Republicans

Donald Trump is reportedly considering announcing his 2024 bid tonight during a rally in Ohio with Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance, just hours ahead of Election Day.

It was reported last week that Trump was considering announcing his 2024 bid sometime this month, most likely in the week after the election. That timing is key in signaling just how quickly the national conversation will switch to 2024 post-midterms. Republican New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu summed up reports of Trump’s plan to announce before the new Congress is even sworn in: It’s a “terrible idea.”

Today reports surfaced that Trump is actually planning to move up his announcement to tonight. And Republicans are now reportedly even more in sync with the “terrible idea” assessment.

If Donald Trump runs again and wins in 2024, he’s reportedly already decided that the QAnon congresswoman who kicks teen activists and thinks that wildfires are started by secret space lasers will be part of his administration.

While it’s unclear whether he sees Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) as a good fit for a Cabinet position, department appointment or some type of White House role, Trump has reportedly told at least two people close to him that Greene would be “great” and he wants her “very close in a second term,” according to a new report from Rolling Stone. One of the sources told Rolling Stone that Trump specifically floated giving Greene a role in the Justice Department.

Politico just put out data from a new poll it conducted a few months back and the results are worth flagging: While most Republicans believe that the idea of Christian nationalism is unconstitutional, most also support declaring the U.S. a Christian nation.

In case you missed it, it’s worth looking at this memo that the big anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America sent to Republican lawmakers last week outlining messaging points and policy proposals for the party to push in the wake of Roe’s demise.

The messaging tight-rope they’re walking to avoid fully dancing on Roe’s grave remains interesting.

For weeks we’ve been watching Republicans squirm to find a messaging balance.

The party as a whole is attempting to walk a bizarre tightrope as leaders try to downplay Republicans’ unadulterated joy at the defeat of Roe, a social issue the GOP’s been using as a policy placeholder for decades, in the face of our evidence-backed reality: support for abortion access is at a record high among Americans across the political spectrum.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the Republican party going full QAnon and the latest follies of Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC).

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

He should’ve known.

As we know, Virginia’s new Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin is working furiously to make good on his campaign promise to essentially make combatting Republican grievances, real and imagined, the top priority of the Virginia state government. We wrote recently about his reversal of the state’s universal masking policy for schools. He also moved to ban the teaching of “inherently divisive concepts” (read: “Critical Race Theory”) in public schools on Day One.

During an interview with conservative radio host John Fredericks earlier this week, Youngkin announced a new tip line his administration had set up, asking parents to notify the state government with reports of public teachers “behaving objectionably,” aka talking about race and systemic racism in the classroom, concepts that the GOP continues to squeeze beneath the ill-suited label “Critical Race Theory” — an academic framework that’s ruffled the right into hysterics in recent months.

But some Republicans are already using the Biden administration’s new, common sense decision to pour gasoline on their baseless federal overreach fights.

The Food and Drug Administration removed two monoclonal antibody therapies from its list of approved treatments for COVID-19 this week, at least temporarily. Citing clinical data, the FDA said in a statement that it has found two of the treatments “are highly unlikely to be active against the omicron variant, which is circulating at a very high frequency throughout the United States.” HHS sent out a letter to state officials this week, alerting them that the federal government would stop handing out the treatments made by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly to states for now, according to the Washington Post which obtained a copy of the letter.