Ben Domenech

Welcome to Thunderdome, where fresh off his thirty-point win in Iowa, former president Donald Trump is now counting on New Hampshire to deliver the killing blow to the nascent Nikki Haley boomlet. Haley underperformed polling expectations in Iowa — in part because of the frigid weather, which saw the lowest turnout in a quarter century for the caucuses. New Hampshire now takes on new importance for her, keeping the narrative going that she’s the better, stronger choice for a showdown with her former boss. With the backing of Republican governor Chris Sununu, an influx of cash from the donor class and a DeSantis campaign that is largely focused southward, Haley will have her best shot at pulling out an unlikely upset.

The decline and fall of the Ron DeSantis campaign has led several people within the commentariat — which these days means anyone online with the ability to type a thought and hit send in even a semi-coherent way, despite lack of experience, background or the skill to even qualify as a volunteer — to weigh in on how awful, how terrible, how wasteful has been the DeSantis effort to run for the presidency. The effect is amusing, in part because it has led outright idiots to claim that if only DeSantis had refrained from criticizing Donald Trump at all, or if only he had criticized Donald Trump more, he would have succeeded.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where the podcast has returned just in time for the final days before Iowa’s verdict. All those counties, all those fairs, all that fried food and all that slogging through freezing temperatures and Covid flare-ups has come to this: a caucus that will determine who drops out first, Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley. You can see in last night’s CNN debate why the hopes were once so high for the Florida governor. DeSantis won the debate, solidly, and has continued to improve as a debater throughout this process. But without Donald Trump on the stage, the back and forth with Haley turned into bickering over lying about records and meta commentary from the former South Carolina governor about bungled campaigns.

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?

Welcome to Thunderdome, where on this week’s podcast we discussed why this seems to be the moment that Democrats publicly turned on Hunter Biden. There have already been statements from multiple Capitol Hill Democrats indicating that they believed Hunter’s activities had risen to the level of illegal and unethical activity — even from partisans like Jerry Nadler and Jamie Raskin. But the comment from Chris Murphy, viewed not just as a partisan but as a close White House ally on multiple fronts, that Hunter is “worthy of prosecution” in reaction to the latest California indictment has to be read as a message to Joe Biden: your re-election may well depend on what you do, or don’t do, about your son’s obvious crimes.

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.

Sometimes the true power of someone new to politics is that they don't arrive in Washington with any of the preconceived notions about the possible. In a political moment that is decidedly post-norms, that's what made Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville's stance against an array of foes, including many on his own side of the aisle, so impressive. Tuberville came to Washington as a cipher. He was a Republican, certainly, and a conservative endorsed by Donald Trump by dint of the failure of Jeff Sessions's brief tenure as attorney general. But it was convenient to think of him as a former football coach who viewed being one of the hundred members of the United States Senate as a step down from the task of raising up some of the most talented athletes in the nation.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where we had a brief glimpse last night of everything we could’ve gotten from a meaningful contest about America’s next generation of leadership, with two Generation Xers from opposite ideologies and coasts taking the stage together for what has to be considered the best debate of the cycle. It showed the clear differences between the governing styles of Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom, included some zingers and insults, but also left viewers with a clear idea of the differences between both states and both men. Congratulations are also due to Sean Hannity, who showed himself more than capable, even as a conservative partisan, of managing a high-quality debate.

During Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House, it became common knowledge that the best way to lobby the president on a particular position was to do an interview on the right cable news programs espousing your views. Gone were the days of relevance of Wall Street Journal op-eds during the George W. Bush administration or articles in the Atlantic for the Barack Obama era. If you wanted to change POTUS’s thinking on something, get in front of a camera and make yourself heard. Now, in the context of the Democratic Party’s split over Israel and the war in Gaza, we are witnessing a surprisingly similar public lobbying campaign play out for Joe Biden’s attention — albeit via different methods than cable news.

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?