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“If You Are a Psycho and You Want to Make Headlines”

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JD Vance has gotten a lot of deserved criticism for the offhand way he dismissed the Apalachee School shooting.

If you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools.

[snip]

I don’t want my kids to go to school in a place where they feel like you’ve got to have additional security. But that is increasingly the reality we live in.

[snip]

We don’t have to like the reality that we live in. But it is the reality that we live in. We’ve got to deal with it.

Trump, of course, famously told the families grieving after a shooting in Perry, Iowa, “It’s just horrible, so surprising to see it here. But have to get over it, we have to move forward.”

It’s not just that JD’s proposed solution is to box everyone up in aquariums like the Secret Service has done to Trump, but the way in which both men want to pray (or feign prayer, in Trump’s case) and move on.

Compare that to how Trump’s own people are treating his own shooting.

Vance, of course, didn’t blame some “psycho who wanted to make headlines” for Trump’s shooting. Instead, he blamed Joe Biden.

And Trump’s top propagandist, Stephen Miller, won’t shut up about Trump’s shooting.

 

Trump’s people want people to obsess about his own shooting, a month ago, even while minimizing the impact of a shooting that killed four, including two kids. That’s true, even though all the evidence to date suggests that Thomas Crooks shares many similarities with school shooters like accused Georgia shooter Colt Gray, including a fascination with previous school (and in Crooks’ case, presidential) shooters.

Even given all of the Secret Service’s failures, Donald Trump was not a soft target, like schools are. But ultimately he, too, was  vulnerable to an assault rifle in the hands of a disturbed young man hoping for notoriety.

Trump and Stephen Miller and JD Vance don’t want to get over that shooting attempt, and the murder of Corey Comperatore. They need Trump to be more special than all the kids gunned down in their schools. They need Trump’s shooting to have a meaning they won’t ascribe to the murder of children in their classrooms.

And yet Trump is no more special a victim than the teenagers killed in Georgia.

There Are No Backsies on Dobbs

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Since the day after the debate in June, I have conceived of the shift from a Joe Biden to a Kamala Harris campaign in three ways: The Vice President would more vigorously explain the wildly successful policies of the Biden-Harris Administration. She might (and indeed, has started to) chip away at the Double Hater logjam that has embodied presidential elections since 2016. And she would speak about choice far better than Biden ever could.

At the time, I maintained that Gretchen Whitmer was the only Democrat nationally who speaks better to choice than Harris does. In assuming the presidential ticket, Kamala’s team has made abortion something far more. They have made reproductive rights a cornerstone of a revamped democracy agenda.

That has happened in a curious way. Dobbs only happened because the Supreme Court has become a supercharged, wildly undemocratic wing of right wing policy. The fight to get abortion referenda on state ballots has repeatedly, perhaps most notably in Ohio, had to first defeat anti-democratic efforts to disempower referenda generally. In Wisconsin, voters first had to put Janet Protasiewicz on the Supreme Court before they could turn to protecting reproductive choice, but organizing to do that has laid the groundwork for renewed Democratic vitality. To restore reproductive rights, in state after state, democracy must be renewed.

But all that’s in the background. Kamala’s team has succeeded in making abortion something more: the most obvious item on a laundry list of the ways the far right has tried to take rights (and books) away, a fight for Freedom, one that has enthused millions of younger voters, especially women of child-bearing age.

And so, as I thought it might, Kamala’s focus on choice is one of the things that has remade the race.

It didn’t take rocket science to offer that prediction (though surprisingly few pundits did so, and most people pushing for a Thunderdome primary, who were overwhelmingly men, missed it). Democrats have successfully run on choice since Dobbs;  it has played a central role in Democratic campaigns even in places like Andy Beshear’s Kentucky. Yet Kamala’s clarion voice on the issue largely got ignored as people plotted for ways to bypass the first woman Vice President to replace Biden.

Thus far in this campaign, a focus on abortion has also provided a way to make visible the patriarchy presumed in most threads of the right wing coalition backing Trump, especially but by no means exclusively Christian nationalism. Lest voters ever forget, Kamala’s campaign keeps rolling out one after another video in which JD Vance demands women get back to the role his Church dictates for them: breeding children.

A number of things — the successful convention, a surge in registration among those women of child-bearing age, polls showing that abortion is the most important issue for a larger number of voters — have led horserace journalists to finally cop on.

Or perhaps they’re just noting Trump’s response to Kamala’s focus on choice. I think choice (and the way it harms Trump with women voters) is one reason Trump’s team made Tulsi Gabbard a more formal surrogate; in their appearance together in LaCrosse, billed a Town Hall, Tulsi told the story of her own attempt to conceive using IVF, effectively adopting Tim Walz’ story and focus. Certainly, it’s the reason why, over the course of one day, Trump said wildly contradictory things about choice.

Yesterday, both NYT and WaPo had stories describing the background to that. Trump whisperers Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, who in July first seeded the false narrative that a GOP platform that enshrines fetal personhood reflects a “softened” stance on abortion, treat it as primarily a matter of messaging.

Back in 2022, the former president had told allies — as the Supreme Court was preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade — that the move would hurt his party. Since that year, when Republicans underperformed expectations in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump has been privately emphatic with advisers that in his view the abortion issue alone could kill their chances of victory in November. And he is willing to make as many rhetorical and policy contortions as he deems necessary to win.

It is through that narrow political lens that Mr. Trump has been weighing the subject, despite his role in reshaping the Supreme Court that overturned the landmark 1973 abortion decision.

The results have been confusing and fluid, a contradictory mess of policy statements as he has once again tried to rebrand himself on an issue that many of his supporters view in strict moral terms, and had come to believe that he did, too.

[snip]

Still, even by Mr. Trump’s standards, the past few weeks have been head-spinning for people trying to keep track of his slippery social conservatism.

Twice divorced serial philanderer Donald Trump doesn’t have social conservatism. He has a politically expedient con. Trump has convinced Christian nationalists he was anti-choice in public while attempting to limit the political damage of anti-choice policies behind the scenes. And that con is running headlong into the consequences of the actions he took to sustain the con.

WaPo states this more clearly; this is not about messaging (though WaPo cites Republicans mocking how bad Trump’s messaging on it is). It’s about Trump’s record. Trump had wanted to run on other policies, immigration and Trump’s distorted claims about the economy, but now he’s having to answer for his anti-choice policies.

Many Republicans are hoping that other topics, like the economy and the border, will take precedence for voters, and they cite polls showing broader voter interest in those issues than in abortion.

Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that women voters will compare the Trump and Biden-Harris administrations, and that under Trump, “the economy was better, groceries and gas cost less, our neighborhoods were safer, and young women like Laken Riley were still alive” — a reference to a Georgia student allegedly killed by someone who entered the country illegally in 2022.

But, as noted, in the month since she has entered the race, Kamala has made abortion the primary issue for more voters than immigration is, and it rivals the economy as the most important election issue among women voters.

Swan and Maggie describe how Trump became what they describe as “agitated” after watching the way the DNC made abortion a primary focus.

In private, Mr. Trump was agitated by the speeches at the Democratic National Convention, according to a person close to him, many of which tied him to Project 2025, an effort by people supportive of Mr. Trump to develop policy proposals for him if he wins that include restrictive ideas for reproductive measures. He was especially bothered by Ms. Harris’s assertions that a second Trump term would further imperil abortion rights.

This is more than agitation.

It is flailing.

Panic.

A recognition that he is losing because of actions he took as President, he is losing because of what the payoff he owed to social conservatives who put him in the White House, a far right SCOTUS, did to women. What NYT journalists with another book contract describe as “head-spinning” is not about branding, it’s about panic because Kamala threatens to hold him accountable for his actions.

No matter how many contradictory statements Trump makes about what a second Trump term would do, there’s no escaping what his first term did do. There are no backsies on Dobbs. There are no backsies on Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. There aren’t even any backsies on that platform granting fetuses protection under the 14th Amendment, even if NYT’s Trump whisperers continue to pretend that didn’t happen.

I mean, come on! If not for the three people Trump added to SCOTUS and those, like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, paid for by the same far right Christian nationalists that pushed Vance as a candidate, Trump would be sitting in trial for his attack on January 6 as we speak. Trump is only here, in the race, because of those ideologues who were willing to alter the Constitution to serve a far right agenda. Trump has survived thanks to that Court; he is panicking as he considers the possibility it’ll sink him as well.

And even as Kamala already has Trump panicking, it could get worse for Trump and his party.

There’s something about the WaPo version of this story that I can’t get out of my head; it’s actually one of the reasons I went through the trouble of writing this post. Its subhead (presumably not written by the journalists) suggests Trump’s wild gyrations on choice come during the “final stretch” of the campaign. “Heading into the campaign’s final stretch, Republicans careen between their base and swing voters on the powerful issue of reproductive rights.” The temporal observation, that we’re in the last stretch, is undoubtedly true viewed through the lens of the traditional interminable US presidential campaign. Labor Day kicks off the last, most intense period of a campaign, though importantly, the period when low-information voters first start to tune in. Given Trump’s attempt to stave off criminal charges by announcing his run early, in November 2022, it’s far more true of Trump, who is 91% of the way through his run to regain the presidency.

Not so Kamala Harris.

As I calculated Wednesday, Kamala is just starting the second third of her campaign, what we might call her second trimester if it were three times as long. As of today, she has 60% of her campaign, 64 days of 107, left to go.

And so, even as Kamala has already made Trump an equivocating wreck, nine-tenths of the way through his campaign and just in time for low-information voters to witness it, she has only just laid a foundation to build on. Even as the press described Trump’s flopsweat as abortion threatens to ruin his bid, Kamala’s campaign rolled out a bus tour to focus on reproductive rights.

They are, quite literally, taking it to Trump, to Palm Beach, for the kickoff.

Today, Team Harris-Walz is announcing the launch of its “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom” bus tour with a kickoff event in Donald Trump’s backyard in Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday, September 3. Senator Amy Klobuchar, Harris-Walz campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Republican TV personality Ana Navarro, and reproductive rights storyteller Anya Cook will hold Trump directly accountable for the devastating impacts of overturning Roe v. Wade, including threatening access to IVF.

This fall, the bus will make at least 50 stops in key states, touching blue communities and red ones, with support for reproductive rights transcending party lines. Each stop will emphasize the stark contrast between Vice President Harris and Governor Walz, who will restore the protections of Roe when Congress passes a bill to do so, and Donald Trump and JD Vance, who will enact their dangerous Project 2025 agenda to ban abortion nationwide, restrict access to birth control, create a national anti-abortion coordinator, force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions, and jeopardize access to IVF.

This is a bus tour of diverse surrogates, not Harris or Walz themselves. The grand-daughter of César Chávez, Julie Chávez Rodriguez, is the only royalty on this bus. But the bus provides the campaign a low-effort way to build on the foundation established at the DNC, to try to yoke state referenda more closely to partisan races, to try to make races like that of Florida Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (or that of Angela Alsobrooks or Dan Osborn) more competitive. If that works, who knows how close Kamala might make the Florida race itself? Even assuming Kamala won’t beat Trump in his own state, it will serve to reinvigorate a state party that had been struggling, but which also just recently delivered embarrassing defeats to Moms for Liberty, the book-burners who serve as both Ron DeSantis and Trump’s surrogates to reach women.

Thus far, horserace journalists have been absolutely loathe to hold Trump accountable for the bad things that happened when he was President: his failures on COVID as well as jobs lost for reasons other than pandemic, the spike in crime, his corruption of rule of law.

But Kamala has finally made Trump own something, his role in stripping women of their bodily autonomy.

And in response, Trump has started to panic.

Update: This Public Notice piece on the press’ willingness to let Trump flip flop on choice with impunity him on it names several other policies he should not have backsies on either.

There’s no earthly reason to give Trump the benefit of the doubt here. Besides dismantling the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, the Trump administration also tried to undermine private insurance coverage for abortions, prohibited clinics from receiving federal funds under Title X if they even referred people elsewhere for abortion services, and slashed grants for teen pregnancy prevention programs. A second Trump administration will be comprehensively terrible for reproductive rights generally, not just abortion, and no amount of uninformed flip-flopping will change that.

With Tim Walz, There Is TOO Such a Thing as a Free Lunch

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Among the numerous critiques I’ve seen from campaign pros and even Republicans about the Trump team is its advance work. First they put JD Vance in front of a half-hidden banner that made him look like he was pitching the Vice President, and since then they keep putting JD Vance in empty parking lots with anemic crowd set-ups.

Then they tried to force Trump to adhere to a policy topic at a 2,500-person venue in Asheville, NC by putting economic slogans — no tax on tips! no tax on social security! — on the backdrop.

It didn’t work. He still made substance free attacks on Kamala Harris.

Yesterday’s so-called press conference was something else. Trump’s staffers had gone shopping in advance, with a bunch of consumer goods laid out on tables behind him. He mostly ignored the props, while reading from a notebook about rising prices in a bored rant. “Grocery prices have skyrocketed,” he said. “Surreals are up 26%,” he seemed to say.

Indeed they are. It was a real Fruit Loops performance.

After finishing a 45-minute monotone speech, Trump finally turned to the products behind him, “wow!” and read off the list of purported price increases. “Up 65% — wow — school lunches up 65%. How can a family afford that?”

At some point, this has to be sabotage. Because if the problem is that nobody can afford school lunches, then Tim Walz looks like the solution.

Under Governor Walz, Minnesota made free no-questions asked school breakfasts and lunches available to any kids. It’s akin to another of the measures Walz signed designed to eliminate barriers to getting kids in schools learning, just like the free tampon program that right wingers have turned into a transphobic attack.

Even as Trump laid out a problem that, in Minnesota, Walz already fixed, Vice President Harris was announcing anti-gouging initiative to bring other food prices down.

In Attempting To Claim WaPo Doesn’t Chase Rat-Fucks, WaPo Lies about Chasing Rat-Fucks

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I’m the rarity among lefties who supports the decision of Politico, WaPo, and NYT (thus far) to not publish the actual files that a persona suspected to have ties to Iranian hackers sent them. That’s true, partly because I think this hack could be even more dangerous than the one of Hillary. But it’s also true because of the opportunity cost that publishing stolen documents incurs.

I prefer Kamala Harris’ message to remain the affirmative message she’s running on, and to the extent that those outlets are doing reporting like the story further developing the suspected $10 million payment via Egypt to Trump, I’d like them to continue to pursue real reporting, as well.

One of the real impacts of the files Russia hacked in 2016 is that they distracted journalists from harder work, work about what a corrupt man Trump is. Campaign reporters are already distracted too easily by nonsense stuff; they don’t need any further distractions from their day job.

That said, reporters don’t have to publish the actual documents to address something that is clearly newsworthy about the files. As Politico explained, the main thing the persona has sent so far was a draft of the vetting document for JD Vance and Marco Rubio.

A research dossier the campaign had apparently done on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, which was dated Feb. 23, was included in the documents. The documents are authentic, according to two people familiar with them and granted anonymity to describe internal communications. One of the people described the dossier as a preliminary version of Vance’s vetting file.

The research dossier was a 271-page document based on publicly available information about Vance’s past record and statements, with some — such as his past criticisms of Trump — identified in the document as “POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES.” The person also sent part of a research document about Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who was also a finalist for the vice presidential nomination.

Note, this mirrors one of the first things Guccifer 2.0 released in 2016: Hillary’s oppo dossier on Trump. So in addition to its use of an AOL account, this persona is adopting another of the Russian persona’s tactics.

Again, I’m cool with outlets sitting on the dossier itself. But the content of it is newsworthy. That’s because after JD Vance’s rocky rollout, both donors and Trump himself are asking whether vetters were surprised by Vance’s misogynist public statements.

Over the past two weeks, Mr. Trump has fielded complaints from donors about his running mate, JD Vance, as news coverage exploring Mr. Vance’s past statements unearthed — and then exhaustively critiqued — remarks including a lament that America was run by “childless cat ladies.”

Mr. Trump dismissed out of hand donors’ suggestions that he replace Mr. Vance on the ticket. But Mr. Trump privately asked his advisers whether they had known about Mr. Vance’s comments about childless women before Mr. Trump chose him.

I’d also like to know if Trump’s vetting team knew of the pictures of JD wearing drag while at Yale, which have become the subject of memes on social media.

Whether the dossier was comprehensive matters (particularly given that a law firm also involved in Trump’s criminal defense completed it). It matters, most of all, because Trump has swapped the mediocre Ivanka as his primary familial advisor for the incompetent Don Jr, and the failson had a key role in picking JD.

So it would be newsworthy to reveal the scope and the thoroughness (or not) of the vetting document.

That said, I think every outlet that is sitting on these documents, particularly if they’re withholding details about any oversights in JD’s vetting document, owes the public an explanation of why they’re adopting a double standard as compared to their poor choices from 2016.

WaPo, which is trying to hunker through controversy about Will Lewis’ possible role in covering up Murdoch’s phone hacking,  tried to do that yesterday. Matt Murray boasted that outlets were taking a breath, and then went on to claim that the vetting document isn’t newsworthy because the six-month old vetting document isn’t, “fresh or new enough.”

“This episode probably reflects that news organizations aren’t going to snap at any hack that comes in and is marked as ‘exclusive’ or ‘inside dope’ and publish it for the sake of publishing,” said Matt Murray, executive editor of The Post. Instead, “all of the news organizations in this case took a deep breath and paused, and thought about who was likely to be leaking the documents, what the motives of the hacker might have been, and whether this was truly newsworthy or not.”

[snip]

“In the end, it didn’t seem fresh or new enough,” Murray said.

WaPo even attempted to address something virtually all discussions about using rat-fucked documents in the context of the suspected Iranian hack do not: the treatment of the Hunter Biden laptop, the most innocent provenance explanation for which is that, after pursuing a laptop from foreigners with ties to Russian intelligence for a year, Rudy Giuliani received just such a laptop out of the blue from a blind computer repairman.

Here’s what WaPo claims about how reserved news organizations were with the hard drives described as the Hunter Biden laptop.

News organizations have been tested since 2016. Wary of (1) hacked materials since then, many proved reluctant to report on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop out of concerns that they were the result of a hack. As the conservative press latched on to (2) allegedly incriminating emails found on the computer in the final weeks of the 2020 campaign, more mainstream outlets did not join in a 2016-style frenzy over the material, and Facebook and Twitter limited distribution of a New York Post story about the laptop.

An analysis by The Post nearly two years later confirmed the authenticity of many of the emails on the laptop and found no evidence of a hack. [my annotation]

Note the two reasons alluded to in this passage, both of which show up in Murray’s claimed explanation for sitting on the JD Vance dossier. There were two concerns, according to the WaPo:

  1. Was the laptop “hacked”?
  2. Did the “allegedly incriminating emails” prove what the NYPost claimed they did?

Then, in the next paragraph, WaPo addresses just one of those two issues, whether the hard drive copied from a copy of a laptop, was hacked. WaPo claims, falsely, that the linked story describing the results of Jake Williams and Matt Green’s analysis “found no evidence of a hack.”

For starters, that’s a category error. This is a copy of a copy of a laptop, not the laptop itself. What their analysis attempted to assess was the authenticity of the emails on the laptop — but two different security researchers were only able to do so for a fraction of the emails. This analysis made no attempt to assess whether the stuff on the laptop was packaged up from authentic files (or from a combination of authentic and doctored files). Far more importantly, given details of Hunter’s cloud accounts, it did not assess whether people besides Hunter Biden had access his cloud data (evidence at his gun case described that not just his mistress, Zoe Kestan, accessed his cloud data, but his drug dealers accessed at least his bank account).

But it did find that the copy of a copy of a laptop lacked marks of reliability and did include files placed there by someone other than Hunter Biden.

Most of the data obtained by The Post lacks cryptographic features that would help experts make a reliable determination of authenticity, especially in a case where the original computer and its hard drive are not available for forensic examination. Other factors, such as emails that were only partially downloaded, also stymied the security experts’ efforts to verify content.

[snip]

In their examinations, Green and Williams found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.

[snip]

“From a forensics standpoint, it’s a disaster,” Williams said. (The Post is paying Williams for the professional services he provided. Green declined payment.)

[snip]

Neither expert reported finding evidence that individual emails or other files had been manipulated by hackers, but neither was able to rule out that possibility.

[snip]

Analysis was made significantly more difficult, both experts said, because the data had been handled repeatedly in a manner that deleted logs and other files that forensic experts use to establish a file’s authenticity.

“No evidence of tampering was discovered, but as noted throughout, several key pieces of evidence useful in discovering tampering were not available,” Williams’ reports concluded.

There are several details, disclosed subsequent to the story, that it lacks: It doesn’t talk about the ways the story John Paul Mac Isaac’s attorney told WaPo conflict with the story JPMI would tell in his book (one very significant conflict pertains to the date when JPMI reached out to the FBI). It doesn’t describe that JPMI himself disavowed some of the content on the Jack Maxey hard drive, the one shared with the WaPo. It doesn’t describe that Hunter has sued Garrett Ziegler and Rudy Giuliani for hacking him (the former survived Ziegler’s motion to dismiss; the latter was dismissed pending the end of Rudy’s bankruptcy; as far as I know, Hunter has not yet renewed the suit against Rudy given the imminent dismissal of Rudy’s bankruptcy). It doesn’t describe that in court filings, Abbe Lowell affirmatively claimed that the data on the laptop itself — not the copy! — had been compromised before being shared with the FBI.

Defense counsel has numerous reasons to believe the data had been altered and compromised before investigators obtained the electronic material from Apple Inc. and The Mac Shop, such that the Special Counsel’s claim that the underlying data is “authentic” (id. at 4) and accurately reflects “defendant’s Apple Macbook Pro and [] hard drive” (id. at 2) is mistaken.

Mr. Biden’s counsel told the Special Counsel on May 10, 2024 it agrees not to challenge the authenticity of the electronic data the Special Counsel intends to use with respect to it being what law enforcement received on December 9, 2019 from John Paul Mac Isaac (owner of The Mac Shop), and from Apple on August 29, 2019 and in a follow-up search on July 10, 2020. (Mot. at n.3.) However, Mr. Biden cannot agree this electronic data is “authentic” as to being his data as he used and stored it prior to Mac Issac obtaining it.

WaPo relies on a two year old story that has been significantly preempted to claim that the copy of the copy of the laptop was not hacked. The story never made such a claim, and the claims it has made have been undermined since.

But there’s an even more telling aspect of WaPo’s self-satisfied claim that reporters gave up their rabid addiction for rat-fuckery after 2016. It doesn’t address whether the laptop subsequently became newsworthy.

There’s good reason for that: Because after the election, WaPo did embrace the laptop, even the doctored one they got from Maxey, as part of a years-long campaign of dick pic sniffing. Their lead dick pic sniffers, Matt Viser and Devlin Barrett, even made shit up when disgruntled IRS agents released details that raised questions about the integrity of the original copy. Since then, prosecutors themselves have described that the extraction of the copy of the laptop they received — the one whence all the data that sloppy reporters call “the laptop” came — is 62% bigger, measured in terms of pages, than the laptop itself. There are potentially innocent explanations for why the hard drive purporting to be a copy of the laptop would not match it, but those explanations would conflict with JPMI’s explanations for how he made the copy. And, scandalously, the FBI never made an index of the laptop, and Judge Maryellen Noreika allowed it to be used in the trial against Hunter without ever even assuring that the forensic reports on the extraction of the two devices matched what got certified to her in a court filing.

And WaPo is not alone in its continuing addiction to relying on a copy of a copy of a laptop with such provenance problems. Just yesterday, NYT’s Ken Vogel did a story that relied on the laptop which basically said, Hunter Biden asked the Commerce Department for help on Burisma but it blew him off (unsurprisingly, Vogel also struggles with the court filings on which he bases his news hook). Four years after Vogel’s chum Rudy Giuliani released the laptop, three weeks after Joe Biden dropped out, NYT is still reporting the absence of news in an 8-year old email as news, precisely the kind of attention suck that rat-fuckers seek when they provide stolen documents to people like Vogel.

Again, in my opinion, WaPo is right not to publish the JD Vance dossier, though that’s different than using it to assess whether there were big gaps in the vetting of Trump’s unpopular running mate.

But WaPo is telling fairy tales about whether mainstream outlets gave up their fondness for rat-fuckery.

They did not. For four years, they have been utterly addicted to the rat-fuckery of the laptop, to the exclusion of reporting on all the details that should raise cautions disclosed since then.

And as such, the decision not to embrace this rat-fuckery, however correct it might be, is a double standard.

In Which Ian Miles Cheong Understands Trump’s Campaign Better than NYT

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The second I saw video of Vice President Harris rolling up to a hangar at Detroit’s airport on Air Force Two, then alighting with Tim Walz in front of cheering crowds, I knew it would break Donald Trump’s brain.

This is the kind of spectacle Donald Trump excels at creating.

This is the kind of spectacle on which Trump has built slavering loyalty from millions of MAGAts who see power in such spectacle.

And a Black woman created it.

Or rather, a Black woman and her campaign team, a campaign team which has already demonstrated they know exactly how to trigger Donald Trump, created it.

And sure enough, it did melt his brain.

Yesterday, he adopted the hysterical claims of some of his followers, posting that Vice President Harris was cheating because (he falsely claimed) she had used AI to sub in a crowd of people who weren’t there.

In fact, some of Trump’s followers were the ones who had used AI, sometimes marked as fake, sometimes not. to give the appearance this crowd didn’t exist.

Trump’s claims are so obviously false that even right wing trolls like Ian Miles Cheong are criticizing him for it.

And Cheong is not the only right wing troll complaining that Trump is hurting the movement, their movement, with his unhinged response to Vice President Harris’ rally. At a time when some prominent right wing trolls are showing RFK-curiosity, they’re also questioning the campaign, in significant part because of Trump’s public meltdown over this arrival.

And that’s where things start to get weird.

Both WaPo and NYT reported overnight on Trump’s unhinged claim.

But they’re both missing a bit of what’s going on, and they’re missing it, in my opinion, because they’re still seeing this race from Trump’s perspective.

In a piece on Saturday, WaPo claimed that Democrats were obsessing over crowd size in their own right, citing Tim Walz’ boast about crowd size in a Friday rally in Phoenix, even while (in the penultimate paragraph) quoting a Harris spox mocking Trump for the meltdowns he has in response.

Then the vice-presidential pick beamed out at the audience in suburban Phoenix — more than 15,000 people, Democrats said — and delivered the punchline with a big grin.

“It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything,” Walz said.

For years Trump, the GOP nominee for president, has been the one boasting about how many people he could pack into a venue. Now Democrats are eager to play the crowd game, too. With enthusiasm surging for their new presidential ticket, they have spent the week needling Trump on a topic he famously obsesses over.

[snip]

Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said Trump has been “rage-Truthing about our grassroots enthusiasm and melting down publicly, both online and in front of cameras” while Harris and Walz hit battleground states.

After Trump’s unhinged post yesterday, WaPo and NYT observed that Harris’ campaign has begun to mock Trump for complaining about coverage of her crowds. WaPo’s version links back to the earlier piece treating this primarily as mere boasting.

Trump’s focus on crowd size also has become something that the Harris campaign has used to poke fun at Trump about — while at the same time bragging about their own crowds.

But they’re suggesting it only started in Phoenix on Friday, after the Trump presser.

That is, they’re misunderstanding the timeline, and therefore the full effect of it.

Both cite Trump’s conflated boast, given in his unhinged presser on Thursday, that his January 6 crowds were bigger than Martin Luther King Jr’s (this is the NYT; note, logically Trump must also be conflating January 6 and his inauguration, which is the only event where he occupied the same real estate MLK did).

Mr. Trump did not hold any events in a swing state last week. Instead, he held a rally in Montana, where there is a crucial Senate race, and a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida.

Mr. Trump showed frustration with Ms. Harris’s crowds at that event, too, and even boasted about the crowd at his rally in Washington D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, that preceded the riot at the Capitol, saying it was larger than the one drawn by Martin Luther King Jr. for his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Mr. Trump claimed.

But they’re missing that the presser and the wildly inflated claims about crowd size took place the day after Kamala’s iconic arrival in Detroit. They’re missing that Trump’s first attempt to dismiss the Vice President’s crowd size came in that presser.

Trump announced the presser first thing in the morning on Thursday, to take place in conjunction with a briefing, purporting to inform reporters about the state of Trump’s campaign, already scheduled that day. So the presser would have come together in the period when Trump was seeing — and responding to — that imagery.

Trump called the presser when his brain was breaking after seeing this image.

And many people, including NYT’s weird write-up of the presser as if it were sound campaign strategy, did not report that in addition to inflating his own crowd sizes, Trump was falsely claiming that Kamala’s crowds were an order of magnitude smaller than they were.

Former President Donald J. Trump tried on Thursday to shoehorn himself back into a national conversation that Vice President Kamala Harris has dominated for more than two weeks, holding an hourlong news conference in which he assailed Ms. Harris’s intelligence and taunted her for failing to field questions similarly from journalists.

Throughout the event, held in the main room at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home in Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Trump assailed the state of the U.S. economy, described the country as in mortal danger if he did not win the presidential election and falsely described his departure from the White House — which was preceded by his refusal to concede his election loss in November 2020 and the violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by a mob of his supporters — as a “peaceful” transfer of power.

Mr. Trump also flashed frustration when asked about the size of Ms. Harris’s crowds while boasting about the attendance at his own rally on Jan. 6, 2021, and insisted that the group of hundreds that stormed the Capitol was relatively small. But he fixated on the size of the crowd that he initially gathered on the national mall, making comparisons to — and declaring it was larger than — the one drawn by Martin Luther King Jr. for his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Mr. Trump said. “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours — same real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not — we had more.”

The Trump team has been looking for ways to interrupt Ms. Harris’s momentum as she has quickly consolidated the Democratic Party behind her and risen in the polls. The goal of Mr. Trump’s news conference, which he announced on Thursday morning on his social media site, was to highlight that Ms. Harris has yet to hold a news conference of her own or to give an unscripted interview to the news media.

On top of describing many of Trump’s false claims — that Kamala is stupid, that the economy is in poor shape, that Kamala was border czar and has let other countries unload prisons into the US, that the legal system was unfair to him, that crime is up — without correcting them, NYT only mentioned Trump’s false comparisons of his own rallies (again, without correction), not his claim that Harris had been getting 1,500 rally-goers, as opposed to 15,000.

Oh give me a break.

Listen. I had 107,000 people in New Jersey. You didn’t report it.

I’m so glad you asked. What did she have yesterday? 2,000 people?

If I ever had 2,000 people you’d say my campaign is finished. It’s so dishonest, the press. And here’s a great example.

I had, in Michigan recently, 25,000 people, and 25,000 people we just couldn’t get them in. We had, in Harrisburg, 20, 25,000 people? And 20,000 people couldn’t get in. We had so many — nobody ever mentions that!

When she gets 1,500 people — and I saw it yesterday on ABC, which they said, “oh, the crowd was so big,” — I have 10 times, 20 times, 30 times the crowd size, and they never say the crowd was big.

That’s why I’m always saying, “turn around the cameras.”

I’m so glad you asked that.

I think it’s so terrible, when you say, “she has 1,500 people, 1,000 people,” and they talk about, “oh, the enthusiasm.” Let me tell you. We have the enthusiasm. The Republican Party — and me, as a candidate — but the Republican Party has the enthusiasm, because people want to see crime stopped, they want to see a country that’s respected.

Trump’s false claims about this Detroit rally started when the wound was still fresh. Trump’s false claims started last Thursday, but few mentioned them as false claims until he went wildly unhinged on his social media site.

And understand: Harris’ campaign is intentionally goading him, intentionally causing these psychic wounds, and they were even before the Detroit rally.

I have no reason to believe that Harris’ campaign had the event in the airport hangar to prepare that spectacle (I think they had to move there once they overfilled their first venue), but holy hell it was great advance work. That said, their rapid response has been deliberately needling the former President with crowd size comparisons, going back a week now, days before Walz was even selected.

After both Georgia,

And Philly,

Kamala HQ posted side-by-side comparisons and, in the latter case, posted it to Truth Social. And Trump invited these comparisons when he booked a rally in the same Georgia auditorium as Kamala chose to do her rally. Trump made excuses for his paltry turnout in real time.

Trump invited this comparison, then failed to match up.

And the Kamala HQ account’s first take on Trump’s unhinged presser captioned it, “A feeble Trump holds a press conference to lie and yell about his noticeably smaller rally crowd sizes.”

Harris’ own campaign is not the only outlet that understood what was going on. Rolling Stone focused on Trump’s obsession about Harris’ crowd size on August 8, not long after the presser, which the KamalaHQ account noted and @ed Trump on.

According to one Republican source who’s spoken to the former president in recent days, Trump is “unhappy with the narrative” forming that Vice President Kamala Harris has been attracting high, enthusiastic attendance at the 2024 rallies she’s held since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.

In private, Trump has recently taken to griping about the media attention the Harris 2024 (now Harris-Walz 2024) rally sizes have been receiving, and at times insisting a number the Harris campaign has put out must be “fake,” the source and another person familiar with the matter say.

And NYT hasn’t been entirely missing this. On August 9, they updated a story posted on August 4 about Trump’s excuses for his thin Georgia turnout.

Still, Mr. Trump couldn’t help but focus on those who weren’t piling in. He claimed that Georgia State University officials in charge of the arena prevented him from letting in more people. “We have beautiful cameras set up for the overflow crowds,” he said. A massive screen flashed to a live video feed of his red-capped supporters milling around outside in the 90-degree heat.

In Mr. Trump’s telling, this wasn’t a safety protocol but a conspiracy to humiliate him, perpetrated by the university and other nefarious forces. It all connects, in his estimation, to the biggest numbers game he has ever lost. “If they’re going to stand in the way of admitting people to our rally, just imagine what they’re going to do on Election Day,” he said.

This goes to the core of Mr. Trump’s crowd-size fixation. He seems to believe that a full arena is a predictor of his ultimate victory — as if the voters in that arena were representative of the country at large.

[snip]

[A]n hour into his speech, the Atlanta crowd had emptied out more than usual.

This is a known trigger for Trump. It has been, going back to his own meager inauguration turnout. It has been racialized since that point too, Trump’s insecurities knowing that a Black president could be more popular than he was.

Further, brags about crowd size are a known building block of Trump’s own false claims about elections. In 2020, for example, he argued it was impossible that Biden beat him because he never left his basement. There are still millions of people who believe Trump’s 2020 Big Lie because they believe his claim that crowd size directly translates to votes.

This time around, Trump is giving pressers in the equivalent of his own basement, arguing that so many people voted for him in Alabama and South Carolina in 2020, he must have won Georgia, even while he inflates his own crowd sizes by an order of magnitude and deflates the Vice President’s by the same margin.

The stakes, for Trump, have to do with his Big Lie, his ability to sustain the belief of his mob that he really is that much more popular than his opponent. He can’t have them see that Kamala can do crowds better even than he can.

Beyond triggering Trump, beyond goading him into melting down in front of campaign journalists, that’s actually not how the Harris campaign views it (nor should it be, in a competent campaign): The WaPo’s description of Trump’s false claims describe Harris boasting of new volunteers being recruited.

And at a fundraising event in San Francisco on Sunday, Harris appeared to address Trump’s social media accusations indirectly.

The energy around the country is “undeniable,” Harris said, adding, “The press and our opponents like to focus on our crowd size, and yes the crowds are large.” But even better, she said, attendees are signing up for volunteer shifts by the thousands.

This is actually the purpose rallies are supposed to serve at this point of a campaign, even one launched a mere three weeks ago. These crowds are important not (just) because they lead Trump to melt down, but because they’re a necessary way to catch up on volunteer recruitment Biden hadn’t been doing. This is why Walz, especially, makes an ask at every one of these rallies. This is why Kamala always talks about the hard work ahead.

This is about recruiting bodies to do voter identification, persuasion, and ultimately GOTV. This is about basic campaign work.

Trump, meanwhile, has sent JD out to speak to empty parking lots.

Pro-Trump trolls like Cheong see this. But full time campaign journalists are slow to catch on. They’re slow to understand that Trump’s own insecurities can be — and were, deliberately — triggered, with predictable results.

Especially when someone can mobilize the kind of spectacle that Trump himself relies on.

The Trump Hack Could Extend Far Beyond a Hack-and-Leak

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When news first broke that Donald Trump’s campaign says it has been hacked, I started drafting a post on applying the lessons of past ratfucks.

The alleged hack was first reported by Politico, which says some person using an AOL account reached out and shared documents, including the vetting materials pertaining to JD Vance and Marco Rubio.

On July 22, POLITICO began receiving emails from an anonymous account. Over the course of the past few weeks, the person — who used an AOL email account and identified themselves only as “Robert” — relayed what appeared to be internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official. A research dossier the campaign had apparently done on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, which was dated Feb. 23, was included in the documents. The documents are authentic, according to two people familiar with them and granted anonymity to describe internal communications. One of the people described the dossier as a preliminary version of Vance’s vetting file.

The research dossier was a 271-page document based on publicly available information about Vance’s past record and statements, with some — such as his past criticisms of Trump — identified in the document as “POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES.” The person also sent part of a research document about Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who was also a finalist for the vice presidential nomination.

Trump’s bouncer-spox, Steven Cheung, claims the hack was done by Iran, citing a Microsoft report released Friday describing the compromise by Iran of the email account of a “former senior advisor,” which the IRGC then used to attempt to compromise a current high-level official.

Yet another Iranian group, this one connected with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign from the compromised email account of a former senior advisor. The email contained a link that would direct traffic through a domain controlled by the group before routing to the website of the provided link. Within days of this activity, the same group unsuccessfully attempted to log into an account belonging to a former presidential candidate. We’ve since notified those targeted.

A pity for the Trump campaign that Cheung is a habitual liar, so we can’t trust anything he says, and Politico’s authentication appears to rely exclusively on word of mouth from those who have the documents, not digital authentication.

Still, it’s distinctly possible. The FBI certainly seems to believe the IRGC is trying to assassinate Trump.

The lessons I was going to propose in my draft post were the following:

  • Vice President Harris should eschew assigning her senior-most staff to exploiting these emails like Trump did in 2016.
  • But only after Trump, Don Jr, and Mike Pompeo apologize for their enthusiastic use of hacked emails in 2016.
  • The same 51 former spooks who warned that the Hunter Biden laptop had the earmarks of a foreign influence operation should write a similar letter here, emphasizing (as they did in their Hunter Biden letter) the import of resisting foreign efforts to influence a presidential election. Maybe Peter Strzok and Andy McCabe could join in. Chris Krebs, who already has weighed in validating the seriousness of the threat, but who was fired for telling the truth about the 2020 election, can join too. They should send it to Politico, which first reported this story, but CC Jim Jordan, who says even writing such a letter is an abuse of First Amendment protected free speech.
  • Donald Trump must provide all the affected servers to the FBI, stat.

It’s the last one that was going to be my punch line. Partly because of misleading (arguably inaccurate) Jim Comey testimony, and partly because a wide swath of people had an incentive to do Russia’s bidding, for eight years people, including many in Congress, have been suggesting that a hacking victim must give all the servers that were hacked to law enforcement — the actual servers, not forensic images — otherwise the FBI’s investigation would be suspect.

They were wrong on several counts. But they were loud and insistent.

Fine. Based on that precedent, Trump must hand over his campaign servers to the same FBI that has criminally investigated him, including his campaign finance shenanigans, immediately.

That’s what I was going to write when Politico’s Alex Isenstadt, who is not a journalist competent to report a hack-and-leak story, was the only one who had written this up.

But then WaPo wrote it up, with Trump-whisperer Josh Dawsey and horserace journo Isaac Arnsdorf bylined, but also Ellen Nakashima and Shane Harris, the latter two of whom are exceptional reporters for a story about hacking.

That story had two additional details that made me rethink the potential impact of this. First, it revealed that Trump didn’t tell the FBI about the hack.

People familiar with the matter said the campaign separately concluded earlier this summer its email system had been breached but did not disclose it publicly or to law enforcement. The people said some officials were told to take more protective measures on their email accounts. At the time, campaign officials communicated to others that they weren’t sure who hacked the emails.

It’s not even clear whether Trump got an outside contractor — and if so, if it was someone more competent than Rudy Giuliani, whom Trump once pitched as a cybersecurity expert — to help clean up this mess. It took Crowdstrike and the DNC over a month to attribute the Russian hack, but they never fully cleaned it up. And persistent attacks continued through the election. That is, even with a respected outside contractor, the Democrats were wasting energy on whack-a-mole defense efforts for the remainder of the election.

Against that background, WaPo’s description of what the persona shared becomes more alarming.

On Thursday, The Washington Post was also sent a 271-page document about Vance from a sender who called himself Robert and used an AOL email account. Dated Feb. 23 and labeled “privileged & confidential,” the document highlighted potential political vulnerabilities for the first-term senator. Two people familiar with the document confirmed it was authentic and was commissioned by the campaign from Brand Woodward, a law firm that represents a number of prominent Trump advisers in investigations by state and federal authorities.

The document drew from publicly available information, including past news reports and interviews with the senator. The campaign commissioned several reports of other candidates, too, the advisers said.

The sender would not speak on the telephone with a Post reporter but indicated they had access to additional information, including internal campaign emails and documents related to Trump’s court cases. [my emphasis]

First, Brand Woodward did the campaign’s vetting.

Stan Woodward represents, along with others, Walt Nauta, Kash Patel, and Peter Navarro in various Trump-related criminal investigations, as well as some seditionists. He’s a great fit for Trump insofar as he’s good at generating outrage over manufactured slights — though in front of regular judges, those complaints usually collapse. Multiple filings in the documents case suggest that Woodward has a tenuous relationship with digital technology.

The role of Stan Brand, Woodward’s partner, has been assiduously hidden, except insofar as he has made claims about cases to the press on-the-record without disclosing the tie to Woodward.

Now, WaPo has confirmed that the Microsoft description — of a former advisor pwned and using that person’s email account, an attempt to hack “a high-official” still on the campaign — pertained to the Trump campaign. Given that description, there’s no reason to believe that Woodward or Brand were affected.

But there’s nevertheless a problem with hiring Brand Woodward to do your candidate vetting. To be clear: Brand is absolutely qualified to do that kind of thing. He’s got a long record of doing so in congress. But even Trump appears to have concerns about major issues the vetting process missed, to say nothing of his donors.

Over the past two weeks, Mr. Trump has fielded complaints from donors about his running mate, JD Vance, as news coverage exploring Mr. Vance’s past statements unearthed — and then exhaustively critiqued — remarks including a lament that America was run by “childless cat ladies.”

Mr. Trump dismissed out of hand donors’ suggestions that he replace Mr. Vance on the ticket. But Mr. Trump privately asked his advisers whether they had known about Mr. Vance’s comments about childless women before Mr. Trump chose him.

There were better choices to vet candidates, but if Trump wants to let a thin team vet the surly troll he picked to be his running mate, that’s his own business.

My alarm about the news that Brand Woodward starts, however, by the way that the Trump campaign has muddled various functions, criminal and civil defense with campaign finance and, now, candidate vetting. It creates a legal morass, one that — if Trump loses this election — could lead to more legal trouble down the road.

Maybe that’s why Trump didn’t call the FBI.

But it also means that some people — most notably, Susie Wiles and Boris Epshteyn, along with Woodward and Brand — are playing multiple functions. Wiles is the one who decides who gets their criminal defense bills paid, she’s also the one who decides how to spend campaign cash, and she was a big backer of the JD pick.

When people play overlapping functions like that, it means that a hack targeted at them for one function — say, candidate vetting — may strike a gold mine of documents pertaining to another function — say, criminal defense.

WaPo’s reference to “documents related to Trump’s court cases” — Politico quoted the persona offering a “variety of documents from [Trump’s] legal and court documents to internal campaign discussions” — may ultimately pertain exclusively to Trump’s electoral court cases. If it does, those could be some of the most newsworthy out there, since Trump’s electoral court cases pose a direct threat to democracy.

But what if they don’t? What if these documents pertain to what those overlap people — people like Wiles or Epshteyn, and they’re only two of the most obvious –know about Trump’s criminal cases? What if they pertain to claims that witnesses have made to the FBI about where documents got moved or what was included in them? What if they pertain to the actual documents Trump stole, starting with the US strategic plan against Iran that Trump shared with Mark Meadows’ ghost writers?

Trump has not firewalled his campaign from a criminal case involving the most sensitive documents of the US government, meaning a well-executed hack targeted at his campaign may turn into an intelligence bonanza.

If Iran plans to make things difficult for Trump, the problems may extend well beyond what documents get leaked. As they did in 2016, this could mean that Trump wastes resources having to serially defend against hacking attempts via a range of different platforms. It could mean that Iran does what Russia did, hack key strategic models to optimize other kinds of fuckery later in the election. Because — unlike Russia — Iran is actively trying to kill Trump, not just defeat him, hacked documents may also facilitate efforts like those charged against Asif Merchant, manufacturing fake protests to create distractions to facilitate an assassination attempt.

The question of how to approach this news, if it is further confirmed, goes well beyond the question of whether to publish the documents allegedly stolen by Iran. In significant part because Trump refuses to maintain boundaries between his political life and his criminal life, hacks from Iran could create real damage to the United States beyond what they do to Trump’s campaign.

So by all means, let’s pause for a moment of schadenfreude. Let’s review all the things Trump said and did in 2016 and 2020 (including with the Hunter Biden laptop) that invite his opponents to fully exploit stolen documents this time.

But as you do that, consider that this ratfuck may be far more dangerous to the US than those targeting Hillary and Hunter.

Vance and the Void

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

Ever since I found the AP Newsroom site where AP photographers upload their work, I’ve been following the presidential candidates’ campaigns through photos.

There’s something freakishly unsettling about JD Vance in these image collections.

First, let me show you a Voice of America post from Mastodon – VOA generally does straight reporting, not prone to leaning one way or the other which is appropriate for news media funded by U.S. taxpayers.

Note the two photos used in this post are fairly typical campaign material from a manufacturing facility; the photos are from the AP.

Thinking I’d take a closer look at the plant and its location in the AP Newroom feed, I did a search for “JD Vance” and scrolled through the results.

Those two photos VOA used are rather misleading, because that’s about it – what you see in those two photos are nearly the extent of the campaign appearance.

Look at this photo from the same event:

Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, speaks at a campaign event at Wollard International, Aug. 7, 2024, in Eau Claire, Wis. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Here’s another angle of the same event:

Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, speaks at a campaign event at Wollard International, Aug. 7, 2024, in Eau Claire, Wis. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

There’s a couple rows of employees behind Vance and a bank of reporters and cameras in front of Vance.

That’s it.

There’s a void where the crowd of campaign rally attendees should be. Vance is speaking into cameras and nothing else. If you’ve attended campaign rallies including those held at manufacturing facilities, you already know there’s usually a crowd of employees and guests to which the candidate speaks. The press operates from the back of the crowd or on an elevated platform so they are able to get good crowd reaction coverage while not obstructing rally attendees’ view of the candidate.

That wasn’t the case in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, at this manufacturing facility’s campaign event.

How weird.

I scrolled back through the photos for “JD Vance” and I noticed there are zero, nada, no crowd shots for other recent events.

None.

Vance is trying to precede or follow the Harris-Walz campaign’s tour through swing states, like some stalker-y ex-boyfriend. It makes sense there’d be photos in AP Newsroom collection featuring the two campaigns in the same destinations regardless of Vance’s creepy campaign-by-stalking.

Except the photos of Vance are like Potemkin villages, all fronts and nothing back end behind the façade.

Here’s one of Vance speaking at the police department in Shelby Township, Michigan. The site is about a hour’s drive away from Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport (DTW), located in the white flight portion of the greater Detroit Metro area:

Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, speaks at a campaign event at Shelby Township Police Department, Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024, in Shelby Township, Mich. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Where are the people who came to see Vance? There are more photos of Vance in Romulus but they’re all similarly void of a visible audience.

Compare and contrast to the Harris-Walz campaign rally held at DTW:

Air Force Two arrives at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport for a rally with Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in Romulus, Mich., on Aug. 7, 2024. (Photo by Andrew Roth/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

Note where this photo was taken from within the site – the back edge of the crowd. There’s overflow outside this hangar at the airport. My god, there’s a crowd, even before Harris and Walz disembark from the plane!

This isn’t fair, you might say; this is a combined event with Harris and Walz and not Walz alone so I’m unfairly comparing apples and an orange dude’s veep choice. But it’s early yet for Walz to have his own campaign events; he’ll finish the swing state series before he’s appearing on his own.

This still doesn’t explain the void where Vance appears, the lack of a crowd in attendance.

There’s chatter about Vance pulling a stunt on the tarmac, approaching Air Force 2 while remarking it’s his future plane.

Except this stunt had no audience, just reporters and photographers who don’t appear in the images.

Worse, the photos are meme-worthy for the lack of an audience – like this wisecrack about Vance and his entourage:

(source)

Who would want to hear this guy speak when he and his portion of the Trump-Vance campaign lack the awareness necessary to appear less weird and creepy and more human?

I have to ask, though: is the Trump-Vance campaign throttling photographers from taking photos of anything besides Vance at Vance’s campaign events? Are we seeing just the opposite – an awareness their faux hillbilly is awkward and as competent at public speaking as a sixth-grade student? Have they stripped away the crowds to avoid problematic interactions?

With or without a crowd, the answers don’t look good. Creepy and weird, even.

Walz’ Leadership and JD’s Spin: The Ethics of Service

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JD Vance yesterday made the substance of his and Tim Walz’ military service an issue yesterday. This was a guy who specialized in spinning the Iraq War, attacking the service of a guy who was promoted into leadership ranks as a Non-Commissioned Officer over the course of 24 years.

At a campaign stop in Michigan, JD accused that, “when Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him.”

Thus began the Swiftboating of Tim Walz, led by Chris LaCivita, the mastermind of the original smear campaign against John Kerry.

The substance of the smear campaign that ensued actually pivots on disputed details far less significant than the kinds of lies that JD and his boss tell as easily as they breathe.

The first issue pertains to how to describe Walz’ final rank when he was promoted to Command Sergeant Major, but never finished the relevant training before he retired in 2005, and so was reverted to his prior rank. The second has to do with a single reference to carrying a gun at war, a rhetorical move to support an argument about the proper role for guns. Both of these are arguments about one or two references years ago — the kinds of misstatements that JD and Trump peddle routinely, including JD’s implication that Walz retired solely to get out of deploying to Iraq.

The third issue — the main one — pertains to whether Walz abandoned his men by retiring the year before his unit deployed to Iraq.

By all accounts, however, Walz had retired already before the formal deployment order came in; he retired because he had already committed to run for Congress when the possibility of a deployment came up.

Walz filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission as a candidate for Congress on February 10, 2005. The next month, after the guard announced a possible deployment to Iraq within two years, Walz’s campaign issued a statement saying he intended to stay in the race.

“I do not yet know if my artillery unit will be part of this mobilization and I am unable to comment further on specifics of the deployment,” Walz said in the March 2005 campaign release.

“As Command Sergeant Major I have a responsibility not only to ready my battalion for Iraq, but also to serve if called on. I am dedicated to serving my country to the best of my ability, whether that is in Washington DC or in Iraq,” he continued, adding: “I don’t want to speculate on what shape my campaign will take if I am deployed, but I have no plans to drop out of the race. I am fortunate to have a strong group of enthusiastic supporters and a very dedicated and intelligent wife. Both will be a major part of my campaign, whether I am in Minnesota or Iraq.”

Walz retired from the Army National Guard in May 2005, according to the Minnesota National Guard. In a 2009 interview for the Library of Congress, Walz said he left the guard to focus full time on running for Congress, citing concerns about trying to serve at the same time and the Hatch Act, which limits political activities for federal employees.

Once you understand that you’d need a time machine for the literal words of JD’s attack to be true, then it changes the discussion, to one about Walz’ ethical decision about the best way to serve his country.

A story on his retirement from the first time he ran describes that he struggled with the ethics of the decision.

Bonnifield said they also bonded during a deployment to Italy connected to post-Sept. 11 Operation Enduring Freedom. After seven months abroad, the unit returned to Minnesota.

But Walz had already begun thinking about an exit and bounced it off others, including Bonnifield.

“Would the soldier look down on him because he didn’t go with us? Would the common soldier say, ‘Hey, he didn’t go with us, he’s trying to skip out on a deployment?’ And he wasn’t,” Bonnifield said. “He talked with us for quite a while on that subject. He weighed that decision to run for Congress very heavy. He loved the military, he loved the guard, he loved the soldiers he worked with.”

Walz said it was merely time to leave and he saw a chance to make a difference in the public policy arena.

“Once you’re in, it’s hard to retire. Of my 40 years or 41 years, I had been in the military 24 of them. It was just what you did,” he said. “So that transition period was just a challenge.”

Bonnifield and his brother did deploy to Iraq, in different units. And they both dealt with severe mental health issues upon their return. Bonnifield said Walz the congressman worked to connect struggling Guard members with help and sought to cut red tape.

“If you listen to him, he’s got a very loud, strong voice,” Bonnifield said. “But there’s a very caring person inside. And one very good leader, too.”

Walz saw a chance to make a difference in the public policy arena. And when elected to Congress as an anti-war Democrat, he spent the twelve years he was there trying to end the Iraq War, and when that failed, trying to make the lives of service members better, both before and after service.

As a member of Congress, Walz opposed President George W. Bush’s troop surge in Iraq, though he still voted to continue military funding to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was an early advocate for repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy barring servicemembers from serving if they came out as members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Walz joined with Republicans in 2016 to oppose cuts to the Army’s troop levels meant to save money — a trend that continues today. He argued doing so would leave the service without the manpower to meet growing worldwide threats. As a Guard veteran and co-chair of the House National Guard and Reserve caucus, Walz advocated for the part-time force, arguing Pentagon strategies and plans should better integrate the Guard and Reserves to make use of scarce Army resources.

Walz’s likely biggest legislative achievement in Congress, however, was clearing bipartisan veterans’ suicide prevention legislation that became law in 2015.

This included opposition to some of Trump’s efforts to bring grift to Veterans Affairs.

As the top Democrat on the committee, Walz was a chief adversary for the Trump administration’s Department of Veterans Affairs. He battled with then-acting VA Secretary Peter O’Rourke in 2018 during a standoff over O’Rourke’s handling of the inspector general’s office, and pushed for an investigation into the influence of a trio of informal VA advisers who were members of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. An investigation by House Democrats completed after Walz left Congress concluded that the so-called Mar-a-Lago trio “violated the law and sought to exert improper influence over government officials to further their own personal interests.”

Walz also opposed the Mission Act, the bill that expanded veterans’ access to VA-funded care by non-VA doctors that Trump considers one of his signature achievements. Walz said in statements at the time that, while he agreed the program for veterans to seek outside care needed to be fixed, he believed the Mission Act did not have sustainable funding. VA officials in recent years have said community care costs have ballooned following the Mission Act.

That’s where a sound comparison should focus, in my opinion.

JD only got to Congress, of course, after being recruited by Peter Thiel, after selling out his childhood for fame, after becoming a hedgie — which background got him a seat on the Banking Committee, not the Veterans Affairs Committee. But once JD got to the Senate, he has garnered attention as a member of a later generation of veterans, this time deemed not anti-war, but America First, an anti-interventionist stance conducive to far-right politics.

On April 23, just hours after the United States Senate approved $61 billion in new military aid to Ukraine, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance took to the floor of the Senate to offer a sweeping rebuke of his colleagues’ decision. Standing behind his desk, Vance — who has emerged as a leading critic of U.S. policy toward Ukraine — unspooled a laundry list of objections: that American military capability is spread too thin; that Ukraine is outmanned and outgunned regardless of an increased level of U.S. support; that the Biden administration lacks a clear plan for bringing the war to a close.

Partway through his remarks, Vance suddenly got personal and pivoted to a less frequently discussed source of his skepticism: his time serving as a Marine during the Iraq War.

“In 2003, I made the mistake of supporting the Iraq War, [but] a couple months later, I also enlisted in the United States Marine Corps,” said Vance, who deployed to Iraq in 2005 as a corporal with the public affairs section of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. Vance’s tenure in the military features prominently in his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” in which he recounted how his time in the Marines helped him overcome his troubled upbringing in post-industrial Ohio to become a disciplined and functional adult. But on the Senate floor, his account of his military service was notably less sanguine.

“I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to,” Vance recounted, the emotion rising in his voice. “[I saw] that promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke.”

[snip]

In Ukraine, Vance argued, the U.S. is doing the opposite: By funding Ukraine and “subsidizing the Europeans to do nothing,” the U.S. is setting itself on a path toward greater involvement in the region, not trying to further extricate itself.

Regardless of the accuracy or intellectual consistency of Vance’s argument, the tendency that it reflects — to ground U.S. foreign policy in a narrower definition of U.S. interests — bears the mark of the failures of the previous wars.

“This idea that it’s in our distinct interest to spread democracy all over the world,” Vance said. “I don’t think that holds even a little bit of water.”

Vance’s opposition to support for Ukraine, in support of which the trained propagandist adopts Russian propaganda, is one of the things that made Trump a fan. And it led him to vote against funding for the military — something that the anti-war Walz did not do.

Vance the propagandist has made the military service of both his and Walz, the NCO, a campaign issue.

But the logical place to bring that scrutiny is not to LaCivita’s parsing of words Walz uttered years ago, but to the ethical decisions both made when they came to an anti-war stance, to the notion of service each took away, to their success at fulfilling that ethic of service.