<Candace Smith did everything right.

During the May 2024 state primary in Georgia, the Atlanta attorney voted early, giving herself time to sort out any issues that might occur and ensure that her vote would be counted.

But on Election Day, when she went to check her ballot status online, a warning popped up. Someone had submitted a challenge to her voter registration status.

“I found it shocking,” Smith said, adding that she has been an active voter in Fulton County for decades, and that the challenge did not include any reason or evidence. “Nothing about it made any sense.”

Smith, an attorney and longtime proponent of voting rights efforts in Georgia, was well positioned to advocate for her rights. She quickly contacted the Fulton County Elections Office, raising the issue to a supervisor to make doubly sure that her ballot had counted. But for the average person, she said, encountering a voter challenge could pose an insurmountable barrier. Had she less time or knowledge about the complex web of election infrastructure, she said, “that might be an issue that prevented me from voting, and it also might be something that would deter me from bothering in the fall.”

Citizen voter challenges, once an obscure practice, have transformed into a mass movement in Georgia, with conservative activists challenging hundreds of thousands of voter registrations in the last several years. Often, the waves of voter challenges coincide with competitive, high-profile elections, with election conspiracy theorists using complaints of rampant voter fraud to cast doubt on election results. Voters of color — and Black voters in particular — have been disproportionately impacted by these vast disenfranchisement campaigns.

And voting rights experts say a newly-passed election law, known as SB 189, is likely to make the problem worse.

Challenging a voter’s registration is nothing new. Almost every state in the country has laws allowing residents to notify local election boards if a resident is found to be voting improperly. In Georgia, citizen campaigns to challenge election registration date back to the 1940s, when white supremacists mobilized to prevent Black voters from accessing the polls. In modern times, however, these laws had not posed any widespread barriers to voters until recently.

South Georgian voter access group responds after president Biden ends reelection campaign “Voter challenge laws were originally intended for a bit of a different era,” said Andrew Garber, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice who has been tracking mass voter challenges since 2021. “It was a way for one person to be able to say, ‘I have personal knowledge that someone is presenting to vote who is no longer eligible.’”

But in recent years, state legislators have passed sweeping election law changes, giving election conspiracy theorists greater power to challenge their fellow voters. SB 202, a 2021 election bill, codified the ability for any one person to challenge an unlimited number of voter registrations. Voting rights organizations have largely considered mass challenges to be voter intimidation tactic.

“It can be scary as a voter to learn that your name is on some list claiming you're not eligible to vote,” Garber said, adding that being challenged can "make it more likely that people will ultimately not be able to vote or choose not to vote.”

In the years since SB 202 took effect, a few conservative activists have filed sweeping challenges, accusing hundreds of thousands of Georgia residents of being improperly registered to vote. The emergence of technology like EagleAI allows activists to comb through massive datasets like the National Change of Address Database, identifying people whose registration may contain errors and submitting those discrepancies to local election officials as evidence of malfeasance.

“The people being challenged are people who have been accepted onto the rolls as registered voters,” said Andrea Young, the executive director of the ACLU of Georgia, which has vowed to sue Gov. Brian Kemp over SB 189. “These are not people who are ineligible to vote.”

Oftentimes, she added, administrative errors interfere with a voter’s ability to cast a ballot. If the county fails to include a resident’s apartment number in their voter registration, for instance, they may be targeted by activists who accuse the resident of having duplicate voter registrations.

“This whole idea of challenges takes what may have been a government mistake and puts the burden back on the citizen who has done their duty and registered to vote,” Young said.....>

<....Though only a small number of people are routinely filing voter challenges, the open-ended nature of voter challenge laws has allowed these activists to cast a wide net. A 2023 ProPublica investigation found that nearly 90% of voter challenges filed since the passage of SB 202 — encompassing 89,000 voters — were submitted by just six people.

While SB 202 can be credited with expanding protections for those filing mass voter challenges, SB 189 has served as a critical counterpart, morphing Georgia’s mass challenge landscape even further.

During the 2024 legislative session, members of the Georgia General Assembly were beginning to realize that the large volume of voter challenges were taking their toll on local election boards, who were the recipients of voter challenges.

Many local election officials had no previous experience dealing with voter challenges before receiving hundreds or even thousands at once, and were not given any additional aid to help accommodate the deluge. The mass voter challenge clause in SB 189 was created to implement a procedure for local election officials to follow.

“There seems to be some inconsistencies with how challenges are sustained or denied, and we want to codify the fact that there are only a very limited number of reasons to sustain a challenge,” said state Sen. Max Burns, who authored both SB 202 and SB 189, at a March committee meeting where the voter challenge language was workshopped.

The resulting legislation, however, did the exact opposite. It listed some criteria that election board members may consider when receiving a challenge, such as knowledge that a voter had passed away. But it also failed to place any restrictions on what evidence activists may submit when questioning fellow voters, how many challenges one person can submit at once, or even mandate that they be residents of the state.

Additionally, while federal law prohibits states from systematically removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of an election, voter registrations can be canceled on a case-by-case basis within that window. SB 189 authorizes county election boards to continue removing voters until 45 days before an election. All these factors create chaos for local election boards.

“Challenges, even when they don't succeed, have a lot of downstream effects,” Garber said. “Certainly voter intimidation, voter confusion, are among those effects, as is wasting a ton of election officials’ time.”....>

<....The technology that election conspiracy theorists are using is undoubtedly modern; Election conspiracy theorists are launching networks of grassroots activists using apps and software platforms to challenge voter registrations, holding cross-country trainings by Zoom. But civil rights groups say the tactics these groups have been employing are just new facets of an ongoing effort to curb minority voter access.

“Conservatives have pushed election fraud conspiracy theory for decades in order to call into question their electoral losses,” said Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of the watchdog organization Documented, which has been tracking the rise in mass voter challenges.

“There's sort of a baked in suspicion of communities that election deniers think are more predisposed towards fraud,” added Emma Steiner, a researcher at Documented. “They're very suspicious of college campuses, college dorms. They're very suspicious of minority neighborhoods. They're very suspicious of things that are baked into election denialism, these conspiracy myths about who is going to commit voter fraud, who is going to attempt to subvert elections.”

For voters of color in particular, advocates say, being on the receiving end of a challenge can also bring up painful reminders of generations’ worth of violence and discrimination.

“You can imagine for people who have been voters since they were 18, they've been voting for 30, 40 years,” said Gerald Griggs, president of the Georgia NAACP. “For another citizen to challenge them — and whether or not they are legally entitled to vote — challenges their very citizenship. And for many African Americans, that harkens back to Jim Crow. It harkens back to slavery itself.”

Even when restrictive election laws do not target people of color explicitly, marginalized communities have historically borne the brunt of laws that make it harder to vote said Lauren Groh-Wargo, the CEO of the nonprofit voting rights group Fair Fight.

“You can look back and see how often there was race-neutral language around the practices and statutes at the time to 'clean’ the voter rolls, and then racially targeted efforts to remove Black folks,” Groh-Wargo said of historical voter suppression tactics.

Ultimately, Groh-Wargo hopes that the rise in mass voter challenges will serve as a mobilizing force for Georgia voters in the upcoming election year.

“They wouldn't be changing the rules every two years, they wouldn't be trying to erect barriers if your vote didn't matter,” she said. “Your vote matters.”>

By the bye, <captiousfred>, I have less than 6000 posts before reaching that number you love to hate.

Ain't life grand?

<Only a week ago, the Republicans were happy, united in their belief that God had spared Donald Trump for a higher purpose. Their convention looked like a wild, weird victory parade for an election that was already in the bag. And J. D. Vance, the newly announced vice-presidential candidate, was the party’s golden child.

Yeah, about that. Since Sunday, Joe Biden’s abrupt exit and the smooth coronation of Kamala Harris as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee have transformed the presidential race. Trump’s campaign is no longer playing on easy mode. Senior Democrats who spent the past month fending off questions about the president’s cognitive abilities are now getting airtime for phrases such as convicted felon, growing economy, and women’s right to make choices about their own body. In her first rally after the Biden news broke, Kamala Harris, although never renowned as a charismatic orator, effortlessly cleared the low bar of seeming energetic and coherent.

Biden’s departure allows the Democrats to turn their opponents’ best attack line back on them: Maybe old men whose sentences go off on weird tangents shouldn’t run for president? (If so, this is terrible news for Trump’s favorite stump-speech riffs about Hannibal Lecter and being eaten by a shark.) Moving Harris up to the top of the ticket also allows her to select a vice-presidential candidate to broaden the Democrats’ appeal, in both demographic and geographic terms.

In that context, the Republican choice of J. D. Vance looks less like a masterstroke and more like the impulse purchase of a luxury good—an expensive handbag bought on a credit card the day before its owner gets fired. Trump should have kept the receipt.

As a senator from Ohio, Vance doesn’t bring a swing state with him; even his family’s roots in Kentucky have been the subject of a multiday roasting by that state’s Democratic governor. Nor does he bring a strong personal following; in 2022, he underperformed the rest of the Republican slate in Ohio. And Vance obviously has no deep convictions, having once called his new boss “America’s Hitler” in private and “cultural heroin” in public. Trump presumably loves watching a former critic debase himself for power, but voters can usually smell a phony.

Worst of all, Vance’s real base is not the stout citizens of Appalachia, but the libertarian edgelords of Silicon Valley (who are largely voter-repellent when exposed to the light) and the right-wing memeplex (ditto).

Unfortunately, the kind of material that has X users such as MAGA Barbie, Catturd, and The Dank Knight hammering the “Like” button is not a winning message in the real world. In 2016, we heard a lot about how the left didn’t understand Trump’s unique appeal, but Vance and his online boosters don’t understand it either. The past decade of American politics suggests that you can indeed say the quiet part out loud, but only if you make it funny.

Trump’s fundamental campiness—an attribute that most people would never have suspected was a winning one for a Republican presidential candidate—is essential to his success. Meatball Ron, Low-Energy Jeb, Pocahontas—the former president’s insults are mean, but cartoonish, like material from a Netflix comedy roast or a WWE SmackDown. His many imitators have gotten the message that they can be gratuitously rude and bullying. But they have neglected to be funny.

What that looks like in practice is J. D. Vance flat-out stating that Kamala Harris is an unnatural woman for not having biological children. “We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too,” he told Tucker Carlson in 2021, in a clip that immediately resurfaced after his nomination. “And it’s just a basic fact if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC—the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”

Yes, plenty of people believe that having kids makes you a better person, because their own experiences of parenthood have given joy and meaning to their lives. But few people would be so crass as to preen about it before a television audience, which invariably includes people who desperately wanted to start a family and could not. And even fewer would imply, as Vance did, that stepkids like Harris’s don’t count. Neither, apparently, do the two kids whom Buttigieg and his husband adopted. “The really sad thing is that [Vance] said that after Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey,” Buttigieg said yesterday on CNN. “He couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children.”....>

<....Vance’s casually dismissive language demonstrates that he is not a man chosen to appeal to swing voters. This was a man chosen to delight people who were already planning to vote for Trump. The GOP has a problem with women voters, who are far less likely to support the party than men. Republicans know this. Before the convention, Trump’s team successfully pushed for the party’s platform not to include a federal abortion ban, well aware that the issue has become a huge liability for the right. Now the defining clip so far of their potential VP is a hack line about cat ladies that would have sounded sexist in 1974? Ouch.

The Republican response to the cat-lady discourse is split between claiming that it’s unfair—the clip is three years old and has undoubtedly been pushed by Democrats who suspect it’s a turnoff to swing voters—and that it’s awesome. But it is representative of Vance’s broader tone and (current) political positions: I watched him speak over Zoom at the National Conservativism Conference in London last year, and the main message he delivered was that Britain’s then-ruling Conservative Party wasn’t right-wing enough. Earlier this month, the Tories’ subsequent hard-line positions on immigration and cultural issues helped bring about a generational defeat in this year’s election, at the hands of a centrist.

Can Vance learn how to preach to anyone but the choir? His speech to the RNC featured a sweet passage about his mom’s sobriety, but also a very strange riff about how, after his beloved grandmother died, the family found 19 loaded guns stashed around her house. “And so this frail old woman made sure that no matter where she was, she was within arm’s length of whatever she needed to protect her family,” Vance said. “That’s who we fight for. That’s American spirit.” Look, I’m not American, so I’m wired differently on gun control, but is this a heartwarming story? Or is this a tragic fable about an old woman who had been told every day by politicians and talking heads that she was besieged in her own home? Does the Republican Party really believe that the American dream is having a gun in every room because the country is a lawless hellhole?

One of the emerging attacks on Harris is that she is cringe—she laughs oddly, and too loudly, and too often. Again, this would be an easier blow to land if the Republican vice-presidential pick hadn’t just scored a viral moment claiming that the left thinks everything is racist. “I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too,” he said at a campaign rally. The room did not go wild. It went semidomesticated at best.

CNN recently reported that Vance has a negative rating among voters—the first for a VP pick immediately after his or her party’s convention since 1980. How will that go down with Trump, a man who hates weakness and who has been known to disparage his allies in public?

Vance will presumably try to redeem himself by zeroing in on Harris’s weak spots and pummeling them as hard as a vice-presidential candidate can. One of her liabilities is having taken a number of unpopular pandemic-era progressive positions and postures. The clip in which she announced her pronouns while wearing a COVID mask might have been grown in a lab for the specific purpose of enraging Elon Musk fans on X—or giving ammo to a culture warrior like Vance. But the Harris team knows that the perception of her as “woke” is a problem—hence the widespread assumption that her VP pick will be a white man with a track record of appealing to swing voters. By contrast, Trump picked an edgelord whose best punch line so far featured Mountain Dew.

Two weeks ago, that decision appeared a lot more sensible than it does today. And look—everyone will admire you for having a Dior handbag on your arm. But not if you lose your house as a result.>

<....Words alone have limited power to hurt, but when they are backed up by political and economic power, they can sting someone who is already in pain from never quite getting a fair shake.

<Donald Trump is a fraud and a con artist. This isn't an opinion, but adjudicated fact, proved by a New York court that found Trump liable for nearly half a billion dollars for his decades of business fraud. Or another court, which accepted Trump's settlement of $25 million for years of defrauding customers of his fake "Trump University." Or the jury in Trump's criminal case, which convicted him on 34 felony charges for defrauding voters by paying hush money to an adult film actress.

What can still be hard to wrap one's mind around, however, is how a man so shamelessly criminal, who openly treats his supporters like wallets to be picked, is the GOP nominee for the third presidential election in a row. But perhaps it's not so surprising, argues Joe Conason. In his new book, "The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism," the journalist and editor-in-chief at The National Memo traces the long marriage between right-wing politics and con artistry. Trump is no anomaly in this history, but the natural result of decades of snake oil salesmen bamboozling the Republican base for political gain and profit. Conason spoke with Salon about why this history matters for the 2024 election.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

We have the Supreme Court's immunity decision. Donald Trump keeps making violent threats and promising retribution. With Project 2025, he's going full fascist. In the pantheon of terrible things about him, one of the least alarming things to most people is that he's a criminal and a fraud. The fraud case he lost fell off most people's radars because everything else about him feels so scary. So why should people care about the fraud angle?

It's all part of a larger whole, right? This is a hugely dishonest person who can't be trusted with the presidency. I don't want to sound Pollyannish about this, but I don't necessarily believe that the armed forces or even most law enforcement officials would carry out the worst kinds of abuses that he may think he wants to perpetrate, in terms of violence against Americans. Now the deportation plan is very bad and I don't want to minimize that. But I still find it hard to believe — and I could be proved wrong — that our military and most law enforcement agencies will seek to perpetrate physical violence on other Americans.

At the same time, the immunity decision gives him license to steal. I think that is what he's most interested in. He really wants to get as much money as he can possibly get his hands on. If he's president. and can use the powers of the presidency without fear of criminal prosecution to enrich himself and his family, I believe he's going to do that in ways that will astonish everyone. He can do whatever he wants in terms of bribery and corruption and foreign emoluments. The sky is the limit. So I do think people should be concerned about that too.

To this day there's a tendency in much of the press to talk about Trump as an anomaly in Republican politics. It doesn't seem Republican voters or politicians care that he's a grifter and a fraud. Tell me how your books explain their indifference.

He is the logical conclusion of what Republicans have been doing for a long time, and it's been growing worse. He is the epitome of a way of doing politics that is all about defrauding people. What Rick Perlstein said in the article in the Baffler that inspired this book is that the scam and the ideology are now inseparable. They're part of one continuous loop. Those Americans who are susceptible to it are in this loop. The ideology, the belief systems, the paranoid ideas, the prejudices are all used to induce them to send money or to buy gold, to buy penny stocks, to buy fake cancer cures. There's an anti-science part to it, too.

I tried to show that it started quite a long time ago. The moral decay of the right began in the fifties. It accelerated in the early sixties with the anti-communist crusades that were all about milking people out of money to assuage their paranoia about communism. It's taken different forms since then. The Tea Party was one form. The prosperity gospel is another form. The religious right had aspects of this. Trump has been part of lots of them. He has qualities that make him like a prosperity gospel preacher. And those were the evangelicals who surrounded him in 2016 and lifted him up as their candidate. The reason is he's a lot like them as a grifter, as a con man, and as someone who preys on weaker people. He's also been in multilevel marketing, in a couple of cases I examined in the book. Trump University was a real estate seminar scam.....>

<...."The Apprentice" created this illusion of Trump as a "genius billionaire," you know, the "greatest businessman." He used that to market these scams to the audience. That was also the way he got elected president. It was the insight of Roger Stone and other people around him who saw this as a way to market a candidate, and it was actually something new.

The prosperity gospel is such an illustration of how fraud is integrated into the religious right. Tell me a little bit more about like the kind of history of religious fraud and how it influenced Republican politics.

Richard Viguerie was the great direct mail fundraiser of the right and pioneered all these techniques for inducing people to send their money to right-wing causes. He came to Jerry Falwell and said the evangelical churches can be milked of money if we start a religious right organization. Initially, Falwell didn't believe him. He was skeptical that you could get the evangelicals into political organization because it was too worldly. But they did a poll and they found out that there was some potential there. So they started the Moral Majority.

In the beginning, it was not as blatant as the prosperity gospel. And in fact, Jerry Falwell positioned himself as an opponent of the prosperity gospel. He conflicted with Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, and the reason he gave at the time was the prosperity gospel, which they were identified with. He called it a heresy and an abomination. And yet, you flash forward and the prosperity gospel is now a dominant mode within the evangelical right.

There's a pastor named Paula White, who is the one who's closest to Trump. She's a prosperity gospel millionaire. Same with Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn. There are a lot of pastors who have gotten very rich by fleecing their parishioners of their money in megachurches on television. Some evangelical leaders find this appalling and despicable even now, but they are powerless to do anything about it. The premise is that, if you tithe to these preachers, they will insure that you are blessed by God, and you will yourself become wealthy. It's incredible that anybody believes it, but they do. At the same time, the pastors are telling them how to vote. They come pretty close to worshiping Trump at this point.

In cases where the victims go to faith healers or prosperity gospel pastors promising relief from debt, they victims are sympathetic. The people that Trump sucked in with Trump University are sympathetic, people who were just looking for better career options. But a lot of the people that get sucked into right-wing scams are not sympathetic victims. The fraud emails they fall for play on their racism or misogyny. I recently wrote about John McEntee from Project 2025. He also runs a "dating" site called The Right Stuff that, as far as I can tell, barely has any female users. It's marketed entirely to incels and sad MAGA dudes and plays on their desire to be jerks. For a lot of people, it's hard to care about a grift when the victims are so unsympathetic....>

<....Everybody has a story. I'm reluctant to judge people that harshly, even when I despise their politics and their attitudes. There's something in their background that made them that way. You have to think something has happened to turn people in the bad direction and hold out hope that they can change. My friend George Conway wrote the forward to this book. He's a very different person than he used to be. I mean, I had a lot of conflict with him back in the Clinton days and I don't think I would have liked him. Now he's a different person.

You're right that a lot of the appeals that are used in these right-wing scams and fundraising operations are designed to appeal to bigotry. The homophobia goes way back in this world. Racism has been a part of it since the very beginning. Viguerie put his mailing list together from the 1964 Goldwater campaign, which only won in Confederate states. You can imagine what kind of a list that was and the appeals that they made. So you're right. Still, some unsympathetic people are also victims at the same time. There are illusions that they live under and the way they were raised. I try to reserve some compassion for all of them.

This book goes back decades and shows the sort of way that grift has been interwoven with right-wing politics for decades. But how should we think about going forward? We have an election coming up. A lot of characters who come from this world of grifting and con artistry are involved in the Trump campaign. How should we think about our future with them in power, if Trump gets back into the White House?

They would all be stealing with both hands. Look at Steve Bannon, who is currently in prison. Bannon was involved in this "build the wall" scam, he will go on trial for those offenses in October. And I believe he's likely to be convicted. If he gets out of prison, he will go right back to these scams and cons. That's what they do. The first Trump administration was full of crooks.

These are people who are going to loot the government to the greatest extent they possibly can. At the same time, they would like to cut every program that helps working people and working families. This would be like living in a country run by gangsters. That's my hope in writing the book is that people will think harder about their political choices. This has been a grift and a con and a deception. I hope they make a choice that reflects that understanding.>

<For months, Democrats have tried to let the public know about Project 2025, a right-wing policy agenda being crafted by the Heritage Foundation with the assistance of several prominent Donald Trump associates. Earlier this month, however, Democrats received some unexpected help — from the former president himself.

A few weeks ago, the Republican nominee published an odd item to his social media platform claiming to “know nothing” about Project 2025. He went on to claim he has “no idea who is behind it,” he disagrees with some of its provisions, and he has “nothing to do with” the initiative.

Democrats were delighted: Trump’s denial helped bring attention to the Project 2025 plan, which is exactly what the party was hoping for. The former president nevertheless issued a similar statement a week later, which again helped to push the radical blueprint into the national spotlight.

At a rally in Michigan this past weekend, the GOP candidate not only tried to distance himself from Project 2025, he also described its authors as part of the “severe right,” adding that some of the agenda’s provisions are “seriously extreme.” Trump reiterated his position online again yesterday.

All of this has the effect of alerting the public to the right-wing agenda’s existence — which again is what Democrats are hoping for — while simultaneously reminding voters that the Project 2025 is so extreme that even Trump doesn’t want to be associated with it.

But there’s a related problem: The more Trump tries to distance himself from Project 2025, the more we’re confronted with evidence pointing in the opposite direction. A Media Matters report explained:

Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, recently named as Donald Trump’s running mate, wrote the foreword to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ forthcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, the proceeds for which will partly benefit Heritage. The Heritage Foundation is leading Project 2025, a far-right staffing and policy initiative backed by more than 100 conservative groups that seeks to remake the federal government into a vehicle for Trumpism and would severely inhibit protections around reproductive rights, LGBTQ and civil rights, and immigration, as well as climate change efforts.

Well, that certainly won’t help.

Complicating matters, a recent CNN report explained that “at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025 ... including more than half of the people listed as authors, editors and contributors to ‘Mandate for Leadership,’ the project’s extensive manifesto for overhauling the executive branch.”

What’s more, NBC News tracked down a 2022 speech in which Trump spoke at a Heritage Foundation event and said, “This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do ... when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

In case that weren’t quite enough, Media Matters also discovered that Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official and the director of Project 2025, told a right-wing podcast last year that his group has a “great” relationship with the former president and that “Trump’s very bought in with this.”

I can appreciate why Trump doesn’t want to be associated with Project 2025 — most voters would find the agenda to be almost cartoonishly extreme — but his denials keep running up against reality.>

This is your boy, <fredremf>! How do ya like that?

#captiousfred
#fredremf
#heartlandscumowned

<In his first rally since President Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 race, Donald Trump did exactly what everyone expected him to do: The Republican spent much of the event going after Vice President Kamala Harris. The former president’s case against his new rival, however, tended to rely heavily on vague name-calling: Trump called the likely Democratic nominee a “lunatic,” for example.

But during his pitch in North Carolina, one [sic] the GOP nominee’s lines of attack stood out:

The Republican’s followers, naturally, cheered the rhetoric.

There was, of course, a degree of irony to the comments: A jury recently found Trump guilty of nearly three dozen felonies. If Harris “shouldn’t even be allowed to run for president” because “she’s committing crimes,” then I supposed we should look forward to the former president delivering a withdrawal speech of his own.

What’s more, insisting that the Democratic vice president is “committing crimes” would be less ridiculous if Trump had any evidence of Harris, you know, actually committing crimes.

But of particular interest was the GOP candidate’s suggestion that his likely Democratic rival “shouldn’t even be allowed to run” for the White House. If the comment rang a bell, there’s a good reason for that:

In October 2015, Trump said Hillary Clinton shouldn’t “even be allowed” to run for president.

In February 2016, Trump said Ted Cruz was “not allowed” to run for president.

In March 2016, Trump said John Kasich shouldn’t have been “allowed” to run against him in a GOP primary.

In October 2020, Trump said Joe Biden shouldn’t have been “allowed” to run for president.

And in July 2024, Trump said Kamala Harris shouldn’t “even be allowed” to run for president.

Part of the problem here is that the Republican nominee is getting lazy, recycling stale insults, nicknames, and attacks.

But just as notable is the fact that Trump has long been taken a keen interest in who should and shouldn’t be “allowed” to run against him, and in a remarkable coincidence, he consistently finds that those who stand in the way are — or should be — ineligible for American ballots.

Trump already earned a reputation as someone who was hostile toward democracy. This won’t help.>

<Less than 48 hours after Vice President Kamala Harris won the support of enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination, Republican Party leadership had a modest proposal for members: Please stop being so overtly racist and sexist.

“House Republican leaders told lawmakers to focus on criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris’ record without reference to her race and gender,” Politico reported, “following caustic remarks from some Republicans attacking her on the basis of identity.”

Having to make such a request means that it's already too late. Several Republican members of Congress had by then started referring to Harris as a “DEI hire,” a reference to diversity, equity, and inclusion, but in reality an assertion that Harris is the nominee only “because of her ethnic background,” as Republican Representative Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin put it. The conservative activist Tom Fitton engaged in some neo-birtherism, implying that Harris’s Jamaican and South Asian parents render her ineligible to run for president. The former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway called Harris lazy, saying, “She does not speak well; she does not work hard; she doesn’t inspire anyone.” Republican Representative Harriet Hagemen of Wyoming declared, “Intellectually, [she is] just really kind of the bottom of the barrel.”

Then there were those who fixated on Harris’s gender rather than her race, or on both at the same time. Of course it's possible to criticize politicians who are women or people or color without that criticism automatically being sexist or racist. That's not what's happening here. Right-wing activists on social media criticized Harris’s dating history and accused her of having “slept her way to the top.” The former Trump-administration official Sebastian Gorka told Fox News that Harris was the nominee “because she’s female and her skin color is the correct DEI color.” Other right-wing activists argued that Harris shouldn’t be allowed to be president, “because she doesn’t have biological children.” This sentiment seems to be shared by Trump officials—liberal activists resurfaced a clip of J. D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, attacking Harris, who is married and a stepmother to two, as one of the Democratic Party’s “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives.”

Republicans will eventually refine these kinds of race- and gender-based attacks into more coded form, but this is not the same as rejecting them or their underlying premises. Trump-campaign officials told The Bulwark that they were planning to “Willie Horton” Kamala Harris—referring to the 1988 George H. W. Bush ad campaign that sought to foment and exploit racialized fears of crime. The first reason to take note of these attacks now is that they are being made when GOP officials are responding to President Joe Biden’s exit from the race, and are therefore expressing their unguarded thoughts, shorn of the sanitizing message discipline that is sure to follow. They are saying these things because they really believe them. The second reason to take note is that their policy agenda is shaped around these beliefs—which when plainly expressed are repulsive to most voters, even many Republican-leaning ones.

Virtually everything being said about Harris was also said about Barack Obama. Questioning Obama’s citizenship was how Trump became a right-wing hero in the first place. Conservatives called Obama an “affirmative-action president” instead of a “DEI hire” because this was years ago and the right-wing vocabulary was different. They called Obama dumb and lazy just as they are calling Harris dumb and lazy; they called him unqualified and said he achieved what he did only because of his racial background. Harris’s politics might be too liberal for many Americans’ tastes, but she was a district attorney, an attorney general, a senator, and then a vice president. She has not only more experience in elected office than Obama did when he ran, but more than either of the white men running on the Republican ticket....>

<....The purpose of the “DEI hire” rhetoric is to diminish those accomplishments, and suggest that any Black person whom conservatives do not specifically approve of did not earn their place—an inversion of the history of racial discrimination in America such that white people become its true victims and Black people its beneficiaries. The purpose of this rhetoric is to stoke racial resentment by suggesting that few if any Black people have earned whatever success they have achieved, and that their success came at the expense of someone who is not Black. It has become a way to imply that Black people are less capable than white people—the problem is once you simply refer to every Black person in a position of prestige or authority this way, regardless of the circumstances, that sentiment is no longer hidden. Behind this racist fiction that almost every prominent Black figure is a “DEI hire” who doesn’t deserve their position is the reality that the wealthy interests backing Trump’s candidacy are bent on hoarding American prosperity for themselves and deflecting the blame for the economic consequences of their own greed onto others.

That worldview is married to the policy agenda of gutting or reversing antidiscrimination protections for nonwhites, so that discrimination on the basis of race in employment, voting rights, education, criminal justice, and housing can proceed without interference. As The Washington Post reported in 2020, “Trump presided over a sweeping U.S. government retreat from the front lines of civil rights.”

The attacks on Harris for her relationship history or lack of biological children similarly reflect a deeply ideological worldview. Vance deriding Harris as a “childless cat lady” implies that women who do not have children cannot meaningfully contribute to or care about America's future; it is indicative of a belief that women are human beings valuable not in and of themselves, but only as broodmares, whose primary purpose is as vessels for human reproduction. The underlying insinuation is that women who do not have children do not have value, that blended families are not real families, and that women should be subject to draconian limitations on their personal freedom that men will never face. This kind of rhetoric is also, on a personal level, exceedingly cruel to all those couples who struggle to have children but cannot, to extended family with no biological kids of their own who bear the responsibility of raising children, and even to godparents who take on the duty of rearing children they are not related to.

Vance, like the activists who would staff a future Trump administration, has said that he believes abortion should be “illegal nationally” and that he wants to prevent women from crossing state lines to get the procedure. Notwithstanding misleading media coverage about Trump's position on abortion, the new GOP platform takes the position that abortion rights violate the Fourteenth Amendment and should therefore be illegal everywhere. As Laura K. Field writes in Politico, Vance has also argued that getting divorced is too easy, a strange position for a man running alongside the thrice-married Trump, but one that is consistent with a totalizing ideological opposition to women’s individual freedom....>

<.....Trump’s longevity as a bombastic celebrity has muted the GOP’s ideological extremism to many American voters. Although Trump shares much of that deeply ideological worldview, it is often obscured by the juvenile nature of his schoolyard insults. Expressed in frank, unguarded terms by Republican apparatchiks, however, it becomes creepy and off-putting even to many conservative voters. When that happens, many Republicans find themselves attempting to distance themselves from it, as Trump has tried to do with Project 2025, the policy agenda his staffers intend to pursue if he is given another term in office. The Republican strategy hinges on exploiting racism and sexism, but most Republican voters are not as fanatically ideological about their prejudices as the new Trumpist elite—right-wing lawmakers, staffers, intellectuals, and commentators. There is a reason that abortion rights tend to win popular referendums even in conservative states, and that the Republican leadership is attempting to tamp down all this vocal sincerity regarding Harris’s background.

An ABC News headline reported that Harris “faces racial ‘DEI’ attacks amid campaign for the 2024 presidency,” as though they were falling from the sky like rain and not directed at her by Republicans. A New York Times headline warned that “Trump’s new rival may bring out his harshest instincts,” as though it was Harris’s fault for provoking him by being a Black and South Asian American woman. A Washington Post headline warned that Harris “would have to contend with DEI, culture war attacks,” without naming those doing the attacking. This framing, however well intentioned, assigns less agency to Republicans for this political approach than GOP leaders have.

Harris is not to blame for these kinds of attacks on her. These are simply expressions of the GOP’s values and its policy agenda, which, for this brief moment, is on display in all its ugliness. Republicans are telling the public not just what they believe, but what they want to do with power once they get it: make a world where the remarkable American story of a biracial woman born of immigrant parents becoming president is not possible. You may see Harris’s story as inspiring. They find it grotesque and unjust. They are announcing as much, as loudly as they can. At least until they learn to use their inside voices again.>

<Over the course of the last few weeks, there has been much talk in legal and political circles about the implications of the Supreme Court opinion on Securities and Exchange Commission v. George Jarkesy. Somehow, though, the positive bearings it will have on racial justice and civil rights in America seem to have gotten lost in the conversation.

The details of Jarkesy, which involved the SEC alleging fraud from a private actor, are as irrelevant to the conversation presented in this column as they were to the court’s opinion. In choosing to take on this matter, the Supreme Court primarily concerned itself with one thing: can the SEC (or any government agency, for that matter) issue civil penalties without a jury trial?

Citing the Seventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which provides the U.S. citizenry with the right to a trial by jury, the Supreme Court answered in the negative. Borrowing verbiage from a previous case (Dimick v. Schiedt), the decision stated that “the right to trial by jury is ‘of such importance and occupies so firm a place in our history and jurisprudence that any seeming curtailment of the right’ has always been and ‘should be scrutinized with the utmost care.’”

Indeed. Without the Seventh Amendment, the civil rights movement would have never materialized.

Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which overturned the “separate but equal doctrine,” in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, wasn’t a traditional jury trial; it came about because multiple African American plaintiffs brought jury trial suits in lower courts and succeeded. Moreover, in Meredith v. Fair (1962), various jury trials allowed African American student James Meredith to reverse discriminatory decisions, ultimately allowing him to receive admission to study at the University of Mississippi. To this day, juries continue to advance civil rights, especially in cases involving voting rights and housing discrimination.

When laws are unjust, judges tend to play “by the book,” ruling consistent with existing precedent. Historically, juries have done the opposite. As too many African American families have discovered on criminal justice-related matters, many judges also defer to prosecutors in criminal trials rather than serve as an important check on the U.S. institutions and branches of government. The Supreme Court did the right thing by protecting the role of juries in the U.S. judicial system.

The impact of the Supreme Court issuing this pro-Seventh Amendment opinion will extend far beyond limiting the SEC’s authority, because the SEC is not the only agency that utilizes in-house quasi-courts, which feature administrative law judges who are hired by and work directly with the agency in question to unilaterally arbitrate right from wrong.

The most prominent among them is the Federal Trade Commission, which has become infamous for using these tribunals to advance its policy aims. Over the last several years, the judicial branch has largely taken care of this concern by siding against the FTC on nearly every case it has brought before the courts. Now, with the Supreme Court reaffirming the need for a jury trial in Jarkesy, there is now little chance of a Seventh Amendment violation ever slipping through the cracks in this post-consumer welfare standard environment.

All told, Chicago-Kent School of Law Professor Harold Krent surmises that over 25 federal agencies will find their powers more constrained by this opinion. And former Justice Department official Barry Hartman said they will all be forced to be extra careful because acting in a manner that is inconsistent with Jarkesy could create a “tsunami of litigation.”

Good. Because recent comments made by certain presidential candidates and their surrogates raise the specter that, without additional safeguards imposed on the Seventh Amendment, a change in White House leadership could dramatically affect voting rights, existing worker discrimination cases and countless other racial justice issues.

Jarkesy created the much-needed safeguards this nation needed. It will ensure such a rollback will not happen — and for that, we should all be grateful.>

<I grew up in eastern Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, immersed in all that the region has to offer—lush forests filled with oak trees and wild orchids; lively streams, teeming with crawfish and minnows. Life abounded and flourished and though gunshots sometimes ricocheted off the hills I loved to climb and explore, I knew the forest to be safe. Copperheads lurked there, sure, but no grown-ups ever followed me into the woods, carrying danger with them. My home held a different story—a story of childhood anguish—which I learned to tell through written words only, knowing silence was a tool for survival.

With J.D. Vance’s recent nomination as Trump’s VP pick, there’s a renewed interest in our region as his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, has once again become a bestseller, much to our community’s collective frustration.

Appalachians have spoken out in droves to reclaim our “hillbilly” identity that Vance co-opted while prescribing bootstrapping as a solution to our problems.

But for those of us who grew up mired in poverty, surrounded by addiction, these systemic problems feel like being trapped in quicksand that only wants to pull you further into despair. There are no boots nor bootstraps, no solid ground to get your footing, when each day is a struggle for survival. But neither the outcry of offended Appalachians nor the book’s glaring inconsistencies mattered to readers or voters in the past; it seems unlikely they will impact Vance’s narrative now.

His story still matters, though. Most notably because, while his memoir resonated with readers for its quintessentially American narrative of a self-made man, the reality is he did not get here alone. He got here because of the policies and programs that support working class people. In fact, it’s one of the few things he and I have in common.

Despite his middle-class upbringing in the Rust Belt, J.D. Vance and I both grew up suffering with the chaos and pain that come with having an addicted parent, violence in the home, and familial mental illness. Any one of those factors will have a negative impact on a child’s well-being and future prospects; growing up with all three, studies show, sets a child up for failure.

Vance and I also both received valuable higher education due to the generosity of others who funded our scholarships. I went to Berea College, a tuition-free college here in Eastern Kentucky where every student works and which has a stated mission to educate low-income Appalachians just as it has educated men and women, Blacks and whites, since its inception in 1855. Vance attended Yale Law School on a generous scholarship, which is a benefit some of our nation’s top schools offer to low-income students. But it’s hardly well-known to most Americans who are just trying to survive. We were lucky to even have known about these schools, much less to get in.

It wasn’t just higher education that helped Vance and me pull ourselves out of the circumstances we grew up in. Despite its imperfections, our national public school system provided a foundation to attend college and even to become writers. My parents and later I, as a single mother, benefitted from social programs like food stamps and medical cards. Welfare programs often keep children fed and even alive—which means that some of us can grow up to become productive adults who not only pay our taxes, but make invaluable contributions to society and our families.

Vance helped perpetuate stereotypes about the “lazy poor” in his memoir when he shared his frustration about discovering, at 17 years old, that there are adults on welfare who dare to own cell phones and buy things that food stamps doesn’t cover (i.e., alcohol and cigarettes). However, he is seemingly also aware of another point that is critical to this discussion, though it isn’t a popular topic in political discourse: Our choices are shaped by our culture, and none of the class issues he critiques can or should be chalked up to immorality.

The reality is that these complex problems require careful thinking and sometimes, complex solutions. Not everyone needs or wants to go to college, and it’s not a guaranteed path to success for those who do go. Addiction and mental illness have become dire problems in our country while resources for treatment have dwindled. Working Americans struggle to keep up with the cost of groceries and utilities, while a lot of mental health support and medical care is prohibitively expensive.....>

<.....Some of Vance’s political views are easy to identify, like his stance on border control and immigration, while his thoughts on abortion (and even Trump himself) have covered broader ground. And there’s plenty of detailed coverage of his thoughts on digital currency and other financial topics. But there’s far less to be found regarding his stances on ensuring high-quality public education for all American children or social welfare programs that support struggling families—which are often in the crosshairs of Republican spending cuts.

This exclusion leads me to wonder: Has Vance forgotten how he rose to his position? Does he think about the other kids in Middletown and throughout Cincinnati who are suffering like he once did, and the parents who are raising them, also struggling to cope?

Vance and I are both lucky to have come out alive, much less as functional and successful adults. What we have in common is grit, yes, but we didn’t just save ourselves: our educational and even our job opportunities offered a path forward. Others who are just like us need mental health support, job training, and the benefits of being taught self-discipline and structure, like the Marines offered Vance.

The economic and cultural pressures we are facing have left American families in turmoil, and children are the ones who bear the greatest burden. They also represent the next generation of our country, whose success we all should be highly invested in. The lifelines that paved the way for both me and Vance have not just served countless Americans; they are crucial to our country’s greatness.

More than 15 years ago, I taught undergraduate classes as an adjunct instructor in English at Eastern Kentucky University for a time after getting my master’s degree there. I had a student in one class who liked to share his political views. I listened but didn’t offer my own. One day, he told me how he thought all social programs should be eliminated.

“What do you think should be done for sick people who can’t afford medical care?” I asked.

And he told me, “We should let them die.”

He would have been 18 or so. I knew there was a chance a lot of his beliefs would change in the near future. As shocking as it was to hear him say that, I know it’s a lot easier to see things in black-and-white when we’re younger, still naïve in ways, before we find ourselves in the midst of complicated situations. I’m sure he couldn’t fathom what it really looks like when we abandon the most vulnerable among us to die in underfunded hospitals or on the streets themselves. And like so many firmly held political beliefs, it’s easier to condemn the people we don’t identify with and think we never will.

If that was 15 years ago, I’m dismayed by some of the ways we are demonized now. When I’m inundated by the obituaries of my former classmates in Eastern Kentucky, lost to opioids in middle age, or horrified by the rampant homelessness and addiction in our cities, I want to know how politicians like Vance will address the despair that has permeated our communities—his community. How will the working class in Appalachia and beyond—which has always fueled our nation’s success, with our coal and timber and bodies—be fairly recompensated? How will we move beyond the impotent speeches about wages and inflation to actually ensure American families aren’t stuck in survival mode?

Our country’s well-being includes the well-being of all. Your neighbor’s addiction or poverty or pain remains isolated for only so long. Our leaders—Democrat, Republican, or otherwise—need to attend to the problems we see all around us, which are not indicative of individual weakness, but of our greater cultural struggles.

Our great country faces a number of challenges, but we also have a myriad of tools and solutions to help us create a better way forward. J.D. Vance has experienced firsthand some of the ways we can do this, and they don’t include the bootstraps he prescribed in his memoir.

Throughout his career, Vance has developed opinions on every hot-button issue in our political landscape. He claims to be for the working class. But it’s now time to ask what will he actually do for us? After all, we know what the working class has done for him.>

<When President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president, some supporters of GOP nominee Donald Trump — including Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) and Fox News' Jesse Watters — accused Democrats of attempting a "coup."

Meanwhile, far-right radio host Erick Erickson even equated Biden's decision with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his allies retaliating against political enemies.

Erickson tweeted, "Y'all can argue over the word coup, but Biden stepping aside is the American equivalent of all those people accidentally falling out of windows in Russia."

But attorney Dean Obeidallah, in a biting opinion column published by MSNBC's website on July 25, argues that anyone calling Harris' presidential campaign a "coup" attempt are misusing the word "coup" badly.

"Almost four years after supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to keep Congress from certifying Joe Biden's win in the 2020 election," Obeidallah argues, "Republicans have finally become comfortable using the word 'coup.' However, consistent with their upside-down view of the world, Republicans are not using 'coup' to characterize what Trump and his supporters attempted between his losing the election and January 6, 2021."

Obeidallah continues, "They're using it to mischaracterize Democrats convincing President Joe Biden to step aside to give Democrats a stronger chance of defeating Trump."

Obeidallah observes that while "a president dropping out only a little more than 100 days from the election was jarring and historic," it was hardly an "attempted coup" — unlike the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building and Republicans in Congress refusing to certify Biden's victory over Trump that day.

"By characterizing the Democrats' changing of the guard as a coup," Obeidallah explains, "the GOP's goal was apparently to divide Democrats with a narrative that Biden was unjustly forced out. As the off-the-charts excitement and enthusiasm for Harris confirms, that's not working."

The attorney adds, "But using the word could definitely work for Democrats. They shouldn't let voters forget that Republicans have nominated for president a man who fought against leaving when voters told him to.">

<Weeks after the extremist Supreme Court majority drove a truck over the rule of law in Trump v. United States, and with all that has happened since, friends still ask, “How do you explain this decision? How could these Republican-appointed justices do something like this?”

The end-of-term Trump immunity decision forever ended any claim by the far right majority justices to belief in checks and balances on presidential power. New polling finds six in ten Americans disapproving the Court’s job performance. So the continuing questions are more than warranted.

For the answers, pay attention to Leonard Leo. He is the judicial kingmaker responsible for the list from which Trump selected Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Leo has shaped this Court and acted effectively to keep its Republican justices from abandoning his – and their – sectarian-right vision of America.

Examine what he says, put it together with the Trump immunity decision, and you can discern the motivating force behind it. The extremist justices are seizing a moment that Leo has prepared them for – a moment to put back in the tube a forward looking, equal opportunity America where church and state are separate. Within their grasp is a presidential dictatorship by which they can realize the rightwing, religious future-state that they perceive as the natural law of the universe.

The immunity decision is the booster rocket for a bloodless cultural coup. Leo made himself rocket fuel, the sophisticated corruption-meister of radical Supreme Court justices.

He was once simply a leader of the hyper-conservative Federalist Society, the backroom nominator of right wing judges. He is now the deep pocketed central operative whose political vision reportedly shares religious roots with those of Steve Bannon. But Leo, instead of landing himself in jail like Bannon, landed a cool $1.6 billion gift from secretive Chicago billionaire Barre Seid.

Here’s how ProPublica described the current cultural conditions that Leo seeks to overturn:

[Leo] sees a nation plagued with ills . . . like environmental, social and governance, or ESG, policies sweeping corporate America. A member of the Roman Catholic Church, he intends to wage a broader cultural war against . . . “vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists and bigots” who demonize people of faith and move society further from its “natural order.”

Per ProPublica, Leo sees conservative Catholicism as “under threat” from “secularist enemies,” the “unchurched . . . whom the devil can easily take advantage of” and who “seek to drive us from the communities they want to dominate.”

It’s not Catholicism under attack; Leo and his allies are the ones attacking the framer’s foundational principle of separating Church and state. The long sad tale of state-sponsored religious discrimination in Europe taught the founders the danger to individual belief of sectarian zeal inhabiting the halls of government.

Perhaps you hear the not-so-faint echoes of Samuel Alito’s victimhood and loathing.

Check out the history here.

Back in 2005, Leo’s Judicial Confirmation Network ran ads in support of Alito when President Bush chose him for the Court over Judge Michael Luttig. Sounding like Leo, Alito has sarcastically lamented that “you had better behave yourself like a good secular citizen” just to go outside. Also recall his expressed belief last month to undercover reporter Lauren Windsor that “the U.S. should return to a ‘place of godliness.’”

Here’s a stunning parallel: Martha-Ann Alito, the justice’s wife with a penchant for flag flying, told the same reporter that she (Mrs. Alito) had hoisted a “Sacred Heart of Jesus” flag at her vacation home this summer. Why? Because she “has to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month.” Compare that to ProPublica’s report that after Alito’s majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, “protesters got permission from Leo’s neighbor to hang a pink fist flag across from his [Maine retreat, and] Leo displayed several different flags with Catholic iconography outside his house.”

You’d almost think there was some kind of not-so-vast rightwing religious conspiracy among the radical right religious power elite....>

<....Elites, like all of us, only act effectively in concert with others. Long ago, Leo apparently grasped the “basic insight of sociology” derived from scholars like Ian Robertson: “[H]uman behavior is shaped by the groups to which people belong and by the social interaction that takes place within those groups.”

And so Leo systematically wove a cocoon of comfortable social interaction around the justices whom he wanted to remain on the Court and to stay true to the extremist vision he held, the way that former Justices David Souter and Sandra Day O’Connor did not. That social cocoon was also one of political reaction and shared belief in sectarianism.

We have learned from reporting just how comfortable the cocoon was. For Alito, free flights to Alaska salmon fishing, courtesy of Leo’s connections to billionaire Paul Singer. For Thomas, $4 million of gifts, including luxury private jet and yacht travel to foreign destinations, private tuition for a child he raised, home buying and a custom RV, much of it again through Leo’s connection to Harlan Crow, another right-wing billionaire.

To whom do these justices feel indebted and to whom do they answer? Corruption can build a thick encasing around ideology; it can be as subtle as the joy of feeling celebrated by right-wing friends in the privacy of a billionaire’s Adirondack sanctuary, or feeling social pressure not to have to explain veering off course politically.

In that vein, within the cocoon is also a shared political theory: that the path to cultural salvation runs most immediately through what Federalist society types call a “unitary executive” – an imperial president – committed to achieving their turn-back goals even through anti-majoritarian means.

That theory holds that a president’s power over the executive branch must be unchecked, especially by Congress. Its most fierce practitioner and developer in the Republican Justice Department 40 years ago was none other than Samuel Alito. John Roberts was there, too.

Trump v. United States is the unitary executive theory on steroids – officially, a president can do no wrong. Congress’ authority to contain the chief executive through ordinary criminal statutes is neutered. A president committed to his own power and to a Christian nation can complete a far-right, religio-political revolution.

Let’s be clear: One branch of government is not enough for a bloodless coup. But two branches, the executive and the judiciary, suffice. For the radical Court majority, with Trump on a path to a second presidency, the time to pull the trigger on complete immunity and a future theocratic nation had come.

So ask not how to explain Trump v. United States. Ask where accountability is for the corruption of the framer’s constitutional vision. The ballot box is our only answer.>

<Public opinion polls suggest that U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris is doing slightly better than Joe Biden was against Donald Trump, but Republican attacks against her are only now ramping up.

Even as a candidate for vice president, Harris was the target of an intense barrage of conservative attacks that claimed, among other things, that she slept her way to political prominence, a common slur against women in power. The anti-Harris rhetoric is part of what a report by the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan think tank, described as a broad pattern of gendered and sexualized attacks on prominent women in public discourse.

More recently, those comments were joined by conservative attacks branding Harris as the “border czar,” part of an effort to tie her to immigration, a hot-button topic for conservatives.

The intense attacks so far are only a fraction of what will come. Trump is skilled at both character assassination and political self-defense. Together, they translate into an exceptional ability to defeat his political rivals once they enter the presidential campaign arena.

But Harris also has sharp rhetorical skills that could make this a fierce election fight.

As I discuss in my book “Presidential Communication and Character,” Trump is highly skilled at both channeling white working-class anger into political support for himself and at convincing his supporters to disregard the former president’s own well-chronicled professional and personal failings.

Trump’s character generates enduring contempt among liberals, but those voters will back the Democratic nominee.

In 2016, Trump defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. He also defeated several well-known Republican presidential hopefuls in the primary race, including Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas and former Governors Jeb Bush of Florida, John Kasich of Ohio and Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

Earlier in 2024, Trump easily dispatched another round of highly experienced Republicans, most notably Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

Like those other opponents, President Biden has long endured Trump’s personal attacks. But in 2020, Trump’s original nickname of “Sleepy Joe” failed to become as effective as his insults aimed at other politicians, and Biden’s election marked Trump’s only electoral defeat.

As the 2024 election approached, Trump and conservative voices once again demonstrated their immense influence in shaping political narratives. They have convinced many voters this year to absolve Trump for his mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, ignore that he designed a Supreme Court majority to overturn Roe v. Wade and agree with him that the 2020 election was stolen.

In an even more powerful demonstration of Trump’s skills at political marketing, polls show that many voters follow Trump’s lead and condemn Biden for U.S. economic conditions that in fact are quite good.

Unemployment is low. Job growth is booming. Infrastructure projects are underway. Inflation is much lower now than it was earlier in Biden’s term, and individual retirement accounts are flush thanks to large stock market gains.

Given Trump’s public relations mastery – and the great susceptibility of many voters to his false narratives – one can marvel about how the Biden campaign had been able to endure the never-ending rhetorical assault and keep the contest as close as surveys show it had remained until recently.

During a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on July 20, 2024, Trump attacked both Biden and Harris, repeatedly calling Biden “stupid” and insulting his IQ. But Harris, Trump said, was “crazy.”

“I call her laughing Kamala,” Trump told the crowd. “You can tell a lot by a laugh. She’s crazy. She’s nuts.”

With Biden dropping out of the campaign, political developments suggest Trump may be in for a taste of his own medicine.

Harris’ previous career as a U.S. senator who challenged Trump administration officials and the former president’s judicial nominees demonstrates that she is among the most effective Democratic officeholders when it comes to holding Republicans accountable.

Her career as an attorney general and a prosecutor also allows her to use law-and-order themes to fight back against America’s first convicted felon former president.

Biden’s departure may provide another major opportunity for Harris to reset the character assassination narrative, as the focus on age can now boomerang against Republicans. Trump now holds the record as the oldest major-party nominee for president, and a key issue that he used against Biden is likely to be turned back toward the former president.

<Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney caught blowback on social media for invoking what many believe are racist tropes by describing the Democratic presidential nominee as a "DEI hire," in addition to being "uninformed and lazy" during a Fox News interview Friday.

In an interview with host Larry Kudlow, Tenney, of New York, ridiculed Harris' “cackle” and “horrible record,” and laid into President Joe Biden for picking Harris as “basically a diversity, equity and inclusion hire.”

“He wanted to hire a black woman,” Tenney said. “But I think Trump needs to be careful here because I think we need to really focus on her record.”

GOP leaders have begged members to shy away from racist and sexist attacks on Harris, but that didn’t deter Tenney from continuing her thinly veiled rebuke.

“The bottom line to me, Larry, is she's uniformed and lazy,” Tenney said. “I think the best attack at her is going to go at her on substance, because she doesn’t have any. You scratch the surface with her, you get more surface.”

On social media, users ripped into Tenney for the insult.

“They’re not even using dog whistles anymore. This is just blatant racism,” wrote @HereLiesBlueDog.

“Racism doesn't sell with the majority of voters. They are going to find that out,” wrote @A_tothe_Z_Amber.

“It's amazing to think that racists were slightly more OK with a liberal president just because he was a white guy named Joe,” wrote @sirDukeDevin.

“And this is part of the reason why Republicans are going to get crushed. They can’t help themselves. The racism and misogyny is hard for them to control,” wrote @yonathanseleshi.>

Imagine that:

<Investors are punishing automakers' stocks this week after second-quarter earnings reports exposed industrywide issues of slowing sales and high prices, just as the companies are having to spend huge sums to make new electric and gas vehicles.

Each auto company has unique problems, but common to many are growing vehicle stockpiles on dealer lots, requiring increased discounts to sell them to buyers with stressed-out household budgets.

Ford Motor Co., which reported a drop in second-quarter earnings due [sic] electric-vehicle losses and persistently high warranty costs, led the declines. Its shares have fallen 20% this week. But others such as General Motors, Tesla, Stellantis and Nissan, all saw their shares drop about 8% or even more.

Carlos Tavares, CEO of Jeep and Ram maker Stellantis, said a significant auto-industry storm he's been warning about for several years has arrived. “We are in it,” he told reporters after releasing disappointing earnings Thursday. “For me, it's a no brainer that this industry is going to be in turmoil.”

Shortly after the coronavirus pandemic spread worldwide in 2020, automakers had to slow their factories due to a global shortage of computer chips. At the time, high-income buyers who couldn't spend money on travel or restaurants started paying above sticker prices for a limited supply of pricey loaded-out vehicles. Automakers used their limited production to build only expensive stuff, and prices soared nearly 27% from pre-pandemic levels.

The trend continued into late last year, with companies and dealerships making big profits with lower-than-normal sales.

But as chip supplies returned, automakers ramped up production, and inventory on U.S. dealer lots grew to around 1.8 million a year ago. Now it's just under 3 million, high but still a million short of pre-pandemic numbers.

The problem for the industry is that it kept building expensive vehicles loaded with options — while most high-income buyers had already bought new vehicles. The remaining buyers now can't afford much of what dealers have in stock because of high prices and interest rates. Now the big profits from pricey trucks and SUVs that paid to develop and build electric vehicles are starting to wane.

“It's kind of ridiculous that anyone would have been surprised that this party was going to come to an end,” said Sam Abuelsamid, principal mobility analyst for Guidehouse Insights. “There are only so many people that [sic] can afford vehicles this expensive, especially when interest rates have remained as high as they have for so long."....>

<....The average price of a new vehicle in the U.S. peaked in December at $48,408, according to data from Edmunds.com. It dropped a little to $47,616 last month. Discounts, which were minimal or nonexistent for the past few years, rose to an average of $1,819 per vehicle in June.

As the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, the average new auto loan rate jumped from a low of 4.1% in December of 2021 to 7.3% last month. That boosted the average monthly payment to $739 per month, with an average borrowing term of nearly six years, according to Edmunds.

The average price of used vehicles soared more than 50% from before the pandemic to a peak of $31,095 in April of 2022. It has subsided to $27,277 in June as new vehicle prices started to fall, Edmunds said.

Stellantis' earnings were crimped by a poor performance in North America. Tavares said the company's prices are too high, causing potential buyers to leave showrooms without hearing about low-interest financing and other discounts.

“Our customers are telling us that they need more affordability,” he said.

Such demands have put Stellantis in a squeeze between offering lower prices, and inflationary pressures on the business, Tavares said. Stellantis, he said, must reduce costs to preserve profit margins at lower prices — something that all automakers are now facing.

"We need appealing products, high-quality products at a competitive cost that protects the affordability that makes the customers buy our products,” Tavares said.

Tavares predicted that the industry storm could last several years, and it could cause some automakers to fail.

Automakers, especially GM, Ford and Stellantis, abandoned lower-cost small and even midsize cars starting five or six years ago, leaving them little to sell to those who want affordable vehicles, Abuelsamid said. Some, like GM, still offer affordable smaller SUVs. But those without affordable vehicles now are likely to struggle more than their competitors, he said.

Industry analysts expect more discounts from automakers and possible interest rate cuts from the U.S. Federal Reserve later this year and into next year. So for those who can, it might be wise to wait before buying a new or used vehicle, said Eric Lyman, vice president of products for Black Book, which tracks auto prices.

“Savvy buyers would be wise to pause their pursuit of a vehicle purchase until we see some more declines in both the used and new vehicle pricing, as well as the interest rate declines that everybody is expecting, to address the affordability crisis that we're in,” Lyman said.>

<Donald Trump honed his attacks on Vice President Harris, the likely Democratic nominee, in a speech at the Turning Point USA Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach Friday night, calling her “the most incompetent, unpopular and far-left vice president in American history,” blaming her for high numbers of migrant apprehensions at the southern border and calling her a “bum.”

“She was a bum three weeks ago,” Trump said. “She was a bum, a failed vice president.”

The former president urged attendees at the faith-themed event to vote — “Vote early. Vote absentee. Vote on Election Day. I don’t care how, but you have to get out and vote,” he said — and promised that in four years, “we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

Trump and other Republicans have long sought to blame Harris for illegal immigration, characterizing her as President Biden’s “border czar.” Though Biden asked Harris to negotiate with three Central American countries to help address the root causes of migration, he never put her in charge of overall border policy.

That and other attacks Friday night continued Trump’s efforts to paint Harris as deeply liberal. Earlier Friday, during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump described Harris as a “radical left person” who “destroyed San Francisco.”

But Harris, who served as the top prosecutor in San Francisco and was later elected California attorney general, has a more complicated political story. She won her first race for district attorney by running to the right of the incumbent, her former boss, whom she criticized as too soft on crime.

Trump zeroed in on Harris’s past comments about the “defund the police” movement. In 2020, amid mass racial justice protests, Harris said the movement was “rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities.”

Trump’s campaign attacked Harris on the issue after she joined Biden on the Democratic ticket that year. But a spokesperson for Harris soon disavowed her earlier comments, saying Biden and Harris “do not support defunding the police, and it is a lie to suggest otherwise.” As president, Biden called for increasing police funding to put more police officers on the street.

“America can do better than the bitter, bizarre, and backward looking delusions of criminal Donald Trump,” James Singer, a spokesperson for Harris’s campaign, said in a statement Friday night.

Trump also continued to complain about Biden’s withdrawal from the race, repeating claims that Democrats replacing Biden on the ticket amounts to a “coup.”

Harris has already secured the pledged support of the majority of the delegates she needs to win the Democratic nomination at the party’s convention in Chicago next month. On Friday morning, she got an extra boost from the endorsements of Barack and Michelle Obama, the former president and first lady, the latest nationally prominent Democratic leaders to publicly embrace her candidacy.

Recent polls have shown some positive signs for Harris, and a rush of new money and volunteers has flooded into what was once the Biden-Harris campaign. Her head-to-head numbers against Trump are better than Biden’s were.

Trump spoke extensively about Harris, whom he hammered in a speech at a rally earlier this week, at the Turning Point USA event. But he has also continued to rail against Biden this week, arguing that the Democratic switcheroo was unfair.

“So, we are forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden, he polls badly after having a terrible debate, and quits the race. Now we have to start all over again,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform earlier this week, asking whether the GOP should be “reimbursed for fraud.”

In West Palm Beach, Trump appeared without the bandage he wore on his ear after a gunman attempted to assassinate him at his Butler, Pa., rally. “As I think you can see, I’ve recovered well and in fact just took off — the last bandage off of my ear,” Trump said, making an “ughhh” sound.

Trump, who has a habit of inventing derogatory nicknames for his political opponents, again mispronounced Harris’s first name, claiming, incorrectly, that there are “numerous ways” to say it and saying he doesn’t care if he mispronounces it.

He also criticized Harris for declining to attend Netanyahu’s recent address to Congress — and claimed she “doesn’t like Jewish people,” though her husband Doug Emhoff is Jewish.

He repeated his false claims the 2020 election was rigged and said, “we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election in 2024.”

The crowd began to chant: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”....>