Republican primaries 2024

Donald Trump is UFC royalty

Donald Trump’s ninety-one felony charges can’t keep him down, nor the thunderous applause of his fans. The former president and well-known mixed martial arts fan was given the celebrity treatment at UFC 295 at New York's Madison Square Garden on Saturday night, complete with his own walkout song.   Kid Rock’s “American Badass” blared as UFC announcers turned their undivided attention to Trump’s arrival. The 20,000-person stadium erupted in cheers as Trump made his way to his ringside seats flanked by his entourage — UFC president Dana White, Kid Rock, Tucker Carlson and Don Jr.  https://twitter.com/ufcontnt/status/1723536824843243833?

donald trump UFC

NewsNation to host next GOP debate in Alabama

It looks like the Republican National Committee will partner with just about anyone to put on a presidential debate. In a press release released Thursday morning, NewsNation, an upstart cable news network with less than 65,000 nightly viewers as of last year, announced that they will be hosting the fourth GOP debate in December.  It will take place in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “All of us at NewsNation are incredibly honored to be hosting a presidential primary debate and to be part of what will be another historic election season,” said Sean Compton, president of Nexstar Networks which owns NewsNation.

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Taking in the DeSantis spin at the Miami debate

Miami, Florida Just sixty days away from the Iowa Caucus, all but one of the Republican presidential candidates prepared themselves for the MSNBC-hosted third Republican primary debate in the majestic Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami. Consultants, donors and surrogates seemed excited to be there — as they are supposed to. But outside the center, there were no chants for biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, no hats with Ambassador Nikki Haley’s name, no fans fainting as Senator Tim Scott walked past them. A mile away from the center, you could start to see folks with Trump 2024 flags or “Florida is Trump Country” signs on street corners.

Why Trump’s rally mattered more than the GOP debate in Miami

Do you believe in coincidences? I used to. But like Macbeth I have just “supped full with horror.” That is, I have been flipping back and forth between the glitzy but pointless Republican debate in Miami and Donald Trump’s rally in nearby Hialeah, Florida.  And here’s Exhibit One in my brief against coincidences: my office reading group is just now, as I write, reading Dante’s Inferno. Yes, could there be any more apposite reading?  I am going to take a page here from that priest W. H. Auden talked about who advised the people who came to him for confession to “be brief, be blunt, and be gone.” An admirable imperative which I intend to obey.

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Why the Kim Reynolds endorsement of Ron DeSantis matters

Iowa governor Kim Reynolds endorsed Florida governor Ron DeSantis yesterday. While endorsements don’t typically matter, this one could be the exception — both because of what it says about the Republican Party, and what it says about Donald Trump. When DeSantis decided to take the plunge into the presidential race, Team Trump has tried to depict him primarily as one of two things. First, they framed him as a fraud — a faux conservative establishment type, a Jeb Bush acolyte beloved by the donor class, a secret neocon with zero charisma.

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Ron DeSantis slays in heels

Practical political wisdom says height is one of the few reliable indicators of electoral victory. In the case of Ron DeSantis, it explains why he is trailing behind 6’3” gargantuan Donald Trump. It also may explain why DeSantis is being accused of wearing four-inch lifts in his favorite pair of cowboy boots.   The Florida governor was confronted with a viral clip of his hidden heels during an episode of the Patrick Bet-David podcast this weekend but denied the allegation. “Those are just standard of-the-rack Lucchese boots,” DeSantis said, adding that he is indeed 5’11”.   https://twitter.com/ronfilipkowski/status/1719095369412284594?

Mike Pence drops out of the 2024 race

Former vice president Mike Pence is suspending his bid to be the 2024 GOP nominee for president of the United States, following months of financial troubles and lagging polls.   Pence made the surprise announcement at the end of a speech given before the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual conference in Las Vegas on Saturday afternoon.    “After much prayer and deliberation, I have decided to suspend my campaign for president effective today,” Pence said. “We always knew this would be an uphill battle, but I have no regrets.”   Pence launched his bid in early June but had struggled to raise money from the start. According to filings with the Federal Election Commission, his campaign was $620,000 in debt entering October and had just $1.

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A conservative education reform PAC is outraising 2024 candidates

Campaign finance data for the third quarter was released this weekend and the numbers aren’t looking good — Ron DeSantis is trailing far behind Donald Trump, Mike Pence’s cash-on-hand is dangerously low and Tim Scott somehow has more money than any candidate bar Joe Biden and Trump.   One group is doing great though — the 1776 Project PAC, a conservative activist organization, which raised $683,915 from July to September. They even came out ahead of two 2024 hopefuls, raising more than both GOP candidate Asa Hutchinson and Cornel West, the professor and activist running as an Independent. Cockburn wonders if the fact that a small conservative group is walloping the field will make some candidates realize it's finally time to drop out of the race.   https://twitter.

Ryan Girdusky of the 1776 Project PAC (BBC screenshot)
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Nikki Haley on why the moms of America are furious

The campaign trail  You gotta love moms. They tell it like it is. And they fight like hell for their children. I saw that fighting spirit a few weeks ago in New Hampshire, where I joined a group of Moms for Liberty at a Manchester school. I heard from moms — and dads — about how fed up they are with education. Their daughters and sons were shut out of school during the pandemic, some for more than a year. Now they’re being indoctrinated with lies about America. Moms are furious. They should be. But you know what those moms are most upset about? That the leaders who are supposed to protect their children are actively attacking them — especially Joe Biden. He didn’t push to reopen schools. He wants boys to play girls’ sports, even sharing the same locker room.

‘Day of rage’ fear paralyzes the West

This Friday October 13, governments around the world received a warning from Israel: look out for yourselves, look out for your Jewish citizens, as terrorism may reach your soil.The Israel National Security Council and Ministry of Foreign Affairs recommended that all Israelis abroad remain cautious, “keep away from the demonstrations and protests and — if necessary — check with local security forces regarding possible protests and disturbances in the area.”“Against the background of Operation Swords of Iron,” the agencies said in a joint statement, “Hamas leadership has called on all of its supporters around the world to hold a ‘Day or Rage’” against Jews around the globe.

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The Ronna Romney RNC is utterly useless

Welcome to Thunderdome, where this week the 2024 election had its first real sea change in priority and policy focus thanks to the horrific, detestable and utterly evil attacks on Israel by Hamas. The general rule in politics is that foreign policy doesn’t matter for voters, and that’s been true in... actually, wait a minute... not even the majority of presidential elections in the past half century! In 1980, 1984, 1988, 2004, 2008 and 2016, foreign policy played an outsized role in the candidate selection of Republicans and Democrats, and you could even argue that Joe Biden’s false promise of foreign policy normalcy was decisive in 2020.

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The GOP debate showed how not to pander to Latinos

Wednesday night’s Fox Business and Univisión Republican primary debate offered some of the most amusing attempts to pander to Latinos on record. Five seconds in and moderator Stuart Varney half had a stroke pronouncing his co-moderator’s last name, Calderón. Additionally, Varney, who also has a funny accent and wasn’t born in the US, couldn’t properly pronounce "Univisión," an even less forgivable faux-pas. Didn’t he practice? Couldn’t he ask for the teleprompter to read “uh-knee-bee-sion”? Initial blunders aside, the inclusion of Jorge Ramos’s sidekick, Ilia Calderón, as a moderator was not bright at all. There are are hundreds of great Hispanic journalists out there that have good pronunciation, went to college in the US and don’t hate Republicans.

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Ronald Reagan haunts the second debate

Let me tell you a ghost story. We are, after all, only a month out from Hallowe’en. It’s about a titan of American politics, who reshaped the nation’s, and the West’s, history over the tail-end of the last century. His leadership helped thaw the Cold War and transform the country’s languishing economy. And now, four decades later, his specter still looms large over the party he recalibrated. Tonight, the GOP’s undercard contenders will clash at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. And you can be darn sure his name will come up a lot.In last month’s debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, America’s 40th president was the subject of one of many flashpoints between former VP Mike Pence and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.

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Donald Trump’s foolish abortion gamble

Abortion was the single biggest issue that led to Donald Trump winning the 2016 election. It may be the single biggest issue that leads him to lose in 2024. The death of Antonin Scalia in Texas in February of 2016 set the presidential election in stark relief. Effectively, voters were asked not just to name the next president, but to decide simultaneously the immediate future of the Supreme Court. Elect Hillary Clinton and you get a Court that will enshrine abortion for eternity; elect Trump and the possibility that Roe v. Wade could be reversed in the decade to come stays alive. This is one of the reasons that Trump, a lifelong limousine liberal on issues like abortion, went so hard into the paint on the topic.

The Youngkin blueprint

Virginia Beach, Virginia “Please run. We need you to save our country. Please.” A man pleads with Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, referring to speculation that Youngkin may jump into the 2024 GOP presidential primary — and that Republican donors are encouraging him to do so. Youngkin responds, with a laugh: “I’m busy.” The governor is, indeed, quite busy. It is late August and he has just finished up one of his “Parents Matter” listening sessions, this one in Virginia Beach. Youngkin has been traveling the Commonwealth and hearing directly from parents to fulfill one of his biggest 2021 campaign promises: protecting the rights of parents from government overreach in matters concerning their children.

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The incredible shrinking field

Welcome to Thunderdome, where you should never let a crisis go to waste, and Donald Trump isn’t wasting any time bashing Ron DeSantis even in the midst of hurricane recovery efforts, hoping to stomp on what could be an opportunity to show off his good governance chops. The White House, meanwhile, is struggling not just with frustration over their delayed response to the Maui disaster and the president’s insistence on repeatedly telling his exaggerated anecdotes about a house fire, but also the anniversary of another, different kind of disaster: the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which brought Gold Star families to bear against the administration this week. The guys discuss all this and more on the latest Thunderdome podcast — listen and subscribe here today!

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Everyone must watch this One America News rap song

Move over Oliver Anthony: there's a new parallel economy music sensation in town. Forgiato Blow, the self-described "Mayor of Magaville," released a new fiery masterpiece: "REAL AMERICA." The song, which features Dan Ball, the host of One America News Network’s Real America, is in fact very Real; the bars in it are Realer still.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znoFeicCJl8&ab_channel=MayorOfMagaville The music video begins with an introduction from OANN's Ball, “We got breaking news: the 45th president of the United States Donald J. Trump has been indicted for the fourth time by a corrupt Biden regime justice system, and patriots are fed up.” Following this, with smooth slow-motion transitions, South Florida white rapper Blow joins Ball on set.

forgiato blow one america news network

Everybody hates Vivek…

Milwaukee, Wisconsin Vivek Ramaswamy arrived in Wisconsin with a target on his back. “The knives are out,” his senior advisor Tricia McLaughlin told me before the debate, “but he’s ready.” The entrepreneur was one of eight Republicans to clash on the stage of the Fiserv Forum amid a heatwave — temperatures broke 100 in the late afternoon. Along with him, Fox News hosted second-favorite Ron DeSantis, former vice president Mike Pence, a hobbled North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, anti-Trump spoilers Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, happy-go-lucky South Carolina senator Tim Scott and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley.

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Eight GOP presidential candidates who aren’t Trump to debate in Milwaukee

The Republican National Committee confirmed late Monday night the presidential candidates who would face each other in Wednesday night’s debate. They are: North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, former vice president Mike Pence, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and South Carolina senator Tim Scott. Former president Donald Trump, who leads every poll comfortably, will not be in attendance. Trump had hoped to send surrogates to vouch on his behalf in the spin room — which, in an apparent tribute to Watergate, will be in the players' parking garage of the Fiserv Forum.

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The rise of the popcons

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.

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