Trump Open-Minded on Attacking Harris’s Race, Gender

Campaign leaders meh on request to be less racist and/or sexist

July 25: Team Trump weighing future sexism, racism … The Harris bump … Five more names for the veep list … Vance-fave think tank veers left …

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A clearly super-energized Donald Trump whips his dead-faced supporters into a non-frenzy at his Charlotte, NC, rally yesterday. (Screengrab / Washington Post video.)

At his Charlotte, NC, rally yesterday, former Pres. Donald Trump vowed that he won’t be “nice” in this campaign — shocker/:::yawn::: — as he for the first time focused more on Vice Pres. Kamala Harris than on Pres. Joe Biden. Meanwhile, his team gave us a sense of what not-nice might include.

Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump’s represidential campaign, was asked about the request from Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) that Republicans not base their attacks on race or gender, but instead deploy the dog whistles distributed to every Republican member at the start of each new Congress.

Cheung responded: “I don’t know it’s off limits” to attack her on her race or gender. He then hilarified that, “[I]t’s not something that we’ve done. So it’s not even on our radar.”

Of course, the party has a longstanding array of radar, sonar, and Distant Early Warning systems to detect any incoming opportunities to play race or gender cards.

Even before the rally, the campaign was seeking to brand Harris as “Cackling Kamala,” because it’s weird that women would ever laugh in America.

Hell, just yesterday, the same day Cheung wasn’t sure if it was off-limits, Trump was complaining about Harris’s media coverage like this:

“Three weeks, four weeks ago, she was the worst politician in America. Now they say, ‘Isn’t it amazing? Look at her. She’s beautiful. She’s so magnificent.’”

It wasn’t just objectifying her in gendered terms, Trump also painted her falsely as dangerously liberal, more so even than Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and tried to make her record as a prosecutor an issue related to crime. And we all know what color face Trump is invoking when his orange face talks about crime. It ain’t his fellow white-collar criminals.

Trump said that Harris, as San Francisco district attorney from 2004 to 2011, “destroyed San Francisco with her policies.” First of all, prosecutors have little impact on crime.

Their policies do little to disincentivize criming, which is almost always done by bozos literally not thinking about consequences before they commit what will likely be one of the biggest mistakes of their lives. And prosecutors literally are not in the crime-prevention business.

It would be one thing if Harris refused to prosecute anyone and all the imaginary prosecution-policy-analyzing potential criminals out there decided, “Okay, now I’ll start criming.” But, in fact, Harris was criticized, rightly or wrongly, for prosecutorial zeal when it came to locking up Black people.

And as for destroying San Francisco, see if you can spot the Harris devastation in the city’s crime rate:

It’s only a matter of time until Trump connects the dots between Harris and the Black Lives Matters riots that burned every U.S. city to the ground. 

Politico asked Republican National Trump Committee (RNC) Chair Michael “Trump” Whatley about Johnson’s whole push to be subtle about its rhetorical racism and sexism so the party can continue being unsubtle in its legislation making it harder for Black people to choose who gets to be in office and women to choose what gets to be in their uteruses.

According to Politico, Whatley “declined to say whether he agreed with Johnson’s remarks about staying away from Harris’ race or gender.” C’mon, man!

ANECDOTAL SHIT Even Trump’s MAGA supporters at his rally yesterday were conceding Harris’s political strengths. A sampling of amateur MAGA punditry:

• “[S]he definitely has the energy… She is going to be a contender for Trump. Honestly, I think she’ll be more of a challenge.”

• “Kamala is probably going to come off a little more fiery than Joe would.”

• “it’s [her youth] definitely going to give her a huge bump right away. She can talk. She can laugh, obviously.”

• “She’s got the momentum.”

Polling Bullshit

Useless for predicting the future, but sometimes helpful in emotional self-medication, new polling shows a bump for Vice Pres. Kamala Harris from Pres. Joe Biden’s previous levels. Not enough to upend the race, which is still statistically tied. But there are signs that if Harris can’t change voter sentiment, what she can do is energize supporters who might not have bothered to vote for Biden.

Compared to polling from early July on Biden, Harris is now seeing several significant improvements:

• Up 9% among independents.

• Up 8% among people of color.

• Up 6% among women.

• Up 6% among voters under 35.

• Up 5% among non-college-educated voters.

The new poll also shows a lot more people now see November as a case of voting for Harris rather than against Trump. Considering the degree of Trump-againsting, that’s saying something.

Polling done Monday and Tuesday, while still showing a statistical tie, actually put Harris on top.

And remember, these polls were done before Biden’s speech last night and without Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) endorsing her yet.

Harris can still expect to get bumps from her vice presidential pick (see below), the Democratic National Convention, and her debates with former Pres. Donald Trump when America will see a former prosecutor lace into him about his criminal convictions for lying to voters to win the 2016 election, a jury finding him liable for what a judge called rape, and actual policy stuff such as his proposed tariffs economic recession.

So strap in, keep your hands and legs inside the vehicle at all times, and know that for every plunge in the weeks and months ahead, there will be soaring, as well. All we can do is the work.

Harris Looking at a Dozen Possible Running Mates

Vice President Kamala Harris is vetting about a dozen possible candidates for vice president, the AP reports, not quoting and not naming “two people familiar with the matter.”

Four people have featured at the center of speculation about her choice, and the AP doesn’t explicitly say they’re on Harris’s list, but kinda implies it, so if anyone’s forgotten, the Big Four:

• Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY)

• Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC)

• Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ)

• Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA)

Five others are on what the AP calls “The broader list” of potential candidates being vetted. They are:

• Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg¹

• Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL)

• Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo

• Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN)

• Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI)

Whitmer has been pretty emphatic about saying she wouldn’t do it. Which apparently doesn’t mean she wouldn’t do it. I’ll ‘fess up and tell you I haven’t done the deep dive to give you a full briefing on the rest of them. Well, three of the rest of them.

I do have some thoughts on Raimondo, but I haven’t done the work to justify those thoughts, so I shouldn’t be mouth-blathering them yet.

The one I have done a (year-long) deep dive on is Buttigieg. He strikes me as perhaps the most effective messenger for the campaign, given his track record on Fox and in other interviews pushing back directly on right-wing bullshit. Thing is, though, that this doesn’t help him. Because he’ll be expected to be a pro-Harris voice regardless.

And putting Buttigieg on the ticket ties every airline debacle of the past four years around Harris’s neck. Delays. Canceled flights. Surge pricing. Missing airplane doors.

And then there’s his record as South Bend mayor. Buttigieg reportedly suffered from a lack of Black support back in the 2020 presidential race. At the time it was treated as a mystery, or it was speculated that Black, churchgoing voters weren’t happy about him being gay. I dunno.

What I do know is what I was told, which was that Black union leaders around the country called up their South Bend counterparts for the lowdown. And didn’t like what they heard.

During the campaign, I was the managing editor of The Young Turks. Because Buttigieg seemed like the least-vetted major candidate, I thought there was a chance of reporting something new on him so I went to South Bend for a week. The threads I pulled led to a year of reporting and multiple return visits.

Almost all of it was about his record with Black people in South Bend. It was not good. Black leaders who backed him for mayor felt used. White cops felt used. And Buttigieg lied and covered up damning facts about his mayoralty. On Tuesday, I posted a summary of my biggest Buttigieg stories, with links to the original reports.

Doesn’t mean I’m out to get him or think he’d be worse than other choices, cuz I have zero idea whether that’s true. But I’m a journalist, which means (a) I think people should know things, and (b) I can’t predict the outcomes of people knowing things.

Anyway, all these potentials are being vetted. But one thing I picked up on in 2019/2020 was that political vetting these days is shit. Even obvious people you’d want to talk to about a major presidential candidate told me they never heard from anyone asking about Buttigieg. Not journalists. Not Dems. Not even Republicans.

And the vetting that the AP describes consists of asking the possible veeps themselves for “financial records and records of past political stances and speeches.” That, plus an interview. Uh, how about a LexisNexis search? Or some old-school gumshoe-style boot-leather other-cliche, independent digging?

Yeesh!

The vetting is being handled by former Attorney General Eric Holder, who I’m guessing wasn’t a big TYT fan, so I’m assuming none of the South Bend stuff will come up in Buttigieg’s “vetting.” But who knows?

And, as I’ve said, the other candidates could have worse stuff lingering in their own backgrounds, so the issue isn’t Buttigieg, it’s whether Holder and his team are going to buck the typical, perfunctory vetting model and make sure they get this right.

Think Tank Tied to Vance Calls Trump Tax Cuts a “Failure”

A think tank tied to Sen. JD Vance™ (R-OH) is today announcing the hiring of a former top aide to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and the news likely will draw further attention to the right-wing group’s acknowledgment that progressives are right about tons of important shit.

Last year, both Vance and Rubio boosted the think tank, which is called American Compass, apparently to differentiate it from other GOP think tanks, which always points right no matter where you’re standing.

Vance said, “If we are to succeed in building a new economic agenda that actually serves the interests of working people in this country, it will be in large part thanks to the hard work and rigorous policy analysis they continue to produce.”

To wit, an American Compass leader wrote last week that then-Pres. Donald Trump’s 13-figure tax cuts for illionaires were “an expensive failure.”

The group says cutting the deficit should include raising taxes and released polling showing that Republicans agree! And it’s not just taxes.

“American Compass makes the case that adherence to tax cuts, deregulation and free trade have been disastrous economic policy,” Politico writes, without stopping dead and slack-jawed at “deregulation.”

Other populist/progressive shit, per Politico:

• “Investments in critical industries”

• “Supporting organized labor”(!!!!!!!!)

• Outlawing corporate stock buybacks [emphasis added for holy shittery]

Now, it’s fine to savor all of this — from a think tank that’s about to get a lot more attention due to its staffers’ ties to Vance — as vintage toldja-so. Which I did earlier.

But it’s also yet another warning light flashing on the Democrats’ political dashboard.

The right wing is embracing economic populism even/especially if it means going further left than the left.

If country now comes second to power, you can bet ideology is even further down the list. If they’ll steal an election to win, why wouldn’t they lower themselves even further and support unions and regulation? The 2024 Republican Trump Party has zero qualms about targeting corporations.

Yes, as Politico notes, every other big star in the illionaire-funded constellation of right-wing advocacy groups is violently opposed to the direction American Compass is pointing. But as Trump has shown us, conservative center of gravity has turned to smoke.

The morning that Trump embraces real, radical, progressive economic populism is the afternoon the rest of his party follows suit. And then the economic Band-Aids™ that Democrats have supported (because they couldn’t get more past Republicans) will look an awful lot like Wall Street servitude.

TCB

I know, I know. I ignored the big dueling speeches yesterday by the two big important dudes, departing Pres. Joe Biden and apparently constantly returning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And, well, they didn’t really say anything new? I mean, Netanyahu vowed to kill every Palestinian civilian certified, licensed, full- or part-time member of Hamas, but he’s said that before. We might have feelings about what they said and how, but I didn’t really see anything new, like agreement on a cease fire, fer instance. So I kinda struggled with what to say about the speeches and then decided to not. Forgive me!

THE TRUMP RIFLE Since I’m still working my temp gig, I’m still keeping his one in my quiver, possibly for tomorrow, when I might not have enough time to generate totally fresh stuff. Forgive me!

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Go get ‘em, kids. And remember to laugh today!

1. I should note that I previously suggested Politico’s Adam Wren was exaggerating Buttigieg’s place in Harris’s discussions, and it’s still possible this is just a courtesy bone they’re throwing him rather than real consideration, but it’s worth acknowledging any/all of my facepalms.