Hello, it's the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕

We have a barn burner on our hands, ladies and gents. Saturday night will see the battle of the titans, Donald Trump vs. Nikki Haley, where Trump has the slight, competitive edge of 31 points.

It's unclear what Haley considers a victory at this point. When Ron DeSantis was in the race, it was second place (unsuccessful). When he dropped out, it was still second place (successful, I guess). In Nevada, it was for everyone to ignore the primary/caucus altogether (which she should hope was successful, as she lost to electoral juggernaut "none of these candidates"). 
 

She's made vague noises in the direction of building momentum; hard to see how getting thoroughly walloped in her own state (that she was once pointing to eagerly as home turf where voters and the media market know her) is in service of that goal. 
 

But Haley's true theory of the case has been the same since day one. It was the same as DeSantis', and basically everyone else who ran (except for Vivek Ramaswamy, who genuinely thrives in this political moment like a water bear splashing in the toxic runoff of a post-apocalyptic wasteland). She's there in case Trump dies or, maybe, gets convicted (though I've long been skeptical that the latter would be enough to lose his king of the party status). If that's her mission statement, losing South Carolina worse than she lost New Hampshire doesn't matter. The reality that her only chance at winning early contests comes in places like Vermont isn't important, because she isn't meaningfully competing for delegates.   
 

She's already irreconcilably alienated herself in Trump's eyes. She'll never be welcomed back into the MAGA fold (though I suspect the doors to a more old-school, corporate Republican world will remain open to her). Some have posited that this is to set her up for a 2028 run, which if true, is pretty delusional. Even so, at this point, the wind in her sails is money. While she's got it — she outraised Trump in January, according to FEC reports — might as well use it. 
 

I once thought that the humiliation of getting demolished in her home state would push her to end her bid before then. But since New Hampshire, she's seemed to be enjoying herself — throwing out more punches, tricking the networks into airing a routine campaign stump speech by teasing that she might be dropping out. 
 

Anything but a Trump landslide in South Carolina would be interesting. And, while there's no one less reliable than the candidate of a doomed campaign, Haley insists that she'll run through Super Tuesday. It's probably worth it to her for the sputtering fury it incites in Trump alone.

We'll hear more after the long weekend.

Given how much support Americans have for marriage equality, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Republicans had dropped ending same-sex marriage from their agenda.

You'd be wrong. As Kate Riga and I reported this week, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) signed a bill into law which brings the state very close to challenging the precedent set by Obergefell v. Hodges. The law allows state officials to decline to participate in formalizing a marriage; not by giving them the power to decline to issue a license, but rather to give them the status that religious officiants have: to decline to solemnize a marriage.

To get legally married, you need both the license and the solemnization. Tennessee Republicans seem to think that they've identified One Weird Trick that would allow them to stop the state from having to participate in same-sex marriages without contravening Obergefell, which mandates that states issue licenses to same-sex couples, but is silent on solemnization.

What next? Tennessee activists told us that they expect the law to be challenged in court; that could end up forming one in a snowballing series of cases that would chip away at marriage equality. LGBTQ activists likened it to the decades-long campaign against Roe: start at the margins, and before you know it, the court will have it overturned.

Longtime connoisseurs of MAGA grievance-ology will recall that there are two events (real or imagined) which Donald Trump perceived as Ukraine acting to hurt him: the first was Kyiv supposedly meddling against him in the 2016 election; the second was Volodymyr Zelensky's refusal to investigate bogus allegations that Biden had a Ukrainian prosecutor fired to help his son Hunter and his employer, Ukrainian gas firm Burisma.

Federal prosecutors this week charged Alexander Smirnov, a longtime confidential source, with lying to FBI agents over that infamous prosecutor story, saying that he fabricated details and events to provide a granular narrative of the supposed Burisma prosecutor bribery scheme. Prosecutors said that Smirnov was meeting with Russian intelligence as he peddled the story.

Josh Marshall and David Kurtz have both noted that this shows the GOP's impeachment effort against Biden was based on Russian propaganda, and lays bare how far opportunists can take obvious disinformation campaigns. For Russia, meddling in the U.S. has another aim: polarizing public opinion around support for Ukraine, using disinformation as a crowbar to pry the U.S. away from supporting Kyiv.

We're two years on from Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine. Kyiv beat back the initial invasion and, with U.S. support, retook huge swathes of its territory before stalling out in a counteroffensive this past summer. Ukraine needs the aid bill in Congress to continue defending itself, let alone start another counteroffensive. The U.S. needs the bill to replenish its own stockpiles, depleted to help Ukraine defend itself.

The House GOP is blocking that in part because Trump is preternaturally vindictive. It's not the grudge alone which spurs Trump to oppose the aid; we can't deny his deference to the kind of raw, dictatorial power that Putin brandishes, and the perception that Russian meddling helped him win in 2016.

But the grudge is a big part of it. It's a testament to the success of what now looks very clearly like a Russian intelligence operation targeted as much at the FBI, Congress, and the American public as at one person, aimed to convince him that Ukraine was a personal enemy to be defeated.

In the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court ruling — declaring embryos "children," a finding that has already had a chilling effect on IVF treatment in the state — Republicans are struggling to respond in a way that lets them have their cake and eat it.

The slice they want to have: Agreeing that embryos are "babies." The slice they want to eat: We <3 IVF.

Watching that squirming unfold in real time has been a telling aspect of a rather grim political moment. Nikki Haley, who has had an almost comedically vague stance on abortion on the campaign trail, had to do some cleanup this week. Wednesday afternoon she told a reporter that she agreed embryos are "babies" only to backtrack almost entirely by Wednesday evening when she told CNN she doesn't necessarily agree with the Alabama ruling.

Republican governors, including Brian Kemp, Bill Lee and Kevin Stitt, had an equally wobbly time declaring their support for IVF treatment generally, while still supporting the extreme fetal personhood ideology baked into the Alabama Supreme Court decision.

By Friday afternoon, Donald Trump had weighed in on the matter — saying, "I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious baby" — and the National Republican Senate Committee stepped in to give Republicans a clear set of talking points. It put out a memo encouraging Republican Senate candidates to "clearly and concisely reject efforts by the government to restrict IVF" and called the Alabama ruling "fodder for Democrats hoping to manipulate the abortion issue for electoral gain." The memo sHoCkInGlY did not offer any guidance on how to navigate the whole embryos-as-babies bit of the decision and what that means for infertility treatment in Alabama moving forward.

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