Politics

Welcome to Thunderdome, where fresh off his thirty-point win in Iowa, former president Donald Trump is now counting on New Hampshire to deliver the killing blow to the nascent Nikki Haley boomlet. Haley underperformed polling expectations in Iowa — in part because of the frigid weather, which saw the lowest turnout in a quarter century for the caucuses. New Hampshire now takes on new importance for her, keeping the narrative going that she’s the better, stronger choice for a showdown with her former boss. With the backing of Republican governor Chris Sununu, an influx of cash from the donor class and a DeSantis campaign that is largely focused southward, Haley will have her best shot at pulling out an unlikely upset.

It’s 2016 all over again, following a frozen Iowa caucus where Donald Trump told Republicans to get on the Trump Train... before it’s too late.Trump’s top two rivals, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, are both staying in the race, whereas Vivek Ramaswamy, who spent much of his campaign running as Trump’s understudy, dropped out and endorsed Trump.It’s hard to think of a better outcome for the former president; Alex Titus, an advisor to Trump’s former super PAC, called Iowa “a massive victory for Donald Trump,” and added that “the only ones surprised by the results are in the consultant class.” Trump narrowly eclipsed the 50 percent threshold many viewed as critical to serving as a strong showing; Haley and DeSantis virtually tied for second at around 20 percent each.

Congressional Democrats have finally admitted why they are so scared of Donald Trump — they think he’s out to kill them. January 6 was just a preview to a possible round of sweeping political assassinations. “Donald Trump and his lawyers essentially asserted that the president has the right to assassinate people, to kill people without any prospect of prosecution unless they’re first impeached by the House and convicted in the Senate,” Representative Jamie Raskin said on CNN last Tuesday after Trump's DC circuit Court of Appeals appearance. Raskin was referring to an argument made by Trump’s lawyer John Sauer that the former president is immune to criminal persecution for official acts taken while in office.

As a new Covid variant, JN1, has cropped up across America, the public health officials who were at the forefront of the Covid-19 pandemic were hauled into Congress and pressed on lockdowns, the origins of the coronavirus, school closures and more behind closed doors. The most prominent target, Anthony Fauci, was particularly grilled by the House’s bipartisan Covid Select Committee for fourteen hours over two days. Unreported until now is the lack of interest by the committee’s top Democrat, the confirmed conflicts of interests that an American scientist investigating Covid’s origins had and the carelessness with which Fauci ran his grant-making.

The US Army has been facing a recruitment crisis for some time now — and new data shines a light on the demographic that seems particularly uninterested in serving: white people.A Military.com report reveals:A total of 44,042 new Army recruits were categorized by the service as white in 2018, but that number has fallen consistently each year to a low of 25,070 in 2023, with a 6 percent dip from 2022 to 2023 being the most significant drop. No other demographic group has seen such a precipitous decline, though there have been ups and downs from year to year.Black recruitment also fell during this period, while Hispanic recruitment jumped from 17 percent to 24 percent.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where the podcast has returned just in time for the final days before Iowa’s verdict. All those counties, all those fairs, all that fried food and all that slogging through freezing temperatures and Covid flare-ups has come to this: a caucus that will determine who drops out first, Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley. You can see in last night’s CNN debate why the hopes were once so high for the Florida governor. DeSantis won the debate, solidly, and has continued to improve as a debater throughout this process. But without Donald Trump on the stage, the back and forth with Haley turned into bickering over lying about records and meta commentary from the former South Carolina governor about bungled campaigns.

White House officials confirmed Tuesday that defense secretary Lloyd Austin kept his prostate cancer diagnosis to himself for a month before informing the White House, adding further scrutiny to Austin’s recent failure to inform Biden or the National Security Council that he was in the ICU for several days. Austin, who oversees a department tasked with deterring conflict, received his diagnosis in December, according to a statement from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center officials.

It’s no secret that Americans are moving from blue states to red ones. According to recently released Census Bureau data, the five with the largest population loss to other states between July 2022 and July 2023 were California (-338,371), then New York (-216,778), Illinois (-83,839), New Jersey (-44,666), Massachusetts (-39,149) and Maryland (-30,905). The five states with the largest overall increases during the same period were Texas (473,453), Florida (365,205), Georgia (116,077), South Carolina (90,600) and Tennessee (77,512). The most frequently cited reason for this ongoing blue-to-red migration is taxes — or, more correctly, the opportunity to pay less and fewer of them.

Stop us if you’ve heard this before: a Republican speaker of the House is facing ire from the Freedom Caucus that is mad about a deal he’s cutting with Democrats, who run almost the entire government.2024 picked up right where 2023 left off, with the narrow GOP House majority stuck between a Freedom Caucus-shaped rock and a hard place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. With at least a partial government shutdown looming, Speaker Mike Johnson’s proposed budget deal strikes many as almost exactly what former speaker Kevin McCarthy’s intra-party foes used as their alleged final straw against him. The Freedom Caucus, which went from loving Johnson to comparing him to John Boehner in slightly over a month, called Johnson’s $1.

DC Council member Charles Allen is facing a recall effort from fed-up citizens as carjackings in the nation’s capital nearly doubled last year while violent crime rose by 39 percent. Murders hit their highest level in two decades in 2023.  The campaign to recall Allen is being led by Jennifer Squires, a former federal government worker who says she voted for Allen previously but found herself troubled by the councilman’s attempts at so-called criminal justice reform. Allen was behind the attempts to revise DC’s criminal code last year. His changes would have eliminated nearly all mandatory minimums and lowered some mandatory maximums, including for carjackings.

Welcome to the first Thunderdome of 2024! I hope you had a great time off and congratulations to all of you chipper Ned Flanders types who’ve already filed your taxes. And also to those of you who are still in full recovery mode, having “Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully — to love all of our relatives, and in general, grossly overestimated our powers.” In any case, the year of 2023 is gone, and now our presidential election year is truly begun... and with it, a contest that is forcibly nonexistent on one side of the aisle, and on the other, one that has been drowned in its infancy. Why is that?

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have lost the support of Charlemagne Tha God, host of the culturally influential hip-hip radio show The Breakfast Club. Charlamagne, who endorsed the Democratic ticket in 2020, told Politico that he has no plans to repeat his mistake in 2024.  “I’ve learned my lesson from doing that. Once they got in the White House, [Harris] … kind of disappeared,” Charlamagne said. “‘Damn, you told us to vote for [them].’ Do you know how many people say that to me all the time?” Why does it matter? The Breakfast Club boasts 8 million listeners a month and Charlamagne is a well-respected voice in the black community, particularly among young, progressive listeners. Charlamagne’s defection feels like a long time coming.

What happens now that the Colorado Supreme Court has kicked Donald Trump off the primary ballot? The first thing, apparently, is similar lawsuits in other “blue” states. Those will continue despite the Wednesday decision by the Michigan Supreme Court that Trump’s name can remain.   Nearly all the commentary has been devoted to the legal reasons for these rulings and their political implications. But it is important to consider the effort to exclude Trump in a wider context, one that goes beyond his personality, polarizing candidacy and events of January 6.  That wider frame is a century-long progressive effort to reframe the way America is governed and to loosen the constitutional barriers to those changes.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s 2024 presidential campaign is imploding spectacularly. His first mistake was waiting too long to announce his intention to run while traveling the country for a “book tour,” which allowed former president Donald Trump to sully his name unanswered for weeks. Then when he did jump in, he made his announcement on a glitchy, botched Twitter Space with Elon Musk. In the months that followed, DeSantis struggled to adopt a clear strategy and seemed uncomfortable with the basic prospect of running a national campaign, perhaps best exemplified by an anecdote from 2018 when an advisor told him to write “LIKABLE” at the top of his debate notepad.