2024 election

The White House has announced that everyone coming into range of President Trump will be tested for COVID-19. Trump, meanwhile, insists that he won’t wear a mask when meeting other leaders — or, as he put it in order of reverse dignity, ‘presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens’.Unfortunately the worst-case scenario — that a 73-year-old might catch a dose and get seriously ill — no longer seems outlandish. On Sunday night, Britain’s prime minister Boris Johnson was hospitalized after falling sick 10 days ago. Today he went into critical care. What if someone sneezes and Trump catches a cold?Welcome to the nasty, brutish and short Pence presidency.

The battle for the soul of the Republican party after President Trump has begun. Last week former United States ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, gave a provocative speech to the Hudson Institute setting herself up for a 2024 run on a largely free market platform. The speech has been published by Stand for America, an advocacy organization founded by Haley after standing down as ambassador in December 2018. Haley argues that capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty, improved the environment, and created immense prosperity – including the electricity, cars, airplanes, the internet and much more.

Nikki Haley, the first female governor of South Carolina, has a book out this week. Titled With All Due Respect: Defending America with Grit and Grace, Haley has been making the rounds to promote it and has managed the rarest balancing act of the Trump era: criticizing him when necessary but not going into full-on Trump Derangement Syndrome.Haley appeared on NBC News with Savannah Guthrie this week and the clip went viral because of how hard Guthrie went after Haley. Liberals on Twitter applauded but the clip also made the rounds of my non-political Facebook universe commending Haley for her calm demeanor and grace under pressure. Guthrie focused most of her questions not on Haley’s book but on Haley’s opinion of Donald Trump and Haley swatted them easily.

‘I met Josh Hawley 10 years ago, and he told me he would be president of the United States,’ a person who knows Missouri’s junior senator tells me. ‘It’s been terrifying to watch him to execute on that pledge perfectly ever since.’Joshua David Hawley, 39, is the upper chamber’s youngest member. Elected in 2018, a bad year as a whole for the GOP, Hawley would seem to be the Right’s answer to Pete Buttigieg: Xennial, Midwestern, Ivy League, sincerely religious, scary smart.Like almost everyone who matters on the Right, Hawley addressed this week’s National Conservatism Conference: ‘As we gather tonight, we face a nation divided, a political class paralyzed, the old political programs in shambles, the future uncertain.

Let’s make it clear right off the bat that Tulsi Gabbard will not be the Democratic nominee in 2020. The party’s base is so consumed with hatred for the president that only one criterion matters: which candidate can cast embody the spirit of The Anti-Trump. Do you hate the Orange Menace for his divisiveness, his crudity, his total lack of chill? Then lose yourself in Obama nostalgia with Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, and Joe Biden. Or are you looking for an all-out brawl, fascists v. reds, Spanish Civil War-style? Well, Elizabeth Warren is sharpening her tomahawk, and Bernie Sanders has his game face on. Gabbard is not the antithesis of Trump, in either temperament nor ideology. Quite the opposite: more than any of her colleagues, she resembles Trump circa 2016.