The Perfect Foil

Our most 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. 

Michael Shear at NYT:

President Biden traveled to Florida on Thursday afternoon with a political gift he had not been expecting before Tuesday night’s State of the Union speech.

The perfect foil.

Republican outbursts during his address to Congress — and Mr. Biden’s real-time exchange with heckling lawmakers about the fate of Social Security and Medicare — gave him exactly that, and he eagerly tried to use the episode to his advantage on Thursday in an event before a small audience of supporters here.

Standing in front of two huge American flags and a sign that said “Protect and strengthen Medicare,” the president made clear he relishes the fight on the issue.

“I guarantee it will not happen,” Mr. Biden said of cuts to the entitlement programs. “A lot of Republicans, their dream is to cut Social Security and Medicare. Well, let me say this: If that’s your dream, I’m your nightmare.”

To drive the point home, the White House placed glossy pamphlets on the seats of every attendee at the Tampa event, designed to look like the plan for a five-year expiration of all government programs put forward by Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida.

“This means Medicare and Social Security would be on the chopping block every five years,” the White House wrote in the mocked-up pamphlet.

Isaac Arnsdorf at WP:

Donald Trump is going on the attack against potential rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination over Social Security and Medicare, seizing on the same GOP divisions over federal spending that President Biden is seeking to exploit.

Trump moved to wield the issue as a wedge in the primary, particularly against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, with a video message last month urging Republicans to use negotiations over raising the debt ceiling to cut spending but not “a single penny” from Social Security or Medicare. He also posted a short video clip of a younger DeSantis praising Paul D. Ryan, the former House budget chairman from Wisconsin who famously proposed replacing Medicare with giving seniors money for private health insurance.

The emphasis reflects potential vulnerability for Republican rivals who were elected to powerful posts in the pre-Trump tea party era, embracing austerity in the last showdown over raising the federal debt limit. As Trump’s campaign has signaled an interest in stoking debate over entitlements, Biden used his State of the Union address on Tuesday to similarly bait Republicans, producing a rowdy spectacle in which they booed his accusation that they want to cut Social Security and Medicare.

 

Congressional Republicans Gobbled Biden's Bait

Our most 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. 

David Frum at The Atlantic:

Not only did Republicans repeatedly heckle, jeer, and shout during President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, but Biden was ready for them. In impromptu remarks not included in the prepared text of the speech, Biden rolled with the interruptions, using them to reinforce his message. Biden accused “some” Republicans of plotting to sunset Social Security and Medicare. When he got protests, he grinned and accepted them as a “unanimous” endorsement. “I welcome all converts,” he told them, recasting for the television audience the Republican hubbub as a sign of submission.

Partisanship, populism, and patriotism were his themes. The speech was strewn with traps carefully constructed to ensnare opponents. He opened with a tribute to bipartisanship, but the mechanics of his address were based on shrewd and unapologetic hyper-partisanship. He anticipated negative reactions in the chamber—and used them to reinforce his message.

Trump v. DeSantis: Very Nasty, Very Early

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  The early stages of the 2024 race have begun.

David Knowles at Yahoo:

Former President Donald Trump escalated his attacks on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Tuesday, seizing on a story that his rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination partied with underage students when he worked as a teacher at a Georgia high school.

In five successive posts Tuesday to his social media site, Truth Social, Trump went after DeSantis. Two of them referenced a story published by the far-right website Hillreporter.com that claimed DeSantis had been photographed "partying with underaged students" at the Darlington School, a private K-12 school in Rome, Ga., where DeSantis taught from 2001-02.

Trump reposted a photograph originally posted by a Truth Social member who goes by the handle Dong-Chan Lee, and who uses a profile photo of the alt-right meme Pepe the Frog, featuring Trump's signature hairdo. The image showed what appeared to be DeSantis flanked by three young women that had been captioned, "Here is Ron DeSanctimonious grooming high school girls with alcohol as a teacher."

Koch v. Trump

Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses campaign finance.

Alex Leary at WSJ:

A group funded by billionaire Charles Koch will work to support a Republican presidential nominee other than Donald Trump, concluding in a strategy memo that “we need to turn the page on the past.”

The organization, Americans for Prosperity, has stayed out of the last two presidential cycles but has concluded it needs to engage now as Mr. Trump mounts his third consecutive White House run. The memo released Sunday doesn’t mention the former president by name but is unambiguous in its purpose.


“To write a new chapter for our country, we need to turn the page on the past,” the document reads. “So the best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter. The American people have shown that they’re ready to move on, and so AFP will help them do that.”

A spokesman for Mr. Trump didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

...

AFP didn’t say how much it would spend but boasts of a large grass-roots and data operation. “The states with some of our strongest and most effective state chapters are the same ones that will play a crucial role in nominating the next Republican presidential candidate,” reads the memo, written by CEO Emily Seidel.

A related super political-action committee, AFP Action, “is prepared to support a candidate in the Republican presidential primary who can lead our country forward, and who can win,” the memo stated.

Balloon Politics

Our most 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. 

Lloyd Lee at Business Insider:

A balloon US officials are calling a Chinese surveillance tool spent days flying over the continental United States before it was shot down by an F-22 fighter jet on Saturday.

Pentagon leaders advised President Joe Biden against immediately shooting the flying orb out of the sky due to safety concerns for civilians as the high-altitude object was large enough to create a large debris field, a senior defense official who spoke on background told reporters Thursday.

The dayslong spectacle saw many Republicans criticize the Biden administration for what they viewed as a slow response to the foreign object, while some conservative leaders and pundits took the opportunity to pick at confidence under the Biden administration in general as they claimed no other leader such as Donald Trump would have let a Chinese spy balloon fly over the US.

"Would Trump have let China fly a spy balloon over our country?" Rep. Jim Jordan wrote on Twitter. "Would Reagan? JFK? Truman? No, no, and no."

But senior Pentagon officials said on Saturday that suspected Chinese surveillance balloons crossed into the US at least three times during the Trump administration and once earlier in the Biden administration, the Associated Press reported.

...

In a statement to Fox News, Mississippi Republican Sen. Roger Wicker claimed that "if press reports are correct, the Biden Administration hoped to hide this incident from the American people."

However, the times when suspected surveillance balloons crossed into the US under the Trump administration were never made public until this past week's incident.

BREAKING: ABC News Host Jonathan Karl just broke it to Senator Marco Rubio that Trump let a Chinese spy balloon fly over the US 3 times.

I could watch his face on repeat 1,000 times as he hears this from Karl! pic.twitter.com/cu2Ou3Ioqj

— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) February 5, 2023

Republicans and Ukraine

 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.  As Russia began its latest invasion of Ukraine, Trump lavished praise on Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. 

Susan B. Glasser at The New Yorker:

Support for Biden’s approach to the war is ebbing, particularly among Republicans. The new House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, has warned there will be no “blank check” for Ukraine going forward, and a recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that forty per cent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents think the U.S. is providing too much support to Ukraine, up from just nine per cent who thought that last March. Over all, the share of adults in both parties who believe the U.S. is doing too much for Ukraine has gone up nineteen points since the war began, a year ago. On Fox News, Tucker Carlson harps on this theme night after night. In the House, vocal McCarthy supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has decried “the neo-Nazis in Ukraine,” blustered, after the G.O.P. won the House in November, that “not another penny” would go to their cause.

And speaking of bluster, there’s Donald Trump, who has lately grown louder and louder on the subject of a Russian war that he initially praised as an act of “genius” by Vladimir Putin. In recent days, as he opens his official campaign to return to the White House, Trump has trashed Biden’s handling of the war and criticized the decision to send the tanks. He’s labelled Americans “suckers” for providing the bulk of aid to Ukraine. He’s insisted he could negotiate an end to the conflict within twenty-four hours. He calls Biden “weak” while opposing Biden’s efforts to send the weapons that make Ukraine stronger.

In a campaign e-mail this week, Trump even seemed to suggest that the American tanks—which will take many months to reach Ukraine—were somehow already responsible both for destroying Ukrainian cities and putting the world on the brink of nuclear war. “Joe Biden is doing what he said ten months ago would cause World War III, sending American tanks into Ukraine,” the statement quoted Trump as saying. “Such a tragic waste of human life, when you look at all that’s happening there. Those cities are obliterated. First, come the nukes. Then, come the tanks.”

The statement, like a lot of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago stylings, makes no sense if you try to actually understand what he is saying: Does he mean that nukes will be used in Ukraine, or perhaps that they already have been? How is it that the tanks are going to roll in after the nuclear apocalypse? It’s all so confusing. An accompanying video from Trump has the tanks coming first, then the nukes. Whatever.

Slow Start to the 118th

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.  The 2022 election produced a divided government.  Previous periods of divided government produced landmark legislation such as the National Security Act of 1947.    But this time is different because the margins are so narrow and the partisan divisions are so deep.

Scott Wong, Sahil Kapur and Frank Thorp V at MSNBC:

One month in, the 118th Congress is off to a spectacularly sluggish start, frustrating some lawmakers and foreshadowing a messy two years of divided government in a presidential election cycle where very little is expected to get done.

Forget making historic laws. It’s not even clear the new Congress can agree to keep the government functional or prevent a self-imposed economic meltdown.

“I have very low expectations,” Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., said in an interview. “I would predict — and I hope I’m wrong — this will prove to be one of the least productive congresses in modern history because of the dysfunctionality of an unstable majority.” 

House Republicans have a mere four-seat majority that empowers just a few rabble-rousers to wreak havoc in the chamber. They spent their first five days squabbling with each other over whether Kevin McCarthy should be speaker. After 15 ballots — the most since 1859 — he finally won the gavel, but not before a physical altercation broke out on the House floor.