The Backchannel

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Moms for Liberty and Moms for Liberty-adjacent, right-wing school board moms like Bridget Ziegler and Clarice Schillinger, it’s that they know how to party. You’ll remember that late last year Schillinger, a one-time candidate for Lt. Gov of Pennsylvania and the head of a major anti-woke school board group in the state, was charged with a mix of offenses related to allegedly assaulting and boozing up minors at her daughter’s 17th birthday party. After a preliminary hearing on Monday, Magisterial District Judge Stacy Wertman held Schillinger over for trial on the same charges after hearing reality TV-style testimony about Schillinger’s, her mom’s and her then-boyfriend’s feral behavior corrupting the youth of Bucks County Pennsylvania — and in some cases just beating the crap out of the youth of Bucks County when they simply tried to escape her house.

Schillinger was released on her own recognizance pending trial.

Let’s go to the video (metaphorically speaking)…!

You’ve probably seen the stories about the UN Agency which allegedly had amongst its employees Hamas operatives who directly participated in the October 7th massacres in southern Israel. The story is both more and less than it seems. The background helps illuminate this as well as much of what we’ve seen over the last three months.

United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was founded in 1949 to administer refugee camps for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had either fled the fighting or were driven out by the Israeli military during both phases of the Israeli War of Independence, what Palestinians call The Nakba. (Most of this happened during the first phase of the war.) There were camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Those camps are still there 75 years later. “Camps” is a misnomer. Over time permanent buildings replaced temporary structures and tents. Schools, hospitals, civic buildings and businesses grew up. They are more like towns, or districts of towns. The vast majority of residents of the camps are third and fourth generation descendants of the original refugees of 1947-48. Under UNRWA’s framework they are also refugees. UNRWA still plays a central role administering these communities — running schools, hospitals, various civil services.

In the lead up to the 2022 midterm, I tried in vain to argue that Democrats needed to frame the election around a concrete promise to pass a law codifying Roe v Wade. Keep the House and the Senate and Democrats would pass a Roe law on a simple majority vote in the Senate. One of my takeaways from the 2022 election ended up being that voters to a great extent didn’t need politicians to spell it out for them. Voters understood the stakes well enough on their own and saw that abortion bans and presidential coups were all part of the same story of MAGA Republican extremism. But I have little question that making the promise more concrete and specific would have had an additional impact.

Yesterday President Biden on Twitter (and presumably via other channels) came pretty close to making that promise for the 2024 election.

This should absolutely be a centerpiece of the 2024 campaign.

Conventional wisdom can evolve in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Conventional wisdom isn’t necessarily valid, of course. The “conventional” label hints that it’s probably not, or at least that it’s incomplete. But conventional wisdom, regardless of its merits, can shape how real world events are perceived and thus the reality of how they unfold. I say all this as preface to note that the day-after reactions to the New Hampshire primary results seemed a bit different from what we heard and saw that night.

Kate Riga mentioned this in the podcast episode we recorded yesterday. We heard all these wild things on Tuesday night about Trump’s resounding victory, how the nomination race is essentially over. And of course it is over if we’re talking about whether or not Trump is going to be the nominee. But I’m seeing more and more comment from the insider commentators and newsletters finally getting around to the idea that while these results almost certainly lock down the nomination, they show general election weakness rather than strength.

Let’s come back to last night’s result. We’ve now had two contests on the Republican side. Donald Trump won 51% of the vote in Iowa (on the GOP side it’s not actually a caucus, just a straight vote) and 54% in New Hampshire. These are at best a thin showing for a former president who remains head of his party. David Kurtz is right that it’s hard to know just what the standard should be when the whole situation is so unprecedented and absurd. The rule in modern American politics is that when you lose a presidential election your career in politics is over. Add to that trying to overthrow the government and facing about a hundred felony indictments and you’d think that would be enough. But that’s obviously not the case. This is the world we’re living in.

Tonight is the night of the first and very likely the last meaningful primary of the 2024 primary calendar. Polls suggest a similar outcome to what we saw last week in Iowa: a bare majority for Trump, which in a normal contest would be a big win but is less clearly so when the candidate is the party leader and de facto incumbent. The difference is that unlike in Iowa where most of the remaining vote was split between Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, now most will go to Haley.

People will be talking all day about just where we should place the thresholds over which Haley overperforms and keeps some semblance of a faux primary campaign going or Trump does the same and gets everyone to finally admit that this thing is completely absolutely done.

I’d put the number for Haley somewhere between 35% and 40%. For Trump, maybe if he goes over 60%. The truth is I have no idea. By any reasonable calculus, if she can’t win in New Hampshire she can’t win anywhere. And really … it doesn’t matter. We’re talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin when there actually is no pin.

I wrote a few days ago that Ron DeSantis’s long campaign collapse was likely the most ignominious and vertiginous in the presidential primary era, which dates in stages from the 1960s and early 1970s. Some skeptics pointed to Jeb! in 2016 or Rudy Giuliani in 2008. But on a closer inspection neither flameout measures up to Ron’s. As evidenced by his legendary “Please clap” mix of exhortation and lament, Jeb! had an uncanny degree of self-awareness about the impending collapse of his succession plans that would cheat him of the prize. Giuliani had the political press in his hands. But his attempt to corner the 9/11 market was never enough to overcome his heterodoxy on issues like gay rights or serial-philandering in an earlier version of the Republican Party where those things mattered. His strategy of sitting out the early primaries and waiting until Florida, while a nice foreshadowing of Florida’s future as the home of Trumpism, was always correctly identified as a way to post-date the end of his campaign. Even the 9/11 brand was too long in the tooth by 2007. Joe Biden was able to make him a punch line with his famous one-liner.

The truth though is that DeSantis never had a chance. His humiliation was preordained and basically certain. Professional Republicans were at least a bit soured on Trump after the 2022 election, which seemed to make clear what 2018 and 2020 had strongly suggested: that Trump is an electoral loser. For professional Republicans there’s a bit more to it though. They’re completely down with Trump and Trumpism, as the last seven years have shown clearly enough. But they’re always going to have an eye out to move on. Part of what it means to be a political professional is to have a wandering eye for the new political horse, the new candidate, the new rising star, which is the usual path to professional advancement. More generously, it’s why you get into political work in the first place.

A Republican Party ruled by Donald Trump is one in which true advancement and greatness is always stymied and, to the extent it exists, always subject to his whims.

It’s been clear for some weeks that there is growing division in the Israeli war cabinet. Now it appears to be breaking into the open, with indications that a new election could come sooner than later.

First a bit of stage-setting and context to explain the moving pieces and what this all might or might not mean.

On October 7th, the day of the Hamas massacres in southern Israel, Israel was led by a narrow and very right-wing coalition government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel had been embroiled for most of the previous year in a highly polarized fight over the government’s effort to dramatically curtail the power of the country’s Supreme Court. The massacres shattered the public’s confidence in Netanyahu, which had kept him in power since 2009 with only one intermission in 2021 and 2022. Soon after the outbreak of the current war, Netanyahu was able to bring one of the two main opposition parties, National Union, into his government.

Over eight years Donald Trump has made it clear that if you cross him your career in Republican politics will be over. With Ron DeSantis’s campaign flatlining, Donald Trump seems to be moving ahead with settling the family’s outstanding business. What jumped out at me here was that his target is not a Mitt Romney (one of the only exceptions to the rule) or Adam Kinzinger or Liz Cheney. Next up appears to be one of the diehardest members of the rump of the Freedom Caucus, Rep. Bob Good of Virginia.

From Northern Virginia we have another one of those stories about significant election irregularities that you’ll likely never hear about since they don’t fit into the MAGA storyline that is all most political reporters seem to care about. I didn’t know about it myself until I got a note from longtime TPM Reader LB.

Our story starts in November 2020 in the Northern Virginia county of Prince William. The General Registrar in Prince William was Michele White. She resigned at some point in 2021, possibly because of the feral Trumper harassment that led so many election officials to quit during that period. She was replaced by a new registrar, Eric Olsen. Olsen found irregularities in down-ballot races in the 2020 election — but not ones great enough to affect the outcome of any race. Olsen then reported those irregularities to newly elected Republican state Attorney General Jason Miyares.