January 24, 2024
The dust is beginning to settle after last night’s New Hampshire primary. Former president Donald Trump won the Republican primary with 54.3% of the vote, netting him 12 delegates to the Republican National Convention. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley came in second with 43.3% of the vote, garnering her 9 delegates. Other candidates together took 2.3%, but none of them won any delegates.
There has been a lot of noise today about whether the New Hampshire results spell good news for Trump or bad news. While the result keeps him in the front spot for the Republican nomination, I fall into the category of observers who see bad news: more than 45% of Republican primary voters—those most fervent about the party—chose someone other than Trump.
As David French pointed out in the New York Times today, Trump is running as a virtual incumbent, and any incumbent facing a challenger who can command 43% of the party faithful is in trouble. President Gerald Ford discovered this equation in 1976 when he faced Ronald Reagan’s insurgency; President George H. W. Bush discovered it in 1992 when he faced a similar challenge from right-wing commentator Patrick Buchanan. While both Ford and Bush went on to win the Republican nomination, they lost the general election.
More important than opinions or history to indicate what the primary indicated, though, is Trump’s apparent anger about Haley’s showing. Politico’s Playbook noted that he “rage-posted” about Haley’s speech after her strong finish with posts that lasted far into the night. Ron Filipkowski noted that at 2:19 this morning he was still at it, posting: “NIKKI CAME IN LAST, NOT SECOND!”
In addition to attacking her from the podium, Trump appeared to threaten her when he warned her about “very dishonest people” she would have to fight. He said she was not going to win, “but if she did, she would “be under investigation…in fifteen minutes and I could tell you five reasons why already. Not big reasons, a little stuff that she doesn’t want to talk about, but she will be under investigation within minutes, and so would Ron have been, but he decided to get out.”
The tactics Trump might have been suggesting became clear this afternoon, when the chair of the Arizona Republican Party, Jeff DeWit, resigned after a recording that appeared to show him trying to bribe Arizona Senate candidate and fervent Trump supporter Kari Lake to stay out of the Senate race was leaked to the press. The tape itself was clearly contrived to show Lake as if she were in a campaign ad, defending Trump and America, but it includes DeWit’s pleas for her to stand aside for two years, presumably while the Arizona party regroups with less extremist candidates, and his request that she name her price.
This sordid story reflects a problem in the state Republican parties as MAGA supporters have tried to take over from the party establishment. In Arizona, challenging the 2020 presidential election—remember the “Cyber Ninjas” who audited the Maricopa County vote?—ran the finances of the Arizona party into the ground. Lake has continued to insist, without evidence, that the election was stolen, and she and other MAGA activists have called for purging the party of all but the Trump faithful. The recording positions Lake as a Trump loyalist fighting against party operatives.
In his resignation letter, DeWit claimed the recording had been “taken out of context” and said he had been “set up.” He noted that Lake has “a disturbing tendency to exploit private interactions for personal gain,” calling out “her habit of secretly recording personal and private conversations. This is obviously a concern given how much interaction she has with high profile people including President Trump,” he added. “I believe she orchestrated this entire situation to have control over the state party,” he wrote.
DeWit said he had “received an ultimatum from Lake’s team: resign today or face the release of a new, more damaging recording. I am truly unsure of its contents,” he wrote, “but considering our numerous past open conversations as friends, I have decided not to take the risk. I am resigning as Lake requested.”
It seems clear the Trump team is eager to consolidate power behind him no matter what it takes, especially in the face of what appears to be his weakness. Rising authoritarians depend on the idea they are invincible, so being perceived as vulnerable—or as a loser—hits them much harder than it does a normal political candidate.
Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel—who was recorded on November 17, 2020, pressuring two Republican officials in Michigan not to certify Joe Biden’s electors in a county he won by 68% and promising the officials to “get you attorneys”—has urged Haley to drop out of the race. Traditionally, party chairs stay neutral in primary contests. Tonight, Trump posted a threat to donors: “Nikki ‘Birdbrain’ Haley is very bad for the Republican Party and, indeed, our Country…. Anybody that makes a ‘Contribution’ to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them and will not accept them.”
For her part, Haley has vowed to stay in the contest. While observers point out that there is very little chance she could actually overtake Trump, it’s also true that either Trump’s obvious mental lapses or his legal troubles could knock him out of the race, in which case she would be the most viable candidate standing.
Curiously, what happened to Trump in New Hampshire was what, before the election, pundits suggested could and maybe should happen to President Joe Biden: a challenger would show that he was weak going into the 2024 election.
Instead, despite dirty-trickster robocalls in a fake Biden voice telling Democratic voters not to show up vote for Biden, he appears to be on track to win 65% of the vote as a write-in candidate—he wasn’t on the ballot—while Representative Dean Phillips and self-help author Marianne Williamson, who were on the ballot, together appear to have garnered just under 25%..
On Monday, Miranda Nazzaro of The Hill reported that the creator of ChatGPT banned a super PAC backing Phillips for misusing AI for political purposes. Billionaire Bill Ackman, who has been in the news lately for his fight against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, attacks on former Harvard president Claudine Gay, and threats to media outlets that pointed out plagiarism in his wife’s doctoral dissertation, donated $1 million to Phillips’s super PAC.
There was other good news for the Biden camp today, too. Sign-ups for the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, have surged by 80% under Biden, with a record 21 million people enrolling this year. Trump has promised to get rid of the program, saying that “Obamacare Sucks!!!” and that he will replace it with something better, but neither now nor in his four years in office did he produce a plan.
Biden also received the enthusiastic endorsement today of the United Auto Workers union, whose president, Shawn Fain, had made it clear that any president must earn that endorsement. Biden stood with the union in its negotiations last year with the big three automakers, not only behind the scenes but also in public when he became the first president to join a picket line. “[Trump] went to a nonunion plant, invited by the boss, and trashed our union,” Fain said, “And, here is what Joe Biden did during our stand up strike. He heard the call. And he stood up and he showed up.” “Donald Trump stands against everything we stand for as a society,” Fain told the crowd.
More news dropped today about the damage MAGA Republicans are doing to the United States. A report published today in JAMA Internal Medicine estimates that in the 14 states that outlawed abortion after the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, 64,565 women became pregnant after being raped, “but few (if any) obtained in-state abortions legally.”
Finally, Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan of Punchbowl News confirmed this evening that although MAGA Republicans have insisted the border is such a crisis that no aid to Ukraine can pass until it is addressed, Trump is preventing congressional action on the border because he wants to run on the issue of immigration. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told a closed meeting of Senate Republicans that “the nominee” wants to run his campaign on immigration, adding, “We don’t want to do anything to undermine him.” “We’re in a quandary,” McConnell said.
Jennifer Bendery and Igor Bobic of HuffPost reported that Trump today reached out to Republican senators to kill the bipartisan border deal being finalized, “because he doesn’t want Biden to have a victory,” one source said. “The rational Republicans want the deal because they want Ukraine and Israel and an actual border solution,” Bendery and Bobic quote the source as saying. “But the others are afraid of Trump, or they’re the chaos caucus who never wants to pass anything.”
“They’re having a little crisis in their conference right now,”
Notes:
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/24/1226514570/new-hampshire-primary-analysis-results
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/01/11/opinion/briefing#trump-margin-victory
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/there-was-a-second-race-in-new-hampshire-last-night
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/01/24/obamacare-record-enrollment-biden/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/13/republican-state-parties-struggles-maga/
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2814274
https://www.meidastouch.com/news/trump-threatens-nikki-haleys-donors
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-border-deal-republicans-biden_n_65b18fa0e4b0166fc770ae46
https://www.politico.com/playbook
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-court-autoworkers-potential-endorsement-looms-2024-01-24/
Twitter (X):
ronfilipkowski/status/1750128567374008328
atrupar/status/1749984852659560829
AZGOP/status/1750234611890971064
“They’re having a little crisis in their conference right now,” I love a good understatement.
Trump is evil. Let's smash the MAGA movement to smithereens at the polls this November.
But what will keep me up is the following factoid given in today's post:
"A report published today in JAMA Internal Medicine estimates that in the 14 states that outlawed abortion after the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, 64,565 women became pregnant after being raped."
That number is not the total number of rapes in just 14 of the 50 states. It's the subset of the total that resulted in an unwanted pregnancy. That limited number is shocking. Even after Trump is defeated, our country will not be safe for women. WTF? Who the f** are we? Is Trump just the smelliest symptom of a deeper rot?