Massacre on Mass. Ave.

Plus: Parsing the ‘weird’ discourse.

Rolling Stone: “In the world of two weeks ago, the graphic Democratic euphoria on display in Atlanta Tuesday would have been almost inconceivable: a Division I basketball arena packed so full of ecstatic supporters that the fire marshal was refusing to let anyone else in.”

Guardian: “Kamala Harris raised $200 million in the week since she was endorsed by Joe Biden . . . Harris for President said about 66 percent of the total came from first-time donors.”

Bloomberg: “Kamala Harris has wiped out Donald Trump’s lead across seven battleground states, as the vice president rides a wave of enthusiasm among young, Black and Hispanic voters, according to the latest Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll.”

Stipulate that we’re still fully within the Kamala Harris honeymoon period; that the vibes are bound to cool off a bit. Still, it’s as good a start as Democrats could have hoped for.

On another note, congrats to the U.S. women’s gymnastics team, which steamrolled to gold yesterday in a dominating performance. USA! USA! Happy Wednesday.

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Happier times: President Donald Trump gives a speech on tax reform at the Heritage Foundation’s President’s Club Meeting on October 17, 2017. (Photo via Getty Images.)

Project 2025: Sorry About All That

—Andrew Egger

Donald Trump has been ragging on the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” for weeks, getting more explicit and frequent in his statements disavowing the think tank’s policy agenda and the prep work it’s done to staff his next administration. Yesterday, Heritage buckled, announcing that Project 2025’s policy operations would cease and its director would step down. It’s the first step toward patching things up with the one man they’ve rebuilt the whole institution to please.

Heritage President Kevin Roberts insisted that wrapping Project 2025 up had always been the plan. That insistence is belied by the exuberant victory dance taking place over in Mar-a-Lago.

“Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed,” Trump advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a statement, “and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you.”

From a messaging perspective, Trump wasn’t crazy to want Project 2025 off his back. (Never mind the fact the project was launched with his blessing and helmed by a bevy of faithful old Trump administration hands.) The project—the latest version of the “Mandate for Leadership” published by Heritage ahead of every presidential election—had become a potent messaging focus for Democrats, a two-word shorthand for an authoritarian-right policy agenda that they said would constitute a second Trump term. By this month, Project 2025 was significantly less popular than Trump himself.

But Tuesday afternoon’s massacre on Massachusetts Ave. doesn’t mean Project 2025 will now suddenly stop being potent electoral fodder. Democrats certainly aren’t going to drop the matter: “Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real,” Kamala Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said yesterday. Nor should they: Trump is ditching Project 2025 because it’s unpopular today, but there’s nothing stopping him from cribbing from it at will should he win.

That’s especially true for Project 2025’s staffing work. “There are 3 months until the election,” Jonathan Swan of the New York Times noted. “Trump has done no real transition work. How do you think they are going to staff 4,000 political positions?”

Heritage, of course, had its own reasons for pulling the plug. The Mandate for Leadership has always served two purposes. The first is ideological: Heritage wants to shape the policy vision of the Republican party.

But the second—no less important—is financial. Heritage wants to be seen as the preeminent entity pushing that policy vision forward hand in glove with the new Republican president, and to be able to fundraise accordingly. It’s hard to make that case to donors when the possible president in question is out there furiously telling everyone who will listen he wants nothing to do with you.

It all represents an astonishing fall from MAGA grace for Heritage. Once the intellectual home of Reaganite fusionism, Heritage spent the last few years painfully convulsing itself into a Trump-happy landing pad for the new populist right. They replaced their coalition-building president, Kay Coles James, with Roberts, a knife-fighting culture warrior. They reversed their longstanding principles on foreign policy and trade—jettisoning many of their own scholars in the process. They started making overtures to explicitly alt-right groups.

Above all, they tied themselves personally to Trump. We could fill a month of newsletters with examples, but here’s the most obvious: On the day of his felony conviction in New York earlier this year, Heritage’s D.C. headquarters hoisted an upside-down U.S. flag.

In some ways, it’s been a great play: With Trump as their guiding light and golden goose, 2023 was Heritage’s best fundraising year ever.

The danger, of course, was that the golden goose might decide to kill them. That’s why Heritage is so fervently insisting this was the plan all along. A MAGA Heritage Foundation that can’t influence Trump is just a fancy building near Union Station.

There’s one more wrinkle to all this: JD Vance.

Trump’s VP candidate wrote the foreword to Roberts’s forthcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America. (That title’s an eleventh-hour edit, by the way: Roberts was initially rolling with Burning Down Washington to Save America, complete with a cover photo of a match.)

“The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems,” Vance writes in the foreword. “We are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach. . . . In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”

Vance probably thought all of this would be good for him. Heritage was ascendent. Project 2025 was the vehicle for the future of Trumpism. He would ride the wave. No one anticipated that Trump wouldn’t sign off on the edgelord routine.

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‘Weird’ Discourse Is Fun—But Not Enough

—William Kristol

For decades in American politics, hapless liberals have been pummeled by conservatives as oddballs. They’re outside the patriotic American mainstream. They’re not in touch with “normal Americans.” They’re not part of the “silent majority.”

In other words, they’re weird.

So you’ve got to enjoy seeing the shoe on the other foot today, as liberals deride the JD Vance Right as weird.

Which in many ways it is.

And the criticism seems to be working, which is nice, given how many previous critiques of today’s Right—though accurate and important—have fallen politically flat.

Still, I’ve got to admit I’m not 100 percent on board this line of attack. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not weird (I don’t think)! I’m not even particularly pro-weird. But I am kind of anti-anti-weird.

Maybe I’ve had too many weird friends and acquaintances over the years. Maybe I’ve admired too many weird-ish types, both today and in history. Maybe I’m too influenced by that sage of my generation, John Lennon, who said, “It’s weird not to be weird.”

Anyway, no one needs to worry that I’m a squish on weirdness, like some kind of a weirdness RINO. I’m fine with Democrats deploying the epithet as long as it works. It’s true enough, and it does capture some aspects of today’s Right.

But—as the Harris campaign knows—the charge of weirdness won’t be enough. It’s not a message that can carry their campaign for a hundred days.

And it needn’t. Because Trump-Vance Republicans aren’t just weird. They’re extreme. They aren’t just oddballs. They’re dangerous. And that’s the pivot that will have come soon.

It’s not, after all, just that Project 2025 has weird elements. It’s that Project 2025 is a genuine threat to our freedom and well-being.

It’s not just that four years of Trump-Vance would result in some weirdos on the federal courts. It’s that those appointments would lead to further abrogation of our liberties and the rule of law.

It’s not just that Trump’s weakness for brutal dictators is weird. It’s a manifestation of a foreign policy that could do incalculable damage at home and abroad.

And it’s not just that January 6th was weird. It was dangerous and appalling.

I apologize for excessive earnestness here. And I repeat: If weirdness is an entry way into explaining to the public the dangers of today’s authoritarians, congratulations to Democrats for having hit upon this rhetorical gambit.

The fact that there are all these odd characters frolicking around in today’s authoritarian movement is noteworthy. But what’s key, of course, is that they be defeated weirdos, not victorious ones.

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What do you make of the ‘weird’ discourse? Useful? Silly? Unfair to the millions of American weirdos out there who are weird in less unsettling ways than JD Vance? Let us know:

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Israel Hits Back Hard

—Will Selber

It took less than 48 hours for Israel to respond to Hezbollah’s attack on Majdal Shams, which left 12 dead in a Druze town in the Golan Heights. And as is customary in Iran and Israel’s shadow war, the response left an unmistakable message.

First, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) conducted an airstrike in Lebanon that killed Faud Shakur, a senior Hezbollah commander whom the U.S. government holds responsible for his role in the infamous 1983 Beirut Embassy attack that killed 300 Americans and French citizens. The IDF blames Shakur for the rocket attack in northern Israel.

Second, a few hours after Iran’s new president, Massoud Pezeshkian, was sworn in, Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, who attended the inauguration, was assassinated in Tehran. Although the details are murky and Israel has stayed mum, both Iran and Hamas have blamed Israel for Haniyeh’s assassination. It has all the signs of a vintage Israeli operation. And it sends an unmistakable message to Israel’s killers: We will hunt you and kill you even when you leave and visit Tehran, the heart of the Iranian regime’s power. None of you are safe.

Israel’s response is smart, shrewd, and ruthless. By killing Shakur, a top Hezbollah terrorist with American blood on his hands, Israel helps somewhat settle the score over Majdal Shams. And the assassination of Haniyeh is a major blow to Hamas, which is losing senior leaders at a striking clip. All that is left of Hamas’ top leaders are a few battalion commanders and Yahya Sinwar, its overall military commander. The fight in Gaza isn’t over, but the IDF has taken battlefield momentum away from Hamas after a frustrating few months in the spring.

Iran will surely respond to this latest embarrassing strike inside its capital. The Iranians are shrewd and ruthless operators, and they understand the tit-for-tat they’re engaged in: Whether Iran explicitly gave the orders for October 7th is a hot topic of debate among counter-terrorism nerds. Regardless, Iran created all the requisite conditions for Hamas’s bloody pogrom.

Then, in April, an Israeli airstrike killed two Iranian generals near its consulate in Lebanon. In response, Iran shot 300 ballistic missiles and drones at Israel. Yesterday’s work by Israel was a far more devastating attack than the Lebanon strike, so the Iranian response against Israeli interests in the region could make the April salvo look small.

While it’s anyone’s guess how close we are to a full-scale regional war, we seem to be inching closer and closer to it, by the day and sometimes by the hour.

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Catching up . . .

• Kamala Harris created a huge wave of energy. How long can Democrats ride it? New York Times

• The fate of Biden’s Supreme Court proposal may lie with Kamala Harris: Politico

• Trump to speak at black journalists convention, as Harris erases his lead in polls: CNBC

• Kari Lake wins Arizona GOP primary, will face Ruben Gallego in November: USA Today

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