THE NEW YORK TIMES IS ALMOST CLOSE TO GETTING IT

A New York Times story about Jon Ossoff's Senate reelection campaign suggests that Ossoff's success in the polls is baffling and paradoxical:

In Georgia, Ossoff Courts Broad Appeal With an Anti-Trump Script

Senator Jon Ossoff, the youngest sitting senator and the only Democrat seeking re-election this year in a state President Trump won in 2024, hasn’t moderated his message in his critical race.

The story's author, Robert Jimison, clearly regards Ossoff's popularity as a head-scratcher:

Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia entered this election cycle with every reason to tack to the political middle.

He is the only Senate Democrat seeking re-election this year in a state President Trump carried in 2024, making him one of the most vulnerable incumbents in his party and an obvious Republican target from the start.

But Mr. Ossoff hasn’t moderated his votes or his message to appeal to a broader swath of voters, as Democrats in competitive statewide races often do in the conservative-leaning South. Instead, he has dived into his party’s efforts to thwart the president’s agenda in Congress, and sharpened his attacks on Mr. Trump and Republicans on the campaign trail.

Are you sure you want to do this, Jon? Jimison appears to be saying.

The approach risks alienating some members of the coalition whose backing he needs to win re-election in Georgia, including independents and conservative-leaning voters.

Or ... maybe Ossoff has unearthed a secret about the Georgia electorate known only to a few. Jimison tells us that Ossoff appears to be

taking advantage of ... Mr. Trump’s sagging approval ratings — a Fox News poll in June found him with net-negative ratings in Georgia, with 56 percent holding an unfavorable view of him....

Trump's favorability in that Fox poll is 42%. So he's at -14 in the state. And among the independents Jamison says Ossoff "needs to win re-election," the Fox poll says that Trump's favorable rating is a mere 26%. Trump's unfavorable rating among Georgia independents is a whopping 70%, including 51% who say their view of Trump is "strongly unfavorable."

So I have this crazy, wacky theory, Robert. I think being opposed to Donald Trump is centrist in Georgia. I think the median Georgian hates the tariffs, the high prices, the war, the corruption, the measles, the diarrhea lettuce, and the obsession with the ballroom. In other words, I don't think Ossoff's decision to campaign as a partisan Democrat is counterintuitive. I think Democratic ideas are what's normal, and Republicans are the out-of-step weirdos.

Jimison notes that Ossoff's opponent, Mike Rogers, is campaigning as a Republican partisan, and doesn't seem to regard that as weird or counterintuitive.

Mr. Collins, the 59-year-old son of former Representative Mac Collins of Georgia, has focused heavily on the issues that animate the Republican base — illegal immigration, transgender athletes, crime and grievances surrounding the 2020 election....

Mr. Collins is working to draw a stark contrast with Mr. Ossoff on issues including law enforcement and border security in a state that remains conservative.

Donald Trump is underwater by double digits, Ossoff has a solid lead in multiple polls, Georgia's other senator is also a Democrat, and a Democrat leads the governor's race, so how can Jimison call Georgia "a state that remains conservative"? It's clearly a middle-of-the-road state. (Jimison, who's Black, may be arguing that white Georgians are conservatives and the state's large Black population is at least culturally conservative. But that doesn't add up to a conservative state.)

Our entire political culture, including most Democrats and most putatively liberal media outlets such as The New York Times, believes that Republicans are normative and Democrats are outlier freaks suitable only for decadent big cities and college towns. Meanwhile, Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last nine presidential elections, and in order to maintain the fiction that Republicans are the normal ones, we grade GOP election performance on a curve, treating Trump's victory in 2024 as a 1932-size landslide even though he won the popular vote by a mere one and a half points, against a replacement candidate handicapped by sexism, racism, and a global impulse to toss out all incumbent parties.

And now America hates Donald Trump, and it might hate the entire GOP if Democrats attacked the party as ferociously as Republicans attack Democrats. In any case, Jon Ossoff knows that Republicanism isn't normative in 2026. Robert Jimison and the Times still seem incapable of grasping this reality.

NEW FRONTS IN REPUBLICAN GRIEVANCE POLITICS

Toluse Olorunnipa of The Atlantic reports on the GOP's latest grievance: naturalized citizens are allowed to hold office.

In recent months, an idea once confined to the fringes has gained mainstream traction across the country. Republican legislators in several states have introduced proposals that would restrict naturalized citizens and dual citizens from running for a range of elected positions, including sheriff and governor. In Congress, at least five Republicans have sponsored various proposals to bar naturalized or dual citizens from serving in roles including federal judgeships, Cabinet posts, and ambassadorships, and in Congress itself. Florida lawmakers this year enacted a law requiring candidates for several state and federal offices to disclose whether they hold another citizenship in addition to being a citizen of the United States.

Olorunippa tells us, "The movement has been fueled in part by the rise of a new class of foreign-born politicians—most prominently New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani." He doesn't mention Ilhan Omar, a naturalized citizen whom Republicans despise, or, for that matter, Abdul El-Sayed and Rashida Tlaib (both of whom were actually born in Michigan, though most Republicans don't know that). If you pay attention to the right, you know it's hard to tell where the belief that even naturalized immigrants are a menace ends and the belief that Muslims are a menace begins.

The campaign to pass these laws is in its early stages:

When Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen first floated the idea of barring naturalized citizens from serving in elected office, he cited Mamdani’s mayoral run as one impetus. “We want to make sure that no potential foreign influence or foreign meddling could impact our state’s highest elected leaders,” he told AL.com last year....

State lawmakers in Alabama introduced legislation earlier this year that would require natural-born citizenship of those seeking to run for governor, legislator, sheriff, or a handful of other elected positions. Republican legislators introduced similar bills in Kentucky and Tennessee this year. Although the proposals—which face significant constitutional questions—have not yet passed, the effort is nevertheless building momentum. When the law in Florida requiring disclosure for dual citizens takes effect next year, it will mark the first time such a proposal has become state law.

The mood on the right is punitive:

Last week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, said that he would bar public schools in his state from hiring H-1B-visa holders. He described the first-of-its-kind proposal as a way to reduce “foreign influence” and “indoctrination in the classroom.”

Even if few of these proposals become law in the immediate future, this fear of contagion will become an effective way for the GOP to maintain party solidarity despite the current Republican president's astonishingly awful mismanagement the country. Just as Republicans relied on the Tea Party to rebrand the GOP after the disastrous George W. Bush presidency, and just as the party used crusades against transgender youth and diversity initiatives to rebrand starting around the time of Trump's 2020 defeat, a message of "Vote GOP and Muslims won't gain political power" could sustain the party until the next charismatic leader comes along.

This isn't the only post-Trump assault on citizenship we should expect. Here's Breitbart's John Nolte reporting on a research paper claiming to find a"connection between trans beliefs and violence."

A just-released study from Rutgers University, the Network Contagion Research Institute, and the Manhattan Institute has found something not at all surprising...

“These findings suggest that gender ideology is associated with LWA [left-wing authoritarianism] and willingness to justify political violence.”

"Gender ideology" is a right-wing jargon term meaning "belief that trans people are human beings deserving respect and basic civil rights."

Nolte quotes the study:

... broader research on perceived victimhood, moralization, and political violence suggests that identities organized around grievance, perceived victimization, and injustice, when paired with authoritarian or punitive dispositions, can predict support for anti-democratic or violent political action... Taken together, these literatures suggest a common mechanism: ideological content that names an oppressor class, certifies ongoing victimization, and locates remedy in coercive institutional or social action which may supply authoritarian psychology with morally justified targets.

In other words, leftism + trans = all True Patriots being at risk of being murdered in their beds by baristas with blue hair.

It's widely believed on the right that trans people are disproportionately responsible for acts of left-wing violence. This is an attempt to demonstrate this premise using science, or at least pseudoscience. Nolte argues that trans people are dangerous, but it's not really their fault:

You take a group of people who are already mentally fragile, you tell them that whoever does not affirm their delusion is committing a genocide, and then turn them loose into a world that they cannot control.

This is not only a deliberate recipe cooked up by the left and their media allies to activate violent Manchurian Candidates who will always target the people the left and media hate (anyone to the right of Joseph Stalin), but it’s an act of cruelty against transsexuals.

He thinks he's being a nice guy here, while accusing cis lefties, or maybe Democrats, or terrorism via brainwashing. Most on the right just go straight to trans people are sick and twisted, so of course they kill people.

I think it's only a matter of time before some states restrict trans people's right to hold certain jobs, as an intermediate step before depriving them of the legal right to vote, or to be trans at all. And if they never get this far, they can at least brand the GOP as the party that wants to do this. If you can tap into rage this way, why would you even need a charismatic leader?

TRAVELING AGAIN

See you on Friday.

I DON'T THINK TRUMP KNOWS WHETHER HE INTENDS TO STAY IN THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HIS TERM ENDS

At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Paul Campos writes:

It remains possible that Trump and the GOP will lose a wave election 75 days from now, and he and his minions won’t have the necessary coherence and organizational discipline to seriously contest that, and he will decide to give up on his current plans to stay in office after 1/20/2029, and King Leer will crawl unburdened towards death. I admit this is possible: I think it’s unlikely.

In short, I think we’re in a disjunctive, paradigm-shifting political and cultural situation, and that Trump does not intend to leave office, or to recognize the results of elections he loses, and that instead he and his inner circle intend to overthrow the current political system with some sort of authoritarian “managed democracy,” that retains the trappings of the old system superficially, but replaces it with a functional one-party state. I don’t know, of course, whether they can manage to succeed in this ambition, but I do believe it is their actual plan, on the basis of their words and deeds, both since 1/20/2025, and most particularly since 1/6/2021....

I don't think we should be talking about "[Trump] and his inner circle" as if they're having the same thoughts about the future. I believe that J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and possibly Pete Hegseth and some other Trump insiders are expecting a normal election cycle in 2028, and their plan is to win the presidency, not to overthrow our constitutional system. Whether any of them intend to overthrow or undermine that system after winning is a different question, of course. But on the subject of 2028, I don't think they want Trump to lead the government for the rest of his life. They want to take over.

You'll argue that other insiders will be afraid of the consequences of elections, and will want the Trump administration to continue forever. I think they know that a Democratic victory probably won't lead to the "Nuremberg trials" so many ordinary liberals and progressives dream of -- Democrats are just too feckless -- and they also know that a Republican really could win an election in 2028 despite the extreme unpopularity of Trump. They assume that electing a Republican successor will ensure their safety from prosecution for at least four years, and permanently quash any momentum an accountability movement might have.

I believe the possible Trump successors might very well move us in the direction of "managed democracy," simply because they don't believe in genuine democracy as long as Democrats can sometimes win elections. They'll do it because they think Republicans should rule forever, not primarily to extend the rule of Trumpism specifically.

I don't believe Trump thinks in those structural terms. He cares only about himself and his family, and he cares about his family only to the extent that he sees the money his family makes as his money.

I believe this, but I also believe Trump might refuse to leave office on January 20, 2029. I don't think he has a plan yet. I think he's keeping his options open.

Trump isn't very good at planning. On some level, I think he knows this. Look at how he's approaching the 2026 midterms: he's trying to subvert them in advance, but in ways that probably won't be effective. Last week we learned that the Trump Justice Department plans to send 1,000 monitors to the polls in the fall. Do you know how many precincts there are in America?

The 2020 survey by the United States Election Assistance Commission found a total of 176,933 precincts or precinct equivalents in the United States, of which 175,441 were in the 50 states plus the District of Columbia and 1,492 were in overseas U.S. territories.

A thousand troops is a wholly inadequate number if you're really planning to subvert democracy. Also:

For Michigan’s primary this month, the Justice Department sent monitors to four Democratic-leaning cities — Detroit, Hamtramck, Lansing and East Lansing. Democrats openly worried that the monitors would interfere with the primary, but state officials said they behaved professionally and did not cause problems.

This is half-assed authoritarianism.

Trump is also trying to prevent the Postal Service from processing mail ballots in states that won't provide the administration with lists of eligible voters, but the administration has lost 21 straight court battles in its effort to get those lists. A capable authoritarian would send armed troops or FBI agents into state capitals to seize that information at gunpoint. Trump hasn't done that.

I have a theory about how authoritarian Trump really is. I think he actually believes in the system, and believes he isn't operating in defiance of the system, his evidence being: Well, the system didn't stop me, so I guess I can do that thing I just did. He's used to the way the law works in the business world: you can cheat someone and get away with it if you can afford better lawyers than the people you're cheating, you can file endless appeals to delay the outcome in a case you're likely to lose, you can wheedle and finagle and wear the system down. Sometimes you lose, but you can fight to the bitter end, blow deadlines when you're required to comply with a court order, and then, finally, comply after you've been given a warning.

When I say that Trump is the worst president we've ever had but not the worst president we will ever have, this is what I mean. In his own way, Trump respects the system. A future authoritarian won't -- J.D. Vance, for instance. See this 2025 Politico story by Ian Ward:

In several instances dating back to the start of his Senate campaign in 2022, the vice president has explicitly said that a second-term Trump should defy the courts — even the U.S. Supreme Court — if they stand in the way of him exercising executive authority in ways he deems fit.

Vance’s most comprehensive statement of this radical position came in an interview I conducted with him in January 2023 for a profile in POLITICO Magazine. During the interview, I referred to comments that he had made on a conservative podcast in 2021 suggesting that Trump, if reelected, should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, [and] every civil servant in the administrative state … and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

I asked Vance if this was still his view.

“Yup,” he responded.

I think Vance, if he were in Trump's position, would declare a massive election-fraud emergency and -- in defiance of the Constitution -- declare that any elections conducted in November will be in defiance of the law, and their outcomes won't be recognized. The courts would declare that he isn't allowed to do this and he'd defy those courts, perhaps even ordering some lower courts disbanded or defunded. Trump won't do that.

What I think he will do is dispute Democratic wins after the fact, citing nonexistent voter fraud, slow ballot counts, and the presence of a trivial number of people on voter rolls who are ineligible as evidence that the midterms were rigged. I think Trumpists in the states will try to help him do this by not certifying elections, and Republicans in Congress will challenge key Democratic wins. I think courts will reject all of this. It will be a mess, and will be horrible for democracy -- once again, the majority of Republican voters will believe they've been cheated rather than outovted.

Even if there's another January 6 -- or multiple January 6 incidents in the states -- Trump will see himself as having operated within the law. In a way, you can't blame him. He'll be able to claim he was acting as a president rather than as a Republican, so, according to the Supreme Court, he won't be subject to criminal prosecution. It won't be possible to get a two-thirds vote to convict him after an impeachment, if there is one. So, he'll think, it was all legal.

That's more or less how I think he'll approach 2028. Trump likes to troll us with "Trump 2028" merchandise, but he also seems to recognize that he can't legally run again -- "the law’s very strong on that," he has said.

I think we'll have a relatively normal 2028 election. I think Trump, fearing consequences after he leaves office but not being a very good planner, will try to tip the scales in the GOP's favor, more or less the way he's doing it now. I doubt that it will be enough to rig the election.

If the Republican nominee wins, Trump will quietly leave office -- any Republican who could win the nomination will be sufficiently pro-Trump to shield him from consequences. But if the Democrat wins, then Trump might decide that his only recourse is to declare fraud and barricade himself in the White House.

That's how I imagine it will go: Trump won't decide on open defiance until a winner is declared, and then he'll create a constitutional crisis only if he thinks he needs to. But who knows?

NATALIE HARP IS A SYMPTOM, NOT THE PROBLEM

Jamelle Bouie thinks the real Natalie Harp scandal isn't the fact that she's a conventionally attractive young blonde who appears to be an aging, doddering president's most trusted aide -- it's the information diet she feeds him.

Bouie quotes a New York Times story by Shawn McCreesh and Maggie Haberman:

As long as Ms. Harp is around, he enjoys an unvetted flow of information, some of it poisonous and counterproductive, at least as far as a number of his other advisers are concerned. She supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter (like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes) and provides him with a view from the world outside official Washington, of which he has always been mistrustful.

Bouie writes:

... the reason [the Harp story] matters is that it is further confirmation of one essential fact of the Trump White House: that the president exists in a degraded, chaotic information environment.

He rejects information that is gathered and collected for the purpose of informing him and is highly reliant, instead, on counsel from people who have no incentive to contradict him and every incentive to tell him what he wants to hear or what they want him to hear....

Harp, it appears, is a key part of that. A total devotee, she shapes his world. The result is a chief executive who is detached from the information he needs to avoid disaster, much less successfully govern the country. Accordingly, Trump has neither avoided disaster nor managed to put the country on stable footing. Instead, he is carelessly careening toward catastrophe. So far, it’s only been a matter of luck that we haven’t crashed.

But Trump has always rejected information that contradicted his upbeat viewpoint. He's always wallowed in happy talk. If Harp weren't the one telling him what he wants to hear, it would be someone else.

Remember 2019, when he fired pollsters because they told him he was on his way to losing swing states, and thus the 2020 election, to Joe Biden? That was years before Harp became a Trump aide. Trump did go on to lose that election. However, he subsequently leveraged that election loss to create a stolen election myth that is accepted as truthful, or at least possibly true, by an overwhelming majority of Republican voters. This "lost cause" myth probably won him the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and possibly the election.

No matter what happens, Trump believes that things will work out (at least for him). In a New York Times interview in May, Tucker Carlson recalled a conversation he'd had with Trump about the president's decision to go to war with Iran:

... he said to me, Everything’s going to be OK. Because I was getting overwrought. Don’t do this. The people pushing you to do this hate you. They’re your enemies. This will destroy you. This will gravely harm our country. We’ve got kids. I’m hoping for grandkids. Let’s not go there. And he said, It’s going to be all right, and he said, Do you know how I know that? And I said no, and he said, Because it always is.

In a June Truth Social message about the Iran war's critics, Trump wrote:

But don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively “chirping,” at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever. Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does!

This isn't happening because of the influence of one sinister personal assistant. This is who Trump is. He's a lifelong believer in the Power of Positive Thinking.

And to some extent it's understandable. It all has worked out for Trump, more or less. The reason is that he's operated in arenas where people like him get multiple additional opportunities when they screw up.

Our plutocracy, particularly in the post-Reagan era, allows well-off people who fail to keep going until they're not failures anymore. Even when you're a billion dollars in debt, someone will lend you money or provide you with opportunities to recoup. The system is rigged in favor of people who've attained a certain level of wealth -- it's nearly impossible for them to completely fall through the cracks, the way an ordinary person with $20,000 in medical debt might. It's also nearly impossible to beat the rich in a court of law, no matter how illegal or lawsuit-worthy their actions are.

Now Trump operates in another field where the game is rigged for people like him: Republican politics. If you're a Republican with enough voter appeal to win elections and you're a congenital liar, our political culture will keep you afloat even as you continue to lie. Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media will back up your falsehoods -- about election fraud, about the glories of your failed economic policies and failed war, about how evil your enemies are -- and the rest of the media and the opposition party, cowed by decades of Republican ref-working, will never fully challenge you. A supine GOP Congress and a Supreme Court rigged for the Republican Party will let you get away with things no other president was ever allowed to do.

At long last, Trump may have come up against troubles he can't outrun: a dug-in Iranian regime, a bond market that's tired of his economic nonsense, restive voters in a heretofore solidly red heartland.

But until now, Trump's delusional positivism has made a horrible kind of sense. Things always did work out for him. Maybe only now, at age 80, is his luck running out.

SEE THE MEDIA COVERING VANCE AS IF HE'S A NORMAL POLITICIAN FROM A NORMAL ADMINISTRATION

A few months from now, J.D. Vance will announce that he's running for president, despite the fact that he carries an albatross around his neck named Donald Trump. What will the media do when Vance announces? If this New York Times story is any indication, the media will carefully removed the albatross:

Drawing on His Rust Belt Roots, Vance Campaigns for Republicans

Vice President JD Vance traveled to his hometown, Middletown, Ohio, and spoke at a steel factory where his grandfather once worked.

This headline is written as if the second Trump presidency isn't happening, as if the Times is prepared to turn the clock back to the days when Vance was seen as a thoughtful memoirist with many important things to tell coastal liberals about Heartland America.

The story isn't much better.

In his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” JD Vance described a community in crisis.

The steel mill where his grandfather worked for nearly 40 years had been neglected and had endured layoffs in the 1980s, turning his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, into “little more than a relic of American industrial glory.”

“There is a lack of agency here,” Mr. Vance wrote. “A feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.”

On Friday, Mr. Vance returned to his roots with promises of a better future, and plenty of blame to go around.

There are a lot of ways the author of this story, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, could have approached it. He could have said that Vance arrived as an emissary of an administration that's unpopular: Trump won Ohio three times, scoring a double-digit win in 2024, but his approval in the state is now -16 according to Civiqs and -26 according to YouGov. I think that would have been part of the lede if a Democratic VP turned up in a state that had once supported a Democratic president but had largely turned against that president. The word "embattled" would undoubtedly turn up somewhere, as would the fact that the party's gubernatorial and senatorial candidates are struggling in the polls. (A few paragraphs down, we're told, neutrally, that Republican Jon Husted "is trying to hold onto his seat in a race against Sherrod Brown, a former senator from the state.")

We're told two things instead: Vance is still a figure whose backstory is fascinating, and he has many positive things to say about current Republican policies and many negative things to say about Democratic policies, all of which we should take very seriously.

Surrounded by union workers in the factory where his “Papaw” once welded steel, Mr. Vance said politicians of both parties had for decades embraced pro-immigrant and free trade policies that redirected jobs away from places like Middletown. He said the Democratic Party no longer resembled the one his grandfather once supported.

And with an eye on the November midterm elections and his political future, Mr. Vance drew on his Rust Belt roots to persuade voters that President Trump’s tariff and immigration policies would protect factory jobs and revitalize struggling towns.

“The future of our homes and communities is going to be built right here in Middletown,” Mr. Vance said.

This is not reported as a credulaity-straining prediction, one that's completely at odds with Ohioans' lived experience. We're not even told that Trump/Vance policies have failed to revitalize Rust Belt economies so far. It's just our normal political discourse, our normal pre-Trump political discourse -- GOP economic policies good, Democratic economic policies bad, Democrats elitist, Republicans (or at least Trump Republicans) pro-Volk -- and it's presented as if there's no evidence that the policies are failing.

“Who do these Democrats put first? Everyone else,” said Mr. Vance....

“You know who the Trump administration puts first?” Mr. Vance asked. “Americans.”

In answer to that second question, I wish someone had yelled out "Himself."

Kanno-Youngs acknowledges a few wispy gray clouds.

Mr. Trump also campaigned on resurrecting the U.S. manufacturing industry, although his on-again, off-again tariff policies have contributed to rising consumer prices.

They also haven't increased employment in the U.S. manufacturing sector, which has shed 75,000 jobs in Trump's second term, a fact that goes unmentioned here.

And while Mr. Vance blamed immigration for threatening American jobs in the heartland, Ohio’s Republican governor has called the Trump administration’s plans to deport Haitians in the state a “mistake,” arguing that the move would hurt the local economy.

No explanation is given for why Governor Mike DeWine said this. In fact, immigrants such as the Haitians who revitalized the economy in Springfield, Ohio, before Trump and Vance attacked them as pet-eating parasites have provided labor and served as additional consumers buying U.S. goods and services. But every Republican voter "knows" that immigrants do nothing but take, and Vance's rhetoric reinforcing that falsehood is essentially allowed to stand.

Ultimately, we're told:

Whether Mr. Vance is correct about the Trump administration’s investment improving the quality of life in Middletown will not just be key for local residents and Republican prospects in November, but also his own political future. Widely considered a potential heir of the MAGA movement, Mr. Vance and his origin story will only be scrutinized more if he seeks higher office.

Vance's origin story is not relevant to the question of whether Trump's policies are working! But Kanno-Youngs thinks Vance's autobiography is such a solid news peg that he mentions it even here.

As for that improvement in Ohio's quality of life, Vance is quoted telling his audience that it's already happening:

“I’m not saying it’s going to be easy or it’s all going to happen overnight,” the vice president said. “But in just 18 months, we have seen an explosion of rebuilding in the American heartland.”

We're given this quote, which is utter nonsense, and the story ends. This wild assertion is never fact-checked.

Of course it isn't. Republicans care about the Rust Belt and are generally excellent stewards of the economy has been an unchallenged notion in our political culture since long before Trump entered politics.

Vance is being portrayed here as a man with a fascinating life history, and as an heir to other Republicans who were depicted by the media as normal and rooted in the soil -- Ronald Reagan, even the Bushes. Vance should be struggling to shake off Trump's stink, but here, he's portrayed as if he's fresh as a daisy.

DEMOCRATS SHOULD BE LESS CONCERNED WITH TRUMP'S POLLING FLOOR AND MORE CONCERNED WITH THE REST OF THE GOP'S POLLING FLOOR

Here's a headline at Zeteo:

Trump Advisers Worry He Could ‘Sink to the High 20s’

Asawin Suebsaeng writes:

I have seen a lot of you making the same complaint, and it goes something like this: Donald Trump is such a horrendous U.S. president on so many different personal and policy fronts; I know his poll numbers are garbage right now, but how is it even possible that he’s consistently clinging to more than 30% favorability in the polling? What does a doddering fascist have to do to crack the 20s?

...You’re not the only ones wondering that. Some very well-connected consultants and Trump whisperers are thinking about the scary 20s, too – and they’re not pleased about it.

Trump's numbers have been very bad lately:

“Trump approval falls to 33%, lowest of his presidency, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds,” Reuters reported on Monday....

American Research Group (which doesn’t have the reputation other pollsters do) clocked him at an even 30.

And sure, things could get worse for Trump.

Private polls commissioned by different organizations and arms of the Republican elite “aren’t much better,” I’m told by an operative close to the White House who has knowledge of data causing a sustained bedwetting from much of the party that President Trump is going to drag them down hard in the critically important midterms.

Democrats are overwhelming favorites to win the House, and have a decent shot at winning the Senate. Trump really is dragging his party down for the midterms.

But if Trump's floor could sink to the 20s, a couple of his fellow Republicans surprisingly appear to have a much higher floor, according to a new Emerson poll:

In this poll by Emerson, Pete Buttigieg is +5 on either JD Vance or Marco Rubio; Jon Ossoff is +5 on Vance, +3 on Rubio; Gavin Newsom is +5 on Vance, +2 on Rubio; Kamala Harris is +4 on Vance, -5 on Rubio; AOC is -2 on Vance, -5 on Rubio bluevirginia.us/2026/08/thur...

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— Blue Virginia (@bluevirginia.bsky.social) August 20, 2026 at 10:30 AM

In 2028 matchups against the Democratic Party's A-list, Emerson says that the floor for both J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio is 44%.

Maybe that would be understandable for a Republican governor who'd never worked in the Trump White House, but these are two of the most prominent figures in his administration. Why aren't they in disgrace, too? Why do they have a reasonable chance of winning the presidency two years from now?

Democrats attack Trump, and Democratic candidates attack their own opponents, but Democrats don't attack the Republican Party as a whole. This is one of the consequences.

You can't expect voters to intuit that the disaster of Trumpism is partly Vance and Rubio's fault. More than any other presidency in our lifetime -- or in American history -- the second Trump presidency seems like the work of one person. Every bad decision, every failure, every screwup seems like Trump's fault and Trump's fault alone. Maybe Pete Hegseth seems to share a little bit of the blame on foreign policy, or Stephen Miller and (formerly) Kristi Noem on immigration policy, but Americans appear to believe the failures of Trumpism are overwhelmingly Trump's responsibility. Voters don't even seem to see his top subordinates, in the executive branch or in Congress, as enablers who share the blame.

Obviously, Democrats will try to hang Trump's failures around the necks of Vance and Rubio starting next year, when they announce that they're running. I hope it works. I hope voters don't conclude that they were just helpless observers of a one-man presidency. What's unlikely, this year and in 2028, is a widescale 1932-level rejection of the Republican Party. That leaves the door open for someone in the GOP -- maybe a congressional or gubernatorial Trump loyalist -- to win in 2028 if Vance and Rubio become too toxic. And they clearly aren't too toxic yet.