On today’s Front Page from The Free Press: Is J.D. Vance “uppity”? The far right is mad at all the Indian Americans at the RNC. The influencers TikTokking for Trump. Peter Savodnik on the paranoid style in Republican politics. And much more.
But first, a tale of two presidential candidates. Any hope in the White House that the attempt on Donald Trump’s life might have saved Joe Biden’s candidacy was surely eradicated yesterday. The president had a very bad day.
There was the polling circulating among Democrats showing that a wide range of alternative candidates are ahead of Biden in battleground states. There was Rep. Adam Schiff, a California congressman running for Senate and a close ally of Nancy Pelosi, who went public with a call for Biden to step down. There was the revelation that last Saturday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer drove to Delaware for a one-on-one meeting with Biden in which he made the case for him to withdraw from the race. It also emerged that Schumer and his counterpart in the House, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, worked together to delay the process for formalizing Biden as the nominee. There was also a meeting in Las Vegas with Jeffrey Katzenberg, in which the Biden Campaign co-chair warned that donor cash is drying up. Oh, and then the president tested positive for Covid. As he boarded Air Force One after the positive test, he told the press he felt “good.” He looked frail and defeated.
This morning, a historically unpopular president will wake up sick, behind in the polls, and seemingly being abandoned by the Democratic party poo-bahs.
Contrast that with Donald Trump. This evening he will formally accept the Republican Party’s nomination for president. It will be an almost unbelievable moment in American history, not just because Trump was almost assassinated only five days ago but because, after his refusal to accept the results of the last election and the violent riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, he was written off politically. A busted flush, he had left office in shame and was expected to spend the rest of his days sulking in Mar-a-Lago. Now, he is the heavy favorite to win a second stint in the White House. It is, by any standard, an amazing comeback. How did he do it? Eli Lake offers some answers.
If you had said on January 7, 2021, that in the summer of 2024 Donald Trump would not only be the Republican nominee but was also poised to win in a landslide in November, you would have been laughed out of the room.
The guy who never accepted the results of the 2020 election, even after exhausting his legal challenges in the courts? The guy who gave rambling and petty press conferences as the nation reeled from the Covid pandemic, suggesting that even disinfectants could be a treatment for the disease? The guy who ended up being impeached twice by the House of Representatives? That guy?
Yes, that guy, who managed to cheat death at a campaign rally last week and rise in the polls despite 34 dubious felony convictions in May. Trump has managed to unify his party, attract former rivals to his side, and even expand the GOP base to include the very minorities who elites assured us in 2016 would be Democrats in perpetuity.
To understand how he pulled that off, you have to go back to the 2012 election. Read on for more from Eli on how Trump rebuilt the GOP.
When Donald Trump gives his prime time address to formally accept his party’s nomination later today, The Free Press team will be there to guide you through the madness as it happens. To watch our live coverage this evening—co-hosted by Michael Moynihan and Bari Weiss, and with some very special guests lined up—follow us on X.
The political vibes have shifted, but why? Tyler Cowen offers nineteen possible explanations, from the intellectual vitality of the Trumpian right to the fact that Trump has a sense of humor. What has our favorite polymath left off the list? Or maybe you think the vibes haven’t shifted? Let us know in the comments. (Marginal Revolution)
Matt Taibbi also thinks we’ve reached a turning point. He identifies decisions in the days since Trump survived an assassination attempt—from NBC pulling Morning Joe off the air to RFK Jr. being granted Secret Service protection—as a series of “real and symbolic surrenders” that point to the dawn of a new political era. (Racket News)
If you think the J.D. Vance pick sends an obvious message about economic policymaking in a second Trump administration, read this sit-down interview with the Donald himself. Trump is at his most business-friendly as he muses about making Jamie Dimon treasury secretary, cutting taxes on corporations and allowing Jerome Powell to serve out his term as Fed Chair. Turns out Donald Trump is an unpredictable and sometimes self-contradictory guy. Who knew? (Bloomberg Businessweek)
Graeme Wood offers a rejoinder to the doomsaying of recent days, arguing that America’s political violence problem is overblown: “Even after the weekend’s attempted murder, I remain mostly sanguine. When I read the pages of our recent political history, I am impressed at how lightly blood-spattered they have been.” (The Atlantic)
Kamala Harris and J.D. Vance spoke yesterday as the campaigns negotiate over a vice-presidential debate. Explaining their reluctance to commit to a date, the Trump campaign said: “We don’t know who the Democrat nominee for vice president is going to be, so we can’t lock in a date before their convention. To do so would be unfair to Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, or whoever Kamala Harris picks as her running mate.” (The Hill)
Microsoft has reportedly fired its whole DEI team. According to an internal memo, the move is due to “changing business needs.” Translation: it’s not 2020 anymore. (New York Post)
Jiaai Zeng, a Chinese immigrant, died after working nonstop in appalling conditions on a marijuana farm in Oklahoma. As this horrifying investigation reveals, the farms are dominated by the Chinese mafia and exploitation and abuse is rife. (ProPublica)
Is there an Ozempic baby boom? This year, female users of the weight-loss drug shared tales of unexpected pregnancies. But the drug’s effect on fertility has not been formally studied, and the drug has not been tested on pregnant women. (Financial Times)
It’s been ten years since Rolling Stone published the UVA rape story that turned out to be a hoax. The scandal was a tale of groupthink, Twitter mobs, and a culture of fear in mainstream media, and it was a sign of things to come. (Freddie deBoer)
An update on the Taylor Swift economy: still going strong. Her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, isn’t just the best-selling album of 2024 so far, it has outsold the rest of the top ten combined. (KPVI)
The crucial moment in J.D. Vance’s extraordinary rise to the Senate and now the Republican presidential ticket was the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, his 2016 memoir about growing up in a poor, dysfunctional Scots Irish family in Middletown, Ohio, and beating the odds to rise to the Marines, Ohio State, Yale Law, and entry into the elite circles that his résumé brought with it. The elites that Vance became part of loved his book. Free Press writer River Page, who comes from a similar background to Vance, did not. Writing for us today, he explains why. Here’s River:
I know J.D. Vance’s routine. Like Vance, and very much unlike most people in my industry, I also grew up in the Scots Irish working class. My own family and upbringing share some similarities with Vance’s.
In the past, I’ve been asked to write about some of the finer points, the more salacious details about my upbringing—my biological dad’s drug issues and my complicated relationship with my mom, who was 16 when I was born—but I’ve always found some excuse not to. It is usually not the real reason, which is that a cynical and probably insecure part of me—the same part that spent my early twenties pulling the twang out of my voice—suspects they find the stories interesting only because they’re pleasantly surprised that someone who grew up like me isn’t too stupid to write them.
It makes me feel a little bit like a dancing monkey. When I read Hillbilly Elegy I see J.D. dancing, and it’s hard for me to not think less of him for it. Click for more from River about why he’d never air his dirty laundry like Trump’s VP pick did.
→ A Republican Party without guardrails: On Tuesday, I was outside the Fiserv Forum, where the Republican National Convention is taking place, when I bumped into Florida Rep. Cory Mills.
Mills, whose Seventh Congressional District stretches from Orlando to the Atlantic, had just wrapped up an interview with right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk.
They’d been discussing the possibility of Donald Trump’s near assassination being an “inside job,” as Mills put it, and we were squeezed between a makeshift stage and a gaggle of cops, press secretaries, and fangirls angling for selfies with the congressman.
When I asked Mills whether it was dangerous to suggest that the Secret Service had tried to kill Trump when there was no evidence to back that up, Mills accused me of being a “liberal.”
“Don’t even start talking to me about dangerous rhetoric nonsense right now,” Mills told me. He said that the president himself had once used his own dangerous rhetoric on a recent phone call with donors, saying, “It’s time to put Trump in a bull’s-eye.”
Then, Mills went on: “The problem with left-wing media—they always want to try and spin things around but not take accountability for their own words.”
I’ll cop to being pro-choice. I think gay marriage is a good thing. I’m not against a social safety net. I’m not sure what that makes me in 2024.
As for the spin that the legacy media is a Democratic media organ—I get that. I work at The Free Press.
Where he loses me—and where I fear the GOP is headed to judge from some of the conversations I’ve had and the speakers I’ve heard this week at the RNC—is straight down the rabbit hole all the way to Alex Jones Land.
The roots of this shift can be traced to the 1950s—recall Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 Harper’s essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”—but it was always kept in check by the guardrails, the institutions. It wasn’t until Donald Trump that it was legitimized. It was Trump, as everyone knows, who promulgated the lie that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States.
And it’s Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who reportedly believes Alex Jones is a teller of inconvenient truths.
The convention that is crowning Trump and Vance gave Charlie Kirk—the head of Turning Point USA, which aims to spread conservative values on campus—a spot as a speaker on the opening night.
This is the same Charlie Kirk who recently complained: “I have impatience for American Jews that have put up with the anti-white sentiments the last decade and thought it was perfectly fine. Because guess what, American Jews, you’re considered white in the eyes of the Marxists.”
In the days after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, Kirk took the lead in spreading the lie that Israel allowed Hamas to attack, that there was a secret “stand down” order. (Ben Domenech, the former editor of The Federalist, said at the time that if Kirk “remains the head of TPUSA, the right has an antisemite problem that will follow them into the coming elections.”)
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was also on the menu this week. (She spoke Monday.)
The Georgia congresswoman recently opposed a bill condemning antisemitism because, she tweeted, it “could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the Gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.” And that’s to say nothing of the infamous “Jewish space lasers.”
And how about North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson? He spoke Monday. Among other things, he has denied the Holocaust and suggested Black Panther was a Jewish plot meant to denigrate and marginalize black Americans.
It’s wrong to say the new GOP is run by antisemites. There are lots of Jews here. There are Israeli flags and Trump kippahs on the convention floor. On day one of the convention, Republicans prayed for the hostages in Gaza. On Wednesday night Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Jewish graduate of Harvard who is suing the school for failing to address antisemitism on campus, spoke of how the far left “has not only abandoned the Jewish people, but the American people.” Orna and Ronen Neutra, whose son is one of the Americans held hostage by Hamas in Gaza, led chants of “bring them home,” and described October 7 as “not merely an attack on Israel. This was an attack on Americans.”
The problem is that any culture that does away with guardrails, that doesn’t allow for a delineation between truth and untruth, is opening a Pandora’s box that inevitably leads to a dark place—for Jews, for all civilized peoples.
But it’s hard to see how we reinsert the genie back into the bottle. The border separating reality and unreality, acceptable versus unacceptable opinion, has been dissolved. In today’s postmodernized Republican Party, everyone has a legitimate point of view, and facts are just “narratives” or “constructs,” and the only thing that really matters is how big your audience is and whether your content goes viral. —Peter Savodnik
→ Influencers for Trump: Xaviaer DuRousseau, a 27-year-old conservative influencer, knows he looks like he belongs at the Democratic National Convention. His bleach-blond hair is the giveaway.
“It’s like wearing a costume,” he says, pointing to his ’do when I catch him at a bar inside the Milwaukee arena hosting the Republican National Convention. “I wanted to look the part. . . it’s allowed me to infiltrate a lot more spaces in that world.”
Then he gives me a wink: “And I just think it looks good.”
DuRousseau (pictured above), a former liberal turned Trump supporter, is one of some 70 influencers invited to the RNC as part of its first-ever content creator program. The influencers get half an hour of access to the arena floor each day, where they take selfies with fans and film videos that later make the rounds on TikTok, Truth Social, and X.
Their inclusion is part of a push to reach Gen Z voters, but polls show that many of them have already been won over by Trump. Numbers from Pew now show Trump leading among American voters under the age of 30. Young voters say that pressure to go along with “woke” politics is lifting, and it’s even become “cool” to back Trump.
DuRousseau tells me he grew up in the “corn-fed town” of Pontiac, Illinois, in a family that was “very left wing” and “broke as hell.”
“Then over time, I started to realize that wasn’t what I wanted for myself,” he says. “I always had this perspective of working hard to get out of there.”
He did, becoming an influencer in Los Angeles, with more than 180,000 Instagram followers.
Before his political change of heart, he tells me that he crafted his “entire perspective around being black.” But he says he realized cities like his birthplace of Chicago were “plummeting” because of the left’s judicial reforms, such as when Illinois became the first state in the nation to eliminate cash bail.
He says when crime is rampant, black people are the losers. Businesses flee “because the crime is getting so insane. And then you wonder why all these black people are unemployed? All these black people don't have opportunities.”
He tells me he was instrumental in bringing his friend Amber Rose, a heavily tattooed OnlyFans model, onstage Monday. In her speech, Rose described her journey from believing “left-wing propaganda that Donald Trump was a racist” to endorsing him for president. DuRousseau sees the moment as part of a cultural shift.
“For far too long, we've been told that you either have to be blue-collar or an old, rich white man that just does nothing but just go to church to be a Republican,” he says. “And I’m just ready for that narrative to be over.”
He describes a caricature of Republicans “dressing like a pilgrim and churning butter on the weekends.” But that’s changing, he says.
“You can be artsy, you can be gay, you can be any demographic and be a conservative—it does not matter. What matters are our principles. Are you going to fight for my freedom? And am I going to fight for yours? That’s the bottom line.” —Olivia Reingold
Olivia has also been talking to the delegates wearing bandages on their ears in solidarity with the former president. For more on this ear-isistable trend, click here:
→ Indian Americans are front and center at the RNC—and not everyone is happy: On Monday night, Harmeet Dhillon did something that doesn’t exactly conform with the image of the Republican Party as overwhelmingly white and Christian: she recited a Sikh prayer onstage at the RNC. Dhillon, a religious-liberty lawyer and member of the Republican National Committee, told the party faithful: “I come from a family of Sikh immigrants. I am honored to share with you, my fellow Republicans and guests tonight, a prayer from my faith tradition practiced by over 25 million worldwide.” Then she covered her head, and recited the Ardas.
The crowd listened, and applauded afterward. “It was silent. People bowed their heads. It was very respectful,” she later told the New York Post. “When I left the stage, I was hugged and people took selfies with me. Not a single word of criticism inside the room.”
But outside the room—more specifically, on social media—it was a different story. Lauren Witzke, the Republican nominee for the 2020 U.S. Senate race in Delaware, decried the fact that a non-Christian God was called upon, labeling Dhillon a “pagan blasphemer.” George Behizy, a Christian commentator with 200,000 followers on X called Dhillon’s prayer “ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE!!” and said whoever “invited her to pray to a foreign god” should be fired.
“Blocking quite a few people. . .” tweeted Dhillon later that night.
“It is difficult to go through it, but I did what I did for a reason,” Dhillon told me the next day. She explained she wanted “to show that all people are welcome in our party. Today, I continued to receive overwhelming support from RNC delegates and conservatives worldwide.”
Dhillon isn’t the only Indian American in the spotlight at the RNC this week.
Usha Chilukuri Vance, the wife of vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, was born in San Diego to Indian immigrant parents and was raised in a Hindu household. An accomplished lawyer, she has clerked for the Republican-appointed Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts as well as Brett Kavanaugh. But since Trump picked Vance, many on what I call the nativist right have homed in on his wife’s religion and background.
Stew Peters, a Christian nationalist with more than 600,000 followers on X, posted a photo featuring Vance and his wife holding their newborn child and said: “Trump VP nominee @JDVance1 and his Indian wife have three children named: Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel. He’s not one of us.”
After Vance’s nomination on Monday, neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes asked on X: “Do we really expect a guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”
For those who don’t want to see Hindus and Sikhs in the GOP, the disappointments have been coming thick and fast lately. On Tuesday night, two of the prime time speakers were the children of Indian immigrants to America who ran for president: Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.
The RNC has been a reminder of the quiet but significant rise of the Indian American Republican. It is also a trend celebrated among mainstream Republicans, who know that devout members of different faiths, from different backgrounds, can share the same political worldview. That’s a reality that drives the nativist right a little crazy. —Rupa Subramanya
Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.
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"It wasn’t until Donald Trump that it was legitimized."
This essay was a fine job of nut-picking. There were plenty of nuts and weirdos long before Trump, and any disinterested observer can spot them everywhere in the fringes of both partys. Ascribing the general character of a party to the delusions in its fringes makes as much sense as the weirdos do.
River Page really should have read Hillbilly Elegy before he wrote his critique of it. Vance has often criticized Congress for doing nothing to help those trapped in the drug & depression cycle. Quoting Vance at a senate hearing: “If you think about addiction, in some cases it’s a straightforward question of medical treatment. But it’s also related to chaos and trauma in certain families. That’s in turn related to the fact that economic opportunities and jobs are harder to come by. If we’re going to make any headway on these problems, we have to tackle each simultaneously.” Vance does not blame the victim, he simply suggests it is a multi faceted problem for which the addict shares some responsibility. Which any competent addiction counselor will agree with.