Republican party

It is an irony of history that the bronze Statue of Freedom which stands tall atop the US Capitol dome was commissioned by the man who would seek to break the nation apart a few years later. Jefferson Davis, secretary of war when the statue was ordered, clashed with Yankee sculptor Thomas Crawford over his original design, which included a liberty cap, the symbol of an emancipated slave, above the statue’s crown. The statue is adorned with a sword, a shield and a wreath of victory. It’s symbolic in other ways as well: struck hundreds of times by lightning, it conducts and dissipates that violent energy into the earth. Freedom makes an excellent lightning rod. Today, critiques of the statue and what it represents arise from different sources.

North Carolina sparked some hope for the GOP future this week, after the “historic” defection of a longtime Democratic legislator handed Republicans a veto-proof supermajority in the state’s House of Representatives. State representative Tricia Cotham, a moderate now-former Democrat, was joined at a press conference by her new colleagues in the state House’s Republican conference and US House representative Dan Bishop, who was on crutches after injuring himself playing pickleball. “I didn’t care if I had to have the leg amputated, I was going to be standing next to Tricia,” he told me.

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.

When last we checked in on The Donald Trump Show, the absurdist political thriller that’s been airing nonstop on CNN for the past seven years, the program seemed to have gotten its groove back. A new character had been introduced, Cassidy Hutchinson, a Trump aide who told the January 6 committee that the former president had lashed out violently, including allegedly trying to commandeer the presidential SUV. Here was everything that had made The Donald Trump Show so great in the first place: the over-the-top drama, the scandal, the unpredictability of its main character. Alas, one of the gripes that critics have most often leveled at the show is that it introduces new plotlines and then doesn’t do anything with them.

To this point in the early days of the Republican primary, all the major potshots have been coming from just one candidate, directed at just one other: Donald Trump taking aim repeatedly at Ron DeSantis. Much of the media conversation about this has focused on DeSantis's unwillingness to respond to any of these attacks: a deliberate choice that hasn't lowered the temperature or frequency of Trump's barbs, which now include comparing the Florida conservative to, gasp, Mitt Romney. But consider the possibility that at this moment, both men are making a political mistake. For DeSantis, the risks of non-response are that Trump defines him before he defines himself. Republican primary voters generally know who Ron DeSantis is and have an overwhelmingly positive view of him.

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.

Psychologists and self-help gurus agree: it’s the little things that bring a smile to one’s lips and impart savor to life. A case in point was just vouchsafed this weary world by Paul Ryan, former important person. An interviewer for ABC recently sat down with Mr. Clean and asked him whether he would be going to the 2024 Republican National Convention, which is to be held in Milwaukee in Ryan’s home state of Wisconsin. “Where will you be?” the host asked. “It depends on who the nominee is,” Ryan replied. “I’ll be here if it’s not named somebody Trump.” Ooo, that stung, Paul! “It’s,” “somebody Trump.” Slash and burn, what? I have some bad news. That “somebody” might very well be Donald Trump.

New Hampshire Vivek Ramaswamy accepts it: running for president is “a weird thing to do as a thirty-seven-year-old.” The biotech multimillionaire and anti-woke capitalism crusader is a surprise entry into the 2024 Republican primary after announcing on Tucker Carlson’s show on Tuesday. He went straight from Carlson’s Florida studio to early-voting New Hampshire. I arrived in the snow-dusted city of Rochester at 9 a.m. on Wednesday to watch him kick off his first full day of campaigning — and to work out what the author of Woke, Inc. hoped to bring to the race. Around thirty or so were gathered in Potter’s House bakery watching Vivek gear up for his third Fox hit in fourteen hours.

“President Trump is my friend,” his former UN ambassador Nikki Haley declared on Fox News after announcing her candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Trump, who says he spoke with Haley before she announced, seemed unthreatened by her, avoiding the invective he has reserved for his strongest potential challenger, Florida governor Ron DeSantis. And although he later posted comments linking Haley to Hillary Clinton and Paul Ryan, he also said he is “glad” she is running. Trump has little to worry about from Haley. In all the national polls, she is languishing in the single digits. Some 41 percent of Republicans either have no opinion of her or don't know who she is.

In recent years, Republican candidates and media figures have become increasingly critical of one portion of the population. At the same time, this same demographic has turned against them at the ballot box. As the GOP became the party of men — married or unmarried — they drove away the single women, who voted against them en masse in the 2022 midterms. It's not hard to see why.

Anna Paulina Luna is a bad girl. Why else would the Washington Post be so eager to discipline her? Reporters Jacqueline Alemany and Alice Crites, truly a modern-day Woodward and Bernstein, appear convinced that the freshman congresswoman representing Florida’s 13th congressional district is a George Santos retread. The pair of bullies went rummaging through Luna’s panty drawer in search of skeletons. The result? A lengthy article intended to punish her — to which several corrections and clarifications have been added in the days since its publication.

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).

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.

After Kevin McCarthy finally ascended to the heights of the speaker’s chair, it remains to be seen what he actually won on that last fifteenth vote. The number of rules changes and side deals made along the way to please McCarthy's conservative opponents could fundamentally undermine the job of the speakership as we know it — and concessions made to leapfrog individual members into key committee positions could have significant ramifications. Whether that leads to more conservative policymaking depends on which members you ask; many are skeptical the results will be all that different for the House GOP given their slim majority. One question we don't know the answer to yet, and won't know for some time, is how permanent these negotiated changes will be.

Politicians and members of the press love to drone on about bipartisanship, waxing lyrical about the way things used to be. Back in the day, a congressman could debate a member of the opposing party on the House floor, only to grab a beer with him after the work day ended! Isn’t that swell? They used to let bygones be bygones. It was a simpler time — and it’s now a cliché in politics that we should be striving to return to those good old days. But guess what? After seeing Senator Mitch McConnell and President Joe Biden slapping each other’s backs in Kentucky on Wednesday, the only thing both sides of the aisle might be able to agree on is that bipartisanship is overrated. That’s right. The president landed in Covington, Kentucky, to tout the $1.