NewsNation Chief Washington Anchor and On Balance host Leland Vittert was a foreign correspondent for four years in Jerusalem. He gives you an early look at tonight’s 7 p.m. ET show. 

Nikki’s Rise Causes Civil War in MAGA World 

The wacko wing of the MAGA world will lose its mind if Donald Trump picks Nikki Haley as vice president. 

Charlie Nash (@CharlieNash) of Mediaite reports former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said in an interview: “They’re gonna try to force Nikki on the ticket. They’ll say Trump needs a woman, Nikki on the ticket, she balances things and she can bring together that 15% of Never Trumpers in the Republican party. We’re going to have to have that fight.”

• Fact: Haley continues to leave the door open to the vice president slot. 
• Remember in 2016, Trump chose Pence, someone he reportedly mocked for having a low net worth, because he needed to shore up evangelical Christians – why wouldn’t he pick Haley? 

Note: We haven’t mentioned Ron DeSantis yet. 

• ICYMI: Over the break, The New York Times dropped a devastating premortem of his campaign.
  • We called him the Scott Walker of 2024 months ago.
  • Watch our June 2023 interview with former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. 

What to watch for: The media’s love-hate relationship with Haley.

• The media loves that she’s an alternative.
• But they hate that a Republican (minority) woman could be the first female president.
  • Fair question: Would Haley be attacked even harder if she were a man? But then again, DeSantis’ boots became an issue.

The latest Decision Desk HQ polling shows Haley at 17.1% in Iowa and 26.7% in New Hampshire. 

America’s Center of Gravity Shifts West 

New York is no longer the center of America — just ask CBS, which broadcasted its New Year’s show from Nashville, Tennessee. 

Did you watch CBS’s Nashville New Year’s Eve? There were no MAGA — no conservative — country singers.

• Oddly (or not so oddly), Jason Aldean didn’t sing his hit, “Try That in a Small Town.” This is noteworthy considering it was not only a No. 1 Billboard country song but the No. 1 song across all music earlier this summer. 

Thought bubble: WWDC think? (What would Dick Clark think?) 

DOOM! 

Welcome to 2024. DOOM is upon us — at least that’s what the leading presidential candidates in each party agree on: Vote for me or the other guy will destroy the country. 

• Toluse Olorunnipa (@ToluseO) of the Washington Post reports on the remarkable similarities in messaging from Trump and Biden.
  • Olorunnipa highlights this from Biden: “‘The greatest threat Trump poses is to our democracy,’ Biden said earlier this month at a fundraiser in Bethesda. ‘Because if we lose, we lose everything.’”
  • And he compares it to this from Trump: “‘As long as Joe Biden is in the White House, the American Dream is dead,’ Trump said during a rally in Durham, N.H., where he also accused migrants of ‘poisoning the blood’ of the nation.”

There’s lots to compare “doom” to.

• This is not Ronald Reagan’s “It’s Morning Again in America” or Bill Clinton who, 16 years after his 1992 win, still walked out to Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.”

Fact Check: “Politics is downstream of culture” to quote the late Andrew Breitbart. America itself is pessimistic.

• 80 percent of Americans think their kids will have worse lives than them. 
• 38 percent of Americans believe the country is on the right track. 

Surviving a Plane Crash

Turns out your chance of surviving a plane crash is remarkably good.

• Overnight, a Japanese Airlines Airbus hit another plane in Tokyo with 379 people on board. Everybody survived. 

• In 2013, an Asiana Airlines plane crashed at San Francisco International Airport with 307 people on board — all but three lived, including two not wearing seatbelts. 

• In 2008, a British Airways plane crashed at Heathrow International Airport with 152 people on board — all lived. 

All planes crashed. Intense flames burned the Japanese Airlines and Asiana Airlines planes to a crisp. With the exception of three at SFO, everybody survived. That’s over 800 people.

• Thought bubble: This is an incredible testament to safety engineering and, not to mention, the professionalism of the flight crews. 

Pro tip: If you are in a crash, don’t be the moron who grabs his roller bag from the overhead bin.

Harvard Board: (ex) President Claudine Gay is the Real Victim 

The first Black president of Harvard makes history again by having the university’s shortest-tenured presidency. 

• FWIW, her resignation letter does not offer an apology for over 50 documented cases of academic dishonesty. 

You can’t make it up:: The DEI enthusiasts (led by Harvard’s board) started complaining almost immediately that Gay was the real victim and that racism, not plagiarism or antisemitism, forced her out. Read the board’s statement. 

Look forward: It was widely reported the Harvard board’s last search for a president focused solely on diversity, equity and inclusion considerations. Will the board conduct a fair search this time around rather than finding the next diversity olympics winner? 

• From the top: President Biden doesn’t believe DEI is dead or toxic. This morning, his spokeswoman once again championed “equity” of outcome over “equality” of opportunity.

The backstory: 

• Harvard’s president and Harvard’s board hoped they could come back from the Christmas and New Year break with the world having forgotten about Claudine Gay’s plagiarism scandal. Instead, today we learned about six new allegations of Gay’s plagiarism. Aaron Sibarium with the Free Beacon lays out the devastating evidence.
• Hours later, she was out, as reported by the Harvard Crimson. 

This is fun reading in retrospect. The Harvard Crimson editorialized over the break that while Gay did plagiarize, she should keep her job.

Two brave writers on the editorial board, Brooks B. Anderson and Joshua A. Kaplan, dissented.

Amnesty 2025

NewsNation’s Ali Bradley (@AliBradleyTV) scoops that December set an all-time record for illegal immigrants.

• She writes on X, formerly Twitter, “CBP sources confirm we hit 302k+ migrant encounters for the month of December. This is the highest monthly total on record–The previous high was September 2023 when 269,735 encounters were recorded.”

Looking forward, after the 2024 election, we will be talking about roughly 10 million people (the population of Michigan) who have come in illegally over the past four years. The push for a “bold” plan to solve the problem must either focus on amnesty or deportation. Take your pick.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson claims it’s “dividing our country.” He also says that resources are stretched to accommodate the influx of migrants. Chicago Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez says, “Whole communities (are) at the brink of collapse.”

Johnson now appears tasked with advocating the progressive left’s most honest ideas including a “pathway to citizenship,” aka amnesty for all illegal immigrants.

Border encounters over the past three calendar years:

• 2023: 2.54 million
• 2022: 2.57 million
• 2021: 2.03 million

That’s 7.15 million total, which is nearing the population of New York City. 

Ground truth: The real number is much higher with the known got-aways (those Border Patrol saw on censors and videos and got away) and the unknown got-aways (the truly terrifying cases of people who paid enough to actually get smuggled through). 

Why Won’t We Hit the Houthis?

Since we last talked about it, it’s a miracle Iran-backed militias haven’t killed an American sailor in the Gulf of Aden/Red Sea. At last count, we know of 23 attacks on U.S. warships and commercial vessels in the Red Sea/Gulf of Aden (international waters) by the Houthis in Yemen.  Conservatively, we’ve spent $100 million dollars or more on interceptors to shoot down cheap drones and ballistic missiles. Yet President Biden refuses to order bombings of the Houthis’ launch sites, weapons depots and storage facilities.

• Our strategy appears to be hoping the Houthis run out of $50,000 drones before we run out of multimillion-dollar interceptors. 
• As we have told you before, weakness in the Middle East is provocative, and Biden’s foreign policy team is so scared of “provoking” Iran that we will get into a war with Iran. 

It’s MADNESS. 

Finally: Epstein’s Black Book

Today, we will learn the identity of around 200 of Jeffery Epstein’s “associates” and see some incredible accusations, like Daniel Bates’ scoop in the Daily Mail: “Did Bill Clinton ‘walk into the night with a beautiful woman on each arm’ on Jeffrey Epstein’s Caribbean island?”

• The biggest question: Why did the rich and famous continue to cavort with Epstein after his 2008 guilty plea and conviction for child prostitution?

Read the flight logs. 

Remember, these are just accusations, but the unanswered question remains: What made Epstein the man to see after he pleaded guilty to vile behavior? 

To be fair….the Epstein story at this point is all guilt by association — well, sort of. You are known by the company you keep, and choosing to fly around on the private jet of a man who pled guilty to child prostitution says a lot about the company you keep. 

Watch tonight: Epstein’s former lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, joins us. He once speculated in an earlier interview with us that the rich and famous gave Epstein hundreds of millions in money to manage and thus lucrative fees to buy his silence about their activities. 

Stay tuned. 

Tune into “On Balance with Leland Vittert” weeknights at 7/6C on NewsNation. Find your channel here. 

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily of NewsNation.