Former President Trump spoke at a GOP convention gathering in North Carolina over the weekend, where he not only gave his endorsement in the state’s crowded Republican primary for an open Senate seat, but also vowed to continue weighing in on races that will be crucial to the party’s midterm success.
The key ingredient to earning that coveted Trump endorsement, of course, remains fealty to the former president and his ongoing list of grievances.
Sometimes a writer will take a bundle of ideas that have been floating around in a lot of other peoples’ heads and commit them to paper with clarity and concision. If you are one of the other people in whose mind the ideas have been floating, seeing this happen can be both illuminating and annoying. But if someone else wrote them down before you did it likely wasn’t just a matter of speed. It was because you hadn’t done the work of taking the inchoate impressions and feelings that occupy all of our minds and whittling them down to concrete assertions and arguments that others can readily understand. We don’t really know what we think until we are able to commit it to the written word.
I got a decent amount of pushback on this rather pessimistic post I published Friday evening about the fate of the President’s legislative agenda – particularly for saying the White House was ‘adrift’. This is particularly about the President’s two big infrastructure bills. But it’s also about the President’s broader and quite ambitious legislative agenda – S1/H1 and a raft of other bills which would require some tweaking or squeezing of the filibuster because they can’t be passed through the 50 vote reconciliation process and they won’t get 60 votes.
First, it’s good to hear from you. If you’re involved in the process either at the White House or on the Hill or in the broader para-political process, please get in touch. Hit me at the main TPM email or my personal email and if you need a secure messaging option I can make that happen too.
On to the details.
