Grace Curley

There was one silver lining that all Americans could agree on during this year’s election season: at least when the presidential race is finally over, the incessant campaign fundraising emails would stop. Would that it were! It has been twenty days since Vice President Kamala Harris conceded the presidential race to Donald J. Trump — and while the joyful warrior is decompressing from her defeat in Hawaii, her team continues to blast out emails begging her downtrodden supporters for more money.  On Saturday, the "Harris Fight Fund" (formerly the Harris-Walz campaign, formerly the Biden-Harris campaign) sent an email to supporters with the subject line, “We need to level with you about where we are.”  “Where they are,” according to reports, is in arrears.

Cities never sleep, but neither does Donald J. Trump. That might explain why he managed to make inroads in the most unlikely of places.  Trump’s gains in the Big Apple were able to do some damage to the Democrats’ star candidate and helped contribute to his popular vote win. “Kamala Harris won New York City by a thirty-seven-point margin, far shy of the nearly fifty-four-point margin of victory that President Biden held over Donald J. Trump in 2020,” Dana Rubinstein and Stefanos Chen wrote in the Times.  So how did he do it? It depends on who you ask.

The Harris-Walz team has a plan to coax Trump into another debate. According to NBC News, the Democratic National Committee will accuse Trump of being a chicken in the hopes of getting under his skin: “The chicken billboards, which will first appear at Trump’s rally Monday in Indiana, Pennsylvania, include a digitally altered image of Trump in a chicken suit alongside the words ‘There’s no debate: Donald Trump’s a chicken.’” The tactics here aren’t subtle, but considering Trump’s penchant for taking the bait, it just might work. But if Operation Chicken lays an egg, then the last big televised event of this campaign season is next week’s vice presidential debate, when Ohio senator J.D.

The Harris-Walz campaign is depending on Americans feeling so rushed this election that they don’t pay attention to the vice president’s dramatic evolution. Last week, CNN’s Kasie Hunt interviewed Harris-Walz campaign senior spokesperson Ian Sams and discussed polling that shows Democrats are losing working-class voters. “What is it about what you guys have been doing for the last three-plus years that explains that?” Hunt asked. Sams’s attempt at a non-answer was actually quite revealing. “We’ve got sixty days until the election,” he replied, exasperated. “You know, we don’t have time to sit around and think about why, over the last few years, certain things may have happened or may not have happened.

I hate to use the Democratic Party’s favorite word against them, but the Harris-Walz tag-team interview on CNN was… well, weird. The two grinning progressives sat side by side and tried their best to handle Dana Bash’s steady stream of softballs. Unfortunately, the starlets' most recent experience answering questions is when they are asking them of each other for schmaltzy social media videos, so to say they were rusty is an understatement. Bash first asked Kamala what she would do on day one if elected. Harris, never one to divulge any concrete courses of action, instead waxed poetic about optimism, hope and a “new way forward.” Back it up. A new way forward?

With seventy days until the election, Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment against former president Donald Trump on Tuesday. You know what they say: if at first you don't succeed... try, try again. “Smith simply re-indicted on same four criminal counts with less evidence,” legal scholar and George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley wrote on X. “He removed factual claims that clearly would trip the wire on the recent presidential immunity ruling of the Supreme Court…” In other words: meet the new indictment, same as the old indictment. But is anyone surprised? The Justice Department has been choosing quantity over quality in pursuit of their white whale Donald J. Trump for years.

Watch out California: Gavin Newsom is wearing a T-shirt. You know what that means: the Golden State governor means business! Every few years the well-coifed pol dons his everyman garb (jeans, trucker hat, aviators, et cetera) and puts on an impassioned performance for the press. His latest PR stunt has to do with his state’s worsening homeless crisis. Two weeks ago Newsom issued an executive order directing state agencies to clear the tent cities and encampments that bestrew the state. To drive the point home, Newsom even put his gloves on and picked up garbage from underneath an overpass in Mission Hills before heading back to the place hefeels most comfortable— in front of the cameras. “We need local government to step up. This is a crisis,” he huffed to the press gaggle.

On Thursday, while delivering remarks at the eulogy for the late Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Vice President Kamala Harris “accidentally” referred to herself as the president. Kamala was discussing a bill that Lee co-sponsored with Republican senator John Cornyn that eventually became law and made Juneteenth a federal holiday. “As a United States senator, I was proud to co-sponsor it. Then, as president — as vice president — it was my honor, with the president. With the president! It was my honor, along with our president, Joe Biden, to stand beside Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee as our president signed her bill into law.” Whoops.

Tonight on a series of Zoom calls, a majority of DNC delegates endorsed Kamala Harris, helping her secure the required number to become the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.  The lesson? Destroying democracy is bad, unless it's done over a video call. In which case, it’s totally fine. Earlier, at the now-Harris campaign headquarters in Delaware, Kamala read from a teleprompter before making an awkward phone call to Joe Biden. I was waiting for the part in the movie when the record scratches, the frame freezes and then the narrator Harris says, “Yup, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.”  The fifty-nine-year-old’s haphazard road to the general election is the best scenario she could have hoped for given her shortcomings.

As if the media’s coverage of the White House Correspondents' Dinner this weekend wasn’t painful enough, now we have to listen to TV personalities agonize over nerd prom's hypothetical demise. The latest in-sync meltdowns stemmed from a joke made by the dinner’s headliner comedian Colin Jost. "Colin Jost had a pretty apt joke tonight when he said this may be the final White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” CNN’s Jim Acosta told Vanity Fair at the NBCUniversal afterparty. “I think people have to think seriously about what’s going on right now.” Nothing says "afterparty fun" like grave assertions about the future of the American media.

The Arizona Supreme Court ruling that upheld an abortion ban from 1864 had Democratic campaign managers practically breaking out their tap shoes. In between the breathless rants about how “women will die” because of the ruling (that Arizona’s attorney general immediately announced she would not enforce), the opportunists of the left couldn’t hide their true ambition. John Heilemann told the nodding eggheads at Morning Joe that the “political effect” of the ruling “could not be better for Joe Biden.” And there it is: Democrats are far less concerned with an archaic abortion ban and far more concerned with changing the political winds for their floundering incumbent. Can you blame them?