Ron de santis

Welcome to Thunderdome, where after three long weeks, the Republicans in the House finally found their path toward a speaker — and boy is it a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto of a choice. Louisiana’s Mike Johnson, known for his kinglike dominance of the green line meme, is your new speaker of the House. He is eminently difficult to categorize, a cipher, an ardent social conservative with little in the way of fiscal conservative instincts but with a lot in favor of Zionist support for Israel. If you are a Squad member, this guy’s your nightmare. But he’s also likely to drive the media crazy, because he’s basically an unupdated social conservative from 2004. Perhaps not exactly what the Democrats had in mind when they helped Matt Gaetz knife Kevin McCarthy.

Utah senator Mitt Romney is not holding back in an upcoming biography set to be released Tuesday, Romney: A Reckoning. According to one publishing source, McKay Coppins's book offers Romney's lively and at times devastating take on nearly every major political figure of the last twenty-five years. After reading several titillating and tantalizing excerpts from the biography, Cockburn fears he may be dethroned as DC’s cattiest gossip columnist. Unsurprisingly, the two biggest victims of Romney’s snark are Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Romney doesn’t try to hide his resentment at the two politicians' success and instead wastes no time calling them both authoritarians and Trump a fool.

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.

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!

Welcome to Thunderdome, where at long last, the 2024 debate is joined by our would-be champions. And also Asa Hutchinson was there. The night held surprises for several candidates, including going against much of what prognosticators thought would happen. But how much does it mean without the presence of Donald Trump, who ditched the debate, did a pre-taped interview with Tucker Carlson that produced no news, and had his squad of surrogates rejected at the doors of the spin room? We discussed all of this, winners and losers, and more on the latest podcast — listen and subscribe today!

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.

Welcome to Thunderdome: have you placed a bet yet on if Chris Christie actually shows up to the debate with a pair of brass knuckles? It certainly would be entertaining to see the New York and New Jersey guys just ignore the rest of the field and tangle — it’d be enough to justify having the debate itself. But Trump might skip it, which makes the prospect of a DeSantis/Newsom debate the most interesting possibility on the horizon — and presents a make-or-break chance for the Florida governor. Meanwhile, Republicans struggle with how to aim their message in a time where culture war is the dominant narrative but perhaps not the most salient one.

National elections should be about contrast and choice — and those choices should offer the clearest opportunity for parity in the candidates and the parties. If the polls are to be believed, the 2024 election as it stands now, before any debates or primaries, does not offer that. Instead the country currently faces the prospect of two senior citizens clashing, both with low approval ratings, personal and legal baggage and questions of mental acuity.