Ben Domenech

The immediate reaction to the indictment of Donald Trump by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has been a run to support the former president from his fellow Republicans, including those who are or soon might be competing with him for the GOP's 2024 nomination. But underlying this unanimity of disgust at the flagrant disregard for historical precedent, and the inflation of glaringly weak charges by Bragg, there is an obvious split in the right's response to this new stage of lawfare against Trump — one which could become more obvious in the coming months. On the one hand, you have the right-of-center Americans who are just plain shocked at this development.

Missouri senator Josh Hawley's attempt to pass his "No TikTok on United States Devices Act" resulted in a clash with Kentucky senator Rand Paul that made for a rare moment of actual debate on the Senate floor yesterday. The conservative senators were at odds over whether the government should ban the Chinese social media app. "I have never before heard on this floor a defense of the right to spy," Hawley responded. "I didn’t realize that the First Amendment contained a right to espionage. The senator from Kentucky mentions the Bill of Rights. I must have missed the right of the Chinese government to spy on Americans in our Bill of Rights. Because that’s what we’re talking about here." "The company has bent over backwards to work with our government,” Paul claimed.

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you,” Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22. And Matt Taibbi has every reason to be paranoid, The journalist has spent his career reporting on some of the most powerful entities on earth, often exposing stories they’d rather keep out of public view. As the most prominent reporter involved in the Twitter Files, Taibbi has already attracted the wrath of many of Elon Musk’s critics in politics and media. Now it seems the government itself is paying attention. According to Taibbi, an IRS agent showed up at his home the very day that he was testifying before Congress on revelations about Twitter to the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

If you want to be a prominent member of Congress in this day and age, the surest path is to become a hype machine for the ideological extremes of your party. Yet Nancy Mace gives no signs of responding to these tabloid incentives in conversation with her constituents. It’s an odd thing to say about a politician in 2023, but you might even find yourself taking her seriously. In a Washington where the House of Representatives is dominated by GOP would-be pundits, including bomb-throwers such as Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, the second-term Republican from South Carolina’s 1st district sounds like a politician from a different era.

To this point in the early days of the Republican primary, all the major potshots have been coming from just one candidate, directed at just one other: Donald Trump taking aim repeatedly at Ron DeSantis. Much of the media conversation about this has focused on DeSantis's unwillingness to respond to any of these attacks: a deliberate choice that hasn't lowered the temperature or frequency of Trump's barbs, which now include comparing the Florida conservative to, gasp, Mitt Romney. But consider the possibility that at this moment, both men are making a political mistake. For DeSantis, the risks of non-response are that Trump defines him before he defines himself. Republican primary voters generally know who Ron DeSantis is and have an overwhelmingly positive view of him.

Ron DeSantis's pending arrival in the 2024 thunderdome has already drawn comparisons to two Republican governors who came before him — one who won the White House and another who flamed out before a single vote was cast in Iowa. His recent statement on Ukraine is telling in how it channels both men, in good ways and bad. DeSantis has already drawn comparisons to Scott Walker, the enormously popular Wisconsin governor who failed to capture any of 2016's populist energy despite prevailing in numerous fights in his state.

Just based on public behavior, you'd think Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis weren't even interested in running for the same office. Trump's approach has been, as is his wont, directly at odds with the traditions of running for office. Normally, a candidate would want to reestablish the sense of a once-and-future political predator building a dominant effort to return to his former job. Consisting of splashy media events like his recent trip to East Palestine, flamboyant social media haranguing, and a campaign operation that has more questions than answers, the Trump show will be on display this week at his old haunting grounds of CPAC. It was the conference that gave him his start in the conservative movement.

Over Presidents Day weekend, Donald J. Trump, our most beloved former president — according to him anyway — posted the following to his Truth Social account: “Ron DeSanctimonious wants to cut your Social Security and Medicare, closed up Florida & its beaches, loves RINOS Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, and Karl Rove (disasters ALL!), is backed by Globalist’s Club for NO Growth, Lincoln Pervert Project, & 'Uninspired' Koch — And it only gets worse from there. He is a RINO in disguise!, whose Poll numbers are dropping like a rock. Good luck Ron!” This is as good a point as any for the launch of Thunderdome 2024, a Republican presidential primary that has all the signs of being even bloodier and more acrimonious than the 2016 contest.

Here's an idea that won't happen but should: if Kamala Harris really wants to reset her political future — and strike back hard against the naysayers in Washington who have undermined her for the past two years — she should consider replacing Dianne Feinstein in the Senate. Hear me out, and feel free to play the theme from The West Wing or House of Cards in the background. Democrats are transparently paranoid about Kamala Harris's failure to launch. She's viewed as a major liability, and should she be the nominee in 2024 through happenstance or an unexpected Joe Biden retirement, most Democrats in Washington feel she would lose to any Republican, even Donald Trump.

In recent years, Republican candidates and media figures have become increasingly critical of one portion of the population. At the same time, this same demographic has turned against them at the ballot box. As the GOP became the party of men — married or unmarried — they drove away the single women, who voted against them en masse in the 2022 midterms. It's not hard to see why.

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.