Americana

1. The Americana Awards
2. DC welcomes President Musk
3. An election court fight in NC
4. MAGA primary challengers kick off
5. Bannon on populism

Also: David recommends his favorite reads to put immigration and border security into context.

Joe Biden’s interviewers came not to bury him, but to praise him. In the weeks before Christmas, having avoided sit-downs with some major outlets for his entire presidency, Biden gave time to liberal and progressive outlets with big online presences, like MeidasTouch and More Perfect Union. They didn’t ask about his pardons, his age, or anything the press corps shouts on a tarmac. They asked why he never grabbed credit for job growth or rising stock prices, like Donald Trump had.

“The media’s changed drastically,” Biden told MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas. “When you read that only — what is it? — something like 6-7% of people under the age of 25 read a newspaper, so on and so forth, technology is changing everything. You guys are extremely successful because you speak to a truth.”

There may be no topic more interesting to the press corps, and less interesting to everybody else, than who gets a presidential interview. But Biden’s contempt for the narrative-crazed “legacy media” had an effect on how he was covered. His efforts to elevate new, friendlier outlets echoed what Donald Trump did effectively in his first term. They were just far less effective.

You can tell, and not just because Democrats are a little embarrassed to see so many pro-Biden influencers taking Christmas party pictures with his son. The Democrats jockeying to run the party, or be the next nominee, are talking about how to make themselves more accessible, and how to talk to conservative outlets whose consumers never hear from Democrats. Biden has all but disappeared during this week’s fight over government funding, and today’s down-to-the-wire scramble to avert a shutdown; Donald Trump has been personally calling TV news anchors to share his demands.

This is the last Americana of 2024, and we’ll return on Jan. 10. There’ll be just two more editions before the Biden presidency is over, though we’ll continue to cover the negotiations over government funding — or how they wrap up.

This will also be the last edition with Benjy Sarlin in the hot seat, editing the copy that always comes in on time, with no typos or unfinished sentences. Benjy was essential to Semafor’s success and the reporting we did over the course of the presidential campaign. If you’ve been enjoying this newsletter, you have him to thank, and next year’s Americana will be a tribute to all his good work and big ideas.

The third annual Americana Awards

Back in 2022, when Americana was just getting started, I started wrapping up the year with a set of awards. There were no actual prizes. There was no public ceremony, which is increasingly unusual for Semafor. The jury consisted of one voter: Me.

You all seemed to like this, and the format helped put everything in context after a surprising midterm election, and — last year— a set of off-year elections that made Democrats over-confident.

This was a much less complicated year, with a clear story and obvious winner. Donald Trump ran the best of his three presidential campaigns, benefitting from a robust alternative media that he helped build, and voter nostalgia for his first term. He was supernaturally lucky, surviving an assassination attempt that changed, for a long time, how the rest of the media covered him. There was no deus ex machina to explain the win this time, no Comey letter or Hillary Clinton fainting spell. He beat Joe Biden, then he beat Kamala Harris.

Democrats find their shutdown villain, and Republicans their hero

Democrats and Republicans agreed with each other on Thursday: Elon Musk had taken over the government, derailing up a funding deal that the elected representatives of the people had negotiated. Federal workers woke up Friday unsure if the government would be funded over Christmas. A man who hadn’t won a single vote was ready to risk a weeks-long shutdown – and absorb the blame for it.

Was this a good thing? That’s where the two parties disagreed.

“Elon Musk, this unelected man, said, we’re not doing this deal, and Donald Trump followed along,” House Minority Whip Katherine Clark told reporters on Thursday. Other Democrats said that they’d warned about exactly this — the wealthiest man in the world, running the government — before the election.

Democrats warned that Musk was usurping Speaker Mike Johnson’s power. Republicans said that voters had given Musk a mandate when they elected Trump — and would it be so bad, really, if Musk did run the House?

“The DOGE movement is enormously popular in the House,” Utah Sen. Mike Lee told podcaster Benny Johnson. “That being the case, given that they all express such affection for Vivek [Ramaswamy] and for Elon, let them choose one of them — I don’t care which one — to be their speaker. That would revolutionize everything. It would break up the firm. We would now have government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

The year’s closest elections head to court, over Democratic protests

North Carolina’s 2024 election is over, but Republicans who lost two crucial races haven’t conceded — and are suing to eke out wins.

After two recounts confirmed his 734-loss in the race for state Supreme Court, Judge Jefferson Griffin is asking that body to disqualify 60,000 ballots, cast by registered voters whose forms were missing information (like additional ID) that old state laws require; a 20-year old state law, which the election was conducted under, does not require them. Another Republican, trailing in a close race for state House, has also contested his loss, which, if it held, would break the party’s supermajority and prevent it from overriding vetos.

Griffin’s challenges were rejected by the state election board, which has a Democratic majority; it won’t next year, after Republicans in Raleigh overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of a bill that gives the state auditor (a Republican) power to appoint a board member, taking that power from the governor. Justice Allison Riggs has declared victory; separately, incoming Democratic Gov. Josh Stein has sued to stop the new law from taking effect.

But Democrats worry that the GOP majority on the state supreme court, which previously sided with Republican legislators and allowed them to re-gerrymander the state’s electoral maps, will throw out the ballots and prevent Riggs from being seated next month.

The GOP is already getting 2026 MAGA primary challengers

Republican senators’ battle against MAGA-inspired primary opponents hoping to win Donald Trump’s favor officially started days ago in Louisiana, where the first Facebook ads began running for a campaign that’s two years away.

One of the ads urged Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy to “support Pete Hegseth” for defense secretary. Another told Republicans that Cassidy needed “to vote for all of Trump’s nominees,” and there was a way to make him do it — follow state treasurer John Fleming, Cassidy’s brand-new GOP primary challenger.

“I’m openly and publicly supporting all of [Trump’s] nominees,” Fleming told Semafor. “It doesn’t mean that I necessarily agree with everything they’ve said in the past. But I trust President Trump.”

As they weigh the president-elect’s Cabinet picks, incumbent GOP senators are facing serious pressure to vote his way if they want to avoid tough and costly primary challenges. Trump confirmed as much on Monday, telling reporters that if Republicans are “unreasonable, if they’re opposing somebody for political reasons or stupid reasons,” then those senators would be primaried.

Steve Bannon shares the populist right’s 2025 gameplan

“I’m for a dramatic increase in corporate taxes,” said Steve Bannon. “We have to increase taxes on the wealthy.”

Late last week, as the fight over government funding started to heat up, Steve Bannon wanted to talk about populism. He sat down with Americana before a taping of his War Room show, denouncing how defense appropriators had shoved through their year-end spending, and previewing a fight between his wing of the GOP and the establishment that was not quite dead.

“In President Trump’s house,” he said, “there are many mansions. You’re going to see a fight. You’re going to see a fight from the populist right. If you look at 2024 as just a win for Trump, he’ll be here for four years, and we’ll figure out what happens after, then you don’t think things have to change. You think we just need the tax cuts. If you look at Trump as a historic figure, as I do — Washington, Lincoln and Trump, right? — then this is the age of Trump, and Trump is a personification and manifestation of deeper forces in the world and in the United States.”

Polls

Quinnipiac’s polling got the swing states right this year, modeling an electorate that was happier than ever with Donald Trump and ready to vote for him. It finds that voters are still mostly optimistic about his second term, by an 11-point margin, and the same voters are a little uncomfortable with Musk’s unofficial, all-reaching role. He’s less personally popular than Trump, especially with non-white voters, and independents disapprove of what he’s doing by 20 points. Eighty-one percent of Republicans approve, in sync with their members of Congress, who’ve embraced Musk and DOGE and started criticizing legislation (like the continuing resolution) for breaking faith with him.

Even as they look forward to Trump II, and agree with him on a few key issues — mass deportation, more drilling, banning gender medicine for minors — non-Republicans are a little worried about his economic agenda. Most worry that tariffs will be painful for them, and a smaller majority of non-Republicans don’t expect him to lower inflation. They have no Biden or Harris nostalgia, and Biden in particular has fallen to the lowest approval ratings of his presidency. But there are more pocketbook worries about Trump than “culture war” worries — on that, he’s winning.

Donald Trump condemned the killing of Brian Thompson and the fandom around his alleged killer. A handful of Democrats condemned the killing, then said they understood the fandom. Neither is very interested in the minority of voters — around one-sixth of the country in this poll — who don’t have a big problem with Thompson’s death. Forty-one percent of voters under 30 say that the killing was either “somewhat” or “completely acceptable, a fringe view (10% or less) among voters over 50. Younger voters consistently say that they have less confidence in political institutions, political parties, and even the health of the American economic system. That extends to how they view an alleged murder of one of the system’s enforcers.

Ads

• Protect Our Care, “Dangerous.” Created eight years ago to defend the Affordable Care Act, POC is now focused on defeating Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Brad Woodhouse, the group’s director, told Semafor that the targets were not just Republicans in cycle for 2026, but Republicans who might have a “spine,” including Mitch McConnell. Its ad isn’t tailored to the Kennedy positions Republicans have been most critical about (and largely forgiven, like his pro-choice views). It’s more focused on his vaccine criticism, which Democrats see as a problem for Republicans even if they’ve stopped talking about it.

Scooped!

I have been followed around by a handler before, but never into the bathroom. Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky one-upped me in their report on the New York Young Republicans Club’s annual dinner, the highlight of the New Right’s calendar. It welcomes reporters, so they can record the confident speeches and celebrations, and so they can be mocked. (“‘You’re particularly shitty and egregious,’ Wintrich explained.”) Ali Breland’s report for The Atlantic covers it from another angle, filling out the story. The bar for “shocking” rhetoric has flown impossibly high.

Next

• 31 days until Inauguration Day
• 319 days until off-year elections
• 683 days until the 2026 midterm elections

David Recommends

The year ended without any DC compromise on immigration or border security, as Republicans hoped for. Next year will begin with new deportations, and changes to legal status for migrants, that Donald Trump ran on and Democrats hope he won’t completely implement. You might want some lighter reading for the holidays, but if not, there are three very different books that put all of this into better context. Jonathan Blitzer’s “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here” is essential, a complete catch-up on what exactly happened in Central America over the past 20 years and how Americans dealt with it. Greg Grandin’s “The End of the Myth,” which deservedly scooped up awards during the first Trump term, is a skeptical look at how Americans learned to love a “closed border.” And T.R. Fehrenbach’s “Fire and Blood,” published 51 years ago, starts with the prehistory of Mexico and vividly describes how the US’ Southern neighbors were built.

The CEO of the company running one of the world’s largest and most embattled copper mines wants Donald Trump to help rescue the project before the legal battles over its future turn uglier, Semafor’s Tim McDonnell scooped.

The rush for global minerals is largely a zero-sum game: Much of whatever isn’t locked up in deals by the US will likely go to China. So even if Trump isn’t enthused about supporting US clean energy, he could look at overseas mining as a way to squeeze China.