A Dire New Threat Posed By Trump II Comes Into Focus

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Gathering Clouds

The most alarming revelation in that secret recording of Project 2025 architect Russ Vought was when he blithely dismissed the George Floyd protests in the historic summer of 2020 not as a reaction to systemic racism, police misconduct, and injustice but a guise for weakening the Trump administration.

“George Floyd obviously was not about race. It was about destabilizing the Trump administration,” Vought was recorded saying in the journalistic sting operation.

Vought, who was Trump’s OMB director, served in the White House during that fateful summer, so it’s hard not to conclude that what he’s expressing now is representative of what the internal interpretation of events was then. It fits. Trump would of course make the protests about him, even though their root causes preceded him by decades and the backlash had been well underway since at least Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

But as hard as it is, let’s set aside for the moment Vought’s astoundingly misguided comments about race. It’s what he said next in the video that made my eyes widen (emphasis mine):

We put out for instance a fifty-page paper designed for lawyers to know that the president has, you know, both the ability along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military. And that something that, you know, it’s going to be important for him to remember and his lawyers to affirm. But we’ve given them the case for that.

That segue in the video from the Black Lives Matter protests to the use of the military to maintain order (assuming that’s an unedited and clean segue) along the border “and elsewhere” caught the attention of the NYT, too.

Vought’s comments seem to have been a missing link of sorts, tying together Trump’s reported eagerness in his first term to use the military to quell protestors with efforts underway to plan for a Trump II and parallel efforts to maximize the opportunities to invoke the Insurrection Act while downplaying and minimizing the legal framework, like the Posse Comitatus Act, that keeps the military out of domestic law enforcement.

The NYT used Vought’s comment as a jumping off point for a triple-bylined piece it appears the paper was already reporting out on the far-right’s construction of a legal and political rationale for broadening its military-heavy, draconian border response to include domestic law enforcement:

“[A]s he has sought a return to power, [Trump] has made clear that he intends to use the military for a range of domestic law enforcement purposes, including patrolling the border, suppressing protests that he deems to have turned into riots and even fighting crime in big cities run by Democrats,” the NYT reports.

The NYT uncovered another missing link, an internal email from Vought’s Center for Renewing America sent in early 2023 that identified topics it was working on. Among those were several categorized as “day one” ideas that the president could unilaterally put into effect right off the bat. One of those was: “Insurrection — stop riots ** — Day 1, easy.”

There’s a lot here, and the NYT’s piece does a good job of pulling it all together. But we shouldn’t rush past the deeply troubling mindset that equates protests with an attack on a democratic regime. When they turn violent, protests are obviously a threat to the rule of law, but a threat to the rule of law is not the same as “destabilizing a regime.” Taking protests about police misconduct, over which the federal government has minimal oversight and responsibility, and making them about a threat to your own power is an authoritarian mindset.

What Project 2025 and Vought and the work they’ve been doing suggests is that a prospective Trump II will roar into office determined to flatten those distinctions into oblivion and treat future prospective protests like an existential political threat to him personally. It’s a recipe for lawlessness of a far different kind than it purports to stamp out. Be warned.

Democrats Gather In Chicago

The Democratic convention kicks off today in Chicago. The highlight of this evening’s primetime programming is President Biden’s speech. Timothy Snyder offers some historical perspective on how Biden arrived at this moment.

An abbreviated version of the convention schedule:

• Monday: President Biden, Dr. Jill Biden, Hillary Clinton, and three women who suffered through difficult pregnancies in states with abortion bans.
• Tuesday: Barack Obama and Michelle Obama
• Wednesday: Tim Walz and Bill Clinton
• Thursday: Kamala Harris

The Protests

The largest of the six major pro-Palestinian protests planned this week in Chicago on the sidelines of the Democratic convention is set for today, with the historical resonance of the 1968 Chicago convention protests hanging over the proceedings. Organizers expect 30,000-40,000 protestors at today’s march.

By The Numbers

• CBS News/YouGov poll: Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump 51%-48% among likely voters nationwide.
• WaPo/ABC News/Ipsos poll: Harris leads Trump 49%-45% among registered voters nationwide.
• NYT/Siena College poll: Harris has gained ground against Trump among likely voters in the Sun Belt battleground states. She leads him 50%-45% in Arizona and 49%-47% in North Carolina. Harris narrowed the gap in Georgia, where Trump still leads 50%-46%. In Nevada, Trump leads 48%-47%.

On The Trail

• The Harris-Walz ticket spent Sunday on a joint bus tour through Western Pennsylvania.
• Trump was in Pennsylvania on Saturday, where he continued to whine about Harris replacing Biden on the ticket, calling it a “coup” and an “overthrow,” all part of his broader gambit to delegitimize Harris and the election itself.
• Trump is counter-programming the Democratic convention with his busiest campaign schedule since the GOP primary
  • Monday: Pennsylvania
  • Tuesday: Michigan, specifically a “crime and safety” speech in a place with some dark history
  • Wednesday: North Carolina
  • Thursday: Arizona
  • Friday: Nevada

Spot The Racism

‘A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats’

TPM’s Kate Riga: Kamala Harris Gives Sherrod Brown A Fighting Chance To Win in Ohio

Georgia Election Board Still At It

The MAGA-dominated Georgia Election Board is poised to adopt a rule today that would give county election board members an additional avenue to delay certification of election results.

2024 Ephemera

• Big bucks: Harris campaign announces plan for $370 million battleground ad buy.
• What happens when you start losing: Far-right influencers turn against Trump campaign.
• The Harris campaign is bringing on Democratic lawyer Marc Elias to deal with potential election recounts, the NYT reports.

Which Women Count As Real Women?

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

The idea of a childless cat lady is an uninspired dog whistle among others — old maid, crone, witch — that are designed to reduce a woman’s social value to her ability and willingness to reproduce. When Vance says that Harris is one of many childless cat ladies who are miserable and trying to make the rest of the world miserable, he is calling on a set of sexist, racist ideas about which women are even allowed to count as real women. Namely, married mothers are real women, and the rest of us are horrible divergences from the social contract.

Of Course It Was A Political Scheme All Along

If you needed additional proof of the true purpose of the House GOP’s bogus Biden impeachment effort, look no further than the decision to sit on its 300-page impeachment report and then release it to coincide with the Democratic convention. Too bad for them that Biden isn’t the nominee any longer, but no worries: House Oversight James Comer (R-KY) is dutifully shifting his committee’s propaganda work to focus on Harris.

Some Solid TPM Scoopage

TPM’s Hunter Walker first reported late Friday on an impending plea agreement to resolve the federal criminal charges against former Rep. George Santos (R-Phantasmagoria). Victims and witnesses were being contacted by federal prosecutors and alerted to the expected plea deal, according to TPM’s report, which was subsequently picked up by the NYT and other outlets over the weekend.

Hmmm …

Last week, the FBI raided the Virginia farm of Dimitri Simes, the Russian-born DC think tanker who informally advised the 2016 Trump campaign and featured prominently in the Mueller report. It’s not clear publicly at least what exactly the FBI is investigating.

Totally Normal

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