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Tonight, Peter Hamby and I dig into the backroom conversations making the rounds this week: Nikki Haley vs Tim Scott, the Trump campaign disappearing act, Biden’s ’24 timing, the age question, and the latest D.N.C. convention betting lines. But first…

Of course, the tabs don’t need much prodding to fixate on Ashley, whose diary was stolen in 2020 and sold to the right wing activist group Project Veritas. She was “spotted” last week at a fashion week dinner for Sam Smith’s designer boyfriend, alongside Sex & the City author Candace Bushnell, and was photographed by Women’s Wear Daily sitting in the front row at Laquan Smith’s show with Beth Ann Hardison—a pickup that Hoy quickly posted on her Instagram feed. Biden also made “Just Jared” for sitting front row with Lea Michele at a Brandon Maxwell fashion show.

Hoy has also been promoting her other fashionista client, infamous con artist Anna “Delvey” Sorokin. Last month, Hoy posted an article from Eater titled “A D.C. Chief Cooked a Lavish Birthday Dinner for an Ankle Bracelet-Wearing Anna Delvey,” as part of Sorokin’s new dinner series that they’re hoping to spin into a reality show. (Biden and Delvey have never met, I’m told.) Hoy also represents Alana Hadid, Elle, and Citizens & Culture, a new D.C. restaurant opening this spring from Food Network regular Ryan Hackney.

Peter: Without analyzing her chances of actually becoming the Republican nominee—or her chances of even winning her home state primary—I actually thought Haley’s launch was pretty good! From a purely logistical perspective, she checked pretty much every box you want to check with a campaign launch. There was a bio-heavy launch video that gestured toward her modest upbringing, her record of economic development in South Carolina, her foreign policy experience as Trump’s U.N. ambassador, and a few forced quips on race and culture designed to appeal to a conservative base that probably doesn’t trust her very much at this point because of her flip-flopping on Trump. Glaringly, Haley didn’t mention one of the defining moments of her governorship, when she removed the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina state capitol following the racist mass shooting at the Mother Emanuel church in 2015.

But, as you suggest, Haley no longer has the kind of cachet she once possessed with grassroots Republicans, back when a Sarah Palin endorsement lifted her out of obscurity and she became Tea Party cool in the Obama years. Nevertheless, she still has connections in the elite media, and her announcement speech got a bunch of national press, as did a few packed campaign stops in South Carolina and New Hampshire. She picked up a couple endorsements from former Trump supporters, like home state congressman Ralph Norman. Importantly, by becoming the first person to step up and challenge Trump for the nomination, she’s going to get a decent amount of media oxygen and fundraising opportunities before the race gets crowded. For someone sitting in low single digits in the early polling, what else could you possibly want?

Oh right, a flame war with a national news anchor loathed on the right, CNN’s Don Lemon, who criticized Haley’s suggestion that aging politicians like Trump and Biden should undergo mental acuity tests. By claiming that Haley, 51, isn’t in “her prime,” Lemon called even more attention to the exact thing Haley wants people to know about her: That she’s younger than Trump and that she’s the only woman in the Republican race. Points scored.

Tara: You’re right, Peter, that Lemon gaffe was a gift. Here’s my perspective: I talk to some South Carolina political insiders who say that Tim Scott will take a different tack when he announces his campaign. Scott will want to be a unifier—which some say signals that he’s actually running for vice president, not the top of the ticket. Then again, that might be Haley’s backup plan, too. So are they running against each other for veep? The difference, so far, is that Haley’s running like she’s playing for the top spot.

Regardless, neither Trump nor DeSantis need South Carolina voters to win, so picking either of them will be more of a demographic than an electoral value-add. Trump has mentioned Scott as a possible V.P. pick, presumably to win over Black voters, even though Trump could leverage Haley’s appeal with white suburban women. I think either would be more likely to join a Trump ticket than to best him in a primary.

Peter: Maybe Haley would want to be someone’s running mate, but I’m not totally convinced she’s interested in any sort of cabinet position in a Trump or DeSantis administration. She already held a cabinet-level position in the Trump White House. Why would any politician not named Tom Vilsack do that again?

Here’s why I doubt it: I first met Haley back in late 2008, at some long-forgotten Republican confab in Myrtle Beach when I was a nobody producer for CNN. She gave me her phone number, and two years later she was running for governor, going on to make history as South Carolina’s first female and person of color to win the state house. I was sourced to the gills in South Carolina back then, and the main take on Haley from Republican admirers and haters, alike, was that she had talent and ambition. Critics would call it opportunism, and we’ve seen whiffs of that with her many finger-in-the-wind criticisms of Trump. Regardless, she has a work ethic and sense of fearlessness that Tim Scott has never really demonstrated in his career, going back to his days as a state representative, before Haley appointed him to the U.S. Senate. Unlike Scott, Haley was always going to run for president, an idea that was ordained from the moment she became governor in 2011. I think Haley looks at the 2024 race and truly believes this is her only shot at the White House. Even if there’s only a 3 percent chance of winning, it’s worth taking that chance.

There’s also something else going on here that’s more prosaic. Between the time Haley became governor and when she was named U.N. ambassador, she was trading at the height of her fame. And it’s easy to forget that for politicians, fame equals money. Back in her rising star days, Haley was constantly doing big network interviews, she scored two lucrative book deals with the help of D.C. uber-attorney Bob Barnett, and she commanded hefty speaking fees from universities and business groups. That’s on top of developing relationships with every kind of rich person, C.E.O., and soft-money donor as a traveling Republican governor from a low-tax, right-to-work state. Haley was practically drowning in money-making opportunities for a decade. She grew up with nothing. By the time she was U.N. ambassador, she was living in a palatial penthouse apartment in Manhattan. But with Trump’s feral Republican Party passing her by—along with other celebrated establishment Republicans from that era, like Chris Christie and Marco Rubio—those check-cashing opportunities have greatly diminished. A run for president, even if modestly successful, has the potential to keep a precious bank account flush.

Do you think that Trump’s own weakness, and low-energy campaign, changes the calculus? I’m told that Trump’s team has actually been encouraging him to lay low for a while, in order to keep him out of the headlines. “People are fatigued by him,” one of his advisers told me. “Even people who like him are fatigued by him. Having him front and center only exacerbates that fatigue.” Trump hates that strategy, so I don’t expect it to last. It can only be executed in dribs and drabs. Still, so much of politics is about momentum and buzz, neither of which Trump seems to have at the moment. That plays to Biden’s advantage.

Peter: Biden beat Trump in 2020 despite being old. And Biden has been pretty open that he feels good about a rematch against Trump, if he runs for re-election. Against someone new or younger, though, like DeSantis or Haley? That feels like a harder road, but strategically there’s really nothing he can do to avoid the contrast. I kind of think he just needs to lean into his age no matter who he runs against. It’s the brand that got him to the White House in the first place. He has to own it.

It’s honestly a little strange that Biden, and his advisers, kind of try to pretend he isn’t ancient. Do you get that sense, too? I know the president goes out of his way to project vigor, with his muscle cars and his bike rides. His staff stresses that he’s planning to run for re-election, and Biden likes to growl “Watch me!” at reporters when he’s pressed on his age. And he makes a very, very good point. The guy is 80 and running the free world! Not easy. I’m awful after a red-eye flight, and this grandpa just flew into a war zone to hang with Volodymyr Zelensky.

His age is a political reality he can’t run away from. Semi-Republican strategist Mike Murphy said something pointed but accurate last week on his podcast, Hacks On Tap, after the White House announced the hiring of the veteran Democratic strategist Ben LaBolt as their new communications director. “Biden’s problem is there are two things that are very hard to fix,” he said. “One is Kamala. Everybody agrees they gotta fix Kamala, but so far she has been incredibly unfixable. And second, Biden is still 80 and aging. And that doesn’t go away. You don’t spin your way out of that. He did great at the State of the Union, but that unforgiving clock is ticking.”

Harris is another topic we’ve gone deep on here, but Murphy is right that Biden’s age isn’t just a number. Questions and phony conspiracies about his mental fitness aren’t even new, in fact. I covered the 2008 campaign, when he ran for president and later became Obama’s sidekick. He was a spry then, in his mid-60s. Just a kid really. But because Biden had a history of gaffes and verbal flubs, he was the frequent subject of those wacky forwarded emails from Republicans grandparents—yes, disinformation existed before social media—claiming that he had brain damage. Those were dumb, but that stuff was going around 15 years ago. We know Biden is old! There’s no reason to pretend he isn’t. Seniority was the reason Obama picked him as his running mate in the first place.

Tara: Perhaps, you’re right. What if Biden embraces the fact that he’s old, à la that old Reagan quip from ’84?

Peter: People in Washington lose sight of this, but politicians are defined rather simply by normie voters. Candidates aren’t defined at first glance by policy ideas or their record or the latest fleeting news story about negotiations with Joe Manchin. Voters look at Joe Biden and think: Old. The same was true with John McCain at the end of his campaign in 2008. Lots of voters looked at George W. Bush and thought “dumb” or “stubborn.” Hillary Clinton: Woman. Barack Obama: Black. Mitt Romney or John Kerry: Rich, out-of-touch. Donald Trump: [Insert adjective here]. Good politicians do two things to overcome those perceptions: They weave them into a message that works in their favor—Obama ran on change, Dubya on toughness, etc.—and they deploy that message in a way that supersedes whatever pre-existing doubts there are about their candidacies.

Biden has already achieved the first part. In 2020, he sold his age as experience and competence. He was a balm against the chaos of Trump. Even if Republicans nominate someone younger than Trump, Biden can’t run away from what got him to the White House in the first place or try to tweak his brand. We saw this in his State of the Union address. Biden is still selling himself as Scranton Joe who can work with some Republicans and get big things done for middle class Americans. Democrats and swing voters have shown themselves willing to vote for Biden and his party despite their obvious lack of dynamism.The midterms last November shored up that dynamic: Doubts about Biden? Sure. Especially among voters under 40. But Democrats were better than the anarchists in the other party.

I can see Biden on a debate stage next year saying something like, “I might be old, but that guy is crazy!” As you note, Ronald Reagan, of course, did a version of this against Walter Mondale in that famous debate moment from 1984. If the economy is in decent shape next November, Biden might as well just embrace his octogenarian brand and dare voters to take a risk on someone else, whether it’s Trump or not.

Tara: That’s right. He needs to make the point that old works, and it might be better than crazy. In the meantime, D.C. continues to wait on Biden, who notoriously works on his schedule, to actually announce that he’s running again. We’re being told that’s coming in April. Until then, there will be stories about whether or not he should. He also needs to signal that he’s the nominee by picking a city for the D.N.C. convention so that the mayor of the chosen city can actually prepare.

Peter: Oh right, that’s the other low-key topic in Washington, since it’s a giant money grab for consultants and whoever wins the city. What’s the latest? When are they going to make an announcement?

Tara: Well, I’m told from reliable sources that it’s in the hands of the Bidens right now, and that of course means that Jill Biden will have some say, too. This also means that D.N.C. members don’t expect to hear from Biden until the last possible minute. But I am hearing from a D.N.C. insider that the mayors are getting antsy; they need to plan. For the 2020 convention, it also took a long time to decide, and it became an issue for Milwaukee because they were scrambling to figure out how to transport people and put people up. They were saved by Covid. Obviously there’s a lot of posturing from all sides about whose bid is the strongest. I heard from a D.N.C. insider that New York made by far the strongest pitch, but that Chicago’s was also impressive.

Unfortunately for New York, Biden’s an old school politician who will be looking at bids in terms of how politically advantageous they are, rather than what makes the most sense logistically, which likely weakens New York’s bid. Labor is a big deal for Biden, and Chicago is a midwestern labor town that has a media market that bleeds into Wisconsin and Milwaukee, where the D.N.C. was slated to host in 2002. But I’m told the biggest issue about Chicago for Biden is how Obama’s presence will hang over the city, potentially overshadowing him. Then again, no one rallies the party quite like Obama, so if Biden was really thinking about politics first, he might embrace that.

Atlanta definitely has its logistical issues in terms of hotel space, not to mention its political issues with its lax record on labor, its trigger laws on abortion, and the Brian Kemp of it all in the backdrop. But Biden wants to solidify Georgia as a blue state, and holding the convention there is a chance to do that, even though it rarely works out that way. Based on my polling of D.N.C. insiders this is how they ranked the likelihood of each city: Chicago, Atlanta, New York, and then Houston.