This piece by Paul Waldman takes up one of my longest standing pet peeves, this notion that somehow rural and small town America is not only more authentically American, its values are far superior to those who live in urban America (where most of the people are.) This is taken as a given and is so accepted that they are allowed to bash cities mercilessly while screaming like wounded harpies if anyone criticizes their “way of life.” I’m sick of it. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum did not announce his bid for the GOP presidential nomination by grabbing a guitar and crooning out the chorus to John Mellencamp’s “Small Town,” but he came awfully close. “I grew up in a tiny town in North Dakota,” he says at the opening of the video meant to introduce him to voters. After touting his business success, he concludes, “A kid from small town North Dakota: That’s America.” Burgum is practicing a version of small-town identity politics. “Small-town values have guided me my entire life; small-town values are at the core of America,” he says.
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They have Anheuser-Busch bowing and scraping Via Axios: In a new bid to steady his rattled company, Anheuser-Busch U.S. CEO Brendan Whitworth vowed to protect the jobs of employees and those of independent wholesalers. Why it matters: With conservatives in revolt over Bud Light’s courting of a transgender influencer, Whitworth’s statement is an effort to fight back and regain market share. Axios has learned that Whitworth plans to go on the road around the U.S. this summer to listen to consumers, in connection with Budweiser’s MLB sponsorship. The company’s summer ad campaign, which begins next week, will portray Bud Light as “easy to drink and easy to enjoy,” he added in the statement Thursday. By the numbers: Sales of Bud Light, a new top target in the culture wars, are off as much as 25%. After the right savaged Bud Light for its relationship with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, sales dropped so sharply that data out this week shows Mexican lager Modelo replacing Bud Light as America’s best-selling beer.
Baby wolves! A zoo in South Dakota has welcomed a litter of critically endangered red wolf pups — a litter vital to the existence of the species with only an estimated two dozen left existing in the wild. The Great Plains Zoo in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, said that they were “thrilled to announce the births of six critically endangered red wolves” on Thursday in a statement on the zoo’s website. The six pups — two females and four males — were born to first-time parents Camelia and Uyosi, who only arrived at the Great Plains Zoo in October of last year from facilities in Washington and Texas, respectively. These six pups are vital to the existence of the species with an estimated 23 to 25 red wolves remaining in the wild and only an estimated 278 alive in captivity, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Red Wolf Recovery Program. “Camelia and Uyosi are amazing parents, I wouldn’t expect anything less from them,” said Joel Locke, the Animal Care Director of the Great Plains Zoo. “We are fortunate to have vet staff and animal care staff that have worked with red wolves for more than 15 years.
“He’s scared s—less” That is why Trump, who pleaded not guilty this week, is under indictment on 37 federal felony charges. Not because he listens to idiots. Although, that is a factor, the Washington Post reveals: One of Donald Trump’s new attorneys proposed an idea in the fall of 2022: The former president’s team could try to arrange a settlement with the Justice Department. The attorney, Christopher Kise, wanted to quietly approach Justice to see if he could negotiate a settlement that would preclude charges, hoping Attorney General Merrick Garland and the department would want an exit ramp to avoid prosecuting a former president. Kise would hopefully “take the temperature down,” he told others, by promising a professional approach and the return of all documents. Trump would not have it. Trump time and again rejected the advice from lawyers and advisers who urged him to cooperate and instead took the advice of Tom Fitton, the head of the conservative group Judicial Watch, and a range of others who told him he could legally keep the documents and should fight the Justice Department, advisers said.
Governance doesn’t bleed It should be no surprise by now that the press covers the circus before it turning to boring non-nonsense. The former president’s performances fascinate (and draw eyeballs and clicks) in the way The Joker is an iconic Batman villain. His antics bleed and lead. The challenge in how the news covers Donald Trump “news” is to cover what is news and not what is more Trumpish nonsense, suggests Brian Stelter, formerly of CNN. “Formerly,” because as a media critic he routinely “said the quiet part out loud” about the fecklessness of major news coverage. It got him cancelled. News sources don’t like having their dirty laundry exposed in public. The problem for Democrats is that taking governing seriously is not headline news. If their daily activities are not as eye-catching as frontal nudity or AR-15 parades or street violence, it is easy to assume they are doing nothing. Just yesterday, an acquaintance on Twitter complained that as Republicans cheer Trump’s violations of law and civic norms, Democrats mostly stand by and do nothing. Two impeachments? Nothing.
It’s the only way to truly prove your devotion The National Review agrees with Coulter. Some people have been skeptical about the presence of motivational speaker/venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy in the 2024 Republican presidential primary race. My colleague Charlie Cooke cruelly accused him of “not really running for president.” An even less reputable writer irresponsibly declared that he had “voluntarily enserfed himself” to Donald Trump, which is the sort of tasteless language that I’m glad National Review no longer tolerates. And with good reason, because Vivek Ramaswamy has proven himself worthy of his candidacy with a truly selfless act: He has called upon all of Donald Trump’s other opponents to sign a promise to pardon Trump of all his crimes regardless of guilt or innocence if they win office. Some opponents of the former president might have taken a combative position in regard to his indictment on 37 counts of stealing and withholding national secrets and more; others might sit on the fence.
I wrote about this a while back but since they seem determined to throw the election to Trump it’s worth reiterating. Here’s Rick Wilson on twitter: Good morning. If any of you are still bamboozled by Nancy Jacobsen and Mark Penn’s @NoLabelsOrg‘s actual intentions let me hook you up. They claim to be moderate, centrist problem solvers who are running a 3rd part effort to “give Americans more choices.” Nancy is one of DC’s most powerful, influential, and connected players. A Swamp Empress. Richer than God. She and Mark Penn are angry, though. Very, very angry. At whom, you ask? Well, Democrats. They were exiled from Clinton world. Obamas, same. They’ve been on a jihad ever since. Mark has dozens of Fox hits defending and praising Trump. Their major donors are the EXACT same billionaires funding Ron DeSantis. (Yeah, Nancy hides her donors, but girl, your org leaks because your staff hates you.) They formed No Labels as a long con, a way to break the Democrats, get rich doing it (and again, they are VERY rich), and punish their imagined enemies.
Yeah, nobody got anything. Surprised? Miami New Times reports: Trump opted to decompress with a trip to Versailles in Little Havana. The iconic restaurant has long been a pit stop for politicians seeking to curry favor with Miami’s Cuban voters. Trump and his entourage arrived at Versailles shortly after leaving the courthouse and made straight for the bakery. The local press was on hand to capture footage of the large crowd milling outside to greet their man. Inside the bakery, Trump supporters fawned over their man, regaling the soon-to-turn-77-year-old with a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday” a day early and holding a group prayer. Former MMA fighter Jorge Masvidal, sporting a University of Miami ball cap, hailed Trump as “everybody’s favorite president of all time” after embracing the former leader of the free world.
Get a load of the polling on Trump and the documents: As the country reckons with an unprecedented federal indictment of a former president, one of the most significant hurdles to a public resolution is arriving at a shared set of basic facts and priorities. And that’s particularly a challenge with the American right. Multiple polls focused on the Trump classified documents case suggest that many, if not most, Republicans don’t particularly appreciate the potential gravity of the situation or its details. And it can’t simply be explained by mere partisanship. One of the inescapable facts of the situation is that Trump got himself in trouble not because he took the documents in the first place, but because he declined to return them. The indictment only charges conduct after the government subpoenaed Trump’s documents in May 2022. After that subpoena, Trump only returned some of his remaining classified documents before the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago turned up more. The Washington Post recapped how Trump’s fateful decision not to return the documents resulted from rejecting his lawyers’ advice.
… ’til your daddy takes the country away I’ve long written that one of Trump’s great gift is that, for his followers, he makes politics fun. This NYT newsletter piece observes that phenomenon: When Donald Trump was indicted on criminal charges in New York City two months ago, I tried to make sense of the political fallout with my colleague Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst. After poring over traditional markers about fund-raising and poll numbers, Nate mentioned another standard I’ve been thinking about over the past few days: Do Trump’s legal challenges make him more (or less) fun? The question is awkward, as it suggests that the reasons some Americans are drawn to politicians are divorced from the seriousness of their office. But after Trump’s arraignment in federal court in Miami this week, I’m reminded of its importance. Nate wasn’t calling Trump fun as a self-evident fact, but rather identifying a set of voters who are attracted to showmanship and celebrity, are distinct from Trump’s base and follow politics only casually, if at all. These voters matter for Trump’s 2024 campaign.