<....Obama officials were unsuccessful in creating a campaign to sell their legislative achievements — including a nearly $800 billion stimulus that cut taxes on the middle class — and it all got lumped into bitter feelings about the economy and the bank bailout.

“I truly believe that was why we lost in 2010,” Pelosi said, a midterm drubbing that lost 63 seats and handed the GOP the majority for eight years.

In 2020, fresh off impeaching Trump over his Ukraine actions, Pelosi again worked with the GOP administration when the coronavirus pandemic killed millions and shuttered parts of the global economy. Democrats again provided most of the votes for several relief packages that tallied almost $3 trillion — even sending direct cash payments to taxpayers that were signed by none other than Trump.

Biden won in November 2020, and Democrats, with majorities in both the House and Senate, set out to clean up the Trump administration’s disjointed handling of the pandemic — beginning with a nearly $2 trillion recovery package.

Month by month, with no effective pushback from Biden and Democrats, voters came to place more blame on the new administration for a crisis that started under the GOP’s watch. Republicans won back the House majority in 2022, this time by a narrow four-seat margin, but they have since used that power to boost Trump at almost every turn.

Pelosi resigned from leadership and returned to life in the rank-and-file, working across the street in a House office building for the first time since 2001.

Pelosi will attend the Democratic National Convention this month in Chicago with no real responsibilities — as leader of her caucus she was the co-chair for the previous five conventions — other than a likely speaking role.

Her main political role these days is still raising money and giving advice when asked. No speaker in modern times has left the post and stuck around in office this long, but Pelosi rather enjoys the freedom and dispensing wisdom that sounds like a mix of a crime boss and local party activist.

For dealing with Republicans who made fun of the attack on her husband, she said: “Treat everyone as a friend, but know who your friends are.”

But a few unnamed GOP lawmakers received the bluntest of messages. “Some of them,” Pelosi said she replied to them, “I just say: ‘We’re out to get you, you’re dead.’”

When it comes to her discussions with Biden, she returned to a motto that former California governor Jerry Brown taught her when she chaired the state Democratic Party in the early 1980s: “Those who talk don’t know and those who know don’t talk.”

She believes Democrats have essentially missed their window to sell the legislative accomplishments, such as the semiconductor plan and the infrastructure bill, ahead of the November elections.

She is advising the Harris campaign team to focus on future proposals such as the expanded child tax credit that expired.

“Really, if I could do one thing, it would be child care. It’ll make the biggest difference in our economy,” she said.

Her “why,” at least through November, is squarely on defeating Trump, whom she called “unpatriotic” and whom she compared to fascist regimes for his attempts to destroy faith in independent media.

She rejected the thoughts from book reviewers that her book title was meant as a tweak on Trump’s original best-selling memoir in the 1980s, “The Art of the Deal.”

“Nothing that I do has anything to do with him, except his downfall,” Pelosi said.

She treasures some friendships with GOP elder statesmen. George W. Bush is a legitimate friend who hosted her at an event early last year, and Pelosi still hasn’t cooked the steaks that Elizabeth Dole sent her three years ago after she visited Bob Dole before he died.

But she’s got no time for new friendships with younger Republicans who like Trump. Pelosi recalled several of the first-term Republicans from New York asking her to attend events tied to their shared Italian heritage.

“When you’re not there, maybe I’ll come,” Pelosi responded to the crew, several of whom are in swing districts that will determine the majority.

She declined their pleas.

“I do not like you. I’m out to get you, I’m out to get you,” she said. “Your defeat is my goal.”>

<Elon Musk, self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” is demanding the government infringe on free speech rights. Again.

Despite his posturing as a defender of free expression, Musk is one of the nation’s most vexatious litigants against anybody who exercises their First Amendment rights in a way he doesn’t like. His latest target is GARM, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, an industry association of advertisers on online platforms of which X, formerly known as Twitter, is still a member. The lawsuit also targets several of GARM’s members for the supposed crime of declining to purchase ads on Musk’s website.

X’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, posted a video on Tuesday explaining that the suit is part of the company’s noble pursuit of preserving “the global town square … the one place that you can express yourself freely and openly.” Yaccarino wore a pendant around her neck that read “FREE SPEECH.”

On Thursday, GARM, citing its inability to handle legal fees that would likely run into the seven figures, simply shut its doors, ending all operations. Musk’s censorial bullying worked — abusing the legal system to shut down his critics.

Musk’s argument against GARM fits a long-running pattern for him: attacks on free speech wrapped in the rhetoric of defending free speech.

Major corporations generally do not want to pay for ads running next to posts praising Adolf Hitler, among other noxious content that has flourished on X under Musk’s ownership. It’s hardly an unreasonable position, and GARM worked to promulgate shared standards companies can adopt for this type of brand safety. This, Musk alleges, amounted to a violation of antitrust laws.

Deciding where to purchase ads is an exercise of core free speech and free association rights for any individual or organization. Boycotting X because it’s overrun with hate speech is no different from a conservative advocacy group declining to pay for ads on a progressive podcast. It’s also a case of business judgment for for-profit corporations. PetSmart might well choose to buy magazine ads in Cat Fancy rather than Cigar Aficionado, for example.

It’s the latest in a long line of Musk lawsuits seeking to silence his critics, a tactic known as a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP....>

<....He’s also sued Media Matters for documenting how X fails to keep ads from large corporations away from extremist content. In the same vein, he’s gone after the Center for Countering Digital Hate. He also endorsed the patently absurd criminal investigations into Media Matters launched by the Republican attorneys general of Texas and Missouri, already enjoined by a federal court as the obvious First Amendment violations they are.

Sometimes Musk’s interest in promoting censorship extends beyond his own critics, such as when he agreed to pay the legal fees of a Canadian anti-vaxxer who had sued a wide range of people for being mean to her.

For many years, actual free speech advocates have been pushing for anti-SLAPP laws, which make it easier to promptly dismiss and receive legal fees for litigation targeting constitutionally protected speech. Texas and California among other states have adopted these robust protections. Unfortunately, there is no national anti-SLAPP law for lawsuits based on federal law claims, such as Musk’s antitrust theory. Federal circuit courts are also divided on whether state anti-SLAPP laws can apply even to state law claims, such as defamation, being heard in federal court under interstate diversity jurisdiction.

In the meantime, Musk’s anti-speech lawfare has its intended effect even when it could never plausibly reach a final decision in his favor.

In addition to shutting down GARM, Media Matters recently laid off several employees, too, with many observers pointing to Musk’s litigation as a likely contributor. This is the defining feature of SLAPP strategy: process as punishment, ruining targets with the expense of fighting a case even when it lacks any legal merit. The tactic can be particularly effective aimed at nonprofits and individuals, whose relatively modest budgets simply cannot handle a protracted court battle with one of the world’s richest men.

Beyond simply being a rich and powerful bully who can waste his own money on vexatious, performative litigation, Musk’s theory of “free speech” is a censorship wolf in sheep’s clothing. He and those he agrees with should be free to speak their minds, the thinking goes, but nobody else should be allowed to criticize or disassociate from them in response. If it falls under nebulous labels like “cancel culture” or the “woke mind virus,” your speech is actually bad for speech and so shouldn’t be allowed. It’s unabashedly statist in its eagerness to use and abuse government power to police the discourse.

Musk is free to run his own website however he wants, as he should be. But his claims to be a champion of free speech are a hypocritical farce. In reality, he is one of the biggest enemies of the First Amendment, and should be recognized as such.>

Muzzling <antichrist, the budapest tosspot> and <fredthebore, putative internet bully> thus would have its amusing aspects.

#budapesttosspotowned
#heartlandscumowned

He added, “This was just too big to overlook. This is a big one. Conflating Willie Brown and me? The press is searching for the real story and they didn’t get it. You did.”>

<The phrase “no one is above the law” has a long and storied history. But in the age of Trump it is coming to seem like nothing more than a comforting legal fiction.

Over the last several years, the former president has given something of a master class in showing how to poke holes in the law. Donald Trump’s record of avoiding responsibility is not perfect, but this past week brought more bad news in the quest to show that he is not above the law.

As the New York Times reported, “A state grand jury in Arizona that charged 18 people this spring in a scheme that sought to overturn Donald J. Trump’s 2020 election loss wanted to indict him, too.… But prosecutors … recommended that Mr. Trump should not be charged, citing a Justice Department policy that discourages bringing state and federal cases against the same defendant that are largely based on similar facts.”

The Arizona prosecutor’s decision is a serious legal and political mistake.

The Justice Department’s policy specifically establishes “guidelines for the exercise of discretion by appropriate officers of the Department of Justice in determining whether to bring a federal prosecution based on substantially the same act(s) or transactions involved in a prior state or federal proceeding.” It has absolutely nothing to do with what an Arizona prosecutor can or should do.

As the Times noted, “The grand jurors investigating allegations of interference in that state’s election seriously considered bringing charges against Mr. Trump. Some of the grand jurors even appeared to be upset when a state prosecutor suggested they should not.”

They were right to be upset. The decision to let Trump skate by following the Justice Department policy was purely discretionary, and it was a bad one.

It further fuels the perception that Trump is a legal Houdini escaping another jam.

Responding to the chagrin of the grand jurors about the decision not to indict Trump, the prosecutor said, “I know that may be disappointing to some of you.” But it was more than that. It is a disappointment to anyone tired of seeing Trump get off scot-free.

Ultimately, the grand jury indicted 18 people on forgery, fraud and conspiracy charges, including the 11 Republicans who submitted a document falsely claiming Trump had won Arizona, five lawyers connected to the former president, and two former Trump aides. But not Trump.

The decision was odd in another respect. The former president has escaped indictment in the false electors scheme in several other states, including Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin.

Georgia is the only state where Trump has been indicted for participating in that scheme. In other places, such as Arizona, he has only been identified as an unindicted co-conspirator.

The fake electors' scheme is, however, also part of special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of the former president, the disposition of which is pending in Washington before Federal District Judge Tanya Chutkan.

In the ordinary case, “if a single act violates the law of two states, the law treats the act as … [two distinct] offense(s)” and nothing prevents prosecution from proceeding in both states.

The same is true for offenses that implicate both state and federal law. This is called the “dual sovereignty doctrine.”

As the U.S. Supreme Court explained in 1985, quoting the original language and spelling of the Fifth Amendment, “The dual sovereignty doctrine provides that when a defendant in a single act violates the ‘peace and dignity’ of two sovereigns by breaking the laws of each, he has committed two distinct ‘offences’ for double jeopardy purposes.”

In applying the doctrine, the justices continued, “The crucial determination is whether the two entities that seek successively to prosecute a defendant for the same course of conduct can be termed separate sovereigns. This determination turns on whether the prosecuting entities' powers to undertake criminal prosecutions derive from separate and independent sources.”

The court’s ruling concluded, “It has been uniformly held that the States are separate sovereigns with respect to the Federal Government because each State's power to prosecute derives from its inherent sovereignty … and not from the Federal Government. Given the distinct sources of their powers to try a defendant, the States are no less sovereign with respect to each other than they are with respect to the Federal Government.”

So here again, Trump is escaping legal responsibility and getting preferential treatment. He hasn’t done this alone. He has been aided and abetted by a shifting cast of characters, now including an Arizona prosecutor, as well as by unusually good luck.

We’ve seen it all before: Prosecutors and judges exercising their discretion in ways that help the former president make a mockery of the idea that no one is above the law....>

<....For example, former special counsel Robert Mueller had Trump dead to rights on obstruction of justice, but declined to seek an indictment based on a years-old opinion by the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel that recommends against indicting a sitting president.

When he appeared before Congress, Mueller said he had “never reached a decision on whether Trump could or should be charged with obstruction because of the OLC guidance…. We did not reach a determination as to whether the president committed a crime." As Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., noted at the time, "a reasonable person looking at these facts could conclude that all three elements of the crime of obstruction of justice have been met.”

That did not stop then-Attorney General William Barr from telling the American public that “after carefully reviewing the facts and legal theories outlined in the report, and in consultation with the Office of Legal Counsel and other Department lawyers, the Deputy Attorney General and I concluded that the evidence developed by the Special Counsel is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense. “

Trump benefited again when Barr offered a misreading of the Mueller report to whitewash allegations “that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Other examples of Trump escaping from legal jeopardy for his misdeeds abound. Think two impeachments and no convictions.

One also could cite the Supreme Court’s decision that states could not bar him from the ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection or, more recently, the court’s mind-boggling decision that the president has immunity from criminal prosecution for acts undertaken in his official capacity. Then there is Judge Alieen Cannon’s unprecedented dismissal of the classified documents case against Trump on the grounds that the appointment of the special counsel was somehow unconstitutional.

It seems that the more off the wall Trump’s legal arguments have been, the more his MAGA-friendly judges buy them.

The former president has also benefited from the good fortune of being indicted in Georgia by a prosecutor who had an affair with a subordinate, creating a legal and moral morass that has yet to be untangled.

This is not to say that the civil judgments that have been entered against him and his criminal convictions do not matter. They do.

But Trump’s win-loss record in slowing down the wheels of justice and evading legal responsibility is both impressive and deeply corrosive of Americans’ faith in the rule of law. That is why the Arizona prosecutor’s grave misjudgment matters so much.

It means that what unfolds in Judge Chutkan’s courtroom, when she picks up the pieces in the Jan. 6 election interference case, and when Trump is finally sentenced next month in the New York hush-money case, is more important than ever. Those judgments can help reassure Americans that when it comes to Donald Trump, the idea that no one is above the law is more than a comforting fiction.>

<After Donald Trump's rally at a Georgia State University arena earlier this month, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's (AJC) Greg Bluestein reported that several Republican activists and strategists were unhappy with the former president's attacks on Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, predicting that they could even tank his campaign.

"A lot of Republicans like me might just decide not to vote at all in the presidential election because of stupid antics like tonight," former Georgia lawmaker Allen Peake told the AJC. "Trump may have just lost Georgia."

A week later, the MAGA hopeful has campaigned little to none, and given a rambling, hourlong press conference that led political experts to question his mental acuity. Furthermore, Wall Street Journal reporter Cameron McWhirter reports that Georgia GOP leaders and strategists remain unmoved and unconvinced that Trump can win the state in November.

"Georgia Republicans, Georgia independents, and swing voters don’t want divisiveness," GOP consultant Stephen Lawson told the WSJ. "They don’t want a relitigation of 2020."

Lawson, who worked on ex-US Senator Kelly Loeffler's (R-GA) failed 2020 campaign, added: “We know exactly how this story ends. If he’s not running on the issues, he’s going to lose."

State Senator Larry Walker III — a top Georgia Republican — "called Trump’s comments 'definitely unproductive and unwarranted,' adding: 'If we continue with this kind of feud, it will make it more difficult' to win Georgia," according to McWhirter.

Veteran Georgia GOP strategist Ryan Mahoney — who believes Trump is committing "political suicide" — insisted, "We’ve seen this movie before, and the former president’s baseless and ill-advised remarks will make it damn near impossible for Republicans to prevail in November."

McWhirter reports, "A Trump spokeswoman didn’t respond to a request for comment on whether Trump and Kemp would appear together on the campaign and whether the two camps are talking. Earlier, when asked about Trump’s Atlanta speech, the spokeswoman referred to Trump’s Truth Social post criticizing Kemp.">

<Sen. JD Vance could use an image boost.

Since becoming former President Donald Trump's pick for vice president, the Ohio Republican has been hounded by some controversial past comments.

From previously calling himself a "never Trump guy" to disparaging several top Democratic Party leaders as "childless cat ladies," he's repeatedly had to address remarks that have raised eyebrows.

Amid his ongoing effort to solidify his image as pro-family (but not in a "weird" way), Vance on Sunday floated a generous $5,000 child tax credit during an interview on CBS' "Face the Nation."

"I'd love to see a child tax credit that's $5,000 per child. But you, of course, have to work with Congress to see how possible and viable that is," Vance told host Margaret Brennan.

Vance is working to position the GOP as the party that would do more to help families. And with most voters continuing to rate the economy as their top issue heading into the general election, the child tax credit remains a top issue for many lawmakers in Washington.

The current child tax credit allows up to $2,000 per child.

During the coronavirus pandemic, Congress expanded that amount to an annual credit of $3,000 to $3,600, depending on the age of the child, but Republicans let that provision expire at the end of 2021.

There's bipartisan support for an expanded credit in the House. But the Senate — with its slim 51-seat Democratic majority and the need for 60 votes to break a filibuster — has held up any meaningful progress on the issue.

In early August, the Senate voted 48-44 on the expanded child tax measure, meaning it did not advance. Vance missed that vote.

While on CBS, the Ohioan referred to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's legislative move as a "show vote," saying it simply didn't have enough support to pass regardless of his presence.

The absence will likely contribute to Democratic efforts to play up the issue ahead of the election as the party looks to hold the White House, keep the Senate, and flip the House.>

<Republicans have been pushing during the 2024 election to get their voters to use early and mail-in voting, after years of urging against the methods, and it appears their efforts may be turning the tide.

Former President Donald Trump led the chorus of skeptics in the GOP regarding early and mail-in ballots in the 2020 election, renewing those calls in the 2022 elections. Republican losses in both of those elections were partly blamed on the GOP voters not utilizing early voting methods, as the Democratic Party had.

Arizona has been one of the top states where Republicans had expressed skepticism over early voting, but now Republican candidates and GOP aligned groups have attempted to boost GOP early voting turnout. The results from July's GOP primary show progress. Republicans entered the final days of the early voting period with a significant lead in turnout after the emphasis on early options to cast a ballot. Comparing the marquee Republican primary races in the past two cycles, the 2022 gubernatorial race and the 2024 Senate race, there is an uptick in the share of early votes compared to polling place votes between the two years.

In the 2022 GOP gubernatorial primary, roughly 79.82% of those voting used early voting methods compared to 83.67% of voters using early ballots in the 2024 Republican Senate primary.

When looking at the voters in both primaries who cast ballots for Kari Lake, who has mirrored Trump's views on several matters including voter fraud claims and early voting, there was a more notable uptick in how many of her voters used early voting. In 2022, 73.38% of her voters cast their ballots early, compared to 81.14% of her voters who did so in the 2024 primary.

While the uptick is encouraging for Republicans in Arizona, the general election on Nov. 5, will be the true test of whether the GOP's efforts have worked.

The Republican National Committee launched the "Bank Your Vote" initiative in June 2023, attempting to reassure voters that by using one of the early methods, their vote is secure and safe – just like voting in person on Election Day.

The first test for the GOP's early voting push came in the 2023 Virginia state legislative elections, where Republicans wanted to win control of both chambers in an uphill fight due to redistricting. While the GOP narrowly failed to win control of either chamber, the seemingly successful push to get Republican voters comfortable with using early voting methods was one bright spot of the off-year election.

Trump, who still expresses his concerns over early voting from time to time, has largely gotten on board with the GOP's early voting push.

The RNC and Trump have encouraged Republican voters to "swamp the vote," contending that they should make it "too big to rig" — a reference to Trump's continued allegations of voter fraud pushed by Democrats in previous elections. There has been no evidence suggesting voter fraud affected the results of races that Trump has made allegations about, including the 2020 presidential election.>

<....If Vance isn’t ignorant of the law, then he is instead merely eager to play the role of demagogue and further inflame an already bitter political debate. Ultimately, neither scenario is ideal for a potential vice president.

On the merits, Schedule F is a controversial idea — one that would undermine the civil service system as it has existed for more than a century and severely impair the integrity and effectiveness of the federal government, with grave consequences.

Currently, the vast majority of federal employees who keep the government running are career civil servants with employment protections and who serve from one administration to the next regardless of party. This is a key part of the “deep state” that Trump and Vance want to eradicate; Schedule F would convert these workers into political appointees who could then be summarily fired by the president and replaced with partisans loyal only to Trump.

“What Trump is trying to do is create a sort of authoritarian type of government where he can manipulate the civil service system to do what he wants,” said Kenneth Warren, a professor at St. Louis University whose areas of expertise include administrative law and the administrative state. “That’s very, very dangerous.”

Daniel Farber, a professor at Berkeley Law School who has also studied the proposal, echoed that view while also emphasizing the legal and administrative mess that would result. “This could turn into an enormous quagmire if they tried to implement it,” he said.

Trump first tried to implement Schedule F during his final months in office through an executive order, but he lost the election and the policy never took hold. Joe Biden rescinded the order shortly after taking office. And earlier this year, the Office of Personnel Management issued a lengthy rule that both reiterates and legally strengthens the traditional job protections afforded to those career officials.

Vance, however, has for years been a vocal proponent of purging the civil service, and of Schedule F.

“I think that what Trump should, like, if I was giving him one piece of advice, [is] fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” he said in 2021 on a podcast. “Replace them with our people. And when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” (The quote attributed to Jackson is, as one scholar has noted, “probably apocryphal.”)

In an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC News in February, Vance reiterated his stance while also seeming to recognize its extreme and unpopular nature — falsely claiming, for instance, that his earlier comments had been limited to the president’s ability to run “the military.”

And in an interview with POLITICO Magazine, Vance went further: “If the elected president says, ‘I get to control the staff of my own government,’ and the Supreme Court steps in and says, ‘You’re not allowed to do that’ — like, that is the constitutional crisis. It’s not whatever Trump or whoever else does in response.”

Vance’s loose collection of legal claims and concepts concerning Schedule F faces several problems, on both a theoretical and practical level.

At the moment, Schedule F “is illegal,” as Warren noted. OPM’s rule bolstering job protections for career employees, which was initiated last September, would take priority over any effort by Trump to reinstate the policy by executive order. It is “very, very tough” for a federal agency to rescind and replace a rule issued through the typical notice-and-comment process, Warren observed, though it would at least theoretically be doable over time if Trump were to retake office and direct his OPM to do so.

The bigger problem, Warren explained, is that OPM’s rule is legally rooted in a long history of statutes passed by Congress — going all the way back to the Pendleton Act of 1883 — and many court decisions since. OPM, he told me, had “done a great job with the rule” by synthesizing and consolidating the preexisting legal authority that makes clear that Trump and Vance cannot simply fire tens of thousands of career employees and politicize the entire federal government by fiat.

In this view, only Congress — not the president — can implement a policy like Schedule F.

<....Still, the Trump administration’s earlier legal theory is also questionable on its face according to both Warren and Farber, the latter of whom told me that it is “too hasty,” especially after the Supreme Court’s decisions overruling Chevron and creating the “major questions” doctrine, which supposedly disfavors executive actions with vast economic and political significance that don’t have clear authorization from Congress. On this view, the court is far less likely to give deference to Trump or his OPM’s interpretation of the statute.

Just last year, the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court used the major questions doctrine to throw out a big chunk of Biden’s student loan relief program on the theory that the administration had tried to justify a dramatic change in federal policy using aggressive and expansive readings of what were, according to them, much narrower statutory authorities.

Former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once wrote that Congress does not “hide elephants in mouseholes.” “Schedule F is an elephant,” Farber said.

Vance’s final line of argument — in fact his only real line of argument — is that the president is constitutionally entitled to run the executive branch however he sees fit. It’s a variation on the unitary executive theory, though not a particularly compelling one.

With the exception of the small number of executive branch officials specifically named in the constitution, the apparatus of the federal government only exists because Congress passes laws and funds the agencies and other executive branch functions necessary to implement them — including the money used to pay all of those people. The idea that the president could simply preempt Congress’ authority in this area is a huge stretch, and it would likely trigger a major constitutional dispute that could take years to resolve.

“That argument might have played fine at a seminar at Yale when Vance was a student,” Farber said, “but is this the hill you really want to die on? Is this where you want to provoke a massive constitutional crisis? Over federal personnel policy?”

A second version of Schedule F in another Trump administration would, in the short term, spur broad challenges to the policy in the courts, but as Farber noted, “even if Schedule F were upheld, there would be a second potential for challenging whether any individual position or civil service employee was properly classified” and removable under the policy.

In other words, there could be hundreds — potentially thousands — of fact-specific legal cases brought by federal employees to contest their reclassification and removal by Trump and Vance given their particular job functions. The result, at a bare minimum, could be years of time-consuming and costly litigation, all at taxpayer expense.

Even as a practical matter, it would not be nearly as easy as Vance has so casually suggested to remove and replace tens of thousands of federal employees without throwing the government into chaos in the interim. It would make a government shutdown look like a walk in the park. (Of course, that may be a feature not a bug for some conservatives, who would be delighted to see EPA or the Labor Department ground to a halt.)

Vance’s proposal for Trump to simply defy the Supreme Court if it threw out Schedule F is also deeply concerning. It runs contrary to our collective, basic and firmly embedded civic understanding that the Supreme Court has the last word on what the law is in this country, for better or worse. Americans may not like it — they frequently and at times vocally do not — but it is a broadly accepted fact of American governance, and Vance’s evident willingness to reject it is worrisome.

“It certainly feeds into concerns that people have expressed about authoritarianism as an element of his thought,” Farber told me. “That’s not the sort of thing leaders in a democracy say — and definitely not about relatively routine legal issues.”

Based on the law and sheer practicality, Vance’s vision of gutting the civil service would seem difficult to execute. But today’s Supreme Court may not be the greatest obstacle in the way. In fact, Vance’s ostensibly confrontational pose toward the court is genuinely curious — if not outright bizarre — under the circumstances....>

<....The Supreme Court — which is controlled by a supermajority of justices installed by Republican presidents, including three Trump appointees — is friendlier to Republican political interests and conservative causes than at any point in decades. That is a major reason why the court’s public approval remains at a historic low and why there is a political movement gaining momentum to fundamentally change the structure of the court. If Trump is reelected and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito resign during his term, Trump could end up appointing an outright majority of the court.

Despite the objectively dubious legal merits of Schedule F, this Supreme Court might very well sign off on it if Trump is elected and pushes some version of it again in a second administration.

“We know that courts can rationalize anything,” Warren told me, “as they just did in [overruling Chevron] or in Trump v. United States,” which granted Trump partial immunity from criminal prosecution over his alleged effort to steal the 2020 election.

The odds of a major standoff between Trump and the Supreme Court in a second term — something that never really happened in the first term even before Trump made all three of his appointments — seem low, to put it mildly. (No, the court didn’t entertain Trump’s election subversion efforts, but it ultimately approved his travel ban from mainly Muslim countries and signed off on his decision to transfer billions of dollars from a congressional military appropriation to fund the construction of his “wall” along the southern border.)

Vance, of course, is not the first lawyer to offer simplistic and misleading views on the law once they enter the political arena. He isn’t even the first prominent Republican Yale Law School alumnus to do it this year.

But all of this makes Vance’s commentary on the court even stranger, except in the narrow — and perhaps most telling — sense that he seems drawn to needlessly incendiary comments designed to rile up the Republican base, even if they turn off moderates and independents.

In that sense, his position on Schedule F and the Supreme Court is not that different from his now-infamous position on “childless cat ladies” — a crude, aggressive and gratuitous swipe at millions of Americans that managed to polarize an issue (support for American families) on which there is actually broad bipartisan support.

These sorts of antics may ingratiate him to Trump and the Republican hard-liners. Whether they actually help Trump win back the presidency, however, is a decidedly open question.>

<As the Harris-Walz team soars (polls are already showing Kamala taking the lead), Trump is cracking up.

His ego can’t take it. He is freaking out that his opponent — a Black woman — has more energy and momentum behind her than he has.

Last Thursday, after ten days of Kamala in the limelight, Trump was so desperate for attention that he held a news conference that provided no news.

During it, Trump absurdly claimed that his January 6, 2021, rally on the National Mall was larger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 rally, when he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. (King’s speech had summoned 250,000 to the Mall. Trump’s rally drew 53,000, according to the House Select Committee that investigated the events of January 6.)

King’s rally also led to the signing of the Civil Rights Act. Trump’s rally led to a deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Why would Trump want to remind anyone of what he did on January 6, 2021?

He can’t help himself. He keeps repeating that the 2020 election was stolen, even though the claim turns off independent voters and does nothing to advance his case against Kamala Harris.

Over the weekend, he posted a link to a 2021 document questioning the security of Georgia’s voting machines. When he made a campaign stop in Georgia the previous Saturday, Trump attacked Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger — both of whom won reelection in 2022 despite Trump’s vocal opposition.

Why is Trump attacking Republican leaders in Georgia instead of Kamala Harris? Because Trump will never forgive Kemp and Raffensperger for not joining his attempt to overturn the 2020 election in the Peach State.

Trump told the crowd that Kemp is “a bad guy, he’s a disloyal guy and he’s a very average Governor,” adding that if it “wasn’t for me, he would not be your Governor. I think everybody knows that.”

Trump’s rant against Kemp is particularly absurd because he needs Kemp’s organization in Georgia to help him in the race against Harris.

Why is Trump going on about the 2020 election being “stolen” anyway? That claim cost Republicans two Senate seats in Georgia’s special elections in January 2021 because it depressed turnout among Republicans who assumed their ballots wouldn’t count.

When Trump does talk about Harris, he’s unable to focus on the policies on which he could criticize her, such as the southern border, but dredges up racist tropes such as whether she’s “really Black.”

He mispronounces her name and attacks her with ideological platitudes, as he did last Friday at a rally in Montana when he proclaimed that “America cannot survive for four more years of this bumbling communist lunatic.”

Trump’s ego has been so injured by the huge turnout at Kamala’s rallies that he’s now claiming they’re “fake.”

Yesterday, in multiple posts to his Truth Social platform, he asserted that the huge crowd at her Detroit-area rally was faked by AI. It “DIDN’T EXIST,” he posted. “Nobody was there.”

On Wednesday, he complained that:

“If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes ‘crazy,’ and talks about how ‘big’ it was - And she pays for her ‘Crowd.’ When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!”

None of this has anything to do with how Kamala would govern America or whether she’d be a good president, but Trump appears incapable of separating his fragile ego from his desperation to get attention and get even rather than get elected president.

He’s attacking everyone and everything. After The New York Times ran a piece a few days ago about the “the worst three weeks” of his campaign, Trump exploded at what he called “the Failing New York Times, which is a crooked newspaper run by a Radical Left group of Lunatics … losing readers at a record level.”

He’s making up stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with Harris or Walz, such as a “scary” helicopter ride with California’s Willie Brown that never happened.

Trump is cracking because the attention and positive energy generated by Harris and Walz are threatening his ego so much he cannot focus on his opponent. So he falls back on the size of her crowds relative to his, her “Blackness,” the “stolen election,” his grievances against Republicans who didn’t support him, and The New York Times.

<With the Paris Olympics coming to an end in a spectacular closing ceremony on Sunday night, Donald Trump had something else on his mind: himself.

The former president specifically posted on his Truth Social platform to take credit for the fact that the next Summer Games will take place in Los Angeles. “As President-Elect, I worked with the Olympic Organizing Committee of Los Angeles in getting the 2028 Olympics to come to the United States,” he wrote. “There was tremendous competition from other countries.”

In November 2016, a spokeswoman for Los Angeles’ then-Mayor Eric Garcetti said Trump planned to support the city’s bid to host its third Olympics. At the time, L.A. was competing with Paris and Budapest for the 2024 Games, though Budapest eventually withdrew its bid. The International Olympic Committee in 2017 confirmed the 2024 event would be hosted by Paris—which the French wanted in part because it last hosted the games exactly a century earlier, in 1924—while 2028 would go to Los Angeles.

“President Obama refused to speak to the International Olympic Committee (perhaps because of a previous rejection by them of a proposal personally made by him!), which needed the enthusiastic support and approval of the U.S. - Without which they would not have chosen our Country,” Trump wrote in his post, referring to the unsuccessful bid for the 2016 Games to be held in Chicago that Obama had supported.

“I gave them what they wanted to hear, and got the job done!” Trump continued. “It was my great honor to do so. Hopefully I will be President, and our Country will have reached new (and record!) levels of success. SEE YOU IN 2028. Thank you!”

Trump’s braggadocious post at the end of this year’s Games came after he attacked the opening ceremony as a “disgrace.” The former president made the comment in a Fox News interview in which he spoke about a section of the ceremony featuring drag performers that some Christians said had mocked Da Vinci’s The Last Supper (but which was actually intended to reference Greek mythology).

“I thought it was terrible,” Trump said last month. Asked what will happen at the 2028 Games if he is president, he answered: “We won’t be having a ‘Last Supper’ as portrayed the way they portrayed it the other night.”>

This narcissist has had all the attention ruthlessly snatched away from him; any will do to satisfy that implacable jones which long ago seized his being.

<After years of condemning former President Donald Trump for spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories, Democrats are now poking fun at his running mate using a false, vulgar rumor.

The rumor, first posted on X last month, involves a fake passage about a sex act and a couch supposedly in Sen. JD Vance's 2016 book, "Hillbilly Elegy."

The lie spread like wildfire, spawning jokes and memes even as the original joke's author clarified that it wasn't real and later made his account private. Several news outlets published fact-checks of the claim.

The fervor reached a peak in Philadelphia, the day Vice President Kamala Harris named Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz told an arena filled with thousands of excited supporters: “I got to tell you, I can’t wait to debate [Vance]. That is if — if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.” As the crowd roared and Harris smirked behind him, Walz, who just weeks earlier started a trend of calling Republicans “weird,” quipped, “You see what I did there?”

The Harris campaign's TikTok account, named Kamala HQ, posted a video of the moment that has been viewed over 5.3 million times.

Republicans online were quick to chastise Walz for referring to the false story.

Jonathan Turley, a conservative legal scholar, attacked “the couch story” on X as having been “debunked repeatedly.”

“We are not even in the post-convention period and our leading candidates are already 'in the mud rolling around' with trolls,” he wrote.

The content and rapid spread of the false rumor seems made for the social media age, when information that is real, false and sometimes a blend of both is presented and disseminated in similar ways — and when fact-checks often never have the same reach as the bad information.

The incident has also caused rival political camps to argue over which pieces of false information are worse than others and the fuzzy line between what is harmful or just mockery.

Walz wasn't the first to joke about the viral falsehood. On July 27, nearly two weeks after the original false tweet was posted and a week after it was hidden by the author, the Harris campaign account posted a screenshot on X of a 2021 tweet from Vance deriding "cat ladies."

The post was captioned "JD Vance does not couch his hatred for women."

On July 26, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent around a news release blasting Vance. The opening sentence read, "House Republicans are couching their public praise of Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee with private criticism."

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who at the time was considered to be on the short list to be Harris' running mate, leaned into the joke twice in the following days.

On the July 28 episode of ABC News' "This Week," Pritzker condemned Trump, saying, "He talks about all kinds of crazy stuff," before adding, "You know, his running mate, as you probably have heard, is, you know, getting known for his obsession with couches."

On the July 29 "White Dudes for Harris" Zoom fundraiser, Pritzker told attendees: "I’ll keep my remarks short. I know that we have a lot of speakers. And afterward, of course, there’s another Zoom that I invite you all to called 'Couches Against Trump.'"

After Walz's speech, some Democrats continued to embrace the joke.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., quoted a tweet from Vance criticizing Harris for not taking questions from the media, with Moskowitz telling him: "I’ve been on Air Force 2 JD, there is a great couch on it."

And at a rally in Las Vegas on Saturday, Rep. Dina Titus, who spoke before Walz and Harris, addressed Vance with the line, "You better hide behind that sofa, because we’re coming for you."

Asked for a statement on Titus' comments, a spokesperson said, "I think we’ll just go with what’s on the tape."

As the quips have gone mainstream, Republicans have blasted Democrats for helping spread the lie — even as Trump and his allies continue to share falsehoods about Harris and Walz.

Democrats are defending their jokes as harmless fun, pointing to harmful past conspiracies spread by Trump and other Republicans about Democrats' running secret sex trafficking rings, being pedophiles or changing their identities for political purposes as far worse than a meme about a couch.

"For 2 years we had to hear that Joe Biden was an international super criminal mastermind from Despicable Me 3. You will listen to couch story," Moskowitz tweeted last week in response to Turley's complaints.

Representatives for the Trump and Harris campaigns, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Pritzker and Moskowitz did not return requests for comment.>

<When former President Donald Trump appeared on Fox News promising "big changes" to Social Security, he again demonstrated why he has earned the title of "Conman-in-Chief." His latest scam is a tax cut that is unpaid for, and in truth, will deplete the Social Security Trust Fund. Thankfully, Newsweek covered the real impact of what the former President has put forward. As the press continues to shine a light on candidates' plans, it holds them accountable for their actions and their impact on the public.

While some may find his empty promises appealing, the facts put his proposals in perspective. As economic analyst Steve Rattner recently pointed out that Trump's unpaid for changes to Social Security would move up the Trust Fund's insolvency date, resulting in an automatic 21 percent benefit cut for beneficiaries.

In last week's interview, Trump again falsely claimed that undocumented immigrants are "destroying" the system by receiving Social Security. This myth has been disproven by nonpartisan experts like Social Security Chief Actuary Steve Goss, who recently testified before the Ways and Means Committee on the matter. Ironically, undocumented immigrants strengthen the system because they pay into it without ever receiving benefits.

Trump continues to pander with false platitudes. Democrats have put forward a plan that is actually paid for. President Biden and Vice President Harris have called to "scrap the payroll cap" on the wealthy so they pay into the program throughout the year like everyone else. This will both extend the program's solvency and enhance benefits for the first time in more than 50 years, and it's paid for!

Facts are telling, and Trump proposed cuts to Medicare and Social Security when he was in office, while at the same time passing massive cash breaks for the wealthiest one percent. This alone added $1.9 trillion to the national debt.

The Republican Study Committee, the largest conservative caucus in Congress, released a budget that would put $1.5 trillion in cuts to Social Security on the table, and also called for raising the retirement age. Raising the age to 70 would be at least a 21 percent across-the-board cut!

House Republicans are currently advancing a government funding bill in line with Project 2025 that includes cutting funding for the Social Security Administration by $453 million. This would close field offices, extend wait times, and delay claims decisions for beneficiaries.

At a time when 70 million Americans rely on Social Security and 10,000 Baby Boomers a day are becoming eligible for the program, they are becoming keenly aware of what impacts their wallets, and these plans could decimate Americans' retirement savings.

Donald, some seniors may have been born at night, but they weren't born last night. They know a con when they hear it.

The humorist Finley Peter Dunne famously stated, "Trust everybody, but always cut the cards." When it comes to the "Conman-in-Chief," Donald Trump, the nation needs to not only to cut the cards—it needs to re-shuffle the deck. The people need the real deal.>

<Former President Donald Trump's lawsuit over the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago property could backfire, legal analysts say.

Trump is set to file a civil suit against the Department of Justice (DOJ) for $100 million in damages, which he argues he sustained as a result of the government's search of his Palm Beach, Florida, home, according to reports. During the August 2022 raid, federal officials found classified documents in Trump's possession a year and a half after he had left the White House.

Trump was subsequently charged with illegally retaining national security documents and obstructing the government's efforts to reclaim them, but Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case last month. The DOJ is appealing her decision.

Former federal prosecutor and elected state attorney Michael McAuliffe told Newsweek that the lawsuit would only be a "publicity stunt" and "nothing more." And former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that she would "welcome" the lawsuit if she were at the DOJ because a civil case would mean discovery and a deposition from Trump.

Legal expert Lisa Rubin agreed, tweeting that through the discovery process "one thing DOJ would get to find out is whether Trump himself (or any business he owns) paid his alleged $15 million in legal fees incurred in defending against the Mar-a-Lago case, or whether, for example, his leadership PAC, Save America, actually assumed those costs for him through the generosity of his donors."

"President Trump is continuing to fight against blatant election interference by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden's weaponized Department of Justice," Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told Newsweek.

"As the complaint powerfully details, the raid on Mar-a-Lago was illegal and unconstitutional, as are all of the Democrat witch hunts that are now falling apart like the rotten house of cards that they are and which should be immediately dismissed in order to bring unity back to our nation," Cheung said.

McAuliffe predicted that either the lawsuit would be dismissed or Trump would drop it when discovery begins, calling it "a predictable Trump litigation strategy."

Former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told Newsweek he expected the lawsuit to be dismissed because there's no evidence to prove Trump's claims that the raid was part of a "political prosecution."

"The government asked for the return of the classified documents before they issued a subpoena, then executed a search warrant. The prosecution was the culmination of Trump ignoring the requests and subpoena and obstructing justice to prevent the lawful return of the documents," Rahmani said.

He added that while Cannon dismissed the case, she did so because she believed DOJ special counsel Jack Smith's appointment was unconstitutional, not because she thought Trump was innocent.

"The government has broad immunity from civil lawsuits absent some violation of a clearly established constitutional right," Rahmani said. "There isn't any such violation here, so I don't expect this lawsuit to go anywhere, like Trump's previous frivolous lawsuit against Hillary Clinton."

In January 2023, Trump and his attorney Alina Habba were sanctioned by a Florida judge for their lawsuit against Clinton. They were ordered to pay nearly $1 million for filing a "completely frivolous lawsuit," which U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks said showed a "pattern of abuse of the courts" that "amounts to obstruction of justice.">

<Last Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, greeted a crowd of over 15,000 supporters in Glendale, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix.

For the Democratic faithful in the Grand Canyon State, the high level of enthusiasm for their party's presidential ticket is indicative of the political transformation that has occurred in state in recent years.

It's also a stunning development in state where former President Donald Trump believes that the issue of immigration will not only rally his base but win over independents who have disapproved of President Joe Biden's policies at the US-Mexico border.

For Harris, Biden's decision to step aside as the Democratic nominee lets her tackle the issue on her own terms independent of the president.

And it's a move that could give Harris a critical lift in a state that Trump is relying on to win back the White House.

Here's a look at how Harris has gone on the offensive on border security and the dilemma Trump faces to win Arizona in November:

Immigration is a top issue for voters this fall, and it's not just one that animates Republican voters. Over the past two years, voters in Democratic-heavy cities like New York and Chicago have seen an influx of migrants sent to their jurisdictions by Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott — who has long railed against the Biden administration's policies at the southern border. It's stoked huge divides even among residents in some of America's most liberal cities.

Earlier in Biden's term, record apprehensions at the southern border made immigration one of his weakest issues. When Biden took office, he pledged to foster a more humane approach regarding asylum seekers, but when Trump launched his 2024 bid, the president's vulnerability on the issue was a major part of his pitch to voters.

Harris' ascension as the presidential nominee scrambles this longstanding dynamic.

The former California attorney general is already running ads touting herself as a "border-state prosecutor" who went after drug cartels and put gang members in prison. And she zeroes in on her pledge to tackle human trafficking and the smuggling of fentanyl into the US.

Another Harris ad highlights the vice president's support for adding additional border patrol agents at the southern border.

One critical thing that's aiding Harris right now: border crossings have plummeted in recent months.

In July, roughly 57,000 migrants were apprehended at the southern border, the lowest monthly figure of Biden's White House tenure. It's a sharp decline from the 250,000 apprehensions in December 2023.

The Trump campaign has repeatedly criticized Harris over the issue and sought to tie her to Biden. Republicans frequently refer to the vice president as a "border czar" who didn't secure the border.

But it is unclear if that message will resonate.

Harris was not officially designated by Biden as a "czar," nor was she assigned the task of fully overseeing the southern border. She was, however, placed in charge of addressing the root causes of migration from Central America.

Before Biden won Arizona in 2020, it last voted for a Democratic presidential nominee in 1996.

Since 1952, those were only two instances when the state voted blue at the presidential level, a reflection of its deep Republican roots.

Now, that conservative lean is no longer the default position....>

<....Democrat Mark Kelly and Independent Kyrsten Sinema hold Arizona's US Senate seats. After years of GOP control, Democrat Katie Hobbs wrestled back the Governor's office in the 2022 midterms. And while the Arizona legislature remains controlled by Republicans, the party has narrow majorities in both the state House and state Senate.

Just two months ago, it appeared that Trump was on pace to win Arizona and potentially flip Nevada — a Democratic-leaning swing state that last backed a GOP presidential nominee in 2004. And his heavy focus on border security was a big part of his resonance with his base and a slice of voters who had grown disenchanted with Biden on immigration and the economy.

But the Cook Political Report recently shifted both Arizona and Nevada (as well as Georgia) from the "lean Republican" category back to the "tossup" column.

The movement comes off the strength of Harris' campaign, as she has not only firmed up Democratic base support but made inroads with independents and undecided voters.

As of July, registered independents — or voters classified as "other" — make up nearly 34% of Arizona's electorate. Republicans make up 35% of the electorate, while Democrats have a 29% share.

While Trump has enduring appeal with the Republican base, he can't win based on those votes alone.

Harris' campaign has already begun attacking Trump over his opposition to a bipartisan border security bill that was backed by Biden but largely abandoned by Republicans after the ex-president warned GOP lawmakers to oppose the measure.

Trump's position has the potential to move independents who want an immigration solution and believe that Harris might take different approaches than Biden on the issue.

For Harris, remaining competitive in Arizona gives her multiple pathways to win in the fall. She is clearly eyeing the state's 11 electoral votes, but she can still win the election without it.

However, for Trump, a Harris win in Arizona would be a huge blow in his attempts to win a second term. Biden's 2020 victories in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada — as well as his wins in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — effectively cut off Trump's path to victory that year.

Should Harris neutralize the border security issue — a feat that seemed unimaginable when Biden was still the presumptive nominee — it'll give her a major opening to win Arizona.>

<I’ll give him this: Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, has been hustling. The GOP’s vice presidential candidate spent the last week doing some heavy campaigning around the country before appearing on three Sunday shows. But it stands in stark contrast to how low-energy the guy at the top of the ticket, former President Donald Trump, has been since accepting the Republican nomination last month.

If you were to ask Vance, it’s all part of the plan. The running mate is traditionally an attack dog for the nominee, a role that he has seemed eager to play in targeting Vice President Kamala Harris. But Trump’s slow pace is odd, even when you consider that August is traditionally a slow month in the presidential campaign season. At some point, if Vance is perceived as doing most of the heavy lifting for the campaign, that could become a major hindrance to Trump’s chances this fall.

I’m not bringing up Trump’s sparse schedule to claim that the number of rallies a candidate holds is determinative of who wins an election. Nor am I saying anything similar about crowd sizes, no matter how much it irks him that Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz have been drawing huge audiences. It does, however, speak to electoral strategy and the lack of any sort of shift from Trump’s camp even as the race has fundamentally changed.

It does speaks [sic] to electoral strategy and the lack of any sort of shift from Trump’s camp even as the race has fundamentally changed.

When President Joe Biden was still the presumptive Democratic nominee, Trump directed the Republican National Committee to divert funds from field operations and get-out-the-vote programs to focus on “election integrity.” His argument at the time was built on the belief that that’s still the greatest motivator to get his supporters out to the polls. But he hasn’t been putting himself out there nearly as much as that bravado would suggest. In fact, he held only a handful of events last week, not counting his hastily called fact-free press conference to try to draw the spotlight back to himself.

This sluggishness wasn’t always the case with Trump. During his last two campaigns, he was a very different creature on the stump, sometimes holding multiple rallies in a single day, according to an analysis from The Washington Post’s Philip Bump. In contrast, the newly minted Democratic duo hit up seven stops over the course of five days, absolutely smoking Trump’s lethargic pace. And while it makes sense that the Harris-Walz ticket is in a hurry to introduce itself to voters with just under three months until Election Day, you’d think the Trump campaign would stress a similar urgency on its boss....>

<....Instead, it was left up to Vance to tail Harris and Walz around the swing states. The plan was to hit at Harris on issues on which the GOP feels she’s weak: immigration, crime and the economy. But as my colleague Jim Downie explained on Monday, those are all areas where things are improving as we get closer to Election Day, potentially blunting the Republican message against Democrats across the board.

Vance’s appearances were also much more sparsely attended than the Harris-Walz events, setting up an unflattering contrast that couldn’t have made Trump happy. Even his attempts to directly confront Harris fell flat. Vance’s decision to literally do a press stop next to Air Force Two in Wisconsin didn’t produce much more than one of the most cringeworthy photo shoots of the election season.

It doesn’t help that Vance isn’t exactly Mr. Popular these days. The messaging from Democrats since he was named Trump’s running mate appears to be sticking, according to recent polling. Since the GOP convention, Vance has “become more and more identified with his particular brand of conservatism and less with his famed biography as an author, veteran, and politician,” according to Semafor’s Kadia Goba. Tellingly, when you look at FiveThirtyEight’s polling aggregate, Vance’s unfavorable ratings are higher than Trump’s, which is really saying something.

If Trump is still set to be the main GOTV force, he’s going to have to start pulling his weight rather than letting Vance be the voice of the ticket.

Vance is calling his stalking tour a win so far though, bragging about his Sunday show appearances on X while criticizing Harris’ lack of tough interviews since she became the presumptive nominee. As talking points go, focusing on whether Harris has done as many press appearances as he has doesn’t seem like a strong one. It honestly feels like a remnant of the race against Biden, when the main message was that Biden is too old to properly campaign.

This all matters because beyond the energy and enthusiasm that have suffused throughout the Democratic base, the Harris campaign is using its events to sign up volunteers and do other ground-level work necessary to win in November. If Trump is still set to be the main GOTV force, he’s going to have to start pulling his weight rather than letting Vance be the voice of the ticket. And yet, it’s ironically Trump’s inability to stick to a message against Harris in his public appearances that has the potential to make Vance into the more reliable — if underwhelming — campaigner.

There is still time for things to shift and Trump to pick up the pace again. Both he and Vance are going to be on the trail this week, including on Wednesday, when they’ll split North Carolina and Michigan between them. Vance will have the earlier appearance, but it’ll be worth seeing just how much more of a crowd Trump draws to his event. All told, the signs point to Vance’s anointment as the future of the MAGA movement as a bit premature — it turns out there’s still nobody quite like Donald Trump.>

<When Donald Trump is at his most vulnerable, when he feels most threatened, he tells fans not to believe their own eyes and ears.

After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, he called the event a “love fest,” denying the video evidence of the violence. After the writer E. Jean Carroll accused him of sexual assault, he said he had “never met” her, despite a photo showing them together.

And yesterday, after Kamala Harris finished a week of arena-size rallies, he claimed that images of her crowds were “fake” and AI-generated. Specifically, Trump embraced a conspiracy theory—touted by pro-Trump social-media accounts known for peddling nonsense—that the Harris campaign had posted a fake crowd photo from her August 7 event in Romulus, Michigan.

“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” he wrote. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”

The turnout at Harris events is entirely real, and political analysts suspect that the crowds she has attracted are making Trump jealous and nervous. But the AI lie is about more than Trump’s size anxiety—it portends a dark and desperate chapter in this already distressing presidential-election season.

Alex King, a 32-year-old political organizer who lives outside Detroit, was at the August 7 rally holding a Harris-Walz sign and wearing a blue shirt. He immediately recognized himself in the picture that Trump shared and pretended was fake yesterday. “There was nobody there!” Trump wrote. But King was there, and he told me the former president’s post was “disheartening and frankly disrespectful.”

Every time Trump challenges his fans to side with him over photographic proof of reality, it’s disrespectful. I have been keeping an informal list of such episodes since the inauguration-crowd-size controversy of 2017, and they are typically driven by Trump’s enormous insecurity.

“The first lie of the Trump presidency,” as The Atlantic’s Megan Garber dubbed the inauguration freakout, began with a 5 a.m. segment on CNN the day after Trump was inaugurated. The CNN anchor John Berman very gently pointed out that Trump had predicted “they were going to break records with the crowds” in Washington, but “it doesn’t look like they did,” and he showed a graphic juxtaposing Barack Obama’s historic 2009 crowd on the left and Trump’s smaller crowd on the right. Trump erupted, and his aides came up with “alternative facts” to deny reality.

Toward the end of his presidency, Trump minimized the crowd sizes at protests, claiming that Black Lives Matter drew a “much smaller crowd in D.C. than anticipated” when in fact a rally over the death of George Floyd in police custody was the largest gathering in the nation’s capital since the Women’s March on the day after his inauguration.

More recently, during his hush-money trial in Lower Manhattan this spring, Trump was reportedly disappointed that his supporters did not flock to the area around the courthouse. He made excuses when reporters pointed out that the park across the street was practically empty. “Thousands of people were turned away from the courthouse,” he lied, calling the area “an armed camp to keep people away.” I pulled out my cameraphone to show how easy it was to visit the neighborhood, and told New Yorkers to come see for themselves....>

<....But Trump’s repeated claims that you shouldn’t believe your own eyes have been buttressed by his near-decade-long insistence that real news is “fake.” A Trump devotee would have a hard time trusting my photo of the wide-open courthouse entrance over Trump’s comforting lie.

I have come to view this as a method of control. The rejection of video evidence, the dismissal of photo proof, even the new lie invoking AI—these claims all leave people arguing over the most basic tenets of reality, and cause some people to give up and give in. As Chico Marx asked in the 1933 film Duck Soup, “Who are ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” Richard Pryor later adapted the line: “Who you gonna believe? Me, or your lying eyes?” Trump has brought the concept into the 21st century.

Some of his photo-denying disputes have been minor, and maybe even humorous. One day in 2019, The Washington Post reported that Trump’s advisers “wrote new talking points and handed him reams of opposition research” for his attacks against the Democratic lawmakers known as the “Squad.” Trump claimed that “there were no talking points” even though a Post photographer, Jabin Botsford, had taken a close-up photo of his prepared notes.

Every instance of Trump disputing the indisputable is revealing in its own way. As Hurricane Dorian sideswiped the Eastern Seaboard, in the fall of 2019, Trump contradicted his own government’s weather maps and claimed that Alabama was in the path of the hurricane when the state was not, then tried to convince people that his faulty forecast was correct. That same year, as Britain’s Prince Andrew was ensnared in sexual-misconduct allegations, Trump said “I don’t know him, no,” despite multiple photos of the two men together, including one taken just six months before.

Vulnerability seems to be the through line here—whether Trump is at risk of trivial embarrassment, criminal exposure, or being caught in lies. A public figure with truth on their side would say Roll the tape to show they’re right. Trump, instead, says, Don’t believe the tape. Just believe me instead.

The aftermath of January 6 is probably the most extreme example of his reality-denial. He watched the insurrection unfold on live TV but then tried to erase the public’s memory of the images. On the one-year anniversary of the attack, Representative Jamie Raskin said on CNN that he felt bad for Trump adherents because “they are essentially in a political religious cult, and their cult leader, Donald Trump, is telling them they can’t believe their own eyes, the evidence of their own experience, and their own ears.”

That’s what Trump did again yesterday—only this time, the proliferation of AI-image-making tools made it easier than ever to sow doubt. Trump is “entering the ‘nothing is true and everything is possible’ phase, as predicted,” the Atlantic contributor Renee DiResta wrote on Threads. “The ability to plausibly cast doubt on the real is the unintended consequence of being able to generate unreality.”

King, one of the real people in the Michigan crowd that Trump said didn’t exist, found the new crowd-size lie dispiriting. “It would be nice for us voters to be able to have discussions on the substantive issues that are at stake in this election,” he told me, “not be hyperfocused on distractions and conspiracy theories.”

Yes—but it is also essential to track how Trump tries to trick people. His is a campaign of disbelief. If Trump is so shaken by Harris that he will insist her thousands of supporters don’t exist, what else will he say and do to deny reality?>

This is a haven for truth and reasoned discussion--that means no liars are welcome, including the <tosspot of budapest> or <fredremf>.

Capisce?

<During his hourlong Mar-a-Lago press conference last week, Donald Trump claimed he would lay low and step off the campaign trail until the Democratic National Convention concludes on August 22.

However, the former president is scheduled for a rally in Asheville, North Carolina on Wednesday, August 14 — which sits in a county where "voters have picked Democrats in presidential elections since 2008," according to the Asheville Citizen-Times.

WCIV ABC News 4 reports business owners in the area have expressed "mixed emotions" around Trump's visit to their stomping grounds. While Gentlemen's Gallery owner Alan Levy believes regardless of political affiliation, it's "an honor" to have a former US president visit Buncombe County, Spiritex clothing store assistant manager Adam Mikaelson isn't too thrilled.

"I work at a sustainable business that supports free speech and a lot of things regarding education [and] equality and these tend to be themes that currently don't align with Donald Trump's politics," Mikaelson told WCIV.

UNC Asheville associate professor Ashley Moraguez explained the possible strategy behind Trump's visit to the Democratic county.

"Because the Democrats have grown their support here, or grown their turnout here, I think it makes sense for Trump to come here to try to counter that," Moraguez told the Citizen-Times. "And I think that’s especially the case because now that Kamala Harris is the candidate … the gap in the polls is closing (in North Carolina). She’s making the state a little bit more competitive."

Western Carolina University political science and public affairs professor Chris Cooper suggested, "Asheville may not seem the most natural place for Trump," but it "is in a battleground state," and "hits multiple media markets in multiple states and clearly Asheville is going to draw from Western North Carolina in general."

Noting that the MAGA leader is more of a "mobilizing candidate" than a "persuasion" candidate, Cooper said that "Trump is more likely to double down, and try to light a fire under his supporters to not just wear the MAGA hat, but to show up at the polls and bring their friends."

Catawba College professor of politics and history Michael Bitzer emphasized "that in North Carolina, it is a 'battle of turnout and mobilization.'"

The Politics Department Chair added, "It sounds like his campaign strategy and his campaign messaging is still very much tied to the past. Making the argument that that he actually won in 2020, that all these prosecutions against him are really against you, my supporters. If you kind of listen to the new ad that has come out from him ... it is still very much a campaign focused on anger, focused on grievance, and if he does continue down this pathway, I think that that’s probably going to be the major message, yet again.">