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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.
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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Welcome To All The New Morning Memo Readers!
We added several hundred new Morning Memo subscribers in July. Welcome, it’s great to have you here!
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The goal is to try to break the chaos down into constituent parts, find the common patterns that make seemingly disparate developments part of a coherent whole, and narrate through the turmoil in a way that makes things a little less chaotic.
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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”We Need Your Help
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Vance: Kamala Sucker Punched Us and It Was So Not Fair
We’ve talked a lot recently about presidential politics as a series of performances of power. When I coined the phrase “bitch-slap politics” (later revised to “dominance politics”) in 2004, it was in reference to the “swift boat” campaign George W. Bush mobilized against John Kerry. In charge of the campaign was Donald Trump’s current co-campaign head, Chris LaCivita. The truth of those attacks weren’t the point. They were demonstrations of power. Bush was powerful because he could hit Kerry in a demeaning and vicious way and he would not or could not defend himself. This was an element of American political culture which Trump, a decade later, placed at the center of American political culture.
It was in this context that I saw the news, first reported by the Post, that JD Vance, at a private fundraiser, referred to the candidate switch as a “sucker punch.”