They took a vote. A, hands up if you think we should do this bloody thing, vote.
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It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump. That’s the title of the new book by Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican operative, chief strategist for Mitt Romney in 2012 and now a leading Never Trumper and one of the people behind The Lincoln Project. Recently we talked about Trump, the GOP, the Southern strategy and growing up in Mississippi in the final days of Jim Crow.
Watch our chat here after the jump.
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Conventions present the face of the party to voters. The Democrats of 2020 are the party of democracy, character and competence (contra Trump) and social inclusivity, with an emphasis on women and minority groups. Programmatically, they promise a continuation of the Obama years, for instance, incrementally shoring up the Affordable Care Act. (The words “public option” were notably missing from Biden’s speech.)
Yesterday The Washington Post reported this study in The Journal of Pediatrics which suggests that children may play a more significant role in the spread of COVID than is widely believed. The gist is that they have comparable viral loads but are far more often asymptomatic. So they may be able to spread COVID just as easily as others but the fact that they’re sick is more hidden.
JoinThis was a very powerful speech from Joe Biden, better than I expected. I don’t think of Biden is a great public speaker. That’s not really necessary for the job. But this was very powerful. It matched powerfully with the historical moment. I was struck listening to Biden’s speech that it made Trump seem like such a vacant, meaningless man. Which is to say it accurately captured him … but it did so largely as an absence.
Trump was a central focus of Biden’s speech and yet he seemed like such a thin presence, almost not even there. This in itself is something because Trump’s chaotic, predatory presence has been such a dominating one in our public life – echoing in our heads – through his presidency.
TPM reporter Matt Shuham has been on the story surrounding the “We Build The Wall” project for months. At one point during the bluster of breaking news this morning he likened covering the story of former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s arrest, and all the absurd developments surrounding it, to “hitting a TPM piñata” — every time you smack it with a bat, something better falls out.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
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It somewhat defies commentary when something you’ve thought and said for years is suddenly confirmed by an unexpected new bundle of evidence. I should note the “I” isn’t relevant here. I’m one of legions who’ve thought and said this. The fact that Bannon was even involved with this crowdfund-the-wall “charity” wasn’t clear to me let alone that he was about to be indicted for perpetrating a massive fraud against the MAGAfied donors. But while it is entirely unexpected in the particular it’s entirely predictable, perhaps inevitable in general.
JoinI know you came for our ongoing coverage of today’s remarkable convergence of Stephen Bannon and Brian Kolfage’s border wall bamboozlement in federal criminal purgatory. You can find all of it right here.
You might not have noticed because we are good at hiding it, but some of the TPM staff is a bit sleep deprived this week.
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