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  • Will Taylor Swift Endorse Kamala Harris?

    Will Taylor Swift Endorse Kamala Harris?

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    Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images

    Taylor Swift’s political leanings have been a topic of debate for many years now (Swift herself released a whole documentary about it). The Tortured Poets Department singer has a long history with Donald Trump, who practically begged her not to endorse his 2024 opponent. And a troubling number of Americans believed an unhinged conspiracy theory about Swift and Joe Biden rigging the Super Bowl in favor of her boyfriend Travis Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs.

    So what’s really going on here? Has Taylor Swift actually endorsed a candidate in the 2024 presidential election? What’s her relationship with Trump and likely Democratic nominee Kamala Harris? Could Swifties really decide the election, as some pundits have suggested? Here’s a guide to Swift’s stance on the 2024 election, which we’ll keep updated and packed with Easter eggs that will tell you the Reputation (Taylor’s Version) release date (just kidding).

    No. Biden stepped aside and endorsed his vice president Kamala Harris before the pop star announced her preferred candidate in the 2024 election.

    Probably! Swift endorsed the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020, so it seems likely that she’ll voice her support for the Democratic nominee once again.

    Swift made her first public presidential endorsement about a month before the 2020 election, announcing her support for the Biden-Harris ticket with this tweet, featuring a batch of campaign logo cookies:

    Swift told V magazine:

    The change we need most is to elect a president who recognizes that people of color deserve to feel safe and represented, that women deserve the right to choose what happens to their bodies, and that the LGBTQIA+ community deserves to be acknowledged and included. Everyone deserves a government that takes global health risks seriously and puts the lives of its people first. The only way we can begin to make things better is to choose leaders who are willing to face these issues and find ways to work through them.

    I will proudly vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in this year’s presidential election. Under their leadership, I believe America has a chance to start the healing process it so desperately needs.

    If Swift follows her precedent from 2020, she might make a Harris endorsement about a month before the election, while she’s on a break from The Eras Tour. The European leg of her tour runs from May 9 to August 20, followed by a ten-week break. The Democratic National Convention is August 19 to 22. Election Day is November 5, and Swift’s tour resumes in Canada the following week.

    In recent years, Swift has periodically encouraged her social-media followers to vote. After she posted an Instagram message about registering to vote in September 2023, the nonpartisan nonprofit Vote.org recorded 35,252 new registrations on National Voter Registration Day, a 23 percent increase over the previous year.

    On March 5, 2024 she encouraged her supporters to vote on Super Tuesday, but she didn’t back any specific candidates.

    After confusing Swift for Britney Spears during his 2023 turkey pardon, Biden made clear this year that he does in fact know who she is, and would appreciate another endorsement.

    In February 2024, Biden joked several times about working with Swift to rig the Super Bowl for the Kansas City Chiefs. He referenced the baseless conspiracy theory — which nearly one in five Americans believe — in his first TikTok and this post-game social-media post:

    When Seth Meyers asked the president to “confirm or deny” that there is an “active conspiracy” between him and Swift a short time later, the president answered, “It’s classified.” He repeated the line when asked if she might endorse him again in 2024.

    While Biden has tried to play it cool in public, in January the New York Times reported that his campaign desperately wants Swift to get involved in the 2024 race:

    … The biggest and most influential endorsement target is Ms. Swift … Fund-raising appeals from Ms. Swift could be worth millions of dollars for Mr. Biden.

    Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a top Biden surrogate, all but begged Ms. Swift to become more involved in Mr. Biden’s campaign when he spoke to reporters after a Republican primary debate in September.

    “Taylor Swift stands tall and unique,” he said. “What she was able to accomplish just in getting young people activated to consider that they have a voice and that they should have a choice in the next election, I think, is profoundly powerful.”

    The chatter around Ms. Swift and the potential of reaching her 279 million Instagram followers reached such intensity that the Biden team urged applicants in a job posting for a social media position not to describe their Taylor Swift strategy — the campaign had enough suggestions already. One idea that has been tossed around, a bit in jest: sending the president to a stop on Ms. Swift’s Eras Tour.

    She publicly criticized Trump for the first time on June 1, 2019 in an open letter to Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander, urging the Republican to ensure protections for the LGBTQ+ community by passing the Equality Act. She said of then-President Trump:

    I personally reject the President’s stance that his administration “supports equal treatment of all,” but that the Equality Act, “in its current form is filled with poison pills that threaten to determine parental and conscience rights.” No, one cannot take the position that one supports a community, while condemning it in the next breath as going against “conscience” or “parental rights.” That statement implies that there is something morally wrong with you being anything other than heterosexual or cisgender, which is an incredibly harmful letter to send to a nation full of healthy and loving families with same-sex, non-binary or transgender parents, sons or daughters.

    Swift kept her political views to herself until the 2018 midterms, when she spoke out against Tennessee Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn. Swift explained why she’d previously remained silent in her Instagram post opposing Blackburn (who went on to win the election):

    In the past I’ve been reluctant to publicly voice my political opinions, but due to several events in my life and in the world in the past two years, I feel very differently about that now. I always have and always will cast my vote based on which candidate will protect and fight for the human rights I believe we all deserve in this country. I believe in the fight for LGBTQ rights, and that any form of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender is WRONG. I believe that the systemic racism we still see in this country towards people of color is terrifying, sickening and prevalent.

    Swift’s decision to endorse two Democrats in the 2018 midterms was a major plot point in her documentary Miss Americana). In the film, per The Daily Beast, she says she regrets not denouncing Trump publicly in 2016:

    In Miss Americana, released in 2020, Swift calls Blackburn “Trump in a wig” in footage of conversations leading up to her decision to drop the post. When one of Swift’s entourage warns her that speaking out against the candidate will prompt the press to conclude that she is also condemning Trump, Swift makes her stance clear. “I don’t care if they write that,” she says. “I’m sad I didn’t say it two years ago.”

    As the 2020 election grew closer, Swift voiced her support for the Black Lives Matter movement and criticized Trump several times on Twitter. In May 2020 she promised “we will vote you out in November”:

    And in August 2020, she accused Trump of trying to sabotage mail-in voting and said his “ineffective leadership” had “gravely worsened” the COVID-19 crisis:

    Yes, on more than one occasion. In January 2020 Swift released the song “Only the Young” to accompany the Miss Americana documentary. The lyrics seemed to make reference to Trump winning the 2016 election and other political issues, like school shootings: “You go to class, scared / Wondering where the best hiding spot would be / And the big bad man and his big bad clan / Their hands are stained with red.”

    In October 2020, Swift allowed Representative Eric Swalwell’s Remedy PAC to use the song in a pro-Biden ad and got a personal thank you from Kamala Harris:

    While Swift’s 2019 song “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince” is less explicitly anti-Trump, she confirmed in a September 2019 Rolling Stone interview that the high-school metaphor in the song is about Trump-era politics:

    There are so many influences that go into that particular song. I wrote it a couple of months after midterm elections, and I wanted to take the idea of politics and pick a metaphorical place for that to exist. And so I was thinking about a traditional American high school, where there’s all these kinds of social events that could make someone feel completely alienated. And I think a lot of people in our political landscape are just feeling like we need to huddle up under the bleachers and figure out a plan to make things better.

    We know from this clip of Trump quietly driving his Rolls-Royce while listening to “Blank Space,” which was filmed by Melania Trump and posted on her Facebook page, that he doesn’t mind her music.

    Trump tweeted about Swift several times during the Red era. He said the Swift-Connor Kennedy breakup was “great news” for her, and called her “terrific.” He also cryptically thanked Swift for the “beautiful picture.” As the Daily Beast notes, “if this tweet implies the existence of a photo of Swift and Trump posing together, it has almost certainly been scrubbed from the internet forever at the hands of Tree Paine, Swift’s formidable publicist.”

    Trump mildly rebuked Swift in 2018 after she endorsed the opponent of his preferred Tennessee Senate candidate, Marsha Blackburn, per The Daily Beast:

    Shortly afterward at a press conference, Trump smirked that he was “sure Taylor Swift has nothing, or doesn’t know anything about [Blackburn].” Then the infamous quote, later referenced on the Taylor Swift Netflix documentary Miss Americana: “And let’s say that I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?”

    Today the ex-president and the pop star are engaged in a popularity contest (in his mind, at least). Rolling Stone reported in January:

    Behind the scenes, Trump has reacted to the possibility of Biden and Swift teaming up against him this year not with alarm, but with an instant projection of ego. In recent weeks, the former president has told people in his orbit that no amount of A-list celebrity endorsements will save Biden. Trump has also privately claimed that he is “more popular” than Swift is and that he has more committed fans than she does, a person close to Trump and another source with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone.

    Last month, the source close to Trump adds, the ex-president commented to some confidants that it “obviously” made no sense that he was not named Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year — an honor that went to none other than Swift in December.

    On February 11, Trump made a desperate attempt to steal attention from Kelce and Swift and convince her not to endorse Biden. He posted this on Truth Social hours before the Super Bowl:

    Trump has been careful not to criticize Swift in public. In a November 2023 interview conducted for the forthcoming book Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass, Trump repeatedly called Swift “beautiful,” and questioned whether she’s actually liberal. Variety published an excerpt from the book on June 10:

    Trump, usually one to punch back at critics, is smart enough to know Swift’s fame is on another level. “She’s got a great star quality,” Trump says. “She really does.” Trump is effusive as he uses one of his favorite adjectives to describe women—“beautiful”— several times in a row.

    “I think she’s beautiful—very beautiful! I find her very beautiful. I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump. I hear she’s very talented. I think she’s very beautiful, actually—unusually beautiful!” It’s her fame, not her songcraft, that fascinates Trump. When asked about Swift’s music, played so frequently on the radio that it’s inescapable in daily life, he says, “Don’t know it well.”

    Beyond Swift’s looks, what intrigues Trump the most is the idea— frequently bandied about online before she endorsed the Democratic Senate candidate in Tennessee in 2018—that she could secretly be supporting him. “But she is liberal, or is that just an act?” he asks me. “She’s legitimately liberal? It’s not an act? It surprises me that a country star can be successful being liberal.”

    I tell Trump that Swift is no longer a country star; she’s been making pop music for years. He doesn’t seem aware of this, but he reaches for a different name. “Garth Brooks is liberal. Explain that! How does it happen? But he’s liberal.” Trump trails off. “It’s one of those things . .”

    Two weeks later CNN played the audio recording of Trump rambling about Swift’s beauty:

    But during a closed door meeting with Republican members of Congress on June 13, Trump reportedly complained about Swift being a Biden supporter:

    Could the megastar help boost turnout in the November election, especially among younger voters? That’s what multiple commentators have suggested. But PolitiFact poured cold water on the idea:

    … it is misguided to assume that Swift’s potential involvement in the race would be a magic bullet with guaranteed results. Experts say it often takes more than a single message or action for celebrity endorsements to move the needle in elections. And younger people could be particularly hard to sway because they consistently chalk up the lowest turnout rates at the polls. An endorsement would draw attention, but her fans already lean left.

    On the other hand, Biden did beat Trump in 2020. And betting against the power of Swifties is usually a bad idea.

    This piece has been updated throughout.


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    Margaret Hartmann

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  • The DNC’s Plan to Nominate Biden Early Is a Bad Idea

    The DNC’s Plan to Nominate Biden Early Is a Bad Idea

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    A virtual renomination of Biden and Harris in 2024 might be quickly unmasked as hiding buyer’s remorse.
    Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images

    The big story in American politics prior to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13 was the struggle within the Democratic Party over efforts to convince President Biden to step aside as the presidential nominee after his bad debate performance on June 27. You can argue all day long about what would have happened had the shooting in Pennsylvania not occurred. Perhaps Biden would have soon put out the fire in his camp and restored order; perhaps the persistent unhappiness of elected officials and even the party rank-and-file would have built to a climax that forced the president to hang up his spurs and turn his candidacy over to Kamala Harris.

    The prevailing conventional wisdom, however, is that Trump’s near-death froze any effort to defenestrate Biden in its tracks, and may have ended the Democratic rebellion as a serious prospect. But to be on the safe side, the Democratic National Committee, predictably a stronghold of Biden loyalists, is pushing ahead with plans to re-nominate the president well before delegates gather in Chicago on August 19. Plans are underway to formally nominate Biden via the sort of “virtual roll call” Democrats used in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, as the New York Times explained:

    Leaders of the Democratic National Committee are moving swiftly to confirm President Biden as his party’s presidential nominee by the end of July, according to four people briefed on the matter who insisted on anonymity to discuss the sensitive deliberations. …

    Since May, he has been set to be confirmed through a virtual roll call, weeks before the Democratic National Convention in August.

    But as Mr. Biden faces persistent doubts from within his party, some delegates involved with the behind-the-scene bureaucratic process are eager to end the public conversations about his future that are unfolding during a fiercely contested campaign.

    To be clear, the “virtual roll call” talk began long before the Atlanta debate debacle. It was mostly motivated by the success of the 2020 process, which allowed for a carefully staged roll call of the states that could be displayed to the world as a video presentation. The idea gained impetus as a roundabout way to minimize the number of high-stakes live events in Chicago that might become a magnet for the many pro-Palestinian protests being organized to coincide with the convention.

    If the idea of dodging protests by simply refusing to hold traditional convention actions is questionable from a public-relations point of view, rushing the nomination to head off a potential rebellion against Biden is far worse. It’s true that prior to the debate flub the roll-call vote was expected to be a pro forma coronation, much like Trump’s nomination in Milwaukee, which was held during an afternoon session on the first day of the RNC with almost no one watching. That’s clearly no longer true. And the official excuse being offered by Biden loyalists for the rush to judgment is, quite frankly, a crock, as Axios explained:

    The DNC’s stated reason for front-running the nomination — Ohio’s Aug. 7 deadline for ballot access — is no longer relevant because Ohio changed its law. The state’s new deadline is Sept. 1.

    The new deadline is safely after the end of the Democratic convention. But in announcing his intention to hold a virtual roll call, DNC chairman Jaime Harrison vaguely alluded to some nonexistent threat to retroactively kick Biden off the Ohio ballot:

    “This election comes down to nothing less than saving our democracy from a man who has said he wants to be a dictator on ‘day one,’ ” Harrison said in his statement. …

    “So we certainly are not going to leave the fate of this election in the hands of MAGA Republicans in Ohio that have tried to keep President Biden off of the general election ballot.”

    Predictably, this course of action has angered Democrats who want to renew the option of a different presidential nominee before it’s too late, as another report from Axios makes clear:

    A letter circulating among congressional Democrats argues that there is “no legal justification” for an early virtual roll call after Ohio moved its filing deadline past the date of the Democratic convention.

    “We respectfully but emphatically request that you cancel any plans for an accelerated ‘virtual roll call’ and further refrain from any extraordinary procedures that could be perceived as curtailing legitimate debate,” it says.

    If this protest fails to regenerate the rebellion against Biden, perhaps his nomination is so secure that it doesn’t really matter whether he’s nominated in a live convention session on or after August 19 or “virtually” a couple of weeks earlier. But in that case, why rush it? There is a risk that the DNC’s maneuver will backfire and lend a sense of real urgency to a simmering revolt that has slowed to a low boil.

    It’s possible the White House is worried about a scary drop in the polls that combines a post-convention “bounce” for Trump with the lingering concerns about Biden’s fitness for office that Republicans are already bringing up often in their communications from Milwaukee. There are already reports from CNN that veteran Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg is sending up flares in private communications to Team Biden:

    “Lose everything,” is how one Democrat described a polling memo Greenberg sent to Biden’s inner circle in recent days. “Devastating,” was the one word answer of a second Democrat close to the White House who is familiar with the Greenberg memos.

    These sources said Greenberg has sent several memos over the past two weeks since the president’s devastating debate performance, analyzing internal polling he asserts shows the president’s position continues to deteriorate because Americans overwhelmingly do not see him as up to serving four more years.

    It’s understandable that Biden loyalists would prefer to move on to November before such disturbing data sinks in. But the last thing Democrats need is to convene in Chicago amid the hoopla of a national convention in which the real story just under the surface is buyer’s remorse.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • History Shows Democrats Can’t Lose the Presidency and Win the House

    History Shows Democrats Can’t Lose the Presidency and Win the House

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    Don’t count on Speaker Jeffries to contain President Trump.
    Photo: Ting Shen/Bloomberg/Getty Images

    One of the ideas coming out of the agonizing intra-Democratic debate about Joe Biden’s fitness to beat Donald Trump is a sort of plan B. Donors, we are told, are considering shifting resources to an effort to flip control of the House (just four seats away) in order to block a Trump-led Republican trifecta and a bacchanalia of authoritarian extremism next year. The reigning assumption is that absent a presidential win (which provides the tie-breaking vote in the Senate), maintaining Democratic control of the upper chamber will be almost impossible, since Republicans are sure to flip West Virginia, and all the other competitive races are on Democratic turf. So making Hakeem Jeffries House Speaker offers the best return on investment and perhaps relief from the agony of watching Biden like a hawk every time he’s on-camera.

    It’s an interesting strategy but not terribly promising from a historical point of view. The last time House control flipped in a presidential-election year was in 1952, when Republicans benefited from a presidential landslide. The last six times House control has flipped (in 1954, 1994, 2006, 2010, 2018, and 2022), it’s happened in midterm elections featuring a very common backlash against the president’s party. You know how often a party has lost the White House and flipped the U.S. House in the same election? Zero times. There were times when Senate races (with their highly eccentric landscapes thanks to only one-third of seats being up in any one election) moved in a very different direction from the presidential election. But the House has always been harnessed to White House results in fundamental and even predictable ways, as political scientist David Faris points out:

    Political scientist Robert Erikson found in 2016 that for “every percentage point that a presidential candidate gains in the two-party vote, their party’s down-ballot candidates gain almost half a point themselves.” A 1990 study by James E. Campbell and Joe A. Sumners found that for every 10 points that a presidential candidate gains in a state, it boosts that party’s Senate contender by 2 points, and its House hopefuls by 4. This basic logic is a large part of why the past five presidents brought congressional majorities into office with them when they were elected to their first term.

    And most of this historical record, mind you, was forged in the bygone era of relatively nonideological major parties that made ticket-splitting immensely more common. House Democrats entered the 2024 cycle optimistic about making gains since 16 Republicans are in districts carried by Biden in 2020 while only five Democrats are in Trump ’20 districts. But as J. Miles Coleman of Sabato’s Crystal Ball observes, an even Biden-Trump race in the national popular vote would turn six Democratic-held House districts red. A 3.3 percent Trump advantage in the national popular vote (his margin in the polling averages Coleman was using) would turn 19 Democratic-held House districts red.

    Flipping the House if Biden loses decisively is hard to imagine. Even now, with polls showing a close presidential race, all of the major House prognosticators give Republicans a slight advantage (Cook Political Report, for example, shows the GOP favored in 210 races and Democrats favored in 203, with 22 toss-ups, half of them currently controlled by each party). The congressional generic ballot, polling that estimates the House national popular vote, is dead even (on average, Democrats lead by 0.5 percent in FiveThirtyEight, Republicans by 0.3 percent in RealClearPolitics). This will be an uphill fight for Democrats in the best of circumstances. And it should be remembered that Biden’s party lost 13 net House seats in 2020 even as he won the White House.

    History, current analysis, and common sense indicate that abandoning the presidential ticket to focus on House races as though they are isolated contests is a fool’s errand for Democrats. Whether it’s Biden, Kamala Harris, or some improbable fantasy candidate heading the ticket, the presidential race needs to stay highly competitive if Democrats want to make House gains. If Trump rides back into the White House with a solid win, his toady Mike Johnson will almost certainly be there to help him turn his scary plans into legislation.

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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Trump Assassination Attempt Suspect Identified: Live Updates

    Trump Assassination Attempt Suspect Identified: Live Updates

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    Trump spoke for about six minutes before shots rang out, delivering his standard rally speech. You can see the full video on C-SPAN.

    He started by commenting on the “big crowd” and lamenting that the “fake news” refused to turn the cameras around and show it because “nobody would believe it.” (Trump has been saying this for years, though the media regularly shows the size of his rally crowds.) Then Trump mocked Joe Biden, claiming only “93 people” showed up to one of his recent events.

    Trump promised to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, who he falsely claims are largely from mental institutions and prisons. “We’ve got to bring our country back to health, because our country is going to hell, if you haven’t noticed,” he said. “Millions and millions of people are pouring in from prisons and from mental institutions. We’re going to stop it. We’re going to bring them back. We’re going to deport.”

    Trump vowed to “defeat Crooked Joe Biden and Laffin’ Kamala Harris,” using his new nickname for the vice-president. And he claimed that he didn’t actually lose the last election.

    “We did fantastically in 2016,” he said. “We did much better in 2020 and it was rigged, it was a rigged deal.”

    Next Trump shouted out Republican Senate nominee David McCormick, who was in the crowd. He said his Democratic opponent, Senator Bob Casey, is “a real stiff” who “votes for Biden or whoever happens to be furthest left.”

    Trump accused Biden of not understanding the meaning of “Make America Great Again,” joking that he’d be “at some beautiful place with a gorgeous ocean” if Biden “was doing the job.”

    Finally, Trump pivoted back to claiming that “dangerous people,” “criminals,” and “drug dealers” are flooding into the country and had his team bring up a chart on illegal border crossings during his administration (which was not visible on the C-SPAN feed). Trump was discussing the chart when the first shots rang out. “And you know, that’s a little bit old, that chart,” he said. “That chart’s a couple of months old. If want to really see something that’s sad, take a look at what happened …”

    Then Trump grabbed his ear and crouched down as he was hit.

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    Intelligencer Staff

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  • Biden Survives His High-Stakes Press Conference: How It Happened

    Biden Survives His High-Stakes Press Conference: How It Happened

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    The Capitol Hill building where Democratic senators heard from top Biden aides Mike Donilon, Steve Richetti, and Jen O’Malley Dillon had two exits, one on a side street with a nice view of the Supreme Court and the other emptying out onto four lanes of traffic on Constitution Avenue with no shade from the July sun. Most senators invariably used the second, because it was the one where they wouldn’t be interrogated by reporters.

    The few who trickled out of the first exit were reluctant to answer any questions at all about the meeting where they sought reassurance from the president’s team that there was a way he could win reelection. They didn’t even answer questions about what was for lunch.

    Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal offered the cryptic answer that “some of my concerns are allayed, some others have been deepened” after the meeting — which Politico reported didn’t seem to have changed anyone’s minds. Still, Blumenthal insisted ahead of Biden’s press conference that he has to “go to American people, not just in one meeting, in one press conference, or in one speech but consistently and constantly.”

    “Tonight will be important,” he said. “The press conference will be potentially a turning point, but there has to be more than one.”

    Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire offered a panglossian spin, rare among Democrats who have been increasingly stone-faced in recent days. “The best way to defeat Donald Trump is to reelect President Biden,” she said. “I thought the presentation we had was a really excellent one.”

    The windows of the building, which was headquarters of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, were plastered with stickers encouraging passersby to look up www.goponabortion.com — a campaign website where they criticized Republicans for their opposition to Roe v. Wade. No one outside was pulling up the website though. They were too busy reading the statement from the latest House member to demand that Biden drop out.

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    Intelligencer Staff

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  • Trump’s Beard Praise Does Not Bode Well for J.D. Vance VP Pick

    Trump’s Beard Praise Does Not Bode Well for J.D. Vance VP Pick

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    Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty

    The political career of J.D. Vance has undergone quite the transformation. In 2016 he was fretting to his college roommate that Donald Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” Today the U.S. senator from Ohio is aggressively pro-Trump, and he’s rumored to be one of the top finalists on the VP shortlist (along with Doug Burgum, Marco Rubio, and maybe Tim Scott). But those who believe Vance has excellent odds of becoming Trump’s 2024 running mate are forgetting one very important thing: Vance has a beard, and Trump has a weird aversion to facial hair.

    The former U.S. president/beauty-pageant owner puts a lot of stock in who has “the look”; when filling his Cabinet he praised several candidates for being “out of central casting.” And as the Bulwark reported on July 9, it’s likely that in Trump’s mind, a vice-president should not have facial hair.

    “J.D. has a beard. But Trump is a clean-shaven guy. He just doesn’t like facial hair,” a Trump confidant told the outlet. “You just never know.”

    Trump’s issues with whiskers are well-known. In 2020 he publicly told his son Don Jr. to get rid of his quarantine beard, and John Bolton’s bushy mustache reportedly took him out of the running for secretary of State (in 2018 he became national security adviser, but by then Trump was desperate). Trump is basically a real-life version of Monty Burns shouting at Don Mattingly to “shave those sideburns.” But that solution isn’t going to work for Vance, according to the Bulwark:

    So why not shave his face? It’s probably out of the question for Vance because of how young he is and looks. The Ohio senator turns 40 on August 2 and would be the third-youngest vice president to serve. But Trump wants someone who is experienced—or at least looks experienced. And “without the beard, Vance looks like he’s 12,” said another Trump adviser.

    So Vance — who admitted it’ll be a “disappointment” if Trump does’t pick him for VP — must have been relieved when Trump denied that his beard is an issue during a July 10 interview with Brian Kilmeade on Fox News Radio.

    “It looks good,” Trump said. “He looks like a young Abraham Lincoln.”

    This was generally taken as a “glowing endorsement” of Vance’s look. And sure, to any sane person that’s what it sounds like. But it’s a huge red flag to anyone well-versed in Trump’s bizarre grudges and insecurities .

    Trump has a long-running rivalry with Abraham Lincoln. It is a one-sided beef, as the 16th president is dead, and he clearly would not be threatened by Trump even if he weren’t. But on numerous occasions, Trump has pointed to Lincoln as the one possible exception to his claims of being the greatest president of all time.

    “I’ve always said I can be more presidential than any president in history except for Honest Abe Lincoln, when he’s wearing the hat,” Trump said at a rally in 2019. “That’s tough, that’s tough. That’s a tough one to beat.”

    Trump continued claiming that he’s “always competed” against Lincoln throughout his presidency, and earlier this year he blasted his 19th-century predecessor for failing to use negotiation tactics to prevent the Civil War.

    So is it really a good sign for Vance that he reminds Trump of the man he thinks of as his biggest rival? Particularly when Trump has already been publicly warned that Vance could potentially “outshine” him, and even replace him as leader of the MAGA movement?

    I’d argue that it’s actually a good indicator that Vance should brace himself for disappointment. Why would Trump pick a running mate who stirs up his deep-seated Lincoln-related insecurities when he could go with Burgum, a guy who most resembles an inoffensive, lesser-known Muppet?


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    Margaret Hartmann

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  • Biden Resistance Appears To Be Waning in Congress

    Biden Resistance Appears To Be Waning in Congress

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    Democrats may not believe Joe Biden is the strongest candidate to defeat Donald Trump in November, but there seemed to be a grim resignation on Capitol Hill on Monday night that none were willing to take the steps that might actually push Biden to drop out. If Democrats could simply wave a magic wand to remove the president from the ticket, they would. But all they have are knives, and few are inclined to use them.

    The fretting was based on the calculus that while Biden was likely to lose if he remained on the ticket, an unsuccessful effort to oust him would just widen the margin of defeat (and the resulting down-ballot casualties). Many took an abstract view of the process as if it was some intellectual question that needed to be worked out on a blackboard. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told reporters “I think we are having an important national conversation and I am confident that the president will make a decision in the best interest of the country.” There was no sense that Biden has already announced that decision a number of times, including hours before in a letter to Congressional Democrats and again during a phone interview with Morning Joe.

    Fatalism gripped the Democratic Party on Monday, fueling a desire among many just to resolve all of this quickly. As one donor said “the longer it lingers, the worse it is going to be in November.” Only Joe Biden could really decide to remove himself from the ticket, and barring a shocking turn of events, he wasn’t going to relinquish that grip. In the meantime, the more the media feeding frenzy continued, the tougher it would be for Democrats in competitive races. After all, the last thing Democrats want to do is spend day after day answering questions about Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities, and until there was a definitive resolution, they wouldn’t have a choice. There would be no open convention, no Sorkinesque sacrifice — just another grim four months of plodding along with a flawed nominee.

    One senior Democratic aide invoked the T.S. Eliot line that became a cliche long before even Biden was born: “This won’t end with a bang but a whimper.”

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    Intelligencer Staff

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  • The Case(s) Against Donald Trump

    The Case(s) Against Donald Trump

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    Case type: Civil
    Where: New York Supreme Court
    Attorney: Roberta Kaplan
    Status: Trump was found liable for battery and defamation in May 2023 and was found liable in a second defamation trial in January 2024.

    In a 2019 New York cover story, writer E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. After Trump accused her of lying, Carroll, represented by Roberta Kaplan, sued him for defamation. Then she sued for damages over the alleged assault, taking advantage of a recent New York law that extends the statute of limitations for adult survivors of sexual abuse. The trial began in April 2023, and on May 9, a jury ruled that Trump was liable for sexual assault and defamation, awarding Carroll $5 million in damages.

    A second defamation trial began in federal court in New York on January 15, 2024, and lasted a week, with Carroll testifying that Trump destroyed her reputation after she accused him of assault. A jury found Trump liable for defamation after three hours of deliberation, ordering him to pay Carroll an additional $83.3 million in damages. Trump and his legal team have vowed to appeal both verdicts.

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    Nia Prater

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  • What Happened in Biden’s High-Stakes ABC Interview?

    What Happened in Biden’s High-Stakes ABC Interview?

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    This section of the interview focused on the widely reported concerns about Biden’s capacity to be a winning candidate, and his current standing in the race — and the president’s answer is unlikely to assuage those concerns. From the transcript (video of the exchange here):

    GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: If you are told reliably from your allies, from your friends and supporters in the Democratic Party in the House and the Senate that they’re concerned you’re gonna lose the House and the Senate if you stay in, what will you do?

    PRESIDENT BIDEN: I’m not gonna answer that question. It’s not gonna happen.

    STEPHANOPOULOS: What’s your plan to turn the campaign around?

    BIDEN: You saw it today. How many– how many people draw crowds like I did today? Find me more enthusiastic than today? Huh?

    STEPHANOPOULOS: I mean, have– I don’t think you wanna play the crowd game. Donald Trump can draw big crowds. There’s no question about that.

    BIDEN: He can draw a big crowd, but what does he say? Who– who does he have? I’m the guy supposedly in trouble. We raised $38 million within four days after this. We have over a million individual contributors, individual contributors. That– that’s less than 200 bucks. We have– I mean, I’ve not seen what you’re proposing.

    STEPHANOPOULOS: You haven’t seen the fall-off in the polls? You haven’t seen the reports of discontent in the Democratic Party, House Democrats, Senate Democrats?

    BIDEN: I’ve seen it from the press.

    STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, I’ve heard from dozens of your supporters over the last few days, and a variety of views, I grant you that. But the prevailing sentiment is this. They love you, and they will be forever grateful to you for defeating Donald Trump in 2020. They think you’ve done a great job as President, a lot of the successes you outlined. But they are worried about you and the country. And they don’t think you can win. They want you to go with grace, and they will cheer you if you do. What do you say to that?

    BIDEN: I say the vast majority are not where that– those folks are. I don’t doubt there are some folks there. Have you ever seen a group– a time when elected officials running for office aren’t little worried? Have you ever seen that? I’ve not. Same thing happened in 2020. “Oh, Biden, I don’t know. Man, what’s he gonna do? He may bring me down, he may…”

    STEPHANOPOULOS: Mr. President, I’ve never seen a President with 36 percent approval get reelected.

    BIDEN: Well, I don’t believe that’s my approval rating. That’s not what our polls show.

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    Chas Danner

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  • How Can Biden Be Replaced? A Guide to Democrats’ Next Steps.

    How Can Biden Be Replaced? A Guide to Democrats’ Next Steps.

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    Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

    Democrats who are freaking out about Joe Biden’s dismal performance in his Atlanta debate with Donald Trump have a lot of question about their options going forward. Now that talk of replacing the president as the Democrats’ 2024 nominee has gotten serious, distant historical precedents and arcane Democratic National Committee rules are suddenly very relevant. Here’s a guide to what happens if Democrats choose another candidate to face Trump in November.

    Sure. At this point he is simply the “presumptive nominee.” The Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which begins on August 19, would normally name the actual nominee. But in order to meet Ohio’s general election ballot deadline of August 7, the Democratic National Committee has voted to hold a “virtual roll call” before the convention (the exact date has not yet been set, though July 21 has been floated as a possibility, raising suspicions the DNC may be trying to run out the clock on any Plan B scenario). Until then, the name that will go onto the bumper stickers, theoretically at least, could be Joe Biden, me, or you.

    If Biden is to be replaced, it would be much easier — and from a political point of view, immensely better — if Biden withdrew as a candidate. For one thing, that would get rid of the obligation delegates had to support him under the laws of 14 states. And it could pave the way to a reasonably harmonious convention and far less disruption of the general election campaign.

    But technically speaking, a majority of convention delegates can nominate whomever they wish. State laws aside, pledged Democratic delegates (unlike Republican delegates) have no more than a moral obligation to back their candidate, and a convention-passed rule could even override state laws.

    No. Like Biden, until she is formally renominated (again, via a virtual roll-call vote at some point prior to August 7), the vice-president has no special status. Even if Biden resigned his office and Harris became president, she’d have to be nominated by delegates to appear on the November ballot.

    In theory, anyone who met the constitutional qualifications to serve as president could replace Biden. In reality, there’s no sort of consensus behind any particular “replacement” candidate. (Perhaps the most discussed fallback candidate, former First Lady Michelle Obama, has repeatedly denied interest.) No one is likely to step forward as long as Biden is still running, and if Biden withdraws, his support for a replacement will be all-important and perhaps dispositive. There’s no reason to think he’d back anyone other than his vice-president.

    Names of Democrats who have been kicked around in fantasy scenarios for a Biden-less ticket have included a number of governors — notably California’s Gavin Newsom, Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, and Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro — along with 2020 candidate and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and some real long shots like Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia. Some progressives might even note that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez turns 35 in October. But again, there’s no consensus, and while pundits thrill at the idea of an “open convention” where multiple candidates duke it out, that would be a nightmare for a party trying to plan a general election campaign.

    There’s been an effort by some voices who favor a non-Biden, non-Harris solution to the current quandary to imagine some sort of pre-roll-call public gatherings — perhaps even debates — to build consensus. It’s unclear whether this sort of “mini-primary,” as Democratic poohbah Jim Clyburn called it, is in any way feasible. (It’s possible Clyburn was referring to a process for choosing a new VP to run with Harris, whom he earlier endorsed for the presidential nomination if Biden “steps aside.”). In any event, all these “open convention” scenarios should be assessed in terms of the disaster that could face Democrats if they push aside both Biden and Harris and then deadlock on a nominee. One unhappy precedent is the Democratic Convention in New York exactly a century ago, where a dispirited and divided party nominated an obscure diplomat after 103 ballots who got absolutely clocked in the general election.

    The presidential balloting is scheduled to take place prior to the convention. But the process, virtual or live, would be the same: a name or names would be placed into nomination by a delegate, and state delegations would vote in alphabetical order until someone has a majority.

    Unlike Republicans, Democrats have superdelegates — 744 of them in 2024 — who attend the convention in recognition of the offices they hold (or held). They include members of the DNC; members of Congress; governors; and former presidents and vice-presidents. They are free to support whomever they wish but cannot vote on the first ballot, when the nomination will very likely be determined.

    Just as the old vice-presidential nominee was chosen: by a roll-call vote. This person would probably be the presidential nominee’s preferred running mate, but delegates could choose someone else. The last time there was a serious convention vote for someone other than the presidential nominee’s running mate was at the 1968 RNC, when George Romney got a significant number of votes against eventual nominee Spiro T. Agnew.

    Members of the Democratic National Committee (not convention delegates) have the power to fill vacancies on the presidential ticket by a simple majority. It exercised that power in 1972 when then-Senator Thomas Eagleton stepped down as George McGovern’s running mate after revelations of drunk-driving charges and electroshock therapy. So if Biden or Harris or anyone else resigned from the ticket after the convention, the DNC could replace them. But there’s no clear power to remove a nominee who won’t go quietly.

    No. Plenty of presidential nominees have begun the general election campaign in a deeper hole than Biden is in right now, but none have been replaced. The talk of replacing him is largely a function of the special horror Democrats have for the prospect of a second Trump term.

    There are two very recent surveys that test alternatives, including a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on July 2:

    When asked about hypothetical Democratic candidate matches against Trump, 50% of registered voters say they would vote for Michelle Obama, and just 39% say they would vote for Trump.

    All other hypothetical Democratic candidates either perform similarly to or worse than Biden against Trump. Vice President Kamala Harris hypothetically wins 42% of registered voters to Trump’s 43%. California Governor Gavin Newsom hypothetically wins 39% of registered voters to Trump’s 42%. All other hypothetical Democratic candidates earn between 34% to 39% of potential votes among registered voters.

    A CNN survey also released on July 2 showed Kamala Harris trailing Trump by just two points; Pete Buttigieg trailing Trump by four points; and Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whimter trailing him by five points.

    It’s hard to say. The first credible post-debate general election polls are showing Biden losing a couple of points against Trump, with some terrible internal findings that big majorities of voters think Biden is too old. But there’s no sign just yet that the race has changed fundamentally, so the panic right now is mostly among Democrats who were already on the edge of panic before the debate.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Biden and Harris’s Absurd Case for Complacency

    Biden and Harris’s Absurd Case for Complacency

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    After absorbing the initial waves of shock from Thursday night’s debate debacle, allies of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have begun whispering to the media their reasons why the Democratic ticket must consist of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It is that, if Biden steps aside, the party’s only option would be to anoint Harris. If they fail to do so, Black voters would be outraged and register their dismay at the polls (or by refusing to go to the polls), thus ensuring Donald Trump’s election.

    The Biden logic then proceeds to its next step: Harris would be a worse nominee than Biden, thus nullifying any reason for him to relinquish his spot on the ticket.

    You can see the logic being traced out via the media. “Biden allies have played out the scenarios and see little chance of anyone besides Harris winning the nomination if he stepped aside,” explains Axios. “Is the Democratic Party going to deny the nomination to the first woman, the first Black American, and the first South Asian American to be elected V.P.?”

    “Most Democrats who want to replace Biden also remain extremely dubious that his incumbent running mate, Kamala Harris, could beat Trump — but if she sought the nomination, then denying that prize to the first woman of color who has served as vice president could tear apart the party,” reports Ron Brownstein. “The fear that such a fight could practically ensure defeat in November is one reason Democrats who are uneasy about renominating Biden have held their tongue for so long.”

    Of course, Harris’s allies understandably dispute the premise that her nomination would be disastrous. But they very much cooperate with the implied threat that denying her the nomination would rip open mortal wounds in the Democratic coalition. “The fact that people keep coming back to this is so offensive to so many of us. They still don’t get that the message you’re saying to people, to this Democratic Party, is, we prefer a white person,” a veteran Democrat and Harris ally tells Politico, which notes that Harris’s allies and aides are “not shy about pointing out the optics of substituting any other candidate (likely White, possibly male) for Harris — a move that they suggest would upset not only Black delegates at the convention but also Black voters with whom the Biden campaign is already on shaky ground.”

    And so, by the logic offered by the Biden and Harris teams, the ticket is frozen in place. Biden can’t step down because he would have to hand the role to Harris, and the party doesn’t trust her in that position. Harris’s allies are aiming a gun at the party, Biden is pointing at Harris, pleading his own helplessness.

    If this reasoning characterized the situation accurately, then the party is indeed doomed to shuffle forlornly toward November and the likely restoration of Trump and all the horrors he would bring. But I find the rationale not only suspiciously self-serving but also wrong on several key points.

    First, while there was good reason to believe a year ago that Harris was clearly worse than Biden, there is much less reason to think that today. His catastrophic debate performance was an out-of-sample event. We will await more polling to measure the scale of the destruction, but Biden’s campaign had been pointing to the debate as the event that would redirect public attention from Biden’s faltering performance and onto Trump’s maniacal unfitness. Not only did Biden fail utterly, he achieved the opposite of his intention. It’s difficult to imagine anything Trump could do or say that would attract more attention than Biden spending an hour and a half sounding like a cast member in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

    Is Harris a mediocre politician? At this point, mediocrity at the head of the ticket would be a welcome improvement.

    Now, while I think Harris is probably a better option than Biden, she is not the Democrats’ best option. If you undertake a change as radical as swapping out your presidential candidate because he’s losing to a sociopathic criminal, then you should really go ahead and pick a candidate whose political and governing skills have the confidence of the party elite. As Napoleon said, if you start to take Vienna, take Vienna.

    This brings me to the next problem with the Biden-Harris argument for staying the course. If Harris is passed over, the threat is that Black voters won’t give Democrats the necessary landslide margins they need. That is happening already. Almost every poll shows the Biden-Harris ticket is garnering the lowest levels of Black support for any Democratic ticket in decades. The danger of a depressed Black electorate is being used to maintain a ticket that is losing in part because of a depressed Black electorate.

    What evidence is there that having Harris as vice president and heir apparent has any positive effect on a constituency outside of political elites and professional activists who whisper to reporters? What reason is there to believe a different ticket, which could easily feature a different Black vice-presidential candidate on it, would fare any worse?

    It helps to think more specifically about the hypothetical complaint that would ensue from Biden-Harris being replaced with, say, Whitmer-Booker. The complaint would be that Harris was passed over for a less-qualified white candidate, and Black candidates are being shunted into the vice presidency, a powerless role, because Democrats don’t trust them in the top job.

    That complaint might have some rational basis if it weren’t for the very well-known fact that Democrats did nominate an African-American for president in the very recent past. Twice! Indeed, Barack Obama leaped ahead of the older white candidate whose supporters believed it was her turn to get the job. So the main basis of Harris’s discrimination charge would be obviously false.

    That the hypothetical specter of baseless charges of racism are being used to empower an obviously ineffective white male candidate reveals a deeper problem to the Democratic Party’s approach to representational politics.

    Identity politics in American elections is not some modern Democratic Party innovation. For most of our history, campaigns were bound by an unstated but extremely firm requirement that the candidate pool be limited to white men. Parties have always deliberately chosen candidates with backgrounds tailored to appeal to identity blocs — Protestant, Catholic, German, Irish, etc. It was long standard practice for presidential tickets to balance a Southern presidential nominee with a Northerner, or vice-versa. None of this was seen as fatally compromising qualifications for the sake of identity politics.

    Still, even when parties employed hard regional or ethnic quotas for picking candidates, they still applied some test of candidate skill. The bosses in the smoke-filled room would try to assess whether the candidate could garner votes. That was the candidate’s job, garnering votes. And there has never been any reason to believe Harris possesses this talent at the level required to win a presidential election.

    She won a Senate race in California, but that is a state where winning the nomination is tantamount to winning the general election. It does not require appealing to any voters who are not reliable Democrats. (For this same reason, I would absolutely not consider Gavin Newsom to replace Biden).

    Harris is telegenic, and appears forceful in prepared settings when she can use her prosecutorial background. I was an early supporter of her 2020 presidential campaign. But that campaign was utterly shambolic. Despite having the benefit of the media treating her as a top-tier candidate, she committed a series of blunders, including changing her position on Medicare for All — at the time the most important issue in the campaign — three times, without ever being able to discuss the issue coherently.

    Biden selected her anyway, due to a strange combination of factors. Early on, he promised to appoint a female vice-presidential nominee. And after winning the nomination, the murder of George Floyd led activists to pressure him to choose someone who was Black.

    The combination of those two requirements functionally narrowed the candidate pool to a single person. Biden considered Karen Bass and Val Demings, who were both members of the House of Representatives, and even Susan Rice, who had never held elective office. But the traditional bar for vice presidents is a governor or senator, and Harris was literally the only Black woman who met that bar. It is surely true that deeply embedded racism and sexism has prevented more Black women from attaining those positions. But where things stood in 2020, Harris applied for a job in which she had the only qualifying resume.

    A more sure-footed Biden campaign would have been able to resist demands that had boxed in their options to such an extreme degree. Here, I think, the extreme non-diversity of Biden’s inner circle left him highly vulnerable. Biden has long confined his trusted confidantes to a small handful of mostly male and entirely white advisers. This made female and non-white Democrats groups understandably suspicious that Biden was not listening to their perspective, and made it harder, especially in the feverish post-Floyd atmosphere, to push back. Biden’s path of least resistance was to avoid any identity politics fights during the campaign and get through to November with a united party.

    Democrats hoped Harris learned from her campaign and would develop into a plausible successor. It’s clear that few leading Democrats believe she has done so. Assessing the performance of a vice president, who has no real official responsibilities, is notoriously amorphous and inherently subject to all kinds of bias, including racism and sexism. Still, Harris has churned through staff. Last year, a New York Times story on her performance contained an absolutely devastating passage:

    But the painful reality for Ms. Harris is that in private conversations over the last few months, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill and around the nation — including some who helped put her on the party’s 2020 ticket — said she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country. Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.

    Harris can chalk this all up to racism and sexism, but even Democrats her own team selected as character witnesses have said they don’t think she is up to the job. If you want to understand why Democrats are so hesitant to replace Biden with Harris, this more than explains their belief.

    So where does this leave the party right now? Obviously, Biden can’t change decisions he made four years ago. But this history should give Democrats a more skeptical perspective on the use and abuse of political jockeying styled as identity politics.

    The modern Democratic Party’s laudable and correct interest in expanding its leadership to excluded groups has had the unfortunate side effect of allowing candidates to weaponize insinuation. Just try to recall the endless volley of charges of racism and sexism between supporters of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008, Clinton and Sanders in 2016, or basically everybody in 2020 without cringing.

    That history is the backstop of the party’s current paralysis. And that toxicity has now returned, with Biden-Harris supporters already taking to social media to tar Democrats who disagree with them as racist, sexist, or both. It may or may not be the case that Democrats are so deeply enmeshed in the most cartoonish form of identity politics discourse that they can’t make clear-headed political choices, even with the highest possible stakes.

    What they should not do is passively accept this state of affairs as an unalterable force of nature. Democrats have a choice about how they conduct their public debates over their nominees. When political actors use charges of bias to position their favored candidate for power, they can subject these claims to the appropriate level of skepticism rather than treat them as nuclear weapons aimed at their base. Submitting to this form of extortion is a choice, as is, potentially, ignoring or resisting it.

    This doesn’t mean Harris can’t be the nominee. At the moment, according to one post-debate poll, only 27 percent of Americans believe Joe Biden has the mental and cognitive health to serve as president. This poses an almost-insurmountable obstacle to his election, even with Trump’s manifest unfitness. Biden is losing, and he has already squandered what his own campaign considered his best chance to change the race.

    Again, even with all her limitations, Harris is probably a stronger candidate now than Biden. I also think there are better options than Harris. My choice would be Gretchen Whitmer, who’s displayed a repeated talent at appealing to swing voters, and who could be paired with a Black running mate like Cory Booker. There are other promising options, but I won’t pretend I can offer any single solution with any confidence that it’s the best way to go. I do believe that almost any change, including a Harris nomination, makes more sense than keeping a nominee who has so deeply forfeited public confidence.

    My overarching point is that Democrats need to summon the collective willpower to make political choices in the clear-headed interest of their party and their country. It’s not too late, but very soon it will be. The Biden campaign has brought the party to a crisis point by a series of choices dictated by personal comfort, short-term thinking, and narrow self-interest. These decisions may be rational for the individuals involved, but they add up to a collective disaster.

    If that persists, they will continue to drift toward a potentially irreversible setback for American democracy. If Biden and Harris haven’t opened their eyes to what we are now facing, everybody else in their party with influence has a duty to grab them by the shoulder and force them to.


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    Jonathan Chait

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  • What the Polls Are Saying After the Trump-Biden Debate

    What the Polls Are Saying After the Trump-Biden Debate

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    Per Survey USA’s summary of its national post-debate poll, which was conducted among 3,300 adults, including 2,315 likely voters:

    Just 29% of all voters say Biden is up to the job; 57% say he is not. Among Biden’s own voters, just 64% say he is up to the job; 14% say he is not; 22% are not sure. … 55% of likely Democratic voters say Biden should continue his run for a second term in office; 34% say he should step aside and allow another Democrat to run. 10% aren’t sure. If Biden does not step aside, 57% of likely Democratic voters say the Democratic Party should nominate him to run again at the Democratic National Convention this August; 33% say they should nominate another Democrat instead.

    If Biden is replaced on the top of the ticket, which Democrat should replace him?

    • 43% of likely Democratic voters say it should be Vice President Kamala Harris, including 63% of Black Democrats, 56% of Democrats age 35 to 49, 55% of those with children under 18 at home, and 53% of those with high school educations. Harris leads or ties as the top choice among every demographic subgroup.

    • 16% choose California Governor Gavin Newsom, including a high of 24% among the oldest and typically most reliable voters, where he is tied with Harris. Newsom also sees outsized support among Democrats with higher income and education levels, and among men.

    • 8% choose Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who outperforms his numbers among white and rural Democrats.

    • 7% choose Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who outperforms her numbers among liberals.

    • 4% choose Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro; 2% Maryland Governor Wes Moore; 1% choose someone else. 20% are undecided.

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    Chas Danner

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  • Yes, Democrats Can Still Replace Biden

    Yes, Democrats Can Still Replace Biden

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    If Biden leaves the stage of his own accord, Democrats will have options.
    Photo: Rebecca Noble/Getty Images

    Editor’s note: this piece originally ran in February 2024. We are republishing it this morning now that talk of replacing Biden has exploded following his disastrous debate performance.

    One byproduct of what some are calling “Oldgate” — a panic over Special Counsel Robert Hur’s suggestion that President Joe Biden is an “elderly man” with memory issues — has been media efforts to understand and explain how Democrats could replace the 46th president as their 2024 nominee, either with or without his consent. From a political perspective, the idea that Biden might be dumped from the ticket is extremely far-fetched. But technically it is possible, though increasingly complicated, right up to Election Day.

    When it comes to changing horses in the middle of a presidential race, Democrats differ from Republicans in one fundamental respect: While GOP rules bind delegates to the candidates who win primaries or caucuses, Democrats have a moral rather than a legal obligation to remain faithful to their candidate. Fourteen states have laws that seek to bind delegates to the winning candidate, but it’s reasonably clear that party rules supersede such laws when they are in conflict. And in most states, delegates are released from their obligations if a candidate withdraws from the race.

    Another difference between the parties is that Democrats have an established set of “unpledged” delegates who hold convention seats by virtue of elected or party offices they hold. These “superdelegates” don’t get to vote unless there’s a second presidential ballot. At the 2024 Democratic convention in Chicago this August, there will be 744 superdelegates out of a total of 4,532 delegates.

    The idea that superdelegates might vote for anyone they want is largely fictional. They are chosen by campaigns to be 100 percent loyal to their candidate. This loyalty is even fiercer when the candidate is the incumbent president of the United States. There’s a reason no sitting president has been denied renomination if he wanted it since Republican Chester Arthur in 1884. So the idea that Democratic delegates are going to look at the polls in August and decide they can do better than Biden is nonsense; it’s not going to happen. Even if faced with the emergency of avoiding a Trump presidency, the Democratic Party will remain a coalition of interests and principles, not just a vehicle for winning one election.

    But if Biden, for whatever reason, chooses to “step aside” — as a self-defenestration is euphemistically described — it’s another matter altogether. The problem for Democratic delegates won’t be liberating themselves to look elsewhere (with the possible exception of those from a few states with stricter “binding” statutes than others); it will be agreeing upon a successor. And the closer to the convention that this decision has to be made, the likelier it is that these 4,000-plus Biden loyalists will back whoever he designated as his successor. Fantasies of a President Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom or J.B. Pritzker or Pete Buttigieg or Michelle Obama notwithstanding, that successor will almost certainly be Vice-President Kamala Harris. Any other choice would not only infuriate Harris and her supporters; it would also retroactively label Biden’s first decision as party leader in 2020 as a mistake. For better or worse, the party will unite around its new leader; the Trump factor will, if anything, give Democrats an abiding hope of victory no matter how things look a few months out.

    It is possible, I suppose, that Biden and Harris could decide to “step aside” together as an act of patriotic self-sacrifice and help design a spanking new ticket that’s dressed for success. But that’s more likely the stuff of potboiling novels from the kind of writers who pretend there are such things as spontaneous candidate drafts and moderate Republicans.

    The cleanest Plan B scenario would involve some cataclysmic event happening to Biden that leads him or the party to reconsider his candidacy after the Chicago convention. In that extremely remote contingency, the Democratic National Committee would have the power to name a replacement nominee, just as it did in 1972 when vice-presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton “stepped aside” after revelations of DUIs and shock therapy. The DNC isn’t going to dump a renominated incumbent president, no matter how poorly he’s doing in the polls; back in the days when presidential elections weren’t almost always desperately close or vulnerable to post-election challenges and insurrections, one party regularly went to battle after Labor Day knowing it was likely to lose. But if Joe Biden cannot take up the cudgels for the last stages of a rematch with Trump (assuming the 45th president isn’t himself dumped for his vast record of misconduct, if not for some physical ailment), the party can quickly move on with Kamala Harris.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Jamaal Bowman’s Loss Is the Start of a New Era

    Jamaal Bowman’s Loss Is the Start of a New Era

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    Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images

    George Latimer ousted Representative Jamaal Bowman, a two-term leftist and critic of Israel, in what’s believed to be the most expensive congressional primary ever fought. For moderates hoping to check the power of the Squad in Congress, it was a joyous night; for the many progressives who hoped to save one of their most prominent politicians, it was a deeply dispiriting — if no longer shocking — turn of events.

    Latimer was technically an insurgent but didn’t campaign like one. Recruited by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Westchester County executive targeted Bowman for failing, in his view, to adequately support Israel in the wake of the Hamas attacks. AIPAC spent at least $14 million on behalf of Latimer, an extraordinary sum, drowning television and radio stations with advertisements lacerating Bowman and propping up the more conservative Latimer. Notably, the AIPAC-funded ads said nothing about Israel, instead focusing on Bowman’s alleged lack of loyalty to Joe Biden, who is liked enough by many Democrats. Bowman’s embrace of the Democratic Socialists of America, who are explicitly anti-Zionist, may have alienated moderate Jewish voters even more. While outside groups like Justice Democrats managed to contribute more than $1 million in ads to help Bowman, the spending was remarkably lopsided: By one tally, Latimer-aligned PACs had outspent Bowman seven to one. Rallies with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the campaign’s final days could not save him, either.

    Bowman, a charismatic and unapologetic leftist with a penchant for controversy, would have had a tough reelection fight even if AIPAC hadn’t emerged to add so much rocket fuel to Latimer’s campaign. He faced a House censure for pulling a false fire alarm when Democrats were trying to stall a vote. Blog posts he wrote more than a decade ago appeared to give credence to 9/11 conspiracy theories, and his YouTube page following conspiracy accounts became news. He was forced to apologize after lavishing praise on Norman Finkelstein, the acerbic anti-Israel scholar, at a panel discussion. And he initially claimed reports of Hamas raping Israeli women on October 7 were “propaganda.”

    In a suburban, racially diverse seat roping in large chunks of Westchester and a northern sliver of the Bronx, these controversies collectively weighed Bowman down, especially in the district’s sizable Jewish community. Four years ago, Bowman, a former middle-school principal, had unseated Eliot Engel, a high-ranking congressman and staunch Israel hawk. Many of Engel’s allies were out for revenge.

    AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups have been casting about for challengers to defeat as many Squad Democrats — the AOC-aligned House group that has been willing to forcefully criticize the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza — as possible, and they’ve had, until Bowman, little to boast about. Summer Lee, a progressive from Pennsylvania, breezed to reelection earlier in the year, and threats to take on Rashida Tlaib, the Palestinian American congresswoman who supports the BDS movement, went nowhere.

    But in Latimer, AIPAC had an ideal recruit. Until this race, he had been a liberal in good standing, working well with activist groups in Westchester and even campaigning with the support of the Working Families Party. Left-leaning Democrats celebrated him for defeating Rob Astorino, a right-wing Republican, and returning the county to Democratic control in 2018. If he was, more subtly, unwilling to ruffle the feathers of the county’s more reactionary forces, he rarely picked fights with the left and mostly focused on hyperlocal issues. Like a suburban version of Chuck Schumer, Latimer was known for showing up everywhere in the county, and no ribbon cutting or potluck dinner seemed too small for the hustling, neighborly pol to make an appearance. A former state legislator, he had been winning elections for three decades.

    Even as Latimer swerved rightward in the primary, he was well positioned to deflect attacks from the Bowman campaign. In 2020, Bowman had won by portraying Engel, who waited out the pandemic in Maryland, as aloof and out of touch with the struggles of the district. Like Joe Crowley, who claimed a Queens residence but raised his family in Virginia, Engel was no longer active among his constituents. Latimer, though, was everywhere in Westchester, and he campaigned aggressively throughout the county.

    Latimer’s triumph could come at a cost. He defeated Westchester’s first Black congressman in a primary that polarized around race. He angered many Democrats by claiming Bowman’s real constituencies were in San Francisco and Dearborn — Bowman and his allies accused Latimer of race-baiting. Black and Latino voters could view him as the new congressman for white, wealthy Westchester, where he resides, and not someone looking out for them. “I’m an outspoken Black man,” Bowman said during a recent debate. “His supporters don’t want that, because it challenges their power.”

    On foreign policy, Latimer’s unstinting alliance with AIPAC might put him on the rightward fringe of his own party, alienated even from Schumer, who called for Benjamin Netanyahu to step aside earlier this year. Democrats in Congress have grown increasingly uneasy with the war there, as Israel continues to slaughter civilians and openly rejects the concept of a Palestinian state. For now, Latimer fits comfortably with the Israel hawks in New York’s House delegation, including the Bronx’s Ritchie Torres. But life for him in Congress may only get more complicated. The Netanyahu government continues to antagonize the Biden administration, and Latimer’s views on Israel bring him into closer alignment with Donald Trump.

    Progressives, meanwhile, have been dealt a grievous blow. Bowman was a rising star and someone who could have, with enough time in the House, run for higher office. When he first ran against Engel, he was able to forge coalitions between working-class voters of color and college-educated activists. The Squad, without him, is still large enough and may grow in the coming years — even if Cori Bush, another prominent member, also loses this summer. But Bowman’s defeat marks the loss of a rare — if undisciplined — political talent. AIPAC and other moneyed forces will hope they’ve found a new blueprint for success: Recruit a willing, well-known lawmaker to run against a progressive and pump many millions into the primary.

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    Ross Barkan

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  • All the Details on Trump & Biden’s Weirdly Early 2024 Debate

    All the Details on Trump & Biden’s Weirdly Early 2024 Debate

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    Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images

    The 2024 election is odd in multiple ways. Joe Biden and Donald Trump both clinched their party’s nomination way earlier than usual. They’re the oldest major-party presidential candidates ever. This is the first rematch between two presidents in more than 100 years. Oh, and one of the candidates is now a convicted felon.

    The two candidates turned up the weird factor even more in May when Biden publicly dared Trump to debate him (using the phrase “Well, make my day, pal.”) Within hours, the two were set to debate in June and September.

    We’ve never seen a debate process quite like this — and yet, we also watched these two guys face off just four years ago. Here’s what you need to know heading into the unprecedented-yet-very-precedented first presidential debate of 2024.

    The first presidential debate of 2024 will be on June 27, 2024 at 9 p.m. ET. The debate will be hosted by CNN, and will be filmed at the network’s studios in Atlanta, Georgia.

    The 90-minute debate will air on various CNN properties, and be simulcast on other networks that have yet to be announced. Per the CNN press release:

    The CNN Presidential Debate will air live on CNN, CNN International, CNN en Español, CNN Max and stream without a cable login on CNN.com. CNN will make the debate available to simulcast on additional broadcast and cable news networks in the United States.

    Other networks can simulcast the debate for free, but they have to leave CNN’s watermark on the screen.

    All previous televised presidential debates took place in late September or October. But the Biden team wanted to remind tuned-out Americans that there’s a presidential election this year, and that it could put Trump back in the White House. Per the New York Times:

    The move was meant to jolt Americans to attention sooner than later about their consequential choice in 2024. Mr. Biden’s advisers have long believed that the dawning realization of a Trump-Biden rematch will be a balm for the president’s droopy approval ratings.

    The earlier date also gives the two elderly, gaffe-prone candidates more time to recover from any debate missteps.

    Commission on Presidential Debates had hosted the debates since 1988. But both Biden and Trump decided not to cooperate with the independent, nonprofit group this year. Instead, they agreed to two debates hosted by single media outlets. Per the New York Times:

    For the first time in decades, a single television network will have sole discretion over the look, feel and cadence of a general-election presidential debate … CNN has picked the moderators, designed the set and will choose the camera angles that viewers see.

    CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.

    David Chailian, CNN’s political director, suggested that Tapper and Bash won’t be doing much fact-checking during the broadcast. He told the New York Times that they will be “facilitating the debate between these candidates, not being a participant in that debate.”

    According to CNN:

    • The candidates will not be able to interact with their campaign staff during the debate, which will be 90 minutes long with two commercial breaks. There will be no studio audience.

    • The network says moderators “will use all tools at their disposal to enforce timing and ensure a civilized discussion.”

    • The candidates’ microphones will only be turned on when it is their turn to speak; and remain muted at other times.

    • They will not be allowed to bring pre-written notes or props to the podium, but will be given a pad of paper and a pen (and a bottle of water).

    • Which (identical) podium each candidate stands at will be decided by a coin toss.

    On June 20, CNN announced that Biden will stand at the righthand podium and Trump will speak last. This was hashed out after Biden won the coin flip:

    The coin landed on the Biden campaign’s pick — tails — which meant his campaign got to choose whether it wanted to select the president’s podium position or the order of closing statements.

    Biden’s campaign chose to select the right podium position, which means the Democratic president will be on the right side of television viewers’ screens and his Republican rival will be on viewers’ left.

    Trump’s campaign then chose for the former president to deliver the last closing statement, which means Biden will go first at the conclusion of the debate.

    Only Biden and Trump — which may be part of the reason both campaigns agreed to go around the Commission on Presidential Debates. Biden’s public challenge was somewhat for show; the Times reported that the Democratic and Republican campaigns had hammered out debate terms beforehand, as they wanted to “face off directly, without Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or other independent or third-party candidates.”

    No. CNN published an article on June 20 saying that only Biden and Trump were in: “The debate qualification window closed at 12:00:01 a.m. ET on Thursday, with Biden and Trump meeting the constitutional, ballot qualification and polling thresholds set by the network.”

    CNN’s rules state that participants must qualify for the presidency under the Constitution and have filed a formal statement of candidacy to the Federal Election Commission. Five candidates have done so: Biden, Trump, Kennedy, Cornel West, and Jill Stein.

    The part where things got tricky for the Kennedy, West, and Stein was the requirements that their names appear on enough state ballots to potentially reach 270 electoral votes, and that they receive at least 15 percent in four national polls selected by CNN. West and Stein have been averaging less than two percent in the polls, so it was clear from the start that they wouldn’t qualify.

    Kennedy’s RealClearPolitics polling average is just over 9 percent in a five-way race or 10 percent in a three-way race. So there was a slim chance that he could hit the 15 percent polling threshold. But as the New York Times reported, he was one poll short:

    To qualify, Mr. Kennedy needed to earn at least 15 percent support in four approved national polls. By Thursday, however, he had only three such polls — one from CNN, one from Quinnipiac University and one from Marquette University Law School.

    While RFK Jr. had claimed that he’s on the ballot in enough states to qualify for the debate. But a Washington Post analysis published on June 18 said that’s not true, and the Times reached the same conclusion:

    Mr. Kennedy also needed to be officially on the ballot in enough states that he could win 270 votes in the Electoral College — the threshold for winning the presidency. As of Thursday, Mr. Kennedy had less than a third of that number, according to an analysis by The New York Times. He is officially on the ballot in only six states — California, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Oklahoma and Utah — totaling 89 Electoral College votes.

    Here’s CNN’s full criteria:

    To qualify for participation, candidates must fulfill the requirements outlined in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution of the United States; file a Statement of Candidacy with the Federal Election Commission; a candidate’s name must appear on a sufficient number of state ballots to reach the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the presidency prior to the eligibility deadline; agree to accept the rules and format of the debate; and receive at least 15% in four separate national polls of registered or likely voters that meet CNN’s standards for reporting.

    Polls that meet CNN editorial standards and will be considered qualifying polls include those sponsored by: CNN, ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, Marquette University Law School, Monmouth University, NBC News, the New York Times/Siena College, NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College, Quinnipiac University, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

    The polling window to determine eligibility for the debate opened March 13, 2024, and closes seven days before the date of the debate.

    Probably not, but he’s giving it a try. On May 28 he filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission accusing Biden and Trump of illegally colluding with CNN to keep him off the debate stage. In the complaint RFK Jr. claims CNN’s debate violates the Federal Election Campaign Act. As New York’s Ed Kilgore explained, Kennedy’s effort probably won’t work:

    …. there’s no legal principle whereby CNN can’t set whatever rules it wants. Team Kennedy is likely working the refs and counting on public pressure to convince CNN to relax its ballot-access criteria on grounds that it creates a double standard benefiting major-party candidates who won’t officially qualify for a single ballot before July (when Republicans formally nominate Trump) and August (when Biden will become the Democratic nominee).

    Even if Kennedy gets his way with CNN, there’s a decent chance the Biden campaign could withdraw its own pledge to participate since it didn’t bargain for a three-cornered event (the Trump campaign has not objected to Kennedy’s participation, which may be an indication as to whose candidacy he is more likely to hurt or help in the end).

    Biden hasn’t publicly commented on debating Kennedy. Trump has offered contradictory remarks on the subject. In a June 7 Fox News interview Trump claimed he’d “love” to debate Kennedy, but suggested he doesn’t want the polling threshold lowered to let him in. Per the Daily Beast:

    “And I’d love to have Kennedy in the debate, too,” he then said. “I think it’s important to have him. The problem is, his poll numbers are terrible.”

    “So there should be a threshold for him?” Hannity asked.

    “Yeah, sure,” Trump replied. “It should be, probably I think they have it at like 20 or 25 percent or something. But his numbers are lousy and they seem to be getting worse. But I don’t mind having him in the debate. I think it would be good.”

    Both Biden and Trump are doing less debate prep than you’d expect (or at least, that’s the message they’re sending).

    A Biden campaign official told Axios, “The president will have less time for debate prep than four years ago given his day job, so prep will largely be confined to immediately prior.” Politico reported that Biden will start preparing on June 20, one week before the debate:

    Biden has not yet done a formal debate prep session, though he is slated to head to Camp David on Thursday night, where preparations are expected to begin in earnest. Ron Klain, Biden’s longtime adviser and his first White House chief of staff, is involved in the preparations.

    Trump is not planning to hold formal debate practice, in which someone plays Biden. Instead he has reportedly held a series of “policy discussions” to refresh himself on the issues. As Politico notes, Trump also referenced the upcoming debate multiple times during a rally on Saturday:

    He mocked Biden for holing up behind closed doors at Camp David to prepare for the debate, suggesting the president would turn to illicit substances to boost his performance. He disparaged CNN debate moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, whom he called “Fake Tapper,” to boos from the crowd gathered at an arena on Temple University’s campus. … Trump even attempted to crowd-source suggestions for how he should approach Biden: Should he “be tough and nasty” toward his Democratic rival or should he “be nice and calm and let him speak?” (After some crowd reaction, Trump indicated he was favoring the former.)

    The second debate is scheduled for September 10 and will be hosted by ABC News.

    This post has been updated.


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    Margaret Hartmann

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  • Will Taylor Swift Endorse Joe Biden in 2024?

    Will Taylor Swift Endorse Joe Biden in 2024?

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    Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty

    Taylor Swift’s political leanings have been a topic of debate for many years now (Swift herself released a whole documentary about it). The Tortured Poets Department singer has a long history with Donald Trump, who practically begged her not to endorse his 2024 opponent. And a troubling number of Americans believe an unhinged conspiracy theory about Biden and Swift rigging the Super Bowl in favor of her boyfriend Travis Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs.

    So what’s really going on here? Has Taylor Swift actually endorsed a candidate in the 2024 presidential election? What’s her relationship with Biden and Trump? Could Swifties really decide the election, as some pundits have suggested? Here’s a guide to Swift’s stance on the 2024 election, which we’ll keep updated and packed with Easter eggs that will tell you the Reputation (Taylor’s Version) release date (just kidding).

    No.

    Probably! She’s yet to announce her preferred candidate in the 2024 election, but since she endorsed Biden in 2020, it seems likely that she’ll do so again.

    Swift hasn’t commented on Biden recently. She made her first public presidential endorsement about a month before the 2020 election, announcing her support for the Biden-Harris ticket with this tweet, featuring a batch of campaign logo cookies:

    Swift told V magazine:

    The change we need most is to elect a president who recognizes that people of color deserve to feel safe and represented, that women deserve the right to choose what happens to their bodies, and that the LGBTQIA+ community deserves to be acknowledged and included. Everyone deserves a government that takes global health risks seriously and puts the lives of its people first. The only way we can begin to make things better is to choose leaders who are willing to face these issues and find ways to work through them.

    I will proudly vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in this year’s presidential election. Under their leadership, I believe America has a chance to start the healing process it so desperately needs.

    In recent years, Swift has periodically encouraged her social-media followers to vote. After she posted an Instagram message about registering to vote in September 2023, the nonpartisan nonprofit Vote.org recorded 35,252 new registrations on National Voter Registration Day, a 23 percent increase over the previous year.

    On March 5, 2024 she encouraged her supporters to vote on Super Tuesday, but she didn’t back any specific candidates.

    After confusing Swift for Britney Spears during his 2023 turkey pardon, Biden made clear this year that he does in fact know who she is, and would appreciate another endorsement.

    In February 2024, Biden joked several times about working with Swift to rig the Super Bowl for the Kansas City Chiefs. He referenced the baseless conspiracy theory — which nearly one in five Americans believe — in his first TikTok and this post-game social-media post:

    When Seth Meyers asked the president to “confirm or deny” that there is an “active conspiracy” between him and Swift a short time later, the president answered, “It’s classified.” He repeated the line when asked if she might endorse him again in 2024.

    While Biden has tried to play it cool in public, in January the New York Times reported that his campaign desperately wants Swift to get involved in the 2024 race:

    … The biggest and most influential endorsement target is Ms. Swift … Fund-raising appeals from Ms. Swift could be worth millions of dollars for Mr. Biden.

    Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a top Biden surrogate, all but begged Ms. Swift to become more involved in Mr. Biden’s campaign when he spoke to reporters after a Republican primary debate in September.

    “Taylor Swift stands tall and unique,” he said. “What she was able to accomplish just in getting young people activated to consider that they have a voice and that they should have a choice in the next election, I think, is profoundly powerful.”

    The chatter around Ms. Swift and the potential of reaching her 279 million Instagram followers reached such intensity that the Biden team urged applicants in a job posting for a social media position not to describe their Taylor Swift strategy — the campaign had enough suggestions already. One idea that has been tossed around, a bit in jest: sending the president to a stop on Ms. Swift’s Eras Tour.

    She publicly criticized Trump for the first time on June 1, 2019 in an open letter to Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander, urging the Republican to ensure protections for the LGBTQ+ community by passing the Equality Act. She said of then-President Trump:

    I personally reject the President’s stance that his administration “supports equal treatment of all,” but that the Equality Act, “in its current form is filled with poison pills that threaten to determine parental and conscience rights.” No, one cannot take the position that one supports a community, while condemning it in the next breath as going against “conscience” or “parental rights.” That statement implies that there is something morally wrong with you being anything other than heterosexual or cisgender, which is an incredibly harmful letter to send to a nation full of healthy and loving families with same-sex, non-binary or transgender parents, sons or daughters.

    Swift kept her political views to herself until the 2018 midterms, when she spoke out against Tennessee Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn (her decision to endorse two Democrats in that election was a major plot point in her documentary Miss Americana). Swift explained why she’d previously remained silent in her Instagram post opposing Blackburn (who went on to win the election):

    In the past I’ve been reluctant to publicly voice my political opinions, but due to several events in my life and in the world in the past two years, I feel very differently about that now. I always have and always will cast my vote based on which candidate will protect and fight for the human rights I believe we all deserve in this country. I believe in the fight for LGBTQ rights, and that any form of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender is WRONG. I believe that the systemic racism we still see in this country towards people of color is terrifying, sickening and prevalent.

    As the 2020 election grew closer, Swift voiced her support for the Black Lives Matter movement and criticized Trump several times on Twitter. In May 2020 she promised “we will vote you out in November”:

    And in August 2020, she accused Trump of trying to sabotage mail-in voting and said his “ineffective leadership” had “gravely worsened” the COVID-19 crisis:

    Yes, on more than one occasion. In January 2020 Swift released the song “Only the Young” to accompany the Miss Americana documentary. The lyrics seemed to make reference to Trump winning the 2016 election and other political issues, like school shootings: “You go to class, scared / Wondering where the best hiding spot would be / And the big bad man and his big bad clan / Their hands are stained with red.”

    In October 2020, Swift allowed Representative Eric Swalwell’s Remedy PAC to use the song in a pro-Biden ad and got a personal thank you from Kamala Harris:

    While Swift’s 2019 song “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince” is less explicitly anti-Trump, she confirmed in a September 2019 Rolling Stone interview that the high-school metaphor in the song is about Trump-era politics:

    There are so many influences that go into that particular song. I wrote it a couple of months after midterm elections, and I wanted to take the idea of politics and pick a metaphorical place for that to exist. And so I was thinking about a traditional American high school, where there’s all these kinds of social events that could make someone feel completely alienated. And I think a lot of people in our political landscape are just feeling like we need to huddle up under the bleachers and figure out a plan to make things better.

    We know from this clip of Trump quietly driving his Rolls-Royce while listening to “Blank Space,” which was filmed by Melania Trump and posted on her Facebook page, that he doesn’t mind her music.

    However, Trump has some issues with Swift herself. The ex-president and the pop star are engaged in a popularity contest (in his mind, at least). Rolling Stone reported in January:

    Behind the scenes, Trump has reacted to the possibility of Biden and Swift teaming up against him this year not with alarm, but with an instant projection of ego. In recent weeks, the former president has told people in his orbit that no amount of A-list celebrity endorsements will save Biden. Trump has also privately claimed that he is “more popular” than Swift is and that he has more committed fans than she does, a person close to Trump and another source with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone.

    Last month, the source close to Trump adds, the ex-president commented to some confidants that it “obviously” made no sense that he was not named Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year — an honor that went to none other than Swift in December.

    On February 11, Trump made a desperate attempt to steal attention from Kelce and Swift and convince her not to endorse Biden. He posted this on Truth Social hours before the Super Bowl:

    Trump has been careful not to criticize Swift in public. In a November 2023 interview conducted for the forthcoming book Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass, Trump repeatedly called Swift “beautiful,” and questioned whether she’s actually liberal. Variety published an excerpt from the book on June 10:

    Trump, usually one to punch back at critics, is smart enough to know Swift’s fame is on another level. “She’s got a great star quality,” Trump says. “She really does.” Trump is effusive as he uses one of his favorite adjectives to describe women—“beautiful”— several times in a row.

    “I think she’s beautiful—very beautiful! I find her very beautiful. I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump. I hear she’s very talented. I think she’s very beautiful, actually—unusually beautiful!” It’s her fame, not her songcraft, that fascinates Trump. When asked about Swift’s music, played so frequently on the radio that it’s inescapable in daily life, he says, “Don’t know it well.”

    Beyond Swift’s looks, what intrigues Trump the most is the idea— frequently bandied about online before she endorsed the Democratic Senate candidate in Tennessee in 2018—that she could secretly be supporting him. “But she is liberal, or is that just an act?” he asks me. “She’s legitimately liberal? It’s not an act? It surprises me that a country star can be successful being liberal.”

    I tell Trump that Swift is no longer a country star; she’s been making pop music for years. He doesn’t seem aware of this, but he reaches for a different name. “Garth Brooks is liberal. Explain that! How does it happen? But he’s liberal.” Trump trails off. “It’s one of those things . .”

    But during a closed door meeting with Republican members of Congress on June 13, Trump reportedly complained about Swift being a Biden supporter:

    In 2020, Swift officially endorsed Biden less than a month before Election Day. If she follows that precedent, she might make an endorsement while she’s on a break from The Eras Tour. The European leg of her tour runs from May 9 to August 20, followed by a ten-week break. Election Day is November 5, and Swift’s tour resumes in Canada the following week.

    Could the megastar help boost turnout in the November election, especially among younger voters who aren’t that enthusiastic about another Biden-Trump matchup? That’s what multiple commentators have suggested. But PolitiFact poured cold water on the idea:

    … it is misguided to assume that Swift’s potential involvement in the race would be a magic bullet with guaranteed results. Experts say it often takes more than a single message or action for celebrity endorsements to move the needle in elections. And younger people could be particularly hard to sway because they consistently chalk up the lowest turnout rates at the polls. An endorsement would draw attention, but her fans already lean left.

    On the other hand, Biden did beat Trump in 2020. And betting against the power of Swifties is usually a bad idea.


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    Margaret Hartmann

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  • Trump Doubles Down on Plan for Huge Spending Power Grab

    Trump Doubles Down on Plan for Huge Spending Power Grab

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    Trump advisor Russ Vought wants to push the button.
    Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images

    When people tell horror stories about Donald Trump’s second-term agenda, they usually focus on his plans to seek vengeance against his political enemies via the Justice Department or perhaps special prosecutors. Others may fear the reactionary social policies he is likely to impose, or the sweeping destruction of climate change or workplace regulations. And the whole country may be shaken by the mass deportations of undocumented immigrants that Trump henchman Stephen Miller is planning.

    But arguably some of the most important second-term plans involve Team Trump’s dark designs on the so-called swamp of the federal bureaucracy. Their interest in tearing down the civil service system is well-known, along with a scheme to fill vacant positions created by mass firings of non-partisan professional employees and their replacement via a so-called Schedule F of political appointees chosen for all the top policy-making jobs in the executive branch. The purpose of placing these MAGA loyalists throughout the bureaucracy isn’t just to ride herd on such bureaucrats as remain in federal departments and agencies. These new commissars would also serve as Trojan Horses charged with advising the Trump high command on how to eliminate or disable executive branch functions the new order dislikes or can do without.

    A second Trump administration, you see, will be under a lot of pressure from Republicans in Congress and conservative ideologues to decimate non-defense discretionary programs, i.e., most of what the federal government does outside defense (which the GOP will definitely wish to expand) and the big middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare (which Trump has repeatedly pledged to leave alone). Preserving or extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts will force major additional cuts. Non-defense discretionary programs are also where most of the social engineering and income redistribution that MAGA folk hate takes place, in areas ranging from education and environmental protection to health and human services functions. If Trump gets lucky and gets a workable Republican trifecta, perhaps he can go for deep cuts in all these disfavored areas via a vast budget reconciliation bill that Congress will be expected to approve on an up-or-down vote. Otherwise Team Trump plans to excavate a highly controversial device popularized by Richard M. Nixon called “presidential impoundment.”

    Impoundment involves a claim by the president of the power to override the spending authority consigned to Congress by Article I of the U.S. Constitution. In minor matters and in consultation with congressional appropriators, impoundment was used by most presidents to nip and tuck undesirable spending. But its aggressive deployment by Nixon was very much a leading feature of his “imperial presidency” that eventually led to his impeachment and resignation from office. Subsequently Congress enacted the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which governs the federal budget process even now, and that makes impoundment claims illegal (presidents do retain a limited power to propose “rescissions and deferrals” of some appropriations, but they are subject to approval by Congress). While presidents have invariably complained about the spending decisions of Congress, particularly when their party did not control it, Trump was the first president since Nixon to talk about impoundment as an inherent executive power that had been unconstitutionally usurped. And indeed, his effort to impound $400 million in money appropriated for aid to Ukraine is what led to his own impeachment in late 2019.

    Indeed, Trump’s budget director Russell Vought was complaining about limits on impoundment literally the day before he left office. That’s significant now because Vought, founder of the Center for Renewing America, is heavily involved in preparations for a second Trump administration, and is generally thought to be the front-runner to become White House Chief of Staff. As the Washington Post reports, the Trump team is planning to make an assertion of impoundment powers central to the MAGA takeover of the federal government, beginning on Day One:

    Trump and his advisers have prepared an attack on the limits on presidential spending authority. On his campaign website, Trump has said he will push Congress to repeal parts of the 1974 law that restricts the president’s authority to spend federal dollars without congressional approval. Trump has also said he will unilaterally challenge that law by cutting off funding for certain programs, promising on his first day in office to order every agency to identify “large chunks” of their budgets that would be halted by presidential edict.

    So in order to reassert impoundment powers Trump and his advisors will push their new set of MAGA appointees in the federal departments and agencies to tell them exactly where to make the draconian cuts they will need. It could all hit Washington like a jack-hammer.

    That impoundment has an unsavory association with Nixon does not bother Trump and his minions; there’s already a revisionist Nixon fan club among MAGA thinkers and writers, focused precisely on the 37th president’s efforts to expand presidential powers to the breaking point. And Vought, the likely architect and engineer of this quick 2025 Trump power grab, has few inhibitions, as the Washington Post explains:

    A battle-tested D.C. bureaucrat and self-described Christian nationalist is drawing up detailed plans for a sweeping expansion of presidential power in a second Trump administration. Russ Vought, who served as the former president’s budget chief, calls his political strategy for razing long-standing guardrails “radical constitutionalism….”

    [Steve] Bannon, the former Trump strategist ordered this week to serve a four-month prison term for contempt of Congress, touted Vought and his colleagues as “madmen” ready to upend the U.S. government at a recent Center for Renewing America event.

    “No institution set up within its first two years [has] had the impact of this organization,” Bannon said. “We’re going to rip and shred the federal government apart, and if you don’t like it, you can lump it.”

    That’s not a threat but a promise.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Trump Denies Saying ‘Lock Her Up,’ So Ignore All This Video Proof

    Trump Denies Saying ‘Lock Her Up,’ So Ignore All This Video Proof

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    Photo: David Greedy/Getty Images

    Do you remember how Donald Trump repeatedly used the phrase “Lock her up” about Hillary Clinton, even calling for her to be tried, convicted, and sent to jail well after he defeated her in the 2016 presidential election?

    According to Donald Trump, you don’t remember any of that.

    No, you’re not crazy. And this isn’t a Berenstein Bears thing. The problem is that Trump is now a convicted felon who could potentially be locked up himself (though that probably won’t happen). This is a pretty embarrassing turn of events for a guy who’s been encouraging his supporters’ “Lock her up” chants for years. So in a Fox News interview that aired Sunday, Trump decided to simply pretend he had never uttered the phrase himself.

    “You famously said, regarding Hillary Clinton, ‘Lock her up.’ You declined to do that as president,” Fox host Will Cain told Trump.

    “I beat her,” Trump responded. “It’s easier when you win. And they always said ‘Lock her up,’ and I felt — and I could have done it, but I felt it would have been a terrible thing. And then this happened to me.”

    President Trump actually couldn’t have ordered law-enforcement officials to lock up Clinton for using a private email server while she was secretary of State; that’s not how our justice system works. But that’s a minor lie compared to what Trump said next.

    “I didn’t say ‘Lock her up,’ but the people said ‘Lock her up, lock her up,” Trump claimed. “Then we won. And I say — and I said pretty openly, I said, ‘All right, come on, just relax, let’s go, we’ve got to make our country great.’”

    So it’s still okay to recall Trump supporters chanting “Lock her up.” But please erase from your mind all these examples of Trump himself calling for Hillary’s incarceration, which were compiled by The Atlantic’s David A. Graham:

    “‘Lock her up’ is right,” he said in October 2016. “For what she did, they should lock her up,” he said at a rally I attended in Greensboro, North Carolina, a few days later. He used other phrasings at other times. In June 2016, for example, he said, “Hillary Clinton has to go to jail. She has to go to jail,” helpfully adding for the historical record: “I said that.” As he noted in the interview, he eased off the demands once he’d won. But in 2020, running for reelection, he went back to playing the hits. “You should lock her up, I’ll tell you,” he said at an Ohio rally.

    And you’re definitely going to want to forget about how Trump was still using the phrase as late as October 2020, saying of Clinton and the Biden family, “Lock them up. You should lock them up. Lock up the Bidens.”

    I’ll let you take one last look at this video of Trump repeatedly saying “Lock her up” over the years:

    But from now on we’re not going to talk about the emperor’s old catchphrase ever again. Sorry, I don’t make the rules — Trump does.


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    Margaret Hartmann

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  • What the Polls Are Saying After Trump’s Conviction

    What the Polls Are Saying After Trump’s Conviction

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    A two-day national Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted online after Trump’s guilty verdict, found that one in ten registered Republican voters were less likely to vote for Trump following his conviction, and one in four independent voters were less likely to support him as well.

    However, NBC News senior political director Mark Murray cautions against over-interpreting that:

    Of the 2,556 adults who responded to the poll, 41 percent said they would vote for Biden, and 38 percent said they would vote for Trump — which is a difference within the poll’s margin of error.

    Of registered Republicans, 35 percent said Trump’s guilty verdict made it more likely they’d vote for him. 18 percent of independents said the same. And 56 percent of registered Republicans said the verdict would have no effect on their vote, as did the same percentage of independents.

    Regarding other views of the verdict, 53 percent of respondents said they didn’t think Trump should be jailed, while 46 percent said he should. A slim majority also thought the hush-money case against Trump wasn’t politically motivated, while 46 percent said it was — in order to keep Trump from becoming president again.

    A larger majority, 60 percent, said it was important that the three pending trials Trump faces should be completed before the election — which is at this point extremely unlikely.

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    Chas Danner

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  • The Courage of Alvin Bragg’s Conviction

    The Courage of Alvin Bragg’s Conviction

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    Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo:Getty Images

    In the end, it was Manhattan’s plodding and plainspoken district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who proved the pundits wrong and delivered what all the big-talking power brokers could not: the criminal conviction of ex-president Donald Trump for the corrupt and illegal business practices that helped him win the 2016 race for president.

    Bragg does not swagger into a room the way so many New York lawyers and politicians do. He does not preen, pose, shout, or boast. Even when traveling with an armed security detail, he tends to arrive quietly, with the friendly, open and approachable style of a Sunday school teacher, which Bragg has been for years.

    It is typical for New York’s men of power to huddle in dark bars and boozy back rooms, swapping gossip, cutting deals, and sipping booze. You’re more likely to find Bragg in Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church chatting about values, scripture, and how to make one’s way in the world with honesty and integrity. That, alone, makes him a different kind of fish in the shark tank of New York politics, which is stocked with bullies, boasters, bluster, and bullshit.

    “This type of white collar prosecution is core to what we do at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office,” Bragg said after the conviction, repeating almost word for word what he’d said last April after Trump’s indictment and arrest. He was telling the truth: An investigation by NBC News showed that during Bragg’s first 15 months as DA, the office charged 166 felony counts for falsifying business records against 34 different people or corporations. As Bragg put it: “While this defendant may be unlike any other in American history, we arrived at this trial, and ultimately today at this verdict, in the same manner as every other case that comes through the courtroom doors — by following the facts and the law, and doing so without fear or favor.”

    Fear and favor have been floating around People v. Trump from the start. The defendant himself, a former president of the United States who instigated the January 6 riot at the Capitol, publicly predicted that “death and destruction” would be the result of his being tried on criminal charges by Bragg. That didn’t happen, even when Trump posted the word “PROTEST” on social media and only a handful of people turned out. But Bragg did receive at least 89 death threats, including a note that said “Alvin — I’ll kill you,” included with a package containing a suspicious white powder. Another ominous note read: “Remember we are everywhere and we have guns.”

    In addition to dodging pro-Trump death threats, Bragg had to fend off attacks from men like Carey Dunne and Mark Pomerantz, two seasoned prosecutors brought in as special assistant district attorneys by Bragg’s predecessor, Cy Vance. Dunne and Pomerantz quit the D.A.’s office when, shortly after taking office, Bragg refused to bring sweeping racketeering charges against the Trump Organization.

    “I believe that your decision not to prosecute Donald Trump now, and on the existing record, is misguided and completely contrary to the public interest. I therefore cannot continue in my current position,” Pomerantz wrote in a resignation letter. “I have worked too hard as a lawyer, and for too long, now to become a passive participant in what I believe to be a grave failure of justice.” Pomerantz went on to write a self-aggrandizing book attacking Bragg and disparaging the case against Trump as “the legal equivalent of a plane crash” due to “pilot error.”

    In legal terms, many attorneys, including my friend Elie Honig, were bothered by Bragg’s use of New York’s clunky two-step law that makes it a felony to file false business records. Trump has been convicted of using false records — disguising his hush-money payments as a “legal fee” paid to his fixer/lawyer Michael Cohen — with the intent of concealing or advancing additional crimes. The quirk under New York law is that those additional crimes do not need to be proved or even specified. We don’t know whether the jurors believed Trump intended to violate campaign finance laws, tax laws, or some other statute.

    The legal objections were accompanied by complaints from the pundit class that condemned Bragg for bringing a case that they called trivial or a distraction; the critics included Jonathan Chait, Peggy Noonan, Richard Hasen and Van Jones. The main complaint seemed to be that falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to a porn star was small potatoes compared to sweeping charges of election fraud in Georgia or the mishandling of top secret documents in Florida.

    “The players in the drama aren’t people of import who stand for big things, they’re not fate-of-the-republic people, they don’t have any size. They’re tacky lowlifes doing tacky lowlife things,” Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “The case involves a questionable legal theory that depends on the testimony of Michael Cohen, who is half-mad in his own right.”

    Fair enough. But Ron Kuby, a well-known left-leaning attorney, pointed out in the Daily News that the tackiness of the witnesses and the complexity of the law do not constitute a valid defense. “It is true that the application of these laws has never been used to criminalize attempted campaign finance violations, but that is because most candidates for president keep better books,” Kuby wrote earlier this year. “It is no more novel than arresting a presidential candidate for DWI; it has never happened before but the law is unambiguous.”

    That sounds about right to me: if Trump or any other candidate was charged with driving while intoxicated, few people would say the matter should be ignored. Bragg, operating at the steady, methodical pace of the courts, stood up for the principle that using business records to hide additional crimes should not be ignored or dismissed for Trump or anybody else. And he convinced a jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the former president violated the law.

    Bragg now gets the last laugh against his critics in the legal profession. Pomerantz got a book contract and made money; Bragg got a conviction and made history. And politically, he has made more of the dent in Trump’s attempted comeback than any of the louder, flashier Democrats that frequent the cable news shows, liberal think tanks, and the big-donor speaking circuit. It almost reads like the kind of lesson from scripture that gets taught in Sunday school: that sometimes, the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong


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    Errol Louis

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