The pumped-up rally that Kamala Harris held in Atlanta with thousands of supporters Tuesday was a reminder of what had been missing from the Democratic ticket: fun. There was excitement, enthusiasm, energy. Through the campaign season prior to the Joe Biden bow-out, the main emotion many Democrats felt was dread. Could Biden shuffle his way to the finish line in November ahead of Donald Trump? Did he have the stuff to surmount voter indifference and doubt and prevail because enough voters despised Trump? Could he get enough of the we-hate-both-candidates voters to hold their noses and cast a ballot for him to save American democracy? Anxiety ruled.

The Biden-Harris switcheroo, which went off without a hitch (which, by the way, I advocated), flipped the script. Nudging (gently) Biden to the side did not lead to five stages of grief but to immense relief. Harris’ coronation was met with instant zeal. The money poured in from thousands and thousands of skinny cats (and a few fat cats). There was an immediate buzz. For Democrats, happy days were here again.

It's worth noting that Harris did not generate such jubilation when she ran for president in 2020. She shined during a few moments in the debates (including when she criticized Biden's position on school desegregation policy years earlier). But her campaign fizzled, and the US senator and former California attorney general was out of the running before the primaries began. So the exultation that greeted Harris’ substitution for Biden may not be entirely due to her; it may well be a sign that Democrats and Democratic leaners yearned for a candidate with spunk who could be supported without apprehension and craved a dash of fun.

Like most endeavors, politics is most appealing when it is fun. Who wants dreary? Fun is certainly a large part of Donald Trump’s appeal. His rallies are like tailgate parties or concerts for his devotees. His followers dress up. They are eager to amass with like-minded folk and to hear Trump run through what for them are his greatest hits. With his cranky and creaky version of insult comedy—he’s the Andrew Dice Clay of American politics—he jazzes them up. It’s entertainment. It’s a community.

Biden was spinach. (I actually like spinach—especially sautéed in garlic with pine nuts—but the metaphor stands.) People were told they had to vote for him to prevent a possible political apocalypse. This wasn’t hyperbole. But it also wasn’t inspiring. With Harris, Democrats could let it all hang out. (Did you see the guy who went viral dancing at the Harris rally?) Whether this might have happened with another candidate who was not battling the ravages of age, we’ll never know. Could anyone with a pulse who could groove to Beyoncé have done the trick? Harris was in the right place at the right time.

It is obviously too early to tell if all this fun will fuel a victory. Harris is about to encounter a half-a-billion-dollar (or so) effort from the right to demonize and delegitimize her. (Remember: Chris LaCivita, a co-manager of Trump’s campaign, ran the defamatory Swift Boat campaign against Democratic candidate John Kerry in 2004.) And while her team deftly handled her launch as the nominee, can it function smoothly and effectively throughout the compressed election season? Can Harris continue to perform at a high level when the honeymoon ends and conquer both racism and sexism? All that aside, it still is worth noting that in many presidential elections of recent decades, the candidate who appeared the most fun triumphed.

Playboy JFK squeaked past Richard Nixon the square. The glamorous Ronald Reagan sent the dour Jimmy Carter back to Georgia and squashed Minnesota-nice-but-boring Walter Mondale. George H.W. Bush defeated the overly earnest Michael Dukakis. The hip sax-playing Bill Clinton beat Bush the Elder. The younger George Bush—the guy you want to have a beer with, right?—triumphed (with the help of SCOTUS) over Al Gore, who was widely disparaged as an insecure nerd. Then good ol’ George dispatched the patrician and too-buttoned-up John Kerry. Cool Barack Obama did in John McCain the old war horse. (McCain was a more fun candidate when he challenged George W. Bush for the GOP nomination eight years earlier.) As for Hillary Clinton and Trump, you tell me. And there was nothing fun about the pandemic-cloaked 2020 election.

Of course, there are other factors. For instance, the taller candidate won in all but six presidential elections between 1916 and 2012. And this year, there has been a lot of serious attention paid to vibes. Pundits, pollsters, and political scientists have pondered why so many Americans feel that the American economy is worse than it is. Why the funk? If vibes matter more these days, then Harris’ juiced-up first fortnight might foretell good fortune for the Democrats.

The polls show that most Americans do not want a Trump restoration. But Biden, whether because of his age or high prices or other factors (the war in Gaza?), could not rally enough of them. Harris is not an empty vessel for anti-Trump sentiment. She’s no blank slate. But she appears to have less baggage and a greater ability to display fight, whip up excitement, and make the effort to hold Trumpism at bay seem enjoyable. It certainly is easier to lift spirits that want to be lifted. And she has injected life and say-it-to-my-face sass into the Democratic ticket. Within days of being elevated to the Democrats’ banner carrier, Harris made the all-important endeavor to protect American democracy feel fun. That may not be enough, but it certainly can’t hurt.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

Two years ago, I went looking for the looniest GOP candidate in the 2022 elections. And I found him.

Mark Finchem, an Arizona Republican state representative running for secretary of state. I wrote:

Finchem is a spreader of Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election, and he is an advocate of deranged QAnon conspiracy theories. The main idea of this paranoid and irrational cult is that the world is secretly controlled by a cabal of Satanic and cannibalistic sex-trafficking pedophiles—including prominent Democrats and other elites—and that Trump is waging an apocalyptic battle against these nefarious forces. Last year, Finchem was a “special guest” at a QAnon conference in Las Vegas. The roster of speakers was a veritable parade of QAnon promoters and other fringe theorists, including Ron and Jim Watkins, who are widely suspected of cooking up the QAnon scam. (They deny that.) Also on the bill: Stella Immanuel, the infamous sex-with-demons doctor, and ret. Lt. General Thomas McInerney, a far-out conspiracist who has claimed the Democrats and the Chinese government plotted to create Covid and then committed voter fraud to oust Trump.

Not surprisingly, Finchem was in Washington on January 6 and issued a tweet that seemed to justify the assault on the US Capitol, describing the riot as “what happens when the People feel they have been ignored, and Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud.” According to the Arizona Republic, “There have been allegations that Finchem was part of the mob that stormed the Capitol but he has denied them—although he refuses to release his texts and other communications from that day.”… 

After bagging the GOP nomination, Fincher did not back off the bonkers stuff. He recently held a fundraiser in California that, according to the Daily Beast, was co-hosted by a QAnon adherent who “has spent years propagating baseless lies like the Sandy Hook shooting being a staged ‘false flag’ and Sept. 11 being an ‘inside job.’” Also present: Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn. This month, prominent Jewish groups accused Finchem of deploying antisemitic rhetoric in his campaign—a charge he denied.

Finchem embodied how batcrap crazy the Trumped-up Republican Party had become. And in 2022 he lost to Democrat Adrian Fontes. But he’s back. This week he apparently won (votes are still being counted) his primary challenge to state Sen. Ken Bennett, a mostly conservative Republican and an election denialist as well. With the GOP nomination in hand, Finchem will be likely to win the seat in November. He symbolizes how Trump-inspired irrationality has become deeply ingrained within the once-Grand Old Party and reminds us that it will be sticking around no matter what happens to Trump on Election Day.  

Due to my absence for a back surgery, we’ve missed a flood of idiocy. Sorry for that. The judges insisted that we note a particularly dumb and dangerous remark that occurred shortly before the past week. Appearing at a rally for JD Vance in Ohio, Republican state Sen. George Lang exclaimed, “I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country, and it will be saved. It’s the greatest experiment in the history of mankind, and if we come down to a civil war, I’m glad we got people like...Bikers for Trump on our side.”

Though there’s been plenty of folks on the right who have hinted at violence if Trump loses, it’s rare that an elected official makes such an explicit threat. Afterward, Lang did issue a retraction: “Remarks I made earlier today at a rally at a rally in Middletown do not accurately reflect my views. I regret the divisive remarks I made in the excitement of the moment on stage.” The judges are not sure whether to buy that. Moreover, the Kamala Harris campaign issued a statement requesting that Trump and Vance denounce “Lang’s calls for violence and apologize for platforming this kind of violence.” The Trump-Vance campaign did neither.

Unsurprisingly, the elevation of Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket triggered a tsunami of misogyny. Naturally, Fox News host Jesse Watters eagerly jumped on this bandwagon. He brayed, “And I heard the scientist say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.”

Was he joking? What did he mean by this? The judges didn’t know. But they were certain this was stupid.

Many right-wingers parroted the dig that Harris was a “DEI hire,” meaning she was no more than a token. The judges chose George Galloway, a controversial British politician (a pro-Russia socialist and Brexit fan), to represent all the chauvinist pigs. Galloway declared, “She was chosen for DEI reasons, right? She was a box-ticking exercise. She could tick Indian, she could tick Black people, she could tick women. She was no threat to Biden, I mean intellectually speaking. She seems like a real empty-headed bimbo to me.”

Nothing shocking for a fellow who used to have a show on RT, Moscow’s propaganda outlet.

The judges tend to evoke the mercy rule when it comes to Trump. Otherwise, he’d be a contender—or winner—each week. But since we’ve been on a hiatus, they suspended the rule this week, especially to note that Trump had the usual multiple bouts of stupidity. Speaking at a conservative conference in Florida, he chided Harris for skipping out on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress and huffed, “She doesn’t like Jewish people.”

Does he not know to whom she’s married?

Trump also appeared before the National Association of Black Journalists and questioned whether Harris was truly Black. The guy just cannot talk about race without being insensitive, dumb, and/or bigoted.

But Trump’s winning entry came when he was bellowing at a rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and said, “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate."

Trump has said this before. Does this mean that schools that require the measles vaccine or the polio vaccine will be punished? Is Trump willing to unleash a host of diseases upon America’s children and the rest of us? This chart shows what could be expected with the end of vaccine mandates:

For being even dumber and more dangerous than the Ohio state senator who threatened civil war, Trump wins this unrigged contest.

The Mail Department had to hire extra help to deal with all the supportive notes that poured in regarding my back surgery. I thank you all for your kind wishes. The procedure went well, but I still have a few weeks of recovery ahead, and then it’s a long road of physical therapy. I’m up and about and walking just fine, thanks to a few pieces of strategically placed titanium.

There was also plenty of mail about the most recent issue in which I explained how JD Vance has blended traditional economic populism with anti-woke racism. Sharon Irvine wrote:

Thank you for your reporting on JD Vance. I read his book several years ago and admired him, but I now find him to be completely off-putting. His comments about single women, particularly, are egregiously mean spirited. How dare he? I speak as an old married grandmother. Women have the right to make choices that suit them best.

Vance is a shapeshifter who made a hard right turn a few years ago. After Hillbilly Elegy came out in mid-2016, he presented himself as a center-right public intellectual who focused on the intersection of economic matters and cultural norms. He was a Trump critic who was respectful of Trump voters. By 2021, when he ran for Senate in Ohio and sought Trump’s endorsement, he had become a fierce right-wing culture warrior, bashing the left and Democrats and praising Trump. Now he’s Trump’s handmaiden. It’s been quite the journey.

As could be expected, there was much reaction to the issue that looked at how the media was screwing up its coverage of the 2024 race. Richard Freeman wrote:

What came to mind re your observation that the media hasn't learned from 2016 is that it's possible it prefers not to do so. The comment that then-CEO of CBS made about Trump—"I know Trump's hurting America...he's great for the ratings"—was published in The Hollywood Reporter of February 29, 2016, before Trump became president.

Here’s the key excerpt from that often-referenced article:

Leslie Moonves can appreciate a Donald Trump candidacy.

Not that the CBS executive chairman and CEO might vote for the Republican presidential frontrunner, but he likes the ad money Trump and his competitors are bringing to the network.

“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” he said of the presidential race.

Moonves called the campaign for president a “circus” full of “bomb throwing,” and he hopes it continues.

“Most of the ads are not about issues. They’re sort of like the debates,” he said.

“Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? … The money’s rolling in and this is fun,” he said.

Moonves was talking more about ad revenue than ratings. But his comment about the 2016 race not being good for America but grand for CBS conveyed his obvious priorities.

Ken Friedman shared this:

I have been a rabid Boston Celtics fan since the days of Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, Bill Sharman. Red Auerbach may have been the greatest coach in the history of any sport. One of his impressive talents was his ability to game the referees, going as far as taking a technical foul at a crucial moment (and ensuring that the next few calls would go in the Celtics' favor). I wonder if the Republicans, talking endlessly about the liberal media (anything to the left of Fox News), have done something similar. For years, the conventional media have increasingly been in fear of their own liberal shadow, even when that shadow was a construct of the far right.

Separately, in the context of our neoliberal economy, profits are the be-and-end-all. And as social media have shown with their algorithms, straightforward, unbiased, and factual reporting does not do nearly as much to generate loyal readership or viewership and corresponding advertising revenue. While many, probably most, journalists have a strong sense of responsibility, that does not appear to apply to editors, or to owners.

Might these underlie the serious failures you have sketched, and perhaps the general failure to publicize Project 2025 and its relation to Donald Trump?

I do think the right has done a wonderful job over the past few decades of lib-shaming the mainstream media so that the MSM has often bent over backward to demonstrate it is not unfair to conservatives. And since the major media are private corporations driven by the need to rack up profits, it’s certainly true that this shapes how they structure their coverage of the news. Most journalists for the big operations I know are motivated by the desire to get good stories and illuminate what’s happening in our world. But they do work within companies with other imperatives. As for Project 2025, I was glad to see it receive much attention in the media in recent weeks, once Democrats and others (including actor Tarij P. Henson) began to highlight its significance. Since then, Trump has tried to distance himself from the operation, and the director of this project stepped down. But most of the work was done, and Project 2025 remains a ready-to-go game plan for a Trump 2.0.

John Peterson emailed:

Maybe the lesson the media learned is that electing Trump results in more clicks, more self-writing headlines, more column-inches, more subscriptions, more viewers on streaming news shows, more money and more power. He is certainly not good for the country, but he is good for media business. This is not a conspiracy, just to me, self-evident.

That is essentially what Moonves said. And Trump has generated much content for media organizations. As I said above, I do believe that most reporters are not rooting for him because he’s good for business. But the conventions of mainstream journalism—particular horse-race coverage of the presidential campaign—often benefit Trump and increase the threat he poses to American democracy.

Susan Rea questioned the tradition of providing a presidential nominee of the opposition party intelligence briefings during the campaign:

Can you dig into why the Biden administration would give this criminal Putin-lover our national intelligence. Especially since he did everything possible to avoid the allegations of stealing sensitive documents. It is a tradition, not law, to share national security briefings with a presidential candidate. Biden needs to break with this tradition. Trump is a crook.

Given Trump’s alleged swiping of national security documents, the Biden administration would be justified in not providing Trump a classified briefing. But to a degree, this is a moot issue. The national security briefings provided to presidential nominees, I have been told by those in the know, tend to not contain super-secret information and are basically a step or two above what a smart reader of the New York Times might glean. If such a briefing occurs with Trump, I doubt that Biden’s national security team will supply him with any valuable secrets. They’re not idiots.

“Moxie, you’re not watching this. These women are amazing.”
“Can they jump three times their height and catch a ball in their mouth?”
“Uh, I don’t think that’s one of the events in the rotation.”
“Get back to me when it is.”