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.

WHY IS HALEY STEVENS USING HILLARY CLINTON'S 2008 PLAYBOOK?

Here's how Haley Stevens is running against Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate primary:

"Cool kids on the Internet. They're doing the cool kid chatter. Some of 'em might be the coastal elites, making fun of how I talk. But let's be real. They're making fun of Michigan. They're thinking they're better than us. Their jokes, their criticism, only make me fight harder." -- Haley Stevens

[image or embed]

— Howard Mortman (@howardmortman.bsky.social) July 25, 2026 at 1:14 PM

Remind you of anything?

After this campaign moment in 2007, Politico's Roger Simon wrote:

When I saw a video of Hillary Clinton downing a shot of Crown Royal whiskey in Bronko’s Restaurant and Lounge in Crown Point, Ind., on Saturday night, I was delighted to see that she has finally learned what campaigning for president is all about.

Last week, Barack Obama went to a private fundraiser in San Francisco and made some semi-coherent remarks about how people in small towns “get bitter” and “cling” to “guns or religion.”

Clinton blasted Obama for being “elitist and out of touch.”

“I was taken aback by the demeaning remarks Sen. Obama made about people in small-town America,” Clinton said.

Clinton began campaigning this way when Obama was close to clinching the Democratic presidential nomination, and it didn't change the outcome. Stevens is campaigning this way in a race that could go either way.

Stevens is the candidate of Chuck Schumer, James Clyburn, and other aging establishmentarians. I know what they're thinking: that moderate candidates like Stevens are more broadly appealing than progressives like El-Sayed, that progressive candidates alienate moderates but moderate candidates don't alienate progressives.

Progressive voters might rally around moderate candidates in states where there aren't a lot of alternatives -- progressives will probably vote for Roy Cooper in North Carolina or Mary Peltola in Alaska. But in part that's because those moderates aren't showing active disrespect for a progressives. In Michigan, a moderate candidate should recognize that attacking a progressive candidate and his supporters means attacking part of the base you'll need to win the general election, as well as poisoning moderates' minds against a progressive who might be the general election candidate.

That's the nature of bitter primaries, which is why it's a bad idea to maximize the bitterness. Clinton's attacks on Obama (as, in effect, the candidate of the "cool kids") didn't cost him in 2008, but he was an extraordinary political talent running against a reviled Republican Party after years of a despised war, followed by a financial collapse. When the ideological pressure went the other way, in 2016, it's quite likely that that the Bernie Sanders campaign helped alienate enough progressive voters to cost Clinton the election.

Hillary Clinton wasn't an Obama-level campaigner. Neither is Stevens -- as the clip above makes clear. I hope 2026 is as difficult a year for the GOP as 2008 was. But if Republican Mike Rogers is competitive in Michigan, Stevens is making it easier for him to win.

TRUMP IS THE WORST PRESIDENT WE'VE EVER HAD, BUT NOT THE WORST PRESIDENT WE'LL EVER HAVE

I've been busy with other matters and haven't had a chance to watch President Trump's White House Correspondents' Dinner speech or read the full transcript, but I'm struck by this in Shawn McCreesh's New York Times write-up:

One particularly awkward moment played out when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer welcomed a group of reporters from The Wall Street Journal to the stage to accept an award for their “courageous reporting on President Trump’s past relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein” that “triggered the release of the so-called Epstein files.”

Mr. Blitzer reminded the crowd that “Trump quickly filed a $20 billion lawsuit against the Journal, revealing reporter Khadeeja Safdar’s home address. Her family had to be relocated. The Journal was kicked off of Air Force One.”

As the reporters took their awards, Mr. Trump threw his hands in the air theatrically, as if to say, Oh well, what can you do.

Trump is an authoritarian thug who's perfectly comfortable ruining other people's lives in order to get what he wants, but he's not the worst imaginable authoritarian, for one reason in particular: It's all a game for him.

He wants to win all the time, but sometimes he loses, and sometimes he shrugs and accepts that. He reworked his tariffs to be in compliance with the Supreme Court's ruling. At long last, he cut a check to E. Jean Carroll (though he's now trying to claw the money back).

If pressure from his adminstration destroys CBS News or (perhaps sometime next year) CNN, terrific. If not, we'll, that's how the game goes (though he won't stop fighting). He'll show up at next year's dinner and make nice with everyone he tried to bring to ruin.

All his life, Trump has fought dirty, but often he didn't win -- the courts, the political system, or, most often, the marketplace defeated him. His businesses went bankrupt. Many lenders wouldn't lend to him. Oh well, what can you do.

He's dangerous now because a Supreme Court full of partisan hacks and a party-over-country congressional GOP have given him near-unlimited power, but he spent most of his life not having this level of power. He's used to that. He's destroyed a lot of guardrails, but he's left some standing. He hasn't disbanded the lower courts that have ruled against him. He hasn't put Khadeeja Safdar in the gulag.

We'll have a Republican president someday who won't be so restrained.

President Vance or President Bovino or President Carlson will take the power granted by the Supreme Court and congressional Republicans and treat it as merely a baseline. A future GOP fascist president won't see authoritarianism as just a power game in which you respect your opponents and assume they're fighting dirty just like you. A future fascist will fight for all the power, with nothing but contempt for anyone standing in the way.

Unless we fascism-proof the country starting in 2029 (or 2027), or fight like hell when an even worse Republican president is in office.

THEY HATE ME, J.D. VANCE BOASTED

Here's The Washington Post's lead story right now:

As JD Vance prepares to make a decision about his 2028 plans, the vice president is facing a barrage of online attacks from within his party, criticism his allies say appears to be part of a coordinated attempt to poison the well for him politically.

His detractors have adopted the “Never Vance” slogan and flooded social media, especially over the past week, with attacks including claims that Vance is “unfit” to be vice president due to his efforts to negotiate a peace deal with Iran. They have asserted, without evidence, that Vance is making policy decisions not supported by President Donald Trump. They have likened him to former president Barack Obama and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).

The sustained public hostility from Vance’s own side of the aisle is unlike that faced by other vice presidents in decades, both in intensity and in the early timing — two years before the party will choose its next presidential nominee.

This seems bad for Vance -- until you take a closer look at the story. It doesn't quote anyone who's part of this well-poisoning campaign. The only people quoted are "a close ally of the vice president," "two other people with knowledge of Vance’s strategy," and "other advisers," all anonymous, along with "Steve Cortes, a conservative commentator supportive of Vance," and, to provide historical perspective, "Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to [Vice President Mike] Pence in the White House."

This story came from Vance World. He wants it understood that some Republicans hate him. He thinks it will help him win the 2028 Republican presidential nomination.

Why does Vance think this is happening?

Vance’s political team remains dismissive of the social media onslaught and its impact on Republican voters, believing that many of the attacks are not organic....

Vance’s allies are keenly aware of and monitoring the online attacks, but his team says the criticism sends a signal to the conservative base that establishment Republicans and opponents they label as neoconservatives hate Vance. That, they say, could ultimately strengthen his standing in a GOP primary.

Vance's team seems to be concerned that not enough Israel skeptics in the GOP noticed this in his recent Joe Rogan interview:

During the show, Vance described himself as a “reasonable moderate” in the debate over the U.S.-Israel relationship. He also cited a recent Time report about an online pro-Israel influence operation run by a former Trump campaign official, through which Vance said he was being attacked “in dishonest ways” by paid influencers.

“You know, my response to that is, ‘Well, go to hell,’” Vance told Rogan. “I’m going to do what I have to do for the American people. I represent Americans first, and that’s the way that I’ve tried to do this job.”

The operation described in the Time story isn't just "pro-Israel" -- it's financed by the Israeli government. The story tells us:

Last September, the global ad agency Havas hired [2020 Trump campaign manager Brad] Parscale’s firm, Clock Tower X, to conduct a digital campaign on behalf of the State of Israel, according to Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings reviewed by TIME. Under the agreement, Parscale’s operation would produce 100 original pieces of content each month, with at least 80% aimed at Gen Z audiences across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and podcasts. In a Services Agreement draft included in the filing, Parscale also pledged to amplify the campaign across social media and through “integration of narrative messaging into Salem Media Network properties and aligned distribution channels,” referring to the Christian conservative broadcasting and publishing company where he serves as Chief Strategy Officer. Parscale vowed the effort would produce at least 50 million digital impressions per month, as well as influence how AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini characterized Israel and the war. For all this, Israel agreed to pay Clock Tower X $1.5 million per month.

The campaign doesn't appear to be working:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had hired Parscale to improve the nation’s standing among conservatives, only to watch support continue to erode on the American right and across the broader U.S. electorate. "We are pissed at Brad Parscale," says [an] Israeli official familiar with the arrangement, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. "He was supposed to make things better. We have paid him lots of money. But what did he do with it? Things have only gotten worse."

But it's out there. The Post story reports:

A Washington Post analysis of conservative influencers’ posts on X found that criticism of Vance spiked immediately after his appearance on Rogan’s podcast.

Vance clearly wants anti-Netantyahu (and anti-Semitic) GOP voters to know about this. He wants them to know who hates him.

Vance is trying to walk a fine line on Israel and anti-Semitism. He'd like to retain the support of at least some voters who are uncomfortable with anti-Semitism while also dog-whistling to anti-Semites. Here's a passage about Charlie Kirk from Vance's recent memoir:

He called me in the summer of 2025 to talk about two things he was seeing among young conservatives that really worried him. The first was that they were very angry about Israeli influence in American politics. The second was that some were going from legitimate disagreement with the Israeli government to anti-Semitism.

“Young people think we allow Israel too much influence over our foreign policy, and they’re concerned about it. But for some, that concern is turning to anger, and even Jew hatred.”

Charlie saw that heated foreign policy disagreements, filtered through the internet, could bleed into ethnic hatred. And while Charlie loved Israel, he agreed with a lot of his young fans that the Israeli government was not always aligned with the interests of the United States. He knew the situation was delicate and complicated, and he worked directly with young activists on how to prevent their views on this political issue from feeding bigotry.

Ironically, Vance's pal Kirk once advised Netanyahu to conduct a social media influence operation much like the one Parscale is running, as the Time story notes:

In a private letter to Netanyahu in May 2025, which TIME reviewed, Kirk warned that anti-Israel sentiment online had reached "record levels" and urged an aggressive communications campaign: mobilize influencers, send former hostages on speaking tours, flood social media with stories that humanized Israeli society. "I know you've got a 7 front war and my kvetching pales in comparison. But I'm trying to convey to you that Israel is losing support even in conservative circles," Kirk wrote. "This should be a 5 alarm fire." Netanyahu never responded to the letter, though he spoke to Kirk on the phone last year, according to a source familiar with the conversation.

Kirk later made some remarks that were critical of Israel. Right-wing influencers -- Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly -- believe Kirk was pressured to tamp down his criticism of Israel (and Owens has blamed Israel for Kirk's murder). But Vance seems to think Kirk had positioned himself correctly, and he seems to want to occupy the same spot. He wants to seem appalled by anti-Semitism while appearing to be anti-Semitism-curious (and anti-Israel-curious). Hence this Post story.