One Right-Wing Battle After Another

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration  has been full of ominous developments -- including a tranche of racist and anti-Semitic chats by prominent Young Republicans.  Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, defended Tucker Carlson after his softball interview with Nazi wannabe Nick Fuentes.

Zach Kessel at The Free Beacon:

Leaders of Advancing American Freedom (AAF), the nonprofit led by former vice president Mike Pence, said that their move to hire more than a dozen former Heritage Foundation employees represents a significant shift within the American right.

AAF president Tim Chapman described the organization’s addition of Heritage Foundation’s legal, data, and economics centers, a move that doubles its size, as a "reorganization of the conservative movement.

"People are voting with their feet as to where they feel they are best suited to be," Chapman said.

The mass defections from the Heritage Foundation are part of the continuing fallout from president Kevin Roberts’s release, in October, of a clumsy video taking aim at critics of the podcast host Tucker Carlson, who had recently conducted a friendly interview with the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.

The new AAF hires include John Malcolm, who led the Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and will lead the new Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law at AAF; Richard Stern, who directed Heritage’s economics center and will lead the Plymouth Center for Free Enterprise at AAF; and Kevin Dayaratna, who ran Heritage’s data analysis center and will build a similar program at his new institution.

...

Since Roberts released the video in late October, three Heritage Foundation board members—Princeton University professor Robert George, Abby Moffat, and Shane McCullar—have resigned. McCullar said he took issue with the fact that the think tank "hesitates to condemn antisemitism and hatred" and "gives a platform to those who spread them." George expressed frustration that Roberts "could not offer a full retraction" of his video statement.

Michael Starr at The Jerusalem Post:

During her Saturday show, Political commentator Candace Owens urged her audience to read a 19th-century antisemitic book and accused Jews of orchestrating the Transatlantic Slave Trade and racial conflict between Caucasian and African Americans.

The YouTube show episode focused on Owens's grievances with conservative pundit and Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro, who had criticized her during his Thursday Turning Point USA AmericaFest conference speech.

AT WP, Jim Geraghty writes of Turning Point USA's year-end conference: 

The smiling faces of [Tucker] Carlson and [Megyn] Kelly were lined up on a poster for the conference alongside podcaster Ben Shapiro, longtime Trump ally Stephen K. Bannon and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. (I realize this is a quaint and old-fashioned notion, but currently serving U.S. intelligence officials should not be speaking at a partisan pep rally.)

On Thursday, as the conference kicked off, Shapiro decided to address the elephant in the room.

“If Candace Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk casting aspersions at TPUSA and the people who work here, who worked with Charlie every single day, his best friends … and, yes, at Erica Kirk and to imply or outright claim complicity in a cover-up over Charlie’s murder, to spew absolutely baseless trash implicating everyone from French intelligence to Mossad to members of TPUSA in Charlie’s murder or a cover-up in that murder, then we as people with a microphone have a moral obligation to call that out by name.”

...

On Thursday, as the conference kicked off, Shapiro decided to address the elephant in the room.

“If Candace Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk casting aspersions at TPUSA and the people who work here, who worked with Charlie every single day, his best friends … and, yes, at Erica Kirk and to imply or outright claim complicity in a cover-up over Charlie’s murder, to spew absolutely baseless trash implicating everyone from French intelligence to Mossad to members of TPUSA in Charlie’s murder or a cover-up in that murder, then we as people with a microphone have a moral obligation to call that out by name.”

....

For his part, Bannon bellowed, “Ben Shapiro is like a cancer and that cancer spreads.”

The Decline of Heritage

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration  has been full of ominous developments -- including a tranche of racist and anti-Semitic chats by prominent Young Republicans.  Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, defended Tucker Carlson after his softball interview with Nazi wannabe Nick Fuentes.

 Jonah Goldberg:

Harvard, MIT, Columbia, et al., should be ashamed of their records of policing speech and providing cover for people who incite hatred. But you know what Harvard doesn’t have that Heritage does? A “one voice” policy.

Unlike other think tanks, scholars at Heritage are not permitted to publicly deviate from the party line. It shouldn’t surprise us that Roberts thinks the whole of the right should have a one-voice policy too. His statement is a call for a popular front on the right. He doesn’t think conservatives should actually argue among themselves because that “sows division” and serves the interests of those “bad actors” serving “someone else’s agenda.” For Roberts, Tucker Carlson is the right made flesh, so if his policy is to bring neo-Nazis inside the tent, we should all honor the “one voice” policy and stay focused on attacking the left. “Speaking with one voice is a distinguishing piece of the Heritage Foundation’s strategic advantage. While other organizations may have experts advocating contradictory points of view, Heritage employees are always rowing in the same direction.”

I have real sympathy for the scholars, staffers, and board members of the Heritage Foundation, because I know many of them have problems with this. Some obviously don’t. But some must. And because the Heritage Foundation has a “one voice” policy that rejects the robust debate Roberts claims to cherish, they are left with a dilemma. I am free to disagree with my colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute. I’m expected—rightly—to be professional and respectful in my disagreements, but disagreement—public or private—is actually valued and protected.

Not so at Heritage, which is why so many people left when Heritage changed many of its traditional stances to better align with Donald Trump and MAGA small donors. Now the people still at Heritage are left in a similar bind. Do you stick around as the president of your institution labors to carve out a safe space inside the tent for bigots and anti-American cranks? If you stay, you can’t complain too loudly—literally and figuratively—when outside observers assume you, too, speak with that same, single voice. That is, again literally, the whole point of the “one voice” policy. And Kevin Roberts has put everyone who works for him in a moral and intellectual trap. All because he loves Tucker Carlson so much.

I am one of those people who left Heritage for this reason. And I was Executive Vice President. https://t.co/rdRvQBuUym

— Kim R. Holmes (@kimsmithholmes) November 2, 2025

The National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, a project of @Heritage, has done valuable work. But free speech includes the right to associate—and not to.
I cannot serve under someone who thinks Nazis are worth debating. Here is my resignation letter: pic.twitter.com/ccVHMdlDbO

— Mark Goldfeder (@MarkGoldfeder) November 2, 2025

Antisemitism on the Right

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration  has been full of ominous developments -- including a tranche of racist and anti-Semitic chats by prominent Young Republicans.

Nicholas Riccardi at AP:

As Republicans accuse Democrats of tolerating antisemitism in their party, the GOP on Friday was roiled by its own schism after the leader of a powerful right-wing think tank defended prominent conservative commentator Tucker Carlson for his friendly podcast interview with a far-right activist known for his antisemitic views.

The comments from Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, sparked outrage from some Heritage staffers, senators and conservative activists. But they also reflect increasing skepticism toward Israel and of Jews among some on the right, complicating the GOP’s efforts to cast the Democratic Party as antisemitic.

The outrage began when Roberts on Thursday posted a video in which he denied his group was “distancing itself” from the former Fox News host, one of the most powerful voices on the right, after Carlson’s podcast hosted Nick Fuentes , whose followers see themselves as working to preserve America’s white, Christian identify.

“The American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right,” said Roberts, adding that, while antisemitism is wrong, conservatives do not need to always support Israel.

...

Earlier this month, Vice President JD Vance dismissed criticism of a Telegram chat among members of a New York Young Republicans group that included racist comments and flippant remarks about gas chambers.

He raised eyebrows again this week for his response to an attendee at a Turning Point USA event who asked why the U.S. was spending foreign aid on the “ethnic cleansing in Gaza” and said Judaism, as a religion, “openly supports the prosecution of ours.”

Vance responded without addressing the premise of the question and instead stressed the administration’s “America First” approach.

“Sometimes they have similar interests to the United States and we’re going to work with them in that case. Sometimes they don’t have similar interests to the United States,” Vance said of Israel.

Ingrassia

 Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments -- including a tranche of racist and anti-Semitic chats by prominent Young Republicans.  Yesterday, a nominee had to withdraw after texts showed him acknowledging a "Nazi streak."

Stef  W. Kight at Axios:

Paul Ingrassia withdrew himself from consideration to serve as the head of the Office of the Special Counsel ahead of a scheduled Thursday hearing after several GOP senators warned they would vote against him.

Why it matters: Ingrassia's history of controversial statements — compounded by new reporting of racist text messages — even made some of President Trump's close allies on the Hill unwilling to back him.

...

Catch up quick: Ingrassia is an attorney and 30-year-old, right-wing podcaster.

His nomination has been in jeopardy from nearly the start. He bombed an early meeting with committee staff back in July, Axios reported at the time.

Senators' concerns were only amplified by new reporting from Politico this week that he texted in a GOP text chain that he has a "Nazi streak" and that Martin Luther King Jr.'s holiday should be "tossed into the seventh circle of hell."

Daniel Lippman at Politico:

Paul Ingrassia, President Donald Trump’s embattled nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, told a group of fellow Republicans in a text chain the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell” and said he has “a Nazi streak,” according to a text chat viewed by POLITICO.

Ingrassia, who has a Senate confirmation hearing scheduled Thursday, made the remarks in a chain with a half-dozen Republican operatives and influencers, according to the chat.

“MLK Jr. was the 1960s George Floyd and his ‘holiday’ should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs,” Ingrassia wrote in January 2024, according to the chat.

“Jesus Christ,” one participant responded.

Using an Italian slur for Black people, Ingrassia wrote a month earlier in the group chat seen by POLITICO: “No moulignon holidays … From kwanza [sic] to mlk jr day to black history month to Juneteenth,” then added: “Every single one needs to be eviscerated.”

...

In May 2024, the group was bantering about a Trump campaign staffer who’d been hired in Georgia and was working on outreach to minority voters, when Ingrassia suggested she didn’t show enough deference to the Founding Fathers being white, according to the chat.

“Paul belongs in the Hitler Youth with Ubergruppenfuhrer Steve Bannon,” the first participant in the chat wrote, referring to the paramilitary rank in Nazi Germany and the Republican strategist. POLITICO is not naming the participants to protect the identity of those interviewed for this article.

“I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it,” Ingrassia responded, according to the chain. One of the people in the text group said in an interview that Ingrassia’s comment was not taken as a joke, and three participants pushed back against Ingrassia during the text exchange that day.

From Firstpost:

He later graduated from Cornell Law School in 2022, where he served as the senior online editor of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy.

While studying law, Ingrassia was involved in conservative student circles and wrote for right-leaning outlets such as The Daily Caller and The Gateway Pundit.

He was twice named a fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank known for its advocacy of traditionalist and nationalist perspectives within the Republican Party.

Trump's Media

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses radical change in the media landscape.

Sarah Ellison at WP:

President Donald Trump has long railed against the “fake news” as an “enemy of the people.” But this week, the president showed how far he has come in finding a new use for the media: as props.

Friendly influencers were summoned to the White House on Wednesday afternoon, as they have been throughout Trump’s second term, to bolster his agenda and attack his targets of the moment. Reporters from mainstream news organizations remained part of the presentation, but mostly as silent foils and heels to be disparaged and critiqued.

“I read more of your stories than I do theirs,” FBI Director Kash Patel told the influencers, gesturing to the reporters at the back of the room, “because you guys are putting out the truth.”

Leigh Kimmins at The  Daily Beast:

ICE Barbie Kristi Noem is now starring in Trump administration airport propaganda.

A slickly produced video featuring the Homeland Security chief began airing Thursday on airport monitors across the country, blaming Democrats for the nine-day-old government shutdown that has already caused massive flight delays and left thousands of aviation employees working without pay.

“Democrats in Congress refuse to fund the federal government, and because of this, many of our operations are impacted and most of our TSA employees are working without pay,” Noem says in the clip, which a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed to Reuters is now being blasted out in airports nationwide.

 

Daily Caller Writer Calls for Violence

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration  has been full of ominous developments. A gunman murdered Charlie Kirk. Trump and his followers are exploiting the tragedy to attack their opponents. 

Benjamin Mullin at NYT:

The Daily Caller, a prominent conservative online publication, published an opinion column on Friday explicitly calling for violence in response to physical assaults on conservatives in America.

The column, written by editor at large Geoffrey Ingersoll and promoted near the top of the site, argues that “patriots” should use force because law enforcement officials do not adequately protect conservatives, including Charlie Kirk, the activist assassinated this month.

“Is this a call for violence?” the third paragraph says. “Yes. Explicitly it is.”

“I want blood in the streets,” he added in the column, which ran with the headline “Enough Is Enough … I Choose VIOLENCE!”

Adam Downer at The Daily Beast:

The column in the Caller, which was founded by Tucker Carlson and is now part-owned by Donald Trump Jr.’s business partner Omeed Malik, was also promoted to subscribers of its “State of the Day” newsletter.

Ingersoll’s call for violence came after Donald Trump and JD Vance claimed that it was the “radical left” that was responsible for growing political violence—a claim greeted with skepticism but which they have doubled down on.

Ingersoll, formerly editor-in-chief of the site and, like Vance, a one-time Marine public affairs writer, made clear that he was calling for “drubbings,” “cudgels,” and “extra-legal acts of violence”—even though the site later appended an editor’s note claiming his essay referred to “hypothetical instances of self-defense.”

New Media Battles

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses radical change in the media landscape.

Mike Allen at Axios:

President Trump's marathon appearances on male-oriented shows made 2024 the first "podcast election." That'll be even more true. Fox News' Greg Gutfeld said on "The Five" while discussing Kirk's death: "The media is dead to us on this story. They built this thing up. We're dealing with it. We are going to act. We don't care what the whataboutism is anymore. That s**t's dead."Alex Bruesewitz, the young Trump adviser who was the architect of the podcast strategy, has become a principal himself — a coveted guest for shows and events.

Drew Harwell and  Dylan Wells at WP:

The White House struck a victorious tone last month when it launched a TikTok account seven months into President Donald Trump’s second term, posting a cinematic highlight reel showing Trump shaking hands and walking red carpets with the caption, “America we are BACK!”

But behind the scenes, according to interviews with eight people familiar with the matter, the @whitehouse account’s launch kindled months of internal uncertainty over strategy, resources and tone, with Trump administration officials at odds over who should lead the effort and how aggressive the videos should be. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

The debut also faced an immediate setback: a flood of negative responses, many from left-wing influencers, that turned every video’s comment section into an anti-Trump sounding board. The top comment on 97 of the 101 videos posted since the launch has been negative or critical of Trump. On the account’s most watched clips, some of the most prominent responses call Trump “the most corrupt president ever” or share an unflattering AI-generated image combining his face with a fish.

...

Trump vowed to ban TikTok during his first presidency, but then last summer his campaign account there became an extraordinary success. Named, like his longtime Twitter handle, @realdonaldtrump, it posted 58 videos in the five months before the election, many of which featured influencer cameos, frenetic cuts and thumping rap-style soundtracks, and received tens of millions of views.

The campaign used the account to undermine Vice President Kamala Harris’s online messaging and her fans on social media, but also to tailor messages to TikTok’s generally younger fan base, including by posting videos in which Trump promised to “save TikTok” from the sell-or-ban law passed last year. “We have TikTok people, you know, we’re leading the internet,” Trump said in August.

NatCons Repudiate Lincoln, Embrace Buchanan

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is has been full of ominous developments.  Forty years ago, conservatism reflected Reagan's sunny optimism about America.  Trump is taking conservatives to a dark place.

At Gettysburg, Lincoln said that this nation was "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."  At the National Conservatism Conference, Senator Eric Schmitt repudiated Lincoln:

If America was a universal proposition, then everything we inherited from our specific Western heritage had to be abolished. So the statues come down. The names are changed. Yesterday’s heroes become today’s villains. The story of the nation has to be rewritten to align America with its true creed.

On the Right, the situation wasn’t all that different. The truth is, by the 1990s, too many on the Right had come to accept the same basic worldview as the liberal elites they claimed to oppose.

In foreign policy, trade, immigration and the domestic culture wars, too many conservatives defined the American identity as nothing more than an abstract and vaguely-defined proposition. Even if you didn’t want to immigrate here, you would be made to submit to that proposition anyway, via military crusades to bring Madisonian democracy to the furthest corners of the world.

For years, conservatives would talk as if the whole world were just Americans-in-waiting—“born American, but in the wrong place.” America was, as one neoconservative writer put it, “The First Universal Nation.”

That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract “proposition,” but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests.

 Ben Jacobs at Politico:

At the National Conservatism Conference in Washington this week, perhaps the second biggest applause line came when Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) discussed his effort to award Buchanan the Presidential Medal of Freedom on the stage. The only bigger reaction came when Trump border czar Tom Homan espoused the hardline immigration rhetoric that once made Buchanan an outlier within the GOP.

For Moore, Buchanan deserved the highest civilian honor in the United States because “he was right about pretty much everything 20 years before most people realized it.” In contrast, he told POLITICO Nightly, George H.W. Bush was “wrong about almost everything.”

The conference wasn’t exactly a welcoming venue for those who adhere to the brand of Republican politics that had dominated at the end of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st century. Even the speaker delegated to defend Trump’s airstrikes against Iranian nuclear sites, Max Abrahms, a professor at Northeastern University, took pains to insist he was not “a neo-con” — an even more deadly pejorative than “liberal” at the venue.

“Buchanan has been revered by the under-30 crowd basically the entire time that I’ve been working in professional politics,” explained Nick Solheim, the head of American Moment, an influential right wing nonprofit. “[P]eople have been posting vaporwave edits of Pat Buchanan since 2016.”

...

David Tell, a former aide to Bush on his 1992 campaign, agrees that Buchanan’s platform is eerily similar to the policies of Trump’s GOP. However, he added, there’s now a “Huey Long element not previously present in American conservatism.”

HFC in Decline?

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Kate Santaliz at Axios:

The House Freedom Caucus is on the cusp of an identity crisis.

Why it matters: The rabble-rousing group of hardline Republicans who once ousted a speaker and have held GOP leadership hostage over the past decade is shrinking in size and clout as several prominent members head for the exits.

The HFC is struggling to reconcile loyalty to President Trump with its own budget-cutting priorities — and the former often takes precedence. That's raising doubts about whether the group can remain an independent force on the party's right flank, rather than increasingly, after some grumbling, caving to Trump.

Driving the news: At least six of the HFC's most high-profile members are eyeing departures, sparking questions about who, if anyone, will fill the void.Rep. Chip Roy, one of the group's biggest agitators, is running for state attorney general in Texas. Three other especially vocal members — Reps. Byron Donalds (Florida), Ralph Norman (South Carolina) and Andy Biggs (Arizona) — are mounting gubernatorial bids. Rep. Barry Moore is running for Alabama's open Senate seat, while there have been reports that Rep. Andy Ogles is jockeying for a Senate appointment if Marsha Blackburn's bid to be Tennessee's governor is successful.

Several other HFC members, including Rep. Scott Perry (Pennsylvania) and caucus chair Andy Harris (Maryland), could face tough reelection battles in 2026.Internal strife has further thinned the group's ranks: Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (Florida) decided to leave the HFC in March, while the group voted last summer to kick out Rep. Warren Davidson (Ohio) for breaking with its leadership, prompting Rep. Troy Nehls (Texas) to resign in protest.
Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was kicked out in 2023 after publicly feuding with fellow HFC members over her support for then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Trump v. Conservatism

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.  It explains how Trump has exploited conservatism without believing in it.

Patrick Svitek at POLITICO:

President Donald Trump lashed out at the conservative legal movement and one of its prominent leaders, Leonard Leo, on Thursday night, blaming them for the federal court ruling that blocked most of his tariffs this week.

In doing so, Trump deepened a schism with an influential community that was crucial to shaping his first term but has increasingly fallen out of favor with the president as he ramps up attacks on the judiciary.

In a lengthy social media post, Trump called Leo a “real ‘sleazebag’ ” and suggested that the Federalist Society led him astray on judicial nominations during his first term.

One of the judges involved in the ruling on tariffs was appointed by Trump. And in recent months, Trump and Leo have been at odds over the wisdom of Trump’s aggressive use of tariffs: A group with ties to Leo is among those that have sued the administration, arguing that the president overstepped his authority in issuing them.

Charlie Savage at NYT:

Hours earlier Thursday, the Justice Department severely undercut the traditional role of the American Bar Association in vetting judicial nominees. A day before, Mr. Trump picked a loyalist who has no deep ties to the conservative legal movement for a life-tenured appeals court seat, explaining that his pick could be counted on to rule in ways aligned with his agenda.

Together, the moves suggest that Mr. Trump may be pivoting toward greater personal involvement and a more idiosyncratic process for selecting future nominees. Such a shift would fit with his second-term pattern of steamrolling the guardrails that sometimes constrained how he exercised power during his first presidency.

But it could also give pause to judges who may be weighing taking senior status, giving Mr. Trump an opportunity to fill their seats. Conservatives have been eyeing in particular the seats of the Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas, who will turn 77 next month, and Samuel A. Alito, 75.

...'

And Professor Yoo, who wrote memos advancing sweeping theories of presidential power as a Bush administration lawyer, said Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Leo were “outrageous.”

“Calling for the impeachment of judges, attacking Leonard Leo personally and basically calling him as traitor as far as I can tell — Trump is basically turning his back on one of his biggest achievements of his first term,” he added, referring to the reshaping of the federal judiciary.

Russian Interference 2024

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses foreign influence and Trump's attack on democracy.  Russia helped Trump through 2020.

Russian influence operations have changed

 Alex Woodward at The Independent:

Federal law enforcement agencies have seized 32 Russian-backed websites that prosecutors say were designed to sow disinformation and discord ahead of 2024 elections and boost Donald Trump’s campaign.

Separately, two employees of Russia’s state-controlled media network RT have been criminally charged with allegedly launching a $10 million propaganda scheme that enlisted popular right-wing social media influencers.

The allegations revealed in warrants and unsealed indictments are evidence of Russia’s attempts to “engage in a covert campaign to interfere and influence the outcome of our country’s elections,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in remarks on Wednesday.

...

Prosecutors allege they relied on a Tennessee-based company and contracted with US-based social media influencers to target specific demographics and regions as part of a calculated effort to subvert the election.

That company — TENET Media, which is not mentioned by name in the indictment — includes a constellation of well-known right-wing influencers, including Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson, among others.

RT employees helped publish nearly 2,000 English-language videos on TikTok, Instagram, X and YouTube, where they have racked up 16 million views, according to prosecutors

TPUSA

Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.  Neither is the condition of the conservative and libertarian movements.

Ben Rothove at The Washington Examiner:

Turning Point USA was once merely a somewhat controversial right-wing student organization, but it has quickly turned into one of the most destructive forces in Republican politics.

Last weekend, Turning Point hosted its “People’s Convention” in Detroit with headliners including Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), and former President Donald Trump. Beyond politicians, controversial speakers at the event included conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, “Pizzagate” promoter Jack Posobiec, and Candace Owens, who recently left the Daily Wire because of her ignorant remarks about Israel.

...

Turning Point has also had a considerable number of personnel problems. The organization had to fire a TPUSA ambassador earlier this year after she posted on X, “The Zionist Jews controlling our planet are all pedophiles who have no regard for the sanctity of human life and purity,” while a top official at Turning Point Action resigned in April after being accused of forging more than 100 signatures to get on the ballot for a state legislature election.

Turning Point, as it now stands, is doing far more harm than good for the conservative movement.

Left and Right

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the ideological, social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.  

David Leonhardt at NYT: David Leonhardt at NYT:

Americans lean left on economic policy. Polls show that they support restrictions on trade, higher taxes on the wealthy and a strong safety net. Most Americans are not socialists, but they do favor policies to hold down the cost of living and create good-paying jobs. These views help explain why ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage and expand Medicaid have passed even in red states. They also explain why some parts of Biden’s agenda that Republicans uniformly opposed, such as a law reducing medical costs, are extremely popular. “This is where the center of gravity in the country is,” Steve Ricchetti, a top White House official, told me.

The story is different on social and cultural issues. Americans lean right on many of those issues, polls show (albeit not as far right as the Republican Party has moved on abortion).

The clearest example in the Biden era is immigration. A core tenet of neoliberalism, once supported by both parties, is high immigration. Along with the freer movement of goods and capital, neoliberalism calls for the freer movement of people.

Most voters, especially working-class voters, feel differently. The soaring level of immigration during Biden’s presidency, much of it illegal, has become a political liability, and it nearly led to another piece of neopopulist legislation this year. Senate Democrats and Republicans put together a plan to strengthen border security. It was the mirror image of Republicans’ agreeing to support the semiconductor and infrastructure bills: This time, some Democrats abandoned a policy stance that was out of step with public opinion.

[NOTE THE UNDERPOPULATION OF THE LIBERTARIAN QUADRANT, LOWER RIGHT]

 

 

The Decline of the Non-Trumpist Right

Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.  Neither is the condition of the conservative and libertarian movements.

 Luke Mullins at Politico:

FreedomWorks, the once-swaggering conservative organization that helped turn tea party protesters into a national political force, is shutting down, according to its president, a casualty of the ideological split in a Republican Party dominated by former President Donald Trump.

“We’re dissolved,” said the group’s president, Adam Brandon. “It’s effective immediately.”

FreedomWorks’ board of directors voted unanimously on Tuesday to dissolve the organization, Brandon said. Wednesday will be the last workday for the group’s roughly 25 employees, though staffers will continue to receive paychecks and health care benefits for the next few months.

The development brings to a close a period of turmoil for the organization. FreedomWorks laid off 40 percent of its staff in March of 2023, and as a result of a drop in fundraising, its total revenue has declined by roughly half, to about $8 million, since 2022, Brandon said.

In an exclusive interview with POLITICO Magazine, Brandon said the decision to shut down was driven by the ideological upheaval of the Trump era.

After Trump took control of the conservative movement, Brandon said, a “huge gap” opened up between the libertarian principles of FreedomWorks leadership and the MAGA-style populism of its members. FreedomWorks leaders, for example, still believed in free trade, small government and a robust merit-based immigration system. Increasingly, however, those positions clashed with a Trump-aligned membership who called for tariffs on imported goods and a wall to keep immigrants out but were willing, in Brandon’s view, to remain silent as Trump’s administration added $8 trillion to the national debt.

“A lot of our base aged, and so the new activists that have come in [with] Trump, they tend to be much more populist,” Brandon said. “So you look at the base and that just kind of shifted.”

Meryl Kornfield at WP:

Some Libertarian Party leaders are fuming over the party’s decision to have former president Donald Trump headline their national convention this month, with national committee members calling on the party to rescind the invitation.

The choice to have the presumptive nominee from another party speak at the Libertarian Party’s nominating convention has inflamed growing schisms within the minor party. State and local factions, presidential candidates and critics of the right-wing caucus that controls the party are registering their anger with Trump’s planned appearance. Over the weekend, the party’s leadership debated disinviting Trump from the Washington convention after the treasurer motioned to reverse course, with dissenters arguing there should be a vote over allowing Trump to attend “when over half of the membership is up in arms,” according to emails The Washington Post reviewed.

 

So the Heritage Foundation has gone full quack. No surprise.

Ivermectin doesn’t work against #COVID19. Neither does hydroxychloroquine. https://t.co/vdXqsiuR4y

— David Gorski, MD, PhD (@gorskon) May 8, 2024

Sex, IVF, Republicans, Conservatives

  Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. Abortion was a big issue in the 2022 midterm. It will probably be a big issue in 2024.

Alice Ollstein at Politico:

The Alabama Supreme Court ruling granting legal personhood to frozen embryos could set up a political and legal backlash against conservatives heading into the November election.

The decision not only threatens GOP efforts to court suburban women and other constituencies uneasy about abortion bans, but also complicates the party’s standing with millions of people who may oppose abortion but support — and in many cases use — in-vitro fertilization and other forms of fertility care. The ruling also demonstrates how the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has made previously theoretical policy and legal battles over the most intimate aspects of American life far more immediate and high-stakes.

GOP strategists warn that pursuing curbs on those treatments risks exacerbating the backlash that has cost Republicans several races since the fall of Roe. One in six Americans who struggle with infertility — millions of people each year — turn to IVF, according to the National Infertility Association.

“It certainly intersects, badly, with general election politics for Republicans,” said Stan Barnes, a political consultant and former Republican state senator in Arizona. “When a state, any state, takes an aggressive action on this particular topic, people are once again made aware of it and many think: ‘Maybe I can’t support a Republican in the general election.’”

Sarah Fortinsky at The Hill:

GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley says she did not endorse the recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling that said frozen embryos and fertilized eggs should be treated as children under state law.

Instead, Haley told the hosts of CNN’s “King Charles,” that she agreed an embryo is an unborn baby.

“Well, first of all, I didn’t, I mean, this is again, I didn’t say that I agreed with the Alabama ruling. What the question that I was asked is, do I believe an embryo is a baby?” Haley said Wednesday evening. “I do think that if you look in the definition, an embryo is considered an unborn baby. And so, yes, I believe from my stance that that is.”

“The difference is — and this is what I say about abortion as well — we need to treat these issues with the utmost respect,” she added.

Her remarks come after she faced pushback to an earlier interview with NBC News, in which she said, “I mean, embryos, to me, are babies.”

 

Heritage Foundation is the lead organizer of Project 2025 (which I called Project 25, below). 2/ https://t.co/7G4FPNp1ix

— jennycohn@toad.social ✍🏻 📢 (@jennycohn1) February 18, 2024

Trump Structure

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun. The nomination phase has effectively ended. At Axios, Mike Allen:

1. Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, the top two officials at the Palm Beach-based campaign, run a tight, lean ship.Wiles is a former top political adviser to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who left on bitter terms. LaCivita is a former Marine with decades of brass-knuckle campaign experience. Along with well-connected Trump senior adviser Brian Jack, they put in place a methodical process for Republicans to seek Trump's endorsement for congressional and statewide offices. This machine gave Trump leverage with rising stars throughout the party, along with extensive data about their home-state political operations.
Trump campaign staffers get along, stay in their lanes and don't leak like sieves — all dramatic changes from his past operations.

2. The Trump team has methodically wired obscure state Republican delegate rules to his advantage. Operatives worked state by state over the past three years to be sure he benefited from mechanics such as winner-take-all rules."This team is lean, efficient, experienced, eye on the prize — none of the backstabbing and gossip and drama," ...
Here again, Trump was greatly limited by disorganization and bureaucratic naïveté when he was in the White House. The Heritage Foundation and other groups are spending millions to make sure that doesn't happen again if he wins.

3. In Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump built extensive ground operations that helped cement him as a formidable front-runner in both states almost a year before voting began.

4. The establishment opposition melted and proved much more amenable to his ways and plans.The shackles imposed on Trump in Term 1 are gone, especially in Congress.

5. Trump, who had flown solo his entire political life, allowed his allies to embrace the Heritage Foundation and other outside groups that are building talent banks and policy blueprints to help him swiftly staff the government to control and shrink what Trumpers call "the deep state."Heritage president Kevin Roberts recently told The New York Times that he sees the think tank's role as "institutionalizing Trumpism."

6. Maybe the biggest shocker: Trump took indictments on 91 felonies in four criminal cases — a death knell for any other candidate — and turned them into a net positive. Even many traditional Republicans see the prosecutions as piling on.

 Lulu Garcia-Navarro at NYT:

Since taking over the Heritage Foundation in 2021, Kevin D. Roberts has been making his mark on an institution that came to prominence during the Reagan years and has long been seen as an incubator of conservative policy and thought. Roberts, who was not well known outside policy circles when he took over, has pushed the think tank away from its hawkish roots by arguing against funding the war in Ukraine, a turnabout that prompted some of Heritage’s policy analysts to leave. Now he’s looking ahead, to the 2024 election and beyond. Roberts told me that he views Heritage’s role today as “institutionalizing Trumpism.” This includes leading Project 2025, a transition blueprint that outlines a plan to consolidate power in the executive branch, dismantle federal agencies and recruit and vet government employees to free the next Republican president from a system that Roberts views as stacked against conservative power. The lesson of Trump’s first year in office, Roberts told me, is that “the Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start. And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.”

"Now, Putin and Russia deserve the blame. I’ve been very clear about that. Having said that, it was our saber-rattling about Ukraine entering NATO that is one of the many factors that led to this. "

...

One priority for both your organization and the Republican Party writ large is reducing the size of the federal work force. What do you envision when you say, as you have said, you want to destroy the administrative state?

I envision the destruction that I’m referring to, which I presume is the real focus of your question, as a political entity being significantly weakened. People will lose their jobs. Hopefully their lives are able to flourish in spite of that. Buildings will be shut down. Hopefully they can be repurposed for private industry. But the administrative state — most importantly, what we’re trying to destroy is the political influence it has over individual American sovereignty, and the only way to do that, or one of the ways to do that, is to diminish the number of unelected bureaucrats who are wielding that power instead of Congress.

... 

In a recent podcast episode, you were speaking with Jesse Kelly, the right-wing radio host, and the episode was about, and I’m quoting here, “the secret Communist movement inside America.” And you were not talking about Chinese government infiltration. You said about those employed in the U.S. government, “These men and women, these Communists, really, are in positions where they’re dictating with the power, the authority of law, what other Americans do.” You use the word “Communist” a lot to describe those you might disagree with politically inside this country.

Well, at least a few of them must be Communists. I think there are far more Chinese Communists who’ve infiltrated our government than American Communists, but at the very least, they’re socialists. So if I were to revise that, I would say they were socialists, not Communists.

God and Trump

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.  

 Thomas Edsall at NYT:

Trump, his family and his supporters have been more than willing to claim that Trump is ordained by God for a special mission, to restore America as a Christian nation.

In recent weeks, for example, the former president posted a video called “God Made Trump” on Truth Social that was produced by a conservative media group technically independent of the Trump campaign. He has also screened it at campaign rallies.

...

Jim Guth, a political scientist at Furman University and an expert on the role of religion in politics, published an article in 2019, “Are White Evangelicals Populists? The View From the 2016 American National Election Study.” The essay describes the basis for the strong affinity of white evangelicals for Trump’s conservative populism.

“White evangelicals,” Guth found, “are invariably the most populist: more likely to favor strong leadership (even when that means breaking the rules), to distrust government, to see the country on the wrong track and to think that the majority should always rule (and minorities adapt).”

Guth also found that

another salient trait of populist politics is the willingness to ignore democratic civility. We constructed a “rough politics” score from three A.N.E.S. items: whether protesters deserve what they get if they are hurt in demonstrating, whether the country would be better off if it got rid of rotten apples and whether people are “too sensitive” about political discourse. Here the usual pattern recurs: Evangelical affiliation, evangelical identity and biblical literalism predicts agreement with those assertions, while religious minorities, secular folks and progressives tend to demur.

The most common explanation [for evangelical support] , according to Guth,

is that white evangelicals have a transactional relationship with the president: As long as he nominates conservative jurists and makes appropriate gestures on abortion and sexual politics, they will support him.

“The evidence here,” he wrote, “suggests a more problematic answer”:

White evangelicals share with Trump a multitude of attitudes, including his hostility toward immigrants, his Islamophobia, his racism and nativism, as well as his political style, with its nasty politics and assertion of strong, solitary leadership. Indeed, Trump’s candidacy may have “authorized” for the first time the widespread expression of such attitudes.

DeSantis Admits That Conservative Media Outlets Are For Trump

Our most recent book, Divided We Stand, looks at the role of conservative media in the 2020 election.  This segment of the press is just as significant in 2024.  After the first indictment, it swung decisively for Trump.

Jonathan Chait at New York:

Meeting with reporters Friday, Ron DeSantis blurted out something every Republican politician knows, but never says: Conservative media does not hold Republicans accountable. “He’s got basically a Praetorian Guard of the conservative media — Fox News, the web sites, all the stuff — they just don’t hold him accountable because they’re worried about losing viewers,” he said of Donald Trump. “And they don’t want to have their ratings go down.”

DeSantis is running through the bitter final days of an immensely disappointing presidential campaign that saw him transformed from the shining knight of the post-Trump party to a punch line. And so he is understandably lashing at at the conservative media, which is now operating mainly as a public-relations vehicle for the candidate who is destroying him.

Facing defeat, he is finally venting about Trump himself:

 

DeSantis: You can be the most worthless Republican in America, if you kiss the ring, Trump will say you are wonderful. pic.twitter.com/bfbOtN9n1D

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 15, 2024

Trump: What He Says and Whom He Appoints

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  The 2024 race has begun.  Trump is already planning on returning to the White House, appointing obedient officials and taking revenge on those who have opposed him.

Just a huge difference w Ds in 2020, who got peppered with questions about specific interest group asks. Trump's deal: Stop asking for unpopular stuff, just let me win and appoint your people.

— David Weigel (@daveweigel) January 5, 2024

Dictator, Continued

Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie.  And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.   

He is planning an authoritarian agenda and would take care to eliminate any internal dissent.

On Saturday, Trump keynoted the New York Young Republican Club’s 111th Annual Gala Keynote speaker

 Jason Beeferman at Politico: 

' “[Peter] Baker today in the New York Times said that I want to be a dictator,” Trump said, referencing an article from the newspaper’s chief White House correspondent.

“I didn’t say that. I said I want to be a dictator for one day. You know why I wanted to be a dictator? Because I want a wall, and I want to drill, drill, drill,” Trump said, adding that Democrats’ “newest hoax” is to label him a threat to democracy

... 

The night’s more than 35 honored guests included the former president’s adviser Steve Bannon, Trump defense lawyer Alina Habba, former New York Mayor Rudy Guliani and members of Congress Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Mike Collins (R-Ga.) and Cory Mills (R-Fla.). Right wing Twitter star Rogan O’Handley, who helped popularize the anti-trans boycott of Bud Light, and Harald Vilimsky, the secretary-general of Austria’s Euroskeptic Freedom Party, a party founded by former Nazis, were also honored guests.

This year’s Master of Ceremonies was Alex Stein, a man perhaps best known for catcalling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the Capitol steps. Tickets to the event, open to the public, ranged from $699 to $30,000

...

 “Since I know the deep state is listening tonight, once President Trump is back in office, we won’t be playing nice anymore,” Wax said.

“It will be a time for retribution. All those responsible for destroying our once-great country will be held to account after baseless years of investigations and government lies and media lies against this man,” he said. “Now it is time to turn the tables on these actual crooks and lock them up for a change.”

Trump then lauded Wax’s remarks.

“Gavin, that was an excellent speech,” he said. “That was an excellent speech, wow.”