Former NBA Draft Pick Is the GOP’s Latest Unhinged Senate Candidate

Plus: The Senate is set for another immigration faceplant.

May 21, 2024

Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images for BIG3

From draft bust to Senate bust

The Republican Party of Minnesota endorsed former NBA player and present MAGA conspiracist Royce White to be the party’s nominee for U.S. Senate in Minnesota. If he wins the nomination later this summer, White will face off against incumbent Amy Klobuchar in November.

At the Minnesota GOP convention, Steve Bannon appeared via video message to introduce White, who went on to win 67 percent of the vote on the first ballot. But while these numbers are impressive, White’s Senate bid could still run into trouble if he succeeds in capturing the nomination on August 13. That’s because he is one of the most unhinged Republican candidates for national office in years.

White, I should say at the outset, has spoken publicly about having mental health issues. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. It’s his views and his rhetoric that are especially troubling.

Some background on White: The Houston Rockets picked him up in the first round of the 2012 NBA draft.1 He would go on to fight with the team and not play a single minute. Former Houston General Manager Daryl Morey mused that White could be “the worst first-round pick ever.”

Fast-forward a few years and White’s political career comes into view. The former basketballer organized Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 before substantially revising his politics and mounting a right-wing challenge to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in 2022, but he could not win that year’s GOP primary.

Over the last few years, White has become a regular guest on Alex Jones’s InfoWars programs. White’s Twitter feed is littered with posts referring to women and men as “bitches,” “fags,” and “whores,” and he declared “the real issue is the Jews” while tweeting about white nationalist Nick Fuentes’s appearance on InfoWars. His targets range from random users in his mentions to primatologist/anthropologist Jane Goodall.2 White is also particularly fond of the word “cunt.” The many politicians and public officials he has called the c-word on his public account include:

Backing a candidate who speaks and acts in this way is a strange decision for a state party, and it gets even harder to understand in light of the fact that it’s a critical race that a steadier Republican candidate could at least have a shot at winning. But the strangeness evaporates when you consider this decision in the context of our political era. It doesn’t break with GOP political custom so much as provide a particularly egregious example of it.

The state party’s endorsement has given White significant momentum along the way to actually obtaining the nomination. He has a shot in part because of the limited field of other Republican candidates: The Minnesota GOP does not have a deep bench, and donations aren’t exactly flowing in. White has raised $10,754.29 as of the last filing deadline in March. He also loaned his own campaign $100 last September.

Not exactly times of plenty—but even so, the only Republican candidate to outraise White in campaign donations is Navy veteran Joe Fraser, who had by the end of March raised just a few bucks more than $45,000. Contrast this with Klobuchar, who raised $1.68 million last quarter to end the period with $5.8 million cash on hand. Klobuchar’s war chest would put her in a comfortable position heading into any kind of statewide race, even a competitive one, but she doesn’t have to worry about that: Fraser, White, and their fellow GOP primary candidates aren’t going to be able to do much more than throw pennies at her campaign Escalade as it cruises by.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) doesn’t seem to take issue with candidates like Kari Lake, Herschel Walker, or many of the other candidates whose political radioactivity has obliterated Republicans’ hopes in past elections. So to take the temperature in Washington, I sought out Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), the NRSC chairman. When I asked Daines if it was wise for the state party to back White, Daines said:

I think they need to find candidates that can win both primaries and generals, and I think he’d have difficulty winning a general election.

I followed up by asking Daines if the NRSC will endorse White if he does end up winning the primary. “I don’t think he could win a general election,” he reiterated.

Daines’s conditional opposition to White is typical of today’s GOP. His only stated problem with White is the candidate’s perceived inability to win elections. White’s real flaw is his likely loss to Klobuchar, not his character, which is the reason for that political vulnerability in the first place. It’s no surprise that from the top down in the current Republican party, everything that matters is secondary to winning: character, words, actions, even criminal behavior. It all gets a pass in the Trump era.

What is dead may never die

Not content with its current list of failures this Congress, the Senate is intent on adding to it by scheduling a vote on another immigration bill this Thursday.

The standalone border security and immigration bill will strongly resemble the failed border security compromise that a bipartisan group of senators attempted to couple with a foreign aid package earlier this year. Because the foreign aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan already passed both chambers and was signed into law by President Biden in April, the immigration policy mulligan should in theory be less politically toxic for Republicans.

“All those who say we need to act on the border will get a chance this week to show they’re serious about fixing the problem,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a floor speech Monday. Schumer added:

The bill we’re voting on this Thursday is practically the same bill that Senators Murphy and Sinema and Lankford and others negotiated three months ago. Republicans agreed to the substance of the bill. It is not at all some new measure or something that comes only from the Democratic side.

But this bill is widely expected to fail by an even wider margin than its predecessor did. After former President Donald Trump intervened to scuttle the last attempt, Republicans allowed the bill to sink—and this, despite branding the situation at the southern U.S. border an urgent crisis that could prompt another 9/11 if somebody, somewhere failed to do something about it.

Even if by some miracle the border proposal did pass the Senate later this week, it has already been declared “dead on arrival” in the House. In a joint statement Monday, the House Republican leadership team said:

For more than three years now, Congressional Democrats have stood by while the Biden Administration has opened our borders to criminal drug cartels, terrorists, and untold millions of illegal immigrants. Now, Leader Schumer is trying [to] give his vulnerable members cover by bringing a vote on a bill which has already failed once in the Senate because it would actually codify many of the disastrous Biden open border policies that created this crisis in the first place. Should it reach the House, the bill would be dead on arrival.
Since the beginning of this Congress, the House has passed multiple pieces of bipartisan legislation to secure the border and deport criminal illegal immigrants, including the Laken Riley Act. All of them have been blocked by Schumer and Senate Democrats. The Secure the Border Act (H.R.2), which would end the border catastrophe by resuming construction of the border wall, ending the exploitation of parole, reinstating Remain in Mexico, and ending catch-and-release, has also been collecting dust on Schumer’s desk for over a year. If Senate Democrats were actually serious about solving the problem and ending the border catastrophe, they would bring up H.R. 2 and pass it this week.

Demanding border security reforms as a condition of unrelated legislation but without actually acting on them when the other party obliges has become a regular obstruction tactic for House Republicans during the 118th Congress. Passing a substantial bill, palatable to both parties, containing the most conservative immigration law in a generation sounds like a GOP dream scenario made real. But the dream is being deferred—at least until after the election, and likely beyond that.

The failed vote will have one potentially advantageous upshot for the Republicans’ colleagues across the aisle. Vulnerable Senate Democrats will have the opportunity to back strong immigration reforms and increased border security provisions while decrying Republicans as unwilling to tackle the issue. This was a key component of Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi’s victory in the special election to fill George Santos’s seat. Many Democrats want to adapt Suozzi’s approach for use in their own states and districts.

Everything everywhere all at once

I wanted to share a recent piece in the Atlantic by W. David Marx titled “The Diminishing Returns of Having Good Taste.”

To draw from my own example, there was much respect to be gained in the 1980s from telling friends about video-game cheat codes, because this rare knowledge could be obtained only through deep gameplay, friendships with experienced gamers, or access to niche gaming publications. As economists say, this information was costly. Today, the entire body of Punch Out codes—and their contemporary equivalents—can be unearthed within seconds. Knowledge of a cheat code no longer represents entrée to an exclusive world—it’s simply the fruit of a basic web search.
Admittedly, an increased difficulty in impressing friends with neat tips and trivia hardly constitutes a social crisis. And perhaps benefiting from closely kept secrets was too easy in the past, anyway: In my Punch-Out example, I gained a disproportionately large amount of esteem for something that required very little effort or skill. But when these exchanges were rarer—and therefore more meaningful—they could lead to positive effects on the overall culture. In a time of scarcity, information had more value, which provided a natural motivation for curious individuals to learn more about what was happening at the margins of society.

I found Marx’s example applicable to my interests as well. At an airport recently, a stranger approached me to ask where I got my shoulder bag. While I was able to experience the euphoric high that comes from telling someone, “I got it in Paris,” the man immediately followed up with, “Where in Paris?” I don’t gatekeep, so I told him. If he really wants the bag, he can now hop online and snag one for himself with just a few clicks.

Maybe that’s a good thing—for that individual, at least. But as Marx writes, the immediate availability of anything and everything we might want has both desirable and undesirable effects on culture, and it could even be slowing innovation.

Read the whole thing and see what you think.

At 6-foot-8, White would be, if he were somehow elected, tied with John Fetterman as the tallest senator in office. The tallest senator ever to serve, Luther Strange, who finished out Jeff Sessions’s term in 2017-18, is 6-foot-9.

The world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees has got to be the unlikeliest person to hate—or maybe Elmo is, actually.