| | | | |  | | By Natalie Allison | With additional reporting from Ari Hawkins
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Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. | Scott Olson/Getty Images | THE I-26 PRIMARY — Nikki Haley next week will become the first Republican to commit to taking on Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential primary. It’s a sign that the road to the White House may now be I-26, the interstate highway that bisects South Carolina. In addition to Haley, South Carolina’s former governor, the state may have yet another homegrown politician enter the 2024 Republican fray: Sen. Tim Scott. On the Democratic side, President Joe Biden, who owed his 2020 nomination to the state’s African American voters, has now elevated South Carolina to the No. 1 spot in Democrats’ presidential nominating process. Candidates angling for a shot at the GOP nomination next year have already made a point to visit the conservative bastion as frequently as they have journeyed to Iowa, New Hampshire or Nevada. Former Vice President Mike Pence on Monday was scheduled to make his ninth visit there since leaving office (South Carolina was where Pence made his first public speaking appearance in 2021 after departing the Trump White House), but had to cancel at the last minute. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson spoke in Greenville a week ago. A day after Haley’s Wednesday campaign announcement, Scott will launch his own listening tour in Charleston. Both Haley and Scott will have to contend with Trump’s enduring grip on the party and the starpower of another prospective candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. But the two South Carolinians are formidable candidates in their own right and have twice won their state resoundingly. Political operatives here are quick to remind you that South Carolina has a knack for supporting candidates who eventually become the party nominee. Trump himself used that line at his Jan. 28 campaign event in Columbia, declaring that “South Carolina picks presidents.” The former president has shown that he is prioritizing the state, announcing an early list of endorsements that includes Sen. Lindsey Graham and Gov. Henry McMaster. Every eventual GOP nominee has won the Palmetto State’s Republican primary since it launched in 1980, with the exception of Mitt Romney in 2012. (Newt Gingrich won South Carolina that year before dropping out of the race a few months later.) A dozen years before South Carolina rescued Biden’s all-but-doomed 2020 presidential bid, the state in 2008 delivered a critical primary win for Barack Obama as the Democratic field remained scrambled. Matt Moore, former chair of the state Republican Party, said he expects the GOP contest in South Carolina to unfold as more of a “six-month sprint, rather than a 12-month marathon” ahead of the early-2024 primary. That’s in part because so many Republicans — potential candidates and voters alike, pro-Trump and anti-Trump — are keeping their powder dry at the moment. With so many potentially appealing candidates, the prevailing GOP sentiment is, Why rush to pick sides until we have a better idea of the field? While a list of other potential 2024 hopefuls continue to play footsie with the idea of running for president — and conventional wisdom says to sit back and let Trump alone take the heat for several months more — Haley’s February announcement makes it all the more critical for other candidates to step up their game in South Carolina. The former governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations is taking a gamble by making herself an early target for Trump. But by getting in early, Haley is allowed to raise federal campaign money — while many of her potential primary opponents are barred from doing so — and build up campaign infrastructure in South Carolina and other early states. It’s a risky move, but not a bad bet. As Haley likes to point out, she’s never lost a race in South Carolina. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at nallison@politico.com or on Twitter at @natalie_allison.
| | | | STEP INSIDE THE WEST WING: What's really happening in West Wing offices? Find out who's up, who's down, and who really has the president’s ear in our West Wing Playbook newsletter, the insider's guide to the Biden White House and Cabinet. For buzzy nuggets and details that you won't find anywhere else, subscribe today. | | | | | | | | — Military shoots down ‘high altitude object’ over Alaska: Biden ordered the military to shoot down a “high altitude object” flying over Alaskan airspace, National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby said this afternoon. “The object was flying at an altitude of 40,000 feet and posed a reasonable threat to the safety of the civilian flight,” Kirby said at a White House press briefing. He added that the said object over Alaska was about the “size of a small car” as opposed to the “two or three buses size” Chinese balloon — that was shot down near South Carolina last Saturday. — Kate Bedingfield to leave White House: Biden’s communications director, Kate Bedingfield, is leaving her post, the administration announced today. And this time, it’s for real. Bedingfield, a longtime Biden aide, previously announced her plan to depart last July, only to reverse course and remain in the job. Ben LaBolt, a former Obama administration aide who most recently oversaw the White House effort to confirm Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, will replace Bedingfield in the role. — Republicans investigate SEC role in Bankman-Fried arrest: Top House Republicans today demanded answers from SEC Chair Gary Gensler about why former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested on the eve of his scheduled appearance before the Financial Services Committee last year. House Financial Services Chair Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) and oversight subcommittee Chair Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.) said in a letter to Gensler that “the timing of the charges and his arrest raise serious questions about the SEC’s process and cooperation with the Department of Justice.”
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President Joe Biden and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva walk to the Oval Office before a bilateral meeting today. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images | DEMOCRACY DOCKET — Biden hosted his Brazilian counterpart Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at the White House this afternoon as the American president seeks to soothe years of tense foreign policy relations under the right-wing presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, Ari Hawkins reports for Nightly. The summit, which took place 40 days into Lula’s presidency, tackled a range of policy issues including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, insecurity in Haiti, migration and climate change as well as efforts to stem deforestation of the Amazon. "Both of our democracies have been tested of late," said Biden, whose words were translated to Lula. He added that “democracy prevailed” in both nations and said the two countries share a desire to “reject political violence” and will “stand together” to support their shared global democratic vision. The talks come more than a month after supporters of Bolsonaro stormed government buildings in the aftermath of his electoral loss, spurring comparisons with the attacks by supporters of Trump on Jan. 6, 2021. In the aftermath of the attacks in Brazil on Jan. 8 this year, Biden invited Lula to the White House. He was also among the first world leaders to congratulate Lula on his close electoral victory last October. Lula, who also used a translator, thanked the American president and said Brazil had “isolated from the world itself for four years.” He added that Bolsonaro lived in “fake news morning, afternoon and night.” In response, Biden joked that the description “sounds familiar.” The visit, which marks Lula’s first trip to Washington, “reflects how big a moment this is for Brazil-US relations,” Filipe Nasser, a senior adviser to Brazil’s foreign policy minister said at a panel organized by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “I think this is an opportunity for the leaders to establish or reestablish a personal rapport between them.” Tensions between the two countries were exacerbated under the former rule of Bolsonaro, who is currently in Florida. It’s unclear how long he will be in the U.S. as he remains under investigation for his role in the attacks on government buildings last month. While in office, Bolsonaro expressed admiration for Trump, and his close ties and persona earned him the nickname “Tropical Trump.” Lula’s electoral victory has still not been recognized by Bolsonaro, who also did not immediately recognize Biden’s 2020 victory over Trump. But even amid efforts to mend diplomatic ties, strong disagreements between the leader of Brazil and the U.S. remain and will likely play a role in their relationship going forward. That includes disagreements over how to respond to Russia’s invasion into Ukraine, which Lula recently reiterated. “The invasion was a mistake on the part of Russia … [But] the mistake was already done, now we have to find people to fix the mistake,” the Brazilian president said in an interview with journalist Christiane Amanpour. “I don’t want to join the war, I want to end [the] war.”
| | | | DOWNLOAD THE POLITICO MOBILE APP: Stay up to speed with the newly updated POLITICO mobile app, featuring timely political news, insights and analysis from the best journalists in the business. The sleek and navigable design offers a convenient way to access POLITICO's scoops and groundbreaking reporting. Don’t miss out on the app you can rely on for the news you need, reimagined. DOWNLOAD FOR iOS– DOWNLOAD FOR ANDROID. | | | | | | | | | | $1 billion The amount of money that the EPA has awarded to clean up 22 toxic waste sites, the second installment in $3.5 billion earmarked for hazardous site cleanup under the 2021 infrastructure package. According to EPA Administrator Michael Regan, of the sites selected, 60 percent are in over-polluted, low-income or minority communities. | | | | | CHICKEN REVOLUTION — In 2020, people around the world consumed more than 70 billion chickens, up from 8 billion in 1965. The story of poultry’s meteoric rise as a staple of the human diet can be traced back to 1923 with a Delaware farmer named Cecile Steel. She, like many other rural American farmers in her age, kept a small flock of chickens that she raised for slaughter, but one day by accident, the local chicken hatchery delivered 500 birds,10 times the amount Steel ordered. Within a matter of months, more than 100 died, but from the survivors, Steel generated a sizable profit — and began to escalate her operations. Within three years, Steel and her husband David were raising 10,000 chickens. The boom coincided with nutritional advances as well as changes in popular opinion related to the health risks of red meat. Read Kenny Torrella’s investigation into how a shipping error helped launch the “chicken revolution” for Vox.
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POLITICO illustration/Photos by Hulu, HBO | SPOILERS AHEAD — It doesn’t take long in “The Last of Us,” the hit HBO series about a pandemic of mind-eating fungi, to realize that the government isn’t going to be much help, writes Joanna Weiss. In the first episode, as the outbreak first hits — people suddenly twitching and biting and running around like zombies — a soldier turns his gun on two healthy people and follows orders to kill. The action flashes forward 20 years to a quarantine zone in Boston, run by a government agency called FEDRA, a cross between FEMA and a hopped-up, underfunded National Guard. There are food shortages, insurgent groups and nary a Dunkin’ in sight. Whether anyone can save humanity is an open question, but it definitely won’t be a public health department. On some level, that’s no surprise; there aren’t many zombie stories that feature a competent public sector. But if dystopias are products of the stresses and fears of their time, “The Last of Us” shows how our anxieties about government have changed. The classics of mid-20th-century dystopian fiction, like 1984 and Brave New World, imagined authoritarian governments that harnessed technology for maximum control. In the 1990s, The Handmaid’s Tale spun up a chillingly efficient theocracy built around control of women’s bodies. In the early 2000s, The Hunger Games envisioned a decadent regime that suppressed dissent by forcing teenagers to fight to the death. In these stories and many more, government is a mastermind, capable of complicated machinations, complex bureaucracies and cunning subterfuge — a scary idea, if alien to anyone who’s waited on line at the DMV. But that’s not the case in the more recent dystopias that, well before Covid-19, used disease as a metaphor for the natural world. Here, government is an ineffective force against a broad and faceless threat, whether it’s a deadly respiratory virus in the 2011 movie “Contagion” or the mystery disease that wipes out government entirely in the 2015 novel-turned-HBO-series “Station Eleven.” In “The Last of Us,” based on a hit 2013 video game, no government agency is up to the task of finding a mushroom vaccine. The quest for a cure is left to a traumatized everyman and a 14-year-old girl, crossing an America that has descended into anarchy. In other words, we’re scared of something different now: not evil technocrats and calculating despots, but amorphous problems like climate change and disease. Read Weiss’ essay here. Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |
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