This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
In the days since the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, supporters of the former president have used the incident to project an image of power.
Continue reading “Trump’s Projection Of Strength After Assassination Attempt Borrows From Authoritarian Playbook”One thing that has driven JD Vance’s rising unpopularity is his crusade against people without children. He’s proposed punitive tax policies to punish people who do these “bad” things like not having children and he’s even suggested diluting the voting rights of non-parents.
The odd thing about the tax policy side of this is that the U.S. tax code is actually filled with tax advantages and subsidies for people with kids. And generally speaking no one has much problem with that. There are dependent deductions, a refundable child tax credit, even something as obvious as public schools. Public schools are generally funded by property taxes. And almost everyone pays those, childful and childless alike, either directly or indirectly. Lots of people have kids and U.S. political culture is pretty pro-kid and pro-family (in the narrow sense of the phrase rather than the right-wing Christian sense). So generally it’s uncontroversial, even something politicians go out of their way to support.
Continue reading “JD Vance, Awkward and Discomfiting Ragelord”Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕
These past few weeks have been grueling for everyone who cares about politics, and particularly so for TPM’s small-but-mighty staff — lots of late night and weekend work, lots of marathon days followed by more marathon days.
Continue reading “Filling The Void”As we go into the weekend I want to thank everyone who’s contributed so far to this year’s drive for the TPM Journalism Fund. We hit the half way point to our goal of raising $500,000 early yesterday morning. Even though we’ve gotten a lot more experience at holding these drives they remain nerve-wracking. They amount to a collective trust-fall – hopefully – into the arms of the larger TPM community. So it always feels really good, at many different levels, when you’re there for us. If you have had a moment to contribute yet you can click right here. It’s easy and quick.
We’ve always gained quite a few new members recently. Which is wonderful. And we want to welcome all of you. We’re still trying to understand the precise reasons for it.
One reason seems to be our new membership system in itself, by which I mean the software that runs it. As you know, our business is almost entirely based on membership fees. So a smoothly running system to manage memberships in all its dimensions – processing fees, authenticating users, record keeping and user experience – is mission critical. (Neither the old or the new system ever touch or store your credit cards. For that we use the industry-standard security and fulfillment of Stripe dot com.)
Continue reading “Thanks, Folks”For election officials across the country, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, and, less directly, the turnover at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, have brought into stark focus just how tumultuous the election environment has become since the 2020 election.
Continue reading “Officials Were Prepped For A Dangerous 2024 Election — And That Was Before The Attempted Assassination”We’ve now had a round of polls of the Harris-Trump race since she became the Democrats’ de facto nominee. All of these polls must be viewed as snapshots in an extremely fluid and unsettled political moment. But we can draw out some early patterns. I averaged all the post-Biden drop-out polls and they come out to Trump up by 4/10ths of one percentage point. That’s about the high water mark that Biden ever got to all year. That average also includes CNN and Times, which have been two of the worst polls for Democrats this year. So the mix of just who has released a poll probably slightly favors Trump.
More interesting to me are the polls out of the swing states, which we’ve already gotten a decent number of. They now show all three Blue Wall states (MI, WI, PA) as ties. Notably, they now show Georgia as a margin of error race, with Harris one or two points back. That’s a major shift. Trump has held a consistent lead of 5 or 6 percentage points there. I only saw one poll each out of Arizona and Nevada and those didn’t show the same shift. Unclear whether that’s unique to these states or whether more polls will show a clearer pattern. The relevant point is that early evidence seems to show Harris significantly growing the map, giving her multiple potential paths to an electoral college win.
Continue reading “Some Thoughts on the Harris Momentum Shift”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Were it not for an assassination attempt and the President dropping his re-election bid, the past two weeks might have featured the meltdown of JD Vance. Even still, there’s reported grumbling in Trumpworld that he picked the wrong guy, especially in light of Kamala Harris being elevated to the top of the Democratic ticket.
Let’s run through some of the fallout:
JD Vance is turning out to be an oppo researcher’s dream:
An online gag that invented a couch-fucking episode in JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy prompted the AP to run and then retract a classic all-time headline: “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.” You will not be surprised to learn that JD Vance and sofas, divans, and couches has turned into a runaway meme.
Parker Molloy caught WSJ op-ed writer Jason L. Riley playing it both ways in two columns only two weeks apart:
July 9: Kamala Harris Would Be The Best Democratic Choice
July 23: Kamala Harris Isn’t The Change Democrats Need
Nothing matters.
NYT: How Some States Are Making It Harder to Register Voters
A bipartisan group of some 40 former Justice Department officials have endorsed Kamala Harris largely on rule of law grounds.
Another day, another belated DOJ inspector general report on the politicization of DOJ under Attorney General Bill Barr. This one is bad.
Yesterday, the NYT had a piece exploring some of the outstanding questions around the projectile that struck former President Trump’s ear, what law enforcement is analyzing, and noting the political context in which it has become a focus of interest.
This morning, the paper published one of its visual investigations assessing audio-video evidence from the scene and concluded that the projectile was likely a bullet: “[A] detailed analysis of bullet trajectories, footage, photos and audio by The New York Times strongly suggests Mr. Trump was grazed by the first of eight bullets fired by the gunman, Thomas Crooks.”
For his part, Trump is hopping mad about the congressional testimony Wednesday of his own appointee as FBI director, in which he said whether it was a bullet or shrapnel remained an outstanding question.
Two new developments of note in the Trump prosecutions:
The associate justice suggested publicly that a panel of lower court judges could enforce the Supreme Court’s new ethics code against the justices.
A three-pronged attack on France’s high-speed rail system crippled train travel on the same day as opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics in Paris.
The Atlantic: There Are No Good Options Left With Bird Flu
A California man is suspected of arson for allegedly pushing a burning car into a gully Wednesday and igniting the Park fire near Chico, which rapidly grew to more than 160,000 acres, making it the largest conflagration in the state so far this year.
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We now know how Vice President Kamala Harris is going to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.
Continue reading “Here’s How The Democratic National Convention Is Going To Work”Senior Trump DOJ officials issued multiple statements weeks before the 2020 election suggesting anti-Trump election fraud in a critical swing state, knowing all the while that no crime had likely been committed and that the main suspect faced a severe mental disability, a DOJ Inspector General report found.
Continue reading “Barr Pushed DOJ To Publicize Bogus Voter Fraud Claim Before 2020 Election, IG Finds”As you know, I’ve been on this story for a while: why there was never any law enforcement briefing or qualified medical report on the Butler, PA shooting incident or information of how Donald Trump was injured. I was especially interested in this because originally Pennsylvania State Police briefed reporters that Trump had been hit by flying debris kicked up by the gunfire. The storyline changed when Trump went on Truth Social and announced that a bullet had hit his ear. From that moment that was the story followed universally in the press.
But yesterday FBI Director Christopher Wray said, ironically in response to a question from Rep. Jim Jordan, that it’s not clear whether Trump was hit by a bullet or debris kicked up by the gunfire. I think in context that’s likely a bureaucratic and gentle way of saying Trump probably wasn’t hit by a bullet. But let’s stick to the precise words. “There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.”
Here’s the actual exchange.
Continue reading “Finally Word from the FBI—About The Trump Story The Press Has Refused To Question”
