Vivek Ramaswamy

Congress struck a major blow against TikTok's Chinese ownership Thursday morning, by passing the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which would require parent company ByteDance to sell its US entity within six months in order to retain access to American app stores and web hosting services. The bill, passed by a 352-65 margin, now heads to the Senate. It offered a rare time that former president Donald Trump found himself allied with progressive members of the Squad in opposition, while Representatives Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries joined forces in voting for the bill, which would help combat the espionage concerns that intelligence officials in the Biden administration have repeatedly raised.

It’s 2016 all over again, following a frozen Iowa caucus where Donald Trump told Republicans to get on the Trump Train... before it’s too late.Trump’s top two rivals, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, are both staying in the race, whereas Vivek Ramaswamy, who spent much of his campaign running as Trump’s understudy, dropped out and endorsed Trump.It’s hard to think of a better outcome for the former president; Alex Titus, an advisor to Trump’s former super PAC, called Iowa “a massive victory for Donald Trump,” and added that “the only ones surprised by the results are in the consultant class.” Trump narrowly eclipsed the 50 percent threshold many viewed as critical to serving as a strong showing; Haley and DeSantis virtually tied for second at around 20 percent each.

Welcome to the first Thunderdome of 2024! I hope you had a great time off and congratulations to all of you chipper Ned Flanders types who’ve already filed your taxes. And also to those of you who are still in full recovery mode, having “Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully — to love all of our relatives, and in general, grossly overestimated our powers.” In any case, the year of 2023 is gone, and now our presidential election year is truly begun... and with it, a contest that is forcibly nonexistent on one side of the aisle, and on the other, one that has been drowned in its infancy. Why is that?

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel was seething in her chair at the Miami performing arts center that housed the third GOP presidential candidates’ debate in November. Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech entrepreneur running an anti-establishment campaign, had just used his opening statement to publicly call on McDaniel to resign. “I think there’s something deeper going on in the Republican Party here and I am upset about what happened last night. We’ve become a party of losers at the end of the day,” Ramaswamy said. “Ronna, if you want to come on stage tonight, you want to look the GOP voters in the eye and tell them you resign, I will yield my time to you.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where last night’s debate in Tuscaloosa had some interesting aspects we’ll get to momentarily — but first, consider what this week looked like from the perspective of the front-runner for the nomination and, according to some, for the presidency. Donald Trump did a town hall with Sean Hannity — which got significantly less viewership than Ron DeSantis versus Gavin Newsom — where he managed to bolster Joe Biden’s central case against his candidacy. In Washington, Jack Smith dropped a new indication of the direction he plans to take with his case against Trump, including evidence of “encouragement of violence.

Many commentators (including yours truly) have pointed out that America is divided more now than it has been since the late 1850s and the run up to the Civil War. But as usual, I may have understated the case.  That, anyway, is what Vivek Ramaswamy would say. In a remarkable, just-published interview with Tom Klingenstein, Ramaswamy several time insists that we are not in a pre-war situation. It’s worse than that. “We are,” he insists, “absolutely in a war with the fate of the country at stake.” Hyperbolic? I don’t think so. The war, he acknowledges, could and likely will get worse. But we can already see the troops deployed and the battle lines drawn.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where the consensus view is that Ronna Romney McDaniel is a disaster. The longest tenured RNC chair in a century, McDaniel has navigated the Republican Party through one disappointing election after another, holding on to power simply because Donald Trump wants her to have the job and no one strongly qualified has chosen to challenge her for it. On the podcast today, we talk about McDaniel’s prospects, whether the RNC should ditch her, Nikki Haley’s social media botch and the rise of third-party threats to make 2024 even more chaotic. Subscribe and listen here! The blame for the off year falls on Ronna Is this the one thing Vivek got right?

Welcome to Thunderdome, where you might think that today would be focused on the off-year election (many lessons on that below) or the debate last night (a few takeaways to be sure), but the breaking news has overtaken all of this: Joe Manchin, the West Virginia senator and former governor, has announced that he will retire rather than run for re-election. Manchin has been at the focal point of one fight after another in the Senate during his tenure, wavering back and forth between working with Democrats and Republicans depending on the issue. His announcement means Republicans are assured of picking up his seat. But there is also a strong indication to it that he does not consider himself done with politics yet.

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.

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.

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.