Jill Filipovic analyzes the latest JD Vance atrocity: The latest unearthed audio has him agreeing with a conservative podcast host on what women are for once we hit menopause: Helping to raise children is “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female.” The whole purpose. Vance has opinions about many different kinds of women. Those who don’t have kids are “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” and lack “a direct stake in the future of the country.” Women who care about their work and plan their families are suckers: “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had,” he tweeted after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Step mothers (and step parents generally), he has suggested, are not real parents.
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It sure looks like someone is thinking about it Things aren’t going well in the Trump campaign. And, as has happened in both of his previous campaigns, he’s likely looking to fire someone: Donald Trump has privately expressed faith in his campaign leadership and no firings are currently expected, but senior advisers find themselves in the most vulnerable moment as they struggle to frame effective attacks against Kamala Harris, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. The past month, starting with Joe Biden’s withdrawal and his endorsement of Harris to succeed him, which propelled her to draw roughly even in key swing state polls, has easily been the most unstable moment for the Trump campaign since its formal launch in late 2022. In that period, Trump has often committed one unforced error after another as he tries to frame arguments against Harris, struggled to break through the news cycle hyping Democrats’ enthusiasm, and suddenly found himself on the defensive with a narrow window left until November.
Good news from Pennsylvania: Recent polling shows Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is beating Republican nominee Donald Trump among Pennsylvania voters — a brand new poll by Quinnipiac University, for example, puts her four points ahead. That represents a significant change from when President Joe Biden was still at the top of the ticket. However, a poll by TelevisaUnivision’s Strategy & Insights provided to WHYY News prior to its publication reveals that shift may have been particularly significant among Hispanic voters in the state. Whereas 39% of Hispanic voters in the Commonwealth said they definitely planned to vote for Biden just before his announcement, 49% now say the same about Harris. That checks out, according to Sarina Torres, 23, of Allentown. “I think a lot of that shift comes from Latina voters,” Torres, a college student and movement politics organizer, told WHYY News. “It’s more exciting to vote for a woman of color.” The TelevisaUnivision poll provides a rare look into voter reactions to Biden being replaced by Harris atop the Democratic ticket.
Harris unveils populist economic plans Ahead of her planned speech today in Raleigh, North Carolina, Vice President Kamala Harris announced a dozen proposed policies for “lowering costs for American families” (Washington Post): The most striking proposals were for the elimination of medical debt for millions of Americans; the “first-ever” ban on price gouging for groceries and food; a cap on prescription drug costs; a $25,000 subsidy for first-time home buyers; and a child tax credit that would provide $6,000 per child to families for the first year of a baby’s life. The last item followed a suggestion earlier this month from JD Vance, the GOP vice-presidential nominee, that the credit be raised from $2,000 per child to $5,000. Harris is also calling for restoring the Biden administration’s child tax credit that expired at the end of 2021, which raised the benefit for most families from $2,000 per child to $3,000.
Check this out: NEW We went undercover in Project 2025. Our investigation uncovered details of the secretive second phase of Project 2025 being led by a Trump insider, with plans to feed hundreds of highly-confidential battle plans directly into the Trump transition team. Watch here. NEW We went undercover in Project 2025. Our investigation uncovered details of the secretive second phase of Project 2025 being led by a Trump insider, with plans to feed hundreds of highly-confidential battle plans directly into the Trump transition team. Watch here. pic.twitter.com/je9qHpjAns — Centre for Climate Reporting (@ClimateReport_) August 15, 2024 I wrote about Russell Vought a while back. He’s quite the piece of work. I can’t imagine that Trump is happy about this one bit — assuming he is aware of anything at this point but his grievance that Joe Biden unfairly dropped out and made it harder for him to win. The 900 page Project 2025 is a shocking manifesto. But it’s always been this secret transition and first hundred days plan by Vought that we needed to see.
I’ve been pointing this out for a while, but now the media is noticing: Trump is relying on his “election integrity” goons to intimidate voters.. And if that doesn’t work, they’ll use the chaos they create to contest the election. They aren’t even trying to legitimately win. Some Republicans worry that Trump’s focus on preventing a “rigged” election has hurt the party’s ground game, the get-out-the-vote operations that can be crucial in an election as close as this one. Trump’s “election integrity” team also has raised concerns among Democrats about potential voter intimidation at the polls. If Trump loses on Nov. 5, the election teams would be his evidence collectors for what almost certainly would be a barrage of legal challenges — and calls for state officials not to certify the election results. Early on, Trump told his team to pour its resources into “election integrity” efforts, saying that he’d take care of generating excitement and turning out voters for his campaign against President Biden.
Will this unreality last after Trump? I suspect it will.The precursors were talk radio and Roger Ailes’ Fox. They aren’t coming back to earth any time soon. They’ve been orbiting Bizarroworld for decades now.
H.L. Mencken was right I still remember reassuring volunteers in October 2016 that despite Trump signs dotting the highways and byways outside the city that there was no way Americans were crazy enough to elect the orange-hued reality star over Hillary Clinton, the former senator and secretary of state. But they did. He’s not just unfit. He’s not just amoral. He’s a walking repudiation of every aspiration the Founders had for this country. Behold: “This is shocking but not surprising because of the pattern,” said MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-host Willie Geist. “This is not a one-off, this is the way he thinks about people who serve the country in uniform.” Trump infamously mocked Sen. John McCain for being a POW. Via Raw Story: “Yeah, there’s something really warped inside of him, there really is,” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson added. “Just something — I guess the word weird is overused, but all that we just played is weird.” “And it is just appalling that he would speak of America’s heroes that way,” he continued.
Now imagine that kind of conversation between Trump and JD Vance.
Highlights of the “press conference” Trump is apparently afraid of campaigning so now he’s just calling “press conferences” and rambling for an hour or so and then taking a handful of questions which he doesn’t really answer. Speaking of intelligence… He just can’t stop trashing the military. Here he is saying that giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to his top donor Miriam Adelman is better than the medal of honor because only broken down or dead soldiers get that one. “They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead. She gets it and she’s a healthy beautiful woman.”