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Lowlight Reel

I know most of you probably spared yourselves the pain of watching the right wing Trumpfest last night. Here are a few of the more indicative moments of the “unity” convention:

It was awful. Of course it was.

Incompatible With Democracy

Trump, Vance, Project 2025

Zack Beauchamp over at Vox reflects on his encounter with Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) in 2022. In 20 words or less: “He was friendly, thoughtful, and smart — much smarter than the average politician I’ve interviewed.”

Also, Vance’s “worldview is fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy.” Donald Trump selected Vance as his election-denying 2024 running mate on Monday. A mere 18 months into his first-ever elected office, Vance is another in the line of “best people” Trump has selected, and ready to step into the Oval Office when Trump is gone.

A second Trump administration, Vance suggests, should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” in the US government and “replace them with our people.” And if a court objects, Trump should ignore the law. It’s a king’s divine right.

Vance is an admirer of authoritarian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. He is, according to inmate Steve Bannon, “at the nerve center of this movement.” He would enable Trump’s worst instincts and place his interpersonal and intellectual skills at Trump’s disposal.

Beauchamp elaborates:

Vance’s ascendance represents the death of this “adults in the room” model. Backed by people drawn from the lists of loyal staffers being prepared by places like Heritage, Vance would not only support Trump’s radical impulses but seems likely to spearhead efforts to implement them.

He would be a direct conduit from the shadowy world of far-right influencers, where Curtis Yarvin is a respected voice and Viktor Orbán a role model, straight to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean described himself as hailing from “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.” If the GOP under Trump has indeed evolved into an authoritarian party, then Vance hails from its authoritarian wing.

An alarm bell in the night

“Some of the most fervent and ruthless authoritarian apparatchiks started as opportunists,” William Kristol and Andrew Egger observe of Vance at The Bulwark:

Vance has been more consistently and fervently America First in foreign policy than Trump. He’s more committed to ethno-nationalism and anti-“elite” populism than Trump. He’s been more committed to destroying any non-political civil service than Trump. He’s more contemptuous of the norms, institutions, and mores of liberal democracy than Trump.

Trump is a con man, a liar, and a demagogue with authoritarian tendencies who might be said to have stumbled into leadership of an authoritarian movement. As a result, Trump’s opponents have at times failed to take him seriously. That’s been a mistake.

But not to take the current Trump-Vance moment seriously would be a bigger mistake.

By 2028 (if Trump wins), Vance will

… have Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and all the wannabe leaders of American-style fascism organized behind him.

The selection of J.D. Vance confirms that the Trump movement now is a full-on authoritarian movement. There are no excuses for the many varieties of acquiescent Trump supporters and enablers failing to see that.

Vance’s selection is “an alarm bell in the night.”

Court Accountability Action (CAA) offers a rogues’ gallery of dossiers on Project 2025 players including Vance.

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Don’t Worry, Get Busy Winning

Democrats have the better turnout operation

Minutes before the Pennsylvania shooting on Saturday, Markos Moulitsas, the founder of Daily Kos, argued before a Netroots nation audience in Baltimore that the fundamentals of this presidential election still favor Democrats. Don’t panic.

Whatever the progressive left thought in 2020, Black voters in South Carolina “picked the least inspiring, most boring candidate” in the Democratic field. What we got for that choice was a win that November and, unexpectedly, “a great president.”

Many Democrats who should have second-guessed themselves in 2020 are failing to do it again in 2024. Every day we focus on Biden’s age is a day Donald Trump wins the news cycle. Meantime, Democrats have overperformed the polls in special elections. They’ve won abortion-related ballot initiatives everywhere while Trump underperformed in his primaries. Republicans tell pollsters they support Trump, Markos reminded, but then don’t show up for him. Voters proved polling favoring the right wing wrong in India, in Poland, and in France. You don’t have to be Simon Rosenberg to have Hopium.

Mike Lux reminds readers that Biden is in a dead heat with Trump in a slew of recent national polls compiled by Rosenberg:

  • 50%-48% NPR/Marist
  • 44%-42% GW/YouGov
  • 47%-46% Split Ticket/Data For Progress
  • 47%-46% Clarity
  • 50%-50% Emerson College
  • 46%-46% Washington Post (Harris leads Trump 49-47)
  • 42%-43% Redfield & Wilton
  • 42%-43% Bendixen and Amandi (Harris leads Trump)
  • 41%-42% Big Village
  • 42%-44% Morning Consult
  • 40%-43% Economist/YouGov

And in the three most important battleground states, Biden is tied (MI), down 1 (WI), and down 2 (PA) in the public poll averages. Even in the four battleground states he is a little further behind in, the margins are barely outside the margin of error: 4 points in NV and AZ, 5 in GA, and 6 in NC.

People are calling Biden too old, but in the last few days he hosted and led a successful week long NATO summit, did an hour-long press conference, gave an inspiring speech at a Black church in Philly, and gave a passionate, fighting populist speech to a fired up crowd in Michigan.

If elections come down to turnout, the better turnout operation wins. Basic blocking and tackling. Trump has outsourced his to Turning Point Action, a “bonkers” decision, Bill Scher noted last month. Turning Point has a “nonexistent track record of successful electioneering and [a] reputation for financial mismanagement.” Bill Scher warned on Monday that the Turning Point decision could be disastrous:

Don’t take my word for it. The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta published an in-depth investigation of Trump’s campaign infrastructure and found other Republicans quietly fretting about the outsourcing plan:

[Trump’s political director James] Blair explained that allied organizations such as Turning Point Action, America First Works, and the Faith and Freedom Coalition would handle much of the right’s canvassing effort moving forward … (This isn’t the relief Republicans officials have been hoping for: Turning Point, for example, became a punch line among GOP strategists and donors after it promised to deliver Arizona— where its founder, Charlie Kirk, resides—in the 2022 midterms, only for Democrats to win every major statewide race. Kirk’s group is assuring dubious party officials and major donors that its operation has scaled up, but several told me they aren’t buying it.)

The fundamentals of the 2024 election remain favorable to Democrats. Gross Domestic Product is growing. Unemployment is low. Wages have been beating inflation for more than a year. American soldiers aren’t fighting and dying in an unpopular ground war. For over a century, incumbent parties in power have won American elections under these conditions.

Democrats have the better turnout operation. Biden is funding it well and fielding “a behemoth of a campaign.” (You should help out where you are.)

Trump is cocky and doubling down on MAGA. Days after the failed assassination attempt on Trump and weekend demands for lowering the rhetorical temperature, Republicans trotted out N.C. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson on the first night of the “unity” Republican national convention. Robinson recently shouted (and didn’t care who didn’t like it), “Some folks need killing!”

The MAGA GOP is a clown show, albeit a dangerous one. Will they take everything you hold dear while you sit on your hands?

On Monday, Judge Aileen Cannon in dismissing the Trump classified documents case on procedural grounds demonstrated once again that the MAGA agenda is to gut accountability to the rule of law for Republicans. You, of course, will experience the full weight in the Republic of Trump.

Yesterday too, Trump selected Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate despite Vance bringing nothing to the table electorally and being more radical than Trump on banning women’s reproductive freedoms. Trump wants a VP who will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t more than he wants to win.

This election will come down to who wants to win more. Do you?

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Says It All

Trump is getting so cocky. He picks Vance which was a mistake. And then this:

Uh huh.

Honestly, this surprises me. I thought he’d have her at the convention sitting in the audience for his speech. And maybe he will. But not to have called her immediately was a huge error.

Vance In Gilead

“My view on this has been very clear. 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 those circumstances of the child’s birth is inconvenient or a problem to the society.”

Clearly, Trump has decided to just say “fuck it, I’m going for it.” He thinks he can just bulldoze his way into the White House with little resistance because Biden whiffed in the debate.

We’ll see about that. A lot more women than men vote in every election. Even more will vote this time.

From Jessica Valenti’s newsletter “Abortion Every Day”

recent poll from Axios/Ipsos, for example, that shows that 81% of Americans believe abortion “should be managed between a woman and her doctor, not the government.” And this is huge: 4 in 5 Americans don’t want pregnancy to be legislated. That includes over half of Republicans! 

We’ve seen multiple polls showing the same thing: Americans want abortion to be legal.(Check out research from PerryUndem for more evidence of this massive and growing support.)

There’s also broad support for mifepristone and misoprostol access amid the political attacks seeking to ban the medication. Polls show 7 in 10 Americans support abortion medication (including one from Fox News), which underscores how much Americans support medication access, regardless of party affiliation.

That’s because Americans increasingly understand that pregnancy is too complicated to legislate. A poll commissioned by Planned Parenthood, for example, found that the messages resonating most with voters are those emphasizing that medical decisions should be made by patients and doctors, not politicians, and those highlighting how wholly unqualified politicians are to have a say.

This support translates to elections, too: Abortion rights have won every time they’ve been on the ballot since Dobbs. Polls also show that 2 in 3 Americans would vote to codify abortion rights into their state constitutions—including nearly half of Republicans. And voters overwhelmingly reject efforts to brand abortion restrictions as ‘middle-ground compromises’ (like their proposal for a national 15-week ban).

All of this terrifies Republicans. That’s why anti-abortion legislators in multiple states are trying to stall or stop abortion rights ballot measures—even if it means undoing democracy in the process. They’ve tried to raise ballot measure standards and written false or misleading language in ballot summaries; they’ve attempted to get the courts to reject abortion rights amendments and have their Attorney Generals to upend the iniative process. And they’re working with anti-abortion groups throughout that process.

All of which is to say, the anti-abortion movement relies on the myth that abortion is just a matter of disagreement, rather than the truth: public officials are upending democracy to bring a landscape of devastation throughout our healthcare system that harms the lives of millions across the country.

And that’s more than a matter of numbers.

Vance on the ticket is going to supercharge the abortion rights movement which is already highly organized. I thought Trump was smarter than this. But I suspect he was so thrilled with Vance’s tweet blaming Biden for the shooting on Saturday that it tipped the balance. It certainly didn’t hurt him. I guess Trump forgot about the abortion problem which, up until now, he’s been acutely aware could hurt him. He’s cocky. But this race is still very, very close.

It’s JD Vance, The Son Donald Trump Never Had

This article by David Frum sums him up perfectly. Apparently, Vance used to write for Frum a decade or so ago and was part of his inner circle who said he was modeling his career on Barack Obama. Frum thought he was a thoughtful “reforminst conservative” who “scorned culture-warring, valued expertise, endorsed social inclusion, rejected partisan rancor, and supported America’s important role in world security.” He thought he was sincere. And he wasn’t the only one:

Before the 2016 election, Vance’s future political path looked straightforward. He would await the expected Trump defeat, then emerge as a next-generation Republican savior: a candidate who could speak from his origins in Appalachia to the suburbs of Columbus, all while preserving his connections to his donors in Silicon Valley.

Trump’s Electoral College victory complicated the calculation. Some Democrats wooed Vance to change parties. Obama’s campaign guru David Axelrod had Vance as a guest on his popular podcast the month after Vance’s Times article was published.

It turned out, as we know, that Vance was actually a very ambitious con man, as are so many who see the Republican party as nothing more than a collection of marks — which is correct. Frum watched as Vance morphed into a hard core wingnut whose “writing and speaking have edged angrier and uglier as he has gained success and prominence.” Yep.

In July 2021, Vance inveighed against the “childless left” who have made no “physical commitment to the future of this country.” In November, he attacked fellow Ohioan LeBron James for criticizing Kyle Rittenhouse’s demeanor at his homicide trial: “Lebron is one of the most vile public figures in our country. Total coward.”

In a September podcast, he urged that Trump, upon his hypothetical restoration to office in 2024, purge the government of federal employees who aren’t loyal to him and defy the courts if the purge was held illegal.

When he got the endorsement recently of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who notoriously floated a conspiracy theory about California’s wildfires being started by space lasers associated with “Rothschild Inc.,” he tweeted: “Honored to have Marjorie’s endorsement. We’re going to win this thing and take the country back from the scumbags.”

The former supporter of the Iraq War has turned into one of the nation’s preeminent scorners of Ukraine’s fight for independence, declaring: “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.” At the end of last month, Vance even suggested that President Joe Biden was plotting intentionally to flood the U.S. with deadly fentanyl: “It does look intentional. It’s like Biden wants to punish people who didn’t vote for him.”

In April of this year, Vance tweeted: “Barack Obama is articulate but has never made a memorable speech. The reason is that his views are utterly conventional. He’s unable of saying anything outside of the elite consensus. He’s a walking, talking Atlantic magazine subscription.” What prompted that highly personal outburst against Vance’s former role model and the magazine to which he himself had contributed his sharpest anti-Trump criticisms? A video clip of Obama speaking negatively of Steve Bannon and Vladimir Putin.

I dunno. I read “Hillbilly Elegy” and could smell the smarmy phoniness a mile away. Why so many liberals were taken in I could never understand.

The anti-populist conservative Vance persona of 2010–17 was well designed to please the individuals and constituencies that held power over his future at that juncture in his career. The angry-white-male persona of 2017–22 was as perfectly aimed at the Thiel-Trump-Tucker nexus as the earlier iteration had been to the Allen-Aspen-Atlantic one…

So the question I ponder is not: What happened to the J.D. I knew? It is: Who will J.D. become next?

He’s going to be Trump’s Vice Presidential nominee and if they win in November, Trump could easily expire on the golf course and Vance would end up as president of the United States.

It’s a terrifying prospect. This man has all the fascist instincts of Donald Trump but a much better brain. He clearly has no heart. And there is a great void where his soul should be.

Here’s JD before his current shape shift:


Oh Baby..

Senator Mike Lee, ladies and gentlemen:

Somebody get him a cigarette.

This convention is going to be like one of those ecstatic religious revival meetings. They’ll all be speaking in tongues before it’s over.

Let’s not forget President U.S. Grant who commanded the Union Army or the father of our country George Washington. And many, many more. Not one of them had the pampered richie rich life of Donald Trump, even the ones born into money. His hammy fist bumping as he’s hustled off the stage by a phalanx of secret service agents is the exact opposite of “tough.” The whining about finding his shoes is before they did it was much more indicative of his true self.

Shot And Chaser

Axios declared that Trump became president today. Again. He’s “pivoted” :

Former President Trump has something rare, precious and definitional: a moment — a fleeting chance to redefine himself, this election, America.

Why it matters: Almost dying rocks perspectives — and people. Yes, Trump has shown little appetite for changing his ways, tone and words. But his advisers tell us Trump plans to seize his moment by toning down his Trumpiness, and dialing up efforts to unite a tinder-box America, when the Republican convention opens Monday in Milwaukee.

“I think it’s real,” Tucker Carlson — who’ll speak in prime time at the convention, and talks to Trump often — told us. “Getting shot in the face changes a man.”

  • Trump — who landed yesterday in Milwaukee, just over 24 hours after the assassination attempt — brought a rare succinctness to a post on his Truth Social platform: “UNITE AMERICA!”
  • It’s an echo of former President Ronald Reagan, who projected strength and humor after being shot in 1981. The late David S. Broder, legendary Washington Post political dean, recalled decades later that Reagan “was politically untouchable from that point on. He became a mythic figure.”

Trump said in an interview Sunday with the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito, a Pittsburgh native who has long covered him, that he’s rewriting his Thursday convention speech to take advantage of a historic moment and draw the country together.

  • “The speech … was going to be a humdinger,” Trump told her as he boarded his plane in New Jersey. “Had this not happened, this would’ve been one of the most incredible speeches,” aimed mostly at President Biden. “Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now.”
  • Zito writes that Trump repeatedly invoked God in their conversations. “It is a chance to bring the country together,” Trump told her. “I was given that chance.”

Uh huh.

Earlier today Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the classified documents case . Yep, she did it. Here’s the Great Uniter’s response:

It didn’t even last the morning.

The good news is that this will break the short-lived truce that inexplicably forced the Democrats to become punching bags for the wingnuts to accuse them of inciting violence.

Fun fact: Cannon was appointed by Trump after the election when Mitch McConnell forced through a bunch of unqualified nominees to the federal bench, a very rare occurrence. It was especially hypocritical considering that he wouldn’t allow Merrick Garland to be confirmed more than 8 months before the election in 2016 saying that it wasn’t proper for an outgoing administration to fill such a seat until the people had spoken. (He did the same with Amy Coney Barrett.) The gravedigger of democracy just threw another pile of dirt on the coffin.

Thoughts And Prayers

According to Brady United 327 people are killed with guns every day in the United States. Over one million have been shot in the last decade. There are more civilian owned firearms than there are people here. America is awash in gun violence and it’s so ubiquitous that we only raise our heads once in a great while when the body count is shockingly high or the victims are particularly vulnerable, like elementary school children. But this weekend we all looked up sharply when a lone sniper shot at Donald Trump and grazed his ear, killed a spectator and wounded two others.

These shootings are all horrific but this one was particularly shocking because America’s history of political assassinations is very long and we are living in one of our acute periods of political violence, whether from religious terrorism or unbalanced people who are radicalized on the internet. There have been attempted assassinations and violent threats against members of congress, the judiciary, the media and election officials in recent years and now the current Republican nominee for president, who also happens to be a former president as well. We are awash in political violence and the proliferation of guns has made it particularly deadly.

It is not surprising, therefore, that many people’s immediate assumption was that the attempt on Donald Trump’s life on Sunday was motivated by politics and/or ideology. While the vast majority of political violence of the past few years has been at the hands of jihadist radicals or right wing extremists there have been a few out of the left such as the man who shot Republican Congressman Steve Scalise during a congressional baseball game. So it’s understandable that people would suspect the shooting could be motivated by hostility to Donald Trump.

Some of the rally-goers reportedly turned on the reporters covering the event, claiming they were responsible and had blood on their hands. Republican officials immediately accused President Biden and the Democrats of inciting the shooter with their campaign against Trump as a threat to democracy.

Some went even further:

The consensus formed very quickly that this wasn’t just an assassination attempt, it was the natural consequence of Democratic criticism of their political rival Donald Trump. This set off a flurry of more solemn remonstrations from other Republicans demanding that the Democrats “change the tone” of their campaign rhetoric. President Biden came out and very quickly condemned the attack which he repeated twice on Sunday. In his formal oval office address he said, “I want to speak to you about the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics.” All the former presidents followed suit with similar statements as well, as did virtually every other elected Democrat.

Everyone said the “right thing” and they used all the comfortable conventional phrases. As David Frum wrote in The Atlantic:

But conventional phrases don’t go unheard. They carry meanings, meanings no less powerful for being rote and reflexive. In rightly denouncing violence, we are extending an implicit pardon to the most violent person in contemporary U.S. politics. In asserting unity, we are absolving a man who seeks power through the humiliation and subordination of disdained others.

[…]

Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.

Witness Speaker Mike Johnson unctuously declaring that Trump is “the most attacked persecuted president in history, maybe since Abraham Lincoln” and condemning the Democrats for saying the stakes in this election are anything unusual. When confronted with Donald Trump’s own rhetoric he just kept on going:

Donald Trump is a demagogue and there is no one in political life who is more rhetorically violent than he is. With all the talk of lowering the temperature, nobody’s mentioned the fact that the most incendiary rhetoric about the event came from Donald Trump himself when he raised his fist and pumped it angrily yelling “fight” repeatedly to his crowd as he was led off the stage. I understand that he was probably in shock but that moment became instantly iconic and it was anything but calm and statesmanlike.

What did Trump mean by that? Was it just another opportunity to look tough, like his glowering expression in his mug shot? Was he hamming it up for the cameras? Or was he once again exhorting his followers to “fight” like they did on January 6th? With all the lugubrious handwringing over Biden and the Democrats saying Trump is a threat to democracy, nobody seems to care that his instinct in that horrible moment was to incite more violence.

The internet has been deluged with merchandise commemorating the moment already. Every person at the GOP convention this week will no doubt be wearing a t-shirt with the famous photo on it. Members of his faithful following are even getting tattoos of the image:

Sunday’s event was the first such act of gun violence in many years that didn’t follow the usual ritual of initial horror and wall to wall coverage before we finally move on until the next one. This incident has inspired a totally different narrative. Nobody is talking about the fact that this was a 20 year old kid who got a hold of a semi-automatic weapon, apparently owned by his father. Nobody is saying this is a problem of mental health not easy access to guns. It’s all about politics and yet we have absolutely no evidence as of yet that this was a partisan political act at all.

Yes, shooting at a presidential candidate or a president is inherently “political” by definition. But this shooter was a registered Republican who liked guns so he hardly fits the profile of a left wing extremist inspired by Joe Biden’s stirring denunciations of Donald Trump. And not all assassination attempts are political anyway. Remember, Ronald Reagan was shot by someone who was trying to impress a movie star.

It’s certainly possible that we’ll find out that he was so upset by someone calling Donald Trump a fascist that he took action. It’s also possible that we’ll find out that he was just another unhappy, screwed up young man who decided that his life as he knew it wasn’t worth living and decided to go out in a blaze of glory. It literally happens in this country all the time and the great irony is that Donald Trump and his party have absolutely no answers for that problem at all. If that’s what this turns out to be I guess we’ll all just have to give them our thoughts and prayers and then move on. Isn’t that how it’s usually done?

Salon