Florida

There’s an easy way out of the chaos in the House, led by a Florida man who’s leaning on lessons learned in his decades as a firefighter and basketball player: Representative Carlos Giménez, the general leading the Only Kevin charge. For some in Congress, the literal Only Kevin pins they wore back in January were as ephemeral as a Nancy Mace promise. But for Giménez, it’s about refusing to reward bad behavior and about loyalty to the man who recruited him to run for his current job. “There was an injustice done” in Giménez’s eyes, he tells me in his Capitol Hill office. “I think that the 96 percent [of House Republicans who voted to keep McCarthy last week] bent to rule of the 4 [percent]. Everybody talks about the majority here.

National elections should be about contrast and choice — and those choices should offer the clearest opportunity for parity in the candidates and the parties. If the polls are to be believed, the 2024 election as it stands now, before any debates or primaries, does not offer that. Instead the country currently faces the prospect of two senior citizens clashing, both with low approval ratings, personal and legal baggage and questions of mental acuity.

You can take the girl out of high society but you can’t take the high society out of the girl — even if you throw her in a Tallahassee prison. According to a report in the Daily Mail, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell has filed a whopping 400 complaints since arriving at the federal prison in July. "Max is the prison Karen. She can file a grievance over anything — she has over 400 of them," a source told the Mail. "She complains about the food, the bedding, when they cancel temple because of bad weather or are late setting up her legal calls." It was also reported that the prison's vegan menu was “insufficient” for Maxwell’s needs.

A bipartisan Coalition of the Willing that includes the last two presidents, the media and nearly everyone else on the left, plus Trump loyalists, has united to try to sink Ron DeSantis’s candidacy before it begins. DeSantis has been savaged by the press for keeping Florida open during the pandemic and for fighting culture wars, yet voters still gave him a nearly twenty-point win in November. At that time, however, the right was united behind him. Can he now survive amid more relentless and bipartisan attacks? Consider some of the hit pieces/obituaries that have sought to sink DeSantis's presidential candidacy in recent weeks. NBC News: “‘I think he’s in trouble’: Growing number of Ron DeSantis donors and allies hope for a shake-up.

Maybe Niccolò Machiavelli was not the first political consultant, but he remains one of the best. Ron DeSantis might solicit his advice before deciding whether a 2024 campaign for the White House is wise. DeSantis could start with the penultimate chapter of The Prince, “What Fortune can do in human affairs, and how it can be resisted,” which is famous for its imagery. Machiavelli first likens fortune to a raging river, whose flood cannot be met head on but whose fury can be dissipated by dams and dykes built in advance. Later he says Fortune is a woman who yields to a young man who comes on strong, even roughly. The lesson for a forty-four-year-old DeSantis is obvious: seize the moment. She’s yours for the taking — if you’re bold.

The Republican Party’s fumbling response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade has caused some in the party to plead for a surrender. Disappointing midterms returns, a string of lost referenda and party in-fighting has led some right-wing commentators to tell the pro-life movement — in no uncertain terms — to get with the program and move on. But at least one presumed presidential hopeful didn’t get the memo. Last week, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed the “Heartbeat Protection Act” into law. Observers were quick to write his political obituary; it’s an aggressive move in the one of the most pro-choice red states. But it confirms his reputation as a principled conservative willing to expend political capital to achieve meaningful victories.

Donald Trump is one boomer Laura Loomer can't rely on. The right-wing provocateur came a few thousand votes shy of winning a safe GOP House seat in Florida last year, running a campaign in a district that contains The Villages while relying on "Boomers for Loomer." But there weren’t enough boomers for Loomer last time — and President Trump is now wavering in his support for her, even though he’s both endorsed her and voted for her in one of her previous failed runs for Congress. In tried and true Trumpworld fashion, a crazy Trump idea (in this case, forcing his campaign staff to hire Loomer for an unknown role) was floated to a journalist he trusts (as always, Maggie Haberman) at an outlet he loves reading (in this instance, the New York Times).

The first thing to understand about the indictment of Donald Trump by the Manhattan Grand Jury convened by the George Soros-funded District Attorney Alvin Bragg is that it is only incidentally a legal proceeding. Don’t be distracted by the avalanche of analyses that are poised to descend on the public. All the legal mumbo-jumbo is beside the point. At its core, the indictment of Donald Trump is a political exercise, not a legal proceeding. That is to say, it involves the deployment of state power against an individual, not the impartial application of the law.  Indeed, what is happening to Donald Trump is about the deliberate abrogation of the law in the service of power.

The woman with a starring role in perhaps the most talked about campaign ads of both the 2018 and 2022 election cycles wasn’t on the ballot. In both, a politician whose stock has risen as much as anyone’s in the last half decade was happy to let his wife do the talking. Five years ago, Casey DeSantis narrated a thirty-second clip in which she testified to her husband Ron’s admiration for Donald Trump. You’ve probably seen it. “Everyone knows my husband is endorsed by President Trump, but he’s also an amazing dad. Ron loves playing with the kids,” says Casey. The ad cuts to footage of the Republican gubernatorial candidate building a toy wall with one child, reading The Art of the Deal to another, and so on. “People say he’s all Trump,” says Casey.