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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Fridays with Nicole Sandler

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Note: I made a mistake in this. It wasn’t Mike Flynn himself who met with Kyrill Dmitriev in the Seychelles. It was Erik Prince, who was very excited about the tie to the Emirates in the meeting.

Listen on Spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

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Trump’s Stranglehold on the GOP Is a Vulnerability

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Kamala Harris’ first couple of stump speeches as Presidential candidate included three parts:

  • Set up of prosecutor versus felon contrast (“I know his type”)
  • Tribute to Joe Biden
  • Lay out promise for the future (“Not going back”)

Last night’s speech (at least until CSPAN’s feed crapped out) swapped the second part — the tribute to Biden — and replaced it with an attack on Trump’s role in tanking the border bill.

That swap came after the Vice President’s campaign released this ad, similarly targeting Trump for his role in killing the bill.

To be sure — this is the same approach Biden has taken: imputing from Trump’s deliberate tanking of the border bill opposition to fixing the border. It was undoubtedly one of the reasons Biden spent so much time negotiating the border bill, only to have Congress tank it.

But when Biden used that approach, he explained it. Harris turned it into an attack on Trump’s selfishness.

These ads will not deflate Republican efforts to turn Harris’ role in working with Central America to try to decrease the flow of migrants, which they’ve spun into being the border czar in charge of the entire border, into fear about her approach to the border. But it succinctly flips the script.

It holds Trump accountable for things he made other Republicans do at his behest.

The same is true of the departure of Paul Dans, the head of Project 2025, from Heritage Foundation.

Trump’s campaign managers — Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles — released a statement crowing after Dans’ departure.

Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.

And Dans booked, then no-showed, an appearance with Kaitlan Collins show.

But ultimately, if you’re making the personnel decisions, as it appears Trump’s campaign did on Dans’ departure, then you own it. It only serves to reaffirm Trump’s role in the project.

And none too soon. Multiple outlets are publishing the forward that JD Vance did for Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, including his adoption of Roberts’ call to “circle the wagons and load the muskets” to take out government.

Vance has deep ties to the Heritage Foundation, and in particular to Kevin Roberts, who has been president of the right-wing think tank since 2021 and is the architect of Project 2025. Vance has praised Roberts for helping to turn the organization “into the de facto institutional home of Trumpism” and has endorsed elements of Project 2025. Vance is also the author of the foreword to Roberts’s upcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light, which The New Republic has obtained in full even though the book’s publisher, HarperCollins’s Broadside Books, has apparently tried to suppress it amid the scrutiny of Project 2025 and Vance’s ties to Roberts.

The subtitle and cover of Roberts’s book were softened as scrutiny of the Trump campaign’s ties to Project 2025 grew. The book was originally announced with the subtitle “Burning Down Washington to Save America” and featured a match on the center of its cover. The subtitle is now “Taking Back Washington to Save America,” and the match is nowhere to be seen. Promotional language invoking conservatives on the “warpath” to “burn down … institutions” like the FBI, the Department of Justice, and universities has also been removed or toned down, though it is still present in some sales pages.

But the inspiration for that extreme language can be found in Vance’s foreword, which ends with a call for followers to “circle the wagons and load the muskets,” and describes Roberts’s ideas as an “essential weapon” in the “fights that lay [sic] ahead.” (The New Republic downloaded Dawn’s Early Light earlier this month from NetGalley, which provides advance copies of books to reviewers and booksellers. Copies were removed from the platform earlier this month.)

Trump might yet replace Vance — though he has only a few weeks before ballot finalization would make that far more difficult.

But he can’t disown the hundreds of top Trump aides associated with this project.

Because of Trump’s stranglehold on the Republican Party, Kamala Harris is in a sweet spot: She can claim credit for Joe Biden’s successful policies. But she can also treat Trump as a near-incumbent, holding him accountable for all the things Republicans have been doing to help Trump beat Joe Biden for the last two years.

That may turn out to be a serious vulnerability for Trump going forward.

Update: Roger Sollenberger confirms that LaCivita pushed Dans out.

The Trump campaign forced the architect of the ultraconservative Project 2025 manifesto out of his job on Tuesday as it sought political cover from a controversy dogging Republicans, the Daily Beast can report exclusively.

Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita “put the screws” to mastermind Paul Dans in an effort to force him out and shut down the right-wing shop behind Proejct 2025, a sprawling blueprint that sought to overhaul the federal government and implement an array of far-right policies for a potential second Trump administration, a well-placed source told the Daily Beast.

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Fraudulent Failson Judgement: JD Vance “Ain’t From Here”

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As always with DC’s gossip press, they exercise almost none of the scrutiny with Donald Trump that they do with others.

One recent example comes in the treatment of Joe Biden and Trump’s sons’ involvement in campaign decision-making.

There was a whole flood of stories because Hunter Biden was part of his father’s decision on whether to stay in the race, as he has been involved in past such decisions.

Hunter Biden has joined meetings with President Joe Biden and his top aides since his father returned to the White House from Camp David, Maryland, on Monday evening, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The president’s son has also been talking to senior White House staff members, these people said.

While he is regularly at the White House residence and events, it is unusual for Hunter Biden to be in and around meetings his father is having with his team, these people said. They said the president’s aides were struck by his presence during their discussions.

A federal jury in Delaware found Hunter Biden guilty last month on gun-related charges. He remains under indictment accused of tax-related felonies, to which he has pleaded not guilty. Shortly after the jury found him guilty, he returned to his home in California.

One of the people familiar with the matter said Hunter Biden has been closely advising his father since the family gathered over the weekend at Camp David after Thursday’s debate. This person said Hunter Biden has “popped into” a couple of meetings and phone calls the president has had with some of his advisers.

Another person familiar with the matter said the reaction from some senior White House staff members has been, “What the hell is happening?”

The insinuation, of course, is that no convicted felon should be involved in such decisions.

The gossip press exhibited no such qualms that Paul Manafort — whose tax fraud was an order of magnitude greater than what Hunter is accused of, and who was hiding the foreign clients with whom he was sharing campaign strategy — was back advising Trump.

Crazier still, the gossip press seems to have little awareness that since May 30, there’s always a convicted felon involved in strategy meetings involving Trump.

I’m more interested in the double standard regarding the involvement of Trump’s sons in campaign decision-making.

Sure, in the Mueller investigation, Don Jr avoided charges for accepting campaign help from the Agalarovs because Mueller rightly figured the failson could argue he had no idea you shouldn’t do that. But both sons have been implicated in their Daddy’s fraud, first when they misused charity donations to benefit Pops, and then when they fiddled with real estate valuations.

Hunter Biden undoubtedly sold on his father’s influence — though he has not been criminally charged with doing so — but Trump’s sons have been involved in  fraudulent claims about their father so he’d get that influence. They’re just conmen like their Daddy, selling the brand.

And on top of the fact that Don Jr has long been targeted by foreign spies and Neo-Nazis, he’s painfully stupid. As Michael Cohen testified, “Mr. Trump had frequently told me and others that his son Don Jr. had the worst judgment of anyone in the world.”

Yet, in all the reviews (or, in some cases, shameless beat sweeteners) of the sons’ involvement in Trump’s recent decisions, there has been no question about whether their cooperation in Dad’s fraud or their poor judgment should disqualify them from such a role.

That’s particularly true given their decisive role in picking JD Vance. The stories describe how the sons, especially Don Jr, were able to convince their Dad to ignore the counsel of actual political consultants like Kellyanne Conway and instead pick an inexperienced extremist who once called Trump America’s Hitler as his running mate.

With the clock ticking to the Republican National Convention last week, Donald Trump met privately to discuss his running mate search with two of his closest advisers: his sons.

The conversation quickly turned tense when the former president indicated that he was leaning toward Doug Burgum, until recently the largely unknown governor of North Dakota — but someone whose low-maintenance, no-drama personality would never threaten to outshine Trump.

That’s when Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump chimed in.

“Don Jr. and Eric went bats— crazy: ‘Why would you do something so stupid? He offers us nothing,’” a longtime Republican operative familiar with the discussion told NBC News.

“They were basically all like ‘JD, JD, JD,’” the operative said.

Trump ratified his sons’ recommendation here Monday, selecting Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his vice presidential candidate. Trump called Vance with the news 20 minutes before announcing it on social media, a source familiar with the call said.

In choosing Vance, Trump made a different calculation than he did in 2016 and leaned fully into his MAGA base. Back then, he looked to his daughter and her husband — the more establishment-friendly Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner — for strategic advice. This time, his red meat-throwing sons have a more central role. And instead of going with a longtime traditional Republican like Mike Pence, Trump chose the MAGA warrior Vance.

Apparently, Don Jr — he of the poor judgment — was impressed by Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir that treats Trump’s people as deplorables.

The eldest Trump son, who had been a fan of “Hillbilly Elegy” before the campaign, had come to like Vance personally, and the two developed a close friendship after Vance won his Senate race.

And so, in spite of the fact that JD Vance actually underperformed Republicans in his Senate race, Trump was convinced that Peter Thiel’s errand-boy will help him win the Rust Belt.

Thanks to Vice President Harris’ accession to the candidacy, media outlets are stumbling over each other to invite Andy Beshear on to explain how furious he is that Vance monetized calling people from Eastern Kentucky, “lazy.”

I want the American people to know what a Kentuckian is, what they look like, because — let me just tell you — that JD Vance ain’t from here. The nerve that he has to call the people of Kentucky, of Eastern Kentucky, lazy.

Listen, these are the hard-working coal miners that powered the industrial revolution, that created the strongest middle class the world has ever seen, powered us through two World Wars. We should be thanking them, not calling them lazy.

And in his first solo appearance, JD Vance attempted to make a joke about Diet Mountain Dew, which flopped.

Which has led superstars like AOC …

… and Mallory McMorrow to make fun of him.

 

There are already reports that, in light of Biden ceding the ticket to Kamala, the campaign may be regretting that decision.

Even the selection of Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate, campaign officials acknowledged, was something of a luxury meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.

Even in Pennsylvania or Michigan, JD’s extremism, especially on choice, will be a liability. And only a spoiled brat like Don Jr would have missed that Hillbilly Elegy insulted Trump’s deplorables, it didn’t celebrate them.

I suppose I should take solace from the fact that NYT is wasting beat sweeteners pretending that Don Jr is anything but a less effective conman than his Daddy.

By all means let Don Jr steer Daddy into stupid decisions.

It just gives smart girls one more thing to laugh at.

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