Politics

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.

Two months after former president Donald Trump went into the lion’s den to be interviewed at the National Association of Black Journalists, Vice President Kamala Harris made her own appearance at an NABJ event. With her sit-down coming just days after a second attempted assassination against Trump, Harris was asked if she has full confidence in the US Secret Service to protect her.She responded by flipping the question to accuse Trump, the victim of the attempted assassination, of fomenting hate and violence toward other groups of people and thus making them unsafe.“You can go back to Ohio,” Harris said. “Not everybody has Secret Service. And there are far too many people in this country who are not feeling safe.”“Yes, I feel safe.

Former president Donald Trump survived a second assassination attempt on Sunday, this one at his golf course in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump reportedly decided yesterday morning to play a round of golf at the Trump International Golf Club and, as the president arriving on the fifth hole, Secret Service officers noticed a gun muzzle sticking out through a chain-link fence between 300 and 500 yards away. Secret Service exchanged fire with the suspect, who fled in a black Nissan and was later captured and charged. He left behind a scoped AK-47 and a GoPro camera.

Welcome to Thunderdome. The initial reactions to this week’s presidential debate from the commentariat was emphatic: Trump lost, Kamala won. But sometimes debates suffer from an initial overreaction from the highly tuned in, and once there’s a couple of days of simmering, reactions can change. That could be what we’re seeing happen in the reaction to this debate — it’s certainly what friend of the newsletter Hugh Hewitt thinks. But it’s also what some undecided voters think, too. Take Arizonan Sabrina Champ’s reaction, who was previously a Bernie Sanders voter and says no one won the debate: “She baited him and he fell for it. That was disappointing,” Champ said. “But as far as Kamala is concerned, I didn’t see a lot of policy.

The first presidential debate between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris took place last night on ABC News. The candidates talked about the economy, immigration, abortion, foreign policy and other major issues facing voters heading into November. We won’t get too much into winners and losers here, as you can head to The Spectator’s home page for all kinds of reactions. Here’s a quick sample:  How Kamala Harris won the debate comfortably, Charles Lipson ABC News is the big loser of the debate, Roger Kimball  The Trump-Harris presidential debate failed the voters, Amber Duke What we will cover is snap reactions from voters and what happens next.

The long-awaited debate between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is kicking off Tuesday night at 9 p.m. ET on ABC News. This is a high-stakes moment, mostly for the Harris campaign: Kamala’s predecessor at the top of the ticket, President Joe Biden, was forced by his own party to drop out of the race after an abysmal performance against Trump in June, and Kamala has only done one unscripted event on camera since launching her own campaign. Unlike that CNN interview with Dana Bash, Kamala will be challenged and will not have her running mate, Tim Walz, sitting next to her for support.

President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden pleaded guilty in federal court Thursday to tax charges in a last-minute reversal of his previous not guilty plea. The younger Biden was accused of failing to pay taxes on his lucrative business — often foreign — ventures and accepted guilt on all nine charges. There was no deal with prosecutors; Biden will not receive a reduced fine or sentence for his change of hear, instead explaining that he merely wanted to avoid putting his family through additional scrutiny like that of his Delaware gun trial.  “I will not subject my family to more pain, more invasions of privacy and needless embarrassment,” Biden said in a statement. Biden’s lawyers acknowledged that there was enough evidence to convict him in a trial.

Welcome to Thunderdome. Without fail, in every cycle, some media commentator will pen a ludicrous piece about why Republicans should want to lose. They follow a similar, all-too-familiar script: if the Democrat wins the presidency, they will be restrained by the power of the Congress and the Courts from advancing a truly radical agenda; historically, their victory will lead to a sizable midterm backlash setting up for a better election the next time around; and the sooner the GOP rids itself of the baggage at the top of the ticket, the sooner it can elevate younger rising stars who haven't been thoroughly villainized yet by the national media. This argument is bunk — and the author is usually not stupid enough to actually believe it themselves.

The political pundits like to tell us that general election polls don’t matter until after Labor Day. That, they say, is when the average American actually starts paying attention to what is happening in the election and so you can get a better understanding of which way the electorate is leaning. The only problem with that traditional wisdom is that it’s hard to put much stock into polls when so many are returning drastically different results.Take the Morning Consult poll that dropped this morning that shows Harris surging with a lead in six of the seven battleground states. The poll has her up eight points in Wisconsin, four in Pennsylvania and Nevada and three in Michigan. To be frank, no one serious believes these numbers.

Chapel Hill, North Carolina What kind of party can you throw with more than $500,000? For months, the organizers of Flagstock 2024 plotted an answer to that question. Last night, at a field outside an American Legion hall in North Carolina, some of country’s biggest stars took to the stage as busloads of college students arrived at a location that organizers had gone to great lengths to keep secret. “In country music, we say if we’re gonna make it happen, we show up in your home town and we make it happen,” singer John Rich told the crowd from the stage. And make it happen they did. Organizers had such a massive budget because Americans donated sums large and small to a GoFundMe, titled simply: “UNC Frat Bros Defended their Flag. Throw ’em a Rager.