Friends and Fellow-Citizens: The period for a new election of a citizen to administer the executive government of the United States being not far distant, and the time actually arrived when your thoughts must be employed in designating the person who is to be clothed with that important trust, it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made.
- George Washington
The Farewell Address, 19 September, 1796
This week's featured post is "The Two Kinds of Unity".
This week everybody was talking about Joe Biden's decision
Yesterday, Joe Biden announced that he is ending his candidacy, but will continue as president to the end of his term. He endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place. He promises to make a formal address to the nation later this week. (He's been in Delaware recovering from Covid. I suspect he wants to be more recovered and back in the White House before he makes the address.)
I have a million reactions, but let's start with this: Can you imagine Donald Trump ever, under any circumstances, doing something that selfless? Despite the pressures brought to bear on him, if Biden had stood his ground, he would not have been denied the Democratic nomination. And despite all the recent pessimism, the fall election was still virtually a toss-up. Polling averages had Biden around 3% behind, which is not much at this stage, especially considering how late-deciding voters broke for the Democrats in 2022. So he is giving up a very real chance to continue as president for another four years.
But that scenario also includes a substantial risk of Trump being elected again, which would be a disaster for this country. So Biden is stepping aside. As historian Jon Meacham wrote in today's NYT:
By surrendering the possibility of enduring in the seat of ultimate power, Mr. Biden has taught us a landmark lesson in patriotism, humility and wisdom.
Trump could never do that. He showed on January 6 that he would risk pulling the whole country down around him in order to stay in power.
Then we come to Kamala Harris. Biden has endorsed her, and so have a few key Democrats like Rep. James Clyburn. More importantly, none of the frequently mentioned competitors has stepped up to challenge her.
The media is spinning all kinds of theories about the process for choosing a nominee, and salivating over the prospect of the first contested convention in many years. But I refuse to speculate until some major candidate other than Harris steps forward. For weeks we've been comparing Biden to Somebody Else, and that kind of conversation needs to stop. If you can't identify who Somebody Else is and point me to the place where they have announced their candidacy, I don't want to hear it.
The Democratic Convention starts in Chicago on August 19. A "virtual vote" was supposed to happen sometime in early August, because of an Ohio deadline that could have kept the Democratic nominee off that state's ballot. But Ohio has since changed its rules, so that's not necessary any more. That vote, though, has neither been scheduled nor called off, so we'll see what happens.
These are maddening times to watch the news networks, because we all want to know what's going to happen, but nobody can tell us. So the airwaves are full of speculation that is mostly baseless. I advise ignoring it: Tune in occasionally to see if there's any actual news, but turn the TV off as soon as the talking heads start speculating. You'll be happier and saner.
Also ignore the polls for at least a week. Harris-as-candidate will poll differently from Harris-as-possibility. Maybe better, maybe worse. (I notice myself feeling more excited about her than I thought I would.) Wait and see.
A few speculations are worthwhile: anticipating attacks on Harris, as Judd Legum and Kat Abu do. Abu's take is particularly interesting: She thinks the Right has wasted four years when it could have been assembling a supervillain image of Harris, a la Hillary Clinton. Instead, they've just painted her as ditzy, which definitely should make swing voters see her as the lesser-of-evils compared to Trump. They'll undoubtedly try to paint a new supervillain image of her, but it won't penetrate as well as it would have if it had been marinating for four years.
Dueling ads are already out: an attack ad against Harris blaming her for covering up Biden's shortcomings, and a pro-Harris ad billing her as "the anti-Trump". "She prosecuted sex predators. He is one."
Donald Trump and [Trump campaign adviser] Chris LaCivita are about to hit Kamala Harris with an avalanche of racist and sexist attacks and a ton of slut-shaming. Democrats across the board need to be saying now what we all know, which is that this will bring out the very worst of Trump. Racism and sexism are his brand. Charlottesville is his brand. You can’t just be on the receiving end of this stuff. Trump is about to show the kind of gutter white nationalist and racist pol he is. Force the press and all observers to see this totally predictable move through that prism. ... Of course Trump will go there, and these attacks and those attacks can be very damaging. But Trump the racist bully and gangster is what kills him in the suburbs. It’s what embarrasses people.
One thing Biden's decision does is put the too-old-to-be-president shoe on the other foot. Trump is 78, which means that in four years he'll be older than Biden is now. Unlike Biden, he's fat, out of shape, and eats a lot of junk food. Like Biden, his mental acuity is dubious. His proposed VP is 39 and has been a senator for a year and a half, during which he has accomplished essentially nothing. That VP, who very well could be president soon if Trump wins, has no other experience in public office.
I'm reposting a David Roberts quote from a few weeks ago:
So, say Biden stepped aside in favor of Harris tomorrow. How long until the vapid gossips we call political reporters find something wrong with her, some alleged flaw they just have to write 192 stories about? ... About 30 f'ing seconds, is my guess.
The NYT in particular is worth watching. It has been running a dedicated campaign to push Biden out since ... I don't know, around March at the very latest. Will they be happy now? Will they finally start covering Trump's inadequacies with the intensity they deserve? Or will they wait a week or so and then go after Harris just as hard as they went after Biden?
and the Republican Convention
The Republican Convention in Milwaukee just ended on Thursday, but it already seems like very old news. The featured post discusses Trump's record-long acceptance speech, which was billed as a call for national unity. The media has been describing it as two speeches at war with each other: a unity call followed by Trump's usual divisive rhetoric.
But I think they're missing something: What Trump means by "unity" is that his opponents give up and submit to his domination. Once you understand that, the two halves of the speech fit together perfectly: He will be a president "for all America" as soon as all Americans shut up and get in line behind him.
Oh, and the speech was full of lies, as CNN's fact-checker pointed out.
J. D. Vance's acceptance speech centered on the kind of false populism he specializes in:
We're done catering to Wall Street. We'll commit to the working man.
But Trump contradicted that sentiment at his first post-convention rally in Grand Rapids:
I love Elon Musk. ... We have to make life good for our smart people, and he's as smart as you get. But Elon endorsed me the other day. And I read ... [that] he gives me $45 million a month.
That's how it works in TrumpWorld. He'll be "committed to the working man" until that man's boss writes him a check.
The Convention's most vivid Party-of-Dumb moment came when Don Jr.'s girlfriend Kimberley Guilfoyle said:
It is no wonder that the heroes who stormed Normandy and faced down communism sadly say they don't recognize our country any more.
All over America, US History teachers were covering their faces and shaking their heads. The heroes who stormed Normandy were fighting Nazis. The Communists were our allies in that war.
Guilfoyle's historical rewrite got me wondering: Do Republicans even recognize any more that the Nazis were the bad guys? Present-day Nazis are MAGA now, so the idea that Americans could have been fighting them in World War II seems unthinkable. Near the end of Trump's speech, he recalled glorious past battles from our history: "Yorktown, Gettysburg, and Midway". Midway, a battle against the Japanese, not the Nazis. By itself, it's a trivial thing, but the pattern seems worrisome.
and the Trump shooting
When I wrote last week's blog, the shooting was still too new for there to be many reportable facts. There had been a shooting and Trump got hit, but he was OK. A few other people were wounded and one had died. The shooter, a 20-year-old White guy, was also dead. That was pretty much it.
Now we know a bit more: Trump was barely injured at all. His ear wound didn't even require stitches. The ear bandages his cultists wore at the convention reminded me of the purple-heart band-aids Republican conventioneers wore in 2004, to minimize John Kerry's war wounds. Then they were trying to make something serious look trivial; this time they wanted something trivial to look serious.
A lot of investigating has happened since last week, but nothing has come out that fits into a convenient narrative. The shooter was into guns, and had some vaguely conservative views, but wasn't particularly active politically. The lack of obvious hostility towards Trump
has left authorities puzzled about a motive for his assault and has had investigators speculating that his intentions may have been less politically motivated and more about attacking the highest-profile target near him. ... In addition to the former president, Crooks had searched online about President Joe Biden and had photos on his phone of other prominent figures from both parties. He searched for the location of Trump’s rally as well as the upcoming Democratic National Convention, the briefing notes say, and discovered that Trump planned to appear just an hour’s drive away from his home in the Pittsburgh suburbs. That suggests Crooks may have been looking to carry out a high-profile shooting, and the Trump event’s proximity and timing offered the most accessible opportunity, federal officials have speculated.
The New Yorker's Jay Caspian Kang suggests that the shooting may have no real political effect, for precisely that reason:
When an act of violence doesn’t lend itself to a clear argument or a tidy story, we often choose not to think about it.
and J. D. Vance
To my surprise, I discover I have a public record when it comes to J. D. Vance: In 2016 I reviewed Hillbilly Elegy for UU World magazine as part of a batch of white-working-class books.
Vance and I are both from what I like to call the "transitional class" -- people who grew up working class but got an education and are professional class now. (I became a mathematician while Vance became a lawyer.) Though we went different ways both politically and religiously, I thought Vance's book was a credible account of how a transitional class person might become a social and religious conservative:
Realizing how close he came to having no one who cared about him, he values traditional notions of duty—holding a marriage together, taking responsibility for children—over individual fulfillment. His feelings about government come not from the military or the state university that helped him, but from the foster care system that he feared would take him from his grandmother and give him to strangers. When as a teenager he reconnected with his father, he found a man who had converted to conservative Christianity and established a new family blessedly free from drinking, daily screaming arguments, and violence. Vance’s adult religion, though conservative, seems to be less about theology or salvation than about the hope of establishing such islands of peace and sanity in an unstable world.
As for who Vance has become since, I turn to two men of his generation also from the center of the country: Pete Buttigieg and Trae Crowder. "I knew a lot of guys like J. D. Vance," Pete says in his trademark blunt-but-not-nasty style.
When I got to Harvard I found a lot of people like him, who would say whatever they needed to to get ahead. And five years ago that seemed like being the anti-Trump Republican, so that's what he was. ... Five years later, the way he gets ahead is that [Trump]'s the greatest guy since sliced bread.
Pete compares Vance to Mike Pence, who similarly started out with one set of principles -- Evangelical Christian moral rectitude -- and then spent down his credibility making excuses for Trump's immoral behavior. Pete notes how that ended "with Trump supporters proposing that he be hanged for using the one shred of integrity he still had to stand up to an attempt to overthrow the government". Pete expresses his hope that things work out better for Vance "maybe not as a politician, but as a human being".
As for why Silicon Valley billionaires support J. D. Vance (Peter Thiel is Vance's biggest political donor) and Trump (Elon Musk is giving millions to Trump's SuperPAC) in spite of otherwise being pro-science, anti-climate-change, pro-gay-rights, and libertarian rather than authoritarian, Pete says:
We've made it way too complicated. It's actually super-simple. These are very rich men who have decided to back the Republican Party that tends to do good things for very rich men.
Trae Crowder, the "liberal redneck", is even less generous, seeing Vance as someone who has sold out the people they both claim to represent. His rant is entertaining, and more fun to watch than to read.
and you also might be interested in ...
A half-written article that keeps slipping from week to week as more urgent news erupts is "The Mythical Trump Economy", about nostalgia for pre-Covid America, which fundamentally has nothing to do with Trump or his policies. In the meantime, look at the WaPo's "Trump's Economy vs. Biden's in 17 Charts".
I also still haven't found time to read Judge Cannon's dismissal of the stolen-documents charges against Trump, the most obviously open-and-shut case against him. Here's the analysis on Law Dork:
It’s a weak-on-the-law ruling for which Chief Justice John Roberts deserves a not insignificant amount of blame — despite his name not appearing once in her 93-page opinion.
Roberts has led the Supreme Court into an era in which precedent can selectively be ignored, eviscerated, or overruled when it gets in the way of conservatives’ goals. That, in turn, has led lower court judges to feel that they have been given power to do the same — predicting, in essence, the precedents that they believe the current court would ignore.
This is not how the law is to work. And yet, one need only glance through Cannon’s decision to see that reality at work Monday in her effort to do Trump’s bidding.
Authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghait:
We know from studies of authoritarianism that the more despondent and despairing people are, the more they become dependent on the promises of a savior, someone who's going to save the nation. They become prone to accepting conspiracy theories. They don't know what's true any more, so they need an anchor, and that anchor would be Trump. So be very wary when you hear these slogans designed to discredit democracy and designed to convince people that America is failing.
Aaron Rupar posts a clip of Trump praising authoritarian leaders, concluding with:
We have to have somebody to protect us. And Orban was right: We have to have somebody to protect us.
We asked RNC attendees when America was last "great." Regardless of age, most said when they were children. Says nothing about America, but lots about conservative psychology.
A Salon newsletter article fleshes this out:
As one commenter on Tik Tok aptly noted: "I'm amazed at the grown men who don't understand that life was simpler when they were children because they were children."
and let's close with something fake
Sometimes you just can't let the facts get in the way of a good story. When a flaw in a Crowdstrike security update crashed Microsoft systems around the world, somebody created a fake image of the Blue Screen of Death filling the Las Vegas Sphere. Snopes declared the rumor false.
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