Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 90
July 24, 2024
July 24, 2024
Tonight, President Joe Biden explained to the American people why he decided to refuse the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination and hand the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris.
Speaking from the Oval Office from his seat behind the Resolute Desk, a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880, Biden recalled the nation’s history. He invoked Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence; George Washington, who “showed us presidents are not kings”; Abraham Lincoln, who “implored us to reject malice”; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who “inspired us to reject fear.”
And then he turned to himself. “I revere this office, but I love my country more,” he said. “It’s been the honor of my life to serve as your president.” But, he said, the defense of democracy is more important than any title, and democracy is “larger than any one of us.” We must unite to protect it.
“In recent weeks, it has become clear to me that I need to unite my party in this critical endeavor,” he said. “I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future, all merited a second term. But nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition. So I’ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation. It’s the best way to unite our nation.”
There is “a time and a place for long years of experience in public life,” Biden said. “There’s also a time and a place for new voices, fresh voices, yes, younger voices. And that time and place is now.”
Biden reminded listeners that he is not leaving the presidency and will be continuing to use its power for the American people. In outlining what that means, he summed up his presidency.
For the next six months, he said, he will “continue to lower costs for hard-working families [and] grow our economy. I will keep defending our personal freedoms and civil rights, from the right to vote to the right to choose. I will keep calling out hate and extremism, making it clear there is…no place in America for political violence or any violence ever, period. I’m going to keep speaking out to protect our kids from gun violence [and] our planet from [the] climate crisis.”
Biden reiterated his support for his Cancer Moonshot to end cancer—a personal cause for him since the 2015 death of his son Beau from brain cancer—and says he will fight for it, (although House Republicans have recently slashed funding for the program). He said he will call for reforming the Supreme Court “because this is critical to our democracy.”
He promised to continue “working to ensure America remains strong, secure and the leader of the free world,” and pointed out that he is “the first president of this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.” He promised to continue rallying a coalition of nations to stop Putin’s attempt to take over Ukraine, and vowed to continue to build the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). He reminded listeners that when he took office, the conventional wisdom was that China would inevitably surpass the United States, but that is no longer the case, and he said he would continue to strengthen allies and partners in the Pacific.
Biden promised to continue to work to “end the war in Gaza, bring home all the hostages and bring peace and security to the Middle East and end this war,” as well as “to bring home Americans being unjustly detained all around the world.”
The president reminded people how far the nation has come since he took office on January 20, 2021, a day when, although he didn’t mention it tonight, he went directly to work after taking the oath of office. “On that day,” he recalled, “we…stood in a winter of peril and winter of possibilities.” The United States was “in the grip of the worst pandemic in the century, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” But, Biden said, “We came together as Americans. We got through it. We emerged stronger, more prosperous and more secure.”
“Today we have the strongest economy in the world, creating nearly 16 million new jobs—a record. Wages are up, inflation continues to come down, the racial wealth gap is the lowest it’s been in 20 years. We are literally rebuilding our entire nation—urban, suburban and rural and tribal communities. Manufacturing has come back to America. We are leading the world again in chips and science and innovation. We finally beat Big Pharma after all these years to lower the cost of prescription drugs for seniors…. More people have health care today in America than ever before.” Biden noted that he signed the PACT Act to help millions of veterans and their families who were exposed to toxic materials, as well as the “most significant climate law…in the history of the world” and “the first major gun safety law in 30 years.”
The “violent crime rate is at a 50-year low,” he said, and “[b]order crossings are lower today than when the previous administration left office. I’ve kept my commitment to appoint the first Black woman to the Supreme Court of the United States of America. I also kept my commitment to have an administration that looks like America and [to] be a president for all Americans.”
Then Biden turned from his own record to the larger meaning of America.
“I ran for president four years ago because I believed…that the soul of America was at stake,” he said. “America is an idea. An idea stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant. It’s the most powerful idea in the history of the world.”
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he said. “We are all created equal, endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. We’ve never fully lived up to…this sacred idea—but we’ve never walked away from it either. And I do not believe the American people will walk away from it now.
“In just a few months, the American people will choose the course of America’s future. I made my choice…. “[O]ur great vice president, Kamala Harris… is experienced, she is tough, she is capable. She’s been an incredible partner to me and a leader for our country.
“Now the choice is up to you, the American people. When you make that choice, remember the words of Benjamin Franklin hanging on my wall here in the Oval Office, alongside the busts of Dr. [Martin Luther] King and Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez. When Ben Franklin was asked, as he emerged from the [constitutional] convention…, whether the founders [had] given America a monarchy or a republic, Franklin’s response was: ‘A republic, if you can keep it.’... Whether we keep our republic is now in your hands.”
“My fellow Americans, it’s been the privilege of my life to serve this nation for over 50 years,” President Biden told the American people. “Nowhere else on Earth could a kid with a stutter from modest beginnings in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and in Claymont, Delaware, one day sit behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office as the president of the United States, but here I am.
“That’s what’s so special about America. We are a nation of promise and possibilities. Of dreamers and doers. Of ordinary Americans doing extraordinary things. I’ve given my heart and my soul to our nation, like so many others. And I’ve been blessed a million times in return with the love and support of the American people. I hope you have some idea how grateful I am to all of you.
The great thing about America is, here kings and dictators do not rule—the people do. History is in your hands. The power’s in your hands. The idea of America lies in your hands. You just have to keep faith—keep the faith—and remember who we are. We are the United States of America, and there is simply nothing, nothing beyond our capacity when we do it together. So let’s act together, [and] preserve our democracy. God bless you all and may God protect our troops.
“Thank you.”
And with that, President Joe Biden followed the example of the nation’s first president, George Washington, who declined to run for a third term to demonstrate that the United States of America would not have a king, and of its second president, John Adams, who handed the power of the presidency over to his rival Thomas Jefferson and thus established the nation’s tradition of the peaceful transition of power. Like them, Biden gave up the pursuit of power for himself in order to demonstrate the importance of democracy.
After the speech, the White House served ice cream to the Bidens and hundreds of White House staffers in the Rose Garden.
And when the evening was over, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden posted an image of a handwritten note on social media. It read: “To those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed, my heart is full of gratitude. Thank you for the trust you put in Joe—now it’s time to put that trust in Kamala.”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/us/politics/biden-speech-transcript.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/29/congress-is-killing-bidens-cancer-moonshot-00154718
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PeterAlexander/status/1816276209854210519
July 23, 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris continues her momentum toward the 2024 presidential election since President Joe Biden’s surprise announcement on Sunday that he would not accept the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.
Today more than 350 national security leaders endorsed Harris for president, noting that if elected president, “she would enter that office with more significant national security experience than the four Presidents prior to President Biden.” As vice president, she “has met with more than 150 world leaders and traveled to 21 countries,” the authors wrote, and they called out her work across the globe from her work strengthening partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region to her historic trip to Africa and her efforts to expand U.S. relationships with nations in the Caribbean and North Central America. In contrast to Harris, the letter said, “Trump is a threat to America’s national security.”
Those signing the letter included former Central Intelligence Agency director Michael Hayden, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, national security advisors Susan Rice and Thomas Donilon, former secretaries of defense Chuck Hagel and Leon Panetta, and former secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.
In a New York Times op-ed today, former secretary of state Clinton praised Biden for his “decision to end his campaign,” which she called “as pure an act of patriotism as I have seen in my lifetime.” She went on to say that Vice President Harris “represents a fresh start for American politics,” offering a vision of an America with its best days ahead of it and, rather than “old grievances,” “new solutions.”
Clinton noted that her own political campaigns had seen her burned in effigy, but said, “It is a trap to believe that progress is impossible” and that Americans cannot overcome sexism and racism. After all, she pointed out, voters elected Black American Barack Obama in 2008, and she herself won the popular vote in 2016. “[A]bortion bans and attacks on democracy are galvanizing women voters like never before,” Clinton wrote, and “[w]ith Ms. Harris at the top of the ticket leading the way, this movement may become an unstoppable wave.”
Today, Harris held her first campaign rally, speaking to supporters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the Republicans held their national convention just last week. The energy from the 3000 people packed into the gym where she walked out to Beyoncé’s song “Freedom” was palpable.
She began by thanking Biden and touting his record, then turned to noting that in her past as a prosecutor, California attorney general, U.S. senator from California, and vice president, she “took on perpetrators of all kinds—predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So,” she said, “hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.” She went on to remind the audience that Trump ran a for-profit college that scammed students, was found liable for committing sexual abuse, and “was just found guilty of fraud on 34 counts.”
While Trump is relying on “billionaires and big corporations,” she said, “we are running a people-powered campaign” and “will be a people-first presidency.” The Democrats, she said, “believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by but to get ahead; a future where no child has to grow up in poverty; where every worker has the freedom to join a union; where every person has affordable health care, affordable childcare, and paid family leave. We believe in a future where every senior can retire with dignity.”
“[A]ll of this is to say,” she continued, “Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency. Because…when our middle class is strong, America is strong.”
In contrast, she said, Trump wants to take the country backward. She warned that he and his Project 2025 will “weaken the middle class,” cutting Social Security and Medicare and giving “tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations,” while “working families foot the bill.” “They intend to end the Affordable Care Act,” she said, “and take us back…to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny people with preexisting conditions…. Remember what that was like? Children with asthma, women who survived breast cancer, grandparents with diabetes. America has tried these failed economic policies before, but we are not going back. We’re not going back.”
“[O]urs is a fight for the future,” she said “And it is a fight for freedom…. Generations of Americans before us led the fight for freedom. And now…the baton is in our hands.”
Meanwhile, MAGA Republicans are still scrambling for a plan of attack against Harris. One of their first angles has been the sexism and racism Clinton predicted, calling her “a DEI hire.” House Republican leaders have told fellow lawmakers to dial back the sexist and racist attacks.
MAGA Republican representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) has taken a different angle: he introduced an impeachment resolution against Harris, while others are demanding that the House should investigate Harris and demand the Cabinet remove President Biden under the 25th Amendment. The Republican National Committee has decided to make fun of Harris’s laugh.
But concern in the Trump camp showed today when Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio shared with reporters a “confidential memorandum” trying to get ahead of polls he says will show Harris leading Trump. He said he expects to see a “Harris Honeymoon” that will end quickly.
Trump has continued to post angrily on his social media feed but is otherwise sticking close to home. His lack of visibility highlights that the Republicans are now on the receiving end of the same age and coherence concerns they had used against Biden, and there might be more attention paid to Trump’s lapses now that Biden has stepped aside. CNN’s Kate Sullivan noted today, for example, that “Trump said he’d consider Jamie Dimon for Treasury secretary, but now says he doesn’t know who said that.”
As Tim Alberta noted Sunday in The Atlantic, the Trump campaign tapped J.D. Vance in an attempt to harden the Republican base, only to find now that he cannot bring to the ticket any of the new supporters they suddenly need.
According to Harry Enten of CNN, Vance is the first vice presidential pick since 1980 who has entered the race with a negative favorability rating: in his case, –6 points. Since 2000, the usual average is +19 points. Vance won his Senate seat in 2022 by +6 points in an election Republican governor Mike DeWine won by +25 points. Vance “was the worst performing Republican candidate in 2022 up and down the ballot in the state of Ohio,” Enten said. “The J.D. Vance pick makes no sense from a statistical polling perspective.”
Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark, who specializes in focus groups, noted that swing voters groups “simply do not like” Vance. “Both his flip flopping on Trump and his extreme abortion position are what breaks through,” she wrote.
The 2024 election is not consuming all of the political oxygen, even in this astonishing week. Today, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that eight large companies must turn over information about the data they collect about consumers, product sales, and how the surveillance the companies used affected consumer prices.
“Firms that harvest Americans’ personal data can put people’s privacy at risk. Now firms could be exploiting this vast trove of personal information to charge people higher prices,” FTC chair Lina M. Khan said. “Americans deserve to know whether businesses are using detailed consumer data to deploy surveillance pricing, and the FTC’s inquiry will shed light on this shadowy ecosystem of pricing middlemen.”
The eight companies are: Mastercard, Revionics, Bloomreach, JPMorgan Chase, Task Software, PROS, Accenture, and McKinsey & Co.
In the House, Republicans have been unable to pass the appropriations bills necessary to fund the 2025 U.S. budget, laced as they are with culture-wars poison pills the extremists demand. Today House members debated the appropriations bill for the Interior Department and the Environment which, among other things, bans the use of funds “to promote or advance critical race theory” or to require Covid-19 masks or vaccine mandates.
According to the European climate service Copernicus, last Sunday was the hottest day in recorded history. The MAGA Republicans’ appropriations bill for Interior and the Environment calls for more oil drilling, fewer regulations on pollutants, no new regulations on vehicles, rejecting Biden’s climate change executive orders, and reducing the funding for the Environmental Protection Agency by 20%.
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/23/politics/video/jd-vance-data-ebof-digvid-enten
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/23/gop-race-comments-harris-00170735
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4788663-andy-ogles-impeachment-articles-kamala-harris/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/23/opinion/kamala-harris-donald-trump.html
https://cdn.nucleusfiles.com/9f/9f5bada8-1641-4603-83ad-2e5ef9c481fb/7-23-24-harris-honeymoon.pdf
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4788574-trump-polls-harris-honeymoon-biden-2024/
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/23/ftc-launches-probe-into-surveillance-pricing.html
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/kamala-harris-biden-trump-election-07-23-24
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/07/trump-campaign-biden-dropping-out/679183/
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SarahLongwell25/status/1815724143939084597
MacFarlaneNews/status/1815841590964892159
July 23, 2024
July 22, 2024
July 22, 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris has continued to rack up endorsements and delegates since President Biden’s surprise announcement yesterday that he would not accept the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination. As of tonight, Harris has the support of at least 2,471 delegates, more than the 1,976 she will need to secure the nomination.
Endorsements have also continued to mount, with the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) Victory Fund, and the Latino Victory Fund all endorsing her.
Labor unions have also backed her: the AFL-CIO, which represents 12.5 million workers, endorsed Harris. So did the Service Employees International Union, with 2 million workers, as well as the United Steelworkers, which represents 850,000 metal workers and miners, and the Communications Workers of America. Other unions endorsing Harris include the American Federation of Teachers, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
Money continues to roll in. Since Biden’s announcement, Harris and the Democrats have raised about $250 million in donations and pledges. More than 888,000 were from small-dollar donors. Volunteers are also joining the Harris campaign, which said that more than 28,000 people have signed up to work on the campaign in the day since Biden passed the torch. Today, Beyoncé gave Harris permission to use her song “Freedom” as a campaign song, and TikTok users have jumped on the Harris trend.
Harris is keeping some of the key infrastructure of Biden’s campaign. She has announced that Biden campaign manager Julie Chávez-Rodriguez and Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon will remain in their positions. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer announced today that she, too, will stay on as co-chair for Harris’s campaign as she was for Biden’s.
Harris spoke today at campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, smoothing the transition from Biden’s campaign to her own. “I know it’s been a rollercoaster and we’re all filled with so many mixed emotions about this,” Harris said. “We love Joe and Jill. We really do. They truly are like family.” Biden called in to the meeting from Delaware, where he is isolating as he recovers from Covid, to thank the staff. “I know it’s hard, because you’ve poured your heart and soul into me, to help us win this thing,” Biden told them, but added: “The name changed at the top of the ticket. The mission hasn’t changed at all.” Biden told Harris: “I’m watching you kid, I love you. You’re the best, kid.”
Harris went on to indicate that she will be taking the fight for the presidency aggressively to Trump, highlighting his criminal behavior. “Before I was elected as Vice President, before I was elected as United States Senator,” she said today, “I was the elected Attorney General, as I've mentioned, to California, and before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump's type.”
She was clear, though, that the fight is not just about Trump; it is about “two different versions of what we see as the future of our country…. Donald Trump wants to take our country backward. To a time before many of our fellow Americans had full freedoms and rights. But we believe in a brighter future that makes room for all Americans.” She promised to continue the work of building the middle class, protect abortion rights, enact commonsense gun safety legislation, and protect voting rights. She contrasted the Democrats’ vision of “a country of freedom, compassion, and rule of law” with the Republicans’: “a country of chaos, fear, and hate.”
Biden’s announcement and Harris’s rapid consolidation of support and money appear to have blindsided the Trump-Vance campaign. MAGA Republicans have responded with scattershot arguments that suggest they had not thought through a scenario in which Biden would step down, an omission so astonishing it perhaps suggests they could not imagine a presumptive nominee voluntarily giving up power.
Without a coherent strategy, MAGA Republicans today have been all over the map, suggesting among other things that Biden’s voluntarily stepping down from his presumptive nomination is a “coup” and that Harris is a “D[iversity] E[quity and] I[nclusion] hire.”
For a party that is offering voters a popular set of policies, the opposing party’s nominee shouldn’t matter all that much, but Trump policies and the Trump campaign’s Project 2025 are both so unpopular that operatives intended to run not on policy but by firing up their base against Biden himself. In The Atlantic yesterday, journalist Tim Alberta explained that the entire Trump campaign apparatus was focused on Biden and that putting extremist Ohio senator J.D. Vance on the ticket “was something of a luxury meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.”
Now the energy appears to have shifted. As Anne Applebaum wrote today in The Atlantic, operatives staged the Republican National Convention of just last week to project strength and power, and Trump’s rambling and incoherent performance there seemed “deranged, sinister, and frightening.” Now, Applebaum wrote, “it just looks deranged,” as Biden’s decision to step away from power contrasts powerfully with Trump’s desperate attempts to cling to power with the Big Lie while he calls up his threadbare descriptions of national carnage.
The change Applebaum identified dovetailed neatly with a new political action committee started by conservative lawyer George Conway to highlight Trump’s “mental unfitness for office.” Frustrated by the apparent unwillingness of the press to cover Trump’s mental health while it focused on President Biden’s, Conway formed the “Anti-Psychopath PAC” to highlight Trump’s mental state. “The failure to treat Trump’s behavior as pathological has led the media and the country, perversely, to treat it as normal,” Conway told The Independent, and said that Project 2025 should be seen as an extension of Trump’s malignant narcissism “because basically he wants to turn the government into a mechanism for retribution.”
A post on Trump’s social media feed tonight suggested that Trump recognizes that being the oldest candidate ever nominated for the presidency is a campaign issue. The post said that “Lyin’ Kamala Harris…has absolutely terrible pole [sic] numbers against a fine and brilliant young man named DONALD J. TRUMP! Be careful what you wish for, Democrats???”
Today, Trump’s vice presidential pick Vance gave his first campaign speech at his former high school in Middletown, Ohio. There, dressed in a blue suit with a red tie that echoed Trump’s signature look, Vance spoke of his history in the town and promised that he and Trump are “ready to save America.” But his lack of experience on the campaign trail showed in his delivery, and the Fox News Channel, which was covering the speech, cut away from it while he was speaking.
Media outlets gave more attention to the Ohio state senator who preceded Vance, George Lang, who began a chant of “fight, fight, fight” and told the audience: "I believe wholeheartedly Donald Trump and Butler County's JD Vance are the last chance to save our country politically. I'm afraid if we lose this one, it's going to take a civil war to save the country, and it will be saved." He later posted on social media that he regretted his “divisive remarks.”
Later in the day, Vance spoke in Radford, Virginia, where he said that “[h]istory will remember Joe Biden as not just a quitter, which he is, but as one of the worst presidents in the history of the United States of America.” He continued: “Kamala Harris is a million times worse and everybody knows it. She signed up for every single one of Joe Biden’s failures, and she lied about his mental capacity to serve as president.”
Josh Dawsey and Michael Scherer of the Washington Post reported today on a different kind of jockeying in the 2024 presidential race. Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has recently been in talks with Trump about dropping out of the race and endorsing Trump in exchange for a position in a Trump administration. Kennedy, who opposes vaccines, is interested in a portfolio that covers health and medical issues.
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/07/22/afl-cio-major-labor-unions-rush-embrace-harris/
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/22/live-updates-harris-democrats-biden-drops-out-trump-campaign.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/07/trump-campaign-biden-dropping-out/679183/
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/22/live-updates-harris-democrats-biden-drops-out-trump-campaign.html
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/flailing-right-wing-media-are-not-ready-kamala-harris
https://www.thedailybeast.com/kamala-harris-lays-out-how-she-plans-to-beat-trump-at-his-own-game
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/07/trump-campaign-biden-dropping-out/679183/
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/07/trump-looks-older-and-more-deranged/679186/
https://www.wlwt.com/article/vp-nominee-jd-vance-hometown-rally-middletown/61667636
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/22/entertainment/beyonce-freedom-harris-campaign
https://apnews.com/article/jd-vance-trump-virginia-ohio-a814f31dffb066e8a6e2335ba81032bb
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/07/22/kamala-harris-coconut-tree-memes-campaign/
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nytimesarts/status/1815497392877138408
July 21, 2024
July 21, 2024
“My Fellow Americans,
“Over the past three and a half years, we have made great progress as a Nation.
“Today, America has the strongest economy in the world. We’ve made historic investments in rebuilding our Nation, in lowering prescription drug costs for seniors, and in expanding affordable health care to a record number of Americans. We’ve provided critically needed care to a million veterans exposed to toxic substances. Passed the first gun safety law in 30 years.
Appointed the first African American woman to the Supreme Court. And passed the most significant climate legislation in the history of the world. America has never been better positioned to lead than we are today.
“I know none of this could have been done without you, the American people. Together, we overcame a once in a century pandemic and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We’ve protected and preserved our Democracy. And we’ve revitalized and strengthened our alliances around the world.
“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.
“I will speak to the Nation later this week in more detail about my decision.
“For now, let me express my deepest gratitude to all those who have worked so hard to see me reelected. I want to thank Vice President Kamala Harris for being an extraordinary partner in all this work. And let me express my heartfelt appreciation to the American people for the faith and trust you have placed in me.
“I believe today what I always have: that there is nothing America can’t do—when we do it together. We just have to remember we are the United States of America.”
With this letter, posted on X this afternoon, President Joe Biden announced he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president. So ended the storyline begun after the event on June 27, when Biden appeared unable to respond effectively to Trump’s verbal assaults. Since then, there has been a drumbeat of media stories and some demands from Democratic lawmakers and donors calling for Biden to step aside and refuse to run for a second term. Increasingly, that drumbeat imperiled his reelection, opening the way for Trump’s election to install a dictatorship of Christian nationalism.
In another post shortly after the first, Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidential nomination, writing: “My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats—it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.”
Harris smoothly took the baton. “On behalf of the American people, I thank Joe Biden for his extraordinary leadership as President of the United States and for his decades of service to our country,” she wrote. “His remarkable legacy of accomplishment is unmatched in modern American history, surpassing the legacy of many Presidents who have served two terms in office.
“It is a profound honor to serve as his Vice President, and I am deeply grateful to the President, Dr. Biden, and the entire Biden family. I first came to know President Biden through his son Beau. We were friends from our days working together as Attorneys General of our home states. As we worked together, Beau would tell me stories about his Dad. The kind of father—and the kind of man—he was. And the qualities Beau revered in his father are the same qualities, the same values, I have seen every single day in Joe’s leadership as President: His honesty and integrity. His big heart and commitment to his faith and his family. And his love of our country and the American people.
“With this selfless and patriotic act, President Biden is doing what he has done throughout his life of service: putting the American people and our country above everything else.
“I am honored to have the President’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination. Over the past year, I have traveled across the country, talking with Americans about the clear choice in this momentous election. And that is what I will continue to do in the days and weeks ahead. I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party—and unite our nation—to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda.
“We have 107 days until Election Day. Together, we will fight. And together, we will win.”
Biden’s announcement ended the month of suspense under which the Democrats have lived, and in the hours since, they appear to be coalescing around Harris with enthusiasm. Those who might have challenged her nomination have stepped up to support her: California governor Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, North Carolina governor Roy Cooper, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg all backed Harris; Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer said she does not intend to challenge Harris. By tonight, all of the state Democratic Party chairs were on board with Harris. Endorsements continued to pour in.
So did money. Following Biden’s endorsement of Harris, donors contributed more than $46.7 million to Democratic races before 9:00 p.m., and major donors, who had paused donations to Biden, have said they will contribute to Harris’s campaign. The Biden-Harris team also managed the paperwork to transfer the $95 million in Biden’s campaign coffers to Harris because the money was raised for the ticket, rather than for Biden alone.
But party rules say that Biden cannot pass his delegates to another candidate, so Harris will have to cement them on her own, as well as the superdelegates, a group of party leaders and former elected officials whose votes carry weight in the convention. As of 10 p.m. on Sunday, she had won 531 of the 1,986 delegates necessary to win the nomination.
Biden’s decision has left the Republicans in deep trouble, and they are illustrating their dilemma with high-pitched anger that the ticket of their opponents has changed and by insisting that if Biden is not fit for another four-year term he must resign the presidency immediately. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has said he will sue to try to keep Biden in the race; Democratic election litigator Marc Elias responded that “if your lawyers are telling you that they can prevent the D[emocratic] N[ational] C[ommittee] from nominating its candidate of choice, they are idiots. I know a lot about that, since I beat them more than 60x in court after the 2020 election.”
Trump, meanwhile, has posted seven times about Biden since he dropped out of the race. He has ignored Harris.
The Republicans’ anger reflects that fact that if Biden is off the ticket, they are in yet another pickle. Just last week, the Republicans nominated Donald Trump, who is 78, for president. Having made age their central complaint about Biden, they are now faced with having nominated the oldest candidate in U.S. history, who repeatedly fell asleep at his own nominating convention as well as his criminal trial, who often fumbles words, and who cannot seem to keep a coherent train of thought. Democrats immediately pounced on Trump with all the comments Republicans had been making about Biden. Republicans have already suggested that Trump will not debate Harris, a former prosecutor.
With 39-year-old Ohio senator J.D. Vance now their vice presidential nominee, it will be tempting for Republicans to push Trump out of the presidential slot. But aside from the fury that would evoke from Trump loyalists, it would further alienate women from the Republican ticket. Republicans were already losing voters over their overturning of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion, so many that Trump has recently tried to sound as if he is moderating his stance on abortion and to appeal to women in other ways. Just this weekend at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump appeared to be courting suburban women by promising to “stop the plunder, rape, slaughter and destruction of our American suburbs and cities” he implied had taken place under Biden. (In fact, violent crime has decreased significantly since 2020.)
Vance is an extremist who supports a national abortion ban, has said he does not believe in exceptions for rape or incest in abortion bans, and has praised women who stay in abusive marriages.
Biden’s decision not to accept the Democratic presidential nomination has created yet another conspicuous contrast with Trump. Thanks for a job well done and praise for his statesmanship have been pouring out ever since Biden made his announcement—indeed, they have apparently convinced some people that he has stepped down from the job altogether, while in fact he will remain the president for another six months.
Among others, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called Biden “an extraordinary guardian of America’s national security,” thanked him for his leadership and statesmanship, and called him “one of our great foreign-policy presidents.” President Lyndon B. Johnson’s daughters called him “a patriot without peer” and said, “we love you and thank you for your selfless service to all who love democracy, social justice and the rule of law.”
For all the accolades, though, it is likely that the one the family-oriented president values most came from his son Hunter, whom the Republicans hammered for years as a proxy for his father.
“For my entire life, I’ve looked at my dad in awe,” the younger Biden wrote. “How could he suffer so much heartache and yet give so much of whatever remained of his heart to others? Not only in the policies he passed, but in the individual lives he’s touched…. That unconditional love has been his North Star as a President, and as a parent. He is unique in public life today in that there is no distance between Joe Biden the man and Joe Biden the public servant of the last 54 years. I’m so lucky every night I get to tell him I love him, and to thank him. I ask all Americans to join me tonight in doing the same.”
In a time of dictators, Trump tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and install himself in power against the wishes of the people. President Joe Biden voluntarily turned away from reelection in order to give the people a better shot at preserving our democracy.
He demonstrated what it means to put the country first.
—
Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/21/read-joe-biden-letter
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/21/harris-biden-drops-out-letter
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/21/kamala-harris-fundraising-surge.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/21/kamala-harris-biden-campaign-funds-00170136
https://apnews.com/article/harris-biden-democratic-convention-2fb8b1bc88b99e919872e63efdd8c275
https://www.thedailybeast.com/democrats-mock-donald-trump-as-too-old-to-runlike-he-did-to-joe-biden
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/17/politics/kfile-jd-vance-abortion-comments/index.html
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4785260-vice-president-harris-delegates/amp/
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July 20, 2024
July 20, 2024
Spent the evening with family, and my photographer nephew showed me today’s capture: a seagull trying to move in on an osprey’s catch. It’s a nice break to see drama from something other than the human news this past week— it seemed relentless.
Taking the night off. I’ll be back at it tomorrow.
[Photo by Tyler Mitchell.]
July 19, 2024
July 19, 2024
Today a Russian court sentenced 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to 16 years in a high-security penal colony after convicting him of espionage in a secret three-day trial. The U.S. government considers Gershkovich “wrongly detained,” a rare designation signifying that he is being held as a political bargaining chip.
Today, President Joe Biden said that Gershkovich was “targeted by the Russian government because he is a journalist and an American. We are pushing hard for Evan’s release and will continue to do so.” He added: “Journalism is not a crime. We will continue to stand strong for press freedom in Russia and worldwide, and stand against all those who seek to attack the press or target journalists.”
Last night, a faulty update of software from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike crashed computer systems all over the world. Banks and hospitals were locked out of their own programs, and government services shut down. In the U.S., more than 2,600 flights were canceled and 9,000 were delayed. Bloomberg’s David Rovella quoted Australian security consultant Troy Hunt: “I don’t think it’s too early to call it,” Hunt said. “This will be the largest IT outage in history.”
Also making history last night was the final night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the night on which former president Donald J. Trump accepted the party’s presidential nomination. Coming as it did just days after a would-be assassin took a shot at Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing one attendee and badly wounding two others, the convention was billed by Republican operatives as a way for Trump to rebrand himself as a candidate of “unity.”
This was certainly the way many major newspapers billed Trump’s acceptance speech this morning, in stories that, as media journalist Parker Molloy noted, were probably based on prepared remarks delivered to news agencies in advance of the speech. But it was not how the evening played out.
Since Saturday’s shooting, it has been notable that there has not been a medical review of Trump’s injuries, although he has said he was injured by a bullet that ripped through his ear. This matters not only because of the extent of his injuries, but also because Trump has made the story part of his identity without any fact check, and the media appears simply to be letting it go on Trump’s say-so, something that adds to the sense that media outlets are treating Trump and Biden differently.
Last night, Trump perhaps tried to address this lack by recounting last Saturday’s shooting. Interestingly, he did not say he was hit by a bullet, but that when he felt the injury he thought, “it can only be a bullet.” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo today noted a report from local Pennsylvania television station WPXI that four motorcycle officers standing within feet of Trump suffered minor injuries from flying debris. Trump has likely cut off further discussion of the topic by saying it is too painful to tell the story again.
With that story behind him, Trump hit the theme of unity, saying he would bring the country together. “The discord and division in our society must be healed, we must heal it quickly. We are bound together by a single fate, a single destiny,” he said. “We rise together. Or we fall apart…. I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America. So tonight, with faith and devotion, I proudly accept your nomination for president of the United States.”
But that was just in the first ten minutes. Then Trump ignored the teleprompter and things veered far off course, reflecting the candidate that has stayed in the safe spaces of Mar-a-Lago and rallies of his loyalists for years. Trump rambled for more than 90 minutes, making it the longest acceptance speech in U.S. history and outlasting the interest of the audience, some of whom fell asleep.
He went on to recite his usual litany of lies: that Democrats cheated in the 2020 presidential election (they did not), that crime is going up (it’s plummeting), that inflation is the worst we’ve ever had (it’s around 3%; the worst was around 23%), that Democrats want to quadruple people’s taxes (CNN fact checker Daniel Dale calls this “imaginary”), and so on. Dale called it “a remarkably dishonest acceptance speech.”
Journalist James Fallows posted: “Of the maybe 10,000 political speeches I've heard over the years, this was overall the worst.” Statistician Nate Silver’s judgment was harsher, in a way: he began with “It’s a weird but a pretty good speech,” then posted “Semi-retract this tweet, this speech is boring AF, but there are worse things politically speaking than being boring.” Shortly after, came: “Fully RETRACT and RESCIND, sometimes it seems like both parties are trying to throw this election.”
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes watched the unhinged speech and concluded: "This is not a colossus, this is not the big bad wolf, this is not a vigorous and incredibly deft political communicator. This is an old man in decline who's been doing the same schtick for a very long time and it's really wearing thin."
The point, though, as Trump meandered through attacks on immigrants and a diatribe about the fictional character cannibal Hannibal Lecter—who he might think was real—as it always has been, was to present a picture of the U.S. under siege by enemies who are persecuting him because he represents true Americans and that he must be returned to office because only he can vanquish those enemies. Greg Sargent of The New Republic noted that Trump cannot offer a “unity” message because “Trump himself knows the MAGA masses will not be satiated without expansive displays of rage, cruelty and sadism directed at hated out groups and designated enemies of MAGA.”
For years, observers have noted that Trump’s approach to politics is patterned on the “kayfabe” at the heart of professional wrestling. Kayfabe is the performance aspect of professional wrestling, in which the actors play out relationships and scenes in which there are good and evil, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal. According to journalist Abraham Josephine Reisman, in old-school kayfabe the actors never let their masks slip, and while the audience knew what they were seeing must be fake, they played along with the illusion.
But in the 1990s, the barrier between reality and illusion blurred as wrestlers and promoters tried to increase the viability of the fading industry by tossing reality into the performances: real-life insults—the more outrageous the better—and real-life events. Decoding what was real and what was not drove engagement until in 1999, an estimated 18% of Americans, about 50 million people, called themselves fans. This “neokayfabe,” Reisman wrote in the New York Times in 2023, “rests on a slippery, ever-wobbling jumble of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods, all delivered with the utmost passion and commitment.”
Neokayfabe, Reisman wrote, “turns the world into a hall of mirrors from which it is nearly impossible to escape. It rots the mind and eats the soul.”
Trump participated in a storyline in this neokayfabe with World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon in 2007, in part billed as a battle over hair. Eventually he was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, and many observers have made the link between neokayfabe and his approach to politics. Indeed, he even blended the two explicitly when he chose McMahon’s wife, Linda, to head the U.S. Small Business Administration during his presidency.
Neokayfabe and politics came together again last night at the Republican National Convention, as Linda McMahon, wrestler Hulk Hogan, and musician Kid Rock, whose music has been featured at wrestling events and who is also a member of the WWE Hall of Fame, all participated.
“So all you criminals, all you lowlifes, all you scumbags…. Whatcha gonna do when Donald Trump and all the Trumpamaniacs run wild on you, brother?!" Hogan yelled to wild applause after ripping off his shirt to show a Trump-Vance shirt. Like the other performers at the convention, he painted a portrait of Trump’s presidency, and of the United States since Trump left office, that was a fantasy of good and evil. Hogan reinforced that there was no way Trump was going to reach toward unity in Milwaukee. His approach to the world cannot be moderated. It depends on the idea that there are two teams in the performance and one must vanquish the other.
Part of that storyline requires rewriting not just the recent past, but our history. At the convention last night, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, said: “It is no wonder that the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy and faced down communism sadly say they don’t recognize our country anymore.” But the Allied soldiers in World War II were not fighting communism. They were fighting fascism. The three great Allied powers were Great Britain, the United States, and the communist Soviet Union.
It might be that Guilfoyle misspoke, or that she doesn’t know even the most basic facts of our history. Or it might be that by rewriting that history to put America on the side of the fascists, people like Guilfoyle hope to make that alliance more palatable to MAGA followers today.
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/opinion/vince-mcmahon-wwe-trump-kayfabe.html
https://www.wwe.com/superstars/donald-trump
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/big-three
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/evan-gershkovich-russia-trial-dbabd6e3
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/19/business/delta-american-airlines-flights-outage-intl-hnk/index.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/one-other-detail
https://newrepublic.com/post/184056/trump-rnc-speech-proves-shooting-hasnt-changed-unity
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-rnc-speech-appears-send-attendees-sleep-1927442
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/18/health/dr-sanjay-gupta-analysis-trump/index.html
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