The long line there was the Special Counsel he had Bill Barr name to “investigate the investigators” — the Durham investigation. Like all the others they came to nothing because there was nothing.
He, on the other hand, tried to overturn an election and incited an insurrection and then stole a bunch of classified documents and refused to give them back.
Big difference. Yuge.
The leader of House Republicans’ biggest super PAC told donors last month he needed $35 million more to compete with Democrats in the fall. Senate GOP campaign chair Steve Daines used his primetime speaking slot at the Republican convention to lament that massive spending from Democrats was keeping him awake at night. And his House GOP counterpart warned that their party’s challengers trailed Democratic incumbents by a collective $37 million at the end of June.
Republicans were already worried about a glaring financial gap even before Kamala Harris’ rise. Now, with the election just two months away, they found themselves in an even more dire position: Democrats have seen a flood of enthusiasm in recent weeks, they’re far outspending Republicans on air and their donors are more energized than ever — with campaign finance data showing a surge in grassroots fundraising in late July after President Joe Biden dropped out.
Panic is starting to set in.
“The only thing preventing us from having a great night in November is the massive financial disparity our party currently faces,” said Jason Thielman, the executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “We are on a trajectory to win the majority, but unless something changes drastically in the next six weeks, we will lose winnable seats.”
Why in the world should they need money? Well. the guy at the top of the ticket is milking the donors for his own purposes.
Here’s one of them:
He spends most of the campaign funds he receives on his own properties and legal fees. They have few offices or staff in most of the swing states. They aren’t making the huge ad buys everyone assumed they would.
He’s pocketing the money.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee plan to transfer nearly $25 million to support down-ballot Democratic candidates in state and federal races this year, a significant boost to those efforts following record fundraising for her campaign this summer.
“If we want a future where every American’s rights are protected, not taken away; where the middle class is strengthened, not hollowed out; and a country where our democracy is preserved, not ripped apart, every race this November matters,” Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement Tuesday. “The Vice President believes that this race is about mobilizing the entire country, in races at every level, to fight for our freedoms and our economic opportunity.”
Big difference. Huge.
Trump cares about nothing but himself. They know this and yet they just can’t quit him.
JV Last at the Bulwark published one of those essays this morning that make you both depressed and relieved at the same time. Depressed because it tells a truth that you really wish wasn’t true and relieved because you realize you haven’t been crazy for thinking the same thing.
He starts off by quoting one of my favorite analysts, Philip Bump of the Washington Post:
The Trump era is about Trump in the way that the War of 1812 was about 1812: a critically important component and a useful touchstone but not all-encompassing. Turning the page on the era requires more than Trump failing to get an electoral vote majority.
Perhaps a more accurate time span to consider is something like 15 years. The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 was hailed as a signal moment in the evolution of American politics and demography, but it also triggered a remarkable backlash. Ostensibly rooted in concerns about government spending, it was largely centered on the disruption of the economic crisis (which triggered an increase in spending) and that overlapping awareness of how America was changing.
I’d say this had started long before, all the way back in the 90s when Newt Gingrich ascended to the leadership of the party. Rush Limbaugh and Fox news all set the stage for Trump. It was inevitable that they would end up with a demagogue. Obama was just the final catalyst.
However, that’s not the issue Last addresses in his piece. He says that he had assumed that once Trump was gone there would be large scale recriminations within the party for having fallen for Trump and in the end it would snap back to its usual ideological positions. He was wrong:
My first mistake was not understanding that Trump had turned the mild tilt of the Electoral College into an enduring 3-point advantage.
By trading suburban, college-educated voters for rural, high-school educated voters, Trump maximized the GOP’s Electoral College efficiency. This trade turned the GOP into a permanent minority party, making it extraordinarily difficult for it to win a national popular majority. But it tilted the Electoral College system to Republicans by a minimum of 3 points in every election.
This was a true innovation. Prior to Trump, no one had viewed minority rule as a viable electoral strategy.
True that. It was already happening but he finalized it by turbo charging that rural vote and repelling the college educated suburbanites. That has changed everything,
Anyway, this is the important insight:
I had always believed that in politics causality was a wheel. You turn it in one direction, then you turn it in the other direction. You set course, then you reverse course.
That view was incorrect. Political causality is like causality in most other realms: It branches.
Something happens and that action or event creates an entirely new universe. Which leads to another branch. And another. There is no going back. There is never any going back. The world is contingent.
Let me give you a historical example: The First World War was an accident. It didn’t have to happen. If you ran the events leading up to it ten times, it probably doesn’t happen in seven of them.
But the fact that the First World War did happen caused a bunch of contingent events which created a new universe. And in that universe, the accident of the First World War made the advent of the Second World War inevitable.
I’m sure some people in 1917 looked at the First World War and thought, “This whole thing was an accident that never should have happened. Once it’s over we can go back to normal.”
But that was incorrect. The Great War created a branch away from normal. “Normal,” as people understood it in 1912, was never coming back.
I made the same analytical error in 2016.
Other people continue to make this error today. Larry Hogan, Chris Sununu, and Nikki Haley make it on a daily basis. So do the conservatives who insist that they are (still) skating to the puck of some post-Trump future.
They’re never going back to normal.
THEY’RE NEVER GOING BACK TO NORMAL.
We need to internalize that. Whatever happens going forward, it’s not going to be what it was. Not even close:
If anything, the dynamics inside the party—the self-selection making the party whiter, more rural, and less-educated; the desire for minority rule; the eagerness for political violence; the disinterest in governing—seem likely to push the party further away from what it was.
Neither will it be the same as it has been under Trump. But I think we need to consider that it might be worse — and harder to beat. Trump is a dumpster fire in a million ways despite the hold he has on the GOP base. It’s unlikely we’ll be so “lucky” as to face someone so uniquely corrupt, criminal and stupid again, The next one may be harder to beat.
As I said, depressing but oddly relieving. I hate it but I’m relieved to know that I’m not alone in thinking this. The Republicans are on a different path than the one we’ve known. I’m not sure they know what it is themselves. But the incentives are what they are for the foreseeable future and we need to be prepared for that.
Trump has primed his cult to believe that Kamala Harris is an illegitimate president. Of course he has. “Obama wasn’t born in the US!” “Clinton shouldn’t be allowed to run!”because of her emails. “Joe Biden didn’t win, they cheated!” Now he’s laying the groundwork to whine that Harris should not have been allowed to run. And his people believe it:
Jason Streem, also 46, a dentist from the Cleveland suburbs who supports Trump, objected to the way Harris became the nominee.
“She was never part of the running process,” he said in a follow-up interview. “She never received the primary votes.” He called it “the most undemocratic way of picking a nominee.”
“It just threw me off,” complained Roger Sierra, 28, of Miami, an independent who supports Trump. He questioned Harris’ rise − put on the Democratic ticket in 2020 even though she failed to win a single delegate during her short-lived presidential bid, “and then for her to have this much support and just to be installed rather than voted in, it’s just a little, how would I say, confusing to me.”
Someone should explain to this poor fellow so he isn’t so confused. JD Vance has never received one delegate and he’s on the ticket. Neither did Mike Pence, Joe Biden, Tim Kaine and on and on. That has nothing to do with anything. In fact, Vance, unlike those others, never ran for any office until 2022. He has almost zero experience in politics.
As for Harris being “installed” it’s totally up to the parties what to do in the circumstance of a candidate dropping out. In this case the party delegates were all polled and decided on Harris, the VP they had all voted for enthusiastically in 2020 to replace Biden if he couldn’t continue. Nothing weird about any of it except the unusual circumstances of an incumbent president deciding not to run again late in the primary season.
If it was so undemocratic you’d think there would be a bunch of Democrats complaining about having their choice of nominee usurped by this process. Nobody’s objected! Democrats are thrilled with their nominee. In the words of Tim Walz, “mind your own damn business!”
But you knew all that. This person is disappointed that his Dear Leader isn’t going to coast to re-election (he never way, by the way) and now he’s in for a fight. Boo hoo.
But you can bet that if she wins the cult will be screaming about Harris being a usurper forever.
Aside from the obvious, his actual performance was just terrible. Here a just a couple of data points I ran across this morning:
I guess when people say they liked his policies, they meant his policies to deny people health insurance.
How about this one?
Or how about Trump’s claim that his tax cuts were the largest in history. (“nobody’s ever seen anything like it!”)
How about Trump’s new crusade against Joe Biden in which he claims that nobody died on his watch? He lied, of course:
65 military personnel died in war zones during Trump’s administration.
It’s common for some gold star families to blame the administration in charge for the deaths of their loved ones. Weirdly, since Benghazi it only seems to be right wing gold star families blaming Democrats. I didn’t see much of this during Trump’s tenure. Maybe all the families of the fallen were Trump fans? Or, more likely, the non-Trump fan families weren’t interested in becoming part of a political campaign.
Bill Sher at the Washington Monthly has more on this:
Trump is betting that he can make inroads on the anti-war left, with the help of Kennedy and Gabbard, by portraying himself a peacemaker battling warmongers Biden and Harris.
Evidence for that charge is also scant. If Biden and Harris have so deeply embroiled America in endless war, how is it that fewer American soldiers have died in combat during their administration than in Trump’s? How is it that fewer soldiers have died in combat than in any administration since Jimmy Carter?
According to the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System, which tracks annual casualty data, 65 soldiers died in “hostile action” during the four years of the Trump administration, versus 13 under Biden through 2022, the last year tabulated. The Washington Monthly’s Zach Marcus reviewed combat-related deaths announced in Pentagon press releases over the previous two years and identified three additional hostile action deaths, for a total of 16. That’s a 75 percent decline.
You are likely familiar with the incidents that caused the 16 deaths, as there are only two: the August 2021 suicide bombing at an Afghanistan airport and the January 2024 drone attack on an American military base in Jordan, for which the loose-knit Iranian-backed militia Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed responsibility.
The reason why the Biden-Harris administration has suffered so few hostile action deaths is because it ended the so-called “forever war” in Afghanistan. Most of the deaths were a tragic consequence of leaving that combat zone, not from deepening any foreign conflict.
In leaving Afghanistan just short of the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Biden and Harris closed the book on the failed neoconservative project of exploiting that traumatic event to expand American hegemony across the Greater Middle East with American ground troops.
How exactly are we on the verge of World War III? In Trump’s narrative, it’s because of the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza wars.
Trump places heavy emphasis on the Afghan bombing deaths to argue Biden and Harris are so incompetent that they facilitated fresh conflicts. He told the National Guard conference, “It gave us Russia going into Ukraine. It gave us the October 7 attack on Israel. Because it gave us lack of respect.”
This tenuous, self-serving argument collapses upon minimal scrutiny.
Read on. It’s a good analysis.
Trump’s only national security and foreign policy is to blather about money, “make friends” with despots who see him coming a mile away, tariffs as a “negotiating” posture that doesn’t work and doing the opposite of whatever his predecessors did. He is an imbecile in most ways but in this way in particular.
Tim Miller of The Bulwark appearing the other day on MSNBC used the phrase “emotional support cougar” to describe the over-made-up groupies who decorate Donald Trump’s Mar-al-Lago resort. The term seems not to have originated with Miller, but perhaps with comedian Carla Collins. Miller deployed the phrase to reference Trump’s regular need to run home to them in his Florida safe space.
But the desperation behind the need is broader than Trump, his sons, and his hangers-on.
Over at The Garden of Forking Paths, Brian Klaas explores the epidemic of toxic masculinity embodied by Trump and guys like Elon Musk. The day after Gov. Tim Walz modeled a healthier masculinity in addressing the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a professional purveyor of the destructive kind, Andrew Tate, was placed under house arrest by a Romanian judge for human trafficking in minors.
Klaas describes the type with a few more pithy phrases:
On the one hand, Tate—a fool so dense that light bends around him—embodies what is often referred to as “toxic masculinity,” a whole suite of severe character flaws.2 For our purposes, I’ll focus on a subset of Tate’s destructive deficiencies which are much more widely held, a specific model of masculinity that pretends one can only be a “real” man if they engage in constant abusive performative insecurity.
In this world, men must not only constantly be peacocks, but peacocks who overcompensate for their lack of genuinely magnificent tailfeathers by buying big guns and flashy cars while confusing women for property and wrongly conflating high wealth with high value.
Tate sells this form of warped masculinity as a product, including a $50 monthly subscription service to the “Real World”—previously known as “Hustlers University”—where he will teach young disciples how to get rich quick on the internet. Or, for the low, low price of just $7,979, you can join The War Room, an online community of Tate superfans that is billed as being “a global network in which exemplars of individualism work to free the modern man from socially induced incarceration.” What an erudite wordsmith one must be to create so much meaningless ambiguity with so few words of drivel!
The fact that internet vipers like Tate are so financially successful indicates that there is a social malaise among rudderless young men; if there weren’t, nobody would pay him absurd amounts of cash—or for this demographic, cryptocurrency—to tell them how to amass control over more worldly objects (which includes women in Tate’s antediluvian mindset).
As James Bloodworth writes, for the men on Andrew Tate’s courses, “Women are viewed as a resource on a par with sports cars and infinity pools – something to show off and deploy to convey your alpha status to other men. The contemporary manosphere has taken the concept of the trophy wife and expanded it into the trophy harem.”
How alpha must Trump be then? He doesn’t have to buy emotional support cougars. They pay him for admission to his club!
What’s particularly spooky about Tate (both British and American) is how well known he is in England where “one in five young British men — have a ‘favourable’ or ‘very favourable’ view of Tate.”
Tate’s strategy of trying to capitalize on the social angst of young men is nothing new. It’s simply dressed up in a new guise and packaged in a slick digital offering. What Tate is bottling up and selling online is an emotion that the sociologist Michael Kimmel identified a decade ago as aggrieved entitlement.
This concept refers, essentially, to the rage-filled sentiment among some men—particularly white men in the West—that they are the innocent victims of a world that’s becoming fairer by race and gender. Some report feeling emasculated by women holding any power. Many believe they are entitled, through fake pseudoscientific allusions to biological determinism and the grace of their genes, to being on top. Andrew Tate’s favored moniker, Top G, is no accident. The chumps toil at the bottom. The champs climb over whoever they need to in order to regain the top.
And at the top, it turns out there’s a lot of performative insecurity: fast cars, big guns, plastic bodies—the empty trappings of a broken person’s idea of what it means to project the illusion of a successful life.
Emotional support cougars, aggrieved entitlement, performative insecurity. Otherwise known as a public health crisis like “deaths of despair.”
It’s a poison in modern society. Not only are these abhorrent, backward views associated with higher rates of gender-based violence that leads to men beating and murdering women, but they are also killing young men, too.
It’s tough to muster sympathy for men who have adopted assholery as a lifestyle even if it’s killing them.
Walz is the counterpoint, Klaas believes, arriving not a moment too soon:
Beyond the biography, though, Walz represents one important rival model of masculinity to Andrew Tate. And it’s not just that he looks like—and is—a Midwestern Dad who likes football and knows how to fix cars and makes lame jokes while posting photos of his pets on social media.
Instead, it’s that Walz inverts the Tate philosophy on every front. For Walz, the chumps are those who speak a big game but are losers because they do nothing to strengthen their communities. The champs are those who need no praise or vanity to help others; who acknowledge their weaknesses and thank those who they’re indebted to; and are those who are never afraid to showcase emotional vulnerability. (The fact that Gus Walz’s unscripted tearful excitement in honor of his Dad became a lightning rod for ghouls in the Tate-adjacent MAGAsphere as an indication of beta male emotional weakness only underlined how utterly broken those men are inside). And, crucially, Walz feels empowered, not emasculated, to be working with a powerful woman.
You don’t need an extortionate online course to teach you how to be a good neighbor, a kind friend, a caring partner, or a community leader, either.
Walz therefore offers a form of quiet, inspiring masculinity that transcends traditional gender roles because it has a powerful message: being a good man and being a good person are the same thing.
If you want a perfect encapsulation of the conservative world view, I wrote early in my tenure here,
you need look no further than “A Boy Named Sue,” a song made famous by Johnny Cash and (ironically) written by the late Shel Silverstein, a writer of children’s books.
“Son, this world is rough, and if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough…
It’s the name that helped to make you strong”
Not a good father. Not a good husband. Not a good citizen. But strong. It’s all that matters.
That and having a few cougars hanging on your elbow.
The Labor Day clip of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaking in Milwaukee (“very good at this” below) went viral on Monday. After I transcribed and posted the gist of it on several platforms, it went nuts on Mastodon. (Don’t ask me why, but I seem to get more traffic on Mastodon than on X, Blue Sky or Threads.)
As a teacher and coach for years, Walz said, “I was a dues-paying member of my union.” When Republican critics accused him of being “in the pocket of organized labor,” he said, “That’s a damn lie. I am the pocket!” Want to attack him for standing up for collective bargaining, for fair wages, safe working conditions, for health care and retirement, have at it.
Democrats have to run for something, Walz continued, not just against the other guys. Fair wages and safe working conditions, expanded health care and addressing climate change, etc. are on Democrats’ agenda. Just one vote made the difference in moving Minnesota forward. “That’s our vision for the country,” Walz said in asking the crowd to give Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and President Kamala Harris working majorities.
Donald Trump opposed efforts to raise the minimum wage and Republicans back “right to work” laws meant to undercut workers’ power to negotiate for pay and benefits, Walz continued.
We know what right to work means, Walz went on. “It means the right to work for less money. It means the right to work in dangerous situations. It means the right to work with no pensions.”
Democrats have to run for something. But it’s also important to be informed, Walz told the crowd. Project 2025 should be subtitled “How to screw the working people.” That’s the Trump-Vance agenda. They’re even going after the 40-hour work week, looking to bring back child labor, and going after Social Security and Medicare while giving the rich another tax cut:
Here’s the money quote:
You tell me who in Wisconsin is sitting around saying, Damn, I wish they’d give billionaires tax cuts and screw me over. Damn, I wish they’d take my health care away. I wish they’d underfund my public school. I wish they would make my job more difficult and more dangerous, and then at the end of the day, I wish they’d make me work till I’m 75 years old. No one’s saying that. No one’s asking for that agenda. What they’re asking for is to be treated fairly with dignity. That’s what we ask.
Full speech here.
“This choir riff proves that we are truly living in the era of @anatosaurus now,” tweeted Anand Giridharadas who devoted a chapter of “The Persuaders” 2023 to Anat Shenker-Osorio’s efforts to change how Democrats communicate in plain-speak. Walz does it naturally.
Turn in your hymn books to page Tim Walz.
Since Trump is determined that we are going to talk about the Afghanistan withdrawal let’s talk about it. Kevin Drum has the best discussion that I’ve seen:
Regular readers know that I’ve long been annoyed by the relentless use of the word chaotic to describe the Afghanistan withdrawal. Of course it was chaotic. It’s like saying the D-Day landings were chaotic. There’s no way anyone conducts an airlift of 100,000 people in a neat and orderly way from a city that’s just been overthrown by the Taliban.
In any case, since it’s back in the news it’s worth reviewing how the Afghanistan withdrawal played out:
- In early 2020 Donald Trump negotiated with the Taliban for a withdrawal date of May 1, 2021, and the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners held by the Afghan government.
- Over the next year Trump pushed hard to reduce US troop levels. By the end of his term he had reduced the US presence to 2,500 troops.
- When Joe Biden took office, he moved the withdrawal date out to September 11. Trump criticized the change. “We can and should get out earlier,” he said.
- In July Biden changed the withdrawal date to August 31. At this point, the Taliban was fighting but hadn’t yet taken over a single province. The broad assumption was that when the US withdrawal eventually took place the Afghan government would still control the country. The US, naturally, was committed to protecting the government through the withdrawal.
- That changed suddenly because the Afghan army collapsed faster than anyone expected. On August 15 the Taliban took over Kabul and the president of Afghanistan fled the country. With only two weeks to go, this made a large-scale evacuation imperative.
- The withdrawal started chaotically, but within a few hours the Army restored order. Meanwhile, despite the Trump administration’s longtime policy of delaying visa requests, which left a huge backlog of unprocessed applications, the State Department worked heroically to process visas for Afghans who wanted to leave the country.
- In two weeks, the Army evacuated about 90% of Americans in Afghanistan and nearly 100,000 Afghan nationals. By any kind of historical standard, this was a superb performance under the most difficult circumstances imaginable.
The entire operation had only one serious failure: the death of 13 American service members (and 170 Afghans) to an al-Qaeda suicide bomber at Abbey Gate. Multiple investigations by the Pentagon concluded that there wasn’t really anything that could have stopped it.
Everyone processes grief differently, and I can’t bring myself to reproach the families that blame Biden for the deaths of their children. But the fact remains that Biden wasn’t at fault; the Army wasn’t at fault; and deaths in the line of duty are a natural occurrence in war.
The withdrawal wasn’t handled perfectly, but there weren’t any huge mistakes. Nor was it really possible not to withdraw given the situation Biden inherited: the Taliban’s takeover was inevitable as soon as Trump signed the withdrawal agreement with them. It might well have been inevitable even without that. After 20 years it was as clear as it could be that there was simply no more the US could do, and Biden showed a lot of political courage in facing up to that.
In the end, despite everything, the evacuation and airlift were considerable successes—and it’s remarkable that the only serious casualties came from a single al-Qaeda suicide bomber. The blame for that rests squarely on al-Qaeda and no one else.
One hopes that Trump’s need to cast blame and the media’s egregious coverage of the event doesn’t mark it otherwise historically but I think Kevin gets it right. It could never have been anything but a nightmare. Biden was the only president who had the nerve to face that..
The comments over at Kevin’s place are interesting too if you’re of a mind to pursue this.
Oh and by the way, here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know:
During Trump’s very weird event with Moms for Liberty last week he lied many times as he always does. And this particular lie is one he keeps telling and it keeps not being true. After telling them that he had wanted to make Ivanka “UN Secretary” (which would not have been possible) he said this:
“Daddy, I just want to help people get jobs….” Yeah right.
Trump signed an executive order creating the National Council for the American Worker, co-chaired by Ivanka Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. One of the council’s priorities is asking companies across the US to sign the Pledge to America’s Workers. The pledge involves “committing to expand programs that educate, train, and reskill American workers from high-school age to near-retirement,” according to the White House.
Two hundred companies have agreed to the pledge, with each providing different numbers of training opportunities. This brings the total number of opportunities pledged to just over 6.5 million. (See the full list.)
CNN’s Senior Economics Writer Lydia DePillis checked out a similar claim made by Ivanka herself last year as she discussed the pledge. “We’re up to 6.3 million new jobs,” Ivanka said last October. That claim, DePillis found, was rather exaggerated.
First, the pledge does not translate to millions of immediate training opportunities. In a press release from the administration, the pledge is described as a commitment to “new opportunities over the next five years.” Secondly, these are better understood as training opportunities, not necessarily “jobs.” In the same press release last year, the White House described these opportunities as “apprenticeships and work-based learning, continuing education, on-the-job training, and reskilling.” These opportunities can be for current employees.
Lastly, many of these opportunities pledged were already planned by the companies. As CNN previously reported, Walmart’s pledged amount over five years would just about match the rate that its program Walmart Academies has trained since it started in 2016. The Associated Builders and Contractors provides a similar example as it pledged to provide roughly as many opportunities in five years as it trains in one year.
In sum, it’s inaccurate to suggest that the number of training opportunities pledged are “jobs.” The timeline for these opportunities spans five years. And many of them match existing company goals and numbers. It’s simply not true that Ivanka Trump has “created millions of jobs,” as her father claimed.
She claimed it too. But then she’s a Trump. They all lie as easily as they breathe.
