The Governor and Legislature want to make sure that women in their state cannot obtain an abortion so they passed a law reclassifying abortion drugs as controlled dangerous substances. Most abortions occur by use of the pills, which the Federal Drug Administration has declared to be safe and effective. Currently they are available by mail, but obtaining them without a prescription will soon be illegal. The new law takes effect October 1.
Louisiana lawmakers have added two drugs commonly used in pregnancy and reproductive health care to the state’s list of controlled dangerous substances, a move that has alarmed doctors in the state.
Mifepristone and misoprostol have many clinical uses, and one use approved by the FDA is to take the pills to induce an abortion at up to 10 weeks of gestation.
The bill that moved through the Louisiana Legislature this spring lists both medications as Schedule IV drugs under the state’s Uniform Controlled Dangerous Substances Law, creating penalties of up to 10 years in prison for anyone caught with the drugs without a valid prescription. Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, signed the bill into law in May. It takes effect Oct. 1.
The new law is the latest move by anti-abortion advocates trying to control access to abortion medications in states with near-total abortion bans, such as Louisiana. The law is the first of its kind, opening a new front in the state-by-state battle over reproductive medicine.
Mary Trump, daughter of Donald’s older brother, thinks that the nation might be suffering cognitive decline. How, she wonders, could anyone think longingly of the days when her uncle Donald was President, when chaos was a daily phenomenon?
She writes on her blog:
Since so many people are acting as if they’re certified neurologists, I’d thought I’d join in and discuss the one patient I actually am VERY worried about.
The United States of America appears to be experiencing cognitive decline. That’s the only way I can explain the short memories that have erased the horrors of my uncle’s catastrophic four years in the Oval Office. It’s the only way I can explain a poll that shows Donald with a 51 percent approval rating in Wisconsin. It’s the only way I can explain why this race is so close and Donald—the convicted felon and adjudicated rapist and fraud—remains a significant threat to our democracy.
On Monday, the Huffington Post published a story about how next week’s Republican convention will cash in on the nation’s “collective amnesia” with a program that seeks to remind us about all of the “good times” we had during the Trump administration. Since those good times are purely fictional—unless, of course, you’re like Stephen Miller and enjoy kidnapping and incarcerating small children—it’s going to be fascinating to see how they go about it, and whether or not the corporate media fall for it.
As writer S.V. Date noted, “Donald Trump left the White House with violent crime spiking, thousands of Americans dying each day from a disease he claimed was no worse than the common cold and having attempted a coup to remain in office despite having lost reelection.”
“The former and would-be future president and the Republican National Committee on Monday released a schedule of convention themes that counts on Americans forgetting all that and instead waxing nostalgic for his years in office.”
Waxing nostalgic? For a time when over 5,000 Americans were dying every day; basic supplies, like toilet paper and hand sanitizer, were impossible to find; and Donald showed his concern for the American people by playing golf every day?
Yes, I’m worried about us.
Don’t get me wrong—I wish I could forget, too. I wish I could forget the refrigerated morgue vans that idled in the streets of New York City while Donald threatened to withhold vital PPE from our frontline medical workers unless Gov. Cuomo kissed his ass.
I wish I could forget the way Donald ordered peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square to be tear-gassed so he could go do a photo-op in front of a church.
I wish I could forget the way he talked about the ratings of his COVID briefings while people were on lockdown and hospital emergency rooms were overflowing.
I wish I could forget the way he tormented non-MAGA Americans with his incessant tweeting.
I wish I could forget his telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”
I wish I could forget the anguished screams of police officers as they were beaten and tortured by Donald’s followers on Jan. 6, 2021.
And I wish I could forget how he stacked the Supreme Court with Christian Nationalists who just stole basic human rights from tens of millions of women and then rewarded him by making him—him—king.
But I can’t forget any of that. And I’m determined not to let the rest of the country forget it either. One of our goals has to be to remind this as many people as possible just how bad things were and warn them that things will be so much worse—if we keep forgetting.
Americans have short memories. And after the massive traumas we’ve experienced over the last eight years, it’s completely understandable that people are inclined to forget. That’s how trauma works. The reason things in this country continue to seem bad now despite much evidence to the contrary is because we’ve never recovered from the horrors of the Trump administration. Ironically, forgetting how bad things were is leading to nostalgia for the worst four years of my lifetime.
The fact that it’s explicable doesn’t make it any less horrifying.
At next week’s Republican convention, the opening night’s theme is “Make America Wealthy Once Again.”
Really?
Donald left office with the economy cratering and the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover. Under Joe Biden, the stock market is breaking records daily, unemployment has been at impressive lows, wages are up, and manufacturing is back. America is much wealthier than it was when my uncle was in the White House.
On Tuesday, the theme is “Make America Safe Once Again.”
Really?
We would ask Officer Brian Sicknick if Donald made America safer, but we can’t because he died after being brutally beaten during Donald’s attack on the Capitol. We could ask former Vice President Pence, but Donald tried to get him hanged.
And on Wednesday, they’re going with “Make America Strong Once Again.”
That is just beyond the pale.
Donald is the weakest man I’ve ever known. He kisses up to dictators like Putin and Kim Jong Un and Saudi Arabia’s MBS and Hungary’s Orban because he craves their power and hopes his groveling will convince them to lend him some of theirs. He thinks he can tell our allies to go to hell because, with a huge assist from the Republican Party, he’s banking on American’s forgetting who our enemies really are.
Either way, we have just a few short months to remind Americans what it was really like when Donald was in office and help them see—by talking about the Republican platform and the fascist agenda laid out in Project 2025—what the future will look like if Donald and his brown shirts get back into office.
He’s betting that we’ve forgotten a lot of things. And maybe we have. Maybe we aren’t just democracy in decline—maybe we’re a nation experiencing cognitive decline.
If we fail, I fear he will do things to this country and its people that we will never be able to forget.
Thom Hartmann explains in J.D. Vance’s words why he thinks Kamala Harris is unfit to be President. Her basic deficit is that she’s a woman. Like his mentor Peter Thiel, Vance doesn’t think women are fit to lead.
Vance is an unabashed misogynist who thinks women belong in the home; their role in life is to have babies. He has ridiculed people like Kamala who are childless. Never, never should they have abortions. And if they are in an abusive marriage, they should not get a divorce. An article by Jessica Winter in the current New Yorker [“J.D. Vance’s Sad, Strange Politics of Family”] suggests that these were the lessons he learned from his own family history.
Hartmann writes:
Yesterday at a campaign stop in Ohio, JD Vance said that Kamala Harris shouldn’t lead America because she isn’t “grateful for it.” Vance told his nearly-all-white crowd:
“You know, what I see? Want to take bets here? Want to start a betting pool just in this auditorium? If you want to lead this country, you should feel grateful for it, a sense of gratitude. I never hear that gratitude come through when I listen to Kamala Harris.”
The white myth of America, which Vance echoed at his RNC speech, is that our nation was “built” by white men, ignoring the Black, Asian, and Hispanic labor, and that of women of all races, that built much of this nation.
For the record, one of Harris’ standard stump speeches has, for years, been about how her parents were both immigrants and discovered in America a “land of opportunity” that let her rise to the positions she’s held. She’s damn grateful for America.
But, apparently, she’s not sufficiently grateful to the white men who Vance believes created that opportunity for Harris and her family. When Vance says “grateful,” what he apparently really means is “deferential.”
In other words, she’s not sufficiently humble in the face of white wealth and power. Instead of gratefully deferring to the white men who are born to rule, she’s a pretender to the role of president, an usurper of the power and privilege that should never be in the hands of a woman, particularly a woman of color.
This is, after all, the JD Vance who, along with eight other Republican senators (including Ted Cruz), wrote to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra demanding that his proposed new rule preventing law enforcement agencies from forcing doctors to turn over women’s and girls’ menstrual and reproductive health records must be withdrawn “immediately.”
Vance, Cruz, et al want police to have access to these menstrual and other health records so prosecutors and police in Red states can pursue and prosecute women who go out-of-state to get abortions or order abortion medications through the mail against state law.
Vance and Cruz, like the Republicans on the Supreme Court, are big fans of the idea of a menstrual police force.
After all, when women can’t control their own reproductive capacity, they can hardly reliably participate in the business or political world. Which, of course, is the goal of today’s MAGA GOP.
Given this, Harris’ lack of a submissive attitude of “gratitude” to morbidly rich white men like Trump, Vance, and the billionaires who own the GOP is the logical result of the white men then on the Supreme Court in 1965 (Griswold) and 1973 (Roe) having “let her” and other ungrateful American women defer having children while they pursued a career.
Those men back in the day gave Harris an exception from the childbearing role Vance and Trump today believe God and biology assigned to her, and she’s not sufficiently appreciative.
In 2022, when running for the US Senate (his first elected office of any sort), Vance was explicit: he supports a “minimum national standard,” also known as a national ban, on abortion. He further argued that exceptions for rape and incest — like the raped 10-year-old girl who had to flee his state of Ohio to get an abortion — should not be allowed.
This wasn’t a gray area for Vance; he laid out his position clearly, saying:
“Two wrongs [rape followed by abortion] don’t make a right.”
He added in that same statement that the fetus or zygote should have primacy over the woman:
“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question really, to me, is about the baby.”
Noting that women today regard children “as inconveniences to be discarded instead of blessings to cherish,” 2019 zealous Catholic-convert Vance added in an interview with the The Catholic Current that:
“There’s something comparable between abortion and slavery … and that while the people who obviously suffer the most are those subjected to it, I think it has this morally distorting effect on the entire society.”
Vance went so far as to argue that the Comstock Act, which would ban the shipping of any drug or device that can be used for an abortion (including surgical instruments to hospitals and clinics) be enforced, ending all abortions in America. The Act is, as Clarence Thomas recently pointed out, still on the books, even though it hasn’t been enforced in decades.
That’ll shut up those ungrateful, uppity women.
Vance is apparently offended that ungrateful American women like Kamala Harris demand not just birth control and abortion but also the right to divorce. He argued forcefully that no-fault divorce is a mistake; the option should be removed from women, even those in violent, abusive marriages:
“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so, getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.’”
Vance attacked Vice President Kamala Harris by name in 2021 as a “childless cat lady,” bitterly complaining that women who don’t produce children themselves (Harris is the proud mother of two step-children from her husband’s first marriage) don’t have a “physical commitment to the future of this country”:
“We’re effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via the corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too…
“It’s just a basic fact: You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people that don’t have a direct stake in it.”
As Sam Alito might as well have written in his Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade, Republicans like Vance believe a woman’s place is in the bedroom, the kitchen, and nowhere else. Remember how Mike Pence refused to dine alonewith any woman other than his wife? How very patriarchal; classic GOP Christian Nationalist.
And, Vance and Cruz will tell you (and told Secretary Becerra), the job of men is to police women’s menstrual periods and travel so they don’t do anything ungrateful like getting birth control, an abortion, or visiting a lawyer to get a divorce.
The American Federation of Teachers held its annual convention in Houston. Its president, Randi Weingarten, delivered this speech about the perils of the present time and the importance of unions.
These are unprecedented times. First and foremost, I want to thank President Biden. He’s been a great president, a great public servant and an incredible patriot. We owe him a debt of gratitude.
Of course I’m starting with a primary source. I don’t think they’ve banned Charles Dickens—yet. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. …” Those words were written more than 165 years ago, but today they feel very Dickensian.
Today, our union has never been stronger, and a revival of labor activism is sweeping the nation. Wages are up, inflation has cooled, the Biden-Harris administration has created more jobs than any other in history, and America’s economy is the strongest in the world—powered by America’s workers.
Yet…
Fear, anxiety and despair have taken hold across our country, driven by disinformation, shifting demographics, loneliness and a pervasive feeling that the American dream is slipping further and further out of reach. Our students and our patients are coming to us with greater and greater needs. Academic freedom and the right to peacefully protest have come under attack. From floods to famines to fires, climate catastrophes are worsening. Hate crimes, particularly anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hate, are climbing. And gun violence still haunts us.
Let’s be clear: Political violence is never justified; not on Jan. 6 and not against political candidates. And while the calls to condemn political violence were encouraging, billionaires and demagogues are still capitalizing on fear to stoke division, defund public education and public services, decimate healthcare and dismantle our democracy—all to cement their power. And the Supreme Court’s extremist majority is aiding and abetting them, rewriting the Constitution in terrifying ways.
Operatives like Christopher Rufo, who work on behalf of billionaires like Betsy DeVos, openly admit their scheme—to create distrust in public education and in their political enemies so they can enact their extremist agenda.
These aren’t the first unscrupulous operatives we’ve faced. We’ve been outspent, been bet against, and had our union’s obituary written more times than we can count. Michelle Rhee tried to sweep us away. Scott Walker tried to legislate us out of existence. Billionaires backed the Janus case to try to bankrupt us. A red wave was supposed to crest in 2022 and wash us away. Mike Pompeo tried to vilify us, first claiming that America’s school teachers teach “filth,” and then calling me the most dangerous person in the world—more dangerous than Vladimir Putin.
Why? Because I am your elected leader.
But we’re still here. In fact, we’re thriving. I guess that old saying IS true—what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And, in our case, bigger. The AFT had 1.4 million members when I became president in 2008. Since then, we’ve been through two recessions, a pandemic and all the crap I just described.
Despite everything that has been thrown at us, since our last convention, the AFT has added 185 new units and more than 80,000 new members. And today, the AFT is 1.8 million members strong!
Who are the newest members of the AFT? Four airport ground crew workers in Bangor, Maine—and 450 teaching assistants at Brown University. Nine licensed practical nurses at PeaceHealth in Oregon, and 910 diagnostic imaging techs in Michigan. Bus drivers in Farmington, Ill., and faculty and staff at universities in Kansas and Hawaii. Healthcare workers at Planned Parenthood in Wisconsin. Librarians in Ohio, doctors in Maryland, charter school educators in Massachusetts, paraprofessionals in Minnesota. And thousands more who just want a better life, including—after a 50-year fight—the 27,000 educators and school staff in Fairfax County, Va. Why do they join the AFT? Because the AFT believes in improving people’s lives. Because the AFT believes in our communities and our country. And because the AFT believes in you.
This growth is essential. America’s middle class has risen and fallen as union membership has risen and fallen. That’s why we—indeed, the entire AFL-CIO—are working to grow.
Our unions help us win better wages and benefits. Our unions give us real voice at work. It’s how the United Federation of Teachers negotiated groundbreaking paid parental leave and lower class sizes. It’s how Cleveland got their new policy prohibiting students from using cell phones during the school day. United Teachers Los Angeles won sustainable community schools. And the Chicago Teachers Union is negotiating for healthy, safe, green schools.
It’s about the value of belonging.
Please open the PDF and finish reading this terrific speech.
John Merrow spent many years as an investigative reporter, most recently at PBS. In the education space, he is probably best known for his multiple segments on “miracle-worker” Michelle Rhee as chancellor of the D.C. public schools, which ended with his hour-long expose of her failures.
He writes:
I spent nearly 75 years reporting for PBS, NPR, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Pravda. During that time I received three Pulitzer Prizes, 12 George Foster Peabody Awards, 17 Emmy nominations (but only nine Emmys, to my great disappointment), and three George Polk Awards.
(My editor and I have agreed that fact-checking this column wasn’t necessary.)
In 2016 I had the unprecedented honor of being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II AND receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama. These awards were somewhat controversial because of my quite public romances over the years with Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Farah Fawcett, Cindy Crawford, and Beyonce.
(The internet has made fact-checking irrelevant.)
But there’s no truth to the rumor that Mother Teresa and I were romantically involved. We were very good friends, that’s all.
(Fact-checking is soooo yesterday!)
In 1996 at the age of 55, I fulfilled a childhood dream: I temporarily gave up reporting and signed with The New York Yankees. That season was a dream–I batted .307, stole 36 bases, and won a Gold Glove for my defensive play in left field. Many feel that I should have won the Rookie of the Year award, but my teammate and good friend Derek Jeter was certainly a deserving winner.
(Why would anyone want to fact-check me? Don’t you trust me?)
During my time as a war correspondent when I was embedded with the Special Forces in Iraq, I saved the lives of seven Americans when I picked up and threw an unexploded IED into a ditch. It subsequently exploded, and observers said we all would have been killed but for my instinctive action. For this, I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the only civilian to ever have received this recognition.
(Are you thinking about fact-checking this? Maybe you should!)
OK, subtlety isn’t my strong suit, and you’ve probably figured out that I’m really writing about the absence of fact-checking during the televised debate between President Biden and former President Trump, for which both political parties and CNN agreed that there would be no live fact-checking. The result, which many of you saw, was a lie-filled 90 minutes during which Trump lied 28 or 29 times–and was never challenged!
Why am I upset? Because CNN should never have agreed to that condition. And once CNN did agree, the two reporters that CNN assigned to serve as moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, should have flat-out refused to participate. But they went ahead, giving candidate Trump license to say whatever he wanted, without fear of being challenged.
The result damaged Biden, as we all know. But for me, the process also did serious damage to CNN and to the reputations of Tapper and Bash. When I tried to make that point recently with Marty Baron, the former editor of the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, he dismissed the idea, and I imagine that many others in my (former) line of work agree with him, but I strongly believe that no reporter anywhere should ever agree to that condition.
For every journalist, fact-checking is not a choice but an obligation!
(Editor’s note: Fact-checking reveals that Merrow told at least 16 lies in the preceding paragraphs. We apologize for our failure to fact-check and will be certain to keep a closer watch on him in the future. To do so, we have subscribed to his blog, which YOU may also do by clicking the ‘subscribe’ button at the top of the page.)
Mercedes Schneider read Project 2025 and concluded that its unifying goal is to turn the American people into white evangelical Christians. This “conservative” vision of a different America doesn’t give much thought to those who are neither white nor evangelical not Christian.
She writes in summary:
Free the churches, imprison the librarians.
Roberts was in the news for stating that an “ongoing American Revolution” will “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” According to The Hill, that comment caused “blowback” for Roberts and the Heritage Foundation.
None of Jesus’ ministry involved any political agenda, much less the government-driven denigration of “other” or the imposing of His will on any human being.
Yet here we are.
It behooves every literate American to read this extremist document before casting a vote in November.
Jonathan V. Last, editor of The Bulwark, a site founded by Never Trump Republicans, explains how he sees the new situation, the withdrawal of Joe Biden and the ascension of Kamala Harris as the likely nominee:
The Democratic party is healthy. The Republican party is not.
Our greatest living president. (Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
1. Seven Lessons
(1) The Democratic party is a healthy institution.
On the night of June 27, the various power centers within the Democratic party began a difficult conversation: Was Joe Biden still capable of running a vigorous campaign?
Over three weeks the party reached a diffuse—if not unanimous—consensus: He was not. This consensus was the product of all levels of the party: Elder statesmen such as Nancy Pelosi, elected Democrats analyzing their own future prospects, donors making decisions about spending, and the main body of public opinion among Democratic voters.
Once this consensus was reached, the various power centers began a dialogue with the party’s leader, President Biden. The party expressed its choice. Biden pushed back. The party took up the question again and, after due consideration, held firm.
Joe Biden then stepped aside for the good of the nation.
This is how healthy institutions are supposed to work…
2. The process which elevated Kamala Harris was sensible.
The Democratic party made another institutional decision in parallel with the Biden question: It vetted Kamala Harris.
This subroutine executed in the background, but it was active. Democratic voters began to consider her as the nominee and polling showed that they were comfortable with her. Party elders evaluated her fitness. Donors and elected Democrats took her measure. The fact that no anti-Harris groundswell—or even boomlet—emerged is proof that the party decided that Harris was an acceptable nominee.
After Biden blessed Harris on Sunday afternoon, the party coalesced around her in much the way it did Biden after the New Hampshire primary in 2020.
The Democratic party will enter the election more unified than it had been pre-debate.
3. Kamala Harris can run as an insurgent, but with the advantages of an incumbent.
The largest advantage of incumbency is that a candidate does not have to take base-pleasing positions during a primary campaign that can hurt him during a general election.
Because of the extraordinary nature of her ascendence, Harris possesses this advantage. She will carry nearly every advantage of incumbency and yet she can credibly position herself as this election’s change agent.
4. Trump is holding the age bomb.
The Trump campaign spent two years creating a political bomb concerning old age. They assumed that they could plant this bomb at the feet of Joe Biden.
Trump is now the one holding the age bomb. He is not only a full generation older than Harris—everything about him looks geriatric by comparison. From his gait to his bronzed-over pallor; from the way he rambles and gets lost in sentences to his inability to keep facts straight.
Every split screen now makes Trump look old and decrepit by comparison.
5. There was enormous pent-up demand among Democrats for a younger leader.
That’s more money than any Democrat has ever raised in a single day. It’s twice as much as Trump raised following his felony conviction. If this doesn’t snap your head back, it should.
Because it’s as good a proxy as you’ll find for excitement.
It will be several days until we have polling with a more detailed view of Harris’s support from Democratic voters, but it is already clear that she will perform much better than Biden has within her party.
Here’s my advice: You should be open to the idea that Harris could ride a wave of excitement and passion that absolutely no one was seeing until Biden stepped aside. I’m talking Obama ‘08-levels of energy.
It’s not a given. But it’s in the realm of the possible. Keep your eyes peeled for it.
6. The Republican party is a failed state.
At the debate, Donald Trump also demonstrated (again) that he is unfit for office. He rambled and lied incoherently. He is a convicted felon. A jury found him guilty of sexual assault. He has said he wants to be a “dictator” and that he wants to “terminate” parts of the Constitution. He selected as his running mate a man who advised disobeying orders from the Supreme Court and forcing a constitutional crisis.
Until last week there was nothing stopping the Republican party from forcing Trump off the ticket. The party elders and elected officials could have demanded that Trump step aside. Republican voters could have said that they had no confidence in his ability to govern. Donors could have closed their wallets.
But the plain fact is that not one single Republican called on Trump to step aside.
Not one.
Why? Because the various precincts of the Republican party understand that they hold no power—at all—over Trump. They could not ask him to withdraw from the race. Even broaching the subject would be grounds for excommunication from the party.
The Democratic party is a functioning institution, with checks and balances; constituencies and power structures. Like any institution, it is amorphous and its decision making is mostly organic.
The Republican party is an autocracy where the only thing that matters is the will of the leader. All power flows through him. All decisions are made by him. There are no competing power centers—only vassal states overseen by his noblemen.
7. Harris is an underdog.
One of the reasons the last three weeks have been so difficult is because Democrats were not choosing between a “good” outcome and a “bad” outcome.
Those sorts of choices are easy.
Instead, Democrats were tasked with deciding between least-bad options. Humans rebel against the idea of “least-bad.” When faced with choices, we want to believe that at least one of them is “good.”
When the first real Harris-vs.-Trump polling comes out next week we’ll see how big of a hole she’s in. But unlike Biden, Harris has the ability to spend the next three months on offense, all day, every day. If she can deliver the goods, she has a puncher’s chance.
2. In Praise of Biden
A slight push-back against those who believe Biden took too long to step aside:
It was three and a half weeks from the debate to Biden pulling out. That’s it.
Joe Biden is the president, but he’s also just a man. Coming to a decision like this one—an unprecedented decision—is hard. There’s a lot to weigh and there’s a tremendous responsibility to get it right.
My own view is that Biden made the call basically as quickly as possible. He couldn’t have done it the week of the NATO summit. Then Trump was shot in the ear. Then there was the Republican convention. To my mind, Biden’s timing on this was optimal, actually.
Nothing about Joe Biden’s presidency was inevitable. Not his candidacy. Not his victory over Trump. Not his withdrawal from reelection.
At nearly every turn, Biden did the right thing for America.
His legacy is assured. He will be remembered as one of the great modern presidents.
I said this last night and I’ll say it again. History had its eye on Joe Biden, and he met the moment. He did his part. Now it’s up to Kamala Harris and us to do ours.
Dean Obeidallah blogs at “The Dean’s Report.” Here he describes Kamala Harris’s secret weapon. She terrifies Donald Trump. Can’t wait to see them debate. Trump will probably cancel.
Nothing triggers Donald Trump (and MAGA) more than strong Black women. Period. Black women are at the intersection of the racism and sexism that so fuels Trump and his MAGA movement.
We’ve seen this for years with Trump’s demonization of visible Black female leaders from repeatedly calling Rep. Maxine Waters “low IQ” to vile attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar including calling for her to “go back” to where she came from and worse. And in 2020, after Kamala Harris was named Joe Biden’s running mate, Trump lashed out by playing on the angry Black women trope by calling her a “mad woman,” “so angry” and even a “monster.”
But now with President Biden stepping aside and the Democratic party rallying around Harris, Trump will for be the first time called to go head-to-head with Harris—and he must be petrified. Harris is the manifestation of all that scares Trump: She is a powerful, successful, smart Black woman.
Harris is also a former prosecutor who was elected in 2004 as District Attorney for San Francisco and in 2010 she was victorious statewide when she won the race to be Attorney General for the State of California. The contrast between prosecutor Harris and convicted felon Trump is perfect. And Harris has been the administration’s point person on reproductive freedom, which again is a powerful contrast to Trump who has bragged, “I’m the one that got rid of Roe v. Wade.”
Trump knows Harris could beat him. We all saw how Trump’s frail ego reacted when Biden beat him in 2020—he attempted a coup and incited the Jan 6 terrorist attack. The prospect of now losing to a Black woman has to shake Trump to the core—as does the prospect of ending up in prison.
That means we can expect Trump, his right-wing allies in Congress and the media to smear Harris non-stop with lies and bigotry. Mika Brzezinski shared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday that, “I’ve heard from inside Republican circles and right-wing media that the hate campaign against Kamala Harris has begun.”
In reality, though, the racist right wing smears of Harris began two weeks ago when GOP member of Congress Chip Roy, former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka and a NY Post columnist Charles Gasparino all labeled Harris a “DEI” hire meaning she only got her job because of diversity mandates, not because she earned it. Gorka—while on national TV–even despicably referred to Harris as “colored.”
Gasparino went even further to say if Biden ended up stepping down as President, then, “Harris becomes the nation’s first DEI president by default.”
To the white right, it doesn’t matter that Harris has been a public servant for more than 20 years, winning election after election from DA, to California AG to the US Senate, where she distinguished herself with her service on the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. And of course, winning the 2020 election as VP.
Let’s be clear: Calling a person of color a DEI hire is what racism looks like. It springs from the white supremacist myth that people of color are inherently inferior to white people, hence, we can only achieve success and visible positions with the help of a program. (I was called a “quota hire” years ago on social media by a Fox News frequent guest because at the time I was the first Muslim hired to host a national radio show.)
When these people say “DEI hire,” in reality they are speaking in coded language to other bigots as the Mayor of Baltimore, Brandon Scott, who is Black, explained earlier this year. Scott, who some on the right have called a “DEI hire,” declared, “We know what these folks really want to say when they say DEI mayor,” adding bluntly, “They really want to say the N-word.” Mayor Johnson later gloriously trolled the bigots, saying on MSNBC that “DEI,” actually means “duly elected incumbent.”
The vitriol and bigotry that will be directed at Harris over the next 100 plus days until the Nov 5 election will likely far eclipse what we’ve seen to date. It will likely be worse than what was directed at Barack Obama given Harris is a woman.
These expected smears are designed to both delegitimize Harris as well as excite Trump’s bigoted, primarily white base. As Brittney Cooper, a professor at Rutgers University, said in 2020 in response to Trump’s calling Harris “angry,” “nasty” and a “monster,” these attacks are intended to undermine Harris as a leader and as a person. Cooper explained, “White supremacy is lazy and unoriginal and doesn’t feel the need to ascribe humanity to Black women.”
And Kelly Dittmar, with the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, in 2020 addressed the politics of Trump’s smears of Harris, saying, Trump is “speaking to a contingent of voters, particularly white male voters, who support him and who are key to his base.” She added, “We know from multiple studies done on the last election that their levels of both sexism and racial resentment were actually pretty strong indicators of their support for Trump.”
Trump never made a person a bigot. He only emboldens bigots to feel comfortable being the worst version of themselves. That means we can expect to see an ugliness over the next 100 days that will be revolting.
But we have the power to win this election. And by doing so, these right-wing bigots now calling Harris a “DEI hire” and other racist names–come January 20, 2025– will be forced to watch America call her, “Madame President.”
George Conway, ex-husband of Trump senior advisor KellyAnne, has created a website and group to call out Trump. It’s called “Anti-Psychopath PAC.”
Its first action was to create billboards on a mobile truck that circled the GOP convention in Milwaukee with a sign that said “Thanks for nominating a felon.”
It takes an insider to tell the truth. Conway is one of my personal heroes. He despises Trump, he loves Corgis.
James Fallows is one of the most eminent journalists in the nation, having served as editor of The Atlantic and published in every major media outlet. I was happy to discover his blog, “Breaking the News,” where great articles like this one appear.
In a ghoulish touch during his acceptance speech, Donald Trump went over to kiss the gear of Corey Comperatore, the fire fighter who was killed in the shooting attack that injured Trump. (Later reports said that this was Comperatore’s own jacket, on which he’d intentionally left his name misspelled for years.) In the opening part of the speech, Trump followed a script in discussing the shooting before moving into an ad-libbed MAGA-rally riff that evoked images of martyrdom and resurrection. (Photo Joe Raedle/Getty Images.)
This post has one central point. It is that the press should give “fair and balanced” attention to what each of the major candidates is revealing about temperament, competence, and cognition, especially in their public performances.
Right now we have these opposing, imbalanced narrative cycles:
—For Joe Biden, every flub, freeze, slurred word, or physical-or-verbal misstep adds to the case against him. There’s an ever-mounting dossier, which can only grow in cumulative importance. “In another difficult moment for the President….” “Coming after his disastrous debate appearance…”
—For Donald Trump, every flub, fantasy, non-sequitur, “Sir” story, or revelation of profound ignorance dulls and blunts the case against him. “That’s just Trump.” “Are you new here? Never heard a MAGA rally speech before?” “It’s what the crowd is waiting for.” “Oh, here comes the ‘shark’ again!” There’s an ever-thickening layer of habituation, normalization, jadedness, just plain tedium. The first five times Trump tells the Hannibal Lecter story, reporters notice and write about it. The next hundred times, they’re checking their phones.
Last night a member of the Washington Posteditorial board actually put it just this bluntly. Mehdi Hasan, formerly of MSNBC and now of Zeteo, asked Shadi Hamid, of the Post, about the many ludicrous and damaging claims in Trump’s convention speech, which Hamid had waved off as “just normal Trump.” Hamid chuckled and answered, “I guess what I’m trying to say is that Trump is Trump, and it’s a low bar, and that’s what we’ve got to work with.” To which Hasan replied, “Some of us are trying to raise the bar.” You can see it here.
I’m sure that on reflection Shadi Hamid would have made the point more carefully. But his instant reaction distilled the “it’s just Trump!” framing that has prevailed through the 2024 campaign.
The obvious and unequal result: The public registers more and more about Biden’s “fitness” based on his appearances, less and less about Trump’s.
Suppose we judged Donald Trump’s performances not on the sliding scale of “That’s just Trump” but the way we do Biden’s? That is, by comparison with the way other people who have ever run for president have sounded and behaved?
—By that standard, everyone who watched Joe Biden’s debate performance last month agreed that it was disastrous, easily the worst presentation by a major-party candidate in the history of televised debates. Not even his staunchest backers denied this reality, though many then framed it as “just a bad night.”
—By a similar real-world standard, I contend that Donald Trump’s acceptance speech two days ago should also be considered disastrous, easily the worst presentation of its type ever. I claimed as much, in a tweet, as soon as its 96-minute sprawl was done. Most GOP commentators I’ve heard or read since then have been predictably more unified and upbeat. One even claimed that the speech had “worked” because most of the audience would already have turned it off after about 30 minutes.
Maybe I’m wrong in that judgment, for which I’ll give my reasoning below. But I’m sure of the reality that the “it’s just Trump!” mindset within the press is badly distorting the public’s view of the candidates
What we should expect from the press is more stories about Trump’s fitness, to match those about Biden. Including: Why have we still heard absolutely nothing from medical authorities about the cause, nature, or consequences of his recent injury? This stonewalling is not normal, or defensible. If anything remotely comparable had happened with Biden, press demands for every forensic detail would grow more intense by the moment. (Yes, Biden is a serving president, but that’s what Trump wants to be again.)
So let’s start with this disastrous speech, in four summary points.
Why was Trump’s speech terrible?
First, it was not a “speech.”
Eight years ago, I stood near the front of the crowd at the Republican Convention in Cleveland, listening to Donald Trump give his first acceptance speech. I thought it was dark, dystopian, and narcissistic. But it was a speech. It had a beginning, a middle section, and a conclusion. It had a theme. (That theme, unfortunately, was “everything is broken, and I alone can fix it.”) It appeared to have been “written,” and Trump appeared mainly to be saying what was set out in the text. The crowd roared when Trump gave the big, planned applause lines.
Thursday night’s speech started out that way. It had some “writerly” early segments—which you can always identify in Trump’s speeches by the way his voice and rhythm change. When he’s sounding out words from “planned” text from a teleprompter, the energy goes out of his voice, and his tone is that of a schoolboy struggling through an unfamiliar primer. Sometimes he gives a little aside of meta-commentary appreciation for a nice line he’s just read: “You know, that’s so true.”
The written part of this speech contained a “bring us together” line that died on Trump’s lips even as he said it: “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.” And his opening description of the shooting had an unmistakable “he is risen!” framing. For example, with emphasis added:
Many people say it was a providential moment. Probably was. When I rose [!], surrounded by Secret Service, the crowd was confusedbecause they thought I was dead. And there was great, great sorrow. I could see that on their faces as I looked out.
They didn’t know I was looking out; they thought it was over.
But I could see it and I wanted to do something to let them know I was OK. I raised my right arm, looked at the thousands and thousandsof people that were breathlessly waiting and started shouting, “Fight, fight, fight.”
You don’t have be a Christian to recognize the Easter-weekend iconography.
If he had stopped there, or even 10 or 15 minutes further in, this speech would have registered as something new and impressive from Trump. Comparison: in the first few minutes of his debate with Biden, Trump was controlled, calm-sounding, relatively clear, nothing like the figure who yelled ceaselessly at Biden during their first debate four years ago. He seemed on a mission to introduce a “new” Donald Trump, and in those opening exchanges he held it together. (Things changed as the debate went on.)
That seems also to have been the intention in this speech, which in its “for release” version is said to have been 3,000 words long. That’s about half an hour of talking, “normal” for a live-TV evening speech of this sort.¹
But of course Trump did not stop there. He went on until after midnight Eastern time, through 96 minutes of talking, creating a transcript of well over 12,000 words. Simple math meant that three-quarters of the airtime was not a planned-and-written “speech” but instead a random-association playlist from Trump’s familiar MAGA rally themes.
On and on it went. Grievances. Attacks and ridicule. More grievances and slights. Fabrications. “Sir” stories. The return of Hannibal Lecter. Farcical claims about his greatness and Biden’s failures. Amazingly, no sharks. It was another MAGA rally. Should you so choose, you could read the whole thing here.
I had to force myself to stay up and keep listening. We’d just gotten home from a long trip. Deb drifted away to do some unpacking, and was asleep by the time the speech was halfway done. Camera shots of the captive audience in Milwaukee indicated that they wished they could do the same thing.
To return to the theme of age and its toll on candidates: this was different from 2016. Then, Trump held the crowd throughout. Now, he came across as the guy in a bar you couldn’t get away from.
Second, it undercut its announced purpose, and missed its main opportunity.
Some of the pre-speech “analysis” was taken in by the “new Trump” opening section. For instance, here was a tweet just before Trump spoke, from Scott Jennings, a former aide to Mitch McConnell whom CNN now employs as an “analyst”:
In a similar vein, from a credulous Axios reporter:
For a sampling of even more gullible “new softness” reporting, I recommend this brilliant segment, from The Daily Show.
If Trump could have held things together for even 20 or 30 minutes, this was the opportunity he could have seized. Reporters love a “New [Person X]” story. The “New Nixon” back in 1968, potentially the “New Trump” now. And the venue itself is (along with presidential debates) among the tiny handful of occasions suited to a candidate’s re-introduction.
JD Vance had tried this formula the night before, presenting himself not as a culture warrior (andmost definitely not as the person who called Trump “America’s Hitler”) but instead as just a lucky guy who grew up hard-scrabble. Bill Clinton’s well-conceived acceptance speech in 1992 introduced him as the young man from “a place called Hope.” John Kerry’s less-successful acceptance speech in 2004 began with him saluting and saying, “I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty.”
The point is, it’s a moment, and one that can’t be recaptured or repeated. And Trump could not control or contain himself long enough to have this moment pay off the way it could have.
He started out preaching unity, comity, and providential guidance. But here’s the kind of thing he was saying in most of his speech:
If you took the 10 worst presidents in the history of the United States—think of it! The 10 worst!—and added them up, they will not have done the damage that Biden has done. Only going to use the term once. ‘Biden.’ I’m not going to use the name anymore. [Cheers] Just one time. The damage that he’s done to this country is unthinkable. It’s unthinkable.²
Trump came alive only when on the attack. That should be as newsworthy as Biden’s stiffness when walking or his “President of Mexico” gaffes.
