You Won’t Find Vintage Trump Nostalgia Here

Hello it’s the weekend, this is The Weekender ☕️

As the team and I were covering Donald Trump’s quest for attention disguised as a press conference at Mar-a-Lago this week, I had a moment of déjà vu. Here I was sitting at the same desk I sat at four years ago when we first began working remote during COVID, listening to the same dude with the same brain worms talk about the same stuff: his crowd sizes, how he could put Hillary Clinton in jail, how he’s not going to cut Social Security, how he has a new idea for a policy that would, in fact, do just that.

Even my roommates, who were unemployed and entertained by my daily void screaming during COVID, reacted to the Thursday press conference as they did in 2020 — laughing over my shoulder at the man’s various Trumpisms and new monikers (Gavin Newscum is genuinely inspired, I’ll give him that).

The thing that was different about this week — as opposed to 2020 — is that Trump’s various oddities, racisms and downright lies didn’t put me in the doom spiral it used to; the bad place we in the biz often find ourselves when there’s no bright spot in the news cycle for months and years on end. The new, different energy that the Democratic ticket generated this week was enough to keep me out of the Trump-inspired what-if-we-have-to-do-this-for-another-four-years void that I, my colleagues and, I’m sure, you, fell into after that disastrous debate a few weeks back.

Obviously, my job is to talk to you about what is happening and why it matters right now, not what will happen or what will matter in the future. All I know is that the internet has been a more fun place to coexist the last few weeks than it has been in five-plus years.

But whether Harris becomes our first woman president or Trump pulls off a victory in the fall, TPM will be here to help you navigate the moment, as we navigate it ourselves. And I can promise this: TPM will bring you the news you need to know with a level of awareness and sanity that I don’t really see at other outlets. Part of that is because of what I described above — a big chunk of the TPM team has been around here, doing this, for a while. If we somehow find ourselves facing another Trump White House, it won’t be the first time many of us have reported through that. I’ve been working with many of my colleagues for seven-plus years. That’s because TPM has been a great place to work for a really long time.

Memberships and the TPM Journalism Fund are what makes that kind of longevity and career fulfillment and job security possible. Investing in our team means investing in journalism and journalists who talk about what’s happening from an informed perspective and who won’t feed you Trump attacks or Republican talking points unfiltered. And donating to the fund means we can continue to grow our team and ensure TPM veterans, like me, can stick around and help out for a few more years.

I hope you’ll consider making a contribution.

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

• Kate Riga digs in on the Trump campaign’s failure to recalibrate in the face of a new, younger opponent.
• Josh Kovensky writes on the Bronze Age Pervert and the weirdness of the “new right.”
• Khaya Himmelman reports on the right-wing media and Republicans laying the ground work for the myth of non-citizen voting to be their election denialism shiny object in the fall.
• Emine Yücel reacts to Trump comparing his crowd on Jan. 6 to the crowd that gather for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech.

Let’s dig in.

— Nicole Lafond

Trump Responds To Harris Candidacy With Prolonged Temper Tantrum

For much of this election cycle, the Trump camp — particularly Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles — has been eager to discuss its own brilliance, that this campaign is a grown-up, cleaned-up iteration of previous Trump efforts. 

While the smugness was annoying, they weren’t wrong. The ‘24 campaign against Joe Biden was leagues more disciplined than any Trump had run before. Over a period of years, he pounded the “Biden is old and senile” message unrelentingly, and guess what? It worked. After one major stumble, the incumbent president dropped out of the race. It’s still almost unfathomable. 

But the Trump campaign did its job too well. Biden dropped out early enough to give his VP a fighting chance. And while that outcome was never beyond the realm of possibility, it caught Trump and co. completely flat-footed. Trump spent the first few days of Harris’ candidacy grousing that he’d wasted so much time campaigning against Biden. Even now, he’s on Truth Social writing fanfiction about Biden storming his way back into the nomination. 

Their attacks on Harris are all over the map — she’s not really Black, she’s not really an American citizen, she’s soft on crime, she’s soft on immigrants, she laughs too much — and the campaign has whiplashed from “he’s too liberal” to denigrating Tim Walz’s military service (an old LaCivita standby).

Meanwhile, Trump is raging. His attempts to wrest back attention from the exuberant Harris campaign have been disastrous. 

The Republican nominee seems too stuck on the unfairness of it all to recalibrate his attacks against his new opponents. It’s the problem with being so constantly aggrieved — when you’re always looking backwards, it’s hard to charge ahead.  

— Kate Riga

What Does Bronze Age Pervert Want to Conserve?

I wrote this week about a set of authoritarian, right-wing social media influencers, thinkers, and activists who have become popular in recent years. What they epitomize is often called the “new right,” referring to conservatives who reject small government in favor of solutions aimed at changing the structure of government to advantage themselves, and at using heavy-handed means to reverse social changes that they dislike.

My editor and I spent some time discussing what to call these people. “New right” is ambiguous, and adding “authoritarian” to it only captures part of what makes them so special. The issue isn’t only that they are often explicitly anti-democratic, or that they do mark a break with previous iterations of conservatism. It’s that they’re also very strange, and often intentionally so. One of the main online influencers runs an account called Bronze Age Pervert, offering Nietzsche-inspired advice on politics, masculinity, and culture in barely grammatical koans. Another, similar influencer is named Raw Egg Nationalist – he’s virulently anti-immigrant, and runs a magazine called Man’s World. The current issue features a piece by Noor bin Ladin, a member of a family not known for its wokeness.

It’s true that they’re consciously affecting weirdness, but the more interesting question here is why they’re doing it. If you’re trying to affect oddness, in some sense that’s part of an argument against the status quo. Weirdness differs, by its nature, from the status quo. For these influencers, demonstrating that they’re not ordinary is also a symbol of their opposition to features of our society with which they disagree. In the case of Bronze Age Pervert, that’s our political system and the continual evening out of the gender hierarchy; hence Bronze Age; hence Pervert.

— Josh Kovensky

MAGA Universe Gives Trump Election Denying Datapoints

In preparation for a possible Trump loss in the fall, the MAGA universe is working overtime to create election denial fodder around the false myth of non-citizen voting. In recent months, Republicans —  both the right wing media and lawmakers alike — have perpetuated the baseless narrative that non-citizens have been and will continue to illegally vote in federal elections on behalf of Democrats. 

It is illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, and perhaps more importantly, there is no evidence at all to suggest that this is a problem, or that it has ever even happened en masse in the first place. 

“The biggest single reason not to vote when you’re a non-citizen is that not only is there a serious criminal penalty attached, and not only is there potential for a serious fine attached, but you can be removed from the country,” Justin Levitt, professor of law at Loyola Law School, previously told TPM.

On Wednesday, Breitbart published a story detailing a singular alleged instance of a non-citizen in Minnesota, legally residing in the U.S., receiving a primary ballot in the mail, which according to Breitbart, “showcases the failures of Minnesota’s citizenship verification procedures, or apparent lack thereof.”

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley, responding to the story in a press release, said: “We will take every step necessary to ensure that the failures in the system are brought to light and immediately resolved. Non-citizen voting is illegal across America, and that must be enforced at every turn.”

Earlier this month, Donald Trump Jr., in an opinion piece for Fox News, wrote about how “Democrats have a clear plan to allow non-citizen voting and (the) Trump campaign is fighting it.” Democrats, he added, are “embracing non citizen voting.”

“Across the country, Democrats have passed laws to allow non-citizen voting. Leftist groups have filed lawsuits to remove commonsense election safeguards and open the system to chaos and fraud,” he said.

Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose has also recently contributed to this effort, albeit less directly. He recently announced that county boards of elections have been told to remove 499 alleged non-citizen from the voter rolls. Ohio has around 8 million registered voters, which means that 499 possible ineligible voters is only 0.006% of the registered voting population.

And even though this is part of normal voter roll maintenance, experts told TPM, that this will likely only serve as fodder for election deniers to claim that the non-citizen voting “issue” is a real one. 

— Khaya Himmelman

Words Of Wisdom

“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours — same real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not, we had more.”

That’s former President Donald Trump during a Thursday press conference comparing the crowd gathered for the speech he gave on Jan. 6, 2020 to the masses that attended MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

The hour-plus long presser — seemingly organized to try and shift the news cycle back to the Trump campaign amid the positive media coverage the Harris-Walz campaign has been getting — was a gold mine for Words of Wisdom lovers. But this was by far one of the worst moments of the afternoon.

Reminiscent of 2016, Trump’s obsession with crowd sizes reemerged in the most cringe way. Does Trump measure up? Well, the crowd size debate can be solved with a quick Google search and basic knowledge of D.C. landmarks.

But forget about Trump’s attempt to claim that his crowd size was bigger than MLK’s. The impertinence of the former president comparing one of the defining moments of the civil rights movement and one of the most iconic speeches in American history to a speech he gave to a crowd of insurrectionists who later stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of an election is… well delusional at best.

— Emine Yücel