‘In a Way Only Donald Trump Can. . .’
Plus: Three House races to watch, tonight and later.
An interesting open letter in Axios this morning:
Sixteen Nobel prize-winning economists are jumping into the presidential campaign with a stark warning: Former President Trump’s plans would reignite inflation and cause lasting harm to the global economy if he wins in November . . .
“While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we all agree that Joe Biden’s economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump,” the 16 economists write in a letter, first obtained by Axios.
Then again, if you’re Trump, what do you care what a bunch of econ eggheads think anyway? Bunch of deep-state gobbledegook, probably. Happy Tuesday.
IT’S HAPPENING TONIGHT! Bulwark+ founding members can ask Tim and former Rep. Adam Kinzinger anything on their mind on tonight’s stream, starting at 9 p.m. Eastern.
‘In a Way Only Donald Trump Can. . .’
Last week, Donald Trump found himself on a podcast hosted by some friendly, not to say sycophantic, venture capitalists. They told him that we need more high-skilled workers in this country. A demagogue aims to please, and so Trump told his hosts—and their audience of wealthy donors and potential donors—that he couldn’t agree more.
“What I want to do and what I will do is you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country. And that includes junior colleges, too.”
Anti-immigration Trump supporters reacted negatively. The Trump campaign walked Trump’s promise back the next day.
And the day after that, when Trump gave two speeches, the green card promise was nowhere to be found.
Surely, you’re thinking, some of Trump’s respectable, business-oriented supporters expressed disappointment when Trump abandoned his pledge to increase high-skilled immigration?
Nope.
Indeed, what was to be found in the two speeches Trump gave the next day, Saturday, was a different kind of immigration idea: fight clubs for migrants.
Trump told a conference of conservative Christians in Washington, and then a rally of supporters in Philadelphia, that he’d suggested the idea to Ultimate Fighting Championship President Dana White.
“I said, ‘Dana, I have an idea. Why don’t you set up a migrant league of fighters and have your regular league of fighters. And then you have the champion of your league—these are the greatest fighters in the world—fight the champion of the migrants. I think the migrants’ guy might win, that’s how tough they are.’”
Trump reported that White didn’t agree with the proposal. But Trump said it was “not the worst idea I’ve ever had,” calling migrants to the United States “nasty”and “mean.”
Surely, you’re thinking, some of Trump’s respectable, faith-and-family-oriented supporters expressed disapproval of Trump’s migrants-fight-for-our-entertainment proposal?
Nope.
The Respectable Republicans™ are all on board. And when Trump toys with them as cats do with mice, they don’t even squeak up.
Last night, Scott Jennings, a former George W. Bush and Mitch McConnell aide turned professional “respectable” Trump apologist, wouldn’t say a word on CNN critical of Trump’s cavalier dehumanizing of immigrants. Instead, he praised the leader of his party: “In a way only Donald Trump can, he is drawing attention to the violent activity that we have seen in places all over this country.”
When an establishment type says, “In a way only Donald Trump can,” he’s about to endorse some reprehensible Trump statement. He’s about to praise Trump, while of course implicitly signaling: It’s not the way we would say it in our C-suite or country club. We wouldn’t want to be seen at those fight clubs. But no, no, no: We’re certainly not criticizing him.
One can say this: In a way only Donald Trump can, he has exposed the moral cowardice of today’s conservative elites and the political cravenness of today’s Republican establishment.
—William Kristol
Party Fights
A few interesting House narratives to keep an eye on this week:
New York’s 16th District: A bitter fight over the ideological direction of the Democratic party; the most expensive House primary battle in history. It all wraps up today, as Rep. Jamaal Bowman—one of Congress’s most progressive members—fights desperately to stave off a formidable challenge from Westchester County Executive George Latimer.
Back in 2020, Bowman was the one making an incumbent sweat: He successfully toppled 16-term Rep. Eliot Engel amid a wider progressive effort to unseat longserving party moderates. He’s had some odd moments in Congress—most notably when he pulled a fire alarm in an apparent attempt to delay a House vote, a move that led to his pleading guilty to a misdemeanor and being censured by the House last year.
But it’s his ferocious opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza that has emperiled his seat. Bowman was among the first members of Congress to call for a ceasefire just days after Hamas’s October 7 massacre last year, a stance he’s doubled down on at every opportunity since. That drew both Latimer and shock-and-awe levels of spending from pro-Israel groups into the race. Of the $24 million spent in the contest, more than $14 million has come from a group affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Heavily outspent and trailing in the polls, Bowman, who is black, has supplemented his attacks on his white opponent’s big-money donors with more vitriolic personal rhetoric: “He also is not just anti-black racist, he’s anti-Muslim racist,” he told Politico earlier this month.
Colorado’s 4th District: Here, by contrast, is a total snoozer of a Republican primary, where Rep. Lauren Boebert is expected to cruise to another nomination tonight. What’s interesting is how she’s getting there.
Boebert is a rare breed this cycle: a carpetbagging incumbent. Her current district is the mountainous 3rd, where a comfortable R+7 partisan advantage was just barely enough last cycle: Democrat Adam Frisch, who essentially campaigned as a personal referendum on Boebert’s ridiculous antics, fell just 546 votes short of unseating her.
This time around, things looked even less promising. Boebert was going through a messy divorce and careening from scandal to scandal: Last September, she was kicked out of a performance of the musical Beetlejuice for causing a disturbance that involved vaping in the theater, singing loudly, and groping her date. Meanwhile, Frisch was running for a rematch and raking in huge sums. So Boebert simply opted out—announcing she was moving and running in the R+13 district left open by retired Rep. Ken Buck instead.
This was far from a foolproof plan. Just ask Madison Cawthorn, another scandal-plagued melted-brain MAGA Republican, who lost his primary last cycle after trying to hop to a redder North Carolina congressional district.
But Boebert was lucky: She had strong name ID, lots of cash to spend courtesy of Donald Trump and House leadership, and a brace of no-name goofball challengers who failed to consolidate around a Boebert alternative. Seriously, here’s Slate:
Despite Boebert’s own unserious reputation, though, her competitors had problems of their own. [House Minority Leader Mike] Lynch had to quit his leadership post in the Statehouse after a 2022 drunk driving arrest surfaced. [Former state Rep. Ted] Harvey was under scrutiny for allegations of having run a “scam PAC” that had spent an unusually high amount of its funds raised on “operating expenses.” [State Rep. Richard] Holtorf, who once was in such a hurry to cast a vote against abortion rights that he dropped his gun on the Capitol’s marble floor, revealed that he had once paid for a girlfriend’s abortion. (He also said that he had once “had another beautiful woman” whom he’d impregnated but that the child had been put up for adoption.) In a January debate, six of nine candidates raised their hands when asked whether they’d been arrested, and Boebert and Lynch gave each other a high-five. In other words, groping a date at Beetlejuice: The Musical wasn’t that atypical of a Sunday night by the field’s standards.
A plot twist here: It’s not impossible that the next Congress could see Frisch and Boebert serving together.
Arizona’s 8th District: The primary in this Republican district isn’t until next month, but it’s already gotten horribly ugly. The matchup between former allies Abe Hamadeh—who lost his race for attorney general in 2022—and failed Senate candidate Blake Masters pits Trump against the ugliest forms of Trumpism.
Hamadeh is an interesting figure—a lawyer, veteran, and onetime centrist-ish Republican who realized his ticket to GOP success was to reinvent himself as a hardcore election denier. Masters is a much weirder dude: a Peter Thiel acolyte who spent last cycle trying to channel Terrence Malick in his campaign ads and waxing eloquent about his admiration for the Unabomber. On policy, they’re very similar: They back Trump on everything.
This cycle, though, it’s Hamadeh who got the blessing of the Orange King. Trump’s endorsement is the alpha and omega of his pitch.
So what’s a guy like Masters to do? Lean hard into the policy of Trumpism, for one thing: While Hamadeh’s yard signs simply say “Trump Endorsed,” Masters’s say “DEPORT ILLEGALS NOW! NOW! NOW!”
Masters is channeling Trump’s ugliest insults, too. “What we don’t need is someone with no wife and kids, right?” he said in a campaign video last month. “No skin in the game.” Another Masters ad said Hamadeh, who grew up Muslim, “supported Chuck Schumer’s amnesty bill—maybe because Abe’s parents were illegal immigrants.” The same ad spotlights a comment Hamadeh made as a teen on an online forum for Ron Paul fans that “America was founded on Islamic principles,” laid over a picture of Hamadeh on a pilgrimage to Mecca, which he made while deployed overseas. An ad from an outside group supporting Masters goes farther, calling Hamadeh a “terrorist sympathizer.”
—Andrew Egger
Catching up . . .
Half a million people in Gaza are facing starvation, U.N.-backed report says: New York Times
WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange to be freed after pleading guilty to U.S. espionage charge: Reuters
U.S. to Hezbollah: Don’t count on us to stop an Israeli attack: Politico
Quick Hits
1. More on the ‘Migrant Fight League’
Jill Lawrence is must-read today:
IN 1835, P.T. BARNUM BOUGHT an enslaved black woman named Joice Heth and marketed her as George Washington’s 161-year-old, forty-six-pound nurse—“The Greatest National and Natural Curiosity in the World.” She was “the first human oddity” his circus ever exhibited, but far from the last.
Nearly a century later, circusgoers could see spear-carrying men in loincloths; Clicko, “the wild dancing bushman” of Africa; and “Genuine Ubangi Savages” with “mouths and lips as large as those of full-grown alligators,” also advertised as “monster-mouthed” savages and the “World’s Most Weird Living Humans From Africa’s Darkest Depths.” There were Asians, Africans, and Native Americans—actual human beings—on display at fairgrounds, theaters, and zoos across America and Europe.
These were the types of images that jumped to my mind with Donald Trump’s suggestion—twice in one day—that migrants fight each other for the entertainment and profit of others. “These people are tough, and they’re nasty, mean,” he told Christian conservatives at a Faith & Freedom Coalition event Saturday in Washington. “They’re going to start hitting us very hard. These people are bad.” He added: “We have probably close to 20 million people [actually, more like 11 million] that came in from all parts of the world and they’re going to have to be gone. They came illegally. Many, many people coming in from prisons and mental institutions.”
Trump floated the “migrant fight league” again in Philadelphia, as well as the slurs, generalizations, conflations, and exaggerations he’s been pounding at since 2015: Undocumented immigrants are not wonderful people, they are “drug dealers, gang members, killers in so many different ways. . . . On Day One I will seal the border, stop the invasion, and send Joe Biden’s illegal aliens the hell back home.”
2. Bashful Bergum
If you caught our show last week in Denver, you heard JVL’s argument for why North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum is Trump’s likeliest pick for running mate. One big reason why: He’s a bland guy who won’t take the spotlight off the boss and runs no risk of being seen by anyone as the heir apparent.
Those qualities were on full display during Burgum’s latest CNN appearance the other day, where he seemed to be actively striving to avoid saying anything that could pass for an actual thought:
Kaitlan Collins: What would you bring to the ticket, specifically, if you’re on it? Would it be your business experience? You talk about governing . . . why should he pick you, basically?
Bergum: Well, I think that’s up to President Trump. President Trump understands the criteria that he wants. He’s gonna make that choice at the time he makes it. He’s got a lot of great choices. I think everybody in the whole country maybe knows my backgroun, which is both success in business and success in the executive branch as governing. But that’s his choice on what criteria that he wants.
And again, when we’ve got this big week and the big debate going this week, nobody’s really thinking about the VP thing this week, and we should really be focusing on, how is Joe Biden going to defend his record on the open border . . .
Collins: But you’re one of President Trump’s busiest surrogates. You make arguments like that right there multiple times on cable news . . . Do you think that you’re best positioned to serve on his ticket?
Bergum: I think that question is up to President Trump.
Collins: But if he’s watching right now, what’s your argument to him, I guess, for why you would be a good choice?
Bergum: Well, that’s a conversation between President Trump and myself. But I think right now I’m doing what I think that everybody that cares about the future of this country should be doing, which is understanding that if you care about inflation . . . then you should be out campaigning for President Trump. There is no expectation that Catherine and I have on this thing about some job in the administration or anything else.
“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Trump’s superpower is that he is a walking, talking gilded spectacle, and whether you love him or hate him, no one can stop talking about him.
How much earned, and free media does this guy get daily? And it doesn’t matter whether it’s good press or bad, as long as Trump is front and center every day, taking all the oxygen out of the room, it helps his campaign.
The Republican Party has become a joke. It’s a race to the bottom of a bottomless pit. I’ve never seen a bunch of grown men grovel and debase themselves for the insane Veepstakes.
If it wasn’t so hilarious, I’d be crying, because it’s just so pathetic. And what’s worse, we have a citizenry that doesn’t care, and an MSM milking this election cycle for every penny they can squeeze out of it; regardless of this country is worse off for the effort.