The race card is Trump’s only hand | Will Bunch Newsletter

Huzzah! I was finishing work on this newsletter when Vice President Kamala Harris leaked that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will be her running mate in the November election. I never thought I would write this, but for the last 15 days Harris and the Democrats have done everything right! The avuncular, good-humored Walz, with a progressive record of getting stuff done, will unite the party and win over blue-collar voters in the Upper Midwest that Harris needs to win. Fans of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who lost out, will get him for (probably) six more years in Harrisburg, where he can build a track record for 2032 when he’ll be just 59, same age Harris is now.

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For a guy who got famous running casinos (and occasionally running them into the ground), Donald Trump seems like he’d be a lousy poker player. The election is almost here and the Republican nominee has been dealt a terrible hand — steep drops in crime and migrant border crossings, and a strong economy despite this week’s wobble — and yet Trump is doubling down, even as the Dems’ new deal of Kamala Harris has upped the ante.

And last week in Harrisburg, Trump gave away his whole game with what poker watchers call “a tell.”

Hours earlier, the 45th and wannabe 47th president was in Chicago, in a rare and often heated Q-and-A session with three African American woman reporters on a stage before the annual confab of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ). In a stunning moment that instantly went viral, Trump responded to a question about his attacks on his newly minted fall rival, Vice President Kamala Harris by questioning her racial background.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now, she wants to be known as Black,” Trump told the NABJ. He pronounced the word “Black” like it had two or maybe three syllables, a verbal blackboard screech in case you weren’t paying attention. “So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

The attendees gasped or laughed awkwardly at the absurdity, since Harris has embraced the heritage of both her Black Jamaican father and Indian mother since birth, and attended an historically Black university, Howard. long before Trump knew about her. Was this a gaffe from a 78-year-old candidate prone to weird off-topic rambles? Or was this the new strategy from a GOP campaign caught flat-footed as Harris seamlessly replaced President Joe Biden on the ticket?

It was strategy.

More than 600 miles east in the Pennsylvania capital, as MAGA diehards filed into the Farm Show complex arena, a slide show on the big screen showed a 2016 headline from the Business Insider: “California’s Kamala Harris becomes the first Indian-American US Senator.” Wow, how nice of Team Trump to salute his opponent’s barrier-busting achievement. Wait, no....actually the campaign was amplifying the new message from Chicago — the ludicrous, false suggestion that Harris didn’t really claim to be Black until she could benefit politically.

Moments later, one of Trump’s closest associates, his criminal attorney Alina Habba, took the stage in Harrisburg. After mispronouncing “Kamala,” as Trump himself and many of his surrogates frequently do, Habba proclaimed, energetically: “I’m going to speak to you, Miss Harris! I am a strong woman, a mom, a lawyer, and an American. And unlike you, Kamala, I know who my roots are! I know where I come from!” Yes, Habba comes from two parents who — just as with Harris — are immigrants, who fled religious persecution as Catholics in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq just before Habba was born in 1984. That might have undermined her message: that a Black woman of South Asian descent who proudly rose to become a U.S. senator and vice president is somehow not who she says it is.

But with the November election less than 100 days away, Trump just slammed all of his cards on the table. He doesn’t even have a pair of 2s. Just the race card. Just a plan to never let a day pass without reminding voters that none of the previous 45 presidents (Cleveland twice) looked remotely like Harris. To convince as many as 81 million voters that they are “the real Americans,” that no one would ever be confused about their race or their background.

It’s hard to say what’s more depressing: that playing the combo of the race card and the gender card is pretty much what elected Trump in 2016, when something as silly as constant doubt about a nothingburger scandal around Hillary Clinton’s private email server was really their backdoor way for voters to channel their doubts about electing a woman, and to take out their anxieties with furious chants of “Lock her up!” Or that it might just work again in 2024, even after millions of voters from the segregated 1950s have been replaced with Gen Z young adults who either went to school with people who look like Harris — and Habba — or who look like them themselves.

Harris has been the Democratic candidate for a remarkable two weeks in which she has electrified a Democratic Party long depressed over Biden’s prospects, while packing arenas, raising hundreds of millions of dollars, and benefitting from massive Zoom calls of voters pledging even more dollars or to knock on doors. Yet all that energy has merely pulled the vice president into a dead heat. There’s still a 50% chance that Trump’s toxic ramblings could return him to the Oval Office.

It seems like Wednesday’s conscious decision to play the race card came after 10 days of Harris momentum and the growing realization that this is all he’s got. Trump’s never been an issues guy, but crime and unauthorized border crossing are way down in 2024 and even the economy doesn’t feel the potent weapon it was a year ago. Trump hasn’t even thought up a good nickname for Harris! But he can fib to voters that she just now claims to be “Buh-lack.” He probably hopes this new Big Lie about Harris’ identity will even peel off some Latino and, yes, Black voters.

No one — not even the often risible Trump — makes it to the lofty perch of the presidency without some kind of special power. In his case, it’s the diabolical ability of the huckster to tell regular folks that everything might look OK but really there is trouble right here in River City, that something not quite American is in the air and that he alone can fix it. After a couple of pointless flirtations with more conventional politics, Trump realized around 2012 that baseless questions about Barack Obama’s birth certificate were really a vehicle for voters to express their unease with a Black president, and he has never stopped peddling this brand of Trump Vodka that intoxicates voters’ very worst instincts.

Biden became the only politician so far to defeat Trump with this 2020 mantra that “this is not who we are,” implying that his sometimes buffoonish, sometimes dangerous presidency was a betrayal of Gettysburg, Omaha Beach, Selma and the spirit of 1776. But Trump knows that America is also Wilmington, Tulsa, the KKK and the 3/5ths Compromise, and he’s is gambling on that America to put him over the top. We’ll see. Team Harris is betting that the 2020s is a whole new game, and that in this one the race card can be easily trumped.

Question: Do we just not care anymore that Supreme Court Justices go on Fox News and offer their thoughts on policy issues that might end up before them?? — a tweet from @asharangappa_ that was forwarded by reader @theolddelewis on X/Twitter

Answer: It was kind of lost in the endless veep speculation, but the question refers to Justice Neil Gorsuch, who went on the highly partisan Fox News Channel for an unusual free-ranging TV interview that included his negative comments on President Joe Biden’s recent call for major reforms at the High Court. Those would include term limits for justices like Gorsuch, named by Donald Trump in 2017. Gorsuch warned liberal reformers to “be careful” — a shocking threat from a jurist who, as Rangappa, a former FBI agent, noted might later rule on the legality of the proposed reforms. I believe that SCOTUS members should continue to speak on the broad judicial issues facing America in appropriate forums, but Gorsuch’s comments on a specific bill, on Fox, were wildly inappropriate. It’s exactly why Congress needs to pass a real code of ethics for the High Court that Gorsuch and the others are resisting.

This may or may not shock you, but not a single respondent to an informal poll initiated by this Pennsylvania-based newsletter thought that Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, should be the Democrats’ pick for vice president (although one writer endorsed him for attorney general in a Harris administration). My informal tally of the readers who used “veep pick” as subject line (otherwise, I’m not able to find it) put up six votes for Tuesday’s pick Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, four for Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, two for Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and one for Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear. Joe Sundeen wrote that Walz “has savaged [JD] Vance with humor (the originator of the weird meme), facts, and a record of governing that would reassure moderates...” Kelly backer Merle Savedow spoke for many by saying “Shapiro has too much baggage.”

📮This week’s question: Now that Harris has finally made her pick of Walz, who would you put up there with JD Vance as the worst VP candidates of all time? Who would you rate the best? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Best/worst VPs” in the subject line.

When your obsession is 1960s/’70s U.S. history, the last 11 years have been a non-stop spree of 50th anniversary parties (this, this, and this meant a lot). Thursday marks the end of this era with a biggie: a half-century since Richard Nixon announced he was resigning the presidency. I was a 15-year-old dork who’d inhaled every twist and turn of Watergate, just devoured the new book All the President’s Men at the village pool, and saw that day’s rumors that Nixon was about to become the first (and still only) U.S. president to resign as the political equivalent of the 1969 moonwalk. My dad was in Atlanta on business, but several of my mom’s friends swung by to pour a drink as we watched on a small black-and-white TV that marked a not very prosperous decade. I watched the speech, then a canned Nixon bio film (probably prepared in case he got shot like so many others in that era) and only went to bed when “The Star Spangled Banner” came on around 2 a.m. or so. I wanted to never forget Aug. 8, 1974 — and I never have.

Even as a teen, I understood that America was forever changed. But changed...for good? The story that we told ourselves in order to live was that taking down Nixon (and criminally convicting most of his “men”) was the imperfectly happy ending to “the Long Sixties,” the best justice obtainable for the crimes of Vietnam, Kent State, and the killing of everyone from RFK Sr. to Fred Hampton. It was pretty to think so, but the exposure of a criminal enterprise run from the White House to bug, burglarize, and play dirty tricks on Nixon’s political enemies should have sparked some type of political revolution. Yet few rose to meet the moment. There were other stunning revelations about what the CIA, FBI, and other agencies had been up to, but the reforms to address them were tepid and, over time, ineffectual. Campaign finance reform? You know how that worked out. Gerald Ford’s September 1974 pardon of Nixon was a clue that actually, yes, maybe the president actually is above the law.

Watergate, the pardon, and the fall of Saigon and everything else that went haywire in Nixon’s America engendered a massive distrust of government and eventually other institutions that has lasted to this day. Young people mostly decided you couldn’t change the world but you could ironically make fun of it on shows like Saturday Night Live, which launched in October 1975. The sliver who did dream of making things better were convinced by All the President’s Men’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that you could do it with a keyboard. Yes, we were that naive.

It took six short years for Americans to decide what we really wanted was a kinder, gentler version of Nixonian hubris. Ronald Reagan was a genial and optimistic actor who knew to stand on the right marks while making the rich richer and the poor poorer. The problems of Vietnam were solved by reinventing a military that could kill the enemy with robots instead of drafting young men. But the most consequential decision in the days that followed Watergate was turning our anger into cynicism instead of action — the national zeitgeist that a demagogue like Donald Trump would inevitably exploit. The dream of Aug. 8, 1974 was more of an illusion than an idealistic teenager could ever have imagined.

Like most folks, I usually try to block out, or forget, what the worst of what dealing with the pandemic was like. Today, with another presidential campaign underway, there’s a lot of focus on nutty things that Donald Trump said or did in 2020. I was interested, then, to find this piece from four years ago today that didn’t exactly absolve Trump, but noted the overlapping crises of capitalism and bad governance that ran much deeper than the 45th president were really what made COVID-19 worse for the underprivileged. I wrote: “If America changes only at the top in January and not from top to bottom, if there isn’t a mass movement to get rid of ‘killer’ hospitals and soul-crushing schools and overstuffed prisons and the systemic racism that undergirds all of them, then our nation will have learned nothing from our near-death experience.” Read the rest: “2020 defeated America because of Americans, not just Donald Trump.”

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