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The Republicans walking 2024 tightropes One of the big questions hanging over Ron DeSantis’s 2024 bid is how he will position himself on foreign policy. A governor with the broad backing of conservatives on a range of domestic issues, DeSantis has so far been reluctant to wade into geopolitics, on which his party is more divided. But in an appearance on Fox and Friends this week — conducted during a swing through the New York, Chicago and Philadelphia — DeSantis was asked about Joe Biden’s trip to Ukraine. In response, he chose to downplay Russia’s threat to Europe, dismissing its military as “third rate” and criticizing what he called Biden’s “blank-check policy” towards Ukraine. “He’s very concerned about those borders halfway around the world.

The 2024 campaign has hardly started, but the air is already filled with noxious fumes, most of it from desperate cable TV hosts and anonymous social-media posters. Don Lemon’s sexist comments about Nikki Haley are the latest example, but the vitriol has spread much wider. It reveals a dank corner of American politics, filled with mud-slinging and name-calling, degrading our public square. Donald Trump specializes in these attacks.. He has already launched several, unsuccessfully, on the man he sees as his most formidable competitor. Calling Florida’s popular governor “Meatball Ron” and “DeSanctimonious” isn’t an argument. It’s an epithet. It has the intellectual heft of giving someone the middle finger.

California senator Dianne Feinstein, eighty-nine, whose mental decline has long been an open secret, announced her 2024 retirement last week. This comes on the heels of a stinging Sacramento Bee editorial withholding endorsement for her replacement and an accelerating race for her seat. Senator Feinstein has no public plans to resign. She says she will serve out her full term, preventing an appointment by Governor Gavin Newsom. Efforts to force her out of office early will persist. When Feinstein ran for the Senate in 2018, she obtained just 54 percent of the primary vote against fellow Democrat Kevin de León, a widely despised figure in California politics, now clinging to his Los Angeles city council seat after being exposed as a cutthroat diversity fraud.

Manchester, New Hampshire Sorry fellas: GOP girlboss Nikki Haley is going to be the next president. At least according to former New Hampshire candidate for Senate Don Bolduc, who knows a thing or two about calling elections. Bolduc introduced Haley at two New Hampshire town halls in the week she entered the 2024 Republican primary. The second was held Friday at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, a regular stop for candidates visiting the early primary state. The packed room was treated to a soundtrack of late-boomer classics from Blondie, Tom Petty and the Detroit Spinners. On her way in, Haley stopped by the overspill area in the foyer to thank the surplus guests for coming. "Next time we'll have a bigger room," the candidate promised.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre didn’t mince words this week when defending her boss. When asked by a reporter about Biden’s adeptness at handling different communication settings, Jean-Pierre stated matter-of-factly, "I would tell you this: the president is the best communicator that we have in the White House.” President Biden rarely communicates with the press corps or with the American public. The old man yells at his teleprompter about McDonald’s WiFi, talks to ghosts and constantly calls people by the wrong name. Just this week, he claimed that he had traveled one million miles a day on Amtrak — not a joke. In the same speech, the great communicator referred to Maryland’s first black governor Wes Moore as “boy.

In recent years, Republican candidates and media figures have become increasingly critical of one portion of the population. At the same time, this same demographic has turned against them at the ballot box. As the GOP became the party of men — married or unmarried — they drove away the single women, who voted against them en masse in the 2022 midterms. It's not hard to see why.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus, or what’s left of it, is in shambles. The Democratic group’s staff has dwindled down to nothing, following months of turmoil under its newly elected chair, Representative Nanette Barragán, who took over in December. In the weeks since, the group’s staff have all either left voluntarily or been fired. Most recently, Barragán fired the group’s lone survivor, executive director Jacky Usyk — news that was first publicized by the anonymous Instagram account, Dear White Staffers, which has been prolifically documenting the CHC turmoil. While Barragán has only been in Congress for six years, Legistorm data show that she has the third highest turnover rate of congressional staff in the past twenty years.

The capital vs the Capitol When the House of Representatives voted to overturn a pair of laws recently passed by the Council of the District of Columbia this week, Eleanor Norton Holmes, the District’s non-voting delegate, delivered an uncompromising and partisan denunciation. “I can only conclude that that the Republican leadership believes DC residents, the majority of whom are black and brown, are unworthy or incapable of governing themselves,” she said. But Holmes’s black-and-white account of the House vote to block two controversial pieces of legislation — one a revamped (and relaxed) criminal code, the other allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections — omitted some inconvenient details.