By Jim Geraghty
Friday, July 19, 2024
You might never see another address of a presidential
candidate at a national convention start so well. And you will probably never
see another go so wildly off the rails, or drag on for what felt like an
eternity, the way Donald Trump’s convention address did last night.
In the opening minutes of Trump’s speech, he showed us
something we almost never see from him: vulnerability.
As you already know, the assassin’s
bullet came within a quarter of an inch of taking my life. So many people have
asked me what happened. “Tell us what happened, please.” And therefore, I will
tell you exactly what happened, and you’ll never hear it from me a second time,
because it’s actually too painful to tell. . . .
In order to see the chart, I
started to, like this, turn to my right, and was ready to begin a little bit
further turn, which I’m very lucky I didn’t do, when I heard a loud whizzing
sound and felt something hit me really, really hard. On my right ear. I said to
myself, “Wow, what was that? It can only be a bullet.”
And moved my right hand to my ear,
brought it down. My hand was covered with blood. Just absolutely blood all over
the place. I immediately knew it was very serious. That we were under attack.
And in one movement proceeded to drop to the ground. Bullets were continuing to
fly as very brave Secret Service agents rushed to the stage. And they really
did. They rushed to the stage.
These are great people at great
risk, I will tell you, and pounced on top of me so that I would be protected.
There was blood pouring everywhere, and yet in a certain way I felt very safe
because I had God on my side. I felt that.
Of course, it’s still Trump:
And there’s an interesting
statistic. The ears are the bloodiest part. If something happens with the ears
they bleed more than any other part of the body. For whatever reason the
doctors told me that. And I said, “Why is there so much blood?” He said, “It’s
the ears, they bleed more.” So, we learned something.
Trump seemed genuinely moved by the events of the past
few days and genuinely saddened by the slaying of Corey Comperatore, walking
over and kissing his helmet on the stage.
Trump is a guy who spends a lot of time talking about
stuff that doesn’t really matter that much: TV ratings, how much money
somebody’s making, what somebody said about him on cable news, etc. In the
aftermath of the shooting, Trump suddenly had something really serious and
consequential to talk about. And for about ten minutes, he was absolutely
riveting.
And then Trump talked for another hour and 23 minutes,
the longest convention speech in American history. The rambling, meandering
monologue literally stretched into Friday morning.
Trump offered the audience at home his thoughts on the
Green Bay Packers, went through three improvised paragraphs about Right to Try
legislation, nicknamed the CBS Sunday morning show, “Deface the Nation,” shared
what is now his trademark bizarre reference to Hannibal Lecter, broke his
pledge to not say the name “Biden,” and told stories of seeing Billy Graham
with his father. The speech had more segues that your city’s tourist district.
I jokingly nicknamed it the 30 Years Convention Address,
but the last 80 percent or so was the extremely familiar
stream-of-consciousness Trump we usually see at his rallies. But a convention
address isn’t just another rally; it’s probably the largest television audience
Trump will have until the next debate, presuming there is a second debate.
The good news for Republicans is that the best part was
at the start, and probably Americans on the east coast turned it off and went
to bed, and everywhere else in the country, when they got bored, they tuned it
out.
Biden
Savor this all-time high of “Democrats in disarray.”
If you look closely, as of this writing, none of the many
stories about Biden’s crisis suggest that he is seriously considering
withdrawing as the party’s nominee. Many of them offer someone else’s account
of a conversation in which some Democratic leader has expressed a belief that
Biden will eventually be persuaded to step down.
“Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi has told some House
Democrats she believes President Biden can be persuaded fairly soon to
exit the presidential race, amid serious doubts he can win in November,
according to three Democratic officials familiar with her private discussions.
“Former president Barack Obama has told allies in recent days that President Biden’s path
to victory has greatly diminished and he thinks the president needs to
seriously consider the viability of his candidacy, according to multiple people
briefed on his thinking.”
“Several people close to President Biden said on Thursday
that they believe he has begun to accept the idea that he may
not be able to win in November and may have to drop out of the race, bowing to
the growing demands of many anxious members of his party.”
“U.S. President Joe Biden is taking calls to step aside
as the Democratic presidential candidate seriously and multiple Democratic officials think an exit is a matter of time,
according to sources familiar with the matter.”
As Kerry Howley succinctly
put it, “Every tweet is like BREAKING: anonymous source potentially senses
a shift of vibe.”
Still, when some Democrats are leaking the internal polling that looks
catastrophic, it’s like spilling an acid that eats away at Democrats’
morale. Either they stick with him and sail the Titanic directly toward the
iceberg, or they forcibly take the car keys from grandpa, and deal with the
lingering bitterness and fallout:
A detailed report compiled by
Democrats showing the president forecast to lose in an Electoral College
landslide has sent alarm bells through the party’s leadership and led to
renewed calls publicly and privately for the president to drop out.
The data, which was based on voter
surveys compiled by Democratic firm Blue Rose Research and viewed by The Wall
Street Journal, shows Biden losing not only all the swing states, but also
behind or even in New Hampshire, Minnesota, New Mexico, Virginia and Maine. It
shows the president leading by only 2.9 percentage points in New Jersey.
For perspective, in 2020, Biden beat Trump in New Jersey,
57.3 percent to 41.4 percent. Could you imagine a 13-percentage-point drop for
Biden across the country?
A major concern for Democrats up
and down the ballot is the fact that half of voters, including 28 percent of
those who backed Biden in 2020 and 52 percent of swing voters, believe that
Democrats in office have been lying about the president’s mental fitness. The
report says voters are likely to view Democrats’ defense of Biden as dishonest
by a two-to-one margin.
Well, voters probably view Democrats’ defense of Biden as
dishonest because it was.
Oh, and a lot of casual political junkies may have missed
that Nate Silver no longer runs the site he founded, FiveThirtyEight.
(He and Scott Rasmussen should get together for a beer sometime.)
If you want the whole story, read the whole thing, but the short version is that Silver
doesn’t trust the assessments of the new model being used at FiveThirtyEight,
which has consistently shown Biden doing better than in Silver’s model and most
other polls:
As a result of these assumptions
about polling movement, 538’s model is extremely uncertain about much of
anything at this stage. For instance, they say that Biden has a 14 percent
chance of winning the national popular vote by double digits. Our model
says the chances of that are just 1.4 percent instead — note the decimal place.
Or in Pennsylvania, 538’s 95th percentile forecast covers outcomes ranging from
roughly Biden +18 to Trump +17. That’s almost certainly too wide of a range.
Biden fans have been pointing to the FiveThirtyEight
forecast as evidence that he’s not doomed. A lot of senior Democrats —
presumably including Pelosi, Schumer, and Obama — seem to think that if there’s
enough public pressure on Biden to announce he won’t seek another term, Biden
will concede, and likely overrule Jill and Hunter Biden, who want to see him in
it until the end.
First, if Biden is too frail, weak, and easily confused
to serve another term as president that starts January 20, 2025, he’s too
frail, weak, and easily confused to be president right now. (In his interview with BET, Biden could not remember the name of
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin: “Because I named a, the, uh, secretary
of defense, the black man.”)
The pressure, leaks, and anecdotes of Biden seeming too
old to do the job are accelerating. But as I’ve tried to explain to Democrats
who have fantasies of the “Super Friends” swooping in and convincing Biden it’s time
to hang it up, the only way to ensure Biden is not the party’s 2024 nominee is through a delegate fight. And that fight would likely be
messy, nasty, and hard.
The only thing Biden has to do to remain the nominee is
refuse to quit. As that scene in the movie Watchmen goes, “None of you
seem to understand. I’m not trapped in here with you. You’re trapped in here
with me.
The Shorter, Quicker, Easier Path to Being the Veep
There’s a funny thing about vice presidents. To become a
president, a candidate usually starts his effort about two years ahead of
Election Day. He spends enormous amounts of time campaigning: giving speeches,
doing television interviews, raising money, trudging through snow in places
like Des Moines and Manchester, crisscrossing the country in the run-up to
Super Tuesday. Millions of votes get cast in the presidential-primary process;
it is a grueling marathon. We do all this so that we can accurately say, “The
party members have spoken, and they have chosen their nominee.’
To become a vice president, one summer day, the nominee
just picks you. And then, with a roughly 50-50 chance of winning in November,
suddenly you’re the guy who’s one heart attack or sniper’s bullet away from the
presidency.
John Nance Garner was famously quoted as saying the vice
presidency wasn’t “worth a bucket of warm spit.” But it’s a heck of a lot
easier to attain than the presidency.
ADDENDUM: Over in the Washington Post,
I tell readers something some of them don’t want to hear: Even with Trump’s
ramble-a-thon, Republicans just completed a successful convention that did
what it set out to do.
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