Politics

Welcome to Thunderdome. Tonight I invite you all to tune into a live conversation at 8 p.m. Eastern with Kmele Foster of the Fifth Column on the shifting race, gender and class divides in 2024, part of the Substack Election Dialogues series — more details are here!We’ve already surpassed 8 million early votes in this election, so that means we’re at the beginning of the final rounds with fewer than twenty days to go. For Kamala Harris, she’s still sprinting around with a media tour (well, really only 60 Minutes and last night’s Fox News interview count as media) that she really should have done months ago.

Vice President Kamala Harris will finally sit down with Fox News this evening after months of pundits justifiably criticizing her campaign for mostly avoiding challenging media. Chief political anchor Bret Baier will conduct the interview, which will air during his show in the 6 p.m. hour. It will be a thirty-minute live-to-tape sit-down and will run in its entirety with no edits and no commercial breaks. Based on recent appearances, this could end quite poorly for Kamala. The Democratic nominee struggled to justify the Biden-Harris immigration policy during an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, and the network felt the need to edit out a word salad answer about her relationship with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Former president Barack Obama made his pitch on Thursday to black men on why they should vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, accusing them of having hang-ups about voting for a woman. Obama stopped off at a Harris campaign office in Pittsburgh ahead of a rally in the city and said he wanted to “speak some truths” to black men as recent polls show former Donald Trump doing comparatively well with the group.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where the vibe is Miller High Life — which should only ever be enjoyed in a longneck as befitting the champagne of beers — and a Kamala Harris campaign that is turning from ebullience to despondence in short order. As my colleague Amber Duke and I discuss in the latest Thunderdome podcast, the refrain is a simple one: the joy is gone. The summer vibes that once sent a thrill down the pant-legs of everyone on the set of Morning Joe, including Mika and her lower-T colleagues, are now reduced to a point of constant contention: what is Kamala doing wrong — and how can she right the ship? And: why can’t Tim Walz be more like Josh Shapiro? And, even more: why won’t Joe Biden just shut up?

Amid lingering questions about what Kamala Harris stands for — plus a precipitous decline of the momentum the vice president enjoyed after leaping to the top of the Democratic ticket — her campaign decided it was time to send her into the media fray. This was a very calculated media tour, of course. With the exception of the traditional 60 Minutes interview on CBS (which Trump declined this time around, as his team claimed the outlet wanted to do “live fact-checking”), Harris stuck to friendly, low-risk outlets where she was unlikely to make any major fumbles.Unfortunately for the Harris campaign, this simple task would prove to be too much for the veep.

President Donald Trump triumphantly returned to Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday — exactly twelve weeks after an attempted assassin shot Trump in the ear, killed a rally attendee, Corey Comperatore, and injured several others.Trump previously promised he would go back to finish his rally in Butler, and he did indeed show up at the same spot where he was very nearly killed, kicking off the event with an acknowledgment that the last time he was there, his speech was cut short. “As I was saying...” Trump said to cheers and laughter. He referenced the famous illegal immigration chart that likely saved his life, as he turned his head to look at it at the exact moment the shooter fired, ensuring the bullet grazed his ear and did not go through his head. “I love that chart.

“I didn’t know which storm you’re talking about,” President Joe Biden said this week, as Hurricane Helene ravaged the southeastern United States. “They’ve gotten everything they need. They’re very happy across the board,” he said, as private citizens have stepped in to fill the void created by the federal government’s lackluster response.Some Americans who have flown helicopters to rescue victims from the storm have reportedly been threatened with arrest, including one who is a volunteer firefighter. Nevertheless, Biden insists that Americans have what they need, and Vice President Kamala Harris prepares to rush to the scene after promising one-time payments of $750.

Welcome to Thunderdome. Liz Cheney is campaigning with Kamala Harris today in Wisconsin at Ripon, known as the birthplace of the Republican Party at the Little White Schoolhouse. It was there in 1854 at a church meeting that Whig and Free Soil Party members gathered to form a “great irresistible Northern party, organized on the single issue of the non-extension of slavery.” This was even then pretty aggressive language for the Episcopalian who called the meeting, but not for Horace Greeley, who publicized it to the nation. Whatever Liz Cheney says today about how important it is to elect Kamala Harris will no doubt equal the historical significance of that moment, at least according to Rachel Maddow.

The Biden administration is struggling to find its footing amid a series of unfortunate events that are testing the oft-vacationing president and his vice president, who is currently auditioning for the top spot in American politics.Hurricane Helene decimated parts of North Carolina, leaving millions of Americans without power, at least thirty dead and many more missing. Entire towns are practically gone, and pictures of video of the storm’s aftermath show flooding enveloping homes and washing out highways. Local officials are begging for assistance and resources; state Representative Neal Collins, for example, tweeted, “I currently have two people on oxygen needing generators & 1 person on dialysis needing one.

Kamala Harris is aiming to project strength on border security, but her critics aren’t buying it.For the first time in over three years, Harris is visiting the border, following an onslaught of ads from former president Donald Trump’s campaign that have savaged her record as America’s border czar. Her trip also comes after a bombshell report from Texas congressman Tony Gonzales about how tens of thousands of illegal immigrants with murder and sexual assault convictions are freely roaming America.

Welcome to Thunderdome. For the past several cycles, Donald Trump has been an anchor around the necks of Republicans running for federal office across the country, forcing them to respond to his every statement of wavering obnoxiousness. “Will you denounce” was practically an autofill statement from journalists, with exasperated Republicans having to suddenly come up with spin on the fly about whatever their top candidate was on about at the moment. This time around, that weight seems far heavier on Democrats. Witness the reaction to Kamala Harris’s endorsement, after previously calling for getting rid of the filibuster for climate issues and voting rights, to codify Roe v. Wade.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky just stopped by an ammunition factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania — which CNN points out is President Joe Biden’s hometown.Now, a group of House Republicans is demanding answers about what taxpayer dollars and US resources were used in what they allege was essentially a campaign event for Democrats.The Hill reports that this past Sunday, Zelensky “was flown to Pennsylvania in an Air Force C-17 plane.” He was also protected by the US Secret Service.

Another day, another potential Kamala Harris flip-flop. The vice president is now quiet on whether she still supports providing a pathway to citizenship for 2 million “DREAMers” —  illegal immigrant children who were given temporary relief from deportation through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.In 2019, when running for the Democratic nomination for president, Harris supported four executive actions to grant amnesty to 2 million DACA recipients.Axios reports:  Harris proposed putting DREAMers on a path to a green card by, among other things, granting work authorizations, using certain parole powers and waiving rules barring people from returning to the US if they leave to apply for a green card in a US consulate abroad.

To hear the New York Times tell it, you’d think Vice President Kamala Harris had finally started answering questions about the Biden administration’s accomplishments and her own policy positions. The Times claims Kamala “hit core campaign themes,” “spoke off the cuff” and “confronted a range of pressing issues” in a two-hour sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey.But did she really?When asked about how she would secure the southern border — one of voters’ top concerns — Kamala said:So it’s a wonderful and important question. I, you know, my background was as a prosecutor, and I was also the elected attorney general for two terms of the border state. So this is not a theoretical issue for me. This is something I’ve actually worked on.

Welcome to Thunderdome. In the space of four weeks, the incumbent president was dethroned from his nomination and replaced by his running mate in a behind-the-scenes coup led by the most powerful person in the party (who still insists on the absurd claim it was an “open primary”). Within that time, the nation witnessed the first of not one but two assassination attempts targeting his opponent, the former president who has faced a thermonuclear level of lawfare in an attempt to seize everything he owns and put him behind bars.