2024 election

If you thought the California nightmare was bad enough, things are about to get much worse. It pains Cockburn to tell you that Representative Adam Schiff is running to replace Dianne Feinstein in the US Senate. His announcement follows hot on the heels of his being booted from the House Intelligence Committee and the resulting wave of media attention. https://twitter.com/adamschiff/status/1618626586303160325 In the opening lines of his video announcement, Schiff says he “always believed that what’s right matters, that the truth matters — and that decency matters.” This is the same Adam Schiff who for years promised he had the goods on Trump’s Russia collusion, that some new conclusive evidence had been found that Trump was a Russian catspaw.

A couple of major news outlets got egg on their faces last week after reporting that John Bolton had officially entered the Republican presidential primary. Alas, that isn’t quite true. What Bolton actually said is that he’d run if he thought he had a chance of beating Donald Trump. “I wouldn’t run as a vanity candidate,” Bolton told Good Morning Britain. “If I didn’t think I could run seriously, then I wouldn’t get in the race.” I don’t blame reporters for jumping the gun. The story is too good to pass up. Even Trump’s enemies would enjoy watching him savage Bolton on the campaign trail: “We booked out this big, beautiful arena, folks. You know where Ambassador Lorax is having his rally? The high school down the street.

Congresswoman Katie Porter of California announced on Tuesday that she would be running for Senator Dianne Feinstein’s seat.  But given Porter’s supposed office conduct, Cockburn can't help but wonder if anyone would dare to work for her campaign. Former staffers for the representative have made allegations that Porter “says rude/racist things” and “talks [expletive] about other members, leadership, staffers, local electeds etc.” It was earlier reported that Porter had mistreated a staffer for having caught and transmitted Covid to the congresswoman. After the staffer apologized via text message, Porter replied, “Well, you gave me Covid. In twenty-five months, it took you not following the rules to get me sick.

Donald Trump has caused something of a hugger-mugger over his last supper with Kanye West, or Ye, and Nick Fuentes. A variety of Jewish organizations are either wringing their collective hands (if they’ve been supporters of Trump) or outright denouncing him (if they’ve long viewed him as an odious figure). A few Republican leaders, including former vice president Mike Pence, who said it was “wrong” for Trump to break bread with the duo, are voicing their disapprobation. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie tweeted on Saturday: “This is just awful, unacceptable conduct from anyone, but most particularly from a former President and current candidate.” Unlike previous Trump controversies, this one does not appear to be subsiding after a 24-hour news cycle.

Just eighteen days after Kanye West vowed that he was taking a thirty-day cleanse from talking, drinking alcohol, watching porn and having sex, the disgraced rapper is back. And like his idol Donald Trump, he's even announced a 2024 presidential bid. If at first you don’t succeed, maybe don’t try again? In a video shared on YouTube this weekend, Kanye revealed far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos as a new campaign staffer. "This is Milo right here, working on the campaign," the mogul said. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1FQXbqRuMs&ab_channel=X17onlineVideo When the cameraman asked if that was an announcement, Kanye laughed as Milo confirmed: "I guess it is. Thanks, I accept." The cameraman then asked Kanye: "So you are running?

“America’s comeback starts right now,” declared former and possibly future president Donald J. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club and private residence on Tuesday evening. Speaking for over an hour in uncharacteristically measured tones, Trump sounded downright businesslike, laying out the achievements of his first term, his aspirations for a possible future term, and the demerits of his once and likely future opponent Joe Biden. “President Trump’s tone,” Bryan Leib, a former Pennsylvania congressional candidate and executive director of Iranian Americans for Liberty, messaged me from the floor, was “calm, confident, and unifying.” About 18 minutes in, Trump matter-of-factly pronounced what everyone was waiting to hear: that he is a candidate for president in 2024.

Donald Trump is expected to announce that he is running for president again next week on November 14, according to multiple reports and chatter near the Trump Organization. The only question is whether he does it even earlier — listening to allies like Matt Gaetz who think he should announce as soon as tonight to take credit for what Republicans anticipate will be a clear red wave. This seems like an uncharacteristic mistake on Trump's part. The announcement, whether it comes this week or next, is premature. It's unlikely to forestall any significant potential competitors — and might actually serve to embolden some. The most powerful tool Trump has is the ability to jump in as a former president overwhelmingly popular with Republican voters and instantly clear the field.

Hillary Clinton has an ominous warning ahead of the 2024 election: right-wing extremists, she said this week, are already planning to steal it. If they were, she would certainly know something about it. Hillary has been shrieking about “vast right-wing conspiracies” since the 1990s when she and her husband were mapping out their political futures of “Eight for Bill, Eight for Hill.” The poor woman just can’t catch a break. You'd have to hood Hillary like a falcon to stop her from talking about how elections have been stolen from her. She claimed that about the 2016 election, in which she seemingly forgot the state of Wisconsin existed for 104 days.

Tom Wolfe invented Al Sharpton in his 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. In the novel, he was called Reverend Bacon. In a splendid case of life imitating art, Sharpton took his place as a fixture in the metabolism of Democratic politics that same year when he hitched his star to the case of Tawana Brawley, then fifteen, who falsely claimed she had been abducted and raped by six white men, some of whom, she said, were police. For reasons that are part of the inscrutable workings of the universe, Sharpton’s histrionic fabrications in that case catapulted him to a position of tribal leadership among Democratic presidential candidates.

Some people are expending a lot of emotional energy on the excerpt in the Atlantic from Maggie Haberman’s new book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. It’s anti-Trump, of course, so it feeds a certain well-formed habit. But it strikes me as pretty thin gruel. The essay is based on three interviews that Haberman, White House correspondent for the New York Times, conducted over the spring and summer of 2021, the first two at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach Residence, the third at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey. A tag line for the Atlantic excerpt tells readers that the former president “tried to sell his preferred version of himself, but said much more than he intended.” Did he? A lot has been made of two statements.

The biggest question for the future of the Republican Party is not whether Donald Trump runs for president in 2024 — he will. It is whether Ron DeSantis chooses to challenge him, or jumps the shark instead. Henry Olsen, the esteemed election analyst and Washington Post columnist, has a new column arguing that the overall lesson from the midterm primaries that have played out over the last several months is that the appetite for Trumpian populist candidates exists almost everywhere. The GOP electorate doesn't just want the policy priorities of populists — they want the style and attitude Trump brought to bear against the media and the Republican establishment.

I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to write about Liz Cheney again. After she was crushed by the Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman last week in the Wyoming GOP primary, I figured the self-obsessed crusader would retreat to her boudoir to dress up in top hats once worn by Abraham Lincoln while guzzling a brand of whiskey favored by Ulysses S. Grant, both of whom she invoked in her petulent non-concession concession speech. But Cheney is not quite done making a spectacle of herself. A couple of weeks ago, the Trump-deranged congresswoman sniffed that she would find it “very difficult” to support Ron DeSantis because he had aligned himself with Donald Trump. That remark garnered some portion of the contempt it deserved, but it was nothing to her latest foray on to the public stage.

What’s left of the Bush-Cheney wing of the Republican Party doesn’t like Ron DeSantis. But it’s eager to see him run for president anyway. For if DeSantis challenges Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination, the old establishment stands to gain no matter who ultimately gets the nod. The Florida governor certainly seems to be ideologically closer to Trump-style populism than to the neoconservatism that prevailed among elite Republicans from the end of the Reagan era to the defeat of Mitt Romney in 2012. Why, then, would those who pine for the likes of Bush and Romney want to see a choice between Trump and DeSantis, both right-wing populists, two years from now?