We begin with a clip from Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus’s 2013 press conference, where he presented the autopsy on Senator Mitt Romney’s failed presidential campaign.
Today’s theme is Luck Be a Lady written and performed by Frank Loesser. Copyrighted music licensed from Lickd.
DNC Chair Ken Martin speaking at a Minneapolis, MN campaign event in November, 2020, when he was chair of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor party. Photo credit: Minne2020/ Wikimedia Commons
In the News:
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard became the most recent bowling pin (and the fourth woman) to fall in Donald Trump’s cabinet. Late last week Gabbard announced that due to her husband’s cancer diagnosis, she would leave her post at the end of June. Narrowly confirmed, Gabbard’s 15 months in the job have been without accomplishment or even visibility, unless she was promoting conspiracy theories. Deputy Aaron Lukas will serve in an acting capacity until a new DNI can be approved by the Senate, which might be never, since the Senate will be out of town by June 31. Bets on Trump using recess appointments on this one for the rest of his presidency?
In April, a new Super PAC called “Lean Left” filed paperwork with the FCC. But, as Judd Legum reports at his Popular Information Substack, observers have picked up peculiar spending patterns. Based at a P.O. Box in Tallahassee, Florida, Lean Left seems to only spend money on whacko candidates in swing districts: one of those candidates was Maureen Galindo, who was denounced by the DCC for making antisemitic remarks and suggested that pedophiles—probably also Zionists, in her view--be castrated. She lost a runoff in Texas 35 to Johnny Garcia this week—decisively. Democrats are outraged—except, of course, that they did the same thing 2022.
Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that two Trump appointees at the Treasury Department have been waging a campaign for over a year to create a $250 bill with Donald Trump’s face on it. Created by a British artist, the mockup would also feature “America 250” branding, and possibly the colors of the American flag. No living person has appeared on American currency since a Treasury employee put his own face on a 5 cent note in 1866: Congress prohibited further self-commemorations; a law reversing that is floating around in Congress.
Finally, in the week’s retribution news, yesterday we saw a report that the Department of Justice had opened a perjury investigation of 82-year-old journalist E. Jean Carroll; today it appears that the funding for the litigation, provided by tech billionaire Reid Hoffman, is the administration’s primary target. Carroll successfully sued Donald Trump for sexual assault, winning a $5 million judgement in 2023. Carroll won another $83.3 million in a 2024 defamation lawsuit. Both cases were upheld on appeal. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has recused himself from the case, since he was Trump’s defense attorney at the time.
Your hosts:
Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.
Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
Image credit: Svet foto/Shutterstock
News focus:
Here is a link to the DNC draft autopsy, otherwise known as an “internal audit” or “post-election review” of the failure to elect Kamala Harris president in 2024.
Released by Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin, the report is much delayed and incomplete: here are five takeaways from the report and a response by political strategist Paul Begala.
Much of the blame has fallen on Martin, who was already under fire—despite the fact that Democratic candidates have been successful at the ballot box and are surging in the polling in many races.
Political parties have studied their losses since the 19th century, but these were rarely public documents. The first use of the word “autopsy” was in 2012, when the Republican National Committee released a report on Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss that stressed broad inclusion; yet, Donald Trump ran hard in the other direction and won in 2016.
But what if we included other insurgent documents in this history? For example, Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice, Not An Echo (Regency, 2014; orig. 1964) was a populist battle-cry that positioned the GOP’s failures as part of a larger problem: its unwillingness to attend to American conservatives. Then, there is Paul Weyrich’s famous challenge to the Republican Party in the fall of 1980: “I don’t want everybody to vote;” and Donna Brazile’s Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-Ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House (Hachette, 2017), that dissected the failures of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign?
Similarly, The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 created a template for governance that it promised the Trump administration would deliver.
Most prominently, what the autopsy does not address is voters’ lack of enthusiasm for party politics, or at least the choices they have been given.
What we want to go viral:
Neil is simultaneously catching up on his true crime and art obsessions with Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession (Penguin/Random House, 2023), a chronicle of a man who stole art for art’s sake in Europe’s lightly guarded collections.
Claire wants you to read Princeton University sociologist Paul Starr’s “Stephen Miller’s Impossible America: The ethnonationalist strategy for white replenishment won’t work” (The American Prospect, May 26, 2026) to understand what the Republican racial agenda is, the history it is steeped in, and how pronatalism and immigration restriction combine to forward the new white supremacy.
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