Politics

Welcome to Thunderdome, fresh from New Hampshire, tired as all get-out and ready to rumble on to South Carolina and its welcoming warmth and palmetto-framed cobblestone streets, as opposed to the watery coffee and stained fingers of the Northeast. The strangest thing seems to be happening, though: with Nikki Haley’s insistence on staying in the race, and the apparent flood of donations she’s received since overperforming against Donald Trump, the people around the former president are taking on a newly aggressive tone — even to the point of trying to anoint him the nominee before anyone else votes!

Last night, former president Donald Trump all but sewed up the Republican nomination for president in 2024. Former UN ambassador and South Carolina governor Nikki Haley finished eleven points behind Trump in a state that she needed to win in order to justify her continued presence in the race. Next up is Nevada, where Haley is not participating in the state GOP’s caucuses, as she has instead chosen to be listed on the irrelevant primary ballot. Then, Trump and Haley will square off in the latter’s home state of South Carolina. Trump enjoys a hefty lead there according to early polling, and Haley will be hard-pressed to improve her position with another $31 million of ad buys like she did in New Hampshire, as she is already a known quantity to voters there.

President Biden was in Manassas, Virginia this evening, at a rally intended to be focused on federal abortion rights, shortly after the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. But some pro-Palestine protesters in the audience had other ideas. “Genocide Joe: how many kids have you killed today?” a man bellowed at Biden. “Israel kills two mothers every hour!” a woman yelled immediately after. More and more hecklers started interrupting the president. “This is gonna go on for a while — they’ve got this planned,” he told the crowd. Shortly after, he appeared to brand the protesters as "MAGA Republicans" — not a notoriously pro-Gaza group... https://twitter.

New Hampshire votes tomorrow in the 2024 presidential primaries — and it seems no one is expecting an upset. The Spectator team dispatched to Manchester and has observed a significantly quieter scene than that of the 2020 Democratic primary contest. News coverage is scanter than expected, the bars and restaurants are empty and there is plenty of parking, even as temperatures creeped above freezing today.The only quasi-surprise so far is that Florida governor Ron DeSantis has suspended his campaign already, although that seemed more a question of when not if, considering his poor showing in Iowa after spending more than $100 million campaigning.

Some enterprising entrepreneur ought to find a way of collecting a cover charge for the entertainments that the Get Trump concession is currently offering the public free and for nothing. At the moment, the first of my two favorite forays into the twilight zone are the defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll against Trump. Carroll claims that sometime, she cannot remember exactly when, but it was about thirty years ago, Trump sexually assaulted her in a fitting room at the swank department store Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan. A New York jury found Trump guilty of defamation and sexual abuse (but not rape) and ordered him to pay Carroll $5 million of the crispest. Now she is back asking for more. Who knows whether she will get it. Stand by and pass the popcorn.

The smallest-ever House Republican majority is squabbling once again, and the irony is that much of the frustration is focused on a tiny group of Republicans who tanked what they claimed to want last year.The usual gang of safe-district Republicans, Republicans running for higher office and anti-team players are agitating to shut down the border or shut down the government, even though many of them voted against a bill last year that would have implemented meaningful border security provisions and cut spending — even with divided government. Ironically, the then-chair of the Freedom Caucus, Scott Perry, negotiated this deal — which included the entirety of the House GOP’s border security package with the exception of strengthening the E-Verify immigration system.

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.