Many MAGA influencers have an apocalyptic story to tell about the country, the political divide, and where we’re all headed, and they’re already using it to lay the groundwork for crossing what has long been a red line: deploying the military for domestic law enforcement purposes.
In this MAGA fever dream, everyone has their part to play. They believe that they’ll be caught up in it; you might be, too. It goes something like this: If Donald Trump wins in November, people will protest. Riots will break out. The left, they theorize, will go all-out to stoke organized violence around the country, clearing the way for a newly inaugurated Trump administration to step in and make unprecedented, widespread use of the U.S. military to restore law and order.
At the Democratic National Convention last week, Harris supporters and the presidential candidate herself leaned in to what is proving to be a successful attack on the former president: ridiculing him.
Former President Donald Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) attempted to downplay the Trump campaign and the far-right’s extreme positioning on abortion over the weekend, after Democrats spent the past week of the Democratic National Convention highlighting the GOP’s attacks on reproductive freedoms.
In an interview that aired on Sunday, Vance said Trump would veto a federal abortion ban as president should a bill like that make it to the Oval Office, something Trump himself has said in recent months in an attempt to moderate his party’s extreme rhetoric on the issue and appeal to voters outside his base of anti-abortion Christian voters.
Given that there’s been a lot of encouraging news about the Harris campaign, there’s an understandable and salutary resistance to any commentary that looks like counting chickens before they are hatched. We have more than two months to go before Election Day. A lot can happen. But there’s something going on with Donald Trump.
In the first week or two after Harris’ campaign launched, it was perhaps understandable that his campaign had a hard time knowing how to respond. Not entirely understandable, of course. His campaign hoodwinked the Times into running a whole story about how it was locked and loaded with ads, oppo and messaging, ready to annihilate Harris and her campaign on the launch pad the moment Biden stepped aside. But when it happened the very next day, they were caught flatfooted. That was odd since the possibility of Biden stepping aside had been very real for six weeks. Still, it’s hard to prepare for something of such magnitude.
Donald Trump is in a vastly different position than he was just a month ago. And it shows.
The race remains tight, but the advantage is now with Kamala Harris and the Trump campaign is telegraphing the flip in the dynamics of the race in ways small and large.
Trump keeps providing himself with potential exit ramps from the Sept. 10 debate with Kamala Harris, complaining anew yesterday that he shouldn’t have to attend the debate because it’s hosted by ABC News, which he claims is against him. This despite him already agreeing to an ABC News debate, first with Biden and then again with Harris.
But in another sign of the changed dynamics of the race, the Harris campaign is now the one haggling over its terms, arguing that the candidates’ microphones should stay on throughout the debate. That’s a change from Biden’s position. He opposed hot mics and made that a condition of his initial offer for debates. In the overall scheme of things, it’s a small point of gamesmanship, but it’s one where Harris is being more aggressive than Biden was, suggests she’s happy to joust with Trump’s attempts to talk over her, and generally puts the onus on Trump to respond and parry her demands.
In another overt sign of Trump’s campaign being on its heels, Trump himself is increasing the pace of his own campaigning, his campaign staff told the WSJ: “Advisers to Trump, who are bracing for Harris to enjoy a postconvention boost in polls, say he will be more active on the campaign trail after setting a modest pace when President Biden was still in the race.”
I’d take a wait-and-see approach to how much more effort Trump actually expends campaigning. Believe it when you see it, especially in light of this reporting from the WSJ in the same story: “In a shift, more of the events Trump’s campaign is eyeing are smaller in scale, which saves money, but they also are designed to keep Trump more focused on a given topic, a constant struggle.”
If rebooting the Trump campaign requires keeping him “on topic,” it makes me skeptical how real the reboot really is. It’s going to be a long road to November for the Trump campaign, stuck with a candidate who may be chronically trailing in race, outshone by a mixed-race woman, and facing the prospect of not just losing but of real prison time when it’s all said and done.
RFK Jr. Is The MAGA Flavor Of The Week
The weird, narcissistic, and pointless presidential campaign of RFK Jr. ended Friday the only way it really could, with an endorsement of Donald Trump. Despite (or maybe because of) all his baggage – anti-vax, pro-bear-roadkill, etc – RFK Jr. is now the flavor of the week in MAGA Land, with Trump going so far as to retweet a post referring to a Trump-Kennedy “ticket.” Poor JD Vance.
2024 Ephemera
Harris $$$: The Harris campaign raised $82 million during the Democratic convention, bringing its total haul since she became the presumptive nominee to $540 million, the campaign reported.
D’oh: Trump event at wall Obama built highlights an unkept promise
The Colorado Republican Party voted to oust its controversial chairman, Dave Williams who was elected just last year. Williams, among other things, had vilified the LGBTQ community, including calling for the burning of all Pride flags.
About That Rejected Arkansas Abortion Rights Referendum …
Former Antonin Scalia clerk Adam Unikowsky takes a closer look at last week’s decision by the Arkansas Supreme Court to reject an abortion-rights ballot initiative, ostensibly because the sponsors failed to dot their i’s and crosses their t’s. Unikowsky’s provocative title gives you a sense of where he’s headed: “They didn’t submit a photocopy that wasn’t required.”
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
In another indication of the Supreme Court’s degraded and vague firearms’ jurisprudence, a federal judge in Kansas last week ruled that a longstanding ban on machine guns violates the Second Amendment, dismissing machine gun possession charges against a criminal defendant.
Quote Of The Day
After over a year in this job, I cannot understand Putin’s hold on Trump.
Former Trump National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, recalling in his new memoir what he once confided to his wife
Trump Prosecution Watch
Mar-a-Lago case: Special Counsel Jack Smith’s appeal brief is due Tuesday at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, where he’s seeking to get Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of the case overturned. Cannon dismissed it on the grounds that Smith was unlawfully appointed as special counsel.
Jan. 6 case: Friday is the deadline for Smith and Trump to submit a joint status report to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan with a proposed pretrial schedule to resolve, among other things, the impact of the Supreme Court’s horrendous presidential immunity decision.
Virus Lives Out Fauci Revenge Fantasy
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the U.S. response to the COVID pandemic and retired after nearly 40 years as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is recovering at home after being hospitalized with a West Nile virus infection that he most likely acquired from a mosquito bite in his D.C. backyard. Fauci, 83, is expected to make a full recovery.
See Ya In 2025!
The United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket with Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft launches from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on June 5, 2024. Boeing launched its very first astronauts bound for the International Space Station aboard a Starliner capsule, which joins a select club of spacecraft to carry humans beyond Earth. (Photo by Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo / AFP) (Photo by MIGUEL J. RODRIGUEZ CARRILLO/AFP via Getty Images)
The two American astronauts stranded aboard the International Space Station will not use the janky Boeing Starliner that got them there to return to earth. Instead, the Boeing craft will return autonomously next month, and the astronauts will wait until next year for a SpaceX craft to arrive and ferry them back home, NASA announced over the weekend.
Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore arrived at the ISS in June on a planned eight-day mission that will now stretch some eight months until the SpaceX Dragon is scheduled to return in February.
This morning on Twitter, Tim Murtaugh, a former Trump campaign spokesman, concluded a tweet attacking Harris by writing: “Her whole vacant message sounds like it’s from a party that’s out of power. But they’re her messes.” Through the spittle and frustration you can see him making a point which quite understandably has Trump’s campaign angry and bewildered. Harris has made Trump into the incumbent with her as the challenger running on a campaign message to turn the page. Whether this is fair or true or any number of other descriptors you might come up with, there’s little doubt that it is an accurate description of the campaign we are in the midst of. The Trump campaign itself is telling us this, almost in spite of itself. And it’s worth taking a moment to consider how exactly this manages to be the case. Since Harris is not only a member of the incumbent party. She’s literally the incumbent Vice President.
I can’t explain it entirely myself because I haven’t been able to completely understand it. But I can point to several key parts of the puzzle.
What remains most striking about this week’s Democratic convention is that they pulled it off despite switching presumptive nominees four weeks before it started.
By any measure, it was a competent and well-run convention that kept the focus on the nominee and the election ahead while catalyzing the energy and enthusiasm of the party base. But by the measure of what they were up against with a last-minute candidate change, it was an extraordinary tableau, one without any real historical parallel. Nothing remotely like this has happened before in the modern TV-era of politics. Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal in 1968 was months before the (cataclysmic) Democratic convention.
But there’s another level of finesse and derring-do here by convention organizers, the Harris campaign, and the party itself. There’s a cost to being a coalition party. Decision making is often collaborative and diffuse and therefore slow. The party is structured to disperse power and influence, in marked contrast to the very top-down GOP. If the Republican Party is run like a military unit or a corporation, the Democratic Party is run like a church bake sale committee.
That makes any change of direction, unexpected difficulties, or even basic logistical problems hard to address quickly and decisively. There are no quick turns in Democratic politics. But despite all of those structural, cultural, and temperamental obstacles, they defied the odds and pulled it off.
Must Watch
If you watch only one portion of Kamala Harris’ acceptance speech, make it this one:
Harris: In many ways Donald Trump is an unserious man, but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious…he tried to throw away your votes. When he failed, he sent an armed mob to the Capitol where they assaulted law enforcement officers pic.twitter.com/muKQlUGMfe
In another section, she explicitly affirmed “America’s fundamental principles, from the rule of law to free and fair elections to the peaceful transfer of power.”
Best Line Of The Night
Kamala Harris: “Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable because he wants to be an autocrat himself.”
Josh Marshall: “I doubt her advisors and press people thought it could have gone much better. … The most telling comments were those from Republican commentators who couldn’t find their way around saying that it was a strong speech before, of course, reassuring listeners that Harris is obviously terrible and they agree with her about nothing.”
Susan Glasser: “In a speech that ran close to forty minutes, Harris more than met the moment, offering her rejuvenated party a vision for winning in 2024 that was pragmatic enough to sound possible and inspiring enough to mark the address as the most consequential of her career.”
John Harwood: “Trump has taken Republicans so far off the deep end as to leave the American mainstream wide open Harris and Democrats spent this effective convention claiming it – on broadly-shared values, on decency, on love of country.”
The rampant rumor that a special guest was scheduled for a supposedly empty 15-minute block on the last night of the Democratic convention took on a life of its own. In the end, there was no special guest. No Beyoncé. No Taylor Swift. No George W. Bush. No Melania Trump. (Okay, I made up that last one.) Here’s one effort to find the origin of the rumor, but it’s not really clear where it came from or why TMZ thought it had confirmation.
Chicago 2024 Was Not Chicago 1968
Despite considerable handwringing internally among Democrats and anticipatory media coverage for months ahead of time, Chicago did not collapse into the chaos of violent protests and civil unrest during the Democratic convention. The pro-Palestinian protestors who did show up came in fewer numbers than they had hoped for and remained mostly peaceful.
Trump Tries To Counter-Program Harris Speech
A very agitated Donald Trump spent Harris’ acceptance speech furiously posting random outbursts to social media then called into friendly TV networks to give his own meandering reviews of his opponent’s performance.
On The Trail
Good Riddance: RFK Jr. is expected to end his presidential campaign in Arizona today, with the expectation that he will endorse Trump. In related news, Trump will have a “special guest” at his Friday rally in Glendale.
Like A Buddy Comedy: Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. lobbied RFK Jr. to drop out and endorse Trump
Georgia On His Mind: Groveling Trump crawls back to Gov. Brian Kemp (R).
2024 Ephemera
Fun Fact: More people donated to the Harris campaign in its first 10 days than in the entire 15 months of the Biden campaign.
Lessons Learned? Democratic pollsters have a warning about Kamala Harris’ lead.
SCOTUS Muddies Voting Requiements In Arizona
In a mixed-bag ruling, a divided Supreme Court allowed some parts of Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship requirements in the voting realm to remain and blocked others:
The Supreme Court left in place a lower court’s ruling that barred enforcement of the law that required voters to document their US citizenship to vote in this year’s presidential election, but it allowed the state to enforce a requirement that would-be voters document their citizenship before registering to vote using a state registration form.
In a partial win for Republicans, in other words, proof of citizenship will be required for new voters in some circumstances. Voters who cannot document their citizenship status will still be allowed to register using a federal form.
Abortion Watch
The Arkansas Supreme Court has ruled 4-3 that an abortion-rights ballot initiative failed to follow the required procedures to make it on the November ballot, leading to some preening by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R).
A special TPM addendum: The case was brought by state Attorney General Tim Griffin, whose name should ring a bell. Way back when, Griffin was among the first of the Bush II loyalists — he’d been a White House aide to Karl Rove — to be installed as a U.S. attorney in the 2006-07 U.S. attorney scandal that led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.
Iceland Is At It Again
REYKJANES, ICELAND – AUGUST 22: (—-EDITORIAL USE ONLY MANDATORY CREDIT – ‘ ALMANNAVARNADEILD (ICELAND CIVIL DEFENSE) / HANDOUT’ – NO MARKETING NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS – DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS—-) An aerial view of Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula volcanic eruption as it has seen its sixth eruption since December 2023, with lava spewing from a new fissure as seismic activity continues, according to press reports, at Sundhnukur in Reykjanes peninsula, Iceland on August 22, 2024. Reykjanes Peninsula experienced the eruption late Thursday night, following a series of earthquakes, the largest recorded at a magnitude of 4.The eruption began at 9:26 p.m. local time, with lava bursting from a fissure that initially measured 1.4 kilometers (nearly 0.9 miles) but quickly extended to 3.9 kilometers (over 2.42 miles) within 40 minutes, according to the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO). (Photo by Almannavarnadeild/Anadolu via Getty Images)
A new four-kilometer long fissure unzipped Thursday on Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula, unleashing effusive lava flows in the same general area as the series of eruptions that have occurred since December. The bulk of the lava is flowing away from the evacuated town of Grindavik.
Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz has developed a reputation as a jolly man, one who appears to love life and family. He is also, we now know, a man who loves balloons.
The final night of the DNC was capped by a speech from Vice President Kamala Harris and a celebratory balloon drop. The former teacher and high school football coach seemed to enjoy the whimsical moment, batting balloons while smiling from ear to ear.
Pure joy is Walz amongst hundreds of falling balloons at the DNC. See for yourself:
Tim Walz enjoying the balloon drop
(Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)
Walz laughs as balloons fall
(Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)
Walz awaits the falling balloons
(Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Walz takes in the moment, and the balloons
(Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)
Tim Walz and Harris’ great-niece play with balloons
(Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)
Walz celebrating amongst the balloons
(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Tim and Gwen Walz in the falling balloons
(Photo by Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Walz revels in this epic balloon moment
(Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)
Walz waves to the crowd surrounded by balloons
(Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Tim Walz loving the balloon stage
(Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Walz enjoying his moment in the balloons
(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Walz celebrates surrounded by balloons
(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Walz waves to the crowd from the balloon stage
(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Walz waiting to see if more balloons will be dropped
(Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Walz takes in the sight of the balloons and the crowd at the final night of the DNC 2024
Headlining speaker Vice President Kamala Harris entered the packed arena Thursday night to deafening applause and cheers of “Kamala.” The chants and cheers of jubilance were so loud that Harris was not able to start her speech for several minutes.
On the fourth and final night of the Democratic National Convention, the vice president officially accepted her nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate for the 2024 election and delivered her much anticipated remarks — not just to Democratic voters in the room and at home, but to Republicans, Independents and the undecideds.
“I know there are people of various political views watching tonight. And I want you to know: I promise to be a president for all Americans,” Harris said. “You can always trust me to put country above party and self. To hold sacred America’s fundamental principles from the rule of law, to free and fair elections, to the peaceful transfer of power.”
