we never do campaign donations, but we will this time.
In this sense, Vance is not a complement to Trump’s MAGA agenda. He is the bridge to something more radical — a religious populism intent on bending the United States into a narrow reactionary Catholic, and perhaps monarchical, order. “Trump will, at most, serve four years in the White House,” Vance told Ian Ward in March of 2024. “There is a big question about what comes after him.”
Quote:Harris has raised $200 million since Biden's exit, new memo says
From CNN's Sam Fossum
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has raised $200 million since President Joe Biden dropped out
of the race and endorsed her, with 66% of those donations coming from first-time donors, according to
a Harris campaign memo.
The memo, written by the campaign’s communications director Michael Tyler, also highlights organizing
efforts and says the campaign has 170,000 new volunteers.
“The momentum and energy for Vice President Harris is real – and so are the fundamentals of this race:
this election will be very close and decided by a small number of voters in just a few states,” Tyler writes.
Tyler concludes the memo by digging at the Trump-Vance ticket, saying they are “scrambling” and claiming
the former president is “scared” of debating Harris.
we never do campaign donations, but we will this time.
this election is too important not to...
The Negative Charisma of JD Vance
It’s been a breakneck few weeks in politics. Trump, Biden, Kamala. And by now, a weird and funny thing’s begun to happen. Trump chose JD Vance as his VP pick. And somehow, it turned out to be a great stroke of fortune for a newly ascendant Kamala, the Democrats, and democracy itself.
Because Vance has this rarest of qualities, seldom seen, in public life. Negative charisma. A quality that’s so rare and singular that we don’t even have a word for it, which points to how funny and strange it really is. He opens his mouth, and people are just jaw-droopingly creeped out.
And then he adds fuel to the weird inside out fire of negative charisma, doubling down on comments about “cat ladies.” We’re going to discuss what it all means in just a second, because it does have a kind of deep meaning, in the evolution of fascism, and democratic collapse, make no mistake. But first, we’re going to discuss the…human end.
How many celebrities do you see, after all, with negative charisma? Not just no charisma, but a sort of black hole that sucks all the energy from the room? Funny.
When I pointed this out to my Twitter followers, for example, they created a hashtag, #negativecharisma. Because it’s funny when you think about it. After all, Vance has had all of America’s major institutions going to bat for him, and helping try to create for him a mythology. They practically anointed him. Big Publishing has no shortage of books to publish, and yet it chose Vance’s memoir. Then Hollywood turned it into a blockbuster budget movie, replete with A-list stars. Meanwhile, mainstream media did its usual hagiographic thing with him.
The idea was manifold. He was a rebel, a genius, an intellectual, a man of the people, authentic, noble, wise, a kind of long-suffering almost Socratic figure in the wilderness of American politics, or maybe something like a JFK of the right.
And then America met JD Vance.
Hilarity ensued, because it turned out, he was none of the above. He was just something like a…creep. The weirdo at work, who’s always making off comments. The angry dad at the soccer park. The guy at the lonely end of the bar, muttering into his beer. Things got very weird, very fast, because Vance kept on making them weirder and weirder.
Awkward. Uncomfortable. Tense.
Positive and Negative Charisma, Or, Kamala vs Vance
That’s negative charisma. My Twitter followers, bemused, began to invent new words for this concept. Creepisma. Zirr, or the opposite “rizz,” which if you don’t know, is a sort of trendy summation of charisma.
So what does this all mean? Obviously, it’s a huge boon to Kamala, who, it turns out, has a great deal of actual charisma. Much more so than even Joe Biden, and we can see that in the explosive wake of her rise to nominee. It didn’t have to be that way. Charisma is what made that happen, a base uniting behind her, donors pouring money in, and there’s a lesson there, even beyond the obvious one, which is this sort of hilarious juxtaposition of Kamala’s charisma, laughing, fierce, tender, warm, versus Vance’s anti-charisma, which is…
Where does that negative charisma come from, anyways? Think about how remarkable it is that even after Big Publishing and Hollywood try to make an entire mythology for you…people still don’t like you. That’s so remarkable I don’t think we’ve ever really seen it before. When the machinery of celebrity starts to work, by and large, people believe it, and there’s almost nothing that can discredit or pierce it. Once you’re famous, you stay famous. Once the machine tells people to like and respect someone, by and large, they do. So this is how deep negative charisma really goes. Even all the PR and institutional power in the world hasn’t been a match for Vance’s natural negative charisma.
That comes from a certain place, if you ask me. A sort of deadness in the eyes. You get the sense that here’s a person who isn’t there in some sense. There’s a lack of empathy, honesty, truth, the qualities of a great soul. You get the sense that suffering—which is what the mythology was about in this case—hasn’t, somehow, led to wisdom, grace, decency, kindness, married with the toughness to persevere in the names of goodness. And that’s bewildering, because once you realize that, the mythology soon enough falls apart. Suffer that much? You’re supposed to mature. Not end up this weird dead-eyed man-child hurling insults at, of all things, “cat ladies.”
The Evolution of Fascism (Or, From “Them” to “Us”)
But in all those weird, creepy, juvenile insults about “childless cat ladies” lies a very real, and pretty sinister point.
How does fascism evolve? As the old poem goes, first it comes for them, and then it comes for you and me. In other words, first it targets the outgroups, the minorities, the disabled, the “weak,” those who are already scorned in society. But it doesn’t stop there. It comes for people who consider themselves perfectly “normal,” too, and in the beginning, often believe they’d never be in its crosshairs.
So. First fascism comes for them, then it comes for me. And that’s what Trump plus JD Vance is really about. Think about it with me. Trump’s ire is directed at minorities, the undocumented, migrants—the easiest scapegoats. But Vance crosses another set of lines entirely. He’s angry, it seems, at women. And not just “brown” women or “minority” women, but even white women, who are “real” Americans—women, period, not to mention children and families, are in his sights.
And that’s the evolution of fascism. If you want it plainer English, first it was about minorities and migrants, and now, in Vance’s world, it’s about women, and their kids, their bodies, white, Black, all of them. He appears to want to exert some kind of bizarre, absolutist, totalitarian control over a society’s reproductive and familial choices, suggesting that having kids isn’t just some kind of religious imperative, but a social imperative, and if anyone fails that test, society should punish them.
That is, in plain English, a totalitarian goal. One that reaches into every single household in society, and aims profoundly to limit, shape, and reorient its most basic freedoms.
Foucault, of course, called all this “biopower.” As in, power over biology. For him, it was the essence of fascism. For Trump, biopower is about a purified society. But for Vance, who takes a quantum leap further, biopower is about the body of every woman in society, what it’s for, and who decides its fate, which is him.
Think about that for a second, because beneath all the hilarity about Vance’s negative charisma lies this deeply sinister reality. Fascism crossing this red line, targeting not just outgroups, but ingroups, aspiring to total control of every body in society, every interaction, every family, every child, all of that not really now something people freely choose to be or have or not, but just a means to an end. For Trump, the end is a purified society, and the means is cleansing. For Vance, something more weird and creepy appears to be true—the goal is a totalitarian society, and the means is your body and mine.
That’s where the negative charisma comes from. Crossing this set of lines before our eyes, trying not altogether very well to hide it, in juvenile jokes about “childless cat ladies,” which aren’t very funny, but the point isn’t that the joke’s on Vance for saying this awful, creepy stuff, it’s that the point of it is super sinister, mega weird, and practically Soviet in its implications.
Does America Really Want to Be a Bio-Totalitarian Society?
Does America really want to be a society whose kids, women, bodies, families, are all under this weird thumb—just means to the end of a purified society? In what sense do basic freedoms even exist in that context, from association to intimacy to privacy and beyond?
I doubt that most Americans want that. Vance was a stunningly poor choice for Trump. Because when you cross red lines that stark, that dangerous? You need an extra-heaping dose of mega-charisma to mask it, hide it, make it seem beguiling, seductive, and alluring. Maybe then, societies can be fooled into self-destruction.
Lucky for America, Vance has just the opposite quality, despite the mythology power tried to build for him, as a long-suffering Socratic figure, he reveals himself to be an angry, bitter, bewildered, and shrunken figure, in mind, spirit, and character, a kind of weird voodoo doll of what power once said would be a great leader—and for that, I suppose, we should all breath a gentle prayer of thanks, because so far, all he’s done is made himself, revealing the utter creepiness of such poisonous ideologies, a laughingstock.
Umair Haque wrote:The Negative Charisma of JD Vance
A week before Christmas, an evangelical minister named Paul Terry stood before thousands of Christians, their heads bowed, in Durham, New Hampshire, and pleaded with God for deliverance. The nation was in crisis, he told the Lord—racked with death and addiction, led by wicked men who “rule with imperial disdain.”
“With every passing day,” the minister said, “we slip farther and farther into George Orwell’s tyrannical dystopia.”
But because God is merciful, there was reason for hope. One man stood ready to redeem the country: Donald Trump. And he was about to come onstage. “We know what he did for us and how he strove to lead us in honorable ways during his term as our president—in ways that brought your blessings to us, rather than your reproach and judgment,” Terry prayed. “We know the hour is late. We know that time grows shorter for us to be saved and revived.” When he finished in the name of Jesus Christ, Amens echoed through the hall. Soon Trump appeared to rapturous applause and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.”
For all the exhaustive coverage of Trump’s campaign rallies, even before the assassination attempt at one of them in July, relatively little attention has been paid to the prayers that start each one. These invocations aren’t broadcast live on cable news, nor do they typically attract the interest of journalists, who gravitate toward the more impious utterances of the candidate himself. But the prayers offered before Trump speaks illuminate this perilous moment in American politics just as well as anything he says from the podium. And they help explain how the stakes of this year’s election have come to feel so apocalyptically high.
To understand the evolving psychology and beliefs of Trump’s religious supporters, I attempted to review every prayer offered at his campaign events since he announced in November 2022 that he would run again. Working with a researcher, I compiled 58 in total, the most recent from June 2024. The resulting document—at just over 17,000 words—makes for a strange, revealing religious text: benign in some places, blasphemous in others; contradictory and poignant and frightening and sad and, perhaps most of all, begging for exegesis.
There are many ways to parse the text. You could compare the number of times Trump’s name is mentioned (87) versus Jesus Christ’s (61). You could break down the demographics of the people leading the prayers: 45 men and 13 women; overwhelmingly evangelical, with disproportionate representation from Pentecostalism, a charismatic branch of Christianity that emphasizes supernatural faith healing and speaking in tongues. One might also be tempted to catalog the most comically incendiary lines (“Oh Lord, our Lord, we want to be awake and not woke”). But the most interesting way to look at these prayers is to examine the theological motifs that run through them.
The scripture verse that’s cited most frequently in the prayers comes from 2 Chronicles. “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”
Ryan Burge, a Baptist minister and political scientist I asked to review the prayers, told me that this verse—which is quoted 10 times—is regularly cited by evangelicals to advance a popular conservative-Christian narrative: that America, like ancient Israel before it, has broken its special covenant with God and is suffering the consequences. “The Old Testament prophets they’re quoting talk about sin collectively instead of individually—the nation has fallen into wickedness and needs healing,” Burge said. “The way they use this verse presupposes that we’re spiraling down the tubes.”
Trump’s supporters attribute America’s fall from grace to a variety of national sins old and new—prayer bans in public schools, illegal immigration, pro-transgender policies, the purported rigging of a certain recent election. Whatever the specifics, the picture of America they paint is almost universally—biblically—bleak.
In Wildwood, New Jersey, a pastor declared, “Our nation finds itself in turmoil, chaos, and dysfunction.” In Fort Dodge, Iowa, the sentiment was similar: “Lies, corruption, and propaganda are driving civilization to ruins.” In Conway, South Carolina, one supplicant informed God, “Our enemies are trying to steal, kill, and destroy our America, so we need you to intervene.”
The premise of all of these prayers is that America’s covenant can be reestablished, and its special place in God’s kingdom restored, if the nation repents and turns back to him. Burge told me that these ideas have long percolated on the religious right. What’s new is how many Christians now seem convinced that God has anointed a specific leader who, like those prophets of old, is prepared to defeat the forces of evil and redeem the country. And that leader is running for president.
Early on in the Trump era, it was common to hear conservative Christians compare him to Cyrus the Great, the sixth-century-B.C.E. Persian king who, though he did not worship the God of Israel himself, liberated the Israelites from Babylonian captivity and helped them build their temple in Jerusalem.
The subtext was not subtle. Here was a handy biblical precedent for the “unlikely vessel”—the man God uses to fulfill his purposes even though he lacks the faith and character of a true believer.
But this analogy seems to have outlived its usefulness to the religious right: A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that 62 percent of Republicans viewed Trump as “morally upstanding,” and in a Deseret News poll commissioned last year, 64 percent said they believed he is a “person of faith.” The former president no longer needs to be described as a blunt, utilitarian tool in God’s hand. “Cyrus was a way of acknowledging, ‘I know this is an immoral person, but he could still do some good,’ ” Russell Moore, an evangelical theologian and the editor of Christianity Today, who has been critical of Trump, told me. “I haven’t heard Cyrus language in at least five years.”
The prayers at Trump’s rallies reflect this shifting perception. Cyrus isn’t mentioned, but Trump does get compared to righteous, prophetic heroes of the Bible, including Esther, Solomon, and David.
In America, more than perhaps anywhere else in the Western world, petitions to God are still a routine fixture of politics—at congressional sessions, presidential nominating conventions, inaugurations. After a gunman shot at Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, both Democrats and Republicans prayed for the former president and for the country he hopes to lead.
And many presidential campaigns are infused with religion. In July, Joe Biden attended a church service in Philadelphia where the pastor compared the president’s recent political struggles to the Old Testament story of Joseph, and a member of the congregation prayed for Biden: “Touch his mind, O God, his body; rejuvenate him and his spirit.”
Bradley Onishi, a scholar and former evangelical minister who studies the intersection of politics and Christianity in America, told me that prayers at political events have traditionally fit a certain mold. God is asked to grant the political leader inspiration and wisdom, to help him resist temptation and lead the country in a righteous direction. “It was always ‘We pray for him to have the strength to do God’s will, to have character, to be the man we need,’ ” Onishi said.
Some of the prayers at Trump’s rallies run along these lines, and would be familiar to anyone who has spent time in an American church, myself included. “Give President Trump the strength to make the right decisions both in and out of the public eye,” one man prayed at a Trump event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. “Remind him to seek your guidance as events unfold.” I have said “Amen” to a thousand prayers like this in my life, on behalf of government leaders in both parties.
But Onishi, like several of the other experts I asked to read the prayers, was struck by how many of them take Trump’s righteousness for granted. “No one prays for Trump to do right; they pray that God will do right by Trump,” Onishi told me.
Indeed, rather than asking God to make Trump an instrument of his will, most of the prayers start from the assumption that he already is. Accordingly, many of them drop any pretense of thy-will-be-done nonpartisanship, and ask explicitly for Trump’s reelection. “Lord, you have a servant in Donald J. Trump, who can lead our nation,” a woman offering a prayer in Laconia, New Hampshire, told God at a rally on the eve of the state’s Republican primary. “Help us to overcome any obstacles tomorrow so that we may deliver victory to your warrior.”
With Trump’s goodness presumed, the criminal charges against him are cast not as evidence of potential wrongdoing but as a sign of victimhood. “We ask that you put a hedge of protection around President Trump,” one woman prayed in Waukesha, Wisconsin, “and deliver him from the baseless attacks, and remove from office those who are subverting justice in our legal system.”
At a February campaign event in North Charleston, South Carolina, Mark Burns, a televangelist in a three-piece suit, squeezed his eyes shut and lifted his right hand toward heaven. “Let us pray, because we’re fighting a demonic force,” he shouted. “We’re fighting the real enemy that comes from the gates of hell, led by one of its leaders called Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”
Although Burns was more provocative than most, he was not alone in using the language of spiritual warfare. This is perhaps the most unnerving theme in the prayers at Trump’s rallies. One verse, from Ephesians, is quoted repeatedly: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
Russell Moore told me he used to hear conservative evangelicals cite this verse as a way of shifting the focus away from earthly concerns like politics and toward the larger, more important battle for our souls. “The point would be that our opponents aren’t our enemies,” he told me. But something has changed in recent years. “That’s not the implication I see in these prayers. It’s ‘Politics is how we fight these spiritual battles.’ ”
Terry Amann, a conservative pastor in Iowa, told me I shouldn’t be surprised to hear such a dire framing of the election. Christians like him see abortion as a grave sin and fast-changing social mores around gender and sexuality as serious threats to the nation’s spiritual health. “Every election cycle, they say this is the most important election in your lifetime,” he told me. To him, it feels like this one really is. “Our republic is in trouble.”
But it’s easy to see the danger in internalizing the concept of politics as spiritual combat. Trump’s rallies become more than mere campaign events—they are staging grounds in a supernatural conflict that pits literal angels against literal demons for the soul of the nation. Marinate enough in these ideas, and the consequences of defeat start to feel existential. “This is not a time for politics as usual,” a Pentecostal preacher declared at a Trump rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, last year. “It’s not a time for religion as usual. It’s not a time for prayers as usual. This is a time for spiritual warriors to arise and to shake the heavens.”
As I was reviewing these prayers, I wondered what Trump’s most zealous religious supporters would do if they didn’t get the result they were praying for in November. With so much riding on the idea that Trump’s reelection has a divine mandate, what would happen if he lost? A destabilizing crisis of faith? Another widespread rejection of the election’s outcome? Further spasms of political violence?
It wasn’t until I came across a prayer delivered in December in Coralville, Iowa, that a more urgent question occurred to me: What will they do if their prayers are answered?
Onstage, Joel Tenney, a 27-year-old evangelist with a shiny coif of blond hair and a quavering preacher’s cadence, preceded his prayer with a short sermon for the gathered crowd of Trump supporters. “We have witnessed a sitting president weaponize the entire legal system to try and steal an election and imprison his leading opponent, Donald Trump, despite committing no crime,” Tenney began. “The corruption in Washington is a natural reflection of the spiritual state of our nation.”
For the next several minutes, Tenney hit all the familiar notes: He quoted from 2 Chronicles and Ephesians, and reminded the audience of the eternal consequences of 2024. Then he issued a warning to those who would stand in the way of God’s will being done on Election Day.
“Be afraid,” Tenney said. “For rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. And when Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.”
With that, he invited the audience to remove their hats, and turned his voice to God. “Lord, help us make America great again,” he prayed.
You could compare the number of times Trump’s name is mentioned (87) versus Jesus Christ’s (61)
This is an old American lunacy in flower at present. These folks talk about a new Great Awakening. And as Coppins notes, it is now tied to an individual political leader.
Quote:You could compare the number of times Trump’s name is mentioned (87) versus Jesus Christ’s (61)
I'm also curious how much time they spend in the old testament vs the new these days. The OT god seems much more useful to them..
One of the advantages of refusing the Democratic nomination for president is that his decision to do that has left President Joe Biden in the position of being above the political fray and being able to act for the good of the whole country.
Today, Biden noted that the American people have lost faith in the Supreme Court. When he was in office, Trump stacked the court with three extremists who have worked with extremist justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to overturn longstanding legal precedents that protect civil rights and move the country toward a theocracy overseen by a dictator. A statement from the White House today recounted how the Supreme Court has “gutted civil rights protections, taken away a woman’s right to choose, and now granted Presidents broad immunity from prosecution for crimes they commit in office.” It also noted that “recent ethics scandals involving some Justices have caused the public to question the fairness and independence that are essential for the Court to faithfully carry out its mission to deliver justice for all Americans.”
Today, Biden called for three major changes to restore trust and accountability.
He called for a constitutional amendment to make clear that no president is above the law or immune from prosecution for crimes committed while in office. This is a direct response to the Supreme Court’s decision of July 1, 2024, in Donald J. Trump v. United States that a president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed in actions that fall under a president’s “official duties.”
The White House wrote that “President Biden shares the Founders’ belief that the President’s power is limited—not absolute—and must ultimately reside with the people.” The “No One Is Above the Law Amendment will state that the Constitution does not confer any immunity from federal criminal indictment, trial, conviction, or sentencing by virtue of previously serving as President.”
Biden also called for eighteen-year term limits for Supreme Court justices. Noting that Congress approved term limits for the presidency, Biden pointed out that “[t]he United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime seats to its high court Justices.” “Term limits would help ensure that the Court’s membership changes with some regularity; make timing for Court nominations more predictable and less arbitrary; and reduce the chance that any single Presidency imposes undue influence for generations to come,” the White House wrote.
The administration is reacting, in part, to the fact that Trump, with the help of then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), denied Democratic president Barack Obama the right to appoint a Supreme Court justice, holding it for Trump, and then, after Trump had appointed a second justice, rushed through a third Trump appointee at the very end of his term, enabling him to appoint three hard-right justices who will be able to skew the court’s decisions for decades.
With those justices on the court, it has handed down a series of nakedly partisan decisions that represent the goals of the extremist Republican Party rather than the majority of Americans. They have overturned a ban on bump stocks for semiautomatic rifles, made partisan and racial gerrymandering easier, undercut business regulation, ceased to recognize the constitutional right to abortion, and, stunningly, ruled that a president has significant immunity from prosecution for committing crimes while in office.
Biden also called for Congress to “pass binding, enforceable conduct and ethics rules that require Justices to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest. Supreme Court Justices should not be exempt from the enforceable code of conduct that applies to every other federal judge.”
This, too, reflects the problems of the modern court, where several justices, especially Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito, have accepted large gifts from those with business before the court and have refused to recuse themselves from those cases. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced articles of impeachment against Thomas and Alito on July 10, and the measures currently have 19 co-sponsors.
As Ankush Khardori noted in Politico today, before Trump’s three justices took their seats, public approval of the court stood at 58%. After its decision to give presidents immunity, that approval fell to a record low of just 38%. More than 75% of Americans, including a large majority of Republicans, support eighteen-year term limits for justices.
In an op-ed in the Washington Post today, Biden wrote: “This nation was founded on a simple yet profound principle: No one is above the law. Not the president of the United States. Not a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. No one.”
He noted that as a senator he served as chair and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, and has “overseen more Supreme Court nominations as senator, vice president and president than anyone living today.” Noting that the current system makes it possible for a single president to radically alter the makeup of the court for generations to come, he warned: “What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach.”
“We can and must prevent the abuse of presidential power. We can and must restore the public’s faith in the Supreme Court. We can and must strengthen the guardrails of democracy.
In America, no one is above the law. In America, the people rule.”
Ian Millhiser of Vox points out that these reforms would currently be almost impossible to pass, but Biden’s embrace of them is a powerful political statement for the Democrats to carry into the 2024 election. Until now, Biden has lagged behind popular opinion on the issue of court reform. Now, though, the sitting president is rejecting the power the extremist modern-day Supreme Court conveyed on presidents and reinforcing the rule of law.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, immediately endorsed Biden’s proposals, meaning that she is willing to be bound by our historic understanding that presidents are not above the law. In contrast, Leonard Leo, who has been central to the stacking of the court and who has called for “flood[ing] the zone with cases that challenge misuse of the Constitution by the administrative state and by Congress,” called the plan “a campaign to destroy a court that they disagree with.” House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) called it “dead on arrival in the House.”
For his part, Biden seemed more optimistic than Millhiser that his reforms could pass. When a reporter asked him how he would get court reform passed, he answered: “You’ve asked me that—on everything I’ve ever passed you’ve asked me that. We’re going to figure a way.”
Today, additional assistance provided to International Brotherhood of Teamsters pension plans thanks to the American Rescue Plan saved the pensions of an additional 70,000 New England Teamsters. This brings the total protected to 600,000. No Republicans voted for the American Rescue Plan, and Teamsters president Sean O’Brien stood next to Biden when he put the first protections into place. After O’Brien spoke at the Republican National Convention earlier this month, Vice President at large John Palmer announced he is challenging O’Brien for the leadership.
Momentum behind Vice President Harris continues to build. Today John Giles, the Republican mayor of Mesa, the third-largest city in Arizona, wrote an op-ed in the Arizona Republic explaining why “as a Republican mayor, I support Kamala Harris over Trump.” He blamed Trump for abandoning cities while Biden and Harris have made historic investments in them and brought thousands of new jobs to Arizona. Giles urged his fellow Republicans to reject MAGA Republicans and turn back to the principles of an older Republican Party. “Our party used to stand for the belief that every Arizonan, no matter their background or circumstances, should have the freedom, opportunity and security to live out their American Dream,” he wrote.
But today’s Republicans are political extremists who are trying to disrupt elections and who killed immigration reform. “Trump poses a serious threat to our nation,” he wrote. “We can’t have a felon representing us on the national stage, let alone one who would threaten to abandon NATO and ruin our standing abroad.”
“Arizona Republicans like me can emulate Sen. John McCain's motto of 'Country First' and beat back Trump and his threat to democracy,” Giles wrote. “Kamala Harris is the competent, just and fair leader our country deserves.”
In the New York Times, Peter Wehner, who served in the administrations of Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush echoed Giles’s autopsy for his party but, in an important shift, examined its recent changes through a lens of the political theories of autocracy. He concluded: “It’s hard and haunting to know that the political party to which I devoted a significant part of my life has become the greatest political threat to the country I love.”
More than 40 former officials from the Department of Justice agree. On July 25 they wrote an open letter endorsing Harris and warning that “Trump presents a grave risk to our country, our global alliances and the future of democracy. As president, he “regularly ignored the rule of law.” In contrast, as the elected attorney general of California, Harris “oversaw the largest state justice department in the country. She forged strong relationships with law enforcement to keep people safe, fought for American consumers and fought against those preying on the American people…. The stakes could not be higher.”
Tonight, White Dudes for Harris held an online fundraiser. Actor Jeff Bridges, who played The Dude in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski, recounted Harris’s popular policies on the call. “I’m white, I’m a dude, and I’m for Harris,” he said. “A woman president, man, how exciting!” Minnesota governor Tim Walz added: “How often in 100 days do you get to change the trajectory of the world? How often in 100 days do you get to do something that’s going to impact generations to come? And how often in the world do you make that b*st*rd wake up afterwards and know that a Black woman kicked his a** and sent him on the road?”
The Trump-Vance ticket continues to stumble. In the Washington Post today, Jennifer Rubin noted that the Republicans appear to have gone out of their way to pick a presidential ticket that would offend women. Trump is, she pointed out, “an adjudicated rapist” who bragged about sexual assault, demeans and insults women, “mused about punishing women for having an abortion,” and boasts that he was behind the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Vance wants to ban abortion in all cases, wants the federal government to stop women from traveling across state lines to obtain abortion care, says childless women don’t have a stake in the country’s future, and has implied that women should stay in abusive marriages.
The Republicans embrace the ideas of right-wing groups whose members want to roll back women’s rights; their call for a “revival of faith, family, and fertility” is a tenet of fascism. “When Harris declares ‘We’re not going back,’” Rubin notes, “the message has particular resonance among women.”
Finally, the world is watching events in Venezuela, where President Nicolás Maduro has claimed victory despite exit polls that showed him losing to opposition candidate Edmundo González by more than 30 points. CNN’s Jim Sciutto commented: “Don’t underestimate the loss of U.S. soft power in moments like this after a U.S. president—and current candidate for president—attempted to overturn an election here.”
“When a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman."
