Trump’s Crypto Turnaround Heralds an Economic Nightmare. By David Gerard

The former president is pitching a new grift.

By David Gerard, the author of the book Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain and the cryptocurrency and blockchain news blog of the same name.

JULY 30, 2024, 4:20 PM

Former U.S. President Donald Trump spoke at the Libertarian National Convention in May and lent his strong support to cryptocurrency: “I will also stop Joe Biden’s crusade to crush crypto. … I will ensure that the future of crypto and the future of bitcoin will be made in the USA, not driven overseas. I will support the right to self-custody. To the nation’s 50 million crypto holders, I say this: With your vote, I will keep Elizabeth Warren and her goons away from your bitcoin.”

Trump has continued to court the crypto industry in the months since; he appeared at the Bitcoin 2024 Conference in Nashville this week, alongside independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Trump’s parting words—“Have a good time with your bitcoin and your crypto and everything else that you’re playing with”—were hardly enthusiastic, but the industry itself remains replete with ardent Trump boosters.

This turnaround came as a surprise given Trump’s previous strong opposition to crypto. When Facebook was floating its libra cryptocurrency in 2019, Trump tweeted: “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air.” Former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s White House memoir, The Room Where It Happened, quotes Trump as telling Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin: “Don’t be a trade negotiator. Go after Bitcoin [for fraud].” In 2021, Trump told Fox Business that bitcoin “just seems like a scam. … I want the dollar to be the currency of the world.”

Why the change? There don’t appear to be votes in crypto. Trump’s “50 million” figure comes from a badly sampled push poll by crypto exchange Coinbase that claimed 52 million crypto users in the United States as of February 2023. But a survey taken last October by the U.S. Federal Reserve showed that only 7 percent of adults (about 18.3 million people) admitted to holding or using crypto—down from 10 percent in 2022 and 12 percent in 2021. Many of those people are likely bag-holders left high and dry after crypto crashed in 2022—and not necessarily fans anymore.

What Trump wants from the crypto industry is money. The crypto industry has so far collected more than $180 million to throw at the 2024 U.S. elections via its Fairshake, Defend American Jobs, and Protect Progress super PACs.

Fairshake spent $10 million on taking out Rep. Katie Porter in the primary battle for Dianne Feinstein’s California Senate seat, funding Porter’s pro-crypto rival Adam Schiff. It put $2 million into knocking out Rep. Jamaal Bowman in the Democratic primary for New York’s 16th District in favor of pro-crypto George Latimer. In the Utah Republican Senate primary, Rep. John Curtis beat Trent Staggs with the help of $4.7 million from Defend American Jobs. In Alabama House District 2, the majority of campaign spending has come from the crypto industry.

Fairshake is substantially funded by Coinbase, cryptocurrency issuer Ripple Labs and Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z. Silicon Valley was deep in crypto during the 2021 bubble, and a16z in particular continues to promote blockchain start-ups even now—and still holds a tremendous bag of crypto tokens from the bubble that it would like to be able to cash in.

Many in Silicon Valley would like an authoritarian who they think will let them run free with the money—while bailing them out in times of trouble. Indeed, Trump promised Bitcoin 2024 attendees that he would hold all bitcoin that the United States acquires. (Never mind that it’s generally acquired as proceeds of crime.) Silicon Valley explicitly sees regulation of any sort as its greatest enemy. Three a16z manifestos—2023’s “Politics and the Future” and “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” and 2024’s “The Little Tech Agenda”—outline co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s demands for technology-fueled capitalism unimpeded by regulation or social consideration. They name “experts,” “bureaucracy,” and “social responsibility” as their “enemies.” Their 2024 statement claims that banks are unfairly cutting off start-ups from the banking system; these would be crypto companies funded by a16z.

Trump’s vice presidential pick, Sen. J.D. Vance, is a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist. He was once employed by Peter Thiel, who bankrolled Vance’s successful 2022 Senate run; Vance has been described as a “Thiel creation.” He has increased support for the Trump ticket among his venture capital associates. Vance is a bitcoin holder and frequent crypto advocate. He recently circulated a draft bill to overhaul how the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) control crypto assets. In 2023, he circulated a bill to keep banks from cutting off crypto exchanges.

Minimal regulation has been tried before. It led to the wild exuberance of the 1920s, which finished with the 1929 Black Tuesday crash and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Regulators such as the SEC were put into place at this time to protect investors and turn the securities market from a jungle into a well-tended garden, leading to many prosperous and stable decades following.

Crypto supplies the opposite of a stable and functional system; it’s a worked example of how a lack of regulation lets opportunists and grifters cause disasters at scale. Crypto’s 2022 collapse replayed the 2008 financial crisis in miniature. Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX was feted as a financial wunderkind who would bring economic miracles if only you gave him a free hand; he ended up stealing billions of dollars of customer money, destroyed ordinary people’s lives, and is now in a prison cell.

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A photo illustration of Sam Bankman-Fried surrounded by Bitcoin with a smirk on his face.

A photo illustration of Sam Bankman-Fried surrounded by Bitcoin with a smirk on his face.

The Crypto Con Years Aren’t Over Yet

Three books explore the failures of regulators—and sometimes journalists.

REVIEW | DAVID GERARD

U.S. regulators have long worried about the prospect of contagion from crypto to the wider economy. Criminal money laundering is endemic in crypto; even the Trump administration made rules in December 2020 to reduce crypto’s money laundering risk. Meanwhile, the crypto industry has persistently tried to worm its way into systemically risky corners of the economy, such as pension funds.

Four U.S. banks collapsed during the 2023 banking crisis, the first since 2020. Two of these, Silvergate Bank and Signature Bank, were deeply integrated into the crypto world—Silvergate in particular seems to have collapsed directly from its heavy reliance on FTX and failed a few months after it did. Silicon Valley Bank was not into crypto but collapsed from a run on the bank due to panic from its venture capitalist deposit holders, particularly Thiel’s Founders Fund.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s mammoth conservative wish list that Trump and Vance have at various times endorsed and tried to distance themselves from, stresses the importance of party loyalists, noting financial regulation especially. The plan recommends replacing as much of the federal bureaucracy as possible with loyalists and “trusted” career officials rather than “non-partisan ‘experts.’” Vance advocated in 2021 that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” and “replace them with our people.” Loyalty is likely to triumph over competence.

Crypto is barely mentioned directly in Project 2025—which suggests that it has little active support among the broader conservative coalition. But near the end of the manifesto is a plan to dismantle most U.S. financial regulation and investor protections put in place since the 1930s, suggesting the exemption the crypto industry desires from current SEC and CFTC regulations.

Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, started as an ideological project to promote an odd variant of Murray Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism and gold-backed Austrian economics—of the sort we abandoned to escape the Great Depression. Crypto rapidly co-opted the “end the Fed” and “establishment elites” conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society and Eustace Mullins. It’s a way for billionaire capitalists such as Thiel, Andreessen, and Elon Musk to claim they’re not part of the so-called elite.

If a second Trump administration hobbled financial regulators and allowed crypto free rein, it might help further the collapse of the U.S. economy that bitcoin claimed it would avert. But it’s more likely that Trump will be happy to take crypto’s money and run.

David Gerard is the author of the book Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain and the cryptocurrency and blockchain news blog of the same name. His new book is Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money.

We can finally call them weird. By Ryan Broderick

We can finally call them weird. By Ryan Broderick

July 29, 2024

Conservatives Are Struggling To Get Ahead Of The Whole “Weird” Thing

As of yesterday, Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign has raised over $200 million. And her TikTok channel is also still incredibly viral, even if the initial burst of “Kamala is Brat” is dying down a bit. Which was always going to happen.

Semafor’s Ben Smith asked an interesting question amid the Kamalamania last week, though, writing, “Who, beyond the candidate, gets credit for the Kamala rollout? Has just been incredibly well executed.”

And, funny enough, aside from Charli XCX canonizing Harris as Brat, I don’t think there really is a clear answer here. Like all good memes, Harris’ campaign just sort of emerged as a piece of culture, fully formed, like it had always been there. In fact, according to a post shared over the weekend by Sen. John Fetterman’s former social producer Annie Wu, many staffers on the Harris campaign were already working for President Joe Biden’s campaign before it shifted over. Which is evident. It’s mostly the same kind of cheeky, brand-safe libposting that it was with Biden. But with Harris at the center of it, it just works a whole lot better. And the stars continue to align for her.

The Swiftie bloc has come out in support, even if Taylor Swift, herself, has yet to endorse. And in a turn of events that will hopefully give Reddit wives something they can use to deradicalize their Star Wars husbands, Simpsons creator Matt Groening, at a panel at San Diego Comic Con this week, unearthed an old clip of Harris quoting the show’s iconic “twirling, twirling, twirling” line from an old Treehouse Of Horror episode. I watched it this morning and, as a long-suffering Simpsons fan, myself, I can’t deny that it made me smile. It’s good shit.

Republicans are having a less good time, however. They clearly assumed Trump’s assassination attempt would win the election for him, even though, once again, that hasn’t really been true historically for American politics. And the introduction of Sen. JD Vance as Trump’s running mate has, literally, if Google Search data is accurate, erased almost any good will it did garner. Depending on what feeds you’re looking at right now, he’s either bickering like an incel with “cat ladies,” a couch-fucker, or the guy searching for videos of women being sexually assaulted by dolphins. And the larger universe of right-wing and far-right influencers is having an even worse time than Vance.

The Republican digital ecosystem is much more decentralized than its liberal counterpart. During the 2010s, spearheaded by publishers like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Ben Shapiro, conservatives learned that if they threw enough racist 4chan posts at the wall, and then aggregated them for platforms like Facebook, some of it would eventually bubble up onto cable news and break through. This strategy does not work now, though. First, the age of algorithmic video is a very different beast than the Facebook era. Most Americans’ timelines are not full of content being shared by friends and family, but, instead, content delivered via algorithms made by strangers and professional posters. And, two, after a decade of exclusively reading the most insane internet content to ever exist, most conservatives have become impossibly weird.

And this weirdness is exactly what the Democrats are now attacking directly. I mean this literally. The official X account for the Democrats posted over the weekend that Trump is “old and weird.” That was it, that was the whole post lol.

And being weird is a hard thing for Trump and his supporters to refute because, yeah, they are. Libs Of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik spent the weekend proving no one in her life cares about her enough to do a wellness check, feverishly sharing out-of-context queer fetish content, stolen TikToks from trans teenagers, and innocuous videos of drag queens and black women, claiming that no, it is, actually, the libs who are weird, not her. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, Jr., a bunch of evangelical Christians, and various QAnon landlords thought the best way to prove they aren’t huge fucking weirdos was to admit they got scared by the Olympics opening ceremony. Vivek Ramaswamy got ratio’d by the Menswear Guy after he tried to prove he wasn’t weird in a post that, also, accidentally revealed he doesn’t know how to wear shoes. And Robert F. Kennedy hung out with Hawk Tuah girl at a karate match at Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville. Great stuff. Not weird at all. You’re all doing great.

Look, I am not going to say that Democrats have the election in the bag. It’s possible Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz is correct in questioning if Harris is something of a political meme stock. We are still very early. But I can say that something, at least for me, personally, has shifted.

I don’t know if it was the horror of the Trump assassination attempt, Harris launching her campaign, or just the the subtle shifts of history, but something has broken in me. A threshold crossed. I’m not scared of these people, I’m not even interested in them. At one point in the last few weeks, I woke up and just felt, in my bones, that I was done. We have spent the last 10 years living in fear of some of the worst, most annoying people on the planet. And they are, and have been from the start, hateful, lonely weirdos who don’t even know how to wear their own clothes properly. And, sure, there will assuredly be new political threats to come, but whatever this all was is ending. And no matter what comes next, it does honestly feel extremely freeing to finally say it. Republicans are deeply unpopular weirdos.

Now for something completely different.

OpenAI’s Search Engine Is Here And It Sucks

I have friends and a life, so I often forget that ChatGPT exists, but, apparently, OpenAI finally announced its long-awaited search product over the weekend. And, as The Atlantic reported, even its demo got a bunch of stuff wrong. SearchGPT is still, according to The Verge, just a prototype, but the plan is to eventually pull it into ChatGPT.

I am, admittedly, a little more openminded about generative AI — or at least easily dazzled by it — than AI doomer king Ed Zitron, but I think every day it becomes clearer that he has been correct from the jump that this stuff is a bubble and it’s bursting. His newest piece today argues that OpenAI might only have a runway of a year or two left to either raise an unfathomable amount of money, build computer God, or implode completely. I’ll tack another prediction on here.

I think the future of generative AI, post OpenAI is bloatware. Remember that weird period around 2014 when HTML5 was replacing Flash and there was still a bunch of old, janky Flash players scattered around the web? That’s what “ask the chat bot” and “summarize with AI” boxes are going to feel like. If they don’t already.

The Most Revealing Moment of a Trump Rally. The Atlantic - Politics by McKay Coppins

Jul 29, 2024 at 8:15 PM//keep unread//hide

A week before Christmas, an evangelical minister named Paul Terry stood before thousands of Christians, their heads bowed, in Durham, New Hampshire, and pleaded with God for deliverance. The nation was in crisis, he told the Lord—racked with death and addiction, led by wicked men who “rule with imperial disdain.”

“With every passing day,” the minister said, “we slip farther and farther into George Orwell’s tyrannical dystopia.”

But because God is merciful, there was reason for hope. One man stood ready to redeem the country: Donald Trump. And he was about to come onstage. “We know what he did for us and how he strove to lead us in honorable ways during his term as our president—in ways that brought your blessings to us, rather than your reproach and judgment,” Terry prayed. “We know the hour is late. We know that time grows shorter for us to be saved and revived.” When he finished in the name of Jesus Christ, Amens echoed through the hall. Soon Trump appeared to rapturous applause and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.”

For all the exhaustive coverage of Trump’s campaign rallies, even before the assassination attempt at one of them in July, relatively little attention has been paid to the prayers that start each one. These invocations aren’t broadcast live on cable news, nor do they typically attract the interest of journalists, who gravitate toward the more impious utterances of the candidate himself. But the prayers offered before Trump speaks illuminate this perilous moment in American politics just as well as anything he says from the podium. And they help explain how the stakes of this year’s election have come to feel so apocalyptically high.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: If Trump wins]

To understand the evolving psychology and beliefs of Trump’s religious supporters, I attempted to review every prayer offered at his campaign events since he announced in November 2022 that he would run again. Working with a researcher, I compiled 58 in total, the most recent from June 2024. The resulting document—at just over 17,000 words—makes for a strange, revealing religious text: benign in some places, blasphemous in others; contradictory and poignant and frightening and sad and, perhaps most of all, begging for exegesis.

There are many ways to parse the text. You could compare the number of times Trump’s name is mentioned (87) versus Jesus Christ’s (61). You could break down the demographics of the people leading the prayers: 45 men and 13 women; overwhelmingly evangelical, with disproportionate representation from Pentecostalism, a charismatic branch of Christianity that emphasizes supernatural faith healing and speaking in tongues. One might also be tempted to catalog the most comically incendiary lines (“Oh Lord, our Lord, we want to be awake and not woke”). But the most interesting way to look at these prayers is to examine the theological motifs that run through them.

The scripture verse that’s cited most frequently in the prayers comes from 2 Chronicles. “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

Ryan Burge, a Baptist minister and political scientist I asked to review the prayers, told me that this verse—which is quoted 10 times—is regularly cited by evangelicals to advance a popular conservative-Christian narrative: that America, like ancient Israel before it, has broken its special covenant with God and is suffering the consequences. “The Old Testament prophets they’re quoting talk about sin collectively instead of individually—the nation has fallen into wickedness and needs healing,” Burge said. “The way they use this verse presupposes that we’re spiraling down the tubes.”

Trump’s supporters attribute America’s fall from grace to a variety of national sins old and new—prayer bans in public schools, illegal immigration, pro-transgender policies, the purported rigging of a certain recent election. Whatever the specifics, the picture of America they paint is almost universally—biblically—bleak.

In Wildwood, New Jersey, a pastor declared, “Our nation finds itself in turmoil, chaos, and dysfunction.” In Fort Dodge, Iowa, the sentiment was similar: “Lies, corruption, and propaganda are driving civilization to ruins.” In Conway, South Carolina, one supplicant informed God, “Our enemies are trying to steal, kill, and destroy our America, so we need you to intervene.”

[Read: You should go to a Trump rally]

The premise of all of these prayers is that America’s covenant can be reestablished, and its special place in God’s kingdom restored, if the nation repents and turns back to him. Burge told me that these ideas have long percolated on the religious right. What’s new is how many Christians now seem convinced that God has anointed a specific leader who, like those prophets of old, is prepared to defeat the forces of evil and redeem the country. And that leader is running for president.

Early on in the Trump era, it was common to hear conservative Christians compare him to Cyrus the Great, the sixth-century-B.C.E. Persian king who, though he did not worship the God of Israel himself, liberated the Israelites from Babylonian captivity and helped them build their temple in Jerusalem.

The subtext was not subtle. Here was a handy biblical precedent for the “unlikely vessel”—the man God uses to fulfill his purposes even though he lacks the faith and character of a true believer.

But this analogy seems to have outlived its usefulness to the religious right: A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that 62 percent of Republicans viewed Trump as “morally upstanding,” and in a Deseret News poll commissioned last year, 64 percent said they believed he is a “person of faith.” The former president no longer needs to be described as a blunt, utilitarian tool in God’s hand. “Cyrus was a way of acknowledging, ‘I know this is an immoral person, but he could still do some good,’ ” Russell Moore, an evangelical theologian and the editor of Christianity Today, who has been critical of Trump, told me. “I haven’t heard Cyrus language in at least five years.”

The prayers at Trump’s rallies reflect this shifting perception. Cyrus isn’t mentioned, but Trump does get compared to righteous, prophetic heroes of the Bible, including Esther, Solomon, and David.

In America, more than perhaps anywhere else in the Western world, petitions to God are still a routine fixture of politics—at congressional sessions, presidential nominating conventions, inaugurations. After a gunman shot at Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, both Democrats and Republicans prayed for the former president and for the country he hopes to lead.

And many presidential campaigns are infused with religion. In July, Joe Biden attended a church service in Philadelphia where the pastor compared the president’s recent political struggles to the Old Testament story of Joseph, and a member of the congregation prayed for Biden: “Touch his mind, O God, his body; rejuvenate him and his spirit.”

Bradley Onishi, a scholar and former evangelical minister who studies the intersection of politics and Christianity in America, told me that prayers at political events have traditionally fit a certain mold. God is asked to grant the political leader inspiration and wisdom, to help him resist temptation and lead the country in a righteous direction. “It was always ‘We pray for him to have the strength to do God’s will, to have character, to be the man we need,’ ” Onishi said.

Some of the prayers at Trump’s rallies run along these lines, and would be familiar to anyone who has spent time in an American church, myself included. “Give President Trump the strength to make the right decisions both in and out of the public eye,” one man prayed at a Trump event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. “Remind him to seek your guidance as events unfold.” I have said “Amen” to a thousand prayers like this in my life, on behalf of government leaders in both parties.

But Onishi, like several of the other experts I asked to read the prayers, was struck by how many of them take Trump’s righteousness for granted. “No one prays for Trump to do right; they pray that God will do right by Trump,” Onishi told me.

Indeed, rather than asking God to make Trump an instrument of his will, most of the prayers start from the assumption that he already is. Accordingly, many of them drop any pretense of thy-will-be-done nonpartisanship, and ask explicitly for Trump’s reelection. “Lord, you have a servant in Donald J. Trump, who can lead our nation,” a woman offering a prayer in Laconia, New Hampshire, told God at a rally on the eve of the state’s Republican primary. “Help us to overcome any obstacles tomorrow so that we may deliver victory to your warrior.”

[From the April 2018 issue: Trump and the evangelical temptation]

With Trump’s goodness presumed, the criminal charges against him are cast not as evidence of potential wrongdoing but as a sign of victimhood. “We ask that you put a hedge of protection around President Trump,” one woman prayed in Waukesha, Wisconsin, “and deliver him from the baseless attacks, and remove from office those who are subverting justice in our legal system.”

At a February campaign event in North Charleston, South Carolina, Mark Burns, a televangelist in a three-piece suit, squeezed his eyes shut and lifted his right hand toward heaven. “Let us pray, because we’re fighting a demonic force,” he shouted. “We’re fighting the real enemy that comes from the gates of hell, led by one of its leaders called Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”

Although Burns was more provocative than most, he was not alone in using the language of spiritual warfare. This is perhaps the most unnerving theme in the prayers at Trump’s rallies. One verse, from Ephesians, is quoted repeatedly: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

Russell Moore told me he used to hear conservative evangelicals cite this verse as a way of shifting the focus away from earthly concerns like politics and toward the larger, more important battle for our souls. “The point would be that our opponents aren’t our enemies,” he told me. But something has changed in recent years. “That’s not the implication I see in these prayers. It’s ‘Politics is how we fight these spiritual battles.’ ”

[Russell Moore: The American evangelical Church is in crisis. There’s only one way out.]

Terry Amann, a conservative pastor in Iowa, told me I shouldn’t be surprised to hear such a dire framing of the election. Christians like him see abortion as a grave sin and fast-changing social mores around gender and sexuality as serious threats to the nation’s spiritual health. “Every election cycle, they say this is the most important election in your lifetime,” he told me. To him, it feels like this one really is. “Our republic is in trouble.”

But it’s easy to see the danger in internalizing the concept of politics as spiritual combat. Trump’s rallies become more than mere campaign events—they are staging grounds in a supernatural conflict that pits literal angels against literal demons for the soul of the nation. Marinate enough in these ideas, and the consequences of defeat start to feel existential. “This is not a time for politics as usual,” a Pentecostal preacher declared at a Trump rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, last year. “It’s not a time for religion as usual. It’s not a time for prayers as usual. This is a time for spiritual warriors to arise and to shake the heavens.”

As I was reviewing these prayers, I wondered what Trump’s most zealous religious supporters would do if they didn’t get the result they were praying for in November. With so much riding on the idea that Trump’s reelection has a divine mandate, what would happen if he lost? A destabilizing crisis of faith? Another widespread rejection of the election’s outcome? Further spasms of political violence?

It wasn’t until I came across a prayer delivered in December in Coralville, Iowa, that a more urgent question occurred to me: What will they do if their prayers are answered?

Onstage, Joel Tenney, a 27-year-old evangelist with a shiny coif of blond hair and a quavering preacher’s cadence, preceded his prayer with a short sermon for the gathered crowd of Trump supporters. “We have witnessed a sitting president weaponize the entire legal system to try and steal an election and imprison his leading opponent, Donald Trump, despite committing no crime,” Tenney began. “The corruption in Washington is a natural reflection of the spiritual state of our nation.”

For the next several minutes, Tenney hit all the familiar notes: He quoted from 2 Chronicles and Ephesians, and reminded the audience of the eternal consequences of 2024. Then he issued a warning to those who would stand in the way of God’s will being done on Election Day.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: My father, my faith, and Donald Trump]

“Be afraid,” Tenney said. “For rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. And when Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.”

With that, he invited the audience to remove their hats, and turned his voice to God. “Lord, help us make America great again,” he prayed.

This article appears in the September 2024 print edition with the headline “‘Lord, Help Us Make America Great Again.’”

What Is America’s Gender War Actually About? - The Atlantic. By Derek Thompson

What Is America’s Gender War Actually About? - The Atlantic. By Derek Thompson — Read time: 7 minutes

The political parties are more divided by their views on gender than they are divided by gender itself.

The United States is politically polarized along several lines, including race, geography, and education. Heading into a general election that will once again offer voters a choice between a Democratic woman and a Republican man, gender may seem like the clearest split of all. But surveys, polls, and political scientists are torn on how dramatically men and women are divided, or what their division actually means for American politics. The gender war is much weirder than it initially appears.

By several measures, men and women in America are indeed drifting apart. For most of the past 50 years, they held surprisingly similar views on abortion, for example. Then, in the past decade, the pro-choice position surged among women. In 1995, women were just 1 percentage point more likely to say they were pro-choice than men. Today women are 14 points more likely to say they’re pro-choice—the highest margin on record.

In 1999, women ages 18 to 29 were five percentage points more likely than men to say they were “very liberal.” In 2023, the gap expanded to 15 percentage points. While young women are clearly moving left, some evidence suggests that young men are drifting right. From 2017 to 2024, the share of men under 30 who said the U.S. has gone “too far” promoting gender equality more than doubled, according to data shared by Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank. Gallup data show that young men are now leaning toward the Republican Party more than at any other point this century.

So far, this seems like a straightforward story: Men (especially young men) are racing right, while women (especially young women) are lurching left. Alas, it’s not so simple. Arguably, men and women aren’t rapidly diverging in their politics at all, as my colleague Rose Horowitch reported. At the ballot box, the gender gap is about the same as it’s long been. Men have for decades preferred Republican candidates, while women have for decades leaned Democratic. In a 2024 analysis of voter data, Catalist, a progressive firm that models election results, “found that the gender divide was roughly the same for all age groups in recent elections,” Horowitch wrote.

One suggested explanation for these apparent contradictions is that the most alarming surveys are showing us the future, and this November will establish a new high-water mark in gender polarization, with women breaking hard for Kamala Harris and men voting overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. Another possibility is that these surveys are a little misleading, and gender polarization has already peaked, in which case this is much ado about nothing.

A third possibility interests me the most. John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, says the gender gap is real; it’s just not what many people think it is. “The parties are more polarized by gender attitudes than by gender itself,” he told me.

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If that sounds a bit academic, try a thought experiment to make it more concrete. Imagine that you are standing on the opposite side of a wall from 100 American voters you cannot see. Your job is to accurately guess how many of the folks on the other side of the wall are Republicans. You can only ask one of the following two questions: “Are you a man?” or “Do you think that men face meaningful discrimination in America today?” The first question is about gender. The second question is about gender attitudes, or how society treats men and women. According to Sides, the second question will lead to a much more accurate estimate of party affiliation than the first. That’s because the parties aren’t remotely united by gender, Sides says. After all, millions of women will vote for Trump this year. But the parties are sharply divided by their cultural attitudes toward gender roles and the experience of being a man or woman in America.

The fable above plays out in survey data, too. In the March 2024 Views of the Electorate Research (VOTER) Survey, 39 percent of men identified as Republican versus 33 percent of women. That’s a six-point gap. But when the VOTER Survey asked participants how society treats, or ought to treat, men and women, the gender gap exploded. Sixty-one percent of Democrats said women face “a lot” or “a great deal”  of discrimination while only 19 percent of Republicans said so. In this case, the gender-attitude gap was more than six times larger than the more commonly discussed gender gap.

To Sides, the conclusion is obvious: The political parties are more divided by their views on gender than they are divided by gender itself. It’s not “men are from Mars, and women are from Venus.” It’s “Republican men and women are from Mars, and Democratic men and women are from Venus.”

America’s parties engage in highly gendered messaging, and the news media contributes to the sense that the parties stand in for masculine and feminine archetypes. “This is the boys vs. girls election,” Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei wrote in Axios before Harris became the Democrats’ presumptive nominee. In the article, they quote Trump advisers who played up the Republican National Convention as an opportunity to sell the GOP as “the testosterone party” that pits “Donald Trump’s chest-beating macho appeals vs. Joe Biden’s softer, reproductive-rights-dominated, all-gender inclusivity.”

Political language today is so coded by gender that it’s easy to identify blind quotes by party. If you hear a politician complain that the opposing party is dominated “by a bunch of childless cat ladies,” well, it’s obviously a Republican speaking. (That would be J. D. Vance in an interview a few years ago with Tucker Carlson.) If you hear a politician accuse the opposing party of becoming a “He-Man woman-hater’s club," well, it’s obviously a Democrat talking. (In this case, the Democrat is Minnesota Governor Tim Walz describing the GOP presidential ticket and this month’s Republican National Convention.)

But there’s a difference between distinct gender rhetoric and a coherent vision of womanliness or manliness. For its part, the GOP plays host to several visions of masculinity, awkwardly mushed together. Trump is a thrice-married Lothario who combines the showmanship of a pro-wrestling heel with the wounded rage of a country-club rejectee. The result is a potent mix of cosmetic macho bluster and marrow-deep elite resentment. For the purpose of containing this multitude in a phrase, let’s call it “alpha-victim masculinity.”

Adding to the muddle, for the third straight election Trump is sharing the ticket with a devoutly Christian vice-presidential candidate whose vision of gender relations is distinctly conservative and traditional.

Whereas Trump flaunted his promiscuity, his vice president, Mike Pence, broadcasted his chastity. Whereas Trump’s alone time with women ultimately led to felony convictions, Pence refused to eat alone with any woman except his wife. Whereas Trump has divorced twice, his new running mate, Vance, has called into question the very institution of divorce. He said in 2021 that the ability to quickly end marriages is “one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace” and slammed the idea that we should make “it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear.”

If the GOP’s gender politics are fragmented by decorum and divorce, the glue tying the party together may be a nostalgia for social-dominance hierarchies and opposition to the cosmopolitan mores of the left. As the Cambridge University historian Gary Gerstle has written, the progressive movement originating with the New Left of the 1960s and ’70s has embraced a cultural politics that is "free of tradition, inheritance, and prescribed social roles” and that “rejected the notion that the patriarchal, heterosexual family should be celebrated.” The watchword of progressive gender politics is not tradition but liberation, a full break from the pull of history. Tradition, which conservatives see as a guardrail, progressives see as a straitjacket.

Women make up a majority of the electorate, outvoting men by millions of ballots each election. So it might be strategic for Democrats to adopt a political language and policy platform that appeals disproportionately to female voters. The problem, as Richard Reeves, the author of the book Of Boys and Men, has told me, is that men vote, too. The left has become more adept at shaming toxic masculinity than at showcasing a positive masculinity that is distinct from femininity. Progressive readers of the previous sentence might roll their eyes at the notion that it is the job of any left-wing political movement to coddle men’s feelings. But if a large shift rightward among young male voters helps Trump eke out a victory in November, Democrats will have little choice but to think up a new message to stop the young-male exodus.

“The Democratic Party appears to have made a conscious choice not to make young men a political priority,” Cox told me, just as “the GOP under Trump seems unconcerned about the ways it may be alienating young women.” If American politics in 2024 is a gender war, it is not yet a conflict between the genders. Let’s hope it never gets to that. But it is a conflict between the parties over the role of gender, the meaning of gender, the definition of gender. And that, frankly, is strange enough.

What Biden Didn’t Say. The Atlantic - Politics by Mark Leibovich

Jul 26, 2024 

President Joe Biden made his prime-time debut as a short-timer last night in an 11-minute address from the Resolute desk. He made the right call to leave the presidential race, and gave a good speech: gracious, high-minded, and moving at the end.

“Nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy,” Biden said. “That includes personal ambition.”

Oh yes, about that. Let’s acknowledge—and the president did not—that, until a few days ago, he was waging an exasperating battle on behalf of personal ambition: his own. And he seemed quite determined to keep the job he’d spent much of his life gunning for. He fretted, fumed, and stalled.

Eventually he came around. Or at least had nowhere to go and spun a new and noble story. “This sacred task of perfecting our union is not about me,” Biden said last night. “It’s about you.” It’s also about polls, fundraising, and fleeing supporters, all of which fueled the anguish of this saga and the outcome. No one should understate the power of the great big “me” in the middle of this story.

[David Frum: The dramatic contrast of Biden’s last act]

“The truth, the sacred cause of this country, is larger than any one of us,” Biden added last night. The truth is also pretty simple sometimes. Although Biden did not want to abandon his campaign, a large majority of Democrats thought he should. This had to be difficult to accept. No doubt it still is. Biden looked wistful and tired as he spoke.

Reaction to the speech was warm, fawning at times, and a bit eulogistic. Biden was praised for his patriotic act. “‘The sacred cause of this country is larger than any of us,’” former President Barack Obama wrote on X. “Joe Biden has stayed true to these words again and again.” The actor and director Rob Reiner gushed over “one of our greatest Presidents,” exactly one week after publicly pleading with Biden to leave: “The handwriting is on the wall in bold capital letters,” he’d said.

This praise parade began within minutes of Biden’s exit announcement on Sunday. Breathless statements rolled in from big-name Democrats about how selfless, statesmanlike, and heroic Biden was for finally submitting to reality. Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer all released communiqués hailing Biden as “a genuine public servant” (Obama), “one of the most consequential presidents in American history” (Pelosi), and someone who “put his country, his party, and our future first” (Schumer).

They all conveniently left out the words “kicking and screaming,” “took him long enough,” and “after stewing and dillydallying for nearly a month.”

In fact, to varying degrees, each of these leaders had been running out of patience with Biden, and was convinced he would lose to former President Donald Trump and possibly cost Democrats the House and Senate. According to various reports, they all worked behind the scenes to nudge Biden along to his eventual decision, which dragged on like a prolonged lobotomy of a wounded psyche.

[Stuart Stevens: How is this going to work?]

All’s well that ends well, you could say. In fact, this all could have ended a lot better. Or, certainly, sooner: three weeks, if not three years, sooner. In the end, Biden’s drawn-out hemming and hawing after his debate disaster on June 27 left Democrats in a hell of a bind.

Prominent Democrats have quickly rallied behind Vice President Kamala Harris, which, if nothing else, should spare the party a divisive battle for the nomination. But this rushed “process” is no substitute for an actual primary with a full field of candidates. That would have produced a better-vetted, better-known, and better-prepared nominee. Harris is off to a good start, but remains unproven. She will have her moments and make her mistakes, some of which could have been ironed out months ago.

As it stands, Biden left time for only a late scramble. And little room to heal the rifts that have arisen from this awkward affair. If Harris loses to Trump, Biden will come in for a healthy dose of the blame.

I don’t mean to kick the president while he’s in retreat. Biden should be given space to process this ordeal, mourn the end of his long career, and enjoy the over-the-top tributes (even the ones from the busybody backstabbers in his party). He should have plenty of time for valedictories. They will be well deserved.

But the full story of Biden’s legacy and his performance through this chapter will be incomplete until a big cliff-hanger is resolved—in November.

Kamala Harris Is Not ‘Totally Against the Jewish People’. The Atlantic - Politics by Gal Beckerman

Jul 26, 2024 

Kamala Harris is not an anti-Semite. It feels absurd to have to say this. After all, she is married to an actual Jew, and I’m certain he would happily vouch for her. But in the days since she took over Joe Biden’s spot as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee for president, there has been a surge of innuendo that Harris bears a secret antipathy for Jews.

Leave it to Donald Trump to utter the quiet part out loud—he always does. Speaking at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, yesterday, he said that Harris “is totally against the Jewish people.” I’m afraid we are about to live through a political moment that is already reminding me of Barack Obama’s entry onto the national stage, when an entire news cycle could revolve around a photo of him in a Somali turban that supposedly exposed his closeted fundamentalist-Muslim identity.

Before we get to why Harris has been smeared like this and what the political dangers are for her, we can clear up this basic point: Harris has no problem with Jews. She has talked of walking around the Bay Area as a young girl with those blue Jewish National Fund boxes, raising money to plant trees in Israel; she does a killer (and affectionate) imitation of her Brooklyn-born Jewish mother-in-law; she knows how to use the word shofar correctly in a sentence; she even helped her husband, Doug Emhoff, clip a kippah to his head at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. I could go on.

These are just her kishkes. But she also has a consistent record of both calling out anti-Semitism and expressing the kind of unambiguous support for Israel that gets a politician invitations to AIPAC conferences every year—she has spoken at two. Harris has condemned again and again hate crimes against Jews and attacks on synagogues. “When Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is anti-Semitism,” she said in 2021, as incidents in which Jewish Americans were the subjects of hate crimes rose steeply. Emhoff made combatting anti-Semitism his signature issue before the war in Gaza, and he has kept at it, clearly with her support, even now that being a proud Jew in the American public eye is a newly fraught proposition—as recently as yesterday, he was fantasizing about putting a mezuzah on the White House.

[Xochitl Gonzalez: What the Kamala Harris doubters don’t understand]

I have really found nothing in Harris’s record as a senator or as the vice president to make me doubt her Zionist bona fides, whether she chooses to embrace that label or not. For those on the radical left, such as the writer and activist Jeremy Scahill, there is no ambiguity either: Harris is a “hardline” supporter of Israel, he writes, in an article titled “Can Kamala Harris Wipe the Blood off Her Hands?” In 2017, she co-sponsored a Senate resolution that criticized the former Obama administration for being too harsh on Israel at the United Nations. Asked in 2016 about her views on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, Harris said she was deeply opposed to an effort that was “based on the mistaken assumption that Israel is solely to blame for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Since October 7, Harris has supported the ultimate military goal of the Israeli government, saying in March, “Hamas cannot control Gaza, and the threat Hamas poses to the people of Israel must be eliminated.” Just last month, Harris held a White House screening of a documentary about the sexual violence that took place against Israelis on October 7—violence that many pro-Palestinian activists deny even happened. “We cannot look away and we will not be silent,” Harris said. Again, I could go on.

But none of this will matter for her partisan critics. And the reason is very simple and sad: Harris has expressed empathy for the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and in ways that feel and sound more genuine than President Biden’s statements. This is the sliver of daylight between the two of them, if one wants to call it that. It’s been enough to make some supporters of Israel anxious about where her heart is, and those on the U.S. right who are eager for a wedge issue salivate at the prospect of depicting her as someone about to break into a chant of “from the river to the sea.”

The main piece of evidence for her supposedly left-leaning views on Israel is an interview Harris recently gave to The Nation. Since the start of the war in Gaza, she has been concerned, she said, about civilians there, about their access to clean water and hygiene products—“I was asking early on, what are women in Gaza doing about sanitary hygiene. Do they have pads? And these are the issues that made people feel uncomfortable, especially sanitary pads.” A statement like this is how she has contributed to the administration’s position, by moving from the abstraction of “humanitarian aid” to thinking about the impossible situation of people caught in the middle of a war zone—and with the added specificity of considering the concerns of women in a socially conservative society.

[Elaina Plott Calabro: The prosecutor vs. the felon]

It’s what came next that could create greater risk for her. Asked about the young people on campuses who have been protesting the war, she said:

They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.

That these protesters have often channeled this emotion into extremely ideological expression—in ways that, yes, have in many instances turned into open anti-Semitism—does not make the emotion itself any less worth acknowledging. Without taking anything away from her consistent, resolute defense of Israel, Harris confronted a reality that almost no politician who has taken a position on the protests has allowed: The students feel something. That feeling does not search for much context or reason before chanting loudly, but it is real, a response to images of mass death, which can’t help but inspire compassion.  

Harris’s acknowledgment might be the first step toward actually engaging with those young people and enabling them to see that a concern for the humanity of one people might be causing them to negate the humanity of another. Her ability to express this empathy should not be seen as a liability. It should be seen as a strength—if, that is, we have any hope of draining the bile that currently courses through every conversation about Israel and Palestine. To be able to say, Yes, I hear what is motivating your protest, and you’re not evil for responding to the sight of dead children is not weakness or giving in to Hamas; it’s attacking the problem at its source. The young people of America did not wake up and decide to be anti-Semites. They are responding, as young people will, to human misery, and want to do something about it, even if the form their activism has taken has created its own callousness and prejudice.

[Adam Serwer: The racist, sexist attacks on Kamala Harris]

But politics being the reductive business it is, especially in an ultra-partisan election year, I’m sure not much room exists for the nuance of this perspective. Instead, Harris will be questioned for every hint of deviation, any signal that on the ledger of Palestinian and Israeli victimhood, she has been too receptive to one side or another. Already, one of the data points for those looking to smear Harris as anti-Israel is the Instagram account of her stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff. Next to Ella’s avid love of knitting, she has apparently twice posted links to raise money for humanitarian efforts in Gaza, including encouraging her followers to donate to UNRWA, the United Nations relief organization that has been accused of complicity with Hamas, but which remains the primary conduit for humanitarian relief.

In his comments at the North Carolina rally last night, Trump tried to create a second data point by calling out Harris for not attending Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress. Harris, on the campaign trail, had an already scheduled event—as did Trump’s Republican running mate, J. D. Vance, who was also absent, though this did not ignite Trump’s ire. In fact, Harris is slated to hold a personal meeting with Netanyahu this week.

The challenge for Harris now will be to manage these optics and associations, because much will be made of them, fairly or not. Even as she should insist that it is neither anti-Semitic nor anti-Israel to show concern for Palestinian civilians in Gaza, she has to keep her distance from those on the left whose activism and concern are more about anti-Zionism than being pro-Palestinian. And she seems primed to do this, issuing a statement that strongly condemned yesterday’s protests in Washington, D.C., against Netanyahu’s visit, denouncing activists who engaged in Hamas cosplay as “despicable” and “abhorrent.”  

In addition to defusing the tensions over student activism, Harris’s facility with expressing empathy gives her a chance to win over those 100,000-plus voters in Michigan who voted “uncommitted” in February’s Democratic primary as a protest against Biden’s Israel policies. But if Harris does so by moving too far toward those whose sympathies are not as evenhanded and generous as hers seem to be—such as Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, who talk of a “genocide”—that will be both a mistake and a political problem: Trump’s refrain about her being an enemy of the Jews will be in regular rotation.

What’s important to understand in this moment when Harris can still define herself, rather than be pinned down by others on the left and right, is where she starts from. I see her as a typical Liberal Zionist (an endangered species, it should be said). She believes in the need for a Jewish state; she defends Israel’s right to do everything it needs to do to protect itself, especially after October 7; she envisions a two-state solution to the conflict; and she has significant worries and deep human concerns about how Netanyahu’s government has waged this war and what it has meant for Palestinian lives. By her words and deeds, this is who Kamala Harris is. Everything else that has been and will be projected onto her when it comes to Israel and the Jews is the result of a political environment that does not know what to do with someone who sees the conflict in this humane way.

What the Kamala Harris Doubters Don’t Understand. The Atlantic - Politics by Xochitl Gonzalez

Jul 26, 2024 

The June 27th debate was barely off the air when my phone began buzzing with messages from anxious Democrats I know: “He needs to pull out. Will he pull out?” President Joe Biden eventually did the patriotic thing and ended his campaign. But in the three weeks in between—as the text threads moved from “if” to “when” to “who”—I was shocked at the certainty with which people dismissed the idea of Biden being replaced by his obvious successor: Vice President Kamala Harris.

Let me be specific. It was not “people” dismissing her; it was men. I have many male friends, and they frequently include me in barstool-punditry sessions where they pontificate, often with wisdom and insight, on the issues of the day. Usually I enjoy this, but over the past few days, I’ve found myself more and more irritated.

[From the November 2023 issue: The Kamala Harris problem]

I’ve had men I know (and love) explain to me the many reasons Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, J. B. Pritzker and—as if to prove that it’s not a “woman thing”—Gretchen Whitmer would all be better and more exciting candidates. I’ve been told about Harris’s mediocre polling (yes, I know about it), reminded of her awkward 2020 presidential bid (yes, I remember). My male friends bring up “likability,” and her made–for–Fox News–fodder role as border czar. I get it: Asking whether someone can actually win is one of the most basic questions in politics. But when I push back on their trepidation, many give me some version of: “I have no issue with her; I’m just worried about how she will play with white midwestern male voters.”

I have been haunted by this unnamed white midwestern male voter for longer than I can remember. He turns up anytime a woman runs for anything, tucks his polo shirt into his jeans, and starts listing all the ways the candidate just doesn’t share his values. If only I could find him and talk with him! If only we could grab one of those proverbial beers. I would explain that although he matters and is important, now is not the time to make things about himself. Now he has to do what I and so many women and people of color have done in this country for generations: hold our nose and vote for a politician who might not totally get us, but whom we have to trust to do their best by us anyway.

I lived through the roller coaster of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. I watched Elizabeth Warren supporters campaign while Bernie bros told them they were wasting their time. Then the Supreme Court took away the right to choose that I had thought belonged to all American citizens. Now I’ve run out of patience. My friends’ barstool logic is not only maddening; it’s dangerous.

It is not that I don’t understand the electoral map, or that I’m dismissing the importance of the white male swing voter. Of course he’s important, and of course there’s a very good chance that, after leaving a diner and speaking to a reporter about what really matters to voters like him … he’s going to vote for Donald Trump. But the Harris candidacy is no longer hypothetical. She is almost certain to be running against Trump, and our democracy hangs in the balance. What do my male friends gain from fretting so much over this particular voter now? I’m beginning to think that they bring him up because they don’t want to admit to their own biases—that he’s a cover for their own hovering doubts about a female candidate, and an excuse for why they’re not getting more enthusiastic about Harris.

Such doubts may reflect a deep desire to defeat Trump. But these men—and the women who secretly or not so secretly agree with them—can’t afford them any longer. The only way to beat Trump is to support Harris. And all sorts of other voters are already doing so. In that spirit, I thought I would provide nervous Democrats with a list of them.

Black voters, and especially Black women, have saved the Democratic Party time and again. Yet non-Black voters continually dismiss the power and potential of this community, which includes supporters, donors, and many swing-state residents. Some people have questioned Harris’s appeal among Black voters. She is half South Asian, and married to a white man, and was a prosecutor whose work, Republicans will point out, resulted in the incarceration of young Black men. But if the past few days are any indication, many Black voters aren’t just enthusiastic about her; they’re gleeful. Harris has long been vocal about issues that affect Black women, such as their disproportionately high mortality rates during childbirth. And she’s a graduate of a historically Black university, where she was a member of a Black sorority.

On the night Biden endorsed Harris, the group Win With Black Women mobilized more than 44,000 women to join a Zoom call; they donated more than $1 million in three hours and some stayed on past 1 a.m. One friend told me she “couldn’t log off, because I didn’t want to miss a word.” The next night, a similar call for Black men was organized.

If Harris wins, she will be the first Asian American president. Her mother was an immigrant from India; the now viral “coconut tree” meme came from one of her mother’s favorite expressions. South Asian Americans are not only the largest Asian American group in America; they are the most politically engaged on many issues. Many live in swing-state cities like Philadelphia and Atlanta. And, despite the high profiles of conservatives such as Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal (and now Usha Vance), most South Asian Americans are Democrats. Tech investors and entrepreneurs such as Nihal Mehta are already lining up behind Harris.

The vice president has the potential to excite women of all races. Anyone who says that they don’t think America is “ready to vote for a woman” has not been paying attention. In 2016, many felt that voting for a woman was a way to shatter glass ceilings and celebrate “girl power.” This time is different. It is not about a milestone. It is about our bodily autonomy and right to control our own health care. Which is why, over the past two years, women have come out even in the most conservative states to vote against ballot measures limiting their reproductive rights. No man can campaign as passionately on this issue as a woman can.

Harris has already gone on a “Fight for Reproductive Freedom” tour in battleground states. And who can forget her exchange with Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings? Harris, like many senators, tried to get him to say what he thought about Roe v. Wade. When he wouldn’t, she asked him something different: whether he could “think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?” He could not. When comparing her with the retrograde MAGA president who put American women in this predicament in the first place, people wouldn’t need to even like Kamala Harris all that much to confidently vote for her.

Perhaps one of the most surprising things about her candidacy is how quickly she’s been embraced by young people on the internet. At nearly 60, Harris would hardly be considered young in any other context. But after watching last month’s Showdown at the Geriatric Corral between a septuagenarian and an octogenarian, Harris seems positively sprightly. Not only can she walk (in heels!) with a spring in her step, but she can dance, and have that dance go viral on TikTok and Instagram. As the artist Charli XCX has already proclaimed to her youthful followers: Kamala is brat. If you don’t know what that means, it doesn’t matter.

[Read: The Brat-ification of Kamala Harris]

What matters is that young people are meme-ing and tweeting and engaging with this candidate. Celebrities such as Cardi B, who had previously said they’d sit the election out, are now endorsing Harris. (Or “Momala,” as her 20-something stepkids call her.) For the cynics who say “Young people don’t vote,” I won’t refute that. But … they might. And in the run-up to November, their excitement will influence the culture. I am old enough to remember when everyone was behind a seasoned political figure named Hillary Clinton until it became clear that all the cool kids were supporting a young senator from Chicago who’d made a speech at a political convention.

On Monday, in her first speech since Biden dropped out, Harris asked: “Do we want to live in a country of freedom, compassion, and rule of law? Or a country of chaos, fear, and hate?” It’s a pressing question. And the kind that reminds us that another broad voter group might be moved to support Harris: people who want to feel optimistic about America again.

Harris is kind of a goofball. She’s earnest when you wouldn’t expect earnestness. She tells awkward stories. She laughs often and loudly. She is not at all cool. And people seem to like it? Many of these things worked against her back in 2020, but now it’s like seeing an ex at a high-school reunion: Suddenly the old flaws look different. Is it us? Are we lonely and desperate now? Probably.

The point is that for some time now, the only place for laughter in politics has been at a Trump political rally, in response to one of his cruel jokes. Politics has been about mass death and mass deportations. Harris takes these things seriously, but she can also provoke joy, which this country desperately needs. At that event Monday night, Harris told Biden—with warmth and sincerity—that she loved him. And then she spoke with a smile on her face about the future prospects for our country. Listening, I felt transported to a time before Trump came down the gilded escalator and turned the conversation from hope to carnage. We live in an era of cynicism, but Americans are still attracted to joy. We might find that even our white midwestern male voters want more of that.

Why Some Republicans Can’t Resist Making Vile Attacks on Harris. The Atlantic - Politics by Adam Serwer

Jul 26, 2024 

Less than 48 hours after Vice President Kamala Harris won the support of enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination, Republican Party leadership had a modest proposal for members: Please stop being so overtly racist and sexist.

“House Republican leaders told lawmakers to focus on criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris’ record without reference to her race and gender,” Politico reported, “following caustic remarks from some Republicans attacking her on the basis of identity.”

Having to make such a request means that it's already too late. Several Republican members of Congress had by then started referring to Harris as a “DEI hire,” a reference to diversity, equity, and inclusion, but in reality an assertion that Harris is the nominee only “because of her ethnic background,” as Republican Representative Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin put it. The conservative activist Tom Fitton engaged in some neo-birtherism, implying that Harris’s Jamaican and South Asian parents render her ineligible to run for president. The former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway called Harris lazy, saying, “She does not speak well; she does not work hard; she doesn’t inspire anyone.” Republican Representative Harriet Hagemen of Wyoming declared, “Intellectually, [she is] just really kind of the bottom of the barrel.”

[Read: What the Kamala Harris doubters don’t understand]

Then there were those who fixated on Harris’s gender rather than her race, or on both at the same time. Of course it's possible to criticize politicians who are women or people or color without that criticism automatically being sexist or racist. That's not what's happening here. Right-wing activists on social media criticized Harris’s dating history and accused her of having “slept her way to the top.” The former Trump-administration official Sebastian Gorka told Fox News that Harris was the nominee “because she’s female and her skin color is the correct DEI color.” Other right-wing activists argued that Harris shouldn’t be allowed to be president, “because she doesn’t have biological children.” This sentiment seems to be shared by Trump officials—liberal activists resurfaced a clip of J. D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, attacking Harris, who is married and a stepmother to two, as one of the Democratic Party’s “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives.”  

Republicans will eventually refine these kinds of race- and gender-based attacks into more coded form, but this is not the same as rejecting them or their underlying premises. Trump-campaign officials told The Bulwark that they were planning to “Willie Horton” Kamala Harris—referring to the 1988 George H. W. Bush ad campaign that sought to foment and exploit racialized fears of crime. The first reason to take note of these attacks now is that they are being made when GOP officials are responding to President Joe Biden’s exit from the race, and are therefore expressing their unguarded thoughts, shorn of the sanitizing message discipline that is sure to follow. They are saying these things because they really believe them. The second reason to take note is that their policy agenda is shaped around these beliefs—which when plainly expressed are repulsive to most voters, even many Republican-leaning ones.

Virtually everything being said about Harris was also said about Barack Obama. Questioning Obama’s citizenship was how Trump became a right-wing hero in the first place. Conservatives called Obama an “affirmative-action president” instead of a “DEI hire” because this was years ago and the right-wing vocabulary was different. They called Obama dumb and lazy just as they are calling Harris dumb and lazy; they called him unqualified and said he achieved what he did only because of his racial background. Harris’s politics might be too liberal for many Americans’ tastes, but she was a district attorney, an attorney general, a senator, and then a vice president. She has not only more experience in elected office than Obama did when he ran, but more than either of the white men running on the Republican ticket.

The purpose of the “DEI hire” rhetoric is to diminish those accomplishments, and suggest that any Black person whom conservatives do not specifically approve of did not earn their place—an inversion of the history of racial discrimination in America such that white people become its true victims and Black people its beneficiaries. The purpose of this rhetoric is to stoke racial resentment by suggesting that few if any Black people have earned whatever success they have achieved, and that their success came at the expense of someone who is not Black. It has become a way to imply that Black people are less capable than white people—the problem is once you simply refer to every Black person in a position of prestige or authority this way, regardless of the circumstances, that sentiment is no longer hidden. Behind this racist fiction that almost every prominent Black figure is a “DEI hire” who doesn’t deserve their position is the reality that the wealthy interests backing Trump’s candidacy are bent on hoarding American prosperity for themselves and deflecting the blame for the economic consequences of their own greed onto others.

That worldview is married to the policy agenda of gutting or reversing antidiscrimination protections for nonwhites, so that discrimination on the basis of race in employment, voting rights, education, criminal justice, and housing can proceed without interference. As The Washington Post reported in 2020, “Trump presided over a sweeping U.S. government retreat from the front lines of civil rights.”

[Read: The Brat-ification of Kamala Harris]

The attacks on Harris for her relationship history or lack of biological children similarly reflect a deeply ideological worldview. Vance deriding Harris as a “childless cat lady” implies that women who do not have children cannot meaningfully contribute to or care about America's future; it is indicative of a belief that women are human beings valuable not in and of themselves, but only as broodmares, whose primary purpose is as vessels for human reproduction. The underlying insinuation is that women who do not have children do not have value, that blended families are not real families, and that women should be subject to draconian limitations on their personal freedom that men will never face. This kind of rhetoric is also, on a personal level, exceedingly cruel to all those couples who struggle to have children but cannot, to extended family with no biological kids of their own who bear the responsibility of raising children, and even to godparents who take on the duty of rearing children they are not related to.

Vance, like the activists who would staff a future Trump administration, has said that he believes abortion should be “illegal nationally” and that he wants to prevent women from crossing state lines to get the procedure. Notwithstanding misleading media coverage about Trump's position on abortion, the new GOP platform takes the position that abortion rights violate the Fourteenth Amendment and should therefore be illegal everywhere. As Laura K. Field writes in Politico, Vance has also argued that getting divorced is too easy, a strange position for a man running alongside the thrice-married Trump, but one that is consistent with a totalizing ideological opposition to women’s individual freedom.

Trump’s longevity as a bombastic celebrity has muted the GOP’s ideological extremism to many American voters. Although Trump shares much of that deeply ideological worldview, it is often obscured by the juvenile nature of his schoolyard insults. Expressed in frank, unguarded terms by Republican apparatchiks, however, it becomes creepy and off-putting even to many conservative voters. When that happens, many Republicans find themselves attempting to distance themselves from it, as Trump has tried to do with Project 2025, the policy agenda his staffers intend to pursue if he is given another term in office. The Republican strategy hinges on exploiting racism and sexism, but most Republican voters are not as fanatically ideological about their prejudices as the new Trumpist elite—right-wing lawmakers, staffers, intellectuals, and commentators. There is a reason that abortion rights tend to win popular referendums even in conservative states, and that the Republican leadership is attempting to tamp down all this vocal sincerity regarding Harris’s background.

An ABC News headline reported that Harris “faces racial ‘DEI’ attacks amid campaign for the 2024 presidency,” as though they were falling from the sky like rain and not directed at her by Republicans. A New York Times headline warned that “Trump’s new rival may bring out his harshest instincts,” as though it was Harris’s fault for provoking him by being a Black and South Asian American woman. A Washington Post headline warned that Harris “would have to contend with DEI, culture war attacks,” without naming those doing the attacking. This framing, however well intentioned, assigns less agency to Republicans for this political approach than GOP leaders have.

Harris is not to blame for these kinds of attacks on her. These are simply expressions of the GOP’s values and its policy agenda, which, for this brief moment, is on display in all its ugliness. Republicans are telling the public not just what they believe, but what they want to do with power once they get it: make a world where the remarkable American story of a biracial woman born of immigrant parents becoming president is not possible. You may see Harris’s story as inspiring. They find it grotesque and unjust. They are announcing as much, as loudly as they can. At least until they learn to use their inside voices again.  

Can Kamala Harris win?

Leaders | American politics 

Joe Biden’s vice-president has an extraordinary opportunity. But she also has a mountain to climb

The phoney campaign has ended. The real battle for the White House will be between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and it has only just begun. When Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy on July 21st, Mr Trump was in a commanding position. With a bit over 100 days to turn around his lead, Ms Harris still has enough time to win the presidency. The question is whether she has the ability.

Her task is to make the election a referendum on Mr Trump, who is unpopular outside his devoted maga base. If, instead, the election is about the record of the Biden administration and her part in it, she is likely to lose. But for Ms Harris to turn the spotlight onto Mr Trump, she must also satisfy voters that she is equal to the job of president. Mr Biden’s campaign was doomed because his infirmity kept the focus on him. Despite numerous appearances, he could not dispel the image of a stumbling, befuddled old man unfit to serve a second full term.

The upshot is a race to define Ms Harris. Unfortunately for the Democrats, Mr Trump has plenty of damning material to work with. As a former attorney-general of California, she is linked to the homelessness, drugs and crime of cities such as San Francisco. A west coast centrist is not a centrist in the battleground states she must win. She had a disastrous run in the presidential primaries last time round, dropping out early, having taken leftish positions on subsidising rent and banning fracking. As Mr Biden’s vice-president, she is lumbered with his record on inflation, immigration and (in Republican eyes) crime.

All along, she has struggled in speeches and interviews. Reportedly, some Biden allies sought to stop Democrats deserting the president by privately warning that she could take his place—as if that were a threat. What, then, can Ms Harris do? Her chances of success rest on one enormous piece of luck and three tests of her political instincts.

The luck was Mr Biden’s obstinacy. Had he given way sooner, the party could have held an open primary and Ms Harris might have lost. As it was, she saw off her potential rivals within 36 hours. After Mr Biden’s epic stall, that reflected the party’s wish to move on. She inherited a ready-made campaign and its cash. A day of record fundraising revealed Democrats’ relief at their new, younger candidate. Simply by being 59, she has turned the issue of age, which devastated Mr Biden, back onto Mr Trump, who is now the oldest nominee in history.

But luck will not be enough. To win, Ms Harris must also pass those political tests. The first is to articulate the convictions that will be the foundation for her presidency, without lapsing into promises to hand out welfare cheques. Her identity as the first black and South Asian woman to run for president could, if handled right, make her a compelling symbol of the American dream. Rather than letting progressives pull her to the left, she should back pragmatic policies that serve ordinary Americans. Mr Trump, she can say, is out to serve himself.

This will mean touting the accomplishments of Mr Biden’s presidency more effectively than he could—in particular, America’s most significant climate legislation ever. But it also means facing up to the Biden administration’s poor record on immigration with the help of a tough plan for the southern border. In contrast to Mr Biden, she must acknowledge voters’ struggle with inflation. She should continue to speak out strongly for women’s reproductive rights, a winning issue—and that involves being aware of Republican traps claiming that this means the unrestricted abortions late in pregnancy which most Americans reject. When pressed, as she will be, she should make clear that she thinks trans women have an unfair advantage in competitive women’s sports.

Ms Harris’s second test is what she makes of having been a prosecutor and a state attorney-general. She may be tempted simply to bash away at Mr Trump as a convicted felon. Instead she should also use her experience as the foundation for a broad argument that she can be trusted to defend American values at home and abroad.

This starts with the rule of law, including in tackling violence and street crime, so as to counter the accusation that Democrats are soft on both. She could contrast her support of an independent legal system with Mr Trump’s plan to deploy the Department of Justice against his foes. And she should endorse America’s global role as the guardian of norms and rules. Mr Trump has a real-estate tycoon’s view of strength as simply muscle; in fact, strength is enhanced by being rooted in principle.

Ms Harris’s third test is to offer America hope. In a vicious election powered by fear and loathing, she may be tempted to peddle apocalyptic visions of a second Trump term. Better to use humour and optimism. Like any bully, her opponent is vulnerable to mockery. An upbeat Ms Harris looking to the future will do well against a sullen, vengeful Mr Trump enraged about the past.

Encouragingly, her first official rally, in Milwaukee on July 23rd, was fizzing with enthusiasm. This was not the awkward, unconvincing candidate of four years ago. After Mr Biden’s halting delivery, her words were full of vitality.

But Ms Harris is the underdog. Her first big decision—her vice-president—is a chance to catch up and plant her campaign in the centre ground. Josh Shapiro, the eloquent governor of Pennsylvania, could help in a must-win state. Mark Kelly, a senator from Arizona, another battleground state, would also add to the ticket—and it would rile Mr Trump to face an ex-astronaut. Be warned, however: Ms Harris is running a rushed operation. If her campaign starts to go awry, recriminations about her uncontested nomination will soon follow.

By contrast, Mr Trump, having survived an assassination attempt, enjoys an unshakable hold on his party. And yet his campaign’s attempt to redefine him as a unity candidate at the Republican convention crumbled with his rambling and mean-spirited acceptance speech. That makes him beatable.

After months of desultory campaigning, Americans have a race on their hands, and a good thing too. At a perilous time for their country and the world, they deserve a real contest. ■

What to expect from polls in the next few weeks. By Natalie Jackson

Read time: 3 minutes

Natalie Jackson @nataliemj10

July 23, 2024, 12:20 p.m.

In case you’ve been under a rock, President Biden ended his candidacy for a second term in office on Sunday and threw his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement. Expect a flood of polls in coming days assessing his decision and Harris’s standing as the top-of-ticket candidate, as her status as successor seems like it will go uncontested.

Polls in the next few weeks will not tell us what is going to happen in the fall, and it will be important to remember that the renewed energy—and fundraising—among Democrats may not necessarily result in a suddenly changed race. Here are a few reminders of how to think about polls in the next few weeks.

We’ll start with the key reminder that polls are not precise or predictive enough in July to tell us how a close election will turn out, even under the best of circumstances. It was a misuse of polling data for those who wanted President Biden to step aside to say that the race was “unwinnable.” Data indicated an uphill climb, but 2-4 points nationally and 5-6 points in swing states in July is not “unwinnable.” Remember this if Harris has similar numbers at first.

That’s because even though we are getting to the point where polls are more predictive of outcomes in typical election years (which this is clearly not), polls will still move quite a bit—a historical analysis of polls from 1952 to 2012 shows that polls averaged 3-4 percentage points off the ultimate outcome 100 days out. My own work on 2020 polls shows that average can be wider—July 2020 polls averaged 4-6 points of variance from the eventual outcome.

Given that presidential elections in the last few cycles have turned on 2 percent or fewer of voters in a handful of states, I’ve cautioned for months not to take early election polls too seriously because a lot can happen. I didn’t exactly have a candidate change in mind, but we are living the reality of “a lot can happen.” We truly have no idea what impact the changing of candidates will have on the electorate. It’s never happened this late in the process in the era of modern polling.

What we do know is that Democrats have a divided party to put back together. The infighting has been ugly and counterproductive to the goal of mounting a campaign against former President Trump. It’s unclear how much that turmoil has affected voters, but from the data we have so far, it seems Harris will likely start with a similar deficit to Biden’s in the horse race against Trump.

Some Democrats who didn’t want Biden to step down may not immediately get in line behind a new candidate. These people will most likely come home in the fall, but in the next week or two, they might not respond to polls, or they might say they are voting third-party out of anger. Differential nonresponse—which means that different types of people choose whether to respond to polls depending on their reaction to events in the news—could work in a lot of directions. Conversely, there could be Democrats re-energized by the change who come back after previously saying they would vote third-party. It will take time for these reactions to shake out in the polls.

In the meantime, Trump is still going to command the support he has held for a year—about 46-48 percent of the electorate in a two-way poll question (i.e., Trump vs. Harris), and somewhere around 42-44 percent in a multi-way question that includes third-party and independent candidates. In all the poll wobbling we’ve witnessed over the last few months, it’s not Trump’s numbers that have changed—it’s Biden’s that have moved up and down. Obviously, Democrats hope that Harris will do better than Biden, but again, it may take some time for opinion shifts to show up in the data.

Finally, we can’t lose sight of what we know about polls in this process. Recent reporting has not been great on this dimension. There won’t be any elections to validate the data until November, making careful data collection and transparency extremely important—don’t just accept numbers from any poll. Make sure their methods make sense. Remember that margins of error exist when media outlets tell you that one candidate leads based on a 1-2-percentage-point difference. Remember that it may take time for voters to adjust to the new horse race before you dismiss a race as “unwinnable.”

Remain aware of the uncertainty—in the polls and in the environment. The past month has been pretty unbelievable and illustrates perfectly that no one knows exactly what is going to happen. It’s going to take a minute for voters to catch up.

Contributing editor Natalie Jackson is a vice president at GQR Research.

The Supreme Court Fools Itself. The Atlantic - Politics by Adam Serwer

Jul 24, 2024 at 7:42 PM//keep unread//hide

The Trumpist justices on the Supreme Court had a very serious problem: They needed to keep their guy out of prison for trying to overthrow the government. The right-wing justices had to do this while still attempting to maintain at least a pretense of having ruled on the basis of the law and the Constitution rather than mere partisan instincts.

So they settled on what they thought was a very clever solution: They would grant the presidency the near-unlimited immunity Donald Trump was asking for, while writing the decision so as to keep the power to decide which presidential acts would be “official” and immune to criminal prosecution, and which would be “unofficial” and therefore not. The president is immune, but only when the justices say he is. The president might seem like a king, but the justices can withhold the crown.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity combines with its regulatory decisions this term to remake the executive branch into the ideal right-wing combination of impotence and power: too weak to regulate, restrain, or punish private industry for infractions, but strong enough for the president to order his political opponents murdered or imprisoned. To ordinary people, the president is a king; to titans of industry, he is a pawn. Given the work the Trump justices have done here, the billionaire class’s affection for Trump, often presented as counterintuitive, is not difficult to understand.

Yet when it comes to the justices’ decision on immunity, they were too clever by half. They seem to believe that when a president goes too far for their taste, they can declare that he’s not immune and constrain him. But there is danger in a ruling that invites presidents to test the limits of their power. By the time a rogue president goes too far, he is unlikely to care what the Supreme Court says. A president unbound by the law is shackled only by the dictates of his own conscience, and a president without a conscience faces no restraint at all. And because the Court ruled as it did, when it did, and on behalf of a man lawless enough to try to overturn an election, Americans may pay for the justices’ hubris sooner rather than later.

Rather than leave such momentous decisions in the justices’ hands as they intended, the ruling empowers anyone amoral enough to commit crimes to do so without any fear of the law or the Supreme Court. The decision implies that this immunity would extend to anyone acting on the president’s orders—meaning that a president is free not only to commit crimes, but to turn the federal government itself into a criminal enterprise, one in which officials can act with impunity against the public they are meant to serve. That the executive branch has all the guns was true prior to the Court’s ruling. But until the justices had to find a way to keep Donald Trump out of prison for trying to stay in office after losing an election, few people believed that the presidency was as unbound from the law as the Supreme Court has now made it.

The American government was constructed with one basic idea in mind: that the three branches would prevent tyranny by counteracting one another. As “Federalist No. 51” put it, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” But a subsequent clause is just as important: “What is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

The Framers were decidedly not angels—their acceptance of slavery being an obvious illustration of their fallibility. They understood that, to sustain itself, the structure of the government would have to account for vices as well as virtues. The Roberts Court’s ahistorical ruling reversed the entire purpose of the Constitution, from creating a government that did not need to be led by angels to creating one so imperial that only an angel ought to be allowed to govern it.

[Read: The Supreme Court puts Trump above the law]

We could speculate on how presidents without fear of the law might act, but we already have a historical example in Trump’s favorite president, Andrew Jackson.

In 1831, the Supreme Court decided 5–1 in favor of a pair of missionaries who had been assisting the Cherokee in a dispute with the Georgia state government. The justices ruled that because the Cherokee constituted a sovereign nation, only the federal government had jurisdiction over them. Georgia had passed a series of laws authorizing the ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee from any lands claimed by the state, and as a result of the ruling, those laws had become invalid. But Jackson had no intention of upholding the Supreme Court’s decision and preventing Georgia from seizing those lands and displacing the Cherokee.

According to the Jackson biographer Jon Meacham, the president did not say, “Well, [Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it,” the popular misquote of Jackson’s reaction. Instead he said, “The decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that it cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.” But the effect was the same. Neither Jackson nor the state of Georgia wanted to follow Marshall’s opinion, and so they ignored it. The federal government had already passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, so the decision would not have prevented the ethnic cleansing known as the Trail of Tears even had it been heeded. Nevertheless, the incident showed that the Supreme Court had no power to enforce its decisions; it relied on the good faith of the executive branch.

In the history of presidential crimes, the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans dwarfs anything Trump has done. Jackson acted as he did not because he believed that the text of the Constitution granted him immunity, but because in 1831 the United States allowed only white men to vote and there was no constituency large enough to oppose his actions. In other words: He did it because he knew he could get away with it.

[Read: The Roberts Court draws a line]

One could retort that the fact that the republic did not fall after a president ignored a Supreme Court decision should provide some comfort. But that is not the lesson here. The lesson is that presidents and governments are capable of doing monstrous things to people they consider beneath them or to whom they are unaccountable. The extraconstitutional presidential immunity invented out of whole cloth by the Roberts Court offers to make presidents unaccountable not just to a portion of the people they govern, but to all of them.

Whatever crimes Trump has committed in the past, or chooses to commit in the future, he will, unlike Jackson, have the Supreme Court’s blessing—so long as he can disguise them as official acts. But even if Trump loses in November, this concept of presidential immunity conjured up by the Roberts Court has made the current crisis of American democracy perpetual. Until it is overturned, every president is a potential despot.

The Jackson incident is a well-known cautionary tale of presidential lawlessness. Trump’s entourage however, sees it differently—as inspiration.  

Trump’s newly announced running mate, J. D. Vance, has said so himself. In 2022, Vanity Fair reported that Vance had appeared on a podcast in which he said, “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” and added:

“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say”—he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

This is not a view of executive power that is going to submit to whatever legal technicalities the justices might use to restrain it, if they even wanted to. One likely reason Vance was picked is that, unlike former Vice President Mike Pence, Vance has openly said he would have tried to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election using the vice president’s ceremonial role in electoral-vote certification. In other words, he would be a willing accomplice to a coup. We might view Vance’s lawlessness here as a kind of audition for the next Trump administration, one he apparently aced.

The originalists of the Roberts Court, supposedly so committed to the text of the Constitution, the intent of the Framers, and the nuances of history, conjured out of nothing precisely the sort of executive office the Founders of the United States were trying to avoid. They did so because their primary mode of constitutional interpretation is a form of narcissism: Whatever the contemporary conservative movement wants must be what the Founders wanted, regardless of what the Founders actually said, did, or wrote.

The right-wing justices, in rewriting the Constitution in Trump’s image, have clearly diverged from the intentions of the Founders. In “Federalist No. 69,” Alexander Hamilton wrote that former presidents would “be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” Expanding on his point, Hamilton wrote, “The person of the king of Great Britain is sacred and inviolable; there is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected without involving the crisis of a national revolution.” The Roberts Court turned the office of the presidency the Founders had made into the kind of monarchical office they had rebelled against.

The justices, less independent arbiters than the shock troops of the conservative movement, wanted Trump to be immune to prosecution, and so they conjured a rationale for doing so, with a narrow window of legal accountability that only they have the right to determine. But that window might as well be barred from the inside: What Jackson’s story shows is that the feeble, arbitrary restraints the justices put into their own grant of royal immunity to Trump will not withstand any president with the capacity to violate them. Unfortunately, the day a rogue president shows the Supreme Court just how powerless it really is, it will not be the justices who suffer most for their folly.

Can Harris Reassemble Obama’s Coalition? The Atlantic - Politics by Ronald Brownstein

Jul 23, 2024 at 2:06 AM//keep unread//hide

If the Democrats nominate Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed President Joe Biden, which now seems the most probable scenario, the shift will likely force the party to accelerate the continuing transformation of its coalition.

As the nominee, Harris could alleviate Biden’s most intractable electoral problem—his erosion of the support of younger and nonwhite voters—but she could also potentially squander his greatest remaining political asset, his continuing support among older and blue-collar whites. What makes this moment so nerve-racking for Democrats is that they have no sure way of knowing whether Harris could gain more with the former groups than she might lose among the voters that Biden brought back.

I asked Joe Trippi, the Democratic strategist who managed Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential bid, whether the benefits of switching to Harris as a potential nominee are greater than the costs. “I don’t think [that] is a knowable thing,” he said.

Despite that uncertainty, by the time Biden announced his withdrawal from the race yesterday, most Democratic professionals had concluded that the risks of sticking with Biden far exceeded the dangers of switching to Harris. Doubts about Harris’s ability to beat Donald Trump, considering the way her own presidential campaign sputtered in the lead-up to the 2020 Democratic primaries, were a principal reason Biden did not face more pressure to withdraw earlier, even though the polling persistently showed his reelection bid in a perilous position.

[Tim Alberta: This is exactly what the Trump team feared]

Since the first moments of last month’s debate, however, most of the party’s top operatives and strategists have come to view Harris as a better bet than the president. That assessment rests on the fact that, at a minimum, she offers an opportunity to shake up a race in which voter resistance to Biden, centered on doubts that he can still do the job, has been steadily solidifying. Yesterday, you could almost hear a collective sigh of relief as Democrats welcomed the opportunity to change the script: Now they could throw aside the need to defend Biden’s visibly diminished capabilities and redefine the presidential contest with new contrasts.

“There’s a chance it won’t work. There’s a chance we have already dug too big a hole here to get out of,” Paul Maslin, a longtime Democratic pollster, told me. “But we need a juiced-up party—and she and a running mate, and a new reset, and all the attention, might do it.”

Biden won in 2020 partly by luring back some of the older and blue-collar white voters who had resoundingly rejected Hillary Clinton four years earlier. That will be harder for Harris; instead, she will need to win back the younger and nonwhite voters whose support has been hemorrhaging from the Biden campaign, while further expanding the party’s margins with college-educated white women. In all of these ways, if the vice president wins the nomination, the Harris coalition will probably look a little less like the voting blocs Biden assembled and more like an updated version of the coalition that Barack Obama mobilized in his two victories.

Enough Democratic strategists, elected officials, donors, and voters worry about Harris’s viability against Trump to guarantee some receptivity at next month’s convention if one or more candidates want to contest the nomination. But after her endorsements from Biden and an array of party elected officials and interest groups yesterday, Harris may face no serious challenge. California Governor Gavin Newsom, one of the strongest possible rivals for the nomination, moved quickly yesterday to endorse Harris, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, another party favorite, joined him this morning.

“Behind the scenes, there are still people who are trying to make an argument for a contested convention,” Aimee Allison, the founder of She the People, a group that works to elect Democratic women of color, told me. “But I would be surprised after President Biden’s endorsement,” she said, “if any top-tier elected official would … make a play for the nomination.”

As I’ve previously reported, research by numerous Democratic groups this year has found that even after Harris’s three and a half years in office, voters hold very shallow impressions of the vice president. The good news is that Republican attempts to paint Harris as a “woke” San Francisco liberal have for the most part failed to stick. The bad news is that voters’ hazy view of her means that they also have little idea of what she’s accomplished or would like to—except for some limited awareness of the work she’s done defending abortion rights since the Supreme Court overturned them in 2022. Probably because Harris is so little known, her favorability ratings have closely tracked the president’s, although some recent surveys have shown her running very slightly ahead of Biden against Trump.

One Democratic pollster, who late last week conducted focus groups that included discussions of Harris, told me just before Biden’s announcement that he was enthusiastic about a possible switch to Harris precisely because there was still “more room to define her” than there was for Biden. “She’d have to prove herself almost immediately out of the gate,” said the pollster, who asked for anonymity to discuss the private focus-group results, “but that is doable.”

Those excited about a switch to Harris point to several immediate benefits it can bring. The most immediate would be to reenergize party donors who had started a kind of sit-down strike against Biden. Harris also has the capacity to campaign far more vigorously than Biden and deliver more cogently the party’s core messages against Trump. Besides advocating for abortion rights, Harris has been the administration’s point person pushing back against book bans, anti-LGBTQ discrimination, classroom censorship, and other restrictions in Republican-controlled states.

[From the November 2023 issue: The Kamala Harris problem]

That contrasts with Biden, who, as the presidential debate last month showed, “just cannot play offense,” Charles Coughlin, an Arizona-based Republican consultant who is critical of Trump, told me. Harris, Coughlin said, will have a better chance of reminding voters of what they didn’t like about Trump when he was president. That could help Democrats reverse a consistent and, for them, ominous trend in public opinion: Retrospective assessments of Trump’s performance as president routinely exceed the highest ratings he recorded while in office.

In particular, Harris has a proven ability to express more effectively than Biden the Democrats’ case that Trump threatens American rights, values, and democracy itself. She can try to frame the race as that of a prosecutor against a convicted felon. Harris, at 59, also has the advantage of relative youth: Polls have shown that a significant share of Americans doubt the mental capacity of Trump, who has stumbled through his own procession of verbal flubs, memory lapses, and incomprehensible tangents during stump speeches and interviews to relatively little attention in the shadow of Biden’s difficulties. Particularly if Harris picks a younger running mate, she could top a ticket that embodies the generational change that many voters indicated they were yearning for when facing a Trump-Biden rematch.

“Not only is she uniquely prepared to deliver our best argument for taking down Trump and the MAGA movement’s assault on our freedoms,” Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, a co-founder of Way to Win, another liberal group that focuses on electing candidates of color, told me, “she embodies the passing of the torch to a new generation at a time when that is desperately needed to shore up our diverse, winning coalition.”

If Harris can strongly present herself that way, many Democrats believe she could improve on Biden’s performance with several significant groups of voters.

In the best-case scenario for this line of thinking, Harris could regain ground among the younger voters and Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted away from Biden since 2020. At the same time, she could further expand Democrats’ already solid margins among college-educated women who support abortion rights.

“One of our biggest problems is the lack of enthusiasm among younger voters and voters of color, younger independent women in particular,” Maslin, the Democratic pollster, told me. “They have been the standoffish voters who don’t like this choice.” A Harris-led ticket would be “at least an opportunity for those people to perk up their ears and listen.”

Against that hope, Democrats also express anxious uncertainty about how Harris might perform among other groups that the party prizes. Some party operatives are skeptical about whether she can reel back a meaningful number of the Black and Latino men, who, polls show, have moved toward Trump since 2020. Even greater concerns circulate about whether Harris can preserve the surprisingly durable support Biden has posted this year among older and non-college-educated white voters.

In 2020, Biden made modest but decisive gains compared with Clinton in 2016 among those groups (as well as among college-educated whites) in the key Rust Belt battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—and Biden has largely held those gains in polling this year, despite his erosion among voters of color. Some Democrats worry that a Harris-led ticket could bleed support among working-class and older whites in the same way that cost Clinton narrow defeats in all three states.

If Harris, as the nominee, loses some of Biden’s older white voters, that could easily offset any gains she might make among nonwhite and younger ones. Mike Mikus, a Democratic consultant based in Pittsburgh, told me that in Pennsylvania—a must-win state for the Democrats where the polls have consistently shown Trump ahead—he didn’t see “much difference in the overall strength” of Harris and Biden.

“She makes it a little easier to turn out the base in Philly, particularly African American voters,” Mikus said, “but I think she probably loses some of the gains he’s made in these outlying areas with blue-collar white voters.”

[Jerusalem Demsas: The problem with coronating Kamala Harris]

That might seem to imply a racist undertow in attitudes toward Harris, but Mikus largely discounts this, believing that Democrats have already lost virtually all the voters who might oppose her because of her race. The bigger problem, he said, is that her background in California could enable Republicans to paint her as “too far out of the mainstream.” As if on cue, the main super PAC supporting Trump sent out a press release yesterday afternoon describing Harris as a “Radical California liberal.” Republicans also believe that Harris’s greatest vulnerability may be her work as the administration’s point person on the border—and this is an area that Democratic polls, too, have identified as a danger for her.

Others more optimistic about Harris’s prospects think the gains she could generate over Biden among the key elements of the old Obama coalition—young people, minorities, and college-educated whites—will exceed any further erosion she might experience with working-class and older white voters. Nominating a Black woman, Allison said, would challenge the belief “that politicians have to appease older white voters in order to be successful. Is that true now? Does it have to be true, or can we evolve?” A Harris nomination would present a real-world test of these questions, with the highest possible stakes.

Whether Harris can assemble a winning coalition also depends on electoral geography. Before Biden withdrew, most analysts in both parties believed that his only remaining path to reelection was to sweep Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the three former “blue wall” industrial states.

With Harris’s assumed strength among Black voters, Ancona of Way to Win argues that Harris reopens “the full 2020 map” of swing states, including North Carolina and Georgia. Coughlin, the GOP consultant in Arizona, thinks her potential improvement among white suburban women around Phoenix could allow Harris to put his state back in play; some consultants focusing on Latino voters expressed optimism that she could do the same in Nevada.

But if those hopes are overstated, Harris will have to follow the same path as Biden and win all three Rust Belt battlegrounds—where white voters, and non-college-educated white voters in particular, are a much larger part of the electorate than they are nationally. Given their demographic composition, those states may be at least as difficult for her as they were for Biden. For that reason, some Democrats are worried that Harris might well win a greater share of the national popular vote than Biden but still face long odds of amassing the 270 Electoral College votes to reach the White House.

These considerations would also loom over Harris’s choice of a running mate, if she becomes the nominee next month. The safe play would be to “balance the ticket,” as political professionals say, by picking a white, male vice-presidential nominee from a swing state. Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona and Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania top many of those professionals’ lists, with Shapiro most favored because Pennsylvania is more crucial to Democrats’ chances than Arizona.

The other option that energizes many Democrats would be for Harris to take the bold, historic option of selecting another woman: Whitmer. That would be a greater gamble, but a possible model would be 1992, when Bill Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate; Gore was, like him, a centrist Baby Boomer southerner—rather than an older D.C. hand. “I love Josh Shapiro and I think he would be a great VP candidate, but I would double down” with Whitmer, Mikus told me. “I don’t think you have to go with a moderate white guy. I think you can be bold [with a pick] that electrifies your base.” I heard similar views from several consultants.

Until yesterday, Democrats were so despondent that the prospect of an electrified campaign seemed remote. That’s all changed. Many Democrats now believe they have a chance to reawaken what they call the “anti-MAGA majority” of voters who showed up for elections in 2018, 2020, and 2022. In the nearly two years since the midterm elections, that coalition has fractured under the weight of discontent about inflation and the border, as well as doubts about Biden’s capacity.

Demographic and cultural changes are remaking America—creating a political moment that has cultivated the conditions for a Democratic “coalition of transformation,” as I’ve called it, centered on the younger, nonwhite, and female voters who are most comfortable with this new America. A Catholic white man born during World War II, Biden was always an improbable leader for such a coalition. Harris can not only articulate the values of such an alliance, but also embody them in a powerful way.

If Harris becomes the nominee, she must prove that she can inspire this coalition to go to the polls in numbers big enough to stop a highly motivated MAGA-Republican movement. A Trump victory would herald a very different, far darker transformation of American life.