Joe biden

Hunter Biden is in trouble... again. The question is how big?This week’s indictment from Special Counsel David Weiss is the latest in a seemingly never-ending saga of legal problems facing the “smartest guy” President Joe Biden knows. The charges, which center on tax evasion, include multiple felonies.  The fifty-six-page indictment, at times, reads like a smut novel. The first son is alleged to have tried to pass off the following as business expenses: hotel rooms he turned into crack dens, strippers and a $10,000 membership to a sex club that he claimed was a “golf club membership.”Weiss has been the target of ire from many on the right, but this week’s indictment received praise from some unlikely corners.

President Joe Biden said the quiet part out loud Tuesday, telling donors at a campaign event that he might not be running for re-election if former president Donald Trump were not in the 2024 race. It’s just bad optics for any presidential candidate, let alone a highly unpopular one, to admit that they aren’t super excited about what they’re doing. Senator Rand Paul had a similar moment on the 2016 trail when he was asked if he was still running for president. His response? “I don’t know; I wouldn’t be doing this dumbass live streaming if I weren’t.” Hilarious, but doesn’t exactly strike confidence in the voting base.

Many commentators (including yours truly) have pointed out that America is divided more now than it has been since the late 1850s and the run up to the Civil War. But as usual, I may have understated the case.  That, anyway, is what Vivek Ramaswamy would say. In a remarkable, just-published interview with Tom Klingenstein, Ramaswamy several time insists that we are not in a pre-war situation. It’s worse than that. “We are,” he insists, “absolutely in a war with the fate of the country at stake.” Hyperbolic? I don’t think so. The war, he acknowledges, could and likely will get worse. But we can already see the troops deployed and the battle lines drawn.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where we had a brief glimpse last night of everything we could’ve gotten from a meaningful contest about America’s next generation of leadership, with two Generation Xers from opposite ideologies and coasts taking the stage together for what has to be considered the best debate of the cycle. It showed the clear differences between the governing styles of Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom, included some zingers and insults, but also left viewers with a clear idea of the differences between both states and both men. Congratulations are also due to Sean Hannity, who showed himself more than capable, even as a conservative partisan, of managing a high-quality debate.

During Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House, it became common knowledge that the best way to lobby the president on a particular position was to do an interview on the right cable news programs espousing your views. Gone were the days of relevance of Wall Street Journal op-eds during the George W. Bush administration or articles in the Atlantic for the Barack Obama era. If you wanted to change POTUS’s thinking on something, get in front of a camera and make yourself heard. Now, in the context of the Democratic Party’s split over Israel and the war in Gaza, we are witnessing a surprisingly similar public lobbying campaign play out for Joe Biden’s attention — albeit via different methods than cable news.

President Joe Biden presided over an event at the White House on Monday in which he announced the creation of a Council on Supply Chain Resilience and promised actions to “strengthen supply chains, lower costs for families and help Americans get the goods they need.” This news might bring a sigh of relief to many — finally, the Biden administration is taking inflation seriously! But the White House first led with a “Bidenomics” victory lap that felt more like a slap in the face than a swelling pocketbook. Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg gave opening remarks in which he chastised the media for “saying that Christmas was going to be canceled” due to supply chain disruptions in the winter of 2021.

Right before President Biden and Chinese president Xi Jinping met in San Francisco this week, the US State Department and the Chinese Ministry of Ecology and Environment each released a statement on “enhancing cooperation to address climate change.”  “[T]he United States and China reaffirm their commitment to work jointly and together with other countries to address the climate crisis,” the Sunnylands Statement says. Addressing “energy transition,” the statement declares that both countries support pursuing efforts to triple renewable energy capacity globally by 2030 and accelerate renewable energy deployment as a substitute for fossil fuels.

Kim Kardashian was once cozy with the Trump White House. Together, the former president and the celebrity entrepreneur spearheaded criminal justice reform, providing the Kardashian with the political experience she desired and giving Trump one of the PR stunts he lives for. But the snuggling ended when Trump found out that Kim wasn’t all in with Team Trump, as she expressed her support for Joe Biden, hitting Trump where it hurts him most — loyalty. Jonathan Karl takes us behind the scenes of this spat in his new book Tired of Winning. According to the ABC News personality, when Kim called Trump for help with a clemency case, Trump hung up on her. According to an excerpt obtained by Axios, at the end of the Trump presidency, Kim attempted to get Trump to commute more sentences.

Immediately after longtime West Virginia senator Joe Manchin bowed to political reality and called it quits on his re-election, Republicans celebrated that it virtually guarantees their party an elusive win next year.  In fact, some were already proclaiming that the state’s First Pup, Babydog, and her owner, Governor Jim Justice, are cruising to victory next November.  But that’s not necessarily the case — it’s not next November that Justice should be concerned with, but rather next year’s GOP primary. Justice, who finally secured Donald Trump’s valuable endorsement, faces Congressman Alex Mooney and a field that may now swell given the GOP’s virtual certainty to pick up the seat.

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.

We’re almost exactly one year out from what increasingly looks like another Trump v. Biden showdown. Former president Donald Trump leads his second-place opponent by more than forty percentage points nationally, and has a thirty-point advantage in Iowa. President Joe Biden avoided a primary challenge from RFK Jr., who is now running as an Independent, and no one thinks Representative Dean Phillips’s campaign is serious, especially considering his refusal to acknowledge the objective reality that he’s even running against Biden. Although Phillips doesn’t seem to be the guy for the job, more Democrats are waking up to the idea that Biden doesn’t have what it takes to win a second term. Polls have consistently shown that a majority of Democrats don’t want Biden to run again.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where for the first time some cracks are showing in the emphatic Democratic support for Joe Biden. Even with his many widely apparent defects as a candidate and a president, Biden’s support from strong Democratic constituencies has remained largely consistent throughout his tenure. The loss of Independent support at this juncture is rationalized away by many Democrats, who feel that once Donald Trump is presumably the GOP nominee, they’ll be able to get all those leaners in the center back in the fold. But now, thanks to his policy choices on Israel, Biden is suffering a major blow among a significant Democrat constituency made more important given its geographic concentration in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania: Arab Americans.

Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota has thrown his hat into the 2024 presidential election ring, challenging President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination.   Phillips’s candidacy is being heralded by many outlets — and acknowledged by Phillips himself — as a “long shot,” with the New York Times noting Biden’s “significant financial advantages.”   Still, Biden isn’t exactly the obvious choice to represent his party in 2024: Axios reported last month that a CNN poll showed “two-thirds of Democrat-leaning voters say the party should not nominate President Biden for a second term.