Here’s what I’ve found interesting: Trump once again diminishes Veterans’ sacrifices, the media needs to explain why it is covering the Trump email leak differently than it handled the DNC leak in 2016, where’s the investigation into the credible reports that Egypt bribed Trump, fact-checking lies Republicans share about Gov. Tim Walz, Elon Musk’s $44 billion donation to the GOP, where JD Vance gets his weird techno-authoritarian ideas, Walz may the person to spark a necessary conversation about Supreme Court reform, Trump came closer than we thought to using the Insurrection Act in 2020, and U.S. athletes took advantage of a novel policy idea while in the Olympic Village.
#1
VFW Admonishes Former President for Medal of Honor Remarks (VFW Press Release)
On Thursday, former President Donald Trump spoke at an event where he made some flippant remarks about the Medal of Honor and the heroes who have received it. In the video that has circulated online and in the media, the former president was recognizing Miriam Adelson in the audience who he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom during his time in office. As he described the medal as the civilian version of the Medal of Honor, he went on to opine that the Medal of Freedom was “much better” than the military’s top award, because those awarded the latter are, in his words, “ … either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.” He continued by comparing Miriam to MoH recipients saying, “She gets it and she’s a healthy beautiful woman. They are rated equal.”
These asinine comments not only diminish the significance of our nation’s highest award for valor, but also crassly characterizes the sacrifices of those who have risked their lives above and beyond the call of duty.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Oh yes, Trump’s comments do. I think this may be the most degrading statement about Veterans ever made by a major candidate for president. Of course, this isn’t the first time Trump has attacked Veterans since becoming the Republican Party’s leader. In 2015, Trump said that Senator John McCain was “not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Trump has attacked McCain as recently as January of this year.
In 2016, Trump went after a Gold Star family who dared speak at the Democratic National Convention. In 2018, Trump canceled a trip to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetary in France because he feared his hair would be negatively impacted by the rain. It was during this same trip to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of World War I that Trump called American war dead “suckers” and ”losers.”
The Republican Party has had many chances to hold Trump accountable for these statements. They have refused to do it. So now they own them. And I will accept no lectures about patriotism from those who have failed to hold Trump to account for them.
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#2
Trump Email Hack Is A Moment Of Reckoning For Him—Or The News Media (Brian Beutler, Off Message)
It may be that the individual or entity who’s shopping these emails around will grow tired of waiting and choose to post them online directly. But even before that happens, the public knowledge that multiple, large, professional journalism institutions have possession of these emails flattens the distinction most of the way. Unless Politico, the Washington Post, and the New York Times collude to bury these leaks, they face a very similar collective-action problem: publish quickly or get scooped by the competition.
In other words, those of us who haven’t forgotten how the media conducted itself in 2016 can credibly demand one of two things: Either stories based on these emails should go to press very soon, promoted with the same zeal we saw eight years ago; or the outlets that obtained them should feel an ethical obligation to publish some of the most searching mea culpas in the history of journalism.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Reporters and editors get upset when critics point out the problems with how they cover former President Trump vs. how they cover Democrats. Their feelings get hurt when people point out how the media keeps holding Trump to a much lower standard.
This email leak example is about as obvious as it gets. In 2016, reporters shared the daily drip-drip-drip of emails leaked by Wikileaks after they were stolen from leading Democrats. Heck, we even know John Podesta’s secret for making creamy risotto.
Someone is now sharing stolen emails related to the Trump campaign with reporters. That is a very similar situation. Yet we know little of the details. One of the leaks apparently includes a nearly 300-page opposition research document compiled by the Trump campaign about Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance. Given how bumpy Vance’s first weeks as the VP nominee have been, how can anyone argue that the opposition research report isn’t newsworthy?
They can’t. So Beutler is right. We need either a mea culpa for the media’s “but her emails” obsession in 2016, or we better start seeing similar coverage of these recent Trump emails. Reporters, editors, and producers need to understand how awful it looks for Trump to get the advantage both then and now.
#3
Democracy dies if we drop the case of Trump, Egypt, and $10 million in cash (Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer)
We know Trump — reluctantly, at the urging of aides — did inject $10 million into his campaign in its final days. The Post said a Trump campaign official later told the FBI the money was structured as a loan that could be repaid to Trump. We now know about the Egyptian withdrawal of nearly $10 million in American cash, in line with the intelligence tip. And we know Trump cozied up to Sisi — largely a U.S. pariah during the Obama administration — and even called him “my favorite dictator” before releasing nearly $1.4 billion in military aid to Egypt that had been held up because of its human rights abuses.
The missing link in the probe was Trump’s bank records, which might have shown receipt of $10 million. But, as the Post chronicled in great detail, the case was handed off in 2019 from the former special counsel, Robert Mueller, who’d chased the tip aggressively, to political appointees in then-Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department, including Barr himself. The Trump appointees refused to go after Trump’s bank records from 2017 as he became president — even after the evidence of the Egyptian withdrawal that January. And President Joe Biden’s AG Merrick Garland, whose tenure has been marked by his political cowardice, didn’t restart the case before the statute of limitations expired in January 2022.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Yeah, what happened to this story? Bribes of politicians should matter. Bribes by foreign government representatives should matter. Bribes that may have influenced a presidential election result should matter. It also should matter that former Attorney General Bill Barr appears to have meddled in at least three investigations on behalf of former President Trump. Why haven’t Senate Democrats used their majority to hold hearings about this allegation? Where are the editorials? Where are the special reports? Not focusing on this credible allegation is a choice. As Bunch explains, it’s one that’s bad for our democracy.
#4
Fact check: Walz retired from Army National Guard after 24 years to run for Congress (Rochelle Olson, Minnesota Star Tribune)
GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance claims that the Minnesota governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate bailed as his unit headed to Iraq, but Walz retired before his unit was called up.
A reality check on the ‘Tampon Tim’ meme (Editorial Board, The Minnesota Star Tribune)
Social-media users swiftly took sides as well, and as usual, facts and context were missing, especially from those who see the new law as evidence of a radical Minnesota under Walz’s leadership. But a closer, more informed look at the issue should yield a different conclusion. This is good and necessary policy. Providing free menstrual products is a practical, compassionate remedy to address an under-the-radar reason for student absenteeism. Some families can’t afford menstrual products, and when that happens students stay home instead of going to class, falling behind as they do.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Sometimes, it helps to go to the source. The Minnesota Star Tribune examines the first two Republican attacks against Governor Tim Walz since his selection as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate. The paper has covered these issues in detail in the past and is in a great position to explain what happened. I was not surprised to see just how outrageous the Republican claims were. We shouldn’t let these lies about Walz’s record stand without a response.
And it would be great if the New York Times would stop helping Republicans by privileging these lies in its coverage. As Jamison Foser explains, “What JD Vance is doing is as disgusting as politics gets. Privileging his lies, as The New York Times has done, is as disgusting as journalism gets.”
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#5
The most expensive political ad of all time (Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, and Noel Sims, Popular Information)
In 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter, one of the world’s largest social networks, for $44 billion. From a financial perspective, it has not worked out well. Over the last two years, the value of Twitter — which Musk renamed X — has plunged. Internal documents reveal that company executives believed it was worth less than half of what Musk paid for it by October 2023. In 2024, Fidelity valued the company at just $12.5 billion.
Musk’s ownership of X, however, gives him full control over its algorithm. According to a report by The Verge, Musk “created a special system” that promotes his posts “to the entire user base.” The new system initially “artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.” Musk himself posted a crude mememocking the ubiquity of his posts on the network after the algorithm change. Although the artificial boost to Musk’s posts has been moderated somewhat, Musk continues to dominate the default “For You” feed of nearly everyone who uses X.
In recent weeks, Musk, who officially endorsed former President Donald Trump on July 13, has weaponized his account to flood millions of X users with pro-Trump and anti-Vice President Kamala Harris messages. Over the last month, Musk has published at least 173 posts supporting Trump and his running mate, Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), or attacking their Democratic opponents.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Does a desire to support far-right political activities explain why Elon Musk has been willing to finance what Pivot podcast co-host Scott Galloway has called “the worst-performing business in history since a change in ownership”?
Musk has promoted Trump (including hosting a bizarre interview with him last week) and doctored videos attacking Harris. He has shared the lie that Democrats are allowing undocumented immigrants to enter the country unchecked so they can vote this fall. For unknown reasons, Twitter has restricted accounts that support the Harris/Walz ticket. What is the value that Musk, the supposedly generational business genius, has gained from turning his $44 billion purchase into a $12.5 billion company in less than two years?
Twitter/X is no longer a town square—it is now the most expensive Republican and far-right campaign storefront ever built. Musk has the right to do all of this as the platform’s owner, but it hardly demonstrates a commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas.
#6
Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas (Gil Duran, The New Republic)
Trump’s first campaign was undoubtedly a watershed moment for authoritarianism in American politics, but some thinkers on the right had been laying the groundwork for years, hoping for someone to mainstream their ideas. [Curtis] Yarvin was one of them. Way back in 2012, in a speech on “How to Reboot the US Government,” he said, “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.” He had also written favorably of slavery and white nationalists in the late 2000s (though he has stated that he is not a white nationalist himself).
Both Thiel and Vance are friends of Yarvin. In The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, reporter Max Chafkin describes Yarvin as the “house political philosopher” of the “Thielverse,” a term for the people in Thiel’s orbit. In 2013, Thiel invested in Tlön, a software startup co-founded by Yarvin. In 2016, Yarvin attended Thiel’s election night party in San Francisco where, according to Chafkin, champagne flowed once it became clear that Thiel’s investment in Donald Trump would pay off.
…
Vance is a Thiel creation. And like his billionaire benefactor—who once wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”—Vance embraces a radical ideology hell-bent on destroying government as we know it. And they got these ideas, at least in part, from Yarvin.
Yarvin is the chief thinker behind an obscure but increasingly influential far-right neoreaction, or NRx, movement, that some call the “Dark Enlightenment.” Among other things, it openly promotes dictatorships as superior to democracies and views nations like the United States as outdated software systems. Yarvin seeks to reengineer governments by breaking them up into smaller entities called “patchworks,” which would be controlled by tech corporations.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Democrats have had success noting how weird many MAGA supporters are since Minnesota Governor Tim Walz first said it out loud in an interview last month. It also helps that JD Vance and his supporters continue to say or agree with weird ideas in weird ways. (For example, that the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female is helping to raise children.)
In this article, Duran highlights the person who has inspired some of these thoughts: Curtis Yarvin. Vance and his benefactor Peter Thiel have praised Yarvin and his call for reordering American society. I think Duran’s article helps to explain why Vance is so weird—and why we should be so concerned about what could happen if he becomes Vice President. As Duran notes, Thiel and Vance and their Silicon Valley supporters have money—now they want unchecked power.
#7
The Man to Bring Supreme Court Reform to the Conversation (Dahlia Lithwick, Slate)
In a profound way, Walz is an avatar for someone who is attempting to do effective and lawful state governance and is being thwarted by an imperial Supreme Court, which is exactly what will happen to the Harris administration if court reforms are not enacted. Just as the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority stood in the way of Biden’s emergency COVID management, his air-pollution efforts, his college-loan-forgiveness program, and his emergency-room abortion-care regulations, it will joyfully throw a spanner into the Harris administration’s efforts to expand voting rights, protect LGBTQ+ Americans, and prevent climate crises. One doesn’t need Juris Doctor behind their name to call this out. One need only have had a semester or two of high school civics to understand that this is neither “checking” nor “balancing” as anticipated by the Framers but rather an untouchable juristocracy that travels by charter flight and superyacht.
It’s high time that a prominent nonlawyer take a turn at this critique of the Roberts court, and it’s clear that Walz may succeed where all of us polite eggheads have failed. The Supreme Court supermajority represents a democracy crisis that needs to be discussed at barbecues and high school lunch tables, not just pondered in the stacks at Ivy League law schools. If Walz can initiate and embody that conversation over the next 90 days, in terms that chime with swing voters and undecideds, and in language that is playful and irreverent and goofy, it will be the best thing to happen to a Democratic Party that has avoided the topic of court reform for two decades too long.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Could it take the first non-lawyer to appear on a White House ticket since Jimmy Carter in 1980 to spark the conversation we need about Supreme Court reform? I hope so.
Thanks to Senator Mitch McConnell’s rule-bending and the Federalist Society’s vetting, the Supreme Court has become an openly political entity. Justices accept gifts from billionaires. Others warn darkly that President Biden and Democrats should “be careful” when they dare to propose rules to check and balance the Court. Walz has demonstrated an ability to discuss policy in relatable and understandable ways—as one would expect of a well-regarded teacher.
I look forward to seeing how Walz uses his new platform to help explain the stakes of this election to voters.
#8
DOJ IG Details How Close Trump Came To Invoking Insurrection Act in 2020 (Josh Kovensky, Talking Points Memo)
The Justice Department’s Inspector General detailed how close Donald Trump and then-Attorney General Bill Barr came on June 1 [2020] to invoking the Insurrection Act, which gives the President nearly limitless powers to use the military for domestic law enforcement purposes.
Some FBI officials believed that Trump would invoke the act, and were studying what it would mean for their agency. The D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI Washington Field Office were asked to prepare information showing that civilian law enforcement was incapable of handling the situation, providing the justification for federal troops.
And, the report says, the Office of Legal Counsel and White House attorneys drafted an Insurrection Act proclamation and accompanying executive order for Trump to sign.
The New York Times reported the drafts in 2021, and NBC reported on Trump’s interest in invoking the Act in June 2020. But the Inspector General’s report adds new details and perspective on an episode that looms over the chaotic final year of the Trump administration.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
I have no doubt that former President Trump won’t hesitate to invoke the Insurrection Act immediately if he wins this election.
Stephen Miller has discussed using it for the mass deportations he dreams of initiating. Trump has called the military and civilian advisors who prevented him from using the Insurrection Act during the 2020 protests “losers.” Trump has promised to use the military to help conduct domestic law enforcement operations.
After allowing the Women’s Marches in 2021, I believe Trump would use the Insurrection Act to put down protests against his second term.
Congress needs to reform the Insurrection Act to prevent these kinds of overreaches. That’s going to require that we elect a President and Congress that don’t want to turn the United States into an authoritarian state.
#9
U.S. Athletes Are Taking Full Advantage of Free Healthcare in Olympic Village (Stephanie Apstein, Sports Illustrated)
Ariana Ramsey won an Olympic bronze medal with the U.S. women’s rugby team here last week. A few days later, something almost as exciting happened: She got a pap smear. For free.
“Like, what?” she said in a post on TikTok describing her new discovery: The Olympic Village offers free healthcare.
The United States, of course, does not. So in the days following her victory, Ramsey made appointments with the Village gynecologist, dentist and ophthalmologist. According to the Paris 2024 organizing committee, the Village also offers cardiology, orthopedics, physiotherapy, psychology, podiatry and, of course, sports medicine—all at no cost to the athletes. (Paralympic athletes will also have access to dermatology.)
Ramsey came to Paris as a rugby player. She is leaving as a healthcare influencer. More than 135,000 people have watched her initial TikTok, and another of the half-dozen follow-up videos she has made has pulled in more than 570 views. That is fine with her. The more she thinks about it, the more frustrated she is that she’s so astonished by the concept.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Yeah, Americans should be frustrated by how odd it is to be able to get affordable healthcare services. I am glad Ramsey shared her experience so other American athletes could take advantage of the opportunity.
But seriously, if it is this difficult for our elite athletes, imagine what regular Americans face. We can do better.
Post-Game Comments
Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:
“There can be no hopes, dreams, and ideals where there is no shared reality; and there is no political community where there is only the self-obsessed and endlessly self-referential president.” (Masha Gessen, Surviving Autocracy)
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