The Backchannel

For something like a year I’ve been predicting that Donald Trump is absolutely positively going to be the 2024 nominee. I was predicting that back when a lot of people really thought that Ron DeSantis was going to at least give Trump a run for his money. I don’t make confident predictions unless I’m certain there’s little chance of being wrong. But I must tell you that this result simply isn’t the victory most reporting makes it out to be.

The Republican version of the Iowa caucus is simply a vote, carried out by less formal means. Each participant writes down a name and that gets counted — no real caucusing. The final result shows Trump getting 51% of that vote.

That is not just a plurality win, the metric customarily used to judge this contest. It’s actually an absolute majority. Barely. (DeSantis has 21.2% and Haley 19.1%.) But everyone now recognizes that Trump is running as the de facto incumbent. Certainly he’s running as the universally recognized leader of the GOP. And yet he has only barely managed a majority in a state which — unlike, say, New Hampshire — is pretty tailor-made for his politics. To put that characterization into context, while Iowa is today is a fairly red state, it has long had a reputation as a state which has a very liberal Democratic Party and a very conservative GOP. The Iowa GOP caucus electorate especially is made up of a high percentage of conservative evangelical voters. It’s overwhelmingly rural. By any fair measure, 51% of those voters is underwhelming.

I wanted to flag a couple issues in the background of the ongoing Israel-Hamas War.

The first is a potential deal to end the war proposed by Qatar. After I describe that potential deal, I’m going to come back to note that just today Qatar has disputed that it floated such an idea. But I’m not sure we can take that denial at face value. So let’s start by describing the proposal, as reported by numerous sources.

Here’s the proposal.

Israel would, in stages, end its campaign in Gaza and withdraw the IDF from the Gaza Strip. Hamas, in stages, would release all Israeli hostages. Critically, Israel would then allow the top Hamas leadership in Gaza safe passage to go into exile abroad.

A couple of days ago I wrote “that the withdrawal from Afghanistan remains one of Biden’s shining moments even though I know absolutely no one agrees with me.” Since then I’ve gotten a steady stream of emails from TPM Readers saying, “No, there’re at least two of us!” So perhaps, in the words made famous by Arrested Development, there are dozens of us. In all seriousness, it’s good to hear. And I won’t ever stop believing this. As I wrote in that post …

The United States remained in Afghanistan for ten years after anyone had any good explanation for why we were there. Obama wanted to leave. But he got rolled by the Pentagon. Biden knew that the only way to really leave was to leave. Someone had to bite the bullet. He bit that bullet and paid a big price and didn’t look back.

As I thought about this this morning, I wondered: does anyone really think today that it would be better if we still had a couple thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan? Being completely out of the country is so obviously better that barely anyone would actually say this. Thus, the standard retort — that of course it was the right decision to get out, it just wasn’t handled well — is a dodge. The idea that you were ever going to completely withdraw from a country you’d A) been policing for two decades with a nominal government that B) had little ability to maintain itself without things getting ugly was a fantasy.

It’s a classic example of continuing to invest more in a failed investment not because there is any hope of getting a return but simply to put off ever having to write down the loss.

I had been planning to write a post today about a shift in the news coming out of Israel-Palestine and a shift in attitudes among the various countries which have been supporting Israel’s war effort, either openly or tacitly. But as I thought about it, the connections I intended to draw were too tenuous or perhaps too premature to really sustain the argument. Instead, I’m just going to share an anecdote and a quote which capture one element of this shift.

First, a bit of stage setting.

As I’ve argued in earlier posts, there are two overlapping but very distinct stories unfolding within Israel. Israel’s devastating onslaught in Gaza in retaliation for the October 7th massacres has broad, really overwhelming support within Israel. But it’s being led by a prime minister whose personal credibility and political standing were shattered by the massacres that triggered the war. As the intensity of the fighting has decreased, this contradiction comes more and more to the fore. As “day after” questions become more urgent, he is more openly toadying to the demands of the settler extremists who keep him in power even as they propose horrific new policies which at best complicate Israel’s position with its top allies and the Arab countries it still seeks to conclude peace deals with.

I wrote this post over the weekend about the continuing importance of the January 6th insurrection and the attempted coup it was a part of. I wanted to follow up on that post with some additional thoughts. One TPM Reader wrote in to tell me that, while she agreed with all the points I made, it was still a major error that the Department of Justice took so long to really get the bit in its teeth over January 6th. This can seem a bit out of whack today since Jack Smith is clearly all in on both Trump prosecutions. But that reader is right.

We’re now waiting to see when — almost certainly when — the Supreme Court will take up ex-President Trump’s appeal of Colorado’s decision to strike his name from the presidential ballot. As we’ve noted, there are many unknowns about just how the Court might respond, though it seems almost inconceivable that the Court won’t make a decision which forces Trump’s name back on the ballot.

But let’s at least consider the possibility that it doesn’t, that the Court allows Colorado and presumably Maine to keep Trump off the ballot. What then? Does this really have practical significance for the 2024 election?

I’ve been making my way through your emails about school board activism in your various necks of the woods. And I have to say, keep them coming, if for no other reason than the immense entertainment value. But seriously, for many other reasons too. I’m digging into them and trying to figure out which ones to report out first. But there are a few points that stand out in advance of that.

One of those points is something I’m half being reminded of, half learning, which is that there was a pretty big backlash against “anti-woke” school boards in 2023. It’s not universal, certainly. But it’s not just the story out of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, I’ve been telling you about for the last few days. There are examples all over the country. (I’ll be coming back to Bucks. Holy Crap, there’s a lot.) This morning I’ve just been reading up on one in a very backwoods part of Idaho, the West Bonner County School District. A lot of the same stuff: a bunch of freaks get washed in in 2021. They do all the anti-woke stuff and other stuff that’s more about just being against public education generally. There’s a successful recall, but not before the board brings in a new superintendent who is a former state legislator whose career went south when it turned out he might not actually live in the state. (Really.) The bigger problem is that Branden Durst had no background in education and didn’t even have the minimal accreditation the state requires for superintendents. He hung on for like three months before he had to resign. That was back in September.

As you can see, I’ve become very interested in the crazy story of “Cool Mom” Clarice Schillinger who seems to have been both a big time anti-woke/protect the kids activist while also hosting teen keggers on the side and sometimes going off and beating the crap out of the kids. But as I’ve learned over the last few days, there’s a fascinating and, from what I can tell, wildly crooked story about the Central Bucks School Board that goes way beyond her.

First, a bit of background detail: Doylestown is the metropolis of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and some of my interest in the story is that I know the place. Between vacations and summers and random stints I probably spent the better part of 4 to 6 months there during and after college. Or, to be super precise, in Furlong, Pennsylvania, an incorporated something-or-other right next to Doylestown. Also, in yesterday’s post I said that Aarati Martino, the wife of Paul Martino, the VC who has funded a lot of school board activism in Pennsylvania, had lost her school board seat in the Dem backlash in 2023. Not so. She lost her election. She was one of the anti-wokist candidates. But she wasn’t an incumbent — just a candidate.

Now let’s get down to business and discuss the super sleazy sweetheart deal, shall we? Excellent.

I wanted to catch you up on some new news about Clarice Schillinger, the anti-woke mom activist at the heart of a lot of school board pressure campaigns in Pennsylvania, especially in Bucks County, which is north of Philadelphia. On Sunday I flagged this totally over-the-top story about how Schillinger, her then-boyfriend and her mom had all been charged with beating the crap out of various teenagers they’d served alcohol to at a boozy birthday party she threw for her seventeen-year-old daughter. Schillinger allegedly punched one sixteen year old in the face three times as he and his friends were trying to leave the party and Schillinger was ordering them to stay. There are reportedly at least two cell phone videos of the assaults, one of which shows Schillinger lunging toward a group of teens and having to be restrained as the teens flee the home.

Now it turns out it wasn’t the first time cops had been called out to one of Schillinger’s teen keggers.

Since this will be the final Backchannel of 2023, I want to devote it to a note of thanks as we go into the new year. 2023 was the first full year of The Backchannel. We launched it at the end of 2022, and it is a members-only newsletter. So I’m writing to you as the members who make TPM not only possible but vital: Thank you.