2024 campaign

Welcome to Thunderdome, where this week the 2024 election had its first real sea change in priority and policy focus thanks to the horrific, detestable and utterly evil attacks on Israel by Hamas. The general rule in politics is that foreign policy doesn’t matter for voters, and that’s been true in... actually, wait a minute... not even the majority of presidential elections in the past half century! In 1980, 1984, 1988, 2004, 2008 and 2016, foreign policy played an outsized role in the candidate selection of Republicans and Democrats, and you could even argue that Joe Biden’s false promise of foreign policy normalcy was decisive in 2020.

My Tuesday evening unexpectedly freed up when a much anticipated (just kidding!) joint Fox News interview with GOP presidential candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and Chris Christie was scrapped. Why? The Republican National Committee threatened to exclude the pair from future RNC debates for violating an agreement they made not to appear in any unsanctioned debates. Although Fox News avoided the term “debate” when advertising the planned special segment, the RNC was not convinced. Christie and Ramaswamy both lashed out at the RNC in response, claiming it was proof of a “broken” primary process and harmful to the party's ability to have substantive “dialogue” about issues.

Weep, ad men. The Republican Party shouldn’t have to rely on any of you in 2024. They don’t need your creative, your deployment of over-the-top grainy crime videos, your use of shooting up legislation with AR-15s. All the GOP needs this election is an editor and the C-SPAN live feed of Joe Biden coping with senility. For a cringe-inducing twenty-six minutes in Hanoi, Biden put his diminished, cranky, meandering mental capacity on display. He rolled out his frequently deployed Hollywood equivalent of a Mandela Effect — his own personal Berenstein Bears, his Stouffer’s Stove Top — about a movie scene that simply does not exist in the plane of existence which we, for our sins, inhabit.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where you should never let a crisis go to waste, and Donald Trump isn’t wasting any time bashing Ron DeSantis even in the midst of hurricane recovery efforts, hoping to stomp on what could be an opportunity to show off his good governance chops. The White House, meanwhile, is struggling not just with frustration over their delayed response to the Maui disaster and the president’s insistence on repeatedly telling his exaggerated anecdotes about a house fire, but also the anniversary of another, different kind of disaster: the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which brought Gold Star families to bear against the administration this week. The guys discuss all this and more on the latest Thunderdome podcast — listen and subscribe here today!

The Republican Party has to come to grips with populism. Donald Trump’s commanding lead in the race for the 2024 presidential nomination makes that clear, as does the fact that the next-most popular candidate, Ron DeSantis, also has a populist streak. In fact, the GOP’s base has subscribed to one flavor of populism or another since at least as far back as the start of the Cold War. In the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-hunting had a pronounced class dimension — elite officials in “striped pants” were a frequent target. By the end of the 1960s, Richard Nixon was appealing to the “silent majority” against a radical campus counterculture. The Moral Majority and other religious right groups of the 1980s and 1990s exhibited a form of Christian populism.

Former president Donald Trump has been indicted in the state of Georgia, along with several 2020 campaign allies, for attempting to subvert the result of the last presidential election.

Former president Donald Trump decried what he characterized as the “fake and fabricated charges” brought against him by the Department of Justice in a half-hour speech on the evening of his arraignment Addressing a crowd of around 900 loyalists at his Bedminster resort in New Jersey, Trump referred to Jack Smith’s indictment of him as “election interference” and “political persecution.” “This day will go down in infamy,” he told his adoring fans, claiming that Biden wanted to see him spend “400 years in prison” for “possessing my own presidential papers.