Weekly Roundup: Kamala Harris's VP Pick and the GOP's Response
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Dan is flying solo this week, discussing Kamala Harris's choice of Tim Walz as her VP running mate, exploring the potential impacts on the Trump campaign and the GOP's strategies against Walz, including critiques of his military service. He touches on JD Vance's controversial comments and the GOP's current strategy under Trump and analyzes how Harris's campaign is actively reshaping the political landscape and causing tumult within the GOP, reflecting on the broader implications for the 2024 election.
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The This calculation was a smart one in terms of, ultimately, what do we need to get this ticket across the line?
And it's got to pull at the heartstrings of middle America.
And as you started off the conversation, Tim, this guy is likable.
He's likable.
Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus and our weekly roundup.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and I am flying solo this week.
Brad is out of town doing some family things and such, and so I think that's great for him.
Happy to be with all of you.
As always, I want to open by saying thank you for those who listen, who support us in so many ways.
I encourage you, if you are not a subscriber, to consider doing that.
That would help us keep doing the things that we're doing.
Certainly, reach out to me.
I always love to hear from folks.
Any thoughts, comments, feedback, Daniel Miller Swag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
As always, a lot of stuff going on this week, and I want to dive into it.
We're going to be spending a lot of time talking about Kamala Harris and her announcement of a VP running mate.
I want to talk some about the effect that this continues to have on the Trump campaign, and I think the GOP response to that, and more importantly, maybe most importantly, what I think that that means.
And we'll have to conclude by talking about J.D.
Vance a little bit, because, you know, we can't not talk about Vance, because his comments and views just don't go away.
I wanted to open, though, with this.
I mentioned Kamala Harris, and it is important, we've talked about this before, to get her name right.
One of the things that we see repeatedly, and we've talked about this, and lots of national media have talked about this, is this concerted effort on the right to continually mispronounce her name.
Trump did it this week, I think in his Mar-a-Lago speech.
It was supposed to be a press conference, it was more of a speech.
And the reason that that matters is that, on the one hand, it reenacts a long history of, I think, mocking and trivializing people of color because of quote-unquote ethnic names.
I've been in contacts with white people who, you know, sort of make a big deal about, well, I don't know how to pronounce their name, or, well, how do you pronounce that, or why do they spell it that way, or, you know, really sort of mocking the names that are not Names that they think of as traditionally white or American or whatever, and I think that it's part of that.
I think it's also part of a pattern of misogyny.
In lots of fields, lots of contexts, I even see it in the news, in academia, I certainly see it.
Oftentimes, if you have a man and a woman of, say, equal rank, equal credentials, equal status, what have you, People are more likely to use the woman's first name than the man's first name.
In other words, to presume a kind of familiarity with the person and use their first name rather than, you know, title and last name or something like that.
And what that does, again, I think, is to kind of Trivialize or render diminutive?
Is diminutize a word?
I don't know.
To diminutize women by using first names.
And so I think both of those things are happening when people on the right intentionally mispronounce Kamala Harris's name.
The reason I bring this up is because I'm also aware and I hear from folks and I've run into folks who mispronounce Kamala Harris's name unintentionally and I have been in that camp when she first rose to kind of national prominence.
So I first became aware of Harris really when she became a senator but certainly in 2020 in the run-up to the 2020 election when she launched her campaign for the presidential nomination.
I've known other people who spell their names the same way and they pronounce it differently.
And so that's the first time I became aware that, oh, I'm like mispronouncing this person's name and have been working since then to pronounce her name as she wants it pronounced, Kamala Harris.
The reason I bring this up is because some folks have reached out to me and I want to thank you for doing that and said, hey, I'm glad that you do that, but you're still slipping into that, that there are times when I am still mispronouncing her name.
So I wanted to acknowledge that.
I wanted to let folks know that I am aware of what's at stake in that, and if I make that lapse, you can keep that in front of me because I need to know that I'm doing that.
It's not intentional.
It is certainly not an effort to do what people on the right are doing, but it does reflect, you know, a sort of linguistic muscle memory that I'm working to overcome.
So, I wanted to thank folks for pointing that out.
And I think it also shows out in the world when we encounter people who do that, the difference between those who, you know, they're not acting in bad faith.
They are pronounced, maybe they've only ever read her name.
Maybe they do have other people in their lives who pronounce it differently and they're mispronouncing it versus those who willfully enact that mispronunciation.
So I think it's important for us to combat that.
I continue to fight that.
Imperfectly, and I apologize for people who might have heard me mispronounce her name, and I just want folks to know that that's something that I'm working to get right, and have been since 2020, but obviously much more of a focus in the last few weeks.
Let's stick with Harris.
Let's stick with the Harris campaign because the really big news this week, obviously, is that she named Tim Walz, Minnesota governor, as her running mate.
And Brad is going to have more on this.
I know he'll have his thoughts on this.
I think on Monday he's going to have those.
But we're going to spend a lot of time talking about Walz today as well.
And they officially, that is Harris-Waltz, officially received the party nomination and roll call vote earlier this week.
You might recall some weeks ago, months ago, when Biden was still running, there was this thing where to get the name of the Democratic nominee onto some ballots, they had to have a formal nominee before the actual convention.
And so they had to carry out this roll call thing.
So I think that's why that has already happened ahead of the Democratic National Convention.
Tim Walz was a surprise to a lot of people.
He was one of three finalists for the position that Harris interviewed over the weekend, and he emerged as the proverbial dark horse to get the nod, and surprised a lot of folks.
And I want to spend some time talking about Why that was, I'm probably, like most of you, didn't know a tremendous amount about Waltz.
I knew he was the governor of Minnesota.
I knew a few things related to that, but I did not know as much as I know this week.
I want to talk about what they're saying about why this was the pick.
I want to talk about, a little bit related to that, who Tim Walz is and what he might bring to the Democratic ticket.
And I want to talk about the GOP attacks against him, right?
And that's going to bring us into some broader reflections I have on what I think we're seeing in the GOP and the Trump response to the Harris-Walz ticket right now.
But the most noted thing about Walz is that he was picked over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.
And a lot of people had their money, literally, on Shapiro, that you could take bets out on this.
He was a popular governor in Pennsylvania, so he's governor of the most, arguably, the most important battleground state.
We had also heard, if you read with any care and looked at the news and things like that, there were a lot of GOP strategists who said that he was the biggest threat.
They were like, you know, if the Democrats pick anybody who would be scary to us, who would be a threat, it's Shapiro.
I don't know how much we trust that.
I'm an NFL fan, as you know.
And leading into the NFL draft, they always talk about a lot of misinformation and teams putting up what they call smokescreens.
Teams will, like, leak information about what candidate they want and who they're targeting.
And, you know, there's always this discussion about, is that really who they're after?
Or are they trying to leverage their pick for somebody else?
Are they trying to, you know, hide their true intentions?
I wonder a little bit about this.
The simple fact of the matter is, obviously, that no matter who the Democrats chose, you would have the Republicans coming out on the offensive and coming out with, I think, some of the same lines they have anyway.
But the point is, there was a lot of emphasis and I think a lot of people, excuse me, leaning towards Shapiro.
Why not?
Why didn't they go with this?
Why didn't they go with this direction?
Well, one issue that has come up—I don't think it's the central issue, but it is an issue—is that there were progressives who had voiced concerns about Shapiro's stance on Israel.
Harris has been trying to distance herself from Biden's unwavering pro-Israel stance.
We've seen that she has had some success in that.
There are groups who are at least indicating higher favorability of her than they were of Biden.
And while all the possible VP picks have expressed broad support for Israel, critics argue that Shapiro's support while he was governor went further than some of the others.
Now, supporters say that he's being unfairly targeted because he's Jewish.
And even the GOP has hopped on that.
They've tried to the line that by not picking Shapiro, this was an anti-Semitic move.
And I don't know that that holds much weight.
There are literally like a countless number of people who could be named.
As VP, most are not Jewish.
I think the fact that you don't choose a Jewish vice presidential nominee automatically amounts to anti-Semitism.
But that's the language that's there.
It's a complex issue, but I think it's only one dimension.
And in reading more about this and hearing what analysts and strategists and anonymous insiders have said, I don't think that that was actually a deciding factor for the Harris campaign.
I'd love to hear from folks about that.
Here are some of the considerations that appear to be more central.
In this, I'm going to walk through a number of things that some of you may know, you may not, but issues of, again, why Waltz?
What does he bring?
One of the biggest things that I think was central for the Harris campaign is that he has experience getting liberal policies enacted in a state that has significant rural red voters.
Gun control legislation, paid medical leave, universal free meals for students in public schools.
Um, back when he ran for the House, the House of Representatives, he defeated Republican Representative, uh, Gutknecht, I'm not sure I'm pronouncing his name right.
I'm sorry, I just butchered that.
We've established by now, I've got trouble with names.
But he was an incumbent.
He defeated the Republican incumbent to take his House seat, despite being outspent, and then he won re-election five times.
In Minnesota's first district, which is conservative and mostly rural.
So he's a Democrat who has been able to compete in a rural red area and win seats.
He left the House to run for governor, and when he did that, he beat the GOP candidate by more than 11 points.
So he's done that.
And those are some bona fides that I think the Democrats are going to like.
But he's also done that, and I think this is a huge piece of this.
I think a huge part of the pick of Walsh is narrative.
It's the story of who he is and where he comes from, and I don't think that with Waltz it's just an empty narrative.
We've talked about Vance a little bit, and he'll come up again.
Hillbilly Elegy, the whole Appalachian Roots thing, and he's been heavily criticized that, you know, you spent summers there, you didn't grow up there, you're not really from there, etc., etc., etc., on and on.
Here's somebody who kind of has lived the kind of story that one can tell about him.
He is the kind of person, and I think that this is the real bet that Democrats are making, who can connect with the kinds of voters that Democrats have been losing to Trump.
Okay?
Rural voters.
White rural voters.
White rural men.
Midwesterners.
This is who they're aiming at.
He was born in a Nebraska town of 3,500, to sort of start that rural story.
He graduated high school in an even smaller town.
He enlisted in the National Guard at age 17, where, as we know if you've done any looking at this this week, he achieved the rank of Command Sergeant Major before retiring 24 years later at the rank of Sergeant Major.
He was, when he left the National Guard to run for the House, he gets the House seat and he becomes the highest ranking enlisted soldier to serve in the House.
And he was, in 2017, named the ranking member of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs.
So, there he is advocating on behalf of the U.S.
military in the House in this senior role.
Before running for the House, in Minnesota, he's a high school geography teacher and football coach.
He was also the faculty advisor for the school's first Gay-Straight Alliance chapter back in 1999.
And for those of you who are of a certain age, as I am, And can remember 1999.
That's a time when it's not sort of cool, culturally or otherwise, to be a kind of straight ally.
And he's doing that in 1999.
He has two kids, both of whom were conceived via IVF.
So he is an advocate, not in an abstract sense, but in a very real sense, on reproductive access for women and can be a strong voice for what that means.
He's also, this I think reflects in Minnesota, if you've known folks from that region, if you live in that region, if you've been in that region, he's an avid hunter.
He once had an A rating from the NRA, but because he also supports gun legislation, he has been an advocate for victims of gun legislation, he now has an F rating from the NRA, and he has said, quote, that he sleeps just fine.
So he's got this story to tell and I think part of it is what he is saying, what he is embodying, what he is trying to demonstrate, what his existence demonstrates is you can be rural, you can be into small town life and culture and activities and sporting and all of that sort of stuff, And you don't have to be conservative.
You don't have to be a Christian nationalist.
You don't have to be exclusionary.
You can have an inclusive vision of society.
So this is what he is.
And Michael Steele, former Republican National Committee chair, summed up the significance of this.
He said this on MSNBC, where he's a, what's the word I'm looking for, an analyst.
There we go.
He said, quote, I think you got the hillbilly elegy against the real hillbilly.
That's going to be Yale versus the guy who actually spent all of his time on the ground fixing F-150s, end quote.
His point there is that Vance and the GOP have tried to tell a story about Vance and who he is.
Here in Wallace, I think they have somebody who's the real deal, okay?
Tied in with all of this, I think, is his ability to communicate his policies to voters of demographics that have been shifting to Trump.
So it's not just that he is from that world, it's that he has been able to communicate those policies in ways that resonate with people in that world.
And he said this, just as an example.
He was sort of joking, speaking sarcastically, in defense of signing a law allowing universal free school lunches in Minnesota.
This is what he said.
He said, quote, What a monster!
Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn and women are making their own health care decisions." End quote.
The sarcasm on display there, essentially, I think he said somewhere else that, you know, he doesn't know why feeding kids is a... he doesn't think of it as a conservative or liberal thing.
It's just a good thing.
It's just you feed kids.
He can communicate that in a way that I think it's arguable whether or not Vance could.
He doesn't communicate those policies or not.
And he's an effective and crafty communicator generally.
The sort of democratic line that has come out and sort of caught on of labeling Trump and Vance as weird, Waltzist is credited with having sort of popularized that, with taking that line.
And so all of this, I think, means that he gives a lot in the mind of the Harris campaign to the campaign.
The final dimension of why he was picked, aside from how he might stack up to other candidates, aside to all the strategic things of what he might bring, is, according to everybody involved, he had just kind of a homerun interview with the Harris team.
Many said he clicked with Harris and the team immediately in a way that some of the other folks didn't, and that that fit really mattered.
There were some concerns that were voiced, and it's hard to know what to make of these.
There's so much political gamesmanship and all of this kind of stuff, but there were some who voiced concerns that Shapiro had a lot of his own ambitions and that that might come ahead of the ticket and so forth.
I don't know if that's true.
By most accounts, his interview with Harris just didn't go quite as well.
And perhaps reflecting this, he told the team after the interview that he had some concerns about leaving his governorship to pursue the VP nomination.
And so it sounds like things just didn't click as well with Shapiro.
You get Walsh, who really steps forward and emerges again, for many, in an unexpected way.
Apparently, I think, for a lot of people on the Harris team, this was unexpected.
But that's where we are.
Tie all that together, what does it mean?
I think they are certainly trying to counter the supposed mid-American appeal of Vance that the GOP or that Trump was hoping with in nominating him.
They are obviously hoping, they're counting on his ability to carry that beyond Minnesota to places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin.
And I think they're also trusting his communication versus Vance.
We've seen Vance flub things up a little bit in speaking and appearing publicly, and I think that they're hoping that they have somebody who's better at communicating that way.
They are also obviously trying to counter the California liberal narrative against Harris.
People talk about balancing the ticket.
They didn't go to balance it by getting somebody who's like super moderate.
He supports a lot of the same policies.
But again, this is about narratives.
So the story he brings, and it's a way to be able to point at him and say, this is not about elitist California liberals or whatever other bogey person people on the right want to bring.
They can point to somebody concrete and flesh and blood and say, that's not all that we are.
OK?
And so sources familiar with the vetting, they put it this way.
They said, quote, he hunts, he fishes, you want to have a beer with him.
He will play in Michigan, Wisconsin, Western Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina.
Or another anonymous insider said, he talks and looks a lot like a lot of the voters we've lost to Trump.
I think that that really sums up.
He talks and looks like a lot of the voters we've lost to Trump.
I think the Harris campaign chose somebody who does that, who brings that, but without sacrificing things that they don't want to sacrifice on policy.
So, I think that that's where we're at with Walz.
Will it work?
We'll find out.
We'll see.
I welcome your thoughts on this.
I welcome Brad's reflections on this and his thoughts about this.
Let's take a break, and we'll be back in just a minute.
All right, so let's talk about the GOP then, how they responded to this.
On one hand, you've had a lot of GOP strategists who say, whew, lucky for us it wasn't Shapiro.
This was a whiff they missed.
They could have gotten Shapiro and really hurt us.
Again, I think that's a lot of smokescreen stuff.
We also don't know about the deep vetting and things that were going on and other concerns.
I don't think that that's that serious.
Here's what I think is the more serious or potentially more serious GOP attack on Waltz, and it is his military service.
And they are literally running back the swift boat strategy that worked against John Kerry in 2004.
For some of you of a certain age, you'll remember this, John Kerry running as a Vietnam veteran.
You had the Swift Boat, I forget what the organization was called, the Swift Boaters for something or other, whatever, but seeking to discredit his claims of, you know, sort of what he had done in Vietnam and so forth.
And Chris LaCivita, or LaCivita, I'm not sure again on the name pronunciation, The point is that this is the figure who was involved in that effort back in 2004, and he is a senior Trump advisor.
This is explicit.
They are explicitly trying to attack Walz on his military service to discredit him, and they are doing it in many of the same ways that they did in 2004.
Okay?
So there are two main lines of attack here.
Okay?
The first is that Walz retired a few months before his unit was deployed to Iraq, and he's being accused of abandoning his unit, of leaving when it was easy.
There was There was an op-ed in Newsweek this week about this.
This is the line that Vance is taking.
It doesn't appear that that's the case.
People have looked at the paperwork.
Say he filed election paperwork in January 2005.
So in January of 05, he filed paperwork to run for that House seat.
He retired in May of 05, okay?
Two months later, in July of 05, his unit was notified of its possible deployment.
So he's out, he's retired when they are notified that they could possibly be deployed to Iraq, and they deployed in October 05.
So it sounds as if this is misleading, that the head of the National Guard in Minnesota has said that They were not told they were going to deploy until after he had retired.
But this is one of the main lines, and so watch this.
Pay attention to this.
This is something to watch and see what happens.
Another one, another line of attack that I think is a little less pronounced, but is there, is some have argued that he sort of inflated his military record a little bit.
And this is tricky.
What he said is that in some descriptions he had written that he deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.
Great.
What he wasn't explicit about in some of those is that this was in Italy.
It was a non-combat support role.
So it wasn't inaccurate.
He did deploy in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.
He has said that it was luck of the draw.
They didn't decide where or how to be deployed.
But there are those who have said that by not specifying that it was explicitly a support role, not a combat role, that he gave the impression that he had served in combat, though he never actually claimed this.
Okay?
So those are the lines of attack.
And here's what I want us to think about, or where I'm at.
We'll see where these go, but I'm not sure That this is going to work the same way now that it did in 2004.
And this is a theme I have for today, which is basically the Trump campaign using the same playbook that they have been using since Trump burst onto the political scene in 2016.
In this case, using a political playbook that goes back even before that.
This is in 2004!
2004, I've got to rewind a long ways and I realize this, but that's like, I feel like immediately, not immediately after 9-11, we're in the midst of 9-11, Iraq, Afghanistan, a certain kind of understanding of U.S.
military intervention and so forth.
Here you've got somebody rolling out this line when you have Trump Who ran saying that he opposed U.S.
military intervention.
It's America alone, make America great again means America first.
We're not going to have foreign wars and all this other stuff.
He has said this on the campaign, this cycle around that there were no wars when he was president and so forth.
I'm not sure that this is going to have the kind of landing power that it had for Kerry.
Now, I was wrong in 2004.
I did not think that, you know, George W. Bush flying, you know, practice missions over Texas was going to beat out the bonafide, you know, Vietnam veteran when it came to other veterans and military folk and so forth.
But I'm not convinced that this is going to work.
In addition, this isn't new for Walz.
He has successfully defended against similar attacks for years.
But it's something worth watching.
For now, I think that this is probably the most significant line of attack and potential vulnerability against Waltz.
We'll talk some more about a couple other things in a minute, but that's what I think for now.
All right?
So that's Waltz.
An awful lot on Waltz.
Vice presidential nominee, it is now the Harris-Waltz ticket.
Lots of internet stuff, camo hats, all different kinds of things like this.
That's Waltz.
What does it mean more broadly?
Well, here I want to talk about the fact that Harris is clearly living rent-free in Trump's head.
I want to shift to how Trump and the GOP have responded to this and what that can tell us, okay?
So, I think the Harris campaign just currently has residents in Trump's mind and has rattled him in ways that I think would have been hard to anticipate.
We talked last week, Annika Brockschmidt and I talked about Trump's meltdown at the National Association of Black Journalists meeting.
I don't want to repeat all of that, but what we have seen since then is we have seen Trump continue to devolve back into the same kinds of misogynistic, racist attacks that he has made in the past.
And two issues here, okay?
The first is that I think this move from Trump shows how much the Harris campaign has shaken him.
How much it has thrown him off of his game.
And the other question that I think follows from that is, does the GOP playbook from the past eight years still work?
And that's something I think we're not going to know until November.
But I think it's a real question to look at because we'll talk about this in just a second.
The GOP is playing the same game now that they've been playing since Trump came down that escalator.
And it's just not clear to me, it's not clear to me that it'll work.
It is clear that it does not work as effectively as it once did.
Okay.
So let's start with the Harris living in Trump's head sort of thing.
Heading into the GOP convention, as people will remember, a lot of people on the right were encouraged by Trump's decrease in sort of the bombast, his more reasoned tone.
He was sticking to the script.
He sounded more like a presidential candidate and less like the angry, you know, 70-something-year-old man running for president that he had been.
And everybody knows he was cruising to what appeared to be an easy victory.
We've talked about this.
The lines of attack on Biden appeared to be working.
Then you had the debate, which of course was a disaster for Biden.
And just in general, the Biden campaign seemed lethargic.
I remember for months just kind of kind of waiting for the campaign to start and like he just kept not starting and you had that going and then we know what happens biden steps out harris comes in and the momentum has thrown everything everything off and it upended the campaign trump's advantages in polls have evaporated um in some cases it's showing that she is ahead and And so far, there's no real sign of that momentum sort of slowing.
And what has Trump done?
He has reverted.
And people have talked about this.
I think Chris Christie talked about this.
Other people in the GOP have talked about this.
Certainly people on the left have talked about this, that he is shaken and doesn't know what to do.
And so the real Trump has kind of come back through.
Okay.
He held, this was on display not just last week, but this week, he held a news conference at Mar-a-Lago that by most accounts was intended as kind of a reset.
I've read things that say that he chose to do this.
His advisors sort of weren't involved.
He was just like, I'm going to do this thing.
And what it showed was that Trump is Trump.
His news conference was rambling but telling.
He said in it, and to me this is Trump saying the quiet parts out loud, as he often does, He said that his campaign strategy has not changed, and I actually think that's the case.
And I think right now that's working to Harris' advantage.
It's about the same policies as it's always been, quote, open borders, weak on crime, end quote.
Same lines as always.
If we have been following Trump for eight years, same lines.
It doesn't matter who he's running against.
It doesn't matter who he's criticizing.
It will always be the same lines, same old lines.
He said that he prefers going against Harris, and he predicted that his performance with white male voters would go, quote, through the roof.
So explicitly appealing to this base of white men.
And the really telling point, though, for all of that, like all of that we can read it and we can say, yep, that's Trump.
We have seen that for eight years.
Nothing surprising.
We could probably, you know, play like some sort of Trump bingo.
And if we got to design our own cards, we'd win in no time flat because he says the same things all the time.
But here's what I thought was the really telling point.
He complained about media coverage of her events.
He complained that the media paid too much attention to her crowd sizes.
And then, of course, he said, well, they pay attention to her crowd sizes, but he said she pays for the crowds.
And I think most people think what he meant by that was that she's had entertainers open for her.
And he has decried this.
He has said that this is unfair and that it artificially inflates her crowds and so forth by having entertainers open up.
And he has said, and this is the bigger thing for Trump, he has said that the media is focusing on her crowds.
His are so much bigger.
And, of course, The example he cites is the January 6th crowd.
So he reaches for the crowd at the protest at the Capitol that becomes violent, that becomes an insurrection to try to stop the certification of the election.
That's what he points to.
But he even goes so far as to say that that crowd was bigger than MLK's I Have a Dream crowd.
Okay, this is how, you know, unfiltered, unhinged Trump works.
And it was mostly just a rambling monologue voicing his standard lines and grievances.
That part's not notable, the content, but the form is.
So what does it tell us?
What it tells me, first of all, again, is I think he's really rattled.
You want another example this week that's not about reading the tea leaves and so forth?
Remember this, that he had that ABC debate scheduled with Biden, and then when Harris first comes out he says it's important for presidents to debate, I look forward to debating her, and then he backed out of the ABC debate.
Lines up a Fox News debate, says he won't debate on ABC and so forth.
Kamala Harris accuses him of cowardice and so forth.
She says, tell you what, I will be on the ABC stage on that night and you can join me or not.
This week, Trump announces what?
That he has accepted the debate invitation from ABC.
He caved!
It's just not something you see Trump do very often.
Of course, he's not acknowledging this, but you don't see him walk things back very often.
He did this.
He is rattled, folks.
He is nervous about what is happening.
But here's the key.
He has no new answers.
He's partying like it's 2016.
He is campaigning just like he did in 2016, just like he has for the last eight years.
He is playing the racist card.
He is playing the misogyny card.
He is playing all the populism cards.
He's playing with the kind of Christian nationalist full house.
That's what he's doing.
But I think the problem for him is, and what's really rattling him more, and then he gets into this cycle of sort of doubling and tripling and quadrupling down, is that it doesn't seem to be working this time.
And the question is why?
Now, I don't have all the answers to that.
I think that, again, some of that's going to be irrelevant until and unless he loses in 2016, in November, the 2024 presidential election.
But right now, if somebody says, why?
What has happened?
My answer is that in eight years, the context around him has changed.
The plays that he made eight years ago, they just don't have the same effect that they did now.
It's sort of like if you go to, you got a favorite band.
I've been going to some metal concerts lately.
I'm thinking about this.
And sometimes you read about somebody who'd be like, you know, I went to see this band and I was really looking forward to it.
And I'd, I saw him a long time ago, you know, when I was in college or, you know, whatever.
And sometimes people say it was, it was okay.
The show was okay, but kind of was exactly the same as it was last time.
It hasn't changed.
There was nothing new.
They haven't really put out any new music.
The set list was the same.
Everything was the same.
I think there's a little bit of that going on with the Trump campaign.
In eight years, the effects have changed.
He is now only speaking to the converted.
In 2016, he was winning people to himself.
In 2020, he got some more people.
I don't think that that's happening anymore.
More importantly, he's right.
The media coverage has changed.
Not just because they like Kamala Harris more or because they're liberal or whatever, but we've got to think back to this.
Remember the critiques from everybody who wasn't in Trump land back in 2016?
That all these big rallies he had that were such big news, they were all getting coverage.
He was getting free coverage from the media all the time.
Media didn't know what to do with his false claims.
We can remember a time, and it is not that long ago, folks, when the media wouldn't say Candidate X made this or that racist comment.
They would say Candidate X made a comment that some people felt was racially insensitive, or so-and-so made a comment that some people felt reflected insensitivity about women in society, or something like that.
They wouldn't call racism racism.
They wouldn't call misogyny misogyny.
They wouldn't call xenophobia xenophobia.
That changed.
Over time, as a result of Trump, they decided that they were going to stop covering everything he said because there were so many falsehoods.
And you had all those questions that the media was still figuring out about, do we report on what somebody says just because they're an important person?
But if everything they say is false, like, what is our role in not pandering to misinformation and so forth?
I think all of that has changed.
Even if he wasn't full of misinformation, his rallies are no longer big news.
They've been going on for the better part of a decade.
It's just not big news anymore.
The simple fact of the matter is that Trump is not new or shocking anymore.
Don't get me wrong.
He's still dangerous.
He's a liar.
He's a threat to democracy.
I think all the things he kind of says that he's saying in jest, they're not in jest.
They're real.
But it's not shocking or surprising.
We know what Trump is.
So I think that that part of the context has changed in the same game that he is playing now.
It's just playing differently than it did then.
Tie in with that, that I think Harris is now, number one, she is.
She's new.
She's the new thing.
And Trump for years, we know, has been very good at sort of capitalizing on the 24-hour news cycle.
He's old news now.
She's not, and the 24-hour news cycle likes what's new, it likes what's shiny, and right now that's Kamala Harris, right?
But in addition, I think she right now, and this is in radical contrast to Joe Biden, As I said, Trump's strategy against Biden was working.
I think part of the same playbook is that they're using the same lines, the same playbook against her that they used against Biden.
She now appears as the high energy candidate.
In that same Mar-a-Lago interview or press conference, Trump was asked about his lighter campaign schedule, and he called the question stupid and said that he's busy doing things like recording commercials and talking on the phone and things like this.
The point is, he's not.
He does not seem to be as energetic as he once was.
His campaign rallies where he does all that rambling and wandering and what he's saying used to seem like, you know, again, it was outlandish, it was shocking, people were hanging on every word.
Now it's the same old stuff and it stands in marked contrast to the much sharper delivery of Kamala Harris and her appearances.
Very simply, and this is not a surprise, he's not competing against sleepy Joe Biden.
He now looks like the 78-year-old man who's running in the campaign.
He looks older.
He looks tired.
He looks like he's got nothing new to add.
So I think the ground has shifted under Trump, and he seems not to realize it.
So he is rattled.
Kamala Harris is living rent-free in his head, and I don't think that he has answers for her and for what she is bringing.
Okay?
But I think this goes beyond Trump.
I think the broader GOP does not have effective answers for her either.
And here's why.
So even the GOP strategists, who are really, they're put off by what Trump is doing, they see this reversion as a problem, they keep saying this.
They keep saying things like, we need to focus on policy.
We can beat the Democrats on policy.
We need to not make it about personality.
We can beat them on policy.
Nikki Haley has said this.
Mike Johnson has said this.
Lots of other nameless strategists have said this.
We can beat them on policy.
Here's the problem with that.
The MAGA movement has never been about policy.
Now stick with me for a minute, okay?
It hasn't been about policy.
It has been about white grievance.
It has been about xenophobia.
It has been about misogyny.
It has been about opposition to all things queer.
It has, in a nutshell, as we have been talking about for the better part of a decade now, it has been about Christian nationalism and defending a Christian nationalist vision of America.
That is what MAGA has always been.
Now obviously, that implies policies, that implies concrete practices and things that you do, but those have always been grounded in these deep-seated, visceral political forces.
That's why they've been grounded not in sort of helping America or whatever, but in punishing people, in enacting revenge, in marginalizing people who are viewed as having too much power and so forth.
That's what it's always been about.
It's never been about policies.
You want a policy book for the GOP?
It's Project 2025.
Article this week about how Trump was on a plane with the originator of all the 2025 stuff in the Heritage Foundation, somebody he has said he doesn't know.
We've talked about this, and what have they done?
The GOP and the Trump campaign have done everything they can to try to move away from that.
There's your policy statement.
The Republican National Convention didn't talk about policy.
It was just vague things that throw red meat to the angry MAGA crowd.
And to be fair, that's what conventions do.
We're going to hear a lot of red meat thrown to the left-leaning Democratic crowd from the Democratic National Convention.
That's my prediction.
But that's what it is.
It's never been about policies, and it was aided by low Democratic enthusiasm.
We talked about this in 2016.
Trump lost to Hillary Clinton in the popular vote in large part because a lot of people just were not excited about Hillary Clinton.
And that's where we were sailing to in 2024, a lack of enthusiasm for Joe Biden.
I said a couple of weeks ago on this show that I think that one of the things that GOP strategists have missed is that they misinterpreted a lack of enthusiasm for the Democrats and for Biden.
They misinterpreted that lack of enthusiasm as excitement about Trump as support for GOP policies and so forth.
I think that's not happening.
So I think that there may be many GOP operatives who really believe that they're winning on policy, that they thought they were winning on policy, but I think that they're wrong.
I think it's a misreading.
I think that they are misinterpreting things.
So I think what they want to do is shift back, quote-unquote, to policy.
It's a shift back to something that never actually happened, and I don't think it's going to win.
So I don't think that right now the GOP or the Trump campaign have a cogent strategy on how to blunt the force of Harris and her momentum.
I think that's also why attacks on Harris and Waltz as, quote-unquote, progressives and liberals aren't likely to work.
Again, it's just the same playbook.
They're like, well, let's just use all the same words we used about Biden.
And attach them to them.
And I think that they're too abstract.
I think if we circle back to Waltz, I think this is part of what Waltz can bring to this, is the ability to say, as we have said, and I think Brad in particular really emphasizes this, it's not about abstract policies.
It's about actually doing good things for people.
Waltz can talk about concretely how the policies they stand for help real people, real everyday Americans.
They don't feed on their animosities.
They don't feed on their grievance.
They don't feed on their anger.
They do things that help them.
And we have seen that this is how the abortion debate is working and has been working for Democrats for, you know, a couple years at this point.
We have seen this.
That when it comes to concrete policies, I think there's a strong argument to be made that the policies that work and have been more popular, the ones with the most political teeth, have been those that the Democrats are promoting.
So I think all of this is showing that the GOP doesn't know what to do.
And the last thing I want to say about this is I think that their dismissal of the current situation is really telling.
There was a statement this week by Tony Fabrizio, who is Trump's chief pollster, He has shown up a couple times before in recent weeks and, you know, kind of warning the Trump campaign that there would be a bump for Harris and so forth.
This is what he said.
He said, quote, we are witnessing a kind of out-of-body experience where we have suspended reality for a couple of weeks.
And in that suspended reality, it's almost like Kamala Harris never met Joe Biden.
You know, they were passing acquaintances, end quote.
This is just a suspended reality.
Yeah, it's been weird.
She's got all this momentum, but you know, it's as if she fell out of nowhere.
Another official said, quote, we hope and think that this momentum will dissipate in a few days, end quote.
Folks, that's spoken like somebody who doesn't really know what to do.
How do you explain Kamala Harris's momentum?
That's a suspended reality right now.
Yeah, it'll dissipate in a few days.
It's been a couple weeks, and it hasn't dissipated yet.
We are down to less than 90 days till the presidential election.
The Democratic National Convention is still going to happen, and by all accounts, we can expect a bump from any candidate.
Typically, it's a bump right after their convention.
Republicans need that to be the case.
They need it to be the case that it will just dissipate.
But they feel right now like a party that is just hoping that the momentum will sort of stall out on its own and that the same playbook from 2016, the same playbook from 2020, will work for them.
And so far, it's not.
Can that change?
Yes.
Can I see the future?
No.
I wish that I could.
I would cash it in, make a lot of money, and do some other things with my life.
I can't see the future.
Lots of things can happen.
A million things can happen.
90 days is a long time in political reality, as we know from just watching what's happened with the Biden campaign.
But right now, the GOP doesn't know what to do.
It's clear that Kamala Harris sort of owns Trump's mental space.
And until they figure out a different strategy, I just don't see that that's going to stop.
Let's take another break.
All right.
Let's shift here.
I could talk forever about Harris and Trump, and we will between now and November, but I said earlier that we can't go a week without having to talk about Vance and Vance.
Actually, the Vance says.
J.D.
Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, are back in the news this week.
One of the things that happened, we've talked about this, is that the carnage of Vance's cat lady statements and everything that goes with that and all the other things he has said about childless Americans and so forth continues to hang on him.
So this week, The campaign tried having his wife clean up his cat lady's comments, okay?
And all this did is give us an example of somebody who carefully, I think, obfuscates what's really going on, works to mask what the real issues are.
She also carefully sidestepped the real issues.
And what she tried to do was to paint him as just a concerned guy.
He's just concerned about the difficulties of raising a family in America.
That was her spin, okay?
And so here's some of what she said.
It was in a pre-recorded statement for Fox & Friends, and this is via The Hill.
They're reporting on this, or their summary.
They gave a good summary of this, but you can go and you can check out the interview, the clip, yourself.
This is what it said.
In it, Vance said that her husband, quote, would never, ever, ever want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family.
She then goes on to blame people, just nameless people, for focusing on the quip, she said this was a quip, for focusing on the quip rather than the substantive point Vance was trying to make.
She goes on to say, quote, I took a moment to look and actually see what he had said and tried to understand what the context was and all that, which is something I really wish people would do a little bit more often.
She goes on to say that she hoped people would spend less time focusing on his three-word phrase, because what he said, quote, was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country, and sometimes our policies are designed in a way that makes that even harder, end quote.
She also said that not being able to have children is, quote, challenging, end quote, never ever anything that anyone would want to mock or make fun of, end quote.
Okay.
She's right.
It can be really hard to be a parent in this country, and sometimes our policies are designed in a way to make it even harder.
Fine.
Cool.
Here's the issue, Osha.
The rest of what you say is bullshit.
When she says, you know, she took a moment to look and actually see what he said, when she tells people to look at the substantive point, people have.
We've talked about this.
Others have talked about it.
It's everywhere.
He said that to Tucker Carlson.
He has gone on and said that people should be punished for not having children.
He said that people who don't have children are more likely to be sociopathic and they're bad for the mental health of the country.
He has said that people with children should have more votes.
That is the substance of what he said.
Nobody's making this up.
And notice what else she says.
This is the standard line of being like, oh, people say that things that I say and believe are misogynistic and so forth.
I'll show you they're not misogynistic, because I'll have my wife, who is a woman, come out and speak in my defense.
Folks, you can support misogynistic policies, and your gender doesn't matter.
Usha Vance Indirectly, and much more tacitly, supports the same misogynistic points in her response that J.D.
Vance does in the things that he says.
She said he'd never want to hurt people trying to have kids.
She sidesteps that whole issue, like, what about people who aren't trying to have kids, who don't want to have kids?
All of those she's allowing?
No, they're still bad marriages.
They're fair game.
She talks about compassion for people who can't have biological children.
She's talking about how children are really challenging, and you'd never ever want to make fun of or mock anybody for that.
I don't know anybody who mocks people who, like, want to have kids and can't, but notice that she is doing exactly the same line.
She's talking about people with biological children.
So again, anybody with children who are not biological offspring, illegitimate.
Out.
This does nothing.
Nothing to counteract what he says about queer folk, or what he's saying about women who have other priorities, or what he's saying about people who, for whatever reason, don't want to have biological kids.
This does nothing to undermine the central, core claims of what he said.
So sorry, Usha Vance.
The substantive point that J.D.
is making, that J.D.
Vance, your husband, is making, that is exactly what we have been focusing on.
And the fact that she can't come on and say something like, he supports all Americans regardless of what kind of family they have, or something like that, that tells us everything we need to know.
So don't be fooled.
When J.D.
Vance's wife comes on and tries to tell us what a good guy he is, or how inclusive his vision is, or what a good father he is, or all the other things they're going to do, because none of that's the issue.
The issue is what are his substantive views?
His substantive views are, if you are not straight, If you are not, I think implicitly in this, in a married relationship, if you are not trying to have reproductive sex and so forth, you're not a good American.
And we've talked about the radical, traditionalist, Catholic views behind that.
We've talked about the way that that feeds Christian nationalism.
That's who he is, and it was only reinforced by his wife's comments this week, if we look at them with any care.
All right, got to wind this up.
I will, after sort of being on a tirade here for a while, end with reasons for hope this week.
And mine is that Harris's momentum continues at present.
I said earlier, I don't know that that will last, and I'm very well aware that the election is not just a popularity contest.
You can't count on momentum, but the clock is ticking.
We're inside that 90-day window, and I think the longer she can ride that wave, the better position to defeat Trump she will be in.
Positive polls this week.
She continues to not only close the gap, With Trump, but to lead in some polls, some of them by a lead that actually outstrips the margin of error.
We all know how inaccurate polls have been in recent years, so I'm not putting all my faith in that, but it is a reason for hope.
I think tied in with that, just today I was reading that immigration rights activists and organizations in Arizona are now very publicly and visibly lining up behind Harris.
Folks, that was another group, another constituency that people were really worried about with Biden.
Some of these same groups said, That they were not comfortable sort of openly coming out and endorsing Biden.
They weren't prepared to say that they were going to support him.
They are now openly saying they support Harris.
That shows that momentum.
I continue to take hope in that.
Not hope because I think Harris is a perfect candidate.
She's not.
Not hope because I think Tim Walz is everything that I would want in a running mate.
She's not.
I can promise you that nobody who holds all the political views I hold would be able to win a general election in the U.S.
because I'm too far to the left, and I accept that.
But if our aim is keeping Donald Trump and his neo-fascism out of office, this gives me reason for hope.
Thank you for listening.
A lot of me today, I realize that, so thank you for indulging that and listening to that.
As always, thank you for the support in so many ways, the encouragement.
Please feel free to reach out to me, Daniel Miller Swagg, DanielMillerSWAG at gmail.com.
Find us online at StraightWhiteAmericanJesus.com.
Find us in other ways.
And if you are not a subscriber and that's something that you would consider doing or in a position to do, would ask you to do so.
Helps us to do the things we're doing, putting out multiple episodes a week as an indie podcast with no external funding.
Thank you all.
Please be well until we get to talk again.
And with all of you, I look forward to hearing from Brad on Tim Walz and seeing where he takes us as we come into the next week.
