I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that both featured posts this week have “Trump” in the title.
I only meant to write one: “Can Trump Steal Georgia?” There’s a been a lot of talk these last two weeks about changes Trumpists on the Georgia State Election Board have made in the rules governing local election boards, and whether these changes might allow a 2020-on-steroids election crisis should Harris get more votes than Trump in Georgia. Short version: That’s clearly what Trump has in mind, but it’s probably not going to work. Either the courts or Governor Kemp should take care of it.
But then as the week went on and I compiled notes for the weekly summary, I noticed something: There was an outrageous new Trump story every single day, starting with bringing his campaign team to Arlington National Cemetery on Monday. This wasn’t some unified scandal that kept building through the week (though the Arlington thing did that), it was some totally new batshit crazy thing each day.
By Saturday, my single Trump-did-some-crazy-stuff entry in the weekly summary had broken through its levees and was threatening to wipe out the flood plain. So I turned it into a separate article “A Week in Trump’s Declining Spiral”. It should post before 9 EDT, with the Georgia article appearing by 10.
With the flood of Trump news diverted into the featured posts, the weekly summary should be short this week, and come out around noon.
This week everybody was talking about the Democratic Convention
The featured post focuses on how the DNC reclaimed Reagan-era values that Republicans have stopped taking seriously or have let drift away from American reality: freedom, family, marriage, tradition, masculinity, and what makes someone American.
I know I mentioned this in that post, but it deserves a second plug: One standard element of a political convention is the roll call of the states as the delegates announce their votes. The DNC did it a little differently from the RNC.
The DNC turned roll call into a dance party, with each state choosing music appropriate to itself, like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” or Illinois choosing Alan Parson’s “Sirius”, the walk-on music the Chicago Bulls use when they play in that same arena. My own state, Massachusetts, picked the Dropkick Murphy’s “I’m Shipping Up to Boston”. But Georgia stole the show by getting Atlanta’s Lil Jon to perform his own “Turn Down for What”.
One difference between the conventions the featured post didn’t cover: The RNC’s message centered on hero-worship: America is in terrible shape, but if we elect Donald Trump again, he will save us. The DNC was more of a pep rally for activists. Speaker after speaker urged the delegates (and by extension those watching at home) to “do something”: volunteer for the campaign, send money, make sure your friends are registered to vote. Kamala Harris will not save us by herself; her campaign is the vehicle through which We the People will save ourselves and each other.
I’ve never seen condoms used for political advertising before.
Major media fact-checking during the conventions was somewhere between comical and infuriating.
If you’re a person actually interested in the truth, the main thing you need to know about the Democratic Convention speakers is that they were far and away more truthful than the Republican speakers. Nothing at the DNC rivaled the big lies that form the scaffolding for MAGA policies: the “migrant crime wave“, or that illegal immigrants are voting, or that other countries are emptying their jails and insane asylums to send their unwanted people to the US.
None of that is even remotely close to being true.
But both-sides-ism decrees that fact-checkers had to flag Democrats for something. So when Tim Walz said that “IVF and fertility treatments” are “personal for Gwen and I”, USA Today had to point out that the Walzes’ daughter Hope resulted from a different fertility treatment than IVF, as if IVF hadn’t been the next option, and as if succeeding before reaching that point would give the Walzes less empathy with infertile couples who do need IVF. In short: Nothing Tim said was wrong or needed correction.
Or when Pete Buttigieg said that “crime was higher on [Trump’s] watch”, USA Today found it important to point out that not all crime rates were higher all the time. So the murder rate (which rose under Trump) continued rising for Biden’s first year before falling to a level below where it was at the end of Trump’s term.
And when Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker said “Donald told us to inject bleach” as a Covid treatment, that was “misleading“, because Trump only made that ridiculous suggestion as something scientists should waste their time investigating.
Bill Clinton said that since the end of the Cold War, 50 million American jobs have been created under Democratic administrations and only 1 million under Republican administrations. PBS rated that only “mostly true“, because even though what Clinton said was exactly right, 1989 was a particularly fortuitous time to measure from. Starting the clock running somewhere else might give less lop-sided results.
Summing up: While Republicans told big whopping lies that they can’t justify their policies without, Democrats sometimes failed to include all the footnotes a journal article would require.
It seems like a conscientious fact-checker would want to note that distinction. But AP’s headlines looked like this:
Good lines from the convention that I haven’t found another place for. D. L. Hughley:
Republicans for Kamala? I guess Donald Trump will finally know what it’s like when you get left for a younger woman.
JD Vance said ‘if you don’t have kids you have no physical commitment to the future of this country.’ When I deployed to Afghanistan, I didn’t have kids then. Many of the men and women with me didn’t either. But let me tell you, our commitment to the future of this country was pretty damn physical.
We believe that a patient’s room is too small and cramped for space for a woman, her doctor, and the United States government. That’s too many people in the room.
On paper, this looks to favor Trump, but it also ratifies Harris/Walz framing: Trump, Vance, and Kennedy are all weird, so of course they would wind up together.
I’ve seen lots of triumphal posting by Trumpists, claiming that this is a big development that nails down Trump’s election. But Nate Silver is unconvinced. His model has Harris up 4% with her convention bounce just starting to show up in the data. Her margin drops about 0.3% when Kennedy is taken out.
and the horse race
I’m not going to pay much attention this week, because if Kamala gets a bounce out of the convention, it won’t show up fully in the polls until at least next week. But generally, her slow and steady momentum has continued. 538’s polling average has her up by 3.4%, which is close to where she needs to be to overcome the Republican advantage built into the Electoral College.
But there is reason to expect a convention bounce. Here, a CNN reporter is stunned that 6 of the 8 undecided voters he talked to in November have decided for Harris. One has decided for Trump and one still isn’t planning to vote.
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Maybe “Communist” and “Marxist” don’t mean what Trumpists think they mean.
and let’s close with something cold-blooded
OK, I’ve heard of support dogs, cats, and even monkeys. But a support gator? I’m picturing a bumper sticker: My support animal can eat your support animal.
With a near-perfect convention in Chicago, Democrats stole themes Republicans have been running on for decades: freedom, opportunity, tradition, patriotism, family, manliness, small-town values, and who the “real Americans” are.
When they left Milwaukee, Republicans were happy with their convention. True, Trump’s acceptance speech had failed to stick the landing, and many were still uncertain that J. D. Vance had been the best (or even a good) choice for VP, but those seemed like quibbles. For four days — right up to the last hour of Trump’s 90-minute speech — the party had been united, put on a good show, and looked poised to do well in November against a Democratic ticket headed by Joe Biden.
And then Biden did something beyond Donald Trump’s imagination: He sacrificed his own ambitions for the sake of his party and the country. Republicans still resist grasping what Biden did: With occasional help from the NYT, they describe his voluntary withdrawal as a “coup” (as if January 6 hadn’t shown us what a coup really looks like) and keep portraying Biden as bitter and angry. Weeks later, Trump was still fantasizing that Biden would make a scene at the convention.
What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the history of the U.S., whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him by Kamabla, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Shifty Adam Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and others on the Lunatic Left, CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE. He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!
But Monday night, as in all his public appearances, Biden was gracious and generous towards Kamala Harris and the entire Democratic Party. If this was all an act, it was an act far beyond Trump’s abilities. Under no circumstances could Trump have contained his disappointments and resentments in front of a national audience for 50 minutes. And yet somehow, he imagined that “senile” Joe Biden could be such a brilliant performer. But Trump can hold those two thoughts together in his mind — Biden is senile and Biden can make an Oscar-worthy presentation — more easily than he can imagine the truth:
It’s been the honor of my lifetime to serve as your president. I love the job, but I love my country more.
Biden’s speech was just the beginning of a four-day master class in how to run a convention. All week, I felt like the Democrats were teaching Republicans how it’s done: You had Kid Rock and Jason Aldean? OK, we’ve got Stevie Wonder, John Legend, and Pink. We see your celebrity Hulk Hogan and raise you Oprah Winfrey. Your people waved signs saying “Mass Deportation Now!”, but we prefer “Freedom” and “USA”. Your rising talent was Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, but we could showcase people who are authentically gifted speakers: Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, AOC, Gretchen Whitmer, and Wes Moore.
I’ve got a message for the Republicans and the justices of the US Supreme Court: You can pry this wedding band from my cold, dead, gay hand.
Turning old Republican tropes upside-down became a repeating motif of the Democratic Convention. Republicans used to be the party that wanted to “defend marriage”, but now it is Republicans like the corrupt Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who threaten marriage, and Democrats like Nessel who pledge to defend it to the death.
But marriage was just one of the concepts that Democrats took back from a Republican Party that had owned them for too long.
Freedom. Republicans used to style themselves as the party of freedom, but Tim Walz yanked that word away from them:
When Republicans use the word “freedom”, they mean that the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office. Corporations, free to pollute your air and water. And banks, free to take advantage of customers. But when we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people that you love. Freedom to make your own health care decisions. And yeah, your kids’ freedom to go to school without worrying about being shot dead in the hall.
Josh Shapiro tied it to Trump’s efforts to stay in power through fraud and force after losing the 2020 election:
It’s not freedom to tell our children what books they’re allowed to read. And it’s not freedom to tell women what they can do with their bodies. It sure as hell isn’t freedom to say, “You can go vote, but he gets to pick the winner.” That’s not freedom.
Family. When Ronald Reagan ran on “family values” with the support of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Republicans meant the (implicitly White and Christian) Mom-Dad-and-2.1-perfect-children families of 1950s sit-coms. But this week the DNC showcased and celebrated American families as they actually are.
It started with the candidates. On the surface, no family’s story could be more Reagan-era normal than the Walzes: Two White Midwestern high school teachers fall in love and are still together decades later, having raised a boy and a girl. But they are open about relying on fertility treatments to accomplish that feat, and they don’t keep their neuro-divergent son hidden at home. (More about him later.)
And then there’s the blended Emhoff-Harris family: A Jewish lawyer was married for 16 years and had two children (again, a boy and a girl). But then he got divorced, and five years later he went on a blind date with the Afro-Asian-American attorney general of California, who was herself the child of divorced parents. They got married and remain on good terms with his first wife (who produced a video for the convention). Doug Emhoff has always supported Kamala’s ambitions, and Ella Emhoff had tears in her eyes as the convention cheered for her apparently-not-wicked stepmother.
Family was everywhere in the convention speeches, with speaker after speaker quoting wisdom instilled in them by a parent, mentor, teacher, or coach. (You will search Donald Trump’s speeches in vain to find a comparable passage. In his stories, he has always known everything.) Harris presented her own it-takes-a-village childhood like this:
My mother worked long hours. And, like many working parents, she leaned on a trusted circle to help raise us. Mrs. Shelton, who ran the daycare below us and became a second mother. Uncle Sherman. Aunt Mary. Uncle Freddy. And Auntie Chris. None of them, family by blood. And all of them, family by love.
Family who taught us how to make gumbo. How to play chess. And sometimes even let us win. Family who loved us. Believed in us. And told us we could be anything. Do anything. They instilled in us the values they personified. Community. Faith. And the importance of treating others as you would want to be treated. With kindness. Respect. And compassion.
In the Democratic world, as in America, family is defined by love rather than blood. Your family is made up of the people you can count on when you need them, and not just the people who share your DNA.
Masculinity. The Republican Convention was nothing if not masculine. Trump entered the hall on Day 3 to James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World“. And prior to the candidate’s acceptance speech the next night, Hulk Hogan tore off his shirt and lumped together Trump’s fraud convictions, his lost civil trials, and his assassination attempt as the work of a mysterious “they” who need to be punished.
When I look out and I see all the real Americans, I think about how Donald Trump, his family was compromised. When I look out there and I see Donald Trump, I think about how his business was compromised. But what happened last week when they took a shot at my hero and they tried to kill the next President of the United States, enough was enough. I said, “Let Trump-a-mania run wild, brother! Let Trump-a-mania rule again. Let Trump-a-mania, make America great again.” …
You know, guys, over my career, I’ve been in the ring with some of the biggest, some of the baddest dudes on the planet, and I’ve squared off against warriors, ooh, yeah, savages, and I’ve even, like I said, body slammed giants in the middle of the ring. I know tough guys but let me tell you something, brother, Donald Trump is the toughest of them all. …
This November, guys, we can save the American dream for everyone, and Donald Trump is the president who will get the job done. All you criminals, all you lowlifes, all you scumbags, all you drug dealers, and all you crooked politicians need to answer one question, brother. Whatchya gonna do when Donald Trump and all the Trump-a-maniacs run wild on you, brother?
But the DNC presented a different model of masculinity, whose manliness is unlikely to “run wild” on anyone: Tim Walz — coach, teacher, soldier, mentor, neighbor, father. I’ve heard a new phrase used to describe Walz: tonic masculinity rather than the toxic masculinity of dominance and violence. Ben Ingman, who remembered Walz as his geography teacher and 7th-grade track coach, started his speech with this:
Tim Walz is the kind of guy you can count on to push you out of a snowbank. I know this because Tim Walz has pushed me out of a snowbank.
Ingman invited members of Walz’ state-championship-winning football team up onto the stage, and they cheered for their former coach.
He described Walz’ coaching style, which also took the track team to a state championship:
Coach Walz got us excited about what we might achieve together. He believed in us, and he helped us believe in each other.
It was important to have a person who was so well-liked on campus, a football coach who had served in the military. Having Tim Walz as the adviser of the gay-straight alliance made me feel safe coming to school.
Over the last several years there’s been this kind of perversion that has taken place, which is to suggest that the measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you beat down, when what we know is the real and true measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up.
To the best of my knowledge, Tim Walz has never body-slammed anybody in the style of Hulk Hogan. But he has consistently lifted people up. And occasionally he has pushed them out of snowbanks.
Walz was only one of many examples of tonic masculinity at the DNC. Another was Astronaut/Senator Mark Kelly, who wordlessly walked his wife Gabby Giffords onto the stage and literally served as her right hand, managing the iPad that contained her speech so that she could gesture with her left hand, the one that still functions. He filled his role so egolessly that I did not even realize what he was doing until I watched the video a second time. (You can bet that if Melania ever needs that kind of help, Trump will move on to Wife #4.)
And then there was Biden himself, sacrificing personal ambitions so that the country he loves will not slide into autocracy. I was reminded of the ending of Lev Grossman’s The Magician King (the middle book of his Magicians trilogy). After plans have succeeded and the day has been saved, the god Ember appears to enforce the rules that have been broken along the way: Quentin (the trilogy’s main character) is to be banished from Fillory, the magical realm he has loved since childhood, when he thought it was fictional.
Quentin protests that he deserves better, because he has been the hero of this story, and “the hero gets the reward.” “No Quentin,” the god replies. “The hero pays the price.”
If American democracy is saved again in 2024, it will be because Joe Biden was willing to pay the price. That’s what a real man does.
That video went viral, but drew ridicule from Trumpists. Former conservative talk-show host Charlie Sykes described it as “the definitive Rorschach Test for the world’s worst human beings”. One of those human beings, Ann Coulter, posted a picture of Gus crying with the comment “Talk about weird …” Former congressman Mike Crispi called Gus “Tim Walz’s stupid crying son” and a “puffy beta male”. He also tweeted “Barron Trump is the future. Tim Walz’s children are nobody’s going nowhere.” And conservative radio host Jay Weber tweeted:
Sorry, but this is embarrassing for both father and son. If the Walzs represent today’s American man, this country is screwed: “Meet my son Gus. He’s a blubbering bitch boy. His mother and I are very proud.”
But Tim Walz is man enough to endure disdain from the Jay Webers of this world, if that’s what it takes for his son to share important moments with him. Personally, I have two reactions: First, you can fake almost anything in politics, but you can’t fake a reaction like Gus had. And second, I imagine most fathers saw Gus and thought: “I wonder if my children feel that way about me.” Pete Buttigieg’s husband Chasten tweeted:
I hope to inspire my kids so much that when they see me speak of the dreams and passion I have for my country they are moved to tears like Gus Walz was. @Tim_Walz has dedicated his life to service and has clearly exceeded in being an excellent, supportive, and loving father every step of the way. We should all be so lucky to know a love like that.
Religious writer John Pavolitz traced the roots of the Republican urge to bully those who don’t fit their cookie-cutter view of the world:
This week has reminded us how morally poisoned our collective bloodstream is.
And the sad part of all of this is, we all know how we got here.
We are witnessing in real-time, the cost of elevating someone like Donald Trump to power: of normalizing his ignorant name-calling, his exploiting of differences, his bullying of those who are vulnerable or different, his hatred of expressions of love that he is incapable of.
This pattern was on display nine years ago when he mocked a disabled reporter and what should have been a campaign-killing moment became the first in an expansive and still-growing resume of filth.
Tradition. Republican rhetoric is full of respect for tradition, from “originalist” legal theory to “that old time religion”. But the current Republican Party is trapped in the present by its worship of Trump. The Republican Convention honored no pre-Trump Republican tradition, and at times gave the impression that the GOP had not existed until Trump came down his escalator in 2015.
By contrast, some of the finest and most emotional moments in the Democratic Convention centered on what the Party owes to the heroes of its recent past. Joe Biden, of course, is not past yet, since he is still president. But he has stood for his last election, so the long ovation he got Monday night and the chants of “Thank you, Joe” that could erupt at any moment constituted a profoundly sentimental send-off.
The Obamas gave a pair of top-flight speeches, with many observers suggesting history will remember Michelle’s as one of the best convention speeches ever. No one could fail to note the appropriateness of Hillary Clinton addressing a convention trying once again to elect the first woman president. (In one reaction shot during Hillary’s speech, Gwen Walz was in tears.) Her mention of Trump’s felony convictions inspired a “Lock him up” chant, which Hillary handled perfectly: She neither encouraged it nor cut it off as she tried to suppress a smile.
But any Republican legacy had vanished down the memory hole: Mitt Romney? The Bushes? Dick Cheney? Paul Ryan? Kevin McCarthy? John Boehner? Mike Pence? They have all become unpeople, because there is no room for them in the Trump personality cult.
Who is really American? I’m not sure which politician coined the phrase real Americans, which I just quoted Hulk Hogan using. I first registered it in 2008, when Sarah Palin kept identifying the rural White counties where she was popular as “real America”. The phrase almost never gets defined, but we all know generally who it points to: White straight native-born Christians who speak English at home and have no obvious mental or physical dysfunctions.
A lot of the legitimacy of Trump’s claim to have won the 2020 election rests on this vague sense that some Americans are more real than others. Even people who understand the absurdity of Trump’s fantasies that vote totals were changed overseas or large numbers of non-citizens voted or mail-in votes were faked or some other less specific claim — even many of them feel in their hearts that Trump should have won, because so many of Biden’s votes came from Blacks, or naturalized Hispanic or Asian citizens, or gays, or Jews, or others whose American-ness is questionable. Real Americans, the people whose votes should count, overwhelmingly supported Trump.
A related question is what an immigrant has to do, beyond the formal naturalization process, to really be American. Melania Trump is a White Christian immigrant, and Usha Vance is a Hindu born in America to Indian immigrants. Presumably they are both OK, so it must be possible.
In a column for The Washington Post, Matt Bai examined how the two VP candidates articulated conflicting visions of what makes someone an American. Vance denied that “America is an idea” and postulated instead that “a group of people with a shared history and a common future”.
Of course there’s room for immigration and racial diversity in Vance’s worldview; his own wife is of Indian descent. But in his view of America, the outsider becomes American by adopting a set of cultural norms — living here “on our terms,” as he put it in his speech. In this way, he sees America as no different, really, from France or Russia or any other country with common ethnic heritage. The price of admission is cultural conformity.
But Walz presented a different view.
In the America Walz described in his convention speech, it doesn’t matter what language you speak at home or what god (if any) you worship, or whether you have kids (naturally or otherwise). Because as long as you believe in the American promise of liberty and adhere to its laws, you’re just as American as anyone else, and anybody who doesn’t like it should “mind their own damn business.”
Community, in Walz’s telling, isn’t defined by somebody’s idea of cultural norms, but rather by your connection to your neighbors. If you’re willing to help out with a stranded car or a bake sale, then he doesn’t care if you’re an atheist or a cat-owner (or, God forbid, both).
Walz’ view, to me, seems very appropriate for a high school teacher: America is neither an abstract idea nor an ethno-cultural nation like France. America is a project. If you pitch in, you belong.
How was this possible? Democrats were able to take these themes (and several others) away from Republicans because the GOP has spent years giving them little more than lip service. When Ron DeSantis began banning books and threatening teachers who taught inconvenient facts about American history, those actions raised no debate about freedom within the Republican Party. There has been no controversy about nominating a philandering, twice-divorced, pussy grabber to lead the party of family values. When one jury of ordinary Americans found Trump responsible for sexual assault, another ruled beyond a reasonable doubt that he had committed fraud, and he avoided his other felony indictments through delaying tactics rather than by challenging the evidence against him, members of the law-and-order party attacked the justice system rather than question their allegiance to a criminal.
The convention speech that brought this all home was by former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger:
I’ve learned something about my party too, something I couldn’t ignore: The Republican Party is no longer conservative. It has switched its allegiance from the principles that gave it purpose to a man whose only purpose is himself.
Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big. He’s a faithless man pretending to be righteous. He’s a perpetrator who can’t stop playing the victim. He puts on—listen—he puts on quite a show, but there is no real strength there.
As a conservative and a veteran, I believe true strength lies in defending the vulnerable. It’s in protecting your family. It’s in standing up for our Constitution and our democracy. That—that is the soul of being a conservative. It used to be the soul of being a Republican. But Donald Trump has suffocated the soul of the Republican Party. His fundamental weakness has coursed through my party like an illness, sapping our strength, softening our spine, whipping us into a fever that has untethered us from our values.
Whatever they may have meant to past generations, in 2024 Republican values have become a “show” with “no real strength” behind them. That’s why Democrats were able to take them back this week.
The Democratic National Convention seemed to blot out all other news this week. A handful of weeks ago it was inconceivable how united, energetic, and celebratory the DNC would turn out to be. It demonstrated a lot of good showmanship, fine oratory, and crisp logistics, but there was also something intellectually and politically significant going on: The Democrats were stealing many of the themes Republicans have owned for decades, like family, freedom, patriotism, and even masculinity.
What is significant is not just that they tried. Anybody can say, “No, we’re the patriotic party” just as Trump has occasionally claimed to represent democracy and even to be “great for women and their reproductive rights“. The significant thing is that across the board they made a good case. They redefined and reframed the themes in such a way that the Democratic claim to them now seems more authentic than the Republican claim. (Do you want to raise your sons in the masculinity of Donald Trump and Hulk Hogan, or the masculinity of Tim Walz and Mark Kelly?)
That’s what I’ll examine in the featured post “The Convention that Ate Republicans’ Lunch”, which should appear between 10 and 11.
The weekly summary should be short this week, and come out around noon.
Over the last several years there’s been this kind of perversion that has taken place, which is to suggest that the measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you beat down, when what we know is the real and true measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up.
This week everybody was talking about the Democratic Convention
The Democratic National Convention in Chicago has already started, if you count events that don’t usually get much coverage, like the delegate breakfasts. Main programming begins at 4 this afternoon, central daylight time. This livestream link begins at 5:30.
Politico has a good article about the convention, including the various ways you can watch it. The major networks are only committed to an hour of coverage 10-11 each night, but CSPAN and various streaming options should cover everything.
Tonight’s headliners are President Biden, who I expect to get a heartwarming reception from a party that appreciates what he has sacrificed for the greater good, and Hillary Clinton, who may finally see her dream of a female president realized this year. The Obamas will speak Tuesday. Wednesday’s lineup includes Tim Walz, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton, and Pete Buttigieg, while Thursday belongs to Vice President Harris. Jason Carter at some point will appear on behalf of his grandfather Jimmy Carter, who is hoping to hang on long enough to vote for Harris in the general election.
This convention will contrast with the Republican Convention in a number of ways that I think will work in the Democrats’ favor. For one thing, the party is not running away from its past, and its nominee has the support of all its major stars. And while the RNC tended to be dour and dystopian, the DNC should be much lighter and joyful.
Also, the Democratic headliners are just better speakers. I expect that Walz on Wednesday and Harris on Thursday will each have a point and make it, in a speech that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. They should contrast well with Trump’s 90-minute ramble at the RNC, and whatever it was that J. D. Vance was doing.
The wild card in the week is how intense and disruptive pro-Palestinian protests will be.
and Ukraine’s invasion of Russia
On August 6, Ukraine flipped the script on Russia and sent its troops into Russian territory in the Kursk region, which is famous as the site of the largest tank battle in history. (The Russian victory over Germany at Stalingrad is considered the greatest single turning point in World War II, but Germany’s defeat on the Eastern Front didn’t become inevitable until after Kursk the next summer.)
It’s hard to know what this all means. A substantial fog of war prevents accurate reporting, but it’s clear that Russia was surprised and has not been able to repel Ukraine yet. The attack could turn out to be anything from a strategic masterstroke to a modern-day Gettysburg campaign that has early successes but ultimately hastens defeat.
In the meantime, it’s a substantial political embarrassment to Putin, whose image of strength is taking damage.
and Gaza
The dying continues in Gaza, and the Palestinian death count has now passed 40,000. The Biden administration continues to push for a ceasefire/hostage release deal, but it’s not clear that either side really wants peace.
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It’s always hard to decide how much attention to pay to the latest Trump outrage. It’s important not to become desensitized to them, but they’ve been going on for nine years and haven’t ended his career yet.
Trump on Thursday, when talking about giving GOP donor Miriam Adelson the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s top civilian honor, said it is “actually, much better” than the Medal of Honor “because everyone (who) gets the congressional medal of honor, that’s soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”
Trump’s former Chief of Staff, former General John Kelly, responded:
No president, member of Congress, judge or political appointee — and certainly no recipient of the Presidential Medal — will ever be asked to give life or limb to protect the Constitution. The two awards cannot be compared in any way. Not even close.
Trump’s remarks would be bad enough in the context of a Medal of Freedom winner who saved many lives through peaceful means, like vaccine developer Jonas Salk, or who risked life and limb in a non-military context, like first man on the Moon Neil Armstrong. But it’s obscene to say such a thing while giving the award to Miriam Adelson, who essentially bought the honor by (with her late husband) contributing hundreds of millions to Republican candidates, including Trump himself.
I discussed Trump’s Mar-a-Lago press conference in detail in the featured post, and barely mentioned his interview with Elon Musk. CNN did a fact check, for what that’s worth. But their discussion of climate change is worth paying attention to, because it so clueless. Bill McKibben dubbed this “the dumbest climate conversation of all time”.
Trump said the same stupid thing he’s said before, which is that rising sea levels aren’t worth worrying about because you just wind up with “more seafront property”. Not only is this wrongheaded, it’s just plain dumb, as McKibben points out:
a rising ocean clearly reduces the amount of oceanfront property. If Florida goes underwater there will be a new stretch of seafront along what’s now the Georgia border—but the amount of oceanfront will be greatly reduced.
But most of the truly idiotic comments come from Musk, while Trump just sits there and seems to agree. Musk is pushing electric cars not because he worries about the climate, but because he worries about running out of oil. Also, he pictures increased CO2 in the atmosphere not causing any real problems until it gets around 1000 ppm (from it’s current level of just over 400), because that would cause breathing problems.
McKibben comments:
There is not a serious climate scientist on planet earth who has ever contemplated a thousand parts per million with anything less than panic and horror. … What Musk’s math implies, of course, is that we have endless time to deal with this crisis. If 1,000 is the danger level, and we’re going up two parts per million per year, that does indeed “give us quite a bit of time.” Three hundred years, roughly. … This is the point of their conversation, at least when it comes to climate. It is to insist that nothing need be done now, that we should just go on expanding the fossil fuel industry.
Social media is trolling Musk: “Elon Musk, dead at 52, says there is no need for misinformation laws”.
Sexism is sexism, even if it comes from a woman. I am appalled that the WaPo published a Kathleen Parker column including this:
Without her beauty, Harris might be joining Biden in retirement. All you have to do is imagine her spoken words coming from a less-attractive package. Or put her on radio.
Hillary wasn’t attractive enough. Kamala is too attractive to take seriously. There’s no winning.
Tim Walz hasn’t forgotten how to speak to a football team. Decades ago, politicians of both parties made these kinds of speeches all the time to promote civic virtues in the rising generations. But it’s been a long time since I’ve heard one.
The DeSantis takeover of New College in Sarasota hasn’t resulted in book burnings, but a lot of gender diversity books that students might have wanted are winding up in the dumpster
and let’s close with some resemblances
James Lucas posts a thread on X that celebrates pareidolia, “our brain’s tendency to see familiar shapes in random patterns”, like the Waterfall of the Bride in Peru.
In recent weeks, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have taken opposite approaches to dealing with the media. Harris has taken few on-the-record questions from reporters, and has focused instead on talking to the voters directly in rallies. She and her running mate Tim Walz are drawing large, raucous crowds that cheer their every word, much the way Trump’s crowds did in past elections, when he was more energetic and his act wasn’t quite so stale.
For obvious reasons, the media prefers Trump’s approach, even though it seems to be working badly for him. Harris has been surging in the polls, and now leads Trump in all the national polling averages (RCP, 538, NYT, Economist), as well as in recent polls of most swing states. While Biden’s hopes for Electoral-College victory followed only one shaky path (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania — where he was behind, but usually within the margin of error), Harris is also ahead or very close in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and even North Carolina. She is unlikely to carry Ohio or Florida, but is running strong enough that Republicans will have to actively defend those once-safe states.
Nonetheless, the media holds that it is Harris who needs to change her strategy. She “must speak to the press” and “needs to present her ideas” by answering press questions. Otherwise she’s running a “no-substance campaign“. She needs an Issues page on her campaign website, filled with white papers proposing specific policies that can be analyzed and critiqued in the media (because that worked so well for Hillary Clinton).
All this lines up with a vision of democracy I grew up believing: The press represents the People. Reporters use their access to ask the questions that voters want answered. When they demand answers, it is because the People need those answers. Ignoring the press means ignoring the voters, which the voters will resent.
And sometimes, the press is an older, wiser aunt or uncle to the voters. Reporters have the time to study issues and become experts in them, so they ask questions that the voters would ask, if they knew more. While voters may get distracted by the flash and gimmickry of a campaign, the press will stay focused on what’s truly at stake.
Quite likely you are laughing now, or at least smiling, at my younger self’s naivety. Because if the press ever filled such a role, it hasn’t for a very long time. James Fallows was already diagnosing the problem in his 1996 book Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. Rather than raise the questions the voters are or should be asking, the press covers elections like sporting events: Who’s ahead? What is each team’s strategy? How likely is that strategy to work? Or (like trouble-making junior high gossips) they try to get one candidate to say something nasty about the other, which they can take to the other candidate and (hopefully) get something nasty in response.
None of that is what wavering voters want or need to know. None of it helps the electorate imagine how a future Smith or Jones administration will affect their lives.
For example, look at what reporters asked about when they did get access to Harris: her plans to debate Trump, and what she thought of Trump’s criticisms of herself or Tim Walz. Not a word about taxes or inflation or competing with China or climate change or abortion.
And why would Harris sit down for an extended interview with a “neutral” journalist, when she has just seen how un-neutrally journalists treated President Biden? After his disastrous debate with Trump, Biden tried to prove his mental competence by meeting with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. Stephanopoulos could have simultaneously tested Biden’s mind and served the public interest by asking a wide range of questions that would force the President to jump from one serious issue to the next: Ukraine, the economy, voting rights. Instead, he spent 22 minutes badgering Biden with different versions of the same question: What would have to happen for Biden to drop out of the race?
When Biden held a press conference after the NATO summit, and demonstrated his deep and detailed knowledge of problem areas around the world, headlines the next day focused on moments when he said the wrong name, and on his “defiant” insistence on staying in the presidential race. (Who was he defying, exactly?)
Trump, meanwhile, has the media tamed. After years of insults and abuse, the “fake news media” doesn’t even try to ask follow-up questions that challenge his false claims. Whatever he says is just “Trump being Trump”.
Saturday, for example, Trump appeared not to know what state he was in. At a rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, he asked the crowd: “Would that be OK, North Carolina?” If Biden had done that a few weeks ago, it would have been a banner headline. But CNN , the NYT, and the WaPo didn’t find Trump’s confusion worth mentioning. (Robert Reich claims to have asked reporters why they don’t cover “Trump’s malfunctioning brain”. They reply that it’s old news.)
Post-event fact-checking has its place, but the checks never catch up to the lies, because far fewer people see them. NPR fact-checked Monday’s Mar-a-Lago press conference and found 162 lies and distortions delivered in 64 minutes — approximately one every 24 seconds. But the news networks had given Trump free air time to spew those lies with no real-time corrections. He took full advantage by telling the millions of viewers these howlers:
Willie Brown told him “terrible things” about Kamala Harris, which Brown would do because Trump knows him “very well” after they “went down in a helicopter” together. (This entire story is a fantasy. Three decades ago, Trump shared an emergency helicopter landing with a different Black politician who has not discussed Harris with him.)
“Millions” of people are coming to America from other countries’ “prisons, from jails, from mental institutions”.
Harris replacing Biden as the Democratic candidate is “unconstitutional”.
His January 6 crowd was larger than the crowd that heard Martin Luther King’s Dream speech.
Reversing Roe v Wade is what “everybody” wanted: “That’s Democrats, Republicans and Independents and everybody, liberals, conservatives, everybody wanted it back in the States, and I did that. … I’ve done what every Democrat and every every Republican wanted to have done.”
An electric truck is “two-and-a- half times heavier” than a gas-powered truck.
Democrats want to allow abortions after birth.
He was “very protective” of Hillary Clinton. “They used to say, lock her up, lock her up. And I’d say, just relax, please.” (You remember that, don’t you?)
Check NPR’s article for why none of that is even close to being true.
But in fact Trump’s Potemkin press conferences are even worse than just the specific lies, in ways you can only appreciate if you watch the whole video or read the whole transcript. Because in the entire 64 minutes, there was not a single speck of useful information.
When he wasn’t lying outright, he was making claims about the parallel universe where he was reelected in 2020. Everything is perfect there: There was no post-Covid inflation. Putin didn’t invade Ukraine. Hamas didn’t attack on October 7. Iran folded under the pressure of his sanctions and ended its nuclear program. That’s why he doesn’t need to tell us how he would deal with these situations, because none of them ever would have happened if he were still president.
Or he was predicting disaster without offering any explanations: We’re on the verge of “a depression of the 1929 variety”. Simultaneously, “we’re very close to a world war”. If Harris becomes president “It’s going to be a failure the likes of which this world has never seen.”
Or he was testifying to things that (even if they were true) he couldn’t possibly know: President Biden “is a very angry man right now. He’s not happy with Obama and he’s not happy with Nancy Pelosi.” (Does Biden call him late at night and confide his deepest thoughts?)
Or he was throwing around value judgments unmoored from any standards: Biden is the worst president in US history. Harris is the worst vice president, and also “the most unpopular” (though she’s kicking his butt in the polls). She is “a radical left person” and also “the worst Border Czar” (a position that has never existed). Nancy Pelosi is “crazy”. Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom “destroyed San Francisco” and “destroyed the state of California”. “We have a very sick country right now.” Josh Shapiro (whose approval/disapproval rating is at +18) “is a terrible guy and he’s not very popular with anybody.” Tim Walz is “heavy into the transgender world”.
In short, he said nothing of any news value, and nothing that would help a voter picture his life in a second Trump administration. The “press conference” was a string of take-it-or-leave-it assertions, a naked attempt to overpower voters’ thought processes rather than convince them of anything.
But you would not grasp any of that from the news stories written about the event. The Hill described it as “long and characteristically rambling”, i.e., Trump being Trump.
After the Mar-a-Lago press conference, Lawrence O’Donnell called out his colleagues in a rant that is well worth watching in its entirety. He began by questioning why a network (especially his own MSNBC) would put Trump on the air to say whatever he wanted without live fact-checking. But then he unloaded on the whole Trump/Harris comparison:
There are rumblings now in the news media about Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate not doing what Donald Trump did: stand in front of reporters today and take their questions. And some of the tiny minds in the news media continue to give credit to Donald Trump for standing up and lying in response to every single question they ask. A lie is not an answer. Donald Trump never answers reporters’ questions. Anyone in the news media that tells you Donald Trump has answered reporters’ questions and Kamala Harris hasn’t is lying to you. And they are too stupid to know they are lying to you because they don’t know what an answer is.
Trump has no policy proposals worth mentioning. The RNC platform promises that he will end inflation “very quickly”, but gives no hint as to how. He has said he would end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, but again, that sound bite is the whole of his stated policy on the topic.
Or at least, he has no proposals he will admit to. Project 2025 is full of detailed policy for a second Trump administration, but its proposals are unpopular, so Trump denies it, despite a recently-revealed undercover video in which Project 2025’s Russell Vought gave his pitch to British journalists that he thought were prospective donors. Vought dismissed Trump’s denials as “graduate-level politics”, and noted that Trump is “not even opposing himself to a particular policy”.
But Project 2025 never came up during the Mar-a-Lago press conference, and Trump faces no general demand from the press for policy details. Only Harris does.
The liberal blogosphere is having none of this. Jeff Tiedrich imagines what Harris will be asked when she finally does hold a press conference:
let’s imagine that Kamala agreed to hold a presser tomorrow. we all know what would happen: it would devolve into a shit-show. the press would waste everyone’s time — and drop our collective IQ by three points — by asking worthless questions.
“Madam Vice President, Donald Trump says you only recently became Black. what is your response?”
who fucking cares? what fresh insight could possibly be gained by asking these kinds of questions? what’s Kamala going to say, that Donny’s a racist lunatic? we already know this. what would be the point of bringing up the toxic sludge that oozes out of Donny’s rancid anus-mouth?
He predicts further questions of similar heft, all based on Republican talking points that have nothing to do with reality and nothing to do with what voters want to know.
I want to be super clear: The press is demanding Harris give them access so they can:
A. Badger her with stupid questions
B. Generate soundbites they can take out of context
C. Try to catch her with gotcha questions
D. Use A-C to undermine her campaign because Donald Trump is imploding at light speed and their precious horse race is threatened.
The only useful suggestion I’ve heard from the mainstream press comes from the WaPo’s Perry Bacon. He begins by invoking the old-time religion of the press’ role in democracy:
Harris is making a mistake. She should be doing interviews and other engagements with journalists, in recognition of their important role in democracy.
But after more-or-less acknowledging that reporters haven’t been playing that role and probably can’t be trusted to do so in the future, he does contribute one good idea: Continue ignoring mainstream political reporters (like Bacon himself), but do interviews with “wonky” journalists who specialize in particular areas, like foreign policy, economics, or the environment.
This makes sense to me. CNN or the Wall Street Journal may be eager to ask Harris inside-baseball questions about polls or her response to ridiculous Trump accusations (like what she’ll do about his mythical “migrant crime wave” or whether she supports abortion-after-birth), but Grist would undoubtedly want to know substantive things about her approach to climate change, while Foreign Policy would be curious about how her approach to Iran or Israel might differ from Biden’s. A reporter who specialized in immigration policy — even one from the NYT or the WaPo — would already know that she was never “Border Czar”, understand the details of the bipartisan border bill Trump had his allies block in Congress, and ask meaningful questions about how to help local governments whose resources are being stretched by the inflow of migrants.
Unlike general press conferences or one-on-ones with the likes of Stephanopoulos, those interviews actually could serve democracy. It might be worth a try.
The news media hasn’t been covering itself in glory lately. Reporters have been letting the Trump campaign use them as props in “press conferences”, where the candidate rambles and lies without pushback. The news networks have been treating these shows as newsworthy events and covering them live, while simultaneously complaining that Kamala Harris is too busy campaigning to answer their questions — as if anything Trump said in his news conferences constituted answers to the questions he was asked. And as if they have asked Harris anything of substance in the few openings she has given them.
That’s the topic of this week’s featured article: “Harris, Trump, and Our Broken News Media”. It should be out sometime before 10 EDT.
That leaves the weekly summary a lot to cover: Ukraine’s surprising counter-invasion of Russia, the ongoing horror in Gaza, the Democratic Convention that begins today, and a number of other things. I’m running behind today, but I’ll try to get that out by 1.
No Sift next week. The next batch of new articles will post on August 19.
I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?
– Donald Trump
When prejudice cannot deny the black man’s ability, it denies his race.
This week everybody was talking about getting prisoners out of Russia
Thursday, President Biden announced a multi-country swap of prisoners that brought home three Americans: WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan, and Radio Free Europe journalist Alsu Kurmasheva. Whelan had been held the longest, since 2018.
The swap relied heavily on US allies. Germany, Slovenia, Estonia, Poland, Norway, and the Maldive Islands released prisoners Russia wanted back. In his announcement, Biden underlined the importance of having allies, a backhanded slap at Trump’s anti-NATO sentiments.
So when are they going to release the details of the prisoner swap with Russia? How many people do we get versus them? Are we also paying them cash?
At some point, questioning the details of the swap is legitimate. But surely the first reaction of any non-weird American was to be happy for fellow Americans who are free now, and for the families who can welcome them home. Trump expressed none of this, but (without knowing any of the details) simply assumed the deal must be bad because it worked against his political interests. He doubled down during his Atlanta rally Saturday.
I would like to congratulate Vladimir Putin for having made yet another great deal.
Didn’t every American other than Trump feel at least a little joy in their hearts for their freed countrymen? That’s the kind of thing that makes him weird.
Of course there’s speculation about what this means politically in the US. Back in May, Trump posted that he would get Evan Gershkovich released “almost immediately after the election”, and that Putin “will do that for me, but not for anyone else”. Some people at the time interpreted this as Putin’s ransom demand: If you want to get Gershkovich back, elect Trump.
[L]ike most world leaders, Putin has no doubt been reading the polls, and he may have concluded that Trump is not going to win … Therefore, Putin might have reasoned, it’s better to take a deal now so it looks as if he’s acting without an eye to our election.
However, I wonder if there’s another angle: Maybe our allies were willing to sacrifice more for Biden, in order to make it less likely Trump will ever be restored to power.
and Trump’s interview with Black journalists
That’s the topic of one featured post. A few related things didn’t make it into that article.
John McWhorter’s analysis of why Trump mispronounces “Kamala” is interesting. He relates it to previous generations of American mainlanders calling the 50th state “Ha-WHY-a” and its capital “Honolula”, or misnaming foreign foods “raviola” and “guacamala”.
The Trumpian attitude toward Harris’s Indian name reanimates an old American trope. Instead of opening up to a foreign word and even exploring it a little, Trump is treating it as an alien presence in need of assimilation, telling it to conform to whatever he decides it should be.
This willfully blasé attitude toward the word’s pronunciation has the effect of othering it, and Harris by extension. A name with no set pronunciation is alien, exotic, unplaceable — and therefore not who we are. It’s a subtle dig that aims in the same direction as Trump’s false rumor that Barack Obama wasn’t American.
A subtle detail in a scene from the recent movie American Fiction sums up something important about race in America. The main character, Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, is a Black author who doesn’t want to be defined by his blackness. (He wants to write literature, not Black literature.)
Early in the movie, he is coming out of an airport while talking on the phone to his agent about his unwillingness to write the stereotypic “Black novel” the market wants from him. “You know,” he says, “I don’t even believe in race.”
“Unfortunately,” his agent replies, “other people do.” And as he says that, a cab drives past Monk to pick up a White man.
A question White conservatives ask constantly is “Why do Blacks (or Democrats or liberals) make everything about race?” That scene is the answer: Black people may try to forget about race, but the world will remind them.
and J. D. Vance continues to embarrass Republicans
Outrageous things Vance has said continue to surface. In a 2021 interview on the Dear Ohio podcast of Spectrum News 1, while he was running in the Ohio Republican primary for the Senate seat he now holds, Vance was asked “Should a woman be forced to carry a child to term, after she has been a victim of incest or rape?” He replied:
I think the question betrays a certain presumption that’s wrong. It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question really, to me, is about the baby.
In other words, a woman should be forced to carry her rapist’s baby, but that’s an inconvenience. It’s not the important thing about the situation.Also, this requirement makes rape a viable reproductive strategy for men, but that’s not important either.
I noticed something in that interview that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere: Vance repeatedly uses the word normal in a way that I find creepy. The first question is why he wanted to run for the Senate, and Vance says
I think normal people in this country, people who want to live a good life, who just want to raise their families, they deserve somebody who fights for them.
Normal comes up several times throughout the interview, and it always refers to people like Vance himself. I find myself wondering what percentage of the country Vance considers normal.
What I find so weird about this, and it reflects on the media more than it does on Simone Biles, is that we’ve tried to turn a very tragic moment — Simone Biles quitting the Olympic team — into this act of heroism. And I think it reflects pretty poorly on our sort of therapeutic society that we try to praise people not for moments of strength, not for moments of heroism, but for their weakest moments
Thiel made him wealthy, setting him up to invest in companies that became popular with the MAGA set. He shepherded Vance’s entry into politics, bankrolling, alongside other Silicon Valley donors, his successful bid for the U.S. Senate in 2022.
Liberalism is exhausted. One suspects that democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted. And we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton Window.
Before passing that on, I felt obligated to search for the context. I found it here: an hour-and-a-half dialog with Tyler Cowen, who I don’t recognize. I haven’t looked at the whole thing, but the immediate context of the quote is a little better than it sounds. They’re discussing the German philosopher Carl Schmitt (who I also don’t recognize). He accurately predicted the fall of democracy in Germany, but “things went very haywire” (according the Thiel) when he got “somewhat entangled with the Nazis”. Thiel describes that entanglement as “bad judgment”.
So Thiel’s not openly espousing fascism in that quote, but I still can’t be comfortable electing the protege of someone who suspects democracy is exhausted. And my overall feeling is: God save us from billionaires who want to raise questions “very far outside the Overton Window”.
and the horse race
Who you think is ahead right now depends on which polling average you trust. They are all close, and they all show Harris gaining. RCP has Trump ahead 0.8% in a two-way race, down from 1.9% last week. In a five-way race (including RFK Jr., Jill Stein, and Cornell West), Harris is ahead by 0.2%. Nate Silver’s average has Harris up 1.4%; Trump was ahead by 0.4% a week ago. I could go on, but you get the idea.
Like everybody else, I’m wondering who Harris will pick as VP. But I don’t see much point in writing about it, because I’m sure the decision is already made and we’ll find out soon enough.
One striking thing about Donald Trump is that so many of the Trump administration veterans who know him best oppose his candidacy: Mike Pence, John Kelly, Jim Mattis, and many others.
Being accused of being weird has gotten under MAGA skins in a way that fascist and racist never did. And yet they keep acting weird.
Normal Americans find inspiration in the Olympics, and cheer for the great athletes who represent us: Simone Biles, Katy Ledecky, LeBron James, and many others. But Trumpers have a weirder reason to pay attention to the Olympics: They need something to get outraged about.
Look at what has gone viral in MAGA-Land: Anger at female Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who defeated her Italian opponent in 46 seconds. Khelif was identified as female at birth and has never professed to be anything else, but she was disqualified from the 2023 world championships after the amount of testosterone in her blood exceeded some limit. The Olympics has different standards, which she fulfilled. She does not physically stand out from other women boxers, and is not the favorite to win the gold medal in her weight category.
But to Trump and his minions, Khelif is “trans”. Trump posted a video of Khelif’s bout with the comment:
It was a person that transitioned. He was a good male boxer.
If having more testosterone than the average woman makes you a man, then all those low-T men — you must have seen the TV commercials for supplements — are actually women.
More weirdness is the way that Trump cheers any bad news for America. Today, he’s glorying in the stock market plunge — even though the market is still much higher than when he left office. At the end of the day, check the value of your 401(k), and reflect on how happy Donald Trump is about your loss.
For reasons that defy explanation, Trump has been going after Georgia’s popular Republican Governor Brian Kemp, both on Truth Social and during his Atlanta rally Saturday night. But here’s the line that really slays me:
He should be seeking UNITY, not Retribution
Look back at my article on his convention speech, which was billed as a “unity” speech. The only unity Trump recognizes is submission to him.
It turns out that was a regular thing in her campaign, and not restricted to Indian people or Indian food: She’d go meet with supporters and cook something. “Cooking With Kamala” is a 7-video series on her YouTube channel. In this one, she visits the chair of her Iowa campaign and teaches her how to make apples with bacon. Kamala attributes the recipe to her mother, who must have picked it up after she came to America. (In the Mindy video, she says her grandmother was a strict vegetarian.)
Worldwide inflation has been a lingering symptom of the Covid pandemic. Trump and Biden share blame for the US inflation, and reelecting Trump won’t fix it.
Polls show that voters trust Trump more than Biden (and probably Harris) on economic issues, and the main reason for that is the inflation we’ve seen since Biden took office. The Republican platform and Trump’s convention speech both appealed to that issue, claiming that Trump will “end inflation … very quickly”.
A few things get lost in this promise, like:
Inflation is already ending, just as the Great Recession had already ended when Trump took office in 2017. So all a reelected President Trump will have to do to “end inflation” is to announce that it’s over. That can happen “very quickly”.
The low gas prices Trump’s supporters point to weren’t due to his energy policy. They came from the fact that the economy was shut down for Covid and nobody was driving.
Post-Covid inflation has been a worldwide phenomenon. Any explanation that pins the blame on Biden alone is simplistic.
Many of Trump’s policy proposals will increase prices, not lower them.
But rather than point fingers about inflation, let’s see if we can tell its story in a way that makes sense.
The roots of the recent inflation stretch back to the Covid pandemic, which reached the US in 2020, the final year of Trump’s term. That seems like a weird claim to make, because in 2020 itself, the threat was deflation. Gas prices, for example, dropped to an average of $1.84 in April, 2020, because the economy was largely shut down. If you had gas to sell, few people were buying. As the economy contracted and more and more people lost their jobs, the economic threat was a Depression-style cascade of bankruptcies: My business is closed, so I can’t pay my suppliers or landlord, so they go bankrupt and can’t pay the people who were counting on them. And so on.
But let’s tell the story from the beginning. Today, after a vaccine and treatments like Paxlovid have been developed, and after the virus itself has evolved into less lethal forms, many of us have repressed our memories of just how terrifying the early months of the Covid crisis were. At the time, the only treatment to speak of was to keep patients’ blood oxygen up in any way possible, and hope that if they didn’t die their immune systems would eventually win out.
In the early places where the infection got loose, such as Italy and New York City, it overwhelmed the health-care system. Sick people languished on cots in hallways, and refrigerator trucks supplemented the morgues. A lack of good data made it hard to determine just how lethal the virus was. Nobody knew how many asymptomatic cases hadn’t been noticed, and the number of Covid deaths might be either higher or lower than death certificates indicated. But the early estimates of lethality were around 3%; about 3% of infected people died. (That later got revised downward to 1.4%.)
So governments faced a lose/lose choice: If the virus were allowed to run wild, probably everyone would get it eventually, so about 3% of the population would die. In the US, that would mean over 10 million people. (The 1.4% rate implies around 5 million American deaths.) The alternative was to shut down non-essential activities where crowds of people might gather and spread the infection: sports events, political rallies, churches, concerts, and so on. Additionally, bars and restaurants, schools, movie theaters, factories, and offices were likely to spread the virus. When social interactions were unavoidable, governments could encourage masking and social distancing.
The point of all this wasn’t to defeat the virus, but to slow it down. The hope was that a slower-spreading virus wouldn’t overwhelm the healthcare system (“flatten the curve”, we were told), and that extra time might allow discovery of better treatments or a vaccine. That more-or-less worked out: In the US, “only” 1.2 million died, rather than 5-10 million. (If we had handled the virus as well as Canada, perhaps fewer than half a million Americans would have died.)
But there was a cost. The unemployment rate went over 14%, and that was an undercount. Millions of other Americans continued to receive a paycheck, but weren’t really working. (A government loan program allowed small-business loans to be forgiven if a business maintained its payroll.) What was going to happen to those unemployed through no fault of their own? What good did it do to keep them from getting sick if they were going to lose their homes and starve?
Again, a lose/lose choice: In order to avoid mass poverty, cascading bankruptcies, and economic destruction that might take years to recover from, governments propped up people’s incomes. In the US, I already mentioned the loan program. Unemployment benefits were repeatedly extended beyond their ordinary expiration dates. State and local governments got federal money that allowed them not to fire their employees. Landlords weren’t allowed to evict non-paying tenants. Occasionally, the government would just send everyone a check, whether they were covered by some income-protection program or not. Other countries took similar steps.
Because tax revenues were collapsing at the same time that governments were taking on these additional expenses, deficits skyrocketed. The largest US federal budget deficit ever came in FY2020 (October 2019 through September 2020), the last year of the Trump administration: $3.13 trillion. The next year (1/3 Trump, 2/3 Biden) was nearly as bad: $2.78 trillion.
What that money was doing was even more inflationary than the deficit itself: People were being paid not to produce anything. So: more money, but fewer goods and services to spend it on. This was inevitably going to increase prices.
But inflation didn’t hit right away, because people confined to their homes didn’t spend much. There was no point buying a new car, for example, when your current car was sitting unused in the garage. The cruise lines and theme parks were shut down, and no one wanted to risk spending hours sitting elbow-to-elbow in an airliner, so vacation spending collapsed. You had to keep buying food, but beyond that, the richer half of households worked from home, cashed their government checks, and let their money sit in the bank.
But when the economy opened up again, all that money was bound to come out and drive prices upward. In addition, not everything restarted at the same rate, so the economy developed bottlenecks that increased prices further. The Ukraine War disrupted the world’s grain and oil markets, adding additional inflationary pressure.
Post-Covid inflation was a worldwide phenomenon that peaked in 2022, when US inflation was 8%. Bad as that was, things were even worse in comparable economies like the UK (9.1%) and European Union (8.8%), while some smaller countries saw catastrophic levels, like Turkey at 72.3% and Argentina at 72.4%.
The final lose/lose choice was how fast to restart the economy. Unemployment was still over 6% when Joe Biden became president, and he had learned a hard lesson from the aftermath of the Great Recession. The stimulus spending President Obama had managed to secure during the two years when he had congressional majorities wasn’t sufficient, and after 2010 he battled Republican leaders in Congress for every penny. The result was an economic recovery so slow that many Americans barely noticed it. Not until 2016 did economic indicators return to the normal range. They continued upward from there, allowing Trump to take credit for “the greatest economy ever” when the trends Obama established continued into his term. (Look at the GDP and unemployment graphs below and see if you can pick out when the “Trump boom” started.)
Given Obama’s experience, Biden opted for a faster restart. To his credit, he invested the stimulus money wisely: building infrastructure and laying the groundwork for a post-fossil-fuel economy.
But the main thing he bought with that spending was job creation. By early 2022, the unemployment rate was back at pre-Covid (“greatest economy ever”) lows, and went slightly lower still. But Biden’s stimulus exacerbated the inflation that was already due to arrive.
The Federal Reserve responded to that inflation by increasing interest rates, which has brought its own hardships. The US economy has been surprisingly resilient under those interest rates, but it remains to be seen whether inflation can be beaten without starting a recession. (As I write, data from a slowing economy is sending the stock market plunging.)
So the impact of the Covid pandemic continues to be felt.
Conclusions. Nostalgia for the pre-Covid 2019 economy is understandable, but thinking of it as “the Trump economy” is a seductive illusion. Trump’s main economic achievement was that he didn’t screw up the recovery that began under Obama.
When Covid hit, the effect was going to be felt somewhere: as millions of deaths, as depression, or as inflation. Trump and Biden made similar policy choices, taking on massive deficits to lessen deaths and avoid depression. The bill for those choices was inflation, which in many ways was the lesser evil. Even in retrospect, I can’t wish the US government had taken a different path.
That bill came due under Biden, but the responsibility for it falls on Trump and Biden alike. That’s not because either of them performed badly, but because the pandemic’s toll had to be paid somehow. Governments got to choose the form of payment (and most made similar choices), but not paying wasn’t an option.
Trump’s primary talent is salesmanship, so he excels at taking credit for anything good that happens and avoiding blame for anything bad. His 2024 campaign has done an impressive job of selling 2019 as the typical “Trump economy”; if things got drastically worse in 2020, that wasn’t his fault. So if we just reelect him, he often implies, it will be as if Covid never happened. 2019 will magically return.
It won’t. Presidents do not wave magic wands, or move economies with their personal charisma. Presidents affect economies through their policies of taxing, spending, and regulation. So far, the policies Trump has put forward are vague and his numbers don’t add up. (The Republican platform promises to cut taxes, increase defense spending, rebuild our cities, maintain Social Security and Medicare at current levels, and yet reduce deficits by cutting “wasteful spending” that it never identifies. We’ve heard such promises before, and they never work out.) Some of his proposals, like a 10% across-the-board tariff on imports or deporting millions of low-wage workers, would increase inflation, not decrease it.
Whoever we elect in November, I can promise you one thing: 2025 will be its own year. It won’t be 2019 again.
She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?
The first thing to note about this comment, which I’ll forget if I don’t mention it right away, is that it’s a lie. Not just that Harris has been open about her blackness all along, but that Trump himself knew.
Trump donated to Harris twice in 2011 and 2014, during her campaign for attorney general of California, around the time she was being touted as “the female Obama” precisely because she is Black. In 2020, a Trump campaign spokesperson pointed to those donations as proof that Trump was not racist, saying, “I’ll note that Kamala Harris is a Black woman and he donated to her campaign, so I hope we can squash this racism argument now.”
Now on to the “Is she Indian or is she Black?” part. I plan to say some serious things in this article, but I won’t be able to get through it without mixing in some humor, because I just can’t pretend that I’m taking this question seriously. I mean, we’re not talking about the wave/particle duality of light here. Harris was born in Oakland to a mother from India and a Black Jamaican father. That really shouldn’t be hard to understand, even if you’re a 78-year-old ex-president whose Secretary of State once called him “a fucking moron” and whose top economic adviser judged him to be “dumb as shit“. According to the 2020 census, multiracial people make up over 1/10th of the US population, so you might expect Trump to have met such a person at some time or another.
Knowing that Harris likes to use Venn diagrams, The F*cking News made one to help her explain the situation.
And Trump’s notion that Kamala at some point “turned Black” evoked memories of a 2016 SNL cold open..
But enough levity: What is going on here?
Unfortunately, I can’t start discussing that question without getting into the ways Trump has dug himself in deeper. I mean, we all say really, really dumb things from time to time, especially under pressure. But after the fact, most of us try to compensate in one of two ways: We either apologize, or we just shut up and hope everybody forgets about it. (That’s the great virtue of the current era: No matter how badly you embarrass yourself, the 24-hour news cycle rolls on, and your blunders will soon scroll off everybody’s news feeds.)
But not Donald Trump. After having time to listen to advisers and think it through, he has spent the last several days continuing to make some kind of a controversy out of Harris simultaneously identifying both with her mother’s family and her father’s family, like that’s just impossible without some kind of betrayal or duplicity.
Remember Trump’s birther days, when he claimed that the detectives he had sent to Hawaii to investigate Obama’s birth certificate “cannot believe what they’re finding”? (Michael Cohen has since verified what I long suspected: “He never sent anybody anywhere, he just said it and everybody sort of bought into it.”) Well, birtherism is back: On TruthSocial, Trump reposted Laura Loomer’s image of Kamala’s birth certificate, which lists her father as coming from Jamaica, not Africa (which no one ever claimed).
But the crowning piece of Trump’s evidence is a video where Kamala herself says “I am Indian.” It’s a 36-second clip from a longer video of Kamala cooking with another Indian-American woman.
Crazy Kamala is saying she’s Indian, not Black. This is a big deal. Stone cold phony.
But he couldn’t even edit the video well enough to make his point: The two women agree that they both have South Indian roots, and Kamala says, “You look like the entire one-half of my family.” The host is not at all confused about Harris’ family having another half, because why would she be? It’s perfectly simple, as everyone but Trump understands.
But here I got curious: I myself have been experimenting with cooking Indian food lately, so I couldn’t help wondering what they made. It wasn’t hard to find out that the other woman was the actress Mindy Kaling, and from there a little googling led to a 9-minute video on Kamala’s own YouTube channel. It was made in 2019, the first time Kamala ran for president. They’re cooking masala dosa.
You should absolutely watch this; I wish I could get every voter to watch it. It’s most endearing, humanizing view of Kamala Harris I’ve ever seen. (Thank you, Donald, for helping me find it.) It’s two women cooking together, laughing a lot, and bonding over memories of how their mothers cooked. (Both families stored their spices in re-purposed Taster’s Choice Coffee jars.)
If you get charmed by it, watch the follow-up of other Indian-American women’s reactions.
I find it impossible to imagine a comparable Trump video. I know cooking is typically a female bonding thing, so I wouldn’t expect to see Trump cook with anybody. But translate this into male stereotypes any way you want: fishing, outdoor grilling, carpentry, going to the big game. Trump could never make a video like this, because Trump doesn’t bond; he either dominates or submits. He’s either the Big Dog, or the runt who trails after the Big Dog (as Trump did with Putin in Helsinki).
The other thing I can’t imagine is anybody thinking this video disproves the authenticity of Harris’ blackness. Whose character is so narrow that there isn’t room to be different with different people, while still being yourself? (The Emmy-winning TV series “Severance” resonates precisely because it builds on the common experience of being different at work than you are at home.) Being both Indian and Black doesn’t make Harris “a chameleon”, as J. D. Vance charged. It makes her a typical resident of our complex 21st century society. (You’d think J. D. would understand biracial identity, since his own children are both Indian and White. Do you think he’ll make them choose someday?)
Which brings us back to the question: What is Trump doing? He’s lying. He knows he’s lying. He’s saying something incredibly stupid and then doubling down on it. But why?
Some writers warn us not to overthink questions like this. Trump’s niece Mary advises:
After eight years of covering Donald, too many journalists have gotten into the habit of seeing strategy in his crude and instinctive behavior. The truth is quite simple–Donald can’t help himself. When it comes to him, we shouldn’t overthink it. He is exactly what he seems: a racist, a misogynist, a liar.
[W]e don’t have to fall into this Trump confusion matrix where we’re kind of beguiled by some mysterious, secret, ingenious plan that explains why a bizarre racist outburst that normal people look at and think “What’s wrong with him?” is actually a genius political move. It’s just an outburst and attempted reset. No more, no less.
But at the risk of giving Trump too much credit, let’s start with a simpler question: Why did he accept the NABJ invitation to begin with? Three possibilities present themselves:
He wanted to appeal for Black votes. This wouldn’t be unreasonable, given Trump/Biden polls that showed him making inroads with Black men. But if that had been his motive, he would have behaved differently. He’d have fended off aggressive questions without rancor and repeatedly returned to nostalgia for the pre-Covid economy, as if anything in his policy proposals would bring it back. The fact that he was combative from the very first question indicates that he wasn’t there to win Black votes.
He wanted to convince White suburban voters that he’s not racist. Overt racism plays badly among educated suburban voters, especially women. That’s why dog whistling was invented: to appeal to White racists without scaring White moderates. That’s also why all Trump’s campaigns have been so diligent about recruiting somebody to stand behind him at rallies with a “Blacks for Trump” sign. It’s not important that Trump have much actual Black support, but he has to appear to have Black support, to placate White moderates. From this point of view, the ideal thing would have been to make no real news at the NABJ convention. Then the story would be the simple fact of Trump’s appearance before a Black audience rather than anything he said. Obviously, that’s not what happened.
He wanted to pick fights that will appeal to his White racist base. This interview will produce many clips that will go viral in the White racist echo chamber: Black women try to trap Trump, but he is not intimidated and stands up to them, challenging the suggestion that he is too chicken to debate Harris, and proving that he will stand up for you when the critical race theory goblins come for you.
It seems clear to me that the third option is correct: Trump’s false claim that Harris wasn’t Black until recently, and that before that she only emphasized the Asian half of her heritage, only makes sense if you’re playing to a White racist audience. Black people understand that being only half African is more than enough to get racists to treat you as Black. And choosing to emphasize some other part of your heritage is never an option, because racism isn’t a choice you make, it’s a choice racists make about you. Also, non-racist Whites have no trouble processing the notion of mixed-race, which Trump seems so confused by.
So Trump’s script casts the Black journalists as antagonists in his performance as the Champion of Beleaguered White Men. Once you see that, his subsequent actions only need to make sense in the worldview of racist White men, who often frame race as a scam, a way for non-Whites to claim some kind of sympathy or benefit. The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer spells it out.
Trump’s attack on Harris is meant to evoke this worldview, in which Black advancement is a kind of liberal conspiracy to deprive white people of what is rightfully theirs. Trump is saying that Harris became Black only when it was obvious that being Black conferred social advantage. … Trump’s smear of Harris is also an accusation of racial disloyalty—that she was ashamed of being Black until it was politically convenient. Racial treason is something Trump finds particularly offensive. He has begun referring to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish, as “Palestinian,” doubly racist in that it turns Palestinian into an epithet and castigates a Jewish man for being insufficiently loyal to his own people. The idea that liberal Jews are not truly Jewish operates similarly to Trump’s attack on Harris, in that it gives the speaker permission to attack a Jewish target in anti-Semitic terms because the target is not “truly” Jewish. Attacking Harris in racist terms, under this logic, is not racist, because she is not “truly” Black. The point of this rhetorical maze is simply to justify racist attacks on a particular target while deflecting accusations of bigotry.
[A]s a fascist, he believes that only white people—or more specifically, only his own white cishet Christian male voters—are authentic and real. Everyone else, to Trump, is fake and inauthentic. … Trump can say that Jewish people who don’t vote for him, “hate their religion,” because as a white Christian fascist, he defines what Jewishness means. He can say Obama isn’t American, because as a white Christian fascist, he defines what America is. He can say Harris isn’t Black, because he is the fascist leader, and he defines what Blackness is. For that matter, he can lie about crowd size, about the weather, about his own actions and beliefs, because as the white fascist patriarch, he is the one authentic measure of truth. He is real. Nothing else is.
Serwer and Berlatsky were writing before Trump began smearing Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, both on Truth Social and at his Atlanta rally, referring to her as “a good male boxer” who “transitioned”, and pledging “I WILL KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS.” Khelif is female from birth, and gender transitions are illegal in Algeria, but what does it matter? As the fascist leader, Trump defines what gender means.
In short, Trump was trying to stoke up the energy of his base by appealing to their sense of racial and gender grievance, promoting resentment that women and people of color are taking what is rightfully theirs, and arguing that they are doing it under the false flags of anti-racism and anti-sexism, because racism and sexism haven’t been a thing in decades and were never that big a deal to begin with.
The fact that he may have confused or angered anyone else, like me or you, is just a side effect.
I don’t have any special insight into the White racist community, so I’m not sure how well this is working. I can only trust that White racists are not a majority of the electorate, and hope that the rest of us show up in large enough numbers to outvote them.
The Weekly Sift 