Opinion Paul Krugman
Donald Trump has been using an ugly word to describe Vice President Kamala Harris. No, I don’t mean privately calling her the B-word, although he reportedly does. I mean “communist,” an insult echoed by some of his allies. For example, Elon Musk, in a post on X, declared “Kamala is quite literally a communist,” demonstrating, among other things, that he quite literally doesn’t know the meaning of “literally.”
Now, Harris obviously isn’t a communist. So why does Trump say that she is? Well, red-baiting, like race-baiting — which Trump also does when it comes to Harris — is very much part of the American political tradition. For example, early in his political career, Ronald Reagan was a part of Operation Coffee Cup, an effort to convince voters that government health insurance, in the form of Medicare, would destroy American freedom.
It’s also true that American political discourse lacks a widely accepted term for people who don’t believe that the government should control the means of production but who do believe that we should have policies to limit economic inequality and prevent avoidable hardship. To find such a term you need to go to European countries in which it was important to distinguish between parties supporting a strong social safety net and Communist parties, which weren’t at all the same thing. In these countries, politicians like Harris, who supports a free-market economy with a robust social safety net, are known as social democrats.
The thing is, social democracy isn’t a radical position. On the contrary, it has been the norm for generations in all wealthy nations, our own included.
True, America’s social safety net is less comprehensive than those in Western Europe. Even so, we have a universal retirement system, Social Security, and universal health care for seniors, Medicare. Medicaid, which provides health care to lower-income Americans, covers around 75 million people. About seven million are covered by CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The Affordable Care Act subsidizes health care for millions more. And so on.
Furthermore, these programs have overwhelming public support. At least three-quarters of registered voters have a favorable view of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The A.C.A. was unpopular when enacted but now has 60 percent approval.
If you believe that the government shouldn’t be supporting seniors and paying for many Americans’ health care, that’s a philosophically defensible position. And there are certainly activists on the political right who consider just about the whole expansion of government’s role since the New Deal illegitimate. But they have very little support outside their ideological bubble.
Even Friedrich Hayek, whom libertarians have adopted as their intellectual patron saint, conceded that there is no reason “why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.”
Which brings us back to Harris. She’s a social democrat who favors government programs that mitigate the harshness of a market economy — but so are almost all Democrats, most Americans and, whether they realize it or not, many Republicans. She wants to expand the social safety net, especially for families with children, but the suite of policies she supports wouldn’t represent a fundamental change in the role of government. She has in the past called for single-payer health care, but has since backed off that position; and if you think a single-payer system is a radical, un-American idea, what do you think Medicare is?
So where does this Kamala-the-communist stuff come from? It could be that Republicans believe they can convince voters that a moderately center-left Democrat who is a former prosecutor is a communist because she’s a Black woman — a twist, perhaps, on the “welfare queen” trope of another era.
But it may be less calculating than that. To all appearances, the Trump campaign has been caught flat-footed, first by President Biden’s withdrawal from the race, then by the surge of Democratic enthusiasm and Harris’s unexpected effectiveness as a campaigner.
Even negative public perceptions of the economy, which have been Trump’s ace in the hole, seem to be evaporating as a political force. A New York Times/Siena College battlegrounds poll released in May gave Trump a 20-point advantage over Biden on the economy; that advantage was down to six points over Harris in the latest Times/Siena poll of three battleground states. A new poll by The Financial Times shows Harris slightly ahead on the issue nationally.
Trump and MAGA seem to be responding by throwing lots of stuff at the wall and hoping some of it sticks.
However, the kind of character attacks that worked against Hillary Clinton and, in a different way, against Biden don’t seem to be gaining traction. I almost felt sorry for the Fox News host Jesse Waters, who tried to attack Harris by saying, “She likes wine. She likes food. She likes to dance.” This is supposed to make voters dislike her?
So since nothing else seems to be working, hey, why not call her a communist?
ProPublica and Documented obtained more than 14 hours of never-before-published videos from Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy, which are intended to train the next conservative administration's political appointees “to be ready on day one.”
Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy guide created by the Heritage Foundation for a future conservative presidential administration, has lost its director. In recent weeks, it faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump, whose campaign has tried to distance itself from the effort. But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy remains on track.
For transparency, we are publishing the videos as we obtained them.
The Heritage Foundation and most of the people who appear in the videos cited in our story did not respond to ProPublica’s repeated requests for comment. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, said, “As our campaign leadership and President Trump have repeatedly stated, Agenda 47 is the only official policy agenda from our campaign.”...
George Lakoff@GeorgeLakoff
Jan 2, 2018
Trump uses social media as a weapon to control the news cycle. It works like a charm. His tweets are tactical rather than substantive. They mostly fall into one of these four categories.
The 2024 election is shaping up to be bizarre on the Republican side. The party’s presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump, has largely stayed home and posted on social media while his vice presidential running mate J.D. Vance has been trying to cover the campaigning for the team. Indeed, Vance’s offer on Wednesday during a rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to debate Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris suggests that Vance is not unwilling to be seen as the face, if not the leader, of the Republican ticket.
The actual presidential nominee appears even more unstable than usual, and it certainly appears that his handlers are trying to keep him off stage. As Tom Nichols of The Atlantic noted yesterday, “When Trump is on TV a lot, his approval goes down. When he’s in hiding and his surrogates are rearranging his bonkers crazypants word salads into something like real thoughts, his approval goes up.”
Observers, including Jackie Calmes of the Los Angeles Times, have been clear that “Donald Trump’s state of mind should be under debate.” “Trump’s fire hose of cray-cray has inured Americans to his outrages,” Calmes wrote today. “But now that President Biden, a normal and empathetic man, has been pushed out of the 2024 race over concerns about his age and mental acuity, Trump’s more manifest unfitness for office should be ignored no longer—by the media, former advisors and military leaders who remain silent and, yes, Republicans.”
Trump held a surprise “press conference” on Thursday, where, according to a team of reporters and editors at NPR, he misstated things, exaggerated, or lied outright at least 162 times in 64 minutes, a rate of more than two times a minute.
He said that the United States “is in the most dangerous position it’s ever been in from an economic standpoint,” and warned we could end up in another depression like the Great Depression of the 1930s. In fact, the economy is strong and growing at a faster rate than it did in three of the four years of Trump’s presidency.
He warned of a national crime wave although crime has been plummeting after a surge in 2020, during Trump’s term, and said that we are “very close to a world war,” which illustrates that Trump’s main lever to turn out voters is fear. With the successes of the Biden-Harris administration having neutralized the economic fears that worked in the past, and with the goals of antiabortion activists achieved in 2022 with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, Trump is apparently going for broke with the threat of World War III.
Altogether, the event did Trump no favors.
Poll numbers for Harris and her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz have climbed since President Joe Biden announced on July 21 he would not accept the Democratic nomination, and observers have reported that Trump’s anger is leading him into unforced errors, picking fights with allies and seemingly unable to let go of his focus on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, a focus that his advisors warn is turning off voters.
Trump has repeatedly seemed to fantasize that Biden will return to the head of the Democratic ticket, and on Sunday, seemingly frantic about Harris’s huge rallies while he can no longer attract big crowds, released a rant accusing Vice President Harris of using AI to create fake footage showing large groups of supporters greeting her airplane. Faking crowds with AI is a technique we know Trump uses, but there is no evidence Harris does. Immediately, people who attended her events released their own videos proving the size of the crowds, and political pundits openly questioned Trump’s mental health.
Then, this morning, Trump posted on his social media channel: “I’m doing really well in the Presidential Race, leading in almost all of the REAL Polls, and this despite the Democrats unprecedentedly changing their Primary Winning Candidate, Sleepy Joe Biden, midstream.” He went on until his closing: “We are going to WIN BIG and take our Country back from the Radical Left Losers, Fascists, and Communists. We will, very quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” This afternoon, Five Thirty Eight showed Harris up 2.7 points in the national polling average.
Trump’s advisors are pleading with him to stop name-calling and to stay on message. His campaign began today to run ads on X that look like his tweets but are much more like standard political ads.
Tonight, X owner Elon Musk planned to “interview” Trump, although it seemed pretty clear the event was intended simply to be a long advertisement for him. European Union commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton wrote an open letter to Musk warning about E.U. laws against amplifying harmful content “that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence, or certain instances of disinformation.” Breton warned that his team “will be extremely vigilant” about protecting “E.U. citizens from serious harm.” Musk responded with a meme that said: “TAKE A BIG STEP BACK AND LITERALLY, F*CK YOUR OWN FACE!”
Last month the European Union charged X with failing to respect its social media law by letting disinformation and illegal content run rampant. X faces fines of up to several million euros.
In the end, technical difficulties delayed the start of the X Spaces event. Instead, wrote BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh, who specializes in exposing disinformation, a “deepfake livestream of the Trump-Musk interview” was playing “on a fake Tesla channel on YouTube, with 200,000 people watching.” Sardarizadeh noted that the channel was running a crypto scam, and YouTube finally suspended it. When the real X channel finally began to function, it showed Musk and Trump heaping praise on each other. But Trump was slurring his words, and when HuffPost White House journalist S.V. Dáte asked the campaign about his inability to articulate, it answered: “Must be your sh*tty hearing. Get your ears checked out.”
Trump went to Montana on Friday in support of Republican candidate Tim Sheehy, who is running to unseat popular Democrat Jon Tester, but otherwise has said he is not planning to hit the road until after the Democratic National Convention concludes next week, an odd lack of campaigning at this point in a presidential contest. He seems to be trying to regain control of the political narrative through tweets and social media. Today he said he is suing the government over the raid on Mar-a-Lago that recovered hundreds of classified national security documents, but this is almost certainly posturing to try to make him look strong: he would never be willing to undergo the discovery phase of such a lawsuit.
In the midst of Trump’s frenzy, J.D. Vance has been doing the usual appearances of a campaign, although, unable to generate rally crowds himself, he has been reduced to following Harris and Walz to theirs and trying to grab headlines there.
On Sunday he did the rounds of the morning talk shows, where on CNN he complained that Democrats are bullying him by calling the MAGA Republicans “weird.” Political journalist Brian Tyler Cohen promptly answered: “Crooked Hillary, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Sleepy Joe, Coco Chow, Lyin Ted, Ron DeSanctimonious, Birdbrain Nikki Haley, Old Crow McConnell, Gavin Newscum, Pencil Neck Schiff, Pocahontas, Cryin Chuck, and Kamabla would all like a word.”
Republicans have made punching down a key part of their rhetoric since at least the 1980s, and Vance’s frustration that the tables have turned feels a bit as if someone is finally standing up to the schoolyard bully.
Outside of the MAGA frenzy, Harris and Walz last week held big, joyous rallies in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada, contrasting their happy campaign with the MAGA Republicans’ drumbeat of carnage and revenge. A cover article from Time magazine today by Charlotte Alter described the scene of one of her rallies as a mashup of a Beyoncé concert, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and “the early days of Barack Obama”: “a kind of reception a Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t gotten in years. Fans packed into overflow spaces, waving homemade signs made of glitter and glue as drumlines roared. When Harris introduced her new running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the cheering lasted more than a minute.”
At the same time, the grave issues that are propelling the Democrats continue to gain traction. The Associated Press today reported that in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs decision, more than 100 pregnant women have been treated negligently or turned away from emergency rooms despite federal law. Two women, each of whom lost a fallopian tube to an undertreated ectopic pregnancy—one also lost 75% of one of her ovaries, and the other nearly bled to death—have asked the federal government to investigate whether the hospitals that sent them home to miscarry without medical assistance violated federal law.
On Saturday, Trump’s campaign said it had been hacked, after Politico reported that it had received communication from an account called “Robert” about internal Trump campaign documents. David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo put together a helpful timeline of the story today, explaining that on Sunday the Washington Post said it had also received some of that information and said it believed the information to be that referred to in an August 9 warning from Microsoft that Iran was engaged in an influence campaign. Today the New York Times also said it had received the information, and this afternoon the FBI said it is investigating attempted hacking against both the Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz campaigns.
CNN national security and justice reporter Zachary Cohen reported tonight that the hackers apparently were able to access the campaign by compromising the personal email account of Trump operative Roger Stone.
“Buckle up,” Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, wrote on X. “Someone is running the 2016 playbook, expect continued efforts to stoke fires in society and go after election systems—95% votes on paper ballots is a strong resilience measure, combined with audits. But the chaos is the point….”
“I’ve not been very political before,” Mr. Musk said toward the end of their chat, describing himself as “moderate, if not moderate, slightly left,” and adding that listeners who categorized themselves that way should back Mr. Trump.
Right about now, something remarkable’s happening in America. It appears to be outgrowing Donald Trump. Appears, because these are early days yet. And yet there’s no mistaking the sudden sense of momentum changing, and the feeling that Trump’s campaign is on the ropes. Will he drop out, people ask? No, others reply, the Supreme Court will just fix it for him. There’s a growing sense, in all these sentiments, that his chances are imploding.
Why is that? This is what happens societies grow. America’s having a growth spurt right now. Of course, much of it’s thanks to the joy and acceptance of the Kamala Harris and Tim Walz campaign, which, as we’ve discussed, is making Americans feel loved for the first time, perhaps. And yet people themselves, it seems, might be beginning to change.
Let me try to explain all that a little bit.
How Societies Outgrow Their Mistakes
Do societies outgrow their mistakes? By “growth,” I don’t mean economic growth. Not at all. I mean advancement, evolution, maturity, of attitudes, sentiments, values, preferences. Towards more sophisticated ways of being. Even that’s a mouthful, so, hold on, here’s an example.
Over the last week, something a little bit jaw-dropping happened. The Democrats surged ahead of the Republicans when it comes to the economy. That’s quite amazing for reasons that go way beyond superficial. It’s the Number One Issue, and always is, in America. But more deeply than that, Republicans have been ahead on the economy more or less since polling began.
In other words, Americans have never trusted Democrats on the economy more. Perhaps the last time was in FDR’s days. Since then, though? Nope. And that in itself is troubling, because…it’s out of touch with reality.
Conservative economics don’t work. All the theories and ideas are ideologies, which have failed in the real world, time and again. The wealth didn’t trickle down. Letting the rich go from super to mega to ultra rich didn’t benefit anyone else. No, unfettered predatory hyper capitalism isn’t a magic bullet that creates a prosperous and fair and stable society for all—it implodes, ultimately, into fascism, by way of despair, loneliness, and rage.
That’s not my opinion, those are just facts that we can observe in the real world, which are backed up by everything from economic research to the visible success of Canada and Europe compared to America for the average person.
But Americans haven’t learned this lesson yet. The reason for that, too, is straightforward. Who’s teaching it to them? Nowhere do Americans encounter the lessons I’ve told you above, not in mainstream media, not on CNN, not in the NYT, etc. Joe Stiglitz is America’s best economist, and to point out that predatory capitalism implodes into fascism he has to give interviews to European, Australian, and Canadian media. Americans, meanwhile, are bombarded by a sort of ideological machine, made of thinktanks, crackpots, pundits, and propagandists. This process of not learning the lesson has gone on for decades too long by now.
Yet now, finally, things appear to be changing. Like I said, Americans now—finally—trust the Democrats more on the economy. That should give Republicans nightmares, because it’s the biggest sea change in attitudes we’ve seen in America in modern history. And yet it’s so far just nascent. Will it endure? Prevail? Will Americans learn the lesson of reality, in this arena?
That’s what it means for a society to grow. Here, Americans are challenged to discern the truth in a more realistic way. To sort out facts from Big Lies. To mature as people, and not just fall prey to silly ideologies, which have obviously failed, to the point the rest of the world wonders: why don’t Americans have thing like healthcare, so their athletes, for examples, aren’t staggered that at the Olympic Village, there’s plenty for all?
When Do Societies Grow?
All that should indicate to you that social growth is hard. It doesn’t come easy. Societies, meaning people, must reckon with their follies, errors of judgments, mistakes, and they must do so collectively. At the same time, leaders must appear, who are willing to be courageous enough to guide and teach them—which is where Harris and Walz are coming in. When all that comes together, at last, the impossible finally becomes possible.
This is where America is right now. It appears to be outgrowing Trump.
I’ve given you one example: economically. Let’s continue the thread. How else can a society grow? In terms of social attitudes and preferences, emotions, morals and values, and ultimately, ways of being. Too abstract—let’s make it concrete
When Americans reject Republicans on economics, what else are they really beginning to understand? Trump’s theory of economics is essentially fascism—it goes like this. The reason your lives, the “real Americans,” are stuck, is that those bad people took everything from you, your jobs, your opportunities, your wives, your kids, your soil. If you cleanse society of them, then you will have lebensraum—prosperity, essentially—again.
But this idea is now old in the tooth. Americans haven’t just heard it for years—they’ve tried it already. And while some think that life was better under Trump, by and large, people seem to be beginning to understand: this theory doesn’t hold water. Just by cleansing societies of hated scapegoats…prosperity doesn’t magically appear. And along the way, damage, possibly terminal damage, is done, to democratic values, institutions, and ideals.
So more and more Americans are beginning to say: it’s not worth it. Not only did it not bear fruit the first time around, the social theory of scapegoating, but it did way more damage than we thought it would. And as they begin to have that thought process, to wrestle with this complex set of causes and consequences, more and more of them are arriving at the conclusion that democracy and prosperity go hand in hand.
And so alongside people trusting Democrats more on the economy, Americans are growing more “socially liberal,” too. That’s a bad way to put it, the way American pundits do, and it only masks the truth: they’re becoming more accepting, and less tolerant of bigotry, hate, injustice, spite, violence, and hate.
Americans are beginning to demand more than just Trumpism. Trump. His endless stream of Big Lies, his unhinged rants, his vitriol. They are starting to sense it doesn’t go anywhere, lead to anything, that it’s just a dead end for them, in the soul, and for their society. This is why Trump’s schtick now feels old. Isn’t even met with outrage anymore, just laughter. Why his rallies are emptier by the day. And why he rages, more violently, trying to weave his spell again.
But isn’t it breaking now?
The Demagogue’s Spell, and How it Breaks
So many remarkable things are happening in—to—America right now. America’s growing, because people are maturing. They are outgrowing the simplistic fairy-tale fantasies of demagogic movements. They are becoming more demanding, sophisticated citizens again, worthy of a democracy. At the same time, leaders like Harris and Walz have emerged, who are teaching people that through goodness and joy and love, a society can be repaired, and led to higher heights still. That there’s a place to go that’s not just the abyss.
And all of this is breaking the demagogue’s spell, which is the most remarkable thing of all. Think of how much power Trump once wielded. I don’t mean formal power, which comes with the office. I mean more like unconscious power over society, reaching into people’s minds, almost supernaturally altering norms, beckoning true believers to shocking acts of violence, the power to teach people history doesn’t exist, lies are real, others aren’t human, and only hatred matters.
That kind of dark, seductive power.
Increasingly, Trump doesn’t have it. Sure, his most ardent believers still give him that license over them. But they’re dwindling. And even some of them are beginning to question. More and more Americans are beginning to realize the emperor has no clothes. This sort of near-supernatural power to alter reality, history, peace, truth—this is the demagogue’s spell. And it’s made of deep, dark stuff—people really believing, in their despair and rage, that there’s no other way out, and so they give the demagogue a kind of control over the minds almost exactly like a cult.
Now one gets the sense all that’s coming to an end. Trump is increasingly a laughingstock. It’s not that his unhinged tirades have gotten that much more unhinged—which is like saying the surface of the sun got a little bit hotter—in fact, the very opposite is true. People are coming back to their senses. And as they do, Trump looks like a bitter, angry, foolish, and mentally decrepit old man—not a Fuhrer, not an Omnipotent Father, not a mythical savior.
Watching America, Outgrowing Trump
That, in the end, is probably the best way to think about what it really means for a society to grow. When it can act in more mature and adult ways, instead of lashing out in infantile rage, or narcissistic grandiosity. When it can come together, reckon with its mistakes, and choose to understand how and why it came to make them, and how to correct them. All of that is hard stuff for a person, so imagine how much harder still it is for a society. A society can only do this together, in the presence of special leaders, and in special moments, when its true capacities are tested to its limits.
This is why the remarkable appears to be happening: America’s outgrowing Trump. There he is, raging against it. But now he’s fighting something much, much bigger than before. History. When a society finally wakes up from the spell it's been under, my friends, watch out. Those are the moments in which societies grow.
Kamala Harris has had as good a three-week stretch as any presidential candidate in modern American history.
When Joe Biden dropped out on July 21, less than a month after his catastrophic debate performance against Donald Trump, the Democratic Party was on course to be defeated in a landslide. Today, Vice President Harris is slightly ahead of Trump in national polls, and in three important swing states—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—new surveys by The New York Times and Siena College show her leading by four points, 50–46, among likely voters.
Since May, when Biden was the nominee, Harris has gained seven points in Pennsylvania, five points in Wisconsin, and four points in Michigan. The Democratic National Convention, which should give her an additional boost, begins next week. By the time it ends, fewer than 75 days will be left until the November 5 election.
The data are pretty clear. Harris has electrified the Democratic Party; a Wall Street Journal survey found that 93 percent of Democrats now support her. Among Democrats, voter satisfaction with their choice of candidate has increased a staggering 27 percent in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan since May. So-called double-haters—voters who are dissatisfied with both major-party choices—have for now broken for Harris. In addition, positive views of Harris have increased 11 percent in less than a month. As Nate Cohn, the chief political analyst for the Times, put it, “On question after question, the poll finds that voters don’t seem to have any major reservations about her.” She’s not without vulnerabilities, especially the charge that she’s too liberal, but the race is now hers to lose.
What explains this head-snapping shift in the presidential race? Only after Biden withdrew did it become fully clear just how enfeebled he was as a candidate, how much his age and his decline were damaging his chances to win reelection, and how much he was crushing the spirit of Democratic voters.
Many Americans who would otherwise vote for the Democratic ticket couldn’t bring themselves to do so as long as Biden was the nominee; his decline was simply too alarming. His debate against Trump cemented those concerns, making it clear to me within minutes that he couldn’t win the election.
Desperation spread among Democrats; polls showed Trump within striking distance in New Jersey, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Virginia. So Biden’s decision to drop out of the race released enormous pent-up energy and enthusiasm among Democrats. They immediately unified around Harris. Long-standing divisions within the party were cast aside. The Democrats were back in the game.
Biden’s impairments also masked the extent of Trump’s flaws as a candidate. The former president exhibits “epic scars & vulnerabilities,” in the words of David Axelrod, chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. Trump has been disliked by a majority of Americans from almost the moment he ran in 2016, and their misgivings have only deepened as Trump’s behavior has grown more unhinged, narcissistic, and lawless.
Biden’s abrupt departure deeply unsettled Trump. His entire campaign was built to defeat Biden. Trump survived an assassination attempt, then met a rapturous reception at the Republican National Convention, and concluded that the race was won. And it was, until Biden stepped aside and Harris stepped up.
Trump, enraged and rattled, is reverting to his feral ways. We see it in his preposterous claim that Harris’s crowds, which are both noticeably larger and far more enthusiastic than his own, are AI-generated; in his resentful attacks against the popular Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, and his wife, because Kemp didn’t aid Trump in his effort to overthrow the election; and in his attack on Harris’s racial identity.
At precisely the moment when Trump needs to elevate his performance, to the degree that such a thing is even possible, he’s gone back to his most natural state: erratic, crazed, transgressive, self-indulgent, and enraged. One by-product of this is that Trump has provided no coherent or focused line of attack on Harris. His criticisms are not just vile, but witless. The prospect of not just being beaten, but being beaten by a woman of color, has sent Trump into a frenzy in a way almost nothing else could.
That the Democratic Party was rejuvenated by Biden’s withdrawal is hardly surprising. But very few people anticipated how skilled Harris has been as a presidential candidate.
It’s not simply that she’s made few missteps so far, which is itself impressive. It’s that she’s hit all the right notes, projected self-assurance, and framed the race in just the way she wants: In contrast with Trump, she is future-oriented, a change agent, at ease and joyful. “The one thing I will not forgive [Republicans] for is they tried to steal the joy from this country,” Governor Tim Walz, her vice-presidential choice, said at a rally in Detroit, perfectly capturing this point. “But you know what? Our next president brings the joy. She emanates the joy.” Harris and Walz seem to be having great fun on the campaign trail. The contrast with Trump and J. D. Vance, who are dystopian, perennially aggrieved, and weird, to use the adjective of the day, couldn’t be greater.
At the same time, Harris is tacking to the center on such issues as fracking, immigration, and law enforcement. One of her first ads focused on border security and ends this way: “As president, she will hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking. Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris.” So far, she’s fortunate not to have been held responsible for what the public believes are the failures of the Biden presidency. Only those who have been a part of presidential campaigns, as I have, can appreciate how much of a challenge it is to get things right, to say nothing of getting things this right.
Harris, right now at least, isn’t simply the nominee of the Democratic Party. She seems to have created a movement, the closest parallel to which is Obama’s 2008 campaign.
Something else, and something quite important, has changed. The whole landscape of the campaign has been transformed. The rise of Harris instantly cast Trump in a new light. He formerly seemed more ominous and threatening, which, whatever its political drawbacks, signaled strength; now he seems not just old but low-energy, stale, even pathetic. He has become the political version of Fat Elvis.
Trump is much better equipped psychologically to withstand ferocious criticisms than he is equipped to withstand mockery. Malignant narcissists go to great lengths to hide their fears and display a false or idealized self. Criticism targets the persona. Mockery, by contrast, can tap very deep fears of being exposed as flawed or weak. When the mask is the target, people with Trump’s psychological profile know how to fight back. Mockery, though, can cause them to unravel.
Presidential campaigns usually feature wide swings of momentum, and this summer has demonstrated that more than most. Right now, most polling experts regard the race as a toss-up. It may be. The Kamala Harris honeymoon will end, and she has yet to face a crisis in her campaign. When she does, we’ll see what it involves and how she’ll deal with it. And I would be the last person on Earth to question the devotion of Trump supporters. But at the moment, it really is beginning to look like The Trump Show is reaching the end of its run.
This might be wishful thinking on my part, and too much is at stake to indulge in complacency. But what will likely define the rest of the race is Trump, a tempest in his mind, raging, raging, and raging again. Trump will go down in American history as many things, almost all of them poisonous. And the label he most fears is the one he now worries will ever be affixed to him: loser.
Trump Can’t Deal With Harris’s Success
The more his Democratic rival succeeds, the louder he rages.
Quote:Kamala Harris has had as good a three-week stretch as any presidential candidate in modern American history.
I caution everyone here...the following:
The more Trump appears to be losing interest in winning this election...the greater my personal fear is that it is an illusion. Trump wants to win this thing at least as much as he wants to continue breathing. It is an existential thing for him. Prison looms if he loses...exoneration comes with victory.
What I think is happening is something I've mentioned before. He no longer sees a way to win using conventional methodology.
His plan, as I see it, is to get the election thrown into the House...which would mean an almost certain victory for him. And during the last two years he has set in place political devices to insure he can get it thrown into the House.
All he has to do is to disrupt the certification process...and not necessarily via mobs storming the Capitol next January 6th. He can get it to happen by having underlings refuse to certify enough at the state level to insure a majority cannot be achieved.
I understand the Dems have squads of lawyers ready to defeat this kind of thing. I wish them luck.
a Wall Street Journal survey found that 93 percent of Democrats now support her.
Here’s What Scares Republicans Most About a Harris Win
The day after Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was announced as Kamala Harris’s choice for vice president, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told a crowd of lawmakers in Louisville, Kentucky, that a Harris administration would spell certain doom for the Republican Party.
“Let’s assume our worst nightmare—the Democrats went to the White House, the House, the Senate,” McConnell said during his keynote speech at the National Conference of State Legislators Legislative Summit last week, according to Spectrum News. “The first thing they’ll do is get rid of the [Senate] filibuster. Second, you’ll have two new states: D.C., Puerto Rico. That’s four new Democratic senators in perpetuity.”
Puerto Rico will vote on a nonbinding ballot measure in November to determine the territory’s future political status, with voters being given three options, all of which would change its official status: statehood, independence, or independence with free association. It will be the seventh time that the island’s 3.2 million people vote to define their political relationship with the United States. Harris has not yet taken an official stance on the vote.
McConnell insisted that next on the historically moderate Democrat’s agenda would be to place as many liberal justices on the Supreme Court as possible, noting that doing so would be “unconstitutional”—while apparently ignoring the fact that that’s exactly what Donald Trump did to achieve SCOTUS’s current conservative supermajority.
“If they get those two new states and pack the Supreme Court, they’ll get what they want,” McConnell said.
German authorities have issued an arrest warrant over the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines nearly two years ago, according to German news outlets ARD, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit.
In an investigation published Wednesday, the outlets reported that the suspect is a Ukrainian national, named only as Volodymyr Z. for privacy reasons.
It is alleged he attacked the pipelines in tandem with at least two others, who are also believed to be Ukrainian citizens.
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According to German authorities, Volodymyr Z. and two others approached the driver of the German-flagged yacht Andromeda, which docked in the northern island of Rügen.
ARD reported that Volodymyr Z. directed the driver out to the location of the pipeline, and two of the three suspects donned diving gear and went underwater.
The driver has reportedly identified Z. from a photo array shown to him by police. According to the report, a white van suspected of being used to transport diving material was caught on a traffic camera on Rügen in September 2022 with a passenger "strongly resembling Z."
A German court issued an arrest warrant for Volodymyr Z. in June.
The suspect was last known to be living in a village outside of Warsaw, Poland. However, he is believed to have gone into hiding.
It is not known why Poland did not honor the European arrest warrant within the legally required 60 days. ARD pointed out that there have long been accusations from German authorities that while Warsaw did not participate in the attack, it tacitly condoned it afterward.
No links between the suspects and the Ukrainian government have been found.
The two other suspects, a married couple who do not have warrants issued in their names, have denied knowing Z. and said that they were on vacation in Bulgaria when the attack took place.
On August 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. While he had already put in place new measures to regulate business and banking and had provided temporary work relief to combat the Depression, this law permanently changed the nature of the American government.
The Social Security Act established a federal system of old-age benefits; unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship of the government to its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.
The driving force behind the law was FDR’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins. She was the first woman to hold a position in the U.S. Cabinet and still holds the record for having the longest tenure in that job: she lasted from 1933 to 1945.
Perkins brought to the position a vision of government very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had embraced the idea of a “rugged individualism” in which men provided for their families on their own, Perkins recognized that the vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality: her own husband suffered from bipolar disorder, making her the family’s primary support. She understood that Americans had always supported each other.
As a child, Perkins spent summers with her grandmother, with whom she was very close, in the small town of Newcastle, Maine, where she witnessed a supportive community. In college, at Mount Holyoke, she majored in chemistry and physics, but after a professor required students to tour a factory to observe working conditions, Perkins became committed to improving the lives of those trapped in industrial jobs. After college, Perkins became a social worker and, in 1910, earned a masters degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University. She became the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for the workers who made the products they were buying.
The next year, in 1911, she witnessed a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in which 146 workers, mostly women and girls, died. They were trapped in the building when the fire broke out because the factory owner had ordered the doors to the stairwells and exits locked to make sure no one slipped outside for a break. Unable to escape the smoke and fire in the factory, the workers—some of them on fire—leaped from the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the building, dying on the pavement.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire proved to Perkins that voluntary organizations would never be enough to improve workers’ lives. She turned toward using the government to adjust the harsh conditions of industrialization. She began to work with the Democratic politicians at Tammany Hall, who presided over communities in the city that mirrored rural towns and who exercised a form of social welfare for their voters, making sure they had jobs, food, and shelter and that wives and children had a support network if a husband and father died. In that system the voices of women like Perkins were valuable, for their work in the immigrant wards of the city meant that they were the ones who knew what working families needed to survive.
The overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering during the Great Depression convinced Perkins that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people. She came to believe, as she said: “The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”
Perkins met FDR through her Tammany connections, and when he asked her to be his secretary of labor, she told him that she wanted the federal government to provide unemployment insurance, health insurance, and old-age insurance. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”
Creating federal unemployment insurance became her primary concern. Congressmen had little interest in passing such legislation, claiming that unemployment insurance and federal aid to dependent families would undermine a man’s willingness to work. But Perkins recognized that the Depression had added pressure to the idea of social insurance by emphasizing the needs of older Americans. In Long Beach, California, Dr. Francis Townsend had looked out of his window one day to see elderly women rooting through garbage cans for food. Appalled, he came up with a plan to help the elderly and stimulate the economy at the same time. Townsend proposed that the government provide every retired person over 60 years old with $200 a month, on the condition that they spend it within 30 days, a condition designed to stimulate the economy.
Townsend’s plan was wildly popular. More than that, though, it sparked people across the country to start coming up with their own plans for protecting the elderly and the nation’s social fabric.
It also spurred Congress to action. Perkins recalled that Townsend “startled the Congress of the United States because the aged have votes. The wandering boys didn't have any votes; the evicted women and their children had very few votes. If the unemployed didn't stay long enough in any one place, they didn't have a vote. But the aged people lived in one place and they had votes, so every Congressman had heard from the Townsend Plan people.”
FDR put together a committee to come up with a plan, but committee members could not make up their minds how to move forward. Perkins continued to hammer on the idea they must come up with something, and finally locked the members of the committee in a room. As she recalled: “Well, we locked the door and we had a lot of talk. I laid out a couple of bottles of something or other to cheer their lagging spirits. Anyhow, we stayed in session until about 2 a.m. We then voted finally, having taken our solemn oath that this was the end; we were never going to review it again.”
By the time the bill came to a vote, it was hugely popular. The vote was 371 to 33 in the House and 77 to 6 in the Senate.
When asked to describe the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins mused that its roots came from the very beginnings of the nation. When Alexis de Toqueville wrote Democracy in America in 1835, she noted, he thought Americans were uniquely “so generous, so kind, so charitably disposed.” “Well, I don't know anything about the times in which De Tocqueville visited America,” she said, but “I do know that at the time I came into the field of social work, these feelings were real.”
With the Social Security Act, Perkins helped to write into our laws a longstanding political impulse in America that stood in dramatic contrast to the 1920s philosophy of rugged individualism. She recognized that the ideas of community values and pooling resources to keep the economic playing field level and take care of everyone are at least as deeply seated in our political philosophy as the idea of every man for himself.
In a 1962 speech recalling the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins reflected: “Of course, the Act had to be amended, and has been amended, and amended, and amended, and amended, until it has now grown into a large and important project, for which, by the way, I think the people of the United States are deeply thankful. One thing I know: Social Security is so firmly embedded in the American psychology today that no politician, no political party, no political group could possibly destroy this Act and still maintain our democratic system. It is safe. It is safe forever, and for the everlasting benefit of the people of the United States.” In 2014, Perkins’s Maine home was designated a National Historic Landmark.
But in 2024 it is no longer guaranteed that Social Security is “safe forever.” The Republican Party has called repeatedly for cuts to the popular program. As recently as March 2024, the Republican Study Committee, which includes the Republican House leadership and about 80% of House Republicans, said it is “committed to protecting and strengthening” Social Security by raising the retirement age and cutting benefits for those who are not yet approaching retirement. The Heritage Foundation, the main organization behind Project 2025, said in June that the retirement age should be raised.
There was such an outcry over that plan that Republicans backed away from it. By July, the Republicans promised in their 2024 platform to “FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY…WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE,” but offered no plan for making it solvent except further deregulation and tax cuts. Indeed, Trump’s recent promise to end federal taxes on Social Security benefits for wealthier recipients could, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, increase the budget deficit by $1.6 to $1.8 trillion by 2036, making the plan insolvent two years earlier than currently projected.
As Minnesota governor, Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate Tim Walz expanded the state tax exemption for Social Security, eliminating it for most seniors but not affecting the program’s solvency. One hundred and eighty-eight Democrats have cosponsored the Social Security 2100 Act, which expands Social Security benefits and raises payroll taxes on those who earn more than $400,000 a year to pay for it.
