Donald trrump

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.

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.

The biggest open secret in Texas politics is now public knowledge. For months, it's been known that Ted Cruz will run for re-election to the Senate in 2024, skipping the presidential contest. It's a smart move by Cruz for a number of reasons, and will likely benefit the potential candidacy of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who would have had to compete with Cruz in the conservative lane for the GOP nomination. Those who come in second in presidential primaries, as Cruz did in 2016, tend to run again. The fact that Cruz is passing on the opportunity leaves a major opening for others. Since 1976, every competitive presidential primary on the Republican side has had one thing in common: at least one candidate has hailed from Texas.

Former director of national intelligence James Clapper made a hamfisted attempt this week to tidy up statements he made in 2020. Allow Cockburn to guide you on a trip down memory lane: In October 2020, Clapper was one of more than fifty ex-intelligence officials who signed a "Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails" (see here). The statement said the emails published by the New York Post bore “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” and that the signatories of the letter were “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” Clapper appeared on CNN, too, where he said, “To me, this is just classic textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft at work.” https://twitter.com/cnn/status/1317307227963678721?

Why would a candidate for the presidency purposefully undermine his greatest achievement in government — one that required the movement of heaven and earth, one that his opponents deemed impossible, but one that he ultimately delivered to the broad benefit of the American people? It seems ridiculous. Yet that is what Donald Trump seems to be doing, in his typically scattershot way. You have to ask: why? Trump, via his TruthSocial account, has been posting at record pace criticizing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — whom he maintains he voted for — as a "globalist," knocking DeSantis for favoring lockdowns (which he didn't) and for pushing people to get vaccinated (which he did).

Search’s up at the Biden beach house. President Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer explains, “Today, with the President’s full support and cooperation, the DOJ is conducting a planned search of his home in Rehoboth, Delaware.” A bevy of black SUVs and sedans swarmed around the Biden property, once the site of happy days where the Biden clan congregated, now the target of the FBI. My heart goes out not to Biden, who was obviously lax in his handling of classified documents, but to the poor slobs in the FBI who have to tromp through his various homes in search of papers that he was supposed to have handed over to the National Archives in January 2017. It’s difficult to think of a more tedious task.

As usual, Elon Musk cut to the chase with a tweet that's both funny and accurate: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1619770090530181120 Pretty good, isn’t it? And do note the little rainbow in the background for the the sexually exotic. Musk’s tweet was in response to the revelation last week (hat tip to the great Matt Taibbi for ferreting through the garbage to retrieve it) that a shadowy group called “Hamilton 68” had been doing exactly what the title of Musk’s imaginary Golden Book says: accusing anyone and anything they don't like of being, or being influenced by, a Russian bot.

It should be obvious by now that too many classified documents are floating around Florida, Delaware, and Indiana. They were removed without authorization and stored improperly under Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Mike Pence respectively. Most of them, it seems, were hurriedly packed by government aides during an administration’s final days, even as the president and vice president were busy handling their official responsibilities. National security law doesn’t distinguish between the accidental and deliberate mishandling of classified documents, but the public does. They know the president and vice president bear heavy, official burdens until the moment they are replaced.

Shortly after reports surfaced that President Joe Biden's team had found classified documents at his office at the Penn Biden Center this past November, the mainstream media rushed to "contextualize" the story. "Contextualize," in this case, means they justified Biden's mishandling of classified materials and drilled into readers that he was much more responsible in regard to the matter than former president Donald Trump. Biden, they said, had possession of far fewer documents overall and was much more cooperative with the Department of Justice in turning them over to the proper authorities once his team found them. Needless to say, these media attempts to downplay Biden's mishandling of classified materials relative to Trump's have not aged well.

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.

Cockburn came across this interesting little tidbit while he was stirring his first apéritif of the early afternoon: a Vox preview of Christopher Whipple’s forthcoming book, The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden's White House, reports that President Biden is distrustful of his Secret Service team and believes the agency fabricated a story about Biden’s German Shepherd, Major, biting an agent. Major Biden and fellow White House German Shepherd, Champ, were removed to Delaware for a while following the alleged incident. Vox reports how in the book, “Whipple details how Biden was showing a friend around the White House and pointed to the spot where Major allegedly bit a member of Biden’s security team. ‘Look, the Secret Service are never up here.