White supremacist, Hitler fan, and far-right political pundit Nick Fuentes shockingly revoked his support from Donald Trump’s campaign early Friday, announcing on social media that he and his allies believed that the presidential bid is headed for a “catastrophic loss.”
“Tonight I declared a new Groyper War against the Trump campaign,” Fuentes wrote on X (formerly Twitter) shortly after midnight, referring to a group of far-right activists known as groypers.
Fuentes explained that he and his far-right squad of online trolls “support Trump” but that they view his 2024 campaign as being “hijacked” by lobbyists, consultants, and donors that had aided Trump’s 2016 Republican opponents. All in all, Fuentes believed they were “blowing it.”
“Without serious changes we are headed for a catastrophic loss,” Fuentes wrote.
“This is NOT a purity spiral, this is about living up to the AMERICA FIRST credo put forth by Trump in 2016 which will ensure VICTORY in 2024,” Fuentes continued. “On Monday I will present a detailed statement of the facts, a mission statement, and a plan of action on my Rumble channel. STAY TUNED.”
They are going after Trump’s campaign managers LaCivita and Wiles demanding Trump fire them. When the base speaks …
Jesse Watters, the unapologetically unfunny “funny guy” on Fox News, is at it again with weird commentary concerning Kamala Harris’ pick for vice president, Tim Walz.
Watters trained his well-known obsession with masculinity onto the Minnesota governor following Tuesday’s rally in Philadelphia rolling out the Dems’ new Harris-Walz ticket.
“The ‘Great Walz of China’ has a lot of red flags, but one is glaring. His body language,” Watters intoned.
“Here’s twitchy Tim on stage, waving profusely in a very unsettling matter, very unsettling. Men should not move this way. It’s not the way we move,” Watters said of all self-loathing men like himself (who’ve had exactly one job since they graduated from college: working at Fox News).
“And the handshake, probably the most telling. This is Walz and his wife shaking hands like business associates, followed by a weird hug,” Watters continued with more video “evidence” in search of an accusation.
With Walz’s supposed lack of testosterone teed up, Watters swooped in with the ultimate knock on the former Army sergeant-major’s unmasculinity: He’s gay for the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff.
“Now, let’s compare that to Walz’s interaction with Kamala’s husband Doug,” leered Watters. “Interesting.”
“What’s going on here? And the hug is not the way you hug your wife. You hug your wife from the body. You don’t hug like this. Different than he hugged Doug.”
Watters’ claim that Walz might be gay follows the former Bill O’Reilly intern’s assertion that men who vote for women are “transitioning.”
After calling the “White Dudes for Harris” Zoom fundraiser last week a “struggle session” for “pale, hairy, flabby California artists,” Watters invoked the longtime Republican canard that Democrats are “weak.”
“I don’t see why any man would vote Democrat. It’s not the party of virtue, security, it’s not the party of strength. It’s definitely not the party of family. And to be a man and then vote for a woman just because she’s a woman is either childish, that person has mommy issues, or they’re just trying to be accepted by other women,” Watters blurted to his self-loathing female co-hosts on The Five.
“And I heard the scientists say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman,” he added.
The sad stand-up attempt earned eyerolls all around.
Even Trump stan and MAGA whack-job “Judge” Jeanine Pirro pushed back.
“I want to say one thing. The men who voted for me didn’t turn into women. Okay?”
The wannabe Man Show host has also accused President Joe Biden of not being masculine enough for his job, targeting his love of ice cream.
“A grown man – especially the president – should not be licking ice cream in public,” he added.
Like eating soup, Watters lectured on his show, “I don’t think it’s manly.”
But this fellow, who wears more make-up than his Ru Paul, and spends more time on his hair than Dolly Parton, is the picture of masculinity. What kind of body language is this?
A friend registered voters with HeadCount Thursday night at a Cake concert. He called yesterday to report he’d not seen this mood among volunteers and concertgoers since 2008. He had the names of a couple of eager, new volunteers to pass along. One woman, especially, could be a star.
Anand Giridharadas comments this morning on the phenomenon. With the joy-filled Harris-Walz campaign taking off like a rocket and the Trump campaign sinking like the Titanic, there are elements of both hope and relief going unnoticed.
Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota embodies the dads and uncles who might have gone the way of loved ones lost to Fox News and right-wing propaganda but did not. In Walz, we see “an older white guy who is just happy and can’t wait for the future.” Mourning in America has turned into morning in America (emphasis mine):
It’s going to make people feel rage at what was stolen from them. And it’s going to show them, not tell them but show, what might yet be possible. There are years that could still be reclaimed.
Yes, the Trump tax cuts were bad. The immigration policy a catastrophe. The Covid policy a calamity. But this — this is unfathomable in scale. Millions of our people were turned into grist for the Murdoch mill, and broken, and from the shards of them a movement was made.
It’s one of these phenomena that underlie politics but isn’t often discussed when discussing politics. But trust me: people feel as strongly about this as about monetary policy or tax cuts. Their kinfolk were stolen by billionaires. Their minds, their hearts, their loving selves.
Dads who lovingly braided their daughters’ hair and practiced spelling bee words with them now malign their freedoms and the people they love and the families they have made. They were stolen. People want their families back. And this is going to become a theme of this campaign.
“Harris is winning the all-important battle — of vibes,” reads the headline on Fareed Zakaria Washington Post column this morning, placing EQ ahead of IQ:
This is a turning of the tables. Donald Trump and the Republicans have tended to be masters of the politics of emotion, emphasizing strength and evoking fear. But for now, Harris’s hopefulness — the sense of “joy” that Walz speaks of on the campaign trail — appears to be dominating.
From there, Zakaria gives a standard IQ analysis of the state of play.
But Giridharadas is onto something, something my friend saw on the ground. It is premature — and overstating things — but it almost feels as if Gollum and the One Ring have tumbled into the fires of Mt. Doom. An earthquake is shaking the foundations of the Dark Tower.
‘Stand, Men of the West! Stand and wait! This is the hour of doom.””
We are not there yet. The rotund opera star hasn’t sung and there is work ahead. But it’s time for the choir to sing, Walz told the Phoenix rally Friday night.
No message, no matter how well crafted and tested, Anat Shenker-Osorio advises, is any good if the choir (that’s you) won’t sing it. “This is my love language,” she tweeted when the video below posted. Get to it.
Walz: I know I am preaching to the choir. A damn big and beautiful choir. But practice is over, people, the choir needs to sing. pic.twitter.com/tkOpxhCcdb
“We are neighbors. We are family. We are each other’s people. Damn the thieves. We must depose them and find each other again. And now we glimpse how,” Giridharadas concludes.
FKA Twitter exploded on Friday after another of those inexplicable New York Times headlines for which the paper has become known of late. The digital din was such that editors have since altered it.
Imagine Tocqueville-style visitor to US of 2024 who travels around the country and concludes, “This is a nation consumed by war.”
—In comparison w times that *was* true: eg 1968 (and 1964-1975), 2001-2005 (and onward), Nov 1962, Feb 1991 (Gulf War), etc. Not to mention 1940s, early 1950s, etc.
—In comparison to what dominates airwaves + news cycles + campaign speeches: Immigration, inflation, abortion, voting and justice systems, “culture wars” + DEI, future of both parties, climate, taxes, etc.
This era’s wars are of profound importance. But “nation consumed”? (As so often the case, hed oversells the actual story. But headlines are all that most people ever see.)
Ukraine is a nation consumed by war; Russia as well to a very real extent. Gaza is consumed by war; Israel to a real extent is consumed by war.
The New York Times, once a newspaper of record, is consumed by journalistic malpractice and malfeasance.
The article by Michael Crowley quotes Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace saying, “although the United States is not directly involved in the wars in Ukraine or Gaza, the risks of large-scale conflict have become higher.”
The rest of the article suggests that war has defined the Biden presidency and that a “wartime mood” pervades Washington. That’s not a sense one gets from watching any coverage. Is the world more unstable? Surely. Are Americans consumed by it? Their attention is more fixed upon the economy, health care, and immigration. And on the fate of democracy.
Fear is the fuel upon which GOP election-year hopes depends. The joy erupting among Democrats over the Harris-Walz campaign is loudly dousing it. Perhaps the Times with its “consumed by war” framing felt the need to tip the playing field back in Donald Trump’s direction.
But Trump considers the press the “enemy of the people.” That includes the Times. Should Trump win in November, placating him won’t save them from what comes next.
Reflecting on the Times headline, Brian Beutler tweeted:
A lot going on over there, but one subtle contributing factor is that in a professional culture where critical thinking is discouraged (don’t form opinions on issues, etc) analytical muscles atrophy, and these reported takes come out braindead.
One X user speculated that Rupert Murdoch was preparing to buy the newspaper of record.
Babs’ snowballs had their first checkup! Hogle Zoo’s teams, joined by MedVet doctors, gave vaccinations & eye exams to the cubs. One cub weighs 4.6 lbs, the other 4.2 lbs. They are in great health, and guests can expect to visit them this fall. Read more: https://t.co/C5BfSmAf5kpic.twitter.com/oreD58gLo3
Resident snow leopard cubs at Utah’s Hogle Zoo had their first 8-week veterinary checkup on July 31, 2024.
Hogle Zoo’s animal care and veterinary teams were joined by an ophthalmologist from MedVet to conduct the wellness exam. This 8-week checkup is a routine practice that allows our teams to evaluate the two cubs’ overall health.
Dr. Lauren Smith, DVM, Dipl. ACZM, one of the zoo’s veterinarians, conducted a comprehensive health examination on the cubs, which included assessing their body conditions and administering necessary vaccinations. Dr. Jaycie Riesberg, an ophthalmologist from MedVet, performed detailed eye exams, and both cubs’ eyes looked great. Eye exams are a unique practice to snow leopards, who are especially prone to ocular issues. The animal care staff also weighed the cubs, with one weighing 4.6 lbs and the other 4.2 lbs.
Since their birth in early June, the two cubs have stayed close to their mom without keeper intervention. This time behind-the-scenes was especially helpful for Babs, a very protective first-time mom, as it provided ample bonding time for the new family. Keepers also had time to slowly build Babs’ existing trust and training so she would feel comfortable while her cubs were away during their exams.
The 8-week checkup, standard timing to receive their first set of vaccinations, was the first time our animal care and veterinary teams have been hands-on with the cubs.
After the checkup, the cubs were given a “straw bath,” covered in substrate with scents familiar to their mom to help them reunite calmly and comfortably. Both cubs did very well and are in great health!
They’ll receive two more rounds of vaccinations before guests can expect to see them this fall. During this time behind-the-scenes, keepers are building trusting relationships with the cubs and beginning early training to help them participate in their future care. The animal care team is also assessing and modifying the cubs’ future outdoor habitats to ensure they can safely explore and navigate the space.
Thanks to our amazing teams and partners for their commitment to care, and congratulations to the amazing first-time mom Babs on a clean bill of health for both her cubs.
#OnThisDay Aug. 9, 1974 President Nixon delivers farewell address to staffers: "Always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember others may hate you but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself." pic.twitter.com/p6pQz1AQ6w
He was a corrupt monster. But at least he wasn’t an imbecile and had the good grace to see the writing on the wall. Of course, if he’d had Fox News and a Supreme Court like this one I have little doubt that he never would have resigned. He was smart enough to know after that Supreme Court ruling on the tapes and the collapse of GOP support he had no choice. That wouldn’t have happened today.
It hasn’t happened today and Trump is a thousand times more corrupt than Nixon and ten times as monstrous. The only thing saving us is his ignorance and at this point that doesn’t even matter.
Trump once again ranted and raved about Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan being the worst decision a president has ever made in his press conference yesterday. He is, as always, completely full of it.
Lost amidst Trump’s rambling incoherence about Afghanistan today is the fact that he negotiated the withdrawal of U.S. forces with the Taliban, not Biden.
Here are the facts about how Biden was handed a giant mess from Trump in Afghanistan.
Trump had boxed Biden in. If Biden reneged on that agreement, Taliban attacks on American servicemembers would have restarted, forcing us to send thousands more troops back into the conflict. Very few Americans would have supported this endless commitment.
The reality is that U.S. military intervention was never going to be successful in standing up an American-style democracy and an American-style military in Afghanistan. 20 years and more than $2 trillion dollars trying to achieve it was enough.
Then as our troop departure – negotiated by Trump – drew closer, the Afghan government and military collapsed without warning. It is not plausible to hold Biden responsible for that. That was a decision made by panicked Afghan leaders.
That collapse would have happened whether Trump or Biden was President. Frankly, Biden performed admirably under the circumstances, organizing the largest post war non-combatent evacuation in our nation’s history.
Trump set in motion the withdrawal in a way that Biden could not reverse. It’s just not true Trump would have managed the withdrawal better. Undoubtedly he would have handled it like he handled every other crisis – disastrously
Murphy is too polite to note that the media (I’m looking at you, Tapper) played a huge part in pushing Trump’s disinformation with their hand wringing over the withdrawal as if both Trump and Biden had never promised to do it (Biden being the only one to actually fulfill it) and suddenly deciding that it was the wrong thing to do. Their breathless reporting was journalistic malpractice and it gave Trump the ability to use it as a cudgel against Biden when it was his incompetence that caused it. Unforgivable.
In fairness, LaCivita was cutely suggesting that the Democrats were the ones who were going to contest the election of Trump rather than the other way around. But I think we know the reality of that statement, don’t we? Joe Biden certainly does:
Speaking to CBS News’s Robert Costa this week, President Joe Bidenoffered a pessimistic assessment of the aftermath of this year’s presidential election. “If [Donald] Trump loses, I’m not confident at all” that there would be a peaceful transfer of power, Biden said. “He means what he says. We don’t take him seriously. He means it, all the stuff about, ‘If we lose, there’ll be a bloodbath, it’ll have to be a stolen election.’”
The “bloodbath” comment to which Biden refers was offered at a Trump rally this year and, in context, appeared to refer to theoretical economic damage from Trump not returning to the White House. But the latter part of Biden’s comment, about how Trump is likely to frame any loss as a function of illegality, is unquestionably on the mark. It’s what he did in 2020, as you’re no doubt aware, and two-thirds of Republicans still tell pollsters that they think Biden’s win that year was somehow illegitimate. More than a third of Republicans say there’s solid evidence Biden didn’t win, which — despite four years of feverish looking — there isn’t.
It’s not clear that there’s any way to ensure that Trump’s supporters accept a loss this time around, either.
[…]
Pew Research Center polling conducted last month found that fewer than half of Republicans believed that the election would be “conducted fairly and accurately.” Recent YouGov polling, conducted for the Economist, determined that 8 in 10 Trump supporters think that he will defeat Harris in the election. Should Harris prevail, is it more likely that those Trump supporters will accept the defeat or that they will assume the election wasn’t fair and accurate?
A separate poll conducted by YouGov for the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University determined that about 30 percent of Republicans who felt the 2020 election was stolen anticipate significant political violence after the election. That poll also found that a lot of Americans are concerned about misinformation — none more than those who reject the 2020 results.
“Republicans who believe Trump won in 2020 are more concerned about misinformation than any other group surveyed,” Johns Hopkins’s Hannah Robbins notes, “and believe ‘liberal media’ are responsible.”
Now you’ve got honest election officials who stood up for the truth last time being drummed out of their jobs either through threats and intimidation or primary elections. And in places around the country, Georgia notably just this week, we see changes to the laws which will allow Trump cronies and GOP henchmen to overturn a legitimate election of Harris with bogus charges of voter fraud and then certify Trump as the rightful winner even though he lost.
The odds are low that Trump would be able to seize power in the event of such a loss. But, as we saw in January 2021, that’s not the only possible negative consequence of his supporters thinking without evidence that the election was stolen.
I’m not sure the odds are as low as he suggests. We don’t know what the courts would do in the event of a state certification crisis. After all, the Supremes intervened in 2000 on behalf of Bush. Three of the justices were appointed by Trump and three of them worked for Bush in that earlier case. Do we really believe that they won’t do it again after what we’ve seen recently?
First things first, of course. Win the election. But nobody should be sanguine that the post election period won’t be complete chaos with an unpredictable outcome. This is what Trump has wrought.
Donald Trump is in a bad way. His campaign has completely lost its bearings with the withdrawal of Joe Biden and the ecstatic reception of the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket among the Democratic faithful. He is so upset about losing Biden as his opponent that he’s even taken to posting freaky fan-fic on his Truth Social Platform, hopefully suggesting that Biden is going to storm the convention and take back the nomination:
Some of that is a classic “I know you are but what am I” Trump set-up to rationalize a loss in November. He’s going to say the Democrats staged a coup and usurped the Constitution by replacing Joe Biden on the ballot. It’s laughably absurd but it will soothe him to say it and give his followers something to hang on to.
But it’s also obvious that he just can’t wrap his mind around the fact that he has to run against Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. It’s so confusing to him that he can’t even leave Mar-a-lago anymore. While the Democratic nominees are barnstorming the country with Trump’s VP choice JD Vance trailing behind them with pathetic stunts, Trump himself is doing just one rally this week — in an irrelevant deep red state that he will certainly win.
Philip Bump of the Washington Post has the numbers showing how much he has slowed down:
Trump is holding far fewer rallies than he did in 2016 and has held far fewer public appearances than he did in 2020, the two previous times he sought the presidency.
A review of Trump’s activities in July and August of those previous years shows the difference. From July 1 to Aug. 10, 2016, Trump held 22 rallies, including six days on which he held multiple rallies. Over the rest of August, he added 15 more rallies. This year, he’s held seven rallies with another scheduled for Friday in Montana.
One might guess that he is still spooked from the assassination attempt and fears being back out there but he wasn’t campaigning much even before that. He just doesn’t seem to think he needs to do it because, as he tells his people, he believes that the votes are already there and the main job of the campaign is “election integrity” which translates to suppressing the Democratic vote and contesting the results if he loses.
Nonetheless, he’s obviously agitated over the Harris’s massive small donor fundraising haul over the past couple of weeks which he knows very well is indicative of tremendous enthusiasm for their ticket. (He’s drained his own small donors dry over the past eight years.) And polls showing her taking the lead are driving him to distraction.
According to his former communications director, Stephanie Grisham he’s decided to take matters into his own hands:
Re: Trump’s self-announced press conference today at 2 pm: He’s panicking. I’ve seen this play many times. He thinks his team is failing him & no one can speak better/“save” his campaign/defend him but him. He hates the coverage Harris is getting & thinks only he can fix it.
The questions at the presser couldn’t be heard because of the poor production at Mar-a-lago, but from what we could tell the reporters were extremely polite and demanded no follow-ups which was nice for him. Some of the questions sounded like they might have even been asked by members of his own staff.
For instance, when someone threw him a red meat question about whether former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown dating Harris back in the 1990s had helped her career, Trump told a wild tale about almost dying in a helicopter with him and that Brown had told him “terrible things” about Harris and was “not a fan.” (This is not the first time Trump has made these crude suggestions about her.)
Willie Brown told the New York Times he’s never been in a helicopter with Trump and that he never disparaged Harris to him. It seems that Trump had mistaken Willie Brown with former California Gov. Jerry Brown who did take a helicopter flight with him and Gov. Gavin Newsom to inspect fire damage a few years back. They didn’t speak of Kamala Harris and the helicopter was never in any danger but Newsom recalls Trump incessantly wondering if it might crash.
Oddly, no members of the media are angrily demanding to see Trump’s medical records despite the fact that he appears to be having major memory problems and possibly even delusions.
After declaring that reproductive rights are no longer an issue because he’d “sent it back to the states” which he insists was the desire of liberals and conservatives for 50 years (total nonsense) there was this straightforward question about whether Trump planned to have the FDA ban mifepristone. He answered with a bizarre mish-mash of words about “supplementing” with something “open and humane” and people voting on it that made no sense whatsoever.
Recall that he told Time Magazine he has “pretty strong views” about mifepristone and would be making an announcement “probably over the next week.” That was on April 30th. There’s been no announcement. This latest gibberish is all we have to go on.
And then there were the crowds. He simply could not stop talking about the size of his crowds, complaining that the press was undercounting them even declaring that his January 6th crowd was bigger than Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. Over and over again he kept bringing it up apropos of nothing as if on a loop. It is a long-standing obsession of his that seems to be getting worse.
He did make some news by saying that he had agreed to debate Harris on ABC from which he had earlier backed out. He also announced a debate on NBC and on Fox but he got the dates all mixed up and according to the Harris campaign they’ve only agreed to the original debate on ABC on September 10th anyway. Perhaps others will happen as well but despite Trump’s apparent desperation to have them, nothing has been set.
All in all, it was another Trump trainwreck, perhaps one of his worst but certainly not unprecedented. However, this time, the opposition is taking no prisoners. The Harris campaign put out a very sharp (and hilarious) response:
He was dour and angry and frankly is starting to look a whole lot older, just in the past few months. He’s not enjoying himself and it shows and compared to the excited crowds greeting Harris and Walz this week this sad, pathetic appearance seemed almost funereal. Donald Trump isn’t fun anymore.
I think he’s considering for the first time that he might lose again and he is not psychologically equipped to deal with that reality. Sure, he’ll fight it and tell his supporters that it was stolen and perhaps even incite more violence. But deep down he knows he might actually lose just as he knows deep down that he lost in 2020. There’s a look of panic in his eyes right now. If he fails this time he might just break apart at the seams.
Chris Hayes had a good take on it last night:
“We are in a different world, one where Donald Trump is no longer the clear favorite,” says Chris Hayes. “That is why we have seen him swing wildly from overconfident to spiraling, whining, and very obviously miserable.” pic.twitter.com/Q6kI7Xdxdi
— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) August 9, 2024
I don’t actually have a problem with showing Trump. People need to be reminded what a decrepit loon he is. I do have a problem with the stupid questions, his unwillingness /inability to answer questions and the media’s docile acceptance of all that. The failure to follow up his gibberish was egregious.
Moreover, the dogging of Harris for an interview or press conference, just as they dogged Clinton and Biden while holding up that Trump garbage as some kind of value to the citizens is outrageous. They are pretty much threatening her with bad press like the horrific press they gave Joe Biden for months:
Trump is holding a presser today, we interviewed him last week and Vance yesterday and Vance is taking open press questions. Time’s just about up on Harris to avoid this becoming a thing. https://t.co/eDwkyHoDW6
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