Politics

Just as TikTok looked as though it had weathered the storm following a murky congressional hearing, a group of Republicans are demanding that the Department of Justice investigate its CEO for allegedly lying to Congress. Thirteen House Republicans, led by Representative Tim Walberg, wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland, in a letter obtained by The Spectator, demanding that the DoJ look into what they claim are critical lies told to Congress by TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, while he was testifying under oath. “It is imperative that we hold Chew and TikTok accountable for his false statements regarding crucial facts of the company’s operations,” the Republicans wrote. The signatories are all members of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which grilled Chew earlier this year.

Mandy Cohen — the doctor rumored to be President Joe Biden’s successor to the scandal-plagued Rochelle Walensky atop the Centers for Disease Control — loves Anthony Fauci, multiple sources familiar with her record tell The Spectator. Biden’s likely pick to helm the CDC has what many view as a troubling record of politicizing science and unnecessarily supporting draconian lockdown measures, even in the face of scientific reality. Most are seizing on a photo of Cohen wearing a mask emblazoned with a giant picture of Anthony Fauci and a video of her at a briefing (while North Carolina was under a strict mask mandate) in which she looks to see if the cameras are on, pretends to put on her mask, then pretends to take it off. https://twitter.

Here comes everybody. With former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, former vice president Mike Pence and, er... North Dakota governor Doug Burgum set to announce their presidential bids this week, the 2024 GOP primary is starting to feel a little crowded. Maybe too crowded, according to Chris Sununu. The New Hampshire governor had been weighing a run but today told CNN’s Dana Bash that he will not seek his party’s nomination.

A distant cousin of Elvis Presley is running as a Democrat to be governor of Mississippi. And much like the King of Rock and Roll, Brandon Presley can’t help falling in love — at the most politically expedient times.  Just days before his campaign season wedding to Katelyn Mabus was scheduled, he scrambled to let invitees know that his show will not in fact go on. Presley, a lifelong bachelor, has been running for office since he was a young man. He was elected mayor of his North Mississippi town at twenty-four years old and has served as an elected energy regulator since.  In December 2022, just twenty-four days before announcing that he’d be challenging Governor Tate Reeves in an attempt to turn Mississippi blue, he had an even more special announcement.

Ron DeSantis has declared war on woke. Donald Trump yesterday declared war on the word “woke.” Speaking in Urbandale, Iowa, yesterday, the Republican frontrunner said: “I don’t like the term ‘woke,’ because I hear the term ‘woke, woke, woke.’ It’s just a term they use, half the people can’t define it, they don’t know what it is.”  Close textual readings of Donald Trump’s stump-speech riffs are a dangerous game, but in this case a difference of opinion over word choice goes to the heart of Team Trump’s plan to paint DeSantis as a career politician who speaks in jargon, in sharp contrast to their candidate’s direct language and quick wittedness.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where I have good news, everyone — we have a podcast now! The Spectator’s long-standing DC-focused podcast, The District, is going all Thunderdome for the 2024 primary season. Every week, I’ll be breaking down the latest in the 2024 contests with a pair of Washington insider friends who will give us their experienced political takes on the state of play. In our first episode, we talked about Ron DeSantis’s Iowa launch, Donald Trump’s Covid revisionism, Chris Christie and Mike Pence, and whether RFK Jr. is the start of something bigger on the Democratic side. Listen here today!

The House will vote on Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden’s debt-ceiling deal this evening and, by all accounts, the speaker has stuck the landing. Having reached an agreement with the White House, McCarthy got his way in a crucial Rules Committee meeting yesterday, fought off a Freedom Caucus rebellion and looks set to win support for his deal from a majority of his conference.  To the great disappointment of those banking on a bruising Republican civil war, McCarthy evidently feels secure in his position. Asked about the possibility of disgruntled hardliners filing a motion to vacate today, McCarthy replied: “Look, everybody has the ability to do what they want. But if you think I’m going to wake up in the morning and ever be worried about that, no. Doesn’t bother me.

It was a not-so-happy start to the Memorial Day weekend for conservative activist Gavin Wax. Wax was publicly fired from his job at the Babylon Bee, a Christian right-wing satire site, on Friday over a not-so-nice tweet about a member of the DeSantis 2024 campaign. Wax, who runs the New York Young Republicans and supports former president Donald Trump in the GOP primary, was warring against DeSantis supporters last week who implicitly accused him of fraud because he used to work for Gettr. Gettr was financially backed by Miles Guo, a Chinese businessman who was arrested for allegedly orchestrating a $1 billion fraud conspiracy. Cockburn acknowledges that this is all very confusing. Stick with him.

For years, in both sympathetic and unsympathetic parts of the press, DeSantis has been hyped as “Trump without the baggage,” “Trumpism without Trump,” “Trump without the brains.” But the first few days have proved these formulations to be, at best, oversimplifications, and perhaps even mischaracterizations. In an especially smart Washington Free Beacon column, Matthew Continetti argues that DeSantis’s launch event, once it got past the embarrassing glitches, demonstrated that the clash between Trump and DeSantis over the GOP nomination “is also a struggle between two concepts of the New Right, pitting the former president’s MAGA populism against the Florida governor’s institutional culture war.

The battle is joined! Welcome to the inaugural edition of the new Spectator newsletter, THUNDERDOME.  Loyal readers will know this has been the name of my columns covering presidential election coverage for years. It was always a tribute to the late great Tina Turner, such an incredible icon and the star villain of the classic Mad Max movie where “two men enter, one man leaves.”  I’ll be writing it once a week, and you can sign up to receive future editions direct to your inbox here. Please sign up today!

Is Ron DeSantis’s decision to launch his presidential bid on a Twitter hangout with Elon Musk this evening evidence of a fatally online campaign or a smart if risky way to inject some juice into a candidacy that some have written off as dead on arrival? The only honest answer to that question is that we’ll soon find out. My own two cents: a more traditional launch is something of a non-event anyway — an undercooked stump speech, a carefully selected cross section of the population waving banners in the background. There’ll be plenty of those over the coming months, so why not try something different?  DeSantis’s Twitter launch isn’t just a moment worth paying attention to for its electoral consequences.