The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has not been great at political predictions this year. I did not foresee Joe Biden withdrawing from the presidential race. I didn’t predict either vice-presidential pick correctly. So far the most prescient thing I wrote was about the political aftermath of the assassination attempt made on Donald Trump:
Anyone claiming that this is it, the 2024 presidential election is over because “the assassination attempt will turbocharge the persecution narrative Trump has placed at the center of his campaign” should not be allowed to write any more U.S. coverage without first taking at least three semesters of undergraduate American politics courses. Remember when Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies? That was 45 days ago. In the next week we will learn who Trump chose as his vice presidential nominee. More debates about Biden’s age will rage on. Maybe this proves to be an inflection point, but it seems far more likely it’s a blip.
It’s been that kind of campaign! So, in the interest of trying to see whether I can do better for the general election season, let’s review the events of the past week or so and determine what has been a controversy and what has been a nontroversy. A controversy is a story that is likely to persist for the next few media cycles and harm one of the campaigns. A nontroversy is a story that is either going to die a quick death or is not significant enough to matter for the campaign.
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As always, one should start with whether Donald Trump is losing it more than he already has. As the author of The Toddler in Chief, I am always on the lookout for changes in Trump’s behavior, for good or ill. To be honest, there isn’t a ton here that seems different from baseline Trump. And to be clear, baseline Trump is an immature garbage fire.
There was his Thursday Mar a Lago press conference, which was… bad. The laugh-out-loud moment was when Trump compared the crowd he spoke to on January 6th to MLK:
In the wake of that presser, there are other signs he is not coping with falling behind Harris in the polls terribly well. The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman serves up the best anecdote, about Trump being furious that reporters are fact-checking him:
Former President Donald J. Trump on Friday afternoon vehemently maintained that he had once been in a dangerous helicopter landing with Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco, and insisted he had records to prove it, despite Mr. Brown’s denial.
In an angry phone call to a New York Times reporter as he landed several hours away from his planned rally in Bozeman, Mont., because of a mechanical issue on his plane, Mr. Trump excoriated The Times for its coverage of his meandering news conference on Thursday at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home, during which he told of an emergency landing during a helicopter trip that he said both he and Mr. Brown had made together….
“We have the flight records of the helicopter,” Mr. Trump insisted Friday, saying the helicopter had landed “in a field,” and indicating that he intended to release the flight records, before shouting that he was “probably going to sue” over the Times article.
When asked to produce the flight records, Mr. Trump responded mockingly, repeating the request in a sing-song voice. As of early Friday evening, he had not provided them.
Mr. Trump has a history of claiming he will provide evidence to back up his claims but ultimately not doing so.
Another Times story by Haberman and Jonathan Swan illustrates that Trump is not growing into the transformed presidential campaign:1
At dinner under the tent, Harrison LeFrak, the scion of a New York real-estate family, whose father is an old friend of Mr. Trump’s, asked how Mr. Trump planned to take the narrative back from Democrats, and what his positive vision for the country would be. It appeared to be a request for reassurance.
Mr. Trump provided none. Instead, he criticized Ms. Harris on a range of fronts, before adding: “I am who I am.”
The fund-raiser came amid a stretch of flailing and self-harm that began after President Biden’s July 21 withdrawal from the race and endorsem*nt of Ms. Harris to succeed him. Close Trump allies have described this as the rockiest period of Mr. Trump’s campaign — and easily the worst since a late 2022 spree in which he mused about terminating parts of the Constitution and dined at Mar-a-Lago with a white supremacist and an outspoken antisemite….
He has found the change disorienting, those who interact with him say. Mr. Trump had grown comfortable campaigning against an 81-year-old incumbent who struggled to navigate stairs, thoughts and sentences. Suddenly, he finds himself in a race against a Black woman nearly 20 years younger, one who has already made history and who is drawing large and excited crowds….
At the Aug. 2 dinner, Mr. Trump told donors that the news media had been incorrectly suggesting that he had mellowed since the assassination attempt. “I’m not nicer,” he said, according to one person in attendance.
It is also interesting to note that Trump ain’t campaigning all that hard, especially compared to his previous presidential campaigns. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump has the data:
Trump is holding far fewer rallies than he did in 2016 and has held far fewer public appearances than he did in 2020, the two previous times he sought the presidency.
A review of Trump’s activities in July and August of those previous years shows the difference. From July 1 to Aug. 10, 2016, Trump held 22 rallies, including six days on which he held multiple rallies. Over the rest of August, he added 15 more rallies. This year, he’s held seven rallies with another scheduled for Friday in Montana.
So, on this question, it doesn’t seem to me that Trump’s behavior has gotten any worse. It merely confirms that he has been temperamentally unfit for the office all along. This is a nontroversy in terms of any change in Trump’s behavior; in terms of his being an immature asshole, however, well, daily reminders can be useful.
If you want further thoughts from me about Trump’s press conference, you can watch/listen to me on my podcasting partner’s newest podcast, 90 Days With Ana Marie Cox, a daily podcast that will be following the last campaign sprint to November 5th.
Next up: the question of when Kamala Harris will be talking to the press and participating in sit-down interviews. One of the reasons Trump held his press conference was to highlight Harris not doing the same. To be fair to the vice president, she was talking to the press when Biden was the nominee, and after Trump’s presser she has engaged her press gaggle — and almost all their questions were about Trump.
Harris said her staff was scheduling at least one sit-down by the end of the month, but this is an instance in which I agree with the press that she should be talking to them more. The rest of August is going to be really good for Harris. Nate Silver is correct to note that the Harris campaign has succeeded in making an excellent first impression, and her VP choice Tim Walz appears to be following in her footsteps. Trump’s VP selection of JD Vance, on the other hand, has gone over poorly. The DNC will be in a little more than a week.
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World believes this is exactly the time when Harris needs to get her sea legs as the major-party nominee in dealing with the press. It gives her yet another opportunity to exceed pre-baked media expectations, based on her 2020 campaign and first year of her vice presidency, that she is a bad politician. Furthermore, any stumbles during this period are likely to be drowned out by DNC and good vibes coverage, while at the same time prepping Harris for the fall.
For now, this is a nontroversy. But it has the potential to be something more if the Harris campaign does not take care to feed the media.
Let’s get to the VP questions. Some on the right, including JD Vance, are questioning Tim Walz’s record of military service with a lot of “stolen valor” claims. The specific charges are that Walz inflated his rank, bailed on his National Guard unit when it was deployed to Iraq, and used language suggesting that he has served in combat when he did not.
After reading the fact-checking from Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, the New York Times’ Thomas Gibbons-Nef, John Ismay, and Kate Selig, and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Rochelle Olsen, my conclusion is that any claim of “stolen valor” is pretty much horsesh*t. Walz held the rank of Command Sergeant Major for seven months. The distinction between “retired Command Sergeant Major” and “served as a command sergeant major” is real but super-minor.
As for allegedly bailing on his unit, Walz stepped down months before his unit’s deployment was announced. Walz had served 24 years when he got out, and his intention was to run for Congress. A good rule of thumb: anyone who stays in the military more than 20 years cannot and should not be challenged for retiring regardless of the external circ*mstances. They have put in their time. Furthermore, Kessler notes that when Walz put in his retirement papers, “the Minnesota adjutant general has the final say and could have blocked Walz’s retirement if he thought it would have had a negative impact on the possible deployment.” The NYT account notes, “Even his most vocal opponents in the Guard agree that Mr. Walz was a respected soldier — someone who did his job dependably and could be counted on to take care of his troops.” So this is also a nothingburger.
Walz’s claims about “weapons of war that I carried in war,” are more serious. Kessler writes, “campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa told The Post that ‘the governor misspoke’ in his remarks…. Walz’s language was sloppy and false. He did carry weapons of war — just not in war.”
In the end, however, this is a nontroversy. The campaign correcting the record relatively quickly helped to defuse this. It helps Walz that the attacks are coming from Vance, who served in the Marines for four years as a reporter and whose military record pales besides that of Walz.
The second-to-last issue is whether the “JD Vance f*cked a couch” meme crossed a line.
