Reading Trump’s Mind: Go Low. Win.

Plus: The flag-saving frat bros get their rager.

With two months to go, this race is uncomfortably tight. Politico has the post-Labor Day level-set:

Of the seven states that both campaigns have identified as the core Electoral College battlegrounds, Harris leads Trump in three of them—the “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—according to multiple polling averages. But those leads are small: In only one state, Wisconsin, does an average show a greater than 3-point margin for the vice president.

In three others—Arizona, Georgia and Nevada—the polls are so close that different polling averages have different leaders as of Sunday night.

Only in the remaining swing state—North Carolina, which Trump won in both 2016 and 2020—does the former president lead in all three polling averages.

Will Harris and Trump’s meeting on a debate stage change the dynamics of this race still further? We’ll find out next week. Happy Tuesday.

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(Photo by Drew Angerer / Getty Images.)

The Road Ahead According to Trump

—William Kristol

August is the cruelest month.

Didn’t some poet say that? (Man, all those poems they made us read in high school. So boring.) Anyway, that poet, Eliot something, I guess he was famous for saying this. Must have had a good PR guy.

Well, this year he was right. August was my first real down month in 2024. Totally unfair. But I survived it, and now it’s September, and I’m going to win.

They swapped out Sleepy Joe in late July. I never thought the Dems would get it together to do that. Pelosi—I’d never say it publicly, but she’s tough. A lot tougher than all our tough guys who just talk about being tough.

And we weren’t ready. I warned Chris and Susie that they could do this. And they told me, “Oh, yes, sir we have a Plan B. Yes, sir, we’re going to go after Harris right away. We’ll define her and take her down.” That was bullshit. They didn’t have a plan, and she got a free ride for a few weeks. Then they had their convention, and now Kamala’s up by maybe three to four points.

But she’s peaked. And it won’t be enough. Kamala’s lead is about the same as Hillary’s was in early September. I beat her bigly. It’s a lot less than Sleepy Joe’s lead in 2020. I almost beat him. I’ll beat Comrade Kamala. Or Kommiela. Or Crazy Kamabla. Look, I’m still working on it. They’ll laugh at me. But one of them will stick.

You know, people are going to look back at my visit to Arlington last week as a turning point. LaCivita knows how to do that kind of stuff. And having Corey around helped. Chris and Susie were getting fat and happy. Now with Corey lurking around, they’re getting tougher again.

Kamala was stupid to get sucked into it. Now it’s her against the Gold Star Families. She says we broke the rules at Arlington. The families say they invited me, Kamala’s never met with them, and her administration got those people killed. Who wins that argument?

So I’ll bring a few of the family members to the debate. They’ll show up with me, I’ll ask that they be seated and allowed to watch, we’ll cause a ruckus about that, that will dominate the news right before the debate. Maybe it will get in Kamala’s head. And the ABC clowns will have to ask about it.

The media really don’t understand anything. Take Vance. Sure, he is a weirdo and people don’t like him much. You know what? I don’t either. But he’s an attack machine, and some of those blows are gonna land. It’s Nixon in 1952—I remember Roy Cohn telling me about that. The media called him Tricky Dick and Dirty Dick—and they almost got Ike to chuck him off the ticket. But Ike and Nixon won.

And you know what cheered me up yesterday? Seeing Sleepy Joe out campaigning for Kamala in Pennsylvania. He’ll be on the trail again later this week, too. Can you believe it? Kamala’s whole thing is to separate from Joe—“we’re not going back” and “we’re turning the page” and all that BS. And there’s Joe, reminding everyone she’s his VP. A few days before the debate. Where I’m going to say the words “the Biden-Harris administration” and “you and Sleepy Joe” a million times. So thanks Joe.

Also, this abortion thing was a mess—but we got through it. We put it to bed before Labor Day. The idiot pro-life people are happy enough. And I’ve shown normal Americans that I’m not going to go crazy and shove this down their throats in states where they don’t want it. I think if I stick to states’ rights on this, it fades. It’ll be one question at the debate. I bet we spend more time on Afghanistan than on abortion.

That debate really is going to matter. But hey, so far this campaign, I’m one for one in debates! In fact, I was TOOOO good.

I can’t believe all the media idiocy about how Trump has to be careful in dealing with a black woman and he can’t look too mean and all that crap. Are you kidding? What country do they think we’re in? I hope Kamala believes all that stuff about when we go low they should go high. Or that she shouldn’t answer attacks.

So when Dana asked her about my “she’s not really black” line, what did she say? It’s the same old tired playbook. Next question, please. Are you kidding me? You gotta turn the attack around. Because you know what? Otherwise that old playbook works.

You know who taught me a lot about that playbook? Roy. He was great. I gotta say, I don’t miss a lot of dead people—I like people who aren’t dead—but I miss the late, great Roy Cohn.

Well, Roy, your spirit will be alive the rest of this campaign. And if you’re looking down from somewhere—I know you’re not, but it’s some kind of poetic expression people use, that Eliot guy probably used it—I’m telling you, I’m gonna make you proud next Tuesday night. I’m going low. And I’m gonna win.

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Rage, Rage

—Andrew Egger

Remember the University of North Carolina frat bros who went viral earlier this year preventing a group of protesters from tearing down an American flag? They became a cause célèbre on the right: Some of them appeared on stage at the Republican National Convention, and an online fundraiser launched by a Republican operative to “throw ‘em a rager” as a reward raked in more than half a million dollars.

Well, that “rager” happened yesterday. The vibes were weird!

The event, dubbed “Flagstock,” took place in a parking lot a few miles from UNC-Chapel Hill, and was more like a tiny music festival than a college party: a number of star-spangled musical acts took the stage, including Lee Greenwood, Aaron Lewis, and Big & Rich. (Sadly, oddly, thankfully, no Kid Rock.) There was even a flyover of fighter jets.

In the V.I.P. tent, the New York Times dutifully reported, frat bros poured beer from an ice luge (a faux pas; those are meant for Jäger) in the shape of the state of North Carolina.

“Nearby,” the Times went on, “were smiling Hooters waitresses, cornhole boards emblazoned with American flags, and red Solo cups for beer pong.”

What a scene, huh? But it wasn’t clear who it was all for. Organizers had initially expected a couple thousand students to attend the invite-only event. But only a couple hundred showed up.

“The crowd looks to be about 200-300 people,” Daily Tar Heel editor-in-chief Laney Crawley tweeted from the event. “The majority of the crowd does not appear to be members of the student body, with some UNC fraternities discouraging people from attending prior to the event.”

As the Times noted yesterday, not all the fraternity members involved in holding up the flag felt great about the whole thing:

In interviews before the event, several members of the U.N.C. chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity, said they were disappointed that the money raised on their behalf was paying for a party. They said they would rather that a significant portion of the money go to a charity that supports Jewish organizations or relief efforts in Gaza.

The “rager,” they said, felt callous given that it grew out of a painful moment for both Jews and Palestinians—all as the war in the Middle East continued.

Far be it from us at Morning Shots to look down on a good frat party! But one quick point on all this.

The frat-bro protest struck such a chord because it hit at what’s supposed to be the core of the Republican party: In the face of an angry mob trying to tear down the flag, here were some kids quietly doing a decent, patriotic thing.

But that big-tent self-conception—we’re the ones who love America!—can stand in uneasy tension with the lived reality of cultural Republicanism today, which puts a big ol’ chip on its shoulder about it. It’s “We Love America” versus “We love America, and fuck you if you’ve got a problem with that!” Often, it’s the “fuck you” part that ends up getting more of the emphasis. And that can make for a decidedly unchill celebration. No wonder so many of the frat bros stayed away.

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Quick Hits

SIX HOSTAGES KILLED: Israel’s military released grim news over the weekend: Six hostages taken from Israel last October by Hamas have been confirmed dead, with their bodies recovered by the IDF in a Hamas-run tunnel under the city of Rafah. Israel said in a statement that the hostages, which included Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, had been murdered “a short while” before IDF troops could reach them. 

In a statement, President Biden praised Goldberg-Polin’s parents, calling them “relentless and irrepressible champions of their son and of all the hostages held in unconscionable conditions.”

“I admire them and grieve with them more deeply than words can express,” Biden continued. “Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes. And we will keep working around the clock for a deal to secure the release of the remaining hostages.”

THE FORMER TRUMP VOTER SPEAKS: Our pals at Republican Voters Against Trump are getting out the checkbook this week: The organization announced $11.5 million in new spending on ads and billboards in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district. The ads, as usual for RVAT, include testimonials from disaffected former Trump supporters across the country.

THE ECONOMIC MESSAGE: The Harris campaign keeps pushing the big red button labeled “CORPORATE GREED.” “We all know costs are too high,” the narrator intones in Harris’s latest ad. “But while corporations are gouging families, Trump is focused on giving them tax cuts. But Kamala Harris is focused on you.” Harris, the ad says, will “make groceries more affordable by cracking down on price gouging” and “cut housing costs by taking on corporate speculators.”

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