Pre-Debate: Remember What's at Stake

Plus: The Center holds. For now.

The zone is officially flooded.

SCOTUS is dropping opinions and technical FUBARS; the Speaker of the House is pimping for Steve Bannon; Adam Kinzinger is endorsing Joe Biden; the Center is holding (sort of); and — for our many and grievous sins — we are watching the President of the United States debating a convicted felon.

Happy Thursday, especially for those of you not yet heavily medicated.

But first…

I actually took this picture on my iPhone Tuesday night. No special lens. A postcard from God.

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Auggie on the dock. Girl in the lake.

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Eli. Water dog. (He loves it; and would swim all day if he could.)

What you need to remember while watching the debate

Of course, tonight’s debate is important. Yes, it can change the trajectory of the race. It might be “pivotal.” It is, indeed, the most important night of the campaign. And it will cause the sales of alcohol and Ambien to skyrocket. But I’m with General McCaffrey on this:

The Deep Punditry wonders: Will Trump be more “disciplined” tonight? Will the format make him seem more “presidential”?

AYFKM?

Have we learned nothing? After decades of this, have we, at long last, learned nothing about this man? Trump will be Trump. Either the unhinged howler-monkey-poop- flinging version, or the gibbering, mendacious, meandering version. In either case, “ignorant, foul, and dangerous.”

Inevitably, I write in my latest piece for MSNBC, the theatrics of the event will overshadow the substance. The post-debate spin will a tornadic shit storm.

But — nota bene — it’s important not to be distracted by the sound and fury, because the underlying stakes are so ridiculously high. Trump and the GOP are telling us quite clearly what they intend to do on everything from tariffs to mass deportations, to banning abortion pills and implementing Project 2025.

I assume all of this will come up tonight, but, in any case, here’s a cheat-sheet for your debate prep:

A Trump 2.0 presidency would mean.

• Deporting millions of migrants. On MSNBC this weekend, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts — one of the architects of Project 2025 — explained: “We need to have the biggest mass deportation system ever in the history of America because it is unjust, illegal and evil that more than 10 million illegal aliens have come to this country.”

• Imposing huge financial burdens on the middle class. Trump is floating the idea of eliminating the income tax and replacing it with trillions of dollars in new tariffs — most of which would be passed onto American consumers. The result would be massive tax cuts for the ultra-rich at the expense of middle- and lower-class Americans.

• Turning the Department of Justice into a weapon of political retribution, against his critics and the news media.

• Pardoning the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, including rioters who attacked police officers defending the Capitol.

• Invoking the Comstock Act to criminalize abortion, even without a federal ban.

• Purging the federal workforce. “The number needs to be more than 50,000, considering that there are more than 2 million federal employees,” Heritage’s Kevin Roberts told Symone Sanders and Michael Steele. “Ultimately, we have to devolve power from the imperial city of Washington back to the people.”

• Deploying the active-duty military to cities run by Democrats. As The New York Times notes, “He came close to unleashing the active-duty military on racial justice protests that sometimes descended into riots in 2020 and remains attracted to the idea. Next time, he has said, he will unilaterally send federal forces to bring order to Democratic-run cities.”

• Abandoning NATO and Ukraine. Just days ago, Trump echoed Russian talking points by claiming that the prospect of Ukraine’s entry into NATO was “really why this (full-scale) war started.”

And so much more. And worse.

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Thank you for your support!

Meanwhile, in Milwaukee…

How’s the RNC’s goat-rope convention going? Via the Recombobulation Area:

Milwaukee is preparing for a busy week with the RNC coming to town, but with just weeks to go before the convention begins, some are raising concerns about a lackluster level of events being booked during the convention, raising questions about whether the convention will deliver on promises of economic impact.  

Gary Witt, president and CEO of the Pabst Theater Group, told The Recombobulation Area that the majority of the group’s venues will have no events booked for the RNC. 

Two of downtown Milwaukee’s most iconic venues, the Pabst Theater and Riverside Theater, will likely sit empty during the convention, he said, as will the Vivarium and The Fitzgerald, which are both located on Milwaukee’s East Side. Turner Hall Ballroom will host a yet-to-be announced organization, but that arrangement was made for the DNC in 2020 before the convention went mostly virtual.

Witt characterized the RNC planning as “underwhelming” and a “failure.”

“It’s 100% a case of ‘overpromise, underdeliver,’ on all parts, by everybody,” he said.

“We were told it was going to be one way over and over and over and over again when (the RNC) was confirmed, and it has turned out to be almost anything but the way that we were told it was going to turn out,” Witt said. “We were sold a storyline of how this is going to go, and basically it didn't go anything at all like the storyline that we were sold.”

The Center holds (sort of)

There were some green shoots of hope in this week’s primaries. But don’t get too jiggy just yet.

Trump-backed candidates lost three GOP primaries, while NY Democrats defenestrated uber-progressive Jamaal Bowman.

Joe Klein writes that the election “was mostly good news for the Sanity Caucus.”

The best news, of course, is that Jamaal Bowman lost. It was also good news that John Avlon¹, a moderate, won his primary on Long Island. There was also good news from Utah, where Trumpers lost in the Republican primaries. And, apparently, we’ll still have Lauren Boebert to kick around—which is good news only in the sense that she’s a constant reminder how crude and demented so many Trump cultists are…But an Election Day like this may be a tiny sign that the left-right extremist fever is ebbing, that sanity may regain its rightful place in American politics. Or maybe not.

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Speaking of Bowman. There’s been a lot of chatter about the role of AIPAC’s Big Money in defeating the anti-Israel rep. But $$$ alone doesn’t explain what happened here.

Why did Bowman lose? Spoiler: He was a thoroughly awful candidate who lost touch with his district and wandered down rabbit holes of extremism and crazy.

Nick Catoggio explains:

Do you have any idea how embarrassing you need to be to get blown out in a primary by a normie in 2024 despite having impeccable populist credentials?…

Bowman’s most embarrassing behavior, and by far the most salient to his primary race, involved his commentary on Israel since October 7. National Review summarized the lowlights:

…During one pro-Hamas rally, Bowman denied that the terrorist group raped Israeli women, claiming the well-documented atrocities were a “lie” and “propaganda”—a statement which he ham-handedly apologized for only recently. In an interview with Politico, he lamented that in his district, “There’s certain places where the Jews live and concentrate”—ignoring their need to be near synagogues, Kosher supermarkets, and other institutions essential to practicing Judaism.

He had to issue a second apology after sitting for an interview with Norman Finkelstein, who compared the slaughter by Hamas on October 7 to the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. Later Bowman took to describing Israel as a “settler colonial project,” progressive jargon designed to delegitimize the nation as a usurpation of Palestinian rights to the land. His hostility to the Jewish state grew so queasy that the advocacy group J Street, which promotes left-of-center solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, withheld its endorsement from him this year.

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So, yes it was a good night for centrism. But keep your irrational exuberance in check, because this also happened: “Three female GOP state senators who filibustered S.C. abortion ban lost their primaries.”

Katrina Shealy, Sandy Senn and Penry Gustafson lost to three male candidates and were among a bipartisan group of five women state senators who filibustered a near-total abortion ban. They were nicknamed the "sister senators."

As a result of their coordinated effort, the group was chosen last year to receive the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.

Nota Bene

And finally. Hugh Hewitt reminds us, once again, that he is Archdeacon of Retromingent Hackery.

1. The John Avlon presidential buzz begins in November. You read it here first.