Election

Republican politicians face a conundrum in Donald Trump’s indictment that reminds me of a scene from Pride and Prejudice. Confronted with the prospect of marrying the loathsome Mr. Collins, Elizabeth Bennet’s father tells his daughter, “An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.” Elizabeth’s choice is, of course, an easy one — and ultimately, she doesn’t make a stranger of either parent.

When President Donald Trump signed the First Step Act in 2018, it was heralded by leaders of both political parties and the mainstream media as a massive bipartisan victory. The legislation developed a risk and needs assessment program to reduce recidivism rates for federal prisoners, amended the good time credits system, shortened mandatory minimums for drug offenders and redressed pre-2010 sentencing disparities for crack versus powdered cocaine offenses. In the five years since it hit the president's desk, though, the First Step Act has become a source of controversy within the Republican Party.

The media should love Jill Casey DeSantis. She’s smart, she’s articulate, she’s attractive and she beat cancer. She’s a mother of three beautiful children and was an Emmy-award-winning journalist, so she was once one of them. She married a man at Disney World, of all places, one who values her opinion; in fact, she is said to be his closest advisor. As the first lady of Florida, she’s spearheaded mental health and substance abuse initiatives as well as innovative plans to lift single mothers and chronically unemployed persons out of poverty. But there’s just one problem: her husband is a Republican. And not just any Republican, but a conservative Republican on a mission to make his state the place where "woke goes to die.

As a general matter, people who are indicted and punished for absconding with classified material tend to have done one of two things. First, they either spread that classified material by leaking to foreign governments, to the press or using it to write their memoirs. Or second, even if they don't engage in such behavior, they are a person who has a lot of enemies in the enforcement bodies in question. If you hand your enemies a baseball bat, you shouldn't be surprised when they smash you with it. The Donald Trump documents scenario looks very much like the second category, but it might also be the first.

Did you know that the Biden’s State Department is run by neocons? Or that Biden’s foreign policy is “bellicose, pugnacious and aggressive”? Ask the people of Afghanistan suffering under the Taliban or the millions of Ukrainians trying to fend off an imperialist Russia. They would tell you that that is news to them. Those assessments come not from the soft-isolationist right, but rather from Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who joined Elon Musk, David Sacks, Tulsi Gabbard, Michael Shellenberger and others for a Twitter Spaces chat on Monday.

Forget the campaign trail: the real Trump-DeSantis fight is spilling out on Twitter. Conservative influencers who support the respective campaigns are duking it out on Elon Musk's app — and it's getting personal. The Twitter beef ostensibly started with Trump supporters growing antsy over the prospect of a "disloyal" DeSantis running against the president who swung his governor's race, then devolved into policy fights over DeSantis and Trump's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and Trump's ability to win the general. The arguments have since spiraled into nasty scuttlebutt. One prominent example featured New York Young Republicans chairman Gavin Wax and a handful of DeSantis surrogates.

The Republican National Committee today confirmed the criteria for presidential candidates to qualify for their first primary debate, which will take place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Wednesday August 23.

Last summer, it seemed clear to me, at least, that should Florida governor Ron DeSantis enter the 2024 primary, a major point of contention with former president Donald Trump would be the contrast in their responses to Covid.  Where Trump gave decision-making power over to the cabal of Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx and the burgeoning public health bureaucracy, DeSantis defied their silly authoritarian approaches in his state to open beaches and businesses. The comparison is obvious and for DeSantis quite beneficial. The open question was how Trump would respond.  Well, a week into the DeSantis campaign, now we know: Trump thinks DeSantis sucked on Covid, and so did Florida!

To win the Republican nomination, you have to knock out Donald Trump. That’s no easy task — polls currently show him leading by over thirty points among Republican voters. But the task is even harder because anyone who defeats Trump must win over his supporters to win the general election. That is Ron DeSantis’s double challenge: beating Trump without alienating his voters. Trump will make both tasks as hard as possible. He is not just the least graceful loser in modern American history, he has retired the trophy. (Elon Musk retired the trophy for worst media rollout of a live presidential event. Unfortunately for DeSantis, it was his grand announcement.) Why do Trump’s primary opponents fear his wrath? Because his vitriol sways his followers, and he still has a lot of them.

South Carolina senator Tim Scott represents the kind of candidate white Republicans like to vote for: a black conservative who directly undermines the left's claims about the United States' — and the GOP's — innate racism. He can punctuate a pro-American litany of personal stories and generational improvement with "Can't somebody say 'Amen'?" without any qualms. And unlike Herman Cain or Ben Carson, he can do so as a successful politician who, as he says, went from cotton to Congress in his grandfather's lifetime. Cain and Carson overperformed significantly, particularly in the early months of their efforts. Yet Scott is likely to have a ceiling to his own try for the presidency. He is in many ways a throwback to the George W.

After Linda Como, a sixty-four-year-old administrative assistant from Quincy, Massachusetts, was fired from her hospital job for refusing to be vaccinated against Covid, she discovered Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine activism, and it resonated with her. But that’s not the only reason Como came to the Boston Park Plaza hotel one morning in April to see Kennedy launch his long-shot 2024 presidential campaign. “I grew up in Boston, went to Boston public schools, so you know the Kennedy family,” Como told me. “They’re like the royal family. So I’ve always been a fan of the Kennedys.” Kennedy lore runs deep in Boston. This is where Robert Kennedy’s father Robert F. Kennedy and his uncles John F. Kennedy and Edward M.

GOP campaign consultant Jeff Roe is the subject of new reporting in the Washington Post that shows his company, Axiom Strategies, takes in 63 percent of every dollar spent by the campaigns it is managing. A general consultant typically only takes in less than 10 percent. So what is Jeff Roe doing with all of that extra cash? According to a recent photo being passed around among journalists, campaign consultants, and even among members of Congress, Roe is icing up. The consultant was spotted at the Kentucky Derby wearing a blinged-out dollar sign chain. A tipster sent the picture Cockburn's way: Cockburn’s sources say Roe was telling people at the horse race that it was real, but now is downplaying it as a joke.

One of Ron DeSantis's contemporaries in Congress strongly believes he should wait out 2024 and run in the future as opposed to challenging Donald Trump for the GOP nomination. Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin — the subject of an extensive upcoming Spectator profile — related his views in his hometown of Stilwell, Oklahoma this past week, noting that DeSantis, his fellow congressional class of 2012 member, has struggled to connect with people and has limits to any personality-based approach to politics. "Ron just isn't charismatic, he doesn't make you want to invite him to sit with you for a beer," Senator Mullin said.