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

Throw Everything Against The Wall And See What Sticks

The initial round of GOP attacks on presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris have so far been scattershot, inconsistent, self-contradictory, and often comical. But we’ve seen it all before, and we know how this works.

The volume and intensity of the attacks – deeply suffused with misogyny and racism – represent 1,000 trial balloons. Some will pop on their own and others will get shot down immediately, but eventually a few will get through the blitz of counterattacks. Those few will offer a clue as to what “works,” and they’ll form the basis for additional rounds of attacks playing off of the same theme or underlying premise, however false it may be.

Repeated often enough, the attacks will slowly accrete into a “thing” that unsophisticated editors and reporters notice. They start asking questions about it. Their questions may seem benign and the early round of stories often tepid (I promise you that before the week is out a reporter is going to grab ahold of the attacks on Harris as a “DEI hire” and use them as a peg to write more generally about DEI), but gradually the “thing” becomes a narrative.

The narrative, with more repetition, begins to be a problem. Maybe the campaign or the candidate says something in frustration and presto you have a pissing match for reporters to cover. Or perhaps the candidate is caught off-guard and gives a casual or ill-thought-out response. There’s blood in the water. Now it’s gone from a problem to baggage that the candidate has to do something about.

What began as toxic, racist, misogynistic drivel is a now a trap that has ensnared the candidate. At each step of the way, the audience for the lie, mistruth, or innuendo has broadened. Each subsequent iteration repeats the attack again to everyone who already heard it before. What started as scattershot attacks has now become a sustained drumbeat that sneakily enters the public consciousness almost undetected.

What I’m describing – a stripped-down description of swift-boating as it has existed in the 20 years since John Kerry was filleted by it – is not easy to combat or to counter. Calling out the lies, or the racism, or the misogyny, while better than whitewashing it, isn’t sufficient, especially in a world where the bigotry is the point and legions of Trump supporters are lapping it up.

The urge to rebut each attack whack-a-mole style may be well-intentioned, but it’s a fool’s errand. Taking on the task of confronting an endless supply of baseless attacks is to let your opponent run you in circles. Distinguishing who the audience is for the attacks – the MAGA base? mainstream reporters? swing voters? all of the above? – can sometimes help focus the counterattacks, but we’re beyond the point where the people left in the Republican Party are capable of being shamed by the nature or subtext of rancid attacks exploiting race and gender bias.

I don’t have the answers to this problem. What I can tell you is that in the relatively short 15 years I’ve been doing this job, the information environment has been radically transformed. What defined TPM in the early days was calling out these kinds of attacks for what they were, but that was back when Republican electeds were trying to soft-pedal this stuff into the mainstream and would awkwardly retreat when called out on it. Starting in 2010, with the Tea Party backlash to President Obama, that began to change. By the time we got to Trump circa 2016, any pretense of soft-pedaling it, let alone shame, was long gone.

In general, mainstream outlets have gotten much better at being direct and not euphemistic about these kinds of attacks, but not all of them have. At the same time, Republicans have trained reporters so well that they now often anticipate and air the Republican attacks before they’re even made. Not the public service journalism we’re looking for.

One advantage TPM has that makes exercising good news judgment in these scenarios a little less daunting is that we serve a specific, defined, sophisticated audience. We know who our readers are. We can flag new lines of attack in their nascent stages, usually without acute concern that we’re fanning the flames. We can broadly reference the nature and subtext of the attacks without getting tied in knots over it because we share a common understanding and language with our audience.

But that isn’t true for every outlet. So while the first 48 hours of Harris’ candidacy have featured an almost cartoonish response from MAGA world, there’s a method to the madness. The effect over time is to work the refs – mainstream news outlets – and wait for them to break down and for the attacks to break through to a wider audience. One way to combat the effort is be a sophisticated news consumer who is aware of it and sees it for what it is.

Quote Of The Day

Before I was elected as vice president, before I was elected a United States senator, I was the elected attorney general of California. And before that I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.

Vice President Kamala Harris, in her first meeting with campaign staffers in Wilmington, Delaware

Are We Taking The Right Lessons From 2016?

A gentle reminder that Hillary Clinton decisively won the popular vote in 2016. Any analysis that traces her failure to win the Electoral College vote back to her gender is really missing the broader point. We’ve shown we’re capable of electing a woman president.

A Reminder Of The Stakes

MAGA Republicans continue to look for every chance to turn our cold civil war into a hot one:

Ohio state Sen. George Lang at JD Vance’s rally: “I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country.” pic.twitter.com/7jtJz2XsAZ

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) July 22, 2024

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This is a special edition of TPM’s Morning Memo focused on President Biden’s decision to end his re-election campaign. Sign up for the email version.

Turmoil v. Uncertainty

The only two things we know with any certainty at the moment are (1) we’ll have a different president come January than we do now; and (2) if the Democrats lose the White House the “what ifs” of recrimination and second-guessing over the 2024 presidential campaign will last the rest of our natural lives.

That’s not much by way of certainty.

President Biden’s unprecedented withdrawal from the race – not even LBJ’s 1968 demurral was this close to Election Day, and the election calendar and rules of the game back then were dramatically different in fundamental ways – truly does unleash a kind of political turmoil that we haven’t encountered before. But let’s distinguish between genuine turmoil and more benign uncertainty.

Genuine turmoil would be Democrats collapsing into internecine warfare over who Biden’s successor as the party’s nominee will be. So far, there are almost no signs of that happening. Rather than Biden’s withdrawal creating a vacuum which triggered more chaos, as seemed at least possible, it looks in retrospect like the last three weeks of a campaign frozen in place was what actually created a vacuum. Democrats were desperate to see that vacuum filled, and Biden’s withdrawal enabled Harris to sweep in and fill it.

As quickly as Democrats coalesced (and worked to to look like they were coalescing) around Harris Sunday afternoon and evening, it is already difficult to imagine a scenario where she ends up in a protracted battle for the nomination. In gaming out what things would look like if Biden did withdraw, one big question was how much appetite would Democrats have for fighting amongst themselves versus finally being able to return to taking on Trump. So far, it looks like Dems have an enormous appetite for re-engaging with Trump, the greatest menace to democracy since the founding.

For Trump and MAGA Republicans, there is genuine turmoil in having to retool their entire rhetorical arsenal for a different race against a different candidate. For all of the dark and sinister reasons that we know Harris makes for an easier GOP target than Biden, Trump world had spent the better part of seven years running against Joe Biden. They reached as far as Ukraine to try to take him down in preposterous ways that nearly brought them down. They leaned on and mirrored Russian propaganda. They launched an auto-coup to keep Biden from assuming power after he won in 2020 and nearly took themselves down a second time. When all that didn’t work, they ran instead against his son, his brother, and anyone else they could lasso into the made-up notion of a “Biden crime family.”

They couldn’t easily “other” Joe Biden. The same isn’t true of Harris. But it takes time to draft and hand out the new scripts and get the entire right-wing Wurlitzer cranking out the same noise ad nauseam. You saw in the flailing response yesterday from Trump on down to Fox News that they weren’t on the same page yet. They only have 15 weeks to cement new attack lines, memes, caricatures, shorthand, and conspiracy theories. That’s doable, but it’s not a lot of time to establish a drumbeat and repeat it long enough to make it accepted truth. The top-down nature of the right-wing political apparatus makes it reasonably well-positioned to turn on a dime, but repetition is key and there’s only so much time remaining to drill in a new collective viewpoint of Harris and the race. It doesn’t help that some of the go-to attack lines against Biden, like his age, boomerang with Harris as Trump’s opponent.

Most of the rest of what we’re contending with isn’t turmoil but uncertainty. What will new polling show about a Harris v. Trump matchup that is no longer hypothetical? What will the new Electoral College map look like with Harris swapped in for Biden? Can Harris access enough fundraising dollars to mount a national campaign on such short notice and make up for the near-collapse of fundraising since the presidential debate (so far so good)? Is Harris personally up to the challenge of taking over and running a national campaign on the fly?

Those aren’t just unknowns; they’re unknowable in the short term. That’s another reason Harris and the Democrats want to race to lock down her support now. It’s not just to cow would-be rivals, but to secure the nomination before the current uncertainty gives way to the emergence of any hard or uncomfortable facts that would call her electability into question. They have a few days before the polling numbers coalesce, the Electoral College map clarifies itself a bit, and the Trump world attacks reach fever pitch. By then, Harris wants to be not only the inevitable choice but the only choice for Democrats.

Look, if there were any kind of playbook in politics, it would have a big, bold-faced, all-caps disclaimer that it’s not designed to be used in a last-minute campaign by a new candidate after her predecessor aged out of the role, let alone deployed as a last-gasp chance to save democracy from a would-be authoritarian who will almost certainly wind up in jail unless he wins the election and can abuse the powers of the office to make his criminal culpability vanish. So gaming out where things go from here is frankly impossible.

Let me end on one ironclad certainty: The stakes of this election are off-the-charts high. Our real national turmoil isn’t Joe Biden’s age or Kamala Harris’ candidacy, it’s that democracy itself is on the ballot. That’s not the mark of a healthy civic life or of a vital and resilient political system. There is some poetry that in our national “break the glass in the case of emergency” moment, we turn to a Black woman to bail us out. And it would be true to form for us to blame her for our own collective failures.

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