Matt Shuham explains (membership required) that while the fireworks industry were donating more than a million dollars worth of fireworks for Trump’s personal fireworks display at the Lincoln Memorial they were also trying to convince him not to follow through on tariff threats that affect their industry.
Don’t miss Matt and Josh’s report on Trump’s big speech/fundraiser/military spectacle and personal fireworks display at the Lincoln Memorial tomorrow evening. It turns out Trump will have his own personal fireworks display put on just behind and over the Lincoln Memorial. (Remember this mini-event within an event is “hosted by the President of the United States.”) It finishes just before the regular America fireworks start. All of it, unsurprisingly, seems very last minute. There’s even trash talk between the fireworks vendors about whose will be the biggest. ““I’m not putting [the main fireworks display] show down — it’s one or two shells at a time. Ours are going to be dozens and dozens at a time,” Phantom Fireworks CEO Bruce Zoldan told TPM. Finally, the White House didn’t just hook up the RNC as a ticket distributor for big donors. According to the Maryland GOP, “our friends at the White House” hooked them up as a ticket distributor too.
A couple weeks ago I told you about an offer we’re going to be making to existing Prime subscribers later this month and also a request, one that is very important to the future of TPM. If you didn’t get a chance to read my note then I would greatly appreciate if you could take a few moments read what we’re doing and why it’s very important to the future of TPM.
A new Quinnipiac poll is out this morning which shows that Sen. Kamala Harris got a dramatic boost after last week’s Democratic debate and Joe Biden’s support has fallen precipitously.
The toplines are Biden 22%, Harris 20%, Warren 14%, Sanders 13%. After that you go way down to Buttigieg at 4 and Booker at 3.
Below I flagged this big fact about Thursday’s Trumpified 4th of July festivities in DC: the RNC has been put in charge of distributing at least some number of the tickets for the event. Consider the following tentative. But I think we’ve gotten at least a sense of how exactly they’re doing this. It’s fascinating and in some ways an entirely different kind of outrageousness.
Let’s start with the fact that it is customary and certainly a matter of longstanding practice that a different set of rules apply to events which this and any other President holds at the White House. The President holds political events there. They even get into de facto fundraising events, sometimes to some controversy. You’ll note that in the Huffington Post article I flagged earlier, an unnamed RNC official actually flagged this as a precedent. “For context, we receive an allotment for other events like White House Christmas Open Houses, Garden Tours in spring and fall, etc.”
We’ve seen all the stories about tanks in DC and the Trumpified Fourth of July celebration later this week. These things are wrong. They’re grotesque. But last night I saw something quite different. According to HuffPost, the RNC has been given tickets to distribute for the event. It’s already clear that this is in substance going to be another Trump political rally. But it’s on US government property. It’s paid for by the US government and in significant part by the US military. It not includes display of heavy weaponry. Trump will apparently have the heads of each uniformed service on stage with him as he speaks. Tickets distributed by the RNC are by definition used for fundraising purposes even if they are not directly sold to donors for a certain contribution price. They’re used to leverage political contributions.
From the beginning of the primary season I thought that Kamala Harris was the logical nominee, at least by a process of elimination. I don’t mean that I thought she would necessarily be the nominee or the was the best candidate. But if I listed out half a dozen boxes to check, she was the one candidate who seemed to check all of them. She had a lot of strong qualifiers and lacked the borderline disqualifiers that many of the others had.
I still think that. But one thing that worries me is she seems to have a penchant for making categorical statements that don’t seem core to her campaign but which could be major problems for her if she’s the nominee.
Today Kamala Harris told reporters in San Francisco today that she supports busing today as a way to desegregate schools. “I support busing. Listen, the schools of America are as segregated, if not more segregated, today than when I was in elementary school… we need to put every effort, including busing, into play to de-segregate the schools… The federal government has a role & a responsibility to step up.” I’m glad she said this because I think it puts the entire debate on a more honest footing.
The red hot intra-Democratic debate over impeachment appears to have subsided a bit over the last week as the debates and the presidential contest took center stage. One notable but little-noted feature of the debates is how little the subject of impeachment came up. I’m not certain the word came up once in the debates. On one level this makes sense: the question is who to nominate for President to succeed Donald Trump, at which point the whole question is moot. Still, it’s odd, given how all-consuming the discussion has been.
Yesterday I talked to Cass Sunstein who has a new book out about what exactly impeachment is, what it’s for, why it’s in the constitution at all. It’s called Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide. It was a very interesting conversation and made me reconsider part of my own thinking on the matter, even though I have a pretty settled take and a decent familiarity with the historical sources of the period. Definitely give it a listen. If you’re not a regular listener to the podcast I hope you’ll subscribe. But if podcasts aren’t your thing, you can just listen to it right here on the site by pushing play. Check it out right here. I hope you enjoy it.
We’ve had and are still having problems with our sign-in system this morning. We are aware of the issues and our team is working to get everything resolved as soon as possible.
Update: This should now be resolved. But you will have to log in fresh if you’re a member. What caused the bumpiness this morning was a long delayed upgrade of the software that runs the commenting system, The Hive and is a major component of the log-in infrastructure. So some bumpiness this morning. But this should help resolve a number of longstanding, chronic problems with comments, The Hive and some other issues. So a little bumpiness today to get a much more stable and functional system going forward.