10:23 p.m.: Needless to say this debate is a total mess. The way that this cranked-up weirdo Ramaswamy basically takes over the whole debate with his inane claims is the story in microcosm of the contemporary GOP.

10:11 p.m.: Pence helped himself with that little speech that he gave when he briefly took over the debate.

10:04 p.m.: DeSantis gives a highly principled explanation of why he has to dodge the question.

9:58 p.m.: Finally Christie at least justifies his being on the stage … I would say Christie did okay with that. But he could have done better. Sorta meh.

9:38 p.m.: Fascinating to me that Pence makes an unabashed, bible-based anti-abortion stand and then embraces the 15-week national ban. That’s a pretty good barometer of where the pro-life movement is.

9:26 p.m.: Fox just let them veto the climate hand raise. Amazing.

9:16 p.m.: Even though I expected it, it’s kind of amazing to me how much of this debate is being conducted as though Trump never happened.

9:14 p.m.: Kind of a small thing but Tim Scott said unemployment was 3%, the lowest ever when they lost their majority. Actually in November 2020 it was 6.7%.

9:08 p.m.: I was hoping Chris Christie would entertain me tonight. But this is weak. Mealymouthed.

8:58 p.m.: Tonight is going to be pretty traditional coverage for us. But we’re going to be doing more live, real-time coverage of some breaking events in the future. Likely election nights, perhaps major breaking news and possibly debates. So let us know what you think about that. I like being able to get immediate audio and video commentary but I don’t necessarily want to get the canned stuff from the cable networks. So we’ll be experimenting with that.

8:55 p.m.: Trey Gowdy: “All eight have something in common. They’re behind.” Good one. Lol.

8:52 p.m.: This debate could decide who will come in second place for the GOP nomination.

In today’s episode of the podcast, Kate Riga and I did a preview of tonight’s GOP debate. So if you’re going to be watching tonight try to listen before the show. We did our best to give pointers on what to look out for. It should be showing up in your feeds this afternoon if you subscribe.

It’s a bit off our radar. But I wanted to point your attention to this eye-popping story on defeated former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro embraced the Trump comparison in office and followed that pattern with his own failed insurrection which broke out after he refused to recognize his reelection defeat in 2022. Since then he’s been under a number of investigations into subjects ranging from his failed coup to various Watergate-like infractions in office to other instances of corruption. But the one that is his most immediate threat turns on his allegedly fencing fancy gifts he received from foreign heads of state at stores and auction houses in the United States.

In addition to the prosaic matters of corruption, securities fraud, free home renovations from a donor and obstructing federal investigations, Texas AG Ken Paxton’s upcoming impeachment trial in the Texas state Senate will include evidence that he used a fake Uber account to hide visits to his mistress as well as burner phones and secret personal email addresses.

Recently we were planning debate coverage. And to do that we went back and watched one of the early 2016 GOP debates. It was striking to me on a number of levels. Only seven years ago — but it was a lifetime ago, truly a different world in politics. A huge amount of the debate was about combating the ISIS threat. You had a bunch of grandstanding about the power and necessity of being willing to say the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism.” But the biggest difference was that hard-to-quite-capture dimension of nothing Republican presidential candidates say really mattering because of the unspoken presence of Donald Trump.

Trump was on the stage in this debate. But it was early. It was before the only real question was whether or not any of the candidates would be able to stop Trump. Today you might see Nikki Haley, or Mike Pence or Ron DeSantis making a speech or doing an interview. But it doesn’t really matter what they’re saying. Because whatever they’re saying isn’t actually what they’re saying. It’s a way to make an argument or communicate something else about the thing that can’t be mentioned: Donald Trump. It’s like a mime performance where the unseen object they’re reacting against is Donald Trump.

We’ve been covering different dimensions of this story. But I wanted to highlight what now seems to be the likely government shutdown this fall. We’ve had shutdowns before and by the standards of recent Republican high-wire acts and hostage taking events they’re relatively minor affairs. What is notable about this round of it is that there isn’t really any big budgetary impasse it’s over. We did that during the debt ceiling drama back in May. At some level it’s House Republicans wanting to re-litigate the fight they believe — reasonably enough — that they lost. But even that doesn’t capture the dimensions of it because that agreement has terms that apply to this kind of situation. Kevin McCarthy made them release their hostage.

Back in the Spring I wrote that I expected Ron DeSantis’s hopeless campaign to eventually be replaced by another GOP candidate memestock, and perhaps a succession of them. By this I mean another non-Trump candidate who gets hosed down with high-roller dollars, gets a lot of media attention and sugar-high narrative buzz like DeSantis did, and then inevitably crashes and burns because GOP voters actually want Donald Trump. The only surprise to me is that there hasn’t been any coalescence behind a new guy, even as DeSantis’s campaign has become little more than a running joke. The inevitable conclusion we can draw from that dog not barking is that the couple dozen or so billionaires who play a dominant role funding GOP campaigns have reconciled themselves to getting back on the Trump Train.

But not so fast?

One of Democrats’ pet peeves is that President Biden has not only overseen a robust economy with almost unprecedentedly low levels of unemployment, his policies actually have some decent claim to responsibility for that record. And yet he gets no credit for it. Not only has Biden been mired in low-40s approval for the last two years, his ratings on the economy are some of his weakest.

This is definitely annoying and certainly unfair (what isn’t?). But it shouldn’t seem new or unexpected. If you’ve been following politics closely for a few decades you’ll remember that Presidents Reagan, Clinton and Obama faced a very similar issue. All three presidents had a significant interval when the economy was demonstrably doing well and yet got zero credit for it or even any clear public recognition that the economy was in good shape.

One of the many interesting details in Josh Kovensky’s podcast interview with independent Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar was the discussion of what often seems like Vladimir Putin’s very American culture war politics. To Americans, these statements by Putin can come off as almost a kind of trolling or part of some common rightist, authoritarian playbook. Zygar argued that they are, for the most part, not aimed at Putin’s domestic audience. In short, Putin decided over the last decade that he needed new international allies. And those allies were less a set of particular countries — or not only that — than the right and far-right in North America and Europe. As an example, Zygar argued that Russia’s recent crackdown on trans rights had very little grounding in Russia’s domestic political dialog. It’s not that Russians are pro-trans rights. It just isn’t something that has much salience either way. The crackdown was more something Putin did to deepen his bond with the global right.