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. . . . . 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.. . . . 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.
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.
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.
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. . . . 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.
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