A Stopped Clock Is Sometimes Right

Plus: Kamala Harris embraces 'No Tax on Tips.'

Time flies when you’re having fun. So we were startled this weekend to realize that we—Bill and Andrew, that is—have been writing this morning missive for six months. It was exactly a half year ago, on February 12, 2024, when the great Charlie Sykes passed the Morning Shots baton to us. We think the handoff was reasonably smooth, and we hope we’ve managed to maintain at least something close to Charlie’s pace. At least we haven’t (yet) been disqualified.

But we did want to take this half-anniversary occasion to thank all of you—for reading, for subscribing, and (it appears from the growth in readers and subscribers) for recommending Morning Shots to others.

And we wanted to thank you also for your vigorous and well-informed comments, and for your corrections on those (of course, rare!) occasions when we’ve been wrong. Happy Monday.

(Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

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Six Months In

—Bill Kristol

Speaking of knowing things, or at least occasionally guessing right, I will point out that this is how I began that first Morning Shots, on February 12, 2024:

Today I feel an obligation instead to grasp an unpleasant nettle: Joe Biden’s age.

President Biden is old. He seems frail. He’s running for another four-year term.

Let’s be honest: It’s not obvious he’s up to that.

This is a serious problem. It’s a problem because the American public doesn’t think Biden should be running for a second term. Partly as a result of that judgment, Biden now trails in the race for presidency. It’s a particularly urgent problem when the alternative is Donald J. Trump, whose second term could do incalculable damage to this country.

This is not a problem that can be dealt with by happy talk or by exhortations to circle the wagons . . .

I’ve believed for more than a year that President Biden should have chosen not to run for reelection . . . I’ve believed such a decision by Biden would produce a strong nominee, one who would enable voters in 2024 to feel they were voting not just against Trump, but for generational change . . .

All it takes is for President Biden to choose not to run again . . .

I still think Joe Biden should make this choice.

I think I was at least right about that. It’s obvious that the president made the right choice, and he deserves credit for doing so.

I want to thank those of you who differed with my judgment for doing so in a civil way. And I want to thank all of you for sticking with us over the last six months through good-faith disagreements on various issues.

As for those issues, I had thoughts on a bunch of them which I’d meant to burden you with this morning, ranging from the state of the race (remarkably good) to the state of Donald Trump (remarkably bad). But we have twelve weeks, five days a week, of Morning Shots ahead of us until election day. There’ll be plenty of time for the consideration of all such topics of weight and moment, so I thought I’d spare you my thoughts for this one morning.

Rather, I’ll leave you with a quotation I’ve always liked from Federalist No. 1. The Federalist Papers were of course the Morning Shots of their day, missives by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (and occasionally John Jay) that appeared in New York newspapers from the fall of 1787 to the spring of 1788 making the case for the new Constitution. Andrew and I write today in defense of that same Constitution, now old but still very much worthy of defense, we think.

In any case, I will certainly acknowledge that our missives are not always at the same level as those of Hamilton and Madison. But I do hope that this passage from Federalist No. 1 captures the spirit of our rather less august enterprise as well:

In the course of the preceding observations, I have had an eye, my fellow-citizens, to putting you upon your guard against all attempts, from whatever quarter, to influence your decision in a matter of the utmost moment to your welfare, by any impressions other than those which may result from the evidence of truth. . . . I affect not reserves which I do not feel. I will not amuse you with an appearance of deliberation when I have decided. I frankly acknowledge to you my convictions, and I will freely lay before you the reasons on which they are founded. The consciousness of good intentions disdains ambiguity. I shall not, however, multiply professions on this head. My motives must remain in the depository of my own breast. My arguments will be open to all, and may be judged of by all. They shall at least be offered in a spirit which will not disgrace the cause of truth.

Morning Shots—and of course The Bulwark as a whole—also aspires to offer arguments “in a spirit which will not disgrace the cause of truth.” And we thank you for engaging those arguments in a spirit of good faith and good cheer.

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Race to the Bottom

—Andrew Egger

Another thing we aspire to be at Morning Shots is consistent . . . which brings us to Kamala Harris’ latest policy proposal.

Rallying in Nevada this weekend, Harris made a new pledge to the hospitality-heavy state that, as president, she would “eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.”

This, of course, mirrors a policy idea Trump first rolled out earlier this summer, alongside a guerilla marketing campaign that exhorted supporters to write “Vote Trump for no tax on tips” on restaurant receipts. Here’s what we had to say about the pitch then:

As a policy matter, this is completely ridiculous. However you feel about America’s idiosyncratic norms around tipping, the idea that a random subset of the hospitality and service sector—bartenders and restaurant servers, mostly—should suddenly get to pay essentially zero tax on their income is incoherent. If you want to lower taxes on lower earners, why not lower taxes on all lower earners?

It’s the sort of thing that gives you hives: candidates on both sides racing to propose huge changes to our basic tax structure, not because those changes would make the tax code more just, but because they hope it will nab them a few key votes in a swing state.

And yes, before you go nuts on me, politicians pander all the time. But that’s not the only route to picking up votes. You can imagine an alternate universe where Harris, instead of embracing “no tax on tips” herself, made it a point of contrast, declaring she doesn’t intend to run America’s economic policy via memes and gimmicks.

Barack Obama used lines like that to great effect in 2008, when—for instance—he stuck to his guns about fuel-economy standards despite worries they could hurt him in Michigan: “That’s the kind of truth-telling we need from the next president.” This wasn’t a one-time thing: Obama also famously opposed a gas tax holiday that John McCain and Hillary Clinton had embraced.

There are, of course, worse things a candidate can do with their time than pander to voters. Donald Trump spent his weekend shorting out his supporters’ minds with some of the dumbest conspiracy-theorizing we’ve ever seen, insisting that the crowds Harris was drawing at her rallies were AI-generated fabrications. Even more insanely, Trump added that this meant Harris should be “disqualified” from the election “because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE.”

Obviously, having a rampaging, diseased mind like that on one side of the contest makes it hard to get worked up about a pandering proposal that almost surely won’t become law. How many distortionary changes to U.S. tax policy would you be willing to accept to keep that man out of power? The number isn’t small!

But on a more elevated level, the no-tax-on-tips race to the bottom is a bracing reminder of just how far we still are from democratic high function. One day, one hopes we’ll get to a point one day where things are calm enough, and the candidates are universally unobjectionable enough, that it’s possible to throw out the bums who pander with nonsense like “no tax on tips” on their ear.

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Quick Hits

1. Not Going Peacefully

Does the Trump who thinks Harris should be banned from running for president for the audacity of actually drawing big crowds at her rallies strike you as the kind of guy who’s prepared to go quietly into the sunset should he lose? Joe Biden doesn’t think so either. In an interview released this weekend, CBS’s Robert Costa asked the president whether he was confident there would be a peaceful transfer of power in November. “If Trump loses, I’m not confident at all,” Biden replied.

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2. Lying with a Smile

JD Vance hit the Sunday shows this week to insist all that stuff you’ve been hearing about him denigrating “childless cat ladies” is a big fat lie. “If you look at what I said in context,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash, “the Harris campaign has frankly lied about what I actually said.” What he had been talking about, he insisted, was the need to get away from anti-family policies, like ridiculously high out-of-network medical bills: “I’ve sponsored legislation to try to fix things like that so moms and dads don’t get these surprise medical bills. I think it’s important for us to be pro-family. That’s all that I have ever said.”

This is some chutzpah! Just to roll back the tape again, here was what Vance actually said: “We are effectively run in this country . . . by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable too. And it’s just a basic fact.”

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3. Musk We Do This?

Trump has a big interview tonight with Elon Musk. Let’s not pretend this is some major journalistic endeavor. Musk has endorsed Trump and has been pumping some truly uncut MAGA content straight into the veins of his tens of millions of followers on X. It’s not an interview. It’s a gift (unless there are some DeSantis-like tech glitches). Either way, Trump seems to be paying it back even before it happens. His campaign, notably, started running ads on X this morning.

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