Deep Breaths. Deep Breaths.
It won’t be a cakewalk, but Harris has a clear path to a victory tonight.
Debate day is here, and it might be the only top-of-the-ticket one we get: Kamala Harris has yet to agree to appear in either of the additional dates proposed by Donald Trump for later this month.
Want to hang out with us for it? (Not us specifically—the folks you really want to see!) We’ll be taking the whole thing live at Bulwark HQ tonight, with Sarah, JVL, A.B., and Sam Stein heading to YouTube for preview, post-view, and programming during the breaks.
See you then! Happy Tuesday.
How Harris Wins Tonight
—Andrew Egger
In another, saner world, it would be enough for Kamala Harris to get up on stage tonight and say: “Remember when my opponent tried for months to engineer a constitutional crisis that would let him steal the election? Remember when he whipped up a mob to ransack the Capitol? Remember when he almost got Mike Pence killed? Vote for me to make sure he never gets to do any of that shit again.”
But we don’t live in that world. Instead, the vice president will have to play defense as well as offense when she faces off against Donald Trump. Her main job is to reach those undecided voters who need to learn more about her before lending their support. But she also needs to deflect the incoming that Trump will surely provide. A night where she accomplishes these three tasks will be a win.
Explain her evolution.
Trump’s most powerful argument against Harris—tucked in amid the raving about her father the “Marxist professor” and only recently becoming black—is still that during the 2019 Democratic primary she positioned herself way farther left than she is today on all sorts of policy matters.
Policy flip-flops aren’t some unforgivable political sin. (God knows Trump’s had his share.) But spotlighting these changes allows Trump to sow doubt in independent voters’ minds that Harris’s current iteration is the “real” one: What if she’s only making these soothing centrist noises to get elected, and then snaps back?
So far, Harris has been too cautious in her response to this line. She waved off the subject during her interview last month with Dana Bash: “My values have not changed.” Meanwhile, each line of questioning about each individual flip-flop has been met with terse shutdowns from campaign flacks. Yesterday, CNN’s Andy Kaczynski asked the campaign: Does Harris still support, as she did in 2019, taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained immigrants? “The vice president’s positions have been shaped by three years of effective governance as part of the Biden-Harris administration,” an anonymous adviser responded.
Lots of committed Democrats want to scoff Trump’s policy attacks off. But there are plenty of gettable Harris voters out there who still have a good-faith concerns about what her governance would actually look like. So she should be open and candid about why she’s put so many positions in the rearview mirror. It’s not about reassuring people who have strong preferences about individual issues—it’s about reinforcing her credibility in the face of Trump’s silly “Marxist” attacks in general.
Hit the kitchen-table pain points.
“One awkward thing about Trump discourse today is that all the vile things about him suck up so much oxygen that it can be hard to make space to talk about the ways in which he’s merely very stupid.”
That’s what I wrote back in June. Since then, we’ve seen this play out time and again. Trump’s cartoon villainy is in the spotlight constantly, while his crackpot ideas for how to “fix” the economy—deporting millions of low-paid migrant workers, slapping monster tariffs on huge swaths of U.S. imports—remain forever in the shadows. But these ideas, if implemented, would jack up prices on consumer goods in America tremendously.
Harris should beat Trump about the head and neck with this, and do so at length. And she should spotlight her own policies aimed at reining in prices—ideally leaning less into the silly grocery-store price-gouging lines and more into her promising pledge to juice new housing construction.
The point here is to attack the foundation of one of the great mass delusions that work in Trump’s favor: that he’s a highly capable transgressor, a jerk who nevertheless makes the trains run on time. Harris should make clear that what Trump is actually running on is blowing up the train station.
Win on democracy.
The democracy issue alone won’t win Harris this debate. And polling suggests that it simply isn’t as salient for voters as other matters.
But that doesn’t mean she should ignore it. The guy did try to engineer a constitutional crisis! He did shrug while his lynch mob changed “Hang Mike Pence!” He is promising retribution against all his political foes, right out in the open! This is not just important to point out, but to tie it into the larger arguments around Trump being a chaos agent, who will be focused largely on past grievances and is perfectly comfortable limiting other’s freedoms in service of his own interests.
If she hits her other marks, it’ll be all the more effective when Harris nails him here.
Grab ’Em By The . . .
—Cathy Young
The latest Republican pitch to voters: If you don’t vote for Trump, migrants will eat your pets.
It all started Friday with a social media post from an account called “End Wokeness” about the horrors supposedly unfolding in Springfield, Ohio after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris let loose “20,000 Haitian immigrants” on the town: “Now, ducks and pets are disappearing,” The evidence: a Facebook post claiming a neighbor’s daughter’s friend’s cat was eaten by the Haitians next door, and a photo of a black man carrying a wild goose.
The cat story was not only lurid but extremely implausible: The owner supposedly spent days looking for the lost feline and then just happened to see it “hanging from a branch” like a deer carcass, being carved up. Just how big was this cat!?
Skeptics were bombarded with supposed corroboration. A police video shows an Ohio woman who apparently killed and ate a cat! (She’s not in Springfield but in Canton, 175 miles away, and neither Haitian nor an immigrant. . . but hey, she’s black too!) A Springfield man testified at a city hearing about Haitians beheading ducks in the park! (He’s a trollish YouTuber and doesn’t say he witnessed it.)
Springfield really does have problems due to the recent influx of migrants, who are here legally under Temporary Protected Status. (The Trump administration tried to end it for Haitians in 2017, but legal challenges delayed the implementation long enough for a reprieve under Biden.) Estimates of the numbers range from 10,000 to 15,000 or 20,000. The right-wing British Daily Mail, hardly a migrant-friendly publication, reports that the Haitians, who have filled new jobs and moved into abandoned houses, have revitalized the local economy. But the stress of rapid change and the strain on social services and schools are real and severe. Clark County, home to Springfield, has a population of about 136,000.
In this climate, it’s no wonder that a fatal school bus crash caused by a migrant with no valid driver’s license, which killed one child and injured 23, would become a flashpoint for anger. Sadly, it’s also unsurprising that ugly, baseless rumors would swirl about the Haitians; or even, in 2024, that this skirmish would bring literal Nazis to march in Springfield and draw out the sort of social media troll who denounces Jews for “importing dysgenic migrants.”
What is shocking is that the rumors, consistently rebutted by Springfield police and by the city, would be boosted by a presidential campaign and mainstream politicians. That includes vice presidential candidate JD Vance (but of course), who amplified the claim that “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.” Sen. Ted Cruz couldn’t resist joining in:
Never mind dog whistles. This is more like an air horn.
How Nervous Are We?
—William Kristol
Debate Day is here. And it’s nerve-racking. Or is it nerve-wracking?
I’m glad you asked. Because one way to handle a period of stressful waiting is to find something else to occupy one’s mind. As it turns out, both spellings are correct.
Racking comes from the verb “to rack,” a term that has a long and somewhat grisly association with parts of the body being unpleasantly stretched. Thus the rack, the medieval torture device. As for applying this meaning of “rack” to our nerves, the first recorded use seems to be in an 1812 letter by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who wrote that he was glad to be away from the “nerve-racking and spirit-quelling metropolis.”
Wracking, on the other hand, comes from a different set of verbs including “to wreck” and “to wreak,” with meanings like damage to destroy. “Nerve-wracking” seems to have begun to move in on “nerve-racking” in the 20th century. In 1908 the New York Times wrote that “the air of America is invigorating and nerve-wracking.”
So both spellings are fine and apt. But now we’re left wondering: Will the effect of the debate sadly be, to quote Shelley, “spirit-quelling?” Or will it happily be, as the Times suggests, “invigorating?”
I don’t even want to think about the question now. It’s too . . . nerve-(w)racking.
Quick Hits
2023 ALL OVER AGAIN: Don’t look now, but House Speaker Mike Johnson’s government-funding appears to be coming apart before it really gets considered. The idea of extending funding levels for six months and attaching a GOP voting bill (prohibiting already prohibited non-citizens from voting) was designed to placate conservatives. But a handful of Republicans are already signaling they’re not on board. And that could imperil the entire enterprise in a closely-divided House.
NO MORE GENERALS UNTIL I’VE HAD MY SAY: Tommy Tuberville is at it again. The Alabama Republican has put a freeze on the nomination of Lt. Gen. Ronald P. Clark to become the head of all U.S. Army forces in the Pacific, The Washington Post reports. Tuberville did this same thing with numerous military promotions because he was upset with the Biden administration’s abortion policy. This time, the source of his pique is Clark’s refusal to address Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s hospitalization several months ago.
Cheap Shots
Illegal aliens eating household pets is bad enough, but I heard, from my aunt's best friend's friend, that they're also eating those kids who think they're cats and have to use a litter box at school. Can you even imagine?
My prediction: Harris will make some minor flub and be excoriated in the press. "She said that unemployment was currently at four percent, but it is ACTUALLY four point two!"
Trump will mumble that he actually eliminated Mondays because all the best people hated them and will claim that actually the Cheneys are secret Marxists, which is why they're endorsing Harris. He will, however, avoid calling his opponent the N-word while the microphones are live and so the New York Times will call him "statesmanlike".