The GOP As We Knew It Is Long Gone And May Never Return

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

A Historic Third Time

Last night, Donald Trump (2016, 2020, 2024) joined Richard Nixon (1960, 1968, 1972) as the only three-time presidential nominees in the history of the Republican Party. Once they find a good one, they sure can’t let go.

TPM’s Josh Kovensky watched last night’s TV spectacle so you didn’t have to:

• If you can’t take much of the melding of low culture and authoritarianism, here are his five takeaways.
• If you’re a glutton for punishment, you have the option of scrolling through his full Hulk Hogan-saturated live blog of the evening’s proceedings. Stay strong.

Credit where due: Much of the political reporting this week has acknowledged and engaged with the fact that the Republican Party is now fully captive to Donald Trump and his cult of personality to a degree it wasn’t in his two prior runs for the White House. That’s an important baseline from which to cover the rest of this campaign and a possible Trump II presidency.

What is perhaps less obvious (and I’ll admit is speculative) is that the chances of the Republican Party emerging intact after the Trump era have markedly declined. The hope that eventually Republicans of good faith who have battled Trumpism – people like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney – would rise to the top again seems more far-fetched than ever. Likewise, the effort to create some sort of permission structure for conservatives to abandon Trump seems like a ship that has sailed.

It’s not just that the Republican Party will emerge from the Trump era with a brand so badly damaged that it will need to be scrapped, it’s that there is likely to be little left of it that is recognizable as a political party in a democratic and pluralistic society. Having become so cultish and thoroughly authoritarian, there won’t be the pieces to pick up again to reform it and restore it as a pro-democracy party. Trump has wrecked it. But as with so many Trump projects, the bright lights and gold leaf draw the eye away from the structural rot.

The GOP’s Rejection Of Democracy Requires A Strongman

Heather Cox Richardson on the GOP convention and the rot on full display: “Paul Manafort walking onto the floor of the Republican National Convention yesterday illustrated that the Republican Party under Trump has become thoroughly corrupted into an authoritarian party aligned with foreign dictators.”

Messiah Complex

Sarah Posner, TPM’s go-to expert on the Christian Right, catalogues the renewed effort since Saturday’s shooting to cast Donald Trump as beneficiary of divine providence and explains how that fits into the Christian nationalism suffusing the far right.

Eating Their Own

TPM’s Nicole Lafond: Usual Cast Of Far-Right Extremists Goes Into Racist Tailspin Over JD Vance’s Wife

Quote Of The Day

It’s not over on election day. It’s over on inauguration day.

Trump campaign senior advisor Chris LaCivita, portending a 2020 redux if Trump loses the election

GOP Still Thinks Registering New Voters Is Bad

TPM’s Khaya Himmelman: The RNC Is Suing Gretchen Whitmer To Make The Swing State’s Election System Seem Sketch

Biden’s Support Among Dem Electeds Further Erodes

No dramatic movement on the Biden front in the past 24 hours, but what movement there has been was all in the direction of trying to push the president out as the Democratic Party nominee:

• Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), whose tough reelection campaign is among those most critical for Democratic hopes of holding their Senate majority, publicly called for President Biden to drop his own re-election bid.
• Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) sent President Biden a letter earlier this month and newly obtained by the NYT urging him to withdraw his candidacy.
• Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) continues to keep the pressure on Biden mostly behind the scenes, telling “California Democrats and some members of House leadership that she thinks Biden is getting close to deciding to abandon his presidential bid,” the WaPo reports.
• Former President Obama does not appear to be trying to bail Biden out, but rather is expressing his own concerns privately and serving as a sounding board, according to the WaPo.

UPDATE: Trump Assassination Attempt Aftermath

• The Secret Service is encountering criticism from close-protection experts on how long it took for agents to get Donald Trump off the rally stage after shots were fired by a would-be assassin.
• Top Hill Republicans are demanding the resignation of Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle.
• ABC News tracks what Thomas Matthew Crooks was doing in the hours leading up to the shooting.

You’re Not Gonna Like This

Former TPMer Tierney Sneed talks to legal experts about the difficulties that Special Counsel Jack Smith will encounter in trying to remove U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon from the Mar-a-Lago case, even at this late juncture with so many anomalous rulings, delays, and her preferential treatment of Trump.

Oh, Rudy

Rudy Giuliani is pushing the judge handling his bankruptcy case to the breaking point.

Totally On The Up And Up

Bloomberg: “The US Securities and Exchange Commission sued Patrick Orlando, the former chief executive of the blank-check firm that helped bring Donald Trump’s social media company public, for allegedly misleading investors about his firm’s plans for a merger.”

Global IT Outage

Massive worldwide disruption after a CrowdStrike software update apparently crippled many devices running Microsoft Windows.

Bob Newhart, 1929-2024

Bob Newhart was such a boss that not only did he have two long-running sitcoms – one in the 1970s and one in the 1980s— but when the one in the 1980s ended he styled the final episode as if the entire run of the second show had just been a crazy dream of his character in the first show. How boss a move is that?!?

To this day, Newhart is the only comedian to win Grammy Awards for best new artist and album of the year.

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