The Iowa caucuses are seven weeks from today. While AFP Action says it will deploy “the largest grassroots operation in the country and a presence in all fifty states” behind Haley, it’s hard to imagine her beating Trump. It feels like another exercise in political delusion: a powerful mainstream Republican force pretending Trump doesn’t control the party.

There’s also deep irony here. As the major financial and political force behind the reactionary, anti-Obama Tea Party movement, AFP helped create Trump, the man it is now trying to defeat.

It's been more than a decade since then-President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, his signature legislative accomplishment, into law. Since then, Republicans in the House and Senate have spent years trying to repeal some, if not all, of the massive health care infrastructure that provided medical insurance coverage to more than 40 million Americans in 2023 alone, according to an estimate from the Department of Health and Human Services. After wielding their repeal efforts as a perennial campaign cudgel for the better part of the 2010s, the 2022 midterms elections were "the first [time] in more than a decade" Republicans didn't make erasing the ACA a tentpole issue, NBC News reported, citing the "diminished appetite" for that particular fight from a GOP resigned to the fact that Obamacare seems here to stay.

As the 2024 general elections ramp up in earnest however, the relative lull of 2022's ACA detente appears at risk of being labeled a fluke, as GOP frontrunner former President Donald Trump insists on making his predecessor's battle-tested legislation a campaign issue once again. Calling it "not good Healthcare," in a post on his Truth Social network this weekend, Trump claimed to be "seriously looking at alternatives" while urging fellow Republicans to "never give up!" on efforts to repeal the law.

The Supreme Court, after a long period of hostility toward any claim brought under the federal Voting Rights Act, recently signaled that this hostility has limits. Last June, the Court surprised nearly everyone who follows voting rights litigation by declaring Alabama’s racially gerrymandered maps illegal and ordering the state to draw a second majority-Black congressional district.

Yet if the Supreme Court’s June decision in Allen v. Milligan (2023) was supposed to be a signal that the justices intend to keep at least some safeguards against racism in elections in place, several Republican appointees to the lower courts missed the memo. Last week, as most Americans were thinking about their Thanksgiving dinners, a pair of federal appeals courts handed down some of the sharpest attacks on the Voting Rights Act — the landmark 1965 law prohibiting race discrimination in US elections — in the law’s history.

In the latest report on billionaire philanthropy from the nonprofit Institute for Policy Studies, authors Helen Flannery, Chuck Collins, and Bella DeVaan use Forbes data to calculate that the 73 surviving American pledgers who were billionaires when the pledge was created in 2010 have more than doubled their collective wealth since then—and 30 individuals have seen their net worths at least triple. Behold the greatest hits.

According to a Tuesday letter addressed to committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), Biden agreed to testify before the committee on Dec. 13 — as long as the hearing was public. In the letter, Biden’s attorneys quoted Comer’s own demand, issued in November, that given Biden’s “willingness to address this investigation publicly up to this point, we would expect him to be willing to testify before Congress.”

The letter added that open-door proceedings “would prevent selective leaks, manipulated transcripts, doctored exhibits, or one-sided press statements.”

Republicans would not have it. “Hunter Biden is trying to play by his own rules instead of following the rules required of everyone else,” Comer wrote in a statement. “That won’t stand with House Republicans.”

Through a package of proposed reforms to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF, the administration plans to shore up the U.S. social safety net. The regulations are intended to ensure that more federal and state welfare dollars make it to low-income families, rather than being spent on other things or not spent at all.

The proposal, drawn up by the federal Administration for Children and Families, is open for public comment until Dec. 1. Once comments are reviewed, officials plan to issue final regulations that could take effect in the months after that, heading into the 2024 election.

There is recent precedent for that sort of perpetual protest candidacy. In 2016, Bernie Sanders didn’t concede defeat until the Democratic convention in late July, even though by every objective standard Hillary Clinton had clinched the nomination in early June. But it was a very close race that was still contested right up until the final primaries. So perhaps a better analogy for a prospective perma-campaign by Christie would be Ron Paul’s 2012 campaign, which fought for delegates — and threatened to disrupt party harmony — months after Mitt Romney had nailed down the nomination.

Most people in West Maui get water from the county’s public water system. But Martin-built developments such as Launiupoko, a community of a few hundred large homes outside of Lāhainā, draw their water from three private utility systems that he controls, siphoning underground aquifers and mountain streams to fill swimming pools and irrigate lawns. More than half of all water used in the Launiupoko subdivision, or around 1.5 million gallons a day, goes toward cosmetic landscaping on lawns, according to state estimates. Just over a quarter is used for drinking and cooking.

The scale of this water usage is stunning: According to state data, Launiupoko Irrigation Company and Launiupoko Water Company deliver a combined average of 5,750 gallons of water daily to each residential customer in Launiupoko, or almost 20 times as much as the average American home. The development has just a few hundred residents, but it uses almost half as much water as the public water system in Lāhainā, which serves 18,000 customers.

Historian Joshua Zeitz wrote on X, "This guy represents California in Congress — one of 9 current states whose territory the US won in part or whole during the Mexican War of 1848."

"These guys spent so much time erasing American history that they forgot to read it," wrote BET host Marc Lamont Hill.

Five former Trump officials and conservative allies told Reuters that even as Trump weighs harsher anti-migrant measures, they are concerned about implementing a new version of the 2018 "zero tolerance" policy that separated thousands of children from their parents at the southwest border.

They said they worry about a repeat of the widespread public backlash provoked by the original policy.

"The family separation that resulted from the zero tolerance caused an uproar in the country," said Tom Homan, a former Trump immigration official who could join a second administration. "The best way to do it, rather than deal with all that chaos that comes with it, is to keep them in a residential center together and have their hearings together."

Now, it's perfectly true that there was never a time in America when everyone just got along beautifully. Our history of racism and xenophobia alone puts the lie to that. But Trump's intolerance truly is ecumenical in that it could be any group, any individual, any foe or (former) friend at any given moment. It's entirely self-serving.

It's making more and more people embrace political violence. The recent American Values Survey from Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in partnership with the Brookings Institution think tank found that one in three Republicans agree that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” – up from 15% in 2021. (22% of Independents and 13% of Democrats agree, all numbers having increased since 2021.) The truly frightening number is that among those who believe the Big Lie, 46% believe they may resort to violence, as well as 41% of Trump fans and 41% who buy into the "Great Replacement Theory." 39% of Christian nationalists are ready to take up arms to "save the country." Those numbers represent tens of millions of Americans.

For all of Donald Trump’s rhetorical innovations, personality quirks, and alleged criminal malfeasance, what has made him truly unique as a political figure is how much he has merged fan culture with American politics. It’s not unusual for Americans to idolize presidents—Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama are still actively revered by many—but no other president has inspired the same level of merchandise lines or themed car flags. A MAGA bumper sticker often isn’t simply a statement of loyalty; it’s a cultural signifier of community much like the dancing bear bumper sticker is for a Grateful Dead fan.

Nowhere is this more clear than at Trump’s rallies. He’s turned his campaign events into something that has more in common with a Bruce Springsteen concert than a Harry Truman whistle-stop tour.