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Is Andrew Breitbart’s over-quoted theory that “politics is downstream from culture” really true? Today, with media machinations stealing prime newspaper homepage real estate from presidential campaign launches, it feels more like politics is downstream from media. Over the last twenty-four hours, Chris Licht was fired at CNN, just a year and a half after he was appointed, and Tucker Carlson launched his new show on Twitter. I get the impression people are hungrier for details about these media stories than, say, the ins and outs of Mike Pence’s presidential announcement.  That’s not because America is suddenly more interested in media than politics, but because the line between the two is more blurred than ever.

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.

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.

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.

Welcome to a later-than-usual debt-ceiling brinkmanship special edition of the DC Diary. The mood music was encouraging as Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden sat down for talks in the Oval Office this evening. “We still have some disagreements, but I think we may be able to get where we have to go,” said Biden to pool reporters. “We both know we have a significant responsibility.” McCarthy was similarly positive. Hours earlier, treasury secretary Janet Yellen wrote to lawmakers telling everyone what they already knew: that the US is “highly likely” to run out of money to pay all its bills if “Congress has not acted to raise or suspend the debt” as early as June 1. Not news, exactly, but an effort to focus minds.

When Joe Biden announced his desire for South Carolina to move to the front of the line, ahead of Iowa and New Hampshire, in a reshuffle of his party’s primary calendar, he used race as the justification.  “We must ensure that voters of color have a voice in choosing our nominee much earlier in the process and throughout the entire early window,” he said in a letter to the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee sent late last year.    The proposal, to which the DNC gave the green light, was patronage dressed up as principle. South Carolina saved Biden’s presidential bid in 2020, and this was one way for the president to repay the favor.

The Republican primary has kicked into a higher gear in recent days. Donald Trump terrified one half of the country (and delighted the other) in his dominant, unrepentant CNN town hall appearance last Wednesday. Ron DeSantis is spending a lot of time in Iowa and — in the surest sign yet that he really wants to be president — appearing jacket-less among normal people. (10/10 fake laugh, Governor.)  The coming few weeks will see more candidates make it official. With Florida’s legislative session done and dusted, a DeSantis announcement is just around the corner. In a lengthy profile of Mike Pence, the New York Times yesterday reported the arrival of a new pro-Pence super PAC, Committed to America, a sign that he will soon come clean about his plans.