Cup of Joe – August 6, 2024 (2024)

New York Times: “The sudden elevation of Kamala Harris to replace President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket has transformed what had been a long slog between Mr. Biden and former President Donald J. Trump into a 100-day sprint to Election Day. This campaign is now playing out in fast forward, with a vice-presidential pick, convention, the debate on debates, the production of television advertisem*nts and the crafting of strategy, all taking place in the crunch of weeks rather than months.”

“Voters will begin casting ballots in Pennsylvania, one of the critical battleground states, as soon as mid-September.”

“Analysts from both parties said that timeline is likely to benefit Ms. Harris. Her campaign is looking to ride a burst of momentum, hoping to coast past some of the scrutiny and detailed policy debates that candidates usually experience on the path to the nomination — and leaving Mr. Trump casting about to adjust to a very different opponent.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders is trying to push Kamala Harris to the left, citing results of a poll he commissioned in battleground states that shows progressive proposals such as increasing the minimum wage or raising taxes on corporations and the rich are overwhelmingly popular,Punchbowl Newsreports.

New York Times says the size of Harris’ crowds is rattling Trump: “The numbers game has long been of paramount importance for Mr. Trump. As a reality television star, he was obsessed with ratings… This only intensified once he entered politics. He spent his first full day in office as president trying to convince the news media that his inauguration crowd was larger than the Women’s March the day before. (It was not.)”

“The crowds he has drawn to his rallies this campaign season have been as big as ever. Whether in blistering heat or deep freeze, his supporters line up for hours beforehand to see him. Mr. Trump’s previous two rivals, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, could never compete with him on this front. What will it mean if his new challenger can?”

“Ms. Harris’s rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday, when she is expected to unveil her running mate, is likely to be a blowout. After that, she’s going on tour, holding rallies in western Wisconsin; Detroit; Raleigh, N.C.; Savannah, Ga.; Phoenix; and Las Vegas. It’s all starting to screw with Mr. Trump’s psyche.”

Jonathan Chait: “If Republicans believe Harris can’t defend her positions extemporaneously and would melt down in the face of any unscripted pressure, it would make sense for them to want her to submit to media interviews. But given their belief that the media is in the tank for Democrats, it would make even more sense for them to want Trump to debate her.”

“After all, we just saw a debate in which Trump destroyed the Democratic nominee onstage. Why don’t they try to make that happen again?”

“A wave of panic rippled through financial markets on Monday, with stocks falling sharply inthe United Statesand around the world as investors zeroed in on signs of a slowing American economy,” theNew York Timesreports.

“Monday’s drop extended a sell off that had begun last week, after the U.S. jobs report on Friday that showed significantly slower hiring, with unemployment rising to its highest level in nearly three years. This deepened fears that the world’s largest economy could be sliding into a recession and that the Federal Reserve may have waited too long to cut interest rates.”

“The drop was exacerbated by other factors — concerns that technology stocks had run up too far too fast, and that a suddenly strengthening yen would hurt the prospects of Japanese companies and some global traders — both hit markets too.”

Bloomberg: “As concerns about a U.S. economic slowdown intensified, traders ramped up bets that the Federal Reserve will step in with an emergency interest rate cut, putting the odds at 30% for a quarter-point reduction.”

“Donald Trump on Monday blamed Vice President Kamala Harris for the stock market’s dramatic plunge, months after claiming he deserved credit for the market’s then-record upswing,”CNBCreports.

“Secretary of State Tony Blinken told his counterparts from the G7 countries on Sunday that an attack by Iran and Hezbollah against Israel could start as early as Monday,”Axiosreports.

“A federal judge ruled thatGoogleengaged in illegal practices to preserve its search engine monopoly, delivering a major antitrust victory to the Justice Department in its effort to rein in Silicon Valley technology giants,” theWall Street Journalreports.

New York Times: “The ruling is the most significant victory to date for American regulators who are trying to rein in the power of tech giants in the internet era. It is likely to influence other government antitrust lawsuits against Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.”

“The ruling did not include remedies for Google’s behavior. Judge Mehta will now decide that, potentially forcing the company to change the way it runs or to sell off part of its business.”

“Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. acknowledged Sunday that he abandoned a young dead bear in Central Park after he initially planned to skin the cub for meat,”NBC Newsreports.

“Kennedy said in a three-minute video on X thatThe New Yorkermagazine found out about the incident, the date of which is unknown, and asked him for confirmation. Kennedy described driving north of New York City to go falconing with a group when he saw a woman in a van hit and kill a young bear.”

The Manhattan district attorney’s officetold WPIXthat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could potentially face charges for leaving a dead bear in Central Park.

In a recent text exchange, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told one person that Donald Trump was “a terrible human being. The worse president ever and barely human. He is probably a sociopath,” theNew Yorkerreports.

But, Kennedy went on, Biden was “more dangerous to the Republic and the planet.”

After its ponderous sojourn at the Supreme Court, the Jan. 6 case against Donald Trump was officially returned Friday to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, D.C., and she immediately picked it back up again and started moving it forward.

Among her initial actions, notably undertaken over the weekend, Chutkan:

• set a Friday, Aug. 9 deadlinefor the parties to submit a proposed scheduling order for pretrial proceedings;
• set a status conferencefor next Friday, Aug. 16,
• denieda pending Trump motion to dismiss the case on statutory grounds, but gave him the chance to re-up it once the immunity questions in the case are resolved.
• denieda pending Trump motion to dismiss the case on the grounds of selective and vindictive prosecution.

And just like that, the case was up and running again. But don’t hold your breath that this will go to trial before the election. Time is simply too short at this point.

The elephant in the room is the Supreme Court’s expansive ruling in this very case on presidential immunity, how much that narrows the indictment, what kind of evidentiary hearings Chutkan needs to address presidential immunity, and the still-unknown ways in which the high court’s unprecedented ruling effects this and the other Trump prosecutions.

Hanging over all of that will be at leastone more trip to the Supreme Courtto give it a chance to weigh in on whether Chutkan properly jumped through all the hoops it has put in her way. Again, there’s no way for all this to happen before Election Day.

In herorderdenying Trump’s motion to dismiss for selective and vindictive prosecution, Chutkan used some of the samedirect and non-nonsense languagethat had marked her earlier handling of the case:

At the outset, the court must address—as it has before—Defendant’s improper reframing of the allegations against him. … At this stage, the court cannot accept Defendant’s alternate narrative.

Chutkan went on to find that most of Trump’s arguments were speculative or conclusory and that he “proffered no meaningful evidence” that would justify a hearing on his motion to allow him to try to develop a factual record.

Under Chutkan’s scheduling order, we may get legal fireworks right off the bat. Don’t expect the parties to come to any kind of substantive agreement on a pretrial schedule; the parties are too far apart, so Chutkan will likely have to weigh in there. But we’ll get our first taste of the legal posture Trump will be taking in this case, knowing the Supreme Court has his back.

“The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an audacious lawsuit by Missouri that asked the justices to intervene in the hush money case in New York in which former President Donald Trump was convicted of falsifying business records,” theNew York Timesreports.

“Andrew Bailey, Missouri’s attorney general, asked the court to defer Mr. Trump’s sentencing, scheduled for Sept. 18, until after the election and to lift a gag order limiting what he can say.”

Associated Press: Supreme Court shuts down Missouri’s long shot push to lift Trump’s gag order in hush-money case.

J.D. Vance’s wife is pushing back against criticism her husband is facing for his “childless cat ladies” remark, saying she wished people wouldn’t focus on the phrase itself, theDaily Beastreports.

Said Usha Vance: “I took a moment to look and actually see what he had said, and try and understand what the context was in all that, which is something that I really wish people would do a little bit more often.”

She added: “The reality is, he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive, and it had actual meaning. And I just wish sometimes that people would talk about those things and that we would spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase, because what he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country.”

Vanity Fairruns an excerpt fromTrump in Exileby Meridith McGraw, concerning the influence of Susie Wiles.

“It was because she [Susie Wiles] was a successful person in her own right that Wiles was of particular value to Trump. She didn’t need him the way that so many in his orbit did — often desperately. And because she wasn’t a sycophant, she seemed to understand him with a rare clarity, as the strange and complicated human he was.”

“Unlike so many others around Trump, she wasn’t afraid to tell him bracing truths that he didn’t want to hear.”

“Justice Clarence Thomas failed to publicly disclose additional private travel provided by the wealthy conservative donor Harlan Crow,” theNew York Timesreports.

Donald Trump is making available four new and rarely available memberships at his exclusive Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida available for a $1 million initiation fee,The Guardianreports.

UK prime minister Keir Starmer said he could “guarantee” rioters will “regret taking part in this disorder” as he condemned an attack on a hotel housing asylum seekers in Rotherham and branded the action “far-right thuggery,”The Guardianreports.

New York Times: “The police in cities across the country have braced for continued far-right and anti-immigration protests spurred by a deadly stabbing attack last week in the northern English town of Southport. Disinformation spread rapidly that erroneously claimed the suspect in the knife attack was an immigrant. On Saturday, dozens of people were arrested as demonstrations from Liverpool to Belfast descended into violence.”

“Sunday saw a new wave of clashes, with groups gathering in Rotherham, Bolton, Hull, Southport, Middlesbrough and other towns and cities scattered across the country that devolved into varying degrees of violence.”

Financial Times: Why are the far right rioting in England?

“J.D. Vance has been trying out different responses to the wave of scrutiny he’s faced since becoming Donald Trump’s running mate. Now, he’s downplaying his own relevance to the election entirely,”Politicoreports.

Said Vance: “My attitude is, it doesn’t really matter, as much as this hits my ego. People are going to vote primarily for Donald Trump or for Kamala Harris. That’s the way these things go. I think my job over the next few months is to just drive home the message that Kamala Harris has been a bad vice president, and she’d be a worse president.”

New York Times: “In his U-turning path from anti-Trump author to MAGA-approved Ohio senator and running mate, Mr. Vance has developed a reputation for being ideologically pliable — open-minded, supporters say; core-less, critics counter.”

“But he has been unswerving in recent years in his assessment of how Republicans should carry themselves when they win: Use every available lever of state, even if that means testing the bounds of the constitutional system.”

Said Vance in 2021: “We are in a late republican period. If we’re going to push back against it, we have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

“For weeks, Senate Republicans delighted in the misery of their Democratic counterparts. The political story of the summer — whether President Biden would back down from his run at a second term — left GOP senators smiling and away from the media’s glaring spotlight on their foibles,” theWashington Postreports.

“But the tables quickly turned. Their party’s presidential nominee recently returned to his natural form and lashed out against Vice President Harris in divisive terms that had little basis in truth. Republicans went right back into the political PTSD of the Donald Trump era, mouthing the same platitudes that they grasped onto during his presidency.”

“The battle for power in a potential second Trump White House is in full swing: Former President Trump’s two veep runners-up, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, are in the running for secretary of state, Trump sources tell us,”Axiosreports.

“We’re told Trump is focused on campaigning, and paying little attention to the fight to staff a prospective second administration. But top Republicans are already lobbying Trump advisers hard for specific slots. A clear matrix of likely options — largely consistent across conversations with Trump insiders — is emerging.”

“The top of a secondTrump administrationwould be mainly white, male, populist and loyal, based on preliminary lists of likely Cabinet members and top staff.”

“Billionaire financier Ken Griffin is spending tens of millions of dollars to back Republican primary candidates across the US, but records show he has so far resisted contributing to Donald Trump — the former president leading an ideological overhaul of the GOP,”Bloombergreports.

“Griffin’s position as an established force in Republican fundraising has sometimes put him at odds with Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, who have promoted policies that were long anathema to conservatives.”

New York Times: “All told, he has given $227 million in contributions to federal candidates and political committees since 2020, nearly all to Republicans — a sum that puts him in the top echelon of the party’s donors, alongside far better-known megadonors like Miriam Adelson and her husband, Sheldon, who died in 2021, and Liz and Dick Uihlein.”

“Yet for all his financial influence, Mr. Mellon and his interests — and what exactly is motivating his largess — have remained largely a mystery.”

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) withdrew from consideration for Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential pick because he feared his Republican lieutenant governor could try to seize power in his absence,Politicoreports.

Said Cooper: “Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor, is the most extreme statewide candidate in the country right now. If I were to be out of state at a campaign event, if I had been the vice-presidential nominee, he could claim he was acting governor.”

Joshua Spivak: “The last time such a choice was made was in 1924, when the Democrats chose Nebraska Gov. Charles Bryan (the brother of three-time Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan) as the vice presidential pick before their inauspicious trouncing to Republican Calvin Coolidge that November. Bryan was chosen after the party took a grueling and record-setting 103 ballots to choose John W. Davis as the presidential nominee at the top of the ticket.”

“Since then, the Democrats have only chosen federal officials for the VP slot.”

“The favorite farm team for vice presidents has been sitting U.S. senators: 16 of the last 17 nominees were taken directly from the U.S. Senate, including Harris herself, who was a senator from California when Biden tapped her in 2020.”

“North Korea said it deployed 250 new mobile launchers for ballistic missiles that can deliver nuclear strikes on South Korea and US bases in the country, in one of its biggest displays of its rocket prowess under leader Kim Jong Un,”Bloombergreports.

“Iran is seeking to harm Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in covert online influence operations, fearing a return to power by the Republican nominee would inflame relations with Washington,” theWall Street Journalreports.

“The assessment of Iran’s election preferences marked a shift from a view shared by American intelligence agencies just a few weeks ago, when they said that Tehran was chiefly focused on acting as a ‘chaos agent’ in the election.”

“American law enforcement has arrested two top leaders of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel, one of the most dominant criminal groups inMexico,” theNew York Timesreports.

“The two operatives, Ismael Zambada García and Joaquín Guzmán López, are among the most powerful drug traffickers in Mexico and command massive transnational cocaine and fentanyl businesses that move narcotics intothe United States, Europe and elsewhere. Both men were in custody in El Paso, Texas.”

Associated Press: U.S. authorities have arrested “El Mayo” Zambada, a historic leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.

TurkishPresident Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is under fire for slapping a child in the face at an event,Gazete Duvarreports.

Erdoğan extended his hand for the boy to kiss, which is common in Turkish culture as a sign of respect to elders, and the boy hesitated so Erdoğan slapped him in the face.

“I think you should get a one year jail sentence if you do anything to desecrate the American flag. Now, people will say, “Oh, it’s unconstitutional.’ Those are stupid people. Those are stupid people that say that.”— Donald Trump,on Fox & Friends. There was no follow up about whether this pertains to the Capitol rioters who used flags to hit police on January 6.