One thing that has driven JD Vance’s rising unpopularity is his crusade against people without children. He’s proposed punitive tax policies to punish people who do “bad” things like not having children and he’s even suggested diluting the voting rights of non-parents.
The odd thing about the tax policy side of this is that the US tax code is actually filled with tax advantages and subsidies for people with kids. And generally speaking no one has much problem with that. There are dependent deductions, a refundable child tax credit, even something as obvious as public schools. Public schools are generally funded by property taxes. And almost everyone pays those, childful and childless alike, either directly or indirectly. Lots of people have kids and US political culture is pretty pro-kid and pro-family (in the narrow sense of the phrase rather than the right-wing Christian sense). So generally it’s uncontroversial, even something politicians go out of their way to support.
These past few weeks have been grueling for everyone who cares about politics, and particularly so for TPM’s small-but-mighty staff — lots of late night and weekend work, lots of marathon days followed by more marathon days.
As we go into the weekend I want to thank everyone who’s contributed so far to this year’s drive for the TPM Journalism Fund. We hit the half way point to our goal of raising $500,000 early yesterday morning. Even though we’ve gotten a lot more experience at holding these drives they remain nerve-wracking. They amount to a collective trust-fall – hopefully – into the arms of the larger TPM community. So it always feels really good, at many different levels, when you’re there for us. If you have had a moment to contribute yet you can click right here. It’s easy and quick.
We’ve always gained quite a few new members recently. Which is wonderful. And we want to welcome all of you. We’re still trying to understand the precise reasons for it.
One reason seems to be our new membership system in itself, by which I mean the software that runs it. As you know, our business is almost entirely based on membership fees. So a smoothly running system to manage memberships in all its dimensions – processing fees, authenticating users, record keeping and user experience – is mission critical. (Neither the old or the new system ever touch or store your credit cards. For that we use the industry-standard security and fulfillment of Stripe dot com.)
For election officials across the country, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, and less directly, the turnover at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket have brought into stark focus just how tumultuous the election environment has become since the 2020 election.
We’ve now had a round of polls of the Harris-Trump race since she became the Democrat’s de facto nominee. All of these polls must be viewed as snapshots in an extremely fluid and unsettled political moment. But we can draw out some early patterns. I averaged all the post-Biden drop-out polls and they come out to Trump up by 4/10ths of one percentage point. That’s about the high water mark that Biden ever got to all year. That average also includes CNN and Times, which have been two of the worst polls for Democrats this year. So the mix of just who has released a poll probably slightly favors Trump.
More interesting to me are the polls out of the swing states, which we’ve already gotten a decent number of. They now show all three Blue Wall states (Mich, Wisc, PA) as ties. Notably, they now show Georgia as a margin of error race, with Harris one or two points back. That’s a major shift. Trump has held a consistent lead of 5 or 6 percentage points there. I only saw one poll each out of Arizona and Nevada and those didn’t show the same shift. Unclear whether that’s unique to these states or whether more polls will show a clearer pattern. The relevant point is that early evidence seems to show Harris significantly growing the map, giving her multiple potential paths to an electoral college win.
Were it not for an assassination attempt and the President dropping his re-election bid, the past two weeks might have featured the meltdown of JD Vance. Even still, there’s reported grumbling in Trumpworld that he picked the wrong guy, especially in light of Kamala Harris being elevated to the top of the Democratic ticket.
Let’s run through some of the fallout:
How Weird Is He?
JD Vance is turning out to be an oppo researcher’s dream:
There’s his history of demeaning people who don’t have children as deserving of less representation in civil life:
JD Vance says women who haven’t given birth are “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives” and shouldn’t be in politics because they “don’t have a direct stake” in America pic.twitter.com/Djw5CNKXcJ
There’s his call for federal intervention to prevent (Black) women in red states from traveling to blue states for abortions:
BREAKING: In a stunning leak, JD Vance is found to be calling for a federal response to stop women from traveling from red states to blue states to receive reproductive healthcare. Retweet so all Americans hear this devastating leak. pic.twitter.com/t9Q4n9dQJL
There’s his endorsement of a book co-authored by Jack Posobiec that call progressives “unhumans” and praises the Jan. 6 rioters.
Weird But Not THAT Weird
An online gag that invented a couch-fucking episode in JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy prompted the AP to run and then retract a classic all-time headline: “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.” You will not be surprised to learn that JD Vance and sofas, divans, and couches has turned into a runaway meme.
How’s JD Vance Playing So Far?
Don Jr tanking his dad's campaign with one of the worst veep choices of all time is delicious pic.twitter.com/SwHhkcfR8J
New DNC rules effectively give Kamala Harris until Aug. 7 to pick her running mate.
NYT/Siena poll: Kamala Harris has closed the gap with Donald Trump among likely voters nationally to 48%-47%. In the prior poll earlier this month, when President Biden was still in the race, Trump led him 49%-43%.
Yesterday, the NYT had a piece exploring some of the outstanding questions around the projectile that struck former President Trump’s ear, what law enforcement is analyzing, and noting the political context in which it has become a focus of interest.
This morning, the paper published one of its visual investigations assessing audio-video evidence from the scene and concluded that the projectile was likely a bullet: “[A] detailed analysis of bullet trajectories, footage, photos and audio by The New York Times strongly suggests Mr. Trump was grazed by the first of eight bullets fired by the gunman, Thomas Crooks.”
For his part, Trump is hopping mad about the congressional testimony Wednesday of his own appointee as FBI director, in which he said whether it was a bullet or shrapnel remained an outstanding question.
Trump Prosecution Watch
Two new developments of note in the Trump prosecutions:
Mar-a-Lago case: The 11th Circuit Court Appeals has set a briefing schedule through mid-October for Jack Smith’s appeal of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling that his was unlawfully appointed as special counsel, meaning the appeal (let alone the case itself) will not likely be done by Election Day. Smith could still ask for expedited handling of the appeal.
Hush money case: Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg filed his opposition to Trump’s effort to overturn his state court conviction using the Supreme Court’s controversial ruling on presidential immunity.
Kagan Lays Down A Marker For SCOTUS Reform
The associate justice suggested publicly that a panel of lower court judges could enforce the Supreme Court’s new ethics code against the justices.
Olympic Sabotage
SNCF employees and French gendarmes inspect the scene of a suspected attack on the high speed railway network at Croiselles, northern France on July 26, 2024. French security forces are hunting people behind arson attacks that hobbled the country’s high-speed rail network hours before the Olympic Games opening ceremony, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said. (Photo by Denis CHARLET / AFP) (Photo by DENIS CHARLET/AFP via Getty Images)
The Atlantic: There Are No Good Options Left With Bird Flu
Largest California Wildfire Of The Year … So Far
CALIFORNIA, USA – JULY 25: Smoke and flames rise from the forest as crews try to extinguish a wildfire in Chico, California, United States on July 25, 2024. (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images)
A California man is suspected of arson for allegedly pushing a burning car into a gully Wednesday and igniting the Park fire near Chico, which rapidly grew to more than 160,000 acres, making it the largest conflagration in the state so far this year.
Senior Trump DOJ officials issued multiple statements weeks before the 2020 election suggesting anti-Trump election fraud in a critical swing state, knowing all the while that no crime had likely been committed and that the main suspect faced a severe mental disability, a DOJ Inspector General report found.
As you know, I’ve been on this story for a while: why there was never any law enforcement briefing or qualified medical report on the Butler, PA shooting incident or information of how Donald Trump was injured. I was especially interested in this because originally Pennsylvania State Police briefed reporters that Trump had been hit by flying debris kicked up by the gunfire. The storyline changed when Trump went on Truth Social and announced that a bullet had hit his ear. From that moment that was the story followed universally in the press.
But yesterday FBI Director Christopher Wray said, ironically in response to a question from Rep. Jim Jordan, that it’s not clear whether Trump was hit by a bullet or debris kicked up by the gunfire. I think in context that’s likely a bureaucratic and gentle way of saying Trump probably wasn’t hit by a bullet. But let’s stick to the precise words. “There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.”
Last night President Joe Biden gave what by any measure was an unprecedented Oval Office address warning of the dangers to democracy posed by Donald Trump, without ever mentioning his name. Sitting behind the Resolute desk and invoking the founders, Biden called this moment an “inflection point” in history with the “soul of America” at stake.
It’s not a speech that will be remembered for its eloquence or its delivery. But no one will be able to say that we weren’t warned. For those who remember the ritual of an earlier time of clustering around communal TV sets to watch these set piece presidential pronouncements, it was jarring to see it used to warn of the perils of authoritarian rule coming from within.
In some quarters, Biden’s address might be dismissed as the self-justifications of a man who was on track to lose re-election, gussied up as self-sacrifice on behalf of a grateful nation. But that would be a grave mistake because it was the very threat of Trump that made forcing Biden out of the race even thinkable. Don’t confuse cause and effect.
As the standard-bearer for the broad anti-Trump coalition, Biden’s faltering on the June debate stage put everything at risk. His failure to rebound quickly or sufficiently enough from that setback prompted the coalition, including his own party and many longtime allies, to abandon him precisely because the stakes were so high.
Biden eventually came around, perhaps more under duress than by free will, but he was ultimately able see that his re-election bid was more than about just him: “Nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition.”
For reasons that are probably peculiar to me, I have been focused to the point of borderline obsessiveness on helping to create a historical record that we didn’t just sleepwalk our way into authoritarianism. If we end up sliding over the cliff into a uniquely American form of fascism, I want it to be unmistakably clear to historians and everyone who comes after us that we knew what was happening. We saw it. We endeavored to prevent it, to arrest the slide, to warn of the perils. We had eyes wide open. We were not blindsided. If it happens, it happened despite our best efforts.
The warnings have come from sitting federal judges, from highly respected longtime Republicans cast out by their party, from conservatives who were previously villains in the progressive firmament, and now from President Biden sitting in the Oval Office having made a substantial personal sacrifice of his own as a way of further sounding the alarm.
History will show that we knew. Maybe that will erase the smugness of future generations that somehow they are immune. We are not, and neither are they.
The Torch Is Passed
NYT: How Kamala Harris Took Command of the Democratic Party in 48 Hours
WSJ: Family, Friends and Longtime Aides Dominate Harris’s Inner Circle
She’s already in his head:
Trump: And then the campaign says “I'm the prosecutor and he is the convicted felon.” I don't think people are going to buy it pic.twitter.com/oLzPJhDi0o
FBI Director Chris Wray provided new details about the Trump rally shooting while testifying before a hostile House committee, revealing that the gunman did a Google search in the days before the attack for “How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?”
Wray offered one of the first law enforcement assessments of Trump’s injury: “With respect to former President Trump, there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.”
In a rare unanimous vote, the House voted 416-0 to establish a task force to investigate the assassination attempt. The 13-member task force will be comprised of seven Republican and six Democratic members and have subpoena power.
Trump Era Accountability Fail, Part 986
Because he is no longer with the Justice Department, former Attorney General Bill Barr was able to avoid answering questions from the DOJ inspector general about the 2020 episode in which Barr ordered the retraction of the sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone provided to the court by line prosecutors.
‘I Got Out’
Spoken like an innocent man:
Drenched In Racism
Note the Speedy Gonzalez line at the end:
Missouri GOP Gubernatorial Candidate Bill Eigel just aired an ad where he talks about deporting illegal immigrants, accompanied by a Mexican translator who gets flustered and panics at the end of the ad.
As anticipated, the #CopernicusClimate ERA5 preliminary data show that Monday 22 July was the warmest day in recent history, at 17.15°C, breaking the records from 21 July 24 and 6 July 23.
After reading Kamala Harris’ “We are not going back” line, a Morning Memo reader sent along this 1970s gospel recording by Sara Jordan Powell. “I Won’t Turn Back” has been running on a loop in my brain since midday yesterday:
