With JD Vance, Things Just Get Weirder And Weirder

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

What On Earth?

JD Vance is coming into focus as a living breathing embodiment of the caricature of the Republican man as obsessed with controlling women’s bodies and eager to reduce the complexities of human relations to late-night-dorm-room-debate levels of sophistication. Heavy on bombast, light on normal. The more sweeping and reductive the assertions, the better!

The latest example is a resurfaced podcast interview of Vance from 2020, before he ran for U.S. Senate in 2022. In fairness, it’s the host, not Vance, saying the weirdest stuff. But Vance doesn’t argue or pushback, let alone bail on the interview. He actually seems to agree with some of the more whackadoodle assertions by the interviewer and uses them to launch into a screed against neo-liberalism predicated on the “transgressiveness” of his Indian mother-in-law showing up to help with his and his wife’s newborn:

Fortunately for Vance, post-menopausal women aren’t really in play in this election. I joke.

Trump’s Front Porch Candidacy

For the second week in a row, Donald Trump has summoned reporters to one of his properties to hold a press conference. Today’s audience with the media will be at his club in Bedminster, NJ.

Trump was on the road in North Carolina yesterday, so he’s not ensconced like a late 19th century pol on his Ohio porch greeting visitors (or like the photo above of the 1920 campaign of Warren Harding, our previously most corrupt president, with due respect to Tricky Dick). But his campaign schedule has been awfully light, and he’s holding pressers in Florida and New Jersey, two states very much not in play.

There’s a combination of factors driving him toward these regular pressers:

• It’s a flex: You come to me.
• It’s attention-seeking: He’s up against Kamala Harris, who has entered the zeitgeist.
• It’s a contrast: I’ll do pressers unlike Harris.

It’s also an effort to drive the news agenda, since his campaign rallies can’t guarantee him uninterrupted national TV time the way they used to. Perhaps his pressers shouldn’t be either, especially when reporters’ questions aren’t audible like last week’s presser.

2024 Ephemera

• The Harris campaign is rushing out a $90 million TV ad buy in seven battleground states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – in the coming weeks to introduce her to voters.
• NYT: When Will They Speak Again? Once Close, Biden and Pelosi Are at Odds.
• Politico: A Florida referendum is putting Trump in a bind on abortion

By The Numbers

• Quinnipiac University poll: Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump 48%-45% among likely voters in Pennsylvania. This is Quinnipiac first poll of likely voters in the state this cycle.
• Pew Research Center: Harris holds a 46%-45% lead over Donald Trump among registered voters nationally, a flip from a month ago when the same poll gave Trump a 44%-40% lead over President Biden.
• NV-Sen: The Cook Political Report has moved the race from toss-up to leans Democrat after its latest polling shows Sen. Jacky Rosen with a whopping 18-point lead (probably an outlier).

Putting A Thumb Heavily On The Scale

To the dismay of abortion rights advocates, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the informational pamphlet sent to all voters about the proposed state constitutional amendment to enshrine abortion rights can refer to an embryo or fetus as an “unborn human being.”

The ruling Wednesday ratified language that Republican lawmakers had come up with, over the objections of supporters of the constitutional amendment who argued that the language was neither impartial nor objective. Ya think?

Trump Campaign Hack Watch

• In his first public comments on the hack of his campaign, Donald Trump semi-declined to say what the FBI has told him about who is responsible:  “I don’t want to say exactly, but it was Iran.”
• Brian Beutler: Trump Email Hack Is A Moment Of Reckoning For Him—Or The News Media
• Google issued a new report confirming some of the reporting on Iran’s efforts to penetrate both presidential campaigns, seeming to refer to Roger Stone but not naming him. Specifically, Google focused on APT42, which it describes as an “Iranian government-backed threat actor:

In May and June, APT42 targets included the personal email accounts of roughly a dozen individuals affiliated with President Biden and with former President Trump, including current and former officials in the U.S. government and individuals associated with the respective campaigns. We blocked numerous APT42 attempts to log in to the personal email accounts of targeted individuals. …

We observed that the group successfully gained access to the personal Gmail account of a high-profile political consultant. …

Today, [Google] continues to observe unsuccessful attempts from APT42 to compromise the personal accounts of individuals affiliated with President Biden, Vice President Harris and former President Trump, including current and former government officials and individuals associated with the campaigns.

Keeping An Eye On This

A military judge has set an Aug. 20 deadline for both sides to brief him on whether Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had the authority to revoke the plea bargains reached with the 9/11 defendants.

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