A video of Trump’s call with RFK Jr. was leaked – Trump talks about vaccines, tells RFK Jr. doing something with him would be “big,” mentioned his call with Biden and said the bullet was like “the world’s largest mosquito.” RFK Jr apologized for the leak. pic.twitter.com/Z6DQ955P6W
On more than 20 occasions, Mr Trump has tweeted about there being a link between vaccines and autism, something experts at the government’s leading public health institute say is not true. He also repeated the claim during a Republican primary debate, a remark that was immediately dismissed as false by the Autistic Self Advocacy Network.
Prior the election, Mr Trump met with four prominent anti-vaccine campaigners at a fundraiser in Florida – disbarred British doctor Andrew Wakefield, Mark Blaxill, editor-at-large of the Age of Autism website, Gary Kompothecras, a chiropractor and Trump donor from Sarasota, and Jennifer Larson, an entrepreneur who has campaigned against the use of vaccines in her home state of Minnesota.
The campaigners celebrated after Mr Trump won the election and met with another anti-vaccine campaigner, Robert F Kennedy Jr (son of Robert Kennedy who was assassinated in 1968).
Mr Kennedy later told members of his environmental law firm he would be taking a leave of absence to chair an advisory panel on the issue at the president-elect’s request. “Mr Trump has some doubts about the current vaccine policies and he has questions about it” he told reporters.
After news of the meeting emerged, Ms Larson wrote on the Age of Autism website: “Now that Trump won, we can all feel safe in sharing that Mr Trump met with autism advocates in August. He gave us 45 minutes and was extremely educated on our issues. Mark [Blaxill] stated ‘You can’t make America great with all these sick children and more coming’. Trump shook his head and agreed.”
He got tied up in knots over the COVID vaccine trying to have it both ways and ruined his cred on the subject. But he was anti-vax long before that.
I won’t be surprised if Kennedy takes him up on his offer. He’s that bad.
Reporter: I covered the family separation crisis closely, will we continue to see policies like separating 5,000 children deliberately from their parents?
Jacob Soboroff wrote a book on the subject so he knows what he’s talking about. And Junior is lying but I suppose he may not even know it. He’s very dumb.
After acting like a cheap thug, he went on Newsmax and whined about it:
Don Jr on Newsmax whines about being asked a totally fair question earlier today by an MSNBC reporter pic.twitter.com/wpWquYxDDC
Apparently, reporters were supposed to speak in hushed tones and not ask any real questions because of Trump’s close call on Saturday. That might make sense except for the fact that they are at a massive political event that’s being covered on all the news networks and policy is on the menu, Evidently, they assumed this was just a coronation like the one England just produced for King Charles. Sorry guys, this is America.
Besides, that’s pretty much what they have. The networks were unbearable yesterday with the endless solemn admonitions that “political violence is NEVER acceptable” and “turn down the temperature” over and over again even as the GOP speakers were indulging in their usual trash talk. and the crowd was rhythmically fist pumping while chanting “fight, fight, fight.” Their ritualized “concern” was bizarre in that context and made for very disjointed coverage. It made me yearn for the old “thoughts and prayers” since none of their lugubrious commentary was actually based on knowledge that the shooting was motivated by politics at all.
They really need to do better. Good for Soboroff for at least trying.
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:
— Janna Bastone #DemsDeliver (@janna_bastone) July 16, 2024
Mitch McConnell blocked Barack Obama from nominating Merric Garland, passed Trump’s tax cuts, confirmed his judges (which led to the conservative Dobbs brass ring). He voted to acquit Trump, which allowed for Trump to run again. And he is met with echoing boos as he retires. https://t.co/P16VXLkkCO
Tim Scott: "If you didn't believe in miracles before Saturday, you better be believing right now." (A Trump supporter was murdered, so it wasn't a very miraculous day for his family.) pic.twitter.com/d3gpMsENoD
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.
JD Vance has only been a senator since last year but somehow Kamala Harris is the least qualified person to ever be Vice President
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.
For JD Vance, it has been a remarkable – and remarkably shameless – transformation from “Never Trump guy” into Trump loyalist, Trump booster, and, now, finally, Trump running mate.https://t.co/ND3jhfdjeypic.twitter.com/5KGle6MpAx
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.
“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.”
JD Vance is an administrator on the Heritage Foundation’s website.
Heritage Foundation created Trump’s Project 2025 guide book, which aims to create an all powerful president who can’t be reigned in by courts or Congress. pic.twitter.com/bPLiEM63Mx
— Rachel Bitecofer 🗽💡🔭🦆 (@RachelBitecofer) July 15, 2024
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.
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.
“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.”
This is absurd! Trump VP Pick JD Vance calls rape an "inconvenience"
When asked about not allowing women to have an abortion when they are the victims of rape or incest, his response is disgusting. It's as if he's a character from the Handmaids Tale.
JD Vance is bringing more anti-abortion extremism to Trump’s presidential ticket. Vance once doubled down on his position that abortion in cases of rape and incest was wrong.
— American Bridge 21st Century (@American_Bridge) July 15, 2024
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.
A 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.
This has aged well today. Billboards and tv ads just quoting JD Vance should be everywhere.
He is so much more despicable than Trump’s true believers, because he knows better. Truly the worst kind of politician- willing to sacrifice everything in the naked pursuit of power. https://t.co/15M1GFWiXY
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:
Here is JD Vance complaining about how Trump demonizes migrants, trade with China, and “Democratic elites” to stoke fear and exploit white working class voters. pic.twitter.com/sAcW1xSn4y
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.
