Welcome to a special edition of Open Tabs. “Special,” as in, I’m writing from a hotel room in Washington, on six hours of sleep and half a cup of coffee from the brewer I found next to the ironing board. After a cluster of tapings earlier in the week in LA, we’re preparing for tonight’s live show at D.C.’s Warner Theatre, more tapings tomorrow, and then Crooked Con on Saturday. (Are you coming? I hope you’re coming! It appears there are still some tickets.) Lots of us from Crooked are here, staying at a giant hotel where every room looks out onto the 1980s-style atrium, but we keep missing each other. Everyone’s both blissed out and stressed out: So many great takes and results to revel in, yet so much to do to be ready for the rest of the week’s events.
Because of that, this issue will look a little different: I’m forgoing the usual section on our plan for the Friday show (we’ve barely had time to think about it), going long on recommended reading, and adding in a guest segment from the one and only Elijah Cone, who’s so fired up that he sent me 700 words of copy at 8:30 am without me even really agreeing to the idea. That’s what we love about Elijah: he’s irrepressible.
We all woke up yesterday morning to JD Vance’s astonishing 𝕏Twitter essay on the Republican wipeout. If you didn’t read it, I’ll summarize it briefly: “The reason we lost is the war,” he said. He admitted that former Trump voters had pulled the lever for Democrats en masse. Then he laid out four things that, according to his pollsters, could bring them back home:
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End the war
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Focus on cost of living/inflation
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Put America First
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Change our relationship to Israel
You can read this as the core planks of the Vance ‘28 presidential platform, and I’m sure that’s exactly what Vance would like you to do. His potential competitors are following suit: Later yesterday, Ted Cruz 𝕏posted an opus of his own, calling the results “an ass-kicking” and “a Watergate-level repudiation,” before laying out how he would have handled the Iran war differently, and how Republicans need to pursue real economic populism that understands people’s pain. Ron DeSantis, another likely candidate, gave a press conference broadly criticizing his party’s performance and, among other things, 𝕏knocking GOP campaigns for running on culture war issues and “fighting yesterday’s battles.” There is reporting today that Marco Rubio may step down as secretary of state and announce his candidacy for president. One can only imagine how he’ll try to disown the war.
I used the word “astonishing” for Vance’s post not because it contained any mind-blowing insights, but because the act of breaking from Trump — or attempting to — the day after the election seems to me like an astonishing waste. The time to criticize Trump’s choices was while he was making them.
Certainly it would have been uncomfortable for the sitting VP to vocally oppose the war, and it would have drawn a hell of a lot of heat. But isn’t that a good thing? Maybe Vance would have had to resign. So resign! It’s not like he has any real work to do aside from being the frontrunner in waiting. Leaving the administration would have made Vance look principled, bold, and independent, rather than what so many people already suspect him to be: an ideological shape-shifter with his finger perpetually in the wind.
So many of Tuesday’s big winners were Democrats who didn’t seem like typical politicians — who knew who they were, had real conviction, and felt the urgency of the cost-of-living crisis. Defending Trump while he launched an idiotic war, singlehandedly jacked up prices on everything, and enriched himself by the billions, only to step out of the shadows later with a polished critique? That’s exactly the kind of Washington stuff that voters rejected.
I still have way too much news and analysis to digest, and it seems like the more I read, the more there is to get through. Here’s where I am right now:
