Trump vs. … the Reagan Library?
There’s more than one reason the ex-president doesn’t want to attend the GOP debate at the Reagan presidential library.
Donald Trump is expected to once again skip the GOP primary debate on Sept. 27, when his Republican challengers will gather to pitch themselves at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. For some conservatives affiliated with the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, which helps sustain the library, that’s all well and good.
Trump is “a spoiled brat in a sandbox,” says one member of the board of trustees.
“Trump is Voldemort,” says an adviser to another board member. Since Trump’s presidency, the Reagan Foundation has invited a spate of Trump antagonists to speak — from current primary challenger and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming to Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse and former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who kicked off the foundation’s 2021 speaker series saying of Trump’s White House curtain call that it was “horrifying to see a presidency come to such a dishonorable and disgraceful end.” Trump responded by calling him a “RINO.”
More Trump-friendly figures have been invited to speak as well — Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to name a couple — but the former president himself hasn’t gotten the invite. Of the foundation’s public explanation that it wasn’t inviting any former presidents to speak, the adviser says: “Yeah, right. Let’s go with that one.”
The feud has become a proxy for the ideological power struggle rocking the GOP, with conservatives torn between the optimism of Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” and the grievance and doom of Trump’s “American carnage.”
“It’s that choice, as much as any policy distinction between candidates, that Republicans are making in the run-up to 2024,” writes David Siders in this week’s Friday Read, a dispatch from the library. “It’s the tension between a sunnier brand of conservatism and the more menacing, grievance-fueled politics of Trump.”
“[He is] lying like a dead dog.”
Can you guess who said this about House Speaker Kevin McCarthy? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.**
Did Kremlin Assassins Come to D.C.? … In March 2007, two men assaulted and shot Paul Joyal, an American security analyst and critic of Russian leaders, outside his home in a Maryland suburb near Washington. Joyal survived, but the case, handled by the Prince George’s County Police Department, remains unsolved. Police came to believe it was a random crime gone wrong. But what if it was something more sinister — an international hit on the doorstep of the nation’s capital? And what if local police aren’t equipped to investigate potential foreign ops? Following the suspicious death last summer of another Putin critic in D.C., Michael Schaffer spoke with Joyal about how to investigate such fishy cases in this week’s Capital City column.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Congress this week, but his reception was much more mixed than his first big trip to the Capitol. A growing number of Republicans have questioned and even criticized America’s support for the war effort. Not kept up with the latest geopolitics? Here are some tips to help you through when your friends bring it up this weekend (from POLITICO’s Gabriel Gavin):
- President Joe Biden wants an extra $24 billion to help Ukraine defeat Russia. Put that in perspective: Instead, he could give every American $70.
- Times are tough. When Zelenskyy landed in Washington on Thursday, the Pentagon even had to cut back on the traditional military band.
- See if your pals can guess who Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance was talking about when he tweeted: “Look I know Schumer changed the dress code but letting someone in the senate chamber dressed like this really crosses the line.” Hint: It’s not Sen. John Fetterman.
- Biden’s “blank checks” for Ukraine actually add up to $113 billion so far — which seems like a drop in the ocean compared to last year’s eye-watering $6.27 trillion federal budget.
Why #BLM Failed … Marxist Substacker Fredrik deBoer, better known as Freddie deBoer, has become a lightning rod on the left for his criticisms of liberal social movements. In his new book, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, he claims that the summer of racial justice protests in 2020 failed to create substantive change in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, blaming elites in the movement for focusing on goals he considers relatively inconsequential, like diverse representation at the Oscars, and unpopular ideas like defunding police. By eschewing broad economic messaging, he tells Marc Novicoff in this interview, the left loses the thread — and that applies not just to 2020, but to 2024. “If it’s true that the left is not appealing to the working class,” he says, “then that is a failure of the left and not of the working class. We have to do a better job.”
‘You Might as Well Get a Gun and Shoot Yourself in the Head’ … That’s what United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, then a rank-and-file union member, wrote to UAW leadership back in 2007, when the union brass agreed to sharp concessions to Chrysler. Fain was having none of it. In a rare act of defiance, he led the Local 1166 to vote against the contract. It was an inflection point in a career that would launch him to the top of the union, which this week hit all three major Detroit automakers with a walkout for the first time in history, sending both Trump and Biden rushing to show their support. “In making these arguments, Fain, like the legendary UAW leader Walter Reuther who led the union from 1946 to 1970, has framed this fight as one to help not just auto workers, but America’s entire working class,” writes Steven Greenhouse.
**Who Dissed answer: That would be Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, a perennial McCarthy opponent who has used the impending government shutdown to call for his removal as Speaker. The “lying” jab came after McCarthy accused Gaetz of colluding with Democratic California Rep. Eric Swalwell to work against him.
