Trump's Worst Day?

Birtherism 2.0

Happy August to everyone, except the haters, losers, single cat ladies, Marxists, fake news reporters, Mexican rapists, recent converts to Blackness, and all the “crappy” Jews, who fail to embrace Trump’s message of American greatness and unity.

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Surely, Donald Trump has had worse days than yesterday. But off-hand, I can’t think of many performances ghastlier than Wednesday’s episode of Fat Elvis Does Birtherism.

For the moment, let’s leave aside the horse-race analysis, and the rank punditry about Trump’s three-dimensional chess strategy. What we saw yesterday was a pathetic old racist trying to replay his greatest hits.

Trump launched his presidential bid by pushing the Obama Birtherism hoax; and he thinks that playing the race cards will work again. Even his post-debacle campaign statement made it clear that he wants to relitigate some of most incendiary comments from 2015. But back then, his comments were shocking; now they just feel…. weird. Even his most reliable turd-polishers recognized that he had crapped the bed.

Don’t take my word for how badly it went. Here’ some of the coverage/commentary:

• NYT: Trump’s SBJ disaster. Trump Questions Harris’s Black Identity at NABJ Conference

  Former President Donald J. Trump questioned the racial identity of Vice President Kamala Harris during a tense appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago on Wednesday, asking, “Is she Indian or is she Black?” He falsely claimed that Ms. Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian heritage and attended a historically Black university, used to identify as Indian and then, “all of a sudden, she made a turn, and she became a Black person.”

• Wapo: Trump says Harris ‘became a Black person’ as NABJ event turns hostile, chaotic

  A tense encounter: Mr. Trump’s appearance began more than an hour late and quickly turned confrontational. Questioned on his rhetoric about race, he complained that it was a “very rude introduction” and accused one of the panelists, the ABC News correspondent Rachel Scott, of working for a “fake news” outlet. The conversation devolved from there, with Mr. Trump mispronouncing Ms. Harris’s first name and peddling falsehoods about his policy record relating to Black communities. His attacks on Ms. Harris then took a bitter turn that recalled his stoking of the false “birther” conspiracy about President Barack Obama, and a bogus theory Mr. Trump floated in 2020 that Ms. Harris was ineligible for the vice presidency.

• Jessica Tarlov Torches Trump's 'Dumpster Fire' Performance

  “It was a complete, absolute dumpster fire for the former president. I don’t feel the need to give him any credit for showing up there because he came with a terrible attitude.”

• Axios: Republicans reel at Trump's "embarrassing" remarks about Harris

  The tense interview is being met with GOP reactions ranging from qualified concern to outright shock, with some Republicans questioning Trump's ability to adapt to the new Democratic ticket.

  *"It was awful," one House Republican said of the interview, telling Axios it raised concerns about whether Trump can contain his impulses while running against the first woman, Black and Asian American vice president.

  *Sen Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said of the Trump campaign: "Maybe they don't know how to handle the campaign, and so you default to issues that just should simply not be an issue."

  *"That was not a demonstration on how to win over undecided voters," another House Republican said.

• Eli Stokols: Trump’s first try at pivoting to Harris blows up in his face

  His remarks, one of many tense exchanges in a Q&A session at the National Association of Black Journalists, underscored the Trump campaign’s floundering efforts to blunt the momentum of Harris since President Joe Biden agreed to drop his reelection bid.

  The interview marked Trump’s first major attempt to pivot a campaign designed to defeat Biden toward a younger and more challenging opponent, and laid bare the difficulties the Republican nominee and his movement more broadly may have in taking on a woman of color without veering into misogynistic, racist invective. While many in Trump’s base may agree with his blunt assessment of Harris as a political token, it may reinforce the former president’s vulnerabilities with swing voters heading into the final stretch of what looks to be a very close election.

Legend

It’s important to give credit where it is due. ABC’s Rachel Scott did what many interviewers have failed to do: she went right after Trump and didn’t blink when he hit back. Here’s her awesome opening question:

“A lot of people did not think it was appropriate for you to be here today,” Scott said. “You have pushed false claims about some of your rivals, from Nikki Haley to former President Barack Obama, saying that they were not born in the United States, which is not true.

You have told four congresswomen of color who were American citizens to go back to where they came from.

You have used words like animal and rabid to describe Black district attorneys.

You’ve attacked Black journalists, calling them a ‘loser,’ saying the questions they ask are ‘stupid and racist.’

You have had dinner with a white supremacist at your Mar-a-Lago resort.

My question, sir, now that you are asking Black supporters to vote for you: Why should Black voters trust you after you have used language like that?”

Trump was displeased, whining…

“I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner, first question,” Trump sniped. “I think it’s disgraceful that I came here in good spirit; I love the Black population of this country; I’ve done so much for the Black population of this country … I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”

It didn’t get better.

I didn’t forget the dog pictures.

Fear not.

Flashback to 2021. Eli contemplates his world.

**

A boy and his dog.

The dangers of court packing

My latest in the Atlantic: A contrarian take on the latest proposals to give the Supreme Court a makeover.

Progressives are cheering Joe Biden’s proposal to reform the Supreme Court. But perhaps they should pause for a moment and ask themselves:

How would they feel if it was Donald Trump, as part of his 2025 agenda, who was proposing a dramatic change to the composition and independence of the Supreme Court?

What if it was Trump—and not Biden—who announced that he had a plan to effectively prevent the most experienced justices from being able to make decisions of import on the Court, and periodically replace them with new appointees?

I think it’s safe to say that the hair of liberal-leaning observers would be on fire, and that reaction would be justified. The danger to the constitutional order and the rule of law would be obvious.

So, as Biden and Kamala Harris embrace a new plan to reform the Court, some cautionary notes are in order—on both the substance and the politics of the proposal.

Biden himself has been reluctant to embrace Court reform and, for years, resisted progressive demands that he pack the Court or try to change the justices’ lifetime tenure. But as the Court’s conservative majority has flexed its muscles, overturned precedents, and flouted basic standards of ethics, progressive pressure to do something seems to have forced Biden’s hand.

Biden is now proposing—and Harris has endorsed—a constitutional amendment that would overturn the Court’s grant of sweeping presidential immunity; he is also proposing an enforceable ethics code, and an 18-year term limit on justices. Under this system, “the president would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years in active service on the Supreme Court,” Biden wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. Realistically, none of those reforms is likely to pass in Congress, so for the moment at least, the Biden-Harris proposal is merely election-year campaign messaging. But it also reopens a constitutional Pandora’s box.

On the surface, the proposal for term limits seems somewhat anodyne, and polls suggest wide support for the idea. Indeed, if the limits applied only to future appointees, it would be a salutary fix to the judicial gerontocracy we have now. But that is not necessarily how Biden’s proposal would work. Instead, one common interpretation of Biden’s 18-year-term-limit plan—for which Democratic legislation has been pending in Congress since last year—attempts an end run around the Constitution’s grant of lifetime tenure by creating a new status of “senior justice.” Every new president would automatically get to appoint two new justices, and only the nine most recently confirmed justices would be able to hear cases on appeal (which constitute the majority of the Court’s work). The “senior justices” would remain on the Court, but—starting with Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito—they would be effectively judicially neutered.

This idea feels too clever by half. Adam White, who was appointed in 2021 to the commission Biden created to study the Supreme Court (and is a friend of mine), explained to me yesterday that, in his view, the senior-justices proposal is simply court-packing by another name. In 1937, Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously tried to pack the conservative Court by expanding its numbers, but he failed to get Congress’s support. (He wasn’t the first president to tinker with the Court. During the Civil War, Congress gave Abraham Lincoln a 10th justice, and the number has fluctuated over time.)

In 2005, Biden—then a senator—forcefully denounced Roosevelt’s ill-fated court-packing scheme as a power grab that brought to mind the warning “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

But, White told me, Biden’s proposal is in some ways “even worse, because we are kicking people off the Court.”

In an article for The Dispatch earlier this week, White explained that the new system would “strip current justices of their constitutional responsibilities and transfer those powers to successors, one justice at a time.” “If anything,” he argued, “the new proposals for disempowering ‘senior’ justices are even more aggressive than the original version of court-packing: FDR tried to add new justices, but he never even attempted to nullify current justices.”

You can read the whole thing here.

Simone Biles and the MAGAverse’s Fetish of Toughness

This week seems like a good time for this flashback from four years ago. Back then I wrote:

There’s something about Simone Biles that apparently triggers the MAGA-verse.

After the world’s preeminent gymnast dropped out of Olympic competition this week, right-wing Trump ally Charlie Kirk lashed out at her as a “selfish sociopath” and a “shame to the country.”

“We are raising a generation of weak people like Simone Biles,” said Kirk, who appears in television ads for pain-relief supplements.

He was hardly alone.

“Sorry, Simone Biles, The Olympics Isn’t About You, It’s About Winning For America,” proclaimed The Federalist. Radio host Clay Travis insisted that “she should apologize to her teammates for quitting on them at the moment they needed her the most.” Piers Morgan felt the need to similarly pile on: “I don’t think it’s remotely courageous, heroic or inspiring to quit,” Piers wrote in the Daily Mail.

Conservative writer Amber Athey joined the chorus, insisting that “a true champion is someone who perseveres even when the competition gets tough.”

Questioning whether Biles is a “true champion” seemed an odd shot to take, considering that the 24-year-old Black woman won four gold medals and a bronze in the last Olympics—tying the record for most gymnastics medals won by a woman at a single Games. That was on top of the 19 gold medals, three silver medals and two bronze medals she has won in other world competitions. In the 2019 world championships, she became the first U.S. gymnast to win five gold medals.

American conservatives used to take pride in this sort of thing. But somehow, Simone Biles has become a symbol of everything the right now loathes. Thereby hangs a tale.

Read the rest here.

Finally, some (very) good news.