Gamechangers

Portrait of a bullet by Doug Mills, The New York Times, via Reddit.

Interesting report in Washington Post (this was a gift link from Bluesky that worked for me) on the presidential election campaign in Hungary, where the fascistoid incumbent Viktor Orbán appears to be in serious trouble:

Officers from the [Russian] intelligence service, or SVR, suggested that drastic action might be necessary — a strategy they called “the Gamechanger.” In an internal report for the SVR obtained and authenticated by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post, the operatives proposed a way to “fundamentally alter the entire paradigm of the election campaign” — “the staging of an assassination attempt on Viktor Orban.”

You know what it made me think of. 

I've never had any patience with the conspiracy theory of the assassination attempt on Trump of July 13 2024, because of all the uncontrollable variables: in the first place there really was a shooter, killed on the spot, of course, so his motives can never be investigated; the four seconds he was given before the local security team put him out of commission, he got off eight shots that hit either three or four people, killing Corey Comperatore and critically injuring two other audience members and probably grazing Trump's right ear (the hardcore conspiracy theory holds that he or somebody with him was prepared with fake blood to smear on his ear after he dropped to the ground). I don't see how the conspirators could have been certain that the shooter, who was clearly prepared to die on the spot, could be counted on to miss Trump, or that he could have come as close as he apparently did, if he didn't intend to kill him. The astonishing photo by NYT's Doug Mills showing a bullet flying toward Trump's right ear could conceivably have been doctored, but that would have expanded the necessary number of conspirators beyond plausibility to include the forensic analysts who decided it was authentic and Mills himself. 

For the Record: Moldbuggery

Saw something yesterday that tempted me to go have a look at something written by enemy of democracy Curtis Yarvin, the artist formerly known as "Mencius Moldbug" (and I really should register a protest against at the use of the Latinized name of the philosopher known as Mengzi (孟子, 372-289 B.C.E.), the most humane and liberal of the early Confucians, a man who sincerely and deeply believed in the innate goodness of the human being and the saving value of education for all, a man as remote intellectually from the Moldbug as it is possible for anyone to be, it actually gets me kind of angry). 

It's pretty interesting, though of course perverted, what Yarvin is doing there, which is spelled out at his own substack graymirror.substack.com/p/a-conversa.... He claims FDR exercised an "informal dictatorship-for-life" that was so immensely powerful that he retained power after he died. Or at any rate left behind a zombie presence that governs us still, 80 years later, presumably forcing us against our will to accept Social Security payments and workers' comp and unemployment benefits and the like:

Read FDR’s First Inaugural, specifically the part where he demands the powers of a general resisting an enemy invasion. In 1933! These were the powers FDR needed to create what, during his informal dictatorship-for-life, was more or less his personal executive monarchy, then after his death became the formalized administrative state.

That is to say, no, Roosevelt did not rule from beyond the grave, but the institutions of the New Deal persisted after he died, and, with the advent of civil rights laws and no doubt Obamacare, even got worse, from Yarvin's point of view...

For the Record: You Can't Be Serious~

 

Still from The Manchurian Candidate, 1962.

Special counsel office working to wipe away the charges against Trump before January 20, including the ones about him stealing classified documents from the government, lying about them, refusing to give them back, conspiring to hide them from the FBI, showing them to hotel guests...

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 8, 2024 at 10:12 PM

Then on January 20 he gets a new security clearance! Is that wild or what? We can't have a trial to find out whether he's guilty of espionage or not, because that might interfere impermissibly with his ability to perform his official duties. We just have to give him the chance to do it again!

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 8, 2024 at 10:19 PM

That's in spite of the fact that we already know perfectly well he did it. I mean the polite thing is to say he's "innocent until proven guilty", but have you looked at the indictment? Have you looked at his sorry excuse for a defense? "Oh I secretly declassified them all!" I don't think so.

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 8, 2024 at 10:25 PM

A Government of Lulz, Not Men

 

Halloween costume by Skeleteen.

As we know, when president-elect Trump left the White House in January 2021, he took a lot of stuff that did not belong to him, but to the National Archives and Records Administration, as provided in the Presidential Records Act, according to which all records of a presidential administration are the property of NARA when the administration ends (with a few exceptions for personal stuff), and brought it to his business/home in Palm Beach, where he kept the boxes in various locations, including a storeroom, a bathroom, his own living quarters, and even on a ballroom stage. 

It's not clear how much stuff altogether Trump stole; NARA's first estimate, when they wrote to demand it back in May 2021, was "two dozen boxes". Trump, after eight months of denial and stalling, sent them 15 boxes in January 2022, but it soon became clear to NARA that there was more that he hadn't returned (including famous things like the love letters from Kim Jong Un and the hurricane map he altered with his Sharpie to prove he wasn't bullshitting when he told the nation the storm was heading for Alabama, though that was an obvious forgery and he plainly was bullshitting). Also, in the 15 boxes they got, 100 documents, 700 pages in all, were classified, which got the FBI more seriously involved in the case (it might be case of violating not only the Presidential Records Act, but also the Espionage Act, especially if Trump went around showing them to people, or moved them around to hide them from the FBI, both of which it turned out he definitely did), to the point where they searched the Florida property in August, and found some 11,000 stolen documents in maybe 22 more boxes altogether, including over 100 more classified documents, some with top secret and higher classification. Finally, that November, the attorney general named a special counsel, Jack Smith, to look into the matter of whether the ex-president had violated any laws, and after a seven-month grand jury investigation Smith decided he had, and issued a criminal indictment in June 2023. The indictment didn't mention the tens of thousands of non-classified documents that should have been given to the NARA—LOL, nobody in Washington cares if you steal stuff from a library, apparently—but he was charged, along with a couple of employees, with 37 federal crimes involving the classified documents, illegally retaining them and conspiring to obstruct justice in the government's effort to get its property back from the thief. All this really happened.

Meanwhile, Smith, in parallel with a special committee in the House of Representatives and the district attorney of Atlanta, Georgia, had also been investing Trump's conduct around the same time, after Joe Biden was elected president in November 2020, when Trump worked with a host of confederates to stop Biden's accession to office, with a combination of failed legal moves to cast the election in doubt, outright extortion, fraud, and conspiracy to change or fake the results, and ultimately violence in the riotous invasion of the US Capitol led (or pushed) by Trump-linked paramilitary groups, on January 6 2021. 

All this really happened too, as you know, and led to serious legal consequences for many of the people involved. In the Georgia case, which focused on Trump's efforts to get the state's election authorities to falsify the election results there in his favor (as also, in varying degrees, in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), it led to racketeering and other charges against Trump and 18 other defendants, among whom Georgia bail bondsman Scott Hall, Justice Department lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, and Trump personal lawyers Sydney Powell and Jenna Ellis have already pleaded guilty. In Washington, the January 6 insurrection has led to charges against more than 1,400 people, among whom at least 629 have pleaded guilty and another 300 or so have been convicted at trial so far (and two defendants, Wikipedia adds, have been acquitted of all charges). A lot of crimes were committed, and Trump was deeply involved in all of them.

But Trump himself has escaped all consequences. Not that he's innocent, or makes any serious claim to be innocent; he often claims, without evidence, that the 900 convicted January 6 defendants are innocent (even though most of them have pleaded guilty) and that those in prison are "political prisoners", but he offers no fact defense at all on his own part. His legal defense is based entirely on strategies of delay, legalist quibbling, judge-shopping (to judges who owe him their jobs, including the three "conservative" Supreme Court justices he nominated, half of an invincible majority if they refuse to recuse themselves, which they always do), intimidation and threats against judges and prosecutors and their families that would mean immediate jail for contempt for any other defendant, and endless appeal, and he's managed to avoid trial up through the 2024 election.

That is, not entirely: he's lost his company's criminal case in New York for bank and tax fraud, and a parallel civil case in which he was ordered to pay $450 million, which is still under appeal, so we can call him an adjudicated fraud, and he's lost E. Jean Carroll's civil case against him for defamation, for another $88 million or so making him additionally an adjudicated rapist, and he's got 34 felony convictions for falsifying business records in hiding Michael Cohen's hush money payments to Stormy Daniels in the 2020 campaign and his reimbursements to Cohen after his inauguration, for which he's to be sentenced on November 26. LOL, nobody cares about that either, and he'll appeal in any event. He'll never pay for that crime, and none of them cost him votes.

Trump was an openly criminal president from the day he took office, as I've been explaining since April 2017 with reference to that illegal hotel lease and the unconstitutional collection of foreign emoluments; and the main reason he's gotten away with it is that nobody is prepared for that, and nobody knows how to deal with it, even after eight years. It's not normal for presidents to break the law or violate the Constitution, and we don't have a mechanism for dealing with it. 

James Comey's and Robert Mueller's efforts to pin down a case against his collaboration with Russian intelligence in the 2016 campaign didn't quite add up to a case, obvious though it was that he'd been doing it (and it does add up to a case since the Senate's investigation was published in 2020, but no prosecutor had the stomach to try it), and while Mueller worked up an excellent case against Trump for obstruction of justice, that couldn't be prosecuted either, and not just because Attorney General Barr chose to join in the obstruction—there's that memo from the Office of Legal Counsel stating that indicting a sitting president would impermissibly interfere with his ability to carry out his duties, and practically everybody insists this has the force of law, even though it obviously doesn't. As Walter Dellinger wrote at Lawfare in 2018, there are six competing memos and briefs on the question, and it's not obvious that they even have a consistent message:

Consider the 1973 OLC memo stating that a sitting president should not be indicted. Far from being authoritative, it was essentially repudiated within months by the Justice Department in the United States’ filing in the Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon...Richard Nixon was so named in the Watergate indictment, and that inclusion was sustained by Judge John Sirica and defended by the United States...

Why would you even want a criminal president to carry on with his duties?

Of course there is supposed to be a specific remedy for that. The idea of the Constitution is that it should be dealt with by impeachment, anyway, but this turns out to be a partisan matter; Trump couldn't be impeached for anything until after the 2018 election gave us a Democratic House to do it, and Speaker Pelosi didn't want it to happen (not that she imagined Trump wasn't a criminal, but she thought it was bad politics), and when they finally managed, first over the smoking-gun evidence of Trump's effort to extort campaign help from the president of Ukraine, then over the January insurrection, the Republican Senate was unable to convict. (They came pretty close in the second case, with a majority of 57 to 43, including seven Republican senators, but they needed 67. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell voted to acquit, although he had said that "there is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day...a mob was assaulting the Capitol in his name. These criminals were carrying his banners, hanging his flags, and screaming their loyalty to him.") Then, in the final insult, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled in Trump v. United States that it is unconstitutional to indict a president or ex-president for acts committed while he is acting in his official capacity. We don't know quite how far that extends. 

All these things really happened, but they didn't stop Trump from getting reelected on Tuesday. The price of butter is still kind of high, and on the reality side credit card interest rates are genuinely usurious (if you think Donald Trump is going to do a better job of lowering your credit card interest rate than a Democratic government getting its banking advice from Senator Elizabeth Warren, you deserve to be paying 23%, but I don't. Sweet Jesus.)

One of the most important things about the Jack Smith cases was that trying them would explore how far that insane new immunity rule can really be carried, but we aren't going to find out: the cases are going away, apparently, as well (we don't know about Georgia yet), even though we all know he's guilty of the crimes (including the less ignorant among the Republicans, who think it's funny, the fuckers—LOL, nothing matters), because Trump will be a sitting president (couch potato–in-chief) again before the trial can be held, a criminal president once again, for four more years of supervising his racketeering operation and watching out for his personal interests and funneling government money into his businesses and promoting his family and minions and grifting money out of his supporters for his lawyers and all the impulsiveness and ignorance and venality that characterized his first term endangering our human rights, our economy, our national security, and our planet. 

As I was typing through that last bit President Joe Biden came on the radio, as Kamala Harris did yesterday, for one of the inevitable unity rituals, congratulating Trump and offering his help in the peaceful transfer of power (the rituals Trump refused to participate in, committed as he was to the lie of the stolen election), and urging us all to stay calm and hopeful, because we're American, and I get that, I really do. He's still working, at the last minute, for the restoration of the norms that Trump smashed to pieces. He's showing Trump how to behave, though there's no chance Trump will learn. It has to be done. All the foreign leaders and all the legislators and governors here will try to do the same. They'll be doing it to protect us, because they don't want Trump to do anything crazy out of pique or rage, and they'll be doing it because they really care about the norms.

I really get it, but I was brought up with the slogan that we should have a government of laws, not men. I understand that's never been perfectly true and probably never would be, but I feel in elevating this lawless man and his minions to the highest position a second time, helplessly (we can't do otherwise), after we've learned so much more fully what he is, we are irretrievably losing—throwing in the trash—the aspiration the slogan represents.. 

This Is Not a Prediction

 

Daniel Drezner suggested there had been a perceptible change in the vibe around the presidential election in the last few days, driven perhaps in part by a change in the Harris campaign's rhetoric: after all these weeks of calling themselves the underdog, they've started allowing themselves to look confident: "We are on track to win this very close race," says campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon. Harris in her new stump speech says, "Make no mistake: we will win." 

That's a strategic decision, no doubt—there comes a moment when being the underdog stops paying off and you want your voters to start feeling they're on a bandwagon of winners, and this was a logical place to make that transition, but there's more to it than that. There's a fire in Harris's and Walz's rally crowds that's like when they were first introduced to the audience in late July and early August, while Trump's malevolent juggalos (as opposed to the musical Juggalos, who don't seem at all malevolent and have given Harris the nod) are plainly dwindling in these final days, as in the scene in Reading shown at top.

I can't at this point imagine Trump winning, and I mean that literally: I should be able to imagine it, I normally have a pretty decent imagination, but my mind just won't go there. 

Maybe it's one of those self-care moves, a sign of mental health even. I can always start imagining it again tomorrow if I have to. We've been preparing for it for two years at least. But for now, imagining Harris winning is so much easier. I'm not saying she will win, I'm just saying she should. If the world makes sense, you know, which is not an easily defended prior assumption and I'm aware of that. I understand she could lose; I'm just not imagining how it happens, or why, for the time being. 

They're running such a technically good campaign, for one thing. "Flawless" is the word that keeps coming up (googling "Harris campaign flawless" returns 850,000 results). They have raised inconceivably huge amounts of money—I'll go back to protesting against that sooner or later (and Obama for breaking the public financing system in 2008)—and they've spent it with discipline, whereas Trump has had difficulty raising money and spent far too much of it on paying his legal bills (that goes back to a while ago, but he's still doing it). 

The Rectification of Names: Fascism

Scene outside Madison Square Garden, before the big political rally, as reported dramatically by Candace Fleming in Salon:

A couple of Firsters stepped assertively toward a reporter. Would the media cover the rally fairly this time? they wanted to know. Or would the newspapers be biased and inaccurate, as usual? Many rallygoers believed the press couldn't be trusted. Their hero, the face of America First and the man they'd come to hear speak, had told them so. "Contemptible," he'd called the press. "Dishonest parasites." In a recent speech he'd even told supporters that "dangerous elements" controlled the media, men who placed their own interests above America's. That's why he had to keep holding rallies, he'd explained. Someone had to tell it like it was. Someone had to speak the impolite truth about the foreigners who threatened the nation. It was time to build walls — "ramparts," he called them — to hold back the infiltration of "alien blood." It was time for America to close off its borders, isolate itself from the rest of the world, and focus solely on its own interests. It was the only way, he claimed, "to preserve our American way of life."

No, not last night. The Salon article was posted March 9 2020, and the occasion they were reporting was a lot earlier than that. Almost 80 years earlier, in fact, and it wasn't the open Nazis of the German-American Bund in February 1939 at the "Pro-America" rally that we've been hearing so much about in the last week or so; it was the American First Committee led by heroic pilot Charles A. Lindbergh, perhaps on October 31 1941, barely two months before Pearl Harbor; or, perhaps more likely, the Garden rally of May 23 that year (Fleming doesn't give us enough clues to say, unfortunately), where a nonpartisan group joined him on the dais—Senator Burton K. Wheeler (D-MT) and the popular novelist Kathleen Norris, as well as the Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas (a genuine pacifist, not a mere anti-anti-fascist like the others). Either way, Lindbergh in New York was not using the "racially charged" language that got him into trouble in Des Moines in September:

Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not.

Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.

I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.

We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.

But at the May rally, he and Wheeler and Norris (I hope that's not Thomas's arm behind Norris's head) had allowed themselves to be photographed in a half-assed emulation of the Sieg Heil salute:

Literary Corner: The Weave

 

Socially distanced Biden campaign rally at UAW Region 1 headquarters, Warren, Michigan, September 9 2020. Photo by Patrick Semansky, AP, via USA Today.

Eight Circles and He Couldn't Fill Tbem Up

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

I mean you can do whatever you want. I said
I don't like that. Lo and behold I see
they went and then built a plant and now
they do their business with India. They probably
do it outside India, too. They built
a very big plant. Many countries do that.
All of a sudden you hear they're leaving Milwaukee
or leaving wherever they may be located.
It's very sad to see. And it's so simple,
This isn’t like Elon with his rocket ships
that land within 12 inches on the moon
where they want it to land or he gets the engines back.
That was the first I really saw. I said, ‘Who the hell did that?’
I saw engines about three or four years ago.
These things were coming. Cylinders, no wings,
no nothing, and they’re coming down very slowly,
landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean,
someplace with a circle. Boom. Reminded me
of the Biden circles that he used to have, right?
He’d have eight circles and he couldn’t fill them up.
But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote.
I don’t know, I don’t know, couldn’t fill up the circles.
I always loved those circles. They were so beautiful.
That was so beautiful to look at. In fact, the person
that did them, that was the best thing about his —
the level of that circle was great. But they couldn’t
get people, so they used to have the press
stand in those circles because they couldn’t get
the people. Then I heard we lost. ‘Oh, we lost.’
No, we’re never going to let that happen again.
But we’ve been abused by other countries. We’ve been
abused by our own politicians, really, more than
other countries. I can’t blame them. We’ve been
abused by people that represent us in this country,
some of them stupid, some of them naive,
and some of them crooked, frankly.

From Trump's remarks at the Detroit Economic Club, October 10 2024. The opening bit is from a story Trump has been telling for years, about the injustice of India having a 100% tariff on motorcycles, which was meant, I think he believed, to harm the US motorcycle industry, as Washington Post's Annie Gowen wrote in 2018:

Fascism and Other Matters

It's amazing how much Republicans (I don't mean people who "identify" as Republicans, I mean party cadres, the activists who do the work and enjoy the rewards, ideological and material, because that's the kind of party the GOP is now) despise their voters.

While both sides have been criticized for misleading fundraising tactics, “[t]he Republican fundraising machine has been subject to more than 800 complaints to the Federal Trade Commission since 2022 — nearly seven times more than the number of complaints lodged against the other side,” they report.

One sad example: “One 82-year-old woman, who wore pajamas with holes in them because she didn’t want to spend money on new ones, didn’t realize she had given Republicans more than $350,000 while living in a 1,000 square-foot Baltimore condo since 2020.”

"I love the poorly educated," said Trump, but I think his understanding of "love" is a relationship where he gets a lot more out of it than he puts in, if you know what I mean.

***

This is so embarrassing on CNN's part:

What She Needed to Do

Portrait of the candidates as baffled uncle and skeptical niece. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty. 

When Vice President Harris opened up in her first debate response—to the fairly stupid but utterly predictable question whether Americans are "better off than they were four years ago", I was somewhat dismayed by the way she completely ignored it, choosing to answer a completely different question instead, with a peculiar mix of autobiographical detail and Clintonian numbers:

So, I was raised as a middle-class kid. And I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America. I believe in the ambition, the aspirations, the dreams of the American people. And that is why I imagine and have actually a plan to build what I call an opportunity economy. Because here's the thing. We know that we have a shortage of homes and housing, and the cost of housing is too expensive for far too many people. We know that young families need support to raise their children. And I intend on extending a tax cut for those families of $6,000, which is the largest child tax credit that we have given in a long time. So that those young families can afford to buy a crib, buy a car seat, buy clothes for their children. My passion, one of them, is small businesses. I was actually -- my mother raised my sister and me but there was a woman who helped raise us. We call her our second mother. She was a small business owner. I love our small businesses. My plan is to give a $50,000 tax deduction to start-up small businesses, knowing they are part of the backbone of America's economy. My opponent, on the other hand, his plan is to do what he has done before, which is to provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, which will result in $5 trillion to America's deficit. My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax, which would be a 20% tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month. Economists have said that Trump's sales tax would actually result for middle-class families in about $4,000 more a year because of his policies and his ideas about what should be the backs of middle-class people paying for tax cuts for billionaires.

But it's astonishing, looking back at it, how many necessary things she accomplished with that, in the first two minutes: 

• sketching out her character, as an ordinary American raised by a single mother with the help of a day care provider (loved, and also properly paid for her work), which has given her a feeling for what ordinary Americans need and a motivation to help them get it, for the benefit of those in the audience that had barely heard of her before July and still doesn't know much of anything about her; 
• establishing her readiness to talk about policy with details, numbers and all, for the benefit of the moderators whose preparation has led them to believe that she's going to keep it vague and airy, and precisely the kind of wonky detail they hate at the politics desk, because they find it so boring;
• establishing the contrast with her opponent, who is focused on helping his fellow billionaires and their giant companies, as he has shown in the past and as he plans in the future; and
• spooking the opponent personally with a description of his tariff proposals that he may not even be able to recognize—it's import duties, paid by the American importers of foreign goods—effectively a sales tax, since the importers normally pass the cost on to their customers, but not literally a sales tax, while Trump keeps implying idiotically that it's paid by the governments of the exporting countries, which he should understand better considering all the import businesses he theoretically ran in his TV star days (Israeli vodka, Slovene cocktail glasses, Turkish furniture, Chinese neckties and eyeglass frames, etc.—of course he was just a licensee pretending to run the businesses for the show, and they were all failures), a description that immediately goads him into opening with a ridiculously ignorant lie:

First of all, I have no sales tax. That's an incorrect statement. She knows that. We're doing tariffs on other countries. Other countries are going to finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we've done for the world. And the tariff will be substantial in some cases. I took in billions and billions of dollars, as you know, from China. In fact, they never took the tariff off because it was so much money, they can't. It would totally destroy everything that they've set out to do. They've taken in billions of dollars from China and other places. They've left the tariffs on.....

No, "other countries" don't pay a dime. And while the money paid by US import businesses is real, it's hardly important: it's up from about 1% of annual federal revenue from 1946 to 2017 to 2% (compared to 49% for income tax), and that's not the reason the Biden administration has held on to them. Tariffs haven't been a significant source of revenue since the income tax was introduced by a Progressive movement a bit over a century ago (it's imaginable that Trump learned from his rightwing father that income tax is an attack on the wealthy, and that's the reason he's convinced tariffs are the solution to every problem).

The only reason for imposing tariffs nowadays is as the (post-neoliberal) Biden administration uses it, for the encouragement of domestic industry, but combined, unlike the Trump tariffs, with an effective industrial policy of the kind Republicans regard as an abomination and which Trump and his minions wouldn't know how to begin in any case (Trump's own tariffs on imports from the EU as well as China are best known for China's retaliation against US agriculture—92% of the "billions and billions of dollars" they brought in went to compensating US farmers for the losses Trump policy had caused them).

Via.

FWIW.

Moreover, Harris did have an answer to the "are we better off" question, which she got to in response to Trump's freakout Gish gallop, which ran in a matter of seconds from tariffs to inflation to a rant on "millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums" before he remembered he was supposed to be talking about the economy. 

"I'd love to" talk about the economy, Harris replied:

Let's talk about what Donald Trump left us. Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression. Donald Trump left us the worst public health epidemic in a century. Donald Trump left us the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War. And what we have done is clean up Donald Trump's mess. 

So you can't complain that she didn't answer—she just chose to do it in her own time, after getting Trump to define his own character, as ignorant, delusional, and vicious, and did it with a list of charges that placed him as the defendant in what would amount to a trial, and took control of the occasion. 

Really, as Rebecca Traister suggested, she took control of it the minute she came on stage and marched over to Trump's podium introducing herself as if she were the host ("Kamala Harris. Let's have a good debate") and forcing him to shake hands.

It was a stunning performance. It was by far the most entertaining presidential debate I've ever seen, and by far the most useful (both at the same time: the faces she made for the camera when Trump was speaking were funny, but they were also instructive, assisting with the fact checking; leading the audience to distinguish Trump the liar from Trump the fool, libelous Trump from psycho Trump, the sneaky one from the one who was just tired and lost). (It's only fair to mention that the moderators did an unusually good job of keeping the candidates on the subject and checking the facts themselves.)

It didn't, as many of the pundits complain, provide a very clear sense of how Harris's presidency will differ policy-wise from Biden's, but I don't understand why it should; she's not running against Biden, she's running against Trump. Josh Marshall likes to say she's making Trump the "incumbent", the representative of the discredited establishment, in order to present herself as the change agent, and some think that's a little too paradoxical, but I think it meets the psychology of the moment, in terms of the Lacanian picture I sketched out a couple of weeks ago. Economically, Biden (or "Biden-Harris") rescued the nation from the calamity of 2020; psychologically, Biden's term is the afterwardsness in which we began to realize how traumatized we've been, and we may irrationally blame him, in the form of the psychoanalytic transference, but it's Trump we're suffering from—it's Trump who abused us, and he really is the incumbent in that sense.

As to whether the debate worked or not for the Harris campaign, whether she "did what she needed to do" as the horserace pundits always put it, I don't know, but I think there are reasons for being hopeful, and I don't mean the current picture in the polls, or for that matter the parade of Bush-era endorsements for Harris, most recently from that old reprobate Alberto Gonzales, or last week's statements from Liz Cheney and her father the abominable former vice; not that there's anything wrong with those in and of themselves, it's the responsible thing to do, given Trump's known incompetence and criminality, and Trump opposes some things in national security and foreign policy where the "bipartisan consensus" is so fundamental that at some level I agree with Dick Cheney (like "the US should have multilateral economic and security alliances"); but I can't quite bring myself to see it outside the context of Liz Cheney's broader project of rehabilitating the Republican Party by pretending Trump isn't really one of them, that he's some kind of horrific invasive species from somewhere entirely different. I may get back to that a little later.

The Liz Cheney endorsement that startled me was the one for Texas Democratic Senate candidate Colin Allred, because it's a direct attack on the party as it is, in the rebarbative person of Senator Cruz: she wrote,

There are numbers of candidates around the country who have embraced election denialism [the C-SPAN transcript says "elections and nihilism" first, but never mind that]—denialism. It is important that we beat them too. I think one of the most important things we need to do as a country as we begin to rebuild our politics is we need to elect serious people. Often, when you go in to vote you don't have the choice. I want to say specifically here in Texas, you guys do have a tremendous serious candidate running for the United States Senate. [Applause.] It's not Ted Cruz. [Laughter.] [Applause.]....You might not agree on every policy position, but we need people who are going to serve in good faith. In this race, that is Colin Allred.

And because she gives a nod to the idea that Allred might conceivably win, pinned in Cheney's explanation to Trump's and Vance's (and by implication Cruz's) misogyny, and its connection to the reproductive rights issue: "Women around this country, we've had enough," she said. It seems like a more conventional endorsement, in which she'd not only like him to win, but personally hopes to help.

The things that are giving me the most hope at the moment have to do with how bad the Trump Republican party is, in every sense of the work, incompetent, corrupt, and unresponsive to voters, especially on the abortion issue. 

There's the  arrogance of Donald Trump saying he doesn't have to prepare for a debate being matched by his vice presidential candidate:

A reporter asked Vance how he was getting ready for the [October 1 debate with Walz] at a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday.

He answered: "The way I'm doing debate prep is by spending time with these fine people—this is how I do debate prep."

That didn't work out so well for Donald, JD, you might want to rethink it.

There's the awful quality of so many of the GOP downballot candidates, especially for the Senate, to the despair of the National Review, with only two seats likely to flip to the Republicans, West Virginia and Montana (but Montana is looking iffier for them, with the Republican, ex–Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy falling from multiple lying scandals to financial scandal to racism scandal).  

There's the turnover of the national committee from Ronna McDaniel (a horrible person, but a professional) to Trump's daughter-in-law focusing on her imaginary music career and outsourcing the party's entire GOTV program to pikers with no experience like Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA. I'm personally convinced Trump is continuing to milk the party to pay his own and his henchmen's legal fees. It's as if they're so confident in their voter suppression efforts in Pennsylvania and North Carolina that they don't need GOTV:

The Republican National Committee (RNC) once envisioned an extensive field operation for the 2024 election, including having about 90 staffers in the must-win state of Pennsylvania.

But the Trump campaign scrapped those plans when it took over the RNC in March, redirecting the focus on field operations to combating supposed voter fraud and pursuing a twin voter turnout strategy of relying on several political action committees and ardent Trump volunteers.

The result has been that the Trump campaign has put fewer resources into its ground game in battleground states, according to people familiar with the matter – and Republican officials have derisively said the Trump operation is more comparable in size to a midterm cycle than a presidential.

They're so bad at everything else, maybe they're not really good at voter suppression either.

Meanwhile, since the coming of Kamala Harris, there's an explosion of new voter registrations, especially among the 18-to-34s and among those particularly among women:

Voter registration surged 700% after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection, according to the CEO of a nonpartisan voter engagement organization....Hailey noted significant registration increases in key swing states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. By the end of the week following Biden’s announcement, Vote.org had recorded more than 142,000 new registrations nationwide....

(who don't show up in the likely voter polls because they'll be voting for the first time). 

This phenomenon is plainly connected to the issue of abortion, which is also the subject of ballot measures in 10 states, including some with important Senate races with repellent Republicans: Montana (Tester vs. Sheehy), Arizona (Gallego vs. Lake), Missouri (Kunze vs. Hawley), and Florida (Mucarsel-Powell vs. Scott). Plus Ohio (Sherrod Brown vs. the unspeakable Bernie Moreno), which had its referendum in 2023, which that state's vile legislature has decided to ignore, and the voters really ought to punish them for it

I'm convinced there could be a Blue blowout in November that polls couldn't have predicted—not that there will be, because it's unpredictable, but that it's really possible, between the joy of the Democrats, the worthlessness of the Republicans, and Harris's emerging pro-freedom campaign.

Graveyard Scene

Screen capture from Trump's Tik Tok campaign video shot illegally in Arlington National Cemetery, via. Just for the record, I know you probably know this already, there were 45 combat deaths of US troops during Trump's presidential term, 18 "non-hostile" deaths, and no 18-month period during which there were no deaths at all. I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere, but there actually were about 18 months with no US deaths in Afghanistan after Trump signed the deal with the Taliban in February 2020, but Biden was the president for eight of those months. (This is a key reason why Biden honored the deal, because he knew if he didn't the Taliban would go back to attacking and killing Americans.)

On that story about the shoving match last week at Arlington National Cemetery, where a ceremony meant to honor the last Americans to die in the Afghan War, with presidential candidate Donald Trump as a guest, was marred by the behavior of members of Trump's gang entourage, who insisted on violating the rules (and the law) by filming the event, for what turned out to be a Trump campaign Tik Tok commercial, to the point of using violence against the official who tried to get them to stop (it's not clear exactly how, whether they pushed her to the ground or just punched her—the Trump team apparently has some video, but they don't seem at all eager to let it out)—there's an angle that hasn't been covered directly, which has to do with the mourners, family members of the American dead.

There were 13 Americans, 11 Marines and one man each from the Army and Navy,  killed on August 27 2021, among 180-some deaths altogether in a suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, where desperate crowds were trying to get flights out of the country as the US forces packed up and left under the disorderly arrangements negotiated by the Trump administration the previous February, and the Taliban assumed control. The Americans were there, at least some of them, to help Afghan evacuees process their papers to get out. The attacker detonating the suicide belt was affiliated with the Taliban's enemies from Isis-K (the Islamic State in Khorasan), but it's not ruled out that panicked American troops killed some of the victims as well. It was a terrible mess.

Literary Corner: Did Trump Close the Border?

 

Screenshot from Newsweek.

The former president responds to the Democratic candidate's acceptance speech, in a call to Fox News, which the network cut off after ten minutes, claiming they were out of time:

I Didn't Have a Bill

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

Why didn’t she do the things
she’s complaining about?
She didn’t do any of it.
She could have done it
three and a half years ago.
She could do it tonight
by leaving the auditorium
and going to Washington, DC,
and closing the border.
She doesn’t need a bill.
I didn’t have a bill.
I closed the border.

It's almost endearing how he still hasn't found out what vice presidents are supposed to do for a living, even though he had one of his own for four years. 

Or is this something I've been missing? Did Pence use to pop over to the White House and issue executive orders while Trump was in the East Wing watching Fox & Friends? Or does he think Harris is already the president? He's often suggested in recent months that the presidency is a very slippery kind of identity, sometimes suggesting Barack Obama is still in office (and likely to be responsible for a nuclear war, because Putin doesn't respect him), sometimes hinting that he believes he's still president himself. 

Here's the passage from Harris's speech:

Pre-DNC Pep Talk

Trump "Freedom Cities" affordable housing proposal, via Raw Story.

By the way, I still think Biden would have won the election, when it came down to it. I still think there was a majority who would be happy to vote for him but told the polls they didn't want to because they'd heard he was unelectable, and were afraid if Biden was the candidate Trump would win. Fear of Trump won out.  But it certainly wouldn't have been as much fun as this looks likely to be. As Josh Marshall (gift link) is saying, it was going to be a slog, weary work, not happy. And now we're talking joy!

I also still think Biden made that happen, defeating the timid centrist plan to run Some White Dude chosen by some improvised set of reality-TV rules, with his endorsement of Kamala Harris as his successor minutes after he left the race (the centrist plan was specifically meant to exclude her, as too "controversial"). And it was clearly a great decision, as was his naming Harris in the first place, back in 2020. If anybody engineered a "coup" it was Biden himself, ensuring his post-neoliberal "legacy" by naming the candidate most representative of the Biden coalition and most likely to continue along his policy lines. As Harris has confirmed in her own naming of the most Biden-like of VP candidates, Tim Walz, the lovable non-rich white guy, mainline Christian, tell-it-like-it-is orator (Biden could easily have invented the "these guys are weird" line himself), simple but extremely sharp, with a genuine fund of out-of-country experience (in China, where he taught English for a while and used to bring his American high school students on trips every year) and an unshakable commitment to kindness and understanding. 

(I also should add, contra Peter Beinart's "Joe Biden Is Not a Hero", that I still think Biden has been doing everything he believes is possible to stop the killing in Gaza, and continues to work tirelessly at that at this late date. I think he's literally hoping to have the permanent ceasefire announced at the Democratic convention. Biden may well be wrong on the hopefulness of this approach, but I'm certain an arms embargo wouldn't have succeeded any better at stopping the killing, given the mood in Israel and the criminal intransigence of the prime minister and his party, intent on saving his own bacon; it would have left Netanyahu feeling even freer to ignore US entreaties. Meanwhile, as I type, FWIW, Blinken has just announced that Netanyahu and Gallant have accepted his "bridging proposal" for getting from here to there, though the details remain thin.) 

NABJ: The First Six Minutes

Via Threads.

I don't think Trump precisely means to praise the fictional criminal; I think his idea is that Lecter is a typical example of a border-crossing asylum seeker, which is equally nuts. But he can't help showing the appreciation for Lecter's comic stylings.

TRUMP:

First of all, I don't think I have ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner, first question. You don't even say "Hello, how are you."

In fact, Rachel Scott began the Trump interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention by thanking the former president for showing up.

SCOTT:

Mr. President, we so appreciate you giving us an hour of your time.

Only then did she ask her question (given his long history of racially insensitive remarks—such as telling congresswomen of color to "go back to where you came from", calling Black district attorneys "animal" and "rabbit" and Black journalists "losers" whose questions are "stupid and racist"—"why should Black voters trust you?") That's the first lie in the first six minutes of the transcript. More, big and little, follow.

***

DEI

 

IDK I really like women who laugh. Talking to UNITE HERE at Culinary Union Hall, Las Vegas, photo by Ellen Schmidt/Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Mrs. Vance isn't laughing:

Here's somebody who went to Yale from freshman through J.D. and picked up an M.Phil. in modern history from Clare College, Cambridge, along the way, and has clerked for Judge Kavanagh before he was elevated to the Supreme Court and Justice Roberts after he was, and has been a really high-powered lawyer with a bicoastal practice (Los Angeles and Washington) at the firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson, described as a "top contender in the cool, woke category" of law firm in 2019, when

Munger has elected eight new partners, and 60 percent of them are women or lawyers of color. What’s more, three of the new partners...took parental leave during the year they were up for partnership—and one of them is a male. The audacity!

(She quit the firm last week after her husband was nominated to be the Republican candidate for vice president in the November election, not because it was too woke there, but maybe to get more in line with her husband's well-known policy positions,

It turns out that normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs, and want a family policy that doesn't shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more "freedom" in the paid labor force.

— JD Vance (@JDVance) April 29, 2021

so she could spend more time with her kids in the family's third home, in Ohio, the state for which the husband has been serving as freshman senator since January 2023. Of course their kids' daycare isn't crap, but the finest money can buy.)

I don't know that you'd want to call her a diversity hire herself, though she is a woman of color (Dravidian by "race", the child of Telugu speakers from Andhra Pradesh). I'll bet she has had a terrific work ethic and fabulous grades throughout her education and career, and I'm told her admired writers include Zadie Smith and Vladimir Nabokov. I have no doubt she's fully qualified for every school and every company that's taken her on.

Nevertheless, when she's thinking about civics, as in the tweet above, it's pretty much at a mediocre seventh-grade level. I mean it's embarrassing. 

I know it's common for presidential candidates to claim their VP choice is just the best possible person for the job, as if there was a qualifying exam and they just picked the one with the highest score, but are you seriously believing them? Dan Quayle? Sarah Palin? 

That isn't how it's done. Picking a vice president is a complex job, weighing a number of different factors. First and foremost, of course, should be whether the person is qualified, in intellect and temperament, to step into the presidency in the event of a disaster, as Quayle and Palin really weren't, and Democratic candidates generally are, like Mondale or Gore (though there was the Eagleton blunder, really an injustice, willingness to seek help for mental illness should be taken as a good sign, not a bad one; and John Edwards turned out to be an awful blunder, though the guy did give great speeches). Then, it's nice if they bring some political benefit to the ticket, typically geographical: John Kennedy, the Massachusetts Catholic, went for Texan Lyndon Johnson to help quiet the nation's Know Nothing fears (though Johnson also brought extraordinary influence over Congress, which greatly helped him, after Kennedy's killing, to push through the JFK agenda). Johnson in turn chose the Minnesota hyperliberal Hubert Humphrey, as Carter would later choose Mondale.

Then there are ideological contributions: Reagan picked G.H.W. Bush to appease the people who feared his ideas on economics were too crazy ("voodoo economics", as Bush had called it during the campaign), Obama picked stalwart old Joe Biden in part for similar reasons, reassuring the public that the Black man wouldn't be too radical (ironically, Biden as president was able to bring much more radical ideas forward than Obama had been). Trump is too stupid to be able to think this way, but Paul Manafort (not just a grotesque criminal but also a skilled Republican operative, which is not a contradiction) did him a solid in 2016 by literally forcing him to pick the pious Indianan Mike Pence, bringing across the white Evangelical community that has become the most loyal component of the Trump coalition, with its bizarre but sincere belief that Trump is what Jesus wants—Trump really wanted an outer-borough insult comic like himself, New Jersey's Chris Christie, I believe because he thought standing next to Christie made him look slimmer. 

Freed from the restraint of people who know what they're doing, this year he's made a historically bad choice, chameleon JD Vance, performing as Trump's Mini-Me (a different approach to accessorizing Trump, perhaps), and bringing in not a single vote over and above the votes Trump was already guaranteed to get, and a résumé considerably thinner than Sarah Palin's was (we like to call her a "half-term governor", but that was her fourth election, after one for Wasilla city council and two for Wasilla mayor, while Vance is as of yet a one-third term senator who's only ever gotten elected, and barely, in a thoroughly red state against that idiot Tim Ryan, once), and apparently a colossally bad public speaker (unlike Kamala Harris, whose much-maligned laughter is generally associated with something that's funny, his seems to be a response to losing his train of thought as completely as Biden did that one time during the "debate", and he did it a lot more than once). But he's descended from Kentucky "hillbillies", and that's what he was chosen for. That's the opposite of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. But it certainly is what it looks like when you go with race instead of qualifications.

Starting with Bill Clinton, and it's something we ought to give him serious credit for, even Carter didn't really think of it, presidential candidates have typically sought vice presidents who could find something to do with their time while they waited for the president to die. His choice of Al Gore, another wonky white guy from the non-deep South, was wildly unconventional, but the two complemented each other, with their different temperaments and subjects and their similar culture, and formed a real partnership, and Gore's signature initiative, "Reinventing Government", really did something [though as commenter Aardvark Cheeselog suggested after this was posted, the hollowing out of the civil service and massive privatization that ended the "era of big government" was not a great thing]. W. Bush's equally out-of-the-box naming of a fellow Texas oilman pretending he was from Wyoming, Dick Cheney, to compensate for his own lack of education and experience and interest in the job, didn't work out so well, of course (I always say Bush really wasn't such a terrible person, but in so far over his head it took him six years to realize how badly he was doing, when he got his father's lieutenants in to rescue him from Cheney and Rumsfeld, and by then it was too late to save the presidency, as the mortgage-backed securities crisis loomed), but it reinforced the pattern.

Obama's selection of Biden in 2008 seemed like an attempt at a conventional response to an extraordinary situation ("here's an old white guy to calm you down, we won't do anything that Black"), but it was also meant to compensate for real gaps in Obama's preparation, in foreign policy and national security questions, not that those were the only ones where Biden played a role, and it was extraordinary. Biden deserves credit for it too, for his willingness to look like the administration's comic relief; he was an essential element in Obama's thinking, as a matter of fact, but he wasn't that interested in glory—he was interested in making the policy work.

And Biden's selection of Kamala Harris is on that model: he certainly chose her for her political reach into a world no US presidential candidate had ever tried to reach before—not only women, as Mondale had tried to do in 1984 with the choice of Geraldine Ferraro, but Black women, the element of the party to which he owed his own elevation after the South Carolina primary in 2020; but also for a personal reason, as we know, because his son Beau, as Delaware attorney general, had really partnered with Kamala Harris, as California attorney general, to get stuff done, during the foreclosure crisis of 2011-12:

In her memoir, Harris called him an “incredible friend and colleague” who became a close collaborator. “There were periods, when I was taking heat, that Beau and I talked every day, sometimes multiple times a day,” she wrote. “We had each other’s backs.”

Biden chose Harris for an extraordinary reason: not just for the obvious reasons that had prevailed, I don't know, since 1832, when Andrew Jackson picked New Yorker Martin van Buren; because he knew her as a family connection, with his beloved dead son. If a "DEI hire" is a bad thing, that's not what this was.

Which is more than can be said for the vice presidential candidacy of "JD" Vance, now acknowledged in the Trump camp (writes Tim Alberta) to be a dumb, arrogant political mistake

born...of cockiness, meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter

(the "base" being that white working class that Vance, the rich Peter Thiel protégé, supposedly represents), which Trump is now regretting, while he unexpectedly faces Harris, who I'm sure he sincerely despised as a "DEI hire", as a skilled, smart, vigorous opponent. LOL.

If You're a Star They Let You Do It

 

Poster for The Frogs, Trinity College Dramatic Society, Toronto, 1902, via Wikipedia.

My theory of what makes Biden the best candidate to beat Trump is pretty simple, and ought to be cynical enough for anybody: it's that he's the only possible candidate at the same level of celebrity as Trump, with the same degree of star quality and a similar ability to work an audience, his reducibility to a three-stroke line drawing or a meme image (as the smiler in the aviators), or a comic book hero (Sunny Joe as the secret identity of Dark Brandon). Elections are reality shows now, and while that's deplorable in many ways it's where we are at the moment, and the only way out is through.

Kamala Harris comes closest to Biden in reality-show capacity, as she has become in the last months, with the fiery oratory and that warm relaxed laugh, and I'm very glad she's there, but she hasn't been exposed enough, and there are the other issues to consider (is she entirely ready for the racism and misogyny she'd have to cope with at the top of the ticket? Is it even fair to her?). The nice governors seem nice, if you're enough of a news junkie to know, but they don't have any established character as performers; we haven't seen them campaign, and still less have the people who count, the members of the electorate. And there's so little time to do it in! (A season of American Idol takes about eight months to put together, from auditions to finals.) And so little evidence that any of those supposed candidates are even willing to jump in—people, that's not because Newsom or Whitmer or Pritzker is too shy, or afraid of looking disloyal, they're politicians; it's because they've calculated they'd be most likely to lose, they're young enough to save themselves for a more auspicious year, and I think they're almost certainly right.

If Biden were really seriously diminished in capacity to the point where he couldn't do the job, it would be different; it would be his duty to resign (and President Harris, I would add, would be a much more compelling candidate than Vice President Harris), but everybody knows that's not the case—that's why there've been no calls for him to resign. All the more since his meeting with the press after the NATO conference on Thursday, which took a remarkable turn; it seemed to be going the way you'd expect, a debate between Biden and a Greek-comedy chorus—

FROGS

Do you really believe you're up to the job? You think you can convince us?
Brekekekéx-koáx-koáx! Brekekekéx-koáx-koáx!

BIDEN

Look, I'm doing the job right now! I'm not being facetious!

—when rescue appeared from an unexpected deus ex machina, the New York Times Washington bureau chief, David E. Sanger, who came up with an idea I'd had myself

My fantasy for tomorrow's presser Biden: OK why don't you test me? Ask me a substantive question and see if I'm capable of answering. Press corps: Biden: OK, person, man, woman, TV, camera, that good?

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) Jul 10, 2024 at 1:22 PM

and asked Biden a question about the policy environment of the NATO summit, as a way (as he later explained it to CNN) of testing his cognitive capacity: