Weeks after Sen. JD Vance’s (R-OH) introduction at the Republican National Convention, few people seem excited about the would-be vice president. Liberals, arrayed around Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, are happy to dub him “weird;” Donald Trump himself downplayed the choice on Wednesday, saying that, historically, the vice presidential pick has “virtually no impact.”
Continue reading “Why A Nerve Center for MAGA Intellectuals is ‘Jubilant’ About JD Vance”Of Course Trump’s A Racist But It’s Worse Than That
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Let’s Be Clear About This
Again, it’s as if we’ve learned nothing from the last eight years.
Donald Trump, his campaign having lost its edge to Kamala Harris, predictably resorts to his well-used playbook of racism, white grievance, and othering. Major national news outlets fumble the coverage, unable or unwilling to call out the racism. The headlines are either too tepid or shift the focus to Harris. We should know by now that racist attacks are not about the victims of those attacks, they’re about the perpetrators. Putting the spotlight on Harris is a form of complicity.
But even well-meaning people stop at the incomplete conclusion that Trump himself is a racist. No doubt he is. But that fails to do justice to the toxicity he brings to the public square. Not since George Wallace has a national candidate exploited racism for personal political gain the way Trump has consistently now for going on a decade. It started with his embrace of Obama birtherism, continued throughout his term in the White House with, among many other things, virulently anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant policies, and is playing out exactly the way you would expect it to now that he’s facing a biracial opponent.
It takes a racist to exploit the kind of divisions that Trump traffics in, but focusing on his personal animosity toward people of color, his own retrograde 1950s attitudes, the darkness of his soul runs the risk of making this a psychological profile or a morality play or another in the long line of old white men stuck in the past. This isn’t your grandpa or your crazy uncle raving in the privacy of your holiday dinner.
It’s the former president of the United States turning his cult and his campaign’s hundreds of millions of dollars against people of color on a public stage in the middle of a presidential campaign. It’s a way of declaring open season on vulnerable minorities. It’s a rallying cry for every white extremist, fringe loner, and KKK wannabe out there looking for an excuse to act out their rage.
We talk a lot about how racism in the form practiced by Trump takes it upon itself to define what is white and what is not, mocks racial and gender distinctions it considers illegitimate, and reserves to itself an imagined gatekeeper role for what is acceptable. All true. But more relevant for our purposes is that the purpose of that kind of racism is to dehumanize people, reduce them to less than, marginalize them – and the net effect is to grant permission to inflict all manner of atrocities and degradations on people deemed less than people.
Just Watch
A lowlight reel of Trump’s NABJ appearance:
It’s Not Just Trump
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) is covering himself in racist glory, too:
A Telling Moment
Among the many indignities of Trump’s NABJ appearance was the moment he whiffed on a question about whether JD Vance will be ready on Day 1 to assume the presidency. The answer Trump gave received considerable attention because he minimized the effect of the veep choice on the outcome of the election, but he totally failed to affirm that Vance is ready for the presidency, the barest litmus test of a vice presidential candidate. That whiff did not go unnoticed by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg:
In related news, Trump allies are accusing Kellyanne Conway of badmouthing Vance:
In interviews with The Bulwark, twenty Trump campaign staffers, allies, confidants, and advisers were quick to shoot down any notion that Trump was turning his back on Vance or was displeased with him amid his rocky rollout. But more than a dozen of those sources volunteered without prompting that they believed Conway, who initially opposed the selection of Vance, was undermining him through leaks to the press expressing doubts about his readiness and the campaign’s vetting.
Conway denies the allegation.
2024 Ephemera
- Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly (D) and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) have each met personally with the team vetting vice presidential contenders for Kamala Harris, Politico’s Playbook reports.
- AZ-08: Blake Masters lost in the GOP House primary to election denier Abraham Hamadeh.
- Maya Rudolph will appear as Kamala Harris On Saturday Night Live for the duration of the campaign.
Quick Reminder
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Big Lie II, The Sequel
Donald Trump is already delegitimizing the outcome of the 2024 election and any election Democrats win, repeatedly lying that Democrats can win only if they cheat:
Trump suggests that the only way Kamala Harris can beat him is by cheating pic.twitter.com/nPIUyP5p9l
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 31, 2024
Correcting Trump’s Jan. 6 Revisionism
It’s not just that Trump promises to pardon the Jan. 6 defendants – of which he is one – it’s the web of lies, deceits, and disinformation that he constructs to justify and defend pardons that is the most toxic element of his historical revisionism. My former colleague Ryan Reilly offers a comprehensive corrective to Trump’s comments to the NABJ on potential pardons.
Important Read
TPM’s Josh Kovensky: DOJ IG Details How Close Trump Came To Invoking Insurrection Act in 2020
Another Biskupic Excluive
CNN’s Joan Biskupic has another piece pulling the back the curtain on the recently completed Supreme Court term. This one is focused on Justice Samuel Alito losing the majority on not one but two cases he originally was assigned to write. His opinions were so strident that the majority abandoned him both times, exacerbating what she so richly calls Alito’s “air of vexation.”
9/11 Plotters Reach Plea Deal
A plea deal that spares the 9/11 plotters at Guantanamo the death penalty is probably the right thing to do, but the only authentic reaction to this news is immense sadness: about the attack itself, about how America lost its way in the aftermath and resorted to torture, about the use of extrajudicial means in contravention of the rule of law, about the Kafkaesque limbo in which the plotters have been held for more than two decades, and about how it ends with little in the way of real reckoning with ourselves over what we became.
Cornering The Market On Weird
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The False, Dark Allure of Trumpite 12-Dimensional Chess
Today Donald Trump appeared at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, attacked the organization, disrespected the journalists interviewing him and then proceeded to claim that Kamala Harris is in fact a fake Black person who only recently decided to become Black. “I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went — she became a Black person,” he said, “I think somebody should look into that too.”
Continue reading “The False, Dark Allure of Trumpite 12-Dimensional Chess”Trump Goes Full Racist In Front Of Black Journalists
Shortly after President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his pick for Democratic nominee, Republican leadership in Congress quickly put out some guidance to lawmakers about how to message around Harris, the first Black, Asian American, woman vice president.
Continue reading “Trump Goes Full Racist In Front Of Black Journalists”Blitz
I have various people I chat with through the day to compare notes about what’s in the news. I can’t remember who the conversation was with or whether it started with me or the other person. But in one of these conversations over the last few days I got to talking about the particular dynamics of a three-month campaign, something totally unheard of and unprecedented in modern American political history. American presidential campaigns last at least 18 months. In some ways they’re perpetual. But there’s nothing in recent American history to compare to what Kamala Harris is doing right now.
The Trump campaign is obviously furious about the switch. Vance called it a sucker punch. They essentially wasted their convention on the wrong candidate. You can understand why they’re mad.
Continue reading “Blitz”DOJ IG Details How Close Trump Came To Invoking Insurrection Act in 2020
In June 2020, as demonstrations around the killing of George Floyd reached their peak, Trump administration officials did extensive work laying the groundwork for the President to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to quell the protests, an Inspector General report released on Wednesday found.
Continue reading “DOJ IG Details How Close Trump Came To Invoking Insurrection Act in 2020”No Podcast This Week
Kate Riga is on vacation this week. So no podcast this week. We’ll be back next week on the regular schedule.
Don’t Be Fooled By Trump’s Big Display Of Killing Project 2025
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Project 2025 Is Dead, Long Live Project 2025
Of all the Trump flailing over the past 10 days, nothing was quite as comical, nonsensical, and ineffectual as yesterday’s big push to try to shove Project 2025 – the centerpiece of MAGA world’s planning for a Trump II presidency – down the memory hole.
Where to even begin with this? It’s bogosity piled on top of bogosity in an effort to pretend it was a rogue effort by unsanctioned people very distant from the former president. None of that was true from the beginning. It wasn’t true yesterday. And it won’t be true tomorrow. What happened yesterday amounts to a whole lot of nothing.
But you don’t have to believe me. The Trump campaign effort to try to make it all go away was itself incriminated by the Trump fingerprints left all over the place. Nothing says “we had nothing to do with this” quite like forcing out the Project 2025 head honcho and making public statements that the same fate awaits anyone else who dares draw too much bad publicity for the former president.
“Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you,” Trump campaign senior advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a statement (emphasis mine).
On the surface, the only semi-meaningful change seems to be the departure of Paul Dans, who was Project 2025’s director. Beyond that, the work of Project 2025, to the extent it wasn’t already done, will continue under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation, which has housed Project 2025 all along. “Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts will take over Project 2025’s operations,” the WSJ reported.
Most importantly, the work that Project 2025 was doing is basically already done. It assembled a 900-page blueprint for a radical far-right agenda for Trump II and became a clearinghouse for potential personnel in a second Trump term. Perhaps a better way to phrase it is that a bunch of alum from Trump I have been charting out who they would hire for Trump II. None of that goes down the memory hole or disappears. “This tool was built for any future administration to use,” said Heritage’s Roberts.
Despite the big display of opprobrium from the Trump campaign, including warning that participants in Project 2025 would be barred from serving in a Trump II administration, few took the threat very seriously:
Some Project 2025 participants have responded by doubting a ban could be enforced when contributors include close Trump advisers such as former White House speechwriter Stephen Miller, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan, and former White House economic adviser Peter Navarro. Miller has denied his involvement in Project 2025, but his America First Legal group is a participating organization, and his deputy, Gene Hamilton, wrote the playbook’s chapter on the Department of Justice.
The best way to think of yesterday’s mini-eruption was as a calculated planned media effort by the Trump campaign to try to drive a stake through the heart of the ongoing series of negative stories about Project 2025 and its plans for Trump II. They needed a head on a pike as a sign that this was “real” and not just a media effort. Dans served that purpose, but one sacrificial lamb doesn’t make this any less of a targeted media effort. “Today’s news looks like political maneuvering, not a substantive disavowal of the policies Trump has advocated for up until now,” Joyce Vance rightly observed.
The icing on the cake is that Roberts, the Heritage Foundation leader who helped spearhead Project 2025 and will now pick up the pieces after the Trump campaign’s eruption, has a book coming out in September with a glowing forward from none other than GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance.
JD Vance Is The Oppo Gift That Keeps On Giving
It’s getting hard to keep track of all of the examples of JD Vance publicly scorning people without children over a period of years:
- TPM’s Emine Yücel: Vance’s History Of Extremist Remarks On Family Doesn’t Stop At ‘Childless Cat Ladies’
- Media Matters: Three more Fox interviews where Vance lashed out at “childless” Democrats like VP Harris
- CNN: It’s not just ‘cat ladies’: JD Vance has a history of disparaging people without kids
On The Trail
- Kamala Harris held a raucous rally Tuesday night in Atlanta, where Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) had the crowd eating from his hand:
- Kamala Harris will hold her first joint event with her not-yet-named running mate in Philadelphia on Tuesday, Politico reports, before the new Democratic ticket embarks on a four-day campaign tour through Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.
- President Biden will keynote the first night of Democratic national convention, CNN reports.
Trump’s Blatantly Racist Appeal
These excerpts from Trump’s interview with Laura Ingraham don’t take any reading between the lines to understand:
2024 Ephemera
- AZ-Sen: Big Lie aficiando Kari Lake won the GOP primary for U.S. Senate over Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb. She will face off against Rep. Reuben Gallego (D-AZ) in one of the most closely watched Senate races this cycle.
- Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll: Kamala Harris has turned a two-point Biden deficit across seven swing states into a 48%-47% lead over Donald Trump.
- Elon Musk’s X/Twitter suspended and then reinstated the “White Dudes for Harris” account after its $4 million fundraising call Monday night.
Quote Of The Day
I picked this room for this interview. This is my favorite room in the Justice Department. It’s a law library. For more than 20 years, I was a federal judge. Do I look like somebody who would make that basic mistake about the law? I don’t think so.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, on U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling in the Mar-a-Lago case that he unlawfully appointed Jack Smith as special counsel.
Good Read
Joan Biskupic: The inside story of John Roberts and Trump’s immunity win at the Supreme Court
Tina Peters Goes On Trial
The former county clerk in Mesa County, Colorado who stands accused of tampering with voting machines in 2020 in a cockamamie search for evidence of election fraud finally goes on trial in state court today. Just one of the many echo effects of Donald Trump’s Big Lie crusade.
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Excuses Donald Trump Has Given For Not Debating Harris
With news today that Donald Trump will “probably” debate Vice President Kamala Harris, it appears we are a few steps closer to a presidential debate getting back on the calendar in coming weeks. Trump initially refused to commit to such a public match up in the hours after President Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris.
Continue reading “Excuses Donald Trump Has Given For Not Debating Harris”