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:

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.

(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.

Trump is calling into Fox, lying, saying Harris is “going to give a tax increase of 4 to 5 times what people and companies are paying right now,” and he seems to be accidentally pressing buttons on his phone while he speaks pic.twitter.com/5Wb4qSZ3C5

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) August 23, 2024

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

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

Consider this an open thread to comment on whatever. I am hoping to not fall asleep before the acceptance speech.

I’m reading that the DNC convention is getter much higher ratings than the RNC did. That’s a good sign. Meanwhile, Trump is bounding around the country trying to get attention. After his extremely weird “law and order” even in Howell, Michigan (see last post), he was supposed to sit for an interview with the Detroit News. But he bailed when reporters started asking tough questions. This is from The New Republic:

As Donald Trump returned to Michigan to speak about crime, he deliberately ignored the truth: Crime is down. 

Standing under a banner that read “Make America Safe Again” on Tuesday, Trump spoke about law and order and a so-called “Kamala crime wave” occurring at levels “nobody has ever seen before.” But when journalists tried to ask him about that claim, he got scared.

According to The Detroit News, the Trump team had originally agreed to sit down for an interview with their newspaper Tuesday. However, after reporters pushed the former president about spreading lies about Michigan’s crime data, “a campaign aide said the presidential candidate no longer had time for an interview after the speech.”

Data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn’t show any crime wave phenomenon. In the two years since the former president left office, violent crime has continued to drop and return to pre-pandemic levels.

Poor baby. Today he was at the southern border doing something. I’m sure Fox News covered it.

More later.

I didn’t watch any of the RNC Convention, so I can’t personally do a compare and contrast. But I snagged a couple of Associated Press photos, one of the RNC and one of the DNC. I won’t have to tell you which is which.

So which group looks like they’re winning?

I’ve been struck by how genuinely multiracial the Democratic Party has become. The  nonwhites at the RNC clearly were there for display purposes only.

My only problem with the DNC convention is that I’m old and in the eastern time zone. I just can’t stay awake for anything that happens after 10 pm EST or so. Last night I saw Michelle Obama being introduced, and the next thing I remember somebody — I think it was Jen Psaki — was giving a roundup of the night’s events. I slept through the Obama speeches, in other words. I’m making a point of finding the videos and watching them later today.

The roll call was a hoot, although a tad overstimulating for me. And that business with holding a simultaneous big rally in Milwaukee was inspired. The DNC has come a long way from the 2004 DNC Convention when the balloons didn’t drop. 

MSNBC is mostly just showing the convention with very little commentary, I notice. Their lineup is on hand but might as well have stayed home. Someone on social media was saying PBS was cutting a lot of stuff out.

Meanwhile, here’s just a little snip of Trump’s inspired “counterprogramming” event from Howell, Michigan, last night.

“You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it” Trump says about seeing people “walk across the street to get a loaf of bread and get shot, you get mugged, you get raped.” pic.twitter.com/j8L1IWWMci

— Sarah Burris ? (@SarahBurris) August 20, 2024

So has anyone run across the street for bread and milk lately? I hope you made it back okay. (And whose bright idea was this, I wonder?)

The much-dreaded protests have fizzled. The organizers were promsing 50,000 or more. Police estimated 3,500 protesters on Monday. Dana Milbank’s column on the protesters is worth reading. From his descriptiton those who did show up were what I’ve called the “vocational protesters” who show up at any leftie demonstration with giant puppets and megaphones to make spectacles of themselves. And, as usual, what few people were there quickly splintered into factions marhing off in different directions. Jill Stein was among them. She seems to be turning into the new Lyndon LaRouche.

So far, so good.

I am watching the DNC convention; so far, so good. I may not have time to post tomorrow, but if you have any thoughts about the Big Whoop-Dee-Doo in Chicago, please feel free to comment.

So the DNC Convention begins tomorrow. I am trusting them to put on a good show to give Harris-Walz a big bump.

There will be protests. Gov. Pritzker has promised the convention will not be a replay of 1968. The protesters will have their voices heard, he said, and police will respect that as long as the protests are peaceful. So good luck, Chicago. Gov. Pritzker is a sensible guy, and I trust he will use good judgment. We can’t always know what police will do, though.

I’m just now catching up on yesterday’s Trump rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, which Trump called “North Carolina.” I found a pretty good highlight video. It does show empty seats in the arena, which has a seating capacity of just over 8,000 (I looked it up). I’m not going to hazard a guess as to how many people were there, but it was definitely less than 8,000. And according to many news stories, people were leaving while Trump was still talking (and talking, and talking).

See also some short highlight clips in this Rolling Stone article.

In the usual stew of nonsense one bit stood out for me. This is from the Guardian:

Trump confused some in the audience with what appeared to be a claim that if Harris could become the candidate without a primary election, then so should he because he is so popular among Republicans.

“I said, so why are we having an election? They didn’t have an election. Why are we having an election?” he said.

Trump’s scrambled brain simply can’t make bits of conceptual knowledge say in their proper lanes. Is he confusing the primaries with the general? Has he forgotten that the Republican primaries, which he won, are over? What’s going on there?

There will be another Trump event on Tuesday. Josh Marshall writes,

Trump just announced a “crime and safety” rally for next Tuesday in Howell, Michigan, a town that has been heavily associated with the KKK for decades. Indeed, just late last month White Supremacists marched in the town chanting “We love Hitler. We love Trump.” Some but not all of the reputation comes from the fact that a long time Grand Drago of the Michigan Klan lived there and his farm was a sort of home base for the Klan. (I just found out this afternoon that a good bit of the 1991 documentary Blood in the Face – great doc, by the way – was shot there.)

I’m not sure this is going to be a rally, exactly. He’s supposed to speak at the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office, according to the Detroit Free Press. It could get weird. This event, whatever it is, is part of a “swing-state blitz” meant to draw attention away from the DNC convention. But attention doesn’t seem to be doing Trump much good.

The Zeitgeist has turned on Trump. In less than four weeks he has gone from being the near-inevitable winner to a captal-L Loser. The political press is awash in stories about how the Trump campaign keeps trying to reset, but Trump isn’t cooperating. At this point, the people running Trump’s campaign and Trump himself are barely on the same team. They’re almost canceling each other out.

And I had not remembered this, but before the 2020 general elections lots of headlines were accusing Trump of flailing and failing to reset. Just like now. He appears to have a long-established pattern of falling apart under pressure.

Far-right influencers like Laura Loomer and Nick Fuentes have begun to attack the campaign — although not Trump himself — for being lame and not far enough Right.

The state of the Trump campaign:

I take it the big reveal in yesterday’s “press conference” in New Jersey was that Trump hasn’t been inside a grocery store in years, if ever.

here is trump finally noticing the visual aids he is suppose to be using to stick to his script: “I haven’t seen cheerios in a long time” pic.twitter.com/5DRyeeddB7

— Nicole LaFond (@Nicole_Lafond) August 15, 2024

At Bedminster he also brilliantly said that if Kamala Harris is president, “You’re all going to be thrown into a communist system … You’re going to be thrown into a system where everybody gets health care.”

See also “Trump blends falsehoods and exaggerations at rambling NJ press conference” from the Associated Press. At the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin joins the growing chorus of media critics asking why Trump’s mental decline isn’t being reported.

Where does this leave Republicans? The MAGA party is caught in a gloom-and-doom loop, forced to run away from the radical Project 2025 plan, defend an increasingly irrational candidate and make excuses for its unlikable, inept nominee for vice president. One wonders when we will hear and see reports about “Republican panic!” or “Could Republicans dump Trump?” Let’s get real: That sort of coverage is reserved for Democrats. Alas, whatever horserace contest the media continues to present bears little resemblance to the jaw-dropping reality before our eyes.

The Trump campaign has another problem that I’ve read about here and there. See Bill Scher at Washington Monthly, who tells us Trump’s ground operation is failing to launch.

You may recall that two months ago for the Washington Monthly, I flagged that Donald’s Trump’s Get-Out-The-Vote Plan is Bonkers, as it relies heavily on outside groups, especially the far-right Turning Point network, despite its lack of campaign experience and dubious finances.

Furthermore, Trump forced out the former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel at the urging of Turning Point’s leader Charlie Kirk to execute the plan. (As I said before, this looks like a scandal and Republicans should be outraged.)

And in this newsletter two weeks ago, I noted that Trump’s “you won’t have to vote anymore” riff, delivered at a Turning Point conference, was part of that GOTV plan—pressing irregular right-wing voters to show up this year.

Recent reporting from the Washington Post and The New York Times about Trump’s ground game has reinforced my view. …

… Many Republicans are not only worried about Trump’s misguided messaging, but also about his mismanaged turnout operation. On August 3, the Washington Post reported, “With fewer than 100 days before the election, local GOP officials in battleground states have raised alarms about the scant presence of Trump campaign field staff.”

“The Trump campaign’s shrunken in-house operation resulted from its takeover of the Republican National Committee in March,” noted the Post. The “RNC had been planning an extensive field program,” but an anonymous source told the Post that the detailed plans were “totally discarded” following the takeover.

As I understand it, Trump figured he could save money on the ground operation. Gotta pay all those lawyers, you know. Do read the whole article; lots of juicy bits. Elon Musk even gets involved. Meanwhile, the Harris campaign is recruiting lots of volunteers to get out the vote.

On the Harris side there is some more good news:

An aggregate of polls modelled by the Washington Post shows that the US vice-president has become newly competitive in four southern Sun belt states that were previously leaning heavily towards Donald Trump, the Republican nominee and former president.

If the trend holds, it means Harris could eke out an electoral college victory either by winning those states – Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina – or, alternatively, by capturing three swing states in the midwestern Rust belt, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Trump, by contrast, would need to capture both groups of states to earn the 270 electoral college votes necessary to secure victory, according to the model.

So, while the race is still close, things definitely are looking up.

I also want to call your attention to a piece in the New York Times by Jamelle Bouie, Trump Has Opened the Pathway to Reform. The headline doesn’t exactly match the article. Bouie is reflecting on whether the Republican Party can be rehabilitated after Trump. In brief, Bouie writes that the GOP’s problem is that it has been able to stay in power and win elections without bothering to craft anything resembling a plan for governance that appeals to the majority of voters. Indeed, the only way to get ahead in today’s GOP is to become more and more crazy extreme Right.  And even after Trump is gone they will have no incentive to change.

The United States will always have a conservative party, but American democracy needs that party to be committed to the maintenance of our democratic institutions. The only way to plot a path from here to there is to forcibly change the incentives within the Republican Party, which is to say, the only way to break the fever is to change the rules of the game. A more democratic American democracy — where majorities elect and majorities rule — would force the Republican Party to try, once again, to compete for national majorities.

Worth reading. No paywall.

I just saw this. You will be amused.

beyond parody pic.twitter.com/nwlvRdU2Km

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 13, 2024

Is this even legal? I suppose it is. Weird, though.

Here’s something I saw yesterday. It’s from the Wall Street Journal, mind you.

You can read it at msn.com here. 

The rightie author is admitting that 2016 was a fluke. “Why did he win in 2016? Because he was new and up against the most tediously familiar and disliked politician in America. Even then, he only squeaked past Hillary Clinton by a total of fewer than 90,000 votes in the three decisive states.” Because of Trump Republicans lost key elections in 2018, 2020 (except for taking back the House, barely) and 2022. And now 2024 is starting to look iffy.

Trump is not being the candidate Republicans need right now. Some top Republicans have begged him to stop with the ad hominem attacks and name calling and shift to discussing policy. He’s also been told to stop whining. The question is, can Trump discuss policy without name calling and whining? Can he say anything about the econmy that (a) makes cognitive sense and (b) wouldn’t make it worse?

Today Trump is in North Carolina and is supposed to deliver “remarks” on the economy. We’ll see what he says. ABC News:

The economy has been one of the Trump campaign’s central election issues this cycle — the former president often spending a considerable amount of time discussing inflation, gas prices and the job market. …

… On the campaign trail, Trump, even as he rails against the economy under the Biden administration, has announced sparse details on specific economic policy proposals for his possible second administration, often offering his signature “Trump tax cuts,” “Trump tariffs” and “drill, baby, drill” — a boost for the oil and gas industry — as solutions to most economic problems.

Judd Legum writes that Trump has become obsessed with conspiracy theories promoted by Laura Loomer.  Loomer is so nuts she was banned from the 2019 CPAC convention. But she’s had Trump’s ear for years, apparently. And now she’s the one feeding him stories about Kamala Harris’s allegedly “turning Black” after never having been Black previously. She’s also a source of the claim that Harris uses AI to inflate crowd sizes. And that’s what he wants to talk about.

Trump is holding a rally tonight in Asheville, NC. The city of Asheville wouldn’t let him hold his rally until he’d paid $82,247.60 up front. They aren’t fools, I take it. He still owes various municipalities $850,000 for rallies for the 2020 campaign. Also note:

The Trump campaign booked the smaller of two venues at the same complex in downtown Asheville for Wednesday’s rally. The Thomas Wolfe Auditorium has a capacity of just 2,431 people, while a larger arena next door that is not hosting Trump has a capacity of 7,200.

I personally don’t think he has it in him to deliver a talk on the economy or anything else that isn’t going to get him into further trouble. He didn’t know what he was talking about in 2016, either, but at the time he could do a better job of faking it. Now it seems every time he makes a public appearance he just digs himself a deeper hole. He has always been a liar, but his lies are increasingly detached from reality. And this may soon be the narrative adopted by most of the news media. We’ll see.

Regarding Hannibal Lecter, see this piece in the Washington Post. Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer, says that Trump is the “crypt keeper for the 1980s,” which was “the high point of his life until he became president.” If you pay attention you notice that Trump’s style and cultural references are nearly all from the 1980s,

“Every time he opens the door, people spill out from the 1980s, whether it’s Roger Stone or Rudy Giuliani, fashion from the ’80s spills out, whether it’s his monochrome tie or suits that invariably are made in two or three different colors … his office decor is still in the 1980s,” he [Tim O’Brien] said. “None of his tastes have been updated in decades.”

The novel The Silence of the Lambs was published in 1987.

The Lecter mentions are a way for Trump to continue “upping the ante” from his previous descriptions of migrants, said Gwenda Blair, another Trump biographer. It’s “not just criminals, rapists, which Trump has already used starting in 2015 … but let’s get cannibal in the mix.”

It’s kind of rich for Trump to be warning people about criminals and rapists, anyway, isn’t it? So we do need to up the ante to cannibals. That’s one thing I can’t say Trump is guilty of himself.

But the point is that Trump is not a flexible person. He doesn’t do pivots. Nor is he rational. He operates out of his id, which is a complicated and dark place. His instincts as a promoter and con man often serve him well, until they don’t.  But he is what he is. Other Republicans may be begging him to update his act, and part of him may even understand they have a point, but I don’t think he’s capable of it.

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.