GOP

Stop us if you’ve heard this before: a Republican speaker of the House is facing ire from the Freedom Caucus that is mad about a deal he’s cutting with Democrats, who run almost the entire government.2024 picked up right where 2023 left off, with the narrow GOP House majority stuck between a Freedom Caucus-shaped rock and a hard place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. With at least a partial government shutdown looming, Speaker Mike Johnson’s proposed budget deal strikes many as almost exactly what former speaker Kevin McCarthy’s intra-party foes used as their alleged final straw against him. The Freedom Caucus, which went from loving Johnson to comparing him to John Boehner in slightly over a month, called Johnson’s $1.

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel was seething in her chair at the Miami performing arts center that housed the third GOP presidential candidates’ debate in November. Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech entrepreneur running an anti-establishment campaign, had just used his opening statement to publicly call on McDaniel to resign. “I think there’s something deeper going on in the Republican Party here and I am upset about what happened last night. We’ve become a party of losers at the end of the day,” Ramaswamy said. “Ronna, if you want to come on stage tonight, you want to look the GOP voters in the eye and tell them you resign, I will yield my time to you.

Let the handwringing begin! Long before the polls closed in Tuesday’s off-cycle elections, pundits were already racing to assign blame for another underwhelming Republican performance. The usual suspects duly took the predictable hits. Legally troubled former president Donald J. Trump played almost no role in the elections, but it was easy to pin lackluster results on him as the GOP’s runaway favorite for the 2024 presidential nomination and the party’s de facto leader. The only major candidate he endorsed, Kentucky attorney general Daniel Cameron, lost to Democratic incumbent Andy Beshear.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where for once the number one story in the political world barely involves Donald Trump or Joe Biden. Instead, the only story anyone’s talking about revolves around Kevin McCarthy and Matt Gaetz, and an act of political assassination that saw eight Republicans cross party lines to join with unanimous Democrats to lop off the head of the party’s speaker and greatest fundraiser. McCarthy as Ned Stark and Gaetz as Joffrey doesn’t track, exactly, since the boy from Bakersfield wanted that job and gave up enormous leverage to get it — but from the moment Gaetz brought the motion, people in Washington assumed that McCarthy would cut a deal with Democrats to survive. But that proved a bridge too far.

Weep, ad men. The Republican Party shouldn’t have to rely on any of you in 2024. They don’t need your creative, your deployment of over-the-top grainy crime videos, your use of shooting up legislation with AR-15s. All the GOP needs this election is an editor and the C-SPAN live feed of Joe Biden coping with senility. For a cringe-inducing twenty-six minutes in Hanoi, Biden put his diminished, cranky, meandering mental capacity on display. He rolled out his frequently deployed Hollywood equivalent of a Mandela Effect — his own personal Berenstein Bears, his Stouffer’s Stove Top — about a movie scene that simply does not exist in the plane of existence which we, for our sins, inhabit.

The Republican Party has to come to grips with populism. Donald Trump’s commanding lead in the race for the 2024 presidential nomination makes that clear, as does the fact that the next-most popular candidate, Ron DeSantis, also has a populist streak. In fact, the GOP’s base has subscribed to one flavor of populism or another since at least as far back as the start of the Cold War. In the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-hunting had a pronounced class dimension — elite officials in “striped pants” were a frequent target. By the end of the 1960s, Richard Nixon was appealing to the “silent majority” against a radical campus counterculture. The Moral Majority and other religious right groups of the 1980s and 1990s exhibited a form of Christian populism.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where this week it’s yet another indictment for former president Donald Trump, this time over argle-bargle about the 2020 election which violated the laws of truth-telling that apparently only matter when Republicans do them. Let’s be clear: Donald Trump lied about 2020 — and he lied a lot. But Democrats lied about 2016, about 2004, about 2000, all at rates that were just as high but didn’t result in riotousness. The Department of Justice and the Joe Biden team at the White House seem confident that this is the path to go down to ensure re-election next fall. But we’ve seen this dangerous game played out before — and in 2016 it had shocking results.

Welcome to Thunderdome! We are a month away from the first presidential debate, and the big news this week was that Mike Pence is dead. Not legally or physically mind you, and certainly not spiritually, where he’s probably the only living politician ensured of a spot in the heavenly choir, but electorally? The former vice president’s fundraising and donor numbers are so low, he may not even make that first debate... and Doug Burgum will! Listen to the podcast, and stick around to hear why No Labels could actually matter… Reset Ron “All men who run for presidency of the United States are amateurs,” Theodore H. White wrote sixty years ago.

For all the splits on the right at the moment, it’s worth taking note of rare unity in decrying former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s comments about the culture war to CBS This Morning on Monday.  Former wide receiver turned morning host Nate Burleson asked Ryan about what he described broadly as a GOP movement to prioritize the culture war. “Republican lawmakers around the country are pushing legislation when it comes to banning books, it could be trans rights, call it 'anti-woke,' however you want to label it,” Burleson said. “Is this a good approach? Is that a good strategy? You're a football fan, is that how you should approach the game?” https://twitter.com/CurtisHouck/status/1668604854539804674 “I’m not a culture war guy,” Ryan answered.

Just based on public behavior, you'd think Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis weren't even interested in running for the same office. Trump's approach has been, as is his wont, directly at odds with the traditions of running for office. Normally, a candidate would want to reestablish the sense of a once-and-future political predator building a dominant effort to return to his former job. Consisting of splashy media events like his recent trip to East Palestine, flamboyant social media haranguing, and a campaign operation that has more questions than answers, the Trump show will be on display this week at his old haunting grounds of CPAC. It was the conference that gave him his start in the conservative movement.

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.

The field of 2023 Republican presidential contenders may soon get larger: commentator Larry Elder said he may jump into the race as soon as March. Cockburn is skeptical that this will make much of a difference in a race that is already largely defined by the two biggest fish in the pond: Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Elder made the surprise comments on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Show on Monday January 30. Elder said that he is not considering a run “because I want to derail Trump or DeSantis or anybody who decides to run.” He also mentioned the two main concerns that he wants to focus on, should he opt to run: “the centrality of having fathers in the home”, and “debunk[ing] this lie about systemic racism.