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Trump’s Desecration of Arlington

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A couple of days ago I saw that Trump had staged some sort of photo op at Arlington Cemetery. This was done to draw attention to the third anniversary of the Kabul airport attack that killed 13 U.S. service members. I thought this was a cheap stunt best ignored. But now more details are coming out that make the incident a bigger deal.

Various news stories have been a bit contradictory. Here is WaPo’s version:

An altercation occurred after a cemetery staff member warned people employed by the Trump campaign that while they were permitted to take photos and videos in the cemetery, they could not do so in Section 60, the final resting place for many U.S. service members who were killed in recent conflicts, a defense official familiar with the situation said Wednesday. The guidance was issued to the campaign both before the memorial event and again once they were on-site due to legal restrictions on campaign-related activities there, said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Trump had been invited to a memorial event to mark the deaths of 13 U.S. service members by some of the grieving families, the defense official said.

“What was abundantly clear cut was: Section 60, no photos and no video,” the defense official said.

A person familiar with the matter told NPR, which first reported the incident Tuesday, that the Trump campaign staff pushed and verbally attacked a cemetery official who tried to stop them from taking photos and videos in Section 60. Cemetery staff said in a statement that federal law bars photography for political campaign purposes at the site.

NPR says it received this statement from Arlington National Cemetery:

In a statement to NPR, Arlington National Cemetery said it “can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed.”

“Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign,” according to the statement. “Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants.”

This appears to say that it’s against federal law to use any part of Arlington Cemetery in a political campaign. Whether photography in section 60 specifically is also against federal law, or is just cemetery policy, isn’t clear to me. You might remember my older brother was buried at Arlington in 2015. People do walk around on the grounds and take photos. Here’s one I took in 2015 of the riderless horse that was part of the procession to the grave site.

My brother is not in section 60, at least.

Charles Pierce had some choice words:

So the sun was out and shining as this third-generation draft dodger pretended to care about the soldiers who were suckers and losers enough to get killed during the United States’ withdrawal from its Afghanistan adventure. How in the hell this was allowed to happen is beyond me. Arlington is the country’s “most hallowed ground.” (Just ask the tour guides.) Arlington is profaned by his presence on just an average day. But to allow itself to be used for the purpose propping up one of the Republican Party’s most noxious half-truths—as promulgated by its most noxious elements personified by its most noxious candidate—is an insult to the over 400 Medal of Honor awardees buried there.

I hope the report that was filed will be made public eventually. And if it really is a violation of federal law to stage campaign stunts at Arlington, I want to see some follow up. At least this morning the incident is getting a lot of coverage.

NPR:

In a statement to NPR, Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s spokesman, strongly rejected the notion of a physical altercation, adding: “We are prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made.

“The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony,” Cheung said in the statement.

The Trump campaign declined to make that footage immediately available.

Steven Cheung claimed the Trump campaign had permission to put on their little stunt. But it turns out the only permission they received was from some of the families of the Marines killed at Kabul. It wasn’t their “permission” to give.

This photo of the stunt, with Trump grinning like the idiot he is and giving a thumb’s up while standing next to headstones, is bad enough. He can’t even fake being respectful. And the families involved should be ashamed. I understand the stunt included a wreath laying ceremony. A video from Fox News shows a man in military uniform taking part. That guy needs to be in big trouble.

Update: I picked up from Steve Benen that the wreath laying was conducted by the Old Guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns. Arlington will take requests for such ceremonies, limited to one a day, says the Arlington website.. Trump put himself in the middle of it, which soesn’t seem normal to me. But the military personnel in the ceremony weren’t doing anything wrong.

Stuff to read:

Rick Perlstein interviews David Neiwert on the potential for right-wing violence after the general election, no matter the outcome.

Trump plans would add $5.8 trillion to national debt. This is according to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Trump’s alma mater.

Jill Filipovic, Why Kamala Harris gets under Trump’s skin at Slate

Trump Has Been Reindicted

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I just saw this —

A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., has reindicted Donald Trump on four felony charges related to his effort to subvert the 2020 presidential election.

The 36-page indictment, secured Tuesday by special counsel Jack Smith, is an attempt by prosecutors to recalibrate the case against Trump in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling last month that concluded presidents enjoy sweeping immunity from prosecution for their official conduct.

The new indictment removes some specific allegations against Trump but contains the same four criminal charges, including conspiracy to defraud the United States. It’s a signal that Smith believes the high court’s immunity decision doesn’t pose a major impediment to convicting the former president.

Jack Smith has been busy. Yesterday he filed an appeal to overturn Loose Cannon’s decision to dismiss the documents case. Here is Joyce Vance’s commentary. It’s expected the 11th Circuit will agree with Smith, but what happens after that isn’t clear. It might go to the Supreme Court. Smith didn’t ask that Cannon be removed from the case, but I understand the 11th Circuit could reassign the case. Note also that Smith didn’t ask for the case to be expedited. So nothing significant is likely to happen until after the election, and possibly not until next year. If Trump loses, perhaps SOTUS won’t try to protect him.

In other news: I’m seeing news stories that Trump is back to agreeing to the September 10 debate, on the same terms as the last debate. I haven’t heard that the Harris campaign has agreed.

Stuff to read: Greg Palast has a post headlined I was on the phone with RFK Jr.
When he lost his mind. Palast has known RFK the Lesser for many years. Years ago they wrote articles together. What Palast describes sounds like the brain worm really did scramble Lesser’s cognitive abiblities.

At the Atlantic, see Trump’s Evangelical Supporters Just Lost Their Best Excuse by Peter Wehner. Wehner explains that Trump has twisted himself into a pretzel trying to back away from abortion restrictions. And that was the primary issue keeping him tied to the evangelicals.

One more. Josh Marshall asks, Donald’s Fallen Down. So Why Can’t He Get Up?

Today’s News Bits, and It’s Only Monday

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First, some humor:

This is the headlline to an actual op ed by Rich Lowry, the editor in chief of National Review. I don’t know what’s going on at National Review, but I skimmed enough of this thing to be able to assure you it’s not a joke. But I’m not going to waste one of my few remaining “gift article” links for the month on it.

There’s another piece at the New York Times that’s actually useful to read: Republican Donors: Do You Know Where Your Money Goes? This one’s a gift article. The author, Juleanna Glover, is some sort of big deal corporate consultant who has worked for past Republican administrations, although not Trump’s.

Anyone who has spent time reviewing Donald Trump’s campaign spending reports would quickly conclude they’re a governance nightmare. There is so little disclosure about what happened to the billions raised in 2020 and 2024 that donors (and maybe even the former president himself) can’t possibly know how it was spent.

Federal Election Commission campaign disclosure reports from 2020 show that much of the money donated to the Trump campaign went into a legal and financial black hole reportedly controlled by Trump family members and close associates. This year’s campaign disclosures are shaping up to be the same. Donors big and small give their hard-earned dollars to candidates with the expectation they will be spent on direct efforts to win votes. They deserve better.

During the 2020 election, almost $516 million of the over $780 million spent by the Trump campaign was directed to American Made Media Consultants, a Delaware-based private company created in 2018 that masked the identities of who ultimately received donor dollars, according to a complaint filed with the F.E.C. by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. How A.M.M.C. spent the money was a mystery even to Mr. Trump’s campaign team, according to news reports shortly after the election.

Apparently nobody can tell if any laws were broken, because there aren’t enough details. Lara Trump was AMMC’s first president. Jared Kushner was also involved with it somehow.

This election, the Trump campaign and four of its PACs have paid Red Curve Solutions, another private company, at least $18 million. The Campaign Legal Center says Red Curve appears to pay Mr. Trump’s legal bills and then gets reimbursed by the PACs. (The law is murky on what types of legal bills can be paid by campaigns, but some are allowed.) The head of Red Curve also serves as the treasurer for the Trump campaign as well as the affiliated PACs.

What percentage of donor contributions go to lawyers defending Mr. Trump? It’s impossible to know.

In June, NBC revealed the existence of a new mystery company, called Launchpad Strategies. Launchpad took in almost $15 million in Trump political cash via the Trump Save America Joint Fundraising Committee and the Trump National Committee. Little is known about this new group. It was created in 2023 and the Trump campaign says it is related to fund-raising. We don’t know who owns it, who runs it or where the $15 million went.

One assumes the Trumps are using campaign money as a kind of all-purpose slush fund, but if Trump is re-elected we’ll never know. If he isn’t, I seriously hope this is investigated. I’m remembering that we never did get the full story of where all the money for his 2017 inauguration went.

Debate May Be Cancelled

This morning there were headlines saying that Trump might call off the September 10 debate. Initially the reports pointed to Trump’s complaints about the host network, ABC. But Politico has another explanation.

With just 15 days left until the scheduled Sept. 10 presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, negotiations between their two campaigns have hit an impasse over whether the candidates’ microphones will be muted when it is not their turn to speak, according to four people familiar with the issue.

In June, President Joe Biden’s campaign came to an agreement with Trump’s: There would be two debates — CNN’s on June 27 and ABC’s on Sept. 10 — conducted by mutually negotiated rules. One of the Biden team’s demands — which the Trump team agreed to — was that microphones “will be muted throughout the debate except for the candidate whose turn it is to speak,” as CNN announced on June 15.

But Biden is no longer running for president. And Harris’ campaign wants the microphones to be hot at all times during the ABC debate — as has historically been the case at presidential debates.

So Kamala Harris wants open mics, and Trump doesn’t. Maybe Kamala the prosecutor is itching to cross examine Trump. I’d love to see that. But I hope this doesn’t crash the debate altogether.

In other news — a daughter of RFK the Lesser says that once her dad found a dead whale on the beach. So as anyone would do, he somehow cut off the whale’s head and strapped it to his car, then drove five hours home with it. “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” the daughter said. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.” I regret that the article doesn’t say what happened to the head.

In more other news — The estate of the late Isaac Hayes served Trump with a notice that he is being sued over use of the Hayes song “Hold On, I’m Coming,” in his campaign, without permission.

Stuff to Read

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Interesting articles I’ve seen over the past few hours —

I recommend this piece by Greg Sargent at The New Republic. He makes an important point. Here’s just a bit:

In her rousing convention speech on Thursday, Harris offered many olive branches to right-leaning independents and Republican voters. She vowed toughness on immigration and crime. She promised to transcend the nation’s divisions. She vowed to govern for all Americans and transcend faction or party. She made numerous appeals to voters with decidedly right-leaning values.

But, in mulling what Harris means by all this, it’s crucial to appreciate what she did not do. Harris offered all this outreach to voters outside the core Democratic coalition without making serious concessions to the ideological preoccupations we associate with MAGA-style right-wing populism. There was no real accommodation with what might be called The World According to MAGA.

Instead, Harris treated Trumpism and the MAGA movement as forces that must be decisively repudiated—and unequivocally left behind.

The crew at the right-wing National Review were never in the tank for Trump, and now that they smell defeat they are to point to it. The original article is behind a paywall, but Raw Story provides some quotes:

“The GOP electoral coalition is the smaller, weaker coalition. It’s lost the popular vote seven out of nine times in my lifetime (I’m 36). It has lost the Electoral College three out of the last four cycles. Conservatives might not be very eager to hear this, but ‘We the People’ are mostly Democrats,” Wright continued.

Republicans can still win despite this, he added, but so far the only times that has happened is when they nominated outsiders — and Trump is now the last thing from an outsider you could imagine.

“Trump isn’t losing because Kamala Harris is being hyped by the press and fluffed up to kingdom come. He isn’t losing because the press is being unfair to him. He’s losing because he’s a weak, unpopular, undisciplined candidate running at the head of a weak, minority electoral coalition. That’s the truth, whether anyone wants to hear it or not,” Wright concluded.

This next article makes an interesting comparison between the two party conventions. The DNC’s stagecraft, signs, posters, chants, etc. were mostly all about America. The RNC’s were just about Trump. Audience signs and chants at the DNC were all about America. At the RNC, it was the Trump show.

And here’s one that says Trump’s “event” at the southern border this weekend featured a setion of wall that was built durng the Obama administration.

MONTEZUMA PASS, Ariz. — A brown ribbon carved a straight gash across a vast, flat desert basin, the only mark of human civilization visible on this wilderness. The partition charged up a steep hill in Montezuma Canyon, then suddenly stopped. Extra pieces lay in piles nearby, rusting monuments to an unfinished campaign promise.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump came here on Thursday to heap praise on the structure standing to his right — “the Rolls-Royce of walls,” he called it — and lament the unused segments lying to his left. Joining him there, Border Patrol union leader Paul A. Perez called the standing fence “Trump wall” and the idle parts “Kamala wall,” after his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Those labels were inaccurate. This section of 20-foot steel slats was actually built during the administration of President Barack Obama. Trump added the unfinished extension up the hillside, an engineering challenge that cost at least $35 million a mile. The unused panels of 30-foot beams were procured during the Trump administration and never erected

I understand chunks of Trump’s wall are not holding up well, so it’s understandable he chose a section that still looks nice.

We now know that each of the four nights of the Democratic convention had significantly higher ratings that the four nights of the Republican convention. As I keep saying, the days in which putting Trump on television is a guaranteed ratings boost are long over.


Was That a Great Convention, or What?

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(Update: Right after I posted this, NBC reported thet RFK the Lesser is dropping out and endorsing Trump. This is not a surprise, and I doubt it will make much difference, but we’ll see.)

(Update: “Special Counsel Jack Smith has decided against seeking a major hearing to present evidence in the election-interference case against Donald Trump before voters go to the polls Nov. 5, according to people familiar with the matter,” it says here.)

Wowzers. I don’t think the DNC convention could have gone any better than it did. If Harris-Walz don’t get a bounce from that, the laws of physics must be suspended. As of this morning it’s still a toss-up race, though. Let’s give it three or four days.

I’m also waiting to see the television ratings for last night compared to the last night of the RNC. For the first three nights the DNC’s television rating blew the RNC’s out of the water. And for those who did tune in to see Trump’s acceptance speech, I believe the most charitable review I read of it was that it was an “unhinged mess.”

The convention has been criticized for not inviting a pro-Palestinian speaker on the stage. I heard somewhere that there were concerns a pro-Palestinian speaker might say something that would muck up the cease-fire talks. Although the cease-fire talks aren’t going anywhere, that I can tell, at the moment.

I suppose you’ve heard the unconfirmed story that Trump called Netanyahu to ask him to not make any deals before the election. Both Trump and Netanyahu deny it happened, which of course has no bearing on whether it did or not. I’d be more surprised if it didn’t happen than if it did. It sounds like something Trump would do. But if it gets closer to November and Trump is losing, Bibi might want to think about making a deal while Joe Biden is still president.

There is also some grumbling in right-wing commentary that Harris didn’t provide enough details about her plans. (Like Trump ever provided details?) Obviously Harris was avoiding a wonky policy speech. And one right-wing blogger complained that Harris actually spent part of her acceptance speech talking about her personal background. From the transcript, it appears Trump spent at least a third of his nearly endless acceptance speech talking about being (maybe) grazed in the ear.

So, roughly, we’ve got two months and a couple of weeks until the election. Besides the great convention, one of the most hopeful signs, to me, is that Trump seems to be utterly melting down. He doesn’t know how to just take a deep breath and rethink his strategy. Now he’s on defense, and he’s being reactive instead of proactive. During Harris’s speech he was furiously posting in ALL CAPS on Truth Social in howling rage. He called in to Fox News, so agitated that he was punching numbers on the phone while talking. And Fox News had to cut him off. So then he called Newsmax, which apparently let him continue as long as he wanted.

At WaPo, Ban Balz writes that Kamala Harris has put Trump in a box, and he’s struggling to break out.

As Harris has glided through the past month, Trump has taken to social media or to friendly media interviews in hopes of setting the terms of the conversation, but that has backfired. He has tried invective, exaggeration and lies, something that in the past he used to shift the focus, sometimes to distract from his own problems, at other times to draw attention away from a rival. It hasn’t done what he hoped.

The former president has tried counterprogramming to force the media to look his way this week. It should have been obvious to him that this would be Harris’s week in the same way that the Republican convention was his. The only news Democrats made during his convention was that pressure on President Joe Biden to quit his reelection bid was ramping up. Trump has learned, perhaps painfully, that at this moment, fewer are listening to him. In short, nothing seems to be working the way it once did.

That could change, and obviously major media will continue to cover his campaign. But as I keep saying his act is old and tired, and if he wants to be the center of attention the way he was in 2016 he’s going to have to do something new. And I don’t think he can.

In other Trump news, see Trump’s businesses are raking in millions of dollars from Republican political campaigns – including his own at CNN.

Night Four: The Big Finale

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Consider this an open thread to comment on whatever. I am hoping to not fall asleep before the acceptance speech.

I’m reading that the DNC convention is getter much higher ratings than the RNC did. That’s a good sign. Meanwhile, Trump is bounding around the country trying to get attention. After his extremely weird “law and order” even in Howell, Michigan (see last post), he was supposed to sit for an interview with the Detroit News. But he bailed when reporters started asking tough questions. This is from The New Republic:

As Donald Trump returned to Michigan to speak about crime, he deliberately ignored the truth: Crime is down. 

Standing under a banner that read “Make America Safe Again” on Tuesday, Trump spoke about law and order and a so-called “Kamala crime wave” occurring at levels “nobody has ever seen before.” But when journalists tried to ask him about that claim, he got scared.

According to The Detroit News, the Trump team had originally agreed to sit down for an interview with their newspaper Tuesday. However, after reporters pushed the former president about spreading lies about Michigan’s crime data, “a campaign aide said the presidential candidate no longer had time for an interview after the speech.”

Data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn’t show any crime wave phenomenon. In the two years since the former president left office, violent crime has continued to drop and return to pre-pandemic levels.

Poor baby. Today he was at the southern border doing something. I’m sure Fox News covered it.

More later.

The Vibes at the DNC

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I didn’t watch any of the RNC Convention, so I can’t personally do a compare and contrast. But I snagged a couple of Associated Press photos, one of the RNC and one of the DNC. I won’t have to tell you which is which.

So which group looks like they’re winning?

I’ve been struck by how genuinely multiracial the Democratic Party has become. The  nonwhites at the RNC clearly were there for display purposes only.

My only problem with the DNC convention is that I’m old and in the eastern time zone. I just can’t stay awake for anything that happens after 10 pm EST or so. Last night I saw Michelle Obama being introduced, and the next thing I remember somebody — I think it was Jen Psaki — was giving a roundup of the night’s events. I slept through the Obama speeches, in other words. I’m making a point of finding the videos and watching them later today.

The roll call was a hoot, although a tad overstimulating for me. And that business with holding a simultaneous big rally in Milwaukee was inspired. The DNC has come a long way from the 2004 DNC Convention when the balloons didn’t drop. 

MSNBC is mostly just showing the convention with very little commentary, I notice. Their lineup is on hand but might as well have stayed home. Someone on social media was saying PBS was cutting a lot of stuff out.

Meanwhile, here’s just a little snip of Trump’s inspired “counterprogramming” event from Howell, Michigan, last night.

So has anyone run across the street for bread and milk lately? I hope you made it back okay. (And whose bright idea was this, I wonder?)

The much-dreaded protests have fizzled. The organizers were promsing 50,000 or more. Police estimated 3,500 protesters on Monday. Dana Milbank’s column on the protesters is worth reading. From his descriptiton those who did show up were what I’ve called the “vocational protesters” who show up at any leftie demonstration with giant puppets and megaphones to make spectacles of themselves. And, as usual, what few people were there quickly splintered into factions marhing off in different directions. Jill Stein was among them. She seems to be turning into the new Lyndon LaRouche.

So far, so good.

Trump’s New Theme Song: Slip Slidin’ Away

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So the DNC Convention begins tomorrow. I am trusting them to put on a good show to give Harris-Walz a big bump.

There will be protests. Gov. Pritzker has promised the convention will not be a replay of 1968. The protesters will have their voices heard, he said, and police will respect that as long as the protests are peaceful. So good luck, Chicago. Gov. Pritzker is a sensible guy, and I trust he will use good judgment. We can’t always know what police will do, though.

I’m just now catching up on yesterday’s Trump rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, which Trump called “North Carolina.” I found a pretty good highlight video. It does show empty seats in the arena, which has a seating capacity of just over 8,000 (I looked it up). I’m not going to hazard a guess as to how many people were there, but it was definitely less than 8,000. And according to many news stories, people were leaving while Trump was still talking (and talking, and talking).

See also some short highlight clips in this Rolling Stone article.

In the usual stew of nonsense one bit stood out for me. This is from the Guardian:

Trump confused some in the audience with what appeared to be a claim that if Harris could become the candidate without a primary election, then so should he because he is so popular among Republicans.

“I said, so why are we having an election? They didn’t have an election. Why are we having an election?” he said.

Trump’s scrambled brain simply can’t make bits of conceptual knowledge say in their proper lanes. Is he confusing the primaries with the general? Has he forgotten that the Republican primaries, which he won, are over? What’s going on there?

There will be another Trump event on Tuesday. Josh Marshall writes,

Trump just announced a “crime and safety” rally for next Tuesday in Howell, Michigan, a town that has been heavily associated with the KKK for decades. Indeed, just late last month White Supremacists marched in the town chanting “We love Hitler. We love Trump.” Some but not all of the reputation comes from the fact that a long time Grand Drago of the Michigan Klan lived there and his farm was a sort of home base for the Klan. (I just found out this afternoon that a good bit of the 1991 documentary Blood in the Face – great doc, by the way – was shot there.)

I’m not sure this is going to be a rally, exactly. He’s supposed to speak at the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office, according to the Detroit Free Press. It could get weird. This event, whatever it is, is part of a “swing-state blitz” meant to draw attention away from the DNC convention. But attention doesn’t seem to be doing Trump much good.

The Zeitgeist has turned on Trump. In less than four weeks he has gone from being the near-inevitable winner to a captal-L Loser. The political press is awash in stories about how the Trump campaign keeps trying to reset, but Trump isn’t cooperating. At this point, the people running Trump’s campaign and Trump himself are barely on the same team. They’re almost canceling each other out.

And I had not remembered this, but before the 2020 general elections lots of headlines were accusing Trump of flailing and failing to reset. Just like now. He appears to have a long-established pattern of falling apart under pressure.

Far-right influencers like Laura Loomer and Nick Fuentes have begun to attack the campaign — although not Trump himself — for being lame and not far enough Right.

Some of the internet’s most influential far-right figures are turning against former president Donald Trump’s campaign, threatening a digital “war” against the Republican candidate’s aides and allies that could complicate the party’s calls for unity in the final weeks of the presidential race.

Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and podcaster who dined with Trump at his Palm Beach resort Mar-a-Lago in 2022, said on X that Trump’s campaign was “blowing it” by not positioning itself more to the right and was “headed for a catastrophic loss,” in a post that by Wednesday had been viewed 2.6 million times.

Laura Loomer, a far-right activist whom Trump last year called “very special,” said his “weak” surrogates had unraveled his momentum and that his approach “needs to change FAST because we can’t talk about a stolen election for another 4 years,” in an X post that was “liked” more than 8,000 times.

I’m not sure exactly what these people want, other than more racism and misogyny. They might have noticed that Trump is barely talking about policy at all. He’ll briefly brag that he’s going to make China pay us through tariffs, which isn’t how tariffs work. He’s going to do something something to end inflation and to shut down the border, and probably deport several million people. He’s cutting taxes. Usual stuff. He doesn’t seem to be interested in much else. He’d rather talk about how Kamala Harris has been prohibited from laughing. Seriously.

As Trump’s campaign grapples with slumping performance in the polls, the far-right activists argue that it has failed by not adopting harder-right positions on race and immigration. They have also called for the campaign to fire its co-managers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, blaming them for a lackluster strategy.

Many of the campaign’s hard-right critics said they still stand strongly behind Trump himself. But some of them have vowed to pummel the campaign online and at Trump rallies unless it changes course, presenting a challenge for campaign officials who have worked to publicly disavow or disregard extreme voices for fear they could alienate voters.

MAGA is trying to self-destruct, in other words. Let’s hope they succeed. It’s interesting to me that they believe Trump is this all-powerful being of great knowledge and authority who has lost control of his own campaign. Hmm.

Anyway, now many Republicans, including Lindsey Graham, are admitting Trump could  lose. See also Spencer Neale at The American Conservative, It’s Kamala’s to Lose.

Paul Simon probaly would object, but I think Trump’s new theme song (now that he can’t use the Titanic song) should be “Slip Slidin’ Away.”

Trump’s Mental Decline News

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The state of the Trump campaign:

I take it the big reveal in yesterday’s “press conference” in New Jersey was that Trump hasn’t been inside a grocery store in years, if ever.

At Bedminster he also brilliantly said that if Kamala Harris is president, “You’re all going to be thrown into a communist system … You’re going to be thrown into a system where everybody gets health care.”

See also “Trump blends falsehoods and exaggerations at rambling NJ press conference” from the Associated Press. At the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin joins the growing chorus of media critics asking why Trump’s mental decline isn’t being reported.

Where does this leave Republicans? The MAGA party is caught in a gloom-and-doom loop, forced to run away from the radical Project 2025 plan, defend an increasingly irrational candidate and make excuses for its unlikable, inept nominee for vice president. One wonders when we will hear and see reports about “Republican panic!” or “Could Republicans dump Trump?” Let’s get real: That sort of coverage is reserved for Democrats. Alas, whatever horserace contest the media continues to present bears little resemblance to the jaw-dropping reality before our eyes.

The Trump campaign has another problem that I’ve read about here and there. See Bill Scher at Washington Monthly, who tells us Trump’s ground operation is failing to launch.

You may recall that two months ago for the Washington Monthly, I flagged that Donald’s Trump’s Get-Out-The-Vote Plan is Bonkers, as it relies heavily on outside groups, especially the far-right Turning Point network, despite its lack of campaign experience and dubious finances.

Furthermore, Trump forced out the former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel at the urging of Turning Point’s leader Charlie Kirk to execute the plan. (As I said before, this looks like a scandal and Republicans should be outraged.)

And in this newsletter two weeks ago, I noted that Trump’s “you won’t have to vote anymore” riff, delivered at a Turning Point conference, was part of that GOTV plan—pressing irregular right-wing voters to show up this year.

Recent reporting from the Washington Post and The New York Times about Trump’s ground game has reinforced my view. …

… Many Republicans are not only worried about Trump’s misguided messaging, but also about his mismanaged turnout operation. On August 3, the Washington Post reported, “With fewer than 100 days before the election, local GOP officials in battleground states have raised alarms about the scant presence of Trump campaign field staff.”

“The Trump campaign’s shrunken in-house operation resulted from its takeover of the Republican National Committee in March,” noted the Post. The “RNC had been planning an extensive field program,” but an anonymous source told the Post that the detailed plans were “totally discarded” following the takeover.

As I understand it, Trump figured he could save money on the ground operation. Gotta pay all those lawyers, you know. Do read the whole article; lots of juicy bits. Elon Musk even gets involved. Meanwhile, the Harris campaign is recruiting lots of volunteers to get out the vote.

On the Harris side there is some more good news:

An aggregate of polls modelled by the Washington Post shows that the US vice-president has become newly competitive in four southern Sun belt states that were previously leaning heavily towards Donald Trump, the Republican nominee and former president.

If the trend holds, it means Harris could eke out an electoral college victory either by winning those states – Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina – or, alternatively, by capturing three swing states in the midwestern Rust belt, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Trump, by contrast, would need to capture both groups of states to earn the 270 electoral college votes necessary to secure victory, according to the model.

So, while the race is still close, things definitely are looking up.

I also want to call your attention to a piece in the New York Times by Jamelle Bouie, Trump Has Opened the Pathway to Reform. The headline doesn’t exactly match the article. Bouie is reflecting on whether the Republican Party can be rehabilitated after Trump. In brief, Bouie writes that the GOP’s problem is that it has been able to stay in power and win elections without bothering to craft anything resembling a plan for governance that appeals to the majority of voters. Indeed, the only way to get ahead in today’s GOP is to become more and more crazy extreme Right.  And even after Trump is gone they will have no incentive to change.

The United States will always have a conservative party, but American democracy needs that party to be committed to the maintenance of our democratic institutions. The only way to plot a path from here to there is to forcibly change the incentives within the Republican Party, which is to say, the only way to break the fever is to change the rules of the game. A more democratic American democracy — where majorities elect and majorities rule — would force the Republican Party to try, once again, to compete for national majorities.

Worth reading. No paywall.