This Sunday’s Gang of 500 brunch at Lauriol Plaza is significant for at least four reasons:
1. We are starting at the special time of noon, a full one hour later than the norm.
2. We are expanding the attendance to a temporary Gang of 1,000, allowing for more previously-excluded Senators, more Axios reporters, and more Wide World of News readers to attend – all on a first-come-first-admitted basis.
3. This will be the last mandatory attendance brunch until the Sunday after Labor Day, with many members planning to hold special summer satellite sessions in our Edgartown, Bridgehampton, Aspen, and Florence bureaus.
4. Some hard truths are going to have to be dispensed in instances in which the Gang might just not be totally correct, as incredible as that might seem to many of you.
**************************************************************************************************************
Please become a voluntary paying subscriber or contributor to this newsletter today.
You can support my daily work by clicking this attractive blue button:
Or, to pick the amount you kick in, you can use any of these various methods:
* Buy me a cocktail (at Galley Aspen prices….), tax and server tip included, by clicking here.
* Buy me a cup of coffee (or a week’s worth) by clicking here.
* Check. send a simple email to markhalperintalk@gmail.com and ask where you can send a piece of paper.
• PayPal. markhalperinnyc@gmail.com
• Venmo. Mark-Halperin-4 (telephone number ends in x3226)
• Zelle. markhalperinnyc@gmail.com
Wide World of News has no ads, sponsors, investors, staff, or corporate influence.
The contributions of readers like you are the ONLY source of financial backing I receive for my work here.
Thank you.
**************************************************************************************************************
Our primary speakers on Sunday will be Gang members Rich Lowry and Mark Leibovich, talking about the two men who always seem to dominate our conversations – and/but about whom we are all feeling a profound sense of anxiety and ennui.
I speak, of course, not about the two Rons (Klain and DeSantis), but about Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
The Gang somehow simultaneously believes that both men will inevitably be the major party nominees in 2024 and that neither man will run for president in 2024.
I’m no logician, but those two stances are not reconcilable.
Lowry will speak representing the Peggy Noonan point of view, which basically says that, polling and 2022 primary results notwithstanding, the sheer logic of the situation means that Republican voters MUST move on from Trump in 2024.
Yes, yes, yes – a lot of what Team MAGA thinks about their hero and the events of the last seven (or, really 27) years regarding the Dominant Media, the Deep State, the Swamp, and the Establishments of both parties is true, but, well, everyone we know who voted for Trump twice is ready to move on, so, well, we need to will that to happen.
Here is a bit of the Lowry piece that all brunch attendees must read in advance of Sunday:
You can argue that Jan. 6 was the work of an out-of-control mob and didn’t constitute an insurrection; that the composition of the committee is unfair and lacks the adversarial element that has always been presumed to be central to the workings of such bodies; that the revelations or supposed revelations from the committee are being overhyped; and that Trump, whatever his failings, didn’t commit crimes and shouldn’t be charged with one.
In fact, I agree with every one of those propositions. But none of them makes Jan. 6 any better or makes it good….
If Trump is the Republican candidate again in 2024, even in the unlikely event that he wanted to memory hole Jan. 6 and never talk about it again, it wouldn’t happen. The Democrats would bring it up unrelentingly and seek as much as possible to make the election a referendum on Trump’s conduct during the most disgraceful period of his presidency. Perhaps it wouldn’t work, but why would Republicans want to risk it or even deal with the complication?
The Leibovich presentation at brunch is even more complicated.
Unlike our Republican members, who are perfectly happy with various other options for 2024 (we have our Cotton, Pompeo, Haley, Rubio, Scott, etc. camps), the Democratic Gang members are at a loss. Not a ton of enthusiasm for Harris, Sanders, Klobuchar, or Booker, and even our smallish Buttigieg contingent comes with a lot of “buts” and some deep concerns.
Leibovich is a brilliant guy who seems to have an unlimited capacity to socialize with his Gang sources, all of whom are part of a silent conspiracy: Deny that Joe Biden has lost sufficient steps to render him unfit for the job in exchange for an agreement that he should not run for reelection.
Here’s a bit of the piece you need to read before Sunday:
The age issue will only get worse if Biden runs again. The “whispers” are becoming shouts. It has become thoroughly exhausting—for Biden and his party and, to some extent, the country itself. But the question quiets considerably when no one’s calculating how old a president born during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration will be in 2028.
It all feels impolite to point this out—disrespectful, ageist, and taboo, especially given the gross Republican smears about Biden being a doddering and demented old puppet. No one wants to perpetuate this garbage. In fact, people who have had regular contact with Biden describe him as engaged with the day-to-day aspects of his job and generally sharp on details. He will sometimes mangle sentences, blank on names, get tortured by teleprompters, lose his train of thought, or not make sense—which is not so abnormal for someone his age.
What we will discuss Sunday, in addition to the piece itself, is what is left out of the text.
There’s a reason Team Biden keeps saying this:
The minute – the MINUTE – Joe Biden says he isn’t running in 2024, he becomes the longest and weakest lame duck in modern American history, giving Speaker McCarthy and Leader McConnell even more sway and leverage than they will otherwise have. It would also put a lot of pressure on The Veep – and create deleterious and unpredictable implications for the Democratic Party at home and American security interests abroad.
However, since, as the Gang uniformly assumes, Biden won’t run in 2024, the question we will discuss is: When and how should he make this clear?
****
Other items on our Sunday agenda:
1. You will need to read the entire 30-minute interview the president did with the Associated Press and come prepared to answer this question: What was accomplished?
2. Look at the framing of our national editor (Matt Drudge), and this tweet in preparation for Debbie Dingell’s presentation: “Why House Democrats Are Freaking Out.”
3. The New York Times’ Trip Gabriel, just back from Manchester, New Hampshire, where he did a lot of Person on the Street interviews, will tell us the impact of the 1/6 hearings in the Granite State – and the results will not surprise a single Ganger:
Voters who supported President Biden in 2020 are closely following the hearings and wondering if, after so many earlier scandals, Mr. Trump will at last be relegated to a place of infamy. Voters who supported Mr. Trump dismissed the hearings as a “sham,” a political exercise by enemies who have always been out to get the former president and a distraction from more urgent issues like high gas prices and the baby formula shortage.
Several voters declined to be fully identified, explaining that they feared becoming targets of harassment in the fraught political climate.
4. Senator Romney will make a presentation on his sadness, as chronicled in the Washington Post:
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who brought the Senate close to a bipartisan $10 billion covid funding deal in March, said the Biden administration had provided “patently false” information about its inability to buy additional vaccines, treatments and supplies. He cited a newly announced White House plan to repurpose some existing funds to cover the country’s most pressing vaccine and treatment needs.
“Washington operates on a relationship of trust between the respective parties,” Romney said at a Senate health committee hearing Thursday, noting the White House had repeatedly claimed it had exhausted covid funding and could not redirect other spending. “I hope that there’s an appreciation that for the administration to say they could not purchase these things, and then after several months, divert some funds and then purchase them is unacceptable, and makes our ability to work together … very much shaken to the core….”
Biden officials said last week they had no choice but to repurpose about $10 billion from other covid priorities, such as testing, to purchase more coronavirus vaccines and treatments, since Congress had not been able to reach agreement.
In interviews Thursday, three administration officials insisted that the White House had been transparent about their needs and spending, and that Republicans had continually found new reasons to object to the efforts to secure additional covid funds.
“We’ve tried to meet Republicans on their requests, and they keep moving the goal posts,” said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to address the issue.
5. David Sanger will remind us that everything else on our agenda is just a prelude to the looming Iran crisis that will make this other stuff look small (if it happens):
Israeli and American intelligence officials have been watching each day as Iran digs a vast tunnel network just south of the Natanz nuclear production site, in what they believe is Tehran’s biggest effort yet to construct new nuclear facilities so deep in the mountains that they can withstand bunker-busting bombs and cyberattacks.
Though the construction is evident on satellite photographs and has been monitored by groups that track the proliferation of new nuclear facilities, Biden administration officials have never talked about it in public and Israel’s defense minister has mentioned it just once, in a single sentence in a speech last month. In interviews with national security officials in both nations, there clearly were differing interpretations of exactly how the Iranians may intend to use the site, and even how urgent a threat it poses.
But as President Biden prepares for his first trip as president to the Middle East next month — one that will take him to Israel and Saudi Arabia, Iran’s two biggest regional rivals — there is little debate that the conflict over Iran’s nuclear program is about to flare again.
6. Lastly, we are making an exception to our usual “No Zoom Rule” to allow our fifth-longest serving member, Dr. Anthony Fauci to appear remotely to discuss this:
In an abrupt change of course, the White House is now declining to comment on the frequency of President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 testing regimen, even as it maintains that it would inform the public if he were to ever test positive for the coronavirus.
Since Inauguration Day, the White House had frequently answered questions from reporters about when Biden, 79, last tested negative for the virus. Now, the White House says its policy is not to answer those questions. (Associated Press)
We are looking forward to seeing everyone on Sunday. No pre-registration is required, but if you aren’t a Gang member (and, thus, don’t have a reserved seat), I recommend you get there really early.
I would hate for you to come all that way and not be included.
Mark
PS: I will be having the fajitas.