Curt Mills

There have been darker days for the House of Cheney. In 2008, Vice President Dick Cheney left office amidst two imprudent wars and a capsizing economy. A decade on, the times are surprisingly kind to a family once among the most controversial in American politics. Dick’s daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney, is looking at a Senate run. ‘She’s got pretty good foreign policy, national security chops,’ Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said unironically earlier this month. ‘She’d be a great addition.

‘Biden is their nominee until further notice,’ a source close to the White House told me recently. The candidacy of Joe Biden, and his ballistic rise in the polls, has suddenly made the 2020 race for the Democratic nomination seem far less competitive than everybody had assumed. Biden always seemed a blue-chip entrant. He was the principal lieutenant of the first African American president. He had north of four decades’ worth of national name recognition. For months, however, a sense that time had passed him by pervaded his primaveral flirtations. No more. Having formally announced last month, Biden has – to the surprise of most of the smart set – effectively lapped his nearest competitor, Bernie Sanders, in opinion polling.

Tell me how you judge Brett Kavanaugh, and I’ll tell you who you vote for. In a divided polity, Kavanaugh cuts a Janus-faced figure. He’s that rarity, a Bushie who made good in the Trump era, but also he’s the favorite jurist of immigration restrictionists. He’s the almost too wholesome basketball dad, but he’s also the sex-predator threat to American womanhood. His swearing in was widely seen as a victory for conservatives, and raised fears of on the left that the bench was tipping right. But many on the right feared his triumph would be Pyrrhic: too much political capital had been spent on a justice with a record to the left of Antonin Scalia. ‘Trust the process,’ former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told me last year on Kavanaugh.

Who’s the biggest loser? Joe Biden’s third try for the White House might look as doomed as Hillary Clinton’s run in 2016, but so far, Biden has followed a different and more promising trajectory. Instead, it’s Bernie Sanders who’s shaping up to be the Dems’ high-profile also-ran. Clinton peaked in popularity — and polling — ahead of her 2015 announcement. Her status as the assumed nominee helped her clear the field. Only the villain from The Wire dared challenge her in the establishment lane at any length; big names like Biden, John Kerry and Andrew Cuomo all preferred not to obstruct the Clinton succession.

The media verdict is clear: the Democrats abhor President Trump’s foreign policy, and the Democrats aren’t really going to talk about it. ‘Democrats want to challenge Trump’s foreign policy in 2020. They’re still working out how,’ reports Vox. ‘Democrats are playing down foreign policy. It’s shrewd — and it may be a mistake,’ opines the Washington Post. ‘Why Aren’t Democratic Presidential Candidates Criticizing Trump’s Foreign Policy?’ wonders Reason magazine. And on it goes. Behind the scenes, however, it’s a frenzy, with the hiring of foreign policy advisers way up. For the Democrats, 2016 was a two-horse race, with a heavy front-runner in the familiar form of Hillary Clinton.

The world, or at least Twitter, awoke Saturday morning to an extraordinary series of retweets from the site’s most infamous user, @realdonaldtrump. Among those he retweeted: Paul Joseph Watson, the controversial Alex Jones adjacent; Lauren Southern, the right-wing internet celebrity and filmmaker, and for good measure, an account called ‘Deep State Exposed’ which seems most intent on exposing Islam’s quest for global dominion. https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet/status/1124097191952441349 ‘Lmao [laugh my ass off],’ said Southern, in a missive, again, retweeted by the president of the United States.

Donald Trump secured his third choice for his third Chief of Staff on Friday. Though the budget pointman, Mick Mulvaney, has only been tapped for the top job in an ‘acting’ capacity – implying a probationary period – there’s every reason to think Mulvaney could prove a success. Mulvaney, a former Congressman from South Carolina, has proved indispensable for Trump in his early years in office, taking jobs that the president has struggled to fill. While the latest is chief of staff, Mulvaney also temporarily headed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from late last year into 2018. But some hope Mulvaney secures his latest job for the long haul. Spurned by Nick Ayers and Chris Christie, Trump has an incentive to show stability.

What does Nick Ayers, the vice president’s aggressive, ambitious chief of staff know? The 36-year-old turned down the president’s offer to replace General John Kelly over the weekend, taking the extraordinary step to rule himself out on Twitter ahead the administration and its allies. https://twitter.com/nick_ayers/status/1071879332283453440 Ayers was thought to be the eager, hands-down next chief of staff to the president – a key consideration in the sacking of Kelly. Amid the legal typhoon the White House appears destined for, does he think it’s a sinking ship?

Fox News, the conservative standard-bearer, has projected the House of Representatives for the Democrats. And Republicans are doing better than expected in the Senate – their total could crest 53 seats. Compared to 1994, 2006, and 2010, this would appear a tamer reaction to an embattled president. Because of the hyped-up expectations for this elections, many on the left are going home disappointed tonight. Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams are on their way to the losers’ aisle. It’s not wrapped up yet, but a Democratic House is a Democratic House. Subpoenas and calls for impeachment from some on the Left are certain. It looks like a split decision. As Steve Bannon told the Spec on this scenario last month: ‘Stalingrad every day.

With over 90 percent reporting, Ron DeSantis is not … messing… this up. The controversial, Trumpite Florida gubernatorial candidate has made the race for the Sunshine State a real fight. Nearly two hours in, the election remains extremely unclear. But the Republican is up in the Governor’s race, which is something of a surprise. And if Rick Scott were to steal a Senate senate for the Grand Old Party, and Congressman DeSantis were to replace him in Tallahassee, it could be a harbinger for a shock night of upset for the GOP. Florida was the true beginning of the crescendo for the Republicans in 2016. Florida went – then the Blue Wall: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

‘It will be Stalingrad every day,’ if the Republicans lose the House in November, Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, told me earlier this month at his house in Washington. But, he adds, ‘I think he’s on fire right now. I think the Kavanaugh thing, ironically, will play against the Democrats.’ ‘They’re going to start to turn on each other,’ Bannon says of the Democrats if the Republicans continue to close in the polls. ‘The Clinton Junta has never been held accountable. How do you lose the presidency? She’s never been held accountable for that.’ That, says Bannon, creates the perfect storm for her to run. ‘It’s not that she’s going to run,’ Bannon told me.

‘Boys come up, I’m going to be president.’ That’s what John Kerry, Massachusetts senator and the Democratic nominee, told a close group of sometime-advisers at 8 p.m. on election night in 2004, or so a source familiar recounts. That year, and his near unseating of George W. Bush, still shape most Americans’ public perception of the 74-year-old: regal but aloof. That campaign seems prehistoric now: pre-Twitter, and preceding the candidate himself using Twitter for the day’s cavil. But that would be giving 2004 short shrift: the contest was as acrimonious as any prior.

It’s becoming a cliché but it bears repeating: in the Trump era, media and politics have merged like never before. The Fox News channel serves as something like, in American baseball terms, a Triple-A farm team for the White House. Most recently called up to play for the Yankees is John Bolton, America’s new national security advisor. Other alumni that have gone in -- and out -- of the White House include Mercedes Schlapp, Tony Sayegh and Sebastian Gorka, the last of whom has, for now, found himself back at Fox.Both Gorka and John Bolton have used the president’s media diet, heavy on the Wall Street Journal and Fox, to their advantage.

In my reporting on John Bolton, the hardline former US Ambassador to the UN, I have noticed a trend. Bolton very clearly wants in. And he has a very specific way of going about it. Some context: despite being a George W. Bush alum, Bolton has largely vociferously backed President Donald Trump. Bolton has been considered, alternatively, for Secretary of State, Deputy Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. The world around former White House Chief Strategist Stephen K. Bannon favored him for Secretary of State at one point shortly after the 2016 election. But Bolton, these days beloved by much of the anti-Bush, Breitbart-type crowd, is now focused on one of those positions: National Security Adviser.

If accounts in the press are to be believed, President Trump has reached a fresh nadir. “These are the darkest days in at least half a year,” reports The Washington Post. “Sources close to President Trump say he is in a bad place,” chimes in the impressively-sourced Axios. Buried in the Post story is a contradictory take from close friend Chris Ruddy, the Newsmax chief: “I’m bewildered when I see these reports that he’s in turmoil. Every time I speak to him he seems more relaxed and in control than ever. He seems pretty optimistic about how things are shaping up.” At the end of the day, only the top man himself knows how he’s feeling. But read between the lines, and a compelling antithesis emerges.

A friend who works for a prominent, hardline conservative think tank writes: 'So, can we all admit that Trump is basically a Democrat now on guns?' On Wednesday, I wrote that American gun reform is close to happening. In the intervening hours, that view has been buttressed by a series of comments from the president of the United States. It seems a perverse fate that Donald Trump, the bogeyman of progressive America, should turn out to be the means a delivering a measure of gun reform. Trump in Washington Wednesday promised 'beautiful' and 'comprehensive' (read: if the immigration debate phrasing is any indication—liberal) reform. On Wednesday, I mentioned Pennsylvania as a flashpoint political state for Republicans considering reform.