<No matter who wins the White House, the next president is increasingly likely to face an unusual hurdle in their first days in office: a divided Congress.

Each of the last five newly elected presidents has entered office with his party holding the majority in the House and Senate, opening the door to an aggressive agenda. But now, Democrats need a net gain of just four seats to reclaim the House majority, while Republicans need just one more flip, with two big opportunities in conservative states, to win back the Senate.

Such a split verdict would be historic: The House and Senate have never both switched majorities in opposite directions in any election since the direct election of senators began 110 years ago. It would also guarantee that Kamala Harris or Donald Trump would enter the Oval Office on Jan. 20 without his or her party in full control of Congress.

From Bill Clinton in 1993 to Joe Biden in 2021, the most recent presidents took office with their party fully in charge on Capitol Hill and began to advance their most important agenda items.

Influential Capitol Hill veterans from that era said the winner in November could be immediately reined in by an opposing party holding the House or Senate, given this politically combustible time when bipartisan dealmaking has been limited to modest measures or must-pass legislation.

“A split Congress at this point means a legislative dead-end for major policy initiatives legislatively and would likely further enhance the subordination of the legislative to the executive branch, which will govern through executive actions,” said John Lawrence, who served as chief of staff in 2009 and 2010 for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) during a productive early part of Barack Obama’s presidency.

“Bipartisan lawmaking is possible, but it’s not going to be anywhere on the scale of what we’re used to,” said Brendan Buck, who served as counselor to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) in 2017 and 2018 during the early phase of Trump’s presidency.

In 1989, George H.W. Bush was the last president to enter office without his party in control of both chambers. The Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate limited Bush’s domestic agenda to mostly tax-and-spending battles, including a 1990 budget deal that undercut his campaign pledge of “Read my lips: no new taxes.”

Instead, he largely focused on foreign policy matters, and lost his reelection bid in 1992.

Trump’s agenda, as laid out on his campaign website, is light on issues that require congressional action; it focuses more on executive actions such as raising tariffs and securing the border.

But priorities such as extending many of the rates set in his 2017 tax law, as well as new cuts for corporations and the wealthy, would be curtailed by a House Democratic majority and a speakership held by Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who is currently House minority leader.

Likewise, Harris’s agenda includes certain items that need a stamp of approval from Congress, including a $6,000 child tax credit; a $25,000 subsidy for first-time home buyers; and new limits on the costs of prescription drugs.

Those would be very difficult to get approved if she’s dealing with “Senate Majority Leader John (TBD).” Sens. John Thune (R-S.D.) and John Cornyn (R-Tex.) are the leading contenders to become Senate GOP leader after Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) steps down in November. Either would outright block Harris’s proposals or force enough revisions so that a majority of Republicans could support the final product.

This dynamic creates the potential for a continuation of the gridlock of the past two years in Washington, when President Joe Biden spent so much time struggling with the House GOP majority over fiscal matters. Next year requires another congressional hike of the nation’s borrowing limit, plus addressing the expiration of the Trump tax cuts and the annual brutal fight over funding for federal agencies.

“In short, next year a new president will struggle to move a big agenda in a divided Congress and will have to devote much of the year to dealing with tax and spending issues,” said Antonia Ferrier, who served in 2017 and 2018 directing a strategic communications office for McConnell.

David Krone, who served as a senior adviser to Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) in 2009 and 2010, recalled how his boss and Pelosi, the House speaker, used their large majorities to ride herd on their committee chairs to produce a massive economic stimulus package, the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank law rewriting oversight of Wall Street. Those served as some of Barack Obama’s grandest presidential achievements.....>

<....“Now, it’s reversed. The Senate majority leader and House speaker will have to rely more on a bottom-up approach. Sure, they can have huge influence, but deals in the Senate will have to come together through some cooperation,” Krone said, noting that many prominent dealmakers of the past decade will no longer serve in the Senate next year.

These prognostications could all be for naught if one party pulls off the political trifecta of winning the White House along with the House and Senate majorities. That would most likely require Harris or Trump winning convincingly enough to have coattails that would help down-ballot candidates win in very unfavorable regions.

The presidential race remains a toss-up. Harris’s momentum since taking over for Biden on July 21 has helped her claim leads in national polls, but she remains statistically tied in five battleground states in the fight for the electoral college, according to The Washington Post’s analysis.

In the House, Harris’s candidacy could be the jolt Democrats need in blue states like California and New York.

Of the 13 toss-up races Republicans are defending, as rated by the Cook Political Report With Amy Walter, 10 are in four states where Biden won by more than 15 percentage points four years ago. Harris will probably match or exceed that margin in November.

Democrats could win enough seats just in those friendly states to claim the House majority. In the Senate, however, Republicans have the much better political terrain, already holding 49 seats and the Democrats all but conceding West Virginia to them with the retirement of Sen. Joe Manchin III (I).

Barring a major upset of either Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) or Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Democrats need Harris to win and defend every remaining seat of theirs, including those of Sens. Jon Tester (Mont.) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio), states where Trump might win by double-digit margins.

Facing a GOP Senate could cause immediate headaches for a Harris administration. Biden managed to efficiently get every single Cabinet secretary confirmed by the spring of 2021, as well as Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson a year later, with the narrowest of Senate majorities.

Harris would have the luxury of asking some secretaries and deputies to remain in their posts, but history suggests many would prefer to move on.

Lawrence recalled how different times were in 2001, when George W. Bush became president with similarly narrow majorities for Republicans. He won a sizable bloc of Democrats for his 2001 tax cuts and a majority for his No Child Left Behind Act.

By the time that education bill got signed into law, Democrats had taken over the Senate majority because of a party switch, but it did not matter. Bush had won the support of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. George Miller (Calif.), the top Democrats on education policy.

In 2009, Obama briefly had a 60-seat majority in the Senate and a bulging House majority with more than 255 Democrats. Fearing political extinction, Republicans decided to almost unanimously oppose every big presidential agenda item.

That required legislative tacticians to maneuver some measures to pass on a fast-track process. “Senator Reid had the ability to shape what he wanted. Same with Speaker Pelosi,” Krone recalled.

Likewise, Republicans had some successes and some failures in 2017, when they tried a similar go-it-alone approach. They failed miserably in their attempt to repeal the ACA despite seven years of promising to do so, but they succeeded in ramming through a nearly $2 trillion tax cut plan without a single Democratic vote.

“Both parties have just used brute political force when they had the opportunity,” Buck said.

Biden and Democrats used brute force to pass a nearly $2 trillion pandemic rescue package in 2021 and a massive climate and prescription drug law in 2022. They also scored some bipartisan success on projects ramping up infrastructure spending and rebuilding chip manufacturing. Those deals, however, would have looked less desirable for Democrats if they were in the minority and Republicans were leading negotiations.

Now, as Harris and Trump look ahead to the possibility of taking office on Jan. 20, both might have to reconsider their expectations for early success.

“In the first 100 days, when a new president wants to put points on the board to show that they can deliver, that might not be the reality,” Ferrier said.>

<Everywhere you look, signs are mounting of a tinderbox election that will test the outer bounds — and breaking points — of American democracy, honesty and civility.

Why it matters: A perfect storm has been brewing for years now — fueled by extreme polarization, election denial, political violence, historic prosecutions and rampant disinformation. Mayhem is bound to rain down in November.

5 conditions for chaos

1. A desperate Donald Trump:

The former president, twice indicted for trying to overturn his 2020 loss to President Biden, repeatedly has refused to commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election — unless he wins. Trump has preemptively accused Democrats of "cheating" by swapping out Biden for Vice President Kamala Harris — a process he's labeled an unfair "coup" — and engaging in "lawfare" through criminal prosecution. Trump and his allies — especially Elon Musk — have promoted the false claim that Democrats are deliberately "importing" millions of undocumented immigrants to illegally vote in the election. Now a convicted felon scheduled to be sentenced after the election, Trump is in an existential fight not just for his political future — but for his personal freedom. The latest: In a Truth Social post late Saturday, Trump decried "rampant Cheating and Skullduggery" in the 2020 election and promised "long term prison sentences" for anyone involved in "unscrupulous behavior" in 2024.

2. A nail-biter like no other:

In the 15 presidential elections since 1964, a candidate has led by more than five points in the national polling average for at least three weeks, according to CNN data analyst Harry Enten.

In 2024, that hasn't been the case for a single day. The race is extraordinarily close — and will come down to tens of thousands of votes in just seven battleground states.

One nightmare recipe for chaos: A 269-269 Electoral College tie, which would trigger a contingent election in the House, whereby each state delegation casts a single vote. Trump would be likely to win in this case.

3. A battleground legal brawl:

Republicans already have filed more than 100 lawsuits against various voting and election procedures — part of a formalized "election integrity" push grounded in Trump's baseless claims of fraud in 2020.

Trump's campaign and the Republican National Committee say they've built a network of about 175,000 volunteer poll watchers and poll workers. Democrats have assembled their own massive legal team and voter protection program as they gird for aggressive election challenges.

Experts are especially anxious about the potential intimidation of election workers forced to count ballots under tense conditions, David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told Axios.

4. The specter of violence:

On Jan. 6, 2021, a violent mob stormed the Capitol to try to stop Congress' certification of the Electoral College results. Eight weeks ago, a gunman came within inches of assassinating Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania.

Political violence has increasingly become normalized in the U.S.: In a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in May, more than two-thirds of Americans said they were concerned about extremist violence after the election.

Top Democrats tell Axios they fear Trump will again cry "stolen election" if he loses and call for street mobilization to "take back the country" — potentially leading to multiple Jan. 6-like incidents at state capitols.

5. A cesspool of disinformation:

Right-wing cable news networks — Fox News, Newsmax, OANN — are likely to tread more carefully around baseless claims of election fraud after being sued for defamation in the aftermath of 2020.

But on X, where pro-Trump owner Elon Musk and his allies routinely pump out conspiracy theories to their millions of followers, the information environment has deteriorated dramatically since 2020.

Compounding the problem is the threat of election interference by foreign adversaries: An axis of disinformation helmed by Russia, China and Iran has added new sophistication to its influence operations.

Reality check: The whole country — from voters and political parties to Hollywood and big-box retailers — is preparing for potential chaos. That makes it more likely that the system once again will hold.

The Electoral Count Reform Act passed by Congress, for example, added new guardrails to the process for certifying election results — ensuring the vice president has only a ceremonial role on Jan. 6.

<House Speaker Mike Johnson is heeding the demands of the more conservative wing of his Republican conference and has teed up a vote this week on a bill that would keep the federal government funded for six more months and require states to obtain proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, when registering a person to vote.

Congress needs to approve a stop-gap spending bill before the end of the budget year on Sept. 30 to avoid a government shutdown just a few weeks before voters go the polls and elect the next president.

Johnson's decision to combine the proof of citizenship mandate with government funding complicates prospects for getting that task done. The bill is not expected to go anywhere in the Democratic-controlled Senate, if it even makes it that far.

But the effort could help Johnson, R-La., next year should House Republicans retain their majority and he seeks to become speaker again. The vote also could give Republicans an issue to go after Democrats in competitive swing districts as Republicans make immigration-related matters a campaign cornerstone.

“Today, House Republicans are taking a critically important step to keep the federal government funded and to secure our federal election process,” Johnson said Friday. “Congress has a responsibility to do both, and we must ensure that only American citizens can decide American elections.”

Democrats will oppose the GOP effort overwhelmingly and warn that any continuing resolution must have buy-in from both political parties. They said Johnson was making the same mistake then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., did a year ago as he tried to placate conservatives. In the end, they rejected his efforts, forcing him to rely on Democrats to get a temporary spending bill passed. That fight led just a few days later to eight Republicans joining with Democrats in removing McCarthy from the speaker's job.

“As we have said repeatedly, avoiding a government shutdown requires bipartisanship, not a bill drawn up by one party. Speaker Johnson is making the same mistake as former Speaker McCarthy did a year ago, by wasting precious time catering to the hard MAGA right, Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Patty Murray of Washington state said in a statement, referring to Donald Trump's “Make America Great Again” movement. “This tactic didn’t work last September and it will not work this year either.”

They said that if Johnson “drives House Republicans down this highly partisan path, the odds of a shutdown go way up, and Americans will know that the responsibility of a shutdown will be on the House Republicans’ hands.”

Schumer is the Senate's majority leader. Murray leads the Senate Appropriations Committee.

The voter registration measure is popular with House Republicans. The House Freedom Caucus, which generally includes the chamber's most conservative members, called for it to be attached to a stop-gap bill that would keep the government funded into early 2025.

Republicans say that requiring proof of citizenship would ensure U.S. elections are only for American citizens, improving confidence in the nation's federal election system, something that Trump has sought to undermine over the years.

Opponents say it is already against the law for noncitizens to vote in federal elections and that the document requirements would disenfranchise millions of people who do not have the necessary documents readily available when they get a chance to register, say at a concert, county fair or at a college voter registration drive.

In an earlier vote on the voter registration bill, Republicans unanimously backed it while all but five Democrats voted against it. President Joe Biden's administration strongly opposed that measure, saying the alleged justification for the bill is easily disproven....>

<....Some Republicans are arguing that if Schumer will allow a vote, assuming the bill passes the House, then a government shutdown would be on him.

“If Chuck Schumer decides he doesn't want to bring it, then Chuck Schumer will be deciding that he wants to shut down government. It's not us,” said Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., during an interview on Fox Business News.

Trump and other Republicans have revved up their complaints about the issue of noncitizens voting with the influx of migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border under Biden's administration. They are contending Democrats let them in to add them to the voter rolls. But the available evidence shows that noncitizen voting in federal elections is incredibly rare.

Another major question to address as part of the short-term spending bill is how long to extend funding. Before the August recess, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., said he preferred that the next president be able to pursue top priorities without the distraction of a messy spending fight.

But the House Freedom Caucus is banking on Trump winning the White House and putting the GOP in better position to secure the spending cuts and policy priorities they desire. So they want to extend funding until after the inauguration in January.

Congress returns to Washington on Monday after spending the past five weeks back in their home states and districts. The short-term bill is necessary because the House and Senate are nowhere near completing their work on the dozen annual spending bills that keep government agencies and programs operational during the coming budget year.

So far, the House has passed five of the 12 annual spending bills, while the Senate has passed none, though the Senate has opted to take a more bipartisan approach to the challenge by moving 11 of the bills through the Senate Appropriations Committee with broad support from lawmakers in both parties. Meanwhile, Republicans in the House are using their majority to push bills through with the vast majority of Democrats in opposition.>

<Federal investigators received classified intelligence that suggested the president of Egypt gave you a $10 million 'cash bribe,' but your attorney general blocked the probe, according to the Washington Post. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee last week asked you to provide the funding source of a $10 million donation you gave your campaign around the same time and how it was repaid. Will you make that documentation public?

You called for prosecuting President Joe Biden, executing your former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, and jailing former Rep. Liz Cheney. If elected, will you follow through on any of these threats or go after other political enemies?

You use faulty claims to criticize Biden and Harris for not doing more about the border. But you worked to kill a bipartisan bill Biden and Harris supported that included the toughest immigration reforms ever. So, is your stance on immigration aimed at scoring political points or finding real solutions?

You have criticized Biden’s efforts to negotiate a cease-fire regarding Israel’s war in Gaza. But the Wall Street Journal said you don’t have a plan. What would you do differently than Biden? And did you urge Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to delay a cease-fire deal until after the election?

You claim to 'know nothing' about Project 2025, yet you support initiatives in the plan to fire thousands of federal civil service workers, curtail the U.S. Justice Department’s independence, and abolish the U.S. Education Department. So, how does your position differ from these same plans spelled out in Project 2025?

Why are so many of your own cabinet members not endorsing you, including former Vice President Mike Pence, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and former national security adviser John Bolton?

You boasted that you “did nothing” about guns while you were president. Indeed, gun violence spiked during your tenure. Have the frequent school shootings, mass killings, or the assassination attempt on your life caused you to rethink your position on gun safety?

You constantly criticize Biden’s economic policies. Yet, he added more jobs during his term than you did — even after excluding the losses during the pandemic. The stock market has reached record levels under Biden, and economists predict your tariffs and other policies will lead to higher prices, increased inflation, and possibly a recession. Even Goldman Sachs expects better economic growth if Harris wins. How will your economic plans help people?

You watched the insurrection unfold on TV for hours and did nothing. Do you wish you had done more to quell the violent attack at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021?

Why do you continue to bow down to Russia even as it commits war crimes in Ukraine?

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said you told him you plan to cut off aid to Ukraine if elected. Is that true?

If elected, will you withdraw the United States from NATO and again abandon the Paris Agreement?>

Here's hoping that, as Leo Durocher once put it, that Kamala Harris stuffs the goddam bat up Hump's ass.

https://democraticunderground.com/1...

<The most popular of President Biden’s recent proposals to reform the Supreme Court is to limit the justices to staggered terms of 18 years. This idea is also among the five proposed amendments from the National Constitution Center’s 2022 Constitution Drafting Project, which convened progressive, conservative and libertarian scholars to identify sources of agreement on constitutional reform.

But despite its popularity, it’s doubtful that staggered 18-year terms would accomplish what advocates expect. The reform would tie control of the Supreme Court more tightly to the outcome of recent presidential elections, but it would also diminish the role of the Senate in the confirmation of nominees. And it is hard to imagine the Senate passing an amendment that diminished its own power. Advocates of the reform propose to cap the size of the Supreme Court at nine justices and give each justice an 18-year term, with a vacancy occurring every two years. The anticipated benefits are three-fold.

First, term limits would shrink the gap between present political realities and the bygone moment in political time when a justice was appointed. That gap is sometimes intolerably large. The court’s most senior justice, Clarence Thomas, was nominated by President George H.W. Bush in 1991. Eight presidential elections have elapsed in the meantime. With an 18-year term, no more than four presidential elections could separate a sitting justice from the political moment of his or her accession to the bench.

Second, vacancies every two years would ensure that winning a presidential election translates to two Supreme Court appointments. When combined with the overall 18-year limit, this should produce a tighter fit between electoral outcomes and the court’s jurisprudence over time.

Third, advocates argue that this predictability will lower the temperature of judicial confirmation battles, because all sides will know they get a fresh chance at two seats after the next election.

These all seem like sensible reasons to adopt term limits. But the consequences and potential drawbacks deserve careful consideration.

It is by no means clear that making Supreme Court vacancies more predictable would make appointments less divisive. Indeed, as Rick Larue has argued, knowing which two justices will be replaced by the next president would only raise the stakes of the election and shift the attendant hyper-partisanship and acrimonious political rhetoric from “one arena — the confirmation process — to another — the permanent campaign.” Predictability and perfect information have not, after all, made political decisions like redistricting and gerrymandering less controversial or partisan.

Then again, vacancies on the court are so divisive because the Supreme Court is so consequential. If we want to lower the temperature, the justices will have to lower the stakes by being more modest in their ambitions.

More importantly, maintaining the two-year timing and predictability of vacancies would require scaling back or eliminating the Senate confirmation power. In the context of divided government, a Senate majority can delay confirmation of nominees indefinitely to prevent an undesirable appointment, as Republicans did with Merrick Garland in 2016.

The proposed amendment that resulted from the Constitution Drafting Project dealt with this problem by providing that advice and consent would be presumed if the Senate failed to reject a nominee within three months of receiving the president’s nomination. In other words, inaction equals confirmation.

This is not a satisfying solution. If the Senate votes to reject the nominee before three months is up, the clock starts over with a new nomination. A Senate majority could still stretch out the process for nine or even 12 months. It would certainly force an up-or-down vote on nominees, but the opposition strategy would escalate from passive obstruction to outright rejection. That kind of honest and open political opposition might be healthy, but it would not lower the political temperature of the confirmation process....>

<....The cleanest and simplest means of achieving the predictability of two-year staggered vacancies would be to eliminate Senate confirmation altogether. The basic gist and logic of the reform is that winning a presidential election should translate into a somewhat predictable and measurable impact on Supreme Court jurisprudence. The appointment of two justices would simply become part of the spoils of electoral victory.

So would eliminating Senate confirmation be such a bad thing?

The Framers’ logic for Senate confirmation was essentially to prevent incompetent or corrupt officeholders, to ensure the president was making a responsible choice. As applied to justices, the process has occasionally performed that gatekeeping function. President George W. Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers and President Lyndon Johnson’s failed effort to elevate Abe Fortas to chief justice come to mind.

Then again, neither of those nominations was a complete disaster. Both nominees were guilty of mediocrity, not any real corruption or incompetence. And mediocrity has regularly found its way onto the bench, even with Senate confirmation.

Against the limited benefits that accrue from the gatekeeping function, consider the circus that the confirmation process has become. Since 1980, the median time from nomination to confirmation is 80 days. Three months or more of drama has become the norm. Of the 15 successful confirmations since 1980, only one — Amy Coney Barrett’s — has taken less than a month, and it was denounced as unprecedented at the time.

In fact, Barrett’s speedy confirmation is far closer to the historical norm. The median length of the confirmation process between 1900 and 1980 was 17 days. Of the 47 successful confirmations then, 36 required less than a month of deliberation, 19 took less than 10 days and three were confirmed within one day. The process was even shorter in the preceding century.

Part of the chaos surrounding Supreme Court confirmations stems from changes in how the Senate deliberates on them. The centerpiece of the process, public confirmation hearings, has become a full-scale vetting of nominees. This, too, is a historical anomaly.

The first public hearings for judicial nominees were not held until 1916, when the Senate broke precedent for Louis Brandeis’s nomination. The first nominee did not appear before Congress until 1925 with Harlan Fiske Stone. And public hearings with testimony from the nominee were not the norm until President Harry Truman’s nomination of Tom Clark in 1949. The public spectacle that has since ensued has arguably done nothing to improve the legitimacy or performance of the Supreme Court or the Senate.

Perhaps, then, weakening or dispensing with Senate confirmation is not such a bad idea. Either way, it is important for advocates of term limits to own up to it as a necessary condition for tying the court more tightly to electoral outcomes.>

<There's a reason that hardline American conservatives regard so many books, movies, TV shows, music, theater, and other creative arts as ideologically poisonous, tools for "indoctrinating" people with "woke" values or "grooming" children to adopt an LGBTQ identity and become sexually permissive. It's because they find little value in a piece of entertainment beyond its reinforcement of a political agenda and preferred cultural norms. To many of the far-right persuasion, Hollywood being a liberal place means it necessarily produces content to liberalize the masses.

Therefore, the right is left to develop counterprogramming - the fare to comfort them with unambiguous assurances that they are right, and they are the good guys. Some of these efforts aim for a break from the mainstream; consider Angel Studios, the Utah-based streamer and production company that focuses on religiously themed material and had a breakout hit with the child-trafficking drama Sound of Freedom. Alternatively, you can pull together a lot of washed-up talent, including various actors who claim that they're victims of discrimination in Tinseltown due to their right-wing views, to make a muddled bore like Reagan, starring Trump booster Dennis Quaid as the Gipper.

Reagan presents the comically oversimplified perspective that President Ronald Reagan was singularly responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, and the only way one could enjoy the film is to already believe that. Even this may not be enough, because rather than focus on any given stretch of Reagan's life - most of which could have made for a compelling story - the film blunders through a full seven decades in the course of a tedious two-and-a-half-hour runtime. Historians certainly can and should identify the copious inaccuracies of Reagan, if only for the record (his long opposition to civil rights legislation doesn't make the cut, for example). But it would be foolish to hope those criticisms mean anything to viewers who came for mindless hero-worship and got plenty.

It might be more illuminating, then, to examine how director Sean McNamara fails to weld an actual drama to the scaffolding of propaganda. Here, the inability to make art out of Ronald Reagan speaks not to his worthlessness as a subject but to a poverty of imagination. (The author J.G. Ballard had no such issues.) In fact, Reagan can't even trace the broad outlines of your stock biopic, because it refuses to allow in its protagonist any kind of complicating flaw, and the geopolitical stalemate that acts as the primary conflict is too big and abstract for the frame. Instead, you get years upon years of pre-presidency Reagan grumbling about communism to anyone who will listen, and those people being impressed by this for some reason.

The movie condescends to its own faithful as well. Since there's lots of ground to cover, we're treated to new characters entering and exiting as if by revolving door, adding nothing to the narrative in their slivers of screentime. Absent scenes where we learn who they are and why they matter, they are introduced with name captions. But why should we care if that guy is Caspar Weinberger or the other is William P. Clark? The filmmakers sure don't; we're skimming Wikipedia. They have so little trust in the audience's ability to go on context clues that they needlessly label familiar scenery, too: A shot of the Golden Gate Bridge bears the words "San Francisco, CA," while a cut to Big Ben looming over the Thames receives a "London, U.K." chyron. Never before I have a watched the cinematic equivalent of a Ben Garrison cartoon. Shame they didn't slap "Washington, D.C." over the White House....>

<....Questions of craft must have been seen as a mere distraction from the message of Reagan. The dire wigs and makeup suggest that no queer people were allowed on set, and as the younger Reagan, Quaid looks practically Facetuned. The attempt to periodically de-age Jon Voight, who plays an old, fictional ex-KGB spy, is doomed from the start, as is the choice to frame the president's life as a tale of civilizational struggle spun through his miserable Russian accent. (As a related aside, Quaid never quite settles on a pronunciation of "Gorbachev.") The movie also just looks awful, with muddled depth of field and borders of queasy light that are perhaps meant to evoke Reagan's saintliness but frequently give the sense that the actors have been digitally inserted into a room.

It's one thing to release a hack picture - in that sense, Reagan is a fitting tribute - and another to imbue it with such self-importance that it has no sense of humor or irony. The two or three jokes were met with a forced chuckle from the same number of theatergoers, while unintentionally hilarious lines, like Reagan telling Nancy early in their courtship that "There's nothing like the relationship with a horse," pass us by without so much as a double-take. We hear Reagan, in his 1983 speech calling the U.S.S.R. an "evil empire," quote C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, remarking that the greatest evil is no longer carried out in dens of crime but "clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice" - as if we won't object that he escalated the War on Drugs and ignored the AIDS crisis from the Oval Office, while being clean-shaven. Elsewhere, Reagan solemnly intones, "family is important." An emotionally detached and absent father, the man didn't recognize his own son after speaking at the young man's high school graduation. Give Reagan credit for this detail, then: The kids disappear by 1969.

The mythology is insulting enough without casting Creed frontman Scott Stapp to do an embarrassing cameo as Frank Sinatra or Kevin Sorbo as the minister who baptizes young Ronnie. Still, the whitewashing of Reagan's red-baiting remains the movie's defining sin, and a testament to how any sense of portraiture is swamped by the petty desire to win a one-sided debate. You see it in everything from the depiction of communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo as an effete gay foil to Cowboy Reagan (there is no serious speculation that Trumbo, who had a long marriage to Cleo Fincher and three children with her, wasn't straight), to the automatic presumption that funding the Contras in Nicaragua was justified, to the mawkish idea of Voight's KGB character slowly realizing that Reagan is an anointed crusader who will bring about world peace.

Well… why not? The word "commie" means nothing more to the MAGA right in 2024 than it did to Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover in 1954: the opportunity to scare people with a fake crisis and thereby control them. Ultimately, Reagan is a greater affront to the 40th president of the United States than anything I could say about him, since it dispenses with the human being to achieve a hologram of his likeness, faker than the Strategic Defense Initiative. Biography, at its best, wrangles with the contradictions of figures known for their influence and power. Reagan is merely concerned with having both.>

<A majority of college faculty in southern states, including Arkansas, are concerned about political interference and are considering leaving academia, according to a new American Association of University Professors survey.

The new study, which received responses from more than 2,900 individuals, highlighted dissatisfaction with the political atmosphere surrounding higher education, with about 70% rating it poor or very poor.

Nearly 57% of respondents said they would not encourage out-of-state colleagues to seek employment in their current state, while 27% are considering interviewing elsewhere in the coming year.

These findings are a “wake-up call for policymakers and administrators” and emphasize the need to address faculty members’ concerns, according to an AAUP press release.

“Failure to do so may result in a significant brain drain and a decline in the quality of higher education in these states,” the release states.

The survey, conducted Aug. 14 to Sept. 1, used social media and email to distribute questionnaires, which garnered responses from faculty members in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

Twelve of Arkansas’ 43 respondents reported applying for jobs outside the state since 2022. Their biggest reason for searching elsewhere was the state’s broad political climate, followed by problems with salary; diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies; academic freedom and LGBTQ+ issues.

“Our work is surveilled by the state,” one Arkansas respondent said. “There are intimidation tactics that come both from the state and then from admin and other faculty. This has an impact on the kinds of discussions we are able to have in class and via events — it stifles discussion and that leaves our students unfamiliar with issues that are crucially important and very complex.”

Faculty names were not included in the survey results....>

<....Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said after taking office in 2023 that she wanted to be known as the education governor. One of her first steps toward that goal was backing the LEARNS Act, a 2023 law that overhauled the state’s K-12 education system. Sanders has said she wants to turn her attention to institutions of higher education during the 2025 legislative session. One survey respondent said “everyone is on edge” because the governor is targeting higher ed.

Arkansas survey participants also voiced concerns about issues of free speech. They cited feeling pressure not to voice opinions about state government or discussing DEI-related issues. One respondent said faculty have been warned about discussing DEI because students have reported faculty to the governor.

Arkansas senator promises to kill DEI at state higher-ed institutions

Sanders signed an executive order on her first day in office that prohibits the “indoctrination” of public school students with ideologies like Critical Race Theory, or CRT. The theory is typically not taught in K-12 schools in Arkansas. The language of the executive order is mirrored in the LEARNS Act.

“There is a fear of reprisal around teaching issues of equity in race and sexual identity,” a tenured Arkansas professor said. “It feels to me that university leaders are trying to keep the institution from being targeted by conservative politicians by preemptively eliminating DEI initiatives on campus.”

The University of Arkansas in Fayetteville announced plans to reallocate staff and resources from its Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion last June. A few months later, Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Jonesboro, requested a legislative study of DEI policies at the state’s universities and colleges.

Last week Sullivan renewed his promise to introduce legislation next year targeting DEI at the state’s colleges and universities. He told the Arkansas Legislative Council’s Higher Education subcommittee he would model his legislation after bills passed in Florida and Texas.

Sullivan has said decisions such as college admissions should be based on need and merit, not someone’s ethnicity or gender. When questioned by lawmakers last October, representatives from six Arkansas universities said their DEI efforts support the recruitment and retention of students from various backgrounds and do not include lowered admission standards for certain groups.

Another issue cited by Arkansas survey respondents was the challenges caused by a state boycott, divestment and sanction (BDS) law supporting Israel.

“My state and university’s stance on Palestine and BDS makes it very difficult to bring guests to campus because they have to sign agreements to not support BDS,” one faculty member said. “Additionally, the university didn’t defend Arab and Arab American scholars on campus from bigoted colleagues, which creates a hostile culture, especially for junior and marginalized faculty who want to engage issues related to Palestine and social justice at large.”

Approximately 27% of all respondents said they do not plan to stay in academia long term.>

<Saviour of Western democracy or racist imperialist? Greatest Briton of all time or villain of the Bengal famine, the Tonypandy Riots and independence movements from India to Iraq to Ireland? While enthusiasm for dissecting Winston Churchill’s legacy remains a popular litmus test in the left-right cultural war, we have grown used to the flak for the wartime Prime Minister coming exclusively from the Left. No one breaks away from a pro-capitalist march in Parliament Square to climb Churchill’s statue with a pot of blue paint and write: “The price of Churchill’s wartime alliance was the much-lamented end of the British Empire and the beginning of Attlee’s disastrous experiment in state-sponsored socialism.”

Cue outraged surprise, therefore, when a Right-wing American historian, Darryl Cooper, sat down last week with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News presenter and prominent Donald Trump cheerleader, for an interview and called Churchill the “chief villain of the Second World War”. Among other ludicrous claims – including the egregious thesis that the murder of millions in concentration camps owed more to weak logistics than methodical genocide – Churchill was lambasted as a “warmonger” and a “terrorist” for allowing the war to spread beyond Poland in 1939, refusing to negotiate with Hitler in 1940 and bombing German cities from 1942.

Needless to say, this wasn’t what Churchill meant when he wrote: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

“Darryl Cooper, I am afraid, is a know-nothing about Churchill or World War II,” says Sir Max Hastings, one of Churchill’s biographers. “He and podcasters like him are sensation-seekers, no more and no less, and the best response to them is to ignore them.”

If only that were the case. By the weekend, a White House spokesman had condemned the interview as “a disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans”, Elon Musk had posted – and subsequently deleted – a post calling it “very interesting, worth watching” and a show normally watched by around 800,000 people had racked up over 33 million views on X.

Meanwhile, two of Churchill’s garlanded biographers took the opposite approach to Hastings and decided to remind readers that Hitler, not Churchill, is still widely viewed as the “chief villain” of the Second World War. “This is not revisionist history,” wrote Sir Niall Ferguson in The Free Press on Thursday. “It is a pack of lies.” In The Washington Free Beacon the next day, Andrew Roberts argued that the Prime Minister spent half a century combatting the triple threats of Wilhelminism, Nazism and Communism, thereby saving freedom of speech “that has been so squalidly abused” by this “intellectually vacant” interview.

Victor Davis Hanson in The Free Press, a distinguished military historian, wrote: “Britain was the only one of the six major belligerents in World War II that went to war on the principle of a third-party nation’s territorial integrity.” What’s more, any peace terms would have been at best a “David Lloyd George Pétain-like collaborationist government”; at worst a “Nazi-imposed Oswald Mosley Quisling dictatorship”.

“In sum,” Hanson argued, “Germany and its fascist allies started World War II, initiated the mass warring on civilians, and institutionalised genocide. And they felt empowered to do so not because of Allied aggression or terrorism, but because of initial Western European appeasement, American isolationism, and Russian collaboration.”

So, although Darryl Cooper should consider his hot take on history thoroughly rebutted (unsurprisingly, his unabashed X feed describes his many critics as “shameless”, “mendacious” and a “loud minority of hyenas”), this row still tells us something fascinating about Churchill’s legacy – as well as the contemporary American political landscape.

One of the less-examined claims among Cooper’s ramblings is that the war fatally weakened the West. A variant of this right-wing criticism of Churchill was expressed in respectable academic form in the 1990s by Prof John Charmley, a British historian. If the prime minister had negotiated with Hitler, Charmley argues in Churchill: the End of Glory, he might have been able to avoid defeat in the battles he really cared about. For example, preserving the Empire, preventing socialism in Britain and stopping the Soviet Union from dominating the European continent.

“This school of thought struggled to find an audience in Britain because it proceeds from the twin premises that socialism was uniquely terrible and the British Empire uniquely good,” explains Dominic Sandbrook, author of a series of acclaimed histories on post-war Britain and co-host of the popular The Rest is History podcast.....>

<....But although Charmley’s view has been largely drowned out by a combination of louder, Left-wing critics, staunch Right-wing supporters and “maybe 75 per cent of people who sit in neither camp and simply view Churchill as a national hero”, criticising Churchill from the Right is a “peculiarly American” phenomenon that stretches back to the 1930s.

“There has always been an element of American populism obsessed with European cosmopolitan conspiracies,” says Sandbrook. “Many felt they were tricked into joining the war in 1917 and this fuelled some of the arguments for isolationism in the 1920s.

“Churchill, with his cigars, bowties and Blenheim pedigree, was the perfect hate figure for these populists. And although this suspicion was largely suspended in 1941, it never went away entirely. Pat Buchanan, who worked for Nixon and challenged George H W Bush for the White House in 1992, anticipated a lot of what Cooper has been saying recently in books such as Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War.”

So why is this unpleasant sub-culture enjoying a right-wing renaissance in America now?

“If Hitler is no longer widely understood as the negation of our deepest values, America will be softened up for Donald Trump’s most authoritarian plans,” writes Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times.

“It is calculated Kremlin-inspired disinformation on a vast scale designed to confuse and misrepresent history in the interest of elevating a view that Western democracy is at fault in the long twilight struggle against authoritarianism,” writes Marc Johnson in Idaho’s Lewiston Tribune, on the notion that the West didn’t need to fight Hitler.

Frank Luntz, a veteran American pollster and political consultant, discounts such apocalyptic theories. “I don’t think this is a meaningful, measurable trend,” he says. “Cooper is simply wrong.”

But while the story of a podcaster who riled the White House and half the academic establishment might not represent a conspiracy of widespread authoritarian acceptance, many point to a looser, if no less damaging, ecosystem of Trumpism, contrarianism and egotism.

Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative columnist, has written compellingly about what he calls “the Barbarian Right”, a group of “pseudo-scholars” eager to “overthrow egalitarian – and essentially feminine – structures”, while attempting to revive some of the “darkest tendencies in the history of thought, including the idolatry of strength (as cartoonishly personified by the likes of Andrew Tate); the notion of supposedly ‘natural’ hierarchies; IQ-based eugenics; overt racism and anti-Semitism”.

Their denizens have, he argues, “got what they wished for” out of Cooper’s interview, praising it widely online and adding their own racist and anti-Semitic tropes.

Carlson, a Trump confidant and notorious cable news host who has entertained conspiracy theories, was finally sacked by Fox last April. Undeterred by losing his $20 million salary, he has taken his contentious views and some of his audience to YouTube and X, where his nearly 14 million followers were treated to his soft-soap interview with Cooper last week.

Their cosy, two-hour chat rounded off a busy – and, presumably, lucrative – period for Carlson. Not only did he famously interview Vladimir Putin in February (the Russian President lectured him, almost uninterrupted, on his unique version of Ukrainian history), but he is widely viewed to be responsible for Trump choosing JD Vance as his running mate, having repeatedly interviewed the would-be vice president at Fox and afterwards....>

<....After a prime slot addressing the Republican National Convention in July, Carlson launched a 15-stop live tour last week by interviewing a barefooted Russell Brand in Arizona. The controversial British comedian, who once supported Jeremy Corbyn, endorsed Trump’s MAGA movement, dropped to his knees on stage and led the crowd in prayer.

Brand’s cameo in this strange nexus of podcasters, presidents, pundits and pseudo-scholars leads us to the conclusion that this story primarily illuminates – and inflates – the egos of a new tribe of internet iconoclasts more interested in being provocative than accurate. Gnomically claiming rare and privileged enlightenment in the face of universally accepted truths, the likes of Cooper have discovered that the Second World War provides fertile ground for tilting at contemporary shibboleths.

“The true villains of [Cooper’s] story are not, in the end, Hitler or Churchill,” writes Megan Garber in The Atlantic, where she accuses Cooper of creating “straw men”. “Instead, they are the culture warriors of the present: the woke, the mobs, the ruling class – the people who will be offended by claims such as ‘Winston Churchill Ruined Europe’.”

Ferguson added his own villain to this list last week, blaming podcasts for “drowning history in a tidal wave of blather, at best sloppy, at worst mendacious”.

Sandbrook, unsurprisingly, disagrees.

“There are a lot of history podcasts out there – some are very good, whereas some have a tendency to be obsessed with soldiers, samurais and themselves,” he says. “A test of a good historian is that they’re honest about what they don’t know, while acknowledging that other historians think differently. Unfortunately, the last 20 years have given a platform to nerdy bores and ranting monomaniacs with a bee in their bonnet.”

The last seven days have certainly given these two monomaniacs their 15 minutes’ worth. Darryl Cooper’s podcast, “The Martyr Made”, was third on Apple’s charts over the weekend, just behind “The Tucker Carlson Show” which had introduced him as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States”.

As they – like many others – probably think Churchill said (he didn’t): “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”>

<Senate Republicans gave the House GOP’s plan to fund the government a chilly reception on Monday, questioning whether it will slow progress toward finding a solution to avoid a government shutdown at the end of the month.

They acknowledged the inclusion of a Trump-backed measure requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote could complicate the stopgap funding bill’s path, and many especially aren’t pleased with the continuing resolution’s (CR) six-month timeline.

House Republicans are expected to move quickly on the bill, which would kick the current Sept. 30 funding deadline into March and includes the SAVE Act — legislation requiring proof of citizenship to be able to register to vote in federal elections. Conservatives, optimistic that former President Trump will return to the White House next year, argue the proposal will allow the next president more influence over how the government is funded through fall 2025.

Conservative Republicans in the Senate are backing the gambit. But others in the GOP worry it comes dangerously close to risking a shutdown, and say that six months is simply too long.

“We’ll have to see what the House ends up sending to us, but my preference is to have a December CR,” Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said. “I think we should complete our work as soon as possible, which is why I’m very disappointed that the floor agenda, once again, this week is not going to include Senate reported appropriations bills. That would strengthen the Senate’s hand in negotiations.”

Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican who is running to become leader next year, said he saw “some argument for pushing this stuff into next year, but there’s also going to be folks [on the other side].”

He added, “It depends a little bit on what happens in November … and what [the incoming president] want to get done before the end of the year and what they want to push into next year.”

“It’s fluid,” Thune continued. “My views will probably be informed and shaped a little bit by what the election results are and … what our colleagues think is the best course of action.”

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas), who serves on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he didn’t have objections to the bill’s inclusion of the SAVE Act.

But he said Monday he thinks “six months is long.”

“I’m for the shortest time frame of the CR that still allows us time to get our work done and avoids an omnibus bill,” Moran said, referring to a massive, normally end-of-year, package that combines all 12-year funding bills.

“That’s probably longer than just a few weeks, but I, you know, six months is a little long, so I’m looking for whatever it is that time frame that actually gives us the time to get the job done without more extensions, without more additional CRs, but especially with giving us the time to work out differences between House and Senate, and actually do appropriation bills.”

Democratic leaders have roundly rejected the plan in the upper chamber. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) took a veiled shot at the inclusion of the SAVE Act in this week’s House bill, saying that “poison pills or Republican extremism” must be avoided in the spending push.

“Democrats support a CR to keep the government open. As I have said before, the only way to get things done is in a bipartisan way. Despite Republican bluster, that is how we’ve handled every funding bill in the past, and this time should be no exception,” Schumer wrote in a letter to Senate Democrats on Sunday. “We will not let poison pills or Republican extremism put funding for critical programs at risk.”

The White House also fired a warning shot on Monday morning, vowing to veto the bill in the unlikely event it makes it to the president’s desk, arguing it would place “agencies at insufficiently low levels — both for defense and non-defense — for a full six months.”....>

<....It’s not clear at this point if the measure will pass the House. Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) decision to include the SAVE Act and stretch the CR to six months brought aboard a number of conservatives normally opposed to stopgaps, but Republican opposition Monday night appeared widespread — and growing.

But there are already eyes on how some vulnerable House Democrats that previously crossed party lines to back the bill will respond to the stopgap pitch, particularly as Republicans have seized on issues like immigration and the border in the months leading up to the November elections.

Many Senate Republicans on Monday backed the inclusion of the SAVE Act, but sounded a cautious note.

The bill passed the House mostly along party lines earlier this year, as many Democrats have denounced the measure, noting it is already a crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections and arguing the bill could make voter registration more difficult.

Backers of the bill argue it ensures that only citizens can vote in federal elections, partly by making it mandatory for states to obtain proof of citizenship to register voters and also requiring states to purge noncitizens from voter rolls.

“I think it’s important to make sure illegal immigrants aren’t voting and the American people need to know what party is on what side of that,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), the No. 3 Republican, adding that he supports what the House is trying to do.

However, he doesn’t believe the lower chamber’s work this week will complicate getting a CR deal when all is said and done.

“I want to make sure the government stays open,” Barrasso said. “I’ve always wanted to make sure that happens and I expect the funding will go through and the government will stay open.”

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the other leading candidate to replace Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) atop the conference, also tossed his support behind the SAVE Act and Johnson’s plan, saying that whatever he needs to do to win support from House GOP members is the right call.

“He needs to do what he needs to do in the House, and we’ll fight that battle over here,” Cornyn said, declining to take sides one way or another on the length of Johnson’s proposed CR. “I just think there’s arguments both ways.”>

<Donald Trump and Kamala Harris faced each other on the debate stage Tuesday night for the first and possibly the last time.

Harris, the Democratic vice president who is a former courtroom prosecutor, was eager to prosecute Trump’s glaring liabilities. But she also was tasked with re-reintroducing herself to voters, who are still getting to know her as the party's presidential nominee.

Trump, a Republican now in his third presidential election, was set on painting Harris as an out-of-touch liberal. He also tried to win over skeptical suburban voters — many of them women — turned off by Trump's brash leadership style and his penchant for personal insults.

The 90-minute debate played out inside Philadelphia’s National Constitutional Center. In accordance with rules negotiated by both campaigns, there was no live audience and the candidates' microphones were muted when it was not their turn to speak.

Some takeaways on a historic night:

The vice president walked across the stage and introduced herself, “Kamala Harris,” before reaching out and grabbing Trump's hand in the opening moments.

In her first answer, Harris said Trump’s trade tariffs would effectively create a sales tax on the middle class. She soon accused Trump of presiding over the worst attack on American democracy since the Civil War — the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. And she charged the former president with telling women what they could do with their bodies.

But Harris may have got under Trump's skin the most when she went after his performance at his rallies, noting that many people often leave early.

Trump was largely calm when he defended himself against each charge, but he showed annoyance with her comment about his rallies. He insisted his events were larger than hers and he seemed to grow angrier at times as the debate continued.

Harris frequently shifted her message from Trump back to the American people.

“You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams and your needs and your desires,” Harris said of Trump’s rallies. “And I’ll tell you, I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first.”

The debate opened with an unexpectedly wonky exchange on the economy: Harris took on Trump for his plan to put in place sweeping tariffs and for the trade deficit he ran as president; Trump slammed Harris for inflation that he incorrectly said was the worst in the country’s history.

The exchange ended up with some of Trump’s traditional bombast. He said Harris was a “Marxist” even though she had just cited positive reviews of her economic plans from Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. But it was particularly notable for Harris' effort to turn the tables on Trump.

Trump noted that people look back on his presidency’s economy fondly. “I created one of the greatest economies in the history of our country,” he said. Harris flatly told viewers: “Donald Trump has no plan for you.”

Americans are slightly more likely to trust Trump over Harris when it comes to handling the economy, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs poll from August....>

<....Harris came out swinging in defense of abortion rights, perhaps the strongest issue for Democrats since Trump’s nominees created a Supreme Court majority to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion. Her sharp arguments provided a vivid contrast to President Joe Biden's rambling comments on the issue during his June debate with Trump.

“The government, and Donald Trump, certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” Harris said. She painted a vivid picture of women facing medical complications, gut-wrenching decisions and having travel out of state for an abortion.

Trump was just as fierce in defense, saying he returned the issue to the states, an outcome he said many Americans wanted. He struggled with accuracy, however, repeating the false claim that Democrats support abortion even after babies are born. He stuck to that even after he was corrected by moderator Lynsey Davis.

“I did a great service in doing that. It took courage to do it,” Trump said of the overturning of Roe v. Wade and its constitutional protections for abortion. “And the Supreme Court had great courage in doing it. And I give tremendous credit to those six justices.”

Polls has shown significant opposition to overturning Roe and voters have punished Republicans in recent elections for it.

Trump refused to say whether he would veto a bill banning abortion nationwide, saying such legislation would never clear Congress and reach the president. He also broke with his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, suggesting Vance spoke out of turn when he said Trump would veto a national abortion ban.

“I didn’t discuss it with JD,” Trump said.

Trump objected when Harris interrupted him — an interjection that he could hear but viewers could not because her microphone was muted according to the rules of the debate.

“Wait a minute, I’m talking now,” Trump said. He was putting his spin on a line she used famously against Mike Pence in the 2020 vice presidential debate.

“Sound familiar?” Trump added.

Four years ago, Harris rebuked Pence for interrupting, saying: “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking.”>

<Vice President Kamala Harris walked onto the ABC News debate stage with a mission: trigger a Trump meltdown.

She succeeded.

Former President Donald Trump had a mission too: control yourself. He failed.

Trump lost his cool over and over. Goaded by predictable provocations, he succumbed again and again.

Trump was pushed into broken-sentence monologues—and even an all-out attack on the 2020 election outcome. He repeated crazy stories about immigrants eating cats and dogs, and was backward-looking, personal, emotional, defensive, and frequently incomprehensible.

Harris hit pain point after pain point: Trump’s bankruptcies, the disdain of generals who had served with him, the boredom and early exits of crowds at his shrinking rallies. Every hit was followed by an ouch. Trump’s counterpunches flailed and missed. Harris met them with smiling mockery and cool amusement. The debate was often a battle of eyelids: Harris’s opened wide, Trump’s squinting and tightening. Harris’s debate prep seemed to have concentrated on psychology as much as on policy. She drove Trump and trapped him and baited him—and it worked every time.

Trump exited the stage leaving uncertain voters still uncertain about whether or not he’d sign a national abortion ban. He left them certain that he did not want Ukraine to win its war of self-defense. He accused Harris of hating Israel but then never bothered to say any words of his own in support of the Jewish state’s war of self-defense against Hamas terrorism. In his confusion and reactiveness, he seemed to have forgotten any debate strategy he might have had.

Something every woman watching the debate probably noticed: Trump could not bring himself to say the name of the serving vice president, his opponent for the presidency. For him, Harris was just a pronoun: a nameless, identity-less “she,” “her,” “you.” It’s said that narcissists cope with ego injury by refusing to acknowledge the existence of the person who inflicted the hurt. If so, that might explain Trump’s behavior. Harris bruised his feelings, and Trump reacted by shutting his eyes and pretending that Harris had no existence of her own independent of President Joe Biden, whose name Trump was somehow able to speak.

Hemmed, harried, and humiliated, Trump lost his footing and his grip. He never got around to making an affirmative case for himself. If any viewer was nostalgic for the early Trump economy before its collapse in his final year in office, that viewer must have been disappointed. If a viewer wanted a conservative policy message, any conservative policy message, that viewer must have been disappointed. When asked whether he had yet developed a health-care plan after a decade in politics, Trump could reply only that he had “concepts of a plan.”

Almost from the start, Harris was in control. She had better moments and worse ones, but she was human where Trump was feral. She had warm words for political opponents such as John McCain and Dick Cheney; Trump had warm words for nobody other than Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian strongman whom Trump praised for praising Trump. It was an all-points beatdown, and no less a beating because Trump inflicted so much of it on himself.

At a minimum, this display will put an end to the Trump claim that Harris is a witless nonentity unqualified to engage in debate. Harris met Trump face-to-face before tens of millions of witnesses. She dominated and crushed him, using as her principal tools her self-command and her shrewd insight into the ex-president’s psychic [sic], moral, and intellectual weaknesses.

Will it matter that Harris so decisively won? How can it not? But it may matter more that Trump so abjectly lost to a competitor for whom he could not utter a syllable of respect.>

Soon the 5th of november will arrive, said on this symbolic day were Trumps 2 braincells crashed like the twintowers. There is and never was any substance in this "man".

<It’s pretty clear to me that on Tuesday night, Vice President Kamala Harris won what may be the only debate between herself and former President Donald Trump. The vice president had some help, too. She was aided and abetted by two ABC News moderators who seemingly felt the need to fact-check virtually everything the former president said.

The former president was clearly frustrated and became more strident and divisive as the nearly two-hour debate continued. And the vice president appeared to gain renewed confidence as she saw Trump faltering under relentless questioning from herself and moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis.

Although Harris clearly won the debate in my estimation, it isn’t at all clear that this debate, just 56 days before the election, will fundamentally impact the outcome on November 5.

I say that because Trump did speak directly to his base on Tuesday night. His supporters understood, as well as anyone, how much bias ABC News introduced into the process. To be sure, Harris had better answers on abortion, healthcare, climate change and leadership for the future. That much is clear. But what is also clear is that what Trump said in his closing statement remains the case.

Voters remain angry about the direction the country is headed in, about the performance of both President Biden and Vice President Harris, as well as which candidate they trust more on the top two or three issues facing the country: the economy, immigration and law and order.

My best guess is that Harris will get a slight bump from her performance at this face-off, which had Democrats cheering as soon as Trump began turning harsh and hostile within the first 45 minutes of the debate.

Yet, elections rarely turn on a dime as completely as they did after the June 27 debate between Trump and President Biden. And while Trump was a seemingly different man on Tuesday night than he was back in June, the points he made were the same. And many voters, indeed a majority of voters, agree with his core assessment of the current state of our nation.

I also believe that this is likely to be the last debate that the candidates engage in. For Vice President Harris, the calculus is simple: she will claim victory, her supporters will be emboldened, money will continue to flow into her coffers and there will be absolutely no reason for her to reengage in any shape, matter or form with the former president.

The Harris campaign may claim that they want a second debate, but it will almost certainly be under conditions that the former president will never agree to. I doubt that Trump would ever agree to go back to ABC, much less NBC or CBS, and the chance that Harris will appear on Fox News is negligible at best.

For the former president, the calculation is very different but reaches the same conclusion: his worst fears were confirmed on Tuesday night. The debate was hardly fair. And absent a debate on Fox News, there’s little reason to believe he’ll get a fair shake from any other network.

He also knows that in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential contests, the first one a winning effort and the second one a losing effort, he was able to make up ground with voters separate and apart from any direct confrontation with his opponent. Trump, on the campaign trail, has a unique and compelling appeal. We have seen proof of that time and time again.

He and his advisers will likely conclude that they can do a lot better with voters by eschewing direct confrontation with Harris. They will do that by sending him out on the campaign trail to do both interviews and rallies. That will be far more effective than taking the risks inherent in a night like the one we witnessed on Tuesday.

But, it is important to note that Harris did reaffirm, for her supporters and potentially many swing voters, that she is the real deal. She’s ready and able to govern. Still, at the same time, doubts about her as the next president of the United States remain strong and clear. Indeed, the great weakness of Trump’s performance on Tuesday night was that he failed to underscore the issue of the economy and the contrast between his economic leadership and that of Joe Biden in a way that was clear and accessible to voters.

Trump’s emphasis on the southern border struck me as over the top, even if the points he was making have wide resonance.

Put another way, I am virtually certain many on the left will proclaim the election over based on Harris’s strong performance. That will almost certainly be an exaggeration or an overstatement.

<Before Tuesday night's debate, Republicans were virtually unanimous: if former President Donald Trump stuck to policy contrasts, he'd win the faceoff with Vice President Kamala Harris.

"He needs to hold her accountable to what she truly believes and what she's done when she was given more power in a bigger position," South Dakota GOP Gov. Kristi Noem told ABC News shortly before the debate.

Still, she added, "his personality always shines through."

She was right.

In a fiery debate that marked the first time Harris and Trump had ever met face-to-face, the vice president repeatedly laid into her opponent, goading him on everything from his 2020 loss to his crowd sizes to his record, which she dubbed a "mess."

And instead of talking about immigration and inflation -- top issues that polls suggest he is more trusted on -- he relitigated false claims that he won the 2020 race, repeated conspiracy theories about Haitian migrants eating neighbors' pets and hammered President Joe Biden, whom he's no longer running against.

"Trump was all over the place. He had a few good moments, but Kamala baited him and he took it every time. Felt like he had two steps forward then three steps backwards," one Republican strategist said. "Not a massive earthquake, but Kamala moved forward, and Trump maybe lost a bit."

Harris opened the debate sounding apprehensive but quickly found her groove, and her playbook became clear: she would not relent in her attacks against Trump.

First, she went after him on policy.

"Let's talk about what Donald Trump left us. Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the great depression. Donald Trump left us the worst public health epidemic in a century. Donald Trump left us the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War. And what we have done is clean up Donald Trump's mess," she said.

Then, she went for the jugular.

"People start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom," she said.

"Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people," she added later. "Clearly, he's having a very difficult time processing that."

And dictators, she said, "can manipulate you with flattery and favors."....>

<....Trump's answers were meandering at first, veering between topics but still punching Harris over things like immigration and student loan debt. But ultimately, instead of landing blows on the border and the economy, he was insistent that he was being sarcastic in recent remarks conceding his 2020 loss and elevating conspiracy theories that were debunked about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, that even his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, backtracked on before the debate.

"Trump started strong but couldn't help taking the bait on things he should have let pass by," said a second GOP strategist. "With that draw, the scale likely tips to the new entry: Harris."

He finished the debate with a closing statement hammering Harris for not accomplishing any of her policies during her 3.5 years in office as vice president, though even for allies who thought he performed well, that came too late.

"He did what he needed to do. She really had to convince people she was the agent of change, and I think she came across very scripted," said Sean Spicer, Trump's first White House press secretary. "Trump's comment about her being there for 3.5 years was great but it should have come earlier."

Throughout the debate, Harris weaved in shoutouts to some of her recently released policy proposals, including boosted assistance for first-time home buyers or parents with newborns. However, she spent much of her time hammering Trump, which some Republicans spun as a win, particularly given how cemented many voters' perceptions of the former president already are.

"She's landing the hits on him but that's not enough. She needed to actually give people that already don't like him reason to vote for her, and she failed to do it. He missed opportunities to hurt her. But it was much lower stakes for him," one former senior Trump administration official said toward the end of the debate.

"We thought it was our best debate ever," Trump himself later boasted during a surprise visit to the debate spin room.

Still, early signs did not bode well for the former president.

A snap poll taken by CNN of debate watchers found that about 63% thought Harris won the clash, compared with 37% for Trump. In the same kind of poll that was taken after Trump's June debate with Biden -- which featured such a faulty performance from the president that he had to end his campaign -- 67% thought Trump won.

The debate comes at a crucial time, after a wave of momentum for Harris jolted Democrats back into a razor-thin race. With that momentum largely stalled before Tuesday, Democrats were eager for an opportunity for another burst.

"She is conducting a master class," Democratic strategist Karen Finney said toward the end of the debate. "His lack of discipline spoke volumes about his poor character."

"Trump was his unhinged self, but she was presidential," added a source familiar with the Harris campaign's thinking. "It is hard to move the needle much in this race, but I suspect that it will."

Still, performing well at a debate is one thing; altering a race is another.

This year's presidential election has certainly been a roller coaster, featuring a historic debate in June, an assassination attempt on Trump in July and an unprecedented scramble to push Biden aside and then elevate a replacement to him on Democrats' ticket.

But polls over recent years show only a dwindling sliver of undecided voters remain, with each party going into November with high floors of support from voters who are expected to put their team jersey on, regardless of their enthusiasm for their party's nominee.

And in a news cycle that has already rendered something as historic as an assassination attempt old news, it's unclear how large a Sept. 10 debate will loom in voters' minds on Nov. 5.

"Harris didn't bomb, and thus passed this test. The country is so polarized and divided I am not sure there will be much impact," said GOP pollster Robert Blizzard. "He took the bait too often, too much wasted time responding instead of prosecuting the case against her. But nothing that will dissuade his current supporters."

For Harris' campaign, though, the strategy appears the same, with more baiting to come.

"Vice President Harris is ready for a second debate," Harris campaign co-chair Jen O'Malley Dillon said in a statement after the debate. "Is Donald Trump?">