And J. D. Vance’s staff needs to take his phone away.
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.
