Donald Trump told David Brody that “we’ll handle that” if Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) challenges him for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
Said Trump: “So, now I hear he might want to run against me. So, we’ll handle that the way I handle things.”
Jonathan Chait: “One of the curious things about the recent revolt by far-right House Republicans is that it was led by some of the party’s Trumpiest figures, yet they were essentially insisting that Congress return to the time before Donald Trump. The Republican-rebel demands — that their leaders stage shutdowns and debt-ceiling threats in the service of bug-eyed hysteria over the budget deficit — ‘harken back to the tea-party era,’ noted Politico.”
“Before the symbol of the right became guys in red hats warning that immigrants and the deep state were destroying the country, it was guys in tricorne hats warning that the stimulus and Obamacare were destroying the country. And now they are back.”
“When Trump won the nomination in 2016, it was widely believed that the Republican Party’s ideological character had changed in some fundamental way. ‘His surprising election marked a replacement of the GOP’s free-market conservatism’ — exemplified by Paul Ryan — ‘with a more populist, big-government conservatism,’ noted budget hawk Brian Riedl a few years ago, bemoaning the ‘final nail in the tea-party coffin.’ Seeing the nails pop out and the coffin spring back open might seem terribly confusing. What happened to the party’s great philosophical evolution?”
“For many cooks, waiters and bartenders, it is an annoying entrance fee to the food-service business: Before starting a new job, they pay around $15 to a company called ServSafe for an online class in food safety,” the New York Times reports.
“But in taking the class, the workers — largely unbeknown to them — are also helping to fund a nationwide lobbying campaign to keep their own wages from increasing.”
Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), who is weighing a U.S. Senate run in Michigan, attended Martin Luther King Jr. weekend events in Detroit and Grand Rapids — neither of which is in her House district.
“The House Freedom Caucus captured the world’s attention by holding Kevin McCarthy’s speakership hostage, but in a divided government any five members can team up to block Republican leaders’ plans,” Semafor reports.
“That’s why it’s worth keeping an eye on the relative moderates who are making rumblings of their own. They have the power to stall legislation or to try and get bipartisan bills to the floor through procedural workarounds — if they have the guts.”
Wall Street Journal: “Multinational companies still want cheap and efficient markets, but they also want safety. That’s why they’re rerouting the pathways of global trade and finance.”
Catherine Rampell: “Now, should Democrats have dealt with the debt limit while they still controlled both chambers of Congress? Yes. Absolutely. If we breach the debt ceiling in the coming months, their failure to do so could turn out to be the biggest tactical blunder of the Biden era.”
“Even if Democrats erred in not neutralizing this bomb when they had the chance, though, blame for any subsequent carnage should be on the maniacs lighting the fuse.”
NBC News: House Republicans gear up for a debt ceiling fight, clashing with Democrats.
The first issue of the Politics Extra newsletter was sent out last night. You can check it out here.
Politico: “Doubling down on mass emails and texts is still a way to raise significant cash, and federal candidates and committees raised a combined $3.3 billion on ActBlue and WinRed, the parties’ primary online fundraising platforms, during the 2022 cycle.”
“But people who work in the field are growing concerned that fundraising appeals are crowding out newsletters, volunteer efforts and other forms of communication amid the insatiable and never-ending hunt for cash.”
Former Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) “wasn’t on any ballot in 2022, but she was deeply involved in the election anyway through a series of new organizations, millions in GOP-focused donations, and today, a 30-page after-action report on what she says worked for Republicans in Georgia and what didn’t,” the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports.
“Key to Republican wins in 2022, the report says, were a Loeffler-sponsored year-round registration and mobilization effort, messaging about Georgia Republicans’ election law overhaul through Senate Bill 202, and having Gov. Brian Kemp at the top of the GOP ticket.”
“Not mentioned in the report at all is Herschel Walker’s campaign, the lone statewide loss for the GOP.”
Politico: “The Trump administration never publicly released White House visitor records. But new data released by the Jan. 6 committee offers a never-before-seen glimpse.”
Former U.S. Army prosecutor Glenn Kirschner sees a telltale sign that Donald Trump knows an indictment is coming: the way and frequency in which Trump writes his Truth Social posts, Newsweek reports.
“Gov. Larry Hogan (R) will leave office Wednesday with the same stratospheric job approval ratings that he’s enjoyed for most of his time in office,” Maryland Matters reports.
“A recent poll conducted for Gonzales Research & Media Services, an Arnold-based polling firm, showed Hogan leaving office with an eye-popping 77% of Marylanders approving of the job he’s doing as governor.”
“In the poll, Hogan had an astonishing 81% job approval rating among Democrats — 13 points higher than it was among Republicans.”
“The Jan. 6 committee spent months gathering stunning new details on how social media companies failed to address the online extremism and calls for violence that preceded the Capitol riot,” the Washington Post reports.
“The evidence they collected was written up in a 122-page memo that was circulated among the committee… But in the end, committee leaders declined to delve into those topics in detail in their final report, reluctant to dig into the roots of domestic extremism taking hold in the Republican Party beyond former president Donald Trump and concerned about the risks of a public battle with powerful tech companies.”
“Congressional investigators found evidence that tech platforms — especially Twitter — failed to heed their own employees’ warnings about violent rhetoric on their platforms and bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives, particularly then-president Trump, out of fear of reprisals.”
“Vietnamese President Nguyen Xuan Phuc resigned Tuesday, becoming the most senior member of the government to step down after a series of high-profile corruption scandals for which he was held responsible,” the AP reports.
During a visit to the Texas border city of El Paso, New York Mayor Eric Adams offered up a blistering criticism of the federal government’s response to the influx of immigrants into U.S. cities, the AP reports.
Said Adams: “Our cities are being undermined. And we don’t deserve this. Migrants don’t deserve this. And the people who live in the cities don’t deserve this. We expect more from our national leaders to address this issue in a real way.”
A new WPA Intelligence (R) poll finds Donald Trump losing to President Biden, 41% to 49% — an 8-percentage point disadvantage for the Republican that’s outside the poll’s 3-point error margin.
But in a head-to-head matchup against DeSantis — who is still not as well-known to voters — Biden gets 42% of the theoretical vote compared to 45% for the Florida governor, which is essentially a statistical tie.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.