J.D. VANCE BELIEVES IN FAMILIES, NOT CITIZENS, AND ONLY SOME FAMILIES

On social media yesterday, The Rude Pundit said something astute:

By now I'm sure you know what Vance told Tucker Carlson about "childless cat ladies" in 2021:

“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” Vance said.

“It’s just a basic fact: You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” he said. “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people that don’t have a direct stake in it.”

And maybe you know what he said in a speech that year about giving parents extra votes:

Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children. When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power — you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic — than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality: If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.

It's true: He doesn't believe you can care about this country simply because ... you care about this country.

Vance cares about his own family, and says he cares about America. But he believes in an America where people who aren't like his family aren't fully American, if they're American at all.

Take a look at the speech Vance delivered at the Republican convention earlier this month. He said:

You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty. Things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.

What does he mean by that? He means America is a place where some people are true citizens because they've been here longer than other citizens. People like his family -- including his own wife, but only conditionally:

Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms....

I am, of course, married to the daughter of South Asian immigrants to this country....

Now when I proposed to my wife, we were in law school, and I said, “Honey, I come with $120,000 worth of law school debt, and a cemetery plot on a mountainside in Eastern Kentucky.”

... Now that cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky is near my family’s ancestral home.

... they love this country, not only because it’s a good idea, but because in their bones they know that this is their home, and it will be their children’s home, and they would die fighting to protect it.

...Now in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.

Now. Now that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principle. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.

Vance's wife is worthy of being buried among these true Americans because she's borne his children. She's borne the children of a true American. That's what he means when he says, "we allow newcomers into our American family ... on our terms."

Recall that when Vance delivered this speech, he thought he'd be matching up with Kamala Harris, who's also the daughter of immigrants, but who hasn't borne any children, much less the children of anyone who could someday fairly soon have seven generations buried in one American cemetery. Harris is, of course, the stepmother to her husband's two children, but he's Jewish, and I don't believe his ancestors have been in America as long as Vance's (though if you've read Hillbilly Elegy, it's likely that they've been much more respectable citizens). So while Harris's parents were in America legally -- they were allowed in on America's terms -- she's unwelcome on Vance's terms.

All this reminds me of something Kathleen Parker wrote about Barack Obama in 2008, before she became a Washington Post columnist:

"A full-blooded American."

That's how 24-year-old Josh Fry of West Virginia described his preference for John McCain over Barack Obama. His feelings aren't racist, he explained. He would just be more comfortable with "someone who is a full-blooded American as president."

... Full-bloodedness is an old coin that's gaining currency in the new American realm. Meaning: Politics may no longer be so much about race and gender as about heritage, core values, and made-in-America. Just as we once and still have a cultural divide in this country, we now have a patriot divide.

Who "gets" America? And who doesn't?

... It's about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots.

Some run deeper than others and therein lies the truth of Josh Fry's political sense. In a country that is rapidly changing demographically — and where new neighbors may have arrived last year, not last century — there is a very real sense that once-upon-a-time America is getting lost in the dash to diversity.

To Vance, America is about families. His own brawling, addicted, irresponsible, fucked-up family is a collection of true Americans. Harris's blended family isn't.

THE RESPONSE TO A KEY PART OF KAMALA HARRIS'S STUMP SPEECH WILL BE VERY GENDERED

Democrats, including me, are cheering this portion of a speech Kamala Harris delivered in Milwaukee on Tuesday:

Before I was elected vice president, before I was elected United States senator, I was elected attorney general of the state of California, and I was a courtroom prosecutor before then. And in those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump's type.

Obviously, Republican voters won't respond well to this. But I don't think negative responses to this passage (which I assume will become part of Harris's stump speech) will be exclusively ideological. For many people, I think it will be a measure of how they feel about men and women.

For many people, including people who didn't think of themselves as Republicans before they got on the Trump train, what's appealing about Trump is that he seems to be a powerful man who does what he pleases and gets away with it. We say that, as a businessman, he's cheated and defrauded people, and they respond that you have to be a little devious and crooked to get by in the cutthroat world of New York business. And as for his sex life, many people see him as a stud rather than a predator, and while they won't admit it to themselves, they thrill to the idea that he sexually imposes his will on women. And some of them will admit it to themselves:

This is a shirt pic.twitter.com/SjFNHpZlMi

— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) October 14, 2016

Many men think they should be able to get away with financial chicanery because everybody does it. They think behavior toward women that you and I would see as predatory is simply normal. And some women agree with them.

To people like this, Harris will undoubtedly come off as a finger-wagging scold who doesn't want men to engage in perfectly healthy behavior. I think some normally Democratic men will fall into this category as well, though I hope it won't be a large number.

On the other hand, there could be a number of Republican women who know what bad men are like, and who'll appreciate what Harris says.

Harris isn't leading in the polls, though she's scrambling the race. She's doing much better with young voters -- her lead over Trump is 20%, according to a new Axios poll, compared to a 6% Biden lead in Axios's last youth poll. And she's doing better with union voters in swing states, according to a new Emerson poll.

But attitudes about bad men and prosecutorial women might affect the votes of some Americans who are normally reliable Democrats or Republicans. Trump was already making inroads among men of color; I wonder what the effect of Harris's candidacy will be on the white male vote. On the other hand, I think Harris could impress some normally Republican women with talk like this. I certainly hope so.

THEY'RE GATHERING EXCUSES FOR A TRUMP LOSS, AND THEY'LL DEPLOY THEM UNTIL JANUARY 6

Okay, here we go:

The ongoing investigation into the attempted assassination of President Trump points to the likelihood that Thomas Crooks was not acting alone and potentially had a handler. pic.twitter.com/1hDP1VSlPX

— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) July 23, 2024

Ana Paulina Luna is a sitting congresswoman, albeit one who posed this way the year of her first (unsuccessful) House run:

Another Republican member of Congress, Eli Crane, wonders about a second shooter and claims to have heard reports that, as one conspiracy-minded site puts it, the home of gunman Thomas Crooks "was scrubbed, cleaned and even silverware removed, prior to the investigative units arriving."

These are some of the less "respectable" Republicans in Congress. But if right-wingers will never find what they'd love to find -- a Democratic/"Deep State" conspiracy to assassinate Trump -- they can at least count on crackpots in their party planting the idea of an assassination conspiracy in the minds of many GOP voters.

But you don't need to believe that there was more than one gunman, or that Crooks had a government "handler," to say what M.D. Kittle of The Federalist says in response to reports that the Secret Service would like Donald Trump to limit himself to indoor rallies:

As The Washington Post first reported Tuesday evening, the U.S. Secret Service is “encouraging” the Trump campaign to halt the large-scale events his supporters have grown accustomed to....

Shutting down the outdoor events would smack of election interference, a way to stymie a successful means of campaigning.

You just need to believe that the Secret Service was incompetent, and now the Democrats and "Deep State" have decided not to let a crisis go to waste, to use a Rahm Emanuel phrase that Republicans love to throw back in Democrats' faces.

All of this will come into play if Kamala Harris wins the presidential election in November.

We know Republicans will say the election is rigged. But not all of them will say that undocumented immigrants voted and fake ballots were fed into the drop-off boxes and ballot readers. Recall that after the 2020 election, there was the crazy theory of election fraud -- the things Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell said -- and the "polite" theory, which, after 2020, was advanced by commentators such as Mollie Hemingway in her book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. From the publisher's description of the book:

Big Tech, wielding unprecedented powers, vaporized dissent and erased damning reports about the Biden family's corruption. And Democratic operatives, exploiting a public health crisis, shamelessly manipulated the voting process itself. Silenced and subjected, the American people lost their faith in the system.

Republicans genuinely believe that the Hunter Biden story, if fully aired before Election Day 2020, would have thrown the election to Trump, and that accommodations for (understandably) COVID-fearful voters tipped the election to Joe Biden. But they didn't really get the "polite" stolen-election theory out there until it was too late. (Hemingway's book was published in October 2021.) This time, they'll want the "polite" version and the crackpot version out there simultaneously, while they still have time to overturn the election results.

So if Harris wins, they'll argue that discouraging Trump from holding outdoor rallies made a massive difference in the final vote, whether or not there was a Vast Liberal Conspiracy to shoot Trump in the first place. This will be one of many arguments they'll make, and it all might be enough to persude Trumpified election officials to refuse to certified a Harris victory.

I agree that the Secret Service ought to be able to protect Trump at an outdoor rally, but I don't understand why not having the option to do outdoor rallies would make any difference in his vote totals -- rally attendees are invariably superfans already, as are the people who watch the rallies on TV and online, and how many attendees or viewers care about the nature of the venues?

As for the "Democrats shot Trump" theory, let's ignore the fact that Democrats aren't psychopaths and ask why it would be to their advantage to do that. After the failed assassination attempt, the media was ready to declare Trump a demigod, a tough-as-nails American hero, which was entirely predictable. The shooting hasn't massively improved his standing in the polls, mostly because he's the same jerk he's always been, but it could have if he'd maintained a posture of humility. And if Trump had died? There would have been a huge outpouring of sympathy for the GOP, and the replacement candidate might well have been Nikki Haley, who led Biden by 9 in a March New York Times poll, and by 16 in a February poll from Marquette. Why would Democrats want that?

In the next few months, Republicans will describe everything they possibly can as election interference. Let's hope the guardrails hold.

THE BROS THINK WE NEED THEIR HELP TO UNDERSTAND WHAT WE WANT

Many pundits are sad today because the Democratic Party won't have a mini-primary to choose Joe Biden's replacement on the presidential ticket. But how do Democrats feel? Morning Consult has done some polling:

A Morning Consult survey conducted after President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign found that 65% of Democratic voters support Harris to lead the party’s ticket, more than double the level of support she had in a hypothetical look at the same question late last month following the first presidential debate.

As has Quinnipiac:

Democrats and Democratic leaning voters were given a list of 10 names of possible Democratic candidates for president instead of Joe Biden and asked who they would most like to see win the Democratic nomination for president.

Vice President Kamala Harris tops the list with 45 percent support, California Governor Gavin Newsom receives 12 percent support, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg receives 11 percent support, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer receives 7 percent support, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear each receive 4 percent support, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly receives 3 percent support, and Maryland Governor Wes Moore, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, and Colorado Governor Jared Polis each receive 1 percent support.

Those are blowout numbers, as is this:

Vice President Kamala Harris raised $81 million in the first 24 hours since announcing her bid for president, her campaign said, a record-breaking showing as Democrats welcomed her candidacy with one of the greatest gushers of cash of all time.

See also this:

Future Forward, the flagship super PAC blessed by President JOE BIDEN, received $150 million in new commitments from major Democratic donors in the 24 hours since the president announced he would step aside from the race, Elena Schneider reports.

The fundraising boon ... gives VP KAMALA HARRIS, Biden’s endorsed successor, an enormous boost as the Democratic Party reorients to a new nominee.

Sounds as if Democrats are very satisfied with Harris as the candidate. And that should be no surprise. Go to FiveThirtyEight's collection of 2024 Democratic primary polls. When you get to the bottom of the list, keep clicking "Show more polls." Long before Biden dropped out, in every national poll that asked respondents about a field without Joe Biden, Kamala Harris won, usually by double digits. When Harris's lead was only in single digits, it was because her closest rival was Michelle Obama, who has made it clear she'll never run for office.

Here are three typical polls, all posted on one day late last month (click to enlarge):

Survey USA: Harris by 27 over a field including Newsom, Buttigieg, Whitmer, Shapiro, and Wes Moore. Morning Consult: Harris by 10 over a field including Newsom, Buttigieg, Whitmer, Moore, Beshear, Cooper, Pritzker, and Moore. Data for Progress: Harris by 21 over a field including Newsom, Buttigieg, Whitmer, Pritzker, Shapiro, Cory Booker, and Amy Klobuchar.

In a field without Biden, Kamala Harris is the Democrats' consensus choice. Kamala Harris has always been the Democrats' consensus choice.

But bros like Ezra Klein aren't satisfied. They still think we Democrats don't know what we want, and need to have a bro-devised process to help focus our tiny minds:

I think there’s a middle path here that Democrats should consider. None of the top-tier candidates are going to challenge Harris for the nomination. But what about some second- or third-tier candidates? Let a few up-and-comers make their case against Donald Trump. Let’s see some CNN town halls, some multicandidate forums. Nobody is going to go negative on each other here. Give the country a reason to watch a lineup of young Democrats, most of all Harris, make their cases against Trump day after day for the next few weeks.

Think of it not as a contest. Think of it as an exhibition. Maybe the people who’ve endorsed Harris can participate, too. She’s going to need a vice president. So maybe Gretchen Whitmer and Shapiro and Kelly and Beshear should be up there, too.... Maybe a little strategic ambiguity about what these candidate forums and voter town halls are would be good.

Harris vs. "some second- or third-tier candidates"? You mean the way Joe Biden ran against Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson? We all derived a great deal of civic nourishment from that process, didn't we?

And what does Klein mean when he writes, "Think of it not as a contest. Think of it as an exhibition," and then "Maybe a little strategic ambiguity about what these candidate forums and voter town halls are would be good"? Beyond the obvious (We can't allow you simple folk to know what your big-brained betters are doing), is Klein arguing that this will be described as an exhibition but will actually be a contest, because donors who want another candidate will urge writers like Klein to magnify any Harris slip-ups and promote a donor-friendly alternative?

Klein goes on to say nice things about Harris, and says she'd almost certainly emerge from his process as the nominee. (Though you never know -- he writes, "If she really isn’t up to it, [Democrats] need to know that now.") He describes this as good publicity for the party (though I'd remind him that a few excellent speeches by the presumptive nominee would also be good for the party, especially if other party stars show up in support of her).

But it's clear that if you're happy about the party's consolidation around Harris, Ezra Klein thinks you're uninformed and need educating. I worry that patronizing bros like this -- and not just the ones in the media -- will choose not to vote for Harris, 'cuz she's a girl and a bunch of girls and girlymen decided to make her the nominee by acclamation, without contests and brackets and March Madness and a Final Four. We need to outvote Republicans, but we may also need to outvote America's Ezra Kleins.

THIS IS GOOD, AND IT'S BEING DONE RIGHT

In the comments to the previous post, I'm seeing some dismay about what just happened. I'm normally the doom-and-gloom guy, but I'm optimistic.

One reason I'm optimistic is that the Democratic response to Joe Biden's withdrawal from the race is exactly what I've wanted from the party for the past three and a half weeks. Democrats suddenly seem decisive. They seem ready to end the drama immediately. I'm heartened that so many Democrats rapidly coalesced around Kamala Harris after Biden's endorsement, everyone from Bill and Hillary Clinton to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to all fifty state party chairs. (Shame on Barack Obama for holding out, but his donor-fueled wish for an open contest is out of step with the majority of the party, and won't be relevant.) This is a party that seems ready to move forward, after weeks of spinning its wheels. I'm not surprised that Biden dropped out, but I'm pleasantly surprised that Democrats knew how to manage the transition.

And it's clear to me that this is good because so many Democratic voters are suddenly hopeful. It's being reported that the Harris campaign received $70 million in small-dollar donations as of 1:00 A.M. This excitement could be contagious. It could spread to swing voters. The polls mostly say that Harris does no better against Donald Trump than Biden does, but that could change, at least momentarily, because of this excitement. After that, Harris will have to grind out a win. But Biden seemed to have no potential for improvement -- voters knew him and Trump, and nothing seemed to change their opinions of either. But while there's absolutely a chance that voters will sour on Harris after this moment, she has the potential to build on her base of support, in a way that Biden couldn't.

It's been impossible for me to ignore the frustration of some voters who are either anti-Trump or gettable, like the guy I saw on the Upper West Side of Manhattan a week or so ago who was wearing an ANYONE UNDER 80 / 2024 T-shirt. (Yes, I know -- Trump is barely under eighty. But I assume anyone who wears this shirt doesn't know that.)

Then there's Lauren Hough, the author of the memoir Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing. She's a military veteran, a lesbian, a former bartender, bouncer, and cable installer, a victim of childhood sexual abuse. She's a writer now, but she's not highly educated or credentialed. She lives in Austin and hangs out with musicians and barflies, not elitists. She's in her forties. She loathes Trump. This was her take a couple of days ago:

I see a lot of younger people who just can't believe Democrats were going to go trhrough with a Biden candidacy. Rightly or wrongly, they saw Biden as self-evidently unable to do the job. Here's Kat Abughazaleh, a twentysomething former Media Matters writer who makes anti-Fox, anti-GOP, and anti-Religious Right videos. She posted this just after the June 27 debate:

Like many people who watched last night's debate, I have one question for Democrats: What the hell do you think you're doing? Now, before anyone attacks me for helping Trump or sabotaging the Democrats, I'd like to say I'm making this video because I want the Democrats to win. I care a lot more about that than preserving tradition. At some point, liberal politicos decided that seniority and decorum matter more than actually winning races and passing bills. We as voters deserve better. And it's not like the DNC is some helpless baby. They could have had an actual primary with actual candidates. And they should have. A lot of us voted for Joe Biden expecting him to be a one-term president. But then he changed his mind. So we all have to deal with the consequences to prop up the ego of an 80-year-old man.

This is harsh, but it's a perspective shared by many people under the age of fifty -- and I mean people who hate Trump and want him gone forever. Biden and the rest of the Democratic Party were at risk of losing these voters this year. They weren't winning them back. And now these voters are gettable again.

I don't share the perspective of some Democrats I've encountered on social media who seem to think the election is already won. Harris is not an Obama-level political talent. America is sexist and racist. Republicans and the Republican-dominated courts could make trouble for Democrats. (I don't believe the courts will knock her off the ballot -- they know that making it impossible for a major party's candidate to run would be taking us into Putin territory, and I think they still want to seem as if they're operating withing the guardrails. On the other hand, I could imagine the courts ruling that Harris can't use money collected by the Biden-Harris campaign, even though her right to use that money seems to be a matter of settle campaign finance law.) Nevertheless, I feel hopeful. Millions of voters hated the choice they had, and now one party has responded to that frustration. That should count for a lot.

IF WE HAVE TO TALK ABOUT WEST WING FANTASIES, HERE'S MINE (with a Biden-withdrawal postscript)

The editors of the New York Times opinion section are undoubtedly aware that many Democrats regard the various replace-Joe-Biden scenarios as "West Wing fantasies," so they decided to troll these Democrats by commissioning Aaron Sorkin to devise a resolution for the party's current crisis, in the manner of the West Wing scripts he used to write. You can probably guess what Sorkin proposes:

... there’s something the Democrats can do that would not just put a lump in people’s throats with its appeal to stop-Donald-Trump-at-all-costs unity, but with its originality and sense of sacrifice. So here’s my pitch to the writers’ room: The Democratic Party should pick a Republican.

At their convention next month, the Democrats should nominate Mitt Romney.

Of course.

Sorkin knows that Romney doesn't support any of the policies that matter most to Democratic voters:

Does Mr. Romney support abortion rights? No. Does he want to aggressively raise the minimum wage, bolster public education, strengthen unions, expand transgender rights and enact progressive tax reform? Probably not.

Would Aaron Sorkin personally benefit from any of these policies? Of course not. So he doesn't care, and, because he's a narcissist like most successful people in this society, he thinks rank-and-file voters don't care about anything he doesn't care about.

Sorkin writes:

But is [Romney] a cartoon thug who did nothing but watch TV while the mob he assembled beat and used Tasers on police officers? No. The choice is between Donald Trump and not-Trump, and the not-Trump candidate needs only one qualification: to win enough votes from a cross section of Americans to close off the former president’s Electoral College path back to power.

Democrats have overperformed in off-year elections since the Dobbs decision, Democrats running in close Senate races are outpolling their Republican opponents, Democrats -- as Sorkin himself notes later in the piece -- have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections, and yet his idea of a candidate who can "win enough votes from a cross section of Americans" is, naturally, a Republican. And not only a Republican, but a Republican who's run for president twice and lost both times.

Which is not to say that Republicans are entirely useless. I'll get grief for this from "burn the lifeboats" Democrats, but let me present you with my best-received post at Bluesky:

I know I'm supposed to hate the Never Trumpers for their past sins, but people like Rick Wilson, Michael Steele, and now David Frum think Democrats could win this race. Imagine if a few actual Democratic operatives and pundits felt that way. (Gift link.) www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

[image or embed]

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) Jul 19, 2024 at 1:35 PM

My West Wing fantasy isn't that Democrats pick a Republican candidate -- it's Democrats hiring some Republican operatives. Not for the policies, or the morally dubious tactics -- it's clear that Democrats need an infusion of people who don't hate themselves. When things go wrong in the GOP, Republicans don't decide that the public hates their party, and they certainly don't go running to every A-list reporter they know and say, "Wow, our party really blows, doesn't it?" They don't incessantly apologize for who they are. They don't engage in circular firing squads.

In my West Wing fantasy -- I hope this is gee-whizzy enough for Aaron Sorkin -- the Democratic presidential campaign hires a young operative who's concealing the fact that much of her past experience was working for Republicans. When her background is discovered, her bosses decide to fire her. Then she says something like this:

I know that what I did was completely unprofessional, but I just want to say one thing:

You need people like me.

Do you know what I learned when I was working for the other party? I learned that you don't win if you hate the people on your own side. I learned that when things are going right, you go on offense, and when things are going wrong, you go on offense. Here's what I never learned: I never learned that it was a good idea to tell a high-level reporter that your candidate is bad. I never learned that it was a good idea to criticize your own party's policies. I never learned those things, and because Republicans don't do those things, they win elections they shouldn't win. They win even though most Americans think they're wrong on abortion and wrong on guns and wrong on how much you should tax rich people. They won in 2016 with an ignorant, congenitally lying criminal and sex addict at the top of the ticket.

You can win with a flawed candidate if your people just shut the hell up and all row in the same direction. That's a lesson this party needs to learn.

That's my fantasy. Sadly, I think Democrats are more likely to actually put a Republican at the top of the ticket than they are to learn -- from disaffected Republicans or, even better, from people on their own side -- that they should not criticize their party publicly, should not undermine their nominee publicly, and should resolve internal fights swiftly and privately while focusing on promoting Democratic policies and criticizing Republican extremism. Couldn't there be a Democratic Party like this? Or is that just a fantasy?

*****

POSTSCRIPT: Well, this one was overtaken by events almost immediately -- President Biden has withdrawn from the race (but won't resign as president -- and he shouldn't). He subsequently endorsed Kamala Harris as the replacement candidate.

Republicans would know what to do in this situation: They'd rally around Harris and talk her up as an amazing candidate. Will Democrats do that? Or will some demand an open convention, while others grumble about whatever process is used to make the transition? I assume the latter, sadly. We'll see.

DEMOCRATS, STICK TOGETHER FOR ONCE AND TELL "BIDEN MUST RESIGN" REPUBLICANS TO STFU

I'm pleased to see the CNN headline "Democratic Consensus Solidifies Around Harris, Should Biden Step Aside" -- if President Biden does end his campaign, Democrats should finally, finally unify around a single alternative and get back to the critically necessary work of reminding voters what a horrorshow a Donald Trump presidency would be.

But here's a potential hitch, though it will be one only if Democrats allow it to be:

As Democrats clash over whether President Biden can win in November, Republicans are saying dropping his bid is not enough — that Biden is mentally unfit to run the country another six months.

... Republicans are laying the groundwork to pressure him to resign from office.

"Everyone calling on Joe Biden to *stop running* without also calling on him to resign the presidency is engaged in an absurd level of cynicism," Trump's running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) posted on Saturday.

Vance added:

If Joe Biden doesn't have the cognitive function to run for re-election, then he certainly doesn't have the cognitive function to remain as Commander-In-Chief.

How can any Dem pushing him to drop out of the presidential race, argue in good faith that he should stay on as POTUS?

— JD Vance (@JDVance1) July 19, 2024

This is being echoed by useful idiots such as Brian Stelter and the usually astute Daniel Drezner.

If Biden withdraws from the race, Democrats need to unite around the message that he is highly capable of serving as president for the next six months. And they should use this as an opportunity to call Republicans on their bad-faith arguments.

Earlier this month, I told you why Biden shouldn't resign: If Harris were to become president this year as well as the Democratic presidential candidate, she would need to choose not only a running mate (a choice that's entirely up to her and her party), but also a vice president to serve the last few months of the term. It could be the same person, but it doesn't have to be. Republicans will pounce on the replacement-VP choice as an opportunity to own Harris and the libs. They'll either refuse to approve her choice or hold star-chamber hearings, probably chaired by a sociopathic extremist like Jim Jordan, in which literally anyone she's chosen will be portrayed as worse for America than Osama bin Laden. Both houses of Congress need to approve the replacement VP. Every Republican in the GOP-controlled House will vote no, just to make Harris look weak, at a time when she's fighting to be a credible presidential candidate.

And then there'll be no vice president in the event Harris wins the presidential election, which means no vice president (acting as president of the Senate) to count the electoral votes on January 6, 2025. If it's a Democratic victory, it's likely to be a close one, and it will be fiercely disputed by the GOP. Who will act as president of the Senate if there's no VP? The new Senate will have been sworn in by then -- that happens on January 3, before the electoral vote count, and seventeen days before the president is inaugurated. If Republicans have the majority in the new Senate, they'll designate the president pro tem -- presumably the senior-most Republican, Chuck Grassley -- to preside. Will he ratify a Democratic victory that's being actively disputed by Republicans? Of course he won't.

That's why Biden shouldn't resign. Now, here's how Democrats should respond to arguments for his resignation.

They should insist that Biden has the physical capacity, the mental astuteness, and the moral judgment to be president for the remainder of his term. (They should absolutely refer to moral judgment -- why not use this as an opportunity to go on offense against Trump?) If they want to concede that Biden sometimes has difficulty summoning up words, they should say that nevertheless he's crystal clear on the issues he's dealing with.

They can argue that he recognizes that he might not have the energy to swerve as president and run for reelection, which are two full-time jobs, so he's making the job of president a priority. And they can argue that Vance, who's not even forty, has no understanding of the wisdom that comes from experience. Vance has never worked long enough to develop expertise at anything in his life -- he's gone from the military to law school to venture capital to a vague nonprofit to a career in politics, and now he thinks he can tell someone who's devoted decades to serving this country that he knows who has the ability to be president. Who does he think he is?

Democrats don't need to take my advice, but they should close ranks around Biden and insist that he has no reason to leave office. And they should remind the public of what Republicans did to Merrick Garland in 2016, and say that Republicans want the opportunity to do the same thing to Kamala Harris when she chooses a vice president to serve oyut the term. For once, Democrats should call Republicans act on their habitual bad faith. They should say that Republicans are certain to act in a nakedly politcal way because they'd rather deal Democrats a defeat than be civic-minded.

Democrats probably won't do this, of course. They don't play hardball this way. But I can dream.

HE MOVED ON COREY COMPERATORE'S UNIFORM LIKE A BITCH

I watched only portions of Donald Trump's speech last night. According to the stories I'm reading, the second part of the speech was was nasty and boring -- I caught some of that, and it was -- but the first part was moving, healing, and unifying.

The "new" Donald Trump soothed and silenced the nation for 28 minutes last night. Then the old Trump returned and bellowed, barked and bored America for 64 minutes more.

But that supposedly soothing portion of the speech climaxed -- if that's the right word -- with the bloody-shirt moment when the uniform of Casey Comperatore, the firefighter who was killed in the attempted assassination of Trump, was displayed onstage. First Trump pointed to it as if we were in the 1980s again and he was showing off the scale model of a proposed building project.

Then he shuffled over and gave Comperatore's helmet a kiss, after which he stood over the uniform and pointed at it again, as if to say, "See this? This is mine."



As a nation, we've just accepted the fact that Trump literally hugs and kisses flags -- I know that liberals find this repellent, but the rest of the culture seems to just shrug and say, "Well, he's just displaying his patriotism." It's weird, and Trump kissing the helmet last night was weird. More people need to say that.

And we should tie it to what was, if only briefly, the lowest moment in Trump's political career: the release of the Access Hollywood tape.

I moved on her like a bitch....

You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful... I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything.

That's what he's doing to the flags. That's what he did to the uniform. That's what he did to E. Jean Carroll. Sex and possessiveness. And then he brags. And America just lets him do it.

YOU'RE NOT SUPERMAN IF YOU SURVIVE BEING GRAZED ON THE EAR

I don't think the events of recent weeks -- President Biden's bad debate, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the president's COVID diagnosis -- were fatal blows for Democrats. Prior to these events, I thought Biden was trailing in the polls, and I hoped for a much better few weeks than we've had, because I thought he needed a boost to win. But the polls don't show Biden's numbers significantly worsening.

What I think might be dooming Democrats is the reaction to these events -- first, the weeks-long, very public undermining of Biden (and, to a lesser extent, Vice President Harris) by fellow Democrats and Democratic donors, and now the media's pro-Trump mythmaking. One example is CNN's Van Jones saying this:

But today is a terrible day. If you pull back and look at this thing – strength versus weakness – a bullet couldn’t stop Trump, a virus just stopped Biden.

Jones's words are echoed by Shane Goldmacher and Lisa Lerer in The New York Times:

An extraordinary three weeks in American politics took another surprise turn, after the White House announced on Wednesday that Mr. Biden had contracted Covid, forcing the president into physical isolation just as his presidential candidacy hung in the balance....

For a fleeting few hours on Wednesday, the two presidents presented starkly dueling images that fed into the very story line Republicans were unspooling at their convention — that Mr. Trump was strong and Mr. Biden was weak. One was flying to his beach house on Air Force One to enter seclusion as his party fractured around him; the other was welcomed as a wounded hero by thousands of cheering supporters, some of whom bandaged their ears in a show of solidarity.

Here's a simple statement of fact: Most people would have survived Trump's wound. Joe Biden would have survived Trump's wound. If Biden had experienced that kind of graze wound, he would have been walking around the next day with a bandage on his ear. (And the Republicans who are treating Trump's bandage as if it's a holy talisman would be mocking Biden's bandage. We all remember how they questioned the severity of the wounds that won John Kerry three Purple Hearts by wearing "Purple Heart Band-Aids" at the 2004 Republican convention. The wound that won Kerry his first Purple Heart was minor, but the wounds that led to his second and third Purple Hearts were much more significant than the one Trump suffered.)

And Biden is very likely to survive COVID. He disembarked from Air Force One unaided. We don't know how Trump would respond to COVID now, though we know he barely survived his 2020 bout. I don't recall anyone in the media arguing in 2020 that Trump's COVID was a metaphor for his weakness.

Many liberals believe that the mainstream media valorizes Trump because media owners, being wealthy, want him to win. I think that's a factor -- but I think many reporters, especially male reporters, are responding to something more visceral in Trump's stagecraft and showmanship. He carries himself like a Big Man on Campus. He's the alpha jock, and betas bend to his will. I think many male reporters were high school nerds who internalized hatred of themselves and admiration of big dumb jocks like Trump.

Trump isn't a smart man, but he knows how to manipulate people who thrill to the sight of an alpha beating his chest. When he got home from the hospital after being treated for COVID, he went straight to a balcony and melodramatically removed his mask. A few seconds after the shooting, he pumped his fist and repeatedly said, "Fight! Fight!" (no link needed, obviously -- we've all seen this way too often). We don't have any evidence that a broad cross-section of voters respond to this -- all Republicans seem to, as do some men who are outside the GOP's usual base. On the other hand, it's repellent to people who hate macho posturing.

But there don't seem to be very many haters of macho posturing in the mainstream media. Mainstream reporters see the world in terms of alphas and betas. Democrats were fortunate in 1992 and 2008 to pick nominees who could satisfy this media craving. But Republicans are satisfying it now.

THE NEW YORK TIMES INVENTS A GOP CRISIS SO IT CAN CREDIT TRUMP WITH ENDING IT

Lead story at the New York Times website right now:

For eight chaotic years, Republicans battled in public and private, fighting over Donald J. Trump’s polarizing personality, his divisive policies and his history of electoral defeats through lawsuits and leadership battles, felony convictions and suburban defections.

Yet even before a single balloon has dropped at their national convention this week, Republicans have united — seemingly without reservation — behind the man and his message.

Republicans have been fighting one another over Trump for eight years? Seriously?

Lisa Lerer and Rebecca Davis O’Brien, the authors of this piece, aren't the only people writing for the Times today who think there are divisions within the GOP. In a naive Times op-ed, Chris Christie asks whether Trump can "meet the moment" with a message of unity and healing. Christie is skeptical, which is to his credit, but one way he expresses that skepticism is by criticizing Trump choice of J.D. Vance as a running mate, a pick that "doubles down on the portion of the party already completely devoted to him rather than reaches out to the broader party and beyond."

But there is no "broader party." I know Christie kept telling us during the runup to the Republican primaries that he was going to get Trump into a debate and flatten him with the mighty power of his rhetoric, after which the party's voters would break free of Trump's spell. But he never got the chance, he had no Plan B, and even if Trump had deigned to debate him, he just would have called Christie fat and doubled his lead over him in the polls.

Of the current completely predictable moment of unity, Lerer and O'Brien write:

It is a party-wide evolution that would have been difficult to envision ... as recently as this spring, when the party was recovering from a bruising primary contest and the serial humiliations of a dysfunctional House majority that struggled to select its own leadership. Then, Mr. Trump was a liability and not the party’s great unifier.

But it wasn't a bruising primary contest. The party's top bruiser, Donald Trump, didn't even debate. Then he won contest after contest effortlessly. Sure, a segment of the primary electorate voted against him, but as I noted during the primaries, many of those anti-Trump primary voters were people who didn't vote for Trump in the 2020 general election. And while there may have been leadership battles in the House, no anti-Trump wing ever emerged.

There is no such wing. The anti-Trumpers have been purged. Whatever disagreements Republicans have, they have been united for years on two things: the belief that Democrats and liberals are an existential threat to all that is good and decent, and the willingness to rally around Trump.

Lerer and O'Brien write:

Speaker after speaker on Tuesday bent their knees, offering tribute to a man who had once insulted them, belittled them and, eventually, defeated them.

This is one of the oldest rituals in Trumpdom. The Lindsey Graham-ing of onetime doubters is now so routine, and so reliably successful, that Trump felt safe picking a former apostate as his running mate. Trump knows he can turn every GOP critics into either an exile or a supplicant for life.

We're frequently told that many Republicans secretly despise Trump. But they're Republicans, not Democrats, so they won't lower their odds of winning by fighting with one another during a campaign. Even the ones who don't have a bone-deep loyalty to Trump have a strong loyalty to their own party. Democrats could learn something from them.

A BOOTLICKER CHOOSES A BOOTLICKER

New York magazine has a piece on Donald Trump's choice of J.D. Vance as a running mate titled "The Billioniaire and the Bootlicker." You can question whether Trump is a billionaire (Forbes still thinks he is), but there's no question that Vance is a bootlicker.

And not just of Trump -- Vance is a serial bootlicker. In 2016, when he wrote all those anti-Trump tweets, he undoubtedly thought he was ingratiating himself with the wing of the Republican Party that would emerge triumphant from the 2016 presidential election, because surely Trump couldn't win. That was just before Vance's move back to Ohio, which, to some of us, was an obvious sign that he was planning to run for office. By 2021, when he was on the verge of a Senate run, he went to Mar-a-Lago and kissed Trump's ring. And prior to all of this, he ingratiated himself with crackpot tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who'd go on to put massive amounts of money into his campaign. Before that, he insinuated himself into the Yale Law circle dominated by the politically connected Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld. If a high-powered person's boots need licking anywhere, Vance is your guy.

But the New York magazine headline implies that Trump is a pure alpha for whom bootlicking goes only one way. That's not really true. Here's a Politico headline from last month:

Trump keeps flip-flopping his policy positions after meeting with rich people

Examples:

Donald Trump privately hinted at a shift in immigration policy at a Business Roundtable meeting last week. He told the group “we need brilliant people” in this country, according to one of the attendees, who was granted anonymity to describe a private meeting. And when he talked about finding ways to keep American-educated talent at home, some top CEOs, like Apple’s Tim Cook, were seen nodding their heads.

The public move came a week later: On “The All-In Podcast” on Thursday, Trump said foreign nationals who graduate from U.S. colleges and universities should “automatically” be given a green card upon graduation.

... Trump’s pivot on immigration followed his reversal on TikTok, embracing an app he once tried to ban, and his shift on cryptocurrency.

... there is ... plainly a pattern of Trump aligning his political stances with the views of wealthy donors and business interests.

Trump chose Elon Musk's preferred vice presidential candidate, and what do you know:

Elon Musk has said he is planning to pledge about $45 million a month to a newly formed super PAC backing former President Donald Trump’s White House bid, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday....

Trump is even licking the boots of an opposition candidate:

In a leaked video of Trump’s call w/ RFK Jr., Trump says he agrees w/ his anti-vax activism.

“I agree with you, man. Something's wrong with that whole system...you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically. I've seen it too many times." pic.twitter.com/mmZkx7c9OW

— Vera Bergengruen (@VeraMBergen) July 16, 2024

What does Trump want? Kennedy's votes, obviously -- and possibly also Kennedy's running mate's money.

Even before the 2024 race started, Trump liked licking dictators' boots, as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un know. Trump even seems to like licking the boots of the "fake news" media. It's hard to read about Trump's 2020 discussion of COVID with Bob Woodward, for instance, without concluding that the most powerful man in the world was trying to impress the aging, past-his-prime journalist. See also Trump and Maggie Haberman.

So Trump was pleased when J.D. Vance prostrated himself before him. But in a way, they're two of a kind.

J.D. VANCE PROBABLY HATES YOU MORE THAN TRUMP DOES

Donald Trump has chosen J.D. Vance as his running mate. At a moment when Republicans say they're seeking "national unity," I want to remind you that J.D. Vance hates many, many people and is proud to say so. Vance is not like Donald Trump, whose expressions of hatred are sometimes just theater. It's clear that Vance is an angry, nasty person whose contempt for the people he doesn't like is bone deep.

Remember his 2022 Senate campaign, when he called Vice President Harris and others "childless cat ladies"?

Vance ... for a solid week in July kept using the term “childless” in an effort to insult his foes on the left.

“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” Vance told Tucker Carlson at the time.

As examples of childless cat ladies, Vance pointed to Vice President Kamala Harris (who has stepchildren); progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the youngest woman in Congress; and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who announced a month later he and his husband had adopted infant twins.

The reference to Buttigieg is a cat lady is also homophobic, though Vance has also used the term to refer to heterosexually married economist and commentator Paul Krugman:

Paul Krugman is one of many weird cat ladies who have too much power in our country. We should change this. https://t.co/uylzHsm6WT

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) July 25, 2021

Of course, Vance thinks all Democrats are "scumbags," as he told us when he accepted Marjorie Taylor Greene's endorsement in his Senate race:

Honored to have Marjorie’s endorsement. We’re going to win this thing and take the country back from the scumbags. https://t.co/tKFWOvRvq3

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) January 25, 2022

In a 2021 speech to the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, Vance implied that he wants to have a shooting war with liberals:

It may not be as bad as it was in the 1860s, but we’re all going through a fiery trial. The people in this room are the people who are going to be at the vanguard of the conservative movement that actually fights back against our enemies instead of just taking it. Because if our enemies are using guns and bazookas, we damn well better fight back with more than wet noodles. We need to use the same means if we’re actually going to win this fight. And I’m not in this to lose, I’m in this to win.

Am I misreading what Vance said? All I can tell you is that if President Biden's post-debate statement that "It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye" is being taken as a literal call for violence, then this Vance speech should be read the same way.

Vance also thought the tragic shooting on the set of the film Rust was hilarious. The day after the shooting, at a time when Jack Dorsey was still the CEO of Twitter, Vance thought it would be delightful for Trump to be back on the site so he could make tasteless jokes about the death, because Vance is a Republican, and Republicans hate Alec Baldwin, who's a Democrat:

Dear @jack let Trump back on. We need Alec Baldwin tweets.

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) October 22, 2021

And let's not forget Vance's assertion in 2021 that even domestic abuse victims shouldn't be able to get no-fault divorces:

The Ohio Republican Senate nominee, talking to Pacifica Christian High School in Southern California ... gave an extended answer that claimed that people now “shift spouses like they change their underwear,” and that it had done long-term damage to a generation of children.

“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term,’” Vance said.

“And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages,” Vance continued. “And that’s what I think all of us should be honest about, is we’ve run this experiment in real time. And what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy.”

Yes, Vance believes it's not good for the children of abused spouses if the abuse victims exit the marriages.

Now that Trump has chosen Vance, I expect Democrats to focus on the mean tweets Vance posted about Trump before he became a Trump fan. I don't see the point -- politcians (and non-politicians) change their minds about people all the time. Kamala Harris said harsh things about Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign. George H.W. Bush attacked Ronald Reagan's economic ideas in the 1980 campaign. I think it's more important for voters to know how much contempt Vance has for everyone who disagrees with him or does things he doesn't like. I have no kids, so he hates me. Maybe he hates you too.

THE DEATH OF AMERICA IS STEADY ROT

News I'm sure you know already:

A federal judge dismissed in its entirety the classified documents case against former President Donald J. Trump on Monday, ruling that the appointment of the special counsel, Jack Smith, had violated the Constitution.

In a stunning ruling, the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, found that because Mr. Smith had not been named to the post of special counsel by the president or confirmed by the Senate, his appointment was in violation of the appointments clause of the Constitution.

The ruling by Judge Cannon, who was put on the bench by Mr. Trump, flew in the face of previous court decisions reaching back to the Watergate era that upheld the legality of the ways in which independent prosecutors have been named.

We think we'll lose democracy and the rule of law suddenly if Donald Trump becomes president again. We think the edifice will be destroyed like the Twin Towers on 9/11: the planes hit the buildings, and without hours they collapsed in on themselves.

But our system is like a house that's rotting room by room. The foundation has cracks. There are termites. The roof leaks. One room after another has become uninhabitable.

We've lost the federal courts. The would-be murderers of America already have the federal bench they need to sustain the horrible America they want. A second Trump presidency won't really worsen the federal bench -- it will only fix it in place in its current form for several more decades. I'm 65, and I'll never live to see a federal bench that isn't an extremist Republican legislature in robes.

Through gerrymandering, we lost democracy in many state legislatures years ago. In states like North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Texas, liberals and moderates add up to more than 45% of the electorate and have exactly none of the legislative power, because of gerrymandering. This happened long before Trump and there were no "Death of Democracy" front-page headlines.

If Trump wins in November, he and the thugs of Project 2025 might take a wrecking ball to what's left of the house. But already several rooms are closed off. It's unsafe to live in them. And even if Trump loses, or wins and doesn't follow through with the worst ideas his backers have proposed, many rooms in the house will continue to rot.

FIRST THOUGHTS ON THE SHOOTING (updated)

Every rank-and-file Republican voter believes this was an assassination attempt ordered by President Biden. Trump will soon start pouring gasoline on the flames by stating this as if it's fact.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) Jul 13, 2024 at 8:31 PM

Trump will now say that if he's elected, he'll have Biden investigated for trying to have him murdered. I hope this will seem paranoid to at least some swing voters.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) Jul 13, 2024 at 8:35 PM

*****

UPDATE: Here we go. Trump-endorsed congressman from Georgia:

Also, this fucking guy:

Today is not just some isolated incident.

The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.

That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) July 14, 2024

They're not even waiting for Trump to pour the gasoline on the fire. They're doing it themselves. They're writing his future material for him.

I don't think this will resonate with anyone but the superfans. But it's ugly, and idiot mainstream reporters will probably ask Biden if he thinks he bears any responsibility for the shooting.

PROJECT 2025: THE GASLIGHTING IS WELL UNDERWAY

Hi -- I'm traveling tomorrow, and I may be on a somewhat lighter blogging schedule for the next two weeks. I'll try to weigh in on President Biden's Lester Holt interview and the Republican convention, but I may not manage my usual daily posting schedule. Or I might! Who knows?

For now, I want to point out that it's clear Republicans are worried about the possible impact of Project 2025 on the November election because right-wing meme creators are working extremely hard to portray anyone who warns about Project 2025 as a paranoid crank. Here are some of the memes that are circulating, courtesy of posts at Reddit's r/forwardsfromgrandma:

A couple more, though I'm sorry that the person who posted these put an X through them:

Brakey, a Maine state senator and self-proclaimned "Renegade Statesman" and "Liberty Populist," has more:

CONFIRMED: Project 2025 has a plan to submerge humans into underground vaults to conduct psychological experiments on those who survive total atomic annihilation in the upcoming nuclear war between the U.S., Russia, and China.

— Sen. Eric Brakey 🌲🦔 (@SenatorBrakey) July 13, 2024

CONFIRMED: Project 2025 includes a plan for the vampire Angelus to open the Hellmouth under Sunnydale, California and unleash a hell on earth for all eternity.

— Sen. Eric Brakey 🌲🦔 (@SenatorBrakey) July 13, 2024

If they feel the need to push back this hard, the attention critics have directed to Project 2025 must be having some impact. On the other hand, Bret Stephens, in his most recent column, assures us that Trump just isn't the kind of guy on whose watch Project 2025 could be implemented:

I have excluded from this essay some of the parade of horribles that Trump’s critics on the left expect from a second term, from anxieties about the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” scheme (which Trump has distanced himself from) to terror about the end of democracy itself. Those are fears I don’t share because, like many conservatives, I don’t think Trump is strong or smart enough to blow down the pillars of American institutional life.... I think those pillars will hold....

That plus the widely cited piece from The Dispatch ("Viral Claims About Project 2025 Are Mostly False") makes me wonder whether "Nothing to see here, move on" will become the standard elite-media message about Project 2025 -- which would be exactly the same message these meme makers are spreading.

FEAR THE ALL-POWERFUL LEFT!

The fever dreams of the propaganda-addled crazies at the Heritage Foundation are hilarious:

Barbra Streisand kidnapped by Hamas. Antifa-BLM protesters taking over a migrant detention facility. The FBI arresting Donald Trump two days after winning the election.

These were among the far-fetched scenarios imagined by a simulation of threats to the 2024 election showcased Thursday by the right-wing Heritage Foundation....

“As things stand right now, there’s a zero percent chance of a free and fair election,” said Mike Howell, executive director of Heritage’s Oversight Project.

Everyone knows these guys are nuts -- but what about serious, sober-sided Bret Stephens of the New York Times opinion section? Surely he wouldn't entertain any scenarios as nutty as these!

Actually, he would:

Imagine the following scenario: Trump is in the White House and decides to make good on his signature promise of mass deportation of migrants. Federal agents are deployed to towns and cities to do the job, but many of them flatly refuse to participate in what feels to them like a modern-day re-enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act. They are joined by Democratic mayors and hundreds of thousands of Americans who are willing to form human chains around homes and neighborhoods to keep the agents out. But Trump doesn’t back down, and governors in red states call out the National Guard to break through the protests. Many are hurt, some are killed, and riots ensue.

That’s the incendiary America we are likely to get again in a second Trump term, whether the match is lit by deportations, another incident of police brutality or something else. The right-wing fantasy of somehow shutting down the left won’t be met quietly.

Right-wingers really believe we take direct action at the drop of a hat, and are always ready to riot. It's as if even the brainier right-wingers have a Fox News B-roll clip of a Black Bloc knucklehead smashing the windows of a police car on auto-repeat in their heads.

Here's a partial list of things over the past decade that didn't lead to left-wing riots, or even to significant left-liberal protests:

* The blockade of Merrick Garland's Supreme Court appointment.
* Donald Trump's election (the protests didn't happen until the inauguration)
* Family separation
* Trump's response to Charlottesville
* The "Stop the Steal" campaign and January 6
* The Dobbs decision
* The banning of abortion in multiple states
* The busing of migrants to blue cities
* The revelations of profound corruption and ideological extremism at the Supreme Court
* Attacks on drag shows
* Attacks on librarians
* Attacks on trans care

And the list goes on. Even other high-profile police brutality incidents haven't sparked widespread demonstrations, much less riots. Apart from the war in Gaza, nothing has inspired a great deal of protest.

I wish Americans would take to the streets the way, say, Israelis have to protest Benjamin Netanyahu's attempt to neuter Israel's Supreme Court, or to protest his self-serving indifference to the plight of the hostages. U.S. unrest in 2020 was an anomaly.

Would we really put our bodies on the line for migrants? Remember, only a few of us tried to block evictions in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. I didn't. Did you?

The Stephens column is headlined "Republicans Will Regret a Second Trump Term." He also predicts Republican regret because he expects Democrats to do well downballot, which will lead to divided government (no tax cuts! no right-wing ideologues on the federal bench!) and lots of "executive actions of dubious legality." Actually, Democrats probably can't win more than 50 Senate seats, given the certainty of a GOP pickup in West Virginia, and that combined with a GOP vice president would give Republicans control of the Senate, which means every judicial pick will be rubber-stamped. But we can't expect New York Times op-ed columnists to understand the basic rules of American government, can we?

What Stephens argues is that Trump will be bad because Democrats and angry liberals/leftists will be empowered. So we're the problem, really. And it's all because we're so tirelessly activist at a grassroots level and make it so difficult for Republicans to govern when we have even the slightest amount of power in Washington. I don't believe this, but I really want to live in the fantasyland where it's true.

ARE BIDEN'S POLL NUMBERS IMPERVIOUS TO BAD NEWS, LIKE TRUMP'S?

For months, I've been arguing that bad news for Donald Trump -- civil judgments against him, a felony conviction -- might not have an impact on the presidential race. I haven't been sure why that would be the case. Is it because Trump's trials haven't been televised? Is it because he hasn't been tried on the most serious charges against him? Is it because of pro-Trump media bias? Or is it because swing voters already think Trump is a criminal, and factored that into their candidate choice long ago? Some have decided it's a dealbreaker, but some clearly haven't. Whatever the reason, nothing that happened to Trump in court over the past year seems to have changed the race.

I'm starting to believe that Joe Biden's age is having the same impact -- or lack of impact -- on swing voters' candidate choices:

The race for the presidency remains statistically tied despite President Biden’s dismal debate performance two weeks ago, a new national NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll finds.

Biden actually gained a point since last month’s survey, which was taken before the debate. In this poll, he leads Trump 50% to 48% in a head-to-head matchup. But Biden slips when third-party options are introduced, with Trump holding the slightest advantage with 43% to 42%.

Those numbers, though, do not represent statistically significant differences, as the margin of error in the survey is +/- 3.1 percentage points, meaning results could be 3 points higher or lower.

Last week we had Biden gaining slightly in a Bloomberg/Morning Consult tracking poll of battleground states. This week, an Emerson College poll had Biden and Trump at 50% each in a head-to-head matchup when leaners were asked to make a choice. It seems as if swing voters either aren't paying attention to Biden's public appearances or haven't seen Biden do anything in recent weeks that surprises them.

FiveThirtyEight's polling average has barely moved since the debate:

The stagnancy of the race isn't great -- Biden was expected to win the 2020 popular vote by 7 points in 2020; then he won by only 4 points and barely scored a victory in the Electoral College. I've been arguing that he needs a big poll lead in order to win the Electoral College this year. (This year, he might need much more decisive victories in swing states, because Trumpified election officials could refuse to certify results that favor him.)

But Biden's argument is that pollsters have underestimated Democrats in post-Dobbs elections, that the Democratic base now consists of more reliable voters than the Republican base, and that opponents of right-wing extremism have recently beaten the polls in countries such as France and Iran.

I'm not sure he's right -- but I'm also not sure any other candidate would improve on his numbers. I think an alternate candidate would have room to grow, but would also be subject to fresh-sounding attacks that might penetrate the consciousness of swing voters.

There's no widely loved candidate waiting in the wings. Harris could spend Biden's accumulated money and might now be receiving a renewed amount of goodwill. Other candidates might please wealthy donors and well-connected podcasters more than the rank-and-file. Advocates of an open process think it will feel democratic and inclusive and will inspire voters, but ordinary primaries often leave many voters disgruntled. I don't think a repeat of the punishing 2016 primaries is inevitable, but that year is a reminder that voters don't always emerge from primaries agreeing that the process was inspiring and fair.

I say coalesce around either Biden or Harris and move on. I've been pessimistic about Biden's chances for months, but I don't think he's any less likely to win than he was before June 27.