How stand things on this August Monday?
For the moment, let’s set aside the veepstakes, the stock market bonfire, and the within-the-margin-of error polling. I also want to second David Axelrod’s warning against irrational exuberance, because the Democrats still have an uphill fight on their hands.
But don’t ignore the evidence of your eyes: Donald Trump is floundering, stumbling, and fumbling. Like a superannuated Fat Elvis, he’s desperately trying to play his greatest hits — Racism! Insults! Bullshit! — but it’s not landing the way it used to, is it?
He’s running away from debates, his crowds are shrunken, and — with Joe Biden out of the race — his cognitive decline is increasingly hard to ignore.
And most telling of all: his lizard-brain instincts seem to be failing him.
While America celebrated inspiring Olympic triumphs and the release of hostages, Trump lavished praise on the hostage taker, Vladimir Putin, and wallowed in faux-culture-war-outrage about an Algerian boxer. It was both weird and strikingly dissonant.
Maybe he can turn this all around, because he has (repeatedly) in the past. But for the moment, we are watching a campaign in full flop-sweat.
Happy Monday.
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Weird Politics
It’s hard to keep up, I know.
RFK Jr. spent the weekend talking about the dead bear cub he dumped in Central Park; MAGA star Byron Donalds melted down on national television; and JD Vance continued sharing his views on parenting, including that heart-warming, alpha-dad moment when he told his 7-year-old to “shut the hell up” because he was talking to the Orange God King.
Folks seem to be noticing that he’s just fuqqing weird.
Of course, neither Twitter nor TikTok are the real world, but this seems relevant:
In the past 7 days, the TikTok conversation around Vance has been overwhelmingly negative. According to social analytics platform Zelf, 76% of the top-performing posts mentioning Vance on the platform have been negative, while just 18% were positive.
The most-viewed video mentioning the unpopular VP candidate is this funky remix of Vance’s infamous line stating that he is “a Never Trump Guy.” It’s received 2.8 million views. There are also A LOT of hot takes on Vance’s (false, but internet famous) affinity for couches. Here are a few to check out, if you’re looking for some sometimes NSFW cushion humor.
But the couch jokes have nothing on the ire of the “childless cat ladies.”
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Meanwhile, we got this from the tangled blackened zucchini of Trump’s prefrontal cortex. Jim Stewartson posted: “Here is the actual GOP candidate for President of the United States attempting to say something about Mark Zuckerberg which is literally all I can figure out from this 90-SECOND LONG SENTENCE.”
“So Mark Zuckerberg called me first of all he called me a few times she called me after the event that he said that was really amazing it was very brave and you know and he actually announced he's not going to support a Democrat because he can't because he respected me for what I did that day I think what I did maybe was a norm to me it was a normal response but I was called by Mark Zuckerberg yesterday the day before on this same subject and he actually apologized he said they made a mistake etc etc in the correcting mistake a Google nobody called from Google one of the things I do in a show like yours you you show you know you see them Fox but what you really see it is all over the place they take clips of your show that you're doing right now with me and if I do a good job they're going to vote for me they're going to vote for me because it's not just on Fox it's on Fox is a smaller part of it you're on all over this those little beautiful cell phones you're on you're all over the place you have a product you have a great product you have a great brand so you have to get out you have to get out you have to do things like your show and other shows and Google has been very bad they've been very irresponsible and I have a feeling that Google isn't going to be close to shut down because I don't think Congress is going to take it I really don't think so Google has to be careful now I will say this I believe Mark Zuckerberg he called me so he called me a lot they are working and I think they fixed it but what can he's not doing what he did four years ago with the five hundred million dollars I don't believe.”
My apologies for wasting your brain cells and those minutes of your life you will never get back.
But, seriously: WTAF?
The Donald Went Down to Georgia
… and attacked the popular GOP governor and his wife.
Real man of genius, amirite?
Here’s Greg Bluestein’s report from the critical swing state:
“Donald Trump’s ‘stupid’ swipes at Brian Kemp come at a terrible time for the GOP in Georgia”
“Trump may have just lost Georgia,” says one despondent former state legislator after Donald Trump revived a long-running feud with Gov. Brian Kemp…
“I’m elated to see the GOP self-implode and devour their own. Meanwhile, we will continue to expand our tent in Georgia to include those Never Trump Republicans that are interested in saving our democracy.”
TRUMP NEEDS GEORGIA far more than he did a month ago when he was threatening Biden’s hold in blue states like Virginia, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and New Mexico. Certainly he wants to win Georgia. But he demands bent knees, and prizes dominance above all else. His pathologies subsume his ambition and fear makes him fight. He doesn’t exactly know how to campaign against Harris so he’s resorting to campaigning against Republicans—it’s what he does when he’s down. That’s what he was doing in January 2021 when he tanked Loeffler’s and Perdue’s Senate bids. He spewed his Big Lie at the infamous airport hangar rally in Dalton, Georgia on January 4; the next day, the GOP lost both Senate seats. Congress convened with a Democratic Senate majority the morning of January 6. The GOP cave to Trump—in the face of that defeat and that day’s insurrection—has brought the party to where it is now.
Nota Bene
Huge scoop from the Wapo: “$10M cash withdrawal drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt”
Five days before Donald Trump became president in January 2017, a manager at a bank branch in Cairo received an unusual letter from an organization linked to the Egyptian intelligence service. It asked the bank to “kindly withdraw” nearly $10 million from the organization’s account — all in cash.
Inside the state-run National Bank of Egypt, employees were soon busy placing bundles of $100 bills into two large bags, according to records from the bank. Four men arrived and carried away the bags, which U.S. officials later described in sealed court filings as weighing a combined 200 pounds and containing what was then a sizable share of Egypt’s reserve of U.S. currency.
Federal investigators learned of the withdrawal, which has not been previously reported, early in 2019. The discovery intensified a secret criminal investigation that had begun two years earlier with classified U.S. intelligence indicating that Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi sought to give Trump $10 million to boost his 2016 presidential campaign, a Washington Post investigation has found.
Since receiving the intelligence about Sisi, the Justice Department had been examining whether money moved from Cairo to Trump, potentially violating federal law that bans U.S. candidates from taking foreign funds. Investigators had also sought to learn if money from Sisi might have factored into Trump’s decision in the final days of his run for the White House to inject his campaign with $10 million of his own money.
**
Joe Klein: “Trump, Terrified.”
The bottom has fallen out of the campaign he planned…and instantaneously, dizzyingly so, after he seemed to be cruising to a Coronation—the Supreme Court ruling, the defiant fist after getting shot, Biden’s sad debate performance, the convention (until he spoke).
Everything was going his way. And now, nothing is.
Even Putin seems to have voted for the Democrats this week. And there’s this thing Trump has about women: he just doesn’t know how to deal with them. (We’ve heard a lot about Donald’s relationship with his martinet father, but I’m really curious about his British mother these days. What on earth was she like?) Hillary Clinton couldn't really go after him because she was afraid of sounding “shrill,” which, sadly, was a place she could go from time to time. Kamala Harris doesn’t come off as shrill; the mellow timbre of her voice, her smile, her natural informality mitigates against that. And she’s tough. Not egregiously so—not Hulk Hogan phony tough—but nail-tough in a prosecutorial way. And so far, in these early days, she has been clever. She chose not to wade in the ethnic muck with Trump this week. She just said that sort of stuff was “the past.” Casting this election as the future v. the past serves a dual function for Harris: it distinguishes her from both Trump and Joe Biden.
Even though she was an integral part of the Biden Administration, I suspect Harris won’t be easily tarred with his failures—Afghanistan, inflation etc.—because she seems so different from him. The Republicans will try to do a paint job on her foolish left-coddling in the past and may find a silver bullet or two—Chris LaCivita is good at that. But there will be no way for Trump to escape Kamala on the debate stage—she’s a prosecutor and speaks English; Hillary was a lawyer and talked in codicils; Kamala’s cool, Hillary was tense, She will have the ability to drop a nuclear bomb on Trump’s head at any moment. She could do it with a smile. Trump has got to be made crazy by her unexpected performance skills—and crazy is as crazy does.
So expect Trump to sound nuttier and more extreme and horrible as this thing goes along. Spontaneous combustion isn’t out of the question.
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Via AP: Harris launches 'Republicans for Harris' to win over GOP voters
The program will be a “campaign within a campaign,” according to Harris’ team, using well-known Republicans to activate their networks, with a particular emphasis on primary voters who backed former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. The program will kick off with events this week in Arizona, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Republicans backing Harris will also appear at rallies with the vice president and her soon-to-be-named running mate this coming week, the campaign said.
The Harris campaign shared the details of the program first with The Associated Press before the official announcement.
Her team is trying to create “a permission structure” for GOP voters who would otherwise have a difficult time voting for Harris. The effort will rely heavily on Republican-to-Republican voter contact, with the belief that the best way to get a Republican to vote for Harris is to hear directly from another Republican making the same choice.
Weekend in Wisconsin. With grandkids. And dogs.
It’s quiet and a bit lonely this morning, because the Frenchies flew home yesterday, after a month-long visit. Miss them already.
That’s Silas paddling into the sunset.
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Water dogs. Auggie and Eli.
I keep saying it, because the evidence keeps bearing it out: turn up the heat on DJT and he melts down like an ice cream cone on an Arizona August afternoon. For all his perceived abilities, the man cannot handle adversity. He thrives when people put him on a glide path, but when he actually has to accomplish something under pressure, facing substantial opposition and requiring real work and coordinated effort, he gets lost in the lights and gives in to his paranoias.
Team Harris surely knows this, and beyond painting a positive agenda for the future, she needs to keep punching and jabbing in ways that he does not anticipate. Run with "weird" for a while and then replace it with another effective tactic as it approaches getting stale. Remind everyone why he lost last time and was replaced by a more competent candidate, and in states that he won previously. J.D. the Heir Apparent is a MAGA extremist times 100. And so on. The GOP is giving them plenty of metaphorical ammunition to use in the war for America's soul. Might as well use it all up, and fight from multiple angles that they do not have covered. It's hard to defeat what you don't see coming.
Love hearing your perspective Charlie! I miss hearing you on the podcast every day, but I’m glad you are still posting and making tv appearances. My hubby and I are trying to open up conversations with a few members of our friend and family circle that may be open to considering a vote for Harris in November. Helping Republicans see how far Trump has taken them from their core values is a tricky and sensitive process. A lot of them have tuned out of current events all together and so have little idea what is going on. I think we will lose some members of the Biden coalition, but maybe we can also bring more in. Thanks again for everything you are doing. We will get through this together!!