Good for Liz Cheney. Now Where Are Mitt Romney and George W. Bush?

If you know anything about the founding and history of the Republican Party, the symbolism of Thursday’s event where Liz Cheney appeared with Kamala Harris had to get your attention. This party that has descended into antidemocratic neofascism was founded in 1854 as a progressive beacon. The Whig Party was dissolving and split into anti- and pro-slavery factions. The Free Soil Party was well intentioned but small. But when the antislavery Whigs and the Free Soilers got together, then they had some numbers and some power. Within six years, they elected not just a president but the most courageous and consequential president in American history (yes, FDR is a close second in my book).

It all started in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, which sits less than a mile away from where Cheney appeared with Harris. Is Cheney a “Lincoln Republican”? In one sense, she’s not even close. Lincoln was a liberal. In addition to ending slavery, he made public universities possible and created the national railroad system. He levied the country’s first income tax, to pay for the Civil War. He was way too big-government for Liz.

But in another sense, yes, she is, because at least she believes in the union, the republic, and the Constitution. By the benighted current standards of her party, that earns her a gold star.

Do liberals love Liz Cheney? Of course not. Nor should we. She’s a super-hawkish neocon. She defended torture. There’s a reason she was ascending the ladder of GOP House leadership in the 2010s. Yes, she had a pedigree, but also, she was totally fine with everything the GOP stood for.

But then Trump happened, and she stood up to say no. That did take some guts, in that authoritarian party. It unambiguously cost her her career, as she surely knew it would. And now she’s talking about the “depraved cruelty” of Donald Trump and endorsing a Democrat. And it’s not as if Harris promised her anything—that she’d bomb Iran or whatever. Cheney did this because Harris “will be a president who will defend the rule of law.”

Will it matter? I think so, and so does Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party and one of the best state party chairs in the country. On MSNBC Thursday night, Wikler identified two groups of voters who might be influenced by this endorsement.

The first group is low-information uncommitted voters. He used a great analogy to describe these people. “These are people,” he told Jen Psaki, “who think about politics the way you and I think about the javelin at the Olympics, which is something that we’re vaguely aware happens every four years, but it’s not something we’re seeking out.” Yes, there are such people. For these voters, Wikler said, “just hearing that Democrats and Republicans are all agreeing that Kamala Harris is the person” might matter.

His second group was more interesting. It consists of “highly engaged” Republicans whose first loyalty is not to Trump but to “the flag and the Constitution.” Cheney’s move shows these people that “you can be yourself with your conservative commitments” and vote for a Democrat.

How many such people are there? A lot. Let’s start with the fact that Nikki Haley got nearly 4.4 million votes in the primaries. That was 20 percent of the total number of votes cast. Now let’s extrapolate that out to a November electorate. In 2020, around 155 million people voted. According to CNN exit polls, 36 percent were Republican, or around 56 million.

And 20 percent of 56 million—that is, the extrapolated Haley vote—makes for a potential pool of anti-Trump Republicans of around 11 million. Now, most of them may not bother to vote, or will write in Ronald Reagan or whomever. But surely Cheney’s backing will help convince some of them that voting for Harris is all right. And if you throw in Republican-leaning independents, that pool grows by maybe another 20 million.

If Harris can harvest votes from these people while promising nothing more than that she isn’t Donald Trump and will defend the Constitution, why shouldn’t she? I’m for as many Republican endorsements of Harris as possible. Aside from signaling a green light to Republican voters, it’ll drive Trump up a wall.

The list of Harris’s GOP endorsers is growing. Former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake joined the band earlier this week. Flake is respected by independent voters in his state. If he campaigns with Harris, he too could move votes.

Meanwhile, the big questions in this arena: What’s up with Mitt Romney and George W. Bush? There are others, like former Trump chief of staff John Kelly. But Romney and Bush are the big fish. What in the world does either man have to lose? Romney is retiring. Bush paints and golfs. Both are richer than Croesus. I assume both want desperately to save their party from Trumpism. Isn’t the obvious best way to do that by encouraging their fellow Republicans to vote for Harris so they can end the scourge of Trumpism and get back to being a normal, warmongering, poor-people-penalizing, planet-scorching party again?

But seriously. If they were to back Harris, and Harris wins semi-convincingly with something like 15 percent of the Republican vote (around half that is normal), Trump will be finished. Not Trumpism. That will take a lot longer.

People like Romney and Bush should consider their place in history. In these next few years, the Republican Party will either corrupt itself beyond repair and crumble into out-and-out fascism, becoming the vehicle that ended the human race’s longest-lasting democratic experiment, or it will finally cast that off and begin to resurrect itself. Do they want to be among those who sat by and let the former happen or those who helped the latter take place? There’s a little schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, they might visit for inspiration.

Kamala Harris’s economic vision speech (delivered in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, a mere two days after yours truly wrote that she needed to give an economic vision speech!) was … fine. Was she offering the second coming of the New Deal? No. Her rhetoric is cautious. More cautious, as American Prospect editor David Dayen interestingly pointed out this week (because Dayen is strongly of the economic populist school), than the plan itself as described in an 82-page “fact sheet” distributed by the campaign. The plan, he wrote, is more progressive than the rhetoric. But on the stump, Harris is not suddenly going to morph into Elizabeth Warren.

And today she goes to the Arizona border to try to establish more swing-voter cred. Am I loving the fact that it’s become a big Democratic applause line that she wants to sign conservative GOP Senator James Lankford’s border security bill? No, not by a long shot. On the other hand, in purely naked political terms, is it smart to go at your opponent’s strengths? Yes, it is.

It’s pretty basic politics. Trump, for all his extremism, does this frequently. Think of his twisted pitch to women this week. Campaigns that successfully neutralize the other side’s advantages tend to win (George W. Bush on John Kerry’s war record). Campaigns that let disadvantages fester tend to lose (Mitt Romney not convincingly answering Barack Obama’s Bain Capital–related attacks).

So Harris is cutting into Trump’s advantages on those two issues. That’s fine, especially with respect to the economy. But issues are the science of campaigning. There’s an art to campaigning too, and it’s on this front that the Harris campaign needs to keep pushing, because it’s here where her biggest advantage over Trump lies.

Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark had a smart piece this week reminding us that campaigns consist of news cycles, and the point of news cycles is to win them. Remember how Harris came out of the gate like a rocket in July? That’s because she was doing everything right. She was making news and winning news cycles. The early speeches, the choice and unveiling of Tim Walz, the near-flawless convention—Harris was firing on all cylinders.

Back then, practically everything about her was new to most people. But that was bound to end. Now we’re through that discovery phase. And she’s not dominating news cycles the way she was six weeks ago.

So, Last writes, the campaign needs to find ways to drive the news. It’s especially important when running against Trump, because he drives news nearly every day. Most of it is madness. But the media machine, as we have learned and relearned, has little capacity to punish madness. It rewards performance. This is what Trump has known for 40 years.

The Harris campaign seemed to know this at first, but it has lost a little momentum in these recent weeks as she’s settled more into normalcy—and, I’d say, defense. The economic speech and the border appearance are essentially defense: They’re defending or inoculating her against possible Trump attacks. As I said, they’re justifiable as politics. But they’re not offense.

So it’s time to play offense. This is where the art of campaigning comes in, and subconsciously taking advantage of her greatest strengths over Trump:

1.     She’s not mentally unfit to be the president of the United States.
2.     She’s not pushing 80.
3.     People seem to like her. They even seem to like, or at least not dislike, her once-infamous laugh.
4.     She proved in the debate that she is smarter than he is, sharper on her feet, his mental and intellectual superior in every way.
5.     She knows how to get under his skin while keeping her cool.

What do these factors add up to? The idea that the Harris campaign should be tossing grenades at Trump that mock and expose him and that make news. Force him to respond. Make him explain. As an analogy, think of a tennis match: One player is sitting calmly at the center of the base line firing ground strokes left and right, while the other is running side to side, panting, covering 25 feet between each shot. It’s pretty obvious who’s going to win most of the points, and the match.

Here’s an example. Just yesterday, Trump spoke on Mark Robinson for the first time since the latter’s insane past comments (“I’m a Black NAZI!”) became public. He was making remarks at Trump Tower. As he finished and walked toward a bank of elevators, a reporter asked him if he was “going to pull” his Robinson endorsement. Trump, who once called Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids,” paused and said: “Uh, I don’t know the situation.”

Obviously, he knows the situation. The Harris campaign should be out with an ad today mocking this, tying it to other similar remarks of his, like when he pretended he didn’t know who David Duke was. But more: Harris herself should talk to reporters mocking Trump’s lame denial. It needs to be Harris herself, not Walz or Doug Emhoff.

There are tons of opportunities. Trump’s liquid rhetoric is such that he constantly contradicts himself and often just makes no sense. It makes me crazy that Harris is being knocked for not having “positions.” Do those critics seriously think that what Trump is saying constitutes “positions”? Remember that answer of his a few weeks ago when the woman asked him about childcare? It was embarrassing to listen to. He does that all the time. Make sure voters know it. Attack. In a mocking way. Make news. Play offense.

People like me aren’t supposed to say things like this, but here it is: A lot of these swing voters, they’re not voting on issues. The economy, maybe. But generally, they vote on vibes. Who has the look of a winner? Who looks fresh and ready to tackle this big job, and who looks tired? Who appears to be having fun?

That was the Harris of July and August. She had some magic. It’s hardly panic time. A raft of swing state polls came out Thursday night, and she leads in every state except Georgia, where it’s tied. She’s ahead, and he’s weak and worried and knows he might lose (and then face sentencing). He’s crumbling, psychologically. Now is the time to step on the gas.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

It was billed as an antisemitism event, and, well, I guess it was, ultimately, although not in the intended sense. The phrase “antisemitism event” usually refers to an event designed to draw attention to and denounce antisemitism. But in Donald Trump’s hands, it morphed into an event that featured antisemitism, in the form of the mind-blowing comments by the principal.

After opining that the Democratic Party has “a hold, or curse” on Jewish Americans, he then said: “I’m not going to call this as a prediction, but in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss if I’m at 40 percent.… If I’m at 40, think of it, that means 60 percent are voting for Kamala [Harris], who, in particular, is a bad Democrat. The Democrats are bad to Israel, very bad.”

First of all, as always, he’s lying. He’s not at 40 percent. He’s at 25 percent. But lies are par for the course. What isn’t par for the course is to show up to a constituency and serially berate them. He said again that American Jews who vote for Kamala Harris “should have their head examined.” He took it as a given that Jews have a dual loyalty to the United States and to Israel—the oldest antisemitic trope in American politics. And he whined that “I haven’t been treated right” by American Jews.

But don’t worry—it wasn’t all about attacking Jews. He attacked Muslims too! He boasted that if elected, he’ll bring back the Muslim travel ban to keep out people from “infested” countries. That is plainly fascist language.

After the debate, I wrote a column arguing that this was the beginning of Trump’s unraveling. I’ve gotten my share of predictions wrong over the years, and we still have 46 days to go, but so far, that one is looking pretty good. In the last few days, Trump:

• has continued to spew the lies about Haitians and house pets in Springfield, Ohio (and, of course, a poll found that 52 percent of Trump supporters think the lie is “definitely” or “probably” true);
• in a press conference in Los Angeles, rambled about that “very large faucet” in Canada that could solve all of California’s water problems. (What was he doing campaigning in California anyway? Oh, of course: He was at one of his golf courses.) This is not entirely made up—he was apparently referring to the Columbia River, but as this Canadian scientist explains, needless to say, there is no faucet and it isn’t that simple;
• said in an interview that the audience at the debate “went crazy” for him. Uh, there was no audience;
• in one of his more bizarre rants ever, said he was “greater even than Elvis.” Trump: “Nobody can draw crowds like me.… I’m the greatest of all time. Maybe greater even than Elvis. Elvis had a guitar, I don’t have a guitar. I don’t have the privilege of a guitar.”

First of all, asshole, a guitar isn’t a “privilege.” It’s something you earn by learning how to play it, like I have. But learning a musical instrument requires having an attention span of more than five seconds, so that’s out of the question for Trump. He couldn’t learn the kazoo.

Second, his reference point shows his age, does it not? How far removed is Trump’s invocation of someone who was at his peak of popularity nearly 70 years ago and died nearly 50 years ago from Bob Dole’s famous reference to the Brooklyn Dodgers during the 1996 campaign? I mean, that was only 40 years after the Boys of Summer fled to L.A. And third, if you know anything about Elvis’s career and what rock and roll tours were like in those primitive days, you know that he was typically playing crowds of three or four thousand, often less—fairgrounds and high-school auditoriums. Even the ’70s-Vegas Elvis played mostly the Westgate Casino Cabaret, capacity 1,700. The large-scale rock and roll tour started with The Beatles and then grew from there. But Elvis remains the lodestar of the 80-year-old Queens brain.

Oh, and by the way: Trump said this at a rally where—of course—there were lots of empty seats and where, yes, people were spotted leaving early.

So we have two issues we need to examine here. First, the astonishingly offensive remarks Trump made Thursday night about Jews. His Jewish support should start sinking like a stone. But there’s one Jew who clearly loves him, and other events this week have to make us wonder whether Bibi Netanyahu is trying to start a war with Lebanon and maybe Iran to raise gas prices and screw up the economy (right after Jerome Powell made a move to ensure that doesn’t happen) to help Trump win, but that’s another column, if I get around to it.

The second issue is one that must remain front and center in the American political media: Trump is really losing his marbles now. Was that statement about the crowd going nuts for him at the debate a normal Trump lie? Or was it a fantasy of which he has convinced himself? If we hooked him up to a polygraph and he repeated that line, would his pulse quicken? Would he change his speech patterns, avert his eyes, cover his mouth? I doubt it. He wouldn’t even think he was lying.

The mainstream media still treats comments like this with diffidence: “Oh, that’s Trump.” No. These are defining comments. They tell us about his mental fitness. They matter. They should be covered. I can’t find evidence that The New York Times or The Washington Post covered those remarks.

This sanewashing must stop. Voters need to be informed when Trump makes statements with a tenuous connection to reality at best. He’s disqualifying himself from the presidency every day that he opens his mouth, but much of the mainstream media is ignoring the words coming out.

I know some people don’t like to play the “Imagine If!” game, but at times it’s hard not to wonder, “Imagine if Joe Biden had said the crazy thing that Donald Trump uttered.” So I’m sorry to say that there is a story from this week that demands we indulge ourselves. Imagine with me that Kamala Harris had attended—oh, let’s say a Holocaust commemoration ceremony—and she brought, as a member of her entourage, someone known for saying the Holocaust was a hoax. Or that she attended a ceremony marking the anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in the company of someone who’d argued, pace Alex Jones, that the shootings were faked.

That’s what Donald Trump just did by bringing Laura Loomer to Wednesday’s September 11 commemoration.

It’s just a surreal moment. I lived in New York when the attacks happened. I keenly remember how zealous Republicans and conservatives were about 9/11, how quick they were to pounce on anyone on the left side of the spectrum who said anything that even hinted at departure from the accepted narrative—and especially those who, along the way, departed from reality. And now, years down the line, the Republican Party standard-bearer comes to New York on 9/11 itself, palling around with someone who called those attacks an “inside job.”

You’ve seen that reference many times now in the last couple of days, but it’s worth unpacking the phrase in a paragraph. “Inside job,” with respect to 9/11, meant that the U.S. government had advance knowledge of the attacks and let them happen. Or even staged them. In some variants, Israel, naturally, was involved as well. I believe a lot of bad stuff about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (still!), but I have never believed that. It’s loony tunes. But adherence to this zany theory was disturbingly widespread, at first on the far left before it spread to and was taken up by some on the far right. In polls at the time, up to a quarter of respondents, sometimes more, said they believed this silliness.

By the way, when I say that Loomer believes lunatic nonsense about the September 11 attacks, I’m not dredging up statements she made 20 years ago to criticize her today. HuffPost reported this week that just last year, Loomer “shared a video on X that said ‘9/11 was an Inside Job!’ and claimed it was somehow related to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s announcing $2.3 trillion in ‘lost’ government funds on Sept. 10, 2001.”

Loomer’s sins hardly end there, of course. She’s a racist and a xenophobe and a provocateur. She’s claimed that school shootings were staged and that the Las Vegas mass shooter was affiliated with ISIS. Remember that murder of the 6-year-old Palestinian boy outside Chicago, who was stabbed 26 times by his white landlord shortly after Hamas’s October 7 attacks? The landlord said he feared a “global day of jihad,” a lie spread by Loomer and Jack Posobiec (of Pizzagate infamy) as well as Jones’s InfoWars website, among others. There’s a lot more. She’s poison.

The fact that Trump took Loomer to the 9/11 event has gotten a lot of coverage. I woke up Friday morning ready to unload on The New York Times for not doing a story on this, but then I looked at the website, and to its credit, the Times has a good piece up today that highlights Trump bringing her to New York and traveling with her more generally. In case you missed it, she was at the debate Tuesday night in Philadelphia. She’s a frequent Mar-a-Lago presence. He wanted to give her a campaign job back in the spring, until others objected. Loomer is apparently too crazy for Marjorie Taylor Greene. I didn’t know “too crazy for Marjorie Taylor Greene” was possible.

What does all this tell us about a possible future Trump presidency? That this racist conspiracy theorist will be around the White House whispering in the president’s ear. And she won’t be alone. Trump’s “social media war room” at the debate included Loomer, Posobiec, and Chaya Raichik, who created the “Libs of TikTok” account that promotes hate speech and transphobia. Children’s hospitals across the country have received bomb threats after social media posts on Libs of TikTok—accusing the hospitals of performing gender-affirming surgeries that in some cases they didn’t even perform—went viral in the right-wing fever swamp.

Imagine the White House filled with people like this. That’s what we’re probably talking about if Trump is elected.

Call it speculative if you want. This is part of why it’s difficult for news outlets that follow traditional reporting norms to fathom these possibilities, let alone make a news story out of them. But the fact that these people are hanging around at Trump’s invitation can’t be allowed to pass without our reckoning with it. On whatever path forward Trump hopes to forge, these people will be along for the ride. And the mere possibility that the White House is going to be bursting with racists and xenophobes and transphobes and multipurpose haters and conspiracy theorists is something to which attention must be paid. There has to be a way, within the conventions of mainstream reporting, to place this alarming possibility in front of the electorate’s collective nose.

Let’s conclude by returning to the “Imagine If” game. What would the mainstream media be doing right now if, on Wednesday, Harris had indulged in one of my above scenarios? First of all, it’s absolutely impossible to imagine, because Kamala Harris is a good human being who has normal human morals. But if she had, everyone—and I do mean everyone: the right wing, of course, but the New York Times editorial page, the talking heads of MSNBC, and even yours truly—would be in a state of meltdown apoplexy until she apologized and explained herself; and even after she did so, loads of people, right and left, Republicans and Democrats, would be declaiming on her unfitness for office and demanding that she stand down as the nominee.

But in the real world? This story, like all Trump stories, is likely to fade. That would be to the detriment of all. At the very least, the mainstream media should not let this outrage die; it should continue to rub this ugliness in the faces of the hypocrites who once called liberals enemies of freedom because we opposed the stupid and tragic War in Iraq that Bush and Cheney used 9/11 as an excuse to start, and who now want this amoral nitwit to be the leader of the free world.

For months, Donald Trump’s frequent lapses into incoherence—the half-sentences that suddenly veer off toward a distant galaxy, the asides that limn the virtues of Hannibal Lecter—have been mostly fodder for late-night TV hosts. Morning Joe has covered them consistently, but for the most part, the mainstream press has ignored them, either cleaning up Trump’s actual words so they made more sense on the printed or pixelated page or just not printing them at all.

This was easier to do when Trump was running against Joe Biden, who sometimes also lost the rhetorical thread, and whose age was a constant news story (not without justification). But now that Trump is running against a younger and more energetic opponent who tends to speak in full, logical sentences and who doesn’t go on rants about bacon and wind power, his mental state is rightly becoming more of a story. As my colleague Greg Sargent put it yesterday: “Trump’s mental fitness for the presidency deserves sustained journalistic scrutiny as a stand-alone topic with its own intrinsic importance and newsworthiness.”

Which brings us to Trump’s appearance Thursday before the Economic Club of New York. I watched some of it. In fairness, reading from his prepared remarks, he was coherent. He rattled off a string of statistics about the economy under his presidency, many of which were actually true, or close enough; when he got around to describing the horrors “Marxist” Kamala Harris had visited upon America, his claims were a lot less true. (He said “crime is rampant, and fleeing is the number one occupation” in California, but crime is trending down in the state this year, and the recent population declines have been turned around too—not that Harris has control over these issues one way or another.)

Then came the question-and-answer period. A woman among the handful assembled on stage asked Trump if he would commit to passing childcare legislation, and if so what his specific proposal would be. Here’s the answer in part, as put out in a tweet by the Harris campaign:

“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down, you know; I was, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio and my daughter, Ivanka, who was so impactful on that issue.… But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about that because the childcare is childcare, couldn’t, you know, there’s something you have to have it, in this country you have to have it.”

Trump’s answer was longer than that, but when he got around to something resembling a response, it was that his tariffs on China are going to pay for everything, no problem. Just like deporting people is going to solve the housing crisis.

A few quick facts. In the nineteenth century, before the individual income tax became a permanent fixture of life, tariffs accounted for most of the government’s revenue (at a time when the government did very little—stood up an army, ran a postal service, etc.). But today, according to the Council of Economic Advisers, import duties bring in only around 2 percent of the federal government’s total revenues. If you want to lower taxes on corporations and the rich, as Trump does, tariffs would need to be substantially jacked up to make up for the lost revenue (although of course in the Candyland in which Republicans and their economists live, reducing tax rates does not reduce revenue, which is probably the single biggest and most insidious policy lie of the last 50 years). And of course, as the CEA and many others argue, much higher import levies are “likely to spark retaliatory tariffs that reduce U.S. exports and subsequently induce transfers of collected duties to impacted U.S. businesses.”

Now let’s get to the point here: the media. Specifically, The New York Times.

I looked Friday morning at the way the Times and The Washington Post covered the speech. The Post’s article, to my astonishment, was mostly about the childcare word salad. “Trump offers confusing plan to pay for U.S. child care with foreign tariffs,” ran the Post’s headline.

The Times’s story was by no means favorable. Under the headline “Trump Praises Tariffs, and William McKinley, to Power Brokers,” the article adopted a gently skeptical tone toward Trump’s promise that tariffs would solve everything. It even mentioned the words “child care,” once.

But the article didn’t bother to quote him on the topic. Why? It could be that the reporter didn’t think it was newsworthy (or perhaps it was an editor, since the Times’ election news blog did partially quote Trump). But this is exactly the point Sargent and others are trying to make: that Trump’s frequent incoherence is in and of itself news. It should be reported on. He should be quoted verbatim, not in a partial way that sanitizes his words and cleans them up.

Why? Because his mental fitness at age 78 to be president for the next four years is a legitimate issue. I’ve covered, and simply watched as an interested citizen, a lot of presidential candidates. Dozens, maybe hundreds, if you count Democrats and Republicans who ran in primaries. I’ve watched hours of debates and attended events like the once-famous Iowa Straw Poll in 1999, at which 11 Republican candidates spoke. I’ve never heard a candidate who talks in such a dissociative, rambling, confused way; never heard a candidate so obviously bluffing his way through certain policy questions.

The conventions of objective journalism are such that reporters tend to use “good” quotes. Reporters favor politicians’ pithiest and most succinct quotes, because reporters themselves are trying to be pithy and succinct, and ergo logorrheic and nonsensical just doesn’t fit the plan. I’ve been there, I’ve done that. Guilty.

But here’s what’s different. Until Trump, using the pithiest and most succinct quote never amounted to a quasi-conspiracy against reality. Now it does. Maybe the voters will decide that Trump’s incoherence doesn’t matter. But they at least need to be presented with the evidence to decide for themselves.

I got an email Thursday morning from a dear old friend of mine. He lives in Virginia. He’s a Democrat who was never susceptible to Donald Trump’s alleged allures. But he did make an interesting point. Years ago, my friend wrote, he used to watch Trump and maybe give some consideration to a couple of the points he made, or at least be entertained. “I turn him off when I see him now,” my friend wrote—and he guessed millions of others did the same.

Trump is staring down the business end of a number of problems right now. There’s Project 2025, and there’s his bragging about ending Roe, and there’s the hefty ankle weight that is J.D. Vance. But for all those things and more, public lack of interest may be Trump’s biggest problem as we enter the homestretch of the presidential race next week. Since the man sees life wholly in terms of acts and star power and ratings, let’s think of him on the terms he understands. The Trump Show has entered its ninth season. That’s a long run for any TV show. Many of the most iconic shows in television history didn’t last that long.

There’s a reason for that: In TV world, longevity can be a curse. Shows lose their originality. They lose key characters. They introduce new ones who aren’t nearly as compelling. They jump the shark, in a phrase coined in 1985 by a radio personality who was discussing an iconically far-fetched 1977 episode of Happy Days when Fonzie literally jumped over a shark while on water skis.

That’s Trump today. Fonzie on water skis. All in the Family after Meathead and Gloria moved to California. Buffy by season 6 (although they still delivered a few classics in the last two seasons). The Office after Michael Scott left, which pulled off the accomplishment of making even Will Farrell unfunny. (I’m sorry I don’t have more recent reference points, but you can fill in your own.)

Trump’s ratings are down. Kamala Harris drew 28.9 million viewers for her convention speech; Trump, just 26.3. There are all those videos of loads of empty seats at his rallies, and columns of people streaming out while he’s speaking. His unfavorable rating, which ticked down a bit after the assassination attempt and the GOP convention, is ticking back up. In poll after poll after poll, both nationally and in swing states, he’s going from four- and five- and six-point leads to one-, two-, or three-point deficits. The race is still close, but the swing is unmistakable.

Trump’s act is old. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still offensive. That Arlington Cemetery stunt was gobsmacking. It’s now a three-day story, and as long as Trumpworld keeps fighting and escalating, trying to convince voters that they should distrust the not-handsomely-paid people who stand guard over ground that your average American considers to be among the most sacred in the nation, it’ll continue. Three days means it’s really getting through, becoming quasi-foundational. It’s reinforcing the view—potentially deadly to him—that he has contempt for veterans and soldiers who died serving the country.

And of course he still says and promotes all kinds of offensive and alarming things. His repost of a “joke” mentioning Harris and Hillary Clinton and blow jobs (I’ll stop there). Those photos he posted of Democrats and others (Bill Gates?) in orange jumpsuits, reinforcing earlier promises about how he’ll pursue “justice” if elected. There’s still plenty of reason to be terrified of a second Trump term, especially if you’re an undocumented immigrant or a transgender person or anyone else he considers “vermin.”

But again, for now, let’s just judge him as an act. His act is way tired. It’s now nine years of “Fake news” and “You won’t have a country anymore” and all the rest. In 2015, all those Trumpisms were stupid and disgusting; but at least they were new. I actually laughed when he described Jeb Bush as a “low-energy person.” He was! I could imagine then how, for voters who didn’t hate him, he was interesting and possibly amusing as a species that American politics rarely produces: someone who threw the script in the air and said whatever the hell popped into his mind.

That was bound to be something people wanted to watch, for a while. And it was just as bound to be something that became less compelling over time. It’s an act. And this is a key difference between politics and show business that Trump can’t see. In showbiz, and on TV, it’s all about whether the production values can sell the act. In politics, it turns out, the act needs more than slick production. It still needs to show some connection to people’s lives and concerns. Harris is better at that than Trump is. And her act is a lot fresher, too. And Walz’s act versus Vance’s? Not remotely close. Yes—Walz is so compelling, and Vance so repelling, that this is one election where the veep choices may actually make two points’ worth of difference.

None of this means Trump is finished. Happy Days lasted several seasons after it literally jumped the shark. But the ratings did start to fall soon enough. No one ever hated Fonzie, like many do Trump. But even fans of the show became a lot less invested in it. My old friend reminded me of the quote by Elie Wiesel: “The opposite of love is not hate. It’s indifference.”

Joe Biden had many lucid moments at his Thursday evening press conference, but the idea that we’re going to judge Biden day by day on the latest speech or press conference is terrifying, for two reasons. First, it sets a ludicrously low bar that is bound to favor standing pat with Biden as the nominee. This is because every one of these appearances is going to be judged on whether he was better than he was at the June 27 debate, and every time, the answer to that question is almost certain to be yes, because he can hardly be worse. But is “He was better than the debate” really the right standard here?

Second, this clock is ticking. It’s five weeks until the Democratic convention, which opens Monday, August 19. That’s time enough to act. Biden did open the door just a crack Thursday night to not being the nominee, but mainly he sounded very dug in, and if that’s the case, he can run out that clock by doing just enough interviews and speeches to be able to say he didn’t go into hiding, but without genuinely exposing himself to a risky public situation. One can predict the news cycles: three days of sensing that the dam may be about to burst and the Democrats are ready to take collective action, then Biden makes an appearance, does OK but only OK, but the momentum for replacing him is killed. 

So if that’s how we’re going to spend these next five weeks, Biden will be the nominee. Is there a chance he can win? There is. Lots of Americans really don’t like Donald Trump. In 10 long weeks between the end of the convention and Election Day, maybe the Democrats can succeed in making the race about Trump, and Biden can eke out a win. A poll came out Friday morning showing Biden ahead by two points.

But the odds are growing that Biden will lead his party to a defeat that will extend to both chambers of Congress. That means that Trump, armed with the radical proposals of Project 2025, a self-declared “Secretary of Retribution” who has a list of some 350 people who may be arrested in a new Trump term, and a fresh Supreme Court ruling that makes all this presumably legal, will return to the Oval Office with Republican majorities in the Senate and House, the latter of which Democrats had been confident of recapturing before the debate but where they now fear they could lose 20 seats.

More House Democrats, and one senator, have come out this week calling on Biden to step aside. Three, led by Connecticut’s Jim Himes, made their announcements after Biden’s press conference, meaning that it did not staunch the bleeding. And we’ve all been reading and hearing this week that privately, the percentage of Hill Democrats who want to see Biden step aside is in the neighborhood of 80 percent.

In Trump world, meanwhile, they’re salivating at the thought of running against this weakened Biden and this divided Democratic Party. The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta wrote a much-discussed article this week headlined, “Trump Is Planning for a Landslide Win.” The landslide is predicated on one fact: that the opponent is Biden. Alberta: “Biden quitting the race would necessitate a dramatic reset—not just for the Democratic Party, but for Trump’s campaign. [Trump aides Susie] Wiles and [Chris] LaCivita told me that any Democratic replacement would inherit the president’s deficiencies; that whether it’s Vice President Kamala Harris or California Governor Gavin Newsom or anyone else, Trump’s blueprint for victory would remain essentially unchanged. But they know that’s not true. They know their campaign has been engineered in every way—from the voters they target to the viral memes they create—to defeat Biden. And privately, they are all but praying that he remains their opponent.”

Even assuming that there is some spin there, there is no doubt that Trump himself has spent four years thinking about running against Biden and that the Trump campaign is planning on spending millions to attack Biden on his age and capacities.

Democrats can no longer ignore this. So next week, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi, and other senior Democrats who are friends of Biden’s (ex-senator Chris Dodd has been mentioned) need to go to him and have the talk with him. They need to get him to withdraw.

And, I suppose, to release his delegates to Kamala Harris. I’d rather see an open process. It would be more democratic (for the party that’s supposedly fighting to save democracy). It wouldn’t have to be chaotic. It could be galvanizing. A handful of candidates would step forward. They’d campaign for a month. They’d give convention speeches. The delegates would vote, and the party would have a candidate, who would then have 10 weeks to campaign against Trump. If most voters pay no attention until Labor Day anyway, that’s time enough. The money and logistical questions are serious, but people who really want to figure those things out can do so.

But a Harris scenario seems more likely. Fine. Just choose a scenario, and go to Biden and explain to him the stakes of his staying in the race, for him personally and for his legacy. If he bows out soon, he goes down in history as the guy who saved the country from a second Trump term, had a surprisingly successful term as president, and graciously gave up power like none other than George Washington for the sake of his party and his country.

If he resists that, he risks dragging the Democratic Party into its biggest crisis in a century. A decisive loss that many people anticipated and feared to the hated Trump, with all the authoritarian ramifications thereof, could lead the party into a period of vicious recriminations and weakness. Is that really what Biden wants? We’re about to find out.

Joe Biden had barely opened his mouth last night when I gasped and said to myself, “Oh God, this might be really bad.” His voice was thin and raspy and weak. His words, ostensibly about how badly Donald Trump botched the pandemic, were unfocused and constituted a huge missed opportunity. And that kept happening over and over and over again.

Trump lied like crazy, sure. Nobody’s aborting a fetus after it’s born. “Everyone” did not want Roe overturned. Millions of people from prisons or mental institutions have not crossed the border. Food prices haven’t “quadrupled.” It went on and on—CNN’s fact-checker said he counted at least 30 outright lies. Jake Tapper and Dana Bash never stepped in to fact-check Trump. All that is true. But none of that changes the overwhelming fact. Biden confirmed Democrats’ worst nightmares. “We finally beat Medicare”? Dear God.

CNN’s flash poll had respondents saying Trump won by 67 to 33 percent. Frankly, I’m not sure who those 33 were. The die-hardest of die-hard Democrats, I guess, or maybe single-issue voters who heard Biden say one thing they liked. But 33 percent means a ton of Democrats admitted that their guy lost, and the guy they really hate and rightly consider a direct threat to the country won. And probably half of that 33 were voting with their heart.

What happens now? Let’s talk about the people who have the power to go to Biden and tell him to step aside. What kinds of conversations is Barack Obama having today? Who’s Chuck Schumer talking to? Hakeem Jeffries? Nancy Pelosi? How about Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Al Gore? The big donors and bundlers? And perhaps most of all, there’s Jill and his family.

All these people have known for a long time that the Democrats had three options. The first has been sticking with Biden. People knew he was a risky proposition. But until this debate, Biden was, plausibly, the least bad option. Because the other two options are these.

Option two is that Biden steps down and hands it to Kamala Harris. She’s his vice president, and how in the world do you sidestep a sitting vice president?

That’s the most likely non-Biden option, but I know no one who’s excited about it. She’s just not a good politician. What’s the scenario where she beats Trump? Maybe she generates some higher enthusiasm among Black women, and theoretically among younger voters to some extent. Maybe she’d have more success making the race a referendum on abortion.

Harris, though, has a huge weakness. She has never really been able to make a strong economic argument. Even back when people were gushing about her in early 2019, when she announced her presidential candidacy, I noticed she had nothing to say about economic issues. And they’re kind of important in a presidential election. And then, of course, there are the racism and sexism you have to factor in here that would hurt her unfairly. My guess is that she runs three to five points worse than Biden against Trump, and that turns a margin-of-error race into a decisive loss—and one that probably affects control of the House and/or Senate.

The final option, therefore, is to throw the thing open and try to get the nomination to one of the governors, or someone else. This has always had a lot of theoretical appeal, because several of these people look like they’d be good candidates.

But the two perceived problems with this scenario are these. First, how much bad blood would start boiling within the party if Harris were pushed aside? The assumed answer has always been: a lot. If Biden were to step aside, pollsters would start asking questions about Harris, and if those polls showed that Black women will basically bolt, going around Harris could be a nonstarter.

And second, is there really any proof that Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom or Josh Shapiro or Jay Pritzker or anyone else would be a better candidate? Governors sometimes just don’t have it when it comes to running for president. Look at Ron DeSantis.

Those are real problems. But in this break-glass moment, they start to look like smaller problems than staying with Biden or just handing it to Harris.

We’ll see what the post-debate polls say. They’ll start coming out early to mid-next week. My guess is that Biden will lose four points on average, maybe five. It might be a little less. But the coverage of this fiasco over the next two days will only amplify how bad it was.

Politicians fear the unknown. They don’t want to cast votes whose political fallouts they can’t predict. They don’t want their districts redrawn. And they sure don’t want to change a presidential candidate in July.

But this is an undeniable crisis. I don’t know the convention rules. And remember—this is made even more complicated by the fact that Democrats have decided to nominate Biden via Zoom (or whatever) two weeks before the mid-August convention, because they need to have a nominee by early August for the nominee to appear on the ballot in Ohio.

So: Is an abbreviated, multicandidate campaign even possible? Here’s a scenario. Biden drops out next week, releasing the delegates he’s amassed during the primaries to do whatever. Candidates announce—Harris, the governors I named above (along with a few others, like Kentucky’s Andy Beshear), Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, maybe another senator or two. Throughout July, they have an intensive schedule of debates. Six or seven. Over the course of those debates, some will rise, some will fade. In early August, in time for Ohio, let the rank-and-file decide via electronic vote. Make all the contenders commit to supporting the process and standing 100 percent behind the winner.

Weirdly enough, that could actually end up working out pretty well. A new nominee would be fresh, providing a new story and a new start. He or she would trip up Trump. This nominee could arguably then roll into the Chicago convention generating a lot more enthusiasm than Biden will. (That’s another thing—think about the anxiety that will precede his convention speech!)

Then the nominee leaves Chicago with his or her well-chosen running mate, and they spend 10 days barnstorming the swing states so that by the end of the summer, the nominee will have galvanized the party. Then that nominee would have the fall to persuade swing voters, who don’t pay attention until October anyway.

Such a process might reinvigorate a party base that today is feeling pretty dispirited and disgusted and terrified. The conversations that happen this weekend in the high precincts of the Democratic Party will help determine the party’s—and the country’s—fate. It’s risky. Lots of unknown unknowns. But it’s worth remembering that with risk comes reward.

Starting today in her Florida courtroom, Judge Aileen Cannon, whom Trump appointed to the bench during his waning months in office, is hearing arguments about whether Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel is constitutional. It’s staggering that this is even happening, for a couple reasons.

First, Donald Trump’s legal team is arguing that Attorney General Merrick Garland had no legal authority to hire Smith. This is absurd. Attorneys general—and, sometimes, presidents and the D.C. Circuit Court—have been appointing special counsels since Ulysses Grant tabbed John Henderson to probe the Whiskey Ring. Since the 1970s, The New York Times reports, the courts have routinely rejected such challenges. The Supreme Court upheld the appointment—by Robert Bork, no less—of Leon Jaworski as special prosecutor for Watergate. Other similar challenges have been tossed.

Second, when courts have considered these petitions, they’ve usually done so on the basis of written arguments. To schedule a hearing that will extend over two days is … is what, exactly? A show of fealty to Dear Leader, probably. In addition, Cannon is allowing three lawyers who have filed amicus briefs to make 30-minute oral presentations. As one law professor told the Times: “The fact that Judge Cannon granted the amici request for oral argument seems to suggest that she is seriously considering the constitutional argument against the appointment of the special counsel.”

So, yes. Cannon is entirely capable of ruling that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. Lord knows, she has shocked us before. After the FBI Mar-a-Lago raid, she barred prosecutors from using any of the evidence collected there pending a review by a special master. Earlier this year, she issued an order asking both legal teams to submit preliminary jury instructions. The order seemed to embrace a key tenet of the Trump legal defense. There’s a lot more.

Next Monday or Tuesday, the arguments about Smith’s appointment will wrap up, and sometime thereafter, Cannon will render her decision. Can you imagine this relatively minor judge, one of 29 federal judges for the Southern District of Florida, who sits in the great metropolis of Fort Pierce, can hold the fate of the republic in her hands like this?

Well, she does.

And remember—if she decides that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional, that deep-sixes not just the classified documents case over which she’s presiding but the even more important (in my view) January 6 insurrection case that’s supposed to be heard in Washington, pending the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity. (The Justice Department would presumably appeal an adverse determination, so the Smith appointment matter may also end up at the Supreme Court one of these days.)

It’s just mind-boggling to think about this. It’s just never been more obvious that a judge is doing the bidding of the president who appointed her. It’s worth taking a look, by the way, at her confirmation vote before the Senate. It happened on November 12, 2020, five days after Joe Biden was finally declared the winner of the election. She was confirmed 56–21, with 12 Democrats joining the Republicans to elevate her. And 23 Democrats, including Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, didn’t even vote.

So that’s the indifferent way she got to the bench in the first place. And now, she has the power to let a man who stole national security secrets and spent months ignoring polite requests from the FBI to come down to Palm Beach to see what he had, and who egged on a violent mob to break into the Capitol building and try to hang his own vice president get away with it all.

And of course there’s the Supreme Court too. Remember the high court’s timeline. The court announced that it would take up the immunity case on February 28. It heard the arguments almost exactly two months later, on April 25. And now here we are, creeping up on two months after that. And still no decision.

Why is all this being slow-walked? It’s obvious enough. They’re trying to help reelect Trump and hasten the arrival of the Christian nationalist post-democratic order. Federal judges and Supreme Court justices can read newspapers and polls. They’ve seen the polls showing Trump’s felony conviction in the Stormy Daniels case is hurting him, especially with independents, and they have no doubt seen this new crop of polls showing Biden creeping into the lead—Thursday, for the first time this year, Biden edged ahead of Trump on the FiveThirtyEight poll tracker. It’s 0.1 percent, but it’s a lead.

So this is what we’re going to see over these next months. The Trump campaign will be getting a push from corrupt right-wing judges, a right-wing propaganda network (actually, two, three, four, or five of them, depending on how you count), and a bunch of CEOs who want their next tax cut more than they value the continuing survival of the world’s oldest democracy. And Aileen Cannon is the most potent symbol of the whole corrupt network: She cares nothing about the law and the country’s best traditions, and there is no way for any of us to do anything about it.

Well, there’s one thing: Vote, in huge numbers. We’re still enough of a democracy that that matters.

Those of you of a certain age will recall the phrase “the Silent Majority,” made popular by Richard Nixon—and his crooked, cash-thirsty Vice President Spiro Agnew—in 1969 to refer to those middle-class Americans who weren’t out in the streets making noise about Vietnam or civil rights but sitting quietly at home seeking normalcy, law and order, and someone to save the country from extremism. Pat Buchanan, the old Nazi war criminal defender, has claimed that he placed the phrase before Nixon in a memo and the president seized on it.

Republicans have used it ever since. It was used by Ronald Reagan. It was employed by Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg (when he was running, as a Republican, for mayor of New York). Donald Trump gave it a spin in 2016. Overseas, Tory David Cameron and rightist leaders in Italy and Portugal have taken it up.

No candidate on the broad left has ever, to my knowledge, invoked the phrase. It’s high time that changed.

Earlier this week, you may have noticed, there was a special election in Ohio’s 6th congressional district, which runs from Youngstown to the West Virginia border. The Cook Political Report rates that district R+16, meaning a Democrat wins it about as often as Trump emits an untangled sentence. In 2020, Trump carried it by 29 points.

And Tuesday? The Republican still beat the Democrat—but by single digits. Michael Rulli, the Republican state senator who won the seat, spent $570,000. The Democratic candidate, an Air Force veteran who most recently worked as a waiter, spent $7,000.

What’s this have to do with the Silent Majority? I suspect maybe a lot.

If an amateur Democrat who couldn’t put two metaphorical nickels together can come within nine points of an experienced pol Republican in a district as scarlet-red as the Buckeyes’ jerseys, something is up. And this result is not an outlier. As Aaron Blake pointed out in The Washington Post, there have been six special congressional elections this cycle and the Democrat has outperformed in four of them, the Republican in just one. In the sixth race, Blake notes, the results (the Democrat won) closely mirrored the 2020 results, but “Democrats swung the results by double digits from the 2022 race for the same seat and flipped the seat blue.”

Simon Rosenberg, the high priest of Democratic optimism with his Hopium Chronicles Substack, constantly preaches: Don’t look at the polls; look at election results. We do not of course know whether his optimism about this November will be validated. We do, however, know that he (and pretty much he alone) was correct that the Democrats would hold their own in the 2022 midterms. He was right then, and he’s been right about most of these elections ever since.

So, a theory for you: Maybe, just maybe, there is an army of Americans out there who may not call themselves liberal or progressive but who are anywhere from sort of turned off to massively repulsed by MAGA. And while Trump and Fox News and Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene and all the rest of them spend their days fulminating about America dying and hyping the authoritarian tsunami coming—talk that the mainstream media picks up and that dominates our discourse—there are in fact millions of Americans sitting quietly at home who detest these histrionic harbingers of hatemongering (a Safire-esque turn of phrase for you, since I mentioned Agnew).

They are out there. And they, I submit, are your new Silent Majority.

They’re not all liberal. But they definitely support abortion rights. They’re not rushing to join trans rights groups. But they want people to be treated with empathy and tolerance. They’re not reading gender-bending young adult fiction. But they recoil against censorship. They’re not socialists. But they want the government to do more for working- and middle-class people. They’re not Earth Firsters. But they believe climate change is real. They may still tell pollsters they’re wary of “big government.” But new interstates and bridges, and airport expansions, and new light-rail tracks, and expanded broadband access? They’re great with all that.

And most of all: They, just like Nixon’s old Silent Majority, seek normalcy, law and order, and someone to save the country from extremism. But in Nixon’s time, the extremism came from the left, while today it comes from the right. It’s the Trump right that attacks normalcy, on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. It’s the Trump right that is lawless, as evidenced most obviously by the fact that all these Republicans are tripping over themselves to support a convicted felon to be the president of the United States. And it’s the Trump right that is extremist on just about every issue, from health care to foreign policy.

So they sit at home, probably not watching much cable news, not marching in any marches, but just waiting until Election Day to register their opposition to MAGA. And in case you were wondering—yes, Michael Rulli, the Republican in that Ohio district, was MAGA all the way. He ran an ad in which the voiceover said: “On June 11, vote pro-gun. Pro-life. And pro-Trump.”

I would love to see the Democrats run with this idea that they are the new Silent Majority. It would infuriate the Republicans, who have assumed for 50 years that it is they who represent “regular America.” But with their slavish embrace of a sexual assaulting, classified document stealing, insurrection leading, twice impeached, quadruply indicted, and once (so far) convicted felon, they have waved goodbye to all that. They’re a noisy minority, and they’re alienating Americans by the millions.