Tuesday, July 16, 2024

Kamala Pete 2024





27 Facts About J.D. Vance, Trump’s Pick for V.P. Mr. Vance spilled scores of details about his life in his coming-of-age memoir. We’ve collected the highlights.

Can Democrats Replace Biden? Here’s What to Know. While it is possible, it would most likely lead to political upheaval in the party unless the president decides to step aside on his own terms. ........ Mr. Biden has the power to leave the race and release all the pledged delegates he has accumulated — 3,894 of 3,937 committed so far, according to a tally by The Associated Press — during his march to the nomination. If he were to do so, those delegates would be free to vote for whomever they chose. That would lead to an open convention, a rarity in modern American politics.

If Trump Wins .... and unilaterally deploying troops to Democratic-run cities.



An Attempt to Kill an Ex-President, Caught in Real Time, Stuns the Country The shooting targeting Donald J. Trump was the first of its kind in the era of social media, and was followed by a flood of striking images, rich eyewitness accounts and furious, fearful reaction. ........ A picture of Mr. Trump, fist aloft, American flag fluttering overhead, became iconic in an instant. ............ Not long after, far bigger names on the right, including Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, a finalist to be Mr. Trump’s running mate, had settled on the argument that Democrats had set the stage for an attempted assassination by framing the 2024 election as a battle between the forces of democracy and the soldiers of fascism. Of course someone was going to take a shot, these conservatives said. .......... Before anyone knew a thing about the man who had pulled the trigger, Mr. Trump’s most senior surrogates, including Mr. Vance and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, were blaming President Biden and Democrats. ......... “Today is not just some isolated incident,” Mr. Vance wrote on the social media site X, owned by the right’s favorite billionaire, Elon Musk. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” ............. The BBC’s interview of a man who was on hand for the rally was stunning: He recounted how he had seen a man with a rifle crawling on a nearby rooftop and, for several minutes, tried to warn the police. Still photographs appeared to show the body of the gunman on the roof after he was killed. .......... An AR-15-type rifle was found near the man believed to be the shooter, which could have fueled more Democratic calls for an assault weapons ban, but the party’s leaders held their tongues. ........ But in the internet era there is always someone who doesn’t. .......... Ms. Lamar wrote, then deleted, “the extremism from the MAGA regime has brought us to this moment,” but not before conservatives had grabbed screen shots and sent them flying around the internet. ......... An obscure aide to Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, became a casus belli for some on the right for suggesting, “please get you some shooting lessons,” even as actual members of Congress were lobbing their own fire bombs from the right. ............. “The Republican District Attorney in Butler County, PA, should immediately file charges against Joseph R. Biden for inciting an assassination,” wrote Representative Mike Collins, Republican of Georgia. ............ A fellow Georgian, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, suggested, “Democrats wanted this to happen.” ............. Arch conspiracy theories came from heroes of the far right, like the activist James O’Keefe, who suggested that the Secret Service was somehow in on it through the “Deep State Intel Community.” ............ Among younger social media users, an image of Mr. Trump’s face photoshopped into a famous portrait of Vincent van Gogh with a bandaged, partly amputated ear was widely shared, often with an ironic “too soon?” attached. .................. In some quadrants of the political right, the mood was almost celebratory, as supporters shared images of a bleeding Mr. Trump, fist aloft. ............... Within minutes after the news of the shooting broke, Mr. Musk took the moment to officially endorse Mr. Trump to his 189 million followers on X, something he had only flirted with previously. He then spent the evening amplifying pro-Trump sentiments and castigating a liberal tech billionaire, Reid Hoffman, for once saying he wished he had made Mr. Trump “an actual martyr.” ............... Even Jeff Bezos, who has shied from politics, weighed in, declaring on social media that “our former President showed tremendous grace and courage under literal fire.” ......... Mr. Musk could uncork his fortune, measured at $265 billion by Bloomberg, on Mr. Trump’s behalf.

Elon Musk Endorses Trump, Moments After Shooting at His Rally Mr. Musk also suggested, without evidence, that the Secret Service may have been “deliberate” in allowing the attack.



Democrats Need to Wake Up From Their ‘West Wing’ Fantasy The show, which ran from 1999 to 2006, portrays politics and policy not as ruthless powermongering pursued by nihilists (that’s “House of Cards”) but as a higher calling that flawed but idealistic people engage in from a place of civic pride........... Jed Bartlet, the fictional Democratic president, is often reaching across the aisle to a wrongheaded but often well-meaning Republican. It’s an attractive fantasy that bears little relation to the world we live in, where partisan animosity is about more than policy disagreements and is rarely resolved via civil debate. ........... Most voters will go to the polls in November not to vote for their guy but to vote against the other guy, a phenomenon known as negative partisanship. Voters say they want Americans to be unified, but Republicans mean they want everyone to be a Republican, and Democrats want everyone to be a Democrat. ......... And partisan obstructionism in Congress has deadlocked policymaking in ways that appear to be getting worse. Working across the aisle isn’t easy when your colleagues are telling their constituents that you’re demonic and they are pushing conspiracy theories about child sex trafficking in pizza parlors. Bipartisan cooperation requires a shared idea of reality that exists in “The West Wing” but not in the real world................ Mr. Biden offers mostly dry policyspeak. On reproductive rights, the president defaults to talk of rights and reason, while Donald Trump makes utterly false but compellingly graphic statements like, “They will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month and even after birth.” ........... The Democrats talk about facts and analyses. The Republicans talk about a holy war in which civilization hangs in the balance. ........... For many, it’s hard to reconcile the idea of an intrinsically good America with, for example, civilian deaths in Gaza enabled by American money and American bombs. ........ Instead of watching “The West Wing,” Democrats should have been taking to heart the lessons of “Veep,” Armando Iannucci’s very different White House series, in which everything dumb and disastrous that can happen does happen. A dark and devastating comedy, it depicts Washington as staffed by petty, venal people who are too busy tripping over themselves to successfully advance their own interests. ............ somewhere in a dusty box in a closet in the Pentagon, there’s a plan for what the United States will do if we’re invaded by Canada. This plan exists not because we think such a thing will really happen but because we have intelligence professionals who are paid and trained to think about how every possible thing could go wrong. ............ This is not an election with a wrongheaded but well-meaning Republican. It’s an all-out war with an illiberal megalomaniac who will happily destroy American democracy if it buys him one more ounce of power and keeps him out of prison.

Biden’s Path to Re-election Has All But Vanished Mr. Trump is now the clear front-runner to be the next president of the United States. .......... I’ve never seen such a grim Electoral College landscape for Mr. Biden: He not only faces losing battleground states he won in 2020, he is also at risk of losing traditional Democratic states like Minnesota and New Hampshire, which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama carried. If current trends continue, Mr. Trump could rack up one of the most decisive presidential victories since 2008. .......... Mr. Biden’s problems run much deeper than one bad debate. By spring, he had the lowest job approval average of any recent president seeking re-election since George H.W. Bush in 1992. His support has dropped by nearly a net 10 points since the 2022 midterm elections. .......... What made Mr. Biden’s poor debate performance so devastating was that it reinforced voters’ strongest negative idea about his candidacy: that he is simply too old to run for re-election. In a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted after the debate, 74 percent of respondents said Mr. Biden was too old to govern another term in office. ............. As 2024 began, the presidential campaign looked to be a repeat of the 2020 and 2016 elections, with the same battleground states determining the outcome. Not anymore. ......... Since his victory in 2020, Mr. Biden has suffered a significant decline in voter support across the board. Any state that he won by 10 percentage points or less in 2020 should now be considered up for grabs. In a sign of how much Mr. Biden’s political position has deteriorated, the map of states where he is clearly favored has contracted, for a total of only 191 electoral votes. ........... he has not dealt with voters’ fundamental concerns that he does not have the physical and mental capacity to take on Mr. Trump, or to serve another full term as president. ........... In the upcoming weeks, if Mr. Biden is unable to excel at the basic activities of running for office — a robust schedule of spontaneous campaign events, regular television interviews and periodic news conferences — calls for his removal from the Democratic ticket will intensify.

James Carville: Biden Won’t Win. Democrats Need a Plan. Here’s One. Mark my words: Joe Biden is going to be out of the 2024 presidential race. Whether he is ready to admit it or not. ........ But it can’t be by anointing Vice President Kamala Harris or anyone else as the presumptive Democratic nominee. We’ve got to do it out in the open — the exact opposite of what Donald Trump wants us to do. .......... For the first time in his life, Mr. Trump is praying. ........... To win the White House and increase his chances of avoiding an orange jumpsuit, he needs Democrats to make the wrong moves in the coming days — namely, to appear to rig the nomination for a fading president or the sitting vice president or some other heir apparent. ........... We’re going to nominate a new ticket in a highly democratic and novel way, not in the backrooms of Washington, D.C., or Chicago. ............. I want to see the Democratic Party hold four historic town halls between now and the Democratic National Convention in August — one each in the South, the Northeast, the Midwest and the West. We can recruit the two most obvious and qualified people in the world to facilitate substantive discussions: Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. ............. You want the prosecutor, or you want the criminal? .......... And our opponent? The one born with a platinum spoon but no moral compass? The pathological liar? The felon? The predator found liable for sexual abuse? The wannabe dictator? The Putin lickspittle? ............ It’s been an agonizing time for those of us who think President Biden more than earned a second term but isn’t going to win one. But now we’ve got to move on. ............ A superdemocratic process — the opposite of what Mr. Trump and his MAGA minions would do — is how we’re going to honor that wisdom in our own “Will democracy prevail?” moment.

Jim Clyburn Is Right About What Democrats Should Do Next President Biden faces a problem with no solution. No interview or speech will convince a doubtful public that he is still fit to serve. Perceptions of him had years to harden. In June 2020, 36 percent of voters said Biden was too old to serve. By 2024, that number had roughly doubled. In the Times/Siena poll conducted in February, 73 percent said he was “too old to be an effective president.” In the April poll, 69 percent said the same. In the June poll, 70 percent. After the debate, 74 percent. ............ Representative Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina elder statesman who saved Biden’s campaign in 2020 and is one of its co-chairs in 2024. In an interview on CNN, Clyburn said on Wednesday that if Biden leaves the race, the party should hold “a mini-primary.” .......... I think that Kamala Harris would acquit herself very well in that kind of a process, but then it would be fair to everybody.” ........... The cliché used to be that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. In recent years, Republicans have fallen apart and Democrats have fallen in line. ............ Some information cannot be surfaced without a bit of chaos and conflict. We have all had seasons in our lives in which we lost control, only to discover new strengths and possibilities. As it is for people, so it is for parties. .......... A coronation would also deny Democrats the reward of a contest: constant media coverage from here until their convention. Imagine Trump’s fury if he spent the next few months barely able to break into a news cycle. .............. And if multiple candidates were seeking our nomination, you would have wall-to-wall, weeklong, prime-time coverage of all of our best rising stars, delivering the party message that, frankly, Joe Biden couldn’t against Donald Trump.” .......... Take the seven states that will almost certainly decide this election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Democrats control the governor’s mansion in five of them. Democrats won 11 of the 14 Senate seats across them. .......... — Pete Buttigieg, for instance, never looks better than when he is on Fox News.

Something Big Just Happened in Kenya Most of the demonstrators were part of the country’s young majority, spreading information about where and when to show up on TikTok, Instagram and WhatsApp. No central political figure or unifying political party stood behind the crowds, and no common ideology united them beyond anger at the government’s plan to increase taxes while social services collapsed, public university fees soared and an unemployment crisis deepened. Even as the street action has faded, more Kenyans are now openly following graft cases on social media, circulating excerpts from the constitution and calling and texting legislators. ............ This marks a seismic shift in a nation where young people have been accused of political apathy. During general elections in 2022, most young Kenyans didn’t even register to vote. Now, for the first time since the country adopted a new constitution in 2010, the country’s youth are a critical part of a movement in which people are risking their lives to fight for the democratic gains they have been promised. It is clear Mr. Ruto senses his tenure is in danger; on Thursday he sacked all but one of his cabinet secretaries, bowing to public pressure.

Democrats Fear Safe Blue States Turning Purple as Biden Stays the Course Lingering worries about President Biden’s age could make Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia competitive, party operatives believe. .......... Down-ballot Democrats, local elected officials and party strategists say Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia — all of which Mr. Biden won comfortably in 2020 — could be in play in November after his miserable debate performance last month. ......... Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico told Mr. Biden that she feared he would lose her state ............ Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, a Democrat, said that his state was “in play” this year ....... the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee said they planned to open eight offices in Minnesota and 11 in Virginia. ......... With typical braggadocio, Mr. Trump has promised to compete even in New Jersey, a firmly Democratic state. ......... In New Mexico, Democrats control the entire congressional delegation, the governor’s mansion and the State Legislature. .......... Some party leaders have begun to worry that Mr. Biden could soon find himself playing defense even in a Democratic bastion like New York, where no Republican presidential candidate has won since Ronald Reagan. Mr. Biden carried the state by 23 points in 2020, and so far, the Trump campaign has taken no meaningful steps to contest it. But a reputable poll found Mr. Biden up by only single digits before the debate. ......... And a statewide survey in Oregon completed this week found that Mr. Biden had just a single-digit lead over Mr. Trump

‘This Is the Pick of a Very Confident Presidential Nominee’: Four Columnists Size Up J.D. Vance In 2016, on the eve of the election, Vance and I were guests on Fareed Zakaria’s CNN show. At the time, he was still a Never Trumper. .......... As Vance told Steve Bannon, “I got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.” ........ Presidential politics boils down to getting to 270 Electoral College votes, and Vance could help Trump in the industrial Midwestern states that are those must-win “blue wall” states for President Biden. ........... Trump had an opportunity to widen his base geographically by choosing someone like Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, given that Trump is running only a point behind Biden there in the polling average, or culturally by choosing someone like Marco Rubio, helping to make inroads for Republicans among Hispanic voters, or ideologically by reaching out to Nikki Haley, thereby appealing to more centrist-leaning voters who thought of her as the sort of Republican they could get behind. Instead, Trump went with the guy who’ll play well at his rallies and will never cross the boss. ............ At a moment when Trump seemed likely to lose, Vance texted a former roommate that Trump would either be “a cynical asshole like Nixon” or “America’s Hitler.” But Vance is an ambitious guy, and once Trump was in power, he had good reason to hop on the MAGA train. To justify doing so, he had to convince himself that he was fighting diabolical forces, and that because his enemies betrayed liberal democratic values, he needn’t be bound by them either. It’s an ideology of Caesarism disguising itself — as all authoritarian creeds do — as self-defense. ........... The thing that stood out to me about Ross’s conversation is that Trump has impulses, whereas Vance has an ideology. He’s done more work than just about any politician in America to create something coherent out of MAGA’s concerns and MAGA’s grievances. He doesn’t just want to possess power, he wants to wield it in quite specific ways. To the extent that MAGA has ideological legs after Trump leaves the scene, it will in large part be because of Vance. ......... In many ways, Vance is an avatar for countless Republicans who’ve significantly changed their assessments of Trump since 2016. Trump loves it when his previous critics bend the knee, and few people have bent the knee more deeply than Vance. He’s gone from being vitriolically Never Trump to perhaps his most enthusiastic supporter in the Senate. I’ve personally known a number of Republicans who’ve made the exact same transition. ........... Vance really is one of those Republicans who think that practically the only foreign policy we need as a country is a secure, militarized southern border — and perhaps a northern one, too. ............. he’s frequently couched his critiques of Biden administration policy in terms of limited U.S. resources and the need to prioritize other threats — meaning China’s threat to Taiwan above Russia’s threat to Ukraine. ........... He’s the vice-presidential pick for the base, for the people who want to see revolutionary disruption in the American government. This is the pick of a very confident presidential nominee. ........... Vance does nothing to help Trump: He is loved by MAGA but no one else. He’s as demagogic as Trump but entirely lacks his dark charisma. ........... and if Trump wins, I can’t imagine him certifying a Democratic victory in 2028. ........ After the assassination attempt against Trump, Vance has been trying to intimidate Democrats out of talking about the ex-president’s authoritarian tendencies, pretending that telling the truth about Trump constitutes incitement to violence. But with Vance on the ticket, Democrats are going to have to talk about how democracies devolve into systems of what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism. ............ He speaks for millions of Americans who feel forgotten, disdained, condescended to or despised by the proverbial coastal elites. ............ And he’s young: He turns 40 next month ......... Vance has a particularly bitter contempt for women without children; he’s railed against “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” It will be interesting to see if Harris can draw his misogyny out for all to see.

Why I’m Moving Home I’ve frequently found myself in places hit hard by manufacturing job losses ......... the conservative scholar Charles Murray calls “super ZIPs.” These super ZIPs are veritable bastions of opportunity and optimism, places where divorce and joblessness are rare. ........... As one of my college professors recently told me about higher education, “The sociological role we play is to suck talent out of small towns and redistribute it to big cities.” There have always been regional and class inequalities in our society, but the data tells us that we’re living through a unique period of segregation. ........... this geographic sorting has heightened the polarization that now animates politics. ......... I’ve heard ugly words uttered about “flyover country” and some of its inhabitants from well-educated, generally well-meaning people. ......... there were practical reasons to move: I’m founding an organization to combat Ohio’s opioid epidemic. We chose Columbus because I travel a lot, and I need to be centrally located in the state and close to an airport. And the truth is that not every motivation is rational: Part of me loves Ohio simply because it’s home. .......... what many communities need most is not just financial support, but talent and energy and committed citizens to build viable businesses and other civic institutions.

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