HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 22, 2024

Last night, Florida governor Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and promptly endorsed former president Trump. DeSantis had tried to present himself as the alternative to Trump, but he put so little daylight between himself and the former president that he could never get traction.

DeSantis appeared to use his power as the governor of Florida to push measures he thought would boost his candidacy, many of which followed the pattern of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who has used his government to destroy democracy and assume autocratic powers. DeSantis pushed anti-LGBTQ+ laws, book bans, and the idea that businesses like Disney must answer to the moral positions of the government rather than market forces, and he flew migrants who were in the U.S. legally to Martha’s Vineyard in an apparent attempt to stand out as an anti-immigrant crusader.

But DeSantis never broke free of Trump’s orbit.

The Miami Herald editorial board noted that while DeSantis’s presidential bid had ended, “the damage of the laws he has pushed through in Florida, as he landed more appearances on Fox News, will live on. Without his political ambitions, there likely wouldn’t be ‘Don’t say gay,’ woke wars and the waste of state resources to fight meaningless battles against drag queen bars. These were efforts to appeal to Trump’s base but his supporters refused to leave the former president, especially after he was indicted.”

The New Hampshire primary is tomorrow, with former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley squaring off against Trump. It is not at all clear what daylight exists between the two of them, either, although Haley is perceived as the representative of the pre-Trump corporate Republican Party. Still, the contest is revealing the future in at least one way: today, New Hampshire voters are reporting that they have received robocalls with a deepfake of President Joe Biden’s voice telling them not to vote.

Republican party officials worry that while Trump is taking up tons of oxygen, the party itself has nothing to run on. Since taking control of the House in 2023, Republicans have very little to show for it except a lot of infighting. The last congressional session was “historically unproductive,” as Sahil Kapur of NBC News put it today. House Republicans’ investigations of President Joe Biden, hyped before the media, have fizzled, and now, after insisting that they would not pass funding for Ukraine, Israel, or Taiwan until the “crisis” at the border was addressed, they have backed off and now say they will not pass border legislation.

Meanwhile, radicals appear to be manufacturing a crisis on the border. On January 11, Michael Scherer and Dylan Wells of the Washington Post reported that political ads had used the word “border” 1,319 times since the start of the year, more than any other word including “approve” and “message,” standard disclaimer terms for political ads.

On Wednesday, January 17, state authorities began to arrest migrants at Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, as part of Governor Greg Abbott’s attempt to take control of immigration away from the federal government. When the government told Texas to stop blocking federal officials from the stretch of the Rio Grande where three migrants died last week, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton’s office responded: “Texas will not surrender.”

Today the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the federal government is authorized to remove the razor wire Texas has installed across the U.S.-Mexico border, although considering the federal government’s authority over border security is very well established, the fact that the vote was 5–4 is surprising. Far-right lawmakers were outraged nonetheless. Representative Chip Roy of Texas urged his House colleagues to defund the Department of Homeland Security, and Louisiana representative Clay Higgins said on social media that the federal government was “staging a civil war” and that “Texas should stand their ground.”

Meanwhile, on Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted Mexican Foreign Secretary Alicia Bárcena to follow up on migration discussions the two countries had in meetings on December 27, 2023, in Mexico. In September 2023, Mexico eclipsed China as the largest trading partner of the U.S., and in the December meeting, Blinken, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Homeland Security Advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, U.S. ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar, and National Security Council Coordinator for the Los Angeles Declaration Katie Tobin discussed cooperation to manage the border safely and humanely while also combating the drug smuggling and conditions that have been driving migration.

On January 8, Julia Ainsley of NBC News explained that the Biden administration has been pressuring Mexico to increase enforcement on its own southern border with Guatemala, deport more migrants from within Mexico, and take in more non-Mexican migrants back across the U.S. southern border. In exchange, Ainsley says, Mexico’s president—who is on the defensive at home because of corruption charges—has proposed that the U.S. invest more money in Latin America and Caribbean countries, suspend its blockade of Cuba, ease sanctions against Venezuela, and make it easier for migrants to work legally in the U.S.

On Friday, in Washington, D.C., the U.S. said that the coordinated efforts were having a positive effect on migration as officials have cracked down on smuggling networks, trains, and bus routes. “Migration is a hemispheric challenge,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said. “The United States is committed to work hand in hand with Mexico and countries across the region to address the root causes of migration and advance economic opportunities in the spirit of Los Angeles Declaration for Migration and Protection,” a landmark 2022 agreement in which the heads of twenty of the countries in the Americas agreed to embrace a regional approach to managing migration.

Today, on the anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, Vice President Kamala Harris, who has made protecting reproductive rights key to her portfolio, and President Joe Biden noted that thanks to the “extreme decision” of today’s Supreme Court to overturn that decision has left tens of millions of American women “in states with extreme and dangerous abortion bans.”

“Because of Republican elected officials,” Biden said in a statement, “women’s health and lives are at risk…. Even as Americans…have resoundingly rejected attempts to limit reproductive freedom, Republican elected officials continue to push for a national ban and devastating new restrictions across the country.” He and Vice President Harris “are fighting to protect women’s reproductive freedom against Republicans officials’ dangerous, extreme, and out-of-touch agenda,” he said. “We stand with the vast majority of Americans who support a woman’s right to choose, and continue to call on Congress to restore the protections of Roe in federal law once and for all.”

This is a position embraced by 69% of Americans, and the Biden campaign has run videos with Trump bragging that he overturned Roe v. Wade and suggesting that women who obtain abortions should be punished.

Recently, the campaign released an ad in which a Texas woman who is herself an OBGYN talks about being unable to obtain an abortion for a planned pregnancy after a routine ultrasound revealed that the fetus could not survive. “Because of Donald Trump overturning Roe v. Wade,” she says, Texas “completely” took her choice away and put her life in danger. “It’s every woman’s worst nightmare and it was absolutely unbearable. We need leaders that will protect our rights and not take them away,” she says.

Finally, today, a historical moment: the Dow Jones Industrial Average, an average of the value of 30 leading companies, passed 38,000 for the first time.