The GOP Is a Messy Soap Opera Right Now

The Democratic ticket has now taken shape, and Donald Trump is not handling it well. Meanwhile, his running mate and the rest of his party are stumbling.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

A Tire Fire

Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party have defied the expectations of many observers—and as usual, when I say “many observers,” I mostly mean “me”—by making an almost flawless transition from President Joe Biden’s faltering chances to a new and energized campaign. Yesterday, Harris rolled out the ebullient Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate at a rally in Philadelphia, where one of Walz’s former competitors for the job, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, gave a rousing address to the crowd.

So far, the Democrats have avoided the backbiting and chaos that could have erupted after Biden’s unprecedented departure from the race. They’ve left that to the Republicans, who don’t seem to be handling any of the news from the past few weeks very well. Before we turn to Trump himself, let’s review some of the recent banner moments for the Grand Old Party.

This week, the former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis accepted a deal from the state of Arizona to cooperate in its fake-elector case. Ellis, who served as a deputy district attorney in a Colorado county for six months before getting fired, was finally disciplined in May by the Colorado Supreme Court for her actions related to the 2020 election, and agreed to give up her law license for three years. An Arizona grand jury described by Politico as “unusually aggressive” (read: deeply pissed off) indicted 18 people in the scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election, even asking to bring in others who were not targets of the investigation. In the days since Ellis flipped, one of the fake electors became the first to take a plea deal.

Nevertheless, Arizona Republicans last week nominated Kari Lake—the MAGA darling, election denier, and loser in the 2022 gubernatorial election—for one of Arizona’s Senate seats. Early polls show Lake running behind Democratic candidate Ruben Gallego, and her weakness as a statewide candidate prompted the conservative Arizona commentator Jon Gabriel to post a simple prediction on X: “Onto another loss in the general.”

Other GOP state parties are flailing about as well. A number of former GOP state and national officials are ditching their party’s nominee and joining “Republicans for Harris,” a group with a name few conservatives could even have parsed five years ago. These defections are understandable when new GOP leaders are people like Lake and Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor in North Carolina who said in June—while standing in a church—that “some folks need killing.”

At the national level, GOP commentators seem especially flummoxed about the Walz rollout. They are, for now, trying mightily to make it seem as if Harris opting for Walz over Shapiro is evidence of roiling anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party. Scott Jennings, who seems to be vying for the Jeffrey Lord Chair of Republican Sycophancy at CNN, mumbled that Harris chose Walz because the Democrats are “awash in anti-Semitism,” a smear that even his network colleagues on the panel wouldn’t let pass. Other Republicans have tried with increasing churlishness to make the charge stick online, and Trump himself has called Walz’s selection “insulting to Jewish people,” which, of course, makes no sense.

Meanwhile, J. D. Vance’s excruciating flameout as Trump’s running mate seems to have some Republicans wishing they could just drive him back to Ohio and leave him there. One source of the bad-mouthing appears to be the GOP strategist and former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who issued one of the greatest non-denial-denials in recent political history:

“When it comes to concerned people questioning the vetting or selection of JD Vance, the calls are coming in, not going out,” she said. “I’m not calling them and saying this is bad. People are asking me. They’re not just asking me. They’re asking lots of people.”

Did you follow that? I’m not out there saying bad things about J. D., and I never said he was a mistake; I’m just answering the many calls—so many!—from people who think he’s a mistake.

Oh.

Trump, for his part, backed up his running mate a week ago by telling the audience at the National Association of Black Journalists convention that vice presidents really don’t matter for the outcomes of elections. (Well, Trump admitted, “maybe Lyndon Johnson mattered, for different reasons.”)

Vance might be grateful that so much of the news this week was about Walz, because at least it overshadowed the story in The Washington Post that Vance—a United States senator—was texting with a notorious internet troll named Chuck Johnson.

Vance and Johnson exchanged views on conspiracies: “Do you think [Jeffrey] Epstein actually killed himself?” Vance asked. He asked Johnson his views on the existence of UFOs, and mocked the death of the GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson. “Never met him,” he wrote. “Hes dead. Don’t care.” The senator also discussed potentially sensitive military-assistance issues with his new friend. (“Dude I won’t even take calls from Ukraine,” Vance reportedly told Johnson, claiming that senior Ukrainian officials had reached out to him, “bitching about F16s.”)

A Vance spokesperson claims that Johnson “spam texted” the senator and that Vance “usually ignored him, but occasionally responded to push back against things [Johnson] said.” That’s not how those texts read, but as a former Hill staffer, I might suggest to Vance’s assistants that someone like Chuck Johnson isn’t even supposed to have your boss’s phone number.

To paraphrase Succession’s Logan Roy: These are not serious people.

No one is handling the past few weeks more poorly than Trump himself, who, as The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger noted, seems to have retreated into an Aaron Sorkin–inspired fantasy. Yesterday, the former president posted this on his Truth Social site:

What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the history of the U.S., whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him by Kamabla, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Shifty Adam Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and others on the Lunatic Left, CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE. He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!

“Kamabla”?

This might be too much even for a Sorkin script. Trump’s reactions lately are so unhinged, so hysterical, that they could pass for one of those scenes in a soap opera where a drunken dowager finds out that her May-December romance is a sham, and she begs him, as mascara flows down her cheeks, to fly off with her to Gstaad or Antibes to rekindle their love.

In reality, of course, this is all a disturbing reminder that Trump is a deeply unwell person who is not fit to be the commander in chief, and that should he return to office, other Republican officials cannot be counted on to protect the nation—especially Vance, who reveals himself daily as every bit the intellectual lightweight and political fraud his critics believe he is.

The Democrats are doing well, and Republicans are sitting in the middle of a tire fire. But Trump is still in a commanding electoral position, and he could still win. The pro-democracy coalition has every reason to enjoy some good news, but these past few weeks should not obscure the existential danger America faces in November.

Today’s News

1. Ukraine launched a cross-border ground assault yesterday, entering western-Russian territory, according to Russian officials. Ukrainian representatives have not commented on the attack.
2. Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker called on Sangamon County Sheriff Jack Campbell to resign over how he handled the shooting of Sonya Massey. Campbell said that he would not step down.
3. Representative Cori Bush of Missouri lost her Democratic primary last night to Wesley Bell, a prosecutor backed by the same pro-Israel groups that helped unseat Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York in June.

A Marriage That Changed Literary History

By Phyllis Rose

When Fanny met Louis in 1876, he was not yet Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, A Child’s Garden of Verses. He was a scrawny, sickly, rotten-toothed, chain-smoking, 25-year-old literary wannabe who had published a few essays and reviews and was financially dependent on his parents, constantly squabbling with them over how—as they saw it—he was wasting his life, denying God, and generally going to hell in a handbasket.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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