Kamala and the Never Trumpers

Plus: Here comes the post-honeymoon campaign

Folks, enjoy this while you can, but remember that euphoria fades and even the spiciest honeymoons come to an end.

Happy Tuesday.

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Dogs on watch

Sunday night at the lake. Auggie and Eli hard at work watching over their people.

Here comes the anti-Kamala blitz

Let’s start with some positives before we dive into the contrarian warnings and alarums:

• The shift from Biden —→ Harris has turned the spotlight on the Dem’s very effective bench.

• Sahil Kapur on the Dem’s new Realist Optimism:

• The enthusiasm is real. Peter Hamby in Puck:

  With apologies to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, Democrats haven’t been this fired up for a presidential nominee since Barack Obama exploded onto the national scene in 2008. That was 16 years ago! Sixteen years since a Democrat has inspired authentic passion, spawning merch, memes, volunteer sign-ups, voter registration, and a tsunami of small-donor cash. The $200 million that Harris has raised since taking charge of the Biden campaign operation—a number that could reach $300 million by the end of the month—is impressive enough. But the standout statistic is how much of that money came from first-time donors: 66 percent. 

  Put another way, a couple million Americans woke up last week, looked at their phones, and said, Holy shit, we can actually win this thing.

• J.D. keeps whining. Via the Wapo:

  “All of us were hit with a little bit of a political sucker punch,” Vance said about Biden’s withdrawal on July 21, according to a recording of his remarks at a Saturday fundraiser in Golden Valley, Minn. “The bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden, because whatever we might have to say, Kamala is a lot younger. And Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did.

• And, speaking of J.D: No, he does NOT f*ck couches. But he’s still weird as sh*t.

  

Now for the warnings.

If you live in a swing state (like me) and have been watching any of the Olympics you’ve already been pounded by anti-Harris SuperPAC ads. This morning Politico’s Playbook is reporting that the Trump campaign’s own attack-ad onslaught begins today.

The Trump campaign’s first $12 million ad flight targeting Harris goes live in six swing states this morning, and it’s all about the border — tagging the VP as “failed, weak, dangerously liberal.”

“Under Harris, over 10 million illegally here. A quarter of a million Americans dead from fentanyl. Brutal migrant crimes. And ISIS — now here,” the voiceover says, cutting to footage from Harris’ widely panned 2021 interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, where she scoffs at a question about visiting the border.

**

None of this comes as a surprise, and it will do little to blunt the wave of enthusiasm among Democrats. But, despite her nearly flawless roll-out, Harris clearly has her work cut out for her. Christopher Cadelago writes in Politico Magazine:

Harris has never dealt with an opponent as ferocious as former President Donald Trump. He’ll seize on any perceived weakness and attack every vulnerability.

That means she needs to figure out how to neutralize her exposure on the border and immigration. Harris will need a crisp answer when talking about stubbornly high inflation. She must stem the slow-rolling erosion of the Democratic coalition that occurred on Biden’s watch and energize young voters, Latinos and other voters of color while holding Biden’s white working-class support across the industrial Midwestern battleground states. As a woman of color, she has to worry about calibrating her approach in ways that may seem unfair, and, at times, limiting. She has a momentous decision to make — her own vice presidential pick — and very little time to make it. In short, there is no margin for the kind of errors that plagued her first presidential bid.

**

Jonah Goldberg (a Kamala-skeptic) offers blunter advice:

I hope she’s prepared to be the Mother of All Flip Floppers. 

I want her to cut an ad where she looks straight into the camera and says, “That stuff I said about getting rid of cows? Screw that noise,” and then take a bite of a giant cheeseburger. 

“Medicare for All? That sounded like a great idea. But I now realize we can’t afford it and there are better and more affordable approaches within the current system.” 

“‘Defund the police?’ Are you high? I’ve seen what a lack of policing does to the most vulnerable. I want to provide whatever resources the police need to do their jobs the right way.”

When asked about her immigration position, she should come up with an entirely new one: “Pathway to citizenship for anybody who crosses the border illegally? That’s bonkers. I learned from my work on this issue that we cannot be a magnet for an endless flow of migrants, no matter how much I sympathize with their plight. We are a nation of laws.” 

I want her to do this because I think these are the right positions. But it shouldn’t be lost on anybody that it would be smart for her to do this politically. If she runs as the Kamala Harris of the 2020 primaries, she will get crushed. 

What’s a Never Trumper to Do?

(Spoiler alert: It’s not really a hard choice.) My latest in The Atlantic:

When the Never Trump movement emerged, in 2016, it wasn’t always clear what never meant. For some anti-Trump Republicans, it simply meant a short, shameful interval before falling back in line with their party. Others couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton and sat out the election. But a notable remnant meant never as in “absolutely never.” As the threat of a second Donald Trump presidency grows more imminent, that remnant seems to have hardened its resolve to do whatever it needs to do to keep him out of office—including planning to support the presumptive Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris.

For some observers, the idea of conservative-leaning Americans voting for Harris is unthinkable. “For Never Trump or Trump reluctant conservatives the Harris nomination is a catastrophic development,” the American Enterprise Institute fellow and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen declared in a post on X. “At least Biden pretended to be a moderate,” he wrote. But now, he argued, Never Trump Republicans have to choose between Trump and Harris, whom Thiessen described as the “most left wing Democratic presidential nominee in modern times,” adding, bizarrely, that she was “a Democratic Socialist who is to the left of Bernie Sanders.”

In other words, Trump is a rapacious, seditionist felon, but as the ever-classy Thiessen later posted, Harris is a “dumb Marxist.”

It’s important to understand what’s going on here. Theissen leans on this sort of crude caricature because it’s useful for anti-anti-Trump Republicans who have been scrabbling desperately for an excuse — almost any excuse — to vote for Trump. For the anti-anti-Trump pundit, whatever the allegation against Trump, whatever his crimes or his frauds, the other side is always worse. As Damon Linker once wrote, anti-anti-Trumpism “allows the right to indulge its hatred of liberals and liberalism while sidestepping the need for a reckoning with the disaster of the Trump administration itself.”

But the gravamen of Thiessen’s argument was that Harris also posed an impossible dilemma for Never Trump conservatives.

“Even the pretense of a benign alternative has been eliminated,” he claimed.

But, as it turns out, the choice of Trump vs. Harris is proving to be a remarkably easy choice for Never Trumpers, who have moved far beyond searching for a “benign alternative.”

The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols posted a quick answer to Thiessen: “Yes, I have to pick between a normal person who is going to have some policies I won’t like and an unhinged, deranged wannabe dictator sociopath surrounded by goons.”

In other words, not really that hard at all.

On paper, Thiessen might once have had a point. Before Trump, the ideological divide between Harris and conservative Republicans might have been too large to bridge. But this is not a normal campaign. For most Never Trump Republicans, the 2024 election is not primarily about the divide between the left and the right; it’s about preserving our liberal constitutional order. For years, Never Trumpers have been split between those who have remained conservative at the policy level and those who more or less transformed themselves into progressives. There were also differences of opinion within the movement about whether Joe Biden should step aside, but there was never any doubt about the existential threat Trump posed to the body politic.

Of course, many conservatives have their own issues with Harris’s policies—and, for that matter, have their issues with Biden’s. In an op-ed for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Geoff Duncan, the conservative Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, acknowledged that endorsing Harris “wasn’t easy. Through my conservative lens, I see very few policy areas where we agree.” But, he wrote, his “current north star is ridding” the GOP of Trump, and Harris is “the best vehicle toward preventing another stained Trump presidency.”

The trauma of the last month also made the choice somewhat easier.

Trump’s July surge focused the mind of anti-Trump voters, perhaps usefully, on the very real prospect that he was about to return to power.

Trump had been leading the polls for months, but the attempted assassination and the Republican National Convention boosted him into the most dominant political position of his lifetime. Meanwhile, the one candidate who stood between him and his future presidency of retribution was visibly floundering.

For anti-Trump progressives, July felt like a near-death experience. Now the relief is staggering—for Never Trumpers too.

There are, however, still bumps ahead, and not every Never Trumper will be able to reconcile themselves to Harris’s style of progressivism.

We’ll find out soon whether Never Trumpers can truly align around Harris, or if policy-related infighting will get in the way.

Some Republicans may sit out the race in a cloud of above-it-all righteous irrelevance.

But at least the staunchest members of the movement seem to be cohering around support for Harris. For Never Trumpers who have been in the political wilderness for nearly a decade now, this is not the time to quibble over tax rates, the Green New Deal, fracking, or pronouns.

**

Great minds alert!

Matt Labash and I have apparently been on parallel journeys that ended up in the same place. Here’s my kicker from yesterday:

Harris is far from their first choice, but when your kitchen is in flames, you reach for whatever extinguisher is at hand. You can worry later about washing the dishes or whether you need a new garbage disposal. Put the fire out now.

And here’s the kicker in Matt’s latest brilliant newsletter:

When your house is on fire, you have to put the fire out first, before you can worry about secondary concerns, like unclogging the bathroom toilet or tidying up the family room.

I readily concede: Matt’s imagery of the whole house on fire is better than my kitchen-centric conflagration. But next time, I think I’ll go even bigger… meteors hurtling our way; tsunamis; murder hornets…

Finally

Donald is having another normal one.