Republican

Nancy Pelosi’s career is ending as it began. She entered Congress in 1986 during the Reagan administration and is ending it under the most influential Republican president since the Gipper. On Thursday she released a six-minute video announcing her retirement in 2027 from Congress, the latest octogenarian to depart it. No sooner did this contagonist announce that she would not seek reelection, than Donald Trump crowed that he had outlasted her. Old age, it seems, is no barrier to a slanging match. A few days ago the 85-year old Pelosi called him an “evil creature.” Now Trump, on the verge of becoming an octogenarian himself, returned the favor. She was evil, corrupt and only focused on bad things for our country,” Trump said.

In the heartland of America, an inflection point has come to pass. Minneapolis was once immortalized in the 1970s television series The Mary Tyler Moore Show, when Mary Richards made her bright-eyed and optimistic journey there in search of opportunity and a new life. But now it is a relic; worn away, gritty and unwelcoming – with more empty storefronts than warm smiles. Of course, the decay didn’t happen overnight. The failed policies of a series of Democratic leaders and a progressive city council have left the biggest city in the Minnesota Nice State a shadow of its former self. Minneapolis has had a Democrat mayor (Democrat-Farmer-Labor in this neck of the woods) every term since 1976 and hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Richard Erdall served one day on December 31, 1973.

Is Maud Maron crazy? Bill Ackman certainly thought the Republican candidate for Manhattan DA was, she tells me, when she asked him for $2 million. While the billionaire hedge fund CEO said he could easily raise the money she needed to fund her campaign in a single night, ultimately he chose not to – and instead focused on backing Andrew Cuomo for mayor.Ackman thought “oh, she's a nice lady, but she's crazy,” Maron recalls. “She's running as a Republican in a Democratic city.”Fast forward six months and Cuomo is on the brink of losing to Zohran Mamdani – and Ackman has cast a vote for Maron, who he now calls “great.

When news broke that the head of Iowa’s largest school district was in ICE custody as an alleged illegal alien, the response from all quarters was disbelief. A school superintendent undergoes intense vetting, and every rung on the career ladder requires background checks. How could such a man possibly have slipped through?Anyone hoping the full story might provide a sensible explanation was quickly disappointed. The more you dig, the more absurd it becomes. Although we don’t yet know the full truth about his immigration status, there is already plenty in his record that raises red flags about the biographies he’s offered. Ian Andre Roberts' life reads less like a CV than a pitch for a Hollywood script in the classic tradition of the charming conman.

In as Trumpian a fashion as it gets, the president has rekindled the years-long debate: Did progressive Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) marry her brother? Shortly after conservative icon Charlie Kirk was assassinated in cold blood by a deranged leftist, Omar reposted a video on X that called Kirk a “reprehensible human being” who was “spewing racist dog whistles” in his “last, dying words.” Republican lawmakers saw an opportunity to censure the “Squad” member and remove her committee assignments. The motion failed by a 214-213 vote.Nevertheless, some conservatives are demanding Omar’s denaturalization and deportation to Somalia. Denaturalization is allowed in cases of “concealment of a material fact or willful misrepresentation.

Yes, things can always get worse. Within less than a week of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a new conspiracy was in town. Despite mounting evidence of the homegrown nature of Tyler Robinson’s radicalism, social media was ablaze with an explanation so perfect, so fitting, so dazzling that only a stooge could possibly deny it. This was no story about terrorism, they say, let alone the online incubation of extremism. This was a story about – who else? – the Jews.The idea that Israel is responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk continues to clock up millions of views every single day on X, so it's worthwhile explaining what happened to readers sane enough to avoid social media entirely.

Contrary to the claims of his critics, Charlie Kirk did not marry a handmaiden. A 2012 Miss Arizona USA, NCAA basketball player and current doctoral student, Erika Kirk also has her own ministry, podcast and clothing line. And now Turning Point USA has named her as its new CEO. Fighting the caricature of the left, Erika, like so many strong conservative women whom Charlie championed, is highly educated, accomplished and articulate. A veritable army of these women, including Riley Gaines, Candace Owens and Alex Clark, has spoken out in the days since Charlie’s assassination to describe his impact on their lives and leadership trajectories. Charlie Kirk was no misogynist; he supported conservative women just as he inspired conservative men.

The New York Times recently announced that Democrats face a “voter registration crisis.” With its delicate, frilly font, the Times story agonized over younger voters, Latinos, and men, especially young black men, who appear to be drifting away from the Democratic party. The Times diagnosis? It’s an accounting problem: The party isn’t signing up enough people. Its cure, predictably, was more money, more organization and more clipboards.This is the answer you’d expect from a bureaucracy. If the shelves are full of unsold tins of beans, the problem is obviously the warehouse. In truth, Democrats don’t have a logistics problem. They have a product problem. Americans don’t want to buy the party they are selling.

Elon Musk has set up a third party and pledged to contest next year’s midterms. But to find a third party that has performed well in a midterm election, we must journey far into the annals of American history. Minnesota and Wisconsin-based parties managed a handful of House representatives and a senator or two in 1934, but these were states-first campaigns that were anchored in a geographical power-base – something Musk does not have. We can discount the movements linked to Ross Perot in the 1990s and George Wallace in 1968, who both ran for president but did not have a viable wider party slate at their own elections or ensuing midterms.

On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump descended a golden escalator in Trump Tower and into political history. The press corps snickered. The consultant class rolled its eyes. Late-night comedians feasted on the spectacle. Most people thought it was a joke. What they missed – and still miss – is that Trump didn’t invent the anger that powered his campaign. He simply noticed it first. The pundits focused on Trump’s bombast. But voters were focused on something else entirely: someone, finally, was saying out loud what they’d been thinking for years. Take China. In 2015, Trump said, “They’re ripping us off.” It wasn’t elegant. But it was true.

Welcome to Thunderdome. The essential divide between Republican insiders on how to attack Kamala Harris is stuck, swinging back and forth between the question of inauthentic climber or authentic leftist. Is she an untrustworthy chameleon who was against fracking before she was for it? Or is she a San Francisco Democrat elitist who was the furthest senator to the left? When the George W. Bush re-elect had to tangle with John Kerry, they went the unreliable flip-flopper route — something Chris LaCivita is very familiar with as the then-media advisor to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — to great success.

"The whole thing is fucked.” That’s how one former blue-state GOP official describes the current turmoil facing state Republican parties. Numerous reports have laid bare the financial struggles, leadership turnover and abject chaos that have ensnared the GOP’s state parties. State parties in Arizona and Pennsylvania, unable to make rent, have sold off their headquarters. There are active battles for control of the party in Michigan and Colorado. Arizona also recently pushed out its chairman and in Georgia the party chair stepped down. Meanwhile, multiple former state-party officials are under indictment in cases related to January 6.

In presidential elections there’s no such thing as a Pyrrhic victory. Winning is everything — and neither party would ever openly admit there could be advantages to losing. Yet the outcome of the 2020 election wasn’t entirely unlucky for the Republican Party or even Donald Trump himself. And as both parties look to next year’s contest, far-sighted strategists can see a bigger picture beyond Trump and Biden. Whoever won in 2020 was going to face the ugly but necessary task of withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan, where twenty years of nation-building had failed to establish a free state that could resist the Taliban. Trump might have executed the withdrawal more successfully than Biden. But if he had, would the media have covered him more favorably? Of course not.

In the closing months of the 2022 midterms North Carolina residents began receiving text messages and phone calls from unfamiliar numbers, a ritual all too familiar to a swing-state voter. The benevolent voice on the line had seen the recipient’s name on a petition to allow the Green Party on the ballot and wanted to ensure the signature was on the up and up. With validity confirmed the anonymous caller would reveal himself to be a Green Party representative. “If the Green Party is on the ballot, it’ll take votes away from Democrats, giving Republicans a huge advantage. It will help them win North Carolina in 2022 and 2024. There’s far too much at stake to let this happen. Are you interested in asking to have your name removed from this petition or leave it as is?

When Charles Barkley came to Salt Lake City for the NBA All-Star game, he found himself trapped in what he called a “boring-ass,” booze-free desert. (Impressively, Barkley did manage to at least sound drunk.) That's how it is in Utah, which sometimes gets depicted as the wet blanket of America. So it was that Marjorie Taylor Greene had cold water thrown on her by her Utah colleagues after she called for a national divorce on Twitter. “This rhetoric is destructive and wrong and — honestly — evil.” responded Utah governor Spencer Cox in a tweet. “We don’t need a divorce, we need marriage counseling.” "We're not going to divide the country,” said Utah senator Mitt Romney, “It's united we stand, divided we fall.

Here's a simple question: how much American taxpayer money is being spent to silence, censor, and blacklist opinions? Legacy media reporting on the House Oversight Committee's initial look into the actions of Twitter during the 2020 elections focused mostly on questions surrounding Hunter Biden's laptop. The committee's investigative reports, however, ought to hone in on the most disturbing aspect of this story: social media giants were routinely directed and coerced into censoring and silencing American citizens by entities funded by those same taxpayers.