Peter Hamby/Vanity Fair:
“ARE WE REALLY GOING TO HAVE A GAFFE-FEST OVER JOE BIDEN?”: HOW CLICKBAIT AND OUTRAGE PORN ARE HURTING READERS—AND ELEVATING TRUMP
Trump wants to drop a nuclear bomb into a hurricane, immigrant children are dying in U.S. custody, and the Amazon rainforest is burning. With the stakes so high, why is the press still assigning so much news value to gaffes?
But this is 2019, which made the Biden episode so confounding. Donald Trump is president, and he reportedly wants to drop a nuclear bomb into a hurricane. He is toying with the global economy because of a long-standing personal grudge with China. Seven immigrant children have died in U.S. custody under Trump administration detention policies. The Amazon rainforest is burning. Russia and China are continuing to meddle in our political process. With the stakes so high, why is the press still assigning such news value to gaffes? “The severity of statements from these candidates needs to be judged in context,” said Ben LaBolt, a former press secretary for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. “Donald Trump says and does something sinister every week that has implications for real people’s lives and has mobilized hateful elements in our society.” Carl Cameron, the former chief political correspondent for Fox News who resigned from the network after Trump’s election, said reporters “have to be careful not to trivialize” the race. “The idea that Joe Biden has loose lips is as old as Biden himself,” Cameron said. “The problem for the press is that Trump says so much more stuff, all the time, and the ratio is just beyond description. He makes what we used to cover as gaffes look meaningless. So are we really going to have a gaffe-fest over Joe Biden?”
It seems as though we already are.
Why suggest Biden is stronger than he looks? Because voters don’t care about the gaffes, they do care about re-establishing norms, and they prefer his health plan because they are loathe to give up what they see as the stability of Obamacare. He has issues that will hurt him, including losing the electability mantle over time, but don’t underestimate his appeal. Just because you don’t like him (pick your reason) doesn’t mean the voters feel the same way.
Bill Scher/Politico:
‘Pocahontas’ Could Still Be Elizabeth Warren’s Biggest Vulnerability
Sure, she calmed nervous progressives. But it’s moderates who might be susceptible to Trump’s attack on her honesty.
Has Warren effectively addressed the controversy? In conversations I had with Democratic and Republican political strategists, unaffiliated with any presidential campaign, there was no bipartisan consensus. The Democrats believed Warren’s rise in the polls is evidence she has weathered the storm. The Republicans argued Warren remains vulnerable to charges of dishonest opportunism.
They’re both right. Warren is enjoying a comeback because she has convinced many skittish progressives that she won’t let Trump disrupt her relentless focus on policy solutions. And she has convinced many Native American leaders that her policy proposals for indigenous communities are more important than what she has said in the past about her ancestry.
But because Warren’s comeback has relied on restoring her standing on the left, she has not done anything to address concerns potentially percolating among swing voters. A detailed white paper on Native American policy has no bearing on whether a moderate white suburbanite believes Warren is of good character. And since Warren has apologized for her past claims, she remains open to the charge she was dishonest when, during her academic career, she relied on nothing more than family lore to identify herself as Native American.
That means if she becomes the Democratic nominee for president, Warren would still face a “Pocahontas” problem, one that threatens the core of her candidacy.
[See this link on Falwell]
The Hill:
Nervous Republicans focus energy on protecting Senate 'firewall'
“If we lose the presidency — and if I had to guess right now, the odds are 10 percent we get the House back — the Senate is the only check and balance,” said one former Republican Senate chief of staff. “If we don’t keep the Senate, we’re basically screwed. I hate to just cut to the chase, but that is exactly what the [National Republican Senatorial Committee] is running with.” …
"The House is going to be a pretty tough road to win back this cycle. The presidential race, it's kind of like who really knows at this point. But the Senate is a safer bet,” the national GOP strategist said, adding it could "easily be a possibility" that Democrats win the White House and Republicans hold onto the Senate.
Republicans say they are cautiously optimistic about their chances for keeping the Senate, but they aren’t taking any chances.
NY Times:
Farmers’ Frustration With Trump Grows as U.S. Escalates China Fight
The predicament of farmers is becoming a political problem for Mr. Trump as he heads into an election year. For months, farmers have remained resolute, continuing to pledge support to a president who says his trade policies will help the agricultural industry win in the end. While there are few signs of an imminent blue wave in farm country, a growing number of farmers say they are losing patience with the president’s approach and are suggesting it will not take much to lose their vote as well.
Mr. Trump, who regularly brags about an economic boom despite signs of a slowdown, has in some cases made matters worse. He recently dismissed sales of American wheat, suggesting Japan was buying it only as a favor to the United States. And his frequent tweets insisting that “farmers are starting to do great again” have rubbed some agriculture groups the wrong way.
“We’re not starting to do great again,” Brian Thalmann, the president of the Minnesota Corn Growers Association, told Mr. Perdue at the event. “Things are going downhill and downhill quickly.”
On Monday, after a 72-hour period during which Mr. Trump twice escalated his trade war with China, Mr. Thalmann said he could no longer support the president as he did in 2016.
“At some point we have to quit playing games and get back to the table and figure this out,” Mr. Thalmann said. “There’s no certainty to any of this.”
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Democrats have stopped self-censoring about Trump’s unfitness
Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren are operating from two starkly different theories of the 2020 election, which are inevitably going to propel them into a confrontation that will have to be settled sooner or later, as Marc Caputo and Alex Thompson suggest in an interesting Politico piece.
In short, Biden, the former vice president, believes the way to beat President Trump is to primarily prosecute the case against Trump himself, while Warren, a senator from Massachusetts, believes a far more comprehensive indictment of the structural problems in our politics and economy are required.
This is a clash of arguments being made to Democratic primary voters. Biden thinks they will be persuaded by his case that the way to win against Trump is to prosecute all the ways the president is an aberration — the racism, the corruption, the contempt for governing and liberal democracy — while promising not radical change but, rather, a restoration of the “soul of our nation,” essentially as it existed during the Barack Obama years…
It’s an interesting dispute and, at some point, Biden and Warren will probably clash over it in some way during a debate.
But at the same time, it’s worth noting that in the background of that dispute, there’s a convergence of sorts happening among leading Democrats right now. They are increasingly willing to cast doubt on Trump’s fitness to serve as president — because of his tacit winking at white nationalism and white supremacy; his nonstop lying, including misrepresenting consequential communications with other world leaders; his erratic approach to international relations; and even his mental stability.
Peter Suderman/Reason:
The Price of an Erratic President
Even if Trump doesn’t follow through on his bad ideas, the uncertainty is still a drag.
Yet just as most people reasonably assume that Trump probably won't try using nuclear weapons to manage bad weather, few, I suspect, worry that he would ever really try to compel American businesses to fully cut economic ties with another country. It's an idle threat made by a president with a penchant for bluster, and no more—and thus about as easy to ignore as the idea of deploying a nuclear deterrent against a hurricane.
Or at least that's what we hope, because the problem with Trump is that it's almost impossible to ever be fully certain that he won't eventually pursue his wilder ideas, to be confident that he won't one day pick up his phone and tweet out an order to pull out of China's economy that is an actual order, backed up by the force and power of the federal government. This is especially true when it comes to trade and immigration, where Trump has proven willing to act in ways that predecessors of both parties probably would have avoided.
The result is generalized political and economic instability, and a pervasive precariousness to American life. This helps feed more exotic, conspiracy-adjacent theories about Trump himself. And over time, it may well take a serious toll on the American economy. Indeed, some economic consequences are already being felt. Trump's announcement of tariff hikes last week, combined with his threats against both China and the U.S. Federal Reserve, rattled already jittery markets, sending stocks to their fourth weekly loss in a row.
Chris Truax/USA Today:
There are a few (dozen?) glitches in that Donald Trump plan to end birthright citizenship
From the Constitution and the Supreme Court to diplomatic immunity and Italian ancestry, it's complicated. And it's another way to torment Obama.
When it comes to news, August is traditionally the silly season and President Donald Trump certainly did his part last week to lighten the national mood. He got into a fight with the Danish prime minister because she wouldn’t sell him Greenland, said he wanted to award himself the Medal of Honor, and endorsed the claim that “Jewish people in Israel ... love him like he is the second coming of God.” It’s possible that the Greenland idea was serious. He did cancel a state visit because of it. But all the rest was clearly parody. How stupid would you have to be to think Israeli Jews would be excited about “the second coming of God?” I mean, if you’re Jewish, that’s not even a thing.
If you are a lawyer, the most hilarious thing Trump did last week was his schtick about eliminating birthright citizenship by executive order. Now, it is true that lawyers can have an odd sense of humor, but this is a joke that, with a little explanation, can be enjoyed by lawyers and nonlawyers alike….
Now, the fun begins. As it turns out, just like the children of illegal immigrants, tens of millions of people born in the United States to U.S. citizens are also citizens of another country at birth even if they don’t know it. Lots of countries automatically confer citizenship based on who your parents were. Some countries make you automatic citizens if one of your grandparents was a citizen. In the case of Italy, you may be an Italian citizen if any of your ancestors was an Italian citizen going right back to the founding of Italy.
Under the birthies' [evolution of birthers] reading of the 14th Amendment, none of these people would be U.S. citizens because, at birth, they would be citizens of another country. We always thought there was something sketchy about Nancy Pelosi!