When the going gets tough TFG has had many bad weeks, but the last couple have been especially bad. Vice President Kamala Harris now leads in some national and swing state polls. President Joe Biden’s success in winning (hear that word, Donnie?) the release of prisoners held in Russia has TFG flummoxed. His “unmitigated caucasity” (as a friend put it) in explaining blackness to the National Association of Black Journalists has neither won him friends nor expanded his voting base. Now the orange-hued, former wrestling promoter is trying to brand Harris as dumb and — xenophobia being his signature chokeslam — as failed “Border Czar Harris.” In TFG’s dim mind, the Biden approach is both weak and dumb. Actual data undercut that argument, Greg Sargent observes. Not that facts mean anything on the right. Border crossings have dropped for the fifth straight month per unpublished data obtained by CBS News and The New York Times, Sargent explains: These numbers badly undermine Trump’s primary attack line on Harris—and not just in the most obvious way.
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Not that reality actually means much, but here’s a little dose of it anyway: At a rally in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, Donald Trump rolled out a new attack on Vice President Kamala Harris that showcased his well-known fondness for high-toned discourse: Her handling of immigration reveals her as not just weak, but also dumb. The former president luridly claimed that Venezuelan gang members were “plotting to conduct ambush attacks” on American cops, then added: “All the while Harris and Biden sit in the White House and try to figure out who is dumber.” He proceeded to blame “Border Czar Harris” for a series of crimes by migrants, even though President Biden tasked her with addressing the root causes of Central American migration, while the Department of Homeland Security secures the border. Unfortunately for Trump, unpublished DHS data shows that border encounters between ports of entry plummeted again to approximately 57,000 in July, according to an official familiar with the numbers. The data, which is preliminary until its official release in the coming days, was also leaked to CBS News and The New York Times.
That energy has a familiar feel: Look around and you might see it: the telltale signs that the #Resistance has been born again. A-list celebs are rallying for and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris; Zoom calls of Black, Latino, female, and young voters are reaching capacity; the coconut-tree and brat memes keep coming. Even cringe and earnest #Resist merch is back — now in the form of organic Kamala Harris merch. The political movement that materialized organically, protested policy decisions, and eventually helped end Donald Trump’s presidency may now be taking on a second political life with the goal of not just beating Trump, but electing the first woman president. None of this was a sure thing. Just a few months ago it looked a lot like the anti-Trump #Resistance was dead. Progressive organizers and activists were exhausted; Trump fatigue had settled in. And voters of all kinds were tuned out and unenthusiastic about the candidate choices they had. That dynamic has flipped — for now.
You would have thought that the TV celebrity politician would have seen that: Even Sen. JD Vance’s allies realize the relative political newcomer has taken a huge leap that was bound to run into some early stumbles. The Ohio Republican is the most politically inexperienced GOP vice-presidential nominee in almost 90 years. He’s run in just one election for any political office. “You know, he’s gotten shot out of a cannon. It’s like going from zero to 60 in terms of intensity, publicity, scrutiny, all that stuff,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), an early supporter of Vance in his 2022 Senate campaign. No kidding. Anyone running as the understudy to a 78 year old president who is clearly losing his mind will receive a lot of scrutiny which is why you might pick someone with tons of experience who has been thoroughly vetted — which he clearly was not. They were completely unprepared for the very online Vance’s record. And he has virtually no experience: At 39, Vance is the second youngest of the 100 senators.
The fault lies not in their candidates “Trump didn’t change the party, he revealed it,” Stuart Stevens (“It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump“) tells The Daily Blast. It’s a view the former Republican says he forced himself to admit. Lee Atwater’s1981 confession about the Southern Strategy was more than a political strategy. It was an admission that it would work on racist sentiments present among the GOP base. “We were very aware of this ugly, dark side,” Stevens says of himself, Nicole Wallace, and other Bush administration colleagues. “But we thought it was a recessive gene, and that we were the dominant gene.” They thought their party would move their way, just out of political practicality. It did not. Stevens tells Greg Sargent he did not write another of those “if only they’d listened to me” books. Because the GOP did listen to him. “American conservatism is a failed intellectual exercise,” Stevens concludes. It is no longer a political party but an extremist movement.
Masha Gesson’s amazing piece today in the NY Times about the prisoner swap is like something out of a John LeCarre novel. It’s absolutely riveting. If you read nothing else about this story, this is the one. I am including a gift link so you can all read it. This is a short excerpt to whet the appetite: Weeks after that phone call, Navalny flew back to Moscow and was immediately arrested. A year after that, “Navalny” was winning major awards and heading for an Oscar, and Grozev and Pevchikh were discussing how to leverage that success to secure Navalny’s release. On that stroll around the reservoir, they came up with a crazy scheme they decided to call Secret Project Silver Lake. They wanted to organize a swap of Russian spies held in Western prisons for Navalny and other Russian political prisoners. When Pevchikh got back to where the team was staying, she Googled “Glienicke Bridge,” a crossing between what used to be East and West Berlin, the site of several prior prisoner swaps, including one that involved four countries and almost 30 people.
The election isn’t going to go smoothly Trump has been telling everyone who will listen that he doesn’t need a get out the vote program because he will personally get his people out. He told the RNC and his campaign that they need to concentrate on stopping the “cheating” (by which he means Democrats voting.) The strategy is to suppress the vote wherever possible and contest the vote no matter how close the election is if he loses. There is no Democratic margin of victory that he will declare legitimate. (After all, even when he won in 2016 he said that he actually won the popular vote which he lost by 2 million votes.) Rolling Stone took a look at how some of the red dominated swing states have set up a system to deny the election results if Trump doesn’t win and it’s sobering: WHEN ELECTION NIGHT comes in November, it will be up to thousands of local election officials to certify election results in their counties.
What kind do you want? A power (and water) outage last night after a long afternoon of canvassing (plus a visit from the neighborhood black bear) has me catching up this morning. I haven’t had time to watch the Kamala Harris rally in Atlanta from last night now that power’s restored. Just sayin’. Apparently, Harris had the kind of to-the-rafters crowd Donald Trump lies about drawing. Rev. Warnock did some preaching. Those years of Republican voter fraud allegations about “them” stealing your vote? Warnock reminds Georgians that a “Florida Man” occupying the Oval Office actually tried to steal theirs in 2020. It’s on tape. And he’s been indicted. VP Kamala Harris received a “modest” welcome at the Georgia State University Convocation Center. Harris laid out the stakes. Really? What kind of future do you want? Those are the stakes.
Is it over Tuesday? Sure, I was disappointed to hear that North Carolina Roy Cooper withdrew from the competition to be Kamala Harris’s vice president. But I get his reasoning: Cooper, the former chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, has been close to Harris since they were both state attorneys general. His potential selection was seen as a possible asset in shifting North Carolina — the Democrats’ only significant opportunity to expand on their 2020 map — into Harris’ hands. Under the state constitution, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who is the GOP’s nominee to replace the term-limited Cooper, becomes acting governor and can assume the Democrat’s powers when he travels out of state. For those following along at home, that’s Mark “some folks need killing” Robinson. Simone Biles is a “weak little gymnast” Mark Robinson. “Doesn’t pay his taxes and is under investigation” for fraud Mark Robinson. Cooper, according to two of the people, has expressed concern about what Robinson might do if he were to leave the state extensively for campaign travel.
So when is the media going to turn on Harris? I don’t know but I’d guess it’s going to happen pretty soon. It’s inevitable for all the reasons Brian Beutler spelled out in his excellent piece today in Off Message: As happily as it ended for liberals, the early weeks of July were their darkest since November 2016, illuminating only how various elites will respond if Donald Trump wins the election. What we saw was disturbing: When it appeared that Trump would win the election all but unopposed, we did not see officeholders take steps to batten down the hatches of the political system, or media figures apply extra scrutiny to the presumptive president. (In 2016, media elites explained away their insipid obsession with Hillary Clinton’s emails by citing her poll numbers—she would likely be president, after all, and thus merited a thorough scrubbing.) Instead, we witnessed what the scholar Timothy Snyder has famously described as “obeying in advance.” Some of these gestures were truly ominous.