Trump’s primary success in 2024 comes down to whether party elites and the media have learned from their mistakes in 2016.
In less than 36 hours, Joe Biden will be sworn in as the next president of the United States. But the magnitude of his victory has been overshadowed by the political fallout from the January 6th siege on the U.S. Capitol by President Trump’s supporters, which resulted in five deaths and President Trump becoming the first president in U.S. history to be impeached twice.
With a deeply unpopular outgoing president as well as the loss of the Senate majority in a traditionally red state, it’s no surprise that Republicans are already talking about rebuilding the party ahead of the 2024 GOP presidential primary without Trump. And these aren’t just Lincoln Project-style Never Trump Republicans; rather, they are self-styled pragmatists who, as POLITICO’s Tim Alberta put it, recognize the “party’s ceiling is stupidly low [and] they need to shed Trumpism” in order to win electoral majorities at the national level again. …
In the era of Donald Trump, nothing has seemed as unassailable as Republican partisanship.
Last Tuesday, Georgia voters elected Democrats Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the U.S. Senate, nine weeks after delivering the state to the Democrats in a presidential election for the first time since 1992. President-elect Joe Biden’s sunbelt victory was stunning enough; but the defeat of two Republican senators in an off-year election proved to be the clearest repudiation of President Trump.
To be sure, incumbent Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue were poor candidates in their own right. Loeffler was appointed to her seat by Governor Brian Kemp in December of 2019, and Trump’s public berating of Kemp in the weeks leading up to the run-offs only reminded Republican voters that she was not their choice for the seat. …
Local activists’ success in getting cities to cut funding for police departments contrasts with a national political environment that remains wary of Black movement politics.
Whether it’s Donald Trump’s shocking electoral victory in 2016 or Joe Biden’s solid but smaller-than-anticipated defeat of Trump in 2020, Black protest movements have been blamed for the Democratic Party coming up short in presidential elections. For example, following a wave a Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2016, author Mark Lilla penned a notorious op-ed in the New York Times arguing that Trump’s strong backing by working class whites, once a reliably Democratic constituency, represented a backlash to liberal identity politics. Similarly, following the Defund The Police movement in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd this past summer, Virginia Rep. …
For all its problems, Band Aid’s 1984 hit “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” reminds me of a spirited internationalism I find missing amidst the global pandemic.
Having spent the past five years working part-time retail jobs during the holiday shopping season, I have encountered a number of Christmas songs that I would have never bothered to listen to if they weren’t in constant rotation over the store’s speaker system during my daylong shifts (I’m not a Christmas music hater or anything, but I rarely stray from the old school R&B renditions of Christmas songs I grew up hearing in my parent’s house). Earlier this week, one of those songs was the 1984 hit “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, released by the UK group Band Aid to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. …
In a series of Twitter posts shooting down Democratic calls for unity in the wake of the presidential election, President Trump’s most famous TV nemesis proves that resentment is the engine of conservative politics.
While states continue to count ballots in some of the biggest population centers around the country, one result that is clear from the November 3rd presidential election (other than who is going to be the next president) is that President Trump is something of a turn out machine for the GOP. He received at least 7 million more raw votes this year than in 2016, all but sealing the party’s Senate majority and gains in the House and state-level races.
Still, Democrats managed to overcome a huge upswing in turnout among Republicans with one of their own, delivering a decisive (though smaller than expected) victory to President-elect Joe Biden in the electoral college. President Trump has not conceded the race however, choosing instead to cling to the fantasy that the U.S. …
The early aughts classic rejects the romantic potential of internet technology that ‘You’ve Got Mail’ embraced.
If timelessness is a staple of the American romantic comedy, then 1998’s You’ve Got Mail broke all the rules of the genre. The film, about two people who fall in love over the internet despite being rival business owners in real life, is so wielded to the technology of the day (America Online, or AOL) that it would hardly muster romantic feelings in someone who did not experience the service firsthand. Even for those of us who are old enough to remember the anonymity and creative freedom of AOL’s chat rooms and instant messenger, the few years of their dominance aren’t really missed — AOL was soon replaced by much faster (and less deafening) broadband services. …
Support for defunding police departments remains extremely low, but the movement has mobilized left activists in a way the Democrats’ anti-Trump resistance never has.
Last Saturday, former Vice President Joe Biden acquired the 1,991 delegates needed to become the Democrat’s presumptive nominee for president. This was not a major development in the primary race given that Biden had been running unopposed since April, but he released a statement reaffirming his role as the “restoration” candidate that would bring back competence to government. “The country is crying out for leadership,” Biden wrote. “Leadership that can unite us. Leadership that can bring us together... We need a president who cares about helping us heal — now.”
The Biden campaign’s focus on Trump’s corrosion of the executive mirrors how Democrats have mostly operated as an opposition party over the past three years. Not only have they moved to punish Trump’s abuse of power (culminating with impeachment proceedings in the Democrat-controlled House), they have sounded the alarms on the downstreaming of Trump abuse of power to other areas of government, namely the Justice Department. …
A sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden has forced Democrats to come to terms with the political costs of being accountable to the Me Too movement.
***Update 4/29/20: Since I published this post on April 15, a former neighbor of Tara Reade has come forward to corroborate Reade’s claim that she told people about Biden assaulting her around the time of the incident. Also, a video clip has surfaced from a 1993 episode of Larry King Live in which a caller, whom Reade says is her mother, asks for advice for her daughter who left her job on Capitol Hill due to problems with a prominent senator. Based on this evidence, I believe Tara Reade is telling the whole truth about what happened to her.
Last month as former Vice President Joe Biden took a near-insurmountable lead in the Democratic primary race, Tara Reade, a former staffer in his Senate office in the early 1990s, came forward with a shocking allegation: then-Senator Biden had sexually assaulted her on Capitol Hill. …
Elizabeth Warren won’t save the Democratic Party from its bitter divisions. No candidate will.
Back in 2016, there was nothing I was more certain of following Donald Trump’s shocking electoral victory than the need for Democrats to heal the divide the primary had left between moderates and progressives in the party. I knew the divisions were more complex than center versus left, and that this framing wasn’t entirely fair to women and people of color prioritizing racial and gender justice issues. …
‘Ally McBeal’ set out to prove women weren’t better off in a white-collar world policed by Me Too-style feminism. Given the movement’s current backlash, did the show get it right?
Two years after the New York Times and the New Yorker uncovered decades of sexual assault allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, there has been a wave of criticism of Me Too, the anti-sexual harassment movement launched in the wake of the Weinstein scandal. As other high-profile figures like former Minnesota Sen. Al Franken became targets of activist backlash despite facing less egregious accusations than Weinstein, many now question if the Me Too movement has gone too far.
In a 2018 op-ed New York Times columnist Bari Weiss slammed the movement’s transformation “from female empowerment” to “an emblem for female helplessness” following a story published by Babe.net in which an anonymous woman claims actor Aziz Ansari assaulted her. …
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