The Prosecutor vs. the Felon

MAGA angst and a Kamala reality check

"So I've been hearing this phrase y'all got over here that I ain't too crazy about. 'It's the hope that kills you.' Y'all know that? I disagree, you know. I think it's the lack of hope that comes and gets you. See, I believe in hope. I believe in belief." — Ted Lasso

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Quick note: I hope Karma is having a chuckle about this. On Sunday I tested positive for covid and have been hammered for the last two days. So, today’s irregular newsletter may be a bit more irregular than usual. But since modern pharmacology is a freaking miracle, I’m feeling well enough to offer some thoughts about the extraordinary developments of the last few days.

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How extraordinary have the last few days been? I’m serious: an historian could write an amazing book on just the last few weeks: “July 2024: the Month That Changed America.” (But it probably won’t happen, because August, September, October and November could be even more remarkable.)

Happy Tuesday.

Obligatory dog picture

Our French dog, Zoke is interested in something in that river

The Baton is Passed

There was no plan, we were told. If Joe Biden bowed to reality and stepped aside, we were warned, all would be lost, and chaos would ensue. Instead, Democrats (uncharacteristically) got their act together with head-spinning speed.

Inevitably, there will be bruised feelings and lingering resentments, but publicly at least, the party is united, the mood exultant, and for the first time in months there is… hope?

You can’t win a campaign just on hope, of course. But, as Ted Lasso said, it's the lack of hope that comes and gets you. And that’s what’s changed.

Instead of being a funeral march, the defining imagery of next month’s Democratic Convention will now be a dramatic inter-generational passing of the torch. Instead of facing worried and depressed delegates, Joe Biden will bask in the gratitude of his party. Suddenly, Democrats are united and energized. And there is a feeling that the political world has just been turned on its head.

At least for the moment.

Kamala Harris still faces formidable challenges, and there are no guarantees she will beat Donald Trump in November, but her shock and awe consolidation of support was impressive. Endorsements and cash rolled in; and by Monday she had already secured the support of a majority of the delegates she needed to formalize her nomination.

And her first major event yesterday answered two big questions: (1) Would Joe Biden pass the torch graciously? and (2) How hard would she lean into her prosecutorial background to make the case against Trump?

As it happened, the Biden-Harris handoff was a love bomb, and Harris was clearly prepared to prosecute the case against DJT.

As a district attorney and California’s attorney general, she said, “I took on perpetrators of all kinds — predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said.

“So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”

As a young prosecutor, when I was in the Alameda County District Attorney’s office in California, I specialized in cases involving sexual abuse.

Donald Trump was found liable by a jury for committing sexual abuse.

As attorney general of California, I took on one of our country’s largest for-profit colleges and put it out of business.

Donald Trump ran a for-profit college, Trump University, that was forced to pay $25 million to the students it scammed.

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Good stuff, but the really hard part is still ahead.

For the moment, though, let’s stick to what’s happening right now, and how it is blowing up everything we thought we knew about the 2024 election.

MAGA Howls

Just a few days ago, Republicans left Milwaukee supremely confident that they had won the 2024 election. Despite his clunky acceptance speech, Trump was in the most dominant position of his political life.

Leading in the polls, Trump was buoyed by a failed assassination attempt, emboldened by a series of court victories, and the uncontested master of his party. When he chose JD Vance as his running mate, he was spiking the football.

MAGA was ecstatic, bordering on giddy. And then Biden pulled out.

Suddenly, Trump was the old guy in the race. And an entire campaign focused on the fragility and senility of Joe Biden had to be tossed in the dumpster.

Trump himself was obviously frustrated. “So, we are forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden, he polls badly after having a terrible debate, and quits the race,” Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social. “Now we have to start all over again.”

In the Atlantic, Tim Alberta described the sudden reversal of fortune as “exactly what the Trump team feared.”

Party officials had left town believing the race was all but over. Now they were confronting the reality of reimagining a campaign—one that had been optimized, in every way, to defeat Biden—against a new and unknown challenger. …

Suddenly, Republicans who had boasted last week about expanding the electoral map—pushing into Minnesota and Virginia and other decidedly blue areas—were fretting about the possibility of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro or Arizona Senator Mark Kelly joining the Democratic ticket, partnering with Harris to put back into play key battlegrounds that just 24 hours earlier seemed to be out of reach.

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As Mona Charen documents this morning, the right appears to be losing its mind all over again, spinning out whiny threats and bizarre conspiracy theories.

WITHIN MINUTES OF PRESIDENT BIDEN’S WITHDRAWAL from the 2024 race, Senator Tom Cotton leaped onto X to declare that “Joe Biden succumbed to a coup by Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Hollywood donors, ignoring millions of Democratic primary votes. Donald Trump took a bullet for democracy.”

Radio host Erick Erickson was even more creative, tweeting that “Y’all can argue over the word coup, but Biden stepping aside is the American equivalent of all those people accidentally falling out of windows in Russia.”

David Sacks, the Putin lickspittle, Elon Musk appendage, and featured speaker at the Republican National Convention, offered that “One candidate survived assassination. The other staged a coup. Your choice, America.”

And Speaker Mike Johnson told a TV audience on Sunday that “it would be wrong and I think unlawful in accordance to some of these state rules for a handful of people to go in the backroom and switch it out because they’re—they don’t like the candidate any longer.”

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Trump himself seems to be having another meltdown:

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All of this seems pretty much on brand for the petty, puerile, and utterly unchanged Donald Trump. But, on another level, it’s interesting because Trump World is also insisting that Kamala Harris will be even easier to beat than Biden. And they have already begun their attacks. You’d think they’d be happier, right?

The Kamala Gamble

It’s important go into the next 100 days with our eyes wide open. The fanboys will go back to fanboying, but we also need to soberly acknowledge some realities, starting with this: Kamala remains a problematic candidate, and the political terrain may be uglier than we thought.

As David Frum writes in the Atlantic, Harris “may be the last best hope, but don’t deny the risks.” Frum lays out what may be coming:

The attacks on Harris will operate in a dual universe. In the more obscure and disreputable parts of the right-wing media system, the sexual and racial fantasies will be elaborated. The former Fox News star Megyn Kelly declared Harris’s intimate history “fair game” in a social-media post today. In the more public and more careful parts of the right-wing media system, the fantasies will be referenced and exploited without ever being quite explicitly stated.

In 2012, the Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld quipped: “Obama is now out of the closet … He’s officially gay for class warfare.” The joke was carefully constructed, using the phrase gay for to mean “enthusiastic about.” But the joke worked, as I wrote at the time, because: “A large part of his audience ardently believes that Obama is in fact gay, that his marriage is a sham, and that Mrs. Obama leads a life of Marie Antoinette like extravagance to compensate her for her husband’s neglect while he disports himself with his personal aides.”

So it will go with Harris. Her midlife marriage, her mixed-race origins, her manner and appearance, her vocal intonations, her career in the Bay Area with all of its association in the right-wing mind with dirt and depravity—those will be resources to construct a frightening psychosexual profile of the Black, Asian, and female Democratic candidate.

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Will the attacks backfire? I tend to think they will, but Nick Catoggio isn’t so sure.

What have you seen from the people of this country since 2015 to make you believe that they won’t tolerate—let alone relish—seeing a candidate demeaned in unusually nasty personal terms?

That’s Trump’s entire brand. His career in politics began with him mocking John McCain for being taken captive by the Vietnamese; he won the presidency the following year, nearly won it again in 2020, and will probably win it a second time this fall, ridiculing and belittling his opponents the whole way. His apologists, among them supposedly respectable conservatives, have come to treat tolerating his “mean tweets” as a sort of fee that’s well worth paying as the price of “strong” leadership.

It will be a strange footnote of history that in two of his three runs for president, the most boorishly macho presidential candidate America has ever produced was opposed by women. Insofar as women leaders are already taken less seriously than men and assumed to be less willing to confront enemies, Trump’s cartoonish bravado and obsession with dominance makes the contrast between his alleged strength and their alleged weakness starker.

Meanness is how he demonstrates “strength” and dominance, and Americans like strength in a leader. He and his fans are about to test how much.

Nota Bene:

Anne Applebaum: “Suddenly Trump Looks Older and More Deranged.”

Whatever happens next, the frame has altered. Now it is the Republicans who are saddled with the elderly candidate, the one who can’t make a clear argument or finish a sentence without veering off into anecdote. Now the Democrats are instead proposing something new. Now it is the many pundits who were already bored by the race and ready to wrap it up who look foolish.

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Michael Baharaeen: “Kamala Harris’ entrance shakes up the race, but she has real liabilities.”

A key factor that likely did in Harris’ 2020 campaign was her desire to placate her party’s activist base—a base that ultimately coalesced around other candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Rather than embracing her accomplishments as a prosecutor and explaining her pragmatic vision for criminal justice, Harris ran from her record, fearing that it would be viewed as excessively punitive. She surrounded herself with staffers who were too beholden to ideas trending on Twitter. This cast of thought likely led her to sign onto some proposals with highly-limited mainstream appeal, including the decriminalization of border crossings and the Green New Deal.

If Harris has learned any lessons from 2020, she might consider a message that highlights her track record of prosecuting criminals—which could set her up for a favorable contrast against Donald Trump.

Finally,

Sad.