Imagine you're sleeping over at a friend's house and you get up in the middle of the night to pee and you hear a weird sound so you follow it to the kitchen, where your friend's mom is drunk, crying, and rambling about the national debt.
Those are the vibes from Katie Britt rn.
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) March 8, 2024
The modern SOTU rebuttal is generally an opportunity to take a putative GOP rising star and make them into a punch line. so yeah.
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 8, 2024
okay, not sure we're going to be hearing a lot more from her
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 8, 2024
Some hours before Britt’s State of the Union ‘rebuttal’, Puck‘s journamalistic botfly Tara Palmeri posted “Mar-a-Lago V.P. Soul-Searching”:
Among the first to arrive at Mar-a-Lago on Super Tuesday was Marjorie Taylor Greene, dressed in all black, at 4:30 p.m., when there were still just a handful of other people in the gilded ballroom. Within hours, of course, the royal court of Donald Trump had filled with red-hatted men and bleached blond women in sequins and leopard prints, who cheered as Trump pulled off a sweep (sans Vermont), essentially securing his coronation as the G.O.P.’s 2024 standard-bearer…
Greene then enumerated the reasons why rising star Katie Britt—the youngest Republican woman ever elected to the Senate, charged with delivering the rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address—isn’t MAGA enough to be Trump’s vice president. “Katie Britt, she’s a fairly new senator,” she told me, citing Britt’s underwhelming Heritage Action score (81) from memory. “Not as strong of a conservative as the base would like to see.” Perhaps there was another candidate Greene had in mind? “Of course, I’ll serve in any role that President Trump asks me to,” she said.
Trump himself spent most of the evening out on the patio, away from the applause and well-wishers, buttonholing high-dollar donors to help ease his financial troubles: a $41 million cash disadvantage relative to Biden and the D.N.C.; a deluge of campaign ads from well-funded Democratic groups; his tens of millions of dollars in legal fees, and hundreds of millions more in civil penalties. (Between the $83.3 million due to E. Jean Carroll for defamation, and $355 million plus interest owed to the state of New York, he’s on the hook for nearly half a billion dollars.) Perhaps that’s why the former president didn’t seem jubilant, exactly, when he sauntered onto the stage to deliver another “American Carnage”-style speech…
So while Greene seems to think that Trump will select his vice president based on their appeal to MAGA voters, the emerging consensus among campaign insiders is that his choice will come down to who can perform best with wealthy donors—the Republican constituency that still needs the most convincing before getting comfortable with another four years of Trump.
Grim Dawn Open Thread: Another Angle on GOP’s Katie Britt ‘Rebuttal’Post + Comments (178)