I want all children to be safe from violence.
Including the children of Gaza.
Certainly something that drives Walter up the wall.
And I've yet to see georgeob1 express an iota of skepticism about Trump's character, his policies, or his style of leadership.
She Campaigned for a Texas School Board Seat as a GOP Hard-Liner. Now She’s Rejecting Her Party’s Extremism
Courtney Gore, a Granbury ISD school board member, has disavowed the far-right platform she campaigned on after finding no evidence that students were being indoctrinated by the district’s curriculum. Her defiance has brought her backlash.
Weeks after winning a school board seat in her deeply red Texas county, Courtney Gore immersed herself in the district’s curriculum, spending her nights and weekends poring over hundreds of pages of lesson plans that she had fanned out on the coffee table in her living room and even across her bed. She was searching for evidence of the sweeping national movement she had warned on the campaign trail was indoctrinating schoolchildren.
Gore, the co-host of a far-right online talk show, had promised that she would be a strong Republican voice on the nonpartisan school board. Citing “small town, conservative Christian values,” she pledged to inspect educational materials for inappropriate messages about sexuality and race and remove them from every campus in the 7,700-student Granbury Independent School District, an hour southwest of Fort Worth. “Over the years our American Education System has been hijacked by Leftists looking to indoctrinate our kids into the ‘progressive’ way of thinking, and yes, they’ve tried to do this in Granbury ISD,” she wrote in a September 2021 Facebook post, two months before the election. “I cannot sit by and watch their twisted worldview infiltrate Granbury ISD.”
But after taking office and examining hundreds of pages of curriculum, Gore was shocked by what she found — and didn’t find.
The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. She’d examined curriculum related to social-emotional learning, which has come under attack by Christian conservatives who say it encourages children to question gender roles and prioritizes feelings over biblical teachings. Instead, Gore found the materials taught children “how to be a good friend, a good human.”
Today a Russian court sentenced 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to 16 years in a high-security penal colony after convicting him of espionage in a secret three-day trial. The U.S. government considers Gershkovich “wrongly detained,” a rare designation signifying that he is being held as a political bargaining chip.
Today, President Joe Biden said that Gershkovich was “targeted by the Russian government because he is a journalist and an American. We are pushing hard for Evan’s release and will continue to do so.” He added: “Journalism is not a crime. We will continue to stand strong for press freedom in Russia and worldwide, and stand against all those who seek to attack the press or target journalists.”
Last night, a faulty update of software from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike crashed computer systems all over the world. Banks and hospitals were locked out of their own programs, and government services shut down. In the U.S., more than 2,600 flights were canceled and 9,000 were delayed. Bloomberg’s David Rovella quoted Australian security consultant Troy Hunt: “I don’t think it’s too early to call it,” Hunt said. “This will be the largest IT outage in history.”
Also making history last night was the final night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the night on which former president Donald J. Trump accepted the party’s presidential nomination. Coming as it did just days after a would-be assassin took a shot at Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing one attendee and badly wounding two others, the convention was billed by Republican operatives as a way for Trump to rebrand himself as a candidate of “unity.”
This was certainly the way many major newspapers billed Trump’s acceptance speech this morning, in stories that, as media journalist Parker Molloy noted, were probably based on prepared remarks delivered to news agencies in advance of the speech. But it was not how the evening played out.
Since Saturday’s shooting, it has been notable that there has not been a medical review of Trump’s injuries, although he has said he was injured by a bullet that ripped through his ear. This matters not only because of the extent of his injuries, but also because Trump has made the story part of his identity without any fact check, and the media appears simply to be letting it go on Trump’s say-so, something that adds to the sense that media outlets are treating Trump and Biden differently.
Last night, Trump perhaps tried to address this lack by recounting last Saturday’s shooting. Interestingly, he did not say he was hit by a bullet, but that when he felt the injury he thought, “it can only be a bullet.” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo today noted a report from local Pennsylvania television station WPXI that four motorcycle officers standing within feet of Trump suffered minor injuries from flying debris. Trump has likely cut off further discussion of the topic by saying it is too painful to tell the story again.
With that story behind him, Trump hit the theme of unity, saying he would bring the country together. “The discord and division in our society must be healed, we must heal it quickly. We are bound together by a single fate, a single destiny,” he said. “We rise together. Or we fall apart…. I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America. So tonight, with faith and devotion, I proudly accept your nomination for president of the United States.”
But that was just in the first ten minutes. Then Trump ignored the teleprompter and things veered far off course, reflecting the candidate that has stayed in the safe spaces of Mar-a-Lago and rallies of his loyalists for years. Trump rambled for more than 90 minutes, making it the longest acceptance speech in U.S. history and outlasting the interest of the audience, some of whom fell asleep.
He went on to recite his usual litany of lies: that Democrats cheated in the 2020 presidential election (they did not), that crime is going up (it’s plummeting), that inflation is the worst we’ve ever had (it’s around 3%; the worst was around 23%), that Democrats want to quadruple people’s taxes (CNN fact checker Daniel Dale calls this “imaginary”), and so on. Dale called it “a remarkably dishonest acceptance speech.”
Journalist James Fallows posted: “Of the maybe 10,000 political speeches I've heard over the years, this was overall the worst.” Statistician Nate Silver’s judgment was harsher, in a way: he began with “It’s a weird but a pretty good speech,” then posted “Semi-retract this tweet, this speech is boring AF, but there are worse things politically speaking than being boring.” Shortly after, came: “Fully RETRACT and RESCIND, sometimes it seems like both parties are trying to throw this election.”
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes watched the unhinged speech and concluded: "This is not a colossus, this is not the big bad wolf, this is not a vigorous and incredibly deft political communicator. This is an old man in decline who's been doing the same schtick for a very long time and it's really wearing thin."
The point, though, as Trump meandered through attacks on immigrants and a diatribe about the fictional character cannibal Hannibal Lecter—who he might think was real—as it always has been, was to present a picture of the U.S. under siege by enemies who are persecuting him because he represents true Americans and that he must be returned to office because only he can vanquish those enemies. Greg Sargent of The New Republic noted that Trump cannot offer a “unity” message because “Trump himself knows the MAGA masses will not be satiated without expansive displays of rage, cruelty and sadism directed at hated out groups and designated enemies of MAGA.”
For years, observers have noted that Trump’s approach to politics is patterned on the “kayfabe” at the heart of professional wrestling. Kayfabe is the performance aspect of professional wrestling, in which the actors play out relationships and scenes in which there are good and evil, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal. According to journalist Abraham Josephine Reisman, in old-school kayfabe the actors never let their masks slip, and while the audience knew what they were seeing must be fake, they played along with the illusion.
But in the 1990s, the barrier between reality and illusion blurred as wrestlers and promoters tried to increase the viability of the fading industry by tossing reality into the performances: real-life insults—the more outrageous the better—and real-life events. Decoding what was real and what was not drove engagement until in 1999, an estimated 18% of Americans, about 50 million people, called themselves fans. This “neokayfabe,” Reisman wrote in the New York Times in 2023, “rests on a slippery, ever-wobbling jumble of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods, all delivered with the utmost passion and commitment.”
Neokayfabe, Reisman wrote, “turns the world into a hall of mirrors from which it is nearly impossible to escape. It rots the mind and eats the soul.”
Trump participated in a storyline in this neokayfabe with World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon in 2007, in part billed as a battle over hair. Eventually he was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, and many observers have made the link between neokayfabe and his approach to politics. Indeed, he even blended the two explicitly when he chose McMahon’s wife, Linda, to head the U.S. Small Business Administration during his presidency.
Neokayfabe and politics came together again last night at the Republican National Convention, as Linda McMahon, wrestler Hulk Hogan, and musician Kid Rock, whose music has been featured at wrestling events and who is also a member of the WWE Hall of Fame, all participated.
“So all you criminals, all you lowlifes, all you scumbags…. Whatcha gonna do when Donald Trump and all the Trumpamaniacs run wild on you, brother?!" Hogan yelled to wild applause after ripping off his shirt to show a Trump-Vance shirt. Like the other performers at the convention, he painted a portrait of Trump’s presidency, and of the United States since Trump left office, that was a fantasy of good and evil. Hogan reinforced that there was no way Trump was going to reach toward unity in Milwaukee. His approach to the world cannot be moderated. It depends on the idea that there are two teams in the performance and one must vanquish the other.
Part of that storyline requires rewriting not just the recent past, but our history. At the convention last night, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, said: “It is no wonder that the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy and faced down communism sadly say they don’t recognize our country anymore.” But the Allied soldiers in World War II were not fighting communism. They were fighting fascism. The three great Allied powers were Great Britain, the United States, and the communist Soviet Union.
It might be that Guilfoyle misspoke, or that she doesn’t know even the most basic facts of our history. Or it might be that by rewriting that history to put America on the side of the fascists, people like Guilfoyle hope to make that alliance more palatable to MAGA followers today.
As he recovers from Covid, the president has grown resentful toward Democratic congressional leaders and former President Barack Obama.
Sick with Covid and abandoned by allies, President Biden has been fuming at his Delaware beach house, increasingly resentful about what he sees as an orchestrated campaign to drive him out of the race and bitter toward some of those he once considered close, including his onetime running mate Barack Obama.
Mr. Biden has been around politics long enough to assume that the leaks appearing in the media in recent days are being coordinated to raise the pressure on him to step aside, according to people close to him. He considers Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, the main instigator, but is irritated at Mr. Obama as well, seeing him as a puppet master behind the scenes.
The friction between the sitting president and leaders of his own party so close to an election is unlike anything seen in Washington in generations — especially because the Democrats now working to ease him out were some of the allies most critical to his success over the last dozen years. It was Mr. Obama who elevated Mr. Biden from a presidential also-ran to the vice presidency, setting him up to win the White House in 2020, and it was Ms. Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, who pushed through his landmark legislative achievements.
But several people close to Mr. Biden, who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal matters, described an under-the-weather president coughing and hacking more than a hundred miles from the corridors of power as his presidency meets its most perilous moment.
He has watched with rising exasperation as a succession of news stories appeared, one after the other, reporting that Mr. Schumer, Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Obama and Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader, all had warned of a devastating defeat for the party in November.
And he certainly noticed that Mr. Obama has not done anything to help him in recent days even as his own former aides publicly have led the way in calling on Mr. Biden to withdraw in what was interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as a message from the former president’s camp. The unseen but clearly felt presence of Mr. Obama in particular has brought a Shakespearean quality to the drama now playing out, given their eight-year partnership.
While Mr. Biden and his team publicly insist that he is staying in the race, privately people close to him have said that he is increasingly accepting that he may not be able to, and some have begun discussing dates and venues for a possible announcement that he is stepping aside.
One factor that may stretch out a decision: Advisers believe that Mr. Biden would not want to do it before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel visits Washington on Wednesday at the initiative of Republicans to address Congress, unwilling to give the premier the satisfaction given their strained relations lately over the Gaza war.
Yet Mr. Biden bristles at pressure and those pushing him risk getting his back up and prompting him to remain after all. Two people familiar with his thinking said he had not changed his mind as of Friday afternoon.
In privately railing about Mr. Obama and even former President Bill Clinton’s aides, Mr. Biden has made clear that he finds it particularly rich that the architects of historic Democratic losses in the 1994 and 2010 midterm elections would be lecturing him about how to save the party after he presided over a better-than-expected midterm in 2022. While one person said Mr. Biden is not irked at Mr. Clinton himself — in fact, he is grateful the former president has been pressing donors to keep giving — others said that Mr. Obama is another story.
“We have to cauterize this wound right now and the sooner we can do it the better,” said Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia, who has not publicly called for the president to step aside. He said the barrage of criticism must be difficult for Mr. Biden. “I mean, to me, this is very painful. I think it just shows the cold calculus of politics.”
More congressional Democrats publicly called on the president on Friday to pass the torch to another candidate to take on former President Donald J. Trump in the fall. Among them were Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and at least nine House Democrats, including Representative Zoe Lofgren, a close ally of Ms. Pelosi, her fellow Californian.
The fact that Ms. Pelosi’s allies have been coming out is seen as no coincidence at the president’s vacation house in Rehoboth Beach, Del. When another of her allies, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, spoke out earlier this week, a Biden administration official noted that it might be Mr. Schiff’s lips moving, but it was Ms. Pelosi doing the speaking.
It has not just been her allies. Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts and a Pelosi rival, said on Friday that Mr. Biden, “a mentor and friend” who had helped him get elected to the House in 2014, “didn’t seem to recognize me” when they met at the D-Day anniversary commemoration in France last month.
“Of course, that can happen as anyone ages, but as I watched the disastrous debate a few weeks ago, I have to admit that what I saw in Normandy was part of a deeper problem,” Mr. Moulton wrote in the Boston Globe, repeating his call for Mr. Biden to drop out.
Mr. Biden pushed back on Friday with a statement vowing to continue the race. “I look forward to getting back on the campaign trail next week to continue exposing the threat of Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda while making the case for my own record and the vision that I have for America: one where we save our democracy, protect our rights and freedoms, and create opportunity for everyone,” he said.
The White House and the Biden campaign have denied that he is about to drop out. “Absolutely, the president is in this race,” Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chairwoman, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Friday, one of the president’s favorite shows and a regular venue for Democrats speaking to other Democrats. “You’ve heard him say that time and time again.”
She acknowledged, though, that the campaign has seen erosion. “I’m not here to say that this hasn’t been a tough several weeks for the campaign,” she said. “There’s no doubt that it has been. And we’ve definitely seen some slippage in support, but it has been a small movement.” She argued that polls show the race was “hardened already” before the debate and so not that many voters have shifted since.
“The American people know that the president is older,” she said. “They see that. They knew that before the debate. Yes, of course, we have a lot of work to do to make sure that we are reassuring the American people that, yes, he’s old, but he can do the job and he can win.”
All of the political machinations were occurring as the president was fighting off symptoms from Covid in isolation in Rehoboth. He was still coughing and hoarse on Friday, but he was improving, according to his doctor. Jill Biden was with him, although staying in a separate room.
Among those with him in Rehoboth this weekend will be his aides Steve Ricchetti and Annie Tomasini. Anthony Bernal, the first lady’s chief of staff, accompanied her. It was unclear if Mr. Biden would still return to Washington on Sunday as planned, but he was tentatively scheduled to travel on Wednesday to Austin, Texas, for a postponed celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library.
Mr. Biden’s pique at his former partner, Mr. Obama, represents the latest chapter in a complicated relationship. While not close when they teamed up to run in 2008, they became friends over their two terms in the White House together, bonding especially when Mr. Biden’s son Beau died in 2015.
But Mr. Biden has nursed a grudge ever since Mr. Obama gently discouraged him from running for president in 2016, steering the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton, who lost to Mr. Trump. So Mr. Obama’s advice may not be particularly welcome in Rehoboth at this point, which is perhaps one reason the former president is not offering it directly, according to people close to him.
Mr. Obama last saw Mr. Biden at a lavish, record-setting Hollywood fund-raiser before the debate in June, when the two appeared onstage together. At the end, Mr. Obama appeared to be leading Mr. Biden offstage. One former Obama aide who was present that night said that it was clear that the former president was startled and shaken by how much Mr. Biden had aged and seemed disoriented.
That fund-raiser was the last big haul for the campaign, which had hoped to raise about $50 million this month from large donors for the Biden Victory Fund, just as it did in June. But after the debate, it may collect less than $25 million in July, an excruciatingly modest sum for a summer month in a presidential race, according to four people briefed on the campaign’s finances. The campaign is not required to disclose its July fund-raising numbers until mid-August, and a spokeswoman dismissed the reports as “speculation.”
As they try to influence Mr. Biden, many associates are holding back from harsh public statements because they feel empathy for him and worry such statements might backfire. Going public, some said, might cause the president to dig in even more. And some were reluctant to have their names attached to statements because they worry about his reaction to a pile-on from his friends.
While the roughly 40 members of Congress who have publicly called on the president to leave the race represents a minority, privately dozens more are said to agree. Two House Democrats estimated that on a secret ballot 70 percent to 80 percent of their caucus would prefer Mr. Biden to withdraw.
“They’re not going to be able to contain this. I think the dam has broken,” Mr. Connolly said. Even before Friday’s announcements, he said, “my sense was that a majority of my colleagues were so uneasy they would welcome a decision to change horses.”
Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware and one of the president’s closest allies, made an impassioned defense of his ability to serve a second term. Speaking from the stage of the Aspen Security Conference in Colorado, Mr. Coons cited the president’s work hosting a NATO summit as well as his recent news conference and campaign events. “There are folks still saying he is not strong enough or capable enough to be our next president,” Mr. Coons said. “I disagree.”
The painful but essential self-removal of Joe Biden from the race for President—one that he has run so hard and, in many ways, in so distinguished a manner—holds some of the shape of a Shakespearean tragedy. So obvious is the seeming connection that it was already a pregnant comparison before there was even a likelihood, much less a certainty, that Biden would cede the stage. The Times has been full of talk of “Shakespearean” falls, its pages touched by leavenings of Julius Caesar and mutterings of King Lear. Indeed, a few weeks ago at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the paper’s own Bard-obsessive columnist, Maureen Dowd, asked two eminent Shakespeareans, Stephen Greenblatt and Simon Schama, just whom in the canon Trump and Biden reminded them of. Neither, tellingly, at that moment, had a strong analogue for the President—though, for Trump, Schama chose Dogberry, the clownish sheriff with the incompetent posse, in “Much Ado About Nothing,” albeit a Dogberry with a darker heart.
An analogue that immediately comes to mind for Biden at this dramatic moment in his and the nation’s life is John of Gaunt, in “Richard II,” the deeply patriotic, yet superannuated and out-of-touch grand old man who, on his deathbed, delivers a matchlessly beautiful speech in praise of the England he has known and of the values he fears are passing. “This earth, this realm, this England,” he chants, warning with desperate alarm that his opponents’ “rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last”—meaning, of course, that he thinks it might. Gaunt resonates because of the depth of Biden’s patriotism and the self-evidence, post-debate, of his own superannuation—of the pathos of his devotion to his country and of the increasing impotence of his rhetoric, however deeply felt and however right the warnings that he offered were. Anyone who admires Biden’s accomplishments as President—real, far-reaching, and always well intended even when arguably wrong—had to respond with pain to the past few weeks’ pitiful, and often infuriating, show of bafflement. What is wrong with you? he kept demanding, in effect. I’ve kept my promises. I’ve achieved my ends. I have been a good and honest king! Turn on me and stab me in the back because I lost my way in a duel where one man lied as he breathed—and all anyone talked about was how unsteady was my gait (F.D.R. couldn’t walk at all) and how husky was my voice (Reagan’s was husky, too).
But, of course, it was apparent to all who admired Biden, if not soon enough to the court circle around him, that his fall was irrecoverable. The man we saw in the debate last month on CNN was not simply an aging politician having “a bad night”; Biden was lost and wandering on a heath of his own devising, and the attempts by his supporters and his friends to rally around him recalled not so much a character out of Shakespeare as the medieval epic hero El Cid, who is mounted on his horse in the desperate hope that the memory of his courage might still be enough to frighten the enemy.
So, yes, let us go there: of all the Shakespearean figures whom Biden’s fall recalls, it is Lear. Lear in his sense of self-loss; Lear in his inability to understand, at least at first, the nature of his precipitous descent; and, yes, Lear in the wild rage, as people sometimes forget, that he directs at his circumstances. “Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain / Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters. . . . Then let fall / Your horrible pleasure: here I stand, your slave, / A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man.” This was all too evidently Biden’s emotional tone in these past weeks. When he announced to George Stephanopoulos, in an interview meant to recover his position, that he’s “not only campaigning” but “running the world,” the forced grandiosity of the wounded King was all too apparent. (For his daughters, read passim, his one-time supporters, with Nancy Pelosi cast as Goneril, and Barack Obama as an improbable Regan, a double betrayal by those whom he had trusted.)
But the President stands, or sits, in relation to Lear with this significant addendum. Until his decision to stand aside for a new Democratic Party nominee, Biden seemed to be solving an ancient literary question: What would have happened if the King had not given up the throne? And that answer was plain; it would have been even worse than what happened when he did. Lear, let us recall, begins the play by giving up his office in exchange for the gratification of the praise of his children, all of whom ostentatiously flatter him—except for Cordelia, the only one who genuinely loves him, who fears seeming insincere. The loss of office and the betrayal of his daughters leaves him soon alone and friendless, save for his loyal fool, out in a wild storm.
With Biden, though, unlike Lear on the heath, raging in the company of only his fool, we were out there on the heath with him, being rained on and blown about, too. The final chapter of the Biden campaign was not pleasant or pretty, with the rage of the President lacking the dignity of age and the instinctive patriotism of long service that he had shown for so long, replacing it with sheer frustration and echoes of another, forgotten Joe Biden. That was the Biden whom chroniclers had long seen as profoundly ambitious, easily frustrated, and in his way already unduly embittered by the neglect of the élite for whom so much, including political elevation, seemed so much easier. The Biden whom Richard Ben Cramer portrayed in “What It Takes,” a chronicle of the 1988 Presidential race—awkward, amiable, and angry—seemed uncomfortably reanimated. On a daily basis, we were watching a man who might well have mulishly pushed aside the evidence of his cratering support. For weeks, there was the very real chance of civic catastrophe, with the fierce blaze of riot likely to set the whole country on fire.
Today, Biden, just as Lear does at the end, seems to have made his peace with the necessity of accepting the sheer injustice of his condition and his predicament, while seeking comfort in the saner corners of his life. Now, with the knowledge that he has finally made the right call for the general good, we can look back in sympathy with his personal predicament. It is unjust; he did a good job. The injustice extends to the reality that, while Biden is old and frail, his opponent is, and sounds, old and nuts. To reflect on Trump’s speech to the Republican National Convention is to see true madness: a disjointed sequence of grievance, self-reference, and unmoored stream of consciousness, offered in a disturbing flow of disjointed imagery, bleeding ears backing into Hannibal Lecter. The whole sounded less like poor Lear and more like poor Tom, the lunatic on the heath whom the disguised Edgar impersonates. Who gives anything to poor Trump?, the ex-President, said, in effect. Whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and through flame, and through ford and whirlipool, o’er bog and quagmire . . . to course his own shadow for a traitor. Bless thy five wits! Trump’s a-cold!
Biden, by comparison, deserves to be ennobled, not ejected. But if there is one theme that runs through Shakespeare it is that the search for justice is almost always doomed, and that the best we can hope for is self-insight and compassion. And so, unjust or not, Biden’s act is also essential—the good job he had done was over. He has, unlike Lear, who ends his life in the midst of a civil war, the gratitude of his country, too, or at least that of part of it not already despairing.
The great lesson of “King Lear” is not that it is wise, or unwise, to give up power, but that power is always insufficient balm to the human condition. Shakespeare’s point is that we should seek comfort neither in empty flattery nor in the exercise of office but in the presence of those who genuinely care for us. Biden has all that which, as poor Macbeth, who has none of it, says, “should accompany old age, / As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends.”
Biden has known terrible loss. But he also has the love of his family and the gratitude of so many citizens who thank him not only for his achievements but also for having found wisdom enough at the end. ♦
