Donald trrump

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.

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.

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.