Never Trump Republicans come in for a lot of grief and often rightly so. But at least they’re not JD Vance. He’s the Yale graduate looking to start a political career whose 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy presented him as a voice for the forgotten culturally conservative culture of rural America who actually came from that world as opposed to Queens. An authentic intellectual from ‘real America’ who eschewed the hyperpartisanship of the times. Alas, it turned out that Trump was a political meal ticket after all. And now he’s deleting his old tweets asking God’s forgiveness for Trump to start running as the new MAGA senator from Ohio.
TPM Reader TL follows up on my discussion yesterday of Teddy Roosevelt and where he fits in the ranking of US Presidents, specifically whether the seemingly consistent decision to place him 4th is rating him too high. TL makes what I think is probably the best case that can be made, and it’s a pretty good one. It focuses on the fact that Roosevelt is in many ways the first modern President. He’s the first American President who approached the job in a way that would be fundamentally recognizable to us today.
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is now live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the infrastructure negotiation dance, as well as the dynamics around the Jan. 6 select committee.
Watch below and email us your theme song submissions and questions for next week’s episode.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.