Did Kamala Do What She Had To?
Plus: The GOP shrugs through Trump’s norm-breaking, policy flailing, and tantrums.
Please keep Andrew in your thoughts this morning; he’s got a big fantasy football draft today.
No Morning Shots Monday—we hope you all enjoy the holiday. Happy Friday.
Kama-live Another Day
—William Kristol
That whooshing sound you heard last night was a collective sigh of relief from Democrats, Never Trumpers, and other assorted Kamala Harris well-wishers.
And after releasing our held-in breath, what we said to each other was:
“Whew.”
“Good enough.”
“Got through the first test.”
“She did what she had to do.”
As she did, I think.
This was the first interview for Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, since they suddenly became the standard bearers for the Democratic party. It’s not easy to get up to presidential speed in less than six weeks. Last night showed they’re a good part of the way there.
But not all the way. I’d mention one point in particular.
For an incumbent vice president running on “change” and “turning the page” and “moving forward,” it was always going to be a challenge to balance that message with having to defend the policies of the current administration of which she is a part.
Yesterday’s interview with CNN’s Dana Bash showed that this remains a challenge. And it raised the question: In the first stage of this contest, Harris seized the mantle of change from Trump. Can she keep it?
We’ll see. But for now, I very much doubt that last night changed the dynamics of the race one way or the other. Sometimes a cable news interview is just a cable news interview.
I do think, though, that the interview marked the end of the beginning of the campaign. In these first five weeks, Harris really did do what she had to do: She reassembled the anti-Trump coalition and reintroduced herself in a favorable light to the American people. She started off a few points behind Trump, and she closed the gap and has now pulled just a bit ahead. Those successes weren’t inevitable. But Harris and her campaign pulled them off.
Last night didn’t reverse any of that. But it didn’t carry forward the impressive momentum of the first five weeks. Perhaps it couldn’t. She had to explain some of her policy shifts. She had to be asked about what she knew about Biden’s capacity to serve. It was bound to be defensive. But it was necessary.
So here we are: coming up to Labor Day, with a race that’s very much up for grabs.
Which makes me just a bit nervous about last night’s sighs of relief. The judgment that “she did what she had to do” is usually offered about a candidate who has a lead and does nothing to endanger it. But Harris isn’t a candidate with a significant lead. She can’t just play defense and run out the clock. What she has to do is stay on offense and play to win.
All of which is to say: We’ve got a tense and decisive two months ahead of us. And we’ve got one key moment coming right up—the debate. Harris’s performance last night was convincing enough to make one hopeful about the debate, and about the next two months. It was also halting enough to make one concerned about the debate, and the next two months.
That’s where we are: At a moment when there’s no cause for overconfidence, and no reason for despair.
And on Labor Day weekend, perhaps it’s also appropriate to say, we’re at a moment where we face a task worthy of all our labor: victory in November.
Don’t look now, but we’re about to hit the home stretch. Come along for the ride with us:
Trump Rages, GOP Yawns
—Andrew Egger
They say it takes 10,000 hours of work to master a skill. So we shouldn’t be surprised that, after years of diligent practice, congressional Republicans have gotten so good at ignoring insane behavior from Donald Trump.
This week, Trump turned Arlington National Cemetery into a campaign prop, brazenly flouting laws forbidding “partisan political activities” at military cemeteries by shooting footage for ads at the graves of soldiers who died in Afghanistan. A cemetery employee who tried to get the campaign to respect these laws was physically “pushed aside,” the Army said in a statement, while the Trump campaign jeered that the employee was having a “mental health episode.”
A few congressional Republicans jumped to defend Trump’s conduct; most were just silent. The Bulwark asked the office of Rep. Mike Rogers, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, whether they intended to look into the incident; we received no response.
Republicans have been largely silent, too, over Trump’s increasingly unapologetic abandonment of the pro-life agenda that he embraced during his first term. Trump has struck an abortion-agnostic pose throughout the 2024 campaign, but since last week he’s taken it to new heights. Last week, he told CBS News that as president, he would not attempt to hinder the mailing of abortion pills nationwide. This week, his campaign dodged a question from The Bulwark about whether he’d veto a Democrat-passed bill enshrining Roe v. Wade back into law.
And yesterday, Trump suggested that—in his capacity as a Florida resident—he’d vote this November to expand abortion rights in the Sunshine State, where he has long criticized the six-week ban signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis last year as a “terrible mistake.” “I’m going to be voting that we need more than six weeks,” he told NBC News. (His campaign later tried to walk this comment back.)
None of this sparked public pushback from any of the four co-chairs of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus: Reps. Kat Cammack, Michelle Fischbach, Andy Harris, and Chris Smith.
There’s been no significant GOP response against Trump’s Monopoly-money economic agenda: No tax on tips! No tax on social security! A new mandate for insurance to cover IVF! More tax cuts and more spending! Pay for it all with tariffs!
And, uh, we haven’t seen Republicans lining up to distance themselves from Trump’s repeated calls—as we noted yesterday—to jail basically every prominent Democrat in national politics and every Republican who worked to bring light to his actions on January 6th.
It’s hard to blame them too much, though: We’re sure they’re all very busy giving their play-by-play commentaries on Kamala Harris’s first interview.
Do you buy Donald Trump’s pivot to the agnostic center on abortion? Let us know in the comments:
Quick Hits
BLAST FROM THE PAST: JD Vance did a JD Vance thing yesterday: He went online to mock Kamala Harris and maybe stepped in it with some women along the way. Trump’s running mate resurfaced a 2007 clip of Miss South Carolina Teen Caitlin Upton to mockingly claim he’d found footage of Harris’s CNN interview. Upton, rather infamously, froze on live TV when asked to explain why Americans had trouble identifying the United States on a map, saying something about people not having maps and the need to help South Africa and Iraq. It was a trainwreck and hardly something Upton would want to relive. But Vance also left out the second part of the story. Shortly after that moment, Upton was offered a job . . . by Donald Trump, who gushed over her beauty.
“When I walked into his office, he said: ‘You are more gorgeous than I expected. You are going to model for my agency, and I won’t take ‘no’ for an answer,’ ” Upton recalls. “It was unreal.”
Upton, again, was a teenager at the time. Here is a picture of them together.
THE YES MAN: The Trump orbiters who tend to loom largest in the liberal consciousness are the rabid ideologues: The Steve Bannons and Stephen Millers of the world. But over at the Atlantic, Elaina Plott Calabro has a great new profile of Kash Patel, a man who’s dangerous for a different reason. “Even in an administration full of loyalists, Patel was exceptional in his devotion,” Calabro writes. “This was what seemed to disturb many of his colleagues the most: Patel was dangerous, several of them told me, not because of a certain plan he would be poised to carry out if given control of the CIA or FBI, but because he appeared to have no plan at all—his priorities today always subject to a mercurial president’s wishes tomorrow . . . What wouldn’t a person like that do, if asked?”
Cheap Shots
Regarding the Arlington Cemetery incident, why must we rely on the employee to bring charges? The Army should subpoena the campaign footage and if it confirms violation of filming rules or assault of the employee, the Army itself should bring charges.
This election was never going to be won or lost via press filters. The Harris campaign is too smart to run their messaging through such feckless intermediaries or set up their agenda for the kind of media vetting that they refuse to apply to Trump. And I think the Harris campaign rightly notes that the press, having been proven so ineffectual in handling Trump, subconsciously wants to reassert its relevance by directing all of that energy at Kamala. Very discerning of her, and she’s smart to avoid stepping into that trap.