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Steve Inskeep
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Still on the air @NPR. Author of Differ We Must, a NY Times bestseller. penguinrandomhouse.com/books/670070/d…
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Presidential press secretary Dana White?
Trump says he “offered” the job, not that White accepted. But let’s consider this possibility, because it says something about the nature of the task.
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Trump says he “offered” the job, not that White accepted. But let’s consider this possibility, because it says something about the nature of the task.
1/2
“There is no voice in all America which has the faintest authority when the ballot speaks.”
- Andrew Carnegie, 1886
- Andrew Carnegie, 1886
“In the campaign to come, [Republicans] must battle over what their party stands for, if not trade wars on friend and foe, shooting wars in the Middle East, state capitalism, public debt, self-enrichment in office and unchecked executive power.”
economist.com/united-states/…
economist.com/united-states/…
www.economist.com Republicans are in for a brutal presidential contest And Democrats suddenly have a unifying agenda Interesting argument here.
This is a total hoot.View quoted post on X
About the only thing it gets correct is that 2024 Trump voters were "pissed." As the polls spell out, very clearly, they were angry about tariffs--a word weirdly not found in this post, but which exit polls showed 65% of voters dislike. There's a straight line between those punishing costs and Senate losses in Kansas, Iowa, Ohio (farm areas) and beyond.
Angry the WH instead spent this past year talking about ballrooms and the Kennedy center. Frustrated by the complete absence of a next-two-year agenda (85% are concerned by healthcare costs. Where is the GOP plan?)
They are also unhappy about the war, though the numbers might be different if the president been clear about an exit strategy. And not sure where the "smartest" (and most anonymous) pollster in the world got the Israel argument. Exit polls show that of the 51% of voters who said our support for Israel was "too strong," only 19% of even that subset of respondents were Republican. The vast majority of GOP voters said our support for Israel was "just right" or "not strong enough."
Amusing to claim the problem here was traditional conservatives, as they were sidelined. Tillis was run out of the party, dooming NC. As was Cornyn. The WH had a pure expression of its second-term Trump/Vance agenda and loyalty in its chosen candidate of Ken Paxton. That would be the smoking carcass sitting on a 12-point loss in. . . Texas of all places. Meanwhile, who exactly is even talking about "asylum"? That's just a smear-y effort to preemptively shut down valid criticism.
The GOP strength has always been in its coalition--free-marketers, defense hawks, cultural conservatives. Trump's first-term success came from largely following that Reagan playbook. The second-term leaned into me-too progressive populism--at the veep's urging--and it ain't working.
The weird thing is that the veep remains more obsessed with remaking the party than with winning. Winning will require a lot better understanding of what happened yesterday than what is on offer in this alternate-universe view.
