Former President Donald Trump spent most of his hour-plus press conference from his Mar-a-Lago compound on Thursday not hearing questions, doubling down on racist attacks about Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ biracial identity, bragging about his crowd sizes, not committing to accepting election results, claiming no one died on Jan. 6 and not remembering Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s name.
This was Trump’s first public appearance since Harris officially became the presidential nominee and selected Walz as her running mate. Trump spent a good deal of his time in front of the cameras claiming Harris is scared of answering questions and doing interviews — unlike the man ticking off grievances who stood before them.
It was a Trumpian attempt to shift the news cycle back to his campaign amid the positive media coverage the Harris-Walz campaign has been getting — most notably breaking through in the form of memes on almost every mainstream social media platform.
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss VP Kamala Harris’ veep pick and the first few weeks of her campaign.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
Earlier today we hit the $350,000 milestone in the TPM Journalism Fund drive.
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Well it’s very simple: That’s 350,000 votes of confidence in our work. That’s 350,000 votes of confidence in our reporting, our analysis, and our commentary. That is 350,000 votes of confidence in our business model, which has kept us going even while countless other publications have, in recent years, failed or made significant cuts. It’s 350,000 votes of confidence in our belief that journalism can’t be hierarchical, so publications should offer free memberships to those who need them. In short, it’s 350,000 votes of confidence in us.
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The Post’s and the Times‘ pieces on Tim Walz service record are more egregious and spurious than you’re probably able to imagine. The accusations come from two members of his unit who are clearly MAGA partisans and who floated them during his 2022 reelection campaign for Minnesota governor in coordination with Walz’s Republican opponent. The attacks aren’t just “like” the Swift Boat attacks from 2004. They’re literally the work of the same guy. Chris LaCivita was the strategist who ran the Swift Boat attacks in 2004 and cut the commercials. He’s now the co-manager of the Trump campaign. He started this and then handed it off to Vance. As David noted, even Politico headlined it as a “Swift Boat” attack. Politico!
The accusation, such as it is, is that Walz retired from service just before his unit was deployed to Iraq.
There’s a lot of talk about the authoritarian leanings of the modern Republican Party. Donald Trump commits to pardon the January 6 rioters who sought to steal him an election; his rank-and-file supporters cheer him on when he says he’ll be a “dictator on day one.” Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), Trump’s Vice Presidential pick, likes to muse that “universities are the enemy” and play with the idea of unleashing the DOJ on political opponents.
JD Vance launched a spurious and baseless attack on Tim Walz’s military service reminiscent of the Swift Boat attacks in 2004 that targeted one of John Kerry’s key political strengths: his heroism and valor in Vietnam. But instead of using the last 20 years to reflect and reconsider the familiar coverage patterns, some political editors still get played like a fiddle when it comes to covering GOP attack lines.
The WaPo was probably the worst culprit, with this headline: “Tim Walz’s military record, National Guard departure get new scrutiny.” It happily launders the Vance attack line without self-awareness or historical understanding of the last two decades of American politics. “New scrutiny” – like its weasel-word compadres “raises questions about” and “is said to” – confers a miraculous virgin birth to scurrilous political attacks even if they’re launched right out in the open.
To its credit, Politico is much more direct and puts the attack in the broader context with a story headlined: “Vance runs a Swift Boat attack against Walz’s military service.” You might quibble with Politico’s handling of it, but it’s clearly not the same laundering operation the WaPo ran on this one.
The irony of the Vance attack and the media coverage of it is that the originator of the Swift Boat attack against Kerry back in the day was Chris LaCivita, who is now a senior Trump campaign adviser.
Can’t Memory Hole Project 2025 That Easily!
Further undermining Donald Trump’s bogus claims that he knew nothing about Project 2025, the WaPo has discovered a private flight (photo included) that Donald Trump took with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts in April 2022 to a Heritage conference where Trump seemed to reference Project 2025. The work of Project 2025 has been done under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation.
The Holocaust is taught too often purely as a historical event, an anomaly, a moment in time. Students understood what had happened and that it was terrible and that the people who did this were monsters. The problem is that relieves us of responsibility. Obviously, the mastermind was sociopathic, but on the scale for it to happen, there had to be a lot of people in the country who chose to go down that path. You have to make the intellectual leap to figure out the reasons why.
then-Rep. Tim Walz (D-MN), in a 2008 interview with the NYT, recounting teaching high school students in Nebraska in the 1990s about genocide
2024 Ephemera
WaPo: Trump complains about campaign as advisers try to focus on attacking Harris
NYT: Tim Walz’s Sudden Rise in the Democratic Party Was No Accident
WSJ: Tim Walz’s and JD Vance’s Personal Finances Couldn’t Be More Different
Biden Warns Trump Won’t Lose Peacefully
In his first interview since ending his re-election bid, President Biden says he’s “not confident at all” that there will be a peaceful transfer of power if Trump loses the November election:
Arizona Grand Jury Wanted To Indict Trump, Too
The Arizona grand jury that handed down indictments in the state’s fake electors probe was interested in indicting Donald Trump, too, but were discouraged from doing so by prosecutors with the state attorney general’s office, according to a new filing this week defending against attacks that the prosecution was politically motivated. Attorney General Kris Mayes has not publicly addressed the thinking behind that strategy since the filing.
Jan. 6 Defendant Taken Into Custody After Threatening Posts
Prosecutors moved to revoke bail for a Jan. 6 defendant who allegedly posted online threats against Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Attorney General Merrick Garland, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Georgia Judge Scott McAfee.
The 2020 Election Still Isn’t Over In Georgia
The Georgia Election Board voted 3-2 to reinvestigate Fulton County’s handling of the 2020 presidential recount. The three Republican members who voted to ask the state attorney general to reexamine the results yet again have been praised publicly by Donald Trump as recently as this past weekend.
For Legal Nerds …
An unusual sequence of events this week in the legal fight over Texas’ installation of buoys in the Rio Grande, a move the federal government is fighting but recently lost on at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. The case is now back to the trial judge. Here’s where things get interesting.
After a status conference two days ago, the Texas attorney general’s office took the unusual step of racing to the appeals court to tattle, basically, on what the trial judge had said in the status conference. That prompted a swift order from the trial judge hauling the parties back into court yesterday for a second status conference in which he lambasted the attorney general’s office.
Politico senior legal affairs reporter Josh Gerstein has some choice excerpts from the transcript of the second status conference.
Astronauts May Be Stranded Until 2025
BOEING STARLINER SPACECRAFT, INTERNATIONAL SPAPCE STATION — JUNE 6, 2024: Amazing Maxar satellite imagery capture of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft docked to the forward port on the International Space Station. This type of satellite collection is known as non-earth imaging or NEI. Please use: Satellite image (c) 2024 Maxar Technologies.
The two astronauts who departed Earth for a planned eight-day mission aboard Boeing’s Starliner two months agomay not return until 2025 as NASA works on a backup plan to have them hitch a ride on a Space X vehicle. The astronauts have been stuck on the International Space Station because of technical issues with the Boeing craft that have raised safety concerns about using it for the return trip.
Ahead of November, the election denying activist group with ties to Donald Trump, “True the Vote,” is asking sheriffs across the country to monitor ballot drop boxes for supposed suspicious or fraudulent activity in swing states — an apparent attempt to revive conspiracy theories leftover from Trump’s campaign to question the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
Have you been planning to contribute to our TPM Journalism Fund drive but haven’t had the chance? We’re now in the second half of the drive. It’s always the hardest slog, the part when it seems like we may not reach the goal we need to reach. Can you take a moment and make a contribution today if you’ve been considering it? I would, we would really appreciate it. It’s a key part of what keeps TPM going strong. It keeps us ready for whatever is next. It’s super easy to do. You can just click right here. Any amount truly helps and we absolutely put your dollars of support to good use.
UPDATE 4:55 PM7:23 PM8:45 PM12:18 AM9:25 AM: We’re now just over $334,000$340,000$343,000$346,000 $348,000 (Almost here! LFG!!!!! – 12:19 AM). If we can get to $350,000 by the end of today we’ll be within shooting distance of the pace we’ll need to get to our goal of $500,000 by the end of the drive.
Right now we’re seeing a parallel race to define Tim Walz, much as we saw and were seeing with Kamala Harris beginning in the last week of July. The stakes of defining the veep nominee are nowhere near as high as they are for the race to define the person at the top of the ticket, where so far it’s gone all in Kamala Harris’s direction. But I wanted to note some of the dimensions of this battle to define. Paradoxically, it’s going on both between the parties and also within the Democratic Party. The Democratic left and the GOP both seem joined in wanting to portray if not Walz than the Walz pick as a sign of rising left-wing power in the Democratic Party or a de facto veto over any VP pick that would validate or express support for Joe Biden’s policies on Israel and Gaza. I don’t think either point is so much wrong as misleading and a simple misreading of the actual political dynamics which are shaping the current moment or politics going back the last six or seven years.
For years, the Democrats were defined by the bitter battles of the 2016 election where the feud between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders essentially split the party into a sharply defined progressive and moderate wing. Now, with the new leadership of Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, there are signs the party is entering a new era, where the demons of 2016 have been exorcized.
