Republican party

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.

As the war on normal escalates, and a silent majority nationwide grows weary of blue-state chaos, GOP opportunities in the midterm elections and 2024 are vast. But Donald J. Trump and his client army stand in the way of broad Republican victories, impeding the revival of values — freedom, faith, and family — they brandish exclusively as their own. Trump empowers the progressive left. Red-Meat Republicans and Devil-Trump Democrats are locked in a never-ending scorpion dance. For many voters, especially women, Trump’s astonishing boorishness preempts policy evaluation. The nation is the loser. Nonetheless, Donald J. Trump has millions of devotees who — fed up with gilded deceit and leftist disdain — like his crazy.

Liz Cheney made two interesting moves last week. One, she was among the fourteen House Republican who voted to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that her Wyoming colleagues in the Senate, John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, refused to support. Two, she offered publicly to instruct her Democratic constituents in the state of Wyoming how to register to vote in the Republican primary election on August 16, thus allowing them to support her against Harriet Hageman, her Trump-endorsed opponent. For decades Wyoming Democrats have taken advantage of the Wyoming Republican Party’s idiotic policy of allowing cross-over voting in the primaries, thus virtually guaranteeing that the most conservative candidate will be eliminated at the beginning of any electoral proceeding.

I just went for a stroll down Main Street here in our little blue-collar New Hampshire town, and noticed the telephone polls festooned with Pride flags.  This was odd enough, given that our town had never observed Pride Month (known as June on the Gregorian calendar) before. What was really shocking, though, is that the town is flying the plain old rainbow flags, not the new “Progress Pride” flags. Ours don’t have the new chevron honoring America’s two most hallowed minorities: trans people (white, pink and blue) and people of color (brown and black). Activists claim that the chevron specifically represents trans people of color. Maybe that’s true. What’s infinitely more likely, though, is that gays and lesbians have been passé since Obergefell v.

Mike Pence began his political career as "Rush Limbaugh on decaf," a calmer and more collegial kind of conservative radio host based in Indianapolis. He likely ended it as Donald Trump's patsy, running for his life from star-spangled sans culottes who wanted to hang him for refusing to certify his own ticket as the winner of an election. And...I mean...geez. We've all ridden some emotional rollercoasters over these last six years, but Pence's is in a category all its own. I think a letdown that severe would have sent me careening up to some remote corner of New Hampshire to live out my days in a lean-to. And that's not even counting all the White House drama Pence no doubt had to endure while in office.

In the late 1990s, I attended a conference on conservatism held by the American Enterprise Institute at the Mayflower Hotel. Various eminences of the right were in attendance, including Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Podhoretz was on a panel with Glenn Loury, who had moved away from his conservative views, and Podhoretz ventilated his exasperation over this evolution. But the panel that really caught my eye was the one that Decter spoke on about American culture. She described a country in a state of breakdown, prompting her daughter, Rachel, to remark, “Mom, it isn’t that bad!” The audience laughed. For Decter, however, it was never a laughing matter. Decter, who recently died, formed what in retrospect can be seen as the vanguard of the culture war.

In February 2021 the FBI indicted L. Brent Bozell IV for crimes committed during the Capitol riot. The significance of Bozell’s presence in the rabble that broke into the Senate chamber was not lost on the media. “Mr. Bozell’s father is a high-profile right-wing activist known for infusing his politics with Christian values,” the New York Times mentioned in its write-up of the arrest. And Bozell’s grandfather, L. Brent Bozell Jr., had been William F. Buckley Jr.’s debate partner, Joseph McCarthy’s and Barry Goldwater’s ghostwriter, the founder of Triumph and organizer of the first anti-abortion protest in the United States. Liberal critics traced the arc of the American right from Bozell Jr.