They’re All My Graves, Son

We’ve all been living with Trump for eight years now. He’s done so much, and so much has been written about him, that it’s hard to be surprised. For a writer, it’s hard to find anything new to say: we all know who he is, his appeal and how he operates are, by now, extremely familiar. 

But there are ways in which the cult of personality that he’s built around himself manifests that continue to at least provide a kick in the ribs. Take two closely related Trump topics: his plans to deploy the military domestically if he’s elected in November, and his staffer’s shoving of an Arlington National Cemetery staff member.

These may seem like different events, but I think that they shock people for the same reason: they evince a belief that the military directly belongs to Trump. If you’re against that, or in favor of rules that transcend his personality, as the cemetery staffer apparently was, you’re immediately an enemy. 

Take the planning around invoking the Insurrection Act. That’s partly coming from an apparent belief that Trump should have invoked the act in summer 2020, but was fooled into not doing so. It sparked a sense of regret, not because Trump believed that using the military to quell the protests was the correct public policy decision, but because he regarded the protests themselves as an affront to his authority. It made him “look bad,” reporting at the time suggested. 

It’s the same dynamic with the Arlington National Cemetery staffer. She didn’t have to have anything against Trump personally; she understood and tried to enforce the law barring political events at military cemeteries. But that, too, was an affront, causing the bizarre incident and the Trump campaign’s response: calling the woman mentally ill and a “disgrace.” 

In some ways, it reminds me of a famous anecdote about Lyndon B. Johnson. As LBJ was preparing to leave on a trip, he walked by a long line of helicopters. A military escort informed the President on which one he was to leave: “Mr. President, your helicopter is this way.” To which LBJ replied: “They’re all my helicopters, son.”

That may be apocryphal, and the analogy is limited: LBJ was President, and the humor from the anecdote comes from the fact that everyone recognizes, on some level, that an individual President’s ego is eclipsed by the size of the U.S. government. With Trump, we don’t have that recognition. It’s his rules and his graveyard.

— Josh Kovensky

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

• Hunter Walker with a scintillating yarn about Ella Emhoff and her (maybe) defunct knitting club.
• Khaya Himmelman updates us on all the latest “mess” surrounding the Georgia Election Board and its new rules — which function as, essentially, catnip for election deniers.
• Emine Yücel checks in on House Republicans, who are, yet again, hijacking typical legislating processes and procedures to do Donald Trump’s bidding.
• Emine Yücel also unpacks Trump’s doubling down on the whole “stable genius” thing.

— Nicole Lafond

Ella Emhoff Has Gone Underground

America’s Second Daughter is shutting down her knitting club until she can figure out what is going on. 

Ella Emhoff, the stepdaughter of Vice President Kamala Harris, announced on Instagram on Thursday that she is going to halt her “Soft Hands Knit Club” events. While Emhoff did not explicitly attribute the decision to the fact that Harris is now the Democratic nominee for president, her announcement obliquely referred to, well, things getting a little weird for her lately. 

“I just wanted to quickly come talk about Knit Club and address how it’s moving forward. Unfortunately, with everything going on right now, I’m not able to conduct them just to protect myself and other club members,” Emhoff said. “The smartest thing is to just hold off until things calm down.”

Emhoff, a fashion model and “textile artist” based in Bushwick, Brooklyn has attracted attention for her style since the 2021 inauguration when she accompanied Harris and her father, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff in a coat from the brand Miu Miu and a dress made by an indie designer. Since then, fashion magazines have breathlessly tracked Emhoff as she walked runways and appeared on red carpets including the Met Gala. 

The coverage helped Emhoff secure a Hollywood talent agent, but it didn’t stop her from hosting small knitting events through her club at locations around New York City as recently as last month. The sessions featured Emhoff — whose own work includes elaborate knitted portraits and crocheted ornaments like the one she wore to the DNC earlier this month — guiding attendees on their own projects. According to a Thrillist writeup of the experience, it was “cloaked in a surprising warmth” and did not feature a noticeable Secret Service presence. 

All of that apparently changed when President Joe Biden abandoned his re-election bid and Harris took over the ticket. With her stepmother even more in the spotlight, Emhoff has faced unhinged attacks from far right media figures including Tucker Carlson, racist pseudo intellectual Richard Hanania, and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, among others. Emhoff has also stood up for her family and memorably shot back after Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance called Harris “childless.”

While Emhoff hasn’t let the needling get to her, the higher profile, pressure, and presumably security requirements have apparently made holding knitting sessions in natural wine bars and chic hotels untenable. Emhoff didn’t respond to questions from TPM about whether she might host an event on Zoom or, if her stepmother wins, in the White House. However, in her Instagram announcement, Emhoff made clear that she will not be unspooled. 

“I will be back, back to knitting,” she said, before clarifying that she meant she would return to “teaching knitting.”

“I’m still knitting,” Emhoff said.  

— Hunter Walker

Everything You Need To Know About The ‘Mess’ That Is Georgia’s New Election Board

A lot has happened in recent days surrounding the Georgia State Election Board and its new, potentially election subverting rules, which Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger described as a “mess” this week. Here’s everything you need to know. 

Earlier this month, the Trump-endorsed Georgia State Election Board implemented two new rules that give more power to election deniers to potentially delay election certification in the state based on false voter fraud claims. 

The first rule passed on August 6 and it gives the board the power to not certify election results until after a “reasonable inquiry” into any discrepancies in the voting process at the county level has been conducted by election officials. The rule, however, is vague, and never actually defines what constitutes a “reasonable inquiry.” Experts told TPM that the vagueness is deliberate. 

“It has potential to allow those election deniers who have made it onto seats on election boards in our state to hold up a perfectly viable election to hold that up and to keep it from moving forward as pace as it should,” Stephanie Jackson Ali, policy director of the nonpartisan New Georgia Project previously told TPM.

The second rule, which passed on August 19, gives election board members the power to “examine all election-related documentation before certifying the results.” The rule also notes that in the event of a discrepancy between the ballot count and the number of voters, the board must investigate the discrepancy prior to certifying election results. 

This rule, too, experts told TPM, gives election deniers another opportunity to hold back the certification process with false claims of irregularities or voter fraud.

The changes were immediately met with pushback from Democrats and Republicans alike. 

Raffensperger called the rules an “effort to impose new rule making,” and more recently on Wednesday, described the board as a whole as a “mess.”

 He also said this about the three Trump-endorsed GOP board members: “There’s three folks there that are living in the past,” per the Gwinnett Daily Post. 

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s office, at the urging of Democratic lawmakers, asked the attorney general this week for guidance on whether or not he can remove members of the state election board, according to The Atlanta Journal Constitution.  

The Democratic National Committee, the Georgia Democratic Party and Democratic members of several election boards also filed a lawsuit in Fulton County on Monday, to block enforcement of the rules. 

“According to their drafters, these rules rest on the assumption that certification of election results by a county board is discretionary and subject to free-ranging inquiry that may delay certification or foreclose it entirely,” the lawsuit reads. “But that is not the law in Georgia. Rather, election officials have a non-discretionary duty to certify results by 5 p.m. six days after election day. Allegations of fraud or election misconduct are then resolved by the courts in properly filed challenges, not by county boards in the counting process.”

— Khaya Himmelman

MAGA Republicans Hijack Ordinary Legislating To Solve Non-Existent Problems

Last year before the lengthy August recess, far-right House Republicans turned ordinarily uneventful appropriations committee meetings into battles over their party’s manufactured culture wars and MAGA grievances.

They stuffed bad faith amendments — attacking anything they like to classify as “woke” — into a handful of different bills, claiming they wanted to cut government spending to pre-COVID levels. Instead they ended up writing a bunch of bills that had no chance of passing a Democratic-controlled Senate, slowing down the appropriations process and risking a potential government shutdown.

Well it seems this year might not be so different. 

With another potential shutdown looming, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agree that a continuing resolution will be necessary to keep the government funded beyond Sept. 30.

And now MAGA Republicans are hoping to attach a bill that would make it illegal for people who are not U.S. citizens to vote in federal elections to the potential stopgap.

“I can verify for you that the SAVE Act is a big part of this conversation,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said during a press call. “And it is not just the Freedom Caucus — it is members across the conference who share the same concern that we do about this. And we believe it’s one of the — perhaps the most urgent issue, the most imminent threat facing the country, is the integrity of this election cycle.”

It is, of course, already illegal for non-citizens to vote in state, federal and even most local elections. And states themselves have measures in place to protect their elections from non-citizen voting, including severe penalties for doing so, like the risk of deportation.
But still, reminiscent of the Big Lie, Donald Trump and his MAGA allies are using their new obsession with supposedly curbing alleged non-citizens voting to stoke fears about election fraud in case the former president loses his third bid for the White House in the fall.

— Emine Yücel

Words Of Wisdom

“I don’t like when people call me stupid. I had great heritage, an uncle who was a great, great genius and a father who was a genius. Everybody…We have a lot of geniuses.”

That’s former President Donald Trump during a Delaware, Ohio rally talking about, in so many words, how he is a “very stable genius.” A true throwback. Remember this moment? Or this one?

It’s good to know Trump is still obsessing over questions about his mental fitness to serve as President — ones that originally started when Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury” got published in 2018.

The recent (and some returning) obsessions with crowd sizes, windmills (and bacon?), and the supposed flood of immigrants coming into the U.S. from jails, prisons, insane asylums and mental institutions and taking “Black jobs” is well … not helping his case. Just saying.

— Emine Yücel