Joe Biden gave a moving speech from the Oval Office last night explaining his decision to withdraw from the race. He pointedly said, “In this sacred space, I’m surrounded by portraits of extraordinary American presidents. Thomas Jefferson wrote the immortal words that guide this nation. George Washington showed us presidents are not kings.” He asked if the character of the president still matters and tasked voters to question whether Trump (to whom he did not refer by name) would uphold the sanctity of democracy and the presidency.
Biden questioned, notably, if the character of a president still matters, and without naming Donald Trump, asked voters to question whether the Republican nominee would uphold the sanctity of the presidency or US democracy. [No, definitely not.] He said, “This sacred task of perfecting our union is not about me, it’s about you,”
That is true. Are there enough of us out there willing to step up and fight back this fascist MAGA movement that’s led by a cretinous imbecile? We’re about to find out.
Meanwhile, here’s Trump this morning on Fox News, always that classy statesman:
“I think it was a coup. They didn’t want him running. He was way down in the polls, and they thought he was going to lose. They went to him and they said, you can’t win the race, which I think is true, unless I did something very foolish, which I wasn’t going to do, and I think he was so far down and they said, ‘You’re not going to win, and you’re not in great shape, and you did poorly in the debate.’ I think the debate started everything.”
“I know a lot of people on the other side, too, that they went, and they forced him out between Pelosi and Obama and some others that you see on television. It was interesting. I’d watch them on television and they act so nice. ‘Oh, yes, we loved you. We loved you behind the scenes.’ I know for a fact they were brutal.”
“It was like a terrible speech and terrible delivery. He looked like he was having problems, and yet you watch the other networks and you would think he was Ronald Reagan in his prime, Winston Churchill in his prime, and he wasn’t. It was not good… It was not a good speech.”
“It’s so phony what’s going on. The press is so – it’s so fake. Anybody can see it was a problem.”
He is incapable of grace or decency. And I know it’s not politic to blame his legions of supporters but I cannot understand how anyone could admire such a man, much less worship him. It’s like worshiping a small, evil child. It’s inexplicable to me. If the Democrats manage to pull out yet another win in November and we get past the inevitable hysteria that will follow I honestly don’t see how we can ever put this country back together with some sort of reckoning with how this happened.
To Donald Trump’s backward-looking “Make America Great Again” movement, Vice President Kamala Harris says forcefully, “We’re not going back.” Her rally crowds now chant it.
“So here’s the thing about breaking barriers,” Harris told the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies in Wasghington, D.C. on Monday. She’s broken a few. “Breaking barriers does not mean you start on one side of the barrier and you end up on the other side. There’s breaking involved. And when you break things, you get cut. And you may bleed. And it is worth it every time, every time.”
This campaign to push back the fascist urges of the MAGA Republican Party’s Christian nationalists will not be pretty. Their once racist and sexist dog whistles now are fog horns. The metaphorical “cutting” Harris mentioned will be involved in the breaking ahead. People who once were and still are being hurt in this “land of the free” know their freedoms, their families, and their futures are at stake in this election. Yours as well.
Much went on yesterday (Wednesday), including Joe Biden’s speech to the nation from the Oval Office. But if you missed it, do yourself a favor and watch Maya Wiley, former Assistant U.S. Attorney, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, deliver her emotional rebuttal to Republican efforts to turn back the clock on America to a time when women and minorities knew their place.
Attempts to repeal the last 60+ years of progress toward equity in this country comes from “a certain group of people who [feel] victimized by fairness, victimized by competition from the competent, who are upset because for so long they’ve gotten to be mediocre and rise.”
Dear Leader is the patron saint of mediocre. And he doesn’t even rise to that level.
“A certain group of people who are victimized by fairness, victimized by competition from the competent, who are upset because for so long they’ve gotten to be mediocre and rise.” – @mayawiley 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/ZI0kyYMuMR
I am so grateful to have had @esglaude hand to hold because this is real talk and it’s about real people’s lives, and value, and purpose and place. We all have a place in this country and we will only move forward! Together! And we #vote! https://t.co/620FNitW72https://t.co/ahS8rSUQO1
It won’t be enough to break the spell. It’s not news that former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R) opposes Donald Trump. Last year he called Trump a man with the moral compass of an axe murderer. Duncan announced he would support Joe Biden for president in May, writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “This November, I am voting for a decent person I disagree with on policy over a criminal defendant without a moral compass.”
But about six seconds into the first presidential debate it was clear that Biden was not capable of handling the rigors of the campaign. If Harris is the one to pick up the baton, Duncan is on board.
BREAKING: Former Georgia Republican Lt. Governor Geoff Duncan has endorsed Kamala Harris for President.
With Kamala Harris now the presumptive Democratic nominee, Duncan announced on FKA Twitter he will support her. He repeated his stance in a Wednesday interview on AJC’s “Politically Georgia” podcast.
I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse @KamalaHarris then count me in! 🇺🇸
Duncan disagrees with Democrats on abortion. But he isn’t shy about hijacking the Democratic Party to restore a Republican Party “I can actually recognize.” He wants back a country where neighbors can disagree without being disagreeable. Are there any more like him back home?
I’m not sure we were ever that country, but it’s something to which we might aspire. A lot like “created equal” and “liberty and justice for all.”
“This election either is going to be an asterisk mark in the history books or a pivot point,” Duncan told “Politically Georgia.”
That’s up to you.
BREAKING: The Kamala Harris campaign just released their first ad. Retweet to make sure every American knows who Kamala Harris is and what is at stake this November. pic.twitter.com/d55aNDbYNZ
Awwww. They have belatedly realized that their piggishness might not be the selling point they thought it was. It’s too late, I’m afraid. We know who they are:
Speaker Mike Johnson and other top Republicans are encouraging members to avoid attacking the vice president’s identity as they seek to navigate a campaign against the new presumed presidential nominee. Harris is the first woman, the first Black American and the first South Asian American to serve as vice president.
Johnson (R-La.) encouraged members to” focus on policy not personality” during a closed-door conference meeting Tuesday, later echoing that sentiment publicly to reporters.
Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) encouraged members in the meeting to “hold off on ‘editorializing’ on Kamala. Just stick to her disastrous record,” a GOP lawmaker who was present for the comments told Axios.
Leadership’s push to quash gender- or race-based critiques of Harris follows comments from a handful of GOP lawmakers asserting that the vice president was able to quickly step in for Biden because she’s a woman of color.
“The media propped up this president, lied to the American people for three years, and then dumped him for our DEI vice president,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) posted on X.
During a recent television appearance, Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) alleged Democrats had to stick with Harris as the nominee “because of her ethnic background.”
Johnson’s efforts to focus on Harris’ policy record are complicated by rhetoric from the top of the ticket.
Sen. JD Vance — Trump’s running mate — hasn’t limited his criticism to Harris’ stance on issues.
In his first solo campaign appearance Monday, Vance drew a biographical contrast with Harris, who he accused of “collecting a government paycheck for the last 20 years”
Reps. Tony Cárdenas (D-Calif.) and Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) are weighing introducing a censure resolution against Burchett over his remarks, Politico first reported.
Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) told CNN the comments “are just racist dog whistles. Whenever you hear DEI, I want you to think about the N-word. I want you to think about racial slurs. That’s what they actually mean.”
“Of course it’s not appropriate, for heaven’s sakes. What, are they just going to say, ‘If you’re not a white male, it’s a DEI candidate?’ I’m sorry. No,” Rep. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told Huffington Post.
Johnson, meanwhile, said he’d “talked with a lot of members,” and he thought his message had landed.
That’s very nice, I’m sure. But unless Fox News and the right wing media lay off of it, it’s going to be out there. And it’s going to gross out over half the population. .
Also, respects to our potentially new Democrat Challenger, Laffin’ Kamala Harris. She did poorly in the Democrat Nominating process, starting out at Number Two, and ending up defeated and dropping out, even before getting to Iowa, but that doesn’t mean she’s not a “highly talented” politician! Just ask her Mentor, the Great Willie Brown of San Francisco.
I’m sure I don’t have to point out that he has suggested exactly the same thing about NY Attorney General Leticia James and Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis, both of whom are Black women. He’s the one who gives permission for this garbage, not Mike Johnson.
Trump’s team is reportedly super loyal to him so this is pretty stupid in any case. They just screwed up on a grand scale.
Cheatle resigned which I think is fine since the buck has to stop at the top and it’s clear the Secret Service fell down on the job. But this looney tunes stuff from a member of congress (yes, it’s Marge Greene, one of their most popular members) is unfortunately par for the course.
I mentioned Vance’s grotesque comments yesterday but the video of him saying it is blowing up on social media and being discussed on mainstream media so it’s worth emphasizing again just how out of step with modern life he really is:
Comments JD Vance made in 2021 questioning Vice President Kamala Harris’ leadership because she did not have biological children have resurfaced, testing the young conservative senator in his early days campaigning as part of the Republicans’ presidential ticket.
During Vance’s bid for the Senate in Ohio, he said in a Fox News interview that “we are effectively run in this country via the Democrats,” and referred to them as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He said that included Harris, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat.
“How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” asked Vance, who is now Donald Trump’s running mate. Harris became stepmother to two teenagers when she married entertainment lawyer Douglas Emhoff in 2014. And Buttigieg announced he and his husband adopted infant twins in September 2021, more than a month before Vance made those comments.
The clip has started to spread online, with Hillary Clinton sharing it in a Tuesday post on X and adding sarcastically “what a normal, relatable guy who certainly doesn’t hate women having freedoms.”
The recirculated comment may be a sign of the GOP ticket’s troubles appealing to women voters, and on the issue of reproductive rights.
They have trouble appealing to women on any issue. They are both disgusting pigs.
And, by the way, the slam at Buttigieg is not only factually incorrect it’s the kind of repulsive homophobic comment that will activate the LGBTQ community as well.
By the way:
While plans for next month’s Democratic National Convention are still in the early stages, according to a source close to the Harris campaign, several Hollywood publicists and agents told CNN the DNC will be star-studded with one source sharing that conversations with an A-list pop star are currently underway about a possible performance.
I wonder who that might be?
Apparently, Hollywood has been activated and they are ready to fan out to support Harris. It’s not going to be as thrilling as Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan, of course. But it’s something.
The best profile of Kamala Harris you will read is by Joan Walsh in the Nation. An excerpt:
I heard the rapid staccato click of high heels. Harris walked in, greeted me warmly, and immediately yanked open the curtains. She was not afraid of the heat. She wanted sunshine in here.
She is about to get much more sunshine—and heat—than she asked for. A few days after our conversation, President Joe Biden had the worst debate performance of his career and sent the Democratic Party into a crisis over his ability to win the 2024 election against Donald Trump. Pundits and more than a few Democratic leaders clamored for Biden to step aside, as polling showed his path to a second term drying up. On July 21, Biden announced that he was suspending his campaign for president and endorsed Harris as nominee soon after. Prominent Democrats quickly lined up behind her as her work wooing Biden’s delegates began.
Harris and I spoke when she was still trying to win a second term for Biden, dispatched to reach voters who were among the most critical to his reelection. In the days before I met with her, I was repeatedly told: Do not suggest that she’s “found her voice” in the two years since the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, when the Supreme Court robbed American women of rights we’ve enjoyed for half a century—although she kicked off her Dobbs anniversary tour the day we spoke. Do not say that she’s “having a moment” on the 2024 campaign trail. Or ask if there’s any “daylight” between her and the president over Israel’s brutal retaliation against Hamas in the wake of the October 7 massacre. (On policy, there isn’t, though Harris has been more critical in public about the mercilessness of Israel’s response and the toll on Palestinian civilians than Biden has.) Do not ask whether anything “surprises” her after a long career as a district attorney, an attorney general, a senator, and now as the nation’s first Black, first Asian, and first woman vice president. This struck me as a defensive tic, a reaction to the feeling that she has repeatedly been underestimated. (That feeling simmers under the surface of our conversation as well.)
I was warned against going down these paths not just by her staff but by some of the friends who’ve known her for decades. They were not protecting her; they were protecting me—from her impatience with what she thinks are stupid questions she’s heard time and again.
So I struggled with how to phrase a question about whether Dobbs has given her a new mission. I think I maybe even used the dreaded word “moment.”
“I appreciate that perhaps for some who weren’t paying attention, this seems like a ‘moment,’” Harris allowed. “But there have been many moments in my career which have been about my commitment to these kinds of fights, whether they’re on the front pages of newspapers or not.”
The problem, though, is that Harris could use this redemption story. Her 2020 presidential primary bid went poorly. (Full disclosure: My daughter, Nora, was her Iowa political director in that race. I also worked with her sister, Maya Harris, at an Oakland nonprofit 25 years ago.) The first year or so of her vice presidency didn’t shine. The past two years have been different: Since Dobbs, she has been Biden’s top ambassador on issues of reproductive justice—yes, unlike Biden, she’ll say “abortion,” but she also frames the issue around broader themes of maternal health and family support. When we met, Harris had just come from a taping at MSNBC where she sat alongside Hadley Duvall, the brave Kentucky woman who spoke about being raped by her stepfather and becoming pregnant at 12 and railed against Republicans who would force girls to have their rapist’s baby.
Duvall had a miscarriage but remembers she took comfort in knowing she had “options”—options she wouldn’t have now in Kentucky or in many other states. “One of the things I’m utterly in awe of is the number of people who have decided, ‘I’m gonna tell my story, because I don’t want other people to go through this,’” Harris told me. “I said to Hadley, ‘I’ve seen, in moments of crisis, the universe has a way of revealing the heroes.’”
After Biden’s catastrophic debate performance and declining poll numbers, the Democratic Party needs a hero. Can Harris pull it off? Senior Democrats as well as some progressives who had been pushing Biden to stay in the race have lined up behind her, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. At press time, former President Barack Obama had not endorsed Harris, yet several of Harris’s strongest presumed rivals for the nomination, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, had. ActBlue reported raising nearly $50 million in small donations in the seven hours after Biden’s announcement. Now the way in which she navigates this unprecedented situation could mean the difference not only between getting herself or Trump into the White House—but between democracy and autocracy.
Back in New York, Harris resisted the idea that her past two years represent any sort of evolution into a stronger leadership role. So I flipped to what her longtime friend, California Senator Laphonza Butler, told me. Butler didn’t see some post-Dobbs awakening in Harris either, but she mentioned one thing she thought might be new, and I shared it with Harris: “I see a Black woman who got sick and tired of trying to please everybody and just said, ‘Fuck it. I’m not gonna make everybody happy. I just have to be me.’”
Harris responded with the trademark laugh that’s launched a thousand hateful Fox News segments and told me: “I love Laphonza Butler.”
During the tumultuous 2020 primary there was a lot of concern that Kamala Harris was not progressive enough for the Democratic party. Some called her Kamala the Cop and believed that her professional history as a DA and Attorney General made her a responsible for the system that led to the murder of George Floyd. I always thought that was overblown but primaries are like that. In any case, Joe Biden, who was hardly the exemplar of ultra-progressive ideology won the election and ended up governing as the most progressive president since FDR and LBJ and the real world results have been sterling.
Axios reports that Harris expects to continue in that vein:
Vice President Kamala Harris has used her first days as Democrats’ likely nominee for president to make it clear that she’ll pursue big — and expensive — parts of Joe Biden’s domestic agenda that never made it across the finish line. Harris is signaling that even as Democrats play defense on Biden’s mixed economic record, she’s eager to go on offense for the next four years.
Her plans include pushing for nearly $2 trillion to establish universal pre-K education and improve elderly care and child care — as well as a permanent tax cut for working-class families.
Her instincts are to go further than Biden’s attempt to raise corporate taxes to 28%, according to people familiar with the matter who recall that Harris backed raising them to 35% in 2020.
Harris previewed her economic priorities when she dropped by her campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., on Monday, and then again at her rally in Milwaukee on Tuesday.
“We believe in a future where no child has to grow up in poverty,” she said in Wilmington. “And where every person has access to paid family leave and affordable child care.”
That’s music — and code — to progressives’ ears.
As a senator, Harris was a champion of the expanded child tax credit, which provided annual tax breaks of up to $3,600 per child for families. Biden included it in his $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill, but it expired after one year.
As vice president, she has governed as a moderate, helping Biden to push through his Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Chips and Sciences Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.
More broadly, she has embraced the pillars of Biden’s new industrial policy, and accepted the emerging consensus that tariffs are a legitimate tool in international economics.
“She’s a classic progressive who is skeptical of trade but doesn’t want to go as far as Trump in terms of imposing blanket tariffs,” a former Biden administration official said.
“Right now, on economic policy, she is the midpoint of the Democratic Party, which is far from the center” of the overall political conversation, the official said.
In one of her first acts as vice president, Harris convened a group of small business owners to signal that her sympathy rested with scrappy entrepreneurs and not big corporations.
It’s a point she has made on the road all year, announcing new grants for women and minority-owned businesses in swing states.
Weeks into her term as vice president, she called JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan to press them to issue more loans to minority and low-income communities under the Paycheck Protection Program.
People familiar with the discussions said her message was clear: We are willing to work with you, but we also are watching you.
Sounds good to me. Trump’s “populism” is phony as we know but he and his pals may realize one day that they made a mistake by adopting that tone. It’s made progressivism sound a lot more mainstream. All they have left is the culture war. Good luck with that.
When Donald Trump began his third run for president back in 2022, he said very explicitly that his campaign was organized around vengeance for his 2020 humiliation. “I am your retribution!” he proclaimed, assuring his devoted cult following that their belief in the Big Lie would be rewarded when he exacted punishment on the political enemies who had denied their Dear Leader his second term. It was a speech you might expect from any demagogue but in Trump’s case it also spoke to the deep psychic wound he suffered as a malignant narcissist unable to accept that he had lost so it was hard to know if he had any other goals beyond the need to prove that he was a winner after all.
As the campaign has gone on it’s become clear that Trump has actually evolved into a true authoritarian. Yes, he’s still simple-minded and juvenile in many ways, and it will always be all about him, but it’s become clear that his attraction to strongmen has developed into a yearning to be a member of their club in a new and different way. And he’s being more and more open about it. We always knew that he admired Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his bromance with the tyrannical North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and affection for various middle eastern leaders was no secret. He’s always bragged about his ability to “get along with” dictators.
He talked about it in his soporific acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention:
I got along very well, North Korea, Kim Jung Un. I got along very well with him. The press hated when I said that.
“How could you get along with him?”
Well, you know, it’s nice to get along with someone who has a lot of nuclear weapons or otherwise. See, in the old days, you’d say that’s a wonderful thing. Now they say, “How can you possibly do that?”
But no, I got along with him and we stopped the missile launches from North Korea. Now, North Korea is acting up again. But when we get back, I get along with him. He’d like to see me back too. I think he misses me, if you want to know the truth.
He spoke similarly about how the Taliban really thought highly of him. In the same speech he said that when snipers were killing American soldiers in Afghanistan he spoke with the Taliban leader:
I spoke to the head of the Taliban. You’ve heard this story. Abdul, still there. Still the head of the Taliban. The press got on me, “Why would you speak to him?” I said, “Because that’s where the killing is.” I don’t have to speak to somebody that has nothing to do with it.
And I told him: “Don’t ever do that. Don’t ever do that again. Don’t ever, ever do that again, you’re going to stop.” Because during the Obama administration, many great people and soldiers, a lot of soldiers, were being killed from long distance. I said, “If you keep doing that, you’re going to be hit harder than anybody has ever been hit by a country before.” And he said, “I understand, Your Excellency.” He called me “Your Excellency.” I wonder if he calls the other guy “Your Excellency.” I doubt it.
(That’s complete nonsense, of course.) We’re all familiar with his embarrassing encounters with Putin and Xi. They saw him coming a mile away.
But for all of his shameful fawning sycophancy over murderous tyrants, he has mostly confined his strongman adulation to matters of foreign policy and national security. His domestic authoritarianism has generally been cloaked in demagogic ranting about crime and such things as the use of executive power to exact revenge on his enemies and abuse the presidential pardon power to excuse his accomplices’ crimes. The plan to round up tens of millions of people and force them into detention camps and deport them is about as authoritarian as you can get. (In fact, the proper word is “fascist.”)
But he’s going even further now, drawing a direct line between the foreign tyrants his admires so much and his own domestic agenda. He’s noted on the campaign trail that some of them, like China’s Xi is a “brilliant man” who controls 1.4 billion people with an “iron fist.” . He recently acknowledged his new best friend, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, by saying “this is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it, right? He’s the boss and … he’s a great leader, fantastic leader. In Europe and around the world, they respect him.” (They don’t, actually.)
Now he’s making it clear that we need that here in the U.S.
A fundamental thing that gets lost in the coverage is that Trump isn’t just promising to govern like an authoritarian, he’s *campaigning like an authoritarian*. Lies, fear, sweeping false promises—Trump’s following the dictator playbook on fooling people into giving up democracy. https://t.co/WokcG8T6km
His reference to Orban was about a visit that took place just a few days ago at Mar-a-Lago when the Hungarian president flew in to brief him on his recent meetings with Putin and Xi during the NATO summit in Washington. An axis (if you will) of mutual interest is forming among the world’s authoritarian leaders and Trump wants to be a part of it. As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, scholar on fascism and authoritarian leaders observed he is “immersed” in it.
Trump is immersed in the new autocratic international order and role of US if he wins will be to stand down and allow Xi and Putin to expand. The talk of "peace" and non-intervention by Vance & Co is about creating conditions for autocrats to succeed. https://t.co/2NRl6GRXG4
Greg Sargent of The New Republic hosted Never Trumper Rick Wilson on his podcast this week to talk about this and it was, frankly, chilling. Wilson spent years in the right wing fever swamps and knows all about their tactics and strategies. He says we must take this very seriously and that even if the media cynically dismisses all this as a “schtick” or old news, Trump and his henchmen are deadly serious.
Trump sees himself as part of this emerging “autocratic international order” and is openly campaigning on that issue. His followers are being programmed through his usual mind-numbing repetition to accept this as normal politics. It may be normal in some countries but up until now it’s never been normal in America. In fact, it’s what normal people used to call un-American,
