A Win for BigDadEnergy
Plus: Trump yearns for a stock market crash.
You ever write something about how there isn’t a vice presidential pick yet, and then suddenly there is one? Nobody knows the hidden travails of the midmorning newsletter writer. Happy Tuesday.
The Walz Are Closing In
—Sam Stein and Andrew Egger
After days of waiting, it appears we have a decision. Kamala Harris, CNN and WaPo first reported, has chosen Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate.
The choice is, on the one hand, a surprise. By all accounts, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro filled the most immediate needs: He’s the popular governor of the state that’s likely to provide its winner a decisive margin in the Electoral College. And winning sort of matters.
But as a matter of modern politics, I suppose this one shouldn’t have shocked us. In an era where vibes rule everything around us, Walz, by the end, was the guy riding the zeitgeist.
The Minnesota governor’s ascension to the VP slot marks the first time that TikTok has helped choose a running mate. Walz was most assuredly not a frontrunner when this process started. He wasn’t even among the top three midwestern governors in the mix.
But his quick ability to brand the Republican ticket as “weird” earned him immediate plaudits among the Democratic faithful. His economic populist pitch, his non-coastal elite resume, and his mockery of JD Vance kept adding to the momentum.
Meanwhile, Shapiro was slowing. A sequence of oppo hits surfaced concerning his time as a prosecutor. His Jewish heritage also had some Democrats skittish—particularly concerning his longstanding support for Israel, a sore spot in today’s internal Democratic politics.
Walz is a fine pick for Harris. He has progressive credentials, an accomplished record, ties to labor and a clear mastery of trolling. He does no harm—at least not that we can see upon first blush. (We’ll have to see how the rehashing of the riots following the death of George Floyd plays out.)
In the end, this selection tells us a lot about both Walz and Shapiro. But it may tell us more about Harris herself. In choosing the former, she has made a play to keep Democratic base enthusiasm going for her candidacy. But the inverse of that is she appears to deprived herself of a chance to fully nail down a critical state or create a generational contrast with Trump that could have worked effectively for her. The vibes may have compelled her to play it too safe.
But perversely, playing it safe can create its own risks. Republicans will be happy to wonder aloud why Harris considered Shapiro’s liabilities so major. Here was JD Vance in an interview this morning with conservative yakker Hugh Hewitt before the news was official: “They will not have picked Shapiro frankly because of antisemitism in their own caucus, in their own party . . . The far left doesn’t like the fact that he is a Jewish American.”
“Rather than pick the very popular governor of a neck-and-neck must-win purple state, Harris chose a dime-a-dozen blue-state governor who gives feels to progressives,” writer Damon Linker tweeted after the pick. “That’s about what I’d have expected from her a month ago.”
Tim Walz: Good pick? Bad pick? Let us know what you think:
The Happiest Guy at the Crash
–Andrew Egger
Stocks dropped heavily on Monday, with markets faltering after years of bull growth. Tech stocks have been hit the hardest, as investors worry if and when huge investments in AI will pay off. Others were spooked by a hiring slowdown in the latest jobs report. Still others are starting to get antsy that the Federal Reserve hasn’t cut rates as quickly as anticipated.
Donald Trump has a different theory: Investors just realized that Kamala Harris is vice president.
“STOCK MARKETS CRASHING. I TOLD YOU SO!!!,” Trump posted to social media late Sunday night. “KAMALA DOESN’T HAVE A CLUE. BIDEN IS SOUND ASLEEP. ALL CAUSED BY INEPT U.S. LEADERSHIP!”
Trump continued to post on this theme throughout the day yesterday:
“STOCK MARKETS ARE CRASHING, JOB NUMBERS ARE TERRIBLE, WE ARE HEADING TO WORLD WAR III, AND WE HAVE TWO OF THE MOST INCOMPETENT ‘LEADERS’ IN HISTORY. THIS IS NOT GOOD!!!”
“This is a preview of the world markets without Donald J. Trump in the White House. None of this happens if Trump is in. Kamala and the markets don’t go together. She’ll destroy the markets. She’s in power now and look at what is happening.”
“Of course there is a massive market downturn. Kamala is even worse than Crooked Joe . . . Next move, THE GREAT DEPRESSION OF 2024! You can’t play games with MARKETS. KAMALA CRASH!!!”
“VOTERS HAVE A CHOICE—TRUMP PROSPERITY, OR THE KAMALA CRASH & GREAT DEPRESSION OF 2024, NOT TO MENTION THE PROBABILITY OF WORLD WAR III IF THESE VERY STUPID PEOPLE REMAIN IN OFFICE. REMEMBER, TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!!!”
“KAMALA CRASH!”
“TRUMP CASH vs. KAMALA CRASH!”
It’s a remarkable spectacle to see a politician openly drooling over the possibility of a market crash that could benefit him politically. And incongruous too. Up until recently, Trump had wanted credit for the strong state of markets, arguing that investors were convinced he was going to win in 2024.
“THIS IS THE TRUMP STOCK MARKET,” he posted back in January, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed 38,000 points for the first time ever, “BECAUSE MY POLLS AGAINST BIDEN ARE SO GOOD THAT INVESTORS ARE PROJECTING THAT I WILL WIN.”
In the mind of Donald Trump, stocks soaring above 38,000 points is a major victory owed to him—but those same stocks correcting back down to 38,700 a few months later is a world-historical crash for which Kamala Harris must be blamed. Nobody ever said the politics of the economy was an exact science.
Could the current dip deepen into an honest-to-God crash? Sure! Could investors buy the dip and turn it around? Of course! If we had a crystal ball for such things, I tell you what, we wouldn’t be out here hustling newsletters on the sidewalk.
But the right-wing doomsayers from Trump on down don’t know either. David Frum made a good point yesterday, looking back on the similar politically induced freakout we went through after last year’s Silicon Valley Bank collapse.
“Today’s market events could indeed signal the system-toppling crisis they so perversely and inexplicably yearn for,” Frum writes. “More likely, today’s events are part of the pattern by which the U.S. stock market delivers an annual return of 8 percent per year: sometimes more, sometimes less. Capitalism is not collapsing. The West is not twilighting. The markets are just doing their job, discovering prices.”
And that’s before today, when the market looks likely to correct from yesterday’s low. Will that correction be dubbed “Kamala’s Comeback”? Or will investors have suddenly remembered once more that Trump will be taking power again soon? This could all get confusing fast. Best not to think about it too hard.
Quick Hits
1. Trump and the Youts
Yesterday, Donald Trump gave a bizarre interview to an unconventional interviewer: the 23-year-old gamer and streamer Adin Ross. Up at the site today, former NARAL president Ilyse Hogue warns that Democrats need to wake up to Trump’s play for the youth of the right:
Ross, who boasts 1.3 million followers, is part of a cohort of young hyperonline men who promote an unapologetically MAGA aesthetic and culture. He is a sycophant of the legendary king of the manosphere, Andrew Tate, known equally for his overt misogyny and the charges he faces for rape and human trafficking.
Ross himself was banned from the more mainstream gaming platform Twitch for multiple hate speech and racial slur offenses. That was never going to be a hurdle for Donald Trump. But the fact that the former president came on Ross’s show still underscores how the GOP is operating in an unconventional but potentially advantageous manner—one that stands in stark contrast to the Democrats, who continue to plod along using a playbook that counts “youth” as an unshakable monolith.
Trump’s appearance on Ross’s show is part of a concerted effort by Republicans to turn up the noise and turn out the vote for Trump among disaffected young men. Harvard IOP pollster John Della Volpe dubbed this cohort the “Barstool Sports generation” for their love of subversive humor and all things anti-woke, as personified by the stream of content produced by Dave Portnoy’s Barstool Sports empire. They’re the next-generation heirs of the Gamergate crowd that moved from online outrage about female game designers to mobilizing politically for the first time when they saw a kindred spirit in Trump during his 2016 run.
2. Sometimes the bear eats you
Yesterday, we wondered what RFK Jr. could have been thinking when he decided to blow up the political internet by “getting out in front” of a story about him dropping a dead bear cub in Central Park. Now that we’ve read the New Yorker profile in question, we’re ready to hazard a guess: Kennedy was trying to put an advance spotlight on one of the piece’s least unnerving allegations. The piece goes deep on Kennedy’s emotional instability; his serial philandering and drug use; his gaslighting relationship with his second wife that seemingly contributed, after their separation, to her death by suicide. The whole thing is well worth a read.
3. Knives out
Last week, our Marc Caputo was first to report that Donald Trump Jr. believes Kellyanne Conway was secretly trashing his dad’s decision to pick JD Vance as his running mate. Conway denied it and added that, when she lobbied the former president against Vance, she was giving advice the way she always does: “privately without compensation, expectation, or machinations.”
Well, it turns out some machinations were happening. Conway just registered as a foreign agent on behalf of a Ukrainian oligarch under a contract that began July 25—just 10 days after Trump picked Vance, who is an outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in Ukraine’s war with Russia. Conway’s compensation: $50,000 monthly. On his Triggered podcast yesterday, Donald Trump Jr. shaded Conway in response to a fan who told him he was “right” about Kellyanne. “Fifty grand a month from Ukraine to do what? It ain’t to negotiate peace,” Trump Jr. said, noting the contract discussion “was going on for a while.” He went on:
There are people who were, say, adverse to JD, and JD is the one guy that wants to cut off Ukraine funding. And it's like, ‘oh, now I wonder why they were adverse to JD?’ You know, when you're in that thing, you start putting the two pieces together, and it's like, ‘Ah … We don't need that.’ So, like, I said, I like her a lot. That's not a good move. I think that's one you could do without.
Cheap Shots
Correction (August 6, 2024, 9:32 a.m. EDT): As originally published, this newsletter mistakenly said Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s Jewish heritage would have been a “major-ticket first.” That distinction actually belongs to the late Sen. Joe Lieberman, Al Gore’s running mate in 2000.
Good pick. Good energy. Good contrast to the dystopian alternative ticket. Lets get it.
Walz is a great pick—he manages to make progressive policies look like common sense and is totally unthreatening when he does it. He looks older (but is about the same age as Harris) and that can be reassuring to a lot of votes who don’t want OLD-old, but want someone who is tested. This will be a good team.