Balls, Strikes, and Yikes!
October baseball isn’t the only reason we’re nervous.
A splash of economic cold water to kick off October: About 45,000 dockworkers went on strike overnight as the International Longshoremen’s Association pushes for a new contract from the United States Maritime Alliance.
The New York Times reports:
A strike could cost the economy $4.5 billion to $7.5 billion, or a 0.1 percent hit to U.S. annualized gross domestic product, every week as truckers and other workers dependent on the ports are furloughed and manufacturers experience delivery delays, according to analysts at Oxford Economics. While those losses would be reversed once the strike was over, it would take a month to clear the backlog for each week of the strike, the analysts estimated.
Fresh supply chain disruptions with a month to go until the election: Hold onto your hats.
Meanwhile: the vice-presidential debate is tonight! Why not watch it with friends? Sarah, Sam, A.B., and JVL will be live at 8:30 to talk the candidates on, then back on for commentary during the commercial breaks and to break things down when it’s all over. Happy Tuesday.
Why Vance Matters
—William Kristol
A few thoughts on tonight’s prime time matchup.
On the one hand, the Atlanta Braves will be exhausted after playing 18 high-pressure innings yesterday, and then flying cross-county to San Diego. And their best pitcher is unavailable for the series. On the other hand, part of the greatness of baseball is its unpredictability—
Wait, wait, wait! My colleagues are telling me that I’m supposed to write about the vice presidential debate, not the baseball playoffs.
Okay, I guess. Their wish is my command. But let me say, as a Mets fan, that the debate and the playoffs give me similar sensations: jangling nerves, palpable anxiety, and a heavy anticipation that it could all go very wrong.
Usually, the vice presidential debate doesn’t carry those types of emotional stakes. But this year’s matters. It matters because it actually matters if JD Vance becomes vice president or not.
So I’ll watch the debate on The Bulwark’s live stream. I’ll admit that I might occasionally be watching on split screen, along with the Braves-Padres game. I mean, all debate and no baseball, that might be a bridge too far.
But, to repeat: We ought to take the prospect—nay, the threat—of a Vance vice presidency seriously.
Why?
First of all, if the Trump-Vance ticket prevails, during the next four years Vance could become president. As Hannah Yoest points out in her fine piece on the website today, “Donald Trump is currently 78 years old. He is the oldest major-party presidential candidate in history.”
Or, if Trump’s health or acuity or interest in the job falters, Vance could become an exceptionally powerful vice president.
But even if Trump stays in the pink of health, Vance will be an unusually influential vice president. He really is committed to an America First agenda abroad, and a Project 2025 agenda at home. He’s thought far more than Trump has about how to implement these agendas. And he will spend time and effort as vice president making sure those agendas are pursued, and that the right personnel are in place to make it so.
Vance will seek to be something like a de facto White House chief of staff. Working with his allies Don Jr., Steve Bannon, and Tucker Carlson, he will have the ambition and the ability to play a major role, and a radicalizing one, in a Trump White House.
So, if you’re tempted to be reassured that we don’t have to worry too much about a Trump second term, because the guardrails mostly held in his first, don’t be. Vance will make it his mission to ensure that those guardrails can and will be overcome. He’s been clear about this, saying for example that on the choice that confronted Mike Pence on January 6th—whether to certify the 2020 election—he would have acted differently.
If you’re worried about the authoritarianism of a second Trump administration, you should be even more worried when you think about the more focused and far-reaching commitment to authoritarianism that Vance will bring to that administration.
It’s also the case, as Hannah points out, that “For all of Vance’s putrid ideological excretions, the most obvious and basic argument against his election to the vice presidency is that he’s 40 years old and has no substantial leadership experience. He’s wholly unqualified for the office he is running for.”
Sadly, Vance is qualified for the job of ensuring that a second Trump term does even more damage than the first to decency and the rule of law at home, and to the cause of freedom and the international order abroad.
In sum: Having Trump back in the White House would be bad. Having Trump and Vance together in the White House would be worse.
I trust Tim Walz will find many ways to make this point tonight. I might even watch Walz and Vance on full screen. With just occasional breaks to look in on the Braves and Padres.
Trump’s Miracle Worker
—Andrew Egger
The most important currency in a presidential campaign is time. Candidates don’t have much of it. Where they spend it tells us about their priorities.
This past weekend, JD Vance spent his time at a “revival” led by televangelist/influencer/self-described prophet Lance Wallnau.
You may have seen a sprinkling of Wallnau’s nuttier utterances in the news. Among other things, he once called Kamala Harris a “demon” who represents “the spirit of Jezebel” and accused her of practicing witchcraft.
But he’s more than just a pro-Trump kook. Wallnau is emblematic of the growing faction in American Christianity that is made in Trump’s image.
Wallnau, who has been in ministry since the 1990s, came up in the charismatic movement—the loosely affiliated coalition of Christians who place a heavy emphasis on supposed present-day miracles and direct spiritual revelations.
Wallnau is also an avowed Christian nationalist who thinks the church has spent too much time trying to win souls and not enough trying to accrue political power. “The business of shifting culture or transforming nations does not require a majority of conversions,” he wrote in his book Invading Babylon back in 2013. “We need more disciples in the right places, the high places.”
In pursuit of those friends in high places, Wallnau regularly offers spiritual artillery support to whatever the MAGA movement is up to in a given moment. Back in 2022, for instance, he was talking about how God had raised Vladimir Putin up to put a “nail in the tire” of the “one-world government agenda” by attacking Ukraine. Putin is “more under the influence of Christian ideology than Europe or the United States left,” he said. “Because he’s saying, ‘Look, man, this whole LGBTQ, abortion thing—you guys are in freefall. Transgender—it’s perverse.’ He said, ‘I’m going with historic Christian nationalism.’”
And, crucially, Wallnau is someone who owes his emergence as a national figure to Trump himself. Back in 2016, he was “prophesying” to anyone who would listen that Trump would be the next president. He wrote a book about it: God’s Chaos Candidate. When Trump did win, it was two jackpots at once for Wallnau: He had made a powerful ally and “hit” on a big-time prophecy, bolstering his reliability among his charismatic followers.
Wallnau kept right on prophesying about Trump’s coming triumphs for God’s kingdom—until Trump lost in 2020. This was an inflection point among pro-Trump charismatics. Some, like the young influential pastor Jeremiah Johnson, apologized for getting their prophecy wrong and faced an immediate and powerful backlash from their audiences.
Others, like Wallnau, took a different tack. The prophecies hadn’t been wrong—Trump had won. But demonic forces were now trying to steal the victory from him. In December 2020, Wallnau preached that God would “overturn” the election—that Trump’s “assignment” from God was not yet complete. The next month, he was at the Capitol on January 6th. The politics and the prophecy fed into one another, becoming self-fulfilling.
There’s one more element to all this: the miracles. A bedrock part of charismatic belief is faith in the eleventh-hour miracle—or even the twelfth-hour one, when things seem truly over. In a recent sermon, Wallnau used the same language of “assignment” while telling a story about an acquaintance whose prayers—he said—had literally raised her husband from the dead: “The Lord had shown him a vision that he has to back to earth because his assignment isn’t finished yet,” Wallnau preached. “This is very important. Your greatest argument with death is an unfinished assignment.”
Miraculous deliverance even after loss seems final: When it comes to the salvation of souls, that’s the gospel message of Christianity. But Wallnau’s gospel is different. His supposed miracles are political victories, and he promises they can manifest even after all the votes have been counted. In 2020, that gospel helped lead to January 6th. Where will it lead this year? Guess we’ll see. JD Vance, for one, is along for the ride.
Quick Hits
GRADE A EXPECTATIONS SETTING: In an interview with Fox Nation last night, Donald Trump made it clear that anything other than a literal faceplant by Tim Walz on the debate stage tonight would be an unexpected triumph for the Minnesota governor. The ex-president said of JD Vance: “He’s going up against a moron. A total moron.” Usually, campaigns act like their opponents possess celestial-like powers over the English language in an effort to raise expectations for their debate performance. But Trump dances to the beat of his own drum.
SPEAKING OF THAT FOX NATION INTERVIEW: Remember last week when Trump world complained bitterly that Stephanie Ruhle would be a softball interview for Kamala Harris? They even suggested that the MSNBC host was on the campaign payroll. Well, the person who interviewed Trump last night was, quite literally, on his payroll. Kellyanne Conway, his 2016 campaign manager and longtime adviser, had the honors.
NORTH CAROLINA ON THE MIND: Hurricane recovery efforts continued in western North Carolina, as the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene came into sharper focus. The long-term implications of these types of storms have become harder to ignore too. The Times notes today that people in Asheville are being forced to rethink the safety of their town, after having been considered a refuge from climate change because of its perch in the mountain ranges. Meanwhile, the Post has a poll conducted from North Carolina, though one taken before Helene hit. It has Trump at 50 and Harris at 48, within the margin of error. It also concludes that the myriad scandals surrounding Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson have not impacted Trump.
YOU DON’T LOOK A DAY OVER 99: Happy 100th birthday to Jimmy Carter, whose life continues to be remarkable. Placed in hospice care well over a year ago, the former president has made it to his personal centennial. The current president and first lady commemorated the day by placed a “100” sign on the White House front lawn.
Cheap Shots
Most people forget that Tim Walz non political career was interacting with 13 to 21 year old men and women. A 40 year old tech bro is just a former student!
I think we need to be realistic about Vance's severe limitations. He's smart and snake-tongued, but he talks too much, and says too many stupid things. He has left a long trail of positions to attack. He repeatedly disparaged Trump in the most brutal terms, even as late as 2020 calling his presidency a failure, and yet he's on Trump's ticket because he realized how wrong he was about Trump all along. Except, based on the record, that's clearly a lie; he thought he was toxic and he thought he was an ineffective president, and there's a written record to prove it. And Vance just made up a story about Haitian immigrants and put it on the Internet so he could troll Democrats, and now the town of Springfield, Ohio is in complete turmoil and people here legally are in fear for their lives. These are things Vance needs to be made to answer for, and I think they're substantially more consequential than tampons in the boys' room. Walz will do fine, not because of how great he is at debating, but because of what a cynical prick the guy is whom he's debating.