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Suddenly, it just tumbled out: "Honestly, every time I hear you I feel a little bit dumber for what you say."
That was former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s rebuke of businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, easily the best line of Wednesday night’s messy and awkward GOP primary debate. Ramaswamy, for his part, produced his own meme-worthy quote during a heated exchange with Senator Tim Scott: “Thank you for speaking while I’m interrupting.”
Such was the onstage energy at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum: Chaotic, sloppy, largely substance-free. Seven candidates desperately fought for fresh relevance; none of them came away with it. Rather than pitching themselves as the candidate who can beat former President Donald Trump, these Republicans seemed to be operating most of the time in an alternate universe, in which Trump was absent not just from the stage, but from the race.
Eight years ago, so many candidates were vying for the Republican nomination that the party took to splitting primary debates into two sessions: the main event and the undercard. The latter contest was mocked as the “kids’ table” debate. So far this time around, there’s only one unified debate night. Nevertheless, Trump has such a commanding lead over his challengers that, for the second debate in a row, he hasn’t even bothered to show up and speak. Voters have no reason to believe he’ll be at any of the other contests. Trump counter-programmed last month’s Fox News debate by sitting down for a sympathetic interview with the former Fox star Tucker Carlson. On Wednesday, Trump delivered a speech in Michigan, where a powerful union—United Auto Workers—are in the second week of a strike.
All seven candidates who qualified for the debate—individuals with honorifics such as “governor,” “senator,” and “former vice president”—spent the evening arguing at the kids’ table. Barring some sort of medical emergency, Trump seems like the inevitable 2024 GOP nominee. As Michael Scherer of The Washington Post pointed out on X (formerly Twitter), the candidates on stage were collectively polling at 36 percent. If they were to join forces and become one person (think seven Republicans stacked in a trenchcoat), Trump would still be winning by 20 percent.
[Read: A parade of listless vessels ]
How many other ways can you say this? The race is effectively over. So what, then, were they all doing there? A cynic would tell you they’re merely running for second place—for a shot at a cabinet position, maybe even VP.
One candidate decidedly not running for vice president is Former Vice President Mike Pence, who has taken to (gently) attacking his old boss. Nor does former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie seem to want a sidekick or administration gig. Christie has staked his entire campaign on calling out Trump’s sins, and, so far, it’s not working. Earlier on Wednesday, Christie shared a photo of himself at a recent NFL game, with a cringeworthy nod to new Kansas City Chiefs fan Taylor Swift: “I was just a guy in the bleachers on Sunday... but after tonight, Trump will know we are never ever getting back together.”
At the debate, Christie stared directly into the camera like Macho Man Randy Savage, pointer finger and all, to deliver what amounted to a professional wrestling taunt. “Donald, I know you’re watching. You can’t help yourself!” Christie began. “You’re not here tonight because you’re afraid of being on this stage and defending your record. You’re ducking these things, and let me tell you what’s going to happen.”
[Here it comes]
“You keep doing that, no one up here’s gonna call you Donald Trump anymore. We’re gonna call you Donald Duck.”
“Alright,” moderator Dana Perino said.
The crowd appeared to laugh, cheer, boo, and groan.
The auto-worker’s strike, and criticisms of the larger American economy, received significant attention at the debate. North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum laid the strike “at Joe Biden’s feet.” Pence came ready with a zinger: “Joe Biden doesn’t belong on a picket line, he belongs on the unemployment line.” (Another Pence joke about sleeping with a teacher—his wife—didn’t quite land.)
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, once seen as Trump’s closest rival, stood center stage but spent most of the night struggling to connect as all the candidates intermittently talked over one another. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, perhaps trying to fight back against those who claim he lacks charisma, frequently went on the attack, most notably against Ramaswamy, who, in the previous debate, claimed his rivals were “bought and paid for.” Later, Scott attacked DeSantis for his past controversial comments about race: “There is not a redeeming quality in slavery,” Scott said. But he followed that up a moment later with another sound byte: “America is not a racist country.”
[Read: The GOP primary is a field of broken dreams]
However earnest and honest Scott’s message may be, it was impossible to hear his words without thinking of the man he’s running against. So again: What was everyone doing Wednesday night? In an alternate reality, a red-state candidate like Scott, Haley, or Burgum might cruise to the GOP nomination. In a way, Fox Business, itself, seemed to broadcast tonight’s proceedings in that strange other world. The network kept playing retro Reagan clips as the debate came in and out of commercial breaks. And those ads? One featured South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem—not a 2024 presidential candidate, but certainly a potential VP pick—making a pitch for people to move to her sparsely populated state. Another ad argued that the Biden administration’s plan to ban menthol cigarettes would be a boon to Mexican drug cartels. What?
It was all a sideshow. Trump’s team seemed to know it, too. With just over five minutes left in the debate, the former president’s campaign blasted out a statement to reporters from a senior advisor: “Tonight’s GOP debate was as boring and inconsequential as the first debate, and nothing that was said will change the dynamics of the primary contest being dominated by President Trump.” For all of Trump’s lies, he and his acolytes can occasionally be excruciatingly honest.
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In Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk, a mere page and a half is devoted to introducing Musk’s grandfather, a Canadian chiropractor named Joshua N. Haldeman. Isaacson describes him as a source of Musk’s great affection for danger—“a daredevil adventurer with strongly held opinions” and “quirky conservative populist views” who did rope tricks at rodeos and rode freight trains like a hobo. “He knew that real adventures involve risk,” Isaacson quotes Musk as having said. “Risk energized him.”
But in 1950, Haldeman’s “quirky” politics led him to make an unusual and dramatic choice: to leave Canada for South Africa. Haldeman had built a comfortable life for himself in Regina, Saskatchewan’s capital. His chiropractic practice was one of Canada’s largest and allowed him to own his own airplane and a 20-room home he shared with his wife and four young children. He’d been active in politics, running for both the provincial and national parliaments and even becoming national chairman of a minor political party. Meanwhile, he’d never even been to South Africa.
What would make a man undertake such a radical change? Isaacson writes that Haldeman had come “to believe that the Canadian government was usurping too much control over the lives of individuals and that the country had gone soft.” One of Haldeman’s sons has written that it may have simply been “his adventurous spirit and the desire for a more pleasant climate in which to raise his family.” But there was another factor at play: his strong support for the brand-new apartheid regime.
An examination of Joshua Haldeman’s writings reveals a radical conspiracy theorist who expressed racist, antisemitic, and anti-democratic views repeatedly, and over the course of decades—a record I studied across hundreds of documents from the time, including newspaper clips, self-published manuscripts, university archives, and private correspondence. Haldeman believed that apartheid South Africa was destined to lead “White Christian Civilization” in its fight against the “International Conspiracy” of Jewish bankers and the “hordes of Coloured people” they controlled.
“Instead of the Government’s attitude keeping me out of South Africa, it had precisely the opposite effect—it encouraged me to come and settle here,” he told a reporter for the South African newspaper Die Transvaler shortly after his arrival. The far-right Afrikaner newspaper treated Haldeman’s arrival as a PR victory for apartheid. (“PRAISES ACTION OF NATIONALIST PARTY REGIME: Canadian Politician Settles In South Africa,” the headline read.)
Musk’s grandfather spelled out his beliefs most clearly in a 1960 self-published book with the weighty title The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa. (Its existence was first reported by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker.) Library databases indicate there is only one copy in the western hemisphere, at Michigan State University, which is where I obtained it. In it, Haldeman wrote that there was:
a strong possibility that South Africa will become the leader of White Christian Civilization as she is becoming more and more the focal point, the bulwark, and the subject of attack by anti-Christian, anti-White forces throughout the world.
She will fulfill this destiny if the White Christian people get together; if they realize the forces that are behind these world-wide attacks; if the people will make a study of who are their real enemies and what their methods are; if she will seriously combat the evils of Internationalism that are already taking cancerous roots in our society.
These views were on display before he set out for South Africa. The minor political party that Haldeman had led in Canada was notorious for antisemitism. In 1946, when one of the party’s newspapers printed the fraudulent The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—arguably the most consequential conspiracy text in the modern world—he defended the decision, arguing “that the plan as outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation of this generation.” A local rabbi described Haldeman’s political speeches to the local newspaper as “shot through with anti-Semitic talk.”
Before that, he’d been a leader in a fringe political movement that called itself Technocracy Incorporated, which advocated an end to democracy and rule by a small tech-savvy elite. During World War II, the Canadian government banned the group, declaring it a risk to national security. Haldeman’s involvement with Technocracy continued, though, and he was arrested and convicted of three charges relating to it.
Once he got to South Africa, he added Black Africans to his list of rhetorical targets. “The natives are very primitive and must not be taken seriously,” he wrote back to his hometown Canadian newspaper in 1951. “Some are quite clever in a routine job, but the best of them cannot assume responsibility and will abuse authority. The present government of South Africa knows how to handle the native question.”
Of course, the sins of the grandfather are not the sins of the grandson, and it would be unfair to suggest otherwise. Joshua Haldeman died when Elon Musk was two years old. And Haldeman’s politics were not universal in the family; Elon’s father Errol Musk, for example, was a member of the Progressive Federal Party, the primary political parliamentary opposition to apartheid. (I reached out to Musk by email but have not heard back.)
But as Musk carries on his own war of words with Jewish institutions—threatening to sue the Anti-Defamation League for $22 billion over its complaints about antisemitism on Twitter—it’s worth pausing on his grandfather, a man whose weakness for antisemitic conspiracy theories and devotion to white supremacist ideology drew the worried attention of Jewish groups on two continents.
When Musk tweets that George Soros “appears to want nothing less than the destruction of western civilization”—in response to a tweet blaming Soros for an “invasion” of African migrants into Europe—he is not the first in his family to insinuate that a wealthy Jewish financier was manipulating thousands of Africans to advance nefarious goals.
Joshua Norman Haldeman was born in 1902 in a Minnesota log cabin; the family moved north to Saskatchewan a few years later. His mother, Almeda Haldeman, was the first chiropractor known to practice in Canada. At the time, chiropractic was less than a decade old and still tightly bound to its origins in pseudoscience and spiritualism; its creator D. D. Palmer claimed he had received it from “the other world” and considered it akin to a religion. Chiropractors believed that the vertebral misalignments they treated were the cause of all disease.
Haldeman followed in his mother’s footsteps, but after only a few years, he left chiropractic work temporarily to become a farmer. The move was poorly timed. The stock market crash of 1929 was followed by the beginning of a decade-long drought that hit Saskatchewan in 1930. Haldeman, like many of his neighbors, lost the farm.
The terrible conditions in Canada’s western prairies made it a hotbed for radical political movements on both the right and left, each promising a root-and-branch restructuring of society. At various times, Haldeman found himself entranced by the promises of several very different movements. The first was on the political left. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation was an amalgam of various socialist, labor, and farmer groups that advocated greater state involvement in the economy to alleviate Depression-era suffering. Haldeman was one of the federation’s strongest supporters in the mid-1930s, becoming the local party chairman for the Canadian equivalent of a congressional district.
But around 1936, he moved to the provincial capital, Regina, and fell into an entirely different political philosophy — one that believed democracy had failed as a political philosophy and needed a scientific replacement.
Technocracy as an idea came into public view in one of the most politically perilous moments of 20th-century American history: the four months between Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election as president in November 1932 and his taking office in March 1933. The Bonus Army (thousands of World War I veterans demanding benefits) had been violently rousted from its occupation of Washington only months before; the machinations of the Business Plot (an abortive scheme to overthrow FDR) were only months away. Herbert Hoover had been defeated soundly at the polls, but he’d spend his last few months in office trying to sabotage what would become the New Deal. Some Americans craved a strongman to take control.
Into that maelstrom came a renowned scientist and engineer named Howard Scott. With a doctorate from the University of Berlin, he’d commanded complex projects around the globe, from British munitions plants to industrial projects for U.S. Steel. Scott and a small group of fellow engineers and scientists had made a diagnosis of civilization’s ills and a prescription for a relief. The current capitalist system, they said, was irrevocably broken, and—as one magazine summarizing the movement put it—“we are faced with the threat of national bankruptcy and perhaps general chaos within eighteen months.” Scott described the solution in the language of an engineer—a civilization “operated on a thermo-dynamically balanced load.”
Scott’s Technocracy Incorporated called for the destruction of all current governments on the continent, to be replaced by the “Technate of North America,” a new entity to be run by engineers and scientists. In calling for the abolition of all existing government, the Technocrats advocated what they liked to call a “functional control system” modeled on the telephone network and other large corporations. (AT&T, they noted, wasn’t a democracy either.) The Technate would measure the total energy output of the continent and annually allot to each citizen a set number of Energy Certificates, which would replace money. “It will be impossible to go into debt and, likewise, impossible to save income for the future,” one Technology Inc., brochure from the period says “It would be impossible to sell anything.”
That sort of radical rationing would be acceptable because—once scientific principles governed the entire economy, and the tech guys were running everything—it would become so profoundly productive that life would become mostly leisure. Technate residents could expect to work only between ages 25 and 45, and even then only four hours a day, 165 days a year. After 45 came retirement, when they could “do whatever they wish for the rest of their lives, and still enjoy full consuming privileges,” a Technocracy Inc. pamphlet promised.
It’s not difficult to imagine the appeal of such a vision in the darkest hours of the Great Depression—especially when laid out by a genius engineer like Scott. There was a problem, though: Howard Scott was not a genius engineer. A reporter quickly discovered that he’d invented nearly his entire backstory. (Among his other tall tales: that he’d been a football star at Notre Dame; that he’d once had to flee Mexico after shooting the local archbishop; and that he’d caused a riot in Montreal by punching some Jesuits who’d shoved his girl off a sidewalk.)
Others began to point out holes in his Technate plans. Not long after becoming a true national phenomenon—The New York Times ran 120 stories on technocracy in that four-month period—Scott and his movement were mostly forgotten. As the political theorist Langdon Winner later wrote, “In its best moments Technocracy Inc. was an organization of crackpots; in its worst, an inept swindle.”
But Howard Scott kept pushing his ideas, and they found a fan in Joshua Haldeman—even as Technocracy Inc. grew stranger with time. Its members began showing up for events in identical gray uniforms and saluting one another in ways that to some observers—in an era of Brownshirts and Blackshirts—had “the tone of an incipient Fascist movement.” (Later, after Pearl Harbor, Scott issued a press release suggesting he be named continental dictator.)
Scott also convinced members that they should begin referring to themselves by a number, not just a name. At one rally, a speaker was announced simply as “1x1809x56.” Haldeman, for his part, became 10450-1. (According to newspaper accounts at the time, the number is derived from Regina’s latitude and longitude.) He became first the local head of Technocracy in his part of Saskatchewan, then the organization’s top man in Canada. Writing in the group’s magazine in 1940, Haldeman/10450-1 predicted a coming “smashup” in society. “Technocracy Inc. is preparing for a New Social Order that is to come,” he wrote. “If you are a Technocrat, are you doing all that you can to extend the Organization and discipline yourself to meet its objectives?”
Technocracy Inc. today might seem more odd than threatening. But the arrival of World War II changed perceptions within the Canadian government. Technocracy issued an isolationist statement proclaiming it was “unequivocally opposed to the conscription of the manpower of Canada for any war anywhere off this continent." Scott bragged publicly that his group was influential enough that the government could not go to war “without permission of this organization.” And Technocracy declared itself the continental government-in-waiting for the imminent collapse of the current system.
In 1940—using the same war powers under which it had banned the country’s major communist and fascist parties—the Canadian government banned Technology Incorporated as a threat to national security. (The United States did not follow suit—not officially, at least. But when Haldeman tried to drive across the border to give a speech in Minnesota a few months later, he was stopped and blocked from entry, despite being born a U.S. citizen.)
Shortly after the ban took effect, Haldeman took out an ad in the Regina newspaper defending Technocracy’s patriotism and impugning the government’s. Days later, Canadian police raided 12 buildings in Regina related to illegal organizations, including Technocracy. It’s likely, though not certain, one of those was Haldeman’s home. And in October 1940, he was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Vancouver. He faced charges of “distributing and publishing documents likely or intended to interfere with the efficient prosecution of the war, and likely to cause disaffection to His Majesty.” He was convicted on all counts, earning a fine of $100 plus court costs, or two months in jail.
After his conviction, Haldeman set out to start his own political party, which he called Total War & Defence, but it gained little traction. By 1944, he’d shifted his allegiance to another odd spawn of western Canada’s Depression-era radical ferment—the Social Credit Party.
Haldeman’s next intellectual North Star was a man named Clifford Hugh Douglas, the Scottish creator of the economic concept of social credit. Like Scott, Douglas was an engineer with a plan to revolutionize society. And also like Scott, Douglas seems to have concocted much of his past. (He claimed to have been the chief engineer of the British Westinghouse Company in India; the company could find no record of his having worked for it. He claimed to have led an important engineering project for the British postal service; records showed he was a low-level employee who was laid off mid-project.)
Douglas believed there was an innate imbalance in the financial system of his day: Workers were not paid enough to consume all the goods they produced. There was always a gap, which he considered waste. His solution was the issuance of a sort of government-created scrip to all citizens—something akin to a universal basic income—that would close the purchasing-power gap.
As with technocracy, the appeal of such an idea in the midst of the Great Depression is obvious. But again, social credit’s utopian economic philosophy came with a political one. Douglas saw social credit and democracy as incompatible. He advocated ending the secret ballot, making all votes public — and then taxing citizens differently depending on who they voted for. He also called for the abolition of political parties and considered majority rule a form of despotism; instead, the work of governance should be left to the experts.
Why was Douglas so skeptical of the secret ballot and majority rule? Because he viewed them as tools of a global Jewish conspiracy whose tentacles infested every corner of society. He was a virulent antisemite who consistently traced the rot in the financial system to a single source: Jews. He cited the Protocols frequently as an accurate blueprint for the actions of the “World Plotters,” whom he saw as at war with Christian civilization.
“The Jew has no native culture and always aims at power without responsibility,” Douglas wrote in Social Crediter magazine in 1939. “He is the parasite upon, and corrupter of, every civilisation in which he has attained power.” Douglas even, bewilderingly, considered Nazi Germany to be a creation and instrument of Jewish power. (He occasionally argued that Hitler was a secret Rothschild.)
Douglas never had any economic training, and his ideas have generally been dismissed by those who do. But they were a phenomenon on the Canadian prairie. A charismatic Baptist radio preacher named William “Bible Bill” Aberhart became a convert to Douglas’s ideas about social credit and began blasting the province of Alberta’s airwaves with its promises. He founded a new Social Credit Party and ran a set of candidates in the 1935 provincial elections. To his — and everyone’s — shock, Social Credit won 56 of the legislature’s 63 seats and Aberhart was suddenly Alberta’s premier.
Putting Douglas’ ideas into practice proved to be a challenge. Aberhart’s government tried issuing a sort of social credit it called “prosperity certificates,” but it was a flop. The Social Credit Party (Socreds for short) quickly transitioned into a mostly normal conservative party — with an extra dose of Christianity from Bible Bill and of antisemitism from Douglas. It became standard Socred rhetoric to rail against the Money Power and World Finance and International Bankers — with some members more explicit than others about their targets.
These developments were of significant concern to the Canadian Jewish Congress, the country’s major advocacy group for Jews. Louis Rosenberg, the Congress’ research director, described Douglas as someone who "mumbles mysteriously about the long discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion and spices his stew…with a little anti-semitic paprika to taste…”
And meanwhile, in Saskatchewan, Joshua Haldeman was enjoying a quick rise within the Social Credit Party. In 1945, he was elected head of the provincial party; a year later, he was named chairman of its national council, the party’s top position. That put him at the center of public disputes over the antisemitism in its ranks.
One such case centered on a man named John Patrick Gillese, who edited the party’s national newspaper, the Canadian Social Crediter. He was a vigorous antisemite who regularly expressed those opinions in the newspaper, over which he had complete control. He complained in a memo that the party spent too much time “continually explaining that we are not anti-Semitic, that we are not fascist.” Gillese didn’t like to be put on the defensive, he wrote.
The party’s top elected official, Alberta Premier Ernest Manning, expressed concern that Gillese’s antisemitism was hurting the party, and demanded that Haldeman oust him from the newspaper. Haldeman rejected the idea, saying he and his fellow Socreds leader Solon Low agreed that “Johnny Gillese should be retained as editor.” Low then wrote Gillese a note complaining about Manning’s efforts: “Please do not worry about the situation. Just go right ahead and continue doing a good job and I'll fight the battle to prevent our being completely muzzled and rendered incompetent.”
The Socreds took another hit in 1946, when it came out that the party’s Quebec branch was publishing excerpts of the Protocols. A Saskatchewan newspaper, the Star-Phoenix, editorialized against the scandal, calling it “home-baked fascism” and calling the concept of social credit “related directly to the authoritarian ideology of Adolf Hitler and others of his ilk.”
Haldeman replied in a series of letters to the editor in which he claimed the Social Credit Party was not antisemitic—while saying some rather antisemitic things—including the outrageous claim that Hitler had been installed as German fuhrer by “money…supplied by international financiers, many but not all of them, Jewish.” He claimed that Jews created antisemitism to generate sympathy. And in multiple letters, Haldeman argued that whether or not the Protocols were fake was beside the point — the ideas they contained were true, even if they were a forgery. “The point is that the plan as outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation of this generation,” he wrote. “This should be fair warning to all of us.”
Haldeman’s letters generated a few angry responses from his fellow citizens. The Canadian Jewish Congress monitored the situation closely.
“Haldeman was all about dog-whistle politics,” Janine Stingel, a historian who wrote a book about antisemitism in Canada’s Social Credit Party, told me. “He wouldn’t say ‘Jew,’ but he’d say everything short of it. He knew what he was saying, and his base knew what he was saying.”
While active in the Social Credit party, Haldeman ran for the federal parliament twice and the Saskatchewan legislature once. He lost badly each time. He began to see communists behind every corner. (He was once shouted down at a gathering of Regina housewives for calling the group “merely a front for the Communist organization.”) He found himself unable to revive the fortunes of the Social Credit Party. In 1949, he resigned his post. He was ready for a different move.
The Haldemans’ 1950 move to South Africa seemed to come out of nowhere. He’d become something of a provincial celebrity for all his constant buzzing from town to town by plane for political appearances. (And, oddly, for his reddish beard—unusual in that clean-shaven era and mentioned in nearly every newspaper story about him.)
In her memoir, Haldeman’s daughter Maye Musk—Elon’s mother, who was two years old at the time of the move—ascribes the decision to her parents having “met missionaries who had been to South Africa, who had told them how beautiful it was.” In a biography of Maye’s brother Scott (who himself became a prominent chiropractor), Haldeman’s decision was prompted by “speaking with an Anglican Minister from South Africa at an International Trade Fair in Toronto.”
In fact, that conversation seems to have been so meaningful to Haldeman that he references it in prominently in The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa. The book’s opening epigraph is attributed to “the prophetic and emphatic statement of an Anglican Minister in Toronto, Canada, 1949” who “had lived many years in South Africa”:
“SOUTH AFRICA WILL BECOME THE LEADER OF WHITE CIVILIZATION IN THE WORLD.”
In Isaacson’s biography of Musk, he writes that South Africa in 1950 “was still ruled by a white apartheid regime.” But in reality, apartheid was only then being established.
The two most foundational apartheid laws—one forcing all South Africans to register their race with the government and the Group Areas Act, which segregated housing in urban areas—weren’t enacted until July 1950, less than a month before Haldeman announced his move there. In other words, Haldeman was choosing to move into a system of regimented racial subjugation just being born.
When Haldeman gave an interview to Die Transvaler, he was speaking to perhaps the most extremist publication in the country, one that held a special animus for Jews, and whose founding editor Hendrik Verwoerd was known as the architect of apartheid. The paper regularly railed against “British-Jewish imperialism” and blamed election losses on “the money of organized Jewry.”
When a rival newspaper in 1941 accused Die Transvaler and Verwoerd of pushing Nazi propaganda and running falsified news stories, Verwoerd sued its editor for libel—and lost, with the judge ruling that “he did support Nazi propaganda, he did make his paper a tool of the Nazis in South Africa, and he knew it."
The Die Transvaler article caught the attention of Jews in South Africa who worried about Haldeman’s splashy arrival, even prompting the secretary general of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies to write to a counterpart in Montreal: “A few weeks ago a paper… carried a story about the arrival of a new immigrant who had been associated with the Social Credit Movement in your country. Knowing that that Movement has from time to time rather favoured anti-Jewish policies, I thought I should enquire from you whether you have any information on this person.”
After a few years in South Africa, Haldeman popped up in the news again for his founding (with wife Winnifred) of the Pretoria Pistol Club, which promoted gun ownership and training for housewives. But it does not appear that he was particularly active in far-right political groups in South Africa, at least not as a prominent leader. Milton Shain, a leading historian of the South African Jewish community and the author of Fascists, Fabricators and Fantasists: Antisemitism in South Africa from 1948 to the Present, said he doesn’t remember coming across Haldeman’s name in his decades of research into antisemitic groups of the period. But he said the coded antisemitic language in Haldeman’s interview in Die Transvaler would have easily stood out to Jews who would have “noted Haldeman's concern about 'international financial interests' — a discourse common among the white far-right in South Africa.”
A few months after settling down in Pretoria, Haldeman wrote an essay for his old hometown paper, the Regina Leader-Post, on his new life there. He described the lives of Black South Africans under apartheid as happy, contented, and leisurely.
“We have two native (Negro) garden boys in the summer and one in the winter and a native girl…” Haldeman wrote. “We give them food and a lot of their clothing and pay them from $10 to $15 [Canadian] a month.” For that sum, Haldeman declared that “Black labor in South Africa industry is found to be the most expensive labor in the world.” (Average income in Canada in 1950 was about $225 a month.) He went on to say that, “it is impossible to make a native work hard. It takes three natives to do the work of one white man and the white people here work about half as hard as Canadians.” With this state of affairs, Haldeman wrote, Black South Africans were “happy and contented…unless stirred up and stirring them up is almost an impossible job.”
Haldeman also encouraged Canadians to follow his lead: “This country seems to have unlimited opportunities for development. The Rhodesias and South Africa could easily stand 50 million white people. We flew over hundreds of miles in which we could scarcely see even a native hut.”
Over the years, Haldeman’s conspiratorial beliefs seemed only to deepen. On March 21, 1960, thousands of Black South Africans gathered at a police station in the township of Sharpeville to protest the latest cruelty of apartheid. Henrik Verwoerd, the former Die Transvaler editor, was now prime minister and had tightened a pass system that sharply limited the movements of Black residents. The protesters were there without their passbooks, offering themselves up for arrest en masse. After attempts to clear the crowd failed, police opened fire on the unarmed crowd. In all, 69 protesters were killed and roughly another 180 wounded. Ten of the dead were children. A police commander on scene later justified the shooting by saying that “the native mentality does not allow them to gather for a peaceful demonstration. For them to gather means violence.”
The world recoiled at the Sharpeville massacre. Days later, the United Nations passed Resolution 134, the body’s first official condemnation of apartheid and the beginning of decades of diplomatic isolation.
Joshua Haldeman, meanwhile, decided to head for the typewriter. A few weeks later, in May 1960, he self-published a 42-page response to Sharpeville entitled The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa. In it, Haldeman predicted that there would soon be “an outside invasion by hordes of Coloured people.” He blamed the international media for paying too much attention to the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid groups. And he repeatedly returned to the “International Conspiracy” pulling the strings behind it all, sometimes shorthanded as “the Conspiracy” or “the Internationalists,” whom he complained controlled the press and the medical profession.
Like many of his old Social Credit colleagues, Haldeman is careful to talk about “International Finance” without speaking openly about “Jews.” By my count, he only slips twice in the book: once referring to communism as a “Jewish moral philosophy for the more equitable distribution of scarcity” and once caustically labeling the London School of Economics (a frequent target) “the Zion of Economists.” But the names to whom he attributes this global control ring throughout: Jacob Henry Schiff, Paul Warburg, Harold Laski, Herbert Lehman, Ernest Cassel, Bernard Baruch, Felix Frankfurter, Samuel Bronfman, and above them all, Mayer Rothschild, whose family he blamed for the French Revolution, the American Civil War, the rise of Mussolini, and an untold number of assassinations.
Like many antisemites, Haldeman saw natural allies in two seemingly opposing forces: communism and capitalist financiers. “Moscow and Wall Street always work hand in hand at the conspiracy to form a World Government under their control,” he writes in his book.
In Haldeman’s telling, the International Conspiracy was even behind the anti-apartheid forces both within and outside South Africa. He said they had sparked the Sharpeville “riot” on purpose to make money on the South African stock market drop that came in its wake. Haldeman consistently argues that Black South Africans are happy with their position under apartheid, even grateful for “the protection of the White people,” and that international meddlers are to blame for riling up opposition. “They know that the White man has done so much for them,” he wrote.
Haldeman closes the book with recommended reading, and the scale of his radicalism can also be judged by what he suggests. He praises the magazine of the League of Empire Loyalists, a British group led by the antisemite A. K. Chesterton, a former leader of the British Union of Fascists. The league later evolved into the fascist party National Front.
He also recommends readers subscribe to the South African Observer, a Jew-hating monthly whose editor S.E.D. Brown held Haldemanesque views (South Africa had been “marked out…as an enemy because it is a bastion of white conservatism; because it believes in national sovereignty and western Christian civilization”). Shain said he considers Brown the “high priest” of anti-Jewish fantasists of the apartheid years.
And he pushes The New Times, the publication of the Australian League of Rights, whose pro-social credit editor published books like The International Jew, an annotated version of the Protocols, “168 pages of anti-Jewish venom.” In the United States, Haldeman recommends The American Mercury, the antisemitic magazine that employed George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party.
At some point after The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa, Haldeman self-published one more book: a sequel of sorts, titled The International Conspiracy in Health. In it, he rails against health insurance mandates, vaccines (which “the promoters of World Government have always been behind”), and fluoride in the water (part of the “brain-washing programme of the Conspiracy”). By then, he was getting near retirement age. In 1974, while practicing landings in his plane, Haldeman didn’t see a wire strung between two poles. It caught his plane’s wheels, which caused it to flip, and Haldeman was killed. He was 71; his grandson Elon Musk was 2.
What attention Joshua Haldeman has gotten in recent years has mostly been tied to what Musk called his “real adventures,” the ones that “involve risk.” He flew his little plane all across Africa and the world; he went on a dozen journeys to the Kalahari Desert to find a “lost city” that appears to have been dreamed up by a Canadian conman.
But his legacy involves a lot more than adventuring. Joshua Haldeman had a weakness for men with fuzzy credentials and big-picture plans to turn society upside down. He believed in shadowy forces that were out to destroy civilization and manipulated the masses into doing their bidding. He believed that a good chiropractor could cure any disease, but vaccines were a front for totalitarianism. And he believed democracy was for the few, not the many.
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No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.
But that hasn’t prevented a crowded primary. On the GOP side, more than a dozen candidates are ostensibly vying for the nomination. Donald Trump’s lead appears prohibitive, but then again, no candidate has ever won his party’s nomination while facing four (so far) separate felony indictments. (Then again, no one has ever lost his party’s nomination while facing four separate felony indictments either.) Ron DeSantis has not budged from his position as the leading challenger to Trump, but his support has weakened, encouraging a large field of Republicans who are hoping for a lucky break, a Trump collapse, a VP nomination, or maybe just some fun travel and a cable-news contract down the road.
[David A. Graham: The first debate is Ramaswamy and the rest]
On the other side, Democratic hesitations about a second Biden term have either receded or dissolved into resignation that he’s running. But his age and the general lukewarm feeling among some voters has ensured that a decent-size shadow field still exists, just waiting in case Biden bows out for some reason. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is also running, ostensibly as a Democrat, but while employing Republican consultants and espousing fairly right-wing views. Even so, he has hit double digits in some polls.
Behind all this, the possibility of a serious third-party bid, led by either the group No Labels or some other candidate, continues to linger. It adds up to a race that is simple on the surface but strangely confusing just below it. This guide to the candidates—who’s in, who’s out, and who’s somewhere in between—serves as a road map to navigate that. It will be updated as the campaign develops, so check in regularly.
REPUBLICANS (Joe Raedle / Getty) Donald TrumpWho is he?
You know him and you love him. Or hate him. Probably not much in between.
Is he running?
Yes. Trump announced his bid to return to the White House at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022.
Why does he want to run?
Revenge, boredom, rivalry, fear of prosecution, long-standing psychological hang-ups.
[Read: Trump begins the ‘retribution’ tour]
Who wants him to run?
A big tranche of the GOP is still all in on Trump, but it’s a little hard to tell how big. Polling shows that his support among Republicans is all over the place, but he’s clearly not a prohibitive front-runner.
Can he win the nomination?
Yes, but past results are no guarantee of future success.
What else do we know?
More than we could possibly want to.
Who is he?
The second-term governor of Florida, DeSantis was previously a U.S. representative.
Is he running?
Yes. He announced his run in a trainwreck of an appearance with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces on May 24.
Why does he want to run?
DeSantis offers the prospect of a synthesis of Trump-style culture war and bullying and the conservative politics of the early-2010s Republican Party.
Who wants him to run?
From the advent of his campaign, DeSantis presented the prospect of a candidate with Trump’s policies but no Trump. But his fading polling suggests that not many Republicans are interested.
Can he win the nomination?
He doesn’t look like the Trump-toppler today that he did several months ago, but it’s possible.
Who is she?
Haley, the daughter of immigrants, was governor of South Carolina and then ambassador to the United Nations under Trump.
Is she running?
Yes. She announced her campaign on February 14, saying, “Time for a new generation.”
Why does she want to run?
Haley has tried to steer a path that distances herself from Trump—pointing out his unpopularity—without openly attacking him. She may also be the leading foreign-policy hawk in the field.
[Sarah Isgur: What Nikki Haley can learn from Carly Fiorina]
Who wants her to run?
Haley has lagged behind the first tier of candidates, but her strong performance in the first debate could help her.
Can she win the nomination?
Dubious.
Who is he?
A 38-year-old biotech millionaire with a sparkling résumé (Harvard, then Yale Law, where he became friends with Senator J. D. Vance), Ramaswamy has recently become prominent as a crusader against “wokeism” and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing.
Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on February 21.
Why does he want to run?
“We’re in the middle of a national identity crisis,” Ramaswamy said in a somewhat-hectoring launch video. “Faith, patriotism, and hard work have disappeared, only to be replaced by new secular religions like COVIDism, climatism, and gender ideology.”
Who wants him to run?
Ramaswamy has come from nearly nowhere to poll surprisingly well—in national polls, he’s currently third (if distantly so) behind Trump and DeSantis, and he dominated the first debate.
Can he win the nomination?
Probably not. Ramaswamy no longer seems like a mere curiosity, but his slick shtick and questionable pronouncements will remain a drag on him.
Who is he?
Hutchinson, the formerly longtime member of Congress, just finished a stint as governor of Arkansas.
Is he running?
Yes. Hutchinson announced on April 2 that he is running. It would have been funnier to announce a day earlier, though.
Why does he want to run?
At one time, Hutchinson was a right-wing Republican—he was one of the managers of Bill Clinton’s impeachment—but as the party has changed, he finds himself closer to the center. He’s been very critical of Trump, saying that Trump disqualified himself with his attempts to steal the 2020 election. Hutchinson is also unique in the field for having called on Trump to drop out over his indictment in New York.
Who wants him to run?
Old-school, very conservative Republicans who also detest Trump.
Can he win the nomination?
Unlikely.
Who is he?
A South Carolinian, Scott is the only Black Republican senator.
Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign in North Charleston, South Carolina, on May 22.
Why does he want to run?
Unlike some of the others on this list, Scott doesn’t telegraph his ambition quite so plainly, but he’s built a record as a solid Republican. He was aligned with Trump, but never sycophantically attached.
Who wants him to run?
Scott’s Senate colleagues adore him. John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate minority whip, is his first highish-profile endorsement. As DeSantis stumbles, he’s gotten some attention as a possible likable Trump alternative.
Can he win the nomination?
Scott is solidly in the second tier; he’s perpetually said to be on the verge of breaking out but never quite there.
Who is he?
The former vice president, he also served as the governor of Indiana and a U.S. representative.
Is he running?
Yes. He formally launched his campaign on June 7 with a video and an event in Iowa.
Why does he want to run?
Pence has long harbored White House dreams, and he has a strong conservative-Christian political agenda. His launch video is heavy on clichés and light on specifics beyond promising a kinder face for the Trump agenda.
Who wants him to run?
Conservative Christians, rabbit lovers, but not very many people overall.
[Read: Nobody likes Mike Pence]
Can he win the nomination?
It’s hard to see it happening.
Who is he?
What a journey this guy has had, from U.S. attorney to respected governor of New Jersey to traffic-jam laughingstock to Trump sidekick to Trump critic. Whew.
Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on June 6 in New Hampshire.
Why does he want to run?
Anyone who runs for president once and loses wants to run again—especially if he thinks the guy who beat him is an idiot, as Christie clearly thinks about Trump. Moreover, he seems agitated to see other Republicans trying to run without criticizing Trump.
Who wants him to run?
Trump-skeptical donors, liberal pundits.
Can he win the nomination?
Highly doubtful.
Who is he?
Do you even pay attention to politics? Nah, just kidding. A self-made software billionaire, Burgum’s serving his second term as the governor of North Dakota.
Is he running?
Apparently! He formally
launched his campaign on June 7 in Fargo.
Why does he want to run?
It’s tough to tell. His campaign-announcement video focuses so much on North Dakota that it seems more like a reelection push. He told a state newspaper that he thinks the “silent majority” of Americans wants candidates who aren’t on the extremes. (A wealthy outsider targeting the silent majority? Where have we heard that before?) He also really wants more domestic oil production.
Who wants him to run?
Lots of people expected a governor from the Dakotas to be a candidate in 2024, but they were looking at Kristi Noem of South Dakota. Burgum is very popular at home—he won more than three-quarters of the vote in 2020—but that still amounts to fewer people than the population of Toledo, Ohio.
Can he win the nomination?
“There’s a value to being underestimated all the time,” he has said. “That’s a competitive advantage.” But it’s even better to have a chance, which he doesn’t.
What else do we know?
He’s giving people $20 gift cards in return for donating to his campaign.
Who is he?
A former CIA officer, Hurd served three terms in the House, representing a San Antonio–area district.
Is he running?
Yes. Hurd announced his campaign on June 22.
Why does he want to run?
Hurd says he has “commonsense” ideas and he is “pissed” that elected officials are dividing Americans. He’s also been an outspoken Trump critic.
Who wants him to run?
As a moderate, youngish Black Republican and someone who cares about defense, he is the sort of candidate whom the party establishment seemed to desire after the now-discarded 2012 GOP autopsy.
Can he win the nomination?
No.
Who is he?
Suarez is the popular second-term mayor of Miami and the president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
Is he running?
No. He suspended his campaign on August 29, less than three months after his June 15 entry.
Why did he want to run?
Suarez touted his youth—he’s 45—and said in October 2022, “I’m someone who believes in a positive aspirational message. I’m someone who has a track record of success and a formula for success.”
Who wanted him to run?
Is there really room for another moderate-ish Republican in the race? Apparently not! Despite dabbling in fundraising shenanigans, Suarez failed to make the first Republican debate (or any other splash).
Could he have won the nomination?
No way.
Who is he?
Hogan left office this year, after serving two terms as governor of Maryland.
Is he running?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Hogan ruled himself out of the GOP race on March 5, saying he was worried it would help Trump win the nomination, but he is now rumored as a potential No Labels candidate, even though such a run might hand the presidency to … Trump.
Why does he want to run?
Hogan has argued that his experience of governing a very blue state as a Republican is a model: “We’ve been really successful outside of Washington, where everything appears to be broken and nothing but divisiveness and dysfunction.”
Who wants him to run?
Dead-ender centrists.
Could he win the nomination?
No.
Who is he?
The governor of New Hampshire, he’s the little brother of former Senator John E. Sununu and the son of former White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu.
Is he running?
No. On June 5, after weighing a campaign, he announced he would not run. Warning about the dangers of a Trump reprise, he said, “Every candidate needs to understand the responsibility of getting out and getting out quickly if it’s not working.” Points for taking his own advice!
Why did he want to run?
Sununu seems disgusted by a lot of Washington politics and saw his success in New Hampshire, a purple-blue state, as a model for small-government conservatism. He is also a prominent Trump critic.
Who wanted him to run?
Trump-skeptical Republicans, old-school conservatives.
Could he have won the nomination?
No.
Who is he?
Pompeo, a former member of Congress, led the CIA and was secretary of state under Trump.
Is he running?
No. On April 14, Pompeo announced he wasn’t running. “This is not that time or that moment for me to seek elected office again,” he said.
Why did he want to run?
Pompeo has always been ambitious, and he seems to think he can combine MAGA proximity with a hawkish foreign-policy approach.
Who wanted him to run?
That’s not entirely clear.
Could he have won the nomination?
Maybe, but probably not.
Who is he?
Youngkin, the former CEO of the private-equity Carlyle Group, was elected governor of Virginia in 2021.
Is he running?
Probably not. He said on May 1 that he wasn’t running “this year.” But he seems to be rethinking that as Ron DeSantis’s campaign sputters.
Why does he want to run?
Youngkin is a bit of a cipher; he ran largely on education issues, and has sought to tighten abortion laws in Virginia, so far to no avail.
Who wants him to run?
Rupert Murdoch, reportedly.
Can he win the nomination?
Certainly not if he isn’t running.
Who is he?
Rogers is a congressman from Alabam—wait, no, sorry, that’s the other Representative Mike Rogers. This one is from Michigan and retired in 2015. He was previously an FBI agent and was head of the Intelligence Committee while on Capitol Hill.
Is he running?
No. He thought about it but announced in late August that he will run for U.S. Senate instead.
Why did he want to run?
He laid out some unassailably broad ideas for a campaign in an interview with Fox News, including a focus on innovation and civic education, but it’s hard to tell what exactly the goal is here. “This is not a vanity project for me,” he added, which, okay, sure.
Who wanted him to run?
It’s not clear that anyone even noticed he was running.
Could he have won the nomination?
Nope.
Who is he?
A longtime conservative radio host and columnist, he ran as a Republican in the unsuccessful 2021 attempt to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Is he running?
Allegedly, yes. He announced his campaign on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on April 20. He’s barely been heard from since.
Why does he want to run?
Glad you asked! “America is in decline, but this decline is not inevitable,” he tweeted. “We can enter a new American Golden Age, but we must choose a leader who can bring us there. That’s why I’m running for President.” We don’t have any idea what that means either.
Who wants him to run?
Impossible to say at this stage, but deep-blue California is a tough launching pad for any conservative, especially an unseasoned candidate. This recall campaign also dredged up various unflattering information about his past.
Can he win the nomination?
Having missed out on the first debate, any hope Elder had is gone.
Who is he?
Perry was a three-term governor of Texas before serving as energy secretary under Donald Trump. He’s also run for president three times: in 2012, 2016, and … I forget the third one. Oops.
Is he running?
Oh, right! The third one is 2024, maybe. He told CNN in May that he’s considering a run. Nothing’s been heard since.
Why does he want to run?
He didn’t say, but he’s struggled to articulate much of a compelling case to Republican voters beyond the fact that he’s from Texas, he looks good in a suit, and he wants to be president, gosh darn it.
Who wants him to run?
Probably no one. As Mike Pompeo already discovered, there’s not much of a market for a run-of-the-mill former Trump Cabinet member in the primary—especially one who had such a forgettable turn as secretary, mostly remembered for being dragged peripherally into both the first Trump impeachment and election subversion.
Can he win the nomination?
The third time would not be a charm.
Who is he?
Before his current gig as a U.S. senator from Florida, Scott was governor and chief executive of a health-care company that committed massive Medicare fraud.
Is he running?
The New York Times says he’s considering it, though an aide said Scott is running for reelection to the Senate. He’d be the fourth Floridian in the race.
Why does he want to run?
A Scott campaign would raise a fascinating question: What if you took Trump’s pose and ideology, but removed all the charisma and, instead of promising to protect popular entitlement programs, aimed to demolish them?
Who wants him to run?
Not Mitch McConnell.
Can he win the nomination?
lol
Who is he?
After decades of trying, Biden is the president of the United States.
Is he running?
Yes. Biden formally announced his run on April 25.
Why does he want to run?
Biden’s slogan is apparently “Let’s finish the job.” He centered his launch video on the theme of freedom, but underlying all of this is his apparent belief that he may be the only person who can defeat Donald Trump in a head-to-head matchup.
[Read: The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden]
Who wants him to run?
There’s the catch. Some prominent Democrats support his bid for a second term, but voters have consistently told pollsters that they don’t want him to run again.
Can he win the nomination?
Barring unforeseen catastrophe, yes. No incumbent president has lost the nomination in the modern era, and Biden has pushed through changes to the Democratic-primary process that make him an even more prohibitive favorite.
What else do we know?
Biden is already the oldest person to be elected president and to serve as president, so a second term would set more records.
Who is he?
Phillips, a mildly unorthodox and interesting figure, is a Minnesota moderate serving his third term in the House.
Is he running?
Probably not. In an August 21 interview, he said he was unlikely to run, but would encourage other Democrats to do so. He had said in July that he was considering it.
Why does he want to run?
Phillips, who at 54 passes for young in politics, has been publicly critical of superannuated Democrats sticking around too long, and he says Biden is too old to run again.
Who wants him to run?
Although it’s true that many Democrats think Biden is too old, that doesn’t mean they’re willing to do anything about it—or that Phillips is the man they want to replace him. Although Phillips claims he has “been overwhelmed with outreach and encouragement,” this looks more like a messaging move than a serious sprint at the moment.
Can he win the nomination?
Not in 2024.
What else do we know?
His grandmother was “Dear Abby.”
Who is she?
Harris is the vice president of the United States.
Is she running?
No, but if Biden were to bow out, she’d be the immediate favorite.
Why does she want to run?
One problem with her 2020 presidential campaign was the lack of a clear answer to this question. Perhaps running on the Biden-Harris legacy would help fill in the blank.
Who wants her to run?
Some Democrats are excited about the prospect of nominating a woman of color, but generally Harris’s struggles as a candidate and in defining a role for herself (in the admittedly impossible position of VP) have resulted in nervousness about her as a standard-bearer.
Can she win the nomination?
Not right now.
Who is he?
Mayor Pete is Secretary Pete now, overseeing the Department of Transportation.
Is he running?
No, but he would also be a likely candidate if Biden stepped away.
Why does he want to run?
Just as he was four years ago, Buttigieg is a young, ambitious politician with a moderate, technocratic vision of government.
Who wants him to run?
Buttigieg’s fans are passionate, and Biden showed that moderates remain a force in the party.
Can he win the nomination?
Not at this moment.
Who is he?
The senator from Vermont is changeless, ageless, ever the same.
Is he running?
No, but if Biden dropped out, it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t seriously consider another go. A top adviser even says so.
Why does he want to run?
Sanders still wants to tax billionaires, level the economic playing field, and push a left-wing platform.
Who wants him to run?
Sanders continues to have the strong support of a large portion of the Democratic electorate, especially younger voters.
Can he win the nomination?
Two consecutive tries have shown that he’s formidable, but can’t close. Maybe the third time’s the charm?
Who is she?
Whitmer cruised to a second term as governor of Michigan in 2022.
Is she running?
No.
Why would she want to run?
It’s a little early to know, but her reelection campaign focused on abortion rights.
Who wants her to run?
Whitmer would check a lot of boxes for Democrats. She’s a fresh face, she’s a woman, and she’s proved she can win in the upper Midwest against a MAGA candidate.
Can she win the nomination?
Not if she isn’t running.
Who is she?
If you don’t know Williamson from her popular writing on spirituality, then you surely remember her somewhat woo-woo Democratic bid in 2020.
Is she running?
Yes. Williamson announced her campaign on March 4 in D.C.
Why does she want to run?
“It is our job to create a vision of justice and love that is so powerful that it will override the forces of hatred and injustice and fear,” she said at her campaign launch. She has also said that she wants to give voters a choice. “The question I ask myself is not ‘What is my path to victory?’ My question is ‘What is my path to radical truth-telling?’ There are some things that need to be said in this country.”
Who wants her to run?
Williamson has her fans, but she doesn’t have a clear political constituency. Also, her campaign is perpetually falling part.
Can she win the nomination?
Nah.
Who is he?
The governor of Illinois is both a scion of a wealthy family and a “nomadic warrior.”
Is he running?
No.
Why does he want to run?
After years of unfulfilled interest in elected office, Pritzker has established himself as a muscular proponent of progressivism in a Democratic stronghold.
Who wants him to run?
Improbably for a billionaire, Pritzker has become a darling of the Sanders-style left, as well as a memelord.
Can he win the nomination?
Not now.
Who is he?
The son of a presidential candidate, the nephew of another, and the nephew of a president, Kennedy is a longtime environmental activist and also a chronic crank.
Is he running?
Yes. He announced his run on April 19.
Why does he want to run?
Running for president is a family tradition—hell, he wouldn’t even be the first Kennedy to primary a sitting Democrat. He’s running a campaign arranged around his esoteric combination of left-wing interests (the environment, drug prices) and right-wing causes (vaccine skepticism, anger about social-media “deplatforming”), but tending toward extremely dark places.
Who wants him to run?
Despite his bizarre beliefs, he’s polling in double digits against Biden—though as he has gotten deeper into anti-Semitism and conspiracies, Semafor has deemed his boomlet over.
Can he win the nomination?
Not the Democratic one.
Who is he?
A Democratic U.S. senator and former governor of West Virginia, he was the pivotal centrist vote for the first two years of Joe Biden’s term. I’ve described him as “a middle-of-the-road guy with good electoral instincts, decent intentions, and bad ideas.”
Is he running?
It’s very hard to tell how serious he is. He has visited Iowa, and is being courted by No Labels, the nonpartisan centrist organization, to carry its banner. He’s shown no signs of running, and would stand no chance, in the Democratic primary.
Why does he want to run?
Manchin would arguably have less power as a third-party president than he does as a crucial swing senator, but he faces perhaps the hardest reelection campaign of his life in 2024, as the last Democrat standing in a now solidly Republican state. He also periodically seems personally piqued at Biden and the Democrats over slights perceived or real.
Who wants him to run?
No Labels would love to have someone like him, a high-profile figure who’s willing to buck his party and has policies that would appeal to voters from either party. It’s hard to imagine he’d have much of an organic base of support, but Democrats are terrified he’d siphon off enough votes to hand Trump or another Republican the win in a three-way race.
Can he win?
“Make no mistake, I will win any race I enter,” he said in April. If that is true, do not expect to see him in the presidential race.
Who is he?
West is a philosopher, a theologian, a professor, a preacher, a gadfly, a progressive activist, an actor, a spoken-word recording-artist, an author … and we’re probably missing a few.
Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on the People’s Party ticket on June 5.
Why does he want to run?
“In these bleak times, I have decided to run for truth and justice, which takes the form of running for president of the United States,” he said in his announcement video. West is a fierce leftist who has described Trump as a “neo-fascist” and Biden as a “milquetoast neoliberal.”
Who wants him to run?
West was a high-profile backer of Bernie Sanders, and it’s easy to imagine him winning over some of Sanders’s fervent fans. The People’s Party is relatively new and unproven, and doesn’t have much of a base of its own.
Can he win?
Let’s hear from Brother West: “Do we have what it takes? We shall see,” he said. “But some of us are going to go down fighting, go down swinging, with style and a smile.” Sounds like a no, but it should be a lively, entertaining campaign.
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This story seems to be about: