What kind of Saturday news day is it?
The kind where these headlines are among the most compelling:
* ‘Am I using too much weed?’ Ask yourself these questions. (Washington Post)
* Cedar Rapids-based chain Donutland opens in Urbandale in late June (Des Moines Register)
* Are the Hamptons Still Hip? (New York Times)
* How to Win at the Airport This Summer (Wall Street Journal)
* Hampton Beach piping plovers won't stop Memorial Day weekend fireworks (Portsmouth Herald)
* AOC shouted down during chaotic NYC town hall: ‘You’re a piece of s–t!’ (New York Post)
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Here is all you need to know about the current state of the debt ceiling talks, via two Associated Press paragraphs:
Work requirements for federal food aid recipients have emerged as a final sticking point in negotiations over the looming debt crisis, even as President Joe Biden said Friday that a deal is “very close….”
Even as they came closer to a framework on spending, each side seemed dug in on the work requirements. White House spokesman Andrew Bates called the GOP proposals “cruel and senseless” and said Biden and Democrats would stand against them.
And here is all you need to know about what is likely to happen next in the debt ceiling talks, courtesy of five paragraphs from 101st Senator Carl Hulse of the New York Times:
Negotiators got some breathing room Friday afternoon with the Treasury secretary’s announcement that the default deadline had moved four days later, to June 5. But Congress will still be hard-pressed to act by then, and the brief extension might even be counterproductive, sapping some urgency to seal a deal….
House Republicans have a 72-hour rule for the time between when the legislation is made public and when it is to be voted on, a timeline that pushes the showdown ever closer to the Treasury’s early June deadline.
Plus, with hard-right elements of the Republican conference joining progressive Democrats in expressing reservations about the deal taking shape, Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Jeffries may have to thread the needle to produce the necessary votes from both sides to win approval of the deal.
Mr. McCarthy and his leadership team will have to assess extremely accurately the number of Republicans committed to voting for any final budget deal with a debt limit increase attached. Then they will need to let Mr. Jeffries know the number of votes Democrats need to produce to make sure at least 218 lawmakers will support the package….
Some believe that it might require … a failed vote and market drop that underscores the economic consequences of a default and motivates lawmakers to act. Others would prefer it not come to that given the potentially severe ramifications of even a brief default.
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So, what I really want to talk more about today is the nature of the conflict between King Kong and Godzilla, a/k/a the fast and furious rivalry between leading Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.
I have covered my share of White House nomination battles over the years, and/but I have never seen anything quite like this.
The earliness of the intensity of the minute-by-minute engagement between the two men and their camps is the most striking element. The cadence and velocity we are seeing every day now is akin to what would normally occur with about a week to go before the Iowa caucuses.
This striking phenomenon is driven by many factors, not least being the advent of (explosion of, really) various digital technologies and platforms, which gives both sides the opportunity to attack often and multifaceted.
Other reasons for the nonstop engagement:
* This is the only style Team Trump knows.
* DeSantis is down by about four touchdowns – and while it is the just the first quarter, his team knows that donors, pols, reporters, and voters will start to think differently about whether this is a two-person race or not if he is still down four touchdowns in the second quarter.
* The rivalry between the two camps went from zero to 600 mph in a big hurry and neither side wants to take its foot off of the accelerator of contempt and attack – partly out of sheer machismo-fueled adrenaline and partly out of fear that even one instance of restraint will allow the other side to gain some cosmic or actual upper hand.
This perpetual battle largely plays out on Twitter, in texts to certain media types, and in the conservative press. Most Americans, even most Gang of 500 members – heck, even most political reporters – are oblivious to much of what is taking place.
It is impossible to know if any of this trench warfare is making, or will make, the slightest bit of difference in the outcome.
But the two sides seem determined to keep at it, despite that lack of clarity (or, really, because of that lack of clarity).
Here is just a limited snapshot of the kind of stuff I am talking about:
1. Team Trump is very enamored with spending time making and distributing anti-DeSantis graphics, as in, via the Washington Examiner:
Former President Donald Trump's campaign staff released a lengthy tirade against GOP challenger Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) on Twitter on Friday, highlighting similarities in campaigns between the governor and former president and painting DeSantis as having stolen Trump's main campaign points.
The account posted tweets that compared the two Republican contenders, with Trump's team saying DeSantis "plagiarized" and stole ideas from the former president, claiming it was the "greatest political plagiarism scandal in American history."
2. Team Trump loves the super-over-the-top anti-DeSantis quote, as in, via the New York Times:
“So now Swampy Politician Ron DeSanctimonious is claiming he voted for it before he voted against it,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement. “He sounds just like John Kerry. What a phony! He can’t run away from his disastrous, embarrassing, and low-energy campaign announcement. Rookie mistakes and unforced errors — that’s who he is.”
3. Team Trump loves distributing and highlighting anti-DeSantis memes, including deepfake videos that are, let’s be honest, spellbindingly clever, like this parody of an iconic scene from “The Office.”
(Seriously, watch both videos, if only to understand just how different the 2024 cycle is going to be from the past based on the unprecedented capacity every mischief maker has to produce compelling manipulated videos.)
4. Team Trump loves ginning up opposition-research-fueled stories based on the many pro-Trump people who serve as spies inside DeSantis world, such as the ones revealing that Florida government employees are using their spare time to ask lobbyists to make campaign contributions to the presidential account.
5. OMG this:
Leaked DeSantis Camp Audio: Move to ‘the Middle’ After Primary, Clinton’s Approach to Abortion.
Leaked audio has emerged from the DeSantis donor strategy meeting in Miami on Thursday. In the clip you can hear below, DeSantis strategists tell high dollar donors making calls for the campaign that:
DeSantis’s position is keeping abortion decisions at a state level (following Trump’s position);
That the Governor will shift to the middle during a general election;
The campaign’s position on abortion can be described as “safe, legal, and rare in Florida” – a stunning deployment of President Bill Clinton’s infamous pro-abortion catchphrase.
During the session, the hosts – including DeSantis pollster Ryan Tyson amongst others – can be heard lauding this a “major step forward for the Republican Party in moving to the middle [on abortion].”
There are a number of times throughout the leaked audio that DeSantis’s strategist can be heard telling wealthy donors: “You have to win a primary before you win a general,” – which is political campaign speak for “we’ll move to the middle after we win the nomination.”
As longtime Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom famously said: “I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It's almost like an Etch-a-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”
At first I thought that Team King Kong and Team Godzilla couldn’t possibly keep up this pace for another eight months.
Now, well, it looks like they just might.
King Kong wants to knock Godzilla out and he knows no other setting besides “KILL.”
Godzilla is fiercely competitive and knows his chances of winning depend on proving every day in every way that he can succeed where Jeb Bush etal failed in 2016.
The escalating arms race will escalate, including DeSantis’ increasing attempts to match Trump in delivering tart contrasts from his own mouth.
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ESSENTIAL READING
* Matthew Continetti flexes his unparalleled understanding of the past and present strands of the conservative movement to brilliantly frame the stakes and meaning of King Kong versus Godzilla:
Ron DeSantis is betting that he will bring this ridiculous moment to a close. He's betting that his institution-based culture war will prove more attractive to GOP voters than MAGA populism. It’s not just a wager on his own talents. It’s a gamble that 2020 changed the Right as much as the Left—and that Donald Trump belongs to a receding past.
* The Trump legal developments are never going to stop, straight through Iowa, such as, via CBS News:
Prosecutors in former President Donald Trump's Manhattan criminal case have released to his attorneys a recording of Trump and a witness, whose identity was not disclosed, according to a document the office made public Friday.
* Holman Jenkins is both a broken record and a teller of the fundamental truth familiar to all Wide World of News readers:
If the New York Times, Washington Post and other top-tier news outlets treated any one of the following stories the way they would have if Donald Trump didn’t exist—the collusion hoax, the Hunter Biden laptop evasion, the Biden clan’s influence-peddling—Mr. Trump would be a fading force in U.S. politics by now. The thing that primarily keeps him afloat is the contemptible behavior of his enemies, including a press that insists on positioning itself as his enemy whatever the damage to its own standards of factual and intellectual honesty.