This Week, Today: A Changed Man?
Trump delivers his first speech since the assassination attempt. Vance becomes the right's princeling. Momentum builds on Biden. Y2K finally happens. Money burns a hole in a billionaire's pocket.
Tone Switching?
Just five days after nearly meeting his maker, The Alley Cat with Seemingly Unlimited Lives delivered his marque speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
The ear was bandaged. The crowd was raucous. The speech was…
Long. Very long. So long I had to call it early and catch up on the remaining highlights in the morning.
Following the surreal attempt on his life, Trump had reportedly ripped up the “humdinger” he’d initially planned to give in favor of something more unifying and moderate in tone.
And that’s what we got: Trump the Unifier. Trump the Obeyer of the Inside Voice Rule. Trump the Bearer of a Face Flush With Tender Emotion.
For about twenty minutes…
A perfect twenty minutes…
A twenty minutes so perfect it might even remind the most passionate of MSNBC viewers that their sworn enemy is, after all, still a human being.
But, like most human beings, Trump eventually succumbed to his hardwiring.
There was ad-libbing. There was rambling. There was exaggeration.
There were tangents. There were attacks. There were crude nicknames. There were falsities.
All told, he spent nearly an hour and a half at the podium – the longest party nomination speech on record.
Pundits were quick to insist that they knew this post-near-death rebrand was never going to last (translation: “I told you so”).
But I’m not ready to join them in their cynicism.
I have the capacity to be idealistic, hopeful, and I think if there’s anyone deserving of the benefit of the doubt at this moment it’s the man who responded with so much courage while under fire.
So for now I’ll chalk up the winding speech to Trump trying to find his footing, and I’ll cosign the generous observation made by the writer Walter Kirn:
“Trump seems reluctant to leave the company of the crowd, a shaken person, still recovering, trying to find his way toward the next step.”
One week—it’s been one week! I’m still processing things that occurred in my life twenty years ago.
Next Gen MAGA
Earlier this week, Trump tapped Senator J.D. Vance from Ohio to be his running mate in move that suggests his campaign believes he’s cruising for a bruising in Ronald-Reagan-1984-Landslide fashion.
Conventional wisdom held that he’d choose a more establishment and “toned-down” pick like Florida Senator Marco Rubio, North Dokota Governor Doug Burnam, or Virginia Governor Glenn Younkin – someone who could appeal to swing voters and who could assuage their concerns around Trump’s Wreck-It-Ralph tendencies.
But the split screen of a man raising a fist in the middle of an active shooter situation (strength) and a man who can’t string more than three sentences together without a teleprompter (weakness) has apparently convinced the campaign that they can confidently afford to go all-in on a populist ticket.
You’ll recall that Vance is that guy who wrote that bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, and who, not too long ago, fancied himself a “Never-Trumper” – a man who had no qualms likening the 45th president to “Cultural Heroin” and, even, “America’s Hitler.”
The great turn of face occurred when Vance, flush with cash from venture capitalist Peter Theil, sought the Republican nomination for the open Senate seat in Ohio during the 2022 Midterms. Thanks to Trump’s endorsement—achieved in no small measure via his friendship with Don Jr.—he pulled ahead in the crowded primary, then went on to beat Democratic congressman Tim Ryan in the general by 8 percentage points.
In the time since, Vance has been a stalwart Trumpian: he’s an ‘anti-woke’ crusader, has an America-First stance on foreign policy, and is an outspoken proponent for the strictest of countermeasures on the southern border.
At 39, Vance represents the next generation of MAGA. He’s the “fuse that Trump lit,” as Benjamin Wallace-Wells of The New Yorker put it. And whether or not Trump wins this November, the GOP’s 2028 presidential primary is now officially his to lose.
On a lighter but no less important note: Vance is the first major candidate in the modern era of American politics to sport a beard.
Sources tell me the reason for this is twofold: to hide a jawline lacking in line, and to make him look older.
Google “no beard Vance” and you’d be mistaken for thinking the guy was a beer-guzzling frat dude who lifeguards at the community pool during summer breaks.
But it’s that baby face that only makes his quick ascension to the highest rungs of public life that much more impressive.
Sailing into the Night with a Torn Bed Sheet
There was a short pause in Democratic infighting over the viability of the Biden-Harris ticket in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt. In fact, for a couple days there appeared to be a sort of resigned rallying behind the geriatric under the logic of the following rhetoricals:
How do you campaign against someone who just took a bullet for the American people?
Is there actually a candidate-in-waiting—cough Gavin Newsom; cough Gretchen Whitmer—who’s still willing to enter the fray?
But then the shock wore off, and more alarming polling came out, and more and more Democratic senators and members of congress began to consider the down-the-ticket implications of tying their fates to a man who this week referred to his Secretary of Defense as “The black man.”
For weeks it’s been clear that the GOP seems poised to take back the White House. But now it looks like the House and Senate are in play too.
So…
Enter the open letters, the public statements, the leaks, and—most crucially—the private needling from Dem heavyweights asking Biden to step down.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, and Former President Barack Obama have now all reportedly vocalized this to The Man from Scranton in one form or another.
Biden is said to be seething over their vote of no confidence this weekend as he’s holed up in his Delaware beach house ‘self-isolating’ amid his third bout of COVID.
But the writing is on the wall in large, eligible-from-space print.
It’s just a question of how long his stubborn pride can hold out.
Y2K-24
Planes were grounded. Hospitals couldn’t pull up health insurance information. Customers couldn’t login to their bank accounts. 911 lines were returning static.
On Friday, the much-feared Y2K had finally arrived – just 24 years late.
We apparently have Wall Street cybersecurity darling CrowdStrike to thank for this “largest IT tech outage in history.” The faux-hawk-adorning CEO—who was so shaken up by the incident that his voice cracked something major while live on NBC—blamed it all on a coding bug in a routine software update they’d put out the night prior.
(Luckily, my antiquated desktop was spared so I could crank out this vital dispatch; as may’ve been the case with Trump at the podium, I posit some divine intervention was at play here.)
Investors didn’t take well to the irony that a leading cybersecurity firm had taken down motherboards in all 7 continents. By market close, the stock was down 11%, and regulators from countries near and afar were promising independent investigations.
That’s bad news for the company.
Although, knowing Wall Street’s reverse logic, there’s a chance market makers will soon buy up the stock hand over fist.
“We underestimated just how heavily adopted CrowdStrike’s offerings had become,” they’ll say, or something like it.
Fire sale! Fire sale! Fire sale!
Bull market! Bull market! Bull market!
Play Money Buys Really Old Thing
Speaking of Wall Street, hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin purchased a “nearly complete” Stegosaurus skeleton (nicknamed “Apex”) at auction on Wednesday. He reportedly paid a cool $45 million for it – the most anyone has ever forked over for dinosaur remains.
“Apex shows no signs of combat-related injuries,” Sotheby’s had said in the advertisement, “[although] there is evidence of arthritis.”
Perhaps it was the “evidence of arthritis” that convinced appraisers that they’d be lucky to get an offer for $6 million. That or they’d just underestimated the power of a man with bookoo bucks who chafes at the possibility of getting outbid…
Encouraged and ecstatic sources from within the stuffy auction house tell me they’re already putting out feelers about acquiring advance rights to President Biden’s skeleton.
When your intrepid reporter asked if that was a tad insensitive, one source vaguely replied:
“Matter can neither be created no destroyed, Jack, but it can be put on display in a marble-exteriored nonprofit with an entrance fee that costs an arm and a leg…no pun intended.”
Reached by phone, a spokesman at the White House who’s now frantically searching for a new job let out a nervous giggle before offering a “No comment.”
Updates to follow.
Find another blogger working this beat and I’ll pack my bags, move to Bali, and become an Instagram influencer.