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Today’s News Roundup

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Yesterday was some news day. It hasn’t made headlines, but Trump did admit on camera that he lost the 2020 election.

Somehow he will persuade his culties that he didn’t really say what he said. However, white nationalist Nick Fuentes is furious.

While Fuentes wasoncea zealoussupporter of former President Donald Trump and even dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, the adoration has since faded, partially because Trump tapped Sen. J.D. Vance, who has a non-white, non-Christian wife, as his running mate. Recently, Fuentes openly declared war on the Trump campaign, vowing to deploy activists in swing states for the purpose of depriving Trump of votes.

Fuentes’ disgust with Trump only increased after the former president seemingly finally admitted that he lost the 2020 election, which contradicted everything Trump has said for the last four years and essentially destroyed the justification for the entire “Stop The Steal” effort. (Later in the same interview, however, Trump nevertheless called the election “a fraud.”)

There will be more on Trump’s inability to keep his stories straight later in this post.

Liz Cheney’s endorsement of Kamala Harris was welcome news,  This could make some not-MAGA Republicans more comfortable with voting for Harris, I would think.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about yesterday’s school shooting in Winder, Georgia. For example, we don’t yet know how the 14-year-old shooter got his hands on the assault weapon he used to kill four people and wound nine more. Then we learned that the FBI had flagged this kid’s online activity a year ago, because he was posting about school shootings. The local police interviewed him but couln’t find a reason to “hold” him. Perhaps not, but maybe there’s an intermediate stage between “holding” and “ignoring.” Like “keeping an eye on him” and “making sure the boy is getting help and has no access to firearms.”

The presidential candidates’ responses were entirely different, as one would expect. Kamala Harris spoke at length about the ongoing tragedy of school shootings, ending with “This is a senseless tragedy — and it does not have to be this way. We must end the epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all.” Her proposals for addressing gun violence include what might be called “enhanced” red-flag laws that might make a real difference in the case of people identified as possible shooters.

Trump issued a statement that called the shooter a “sick and deranged monster,” but he said nothing about addressing gun violence.

Whoa, here’s an update I just saw — the Washington Post is reporting that one of the shooter’s aunts is saying the boy was begging for help for months before the shooting.

The 14-year-old suspected of a mass shooting at Georgia’s Apalachee High School had been “begging for months” for mental health help before his deadly attack on Wednesday, according to an aunt of the suspect.

He “was begging for help from everybody around him,” the aunt, Annie Brown, told The Washington Post. “The adults around him failed him.”

The parents had also promised law enforcement last year that he would have no unsupervised access to the firearms in the home.

Now, on to the Russians — David Kurtz writes at TPM,

The details that emerged yesterday in the new federal indictment announced by the Justice Department in the most high-profile of ways offers an extraordinary glimpse of how brazen Russia’s influence operations within the United States have been – and of the extreme gullibility of right-wing influencers who were the highly paid alleged victims of the Russian-backed scheme.

Rolling Stone has a pretty good background on the scheme. The influencers deny they knew they were working for Russians. I understand some of these influencers are prominent in right-wing circles, but I can’t say I can place any of them.

Today there was a hearing on Jack Smith’s election interference case. Judge Tanya Chutkan denied a Trump motion to hold off on any further activities in the case until after the election. “This court is not concerned with the electoral schedule,” Chutkan said. Per Politico,

Chutkan appeared inclined to give prosecutors a chance to lay out damaging evidence against Trump within the next few weeks — a timeline that would coincide with the ramp-up of early voting and the critical final weeks of the presidential campaign.  …

… Special counsel Jack Smith, who was present in court, is seeking Chutkan’s permission to submit an extensive brief laying out the facts of the case against Trump, a response to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that granted broad immunity for “official” presidential acts and ordered Chutkan to evaluate whether Trump is immune from the allegations that he abused his power to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.

The brief and its potential public release raises the prospect of a series of damaging legal developments for Trump in the closing weeks of the 2024 election cycle, just as voters are casting early votes in key states. Trump is also slated to face sentencing for his conviction in the New York hush money case on Sept. 18.

Finally, about Trump’s  not keeping his stories straight: Do read Greg Sargent at The New Republic, Finally: Top Journo Erupts at Media for Ignoring Trump’s Mental State.

“We have a damaged, delusional, old man who again might get reelected to the presidency of the United States,” Mike Barnicle, who served as a longtime columnist for The Boston Globe and other newspapers, said on Morning Joe early Wednesday. Barnicle continued that Trump frequently says “deranged” things in public that “you wouldn’t repeat” on “American television” or “in front of your children.”

“How did we get here?” Barnicle asked. Then he pointed a finger at his media colleagues. “Donald Trump can say whatever crazy things he wants to say, about submarines, and sharks, and electric batteries,” Barnicle said. He noted that such things are “not really covered” as a window into “who the man is” or a sign that he’s “out of his mind.” 

Greg Sargent continues,

Let’s try to state what should be obvious: Trump’s mental fitness for the presidency deserves sustained journalistic scrutiny as a stand-alone topic with its own intrinsic importance and newsworthiness. Real journalistic resources should be put into meaningfully covering it from multiple angles, as often happens with other big national stories of great consequence.

This is not happening now, obviously. Some of Trump’s loopier utterances do make news sometimes, but usually are mostly fodder for the likes of Stephen Colbert. And, of course, Trump’s mental decline isn’t getting nearly the attention that President Biden’s frailties were getting. Do read the whole piece.

Trump’s Adventures in Arlington, Revised

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I’m still seeing updates on the Arlington scandal. Let’s start with this “fact check” article in WaPo by Glenn Kessler,  Trump appears to have misled Gold Star families on troop deaths in Afghanistan.

The gist of this is that Trump keeps saying that during his presidency there was an 18-month period with no hostile fire deaths of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. You can hear him saying this in the campaign video he made at Arlington. But that is not true. WaPo staff looked through DoD records. There was no such 18-month period during Trump’s administration. Even during the last 18 months of his presidency, which seems to be what he is talking about, 12 U.S. troops died from hostile action in Afghanistan.

The only 18-month period without hostile deaths was during the last 11 months of Trump’s presidency and the first seven months of Biden’s. Kessler carefully says that Trump merely “implies” that this period was all under his watch, but then quotes him saying things like  “We had no soldiers killed for 18 months while I was there because they knew — don’t play around with our soldiers.” (Rally in Asheboro, NC, Aug. 21, 2024). That’s more than “implying,” I believe.

Trump also is the one who set up conditions for the withdrawal by negotiating with the Taliban, which he still brags about in his rambling rally speeches. (Did you know the leader of the Taiban called Trump “your excellency”? Trump says he did. That makes Trump very special.)

Kessler doesn’t mention this, but Bill Scher at Washington Monthly documented last week that “65 soldiers died in ‘hostile action’ during the four years of the Trump administration, versus 13 under Biden through 2022, the last year tabulated.” I bet some of those 65 are buried in Arlington. Did Trump do his garish thumb’s up act over their graves?

Now let’s move on to David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo. Trump is now claiming that the altercation in which his staff shoved an Arlington employee never happened.

Kurtz writes,

So now we have a situation where the Trump campaign disparaged the cemetery staffer as having a “mental health episode,” said she shouldn’t be in her job, suggested she suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome – and now Trump himself is claiming nothing even happened.

At the same time, the Army seems desperate to make this all go away.

The Army is currently sitting on the police report filed by the cemetery staffer recounting her version of the incident where she was reportedly verbally abused and shoved aside by two Trump campaign staffers when she tried to enforce cemetery rules against political activities.

Democratic staffers in both the House and Senate are trying to get hold of the report. It seems to me that a police report should be public record.

Related to this, see Greg Sargent at The New Republic, from last week.

In his Michigan rant, Trump claimed he’d been invited to Arlington by the relatives of soldiers killed in the 2021 bombing at Abbey Gate, outside Afghanistan’s Kabul Airport. He then lashed out at the Arlington staffers who’d tried to prevent the Trump campaign from filming in a restricted area of the cemetery—in apparent violation of the law—which reportedly led a Trump aide to push aside one of those cemetery officials. In his speech, Trump linked the staffers—federal employees simply doing their jobs of guarding ground most Americans revere—to law enforcement prosecuting him for his various alleged crimes.

“These are bad people we’re dealing with,” Trump seethed. “They say I was campaigning,” he continued. “I don’t need the publicity.” Trump flatly dismissed the idea that he was at Arlington to “politick” in any way, and insisted he’d only been asked by relatives of the fallen to pose for pictures at a gravesite. 

Yes, there just happened to be a video photographer there, and somehow — nobody knows how — the video of Trump at Arlington was made into a campaign video with Trump himself doing the voiceover and posted on Trump’s vanity social media site within a few hours of the visit.

He’s changing the story as he goes along, in other words. Next he’ll deny he was ever in Arlington. And his culties will believe him.

And we still don’t know exactly how roughly the Arlington employee was treated and which Trump staffers shoved her.

The best thing I’ve read on the Arlington fracas is from Will Bunch at the Phileadelphia Inquirer.

The people closest to Trump allegedly shoved and verbally abused a woman — because that’s what they do.

And when the woman complained in a formal statement to the U.S. Army, Team Trump gaslit her by accusing her of being a psycho — seemingly part of an intimidation campaign which was meant to scare the accuser from pressing criminal charges.

This blatantly sexist bullying of the Arlington employee has worked — just as it’s worked so many times for Trump himself during his decades-long trail of sexual abuse and harassment allegations, and just as violence and gross mistreatment of women hasn’t thwarted the careers of Trump’s male-dominated inner circle.

We shouldn’t let the other unseemly aspects of Trump’s behavior at one of America’s most sacred places obscure the fact that rank misogyny is the lifeblood of this authoritarian crusade to retake the White House, and that contempt for women saturates everything they do.

This is taking us into a change in topic, but it cannot be denied that misogyny, more than anything else, is driving the American hard right. Racism is in there too, of course, but it’s there fear and loathing of women that’s pushing them into the extreme crazy these days, regarding abortion rights. Abortion criminalization is the hill they’re preparing to die on.

This fear and loathing appears to have taken a pure and undistilled form in J.D. Vance. Not a day goes by that someone doesn’t release some old quote of his that shows him disparaging women with careers and no children. He really does seem to think that civilization will fall apart if women’s aren’t kept barefoot and pregnant.

I confess I never read Hillbilly Eligy and don’t intend to do so now. But from others I have heard that it’s a very angry book. And he is especially enraged against his mother. The mother never had a chance. She was impregnated at age 13 and married off to the older man who had impregnated her. That infant was stillborn, and then the her husband turned out to be a violent drunk, and she was a mess for obvious reasons. And J.D. found refuge with his grandparents, the ones who had raised his badly damaged mother in drunkeness and violence and chaos but in their old age had settled down a bit and provided some semblance of normalcy to young J.D. Meanwhile his mother divorced his father and got sober. J.D. is still palbably furious with his mother, readers of the book says. Not so much his father, oddly enough.

And the lesson J.D. somehow got from this is that women must be forced to have children and be married and give up all other ambitions.  If anyone was a walking candidate for intensive psychotherapy, it’s J.D. And clearly he is projecting his mother issues onto all other women, which is the commonest thing in the world for men who hate women to do, in my experience.

Back to Will Bunch:

Vance’s open contempt for women is the force that gives meaning to Trump’s MAGA movement, and it permeates everything they do. It certainly weighs down the policy blueprint for a Trump presidency known as Project 2025, which aims to shrink federal dollars for abortion and proposes restricting contraception, would strip all references to “gender equality” from government documents, and demands that the Senior Coordinator of the Office of Women, Children, and Families be a “pro-life” political appointee.

It’s all of a piece.

Updates on Israel

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You no doubt heard that the bodies of six Israeli hostages were discovered a couple of days ago in Gaza. They had been dead only a few hours. Juan Cole says that “Three of them had been designated as part of a hostage exchange with Hamas that the Hamas leadership had agreed to on August 3,” but Netanyahu had made other demands that soured the deal. “Many Israelis believe that if Netanyahu had accepted the hostage deal in early August, the six who were killed on Saturday would still be alive,” Juan Cole says. So yesterday there were massive demonstrations all over Israel, along with strikes and labor stoppages that continue into today. In brief, Israelis are massively pissed at Netanyahu.

Today Axios reports that “President Biden told reporters on Monday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu isn’t doing enough to get a Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal.” From what I’ve been reading over the past several weeks Netanyahu really is a bigger holdup to a deal than Hamas. As I understand it, Netanyahu thinks his political fortunes depend on stoking conflicts with Hamas, not on making deals with them.

Axios continues,

The other side: A senior Israeli source said “it is puzzling that president Biden is pressing Prime Minister Netanyahu, who agreed to the U.S. proposal as early as May 31 and to the U.S. bridging proposal on August 16, and not Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who continues to vehemently refuse any deal.”

I regret I’m not following this closely enough to know who is doing what. So back to Juan Cole:

One of the protesters, a woman, mocked Netanyahu’s attempt to blame Hamas. He had said, “Whoever wants a deal doesn’t kill hostages.” But the demonstrator said he was speaking of himself, not Hammas, and was speaking of his cabinet members who voted, she alleged, to sacrifice the hostages. She underscored that “it was possible to get them back home alive.” She added, “The Israeli government and its leader deliberately sacrificed the hostages, leading to their deaths.” She pointed out that the six hostages had been left there eleven months, and killed only a week ago. The hostage families said they want a deal “now!”

I don’t trust Hamas, either, but as I said what I have been reading over the past few days puts more blame for the failure on Netanyahu than Hamas. Lindsey Graham disagrees and has suggested that the U.S. start bombing oil refineries in Iran if the hostages are not released. Um, maybe not.

This  morning Biden and Vice President Harris met with the national security team about Israel. WaPo, yesterday:

The United States has been talking to Egypt and Qatar about the contours of a final “take it or leave it” deal that it plans to present to the parties in the coming weeks — one that, if the two sides fail to accept it, could mark the end of the American-led negotiations, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private and sensitive deliberations. Biden officials said it was not immediately clear whether the discovery of the six hostages would make it more or less likely that Israel and Hamas could come to an agreement in the coming weeks.

“You can’t keep negotiating this. This process has to be called at some point,” said the senior official, who said that the United States, Egypt and Qatar had been working on the final proposal before the six hostages were found dead in a tunnel beneath the southern Gaza city of Rafah. “Does it derail the deal? No. If anything, it should add additional urgency in this closing phase, which we were already in

As I’ve said before, I think Netanyahu is trying to drag out negotiations in hopes Trump wins another term. Now that that possibility is looking iffier, maybe he’ll cave. Or not.

 

Trump Finds No Refuge from Abortion

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Once upon a time there was a very powerful Republican politician who climbed to that power by claiming the government was infested with communists. He issued more smears than anyone could fact check, and people believed him. It got so that even those in his own party dare not criticize him, because those who did became victims of his inquisition. His claims started with the State Department but then spread to other branches. But then one day he made the mistake of taking on the United States Army. And within a few months the Army destroyed him. That was the end of his political career.

I was thinking of Joe McCarthy yesterday when I read that Trump’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita doubled down on dissing the Army. After the Army issued an official rebuke of the Trump campaign and its continued smears of the Arlington staffer they assaulted, LaCivita re-posted the campaign video made at Arlington with the words, “Reposting this hoping to trigger the hacks at @SecArmy.”

Of course, the normal thing for a campaign manager to have done was to issue some bland statement about regretting the misunderstanding or the miscommunication or whatever. I don’t expect the Army to respond to LaCivita. But there are already congressional inquiries.  LaCivita had better be hoping his client wins the bleeping election, because if he doesn’t I expect there to be public hearings on Arlingtongate in the next Congress. And then the Army will destroy him, and his client too. This is not something that can be allowed to stand.

I’m just now learning that shortly after the incident, J.D. Vance actually scolded the media and said, “You’re acting like Donald Trump filmed a TV commercial at a gravesite.” And then Trump posted the campaign video/TV commercial he had made at a gravesite.

The other relic of the 1950s that came to mind this week was the song “Oh Sinner Man,” which was first recorded in 1956. You might remember that the song describes some poor damned soul who could find no refuge on Judgment Day. This week Donald Trump may have begun to learn there is no safe place to stand on the abortion issue. He keeps trying to find some sweet spot, some middle ground, that will get the issue off his back. But ain’t no such place.  There is no position that will keep the anti-abortion zealots happy that won’t also cost him support among nearly everybody else. Again, anyone familiar with the issue could have told him that.

I doubt Trump cares one way or another about the abortion issue. I doubt he has paid close attention to all the ways other politicians have tried to finesse the issue over the years. He seems to have believed that being the guy who finally killed Roe v. Wade would earn him everlasting campaign victory.

And then when the inevitable and long-predicted backlash began, he fell back on saying that abortion should be left to the states. That was the forced-birth movement’s disingenuous favorite talking point for years; let the states decide. It shouldn’t be a federal matter. Anyone who had watched them closely over the years knew that “back to the states” was just a first step, and that they would not rest until abortion was criminalized nationwide. But they wouldn’t admit that until the Dobbs decision really did “let the states decide.” Now, of course, all the anti-abortion organizations are calling for a nationwide ban. This was utterly and obviously predictable.

But it wasn’t predicted by Trump.

He’s using all his magic powers to make abortion go away. By early August he was declaring that abortions are “not a big factor” in elections any more, so we don’t have to talk about it. Nice try.

Over the past few days he’s been like the guy in the “Sinner Man” song, running to one place after another to escape the Judgment. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan wrote in the New York Times how Trump Contorts Himself on Abortion in Search of Political Gain. I think it’s more like he’s trying to find the position that will do the least damage.

For example, several of his surrogates lately have declared that Trump would never sign a federal abortion ban. Now the wrath of the anti-abortion zealots is upon him to reverse that. A couple of days ago he vagely signaled he might vote yes on Florida’s abortion access referendum, because a ban after six weeks was too short. After hellfire rained down on him for a couple of days he appeared to have changed his mind. And he brilliantly promised free IVF for everybody! I’m not sure he understands why the anti-aborts are down on IVF.

See also Trump’s Latest Move to Avoid Abortion Is His Strangest One Yet by Michael Schaffer at Politico. This one features a conflict between abortion access in the District of Columbia and Trump’s promise to take over running the District himself. “We will take over the horribly run capital of our nation,” Trump himself said at a Florida rally this summer. “We’re going to take it away from the mayor. And again, that doesn’t make me popular there, but I have to say it.” You might remember that Trump’s beef with D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser goes back to the Black Lives Matter protests, if not before.

The District also has very liberal abortion laws. It’s one of the few places with no gestational limits. And the Fetus People want Trump to change that. But recently Trump has decided that abortion is the one thing that the District can decide for itself. Politico:

“Democrats want to gaslight Americans and sow fear, but President Trump has long been consistent in supporting the rights of states, and the District of Columbia, to make decisions on abortion,” Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

The “and the District of Columbia” part of that sentence marks a jaw-dropping departure from decades of GOP orthodoxy.

In Congress, GOP majorities have intervened to stop the locals from voting to legalize marijuana, administer a needle-exchange program, allow noncitizens to vote in city elections, update the municipal criminal code, and use hometown tax dollars to pay for low-income abortion care. The Project 2025 blueprint calls for prohibiting D.C.’s public schools from teaching critical race theory. There are ongoing Congressional efforts to do away with physician-assisted suicide and permit concealed carry in the city.

And, finally, see Cleanup on Aisle MAGA: Trump Bends to Conservative Abortion Critics by Marc A. Caputo and Andrew Egger at The Bulwark.

In other news:  See Trump Wants to Hide His Attempt to Assassinate Mike Pence from Voters by Marcy Wheeler.

Trump’s Adventures in Arlington: The Fallout

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Wow, the Arlington story has actual legs. It’s blowing up in Trump’s fat orange face. And the more details come out, the worse it gets. It’s so bad for Trump that Elon Musk’s X has tagged news about the incident as “unsafe” to discourage people from reading about it.

First off, there’s no question that Trump was there for a campaign event and to make a campaign video, which was posted on Trump’s vanity social media site. You really must watch Chris Hayes on this point.

WaPo has the backstory about how all this happened.

Earlier this month, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign contacted military officials about visiting Arlington National Cemetery to mark the third anniversary of the Islamic State bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members during the evacuation from Afghanistan.

Federal law prohibits election-related activities at military cemeteries, and Arlington is the most prestigious and sacred of all. Pentagon officials were deeply concerned about the former president turning the visit into a campaign stop, but they also didn’t want to block him from coming, according to Defense Department officials and internal messages reviewed by The Washington Post.

Officials said they wanted to respect the wishes of grieving family members who wanted Trump there, but at the same time were wary of Trump’s record of politicizing the military. So they laid out ground rules they hoped would wall off politics from the final resting place of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice for their nation.

Instead, they got sucked into exactly the kind of crisis they were hoping to avoid.

The right-wing Daily Caller is running a story claiming that House Speaker Mike Johnson had to intervene to get the military to allow Trump into the cemetery. But instead of giving clicks to Daily Caller, do read about it on Politics USA. This story as written in Daily Caller makes no sense, since any citizen can enter Arlington during visiting hours. Well, I suppose if you showed up buck naked and carrying a flamethrower you might run into some obstacles. But the issue wasn’t about whether Trump could enter cemetery grounds but what he was planning to do there. The story came from a member of one of the families involved in the incident, and that person may have been confused.

Anyway, the military was fine with Trump participating in a requested wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns, but it asked that no cameras or film equipment be taken into section 60 near the graves. As explained in yesterday’s post, federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within U.S. military cemeteries. This includes include “photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign.” I take it the military was willing to look the other way about campaign staff as long as no photographs or videos were made around the graves that would end up in campaign messaging.

But of course, Trump’s people believe they are entitled to do whatever they want. When a woman employed at Arlington tried to enforce the rule and stop the fillmmaker(s) and phtographer(s) from entering Section 60, she was pushed aside and later smeared by the Trumpers as being mentally unstable. And so Trump got his campaign video.

The woman who was shoved decided not to press charges because she didn’t want to become a target of Trump thugs. The military issued a statement rebuking Trump for his and his team’s behavior at Arlington, but then declared the matter to be closed.

But assaulting a federal employee in the performance of her duties is a felony (18 USC 111). Under nearly any other circumstance a person shoving aside an Arlington employee who was just doing her job would have been arrested on the spot. And, as we’ve already said, making a campaign video around the graves is definitely illegal also. Once again, Trump gets away with breaking the law because people — in this case the bleeping military — don’t want to get sucked into one of Trump’s dramas and possibly cause a MAGA mob to storm Arlington.

So is that the end of the story? So far I’ve found one U.S. Congressman calling for the incident report to be released to the public.This is Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat who represents Virginia’s 11th district. This district does not include Arlington but is right next door to it. I assume Mike Johnson would quash any investigations in the House, but the Senate could do something. And so far the family of at least one Green Beret buried in Arlington has expressed “dismay” that the grave marker of their loved one, Master Sgt. Andrew Marckesano, is visible in Trump’s video. They did not give permission for that, they said. So further developments are possible.

Trump’s Desecration of Arlington

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A couple of days ago I saw that Trump had staged some sort of photo op at Arlington Cemetery. This was done to draw attention to the third anniversary of the Kabul airport attack that killed 13 U.S. service members. I thought this was a cheap stunt best ignored. But now more details are coming out that make the incident a bigger deal.

Various news stories have been a bit contradictory. Here is WaPo’s version:

An altercation occurred after a cemetery staff member warned people employed by the Trump campaign that while they were permitted to take photos and videos in the cemetery, they could not do so in Section 60, the final resting place for many U.S. service members who were killed in recent conflicts, a defense official familiar with the situation said Wednesday. The guidance was issued to the campaign both before the memorial event and again once they were on-site due to legal restrictions on campaign-related activities there, said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Trump had been invited to a memorial event to mark the deaths of 13 U.S. service members by some of the grieving families, the defense official said.

“What was abundantly clear cut was: Section 60, no photos and no video,” the defense official said.

A person familiar with the matter told NPR, which first reported the incident Tuesday, that the Trump campaign staff pushed and verbally attacked a cemetery official who tried to stop them from taking photos and videos in Section 60. Cemetery staff said in a statement that federal law bars photography for political campaign purposes at the site.

NPR says it received this statement from Arlington National Cemetery:

In a statement to NPR, Arlington National Cemetery said it “can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed.”

“Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign,” according to the statement. “Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants.”

This appears to say that it’s against federal law to use any part of Arlington Cemetery in a political campaign. Whether photography in section 60 specifically is also against federal law, or is just cemetery policy, isn’t clear to me. You might remember my older brother was buried at Arlington in 2015. People do walk around on the grounds and take photos. Here’s one I took in 2015 of the riderless horse that was part of the procession to the grave site.

My brother is not in section 60, at least.

Charles Pierce had some choice words:

So the sun was out and shining as this third-generation draft dodger pretended to care about the soldiers who were suckers and losers enough to get killed during the United States’ withdrawal from its Afghanistan adventure. How in the hell this was allowed to happen is beyond me. Arlington is the country’s “most hallowed ground.” (Just ask the tour guides.) Arlington is profaned by his presence on just an average day. But to allow itself to be used for the purpose propping up one of the Republican Party’s most noxious half-truths—as promulgated by its most noxious elements personified by its most noxious candidate—is an insult to the over 400 Medal of Honor awardees buried there.

I hope the report that was filed will be made public eventually. And if it really is a violation of federal law to stage campaign stunts at Arlington, I want to see some follow up. At least this morning the incident is getting a lot of coverage.

NPR:

In a statement to NPR, Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s spokesman, strongly rejected the notion of a physical altercation, adding: “We are prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made.

“The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony,” Cheung said in the statement.

The Trump campaign declined to make that footage immediately available.

Steven Cheung claimed the Trump campaign had permission to put on their little stunt. But it turns out the only permission they received was from some of the families of the Marines killed at Kabul. It wasn’t their “permission” to give.

This photo of the stunt, with Trump grinning like the idiot he is and giving a thumb’s up while standing next to headstones, is bad enough. He can’t even fake being respectful. And the families involved should be ashamed. I understand the stunt included a wreath laying ceremony. A video from Fox News shows a man in military uniform taking part. That guy needs to be in big trouble.

Update: I picked up from Steve Benen that the wreath laying was conducted by the Old Guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns. Arlington will take requests for such ceremonies, limited to one a day, says the Arlington website.. Trump put himself in the middle of it, which soesn’t seem normal to me. But the military personnel in the ceremony weren’t doing anything wrong.

Stuff to read:

Rick Perlstein interviews David Neiwert on the potential for right-wing violence after the general election, no matter the outcome.

Trump plans would add $5.8 trillion to national debt. This is according to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Trump’s alma mater.

Jill Filipovic, Why Kamala Harris gets under Trump’s skin at Slate

Trump Has Been Reindicted

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I just saw this —

A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., has reindicted Donald Trump on four felony charges related to his effort to subvert the 2020 presidential election.

The 36-page indictment, secured Tuesday by special counsel Jack Smith, is an attempt by prosecutors to recalibrate the case against Trump in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling last month that concluded presidents enjoy sweeping immunity from prosecution for their official conduct.

The new indictment removes some specific allegations against Trump but contains the same four criminal charges, including conspiracy to defraud the United States. It’s a signal that Smith believes the high court’s immunity decision doesn’t pose a major impediment to convicting the former president.

Jack Smith has been busy. Yesterday he filed an appeal to overturn Loose Cannon’s decision to dismiss the documents case. Here is Joyce Vance’s commentary. It’s expected the 11th Circuit will agree with Smith, but what happens after that isn’t clear. It might go to the Supreme Court. Smith didn’t ask that Cannon be removed from the case, but I understand the 11th Circuit could reassign the case. Note also that Smith didn’t ask for the case to be expedited. So nothing significant is likely to happen until after the election, and possibly not until next year. If Trump loses, perhaps SOTUS won’t try to protect him.

In other news: I’m seeing news stories that Trump is back to agreeing to the September 10 debate, on the same terms as the last debate. I haven’t heard that the Harris campaign has agreed.

Stuff to read: Greg Palast has a post headlined I was on the phone with RFK Jr.
When he lost his mind. Palast has known RFK the Lesser for many years. Years ago they wrote articles together. What Palast describes sounds like the brain worm really did scramble Lesser’s cognitive abiblities.

At the Atlantic, see Trump’s Evangelical Supporters Just Lost Their Best Excuse by Peter Wehner. Wehner explains that Trump has twisted himself into a pretzel trying to back away from abortion restrictions. And that was the primary issue keeping him tied to the evangelicals.

One more. Josh Marshall asks, Donald’s Fallen Down. So Why Can’t He Get Up?

Today’s News Bits, and It’s Only Monday

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First, some humor:

This is the headlline to an actual op ed by Rich Lowry, the editor in chief of National Review. I don’t know what’s going on at National Review, but I skimmed enough of this thing to be able to assure you it’s not a joke. But I’m not going to waste one of my few remaining “gift article” links for the month on it.

There’s another piece at the New York Times that’s actually useful to read: Republican Donors: Do You Know Where Your Money Goes? This one’s a gift article. The author, Juleanna Glover, is some sort of big deal corporate consultant who has worked for past Republican administrations, although not Trump’s.

Anyone who has spent time reviewing Donald Trump’s campaign spending reports would quickly conclude they’re a governance nightmare. There is so little disclosure about what happened to the billions raised in 2020 and 2024 that donors (and maybe even the former president himself) can’t possibly know how it was spent.

Federal Election Commission campaign disclosure reports from 2020 show that much of the money donated to the Trump campaign went into a legal and financial black hole reportedly controlled by Trump family members and close associates. This year’s campaign disclosures are shaping up to be the same. Donors big and small give their hard-earned dollars to candidates with the expectation they will be spent on direct efforts to win votes. They deserve better.

During the 2020 election, almost $516 million of the over $780 million spent by the Trump campaign was directed to American Made Media Consultants, a Delaware-based private company created in 2018 that masked the identities of who ultimately received donor dollars, according to a complaint filed with the F.E.C. by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. How A.M.M.C. spent the money was a mystery even to Mr. Trump’s campaign team, according to news reports shortly after the election.

Apparently nobody can tell if any laws were broken, because there aren’t enough details. Lara Trump was AMMC’s first president. Jared Kushner was also involved with it somehow.

This election, the Trump campaign and four of its PACs have paid Red Curve Solutions, another private company, at least $18 million. The Campaign Legal Center says Red Curve appears to pay Mr. Trump’s legal bills and then gets reimbursed by the PACs. (The law is murky on what types of legal bills can be paid by campaigns, but some are allowed.) The head of Red Curve also serves as the treasurer for the Trump campaign as well as the affiliated PACs.

What percentage of donor contributions go to lawyers defending Mr. Trump? It’s impossible to know.

In June, NBC revealed the existence of a new mystery company, called Launchpad Strategies. Launchpad took in almost $15 million in Trump political cash via the Trump Save America Joint Fundraising Committee and the Trump National Committee. Little is known about this new group. It was created in 2023 and the Trump campaign says it is related to fund-raising. We don’t know who owns it, who runs it or where the $15 million went.

One assumes the Trumps are using campaign money as a kind of all-purpose slush fund, but if Trump is re-elected we’ll never know. If he isn’t, I seriously hope this is investigated. I’m remembering that we never did get the full story of where all the money for his 2017 inauguration went.

Debate May Be Cancelled

This morning there were headlines saying that Trump might call off the September 10 debate. Initially the reports pointed to Trump’s complaints about the host network, ABC. But Politico has another explanation.

With just 15 days left until the scheduled Sept. 10 presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, negotiations between their two campaigns have hit an impasse over whether the candidates’ microphones will be muted when it is not their turn to speak, according to four people familiar with the issue.

In June, President Joe Biden’s campaign came to an agreement with Trump’s: There would be two debates — CNN’s on June 27 and ABC’s on Sept. 10 — conducted by mutually negotiated rules. One of the Biden team’s demands — which the Trump team agreed to — was that microphones “will be muted throughout the debate except for the candidate whose turn it is to speak,” as CNN announced on June 15.

But Biden is no longer running for president. And Harris’ campaign wants the microphones to be hot at all times during the ABC debate — as has historically been the case at presidential debates.

So Kamala Harris wants open mics, and Trump doesn’t. Maybe Kamala the prosecutor is itching to cross examine Trump. I’d love to see that. But I hope this doesn’t crash the debate altogether.

In other news — a daughter of RFK the Lesser says that once her dad found a dead whale on the beach. So as anyone would do, he somehow cut off the whale’s head and strapped it to his car, then drove five hours home with it. “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” the daughter said. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.” I regret that the article doesn’t say what happened to the head.

In more other news — The estate of the late Isaac Hayes served Trump with a notice that he is being sued over use of the Hayes song “Hold On, I’m Coming,” in his campaign, without permission.

Stuff to Read

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Interesting articles I’ve seen over the past few hours —

I recommend this piece by Greg Sargent at The New Republic. He makes an important point. Here’s just a bit:

In her rousing convention speech on Thursday, Harris offered many olive branches to right-leaning independents and Republican voters. She vowed toughness on immigration and crime. She promised to transcend the nation’s divisions. She vowed to govern for all Americans and transcend faction or party. She made numerous appeals to voters with decidedly right-leaning values.

But, in mulling what Harris means by all this, it’s crucial to appreciate what she did not do. Harris offered all this outreach to voters outside the core Democratic coalition without making serious concessions to the ideological preoccupations we associate with MAGA-style right-wing populism. There was no real accommodation with what might be called The World According to MAGA.

Instead, Harris treated Trumpism and the MAGA movement as forces that must be decisively repudiated—and unequivocally left behind.

The crew at the right-wing National Review were never in the tank for Trump, and now that they smell defeat they are to point to it. The original article is behind a paywall, but Raw Story provides some quotes:

“The GOP electoral coalition is the smaller, weaker coalition. It’s lost the popular vote seven out of nine times in my lifetime (I’m 36). It has lost the Electoral College three out of the last four cycles. Conservatives might not be very eager to hear this, but ‘We the People’ are mostly Democrats,” Wright continued.

Republicans can still win despite this, he added, but so far the only times that has happened is when they nominated outsiders — and Trump is now the last thing from an outsider you could imagine.

“Trump isn’t losing because Kamala Harris is being hyped by the press and fluffed up to kingdom come. He isn’t losing because the press is being unfair to him. He’s losing because he’s a weak, unpopular, undisciplined candidate running at the head of a weak, minority electoral coalition. That’s the truth, whether anyone wants to hear it or not,” Wright concluded.

This next article makes an interesting comparison between the two party conventions. The DNC’s stagecraft, signs, posters, chants, etc. were mostly all about America. The RNC’s were just about Trump. Audience signs and chants at the DNC were all about America. At the RNC, it was the Trump show.

And here’s one that says Trump’s “event” at the southern border this weekend featured a setion of wall that was built durng the Obama administration.

MONTEZUMA PASS, Ariz. — A brown ribbon carved a straight gash across a vast, flat desert basin, the only mark of human civilization visible on this wilderness. The partition charged up a steep hill in Montezuma Canyon, then suddenly stopped. Extra pieces lay in piles nearby, rusting monuments to an unfinished campaign promise.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump came here on Thursday to heap praise on the structure standing to his right — “the Rolls-Royce of walls,” he called it — and lament the unused segments lying to his left. Joining him there, Border Patrol union leader Paul A. Perez called the standing fence “Trump wall” and the idle parts “Kamala wall,” after his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Those labels were inaccurate. This section of 20-foot steel slats was actually built during the administration of President Barack Obama. Trump added the unfinished extension up the hillside, an engineering challenge that cost at least $35 million a mile. The unused panels of 30-foot beams were procured during the Trump administration and never erected

I understand chunks of Trump’s wall are not holding up well, so it’s understandable he chose a section that still looks nice.

We now know that each of the four nights of the Democratic convention had significantly higher ratings that the four nights of the Republican convention. As I keep saying, the days in which putting Trump on television is a guaranteed ratings boost are long over.


Was That a Great Convention, or What?

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(Update: Right after I posted this, NBC reported thet RFK the Lesser is dropping out and endorsing Trump. This is not a surprise, and I doubt it will make much difference, but we’ll see.)

(Update: “Special Counsel Jack Smith has decided against seeking a major hearing to present evidence in the election-interference case against Donald Trump before voters go to the polls Nov. 5, according to people familiar with the matter,” it says here.)

Wowzers. I don’t think the DNC convention could have gone any better than it did. If Harris-Walz don’t get a bounce from that, the laws of physics must be suspended. As of this morning it’s still a toss-up race, though. Let’s give it three or four days.

I’m also waiting to see the television ratings for last night compared to the last night of the RNC. For the first three nights the DNC’s television rating blew the RNC’s out of the water. And for those who did tune in to see Trump’s acceptance speech, I believe the most charitable review I read of it was that it was an “unhinged mess.”

The convention has been criticized for not inviting a pro-Palestinian speaker on the stage. I heard somewhere that there were concerns a pro-Palestinian speaker might say something that would muck up the cease-fire talks. Although the cease-fire talks aren’t going anywhere, that I can tell, at the moment.

I suppose you’ve heard the unconfirmed story that Trump called Netanyahu to ask him to not make any deals before the election. Both Trump and Netanyahu deny it happened, which of course has no bearing on whether it did or not. I’d be more surprised if it didn’t happen than if it did. It sounds like something Trump would do. But if it gets closer to November and Trump is losing, Bibi might want to think about making a deal while Joe Biden is still president.

There is also some grumbling in right-wing commentary that Harris didn’t provide enough details about her plans. (Like Trump ever provided details?) Obviously Harris was avoiding a wonky policy speech. And one right-wing blogger complained that Harris actually spent part of her acceptance speech talking about her personal background. From the transcript, it appears Trump spent at least a third of his nearly endless acceptance speech talking about being (maybe) grazed in the ear.

So, roughly, we’ve got two months and a couple of weeks until the election. Besides the great convention, one of the most hopeful signs, to me, is that Trump seems to be utterly melting down. He doesn’t know how to just take a deep breath and rethink his strategy. Now he’s on defense, and he’s being reactive instead of proactive. During Harris’s speech he was furiously posting in ALL CAPS on Truth Social in howling rage. He called in to Fox News, so agitated that he was punching numbers on the phone while talking. And Fox News had to cut him off. So then he called Newsmax, which apparently let him continue as long as he wanted.

At WaPo, Ban Balz writes that Kamala Harris has put Trump in a box, and he’s struggling to break out.

As Harris has glided through the past month, Trump has taken to social media or to friendly media interviews in hopes of setting the terms of the conversation, but that has backfired. He has tried invective, exaggeration and lies, something that in the past he used to shift the focus, sometimes to distract from his own problems, at other times to draw attention away from a rival. It hasn’t done what he hoped.

The former president has tried counterprogramming to force the media to look his way this week. It should have been obvious to him that this would be Harris’s week in the same way that the Republican convention was his. The only news Democrats made during his convention was that pressure on President Joe Biden to quit his reelection bid was ramping up. Trump has learned, perhaps painfully, that at this moment, fewer are listening to him. In short, nothing seems to be working the way it once did.

That could change, and obviously major media will continue to cover his campaign. But as I keep saying his act is old and tired, and if he wants to be the center of attention the way he was in 2016 he’s going to have to do something new. And I don’t think he can.

In other Trump news, see Trump’s businesses are raking in millions of dollars from Republican political campaigns – including his own at CNN.