Firehose #195: Will the Last Anti-Trump Republican Please Turn off the Lights?

Also: See you in the nation’s crapital Tuesday night!

Before we go any further, there are still tickets available to our show Tuesday in Washington, D.C., now featuring New York Times yakker Lulu Garcia-Navarro, fresh off her waves-making interviews with Graham Platner and Tucker Carlson, and at least one other special guest with fabulous hair.

* On Saturday, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R—La.) became the first incumbent U.S. senator since 2017 to lose a primary election, finishing third in a top-two runoff against two Republicans preferred by Donald Trump. Cassidy was one of seven GOP senators who voted to impeach Trump in 2021; only two others remain in office: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Maine’s Susan Collins.

The president was characteristically magnanimous in victory:

Bill Cassidy, after falsely using his “relationship” with me during his political career, and winning Elections because of it, voted to impeach me on preposterous charges that were fake then, and now, are criminally insane! His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now a part of legend, and it’s nice to see that his political career is OVER!

Coming on the heels of six (out of seven) Trump-backed primary challengers defeating Indiana State Senate incumbents who had declined the president’s suggestion to engage in mid-decade partisan redistricting, and just hours before Tuesday’s Trump-backed primary challenge against persistent side-thorner Rep. Thomas Massie (R—Ky.), the Cassidy defenestration reinforces a paradox: Precisely at the moment when Trump’s approval rating is sinking like an anvil, jeopardizing slim GOP majorities in the Senate and House before his final midterms, the president’s lock on the Republican Party is tightening to near-absolute. Even the candidates that Trump actively insults and campaigns against twist their spines into pretzels in a doomed effort to tell voters that, no really, they’re pro-Trump after all!

Take Cassidy. “If you want somebody who works well with President Trump, you vote for Bill Cassidy,” the senator lamely claimed in a radio interview last week, per the Washington Post. “He may not like me, but he had signed into law four bills that I either wrote or negotiated in the last four months.” So cowed was Cassidy that, despite being a physician passionate about childhood vaccines, he famously voted to confirm conspiratorial anti-vax crusader Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for secretary of Health and Human Services, not that the MAHA faithful ever forgave him for some mildly challenging confirmation-hearing questions.

Previous shirt-models for Trump’s electoral bootprints have also engaged in that frantic, late-campaign triangulation; akin to baseball’s “swim move,” only with less success. Past guest Dan Crenshaw (Episode #476) spent his final days as a viable Republican candidate insisting that “I’m out there defending Trump in places where Republicans are too scared to go,” and running attack ads accusing his opponent of betraying the president on immigration. Even Thomas Massie (#51) in his messaging has been far more likely to stress his opposition from AIPAC and Israel than the orange elephant in the room. Who, in addition to dumping $7 million into what is the most expensive House primary in history, has been TruthSocialing poetry like this:

Tom Massie of Kentucky, the worst and most unreliable Republican Congressman in the history of our Country, is an even bigger insult to our Nation than Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who suffered an unprecedented loss tonight by not even being allowed to run in the Republican Primary. This is the first time such a thing has ever happened to a sitting U.S. Senator! That’s what you get by voting to Impeach an innocent man, especially one who made it possible for Cassidy’s Senate win. Very disloyal, but Tom Massie, a major Sleazebag, is even worse! Kentucky, get this LOSER out of politics in Tuesday’s Election. He is nicknamed Rand Paul Jr., another real “beauty,” because of his absolutely terrible voting habits. Vote for Ed Gallrein, a successful Kentucky farmer, and American War Hero, who only ran because he thought that Massie was so disloyal and disrespectful to your President, ME!

* Cupla Reason-world defenses of Comrade Massie this past week. First, for The New York Times, boss lady Katherine Mangu-Ward (#75, #395) wrote a piece headlined “He’s One of a Dying Breed in Congress. America Needs Him Now More Than Ever.” This section has resonance to some stuff we’ve talked about on the podcast:

For years, Mr. Massie told me, he thought the Epstein files were probably “an internet conspiracy” he did not have time to investigate. Then the Trump administration released binders that seemed to him to contain nothing much at all. Why are they going to these lengths to pretend they’d released something they hadn’t? he wondered.

The question stayed with him. So did the testimony of Epstein survivors. It “was like a level of evil I hadn’t even contemplated,” he told me.

Mr. Massie reshaped his legislative priorities accordingly — and bent his considerable technical skills to a moral crusade. He and Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, pursued a discharge petition — not on a bill, he explained, but on a rule. He had served on the Rules Committee and knew the power it held.

Next, colleague Robby Soave (#332, #517) weighed in with a piece titled, “Thomas Massie’s Enemies Are Attacking Him With an Unfair Accusation: Partisan political actors have seized on a vague and unsupported ‘hush money’ allegation.”

* Jonah Goldberg (#182) for one expects Trump to retain a tight grip on GOP voters, which is our cue for … AD SWAP!!! (ad swap, ad swap…)

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* Before Trump went to (Red) China this week and gave Taiwan the equivalent of a shrug-emoji, we sat down in Members Only #320 with the great global affairs journalist, Robert D. Kaplan. Who told us in this free-for-everyone clip that that part of the world is the key to our geopolitical future, in part because “The South China Sea is the most important chokepoint.”

* Kaplan’s influential Balkan Ghosts, which we referenced a bit in our convo, was one of the books I recommended four years ago in a post here answering an email asking for Yugoslavia-related book tips. Here’s what I wrote there:

The one guy who did finish Black Lamb was the one who popularized it for so many of us—the international affairs writer Robert D. Kaplan, in his deeply influential, 1993 bummer of a book Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History. Ghosts, which is great to read in tandem with the far more enjoyable Danube, is a winningly Hellenophobic travel/literary exploration of what is and is not the Balkans, at times reminiscent of the wonderful BBC World Service series “From Our Own Correspondent,” where you’d get these burned-out stringers from Turkshittystan compiling one last big F-you to the hellhole they were finally swapping out for some London R&R. (Kaplan had been a longtime newspaper correspondent in Athens, and seemed very happy to burn those bridges.)

Balkan Ghosts convinced many Western elites that doing anything to stop the raging bloodshed in disintegrating Yugoslavia was hopeless, due to the aforementioned history of murderously entangled tribes/religions/empires. I think Kaplan felt bad for the book being associated with transatlantic hand-wringing in the face of slaughter, and has spent much of the rest of his career trying to make up for it by agitating for a more robust American/Western response to global awfulness. It could also well be that that interpretation is out of date.

* This Bill Maher monologue on American anti-Semitism seems to be getting a lot of traction. Of particular interest to me was how … quiet the audience was:

* Going loudly in the opposite direction was frequent Maher guest Andrew Sullivan (#139, #200 & #449), in a piece subtitled “How Israel threw its soul away.”

* Last week in this space I referenced a Washington Post article detailing some struggles over at Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire empire. That article was followed—a little too closely, turns out—by Ross Barkan over at New York magazine. Luxuriating in the fallout was one Ben Shapiro:

* Our friends at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) have been doing a “Free Speech Future” live event/panel series. Here’s one on “Knowledge Creation and A.I.,” hosted by Kmele, in an apartment that will look familiar to some Never Fly Coach subscribers:

* More Kmele here dancing his weekly Tangle-o:

* Still moar Kmele, from his May 4 appearance on CNN:

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

With The Fifth Column’s DC show coming up Tuesday, it’s only fitting to break out the American classic that is The Werewolf of Washington. Though there’s a grand Hollywood tradition of responding to the country’s political upheavals with moralizing, melodramatic Oscar-bait, this is … not that. Directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg (Coming Apart), and released in 1973 during the Watergate scandal, the movie stars Dean Stockwell in as Jack Whittier:

“I was the youngest member of the Washington press corps, its fastest rising star. One of the best and the brightest, as we used to say. Before so much blood passed under those pretty Potomac bridges.”

It’s a tale as old as time: journo having affair with the president’s daughter decides to flee to Budapest, but then gets offered the job of White House Press Secretary, but before leaving Budapest, becomes a werewolf, and proceeds to devour victims in a pentagon–shaped pattern across D.C., which the administration is then keen to cover up. Watch for free on YouTube, or for a real good time, watch it on Prime Video with Elvira hosting (replete with Sarah Palin impersonation). Trailer:

* Comment of the Week comes from Kevin Sullivan:

Talking about Malthus because of some Jihadis in Niger and ignoring that India has been basically fine as far as resources go is insane.

Also just casually said the US middle class is worse off and that’s just absolute BS. People might feel precarious, but that’s because of vastly higher expectations for what “middle class” should mean.

Kaplan isn’t a dumb guy but this conversation honestly feel like the vaping version of Mearshimer’s American Spirits.

PS. As far as regularizing migrants in Spain, that’s not the cause of Vox at all. It’s almost all just signaling. And this is one of those things where I have to say if you’ve never heard the word “arraigo”, you should probably stop to figure out exactly what happened. Basically it was already a process where after 2 years, an illegal migrant could get papers*. So the “regularization” was basically just moving 18-24 months of applications all at once but it’s going to take so long to process it’s basically just going to be exactly what it would have been regardless and is mostly a virtue signal thing to keep the left wing coalition together.

*I think that’s a bad policy, too but it’s been a thing forever

* Sendoff. You will do worse things with the rest of your Sunday than listen to the great-sounding first four albums by Clarence Carter, the blind and quite horny rhythm & bluesman who died Wednesday at the ripe old age of 90. Big baritone throat that he liked to strain at the top (or talk lower about sexytime). Winning late ‘60s/early ‘70s Muscle Shoals production with loud drums and danceable funk. You have heard some of his novelty horndog songs: “Back Door Santa,” “Making Love (at the Dark End of the Street),” the later-career “Strokin’” and “I Got Caught Making Love.” But don’t sleep on “Slip Away,” and this banger below: