2024 presidential election

The list of attendees for the first GOP presidential primary debate keeps getting longer. Former vice president Mike Pence has apparently just succeeded in reaching the 40,000 unique donor milestone, granting him a spot in Milwaukee on August 23 alongside Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Chris Christie and a governor from one of the Dakotas (not the one you like looking at). Trump may or may not attend, but whatever he chooses, Cockburn expects him to be at the center of the debate. The RNC also gave candidates some prompts about what to expect: some pre-taped questions from student members of the Young America's Foundation, one minute for answers, thirty seconds for follow-ups, forty-five seconds for closing statements, no opening statements.

I wonder if Ron DeSantis’s favorite mot these days is from Mark Twain: “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Maybe so. But let’s face it, the reports are many and deafening.  They are also damaging. Consider, to take one recent example, the report, conveyed by Semafor, on the DeSantis Meme Team that works under the rubric of “War Room Creative Ideas” on the encrypted message app Signal.   Among the “creative ideas” were videos, insinuated anonymously onto Twitter (as it then was), that smeared Donald Trump by including a fascist symbol — get it? Another attacked Trump for pro-LGBT rights comments. Both were instantly attacked by the Trump base.

North Dakota governor Doug Burgum is used to being counted out — and he brought that underdog energy to a meet and greet to Washington, DC, just in time to celebrate his surprising qualification for the Presidential Republican primary debate stage. At the swanky Capitol Hill Club he made his case. He was surrounded by his state’s congressional delegation along with Senator Susan Collins, former senator Norm Coleman and a room of curious onlookers, many of whom told Cockburn they first learned of his campaign when he launched a clever scheme to mail out $20 gift cards in exchange for a $1 donation—a way to reach the 40,000 donor threshold to make the stage.

What if the problem for Ron DeSantis isn’t that he resembles the spiraling candidacies of the past, but that he’s emulating someone who had a great start, then turned a plateau into a cascade? The general experience in Republican presidential flameouts over the past decade and a half has been the very obvious crash and burn. We have Rudy Giuliani in 2008, who botched his Houston abortion speech then said he would wait until Florida and dropped from a 44 percent lead into utter ignominy. We have 2012’s Rick Perry, who surged to a 29 percent lead over Mitt Romney’s 17 percent in the summer of 2011, only to drop out in the same place he announced, South Carolina.

As Miami mayor Francis X. Suarez looks to dribble onto the presidential debate stage in Milwaukee, he’s raffling off front-row tickets to soccer superstar Lionel Messi’s American debut to anyone who Venmo's his campaign a single dollar — but campaign finance experts warn that the gimmick could pave the way for an influx of illegal foreign cash. Suarez is shooting his shot, banking on Messi’s star power more than his own to vault him past the required 40,000 donors the Republican National Committee is requiring in order to debate.  https://twitter.

Open any national publication, and you’ll read all about a cultish, fire-breathing MAGA majority in the Republican Party, slavish in its devotion to Donald Trump. Nothing will shake their conviction that Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election. This is the group that fumbled the ball on the one-yard line in the 2022 midterms, nominating unelectable kooks who could not perform the most basic of political tasks: winning undivided control of Congress amid 8 percent inflation that Americans largely blamed on the incumbent Democratic president. And now they’re poised to do it again. The front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024 is (at present) the twice-indicted Donald Trump.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and we are seeing that truism play out in real time with what C-list Republican presidential candidates are doing to qualify for the presidential primary debates. While it’s increasingly unclear if former president Donald Trump will even appear on the debate stage himself, candidates such as North Dakota governor Doug Burgum are trying something new out: paying people to recruit more donors. The routes being taken by these also-ran candidates are slightly different. America Strong & Free PAC, which is backing former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, is offering to make some small-dollar bundlers contractors by paying them for every new donor they recruit, Cockburn can first report.

The Trump-DeSantis Twitter wars are raging on — and now some real celebrity is involved. Caitlyn Jenner, the transgender woman formerly known as Bruce, previously said in 2021 that she would support Donald Trump if he ran for president in 2024. The Olympic champion in the decathlon also said in an interview in April that the country needs an "alpha male" like Trump in the White House. The DeSantis camp drew the ire of Jenner and other LGBTQ+ Republicans with a new ad attacking Trump for various statements he made in support of Pride month and trans people using the bathrooms of their chosen gender.