Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Harris unveils populist economic plans

Ahead of her planned speech today in Raleigh, North Carolina, Vice President Kamala Harris announced a dozen proposed policies for “lowering costs for American families” (Washington Post):

The most striking proposals were for the elimination of medical debt for millions of Americans; the “first-ever” ban on price gouging for groceries and food; a cap on prescription drug costs; a $25,000 subsidy for first-time home buyers; and a child tax credit that would provide $6,000 per child to families for the first year of a baby’s life.

The last item followed a suggestion earlier this month from JD Vance, the GOP vice-presidential nominee, that the credit be raised from $2,000 per child to $5,000. Harris is also calling for restoring the Biden administration’s child tax credit that expired at the end of 2021, which raised the benefit for most families from $2,000 per child to $3,000.

The flurry of policy positions — just days before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago — represented the clearest articulation yet of how Harris, who has only had a relatively brief time on the national stage, would handle economic policy if elected this fall. Harris has thus far surrounded herself with many former aides to Biden, and her team had made some overtures to business leaders that they hoped reflected a more centrist approach. But the policy positions she embraced Friday suggest she will continue, if not deepen, the party’s transformation under Biden, who pushed for more aggressive government intervention in the economy on industrial, labor and antitrust policies.

Donald Trump, Republicans, and their industrialist backers will come after Harris with torches and pitchforks. Financing details for the policies were not immediately available, but Harris and her party have made a commitment to a “pro working-family agenda,” The Post adds. Their calculation is that victory in November lies down that path.

“Vice President Harris faces a dilemma: On the one hand, America is on a fiscally unsustainable path, and if we’re going to embark on some of the more ambitious programs she’d like to pursue we need more revenue,” said Daniel Hemel, a tax policy expert at the New York University School of Law. “On the other hand, democracy is in peril, and that crisis feels — and is — more imminent than the fiscal crisis, and I think she’s made the correct calculus that sacrificing on fiscal policy for a few hundred thousand middle-class voters in the battleground states is worth it.”

A butter knife to a gunfight?

Policy proposals signal to serious people that Harris is a serious presidential candidate. But Donald Trump operates in a different universe altogether, one of lies and insults. Dana Milbank catalogues a host of Trump’s insults in his Washington Post column this morning in addition to Trump anecdotes that are simply “bananas.” Less-MAGA Republicans are begging Trump to stop. But insults are all he has.

CNN's Daniel Dale with a brutal fact check of Trump, " I made a whole list here of other claims that were just flat out wrong, like this was just a whole bunch of nonsense." pic.twitter.com/i0pkTHA0ps

— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) August 15, 2024

Trump’s disastrous pick for vice president, J.D. Vance, dismissed concerns about a campaign built on insults and “a whole bunch of nonsense.” Vance thinks giving offense is just fine (via Talking Points Memo_:

“The reason people love him is because he is his own man, he is unfiltered and he lets the American people see who he is,” Vance said during a campaign rally in Byron Center, Michigan. “We’d much rather have an American president who is who he is, who’s willing to offend us, who’s willing to tell us the truth, who isn’t a fake who hides behind a teleprompter but lets the American people see exactly who he is.”

So let’s hope Harris is not bringing a policy butter knife to a gunfight. A substantial number of Americans are happy to live in an authoritarian Trumpistan. They are willing to risk themselves and the western alliance to bring it about.

They have abandoned democratic principles to establish a white, Christian nationalist homeland where the land of the free once stood. “Truth, justice, and the American way” is not the 1950s to which they hope to return. They condemn liberal aspirations for equality of opportunity as a demand for equality of outcomes while backing a convict whose foot soldiers are at work rigging election outcomes.

ELIAS: “People underestimate Trump — he’s not just interested in rigging the rules, he’s interested in rigging outcomes. Until people accept that they fail to understand how far he’ll go, and how much loyalty he will expect.” – @marceelias of @DemocracyDocket 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/X6RSFhdSJY

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) August 16, 2024

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

H.L. Mencken was right

I still remember reassuring volunteers in October 2016 that despite Trump signs dotting the highways and byways outside the city that there was no way Americans were crazy enough to elect the orange-hued reality star over Hillary Clinton, the former senator and secretary of state. But they did.

He’s not just unfit. He’s not just amoral. He’s a walking repudiation of every aspiration the Founders had for this country.

Behold:

Trump: When we gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom… It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor— it’s actually much better because everyone who gets the Congressional Medal, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many… pic.twitter.com/a766KxAC2e

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 16, 2024

“This is shocking but not surprising because of the pattern,” said MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-host Willie Geist. “This is not a one-off, this is the way he thinks about people who serve the country in uniform.” Trump infamously mocked Sen. John McCain for being a POW.

Via Raw Story:

“Yeah, there’s something really warped inside of him, there really is,” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson added. “Just something — I guess the word weird is overused, but all that we just played is weird.”

“And it is just appalling that he would speak of America’s heroes that way,” he continued. “I mean, the heroes, many who made the ultimate sacrifice for the country, and he simply does not get it. He doesn’t understand. There’s a connection there that’s not being made, and, you know, you saw it where for years he was president and, boy, if he ever became president again, I would really worry about this country because of that emptiness, that lack inside of him, that lack of empathy, that lack of patriotism. It’s just not there. It’s not there.”

Jim LaPorta of CBS News:

Equivalent means equal in value. The two medals are not comparable other than being the highest award in their fields. A medal being “much better” than the other is a matter of opinion. The Medal of Honor is for extraordinary heroism in the face of great danger on battlefields. The Presidential Medal of Freedom is given for significant achievements in the arts, public service, science and other fields. Recipients chosen often reflect a president’s political and personal interests per CRS.

David Simon of “The Wire” fame:

He is speaking of Miriam Adelson, who charged two German machine gun nests, was wounded sixteen times but managed to pull five other wounded members of a platoon to safety before collapsing herself.

Wait, I just checked the award citation and Ms. Adelson received the Medal of Freedom for donating several million dollars to Mr. Trump’s political campaigns.

Americans elected this soulless grifter to lead them. We actually did that. And incredibly, a plurality of us want to do it again. If we do, we deserve the world’s astonished contempt.

There are people living among us who, once burned by a hot stove, cheerfully stick their hands on it again. Oh, and people like Talks to the Sky.

Do everything you can to make sure they are the ones disappointed on November 5.

Compare and contrast:

This story by Kamala is making the rounds on TikTok pic.twitter.com/SHHq6C9uym

— D (@dilemmv) August 16, 2024

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

Good news from Pennsylvania:

Recent polling shows Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is beating Republican nominee Donald Trump among Pennsylvania voters — a brand new poll by Quinnipiac University, for example, puts her four points ahead. That represents a significant change from when President Joe Biden was still at the top of the ticket.

However, a poll by TelevisaUnivision’s Strategy & Insights provided to WHYY News prior to its publication reveals that shift may have been particularly significant among Hispanic voters in the state. Whereas 39% of Hispanic voters in the Commonwealth said they definitely planned to vote for Biden just before his announcement, 49% now say the same about Harris.

That checks out, according to Sarina Torres, 23, of Allentown.

“I think a lot of that shift comes from Latina voters,” Torres, a college student and movement politics organizer, told WHYY News. “It’s more exciting to vote for a woman of color.”

The TelevisaUnivision poll provides a rare look into voter reactions to Biden being replaced by Harris atop the Democratic ticket. The poll was already being conducted when Biden made his announcement, and researchers were able to record the immediate change in public opinion. Trump saw a marginal gain in votes in his head-to-head contest against the Democratic nominee.

Kathy Whitlock, VP of Strategy & Insights at TelevisaUnivision, warned that it’s still too early to make concrete predictions, but said the poll also gives key insights into a growing voting bloc that may impact the results in what is expected to be a close race in Pennsylvania.

“In the past, it was a virtual tie and this breathed new blood into this cycle,” she said.

Fingers crossed.

Every single person at a Trump rally will tell you that the reverse of this chart is true, because that’s what Trump & Fox/Newsmax tells them. They live in an alternate angertainment fact-free reality. They believe commie democrats have stopped fossil fuel production. pic.twitter.com/SZR6iCjvbX

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 15, 2024

Will this unreality last after Trump? I suspect it will.The precursors were talk radio and Roger Ailes’ Fox. They aren’t coming back to earth any time soon. They’ve been orbiting Bizarroworld for decades now.

It sure looks like someone is thinking about it

Things aren’t going well in the Trump campaign. And, as has happened in both of his previous campaigns, he’s likely looking to fire someone:

Donald Trump has privately expressed faith in his campaign leadership and no firings are currently expected, but senior advisers find themselves in the most vulnerable moment as they struggle to frame effective attacks against Kamala Harris, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

The past month, starting with Joe Biden’s withdrawal and his endorsement of Harris to succeed him, which propelled her to draw roughly even in key swing state polls, has easily been the most unstable moment for the Trump campaign since its formal launch in late 2022.

In that period, Trump has often committed one unforced error after another as he tries to frame arguments against Harris, struggled to break through the news cycle hyping Democrats’ enthusiasm, and suddenly found himself on the defensive with a narrow window left until November.

The sudden difficulty for the Trump campaign to lay a glove on Harris has led to Trump’s allies seeing an opening for the first time to openly challenge decision-making by senior aides and privately challenge whether some advisers should remain in their positions or be sidelined.

And the past month has been bad enough for the Trump campaign that advisers have taken those challenges – whether from enemies real or perceived – as serious threats or slights that necessitate devoting time and effort to slap down.

In a statement referring to the campaign chiefs Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, a Trump spokesperson said: “As President Trump said, he thinks Ms Wiles and Mr LaCivita are doing a phenomenal job and any rumors to the contrary are false and not rooted in reality.

Uh huh. Sure.

Trump doesn’t really seem to be engaged enough with his campaign to care to tell you the truth. He’s obsessed with his assassination attempt and the fact that Joe Biden isn’t his opponent anymore. To the extent he cares at all, he’s convinced that he can persuade the courts that the election was stolen and take power whether he wins or loses. Or maybe he just wants to whine about the election being stolen and hold court at Maralago with the ragged remainder of his cult until the end of his days.

Honestly, I’m not convinced he really wants to be president again, he just wants to prove that he isn’t a loser. Now that he knows he can convince nearly half the country of that without having to prove it, he may just be satisfied with saying that he won without having to actually do anything. He is almost 80, after all.

I’ve been pointing this out for a while, but now the media is noticing: Trump is relying on his “election integrity” goons to intimidate voters.. And if that doesn’t work, they’ll use the chaos they create to contest the election. They aren’t even trying to legitimately win.

Some Republicans worry that Trump’s focus on preventing a “rigged” election has hurt the party’s ground game, the get-out-the-vote operations that can be crucial in an election as close as this one.

Trump’s “election integrity” team also has raised concerns among Democrats about potential voter intimidation at the polls.

If Trump loses on Nov. 5, the election teams would be his evidence collectors for what almost certainly would be a barrage of legal challenges — and calls for state officials not to certify the election results.

 Early on, Trump told his team to pour its resources into “election integrity” efforts, saying that he’d take care of generating excitement and turning out voters for his campaign against President Biden.

But now that Biden has stepped aside, Trump faces an invigorated Democratic ticket led by Vice President Kamala Harris, who’s benefitting from the robust ground operation the Biden-Harris campaign built in swing states.

The difference between the Harris and Trump door-to-door campaigns is evident in several states, especially the seven swing states likely to decide the election — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Harris’ team says 330,000 people have worked as volunteers since she announced her campaign last month. The campaign has about 1,500 staffers.

After months of declining to specify the scope of Trump’s ground operations, Trump campaign political director James Blair posted on X that the campaign has hundreds of paid staffers.

Blair told Axios the campaign has 14,000 trained volunteers or “Trump Force 47 Captains” in battleground states. He added that the operation has more volunteers but would not elaborate. Blair also disputed the size of Harris’ volunteer force, calling it “fake numbers on a spreadsheet.”

Trump is relying on Turning Point USA, the Sentinel Action Fund, conservative activist Scott Presler’s group Early Vote Action, and the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s network of churches and Elon Musk’s America PAC to get out the vote. Reports are theat none of them have a clue what they’re doing.

Meanwhile Trump’s campaign has allegedly trained about 160,000 “poll watchers”

At Trump rallies in swing states, large signs with QR codes asking attendees to sign up to “Protect the Vote” are everywhere.

RNC chair Michael Whatley told Axios the goal is to have 5,000 “election integrity volunteers” in each battleground state.

Whatley also told Axios their GOTV operation is aimed at people who haven’t voted before. Maybe they should just start handing out cash?

It’s possible this is all bluster. If their amateur hour of a convention is any example, this campaign is not exactly first rate. But Trump has said repeatedly that there’s no need for a GOTV operation because he is all that’s needed to get his people out to the polls. He certainly believes that. But his rallies aren’t really pulling like they used to and it’s possible that the show has gone on just a little too long, even for the faithful.

Jill Filipovic analyzes the latest JD Vance atrocity:

The latest unearthed audio has him agreeing with a conservative podcast host on what women are for once we hit menopause: Helping to raise children is “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female.” The whole purpose.

Vance has opinions about many different kinds of women. Those who don’t have kids are “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” and lack “a direct stake in the future of the country.”

Women who care about their work and plan their families are suckers: “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had,” he tweeted after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Step mothers (and step parents generally), he has suggested, are not real parents.

We have not yet heard his views on the purpose of pre-pubescent girls, but he has said that he believes even raped and impregnated children should be forced to give birth, even though their circumstances are “inconvenient” — and Ohio, the state he represents as a US senator, has done just that, notoriously refusing to allow a ten-year-old rape victim to end her pregnancy (she had to travel out of state, at which point Republicans targeted the doctor who helped her).

He goes on to tell the podcast host that his own wife, who clerked for a Supreme Coourt Justice, had the help of her own mother who took a year off from her job as a biology professor to come help them in the home. He laments that some people would have just given them money. He, at the time, was trying his failed start-up and didn’t have time to help and wouldn’t anyway because it’s clearly a “female” job.

This guy is a real throwback and I think it’s comments like this that argue for the newspapers to release those documents they obtained that show the Vance vetting process. They either show that Trump and his people knew about his creepy sexism and either agree with it or didn’t care — or they did a very poor job of it. Either way, it’s newsworthy that someone with these antediluvian views made it on to a presidential ticket in 2024 despite a process that ostensibly vetted him.

I’m ticking off an awful lot of boxes that JD Vance seems to consider make me a useless, perhaps evil, member of society. It’s more than a little concerning.

Let them have their convention, and who knows how that’s going to turn out? Joe Biden is a very angry man, they took it away from him, they usurped it, they took it away from him, terrible terrible. I’m not sure they picked the right guy in him but he got 14 million votes — he got 14 million votes, she got no votes and you look at what happens, that’s not the way it was supposed to happen. They’re a threat to democracy, right? As they say.

—Trump in North Carolina 8/14

He just can’t quit Joe.

He’s more unstable than ever. Losing Joe left him “gutted.” And that assassination attempt pushed him over the edge:

“He’s been watching that seven-second clip of how close he was to getting shot right in the head—over and over and over again,” said a Republican close to the campaign, reported Vanity Fair.

The July 13 assassination attempt of Trump came amid a whirlwind month of political news, which included the RNC, the announcement of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate, and, most notably, Joe Biden announcing that he was bowing out of the presidential race.

That vicious news cycle meant the attempt on Trump’s life quickly took a back seat to other news stories, like Kamala Harris’ surging momentum and the unearthing of controversial past remarks by Vance.

Trump has been notably quieter on the campaign trail in recent weeks, opting to stay at Mar-a-Lago while his running mate tailed Harris at her campaign stops in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin last week. He’s still posted regularly to Truth Social, called into Fox News, and has been apart of two livestreams in August—one with Elon Musk, and the other with the controversial streamer Adin Ross.

Yet that activity pales in comparison to Trump at this point in his campaigns in 2016 and 2020, political analysts have noted. Sources who spoke to Vanity Fair suggested that just might be because of the trauma—or because Trump is gutted he’s no longer facing Biden.

A source who spoke to the magazine claimed Trump has told people close to him that “they cheated by swapping Biden.” In social posts, Trump has suggested that Biden may crash the DNC next week and force himself back to the top of the ticket—something no Democrat or media outlet has suggested.

With Harris overwhelmingly likely to be the Democrats’ candidate in November, some in Trump’s circle, like Roger Stone, have reportedly encouraged the ex-president to attack her on policy and not by calling her “Laffin Kamala” and “Kamabla.”

“I do think it’s counterproductive to call her stupid,” Stone told Vanity Fair.

To push back against the advice from all over, the magazine reported that Trump has told advisers: “I know what I’m doing.”

Sure he does…

When Roger Stone says you shouldn’t be calling someone stupid…

You have a place in the next Trump administration

These leaked Project 2025 training videos aren't helping conservatives beat the "weird" allegations pic.twitter.com/7p1HZhZ36R

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) August 15, 2024

Trump is playing ignorant about Project 2025, but this is the same guy who didn’t know anything about Stormy Daniels pic.twitter.com/fRVGsJw2ZM

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) August 15, 2024

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

Countdown to meltdown

The felonious Republican presidential candidate with the overlong tie and the Cheez Whiz comb over was in Asheville, North Carolina on Wednesday. * His campaign team called it an economic address. The venue was too undersized for his vanity to label it a rally. (The press might report the crowd size.)

Washington Post:

The 75-minute speech featured a litany of broad policy ideas and even grander promises to end inflation , bolster already record-level U.S. energy production and raise Americans’ standard of living. But those pronouncements were often lost in the former president’s typically freewheeling, grievance-laden style that has made it difficult for him to answer the enthusiasm of [Kamala} Harris’ nascent campaign.

Trump aired his frustration over Democrats swapping the vice president in place of Biden at the top of their presidential ticket. He repeatedly denigrated San Francisco, where Harris was once the district attorney, as “unlivable” and went after his rival in deeply personal terms, questioning her intelligence, saying she has “the laugh of a crazy person” and musing that Democrats were being “politically correct” in trying to elevate the first Black woman and person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president.

“You know why she hasn’t done an interview? She’s not smart. She’s not intelligent. And we’ve gone through enough of that with this guy, Crooked Joe,” Trump said, using the nickname he often uses for Biden.

Donald Trump hit a few of his prepared points before reverting to winging it with “gestures and hyperbole.” He dislikes policy, is uncomfortable speaking about it, and reverts to personal attacks. That’s Trump’s happy place.

CNN’s Stephen Collinson observes that after a couple of floundering weeks, Trump may be settling on a line of attack against Harris. Of course, it’s personal:

The new approach, if Trump ever musters the discipline to implement it in a concentrated way, is deeply personal and designed to destroy the idea that Harris, just the second woman to head a major party presidential ticket, is competent to serve. It involves blaming her for the scourge of inflation and high grocery prices that haunted Biden’s administration, under the new title of “Kamalanomics.”

With Harris expected to lay out her own economic plan on Friday, Trump’s team also wants to frustrate any effort by the vice president to bill her candidacy as a fresh start for economic policy. Trump also stepped up efforts to paint Harris as an extreme liberal – a strategy that has sometimes worked for Republican presidential campaigns in the past – at a time when conservative media is making comparisons between her and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Trump is also portraying Harris as a flip flopper who backed away from past positions on energy and health care but who would return to what he says is her radical past if elected. It’s an attempt to shatter public trust in the new Democratic nominee and builds on his previous questioning of her identifying as a Black woman, as well as a South Asian American. In the words of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, Harris is a “chameleon” who changes her politics and racial identify to suit her quest for power.

Except Trump’s act has become something out of an old SNL sketch with Mike Meyers as Dieter. His stories have become tiresome.

Plus, Democrat’s efforts to hang Project 2025 around his neck like an albatross have been successful: 70-80 percent of voters have heard of it and don’t like what they’ve heard, Amanda Marcotte reminds Salon readers:

Just based on the name, 43% of Americans oppose the program, and only 11% say they favor it, with the rest saying they don’t know enough to decide. When respondents are asked about specific policy items in Project 2025, disapproval soars even higher….

The Project 2025 training videos leaked over the weekend won’t help.

Trump’s persistent denigration of the United States is a turn-off. He’s got only fear-mongering and racial slurs.

MSNBC contributor, Mike Barnicle, tells “Morning Joe” this morning, “The campaign is yesterday versus tomorrow. I mean, we just saw yesterday. We saw a man standing there on the stage saying we are literally a third world country. I don’t know anyone who believes we are literally a third world country.”

His campaign managers have lost control of him, Barnicle added, and when Trump stands on a debate stage with Kamala Harris, a smart, experienced prosecutor, he could lose control.

“And I think what’s going to happen is when that debate occurs, he’s in the ring with the vice president of the United States, a woman, a very sophisticated, very intelligent woman, and she hammers him like a prosecutor and doesn’t let him off the hook, he will go — I can’t say it — but something will snap in him and that will be it.”

One can hope. But don’t count on it. Get out there and volunteer for your local candidates. Direct voter contact is effective for boosting turnout. A friend registering voters at a concert last weekend called to report a 2008 vibe in the air. Another in a red state reported this week that her dental hygienist said that while the office was “Trump Country,” she’d changed after the fall of Roe.

“I have a daughter, for God’s sake.”

* No, I did not attend. I had a meeting a few block away with the campaign manager for a statewide, down-ballot race.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.