Cats of the Louvre, a graphic novel by Taiyo Matsumoto
There are just 37 days remaining until election day, November 5. While Trump continues to display his growing cognitive issues as well as his ignorance of public policy, Kamala Harris has been making substantive appearances in which she intelligently spells out what she will do as president. Earlier in the week she spoke about her economic plans. Yesterday she visited the border in Arizona and gave a speech outlining her proposed immigration policies and attacking Trump’s failures.
Vice President Kamala Harris went on the offensive against former President Donald Trump on immigration Friday during her visit to the southern border in Arizona as she tries to turn a political vulnerability on its head.
Immigration has featured prominently in the 2024 presidential election, with polls showing voters placing more trust in Trump to handle the issue than Harris.
Democrats, grappling with years of border crises, have tried to gain ground by pointing to the bipartisan border measure that congressional Republicans blocked earlier this year after Trump came out against it. Harris on Friday lambasted Trump for his role in stymying that bill.
“It was the strongest border security bill we have seen in decades. It was endorsed by the Border Patrol union. And it should be in effect today, producing results in real time, right now, for our country,” she said at a rally in Douglas, a town on the US-Mexico border.
“But Donald Trump tanked it. He picked up the phone and called some friends in Congress and said, ‘Stop the bill,’” she said. “He prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem. And the American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games and their personal political future.”
She said she would ask Congress to pass the measure if she is elected, and would sign it into law. She also laid out a series of proposals that she said were “not just about some rhetoric at a rally,” but would help stem the flow of migrants into the United States.
A bit more:
“Solutions are at hand if we focus on fixing a problem and not running on a problem,” Harris said.
She said she’d work with Congress to create a pathway to citizenship for “hardworking immigrants who have been here for years, for years, and deserve to have a system that works,” as well as “Dreamers” – undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as children, who are allowed to live and work in the US under an Obama-era program but generally cannot become citizens under current law.
“They are American in every way. But still, they do not have an earned pathway to citizenship. And this problem has gone unsolved at this point now for decades,” Harris said. “The same goes for farmworkers who ensure that we have food on our tables and sustain our agricultural industry – and they too have been in legal limbo for years because politicians have refused to come together and fix our broken immigration system.”
Earlier this year, Biden announced an executive action severely limiting the ability of migrants to seek asylum at the US southern border if they crossed unlawfully – a departure from decadeslong protocol. Immigrant advocates have likened the executive action to Trump-era policies.
The measure can be turned on and off and lifted when there’s a daily average of fewer than 1,500 encounters between ports of entry, among other criteria. It remains in place.
Homeland Security officials have credited the action for driving down border crossings to the lowest point since 2020.
The Washington Post: Harris, in visit to border, proposes new restrictions on immigration.
DOUGLAS, Ariz. — Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign on Friday proposed new border restrictions that would go further than the emergency rules the Biden administration deployed in June, making the announcement during a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border Friday in an effort to confront one of her biggest political vulnerabilities.
By Taiyo Matsumoto
Harris’s proposed executive action would build on President Joe Biden’s current policy of essentially closing the U.S. asylum system unless illegal border crossings stay below 1,500 daily crossings for a week. Harris would lower that threshold and extend the period it must be met, advisers said, although exact figures were not immediately available.
The action might have a limited practical impact, at least in the short term, but the proposal appeared designed to send a message that Harris is taking a more assertive immigration posture than the administration in which she serves and that she is not ceding the issue to Donald Trump, who consistently scores higher marks among voters on border security and immigration.
In what her campaign had billed as a major speech in this community, which sits on the border, Harris also emphasized her support for an enforcement-heavy border security bill crafted by a bipartisan group of senators earlier this year. She decried Trump’s central role in derailing it, noting that he had urged Republicans in Congress to oppose the legislation.
“Donald Trump tanked it,” she said, standing amid six different signs that said in capital letters, “Border Security and Stability.”
“Because, you see, he prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem,” she added. “And the American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games and their personal political future.”
Read more details at the WaPo link.
NPR: At the border in Arizona, Harris lays out a plan to get tough on fentanyl.
Vice President Harris walked along the U.S. border with Mexico on Friday alongside a stretch of border wall built during the Obama administration, talking with border officials about their work.
It was a photo op meant to illustrate that she supports border security — one of the biggest concerns voters have about Harris — and to try to defang criticism from her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump.
Later, she embraced a mother whose son died of a fentanyl overdose, and made her most extensive remarks to date on how she would address border security and immigration reform.
“I will reach across the aisle and I will embrace common sense approaches and new technologies to get the job done,” she said….
She said her experience as a prosecutor and attorney general gave her experience to tackle the fentanyl problem.
“I’ve seen tunnels with walls as smooth as the walls of your living room, complete with lighting and air conditioning, making very clear that it is about an enterprise that is making a whole lot of money in the trafficking of guns, drugs and human beings,” she said.
“Stopping transnational criminal organizations and strengthening our border is not new to me, and it is a long standing priority of mine. I have done that work, and I will continue to treat it as a priority when I am elected president of the United States,” Harris said.
Read more at NPR.
Trump very much has not been focusing on policy, and if you’ve paid attention to his rallies and other public appearances, you know that he’s simply not capable of doing so. Even though he was “president” for four years, he has learned nothing about how the government works or about serious issues. He is incapable of learning, and why the media keeps propping him up is a mystery. Here are a couple of “issues” raised by the Trump camp over the past couple of days.
The New York Times: Trump Threatens to Prosecute Google for Showing ‘Bad Stories’ About Him.
Former President Donald J. Trump threatened Friday to prosecute Google if he was elected to the presidency a second time, claiming that the tech company had been “illegally” showing only “bad stories” about him and only “good” ones about Vice President Kamala Harris.
By Taiyo Matsumoto
It was the latest instance of Mr. Trump threatening to prosecute his perceived opponents should he return to office. This month, he called for the prosecution of lawyers, political donors and operatives if they engaged in “unscrupulous behavior.”
Mr. Trump said at a news conference on Thursday that the former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should be prosecuted in connection with the security lapses by which a mob of his own supporters attacked the Capitol during the transfer of presidential power on Jan. 6, 2021.
And on Friday, in Michigan, he called for an attorney general “somewhere, like in a Republican territory” to investigate Ms. Pelosi and her husband over reports that Mr. Pelosi had sold Visa stock ahead of the Justice Department’s filing an antitrust lawsuit against the company.
It was not immediately clear what prompted Mr. Trump to make the statement about Google on his social media website, Truth Social.
“It has been determined that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris,” Mr. Trump wrote.
“This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections,” he added. “If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the Election, and become President of the United States!”
Google said it did not manipulate search results to favor any candidate.
“Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of search for relevant and common search queries,” a Google spokesman said.
The New Republic: Trump Is So Mad About His Bad Press That He’s Unleashed a New Threat.
The source of Trump’s claim appears to be the right-wing Media Research Center, which published a report on Wednesday covered this week by Fox News and The New York Post.
MRC’s report “analyzed the Sept. 6 Google search results” for the terms “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024.” The group alleges that the results favored outlets with “a history of leftist bias,” and that, while Trump’s campaign website appeared sixth in his search results, Harris’s campaign website appeared third in hers.
Dismissing MRC’s report, a Google spokesperson told Fox, “Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries. This report looked at a single rare search term on a single day several weeks ago, and even for that search, both candidates’ websites ranked in the top results on Google.”
Trump’s Truth Social post recalls his previous claims that Google search results are biased against him, which Google has denied.
It is also yet another example of Trump promising to prosecute his perceived political foes if he retakes the White House. Earlier this month, for example, Trump posted to Truth Social that, if he wins, “those people that CHEATED”—such as “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials”—“will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences.”
This is what Trump is preoccupied with a month before the November election.
Oh, and JD Vance continues to say the quiet part aloud when it comes to women’s control over their own bodies and lives. Recently, close Trump adviser did it too.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo: Trump Camp Says State Menstrual Surveillance Programs are A-OK.
One of the most toxic and politically explosive parts of the current abortion rights debate is tied the complexities and perhaps inanities of leaving national abortion policy up to individual states. And a comment yesterday from Trump spokesman Jason Miller put the question right back into the center of the campaign.
By Taiyo Matsumoto
It’s not enough for many anti-abortion stalwarts to ban the procedure in their state. They want to ban legal drugs designed to induce abortion. They want to surveil and block women traveling to other states to obtain an abortion. One of the most threatening dimensions of these programs is that they threaten to make doctors and other medical professionals — who might give counsel on or simply know about a woman’s plans to obtain an abortion — responsible for reporting her actions. If you visit your OB-GYN and discuss traveling to another state to get an abortion, does your OB have to report you to the local sheriff? It applies to third parties who might assist a woman either in traveling to get an abortion or getting FDA-approved medications to induce an abortion at home. The cases we’ve already seen range the gamut from sheriff’s departments wanting to pull medical and travel records for evidence of pregnancies that ended for unexplained reasons, gaps in menstruation, trips out of state that coincided with a pregnancy not brought to term….
…[Y]esterday in an interview on Newsmax of all places, a host asked Trump spokesman Jason Miller whether Donald Trump supported or wouldn’t aim to prevent states from enforcing their own menstrual surveillance regimes. It was one of those Fox-like interviews in which the host seems to go out of his way to signal what the right answer is. You wouldn’t do this, right?
“But he wouldn’t support monitoring pregnancies, even if a state decided to do that?” the host asked.
Miller responded that “he’s [i.e., Trump’s] made it very clear that he’s not going to go and weigh in and push various states on how they want to go and set up their particular rules and restrictions. That’s going to be up to the states.”
So he went there. It’s totally up to the states. Trump’s “leave it up to the states” approach applies to all these menstrual surveillance and travel restriction regimes as well. It’s a new opening for the Harris campaign to focus attention on an issue that hasn’t yet gotten enough attention — not just abortion rights as a general issue but states and county sheriffs’ effort to restrict women’s travel, access their medical records and current state of menstruation or gestation, and bar access to legal medications.
What else is on Trump’s befuddled mind these days? He’s “obsessed” with Olivia Nuzzi/RFK Jr. story.
The Daily Beast: Trump Is ‘Obsessed’ With RFK Jr.’s Sexting Scandal.
Donald Trump has become “obsessed” with the sexting scandal surrounding his new ally Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and New York magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi, according to a report.
The former president even called up the 70-year-old Kennedy—who’s married to Curb Your Enthusiasm star Cheryl Hines—to ask if the bombshell reports about him and the 31-year-old journalist were true, and if the relationship ever went beyond the sending of “demure” nudes, according to Puck News.
“[Kennedy] denied the whole thing to Trump,” a source with direct knowledge told the outlet. “He said he hardly knows her. He said he met her one time.”
Trump was also apparently close to making a public statement about the alleged digital dalliance, having “almost posted to Truth Social, his social media platform, ‘My condolences to Ryan Lizza…’” according to the Puck report. Lizza, a Politico journalist, ended his engagement to Nuzzi last month after learning of her relationship with Kennedy, according to Vanity Fair.
Trump apparently exercised more restraint than his adviser, Corey Lewandowski, who tweeted and then later deleted his own post sharing the Kennedy gossip.
Nuzzi had interviewed Trump for a piece published earlier this month which, in part, featured a detailed description of the GOP nominee’s ear bandaged up following the attempt on his life at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania in July.
By Taiyo Matsumoto
I’m sure he’s read the latest gossip about the scandal at Page Six. The Daily Beast: ‘Madly in Love’ Olivia Nuzzi Had ‘Incredible’ FaceTime Sex With RFK Jr: Report.
The forbidden love between New York magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been chronicled in a new report that reveals even more details of their dalliances.
The Page Six report, which cites only anonymous sources, claimed Friday the 31-year-old Nuzzi fell “madly in love” with the Kennedy scion, 70, after he “love bombed” her and sparked a virtual relationship during his campaign.
The two reportedly exchanged “I love yous” and had an affair that lasted nearly a year, complete with the duo having “incredible” FaceTime sex and speaking on “long calls.” The report also alleged that Nuzzi and Kennedy shared “endless texts” with each other.
Page Six reported that Nuzzi and Kennedy’s supposed relationship kicked off as Nuzzi worked on a profile of the failed presidential candidate for New York.
Nuzzi, who was engaged to Politico’s Ryan Lizza at the time, traveled to Los Angeles to interview Kennedy during a hike together in October 2023. It was on that hike that Kennedy, who has been married to the actress Cheryl Hines for 10 years, reportedly made his first pass at Nuzzi and grabbed her arm “as a romantic overture.”
Page Six reported that Nuzzi and Kennedy’s relationship heated up after the journalist contacted Kennedy with follow-up questions as she wrote her profile. The relationship reportedly remained under wraps for months, but word of it had reached Lizza by August.
Vanity Fairreportedthat Lizza had a “heated” call with Kennedy over the alleged affair upon learning of it. It remains unclear how Lizza caught wind of the reported fling, but the Daily Beast exclusively revealed this week that Kennedy had been bragging about receiving nude photos of Nuzzi.
I hope this will be the end of Nuzzi’s career in journalism, but it probably won’t be. She could always go to Fox News.
I’ve tried to keep this post light, because the news overall has been so depressing lately. In that spirit, I’m going to end with another hilarious, gossipy story about a Republican candidate.
Rolling Stone: Childless GOP Candidate Borrows Friend’s Wife and Kids for Photo Ops.
Republicans have taken umbrage with the notion that they’re weird — specifically when it comes to accusations that they’re weird about people (usually women) who don’t have children.
The sentiment in Republican politics that childless Americans are — as JD Vance put it — disorienting and disturbing has become so prevalent that one GOP candidate has taken to borrowing his friends’ wife and children for photo ops.
According to a Friday report from The New York Times, Derrick Anderson — a former Green Beret running for the House of Representatives in Virginia — has repeatedly featured a woman and her three daughters in campaign materials.
One photo features the group posing close together in an image that you could probably find framed on a grandmother’s mantle, the type of photo that your parents made your uncle with a DSLR camera take because “we never get nice pictures together.” https://twitter.com/JacobRubashkin/status/1839759803729752271
In one campaign video, Anderson is seen walking side-by-side with the same woman. In another video, which was featured on the National Republican Campaign Committee’s website and on his YouTube channel, shows Anderson speaking to the woman and the three girls while seated in a home dining room.
According to the Times, the woman and girls are “the wife and children of a longtime friend.” Anderson’s campaign website does not mention a wife or children, but notes that he “lives in Spotsylvania County with his dog, Ranger, a Dalmatian.” The Republican candidate recently revealed on social media that he is engaged to his girlfriend, Maggie, and has posted pictures of her — she is decidedly not the woman featured in the photos and videos.
By Taiyo Matsumoto
You can see the “family photo” in this article at Mediaite: Anti-Abortion GOP Candidate Borrows Friend’s Wife and Daughters for Campaign Photo Op.
A Friday article at The New York Times, headlined “G.O.P. Candidates, Looking to Soften Their Image, Turn to Their Wives,” reported how “male Republicans struggling to appeal to female voters concerned about their records on reproductive rights are unleashing their spouses to make the pitch on their behalf.”
Male GOP candidates who are worried about getting dragged down by the abortion issue in November are putting their wives front and center in their campaign ads. That’s hardly a new phenomenon — candidates have showcased the stereotypical [husband + wife + at least two children + probably a dog or two] family photo for ages — but the Republican angst about Dobbs is so acute, at least one candidate resorted to faking an entire family for his ads.
These GOP ads included anodyne images of “women in softly lit living rooms and pristine kitchens vouching for their husbands’ characters,” “a wholesome family gathering around the dining room table,” and moms “driving S.U.V.s with young children in the back seat as they stop for gas and groceries, talking about how their husbands are champions for their families, and can be champions for yours, too.” [….]
So what do you do if you’re running for Congress with an R after your name but don’t have your own wife and kids?
If you’re Derrick Anderson, a candidate running in an open race for Virginia’s seventh congressional district, you borrow a wife and daughters from a friend.
The campaign of Derrick Anderson, a former Army Green Beret who is running in a competitive race for an open seat in Virginia’s Seventh District, has posted footage of him posing with a woman and her three daughters in what looks like a photo that might be used for an annual holiday card. In another scene filmed for potential use in a campaign ad, Mr. Anderson is seated around the dining room table with the same woman and three girls, chatting and smiling.
But the people are not relatives. They are the wife and children of a longtime friend. Mr. Anderson, who announced this month that he was engaged, does not have any children of his own. His campaign website says he lives with his dog and does not display any of the photos.
Isn’t it strange that Trump is never accompanied by his wife and family, but the media never mentions it?
That’s it for me today. Please take care, especially if you are/were in the path of Helene.
By Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi
I wanted to post an article that appeared in New York Magazine a couple of days ago, but I can no longer get past the paywall. It was about the ultra right wing Catholic sect Opus Dei, which has become a very powerful influence in Washington DC. The article was based on a new book that will be released on October 1,
Here is a description of the book from Publisher’s Weekly:
Abuse, enslavement, and financial schemes are the stock in trade of the shadowy Catholic sect Opus Dei, according to this chilling debut exposé. Journalist Gore stumbled onto the institution’s web of influence during the 2017 collapse of Banco Popular, when he discovered that the Spanish bank’s biggest shareholder, mysteriously named the Syndicate, could be traced to Opus Dei. Combing through the Syndicate’s sprawling network of foundations and nonprofits led Gore to uncover Opus Dei’s connections to offshore money-laundering schemes and a global web of vocational schools implicated in human trafficking of children. Delving into archives and conducting interviews with former members, Gore alleges that a mission to “serve God by striving for perfection even in the most everyday tasks” has masked abuse since Opus Dei’s 1928 founding by Josemaría Escrivá, whose recruitment methods rapidly turned cultlike, incorporating “listening devices” and “prescription drugs.” While Gore reports that today abuse permeates the entire hierarchy of the organization, he most harrowingly recounts the plight of its lowest rung: underage girls assigned to household work in Opus Dei residencies, where many later reported being held captive; others minors connected to Opus Dei have reported instances of sexual abuse. Gore’s most alarming line of inquiry is into Opus Dei’s political influence in Washington, D.C., via the Catholic Information Center and the Federalist Society. Readers will be disturbed.
Some of the powerful people who are known to be members of Opus Dei: Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence and Gini Thomas, J.D. Vance, Leonard Leo, who hand-picked Trump’s SCOTUS picks, and Project 2025 author Kevin Roberts. There are many more.
Rachel Leingang and Stephanie Kirchgaessner at The Guardian (from July, 2024): Kevin Roberts, architect of Project 2025, has close ties to radical Catholic group Opus Dei.
Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president and the architect of Project 2025, the conservative thinktank’s road map for a second Trump presidency, has close ties and receives regular spiritual guidance from an Opus Dei-led center in Washington DC, a hub of activity for the radical and secretive Catholic group.
Roberts acknowledged in a speech last September that – for years – he has visited the Catholic Information Center, a K Street institution headed by an Opus Dei priest and incorporated by the archdiocese of Washington, on a weekly basis for mass and “formation”, or religious guidance. Opus Dei also organizes monthly retreats at the CIC.
In the speech – which he delivered at the CIC and was recorded and is available online – Roberts spoke candidly about his strategy for achieving extreme policy goals that he supports but are out of step with the views of a majority of Americans.
Outlawing birth control is the “hardest” political battle facing conservatives in the future, the 50-year-old political strategist said, but he urged conservatives to pursue even small legislative victories – what he called “radical incrementalism” – to advance their most rightwing policy objectives.
Roberts gained notoriety this year as the leading force behind Project 2025, a foundation plan backed by more than 100 conservative groups that seeks to radically upend a broad range of policies if Trump gets elected again, from limiting abortion access and LGBTQ+ rights and dismantling the Department of Education, to ending diversity programs and increasing government support for “fertility awareness” programs, like ovulation tracking and practicing periodic abstinence, instead of more reliable contraception.
But Roberts’ personal ties to Opus Dei and the significance of his affiliation, have received far less attention.
King Cat, by Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi
Gareth Gore, the author of a forthcoming book on Opus Dei, said members of the Catholic organization are engaged in “a political project shrouded in a veil of spirituality”. The group’s founder, Saint Josemaría Escrivá, saw his followers as part of a “rising militia”, Gore said, who were seeking to “enter battle against the enemies of Christ”.
“Like Project 2025, Opus Dei at its core is a reactionary stand against the progressive drift of society,” Gore said. “For decades now, the organization has thrown its resources at penetrating Washington’s political and legal elite – and finally seems to have succeeded through its close association with men like Kevin Roberts and Leonard Leo.”
Leo is a conservative activist who has led the Republican mission to install the rightwing majority in the supreme court and finances many of the groups signed on to Project 2025.
Like Roberts, Leo also has links to the Opus Dei-linked CIC. In a 2022 speech accepting the CIC’s highest honor, the John Paul II New Evangelization award, Leo praised the center while also referring to his political opponents as “vile and amoral current day barbarians, secularists and bigots” who were under the influence of the devil….
One of the core tenets of Opus Dei is that it does not believe in the traditional separation of church and state. Instead, said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, it believes the two ought to have a symbiotic relationship.
I hope you’ll read the rest of the article. It’s not as extensive as thJe one behind the paywall at New York Magazine, but it’s good.
Matthew Fox at Daily Meditations (May, 2024): A Deeper Look at Opus Dei, Christofascism, Misogyny & SCOTUS.
Since the far-right wing cult in the Roman Catholic church known as “Opus Dei” has played such a prominent role in Leonard Leo’s life and in the current Supreme Court that he has fashioned, it seems fitting to take a closer look at the organization.
Christofascism is always steeped in misogyny. So was the fascist founder of Opus Dei, Josemaría Escrivá, who was rushed into canonization shortly after he died. Maria del Carmen Tapia wrote a tell-all book about Escrivá which became a best-seller in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Germany. The Boston Globe called it a picture of an obsessively secretive, manipulative, and sexist organization with a virtual cultlike veneration of its founder.
Tapia played significant roles in her 18 years with Opus Dei including working as Escrivá’s secretary for seven years. She wrote about what she saw. “There’s a constant sexual obsession within Opus Dei” she writes.
Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi Ghost and Cat
Beating of one’s body was encouraged as a spiritual practice and Tapia confessed that “I treated my body with brutality.” At one meeting where Tapia was present, Escrivá raged and shouted to fellow priests, Take the one [woman], lift up her skirt, take down her panties, and whack her on the behind until she talks. MAKE HER TALK!
He shouted at Tapia, You’re a wicked woman, sleazy, scum! That’s what you are! She endured many interrogations and “advisers” were stationed inside and outside her room who followed her even to the bathroom. She wrote, I began to shake almost constantly as a result of my terror. I was afraid they would take me to a mental institution as I knew they had done to other members.
In her final meeting with Escrivá, he shouted at her, You are a seductress with all your immorality and indecency!. …You’re wicked! Indecent!….Hear me well! WHORE! SOW!
Escrivá hated Vatican II and liberation theology and actually was heard to praise Hitler. But two papacies, those of JPII and Benedict XVI, appointed numerous members of his sect as bishops and cardinals in South and North America.
Pope Francis has tried to marginalize Opus Dei, apparently without much success.
It should be very concerning that J.D. Vance is a member of this cult.
Molly Olmstead at Slate: J.D. Vance Used to Be an Atheist. What He Believes Now Is Telling. Subhead: He’s not an evangelical Christian. He’s a Catholic—of a very specific type.
In 2021, when J.D. Vance was asked at a conference why he had converted to Catholicism just two years earlier, he had a fairly simple answer.
“I really liked that the Catholic Church was just really old,” he said.
This anti-modern worldview is key to understanding Vance. In a party long dominated by anti-intellectual evangelical Christians with a hearty distrust of institutions, Vance stands out among its leaders for having embraced a church with a complex social doctrine built off the work of ancient philosophers. His enthusiasm for a particular and relatively obscure kind of contemporary Catholic political thought shows up in his politics—his longing for Americans to build robust nuclear families, his comments about banning porn, his scorn for childless cat ladies. It’s tempting to see these stances as old ones from the Christian right, familiar to anyone who has followed the evolution of the GOP in the past couple of decades, but Vance’s past comments indicate that they’re motivated by something newer, and more radical, than that.
Vance wasn’t always so unusual among his fellow Republicans: He grew up loosely evangelical Christian; he writes in Hillbilly Elegy that his commitment to his father’s church was strong but short-lived. As a young man, he identified for a while as an atheist. Then, as he recounted in a 2020 essay about his conversion for the Catholic magazine the Lamp, he reconnected with Christianity when he was searching for greater meaning in his life during law school. He began to feel drawn to Catholicism in particular after reading up on Catholic moral philosophers and discussing theology with conservative Dominican friars he knew.
The Cat Which Relaxes, by Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi
After he officially converted in 2019, Vance explained in an interview with his friend Rod Dreher—a conservative writer and Catholic convert who later went on to convert, again, to Orthodox Christianity—that he had to Catholicism in part because of the writings of Saint Augustine. “Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way,” Vance said. “As someone who spent a lot of his life buying into the lie that you had to be stupid to be a Christian, Augustine really demonstrated in a moving way that that’s not true.” [….]
But as Vance would explain at that 2021 conference (held by the Napa Institute, a conservative Catholic organization), he was also drawn to Catholicism for its rules and relative stability over centuries. “I felt like the modern world was constantly in flux,” Vance said. “The things you believed 10 years ago were no longer acceptable to believe 10 years later.”
“We have, I believe, a civilizational crisis in this country,” Vance said at the 2021 Napa Institute event. “Even among healthy, intact families, they’re not having enough kids such that we’re going to have a long-term future in this country.” For his Senate campaign, also in 2021, Vance praised Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán for policies that incentivized marriage and children. Orbán’s government had offered loans to married couples that were forgiven if the couple stayed together and had three children. (Orbán is not himself Catholic but has privileged Christianity in a country dominated by Catholicism.) “Why can’t we do that here?” Vance asked. “Why can’t we actually promote family formation?”
These anti-modern comments fit with a certain kind of worldview that prizes a traditional and family-oriented society above individual liberties—and even democracy. It’s a guiding philosophy of a new faction of the conservative movement that pulls from elements of both the left and far right, that champions populist economics and radically conservative social policies, and that promises a revolution in the entire political order: the postliberal right.
Olmstead doesn’t mention Opus Dei, but she spells out Vance’s ultra right wing Catholic religious beliefs. There’s more at the link.
I’m not sure where I’m going with all this. I guess I’m going down a rabbit hole, as Dakinikat often says. But I wanted to call attention to the fact that it’s not just evangelical Protestants that are influencing our government–far right wing Catholics may be even more powerful, and now those powerful people are trying to place one of their own (Vance) in the White House.
One more article on Opus Dei’s influence, focusing on Leonard Leo. Thomas B. Edsall at The New York Times: The Man Behind the End of Roe v. Wade Has Big Plans for America.
In the world of political fund-raising, there is hard money, soft money, dark money — and Leonard Leo money.
Political advocacy and charitable groups controlled by Leo now have far more assets than the combined total cash on hand of the Republican and Democratic National, Congressional and Senatorial committees: $440.9 million.
Leo is a 58-year-old graduate of Cornell Law School, a Catholic with ties to Opus Dei — the most conservative “personal prelature” in the church hierarchy — chief strategist of the Federalist Society for more than a quarter century and a crucial force behind the confirmations of John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. He has emerged over the past five years as the dominant fund-raiser on the right.
As Leo has risen to this pinnacle of influence, he has become rich, profiting from the organizations he has created and from the consulting fees paid by the conservative advocacy and lobbying groups he funds.
Leo has an overarching agenda. In a 2022 speech he made upon receiving the John Paul II New Evangelization Award at the Catholic Information Center, he warned fellow Catholics: “Catholic evangelization faces extraordinary threats and hurdles. Our culture is more hateful and intolerant of Catholicism than at any other point in our lives. It despises who we are, what we profess and how we act.”
Inca, by Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi
Leo describes the adversaries of Catholicism as “these barbarians, secularists and bigots” who “have been growing more numerous over the past few years. They control and use many levers of power.” He is determined to wrest the levers of power from “the grasp of liberals” and place them, permanently if possible, with those he sees as their rightful owner: social and economic conservatives.
Leo has most famously used his network and personal influence not only to establish a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court but also to secure appointment of deeply conservative justices throughout the federal and state court systems.
At the same time, Leo has provided essential support to the full gamut of right-wing advocacy and lobbying organizations, including the Federalist Society, Susan B. Anthony Pro-life America and the Faith and Freedom Coalition.
The millions of dollars Leo has raised through his tax-exempt nonprofits have, in turn, flowed to profit-making consulting companies owned, in part or wholly, by him. In 2016, he created the BH Group, a for-profit consulting firm that is now defunct, which received at least $6.9 million from tax- exempt donor nonprofits run by him.
Four years later, Leo formed CRC Advisors, also a profit-making consulting firm. Since then, two of his tax-exempt donor organizations, the 85 Fund and the Concord Fund, have paid CRC Advisors more than $77 million, according to reports filed with the I.R.S.
Leo is a prodigious fund-raiser whose organizations take in and hand out hundreds of millions annually. For example, the 85 Fund, according to the I.R.S., raised $317.9 million from 2020 to 2022 and gave out grants totaling $147.4 million. During that same period, the 85 Fund paid CRC Advisors — of which Leo is chairman — fees totaling $55.2 million, according to I.R.S. filings and research by Accountable.us and ProPublica.
Leonard Leo is definitely a member of Opus Dei, and there’s much more information about him at the link. Here is a gift article in case you’d like to read the whole thing.
I have to end here, because I’m having WordPress problems. I’ll add a few more links in the comments.
Take care of yourselves and have a nice weekend.
“I know they wanted JFK Jr, but RFK Jr is a nice addition to the trump campaign.” John Buss, @repeat1968
The Trumplican Party continues to devolve. I doubt my father would even recognize it if he were alive. The latest example is the addition of RFK Jr., a conspiracy nut with habits that the word eccentric can’t even begin to describe. This headline from The Wrap, written by Stephanie Kaloi, is something regular folks can’t wrap their head around. “RFK Jr.’s Daughter Says Dad Cut Off a Whale’s Head, Drove It 5 Hours Home. When they would accelerate, “whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick Kennedy explained to Town & Country Magazine.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s daughter Kick Kennedy may or may not be spending time with Jennifer Lopez’s estranged husband Ben Affleck (as reported by Page Six), but she certainly spent time with Town & Country Magazine for a profile that has been resurfaced and made waves on social media, in which she shared an anecdote about her father and a dead whale that still checks out with what we know about the odd politician — especially when it comes to his love for dead animals.
When she was 6, her dad chopped off the head of a whale that washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port. Due to RFK Jr.’s love of studying animal skulls and skeletons, they then strapped the dead whale’s head to the car and spent five hours driving it to their home.
“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kennedy said. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
RFK Jr. made headlines earlier this month when he shared the story of taking a dead bear that he found as roadkill, intent on saving it to eat, before ultimately dumping it in a bizarre prank in New York City’s Central Park. On Friday, the independent candidate dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Donald Trump.
RFK Jr. approached the Harris/Walz campaign, but they didn’t answer his calls. That’s just some American common sense with nothing to do with political savvy. What possible benefit could his addition add to a campaign? But he’s just another (yawn) Maga Sideshow full of weirdos who generally wind up in trouble with the law, one way or another. His J6 “gala” next month will undoubtedly highlight the number of criminals that actually might actually violate his terms of release. Also, Rudy Guilliani will be there. He is definitely on the Trumplican weirdo and felon list. This information popped up on Alternet, and I just had to share it. “Trump’s ‘gala’ honoring ‘courage and sacrifice’ of J6 rioters may violate his terms of release” is written by Carl Gibson and answers my call out to all the parole officers in charge of these folks.
Convicted felon and 45th President of the United States Donald Trump is planning on hosting a gathering of other convicted felons next month. One legal expert is pointing out that the event may frustrate his efforts to remain a free man.
According to NJ.com, the ex-president is hosting a “J6 awards gala” at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club next month. Progressive group MeidasTouch reported that on September 5, Trump will be joined by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and MAGA influencer Anthony Raimondi at the event, where he is expected to personally address participants in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
…
However, if Trump follows through with the gala, it may complicate his own legal situation. According to attorney Tristan Snell – who prosecuted the former president over his sham Trump University while at the New York Attorney General’s office — New York state law would prohibit such an event given the expected guest list.
“Someone should alert Trump’s probation officer — because convicted felons are legally prohibited from associating with other felons,” he tweeted.
While Trump has been convicted by a jury on 34 class E felony counts, he won’t be sentenced until September 18. At that point, assuming the former president isn’t ordered to serve time behind bars (Judge Juan Merchan has the ability to sentence him to as much as 20 years in prison), he will then be issued a probation officer, who he will be required to check in with on a regular basis. This means the September 5 event will be legal, though it likely won’t help his case when he appears before Merchan less than two weeks later.
The former president narrowly dodged the ire of prosecutors at last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade pointed out that some of the convention’s attendees included indicted “fake electors,” and that Trump seen associating with them may have resulted in Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith and/or Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis petitioning the court to incarcerate Trump prior to his trial for consorting with criminal defendants.
DonOld is facing new lawsuits from musicians who don’t want their music to be associated with MAGA craziness. The first to take action was the son of Issa Hayes. This is reported in the Daily Beast by Clay Walker. “Isaac Hayes Estate Marks Victory in Suit Against Trump.” The candidate and the campaign continue to act like laws don’t matter.
The estate of the late soul singer Isaac Hayes is moving forward in their lawsuit against Donald Trump for using a song co-written by the artist. “The Federal Court has granted our request for an Emergency Hearing to secure injunctive relief,” the late singer’s son, Isaac Hayes III, wrote on X Friday. According to Hayes III, Trump himself will have to appear in court in September. The lawsuit was originally filed earlier this month and sought $3 million for the former president’s campaign’s unauthorized use of “Hold On, I’m Coming,” a 1960s song originally performed by duo Sam & Dave, more than 100 times. Prior to the filing, the Trump campaign was asked to discontinue the use of the song, but things came to a head on August 10, the anniversary of the singer’s 2008 death, when Trump used it again at a Montana rally. “Donald Trump represents the worst in integrity and class with his disrespect and sexual abuse of Women and racist rhetoric. We will now deal with this very swiftly,” Hayes III wrote on X.
Next up in court is the band Foo Fighters. This is from The Hill. “Trump campaign disputes Foo Fighters claim song use was unauthorized.” Laura Sforza writes on the Foo Fight.
A spokesperson for the Foo Fighters said in a statement to The Hill late Sunday the band did not give permission to the Trump campaign to use the song at a Friday campaign rally in Arizona. The spokesperson said any royalties the band earns off the song would be donated to Vice President Harris’s campaign.“Foo Fighters were not asked permission, and if they were they would not have granted it,” the spokesperson said.
However, the Trump campaign said it had permission to play the song.
“We have a license to play the song,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in an email to The Hill.
He also took to the social platform X to dispute the claim.
“It’s Times Like These facts matter, don’t be a Pretender. @foofighters,” he wrote, referring to two other songs by the band.
“My Hero” could be heard playing at Trump’s rally in Glendale on Friday as the former president introduced former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suspended his campaign earlier in the day and threw his support behind Trump.
And there’s more in the Weirdos and Felons news. We have this from the LGBTQ Nation. Seriously, we’ve gone way past the deplorable basket at this point. “MAGA ex-GOP party chair calls gay lawmaker a “f*g” on social media. She called Pete Buttigieg a “weak little girl” in 2022, before she got indicted.” This is written by Alex Bollinger.
A former high-ranking state Republican official who has been indicted in an alleged conspiracy to steal the 2020 election used an anti-gay slur to describe a gay Democratic lawmaker.
Meshawn Maddock used to be the head of the Michigan Republican Party until shortly after she was charged in connection to a scheme to make Michigan’s votes go to Donald Trump in 2020 instead of President Joe Biden, who won the state. Now she is now using slurs on social media.
She was responding to a post on X from Michigan state Rep. Jason Morgan (D), who is an out gay lawmaker and the vice chair of the state’s Democratic Party. Morgan posted a picture of the Michigan congressional delegation at the DNC last Friday, where they were smiling and holding American flags.
“F*gs and hags,” Maddock responded. X responded by reducing the visibility of her post due to a potential violation of the platform’s Hateful Conduct policy. However, the post has not been deleted by the platform.
Stay Classy you god-fearing Christians you! I have to agree with this Op-Ed headline at The Hill. “The right’s killjoy politics only fuel Harris’s momentum.” It’s written by Svante Myrick.
It’s been a couple of days since I flew home after attending the Democratic National Convention. And at the risk of sounding corny, I think I could have done it without the plane. To attend that convention was to experience a sense of joy so powerful that it made you feel like you had wings.
My organization, People for the American Way, was very excited to bring to the convention posters designed especially for us by the artist Victoria Cassinova, which we felt represented the pride and hopefulness of this campaign.
The posters featured a portrait of Harris with the single word: “Freedom.”
We had fun posting them all over the city. We were thrilled to see lots of residents and convention-goers admiring them and taking pictures and selfies. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) shared hers on Instagram.
Then, on the third night of the convention, something sad happened. A group calling itself Artists for Kennedy and Trump defaced a wall of these Harris portraits.
Capturing themselves on video, the vandals spray-painted crimson streaks across the images, focusing on the portrait’s face and eyes. They used words like “war” to describe what they were doing.
It was an ugly but galvanizing reminder of what we’re up against in this race.
I — we — have had enough of creepy authoritarians trying to censor art, ban books and steal our joy.
Because while art does give joy, it also gives strength. It has always been a tool to challenge injustice and enforced conformity, to resist oppression and authoritarianism. That’s why dictators down through history have suppressed and banned art and even murdered artists.
It’s why artists and creators face an enormous threat today, not just from vandals roaming the streets of Chicago but from the deadly serious, powerful operatives behind Project 2025, who are intent on stigmatizing and suppressing vast numbers of artworks by calling them “pornography.”
I remember being shocked and stunned by Trump stalking Hillary on the debate stage and the lack of response to it by the debate’s moderators. Now I think we know exactly how low they go, and as far as I can tell, there is no bottom. If they stage an insurrection and try to nullify votes, they’ll do anything, and we should all be prepared. So, the Harris/DonOld debate with ABC is now in jeopardy. I bet we all had this on our bingo card. This is from Marianne Levine, who is writing for the Washington Post. “Trump suggests he might skip ABC debate with Harris. The Sept. 10 debate with ABC is the only one both campaigns have agreed to.”
Former president Donald Trump suggested Sunday evening that he might skip a Sept. 10 ABC News debate with Vice President Kamala Harris (D), after agreeing earlier this month to participate.
“I watched ABC FAKE NEWS this morning, both lightweight reporter Jonathan Carl’s (K?) ridiculous and biased interview of Tom Cotton (who was fantastic!), and their so-called Panel of Trump Haters, and I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump asked in a social media post Sunday evening.
During a campaign stop Monday after visiting Arlington National Cemetery, Trump reiterated his criticism of ABC News, calling it “the single worst network for unfairness” and saying that ABC “really should be shut out.”
The Sept. 10 debate is the only one that both campaigns have officially committed to. Trump’s renewed questioning of the ABC News debate comes as Harris has increased her lead in national polls and is gaining ground in key swing states. As of Sunday, The Washington Post polling average has the vice president leading in Wisconsin by three percentage points, in Pennsylvania by two points and in Michigan by less than one point. Trump continues to lead in four Sun Belt swing states, but Harris has significantly narrowed the gap.
The latest rift between the campaigns is about the terms and conditions about how the debate would work. Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s senior adviser for communications, said in a statement that the campaign has told ABC and other networks that “both candidates’ microphones should be live throughout the full broadcast.”
“Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own,” Fallon said.
When asked by a reporter Monday about whether he wanted his microphone muted, Trump replied, “Doesn’t matter to me, I’d rather have it probably on.”
Jason Miller, senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said the campaign agreed to the “the ABC debate under the exact same terms as the CNN debate,” referring to a June 27 debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, before Biden ended his reelection campaign.
Oh, I officially quit the New York Times a while ago. I would like to say that seeing the headline on a guest’s op-ed today reinforced my excellent decision. Here’s a brief statement: I agree with her. I can’t say
more because I refuse to read it. Rich Lowry can bite his crank for writing “Trump Can Win on Character.” RIFF NYT. Rest in Fuckery and Failure.
Now, back to the normal news. This is from Salon’s Charles R. Davis. As the Vice President said, she’s been a prosecutor and knows his type. “”He’s now terrified of debating her”: Trump’s debate flip-flop is a sign Harris has him figured out. The former president suggested Sunday that he would not attend his scheduled Sept. 10 debate with Kamala Harris.”
Donald Trump is not feeling great. This year alone he’s been found liable by a jury for sexual assault, convicted by another jury on 34 felony counts of fraud, and shot at by a young registered Republican at a campaign rally, the one previously safe space where the president could comfortably rant and complain to certain applause. Then he had to spend a week at home watching Democrats pull off their convention without a hitch, just a month after an unprecedented switch at the top of the ticket.
The former president’s own campaign is publicly predicting that Vice President Kamala Harris will now surge in the polls (after already leading, nationally, by an average of about 3.6%). In a similar situation, the current president and his team decided it was time to debate, saying a televised contest would “reset” the race; the subsequent performance cost Joe Biden the Democratic nomination.
Perhaps that’s why Trump himself is doubting his own commitments.
“Why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump posted on social media Sunday night, complaining about an ABC News interview with Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and panel discussion earlier that day, saying the former was “biased” and the latter full of “Trump Haters.” The Republican nominee filled the rest of his post with tedious name calling — “Crooked,” “Marxist” — and attacks on the insufficiently fawning journalists of ABC.
“They’ve got a lot o questions to answer!!!” Trump posted just after 10 p.m. Eastern. “Why did Harris turn down Fox, NBC, CBS, and even CNN? Stay tuned!!!”
The former president already agreed to debate Harris on Sept. 10, which was originally slated to be the second of two televised confrontations with Biden. He did so after previously trying to pull out of the event when Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, initially claiming the debate was off because Biden was out of the race and then trying to move it to the friendlier waters of Fox News, a media platform that was forced to pay out $787 million after admitting that it cynically aired what its knew to be MAGA lies about the 2020 election.
This last read is from the New Republic‘s Michael Tomasky. “Finally, the Democrats Have Found Trump’s Achilles’ Heel: Ridicule Him. Kamala Harris gets it. Yes, we should fear Trump—but we should also mock him mercilessly because it drives him nuts.”
Donald Trump is in free fall. Read this description from Sunday’s Washington Post of how the GOP nominee spent last week: “[A]ides did not want a situation where he was watching the convention every night, getting angry, and then just golfing all day and stewing, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private interactions. Trump also had grown annoyed with the news coverage that depicted him as not working as hard as his opponent, one person who talked to him said.”
If you didn’t know that the article was about Trump and you just read it cold without knowledge of the context, you might think it was a description of parents trying to figure out how to handle an ungovernable four-year-old. So they convinced Trump to get out of Bedminster and hit the road, trading suck-ups with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In the past, Trump has called Kennedy the “dumbest member” of the Kennedy family and a “radical left lunatic.” Kennedy has called Trump a “terrible human being” and “probably a sociopath.”
Will RFK’s endorsement get Trump a few votes? It might. But these two unprincipled freakos deserve each other, and if it ever looks like RFK might matter, all Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have to do is say something like that.
Harris’s campaign so far has been a work of genius on several levels, but maybe the most ingenious stroke of all has been the decision to mock Trump—to present him not only as someone to fear but also to ridicule. Harris perfectly encapsulated this two-pronged attack in these memorable lines from her acceptance speech: “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences—but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.… Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”
But the emphasis has been on ridicule (Tim Walz’s “weird” comment, Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s jab at Trump’s bone spurs, Barack Obama’s hilarious hand gesture when he was talking about Trump’s obsession with crowd size). It’s great on three levels. The first is that it must drive Trump nuts, and when he goes nuts, he says especially nutty things. Second, it’s arguably more persuasive to swing voters than calling Trump a fascist. Trump is a fascist, make no mistake. But he’s also ridiculous. Mocking him over his Hannibal Lecter obsession will stick in apolitical people’s minds far more strongly than warning about his plans to wreck the Justice Department, and in its way, it’s just as disqualifying. Do we really want a president who thinks an eater of human flesh, however fictional, was misunderstood?
And third and most of all: Sustained ridicule has the potential to reinforce the downward spiral Trump is now in. He probably likes it when we call him a fascist or authoritarian, because it expresses fear of him, and he aches to be feared. It acknowledges his power. This motivates him and makes him stronger.
Ridicule makes him weaker. Ridicule makes him small. Ridicule makes him desperate. He’ll try to respond with ridicule of his own, but he is not a clever man. He’s a stupid man. He has no wit. He has no sense of mischief. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t think beyond first reactions. These nicknames of his, which the press has made such a big deal of over the years—they’re nothing. They’re dick contests put into words. Little Marco, Sleepy Joe. There’s nothing remotely clever about any of them.
And now he reportedly thinks he’s come up with a great one in “Communist Kamala.” Well, it’s alliterative, I’ll give him that. But I doubt very much that it’ll play beyond the base. First of all, people under 40 barely know what a communist was. Even for older people who do know, is communism the specter it once was?
Brilliant! When he goes low, we make fun of him and call him weird. He becomes lethargic and fussy. He says weird things and makes weird decisions. That’s a daily event in Day Cares everywhere and evidently in not-so-posh Jersey Golf Clubs with Galas for Criminals. This is getting fun.
Embrace the JOY!!!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
“Every time Trump opens his mouth, he lies.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Every day, it becomes more clear that DonOld is so old and addlepated that he is unsuited for anything but a front porch rocker in a place where he can’t harm himself or others. This quote from a Laura Ingraham interview on July 29th pretty much sums up exactly how far his mental deterioration has advanced. This is from The Hill and reported by Brett Samuels. “Trump on Vance’s ‘childless’ comments: ‘He likes family.’” Even the polygamist inventor of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, wasn’t up to this task.
Former President Trump on Monday offered cover for his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), as Vance faces a firestorm over his past comments mocking “childless cat ladies.”
Trump told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that Vance has “tremendous support,” and argued he does particularly well among “people that like families.”
“He made a certain statement having to do with families. That doesn’t mean that people that aren’t a member of a big and beautiful family with 400 children around and everything else, it doesn’t mean that a person doesn’t have — he’s not against anything. But he loves family. It’s very important to him,” Trump said of Vance.
Okay, that’s weird. Meanwhile, we are likely to find out Vice President Harris’ choice of a VEEP sometime tomorrow in a videotaped announcement. This is from Eugene Daniels writing for Politico. “Harris VP announcement coming Tuesday with likely video. Biden’s 2020 introduction of Harris is a likely model, campaign insiders say.”
Vice President Kamala Harris is bringing her crash search for a running mate to a close, with a final decision expected over the next 24 hours with a video announcement likely to follow sometime Tuesday, according to people familiar with the selection process.
While the precise nature of the rollout is not final, campaign insiders are pointing to President Joe Biden’s 2020 video introduction of Harris as a likely model. A media leak of the pick could upend those plans, they said.
The planned rollout will follow a closely watched final weekend of deliberations. A vetting team led by former Attorney General Eric Holder briefed Harris on the roughly half-dozen final candidates.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker have also been reviewed by the Harris campaign vetting team.
Biden in 2020 formally introduced Harris in a two-minute video released five days before the Democratic National Convention that included video of the future president calling Harris to ask her to join the ticket. Media reports, however, broke the news the night before the video was released, which the Biden campaign acknowledged with online postings.
Harris is scheduled to make her first appearance with her new running mate at a Philadelphia rally Tuesday, kicking off a five-day barnstorming tour to seven battleground states.
All of this stands in sharp contrast to the Vance roll-out. But would you expect from a Geezer that confuses Nancy Pelosi with Nikki Haley? Or E. Jean Carrol with Marla Maples? How refreshing is it to have our daily moments of Black Girl Joy compared to the constant misogyny of DonOld the Addlepated? Even the Australians don’t like seeing, hearing, or dealing with Trump’s Trauma. This is from The Guardian. “Trump and Vance’s misogyny and cynical identity politics mean Australians can’t ‘just chill’ about the US election. America remains the west’s most influential nation – which is why I fear for a world where Republican leaders could be in power. ” This Op-Ed is written by Paul Daley.
The litany of Trump’s actual (and verbal) offences against women is notorious. This seems too often forgotten or overlooked by admirers the world over – especially among sections of the political class here in Australia – to the file marked “character’’ and made, therefore, somehow irrelevant.
But such character traits are as highly relevant globally, as Trump attacks the reproductive (and human) rights of American women and deploys vicious slurs against women who threaten – or call out – their misogyny. The latest to come to lightseems to be Vance’s weaponisation of parenthood, in 2021 labelling senior Democrats – including now presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – “childless cat ladies’’.
Trump’s latest attack on Kamala Harris – saying she had “turned black’’, an unsustainably false challenge to her racial identity – makes him less worthy. Just as this will give succour to racists the world over, it also enables politicians, including here, who would weaponise racial identity for cynical gain.
While Trump and Vance, like all populists, are perilously short on constructive policy and plans and optimism for the future, their prescriptive visions for social design when it comes to families and how they reckon they should look are coming into very sharp – and alarming – focus.
If this is all starting to sound, well, somewhat dystopic, that’s because it is. The most alarming thing for me, a world away, about the re-emergence of Trump (twice impeached, 34 felony convictions) and the upwardly-managing Vance is the global licence they give others to ape, voice and enact their misogyny. If it’s good enough for the leader of the free world and his apprentice …
With Trump’s cozying up to despots and dictators and his own dictatorial fantasies (having denied the last election result then incited a 6 January lynch mob to attack the capitol in pursuit of his then vice-president, Mike Pence, who certified the legitimate election of Joe Biden), Trump is the embodiment of autocracy. The danger he poses potentially extends far and away beyond the US, and with a deputy like Vance (who would not stand up to him the way Pence did), Trump’s power would be unfettered. So, “responsible’’? No. Don’t just chill. Be vigilant.
Liz Dye writes, “It’s fine to laugh at JD Vance and his couch. Having fun with a viral joke is not the same as lying relentlessly.” This is from Public Notice.
Since Trump named him as his running mate, the media has unearthed an endless stream of videos of Vance saying deeply weird things. He inveighs against “childless cat ladies” like Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He suggests that parents should be entitled to cast votes for their minor children because if you’re childless “you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country” and “maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.” He says that childcare subsidies are “class war against normal people.” He responds to racist attacks on his wife, who is Indian, by protesting that he loves her and she’s a good mother.
Vance suggests that women should stay in violent marriages and writes actual elegies about his grandparents’ marriage, which was mired in abuse and alcohol and began when his grandmother was a pregnant 13-year-old child.
Even as he holds the exact same job that Harris had four years ago, he demands to know what Harris, a former senator, prosecutor, and state attorney general, has done with her life “other than collect a check.” He also supports ending birthright citizenship, which would delegitimize Harris (and also his own wife Usha Chilukuri Vance).
The choice is to laugh or cry or VOTE! And I’m not even going to elucidate on RFK Jr and that poor dead bear.
But, the good news is the more DonOld and JD lean into extremism. The worse it gets for them. This Guardian article explains how Trump has been rilling up his White Christian Nationalist base. “Trump leans into religious extremism to energize rightwing evangelicals. Ex-president turning to Christian nationalists for support as Kamala Harris’s potential nomination poses hard challenge.”
Donald Trump, now facing a tougher challenge in the US election after Joe Biden stepped down in favor of Kamala Harris, is increasingly leaning into religious extremism aimed at energizing a key section of his support base: socially conservative Christians.
Fears that Trump would be an authoritarian leader if elected seemed to be realized last week, when he told a group of Christian supporters they “would not have to vote” in four years if he becomes president.
“My theory would be that since Harris has entered the race, Trump has recognized that he’s on shakier ground,” said Matthew D Taylor, author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.
“If you watched the RNC and saw the discourse there, [Republicans] really were quite confident that they were going to kind of have a cakewalk to victory in November.
“I think there’s, there’s more anxiety there now. I think Trump is dialing up religious dog whistles, and sometimes just straight up whistles to really galvanize and submit that religion’s religious support.”
Since 2016, Trump has become an unlikely hero for Christian nationalists – a loose grouping of evangelical Christians who believe the US was founded as a Christian nation, and want to see Christianity feature prominently in American life and politics.
After a stumbling start – during his first run for president the thrice-married Trump struggled to name a single Bible verse, referred to the Eucharist as a “little cracker”, and put money in the communion plate during a church visit – the relationship was cemented when Trump-installed supreme court justices overturned Roe v Wade.
Writing at The New Republic, Greg Sargent explains that extremist policies are moving the voters towards Haris. “Surprise Poll Reveals a Key Trump Weakness Against Kamala Harris’ A new survey finds Harris substantially ahead of Trump among Latinos, a sign that she may be rebuilding the Democratic coalition—which is essential to defeating him.”
Now a new poll—apparently the first large-sample poll of Latinos since Harris became presumptive Democratic nominee—provides fresh grounds for that optimism. It finds that Harris holds a nearly 20-point lead over Donald Trump among Hispanics in the battleground states, a surprisingly large expansion of Biden’s ailing support among them—and that her candidacy has room to grow that lead, suggesting she may be putting back in play Sun Belt states that appeared lost under Biden.
Harris leads Trump by 55 percent to 37 percent in the head-to-head finding, which sampled 800 Latinos across Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and North Carolina. The survey—provided to The New Republic in advance of its release on Monday—was conducted July 23–26, well after Biden stepped aside on July 21.
The poll dovetails with other national polls finding similar advantages for Harris among Latino voters. But, significantly, the larger Latino sample size in the survey—commissioned by the voter engagement group Somos PAC and conducted by Latino pollster Gary Segura—provides a stronger basis for confidence that Harris’s lead among Hispanics is real.
“Harris enters as the nominee with a very strong lead among Latinos,” says Segura, whose firm BSP Research did the poll (Segura’s business partner, Matt Barreto, polls separately for the Harris campaign). “We focused only on the battlegrounds, with a large enough sample in them to arrive at a confident estimate of the two-party vote in the states that will actually decide the election—not in states where the outcome is already determined, like Texas and California.”
This is leaving Trump in a very confused place. Alexander Bolton at The Hill writes this. “GOP senators say Trump caught ‘off guard’ by Harris’s strength.”
They see Trump’s awkward discussion about Harris’s racial heritage at the National Association of Black Journalists convention as a clear sign the Trump campaign hasn’t yet hammered out a workable strategy for the battle against Harris.
GOP lawmakers also view Trump’s selection of Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate as evidence that the former president didn’t expect Biden to drop out of the race. They worry Vance’s outspoken views on restricting abortion and his claim that “childless cat ladies” run the country play right into the message that Harris and Democrats will center their campaign on in the fall.
One Republican senator who spoke to Trump before he announced Vance as his running mate said the former president expressed skepticism that Biden would drop out of the race.
“I think they were caught off guard. I think they were surprised,” the senator said. “I think there was shock when the Democrats revived [their party] really quickly” and unified support behind Harris.
“I think she’s more formidable than Republicans give her credit for. It’s going to be a short election. That favors her. It’s going to be sprint. We’re used to these long elections; this one’s going to end up being short. That helps her,” the lawmaker said of Harris, who announced she had raised $310 million for her campaign in July.
The lawmaker said Trump’s selection of Vance as his running mate to combat Biden’s strength in Michigan and Pennsylvania, specifically, showed he expected the incumbent to be his opponent in the fall.
A second GOP senator in contact with Trump who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the campaign said the GOP nominee and his team weren’t ready for the entire Democratic Party to rally behind Harris within a few days of Biden dropping his reelection bid.
How about he’s just an addlepated, mean old man who’s a convicted felon, lies and cons his way to money, and has policies that will lead everyone but white male Christians into a less free and equitable space in this country? Doesn’t character mean anything anymore? What is rather odd to me is that JD Vance appears to be stalking Harris and whoever becomes her running mate around the campaign trail. This is in Politico and is written by Alex Isenstadt. “JD Vance is touring the same states as Harris this week. The Republican vice presidential nominee is “bracketing” Harris as she introduces her runningmate.” I’m not particularly sure that contrast will go well for Vance, who is still weird. It reminds me of when Donald stalked Secretary Clinton around a stage.
JD Vance is planning to trail Kamala Harris to a series of battleground states over the coming week, a move that comes as the Republican vice presidential nominee is carving out a more defined role for himself on Donald Trump’s campaign.
Vance will take part in a three-day tour following Harris — or “bracketing” in political parlance — to four key states, according to a schedule shared first with POLITICO. His first stop on Tuesday will be in Philadelphia, the same day Harris will be there to introduce her newly minted vice presidential candidate.
The Ohio senator is expected to use the appearances to target Harris on immigration, crime and the economy – three areas where the Trump campaign plans to focus attacks on the vice president. Vance has been sketching out a role for himself as the campaign’s chief policy attack dog, looking to define Harris as out-of-the mainstream on a number of issues
Vance is also looking to take to the media circuit, including on less traditionally conservative-friendly outlets. He is expected to be an active participant on podcasts geared toward younger voters: Last week the 40-year-old Vance made an appearance on “Full Send,” a podcast that is particularly popular among young men.
I guess we’ll see who is out of touch with the values of America when all they can do is lie to hide the truth of their plans.
So, that’s it for me today. I’m doing more phone banking on Wednesday. It will be fun to see which state I get to call next. There are many more states in play than when I first started, which is the best news I can give you from my vantage point.
Hope you have a great week! The best thing may be for you to turn off the TV after we get the VEEP candidate. Then, start writing postcards for Kamala. Action always beats passively watching the media trying to go for the clicks.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
I’m trying very hard not to panic this morning. Ever since the shooting at the Trump rally on Saturday, cable news outlets MSNBC and CNN have completely surrendered to Trump and the Republicans. Both channels are hosting wall-to-wall coverage of the Republican National Convention.
On Monday, MSNBC even took Morning Joe off the air and replaced it with anodyne Today Show-like programming, because they were afraid a host or guest might say something derogatory about Trump. Joe and Mika threatened to quit if it happens again.
From Oliver Darcy at CNN: ‘Morning Joe’ pulled from air Monday because of Trump shooting.
MSNBC will not air “Morning Joe,” its celebrated politics roundtable program, on Monday, opting to instead air continued breaking news coverage of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
The progressive news network confirmed the decision to preempt its influential and top-rated morning show after a CNN inquiry Sunday evening. The network said the show will resume airing Tuesday.
The decision by MSNBC to leave one of its most recognizable programs on the sidelines amid a seismic politics-driven news cycle, with the Republican National Convention getting underway in the wake of the Saturday shooting at Trump’s campaign rally, is certain to raise eyebrows.
A person familiar with the matter told CNN that the decision was made to avoid a scenario in which one of the show’s stable of two dozen-plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television that could be used to assail the program and network as a whole. Given the breaking news nature of the story, the person said, it made more sense to continue airing rolling breaking news coverage in the fraught political moment.
Morning Joe hosts Mika (formerly Brzezinski) and Joe Scarboro
“Given the gravity and complexity of this unfolding story, NBC News, NBC News NOW and MSNBC have remained in rolling breaking news coverage since Saturday evening,” a spokesperson for NBCUniversal News Group said in a statement to CNN. “As we continue to cover this story into the week, the networks will continue to cross simulcast, alternating between NBC News, NBC News NOW and ‘MSNBC Reports,’ so there is one news feed covering this developing situation.”
In the wake of the attempt on Trump’s life, some of the former president’s supporters have vehemently criticized the press and liberal media commentators for their hard-knuckled reporting, which has sounded the alarm on what four more years under the former president would look like.
Cesar Conde, the chairman of NBCUniversal News Group, made the decision in conjunction with Rashida Jones, the president of MSNBC, and hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the person familiar with the matter told CNN.
From Politico: Scarborough blasts NBC for pulling ‘Morning Joe’ after Trump shooting, threatens to quit if it happens again.
MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough slammed his own network for pulling his show on Monday in favor of news coverage of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, saying he and co-host Mika Brzezinski were “surprised” and “disappointed” by the call and threatening to leave if it happens again.
“Next time we are told there will be a news feed replacing us, we will be in our chairs,” Scarborough said live on air Tuesday morning. “And the news feed will be us, or they can get somebody else to host the show.”
Scarborough said the network told the “Morning Joe” team that there would be one NBC News feed “in breaking news mode” across all NBC channels all day Monday. But the “Today” show aired on Monday morning on NBC, and MSNBC hosts Andrea Mitchell and Chris Jansing appeared for their regularly scheduled shows in the afternoon.
“If we had known that there wasn’t going to be the one news feed from NBC News across all NBC News channels … we obviously would have been in yesterday morning,” Scarborough said, later adding: “Our team was not given a good answer as to why that didn’t happen, but it didn’t happen.”
Trump with his massive bandage.
Despite the heavy coverage, no one seems to be asking questions about what actually happened on Saturday. What kind of injury did Trump have? If he was actually grazed by an AR-15 bullet, it seems as if it would have done more damage than is apparent in photographs. Originally, local police said he was hit by fragments of the teleprompter. Trump went to the golf course on Sunday; he wasn’t wearing a bandage and his ear looked normal. Now he’s wearing a large “maxi-pad” at the convention. Here are a few Twitter comments on the subject:
From former RNC chair Michael Steele:
@MichaelSteel
You would think someone would inquire about Trump’s medical report if for no other reason than Trump has not provided any medical updates or information, neither has the hospital that treated him. Outside of Trump telling us he’s “fine”, how severe was the wound? Did he loose part of his ear (bullets do terrible things to flesh)? How long for recovery? Will the wound require cosmetic surgery? What about reports that it may not have been a bullet which wounded him but glass from the shattered teleprompter? If I missed such reports from his campaign or the hospital please post. Thank you.
From The Hoarse Whisperer
Feel free to point me to the magic trajectory that would allow for a through-and-through of a person’s ear from a location lateral to them. Show me your expertise in… basic geometry.
Hi. A round from an AR wouldn’t poke a little hole in an ear. Trump didn’t get shot. He was injured by shrapnel or shattered glass or something.
We shouldn’t have to speculate abt any of this. It is the most basic thing for law enforcement and or the medical team that examined Trump to say what they found. It’s such a basic thing. It’s a huge story. How can it be that there’s zero official abt this part of it?
AR-15 bullets
This man is running for president. Shouldn’t we get more details about what happened? And why aren’t we getting more information about the shooter? Ever since it came out that he was a Republican, no one seems to want to talk about him. Maybe if the FBI can break into his phone, we will learn something.
Today we got at update on the injury from Eric Trump. CBS News: Donald Trump doesn’t have stitches after assassination attempt, but a “nice flesh wound,” Eric Trump says.
Former President Donald Trump’s son, Eric Trump, said his father doesn’t have stitches after he was shot in an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend, but that he has a “nice flesh wound” from the shooting.
The former president could be seen touching his ear as the attack unfolded, before he was shielded by Secret Service and whisked off the rally stage with blood on his face. When he appeared at the Republican National Convention on Monday and Tuesday, he wore a large bandage over his injury.
Speaking to “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil from the convention in Milwaukee Wednesday morning, Eric Trump said his father has referred to the injury as “the greatest earache he’s ever had.”
“You know, he was millimeters away from having his life expunged … I’m sure the ear doesn’t feel well,” Eric Trump said.
Eric Trump also told “CBS Evening News” anchor and managing editor Norah O’Donnell on Tuesday that his father’s hearing is fine and that he is “in great spirits.
Okay. Take that for what you think it’s worth.
The Homeland Security IG is investigating the Secret Service security failures at the rally. AP: Homeland Security inspector general investigates Secret Service handling of security at Trump rally.
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general said Wednesday it has opened an investigation into the Secret Service’s handling of security for former President Donald Trump on the day a gunman tried to assassinate him at a Pennsylvania rally.
In a brief notice posted to the inspector general’s website, the agency said the objective of the probe is to “Evaluate the United States Secret Service’s (Secret Service) process for securing former President Trump’s July 13, 2024 campaign event.”
There was no date given for when the investigation was launched. The notice was among a long list of ongoing cases that the inspector general’s office is pursuing.
President Joe Biden already had directed an independent review of the security at the rally.
The shooting has raised questions about how the gunman was able to climb onto a roof with a clear line of sight to the former president, who said he was shot in the ear.
The 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was able to get within 135 meters (157 yards) of the stage where the Republican former president was speaking when he opened fire. That’s despite a threat on Trump’s life from Iran leading to additional security for the former president in the days before the Saturday rally.
We may get more information about Crooks from local media. Here’s a story from Pittsburgh’s ABC news station WTAE: Video appears to show would-be Trump assassin at rally hour before shooting.
We’re learning more about the movements of Thomas Matthew Crooks before Saturday’s shooting at the rally for former President Donald Trump.
New video obtained exclusively by Pittsburgh’s Action News 4 appears to show 20-year-old Thomas Crooks lurking in the area an hour before he opened fire.
The man, who didn’t want to show his face on camera, captured the video at 5:06 p.m. on Saturday evening. He says it was a seemingly simply moment as he was trying to capture the size of the crowd, but ended up capturing much more.
“I wanted to pan the crowd because it was a massive crowd, so I was just taking in the moment. So this was before the shooting. Obviously had no idea how that day, how that day would end,” said the man who attended the rally with his teenaged son.
The video appears to show Crooks, 20, lurking in the area near a building just past the secured perimeter of the event itself. As it pans to the crowd, it shows multiple law enforcement vehicles in the area facing the building itself. As the video moves back toward the building, Crooks appears to be seen again. This means that Crooks was likely in the area for more than an hour before the shots were fired….
Pittsburgh’s Action News 4 has learned from multiple sources that Crooks was spotted at the rally, photographed as suspicious and officers were actively looking for him when he made his way onto the roof.
Law enforcement sources say Crooks was able to access the roof by climbing over an air conditioning unit adjacent to the building.
Dakinikat wrote in detail about the many questions that remain about what happened at the rally on Saturday, so check that out if you haven’t read it.
DC Democrats are still fighting each other over whether Biden should be their nominee. This has been going on for 3 weeks now. No one ever explains how replacing him would work. All of the suggested replacements are polling worse than Biden, and are unknown to the average voter who doesn’t follow politics closely. Many of these “insiders” who want to replace Biden also want to dump Kamala Harris. That would guarantee losing black and women voters who are the base of the party.
NBC News says that Biden is getting “combative.” I don’t blame him. , , , and write: Determined to push forward, Biden tightens his circle and grows combative.
President Joe Biden spent more than a week in meetings and on phone calls addressing Democrats’ concerns about his candidacy with a positive, conciliatory message about his path forward. At times, he even sounded contrite about his uneven debate performance, which prompted calls for him to suspend his re-election campaign.
He took blunt questions about his mental acuity in stride. He smiled through suggestions from allies that he take a cognitive test or consider allowing someone younger to take his place on the Democratic ticket. He agreed that his supporters have legitimate concerns and promised to show them he’s up for the rigor of a presidential campaign and another four years in the White House.
Then he’d had enough.
In the past few days, Biden has started to privately convey a new message to Democrats: The conversation about my future is over, and I’m getting irritated that you’re not realizing that. Biden has called several prominent allies individually to tell them to spread the word.
“We think we’ve got a good plan to fight through this,” a senior Biden aide said.
Nearly three weeks since his rocky debate performance that shook his party, Biden is intent on shutting down dissent among Democrats in order to move forward and focus on defeating Donald Trump. And after hearing out his critics, he’s tightening his circle to those he‘s relied on the longest — and who support his path ahead.
Biden’s thinning patience for questions about his candidacy were on display as he campaigned Friday in Detroit telling a large, effusive crowd: “You made me the nominee. No one else. Not the press, not the pundits, not the insiders, not donors.”
“And I’m not going anywhere,” Biden added.
Read more DC gossip at the NBC link.
Biden did make some news this morning. He is working on changes to the Supreme Court.
David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo: Biden Relents And Elevates Supreme Court Reform To His Re-Election Agenda.
It’s hard to know the precise combination of developments that changed President Biden’s mind about Supreme Court reforms and prompted him to place them more centrally in the framework of the 2024 election.
Was it the ethics scandals of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and the Supreme Court’s own ineptitude in dealing with them? Was it the series of controversial decisions across a whole host of issues and areas of civic life in which the court wrested power away from the executive and legislative branches and placed it firmly in the judicial branch? Was it the six-justice conservative majority aggressively uprooting the court’s own precedents in pursuit of its own preferred legal and policy outcomes? Was it the fact that he’s trailing in the polls with his own re-election more at risk that at any previous point in his presidency?
All of the above are in play, of course. A tipping point was reached, and it’s unlikely any one development was the difference-maker.
The shift, first reported by the Washington Post, was revealed over the weekend in a call Biden had with the Congressional Progressive Caucus:
“I’m going to need your help on the Supreme Court, because I’m about to come out — I don’t want to prematurely announce it — but I’m about to come out with a major initiative on limiting the court. … I’ve been working with constitutional scholars for the last three months, and I need some help,” Biden said, according to a transcript of the call obtained by The Washington Post.
The NYT separately confirmed that Biden’s “proposals to overhaul the court … could be unveiled in the coming weeks.”
Among the menu of choices Biden is reported to be considering:
- term limits for the justices;
- imposing an enforceable ethics code; and
- Relatedly, backing a constitutional amendment to reverse the effect of the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity.
Late addition: I meant to note that enlarging the court beyond its current nine-justice setup does not appear to be among Biden’s proposals.
None of these measures will pass the GOP-controlled House, though they could serve as messaging vehicles on the Hill between now and the election. More importantly, they elevate Supreme Court reforms to his second term agenda, creating the opportunity for the November election to be a referendum on the high court and create legislative momentum if Biden wins. Even then, it’ll be a very heavy lift.
This is a long-game move, that also offers a few short-term political advantages.
Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, applaud on Tuesday.
Yesterday’s big news was that Trump has chosen JD Vance as his running mate. It appears this is going to be a controversial choice. We will be writing more about him in the days to come, but here are a few relevant articles:
Andrew Roth at The Guardian: Trump’s choice of Vance ‘terrible news’ for Ukraine, Europe experts warn.
Donald Trump’s choice of JD Vance as his vice-presidential pick has reignited fears in Europe that he would pursue a transactional “America first” foreign policy that could culminate in the US pushing for Ukraine to acquiesce to Vladimir Putin and sue for peace with Russia.
“It’s bad for us but it’s terrible news for [Ukraine],” said one senior European diplomat in Washington. “[Vance] is not our ally.”
Foreign diplomats and observers have frequently called Trump’s actual policies a “black box,” saying that was impossible to know for certain what the unpredictable leader would do when in power.
Some have soothed themselves by suggesting that names tipped for top positions, such as former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, would maintain a foreign policy status quo while Trump focuses on domestic affairs.
Jonathan Martin at Politico: ‘Scared to Death’: GOP Security Hawks Slam Vance Selection.
Former President Donald Trump didn’t just select a running mate here – he doused political kerosene on the raging Republican fire over foreign policy.
By tapping the 39-year-old Sen. J.D. Vance, one of the party’s leading national security doves, Trump strengthened the hand of the isolationist forces eager to undo the hawkish GOP consensus that has endured since the Reagan era.
Should Trump prevail in November, the non-interventionists will have one of their most articulate advocates at Trump’s side. What worries the hawks is that Vance may also be the last adviser in the former president’s ear.
While toeing the party line and praising Vance in their public comments, in private the interventionists ranged from horrified to merely alarmed that one of the loudest critics of aiding Ukraine could soon be first in line for the presidency. The grimaces, sighs and whispered frustrations from the old guard as they made their way through the convention reception circuit were easy to find in the day after the selection.
Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), who oversees military spending as the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee chair, told one associate,according to a person familiar with the exchange: “The Ukrainians better hurry up and win.”
Another influential congressional Republican simply told me about the Vance selection: “I’m scared to death.”
While he had it on before Trump announced his running mate, the Ukrainian flag pin on the lapel of Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, neatly illustrated without the necessity of words the gulf between so much of the GOP and Vance on the war in Europe.
Read the rest at Politico.
JD Vance with his wife Usha during his Senate campaign.
Some racist Republicans are unhappy with the Vance choice, because he is married to a woman of color.
Newsweek: MAGA Makes Racist Attacks Against JD Vance’s Wife.
Extremist figures and members of the Make America Great Again movement have criticized the wife of Ohio Senator JD Vance after former President Donald Trump named him as his running mate in the 2024 election.
Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants, was raised in San Diego before meeting her husband at Yale Law School. They were married in 2014 and later blessed by a Hindu pundit in a separate ceremony, The New York Times reported.
In the wake of Trump’s vice presidential announcement on Monday, numerous conservative and far-right figures have taken to social media to launch racist attacks against Usha Vance because of her Indian heritage and the assumption that her influence on her husband’s political career means the Republican Party will be softer on immigration.
“I’m sure this guy is going to be great on immigration,” Jaden McNeil, a far-right activist and the founder of America First Students, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, while sharing a picture of the Vances with their newborn baby.
Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home along with rapper Kanye West in November 2022, suggested that Vance would not be a “defender of white identity” because of his wife’s Indian heritage.
“Who is this guy, really?” Fuentes said on his podcast. “Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”
Vincent James Foxx, who was present at the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, wrote on X: “JD Vance gets tapped as VP and immediately there’s a Hindu prayer at the RNC. Next we’ll see Sen. Mike Lee and JD Vance team up to convince Trump to let in 10 million Indian immigrants. Green cards on diplomas!”
More racist comments from MAGA world at the link.
More Vance reads to check out:
The Guardian: Who is Usha Vance, the Indian American lawyer married to JD Vance?
Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: The phony populism of JD Vance.
Talking Points Memo: JD Vance, Menstrual Surveillance Hawk.
The Guardian: A Trump-Vance administration would be ‘the most dangerous’ for abortion rights, say advocates.
Financial Times: How Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley funded the sudden rise of JD Vance.
Those are my recommended reads for today. Have courage, Sky Dancers!
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