When Lenny Bruce did his first comedy show after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the first words out of his mouth were: "Poor Vaughn Meader!" Meader was a comic who had impersonated Kennedy on an album called The First Family, which went to #1 on the Billboard chart and sold more than seven million copies. A sequel, The First Family, Volume Two, was released a few months before the assassination. Meader was a huge star while Kennedy was alive, but now his career was effectively over.
Donald Trump's obvious distress at no longer having Joe Biden to run against reminds me of that. Poor Trump! He has all this great material about Biden and he can't use it now -- except he's still trying to use it:
Trump polls his Montana audience on which attack line he should use on Joe Biden, who he’s no longer running against pic.twitter.com/IgW8d38cgR
I don't think Trump is just trying to stir the pot. I think Trump -- a lifelong believer in Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking -- is also comforting himself with this scenario. I'm not sure he thinks it's possible, but he wants to believe it's possible. Hey, it's what he'd do if he were in Biden's position.
In Thursday's Mar-a-Lago news conference, Trump said that "the presidency was taken away" from Biden (even though Biden is still president, though I'm not sure Trump realizes that, because he knows so little about how the government works).
And last night in Montana, he was still complaining about the Democratic swap and predicting that Biden will bum-rush the Democratic convention:
Trump calls the swap "unconstitutional" (the Constitution says nothing about how parties pick candidates) and a "coup." "Coup" is obviously Trump saying "I know you are, but what am I?" to critics of his efforts to steal the 2020 election. But I also think he really wants Biden back as an opponent.
Trump was a middling real estate mogul who became a middling reality-TV star. He went into politics and was lucky to run against charisma-challenged primary candidates (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz) and then a Democrat who's never been a natural politician. He beat Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College. Four years later, he nearly beat Joe Biden -- who's also not exceedingly charismatic and whose best days as a public speaker are behind him.
Can Trump fire up a crowd? Well, he's better at it than Biden. He's not better than Kamala Harris or Tim Walz, and he knows it. Plus, he has so much Sleepy Joe/Crooked Joe material that doesn't really work anymore! It's so unfair. But maybe Biden will get the nomination back if Trump just believes.
Former President Donald J. Trump told a jaw-dropping story on Thursday about nearly dying in a helicopter ride with Willie Brown, the former California politician and ex-boyfriend of his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.
There was only one problem with the story. Or maybe two. Or maybe three.
It wasn’t the famous former San Francisco mayor on the helicopter flight at all. It was Gov. Jerry Brown, the former governor of California....
There was also no emergency landing, and the helicopter’s passengers were never in any danger at all, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was also on the flight.
Jerry Brown, who left office in January 2019, said through a spokesman, “There was no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris.”
when he was asked about Vice President Kamala Harris' past relationship with the former mayor and whether he thought the relationship had played a role in her career path.
"In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him. We thought maybe this is the end. We were in a helicopter going to a certain location together, and there was an emergency landing. This was not a pleasant landing, and Willie was, he was a little concerned,” Trump said. "So I know him. I know him pretty well."
Apart from the fact that they share a surname and a home state, I don't know how anyone who knows anything about politics could confuse Willie Brown (gregarious, glad-handing, and Black) with Jerry Brown (white, dour, and not particularly outgoing). But it's not clear that Trump knows much of anything about American politics prior to his own first campaign. It's possible that Trump (or an aide) remembered the Jerry Brown story and reassigned it to Willie Brown, but it's also possible that Trump pictures Jerry when he's told about Harris's long-ago romantic involvement with Willie because he doesn't know the difference.
“I was on a helicopter with Jerry Brown and Trump, and it didn’t go down,” Mr. Newsom, 56, said in an interview. He said that Mr. Trump had, however, repeatedly brought up the possibility of crashing.
(Emphasis added.)
One of the strangest things about Trump is that he postures as a tough guy, but he's delighted to talk about all the things that irrationally frighten him. He's admitted that he likes fast food in part because he thinks fast-food chains are especially sanitary:
Addressing fast food in general, Trump told [CNN's Anderson] Cooper [in 2016]: “I’m a very clean person. I like cleanliness. And I think you’re better off going there than someplace that you maybe have no idea where the food is coming from. It’s a certain standard. But I think the food is good.”
From a 2021 Washingtonian story, we know that the restaurant in Trump's D.C. hotel had an elaborate ritual for seving Trump his beloved Diet Coke:
As soon as Trump was seated, the server had to “discreetly present” a mini bottle of Purell hand sanitizer. (This applied long before Covid, mind you.) Next, cue dialogue: “Good (time of day) Mr. President. Would you like your Diet Coke with or without ice?” the server was instructed to recite. A polished tray with chilled bottles and highball glasses was already prepared for either response.... The beverage had to be opened in front of the germophobe commander in chief, “never beforehand.” The server was to hold a longneck-bottle opener by the lower third of the handle in one hand and the Diet Coke, also by the lower third, in the other.
The manual instructed the server to open mini glass bottles of Heinz ketchup in front of Trump, taking care to ensure he could hear the seal make the “pop” sound.
Trump might not talk about these rituals, but he openly refers to himself as "very much a germaphobe."
And can we talk about sharks? Stormy Daniels has told us that Trump is terrified of them:
Here’s how she remembered a 2007 dinner in Trump’s room at the Beverly Hills Hotel:
The strangest thing about that night — this was the best thing ever. You could see the television from the little dining room table and he was watching Shark Week and he was watching a special about the U.S.S. something and it sank and it was like the worst shark attack in history. He is obsessed with sharks. Terrified of sharks. He was like, “I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.” He was like riveted. He was like obsessed. It’s so strange, I know ...
So strange. So we finished dinner and we moved to the sofa so he could get a better view of Shark Week.
Trump has denounced sharks on Twitter:
Sorry folks, I'm just not a fan of sharks - and don't worry, they will be around long after we are gone.
... at a rally in Pennsylvania on August 20, 2020, Trump let it be known that he has no interest in using his power to safeguard the animal.
“They were saying the other night: the shark! They were saying, ‘Oh, sharks! We have to protect them,’” Trump recalled. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, wait.’ They actually want to remove all the seals in order to save the shark. I said, ‘Wait a minute. Don’t you have it the other way around?’ That’s true.”
Trump offered no explanation of who “they” were or where he had heard this, but Discovery’s “Shark Week” had just ended. It’s a safe bet he was referring to something he saw on TV.
All this was before the June 2024 fable of the battery-powered boat and the sharks. What could have been a simple (though complete false) story about how heavy, dangerous, and generally unseaworthy battery-powered boats are (in Trump's mind, with his ideas ascribed to an undoubtedlky fictional South Carolina boat builder) turned into a story about sharks:
“So I said, ‘Let me ask you a question, and [the guy who makes boats in South Carolina] said, ‘Nobody ever asked this question,’ and it must be because of MIT, my relationship to MIT —very smart. He goes, I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight? And you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery is now underwater and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’”
At this point, Trump apparently decided to pursue this tangent in earnest. “By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately, do you notice that, a lot of sharks?" he asked. "I watched some guys justifying it today. ‘Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were, they were not hungry, but they misunderstood what who she was.’ These people are crazy. He said there’s no problem with sharks. ‘They just didn’t really understand a young woman swimming now.’ It really got decimated and other people do a lot of shark attacks.”
And then he shifted back to his original story.
“So I said, so there’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards or here, do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking? Water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking. Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted? Because I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer. He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.” I said, ‘I think it’s a good question.’ I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water. But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted, I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark. So we’re going to end that.”
Trump wallows in his own fears -- but remember, he's the tough guy, and the people who don't like him fear his courageous manliness.
UPDATE:Politico and The New York Times are reporting that Trump was in a helicopter that made an emergency landing years ago, accompanied by a Black politician -- but the politician was Nate Holden, who was a city councilman and state senator, is from L.A. rather than San Francisco, and is significantly taller than Willie Brown.
Mr. Holden said that he called Mr. Brown to compare notes. Mr. Brown told him he had never been in a helicopter with Mr. Trump.
“I said, ‘Willie, you know what? That’s me!’” Mr. Holden said. “And I told him, ‘You’re a short Black guy and I’m a tall Black guy — but we all look alike, right?’”
Nate Holden has never been linked romantically to Kamala Harris.
JD Vance briskly marched up to Air Force 2, Kamala Harris’ plane, planning to give political reporters a show as he confronted the vice president uninvited on Wednesday. His power-play dreams, like most of his chaotic veep run, were immediately thwarted once he realized Harris was not present.
“I just wanted to check out my future plane,” Vance told campaign reporters gathered on the tarmac in Wisconsin.
I didn’t think there was a way for JD Vance to lose even more women voters, but seeing him trying to stalk Kamala Harris on a tarmac is the way to do it.
Every woman has a story of a creepy man doing creepy shit. JD fits the bill.
But the Trump campaign clearly likes it when J.D. Vance acts like a stalker. It's clearly of a piece with the He-Man Woman Haters' Club vibe of the Republican convention, particularly its last night, which deeply impressed at least one nepo-baby reporter, despite the interminable length and weirdness of the nominee's acceptance speech:
The rambling doesn’t matter. The sound bites were made. Tomorrow the clips will be Hulk Hogan intro and fist pumping 🇺🇸 glory. Shared on social to many impressionable people who don’t spend hours watching a political speech. The warrior image is cast.
How does a "warrior" ticket become a stalker ticket? The flip side of that performative machismo is resentment when anyone, especially a woman, refuses to swoon in response -- especially if she laughs instead. And oh boy, is Kamala Harris laughing. Tim Walz too, and also millions of voters.
And even though some women are spreading the joke, I see contemptuous-male energy -- specifically, eleven-year-old-boy energy -- in the GOP's many references to Walz as "Tampon Tim."
Arguably, Republicans have a wedge issue here. A bill Walz signed into law in Minnesota makes tampons available free in schools not only in girls' bathrooms, but also in boys' bathrooms. To me that's an appropriate acknowledgment of the fact that some young people who menstruate identify as male, but I can see that Republicans might want to contest that approach in this election.
However, when they attack Walz on this, they frequently don't bother to mention the boys' bathrooms. They think "Tampon Tim" is hilarious, and devastatingly effective, all by itself:
To these Republican men and male-identified Republican women, putting "Tampon" before the name of a man is inherently emasculating. (To normal people, free tampons in schools are just common decency.)
The Trump campaign really seems to believe that its candidate can win if he can just add a few additional resentful men, especially younger men, to the party's usual base.
It might have worked when Democrats had an uninspiring candidate. I don't think it's working now.
Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz to be her running mate instead of Josh Shapiro, and the press wants us to know that Harris made a huge mistake. Politico Playbook enumerates some of the anticipated GOP attacks on Walz:
... Republicans we spoke to said they are readying a multi-prong attack, based largely on Walz’ record as governor, that will seek to undermine the folksy appeal that the Harris campaign is playing up:
— That Walz has given undocumented immigrants incentives to come to the U.S. ...
— That Walz slow-walked requests to call in the National Guard to stop the 2020 rioting following the death of GEORGE FLOYD....
— And that Walz is an avuncular face on a socialist agenda....
These are all issues that make Republican voters' heads explode; in their bubble, everybody is still angry about politcal unrest four years ago, and everyone is obsessed with gender. They call everyone they disagree with on any issue a socialist or a communist. There might be some gettable voters who'll respond to these attacks, but it's clear that people who'll really respond to them are the ones who were already certain to vote for Trump.
We're supposed to believe that Team Trump really feared Josh Shapiro and is delighted that he's not Harris's running mate. The Bulwark's Marc Caputo reports:
Trump World Fueled an Anti-Shapiro Whisper Campaign
AS KAMALA HARRIS BEGAN WINDING DOWN her search for a running mate, Donald Trump’s team knew one thing clearly: It didn’t want her to pick Josh Shapiro, the popular governor of swing-state Pennsylvania whose more moderate record made him a formidable opponent.
So the Trump campaign and its allies moved to quietly kneecap Shapiro. It did so by forging a de facto alliance with the enemy of its enemy, the progressive left, which opposed Shapiro—the only Jewish candidate on Harris’s shortlist—largely because of his pro-Israel stances. The result was a swelling of progressive opposition (some of it organic, some artificially fed) that, among other things, saw Shapiro’s online critics dub him “Genocide Josh.”
“Where we could, we amplified the leftists on Twitter. We fed Shapiro oppo [opposition research] to the media. We did what we could to create more noise and discontent,” a Trump adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe internal campaign workings, told The Bulwark prior to Harris making her pick on Tuesday.
“We didn’t do that with Tim Walz,” the adviser said of the progressive blue-state Minnesota governor who ultimately scored the VP nod.
This is supposed to make us think that a Harris-Shapiro ticket would have been harder to beat than a Harris-Walz ticket. Maybe that's true. But what it tells me is that the Trump campaign had a strategy for attacking Shapiro. It deployed that strategy to keep him off the ticket, but it would have deployed the strategy with more ferocity if he'd been on the ticket. In other words: Walz has vulnerabilities, but so does Shapiro.
Many young progressives who are ready to vote for Kamala Harris were planning to sit out a race between Trump and Joe Biden, or were planning to vote third party. Obviously the Trump campaign would have worked the "Genocide Josh" angle if Harris had chosen Shapiro -- and if you think that wouldn't have mattered because there aren't very many voters in this cohort, I'll remind you that Jill Stein's 2016 vote totals in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were greater than Trump's margin of victory in those states.
Also, there are stories about Shapiro that normie voters might have found troubling, especially if the right-wing noise machine promoted them relentlessly. I was seeing them in the days before Harris made her pick, and I'm sure Trump's team had something to do with that. The most lurid is the case of a young woman who died in 2011 from twenty stab wounds, some of which were at the back of her neck. The death was first ruled a homicide and later ruled a suicide. The dead woman's parents still think it was murder, but in 2019 the office of then-Pennsylvania attorney general Josh Shapiro agreed with the suicide finding. There are rumors, which appear to be unfounded, that that Shapiro is close to the family of the dead woman's fiancé, who found her body and made the 911 call. The state Supreme Court has agreed to hear the parent's case challenging the suicide finding. (The Philadelphia Inquirer has the best roundup of facts in this case.)
A reporter who attended J.D. Vance's campaign appearance in Philadelphia yesterday noted this:
Whoops. These flyers were scattered on the media tables at the Vance event in Philly. Someone with a campaign staff lanyard came around to collect them and blamed a rough volunteer… pic.twitter.com/8qVXbMEvS3
The site is real and is still up. (An archived version is here.) The site is a crude mess, but it does cite the story of the stabbing victim, as well as a story that has appeared in the mainstream press involving alleged sexual harassment by a former aide. It also cites a Daily Caller story headlined "Harris VP Short-Lister Collaborated With Trans Lobby To Target Counselors Who Don’t Gender-Transition Kids." (In other words, Walz isn't the only VP short-lister the GOP planned to trans-bash.)
Maybe you think none of this would have been a problem for a Harris-Shapiro ticket. I agree that the Harris campaign is very good at counterpunching. But it's clear that picking Shapiro wouldn't have been risk-free.
Denise Bren’s voice trembled as she stood in a city park near her home to ask Sen. Barack Obama what he would do to help people like her struggling to pay their bills....
Skipping any expression of sympathy for Bren’s personal plight on a day when he was focused on the Iraq war, Obama (D-Ill.) launched into a detailed, six-point plan outlining the economic policies he would change as president....
A former Harvard Law Review president and constitutional law lecturer at the University of Chicago, Obama can sometimes seem professorial. It is one of the reasons he sometimes fails to connect with working-class voters.
Pollsters call Bren and those like her “beer-track” voters, while those with higher incomes and more education are dubbed “wine-track” voters. The first group tends to care more about pocketbook issues. The second places greater value on more global matters....
So far, Obama has done well attracting the Chardonnay crowd, but he has had less success winning over Joe Sixpack.
So you'd think they would have wanted Kamala Harris -- the urbane daughter of a college professor and a scientist -- to pick a "beer-track" running mate in order to balance the ticket. But they didn't. Pundit after pundit after pundit urged Harris to pick fellow wine-tracker Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania.
She didn't. She chose Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who is decidedly not a wine-tracker.
Walz grew up in small-town Nebraska and was one of 25 students in his high school graduating class. He went to a public college in Nebraska, served for many years in the National Guard, became a teacher, coached football and was the faculty advisor for his school's Gay-Straight Alliance, and eventually got involved in politics and served twelve years in Congress. Being a bootstrapper doesn't seem to have given him dark ideas about mass societal upheaval, unlike the guy he'll soon be debating, J.D. Vance.
Pundits wanted Harris to pick someone much more like herself as a running mate, and more like their own idea of normal. Shapiro is what "regular guy" looks like to well-educated people from the Northeast. Walz looks more like all those Trumpers in trucker hats who got interviewed in diners starting in 2016.
I assume the media won't like this pick, but I do.
Is this the future that conservatives want for America if Kamala Harris becomes president?
Rioters set fire and broke into hotels used to shelter asylum seekers in northern England on Sunday, as the country grapples with the worst social unrest it has seen in years.
The violence was triggered by the stabbing of three young girls in Southport, northwest England, earlier in the week. The far right has seized on and spread a wave of disinformation, including false claims the attacker was an immigrant, to mobilize anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant protests. Police say the suspect was born in Britain.
Before the fire and fury in Southport, there was a name – Ali Al-Shakati.
Al-Shakati has never existed, we now know, but that didn’t stop an obscure, Russian-linked fake news outlet from naming him as a 17-year-old supposedly Muslim asylum seeker responsible for the murder of three schoolgirls in the town on Monday.
Channel3 Now, a website that masquerades as a legitimate American news outlet but acts as an “aggregator” for real news stories as well as fake viral claims, published the claim on the back of speculation which appeared to have started on X, formerly known as Twitter.
... the name was boosted by thousands of other Russia-linked accounts before being repeated by authentic Russian state media, which cited Channel3 Now in its reporting.
The claim was meanwhile picked up by far-Right figures such as Tommy Robinson – founder of the anti-immigrant English Defence League, which played a major role in instigating the riots in Southport and elsewhere this week – and notorious influencer Andrew Tate, whose posts about Al-Shakati garnered millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes.
But it's the involvement of other bad actors, including Russian actors, that concerns me. Riots like this haven't happened in America, even though crimes reportedly committed by undocumented immigrants become major stories in the right-wing press, and sometimes in the mainstream media.
When did this happen in the U.K.? Just a couple of weeks after a Labour government took power. Obviously, that just happened to be when the crime took place. It was a particularly brutal attack, and the person charged with the crime is a young Black man of Somali descent. (I'm sure many of the rioters know that the Ali Al-Shakati rumor is untrue and hate British-born Blacks as much as they hate immigrants.) So you'd expect right-wing outrage. But provocateurs seem to want more than outrage now -- they want riots.
The global far right doesn't want unrest like this in America at this moment because it would make Donald Trump and other Republicans look bad. But if Kamala Harris wins the election, I assume the right will seize the first opportunity to make her look as if she has an out-of-control border letting in thousands of brutal criminals. I assume they'll want her to have to deal with riots like this during whatever limited "honeymoon" she has as a new president, if they get an opportunity to stir the pot.
We already know that if Harris wins, "mainstream" Republicans will do everything they can to make her presidency seem like a failure and to make her a one-term president. That's a given when a Democrat wins the White House. But the far right will have its own plans. She'll need to be ready.
It's good that this exists, but it could be a lot more useful:
The group known as Republicans for Biden is officially relaunching Sunday as Republicans for Harris....
In an election that is once again looking tight, the Harris campaign is hoping that Republicans repelled by Trump and independent moderates can help make a difference for the vice president in critical states.....
On Monday, the new group will hold kick-off events in Arizona, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.... Already signing on as supporters: former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld (the 2016 Libertarian nominee for vice president who then challenged Trump in the 2020 Republican primary), former New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman, [former Illinois congressman Adam] Kinzinger, former Virginia Rep. Denver Riggelman, former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh (who also challenged Trump in the 2020 primary) and former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham.
Not participating: George W. Bush, Liz Cheney, Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, or Mike Pence, to name five of the most prominent GOP figures who've publicly declared opposition to Donald Trump, or at least skepticism. I don't blame Harris for landing any of these people. I blame the Republicans themselves, who prefer empty gestures to publicly declaring support for the one person who could actually beat Trump.
Former President George W. Bush intends to vote in the 2024 presidential election, but he might write in the name of his brother, Jeb Bush — or his late Scottish terrier, Barney.
Though joking, Bush echoed a concern many Americans cite about two of the prospective candidates: their age.
“I predict that most Americans think we’re too damn old at the top,” Bush ... said. “I’m too old to be president. I know what it takes to be president, and I’m younger than Biden and Trump.”
Bush is about four years younger than current President Joe Biden and about one month younger than former President Donald Trump.
Kamala Harris is eighteen years younger than Bush. But Bush undoubtedly would like his nephew George P. Bush to remain politically viable in Texas, so he won't do the right thing and publicly endorse Harris.
Liz Cheney wants to remain a potential Republican candidate, possibly in Virginia, where she grew up and now works, so I assume she won't endorse Harris. Collins has said she plans to waste her vote by writing in Nikki Haley's name in November. Romney has said that he wasted his vote in 2016 and 2020 by writing in his wife; I assume he'll do the same this year, even though he's retiring from the Senate and is in his late seventies. And Pence says he might vote for the guy who almost got him killed.
I assume Harris won't put too many resources into this effort, and she shouldn't. The cowardice of Trump's intraparty critics ensures that this group will be of only limited utility. They also might assume that prominent defectors from Trump will make their party look weak. If so, they're literally putting party over country -- as you'd expect.
As a presidential candidate, Kamala Harris has been very good at taking on her Republican opponent and his party. I worry that she's not as good at dealing with the threats to her campaign from her own party.
Harris has been assessing possible running mates, and it appears that Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro is the favorite. He's getting the most positive press, he's way ahead in the betting markets -- and now he's the subject of a New York Times op-ed by allegedly Democratic pollster Mark Penn. After his wife's work with No Labels and his own work on his wife's behalf, I don't think anyone in politics sees Penn as a Democrat in good standing. However, his arguments are the kind that resonate with many powerful Democrats, especially those who still believe the winning formula for the party is to be as non-Democratic as possible, an approach that might be successful if we suddenly wake up in 1992 again.
Penn praises Shapiro for the reasons you'd expect ...
He has supported Israel and has been strongly critical of the campus protests, blasting the antisemitism on display at many of those demonstrations.... His selection would be another push against the left wing of the Democratic Party that has taken a strong position against America’s ally.
... and also for reasons that don't seem at all relevant to this election:
Mr. Shapiro believes in school choice, which runs counter to one of the Democrats’ biggest support groups — the teachers unions (though he ultimately vetoed a school voucher bill he had initially supported). Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, is a fixture of the Democratic establishment, but her positions are unpopular with many other Americans — including those who believe that the Covid school shutdowns were dragged out unnecessarily.
Generally, Penn believes Shapiro is a good choice because liberals are wary of him:
Mr. Shapiro, who is unpopular with many progressives over energy policy, school choice and other issues, would send a signal that Ms. Harris is not captive to the left.... He would provide balance to the ticket and underscore that there is a place for moderates in today’s Democratic Party.
(Penn, of course, sees Shapiro's support for fracking as a huge plus.)
It's not clear that Shapiro is noticeably more moderate than, say, Andy Beshear or Mark Kelly on most issues -- but he's being marketed as the anti-liberal, anti-progressive candidate. Which means that many voters in Harris's base will feel angry and insulted if Harris picks him, while a choice other than Shapiro will now be regarded as a sign that Harris yielded to "the woke mob."
Unfortunately, Harris is now at the mercy of Democratic and Democratic-adjacent figures who have ensured that her VP pick will be divisive. I wish it hadn't come to this.
I don't know whether Donald Trump's assertion that Kamala Harris only recently began to identity as Black will work for him, but I suspect it isn't working, for a surprising reason: It's drawing too much attention to Trump.
Many people would argue that drawing attention to himself was the point of the attack. Ever since Harris became the clear favorite for the Democratic nomination, Trump has been out of the headlines. Some people believe he launched this attack on Harris primarily to get himself above the fold, in newspaper terms.
But as I argued yesterday, Trump wanted this attack to make voters begin to see Harris as a phony. He doesn't need to persuade his base to think any negative thing he says about an opponent is true, but I think he believed that swing voters would fall for this. I was thinking of mostly white swing voters, many of whom don't know much about Harris's long identification with both Blackness and Indianness; many whites in America don't feel that they have a particularly complicated heritage, so they could conceivably be responsive to Trump's argument. And as some post commenters pointed out, Trump might also have been aiming him comments at the Black men who've warmed to him. They might be receptive to the idea that Harris isn't authentically Black.
But in the aftermath of these remarks, we're mostly not talking about Harris's identity. We're talking about what Trump said. We're debating whether Trump's outburst was accident or calculation. We're watching J.D. Vance as he defends Trump. Trump made himself the story when he was trying to make Harris the story.
That's how it looks right now. I'm sure Trump and Vance will continue to call Harris a phony. The base will cheer. But the line of attack might never work beyond the base, because instead of asking, What's up with that Harris woman anyhow? -- the kind of othering Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and other Democrats were subjected to in the media -- we seem to be asking, What the hell is wrong with Trump? That's good.
The people running Donald Trump's presidential campaign are good at what they do -- so good, in fact, that they sold Politico on a lie about the campaign's strategy in the race against Kamala Harris. The lie is that the campaign intended to attack Harris strictly on issues and political philosophy, but then the candidate went off message:
Scrambling to put an end to Kamala Harris’ ascent, Donald Trump’s campaign and outside allies came up with a plan: Hit her on immigration, her record as a “liberal prosecutor” and as a “radical.”
It didn’t last long.
During a 34-minute question-and-answer appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump questioned Harris’ Black identity.
Trump was asked about repeated Republican attacks ... characterizing [Harris] as a "DEI candidate" chosen because of her race and gender rather than her merits. Given the opening to denounce those accusations, Trump questioned Harris' race.
... "She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage," he said. "I didn't know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black."
"I don't know, is she Indian or is she Black?" he asked....
Just to be clear:
Harris has talked at length — including in her book, during her 2020 presidential campaign and in her time as vice president — about her multiracial heritage. Her father is Jamaican; her mother was Indian American.
Harris graduated from Howard University, joined a historically Black sorority and was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.
When Harris was in elementary school in the 1970s, she participated in a busing program meant to racially integrate schools in Berkeley. Twenty-one years ago, in 2003, when she won the San Francisco DA race, both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times said she would be California's "first African American district attorney."
If Trump's remarks were a slip-up by an undisciplined candidate who was going against the campaign's carefully crafted strategy, then how do you explain this?
After the panel interview ... Trump and his campaign leaned into the messaging about Harris’ racial identity. Before his rally Wednesday night in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the campaign flashed on screen a graphic of Harris laughing, with a screenshot of a news headline referring to her as “Indian-American.” His attorney, Alina Habba, appeared to intentionally mispronounce Harris’ first name when she said “unlike you, Kamala, I know who my roots are. I know where I come from.”
“So what he said, I thought it was hysterical,” [J.D.] Vance said. “I think he pointed out the fundamental chameleon-like nature of Kamala Harris. And you guys saw yesterday, she was in Georgia, and she put on a southern accent for a Georgia audience. She grew up in Vancouver. What the hell is going on here? She is not who she pretends to be.”
When asked by a reporter explicitly if he questions whether Harris is Black, Vance said, “What I question is why she presents a different posture depending on which audience that she’s in front of.”
So ironic that a guy who completely reinvented himself and went from “Trump is hitler” to “trump is the best ever” when he ran for senate would say this.
Also, J.D. Vance is on his third name -- he was born James Donald Bowman, then his name was changed to James David Hamel after his mother's third husband adopted him. In the early 2010s, he wrote for David Frum's Frum Forum under the name J.D. Hamel. So who is he, really?
Well, obviously he's a product of broken homes and multiple parents, stepparents, and parental figures. That's okay. It's also okay to have parents from both Jamaica and India, and to have been raised in both the U.S. and Canada. (Hell, Ted Cruz was bornin Canada!)
Other Republicans are playing their assigned roles by fretting over Trump's remarks in the media:
"It was awful," one House Republican said of the interview, telling Axios it raised concerns about whether Trump can contain his impulses while running against the first woman, Black and Asian American vice president....
"That was not a demonstration on how to win over undecided voters," another House Republican said.
But I assume Trump thinks it will win over undecided voters. Trump isn't a smart man in most ways, but he has a cornered rat's instinct for fighting. If this tactic works, undecided voters will half-hear about it, and possibly find themselves repeating it: Well, they say she's a phony. They say she pretends to be one thing in front of one audience and another thing the next day in front of a different audience. The idea that Harris "happened to turn Black" only recently might seem plausible to low-information voters: They don't know about her college days or her early political career. And many of them will be white people who don't have a lot of acquaintances with multi-racial identities.
But Harris is running a smart race. I expect her to have an effective strategy to neutralize this -- and I don't think we'll have to wait long to see how she responds, because she's not an old-school Democrat who lets attacks fester.
Nevertheless, we can stop telling ourselves that the Trump campaign is still searching for a way to campaign against Harris. The campaign has a plan now, and this is it. This is the official strategy. When Trump said these things, he was on message.
*****
Here's something you need to remember: Republicans think invocations of identity (apart from straight, white, male, and/or Christian) are a scam, and they think Democrats know this. Here's a clip of the Daily Wire's Michael Knowles arguing -- I'm not making this up -- that Pete Buttigieg might not really be gay:
MICHAEL KNOWLES (HOST): Put another nickel in the Pete-is-not-gay conspiracy theory jar. I've always taken Pete at his word that he is a homosexual. However, I have some friends including a homosexual friend of mine, Spencer Klavan, who has said for a long time that Pete Buttigieg is not really gay.
That's his favorite conspiracy theory. And I said, I don't know, man. You know? I don't know. And he said, no. I'm telling you. He's — and his argument was that Pete Buttigieg, I've met many people like this, he's a real striver. You know? He was a Harvard guy, real ambitious....
And — but he has this problem, which is he's a straight white guy. And, again, I'm not saying he's a straight white guy. I'm saying this is the conspiracy theory. He's a straight white guy. So he's got this problem. Right? He's over there at Harvard. He says, shoot, man. I'm not gonna rise very far in liberal politics if I'm the most evil type of person in the world, a straight white guy. So I need something. I need some struggle.
They're sure we think it's all a scam. So whether or not they can persuade anyone outside their circle that Kamala Harris is faking an absolutely legitimate part of her background, they find it extremely plausible that she would engage in race fakery. So expect your right-wing relatives to post many Kamala Harris = Rachel Dolezal memes on Facebook between now and November.
Kamala Harris is being attacked at a "DEI" vice president who, if elected, would be a "DEI" president. The usually wrongheaded Matt Bai recognizes that this is an unfair attack:
It’s true that Joe Biden had committed to choosing a woman as his running mate by the time the death of George Floyd threw the country into turmoil in the summer of 2020. It’s also true that he then came under enormous pressure to choose a Black candidate, as well, which is why his final list included multiple Black women.
... Absent her identity, it’s hard to imagine she would have been anywhere near Biden’s top choice.
But you know what? You could say the same for almost every vice-presidential pick in recent memory. Would JD Vance be on Donald Trump’s ticket if he weren’t a rural White guy from Ohio? Was Sarah Palin chosen for her vast policy experience? Would Barack Obama have chosen Biden if he hadn’t felt he needed a validator for White working-class voters?
To say that Harris is where she is largely because of her identity is to say she is the vice president of the United States. To say that makes her somehow different from everybody else who gets the job is just plain ignorant.
But Bai thinks Harris should respond to the smear directly -- and, because he can never resist taking a cheap shot at liberals, he blames us for the fact that she might not:
What Harris can do ... is tell her own personal story: of a girl born to two immigrant academic parents (one Indian and one Jamaican), a child of divorce raised with the help of a strong African American community, who willed herself to a higher level in U.S. government than any woman in history. It’s the story she only started to tell during that [2020 primary] debate with Biden — not of victimization or futility in the face of prejudice but of the promise of American opportunity, aided by activist government. Simply by recounting her own improbable journey, Harris can embody the American story that most voters still want to believe.
That’s not the pessimistic story some on the left want to hear right now.
Maybe she should talk that way. Or maybe she should keep doing what she's doing, which seems to be working.
A story in The New York Times today discusses the attacks Harris faces online and is genteel in talking about the sexist ones:
Sexist posts ... claimed that Ms. Harris was indebted to men for her success.
That's ... putting it mildly. Online posts claim that Harris used sex to advance her career, including, for some reason (and basecd on no evidence), one particular sex act. (Here's a selection of memes on that subject, though you'll want some brain bleach after looking at them.) But the Times story is correct: The message is that she got where she is without deserving it.
She could address this directly, too. But I think what she's doing is a better response.
If haters are saying that you don't deserve to be where you are, you need to show them that you do deserve it. Harris is doing that right now. We're seeing her skills as a politician. Through the long months of the Joe Biden reelection campaign, I said that voters, especially swing voters, judge politicians on how they speak, because if you can respond to the news articulately and confidently, that conveys a sense that you understand the nation's problems and are on top of them, and that you're steady and reliable and well informed and capable of sound judgment. Sure, it's possible to be good at speaking while also being ignorant or incompetent -- think of Sarah Palin's 2008 Republican concvention speech, which sounded pretty sharp -- but you need to create a sustained impression of sharpness and competence, and Palin couldn't.
Right now, Harris looks as if she can. This won't persuade the haters, obviously. But it should persuade many of the doubters.
She sounds good on the stump. She sounds fearless:
Harris looks as if she knows how to campaign. Trump, with great fanfare, released an ad attacking her on immigration:
You might not agree with her immigration stance, but she's offering solutions. She's not afraid to talk about the issue, and she has proposals.
In 2008, Barack Obama was accused of being a celebrity and a lightweight, but it was clear when he spoke that he understood the issues in depth and could talk about them in a clear, compelling, and inspiring way. In 1992, when Bill Clinton was being called "the failed governor of a small state," the same thing worked for him. Pete Buttigieg's intelligence and eloquence, though not as compelling as Obama's, Clinton's, or Harris's, has persuaded many people since the 2020 campaign that he deserves to be taken seriously.
Harris has the verbal chops. Harris has smart ideas about how to take on Trump. Does she deserve to be where she is? By demonstrating skill, she's showing that she does.
I have a habit -- here and in real life -- of expressing concerns at times when other people think everything's going fine. The result is that I come off as someone who always thinks things are going badly. Often, all I'm trying to say is that things could go wrong, or that one aspect of something that's otherwise positive could be improved. But I don't communicate well enough to make what I'm thinking clear -- and I come off as a bummer when everyone else is happy.
I did this yesterday when I expressed some concerns about the Kamala Harris campaign strategy of calling Republicans "weird," and as a result I conveyed the impression that I don't think Democrats should ever fight (even though I said they should) and I don't think Democrats should ever point out how peculiar Republicans and their ideas are.
I focused quite a bit on the fake J.D. Vance couch story because it seemed like the launchpad for the entire "weird" campaign. (I was told in the comments yesterday that the couch moment has passed, but Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker reportedly made three couch jokes on the White Dudes for Harris Zoom call last night, so it's going strong.) I still wish Democrats had limited themselves to real Republican weirdness. Actual Republican policies are weird:
Republicans don't actually seem to want to ban polio vaccines, but shrinking numbers of them support vaccination, as Radley Balko notes:
In April the New Hampshire legislature passed a bill removing the requirement for a polio and measles vaccine to attend public schools. Republicans in Wisconsin, Georgia, Montana, and Iowa have tried to restrict or remove vaccine requirements for public facing government jobs, which may include public schools. Other Republican legislatures have passed or introduced bills that erode support for vaccines in other ways, such as barring state governments from advocating them. The Republican party in Lee County, Florida, wants to ban the COVID vaccine for everyone, and Montana Republicans have tried to ban people who have received the COVID vaccine from donating blood.
That's weird.
I like the way AOC and Josh Shapiro link weirdness to policy:
Being obsessed with repressing women is goofy.
Trying to watch what LGBTQ+ people do all the time is abnormal.
Punishing people who don’t have biological offspring is creepy.
It’s an incel platform, dude. It’s SUPER weird. And people need to know. https://t.co/vgDeM9e7pU
Shapiro: You ever see this guy? He kind of meanders over and goes over to the flag and hugs the flag. I love the flag but it’s a weird thing he does. While he’s hugging the flag, he’s ripping away our freedoms… pic.twitter.com/YvNGpUZawS
And I think it's great to nail Republicans on style if the attack is based on real things they do, especially when they're proud of what they're doing. The montage below is very good -- and I especially like it because it's not limited to Trump and MAGA (I hope the idea that the GOP is a fine collection of individuals who'll revert to decency once Trump passes from the scene died when Joe Biden withdrew from the race):
Techdirt's Mike Masnick thinks it might be pointless even to try to pivot to substance -- as he sees it, Trumpers never do, so attacking them by changing the vibe is the only way to go:
In the last week, there’s been a notable difference in the way the Democrats have campaigned against the Trumpist GOP, since Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 Presidential election. The Democrats have not focused that much on debunking any of the many, many (many) falsehoods the Trump/Vance campaign spews. They haven’t even focused as heavily on the extreme policies the campaign is pushing (though, that’s a part of it).
Instead, they’ve leaned in deeply on just how fucking weird Trump and Vance and their core beliefs are. And, in many ways, this seems to be generating excitement, at least online, from Democrats who were kinda blah about Biden and his chances.
Of course, this kind of campaign-by-meme and focusing on mockery over policy was embraced by Donald Trump going back nearly a decade. It took forever for the Democrats to figure out a way to counter it. Trump’s entire argument against Democrats has been to constantly mock them and never engage seriously on policy. And it’s worked....
Who knows if it will be effective in the long run. I have no sense about the political viability of it all. But at a first pass, it seems like it’s done an impressive job in reframing the debate away from this idea that Trumpworld are plotting to destroy everything (which feels unbelievable) to just: get a fucking load of what these dumbasses believe, and how incredibly dorky they are.
Is it true that Trumpers "never engage seriously on policy"? They seem pretty damn serious about policy when they're warning that Democratic rule means a pedophile drag queen in every library and a murder-minded undocumented immigrant under every bed (and in every voting booth). Rolling back LGBTQ rights and conducting a mass deportation of immigrants seem like real policy goals.
And I don't know why the idea that "Trumpworld are plotting to destroy everything ... feels unbelievable." Masnick seems to be saying that MAGA is one big exercise in mockery, jokes, and humiliation of liberals with no actual political content, but MAGA has plenty of political content. There are 900 pages of political content in Project 2025.
But, yes, the Trumpers combine this with the three-ring Trump circus, the rallies and boat parades and massive trucks covered with anti-liberal bumper stickers.
That's the right combination for Democrats, too -- jokes plus substance. We ought to be able to do real substance, because Republicans really are trying to destroy everything. Changing the vibe is good, but if Trump (and Fox and the rest of the GOP noise machine) can talk about issues and scare the rabble without spoiling the party, we should be able to do that too. And it looks as if many Democrats understand that.
None of you agreed with me when I said this in the comments to an earlier post, but I'll say it again: I don't like the J.D. Vance couch meme.
I don't like it for a lot of reasons: First, it's disinformation. Vance did not write in Hillbilly Elegy that he once masturbated as a teenager by inserting his penis into a latex glove and placing the glove between two couch cushions. I want Democrats to be better than Republicans about respecting the truth and not smearing opponents with lies. I remember GOP lies during presidential campaigns: Republicans told us that a young Kitty Dukakis burned an American flag, that Bill Clinton was a youthful Russian spy, that John Kerry served dishonorably in Vietnam. I understand that I'm supposed to see this as payback, and not as Democrats saying that we're at war, so a respect for truth is something we might need to sacrifice.
I also don't like the couch meme because if he did this as an adolescent, so what? Teenagers masturbate, and some get creative when they're doing it. Who knows how your favorite politician or athlete or pop star jacked off (or jilled off) at the age of fifteen?
This meme worked, but for a reason that makes me uncomfortable: because Vance is weird and spectrum-y and awkward as a public figure. Part of me is thrilled to see Democrats taking advantage of a Republican's awkwardness and part of me is uncomfortable: Republicans said Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and Mike Dukakis were weird and spectrum-y and awkward, and that was a big reason why all four lost their elections. Are we now agreeing that those were valid lines of attack?
"Weird" is the word Democrats are using to attack Republicans this year.
Donald Trump is weird. JD Vance is very weird. Vivek Ramaswamy is really weird. Elon Musk is really really weird. Lindsey Graham is weird af. Tim Scott is so so so weird. Mike Johnson is incredibly weird. Ted Cruz is insufferably weird.
I like this line of attack when it's connected to weird ideas and weird policies. Denouncing adults without children as "childless cat ladies" and proposing that parents get extra votes? Preventing interstate travel by women seeking abortions? Wanting to replace American democracy with brutal tech-enabled micro-monarchies, as recommended by Vance's friend Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug? Those are weird ideas. "Weird" is a good word to use in reference to those proposals.
But it seems to me that Vance is being attacked as weird merely because he's a spectrum-y guy who has ideas, which is exactly what happened to Dukakis, Gore, and other Democrats. I don't like that. The attacks on those Democrats always felt to me like a respectable adult version of high school bullying, and this has some of the same qualities.
If Kamala Harris picks Minnesota governor Tim Walz as his running mate, we'll see, at least at the vice presidential level, a reversal of the pattern we had when Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush led the GOP: Democrats will be the party in which a gregarious man says his ideas are simple common sense, while Republican ideas are peculiar notions cooked up by eggheads who spend way too much time in their rooms alone.
Gov. Walz on trail stumping for Harris. Posting a few of his remarks that stuck out to me.
"These guys are just weird," he said before calling Trump/Vance "a threat to democracy" who will put people in danger. He said Trump is going to have his "ass handed to him" in Minnesota. pic.twitter.com/BcHYSFKFxX
"Climate change must be a hoax because Al Gore is a weirdo" is a statement millions of Americans believe. Maybe it's good that we're attacking Republicans the same way, but I wonder.
I'm also concerned that it will be hard to use "weird" in reference to both J.D. Vance and Donald Trump. Trump's public affect is the exact opposite of Vance's sullen-nerd persona. Vance seems as if he spends hours seeking pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-scientific justifications for his own prejudices and resentments. But Trump just blurts out whatever he thinks after two minutes of watching Fox News. He's gregarious where Vance is mumbly. Intellectually, I see how they both fall into the category of "weird," but viscerally they seem to belong to very different high school cafeteria tables. I'll accept the argument that we're in a battle for America and therefore we can't forsake any weapon, but I wonder if you can even get swing voters to see both Trump and Vance as "weird." Can this even work against the guy at the top of the ticket? It's clear we're about to find out.
ADDING: I think Democrats should fight. As I said in the comments a couple of days ago, I think Democrats should fight much harder than the milquetoast generation that ran the party until a couple of weeks ago ever wanted to fight. I'm just questioning whether this is the best way to fight. And until Harris is five or more points in the lead in all the polls, I think the jury will still be out on whether this aspect of the new Democratic combativeness is working.
The New York Times has just posted a long story -- more than 3,600 words, twenty and a half minutes in the audio version -- about people who belong to an online community called Patriot Party News, which features conspiratorial right-wing chat and promotes medical quackery.
When I say "conspiratorial right-wing chat," I mean this:
In a fracturing country, here was an echo chamber with the power to turn fringe conspiracy theories into widely accepted political dogmas — that the Covid vaccine was poison, the mainstream media was deceitful and the federal government was controlled by a “deep state cabal” that had stolen the 2020 election from former President Donald J. Trump and was now trying to orchestrate his assassination.
“I saw somewhere this morning that the vaccine’s killed more people than Hitler and Stalin combined,” said a woman who went by the name Truth and Freedom Fighter.
“It’s genocide, 100 percent,” Michael said, as he pulled himself out of bed.
“I want handcuffs and perp walks for all those criminals,” someone else said. “Who goes first? Fauci, Obama or Biden?”
And when I say "medical quackery," I mean this:
Of all the wild conspiracies he’d discovered on Patriot Party News, the concept of medbeds had initially struck Michael as the most far-fetched, even if it was also among the most popular. Every few days, someone else on the platform shared an illustration of a futuristic-looking chamber, sometimes with a doctored image of Trump superimposed in the foreground. The founder of the site, Armour, sometimes mentioned videos or podcasts about medbeds that had become popular on the far-right corners of Telegram, Discord and Rumble, and Michael clicked on the links, as did millions of others.
The videos claimed with no evidence that the U.S. military was already in possession of advanced, or possibly even alien, technology that could cure all disease and extend human life. There were said to be at least three types of medbeds already in existence in secret military tunnels. One, a “holographic medbed,” scanned the body to instantly diagnose and then heal any sickness, no matter how severe. Another bed was able to regenerate personal DNA so people could regrow missing limbs in a few minutes. A third was designed for reverse aging and could rewind people’s bodies to the age and condition of their choosing.
The only holdup, according to the videos, was that a collection of liberal billionaires kept hoarding the technology for themselves. On the Patriot Party News audio feed, people speculated that medbeds wouldn’t be available to the public until Trump was back in control of the White House, at which point everyone would be invited to make appointments for free at a secret underground military base.
But this isn't a story about toxic disinformation, and it's only glancingly about villains who commit medical fraud. It's about how this community of liberal-haters is formed out of pain. It asks readers to feel sorry for people who want to arrest Anthony Fauci for a mythical medical genocide, because some of them are desperate for a medical miracle.
Here's the lede:
Michael Chesebro awoke to the same reality as he did each morning, with pain radiating up his spine and into his shoulders before he opened his eyes. He remained still for a moment, summoning the courage to reach from his bed to his night stand. He rolled onto his back, which was fused together with metal after almost 20 years as a paratrooper in the military. He extended his arm, which he had broken several times while wrangling bulls and horses on his ranch outside Cheyenne, Wyo. Finally, his hand found his cellphone, and he logged on to the online universe where he spent most of his days.
“How’re we all doing this morning?” asked Michael, 63. “I’m hurting again — too much time spent jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.”
“You served our country well,” a retired teacher from Kansas responded.
“Hang in there, patriot,” a truck driver in Texas said. “Remember, the pain’s only real if you believe in it.”
“Distract me,” Michael said. “What part of our country is falling apart today?”
On the other end of his phone were hundreds of people in a live voice chat for Patriot Party News, one of about a dozen far-right media platforms that has grown in both size and influence over the past few years, not only by creating an ecosystem of disinformation but also by providing an authentic sense of community.
I have no doubt that Michael Chesebro's pain is genuine. I'm sure it's terrible. But after years in which the Times has demanded that we really get to know right-wingers while rarely telling us about the vile things these trucker-hat-wearing diner customers believe, we get this story in which some of the beliefs are made clear -- but, we're effectively told, you can't blame the believers because they're hurting. Either they're hurting or they're colorfully down-home:
There was Bill, a farmer in central Wisconsin whose frequent raves about Trump were sometimes difficult to hear over the roar of his tractor; and Val, a retired art teacher who sometimes read aloud from the Bible; and Keith, who had recently been paralyzed from the knee down by an infection and was relearning to walk; and Meagan, a single mother of five who requested prayers for her child’s flag football games; and Janel, who was facing foreclosure on her house in Illinois and trying to rehome all 30 of her cats; and Jay, a real estate agent who spent his free time bass fishing; and Beverly, who was taking care of her husband, who had advanced dementia, because she couldn’t afford to pay for help. “I’m hanging on by a thread,” she said one night. “He’s very difficult to handle, and now he hallucinates. Most days I’m ready to give up, but going to bed listening to the chat on this platform is what saves my sanity.”
The photos chosen to illustrate the story are clearly intended to elicit empathy ...
... or to romanticize the subjects' way of life:
We all know that many people who believe the most extreme right-wing conspiracy theories are just ... assholes. They're not in an extraordinary amount of pain, and they're not colorfully rural. They're the uncle who shows up at Thanksgiving and starts baiting everyone before he gets his coat off. They're the people with JOE AND THE HO GOTTA GO bumper stickers on their vehicles. They're not sympathetic figures.
But in The New York Times, there are no villains in MAGA Land. There are only people we need to understand. We're even supposed to like some of the purveyors of this snake oil:
And then there was Andrea, the new owner of a medbed spa. She was a nail technician and certified wellness coach who had specialized in diet programs until she decided in January to buy Baxter’s products and rent a building across the street from a hospital in Sheridan.
“We’re still hoping to get F.D.A. approved, but that whole process is so corrupt anyway,” she said on the audio channel. “You can’t totally grasp the magic of it until you try it. Honestly, it’s a God thing.”
... Andrea had decided to charge $85 an hour for use of the beds, but insurance didn’t cover the experimental treatment, and she didn’t believe in turning anyone away. In the past few months, people had arrived from across the West hoping for answers for their late-stage cancer, A.L.S., chronic depression and dementia, and Andrea let some of them use a medbed for free. She cooked for them, found them places to stay and often held their hands to pray before they lay down in the medbed.
“I don’t care if it means I’m losing some money,” Andrea told Michael. “I feel like I landed smack dab in the middle of my purpose on this planet.”
Andrea is the woman giving the big hug in the second photo above. She's clearly meant to be a sympathetic figure.
The chief purveyors of this phony technology appear only briefly: Warren Armour, the co-founder of Patriot Party News, and John Baxter, whose company sells the medbeds. They're described in flat, neutral language:
The Patriot Party News feed included regular segments on essential oils, unproven supplements and ivermectin, and one morning Armour came onto the platform and introduced another “truth-seeking health expert.” His name was John Baxter, and he had spent his career in the Florida mattress industry before founding a company called Anti-Aging Beds, which had received a warning letter from the Food and Drug Administration in 2020 for selling unproven medication. Baxter introduced himself as an inventor and the author of a self-published book: “The Med Bed Story — Restoring the Health of Humanity.”
“We are the only ones in the medbed movement that actually have a bed,” Baxter said, as Michael listened with hundreds of others. “It’s available, and it’s ready for you to try.”
This could have been a story about predatory quacks, but the Times doesn't like stories that have right-wing villains. Instead, this is a story about good people who seek to treat their pain with non-traditional remedies -- Trumpism as well as preposterous medical technology -- and we're supposed to root for them:
Andrea punched in a few codes and the bed began to recline and then vibrate. Michael pulled a blanket over his chest and took out his phone to type a quick note into the chat forum on Patriot Party News. “FOMO!” he wrote. “Haven’t been on for a bit because I’ve got the whole family getting Baxter treatments.” He checked back a few moments later to track the flow of replies.
“Thank God! Medbed miracle!”
“Can’t wait until Trump makes these available for all true Patriots.”
Andrea came back into the room and stood by the doorway, holding up her own phone. “People on the platform are so excited,” she said. “Is your back starting to feel better at all?”
He shifted in the bed and stared up at the ceiling, trying to believe, working to align his mind with the right frequencies.
“You know what?” he said, after a moment. “I think it does.”
Because only bubble-dwelling elitist haters look at Red America and see something malignant.
