Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 26, 2024

The Democratic National Convention buoyed the Democrats. Thirty-four million dollars worth of donations came into ActBlue on the night of Vice President Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech. That money added to the other donations pouring in to make a record-breaking total of $540 million since July 22, when Harris’s campaign launched.

Analyzing voter registrations in Michigan, pollster Tom Bonier found an immediate increase in young women registering to vote in the week of July 21, and his models suggest a 20-point Democratic advantage among those new registrants. FiveThirtyEight shows Harris up 2.7 points over Trump in the national polling average, a six-point improvement from Biden’s last day as a candidate. Across the country, the campaign has 400,000 volunteers.

Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz will cross southern Georgia by bus next week to build on the momentum of the convention, working with the 35,000 volunteers, 174 staffers, and 24 campaign offices across the state.

Trump and the MAGA Republicans have not taken the Democrats’ momentum quietly. Trump has been frantically posting.

On Thursday morning he assured readers on his social media channel that “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” although he has boasted about ending the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that protected women’s access to abortion and suggested that women who obtain abortions should be punished. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times wrote that his posts “were too ridiculous even for Trump,” and she wondered if his account had been hacked by Iranians.

Then Trump went to Montezuma Pass, Arizona, to praise a section of border wall constructed there. A Border Patrol union leader called it the “Trump Wall,” and Isaac Arnsdorf, Marianne LeVine and Erin Patrick O'Connor of the Washington Post wrote that Trump’s visit was designed to recapture the storyline of this presidential race from Harris. But it turned out that the section he visited was actually built under President Barack Obama. The nearby Trump portion was unfinished and cost at least $35 million per mile. As president, the reporters note, “Trump spent more than $11 billion to finish more than 450 miles of wall along the almost 2,000-mile southern border, one of the most expensive federal infrastructure projects in history.”

Harris’s acceptance speech had Trump apparently beside himself. During her 38-minute speech he posted 59 times on his social media platform, saying, among other things, “WHERE’S HUNTER?” referring to President Joe Biden’s son. After the speech ended, he called in to the Fox News Channel to rant, in what Dowd called a “scream-of-consciousness,” in which he insisted he is “doing very well in the polls,” until host Bret Baier cut him off. So he turned to right-wing media outlet Newsmax, where he continued his diatribe.

That night, apparently increasingly concerned about his chances of election, Trump—or his team, because it didn’t really sound like him—reached out on social media to Georgia governor Brian Kemp, whom he has lambasted since 2021 for refusing to help him steal the 2020 election. As recently as August 3, Trump went after Kemp, but on Thursday he thanked the governor “for all of your help and support in Georgia, where a win is so important to the success of our Party and, most importantly, our Country. I look forward to working with you, your team, and all of my friends in Georgia to help MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo commented: “Nothing tells you Trump is in full panic more than seeing him crawl back to nemesis Brian Kemp begging for help in Georgia.” “Kemp wanted a public groveling,” Ron Filipkowski wrote, “and that’s what Trump did tonight.”

It wasn’t just Trump who was concerned about the Democratic National Convention. A number of prominent Republicans who will be voting for Harris spoke there, providing a permission structure for other Republicans to shift their support to Harris and Walz. But that message did not make it through to viewers of the Fox News Channel. Media Matters, which monitors right-wing media, reported that the Fox News Channel did not air any of the Republicans’ DNC speeches.

In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan complained that Democrats “stole traditional Republican themes (faith, patriotism) and claimed them as their own”—as if somehow Democrats shouldn’t be able to claim either faith or patriotism—and worried that Trump “is famously off his game.” His “old insult shtick isn’t working,” and when he tries to read from a teleprompter, “he talks like a tranquilized robot.” Because he has insulted everything, when he now disparages something, she wrote, “it seems part of his act.”

Recognizing the momentum of the Harris-Walz campaign, the Trump-Vance campaign on Saturday sent out a memo predicting a post-convention bump for Harris-Walz but promising the bump would be temporary. It also did not mention that Trump and Vance did not get the normal post-convention bounce after their 2024 convention in July.

Friday brought more bad news for the Trump campaign when twelve Republican lawyers who served in the administrations of presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush wrote an open letter endorsing Harris because they believe Trump is a threat to American democracy and the rule of law. They continued: "[W]e urge all patriotic Republicans, former Republicans, conservative and center-right citizens, and independent voters to place love of country above party and ideology and join us in supporting Kamala Harris."

They join conservative jurist J. Michael Luttig, who endorsed Harris on Wednesday and wrote: “In voting for Vice President Harris, I assume that her public policy views are vastly different from my own, but I am indifferent in this election on any issues other than America’s Democracy, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law, as I believe all Americans should be.”

Also on Friday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was running for president as an Independent, suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump. He joined Trump onstage in Glendale, Arizona, to the music of the Foo Fighters, who made it clear the campaign did not ask permission to use the song, they would not have allowed it, and that they will donate all royalties from its use by Trump’s campaign to the Harris-Walz campaign.

It is not clear that Kennedy’s endorsement will help Trump much. He was polling at under 5%, and his numbers were dropping. Kennedy also is a poor candidate to help Trump combat the “weird” label the Democrats have attached to his campaign. His odd past includes recent stories that he claimed in court to suffer from a worm in his brain and that he dumped a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park and tried to make it look as if a bike had hit it. Josh Marshall added that the endorsement also “puts a spotlight on the fact that [Trump’s] desperate and trying basically anything now to shake up the race.”

Five of Kennedy’s siblings called the endorsement “a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.” Quoting President John F. Kennedy, his grandson Jack Schlossberg endorsed Harris on stage at the DNC.

Trump seemed thrilled with the endorsement, though. On Saturday he shared a post calling himself and Kennedy “the Strongest anti-establishment ticket in American History.” But, of course, Kennedy is not on the ticket. J.D. Vance is.

Vance’s dismal rollout has not gotten better. He appears to have taken on the task of actually campaigning for the ticket, but he is enormously inexperienced, and it’s not going terribly well. An awkward visit to a donut shop in Georgia where Vance ordered “whatever makes sense” has become a viral TikTok meme. An AP_NORC poll has Vance at –17 (27% favorable versus 44% unfavorable); Walz is +11 (36 to 25).

Finally, in a post on his social media site tonight, Trump appears to be hinting that he will pull out of the planned debate between him and Vice President Harris scheduled for September 10. “I watched ABC FAKE NEWS this morning,” he wrote, “and I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?... Stay tuned!!!”

One other item came from Trump this week, but it got little oxygen with everything else that was going on. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have been teasing a “big announcement” this month related to cryptocurrency and decentralized finance, or DeFi. On Thursday, Trump announced a new cryptocurrency project called “The DeFiant Ones” and linked to a Telegram channel set up on August 6, the same day Eric posted that such a project was in the works.

Telegram is a social media app launched by Russian-born billionaire Pavel Durov, and it is the main communications tool in Russia. Durov was arrested today in France on charges that Telegram has been used for money laundering and other crimes.