Ben Domenech

Welcome to Thunderdome. I celebrated the official expiration of the Commission on Presidential Debates on my Fox podcast this week, which you can listen to here. It’s a long overdue mercy killing of an institution that has repeatedly failed in its duties and due diligence, with their repeated lies about C-Span’s Steve Scully and his “hacked” Twitter account. Enjoy the ignominious end to this ludicrously overpowered commission. Now the Biden White House and the Trump campaign have agreed on at least two debates, one in June and another in September. There really ought to be August and October debates, too — but those will likely only happen if Team Biden thinks he can convince some voters at a low risk for his candidacy. The big question is: why do this?

One of the most famous criticisms of Joe Biden over the years came from former Bush and Obama secretary of defense Robert Gates, who wrote in his 2014 memoir that "I think [Joe Biden] has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” The former SecDef has repeatedly been asked if he stands by the statement — and each time, he does. Of course, we're a decade removed from that memoir — and in that time, Gates has openly criticized Biden over the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, his administration's approach to Putin and Russia and the slow walking of military aid to Ukraine. So it seems it's safe to say we're at five decades now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Welcome to Thunderdome. It’s been clear since day one that Joe Biden was more scared of the progressive left than anyone else. His White House was incredibly fearful of a challenge from Bernie Sanders or a Squad member within the 2024 primary and the damage it would do to the Democratic coalition and his own re-election hopes. So the White House swung left — not just on economic policy, where he threw everything behind massive expenditures that pleased leftist politicians, pundits and people who have shrines to FDR in their houses, but on social policy as well, where he embraced the culture war issues of abortion and the trans agenda and hung on tight.

The biggest question in politics right now has to be: why is Kristi Noem doing this to herself? Let's do a quick recap. The South Dakota governor is your classic Tea Party-era politician, running for Congress in 2010 and beating an incumbent Democrat. When she arrived in Washington, she was a reliable Republican vote for the anti-Obama House majority — anti-tax, pro-Keystone, anti-abortion, pro-balanced budget, drill baby drill. Her congressional career was pretty unremarkable. She decided after winning reelection in 2016 to run for governor — and won handily despite doing it in a tougher year for Republicans across the board. Winning the governorship elevated Noem's national profile and the quick follow-on of the Covid pandemic raised her even higher.

Welcome to Thunderdome. When Joe Biden ran for president, he did the same thing he always does when he does anything: invented an obviously fictional story casting himself as a rescuing hero. In his framing of the situation, he — a lifelong politician who has demonstrated nothing but constant ambition for the White House — was a reluctant candidate pulled from the sidelines by the roaming threat of a dangerous Orange Man and his tiki-torch-carrying supporters in Charlottesville. Biden wasn’t running because he’d been trying to get the job for decades; he had the nobler purpose of healing the soul of the nation.

Welcome to Thunderdome. There’s really no question now that Israel will be a major issue driving protests at the summer conventions, particularly at the DNC in Chicago. The scene that’s played out on Ivy League campuses over the past several weeks can easily be transported to the outskirts of the Chicago convention, where media presence alone will be beneficial for protesters and sympathetic Democratic politicians could provide aid and comfort. As someone who enjoyed getting teargassed in Minneapolis in 2008, and was profoundly disappointed at the Rage Against the Machine non-protests in 2016, I’m eager for the test. Tim Stanley shares his thoughts: One: Biden owns the Middle East conflict even as he denounces the casualties.

The past week has presented a fascinating object lesson in the continued tension over the direction of foreign policy and national security in the MAGA era, on what matters and what doesn’t, and who matters and who doesn’t, when it comes to finding a true forward-looking Trump-Reagan fusion. I wrote about this in the context of reviewing the new book by Matt Kroenig and Dan Negrea, who wrote a Ukraine-focused piece for Foreign Policy last week. But that’s just writing, not voting — and this week brought votes that include more useful indicators of what’s going on.

Welcome to Thunderdome. It’s obvious that when it comes to 2024, Donald Trump doesn’t want the race to be about the culture war issues that he views as a major drag from the past few years of elections, with abortion at the top of the list. He’d rather it be a race about immigration, the economy, and oddly enough, his own persecution by the Deep State (which motivates his core supporters, but not many others). What’s clear is that in the aftermath of his statement on abortion, Republicans aren’t taking up Trump’s call.

“If there’s anyone who deserves impeachment, it's Alejandro Mayorkas. Not only has he failed to enforce the law, he’s violated his oath of office with impunity.” Greg Abbott is not mincing words. The Republican governor of Texas is at the center of the biggest issue on the minds of many 2024 voters — the border, where his policy clashes with Joe Biden’s White House and administration have become a focal point for Republican candidates nationwide and will be a major part of the 2024 Trump campaign. Multiple polls show the border/migrant issue to be top of mind for voters, especially for Republican-leaning independent voters — more on that below.

One of the two Johns — John Cornyn and John Thune — is in all likelihood going to be the next leader of the Senate. One may potentially, based on the very favorable map for Republicans this cycle, may be the next majority leader. It’s a massive trade in power, away from the long-tenured Mitch McConnell and his diaspora of consultants and groups, and into the new hands of different Senate staffers and teams. But one thing that Cornyn and Thune represent is not just a generational shift, but a shift in the nature of the leadership and what they represent. Cornyn and Thune were both recruited in 2004 by Karl Rove as part of the effort by George W. Bush to take the Senate.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where this week we have the first named vice presidential candidate from a 2024 challenger — Nicole Shanahan, whom I know little about outside of this glossy profile in People magazine. Forget the child of immigrants rags to riches story or any of that stuff. On paper she seems like an extremely wealthy progressive California attorney with all the various interests of such a type — yoga, natural living, meeting your third spouse at Burning Man and so on. But none of that matters, and none of it will matter — which is why this choice strikes me as potentially ingenious on the part of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Understand this: no one, absolutely no one, votes for a president based on his or her vice presidential candidate.

Welcome to Thunderdome. The Republican Party has new leadership, with North Carolina GOP chairman Michael Whatley and daughter-in-law of the former president Lara Trump taking over an organization that will, in reality, be run by Chris LaCivita. They’ve already made one controversial but wise decision in demurring on the hiring of Scott Presler, a ballot harvester popular with the MAGA crowd. But they now confront the harsh reality of the RNC’s fundraising woes: they’re well behind the Joe Biden campaign and the DNC. The Democratic president’s campaign account officially reported taking in $21 million in February, according to its report filed with the Federal Election Commission late Wednesday, ending the month with $71 million cash on hand.

One of the accepted media tales about the Republican Party is that because Donald Trump dominates it politically and stylistically, he also dominates its policymaking process. There are several examples where this hasn’t been true, both during his presidency and after it — but perhaps none more prominent than the TikTok debate on Capitol Hill, which resulted in that modern rarity of a sweeping 352-65 bipartisan vote in the House last week, a vote immediately applauded by populist conservative leaders such as Missouri senator Josh Hawley and institutions such as the Heritage Foundation.