As with pretty much everything involving California governance, discerning the state’s election results can devolve into a big, unruly mess. To wit, Tuesday’s primary—particularly the free-for-all campaign for governor to succeed Gavin Newsom—remains too muddled to call, with millions of outstanding ballots likely yet to be counted.
At minimum, though, we can speak with some preliminary clarity, let’s call it, on the contest.
On a chilly Saturday late last month, I met Eric Swalwell at a Little League diamond near Capitol Hill, where the Bay Area congressman and his wife, Brittany, would be watching their 8-year-old son. Swalwell, who was running to succeed Gavin Newsom as the next governor of California, had been gradually rising above a Lilliputian cast of candidates and had acquired a strong scent of momentum in the race.
“Impeccable timing for you,” he’d texted me on my drive over.
Back when he was a House member from Wyoming, Dick Cheney was part of a congressional delegation that visited the Soviet Union in the 1980s. During a lull in the schedule, Cheney and his colleagues were sitting around trying to entertain themselves when one of their wives decided to administer personality tests. The results included professions for which the members would be well suited.
Cheney’s ideal job? A funeral director.
Ideally, this interview would have been over breakfast at a diner in Omaha, and the local congressman, Don Bacon, would have ordered his namesake. He says he eats bacon two or three times a week when he’s in Nebraska; he likes it extra crispy and, if possible, prepared at home. “If you ask me for my favorite bacon, it’s Angie Bacon,” he told me this week, referring to his wife of 41 years. (Sadly, the congressman and I were speaking not over breakfast but by phone.
Yesterday marked one year since Joe Biden’s debate meltdown against Donald Trump. Happy anniversary to those who observe such things, or are triggered by such things. Please celebrate responsibly.
For Democrats, the debacle was a harsh awakening and the start of an ongoing spiral. Prior to that night, they could hold on to the delusion that the party might somehow eke out one last victory from Biden’s degraded capacity and ward off another four-year assault from Donald Trump.
This is the week that Gavin Newsom stopped thinking so much.
The governor of California has found himself in a hot swirl of events: Federal authorities are patrolling streets, ICE agents are raiding Home Depots, and protests (mostly though not entirely peaceful) are spreading across the state. President Donald Trump ordered the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, very much against Newsom’s wishes. He also endorsed the idea of Newsom being arrested.
Where have you gone, Elmo, Cookie Monster, and Big Bird?
In a more innocent time, the hallowed puppets of Sesame Street were recurring characters in congressional debates about public broadcasting.
But really, who among us hasn’t inadvertently shared secret plans about an imminent military strike on Yemen with the editor in chief of The Atlantic?
Wait, what?
Occasionally, Washington gets hit with one of those stories. The kind that halts the busy company town in its divided tracks. Everyone seems to unite, at least briefly, in disbelief. A single dominant topic comes along and crushes everything, and all the rest is suddenly beside the point.
Let us pause the various constitutional crises, geopolitical showdowns, and DOGE dramas to make a simple observation: Donald Trump seems kind of busy, no?
In recent days, he kicked off what the media have dubbed “Tariff Week” by declaring Sunday, February 9, to be Gulf of America Day. This occurred as he flew to New Orleans to become the first-ever sitting U.S.
Greenland’s prime minister, Múte Egede, looked like he was being chased by an angry musk ox.
“Mr. Prime Minister, have you spoken to President Trump yet?” I asked as he fled a lunchtime news conference on Tuesday in the capital city, Nuuk (population 20,000). Egede, who is 37, wore a green zip-up sweater, stared straight ahead, and was walking toward me. He said nothing.
“Prime Minister Múte Egede,” I tried again, using his full name this time, for some reason.
He remained … mute.
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Kamala Harris has now completed her first major television interview as the Democratic standard-bearer: perhaps the most feverishly anticipated, campaign-defining, existentially urgent interrogation ever conducted in the English language, or any language, in recent memory.
“Okay, we have to move fast,” one of Pete Buttigieg’s aides told me as the discoursing dynamo was finishing another cable interview on the last day of the Democratic National Convention.
Buttigieg stepped off an MSNBC set and onto the United Center floor. “I’m here to give you some much-needed attention,” I told him. By “much-needed,” I was of course being sarcastic: Buttigieg has been a rather relentless media presence in recent weeks, especially this past one in Chicago.
Here’s the thing about political conventions: They are, foremost, productions—obsessively planned and guided heavily to what looks pretty on screens. But here’s the thing about the Democratic Party: Now, as ever, it is a bit of a mess.
A seemingly happy mess. But a mess nonetheless. And this can make for an awkward production.
So, about that age issue: It’s now officially a Republican ailment, as of 1:46 p.m. yesterday, the moment President Joe Biden quit his reelection campaign and was supplanted by Donald Trump, 78, as the oldest presidential nominee in American history.
Democrats are ecstatic to be rid of this distinction. Since Biden’s debate debacle on June 27, the preoccupation with Biden’s age, fitness, and, yes, decline had become their crushing, almost incapacitating, burden.
Never underestimate the destructive power of a stubborn old narcissist with something to prove.
Ideally no one gets hurt along the way: Maybe grandpop refuses to give up his license, drives into an oak tree, and only the car gets totaled. But sometimes there are casualties: Maybe a pedestrian gets hit.
President Joe Biden, 81, is acting like one of history’s most negligent and pigheaded leaders at a crucial moment, and right now, we are all pedestrians.
Since President Joe Biden’s debate debacle on Thursday, I’ve learned two things for sure: first, that Republicans are not the only party being led by a geriatric egotist who puts himself before the country. And second, that Republicans are not the only party whose putative leaders have a toxic lemming mindset and are willing to lead American democracy off a cliff.
I know, I know: Calm down, bed wetter. And how dare you “both sides” this predicament.
President Biden needs to end his campaign. The first presidential debate, held on Thursday night, was a disaster. It was clear from the outset that Biden looked old, sounded old, and yes, is in fact very, very old.
This has been rumored for a while. Thursday night, it was confirmed.
Panic seemed to set in among Democrats within minutes of the candidates taking the stage—on social media, at shellshocked “watch parties.” Full freak-out mode was achieved by the 20-minute mark.
Say what you will about Joe Lieberman, the self-described “Independent Democrat” senator from Connecticut and onetime Democratic vice-presidential candidate. He was many things—honorable, devout, sanctimonious, maddening, and unfailingly warm and decent—all of which have been unpacked since his death yesterday, at 82. He elicited strong reactions, often from Democrats, over his various apostasies to liberal orthodoxy.
Like many politicians, Representative Dean Phillips likes to look people in the eye. And because he’s a politician, Phillips can glean things, just as President George W. Bush did when he peered into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and saw his soul.“I’ve looked Benjamin Netanyahu in the eye,” Phillips told a group of students at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, last week.And?“I did not like what I saw,” Phillips said of the Israeli prime minister.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, who died last night at 90, braved one of the most remarkable political expeditions in American history—and also one of the grimmer spectacles at the end of her life and career.Is it too soon to point this out? Yes, perhaps.
Every so often, someone asks me who my favorite politicians to write about over the years have been. I always place Bill Richardson, the longtime congressman and former governor of New Mexico, near the top of my list. I once mentioned this to Richardson himself.“How high on the list?” he immediately wanted to know. “Top 10? Top three? I get competitive, you know.”Richardson died in his sleep on Friday, at age 75.
Real-life Ron DeSantis was here, finally. In the fidgety flesh; in Iowa, South Carolina, and, in this case, New Hampshire. Not some distant Sunshine State of potential or idealized Donald Trump alternative or voice in the far-off static of Twitter Spaces. But an actual human being interacting with other human beings, some 200 of them, packed into an American Legion hall in the town of Rochester.
After his historic indictment was announced Thursday night, former President Donald Trump reacted with his characteristic cool and precision: “These Thugs and Radical Left Monsters have just INDICATED the 45th President of the United States of America.” Presumably this was a typo, and he meant INDICTED. But the immediate joining of arms around the martyr was indeed a perfect indication of precisely who the Republicans are right now.
Photographs by Ryan PflugerArnold Schwarzenegger nearly killed me.I had joined him one morning as he rushed through his daily routine. Schwarzenegger gets up by six. He makes coffee, putters around, feeds Whiskey (his miniature horse) and Lulu (his miniature donkey), shovels their overnight manure into a barrel, drinks his coffee, checks his email, and maybe plays a quick game of chess online.
A few years ago, I asked Tom Brady if he ever worried that too much of his life was consumed by the game of football. This was, in retrospect, kind of a duh question to put to someone who played, you know, the game of football for a living. Rather successfully, too, and for a long time.Brady confirmed the question’s premise that, yes, football meant pretty much everything to him and he could not imagine doing anything else with himself.
Donald Trump has a knack for making his most committed apologists look like complete imbeciles—even if they are not complete imbeciles, though many of them are. This has been true for several years. But in recent weeks, Trump’s trickle-down idiocy has become a significant midterm-election issue for Republicans, and a drag on some of the party’s most vulnerable Senate candidates.