Personally, I like Tim Waltz, but Minnesota will be in the Democratic column either way. Pennsylvania may be more problematic. 

David M. Perry, who bills himself as a journalist and historian, advocates for Walz at MSNBC: I didn’t vote for Tim Walz originally. Now I’m completely Walz-pilled.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz thinks the leaders of the modern Republican Party — especially but not exclusively former President Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance of Ohio — are extremely “weird.” He has been saying so for months, but ever since Vice President Kamala Harris emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, he has become one of her most effective messengers, doing the dirty work of attacking the Republicans so Harris can focus on a positive message — “Freedom.”

It has become easy to imagine Walz as the next Democratic nominee for vice president, one of a handful of politicians who have emerged as front-runners for the honor. If it happens, I’ll be thrilled. I’m a Minnesotan and have watched Walz since he started running for governor in the 2018 election. Before that, he was just a “downstate” congressman and not so much on my radar. 

But much to my surprise, I’ve become fully “Walz-pilled,” not so much because of the viral clips, but because when he has had the opportunity, he has done everything he can to make Minnesota a better place for everyone.

Frankly, I’m surprised at my own enthusiasm, because I wasn’t a Walz supporter when he ran for governor in 2018. This is inside baseball for Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor politics (not technically the Democratic Party), but Walz came into the race as the more electable, more conservative major candidate for governor. He seemed fine but boring, and it felt like in the coming blue wave anti-Trump election cycle, Minnesota could do better. 

Why has Walz captured his support?

Walz’s first term was fine, marked by generally solid health-related leadership during Covid and some questionable decisions during the 2020 George Floyd uprising, but it was last year that everything changed. 

In the 2022 elections, Democrats won a trifecta, taking full control of state government, but with a Senate majority of only one seat. DFL leaders never hesitated, taking advantage of a large budget surplus to quickly enact a wide range of progressive policies across the board that changed our state for the better. 

They made Minnesota a safe haven for the trans community. They affirmed abortion as a fundamental right and removed restrictions that limited access. They legalized recreational cannabis use and passed laws for driver’s licenses for all Minnesotans regardless of immigration status, automatic voter registration, paid family and medical leave, tax rebates for people making less than $75,000 and new climate goals, and they phased out parental fees for families with kids on Medicaid. This last one is perhaps narrower than the others, but my son has Down syndrome and is on Medicaid, so I sure paid close attention to this….

I’m less interested in the identity politics surrounding Walz, though I recognize that as a Midwestern white dad, a veteran, a former social studies teacher and football coach and a dad from a small rural town, he has a background very distinguishable from Harris’. 

But there’s an advantage to this. He can argue, as he did on MSNBC, that the genuine problems facing small-town white Americans are the fault of plutocrats — the Trumps of the world, venture capitalists like JD Vance and their backers. Because the problem isn’t just that they are weird creeps, but that they’re genuinely making lives worse for more people.

Walz believes Democratic policies make lives better. At the end of the 2023 legislative session, Walz gave the memorable quote “Minnesota is showing the country you don’t win elections to bank political capital — you win elections to burn political capital and improve lives.” 

As we’ve noted previously, Trump has been going around saying threatening things about voting. At rallies, he has told supporters he doesn’t need their votes, because he already has plenty of votes. He has also told “christians” they need to vote just this time, and after that they’ll never have to vote again. What does he mean? I think he means he’ll be a dictator and then he will abolish elections. Republicans claim he’s just “joking.” Yesterday, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham asked him to explain.

The Hill: Ingraham presses Trump on telling Christians ‘You won’t have to vote anymore’ in 4 years.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham repeatedly prodded former President Trump on Monday over his comments at a conservative Christian summit, where he told attendees they won’t have to vote anymore after November.

Trump did little to push back on the backlash over his remarks, as some Democrats have suggested the former president was saying there would be no more elections if he won. Instead, Trump repeatedly argued his comments were because Christians do not vote in large numbers, and he offhandedly questioned Jewish voters who support Democrats.

“That statement is very simple. I said, ‘Vote for me, you’re not going to have to do it ever again.’ It’s true, because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group,” Trump said.

“This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country, you won’t have to vote anymore. I won’t need your vote. You can go back to not voting,” he added.

“You meant you won’t have to vote for you because you have four years in office. Is that what you meant?” Ingraham asked.

When Trump did not directly answer, Ingraham pointed out that some liberals were interpreting Trump’s original remarks to mean there would not be another election. Trump said he had not heard that criticism previously, and he repeated his argument that Christians tend not to vote in large numbers….

“’Don’t worry about the future,’” he continued. “’You have to vote on Nov. 5. After that, you don’t have to worry about voting anymore. I don’t care, because we’re going to fix it. The country will be fixed … We won’t even need your vote anymore because, frankly, we will have such love.’”

Moustafa Bayoumi at The Guardian: Donald Trump sure makes a lot of ‘jokes’ about ruling as a dictator, doesn’t he?

Last Friday, Donald Trump told an audience of Christian conservatives to “get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians.”

Selling the idea to US citizens that their next vote will be their last one just doesn’t seem like a winning proposition to me, but what do I know? I’m not running to be elected dictator on day one of my second presidency.

That campaign pledge is of course what the former president told Sean Hannity last December. Hannity posed a question to Trump, who weeks earlier had called his political opponents “vermin”. “You are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” Hannity asked.

“Except for day one,” Trump responded. “I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill.”

Democrats rang all the alarm bells then, as they are ringing them now, responsibly warning us of our impending authoritarian future under Trump. And Trump’s supporters? They just thought he was kidding. “Of course he’s joking,” one attendee who’s been to more than a dozen Trump events told the Washington Post last December. “You can’t be a dictator with a constitutional republic.”

Whether this attendee is right isn’t the point. The issue is how one side hears jackboots marching just over the hill, ready to trample on our democracy. And the other side hears only guffaws.

And this disconnect continues, day by day, week by week, month by month. After Trump’s comments on Friday, the prominent Democrat and California representative Adam Schiff stated: “Democracy is on the ballot, and if we are to save it, we must vote against authoritarianism.” Meanwhile, on CNN’s State of the Union, Senator Tom Cotton dismissed any worry about Trump’s call to end voting by 2028 by saying that Trump was “obviously making a joke”.

I don’t find Trump’s jokes funny, but what’s really missing from this conversation is how much Trump’s so-called sense of humor draws from the information strategies of the contemporary far right, and how much the Democrats end up playing right into his hands.

Bayoumi’s reasoning is interesting, considering the Democrats’ attacks on Trump and Vance for being weird. 

Today’s right wing… “weaponizes irony to attract and radicalize potential supporters”, according to media studies scholar Viveca Greene. She argues that today’s far right uses irony and humor “to challenge progressive ideologies and institutions”, and in so doing, the right is able “to create a toxic counter public”.

Greene is mostly concerned with the alt-right – that is to say, the more extreme elements of the right wing – but Trump’s signature contribution to this discourse is to mainstream alt-right communication strategies on to a national stage. And a kind of plausible deniability plays an enormous role in this rhetorical ecosystem.

Did Trump just call for democracy to end in the next election cycle? Oh, come on. He’s just being funny! (But yes, he did.) Did Trump guarantee to root out the “radical left thugs” that “live like vermin” in our country? That’s hilarious! (He said he will.) Did Trump promise that he will be president for three terms? Stop! My sides are aching! (You bet he did.) Will Trump “terminate” the US constitution if he’s elected? So funny! It’s like he’s saying: “You’re fired!” to a piece of paper! (It’s on the record.)

Bayoumi suggests that making fun of Trump and his threats might work better.

Wouldn’t it be smarter to draw attention to Trump’s ridiculousness rather than his threats? Isn’t there some cliche out there about choosing honey over vinegar? Can the Democrats rediscover the extraordinary political power of satire before it’s too late? The demands on humor on a national stage have never been greater, and that’s no laughing matter.

And that is just what Tim Walz started by calling Republican ideas weird. This week, the Harris campaign and many other Democrats took up that argument and it’s working! Let’s hope they keep coming up with more ways to make fun of Trump. He hates being laughed at, especially by women.

The attacks on Project 2025 are working too. Trump has tried very hard to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation project, but it’s not working because so many former Trump administration people are working on it. Not only that, JD Vance wrote the introduction to the Project 2025 book! 

Rolling Stone: Trump Flipped Out That ‘Lunatic’ Project 2025 Could Tank His Campaign.

As he entered the final stretch of the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump spent much of this month trying to disown the highly Trumpy, Heritage Foundation-led Project 2025 — to the point that he even got his fans to boo the initiative during a recent campaign rally. His protracted freakout over the conservative project — to which he has multiple direct ties, and which is only as extreme as it is largely because of his influence — is driven almost entirely by Trump’s fear over one thing.

When the twice-impeached ex-president and convicted felon took to social media in early July to make the (patently absurd) claim that “I know nothing about Project 2025 [and] I have no idea who is behind it,” he added, “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” He did not specify what “things” he meant.

But according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, shortly before he posted that brief message, Trump had been privately — and very bitterly — complaining about the abortion policies laid out in the lengthy Project 2025 manifesto, and trashing the Project 2025-linked “lunatics” who keep demanding unpopular abortion bans and restrictions. Among the policy proposals in Project 2025’s policy roadmap are plans to end federal approval for abortion pills, use federal agencies for expanded “abortion surveillance,” restrict access to emergency contraception, end the federal requirement that hospitals provide medically necessary emergency abortion care, and revive a 150-year-old law that could serve as a de facto national abortion ban. 

For what it’s worth, some of the people who helped author Project 2025’s abortion provisions were appointed under Trump to influential federal posts during his first stint in the White House — including Roger Severino, who headed the HHS’ Office of Civil Rights under Trump, and Gene Hamilton, who worked in Trump’s Justice Department and Homeland Security Department. 

Trump, now the 2024 GOP presidential nominee, vented that the abortion policies could badly damage his chances at retaking the White House, even at a point in the election cycle when Trump was riding high on strong polling numbers against President Joe Biden. (In the time since, Biden has dropped out of the 2024 contest, with Vice President Kamala Harris now the presumptive Democratic nominee.)

Of course, it was Trump himself who made the hard-right, ambiently unpopular abortion policies embedded in Project 2025 possible at all, as it was Trump’s Supreme Court nominees who were necessary to destroy Roe v. Wade in the first place. 

The Daily Beast: Trump Forces Out Project 2025 Mastermind.

The Trump campaign forced the architect of the ultraconservative Project 2025 manifesto out of his job on Tuesday as it sought political cover from a controversy dogging Republicans, the Daily Beast can report exclusively.

Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita “put the screws” to mastermind Paul Dans in an effort to force him out and shut down the right-wing shop behind Proejct 2025, a sprawling blueprint that sought to overhaul the federal government and implement an array of far-right policies for a potential second Trump administration, a well-placed source told the Daily Beast.

The president of Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that employed Dans and conceived of the controversial handbook, fired back on X, formerly Twitter, that Project 2025 is going nowhere.

“Project 2025 will continue our efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels—federal, state, and local,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts said, adding that he was “extremely grateful” for Dans’ work on the policy platform and his “dedication to saving America.” [….]

His departure hinted that Heritage was shutting down its work on the initiative more than a year after Project 2025 produced its cornerstone 900-page policy mandate that came to define the MAGA movement. The manifesto attracted widespread criticism in recent weeks over its extremist proposals that would demand fealty from federal workers, promote Christian nationalism and overhaul policies from abortion to civil liberties and climate and restructure the departments of Justice and Defense, among other agencies.

As the project backfired politically, Trump sought to distance himself from the group despite its naked ties to his first administration, with Project leadership boasting a number of senior Trump aides and close advisers.

Of course everyone with half a brain knows that Project 2025 is still the plan for a second Trump administration.

Trump’s campaign staff are worried about his expected sexist and racist attacks on Kamala Harris.

The New Republic: Team Trump Panics About His Attacks on Kamala Harris Backfiring.

As Republicans begin developing lines of attack against Vice President Kamala Harris, many on Team Trump worry that those on their side—including Trump himself—will make disparaging comments about Harris’s identity, alienating key voters.

On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that Trump’s allies believe attacks on Harris’s political record are more effective than personal insults, but “they also worry that Trump and some of his more extreme supporters will be unable to refrain from deploying sexist and racially fraught language, which they fear will hurt him with crucial voting blocs.”

A source “familiar with the Trump campaign’s thinking” who spoke with the Post “on the condition of anonymity to share candid views,” seemed to think that it’s all but inevitable that Trump will make problematic comments toward Harris. “We hope he doesn’t act like a crazy racist and sexist person, but we can’t control him,” the source said. “There are probably dog whistles and racist and sexist tropes he’ll stumble into. His campaign is going to try to keep him out of that rhetoric, but it’s going to be difficult.”

This isn’t the first time that Republicans have fretted about the bigotry in their own ranks affecting their electoral prospects. Last week, Politico reported that leading House Republicans had to tell “lawmakers to focus on criticizing [Harris’s] record without reference to her race and gender,” following “a series of comments by their members that focused on Harris’ race as well as claims she is a ‘DEI’ pick.”

Over the weekend, several Republican lawmakers and Black Trump supporters told Reuters they worried about “demeaning racist and sexist attacks” and “whether the onslaught could harm Republicans at the ballot box.”

Good luck trying to control him. He can’t control himself.

One more on Trump’s weird VP pick.

The Daily Beast: Michael Ian Black: J.D. Vance’s Obsessions Are Way Creepier Than Being Childless.

[W]hether somebody has children or doesn’t have children isn’t a reflection of their values, their patriotism, or their commitment to the nation.

So why won’t J.D. Vance shut up about children? The man is child-obsessed. CNN published an article Tuesday, “It’s not just ‘cat ladies’: J.D. Vance has a history of disparaging people without kids.” The piece highlights Vance’s obsession with the childless dating as far back as 2020.

One series of fundraising emails that authors Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck uncovered include lines like, “We’ve allowed ourselves to be dominated by childless sociopaths—they’re invested in NOTHING because they’re not invested in this country’s children.”

What?!?

Those without children are sociopaths? Dolly Parton is a sociopath? Lindsey Graham isn’t invested in the country? Elon Musk, father of God knows how many, is somehow preferable as a person to Taylor Swift? Why? Who the hell is J.D. Vance to make these kinds of broad, grotesque statements? [….]

The childless are people without children. That’s it. Why must any other inference be drawn, unless you’re just a creepy fuck who wears too much eyeliner at all the wrong events?

And it’s not as if the childless are somehow an aberration. A Pew Research Study published just a few days ago reveals that 47 percent of Americans under the age of 50 do not have children. If almost half of the country is sociopathic, as Vance believes, we’ve got bigger problems than the current election cycle.

But, of course, the narrative that childless people are somehow sinister is absurd on its face. Jesus didn’t have any kids. Neither does the Pope. I don’t know if either of them had/have cats, which is J.D. Vance’s one-two whammy of degeneracy, but I’d be hard-pressed to make the argument that Jesus F. Christ didn’t care about the future.

As stupid as the argument may be, I think it speaks to something more subtle about the Republican Party. Under the leadership of Donald Trump (and before, but I’ll confine this piece to the current Republican Party), the GOP has become a shell company for investors attempting to strip-mine the nation of its value, and grab as much as they possibly can for themselves. Why do you think Trump supports Putin so much? Because Putin has already implemented this model in Russia to great success—for Putin….

In this Hobbesian model of America, the contest between the political parties is a blood sport in which to the victors go all the spoils. The “spoils” can be financial and/or cultural, but it’s a fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-American view of political power. And it very much involves children because children give them the moral license to conduct their snatch-and-grab.

Reducing expenditures on social programs, which Republicans support, will certainly hurt other people’s children but will lower public expenditures for themselves and their children. It is for the children that they wreak havoc on the American experiment and call it pro-family. Book bans, school vouchers, anti-LGBTQ legislation, anti-abortion legislation. All of it “for the children.”

No. Fuck you.

Read the rest at The Daily Beast.

That’s it for me today. What’s on your mind?