The Brooklyn Rail

Dispatch 1: Fight! Fight! Fight! (For Unity, Of Course)
Monday, July 15, 2024

They say there will be 50,000 people in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention, including 30,000 members of the press. Most of the delegates and activists at the convention believe that what they do there is a mere formality at this point, since in their minds Trump has already won. As human sponge Tucker Carlson said after the attempted assassination, “Trump just won. He just won.”

I watched a CNN panel earlier today where all of the commentators, Democrats and Republicans alike, marveled at length about what a lucky S.O.B. Trump was, with everything—the calamitous debate with Biden and the subsequent Democratic scramble to get Biden to withdraw from the race, the failed assassination turned victory celebration, and now Trump’s Judge Aileen Cannon throwing out the classified documents case against him—going his way on the way to the convention in Milwaukee. It’s as if God wants Trump to win and doesn’t care who knows it. God it’s a good time to be Right.

J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Yale Law grad turned tech bro-throb, is the first Millennial to be nominated near the top, an inch away from the presidency, and Vance wants to be president so badly he can hardly walk upright.

Two hours after the assassination attempt, Vance tweeted this on X: “Today is not some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Directly? So the incessantly bullied nursing home aide from Bethel Park was taking his marching orders from the Biden campaign?

This rancid bleat rhymed well with Matt Gaetz’s characteristically trenchant analysis: “They tried to impeach him. They are trying to imprison him. Now, they have tried to assassinate him.” “They” being the Democrats.

And the GOP said, “We are going forward with a vengeance.” Vance-vengeance.

Choosing J.D. Vance for Vice President, Trump fortifies his tech mogul Musk-Thiel support, reinforces his assault on the Blue Wall, and gets an absolutely malleable subservient Vice President who will help him with the youth vote, being half Trump’s age. Never mind that Vance was once a committed Never Trumper, who called Trump “cultural heroin” and “America’s Hitler.” In August 2016, the prophet of white working-class despair told Terry Gross, “I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”

But when Trump took over the Republican Party, and it became necessary for an ambitious young politician to “adapt,” Vance became mega-MAGA and a Trump devotee. Mitt Romney once said, “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance.”

Vance has long ago abandoned his Ohio/Kentucky hillbilly roots and become a striving tech millionaire. Enter the unctuous Peter Thiel (Thiel almost singlehandedly created Vance’s political career, giving him $10 million for his Ohio Senate run) and the overlord Elon Musk, who announced tonight that he will contribute $45 million a month to a new super PAC for Trump’s campaign, because he thinks the next president will control the fate of AI, which is going to completely transform how we all live, and he wants to be in control of the person in control. Imagine Musk as a shadow president working beside Trump. Oligarchs United.

And tonight’s convention theme is, serendipitously, “Make America Wealthy Again.”

In addition to Vance’s unveiling, tonight also featured a surprise appearance of the surviving hero himself, with a bandaged ear, like a mobster van Gogh. He came in with Lee Greenwood himself singing his anthem, and then sat down with VP Vance and theocratic Speaker Mike Johnson. (Greenwood later suggested that God himself had intervened so that the bullet didn’t puncture his skull, so that he could become our president again.) “Prayer works,” said Greenwood.

The surprise appearance of Trump on the first night set up one of the strangest juxtapositions yet: Donald Trump watching model and rapper Amber Rose on stage, explaining why Trump is not a racist. Amber has 24 million followers on Instagram, while Joe Biden only has 17 million.

Trump looks different now, after the assassination attempt. He looks older, more tired, and something new has come in behind his eyes.

Dispatch 2: Ultimate Migrant Fighting
Tuesday, July 16, 2024

For all of you out there watching this spectacle on linear, try spending at least a portion of the night looking at it with the sound off. It does clarify things. An old Roger Ailes technique.

Earlier today, video was leaked and posted on X, recording a call Donald Trump made to RFK Jr. on Sunday, less than 24 hours after the attempted assassination. The video shows RFK holding the phone, with an American flag in the frame, and the voice of Trump saying that he objects to “giant horse pills” of vaccines being given to babies and that you can watch the babies change before your very eyes, after they are given these giant pills.

Also in the tape, Trump tells Kennedy, “I would love you to do something. And I think it’ll be so good for you and so big for you. And we’re going to win.” Trump and Kennedy then met in Milwaukee on Monday. RFK Jr. later put out in an X post, “Our main topic was national unity, and I hope to meet with Democratic leaders about that as well. No, I am not dropping out of the race.”

Why are the FBI and DHS apparently slow-walking the release of any information on the Pennsylvania shooter’s motive for attempting to kill Trump? So far, they’re saying that the shooter left no manifesto, had absolutely no social media presence, and apparently had no RL friends. He’s a complete cypher.

Unlike J.D. Vance, who seems to have lived several different lives already, at age 39.

To the point in January 2023, when Vance “wanted to make an intellectual argument for Mr. Trump that would resonate with the donor class and other elites,” and then meeting Trump at Mar-a-Lago after which Trump went all Aryan-mushy talking about “those beautiful blue eyes.”

The theme of tonight’s meeting is “Make America Safe Again,” which immediately prompts the question, “Safe from who or what?” and “Safe for who or what?” And those two questions hung over the proceedings all night.

One answer was clearly “Safe from former opponents and rivals.” Trump wanted to be in the room when his former opponents spoke: Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio from the 2016 campaign and Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Vivek Ramaswamy from the recent primaries. The former president came in just in time for their speeches, looking to be in a much better mood and mien than last night and still wearing the bandage on his right ear that appeared to be a blank square white screen on which people could project anything they wanted.

Ted Cruz went in full swarmy, thanking God Almighty for getting Trump to turn his head when the bullet approached and thanking Trump for protecting us from the huge migrant violent crime wave that has overtaken Biden’s America. Vivek Ramaswamy did his best young Obama imitation, only from the opposite direction politically. And Nicki Haley swallowed what was still left of her pride and said she was now all in for Trump and she wished all of the good people who had supported her would now swallow their own pride and do the same. DeSantis got in line and made no waves, as did Marco Rubio.

As Trump watched this abject spectacle, it was easy to see the pleasure it gave him.

And also the person sitting beside him, J.D. Vance, whose rapid ascension has made the future political careers of Cruz, Ramaswamy, Haley, and Rubio effectively obsolete.

At the end came Lara Longform Trump, representing nepo babies everywhere, heaping praise on her father-in-law for 21 excruciating minutes, that reached a nadir when she quoted both the Bible (Proverbs 28:1, “The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion.”) and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech (“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience and comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”) to apply to Donald Trump.

Dispatch 3: A Cold Fear, Again
Wednesday, July 17, 2024

Imagine, for a moment, that the miniature blank white screen on the side of the former president’s head suddenly began to display images projected from inside his head—mind movies from his agitated id. All of his revenge fantasies, memories of humiliations, nightmares and fears. And then imagine that these phantasms are then miraculously projected onto all the screens in the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, and then all the screens in America, large and small, preempting everything else.

And further, imagine that Steve Bannon is let out of prison for a day to join Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Kevin Roberts and Roger Stone and Stephen Miller on the main stage at the convention to tell us what they actually have planned for us when Trump is re-elected President. What would happen then? Would people pay attention then?

Well, that didn’t happen tonight, on “Make America Strong Once Again” night at the convention, but there was certainly a lot of red meat strewn, by Matt Gaetz and Peter Navarro among others. Navarro was just out of prison, after serving a four-month stretch for contempt of Congress. Even though he was abandoned by Trump, he remained loyal: “They will come for you…. I went to prison so you won’t have to.”

Donald Trump Jr. led with his daughter Kai Madison Trump, talking about her sweet grandpa to give things a gentle touch, and then unloaded with a strictly self-absorbed MAGA rant. “There is tough. And then there is Trump tough.” I thought back to the night eight years ago, when I saw Don Jr. give his speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 19, 2016, and the effect it had on me then:

He took the stage like the groomed scion he is—supremely confident, forceful, and at ease with his privilege. When he made a mistake about “pouring sheetrock and hanging cement,” it didn’t hurt him because he shrugged it off with a perfectly timed and nuanced laugh. His speech was remarkably cogent and persuasive, as if someone had taken his father’s rants and distilled them into sense. His temperament was also refined, as if his father’s bullying hateful speech had been run through a less aggrieved and resentful filter. Donald Junior was good—Kennedy good.

Tonight at the Q, Paul Ryan looked like the past, and Donald J. Trump, Jr. looked like the future.

Until now, I have not been truly afraid of Donald Trump, because I’ve never really believed that he could, finally, be elected. There are just too many negatives for too many voters. But tonight, watching his heir rise, and watching the effect his son’s speech had on the crowd, how their faces and body language were transformed, a cold fear washed over me.¹

Tonight, it wasn’t Don Jr.’s speech that did that to me, but that of his friend J.D. Vance. Don Jr.’s speech was really there this time to set up Vance, whose night this was. He was further introduced by his wife Usha, who seems like a decent person.

Vance, however, is as slick as black ice and just as deadly, and he’s going to be a dangerous threat to American democracy for a long time to come. In four years, Donald Trump will be eighty-two, a year older than Biden is now, and Vance will be forty-three.

I feel like I know this guy. Pure poison, all wrapped up in an irresistible package. His narrative of the decline of the white working class is compelling, but his solutions to it are noxious, and almost entirely based on falsehoods.

Gabriel Winant, who wrote an in-depth assessment of Vance last year for n+1, said of his book Hillbilly Elegy, “The book and indeed his whole career form a spectacular act of revenge in the guise of a loving tribute.”²

A specter haunting the proceedings tonight was an ailing Joe Biden. Just before prime time, it was announced that Biden has COVID, and the networks repeatedly played tape of him struggling to walk up the stairs to Air Force One, and then later, stumbling off the plane in Delaware, where he’s gone to rest and recover. And the whole night was punctuated by breaking news that key Congressional leaders—Schumer, Jeffries, Pelosi, Schiff—are telling Biden that he can’t win and that he’s in danger of pulling the whole party down in the election.

But the real impediment, and the real enemy in November, is apathy and complacency. If people in the country don’t start paying attention soon, the people currently celebrating in the Fiserv Forum are going to make all their choices for them.

1. David Levi Strauss, Co-Illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press, 2020).
2. Gabriel Winant, “J. D. Vance Changes the Subject: A Senator from the Unconscious,” in n+1, Issue 45, Spring 2023. Thanks to Ann Lauterbach.

Dispatch 4: Out Beyond the Rally Fence
Thursday, July 18, 2024

A substantial portion of the convention last night can be summarized in this way: “Yes, Donald Trump may be a sociopath, a malignant narcissist, a congenital liar, and a serial abuser of women. He may be a wannabe dictator whose vision for the future includes curtailing the rights of women, discriminating against anyone deemed not-white-enough, blaming all our social ills on migrants, and doing away with the Rule of Law. But he is also my dad, my grandpa, my friend [Curiously, I don’t remember anyone calling him ‘my husband.’], and that should be enough for you. That’s who you should come out and vote for, in Peace, Love, and Unity.”

In anticipation of tonight’s speech, I am cast again back to the acceptance speech Donald Trump delivered on July 21, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio, which I experienced in person:

With this speech, translated from the original German (thank you, Molly Ivins) onto teleprompters, Trump swept away all the tentative attempts at unity and understanding and diversity, most of them offered by his own family, over the past four days. He took all the vitriol and pomposity and demagoguery spewed in his primary campaign rallies and turned them up a notch. This speech was fueled by xenophobia, nativism, protectionism, and rank nationalism. It used catchwords and phrases from the history of these tendencies: “Make American Great Again” from Ronald Reagan, “America First” from Charles Lindbergh, “Law and Order” from Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, and “I am your Voice” and “The time for action has come” from Mussolini.¹

That first Trump acceptance speech went on for an hour and fifteen minutes, the longest acceptance speech since Nixon’s in 1972. Tonight’s speech blew past all the competition, clocking in at an hour and thirty-three minutes.

Trump’s official “acceptance speech” had two distinct parts. The first part was well-scripted and delivered in a halting, sometimes hushed voice, as he described being shot in the ear at the rally on Saturday, and barely avoiding being killed. He told the crowd that this is the only time he will ever tell this story, because it’s just “too painful to tell.”

Trump’s demeanor during the telling was like that of a small child or an adolescent who knows that they should be serious and stricken, but can’t quite bring themselves to do that. “Wow, what was that? It can only be a bullet.” Especially inauthentic were his references to faith, God, and divine intervention. He said, “I felt very safe because I had God on my side,” and that he was only here speaking to us all tonight “by the grace of Almighty God.” These words seemed utterly foreign to him.

When he spoke about the fireman, Corey Comperatore, who was killed that day by the gunman, and the other two rally-goers who were critically injured, David Dutch and James Copenhaver, he was more comfortable telling about the 6.3 million dollars he’d raised for their families, and even gave the name of one donor who’d just given Trump a check for a million dollars.

But he did try to use this occasion to present a kinder, gentler version of his usual approach: “I stand before you this evening with a message of confidence, strength, and hope.” And “I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America.” And “We rise together, or we fall apart.”

But he then drifted fairly rapidly toward the “American Carnage” narrative with which he is more familiar, and a description of the world in crisis and ruin on nearly every front, where things are so bad that only he can fix it. “I will end every single international crisis that the current administration has created,” and, “I will bring back the American Dream.”

He kept trying to return to his scripted speech, but couldn’t resist ad-libbing and going off on well-worn tangents. There began to be more extemporaneous tangents than script, until—thirty minutes or so in—he seemed to abandon the script and revert entirely to the woolly rally routines that he’s been doing for years now. Like an aging vaudevillian, he went on automatic.

It’s the same old story he’s been telling at all his rallies—a fabric of lies and half-truths that presents himself as the only one who knows how to deal with all these intractable world problems. People at the rallies, who travel around the country to attend one after another, love these stories because they want to believe they’re true, and that the answers are just that easy. They’re like bedtime stories: and everyone lived happily ever after. “Love, it’s about love.”

At some point, Trump was fully in rally mode, and went into his usual routines. Even Hannibal Lecter made an appearance. “He’d love to have you for dinner.”

“We’re going to build an Iron Dome over our country.” “We’ll cure cancer and Alzheimer’s. And we can do that, but we can’t have men competing in women’s sports.”

At this point, a camera caught J.D. Vance looking very worried indeed. He knows that much of what Trump was saying is not true and is not possible. It’s a fantasy—the fever dream of a con man or just the well-worn routines of an aging entertainer, like those of Trump’s friend Hulk Hogan, who helped introduce him. The aging Hulk tried to rip off his Hulk shirt to reveal a Trump/Vance shirt underneath, but he had a hard time tearing it off and had to try several times, ruining the effect.

Just like at the rallies, these stories Trump tells make everyone present feel good, but you’ve got to be there—you’ve got to be part of the group. This is maybe the first time that Trump has brought the full rally routine out into the world, for a lot of people who’ve never been to a rally, and this was a terrible, terrible mistake.

It is as if the assassin’s bullet broke the spell of the rallies.

Reporters said a lot of people in the upper sections of Fiserv Forum left halfway through, and many others were checking their phones and looking around at each other in confusion. As we approached the midnight hour, the whole room suddenly fell silent, as the delegates and activists were stunned by the dissociative fugue playing out in front of them. What happened tonight was the vocal version of those mind movies I mentioned earlier.

It was supposed to be an acceptance speech, but it turned out to be an unveiling of things the Republican Party has been trying desperately to conceal since giving everything over to Trumpism. Now it’s out in the world beyond the rally fence, and it may be impossible to get it back in. Trump is unhinged, and now the whole world has seen it.

1. Co-illusion, 17.

Dispatch 5: Stand Down & Stand By
Sunday, July 21, 2024

Barely a week after the Miraculous Ear Wound, and three days after the Great Unveiling of Rally Trump in Prime Time at the RNC, Joe Biden turned the tables on Donald Trump in a decisive way today by standing down and endorsing his Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him as the new nominee for President of the United States.

In one fell swoop, Biden thereby completely upended the 2024 campaign. Republicans wanted desperately for Biden to stay in the race after being mortally wounded by his disastrous debate performance on June 27. After that and an attempted assassination of Trump, and the reversal of a court decision against him in the classified document case, Trump went into his party’s convention last week riding high and virtually certain of winning the coming election. Trump was so convinced of his impending victory that he picked a MAGA attack dog/obedient service animal as his new running mate, turning off any voter outside of the hard MAGA/Project 2025 base.

To get back in the race, Democrats needed to disrupt things, and they did that today. For the first time in Trump’s political life, he was ahead in the polls, and the disruption came from the other side. The sound you hear today is momentum shifting to the Democratic side. A tremendous grassroots movement began to coalesce almost immediately behind the Harris candidacy.

ActBlue announced that small-dollar donors contributed over $27 million in the first 5 hours of the Harris campaign. Two hours later, ActBlue announced that, in the first 7 hours, that figure had jumped to $47 million. Endorsements of Harris by elected officials began piling up like donor dollars.

Trump is scared and well he should be. Strong women, and especially strong women of color, have always been his Nemeses.

The battle is now billed as “The Prosecutor vs. The Felon,” begging the question for all voters in November: Do you believe in the Rule of Law or not? What will a debate look like now, with the prosecutor leaning in? The old feeble man in the race is now Donald Trump. And Democrats are re-invigorated and itching for a fight.

Kamala Harris has always been underestimated politically, much like Joe Biden. Now she’s about to enter the ultimate crucible.

American democracy is still going to be in the fight of its life in the next 107 days, and there will likely still be dark days ahead. But something significant has changed.

And it is Joe Biden who’s made that change happen. What he just did is unbelievable. Biden put the needs of the country before his own. It is an act of supreme selflessness and courage that someone like Donald Trump will never understand.

Maybe now that Biden has bowed out, Democrats can finally properly celebrate him and what he’s accomplished. He has been one of the most consequential US presidents in history, even after only one term, and certainly one of the most effective at getting progressive legislation passed. He saved us from Donald Trump already once. He stood in the breach for us. He got us out of the Covid crisis remarkably well. And now, he’s cut through the noise to get to the signal, hopefully just in time.

He’s still got six months left in office, and I’m sure he’s going to make every day of that count.

Character is destiny, and Biden has made his character clear in a way that will go down in history.

Trump, on the other hand, has gone as far as he can go without character in a democracy. To go further, he would have to abandon democracy and embrace autocracy, which is where he and J.D. Vance are clearly headed. Luckily, in a democracy, the people still have a say in that.

Dispatch 6: Sitting This One Out?
Wednesday, July 24, 2024

In the three days since Joe Biden announced that he was withdrawing from the race and endorsing Kamala Harris for president, everything about this entirely consequential contest has changed. A real grassroots movement immediately sprang into action, as if out of nowhere, to support Harris. Donors small and large showered the new campaign with money. Over a million people went to KamalaHarris.com and signed on, in a very short period of time. Tens of thousands of mostly young people volunteered to help with the campaign. Harris, up until now a minor figure, not clearly seen, suddenly became vivid. There followed a massive meme explosion on social media, setting Harris’s words to music and minutely dissecting her dance moves. And bratification and chartreuse spread throughout the land.

It was immediately clear that Democrats had been so stopped up, fearful, and apprehensive for so long about the real possibility that Trump & Co. would take over again, and transform this country into a Project 2025 nightmare, that the release, when it came, was explosive. Suddenly, things seemed possible again. It is difficult to win an election with hope, but despair will lose every time. And a lot of Democrats and anti-fascists in America had drifted dangerously close to this enervating despair.

One of the ways that autocratic regimes take control is by convincing people that nothing they do makes any difference, and that hope for such democratic action is a chimera, only believed in by suckers and losers.

Of course, there is still a tremendous amount of work to do, and there are definitely more hard times ahead. The MAGA machine will not go down easily, and the psychic miasma that has fallen over half of the country will not easily be dissipated. But the hunger for a next-generation politics is immense. I’ve heard a number of cynical, hardened political operatives liken this new energy to what was in the air in the 2008 election cycle, and we all know what happened when that was unleashed.

War criminal Benjamin Netanyahu spoke today to the U.S. Congress, in a disgraceful appeal to the worst of American politics. Of the over 5000 protestors outside, Natanyahu said, “These protestors stand with evil. They stand with Hamas. They stand with rapists and murderers. They should be ashamed of themselves.” But it is not the protestors who have killed more than 35,000 civilians in Gaza, including 15,000 children, and made sure that tens of thousands more have been gravely injured and will starve in the days to come, without aid in a bombed-out wasteland. Anyone with eyes to see knows that.

I’m glad, and proud, that Kamala Harris, in her capacity as president of the Senate, was not in her chair for that speech today.

Coupled with the new sense of hope and excitement about Kamala Harris’s campaign is a real sadness about Joe Biden. His speech today from the Oval Office was memorable and also wrenching. “The defense of democracy is more important than any title.” “I revere this office, but I love my country more.” “Kings and dictators do not rule here. The people do.”

The Republicans’ plan to try to unseat Biden from office in his last six months is wildly unpopular and will not succeed. But it is still difficult to see him, obviously impaired, struggle to communicate. Words have never treated Biden well, and now they are abandoning him altogether. Even so, he deserves our undying gratitude and respect. He protected us from Trump before and picked up the pieces of what Trump left behind after his four calamitous years in office and built something out of it. He did a good job.

Maybe now some of the people who’ve gotten caught up in this populist fervor and ended up in Trump’s orbit and now wonder how they got there, may be able to hear this, and remember where they came from. Or just people who have always voted Republican and are faithful, but know now that Trump and Vance are not really Republicans. Okay, so you can’t bring yourself to vote for a Democrat, but maybe you’ll consider sitting this one out, because you really don’t believe in what Trump and Vance are and will do, and don’t want to have that on your hands.

Dispatch 7: A Woman Laughing
Sunday, July 28, 2024

It has been astonishing to see and hear the extended and elaborate lamentations on the Right concerning Kamala Harris’s laugh. You’d think it was a matter of national security. It is related to their focus and furor over Hillary Clinton’s laugh when she ran for president, but is even more pointed, if less efficacious, this time. This time, the nominee-for-president’s laugh is seen and heard widely among Republicans as an affront to the office and to all God-fearing (male) subjects. How could she laugh at a time like this?

It appears that MAGA men much prefer agelast women, among whom Melania Trump reigns supreme. You might have seen her laugh, on screen, but I doubt very much you have ever heard her laugh. Of course, it’s easy to ascribe her supreme and ageless agelasty to her current matrimonial and legal predicament. Who wouldn’t be somber? But one wonders, has she ever laughed since meeting Trump?

Kamala Harris’s laughter is offensive to the Right because it is unrestrained, first and foremost. Conservative men feel it as an attack on ladylike reserve. And they fear it may also be contagious, for Christ’s sake. What would happen if other women caught this bug and started laughing, too? What comes next, a woman President?

And besides, it’s indecent. We all know this. It is the laugh of the lascivious. Which is okay in certain women (we applaud it!), but certainly not in the women we marry or allow to work with us. And certainly not in women seeking higher office, who petition to join the sacred brotherhood of power. No laughing is allowed by women in these precincts!

Some women confederates have joined in the condemnation of Harris’s indecent hilarity, in predictable ways. Former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly tweeted that Kamala Harris “did sleep her way into and upward in California politics” (by way of explanation). Last year, far-Right Australian commentator Teena McQueen said about Harris, “The woman continually laughs this ridiculous laugh. I don’t know what drugs she’s on or what makes her happy all the time, but she’s an absolute disgrace and she hasn’t done women any favors.”

Trump has now taken to calling Harris “Laughin’ Kamala.” At a rally last Saturday, he asked the crowd, “Have you ever watched her laugh? She is crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh . . . She is nuts.”

A woman laughing means she doesn’t need a man and this makes insecure men like Trump shrink. In a larger frame, her joyousness and vitality is a threat against his dark vision of American Carnage. Her laughter makes light of his politically-motivated imagination of ever-impending doom that only he can avert. You can’t fix this. Only he can do that.

Laughter is the sign of the Social. It’s about relation and communication. It binds people together.

I once had a friend, a brilliant thinker, who could make me laugh for hours. He was one of the funniest people I’ve ever known. But at a certain point, he abruptly and viciously betrayed me for his own personal gain, and I never saw him again. And when I looked back at our brief time together, I realized that I had never, ever heard this fellow laugh.

Donald Trump, too, has an “entertainer” side that loves to make his followers laugh, with his routines of predatory intent, but he himself doesn’t laugh, because he considers laughter a form of weakness and vulnerability—a human opening that he will never allow. As Maya Angelou often counseled, “Don’t trust people who don’t laugh.”

Women, especially women of color, have long been Trump’s bête noires. “Laughin’ Kamala” is about to become his worst nightmare.

Dispatch 8: The Tip of Aaron’s Right Ear & the Tip of the Spear
Wednesday, July 31, 2024

From the beginning of his political career, Donald Trump has often made his most revealing pronouncements about his ultimate political intentions when speaking to an audience of Evangelical Christians. Why? Because Trump has always known that his principal appeal to his most fervent followers is based on faith and belief. The MAGA movement is a White Christian Nationalist movement at its base. Steve Bannon certainly knows this. So does Stephen Miller and Speaker Mike Johnson. And now J. D. Vance knows it. Their ends are political, but the means are faith-based.

Observers from outside the movement have often wondered how Christians could follow such a manifestly ungodly figure as Trump. But sinners have always had a special dispensation in the Christian faith, especially in the fundamentalist variety of that faith. Sinners are the living proof of God’s love and grace. And if God loves and forgives sinners, so should we.

Trump’s miraculous survival of the assassination attempt on July 13 was the final proof Evangelical Christians needed that he is in fact the chosen one. The bloodying of Trump’s right ear was seen to represent a physical and spiritual transformation, preparing him for his sacred role as savior. Just as Jesus healed the right ear of Malchus in the Gospels, he healed Trump. “But Jesus said, ‘No more of this!’ And he touched his ear and healed him.” (Luke 22: 51) And in the Old Testament, blood on the right ear is a sign of consecration and indicates that a person has been chosen for service. In Leviticus 8:22-24, Moses kills the sacrificial ram of ordination, and puts some of the blood “on the tip of Aaron’s right ear” and on the tips of the right ears of Aaron’s sons as well, as priests.

And Steve Bannon said, “Trump wears the armor of God.” Case closed.

So it was that at the “Believers’ Summit” in West Palm Beach on July 26, Trump urged, “Christians, get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you, Christians… In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

Just one more time. The last time.

I hope enough Americans recognize soon enough (96 days and counting) that this is not an election like other presidential elections in our history, but that this may be the final referendum on democracy and the rule of law. It is believed that almost a quarter of Americans are White Evangelical Christians, and three of ten are adherents to or sympathizers with Christian nationalism. This is clearly not enough voters to elect Trump and sanction an autocratic takeover of the government. But the MAGA movement is a coalition of sympathizers and aggrieved people, which may comprise 40 to 50 percent of the electorate. And it means that a significant proportion of the other 50 to 60 percent needs to take a stand and vote. Just this time. Because, if you don’t, in four more years, you won’t have to vote again.

Poor and working-class people in this country have been abandoned politically and economically by the juggernaut of globalized capitalism. And they have been abandoned culturally as well by liberal elites in America. Their culture has been stolen from them and they’ve been treated as figures of fun—deplorables and depraved reprobates—among these elites. This has built up a tremendous reserve of resentment and grievance that has been tapped by a cynical political movement moving rapidly toward autocracy. This election is our last chance to stop this movement and regroup.

Dispatch 9: The Same Old Show
Tuesday, August 6, 2024

After surviving five Covid summers without succumbing to the virus, I tested positive on Friday, July 31, and was sick for a miserable three days. It was a relatively mild version of the scourge, like having a weakened predator take a swipe at you as it runs by on its way to more dire and desired prey.

I’m told the new Covid vaccine boosters will be available next month, so the virus got me at the exact point of least protection. And it reminded me that one of the very, very few things Trump did right as President was to sanction, or at least not completely stand in the way of, Operation Warp Speed, launched in May 2020 to get the vaccines to market quickly. Otherwise, the Trump administration was mostly in denial about the pandemic and downplayed its seriousness for far too long, causing a horrific amount of suffering. If it hadn’t been for Dr. Fauci, there would have been even more. Trump’s negligence in the pandemic has been reported and analyzed thoroughly by historian Heather Cox Richardson, among many others. Richardson has been consistently and clearly narrating the facts in this campaign and giving context for the struggle masterfully, from the beginning.

Yesterday, Richardson pointed to reporting showing that the reality TV industry has collapsed, and posited that “the change seems to represent Americans’ souring on the blurring of reality and entertainment that gave us the Trump era.”

Trump rose to political power thanks to his appearances on reality TV, which claimed to be unscripted but was actually edited to emphasize ruthless competition among people striving for ultimate victory in a closed system. The Apprentice launched in 2004, and its highly edited episodes portrayed its star, Trump, as a brilliant and very wealthy businessman despite his past failures.…

Since 2015, Trump has offered a simple narrative of American life that did not reflect reality. Using the sort of language rising authoritarians use to attract a disaffected population, he promised those left behind economically by forty years of supply-side economics that he would bring back manufacturing, close tax loopholes, promote infrastructure, and make healthcare cheaper and better.…

He never delivered on his economic promises: manufacturing continued to decline, he cut taxes for the wealthy and for corporations, “infrastructure week” became a national joke, and rather than expand the Affordable Care Act, Republicans repeatedly tried to kill it. But Trump and his followers did center those who had gravitated toward the MAGA movement for its cultural promises.¹

But the cultural promises are slipping away as well, Richardson concludes, as “Voters seem increasingly aware of the difference between image and reality.”

Now Trump is refusing to appear on a stage with Kamala Harris unless he can completely control the stage. But perhaps the Trump Show, what Harris calls “The Same Old Show,” may finally be nearing the end of its run, as viewers look elsewhere.

1. Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, on Substack, August 5, 2024.

Dispatch 10: “Thank You for Bringing Back the Joy”
Tuesday, August 6, 2024

Today was another joyful one for Democrats. The Harris campaign rollout, only two weeks old, has been, honestly, virtually flawless, and their introduction of running mate Tim Walz today also went off without a hitch. Harris, Walz, and Josh Shapiro all gave rousing speeches, and the crowd of 14,000 at Temple University in Philadelphia was on fire. Harris and Walz seemed to have genuine affection for each other and to be having a good time as they embraced the task of beating Trump and Vance.

Walz (age 60) grew up in a small town in Nebraska and joined the Army National Guard at age 17, achieving the rank of command sergeant major and serving for 24 years. His father died of lung cancer when Walz was 19. He became a high school social studies teacher and football coach, and eventually ran for and was elected to Congress, and was reelected five times, serving in the House from 2007 to 2019. He was known as the best marksman in Congress and an avid hunter, and was supported by the NRA, but when the Parkland massacre happened, he denounced the NRA and donated all the money the NRA Political Victory Fund had given him ($18,000) to the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund to treat military personnel suffering from traumatic brain injury and PTSD. He was elected governor of Minnesota in 2018.

The day after the murder of George Floyd, Governor Walz said this about the video of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck: “The lack of humanity in this disturbing video is sickening. We will get answers and seek justice.”

When protests against the continued U.S. funding of the war in Gaza erupted, Walz said, “This issue is a humanitarian crisis. They have every right to be heard... These folks are asking for a change in course, they're asking for more pressure to be put on… You can hold competing things: that Israel has the right to defend itself, and the atrocities of October 7 are unacceptable, but Palestinian civilians being caught in this… has got to end.” He further said he supports a ceasefire in Gaza.

My high school football coach in Chapman, Kansas was named Nevoy Hettenbach and one of his main assistants was Dennis Sidener, who also taught woodworking. The former was wiry and compact and the latter was bullish and massive, but they were similar in disposition. They were both hard taskmasters and disciplinarians, but were always fair and could be kind when kindness was called for. For all of us who played for them, the last thing you wanted to do was disappoint either one of them. They brought out the best in their players, year after year. And they were both strong men who had nothing to prove.

It strikes me now that Tim Walz is that kind of person, and he stands in sharp contrast to Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, two men who must continually try to prove their toughness, driven by their deep-seated insecurity. Trump, especially, is a classic over-compensating bully, who is, at heart, fearful, cowardly, and weak. J.D. Vance’s weird identity crisis is currently being played out in full view of the American electorate.

Tim Walz is the kind of man that Trump and Vance claim to be, which presents a big problem for them now, because their imaginary selves are forced to face a real example of what they only pretend to be. Trump’s first response to the announcement of Walz’s candidacy was a hysterical post under the heading, “Tim Walz will unleash hell on Earth!” And Vance called Walz “one of the most far-left radicals in the entire United States government at any level.” This, even though Walz was ranked the 7^th-most bipartisan House member during the 114^th Congress.

Walz is going to further shrink Trump and Vance. Like Walz, I’m really looking forward to a Walz v. Vance debate, if Vance doesn’t duck it, like Trump is ducking Harris.

Dispatch 11: A Little Concerned
Thursday, August 8, 2024

Donald Trump’s performance today in an impromptu press conference at Mar-a-Lago included a deeply unsettling glimpse into the addled and free-associational but always conniving mind of its master. In response to a leading question by a reporter about Kamala Harris’s relationship thirty years ago with the former mayor of San Francisco Willie Brown, Trump said, “Well, I know Willie Brown very well. In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him. We thought maybe this is the end. We were in a helicopter going to a certain location together, and there was an emergency landing. This was not a pleasant landing. And Willie was—he was a little concerned.” The implication was clear: Trump was fine, courageous under fire, as always, but Willie Brown was scared to death, the coward. But, I’m sorry, you wanted to know about his relationship with Kamala Harris, didn’t you?

“So I know him, but I know him pretty well. I mean, I haven’t seen him in years. But he told me terrible things about her. But this is what you’re telling me, anyway, I guess. But he had a big part in what happened with Kamala. But he—he, I don’t know, maybe he’s changed his tune. But he—he was not a fan of hers very much, at that point.”

So Willie Brown was terrified of dying in a helicopter crash with the hero Donald Trump, but he still took time, there in the plummeting helicopter, in the few minutes he had left, to tell Trump what a bad person Kamala Harris was and that he, Brown, was sorry he had helped her. It was sort of like a last wish by the former Democratic mayor. A political penance before dying.

Through Trump, Brown wanted the world to know that they shouldn’t trust this terrible person Kamala Harris, and they certainly shouldn’t vote for her for president.

And luckily, Trump was there to witness it, all those years ago. Except, he wasn’t.

The helicopter ride Trump hazily remembered happened in California in November 2018, on the way to view the terrible fires ravaging the Sierra Nevada foothills above Sacramento. Then-president Trump was with then-governor of California Jerry Brown (not Willie Brown) and then-governor-elect Gavin Newsom in the helicopter. Jerry Brown said through a spokesman, “There was no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris.” Gavin Newsom remembers that it was Trump who was scared, talking incessantly about the possibility of the helicopter crashing. You know the type.

When they landed safely on the ground without incident, Trump went on and on about his theory that the fires in California happened because the forest floor was cluttered with debris, and should have been raked clean. That’s how these fires must be controlled, he claimed: “You gotta clean your floors!” He blamed California for their fires and threatened to withhold federal funds until they complied with his commands.

When Times reporters reached Willie Brown, now 90 years old, by phone at Sam’s Grill in San Francisco right after Trump’s news conference today, he said Trump’s entire story was false—complete fantasy. “He had never ridden in a helicopter with Mr. Trump, he said. He had never nearly perished in any helicopter ride. And he remained an avid supporter of Ms. Harris’s.”¹

As for Trump, how far away are we from a full-on dissociative fugue or dementia? And when he finally breaks, and loses contact with reality, what is he going to do?

1. Heather Knight and Shawn Hubler, “That Time Trump Nearly Died in a Helicopter Crash? Didn’t Happen,” The New York Times, August 8, 2024. 

Dispatch 12: Kamala and the Kamera & The Trumpelon Show
Monday, August 12, 2024

Ezra Klein recently said, “Harris holds the camera like no politician since Barack Obama.”¹ How did she get to this point? The camera has liked Kamala Harris for a long time, but the way she holds the camera now is a recent trait. Some of this has to do, of course, with outside factors: the right person at the right time, after a long pent-up public hunger. Joe Biden was a highly effective President, but he didn’t hold the camera, except at the end, in a negative way. It was a kind of perverse attraction, like the camera’s attraction to Trump, i.e., like that of a vulture to carrion.

Kamala holds the camera now because she is so obviously in the right place at the right time, and she knows it. Her pure confidence is a good place to hang out. It is not threatening or condescending. It is neither callow nor weary. It makes one want to look for awhile. It’s inclusive and welcoming. And it combines well with the big dog goofiness of Tim Walz.

Holding the camera means being comfortable in front of it. Not self-conscious and not afraid. It wants to know that you belong there. Kamala has always been a little sexy and a little stern, taking care of business and enjoying it. She’s not asking for anything because she doesn’t need anything. She’s right where she’s always known she should be and if you want to join the movement, come on.

Trump is being driven mad by Kamala’s relation to the camera. On Sunday, Trump accused her of using AI to fabricate an image of a huge crowd at her rally in Detroit last week. Since her crowd size dwarfed his, it couldn’t be true. On Truth Social, Trump said, “She ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” The following day, the New York Times did a quick photo-analysis of the actual crowd that day in Detroit to swiftly debunk Trump’s claim.² But, like the Big Lie of Stop the Steal itself, the accusation of falsehood by Trump was not subject to proof or evidence. It was designed to shake the reliance on proof and evidence itself and replace it with the sheer force of assertion by the Fearless Leader.

Elon X Donald

Yes, I was one of those waiting for the Musk/Trump “interview” last night, billed (by Trump) as “THE INTERVIEW OF THE CENTURY,” and predicting that “The talking heads in the lamestream media will LOSE THEIR MINDS when they watch this.” We checked all platforms and all devices in anticipation of something we all knew would be a big disappointment as time ticked by. Fifteen minutes in, Elon sent out a brief message to say that the site had suffered a massive DDoS attack (“They don’t want him to be able to speak!”) and Elon was working to shut it down. They finally established an audio link 40 minutes in and Elon and Trump had what Musk called “a conversation,” which consisted of two narcissists giving set speeches and slavering praise on each other for two hours and six minutes. One of them was slurring his speech. Welcome to the Trumpelon reality show.

1. Ezra Klein, “Biden Made Trump Bigger. Harris Makes Him Smaller,” The New York Times, August 11, 2024.
2. Bora Erden, Malika Khurana, Ashley Wu, Kalina Borkiewicz and Kellen Browning, “Despite Trump’s Claims, Footage Shows Large Crowd at Harris’s Detroit Rally,” The New York Times, August 12, 2024.

Dispatch 13: The Greatest Cutter and Elon’s Little Finger Nail
Thursday, August 15, 2024

Elon Musk’s “interview” with Donald Trump on X on Monday night was festooned with superlatives. Trump called it “the interview of the century,” and Musk’s people speculated that it may have been the biggest live event in the history of the internet. For being such an august event, it began with an embarrassing silence. Musk blamed the delay on a coordinated cyberattack, but this turned out to be a smokescreen. The fact is the thing just didn’t work.

When the system finally groaned to life, the actual “conversation” quickly revealed itself as a rehash of Trump’s usual routines, with Musk playing along slavishly. We know why Trump played along: forty-five million dollars a month (“We have to make life better for our smart people”). But why was Musk so subservient? To try to lure Trump back to the fading shadow X of Twitter, yes, but also, presumably, because Musk thinks Trump is going to win in November and become the dictator of the United States, and Elon wants to be the first oligarch in line.

The event did make news on two fronts: Climate Change and Labor Relations.

Bill McKibben called the Musk/Trump confab “the dumbest climate conversation of all time.” Trump said that rising sea levels due to melting glaciers would create “more oceanfront property.” He also said the problem of global warming (which he has repeatedly called a “hoax”) is nothing compared to the problem of “nuclear warming.” No one knows what that is.

For his part, Elon Musk opined that it was wrong to vilify the oil and gas industry, and that the only real imperative to quit fossil fuels is that they will eventually run dry, but that is a long way off and less of a problem than people think, just as nuclear war is also much less dangerous than people think.

When The Guardian fact-checked the Musk/Trump conversation on climate change, Musk tweeted back, “ My little finger nail knows more about climate issues than the entire staff of The Guardian.”

The other area of conflict after the Trumpelon spectacle was their characterization of labor relations, which may have been illegal and will certainly come back to bite the candidate.

It came when Trump gave what he thought was a supreme compliment to Musk: “You’re the greatest cutter,” he said. “I mean, look at what you do. You walk in and you just say, ‘You want to quit?’ They go on strike. I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike, and you say, ‘That’s okay. You’re all gone. You’re all gone.’” Musk laughed. But the United Auto Workers union did not, and immediately filed federal labor charges against Trump and Musk.

This is not new for Trump. He has an extensive record of working against the interests of organized labor, and of working against working people in a myriad of ways.

The president of the U.A.W., Shawn Fain, who has enthusiastically endorsed Harris/Walz, said in a statement, “When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean. . . . Both Trump and Musk want working class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly.”

Even the Teamsters President Sean O’Brian (who spoke at Trump’s coronation in Milwaukee), reacted to say, “Firing workers for organizing and striking and exercising their rights as Americans is economic terrorism,” but he still stopped short of endorsing the Harris/Walz ticket, saying the Teamsters would make an announcement after both parties had completed their conventions. That didn’t prevent the Chair of the Teamsters National Black Caucus, James Curbeam, from coming out after the event to heartily endorse Harris/Walz, as most other unions already have.

Dispatch 14: We Just Have to Remember Who We Are
Monday, August 19, 2024

This first night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was mainly a night to celebrate political legacies of the Democratic Party. Jesse Jackson, at age 82, was wheeled onstage by Al Sharpton to be honored by the assembly for his signal accomplishments over many decades. Hillary Clinton was given a massive round of applause during and after her speech. And Jim Clyburn quoted from II Corinthians to comment on the current predicament of the Party and the Nation: “We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.”

But there was also time given tonight to celebrate rising stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Raphael Warnock, Peggy Flanagan, Jasmine Crockett, Jamie Raskin, and Steve Kerr—wait, Steve Kerr? Actually, Coach Kerr gave an exceptional speech and should be hired by the campaign immediately to go on the road with them.

But mostly, the night was devoted to celebrating Joe Biden. He was introduced by his wife Jill and then his daughter Ashley, who caused her father to shed a tear before he’d said a word. Then the convention crowd gave Biden an extended ovation that wouldn’t quit.

As the crowd cheered, I reflected on what a cruel business politics can be. Who was it who put Joe Biden out there on that stage in Atlanta on June 27^th in front of 51 million viewers and his nemesis, to wreck everything he’d built? And who was ultimately given the assignment to tell him he was no longer viable as a candidate?

Last night, Biden basically gave the speech he would have given if he was still the candidate and the nominee, recounting what his administration had managed to do in three and a half years and talking about what they would do if reelected. When it was over, Rachel Maddow said, “There is no balloon drop, which is the only way you would know that this wasn’t an acceptance speech.” And what it made clear, again, was that the rhetoric and message Biden is still projecting would not win over enough voters in this turn-the-page election.

This was Biden’s 13^th DNC, comprising 52 years of Democratic Conventions. And he was almost the old Biden tonight: strong and clear and committed once more, using the aggressive style that had been so successful for him in his last State of the Union address. Yes, as the speech went on, he did lose the thread briefly, and then began to stumble a bit more, having a lot of trouble with “the electrical/electoral power of women.”

But at the end he also shifted his remarks to concentrate more on the Harris/Walz ticket, saying that selecting Kamala to be his vice president was the best decision he made in his entire career, and that he would now be “the best volunteer for the Harris/Walz campaign that anyone has seen.” Then he got in a plane and flew to California for a vacation.

At the end of the speech, one phrase separated itself from the rest and hung over the assembled multitude. It was the signature line that Biden has been using for a long time, but it had a different valence and relevance tonight: “We just have to remember who we are.”

Dispatch 15: Just the People
Tuesday, August 20, 2024

Kamala Harris first met Barack Obama in 2004, when Harris helped Obama win his senate race in Illinois. This was of course the same year that most of the rest of the world first heard about Barack Obama, when John Kerry invited him to give the keynote address at the DNC that year in Boston. A few years later, Kamala Harris volunteered on Obama’s presidential campaign and worked for him in the Iowa caucuses. Obama reciprocated in 2010, helping Harris and endorsing her in her run for Attorney General of California. In an appearance on the David Letterman show the year before, the great Gwen Ifill had said of Harris, “They call her the female Barack Obama.”

John Kerry chose Obama to give the speech in Boston in 2004, Obama chose Biden as his running mate in 2008, and Biden chose Harris as his running mate in 2020. These are the consequential choices that have brought us to the present moment.

Now Kamala Harris is trying to rebuild the Obama coalition to beat Donald Trump. She is surging among voters under thirty and building momentum among women and racial minorities, in cities and suburbs, and among moderates. During and after their convention, Democrats must run these numbers up, because the system is rigged against them. They can’t just get the most votes—they have to get at least seven million more votes than the opposition to win in the Electoral College.

A lot of amazing things happened at the convention tonight. Probably only complete electoral politics nerds like me were moved by the roll call vote of all the states and territories, but I loved it. The Harris/Walz campaign pulled off a campaign rally in Milwaukee, in the same place that the Republicans held their convention last month, at the same time as the convention in Chicago. Bernie Sanders gave a strong speech at the convention, explaining exactly what the Biden/Harris administration did in response to the disastrous Covid-19 pandemic and related recession. “In the last three and a half years,” he said, “working together, we have accomplished more than any government since FDR.” Basically, he gave a cogent and convincing argument for democratic socialism, and concluded, “This is what the American people want from their government.” He also said, “We must end this horrific war in Gaza.” In 2016, Bernie Sanders’ supporters were edged out and in some cases locked out of the convention. In 2024, they’re inside, working with Harris/Walz.

But all of this was overshadowed by what happened at the end of the night, when two of the greatest political orators America has produced spoke, one after another. The two orators happen to be married to each other.

Michelle Obama spoke first, beginning with her grief over the death of her mother, and the legacy of mothers and their influence on all of us, including “my girl Kamala Harris.” That is, those of us who do not have “the affirmative action of generational wealth,” and who “don’t get to change the rules so we always win.” This time Michelle went right after Donald Trump: “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking may be one of those ‘Black jobs’?”

She spoke candidly about the tactics that Trump and his followers will use against Harris and Walz, and warned against Democrats quibbling about little things they might not like about our candidates. She said they are human and will make mistakes, but we don’t have time to quibble when the stakes are so high, time is so short, and the choice is so clear.

Then Barack Obama spoke, almost exactly twenty years after his first keynote speech for the Democratic National Convention. He is older and wiser, but just as energized and effective. He talked about the reasons that some people have turned to Trump, that they’re asking “Who will fight for me?” And he said “our task is to convince people that democracy can actually deliver.”

He talked about the core of democracy, that disparate people are “united by a common creed.” And he admitted that this is a time of great confusion and rancor, when “politicians and algorithms teach us to caricature each other and troll each other and fear each other.”

Neither of the Obamas pulled any punches when it came to the odds or the difficulties to come. They said the race was going to be close, and the Democrats were going to have to make it a substantial win, or it would get messy. There is little time, and everyone is going to have to work together in a concerted way.

Barack Obama said that “building a true democratic majority that can get things done” is going to be especially difficult in these circumstances, but it’s not impossible.

“So, let’s get to work,” he concluded.

If there is any way to do it, recordings of these two speeches should somehow be made available to every American right away. Surely, that would change things. I’m reminded that 8.5 million people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 turned around and voted for Trump the next time. Some of them voted for Obama twice and then voted for Trump. It’s not two different worlds. It’s a democracy, still, which means it’s just the people.

Dispatch 16: “I’m Ready to Turn the Page on These Guys”
Wednesday, August 21, 2024

I grew up in a small town in Kansas called Chapman, on the Smoky Hill River. Everything that Tim Walz says about Butte, Nebraska, where he grew up, rings true to me about Chapman—hard-working people trying to get by; neighbors helping neighbors, regardless of their differences; and adherence to the Golden Rule of “Mind your own damn business” when it comes to government interference in people’s private lives. In contrast, neither one of these small towns is anything like any of the small towns portrayed in Hillbilly Elegy.

As Trump used to say about the people he picked for his administration, Tim Walz is “a guy from Central Casting” for the role of a new kind of rural left populist. It’s hard to pick apart his bio because it’s so straightforward. So the only way for the opposition to respond is with a barrage of phony outrage and American Carnage catastrophizing. A few minutes after Walz’s speech at the Democratic National Convention concluded after midnight, I got an alert from Trump labeled, “Still awake after that?” and reading, “Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton, and Tim Walz spoke today. Their vision for America is scary. It’s really bad. It’ll be the end of this country. Economy CRASH. Jobs ELIMINATED. Illegals INVADING. Crime SKYROCKETING.”

What Trump and Vance have been telling people about how terrible everything is in small town America only works if white working-class people remain entertained and entranced by the Trump catastrophe show that owns the libs. That may be wearing thin.

At the end of Walz’s speech at the convention, Neil Young’s “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World” played over the amped up delegates. Young sued Trump back in June 2015 to get Trump to stop playing “Rockin’ in the Free World” at his rallies, but he gave the Harris/Walz campaign blanket permission for theirs. Even so, the song only works as an anthem if you don’t listen to the lyrics, which are more American Carnage than American Rescue, concluding with verse three: “We got a thousand points of light/ For the homeless man/ We got a kinder, gentler machine gun hand/ We’ve got department stores and toilet paper/ Got Styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer/ Got a man of the people says keep hope alive/ Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive.”

A real debate between Walz and Vance about their competing visions and plans for the white working class would be enlightening, if it ever happens.

Stevie Wonder and Oprah both gave good speeches tonight, and Wes Moore again distinguished himself as a leader to watch in the future.

Bill Clinton’s speech tonight, which went way over time, was “low energy” as Trump would (and probably will) say, but he delivered a few good lines. “Donald Trump creates chaos and then he sort of curates it as if it were precious art.” “Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, America has created 51 million new jobs. Democrats created 50 of them, and Republicans created 1.” And on the business of politics, he said, “This is a brutal, tough business. I want you to be happy. But we should never underestimate our adversaries. And those people are really good at distracting us and triggering doubt.”

Dispatch 17: The Next Great Chapter in the Most Extraordinary Story Ever Told

Tuesday, August 22, 2024

Destiny put Joe Biden in direct conflict with Donald Trump, and the battle has taken a toll on both of them. Biden became too sure of his own unique power to defeat Trump, which kept him in the race too long. But he realized his mistake in time to withdraw and immediately set up Kamala, who he really does believe in. And Trump is now left bemoaning the fact that he is no longer running against Biden, making him unable to effectively take on his new opponent. If he doesn’t catch up with the changed situation soon, it’s going to be too late.

On Tuesday night in Chicago, Trump’s worst nightmares from the past took the stage, in the persons of Barack Hussein Obama and a powerful Black woman named Michelle Obama. Together, they ripped him up and down. From the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011, when Barack Obama roasted Trump to his face, to now, the Obamas have long had his number. When asked by a reporter before the speeches on Tuesday night about his thoughts, Trump meekly said he liked and respected the Obamas. And after the speeches, he complained that they were mean to him, mounting personal attacks, and “They’re taking shots at your President!” just like Thomas Crooks!

Both parties went into their national conventions this year believing strongly that they were going to win the election in November. The Republicans entered Milwaukee after the catastrophic failure of the opposing candidate in an early debate that the opposition had requested, and right after their own candidate survived an assassination attempt and turned it into an iconic moment of defiance and victory.

And the Democrats entered Chicago after switching candidates and mounting an accelerated rollout of a new, refreshed candidate that deftly avoided the rough and tumble of a contested candidacy and hit the ground running, and who appears at the moment to be unstoppable, having chosen exactly the right running mate. The Democrats came to Chicago united. The only dissent is outside, with pro-Palestinian protesters determined to force the world to confront the genocide in Gaza and the U.S. government’s complicity in that atrocity. But in the age of “unscalable” fencing and aggressive crowd control, it is very difficult to mount an effective protest at a political convention.

Though losing energy rapidly, the MAGA movement is still formidable. And though increasingly unhinged, Trump still has the undying affection of all the members of that movement. For the Democrats to “turn the page on these guys” is going to take a tremendous campaign. They’re going to have to separate the MAGA base, which is still unmovable, from the rest of the country.

Trump calls Harris “the most radical left person ever to run for office,” and he calls the Democratic Party “communists.” Kamala Harris’s real politics, and her real story, are compelling, and Tim Walz’s are compelling, but to get those politics and those stories past the noise, coming from both the other side and also from the low-information, nihilist center, is going to take a massive effort.

Tonight, Kamala Harris gave the speech she needed to give, just as she’s done everything she’s needed to do since becoming the nominee. It was a transformative speech, a breakthrough. She was warm, humble, clear, confident, forceful and so direct. She spoke not just to the Democrats in the hall, but to the whole country, and to the world. “With this election, our nation has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past.” “Donald Trump is an unserious man, but the consequences of putting him back in office are very serious.” “I see a nation that is ready to move forward.” “Let’s write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.” “It’s our turn.”

The despair we were in before came from our doubt and growing regret that the Democrats weren’t mounting their best game against Trump and Vance. It now feels like democracy itself is going to put up the fight of its life in this election, and Kamala Harris is more than able and ready to lead that fight.

This is a whole new ballgame.