Republican primaries 2024

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.