| | | | |  | | By David Siders | With additional reporting from Joanne Kenen
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CPAC attendees cheer as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo takes the stage to speak. | Francis Chung/POLITICO | THE TRUMP SHOW — The Conservative Political Action Conference, the major gathering of activists unfolding this week outside Washington, was once among the most important events on the conservative calendar. In recent years, however, its reputation has taken a hit as CPAC evolved from a serious, must-attend political conference to something more like a MAGA carnival. There was the “golden calf” statue of Donald Trump at the confab two years ago, followed by the man in a MAGA hat doing performance art inside a cage. Fringe characters have proliferated. This week in National Harbor — the conference runs through Saturday — is following in those footsteps. Today, amid the Trump-related merch and art, Donald Trump Jr. caused a stir when he told attendees to look for gold-wrapped chocolate bars under their seats for the chance to win a VIP ticket to a reception with his father on Saturday. And what a mind trip that speech may be, coming on the heels of Trump’s release of a futuristic plan to create as many as 10 new “Freedom Cities” built from scratch on federal land. As my colleague Meridith McGraw reported exclusively today, the plan includes investments in vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles, “baby bonuses” and “hives of industry” free from Chinese imports. There’s no small chance Trump’s audience tomorrow will be cheering procreation and made-to-order places to live. And then there’s Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur who, like Trump, is running for president in 2024. My colleague Natalie Allison posted a photograph on Twitter from one of his aides of his handwritten speech (it’s really worth a look). He plans, she wrote, to call for the FBI to be shut down. Ramaswamy almost certainly isn’t going to be president. And the entire significance of CPAC has been the subject of much debate recently. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s top rival, is skipping the conference. So is former Vice President Mike Pence, and a number of other top party leaders. It’s about as Trump-y a show as you’ll find anywhere in the GOP, and whatever happens in the straw poll on Saturday should be taken with a bucket load of salt. But you can’t ignore it, either. Trump is still the frontrunner to win the party’s nomination in 2024. And if anyone is going to knock him off, eventually they’re going to need to cut into his margins with the energetic grassroots activists who go to events like CPAC — a not entirely unfaithful representation of the base of the GOP. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at dsiders@politico.com or on Twitter at @davidsiders.
| | | | 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. | | | | | | | | EXPANSIONISTS — North Carolina has just struck a deal to finally expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, reports Joanne Kenen, the Commonwealth Fund Journalist in Residence at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. And it did it the old fashioned way, through bipartisan, even bicameral negotiations. The state’s health secretary, Kody Kinsley, said it will be “life changing” for about 600,000 low-income people, many of whom are now uninsured. The state Republicans had been edging toward accepting the Obamacare program for several years, part of a broader set of health care changes in the state. But they never quite got there. Sometimes the deals got entangled with fights over Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s other priorities; more recently, it’s been Republican lawmakers arguing amongst themselves about other state health policies and regulations. Finally this week, GOP leaders in Raleigh announced the breakthrough at a press conference with a reasonable amount of hoopla. It has to be finalized but the wheels aren’t likely to fall off. “As a kid who grew up in North Carolina without health insurance — I’ve lived the challenges families face every day when they are trying to stay healthy,” Kinsley told Nightly in a text conversation. He pointed out that the influx of federal Medicaid dollars will be a lifeline for rural hospitals, a badly needed infusion of money for mental health and addiction treatment, and for veterans — not to mention shoring up just about every other aspect of the health system after Covid. The last state that decided legislatively to go ahead with expansion was Virginia in 2018. Since then, seven more mostly conservative state governments — Idaho, Maine, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah and South Dakota –have moved ahead with expansion after voters approved ballot initiatives, basically rebuking the lawmakers who had resisted something that the people in their state clearly endorsed. That ballot option doesn’t exist or is extremely cumbersome in mostly of the remaining 10 holdouts, which include Florida and Texas. The bipartisanship in North Carolina doesn’t mean any of the other 10 states will follow (although there are some conversations underway in a couple of them). It does mean that the North Carolina version will have a broad, and likely durable, agreement on a program that can be a lifeline to some of the state’s most vulnerable people.
| | | — Biopsy found Biden’s skin lesion was a common skin cancer: The White House today confirmed President Joe Biden’s skin lesion that was removed during his physical last month was basal cell carcinoma — a very common and treatable skin cancer. All cancerous tissue was removed and no further treatment is required, his doctor said. In a memo, the president’s doctor noted that basal cell lesions “do not tend to ‘spread’ or metastasize,” as other serious skin cancers do. During Biden’s physical last month, the area of the skin on his chest was removed via electrodesiccation and curettage, a common skin cancer treatment that involves scraping and removing the skin with a sharp instrument and a high-frequency electric current. — White House condemns efforts to stop pharmacies from dispensing abortion pills: The Biden administration today called Republican efforts to dissuade pharmacies from distributing abortion pills “dangerous and just unacceptable.” The statement follows Walgreen’s decision, first reported by POLITICO, to not dispense the pills in nearly two-dozen states where GOP attorneys general have threatened them with legal action under the 19th century Comstock Act. — Garland makes surprise visit to Ukraine: Attorney General Merrick Garland made an unannounced trip to Ukraine today to join President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a conference, according to a Justice Department official. Garland traveled to Lviv, Ukraine, at the invitation of Zelenskyy to join him and international partners at the “United for Justice Conference.” The trip was not previously announced for security reasons, the official said.
| | | | 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. | | | | | | | | THE NEW MCCAIN — Early in the 2024 Republican nominating contest, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu is endearing himself to one small but powerful constituency: Beltway pundits. Sununu is doing morning shows, punching right at his Republican rivals and giving sermons on a bygone era of bipartisanship for anyone who will listen. For many modern Republican primary voters, though, this sort of media blitz is disqualifying. The Washington-favored candidate might not make it to the White House. But he is codifying his place in the green room.
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President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images | TURKEY’S NEXT ELECTION — Tensions in Turkey’s opposition coalition boiled over this morning just as the six parties were attempting to agree on a candidate to challenge President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the most hotly contested elections in his 20-year rule, writes Nicolas Camut. Unless the parties can overcome their grievances in the coming days, the fissure is likely to play in favor of Erdoğan, who is seen as unusually vulnerable over double-digit inflation, and criticism over his response to devastating earthquakes last month that killed tens of thousands. Cracks in the wide-ranging alliance, which mixes parties from left to right, started to show on Thursday, when the six parties met to discuss their pick for a joint candidate for the upcoming presidential elections, and failed to settle on a name. One of the central dilemmas for the opposition has been whether to back Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, a 74-year-old former bureaucrat who has led the center-left Republican People’s Party (CHP) for more than a decade, over his fellow party member, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu. The next Turkish general election, scheduled for May 14, promises to be one of the world’s most significant elections of the year. The outcome will be keenly watched for clues as to whether Erdoğan — who is treading a political tightrope over Russia’s war against Ukraine — will push the country of 85 million in a more traditionalist, religiously conservative direction, or whether a new leader will be able to reset damaged relations with the West. DEMOCRACY FADES — Cambodia’s most prominent opposition leader was sentenced to 27 years under house arrest in a trial condemned as fraudulent by the U.S. The court ruling found Kem Sokha, who led the Cambodian National Rescue Party, guilty of “treason” earlier today and stripped him of the ability to participate in Cambodian politics, four months ahead of the country’s presidential election. Prime Minister Hun Sen has escalated a fierce campaign to use the courts to crack down on political opponents in recent years, and last month shuttered one of the nation’s last independent news publications, the Voice of Democracy. Opposition politicians and human rights groups warn the changes underscore Cambodia’s rapid democratic decline.
| | | | | 82 cents The amount women earned on average in 2022 for every dollar earned by a man, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly wages. The figure reflects a wage-gap that has remained relatively stable since 2002, which recorded that value at 80 cents. Despite recent trends, the current 18-cent gap among female workers compared to male workers marks a substantial decline from the 35-cent gap recorded in 1982. | | | | | MADE IN MOSCOW — Since the onset of President Vladimir Putin’s invasion into Ukraine, Russia has faced an onslaught of sanctions, and as a result, a mass exodus of technology companies like Samsung and Apple. In response, the Russian government has promised “unprecedented” amounts of funding to develop the country’s electronics industry and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishusti said he wants to eventually replace 85 percent of foreign software with Russian substitutes. In fact, Moscow is doubling down on its efforts to attain technological self-sufficiency with the creation of a new Android smartphone, which has the goal of selling 100,000 smartphones by the end of 2023. But the difficulties faced by other technology companies facing international sanctions like China-headquartered Huawei, as well as Russia’s inability to access certain critical technologies like chips, have some market analysts skeptical of the phone’s potential reach. Read Masha Borak’s peak into the development of the first Moscow-made Android phone for WIRED.
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On this day in 1984: The Reverend Jesse Jackson passes out a bag of food at the inauguration of his Miami presidential campaign headquarters. Jackson, the second Black American to officially run for president, finished third in Democratic primary voting totals. | Jann Zlotkin/AP Photo | Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |
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