An Ugly Republican Primary? It’s About Time!

Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are laying into each other. Trump makes his juvenile cracks about how to pronounce DeSantis’s name. Dee/DuhSantis counters by calling Trump’s jibes, well, “juvenile,” and had a bus paid for by a super PAC supporting him follow Trump across Iowa, mocking him.

Politico calls this “savagery,” or at least a “path of savagery.” That seems a little overstated to me, at least for now, but this is something new, and it’s worth thinking about: The 2024 GOP presidential primary could get mean and brittle in a way no Republican primary has been since … well, let’s think:

Since 2020? No, that was just Trump.

Since 2016? That race had its moments of bitterness, but the governing dynamic, as you may recall, was that most of the other Republicans refrained from attacking Trump on the assumption that he wouldn’t last and they would gather up his supporters. Marco Rubio notably broke from this mold and lobbed some grenades Trump’s way, but he ended up sounding more like Don Rickles than a candidate for president.

Since 2012? There were some tense moments between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. But the bottom line was that you never thought Romney was really going to lose.

And this is why 2024, just maybe, could be different: There just might be actual drama about the outcome.

I know it doesn’t seem that way now. Trump is way ahead. And the more people who join the race—there are seven well-known candidates now (and two no-names), and Chris Christie next week is going to make it eight—the more it favors Trump, because he is presumed to have his 30 percent, which leaves seven people splitting the other 70 percent. Even I can do that math.

But just this once let’s play around with this hypothetical. Trump is indicted by Jack Smith. That’ll be indictment number two. Then he is indicted by Fani Willis in Georgia. That’s number three. The conventional wisdom is that this will merely galvanize his supporters, and that’s surely true of many or probably most of them. But all of them?

Elections are about percentages. Sweeping statements of conventional wisdom tend to ignore this. Some percentage of Trump’s base will, in fascist fashion, adhere to him all the more loyally, and they’ll buy all the deep-state garbage he dumps into the civic bloodstream. Some percentage will basically stay with him but start to entertain some practical doubts about whether he’s the best person to send into battle. And finally, he’ll lose some percentage.

It’s anybody’s guess as to what that number is. But let’s say it’s a quarter of his base. If we’re calling his base 30 percent, that’s 7.5 percent of the electorate. That takes him down closer to 20 percent. That’s a different race.

Now throw on top of the indictments the reality that at least two candidates, DeSantis and Christie, will be attacking Trump directly. People tend to roll their eyes about Christie’s candidacy, and eye-rolling is the right response if the question is “Can he win?” But that’s the wrong question. Nobody thinks Christie can win. I very much doubt even Christie thinks he can win. No—he’s getting in to stop Trump. There’s no other rationale.

Christie’s track record with respect to Trump is a long way from consistent and admirable, and Fox will have no trouble finding clips of Christie sucking up to Trump. But lately, he’s been a consistent critic. He called Trump “Putin’s puppet.” As USA Today reported this week, Christie is basically going to camp out in New Hampshire, ignoring Iowa and other early states. The idea is obviously to try to convince New Hampshire’s sometimes prickly and unpredictable electorate to turn on Trump and stop him.

If that works, and Trump loses New Hampshire, then we have a race. The outcome will actually be in doubt, at least for a while. Christie and DeSantis, and by that time perhaps others, will lay into Trump. This will be new. What will this Trump—thrice indicted, under constant barrage of attack—be like on the campaign trail?

There really aren’t any serious fissures in the Republican Party today. It’s an ethnonationalist, anti-democratic, neofascist, anti-freedom party that really only cares about creating a moral panic over certain Americans it finds threatening to its brittle and reactionary righteousness. There’s no serious disagreement about any of that. There are merely people who are gung ho about it, and people who would prefer for various reasons to soft-pedal it. But they’re all on board with the basic program. If they weren’t, they’d nominate a candidate who opposed all that, but there is no chance of that.

The only fissure is a tactical one, over Trump. Is he the best field marshal to advance the moral panic? That’s what the 2024 primary will be about. The odds still favor it not being much of a fight. But the Trump-DeSantis pre-savagery this week, combined with Christie’s coming entry, means there’s a chance that all this could get desperately ugly next year. Make that nasty. It will already be ugly.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

Nearly every week is a bad week for Donald Trump these days, but this week brought developments that, while extremely gratifying from my perspective, are monumentally, roaringly, Wagnerianly bad for the former guy. It now looks somewhere between probable and certain that as he seeks the presidency, Trump will be staring—at not one, not two, but three indictments—as well as at least one criminal trial, which we learned this week is going to happen in the thick of the presidential primary season.

I don’t want to speak too soon. The wheels of justice grind slowly, and they can roll very timidly where presidential office-seekers are concerned. But we’re getting closer with each passing week to being able to say that by running for and becoming president, Trump finally went too far and made his biggest mistake. If you’re a rich private citizen in this country, you can break the law all you want, short of things like actual murder, and the law might never catch up with you. But take a public office, and suddenly an entirely different set of laws applies to you, the scrutiny of your words and deeds—past and present—becomes white-hot intense, and the system takes your misdeeds far more seriously than a mere failure to pay your taxes. This can take a person who became accustomed to ignoring the law over the course of 50 years by surprise—though in fairness, it could be a big reason more white-collar criminals don’t run for president.

Let’s go through the three cases, with which you may have some familiarity. The first is the criminal indictment already unsealed, that of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, over the Stormy Daniels hush money and the whole National Enquirer “catch and kill” business. This week, Judge Juan Merchan (by the way, he is a native of Colombia; I’m starting an over-under pool on when Trump starts pointing this out) set the trial date for next March. Also on the schedule for next March: No fewer than 25 primaries—13 on Tuesday, March 5 (Super Tuesday), and another dozen following over the course of the month.

Picture it: It’s Tuesday, March 12. The date of the primary in the crucial state of Georgia, the state Trump most blatantly tried to steal in 2020. Ron DeSantis is in the Atlanta suburbs. Nikki Haley is in Columbus. Tim Scott is in Macon. Asa Hutchinson is in Augusta. Mike Pence is barnstorming his way from Valdosta to Albany to Vidalia. And Donald Trump is in a courtroom in Manhattan testifying, lying his brains out, as will be obvious to everyone watching except the MAGA people.

Case number two is the big one: where special prosecutor Jack Smith enters the chat. Reports came out this week that Smith could be within weeks—some say within days—of bringing charges against Trump. The Washington Post reported Thursday that two Mar-a-Lago employees moved boxes of papers the day before a June 2022 visit by FBI agents (this was not the raid—that was August—it was just a visit) looking to collect classified documents pursuant to a subpoena that May.

It could be a coincidence. (There are a lot more coincidences in this world than people think.) But it looks pretty weird. Legal experts seem to be in agreement that the classified documents situation represents Trump’s biggest legal Achilles’ Heel. And remember—Smith is also investigating Trump’s role in the January 6 attacks. We all saw Trump egg on the violence in a way that meets any human common-sense standard. But meeting a legal standard is a higher bar. So that may be harder to reach.

But the encouraging development along these lines this week? There is renewed speculation about what’s going on behind the scenes with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff at the time. CNN reported this week that Meadows is quietly advising the House Freedom Caucus on the debt-limit fight. But that report also noted that Meadows is no longer in touch with Trump, which has led to speculation about whether Meadows is cooperating with Smith. A former Defense Department counsel tweeted the CNN story and wrote: “If he’s cooperating, game over.” Others were skeptical that Meadows would cooperate against Trump. But prosecutors have leverage. If Meadows is cooperating, well, there’s probably no one, not even Melania, who possesses a fuller mental log of the things Trump did and said that day.

We circle back to Georgia to consider the third case: Fani Willis’s probe into Trump’s frantic search for the famous 11,780 votes he called for to be added to his short-of-Biden’s-tally total. Willis appears almost certain to bring an indictment against Trump in August, a date she announced a week ago today. (See what I mean about this being a spectacularly bad week?) This investigation has long seemed the most open-and-shut of all the cases against Trump, given that the whole world has heard him on the telephone instructing state officials to go find him the votes.

So, let’s assume indictments from Smith and Willis. When would those trials commence? In all likelihood these, too, would kick off sometime next year. (Though I suppose that maybe one will have to wait for the other; all indictments answered in the order they are received and all that,) Still, it’s just wild to imagine what this could all look like, what kind of presidential campaign we might have if one candidate is moonlighting as a semi-professional defendant.

We must, of course, admit of the possibility that the GOP will nominate Trump anyway and, by Election Day, he will be thrice acquitted.

But it sure seems more likely that a harsher outcome awaits him. Let’s just look at the post-presidential legal track record. In December 2022, the Trump Organization was found guilty on all charges of tax fraud. Earlier this month, a jury took about three minutes (okay, not literally) to agree that Trump sexually abused E. Jean Carroll. There’s a pattern here.

There remains the question of whether there’s a point at which this all becomes too much even for Republican primary voters. A third indictment may be a bridge too far; they might decide at long last that Trump’s no longer worth the trouble. But he’ll turn this into Armageddon. It will get ugly—perhaps terrifyingly so. But the end times are coming, all right—not for the world, but for Trump. If he’d stayed a private citizen, the law wouldn’t have gone to the expense and trouble of nailing him. But he became a public servant. As corrupt as our country and legal system are in many ways, you just can’t do anything you want as a public servant. The system eventually says enough. Let’s sit back and enjoy every delicious minute of watching him learn this lesson.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

It’s established fact that Donald Trump is deep in the legal soup. The Trump Organization was found guilty of criminal tax fraud. Trump was indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg over the payment to Stormy Daniels and those “catch and kill” payments that buried negative stories about him. A separate New York jury found that he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll.

That would be reasonably “impressive” for any gangster, but for Trump, it’s just the appetizer. Fani Willis, district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, is expected to drop the hammer by August. And special prosecutor Jack Smith continues to look like he’s loading the cannon with grapeshot, getting ready to indict Trump on both January 6–related charges and his … expropriation of classified documents.

But this week, we learned that it’s quite possible that none of that is the worst thing he may have done. Noelle Dunphy, who worked for Rudy Giuliani back in 2019, filed a complaint this week alleging all manner of grotesque behavior by her old boss. But even as I waded through that sordid muck, I gasped when I got to paragraph 132:

[Giuliani] also asked Ms. Dunphy if she knew anyone in need of a pardon, telling her that he was selling pardons for $2 million, which he and President Trump would split. He told Ms. Dunphy that she could refer individuals seeking pardons to him, so long as they did not go through “the normal channels” of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, because correspondence going to that office would be subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. 

What?

This hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves, partly because the bulk of her complaint is far more sensational and gross, as it has to do with allegations of forced sexual service and morning boozing, and partly because the news cycle has been pretty crowded this week.

But think about it. A president selling pardons is morally and ethically right up there with the Catholic Church selling indulgences, a practice that has gone down rather poorly in history—and that led, more or less, to the rebellion against the Church that became the Protestant Reformation. As Trump’s possible crimes go, it may not be quite the equal of trying to orchestrate the overthrow of the U.S. government. But it’s bad. It’s impossible to imagine any other recent American president having contemplated such a thing (Nixon? No, not even Nixon, I don’t think). But with Trump … well, of course this is just an allegation, but who on this earth—this earth, not Jim Jordan earth—thinks he’s above such a thing? And Giuliani? The Giuliani I knew 30 years ago would not have done such a thing. But this Giuliani?

Let me put it to you this way. Bill Barr was on Fox this week. Bret Baier asked Barr if he thought such an allegation could be true. Barr sighed: “Uh, I’m skeptical about that. I don’t think Rudy Giuliani would do that. I hope he wouldn’t, but I don’t know.”

Note that Barr expressed the hope that Giuliani wouldn’t do such a thing. But with respect to Trump, he expressed no such hope. Left unsaid but clearly implied: Of course Trump would do such a thing! And this is the guy who shilled for Trump on several occasions.

There’s reason to suspect there may be some fire behind this smoke because this has come up before. In January 2021, when everybody was obsessing over the insurrection, The New York Times reported on the “brisk market” in fees for Trump allies helping to arrange last-minute pardons for various people. There was the case of a onetime Trump adviser who was paid $50,000 to try to get a pardon for John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer convicted of selling classified information. The Times reported that Kiriakou was “separately told” (by whom, it didn’t say) that Giuliani could help him secure a pardon for … $2 million. Kiriakou rejected the offer. Someone told the FBI about it. Giuliani denied it.

Kiriakou appeared on Democracy Now! this week and told Amy Goodman of a meeting he had with Giuliani and others at Trump’s Washington hotel. Kiriakou said he asked Giuliani about a pardon. Giuliani got up and went to the rest room. Kiriakou asked the aide what just happened. The aide said, “You never talk to Rudy about a pardon. You talk to me about a pardon, and I’ll talk to Rudy.” Kiriakou said OK. The aide said: “Rudy’s gonna want $2 million.”

There it is. So paragraph 132 of Dunphy’s complaint didn’t materialize out of thin air (although the fact that it was public previously could conceivably mean Dunphy’s lawyers included it based on those news accounts).

Now let’s look at some of the folks Trump pardoned, or whose sentences he commuted, just before he left office. It was a long, long list. There were a lot of narcotics traffickers, and while this doesn’t exactly mesh with the Republican Party’s hard-line stance on the matter, let’s be kind and assume that some of those were actually sort of humane.

But there were at least seven or eight people who were involved in Ponzi schemes or other forms of fraud. I’m not accusing these people of anything. I’m just pointing out that Trump pardoned (or commuted the sentences of) people who probably had access to or could rustle up a significant amount of cash.

Trump’s already-known abuse of the pardon system is that he pardoned or gave commutations to so many people who were involved with him—Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and so on. This constituted a flagrant abuse of power. At the Constitutional Convention, when they were debating the pardon power, George Mason said the president “ought not to have the power of pardoning, because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself. It may happen, at some future day, that he will establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic” (big points for prescience there, eh?). James Madison rejoined that, well, Congress could always impeach such a president. Right.

So Trump has already violated the spirit of the pardon language. Now we learn he might have violated laws too (specifically, these laws). Again, we don’t know it to be true. But surely there’s good reason for the Justice Department to look. And it’s safe to say that this is unlikely to be the last shocking allegation we’ll hear about the man who remains the GOP front-runner for 2024.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

We hardly go a week without seeing yet another example of Republican hypocrisy. They claim to live according to God’s law and family values, and yet some hectoring moralists in their ranks will splash into the tabloids after getting caught in a love nest. They preach about the rule of law and then back every lawless move Donald Trump makes. They natter on about freedom, but when it comes to the freedoms of women and LGBTQ people, well... I could, as you well know, go on and on.

But here’s a particularly hilarious and galling example of Republican hypocrisy, on display in the ongoing debt ceiling fight. Last week, the House Republicans passed their debt-limit budget bill, with all but four members of their caucus voting aye. The bill puts off the debt limit problem for a year, but in exchange, it demands a raft of the usual right-wing priorities—work requirements for poor people getting government assistance, the repeal of student-loan relief, attacks on Joe Biden’s renewable energy priorities, and, just to show us all how proud they are of their hatred of science, boosts for fossil-fuel production.

The bill also would result in massive cuts to most government programs, because it shields the Pentagon, which eats up about 16 percent of the federal budget, from any trimming. Around two-thirds of federal spending goes to things Congress can’t really change like entitlements and interest payments. That places the remainder of federal spending under the guillotine. The White House says most domestic programs would face cuts of 22 percent.

The list of affected programs includes the usual things Republicans hate. But it also includes some things Republicans claim to love.

What am I referring to here? Well, let’s recall how, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, activists introduced the phrase “defund the police” into the public discourse. At the time, Republicans tried to hang that phrase on President Joe Biden and Democrats like stink on a pig. But while a handful of Democrats in deep blue districts took up the call, the rest of the party from Biden on down said no, we don’t support that. (Perhaps they should: If we lived in a world where we could have a rational debate about these things, we might be able to agree that police departments handle some matters that would be better attended to by social-service agencies, but that isn’t our world.)

Institutionally, Democrats have never wanted to defund the police. In fact, last year, Biden sought $37 billion in additional federal funding for police departments. The Republican debt ceiling bill, however, would defund the police! At both the local and federal levels.

Let’s look at the numbers. Federal spending on local law enforcement isn’t a huge program. But there are two categories of federal spending on police that are reasonably significant. The Community Oriented Policing Services program, or COPS, doles out $225 million in grants to local police departments. Another grant program called the Byrne-JAG hands out a little more, around $270 million or so. These dollars are used for personnel, equipment, crime prevention, and so on. A lot of money goes to small-city and small-town departments—which is to say, police departments in red America.

Democrats are more inclined, given their interests and priorities, to make noise about social-service cuts. They should do that—those cuts are unpopular too. Some examples: The Office of Management and Budget estimates that the GOP bill would result in the layoffs of 108,000 teachers, and 30 million fewer outpatient visits for veterans.

Americans generally like teachers and veterans. I have days when I think Biden should just roll over, let the Republicans have their way, and say to America, “Okay, folks, let’s live according to Republicans’ priorities for a while,” just so people can feel the impact of the cruelty and hypocrisy in their daily lives. But as a liberal, I actually give a crap about things like kids having an adequate supply of teachers and veterans getting decent care, so I’d rather not subject ordinary Americans to the full impact of the Republican Party’s grand social experiments, edifying though they may be.

Oh—I haven’t even mentioned the border! The southern border is just about all that Republicans talk about. Whenever there’s a huge story that runs against them in the news, a Trump indictment, or some other scandal, I flip on Fox to see how they’re handling it. And nine times out of 10, they’re handling it by yammering about the border. “Border” is the GOP’s safe word. But their debt ceiling bill would eliminate funding for 2,000 border agents!

Finally, their bill would eliminate funding for more than 10,000 FBI personnel. This no longer counts as hypocrisy, I suppose, since Trump has turned those people into deep staters. But it sure can’t be popular. And it will have obvious knock-on effects that could land heavily on ordinary people.

Biden and the Democrats have two roads they can travel here on the debt limit debate in these next three weeks. One is to highlight Republicans’ heartlessness. The other is to showcase their hypocrisy. I see no reason why they can’t do both, and I sure hope Democrats don’t ignore the hypocrisy angle. That theme would also highlight the fact that Republicans happily passed debt limit increases during the Trump presidency when they controlled the Senate and House—twice when they controlled Congress, and once when Democrats did (and Kevin McCarthy voted for all three, by the way).

Republicans do these things because they’re shameless, and they know that the average person is too busy living their lives to sit down and connect these complicated dots on their own. That’s why it’s the White House’s job to do that for them. It’s how Democrats win this fight.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

As Tucker Carlson begins to slither out of the news cycle, here’s a reminder to keep our eyes on the prize. The prize—that is, the real enemy of standards and decency and integrity—is Rupert Murdoch. Carlson was a symptom. An unusually disgusting and purulent (great word, look it up!) symptom, but a symptom all the same. The disease is Murdoch.

He has been destroying journalism for 50 years. I’ll get into some of that below. But right now, let’s focus on something that’s happening in England, which I can assure you is something that Rupert is worried about—maybe even more worried than he is about Smartmatic.

Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but, a month out from Prince Charles’s coronation, Prince Harry has been out there shredding his father’s reputation. Harry is part of a large group suing Murdoch’s British media empire, News Group Newspapers, over the old phone-hacking scandal, which Harry and other litigants claim went on far longer than known and extended to the Murdoch property The Sun (so far, only News of the World, shuttered after a massive settlement, has been implicated). In papers released Tuesday, Harry alleges that Queen Elizabeth II wanted to go after Murdoch’s media empire legally but that Charles called her off. This was allegedly because he wanted to stay on Rupe’s good side for the sake of Camilla—that is, so that Murdoch media outlets didn’t make any waves about her becoming queen. Charles may have feared another “Tampongate.”

The internal royal squabbling is an interesting curiosity. But what concerns us more over here is Harry’s crusade against Murdoch. Clive Irving explains in The Daily Beast: “Harry’s attack on the ‘grotesque and sadistic’ London tabloids is likely to bring more reputational harm. Murdoch’s lawyers know this. Harry’s refusal to settle out of court—as thousands of other hacking victims have done because they lack his kind of wealth to support protracted litigation—means that damning documents uncovered during discovery would suddenly be made public in court.”

Harry is out for blood. And unlike the thousands of regular-person victims of the phone-hacking scandal, such as the grieving parents of dead children, Harry has the money to go toe-to-toe with Murdoch in the courtroom. He doesn’t want to settle. He wants all the facts out there, and he wants Murdoch crushed.

The target, aside from Murdoch himself, is Rebekah Brooks, the odious former editor of News of the World who ran the tabloid while the phone hacking was going on. Brooks was acquitted in 2013 of the charge of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, and her lawyers managed to persuade the court that she hadn’t been actively involved in the hacking of people’s phones. Irving reports that Harry’s legal team has discovered new evidence that the hacking happened at The Sun while she was editor there. And they want the British public, and the world, to know. Irving writes that it is estimated in Britain that all this could end up costing Murdoch $1.25 billion.

And now let’s return to Smartmatic, the electronic-voting tech company that’s suing Fox News for $2.7 billion. On Wednesday, CNN reported that Fox agreed to hand over more documents to Smartmatic’s lawyers after the lawyers complained in a letter to the judge about “obvious gaps” in the material Fox had provided. Judge David Cohen is seeking a “broadening of discovery.” One Smartmatic lawyer previously vowed that the Dominion lawsuit had started the demolition of Murdoch’s empire and that Smartmatic would finish the job.

So, in both the United States and England, Murdoch’s ass is on the hot seat in a huge way. The costs still aren’t enough to kill his empire, in all likelihood. But with any luck, the reputational damage will be severe. So severe that pressure builds on cable companies to stop paying the carriage fees that are Fox News’s mother’s milk. These fees, not ad revenue, constitute a majority of Fox’s income. And just last week, Fox asked for a large increase in those fees, Brian Stelter reported. That was after the Dominion settlement but before the firing of Carlson. Fox’s ratings have tumbled since Carlson’s ouster.

I once spent an afternoon in the morgue of the New York Post looking at old papers from late 1976 and early 1977. Why? Because it was January 1977 when Murdoch took over ownership of the paper from Dolly Schiff, the longtime owner of the Post and ardent New Dealer. Schiff’s Post was one of the country’s leading liberal newspapers—and, in those days when there was little tension between liberalism and Zionism, a leading defender of both. And while it was tabloid, it wasn’t supermarket-ish.

Within a month or so, Murdoch’s henchmen had transformed the paper utterly. It was conservative, and it was trashy; whereas Schiff’s Post had shouted, Murdoch’s version screamed at the top of its lungs. Then he took over The Village Voice (just for the money—he didn’t try to change it ideologically), New York magazine, and a local New York TV news channel, and the race was on. It was unheard of at the time that one man should own two newspapers and a magazine. Unheard of and against the laws that then existed. Murdoch just got the laws changed.

He’s been destroying journalism ever since. It’s not even journalism, what his properties do. Oh, they do enough journalism for the purposes of cover. The New York Post has a good sports section. Fox News dayside reports on what happened today. But the point of both properties isn’t to cover the news; it’s to shape and distort and change it. In Britain, by eavesdropping on suffering people. In America, by turning its audience into raging reactionaries who hate their foes so much that they now oppose the democracy they’ve shared with those foes for 250 years. It’s a reign of terror that must end. And now, there is some actual hope that it might.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.