“When you buy something for one price, and later sell it for a higher price, that’s called a “capital gain.” In tax lingo, you “realize” a capital gain when you ultimately sell the asset. If the asset gains in value without you selling it (e.g., a stock you own rises in price), those gains are “unrealized.”
The capital gains tax in the US has a “realization requirement”: You have to actually sell the asset to be taxed. This creates an easy way for rich people to avoid taxes, by simply waiting to sell.
Imagine a 20-something who starts an internet company called FriendCo with his college roommates. Let’s call him Mark. (While I’m obviously basing Mark on somebody real, I’m going to simplify the real numbers a lot to make it easier to follow.)
At FriendCo’s founding in 2004, Mark and his four roommates each took 10 percent of the company, with the other half to be sold to investors. At the start, their shares were worth $0. But their website took off fast and soon had 1 billion users. The company went public in 2012, at a market value of $100 billion. Mark and his roommates’ shares were worth $10 billion each.
At this point, the company stands still and remains worth $100 billion forevermore (I told you I was going to simplify).
If Mark sells all his shares in 2012 after the company goes public, he’d pay taxes on the amount that the shares increased. They were worth $0 at first, and are now worth $10 billion. The top rate on capital gains in the US is 23.8 percent, so he’d pay $2.38 billion in taxes.
Suppose, instead, Mark decides to keep all his shares until he retires 40 years later, in 2052. Assuming the tax code doesn’t change, he’d still pay $2.38 billion. That, right there, is the problem.
Being able to pay a tax bill decades in the future, instead of right now, is a huge benefit. If I told my landlord that I would prefer to pay my rent 40 years from now, she would not find that very amusing. At the very least she would demand that I pay a lot of interest for paying so late. Other big purchases, like houses and cars, usually do involve paying a ton of interest in exchange for later payments. Capital gains taxes don’t.
The “realization requirement” of the capital gains tax thus functions like a massive, zero-interest government loan to people who’ve gained money on their investments. They’re able to save huge sums in taxes merely by waiting to sell their assets, and not paying any interest while they wait.
This is unfair; if you can afford to wait and not sell, you get a big tax break, but if you can’t afford that, you don’t. But the rule can also cause serious economic harm. By pushing people to hold onto investments longer than they normally would, it keeps them from moving their money to newer investments. That makes it harder for startups and other innovative firms to get the money they need to grow, leading to less innovation and slower economic growth.
The problem is compounded by other aspects of the US tax code. If Mark were to never sell his shares and instead pass them along to his children, they would not have to pay capital gains tax on the gain. In fact, if they were to later sell the shares, they would only pay tax on the difference between the value of the shares when they sell, and the value when they inherited them. (This is called “step-up in basis” or, more evocatively, the “angel of death loophole.”) So if the shares remain at $10 billion, the children can sell them and not pay a dime in capital gains tax. The rich are talented at evading the estate tax, too, so it’s very possible that Mark’s fortune will be completely untaxed.”
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“The Biden proposal is meant to make the ultra-rich pay more. The strategy is simple: get rid of the realization rule.
For people with over $100 million in assets, the proposal would put in place a new tax regime. For easily sold assets with clear prices, like stocks and bonds and crypto, gains in value would be taxed during the year they happen, whether or not the assets are actually sold. Taxpayers would be able to get refunds if the assets later fell in value.
Andreessen, Horowitz, and other Silicon Valley types fret about what this would mean for startup founders whose companies haven’t gone public yet. These founders may be billionaires on paper but do not have any actual cash with which to pay taxes.
If these VCs had read the fine print of the plan, they’d see that someone in this situation would not have to pay taxes yet. If more than 80 percent of a person’s net worth is in “illiquid assets” like private company shares, they would not have to pay annual tax on those assets. If they sold the assets, they’d pay the tax plus a “deferral charge,” a kind of interest for paying the tax years after they gained the money. Should the company go public or be acquired, the situation would change — but also the newly minted billionaire would suddenly have liquid assets with which to pay their tax bill.
This is all somewhat academic, though, after the Supreme Court’s June 20 ruling in Moore v. United States. While the decision itself concerned a minor provision in the Trump tax cuts, one justice, Amy Coney Barrett, wrote a concurring opinion arguing that realization is required for a capital gains tax to be constitutional. As my colleague Ian Millhiser notes, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s majority opinion hinted pretty strongly that he’d side with Barrett on the matter, while deferring on a ruling for now.
If the Barrett view has at least five supporters on the Supreme Court, then the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax is dead in the water.”
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“I do not know of a single honest defense of the angel of death loophole, but unfortunately there are many deeply dishonest defenses. Former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) spent much of 2021 claiming that realization at death would obliterate family farms in the Plains, for which she offered literally zero evidence. Alas, the gambit worked.
In theory, though, a future Congress could still close the loophole. They could go further still and pass law professors Edward Fox and Zachary Liscow’s plan to tax the loans billionaires currently use to generate tax-free cash. The most ambitious option would be to add deferral charges to the capital gains tax, so the rich have to pay the government interest when they defer taxes by not selling their assets.”
“Former President Donald Trump has lately been trying to distance himself from Project 2025, claiming it was cooked up by the “severe right” and that he doesn’t know anything about it.
But it turns out the severe right is coming from inside the house.
Kevin Roberts, the self-proclaimed “head” of Project 2025, has a book coming out in September — and the book’s foreword is written by Trump’s vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, who lavishly praises its ideas.
“Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism,” Vance writes, according to the book’s Amazon page. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”
What ideas? Like Vance, Roberts is obsessed with the idea that the left controls major American institutions — he lists Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education and even the Boy Scouts of America. The book argues that “conservatives need to burn down” these institutions if “we’re to preserve the American way of life.” (Vox has requested a copy of the book, but has not yet received one at the time of this writing.)
Obviously, this poses a problem for Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the virally unpopular Project 2025 and its lengthy agenda for what he should do if he wins, which includes proposals to restrict abortion access and centralize executive power in the presidency.
And it’s one more indication that Trump’s pick of Vance might be politically problematic for him. Vance has a fascination with provocative and extreme far-right thinkers, and a history of praising their ideas. He is not a running mate tailored to win over swing voters who are concerned Trump might be too extreme — quite the opposite.
The book was written and announced before Vance was chosen as Trump’s running mate. But there’s some indication that people involved had some late second thoughts about it. It was originally announced as “Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America,” with a cover image showing a match over the word “Washington.”
More recently, though, the subtitle has been changed to “Taking Back Washington to Save America,” and the match has vanished from the cover.”
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“Project 2025 contains a multitude of proposals in its 922-page plan, not all of which J.D. Vance necessarily supports.
But he’s on record backing ideas similar to those put forth in two of Project 2025’s most controversial issue areas.
The first is abortion. Project 2025 lays out a sweeping agenda by which the next president could use federal power to prevent abortions, including using an old law called the Comstock Act to prosecute people who mail abortion pills, and working to prevent women from abortion-banning states from traveling out of state to get abortions.
Vance is on record supporting these ideas. Last year, he signed a letter demanding that the Justice Department prosecute physicians and pharmacists “who break the Federal mail-order abortion laws.” In 2022, he said he was “sympathetic” to the idea that the federal government should stop efforts to help women traveling out of their states to get abortions. That year, he also said: “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”
At other points, Vance has struck a different tone. ““We have to accept that people do not want blanket abortion bans,” he said last December. And this month he said he supported a Supreme Court decision that allowed the abortion bill mifepristone to remain available. Here, Vance is trying to align with Trump, who — fearing political blowback — argues he merely wants abortion to be a state issue, despite his long alliance with the religious right. But Vance’s record implies his true agenda might be otherwise.
The second controversial area where Vance is sympatico with Project 2025 is centralizing presidential power over the executive branch. The project lays out various proposals to rein in what conservatives view as an out-of-control “deep state” bureaucracy — mainly, by firing far more career civil servants and installing far more political appointees throughout the government.
Vance, as I wrote last week, has backed a maximalist version of this agenda. In 2021, Vance said that in Trump’s second term, Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” The courts would try to stop this, Vance continued, and Trump should then “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
So it’s no big surprise that Vance would write the foreword for a book by Project 2025’s architect. They fundamentally agree on how they see the world, and in much of what they want out of politics: a battle against the left for control of institutions, and expanded government power to stop abortions.”
“The major proposals pitched by the campaigns of Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump would both expand the federal budget deficit—though Trump’s plans would require significantly more borrowing over the next decade.
Trump’s proposals would add an estimated $5.8 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a fiscal policy think tank at the University of Pennsylvania (Trump’s alma mater). Most of Trump’s deficit-increasing policies result from proposed changes that would reduce Americans’ tax burden. He’s called for permanently extending the 2017 tax cuts, which would add an estimated $4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade (unless Trump comes up with offsetting spending cuts). His plan to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits will add another $1.2 trillion.”
“When the Supreme Court endorsed broad presidential immunity from criminal charges last month, it raised troubling questions about whether and how former occupants of the White House can be held accountable for abusing their powers. In an initial attempt to answer those questions, Special Counsel Jack Smith this week unveiled a superseding indictment in the federal election interference case against former President Donald Trump—the same case that prompted the Court’s ruling.
The viability of United States v. Trump is unclear at this point. The Supreme Court charged U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan with reviewing the charges against Trump in light of its ruling, and any decisions she makes will be subject to appeal. There is no chance that the case will go to trial before this year’s presidential election, and if Trump wins, we can be sure he will find a way to make it disappear. Smith’s revisions nevertheless suggest what it might take to successfully prosecute a former president despite the obstacles that the Supreme Court has erected.
The most notable change from the original indictment is the excision of any reference to Trump’s interactions with the Department of Justice (DOJ). The government initially portrayed those conversations, in which Trump pressured DOJ officials to investigate his baseless claims of systematic election fraud, as part of a criminal scheme to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory. But the Supreme Court explicitly ruled out criminal liability based on such contacts.
Trump was exercising his “conclusive and preclusive” authority as president when he urged the DOJ to validate his stolen-election fantasy, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. The executive branch has “‘exclusive authority and absolute discretion’ to decide which crimes to investigate and prosecute,” he wrote, “including with respect to allegations of election crime.”
As Justice Sonya Sotomayor noted in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, that holding seems to give presidents a lot of leeway to wield the federal government’s daunting prosecutorial powers against their political or personal enemies. Under the majority’s “view of core powers,” she said, “even fabricating evidence and insisting the [Justice] Department use it in a criminal case could be covered.”
Sotomayor also noted other possible implications of the majority’s position. When a president “uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution,” she warned. “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”
Roberts faulted Sotomayor for “fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals.” But we do not need imaginary scenarios to understand the perils of assuring presidents that they need not worry about the threat of criminal prosecution as long as they are exercising their “core powers.”
The proposed articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon alleged, among other things, that he made “false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States” and that he interfered with “the conduct of investigations by the Department of Justice of the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, [and] the office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force.” The issue of whether Nixon could have faced criminal charges based on those allegations was never litigated, because he resigned before he could be impeached, and his successor, Gerald Ford, granted him a pardon that covered any federal offenses he might have committed in office. But according to the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Trump v. United States, Nixon’s corrupt interactions with the DOJ would have been off limits for federal prosecutors.
Beyond that specific instruction, the Court was hazy about the extent of presidential immunity. “We conclude that under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power requires that a former President have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office,” Roberts wrote. “At least with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute. As for his remaining official actions, he is also entitled to immunity. At the current stage of proceedings in this case, however, we need not and do not decide whether that immunity must be absolute, or instead whether a presumptive immunity is sufficient.”
What about Trump’s interactions with Vice President Mike Pence? Trump persistently pressured Pence, in private and in public, to intervene on his behalf during the congressional ratification of the election results by rejecting electoral votes for Biden. Citing the “contingent” electors that his campaign had recruited in several battleground states, Trump urged Pence to send both sets of slates “back to the states” so that legislators could resolve a nonexistent controversy about the actual results. Pence repeatedly resisted, saying he had no authority to do what Trump asked.
The original indictment portrayed those interactions as a key part of a criminal conspiracy to change the outcome of the election. That aspect of the indictment presented “difficult questions,” according to the Supreme Court. “Whenever the President and Vice President discuss their official responsibilities, they engage in official conduct,” Roberts wrote. “Presiding over the January 6 certification proceeding at which Members of Congress count the electoral votes is a constitutional and statutory duty of the Vice President. The indictment’s allegations that Trump attempted to pressure the Vice President to take particular acts in connection with his role at the certification proceeding thus involve official conduct, and Trump is at least presumptively immune from prosecution for such conduct.”
The question, Roberts said, is “whether that presumption of immunity is rebutted under the circumstances.” He noted that the vice president is acting “in his capacity as President of the Senate,” part of the legislative branch, when he oversees the electoral vote count. The government therefore “may argue that consideration of the President’s communications with the Vice President concerning the certification proceeding does not pose ‘dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.'”
Would that argument be correct? Maybe not, Roberts suggested: “The President may frequently rely on the Vice President in his capacity as President of the Senate to advance the President’s agenda in Congress. When the Senate is closely divided, for instance, the Vice President’s tiebreaking vote may be crucial for confirming the President’s nominees and passing laws that align with the President’s policies. Applying a criminal prohibition to the President’s conversations discussing such matters with the Vice President—even though they concern his role as President of the Senate—may well hinder the President’s ability to perform his constitutional functions. It is ultimately the Government’s burden to rebut the presumption of immunity.”
The new indictment tries to do that in several ways. It notes that Pence was Trump’s “own running mate,” meaning the intervention that Trump demanded would personally benefit both of them. It adds that “all of the conversations between [Trump] and [Pence] described below focused on [Trump] maintaining power.” The indictment points out that Trump “had no official responsibilities related to the certification proceeding, but he did have a personal interest as a candidate in being named the winner of the election.” It later reiterates that Trump “had no official role” in the certification process.
The indictment also emphasizes the private character of other conduct that might be construed as “official acts.” Regarding Trump’s pressure on state officials to reverse Biden’s victories, for example, the indictment notes that Trump “had no official responsibilities related to any state’s certification of the election results.” Discussing Trump’s “fake electors” scheme, the indictment likewise notes that he “had no official responsibilities related to the convening of legitimate electors or their signing and mailing of their certificates of vote.”
Like the original indictment, the revised version describes the notorious telephone conversation in which Trump leaned on Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes necessary to reverse the election outcome in that state. But the indictment makes a point of noting that the participants in that call included “private attorneys” and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who “sometimes handled private and Campaign-related logistics” for Trump.
The indictment still relies on Trump’s social media posts to make the case that he pushed a phony grievance aimed at preventing Biden from taking office. But it argues that such communications should not be viewed as “official acts.”
Although Trump “sometimes used his Twitter account to communicate with the public, as President, about official actions and policies,” the indictment says, “he also regularly used it for personal purposes—including to spread knowingly false claims of election fraud, exhort his supporters to travel to Washington, D.C. on January 6, pressure the Vice President to misuse his ceremonial role in the certification proceeding, and leverage the events at the Capitol on January 6 to unlawfully retain power.” And when Trump riled up his supporters that day, stoking their outrage at the prospect that Congress was about to recognize Biden’s supposedly fraudulent victory, he was speaking at “a privately-funded, privately-organized political rally.”
The indictment lists five alleged co-conspirators, “none of whom were government officials during the conspiracies and all of whom were acting in a private capacity.” It describes four as “private attorney[s]” and one as “a private political consultant.””
“Like Carlson, Vance had once opposed Donald Trump, and like Carlson, he had transformed into a prominent Trump supporter and a rabid participant in the culture wars. “We are effectively run in the country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs,” he told Carlson, “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to name Kamala Harris (and Pete Buttigieg, and AOC) as his prime examples of the childless leaders who should be excluded from positions of power.”
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“Vance appears to be a decent family man — someone who supports traditional conservative values, and is even willing to buck conventional GOP norms by supporting strong pro-family policies. But a quick perusal of his thoughts on women and gender reveal some unusual opinions that lie outside the American mainstream, beyond a stray comment about cat ladies.
Vance is staunchly opposed to abortion, and has suggested that it is wrong even in cases of rape and incest. He has compared the evil of abortion to that of slavery, and opposed the Ohio ballot measure ensuring the right to abortion in 2023. He also was one of only 28 members of Congress who opposed a new HIPAA rule that would limit law enforcement’s access to women’s medical records. He has promoted Viktor Orban’s pro-natalist policies in Hungary, which offer paybacks to married couples that scale up along with the number of children (a new Hungarian Constitution that banned gay marriage went into effect in 2012, so these benefits only serve “traditional” couples). Vance opposes same-sex marriage. During his 2022 Senate campaign, he suggested the sexual revolution had made divorce too easy (people nowadays “shift spouses like they change their underwear”), arguing that people in unhappy marriages, and maybe even those in violent ones, should stay together for their children. His campaign said such an insinuation was “preposterous,” but you can watch the video yourself and be the judge.”
“The theme of the Republican National Convention’s second night was “Make America Safe Again,” and the roster of speakers repeatedly criticized Biden’s record on crime and immigration: Randy Sutton, a retired police officer, said there was a “war on cops.” Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird said that Biden treats “police like criminals, and criminals like victims.” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz declared that “your family is less safe, your children are less safe, the country is less safe,” as a result of Biden’s presidency.
But the Republican speakers’ rhetoric on crime spiraling out of control was out of touch with reality.
While there was indeed a rise in crime during the pandemic, recent data has shown that crime is declining nationwide. According to the FBI, murder is down 26 percent and robberies have declined by 18 percent in the first three months of 2024 compared to the same time last year. That didn’t stop Republican speakers throughout the night from singling out incidents of heinous crimes and drug overdoses to conjure up an image of lawlessness and disorder.
So why are Republicans plowing ahead with their “Make America Safe Again” messaging despite data that shows America is already getting safer? The answer is simple: Most Americans believe that crime is getting worse, so it’s not a particularly tough message to sell.”
“Donald Trump’s allies have laid out sweeping plans to reshape the executive branch of the federal government if he is returned to power, plans that involve firing perhaps tens of thousands of career civil servants and replacing them with handpicked MAGA allies.
But how far, exactly, would Trump go in trying to tear down what he calls the “deep state?” The answer hasn’t been clear.
In picking J.D. Vance as his vice president, he’s picked someone who will egg him on to go very far indeed.
“If I was giving him one piece of advice” for a second term, Vance said on a 2021 podcast:
“Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
That was no idle talk. To an extent unusual for a politician — and perhaps because he hasn’t been in politics very long — Vance is interested in big ideas. He’s been deeply influenced by thinkers on the movement known as the New Right, who want to seize and transform societal institutions they believe are dominated by the left.
A big part of that would involve a restored President Trump purging any resistance to him, or checks on his power, from the executive branch.”
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“As Trump was about to leave office in 2020, he finally got around to trying to do something about the supposed “deep state”: He issued an executive order known as Schedule F.
This order laid the groundwork for reclassifying as many as 50,000 career civil servant jobs as political appointees who could then be fired and replaced by Trump. He was out of office before it could be implemented, however, and Biden quickly revoked it.
There’s been much fear about Trump restoring this policy in his second term, replacing a great many nonpartisan career experts with political hacks or ideologues willing to go along with his extreme or corrupt plans.
Such a move could be implemented in any number of ways, from the more limited and less disruptive to more sweeping and very disruptive. Considering Trump has only intermittent interest in the details of policy and implementation, I’ve thought that how this plays out would depend on who staffs his administration, since he could be pulled in various directions. Advisers worried about chaos and political blowback could counsel restraint.
Vance would not do that. He would be a key voice in Trump’s administration urging him to go very big indeed.
Elsewhere in the podcast, Vance said that the courts would inevitably “stop” Trump from trying to fire so many employees. When they do, Vance went on, Trump should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
That is: Vance urged that Trump radically remake the executive branch even if the Supreme Court said doing so was illegal.”
“Beyond Trump worship, the RNC has been billed as proof that the populist takeover of the Republican Party is complete. On issues like trade, immigration, and foreign alliances, this analysis is surely correct; the Trumpian insurgency has gone head-to-head with the party old guard and defeated them.
Yet elements of the old Republican Party remain thoroughly in place.
Unlike Europe’s far-right populist parties, the GOP remains unyieldingly opposed to the welfare state and progressive taxation. It remains committed to banning abortion, an issue where its actions at the state level speak for themselves. It remains deeply hostile to unions; vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance, allegedly the avatar of the party’s pro-worker populism, has a 0 percent score from the AFL-CIO. On foreign policy, it is by no means strictly isolationist: it seeks to ramp up military spending and aggressively confront China even as it tears down both military alliances and the American-led global trade regime.
Ideologically, the GOP is a mess, a political party constructed less out of one cogent worldview than an assemblage of different parts, a zombie given life by the lightning of Donald John Trump. It is Frankenstein’s party. And while Trump and his loyalists are clearly our Shelleyian monster’s head, they do not (yet) have full control over all its limbs.
The Trump coalition is so new that it has yet to produce an equilibrium, a stable set of policy commitments that will endure as long as it aligns. It basically works by Trump getting his way on issues he really cares about — like democracy, trade, and immigration — while others claim what they can when they can claim it. The monied class is still calling the shots on taxes and regulation; the social conservatives are still in the driver’s seat when it comes to issues like abortion and LGBT rights.”
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“Some of the most notable policies in them, like Project 2025’s proposal to end the Justice Department’s independence or the platform’s call for “the largest Deportation Program in history,” is pure Trump (right down to the random capitalization).
But in issue areas where other elements of the right prevail, things sound a bit more old Republican. Project 2025’s chapter on the EPA is about as old-school business friendly as it gets; the GOP platform promises to “slash Regulations” and “pursue additional Tax Cuts.” Project 2025 calls on the next president to “rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.”
When there’s tension between Trump’s instincts and the old Republican agenda, the result is not always clear.
On trade, Trump has simply won; the issue is central enough to his political identity that his protectionism has become party orthodoxy. But on abortion, where Trump wants the party to moderate, signals are more mixed. He succeeded in, for example, taking a call for a national abortion ban out of the GOP platform — but banning abortion remains central to the party identity. Both Vance and Project 2025 support using an obscure 1873 law to ban the distribution of mifepristone, the abortion pill, by mail.
Partly, this confused state of affairs is a product of Trump’s own personality. The conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru argues, correctly, that he simply doesn’t have the character necessary to run a strict and doctrinal ideological movement.
“It’s not just that he lacks the discipline and focus to carry out an objective, although he does lack both, or that flatterers easily manipulate him, although they do. It’s also that his objectives are malleable to start with,” Ponnuru argues.
But partly, it’s a result of coalitional politics — how the American right has always worked.”
“At the behest of Trump and his allies, the RNC approved a new GOP platform, one free of calls for federal abortion bans or any explicit opposition to same-sex marriage. The Republicans’ official agenda also forswears any cuts to Medicare and Social Security, including increases to the retirement age. All of these stances contradict longstanding conservative movement goals, and all three bring the Republican Party into closer alignment with public opinion.
Meanwhile, Trump used some of the RNC’s primetime speaking slots to signal sympathy for nonwhite voters, younger Americans, and union members. The biracial model and rapper Amber Rose gave a speech that invited young, historically liberal voters to rethink their skepticism of Trump and his party. “The truth is that the media has lied to us about Donald Trump. I know this because for a long time I believed those lies,” Rose declared, explaining that she eventually realized, “Donald Trump and his supporters don’t care if you’re Black, white, gay, or straight. It’s all love. And that’s when it hit me. These are my people.”
The RNC’s outreach to union voters was even more concerted. On the convention’s first night, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien enjoyed the most prominent speaking slot. The union leader did not actually endorse Trump and spent much of his address on diatribes against corporate greed that received tepid support in the convention hall.
To all but the most attentive viewers, however, O’Brien’s status as the keynote speaker overshadowed the absence of a formal endorsement: By all appearances, the head of one of America’s largest unions was vouching for Trump’s commitment to workers’ interests.
Taken together, the RNC’s four-day infomercial for Trump’s GOP was far more professionally orchestrated and broadly accessible than its 2020 and 2016 predecessors, which often seemed to be made by and for Fox News addicts.
Yet other aspects of the convention betrayed the strange, illiberal, and authoritarian character of Trump’s politics. As well-managed as the Trump campaign has been to this point, it cannot escape the inherent liabilities of the man it’s trying to sell.”
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“Vance is among the most openly authoritarian Republicans in Washington. He has said that he would have helped Trump overturn the 2020 election results, raised money for January 6 rioters, called on the DOJ to launch a criminal investigation against an anti-Trump Washington Post columnist, touted plans for consolidating the president’s authority over the federal bureaucracy, and argued that Trump should simply defy any court orders that obstruct such a power grab.
Traditionally, presidential candidates use their VP picks to assuage potential concerns that swing voters might have about them or balance out the ticket demographically. Vance’s selection, by contrast, exacerbates Trump’s biggest political liabilities: the perception that he is an authoritarian extremist whose election would threaten abortion rights.
Nevertheless, Trump picked him precisely because Vance’s current ideology closely mirrors his own. According to the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta, the Trump campaign had initially planned to pick a milquetoast, unthreatening running mate, such as North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum. But Trump was eventually persuaded that he needed a fellow true-believing populist to help him enact his most far-reaching ambitions.”
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“The Republican nominee’s acceptance speech was the longest ever given, meandering across 92 bizarre and tedious minutes. This excess was a direct reflection of the authoritarian nature of Trump’s candidacy. The nominee of a healthy democratic political party must balance their own narcissistic appetite for attention against the interests of the various constituencies they represent.
Having consolidated his personality cult’s control of the GOP, Trump faced no such constraint. His speech did not stretch to marathon length because of its abundance of substantive content. Rather, it consumed so much time because Trump allowed himself to supplement nearly every passage with pointless and tiresome ad-libbing, after detailing his own narrowly averted assassination in painstaking detail.
A less weird and authoritarian Republican nominee might have also drummed up panic about undocumented immigration. But they probably wouldn’t have paused in the middle of such demagogy to ask the crowd, “Has anyone seen The Silence of the Lambs?” and then say, incongruously, “The late, great Hannibal Lecter.”
Trump’s endless, self-indulgent rambling was alienating enough in and of itself. Even more unnerving was the spectacle of an increasingly bored crowd struggling to humor their dear leader with increasingly strained outbursts of enthusiasm.”