President Biden finally conceded to the growing crescendoes of fellow Democrats urging him to leave the race.
This is a historic and sad moment.
Joe Biden has been a GREAT President!
But his disastrous debate performance last month doomed his candidacy.
My personal preference: Kamala Harris for President.
For Vice President: Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan or Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.
Either team would be a bold, innovative statement that would bring excitement to voters. Younger voters would especially be attentive to a team that is fresh, thoughtful, well-informed and articulate. They would be well situated to confront abortion, climate change, gun control, and voting rights, all of which Republicans have attacked.
If Democrats decide to add a man to the ticket, Andy Beshear would be a great choice, as a governor in a red state. He has demonstrated his ability to get bipartisan support and he is a strong friend to public schools. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania would be a terrible choice because he supports charters and vouchers, probably because of words whispered by Jeff Yass, a multibillionaire who is the richest man in Pennsylvania and an arch-enemy of public schools even though he was educated in NYC public schools.
I’m sad to see President Biden step down. He will go down in history as one of our best presidents because of his legislative accomplishments, done with a razor-thin majority or none at all.
But I’m excited about the prospect of seeing Kamala Harris debate Trump, whose ignorance of policy is well known.
In her column in the Washington Post today, Jennifer Rubin explains why Kamala Harris is the best person to replace Biden. She is smart, experienced, tough, articulate, and ready. She is 59, and Trump—not Biden—would be the elderly person in the race. Rubin believes that if Harris passed over, the Democratic Party would be a shambles. Harris, she believes would energize the youth vote. Furthermore, she would be able to call out Trump’s lies without fumbling. The media is prepped to call out Biden’s gaffes, pauses, mistakes, stumbles; Harris speaks clearly and decisively. Furthermore, she is well-versed in the harms of the Dobbs decision and could appeal to Republican women.
Rubin writes:
As of this writing, President Biden hasn’t said he would step away from the 2024 campaign. Democrats nevertheless seem poised to move on. In multiple appearances, including TV interviews and meetings with Democratic lawmakers, Biden has not convinced them he is capable of winning the race, in large part because the race has become about him — his age, his health, his capacity. Each appearance becomes a “Perils of Pauline” moment in which supporters gird themselves for a gaffe or stumble. A race that was supposed to be about Donald Trump is now about Biden’s infirmities.
I know the feeling. I have watched Biden’s appearances with trepidation. I admire him and respect him and marvel at his accomplishments. But I worry that the press is now primed to catch any mistake he makes and blow it up, while ignoring Trump’s obsession with “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” and his nutty insistence that he won the 2020 election.
She cancels Trump’s only issue: Biden’s frailty. And she can shift the focus to his extremist plans.
Rubin says:
Without Biden attracting questions about his physical and mental fitness, perhaps the media might finally focus on Trump’s unhinged rants, compulsive lying and utter lack of policy knowledge.
Kamala Harris is the best candidate to oppose the Insurrectionist-in-Chief.
On Tuesday, President Biden tweeted three words: “Google Project 2025.” Google Trends saw search interest surpass even that of Taylor Swift this week.
Unfortunately for the Biden campaign, searching the term first yields the project’s own shiny homepage, complete with fireworks and flags and soaring language. So what is Project 2025 really?
In short, it’s a playbook for dramatically overhauling the federal government should Republicans win control. Technically, it comes from the Heritage Foundation and not the GOP presidential campaign, which allows Trump to claim he knows no more than the average confused Googler. “Don’t fall for it,” Catherine Rampell writes. Project 2025 and the MAGA machine are inextricable, with hundreds of Trump officials taking part in the planning.
The planning of what? Let’s take a look:
Project 2025 would steeply reduce Medicaid funding and remove medication abortion drugs from the market.
It would shutter LGBTQ+ health programs and have the government declare that heterosexual couples are the superior family structure. The term “sexual orientation” would be forbidden from federal legislation.
It would terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that allows “dreamers” to stay in the United States and would lower legal immigration limits, as well.
It would bring the FBI under direct control of the president and eliminate the Education Department.
It would stop expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy.
It would make pornography illegal and imprison people who make it.
It would officially recognize the Sabbath and infuse Judeo-Christian values throughout government.
And it lays out how the president could purge nonpartisan civil servants and install loyalists who would accomplish all of this.
But don’t worry: Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has promised that this revolution will be “bloodless” if the left acquiesces.
Catherine allows that Trump might not know some of the particulars of Project 2025 — “few would mistake the man for a policy wonk.” Even if so, that’s just as dangerous; Trump delegated major decisions to his underlings last time and would do so again.
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.
Jess Piper lives on a farm in Missouri, and she is a proud Democrat. In this post, she describes how the state has been taken over by Christian nationalists who don’t believe in separation of church and state. Senator Josh Hawley, as she shows, recently declared that he was a Christian nationalist. She has confronted state leaders, and they uniformly told her to move to another state. She describes a State Senator who holds prayer sessions in his government offices. And Jess reminds us that the guys who wrote the Constitution were not Christian nationalists. The First Amendment bars a government establishment of any religion and protects the free exercise of religion. If they had wanted a Christian state, they would have said so.
They say that converts are even more zealous than those who have been born into a religion. Jay Kuo thinks that’s the case with JD Vance. Having started as a harsh critic of Trump, he is now an extreme MAGAt. He is more Catholic than the Pope. A bad analogy, since Trump has no religion.
JD Vance represents the extremes of the MAGA GOP. On nearly every issue, Vance is about as wretched and radical as he could be without morphing into Marjorie Taylor Greene. How’s that for an image?
On the nifty side, this same extremism means the GOP ticket will create greater unease among moderate and independent voters looking for a cooling off of our politics and an end to chaos, fear and rising violence. Indeed, JD Vance is likely to turn up the national heat further at a moment when most voters want it turned down. And that spells trouble for the ticket.
As nasty as they come
It’s difficult to imagine a more radical VP choice than JD Vance when it comes to the most divisive issues facing America and already splintering the GOP. In earlier pieces, I discussed how the GOP is currently wedged on several major issues, with stakes driven deep into its side over abortion, January 6th, and traitorous support for Putin.
I would now add to that list the poisonous effect of Project 2025, which could peel off moderates and independents afraid of a fascist takeover.
On each of these wedges, Vance not only stands on the wrong side, but himself is a chief driver of the wedges.
Vance is an anti-abortion zealot who supports a national ban. Even on the question of exceptions, Vance is unyielding. For example, when asked in an interview whether people should have a right to get an abortion if they were victims of rape or incest, he belittled the trauma, said that society shouldn’t view a pregnancy or birth resulting from rape or incest as an “inconvenience.” He argued that when it came to such exceptions, “two wrongs don’t make a right”—meaning that while it was “wrong” to inflict rape or incest upon a girl or woman, it would be a second “wrong” to permit the abortion.
Over January 6 and the 2020 election, Vance is also a staunch election denier and has refused to unequivocally state that he will accept the results of the 2024 election. Instead, in an interview on CNN, he qualified his acceptance, saying that the results must be “free and fair”—suggesting ahead of time and without basis that they will not be. Further, in an interview with ABC News in February, Vance maintained that he would have halted the certification of the election on January 6. “If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance said. Former Rep. Liz Cheney blasted Vance for this, tweeting, “JD Vance has pledged he would do what Mike Pence wouldn’t – overturn an election and illegally seize power.”
Vance is also a Putin apologist of the most extreme kind. If given power, Vance would grant Putin a free hand in Europe and leave allies like Ukraine without critical U.S. aid. Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Vance amazingly treated it with a shrug. “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other,” Vance said. Since his election, he has become one of the most vocal critics of U.S. aid to Ukraine and led a campaign in the Senate to block a $60 billion aid package. He has urged Ukraine to stop all offensive maneuvers against Russia and negotiate a settlement quickly (thereby ceding much territory) because, in his view, victory isn’t feasible.
Finally, Vance would implement Project 2025 and replace thousands of career civil servants with Trump loyalists. In a podcast interview, Vance said that an incoming Trump administration should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” in the government and “replace them with our people.” If the courts attempt to stop Trump, Vance said, he should simply ignore the law. “You stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it,” Vance declared. This worldview and plan aligns squarely with Project 2025, which calls for the replacement of tens of thousands of career civil servants with MAGA loyalists, as well as its theory of the unfettered power of the unitary executive.
The nifty silver lining
These positions held by Vance—and there are many other radical ones—are admittedly extreme and terrifying. But the good news is that extreme and terrifying positions have led to electoral losses by the GOP. Voters, including all-important swing state moderates, have been consistently unwilling to support them since 2022….
Finally, at age 39, Vance is inexperienced, with just two years in the Senate. Measured against Kamala Harris, Vance is green and untested. That could be on full display in their debate next month, the terms of which are still being negotiated. As a vocal champion of women’s reproductive rights and an experienced prosecutor, Harris will have an opportunity to paint Vance into a corner over his extremism.
Indeed, the contrast between an under-qualified white male MAGA radical and a seasoned minority woman defender of democracy and liberty could hardly be clearer. Trump may have thought he was making a smart bet, hoping to pull in more of his base voters in the midwestern swing states. But those people aren’t going to show up in greater numbers just because Vance is on the ticket. Trump already had those voters.
Heather Cox Richardson skillfully deconstructs the symbolism and iconography of the last night of the Republican Convention. Her insightful review makes me happy that I didn’t watch. She touches on widespread speculation that Trump was hit at the Pennsylvania rally not by a bullet but by a shattered piece of plastic from the teleprompter.
She writes:
Also making history last night was the final night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the night on which former president Donald J. Trump accepted the party’s presidential nomination. Coming as it did just days after a would-be assassin took a shot at Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing one attendee and badly wounding two others, the convention was billed by Republican operatives as a way for Trump to rebrand himself as a candidate of “unity.”
This was certainly the way many major newspapers billed Trump’s acceptance speech this morning, in stories that, as media journalist Parker Molloy noted, were probably based on prepared remarks delivered to news agencies in advance of the speech. But it was not how the evening played out.
Since Saturday’s shooting, it has been notable that there has not been a medical review of Trump’s injuries, although he has said he was injured by a bullet that ripped through his ear. This matters not only because of the extent of his injuries, but also because Trump has made the story part of his identity without any fact check, and the media appears simply to be letting it go on Trump’s say-so, something that adds to the sense that media outlets are treating Trump and Biden differently.
Last night, Trump perhaps tried to address this lack by recounting last Saturday’s shooting. Interestingly, he did not say he was hit by a bullet, but that when he felt the injury he thought, “it can only be a bullet.” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo today noted a report from local Pennsylvania television station WPXI that four motorcycle officers standing within feet of Trump suffered minor injuries from flying debris. Trump has likely cut off further discussion of the topic by saying it is too painful to tell the story again.
With that story behind him, Trump hit the theme of unity, saying he would bring the country together. “The discord and division in our society must be healed, we must heal it quickly. We are bound together by a single fate, a single destiny,” he said. “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. So tonight, with faith and devotion, I proudly accept your nomination for president of the United States.”
But that was just in the first ten minutes. Then Trump ignored the teleprompter and things veered far off course, reflecting the candidate that has stayed in the safe spaces of Mar-a-Lago and rallies of his loyalists for years. Trump rambled for more than 90 minutes, making it the longest acceptance speech in U.S. history and outlasting the interest of the audience, some of whom fell asleep.
He went on to recite his usual litany of lies: that Democrats cheated in the 2020 presidential election (they did not), that crime is going up (it’s plummeting), that inflation is the worst we’ve ever had (it’s around 3%; the worst was around 23%), that Democrats want to quadruple people’s taxes (CNN fact checker Daniel Dale calls this “imaginary”), and so on. Dale called it “a remarkably dishonest acceptance speech.”
Journalist James Fallows posted: “Of the maybe 10,000 political speeches I’ve heard over the years, this was overall the worst.” Statistician Nate Silver’s judgment was harsher, in a way: he began with “It’s a weird but a pretty good speech,” then posted “Semi-retract this tweet, this speech is boring AF, but there are worse things politically speaking than being boring.” Shortly after, came: “Fully RETRACT and RESCIND, sometimes it seems like both parties are trying to throw this election.”
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes watched the unhinged speech and concluded: “This is not a colossus, this is not the big bad wolf, this is not a vigorous and incredibly deft political communicator. This is an old man in decline who’s been doing the same schtick for a very long time and it’s really wearing thin.”
The point, though, as Trump meandered through attacks on immigrants and a diatribe about the fictional character cannibal Hannibal Lecter—who he might think was real—as it always has been, was to present a picture of the U.S. under siege by enemies who are persecuting him because he represents true Americans and that he must be returned to office because only he can vanquish those enemies. Greg Sargent of The New Republic noted that Trump cannot offer a “unity” message because “Trump himself knows the MAGA masses will not be satiated without expansive displays of rage, cruelty and sadism directed at hated out groups and designated enemies of MAGA.”
For years, observers have noted that Trump’s approach to politics is patterned on the “kayfabe” at the heart of professional wrestling. Kayfabe is the performance aspect of professional wrestling, in which the actors play out relationships and scenes in which there are good and evil, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal. According to journalist Abraham Josephine Reisman, in old-school kayfabe the actors never let their masks slip, and while the audience knew what they were seeing must be fake, they played along with the illusion.
But in the 1990s, the barrier between reality and illusion blurred as wrestlers and promoters tried to increase the viability of the fading industry by tossing reality into the performances: real-life insults—the more outrageous the better—and real-life events. Decoding what was real and what was not drove engagement until in 1999, an estimated 18% of Americans, about 50 million people, called themselves fans. This “neokayfabe,” Reisman wrote in the New York Times in 2023, “rests on a slippery, ever-wobbling jumble of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods, all delivered with the utmost passion and commitment.”
Neokayfabe, Reisman wrote, “turns the world into a hall of mirrors from which it is nearly impossible to escape. It rots the mind and eats the soul.”
Trump participated in a storyline in this neokayfabe with World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon in 2007, in part billed as a battle over hair. Eventually he was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, and many observers have made the link between neokayfabe and his approach to politics. Indeed, he even blended the two explicitly when he chose McMahon’s wife, Linda, to head the U.S. Small Business Administration during his presidency.
Neokayfabe and politics came together again last night at the Republican National Convention, as Linda McMahon, wrestler Hulk Hogan, and musician Kid Rock, whose music has been featured at wrestling events and who is also a member of the WWE Hall of Fame, all participated.
“So all you criminals, all you lowlifes, all you scumbags…. Whatcha gonna do when Donald Trump and all the Trumpamaniacs run wild on you, brother?!” Hogan yelled to wild applause after ripping off his shirt to show a Trump-Vance shirt. Like the other performers at the convention, he painted a portrait of Trump’s presidency, and of the United States since Trump left office, that was a fantasy of good and evil. Hogan reinforced that there was no way Trump was going to reach toward unity in Milwaukee. His approach to the world cannot be moderated. It depends on the idea that there are two teams in the performance and one must vanquish the other.
Part of that storyline requires rewriting not just the recent past, but our history. At the convention last night, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, said: “It is no wonder that the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy and faced down communism sadly say they don’t recognize our country anymore.” But the Allied soldiers in World War II were not fighting communism. They were fighting fascism. The three great Allied powers were Great Britain, the United States, and the communist Soviet Union.
It might be that Guilfoyle misspoke, or that she doesn’t know even the most basic facts of our history. Or it might be that by rewriting that history to put America on the side of the fascists, people like Guilfoyle hope to make that alliance more palatable to MAGA followers today.
********************************
If, like me, you were puzzled by the term “kayfabe,” you will enjoy this article written by Abraham Josephine Reisman, which appeared in the New York Times (no paywall).
Project 2025 has been so much in the news lately that former President Donald Trump had to respond to the right-wing policy proposals, which the Heritage Foundation put together in hopes of implementation under another Trump presidency.
“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump said. “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.”
In a familiar rhetorical pattern, Trump says two contradictory things at the same time: Parts of Project 2025 are “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” and “anything they do I wish them luck.”
Well, there is a third contradictory thing: “I know nothing about it.”
But anyone reading through the nearly 1,000 pages of Project 2025 might easily be two-minded, or three-minded, about it. It is vast and dense.
Nevertheless, there is a predominant theme threaded throughout: Federal government must be downsized, decentralized, and disempowered as much as possible, as rapidly as possible, just as soon as conservatives gain control the federal government. And embedded within this theme is a prominent second thread: that the enemy – variously named “that institutionalized cadre of progressive political commissars,” “LGBT advocates,” “the pursuit of racial parity,” “racial and gender ideologies,” etc. — must be vanquished.
You may see different patterns, but this is what I discerned. Readers should look for themselves. Find the chapter(s) that matter to you. You may choose from sections titled “Taking the Reins of Government,” “The Common Defense,” “The General Welfare,” “The Economy,” and “Independent Regulatory Agencies,” with each major federal government agency discussed. I spent a couple days reading through the 1,000 pages to glean what is being proposed to support healthy rural populations and thriving rural communities. Not very much.
In fact, the entire subsection “Rural Health” (Chapter 14, Department of Health and Human Services, at p. 449) is shorter than the subsection on “Wild Horses and Burros” (Chapter 16, Department of the Interior, at p. 528). Empathy for the four-footed ungulates is conveyed by discussion of their “iconic presence” described as “not a new issue … not just a western issue- it is an American issue.” We two-footed humans rate similar patriotic rhetoric – “seeking space for one’s family and cultivating the land are valued goals that are deeply rooted in America’s fabric” – but the paltry few policy proposals – less than one page out of nearly 1,000 – are insulting.
For example, to increase the supply of health care providers by reducing regulatory burdens on “volunteers wishing to provide temporary, charitable services across state lines,” and to encourage “less expensive alternatives to hospitals and telehealth independent of expensive air ambulances,” Challenge me if I am wrong, but these proposals explicitly, in writing, advise that rural communities can, at best, expect “second class,” maybe just “third class,” treatment from Project 2025 Conservative elites. But at least Project 2025 doesn’t advise “humane disposal” for sick rural folks as it does for the horses and burros.
Open the link to learn more about the GOP’s indifference to rural voters.
I subscribed to Jay Kuo’s blog, The Status Kuo, and I hope he will forgive me for quoting today’s post at length. Jay is a multi-talented man. This is his Linked In profile:
I am the CEO and founder of The Social Edge, a social media and digital publishing company based in New York City.
I am also a composer/lyricist/playwright. My show Allegiance–a story of love, loss and heroism during the Japanese American internment, starring George Takei and Lea Salonga–opened in the fall of 2015 and had its LA premiere in 2018. Tokyo Premiere in March 2021. London January 2022.
I am a two-time Tony winning Broadway co-producer (Hadestown, The Inheritance)
My background is in law. I am an appellate litigator admitted to practice in California, the Ninth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court.
Here is Jay’s report on Trump’s Acceptance speech, which I’m glad I missed:
Someone didn’t have the cajones to tell Trump not to write his own speech and to stay on script. The result was an embarrassing end to the entire Republican National Convention.
Trump began as expected, leaning into his new-found martyrdom and sporting a bandaged ear. Many MAGA faithful decided to wear bandages, too, as a symbol of fealty because “they aren’t sheep.”
Then it got weird. Trump veered off into la-la land with references to Hannibal Lecter, 2020 election denialism, praise for authoritarians like Viktor Orbán, and (checks notes) how he could stop wars with a single telephone call.
“This is the first good thing that’s happened to Democrats in the last three weeks,” observed David Axelrod, with a characteristic backhanded slap to his own party. “This really reminded everyone why Donald Trump is fundamentally unpopular outside this room.”
Pundits watching in real time were scathing. Because it’s Schadenfriday, I pulled together some of the commentary for your consumption, organized into basic buckets of why his speech sucked.
Trump has the discipline of a five year old
Earlier in the week, I conveyed my skepticism that Trump could ever recast himself and avoid being the petty, vindictive man he truly is, even after nearly being killed by a lone shooter. His speech last night proved this prediction correct.
Right after he got through talking about the shooting—a beginning that was carefully scripted and in fairness he pulled off fairly well—there was “a jarring tone shift” per Washington Post editorial board member Shadi Hamid. “It almost seems schizophrenic,” he observed.
That’s because Trump’s brain is actually not okay. The media underreports this, but it was on full display last night.
In reverting to his standard campaign speech—a hodge-podge of political grievance, personal attacks, meandering stories, and truly bizarre references—Trump forgot he had a national television audience before him, speaking instead to the MAGA faithful who already know this weird and disquieting speech well.
Even the New York Times, which has been stanning for Trump in its headlines by calling him “muscular” and referring to the “coronation” he would receive on Thursday, conceded that Trump has a “challenge with discipline.” That’s a candidate for understatement of the year. After the scripted part was over, the Times reporters agreed that Trump “could not resist falling back into the kind of rambling, unscripted diatribe that has long been his signature style.”
“Trump has reverted to factory settings,” noted Jim Geragthy, who is the senior political editor of the National Review and not exactly a liberal. “Biden is watching this in Delaware and saying to Jill, ‘See? I’m not that bad!’” he joked.
Unity is for suckers and losers
“Trump the unifier” is a laughable idea. It stands in contrast to everything we know about the man, who has done more to divide this country than any single person since the Civil War.
And certainly in the speech last night, there was none of the unity Trump had promised. The Times headline read, “Trump Struggles To Turn the Page on ‘American Carnage,’” noting,
He derided former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “Crazy Nancy.” Less than four years removed from office, he said America was already a “nation in decline.” He waxed hyperbolic about the immigration crisis, calling it “the greatest invasion in history” and compared undocumented migrants to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer and cannibal from “The Silence of the Lambs.”
Those in CNN’s focus group in Michigan agreed. “I gave his speech a D,” said one undecided voter. “He started out great, but then he went into mistruths and grievances and attacks. It just totally contradicted itself in terms of what he wanted to achieve with unity.” (CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale counted no less than 22 false claims in the speech.)
As Aaron Blake of the Washington Post reported, the “initially subdued manner and calls for unity didn’t match the content of an often divisive speech.” In addition to the moments the Times recounted above, Blake observed that Trump also called for the firing of the head of the United Auto Workers, called a Democratic senator a “total lightweight,” and cited the “China virus.”
When that phrase popped up, it was like we time traveled to 2020…
We know that Trump thrives on division and chaos. And he couldn’t even manage to stick to a prepared speech after promising unity just four days ago.
Long, winding, and boring
Historians take note: This was the longest presidential nomination acceptance speech since they began timing these things. It clocked in at 93 minutes.
”[H]e hasn’t given any speeches for nearly a week, and he has a lot of pent-up words that he is releasing now,” observed Washington Post opinion columnist Charles Lane rather dryly.
Notably absent from his speech, as the Biden Campaign pointed out, were any references to Project 2025, how he has harmed American women by getting Roe v. Wade overturned, or his promise to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists.
There was also no organization to his words, which is indicative of Trump’s management style. He not only rambled but circled fully back to things he already said earlier, like trashing on electric vehicles. His speeches are “like lazy Susans,” remarked Washington Post contributing columnist Ramesh Ponnuru.
Near the 90 minute mark, Alexandra Petri, whose work in McSweeney’s I adore, quipped, ”When I agreed to do this live blog, I did not realize I was signing the best years of my life away.” She compared it to the movie Up. “The first 10 minutes had emotion and were unlike anything I’d seen. The remaining 70 minutes were just an angry man roving wildly at large for unclear reasons.”
The only possible good news for Trump is that people probably stopped watching it after the first 45 minutes. But the folks in the convention hall, who normally get to start leaving a Trump rally early, were stuck listening to him as the speech stretched past midnight Eastern time.
Even pollster and analyst Nate Silver, who has been particularly hard upon President Biden for not dropping out of the race, went through all the stages of Trump fatigue in real time, first calling it a weird but pretty good speech, then calling it boring AF, then fully retracting and rescinding this earlier statement, saying “it seems both parties are trying to throw this election…”
“Is… is it over?” asked Jim Geraghty. “Quick, someone release the balloons, before he starts talking again!”
The speech was so bad that Ana Navarro had a strong message for Democrats who soured on Biden after his poor debate performance:
“If this clinically-insane Trump speech does not get Democrats out of their defeatist doldrums, and focused and energized around electing their nominee—instead of tearing him down—I don’t know what will.”
The paper tiger
On Monday I observed that an orange tiger like Trump can’t change his stripes, the attempt on his life notwithstanding. But I also called him a paper tiger for a reason: He isn’t invincible, scary or dominating at all. He’s an old man operating on autopilot, full of piss and vinegar and entirely unlikeable.
No matter what Democrats are going through presently and who the party’s nominee ultimately is, the Donald Trump that was up there on the most important night of his future political career is someone the majority of voters would resoundingly reject, just as they did in 2020. We need to understand that and then lean into it hard. Make this election about him, and we win it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 