The 24 Seven - 5/2/24
The top seven stories shaping the race for the White House ...
Welcome to The 24 Seven – 24sight’s daily roundup of the top seven stories shaping the race for the White House. If you see something we missed, have some suggestions or care to share a hot tip, please drop us a note: info@24sight.news.
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One of the central tenants of 24sight’s style and reporting is bringing clarity to an utterly chaotic media ecosystem. (If you’ve checked out because lawmakers performing sex acts in Beetlejuice musicals gets the same footing as riotous campus protests or Supreme Court hearings, this is where you check back in. We keep it tight, clean and on the button – news judgment.)
1 Country on fire
Campus protests over the Israel/Hamas War — marked by police clashing with pro-Palestinian protesters, some protesters chanting wildly anti-Semitic death threats and a bifurcating of the Democratic coalition with Democratic officials clearing out camps of student protesters — have spurred comparisons recently to the historic showdown at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.
The corollary may be imperfect — particularly in the underlying reasons behind the protests, continued war ripping apart the Middle East, versus fights over a draft which sent an entire generation to fight in Vietnam — but the images are inescapable.
Of note, this is not the same as the January 6th attack on Congress in 2021 – that was a violent insurrection in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election. Some of the insurrectionists were peaceful, some were also armed with guns. People who attacked police, spilling their blood on the Capitol steps in some cases, and smashed through the windows of the Capitol were arrested, tried and jailed.
2 News you can use
It’s been two years since Politico landed a truly historic scoop, obtaining the draft opinion which would eventually overturn Roe v. Wade-era federal abortion access protections.
Since then, the issue — and the struggle to further ban abortions throughout the country — has inflamed voters of all stripes, proving a key factor in the 2022 elections, 2023 ballot measures and very likely in November’s general election.
24sight’s Tom LoBianco spoke with veteran podcaster Justin Young about the state of the pro-life/anti-abortion movement this week for the “Politics, Politics, Politics” Pod. Worth your time.
3 What is the former president saying?
In the race for the White House, the biggest story of the week remains the remarkable Time Magazine cover story featuring a revealing pair of interviews with former President Trump.
Trump has spent the better part of this election teasing authoritarianism and white supremacy. In the early days of his campaign he dined with a neo-Nazi (and star rapper) and didn’t seem to know that he was at dinner with a different neo-Nazi leader. Later in the campaign he began echoing language the language of Nazis, saying immigrants from around the globe were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
But his comments, as has always been the case for his nine years as the country’s most era-defining politician, are almost always vague or disjointed enough to leave some room for doubt. (An “exit ramp” as political pros say.)
He’s been in the race for 18 months now, it’s a defining characteristic of his third run for the White House. (Conversely, the defining characteristic of his finely tuned campaign machine has been clean spin and targeted messaging.)
The old game used to be trying to figure out what a politico actually meant in a word salad, because it would be indicative of how they would govern and give readers a sense of what they’re getting from the ballot box.
That’s not the case anymore.
4 It’s a gag
Gag orders don’t work, at least not in the first ever criminal trial of a former president.
Trump was fined $9,000 for attacking members of the judiciary, possible witnesses and family members … and then attacked the judge again, as “crooked”. So now the judge may consider, again, potentially imprisoning the former president for repeatedly refusing to abide the rules of the Third Branch of government.
(For more on this, recommend our very prescient 24sight Pod episode with Just Security fellow Adam Klasfeld, in which he diagrammed exactly why baiting the judiciary with repeated attacks is a very sharp legal strategy indeed.)
Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, ostensibly one of the people who’s supposed to be protected by the “gag”, is making a killing on TikTok attacking Trump.
Writing in the pages of the Gray Lady, Trump surrogate Matthew Schmitz deemed that all of this is helping to build Trump into an “outlaw” in the populace, an image of an underdog — which is invaluable in politics, if it bears out.
That may be laughable to the audience of the New York Times op-ed page. But in a highly selective focus group of Uber drivers around Washington, your author found a lot of support for Trump (and not much hand-wringing) - said one, “He’s gangster.”
5 Key Bridge
A fifth victim of the Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore was pulled from the water last night, The Baltimore Banner reports.
6 Swing States
Astute political analyst and observer Kyle Kondik writes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball about the swing states flying under the radar — Nebraska and Maine.
If lawmakers in Nebraska — nonpartisan, but largely in line with Republicans — change their rules to allot electoral votes statewide, removing a singular vote which almost always goes Democratic — and in Maine, where Democrats could retaliate by stripping a likely Republican electoral vote — it could end in a 269-269 tie between Trump and incumbent President Joe Biden in November.
In this hypothetical, the decision over who becomes the next president moves to the House of Representatives, where each state delegation casts one vote for president - and a simple majority wins. At this time, Republicans control 26 delegations, enough to hand a victory to Trump in this scenario.
Of note, this was the same strategy outlined by No Labels – a mashup of former top Republicans and Democrats from decades past. It was also the same strategy outlined by disbarred lawyer John Eastman to then-President Trump, with the goal of pressuring former Vice President Mike Pence into overthrowing the 2020 election.
7 News
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