Oliver Wiseman

There was an evangelical beauty pageant in Washington, DC today. At Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference, a major gathering of religious conservatives and campaigners, a procession of presidential candidates strutted their stuff in the ballroom of the Washington Hilton. Keen to see the contenders in action, I went along (Cockburn in tow).     Ron DeSantis delivered a battle report from his ongoing “war on woke.” Vivek Ramaswamy offered a characteristically caffeinated spiel and touted his status as “the first millennial to run for president as a Republican.” Mike Pence walked out to Kid Rock’s “Born Free.” Miami mayor Francis X. Suarez told attendees, “I would say bienvenidos a Miami but we’re not in Miami!

Some weeks it feels like the line between politics and the law has all but vanished. From Hunter Biden’s plea deal and Donald Trump’s ongoing criminal woes to the brouhaha surrounding gifts accepted by Supreme Court justices and John Durham’s appearance before the House Judiciary Committee to defend his report on the FBI and Russiagate, this is one such week.  For more on the Hunter story, check out my colleague Ben Domenech’s latest. Meanwhile, a fresh row about the Supreme Court bubbled up in an unusual way overnight.

This is said to be a uniquely angry time. Every third newspaper column is a riff on polarization and rage. Writers at serious outlets warn of civil war and even wonder about the merits of national divorce. And yet, for all the real-if-overstated divides in America, it’s increasingly clear that the prevailing mood as this presidential cycle kicks into gear isn’t anger but apathy.   When Donald Trump was arraigned this week, it was the second time in as many months that a courtroom appearance by the former president failed to precipitate the kind of Weimar-style street brawl that both Trump and his loudest critics seem to be lusting after. Before his first indictment, he warned of “potential death and destruction.

The arraignment of Donald Trump at a Miami courthouse yesterday was of a piece with many other dramatic moments in the former president’s political career. The day mixed the deadly serious — a president pleading not guilty to thirty federal charges — and the absurd — a rendition of happy birthday in the famous Cuban hangout Versailles and a speech outside a country club. In other words, it was all impeccably Trump. With their predecessor making the political weather, his Republican presidential rivals demonstrate no real confidence in how to handle him. (The honorable exception here is Vivek Ramaswamy, who has jumped with such enthusiasm at the chance to defend Trump that it is difficult to know why he is still running for president.

In recent months, the Biden administration has indicated a thaw in US-China relations. The easing of tensions is, according to the White House and the State Department, simply responsible statesmanship: high-level channels of communication must be maintained to avoid disaster, the temperature should be lowered to avoid an ill-considered confrontation; better jaw-jaw than war-war.  As part of this softening, Antony Blinken is set to visit China later this month. That trip was supposed to take place in February, but was cancelled at the last minute after a Chinese spy balloon drifted across the continental United States. (Blinken has reportedly told Chinese officials he wants to “move past” the incursion.) CIA chief William Burns was in Beijing in May.

Given that Donald Trump’s legal trouble has been the political equivalent of background noise for more than half a decade, it’s easy to see why many will shrug at the news of the former president’s indictment in the classified documents case.  “America is stuck in Trump legal groundhog day,” argued Freddy Gray on the site this morning. Also writing for The Spectator, Jacob Heilbrunn suggests that, contrary to the indictment marking a “uniquely contentious time in American history,” the country “may simply greet [Trump’s] indictment with a yawn.”  Those betting against Trump’s ability to shake off whatever charges he faces, to move on from the latest scandal miraculously unscathed, have lost a lot of money over the years.

Is Andrew Breitbart’s over-quoted theory that “politics is downstream from culture” really true? Today, with media machinations stealing prime newspaper homepage real estate from presidential campaign launches, it feels more like politics is downstream from media. Over the last twenty-four hours, Chris Licht was fired at CNN, just a year and a half after he was appointed, and Tucker Carlson launched his new show on Twitter. I get the impression people are hungrier for details about these media stories than, say, the ins and outs of Mike Pence’s presidential announcement.  That’s not because America is suddenly more interested in media than politics, but because the line between the two is more blurred than ever.

Here comes everybody. With former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, former vice president Mike Pence and, er... North Dakota governor Doug Burgum set to announce their presidential bids this week, the 2024 GOP primary is starting to feel a little crowded. Maybe too crowded, according to Chris Sununu. The New Hampshire governor had been weighing a run but today told CNN’s Dana Bash that he will not seek his party’s nomination.

Ron DeSantis has declared war on woke. Donald Trump yesterday declared war on the word “woke.” Speaking in Urbandale, Iowa, yesterday, the Republican frontrunner said: “I don’t like the term ‘woke,’ because I hear the term ‘woke, woke, woke.’ It’s just a term they use, half the people can’t define it, they don’t know what it is.”  Close textual readings of Donald Trump’s stump-speech riffs are a dangerous game, but in this case a difference of opinion over word choice goes to the heart of Team Trump’s plan to paint DeSantis as a career politician who speaks in jargon, in sharp contrast to their candidate’s direct language and quick wittedness.

The House will vote on Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden’s debt-ceiling deal this evening and, by all accounts, the speaker has stuck the landing. Having reached an agreement with the White House, McCarthy got his way in a crucial Rules Committee meeting yesterday, fought off a Freedom Caucus rebellion and looks set to win support for his deal from a majority of his conference.  To the great disappointment of those banking on a bruising Republican civil war, McCarthy evidently feels secure in his position. Asked about the possibility of disgruntled hardliners filing a motion to vacate today, McCarthy replied: “Look, everybody has the ability to do what they want. But if you think I’m going to wake up in the morning and ever be worried about that, no. Doesn’t bother me.

For years, in both sympathetic and unsympathetic parts of the press, DeSantis has been hyped as “Trump without the baggage,” “Trumpism without Trump,” “Trump without the brains.” But the first few days have proved these formulations to be, at best, oversimplifications, and perhaps even mischaracterizations. In an especially smart Washington Free Beacon column, Matthew Continetti argues that DeSantis’s launch event, once it got past the embarrassing glitches, demonstrated that the clash between Trump and DeSantis over the GOP nomination “is also a struggle between two concepts of the New Right, pitting the former president’s MAGA populism against the Florida governor’s institutional culture war.

Is Ron DeSantis’s decision to launch his presidential bid on a Twitter hangout with Elon Musk this evening evidence of a fatally online campaign or a smart if risky way to inject some juice into a candidacy that some have written off as dead on arrival? The only honest answer to that question is that we’ll soon find out. My own two cents: a more traditional launch is something of a non-event anyway — an undercooked stump speech, a carefully selected cross section of the population waving banners in the background. There’ll be plenty of those over the coming months, so why not try something different?  DeSantis’s Twitter launch isn’t just a moment worth paying attention to for its electoral consequences.

Welcome to a later-than-usual debt-ceiling brinkmanship special edition of the DC Diary. The mood music was encouraging as Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden sat down for talks in the Oval Office this evening. “We still have some disagreements, but I think we may be able to get where we have to go,” said Biden to pool reporters. “We both know we have a significant responsibility.” McCarthy was similarly positive. Hours earlier, treasury secretary Janet Yellen wrote to lawmakers telling everyone what they already knew: that the US is “highly likely” to run out of money to pay all its bills if “Congress has not acted to raise or suspend the debt” as early as June 1. Not news, exactly, but an effort to focus minds.

When Joe Biden announced his desire for South Carolina to move to the front of the line, ahead of Iowa and New Hampshire, in a reshuffle of his party’s primary calendar, he used race as the justification.  “We must ensure that voters of color have a voice in choosing our nominee much earlier in the process and throughout the entire early window,” he said in a letter to the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee sent late last year.    The proposal, to which the DNC gave the green light, was patronage dressed up as principle. South Carolina saved Biden’s presidential bid in 2020, and this was one way for the president to repay the favor.

The Republican primary has kicked into a higher gear in recent days. Donald Trump terrified one half of the country (and delighted the other) in his dominant, unrepentant CNN town hall appearance last Wednesday. Ron DeSantis is spending a lot of time in Iowa and — in the surest sign yet that he really wants to be president — appearing jacket-less among normal people. (10/10 fake laugh, Governor.)  The coming few weeks will see more candidates make it official. With Florida’s legislative session done and dusted, a DeSantis announcement is just around the corner. In a lengthy profile of Mike Pence, the New York Times yesterday reported the arrival of a new pro-Pence super PAC, Committed to America, a sign that he will soon come clean about his plans.

Philadelphia will choose its next mayor tomorrow. The election isn’t until November, but Republicans don’t stand a chance in the City of Brotherly Love these days. So tomorrow’s Democratic primary is all that matters.  In this big-city race, crime and public safety has dominated the campaign, pitting moderate Democrats against progressives. If you feel like you’ve read that sentence before, it’s because you probably have, in relation to any number of major US cities in the last three years.  Since 2020, America’s metropolises have been the scene of blue-on-blue political fights over the interlocking issues of crime, homelessness, public order, criminal justice and Covid restrictions.

America’s border security was stretched to breaking point this week. US Customs and Border Protection chief Raul Ortiz said this morning that border patrol has averaged around 10,000 arrests a day as midnight last night, and the end of Title 42, approached. On Wednesday, Ortiz said that an estimated half a million “gotaways” have made it into the US since the start of the fiscal year in October.  Officials had expected a surge of migrants after the expiry of Title 42, the pandemic-era regulation that made it easier for authorities to deport arrivals. For now, reporting from the border suggests the new rules have been met with a lull in activity. That is a sorely needed reprieve for a system that has proven unfit to handle the influx in recent weeks.

What does Mike Pence, a family man, a devout Christian, occupant of the top spot on Donald Trump’s enemies list ever since January 6, 2021, and rival of his old boss in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination, think of the fact that the former president has been found by a jury to be “civilly liable” for the sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll?  Asked by NBC for his reaction, he sidestepped: “I really can’t comment on a judgment in a civil case,” he said. “It’s just one more story focusing on my former running mate that I know is a great fascination to members of the national media, but I just don’t think it’s where the American people are focused.”  Vivek Ramaswamy cried foul play.