The Morning Dispatch: Primaries Show Trump’s Staying Power

Happy Wednesday! The archaeologists who entered a 3,000-year-old secret chamber below a Peruvian temple this month are far braver than we are. We’ve seen Raiders of the Lost Ark too many times to think about getting anywhere near that.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The House voted 396-27 on Tuesday to pass legislation—unanimously approved in the Senate last month—that would extend security protections to immediate family members of Supreme Court justices if the Marshal of the Supreme Court “determines such protection is necessary.” The bill now goes to President Joe Biden’s desk; he is expected to sign it into law.

• The White House announced Tuesday President Biden will visit Israel, the West Bank, and Saudi Arabia next month on a trip throughout the Middle East. Biden pledged during the 2020 campaign to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” after U.S. intelligence determined the kingdom’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman likely ordered the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, but Saudi Arabia is a major oil producer at a time of sky-high energy prices.

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday the Producer Price Index—a measure of what suppliers and wholesalers are charging their customers—increased 0.8 percent in May on a seasonally adjusted basis, up from 0.4 percent in April and 1.6 percent in March. On an annual basis, PPI inflation remained near record highs at 10.8 percent.

• Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters on Tuesday he is “comfortable” with the gun violence prevention deal announced by a bipartisan group of senators over the weekend, and he’ll support it “if the legislation ends up reflecting what the framework indicates.” Negotiators are hoping to complete the legislative text in time to set up a Senate vote next week.

• Representatives at the Southern Baptist Convention’s national meeting in Anaheim, California overwhelmingly approved two reforms on Tuesday in response to a report published last month detailing decades of sexual abuse within the church. Tuesday’s votes created a mechanism to track credible accusations against ministers and pastors and a new task force to implement more of the report’s recommendations. Bart Barber, a pastor from rural Texas, was elected the SBC’s next president. 

• Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has reportedly been transferred to a maximum-security prison 360 miles north of Moscow and known for engaging in torture and abuse. He lost an appeal last month of his new, nine-year sentence for fraud and contempt of court that was levied on top of a two-and-a-half-year sentence he was given for violating the terms of his probation. Human rights organizations and critics of the Putin regime have decried the charges as politically motivated.

• Russian state media reported Tuesday that a Russian court extended American WNBA star Brittney Griner’s detention until at least July 2. Griner was arrested at an airport near Moscow in February when authorities claimed to have found vape cartridges containing cannabis oil in her luggage. The State Department announced last month it considers Griner to be wrongfully detained.

A Trumpy Tuesday

Another Tuesday in primary season has come and gone, its results hinting at former President Donald Trump’s enduring power in the Republican Party and Democrats’ future in Texas.

In South Carolina, the Trump train chugged into town for another stop on the revenge tour. Elected five times to the ruby-red 7th District, GOP Rep. Tom Rice once supported both of Trump’s presidential campaigns and voted with the former president more than 90 percent of his time in office.

Then came January 6 and Rice’s vote to impeach Trump after the attempt to overturn the presidential election—a move surprising enough that he’s said he received calls asking if he’d accidentally pressed the wrong button. Rice’s popularity dissolved into threats and a censure by the state Republican party. He tried to focus his reelection campaign on traditional Republican talking points but also stuck by his impeachment vote. Rice was the only Republican who voted to impeach Trump and voted against certifying the election results the night of Jan. 6. He now regrets voting not to certify the election.

“Defending the Constitution is a bedrock of the Republican platform,” he told ABC’s “This Week” in early June. “That’s what I did. That was the conservative vote.”

Unsurprisingly, Trump disagreed. And in a state where 89 percent of Republicans approved of Trump in an April Winthrop University poll—and in a district Trump won by 20 points—Rice’s opposition was bound to cost him. In January, challenger State Rep. Russell Fry posted a video declaring the 2020 presidential election rigged. In February, he received Trump’s endorsement. The former president hasn’t spent money on the race, but he did hold two rallies—one in person, one remotely—for Fry. 

Fry won 51 percent of the vote to Rice’s 25 percent in early returns, exceeding the 50 percent he needed to avoid a runoff in two weeks.

In South Carolina’s 1st District—still red but with more moderate and Democratic voters mixed in—Rep. Nancy Mace avoided a similar fate. A freshman, Mace voted to certify the election and said shortly after January 6 that the attack had “wiped out” Trump’s legacy. But she didn’t vote to impeach, and she has since cast her comments as more heat-of-the-moment than a true stance, filming a video outside the Trump Tower in New York City to underscore her support for the former president. 

Still, Trump endorsed Katie Arrington, a former representative who lost the district in 2018 to the Democrat Mace later unseated. Perhaps fearing a repeat of that loss, former Trump chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former South Carolina governor and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley endorsed Mace. Haley stumped with Mace in the race’s final days; enough so that the race resembled a Haley v. Trump proxy war. Mace also cleared the 50 percent hurdle to avoid a runoff.

In Texas, a small vote that might have big implications: the 34th District special election to replace resigned Democrat Filemon Vela. Republican Mayra Flores defeated Democratic opponents, flipping to red an 84 percent Hispanic south Texas district that Biden won by 13 points in 2020. With low turnout it’s dangerous to draw sweeping conclusions, and redistricting will give Democrats a 17 point advantage in the district come midterms, per FiveThirtyEight. Still, it’s a jarring sign for Democrats worried about losing Texas’ border districts and Hispanic voters.

Over in Nevada, Republicans have a shot at flipping several seats come November, and in several races voters had their pick of Trumpy or Trumpier. Former attorney general Adam Laxalt, who spearheaded Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results in Nevada and earned his endorsement, won the Republican Senate primary. He’ll face Democratic incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto in a toss-up race that will help determine control of the Senate.

Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo—who had Trump’s endorsement but has stopped short of declaring the 2020 election stolen—won the Republican gubernatorial primary. Trump loyalist Jim Marchant won the Republican secretary of state primary, competing for a role that would make him the state’s chief election officer. He’s pushed for replacing ballot counting machines with hand counts.

Between South Carolina and Nevada, plus races in North Dakota and Maine, Trump’s endorsees won six out of seven contested primaries. His influence doesn’t explain them all—he endorsed Lombardo only after the candidate was leading in the polls. Although Mace’s win broke Tuesday’s streak, she didn’t exactly thumb her nose at Trump, while Rice’s decision to stand by his impeachment vote proved his downfall. 

Rice went out defiant. 

“I thought he should be held accountable,” he told NBC last week. “Win, lose or draw, I did the right thing.”

Why Are Democratic Groups Boosting GOP Election Truthers?

We’ve written a lot in recent—days? weeks? months?—about the toxicity of the Trump campaign’s stolen-election narrative in the wake of the 2020 election. Democrats have had a lot to say about that too, including in the January 6 committee hearings that began last week. Which is why we’ve been fascinated to see Democratic groups attempting to influence Republican primaries in some competitive districts this year—not to make sure stolen-election candidates get squashed, but to try to make sure they beat their Republican challengers. Audrey has the story in a piece on the site today:

Ahead of this month’s jungle primary in California’s 22nd Congressional District, Republican candidate Chris Mathys scored a television shoutout from an unanticipated spender: the Nancy Pelosi-aligned House Majority PAC. 

The TV ad lambasted incumbent GOP Rep. David Valadao for his vote to impeach former President Donald Trump last year and called Mathys—a far-right candidate who has previously said Trump would still be president had the 2020 votes been “properly counted”—“a true conservative” who is “100 percent pro-Trump and proud.”

Despite the House Majority PAC’s best efforts to boost Mathys’ candidacy, Valadao managed to secure a second-place runoff spot with 26.3 percent of the vote behind Democratic candidate Rudy Salas, who came in first with 44.1 percent. Mathys finished third with 22.4 percent.

Democrats have deployed similar tactics before. During her 2012 reelection campaign, former Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri famously engineered the GOP primary in her favor by propping up ultra-conservative Republican candidate Todd Akin—the candidate she felt she was best-positioned to beat in the general election. “I told my team we needed to put Akin’s uber-conservative bona fides in an ad—and then, using reverse psychology, tell voters not to vote for him,” she recalled years later in an op-ed. The tactic was wildly successful. In what was initially expected to be a competitive general election race, McCaskill sailed to victory with a 16-point margin of victory.

This midterm cycle, though, some Democratic groups face scrutiny for taking primary manipulation tactics to the next level. Instead of simply adopting the McCaskill-era reverse-psychology playbook, organizations like the House Majority PAC are running attack ads against far-right candidates that are hard to distinguish from explicit endorsements of their campaigns. 

And they’re doing so while simultaneously decrying those candidates as threats to democracy. “I say to my Republican friends—and I do have some—take back your party, you’re the grand old party of America, you’ve done wonderful things for our country. You’re now being hijacked by a cult that is just not good for our country,” Pelosi said last September, months before her PAC propped up some of those same candidates.

Republicans who have been on the receiving end of these tactics have been quick to denounce them.

“From the donors’ perspective, I think they should be furious, because on one side, they’re being preached to that these people are a danger to democracy,” Valadao said in an interview on Monday. “And then they’re taking those same people’s money and trying to prop up those candidates and potentially put them in a spot where they can be a member of Congress.”

He said that some of his Democratic colleagues privately expressed frustrations to him about the ad. “I’ve had two Democrats last week—during one of the vote series on the floor—come up to me and apologize,” Valadao said, although he declined to name the members.

For their part, Democrats are largely denying that these ads are intended to boost the candidates they concern.

In Illinois’ Republican primary race for governor, for example, the Democratic Governors Association (DGA) is airing ads describing state Sen. Darren Bailey as a candidate who “embraces the Trump agenda” and is “too conservative for Illinois.” Bailey is running to the right of Republican candidate Richard Irvin, whom the DGA has railed against in ads for his 15 years as a defense attorney representing clients who have been accused of child pornography, domestic abusers, and reckless homicide.

A DGA spokesman described the ads as well within the bounds of fair political play. “The DGA is wasting no time in educating the public about these Republicans,” DGA communications director David Turner said of the Illinois governor’s race ads. “These elected and formerly elected officials want to deceptively retell their histories, and we’re just filling in the gaps.”

Worth Your Time

• In a development that was obvious yet thought-provoking, a New York court ruled on Tuesday that elephants are not people. At issue was whether Happy, in captivity at the Bronx Zoo for more than four decades, could be released to a sanctuary through a habeas corpus proceeding. “Because the writ of habeas corpus is intended to protect the liberty right of human beings to be free of unlawful confinement,” Chief Judge Janet DiFiore wrote for the majority, “it has no applicability to … a nonhuman animal who is not a ‘person’ subjected to illegal detention.” Historian Jill Lepore detailed the historical significance of the case in an essay last November. “No case like this has ever reached so high a court, anywhere in the English-speaking world. The elephant suit might be an edge case, but it is by no means a frivolous case,” she wrote. “In the wild, the elephant is a keystone species; if it falls, its entire ecosystem can collapse. In the courts, elephant personhood is a keystone argument, the argument on which all other animal-rights and even environmental arguments could conceivably depend. Elephants, the largest land mammal, are among the most intelligent, long lived, and sentient of nonhuman animals, and, arguably, they’re the most sympathetic.”

• Fraternities and sororities are not without their issues, but the homogenous and cultureless social scenes many universities have implemented in their stead take a toll as well. “Stanford has become a case study of how overzealous bureaucrats can crush natural social expression, and how the urge to excise danger can quickly devolve into a campaign to whitewash away anything remotely interesting,” Ginevra Davis writes for Palladium Magazine. “Students who are not in a housed social organization are sent to one of the dozens of now-cultureless dorms scattered around campus. Students in ‘bad housing’—the labyrinth of themeless, meaningless dorms awaiting most Stanford students—rarely bother to learn their neighbor’s names. Hallways are quiet and doors are locked. Without a strong existing support network, these students can easily bounce from anonymous dorms, to lecture halls, to cavernous dining halls without anyone acknowledging their presence for days. Sometimes students come to the conclusion that no one would really notice if they disappeared. During my freshman year, I overheard one junior boy speculating how long it would take someone to find his body if he died in his room. I remember that he settled on a range between four and seven days.”

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Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• In Tuesday’s Uphill, Haley dives deep on the path forward for the Senate’s bipartisan gun safety framework. “It isn’t sweeping or even close to the laws Democrats would pass if they had their way,” she notes. “But, if it succeeds, gun safety advocates say it would become the most significant gun violence prevention measure in more than two decades.”

• This week’s edition of The Sweep (🔒) jumps around from the ideological diversity of friendships to the number of competitive house districts this cycle to David McCormick’s decision to concede in Pennsylvania. Plus: the politics of the January 6 hearings. “Small dollar fundraising is a problem for both parties,” Sarah writes. “Hand in hand with partisan primaries, it’s driving a political agenda totally apart from the interests of the vast, vast majority of voters.”

• David’s latest French Press (🔒) looks at the Trump campaign’s alleged use of fraudulent election claims to vacuum up hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters of the former president. “How could so many people give so much money to a campaign that was transparently frivolous and—at times—incandescently amateurish?” he asks.

• On today’s Dispatch Podcast, Thiru Vignarajah—former deputy attorney general of Maryland—joins Sarah for a conversation about all things Baltimore: violent crime, reforming police practices, and the Baltimore state’s attorney race. Plus: What might help bring down gun violence in major cities?

• Fresh off his appearance before the January 6 Committee, Chris Stirewalt rejoins The Remnant today to discuss how the hearings have played out thus far and what to expect going forward. What happened on election night when Fox News’ decision desk called Arizona? Will the revelations influence the midterms?

• On last night’s Dispatch Live, Sarah, David, and Steve discussed the first few January 6 Committee hearings before turning to questions from the audience. If you missed the discussion—or want to watch it again—Dispatch members can do so here.

• On the site today, American Enterprise Institute fellows Giselle Donnelly and Maj. Gen. John Ferrari have a piece about keeping tank production, and Jonah has a piece on the January 6 committee hearings thus far.

Let Us Know

What do you make of the Nonhuman Rights Project’s case for Happy the Elephant’s freedom from the Bronx Zoo? Totally frivolous? Eminently reasonable? Something in between, but thought provoking?