A long list of people who worked in the campaigns or government offices of George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney and John McCain issued a statement endorsing Kamala Harris yesterday. The full list appeared in USA Today. Many, but not all, of the group opposed Trump’s re-election in 2020. No comparable group of Obama-Biden alumni has endorsed Trump.
Jennifer Rubin, columnist for the Washington Post, was at the convention in Chicago with her colleagues. She made a sage observation. The Democrats have a strong bench of new and young faces. The Republicans do not.
She wrote:
It has become evident during convention week that Democrats are blessed with three groups of leaders. The wise first group — Hillary Clinton, the Obamas, former speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and now Biden — has guided the party for the past generation, nationally making strides and keeping the Democratic coalition together. The domestic accomplishments they have collectively made would stand up to any other generation’s output. The second group’s time has come: Harris, Gov. Tim Walz (Minn.), Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (Ga.), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), Gov. Josh Shapiro (Pa.). They are more media savvy than many in the older generation and better able to reach voters who are younger and more diverse. This second group’s challenge will be putting a stake through the MAGA movement and charting a path forward for a sustainable, center-left governing majority. The third, and most interesting, group includes the future stars, two of whom (Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Jasmine Crockett (Tex.)) lit up the convention on Monday night. Other less flashy but equally compelling figures have the governing chops to win legislative battles and keep the party from straying too far left. These include Rep. Abigail Spanberger (Va.), who is running for governor; Rep. Elissa Slotkin (Mich.), who is running for Senate; Rep. Mikie Sherrill (N.J.); and Rep. Dan Goldman (N.Y.), who distinguished himself by going toe-to-toe with Republicans who ineptly and corruptly tried to investigate the Bidens.
Republicans have nothing comparable. Trump has hollowed out and disgraced the party. Any rebuilding, if Trump loses, will likely have to fall to a new generation. Trump, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and a flock of House and Senate extremists have dominated the GOP, turned off a great many voters and done immense damage to comity, the rule of law and good governance. One of the most attractive features of a possible Harris victory: Many prominent Republicans will be swept aside. We can only hope a better crop replaces them.
Note that Trump and his acolytes have driven the next generation of Republicans out of the party. Trump himself campaigned to defeat any member of Congress who voted to impeach him. Trump-aligned governors have “primaried” moderate Republicans. To be successful in today’s Republican Party, a candidate must pledge to defend The Big Lie. That hollows out good people like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney.
The Bulwark is a Never-Trumper site, made up of angry Republicans. They have terrific content. Here is Bill Kristol, former editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, praising Kamala’s fabulous speech.
Success.
Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech last night was a success. It capped a Democratic convention that was a success. That convention, in turn, capped Harris’s first month as a candidate, which was a success.
All that success was by no means inevitable.
One really has to tip one’s hat to the vice president and her campaign, and say: Not bad. Not bad at all. Pretty damn impressive, in fact.
Of course past performance is no guarantee of future results. Still, it does seem that a certain amount of optimism—guarded and hard-headed optimism—is warranted. We now have a reasonable likelihood of defeating Donald Trump, and electing as our next president a vigorous and centrist leader of a healthy and mainstream political party.
The convention has sought, for the most part, to present such a party. And last night’s speech presented such a leader.
The speech began with a very effective biographical section. Harris’s mother, Shyamala Harris, was central to her narrative. The tribute to her mother ran like a red thread through this part of the speech, and indeed the speech as a whole, allowing Harris to humanize herself while deftly avoiding the grandiosity and pomposity that often mar such efforts.
Having introduced herself to the nation, Harris formally accepted the nomination of her party. But it was a remarkably nonpartisan acceptance of a party’s nomination:
And, so, on behalf of the people, on behalf of every American, regardless of party, race, gender or the language your grandmother speaks. On behalf of my mother, and everyone who has ever set out on their own unlikely journey. On behalf of Americans like the people I grew up with—people who work hard, chase their dreams and look out for one another. On behalf of everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on Earth, I accept your nomination to be president of the United States of America.
The tone of that paragraph laid the groundwork for the rest of the speech. Harris spoke more as an American than as a Democrat; as a patriot, not a partisan; and as someone grateful not aggrieved, future-oriented but not at all hostile to our past.
And so Harris continued:
And let me say, I know there are people of various political views watching tonight. And I want you to know, I promise to be a president for all Americans. You can always trust me to put country above party and self. To hold sacred America’s fundamental principles, from the rule of law, to free and fair elections, to the peaceful transfer of power.
The invocation of America’s fundamental principles, in turn, laid the predicate for a criticism of Trump as threatening them:
In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.
And the critique of Trump led into the last half or so of the speech, which consisted of a pitch for more-or-less centrist domestic policies— including the bipartisan border bill that Trump torpedoed—and a robust endorsement of America’s necessary and distinctive role in the world.
Overall, the vision was kind of Bill Clinton (with a touch of Jack Kemp) at home, and John McCain abroad, with a hefty dose of John F. Kennedy-Ronald Reagan patriotism throughout. Harris even offered a striking endorsement of American exceptionalism:
I see an America where we hold fast to the fearless belief that built our nation and inspired the world . . . We are the heirs to the greatest democracy in the history of the world.
It is now our turn to do what generations before us have done, guided by optimism and faith, to fight for this country we love, to fight for the ideals we cherish and to uphold the awesome responsibility that comes with the greatest privilege on Earth: the privilege and pride of being an American.
With this speech, and with this convention as a whole, we have come a long way—the Democratic party has come a long way—from the identity and grievance politics of the left. Harris and Tim Walz have laid the predicate for a center-oriented, optimistic, and patriotic campaign. Consider the final tally. The terms America, American, Americans were uttered 34 times; country or nation, 20 times; freedom, 12 times; opportunity, 6 times; Democrats or Democratic party, 0 times.
It won’t be smooth sailing ahead. Trump and his campaign will go after them. And the left won’t simply be quiet. So there will be challenges aplenty.
Still, the prospects for the next two months seem pretty good to me.
But enough of all this unaccustomed good cheer. We need to start worrying about the debate. It’s only two-and-a-half weeks away.
While Kamala Harris was giving her terrific speech last night, Trump was live-tweeting on his favorite site. He was outraged!
Andrew Eggers wrote:
When things are going well and he’s feeling good, Donald Trump can sometimes be cajoled by his team into something resembling discipline. When things are going badly, he’s much more prone to publicly venting some spleen.
So perhaps the greatest measure of the effectiveness of Kamala Harris’s convention speech was the truly unhinged content bender it sent Trump spiraling into last night.
It started on Truth Social, where Trump informed us he had “assembled a small group of people, GREAT PATRIOTS ALL,” to watch Harris’s “puff piece.”
At first, Trump was jocular: “A lot of talk about childhood,” he wrote as Harris told her personal history, “we’ve got to get to the Border, Inflation, and Crime!”
Soon, though, the wheels were coming off. “These Prosecutions were all started by her and Biden against her Political Opponent, ME!” Trump fumed as Harris turned to his legal troubles. “IS SHE TALKING ABOUT ME?”
A random sampling of what followed:
But posting, it turned out, wasn’t enough to soothe Trump’s jangled nerves. After the speech, he dialed into Fox News for still more free-associative complaining, bowling right over Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum’s attempts to get in specific questions, seemingly pressing phone buttons with his face as he talked. They eventually had to cut him off mid-sentence to wrap up their show.
Not to worry, though: When they pull the plug on you on Fox, there’s always Newsmax. So Trump picked up the phone again. “I will tell you, I just watched it,” he told Greg Kelly and Mercedes Schlapp a few moments later. “She didn’t talk about many things, like interest rates, China, fracking anywhere, let alone Pennsylvania, crime, poverty, trade deficits, child trafficking, woman trafficking, drugs, the border—she didn’t talk about the most important things.”
Did he get the bile out of his system? Trump’s rallying in Arizona this afternoon; I guess we’ll find out then.
I wrote a post on Monday about the relentless GOP attacks on Tim Walz and his wife. They claim his 34 years of service in the National Guard was tarnished; they say he’s not really a coach; they say he and his wife are left wing radicals; they say the Walz family is worth almost $200 million; they say Tim is possibly a spy for China. All lies. Trumpian lies.
In his blog The Status Kuo, Jay Kuo explains why the GOP is aiming their insults at Walz, not Kamala, and why it’s a good thing.
He writes:
There’s a strange phenomenon occurring with the terminally online right. Ever since Vice President Kamala Harris announced that Gov. Tim Walz would be her running mate, many of the right have acted with fury. They’ve attempted to “Swift Boat” his 24-year service record in the Army National Guard. They’ve called him a racist for talking about “white guy tacos.” And they’ve drudged up a nearly 30-year old DUI—for which he took accountability and after which he stopped drinking altogether—to prove he’s somehow not so perfect a role model.
What they haven’t been able to do is make any of this stick. And yet, Walz continues to draw fire, which could otherwise have been directed at Harris.
In other words, Walz is turning out to be a shrewd pick. At net 11 points positive favorability in polls, Walz is immensely more popular than his counterpart on the GOP ticket, JD Vance, who is underwater by nine. And as they continue to rail against him, the right keeps making his fundamental point about them: They are just really weird.
In today’s piece, I explore some theories about why Walz brings out the worst impulses of the right just by being who he is. Then I’ll lay down some political tarot cards and prognosticate about where I think this leads.
Politico Uno Reverse
By most identity measures, Walz should be one of the MAGA right. He’s a midwestern white dude in his late 50s. He loves to hunt and is a sharpshooter. He served for decades in the military and achieved the highest enlisted rank of Command Sergeant Major. He was a football coach who helped lead his team to the state championship.
And yet, despite all these identity markings, Walz in an unabashed progressive. He is for reproductive rights and an ally and protector of gay teens. And there isn’t a bigoted bone in his body. It’s as if when Harris picked him, she played, as writer Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman succinctly described it, a “political uno reverse.” The Walz card threw it right back at them, as if to say, “I’m a guy just like you, but without any of the weird baggage.”
The MAGA GOP’s base is supposed to include white guys like Walz. But here is living evidence that they don’t have all of them or the best of them. That’s why they’re so eager to discredit him, because if they don’t, as psychologist Julie Hotard notes, then Walz will stand instead as a model of what is possible. On many levels, an appealing, white, male Democrat is a far bigger threat to their sense of identity than even a biracial woman candidate for president.
The 2004 playbook
All this helps explain why Republicans have trained their fire upon Walz and are so determined to sink him. To do so, they tried an old play that Walz and the Harris team saw coming for miles.
In an election 20 years ago, Republican dirty trickster and campaign strategist Chris LaCivita created the “Swift Boat” controversy to tarnish John Kerry’s otherwise unblemished military record. It was character assassination from a group calling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and it worked—even though there was no basis in fact for any of it. As NPR recently summarized,
“Their accusations are widely understood to be false. Military records (released by Kerry’s campaign) backed up his combat claims. And while most of the swift boat veterans who spoke out against Kerry did not serve with him directly, the ones who did publicly supported his version of events….The swift boating undercut Kerry’s momentum coming out of the Democratic National Convention, and turned one of his greatest strengths into a liability….“
Now LaCivita is back as senior advisor to the Trump reelection campaign, as are attempts to impugn the military record of Walz, another veteran turned politician. The Trump campaign claimed, for example, that Walz resigned from the military in order to avoid the fighting in Iraq, making him a coward with “stolen valor,” but the timeline doesn’t match up. Walz retired months before his unit received any deployment orders to active duty overseas.
This time, however, Democrats were ready for the bad faith attacks, and reporters (outside of the Fox ecosystem anyway) appeared unwilling to take the bait. So far, the swiftboating of Walz is fading fast from the headlines.
Attacking Mr. Nice Guy
For the past two decades, the GOP has shifted markedly toward being a party of cruelty, of “owning” the libs and drinking their tears, and of being as unpleasant and in-your-face as they can be. That kind of behavior has been rewarded with appearances on Fox and other right wing media, fundraising dollars from the MAGA base, and a spot at the side or in the tweets of the ex-president himself.
As author Patrick S. Tomlinson observed, Walz represents what shouldn’t be an extraordinary notion: that you can be a nice guy, supportive of women, embracing of gay people, and still be all the coded masculine ideals of soldier, football coach, hunter and father that the MAGA right believed it had a lock on. Plus, you can be all those things without ever asking weird questions about menstrual cycles, chromosomes and genitalia.
The right even tried to make a big deal about Walz’s efforts as governor to ensure free tampons were available to girls in school. Rumors circulated that schools had been required to also put tampons in boys’ bathrooms, but those claims turned out to be untrue, while demonstrating how off kilter the right becomes over sexuality and gender. The “Tampon Tim” moniker didn’t stick. On the contrary, there are probably many moms and dads grateful for a governor like Walz who is thinking about their daughters’ needs.
For a party accustomed to attacking its enemies, the GOP is now at a loss over how exactly to attack Walz next. Their latest meltdown over his “racist” comment about eating “white guy tacos” exposed them further as the very “snowflakes” they decry, delicate creatures who don’t understand the basic difference between racism and self-deprecation. And really, don’t they have anything better to do than whine about one of their own making a joke about spice tolerance levels? It’s all very silly, but also bogs them down in their own angry stew.
And in that obsession to bring him down, the right is walking right into Harris’s trap. Every day that Walz draws their attention is one more day Harris moves closer to the presidency end zone, without anyone getting close enough to tackle her. For his part, Walz appears perfectly happy to distract her would-be assailants.
It’s a play an experienced and successful defensive coach like Walz would appreciate.
The fact is that the GOP hasn’t figured out how to attack Kamala without being racist or misogynistic. Trump has called her “Laughing Kamala,” “Crooked Kamala,” “Lying Kamala,” but none of his schoolyard bully taunts has stuck. He has said she is “low IQ” and the “worst Vice-President in history,” but that didn’t stick either. He also called her a “communist,” but no one takes him seriously. So the empty headed MAGA crowd sticks with “Tampon Tim,” which assumes that none of them have teenage daughters. The girls are grateful to Governor Walz.
Jonathan V. Last is editor of The Bulwark, a site for Republican Never-Trumpers. I enjoy reading articles on this site because it is not part of a liberal Democratic echo chamber. He was a strong supporter of President Biden. He here refers to him as “the old man who saved democracy. Twice.” He published this article the day after Biden gave his moving speech to the Democratic National Convention.
He writes:
I hope you drank it in last night. It was one of the most human moments I’ve ever seen in politics, from the second the president stepped on stage and embraced his daughter.
But it was more than that. It was America saying goodbye to this ordinary man who has become an extraordinary president. A president who saved our democracy.
This is one of those cases where the transcript doesn’t give you enough context. You need the video. You need to see Biden’s face and feel the vibrations from the crowd. And you absolutely need to watch his final section, when he transitions from a campaign speech to a valediction.
This is the story of a nation grateful to a president not just for his accomplishments, but for his sacrifice. For his ability to understand that he was dispensable.
It was this extraordinary willingness, when American democracy was threatened from within, that made Joe Biden the indispensable man.
I know I’ve said this before but I want to say it again: Biden is our greatest living president.
Seven years ago Joe Biden was an old man happy in retirement. Then he watched a group of neo-Nazis—emboldened by the election of Donald Trump—take to the streets of a college town in Virginia.
Biden looked around the political landscape and realized that he was the only person capable of defeating Trump in that moment. So he came out of retirement to run not a political campaign, but a fight for the soul of the nation.
And he won.
Biden’s victory set off a new crisis. As president-elect he watched the sitting president attempt a coup d’état—first through legal means, then through extralegal means, and finally through physical violence.
Lost in the analysis of January 6th and the post-election chaos is the critical role Biden played.
He was utterly and completely calm. He spent the post-election period preparing for the transition, even though Trump’s administration refused to cooperate with his team. And here are some of the things Biden did not do:
Any of those actions might have helped Biden politically. All of them would have added gasoline to a raging fire.
President-elect Biden chose unity and calm over hysteria and division even as President Trump was attempting to end our democratic experiment. Reflect on that for a moment: Can you think of a single thing Biden said or did during that period?
No, you can’t. And that’s because Biden knew that in order to preserve the legitimacy of our system, the conflict had to be between Donald Trump and the rule of law, not between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
As president, Biden passed a large amount of meaningful legislation, but those accomplishments were secondary to his two larger projects, one foreign and one domestic.
On foreign policy, Biden’s big project was re-energizing internationalism. Where Trump had attempted to turn America into an isolated superpower that curried favor with dictators so that it could distance itself from alliances, Biden steeled—and expanded—NATO in the face of Russian aggression and took a hard line against China.
Domestically, Biden created a mechanism for the Republican party to heal itself. Instead of pushing a divisive agenda, Biden focused mostly on popular items with broad bipartisan support, many of which directly benefited Republican constituencies: infrastructure spending, the creation of manufacturing jobs, immigration reform, reducing medical costs for seniors.
Republicans could have supported these policies (which many of them did) while trying to guide their voters away from Trumpism (which almost none of them did).
Over and over Biden tried to make space on the right for a Republican party independent of fascist overtones.
That Republican voters affirmatively chose another run with Trump is no fault of Biden’s. He did everything he could. But his big domestic project failed because the base fact is that a political party can only be as healthy as its voters let it be.
And these days the GOP is a party where voters wear t-shirts bragging about how their nominee wants to be a “dictator.”
Faced with this failure and the resurgence of the authoritarian movement, Biden saved our democracy again—this time by walking away from power. When he realized that he could not win the battle a second time, Biden anointed Kamala Harris—shutting down any contest and giving her the space to establish herself as a force.
I hope everyone had the opportunity to watch the Democratic Convention last night. It was exhilarating! I have watched both parties’ conventions ever since they were first televised. I remember back when conventions were contested, when no candidate had enough votes to lock up the nomination beforehand, and there were multiple votes cast to choose the candidate. There were fewer primaries back then, and the candidate was chosen at the convention. Now the convention is a coronation.
This year, though, there was a historic switch at the top on the Democratic side. Biden was determined to stay in the race until he wasn’t. Many of the party’s leaders asked him to step aside because they feared that he would drag down the Democratic Party if he stayed in. He was finally persuaded to do so because he realized that he could not unite the party. So, knowing how important it was to defeat Trump, he agreed to drop out for the good of the nation.
Given that everyone knew for certain the identity of the nominees, the challenge for the Convention planners was how to keep it interesting.
And they did it by showcasing the rising stars of the party, like Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas, who is sharp-tongued and witty; Governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky, who gets elected and re-elected in a red state; and AOC, who hit it out of the park with a fiery speech. Actually, everyone who spoke was awesome.
Then there were the three young women who talked about how their lives had been changed by harsh abortion bans. The third speaker, from Kentucky, Hadley Duvall, talked about being sexually abused and raped by her stepfather, learning she was pregnant when she was 12. She said, “”[Donald Trump] calls [total abortion bans] a ‘beautiful thing,'” Duvall said. “What is so beautiful about a child having to carry her parent’s child?”” There was silence and a collective gasp in the arena.
Hillary Clinton received a standing ovation that went on and on. And she delivered an eloquent, pointed speech. At one point, the audience broke into chants of “Lock him up!” She didn’t join in, but she smiled.
The highlight of the night was Joe Biden. His introduction by his daughter Ashley was moving. The audience welcome was ecstatic, and the cheers for him continued for several minutes. He was bathed in love and admiration. He spoke honestly, passionately, powerfully about his career, his love of country, his devotion to democracy, and his determination to keep Trump out of the White House. He said his decision to ask Kamala to be his running mate was the best decision of his long career. He said wistfully at the end of his speech that when he was first elected to the Senate at the age of 28, and now he is “too old” to run again.
Biden gave a cleared-eyed and incisive analysis of why this election is consequential. If you were not watching, I urge you to watch it now.
Trump supporters are desperate. First, they attacked Tim Walz’s 24 years of service in the National Guard because he retired to run for Congress at a time when his unit knew they might be deployed to Afghanistan in the next two years.
The Trump rumor mill has been working overtime to depict Walz and his wife as dangerous, leftwing radicals.
Snopes debunked a rightwing rumor that Tim and Gwen Walz have a net worth of $182 million and their daughter Hope got a student loan of $82,000 forgiven. In fact, the Walz family has a net worth made up of their pensions; they own no stocks or bonds. In 2023, they had a joint income of $299,000, with almost half coming from pensions. By contrast, Republican VP candidate J.P. Vance is a multimillionaire, with a net income of $1.2 million-$1.3 million in 2022, according to the Wall Street Journal. Some Americans like the fact that Walz is not wealthy, says the WSJ, but others think he lacks the financial acumen of a wealthy man.
Now, says The New York Times, they say Walz wasn’t really a coach because he was not the head coach of the high school football team. Only the head coach, they claim, is a real coach. How petty can they be?
Meanwhile, hard–right Congressman James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, announced that his committee will investigate Walz because of his visits to China as an exchange student and as chaperone for student exchanges. Is he a spy?
All of this is a reflection of Republican desperation and Red-baiting.
Jess Bidgood, a reporter for the New York Times, asked her colleague Alan Blinder of the New York Times to explain whether Walz was really a coach:
A surprising argument has emerged from some right-wing circles: that Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota was not a high school football coach because he was his team’s defensive coordinator, not the head coach. I asked my colleague Alan Blinder, a font of football knowledge who wrote about Walz’s coaching career *and* answers my questions about sports whenever I have them, to explain what’s what.
Setting aside that assertion’s spuriousness for the moment, our reporting last week on Tim Walz as Coach Walz suggests just how comfortable he is with not being the top dog.
Rocky Almond, who coached basketball with Walz in Nebraska in the early 1990s, said that Walz had “been the supporting actor for his whole life,” recalling a trip to China that the future vice-presidential pick organized. Even though Walz was the group’s veteran Asia hand, Almond remembered a coach who never tried to seize command.
“He just was always in the background,” said Almond, who thought the vice presidency was “the perfect role” for his old colleague’s temperament.
“I think he had the intensity, but it was a positive energy,” said Jeff Tomlin, the Nebraska high school head football coach who brought Walz aboard to coach linebackers. “He was a very good assistant that way. As the head coach, you sometimes have to be an enforcer and really guard your culture and make hard decisions. As assistant, you want to be loyal to your head coach and back up your head coach, and he was all of those things.”
And as for that question of whether Walz should count as a coach at all? Some players on his Minnesota title-winning team still refer to him as “Coach Walz,” and football staffs are filled with specialty coaches who are, in fact, coaches with headsets and playbooks.
“Defensive coordinator is arguably the most important position on a coaching staff other than the head coach,” the ESPN commentator Paul Finebaum mused to me today. “You can’t win a game, let alone a state championship, without being able to stop someone.”
— Alan Blinder
Thom Hartmann encourages readers to beware of political scams right before the elections. The economy is cooling off. Why isn’t the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates? Is it because the chair of the Federal Reserve is a Republican? Did you know about Trump’s increase in wealth during his presidency? I don’t agree that Trump wants to get elected to make money; I think he wants to stay out of jail. But we may both be right.
He writes:
— Is the Fed Chair “trying to get Donald Trump elected” by keeping rates high? The anti-corruption watchdog group Revolving Door Project is claiming that lifetime Republican and former commercial banker Jerome Powell, now the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, is “trying to get Donald Trump elected.” Fully two months ago, Powell noted that “this is no longer an overheated economy” and “the labor market appears to be fully back in balance.” Yesterday’s jobs numbers — lower than expected new jobs (144,000) and a jump in unemployment to 4.3% — suggest the economy is on the verge of tipping into recession, an event that Trump yesterday pointed out and proclaimed is happening because of “Kamalanomics.” The Project’s Executive Director Jeff Hauser was explicit: “That Powell’s Fed still refuses to lower interest rates—after Trump said that rates shouldn’t be lowered before the election—raises questions about the central bank’s independence. Whether the Fed keeps rates high or brings them down, one of two presidential candidates will benefit. While lower rates would provide much-needed economic relief to the American people, Powell has instead chosen to stick it to the people and give an electoral boost to Trump.” Senator Elizabeth Warren yesterday called on the Fed chair to “cancel his summer vacation” and “lower interest rates now.” The warnings signs are flashing bright red — with worldwide declines in stock market indexes — and if Powell and the Fed don’t lower interest rates at least a half point within the next few weeks, it’ll be safe to conclude that Hauser is exactly right in his diagnosis of this situation.
— Did Egypt give a $10 million bribe to Trump? The Washington Post published a blockbuster report yesterday, detailing how the Egyptian government pulled together $10 million in cash in 2016 right after Donald Trump sought out Egyptian dictator El-Sisi and promised him a presidential visit (which he fulfilled) right after his inauguration. The Department of Justice found out about it in 2019 and the FBI began an investigation, but Attorney General Bill Barr — one of the most publicly corrupt senior government officials in modern history — put the kibosh on the investigation. As a result, nobody knows if or how the money was delivered to Trump, although right around the time it would have been delivered Trump took the unusual step of putting exactly $10 million of his own money into his campaign. Saudis and Russians own large parts of Trump Tower and multiple nations funneled millions to Trump by booking blocks of rooms in his DC hotel and then just leaving them empty. Forbes estimates that Trump’s businesses brought in $2.4 billion during his four years as president; hundreds of millions of that came from foreign governments and from his charging the Secret Service and our US government a small fortune for their stays at Trump properties around the world. His entire presidency, it turns out, was a giant grift; no wonder he wants back into office.
— Senate Republicans tell us who they are. President Biden’s American Rescue Plan increased child tax credits in a way that lifted an estimated 30 million children out of poverty, cutting the US child poverty rate in half. They expired last year, and legislation to reinstate them passed the House with roughly equal votes from both Democrats and Republicans. Iowa Senate Republican Chuck Grassley famously opposes help to poor families, saying “passing a tax bill that makes the president look good mailing out checks before the election, means he could be reelected and then we won’t extend the 2017 tax cuts.” Senate Republicans got the message and killed the bill on Thursday afternoon, keeping child poverty in America at a higher level than any other developed nation in the world.
Republicans say that the child tax credits are an effort by Democrats to buy votes. Maybe they are but when they were in effect, they cut child poverty rates in half. That’s reason enough for both parties to support them.
Republicans were blindsided when President Biden announced that he was stepping down, and he endorsed his Vice President, Kamala Harris. All of their planning and strategy was targeted on Biden, who—they said—was too old, senile, sleepy, confused, and unable to lead the country. They had ads and video clips ready to roll. They were not at all happy to learn that Biden was taking himself out of the race. They had to redirect their slime machine to Harris, not Biden.
Sad, very sad, as Trump might say.
They quickly recalibrated their attack ads. First, they insisted that Biden could not leave the ticket. It wasn’t fair, they said. Then they said Harris could not have access to the money raised for the Biden-Harris ticket; they threatened to sue. Then they said it was undemocratic to put Harris at the top of the ticket because primary voters didn’t choose her. But of course they did vote for her. They voted for Biden and Harris.
They said that Kamala Harris was “a radical Communist.” They said she was the “worst Vice President in American history.”
None of these claims caught fire, so they settled on attacking Harris because she laughed too much. Really. They called her “a cackling hyena.”
It’s true, Kamala smiles a lot and flashes her joyous smile at crowds. And she laughs often. Her laugh is genuine and it is contagious. She makes people happy.
So the Republicans thought they could diminish her by denouncing her expressions of happiness.
They must have thought that people would recoil at the sight of Kamala Harris laughing.
But they haven’t, they didn’t, and they won’t.
People see Trump and they see him scowling and angry. He likes to look angry. When he had his mug shot taken in Atlanta, he posed with a dark scowl.
Have you ever seen him laugh or smile? I haven’t. Does he have a sense of humor. I think not.
Imagine if you were offered an hour with either Trump or Harris. Which would you choose? The angry one or the happy one? The one who was embittered by his grievances or the one who would take an interest in you? The one who was angry or the one who was joyful?
The Harris campaign made an ad that begins with Trump saying that he hates it when people laugh at him. Then there is about 60 seconds of clips showing Kamala laughing uproariously.
They cleverly took Trump’s sneering at her laugh and made a cartoon ad featuring her laugh.
Keep laughing, Kamala.
Chris Tomlinson, a columnist for The Houston Chronicle, explained the origins of Project 2025, the extremist agenda for Trump’s second term. It was born in Texas, where it merged Republican thought with the demands of rabid white Christian nationalism.
He wrote:
What starts here changes the world, the University of Texas at Austin’s motto says, and one Longhorn’s plan for a second American Revolution, known as Project 2025, offers a return to white supremacy, patriarchy and theocracy.
Before Kevin Roberts became president of the Heritage Foundation and the impresario behind a radical agenda for a second Trump administration, he was a doctoral student in the UT history department and later head of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Many of the ideas found in Project 2025 originated in the Lone Star State.
TPPF, with backing from Christian nationalist billionaires such as Tim Dunn, has long called for defunding public schools, banning abortion, repealing climate change legislation, deporting undocumented immigrants and imposing burdensome voting restrictions.
The Austin-based think tank is an official contributor to Project 2025. Many policies pioneered by TPPF in Texas appear in the 900-page roadmap officially known as the “2025 Presidential Transition Project.”
Heritage, founded in 1973, radically changed when Roberts took over in 2021. Roberts transformed the traditional country club conservative organization into a group committed to “institutionalizing Trumpism,” he told the New York Times. Heritage under Roberts is much closer to TPPF’s Christian fundamentalist politics than former President Ronald Reagan’s.
Disclosure: Roberts used his perch at TPPF to convince Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to cancel a scheduled appearance by Bryan Burrough and me to discuss our book “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth” at the Bullock State History Museum. Roberts has since deleted his Twitter posts, but his quotes condemning us and praising Patrick’s acquiescence live on.
In addition to the hot-button, culture-war issues, the plan drafted by 140 former Trump administration officials would overhaul the Department of Commerce to privatize the National Weather Service, slash the Census Bureau’s economic data gathering and restrict economic development programs.
At the Treasury Department, Project 2025 calls for shutting down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government agencies that make most mortgages possible. Conservatives also want to end programs to fight discrimination in the banking and securities industries and efforts to address climate change.
Of particular interest to Texas businesses is the abolition of the Export-Import Bank. The federal agency has helped 938 businesses export $16 billion in products and services over the past decade. The bank guarantees financing when commercial banks will not with an almost perfect success rate.
Lastly, the most radical economic proposal is to end the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate to set interest rates in a way that will maximize employment while limiting inflation. Project 2025 proposes limiting the central bank to limiting inflation with no regard for unemployment rates. The game plan also limits the Fed’s authority to prevent bank failures.
Conservative deregulation of the banking and financial industries led to the Great Recession. If repealing civil rights and raising the Social Security retirement age don’t frighten you, Project 2025 would remove many economic guardrails designed to avoid another Great Depression.
Project 2025’s radical ideas put off most Americans, which is why Trump has recently distanced himself from it. But he was there at the inception and welcomed Heritage’s help drafting an agenda for his first 180 days in office.
“This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what you’re movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America,” he told a Heritage fundraiser in April 2022.
Trump’s choice for vice president, J.D. Vance, also praised Heritage and Project 2025 before polling showed it was poisonous to their campaign. He wrote the forward to Roberts’ new book “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America.”
“Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism,” Vance wrote. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lie ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”
Texas has become a workshop to test conservative ideas, and Roberts’ ascendancy to Heritage Foundation president is only one example. If Trump is reelected, what started here will undoubtedly change the world, but not necessarily for the better.
Diane Ravitch's blog 