success, if even it were possible. In a two-way race, the math just doesn’t work for the underdogs. The rules of the 2024 nominating contest are not meant to encourage also-rans from sticking around to pick up a delegate here or there. In 2016, the GOP watched as Trump slogged to the nomination with the likes of Ted Cruz nipping at him and threatening a delegate mutiny. Mitt Romney did the same four years earlier as a stubborn Rick Santorum kept peeling-off wins in states like Colorado and Tennessee. This time, the rules regime was meant to deliver Republicans a nominee as bloodlessly as possible. And they may work with admirable efficiency this year. The Iowa landslide led Trump to gently call on rivals to give up. But for now, the delegate race is anyone’s ballgame. Trump is up by 12 delegates over DeSantis and 13 over Haley. (Even fourth-place Iowa finisher Vivek Ramaswamy hobbled out of Iowa with three delegates—and an invitation to join Trump in New Hampshire for campaign stops this week as a dropout.) DeSantis framed a distant second-place in Iowa as a victory; Haley, despite coming in third, cast herself as the second half of a two-candidate race. But eventually, this narrative-shaping must give way to math, and the magic number of 1,215 has to be atop strategy sessions. And with the rules stacked in Trump’s favor as the primary goes on, it may not be long before both have hard choices to face.

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    Philip Elliott

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  • Iowa Doesn't Pick Winners. It Culls Losers.

    Iowa Doesn't Pick Winners. It Culls Losers.

    This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

    To listen to the pundits and pollsters tell it, Monday’s lead-off caucuses are a critical test in the Republican primary. Months have been spent tracking the aspirants’ bobs and weaves, this tick up or down in polling, that endorsement or defection. For some candidates, the caucuses have been years in the making, the culmination of their first introduction to a national audience.

    But here’s the dirty truth: when Republicans gather for their convention in Milwaukee this summer, less than 2% of the total delegates will be awarded from Iowa. No one wins the nomination in Iowa; there are only losers coming out of the 1,657 activist-run caucus sites scattered in high school gyms, church basements, and fire houses. No, the real prize is the Big Mo’, the sense of hope that the caucuses can bestow on the candidates hoping to derail ex-President Donald Trump’s third nomination in eight years.

    Would it even matter? In the last five competitive Republican caucuses, the winner of Iowa averaged fewer than 37,000 supporters, ranging from the 1996 tally of 25,000 supporters behind Bob Dole to the 52,000 Ted Cruz fans who set the modern record in 2016. Among those five, dating to 1996, the most recent three winners in Iowa failed to be the actual nominee; the last to win Iowa and the big prize was George W. Bush in 2000. And all at the cost of millions upon millions of dollars; Republican ad spending in the state has topped $100 million this cycle alone.

    As many GOP candidates have lamented, Iowa is hardly representative of the party as a whole. More people live in one square mile of Manhattan than will be behind Monday night’s Iowa winner. Yet candidates can’t ignore it. Plenty have tried skipping the Hawkeye State’s vast plains in favor of friendlier terrain. As Chris Christie knows well by now, it’s exceedingly difficult to pull off. 

    None of this is to disparage Iowa, a place where I’ve watched seemingly knowledgeable and competent national figures crumble into brow-beaten know-nothings as the party activists pepper contenders with detailed policy questions. The Christian Evangelicals there are a good test for candidates’ ability to message to the party’s base and can very quickly spot a huckster—or reward a Mike Huckabee. And the state’s tricky caucus system demands that candidates figure out how to build a machine beyond headlines and hype; it’s how Cruz bested the biggest braggart in politics in 2016.

    Democrats, burned by the caucus system after the failure of the party’s app four years ago and looking for an electorate more representative of their party, decided to can Iowa’s lead-off position in 2024 and instead start their official calendar in South Carolina on Feb. 3. (New Hampshire, meanwhile, has something to say about that, and will have a rogue primary on Jan. 23 that won’t feature Joe Biden on the ballot.)

    And yet, neither party can afford to ignore the message that Iowa will send on Monday night. If Trump dominates as expected, it will reaffirm his sense of inevitability heading into New Hampshire on Jan. 23. If Trump loses—or fails to meet expectations, as described by TIME’s Eric Cortellessa here—it sends him to New England with wobblier odds. The fight in Iowa appears to be for second place, and it has put Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley on a collision course. A disappointing result could well be the end of the road for DeSantis, who has pinned the future of his campaign on a strong result in the caucuses.

    Put simply: the result of Monday’s caucus matters as much as each watcher allows it to mean. Not because the outcome will determine who gets crowned at the convention this summer, but because it offers a hint about who is viable and—perhaps more importantly—who is not. The race is not won in the first moments, but you sure can stub a toe at a starting line and never recover from it.

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    Philip Elliott

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  • In Fourth GOP Debate, DeSantis Fades as Haley Rises

    In Fourth GOP Debate, DeSantis Fades as Haley Rises

    This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis looked like he knew he was caught flat-footed when asked repeatedly on the debate stage Wednesday evening whether ex-President Donald Trump is mentally fit to return to power.

    “Look. He is show—” DeSantis stammered before making a familiar case generally that it’s time for a new generation without directly responding to the question. “Father time is undefeated,” DeSantis said of Trump’s age, leaning into a workshopped answer that betrays just how tough it is to go from a statewide candidate—even one in huge and diverse Florida—into a national figure. In a race that is still seemingly a contest for second place, taking on the GOP giant was too much of a risk for DeSantis and he tried to deflect.

    For former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has made criticism of Trump a hallmark of his second bid for the White House and knows no job awaits him in a second Trump administration, the vagaries were too much from a figure fading fast.

    “The question was very direct: Is he fit to be President or isn’t he? The rest of the speech is interesting but completely unresponsive,” Christie mocked.

    The two men devolved into a screaming match that the NewsNation moderators tried unsuccessfully to get it together. “Either you’re afraid [of Trump] or you’re not listening,” Christie shouted.

    Throughout the fourth Republican debate, it was impossible to miss the fact that DeSantis’ dreams are on the ropes. 

    Despite starting the campaign as the most intriguing alternative to Trump and riding high after a remarkable re-election to his second and final term as Governor, things have not gone well for DeSantis. The super PAC tied to his campaign has gone through three waves of shakeups, including one nine-day stint for a CEO. He dumped the campaign manager. Polling is going in the wrong direction; he started with national numbers north of 30%, but is in danger of dipping into single digits. In early-nominating states, it’s been even a steeper drop-off despite redeploying one-third of his campaign staff to Iowa. Plus, as voters have gotten to know DeSantis beyond slick campaign propaganda and fawning coverage in conservative media, they have been less impressed. DeSantis is often stiff, occasionally awkward, seldomly improvised. The turn-around efforts have proven grossly inadequate.

    “Here we are, a month out from the first real votes, and you haven’t managed to do it,” moderator Megyn Kelly said of DeSantis’ promised campaign surge.

    DeSantis had the ready-made rejoinder ready: “The voters make the decision, not pundits or pollsters. I’m sick of hearing about these polls.” He’s probably being honest about his appetite for lousy polling data, but hiding from the bad news won’t make it go away.

    DeSantis has endured one of the fastest crumblings of campaign optimism in recent memory. Every cycle has flame-outs, but DeSantis’ has simultaneously been one of the most devastating and unrepentant. Wednesday night’s debate at the University of Alabama only shook the DeSantis foundation further. Pressed on topics as varied as transgender rights, immigration, Chinese economic interests, and Israeli aid, DeSantis never seemed quite to find his footing. Unlike a week ago, when he debated California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, for a Fox News special, DeSantis struggled to command facts to make his case and instead flailed when trying to set himself apart from the other non-Trump competitors who are in large measure in agreement on the big picture.

    After dumping $16 million of super PAC money on ads in Iowa and piles of cash more to build an organization to help his efforts there, DeSantis has little to show for it, and the debate stages have not helped him. Some $42 million in national super PAC ads have not offset the stumbles. His focus has seemed to be on defending Trumpism and dinging Biden and other Republicans. But when given a chance to make the case for overtaking Trump, the steel melts. 

    Meanwhile former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who went into Wednesday night’s debate ascendant, left rising even more quickly. “Her donors, these Wall Street, liberal donors, they make money in China. They are not going to let her be tough on China. She will cave to the donors. She will not stand up for you,” DeSantis said of Haley. 

    Haley kept her cool: “He’s mad because those Wall Street donors used to support him and now they support me.” She humble-bragged in a way that was Trumpian in the best way: “They’re just jealous.” The audience howled with laughter. 

    Later, Haley took another shot: “First of all, Ron has continued to lie because he’s losing.”

    In further evidence that Haley may be the most viable non-Trump candidate to beat, she drew some of the sharpest attacks of the night—and some of the most foolhardy. 

    When asked if entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy was questioning Haley’s Christian faith and whether he was dog-whistling when using her given name, Nimarata, in campaign documents, Ramaswamy launched into what can only be described as a screed. His rant about identity politics, her alleged corruption and ties to donors drew boos from the audience and scowls from the rivals on stage. “Nikki is corrupt. This is a woman who will send your kids to die so she can buy a bigger house,” he said. “Having two X chromosomes does not immunize you from criticism.”

    Asked to respond, Haley was dismissive. “No. It’s not worth my time to respond to him,” she said as the man to her left held aloft a legal pad with “Nikki = Corrupt” in sharpie.

    DeSantis kept focus, looking straight ahead and trying to not be hit by the rhetorical shrapnel. This was not a skirmish he wanted to join, especially if 2024 proves not to be the year for the ambitious if awkward 45-year-old.

    The evening may shuffle the candidates on stage, but the fact remains that Trump is head and shoulders above this crew. It was the fourth debate of the cycle that Trump skipped, allowing him to largely dodge any meaningful criticism in close quarters. 

    Christie seemed to say what everyone in the spectator seats knows. “We are 17 minutes into this debate and except for your little speech in the beginning, we’ve had these three acting as if the race is between the four of us,” Christie said early in the evening. “The fifth guy who doesn’t have the guts to show up and stand here, he’s the one, as you just put it, who is way ahead in the polls.” 

    Christie has made his campaign a warning against Trump’s dangers yet has not gained much traction inside the party Trump still leads.

    Since September, DeSantis has seen his second-place standing stay stagnant in Iowa—despite recently wrapping up a tour of all of the state’s 99 counties—while Haley is quickly catching him, narrowing his lead over her by 10 full points since the end of summer. With a little more than a month until Iowa’s lead-off caucuses, the race for second place is one that will only intensify as the candidates and voters try to figure out if any one of them could emerge as a real challenge to Trump and Trumpism. 

    At this point, though, it seems like it could be a fool’s errand. Which is why DeSantis’ continued attempts to regain his footing may end up getting more wobbly than the crowds soon to shuffle across Iowa’s treacherous black ice into caucus locations. Maybe by 2028, he’ll figure it out.

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    Philip Elliott

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  • Mike Johnson: Why House GOP Is Souring on Its New Speaker

    Mike Johnson: Why House GOP Is Souring on Its New Speaker

    This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

    If House Republicans were forced to vote today on who should lead them, it’s widely accepted on Capitol Hill that Mike Johnson would find it tough to keep his unenviable job as House Speaker. Put simply: the honeymoon is over, the troublemakers who made his promotion possible are losing patience, and the GOP caucus remains as ungovernable as ever.

    All of which adds up to this tough truth: a partial government shutdown could be triggered on Jan. 19, with a complete collapse looming on Feb. 2. And the people who made Johnson’s speakership possible are rooting for House Republicans to preside over a total meltdown of government. It might be the natural conclusion of a right-wing movement kindled in the first months after Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 and which reached a roar during a deadly riot in the last weeks of the Trump administration, and now finds itself with little to do but cheer on destruction in the Biden era.  

    It’s been two months since a klatch of House Republicans forced the ouster of then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy because, frankly, they didn’t like him. One voted against him because she didn’t think he had women’s rights in mind. Another kicked him to the curb because he thought McCarthy had mocked his faith. Others said they found him duplicitous and wobbly on conservative goals. After all, McCarthy had dared to strike a deal with Democrats earlier in the year to keep the lights on. In the end, those eight rabble-rousers booted McCarthy after just nine months with the gavel, turning themselves into a kind of veto-wielding super-minority in a chamber where the Republican margins are epicly narrow.

    After 22 days of deliberations, 14 candidates, four nominees and three public floor votes, Johnson got the top gig in the House in October. The little-known-beyond-Louisiana conservative weathered a rough few weeks as the public—and many of his colleagues—discovered that he was far more aligned with the evangelical, hard-right flank of the GOP than they had realized. But, in those first few weeks, a lot of conservatives held their tongues as Johnson got his sea legs and started to show what kind of figure he would be as he clutched the gavel.

    So what has Johnson got done so far? In the middle of an international crisis, he tried to leverage a request for aid to Israel to score cuts to the IRS budget that will likely never get a vote in the Senate let alone President Joe Biden’s signature into law. He released carefully selected footage from Jan. 6, and then said he was blurring the faces of rioters to protect them from prosecution. And he has fast-tracked impeaching the President despite thin evidence to date—but, hey, a formal vote calendared for next week to allow subpoenas is propped up behind a snazzy logo. All that’s missing is theme music.

    Yet none of that has solved the problems that McCarthy found himself ill-equipped to solve. The structural deficiencies that fueled Johnson’s improbable rise to the lush Speaker’s office remain. It’s like Goldilocks doesn’t have just three bowls of porridge in front of her at the moment; she has an entire oatmeal factory that no one knew existed. 

    And that’s why the Speaker of a Republican House may very well be the worst prize in D.C. If America’s Shakespeare, Stephen Sondheim, were still with us, he’d be writing Johnson as a modern Nellie Lovett from Sweeney Todd: a cannibalistic opportunist. There’s a problem with that analogy, though: Mrs. Lovett had buy-in from her co-conspirators in a way that the hopelessly divided House Republicans would never offer Johnson, just like they didn’t McCarthy.

    Which begs the question: How are you finding the gavel, Mr. Speaker?

    Along with avoiding a government shutdown, Republicans are returning to Washington this week with a pressing to-do list, including requests for billions in aid for Israel and Ukraine. And yet nothing seems to be moving any better now than it was in the McCarthy era.  And for those not rooting for a shutdown in the new year, the fact that there is so little ink on paper at this hour when it comes to a spending bill should worry even the most optimistic lawmaker. Johnson is sticking with the parameters negotiated between the Biden White House and Speaker McCarthy’s office, including topline spending of $1.59 trillion through next Oct. 1. While the far-right Freedom Caucus seems to have made peace with that, some holdout conservatives are still demanding that number be cut to $1.47 trillion. That delta is one of the reasons some GOP lawmakers are starting to sour on Johnson.

    Not helping matters is Johnson’s decision last week to lock arms with George Santos before a two-thirds majority of the House chose to expel him from the chamber, a dicey vote that left swing-district Republicans in a lurch.

    Meanwhile, Democrats are missing no opportunity to highlight the myriad ways that Johnson and like-minded Republicans are afield from both national sentiment—religion and abortion being central to this askew position—and party orthodoxy. And, golly, has it been good for fundraising even before Johnson seized the gavel: national Democrats have enjoyed the upper hand this cycle and show no sign of slowing down against a new Speaker who arrived on the job lacking a network of well-heeled donors conditioned to give.

    Privately, lawmakers are grousing that Johnson is embracing his “four-corner” role—that is representing all House Republicans in the closed-door conversations with House Democrats’ top hand and the two parties’ leaders from the Senate. Which, if we are being honest, is what he should be doing. Yes, party leaders in both chambers and in both shades of jersey should be playing to win. At the same time, they need to be working to make sure their members aren’t getting dinged as party hacks. But what is a leader’s job when his members want to be branded as hacks? To his credit, Johnson isn’t playing along thus far. Still, with every moment of sober responsibility, he’s endangering the vocal minority of his slim majority who want to be seen as arsonists. Privately, the fringe adults in his caucus are appreciative of the level-headed approach. But there’s a reason that appreciation is being expressed privately. The burn-it-down caucus is much more upfront about their intentions. 

    There’s a reason none of the last three Republican Speakers ended their tenures on their own terms. House Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan took the hint and exited early; McCarthy failed to read the room and was forcibly removed. Johnson isn’t quite at that point but he may have already lost his chance to show he can lead his caucus with anything approaching unity. And, once again, House Republicans seem to be readying the moment when they will incinerate one of their own over disagreements that are not easily distilled to easy-to-understand conversations in the districts that will decide the balance of power come early 2025. The fight is entirely one of Washington’s making, and only the insiders understand why Republicans can’t stifle internal dissent at a moment when Americans are looking at D.C. with disbelief that this is really how the country is being run.

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  • Exclusive: Bill Averting Shutdown Could Slow Jan. 6 Cases

    Exclusive: Bill Averting Shutdown Could Slow Jan. 6 Cases

    This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

    Congress just averted a shutdown by agreeing to keep federal spending at current levels for a few more weeks. But look under the hood of that agreement and you’ll find lots of money was moved around within agencies in ways that affect how they operate. One potential ripple effect: the Department of Justice may find itself paring back its efforts to hold hundreds of Jan. 6 insurrectionists accountable for their actions.

    At first glance, this may not seem like not such a big deal, given the stream of headlines of convictions secured against Jan. 6 players. Maybe you remember the QAnon Shaman copping a plea deal; he served 27 months of a 41-month sentence—and this week announced he would run for Congress. But many others who were part of the armed mob who tried to short-circuit Congress’ duty to ratify Donald Trump’s loss have yet to face any repercussions. Officials have said more than 2,500 people breached the Capitol on Jan. 6; other estimates put the number of potential defendants as high as 3,000. 

    As of Nov 1., just 1,202 people have been charged, according to the DOJ. The FBI says it has video of 13 suspects who violently assaulted federal officers and two more who attacked journalists, and agents are still trying to identify members of both groups.

    So what does that have to do with the short-term spending bill Congress just passed to avoid a shutdown? Well, it includes a 12% cut in funding for federal prosecutors. That number was also almost one-fifth lower than what the DOJ said it needed. Soon after Jan. 6 in 2021, when the agency said it was preparing to handle an “increasing number of cases and defendants” related to domestic terrorism, a Democratic-controlled Congress upped their funding for federal prosecutors to $2.8 billion. Last year, that fell to $2.6 billion. And now, it looks like House Republicans managed to carve that down to $2.3 billion over the next year, a reduction likely to mean hundreds of fewer lawyers and other workers available to take on the department’s caseload.

    And as some House Republicans complain that new House Speaker Mike Johnson rolled over for Democrats by not demanding more cuts, official talking points from the GOP caucus list all the ways they pushed their policy goals through this spending bill, including, right there on page six, that they managed to roll back DOJ’s reach of prosecutions. That suggests the agency will have a tough time restoring that funding when it’s time to try to pass a longer-term budget early next year.

    This may all seem like an accountant’s fever dream but a snooze for most Americans. But there are real consequences for the ability of federal prosecutors to get the job done and send a message to those who cheered on such a dark day in American history.

    As anyone who spends their time around law enforcement will tell you, trials are costly, not just in money but also time. And defendants in these cases are guaranteed the right to a speedy trial. Without a bench of seasoned prosecutors standing by to promptly handle these cases, the defense lawyers can credibly argue their clients are being denied just due process. Not to mention the courts themselves, which don’t exactly have a lot of slack in courtrooms that are scheduled in six-minute intervals. Which is also why many of these cases lay languishing without accountability.

    Complicating all this is a ticking stopwatch that haunts rank-and-file prosecutors. The standard statute of limitations for most federal offenses is five years, or 60 months. It’s been 34 months since the attempted insurrection at the Capitol. For the math-challenged among us, that means half of the window has passed, and as many as two-thirds of potential targets of prosecution are not even in the system. While those who are—including the 683 guilty pleas and 127 convictions at contested trials—have cases that still require DOJ resources to see through.

    For a party that prides itself as the one linking arms with law-and-order hardliners, excusing insurrectionists who caused almost $2.9 million in damage to the Capitol is the height of hypocrisy. And more broadly, choking off cash to a department that is a cornerstone of protecting democracy is not a good look for either party. Yet, when given the chance, House Republicans not only cut the budget for federal prosecutors by one-eighth, they then told their colleagues that it should be a point of pride.

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    Philip Elliott

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  • Haley Walks Away With 3rd Debate, Despite Ramaswamy’s Attacks

    Haley Walks Away With 3rd Debate, Despite Ramaswamy’s Attacks

    This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

    Nikki Haley had heard worse than the snipes from one of the three men standing to her left on stage Wednesday night in Miami. As a candidate for Governor of South Carolina in 2010, she was attacked with anti-Indian American slurs. Three years later, the state party chairman said she should go “back to wherever the hell she came from,” ignoring that she was born in South Carolina’s Bamberg County Hospital. When she was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, the Secretary of State allegedly called her sexist slurs that begin with a B and a C. To her face.

    But when the presidential candidate had her daughter’s social media usage invoked during the third debate among the second-tier contenders, Haley stood on the verge of boiling over. “Leave my daughter out of your voice,” Haley said with a cool edge as tech bro Vivek Ramaswamy brought up Rena Haley’s TikTok. “You’re just scum,” she added as her daughter watched from the room.

    With her eyes cast toward the blazing stage lights overhead in Miami, you could see Haley push reset and perhaps remind herself that combativeness is way too easily clothed as rage on female candidates. That clear-eyed ownership of her space in the current Republican campaign has served her well to this point. She is the only candidate on the rise in national polls, early state polls, and her standing among donors. Although ex-President Donald Trump remains leaps ahead of her, Haley is quickly becoming a plausible chief rival and the best shot for Republicans to find an off-ramp to his third nomination.

    “We can’t win the fights of the 21st century with politicians from the 20th century. We have to move forward,” Haley said during her closing statement. It was the distillation of her campaign thesis, one that hinges on an appetite among Republican voters for a former state executive and high-stakes diplomat over a former President who is on trial in four jurisdictions. Objectively, that formulation makes a ton of sense. But ask Jon Huntsman, a former Utah Governor and the ex-Ambassador to China and Singapore, about the two delegates he earned during his 2012 campaign for the White House.

    On stage, Haley understood the rules. She has a hawkish instinct on national security, giving her a leg up during a debate that toured the globe’s crises in Ukraine and Israel as well as threats from the southern border and China. She’s a pragmatic realist when it comes to social issues, smartly reasoning that Congress passing a federal abortion ban is as realistic as finding the Loch Ness Monster. And she has some very talented advisers in lead-off states of Iowa and New Hampshire guiding her, plus her home-state advantage in South Carolina, where she can count just one loss at the ballot in a 20-year career.

    Read more: The Biggest Moments From the Third Republican Debate

    But it has to be said: Haley is still far from a threat to Trump, her policy-based antithesis who once again skipped the debate stage altogether. About 20 minutes away from the Miami theater, the former President was staging his own production that was chock full of victimhood and grievance, promising the GOP base once again a fanciful agenda. Before Trump took the stage in Hialeah, Fla., a UFC fighter led the crowd in a chant of “Let’s Go, Brandon,” a not-terribly-clever intonation of an anti-Joe Biden rallying cry. It was showmanship, not statecraft.

    Being a former President has its advantages, and fundraising is chief among them. Trump raised more than $24 million in the three-months leading into October, and $17 million during the quarter before that. He finished the period with $37 million in the bank, $20 million ahead of the $12 million in the pockets of Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis.

    That’s right: DeSantis remains in the race, even if his standing among Republicans has faded greatly since the start of the year. Some rocky terrain and Trump’s withering attacks have left the man dubbed “Ron DeSanctimonious” slightly off balance heading into the starting line. Even so, the closest he ever crept to overtaking Trump was a 15-point deficit, meaning his threat was never exactly perilous.

    Haley, meanwhile, may be improving, but she’s a solid 50 points behind Trump. And while emerging as the winner of the Not-Trump primary matters for media coverage, the Republicans rules don’t reward second place. That means either she starts to chart a way to overtake Trump in less than 100 days or she needs to convince backers of folks like South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to pivot to her camp. Even so, it’s still tough odds. Trump’s hold on the party has proven durable enough that not even the prospect of voting for a jailed nominee is sufficient to dent his support.

    “I’ll say this about Donald Trump: Anybody who is going to be spending the next year and a half of their life focusing on keeping themselves out of jail in courtrooms cannot lead this party or this country,” Christie said dryly. “It needs to be said plainly.”

    Which is why Haley has been so strategic in picking her spots in a critique of her former boss. “He was the right President at the right time. He’s not the right president now,” she said of Trump, for whom she served as his representative to the U.N.

    Her smart late rise, however, has left her a prime target for rivals who lack Trump to bash on stages.

    “Do you want a leader from a different generation that is going to put this country first? Or do you want Dick Cheney in three-inch heels?” Ramaswamy said before taking a mocking tone toward not just Haley but DeSantis’ choice of footwear. “In this case, we’ve got two of them on-stage tonight.”

    Haley, turning to her go-to rejoinder, missed zero beats. “They’re five-inch heels. I don’t wear them unless you can run in them,” she said. “I wear heels. They’re not for a fashion statement. They’re for ammunition.”

    Asked later about the Ramaswamy aggression, Haley was justifiably dismissive. “Look, I’m a mom. The second that you start saying something about my 25-year-old daughter, I’m going to get my back up,” she said in the spin room. “I don’t even give him the time of day.”

    It may be time, though, for serious-minded Republicans to give her that courtesy if they want to dodge a third nomination of Trump.

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    Philip Elliott

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  • Mike Johnson: Speaker of a Broken House

    Mike Johnson: Speaker of a Broken House

    This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

    Finally, after 22 days and four nominees, House Republicans on Wednesday finally picked Mike Johnson to replace deposed Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Finally would be the most important word in that previous sentence. Mike Johnson, a largely unknown figure in the GOP and a surprise choice, may be the least.

    The embarrassing intra-party squabble that stretched for three weeks and paralyzed Congress grew more perilous with each passing day as government funding deadlines raced closer, a war between Israel’s government and Hamas erupted in the Middle East, and Ukraine’s defense against Russia became more iffy. The elevation of Johnson, a Louisiana lawyer who arrived in Washington the same month Donald Trump was inaugurated, came so suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere that Johnson’s wife couldn’t even make it to the Capitol in time to see her husband be elevated to just behind the Vice President in terms of constitutional power.

    “She couldn’t get a flight in time. This happened sort of suddenly,” Johnson said in his first speech as the new face of House Republicans, a fractured collection of competing agendas, ideologies, and personalities that may prove ungovernable in short order.

    With a margin of no more than five votes, Johnson is starting his attempt at governing with one of the smallest majorities for a new Speaker in a century. Even his fellow Republicans have doubts about his longevity in the role. The fourth-term lawmaker from Shreveport, La., told his colleagues he would run the chamber by not really running it himself. He promised a decentralized power structure and pledged that lawmakers themselves would have as much autonomy as they believed they needed. Yet he has no plans to change the rule that allowed McCarthy’s ouster at the hands of just a handful of troublemakers, leaving Johnson in an equally precarious position and at the mercy of the same mercurial whims of raconteurs.

    To listen to Johnson’s address on Wednesday, it’s tempting to think Republicans had settled on a middle-of-the-road figure who could bridge the deep divides between the parties and even fellow Republicans. “I do look forward to working with you on behalf of the American people. I know we see things from very different points of view,” Johnson said, addressing both his new playground and specifically Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. “But I know that in your heart you love and care about this country and want to do what’s right. So we’re going to find common ground.”

    But it also quickly became clear that Johnson’s optimism is matched only by his hard-right credentials. “I don’t believe there are any coincidences in a matter like this. I believe that Scripture, the Bible is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority. He raised up each of you. All of us,” Johnson told the House. “And I believe that God has ordained and allowed us to be brought here for this specific moment in this time.”

    Johnson’s right-wing views will draw plenty of attention in the coming days but he is not an extreme outlier among his fellow House’s Republicans. In fact, he became the vice chairman of the conference and earlier served as the chair of the Republican Study Committee, the conservative ideas factory inside the House. Colleagues described him as cordial, even to political opposites. Whereas some in the MAGA wing of the GOP delight in being in-your-face aggressive, Johnson takes a choir-master’s lilt and lies in wait until the right moment. All of which, of course, makes for an entirely unpredictable Speakership.

    But it’s indisputable that Johnson is a different flavor of Republican than his predecessor. While McCarthy dabbled in his share of election denialism after Joe Biden’s 2020 victory Johnson was among the biggest—if not loudest—defenders of Trump. Johnson circulated a friend-of-the-court brief in the House, collecting more than 100 signatures during a campaign that some found to be menacing, and on Jan. 6, 2021, he led the effort to keep Trump in power. He has told colleagues that the Biden presidency is one that will have an asterisk attached to it.

    Asked about his election denialism on Tuesday, Johnson did not answer. His colleagues told the reporter to “shut up” and booed her. 

    Around the Capitol, Democratic staffers quickly settled on their theme that Johnson was merely a softer spoken version of Jim Jordan, one of the contenders who sought to follow McCarthy but was deemed too extreme or caustic to be palatable to enough Republicans. Democrats were quick to point out Johnson’s opposition to abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, even funding for veterans and Ukrainians.  But for now, Johnson is working with the slightest of national profiles, giving him something of a blank slate with the American public. At least for now, he is no Nancy Pelosi or Newt Gingrich, the kind of Speaker who members of the opposite party could invoke and be confident that the ka-ching of fundraising would follow.

    Johnson told his colleagues that the House’s first item of business would be a measure to support Israel in its war against Hamas, setting the chamber up to do its job for the first time in three full weeks. But that’s just one of the pressing items facing this neophyte Speaker who comes to office with one of the thinnest political resumes in decades and with the least experience in 140 years. The White House and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell alike have urged Congress to couple funding for Israel with money for Ukraine. The government is also due to run out of money in mid-November and Johnson has told colleagues to expect another stopgap spending resolution, likely into the new year to avoid a holiday-time threat of a shutdown. 

    During previous votes on Ukraine and on government funding, Johnson was a nay. But a rank-and-file lawmaker’s no—even one he says is mischaracterized—is seldom predictive of what he will allow to come to the floor as Speaker. Or at least that’s what lawmakers desperate for the House to return to what passes for functionality are counting on. Then again, the last three weeks have shown not just how broken the Republican Party has become, but how much Congress is hobbling from crisis to crisis. More than specific pieces of legislation, Johnson’s legacy-in-making could well be to fix the half of the Capitol he now controls. Or at least find some spackling to patch the cracks in the plaster.

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    Philip Elliott

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