Tom Nichols: The GOP Is a Circus, Not a Caucus

Now controlled by its most unhinged members, the Republican Party has returned to power in the People’s House. Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the ringmaster of this circus, is happily paying off his debts by engaging in petty payback, conjuring up inane committees, threatening to crash the U.S. economy, and protecting a walking monument to fraud named George Santos, who may or may not actually be named George Santos.

Kevin McCarthy will be fine with all of it, as long as he gets to wear the top hat and red tails while indulging in the fantasy that he is in control of the clowns and wild animals, and not the other way around. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/01/the-gop-is-a-circus-not-a-caucus/672843/

Charles C.W. Cooke: Trump Has Completely Lost His Grip on Reality

Let’s check in on the shadow primary for the 2024 Republican nomination. Nikki Haley is putting together a finance committee, and suggested last week that she’s ‘leaning in’ to a run. Mike Pompeo has just published a book called Never Give an Inch, and told CBS yesterday that he’ll decide whether to enter the fray over the ‘next handful of months.’ Governor Ron DeSantis has continued to pick winning fights in Florida since being reelected in a November landslide, and has stayed assiduously quiet about his future.

And then there’s Donald Trump, who, despite being the only candidate who has officially announced his bid, is . . . well, ranting like a deranged hobo in a dilapidated public park. No, don’t look at him — he might come over here with his sign.

There was a point in time at which Trump’s unusual verbal affect and singular nose for underutilized wedge issues gave him a competitive edge. Now? Now, he’s morphing into one of the three witches from Macbeth. To peruse Trump’s account on Truth Social is to meet a cast of characters about whom nobody who lives beyond the Trump Extended Universe could possibly care one whit. https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/trump-has-completely-lost-his-grip-on-reality/

Ed Kilgore: Trump’s Terrified 2024 Rivals Show It’s His Race to Lose

We are constantly being told by wise insiders that Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign is already toast. Without question, he misplayed the midterms by making a series of dubious endorsements and creating a distraction by insisting Republicans accept his 2020 stolen-election fables. And he squandered the advantage associated with being the first candidate in the 2024 field by basically hanging around the house for many weeks.

But if Trump 2024 is indeed the doomed final gesture of an exhausted demagogue whose party and country are thoroughly tired of him, why aren’t any of his many potential rivals stepping forward to administer the coup de grâce? Au contraire: As Politico explains, the GOP’s other presidential candidates plan to stay on the sidelines because they are afraid of Trump.

For Trump’s potential opponents, it may be a matter of self-preservation. Though Trump’s support softened following a midterm election in which high-profile, Trump-endorsed candidates flopped, there is a recognition among Trump’s rivals that the ex-president — with the benefit of an opponent — can be lethal. He is still polling ahead of potential competitors in national surveys, and no Republican has forgotten his humiliation of low-energy Jeb Bush, little Marco Rubio and lyin’ Ted Cruz in the 2016 primaries.

And so, everyone is waiting for the other to act. As another Republican who has spoken with multiple prospective candidates and their teams put it: I think they think a group launch … provides them protection from Trump.

Every day Republicans let Trump stand alone in the 2024 presidential field makes his renomination more likely. And if they’re too gutless to take him down, it will be up to Joe Biden to keep him out of the White House again. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/trumps-terrified-2024-rivals-show-its-his-race-to-lose.html

Ed Kilgore: Why Republicans Won’t Name Their Debt-Ceiling Demands

As the United States lurches toward a possible debt default thanks to House Republican hostage-taking on legislation needed to extend or suspend the debt limit, it’s increasingly evident that the hostage-taker is strangely reluctant to name a ransom. Indeed, the initial Democratic strategy in this complicated chess game was simply to force House Republicans to say exactly what kind of spending cuts they propose to make in exchange for allowing a debt-limit measure to wobble its way to Joe Biden’s desk.

They say they want to reduce deficits — but meanwhile have ruled out virtually every path for doing so (cuts to defense, cuts to entitlements, wiping out nondefense discretionary spending, or raising taxes). …

Republicans say they want lower deficits — in fact, they have pledged to balance the budget (that is, no deficit at all) within seven or 10 years. But they have not laid out any plausible mathematical path for arriving at that destination. They promise to cut wasteful spending … but can’t agree on what counts as waste.

In so quickly reaching this predictable dead end in answering the world’s easiest math problem, Republicans have one plausible line of defense: It’s how much of the public feels about fiscal matters as well. They really don’t like deficits and (especially) debt. But they really don’t like the kind of spending cuts that Republicans are talking about either (tax increases, of course, are categorically off the table for the GOP and have been since the George H.W. Bush Read my lips: No new taxes debacle).

The lesson for Republicans is clear: Their crusade for fiscal discipline is popular, so long as it is very general and you exclude higher taxes on the rich as a possible solution. No wonder politicians like McCarthy want Democrats to be the ones who name the GOP’s price for letting the U.S. economy get through the year without calamity. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/why-republicans-wont-name-their-debt-ceiling-demands.html

Amanda Carpenter: The Democrats’ Senate Map of Doom

In 2024, nearly half of the Democratic caucus—23 senators—is up for re-election. Of those, eight are considered vulnerable: five in battleground states (Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia) and the other three in solidly red states (Ohio, Montana, West Virginia). Republicans, on the other hand, have only 11 senators up for re-election in the 2024 cycle, and all of them represent states Trump won in 2020…

So even though it’s early and elections are unpredictable, the map math is hard to deny: Republicans stand a much better shot of taking control of the Senate than Democrats do of keeping it in 2024. https://www.thebulwark.com/the-democrats-senate-map-of-doom/

Jonathan Chait: Ron DeSantis’s Long War on Black Political Power

Last year, DeSantis strong-armed his party into enacting an aggressive new congressional map that dramatically reduced the representation of Black voters. Two districts that had elected Black Democrats to Congress were broken up and scattered. One district, populated by descendants of Black sharecroppers and slaves, was broken up into four pieces, each scattered into a mostly white, heavily Republican district in which the Black vote would have little influence.

It’s hardly uncommon for Republicans to reduce the influence of Black voters, but this was not merely a routine party measure. DeSantis had to twist the arms of fellow Republicans to go along with such an aggressive measure. “In meetings, he would just demand, ‘Pass my maps! My maps! My maps!’ He’s just bizarrely obsessed with this,” a Republican told Marc Caputo.

DeSantis hadn’t denied Black citizens in those districts the right to cast a ballot. They simply no longer had a realistic chance to be represented by a candidate who agreed with them.

Last year, DeSantis formed a new state-police division dedicated to prosecuting voting fraud despite a paucity of evidence it existed. A few months later, he gathered the media, flanked by police officers, to splashily announce a wave of new arrests for alleged voting fraud.

The operation consisted of a series of raids upon shocked, mostly Black Floridians. In the ensuing days, DeSantis’s voter-fraud cases disintegrated. The “fraudulent” voters had been told by election authorities that they were eligible to vote.

But the tactic served his purpose anyway. It gave him a hook for another wave of adulatory coverage in the conservative media, which lauded his heroic fight against the specter of voter fraud. And it sent a chilling message to the Black community. Many Black people are afraid of the police and don’t trust the government to treat them fairly. DeSantis’s message is that voting could cause them to be pulled out of their house in their undergarments and hauled off to prison for casting a ballot — even if they believe they’re eligible to vote.

DeSantis’s critics have often dismissed his agenda as a “culture war.” But his crusade to ban critical race theory is not merely a spectacle designed to get his face on Fox News — it is an attack on a theory that helps explain how, without doing or saying anything racist, DeSantis has systematically disempowered Black people. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/desantis-black-ap-african-american-history-poll-tax-gerrymander-voting.html

Thomas B. Edsall: The Resentment Fueling the Republican Party Is Not Coming From the Suburbs

Rural America has become the Republican Party’s life preserver.

Less densely settled regions of the country, crucial to the creation of congressional and legislative districts favorable to conservatives, are a pillar of the party’s strength in the House and the Senate and a decisive factor in the rightward tilt of the Electoral College. Republican gains in such sparsely populated areas are compensating for setbacks in increasingly diverse suburbs where growing numbers of well-educated voters have renounced a party led by Donald Trump and his loyalists.

The anger and resentment felt by rural voters toward the Democratic Party are driving a regional realignment similar to the upheaval in the white South after Democrats, led by President Lyndon Johnson, won approval of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/opinion/rural-voters-republican-realignment.htm

Charlie Warzel: Trump and Facebook’s Mutual Decay

This afternoon, Meta announced that it will soon reinstate Donald Trump’s account after a two-year suspension from Facebook and Instagram. The former president was deplatformed after his posts were deemed to have incited, or at the very least encouraged, the January 6 insurrection. But according to Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs, the public-safety risk that triggered the punishment “has sufficiently receded.” The poster in chief can post once again.

And yet there is something underwhelming—stale, even—about the news. The story of Trump’s deplatforming feels cryogenically frozen, a 2020 narrative that seems to have lost part of its relevance now that it’s thawed out. This is partly because close observers of the story anticipated today’s development: In 2021, after a ruling from its independent Oversight Board, Facebook announced that Trump’s suspension would be lifted after two years, “external factors” permitting. (The company said at the time that it would assess “instances of violence, restrictions on peaceful assembly and other markers of civil unrest.”) And some of the thunder was stolen by Twitter, which reinstated his account late last year, although Trump hasn’t resumed posting there.

There is also the mutual decay of both Trump and Facebook. Each thrives by hijacking attention and monetizing outrage, and they’ve benefited each other: The Trump campaign spent millions of dollars on more than 289,000 Facebook ads over the span of just a few months in 2020, according to an analysis by The Markup. But lately, both appear to have lost the juice. Many people still support Trump, and many people still use Facebook products, but the shine is gone—and that matters. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/01/meta-reinstates-trump-facebook-instagram-accounts-ban/672845/

Susan B. Glasser: The Trump Enablers Dance On

With Donald Trump, there is nothing new, only new iterations of old scams. In 2019, the legendary sports journalist Rick Reilly wrote a book about Trump’s apparent epic knack for cheating at golf, noting that a plaque at Trump International Golf Club at West Palm Beach listed Trump as having won the club golf championship three times—including in 1999, seemingly before the club had opened. At his New Jersey golf club, Reilly reported, Trump once declared himself the winner of the senior golf championship after playing the “winning” round at a different course, eighty-seven miles away.

This past Sunday, Trump repeated the feat, announcing that he had been victorious in his West Palm Beach club’s senior championship over the weekend, despite not playing in the first round. Trump had been in North Carolina that day, but apparently decided to give himself a lead in the tournament anyway by using a score he recorded before the tournament started. In revealing the “win” on his Truth Social social-media network, Trump cited it as proof of the exceptional “strength and stamina” he would bring back to “govern.”

This particular bit of absurdist disinformation on a platform that Trump has shorthanded to “TRUTH” struck me as the perfect representation of his so-far shambolic revenge candidacy: puffery combined with fakery and presented to the public with such incredible unseriousness that it’s all too easy to forget that he remains the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination. Maybe that’s why Facebook, like Twitter, announced this week that it has decided to reinstate an unrepentant Trump, two years after suspending him for spreading lies and misinformation about the 2020 election he lost. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/the-trump-enablers-dance-on

Philip Bump: The challenge of cutting the federal budget, visualized

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) produced an interesting analysis this month looking at how moving certain buckets out of consideration for reductions made the challenge of cutting spending that much more difficult. To balance the budget without increasing revenue — mostly meaning taxes — you’d need to trim the federal budget by 26 percent over the next decade. If you exclude defense or veterans programs from cuts, you need to eliminate a third of what’s left. Take out Social Security and Medicare, too, and suddenly you have to cut basically everything. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/26/house-republicans-spending-debt-ceiling/

Dana Milbank: House Republicans bring the bread and circuses

In an account of the tender friendship that has blossomed between McCarthy and Rep. Marjorie “Jewish Space Lasers” Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), the New York Times had this touching remark McCarthy made to a friend: “I will never leave that woman.” (Suggested Swift lyric: Darling, you’re the one I want.)

McCarthy has displayed his affection with gifts, seating Greene not just on Comer’s Oversight Committee but also on the select committee probing covid-19’s origins. Greene already has ideas on the subject: She has speculated that NFL player Damar Hamlin’s collapse and the death of Diamond and Silk’s Lynnette Hardaway were both vaccine-induced.

“It’s time to reveal the truth,” Greene tweeted after securing the seat. Once she reveals those, she can probe other “truths” recently floated by Tucker Carlson and the Fox News conspiracy club. Carlson has recently suggested that cigarette smoking is good for you (“nicotine frees your mind”), and that M&M’s “spokescandies” were part of a woke plot.

Greene’s appointment is part of a wholesale takeover of key committees by the far right. The House Freedom Caucus, about 20 percent of the GOP caucus, now controls 38 percent of the Oversight Committee, 44 percent of the Judiciary and coronavirus panels, and 50 percent of the “weaponization of the federal government” select committee, the Post’s Aaron Blake calculates. The far right also has effective veto power over the House Rules Committee, which determines what goes to the House floor.

With so many committees overloaded with loons, it’s but a matter of time until things blow up. In an embrace of mayhem, the National Republican Campaign Committee adopted as its new slogan “bring the tiger,” Politico’s Olivia Beavers reports. That’s a reference to a mock lip-reading video of McCarthy’s famous fight on the House floor this month with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) in which McCarthy says “I brought the tiger.”

Yep. He brought the tiger, and now he must ride it. This is life in the circus. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/27/house-gop-taylor-swift-lyrics/

Jonathan Chait: The Durham Probe Was Barr’s Witch Hunt A shockingly unethical and failed crusade to vindicate Trump.

There is an enduring pattern in American conservatism in which the right first develops a paranoid interpretation of the liberal Establishment, and then reverse engineers its own version of the monster it has imagined. Conservatives convinced themselves that the mainstream media and universities were mere propaganda organs, then created institutions like the Heritage Foundation and Fox News, warped reflections of their own overheated critique. The January 6 insurrection was, of course, in the mind of its participants, a “response” to the imagined vote-fraud conspiracy and its antifa/BLM shock troops.

John Durham’s investigation is a classic episode in this tradition. The American right first convinced itself that Robert Mueller and the deep state, using the cover of dispassionate professionalism, had launched a partisan witch hunt to smear Donald Trump. In response, it created a right-wing mirror image, as fervently partisan and unhinged as they believed their enemies to be.

The New York Times has a deeply reported narrative showing how Durham’s counter-investigation of the Russia probe, cooked up by William Barr at Donald Trump’s urging, was just as abusive, partisan, and unhinged as Trump’s defenders made Mueller out to be.

The paranoid style of American conservatism is imprinted upon the institutions it creates. The Durham probe will go down in history as a monument to the right’s fever-dream defenses of Trump’s corruption. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/the-durham-probe-was-barrs-witch-hunt.html

Charlie Sykes: Trump's 2024 MAGA litmus test - cruelty is no longer enough

For Trump, this is hardly a new theme. His enthusiasm for violence — including torture, extra-judicial murder and shooting both migrants and protesters — has been a consistent feature of his politics for years.

Trump has long cultivated cruelty as a political weapon. But he has not confined his cruelty to mere rhetoric.

As Rolling Stone reported this week, the Trump administration rushed to “execute every prisoner he could” in its last months in office.

As president, Trump not only wanted a border wall but frequently talked about having it electrified, with sharpened spikes on top, and had aides draw up cost estimates for moats filled with alligators and snakes. He publicly suggested that soldiers shoot immigrants who threw rocks, and, when told that would be illegal, “suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down.” During his first campaign, he urged supporters to beat up hecklers and boasted that he could order the military to commit war crimes, including killing the families of suspected terrorists. “If you were president of United States, and the military declined to carry out an illegal order, what would you do?,” Fox News host Bret Baier asked him. “They won’t refuse,” he replied.

Relevant to the police brutality protests rippling out in the wake of Tyre Nichols’ death, Trump has encouraged police to stop worrying about physically injuring suspects during arrests. As unrest spiked after the police murder of George Floyd, Trump tweeted that he had told Minnesota’s governor that “the Military is with him all the way.”

“Any difficulty and we will assume control,” Trump wrote, “but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-vs-desantis-2024-republican-litmus-test-brutality-rcna67979

McKay Coppins: Republicans’ 2024 Magical Thinking

Press them hard enough, and most Republican officials—even the ones with MAGA hats in their closets and Mar-a-Lago selfies in their Twitter avatar—will privately admit that Donald Trump has become a problem. He’s presided over three abysmal election cycles since he took office, he is more unstable than ever, and yet he returned to the campaign trail this past weekend, declaring that he is angry and determined to win the GOP presidential nomination again in 2024. Aside from his most blinkered loyalists, virtually everyone in the party agrees: It’s time to move on from Trump.

But ask them how they plan to do that, and the discussion quickly veers into the realm of hopeful hypotheticals. Maybe he’ll get indicted and his legal problems will overwhelm him. Maybe he’ll flame out early in the primaries, or just get bored with politics and wander away. Maybe the situation will resolve itself naturally: He’s old, after all—how many years can he have left?

This magical thinking pervaded my recent conversations with more than a dozen current and former elected GOP officials and party strategists. Faced with the prospect of another election cycle dominated by Trump and uncertain that he can actually be beaten in the primaries, many Republicans are quietly rooting for something to happen that will make him go away. And they would strongly prefer not to make it happen themselves. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/01/2024-republican-primary-donald-trump-deus-ex-machina/672888/

Julia Ioffe: Putin’s Plot Against America

From Moscow’s vantage point, it isn’t simply the gross incompetence of its military and intelligence services that prevented Russia from seizing Ukraine in a flashy blitzkrieg last February. It was the fact that Ukraine was armed with NATO weaponry, its troops trained by NATO advisors, its intelligence services constantly fed information by Western intel agencies. Moscow has made no secret of this frustration or its assertion that the battle for Ukraine was a proxy war against the West, itself.

This is why, from the very beginning, Moscow has framed this war as one not between Russia and Ukraine, but rather one between Russia and what Vladimir Putin and his coterie love to call ‘the collective West.’ And, according to this consensual ideology, it is this collective West—not the incompetence of any generals or advisors—that has thwarted Putin’s aims of swallowing Ukraine and fulfilling his dream of a pan-Slavic super state with Moscow at its capital. https://puck.news/putins-plot-against-america/