As Donald Trump and his allies struggle to hit presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris with anything of substance, MAGA world is resurrecting its fixation on the myth of non-citizen voting.
Continue reading “MAGA Resurrects Most Vile Non-Citizen Voting Hysteria As It Flails In Attacking Harris”Are You on Team ‘Weird’?
In case you hadn’t noticed, over the course of the first week of the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, when it was hard to know what was real or what was happening, “weird” suddenly became a central part of the story. If this hasn’t locked on your radar yet, this is the gist: It’s hard to know precisely where it started, but Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota has gotten the most attention for pushing and then amplifying it. Quite simply, he said, guys like Trump and Vance are just “weird.” And along with the dominating freight train of Kamala Week One, that message, that identification, seemed to connect in ways that “authoritarian” and “extremist” and “threat to democracy” never quite did. JD Vance is a big supporter of “menstrual surveillance,” he’s got this weird snarling anger at women with no children. It may be bad and wrong, but everyone gets that its just … well, weird.
And look, JD Vance is super weird. But what’s been most interesting to me is that over the last handful of days I’ve had several friends reach out to me and ask, “Where are you on ‘weird’?”
They don’t feel the need for any additional explanation. And they’re right.
Continue reading “Are You on Team ‘Weird’?”Trump Promises 2024 Is The Last Time We’ll Have To Vote … Wait, Wut?
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
How Much More Warning Does Anyone Need?
In his speech Friday to the Christian Right “Believers Summit” in West Palm Beach, hosted by Turning Point Action, former President Donald Trump exhorted the audience of religious believers to vote in November because the stakes are so high but quickly reassured them that this will be the last time they will have to vote:
Trump didn’t merely veer into weird, off-the-cuff remark that can be waved away as idle ramblings. This has been a line he’s used repeatedly in recent speeches. There were still some half-hearted efforts to parse the line into meaninglessness, such as this helpless shrug from the WaPo:
Democrats and others interpreted the comments as signaling how a second Trump presidency would be run, a reminder that he previously said he would not be a dictator upon returning to office “except for Day One.” …
The Trump campaign, however, says the comments, made at the event hosted by the conservative group Turning Point Action, were about how Trump would unite the country.
On the one hand … on the other hand … etc.
When a former president who tried to stay in office via an auto-coup is now the frontrunner to return to that office and is assuring his most diehard supporters that they only have to make the effort to vote one last time, you should take that as the clarion call it is. No excuses.
On High Alert
WaPo: As Harris steps up to face Trump, far-right attacks follow
More From The JD Vance Oppo Files
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B: Inside the powerful Peter Thiel network that anointed JD Vance
Exhibit C:
2024 Ephemera
The reordered presidential race is still settling out, but it’s safe to say that Kamala Harris has already avoided the worst of the plausible scenarios: an immediate widening of the gap into a hard-to-overcome deficit to Trump. On balance, the polls so far are showing her at least holding her own and in several polls narrowing the gap with Trump nationwide.
- Kamala Harris’ campaign raised more than $200 million in its first week.
- Bernie is bargaining in return for his endorsement of Harris.
- Will Harris help down-ballot Dems?
- WSJ poll: Trump leads Harris 49%-47% among registered voters nationwide, a smaller gap than the six-point lead the previous found that Trump had over Biden before he withdrew from the race.
Biden Goes Public With SCOTUS Reform Proposal
With an op-ed in the Washington Post and a speech at the LBJ library in Austin commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, President Biden is rolling out his proposal for Supreme Court reform today. His proposal includes 18-year term limits for the justices and a constitutional amendment to reverse the high court’s ruling on presidential immunity.
Trump Shooting Update
- FBI confirms bullet or bullet fragment struck Trump’s ear.
- NYT: Gunman at Trump Rally Was Often a Step Ahead of the Secret Service
- WaPo: Trump team complained they were not told of suspicious-person reports before shooting
Power Projection
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Trump’s Projection Of Strength After Assassination Attempt Borrows From Authoritarian Playbook
DOJ Settles With Strzok And Page
Former senior FBI special agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page will receive $1.2 million and $800,000 respectively in a settlement with the Justice Department of their claims that their text private messages were leaked in violation of their privacy rights. The revelation of the texts critical of Donald Trump and of the pair’s extramarital affair ended their FBI careers. Both had been part of the separate investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election and Hillary Clinton’s email server. Strzok continues to pursue a related claim that his firing was a violation of his free speech and due process rights.
Mark Meadows Goes To SCOTUS In Georgia RICO Case
Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is now asking the Supreme Court to move the Georgia RICO case against him from state to federal court.
Good Read
Rolling Stone talks with the CIA analyst who confirmed Russian meddling in the 2016 election to benefit Donald Trump:
The lead author of the CIA report that would haunt Trump’s presidency wasn’t a Hillary Clinton partisan or a ringer for the CIA leadership’s personal preferences, as MAGA conspiracy theorists have claimed. He doesn’t have a book to sell, he’s not running for office, and you won’t find him in a cable news greenroom.
I Had No Idea The Number Was This Large
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s long-running stunt of bussing migrants to Democratic-controlled cities has now transported nearly 120,000 people over the last two years.
Iowa’s Abortion Ban Takes Effect Today
A new six-week abortion ban, down from the previous 22-week ban, goes into effect today in Iowa, after the state Supreme Court cleared the way for the law last month.
Still Puzzling Over SCOTUS’ Immunity Decision
The NYT’s Adam Liptak takes a stab at the comparing the worst elements of the Supreme Court’s immunity decision with everything the conservative justices claimed as recently as Dobbs were the most egregious overreaches of Roe v. Wade.
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Trump’s Projection Of Strength After Assassination Attempt Borrows From Authoritarian Playbook
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
In the days since the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, supporters of the former president have used the incident to project an image of power.
Continue reading “Trump’s Projection Of Strength After Assassination Attempt Borrows From Authoritarian Playbook”JD Vance, Awkward and Discomfiting Ragelord
One thing that has driven JD Vance’s rising unpopularity is his crusade against people without children. He’s proposed punitive tax policies to punish people who do these “bad” things like not having children and he’s even suggested diluting the voting rights of non-parents.
The odd thing about the tax policy side of this is that the U.S. tax code is actually filled with tax advantages and subsidies for people with kids. And generally speaking no one has much problem with that. There are dependent deductions, a refundable child tax credit, even something as obvious as public schools. Public schools are generally funded by property taxes. And almost everyone pays those, childful and childless alike, either directly or indirectly. Lots of people have kids and U.S. political culture is pretty pro-kid and pro-family (in the narrow sense of the phrase rather than the right-wing Christian sense). So generally it’s uncontroversial, even something politicians go out of their way to support.
Continue reading “JD Vance, Awkward and Discomfiting Ragelord”Filling The Void
Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕
These past few weeks have been grueling for everyone who cares about politics, and particularly so for TPM’s small-but-mighty staff — lots of late night and weekend work, lots of marathon days followed by more marathon days.
Continue reading “Filling The Void”Thanks, Folks
As we go into the weekend I want to thank everyone who’s contributed so far to this year’s drive for the TPM Journalism Fund. We hit the half way point to our goal of raising $500,000 early yesterday morning. Even though we’ve gotten a lot more experience at holding these drives they remain nerve-wracking. They amount to a collective trust-fall – hopefully – into the arms of the larger TPM community. So it always feels really good, at many different levels, when you’re there for us. If you have had a moment to contribute yet you can click right here. It’s easy and quick.
We’ve always gained quite a few new members recently. Which is wonderful. And we want to welcome all of you. We’re still trying to understand the precise reasons for it.
One reason seems to be our new membership system in itself, by which I mean the software that runs it. As you know, our business is almost entirely based on membership fees. So a smoothly running system to manage memberships in all its dimensions – processing fees, authenticating users, record keeping and user experience – is mission critical. (Neither the old or the new system ever touch or store your credit cards. For that we use the industry-standard security and fulfillment of Stripe dot com.)
Continue reading “Thanks, Folks”Officials Were Prepped For A Dangerous 2024 Election — And That Was Before The Attempted Assassination
For election officials across the country, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, and, less directly, the turnover at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, have brought into stark focus just how tumultuous the election environment has become since the 2020 election.
Continue reading “Officials Were Prepped For A Dangerous 2024 Election — And That Was Before The Attempted Assassination”Some Thoughts on the Harris Momentum Shift
We’ve now had a round of polls of the Harris-Trump race since she became the Democrats’ de facto nominee. All of these polls must be viewed as snapshots in an extremely fluid and unsettled political moment. But we can draw out some early patterns. I averaged all the post-Biden drop-out polls and they come out to Trump up by 4/10ths of one percentage point. That’s about the high water mark that Biden ever got to all year. That average also includes CNN and Times, which have been two of the worst polls for Democrats this year. So the mix of just who has released a poll probably slightly favors Trump.
More interesting to me are the polls out of the swing states, which we’ve already gotten a decent number of. They now show all three Blue Wall states (MI, WI, PA) as ties. Notably, they now show Georgia as a margin of error race, with Harris one or two points back. That’s a major shift. Trump has held a consistent lead of 5 or 6 percentage points there. I only saw one poll each out of Arizona and Nevada and those didn’t show the same shift. Unclear whether that’s unique to these states or whether more polls will show a clearer pattern. The relevant point is that early evidence seems to show Harris significantly growing the map, giving her multiple potential paths to an electoral college win.
Continue reading “Some Thoughts on the Harris Momentum Shift”Turns Out JD Vance Is One Weird Dude Even Without The Sofa Thing
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Pass The Popcorn
Were it not for an assassination attempt and the President dropping his re-election bid, the past two weeks might have featured the meltdown of JD Vance. Even still, there’s reported grumbling in Trumpworld that he picked the wrong guy, especially in light of Kamala Harris being elevated to the top of the Democratic ticket.
Let’s run through some of the fallout:
How Weird Is He?
JD Vance is turning out to be an oppo researcher’s dream:
- There’s his history of demeaning people who don’t have children as deserving of less representation in civil life:
- There’s his call for federal intervention to prevent (Black) women in red states from traveling to blue states for abortions:
- There’s his endorsement of a book co-authored by Jack Posobiec that call progressives “unhumans” and praises the Jan. 6 rioters.
Weird But Not THAT Weird
An online gag that invented a couch-fucking episode in JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy prompted the AP to run and then retract a classic all-time headline: “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.” You will not be surprised to learn that JD Vance and sofas, divans, and couches has turned into a runaway meme.
How’s JD Vance Playing So Far?
2024 Ephemera
- The Obamas announced their endorsement of Kamala Harris.
- New DNC rules effectively give Kamala Harris until Aug. 7 to pick her running mate.
- NYT/Siena poll: Kamala Harris has closed the gap with Donald Trump among likely voters nationally to 48%-47%. In the prior poll earlier this month, when President Biden was still in the race, Trump led him 49%-43%.
- Donald Trump is bailing on the second presidential debate now that Harris is the Democratic nominee.
A Spectacular Catch
Parker Molloy caught WSJ op-ed writer Jason L. Riley playing it both ways in two columns only two weeks apart:
July 9: Kamala Harris Would Be The Best Democratic Choice
July 23: Kamala Harris Isn’t The Change Democrats Need
Nothing matters.
Republicans Hate Voting, Part 632
NYT: How Some States Are Making It Harder to Register Voters
The Fate Of DOJ Under Trump II
A bipartisan group of some 40 former Justice Department officials have endorsed Kamala Harris largely on rule of law grounds.
It’s About Damn Time
Another day, another belated DOJ inspector general report on the politicization of DOJ under Attorney General Bill Barr. This one is bad.
Piecing Together The Trump Assassination Attempt
Yesterday, the NYT had a piece exploring some of the outstanding questions around the projectile that struck former President Trump’s ear, what law enforcement is analyzing, and noting the political context in which it has become a focus of interest.
This morning, the paper published one of its visual investigations assessing audio-video evidence from the scene and concluded that the projectile was likely a bullet: “[A] detailed analysis of bullet trajectories, footage, photos and audio by The New York Times strongly suggests Mr. Trump was grazed by the first of eight bullets fired by the gunman, Thomas Crooks.”
For his part, Trump is hopping mad about the congressional testimony Wednesday of his own appointee as FBI director, in which he said whether it was a bullet or shrapnel remained an outstanding question.
Trump Prosecution Watch
Two new developments of note in the Trump prosecutions:
- Mar-a-Lago case: The 11th Circuit Court Appeals has set a briefing schedule through mid-October for Jack Smith’s appeal of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling that his was unlawfully appointed as special counsel, meaning the appeal (let alone the case itself) will not likely be done by Election Day. Smith could still ask for expedited handling of the appeal.
- Hush money case: Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg filed his opposition to Trump’s effort to overturn his state court conviction using the Supreme Court’s controversial ruling on presidential immunity.
Kagan Lays Down A Marker For SCOTUS Reform
The associate justice suggested publicly that a panel of lower court judges could enforce the Supreme Court’s new ethics code against the justices.
Olympic Sabotage
A three-pronged attack on France’s high-speed rail system crippled train travel on the same day as opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics in Paris.
A Measured Assessment Of Avian Flu
The Atlantic: There Are No Good Options Left With Bird Flu
Largest California Wildfire Of The Year … So Far
A California man is suspected of arson for allegedly pushing a burning car into a gully Wednesday and igniting the Park fire near Chico, which rapidly grew to more than 160,000 acres, making it the largest conflagration in the state so far this year.
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