Will Nikki Burn the Boats?
Plus: How Trump hides in plain sight on Truth Social.
Donald Trump will capture a huge chunk of the delegates he needs to wrap up his third straight GOP presidential nomination today, and the Supreme Court—while avoiding the question of whether it’s accurate to deem him an insurrectionist—won’t let states get in his way.
The beatings will continue until morale improves. Happy Super Tuesday.
Will Nikki Burn the Boats?
You can’t go home again, they say. But I did today, briefly.
I voted this morning in the Republican primary here in Virginia. I’ve participated in many GOP primaries over four decades in this fine commonwealth, which has no party registration, and where you simply request a ballot for one party’s primary or the other.
But I hadn’t voted in a Republican primary since 2016. I had to steel myself to ask for a ballot for my former party, one that is about to overwhelmingly nominate Trump for a third consecutive time. But I did so. And I cast my vote for Nikki Haley.
Now what? (Not for me—I’m back home safe and sound from the polling place, once again an ex-Republican, and looking forward to participating in the Democratic primary for our House seat in June.) What’s next for Nikki?
Will she take Sarah Longwell’s advice, offered a week ago after Haley acknowledged that it was “very possible” the Republican party had shifted decisively away from her views? “Burn the boats, Nikki,” Sarah said. “There’s nothing to go back to.”
Will Nikki follow in the footsteps of Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who, legend has it, burned his ships in 1519 so that he and his men would have to stay in the New World, to conquer or die?
A couple of months ago, I would have predicted that, after losing the nomination, Haley would choose to sail timidly back to Trump’s Republican party. I think she expected to do that. She expected to go back home again.
But I no longer believe she expects to go back. I think it’s more likely she’ll embrace the logic that increasingly shaped her rhetoric and animated her campaign. I think she’ll refuse to endorse Trump.
Now, there are many different paths to take after not endorsing Trump. Haley’s made it clear she won’t support Joe Biden. So she could simply sit out the rest of the 2024 campaign.
Or Haley could choose to continue to make the case against Trump in 2024. She could even engage in energetic efforts to stop Trump from winning in November. She could even consider participating in an independent candidacy, her own or someone else.
Haley’s path ahead is uncertain. It won’t be easy. Cortés had a complicated and challenging time in the New World, to say the least, after he burned his boats!
But he made history. Haley has a chance to try to play a historic role as well, to help chart a new path and explore a new continent in American politics.
But first she has to burn the boats.
—William Kristol
Trump’s Blurry Recent Past
Remember “There’s always a tweet”? When Donald Trump was on Twitter, keeping track of the old things he’d posted there was easy—and it was a crucial tool for keeping tabs on his shifting stories and distortions. On the site today, Andrew has a piece exploring how Trump’s new platform, Truth Social, helps shield him from accountability for a simple reason: Its search function is so broken that tracking down old posts is basically impossible:
On Twitter, surfacing old posts is easy. On Truth Social, it’s impossible. The site’s rudimentary search function lacks the ability to, for instance, pull up all posts from a specific account that mention a specific word. All Trump’s old posts are still there—present on Truth Social’s servers, theoretically accessible to anyone who wants to go find them. It’s just that the only way to do that is by scrolling chronologically down his page, an interminable slog through a deluge of MAGA flotsam—links to articles, screenshots of polls, liveblogs of TV programs, endorsements of random House candidates, sales pitches for Trump NFTs or Trump sneakers. To find something a week or two old is doable, a month or two a major chore. Farther back than that you approach the theoretical limits of human patience.
It’s not as though what Trump posts on Truth Social gets ignored—if he says something explosive there, it’ll get shared other places and written up in the press. But the inability to pull things up later makes Trump less legible to us, his stated positions blurrier around the edges—which plays to his advantage.
Whether Truth Social’s opacity is a bug or a feature—the result of shoddy programming or a deliberate design choice intended to frustrate—isn’t quite clear. When I reached out to the site’s operators last month to ask if there was some weird trick by which one could surface old posts, I got a message back suggesting the former: “We appreciate you bringing this issue to our attention. We have shared the information with our team and are working towards a resolution. Thank you for your patience.”
I am not, however, holding my breath for an update. After all, an unsearchable Truth Social still accomplishes the purpose Trump has for it: Ladling daily chum into the seething feeding pit of the MAGA id. Who there cares to resurface months-old chewed-over chum? For Trump and his online followers, Truth Social is the smooth plane of an eternal present, where you can say anything at all as long as it scandalizes the RINOs and owns the libs. Keeping the old stuff around would just box him in.
—Andrew Egger
Catching up . . .
Biden’s new strategy: Go for Trump’s jugular: Axios
Trump expected to win big on Super Tuesday after SCOTUS ruling: NBC News
U.N. team finds ground to support reports of sexual violence in Hamas attack: New York Times
Supreme Court temporarily blocks Texas law that allows police to arrest migrants: The Hill
White House announces ‘strike force’ on unfair and illegal prices ahead of State of the Union: Politico
Ukraine says it sunk a Russian patrol ship near Crimea, its latest Black Sea victory: NBC News
Europe starts war machine to wean itself off U.S. weapons: Politico
Quick Hits
1. George Conway on SCOTUS
Yesterday’s huge SCOTUS ruling that states cannot pull Trump from the ballot for being an insurrectionist pulled George and Sarah in for an emergency podcast, where George argued the court had ducked the central questions at hand out of fear of being sucked into the political process.
George’s central takeaway:
I think the most important thing to take away from this decision is the one thing it didn’t address . . . going anywhere near the factual findings in the District Court in Denver that Donald Trump was, in fact, an insurrectionist. And as far as I’m concerned, Donald Trump—just as he is an adjudicated rapist—remains an adjudicated insurrectionist, even if the Supreme Court has wrongly held that the states do not have the power to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment against potential candidates for federal office.
2. Looking Down the Super Tuesday Ballot
“Super Tuesday is the first test of what next year’s House GOP will look like,” Politico reports:
A woman who allegedly tried to hit her ex-husband with a car. A 30-year-old who marketed a conspiracy-theory movie. A pastor whose previous campaign was mired in election fraud.
These are some of the candidates national Republicans are trying not to nominate this week.
The Super Tuesday primaries will serve as the most comprehensive test yet of whether the party can mount a strong campaign to keep control of the House in November — and whether they will be able to avoid the utter chaos that stymied Congress over the last year.
Five states are holding nominating contests for more than 100 House districts, narrowing down fields in key races in states that include North Carolina, Texas and California. Even just a handful of these seats can help determine which party controls Congress in 2025.
But many of Tuesday’s primaries are in open deep-red districts that will shape the contours of the House GOP conference. And if the majority comes down to a razor-thin margin — again — the impact of those new members will ripple far beyond their individual districts.
All the contenders are conservative, and many profess deep allegiance to former President Donald Trump. But there are huge differences in style and personality among them. That has some establishment Republicans worried and has spurred intraparty efforts to intervene in the contests.
We live in an era of hyper-polarized politics where all guardrails have come off the institutional GOP. The combination of these two factors mean that, in many districts around the country, whatever maniac manages to squeak through a Republican primary is pretty much guaranteed a seat in the House next year. Don’t forget things can always get crazier!
Cheap Shots
Over the last eight years the GOP has gone through a process of self-selection in which those who believe in science, the rule of law, and actual conservatism have headed for the exits. They've been replaced by people who want to be in politics to build their "brand," live in the capital, and create content. Legislating is not even top five.
I feel that anyone who thinks Haley will resurrect a sane GOP or weaken Trump is indulging in wishful thinking. This is a woman who said she would pardon Trump, that frozen embryos are babies, and that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. She can try to walk it all back, but she is a weak, power hungry weathervane. She can’t burn the boats as she is already on fire.