If you’ve watched Democrats flounder for years to find messaging that actually catches on, that actually smacks down Republicans’ vapid posturing over family and patriotism, you’re not alone. Remember Rep. Steny Hoyer’s (D-Md.) stillborn effort to sell how you can make it in America if we “make it in America”? I winced.
Well, with a new generation comes more facile minds, quicker wits, and sharper tongues.
Consider if you will, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his response to Sen. J.D. Vance’s suggestion that Americans without children have “no physical commitment to the future of this country.”
Buttigieg responds, “When I was deployed to Afghanistan, I didn’t have kids back then. But I will tell you, especially when there was a rocket attack going on, my commitment to this country felt pretty, pretty physical.”
And the crowd goes wild.
Republicans’ economic populism is just posturing, Buttigieg argues. It’s more body language than policy. It’s an act.
.@PeteButtigieg: "If your party has been systematically against unions, against a higher minimum wage, against paid family leave, against overtime, then just because you found Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock and put them on a stage doesn't make you a friend of the working man." pic.twitter.com/bMb74nDSn3
— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) July 30, 2024
The New Republic considers GOP whines about being branded “weird“:
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday shut down Vivek Ramaswamy’s attempt to fire back at the Kamala Harris campaign’s criticisms of Republicans as “weird.”
It started when Ramaswamy posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday night about how “this whole ‘they’re weird’ argument from the Democrats is dumb & juvenile.”
Don’t mess with AOC. She’s not from the Hoyer wing of the Democratic Party.
Being obsessed with repressing women is goofy.
Trying to watch what LGBTQ+ people do all the time is abnormal.
Punishing people who don’t have biological offspring is creepy.
It’s an incel platform, dude. It’s SUPER weird. And people need to know. https://t.co/vgDeM9e7pU
“It’s an incel platform, dude. It’s SUPER weird,” AOC answers Vivek Ramaswamy’s attempt to counterpunch.
It appears that the criticisms of Vance and Trump are starting to get to Republicans, which signals that they’re working. For the past week, Vance has been heavily mocked, as his campaign speeches fell flat and a false internet rumor circulated about him conducting a sex act with a couch. Old remarks where he compared Democrats to “childless cat ladies” resurfaced and drew criticism from celebrities as well as lawmakers.
It doesn’t help deflect the “weird” label when the GOP’s presidential candidate doesn’t just cover his baldness with a combover but sculpts his hair into an architectural wonder. He then trowels on bronzer to conceal his pastiness before going online to fish for compliments from dictators. And when your party’s celebrities look like Batman villains.
Third, the gear that wear to show that they’re totally normal and their opinions are serious.
— Veterans For Responsible Leadership (@VetsForRL) July 29, 2024
Anat Shenker-Osorio self-promotes the fact that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s recently celebrated messaging cleverness has a history. Democrats sold a brighter future in Minnesota that Walz’s policies made real.
For those just newly catching onto Walz, admittedly not objective here, but strongly encourage taking a listen to our podcast episode on the emergence of his extraordinarily effective messaging. https://t.co/rtdmlALeeB
— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) July 29, 2024
Signals abound that the political ground has shifted to the Democrats. The Kamala Harris Zooms, for example. The latest last night, “White Dudes for Harris,” raised $4 million in three hours. Jeff Bridges, “the Dude,” dropped by along with 180,000 others. “Harris leads Trump 44% to 42% in US presidential race,” blares a Reuters headline from Thursday. I cited some local signs on Monday. Republicans are experiencing a “weird” problem they’re having trouble shaking.
A few images of Trump world being totally normal and not at all weird. 🧵
— Veterans For Responsible Leadership (@VetsForRL) July 29, 2024
Trump, The Man Who Never Laughs, is making fun of Harris for having a sense of humor. Eugene Robinson notes, “Think about it: We’ve heard Trump snarl and mock, we’ve seen him smile, but can anyone remember him laughing out loud? I can’t. Kind of weird, no?”
Sen. J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, demonstrates yet again that Trump’s boast that he picks only the best people is as good as the 34-felonies former president’s promise to produce a replacement health care plan in “two weeks.” That is, if it doesn’t conflict with his next “Infrastructure Week.”
“Donald Trump hired 44 cabinet members; 75 percent of them want nothing to do with the guy,” Jon Stewart reminded “The Daily Show” viewers Monday night. The man who once boasted he couldn’t be bought is openly selling policies to the highest bidders. When the going gets tough, the weird get weirder.
It’s a new day, historian Heather Cox Richardson observes:
Just a week ago, it seems, a new America began. I’ve struggled ever since to figure out what the apparent sudden revolution in our politics means.
I keep coming back to the Ernest Hemingway quote about how bankruptcy happens. He said it happens in two stages, first gradually and then suddenly.
That’s how scholars say fascism happens, too—first slowly and then all at once—and that’s what has been keeping us up at night.
But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe democracy happens the same way, too: slowly, and then all at once.
At this country’s most important revolutionary moments, it has seemed as if the country turned on a dime.
In 1763, just after the end of the French and Indian War, American colonists loved that they were part of the British empire. And yet, by 1776, just a little more than a decade later, they had declared independence from that empire and set down the principles that everyone has a right to be treated equally before the law and to have a say in their government.
The change was just as quick in the 1850s. In 1853 it sure looked as if the elite southern enslavers had taken over the country. They controlled the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They explicitly rejected the Declaration of Independence and declared that they had the right to rule over the country’s majority. They planned to take over the United States and then to take over the world, creating a global economy based on human enslavement.
And yet, just seven years later, voters put Abraham Lincoln in the White House with a promise to stand against the Slave Power and to protect a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” He ushered in “a new birth of freedom” in what historians call the second American revolution.
The same pattern was true in the 1920s, when it seemed as if business interests and government were so deeply entwined that it was only a question of time until the United States went down the same dark path to fascism that so many other nations did in that era. In 1927, after the execution of immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, poet John Dos Passos wrote: “they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspaper editors the old judges the small men with reputations….”
And yet, just five years later, voters elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised Americans a New Deal and ushered in a country that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights.
Every time we expand democracy, it seems we get complacent, thinking it’s a done deal. We forget that democracy is a process and that it’s never finished.
And when we get complacent, people who want power use our system to take over the government. They get control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court, and they begin to undermine the principle that we should be treated equally before the law and to chip away at the idea that we have a right to a say in our government. And it starts to seem like we have lost our democracy.
But all the while, there are people who keep the faith. Lawmakers, of course, but also teachers and journalists and the musicians who push back against the fear by reminding us of love and family and community. And in those communities, people begin to organize—the marginalized people who are the first to feel the bite of reaction, and grassroots groups. They keep the embers of democracy alive.
And then something fans them into flame.
President Joe Biden’s passing-the-torch moment, compelled or self-inspired, has relit the flame that felt all but snuffed out by creeping authoritarianism just weeks ago. But Trump is no Smokey Bear. He failed to properly drown democracy’s embers. The Dobbs decision overturning Roe “made it clear that a small minority intended to destroy democracy and replace it with a dictatorship based in Christian nationalism.” Bad move. It fanned the embers.
But Biden did not pass the torch to Harris, Richardson suggests. He passed it to us.
It is up to us to decide whether we want a country based on fear or on facts, on reaction or on reality, on hatred or on hope.
It is up to us whether it will be fascism or democracy that, in the end, moves swiftly, and up to us whether we will choose to follow in the footsteps of those Americans who came before us in our noblest moments, and launch a brand new era in American history.
Perhaps as Benjamin Franklin said of the chair in which George Washington sat during debates over the Constitution, the sun carved into it is rising, not setting.
President Biden has endorsed three important reforms to the Supreme Court. He’s asking for binding code of conduct, which is long overdue. He wants no immunity for former presidents accused of crimes while in office. And the biggie is that he’s asking for terms limits for Supreme Court Justices.
The right wing is having a fit as usual. They love corruption so that’s not surprising. But it’s the term limits that have them screaming. Unfortunately, as with so many issues, they are on the wrong side of that one too:
Even most Republicans think it’s a good idea. But the “influencers” are very up in arms. Keep it up.
Bolts has a very important primer on the Arizona primaries tomorrow. It’s interesting because the GOP slate is full of MAGA weirdos and that’s going to have an effect on what happens in November (just as it did in 2022.) If Arizona is in play for the Democrats it could be decisive:
Donald Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 presidential race have rocked Arizona politics in recent years, causing threats against election officials, and leading many conservatives to demand election audits, resist certifying elections, and push for new voting restrictions.
Now these aftershocks are showing up all over this swing state’s Republican primaries.
There’s the fake Trump elector from 2020 who is now running for Congress.The lawmaker who proposed a bill locking in the state’s 2024 electoral votes for Trump. The election deniers who want to take over local election administration. The Republicans who never conceded their own statewide losses two years ago and are now mounting comebacks, including Kari Lake and Mark Finchem.
To help guide you through these races, here’s your Bolts primer on what to follow on July 30.
Also on the menu, Democrats are hosting several noteworthy contests—including a sheriff’s race in Tucson marked by disagreements over immigration enforcement, and an expensive Phoenix-area U.S. House race to replace Ruben Gallego, who is running for Senate.
Be sure to return to this page on election night: We’ll update this page with results. And note that this guide is not exhaustive; it is Bolts’ selection of important races to monitor.
The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins took a look at the prayers people say at Trump rallies. Yikes. It’s not that there aren’t always prayers at political events in America. I’ve always found it a little presumptuous but it is what it is. But the praying at Trump rallies is different. It’s not just done to appeal to God for protection or what have you. They have changed over the years to be a celebration of Donald Trump as God’s anointed representative on earth and his political opponents as instruments of Satan if not actual demons themselves:
[I]t’s easy to see the danger in internalizing the concept of politics as spiritual combat. Trump’s rallies become more than mere campaign events—they are staging grounds in a supernatural conflict that pits literal angels against literal demons for the soul of the nation. Marinate enough in these ideas, and the consequences of defeat start to feel existential. “This is not a time for politics as usual,” a Pentecostal preacher declared at a Trump rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, last year. “It’s not a time for religion as usual. It’s not a time for prayers as usual. This is a time for spiritual warriors to arise and to shake the heavens.”
As I was reviewing these prayers, I wondered what Trump’s most zealous religious supporters would do if they didn’t get the result they were praying for in November. With so much riding on the idea that Trump’s reelection has a divine mandate, what would happen if he lost? A destabilizing crisis of faith? Another widespread rejection of the election’s outcome? Further spasms of political violence?
It wasn’t until I came across a prayer delivered in December in Coralville, Iowa, that a more urgent question occurred to me: What will they do if their prayers are answered?
Onstage, Joel Tenney, a 27-year-old evangelist with a shiny coif of blond hair and a quavering preacher’s cadence, preceded his prayer with a short sermon for the gathered crowd of Trump supporters. “We have witnessed a sitting president weaponize the entire legal system to try and steal an election and imprison his leading opponent, Donald Trump, despite committing no crime,” Tenney began. “The corruption in Washington is a natural reflection of the spiritual state of our nation.”
For the next several minutes, Tenney hit all the familiar notes: He quoted from 2 Chronicles and Ephesians, and reminded the audience of the eternal consequences of 2024. Then he issued a warning to those who would stand in the way of God’s will being done on Election Day.
“Be afraid,” Tenney said. “For rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. And when Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.”
Yes, that’s unnerving. And it appears that Trump knows exactly what he’s dealing with when he says, “don’t worry, you won’t have to vote after this election, my beautiful Christians.”
After having spent most of the last two years playing golf and dining with his paying fans at Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump picked up the pace of his campaign a little bit this past weekend. He met with a Christian group on Friday night and then made two appearances back to back, first at a Bitcoin convention in Tennessee followed by a rally in Minnesota.
You might think that just coming off of the RNC 10 days ago and after last weeks dramatic events in the Democratic Party going to a Bitcoin convention might not be among your top priorities. But Trump is always hungry for money and his campaign’s been collecting Bitcoin donations for a couple of months while observing that large cryptocurrency PACs have put over $180 million into some congressional races. So he went there along with some other high profile Republicans and Vivek Ramaswamy to make a bunch of promises at the behest of donors which he clearly didn’t understand and make a pitch for votes from people who had listened to independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr the night before.
He promised to create a “Bitcoin and crypto presidential advisory council” made up of people who “love your industry, not hate your industry.” When he promised to fire Gary Gensler, the Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman, the crowd went wild prompting Trump to exclaim, “I didn’t know he was that unpopular. Let me say it again: On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler.” Look for him to repeat that one on the trail even though your average MAGA follower probably won’t know what he’s talking about. But there’s nothing unusual in that.
Gensler is hated by this crew because he has filed lawsuits and fined members of the industry when they put the system at risk such as when one of the founders of an exchange was convicted of fraud and his exchange collapsed. Trump wants to fire anyone who wants to enforce the rule of law against fraudsters, especially himself.
Speaking of enforcing the law, judging from his rally speech in Minnesota and his incessant posting on social media, he seems to think he’s found the poison arrow that will destroy Vice President Kamala Harris. Rather than immigration, which I thought they’d emphasize over everything else, aside from some half-hearted slams at her for being the “border czar”he’s been attacking her relentlessly for allegedly saying that she wanted to “defund the police” when she was running for president. He’s repeatedly posted and reposted a misleading CNN headline claiming that she said it. (What she actually told The New York Times was that she agreed with the idea of assessing “what public safety looks like” and the size of police budgets, “but, no, we’re not going to get rid of the police. We all have to be practical.”)
This might be a good attack line against a former prosecutor and Attorney General if it weren’t for the fact that Trump himself is a convicted criminal who has promised to pardon hundreds of fellow criminals he incited to assault police officers on January 6th.
Perhaps he would like to explain his own calls to defund law enforcement?
As Steve Benen at MSNBC’s Maddowblog chronicled, Trump has nothing but contempt for any law enforcement agency he doesn’t see as loyal to him over the rule of law:
In recent months, the former president has equated the FBI with “the Gestapo.” He’s told the public that the bureau is led by “Marxist Thugs.” He’s promoted a piece that referred to the FBI as “the Fascist Bureau of Investigation.” He’s condemned the FBI as “corrupt” and “crooked.” He’s described FBI officials as “mobsters” and a “real threat to democracy.” He’s slammed the FBI as the “Fake Bureau of Investigation,” before accusing the bureau of secretly paying people to “steal” the 2020 election from him, as part of the FBI’s plot to “rig” the election and “illegally change” the results.
Last March his minions in the U.S. House of Representatives did his bidding and voted to cut the FBI by 6% and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) by 7 percent. They were disappointed it couldn’t be more but they have promised to return to it as soon as they are back in power. And needless to say, if they are able to fulfill the Project 2025 agenda of firing all civil service employees who do not pledge fealty to Donald Trump, they will then provide full funding for the new East German STASI-style FBI. Until then, they are an enemy of the cult.
Trump said a few other weird things this weekend. He spoke at a Turning Point Actions conference on Friday night where he offered up an astonishing promise to his Christian followers that they won’t have to vote anymore after four years if they elect him:
Trump: You have to get out and vote. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four years, it will be fixed, it will be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore.. In four years, you won’t have to vote again. pic.twitter.com/DBGcBr3Wht
If it weren’t for his constant praise for dictators and tyrants and his repeated comments that he should be allowed to stay in office beyond two terms, I might be willing to believe some people’s interpretations of this startling remark to mean that he will fix everything in four years so they will have no reason to be involved in politics after that. But that makes no sense since unless he means he’s not leaving office, people will always have to vote lest their opponents reverse their gains as Trump himself is promising to do right now. No, he said what he said and we know what he means.
“I want to be nice,” Mr. Trump said. “They all say, ‘I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed since two weeks ago. Something affected him.’”
But to a cheering crowd of thousands, Mr. Trump quickly conceded the point. “No, I haven’t changed,” he said. “Maybe I’ve gotten worse. Because I get angry at the incompetence that I witness every single day.”
He must be talking about his campaign. It’s understandable that he’s angry but he has no one to blame but himself. Despite having been given a priceless gift with that awful debate and an assassination attempt that mercifully missed, he’s now slipping in the polls and is saddled with a national joke of a Vice Presidential candidate. He was born lucky but he has a unique gift for squandering it through hubris and ineptitude. And yes, he’s gotten worse.
Donald Trump’s selection of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) for his running mate is the biggest Republican candidate blunder since Sen. John McCain of Arizona chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to join him in defeat. But stupidity is not a crime. Insurrection is. Don’t let the press forget it. Nor his attempts to overthrow the democratic process. He’s planning another coup if he loses in November.
Trump is doing everything he can to delegitimize democracy.
The press needs to put the coming coup attempt and his last attempt in context, explains Marcy Wheeler.
I emphasized over the weekend that the press will move on from Trump’s promise to Christian nationalists to a) end all elections in his second term, or to b) render elections (the consent of the governed) irrelevant. The press will move on to the next news cycle. You must not.
Marcy Wheeler agrees, but castigates “horse race journalists” for finding it initially “more important to repeat and therefore magnify Trump’s latest slur on Vice President Harris” before acknowledging his threat to democracy. Only hours later did that story surface.
That story included Trump’s comment about voting, along with Gold’s spin of it as a claim that Trump would address the concerns of Christian voters sufficiently that they would no longer have to vote, buried in ¶14.
At the end of his speech, Mr. Trump urged the religious crowd to vote in November, suggesting that if elected he would address their concerns sufficiently enough that they would no longer need to be politically active. Earlier, he had lamented that conservative Christians do not vote proportionately to their size, a complaint he has made repeatedly in recent weeks.
“Christians, get out and vote. Just this time,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more, years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”
Let it be noted that one of NYT’s allegedly professional horserace journalists believes that the white Evangelical Christians who have been among Trump’s most important supporters vote in disproportionately low numbers or that any Republican would forego that most important part of their coalition. (That said, for demographic reasons Trump can’t change with a speech, white Evangelicals make up an increasingly smaller proportion of the voting public, which poses an entirely different kind of threat than apathy.)
In spite of disinterest by journalists paid to write horserace stories, the clip went viral on social media, setting off a debate about what Trump meant. Right wing trolls pushed the same horseshit claims of low turnout (again, we’re talking about the in-person and TV audience for a Turning Point conference!) that Gold provided. Others attributed it to Trump’s narcissism, a suggestion that he only cares about votes so long as he would be on the ballot.
Three Sunday morning shows dealt with it — all abysmally.
Martha Raddatz for example, let Chris Sununu dismiss the comments as a “classic Trumpism,” without asking what he meant by “this stuff” when he said it “can be fixed.” Then she went back to the horse race.
Only, at that point, before Joe Biden had dropped out of the race, Trump said,
I said, we don’t need votes. And Charlie Kirk is helping. He’s got his army of young people. These are young patriots. They don’t want to see happen what’s been happening in our country.
Thank you Charlie.
[USA chants]
And I said to Charlie, and I said to Michael [Whatley], listen, we don’t need votes. We’ve got more votes than anybody’s ever had. We need to watch the vote, we need to guard the vote.
We need to stop the steal.
In mid-June, before Biden dropped out, Trump wasn’t concerned about turnout. Now he is.
This comment — to the people Charlie Kirk had assembled to listen to Donald Trump — is best understood as a comment about Trump’s plan to win. As the January 6 Committee discovered, when Trump decided in late December 2020 that he was going to speak and march to the Capitol, Carline Wren turned to Kirk to help turn out bodies. Turning Point was also allegedly used to launder speaking fees to Don Jr and his girlfriend. As it happened, Kirk backed out of attending and deleted his boasts about arranging dozens of busses so others could do so. He pled the Fifth rather than explain to the January 6 Committee anything about all that.
But nevertheless, Charlie Kirk got busloads of people to Trump’s insurrection.
To the extent that Trump needs lots of bodies to be somewhere, Charlie Kirk is a key part of that process. And in June, he wanted them out to surveil polling centers, once again mobilizing Stop the Steal. Friday, he emphasized he actually needs some people to show up to the polls.
If you follow Tim Alberta, he’s reported that Trump axed the GOP’s field operation and turned it over to “allied organizations such as Turning Point Action, America First Works, and the Faith and Freedom Coalition.” But especially to Turning Point. Kirk’s org had become a punch line among the GOP’s strategists after promising to win big in Kirk’s Arizona in 2022 and losing bigger. The RNC wanted to invest in field, in GOTV. Trump would rather invest in “election integrity,” that is, in blocking the vote, Alberta reported:
The marching orders were clear: Trump’s lieutenants were to dismantle much of the RNC’s existing ground game and divert resources to a colossal new election-integrity program—a legion of lawyers on retainer, hundreds of training seminars for poll monitors nationwide, a goal of 100,000 volunteers organized and assigned to stand watch outside voting precincts, tabulation centers, and even individual drop boxes.
Doubling down on the Big Lie is a helluva tell, Wheeler notes. But that was before Biden dropped out. Now he needs GOP turnout too.
I’d noted an important Blue Sky thread by Sarah Posner but could not get to commenting. Wheeler does:
The point is, Trump’s audience of Christian nationalists do view taking over government in apocalyptic terms. They did, on January 6. And it nearly worked the first time.
This was only a Trumpism, as Sununu called it, to the extent that Trump is an epic conman who knows how to mobilize his audience, even Christian nationalists with whom Trump shares little more than a fondness for authoritarianism.
So sure: Perhaps this was just an attempt to juice more turnout out of a group that already turns out in high numbers, almost exclusively for Republicans. Or maybe — as his comments in June were — it’s part of a larger effort to delegitimize democracy.
But even beyond Trump’s last coup attempt, there’s a context here, one you need to at least acknowledge if you’re going to claim to assess his comments.
Trump is too good at wiggling out of trouble. The press is going to move on to the next heat in the horse race. We have to hold him accountable for his words and his plans in the streets, on people’s doorsteps, and on social media. The press will not.
A couple of Democratic events here in WNC over the last week drew far bigger crowds than I’ve seen in nearly two decades. A fundraiser for a county commission candidate at a nearby farm on Thursday drew hundreds. A district-wide gathering featuring a slate of statewide candidates at a rural farm west of here drew 400-500. An ice cream social at a city park shelter on Sunday exploded to 300 and became a local happening.
Local ice cream social exploded to 300 attendees, Asheville, NC. Photo by Paul King.
On Saturday afternoon, around 500 golf carts reportedly paraded through the Villages, a retirement community in Central Florida, in support of Kamala Harris for president — roughly 200 more than the number that reportedly showed up for President Biden ahead of the 2020 election.
With roughly 30% of Florida voters affiliated with neither the Republican or Democratic parties, per the Tallahassee Democrat, some attendees saw the turnout as a sign of a notable shift for the largely conservative community.
500+ golf carts for Kamala Harris parade around in the villages in Florida.
Jennifer Rubin suggests this morning that the way to fight autocracy is with optimism, joy, and humor. Less-engaged voters want to support the winning team. Democrats need to start acting like winners.
Hundreds join statewide candidates at rally in rural Transylvania County, NC on Saturday. (Photo by author.)
But while the Trump-Vance ticket has shown itself to be a joke, what it represents is not. This is still a serious fight. Rubin attended the Anti-Autocracy Conference last week featuring totalitarianism expert, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who told the assembly:
This is an anti-autocracy conference because autocracy is what we are looking at if Donald Trump is reelected.
I know many Americans feel this is hyperbole, even after MAGA attemped [sic] to overthrow the government to keep Trump in office illegally. In my line of work, we call this a coup attempt. Even now, Trump is continuing to use his rallies to market strongman rule to Americans. Just a few days ago he praised Xi Jinping, a Communist dictator, as “brilliant” because he rules with an “iron fist.”
What’s important in pushing back against this dark movement is finding the common ground most Americans share:
Norm Eisen, co-founder of State Democracy Defenders Action✓ — which hosted the conference together with conservative group Principles First and advocacy group Democracy Forward — told me, “There is much more that unites us as Americans than divides us.” He laid out 10 principles at the conference that “define what a long-term right, left and center coalition would look like to unify the vast majority of Americans against Trump’s authoritarianism and ensure that the American democratic tradition continues — and that Trump led autocracy is permanently banished from the American political scene.” These principles boil down to:
Democracies rest on rule of law; someone who denies the sanctity of the Constitution and serially violates our laws cannot be president.
Democracy cannot survive without truth, facts, science and evidence.
Free and fair elections are the essence of democracy, where power resides in the people.
Civil discourse must be the means to resolve differences; compromise is essential to governance.
A democratic government cannot operate without an independent, nonpartisan civil service, and subject matter expertise is essential to good government.
An ethical government free from corruption and self-interest is essential to our democracy.
The United States is the indispensable nation for international stability, economic prosperity and democracy. Our military takes an oath to the Constitution, not to a single leader.
Democracies require and ensure widespread prosperity. Democracies that deliver economically for citizens require a domestic calm, commitment to the rule of law and opposition to cronyism.
A vibrant, independent press is vital to democracy.
Equality and civil rights (“All men [and women] are created …”) are foundational to our American creed.
What surprised Rubin was (despite the serious topic) the atmosphere of “camaraderie and humor.”
Adam Gallagher and Anthony Navone wrote that humor “disrupts dominant discourses and challenges power ‘by disrupting the language and symbols used by those in power to represent reality in a particular way and providing alternative interpretations of that reality.’” Moreover, “Authoritarian leaders and regimes rely on projections of unshakable power; using fear to maintain control,” the authors wrote. “No wonder they hate jokes.” (Not coincidentally, Trump has said he hates being laughed at.)
Americans are anxious for connection, for in-person relationships and for fun. Especially when enlisting previously apolitical people, optimism, joy and, yes, humor can help hold movements together. No wonder Vice President Harris’s laugh is already is unnerving MAGA scolds; perhaps they grasp the power of happy warriors.
It helps that Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, is, as Harris campaign co-chair Mitch Landrieu told CNN, “one of the most unprepared people that we have ever put up to hold the vice presidency of the United States.” Vance barely meets the minimum requirement to be 35 years old and native-born, Landrieu said:
“He didn’t even run a business. He’s never run anything. And he’s about to be one heartbeat away from the largest entity in the world, and the one that’s the most important,” Landrieu said. “So it’s a fair question to ask: How would we know whether you have the capability to run domestic and national security policy for the most powerful country in the world, which you may be called to do on a moment’s notice?”
Expect the contrast with Harris’s upcoming VP pick to be stark, starker even than the choice Sen. John McCain’s made in 2008 to choose Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska . She saw her role as spokesmodel. What helped sink McCain’s candidacy then will help sink Trump’s now.
Plus, as America has seen recently, Trump the Unhinged is becoming more unhinged. His act is old and stale, and he is now the old man in the race facing an energized Democratic Party and a happy warrior in Kamala Harris.
Anecdotally here, independents are getting off their couches and getting involved in the fight.
The lighthearted memes cropping up around the Harris campaign feed the excitement. So what if they are silly or unintelligible to older voters? They’re working. As Barack Obama once cautioned, don’t be buzzkills.
The US could have avoided almost 250,000 Covid-19 deaths if every state had adopted stricter mask and vaccine requirements seen in the Northeast during the height of the pandemic, according to a new study.
The research from University of Virginia public policy and economics professor Christopher J Ruhm, published Friday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Health Forum, analyzed mortality data between 2020 and 2022, comparing it to a baseline of 2017 through 2019.
“These study findings do not support the views of those opposing COVID-19 restrictions who erroneously believe the restrictions did not work,” Ruhm writes. “To the contrary, the package of policies implemented by some states probably saved many lives.”
“If all states had imposed restrictions similar to those used in the 10 most restrictive states, excess deaths would have been an estimated 10% to 21% lower than the 1.18 million that actually occurred during the 2-year analysis period,” according to the study.
“Conversely, the estimates suggest counterfactual increases of 13% to 17% if all states had restrictions similar to those in the 10 least-restrictive states.”
All the elderly and immunocomprised as well as the workers in necessary workplaces who didn’t have a choice in this were among those who died in those red states. It’s shameful. Wearing a mask was hardly the end of the world but they had to act like fools and hundreds of thousands died.
Unfortunately, they have not learned their lesson. They never will.
