Republican party

The GOP absolutely blew a historic opportunity in the 2022 midterms and, sadly, it seems nothing in the party will change. For all the talk of accountability and blame last week, many in the GOP now seem content to just… move on. All eyes have turned to the 2024 presidential nomination with former president Donald Trump’s announcement Tuesday night that he would be running for a third time. Trump’s rally handed the establishment a welcome distraction from their own failures in the midterms; now, the debate is over how badly Trump hurt the party with his endorsements and whether or not he and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will officially go to war. The party — and more importantly the voters! —  should decide if they still want Trump to be their leader.

Former president Donald Trump called for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to be replaced by Senator Rick Scott during a rally in Ohio late Monday night. Cockburn is not terribly surprised that the former president would choose to attack his party a day before what promises to be a Republican wave — after all, he's aligned with the voices on the left who consider the GOP "the Trump Party." Trump branded McConnell a “lousy leader,” saying he “has been very bad for our nation” and “very bad for the Republican Party.” He also praised Scott as a “very talented guy” who is the “likely candidate” to replace McConnell.

President Biden’s recent interview with transexual TikToker Dylan Mulvaney is a clarifying event for anyone who pays attention to America’s culture wars. The first notable aspect of the interview was the mere fact that it happened — that the president of the United States, in the home stretch of a midterm election season, deemed it a prudent use of his time to sit down with such a radical activist. The second notable aspect of the interview is what our senile commander-in-chief said in the course of his conversation. At one point, Mulvaney asked our hapless supremo if he thinks states should be permitted to “ban gender-affirming health care.

“Floridians’ lives are in danger,” tweeted Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s rapid response director Christina Pushaw as Hurricane Ian bore down, “so of course CNN is rooting for the hurricane.” Pushaw was responding to CNN reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere, who had earlier admonished DeSantis for having “put himself at odds with many local government officials” and “looking for fights with a president he may end up running against.” The governor was “playing politics,” suggested Dovere’s colleague Steve Contore, who covers Florida politics for CNN, surmising that “he is urging residents to heed advice from the same local leaders” whom DeSantis supposedly said to “ignore during COVID.

You have to wonder what Liz Cheney feels her relationship to the Republican Party to be today. Having spent years denouncing Donald Trump as a faux Republican and a disgrace to the party, much of the past year implicitly accusing him of treason as vice-chair of the January 6 Committee and the two months since her defeat in the Wyoming primary characterizing half (at least) of the GOP as “very sick,” she is co-sponsoring a bill with Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, to reform the Electoral Count Act in order to “protect the rule of law and ensure that future efforts to attack the integrity of presidential elections can’t succeed.” Representative Lofgren was one of seven impeachment managers in President Trump’s trial for his first impeachment in 2020.

Pittsburgh Fresh off the campaign stage in Arizona, where he stumped for gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, Florida governor Ron DeSantis made his way to Pittsburgh for another Turning Point Action rally. This one was supposedly for Doug Mastriano (DeSantis was headed to Ohio for J.D. Vance right afterward), who’s challenging state attorney general Josh Shapiro to replace Democratic governor Tom Wolf — but his address sounded every word a DeSantis 2024 presidential speech. The polls suggest Mastriano needs all the help he can get, as Shapiro — who has already spent $12 million on ads — leads Mastriano — running a “shoestring campaign” — by a healthy margin (one recent poll has Shapiro leading by fifteen points). But DeSantis hardly mentioned Mastriano at all.

With the collapse of Liz Cheney's political career in Wyoming, Donald Trump's supporters are fully ensconced in the vast majority of critical candidacies headed into November. He and his supporters have remade the GOP, at least for the moment, into a party devoted to the Trumpian America First agenda and running on that set of priorities — at least when it comes to the lip service they give to border concerns, trade, anti-globalism and culture war issues. But will this be a Republican Party that actually delivers on these priorities should they receive voters' endorsement in November? That’s a more questionable proposition. The core problem that many traditional GOP forces have with a Trumpian agenda is one of prioritization, not of positioning.

Cockburn on Thursday headed over to Nationals Park in Washington to watch members of Congress play a friendly game of baseball. The friendly game soon turned into a brutal slaying when the Republican team beat the Democrats 10-0 in the seventh inning. The air was alight with excitement. Crowds bustled into the stadium, though not without some trouble. Outside the park was a small crowd of people wearing red — a protest that included a band with a very ecstatic tuba player. It turns out these people were from the Ikiya Collective, an activist “news” organization that focuses on protests, and were advertising for NowOrNever.earth, a climate activist group. Some particularly observant readers may ask what this had to do with baseball. Absolutely nothing, as it turned out.