| | | | |  | | By Brakkton Booker | With help from Ella Creamer, Rishika Dugyala, Brittany Gibson, Jesse Naranjo and Teresa Wiltz
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POLITICO illustration/Photo by AP | What up, Recast fam! Donald Trump campaigns with former rival Vivek Ramaswamy in New Hampshire… but not before the former president stopped by a New York courtroom for jury selection in his civil defamation trial. Longshot Democratic White House hopeful Dean Phillips scrubs DEI references from his campaign website, and an interesting rift emerges between independent candidates Cornel West and RFK Jr. First, we focus on Nikki Haley’s closing arguments. The historic margin of victory in Iowa on Monday, for many, provided all the evidence needed that the remainder of the 2024 primary is nothing more than Donald Trump’s GOP coronation. Even so, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley boldly projected confidence in the wake of her defeat. Iowa caucusgoers, she said, did exactly what she needed them to do: winnow the GOP presidential field and set up next week’s New Hampshire primary as “a two-person race” with Trump. That’s an audacious claim for someone who actually finished a distant third behind Trump. While she can claim the smallest of moral victories — denying her former boss from pitching a complete shutout en route to his victories in 98 of 99 Iowa counties — according to preliminary results from the Iowa GOP, Haley beat out Trump in Johnson County by a single vote. Still, Haley will gladly take the eight delegates she earned with her ticket out of Iowa and look to rally voters in New Hampshire. It’s far more favorable terrain for her — if she can only find ways to avoid high-profile gaffes. More on that in a bit.
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First, it’s important to understand that unaffiliated voters outnumber registered Democrats and Republicans in New Hampshire — and those voters can participate in party primaries.
So while Haley trails Trump among New Hampshire’s registered Republicans (58 percent for Trump to 21 percent for Haley), she is leading him by wide margins among unaffiliated voters (17 percent for Trump compared to 43 percent for Haley), according to a recent University of New Hampshire/CNN Granite State Poll. | 
Haley greets voters during a campaign stop Tuesday in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. | Charles Krupa/AP | It’s important to note that the poll was taken prior to former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie suspending his campaign. So Haley’s claim, the one I called audacious, might not be so crazy after all. But then Haley shifts all attention from the task at hand. During an appearance on “Fox and Friends” Tuesday morning she was asked to respond to a clip of MSNBC host Joy Reid describing what she sees as Haley’s chief issue for why Republican voters hold her at arm's length. “The elephant in the room: She’s still a brown lady that’s still got to win in a party that is deeply anti-immigrant,” Reid said. Brian Kilmeade of Fox News asked if Haley agreed with Reid’s interpretation. Haley did not shy away from her Indian heritage, first swatting at Reid — she “lives in a different America” — before saying, “I mean yes, I’m a brown girl that grew up in a small rural town in South Carolina who became the first female minority governor in history, who became a U.N. ambassador and who is now running for president.” But she didn’t leave it there when Kilmeade followed up: “Are you involved in a racist party?” “No,” retorted Haley, a child of the Deep South. “We’re not a racist country, Brian. We’ve never been a racist country.” She said more, but it’s irrelevant. Once again, her actions raised the question: Is she willing to whitewash American history in exchange for votes?
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| On the one hand, she wants credit for being the first minority woman governor, the same one who led the charge, under pressure, to take down the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse grounds following the racist terrorist attack at a Black church in 2015 — that same church President Joe Biden visited last week to woo Black voters. Race had a lot — if not everything — to do with those events. It wasn’t the first time she stumbled on race. Just last month, Haley failed to name slavery as a leading cause for the Civil War, only to come back later with “of course the Civil War was about slavery, we know that,” following a torrent of negative reports which forced her course correction. Fittingly, that also took place as she was campaigning in New Hampshire. Following the slavery omission, Republicans of color told me, “She’s toast.” Will this turn off unaffiliated Granite Staters and those registered Republicans fed up with Trump? Doubtful. But with less than a week to go before voters head to the polls, this is the type of misstep that raises doubts that she learned anything from last month’s fiasco. And that could pose problems for her if the goal is to win New Hampshire outright — or at least place a strong second to springboard her campaign to her home state of South Carolina next month. We’ll certainly keep tabs on this to see how it all plays out. All the best,
The Recast Team
| | | | A POLITICO PROGRAMMING NOTE
|  From left, Reps. Katie Porter, Adam Schiff and Barbara Lee participate in a California Senate debate in October. | Richard Vogel/AP | Next week is going to be jam-packed with election news. On Monday Jan. 22, tune in to a debate in California’s U.S. Senate race hosted by POLITICO, Fox 11 Los Angeles and the University of Southern California Dornsife Center for the Political Future. The top four candidates in the contest are all scheduled to be there: Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff, Katie Porter and Barbara Lee, as well as Republican Steve Garvey. The debate will be livestreamed on POLITICO.com starting at 9 p.m. Eastern/6 p.m. Pacific. Be sure to come right back to POLITICO on Tuesday, Jan. 23 for coverage and analysis of the New Hampshire primary.
| | | MLK WIRETAPS: RFK JR. VS. CORNEL WEST
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Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. addresses media Jan. 3 in Salt Lake City. | Hannah Schoenbaum/AP | Independent presidential candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West found themselves in stark opposition on the merits of wiretapping Martin Luther King Jr., according to POLITICO’s Brittany Gibson, who sent in this dispatch: The FBI’s counterintelligence program that surveilled activists and artists throughout the Civil Rights Movement — dubbed COINTELPRO — resurfaced during MLK commemorations over the past week. While campaigning in Atlanta, Kennedy defended his family’s involvement in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI surveillance of King. In an exclusive interview with POLITICO over the holiday weekend, he argued there was “good reason” to do it. His father, Robert F. Kennedy Sr., was attorney general at the time and authorized the measure, and his uncle — that would be John F. Kennedy — was president. West, a prominent public intellectual who grounds his own political ideology in the Black freedom tradition, vigorously denounced Kennedy’s remarks. “RFK Jr. has to realize that this is not a question of some kind of institutional arrangement between his father and uncle and the FBI — no, no,” West clapped back. “They declared war on my people.” The decision to wiretap King is largely viewed as a stain on Kennedy Sr.’s legacy.
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Fellow independent candidate Cornel West denounced Kennedy's remarks. | Damian Dovarganes/AP | | “We can never excuse the blatant and racist violation of the constitutional rights of Black people, whether leaders like MLK or the regular folks petitioning government for justice and freedom,” Maya Wiley, president of the Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights, told POLITICO in a statement. “If we allow the whitewashing of history in service of authoritarianism we not only lose our way, we lose our democracy,” Wiley added. Relitigating the FBI’s 20th century actions is far from a top issue in 2024. But voters are concerned with the government’s relationship to people’s everyday lives and civil liberties. Kennedy’s defense of COINTELPRO contradicts one of his main campaign grievances: that the U.S. government eroded civil liberties in the case of Covid-19 health restrictions, vaccine mandates and track-and-trace “surveillance.” On the other hand, West’s views can be traced to his own record of civil disobedience and activism on behalf of Black and other marginalized communities. “This is about lies about a great Black freedom tradition,” West said. “And I come out swinging on that.”
| | | ICYMI @ POLITICO
|  Anti-affirmative action activists protest outside the U.S. Supreme Court building on June 29, 2023. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images | Americans Support Nixing Affirmative Action — That’s what POLITICO’s Matt Berg reports, based on the results of a Gallup Center on Black Voices survey. Some 68 percent viewed last year’s Supreme Court decision favorably, while 32 percent said it was “mostly a bad thing.” HAPPENING TODAY — Biden has invited the top four congressional leaders to a White House meeting as negotiations over his national security spending package remain at an impasse. POLITICO’s Burgess Everett breaks it all down. Biden’s Peach State Problem — A new Atlanta Journal-Constitution/University of Georgia survey shows Biden trailing the likely GOP nominee, Trump, in Georgia by 8 percentage points, reports POLITICO’s Christine Zhu. Biden narrowly won the state four years ago.
| | | THE RECAST RECOMMENDS “You Dreamed of Empires” by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer, reimagines the story of Tenochtitlan — today’s Mexico City — after Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrives in a "colonial revenge" tale. “The Book of Clarence,” a comedic retelling of the story of Jesus with a predominantly Black cast led by LaKeith Stanfield as Clarence, the twin brother of Jesus’ apostle Thomas who looks to capitalize on the rise of Christ.
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| In K-thriller "A Shop For Killers," a university student becomes embroiled in a violent underworld after the death of her uncle. It premieres on Disney+ today. “Beef” cleaned up at the Emmys, dominating the limited or anthology series categories — and Ali Wong became the first woman of Asian descent to win a lead acting Emmy. ICYMI, or if you want to rewatch, catch it on Netflix. Jennifer Lopez marries several different men and gets into a food fight at a dreamy, pink and white-themed ceremony for “Can’t Get Enough” from her upcoming album, “This Is Me... Now,” which is something of a sequel to her 2002 album, “This Is Me... Then.” 21 Savage has a London homecoming in his music video for "redrum." | 
| TikTok of the Week: Don’t look at me
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