This is how you do it. He’s just an excellent politician.
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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
Oh, please. Oh, please.
Admit it. You’d love to see the Democratic former district attorney debate the helmet-kissing, multiply convicted, sex-offending, Republican presidential candidate currently out on bail in three jurisdictions. You enjoyed the faces Senate Judiciary Committee witnesses made when it came time for Sen. Kamala Harris to ask questions and their sphincters puckered.
So what does the Donald Trump campaign think about the prospect that their strategy against Joe Biden might get chucked if Harris is their new nemesis?
Well, Republicans still plan to cheat, of course, while accusing Democrats of doing what they’ve promised they themselves will do. They claim the switch is no big deal. They’ll just tar Vice President Harris with the same policies they planned to tar Joe Biden with, especially on immigration. She’s brown-skinned like many immigrants they target, so it’s a bonus for them.
On the other hand (Intelligencer):
Republicans are bracing for the fact that Harris will be a more effective campaigner than Biden and certainly a better debater. And they think that should Harris ultimately become the nominee, she will be awash in positive media coverage from outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, which Republicans believe have been on a crusade to replace Biden. The positive media coverage will likely result in a modest polling bump for Harris — but Republicans believe it will only be a temporary one.
But Trump’s proclivity for spouting racially coded and misogynist comments “would come out should Harris become the nominee, further turning off college-educated voters and women.”
Thus, Republican pollster Frank Luntz is less than cocky:
“It would change the race significantly because it brings race directly into the picture and it brings gender directly into the picture,” said GOP pollster Frank Luntz. “If Trump goes back to the Trump we’ve known, then all bets are off.”
“I think the Republicans should be a little more careful about what they wish for,” he added. “It reminds me of the dog that catches the car. It doesn’t work out very well for the dog.”
[…]
If the Democratic Party were to execute a switch just months prior to the election, it would represent yet another unprecedented event in a campaign that has been full of them. Many Republicans said that in a year in which nothing has gone according to plan, it would be hard to predict how the latest twist in this race would go.
Oh, they still plan to use every lever at their disposal (including frivolous lawsuits aimed at reaching the U.S. Supreme Court) to monkey-wrench the election. But if Trump finds himself facing Kamala Harris instead of Joe Biden this fall, there will be no pucker. He’s all hole.
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Vaporware for President, revisited
Let’s review. Yes, more denizens of Capitol Hill are calling for Joe Biden to withdraw as the Democrats’ nominee for president, including last night Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Yes, there are a lot of unanswered questions as to how that would work. They’re playing a lot of fantasy football right now inside the Beltway and too few of them are adults. Too many are unnamed sources close to … someone who heard something from someone.
Politico reports that several of those someones dished on a California meeting where several members of the Democratic delegation “talked about the potential political downsides of party elites quickly crowning the vice president as the next nominee.” Harris has to earn it, they mean. What “crowning” means is unclear since delegates still must vote.
What’s preferred, especially by a teething press and the “Open Convention Wrestlemania crowd,” is a free-for-all, may the best man or woman win process. Great TV. Drama. Pathos. Thrill of victory and agony of defeat stuff. In this scenario, delegates committed to Joe Biden, if released, should be able to vote their consciences. If they all pivot to a Biden-endorsed Harris, no one’s fee-fees will be hurt, see? Clean. Neat.
Or the present chaos could compound (Politico):
“Should he make that decision, there will have to be quick steps. I don’t think we can do a coronation, but obviously the vice president would be the leading candidate,” [Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.)] said, floating a “mini primary” with events that she said could be hosted by former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
The idea of a so-called “blitz primary” has become a popular idea among many House Democrats, including in the California delegation. It had initially been floated by people close to the Obama administration, according to one person familiar with the internal discussions. But others in the party have dismissed it as farcical with so little time until the convention.
Farcical indeed.
Back in February, FIVE MONTHS AGO, former Senate staffer Lawrence O’Donnell ran down just how farcical. Please review:
Yet, this process has become a farce anyway, a potentially deadly one for the country.
In February, Politico thought it important to game out a “Plan B” for Democrats: “Because of procedural and political hurdles, it would not be easy to simply swap [Biden] out. The likeliest outcome is that Biden stays on the ticket.” Then, as O’Donnell noted, they spent another 1,300 words considering those unlikely outcomes that are still unlikely for all the same procedural and political reasons. Because that’s what a horse-race press does.
O’Donnell asked a version of what I asked, what AOC asked: What’s the game plan? People working to push Biden out don’t seem to have one. But they may succeed in elbowing him out nevertheless.
Here’s what’s real. The 2024 election isn’t Biden vs. Trump. It’s Democrats’ turnout operation vs. the GOP’s. Some Democratic politicians claim they’re not getting volunteers with Biden atop the ticket. IF TRUE, a Harris ticket might close that enthusiasm gap. Let’s hope. (That’s where you come in.) But if the anti-Bidens have a post-Biden plan, we’re not hearing anything beyond fantasy football.
Tell me when it’s over.
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Panda-monium
The public is getting its first video look at the San Diego Zoo’s new pair of pandas, just ahead of their first chance to see the pandas in person.
Zoo officials on Friday released a video of the pandas, Yun Chuan and Xin Bao, playing in Panda Ridge, their home at the San Diego Zoo.
Officials also announced that the pandas, who arrived to the zoo from China in June, will make their public debut on Thursday, Aug. 8.
“We are delighted to introduce Yun Chuan and Xin Bao to our San Diego Zoo community,” Paul Baribault, president and CEO of San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, said in a statement. “Our newest residents will bring joy to our visitors and symbolize the enduring spirt of international conservation efforts.”
The pandas are the first to enter the United States in over two decades, according to the San Diego Zoo.
Here are some gratuitous panda videos just for fun:
Dan Pfeiffer has some thoughts about how they plan to attack Harris if she does become the nominee:
Despite their hatred of the “Crooked Media” (and Crooked Media), the Republicans follow the news. They know what is happening on our side. They built their entire campaign around beating Joe Biden — using concerns about his age as a proxy to frame the race as strong vs. weak. Thanks to Biden’s debate performance, that strategy worked well. As we stand today, Trump is a heavy favorite to return to the White House. The campaign wasn’t set up to beat Kamala Harris or someone else, so Trump supporters are begging Biden to stay in the race. As the convention continues, more and more Republicans are trying to shoehorn Kamala Harris into their speeches.
Here’s JD Vance on Wednesday night:
We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike. A leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations, but will stand up for American companies and American industry. A leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Green New Scam and fights to bring back our great American factories.
Other speakers previewed what I expect to be the top two attacks if Harris becomes the nominee. One, she was in charge of the border and therefore responsible for the chaos that is so prominent in Republican rhetoric. Not to get into technicalities, but she was not specifically responsible for border security; she was in charge of working with countries in the region to stem the flow of migrants. The second attack is classic MAGA conspiracy-mongering — Harris was part of an effort to cover up Biden’s mental infirmities. The former may have some purchase with swing voters; the latter is mostly red meat for the MAGA base, although it could lead to some uncomfortable media encounters.
“Uncomfortable media encounters” is a gentle way of putting it. The media is loaded for bear on that. It’s not just red meat for the base.
And, needless to say, the right will hit hard with misogyny and racism but I think there’s a good chance that they will overplay that hand. The stuff that’s already percolated up from the fever swamps is so ugly it’s likely to backfire in my opinion.
The upside is that Harris is such a contrast to Trump that she makes it easy to differentiate the two candidacies in ways that the battle between the two graybeards doesn’t do. At this point I think that might be helpful and could balance out the downside.
Whatever happens it needs to happen soon. This story is so dominant that it’s drowning out the Trump freakshow and that’s helping him.
The week has been more of a coronation than a convention. Trump and the Republicans are brimming with confidence about his prospects of returning to the White House. A sense of inevitability loomed over the convention and permeated the media coverage, magnified by the near-miss assassination attempt on the former President. His party and even some in the media are treating Trump as a candidate of destiny. But Trump is not inevitable. He is vulnerable.
Yes, he is ahead in the polls today, but he can be beaten. Look at that guy on stage last night. The speech wasn’t good. It didn’t offer a compelling vision for the country. It was low energy, bordering on somnambulant. Trump couldn’t discuss his policy agenda because that would stick a thumb in the eye of most voters. There was no message. Trump lost his fastball.
It’s easy to forget, given the tone and tenor of the press coverage over the last week, but the majority of voters in this country are anti-MAGA. Trump can — and will — be defeated if and only if we do the work to once again turn out the coalition that defeated MAGA in 2017, 2018, 2020, and 2022.
Yeah…
I confess, I did enjoy that.
My impression from the convention is that Republicans, from Trump on down, are absolutely certain he’s going to win.
[…]
What I saw at this convention wasn’t confidence. It was overconfidence. It was complacency. I saw a party and a candidate who expect a coronation, not a campaign. Who believe that the general election will play out exactly as the primaries did.
What I saw was a tired, meandering old man playing the hits. Still trotting out Lee Greenwood and Franklin Graham.
He says this is an opportunity. He’s sure that Biden will step aside and that “Donald Trump will not run against a zombie campaign the rest of the way. He will be challenged by someone young, scrappy, and hungry.”
I don’t know about that. It seems likely today but who knows? This drama seems to be continuing and the media can speak of nothing else. Last says, ” the Trump we saw last night can be beaten. And the fact that Republicans don’t realize this only adds to his vulnerability.”
I think that’s right. If the Democrats can get it together.
Last gives credit to Trump for not turning the convention into a call for retribution. But is that really true? They were all chanting “fight, fight fight” and wearing pictures of him raising his fist with blood all over his face. He wore that bandage like a purple heart. The convention did seem very low energy all in all but it was probably because the shooter was a registered Republican and yet another young gun nut with an AR-15. In other words, one of them.
But he is worried anyway:
That said, I am concerned about how Republicans will react if Trump loses.
Because that crowd seemed to find the idea of a Trump defeat utterly incomprehensible.
I don’t mean that these guys think Trump is an overwhelming favorite.
I mean that there did not seem to be any recognition that defeat was possible.
You know how, in football, a team that’s favored by three touchdowns will still say, “Sure, but on any given Sunday. That’s why we play the games. Yadda yadda yadda.”
There was none of that. Zero.
I am concerned that this iteration of the Republican party lacks the ability to countenance a loss.
I fear for what a Trump administration would do if he wins. But I also fear for what this Republican party will do if he loses. Because they have moved past electoral politics and into the realm of messianic prophecy.
Yep. They do not think it’s possible to lose. And as I wrote this morning, the ruthless operatives in the GOP are laying the groundwork to exploit that. If Trump wins it will be a nightmare. If he loses it will also be a nightmare. Better the first than the second but either way Trump and MAGA present a clear and present danger.
Prematurely spiking the ball plays right into that plan. And frankly, the Democrats are helping them do it by acting like a bunch of sad sacks telling the media they can’t win. You can already hear them say: “There’s no way that guy could have won! Everybody said he was losing!”
I wish there were more reporters willing to speak this way.
I had some hope last night while watching that dumpster fire of a convention speech by Donald Trump that the media was going to finally take a look at his cognitive abilities and give them the same obsessive focus as they have done with Joe Biden. In social media many of them were aghast at what they saw and weren’t being shy about saying it.l
So imagine my surprise when I wake up this morning and find that the papers never changed their “unite headlines” in the face of his incoherent, divisive freak show of a speech and the news networks are back to the Biden deathwatch without even a moment’s pause. It’s just hopeless.
Joe Alsop at Columbia Journalism review has some thoughts:
Last weekend, Salena Zito became the first journalist to interview Donald Trump after a gunman tried to assassinate him at a rally in Pennsylvania, a conversation published in the Washington Examiner under the headline: “Trump rewrites Republican convention speech to focus on unity not Biden.” Trump told Zito that he had been preparing a “humdinger” of a speech, but that he’d ripped it up. “It is a chance to bring the country together,” he said. “I was given that chance.” As the Republican National Convention proceeded in Milwaukee, Trump’s team continued to push the unity theme and members of the media echoed it, with varying degrees of skepticism. In a piece quoting allies as saying that Trump had become “serene” and “emotional” in the wake of the shooting, Politico noted that, while he had since posted some unstatesmanlike things online, he had also “leaned into the notion of faith and divine providence, lending credence to allies’ private claims that he is engaging in deep reflection.” Last night, before Trump took the stage for his speech, Scott Jennings, a right-wing pundit on CNN, said that he’d already seen a chunk of it. “Buckle up,” Jennings advised, “because he’s about to blow the doors off and rise to the occasion.”
Finally, Trump appeared, framed by a giant sign spelling his name out in lights. (When the New York Post splashed the headline “Everything’s coming up TRUMP” on Tuesday, it surely didn’t imagine that the reference to Gypsy would soon be quite so visual.) As he spoke, he only mentioned Biden’s name once. (Well, technically twice, but the second time was to underline that he would only be saying it once.) “Typically Fiery Trump Calls for Unity at Republican Convention,” one headline read in the aftermath; “Trump urges unity at final night of the RNC,” read another. A news analysis in the New York Times noted that Trump had “attempted a politically cunning transformation.” Sure, he had proved unable to resist “a handful of exaggerations and personal attacks on Democrats”—claiming that Democrats cheated in 2020; calling Nancy Pelosi “crazy”; repeatedly referring to an “invasion” of immigrants and comparing them to “Hannibal Lecter.” But “open threats and nakedly vicious imagery were largely absent from his address,” as he exhibited both a “newfound temperance” resulting from his near-death experience and a “new approach” that “poses fresh challenges for Democrats.”
Even that article, though, seemed to be arguing with itself. (Headline: “Trump Struggles to Turn the Page on ‘American Carnage’”; subheading: “Trump promised to bridge political divides, and then returned to delighting in deepening them.”) And other major outlets seemed unconvinced by the whole unity thing. The Washington Post reported that Trump “wrapped a fresh gesture toward unity around his usual dark view of American decline and loathing for political opponents and immigrants”; other headlines read “Trump Calls for Unity but Shifts to Familiar Attacks,” and “Donald Trump called for unity at the top of his speech. Then he went after Democrats.” When Trump finally stopped talking—after an hour and thirty-two minutes—CNN’s Jake Tapper said that he had “started off with what we were told was the new tone of unity,” but then, “and I hope this doesn’t sound harsh, it pretty much became the kind of speech we generally hear from Donald Trump at rallies.” Chris Wallace added that he’d thought “we’re off to the races here, this is really gonna be a different Donald Trump,” only to come away disappointed. In between, they paused to take in what Trump claimed was “the biggest balloon drop in the history of balloons.”
[…]
The conversation put me in mind of an old cliché from the 2016 election—one coined by Zito, who also interviewed Trump back then and famously concluded that, while his fans take him “seriously, but not literally,” the press “takes him literally, but not seriously.” Coverage of Trump has evolved since then, of course, but as I see it, the literally/seriously balance remains something of a puzzle. His speech last night is a case in point. We now have a Trump record to assess—one that indicates that, when he talks about supposed Democratic election cheating and “invasions” of immigrants, he is being very serious, even if talk of Hannibal Lecter might not be literal. His promises of unity, on the other hand, were literal but didn’t deserve to be taken seriously at all; at least, not in the absence of evidence. Earlier in the week, Sargent suggested that “if media figures are so eager to depict Trump as unifying, then let’s lay down a hard metric”—that, before indulging such claims, Trump must clear “the absolute minimum threshold” of renouncing his election denialism and “authoritarian designs” for a second term. This is a welcome idea. In the absence of his doing so, the designs must remain the biggest story.
He’s actually being more generous that I think is necessary. Trump was a train wreck last night with his flamboyant bandage on his head, kissing the helmet of the dead fireman, going on and on about the shooting trying to portray himself as some sort of hero but really sounding like an old man talking about his gall bladder surgery. The rest was a low energy rally speech and as embarrassing as they all are only this time it was in front of the whole country. Most people were appalled. But the news media is assiduously sweeping it under the rug and back on the Biden candidacy deathwatch this morning.
I’m very worried. The Democrats aren’t just up against MAGA and the right wing media in this election. Even if Biden does drop out, as seems more and more likely, the media appears to be completely unable to properly cover Donald Trump. As Alsop points out elsewhere in his piece, they were working at getting Project 2025 out into the ether and now it’s disappeared again in the wake of the shooting, the convention and the Biden story. Whenever there’s choice, the tough coverage of Trump drops by the wayside for the next shiny object which is often generated by Trump himself. (This idea that he’s a changed man because of the assassination attempt is a perfect example. Please.)
If the Dems ever get their act together the story line might change in a more positive direction but until then we’re stuck in this feedback loop.
They’re going to stop certification of the votes
I said a couple of weeks ago that if President Biden decided to withdraw from the race it would awesome if he would do it on the night Donald Trump accepted the GOP nomination. That didn’t come to pass last night but the news media did spend the whole day speculating that it was about to happen which no doubt irritated Trump almost as much since he always wants to be the center of attention even when his opponents are doing his job for him.
It’s obviously helpful to him that the Democrats fighting each other over the fate of their candidate just three months from the election but the drama around Biden potentially withdrawing from the race has stepped on Trump’s martyr story line even as he’s ostentatiously sporting a bizarrely large bandage on his right ear and cynically playing the sympathy card. But he made up for it with a smarmy opening to his acceptance speech in which he gave a mournful minute by minute recitation of the assassination attempt. At one point he indulged in some truly embarrassing schmaltz by kissing the helmet of the fireman who was killed at that rally on Saturday which just seemed …. weird. One suspects that he’s been talking about this non-stop ever since it happened and is obviously still very much obsessed by the event.
That part of the speech was reportedly written by Trump himself and I think that’s obviously true. He’s been dying to share the dramatic story of his allegedly brave reaction to the terrifying experience and this was his chance to take as long as he wanted to do it. (Brushing it off and saying “”honey I forgot to duck” as Reagan did isn’t exactly his style).
Unfortunately, he also had to talk about other stuff. It was a major political event after all. And despite the billing of the speech as a call for unity, the rest of it was a flat rendition of his usual rally speech although he did curtail the profanity, eschewed the crude impressions of his political opponents and managed not to insult too many Republicans seeing as it was the RNC and all.
If social media is any indication, the speech seemed to shock many observers who have forgotten that Trump lies constantly and is incoherent and ignorant even when he’s at his best. And he was definitely not at his best. Despite the long winded delivery of all his greatest hits going back to 2016, he’s definitely lost a step.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes astutely described what we all saw last night:
“This is not a colossus, this is not the big bad wolf, this is not a vigorous and incredibly deft political communicator. This is an old man in decline who’s been doing the same schtick for a very long time and it’s really wearing thin.”
The substance, to the extent there was any, was delusional and frightening. From bragging that when he was president he “could end wars with a phone call” to the endless lies about his accomplishments while in office, he assiduously avoided speaking specifically about 95% of his agenda as laid out in Project 2025 and his own Agenda 47. But he did say one thing that caught my attention and should catch the attention of every American. After admonishing Joe Biden for saying he’s a threat to democracy earlier in the speech, he said in passing “we had that horrible, horrible result that we’ll never let happen again, the election result, we’re never gonna let that happen again.”
One might think that was just another example of Trump’s cognitive decline. But that was actually a very straightforward comment and one that is backed up by ample evidence. The Republicans who are backing Trump (virtually all of them) have a fully developed plan to ensure that if the Democrats win in November, they will contest the results regardless of any evidence of fraud. When Trump says “we’re never going to let that happen again” he means we’re never going to let the Democrats win again.
And he’s not talking about getting out the vote. Trump has been quoted repeatedly telling his troops:
[W]e don’t need votes. We got more votes than anybody’s ever had. We need to watch the vote. We need to guard the vote. We need to stop the steal. We don’t need votes. We have to stop — focus, don’t worry about votes. We’ve got all the votes. I was in Florida yesterday — every house has a Trump sign. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. We have to guard the vote.
The NY Times took a long look at the Republican plan and it’s not good news.
Mr. Trump’s allies have followed a two-pronged approach: restricting voting for partisan advantage ahead of Election Day and short-circuiting the process of ratifying the winner afterward, if Mr. Trump loses. The latter strategy involves an ambitious — and legally dubious — attempt to reimagine decades of settled law dictating how results are officially certified in the weeks before the transfer of power.
At the heart of the strategy is a drive to convince voters that the election is about to be stolen, even without evidence.
The article quotes numerous GOP officials saying that fair elections are impossible under the current laws so they have set out challenge and change them in the swing states that are decisive in our bizarre electoral college system. Most concerning is their plan to give local elections officials the power to hold up certification of the vote.
Certification was never a matter of contention before 2020 having always been seen as a largely ceremonial non-partisan part of the process. But the Republicans and their allies have decided this is a useful tactic to disqualify results that don’t go their way. In some states, like Georgia, they’ve even empowered right wing activists who are now members of the election boards to “investigate” voters to determine if the votes are legal. In Nevada a similar law has already caused chaos in primary elections which are still in limbo due to board members contesting the reseults. These cases are wending their way into the courts, delaying the certifications.
At the RNC this week, Chris LaCivita, Trump’s campaign manager, made it clear that they don’t plan to accept any loss or concede the race even after the votes are counted:
Donald Trump Jr says it more plainly even than that:
This is the assault on democracy that the Biden campaign is talking about. It’s not just rhetorical. They are literally assaulting the democratic process by changing laws at the local and state level that will make it possible for them to contest the certification of the election results all the way up until January 6th and, apparently, beyond.
Trump is beatable as demonstrated by that bizarre performance at the RNC. He is not a well man. It’s clear that he and his team know this which is why they are pulling out all the stops to contest the results of an election that hasn’t even happened yet. These are not the actions of a confident campaign. But keep in mind that this now goes way beyond Trump and his massive ego. He’s shown the Republicans the weaknesses in the system and they’re going to exploit them. As he said “we’re never going to let that happen again.” This problem will exist long after 2024 whether Trump ultimately gets back into the White House or not.
Salon