The momentum for Harris continued this week, as the Trump campaign struggled to come up with a counter-message. On Wednesday, Trump was interviewed at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, and reverted to his Birther political roots: He challenged Harris’ racial identity, professing not to understand how she could be both Indian and Black.
The first featured post will examine what he could possibly have been thinking and what audience his remarks were aimed at. Because his position is so hard to take seriously, I’ll include a certain amount of humor, and I’ll point you to an endearing Harris video from 2019 that Trump thinks proves his point. (I hope you’ll watch it. At a minimum you’ll learn a good onion-dicing technique.) “The Unfathomable Mystery of Biracial Americans” should post around 9 or so EDT.
For weeks I’ve been hoping to write a series of issue-oriented articles, but events keep outrunning my ability to cover them. I particularly want to examine the issues where the Trump campaign claims an advantage: inflation and immigration. This week I’ll finally get my inflation article out. “Where Did Inflation Come From?” should appear by 11.
Even with two featured posts, the weekly summary has a lot to cover: the prisoner swap with Russia, the rising tensions between Israel and Iran, Venezuela’s post-election crisis, J.D. Vance’s continuing problems, the Trump/Egypt investigation, Harris catching Trump in the polls, and a few more things. I’ll aim to get that out by noon.
She’d rather address, in the summer, a sorority — a colored sorority. Like she can’t get out of that.
This segment of Nicole Wallace’s show demonstrates what Harris candidacy means to Black people and especially Black women. Erin Haines describes Republican’s racist attacks on Harris as “a train that is never late”.
The segment replays part of a Harris interview:
So here’s the thing about breaking barriers. Breaking barriers does not mean that you start on one side of the barrier, and you end up on the other side. There’s a breaking involved. And when you break things you get cut. And you may bleed. And it is worth it every time.
Maya Wiley responds:
We have been cut. When she says that … we have lived that cut as students at Ivy League schools. We lived that cut when we were lawyers standing in front of a judge that said “Where’s the lawyer?”
And she calls out the sense of “victimization” Trump keeps appealing to:
People who are victimized by fairness. Who are victimized by competition from the competent. And who are upset because they have for so long gotten to be mediocre and rise.
The whole thing is worth watching.
and J. D. Vance
the subject of the other featured post. And I didn’t even get around to mentioning this weird conversation he had on a podcast in 2021. He claimed “a core part of what’s wrong with journalism in America” is that female reporters are panicking about their biological clocks running out. And then this:
they’re all fundamentally atheist or agnostic. They have no real value system.
Because to him the only values are Christian values. If you don’t have those values, you don’t have any values.
and Trump’s “You won’t have to vote any more”
A mistake journalists and pundits often make with Trump is to hear what he says and think: “He couldn’t possibly have meant that.” Then they search for some less threatening interpretation, and claim that’s what he must have really meant.
Well, this weekend I caught myself about to do the same thing. Friday, Trump spoke to Turning Point Action, a political group of right-wing “Christians” [About that: How much of the Sermon on the Mount would they reject as “woke”?] founded by Charlie Kirk. He said that Christians needed to get out and vote for him just this once.
You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.
That sure sounds like he’s confessing to exactly what his enemies charge: If he gets another term, democracy will be over in America. Nobody will have to vote any more.
But then I thought: No, he must not have meant that. He must be talking to Christians who usually ignore politics, telling them that they should make an exception this time. (Even that isn’t a very positive take: He’s pitching his message to people who think democracy is a burden; they should vote for him so they can slough off the chore of self-government.)
Marcy Wheeler traces how the NYT covered this speech: Its initial headline was about Trump calling Harris “a bum”. Only after the won’t-have-to-vote clip caught fire on social media did the NYT mention it — in paragraph 14, with the explanation I suggested above.
As he so often does, Trump wants it both ways on his failed assassination: He wants to brag about “taking a bullet for democracy”, but he doesn’t want to provide any transparency about his injuries. (In recent appearances, his ear looks fine.)
Predictably, the NYT completely ignored the transparency issue and did its own analysis to back up Trump’s claim about the bullet. The FBI later said more-or-less the same thing, though they left open whether he was hit by a whole bullet or just a fragment of one.
This is the result of Trump successfully working the refs: He has complained so loud for so long about “the fake news media” that the NYT is too intimidated to apply the standards every other politician is subject to.
Appallingly, the Times’ editorial board then framed transparency as a both-sides issue, and called on Harris to make the first moves: “she needs to do more, and she needs to do it quickly”.
Trump won’t release the real ER report on his injury, so somebody made one up. It’s fake, but I love it.
and Elon Musk
Elon had a bad week. On Tuesday, Tesla announced that its second-quarter earnings dropped 45% compared to last year. It was bad news in two ways: the number of cars sold was down 4.8%, and profit on each car dropped as well, as the company had to cut prices on some models. Tesla, which the market treats as a growth stock, saw its shares drop from around $250 to $225. Musk owns over 700 million shares, so his net worth went down nearly $18 billion. The shares still sell at over 60 times earnings (more than double the market average), so there’s still a long way to fall if growth doesn’t resume.
Musk’s personal image took yet another hit this week, as his 20-year-old trans daughter responded publicly to comments he had made about her Monday in an interview on Jordan Peterson’s podcast. Musk told Peterson that his “son” was “dead”, “killed by the woke mind virus”, and that Musk himself had been “tricked” into approving gender-affirming treatments.
I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged. Which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.
Wilson, who had her name legally changed two years ago to disassociate herself from Musk, described him as “absent”, “cruel”, and “cold”. Looking at what he said, it’s hard to argue with her.
and you also might be interested in …
Last Sunday was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth. That record lasted until Monday. 2024 has consistently broken temperature-on-this-date records, and now that we’re getting into the hottest part of the year it’s breaking all-time records.
Jess Piper, who writes the blog “The View from Rural Missouri“, which I have linked to in the past, got swatted on Tuesday. One of her posts had drawn the ire of Libs of TikTok, which Wikipedia defines as “a handle for various far-right and anti-LGBT social-media accounts operated by Chaya Raichik”. A few days later (a correlation whose causality is impossible to prove), a deputy sheriff interrupted her gardening to inform her that the sheriff’s office, and several other law enforcement entities in the area, had received an email. The local water department had gotten a letter.
The email claimed to be from a close family relation. The letter stated that the family member had murdered me and my husband the night before. It went on to state that they intended to shoot and kill anyone who came on the property.
Needless to say, Jess was fine, and so was everyone else in her household. The point of a hoax like this is to provoke police to come into the situation with guns blazing, and maybe kill the unsuspecting target or her loved ones. Failing at that, the person being swatted should be terrorized, maybe so terrorized that she’ll stop doing, saying, or writing things that far-right or anti-LGBT people find offensive.
It might have worked, but for the fact that Jess really does live in rural Missouri, where local authorities know most of the long-term residents. So the deputy sheriff decided to drop in on his neighbor rather than call in a SWAT team.
It sounds like the terrorizing part of the plan didn’t work either.
In the end, this is the time in which we live. The internet has allowed me to find a following with like-minded people. It’s allowed me to organize across the state and remind people that folks like me exist in rural spaces. A whole lot of us live here and it’s getting out. We are contesting more rural seats and this will lead to more Democratic wins in my state.
But, with the good comes the bad. I have folks threaten me on a regular basis and now it has escalated to a swatting. But, I can’t bend to fear and I can’t stop the momentum we are building. So, I move on. We move on.
We lock arms. We do this together. I could not organize without support.
After Biden stepped down, the story was supposed to be “Democrats in Chaos”. But instead it’s the Republicans who are floundering.
If this were an ordinary election cycle, Trump would be flying high right now. The out-of-power party usually holds its convention first, gets a lot of media attention for its message, paints its nominee in his or her most favorable light, and has a bright new (or maybe distinguished old) vice presidential nominee everyone’s excited about. In 1988, that combination of factors temporarily gave Mike Dukakis a 17-point polling lead over George H. W. Bush. Then the Republicans held their convention, and the rest is history.
If anything, you’d expect Trump to be flying higher than is typical for the inter-convention lag, because he survived an assassination attempt. Right now, he should be getting as much sympathy as he’s ever going to get. And Kamala Harris is an unknown quantity who wasn’t even considered all that popular even a week ago.
Instead, just about every poll is within the margin of error. The RCP polling average has Trump up 1.7%, down from the 3.1% lead he had on Joe Biden. And the news cycle is running in Harris’ favor. She’s raising incredible amounts of money and signing up incredible numbers of volunteers. She’s getting new endorsements just about every day. (Barack and Michelle Obama have disdained the kingmaker role in the Democratic Party, so their endorsements Friday put the final exclamation point on Harris’ rise.) In a few weeks she’ll have her own convention to showcase her vision, and her own shiny new VP candidate.
I’ve had to admit to being wrong about a lot of things lately, so what’s a few more? I totally did not anticipate how smoothly the transition from Biden to Harris would go, how quickly Democrats would unite behind Harris, and just how exciting the whole process would be. Harris was ready to go, Democrats were eager to get past the angst of the previous month, and Harris’ people have artfully exploited social media, especially Tik Tok. Framing the race as the Future vs. the Past is brilliant. “We are not going back” is the perfect response to “Make America Great Again“.
Biden’s gracious exit had a lot to do with this, and I think we should all be grateful to him. He has been an excellent president under difficult circumstances, and I agree with him that he deserved a chance at a second term. But the future of American democracy depends on beating Trump, and he came to recognize that he wasn’t in a good position to do that. So he responded to the world as it is rather than the world as it should be.
The Harris boom seemed to take the Trump campaign by surprise, in spite how often they had claimed Biden would have to step aside. I think that’s because Trump himself still cannot imagine how someone with power could voluntarily surrender it for the common good. [1] In a similar situation (which he is sort of in now — he’s the over-the-hill guy dragging his party down) he would be plotting his next coup, not anointing his successor. Even if he could somehow be induced to withdraw, he couldn’t possibly do it without whining.
So Republicans didn’t have anti-Harris talking points ready to go, and instead fell back on kneejerk racist and sexist attacks.
Dahlia Lithwick has a complex but worthwhile interpretation of the whole catalog of attacks against Harris: DEI hire, slept her way to the top, Jezebel, childless cat lady, and so on. What unites these lines of attack is the belief that a woman’s life is not the sum of her own choices, but the sum of the judgments men have made about her. The attacks are “rooted in the idea that any woman who succeeds in America does so only because men desire her, sleep with her, promote her, and support her”. Those kinds of attacks may have worked in the past, but after Dobbs, American women have been pushed too far.
There are a thousand good reasons that going after Harris for her race and gender are stupid and should stop now. But from a purely strategic perspective, chief among these reasons is that every woman who votes has been told within the past two years that someone else—a doctor, a legislator, a husband, a Supreme Court justice—is better suited to make life choices for her than she is. I’m not sure they’re buying it. Reducing Harris this time around to a cartoon version of a person who never made any real choices because powerful men have been slinging her around the chessboard for 30 years is not a persuasive argument for the GOP, even while it’s a familiar one. Maybe Republicans think women resonate with being called lazy sluts who stand on the shoulders of powerful men for the entirety of their careers. But it seems to me that a failure to treat the putative next president as a moral and political actor in her own right signals a failure to believe that women voters are themselves moral and political actors as well.
Having watched their initial attacks backfire, Republicans seem to have settled on framing Harris as a “San Francisco radical“.
This is another thing Republicans do that Democrats don’t: demonize parts of America. Democrats threw the kitchen sink at George W. Bush, but I never heard anybody say that he was bad because he was from Texas. Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott are objectionable because of their beliefs, actions, and character, not their home state.
Anyway, the San-Francisco-radical attack seems to be centering on Harris’ support for defund-the-police policies, San Francisco’s status as a “sanctuary city”, and her role in the Biden administration’s border policies. She must have anticipated this, so we’ll see how she responds.
Oh, and she supposedly wants to ban plastic straws. (She does, but only after somebody comes up with a better paper straw.) Clearly this is a great issue for Republicans to build their national campaign around. Forget climate change, abortion, Ukraine, democracy, the Supreme Court — plastic straws.
I consider myself attuned to the symbolic meaning of various superheroes. But I’ve been surprised by one association: Kamala Harris as Captain America. I might have expected Storm from the X-Men, or a warrior from Wakanda, or even a white female icon like Wonder Woman. But no: Captain America. And it works.
I expect the Democratic Convention to contrast strongly with the Republican Convention, and that it will provide Harris with the polling bounce Trump didn’t get. One reason: Democrats are not ashamed of their recent history.
Two weeks ago, the RNC engineered none of those emotional moments we often see at conventions, when the party loudly applauds some elder statesman. Think about all the people who could have been featured at the Republican Convention but weren’t: most obviously Mike Pence, but also the Bush family, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, and Mitch McConnell. Cindy McCain could have waved to a crowd cheering the memory of her husband. None of that happened, because today’s Republican Party has no past. It’s just Trump.
But in Chicago next month, Joe Biden’s ovation will probably last longer than his speech. Barack Obama will be welcomed home. Hillary Clinton will pass her glass-ceiling-breaking torch to Kamala. Maybe there’ll be one last video montage paying homage to Jimmy Carter. Rising stars like Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer will get prime-time slots. And I guarantee you that Harris and whoever she picks as VP will give more inspiring acceptance speeches than Trump and Vance did.
It will be great TV. People will feel good watching it. And it will move the needle.
[1] When DC relaunched Superman in 1986, John Byrne came up with a new solution to an old problem: If Lex Luthor is so brilliant, why can’t he figure out that Superman is Clark Kent? The answer came in Superman #2 “The Secret Revealed”. Luthor had a subordinate investigate what relationship Superman had to Kent, and the answer came back that they were the same person.
Luthor fired that woman, because “I know better. I know that no man with the power of Superman would ever pretend to be a mere human. Such power is to be constantly exploited. Such power is to be used.”
In short, he had the answer, but his worldview wouldn’t let him accept it. That’s also what happened to Trump. Sure, he kept saying the Democrats would have to replace Biden, but he couldn’t imagine that Biden would step aside gracefully for the good of his party and the country. Because Trump knows better. He knows that human beings will hang onto power at all costs, because that’s what he tried to do after he lost the 2020 election.
Let me say this right up front: In no part of Hillbilly Elegy did J. D. Vance confess to having sex with a couch. In fact, we have no reliable reports of Vance sexually abusing any piece of furniture. Ever. He has not been banned from Ikea. The clip of him singing a love song to a couch is fake; the lip movements don’t even match the audio. If you search on the #CouchHumper hashtag, all you’ll get is misinformation. Are we clear on that?
But somehow this week the mythical Vance/couch tryst became one of the funniest examples in the history of framing. It started on social media, with a tweet providing exact page numbers for the confessional excerpt. If you didn’t happen to have a copy of Hillbilly Elegy handy, how could you check? Surely nobody would just make something like that up, would they? [1]
Largely because of that specific referencing, the rumor began to take off — I even believed it myself at first — to the point that it needed to be debunked. So AP published a fact-check (since removed) which it headlined: “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.”
As any fan of George Lakoff knows, the first law of debunking misinformation is: Don’t put the lie in the headline. The reasoning is simple: Directly negating a frame invokes the frame. In Lakoff’s famous example, “Don’t think of an elephant” invariably makes you think of an elephant. Until this week, the most famous real-life violation of Lakoff’s rule was Richard Nixon’s immortal denial “I’m not a crook.” If you had never before considered whether Nixon might be a crook, you did then.
Well, lots of people who don’t delve deeply into social media, and so hadn’t heard the rumor at all, do read AP headlines. And they immediately thought: J. D. Vance? A couch? What’s up with that? And then, even though they didn’t have time to read the article, they wondered what exactly was wrong about the rumor. Did Vance just flirt with the couch? Did the couch misinterpret his intentions? Maybe he was napping on the couch and had a wet dream. That’s embarrassing, but it’s innocent; it could happen to any young man.
A few people who made the early couch memes may have believed the claim was true, but before long everybody knew it was invented. And yet the jokes just kept rolling in a tone of OK-it’s-false-but-I’m-having-too-much-fun. [2]
I am still looking for a social psychologist who can explain why this has been so enjoyable. But in the meantime I’ll take a stab at it. I think the message here is: “See? We can lie too.”
We’re sick to death of answering stuff like that with facts, only to watch the lie propagate in spite of the facts. So you want to lie? Fine. Our lie is funnier and more viral than yours.
I’ll be interested to see whether people start consciously using it that way, responding to right-wing BS with Vance-and-the-couch claims, and, when challenged, saying, “Oh, I thought you had started a lying contest.”
Another reason we’re all being so merciless with the couch jokes is that other stuff emerged this week: stuff Vance really did say that personally insulted millions of us, and left us feeling like “I dare you to say that to my face, you couch-humper.”
childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too
How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?
Wow. What a judgmental, clueless thing to say. J. D. Vance has never met me, but he’s sure that I don’t care about the future, that I couldn’t possibly care like he does, because my only connection to the future is through my sister’s kids and grandkids, the children of my close friends, the kids in my church community, the students I’ve taught, the coworkers I’ve mentored, and my membership in the human race. Kamala Harris is even a stepmother to her husband’s children, but she’s one of the childless cat ladies Vance called out by name. Apparently, step-parenting doesn’t count either.
Another childless person he called out by name was Pete Buttigieg, whose adopted twins are nearly three now. But at the time
Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey. He couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children. [3]
He seems to view everything in terms of the negative. … I think a lot of us who have had kids would certainly say that that experience opens you to a new way of thinking about the world. But he doesn’t talk about it in those terms. He talks about how anybody who doesn’t have kids is less than, that their perspectives have less value, which is a really strange take.
Precisely. If Vance wants to wax poetic about how parenthood has changed him for the better, I’m happy for him. But if he wants to project onto me the benighted mindset he had before becoming a father, or (based on that projection) assign me a correspondingly lesser role in the nation we share, I’ve got a problem with that.
And let’s be clear: Projection is the key concept here. Vance’s attack is actually a confession. He doesn’t care about the future beyond how it affects his own biological descendants. Caring about other people’s kids, or about your community more broadly, is so foreign to him that he can’t even imagine how people like me can do it.
Such a me-and-mine worldview perfectly explains his position on climate change. If he can leave his own children well fixed by selling out to fossil fuel companies, that sounds pretty good to him, even if it condemns everyone else’s kids to an apocalyptic hellscape.
I’ve got nothing against cats. I’ve got nothing against dogs. … People are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I said, and the substance of what I said, Megyn, I’m sorry, it’s true.
But he wasn’t being “sarcastic”. He was being an asshole. He has ignorantly insulted me and millions of people like me, and when it was pointed out to him, he wouldn’t apologize. So the insult stands.
Do you want an asshole to be vice president of United States?
But OK, let’s put aside the insults and assholery and look at what Vance was proposing, which is — let’s face it — just a dumb unworkable idea: Children get votes, which their parents get to cast. So if Mom and Dad disagree — it is OK for a woman to disagree with her husband, isn’t it? — which one gets to cast the kids’ votes? If Mom and Dad separate with joint custody, where do the votes go? And think about those stereotypic welfare moms that Republicans love to scapegoat, the ones who keep having kids just to get more welfare. Do they get extra votes? If I’m an undocumented immigrant, but my “anchor baby” is an American citizen, can I cast her vote?
The whole idea is stupid. Clearly Vance just says stuff without thinking it through.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz burnished his Harris-VP credentials by applying a term that has stuck: weird. If you want to say that Vance’s ideas are scary or stupid, I can’t argue with you. But the main thing they are is weird. Here’s an example of the far-out scenarios that hatch in Vance’s mind, and the kinds of things he justifies with these bizarre fantasies. [4]
Let’s say Roe v Wade is overruled. Ohio bans abortion … let’s say in 2024. And then every day, George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California. … And if that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening? … I’m pretty sympathetic to that actually.
Federal response like what exactly? Banning pregnant women from crossing state lines? Making women take pregnancy tests before getting on interstate flights? What? Suppose a pregnant Ohio State student flies home to California for Thanksgiving and miscarries while she’s there. How can she prove she didn’t get an abortion? What happens to her?
I’m sure Vance’s musings would sound perfectly normal in the Republic of Gilead. But not here. In America, they’re weird.
[1] Apparently, people have been making stuff like this up for a long time. In Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Hunter S. Thompson told this story about Lyndon Johnson.
The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.
“Christ, we can’t get a way with calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”
“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”
[2] Rep. Jack Kimble is often amusing, but he’s not a real congressman. California’s 54th district does not exist.
[3] Pete is being generous. Yes, Vance couldn’t have known at the time that Buttigieg and his husband were having trouble adopting. But he knows now, and hasn’t offered any kind of apology.
I haven’t found any direct statement of Vance’s views on same-sex marriage, or adoptions by same-sex couples, but he opposed the Respect for Marriage Act that would have codified marital rights for same-sex couples, and many of his “pro-family” statements use phrases that are also used by anti-gay hate groups. So it’s possible, even likely, that Vance not only thinks Pete should have second-class citizenship, but that he opposes any attempt by gays and lesbians to qualify for first-class citizenship by getting married and adopting children.
[4] Lots of Republican proposals are justified by similarly bizarre fantasies. We have to ban late-term abortions, for example, because of the possibility that some woman might carry a healthy fetus for nearly nine months, and then choose an abortion at the last minute on a whim. Who does that?
Or we need to ban trans athletes from high school and college sports, because women’s programs could be overrun by men pretending to be women. How many trans athletes do they think are out there? Are they dominating any sport? Is any women’s program in America being overrun by them? Can Republicans name even one trans athlete whose motivation is anything like what they’ve described?
I keep getting overwhelmed by events, so the series of posts I plan to do on major issues keeps getting pushed off. (I have one on inflation half-finished, and plan another one on the border and immigration.)
But this was an amazing week. Last Monday morning, President Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race wasn’t even 48 hours old, and it wasn’t clear at all how things would shake out. But this week, Kamala Harris unified the Democratic Party behind her candidacy. None of the rival candidates pundits had fantasized about stepped up to challenge her, and she’ll go into the Democratic Convention with the support of a large majority of delegates.
Perhaps even more important, Democratic hope and energy exploded this week. The Harris campaign raised money and signed up volunteers at a record pace. New voter registrations also surged, though they didn’t quite reach the levels the Obama campaign achieved in 2008. Potential VP choices for Harris fanned out across the news shows, competing to show how well they can articulate the Democratic message and take the offensive against Trump and Vance.
So that’s one post, “The Harris Surge”, which I’m aiming to get out around 11 EDT.
Before that, though, I plan to post an article on J. D. Vance’s rough week, and why I believe he deserved it, even if he never actually did have sex with a couch. (I think we can’t repeat that often enough: J. D. Vance did not have sex with a couch. He does not pose a threat to the sofas of America.) “Couches, cat ladies, and J. D. Vance” should be out by 9 or so.
That leaves a bunch of stuff to the weekly summary, which I hope to get out between noon and 1.
Friends and Fellow-Citizens: The period for a new election of a citizen to administer the executive government of the United States being not far distant, and the time actually arrived when your thoughts must be employed in designating the person who is to be clothed with that important trust, it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made.
This week everybody was talking about Joe Biden’s decision
Yesterday, Joe Biden announced that he is ending his candidacy, but will continue as president to the end of his term. He endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place. He promises to make a formal address to the nation later this week. (He’s been in Delaware recovering from Covid. I suspect he wants to be more recovered and back in the White House before he makes the address.)
I have a million reactions, but let’s start with this: Can you imagine Donald Trump ever, under any circumstances, doing something that selfless? Despite the pressures brought to bear on him, if Biden had stood his ground, he would not have been denied the Democratic nomination. And despite all the recent pessimism, the fall election was still virtually a toss-up. Polling averages had Biden around 3% behind, which is not much at this stage, especially considering how late-deciding voters broke for the Democrats in 2022. So he is giving up a very real chance to continue as president for another four years.
But that scenario also includes a substantial risk of Trump being elected again, which would be a disaster for this country. So Biden is stepping aside. As historian Jon Meacham wrote in today’s NYT:
By surrendering the possibility of enduring in the seat of ultimate power, Mr. Biden has taught us a landmark lesson in patriotism, humility and wisdom.
Trump could never do that. He showed on January 6 that he would risk pulling the whole country down around him in order to stay in power.
Then we come to Kamala Harris. Biden has endorsed her, and so have a few key Democrats like Rep. James Clyburn. More importantly, none of the frequently mentioned competitors has stepped up to challenge her.
The media is spinning all kinds of theories about the process for choosing a nominee, and salivating over the prospect of the first contested convention in many years. But I refuse to speculate until some major candidate other than Harris steps forward. For weeks we’ve been comparing Biden to Somebody Else, and that kind of conversation needs to stop. If you can’t identify who Somebody Else is and point me to the place where they have announced their candidacy, I don’t want to hear it.
The Democratic Convention starts in Chicago on August 19. A “virtual vote” was supposed to happen sometime in early August, because of an Ohio deadline that could have kept the Democratic nominee off that state’s ballot. But Ohio has since changed its rules, so that’s not necessary any more. That vote, though, has neither been scheduled nor called off, so we’ll see what happens.
These are maddening times to watch the news networks, because we all want to know what’s going to happen, but nobody can tell us. So the airwaves are full of speculation that is mostly baseless. I advise ignoring it: Tune in occasionally to see if there’s any actual news, but turn the TV off as soon as the talking heads start speculating. You’ll be happier and saner.
Also ignore the polls for at least a week. Harris-as-candidate will poll differently from Harris-as-possibility. Maybe better, maybe worse. (I notice myself feeling more excited about her than I thought I would.) Wait and see.
A few speculations are worthwhile: anticipating attacks on Harris, as Judd Legum and Kat Abu do. Abu’s take is particularly interesting: She thinks the Right has wasted four years when it could have been assembling a supervillain image of Harris, a la Hillary Clinton. Instead, they’ve just painted her as ditzy, which definitely should make swing voters see her as the lesser-of-evils compared to Trump. They’ll undoubtedly try to paint a new supervillain image of her, but it won’t penetrate as well as it would have if it had been marinating for four years.
Dueling ads are already out: an attack ad against Harris blaming her for covering up Biden’s shortcomings, and a pro-Harris ad billing her as “the anti-Trump”. “She prosecuted sex predators. He is one.”
Donald Trump and [Trump campaign adviser] Chris LaCivita are about to hit Kamala Harris with an avalanche of racist and sexist attacks and a ton of slut-shaming. Democrats across the board need to be saying now what we all know, which is that this will bring out the very worst of Trump. Racism and sexism are his brand. Charlottesville is his brand. You can’t just be on the receiving end of this stuff. Trump is about to show the kind of gutter white nationalist and racist pol he is. Force the press and all observers to see this totally predictable move through that prism. … Of course Trump will go there, and these attacks and those attacks can be very damaging. But Trump the racist bully and gangster is what kills him in the suburbs. It’s what embarrasses people.
One thing Biden’s decision does is put the too-old-to-be-president shoe on the other foot. Trump is 78, which means that in four years he’ll be older than Biden is now. Unlike Biden, he’s fat, out of shape, and eats a lot of junk food. Like Biden, his mental acuity is dubious. His proposed VP is 39 and has been a senator for a year and a half, during which he has accomplished essentially nothing. That VP, who very well could be president soon if Trump wins, has no other experience in public office.
So, say Biden stepped aside in favor of Harris tomorrow. How long until the vapid gossips we call political reporters find something wrong with her, some alleged flaw they just have to write 192 stories about? … About 30 f’ing seconds, is my guess.
The NYT in particular is worth watching. It has been running a dedicated campaign to push Biden out since … I don’t know, around March at the very latest. Will they be happy now? Will they finally start covering Trump’s inadequacies with the intensity they deserve? Or will they wait a week or so and then go after Harris just as hard as they went after Biden?
and the Republican Convention
The Republican Convention in Milwaukee just ended on Thursday, but it already seems like very old news. The featured post discusses Trump’s record-long acceptance speech, which was billed as a call for national unity. The media has been describing it as two speeches at war with each other: a unity call followed by Trump’s usual divisive rhetoric.
But I think they’re missing something: What Trump means by “unity” is that his opponents give up and submit to his domination. Once you understand that, the two halves of the speech fit together perfectly: He will be a president “for all America” as soon as all Americans shut up and get in line behind him.
I love Elon Musk. … We have to make life good for our smart people, and he’s as smart as you get. But Elon endorsed me the other day. And I read … [that] he gives me $45 million a month.
That’s how it works in TrumpWorld. He’ll be “committed to the working man” until that man’s boss writes him a check.
It is no wonder that the heroes who stormed Normandy and faced down communism sadly say they don’t recognize our country any more.
All over America, US History teachers were covering their faces and shaking their heads. The heroes who stormed Normandy were fighting Nazis. The Communists were our allies in that war.
Guilfoyle’s historical rewrite got me wondering: Do Republicans even recognize any more that the Nazis were the bad guys? Present-day Nazis are MAGA now, so the idea that Americans could have been fighting them in World War II seems unthinkable. Near the end of Trump’s speech, he recalled glorious past battles from our history: “Yorktown, Gettysburg, and Midway”. Midway, a battle against the Japanese, not the Nazis. By itself, it’s a trivial thing, but the pattern seems worrisome.
and the Trump shooting
When I wrote last week’s blog, the shooting was still too new for there to be many reportable facts. There had been a shooting and Trump got hit, but he was OK. A few other people were wounded and one had died. The shooter, a 20-year-old White guy, was also dead. That was pretty much it.
Now we know a bit more: Trump was barely injured at all. His ear wound didn’t even require stitches. The ear bandages his cultists wore at the convention reminded me of the purple-heart band-aids Republican conventioneers wore in 2004, to minimize John Kerry’s war wounds. Then they were trying to make something serious look trivial; this time they wanted something trivial to look serious.
A lot of investigating has happened since last week, but nothing has come out that fits into a convenient narrative. The shooter was into guns, and had some vaguely conservative views, but wasn’t particularly active politically. The lack of obvious hostility towards Trump
has left authorities puzzled about a motive for his assault and has had investigators speculating that his intentions may have been less politically motivated and more about attacking the highest-profile target near him. … In addition to the former president, Crooks had searched online about President Joe Biden and had photos on his phone of other prominent figures from both parties. He searched for the location of Trump’s rally as well as the upcoming Democratic National Convention, the briefing notes say, and discovered that Trump planned to appear just an hour’s drive away from his home in the Pittsburgh suburbs. That suggests Crooks may have been looking to carry out a high-profile shooting, and the Trump event’s proximity and timing offered the most accessible opportunity, federal officials have speculated.
When an act of violence doesn’t lend itself to a clear argument or a tidy story, we often choose not to think about it.
and J. D. Vance
To my surprise, I discover I have a public record when it comes to J. D. Vance: In 2016 I reviewed Hillbilly Elegy for UU World magazine as part of a batch of white-working-class books.
Vance and I are both from what I like to call the “transitional class” — people who grew up working class but got an education and are professional class now. (I became a mathematician while Vance became a lawyer.) Though we went different ways both politically and religiously, I thought Vance’s book was a credible account of how a transitional class person might become a social and religious conservative:
Realizing how close he came to having no one who cared about him, he values traditional notions of duty—holding a marriage together, taking responsibility for children—over individual fulfillment. His feelings about government come not from the military or the state university that helped him, but from the foster care system that he feared would take him from his grandmother and give him to strangers. When as a teenager he reconnected with his father, he found a man who had converted to conservative Christianity and established a new family blessedly free from drinking, daily screaming arguments, and violence. Vance’s adult religion, though conservative, seems to be less about theology or salvation than about the hope of establishing such islands of peace and sanity in an unstable world.
As for who Vance has become since, I turn to two men of his generation also from the center of the country: Pete Buttigieg and Trae Crowder. “I knew a lot of guys like J. D. Vance,” Pete says in his trademark blunt-but-not-nasty style.
When I got to Harvard I found a lot of people like him, who would say whatever they needed to to get ahead. And five years ago that seemed like being the anti-Trump Republican, so that’s what he was. … Five years later, the way he gets ahead is that [Trump]’s the greatest guy since sliced bread.
Pete compares Vance to Mike Pence, who similarly started out with one set of principles — Evangelical Christian moral rectitude — and then spent down his credibility making excuses for Trump’s immoral behavior. Pete notes how that ended “with Trump supporters proposing that he be hanged for using the one shred of integrity he still had to stand up to an attempt to overthrow the government”. Pete expresses his hope that things work out better for Vance “maybe not as a politician, but as a human being”.
As for why Silicon Valley billionaires support J. D. Vance (Peter Thiel is Vance’s biggest political donor) and Trump (Elon Musk is giving millions to Trump’s SuperPAC) in spite of otherwise being pro-science, anti-climate-change, pro-gay-rights, and libertarian rather than authoritarian, Pete says:
We’ve made it way too complicated. It’s actually super-simple. These are very rich men who have decided to back the Republican Party that tends to do good things for very rich men.
Trae Crowder, the “liberal redneck”, is even less generous, seeing Vance as someone who has sold out the people they both claim to represent. His rant is entertaining, and more fun to watch than to read.
and you also might be interested in …
A half-written article that keeps slipping from week to week as more urgent news erupts is “The Mythical Trump Economy”, about nostalgia for pre-Covid America, which fundamentally has nothing to do with Trump or his policies. In the meantime, look at the WaPo’s “Trump’s Economy vs. Biden’s in 17 Charts“.
I also still haven’t found time to read Judge Cannon’s dismissal of the stolen-documents charges against Trump, the most obviously open-and-shut case against him. Here’s the analysis on Law Dork:
It’s a weak-on-the-law ruling for which Chief Justice John Roberts deserves a not insignificant amount of blame — despite his name not appearing once in her 93-page opinion.
Roberts has led the Supreme Court into an era in which precedent can selectively be ignored, eviscerated, or overruled when it gets in the way of conservatives’ goals. That, in turn, has led lower court judges to feel that they have been given power to do the same — predicting, in essence, the precedents that they believe the current court would ignore.
This is not how the law is to work. And yet, one need only glance through Cannon’s decision to see that reality at work Monday in her effort to do Trump’s bidding.
We know from studies of authoritarianism that the more despondent and despairing people are, the more they become dependent on the promises of a savior, someone who’s going to save the nation. They become prone to accepting conspiracy theories. They don’t know what’s true any more, so they need an anchor, and that anchor would be Trump. So be very wary when you hear these slogans designed to discredit democracy and designed to convince people that America is failing.
We asked RNC attendees when America was last “great.” Regardless of age, most said when they were children. Says nothing about America, but lots about conservative psychology.
A Salon newsletter article fleshes this out:
As one commenter on Tik Tok aptly noted: “I’m amazed at the grown men who don’t understand that life was simpler when they were children because they were children.”
and let’s close with something fake
Sometimes you just can’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. When a flaw in a Crowdstrike security update crashed Microsoft systems around the world, somebody created a fake image of the Blue Screen of Death filling the Las Vegas Sphere. Snopes declared the rumor false.
Unity can arise in two very different ways: when a group of equals recognize their common interests and purposes, or through dominance and submission. Guess which kind of unity Trump called for Thursday night.
Shortly after Donald Trump’s ear was barely grazed by a bullet, piece of shrapnel, or whatever it was, he announced that he was rewriting his convention speech to call for Unity.
It is a chance to bring the country together. I was given that chance.
The media dutifully reported this intention, imagining, as they so often do, that Trump was about to mature and become presidential. Friday morning, some headlines around the country echoed Trump’s call for unity, as if he had actually made one. Parker Malloy collected the evidence:
She commented:
The notion of a Trump “pivot” is as old as his political career. Since 2015, the media has repeatedly predicted — and prematurely celebrated — moments when Trump supposedly transformed into a more measured, presidential figure. These predictions have consistently proven to be mirages, disappearing as quickly as they formed.
When the mainstream media realized the speech wasn’t what they had predicted, they started interpreting it as two speeches at war with each other (which at least would explain why it was twice as long as a typical acceptance speech).
The “new” Donald Trump soothed and silenced the nation for 28 minutes last night. Then the old Trump returned and bellowed, barked and bored America for 64 minutes more.
This interpretation is misguided. Trump gave one speech, with a single theme: unity, but not the kind of unity politicians in a democratic republic usually call for.
Pundits misinterpret Trump when they refuse to recognize what he is: a sociopath. As such, Trump has no concept of what we usually mean by national unity: A broad consensus of citizens coming to recognize their common interests and purposes, and using that recognition to put aside their previous conflicts and mutual distrust.
The most obvious examples of unity in our history come after shocking disasters like Pearl Harbor or 9-11. Republicans did not instantly find love in their hearts for FDR, and Democrats similarly did not love W. But they recognized that all Americans faced a common threat and needed to move with a common purpose.
Admittedly, moments like that are rare, and the attempted assassination of Trump didn’t rise to that level. But nonetheless there are common purposes Trump could have invoked and built on.
Hardly anyone likes the level of hostility that currently exists in American politics. We’ve fallen a long way from that moment in the 2008 campaign when John McCain corrected a questioner who said she couldn’t trust Barack Obama because “he’s an Arab”.
“No ma’am,” McCain politely but firmly replied, “He’s a decent family man, a citizen, who I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. And that’s what this campaign is all about.”
Nonetheless, there is still a lot to build common cause around. A substantial majority of Americans in each party want our children to get educated, and to be able to find productive places in a prosperous economy. We want our basic infrastructure — roads, electrical power, communications, etc. — to work flawlessly. We want clean water and breathable air. We want sick people to get care and old people to live their final years in dignity. We want to be safe from crime. We want to live in peace. We want our country to do well in international competition, and not to fall behind China (or anyone else) either economically or militarily. We want to help our fellow Americans when natural disasters strike. We want to be able to take pride in our country, and to believe that oppressed people around the world see us as a beacon of hope.
We often lose sight of these common intentions, but we shouldn’t. How to accomplish any of these goals leads to serious arguments — like whether the government or the market should take the lead — many of which are hard to resolve. So there would still be plenty of room in our politics for “disagreements on fundamental issues”. But there is a lot to build unity around, if we would choose to do so.
Donald Trump, however, doesn’t live in a world where that kind of unity is possible, or even makes sense. To a sociopath, all relationships are built around dominance and submission. In every interaction, somebody wins and somebody loses. Win/win is just not a thing.
This view runs far deeper than just his politics. The Art of Deal, for example, is about winning every negotiation, not about building mutually beneficial long-term relationships with clients, employees, or suppliers. He often refused to pay small contractors who worked on his casinos and clubs, or he bullied them into taking less than their contracts called for. (They will never deal with him again, but so what? He won.) The background for his recent fraud trial was that banks would no longer offer him competitive rates without special guarantees, which he verified through false documentation.
Or take a look at his cabinet picks from 2017: Mike Pence, Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, Steve Mnuchin, Jeff Sessions, Mike Pompeo, Ryan Zinke, Sonny Perdue, Wilbur Ross, Alexander Acosta, Tom Price, Ben Carson, Elain Chao, Betsy DeVos, Rick Perry, John Kelly, David Schulkin, Nikki Haley, Scott Pruitt, Mick Mulvaney, Robert Lighthizer, Linda McMahon, and Andrew Puzder. Forget about whether any of them will serve again should he be reelected; how many of them are even supporting him now? Why did he even need a new vice president?
Trump doesn’t do mutually beneficial relationships that build trust over time. He uses people until their usefulness is exhausted, then he discards them as “losers” or denies that he ever really knew them.
Similarly, NATO has never made sense to him, because it’s about countries banding together for mutual protection. In his mind, though, if we’re not taking advantage of them, they must be taking advantage of us. Many of the fantasy sir-stories he tells during his rallies are about him expressing dominance and other world leaders submitting. Here’s one in his convention speech:
For years and years when I first came in, they said President Obama tried to get [gang members we wanted to deport] to go back and [other countries] wouldn’t accept them. They’d put planes on the runway so you couldn’t land the plane. They’d close the roads so you couldn’t take the buses; they’d all have to turn back.
As soon as I said no more economic aid of any kind to any country that does that, they called back and they said, “Sir, it would be our great honor to take M.S. 13. We love them very much. We love them very much, sir. We’ll take them back.”
He reinterprets his greatest diplomatic blunder — tearing up the Obama agreement that would have kept Iran from getting nuclear weapons, then utterly failing to get the “better deal” he said was possible — as simply not having enough time for his attempted domination to take effect. (Because of course the country that was willing to lose hundreds of thousands of soldiers in its war with Iraq would crumble under his economic threats.)
I told China and other countries, “If you buy from Iran, we will not let you do any business in this country, and we will put tariffs on every product you do send in of 100 percent or more.” And they said to me, “Well, I think that’s about it.” They weren’t going to buy any oil. And they were ready to make a deal. Iran was going to make a deal with us.
And then we had that horrible, horrible result that we’ll never let happen again. The election result. We’re never going to let that happen again. They used Covid to cheat. We’re never going to let it happen again. And they took off all the sanctions, and they did everything possible for Iran and now Iran is very close to having a nuclear weapon, which would have never happened.
Because to Trump, that’s what relationship is all about: dominance and submission. If you’re not the predator, you’re the prey.
So it should have been immediately obvious what kind of national unity Trump would call for in his convention speech: If you’ve been resisting his dominance, it’s time for you to recognize that you’re beaten and submit.
The opening part of Trump’s speech, the 28 minutes Axios liked, sounded like common-purpose unity, if that’s what you were primed to hear.
I stand before you this evening with a message of confidence, strength and hope. Four months from now, we will have an incredible victory, and we will begin the four greatest years in the history of our country.
Together, we will launch a new era of safety, prosperity and freedom for citizens of every race, religion, color and creed.
The discord and division in our society must be healed. We must heal it quickly. As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart.
I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America.
But it is also consistent with the sociopathic unity of dominance and submission, as the second part of the speech made clear. He wasn’t reaching out to the other half of America, he was demanding its surrender.
And we must not criminalize dissent or demonize political disagreement, which is what’s been happening in our country lately, at a level that nobody has ever seen before. In that spirit, the Democrat party should immediately stop weaponizing the justice system and labeling their political opponent as an enemy of democracy. … If Democrats want to unify our country, they should drop these partisan witch hunts, which I’ve been going through for approximately eight years. And they should do that without delay and allow an election to proceed that is worthy of our people. We’re going to win it anyway.
He lamented what has been happening to his sons, who were fellow defendants in the fraud lawsuit that he lost (because a jury of ordinary Americans found that he and his sons committed fraud).
[Eric is] such a good young man. He went through a lot of trouble, and Don, last night, was incredible. They went through so much trouble. They got subpoenaed more than any people probably in the history of the United States. Every week they get another subpoena from the Democrats. Crazy Nancy Pelosi, the whole thing. Just boom, boom, boom.
They’ve got to stop that because they’re destroying our country. We have to work on making America great again, not on beating people. And we won. We beat them in all. We beat them on the impeachments. We beat them on the indictments. We beat them. But the time that you have to spend, the time that you have to spend. If they would devote that genius to helping our country, we’d have a much stronger and better country.
Got that? Everyone has to stop focusing on beating people, but I beat you. You don’t win; I win. So stop trying to make me obey laws or holding me accountable for my crimes. Submit. And then our country can move forward in unity.
If we do that, if we submit to Trump, he offers the vision that he can become powerful enough to dominate others on our behalf.
For too long, our nation has settled for too little. We settled for too little. We’ve given everything to other nations, to other people. You have been told to lower your expectations and to accept less for your families.
I am here tonight with the opposite message: Your expectations are not big enough. They’re not big enough. It is time to start expecting and demanding the best leadership in the world, leadership that is bold, dynamic, relentless and fearless. We can do that.
We are Americans. Ambition is our heritage. Greatness is our birthright.
But as long as our energies are spent fighting each other, our destiny will remain out of reach. And that’s not acceptable. We must instead take that energy and use it to realize our country’s true potential — and write our own thrilling chapter of the American story.
Trump closed by recalling past American glories.
Together, these patriots soldiered on and endured, and they prevailed. Because they had faith in each other, faith in their country, and above all, they had faith in their God.
Just like our ancestors, we must now come together, rise above past differences. Any disagreements have to be put aside, and go forward united as one people, one nation, pledging allegiance to one great, beautiful — I think it’s so beautiful — American flag.
But you will search this text in vain to find any indication that Trump himself is putting aside past differences. He’s still talking about “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and refusing to recognize any positive purpose (like mitigating climate change or trying to limit Covid deaths) that Biden might have been trying to achieve with his policies. And if you don’t share “faith in their God”, well, you just don’t count.
Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve – And never was! He only attained the position of President by lies, Fake News, and not leaving his Basement. All those around him, including his Doctor and the Media, knew that he wasn’t capable of being President, and he wasn’t – And now, look what he’s done to our Country, with millions of people coming across our Border, totally unchecked and unvetted, many from prisons, mental institutions, and record numbers of terrorists. We will suffer greatly because of his presidency, but we will remedy the damage he has done very quickly.
So no, putting aside differences is not for him, it’s on me and on you. We just need to get in line and submit. Only then will America have the kind of unity Trump wants.
There is a word for this kind of unity, but not an English word: gleichschaltung. It’s an old German engineering term, for when you wire a bunch of electrical circuits together under a common master switch. It got applied to German politics in 1933, for reasons that you may recall from history books.
I don’t usually put a cartoon in the Teaser, but this Garth German drawing was too spot-on. Last week, the Trump shooting was still so fresh that not much was known about it. Then J. D. Vance was announced as Trump’s VP and the whole circus of the convention started, culminating in Trump’s record-long 90-minute acceptance speech, which had the laundry-list quality of a bad State of the Union.
Meanwhile, President Biden’s support among elected Democrats continued to slip, with a new defection or two almost every day. Then Sunday, he announced he’s leaving the race and endorsing Kamala Harris. Now all eyes are on her, and the TV talking heads barely have time to mention Trump, who suddenly looks very old.
It’s a lot to cover, but I have one advantage over CNN and MSNBC: I try to stick to what I know, and nobody knows much at this point. So I’ll edit out all the maybe-this-maybe-that and see what’s left.
Here’s what I have planned: For my sins, I watched the full 90 minutes of Trump, and I think the mainstream media completely missed his point. They saw two speeches: the call for national unity that they predicted and wanted to see, followed by Trump’s usual divisive rhetoric. I saw one speech: It was all about unity, but not the kind of unity the media had imagined. Throughout, Trump was calling for his enemies to surrender to his domination. Then we can be one unified nation, he promised, and stop wasting our energies fighting each other.
The Germans have a word for that kind of unity: gleichschaltung, which is pretty much untranslatable. It’s an old engineering term, but they coined its political usage in the 1930s, for some reason.
So the featured post “The Two Kinds of Unity” will flesh out that interpretation of Trump’s speech. Everything else will wind up in the weekly summary. The featured post should appear between 9 and 10 EDT, and the summary before noon.
Yes. I know: Mr. Biden is old, is prone to gaffes, walks stiffly and had a disastrous debate with Mr. Trump. But this I also know: A presidential election is not an entertainment contest. It does not begin or end with a 90-minute debate. Enough! Mr. Biden may not be the ideal candidate, but he will be the candidate and should be the candidate. And with an effective campaign that speaks to the needs of working families, he will not only defeat Mr. Trump but beat him badly. It’s time for Democrats to stop the bickering and nit-picking.
This week everybody was talking about the Trump shooting
I assume you already know that somebody shot at Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday. They hit his ear, but did him no lasting damage. The shooter was killed and so was one other person; two were critically injured. The shooter has been identified, and everybody is wondering how he established a position so close to the stage. Officials aren’t speculating about his motives yet, so I won’t either. Sometimes assassins have coherent political agendas, but sometimes what they do only makes sense in their own inner worlds. Wait and see.
There is a fairly standard statement that any responsible leader needs to make in this situation, and Joe Biden made it:
I have been briefed on the shooting at Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania. I’m grateful to hear that he’s safe and doing well. I’m praying for him and his family and for all those who were at the rally, as we await further information. Jill and I are grateful to the Secret Service for getting him to safety. There’s no place for this kind of violence in America. We must unite as one nation to condemn it.
As one whose family has been the victim of political violence, I know firsthand that political violence of any kind has no place in our society. I thank God that former President Trump is safe. As we learn more details about this horrifying incident, let us pray that all those in attendance at the former President’s rally today are unharmed.
I’ve decided not to speculate about the shooter, his motives, or the possible effects on the presidential campaign. For the most part, I find myself agreeing with Jay Kuo, especially his expectation that Trump and his cult will “overplay their hand”. There’s already an attempt to cash in.
One possible result of the shooting is pressure on Democrats to tone down their attacks on Trump, which I would hate to see. I understand why President Biden said in his televised address:
The political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated. It’s time to cool it down. And we all have a responsibility to do that.
But of course we know what will happen: Trump will continue his violent rhetoric, and the media will call Biden a hypocrite any time he criticizes Trump, no matter how justified that criticism is. Rick Perlstein posted:
A predictable effect of the Trump shooting that the Republicans have worked the refs by saying that this is what happens when you say their candidate means to end democracy. This plays to agenda-setting elite political journalists” cult of consensus–for their immediate response was to cluck about “politicized” responses, when the only politicized response were from Republicans (Democrats who went on the record also responded with consensus cliches).
Republicans thus are already succeeding in neutralizing the perceived legitimacy of Democrats continuing to make the true argument that the Republican candidate does mean to end democracy.
Nobody is addressing the elephant in the room, which is the temptation almost everybody feels to get violent, if only in fantasy. That’s what one featured post is about.
and Democrats were still arguing about Biden’s candidacy
Whatever you believed last week, this week proved you right. Biden kept a busy schedule, did a lot of the things his critics said he needed to do, and did them well but not perfectly. He hosted the NATO summit, held an hour-long press conference afterwards, and had enthusiastic rallies, including a fiery speech in Michigan in which he both went on offense against Trump and laid out his vision for a second term. Last night he addressed the nation about the Trump shooting. (This morning I can’t find any articles about what he said, so he must have done fine.)
If you support Biden, you noted that his press conference (on foreign policy, mostly) displayed a depth of understanding we have never seen in a Trump press conference. He not only answered the questions directly, with detail and nuance, but recognized the individual reporters and made reference to their fields of expertise. If you want him out of the race, you noted that he sometimes said one word when he meant another (“Vice President Trump“), spoke in his characteristic interrupting-himself style, and wasn’t particularly charismatic. It was all too little too late.
There are polls to support both points of view. 85% of Americans told an ABC poll that he’s too old to be president and 65% want him to step aside. But the same poll found showed Biden within 1% of Trump, and a Marist poll has Biden up by 2%, belying the often-repeated claim that Biden “can’t win”, or that he needs some drastically different strategy that he still hasn’t announced. 538’s prediction model (which includes “fundamental” factors I don’t fully understand in addition to polling) has Biden as a slight favorite.
Prominent Democrats continued to pick sides. AOC and Bernie Sanders are all in for Biden, but the number of congressional Democrats expressing doubts about his candidacy (or even outright calling for him to quit the race) is over a dozen now. Nancy Pelosi made an enigmatic statement about supporting whatever decision Biden makes, as if his announced resolve to stay in the race wasn’t his final answer.
Whichever side of this argument you’re on, you’re probably annoyed that Trump doesn’t get similar scrutiny. He never holds unscripted press conferences, only does interviews with friendly journalists who won’t fact-check him or ask difficult follow-ups, hasn’t released his medical records, and makes constant verbal blunders that the media calls no attention to. His bizarre rambling at public rallies is covered as Trump-being-Trump rather than medically significant symptoms.
If Trump did hold the kind of press conference Biden held Thursday, we know what we’d see, because we saw it so many times when he was president: Before long a reporter would ask him about something he didn’t know, and he would respond with a word salad containing numerous falsehoods. Any follow-up question would trigger Trump to call the reporter “a disgrace” working for “the fake news media”. Headlines and sound bytes from the conference would be all about Trump sparring with reporters rather than anything we learned from his answers.
More and more I feel like the media is covering itself rather than external events. Thursday, NYT analyst Peter Baker sort-of covered Biden’s NATO press conference, but never actually got to the content of Biden’s words, focusing instead on “every momentary flub, every verbal miscue” which “even if quickly corrected, now takes on outsize importance” because
The reality is that every public appearance between now and November will be scrutinized for evidence of infirmity.
Scrutinized by who? Well, by Peter Baker, for one. He’s not reporting on events, he’s announcing his intentions.
Similarly, I can’t count all the headlines that have described Biden as “defiant” when he says he won’t drop out of the race. But who is he defying, exactly? Mostly the very same pundits who now tag him as “defiant”.
The NYT (where else?) provides Daniel Schlozman a platform to explain how the Democratic Convention can do whatever it wants, independent of what happened in the primaries. He notes that the Biden delegates are “pledged, not bound“.
I realize that in the shadow of Project 2025, the long-term consequences of a bad precedent may seem small. But this kind of hair-splitting can’t help but devalue the primaries going forward. Progressives should consider how this could come back to bite them.
Imagine that in 2028 or 2032, AOC pulls off some early primary upsets, gets momentum, and by summer is headed to the convention with a majority of delegates pledged-but-not-bound to support her. Unfortunately, polls show her losing to some MAGA successor like J.D. Vance or Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has been making hay by tarring AOC with the “socialist” and “radical Marxist” labels. Meanwhile, some Democratic centrist who didn’t even run in the primaries — let’s say Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, who the Republicans haven’t bothered to smear yet — has better numbers. The Biden 2024 precedent would open the possibility of pushing AOC out, in spite of what the primary voters wanted.
In my opinion, the dumbest idea around is to remove Biden via the 25th Amendment, as was proposed in The New Yorker by Jeannie Suk Gersen. Of course she’d prefer that Biden resign voluntarily — not just step down as nominee, but leave the presidency immediately.
But if Biden resists either an outright resignation or a break for the rest of his term under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, then it would be time to look to Section Four of the Amendment, which covers removing the President involuntarily. The Vice-President and a majority of the Cabinet can declare that Biden “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” whereupon Harris would become the acting President.
Aside from the objection that this will never happen, there are two very good reasons why it shouldn’t. First, the 25th Amendment isn’t about the president polling badly, or worries about his abilities four years from now. It requires the VP and the cabinet to affirm that right now Biden is “unable to discharge the duties of his office”. The example that everybody was talking about when the amendment was passed in 1967 was Woodrow Wilson’s stroke, after which his wife Edith secretly ran the country.
Is there any evidence that Biden is incapacitated in the way the Amendment envisions? We just saw Biden host a NATO summit, which seemed to all outward appearances to go well; the alliance is united and taking decisive action to aid Ukraine. Inflation was actually negative in June. The economy continues to create jobs, and even as the unemployment rate ticks upwards to 4.1%, it remains remarkably low for this point in the interest-rate cycle. The stock market is at an all-time high. Biden has successfully negotiated with an insane Republican majority in the House, and has managed to keep the government open without giving up the gains he made (bipartisan infrastructure, the anti-climate-change provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act …) when he had a Democratic House majority.
So independent of any policy disagreement (on issues like the border, say, if you’re conservative, or Gaza if you’re liberal) where’s the evidence that the US is being mismanaged because Biden is unable to discharge his duties? You and I were never appointed to any office by Biden and owe him nothing, but could you sign a declaration to Congress affirming that he’s incapable at this very moment? I couldn’t. Using the 25th Amendment this way would set a terrible precedent.
But there’s an even more serious problem, which is that once Harris is sworn in, there’s no VP. So if anything happens to Harris Mike Johnson becomes president.
I know, I know: the Amendment makes provision for that:
Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.
So Harris can nominate Gavin Newsom or Beshear or some other White guy who could maintain the ticket’s racial and gender balance. But then we’re back to that insane Republican House majority, which would love to see Mike Johnson become president. Even if a handful of Republicans were willing to cross party lines, what if Johnson just adjourned the House without voting on the VP nomination?
So in the meantime, and probably until January, Johnson is next in line to be president. It would be an open invitation for some Christian nationalist nutjob to kill Harris. And if you think things like that don’t happen any more, take a look at Donald Trump’s ear.
and the Republican convention
It started yesterday in Milwaukee. I try to avoid speculation on this blog, but I’ve been expecting for months that this convention isn’t going to help them. Most of the country discounts what a freak show the MAGA Republican Party has become, and I expect the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Matt Gaetzes to be out in such force that the country can’t ignore them. Most Americans haven’t watched a complete Trump speech in four years, and I expect them to be surprised.
See the point made above about Trump overplaying his post-assassination-attempt hand.
Pundits are settling on J. D. Vance as Trump’s VP, which fits the model I laid out some while ago. Trump’s VP has to have
no moral code, so that his conscience won’t keep him from doing whatever Trump asks (like Mike Pence’s did)
no independent following, so that he never outshines Trump (as Marjorie Taylor Greene might among the true MAGA faithful)
no prominence prior to Trump, so that he owes Trump everything (which eliminates Marco Rubio).
but I’ve been re-reading a book
Three of them, actually: Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, which is practically a time-trip to the late 1600s and early 1700s. Why is that worth mentioning here? Among many other things, Stephenson draws a strikingly simple line that divides Whigs from Tories: Tories believe that wealth comes from land, and Whigs believe that wealth comes from commerce.
Once you understand that, you see that generations later it was also the difference between two seminal American founders — Jefferson and Hamilton. In Jefferson’s ideal country, every family owned its own small farm. If you look at things that way, merchants and bankers — Hamilton’s people — seem like parasites.
The Hamilton/Jefferson argument is still with us, though you have to look at everything sideways to see it: If you think wealth comes from land (and the modern assets comparable to land, like brands, intellectual property or anything else you might charge rents or royalties for), government has no natural role in the economy. (It can’t create land, after all.) But if you think wealth comes from commerce, government can increase national wealth by building up the infrastructure of commerce: transportation systems, communication systems, education systems, and so on.
So if you dimly remember something in your high school US History class about Andrew Jackson fighting the Bank of the United States, that’s what it was about: Does a reliable banking system play a role in generating wealth, or does it just suck money away from the common people? And if you run into somebody who thinks government can only “redistribute” wealth that it has no role in producing, channeling it from “makers” to “takers”, you’re hearing the latest round in an argument that is more than 300 years old.
and you also might be interested in …
This morning, Judge Cannon dismissed the classified documents case against President Trump, the most open-and-shut of the cases against him. She wrote a 93-page opinion, which I haven’t looked at yet. Marcy Wheeler is reading it, and the Lawfare blog will have a podcast on it this afternoon.
Based on nothing but intuition, I think this is a good thing, because it opens the possibility that her decision will get reversed and the case can be assigned to a judge who isn’t in Trump’s pocket.
When the Supreme Court’s Loper decision came down two weeks ago, redefining the relationship between federal agencies and the courts, it was a little hard to describe what exactly it would mean in people’s lives. Fortunately, the Public Notice blog has an article listing the cases that are already being affected.
Taken together, it’s evident that any moves the administration makes to tilt the playing field even slightly in favor of workers are designed to fail once they reach a conservative federal judge. And thanks to right-wing judge shopping, plaintiffs are often able to get their case in front of an anti-regulation judge they know will be favorable to their challenges.
Friday, Maine Senator Susan Collins told reporters she won’t vote for Donald Trump.
Now imagine what a media storm there would be if Maine’s other senator, Angus King, announced that he wouldn’t vote for Biden. The event and the hypothetical event sound nearly the same, but clearly I’m missing something.
Rudy Giuliani’s attempt to use bankruptcy to get out of his $150 million defamation judgment isn’t going to work. Citing his lack of “financial transparency”, a New York judge dismissed his bankruptcy case. Next stop: asset seizure.
I love photo contests, and BigPicture has a great one. The photo below is called “Ghosts of the North”, and I was sure it must violate the rules by superimposing one image on another. But in fact it just has a long time exposure. The wolf was there long enough to register, but not long enough to look solid.
Trump designed Project 2025 to be deniable. But the Republican platform isn’t deniable, and it’s bad enough.
Recently a lot of attention is being paid to Project 2025, which I warned you about last August. Project 2025 is a massive 900-page plan for the second Trump administration to hit the ground running next January, together with a database of loyal MAGA Republicans to staff it, and a process by which Trump acolytes can declare their fealty in hopes of landing a government job.
In essence, Project 2025 plays two familiar roles: The 900-page doorstop is a very detailed party platform, and the staffing database resembles what a presidential transition team might do — enlarged by Trump’s plan to “demolish the Deep State” by circumventing civil service requirements and appointing over 50K people, rather than the usual 4K or so.
What’s different about Project 2025 is that (by farming the effort out to a consortium of conservative groups headed by The Heritage Foundation), Trump has made the whole effort deniable. So if something in the 900 pages terrifies you, like that it will get rid of all the people in the Justice Department or the Pentagon who thwarted Trump’s post-2020-defeat coup, or that it reverses all the rules that protect LGBTQ people from discrimination, Trump can tell you not to worry. It’s not his platform or his transition team, it’s those guys.
I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.
Meanwhile, if you’re a MAGA cultist and you love the stuff in the 900 pages, Trump gives you a wink and a nod: Sure, that’s what we’re going to do, but I can’t say that just now.
In other words, Project 2025 is designed to be the mother of all dog whistles. Undecided voters are supposed to hear one thing, while MAGA cultists hear something else. If Trump has one superpower, it’s his ability to get people to believe that he’s telling them the truth and lying to the other guy.
No hard feelings from any of us at Project 2025 about the statement, because we understand Trump is the standard-bearer and he’s making a political and tactical decision here.
I’m not going to do an elaborate debunking of Trump’s Sargeant-Schultz-like I-know-nothing claim, because other people have done that. Suffice it to say that Trump knows a lot about Project 2025, he knows the people behind it, he has everything to do with them, and he agrees with what they’re saying, especially the parts that are ridiculous and abysmal.
But OK, Trump has his superpower and we’re being naive if we ignore it. Lots of people are going to believe his denials and accuse us of being afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome if we are skeptical. So let’s leave the details of Project 2025 for another day and consider the Trump plans that aren’t deniable: the draft platform for the Republican Party, whose national convention is meeting in Milwaukee at this very moment. I don’t think even Trump could get away with saying that he knows nothing about the Republican Party or who’s behind it, so let’s examine what’s in the party platform.
The platform is a 16-page document with a three-page preamble, ten pages of elaboration, and three pages of filler. The introduction culminates in “twenty promises that we will accomplish very quickly when we win the White House and Republican Majorities in the House and Senate”. The promises are in all-caps, as if they were Trump posts on Truth Social. Most of them probably were at some point.
Inflation. A number of the promises are deceptively simple, like #3 “End inflation and make America affordable again.” (I’ll spare you the all-caps.) I’m sure that when Democrats read this they immediately slapped their foreheads and said, “Why didn’t we think of that? We’ve been wondering what we should do about inflation. Why didn’t it occur to us to end it?”
So OK, how do Republicans plan to end inflation? That’s Chapter 1 of the elaboration.
We commit to unleashing American Energy, reining in wasteful spending, cutting excessive Regulations, securing our Borders, and restoring Peace through Strength. Together, we will restore Prosperity, ensure Economic Security, and build a brighter future for American Workers and their families. Our dedication to these Policies will make America stronger, more resilient, and more prosperous than ever before.
Most of this in code.
unleashing American Energy means (as the preamble says) “drill, baby, drill”. It’s not about unleashing American wind energy or solar energy. It means producing as much fossil fuel as we possibly can and ignoring what that means for climate change.
reining in wasteful spending is the same sleight-of-hand we’ve been seeing in Republican proposals since Reagan. It’s a fudge factor that makes their budget numbers work. In #14, they promise to “protect Social Security and Medicare with no cuts”. #12 will “strengthen and modernize our military, making it, without question, the strongest and most powerful in the world”. #2 envisions “the largest deportation operation in American history”, which sounds like it might be expensive to pull off. Ditto for #8, which will “build a great Iron Dome missile defense shield over our entire country” and #11 “rebuild out cities”. No specific examples of “wasteful spending” are given, and it’s hard to imagine cuts that could make up for all this increased spending. Spending rose in every budget of the first Trump administration (going from Obama’s last budget of just under $4 trillion to Trump’s last of $7.2 trillion), and would likely continue rising in a second. The platform also promises tax cuts (#6), so deficits should go up substantially, assuming Republicans haven’t ended arithmetic too.
cutting excessive regulations means two things: In general, abandoning efforts to protect Americans from whatever rapacious corporations may decide to do, and more specifically, eliminating rules aimed at fighting climate change by cutting fossil fuel use.
securing our borders appeals to the misperception (widespread among the MAGA base) that undocumented immigrants cost our government much more than they actually do. Trump’s plans to secure the border are an expense, not a savings.
restoring Peace through Strength means letting Russia take Ukraine, ending the “wasteful spending” of supporting Ukrainian sovereignty.
And then there’s stuff that would drastically increase prices, like tariffs.
Republicans will support baseline Tariffs on Foreign- made goods, pass the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act, and respond to unfair Trading practices. As Tariffs on Foreign Producers go up, Taxes on American Workers, Families, and Businesses can come down.
Trump has long pushed the bizarre idea that foreigners pay our tariffs. In fact, importers pay tariffs, which they pass on to their customers as higher prices. Do you buy anything made in another country? It’s price will go up 10%. To the extent that the government relies on tariffs rather than income taxes, the tax burden shifts from rich people to ordinary consumers.
How will this plan end inflation? It won’t. Gas and cars might be a bit cheaper, at great cost to future generations. Corporate costs might go down, but Americans across-the-board would be less safe from pollution and dangerous products. (And would those lower corporate costs mean lower prices, or just larger profits?) Government spending and deficits would continue to increase, unless Republicans got clever with the “no cuts” promise on Social Security and Medicare. (They might decide that ending cost-of-living increases in Social Security isn’t a “cut”, or that freezing overall Medicare spending isn’t a “cut”, even though it would mean less care and higher costs for individuals. I know I wasn’t going to mention Project 2025, but it wants to raise the retirement age, which wouldn’t “cut benefits” for anybody who still received benefits. But the platform explicitly promises “no changes to the retirement age”, which you should totally believe because Trump is lying to the other guy, not you.)
Climate and the environment. The word “climate” does not appear in the platform, because an underlying principle of the document is that climate change is not a problem and nothing needs to be done about it. But refusing to combat climate change has a strong implied presence in the document.
The glorification of fossil fuels is everywhere.
Under President Trump, the U.S. became the Number One Producer of Oil and Natural Gas in the World — and we will soon be again by lifting restrictions on American Energy Production and terminating the Socialist Green New Deal.
Republicans will increase Energy Production across the board, streamline permitting, and end market-distorting restrictions on Oil, Natural Gas, and Coal. The Republican Party will once again make America Energy Independent, and then Energy Dominant, lowering Energy prices even below the record lows achieved during President Trump’s first term.
Want to drill for oil in some environmentally sensitive area? No problem! And did I mention that the US is already energy independent, in that we’re a net exporter of oil and gas? And if you remember those low gas prices during the Trump administration, you might also remember that they happened during the Covid lockdown, when nobody was driving. And “market-distorting restrictions” means subsidizing sustainable fuels.
I didn’t mention one of the Republicans’ ideas for lowering housing prices:
open limited portions of Federal Lands to allow for new home construction
Look around your neighborhood and see if you can spot any federal lands you’d like to build on. None? But mining companies have their eyes on lots of federal lands.
Republicans will revive the U.S. Auto Industry by reversing harmful Regulations, canceling Biden’s Electric Vehicle and other Mandates, and preventing the importation of Chinese vehicles.
Those “harmful regulations” are things like CAFE standards to increase gas mileage. And of course Republicans don’t want you driving an EV, which Exxon doesn’t profit from. Cheap Chinese EVs should be a genuine debate, because while importing them would cost American jobs in the auto industry, it would also speed the transition away from fossil fuels. But it isn’t an issue in this campaign, because Biden also wants to keep them out.
Social Security and Medicare. We’ve already talked about how a Republican administration might get around its promises not to cut these programs. But something nobody talks about is how undocumented immigrants prop them up: Many immigrants work under fake SSNs, which means that they pay taxes but will never collect benefits. Legal immigrants tend to be much younger than the general population, so they pay taxes now but won’t collect benefits for many years. So Trump’s deportation plan will harm all our pension funds. But the platform makes it sound like money flows in the opposite direction.
Republicans will protect Medicare’s finances from being financially crushed by the Democrat plan to add tens of millions of new illegal immigrants to the rolls of Medicare.
I have no idea what plan they’re talking about, and I doubt they do either. Another bit of cluelessness is
corrupt politicians have robbed Social Security to fund their pet projects
I blame both parties for this bit of rhetoric, which goes back to Al Gore’s “lockbox” promise. The federal government has been running deficits, and the federal trust funds have been investing their money in government bonds, as many private pension plans do. Unless the US reneges on its debt (something Trump has hinted at from time to time), nobody is “robbing” Social Security.
Culture wars and education. The platform promises to end “political meddling” in our schools and “restore Parental Rights”, but we can see what this really means by looking at Ron DeSantis’ Florida. Florida education is full political meddling, including a law listing ideas that can’t be taught in Florida schools. And “Parental Rights” means rights for conservative Christian parents, which come at the expense of the rest of us.
So if you want your child to learn real American history rather than rah-rah propaganda, you don’t have that right. If you want a library stocked with books from a wide range of views, including books that help non-White or LGBTQ kids make sense of what they’re experiencing, tough luck. Moms For Liberty said no, and they have the final word.
The platform also calls for ending tenure for teachers and “allowing various publicly supported Educational models”, which means using public money to support conservative Christian schools.
Republicans will support overhauling standards on school discipline, advocate for immediate suspension of violent students, and support hardening schools to help keep violence away from our places of learning.
“Hardening schools” is a euphemism for making them more like prisons. Republicans refuse to do anything about our gun problem, so instead we’ll turn our schools into armed camps. (And of course no armed teacher or school guard will ever flip out and start killing students.)
Republicans will ensure children are taught fundamentals like Reading, History, Science, and Math, not Leftwing propaganda. We will defund schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination of our children using Federal Taxpayer Dollars.
“Leftwing propaganda” and “inappropriate political indoctrination” means recognizing that racism is still a problem in America, or that families take many different forms these days.
Republicans will champion the First Amendment Right to Pray and Read the Bible in school, and stand up to those who violate the Religious Freedoms of American students.
Conservative Christian teachers will be allowed to indoctrinate their students, but non-Christian teachers won’t have similar rights. Teachers who use the Bible to teach critical reasoning skills rather than Christian dogma will find themselves in deep trouble.
We are going to close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. and send it back to the States, where it belongs, and let the States run our educational system as it should be run.
But of course they’re also going to cut federal spending on “Leftwing propaganda”, no matter what a liberal state might want its kids to learn. States rights are for red states, not blue states.
Our Great Teachers, who are so important to the future wellbeing of our Country, will be cherished and protected by the Republican Party
But we’re also getting rid of tenure.
All sorts of phrases in the platform advocate returning to the Dead White Guys tradition in education: “Western Civilization”, “Classic Liberal Arts Education”, and so on.
Immigration. In several places, the platform frames desperate families arriving at our borders as an “invasion”, which is to be met with force and fortification.
We will complete the Border Wall, shift massive portions of Federal Law Enforcement to Immigration Enforcement, and use advanced technology to monitor and secure the Border. We will use all resources needed to stop the Invasion— including moving thousands of Troops currently stationed overseas to our own Southern Border.
Nonviolent solutions — like funding more immigration courts and judges, so that people who arrive here with legitimate asylum claims under our laws and treaty obligations can have their cases handled promptly and won’t have to wait around here or elsewhere — are not mentioned. That was a big piece of the bipartisan immigration bill Trump had his allies in Congress torpedo a few months ago.
The platform also promotes the myth of “Migrant Crime”, as if crimes by migrants were somehow different or more virulent than crimes by American citizens. They aren’t.
And then there’s “the largest deportation program in American history” and “sending Illegal Aliens back home”. That’s millions of people working millions of jobs. Restaurant workers, crop pickers, teachers, nurses, programmers, and probably people you know whose paperwork you never thought about. Your mom or grandpa might have to go to a nursing home because home health aides will suddenly be in short supply. You or your spouse might have to quit working, because child care will be hard to find.
And how do you do an operation of this size without making its processes automatic and inflexible? Where do the millions of people go? To detention camps while we find countries to accept them? How do we keep those camps from turning into hellholes, staffed by people who get off on having power over helpless human beings?
The Weekly Sift 