WHY ISN'T DAVID HEARN THE MAIN CHARACTER IN THE REFLECTING POOL STORY?

At some point in our post-Columbine era of mass shootings, advocates began accusing the news media of paying too much attention to perpetrators and not enough to victims. Some argued that the press shouldn't name the perpetrators of mass shootings at all. The press hasn't gone that far, but most well-meaning news outlets try to report on the victims and the lives they've lost.

No one was shot in the Trump administration's war on imaginary Reflecting Pool vandalism, but I'd like to see a little more attention paid to David Hearn, whose life was upended because he put his hand in the pool's water.

This is the story:

donald trump can just sit in mar-a-lago and make up a lie on someone and then have the entire weight of the federal government come down on that person.

That should scare you.

— Covie (@covie_93) August 1, 2026

But this is how the story is being presented:

This is a story about the President and several of his hand-picked appointees all committing crimes and blatantly lying to the public while stealing public funds and abusing the criminal justice system, but the NYTimes describes the situation like they're recapping a soap opera.

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— Max Kennerly (@maxkennerly.bsky.social) August 2, 2026 at 8:24 AM

The story cited here, by Glenn Thrush of the Times, isn't just about Trump's feelings -- it's about the feelings of the three people Thrush regards as the main characters. The innocent man who was indicted isn't one of them.

Jeanine Pirro faced the cameras on July 2 with characteristic self-assurance to announce the indictment of the 67-year-old ex-Olympian David Hearn for trashing “sacred” government property, President Trump’s highly prized but shoddily renovated Reflecting Pool.

There's something off about the final clause in that sentence. I understand what Thrush is trying to say -- that Trump seems to prize the Reflecting Pool but did a shoddy job of renovating it -- but the pool isn't "President Trump’s highly prized ... Reflecting Pool." It isn't Trump's pool at all. It's our pool.

“This is not only a priority for the president, but for myself,” said Ms. Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, disclosing felony vandalism charges against Mr. Hearn for touching the lining of the pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

But Hearn wasn't charged with a felony "for touching the lining of the pool" -- the U.S. attorney's office said at the time of his indictment that on June 19 "Hearn allegedly ripped a piece of the recently installed blue pool sealant on the bottom of the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial."

Every reasonable person knew at the time that this was a lie, and Pirro is admitting that now. But Hearn was repeatedly slandered by the president and other Republicans.

We could've made this montage of liars an hour long but you get the point

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— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) July 31, 2026 at 7:02 PM

Fox News told us:

Records show former Olympic canoeist David Hearn, who was charged in the weekend vandalism of the Reflecting Pool, has ties to a major left-wing fundraising network as protesters descended on the National Mall and racked up multiple criminal charges.

Hearn, 67, donated to Democratic fundraising apparatus ActBlue 10 times while also contributing to Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns five times, an administration official told Fox News Digital.

Fox also tried to portray Hearn as a repeat offender because in 1996, when the Potomac River flooded, the former Olympic canoeist was arrested for venturing into the floodwaters in his whitewater canoe. (The charges were dismissed.)

But Hearn is all but invisible after the first couple of paragraphs of the Times story, which is all about Trump, Pirro, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum:

Ms. Pirro’s office dramatically reversed course on Friday, not only withdrawing the charge against Mr. Hearn but blasting the Interior Department for the rushed and “botched” renovation....

Ms. Pirro’s 20-page filing did not refer to, much less rebuke, Mr. Trump for claiming the damage was caused by left-wing vandals rather than his administration’s missteps. But it raised innate doubts about his assertion that criminals had slashed the pool’s lining with a “knife or blade.”

That Ms. Pirro ... was aiming much of her criticism not at Mr. Trump, but his interior secretary, Doug Burgum, who oversaw the issuance of a no-bid contract to renovate the pool, did not appear to matter much.

On Saturday morning, Mr. Trump dashed off a post on Truth Social that made clear he was unhappy with Ms. Pirro, a friend and ally since the 1980s....

“I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM,” he wrote, adding, “There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!”

In the second Trump term, the media has been able to focus on some ordinary citizens brutalized by ICE, but only in a sustained way when the victims, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were murdered and were white. Earlier, Senator Chris Van Hollen forced the media to pay attention to Kilmar Abrego Garcia when he was sent to rot in a Salvadoran torture prison.

But it's hard to get the media to care when there a story doesn't include Beltway boldface names. The press is paying very little attention to Texas defendants who were sentenced to decades in prison in connection with a shooting that wounded a cop at an anti-ICE demonstration in Texas. Not only was the shooter sentenced to 100 years in prison, but others who attended the demonstration yet had no connection to the shooting received sentences of 50 years, and one defendant who wasn't even present for the shooting was sentenced to 30 years. The East Coast press doesn't care.

Even if these aren't the most sympathetic defendants, the extreme sentences are appalling. But no top official is holding news conferences about this case in D.C., and Trump hasn't made the story a Truth Social fixation. So the defendants aren't of interest to the national media. They should be, just as every victim of Trumpian authoritarianism should be.

THE PARTY OF TRADITIONAL VALUES HAS NO VALUES EXCEPT WINNING

This poll was mostly overlooked a couple of days ago:

The POLITICO Poll finds President Donald Trump’s MAGA supporters are the most loyal of any group of voters — with majorities saying they would stick by GOP candidates confronted with an array of scandals, from a DUI conviction or accepting lobbyist gifts to more serious accusations including domestic violence, sexual assault and antisemitic social media posts.

Two-thirds of self-identified MAGA Trump voters say they would continue supporting a GOP candidate accused of sexual assault — 13 percentage points higher than the share of Trump 2024 voters writ large, which include those who do not identify as MAGA. By comparison, 40 percent of voters who backed former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 would continue backing a Democratic candidate accused of sexual assault.

This is framed as evidence that MAGA voters are especially amoral, but note that 53% of Trump voters overall -- a majority -- would continue supporting a Republican candidate accused of sexual assault. (It's disturbing that even 40% of Harris voters would continue to support a Democrat accused of sexual assault, but at least 40% isn't a majority.)

Seventy-two percent of MAGA Trump voters say they would stick with a GOP candidate accused of domestic violence, more than 10 ercentage points higher than the overall share of Trump 2024 voters who would back a GOP candidate (61 percent). Thirty-nine percent of Harris voters say they’d stick with a Democrat accused of domestic violence.

Again, it's not just MAGA. A majority -- in this case, a solid majority -- of Republicans overall would continue supporting a Republican candidate accused of domestic violence. Approximately four in ten Democrats -- not a majority -- would support a Democrat who was similarly accused.

Here are the MAGA numbers for other scandals:

Some of this might reflect Republicans' belief that any accusation of scandal against a Republican they like is a lie, however well documented. And some Republicans might not believe that domestic violence, say, or wearing blackface is a bad thing.

I think the discrepancies here come down to two differences between conservatives and the rest of us. First, conservatives generally decide who is a good person -- someone who agrees with them politically -- and conclude that whatever is done by a person they like must be moral. That's why they've shrugged off Donald Trump's sexual improprieties for years. That's why MAGA Republicans, at least, continue to believe Trump isn't corrupt. They like Trump, therefore he's a moral man.

Democrats try to give people they like the benefit of the doubt, but only up to a point. In just the past few months, we've cut Graham Platner and Eric Swalwell loose. Over the years, here in New York State alone, we dumped Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, and Andrew Cuomo. (Cuomo almost made a comeback, but not quite.)

The second difference between Republicans and Democrats is that more Republicans than Democrats see politics as an existential battle between their party and the opposition. To some extent, this is because Rupert Murdoch figured out how to tabloidize politics, turning every story into a drama about good (them) vs. evil (us). Fewer Democrats see politics that way.

Beyond that, Republicans relentlessly promote (and defend) their own while attacking Democrats. Democrats attack one another even when there's no scandal involved (see: DSA vs. the establishment), regularly berate themselves (calling their own party "weak and woke"), and brag about bipartisanship while wishing for "a strong Republican Party." Republicans never admit error and close ranks around party members who are under attack nearly every time. (They also close ranks around candidates whom they don't consider ideologically ideal.)

I don't really want Democratic voters to defend immoral candidates, but I wish we had a higher level of party loyalty -- or maybe Republicans should have a much lower level.

THE WAR ON FAUCI, BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE KOCH NETWORK

If you watched Anthony Fauci's appearance before a Senate committee this week and are wondering why Republican base voters still despise him years after his retirement, and years after COVID peaked, let me remind you that the war on mainstream COVID science was funded by right-wing billionaires, particularly the Koch network -- the same people who finance and weaponize all the other propaganda that makes your Fox-watching grandparents crazy. When these folks implant an idea in GOP voters' brains, it stays implanted.

In 2021, the Center for Media and Democracy reported on the Koch network's involvement in COVID propaganda:

The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.

“We can achieve public health without depriving the people most in need of the products and services provided by businesses across the country,” it read.

A month later, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a business lobbying group partially funded by Koch Industries, published a letter calling on President Donald Trump to enable states to reopen. That letter was signed by over 200 state legislators and “stakeholders,” including leaders from Koch-funded groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the James Madison Institute....

Participants for a number of anti-lockdown rallies were recruited by FreedomWorks, a dark money group tied to Charles Koch instrumental in organizing Tea Party protests in 2009. Several of the 2020 rallies were also promoted by the Convention of States Action, a group founded by an organization with ties to the Koch network and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer that wants to rewrite the U.S. Constitution....

On October 4, 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration was released to the world. Authored by Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya, former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, and Oxford University professor Sunetra Gupta, the declaration recommended governments allow younger, healthier people to become infected with Covid-19 while reserving “focused protection” for the vulnerable, in order to reach herd immunity. Suggestions included having nursing homes limit staff rotations and businesses rely on workers with “acquired immunity.”

Bhattacharya is now the director of the National Institutes of Health and the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

... the auspicious-sounding American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) ... which hosted and filmed the [Great Barrington] conference ... is a Koch-tied libertarian think tank. From 2018 to 2020, the Charles Koch Foundation donated more than $100,000 to the institute. And before that, the Koch Foundation donated nearly $1.5 million to the Emergent Order Foundation, formerly Emergent Order LLC, a PR firm that engaged in hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of marketing consulting for AIER.

AIER has also received $54,000 from the Atlas Network, an anti-regulation group formerly known as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation that has received more than a half million dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation and the connected Charles Koch Institute.

And as HuffPost reported in July 2020:

A seemingly obscure Capitol Hill press conference by a fringe group of self-proclaimed medical experts quickly became on Monday the most widely seen propaganda video about the coronavirus after Breitbart News livestreamed it on Facebook. The post racked up tens of millions of views across social media in a matter of hours....

The video featured a string of right-wing talking points that criticized lockdown measures, demonized public health officials, called for schools to reopen and urged Americans not to wear face masks. The speakers, who were all portrayed as doctors, often declared hydroxychloroquine a “cure” for COVID-19....

But in fact, a conservative dark-money group was behind the press event that created this viral propaganda moment. The group featured in the video, “America’s Frontline Doctors,” sprang from nowhere only days ago and appears connected to groups involved in the Save Our Country Coalition, which was a driving force behind the “reopen” protests in April that lobbied for America’s rapid reopening, even as death tolls spike in hot spots across the country....

Monday’s livestreamed event featuring the America’s Frontline Doctors group was organized by Tea Party Patriots, a wealthy Republican donor-backed nonprofit that, in partnership with FreedomWorks and other right-wing dark money groups, launched the Save Our Country Coalition in April to push for America’s rapid reopening. Jenny Beth Martin, TPP’s co-founder, spoke at the conference alongside the self-proclaimed frontline doctors, urging people to call their elected officials to demand access to hydroxychloroquine....

The coalition’s groups have largely been funded by prominent billionaires, including oil and gas mogul Charles Koch ― who has donated to SOC group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) ― and Richard Uihlein, a major donor to Tea Party Patriots.

Many people think the country, or at least the Republican Party, began to go crazy in the summer of 2015, when Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy. Many people think Republican lunacy all stems from him.

Some of it does. But quite a bit of it should be blamed on the Kochs and others who began professionalizing culture-war politics long before Trump stepped onto that escalator. Crackpots like Robert Kennedy Jr. fanned the COVID-denialist flames, but he found a receptive audience for his quackery only because right-wing billionaires had made GOP voters as crazy on the subject of public health as they were on the subject of Barack Obama's presidency. Trump just followed their lead.

TRAVELING AGAIN

See you tomorrow.

DO J.D. VANCE'S BIGGEST ADMIRERS EVEN CARE IF HE'S "INAUTHENTIC"?

Oh, dear -- we're talking about "authenticity" again. In The New York Times, Thomas Edsall writes:

Whenever Vice President JD Vance takes the microphone, he has to decide which combination of his multiple identities to select for the specific audience before him, a choice he sometimes seems to find bewildering.

The range of Vance’s mix-and-match choices includes hillbilly, intellectual, Trump successor, raging MAGA loyalist and high-tech investor, not to mention veteran threatening other countries and veteran no-long-wars guy....

Vance’s problem is his failure to find comfort in any combination of identities so that he comes across as inauthentic, cross-pressured, forced — even counterfeit.

As regular readers of this blog know, I don't believe in political "authenticity" -- or, to be more precise, I don't believe that the word is used in politics in a way that has anything to do with realness or fakeness. When we say a politician is "authentic," we mean the politician (usually a man) is personable. Donald Trump is the biggest liar on the planet, but we call him "authentic." We usually use the word "inauthentic" in politics in reference to politicians like Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton. They're not phony at all. They're just awkward. For the most part, they are who they seem to be -- they say what they mean, they just don't say it personably.

Vance has that problem, but I agree that he's also truly inauthentic, in the sense that he'll change his opinions to suit the prevailing trends. But I think there's an aspect of his personality that's utterly genuine, even though one of Edsall's sources -- Harvard's Randall Enos -- disagrees:

Part of Trump’s appeal is that, despite his ideological incoherence, you believe his commitment to the politics of resentment is genuine because he is personally motivated by resentment: feeling that he was disrespected by the establishment is his casus belli. In the end, that seems to be the only consistent feature of his governing style.

Vance lacks this characteristic; rather, he appears to have adopted resentment politics because it serves him politically.

Really? If there's any Vance characteristic that seems utterly genuine, it's resentment. He just seems like a deeply resentful guy. The object of his resentments may change, but the anger remains. (“Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion,” he wrote in Hillbilly Elegy.)

Republican voters leap from resentment to resentment -- whatever and whoever the right-wing propaganda machine tells them to hate, they'll hate. So I'm not sure they care about the specifics of Vance's resentments, as long as the resentments don't directly contradict their own. (They'll forgive Vance for formerly being a Trump critic just the way they'll forgive Trump for inviting the Clintons to his third wedding.)

Notably, it's only Republicans who like Vance:

Civiqs amassed 53,032 voter comments on Vance’s favorability/unfavorability ratings over the past two years and found that an overwhelming majority of Vance’s support is concentrated among Republicans, 86 percent favorable, 7 percent unfavorable, while independents were 33 percent favorable, 59 percent unfavorable, and Democrats 3 percent favorable, 95 percent unfavorable.

Karrin Vasby Anderson, a professor of communication studies at Colorado State University, has a theory about the one specific group Vance appeals to most:

There is, according to Anderson, only one constituency firmly in Vance’s corner: “It’s men who spend time in the so-called manosphere, which is where Vance cultivated his political support. He knows how to talk with that demographic on their own terms, so they are more likely to identify with him.”

That's plausible. Why would men in the manosphere care about authenticity? Much of the propaganda of the manosphere is about the importance of turning yourself into a fake, artificial, "maxxed" version of yourself. Change your name, like Myron Gaines (born Amrou Fudl). Get buff. Change your facial features -- with a hammer if necessary, like Clavicular. Andrew Tate went from atheist to Christian to Muslim over a period of four years. People in the manosphere believe they need to be phony versions of themselves in order to make money and get sex. (Let's face it, these are their only goals.)

So if Vance is inauthentic, they don't care, as long as he's resentmentmaxxed.

WHAT IS THE GOP'S 2026 MIDTERM MESSAGE? "FAUCI SUCKED SIX YEARS AGO!"

A couple of months ago, Ezra Klein said this:

My pet theory right now is that President Trump is not trying to win the midterm elections.

... if he wanted to win the midterms, he’d be moving to the center. He’d be focusing on the things that Americans are angry about, disappointed in him about. He’d be supporting the strongest Republicans in contested races and doing everything he could to bolster Republicans in vulnerable states and districts.

He’s not doing even a little bit of that.

Many people agree with Klein. They see a president who's focused on construction projects and the SAVE America Act rather than affordability and assume he's not thinking about motivating voters.

It's widely assumed that House and Senate Republicans are different. They passed a bipartisan housing bill! They're at least trying to seem like a party that wants to help people!

But they're not all that different from the president. You really need to understand that this is their idea of an election pitch:

Former White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci will appear before the Senate this week for a hearing. Leading up to his appearance, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) released thousands of pages of Fauci’s diary entries from 2020 to 2022.

Right now, normal people care about gas prices, grocery and housing costs, produce that causes explosive diarrhea, and other concerns related to the world we live in right now. But this story, about a government official who retired nearly four years ago, is a right-wing media obsession now. Here's just a sample of the headlines:

* Amanda Macias, Fox News: Fauci's Newly Released Covid Diaries Reveal Bizarre Fixation on Fame as Pandemic Deaths Mounted

* Bob Hoge, RedState: Fauci's Diary Reveals Astonishing Level of Sycophantic Groveling by the Legacy Media

* Alana Mastrangelo, Breitbart: Actress Patricia Heaton on Fauci Diaries: Lying COVID Tyrant Was ‘Exulting in His Fame’ While We Were Locked Down

* Ben Shapiro, The Daily Wire: The Hero Complex That Held America Hostage: For Anthony Fauci, it was Anthony Fauci and his ego, everywhere, all of the time.

* Hans Mahncke, The Federalist: 10 Questions for Congress to Ask Fauci About His Covid Corruption and Coverup

And on and on.

Why this now? Why these hearings now? No one's going to get Fauci to change his mind about the origin of the virus -- he still believes it emerged naturally, not from a lab, as do many other experts. He won't denounce the government's efforts to minimize death and suffering during the worst of the COVID pandemic, when -- it should be noted -- he was working for Donald Trump, not a Democrat. (Fauci was serving as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a job to which he'd been appointed during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.) The facts of his career don't matter -- to the GOP base, Fauci in 2020 represents Democrats in 2026.

Will these revelations and hearings really inspire voters in the Republican Party's grievance-collector base to turn out in November? Hard to know, but Republicans need something, as The Washington Post noted a couple of days ago:

Republican pollsters and political groups are raising the alarm that their party faces a listless and demotivated base ahead of November’s midterm elections....

The lack of enthusiasm is reaching deep into Republicans’ loyal base, spreading to the party’s most consistent voters — who have shown up to vote in all of the past four primaries and general elections, according to an analysis done by Americans for Prosperity Action, a conservative super PAC affiliated with billionaire Charles Koch....

About 1 in 5 reliable Republican base voters are at risk this November, according to Nathan Nascimento, executive director at AFP Action.

Apart from that housing bill, Republicans have nothing positive to offer their own voters. So they're giving them hate. We'll see if it works.

I DO NOT THINK THAT WORD "INCUMBENCY" MEANS WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS

This is a peculiar story from Axios's Andrew Solender:

Democrats hit the anti-incumbency trap

Democrats are learning a hard lesson Republicans know all too well: The party out of power doesn't just ride the anti-incumbency wave — it can also get swept up in it.

Why it matters: The populist energy surging through the left after President Trump's return to the White House is roiling Democratic primaries and fueling establishment fears about the party's general election chances.

Just ask Senate Republicans how that went for them in 2010, 2012 and 2022.

In 2010, Senate Republicans gained 6 seats (and House Republicans gained 63 seats), so even though they failed to win the Delaware Senate race with Christine ("I'm not a witch") O'Donnell and perhaps blew a couple of other potential wins, they had no real reason to complain. The "anti-incumbency wave" in 2012 ended with the re-election of the incumbent president, so maybe there was no anti-incumbency wave at all. And 2022 ended with Republicans gaining 9 seats in the House and Democrats gaining 1 seat in the Senate, so, again, maybe it wasn't really a strongly anti-incumbent year.

What are Solender's examples of anti-incumbency pressure on Democrats?

Former state Rep. Amish Shah — whose grassroots, door-to-door campaigning tactics the DCCC does not believe are effective — prevailed over the party favorite, ex-TV journalist Marlene Galán-Woods.

The DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] ran a $500,000 joint ad buy with Galán-Woods and outside Democratic groups spent millions more to support her, but to no avail.

Shah's win came after progressives Randy Villegas of California and Matt Dunlap of Maine defeated DCCC-backed rivals in primaries last month.

But none of the losing candidates in these primaries were incumbents.

While Villegas and Shah are running to flip GOP-held seats, Dunlap is simply trying to hold retiring Rep. Jared Golden's (D-Maine) district.

"Incumbent" is a word that has a meaning. It means you're the current officeholder. The establishment-endorsed candidates in these races weren't the current officeholders.

It's as if to Solender -- and maybe to the establishment Democrats who served as spin doctors for his story -- "incumbent" means preferred establishment candidate. Just being in the clique -- being the Democratic establishment's favorite -- is like being the incumbent.

Solender continues:

Add that to Democrats' big mess in Maine, where populist left-wing darling Graham Platner dropped out earlier this month amid allegations of sexual assault, which he denied.

Platner, a self-described oyster farmer, had won the Democratic nomination after muscling out Maine Gov. Janet Mills, the preferred choice of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Instead state party activists have turned to Troy Jackson, a progressive logger and state Senate majority leader who is already facing scrutiny over alleged angry outbursts during his time in the legislature.

Jackson is leading in the first poll of the race and is a 67% favorite according to Polymarket, but this is a "big mess" for Democrats, according to Solender. And hey, it might be -- Collins consistently trailed in the polls the last time she ran, then won handily. But the polling this time might be right -- the betting markets think so. In any case, Janet Mills may be the incumbent governor, but she's not the incumbent senator. Yet it's as if she was owed the nomination because she was the establishment's preferred candidate.

You can probably guess which race this is leading up to:

One of Democrats' biggest headache this cycle is Michigan, which has primaries on Aug. 4.

Centrist Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) and progressive Abdul El-Sayed are pummeling each other to be the Democratic candidate in what is sure to be a highly competitive U.S. Senate race.

Establishment Democrats are petrified about an El-Sayed win....

Again, what does this have to do with incumbency? Neither Stevens nor El-Sayed is the incumbent. (That would be Gary Peters, a Democrat, who's retiring.) But it's as if being the establishment favorite is effectively incumbency, to Solender and his spinners.

As I said yesterday, I'm worried about this race, mostly because of the intra-party pummeling Solender mentions. But polling suggests that both candidates are equally viable -- they each lead Republican Mike Rogers by 0.5% according to the Real Clear Polling average -- and Polymarket thinks Democrats are 70% favorites.

Still, none of this has anything to do with incumbency, unless you think of the establishment Democratic Party -- powerless and stuck in the minority -- as an incumbent party that deserves to retain its status forever, powerless or otherwise.