For the second installment of Inside TPM, I spoke with Kate Riga, who, like many at TPM, wears many hats. As podcaster/Capitol Hill reporter/Supreme Court reporter/(possible author???), she is a true multihypenate. Kate talked about how TPM chooses the Supreme Court cases it covers and how she prepares for the unique challenges involved in covering Supreme Court oral arguments and decision days. She also gives some book recommendations and her take on the state of the WNBA (at 6-19, her Washington Mystics are struggling just as much as everyone else in DC these days).
I wanted to share a few thoughts with you about the current state of things with President Biden’s candidacy. See it more as comparing notes with you than reporting, per se.
Yesterday there was a frenzy when President Biden’s interview with BET was released and he said that he would leave the race if doctors told him he had some medical condition or illness that made it necessary. Was this planting the seed? Was this how it was going to happen? When it was reported a couple hours later that Biden had COVID, I thought to myself: Are we going full Aaron Sorkin here? Is this really happening? It was one of those few moments when I literally couldn’t figure out what was going on. Is this for real? Are we saying the interview was a cue up for the COVID? Does he really have COVID? Are the writers just pushing the bounds of realism?
But as I alluded to yesterday afternoon there are other things happening that are not cinematic. Random backbenchers telling Biden he should end his candidacy was never going to do it. As we’ve said from the beginning, the people who can deliver that message to the President are Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, perhaps Barack Obama, though that last one is a lot less clear to me. Starting yesterday it became clear that all three congressional leaders either had or were in the process of doing that. That matters, in ways that all the other stuff does not.
A group of top Republicans on Capitol Hill have responded to the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump during a Saturday afternoon campaign rally in western Pennsylvania by calling for Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle to be replaced.
The Republican National Committee and Donald Trump’s campaign have filed a lawsuit in federal court against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson over their efforts to make voter registration more accessible.
The events of the past 24 hours have placed President Biden’s renomination in greater jeopardy than at any point since his June debate performance upended his campaign and the trajectory of the general election.
We now know that private entreaties from other leading Democrats for him to withdraw his re-election bid – which were suspected but not yet confirmed – were in fact made over the past week. The emissaries to the president included, separately, Sen. Charles Schumer (NY), the leading Democrat in the Senate, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (NY), the leading Democrat in the House, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (CA), the former speaker of the House.
It is obvious by his words and deeds that Biden rebuffed those appeals.
What happened yesterday was the other shoe dropping: It appears through strategic leaks and off-the-record confirmation of those leaks that leading Democrats let it be known via the press that they had tried and failed to dislodge Biden. Making that information public was another step in the pressure campaign to get Biden out. Private appeals having failed, the pressure campaign from leading Democrats went public.
At the same time, the likely next senator from California, Rep. Adam Schiff (D), came out publicly against Biden remaining as the nominee. Schiff’s position as an active Senate candidate from the most populous state was another indication of the darkening political environment for Biden.
In a parallel move, the Democratic National Committee delayed from July until August a virtual roll call vote to make Biden the nominee. The move reportedly came at the urging of Schumer and Jeffries. The effect is to buy the anti-Biden movement more time to exert pressure on him to withdraw. Meanwhile, Democratic donors continue to make their displeasure with Biden known.
It’s fair to say that there is no real historical precedent for this situation, certainly not since the implementation of the current presidential primary system in the 1970s. It’s astonishing to consider the ousting of the sitting president as the party’s standard bearer at such a late date, but it is at least as difficult to envision how he survives this widespread intra-party revolt against his candidacy.
Biden Tests Positive For COVID
The president was on a campaign swing through Nevada when he tested positive for COVID. He will isolate at his Delaware home. His symptoms are described as mild.
Piecing Together The Trump Assassination Attempt
As preliminary after-action reports continue to trickle in, let me offer one caution on sourcing for the details of the security failure that led to Donald Trump narrowly escaping assassination.
There are four broad categories of sourcing:
Official on-the-record accounts from law enforcement agencies;
Independent reporting from journalists based on eyewitness accounts and visual and documentary evidence;
Off-the-record accounts from government (leaks, basically);
Second-hand accounts provided by members of Congress based on briefings from law enforcement agencies.
No single source is inherently more or less reliable, except No. 4 above, which is always fraught because it is second hand and because members of Congress filter the information, sometimes deliberately and other times unconsciously, through their own political prisms.
With that said, here are some of the key stories from the past 24 hours:
The NYT has produced one of its high-quality audio-visual dissections of the assassination attempt drawing on contemporaneous video and photographic evidence of the rally site from multiple angles and viewpoints.
NYT: A Blind Spot and a Lost Trail: How the Gunman Got So Close to Trump
WSJ: Trump Gunman Identified as Suspicious Well Before Shooting
WaPo: Secret Service was told police could not watch building used by Trump rally shooter
NYT: Gunman’s Phone Had Details About Both Trump and Biden, F.B.I. Officials Say
Never Seen Anything Like This
Four GOP senators confronted Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle at the Republican National Convention over the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and continued to follow and berate her after she tried to end the exchange.
The senators were James Lankford (OK), Marsha Blackburn (TN), Kevin Cramer (ND), and John Barrasso (WY). Here’s video of the encounter posted by Blackburn:
🚨FULL VIDEO: Secret Service Director REFUSES to answer to the American people. pic.twitter.com/MPVOke5zhY
The Secret Service felt compelled to a defend its female employee against right-wing attacks, providing a statement to NBC News that read in part: “It is an insult to the women of our agency to imply that they are unqualified based on gender. Such baseless assertions undermine the professionalism, dedication and expertise of our workforce.”
Still No Official Word On Trump’s Injuries
AP: “Four days after a gunman’s attempt to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally, the public is still in the dark over the extent of his injuries, what treatment the Republican presidential nominee received in the hospital, and whether there may be any long-term effects on his health.”
Foreshadowing More Gun Violence
The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that Minnesota’s ban on 18- to 20-year-olds carrying handguns in public is an unconstitutional infringement of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. Relying on recent Supreme Court decisions, the appeals court said the Second Amendment applies to all adults.
JD Vance Accepts Veep Nomination
TPM’s Josh Kovensky offers four takeaways from JD Vance Night at the Republican National Connvetion.
The Lawlessness On Full Display
Former Director of the US Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Peter Navarro gestures as he speaks during the third day of the 2024 Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on July 17, 2024. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump White House official Peter Navarro was released from federal prison yesterday and made a beeline for Milwaukee, where he was reward with a speaking slot at the Republican National Convention. Navarro had served four months in prison for contempt of Congress after stymying the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation.
Menendez On Verge Of Resigning
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), now convicted on federal bribery charges, is considering resigning his seat under pressure from Senate Democrats, the NYT reported. NBC News took it a step farther, reporting that Menendez is telling allies he will resign.
Still Grinding My Teeth Over SCOTUS Immunity Ruling
Roger Parloff has yet more on the part of the ruling that is most flagrantly favorable to Trump’s particular situation and puts the New York hush-money conviction at risk.
As you know, I’ve been pressing the simple point that we don’t have any information about the injury to the former president’s ear or what caused it other than a social media post from him on Truth Social a few hours after the Saturday afternoon shooting. That’s not just inadequate. It’s frankly bizarre. Someone did just flag to me that two days ago the Times made a very oblique reference to this in an article devoted to Congressman Ronny Jackson’s description of changing the gauze on Trump’s ear on his flight to Milwaukee (“Former White House Doctor Describes Tending To Trump’s Wounded Ear“). That article says in passing: “So far, only Mr. Trump has described his injuries; his team has not provided any formal medical briefing to the public since the shooting.” And that’s it.
The third night of the Republican Convention in Milwaukee had two goals: introduce audiences to the MAGA 2.0 take on foreign policy, and to former President Trump’s newly selected vice presidential candidate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH).
In both cases, what was included was as notable as what wasn’t.
Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) will deliver the keynote speech at the RNC on Wednesday night, marking his first full-length public appearance after Donald Trump selected him as a vice presidential candidate.
We plan these drives months in advance. So let me start by saying we had no way of knowing that we’d be launching in the midst of what has been perhaps the most chaotic, bewildering, and often agonizing three-week stretch in our political life in recent memory. After we’d processed launching during the post-debate frenzy, then came last weekend’s Trump rally shooting. I say this simply to note that we’re fully cognizant of the fact that it may seem jarring to be holding a drive in this current news moment. But in an odd way, it all fits with our drive’s focus this year, which is on “preparing TPM for what’s next.”
The success of our drive last year made possible all sorts of big, exclusive stories — like our expose of SACR, the Trumpist secret society of white Christian men prepping for a “national divorce,” the Ken Chesebro document trove that shed new light on the fake electors scheme, our profile of a tough-talking sheriff taking on the neo-nazis who surged into central Florida, or our look, before anyone else was looking, at the surreal, extreme post-2020 world of the man who became the GOP nominee for governor of North Carolina. It’s also made possible what I believe has been unparalleled, deeply knowledgeable coverage of the Trump trials from Josh Kovensky and of the right-wing judiciary from Kate Riga.
I’m sure we’ll have more big exclusives like these over the next year. But when we say “preparing for what’s next,” we mean something slightly different, more expansive. At this moment, we very much don’t know what’s next. I don’t mean the lead-up to the November election. No one knows what the next three and a half months hold, but our team has been preparing for a campaign in which literally almost anything is possible for months. We’re ready for all of that. I’m talking about what comes after that, which is very much up in the air at this moment.
So what we mean is fortifying and strengthening TPM for the long haul, to be able to react, grapple with, make sense of any number of future possibilities. In the last three weeks, especially, I’ve had so many TPM readers reach out to me and say they’ve found the site as valuable and as necessary as it’s ever been precisely now — not just for our efforts to explain, as best as we’re able, the unprecedented, but to do so with a unique steadiness and transparency about our reasoning. While I’m admittedly biased, I believe TPM is a unique beacon in the journalistic firmament, an oasis for our community and a source of news and insights that spread far beyond our virtual pages. We want to make TPM strong enough — financially, editorially, legally — for whatever comes next.
That’s what this year’s drive is about. So I hope you will be able to contribute in whatever amount you feel able to. Let me add that in addition to keeping TPM robust and vital, the Journalism Fund is what provides the resources that allow us to provide free memberships to TPM Readers who cannot afford a subscription as well as to any registered student. Last week we held our first of what we hope will be many TPM community happy hours in New York and in other cities. And a reader came up to me and told me she had one of these free memberships and thanked me personally. I told her that was very nice of her to say but that it was our pleasure and, really, the thanks goes to our larger community, which makes them possible. But it was gratifying to hear because this part of our financial model is part of what makes me proud of what we do and of our community.
Publications around the country are shuttering, retrenching, laying off employees, getting sold to private equity funds. We’re not. This year, like last year, our goal is to raise $500,000 for the drive. Last year I made clear that it was critical that we reach that number. And we did. For reasons tied specifically to 2023, the wolf was truly at the door. And that is not the case this year. But let’s be honest: the wolf lives in a co-op down the street from TPM. He’s never far away. So this year’s drive remains very important. We aim to and believe we can strengthen the financial footing of the organization, get ready for what comes next and even modestly expand. And that’s the spirit in which we’re coming to you today
Over the weekend, shortly before a gunman fired on former President Trump, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) told a crowd gathered at a New York fundraiser that if President Biden remained at the top of Democrats’ 2024 ticket, the party would suffer significant losses down-ballot.
