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.

Last night Rachel Maddow pointed out other alarming things Trump has been saying about voting lately. In fact, he’s already got enough of his own people in place to potentially steal the November election.

And before you pooh-pooh this, remember I’m the one who was predicting Trump was planning to steal the 2020 election way before the election, and I came pretty close to he was planning to do it.

WaPo is now admitting that Trump is facing a backlash for his “you won’t have to vote again” remarks. (I’m out of free WaPo links for the month, but here’s the story on MSN.) Still, WaPo gives itself some wiggle room. It says that Democrats “interpreted” the remarks as a threat to democracy, not that the remarks were a threat to democracy. Some politics expert who was quoted called the remarks “ambiguous.” As in,  “Trump frequently makes these kinds of deliberately ambiguous statements that can be interpreted in multiple ways.”

Let’s review:

Trump: You have to get out and vote. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four years, it will be fixed, it will be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore.. In four years, you won’t have to vote again. pic.twitter.com/DBGcBr3Wht

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 27, 2024

In conclusion, “In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.” That’s right off the video. There’s nothing ambiguous about that. If we take his words literally, he’s clearly saying they’ll “fix” the system so that there will be no more elections.

It’s entirely possible that isn’t what Trump meant, but if that was the case it wasn’t a matter of Trump being “ambiguous” but of Trump “mis-speaking.”

A few days ago Dan Froomkin wrote in Press Watch that media tend to cover Trump as if he is not responsible for what he says.

Reporters who know Donald Trump know that he will respond to Kamala Harris’s candidacy with racist and sexist attacks on her as a woman of color.

In fact, he’s already started.

But the way two New York Times journalists wrote about it on Tuesday, it was as if Trump has no agency –  no responsibility for his own behavior.

The article cast Trump’s racist and misogynistic response to being challenged by a woman of color as inevitable and unpreventable – something like the weather or a natural disaster — rather than as a deliberate choice on his part.

Written by the Times’s two most ardent Trump-whisperers, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, the article was headlined: “Trump’s New Rival May Bring Out His Harshest Instincts.”

Note the passive construction – and the use of the word “instincts,” as if Trump has no say in the matter: It’s just Trump being Trump.

That’s letting him off the hook. The headline should have said something like: “Trump Already Engaging in Repugnant Attacks on New Rival”.

There were some comments to the last post saying that news media favor Trump because Trump content bumps ratings/readership, but that actually hasn’t been true for some time. It may still be true for Fox and OAN, but not for “mainstream” media. Most people are tired of his act. Probably even some people who plan to vote for him aren’t that keen on watching him so much. I understand attendance at his rallies is way down, too. And the favoritism isn’t limited to Trump but extended broadly to the Right.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, is blaming the culture wars. Rather than calling out right-wing attacks on Harris as racism, pure and simple, reporter Emmanuel Felton on Monday termed them “racial attacks” and situated them as part of “the broader culture war over corporate diversity and affirmative action programs.”

For Felton, the story is not that the right wing is responding to Harris with grotesque racism, it’s that “America’s fraught racial politics are set to, once again, take center stage.”

The headline on that story was another passive horror, almost putting the onus on Harris rather than on the perpetrators: “Harris’s campaign will have to contend with DEI, culture war attacks”.

I personally think this comes back to the media’s sensitivity to being called “biased.” If you tell the straight-up, unvarnished truth it makes the Right look bad, and then they scream about media bias. So whatever the Right is doing has to be sugar-coated somehow, to appease the gods of both-siderism. And we don’t know how much owners like Jeff Bezos, who owns WaPo, get involved in these news decisions.

But, yeah, at least there’s a backlash. The remarks are getting covered, and I expect Democrats to keep refreshing our memory about them.

As far as the Right is concerned, Trump didn’t say what he said. Here’s the official excuse from the Trump campaign, from the WaPo story linked above —

 Asked to clarify what Trump meant, Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the campaign, said in a statement on Saturday that the former president “was talking about uniting this country and bringing prosperity to every American, as opposed to the divisive political environment that has sowed so much division and even resulted in an assassination attempt.”

That’s not even in the ball park of what he said. It’s not even in the neighborhood of the ball park. Or the same city, even.

For another reaction from the Right, see Jazz Shaw at Hot Air.

The response was as predictable as it was dishonest and flatly incorrect. Kamala Harris’ campaign immediately characterized the speech as “a vow to end democracy.” The Atlantic said that Trump was, “telegraphing his authoritarian intentions in plain sight.” The New York Times, clearly unable to restrain themselves, declared that Trump is “planning to destroy our democracy” and  he’s going to “fix himself up as dictator.” Another liberal outlet determined that Trump had “said the quiet part out loud.”

Of course, none of that was what Trump actually said and they’re all smart enough to know it.

Of course, it is what Trump actually said, and Jazz Shaw is too ideologically blinkered to admit it. And the quotes he attributed to the New York Times actually did not appear in the New York Times article he linked. He trusts that Hot Air readers won’t bother to check, I guess.

Here’s a story, and a story about a story. Last night in a speech at the Turning Point USA Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach, Trump said this (as reported in The Hill):

Former President Trump at a Friday event hosted by the conservative Christian organization Turning Point Action urged Christians to vote, saying they wouldn’t have to do it again if they got out there in November and elected him because “everything” would be “fixed.”

“Christians, get out and vote, just this time,” Trump exclaimed to a cheering crowd in West Palm Beach, Fla.

“You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians” he added.

“I love you Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you, get out, you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote,” Trump said.

That sounds a tad sinister to me. And this story is viral all over social media. Here’s the headline at Rolling Stone:

Here’s the Rolling Stone story:

After repeating his usual unfounded claims about mail-in voting, Trump launched into an appeal directed at Christian voters. “Christians, get out and vote!” yelled Trump. “Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years. You know what? It’ll be fixed! It’ll be fine! You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you, Christians!” He added, “You gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”

And here’s the video:

Trump: You have to get out and vote. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four years, it will be fixed, it will be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore.. In four years, you won’t have to vote again. pic.twitter.com/DBGcBr3Wht

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 27, 2024

So he said this; there isn’t any question. And he appears to be saying that if he’s elected again he’ll “fix” things to establish some kind of permanent dynasty. Now, I question if he actually knows what he’s saying half the time. But there aren’t a whole lot of ways to interpret this that aren’t really, really threatening.

This is the sort of remark that ought to be picked up and used against him, the way Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” and Barack Obama’s “cling to guns or religion” were used against them. And the Democrats had better start driving this.

At least the New York Times picked this up, although I couldn’t find it on their home page,

The Washington Post, however, brushed off the “no more voting” threat with a brief mention in the third paragraph. Instead, WaPo emphasized Trump’s criticisms of Kamala Harris (she’s a “bum,” apparently). Many of the comments attached to the story complained.

Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

When I first heard about this I assumed somebody was paraphrasing, and saying that Trump was implying to his Christian supporters (Christian in this context might as well be a synonym for neo-fascist) that they wouldn’t have to vote again if they just vote for him this one time.

But of course not: he’s saying this, very literally — although perhaps not “seriously,” because if he were serious it seems the fact that one of the two major party candidates for president is promising his supporters he’s going to install a dictatorship would get some major media coverage. (Oddly, he also appears to say “I’m not Christian” in the midst of his rant).

Yes, “if he were serious it seems the fact that one of the two major party candidates for president is promising his supporters he’s going to install a dictatorship would get some major media coverage.” You’d think. The Democrats need to raise major stink about this. Again, it’s possible Trump didn’t fully understand what he was saying. I question if he knows what planet he’s on half the time. But, then, if he’s babbling nonsense in his speeches (which he is), why isn’t that the story? 

Last month Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic,

Perhaps the greatest trick Donald Trump ever pulled was convincing millions of people—and the American media—to treat his lapses into fantasies and gibberish as a normal, meaningful form of oratory. But Trump is not a normal person, and his speeches are not normal political events.

For too long, Trump has gotten away with pretending that his emotional issues are just part of some offbeat New York charm or an expression of his enthusiasm for public performance. But Trump is obviously unfit—and something is profoundly wrong with a political environment in which he can now say almost anything, no matter how weird, and his comments will get a couple of days of coverage and then a shrug, as if to say: Another day, another Trump rant about sharks.

We all need to raise a major stink with the major news media. Enough.

Stuff I learned over the past few hours:

The shrapnel theory is back.

The FBI has “some question” about whether Trump was struck by a bullet or by shrapnel, says FBI Director Christopher Wray. This is from ABC News:

“With respect to former President Trump, there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear,” Wray said in response to a question from Chairman Jim Jordan asking whether the FBI has accounted for all bullets fired by the shooter. “It’s conceivable, although as I sit here right now, I don’t know whether that bullet, in addition to causing the grazing, could have also landed somewhere else. But I believe we’ve accounted for all the shots in the cartridges.”

I don’t know if a doctor who might have examined the fresh wound would have been able to tell if it had been caused by a bullet or shrapnel, but this is possibly another reason why Trump won’t release the medical reports. And it looks like the FBI hasn’t seen them, either.

I also notice that he wasn’t wearing the stupid bandage or whatever it was at a rally yesterday, and his ear looks completely normal.

It’s way past time for media to start hounding him about releasing medical information, and not just about the ear. And, indeed, Marcy Wheeler says Trump is asking to be hounded.

Trump has posted on the social media site he has propped up by influence laundering, insisting he was hit by a bullet (though mentioning only glass as an alternative), and then making a claim about his hospital diagnosis.

If Trump is going to make claims about what the hospital report says, then by all means he can ask them to release his records, including the CT scan results, and give a press conference.

Perhaps now — almost two weeks after the attack — journalists will start asking him for those records?

J.D. Vance  is weird.

“Weird” is the adjective I keep seeing attached to the name “J.D. Vance.” This is true even if you don’t believe he has a thing for sofas. See also J.D. Vance didn’t have sex with a couch. But he’s still extremely weird. at Vox. Also, J.D. Vance’s Sad, Strange Politics of Family at the New Yorker.

And it’s looking like J.D. Vance may be the new Sarah Palin, as in a drag on the ticket. Among other things, Vance is a radical anti-abortionist.  If Trump thought his campaign could get away with avoiding the “A” issue, that ain’t gonna happen with Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket. Vance also thinks that adoptive parents are not real parents, and only those who have directly passed on their DNA to their own offspring have a legitimate stake in the future of the country. And in Vance World, the primary function of women is to have children.

Further, the guy is light in the credentials department. The Right keeps calling Kamala a “DEI hire” in spite of her impressive resume. Vance was in the Marines, he wrote a book, he worked for some investment firm for a while, he has been a Senator for two years. Neither he nor Trump are qualified to be president, IMO, even though Trump already held the job for four years. He didn’t actually do the job when he had it.

And so, headlines about Republican “buyer’s remorse” about Vance are blossoming like flowers in the spring. I’m also starting to see headlines asking if Vance will be replaced on the ticket. If — I hope when — Trump starts falling further behind Harris in the polls, I wouldn’t be surprised if Vance is bounced.

Don Jr tanking his dad’s campaign with one of the worst veep choices of all time is delicious pic.twitter.com/SwHhkcfR8J

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 25, 2024

Trump is afraid to debate Kamala Harris.

This isn’t really a surprise, except that it shows that he’s still cognizant enough to recognize she’d clean his clock.

“Given the continued political chaos surrounding Crooked Joe Biden and the Democrat Party, general election debate details cannot be finalized until Democrats formally decide on their nominee,” Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung said in a statement.

Cheung referenced former president Barack Obama, who has yet to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, and claimed that there “is a strong sense” in the Democrat Party that Harris “cannot beat President Trump, and they are still holding out for someone ‘better.’”

Barack and Michelle Obama have since endorsed Kamala Harris. Next excuse? The second debate was scheduled by September 10, btw, way past the time the Dem ticket will be formalized.

There’s more evidence Bill Barr is a snake.

Yesterday an Inspector General report was released that said while he was Attorney General, Bill Barr used his office to help the Trump campaign claim voter fraud. Josh KOvensky at TPM:

Senior Trump DOJ officials issued multiple statements weeks before the 2020 election suggesting anti-Trump election fraud in a critical swing state, knowing all the while that no crime had likely been committed and that the main suspect faced a severe mental disability, a DOJ Inspector General report found.

You may recall the widely covered story of nine ballots cast by overseas military voters found in the garbage in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. On its face, the initial reporting seemed to affirm the most intense, right-wing fever dreams of widespread voter fraud.

Then-Attorney General Bill Barr directed DOJ officials to take the virtually unheard of step of releasing details about the investigation – including that several of the ballots contained votes for Trump – even though the case “would likely not be criminally charged,” the report found. …

… Per the report, Barr pumped Trump up with the juiciest details from the Luzerne County incident on Sept. 23, 2020. Several ballots had been found in the garbage, Barr told the President. They were military and, in a remark that was like waving red before a bull, they were pro-Trump. That same day, Trump refused to commit to the transfer of power. The next day, Trump went on a radio station and used the details Barr provided him about the investigation to rile up the public and reinforce Barr’s incorrect conclusions: mail-in ballots were a “horror show,” Trump said, and the DOJ would investigate.

There’s more evidence Trump is a cartoon.

At a rally yesterday Trump seriously suggested the U.S. military should be run by NASCAR drivers and football coaches.

I see that Kamala Harris now has enough pledged delegates to secure the Democratic nomination. And my impression is that Democratic voters are downright giddy with relief. I know I feel a lot better. I was able to watch MSNBC last night with no fear it would be too depressing.

I did not know, until I heard Lawrence O’Donnell say it last night, that only Kamala Harris is in a position to take over the Biden campaign’s war chest. Probably. If someone else were to be nominated, Biden would have had to donate “his” campaign money to a PAC for that candidate or something. Most campaign finance experts think that it should be fine for Harris to just resume the Biden-Harris campaign as the Harris-? campaign, and if anybody files a complaint with the FEC there’s no way the FEC is going to deal with it before the election. There also seems to be no real legal issue with Kamala Harris replacing Joe Biden as the presumptive nominee, no matter how many Republicans line up to say otherwise.

Do see Josh Marshall, The Curious Lure of Writerly Anti-Politics, about the naysayers who even yesterday were still talking about a slower process and a brokered convention. There were concerns the voters would feel party elites were crowning Harris without giving voters a say. Democratic voters responded by donating $100 million to the Harris campaign in the first 24 hours after Biden’s withdrawal announcement. I believe there is a genuine groundswell of support for Kamala Harris, and the elites need to fall in line. Voters realize there is no time to waste.

There is, of course, a certain amount of hand-wringing over a woman nominee. Hillary lost the Electoral College, after all. The difference between Clinton losing but Biden winning is that Biden got a bigger proportion of the male vote, some are saying. But  while I certainly acknowledge that misogyny was big a factor in 2016, I also think that Clinton lost a lot of voters in the Rust Belt because she was Hillary Clinton. This is not something a lot of people in the Democratic Party are willing to acknowledge even today. She and her husband are not exactly famous for being supportive of Unions or for keeping manufacturing jobs in the U.S. Trump narrowly won the Electoral College in 2016 in part because a lot of voters in Rust Belt precincts thought he was listening to them and Clinton wasn’t. And she wasn’t. Clinton did get a lot of Union endorsements, but the rank-and-file had nothing to say about that and preferred Trump.

I don’t think so many prefer Trump this year, however. Probably some do, but a lot of them must realize now that Trump isn’t the friend of labor they thought he would be in 2016. The Rust Belt vote was a lot bluer in 2020 than it was in 2016, and I think Joe Biden worked to persuade union members he was listening to them.

So while I do not doubt there will be bumps we don’t anticipate, I am feeling fairly optimistic about the next few months.

Thanks everybody for chipping in to my fundraiser. I have now paid off all my medical bills and will not ask for any more money, although the fundraiser links will be open for a few more days. And I’m saving up for some furniture. I moved into my apartment a year ago with a bed, a desk, and a bookcase. I’ve added a cardtable and chairs and a couple of standing cabinets, and I have some more bookcases my son is going to put together for me in a couple of days. I think next I’ll go for a sofa. Eventually.

Some news day yesterday, huh? And I had to pick yesterday to meet my kids in the city for dinner and a movie. I was on the train to Grand Central when I heard someone say Biden had dropped out, so I checked my phone, and lo, it was true. And my heart breaks for President Joe Biden, because he didn’t deserve the way his own party has been treating him. But I also think this may be for the best.

So on the train back I checked my phone again and saw all manner of Very Serious People in media calling for an open convention, saying it would be good for the Democratic Party. “Vice President Harris may be the most likely replacement, but a contested convention is good for everyone,” opined the Washington Post editorial board. As of this morning, this Very Serious Opinion had almost 5,000 comments, roughly 99 percent of which said, “Screw you, WaPo. It’s Kamala. Deal with it.”

I think it’s fairly obvious to most of us that we don’t need more weeks of Democratic Party infighting right now. And it’s also obvious to most of us that the Dems didn’t dare pass over a woman of color to nominate one of the usual white guys. I’m seeing a lot of social media comments calling for a “dream ticket” of Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitmer, in fact. Hey, Trump has the He Man Women Hater’s Club sewn up; why not? And today a lot of headlines are declaring that much of the Dem party is rallying around Kamala. Because most of us want to get on with the campaign to beat Trump.

I understand that the Republicans are dumbstruck; this isn’t what they expected. Trump’s entire campaign was built around tearing down Biden as old, senile, and corrupt. And now they’ll have to start from scratch. Gee, I wonder how Trump will run against a Black woman? Josh Marshall:

Donald Trump and Chris LaCivita are about to hit Kamala Harris with an avalanche of racist and sexist attacks and a ton of slut-shaming. Democrats across the board need to be saying now what we all know, which is that this will bring out the very worst of Trump. Racism and sexism are his brand. Charlottesville is his brand. You can’t just be on the receiving end of this stuff. Trump is about to show the kind of gutter white nationalist and racist pol he is. Force the press and all observers to see this totally predictable move through that prism.

Trump is losing the campaign he wanted to run, the one he and his campaign have spent years planning to run. There’s now going to be a furious race to define Harris first. Of course Trump will go there, and these attacks and those attacks can be very damaging. But Trump the racist bully and gangster is what kills him in the suburbs. It’s what embarrasses people.

Any normal person would have already been embarrassed by Trump, but whatever.

Even more typical of Trump: He’s now demanding a “refund” of money he spent campaigning against Biden.

“So, we are forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden, he polls badly after having a terrible debate, and quits the race. Now we have to start all over again,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday night.

“Shouldn’t the Republican Party be reimbursed for fraud in that everybody around Joe, including his doctors and the Fake News Media, knew he was not capable of running for, or being, President? Just askin’?”

Dana Milbank: