I want to say something about campaign narratives. Campaign narratives are something like ongoing themes that campaign operatives and the news industry assign to political campaigns. Hillary Clinton’s emails are an example. People heard over and over about the emails. If you had stopped 20 people at random and asked them to explain the email issue, I’m betting maybe one out of the 20 actually understood it. Maybe. But people knew there was something scandalous about those emails.

This Chicago Sun Times article by a political reporter, Andy Shaw, defines the campaign narrative pretty well —

Covering politics for three decades left me with a lifetime of takeaways, but a compelling one that resurfaces more often than most, as we try to explain widespread public perceptions of politicians, is the importance of narrative.

It’s an overarching media-and-consultant-driven storyline that, for better or worse, defines, describes and tends to stick to candidates and elected officials like glue until the passage of time or a figurative solvent — an unanticipated major event — pries it loose.

Note that this was written after the debate disaster but before Joe Biden had dropped out of the race.

So now we get to President Joe Biden, whose narrative honed over a decades-long career characterized him as “Good ol’ Joe”— a solid, earnest, hail-fellow-well-met Democratic pol who endured several personal tragedies and survived multiple stumbles and bumbles on his uneven road to the White House. …

… Then came the devastating debate debacle, which entirely ripped off the narrative patch, leaving Biden gasping for air in shark-infested political waters as handlers rushed to the rescue and an increasing number of voters shrugged their shoulders in dismissive disinterest.

After the debate, IMO, there was no rehabilitating his campaign. I think now there’s no question his dropping out was the right thing to do. The new Harris-Walz campaign, along with adopting a “happy warrior” theme, also has quickly created the narrative that we are psychologically normal. Wholesome, even. But they are weird.

IMO “weird” is definitely sticking to J.D. Vance.  And I don’t think he has it in him to rehabilitate his image. He is weird.

But I think Trump is in big danger of being tagged by news media as downright deranged. I could be wrong, of course. The press has been cutting him endless slack for several murky reasons, one of which was that until recently they were more focused on the old “Joe is old” narrative. But there’s just too much evidence bleeding into public view that Trump is not tethered to what we might call commonly experienced reality. The story behind the “chopper whopper” and his claims that his January 6 crowd size exceeded Dr. Martin Luther King’s when he gave his “I have a dream” speech were widely reported, for example. Now I’m seeing headlines like this — Trump baselessly charges Harris Michigan rally crowd ‘didn’t exist,’ was generated with AI. That’s getting reported all over the place this evening. Yes his supporters will believe him, but his supporters are too small a minority to elect him by themselves.

Do see Behind the Curtain: Inside Trump’s slump at Axios. It says his advisers can’t get him to stop flailing and meandering and stick to a disciplined campaign message. I take it he’s too angry, and probably too frightened, to listen. He has no discipline; he has no fortitude. And his con man’s instincts, which worked well for him in 2016, are failing him now. And as some of the major media outlets report on the flailing and babbling, and the sky doesn’t fall, they’ll realize it’s safe to keep reporting it.

Jeff Greenfield has a really good analysis at Politico headlined Trump’s Crucial Power Has Been Neutralized. In 2016 his power was that he was the change candidate running against Mrs. Status Quo Establishment. And he managed to not be so alarming or out of touch with reality to scare voters away. As I’ve said before, Trump got the last-minute “what the hell’ votes after James Comey released more news About Her Emails just days before the election.

But now Trump is out of control and babbling nonsense, and the Democrats have their act together. We’ve still got the Dem convention and the September 10 debate to look forward to, which gives Democrats more opportunity to drive their narrative home. Let’s hope.

Also, too: About the hack of Trump’s campaign servers, do see Marcy Wheeler.

This was the big news today:

It’s still within the margin of error with 80-something days to go,. According to Josh Marshall, though, “The Times-Siena poll has been among the least friendly to Democrats through this political cycle and the previous one as well.” Further,

… as the pollster whose numbers have generally showed weaker end numbers for the Democrats, it tends to confirm the new electoral reality – at least for the moment. Harris now appears to have significant leads in the Blue Wall states which alone are enough for electoral victory, if only by the slenderest of margins. Meanwhile she is at least in solid contention in the southern tier states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and quite possibly North Carolina.

This means that it’s Trump who’s never very much on electoral defense, needing to hold all the southern tier states and grab at least one of the states in the Blue Wall. We still have almost three months left of this race. We’re only three weeks in. But this is a decisively changed race. That’s not an overstatement. It’s not just the top-line numbers. Major demographic groups have shifted in Harris’s favor. 

A number of commenters are saying the race has fundamentally changed, for now. Nobody is predicted a Harris win. However, Trump seems to not know how to respond. If Trump were a skilled political operator I’d say the current polls were meaningless. But instead of responding to the Harris campaign he’s flapping around getting into a fight with the New York Times over the chopper whopper.

He threatened to sue the Times for not believing his story. It turns out that the dangerous helicopter ride he remembered may have happened in about 1990, and he was with a Black Los Angeles politician named Nate Holden. Trump was looking to build something or other in L.A. at the time, but the helicopter ride was in New Jersey. In 1990 Kamala Harris had just finished law school and had been hired as a deputy district attorney in Oakland. She passed her bar exam on the second try, btw. the point is that it’s unlikely he and Nate Holden talked about her or had ever heard of her.  Trump probably has several different helicopter episodes tangled up in his head, some of which may be entirely imaginary.

Do read Inside the Worst Three Weeks of Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan (gift article). Trump seems to be unable to settle into any kind of sustained strategy against Harris. People in his campaign are trying to steer him toward specific policy areas — crime, immigration, inflation — and what he intends to do about them. But Trump isn’t getting the message. He keeps re-hashing his old grievances about the “stolen” 2020 election and crowd sizes and Harris’s biracial background, which seems to baffle him. He’s trying out nicknames for Harris — Crooked Kamala? Crazy Kamala? And he’s picking fights with supporters, including Miriam Adelson, the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who inexplicably gives him lots of money.

Do read The Truth About Trump’s Press Conference by Tom Nichols at The Atlantic (gift article). He makes some of the same points Lawrence O’Donnell made the other night, about hyper-cautious media coverage of Trump. Trump’s press conference was all lies and word salad, but headlines made him seem normal. For example, CNN went with  “Trump Attacks Harris and Walz During First News Conference Since Democratic Ticket Was Announced.” Nichols writes,

All of these headlines are technically true, but they miss the point: The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.

Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him.

This is not, as some of you keep insisting, because news media are somehow making more money covering Trump than they are covering other people. They are not. That was probably true in 2016, but it isn’t true now. What we’re looking at is a combination of not wanting to appear biased or more alarmist that the other journalists/media outlets and a fear of being sued.

We’re in a territory that I don’t think the country has ever been in before, in which one of the major parties is promoting a nominee who is not well and not stable and shouldn’t be allowed to operate anything more complicated than a toaster, never mind the nuclear codes. There have been nominees who were scoundrels of various sorts, sure, but that’s normal for politics. Whichever major media company ever comes out and says plainly the truth about Trump will take a serious hit in lost subscriptions, viewers, and advertising revenue, although possibly just a temporary one.

In other news — Somebody hacked the Trump campaign and stole a bunch of internal documents, including a big dossier of negative stuff on J.D. Vance. The Trump campaign is blaming Iran, but there’s no verification of that. The hacked documents are being sent to media outlets. It’s too soon to tell whether this will be a big deal or not. The Vance dossier, for example, is made up of publicly available information, news stories say. Nothing new and juicy has come out so far.

If you missed Lawrence O’Donnell last night,  please watch the video. He eviscerates the media coverage of Trump’s “press conference” yesterday.

I sincerely hope everyone in the Washington press corps, plus the bigwigs of major media, look at this.

I wish there was a transcript of what Trump said yesterday. There may be one somewhere, but I haven’t found it. O’Donnell reads one of Trump’s answers to a question that would be hilarious if we weren’t in such a desperate situation.

I sincerely believe that Trump is much more mentally impaired than he was in 2016. He told lies then, too, obviously to serve his ego. But now what comes out of his mouth is more like mental flotsam, words and phrases that might have been associated with a coherent idea at some time but which came lose from all context and just washed up on shore, so to speak. For example, his repeated claim that border migrants are coming from “insane asylums” probably came about because he heard them called “asylum seekers,” And then whatever scrambled mess of synapses he has for a brain connected “asylum” to “insane.”

Somehow he’s created a memory now being called the “chopper whopper” that he and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown “went down” in a helicopter at some point. Willie Brown says he was never in a helicopter with Trump. Former Gov. Jerry Brown says he was, but they were never in any kind of forced landing situation. My point is that this is not the sort of lie that a calculating brain might come up with. It came about because random badly remembered things collided in his head and kind of stuck together. He probably believes it’s true.

This was just published at The New Republic:

Former Trump administration national security adviser John Bolton was thoroughly unimpressed with Donald Trump’s last-minute presser at Mar-a-Lago, criticizing him as a man so dishonest that he can no longer perceive the difference between the truth and his lies.

Responding to a clip from Trump’s Thursday speech in which the former president claimed he had been “protective” of Hillary Clinton during his administration (despite telling crowds at the time that she should “be in jail” and be “locked up”), Bolton told CNN that Trump “can’t tell the difference between what’s true and what’s false.”

“It’s not that he lies a lot because to lie, you have to do it consciously. He just can’t tell the difference,” Bolton continued. “So he makes up what he wants to say at any given time. If it happens to comport with what everybody else sees—well, that’s fine. And if it doesn’t comport with anybody else, he doesn’t really care and he’s had decades of getting away with it.

“So in his mind, the truth is whatever he wants it to be. And that’s what you heard today,” Bolton added.

Not that I think Bolton is a reliable source for anything, but he may be somewhere in the ball park this time. But I suspect Trump may be even more disconnected from what we might call commonly experienced reality than he used to be. If he honestly doesn’t know that his helicopter story, for example, never happened, that’s kind of a problem. If he does know it didn’t happen, and doesn’t care, that’s also a problem.

On the other hand — McKay Coppins wrote a piece for The Atlantic in January that says he spent a couple of days with Trump in 2014, and says the Trump he saw then is the same person he sees now. Maybe.

I watched as much of the Trump press conference as I could stand. After about half an hour I switched to the live and fact-checked updates in the New York Times. If you want to know what was said, just click on the link and read away. I’m not sure he’s said anything at all that’s entirely true. See also the highlights at TPM.

The big news, I suppose, is that Trump says he’s “agreed” to three debates, including the previously scheduled ABC debate on September 10. He didn’t say what conditions he wants. He’s probably going to want an audience and to have his mic kept on while Harris is talking, and she should not agree to that. But Trump has talked himself into a corner by insisting that Harris is “not smart” and can’t talk or answer questions without a teleprompter. The former prosecuting attorney can’t talk. Sure.

Otherwise, it was same old, same old. He’s obsessed with crowd sizes and insists he gets much bigger rally crowds that Harris. He insists the polls have him way ahead of her in swing states.

He seems confused about when Harris ran for the presidential nomination, which was in 2019. She dropped out before the voting started. He seems to think this is somehow pertinent to her status as the nominee now, and brought it up several times. He also doubled down on his fantasy that Biden was forced out of being the nominee, that it was taken away from him by some evil cabal led by Crazy Nancy Pelosi, and that Joe Biden is furious about it.

He responded to a recent remark by Joe Biden, that if Trump loses there might not be a peaceful transer of power. He insisted there was a peaceful transfer of power in 2021, and that “nobody died on January 6.” That one is getting fact checked pretty robustly in the NY Times.

Oh, and his tax cuts were the biggest in history (false) and Kamala Harris will take away your gas-powered cars and guns (false, false)

Seriously, I question whether he’s consciously lying or whether he’s just untethered to reality. But this was all about his fantasies and his grievances and his warnings that if the Harris-Walz ticket is elected America will immediately be plunged into a thousand years of darkness. We’ll be hit by Great Depression II and World War III at the same time.

I have confirmed that this is an authentic Truth Social post from Trump.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Trump posted this because he desperately wants it to be true. He feels the election slipping away from him. He wants Joe Biden back as his opponent. He’s not all that tightly tethered to reality, in other words. As I understand somebody said on Morning Joe today, Trump is “losing his freaking mind.”

And then when it was announced that Tim Walz would be the veep nominee, Trump sent out a campaign email saying “He’ll unleash HELL ON EARTH”. This guy.

Alexandra Perti had a fine time imagining Trump and Vance touring the seven circles of Tim Walz hell. People from the State Fair Butter Sculpture Circle kept trying to give them a hot dish.

Trump and his supporters keep talking about the “Radical Left” when in fact they are the most radical elements in U.S. politics. And I think one of the deft things the Harris-Walz ticket seems poised to do is make that fact really obvious. We are the normies. Those people are weird. Trump seems stuck in permanent rage mode these days. It’s all he knows how to do. And he’s boring. Vance is pretty much a laughingstock already. I don’t think either one has it in him to adjust and begin running an effective campaign. Of course, those who are getting all of their information from the right-wing media echo chamber will believe whatever nonsense is generated to smear the Democratic ticket. But that’s not everybody.

In other news: As you may have heard, yesterday Squad member Rep. Cori Bush of St. Louis lost her primary to St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell. People are going to try to read all kinds of implications into this that probably aren’t warranted. Wesley Bell’s positions on issues are nearly identical to Bush’s. The difference between them may be more of style rather than substance. He did get a lot of AIPAC money because AIPAC seriously doesn’t like Cori Bush, but in that district I doubt people were voting on that issue. He used to be on the Ferguson City Council and then became St. Louis County’s first Black Prosecutor, replacing a White conservative.

I mentioned Bell in a post back in 2018. As I anticipated, I’m seeing some hand-wringing about Cori Bush’s loss being a threat to Progressivism.  But I think Wesley Bell will be a fine representative who is just a better fit for the district than Bush was. When I first heard he was running in the primary I suspected he would win. Rep. Bush had become something of a showboater who inexplicably voted against some of President Biden’s initiatives, such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. That one cost her union support and probably didn’t make any sense to her voters, either.

I think Tim Walz was the smart choice for veep. This is a solid ticket. I’m almost looking forward to what most certainly will be a terribly messy election. But first, some humor. This is for you, gulag, wherever you are.

RFK Jr. should probably blame the brain worm for the bear episode.

Anyhoo — what I’m mostly seeing on social media is yay, Tim Walz, now let’s beat Trump. Most of the pundits are on board. But there are exceptions. Jonathan Chait is grumbling that Kamala Harris “doesn’t understand the assignment.” Tim Walz, a popular governor of bleeping Minnesota who has flipped formerly Republian districts, is too far Left, says Chait. He and Harris have to pivot to the middle immediately!

Um, no. And any political “pundit” who still thinks there’s a “middle” needs to retire.

A bunch of people at Politico explain why Harris chose Walz.

Tomorrow Kamala Harris is supposed to announce her choice of a vice president. All the smart people are saying probably Shapiro, maybe Kelly, maybe Walz. I’ve got my fingers crossed for Walz, but they are all solid choices. I’m hearing there’s a rally tomorrow in Philadelphia, which points to Shapiro, but we’ll see. And here’s an atta boy for J.B. Pritzker, who has been a fine governor for Illinois and deserves more attention than he gets. But Illinois is even less a battleground state than Minnesota.

I’m seeing a lot of articles like this one by Rex Huppke at USA Today, Has Harris finally broken Trump? He’s flailing, glitching and running scared. “Flailing” is a word that’s following Trump around. See also Edward Luce in the Financial Times, Trump Is Flailing. Google “Trump flail” and you’ll get a lot more. On top of that, he’s only making about one or two personal appearance a week, folks on teevee are saying. And when he does speak in public, it’s the same old, tired nonsense about race and women and immigrants and anybody he doesn’t like. Several reports say that the audience in his recent Georgia rally was thinning out, heading for the exists, even as he was speaking. I’ve read the same thing about other rallies.

Jim Geraghty at WaPo writes, Does Trump even want to win? This is a commentary on Trump’s Georgia rally, in which he took up a lot of time slamming Gov. Brian Kemp. I am no fan of Kemp, but he’s more popular in Georgia than Trump is, saith the polls.

But more likely, Saturday night was just the seemingly billionth example that at any given moment, Trump cannot prioritize anything, not even his own long-term interests, above his sense of grievance. Kemp and Raffensperger refused to help Trump game the 2020 election results, therefore they’re the enemy — regardless of how useful their support could be for 2024 in a state that could have a big influence on Trump’s fortunes.

Trump lacks the intellectual capacity to conceputalize a grand strategy and stick to it. He had a simple plan that was working against Joe Biden — emphasize Biden’s age and frailty. But now he’s the old man. He lacks the emotional strength to steady himself and respond effectively to a new Democratic opponent. He’s flailing.

In other news — Justice Thomas Failed to Reveal More Private Flights, Senator Says. Busted again.

I understand that Kamala Harris is now officially the Demcratic presidential nominee.

WaPo is reporting that in 2019 the Justice Department was investigating whether Trump was getting money under the table from the government of Egypt. See $10M cash withdrawal drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt (no paywall). The $10 million in cash was taken from an account at the National Bank of Egypt associated with the Egyptian intelligence service.

The discovery intensified a secret criminal investigation that had begun two years earlier with classified U.S. intelligence indicating that Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi sought to give Trump $10 million to boost his 2016 presidential campaign, a Washington Post investigation has found.

Since receiving the intelligence about Sisi, the Justice Department had been examining whether money moved from Cairo to Trump, potentially violating federal law that bans U.S. candidates from taking foreign funds. Investigators had also sought to learn if money from Sisi might have factored into Trump’s decision in the final days of his run for the White House to inject his campaign with $10 million of his own money.

Those questions, at least in the view of several investigators on the case, would never be answered,The Post found.

Within months of learning of the withdrawal, prosecutors and FBI agents were blocked by top Justice Department officials from obtaining bank records they believed might hold critical evidence, according to interviews with people familiar with the case as well as documents and contemporaneous notes of the investigation. The case ground to a halt by the fall of 2019 as Trump’s then-attorney general, William P. Barr, raised doubts about whether there was sufficient evidence to continue the probeof Trump.

Do read the whole thing. Also read emptywheel. The $10 million may or may not have gotten to Trump — we’ll probably never know — but the circumstantial case is pretty damn strong.

The NABJ Meltdown

Here’s more about Trump’s meltdown at the National Association of Black Journalists annual convention in Chicago on Wednesday. It began before Trump took to the stage. Axios reports:

Trump did not want to be fact-checked live and was refusing to go on stage, NABJ president Ken Lemon told Axios.

“[Trump’s team] said, ‘Well, can you not fact check? He’s not going to take the stage if you fact-check,'” Lemon said.
The intrigue: The Q&A with the GOP presidential nominee was delayed more than an hour before he eventually joined a panel of Black journalists, including ABC News correspondent Rachel Scott, Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner and Semafor reporter Kadia Goba.

At the time, President Trump blamed the delay on audio problems.
Lemon told Axios, “There were audio problems, but they were resolved very quickly.”
“The bigger problem was his threat not to take the stage when he had agreed to go on. He did not want to be fact-checked, but we could not let him on the stage without fact-checking,” Lemon said.
Behind the scenes: The stalemate was so prolonged that NABJ leaders were prepared to explain to the audience of nearly 2,000 people why Trump would not appear.

“I was prepared to go on stage to craft a statement, saying he decided not to go on stage because of fact-checking… we couldn’t compromise on that.
As Lemon was preparing that statement, Trump walked onto the stage.

Trump still blames the delay on technical issues. But, yeah, he walked on that stage already pissed.

Trump Is an Old Man

Josh Marshall just published this. He begins by pointing out that Trump has aged a lot since he first ran in 2026, and even since 2020.

This was hidden in a way so long as Biden was the nominee and it was hidden or perhaps rendered meaningless as long as Trump was ahead. If your candidate is old but he’s winning … well, whatever. If Joe Biden had spent the last year sitting on a five point lead the whole campaign, clearly, would have gone quite differently.

What’s not clear to me is whether Trump has the fight and fluidity left to battle from behind, to run a campaign as an underdog. This obviously assumes some key hypotheticals not yet in evidence. At the moment poll averages show Kamala Harris with a very small popular vote lead. That likely makes the electoral college as of this moment if not a tie per se than something like a jump ball. Of course, her momentum could dissipate as fast as it built up. Or she could continue on the same trajectory. My gut tells me we’re in a fundamentally changed race. But we don’t have enough evidence yet to operate beyond impressions and hunches.

My point in writing this is that we haven’t really seen candidate Trump much this year. 

He’s not saying we haven’t seen plenty of Trump. He’s saying that Trump has been coasting, just doing his old act for cameras, and not really campaigning, exactly. He’s spent more time playing golf than going out on the campaign trail. The switch to a younger opponent really has thrown him off. His widely panned speech at the RNC and his temper tantrum at the NABJ suggests he’s not adjusting well.

The Prisoner Release

Now we’ve learned that even as President Biden was wrestling with stepping down from his campaign, he was actively engaged in a 12-dimensional-chess multinational deal to get Americans out of Russian prisons. Wow.

Anyway, Trump is pissed. He’d bragged that he, and only he, could get those prisoners released because Putin likes him. When the deal was announced, Trump ridiculed it for being a bad deal, somehow. Do read Steve Benen at MSNBC about why Trump is basically just pissed that the deal was made without him. But never fear; J.D. Vance attempted to give Trump credit for the swap anyway.

Fred Kaplan at Slate speculates that Putin might have agreed to the deal now because he realizes Trump might lose.

However, like most world leaders, Putin has no doubt been reading the polls, and he may have concluded that Trump is not going to win, that Vice President Kamala Harris has a better chance of taking office, and that Harris is no less suspicious of Putin’s Russia than Biden is—that, like Biden, she views Russia as a threat to the world order and sees Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as an important ally very much worth defending.

Therefore, Putin might have reasoned, it’s better to take a deal now so it looks as if he’s acting without an eye to our election. This is particularly true if he’s interested in resuming negotiations or striking deals on other, more geopolitical issues—though there’s no evidence at the moment that he is.

This is just guessing on Kaplan’s part, but the timing does seem like a bit of a slap in the face to Trump.

Hoo, boy, did Trump step in it today. I believe this to be the entire Q and A at today’s  National Association of Black Journalists annual convention in Chicago. I haven’t been able to watch it all the way through.

It goes off the rails in the opening moments and remains ghastly. I assume Trump wanted to be seen standing up to “the Blacks” and putting them in their place. If he thought this performance might win him some Black votes he really is atomic crazy.

Here’s just a little bit of the dialogue.

Trump’s problem, per Politico —

‘MISUNDERESTIMATED’ ALL OVER AGAIN — One of the biggest complaints during the months of hand-wringing about Biden’s ineffectiveness was that he wasn’t really campaigning. He wasn’t driving a message or picking fights that gained any traction or breaking through with the public at all.

It may have made DONALD TRUMP complacent. Suddenly faced with a candidate who is adept at the basics, Trump appears knocked back on his heels and uncertain. VP KAMALA HARRIS is extending her streak looking nimble and sure-footed in all of the ways that her processor came up short.

Just over a month ago in Atlanta, Biden sputtered for 90 minutes in a studio, triggering the end of his campaign. Last night, Harris returned to the city in a show of force, hosting 2024’s largest Democratic rally, one that is garnering Obama-like coverage in the press today.

The NYT noted that her event “dwarfed Mr. Biden’s 2024 campaign events in both scale and enthusiasm, rivaling the types of crowds Mr. Trump regularly draws for his rallies in similar spaces.” (We’ll know for sure on Saturday when Trump hosts a rally at the same arena.)

There has been a lot of commentary about how absolutely flat-footed the Trump campaign has been since Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee. It’s not like they didn’t know this might have happened. It’s all anybody talked about since the debate on June 27. Yet the Trump campaign clearly was not prepared.

David Kurtz wrote yesterday at TPM,

The Trump campaign had at least a month of forewarning that President Biden ending his re-election bid was a plausible scenario, and they let every reporter within earshot know that if that happened they were ready. It did, and they weren’t.

GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance fessed up to donors in Minnesota over the weekend that Kamala Harris has thrown the Trump campaign for a loop:

All of us were hit with a little bit of a political sucker punch. The bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden, because whatever we might have to say, Kamala is a lot younger. And Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did.

A sucker punch is a cheap shot, delivered without warning to an unsuspecting victim. It’s fitting that Vance would couch it in terms of victimization, the perpetual posture of MAGA adherents. Their constant whining about fairness grew out of conservatives’ own decades-long misinterpretation of special interests on the left as animated by “grievance” politics. The result was a transformation of older white voters into a special interest group of their own, with a parallel set of grievances that mirrored what they had railed against for so long. That’s how you get canards like reverse discrimination against whites.

Back in the real world, Harris’ ascension to the nomination was not without warning or time to prep. The failure of the Trump campaign to do so effectively remains inexplicable and a bit mystifying. They seemed wedded to what they thought was a winning campaign strategy against Biden. They may have been right about that; we’ll never know.

At the very least, I think it’s safe to say the Trump campaign is not staffed by the sharpest tacks in the box. And that goes up to the head tack. Nimble thinkers they are not. One wonders how they expect to lead a nation, where they might face unforeseen disasters at any time. But they don’t think about that, obviously.

Trump and his people have fallen back on racist and sexist insults. Here’s the latest —

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trumpsuggested thatVice President Harris wouldn’t be able to stand up to world leaders because of her appearance, adding that he didn’t want to spell it out but viewers would know what he meant.

“She’ll be like a play toy,” Trump — who has a history of using sexist attacks and stereotypes in campaigns against women — said in a Fox News interview with Laura Ingraham, a portion of which aired on Tuesday night. “They look at her and they say, ‘We can’t believe we got so lucky.’ They’re going to walk all over her.”

Trump then turned to look directly at the camera and added: “And I don’t want to say as to why. But a lot of people understand it.”

Seriously? Sorry I’m out of WaPo gift articles for the month, but that’s the gist of it.

Trump has also been claiming that Harris is antisemitic. Harris’s husband is a Jew. Steve Benen tells us how Trump rationalizes this —

During a speech last week, for example, the GOP nominee falsely said his likely Democratic rival is “totally against the Jewish people” — a curious claim about someone who’s married to a Jewish person — and as the Associated Press reported, Trump went even further yesterday.

Former President Donald Trump in an interview on Tuesday claimed Vice President Kamala Harris, who is married to a Jewish man, “doesn’t like Jewish people” and seemed to agree with a radio host who called second gentleman Doug Emhoff “a crappy Jew.”

The former president seemed quite worked up on the issue, ranting that Harris dislikes both Israel and Jews — it’s something “everybody knows,” Trump said, reality notwithstanding — while adding that Jewish voters are “fools“ to vote Democratic.

The radio host, Sid Rosenberg, proceeded to say that Harris’ Jewish husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, is “a crappy Jew” and “a horrible Jew.”

And while Trump didn’t use those words himself, as an audio clip makes clear, he seemed to agree with the condemnations.

Only an actual antisemite would be taken in by this argument, IMO. Someone might want to have a word with Sid Rosenberg.

IMO Trump’s problem is that he can’t run on policy proposals — one, he’s not that interested in policy that doesn’t benefit him; and two, he’d rather people didn’t know what his patrons are planning to do in his name. So negative campaigning, smearing his opponent, is all he’s got. That worked against Joe Biden. I don’t see it working against Kamala Harris.

I’d like to point out that, contrary to some Dem party mythology, Trump actually did run on policy in 2016. He promised better health care, a return of manufacturng jobs, and tough measures against the opioid epidemic, among other things. Oh, and he was going to build a wall along the southern border. He accomplished absolutely none of that. He didn’t even make a serious effort to address most of that, except for the wall. He did build about 450 miles of the wall along the 1,954-mile border. I understand parts of the wall are damaged, and it’s unclear what good it’s done given the expense and fuss of putting it up. But it’s one of the few things he followed through on. I’m surprised he isn’t promising to finish it (if he did, I missed it). My point, though, is that he can’t run the same campaign he ran in 2016, when his foil was Mrs. Neoliberal Status Quo Establishment.

Big events tend to resonate with the myths deeply buried in human psyches from ancient times. U.S. presidential elections sometimes take on vibes from one of our great myths, the eternal struggle between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. This may not always be true. But when it is true, the candidate who most energetically channels Bugs Bunny is going to win. Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, in different ways, were clearly the Bugs Bunny candidates against Elmer Fudds — George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. Although he probably really didn’t win, I’d have to say that George W. Bush was more Bugs Bunny than earnest Al Gore, alas. And maybe Hillary Clinton’s real problem was that she didn’t have it in her to be Bugs Bunny.

Donald Trump lacks the self-awareness and basic cool to ever be Bugs Bunny. On a good day, Joe Biden’s “Dark Brandon” persona was much closer. But the spirit of Bugs abandoned Joe when he most needed it. And Donald, with his weird riffs on sharks and Hannibal Lechter, might have seemed kind of Bugs Bunny-ish to his followers, although a true Bugs is never a hater or a bully. It seems to me that what’s happening now is that Kamala Harris has embodied the Bugs Bunny role, and Trump is revealed as an exceptionally ugly Elmer Fudd. If she can keep this up, she’ll win.