Politics

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.

Kamala’s first interview as nominee falls flat Vice President Kamala Harris — and CNN — failed to impress in the first sit-down and unscripted interview she has given since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee forty days ago. Harris spoke for just eighteen minutes and opted not to explain how and why her policy positions have changed so drastically in the past four years, instead offering that her “values haven’t changed” and stood by her positive post-debate assessment of President Joe Biden’s cognitive state. Perhaps most confusing was Harris’s insistence that Americans are looking for a “new way forward” and to “bring America into a new decade,” which conveniently left out the fact that she has been in office for at least a third of that decade.

Welcome to Thunderdome. When the decision was made to shift from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris, the campaign staff was totally blindsided, with the entire Delaware operation shocked to learn about the president’s decision via social media — leading to the now infamous unnamed Democrat staffer’s line: “We’re all finding out by tweet.” It’s a sign of just how insular the Biden operation was, and how confined to the upper echelons of close, trusted staffers known for their tight lips and protective nature toward the old man. The Harris operation in 2020 was anything but that — leading to her epic collapse as a candidate and strewing numerous back-stabbing comments from staffers across the media on the way out the door.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee yesterday that the government pressured his company to censor content during the Covid-19 pandemic and said he regrets following their wishes. The committee described his comments as a “big win for free speech.” Meta produced thousands of documents for the committee’s investigation into alleged government censorship and Zuckerberg wrote the supplemental letter to outline what he had learned during the process. “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” he said.

This just in: Steve Hilton, former Fox News host and policy advisor to British PM David Cameron, wants to be the next media star to challenge California governor Newsom, Politico reports.   Newsom's mettle was previously tested by conservative radio host Larry Elder, who failed to get the governor out of office in 2021 during an unsuccessful recall effort. Elder received the most votes out of forty-six people running to replace Newsom, but since most voted against replacing the governor, that became irrelevant.   Not to mention California has not had a Republican in Sacramento since Arnold Schwarzenegger won a recall election against Democratic governor Gray Davis in 2003...   Hilton seemingly fled the UK to Atherton, California, in 2012 for his wife's job.

Former president Donald Trump made a surprise appearance at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday to lay a wreath and pay his respects to the thirteen American service members who were killed during a suicide bombing amid the military withdrawal from Afghanistan. It is the third anniversary of the Abbey Gate attack, which was a tragic source of national embarrassment as America left the twenty-year long war and has been a continuous political thorn in the side of President Joe Biden. While Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris both released statements recognizing the fallen service members, Biden is currently at the beach (in fact, he is on vacation all week long) and Harris has no public events on her schedule.

Chicago Pour one out for the Beyhive. For the bulk of the final day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the topic of conversation was: who is the mystery guest? The speculation ran rampant but was mostly focused on the myth of the goddess — Beyoncé herself was going to descend from the sky to affirm the ascendance of Kamala Harris. And then it turned out that the bright shiny mystery box contained... nothing at all. Too bad, so sad. But this itself seems in keeping with the 2024 cycle, where all promises decay into a great big pile of fail.For the delegates and consultants, this was a perfectly fine convention, logistical failures aside — a daily hammering of the impending evil and danger of a second Donald Trump term.