<San Francisco … It’s always great to be in San Francisco, but last Thursday was an especially great time, when Donald Trump’s helicopter tale landed like a thud.

California political reporters were stunned when, in the middle of a news conference, Trump suddenly spun a riveting story of barely escaping death in a helicopter with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown – a scary flight during which, according to Trump, Brown never stopped trashing then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Joe Garifolo jumped into action. As he told me on my podcast, Garifolo called Brown on his cell at Sam’s Grill, Brown’s daily lunch spot. Brown told him to call back later, after he’d finished lunch. When Garifolo called again, Brown refuted the entire Trump tale.

No, Brown insisted, he had never been in a helicopter with Donald Trump. No, he did not trash Kamala Harris to Donald Trump. And no, he did not crash land in a helicopter with Donald Trump. Never accused of being shy, Brown quipped: “Believe me, if I’d ever crash-landed in a helicopter, you’d know about it!”

Soon other reporters fleshed out the story. Trump was dead wrong about everything. He did not take a helicopter ride with Willie Brown. He took one with then-Gov. Jerry Brown to view damage from California wildfires. Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom was also onboard. Both Brown and Newsom confirmed there was no problem with the aircraft, no emergency landing, and no discussion of Kamala Harris.

Then it got even more bizarre. Former state Sen. Nate Holden of Los Angeles revealed that, years ago, he had, in fact, once shared a helicopter ride with Trump — from New York City — that experienced engine failure and made a bumpy landing. But, again, no talk about Kamala Harris.

In other words, Trump just made it all up, confusing the Black Willie Brown with a white Jerry Brown, a Brown with a Holden, and New York City with California. He probably also invented the trash talk about Kamala Harris. One can only imagine how Republican leaders and the media would have condemned President Biden if he had made such a wild string of errors.

It’s tempting to laugh off Trump’s helicopter fantasy as a momentary lapse of memory. But it’s much more serious than that and should be taken more seriously for a couple of reasons.

One, Trump’s goal (which got lost in the helicopter story) was to respond to an obviously planted question by spreading an old attack line on Harris: that she only got where she is today because she had been in a relationship with Willie Brown. It’s the ugly misogynist smear used against any successful woman. It’s sexist, disgusting, and an insult to all women of America.

Two, Trump’s phony helicopter tale does not stand alone. It’s just the latest in a string of weird comments. This is the same man who still falsely insists he won the last election. The same man who says Biden is going to change his mind and steal the nomination from Harris. The same man who dishonestly claims he drew a bigger crowd on the Ellipse on Jan. 6 than Martin Luther King did at his “I Have A Dream” speech.

It’s time the media stopped treating Donald Trump like a normal candidate and started portraying him for what he is: An angry old man, the oldest man ever to run for president, with increasing signs of mental health issues — and clearly unfit to be trusted with the office of president.>

<There was a lot to be insulted by when former President Donald Trump suggested this month that Democratic rival Vice President Kamala Harris "happened to turn Black." He accused her of only promoting her Indian heritage until recently, asking, "So I don't know, is she Indian or is she Black?"

Multiracial people everywhere were not surprised, just disappointed. We've been waiting for this trope to rear its ugly head, that we choose one identity or the other when it suits us like a chameleon would use camouflage to blend in with or stand out from its surroundings. And that we are never enough of one thing.

We are tired of this trope, and we need to talk about it, because it does not just come from the mouths of red-hat-wearing extremists like Donald Trump. We often face these slights and accusations from people who think they're on our side, but still insist we pick a side. It's time to put it to an end.

First, hopefully it goes without saying that Harris, whose mother is Indian and father is Jamaican, has long self-identified as both Black and Asian, owning and celebrating both parts of herself in her narrative and life experience. We should not have to pull out her list of credentials like attending Howard University and being a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, a Divine 9 Black sorority. How we as multiracial people might try to affiliate to achieve a sense of belonging is often used for or against us years later, when at the time, we were just trying to figure out ourselves and our place in the world.

I identify as multiracial, with an Indian immigrant father and Jewish American mother. If that wasn't complicated enough, they ran an Irish pub in Los Angeles and bestowed upon me an uncommon Hindu name that is often associated with Black culture. It was a lot growing up, and my parents didn't really have the language to help. They were trying to justify their own union to a segregated nation and world.

Back then, before the Barack Obamas and Kamala Harrises were in the spotlight, we had no such mainstream stories like ours to claim as uniquely American. We were just complicated people who constantly got asked, but where are you really from? No really.

And the thing is, when we are asked this question, most people already have an answer in their heads, and they just want us to validate it. I was arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department at the age of 13 for supposedly being "out after curfew" with my friend who was Indigenous and Black, and the first and second questions they asked us were, "Are you Mexican?" and "Are you sure you're not Mexican?" In fact, when they finally started filling out the arrest paperwork in the middle of the night and asked us what race we indeed were, we began to explain our heritage, and they just laughed and said, "Okay. Other."

Other has never been an easy box to check, or a pleasant way to feel. One in 10 Americans now identifies as multiracial, and we finally get to check the boxes and tell the stories that fully reflect us. But now Trump wants to put us back into one box, which Harris was right to call the "same old show" of divisiveness and disrespect.

We are ready for the challenge of ending this dog whistling about who we are, and so are the majority of Americans, who are sick of having ideas about their identities thrust upon them. That's why you saw an effort to unify behind Kamala Harris that was led by Black women, but backed up by many other marginalized communities who know how this division hurts them.

In the end, everyday Americans have risen up to defend and support Harris because we are everyday Americans, and so are the people who love us and are proud to stand with us. And we are not going back to being put in a box.>

<Donald Trump has always inhabited an alternate reality of his own making, bending and twisting the truth for personal and political gain throughout his time in the public spotlight.

Lately, though, the former president’s claims have gotten even more bizarre and outlandish ― a trend that just so happens to coincide with Vice President Kamala Harris’ surge in the polls and heightened enthusiasm among Democrats not seen since the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency.

Over the weekend, Trump said that a huge crowd of 15,000 people gathered to see Harris and her new vice presidential running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, at a Detroit airport hangar last week simply “DIDN’T EXIST.”

“Nobody was there,” Trump claimed Sunday on his social media platform Truth Social, accusing the Harris campaign of using artificial intelligence to fake the image.

Dozens of images and videos posted online by people who attended the event confirmed that there was indeed a large crowd of Harris supporters at her Michigan rally — and that Trump is, once again, lying about something plain as day.

Harris also drew similar attendance at other rallies in the battleground states of Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada, underscoring Trump’s political peril just 90 days from the November presidential election.

The GOP nominee, a convicted felon, doesn’t have to worry about just winning; he also has to worry about potentially going to jail if he doesn’t become president again.

Last week, Trump claimed falsely at a press conference that his crowd at the White House on Jan. 6, 202, rivaled that of Martin Luther King Jr. for his 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech on the National Mall, which vastly outnumbered Trump’s pre-insurrection rally with about 260,000 people.

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) urged Trump to quit obsessing about crowd sizes and keep his eye on the ball in an interview with Fox News on Monday.

“You’ve got to make this race not on personalities,” McCarthy said. “Stop questioning the size of her crowds and start questioning her position when it comes to, what did she do as [California] attorney general on crime? … What did she do when she was supposed to take care of the border as a czar?”

Trump hasn’t shown an ability to stay focused on GOP talking points despite pleas from many in his party to do so. He’s been far more preoccupied with complaining about President Joe Biden’s decision to leave the race after Democrats called for a younger nominee, veering decidedly into conspiratorial theories about the nature of Biden’s exit.

“This was a coup. This was a coup of a president of the United States. He didn’t want to leave,” Trump told billionare Elon Musk on Monday. “They just took him out back behind the shed and basically shot him.”

Trump also baselessly alleged during his press conference last week that Harris “was working with the people that wanted [Biden] out.”

And in what is perhaps the biggest sign of his desperation and anger about having to face Harris in November, Trump fantasized about Biden somehow returning to try and reclaim the presidential nomination during next week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

“What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden … CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last week. “He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!”

The chances are zero. Harris has officially been nominated as her party’s standard bearer by 99% of Democratic delegates. Biden endorsed her last month and is reportedly scheduled to deliver a speech on the opening day of the convention.

Even when Trump does home in on Harris, he tends to get into trouble by making comments about her race and gender, eliciting grimaces from elected Republicans. He falsely claimed that Harris only recently identified as Black, and has reportedly referred to her as a “bitch” on several occasions in private (his campaign has denied it).

For weeks, Republicans have urged Trump to stick to hammering Harris on policy, with mixed results.

“This is a perfect person to run against,” McCarthy told Fox on Monday. “You thought John Kerry was a flip-flopper? She is the biggest flip-flop, with the most extreme positions, and you got a short time frame to do it.”

“So don’t sit back, get out there and start making the case and use her own words to do it to her,” he counseled.>

<Forget about the economy, the war in Gaza, the perils of global warming. Never mind the crime issue or that favorite Trumpian hobbyhorse, immigration and the border.

What really has the Republican presidential nominee worked up is crowd sizes. Specifically, the eye-popping assemblages that greeted Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, in last week’s getting-to-you know gambol through battleground states.

More than 14,000 people turned out in Philadelphia. Roughly 15,000 giddy supporters swarmed Harris-Walz rallies in Las Vegas, suburban Detroit and outside Phoenix.

Trump’s cranium seemed ready to explode.

“She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people!” Trump bleated in one post, claiming the hordes were actually AI-generated fakes. “This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING - And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box. She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE.”

Unlike, say, PAYING HUSH MONEY to a Pornographic Film actor to cover up an EXTRAMARITAL LIAISON that would have TANKED Trump’s TEETERING presidential campaign in its Final Days.

But we digress.

There is no doubt the vice president is riding an incredible wave of enthusiasm.

Whether it’s crested as Democrats get beyond their all-is-not-lost exuberance, or continues building, the way Barack Obama drew super-sized crowds throughout the fall of 2008, remains to be seen.

But there’s no question that Trump is struggling to recalibrate and acclimate to a startling new political reality. His opponent is no longer a doddering 81-year-old throwback but his surging, future-facing replacement, who is 19 years younger than Trump and, for the moment, a far more captivating political figure

The former president, who requires attention the way others need oxygen, can’t stand being relegated to a mere afterthought.

George Artz, a longtime observer of Trump, believes his crowd-size convulsions are telling.

“Donald is a very competitive guy and he always speaks in superlatives: ‘The biggest.’ ‘The best,’” said Artz, a New York City political and public affairs consultant, whose history with the former Manhattan real estate developer goes back to the 1970s. (Trump, who’s been know [sic] to shave strokes to improve his golf game and add phantom floors to increase the size of his skyscrapers, once called the practice “truthful hyperbole.” Others would describe it more simply as “lying.”)

The impulse to exaggerate — and vent his frustration in run-on sentences with odd punctuation and random capitalization — is a sure sign Trump is in a swivet.

“He’s a person who, when in trouble, grasps at things,” Artz said, “and then words just come spilling out.”....>

<....What is demonstrable — and the reason Trump has gone even more bonkers than usual — is that Harris has been drawing much bigger crowds than Trump or President Biden, whose campaign, before exiting, was a Democratic exercise in making the best of a funereal situation.

The Crowd Counting Consortium, a nonpartisan academic organization that tracks political gatherings across the U.S. — estimates Trump has drawn an average crowd of about 5,600 at this year’s events. Biden was attracting about 1,300 people. Harris, in her six rallies last week, had an average crowd of nearly 13,500.

That’s impressive. But crowd size, to be clear, reveals only so much about the state of a political contest.

“Crowd size can tell us something about enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is important for things like donations and volunteers,” said Jeremy Pressman, a University of Connecticut political science professor and co-director of the Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint project of the university and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

“But it’s important to remember what it doesn’t tell us,” he went on. “It doesn’t tell us who’s ahead. It doesn’t tell us who’s winning. It doesn’t necessarily predict who’s going to win at the end of the day.”

A popular candidate may attract tens of thousands of people to a campaign rally. But that’s an infinitesimally small number compared with the 155 million Americans who voted in 2020 or the 138 million who turned out in 2016, and offers no meaningful gauge of where a race stands.

Crowds are also self-selected, which is to say, not necessarily reflective of broader sentiments. Attending a political rally requires a commitment of time and level of interest beyond that of the average voter. Bernie Sanders, for instance, had legions of faithful followers and routinely drew larger crowds than Biden throughout the 2020 primary season. Still, the senator from Vermont fell well shy of winning the Democratic nomination.

For now, Democrats are taking great glee in trolling Trump, posting side-by-side photos of his and Harris’ rallies and urging her supporters to turn out en masse, just to get inside Trump’s head — which has proved not at all difficult, given his long-standing crowd-count obsession. Recollect how the narcissist in chief spent his early days in the White House defending the laughable claim that his inauguration had outdrawn Obama’s.

“I’ve spoken to the biggest crowds,” Trump boasted at last week’s look-at-me-please news conference. “Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me.”

He even claimed his Washington speech on Jan. 6, 2021 — which, not incidentally, preceded a violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election — drew more people than Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous address at the 1963 March on Washington. (Another lie.)

King had a dream.

Trump has delusions.>

<Donald Trump needs an intervention.

He needs his friends and political allies to lock him in a room, sit him down, look him in the eye and tell him that if he doesn’t change his ways, he’s probably going to lose in November.

They need to tell him that he’s been lucky in the past, but he can’t count on luck to carry him over the finish line once again. They need to remind him about how lucky he was in 2016, when he had the good fortune to run against a candidate many Americans saw as even less likable than Trump himself.

They need to remind him that in 2024 he got lucky again — when it looked like he would run against a diminished Joe Biden, who came off as feeble in that disastrous presidential debate.

But when Biden dropped out, Trump’s luck may have run out.

Now he’s running against a 59-year-old woman of color. She’s the new face in the campaign. Trump has been relegated to the role Biden once played of the old white guy.

“Harris,” as E.J. Dionne put it in the Washington Post, “instantly flipped the age issue against Trump. His often-disjointed screeds suddenly felt like the ravings of a grumpy old man, not entertaining breaks from politician-speak.”

Trump’s political friends, along with his pals who slobber all over him on conservative cable television, need to tell him that calling Kamala Harris “crazy” … and a “bum” … and “low IQ” … and “lyin’ Kamala Harris” — and now behaving as if he’s still in third grade by calling her “Kamabla” — may go over with supporters who are entertained by childish name-calling. But suburban women and college-educated moderate voters in general — the ones who likely will decide the presidential election — aren’t laughing.

And his friends need to tell him something else, even though it’s something he could never believe: That while he was once the glitzy star who caught the attention of voters who were tired of the same old politics, he has become the one thing that you can never be in the world of TV (where campaigns are run). They need to tell him he’s become … boring.

His act has become tiresome. How many times do we want to hear about how those evil Democrats stole the 2020 election out from under him? Voters don’t want to see the same show over and over again. Trump’s friends need to tell him that it’s not 2016 anymore, when everything he did was new and (to some, anyway) refreshing.

We’ve been through a lot this political season — a historically bad debate, a near-assassination, the departure of a sitting president from his party’s ticket and the “coronation” of his vice president. So anything can still happen. It’s possible, I guess, for Trump to get lucky again. But counting on luck is a risky bet.

After he was shot, it was reasonable to wonder if there’d be a new Donald Trump, one changed by a near-death experience. We’ve since learned that if there’s a new Donald Trump, he behaves a lot like the old Donald Trump.

He’s still griping about how he really won four years ago, about how he should never have been impeached. And at a rally in Atlanta, Trump went out of his way to call the popular Republican governor of Georgia a “bad guy” for not stopping a local district attorney from prosecuting him for trying to overturn the 2020 election results in the state. Someone needs to tell the former president that Georgia is one of those important battleground states that he needs to win in November and that bad-mouthing the governor was just plain dumb.

While Kamala Harris is talking about the future, Donald Trump is mired in the past. When luck runs out, hard work has to kick in.

The question is whether Trump is capable of hard work, whether he can focus, if he has the discipline to stay on message, to make sure voters know that Harris and her new running mate, Tim Walz, are far to the left of most American voters.

But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Donald Trump isn’t capable of doing what’s in his own best interest. That’s why he needs an intervention. But that requires friends who aren’t afraid to tell him what he needs to hear — and a candidate not afraid to listen.

Telling Trump inconvenient truths requires a modicum of courage. It is no secret that if he thinks you’ve turned on him, he very likely will turn on you, and in a very public way.

I’ve written before that profiles in courage are hard to come by — but profiles in cowardice are a dime a dozen. Unless Trump’s friends show some courage, there’s a good chance that 2024 will end for him the same way 2020 did.>

<This month, GOP operatives and others close to Donald Trump have grown increasingly nervous over trends they've seen in recent private polling data produced by different Republican organizations and conservative allies.

It's not just the swing-state polling or the national surveys that are causing distress lately. The anxiety-spiking numbers are coming out of Trump strongholds like Ohio and Florida, according to three GOP sources, including two people close to the former president, who have reviewed the private polls.

"They're looking worse than they should," one Republican operative who has seen the internal data tells Rolling Stone. "Donald Trump is not losing Florida or Ohio, but that isn't what's concerning… It's a trend of softening support."

The polling results are a mirror image of what spooked Democratic operatives - prior to President Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 contest - when both public and private polling data showed Biden shedding support in safe terrain like Minnesota, New Mexico, Virginia, and even New York. The question was never, for instance, if the president would win New York; his soft support in liberal bastions foretold doom in critical battleground states.

But within the past month, after Biden ceded the ticket to Vice President Kamala Harris, the Harris-Walz campaign has significantly cut into (or in some cases reversed) Trump's leads, infuriating the former president with less than three months until Election Day.

Several of those signs, much to the consternation of some of the national Republican Party elite, are now popping up in Trump country.

The three sources would not allow Rolling Stone to print any of the referenced data pertaining to these solidly red states, or to publicly identify which conservative groups or GOP organs had run the recent surveys.

There is a sense among various Republican consultants that the poll numbers would not be helpful to party morale or - more optimistically speaking - merely present a snapshot of a Harris 2024 "honeymoon." Indeed, two of the sources say they personally have not briefed the data or their concerns to Trump yet, fearing it would only upset him.

For certain veteran party pollsters, the ex-president's ongoing 2024-related woes aren't at all surprising.

"When you address things that voters don't care about [such as obsessing over Kamala Harris' crowd sizes], they punish you - and Trump's being punished right now for not staying on message and not addressing issues people care about," says Frank Luntz, a longtime pollster and conservative Trump critic. "This election was his to lose, and he's losing it… And he's incapable of changing."

Luntz adds that, based on his own data, he sees that most voters across the nation actually rate Trump, on policy issues they care about most, "as better able to solve them than [Harris] - but they just don't like him. And that's playing a bigger and bigger role in her surge and his falling back. She's even expanding the voter pool, specifically among younger women who didn't want to support Biden or Trump, and that changes the makeup of the electorate."....>

<....Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that "two private polls conducted in Ohio recently by Republican pollsters - which Mr. Trump carried in 2020 with 53 percent of the vote - showed him receiving less than 50 percent of the vote against Ms. Harris in the state." (Sen. J.D. Vance, Trump's extremely MAGAfied vice-presidential pick, is from Ohio.)

And in the realm of public and nonpartisan polling, the red-state warning signs for Trump and his party are blaring.

"I was surprised that Harris is within striking distance, being only five points down," David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, said, regarding a USA Today/Suffolk University/WSVN-TV poll of likely Florida voters released this week.

There is a long, two-and-a-half-month stretch between now and Election Day, and the presidential race between Harris and Trump remains effectively in toss-up territory. Nobody who works on or close to the Harris or Trump campaigns whom Rolling Stone has spoken to say it is even remotely likely that Trump loses to Harris in Florida or Ohio this November.

Still, at this late stage in the campaign, Team Harris is reveling in recent polling news and a palpable uptick in Democratic voter enthusiasm. Meanwhile, Team Trump is suddenly playing defense, a position they largely were not expecting to be in at this point in the election cycle.

"We are going to go to bed early on November 5, as Donald J. Trump will be announced as our 47th president. Early," Republican National Committee co-chair and Trump family member Lara Trump said one short month ago, at a late-night afterparty during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. "I'm calling it at 10 o'clock at night. How does that sound to everybody?"

Among much of the Republican Party's national apparatuses, more and more operatives are growing less cocky by the day. Several of Trump's own lieutenants and advisers are also leaning away from premature football-spiking.

"It's going to be a close race," John McLaughlin, one of Trump's top pollsters, tells Rolling Stone. "We haven't even hit Labor Day, and Trump and Harris haven't even debated, so there's a long way to go. We're up against a tougher team with Harris compared to Biden, and we've got to run on the record and the policies that created that lead over Biden. We have to make that case. With 75 percent of all voters telling us the country is on the wrong track in our latest survey…we have a lot of advantages to win this race.

"The fun is just beginning," he says.>

<Joe Biden has reportedly acknowledged that Nancy Pelosi “did what she had to do” in ousting him to keep Donald Trump from returning to the White House.

The president is gradually coming to terms with being forced to step aside, but is still smarting about the role played by the former House of Representatives speaker and other old allies in making that happen, according to Politico.

Mr Biden, 81, is said to have a grudging respect for Ms Pelosi, who reportedly presented him with private polling in July showing that he could not beat Trump in the election.

The same month, she refused to publicly back his re-election bid when pressed on the president’s favourite TV show, Morning Joe – something Mr Biden’ aides believe gave the green light to other Democrats and donors to move against him.

“She did what she had to do” in order to give Democrats the best chance to win in November, Mr Biden is said to have told one of his close associates.

Sources in Mr Biden’s inner circle told him the day before he dropped out that they believed Ms Pelosi, 84, would publicly raise concerns about his campaign – a move that would have humiliated her long-time ally.

Although Ms Pelosi never publicly called on Mr Biden to leave the race, several of her allies did.

A senior White House official said Mr Biden views the former speaker as “ruthless” and willing to set aside long-term relationships to keep the Democrats in power.

On Sunday, Mr Biden admitted that pressure from Ms Pelosi and other Democrats had forced him out of the election. Disquiet from his own party had become a “distraction”, he said.

Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said the following day that Mr Biden “respects” the former speaker and insisted he had “no hard feelings”.

Nevertheless, Politico reported that the pair have not spoken since Mr Biden ended his campaign.

Ms Pelosi has downplayed her role in ousting the president from the race, insisting she had not called anyone to whip up opposition to his standing in November. However, she reportedly took multiple calls from concerned Democrats.

Mr Biden is also said to be frustrated with Barack Obama, whom he served as vice president, because he would not tell him to his face that he should leave the race.

Although the former president expressed support for Mr Biden following his disastrous debate performance in June, he did not attempt to quell the move to bring him down.

The two men share a complicated relationship, and the president has long believed that Mr Obama’s staff looked down on him.>

<According to the Cook Political Report, Georgia is very much in play for 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. Cook's polling analysis finds that Harris and GOP rival Donald Trump are tied in that key battleground state.

But journalist Justin Glawe, in an article published by Rolling Stone on August 14, warns that the Georgia State Election Board is now saddled with MAGA loyalists who may not accept election outcomes they don't like.

"After completing the MAGA takeover of the Georgia State Election Board," Glawe explains. "Donald Trump's allies quickly cemented his 2020 election lies into policy, and moved to allow conspiratorial-minded county election officials to refuse to certify election results if they see fit. Even before the election board granted broad powers to county election officials to deny election results and reopened an investigation into minor vote-counting errors in Fulton County in 2020, Trump was publicly praising the work of three Republicans who hold majority power on the board."

The three Trump loyalists that Glawe is referring to are Rick Jeffares, Dr. Janice Johnston, and Janelle King.

According to Georgia Democrat Sara Tindall-Ghazal, the presence of MAGA election deniers on the Georgia State Election Board (which she is a part of) is a recipe for "chaos" in the 2024 election.

Tindall-Ghazal told Rolling Stone, "I think it's important to put it all in context with what's happened in the last month. Yes, we've got some rules that are particularly egregious and threaten a smooth election process but you've also got some really pernicious rules that will cause chaos right at the election."

Max Flugrath, communications director for the voting rights group Fair Fight, is sounding the alarm as well.

Flugrath told Rolling Stone, "The State Election Board has become a MAGA government body,” says Max Flugrath, communications director for Fair Fight, the left-leaning voting rights group founded by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams."

Another warning came from Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye, executive director of the Georgia Democratic Party.

Olasanoye told Rolling Stone, "Our State Election Board exists to protect the right to vote for all Georgians, not to favor any single candidate in any election. The three members Donald Trump called his 'pitbulls' for 'victory' disagree, and they're determined to establish a new power of not certifying an election result should their preferred candidate lose — as he did in 2020.">

<A construction boom in the U.S. has resulted in lower rents and other benefits for renters.

Record-construction activity since the pandemic has increased the supply of empty units, meaning more inventory is available for renters. More multifamily units were completed in June than in any month in nearly 50 years, according to Zillow Group, an online marketplace for real estate.

Landlords are taking notice and are now adding rent concessions — discounts, incentives or perks to attract new renters — like free weeks of rent or free parking.

About one-third, 33.2%, of landlords offered at least one rent concession in July across the U.S., up from about one-quarter, 25.4%. last year, Zillow found.

Meanwhile, the median asking rent prices for apartments in one- to three-bedroom units fell in July, the first time that’s occurred since 2020, according to Redfin, a real estate brokerage site.

The median asking rent price for a studio or one-bedroom apartment fell 0.1% to $1,498 a month; two-bedroom apartments decreased 0.3% to $1,730; and units with three bedrooms or more, were down 2.% to $2,010, per Redfin data.

Rents are still high because of how much prices climbed during the pandemic, said Chen Zhao, who leads the economics team at Redfin. But now, rent growth has flattened, which can be seen as “good news for renters,” she said.

Metro areas in Florida and Texas, two Sun Belt states that have introduced a high number of newly built apartments since the pandemic, are seeing significant rent price declines as more units become available, according to Redfin.

For example, the median asking rent price in Austin, Texas, fell to $1,458 in July, a 16.9% decline from a year prior, according to Redfin. It was the biggest drop among all other analyzed metro areas in the national report, the firm noted.

The median asking rent price in Jacksonville, Florida, declined 14.3% in the same time frame, to $1,465, per Redfin.

To compare at a state-wide level, the median rent price in Texas stands at $1,950, according to Zillow. That comparable price in Florida is $2,500, it found.

Rent concessions are up from a year ago in 45 of the 50 largest metro areas in the U.S., according to Zillow.

The annual increase in the share of rental listings offering concessions is the highest in Jacksonville, Florida, which saw concessions rise 17 percentage points, followed by Charlotte, North Carolina (15.7 points), Raleigh, North Carolina (14.7 points), Atlanta (14.5 points); and Austin, Texas (14.1 points), per Zillow data.

Historically, wage growth and rent growth have been very linked, said Orphe Divounguy, a senior economist with Zillow’s Economic Research team.

How tight the labor market is can be predictive of how tight the housing market is going to be, he explained.

The labor market has eased recently, with the number of candidates outpacing the jobs available. In July, nonfarm payroll increased by just 114,000 for the month, down from 179,000 in June, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate jumped to 4.3%, the highest level since October of 2021.

“When wages are rising rapidly, that helps to support housing demand,” said Divounguy. “As the labor market loosens, we expect the rental market to continue to loosen.”

Wages are growing 4% to 5% year over year, said Zhao: “That’s good. That means that rents are actually falling relative to wages. Your wages are increasing more than rents are.”

To be sure, wage growth has slowed. Wages and salaries increased 5.1% in June for the 12-month period ended in June 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Wage growth peaked at 9.3% in January 2022, and has slid down to 3.1% by mid-June, returning to pre-pandemic wage levels, according to Indeed Hiring Lab Institute.>

Yes, <antichrist the tosspot>, we are all well aware that you consider my posts here 'pointless' and 'stupid'.

Guess what? You do not control content here--<I> do.

Capisce?

<Recently, a retired woman seeking advice wrote into MarketWatch’s financial advisor, saying:

“I was ‘financially set’ after my husband died. But my current adviser lost $500,000 over the last few years, and then a new adviser said my portfolio was ‘a mess’ and wants 1.25% to fix it. What’s my move?”

She was the victim of an unethical financial advisor hustling decades of churning commission-based products that essentially transferred her money into his pocket. As she told MarketWatch, “The adviser was paid per trade.”

President Biden wants to do something about this.

“This is about basic fairness,” Biden said when announcing a new rule to protect people like her. “People are tired of being played for suckers.”

He added:

“Bad financial advice by unscrupulous financial advisers driven by their own self-interest can cost a retiree up to 1.2% per year in lost investment. That doesn’t sound like much but if you’re living long, it’s a lot of money. Over a lifetime, it can add up to 20% less money when they retire. For a middle-class household, that can amount to tens of thousands of dollars over time.”

But Republicans have declared war on Biden and middle class people who want to save for retirement.

Odds are you’ve never heard of their shock troops: Judge Jeremy Kernodle or Judge Reed O’Connor, both federal judges appointed to Texas districts by Donald Trump and George W. Bush respectively.

For reference, both are hard-core rightwingers: Kernodle was one of the 13 federal judges who pledged not to hire clerks from Columbia University after the student demonstrations there against Israel’s destruction of Gaza; O’Connor struck down the Gun Control Act of 1968 and tried to take down Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

But even if you’ve never heard of them, they’re trying their best to have a huge impact on your ability to comfortably retire when the time comes, or on how you can live off your retirement funds if you’re already past 65.

Millions of Americans use investment advisors to manage their retirement funds; the total that could be affected by these judges’ actions is, according to The Washington Post yesterday, more than $770 billion.

While there’s a wide variety of companies and financial products (insurance, annuities, 401Ks, simple investment accounts, etc.) people use to invest their retirement funds, the advisors and brokers who handle them on your behalf basically fall into two categories: those who’re looking out first and foremost for your interests and those who’re looking out first and foremost for ways they can siphon off your funds into their own pockets.

Those advisors and brokers who are looking out for you are called “fiduciaries,” an industry and legal term that requires them to put your interests ahead of their own. Typically, this means they don’t sell products that pay them a commission, but instead work on a simple and transparent fee basis. It also means they won’t churn your account just to earn per-trade fees.

Most of those agents and companies that aren’t fiduciaries are working in what could be described as the wild west of finance: they’re constrained by fraud and embezzlement rules but can easily shave off part of your savings with every transaction they make on your behalf simply by putting you into products that pay them a commission.

And those commissions aren’t chicken feed: just for Americans who put their money into annuities, if all brokers and agents selling them were required to act as fiduciaries, the people buying those annuities would save over $32 billion over the next decade.

Commissions on insurance-based products can run as high as 70% of the first year’s payment, and can hit 10% on annuities. Advisors who churn your investments can drain your funds before you realize what’s happened to you, and there’s usually no recourse to get your money back.

It comes down to America having a regulated investment industry where it’s against the law to rip off its customers by hustling high commission products versus being a country where every American is at the mercy of unscrupulous investment advisors who’re getting rich by shaving a few points in commissions off every trade or financial product bought or sold on our behalf.

To deal with this problem and make America a safe place for average citizens to save for retirement, the Biden Labor Department put into place earlier this year a set of rules that would require most investment advisors and insurance brokers to act as fiduciaries and put their customers’ interests first.

The industry immediately sued in the courtrooms of judges Kernodle and O’Connor, who, three weeks ago, put the DOL fiduciary rules on hold pending appeals....>

<....Democrats, of course, are on the side of average American consumers and retirees, which is why the Biden Labor Department put those rules into place requiring a huge chunk of the investment industry to operate as fiduciaries.

Republicans, on the other hand — including the two judges mentioned earlier — claim to believe in a mythical so-called “free market” where giant corporations and sleazy brokers can rob us of our retirement and then make campaign contributions to the GOP with some of that money.

Contributions, for example, to Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC), whose top contributor according to opensecrets.org is Apollo Global Management and who’s top two donating industries are “retired” and “securities and investment.” Of the $2,938,046 in cash-on-hand Foxx has for her campaigns, a mere $38,896 came from individual under-$200 donors.

Foxx, in exchange for this retirement industry largesse, has sponsored legislation in the House of Representatives that would permanently bar the Labor Department from putting fiduciary requirements into law.

While shilling for the investment industry, she pretends she’s defending the little guy — a popular Republican scam — saying that requiring investment advisors and brokers to put the customer first and not shave commissions off of their retirement funds would “eliminate options for working-class Americans, reduce their ability to retire and limit their access to financial advice.”

And arguably that’s at least partially true. Fiduciary requirements do “eliminate” the option of buying products that rip you off and also “limit” your access to bad financial advice that will leave you poorer than when you started. But, to Foxx’s concern, they also prevent the industry from extracting that estimated $33 billion in fees and commissions from your pension, annuity, IRA, 401k, etc.

Republicans in the House are also going to try to zero out of the Labor Department’s budget any money that could be used to enforce the rules if they survive in the courts; expect that to be part of the GOP’s threat to shut down our government this fall if they don’t get their way.

Every day, it seems, brings new examples of the stark differences between Democrats and Republicans, this merely being the most recent.

Of course, there won’t be a peep about this on Fox “News” or rightwing hate radio, keeping GOP voters safely and quietly in their ignorant little bubble.

The rest of us, however, can see what’s going on with Republican scams at every level from taxation to climate policy to protecting our retirements.

Pass it on.>

<No plan survives first contact with the enemy. This is especially true if one ends up fighting an enemy they did not prepare for.

Donald Trump and his campaign developed a strategy specifically to defeat President Biden in the 2024 Election. Once Biden was defeated Trump would become the country’s first dictator and systematically destroy multiracial pluralistic democracy. As detailed in Project 2025, Agenda 47, and elsewhere, Donald Trump and his regime are very well-prepared to accomplish that goal.

Their plan was working. Trump was leading or tied with President Biden in the polls, both nationally and in the key battleground states. Trump continued to bypass or smash through the obstacles in his path and to turn the (incorrect) convention wisdom on its head about how “the walls were closing in” and that “the rule of law,” “the institutions,” and “American decency” would stop him and the MAGA movement. President Biden and the Democrats were not mounting an effective defense—never mind a counterattack. The one direct confrontation between President Biden and Donald Trump during the first debate went horribly. Biden imploded and appeared to be impotent before Trump’s barrage of lies and manic energy.

Sensing imminent defeat, President Biden made the wise decision to step aside and allow Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. Donald Trump and his campaign’s strategy is now falling apart, nullified and frustrated by an enemy they did not plan for. Trump’s leadership is also being tested. At this point, he is failing the test.

Kamala Harris is now tied with or leading Trump in the national polls and key battleground states. The Democratic Party’s base is energized. Fundraising has increased dramatically. With the selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her vice-presidential running mate, Harris has infused the party (and campaign) with a type of populist energy and vibrance it has lacked for a long time.

It has only been three weeks since Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee. In that very short time, Donald Trump appears to be experiencing one of the greatest reversals in political momentum in recent American history.

In an attempt to gain a better perspective on these whiplash-like changes, I recently spoke with Rick Wilson. He is a co-founder of The Lincoln Project, a former leading Republican strategist, and the author of two books, "Everything Trump Touches Dies" and "Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump - and Democrats from Themselves."

In this conversation, Wilson explains how and why Donald Trump’s campaign has lost momentum and focus so quickly. He also details the advantages that Kamala Harris possesses against Donald Trump — advantages that may be very difficult for the corrupt felon ex-president to counter.

Wilson warns that Donald Trump and his campaign will attempt to use racism and misogyny against Kamala Harris in ways that will likely shock many members of the public — but that such a tactic may actually backfire.

At the end of this conversation, Wilson cautions against premature celebrations and the bandwagon effect because the 2024 election will be a long one and a Kamala Harris victory, at this early stage, is far from guaranteed.

These last few weeks have been a whirlwind. How are you feeling? How are you managing this torrent?

I'm doing alright. Donald Trump laid a trap to try to beat Joe Biden, and that trap was to tell every American that the old man couldn't hack it, and now Trump is the old man who can't hack it in the race. We’re in a much different and better position than we were in a few weeks ago. Here at the Lincoln project, we've had a remarkable run of communicating to the voters we're trying to persuade. Over the last few weeks, we've seen a lot of movement in the polling. The 2024 election is fundamentally changed. This is not Donald Trump's race anymore. Trump no longer controls the narrative. He doesn't have control of the flow of information, and it's really hurting Trump.....>

<....Given your decades of experience in American politics at the highest levels, have you experienced anything like these twists and turns these last few weeks in the story that is the Age of Trump?

Both the frequency and the amplitude of the changes are increasing. We are seeing an election that has really been shaken up and redefined in a way that has not occurred in a political campaign in my lifetime. We are in a moment where the politics of the country are demanding that we pay attention every day. Our team at the Lincoln Project is very seasoned at this point. They've been around this fight for four years. Our staff is now very accustomed to the cadence and the work and the pace that we maintain. That is great. But we try to emphasize balance here. People need time to rest and to take a breather. This is going to be a long fight.

When people email me seeking guidance about what to do about the election and just trying to make sense of the Age of Trump and its misery and how to manage it, I tell them it is going to be a long war and not a fight. I also counsel that they must fight small battles each day.

There will be good days and bad days for Vice President Harris and her campaign from here to Election Day in November. One of the lessons that I emphasize with my colleagues is that "perspective in politics is a weapon." It's a superpower. Knowing how to manage your own expectations for what good days and bad days look like is really important. Donald Trump had a period of time which were, to be frank, the best six weeks I've ever seen in politics. Those six weeks culminated with a coronation at the Republican National Convention. Some broke that night when Trump took the stage. Guess what? Vice President Harris has had three amazing weeks where she has consolidated the Democratic Party base, won over a cohort of Republican women voters who are pro-choice, and has made a ton of progress in redefining not only what the Democratic Party can look like for Americans, but also in what people should expect from a campaign. The hope and optimism element of her campaign is driving the Republicans crazy. Why? Because the Republicans view campaigns as reductive and negative, and they're really having trouble processing how to counter that.

After the assassination attempt when Trump rose from the ground and pumped his fist in the air while saying "fight! fight! fight!", I watched that iconic moment and said aloud that is the next president of the United States. Then Trump is elevated as some type of fascist god king at the Republican National Convention and what should have been something out of "Triumph of the Will" and Hitler and the Nazis was something more somnolent and akin to a tired premier giving a speech before the Supreme Soviet.

Now, Harris is leading Trump, and the momentum is decidedly hers. How did things go so wrong so quickly for Donald Trump and his campaign?

Donald Trump has no one but himself to blame for his political fortunes right now and how he has lost the momentum so fast. I will say this about the assassination attempt. There was an attempt by the Trump campaign, smartly to show or to say that this was part of a larger conversation in America, and this was about hatred of Donald Trump, and the overall tone of our politics in the country right now. But it turned out we very quickly learned it was about a sick young man who like a lot of other lost young men in this country, has easy access to guns but does not have friends. They have the internet but no real meaningful relationships. This young man went out to shoot a famous person.

The narrative that Trump and his people were trying to impose on this horrible event did not match up to what the motivation turned out to really be. And then Trump himself turned it into a clown show, with the huge bandage on his ear. The drama Trump tried to create around the assassination attempt did not work. Trump himself has conditioned Americans to change the subject and he has conditioned Americans over and over again, to believe and to know that everything's going to change. The American people know that Trump is going to change his mind. He is going to change his message. That is not going to change. Trump's own temperament and behavior redounded against him in this case because he wanted everybody to think of him as a glorious martyr. He isn't....>

<....Earlier in our conversation, you said that Donald Trump has a "superpower" and that he also built his own trap. Trump is a character in a story that he is writing in his own mind in real-time where he is the hero. How did he lose control of his own story?

You have to maintain pressure on Donald Trump all the time. Trump is like trying to give a cat a bath. You're going to have to make sure that you are prepared to get cut up and scratched and bitten. You have to be sure you are never going to take your hand off the scruff of that cat's neck until you get it into the bathtub. Trump will fight and scrap and twist and turn and do everything he can to get out of trouble. Once you deliver a message about Donald Trump, you have to keep hammering that message home. You can never give Donald Trump even 10 seconds to come up off the mat. You can never give Trump a break or a breather or grace or any respite. The assassination attempt on Trump's life does not change that fact. That event changed nothing about him and how we should approach defeating him. Donald Trump is still exactly who and what he's always been. Period.

Kamala Harris's campaign is very different in terms of style, messaging, and tone. To this point, it is much more effective than was President Biden's. Where was this approach from President Biden and his campaign team?

Every campaign is an organic creation. Every campaign is its own thing. This means that every campaign reflects the person leading the campaign, the candidate. Right now, this campaign is reflecting Vice President Harris pretty well. Her campaign is giving the public a look at who she really is. She is not the same sort of institutionalist figure that President Biden is. I don't mean that as a critique of President Biden. Not at all. Kamala Harris is just a different person. She is also of a different generation. She has a different energy, pose and stature. Kamala Harris has a different kind of delivery. That presentation as somebody who is younger, sharper, more and more connected to pop culture and the world as it exists now is going to be the focus of how she is presented to the American people. She's a different candidate than Biden which means that we are going to see a very different type of campaign.

The New York Times recently reported that Trump has been "triggered" by Kamala Harris and the early success of her campaign. There is other reporting about how Trump's campaign is in tumult, and he is raging and lashing out. What is your assessment of Trump's behavior and reaction to Harris?

Donald Trump is shook. He's not happy. Trump is particularly upset about how on paper, the 2024 election looked like it was in the proverbial bag for him already. And when that didn't work out, as it is slipping away, Trump's reaction has been extremely ugly internally. All of Trump's people are leaking information to the press now. That is a sign of a bad campaign, one that is in real trouble. Everybody's trying to defend themselves; they're trying to blame shift. Kamala Harris is taking the lead in the swing state polls. That has really upset Donald Trump. He really thought he had a campaign that was absolutely perfect for this, for this moment and targeting Joe Biden. Now that is all thrown out the window.

Donald Trump and his agents, especially JD Vance, are already launching racist and sexist attacks on Kamala Harris. What they are going to try to do to Kamala Harris will make Birtherism look kind. This is going to be some old school racism and white supremacy and hatred of Black women. I have been trying to warn people that what Trump's campaign is going to do will be Willie Horton 2.0—if not worse. How does Trump's campaign balance those types of racist and sexist attacks on Harris with not turning off larger portions of the American electorate?

When the Willie Horton ad was put out, that was the late 1980s, the average voter was much more likely to be older and more suburban and rural and whiter. We are in a very different time now. That was also an era where it was harder to fact check, and harder to vet and verify the claims being made in political ads. You could get away with stuff back then that you in no way could get away with now....>

<....There are plenty of ways where the countervailing messages to push back on Trump's use of racism and sexism can become very painful for him and his campaign. I have no doubt they are going to try some Willie Horton old school racism attacks. Trump and his people in the media and elsewhere are going to do everything but say the N-word in public by the time this is over. I 100% believe in private that Trump is saying such things. We're in a moment where the desperation on their side is showing. You can see it in their communications. You can see it in the media coverage. You can see it in Trump's behavior on social media. You can see it in the campaign’s press releases and statements. Donald Trump does not know how to get out of this. Kamala Harris's rise is a dark moment for him. I do not see any light on the horizon for Trump. Yet, we've got a long way to go. The vice president has moved up in the surveys by some three to seven points, depending on the state. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago is going to be unified and happy and raucous and fun. That's going to help her win a few more points here and there. I won't say the whole race is stacked against Trump right now. But it sure is not built for him.

How do you assess the matchup between Tim Walz and JD Vance?

Walz connects with ordinary people. He gives a lot of moderate sort of midwestern north central American Republicans a way to go. I know that guy. Yeah, maybe he's a Democrat, but he knows about ice fishing and he is of their culture. Vance is weird. That is obvious. But he is playing that part, almost like a stereotype, every day. I am deeply amused by Vance's inability to connect with regular people.

What are the public opinion polls, which are a snapshot in time, indicating about the 2024 Election at this point?

What I find most surprising is all the growth that's left is in the middle. Harris is solidifying the Democratic base at a breakneck pace, Trump has not been able to solidify more moderate Republicans, those Nikki Haley voters, those non-Trump voters, and I don't think he can at this point. When the Republicans do a post-mortem of this era, if they are being honest with themselves, they will see that the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade was the most fatal political moment in their party's modern history.

I am very concerned about how too many members of the news media and pundit class (and general public) are leaping to far too early conclusions about Harris and her momentum being somehow determinant of a victory over Trump in November. The lesson from history I keep coming back to is how Michael Dukakis was way ahead of George H.W. Bush and then lost to him in the election.

That was my first big campaign, 1988. At this point in the election contest, Dukakis was ahead by 17 points. Here are the lessons from that defeat. Don't ever take anything for granted. Run through the tape. Never take your foot off the pedal. It's a simple and what should be an inviolate rule. You have to run all the way through. You have to fight all the way down. You can never, ever, take a break from the campaign at this early point. You've got to drive through the tape.

One of the things we have to watch for here is that Trump can beat Trump. Harris can beat Trump. Trump I do not believe can beat Harris with the popular vote. But Trump could beat Harris because of the Electoral College.

How is your hope tank doing as compared to a few weeks ago? What about your worry tank?

My worry tank is diminished meaningfully. My hope tank is on three-quarters, but I'm going to stop for gas again soon before Election Day in November.>

<At a moment when the Democratic Party is trying to project unity, disagreements about corporate power and regulation are threatening to expose cracks in the solid exterior. Vice President Kamala Harris faces opposing pressures from opposite wings of her party about whether to replace Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, putting the presidential candidate in a delicate and awkward spot.

"There are a number of factors that would shape the Vice President's thinking," said William Kovacic, former FTC chair and current law professor at George Washington University. "One is, in isolation, what kind of policy do I want?"

As of right now, it doesn't seem that anybody is quite sure of the answer.

Since President Joe Biden appointed Khan as chair in June of 2021, she has taken on an ambitious antitrust agenda, relying on seemingly forgotten federal laws to reign in monopoly power and corporate mergers. Her actions have drawn the ire of some big names in Silicon Valley, namely billionaire and Democratic mega-donor Reid Hoffman. At the same time, economic progressives like Elizabeth Warren have praised Khan's stances. Harris finds herself stuck between the two camps, struggling to determine how to be at once a pro-business and sufficiently progressive candidate.

Hoffman turned heads when he went on CNN at the end of July and said Khan is "waging war on American business" and that he would prefer that Harris replace her. Barry Diller, a media mogul, called Khan "a dope" and said he would advocate for her removal should Harris win in November.

Khan's term as chair ends in September, though FTC rules stipulate that she will remain in her position until the president appoints and the Senate confirms someone else. The confirmation process is involved and lengthy, according to Kovacic, who experienced it firsthand. Though Biden will be in office when her term is up, Kovacic anticipates that he will take Harris' wishes into consideration when deciding whether to replace Khan. Presidents are not obligated to appoint a new chair within a certain time period.

"My intuition would be that, just as a general protocol, the President in this circumstance would respect the prerogatives of the Vice President," Kovacic told Business Insider. "Another approach the President could take would be to say, 'I'm not going to fill the spot. I'm not going to act on this, because the chair of the FTC will remain the chair until her successor is qualified, so I'm not going to act. And Kamala, it's all yours after you're sworn in."

As with much of her specific policy positions, Harris has remained relatively tight-lipped about her plans for Khan and has thus far avoided ruffling too many feathers. Kovacic anticipates that she might try to move further into the center when it comes to mergers, but stay away from tempering the administration's stance on monopolization.

When asked to comment on this article, the Harris campaign told Business Insider that Harris plans to propose a federal ban on corporate price-gouging and give the FTC investigative authority into corporations that violate the rules in a speech on Friday. They did not comment on whether she would replace Khan as chair of the FTC.

"Typically, by this point, the nominee would have made more specific policy proposals, because they would have had to in order to secure the support of various factions within their party's coalition," said Sanford Gordon, the chair of the politics department at New York University. "Harris really hasn't had to do that."

Her vagueness likely stems from the awkwardness of her positioning — she is close to Silicon Valley while also trying to appeal to progressives. Harris is raking in money from venture capitalists, has appointed her brother-in-law and Uber executive as a campaign advisor, and is a Bay Area native.

As some on Wall Street grumble about Khan, members of the business and tech community hope Harris will be open to restoring a more relaxed relationship between the FTC and big corporations. Yet that same belief is a source of concern for economic progressives, whom Kovacic referred to as the "Warren faction," referencing the Massachusetts senator.

Compared to Biden, Harris has more freedom to loosen the FTC's regulatory posture, Kovacic said. In 2020, the president promised Warren significant say over economic regulatory agency appointments, and he has stayed true to his word.

"That was Biden's promise. That's not Harris' promise," Kovacic said, noting that Harris must assess her relationship to the Warren wing of the party. "How much loyalty does she feel to them? How much does she believe she has to cater to their tastes in order to maintain a harmonious political relationship?"...>

<....A coalition of progressive and consumer advocacy groups sent a letter to the Harris campaign in response to Hoffman and Diller's comments and urged her to keep Khan.

Hoffman and Diller have since tempered their stances, but Harris still seems stuck between the risk of alienating donors and inflaming economic progressives in her party.

In a lengthy post on X, Hoffman said that he has never talked to Harris about Khan and will support her campaign regardless of her FTC appointments. Diller qualified his comments to Bloomberg, saying, "I said, 'she's a dope.' She isn't. She's smart, but I believe overreaches in disrupting sensible business combinations."

Harris will likely continue trying to find a faint, almost invisible middle ground between the two wings of her party by deflecting specific questions, Gordon said.

"I don't think [Hoffman] is going to get her on the record, in public, making any kind of commitment whatsoever," Gordon said. "I think that would be politically extremely in-astute of her."

Despite Hoffman's public comments, it also remains unclear what Silicon Valley thinks overall. The world of venture capitalists and tech billionaires has suffered partisan divides this election cycle, and it seems that there may be varying opinions among Democrats in the area as well. Kovacic said that some tech companies likely approve of Khan precisely because she targets their nemeses.

"We know Reid Hoffman has grabbed the headlines, but we also know, from our own work, that there's a diversity of opinion in Silicon Valley and among VCs and entrepreneurs who want to encourage innovation and fairness in the sector," said Taylor Jo Isenberg, the executive director at the Economic Security Project, a progressive non-profit focused on economic issues and anti-monopoly actions.

"It's tempting to say there's this sort of progressive wing of the Democratic coalition and then there's the donors, and the donors are coming from the sort of people like venture capitalists connected to Silicon Valley," Gordon said. "However, as with many regulatory issues and particularly antitrust, it's not especially clear to me that there wouldn't be divisions within business and within venture capital."

To make matters more complicated for Harris, the issue is one of the few areas of bipartisan murkiness. Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee with his own links to Silicon Valley, has praised Khan, who was approved with bipartisan support in a 69-28 vote.

As Harris works to define herself as a candidate and be sufficiently specific in her policy proposals, the Khan question is emerging as a particularly delicate one, and it remains unclear how she'll discuss the thorny issue on the campaign trail.

"There's an opportunity to pay attention to the diversity of voices that are out there talking about this," Isenberg said. "But campaigns are a hard time for nuance.">

<Thousands of registered voters in Alabama who have previously been identified as noncitizens by the federal government will have their registration status changed to inactive, the secretary of state announced this week in a move that prompted quick opposition from voter rights advocates.

Secretary of State Wes Allen announced on Tuesday that 3,251 people will receive letters notifying them that their voter registration status has been made inactive. Allen's office cross-referenced a list of noncitizen identification numbers provided by the Department of Homeland Security with local voter registration data in order to identify them, he said in a written statement. Alabama has over 3 million registered voters, according to the secretary of state's office.

“This is not a one-time review of our voter file. We will continue to conduct such reviews to do everything possible to make sure that everyone on our file is an eligible voter,” Allen said.

He added that he would provide the Attorney General’s Office with the list for “further investigation and possible criminal prosecution.”

Fear that noncitizens are voting illegally in U.S. elections has become a cornerstone of Republican messaging in recent months, despite the fact that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

Prominent Democrats and voting rights activists across the country have pushed back against national legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, citing preexisting legislation that makes it a federal crime to vote as a noncitizen, and concerns that eligible voters will be disenfranchised.

The 3,251 voters will be required to fill out a form with their local county registrar's office and provide proof of citizenship in order to vote in November.

The list provided to the Alabama Secretary of State's office by the Department of Homeland Security includes people who may have become naturalized U.S. citizens and as such are legally eligible to vote. Allen said naturalized citizens will have the opportunity to update their information.

The Alabama initiative mirrors similar moves in neighboring states. In June, Tennessee election officials asked over 14,000 people to provide proof of citizenship in order to remain on active-voter rolls. They later walked back that request after local voting rights advocates accused the state of voter intimidation.

Jonathan Diaz, the director of voting advocacy and partnerships for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan organization that works to expand voting access, said Allen's announcement undermines public confidence in the integrity of elections, and is a disproportionate response to a relatively rare phenomenon.

“It's like using a bazooka to kill a cockroach,” he said. "You know, you get the cockroach, but you’re going to cause a lot of collateral damage. And in this case, the collateral damage are eligible registered voters who are being flagged for removal from the rolls.”>

<Georgia's secretary of state on Thursday came out against election rule changes pending before the State Election Board, specifically rejecting a proposal to count ballots by hand at polling places on election night.

At a meeting in July, the board advanced a proposal that would require three separate poll workers to count ballots at voting precincts on election night to make sure they match the number of ballots recorded by voting machines. That proposal has been posted for public comment and the board is set to vote Monday whether to adopt it.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the state's top elections official, called that effort “misguided,” saying it would delay the reporting of election results and introduce risks to chain of custody procedures. “Activists seeking to impose last-minute changes in election procedures outside of the legislative process undermine voter confidence and burden election workers,” Raffensperger said in a news release.

The State Election Board has received a slew of rule proposals in recent months, many of them coming from activists aligned with former President Donald Trump, who continues to complain without evidence that widespread voter fraud cost him victory in Georgia's 2020 presidential election. Trump and his supporters have consistently blasted Raffensperger for his steadfast defense of the integrity of that election.

Three of the five members of the board are Republican partisans whom Trump called out by name and praised during a campaign rally last month in Atlanta.

Sharlene Alexander, a member of the Fayette County Board of Elections and Voter Registration, submitted the proposal to have three poll workers hand count ballots, sorting them into stacks of 50 ballots until all have been counted and the three workers have arrived at the same total. If that number doesn't match those recorded on the voter check-in system, the electronic voting machines and the scanner recap forms, the poll manager is to determine the reason for the inconsistency and, if possible, correct it.

Alexander did not immediately respond Thursday to a voicemail, text message and email seeking comment on Raffensperger's opposition to hand counting ballots at polling places.

Alexander wrote in her proposal that such a hand count of ballots was a “long-standing tradition” in Fayette County and other places. That stopped, she wrote, when Blake Evans, director of elections for the secretary of state's office, sent an email to county election officials in October 2022 telling them not to do the hand count.

“I know that many counties have received an email requesting that poll workers hand count ballots at polling places on election night. Deciding to have poll workers hand count ballots at each polling location on election night is not something your poll workers should do,” Evans wrote in the email, which Alexander attached to her proposal.

Evans cited sections of Georgia law and State Election Board rules governing the handling of ballots at poll places on election night and wrote that “to ensure maximum security for the voted ballots, poll workers should not prolong the process of removing ballots from ballot boxes and sealing them in transport containers.”

The secretary of state's news release Thursday referred to the members of the State Election Board as “unelected bureaucrats who have never run an election” and said they “seem to reject the advice” of anyone who has run elections.

The board has five members: one appointed by the state House, one chosen by the state Senate, one each from the Republican and Democratic parties, and a nonpartisan chair selected by the General Assembly or by the governor if the General Assembly is not in session when there is a vacancy.

Spokespersons for Gov. Brian Kemp, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and state House Speaker Jon Burns did not immediately respond to requests for comment.>

Better yet, the litigation will be heard before that stout defender of democracy, Aileen QAnon:

<A Florida newspaper is warning that an "election conspiracy theorist" is vying to take control of elections in an area that includes former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club residence.

Republican Jeff Buongiorno is hoping to unseat Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link in November. Link was appointed to the role by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in January 2019 as a Republican but became a Democrat after taking office.

Buongiorno recently filed a lawsuit over what he claims is "a conspiracy to influence the upcoming elections by registering non-citizens and synthetic identities as voters," naming Link, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and other federal and state officials as defendants.

In an opinion article published on Thursday, the editorial board of the South Florida Sun Sentinel warned that Buongiorno "subscribes to the fantasy that millions of immigrants are surging into the country illegally to vote [Vice President] Kamala Harris into the Oval Office.

"There was a time when such conspiracy-wielding candidates were laughed off as unelectable. No more. After all, millions of Floridians will cast ballots for the biggest election conspiracy theorist of them all in November.

"In 2020, there was just one election conspiracy. Now there are dozens, and across the state, election conspiracy theorists like Buongiorno are on the ballot or jostling to influence whose vote counts."

Newsweek reached out for comment to the Buongiorno campaign via email on Thursday.

Buongiorno's lawsuit speculates that "millions of illegal border crossers" have or will be registered to vote in November's election. Trump and some supporters have made similar claims about past federal elections, with investigations revealing that an infinitesimally small portion of ballots cast, far fewer than needed to sway results, were actually from noncitizens.

Complaints in the suit include "the Palm Beach County DMV registering Spanish-speaking people to vote without asking for proof of citizenship." Proof is not required for anyone registering to vote under federal law, with those registering instead being required to swear that they are citizens under penalty of perjury.

States also have processes to weed out any noncitizens attempting to register. A 2022 audit of Georgia's voter rolls found that 1,634 people who were not citizens attempted to register but were all unsuccessful because they were caught by election officials, according to the Associated Press.

The Sun Sentinel's editorial board argued that Floridians cannot "shrug off" Buongiorno's suit because the case has been assigned to Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, best known for dismissing the former president's federal documents case last month after making a series of rulings that were criticized for allegedly being biased in his favor.

"Buongiorno is just one of several conspiracy-minded supervisor of election candidates who hope to oversee Florida votes," the board wrote. "There really is an election fraud being perpetrated in Florida, one that voters need to pay attention to: It's the clickbait fiction that the machinery of democracy is hopelessly rigged and is fixable only by limiting access to the ballot box.">

<Deep into his ranting news conference on Thursday, former President Donald Trump told a truth that explained everything : “I’m very angry at her.”

He was referring to Vice President Kamala Harris, whose late entry into the general election race has left him bitter, disoriented, and mourning the loss of the old campaign — the one he was winning against President Joe Biden.

Trump’s discombobulation was laid bare in a self-pitying and raging stream of consciousness delivered at his New Jersey golf club that raised serious questions about the future trajectory of his quest to return to power.

The ex-president insulted his way into the Oval Office in 2016 — when his often-unhinged soliloquies that shattered all the rules of decorum and politics delighted grassroots Republican voters craving an anti-establishment revolution. But eight years on, the now-familiar act is getting tired, a reality that’s been thrown into sharp relief now that Trump is facing a new campaign against younger, more energetic opponent rather than a re-run agains 81-year-old Biden. The former president is driving his strategists to distraction by refusing to stay focused on the issues — like the economy — that could help him prevail in November. He keeps missing chances to prod Harris’ vulnerabilities, allowing the vice president the space to power up her campaign and erase Biden’s polling deficits.

Almost every Trump event now feels like damage control for a previous one that went off the rails. Thursday’s news conference was a do-over for Wednesday’s trip to North Carolina, when the ex-president mocked his own aides for demanding that he give an “intellectual” speech on the economy and instead went his own way, focusing on insulting his opponent.

Trump’s team did their best for him on Thursday. Someone went to a local supermarket and stocked up on groceries, including Cheerios, tubs of coffee and ketchup, and provided Trump with charts showing the high cost of goods in the Biden era. But their boss didn’t even get to the end of his first point before veering into a furious aside while falsely accusing Democrats of acting illegally by replacing Biden with Harris. “It was a coup by people that wanted him out, and they didn’t do it the way, not the way they’re supposed to do it. $129 more on energy, and $241 more. This is all per month on rent,” Trump said, running two thoughts together in his fury.

As if trying to keep himself on course, the former president sometimes followed with his finger on the text of his remarks inside a ring binder. But the argument going on in his head and the text on the paper again diverged. “We have wars breaking out in the Middle East. We have the horrible war going on with Ukraine and Russia. All these things would have never happened if I was president. Would have never, ever happened, and they didn’t happen. Since Harris took office, car insurance is up 55%,” Trump said, in another dizzying shift in direction. As his remarks stretched into a second hour, a squadron of flies assembled, likely attracted by several packs of breakfast sausages sweating in the summer heat. The bizarre spectacle only heightened the incongruity of using Trump’s private golf club as the backdrop for an event meant to illustrate the pain faced by millions of Americans at grocery checkouts.

The former president bristled when asked about advice from prominent Republicans — including his former primary foe Nikki Haley, that he should turn from personal attacks on Harris towards the issues many voters care about. Trump also seemed almost wounded at the mockery by Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

“As far as the personal attacks, I’m very angry at her because of what she’s done to the country. I’m very angry at her that she weaponized the justice system against me and other people —- very angry at her,” Trump said. “I think I’m entitled to personal attacks. I don’t have a lot of respect for her. I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence, and I think she’ll be a terrible president.”

The former president still has millions of devoted supporters. And he remains in striking distance of one of the most stunning comebacks in American politics and becoming only the second defeated one-term president to return to office. And while his outrageous behavior is exactly the reason many of his followers love him, it risks further alienating moderate, suburban swing state voters who cost him the 2020 election and will be vital in what is shaping up as a close fight.....>

<....The mangling of Trump’s rhetoric throughout his news conference eloquently expressed the utter rage that has been evident in all of the public appearances since Biden left the race, and Harris transformed it with big enthusiastic rallies and huge crowds.

After Biden was effectively pushed out of the race after a disastrous debate performance validated fears of voters about his acuity and capacity to serve a second term, Trump’s inability to focus is raising questions about his own fitness for a return to office.

“Donald Trump is not the Donald Trump of 2016, he seemed slowed down, he seems meandering, he seems low energy and he really is struggling to make a point,” said former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin, who broke with the ex-president after he refused to accept his defeat in 2020. “He is somebody who is not performing at the caliber he once was and that might have worked when he was up against Joe Biden — the contrast did make him appear at times stronger and more vibrant. It’s not working against Kamala Harris who is the younger candidate and the one with more energy,” she said on CNN’s “AC360.”

Scott Jennings, a CNN political commentator, who worked in the George W. Bush White House, approved of Trump’s impulse in taking about high food prices that are hounding many Americans. But he told Anderson Cooper that Trump had gone “way off the beaten path” in his news conference. “He’s the only one who can make the decision to get focused and stay focused … it’s really on his shoulders because he is the star of the show.” Jennings added that Trump is “going to have to decide how comfortable he is doing it that way for the rest of the election.”

The former president, however, is showing no signs that he is ready to listen to advice, telling reporters “Now you’ll say he ranted and raved … I’m a very calm person, believe it or not.”

But proving the opposite, Trump on Thursday dove down multiple rabbit holes — venting about Hillary Clinton’s emails as if he had been transported back to the 2016 election, relating bizarre conversations with people calling him “Sir,” musing about “bird cemeteries” he claims are caused by wind farms, lauding his own “great relationship” with China’s President Xi Jinping and fuming at prosecutors who charged him with seeking to overturn the 2020 election and of hoarding classified documents.

The Harris campaign is relishing the spectacle of Trump’s almost daily meltdowns. After the New Jersey appearance, the vice president’s team released what is said was a “Statement on Trump’s … Whatever that was.”

The poignancy of Biden’s eclipse by the Harris campaign was on display Thursday when the president and the vice president appeared at a joint formal event for the first time since he shelved his reelection bid. Harris led pro-Biden cheers in suburban Maryland as the pair highlighted a landmark deal with big pharmaceutical firms that will cut the cost of certain drugs for seniors. “It is my eternal and great, great, great honor, I have to tell you, to serve with this most extraordinary human being and American and leader, our president, Joe Biden,” she said.

Biden appeared moved by his reception and declared that Harris would make “one hell of a president.” The event underscored how the vice president is seeking to share credit for some of the Biden administration’s greatest successes even as she seeks to frustrate Trump’s effort to tie her to the policies that helped fuel inflation and to exploit the economic frustration of many working Americans.

On Friday, the vice president is due to deliver an economic speech in North Carolina that will be seen as a reply to the former president’s remarks in the critical swing state on Wednesday. She is expected to propose new restrictions to thwart what she views as price gouging by supermarket giants and a plan to lower housing costs including $25,000 in down payment assistance for first time homebuyers. The thematic backdrop of the new plans appears to be a populist effort to portray Harris as a lifelong champion of working Americans against powerful wealthy corporate interests. As the vice president and former prosecutor and senator put it in highlighting the pharmaceutical deal: “My entire career, I have worked to hold bad actors accountable and lower the cost of prescription drugs.”

But the mechanics of Harris’ plans will be controversial — critics are already accusing her of backing the kind of price controls that have often worked poorly elsewhere. There is therefore plenty of scope for Trump to advance effective arguments against his new opponent. Yet an ex-president who has always believed he’s his own best advocate, now seems to lack the coherence to do so.

<1. Word Salad

This phrase is used to describe a series of words that do not connect to each other within the context of a sentence or speech, and that don’t relate to the question or the conversation they came from.

Its origin comes from psychiatry, describing how people who suffer from schizophrenia sometimes talk. They try to make sentences and to express themselves, but the brain is unable to process and apply a proper syntax. Just clips of phrases that don’t make much sense.

Why do narcissists use it?

– It seems as if they are answering the question – I speak, you speak – even if they do not know the answer. It ensures they get the final word. It’s hyper competitiveness; they can turn anything into a competition. It’s verbal ping pong, not two adults having a normal conversation.

– It controls the victim’s state and generates confusion. Through their linguistic ambiguity, they induce uncertainty and helplessness in the victim so that they give up and are more open to suggestion. Most narcissists have a natural knowledge about how to use language to manipulate and get their victim to a state where he/she is “at their mercy” (It seems they all go to the same school to learn these things).

– For blatant provocation of negative states, to trigger things in the victim, that he/she is a nasty, dishonest, immoral person,… they will provoke the victim to a point that he/she will burst out and have a fight.

2. Flying Monkeys

This term was coined from a scene in the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” where the wicked witch sends over her flying monkeys to bother Dorothy.

Flying monkeys are those people used by the narcissist as tools in order to get what he/she wants. If, for example, the narc wants to start a smear campaign against the victim, he/she will manipulate the flying monkeys into doing the dirty work, such as spreading lies, bullying or harassing the victim.

There are two kinds of flying monkeys: the one who is too naïve and blindly believes the lies of the narcissist, and the cynical one who is planning to get some advantage out of the narcissist. Flying monkeys are usually family or friends of the narcissist.

3. Cognitive Dissonance

The psychologist Leon Festinger was first to describe the theory of cognitive dissonance. It means the perception of an incompatibility between two simultaneous thoughts that might impact negatively on attitudes or behaviors.

Victims suffer permanent tension in their brains for receiving two different and contradictory messages at the same time. On the one hand, the emotional side of the brain (previously intoxicated with an oxytocin overdose through love bombing) says that the narcissist is a good, lovable, worthwhile person. On the other, a series of facts lead the person to rationally conclude that the narcissist is lying, cheating, manipulating and humiliating them.

The usual consequences of cognitive dissonance are stress, anxiety, blame, anger, frustration and/or shame. Oftentimes, victims fall into self-deception in order to stop feeling that tension. The bigger the investment of time and feelings in the relationship (for instance, let’s say the victim is married to and has a child with the narcissist), the more prone the victim will be to self-deception in order to justify the behavior and stop the cognitive dissonance.

Basically, they will unconsciously generate new thoughts (lies to themselves) to compensate for, and override, the disturbing ones....>