Category: Politics

The Validation Brigade Salutes Trump

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Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage. Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, officially endorsed Donald Trump’s campaign for reelection two Saturdays ago. The news landed as an afterthought, which is probably how she intended it. “Today at the @WVGOP Winter Meeting Lunch, I announced my support for President Donald Trump,” Capito wrote on X, as if she were making a dutiful entry in a diary. Republicans have reached the point in their primary season, even earlier than expected, when the party’s putative…

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‘The Most Entertaining Dead-Cat Bounce in History’

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Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage. Not very long ago, the harshest thing Nikki Haley would say about Donald Trump was that “chaos follows him”—a sort of benign jab that creatively avoids causation and suggests mere correlation, like noting that scorched trees tend to appear after a forest fire. For most of the Republican-primary campaign to date, Haley adopted a carefully modulated approach toward the former president, and reserved most of her barbs for her other primary rivals. Her motto seemed to be “Speak…

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Can Biden Win a Primary He Ignored?

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As he stood on a frigid New Hampshire street corner on Saturday morning, Jim Demers was trying to persuade me that the fate of the republic hinges on today’s presidential primary—specifically, whether more people write “Joe Biden” on their ballot than fill in the bubble next to the names of his Democratic challengers. “This is an election like we’ve never seen before. This is one where democracy is on the ballot,” Demers, a lobbyist and former state representative, told me. “This is bigger than New Hampshire. This is about the…

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Elise Stefanik’s Trump Audition

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Elise Stefanik and I had been speaking for only about a minute when she offered this stark self-assessment: “I have been an exceptional member of Congress.” Her confidence reminded me of the many immodest pronouncements of Donald Trump (“I would give myself an A+”), and that’s probably not an accident. Stefanik has been everywhere lately, amassing fans among Trump’s base at a crucial moment—both for the GOP and for her future. Stefanik spent October presiding over the leaderless House GOP’s search for a new speaker—a post that Stefanik, the chair…

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What Nikki Haley (Maybe) Learned in New Hampshire

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Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage. “Everybody’s waiting to write my obituary.” This is never a good thing for a candidate to be saying on Election Day. But Nikki Haley, the candidate, was trying—pleading—to make a larger point to CNN’s Dana Bash as they sat on raised chairs in the middle of Chez Vachon, the landmark coffee shop and makeshift TV studio on the west side of Manchester, New Hampshire. “We had 14 candidates,” Haley said, referring to the number of people who were…

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What Trump’s Victory in Iowa Reveals

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Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage. Donald Trump’s victory in the Iowa caucus was as dominant as expected, underscoring the exceedingly narrow path available to any of the Republican forces hoping to prevent his third consecutive nomination. And yet, for all Trump’s strength within the party, the results also hinted at some of the risks the GOP will face if it nominates him again. Based on Trump’s overwhelming lead in the poll conducted of voters on their way into the voting, the cable networks…

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