Dear Weekend Jolter,
The 2024 presidential primaries were a mirage. You might think you caught a glimpse of them. You might have that shadow of a fading memory of Dean Phillips warning us about something rather serious or Vivek Ramaswamy beta-testing personality updates during the debates, but, I assure you, it is a false one.
Among the Democrats, the incumbent froze the field only to drop out at the last possible moment and transfer the nomination to his vice president. Among the Republicans, the chief challenger ran as an incumbent and cleared much of the field before primaries began, driving out all save Nikki Haley before January’s end.
Those conditions, to state the obvious, won’t repeat in 2028. And since it’s now 2026, officially, according to my page-a-day calendar, it’s not too early to start looking at the contours of the next presidential race and field. And that looming post-Trump, no-incumbent moment, involving two parties in the throes of existential identity crises, could lead to a historically crowded crucible — one that makes the 2016 GOP primary circus look tame by comparison.
Again, it’s January. Of 2026. Polling for 2028 is unreliable and silly — but at the very least, it can give us an idea of which politicians voters are being asked to consider. For the Democrats, that list includes Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris (unburdened, at last), JB Pritzker, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Josh Shapiro, Mark Kelly, Gretchen Whitmer, Tim Walz (burdened, by rampant fraud), Andy Beshear, and Bernie Sanders (who is 84, so don’t count on it). Senators like Chris Murphy and Ruben Gallego, though not generally showing up in the polls, may also be in the mix, among others.
The victors of November’s off-year elections stand for the broader question the Democrats have yet to resolve: Are the socialist, collectivist Mamdanis in charge, or are the comparatively conventional Spanbergers adulting their way back to the helm from steerage? No matter the answer, voters are likely to put a premium on relative youth after the Biden-dotage trauma. (For what it’s worth, a recent Yale Youth Poll showed AOC leading the Dems among voters in their late teens, 20s, and early 30s. Harris and Newsom trailed at a considerable distance.)
The list of possible Democratic contenders will continue to evolve. Jim Geraghty recently attempted something few journalists would — he did math, calculating that nearly 20 percent of Senate Democrats are possibly maybe thinking about running for president: “By my count, nine Democratic senators are either interested or, at minimum, letting the speculation about themselves continue.” That’s just senators; the most frequent subjects of speculation can be found outside the chamber. Witnessing Harris’s attempts to keep herself fresh and relevant, Jim also posed a question to the party:
She is one of two people on the planet who have been put forth as a candidate against Donald Trump and lost. Maybe the 2028 Republican nominee will be easier to defeat, but if you’re a Democrat, you may well have more than a dozen options again, including possibly as many as nine senators. Why would Democrats roll the dice on her in a second straight cycle and hope for a different outcome?
The Republican primary polls, meanwhile, reflect a similarly crowded theoretical field, including, of course, JD Vance, as well as Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, Ramaswamy, Haley, Ted Cruz, Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Youngkin, Donald Trump Jr. (his name is frequently offered in polls; that doesn’t mean he’s running), Kristi Noem, Brian Kemp, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Rand Paul, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who dramatically resigned from Congress in November, denies interest.
Unless Vance is pronounced “excommunicado” by MAGA World, he would enjoy the closest thing to an incumbent’s advantage (Rubio seems to appreciate this). Axios reported last weekend that the VP’s plan is to “literally fly above MAGA’s rising civil war” by campaigning across the country for Republicans in the 2026 midterms, showing conspicuous loyalty to President Trump, and avoiding sides in the right’s ongoing infighting. (On the latter plank, Noah Rothman notes that the veep’s recent rejection of “self-defeating purity tests” amid the war of the podcasters was hardly a vow of neutrality, indicating instead that he views outspoken figures like Ben Shapiro as a bigger problem than Nick Fuentes and his enablers.)
Vance’s status may rise or fall depending on how Trump himself is treated on the right. There have been indications for a while that Republicans are at least slightly more willing to buck or admonish the president, on redistricting, on his pardons, on his military operations, on the Epstein files, on H-1B visas, etc. A better-than-expected performance by the president’s party in the midterms could eventually ease that restlessness, as it did for President Joe Biden (to disastrous results) after 2022. A wipeout, naturally, could have the opposite effect.
But, as Dan McLaughlin recently wrote, because Trump broke the traditional political cycle — losing reelection, only to win four years later — we can’t even say where we are in that cycle right now. All we can say is that, as the parties battle internally over what they stand for, a great number of people appear ready to offer themselves up as the answer.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
ARTICLES
Jeffrey Blehar: So Long and Good Riddance to a Year of Tragedy, Presidential Antics, and Mamdani-Mania
Elliott Abrams: Let Freedom Ring in the Caribbean in 2026
Jim Geraghty: China’s Largest Live-Fire Naval Exercise Simulates a Blockade of Taiwan
Jianli Yang: Beijing Weaponizes Strategic Ambiguity on Taiwan
Rich Lowry: RFK Jr. Is Right About ‘Gender-Affirming Care’
Jessica Hornik: Our Favorite Books: What We Were Reading in 2025
James Lynch: 2025, the Year of the Surprise Presidential Pardon
Daniel Buck: Bring Back Snow Days
Brittany Bernstein: Remembering the Worst Media Misses of 2025
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Ben Sasse Reminds Us That Life Is Precious
Noah Rothman: One Man’s ‘Warmth of Collectivism’ Is Another’s Inferno
Noah Rothman: Are These Iran Protests Different?
Michael Brendan Dougherty: A Syllabus of Conservative Thought
CAPITAL MATTERS
John Gustavsson cautions Californians about a proposed referendum that would usher in “arguably the most destructive wealth tax ever implemented anywhere in the world”: California, and the Worst Wealth Tax in the World
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White, on the “affectionate, if morose,” Eephus: Nostalgia, the Not-So-Great Pastime
A missing tomb, found; a Pompeii spa; a DOGE bobble. Brian Allen covers it all: When New Art’s Really Old: From the Valley of the Kings to Pompeii to a Rubens in a Paris Closet
NEW YEAR, NEW EXCERPTS
So New Yorkers are getting democracy, good and hard. Noah Rothman weighs in on Zohran Mamdani’s alarming, if not terribly surprising, inaugural address:
Throughout the address, Mamdani exerted himself in his pursuit of transcendent prose, swinging for the rafters at the end of every other paragraph.
The mayor dismissed the winter weather, noting that he and his listeners were “warmed against the January chill by the resurgent flame of hope.” He eschewed gentility and courtesy. “For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty,” read one of Mamdani’s more labored constructions. He secured the online virality he clearly sought, albeit for all the wrong reasons, when he extolled the virtues of socialism as a remedy to the primacy of the individual. “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” Mamdani declared.
The nauseating draft managed to marry the gauzy romanticism of America’s aged flower children with the monomania of the Red Guards. It is a small comfort that the authors of that speech appear to genuinely believe true socialism has never been tried or else they would not have exhumed from their deserving graves so many threadbare socialist nostrums that reached their sell-by date on December 26, 1991. It’s not unreasonable to expect that this collection will prove to be about as good at governing as they are at speechwriting. Indeed, Mamdani himself tended with care to the trap he and his speechwriters set for his administration.
In his address, the mayor chided the unnamed doubters who said that he should manage the sky-high expectations he himself had set. “The only expectation I seek to reset is that of small expectations,” Mamdani declared. “Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously.” He would make New York City into a place where “there is no need too small to be met, no person too sick to be made healthy.” Indeed, in pledging to “govern without shame,” Mamdani made perhaps the only promise that he is all but certain to fulfill. . . .
But while Mamdani has compromised a lot and will compromise further still, it has been clear for some time that he will not countenance an accommodation with Israel and American Zionists.
In a flurry of executive activity following his swearing in, the new mayor invalidated all of former Mayor Eric Adams’s executive orders issued after September 26, 2024 — the day on which Adams was indicted on a variety of corruption charges. That may sound like an exercise in good governance, but it just so happened to capture a variety of initiatives aimed at combating antisemitism. Among them, the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism (generally regarded as the international standard) as the city’s legal lodestar.
That may seem insignificant, but it contributes to a troubling trend.
The world should be paying very close attention in the new year to China’s latest saber-rattling. Jianli Yang, on why:
On December 29, 2025, the Eastern Theater Command of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) abruptly launched a large-scale military operation around Taiwan. The operation, code-named “Justice Mission 2025,” was the seventh such action since 2022. But this provocation crossed red lines that earlier drills had deliberately avoided.
For the first time, Chinese maneuvers extended inside Taiwan’s twelve-nautical-mile territorial waters, with the closest activity reportedly less than five nautical miles from the main island. Disturbingly, the operation involved live fire. The drills caused tangible economic and social disruption: Taiwan’s civil aviation authorities were forced to issue multiple emergency flight advisories rerouting civilian aircraft, commercial shipping companies adjusted their schedules, and insurers raised risk alerts for vessels operating nearby.
Beijing framed the operation as a response to Washington’s recent approval of an approximately $11 billion arms package for Taiwan and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s November statement that “a Taiwan contingency is a Japan contingency,” which echoed long-standing Japanese security assessments linking Taiwan’s fate to Japan’s own defense posture. Official statements from the Chinese government described the drills as a warning to “Taiwan independence forces” and “foreign interference.” Yet judged by scale, proximity, intensity, and real-world impact, “Justice Mission 2025” cannot be accurately understood as a conventional military exercise — or as a typical, one-off political response to Taipei, Washington, or Tokyo.
What makes this operation fundamentally different is not only how close the PLA moved, but how it moved. Past exercises were announced in advance and followed a predictable pattern, with clearly delineated zones, timelines, and preparation phases. We saw this during the large-scale drills that followed then–Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit to Taiwan, when China publicly released exclusion zones and maritime notices days ahead of time. This time, the boundary between preparation and execution was blurred. The suddenness, the live fire inside territorial waters, and the immediate disruption of civilian life all marked a qualitative shift. With China going so far as to paraphrase Vladimir Putin’s language before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — when Moscow labeled its assault a “special military operation” — this action looks less like a carefully calculated exercise and more like a deliberate attempt to erase the line between drills and war.
This recent operation marks the inauguration of a new strategy that can be described as Beijing’s strategic ambiguity. Its core logic is to normalize the isolation of Taiwan while systematically blurring the distinction between routine military activity and imminent combat. By repeatedly operating at the threshold — inside territorial waters, under live-fire conditions — the PLA forces its opponents to guess whether its next move will be another drill or the opening shot of a real conflict. Ambiguity itself becomes a weapon.
Kathryn Jean Lopez pays tribute to Ben Sasse, who recently announced some very sad news:
Just before Christmas, Ben Sasse, who served as a United States senator from Nebraska between 2015 and 2023, announced that he has an advanced case of cancer and he’s going to die soon.
At one point, people talked about Sasse as a potential Republican presidential candidate. I always thought that he could have been the best civics teacher in the United States. His love of America is rooted in an understanding of the gift that our country is to the world and to individual human beings.
At a time when the dignity of human life is under attack, Sasse has been a godsend. He wrote on social media about this diagnosis:
This is hard for someone wired to work and build, but harder still as a husband and a dad, I can’t begin to describe how great my people are during the past year, as we temporarily stepped back from public life and built new family rhythms. Melissa and I have grown even closer, and that on top of three decades of the best friend a man could ever have. Seven months ago, Corey was commissioned in the Air Force, and she’s off at instrument and multi engine rounds of flight school. Last week, Alex graduated from college a semester early. . . . This summer, 14-year-old Breck started learning to drive. . . . I couldn’t be more grateful to constantly get to bear hug this motley crew of sinners and saints.
And that is what we are. We are all human beings, and we have deadlines. Just as I sat down to write this column, I got a prayer request for an infant who doesn’t have a fully developed brain and is dying. Sometimes it happens that quickly. Sometimes it takes a few decades. But we all face death eventually. And even though we all face it, it still hurts. It’s still painful. It still is something we’re not fully prepared for.
CODA
Nobody wants to hear about my resolutions. So instead, how about a guilty pleasure? My wife and I have gotten into Palm Royale. The somewhat-soapy show on Apple TV showcases Kristen Wiig’s versatility and the, yes, acting of none other than Ricky Martin. Featured in that series is this song, a cover (by Ricky) of “Comin’ Home Baby.” Here’s Mel Tormé doing the same, a few moons ago. Enjoy.
Happy New Year, all.