Elise Stefanik

Maybe the surprising thing isn’t that Donald Trump yanked Elise Stefanik’s nomination to become ambassador to the United Nations. It’s that he hasn’t pulled America out of the organization. But perhaps that outcome is in the offing as Trump ponders whether he should select anyone to succeed her abortive nomination. Trump decided to leave Stefanik in Congress because of the slender Republican majority in the House – 218-213, plus four vacancies. “I have asked Elise, as one of my biggest Allies, to remain in Congress to help me deliver Historic Tax Cuts, GREAT Jobs, Record Economic Growth, a Secure Border, Energy Dominance, Peace Through Strength, and much more, so we can MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

President Donald Trump is making quick work of his first week in office, signing a flurry of executive orders on everything ranging from the southern border to abolishing diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs for much of the federal workforce.Starting this week, Trump wants “radical and wasteful” DEI offices to be placed on paid leave, according to a memo issued by the Office of Personnel Management. “President Trump campaigned on ending the scourge of DEI from our federal government and returning America to a merit-based society,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said of the move.

Donald Trump’s ascension to his second presidency comes with a new cadre of followers and sidekicks, in the form of a cabinet built almost entirely from fresh faces. This is not a president interested in continuity, which he signaled early on, stating on social media that Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo — his erstwhile United Nations ambassador and secretary of state — would have no place in his second administration. The first name wasn’t a surprise, given the obvious tension he had with the woman who was his last challenger in the primary. The second was because Pompeo had been a dutiful supporter of Trump while in office, wrote a book defending their shared record on foreign policy and rejected the opportunity to run himself.

Donald Trump’s second term administration is taking shape, and thus far it’s turned out to be impressively Catholic in its approach — representing Trump’s dominance of the Republican coalition and his capacity to ignore the worst instincts of some of his more vocal supporters on the New Right who see governance through a naive lens. One of the questions heading into this term was who Trump would disappoint by being insufficiently one thing or the other — by being too radical in some areas or too modest in others. But at this point, there are very few people disappointed in the names he’s chosen, outside of a handful of very online voices who had fantasies of their favorite pundits and follows on X getting a shot at cabinet positions.

President-elect Donald Trump is slowly revealing who will — and who will not — be a part of his second administration come 2025. As a reminder, last week Trump announced campaign co-manager Susie Wiles as his chief-of-staff.Over the weekend, Trump rebuffed Nikki Haley, who previously served as Trump’s UN ambassador, and Mike Pompeo, who was Trump’s secretary of state. “I will not be inviting former ambassador Nikki Haley, or former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, to join the Trump administration, which is currently in formation,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I very much enjoyed and appreciated working with them previously, and would like to thank them for their service to our country.

The 2024 Libertarian National Convention in Washington, DC, unsurprisingly attracted a quirky bunch. Attendees would find themselves greeted by a man wearing a “Fuck Vaccines” shirt (not that odd) that was doing some squats in the lobby (pretty odd). Also overheard in the lobby, a weird flex: “I read Mises before I was twenty” — and then an even weirder one: “I grew up without AC, a very libertarian upbringing.” “Ermmm, konnichiwa actually means good afternoon,” one lady told her interlocutor. Last cycle’s Libertarian vice-presidential candidate Spike Cohen told The Spectator, “It is useful to have Donald Trump speak, only if our candidate speaks right after him and rebuts him. Same with RFK. We should be leveraging them for attention, not the reverse.

Manchester, New Hampshire “OK, who here is not a voter in New Hampshire?” asked Marianne Williamson as she took the microphone. Almost everyone in the small, quarter-full auditorium at Manchester Community College raised a hand. “Well, that’s depressing,” said Marianne. Williamson carries herself with a certain grandiosity. She has that quasi-aristocratic bearing that comes from decades of being attractive, famous, well-off and radical. In 2024, she’s casting herself as the presidential candidate for despairing Bernie Sanders supporters. As she did in 2020, she presents her agenda as the spiritual alternative to politics as normal. “Not every rich person in America is a greedy bastard,” she says. “Not every poor person is a noble and pure soul.

After a long wait, the text of the bipartisan Senate bill for Ukraine and border funding was finally released on Sunday night. The massive piece of legislation clocks in at 370 pages and, in addition to the border policy changes previously reported on here, sends an additional $60 billion to Ukraine, tightens asylum standards, prohibits removal of unaccompanied minors, authorizes $1.4 billion in FEMA funding for resources for migrants settling in the US and gives President Biden the authority to overturn any emergency authorization at the border. The House GOP’s verdict is in: Speaker Johnson asserted that the legislation is “dead on arrival” in his chamber.  “I’ve seen enough.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where fresh off his thirty-point win in Iowa, former president Donald Trump is now counting on New Hampshire to deliver the killing blow to the nascent Nikki Haley boomlet. Haley underperformed polling expectations in Iowa — in part because of the frigid weather, which saw the lowest turnout in a quarter century for the caucuses. New Hampshire now takes on new importance for her, keeping the narrative going that she’s the better, stronger choice for a showdown with her former boss. With the backing of Republican governor Chris Sununu, an influx of cash from the donor class and a DeSantis campaign that is largely focused southward, Haley will have her best shot at pulling out an unlikely upset.

Too much Trump, or not enough Trump? That is the question that everyone from journalists to Republican elected officials had on their minds as the House GOP apparatus descended on the Marriott in Orlando for its annual retreat. Cockburn managed to sneak into a spare hotel room. During the Hotel California-esque conference, Republicans ate, drank and were merry. But Donald Trump was on everyone’s minds, both during the daytime sessions and at the happy hours that stretched into the wee hours of the morning.  You'll be shocked to hear that no one expressed support for Alvin Bragg, the George Soros-funded district attorney who may or may not be arresting the former president. Many of those gathered compared the Manhattan DA's actions to those of a tinpot dictator.

In their 2004 chart-topping album American Idiot, Green Day sings that “another protester has crossed the line to find the money’s on the other side.” Fast forward to 2022, and we find that many young politicians posing as threats to the establishment are singing the same tune. Top millennials in Washington may brand themselves as rebels, but their votes often end up indistinguishable from the elder establishment they so revile. In a recent campaign ad, South Carolina Democratic gubernatorial candidate Joe Cunningham declared that both his state and America are being run by a geriatric oligarchy. “Some of these people have been clinging onto power for 30, 40, even 50 years,” Cunningham said.

Are you a Republican — or did you vote for the infrastructure bill? That’s the binary choice offered to House GOP members by the right-wing of the party. The thirteen representatives who voted to pass the landmark legislation find themselves in the sights of not just their fellow members of Congress, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn, but also former president Donald Trump, whose list of primary targets grows longer by the day. In a Saturday email, Trump called for “good and SMART America First Republican Patriots to run primary campaigns” against both the members who’d voted for the infrastructure bill and the members who had voted to impeach him for causing the January 6 storming of the Capitol. “You will have my backing!” he asserted.

Kevin McCarthy's mouth does two things: it kisses Donald Trump's hand and it emits denouncements of his constituents. After Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene recently likened what she considers COVID-19-based discrimination to the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust, the House minority leader swooped down bearing talons of condemnation. 'Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling,' he wrote. 'Let me be clear: the House Republican Conference condemns this language.' Whatever you might think of Greene's comments, it's hard to imagine a Democrat as eager as McCarthy to smite one of his own.

The Republican establishment played a dirty trick on voters this week. With the ouster of Wyoming representative Liz Cheney from leadership, and her subsequent replacement by New York representative Elise Stefanik, the GOP pretended to value its base. It was, however, a fake virtue signal. The mainstream media has tried to frame Cheney's removal as House Republican Conference chair as a consequence of not being sufficiently loyal to former president Donald Trump, who is still extremely popular with GOP voters. The timeline of her removal makes it quite clear that is not the case. Remember, Cheney survived a vote to oust her from leadership in February after she voted to impeach Trump.