Our Time for Choosing

World events and dark anti-immigrant zealotry have made it all the more important for leaders to get off the sidelines.

We thought we’d seen the worst of Helene after it made landfall in Florida, but the storm continued its devastation through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia over the weekend, killing at least 90 people and causing billions of dollars in damage. The scenes coming in look absolutely horrific and both campaigns today are adjusting around it, with Trump heading to Georgia to help with relief and Harris going to FEMA headquarters to be updated on those same efforts.

Here are a few places worth donating to as people try to pick up the pieces:

The North Carolina Disaster Relief Fund
World Central Kitchen
Salvation Army

Happy Monday.

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US Vice President Kamala Harris (L) shakes hands with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky during a meeting on the sideline of the Summit on peace in Ukraine, at the luxury Burgenstock resort, near Lucerne, on June 15, 2024. (Photo by ALESSANDRO DELLA VALLE/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

A Foreign Policy Election

—William Kristol

Events this election year have often called to mind Lenin’s apocryphal remark: “There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.” Events these past few days have also called to mind the perhaps equally apocryphal remark of his comrade, Leon Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

It’s obvious that, from Europe to the Middle East and perhaps beyond, we’re living in a world of wars or potential wars. It’s also obvious that dealing with the challenges of such a world will have to be a major focus of the next American president.

But, we’re often told, American voters aren’t very interested in wars or potential wars abroad. We vote on inflation, or immigration, or abortion. Foreign policy isn’t our thing.

This has seemed to be the case so far in this cycle, even though it’s occurred in the shadow of two truly consequential moments beyond our borders: Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Still, so far, foreign policy has taken a back seat to domestic issues.

Is that about to change?

It’s not as if American voters have never put foreign policy front and center in presidential campaigns. Foreign policy and national security were central to many elections during the Cold War. You couldn’t write an account of the presidential campaigns of 1952, or 1968 and 1972, or 1980 and 1984, without discussing foreign policy debates. Even after the Cold War era, the response to 9/11 was key to the campaign of 2004. The Iraq war overshadowed all of 2008—until the economy collapsed.

Developments in the Middle East over the past week suggest 2024 may join the ranks of those presidential elections where voters are reminded that in electing a president they are electing a commander-in-chief.

It’s going to be hard to ignore foreign policy over the final five weeks of this campaign. And the choice is going to be far clearer than it often has been.

Kamala Harris has presented herself as standing in the mainstream of post–World War II American national security policy. One can question whether she has fully come to grips with the new challenges we face, or whether she is fully ready for the challenges ahead. But she clearly is committed to standing with our allies and upholding and even revitalizing the U.S.-led international order.

The Trump-Vance ticket, on the other hand, features an explicit repudiation of that foreign policy tradition. That intellectual repudiation—embodied in the phrase “America First”—is accompanied by Donald Trump’s contempt for the members of the military, the intelligence officials, and the diplomats who have carried out those policies.

Trump also has the distinction of having many of the senior national security officials who served in his own administration saying he is unfit to be commander-in-chief.

Surely it is time for those judgments—of John Kelly and Jim Mattis, of H.R. McMaster and John Bolton and others—to be brought more clearly front and center in this campaign.

It’s time for the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, to acknowledge it’s more important to help stop Trump from becoming president than to stay out of the presidential race in order to preserve some mythical ability to help shape the future of the Republican party after the election.

And it’s also time for two-time presidential candidate Chris Christie to step forward. Christie went out of his way to travel to Ukraine during his presidential campaign in the summer of 2023. It was an “incredibly emotional experience,” he said. Later in the year, in one of the presidential debates, Christie declared that funding Ukraine is “the price we pay for being the leaders of the free world.”

Above all, it is time for the previous Republican commander-in-chief, George W. Bush, to get off the bench and join his vice president, Dick Cheney, in making clear that Trump is unfit to be our next president, and that Harris is far preferable. Others like Condi Rice might say a word as well! So many who’ve worked for Bush and Rice have stepped up to put the country first. There’s no reason their bosses shouldn’t follow suit.

All of these figures must have been appalled when JD Vance voted against aid for Ukraine earlier this year. They must have been revolted when they saw Trump on Friday, standing next to Volodymyr Zelensky, casually asserting a moral equivalence between the cause of the brutal, aggressive dictator Putin and that of the people of Ukraine.

And all of them—along with Vice President Harris and her campaign—could and must do more to make clear to voters the grave dangers of Trump’s reckless America First world view. Embracing a foreign policy that hearkens back to the world of the 1930s is a risk I think the American people will not want to take. It’s a risk that should be central to our national deliberations over the next five weeks.

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The Darkness Grows

—Sam Stein

World events are not the only element that should prompt us to step back from the daily barrage of election fodder and assess the larger picture of the campaign being waged in front of us.

Over the course of this weekend, Trump warned of migrants ruining traditional American culture and taking over schools. He said he would “liberate” Wisconsin “from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang members.” He said that migrants were hardened criminals who would “walk into your kitchen” and “cut your throat.” He said Vice President Kamala Harris would turn every town into a “third-world hellhole.”

How does one process all this?

On the one hand, we expect this type of behavior from Trump. Racism and anti-immigrant viciousness have always been the heart of his appeal. And he’s also always one to ratchet up the rhetoric as Election Day approaches. Because of that, one’s tempted to just treat this as politics—Trump’s politics—as usual.

“Trump pounds immigration message after Harris’ border visit,” read Axios’s summary. 

“Donald Trump sharpened his criticism on border security in a swing-state visit, playing up a political vulnerability for Kamala Harris,” read Bloomberg’s.

But treating these lines as mere volleys in a larger political back and forth does them, and the voters, a disservice. Trump’s not leveling attacks; he’s outlining a strikingly dark worldview, with strikingly dark implications for the country.

We’re at risk of not recognizing this because of our inclination to apply horse-race coverage to the election. Trump is running the most nativist, xenophobic campaign in modern times. The bigger picture is what matters here. We should be clear and honest about it.

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Quick Hits

THE VERY ONLINE ASSEMBLE OFFLINE: Quite the assortment of personalities made their way down to the National Mall yesterday for a pro-Trump “Rescue the Republic” rally, which featured appearances by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Charlie Kirk, Bret Weinstein, Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson, Rob Schneider, and “journalist” Matt Taibbi.

For a taste of what was on tap, here is Brand’s closing prayer: “I ask, heavenly Father, for a new era of peace—that Satan be cast out in your name in all his forms, but in particular in the bizarre Kafkaesque Huxley-esque late Orwellian form of totalitarianism bureaucracy in the name of care.”

Very online Trump supporters have gotten it in their head recently that they are actually America’s big-tent party: “Team Unity,” as a recent batch of Arizona GOP billboards featuring Trump, Vance, RFK, Gabbard, Elon Musk, and Vivek Ramaswamy put it. That’s true in one sense: MAGA welcomes anybody who has this particular brand of internet brain worms.

THE FINAL PUSH: The folks at Republican Voters Against Trump have started their final big advertising campaign leading up to the election:

Republican Voters Against Trump launched a new $15 million swing state ad blitz, our largest campaign to date this cycle, and our final major ad push before the election. The campaign features first-person testimonial ads and billboards showcasing former Trump voters who will support Kamala Harris this election. . . .

This is the capstone of the 2024 Republican Voters Against Trump campaign, and the final major ad push ahead of the November election. To date, we have collected more than 300 testimonials from former Trump voters who no longer support him, representing 46 states and the District of Columbia. The campaign has already spent $15 million to date this cycle, in addition to the new campaign.

You can watch one of their ads here.

‘THOROUGHLY FAILED TO DELIVER’: America’s most online politician, JD Vance, found himself in hot water yet again this weekend after the Washington Post got hold of a batch of his old Twitter DMs from 2020. “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy),” Vance wrote in February 2020. Biden, he added later, was probably headed for an election win.

It’s an amazing picture. Vance’s entire account for why he abandoned his fervent 2016 Never Trump positions has been that Trump won him over by being such a damn good economic populist in his first term. Not that anybody ever really bought that—Vance just realized MAGA was the better bet for ascending to greater power.

Team Trump’s response to this has been to dox the guy who leaked Vance’s DMs (he works for consultancy-borg firm Deloitte) and threaten to ice the company out of government contracts. So I guess you could say they’re taking it well.

JESUS FREAKS: For his part, Vance isn’t bothering to engage too much with stories like that. With a month and change to go before the election, he’s been busy pounding the pavement to woo the median American voter, per WaPo:

Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance appeared Saturday at a town hall event organized by top Christian nationalist leaders who promote election denialism and portray Vice President Kamala Harris as a “demon.”

The event’s host, Lance Wallnau, who emceed the live event and introduced Vance’s first town hall on the campaign trail, is a leading figure in the fast-growing New Apostolic Reformation, a movement that preaches Christian supremacy through a blend of prophecy and hard-right politics. . . .

For his part, Wallnau has previously cast Harris as both a demon and Jezebel, the biblical symbol of womanly wickedness. He has said on his podcast that Harris represents “the spirit of Jezebel in a way that will be even more ominous than Hillary [Clinton] because she’ll bring a racial component, and she’s younger.”

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