Michigan

“This is the easiest speech to make,” President Trump was saying. “We have great people. And all I’m doing is spewing off what the hell we’ve done.”No speech is particularly hard to make for this President. He loves speaking. He would speak to an empty room, a kindergarten class, or a blank wall. In this case, he was speaking to the Detroit Economic Club after a nice tour of a Ford F-150 plant. During the tour, a Ford worker – who almost certainly no longer has a job – yelled "pedophile protector" at Trump, who yelled back "f--- you" twice and flipped the guy the bird.  After that, Trump, who, after all, is just like us, headed off to talk to the swells. "Isn't it nice to have a President who can go off teleprompter?

“I’m that same woman from Michigan,” Governor Gretchen Whitmer told Fox 2 Detroit Tuesday night, when asked about her changing relationship with President Donald Trump. Yet for progressive Democratic voters, Whitmer’s willingness to appear – reluctantly in the Oval Office three weeks ago, less so Tuesday at the Air National Guard Base at Selfridge, where Trump invited her to speak at the lectern prominently bearing the seal of the President – is viewed as anathema. Who’s right in this moment? Will Whitmer’s multiple appearances and plaudits for Trump become something she intensely regrets when the Democratic party’s presidential primaries begin apace? Or is the True Gretch author sly as a fox?

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?

"The whole thing is fucked.” That’s how one former blue-state GOP official describes the current turmoil facing state Republican parties. Numerous reports have laid bare the financial struggles, leadership turnover and abject chaos that have ensnared the GOP’s state parties. State parties in Arizona and Pennsylvania, unable to make rent, have sold off their headquarters. There are active battles for control of the party in Michigan and Colorado. Arizona also recently pushed out its chairman and in Georgia the party chair stepped down. Meanwhile, multiple former state-party officials are under indictment in cases related to January 6.

What happens now that the Colorado Supreme Court has kicked Donald Trump off the primary ballot? The first thing, apparently, is similar lawsuits in other “blue” states. Those will continue despite the Wednesday decision by the Michigan Supreme Court that Trump’s name can remain.   Nearly all the commentary has been devoted to the legal reasons for these rulings and their political implications. But it is important to consider the effort to exclude Trump in a wider context, one that goes beyond his personality, polarizing candidacy and events of January 6.  That wider frame is a century-long progressive effort to reframe the way America is governed and to loosen the constitutional barriers to those changes.

Not long ago, I accepted an invitation to attend a gala dinner in Washington, DC, celebrating what Caketoppers.co.uk informs me is the “emerald” anniversary of AnOther magazine. Ten years ago, as an unpaid intern with the same publication, I used to sign up for these things indiscriminately: House Freedom Caucus luncheons “catered” by Chick-fil-A, panels at the Brookings Institution on the debt-to-something-or-other ratio, symposia on the threats to cybersecurity faced by entrepreneurs in suburban Uzbekistan. As long as you showed up and at least pretended to listen (which meant, in practice, taking no more than two cigarette breaks per speaker), you got a free meal and an evening’s worth of drinks in one of the most expensive cities in the country.

Are you a man? Need a job? Well, former labor lawyer and current Michigan congresswoman Hillary Scholten would really rather you didn't apply to be her new senior communications director in DC, according to a job posting obtained by The Spectator.  The job posting stipulates that “our office deeply values staff diversity (both because we recognize we are a better office for it and because we know that it is objectively the right thing to do!)” “We strongly encourage women (and all individuals who do not identify as male), people of color, LGBTQIA+ individuals, people with disabilities, veterans, and members of other underrepresented communities to apply,” the post continues.

In the past three weeks, two small communities in two Dairy Belt states have seen tragedy — and, of course, two very different media reactions. In Oxford, Michigan, Ethan Crumbley, a fifteen-year-old student, opened fire with a handgun at his high school on Tuesday. He killed four students and wounded eight and was taken into custody. After a brief search, both of Crumbley’s parents were arrested on manslaughter charges, for purchasing the firearm and gifting it to him. Ethan Crumbley has been charged with twenty-four different felonies including terrorism. Shortly before the shooting, a teacher identified disturbing signals in classroom, including his drawings depicting suicide, mass death, blood and firearms.

Cockburn has always been suspicious of politicians who don't drink. The track record there isn't very good: Hitler, Biden, Trump, Che Guevara, the grand old Duke of York Prince Andrew. Contrast that to history's legions of statesmanlike squifflers, from Winston Churchill to George Washington to Vaclav Havel. Hence why Cockburn is struggling to understand why Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel is under fire for getting a bit tibbly. Nessel, a Democrat, apologized on her Facebook page Wednesday for having had too much to drink at a tailgate party before a college football game. She admitted that she'd been imbibing on an empty stomach, and said she'd later felt sick and had to leave the stadium so as to, as she put it, "prevent me from vomiting on any of my constituents.