A Mandate From Above

Blessed By A Bullet?

Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕

Does almost getting killed make you a leader? That’s what Tucker Carlson suggested on Thursday night at the RNC, where he distilled what many other speakers were suggesting into a simple formula: Trump survived his assassination attempt thanks to “divine intervention,” and that, in turn, anointed him “leader.”

In one sense, it’s a vindication of political violence, but not in the way that we usually think about it. Carlson and Trump weren’t giving approval to the idea that it’s okay to use violence to suppress your political opponents. Rather, they were drawing on the idea that, in this sense, violence is what granted Trump legitimacy. Surviving the assassination attempt, in this telling, was not just a moment of divine intervention but a coronation. That was the moment where it was revealed that Trump has a mandate from above to lead.

It sounds crazy, but this is very literally what Carlson and others were saying at the RNC on Thursday night. To find the agenda that this allows, however, you have to look to the night before, when vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) spoke.

Vance used his speech to lay the rhetorical groundwork for some of Trump’s most transformative policies, including banning birthright citizenship and dramatically restricting legal immigration. To do that, Vance tried to define America in a way that would accommodate those policies.

“But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation,” he said.

It’s a fancy way of both closing the door to new immigration, and of rejecting a core feature of the melting pot that characterized America’s development: that immigrants don’t only assimilate, but they bring elements of their own cultures and values into the country, thereby helping to shape a common culture.

Here’s what else TPM has on tap this weekend:

• Kate Riga soothes our collective anxiety. 
• Hunter Walker gives us a post-mortem on the phenomenon that hung over the RNC like thick smoke: Jan. 6.
• Khaya Himmelman weighs in on the ways in which the myth of non-citizen voting reared its head at the Republican convention this week. 
• Emine Yücel reacts to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s belief in an American flag angel that supposedly protected Donald Trump during the shooting.

Let’s dig in.

— Josh Kovensky & Nicole Lafond

Unending Unprecedented Times

If you’re anything like me, you’re utterly, inarticulately, down-to-the-bone exhausted right now.

I was rocked to my core by President Joe Biden’s historically awful debate performance and its massive ramifications. I was still numb when the Supreme Court handed down its sea change of an immunity decision just days later. By the time Donald Trump was nearly assassinated two weeks later, nothing felt real to me anymore. My emotions had curled up into some kind of shock-proof armadillo ball.

The January 6 attack was the last time I felt this sense of surreality, that the events in our politics were too shocking, too upsetting to fully process, leaving me to push on cloaked in a cloud of free-floating anxiety.

It can’t stay like this forever. At the very least, the fever pitch over Biden’s candidacy — the source of intense stress and anguish for most on the left and all who oppose Trump — will die down when that question is answered, either by his stepping aside or by convention deadlines. Our baseline is still an election year news environment, but it won’t have the minute-by-minute fluctuations about what Biden or the people around him may be thinking or doing or saying.

There are months to go until the election. As Trump’s keynote speech at the convention proved, some of the overweening right-wing confidence is unjustified, or at least preemptive; he continues to be a weak candidate with massive and exploitable flaws, if Democrats can get their house in order enough to exploit them.

These past three weeks have been some of the hardest for anti-Trump forces since he came on the scene. But there are miles to go. Unless you predicted everything that happened in the past 23 days (and if you did, shoot me an email, or maybe just set up shop over a big crack in a Delphic cave), there’s no reason to assume you know how this ends.

— Kate Riga

The J6 Convention

The final night of the Republican National Convention on Thursday featured a speech from former President Donald Trump, who is, of course, the single biggest promoter of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. He is also the one who called his supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol and “fight like hell” based on those lies as his loss in that race was being certified on Jan. 6, 2021. We all know what happened next. 

While it’s not surprising that the convention for a candidate and party who masterminded the efforts to overturn the last election would feature many people who participated in different aspects of the plot, it’s still noteworthy. Courage For America, a group that is dedicated to taking on what it describes as the “extremist” GOP House majority and highlighting risks to the next electoral certification, issued a press statement pointing out multiple people involved in the RNC who were in the crowds outside the Capitol as it was stormed on Jan. 6 or part of the political efforts to reverse Trump’s loss. 

The CFA list included the deputy policy director of the RNC platform committee, Ed Martin who the group said “was in the mob outside the Capitol on Jan. 6.”

“At least three other people photographed in that mob are serving as delegates,” the CFA press release said. “So are five people who previously served as alternate electors, including four who have been charged with fraud, forgery and conspiracy.”

CFA specifically pointed out the presence of Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald, who seconded Trump’s formal nomination and helped lead an effort to organize a slate of pro-Trump alternate electors in his home state. The group also noted Wyoming state senator Bob Ide, who it said “was photographed on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, reaching the scaffolding set up for the inauguration.”

The attempted assassination of Trump last Saturday put the spotlight on rising political violence in this country. CFA’s statement about the RNC “platforming Jan. 6 insurrectionists” included a remarks from Michael Fanone, a former D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer who was injured defending the Capitol when the violence broke out. He stressed that this could be a chance to walk away from extremism, but argued the RNC’s choice of participants shows Trump’s party is headed in an entirely different direction. 

“What happened on January 6th almost cost me my life and brought our democracy to the brink,” Fanone said. “This is a moment to come together and oppose those who call for violence in politics, but the RNC’s decision to give a platform to the same people who rioted against our democracy on January 6th does the opposite.”

— Hunter Walker

The Myth of Non Citizen Voting Becomes RNC Talking Point

The myth of noncitizen voting was, unsurprisingly, a big topic for speakers at the RNC this week. Republicans have been perpetuating the false narrative that non-citizens are illegally voting in our elections on behalf of Joe Biden for months now, but there is simply no evidence to suggest this is happening. It’s illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections.

“Democrats cynically decided they wanted votes from illegals more than they wanted to protect our children,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said during the RNC this week.

Arizona Senate candidate and failed GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake similarly claimed at the convention that Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego “voted to let the millions of people who poured into our country cast a ballot in this upcoming election.”

And House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) claimed at another point during the convention that: “Biden and Harris want illegals to vote now that they’ve opened up the border.”

The narrative, as TPM has reported, has increasingly become an area of fixation for Republicans who are preparing for ways to potentially cry voter fraud or challenge the election results in November. 

In May, Republican members of Congress promoted a redundant piece of legislation, known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would’ve outlawed non-citizens from voting in federal elections – something that is already illegal. 

Eliza Sweren-Becker, senior counsel in the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, in a previous interview with TPM, described the myth of non citizens voting in elections as “yet another misrepresentation and falsehood about the integrity of elections that appears intended to spread mistrust in our election systems.”

— Khaya Himmelman

Words Of Wisdom

“I believe we all witnessed a miracle. You know, before it happened, the flag above got blown in the wind and it got tied into literally what looked like an angel … It was like an angel coming down.”

That’s MAGA loyalist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) during an interview she gave at the RNC commenting on the attempted assassination of Trump during a Saturday afternoon campaign rally in western Pennsylvania.

The conspiracy theory-loving congresswoman is known to exaggerate and, well, lie. But an American flag angel that appeared before the shooting to protect Trump from a gunman … please let’s be real here.

Don’t get me wrong, she is not the only MAGA ally who has tried to cast Trump as divine and appointed by God in the wake of the shooting. In fact, the list of Republicans who leaned into that image at the RNC is not short. 

— Emine Yücel