Jonathan Martin: Is Trump Inevitable? Some in the GOP Are Starting To Wonder

Standing before a room filled with lightly interested college students, self-described “political tourists” and even some honest-to-God undecided New Hampshire voters, Chris Christie used a town hall here last week to sketch out the political indictment against the defendant, Donald J. Trump, he thinks Republicans must prosecute to deny the former president his party’s nomination.

Yet near the end of his remarks, Christie articulated something more revealing: The sense of fatalism that’s fast gripping Republicans of all stripes about the inevitability of Trump again being the GOP standard bearer.

“What you need to decide is: Are we just going to put this race on autopilot, ‘he’s ahead, let him win, let’s see what happens, how bad can it be?’” said the Trump ally turned Trump enemy. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/27/gop-donald-trump-presidential-race-2024-00094061
 

Dan Froomkin: Republicans threaten to tank economy. Media blames Biden

House Republicans are refusing to let the government keep paying its bills unless the Biden administration rolls back some of its signature achievements.

It’s a demand that neither the Senate nor Biden will ever agree to.

Raising the debt limit is a procedural move that allows the Treasury to make good on existing commitments. It’s not a budget bill.

But House Republicans appear to be ready to default on the debt if they don’t get their way. Such a default would be catastrophic for the U.S and world economies, and could permanently damage the dollar’s status as the de facto global currency.

Explaining it that way is simply good journalism.

But as usual, extremist Republicans have been enabled by media coverage that tries to split the difference, and treats what is essentially a hostage crisis created exclusively by one side as a normal, two-sided partisan squabble. https://presswatchers.org/2023/04/republicans-threaten-to-tank-economy-media-blames-biden/

Ed Kilgore, Kevin McCarthy’s Hollow Debt-Ceiling Victory

House Republicans are celebrating passage by the narrowest margin possible (217-215) of a measure providing a short-term increase in the public debt limit in exchange for deep across-the-board cuts in discretionary spending (details TBD), stepped-up work requirements for beneficiaries of federal programs, repeals of Inflation Reduction Act green tax credits, and a clawback of COVID-relief funds. Since the bill in question is absolutely dead on arrival in the Senate and at the White House, the celebrating is actually about Kevin McCarthy’s Speakership surviving for another day, and right-wing members flexing their power.

After scratching and clawing and surrendering to his members’ demands, ranging from Iowans demanding biofuel credits and House Freedom Caucus folk wanting to accelerate work requirements, McCarthy got to the starting line of theoretical negotiations with the White House and the Senate. Now he gets to play chicken with Democrats who are entirely united around a demand for a “clean” debt-limit increase or suspension that pays the nation’s bills. Failure to pass a debt-limit measure quite soon (perhaps as early as June, depending on the U.S. Treasury’s revenue and spending estimates) could pose a catastrophic threat to the U.S. and global economy. So McCarthy, with just four votes to spare, will have to somehow convince the public (and his own party) that his grab bag of random proposals must be imposed on Congress and the White House, lest he drag the whole country into a fiscal crisis. The current celebrations are sure to be brief.

The MAGA folk who hold McCarthy hostage as he holds the country hostage don’t care about the ultimate outcome as much as they do about their control of the GOP, as Politico notes:

"Soon after House conservatives extracted enough concessions from Kevin McCarthy to let him claim the speakership, they began plotting their next move: Pushing him as far right as they possibly could on the debt ceiling. …"

"It started in late January, when a group of House and Senate conservatives gathered around Sen. Rick Scott’s dining room table to try to solve a seemingly impossible problem. Given McCarthy’s slim majority — and the reality that many on his right flank had never voted to lift the debt ceiling — could conservatives write a bill that would unite the party and give it at least a bit of leverage in talks with the White House?"

Well, they did write a bill that united House Republicans. But now the question is who will supply the votes for the inevitable surrender that the GOP’s Wall Street allies will eventually insist upon, like a parent telling an unruly child it’s time to shut up, cut off the lights, and go to sleep. McCarthy is hoping to avoid both blame for an economic catastrophe, and blame from within his party for caving too easily. If he can do that, his gavel is probably secure for a bit longer. The price his party is paying for his Speakership, however, continues to rise. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/04/kevin-mccarthys-hollow-debt-ceiling-victory.html
 

David Frum: The Coming Biden Blowout

The Republican plan for 2024 is already failing, and the party leadership can see it and knows it.

There was no secret to a more intelligent and intentional Republican plan for 2024. It would have gone like this:

(1) Replace Donald Trump at the head of the ticket with somebody less obnoxious and impulsive.
(2) Capitalize on inflation and other economic troubles.
(3) Offer plausible ideas on drugs, crime, and border enforcement.
(4) Reassure women worried about the post-Roe future.
(5) Don’t be too obvious about suppressing Democratic votes, because really blatant voter suppression will provoke and mobilize Democrats to vote, not discourage them.

Unfortunately for them, Republicans have turned every element of the plan upside down and inside out. Despite lavish anti-Trump donations by big-money Republicans, Trump is cruising to easy renomination. Rather than capitalize on existing economic troubles, Republicans have started a debt-ceiling fight that will cast them as the cause of America’s economic troubles. Worse for them, the troubles are fast receding. Inflation is vexing, but the recession that Republicans hoped for did not materialize: Instead, Joe Biden has presided over the fastest and steepest unemployment reduction in U.S. economic history.

The big new Republican idea to halt the flow of drugs is to bomb or invade Mexico. Instead of reassuring women, Republican state legislators and Republican judges are signaling that they will support a national abortion ban if their party wins in 2024—and are already building the apparatus of surveillance and control necessary to make such a ban effective. Republican state-level voter-suppression schemes have been noisy and alarming when the GOP plan called for them to be subtle and technical.

It’s early in the election cycle, of course, but not too early to wonder: Are we watching a Republican electoral disaster in the making?

If Trump secures the GOP nomination to run for a second term in 2024, the conditions are all in place to transfer the title of “worst popular-vote loser of the century” from the great Arizona senator to the putsch-plotting ex-president. Trump’s own party is doing its part to deliver this debacle. Soon enough, all Americans will have the opportunity to do theirs. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/gop-republicans-2024-election-biden-trump/673856/
   

Eugene Robinson: Kamala Harris must keep walking a tightrope for Biden’s reelection bid

It is no accident that Vice President Harris appears more than a dozen times in the video kicking off President Biden’s reelection campaign. She played a big role in mobilizing the Democratic Party’s base in 2020 — and should be expected to do the same thing again in 2024.

As has been the case with virtually every vice president since the nation’s founding, Harris gets a bad rap. The first duty of the job is to avoid upstaging the president, which means surrendering any political autonomy and never being out in front of the West Wing on any issue. Recall the way Mike Pence always stood like a hyperrealist statue, mute and expressionless, while President Donald Trump ranted and raved. Somehow, Pence managed to never even lift an eyebrow.

Biden is in good health, according to his doctors, and I know of no reason why he should not be expected to live through a second term. But one of Harris’s important tasks during the campaign will be to demonstrate that she is prepared to assume the awesome responsibilities of commander in chief if necessary.

Her other big task will be to energize voters around the issues on which the Republican Party has boxed itself into fringe positions that are rejected by most Americans. Especially on abortion — and the GOP’s ongoing attempt to deny women autonomy over their own bodies — I expect her voice to be a clarion call. And, as in 2020, I expect her to inspire and motivate the Democratic Party’s most loyal voters, African American women.

As the first woman and first Black and South Asian American to serve as vice president, Harris was destined to be held to an impossible standard. Now, as the reelection campaign begins, she gets to show the talent and drive that got her there. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/27/kamala-harris-role-biden-reelection-campaign/

Susan B. Glasser: The Week the Biden-Trump Rematch Got Real

While Biden’s formal declaration of his candidacy was neither surprising nor particularly well timed, it at least laid down a marker for a campaign whose outcome is as uncertain as any I can remember. One theme in particular stuck out: that of Biden as a fighter for “freedom.” Four years ago, in his famous “battle for the soul of the nation” campaign-launch video aimed at Trump, Biden never mentioned “freedom.” In his new video, it was his opening line and repeated for emphasis five times.

But, if Biden is planning a new campaign theme, so, too, are the Republicans, who also piled on this week not only against Biden but against Kamala Harris, his even-less-popular Vice-President. Nikki Haley, who said in a tweet that the prospect of a Harris Presidency was “scary,” was as crass as I’ve ever heard a politician when she went on Fox and flatly predicted that Biden would likely die in the next five years, thus making support for him in 2024 tantamount to anointing Harris. “If you vote for Joe Biden, you are really counting on a President Harris,” Haley said. Or, as Tom Cotton put it, “A vote for Biden is a vote for President Kamala Harris.”

In Washington, it is a supposition widely believed if rarely stated explicitly as such that the eighty-year-old President is running again only because of Harris’s weakness. This is true, I’m convinced, among many on the left and the right. Is Harris more of a liability than a Party that wants to deny women their reproductive freedom, that spends its time legislating against Mickey Mouse and gender-neutral bathrooms? Than Donald Trump himself? Stay tuned to the circus. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/the-week-the-biden-trump-rematch-got-real
 

Maureen Dowd: DeSantis’s Puddin’ Head Campaign

Even in a world made crueler by social media and Donald Trump, DeSantis seems mean, punching out at Mickey Mouse, immigrants, gays and women; pushing through an expansion of his proposal to ban school discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity to include all grades, as well as a draconian ban on abortion after six weeks. He even admonished some high school kids during the pandemic for wearing masks. On Thursday, DeSantis signed a bill cutting the number of jurors needed to give a defendant the death sentence from 12 to 8.

DeSantis seems contrived with Tucker Carlson, weak against Robert Iger, robotic against Trump and inept with potential donors and endorsers. The 76-year-old Trump and the 44-year-old DeSantis can both be nasty, but Trump’s base finds him entertaining, with his “DeSanctimonious” and “DeSanctus” nicknames for the rival he deems “dull.”

Trump is so eager to trash DeSantis that he jumped in on the side of woke Disney and later posted an MSNBC headline on his social media site, “Ron DeSantis’ D.C. charm offensive was a massive failure.”

On Friday, speaking at a Heritage Foundation event outside D.C., DeSantis took a shot at Trump, saying he could send Florida workers to finish Trump’s wall.

But as Axelrod dryly noted, “If they’re going to get into a food fight, Trump always comes with more food.”

The bitchy Trump has plenty of ammunition when DeSantis wears white boots redolent of Nancy Sinatra, as Jimmy Kimmel said, to tour Southwest Florida after a hurricane; or when a report alleges (denied by the governor) that DeSantis ate chocolate pudding with his fingers. (Trump backers already have an ad up about that beauty.) DeSantis let Fort Lauderdale go underwater, inundated by flash floods, while he gallivanted around testing the waters.

But as Jerry Brown once told me: “I think we’re always judged on likability and I think that’s something a lot of politicians don’t want to admit. But I can tell you, when they throw you out, most times they didn’t like you. They got tired of you.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/22/opinion/desantis-trump-2024.html
 

Michael Hiltzik: America vanquished the ‘ancient atrocity’ of child labor. Republicans are bringing it back

Among the most heartfelt goals and proudest achievements of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was the eradication of child labor.

In 1933, in signing a textile industry code that outlawed the employment of children under 16 in sweatshops, FDR crowed that “after years of fruitless effort and discussion, this ancient atrocity went out in a day.”

Conservatives and Republicans, who have tried for decades to undo such cornerstones of the New Deal as Social Security, have lately turned their efforts to resurrecting this “ancient atrocity.”

This permit was an arbitrary burden on parents to get permission from the government for their child to get a job.

In the last two years, 10 states, mostly Republican-controlled, have enacted or introduced laws rolling back child labor restrictions. Bills to do so have been introduced in six Midwestern states — Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and South Dakota.

Make no mistake: The rollback of child labor protections isn’t a matter of streamlining unnecessary regulations. It’s a moral test for America.

The advocates of putting children to work and removing enforcement tools are turning a blind eye to the hazards of child labor. They congratulate themselves for taking government off the backs of working families, but their goal is just to make it easier for unscrupulous businesses to saddle up. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-04-28/column-america-vanquished-the-ancient-atrocity-of-child-labor-republicans-are-bringing-it-back

Peter Wehner: MAGA Is Ripping Itself Apart

Some of us have spent the better part of eight years warning about the incalculable damage that would be done to the United States, to its politics and culture, and to the Christian witness by those who embraced a Trumpian ethic, defined by cruelty, lawlessness, the shattering of norms and traditional boundaries, and an eagerness to annihilate truth and trust in institutions. Those warnings have been validated, those concerns vindicated. What happened on January 6 wasn’t an anomaly; it was an apotheosis.

Now this movement, which has taken such delight in aiming its nihilistic arrows at the Democratic Party and the Republican establishment, at media outlets and scientists, is in the process of devouring itself. A l’exemple de Saturne, la revolution devore ses enfants.

It is a lesson nearly as old as time itself: Those whose passions are inflamed—and Trump supporters are nothing if not perennially inflamed—are drawn to destruction. “Rage and phrenzy will pull down more in a half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years,” the 18th-century conservative statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke warned.


Lack of restraint is the essence of the Trump movement. Shattering guardrails is what they find thrilling. But what MAGA adherents forget is that those guardrails exist to protect not only others, but also ourselves from excess, self-indulgence, and self-harm. There’s a reason temperance—self-mastery, the capacity to moderate inordinate desires, balance that produces internal harmony—is one of the four cardinal virtues. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/trump-e-jean-carroll-rape-case-tucker-carlson-fox/673857/

Adam Nagourney and Jeremy W. Peters: How a Campaign Against Transgender Rights Mobilized Conservatives

When the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage nearly eight years ago, social conservatives were set adrift.

The ruling stripped them of an issue they had used to galvanize rank-and-file supporters and big donors. And it left them searching for a cause that — like opposing gay marriage — would rally the base and raise the movement’s profile on the national stage.

“We knew we needed to find an issue that the candidates were comfortable talking about,” said Terry Schilling, the president of American Principles Project, a social conservative advocacy group. “And we threw everything at the wall.”

What has stuck, somewhat unexpectedly, is the issue of transgender identity, particularly among young people. Today, the effort to restrict transgender rights has supplanted same-sex marriage as an animating issue for social conservatives at a pace that has stunned political leaders across the spectrum. It has reinvigorated a network of conservative groups, increased fund-raising and set the agenda in school boards and state legislatures.

The campaign has been both organic and deliberate, and has even gained speed since Donald J. Trump, an ideological ally, left the White House. Since then, at least 20 states, all controlled by Republicans, have enacted laws that reach well beyond the initial debates over access to bathrooms and into medical treatments, participation in sports and policies on discussing gender in schools.

About 1.3 million adults and 300,000 children in the United States identify as transgender. These efforts have thrust them, at a moment of increased visibility and vulnerability, into the center of the nation’s latest battle over cultural issues. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/us/politics/transgender-conservative-campaign.html

LA Times Editorial: House Republicans want to balance the budget on the backs of America’s kids

House Republicans narrowly passed a bill this week that would increase the federal government’s debt ceiling in exchange for $4.8 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years that show what the GOP cares about.

It’s not our nation’s youth. Republicans propose slashing funding for critical education programming that would affect low-income students, students with disabilities and students who need mental health support. These plans would also shrink the Pell Grant program, which helps low-income students attend college. In addition, the bill would block President Biden’s student debt relief plan before the Supreme Court has a chance to rule on its legality this year.

Republicans are proposing these cuts at a time when students are still recovering from pandemic-induced learning setbacks and suffering high rates of mental health difficulties.

Thankfully, this bill is not likely to pass the Democrat-controlled Senate, and Biden has promised to veto it if it does. The Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023, which passed on a 217-215 vote, would also trim funding to programs for veterans, enact work requirements for government aid recipients starting in 2024, rescind funding for 87,000 Internal Revenue Service agents and end tax credits for companies investing in green energy. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-04-28/house-republicans-debt-ceiling-budget-cuts
 

Michelle Cottle: Georgia’s Hot Mess Is Headed Your Way

Here’s a head scratcher for you: What happens when the leadership of a political party becomes so extreme, so out of touch with its voters, that it alienates many of its own activists and elected officials? And what happens when some of those officials set up a parallel infrastructure that lets them circumvent the party for campaign essentials such as fund-raising and voter turnout? At what point does this party become mostly a bastion of wingnuts, spiraling into chaos and irrelevance?

No need to waste time guessing. Just cast your eyes upon Georgia, one of the nation’s electoral battlegrounds, where the state Republican Party has gone so far down the MAGA rabbit hole that many of its officeholders — including Gov. Brian Kemp, who romped to re-election last year despite being targeted for removal by Donald Trump — are steering clear of it as if it’s their gassy grandpa at Sunday supper.

Republicans elsewhere should keep watch. Democrats too. What’s happening in Georgia is a cautionary tale for pluralism, an example of how the soul of a party can become warped and wrecked when its leadership veers toward narrow extremism. And while every state’s political dynamics are unique, a variation of the Peach State drama could be headed your way soon — if it hasn’t begun already. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/opinion/georgia-trump.html
 

Tom Nichols: The World Awaits Ukraine’s Counteroffensive

The democracies face a coming year of decision. In the next 12 to 18 months, we will know whether Americans have the collective will to resist yet another attempt to hand power to a would-be autocrat; as astonishing as it seems, one of the likely presidential candidates in the 2024 election is a man who incited a violent attack against the government and the Constitution of the United States. We will also know whether the free world (and yes, it’s long past time to start using that expression again) has the will to resist the onslaught of Russian butchery in Europe.

Without a powerful counteroffensive and eventual victory, there can be no peace in Ukraine, and no stability in Europe or the world. What does “victory” mean? Obviously, the survival of an independent Ukraine is the immediate goal, but a lasting peace has to mean more than living through successive Russian conquests and partitions. The Ukrainians, who have lost so much already, are unlikely to accept such an unjust truce, even if the Russians had any interest in offering one. If the Ukrainians lose sovereign territory, if they are not safe from Russian attack, and if there is no reckoning with Russian war criminals, then any Ukrainian “victory” is just a temporary respite from another round of Russian aggression.

But even more important, any outcome short of a Ukrainian victory would endanger the rest of the world. There is a reason, as Anne and Jeff write, that so many nations, movements, and individuals are waiting to see what happens:

If a Ukraine that believes in the rule of law and human rights can achieve victory against a much larger, much more autocratic society, and if it can do so while preserving its own freedoms, then similarly open societies and movements around the world can hope for success too. After the Russian invasion, the Venezuelan opposition movement hung a Ukrainian flag on the front of its country’s embassy hall in Washington. The Taiwanese Parliament gave a rapturous welcome to Ukrainian activists last year. Not everyone in the world cares about this war, but for anyone trying to defeat a dictator, it has profound significance.

Americans can find it easy to forget the war raging across the sea, but Ukraine is approaching a battle for its ultimate fate—as are all of us living in the free world. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/05/ukraine-counteroffensive-june-cover/673923/

John Cassidy: Joe Biden’s 2024 Opening Argument: It’s Me or the Abyss

Now it’s official: President Joe Biden is running for reëlection. In his opening argument of a campaign that will span the next eighteen months, he portrayed himself as a bulwark against right-wing assaults on freedom, democracy, and social rights. “That’s been the work of my first term, to fight for our democracy,” Biden said, in a three-minute campaign video posted online Tuesday that opens with footage of Trump supporters storming the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021.

Biden cast the entire Republican Party as an extremist, Trump-dominated organization that is attacking basic American values. Around the country, he said, “maga extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms, cutting Social Security that you paid for your entire life . . . dictating what health-care decisions women can make, banning books, and telling people who they can love.”

Biden’s calling card, the one that identifies himself as a Trump-slayer, and an upholder of normality and sanity, remains his biggest advantage going into 2024. He does have others, though. Inside the Democratic Party, he has proved an adroit coalition builder. Much as he’s an old-school, Irish-American politician and many of his closest political advisers are veteran, white operatives who hail from the moderate wing of the Party, he nevertheless recognized long ago that his party’s center of gravity has shifted, and his Administration has sought to bring on board Democrats who are younger, more diverse, and progressive. This approach is already evident in preparations for the 2024 campaign. On Tuesday, Biden also announced that Julie Chávez Rodríguez, a White House official who is the granddaughter of the labor leader Cesar Chavez, will be his campaign manager, and Quentin Fulks, a thirty-three-year-old Black political strategist, who managed Raphael Warnock’s Senate campaign in Georgia, will serve as principal deputy campaign manager.

Though Biden didn’t dwell on the details of his policy record in his launch video, he has some substantial achievements to highlight. Under his leadership, the U.S. economy rebounded more quickly from the coronavirus pandemic than many of its competitors, and the unemployment rate is just 3.5 per cent. In the past year, Congress has enacted historic investments in green energy, electric vehicles, and semiconductor-chip manufacturing. These initiatives are already paying off in announcements to build new factories and create new jobs, many of them in purple and red states. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/joe-bidens-2024-opening-argument-its-me-or-the-abyss
 

Thomas L. Friedman: Why Kamala Harris Matters So Much in 2024

Biden needs to make the case to his party — and, more important, to independents and moderate Republicans — why Harris is the best choice to succeed him, should he not be able to complete his term. He cannot ignore this issue, because that question will be on the minds of many voters come election time.

At the same time, Harris has to make the case for herself, ideally by showing more forcefully what she can do. One thing Biden might consider is putting Harris in charge of ensuring that America’s transition to the age of artificial intelligence works to strengthen communities and the middle class. It is a big theme that could take her all over the country.

Make no mistake, the vice presidency is really going to matter in an election that is really going to matter. Because I don’t want Biden to win this election with 50.1 percent. I want it to be a landslide rejection of Trumpism and the politics of division. I want it to send a loud message around the world — to the Putins and the Netanyahus and the Orbans — that there are way more of us Americans on the center-right and the center-left, way more people who are ready to work together for the common good, than there are haters and dividers.

That’s an America worth handing over to our children and grandchildren. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/opinion/kamala-harris-joe-biden-2024-reelection.html