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Keep this in mind when you hear that Trump has changed his spots and “won’t have time for retribution.” It’s what he lives for: Former President Donald Trump and people in his inner circle have told down-ballot Republican candidates not to hire Republican strategist Jeff Roe or his political consulting firm after Roe worked to elect Ron DeSantis, according to four people familiar with the conversations. The admonition against hiring Roe represents an attempt to choke off revenue for his consulting firm, Axiom, in an act of political retribution. Roe was a top strategist for the DeSantis super PAC, Never Back Down. Roe resigned in mid-December after the Washington Post published a story detailing backbiting at the super PAC. Candidates have been warned that hiring Roe could create a political problem for them with the Trump team. “It’s an open secret that candidates who want to stay on President Trump’s good side should not hire Axiom,” said one of the four people, an influential Republican strategist who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “They are enemy No. 1.” He wants to be a dictator.

And 75% of GOP voters think Trump is just fine It’s the other 25% he needs to be concerned about… Former President Donald Trump‘s convincing victory in Monday’s Iowa caucuses shows his continued strength among Republicans, and a new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds once more that Trump is both viewed nationwide as the candidate whom Republicans and Republican-leaning independents would be most satisfied with as their 2024 nominee as well as the highest-rated contender across a range of other attributes. Three out of four Republican-leaning adults say they would be very or somewhat satisfied with Trump as the GOP’s presidential nominee, compared to 64% who say the same about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and 50% for former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Trump’s two remaining rivals in the nominating race. Trump’s advantage tracks closely with the findings about Republicans who were interviewed as part of a more extensive ABC News poll conducted the week before the Iowa caucuses.

I’ve written for UnHerd about the international bestseller Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth by Kohei Saito, the rising star of contemporary Marxist thought. The book was a huge success in his home country Japan, selling over half a million copies, and has now just been published in English. Saito’s argument is pretty straightforward: capitalism is destroying the …

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Florida Democrats flip state House seat With few exceptions (Hi, Hillsborough!) Democrats in Florida have not been showing us how it’s done lately. Maybe that’s changing (Daily Kos): Florida Democrats kicked off the new year with a major victory as businessman and Navy veteran Tom Keen flipped a Republican-held seat in the state House―a development that represents Gov. Ron DeSantis’ second electoral humiliation in the span of 24 hours. Keen defeated his Republican rival, Osceola County School Board member Erika Booth, 51-49 in Tuesday’s special election for the 35th House District, a constituency in the Orlando suburbs that Joe Biden carried 52-47. The Democrat will succeed Republican Fred Hawkins, whom Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed in June to serve as president of South Florida State College despite lacking any background in higher education. “Republicans will hold an 84-36 supermajority in the state House,” writes Jeff Singer, with “a similarly lopsided edge in the state Senate.” Keen’s seat will be up for reelection in November, so he had best not get too comfortable.

Trump’s win in Iowa showed his weakness The Trump juggernaut rolled into Iowa on Monday and won what the media is calling a “historic” victory. He won 51% of the vote while his closest rival Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis only won 21% and Former S. Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, 19%. Obviously, it was a tremendous victory for the former president, demonstrating his massive strength going into the 2024 election. Or was it? First of all, this was no surprise. Donald Trump has been destined to win this caucus and frankly, every primary from the moment he announced he was running. Unlike in 2016, he reportedly had a very professional campaign in the state and was polling over 50% throughout the race. It is very probable that he will be the de facto nominee within the next month and will have it all wrapped up by Super Tuesday. However, taking a closer look at those Iowa numbers shows some of the pit falls awaiting him in the general election. If there’s one state in the nation you can call MAGA country, it’s Iowa. It’s something like 95% white, older than most states, extremely rural and the Republican Party there is as conservative as it gets.

Trump is acting like a juvenile delinquent in the federal courthouse today. His lawyer is too. Is there anyone else on earth who would be allowed to do this? Millions of people want this monster to be president of the United States. This is a very, very sick political culture.

That’s what it’s come to. He’s just spreading disinformation for fun now. He’s not going to win anything in New Hampshire. I thought this was an interesting look at what happened to his once vaunted campaign from Marc Caputo. An excerpt: There’s dispute about whether Trump was ever beatable in a GOP primary. But there’s little disagreement among connected political pros about the multiple problems with the campaign of DeSantis, an aloof not-ready-for-primetime candidate who didn’t know what he didn’t know and was arrogant about it, according to more than a dozen insiders who shared their insight to The Messenger since March. They spoke on condition of anonymity, many out of fear of retribution from DeSantis or his aggressive army of social media followers on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. DeSantis’s prickly personality estranged one-time allies, donors and political pros. His likability problems turned off many voters. The $47 million spent against him by the super PACs of Trump and Nikki Haley damaged him. And the spring and summer criminal indictments of Trump changed the trajectory of the race.

Has only read paper four times in recent months First, if you didn’t know already, Sinclair Broadcasting is based in Baltimore, David Folkenflik reminds Threads readers:   Post by @davidfolkenflik View on Threads About David D. Smith, Judd Legum adds: Smith is the son of Sinclair founder Julian Sinclair Smith and, along with his brothers, controls the company. Sinclair, a publicly traded company, owns or operates 185 local television stations across 86 markets. A 2018 study published in the American Political Science Review found that stations purchased by Sinclair “coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics” and undergo “a significant rightward shift in the ideological slant of coverage.” Smith is the executive chairman of Sinclair Inc., reports the startup Baltimore Banner. [Smith] told New York Magazine in 2018 he considered print media “so left-wing as to be meaningless dribble.” Asked Tuesday during the meeting whether he stood by those comments now that he owns one of the most storied titles in American journalism, Smith said yes.

Really? He’s got a lot of nerve… I carry no brief for Nikki Haley. She would be an awful president but not because she’s not “tough” enough. This is reminiscent of his fatuous claims against Hillary Clinton that she didn’t have the “strength and the stamina” to be president. He thinks all women are weak. But as he proved when he was president nobody is a bigger patsy than he is. By the way, he’s also going after her for her ethnicity: In case you were wondering: Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday went after Nikki Haley while referring to her by her first name, Nimarata, in the latest example of Trump using racist dog whistles to attack his GOP presidential rival. Haley is the daughter of Indian immigrants and was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. She took her husband Michael Haley’s last name after they married. Trump misspelled Nimarata as “Nimrada” as he attacked her in a new post on his social media platform Truth Social. The MAGA crowd has been calling her “Nimroda” (nimrod, get it?) for months. naturally he’s doing it now too. Most Republicans don’t care.

From Scott Rosenberg’s Hopium Chronicles (to which you should subscribe for a little bit of political positivity.) As we often discuss here the central dynamic in American politics since Dobbs in the spring of 2022 has been Dem overperformance, Republican struggle in race after race, all across the country. We saw it in the battlegrounds in 2022, as we improved our standing over 2020 in AZ, CO, GA, MI, MN, NH, PA; and got all the way up to 59% in CO, 57& in PA, 55% in MI, 54% in NH. We saw it all throughout 2023 as we took away Colorado Springs and Jacksonville, two of the largest GOP held cities; the Supreme Court seat and rancid gerrymandering in WI; the six week abortion ban in OH; the Virginia Assembly and the fantasy that the 15 week abortion ban would be a safe haven for Republicans; and so much more, all across the country. When I started Hopium in early 2023 I wondered whether this dynamic that we saw in 2022 would continue in 2023, and it did. 2023 was really a blue wave year across the US. And here in early 2024 we’ve been wondering would this same dynamic carry over to this year?