Mike Pence has lame new mild criticism of Trump he wants you to hear
"'Some people...' whom I'm not going to name or testify against... said something I find slightly concerning..."
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We begin with Mike Pence’s pathetic and as-yet-undeclared pseudo-campaign.
Pence is speaking at the Nixon National Energy Conference, a fitting event for the VP who served the first president ever to be charged with a felony, and apparently one of his staff leaked his scathing timid rebuttal of his former boss to Politico. Politico’s “Playbook” Newsletter provides this intro:
Former VP MIKE PENCE will once again take aim at his former boss
Again! Maybe this will be the time Pence’s witticism DESTROYS Trump once and for all. Here it is:
In recent years, China has only grown bolder in repressing religious liberty, trampling human rights, committing trade abuses, threatening Taiwan, and launching aggressive military maneuvers in the South China Sea. Under Biden, Chinese influence is even spreading on American soil...China may not yet be an Evil Empire, but under President Xi, it certainly aspires to become one. Some people say Xi is a “brilliant man.” I happen to think he’s an evil man, whose vision for the world is one in which freedom is constrained, but Beijing’s power is not. Appeasement has never worked a single time in human history, and it will not work now. America and her allies cannot not allow either China or Russia to trample the liberty of our friends – we must ensure that our leaders send an unambiguous message that such aggression will never be tolerated.
Get it? Because Trump called Xi Jinping a “brilliant man” in a recent interview, just like how he praised Xi, Kim Jong-un, and Vladimir Putin effusively when Pence was his veep and Pence didn’t say anything! So brave of Pence to make a tame joke about Trump and telegraph it in the Politico newsletter.
Club for Growth vs. McConnell vs. Trump
Politico has a piece out on how both Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump are annoyed by the Club for Growth’s efforts to nominate hardline fiscal conservative ideologues for competitive Senate races. The worst case scenario for the GOP is that the Club’s favored candidates win their primaries and lose the general elections. The best case scenario for Mitch is that the “normal” “establishment” candidates he chooses win their primaries only after the National Republican Senatorial Committee spends a lot of money on those primaries.
The three biggest races in question are West Virginia, Montana, and Ohio, three red states with old guard conservative senators. Joe Manchin only won West Virginia by 3.3 points in 2018, but Trump won the state by 38.9 points in 2020. Jon Tester won his third-term in Montana by 3.6 points in 2018 and was contemplating retirement before getting pulled back in. Sherrod Brown might be in the best position. Even though Ohio is trending redder, it is still more competitive than W.V. and Montana (Brown won each of his past two races by 6+ points), and the Ohio Republican Party has a track record of nominating particularly poor quality candidates.
Privately some top party operatives and McConnell-aligned strategists worry the Club’s recruits, who are typically conservative hardliners, could struggle to win competitive races. The fear is that, at best, the group is creating unnecessarily messy primaries. At worst it is blowing another shot at retaking the majority.
And:
But the Club hasn’t been content merely to cross Senate GOP leaders. The group has launched an offensive against Trump too, raising the spectre that a primary that was already destined to be brutal could end up bloody.
Now you might say, But wait, candidates Trump supports are also extremist whack jobs who lose elections! And that’s true. But Trump prefers a different kind of extremist. He likes the charismatic, unprincipled weirdos who will follow Trump on anything. If you’re a celebrity like Mehmet Oz, all the better! Trump might have done everything the GOP fundraisers and Heritage and the Federalist Society told him to do as president, but he personally isn’t very committed to an overarching Reagan/Norquist/Gingrich-esque agenda.
(For example, Trump’s PAC is attacking Ron DeSantis for trying to cut Social Security:
Read
's commentary on this ad: Why Trump's Pudding Ad isn't as Dumb as it Seems)The Club for Growth likes the kind of nerdy weirdo who reads and quotes from Ayn Rand (or is named after her) and tries to block a debt ceiling hike. See their 2022 endorsements: Ted Budd (NC), Adam Laxalt (both McConnell and Trump’s candidate as well) (NV), Mike Lee (UT), Blake Masters (Trump’s and Peter Thiel’s candidate) (AZ), Rand Paul (KY). Of the non-incumbents, they went 1-2.
So this isn’t McConnell and Trump uniting against the Club for Growth. It’s a chaotic mess. There could be campaigns where all three of them go at each other.