Barr’s ‘Highly Unusual’ Involvement in Roger Stone Sentencing Remains Murky

Posted on by Josh Kovensky

A new DOJ Inspector General report on a bizarre 2020 episode in which the Trump DOJ retracted its sentencing recommendation for Trump impresario Roger Stone reveals in part how much senior officials from that era don’t want to discuss it.

Continue reading “Barr’s ‘Highly Unusual’ Involvement in Roger Stone Sentencing Remains Murky” →

The Battle Is Joined

Posted on by Josh Marshall

As we’ve noted a few times, we’re now in the midst of a race for each campaign to define Kamala Harris. What focus groups have shown in recent weeks is that many swing voters or marginal voters have vaguely negative impressions of Harris but basically know little about her. So she’s largely a blank slate for these and actually many other voters. That was always going to be very different for Biden and Trump. Voters know who they are and tend to have very fixed opinions about them. Not so for Harris.

The Trump campaign – actually one of its allied SuperPacs, as far as I can tell – went on the air last night with a series of attack ads in the Blue Wall states. (They’re probably appearing in other places too. But that’s where I have direct reports of their appearing.) They focus on what I believe is Harris’s key vulnerability. (Ed.Note: I’ve subsequently heard these ads may only be running in the Philly and Detroit metros – more information on that as I learn more.)

Continue reading “The Battle Is Joined” →

We Suddenly Have A Real Campaign On Our Hands

Posted on by David Kurtz

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

‘We Are Not Going Back’

It was so hard to imagine an incumbent president ditching his reelection campaign as late as the July before Election Day and equally difficult to envision a smooth passing of the baton to his vice president that I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking through what a Kamala Harris candidacy would look like. As a result, I probably underestimated how Kamala Harris would personally embody the themes of her campaign in ways that are particularly effective where Biden wasn’t in drawing contrasts with Trump.

The generational difference in age was obviously going to be helpful, but the chant she led at her first campaign rally since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for president – “We are not going back” – is more than about relative youthfulness. It harkens to the dark Trump years and even obliquely references Biden, though not in a disrespectful way, while pivoting toward the future. It’s the same powerful message from Clinton 1992 and Obama 2008. She’s not only delivering that message, but like Clinton and Obama did before her, she stands as symbol of that message:

It’s easy to see her gender and racial diversity as potent attack points for Trump, but less obvious until you see her in action how her own story embodies the central 2024 issues of immigration, abortion, and tolerance. Joe Biden prided himself on enjoying the same embodiment of working-class whites in the industrial Midwest.

It’s hard to overemphasize how much of an advantage that personal embodiment provides, not just in enhancing her credibility or in giving her relevant experience or in resonating with particular constituencies. It means her mere presence speaks to those issues. She raises those issues just by showing up, which let’s her address them without even having to talk about them. She’s already checked those boxes implicitly, and it frees her up to address other issues explicitly.

We’re still mostly flying blind on the state of the race, pending more polls conducted since Biden’s withdrawal, so today’s headline that we have a real race on our hands isn’t a reference to the horse race but to the kind of race Harris is in a position to run now. Even at 59, Harris can run a race of generational change, especially against a 78-year-old former president trying to regain his lost office. Who wants to go back to that?

2024 Ephemera

  • Historic flood of cash powers Democratic campaign efforts since Biden withdrew.
  • WSJ: “The Trump campaign filed a long-shot challenge to block Vice President Kamala Harris from campaign funds in what used to be the joint Biden-Harris war chest, in a complaint filed Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission.”
  • Schumer and Jeffries throw their support to Harris.
  • Politico: The GOP doesn’t want to talk about abortion. Harris wants to make them.

A Glimpse Of The Rancidness

House Republican leaders have reportedly urged their members to tone down the racist attacks on Kamala Harris, but since they won’t stop, you’re left to wonder if it’s a “have your cake and eat it, too” display of handwringing:

Practically Freudian

In a glorious on-air flub, Fox Business’ Larry Kudlow momentarily bungles the “E” in DEI as “exclusion”:

Biden To Give Oval Office Address

President Biden will deliver a nationally televised Oval Office address today at 8 p.m. ET, his first public remarks since ending his bid for re-election and throwing his support to Vice President Kamala Harris.

This is the fourth Oval Office address of Biden’s presidency, all within the past 14 months, and the second in 10 days.

Headline Laughs

In my next life, I want to come back devoid of skepticism. I can’t even imagine what that would be like, but it might look something like this: “Trump is back to insulting his opponents despite reported transformation”

Secret Service Wants Trump To Curtail Outdoor Rallies

In the wake of the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, the Secret Service is encouraging the Trump campaign not to hold outdoor events with large crowds.

Secret Service Director Resigns

Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned one day after she endured withering scrutiny from both parties in a House committee hearing.

Menendez Resigns

Convicted on federal bribery charges after a previous public corruption case against him ended in a hung jury, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) finally announced his resignation from the Senate, effective Aug. 20.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) promised to fill the seat quickly for the short remainder of Menendez’s term, which ends in January. It won’t be filled by Murphy’s wife, Tammy, who ran earlier this year in the Democratic primary to succeed Menendez.

One note: While Senate Democrats widely called for Menendez to leave, few Republicans senators joined the chorus because … it would have been awkward to force a convicted felon to resign when their own party’s presidential nominee is also a convicted felon. Fun times in the GOP.

Everything’s Fiiine

Sunday was the warmest day ever recorded by humans, according to the European climate service Copernicus.

In slightly (but only slightly) more positive news, greenhouse gas emissions may have peaked.

Nature Doing Its Thing

A hydrothermal eruption in Yellowstone National Park damaged a boardwalk and sent tourists scrambling but there were no reported injuries:

Here’s an aerial shot of the aftermath. The otherworldly clear blue pool at the bottom center of the photo is what the larger pool above it, now gray and opaque, looked like before the explosion:

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Can You Help With This?

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I want to send a huge thank you to the 1601 TPM Readers who have given so far to this year’s annual TPM Journalism Fund drive. We are currently at just over $212,000 and we really want to get to the halfway point of $250,000 toward our goal of $500,000 by the end of the first week of the drive. So if you’ve been considering contributing, can you take a moment and make it today? It is, I believe, a great and important cause, keeping TPM here, vital and robust for the future. If you’re ready, just click right here. We thank you, our whole team.

Expectations Setting

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I wanted to do a short post on expectations setting now that we’ve absorbed the stunning and sometimes euphoric news of the last 48 hours. What will the polls say about this new race? What are Harris’s chances of winning? As my colleague David Kurtz has rightly stated, we’re truly flying blind here. There are so many unprecedented variables we can’t be certain about anything. My own best guess is that we should be not so much expecting but prepared to see Harris roughly where Joe Biden was before the late June debate. That speculation is based mostly on the fact that the polls have been primarily driven by the size of the Republican and Democratic voting blocks with a large percentage of voters supporting third party candidates.

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A Reader’s Guide To MAGA’s Racist And Misogynistic Attacks On Kamala Harris

Posted on by David Kurtz

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:

We Need You!

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