Letters from an American - August 27, 2024

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

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August 27, 2024. Sam Stein of The Bulwark reported yesterday that the Trump campaign is about to start running ads in the area around Mar-a-Lago. Trump insiders say the campaign has paid almost $50,000 to run ads to make Trump and local donors feel good. On August 14th, Kevin Cate, former spokesperson for President Barack Obama, predicted that Trump would spend his first television dollars in Florida for his ego and against his team's advice. And that's how you'll know we're in landslide territory. Predictions about future elections and an average of $3.08 will get you a cup of coffee these days. But there are some interesting signs out there today. Pollster Tom Bonior noted what he called the Harris effect.

The 13 states that have updated their voter files since July 21st, when Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president, have seen incredible surges in voter registration relative to the same time period in 2020, driven by women, voters of color, and young voters. The registrations of young Black women have almost tripled compared with the same period in 2020. The registrations of young Hispanic women are up by 150 percent. Black women overall have almost doubled their registration numbers from 2020, Bonnier wrote. These changes benefit Democrats, Bonior noted. Democratic registration has increased by over 50 percent as compared to only 7 percent for Republicans. These new

registrants are modeled as plus 20 points Democratic, as opposed to plus six during the same week in 2020. The Cook Political Report today moved the electoral votes of Minnesota, New Hampshire, and North Carolina and the governor's races in North Carolina and Washington toward the Democrats. Minnesota, New Hampshire, and the Washington governor have gone from leaning Democratic to likely Democratic wins. The North Carolina governor's race has gone from toss-up to lean Democratic. North Carolina has gone from lean Republican to toss-up. Meanwhile, Trump began the day by posting an advertisement for the fourth series of Trump digital trading cards, or NFTs, which are unique digital tokens, featuring heroic

images of Trump. People who buy 15 or more of them at $99 a piece get a physical trading card as well. Trump said that the physical card has a piece of the suit he wore at the presidential debate, and Trump promises to sign five of them randomly. Up to 25 people who buy $25,750 worth of the cards with cryptocurrency will be invited to a gala next month at his Jupiter, Florida golf club. In the ad, Trump made it a point to emphasize his enthusiasm for cryptocurrency, an emphasis that dovetails with Trump's recent promotion of an official cryptocurrency project. He linked to a telegram channel run by his sons Don Jr. and Eric that, at the time, was called The Defiant Ones but has been renamed World Liberty Financial. While there's little public information about the project, the channel has almost 50,000 subscribers. Hawking merchandise was an odd move

for a presidential candidate, and it suggested his focus is elsewhere than on the election. Also today, Trump announced that he plans to make former Democrats Robert Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, both of whom have endorsed him, honorary members of his transition team. Kennedy told right-wing personality Tucker Carlson that he would help pick the people who will be running the government. This afternoon, Trump announced that the terms for the September 10th presidential debate had been set, but the fact it came from him alone suggested he was trying to get his way by simply declaring he had won. Indeed, the Harris campaign said the issue hadn't been settled, and ABC News, which is holding the debate, did not comment. Late this afternoon, Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment

against Trump in the federal criminal case concerning Trump's attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. After the Supreme Court decided on July 1st, 2024, in the aptly named case of Donald J. Trump versus the United States, that Trump cannot be charged with crimes committed as part of his official duties, the criminal case Smith had filed against him for his attempt to steal the election had to be reworked to eliminate those actions the court deemed official. A new grand jury heard the evidence for this indictment, avoiding concerns that the previous grand jury might be swayed by evidence that they had heard before but was no

longer admissible. The new indictment removes those matters but retains the four original charges and clarifies that they concern actions that are not official duties. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance of Civil Discourse notes that while the old indictment referred to Trump as a former president, this one refers to him as a candidate for president. Trump greeted the announcement with a long, unhinged rant on his social media company, saying that the people of our country will see what is happening with all of these corrupt lawsuits against me and will reject them by giving me an overwhelming victory on November 5th for President of the United States. For those counting, legal analyst Andrew Weissman wrote, five separate grand juries, scores of citizens,

have now found probable cause that Trump committed multiple felonies. And then this evening, Quill Lawrence and Tom Bowman of NPR explained the story behind the surprising photos of Trump on Monday giving a thumbs up over a grave in Arlington National Cemetery. The reporters wrote that two members of Donald Trump's campaign staff had a verbal and physical altercation Monday with an official at the cemetery, where federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities. When a cemetery official tried to prevent Trump campaign staff from entering the section where the grave was located, campaign staff verbally abused and pushed the official aside.

A Trump campaign spokesperson said the official who tried to prevent the staff from holding a political event in the cemetery was clearly suffering from a mental health episode. The elephant in the room these days is that most Republicans, along with many pundits, are pretending that Trump is a normal presidential candidate. They are ignoring his mental lapses, calls for authoritarianism, grifting, lack of grasp on any sort of policy, and criminality, even as he has hollowed out the once grand Republican Party and threatens American democracy itself. It's hard to look away from the reality that the Republican senators could have stopped

this catastrophe at many points in Trump's term, at the very least by voting to convict Trump at his first impeachment trial. At the time, Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican of Texas, said, out of 100 senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There's not a single one. Republican senators nonetheless stood behind Trump. This is not about this president. It's not about anything he's been accused of doing, then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican of Kentucky, told his colleagues. It has always been about November 3, 2020. It's about flipping the Senate.

When the framers wrote the Constitution, they did not foresee senators abandoning the principles of the country in order to support a president they thought would enhance their own careers. Assuming that lawmakers would jealously guard their own power, the framers gave to the members of the House of Representatives the power to impeach a president. To the members of the Senate, they gave the sole power to try impeachments. They assumed that lawmakers, who had just fought a war to break free of a monarch, would understand that their own interests would always require stopping the rise of an authoritarian leader. But the framers did not foresee the rise of political partisanship. In the modern era, extreme partisanship has led to voter suppression to keep Republicans in power,

the weaponization of the filibuster to stop Democratic legislation, and gerrymandering to enable Republicans to take far more legislative seats than they have earned. The demands of this extreme partisanship also mean that members of one of the nation's major political parties have lined up behind a man whom, were he running this sort of campaign even 10 years ago, they would have dismissed with derision. Finally, devastatingly, the partisanship that made senators keep Trump in office enabled him to name to the Supreme Court three justices. Those three justices were key to making up the majority that overturned the nation's fundamental principle that all people must be equal before the law. In July 2024, they ruled that unlike anyone else, a president is above it.

In May 2016, South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham famously observed, If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed with music composed by Michael Moss.